I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

34 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
undergraduate econometrics (yes . . . but read on before getting out the Wolfsbane, garlic,
and wooden stakes) and doing research for the Office of Naval Research on Navy and
Marine Corps problems during the Viet Nam War.
There is nothing like living close to, if not being in, the belly of the beast. In the Virginia
’burbs, most of my neighbors were federal bureaucrats; at GWU, most of my graduate students
were federal bureaucrats getting their degree at taxpayers expense; many of the GWU faculty
were doing various work on some government contract or project or other. Forget about social
welfare, externalities, the public interest, and all the other buzz words that were so prevalent
at the time and used to justify the growth and intrusiveness of government. Trust me, casual
conversation at every turn showed that private self-interest was rampant throughout the public
sector; government largely served the interests of those in government. But where did all my
Keynesian training and the public policy and the . . . fit in? Simple answer: It didn’t.
Something was totally out of whack. I needed a new perspective, a new paradigm. So,
in desperation, I hiked over to George Washington University’s Gelman Library and started
checking the card catalog (that’s what it was back in those days) for books about bureaucracy.
I found Ludwig von Mises’s classic work, Bureaucracy. Mises made perfect sense. Reading
Bureaucracy was my equivalent of Saul seeing the light on the road to Damascus. Then, I
found Gordon Tullock’s book, The Politics of Bureaucracy. My thinking was transformed.
To me, Mises’s arguments were cogent, persuasive, and totally compelling. Tullock’s work
confirmed Mises’s brilliance and supplemented his insights.
After five years of fighting traffic to get to work, and tired of the socialist bilge prevalent
there, I left GWU and came to George Mason University in 1975. Even back then Mason’s
economics department had a very strong market orientation. GMU was young and growing,
and it had a tremendous advantage: Very little bureaucracy to encumber your efforts
and an economics department (very much in the Virginia mold) where ideology and philosophy
were not issues. The atmosphere was most congenial to a free-market promoter.
Bill Snavely was chair of the Department at the time, and he had been tutored well by his
father, Tipton R., long-time chair of the University of Virginia economics department.
“And, I might add, Tipton’s book, The Department of Economics at the University of Virginia,
1825–1956, remains famous for what was judiciously omitted.”
In my early days at GMU, I was still teaching primarily econometrics. But one day,
roughly 1978 or so, a colleague came to me with a problem: the regression coefficient in
his model had a positive sign and was greater than one; his theory required a negative value
less than one. Like the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, I started throwing poisoned
entrails into the empirical cauldron. Instead of eye of newt and wing of bat, I transformed
the data by taking logarithms and stuck in a couple of plausible dummy variables to bring
some outliers back into the fold. Voila! The deed was done; he got the coefficient that he
wanted. I got a revelation: I was a data Nazi. Torture the data enough, and it will tell you
precisely what you want to know. Truth: I swore that I would never teach econometrics
again, and I haven’t run a regression since. My metamorphosis was complete. Aside: I’d
make a lousy politician—at root, I am honest.
My first face-to-face experience with a dyed-in-the-wool, certified libertarian was the
fateful day when I met The Great One late in the 1970s. No, not Jackie Gleason, but Gordon