I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

282 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
single copy of any of the writings of Mises, or even so much as mention the existence of
any of them in any of the assigned readings or, as far as I was aware, in a classroom, the
department saw to it that literally dozens of copies of Oskar Lange’s attempted refutation
of Mises’s doctrine on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism were available
on open reserve in the library—as an optional, supplementary reading in the introductory
economics course.
Economics was not the only area in college in which I experienced revulsion for
Columbia’s teachings. I had the same experience in the so-called contemporary civilization
courses I had to take, and in history courses.
I do not know if my college education could have damaged my intellectual development
permanently. It did not have the chance. For just a few months after graduation, Atlas
Shrugged appeared.
I obtained a very early copy and began to read it almost immediately. Once I started
it, I could not put it down, except for such necessary things as eating and sleeping. I was
simply pulled along by what I have thought of ever since as the most exciting plot-novel
ever written. Every two hundred pages or so, the story reached a new level of intensity,
making it even more demanding of resolution than it was before. I stopped only when I
finally finished the book, four days after I had started it. When I finished, the only thing
I could find to say in criticism, tongue in cheek, was that the book was too short and the
villains were not black enough.
The first thing I got out of Atlas Shrugged and the philosophical system it presented
was a powerful reinforcement of my conviction that my basic ideas were right and a renewal
of my confidence that I would be able to expose my professors’ errors.
Very soon thereafter, the whole Circle Bastiat, myself included, met again with Ayn
Rand. We were all tremendously enthusiastic over Atlas. Rothbard wrote Ayn Rand a letter,
in which, I believe, he compared her to the sun, which one cannot approach too closely. I
truly thought that Atlas Shrugged would convert the country—in about six weeks; I could
not understand how anyone could read it without being either convinced by what it had to
say or else hospitalized by a mental breakdown.
The following winter, Rothbard, Raico, and I, and, I think, Bob Hessen, all enrolled
in the very first lecture course ever delivered on Objectivism. This was before Objectivism
even had the name “Objectivism” and was still described simply as “the philosophy of
Ayn Rand.” Nevertheless, by the summer of that same year, 1958, tensions had begun to
develop between Rothbard and Ayn Rand, which led to a shattering of relationships,
including my friendship with him. (When I knew Rothbard, he was a staunch pro-
McCarthy, anticommunist. In fact it was he who wrote the speech I delivered at the
previously mentioned dinner for Roy Cohn. Later on, incredible as it may seem, he came
to hold that the United States was the aggressor against Soviet Russia in the so-called
Cold War (see his For a New Liberty).
Shortly after that break, I took Rothbard’s place in making a presentation in Ayn
Rand’s living room of the case for “competing governments,” i.e., the purchase and sale
even of such government services as police, courts, and military in a free market. As the
result of Ayn Rand’s criticisms, I came to the conclusion that the case was untenable, if for