I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Bryan Caplan 77
of murder as an independent moral fact. In the admittedly rare circumstances where murder
serves one’s self-interest, it remains wrong.
Huemer resolved my philosophical doubts so well that I became less and less interested
in pursuing a career in philosophy. I lost all urge to convince other academics that they
were not brains in vats. My interest in economics, on the other hand, remained strong. Yet
the more I studied, the more disenchanted I became with Austrian economics. Years later,
after completing my dissertation, I explained why in my webbed essay, “Why I Am Not an
Austrian Economist.”
Perhaps the main problem with Austrian economics is that it is not introspective enough.
Mises and Rothbard insisted that economists could only recognize preferences “revealed
in action.” Rothbard used this principle to attack several pillars of modern neoclassical
economics. These ranged from the most abstract to the most applied. He rejected indifference
curves because action always reveals preference, never indifference; he insisted that
voluntary trade was always Pareto-improving, because participants demonstrate by their
actions that they are better off, while grumbling bystanders do not; and he denied that
government action could ever be Pareto-improving, because the need to use coercion proves
that at least one person is demonstrably worse off.
What became increasingly evident to me was that the Austrian equation of preference
and action is crude behaviorism. I know by introspection that I have preferences that I fail
to act upon. And while I do not have telepathy, it is overwhelmingly probable that the same
holds for my fellow human beings. Once you grant this principle, the most distinctive
Austrian doctrines crumble.
I found the Austrians’ resistance to probability theory almost equally objectionable.
Mises and Rothbard saw no role for quantifiable probabilities outside of games of chance
and actuarial tables. They insisted that it was impossible to assign numerical probabilities
to unique events. I unthinkingly accepted their view until the summer of 1992, when
Michael Huemer pointed out its absurdity. Probabilities are nothing more than degrees of
belief, which we know are real from introspection. (I paid no attention to Kirzner’s
“Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Competitive Market Process: An Austrian Approach,”
Journal of Economic Literature (1997) objections to probability theory until years later. In
one respect, Kirzner is more reasonable than Mises and Rothbard. He recognizes that
probabilities can be legitimately assigned outside of games of chance and actuarial tables.
But his invocation of “sheer ignorance” strikes me as pure obscurantism. The Mises-Rothbard
position is intelligible but wrong; the Kirzner position is plain incoherent.)
Sorting out my views on Objectivist philosophy and Austrian economics took up the
majority of my undergraduate reflection. But my interests remained eclectic, and I read
widely, especially in history, epistemology, and political philosophy. I eagerly studied the
history of Communism while I watched its death throes on the news. Learning about horrific
events such as Stalin’s terror-famine in the Ukraine enriched my political outlook.
This tragedy helped me appreciate the logical conclusion of collectivist ideas: Rand’s equation
of socialism with slavery was no hyperbole. At the same time, though, knowing the
history of Communism helped me realize how much worse our political situation could
become. To this day, I am baffled by libertarians who read the newspaper or watch the