I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

108 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
upper middle class were (and in the case of my mother, is) a basic, New Deal liberal who
shares a deep suspicion of big business and the Republican Party in equal measure—wise
judgments in both cases. My friends and relatives ran the gamut of sentiment, and there
were few who had any extreme views on politics, let alone political theory, although all
believed that success depended on a combination of brains, luck, character and hard work.
To be sure, my uncle Sammy did have a friend who was a strong social Darwinist who
inveighed against how charity weakened the spine of the system, but he died, tragically,
from a bee sting, which always seemed to me to warn against the perils of excessive individualism.
Besides, libertarians support voluntary contributions to the poor and would
never ban them because of some indirect harm to the long-term fitness of the species.
So where then does all this come from? Here I would point to two ingrained intellectual
attitudes that helped shape my views. I call these ingrained because I cannot remember a
time when I had a different intellectual orientation. First, I dislike complex and sophisticated
explanations of routine phenomena. I have no claims to be a mathematician or a physical
scientist, although I studied both fields with at best modest distinction in some detail, all
the way through college. Yet what I liked was the parsimony of the explanations, and the
search for general laws that linked together patterns of events or behaviors that looked at
first to be wholly disparate.
In the same vein, I have always been a champion of the naïve point of view on every
philosophical topic—and these I did study in some depth—from metaphysics to epistemology
to psychology, and on to ethics. Never once did I flag in my belief in the external world
because of the learned demonstration of how knowledge is acquired through the senses
which may, therefore, be all that we have. This suspicion against “deep” and sophisticated
truths has always led me to embrace theories that accentuate order in natural events and
social behavior and look down on all anomalies regardless of source unless they offer a
window into a more powerful general theory. For example, my instincts run against the
quirky results of behavioral economics with their appeal to instability of individual preferences.
I have not seen many people act in strange ways and think that a few robust assumptions
about rationality and self-interest explain a lot more about how legal rules and social
institutions operate than any highly ad hoc or contextual explanation. I regard arguments
for pragmatism or relativism, whether in the world of action or ideas, as signs of intellectual
weakness, which function as poor excuses for having nothing intelligent to say about a
given problem. There is nothing particularly reasonable about an appeal to reasonableness,
without guides. Rules should come first, and complex balancing only at the margins.
That view of truth influences one’s view of legal rules. If there is little reason for ad
hoc justifications in the domain of metaphysics, then it is best to be cautious about the use
of similar strategies in social arguments. If there are broad general truths, then the instinct
to compartmentalize should be greeted with some suspicion. Hence the modern view to
find a particular statute for every occasion cuts against the aesthetic view of the fundamental
unity of the legal order. It is the same fascination with ad hoc judgments that gets in the
way of a firm understanding of the regularity of empirical phenomena. One reason why
the Supreme Court has tolerated so much chaos in the law of takings, for example, is that
it has persuaded itself that it can do no better than form “ad hoc” judgments as to what is