Karl Dickey — Entrepreneur, Author, Libertarian Organizer, Florida

If you're new here, the fastest way to understand who I am is to see how these five threads connect — because they're not separate chapters. They're the same throughline.

It started with a business. In 1979, I moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and over the following decades built a career around Nu-Look 1Hr Cleaners — first operating locations, later helping other entrepreneurs franchise into the dry-cleaning industry. That work taught me what lies beneath everything else I do: how ordinary people build independence through ownership, not permission.

That same instinct pulled me into politics. Running a small business in Florida means running into government at every turn — licensing, zoning, taxes, and regulations that protect incumbents more than they protect customers. That friction is what took me from business owner to Libertarian Party organizer: serving as Treasurer for the Libertarian Party of Palm Beach County, running for Florida State Senate (earning 146,000 votes), and later serving as chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida (2007-2009). Today, that work continues with the Libertarian Party of Brevard County, where I lead the local affiliate during my retirement.

The Boca meetup is where the ideas get pressure-tested. Long before any of the organizing, I was showing up for the Boca Raton coffee-and-conversation circuit, which I now lead — the informal gathering where entrepreneurs, activists, retirees, and skeptics argue over ideas with coffee rather than at a podium. It's unglamorous, but it's the room where half of my political and business thinking actually got stress-tested before it became public.

And eventually I wrote it down. Liri: An Adventure Toward Freedom (2014), edited by Jodi McMasters, is the novel version of that same argument — a story about two people rebuilding their lives after devastating loss, told through a libertarian lens. Readers have compared it to a horribly written The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; I'd describe it more simply as fiction built from the same conviction that runs through the franchise business and the party organizing: that freedom is built one deliberate choice at a time, not granted. That little book was a learning experience, and I am working on a much higher quality book now.

That's the shape of it — a dry-cleaning franchise, a political party chairman, a coffee shop in Boca, writing on Substack, and a novel.

Find me elsewhere:

• My writing on Substack — Palm Beach Examiner (Freedom Vanguard)

• Amazon Author Page

• Libertarian Party of Brevard County, Florida

• Boca Raton Coffee & Conversation Meetup Page

• Follow along on X, Instagram, Facebook.