I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

68 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
and “Three Hundred Spartans” mentality. I recall one of the course organizers once saying
that in some far distant future someone might unearth a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say,
“Gosh, there were rational people way back then.” My friend replied, “I hope it’s a copy of
Das Kapital and they say, ’Jeez, who could have ever believed this crap!’ ”
This Randroid period mostly came to an end after I met Nathaniel Branden. As a
member of the university Student Forums committee, I arranged for him to give a lecture
on campus. My reward was to share a ride to the lecture and have dinner afterwards with
the great man himself. Rand’s heroes were tall and athletic, with faces composed of angular
planes; Branden was overweight, dumpy, beady eyed. I cut him no slack, asking during
dinner how he could allow himself to be fat. He replied that it was “a personal decision.”
My naïve, twenty-four-year-old self wasn’t accepting this dodge; Rand had painted a verbal
picture of ideal people and I hadn’t found any—even at the top of her social pyramid. I
wondered if the whole Randian “movement” was a hypocritical fraud and decided to steer
clear of any more involvement with the organized aspects of it.
Needless to say, it was some years before I realized that there is often a disjunction
between the world of the mind and that of the conduct, even of some of the most principled
people—and that includes myself. At the time, I decided that Branden was a plaster saint,
and I became more reflective and more explorative of wider political, philosophical, and
economic literature, although I continued to subscribe to Randian publications and to buy
and read books recommended in them.
As an undergraduate, I had become an economics major and purchased books by Mises
from NBI and the Conservative Book Club. A friend of my family had tried to get me
involved in conservative circles, but I hadn’t found it very satisfying. Conservatism seemed
too considerate of the status quo at the expense of broader political philosophical and free
market principles. It was near beer; Randianism was 200 proof. When I met them during
this period, Fred Schwartz seemed too much like an evangelist, Russell Kirk was a glowering
presence, wreathed in cigar smoke as he pontificated, and “Taiwan Tony” Kubek was
frightening (to a 19-year-old) in the intensity of his vilification of President John F. Kennedy.
I read Mises’s Human Action and Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest. Neither made
much sense to me in comparison with the contents of the neoclassical and institutionalist
textbooks used in my undergraduate program. Nevertheless, my senior thesis attacked the
neoclassical, perfect competition model as lacking in competition. It was termed “sophomoric”
by the department chairman, and he refused to accept it. Years later, as I read an
article by Israel Kirzner, I was amused to find some of the same arguments I had crudely
presented in that early thesis.
While a college senior I applied to several graduate programs in economics. I really
had no idea where to go, since I wanted to study free-market theory and the Randians
had convinced me that it wasn’t taught anywhere except in the NBI course by Alan
Greenspan. I had heard something positive about the “Virginia School,” but a respected
business faculty member whom I asked about it said the people there were “a bunch of
wackos.” I had applied to one program where my best undergraduate economics teacher
at TCU had emigrated. It was Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and I was
offered a full ride, in contrast to my next best alternative, which offered to consider aid