I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

28 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
as they had seen how the National Socialists, and then the International Socialists, had torn
apart their own country. I went into their bookshop. An elderly gentleman, a war veteran,
noticed I was looking around fairly aimlessly and directed me to a book by Eamon Butler,
head of the Adam Smith Institute, which was an introduction to Freidrich Hayek. Everything
in that book seemed to make sense, fuelling my interest in political philosophy.
I went to LSE from 1988 to 1991 to study in the Government Department, for a joint
honours degree in Politics and Law. My economics papers in the first year were tiresome
and tedious. We read a textbook by Richard G. Lipsey called Positive Economics, the UK
equivalent of Samuelson’s Principles textbook in the USA. Getting rapidly bored with the
Alice in Wonderland nature of Keynesian economics and not feeling entirely comfortable
with the monetarist alternative, I gave up the study of economics and pursued courses that
related largely to political philosophy and law. By the second term of the first year we had
moved into the world of macroeconomics. I closed the page of the textbook and gave up
economics never to attend a class again when I was faced with a grown man, a professor
indeed, trying to teach the class about the multiplier. You all know the story; the multiplier
is the sum of a convergent series. Spend £1m today with a marginal propensity to consume
of 0.8 and the new people who have received the 1st £1m get £800,000 and so on and so
forth. Therefore £1m injected by government into the economy could become £5m of
spending in the ecomony. For about two seconds I thought that there was suddenly presented
to me a cure for all the world’s problems, poverty abandoned overnight. Reality struck in
the third second and I could not look with seriousness at any person who tried, with a
straight face, to teach such appalling nonsense. Like a militant trade unionist, I downed
tools and refused to be taught such crap. During this time while I was an undergraduate,
I participated in a buy-out of a private members’ night club in the Kings Road in Chelsea—
the 151 Club—and then also in the establishment of a restaurant in Chelsea, Le Casino,
with two other partners. This career was taking off fabulously and my academic studies
were being put on the back burner.
But I was taking some very good political thought courses and this confirmed in my
mind that I was a natural rights/natural law person. I followed the tradition of Aristotle,
St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and then the great Enlightenment thinkers: John Locke,
and Immanuel Kant. On the law side, I did jurisprudence, again confirming my position
as a “natural” lawyer. I had no truck with the positivist doctrines of people like H.L.A.
Hart. In our history of modern political thought I was delighted to come across Freidrich
Hayek again through his Road to Serfdom, Constitution of Liberty and The Fatal Conceit.
These are his latter writings and they provided a justification for a pro liberty society based
on spontaneous order. Hayek seemed to come to the natural rights position via a conservative
route, the empirical position of the Scottish Enlightenment and Hume. This left a clear
gap in my thinking, the natural law position coming very much from a rationalist standpoint
and the Hume/Hayek position seeming to be based in the empirical tradition.
When I graduated from LSE to pursue a business career, I vowed that once my entrepreneurial
situation had settled down I would rekindle my interest in these debates and try
to solve in my own mind why I was a natural rights/natural law advocate. My overall political
philosophy favored Hayek, via the empirical tradition; this seemed to encompass my