I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Lawrence W. Reed 273
I was a good friend of Dr. Haing Ngor, Academy Award-winning actor from The Killing
Fields. In 1989, I accompanied him on his first trip back to his native Cambodia since his
escape from the Khmer Rouge a decade before. Now there’s a guy who knew what freedom
was and how costly it is to lose it. The supreme tragedy of his life was that after going
through an unbelievable hell under a communist dictatorship, he was later killed by common
street thugs in downtown Los Angeles.
Foreign travel has been a large part of my life since my first visit to the old Soviet Union
in March 1985. I’ve visited more than 59 countries on six continents, many of them several
times. When I was doing anti-communist work in the 1980s and early ’90s, I went to the
Soviet Union five times, China three times, Nicaragua five times, Poland twice, and even
Cambodia. After I befriended the leader of the rebel opposition in Marxist Mozambique
in 1991, a colleague and I made an incredible, surreptitious trip to that country and lived
with the rebels at their bush headquarters in the midst of a devastating civil war. That was
unlike just about any other trip I’ve ever made anywhere.
I’ve studied hyperinflation in Bolivia (1985), voodoo in Haiti (1987), and underground
movements in the old East bloc. There are few places in the world that I don’t want to go
to some day. Foreign travel is an enriching experience but after awhile, it’s a killer trying
to keep up correspondence with friends you’ve made all over the place.
What have I learned from all that travel? I’ve learned that the planned economy—
socialism in all its preposterous and destructive manifestations—is a cruel joke that never
works. Socialists have said that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, but as I’ve
written in a number of places, socialists never make omelets. They only break eggs. You
can read about that in an essay I wrote entitled, “Where Are The Omelets?”
I’ve learned that the prism of individualism is the only way to see the world. Stereotyping
a people or a nation is always a false, ignorant, and dangerous way to view them.
I’ve learned that individuals are often phenomenally enterprising in the face of enormous,
artificial, politically-erected roadblocks. I saw so much in the way of black markets
and private enterprise in places where such things were repressed that I’ve come to regard
much of what government does in the way of pushing people around to be utterly futile.
If it’s a peaceful activity with no real victims, leave it alone.
And I’ve learned that the two main obstacles that pull people apart and provoke hatred
and conflict are: (1) stupid, brainless, know-it-all ideologies of power and control, and (2)
the incompetent, venal governments that make those ideologies into policy.
I worked for 20 years at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. I was its president from
the time it opened its doors in January of 1988 until 2008. I’m enormously proud of what
was built. Within half a dozen years, the Mackinac Center became the largest and one of
the most prolific and effective of some 40 state-based free market institutes.
In 2008 I did become president of the Foundation for Economic Education after turning
the position down in 1983.
The case for liberty is intellectually airtight. What we’re really battling to overcome is
ignorance and corruption. We’re winning the battle, slowly but surely. Think about the
people who have undergone philosophical transitions in recent years. I know of lots of
former statists, interventionists, coercion-worshippers—whatever you want to call