I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

308 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
political biases in class, initiated an extracurricular reading club that I joined. The first book
we discussed was None Dare Call It Treason by Bircher, John Stormer.
By my junior year, I had become recognized among the faculty as one of the most
outspoken of the group of conservative students informally known as the “Lower Ten
Percent.” This label emerged from a debate in religion class over the Catholic view of the
Vietnam War wherein I called Pope Paul VI’s position on the war “quixotic” and another
conservative referred to it as “asinine.” This infuriated our religion teacher who abruptly
halted the debate. The next class the Brother informed us that there would be no more
discussion of current events in class, noting cryptically that in some bushels of apples the
“lower ten percent” begins to rot prematurely and threatens to spoil the rest. Of course
we conservatives perversely seized on his words and proudly touted them as our new
moniker.
Late in my junior year I tried to foment a petition drive among my fellow students in
the A class to protest the rumored integration of the A, B, C, and D classes in our senior
year. When my cohorts had entered as freshmen, we had been placed according to our
scores on special placement exams. Each class moved from subject to subject (except for
languages, I believe) en bloc. One significant result of this rigidly hierarchical system, which
had existed since the founding of the institution, was that the classes competed ferociously
with one another in intramural sports. Most importantly the A class, which took mostly
accelerated courses, was supposed to have its grades more heavily weighted in calculating
grade point average for the purpose of class ranking in senior year. Needless to say my
anti-egalitarian and pro-tradition petition drive was ruthlessly quashed by the administration,
and a few of the smarter B class kids were seeded amongst us in senior year. However,
the administration did continue its policy of more heavily weighting grades for accelerated
courses, while we “native” A class students employed informal methods of persuasion to
ensure that the integrity of our intramural teams was not breached.
It was early in my senior year when I first became acquainted with the science of
economics. My economics teacher was an enthusiastic young adherent of Great Society
liberalism and the improbable brother-in-law of the Bircher, Mr. Schreck. Mr. Mautner
assigned us to read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and then parts of Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Completely unacquainted with economics and distracted by
Galbraith’s relentlessly sententious and laboriously styled prose, I could not follow and did
not care much for The Affluent Society. The Wealth of Nations was another matter. I was
enthralled by Smith’s straightforward and non-moralizing analysis of the free market
economy and its social benefits. It dawned on me that economics offered a scientific argument
for the free society that complemented the moral argument in its favor. By the time
I finished reading the assigned passages in Smith’s book, I knew that I wanted to be an
economist and I never really deliberated upon the matter again.
There was a pre-graduation tradition at St. Joseph’s in which the senior class presented
a burlesque show amiably mocking the speech, dress, and mannerisms of its favorite—and
not so favorite—teachers and the faculty returned the favor by bestowing frivolous legacies
on selected seniors. My legacy read: “To Joseph Salerno, leader of the Lower Ten Percent,
we leave a pair of binoculars with which to look down upon your fellow man.”