I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Bettina Bien Greaves 133
them newly printed Federal Reserve notes, up to the full million dollars of the government’s
bond which had been held as “backing” for the deposit. I was shocked! That was pure
inflation! Pure stealing!
Percy invited me to lunch and talked about Pearl Harbor non-stop. He was full of the
subject, having just spent an entire year with the Joint Congressional Committee on the
Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, trying to discover how much advance notice of
the attack, if any, Roosevelt and his administration had had. I was fascinated!
When Percy was working on an article, he encouraged me to ask questions if I didn’t
understand. But I didn’t know enough to ask questions. Yet one day I did ask, “Why wouldn’t
it be a good idea for the government to collect the money and distribute it to the people as
needed?” Shades of the benevolent dictator idea! He answered with another question: “Who
is better suited to distribute money than the person who has earned it, who had the guts, energy,
ideas, initiative, industry, and brains to produce it?” From that moment on, I was “liberated”
from the “enlightened dictator” idea and began to see the world through free-market eyes.
Percy liked to talk and to explain and he found me a good listener and an eager student.
It was a new and exciting experience to be appreciated because I had a mind, not merely
because I was a woman. I encouraged him to keep on talking and explaining, and I kept
on listening and learning. He gave me some economics books to read, but I found them
pretty rough going. He also gave me pamphlets published by the Foundation for Economic
Education in Irvington. These I could understand.
Percy had first heard of Ludwig von Mises in 1944 when he encountered Bureaucracy
and Omnipotent Government in a bookstore. He was then Research Director of the Republican
National Committee doing his best to keep Roosevelt from being elected to a fourth term
as President. In 1944, while he was trying to explain to voters the threat inherent in
Roosevelt’s interventionist New Deal programs, I was in Vienna doing no serious reading,
socializing with Army officers in Vienna, and using my knowledge of German only to ask
orchestra leaders to play my favorite dance tunes.
Percy had been so much impressed by Mises’s two 1944 books that when Human Action
came out in the fall of 1949 he promptly bought a copy and started reading it. By then, the
Foundation for Freedom had run out of funds and closed its doors, and he was free-lancing
as writer and lecturer. During these years, whenever he traveled, he carried with him Mises’s
889-page Human Action PLUS his large 3,194-page unabridged Webster’s dictionary in
order to look up the words in Human Action that he didn’t know. This experience planted
the seed for Percy’s slender (157-page) Mises Made Easier: A Glossary for Ludwig von Mises’s
HUMAN ACTION, published in 1974.
In 1950, Percy started writing a regular column for Christian Economics, a newspaper
for Protestant ministers published by the Christian Freedom Foundation, and was spending
most of his time in New York. When he heard about Mises’s Thursday evening seminar,
he registered at New York University and began attending regularly.
I was living with my parents, in the D.C. suburbs, and working in a real estate office.
I wasn’t yet up to reading Mises, but I had become interested in free market economics and
began looking for a job in some related field. I wrote several free-market-oriented organizations,
including the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, N.Y., asking