I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

312 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
no idea who he was. By the time I finished reading the article I had been converted to the
pure libertarian position—a position the authors designated by the then novel term “anarchocapitalism,”—and
my curiosity about Austrian economics had been piqued.
Back at the YAF office I mentioned my discovery of Austrian economics to my comrades.
Shortly thereafter, one of them, Gerald Uba, produced and placed in my hands an
odd-sized “minibook” (measuring 3.75” by 5”) written by Rothbard and entitled Depressions:
Their Cause and Cure. After reading Rothbard’s thirty pages of clear and scintillating prose,
I knew I had learned more in one hour about business cycles or “macroeconomic fluctuations”
then I had absorbed from two semesters of listening to lectures in Principles of
Macroeconomics and Intermediate Macroeconomics and of poring over the jargon filled,
opaquely written, deadly dull textbooks assigned in these courses. Moreover, my deep
interest in economics was now transformed into a burning passion for the subject.
Serendipitously, in the same semester that I was introduced to Rothbard and modern
Austrian business cycle theory, I was enrolled in a History of Economic Thought course
taught by Robert Cheney, S.J. Father Cheney was a superb, if somewhat low-key, teacher
and near the end of the course he introduced the topic of the marginalist revolution.
Referring to the early Austrians, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and the latter’s
brother-in-law, Friedrich von Wieser, he characterized the formation of the Austrian School
as a “unique event” in intellectual history. Never before, he declared, had such brilliant
men worked so closely together to develop a common approach to economic phenomena.
Father Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the older Austrian School further bolstered
my interest in learning more about the School.
As soon as I arrived back home that summer I began to devour all the libertarian and
Austrian books I could lay my hands on. Through my local bookstore I ordered Jerome
Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative. Although some of its illustrations
are now a bit dated and it contains a few minor “lifestyle libertarian” confusions and
deviations, it served, and still serves, as a compelling introduction to the radical libertarian
philosophy and movement.
I next began to scour public libraries in the suburbs of central New Jersey for books
by Rothbard and the two Austrian business cycle theorists he had referred to in his booklet,
Mises and Hayek. Needless to say, I did not have much luck at first. Desperate, I then
decided to venture into the Plainfield Public Library. Plainfield was a small city that, like
Newark had been torn by race riots in 1967. A city policeman chasing looters had been set
upon by a black mob and beaten to death with a shopping cart. The National Guard, which
had then been sent in to quell the riot, conducted an indiscriminate and warrant-less houseto-house
search for weapons that inflamed even the most peaceful black residents and left
lingering bitterness and racial hatred. Anyway, by the summer of 1971, “white flight” from
the beautiful Victorian houses and Dutch colonials that encircled the once thriving shopping
district of the city was almost complete leaving the large well-stocked library, housed
in a new glass-walled building next to the increasingly rowdy high school, nearly always
deserted. It was there one late spring evening that I finally located musty copies of America’s
Great Depression, The Theory of Money and Credit, Human Action, Monetary Theory and the
Trade Cycle, and Prices and Production. Despite the fact that I was an out-of-towner I