I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Robert Lawson 183
Throughout high school, I was an excellent student and luckily fell into the right crowd
of other nerdy-intellectual types, but I hadn’t given up the idea of the military completely.
I dallied for a while in the Civil Air Patrol and considered applying to the Naval Academy.
In the end, I was tempted to take a full NROTC scholarship that was offered to me at
Miami University. Fortunately for me, my girlfriend (who is now my wife, Tracy) went to
Ohio University, so I followed her there. I enrolled in the Honors Tutorial College at OU
which allows you to graduate in three years.
During freshman orientation, one of the leftist student advisors told me I should seek
out Richard Vedder in the economics department if I was one of those “right-wingers.” I
could tell this was not a compliment. Although I was planning to major in political science,
I was able to enroll in Vedder’s “tutorial” in the principles of microeconomics with 3 other
students. By the end of my first quarter, I had changed my major to economics and decided
that I wanted to be an economist. I also became active in the College Republicans, which
Vedder advised, eventually becoming the president of the group. As it turned out, most of
the CRs were libertarians and we learned a lot from each other at our Friday afternoon
happy-hour sessions. Those were fun days. Reagan was president and we knew we were on
the right side! It was in the CRs that Paul and I (we were still inseparable) met David Sollars.
Dave was another one of Vedder’s econ students, a senior.
I was groomed to go to graduate school by Vedder from day one. I took graduate level
micro and macro as a sophomore, and all the mathematics I could muster. I took a fantastic
special topics course in Public Choice economics from him, which made me decide to study
that topic in graduate school. Vedder was a distinguished professor at OU which afforded
him the right to give away one full academic scholarship to a student each year. As money
was always tight, I was unbelievably happy when he offered me the scholarship in my final
two years. He set me up in an internship with the Joint Economic Committee in Washington,
D.C., and he urged me to attend the second Mises Institute Conference in Austrian
Economics in 1987 at Stanford. I probably officially admitted to myself that I was a libertarian
and not a conservative at this conference. It was Walter Block in fact whose argument
that government redistribution was theft that solidified the case. It was classic Walter Block:
“If taking property by force from A to give to B is theft, then welfare spending is theft.” I
do consider myself a neoclassical economist, but I like to fool myself into thinking that I
have avoided the worst of the neoclassical mistakes by studying the Austrians.
Over the winter break in my final year, I stayed in Athens to work for the local County
Auditor processing dog tags (a bit of political patronage related to our work with the CRs).
I was trying to make some dough to buy an engagement ring. In the long, cold, dark evenings
of this December, I read Atlas Shrugged. Wow! It is hard to explain the power of this
book. After reading it, I knew that the free market not only worked better than the alternative,
but that it was moral too.
I also shared housing with John Moser. John went on to get his doctorate in history.
He worked for the Institute for Humane Studies for a while, and is now a libertarian history
professor. I take a measure of credit for John’s conversion to libertarianism by making him
read the essay, “Not Yours to Give,” which the Foundation for Economic Education had
sent to me.