I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

90 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
mind as being particularly disappointing was their change in position on Social Security.
Somewhere around 1969 or 1970, they publicly withdrew their position paper favoring its
repeal. I never understood this, since I thought the case made in their original position
paper was quite compelling and philosophically sound.
I was first made aware of libertarianism as a word and a philosophy/movement in 1971
as a senior in high school. A friend of our family, who was an extreme leftist and activist in
New York’s Liberal Party, gave me a copy of the now famous article in the New York Times
Magazine (January 10, 1971) titled “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism.” This article
mentioned David Friedman as a leader of this new movement and identified the Society for
Individual Liberty as “the chief libertarian organization nationally.” I recognized Friedman’s
name, not because of his father (I had no idea what economics was at the time), but because
he was a regular contributor to the YAF magazine called The New Guard. I proceeded to
write a letter to Friedman in care of The New Guard asking him about the movement. He
responded and told me about Don Ernsberger and David Walter at SIL and the strained
relationship between YAF and the libertarians. (As an aside, he warned me that my letter had
been opened by YAF before he received it. From that point on I received no more mailings
from YAF and my subscription to The New Guard suddenly ended. I expect now that that
was not a coincidence.) After hearing from Friedman I contacted SIL and joined.
My next step forward came the following year when I became a college student at The
Hartt School of Music, which was part of the University of Hartford. At the time, Dom
Armentano was a young professor at University of Hartford and was writing a regular
column for the school’s student newspaper. I immediately recognized his point of view as
libertarian and went knocking on his office door. Dom was the first real libertarian I ever
met and I was amazed by how radical his views were. He was an unabashed anarchocapitalist.
It was Dom who introduced me to the radical libertarian thinkers like Rothbard,
the Tannehills, and Rand. During my four years as a music student, I developed a close
relationship with Dom (and his family) and gradually became interested in economics. Two
years after I graduated from music school, and after reading a good deal of Austrian economics
on my own (most of it way over my head), I entered the masters program in economics
at University of Hartford. I must admit that part of my motivation was that I could take
Dom’s courses for credit. During this period Dom introduced me to libertarian academia.
I accompanied him to Libertarian Scholars’ conferences sponsored by the Center for
Libertarian Studies, then in New York, and to Austrian economics conferences at NYU.
Dom also introduced me to the Cato Institute and got me to attend their weeklong conference
at Dartmouth (1979). It was there where I met Rothbard, Roy Childs, Leonard Liggio,
Walter Grinder, Roger Garrison, Israel Kirzner, Ralph Raico, and a host of others. It is the
cumulative effect of these events and my association with Dom that convinced me to pursue
a Ph.D. in economics. I realize now that the point of this new career path was not to study
economics per se but to position myself to better advance the ideas of liberty.
Roy Cordato is vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation, Raleigh,
North Carolina.