I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

John Hasnas 151
they would. As a child, I attended Hebrew school where we were taught Jewish history.
Jewish history is the story of millennia of oppression by church and state culminating
with the Nazis. Although the lesson usually drawn is that the world is beset by irredeemable
anti-Semitism, it requires only limited powers of abstraction to move to the more
general conclusion that the evil resides not in who is oppressed, but in the existence of
the power to oppress itself.
Another factor predisposing me toward libertarianism was that my parents (inadvertently,
according to them) inculcated in me a belief that knowledge came from investigating
and thinking for oneself. Like most Jews, my parents placed an extraordinarily high value
on learning, but they had neither the education nor time to answer most of my questions.
The best they could do was to encourage me to figure things out for myself. The response
I almost invariably received to my requests for information was, “Look it up.” Thus, I grew
up thinking that one was supposed to engage in independent thought rather than just
receive wisdom from others; that one should believe something because it made sense rather
then merely because an authority figure said it was true.
This cultural and familial background imbued me with a strong, if inchoate, skepticism
of power and a desire to discover truth for myself. These two factors, when combined,
would inevitably make one susceptible to the appeal of libertarianism. Thus, I was probably
at least as predisposed to become a libertarian as the child of alcoholic parents is to become
an alcoholic.
Of course, being predisposed toward a particular trait does not ensure that the trait
will be expressed. Not all children of alcoholics become alcoholics. Something must trigger
the predisposition. In my case, the trigger was a combination of my experience in the New
York public schools system, my childhood love of science fiction, and a mistake.
In my day, the government-run elementary schools spent several years indoctrinating
their students with belief in the value of liberty. We were taught that the American Revolution
was fought to achieve freedom from an oppressive government that taxed its citizens unfairly.
We learned that the Declaration of Independence recognized individual rights to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness and restricted government to protecting these rights. We were
told that Americans possessed rights to freedom of speech and religion before we even knew
what the Constitution was. We were taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
In short, our early education was basically libertarian propaganda.
In middle school (what we used to call “junior high school”), this early indoctrination
was followed immediately by the glorification of government power. We were taught how
the federal government saved old people from being cast into the street, ended the vicious
exploitation of poor women and children, repelled the depredations of the robber barons,
provided education for all, empowered the working man, helped the needy, ended the
Depression, and generally righted the wrongs inherent in the capitalist system.
Although the seamless passage from government is bad unless it is restricted to preserving
liberty to government is good and should pursue all good ends was accepted without
question by my public school compatriots, it was troubling to me. Was government good
or bad? How could it be true both that people should be able to live their lives as they choose
and that government should be allowed to tell them what to do? How could liberty be both