Roy A. Childs, Jr. (January 4, 1949 - May 22, 1992) was an American libertarian essayist and critic.
Childs counted among his early influences Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, and Robert LeFevre.
In the 1960s Childs endorsed anarcho-capitalism, but later expressed doubts about anarchism.[1] In the 1960's, Ayn Rand wrote an essay entitled "America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business." Childs responded with an essay entitled "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism.” He wrote that: “To a large degree it has been and remains big businessmen who are the fountainheads of American statism.”[2] Childs edited the magazine Libertarian Review from 1977 until it folded in 1981. He was also a research fellow and later a policy analyst with the Cato Institute from 1982 to 1984. Perhaps Childs's most visible public role was as lead book reviewer for Laissez Faire Books, in which position he produced a number of memorable short essays. He held this position from 1984 until his death.
After suffering from poor health for several years, Childs died in 1992 at the age of 43. Following his death, pundit Tom G. Palmer wrote of him, "Roy Childs was one of the finer members of a generation of radical thinkers who worked successfully to revive the tradition of classical liberalism ... and who dared to launch a frontal challenge to the twentieth-century welfare state ... his writings exercised a powerful influence on a generation of young classical liberal thinkers."[3]