By Morgan Lloyd, news correspondent 

It was 30 minutes into the meeting when Jeffrey Tucker answered the call. There had been a mix-up, and the speaking commitment hadn’t been placed on his schedule. Still dressed in his cocktail party finery, the notable anti-government economist sat down and delivered an unscripted speech to the Northeastern student libertarians for the remainder of the hour.

The Tuesday speech was one of several events of the semester organized by Northeastern’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, a nationwide organization for student libertarians. The group, which describes itself as pro-liberty, seeks to provide a place for discussion and activism for libertarians on campus.

“Anyone that believes in individualism and free markets and our core beliefs, they’re always very welcome,” said chapter President Aubrey Kenderdine, a fourth-year biology and political science combined major.

Approximately 20 students from Northeastern, Wentworth Institute of Technology and Berklee College of Music attended the meeting to hear Tucker speak. Tucker is a premier author and economist of the Austrian School of economic thought, which advocates for the abolition of government and the establishment of a free market.

“Nobody’s smart enough to run society, and nobody’s smart enough to outwit the brilliance of the economy,” Tucker said. “Nobody’s smart enough to be your master.”

At the end of Tucker’s speech, Kenderdine asked the group who agreed with Tucker’s brand of anarchism; few attendees raised their hands. This was intentional on the part of Kenderdine, who said she arranged for Tucker to speak to challenge the members of the Young Americans for Liberty.

“I had heard Jeffrey Tucker speak in the past,” Kenderdine said. “I definitely remember not agreeing with anything he said, but he really made me think about things that I would never have really thought about.”

This diversity of opinion is a large part of the club’s essence, said social media coordinator Nafisa Kabir.

“There’s a broad spectrum of libertarians and our mission here at Northeastern and in the Northeast is to facilitate that — let people discover their beliefs, let people fine-tune their beliefs and have that discussion, have that lack of censorship and allow people to communicate and express their ideas as they see fit,” said Kabir, a second-year criminal justice major.

Before taking questions from students about immigration, security and new technologies in an anarcho-capitalist world, Tucker closed his speech asking the YAL to join him in working to bring about a libertarian society.

“To me, the great battle of our future is to carve out a libertarian future, in which we realize we can be without this huge apparatus,” Tucker said. “This is going to bring peace to our communities, prosperity to our societies and allow us to benefit from technological innovations that are around us everywhere. I would say that it is the most urgent task we face.”