I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

294 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
around, I didn’t see any libertarian organization that focused on advancing academic
scholarship specifically focused on the Austrian School.
Also, I worried that Mises had been losing status as a thinker since his death. Hayek’s
place was secure because of the Nobel Prize. But the rationalism of Mises, the tough-edged
quality of his thinking and his prose, the conviction that economics is a logical system that
can justly claim the mantle of science, seemed to be fading.
The free enterprisers were turning toward murkier thinkers, monetarists, positivists,
and even institutionalists who had no interest in the grand Misesian project. This also
seemed to go along with an unwillingness to consider difficult and radical questions on
grounds that they were politically unviable.
There was overlap here with what was happening in politics. Since the early 1970s, the
conservative movement was increasingly dominated by former members of the Old Left
who had made their way over to the right. These so-called neoconservatives made the switch
in opposition to George McGovern’s foreign policy “isolationism,” but they had not really
changed their views on domestic issues.
To give them credit, the neocons always admitted that they hadn’t left the Democrats;
the Democrats had left them. They openly celebrated the legacies of Wilson, FDR, and
Truman—mass-murdering, would-be dictators all.
That position needed to be refuted and fought, but instead, a military-minded conservative
movement embraced the neocons as allies on the only issue that really mattered
to them, the expansion of the warfare state. There was no place for Mises, whose writings
on war and statism were numerous and profound, in this new consensus.
There were few alternatives to the Reaganized right. The Beltway libertarians were drifting
more and more toward policy and a generalized concern with respectability (the two go
hand in hand), and away from Austrian economics and anything that smacked of idealism
or a high theoretical concern. Hosting Alan Greenspan at a cocktail party became the goal.
I noticed a similar tendency among scholarship-granting institutions. They seemed
interested in subsidizing only Ivy League students of a soft classical-liberal bent, rather than
promoting the concrete development and application of radical thought.
Another approach I rejected was quietism. I’ve never been impressed with the idea that
we should sit back in complacent satisfaction that we constitute the remnant, while others
eventually join us or not. Surely ideas do have consequences, but reality dictates that they
need passionate scholars to advance them on every front.
Hence, Mises as a thinker, who had done so much to resuscitate old-fashioned, toughminded
liberalism, was falling by the wayside, a victim of a movement that eschewed all
such unrespectable thinkers. Misesian theory and practice were fading fast. I set out to
change that, and to serve a neglected generation of students. Idealism is what stirs the young
heart, and the only idealism that seemed to be available to students in those days was from
the left. I harkened back to my lifetime love of Mises, of his brilliance and his courage, and
talked with Margit about the project. She was thrilled, made me promise to make it my
lifetime work, and we got busy.
When I asked Murray to head academic affairs, he brightened up like a kid on Christmas
morning. We agreed that the goal should be to provide a support system that would revive