I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Gary North 245
Nevertheless, I owe a great deal to FEE. Paul Poirot launched my national career by
publishing almost everything I submitted to The Freeman. The money helped put me
through grad school. His editorial policy was simple: all or nothing. He sent back a submission
if he did not like it. He did not alter the author’s text. He did add bold-faced headings
if the author didn’t, so I started adding my own. This affliction has never left me. I cannot
write without headings. I even ad sub-headings in my books.
In the summer of 1973, I went on staff at my father-in-law’s Chalcedon Foundation.
I was the second full-time employee. I made $1,000 a month with no benefits, retirement
or medical insurance. I started my newsletter less than a year later. He let me mail my
first promotional piece free of charge in his newsletter. That was what launched my
publishing career.
In 1974, I attended the now-famous Austrian Conference at South Royalton, Vermont,
sponsored by Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies. Harper had died the year before.
There, a few months after Mises had died, and a few months before Hayek won the Nobel
Prize, the troops assembled. The old warriors were there: Rothbard, Kirzner, Ludwig
Lachmann, Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt (of “consumer sovereignty” fame), and William Peterson.
Younger faces included Jack High, David Henderson, Richard Ebeling, Shirley Letwin,
Karen Vaughn, Laurence Moss, Walter Block, Walter Grinder, Sudha Shenoy, Joseph
Salerno, Roger Garrison, Mario Rizzo, D.T. Armentano, Don Lavoie, and Gerald O’Driscoll.
Milton Friedman even showed up to deliver an evening lecture.
It was at that meeting that Walter Block and I first met. We found a common interest:
our sense of outrage at R.H. Coase’s famous theorem. I recall Block’s succinct theoretical
objection to Coase’s theorem: “Coase, get your cattle off my land.” That pretty well summarizes
my position.
That conference was a major event in the recovery of the Austrian economics movement.
Out of that conference came The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (1976).
Edwin Dolan had persuaded Cornell University’s economics department to allow our little
group to meet there, but then they reneged, even though Dolan was on the faculty. The
South Royalton School of Law was a fall-back position in every sense. We therefore can
trace early academic Austrianism in America from Cornell to Cornell (almost).
I joined Ron Paul’s staff in June, 1976. He had just been elected to Congress after
the incumbent Democrat resigned to take a bureaucratic job. Congressman Larry
McDonald had told Paul that I was available. (Seven years later, McDonald disappeared
on Flight 007, which we are told crashed, leaving no bodies or debris. Some people still
believe this official version. I don’t.) It turned out that Paul was a subscriber to Remnant
Review, or so I recall. I joined his staff as his research assistant. I even got a parking place.
That was back when you could by a 2,500 square foot brick home in the Washington
suburbs for $85,000.
It was an amazing staff. Bruce Bartlett was on it. He was an M.A. in history, author
of The Pearl Harbor Cover-Up. He later went on to become Jack Kemp’s staff economist.
There was John Robbins, a Ph.D. in political science, a former Sennholz student, a Calvinist,
and a disciple of philosopher Gordon Clark, Van Til’s nemesis. We shared the same back
office.