I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

18 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
why rent control causes homelessness and the minimum wage unemployment. Since these
policies were introduced by people who had the interests of the underprivileged at heart
they must be OK. It seemed then, and does today, that all kinds of intellectual error are
absolved if you have the right motivations. I was to learn later that everybody is a utility
maximizer and that, on the whole, the right motivation, or virtue, is a menace to freedom
and prosperity. Socialism was also not very funny. It had much more to do with dour
Calvinism than that laughter-driven, pleasure-soaked nirvana the Left always promised.
Everything came a little late for me and the realization that not only did libertarianism
have the best ideas it also had the funniest jokes came the last of all. I guess I got the taste
for humor from the aforementioned Tom Stoppard and his brilliant parodies of Marxism
and logical positivism.
I started graduate work knowing little about freedom and, like most libertarians, did
all the groundwork myself. I picked up the dangers of socialism, Keynesianism and inflation
initially from casual reading and personal experience of state education and the National
Health Service. My early research was in political theory in the Oxford analytical tradition.
That is not as bad as people think and although its leading exponents were Left wing they
did manage to separate their values from the analysis. An early, and remaining, influence
was the legal positivist, H.L.A. Hart. His The Concept of Law is a magnificent piece of
philosophical reasoning and his intellectual opposition to Ronald Dworkin, who has done
so much to distort the common law tradition while pretending to be faithful to it, was
instructive. His substantive moral and political views were similar to Dworkin’s but he
never claimed that they were derived from his understanding of law. This was another
reason for my distrust of “morality,” which has turned out to be a license to do anything
that costs someone else money. And then I got my first serious academic job.
I was still not a libertarian but a good candidate for instruction. The job was in about
the worst place in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa. It was at the Queen’s University,
Belfast, Northern Ireland. Its permanent political and historical problems have been boring
the rest of the world since at least 1690. That was when the Prods licked the Micks at the
Battle of the Boyne. In Belfast, it could have been yesterday.
No libertarians there then, though I am told there is an Austrian economist at Cork
University in the Irish Republic. But this was Belfast, an outpost of the British welfare state.
However, the strange thing was that I learned something about liberty there quite by accident.
A graduate student was researching the question as to why Catholics had, then, moved
away from Irish republicanism and into “civil rights.” Had they been Americanized, I
wondered? The answer was obvious. Most of the local governments then were controlled
by Protestants, who distributed public sector jobs (of which there were many) and public
housing, to their supporters. I said to the student, if there were no public sector at all there
would not be so much trouble here. The student had never imagined there could be no
public sector and, until that moment, neither had I. But it dawned on me that if people
lived with little politics there would be fewer venues for their natural fractiousness. At the
same time, the “liberals,” with their absurd idea, derived from Rousseau, of the “perfectibility
of man,” were piously bewailing the fact that the public schools in Northern Ireland
are divided into Protestant and Catholic. If children went to mixed schools, the liberals