I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

22 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
girls singing “A is A” but I did find out that Rand had done a New York play once. I was
pleased it wasn’t being performed.
New York, the home of American Leftism, did seem a wonderfully free place. I bought
copies of the National Review (I didn’t know then how awful neoconservatism was) and regularly
read the Wall Street Journal. I even took a tourist trip around the stock exchange. I was
also invited to a July 4th party. I had to point out to the host that as a good conservative I
didn’t normally commemorate armed uprising against lawfully established authority, but I
would make an exception in America’s case. However, I never was a conservative and I reestablished
my libertarian credentials with an eloquent defense of the Articles of Confederation.
Closer to home, the other event of the 70s that had long term significance was Britain’s
entry into Europe, the European Economic Community (EEC), as it was then called. I was
never an admirer of European integration despite the EEC’s original free market credentials.
I was very much impressed by Ludwig Erhard’s (the great post-war German free market
leader) critique of its inexorable tendency toward centralization. Britain had entered the
EEC under the Conservatives in 1973 but the 1974 Labour Government had a referendum
in 1975 on whether we should stay in. Many of their supporters feared that the EEC was
a capitalist plot. Although I knew about rational choice theory and the irrationality of voting,
I played the democrat. The polling booth was on my way to work and voting would
not involve too great a cost. I voted to stay in mainly because I was terrified of British
socialism. It really did look as if we were headed for the Gulag. And the Europeans seemed
so much freer—and richer. Now I am associated with the Euroskeptics and write long
articles on the benefits of “competitive jurisdictions” and against Europe’s regulatory socialism
and centralization. It is no surprise that the Labour Party and the other socialists are
now all very pro-Europe. It took them a long time to realize it but the (now) European
Union is not a capitalist plot but a socialist project and a rent-seeker’s paradise. I am not
really a Euroskeptic but a firm believer in withdrawal—for Britain and every other freedomloving
European country. Europe now is like we British were in the 1970s.
But at last the 80s came along—the much-maligned “decade of greed.” It was good
for me and the rest of the world. For a few months I really thought that capitalism and
freedom were becoming popular. It was the best modern example of Bernard Mandeville’s
famous paradox of “private vice and public virtue.” For everybody was for the first time
concerned with getting rich and behaving selfishly. As Mandeville said, back in 1705: “Each
part was full of vice/But the whole an earthly paradise.”
I know libertarians have written at great length about the errors of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher but for me, having been raised on welfare and socialism, those two
brought a new beginning. Mrs. Thatcher defeated the trade unions, privatized much of the
economy and began an (unsuccessful) cutback on welfare. And she also once famously said:
“There is no such thing as society.” Of course, nothing much changed in the US and the
UK in many areas but psychologically the era was very significant.
And it was good for me, too. I wrote a textbook on political theory which had a definite
libertarian stance. There was no other text that had Rothbard in the index, though Nozick
was creeping into some. There was an up and coming young political theorist from Oxford
who gave it a terrible review in The Times Literary Supplement. He said it was just free