I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

George Reisman 281
positions that I did not want to support, and that I was repeatedly being driven into supporting
such positions.
Neither of the evenings were very pleasant. At one point—I don’t know how we got
to the subject, nor whether it occurred at our first or second meeting—I expressed the
conviction that a void must exist. Otherwise, I did not see how the existence of motion was
possible, since two objects could not occupy the same place at the same time. Ayn Rand’s
reply to my expression of my conviction was that “it was worse than anything a communist
could have said.” (In retrospect, recognizing that the starting point of her philosophy is
that “existence exists,” I realize she took my statement to mean that I upheld the existence
of “nonexistence” and was thus maintaining the worst possible contradiction.)
Because of such unpleasantness, I did not desire to see her again until after I read Atlas
Shrugged. However, I could not forget our meetings and could not help wondering if somehow
she might be right that values really were objective after all. I was very troubled by the
implications of the proposition that all values are ultimately arbitrary and subjective, as
Mises claimed. It no longer seemed enough that the great majority of people happened to
prefer life to death, and health and wealth to sickness and poverty. For if they happened
not to, there would be nothing to say to them that could change their minds, and if there
were enough of them, no way to fight them, and, worst of all, no way even morally to
condemn any slaughters they might commit, because if all values really were arbitrary and
subjective, a concentration-camp sadist’s values would be as good and as moral as the values
of the world’s greatest creators.
The years between my first meetings with Ayn Rand and the publication of Atlas Shrugged
spanned my sophomore through senior years in college. In that time, I experienced serious
intellectual doubt in connection with my ability to defend capitalism. What I had learned
from Mises enabled me decisively to answer practically every argument that had been raised
against capitalism prior to 1930, which was more than enough to answer my high school
teachers. But my college professors presented a different challenge. They were teaching
Keynesianism and the doctrine of pure and perfect competition/imperfect competition. Mises,
I reluctantly had to conclude, had not dealt adequately with these doctrines. (This conclusion
may appear somewhat ironic in view of the fact that what is today accepted as a new and
convincing major critique of Keynesianism, namely, the “rational expectations doctrine,” is
nothing more than arguments made by Mises and Hazlitt in the 1950s, for which they have
received no credit.) At any rate, these were two major areas in which I found myself unable
to turn to his writings for the kind of decisive help I had come to expect from him.
The doubts I experienced in college were not in response to any kind of solid arguments,
but more in response to phantoms of arguments that could not be grasped in any
clear, precise way and that in fact usually bore obvious absurdities. This last was certainly
true of the Keynesian multiplier doctrine and of the claim on the part of the pure-andperfect
competition doctrine that competition implied the absence of rivalry. Despite the
absurdities all of the faculty and practically all of my fellow students at Columbia seemed
perfectly at home with the doctrines and absolutely confident of their truth.
If anyone concrete example can convey the intellectual dishonesty of Columbia’s
economics department in those days, it was this. Namely, while neglecting to provide a