I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

George Reisman 277
to my classmates in the seventh grade in an oral report, and which I had learned from a
motion-picture documentary shortly before. This was the fact that with only six percent
of the world’s population, the United States produced fully forty percent of the world’s
annual output of goods and services. The man’s reply was yes, but so what; ten percent of
the country’s population owned ninety percent of its wealth.
I soon realized that no one I knew, neither other students, nor any of the adults I
knew, was able to answer the leftwing arguments I was encountering daily at school. For
a time, I thought, the explanation was that this was New York City. The people here have
been intellectually corrupted. But the rest of the country is still full of people who support
the principles of individual rights and freedom and know how to defend them. Over
the next two summers, I learned that the problem was nationwide. I made this discovery
as the result of my experiences at a vacation camp in Maine, where I met a wide variety
of college students from all over the country who were working as camp counselors, as
well as occasional local citizens. The college students too included a goodly proportion
of self-confessed “social democrats.” I remember one of them telling me with obvious
contempt how ignorant the parents of many of the campers were. They had been to see
a local production of a play by George Bernard Shaw that made this type of people its
targets, and they all loved it.
I saw that virtually all of the arguments against property rights were of an economic
nature. I undertook the study of economics for the explicit purpose of finding economic
arguments in defense of property rights. In my first year of study, with the aid of a dictionary
by my side, I read substantial portions of Adam Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations, and
David Ricardo’s, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, as well as the whole of a book
on the history of economic thought. I started with Smith and Ricardo in the belief that
their books would provide the arguments I was seeking, for they had the reputation of
having been the leading defenders of capitalism in the system’s heyday. Although my mature
evaluation of them is that they do in fact have some very important things to say in the
defense of capitalism, I was greatly disappointed in them at the time, because it seemed to
me that with their support for the labor theory of value, they served merely to prepare the
ground for Marx. (Concerning the errors of this view, see Capitalism, pp. 473–500.) None
of the other authors described in the book I read on the history of economic thought
appeared to offer any serious arguments in defense of capitalism.
At the age of fourteen, I discovered William Stanley Jevons’s The State in Relation to
Labour and The Theory of Political Economy.
During this period, I had come to subscribe to a fortnightly magazine called The
Freeman. At that time, Henry Hazlitt played a major role in writing the magazine’s editorials
and in determining its content. So long as he continued in that role, I found the magazine
so valuable that I read every issue from cover to cover.
It was in one of the early issues of The Freeman that I had my first exposure to the
writings of Ludwig von Mises. It was his essay, “Lord Keynes and Say’s Law.” From reading
the essay, I could see that Mises knew the history of economic thought and that he was
presenting a strong, self-assured position in defense of an important and relatively complicated
aspect of the functioning of capitalism, a position that Say and Ricardo had taken in