I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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ROBERT KLASSEN
WHAT? LIBERTARIAN?
Isn’t it curious how so many individuals arrive at more or less the same place by following
their own path? And this in an egalitarian age where to think for yourself is anathema?
How can this be?
For me, the path began with a purely emotional contemplation of Jesus in the Stations
of the Cross posted in our parish church. I was seven, an impressionable first grader who
liked to interpret pictures, and ask questions. Although I had no words for it at the time,
I saw Jesus as a radical individualist who turned his back on both the reigning political
government, and on the religious establishment, to preach his own insight into the nature
of reality. He put his life on the line for the truth, and he paid the price. This emotional
understanding, however childlike in simplicity, became the foundation of my thinking.
I stumbled across Thoreau at the age of ten, and my vague notions of independence and
individualism began to acquire a secular tone, and even a sense that action was possible. This
did not correlate with my school experience, however, where I almost instinctively resisted
authority, and refused to march in lockstep with my peers, either physically or intellectually.
This attitude spelled disaster on the university level and, sure enough, I wasted seven years
searching for the right finger to point out the right path to knowledge, not training.
I discovered Atlas Shrugged in a drugstore during a brief sojourn in Denver in 1965,
my twenty-fifth year. Here was the finger, and there was the path. I read everything Rand
wrote, and everything she recommended, an ever widening circle of literature that came
to include Mises, Hazlitt, and Rothbard. The world was finally making sense to me, and
then in 1972 I met Galambos.
For better or worse, Andrew J. Galambos was a master salesman, and a compelling
lecturer. Although I didn’t like the man, or completely trust him, I listened to him for six
years (on tape), and I read every book he recommended. From him I learned that government
could be conceptually divided into what I now call political, or government by force
and fraud, and economic, or government by voluntary participation in institutions selling
security and justice.
A decade after I dropped out of the Galambos School, I began to write about my
own interpretation and possible application of the multifarious ideas of social organization
that I had learned. Seven years later, I published Atlantis, A Novel about Economic
Government, which has come to be called by some a description of a libertarian society.
Actually, I never paid attention to the word, libertarian, while I was writing it, so this
designation was purely serendipitous.