I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Dan Klein 173
During what would have been my last year of high school I became increasingly integrated
in Tyler’s circle of intellectual friends (with whom I was at least acquainted because
I had been in the smart math classes). Among them was Randy Kroszner. Tyler was getting
him into libertarianism and economics in parallel with me. Randy and I were friendly then
but it was later that we became close. Randy is my other best friend, but our friendship,
though often playing in libertarian and professional-economics circles and depending on
a critical libertarian understanding of things, is not so much an intellectual or movement
enterprise. We talk a lot about economists, and some about economics. He has a pretty
high standing in professional economics, and he gives me something of an insider view of
establishment circles and institutions. His input has very much helped to give me confidence
in my irreverence toward the profession. But our friendship is based mostly on flights of
satire and absurdity. Randy supplies the imagination and knack for imitating voices and
seizing on characteristic utterances. If someone were to tap the phone line he would hardly
be able to make sense of it, since every other expression has some special meaning and is
interrupted by rifts of giggles. Significant others have had to tolerate these “conversations.”
Incidentally, and to return to 1980, Randy was the high-school class valedictorian and in
cap and gown at commencement he began his speech: “These ridiculous outfits are a fitting
conclusion to our 12 years of servitude.” It got more radical from there.
At Rutgers Newark, at age 18, I had courses with Joseph Salerno and Richard Ebeling,
and seminar discussions also with Rich Fink and Don Lavoie. I was part of the group that
relocated to George Mason. There I took courses and interacted with Fink, Lavoie, Jack
High, Karen Vaughn, Tom DiLorenzo, James Bennett, and David Levy. Also, about a year
after we arrived at Mason, the people of The Cato Institute and Libertarian Review and
Inquiry magazines arrived in Washington, DC, and Tyler and I became involved with Tom
Palmer, David Boaz, Sheldon Richman, and, most importantly, Roy A. Childs, Jr. I was
very, very lucky in all this. Not merely for finding these circles, but also that I had Tyler to
get me included.
I wasn’t a reader. Having Tyler as a roommate I let him do the reading and tell me
about it. He was reading everything from Althusius to Charles Tansill, so, on Tyler’s coattails,
I acquired some awareness of the big picture and how things fit together. Tyler was
pursuing the history-intensive reading program outlined by Walter Grinder.
Although Tyler’s knowledge and raw thinking power dwarfed mine, it wasn’t as though
I sat at his feet in awe. In a back-and-forth process of testing and reformulation, even though
I had usually not read anything about what we were discussing, we decided whether we
liked an idea. I think there has always been a division of intellectual disposition and tendencies
between us. Each has talents and shortcomings the other learned to rely on, play
off, and profit from. I don’t recall us ever really differing on anything substantive.
For me, the real focus has always been libertarianism as a movement. This I knew to
be worthy at a visceral level. I knew that a “philosophical foundation” was at best a dreary
stand-in for the rage you feel. At college we were officially Austrians and I suppose nonaggression-axiom
libertarians, but by the second or third year our attitude was pretty
independent of all that. A friend and peer whom we called “The Master” used to play Mises’s
“Liberty and Property” audio-tape over and over again, squealing with hysterical laughter