I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

74 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
Objectivism. After a couple of months—a long time in the intellectual life of a teenager—I
was not playing devil’s advocate any longer. I was convinced that her philosophy was by
and large correct.
From there, I branched out to other libertarian works. Rand, of course, rarely recommended
anything written by someone other than herself, but some liberty-loving soul had
donated a copy of John Hospers’s Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971)
to my local public library. While I doubt I would find Hospers’s book impressive today, at
the time it was a thrilling read. I had never heard the “standard libertarian arguments”
before. Price floors cause surpluses? It was never mentioned in my semester-long twelfthgrade
economics course. The minimum wage therefore causes involuntary unemployment?
A shocking thought. It was obvious once Hospers pointed it out, but these ideas were never
even ridiculed by my liberal teachers. They were unheard of.
Every history teacher I could remember had told me that pharmaceutical regulation
was a great blessing, sparing us a generation of Thalidomide babies and God knows what
else. Reading the standard libertarian rebuttal—delaying beneficial drugs kills far more
people than approving ineffective or even harmful ones—made my head spin. If I asked
my teachers, “Is there any argument an intelligent person might make against the FDA?”
I doubt one of them could have articulated this retrospectively obvious objection.
As I digested the stock of libertarian insight, I noticed a phenomenon central to my
mature research: Most people violently rejected even my most truistic arguments. Yes, I
was a shrill teenager, but it seems like anyone should have recognized the potential downside
of drug regulation once I pointed it out. Instead, they yelled louder about Thalidomide
babies. True, it was not a complete surprise—I had already experienced the futility of trying
to convert my family and friends to atheism during the prior year. But I was frustrated to
find that human beings were almost as dogmatic about politics and economics as they were
about religion and philosophy.
In those dark days before the World Wide Web, it was not easy for a seventeen-year-old
to get information about intriguing ideas, much less converse with real-life proponents. But
I mailed away for information from the Ayn Rand Institute and the Libertarian Party, and
they ultimately plugged me into an array of social/ideological networks. Through ARI I
learned of the existence of “The Forum for the New Intellectual,” a monthly Objectivist
discussion group that met at a bank in downtown Los Angeles. I began attending regularly.
I wound up having little to do with the Libertarian Party—the one “supper club” I attended
seemed far too practical!—but one of the members turned me on to Austrian economics
in general and Murray Rothbard in particular.
Luckily for me, I took a couple of classes at Cal State Northridge during my last semester
of high school. That meant that I had a university library card, which in turn meant that
I could check out a mountain of fascinating books in philosophy, economics, politics, history,
and psychology. Soon I had read Man, Economy, and State as well as Human Action.
But it was Rothbard’s defense of anarcho-capitalism in For a New Liberty that shocked me.
It had to be wrong.
I started asking everyone at the Forum for the New Intellectual to tell me why Rothbard
was mistaken. (I had already been underwhelmed by Nozick’s response in Anarchy, State,