I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

332 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
more carefully studied the technical arguments of the Austrian School in parallel with and
as counterpoint to the neoclassical approach that I dealt with in class. Before long, it was
clear to me that laissez-faire was irrefutably the social ideal from the perspective of any
academic discipline. One thing that helped me immeasurably was the contact I had with
Murray Rothbard throughout the 1980s. I wrote him somewhere around 1981 regarding
some point in For a New Liberty and we periodically exchanged letters and phone calls until
his death in 1995. He was always a gracious source of both information and inspiration.
It is fair to say that my approach to any subject, whether economics or not, is rather
ecumenical. That, however, can constitute heresy in some persons’ eyes. For example,
although I categorize myself as an Austrian economist, I am not averse to the use of econometrics,
if employed with great care. The key influences on my thought have certainly been
Rand and Rothbard, but I have found value in the works of a number of other people. To
synthesize those many insights is a daunting task which I am far from completing, and will
never complete alone.
The common thread I am trying to trace is essentially an Aristotelian one. Carl Menger,
founder of the Austrian School, was a realist in the tradition of Aristotle, as were both Rand
and Rothbard. Mises and Hayek represent departures from that thread. Mises was, in at
least some respects, a neo-Kantian, and Hayek was an ardent admirer of David Hume as
well as of Kant. Insofar as economic theory is concerned, considerable progress along the
lines I am pursuing has been made by George Reisman. Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise
on Economics tries to integrate the ethics of Rand with the economics of the Austrian School,
partly by resurrecting various concepts from classical economics and partly by introducing
clarifications of his own devising. An important recent development in a related area is the
work of another friend, Chris M. Sciabarra. Sciabarra has made the provocative argument
in his Total Freedom that libertarianism is best defended using a dialectical method. But
this is not the dialectics of Hegel and Marx; it is the dialectics of Aristotle. Ultimately, if
the Austrian School is to prosper, I believe it must return to its Mengerian, that is, its
Aristotelian, roots and develop further from there.
My range of interests has led me to write on a variety of topics. My book, Free Banking,
was published by Quorum Books in 1993. I have also written several journal articles on
free banking and the related topic of business cycles. It may be unusual for an Austrian,
but I have had two econometric papers published. One dealt with purchasing power parity
as a reflection of expected rather than realized price levels. The other investigated correlations
between an Austrian measure of the money supply and some common macroeconomic
variables. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Fall 1999 and Fall 2000) published my two-part
critique of Rand’s defense of limited government, a critique based on Rothbard’s recognition
that the distributional effects of taxation are never neutral. Those two papers also gave
some of the reasons for my advocacy of anarcho-capitalism. My comparison of Rand and
Hayek appeared in Reason Papers in 1998. An essay on the contributions of Jean-Baptiste
Say appeared in the book 15 Great Austrian Economists. I am currently completing an 800page
manuscript—the culmination of fifteen years of research—on the performance
characteristics of commercial sailing ships. A paper on “Praxeology, Economics, and Law”
draws parallels between Rothbard and legal theorist Adolf Reinach and appeared in the