I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Peter Boettke 59
Why Sennholz’s lectures resonated with me is something I’ve thought about for close
to 20 years. To be honest, his lectures made sense to me because they fit with lessons I had
been taught by my father and my athletic coaches since I could remember. Simple lessons
about the dedication to individual excellence and the personal responsibility one must take
in achieving success or experiencing failure. Competition, I was taught, brings out the best
in us, and Sennholz seemed to me to be simply applying that lesson to economic life. My
father is without doubt the greatest influence on me. He was not an intellectual, but he was
a staunch individualist. He was an independent businessman and a great outdoorsman who
was probably more comfortable on the ocean deep-sea fishing than in doing anything else.
In his youth he was a standout athlete (tennis and basketball) and then served in the U.S.
Army Aircorp during World War II. He spent the last 18 months of this episode in a prisoner
of war camp in Germany. While he was proud of this service to the U.S., my father refused
to take advantage of any of the benefits due to him afterward (G.I. Bill, etc.) and even later
in life when financial hardship hit, he refused to take advantage of any government help
available to him. He believed that you were responsible for your own life and should not
be beholden to anyone else. I cannot say whether my brother and sister got the same lesson
from my father, but that is one of the lessons I got from him—create your own opportunities
in this world and capitalize on them. If you fail to capitalize or your project fails, look
in the mirror and bear the responsibility. My Dad thought sports taught you these lessons,
and that they were vital to leading a successful life. As he often said to me, “I was not put
on this earth to praise you, but to raise you.” My father respected excellence and encouraged
his children to excel in whatever endeavors they engaged in—“The cream will rise to the
top.” Though he was not an intellectual, my father respected academic success and encouraged
it in me.
Academically speaking, I was a late bloomer. I was not very studious in high school
and instead devoted myself to athletics, and in particular basketball. I practiced basketball
for endless hours throughout my teenage years. The only books I read were basketball
stories, and my choice of colleges was limited to those schools where I was expected to play
basketball. After graduating from high school, I worked that summer at Lehigh Valley
Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania and then headed off to Thiel College in the fall of 1978
with the idea of majoring in education so I could coach high school basketball upon graduation.
I found only two courses of value at Thiel College—a philosophy course (which I
took pass/fail), and a philosophy of education course where we read Plato’s Republic. My
basketball playing that year ended early in the fall with a broken ankle, and the injury
would reoccur in the spring as I was trying to recover from the first break. My first year of
college was one of disappointment and disillusionment. As a boy from New Jersey, the rural
Pennsylvania town of Greenville did not possess the charm to me that it did to many of
my classmates. I didn’t find my classes illuminating. Basketball wasn’t working out on
several fronts—the team was lousy, and my injuries prevented me from achieving goals I
had set for myself. My disillusionment with Thiel College was compounded by the death
of my maternal grandfather who I was very close to, and my homesickness for New Jersey,
family, and especially my girlfriend (now wife) Rosemary. One of the assistant coaches,
Glen Salow, who had played for the Christian Fellowship team of Athletes in Action, noticed