I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

D.T. Armentano 11
Years later Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute asked me to revise and expand the Cato
book with special attention devoted to the then on-going Microsoft antitrust case. With Lew’s
generous support, that book was published by the Mises Institute in 1999 as Antitrust Policy:
The Case For Repeal, and has had some college adoptions and some modest success.
One of my favorite journal articles was written as a response to an attack on my antitrust
theories by Professor Frederick M. Scherer. Professor Scherer, a nationally recognized expert
in industrial organization and the author of the most influential textbook in the area,
pretended to “review” the 1990 edition of my Antitrust & Monopoly in a new and interesting
journal, Critical Review. His review, however, was filled with errors of commission and
omission and he distorted my positions at almost every turn. (Our feud goes back to a
decade-old Hillsdale College luncheon that was particularly unpleasant; the Critical Review
hatchet job was payback, apparently.) There is not sufficient space here to explain all of the
problems with Scherer’s analysis of my antitrust positions nor all of the problems associated
with Scherer’s own antitrust views. Suffice to say, for those who are interested in such matters,
see my “Anti-Antitrust: Ideology or Economics? Reply to Scherer” Critical Review
(1992) for my definitive thoughts on the Scherer affair.
My scholarly writing was always important but I most enjoyed writing op/ed articles
for newspapers. I have been a regular writer of op-eds for over 35 years (I continue to write
for the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Florida where I live) and have probably written many
hundreds by now. My articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times
(articles on legalized gambling and merger policy), The Wall Street Journal (an article on
allowing the air carrier industry to collude on prices), the London Financial Times, the
National Post (Canada) and many other newspapers in this country and abroad. While
teaching at the University of Hartford, I wrote many op/eds on such topics as the selective
service system, banking deregulation, antitrust policy, and the tax system in Connecticut.
These appeared regularly in The Hartford Times and, after the Times folded, The Hartford
Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in America.
I am most proud of a series of articles that appeared in The Hartford Courant just prior
to Connecticut’s adoption of a state income tax in the early 1990s. Professor Jack Sullivan, a
colleague of mine, and I wrote four detailed critiques of the proposed state income tax and
these articles were extremely well received around the state. We had done our homework. We
knew that the Connecticut’s state budget process had been out of control for years and that
more taxes would not fix it. We knew what happened in other states when a state income tax
was adopted: their economic growth rates declined. We knew that state income taxes did not
“fix” budget deficits. Indeed, the states with the highest state income taxes had the highest
deficits! So here was a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually prevent government from
expanding its power if we could only defeat the demonic state income tax.
After the articles were published, I (and others) spoke before a crowd estimated at
25,000 that gathered on the lawn in front of the State capital building in Hartford to protest
the imposition of any new state taxes and to demand that the legislature (and the evil
Governor Lowell Wicker) control state spending instead. I gave several talks around the
state in opposition to the proposed tax and I testified against the adoption of any state
income tax at a special legislative hearing on the matter. For months the battle raged, a