I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

80 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
webbed survey, “The Libertarian Purity Test.” Another feature I added later—ultimately
becoming my website’s biggest draw—was the online Museum of Communism, dedicated
to exposing the horrors of Marxist-Leninist regimes. (I lost more respect for Rothbard
when I learned about his alliances with full-blown communists in the 60s, including the
Maoist Progressive Labor Party during the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution
[see Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, 2000].
What was Rothbard thinking?)
In my spare time, I did what I was supposed to be doing, writing a “plain vanilla”
dissertation on the economics of state and local government. It was an unpleasant experience,
but I picked up the basics of academic writing and finished the Ph.D. in four years,
so I have no cause for complaint. When I went on the job market, my earlier contact with
Tyler Cowen served me well. I had nine interviews, one fly-out at George Mason, and one
offer from George Mason. As in marriage, I reflected, it only takes one.
During my first year as an assistant professor, a passage in Rothbard’s biography of
Mises strengthened my resolve to use my opportunity at Mason well: “What could he have
done, and what would the world have gained, if he had enjoyed the leisure that most academics
fritter away?” (Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, 1988)
I knew that I had to navigate between two dangers: (1) failing to publish and thus perishing,
or (2) wasting my life writing boring, plain vanilla papers. In retrospect, I struck a
good balance. I turned all of my dissertation chapters into articles and put them in the
mail. I then initiated new lines of research, tied together by the common theme of voter
irrationality. Since I was at Mason, I felt free to be creative before getting tenure.
Donald Wittman’s work, showing how rational voters (in the rational expectations
sense of the word) could easily make democracy work well, had already inadvertently
convinced me that voters are not rational. I began to wonder: If a voter has no chance of
changing electoral outcomes, why would he strive to be rational? Geoffrey Brennan and
Loren Lomasky’s wonderful book on expressive voting, Democracy and Decision, helped
me visualize the expansive implications of voter indecisiveness. Inspired by these two
works, I began years of fruitful reading and writing. I discovered empirical public opinion
research, and learned that political scientists had long since debunked economists’ silly
cliché that voters maximize their financial self-interest. I struck gold when I realized that
an already-existing data set, the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy,
had not been used to test for the rationality of voter beliefs—but could be. Working with
this data gave me my first taste of the joy of empirical research. Too much of the empirical
work I saw at Princeton was little more than using econometrics to shoehorn the facts into
preconceived molds. As I analyzed the data on economic beliefs, I felt like I was unearthing
novel facts about the world. These findings became the core of my book, The Myth of
the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, published in 2007 by Princeton
University Press.
The underlying goal of my research on voter irrationality, in brief, is to resurrect the
1970s University of Chicago “markets good, government bad” consensus. This intuitively
plausible view has fallen out of favor in academic economics, largely because its defenders
blamed too much on special interests. The real problem with democracy is not that special