I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

214 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
imply. I found in it a lot of -isms that alarm a conservative: utilitarianism and utopianism
were instantly objectionable, while rationalism and individualism could, in the wrong
hands, be turned into cudgels with which to attack everything from religion to the bourgeois
family. Individual libertarian policies may or may not be sensible, and the economic theory
must have been largely valid, but the underlying worldview of libertarianism looked to be
diabolical.
By the time I came to think such thoughts I had long since abandoned the limp conservatism
of the establishment Right. I’d discovered Chronicles and “paleoconservatism,”
and had been won over by the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy abroad and
decentralized government at home. Soon thereafter I discovered Antiwar.com—I was
already familiar with Justin Raimondo from his occasional articles in Chronicles. Raimondo
and another Antiwar.com writer, Joseph Stromberg, influenced me profoundly: they taught
me more about the history of the conservative movement, and in particular the pre-World
War II “Old Right,” than I’d learned from years within the movement itself. Names like
Nock and Mencken, or even Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, were cited more often on
Antiwar.com than they were in National Review. Around this same time the second edition
of Robert M. Crunden’s Old Right anthology, The Superfluous Men, was published. Reading
it was like discovering some long lost family tree.
Finally, in January, 2000, I found LewRockwell.com and—well, it’s a tired old cliché,
but it’s true—everything I thought I knew about libertarianism was wrong. Without exaggeration,
that was clear the minute I set eyes on LRC. There were strongly Catholic articles,
including a link to a Culture Wars piece about the suicide of Lissa Roche at Hillsdale
College. Hans-Hermann Hoppe had an article laying out a libertarian argument against
immigration. There was no utilitarianism and no utopianism. The site had eclectic interests,
which set it apart from other libertarian forums (which tended to get stale pretty quickly).
It was more conservative than any major “conservative” publication; at the same time, it
was still wholly libertarian. LRC was the Old Right reborn.
From LRC I learned about the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Mises himself, and Murray
Rothbard. And it was either from LRC, or from researching some of the names and ideas
mentioned on the site, that I started to learn about Austrian economics and praxeology.
The economics I had found so boring in college and in conservative books had always been
Keynesian or neoclassical. Austrian economics made a great deal more sense. Reading up
on the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe also gave me an appreciation for extreme rationalism
that I had never had before. The anarchism of Hoppe and Rothbard didn’t bother me:
“minarchism,” the idea that the State exists to protect our rights, had never made any sense.
What possible reason could there be for the State, as an institution, to limit its own power?
It’s like suggesting that a company would voluntarily limit its own profits. A business exists
to make money and the State exists to wield power.
I came to libertarianism in reverse, starting out as a conservative with no strong feelings
about libertarianism one way or another, and then actually becoming quite hostile
toward it based on what I’d seen. Ayn Rand never has appealed to me, nor has CATO-style
managerial minarchism or Virginia Postrel’s techno-utopianism. It’s safe to say that without
LRC, the Mises Institute, Antiwar.com, and the rest of the Rothbard legacy, I would not