I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Norman Barry 19
said, they would learn to love each other and see their common class interests. I thought
that was naive and patronizing. The religious groups paid for the schools, anyway, through
their taxes, so why should they not choose which ones they wanted? In fact, the classrooms
were the safest places in the province precisely because the schools were separated.
So I suggested everything else, including police, should be separated and the inconvenience
that brought about would lead the two rival sects to make deals and begin to
co-operate naturally. That would be much more just and efficient than forcing them to
love each other. I later learned from reading the philosopher David Hume that, if left alone,
even the most divisive of people will develop conventions which will enable them at least
to get through the day. It is when democracy and egalitarianism are used to compel people
to iron out their natural differences that the trouble starts.So, by a combination of personal
experience and a little bit of reading I was ready for liberty. After about a year in Belfast, I
returned to England to face a different kind of turmoil. The 1970s was an absolutely dismal
decade during which Conservatives and Labour took turns at trying to socialize the country.
What they did was to hand it over to the trade unions. Strikes were frequent, social disruption
a regular occurrence, the rule of law was breaking down, inflation was rampant and
completely ineffective regulations were passed all the time. There was a lady called Margaret
Thatcher in the Conservative Government of 1970–74 but she was at that time just another
rent-seeking politician.
But after my experience in Northern Ireland I was anxious to know more about libertarianism
and I was already aware that true freedom was about more than sexual liberation
and there was more to it than the fashionable civil liberties: it had to include free markets.
In my new post, at the then Birmingham Polytechnic, I was surrounded by the children
of the 60s, disaffected and spoilt brats who despised capitalism yet lived parasitically off
its fruits. At that time all productive people were being enervated inexorably by an everoppressive
state. It was an age of general despair. But there were two very important books
for any beginner to libertarianism. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was well-known. It was
even mentioned by my undergraduate teachers as a kind of eccentric text that rejected the
compatibility of economic planning with personal liberty. Look, they would say, we have
had economic control and the welfare state since the 1940s without concentration camps
or even the direction of labor: conveniently neglecting the minor but irresistible inhibitions
on personal choice that were already taking place and were threatening to worsen as the
economy visibly wilted.
But there was another book which was less familiar, even to classical liberals. I refer
to John Jewkes’s Ordeal by Planning. This contained none of the heavy metaphysics and
portentous verbiage of Hayek’s work but was a detailed account of the errors of the early
days of planning by the 1945 Labour Government. It is a beautifully written analysis of
the missed targets, artificial shortages and miserable outcomes of that non-communistic,
but still socialistic, episode. Jewkes’s book was published in 1947 and things were to get
much worse as the post-war era unfolded. There were some erstwhile classical liberals,
Lionel Robbins in particular, whose early opposition to economic planning in the 1930s
had been muted by the war experience. It had worked, they said, and could be a model for
post-war reconstruction. But Jewkes had worked in government during the war and knew