39. How I Became a Libertarian

39

DAN KLEIN

HOW I BECAME A LIBERTARIAN

I WAS DELIGHTED THAT Walter Block wanted me to participate in his collection of libertarian memoirs. Reading back over my own, I see that it is a general account of my intellectual bearings up to age 30, rather than a narrow telling of how I became a libertarian.

I don’t recall hating my kindergarten or 1st grade teachers, but from the 2nd grade I think I hated most of them. Now I am a teacher, and I think I am popular as a teacher because I have a natural hatred of teachers.

Born in 1962, I grew up in a nonreligious-Jewish, nonpolitical-Democrat family, the third of four boys, in northeastern New Jersey. As a kid I thought pretty seriously about time, space, God, free will, causation, philosophical foundations, and other infinite regresses. I think I early saw common patterns to such conundrums. I came to a view similar to that of H.L. Mencken’s about theology: “An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.”

Until puberty I was smart, handsome, popular, tough, and fairly athletic, but at puberty all my advantages declined at once. Puberty was a period of emptiness and growing cynicism and despair. I did not read. I watched TV.

In 8th grade they put me in the smart class and it was there I met Tyler Cowen. Officially, he was a nerd, but he was profoundly wise to all the bullshit. Like in a Hollywood high-school movie, Tyler was the nerd who was actually the coolest guy around.

At first our friendship was glancing. At school we developed a mutual admiration. He would come out with remarks that made a great impression on me. Most of my friends were athletic and worshipped our math-teacher/basketball coach Mr. Nickel. I hated Nickel. One of these friends and I disputed the matter, and from nowhere Tyler the brainy nerd interjected with a knowing smile: “Nickel’s a douche.”

In 8th grade I started listening to music and discovered that Tyler and I had similar tastes. The Beatles were primary and we branched out widely, with Tyler scouting and blazing the trails. We were becoming quite friendly at school, but we didn’t hang out outside of school much, probably because our circles didn’t mesh. Neither one of us would have been a natural addition to the other’s circle. Also, we didn’t live that close to each other.

Tyler was very intellectually advanced. He was a bona fide chess champion. Even more remarkable was his voracious reading and broad knowledge. I knew from remarks he made that his political views weren’t the standard stuff, but I was pre-political. My superficial prejudices, from my parents and grand-parents (New Deal Democrats), were against Nixon, etc., as were the prejudices of Mad magazine, which was about the only thing I read before I was 16 or so.

I was at Tyler’s house, probably in 9th grade, and we were playing ping pong in his basement. He asked: “Have you ever thought about why school sucks?” “The teachers are assholes, they treat you like children, it’s boring . . .” “No, no, I mean why it sucks?” “No, what do you mean?” It had never occurred to me that school could possibly not suck.

He said it sucked because it isn’t privately owned, it gets its money from politics not the voluntary choice of customers, and so on.

I immediately saw the truth in this. It made perfect sense.

My contempt of school was a major passion in my life. Suddenly I had a powerful theory of why the experience was so disagreeable.

In 9th and 10th grades my general pubescent indirection continued. My main social activities were hanging out with a very cynical neighbor friend and playing poker with a regular group of guys. The first time I took the SAT my verbal score was 490.

Tyler and I continued a friendship based mainly on music (Harry Nilsson was a special favorite), but still we didn’t really hang out together. My disgust with school led me to go away in 11th grade to a boarding prep school in Connecticut. I became more serious about my coursework. I had a science fiction course and I recall Tyler and I corresponding about Arthur C. Clarke and the Overlords coming and establishing Big A. I think Tyler put Economics in One Lesson or Defending the Undefendable in my hands. These were among the first libertarian books I read. I liked them immediately. I began to get very interested.

That summer I spent 6 weeks in France. I was supposed to be learning French and diddling French girls, but all I actually accomplished was reading For a New Liberty. I received a letter from Tyler about his going to an economics seminar at Oxford and that I should travel from France to meet him. I did. I didn’t know where the seminar was meeting. I just went to Oxford and asked the Tourist Centre where an economics seminar was taking place. I actually found it and Tyler and I got to hang out together for about two days. We totally talked libertarianism. He had finished high school a year accelerated and was enrolling at Rutgers Newark in an Austrian program directed by Rich Fink. He suggested that I join him. But I still had another year of high school. Rich got me accepted for the semester starting January, so I started college as a high school dropout.

During what would have been my last year of high school I became increasingly integrated in Tyler’s circle of intellectual friends (with whom I was at least acquainted because I had been in the smart math classes). Among them was Randy Kroszner. Tyler was getting him into libertarianism and economics in parallel with me. Randy and I were friendly then but it was later that we became close. Randy is my other best friend, but our friendship, though often playing in libertarian and professional-economics circles and depending on a critical libertarian understanding of things, is not so much an intellectual or movement enterprise. We talk a lot about economists, and some about economics. He has a pretty high standing in professional economics, and he gives me something of an insider view of establishment circles and institutions. His input has very much helped to give me confidence in my irreverence toward the profession. But our friendship is based mostly on flights of satire and absurdity. Randy supplies the imagination and knack for imitating voices and seizing on characteristic utterances. If someone were to tap the phone line he would hardly be able to make sense of it, since every other expression has some special meaning and is interrupted by rifts of giggles. Significant others have had to tolerate these “conversations.” Incidentally, and to return to 1980, Randy was the high-school class valedictorian and in cap and gown at commencement he began his speech: “These ridiculous outfits are a fitting conclusion to our 12 years of servitude.” It got more radical from there.

At Rutgers Newark, at age 18, I had courses with Joseph Salerno and Richard Ebeling, and seminar discussions also with Rich Fink and Don Lavoie. I was part of the group that relocated to George Mason. There I took courses and interacted with Fink, Lavoie, Jack High, Karen Vaughn, Tom DiLorenzo, James Bennett, and David Levy. Also, about a year after we arrived at Mason, the people of The Cato Institute and Libertarian Review and Inquiry magazines arrived in Washington, DC, and Tyler and I became involved with Tom Palmer, David Boaz, Sheldon Richman, and, most importantly, Roy A. Childs, Jr. I was very, very lucky in all this. Not merely for finding these circles, but also that I had Tyler to get me included.

I wasn’t a reader. Having Tyler as a roommate I let him do the reading and tell me about it. He was reading everything from Althusius to Charles Tansill, so, on Tyler’s coat-tails, I acquired some awareness of the big picture and how things fit together. Tyler was pursuing the history-intensive reading program outlined by Walter Grinder.

Although Tyler’s knowledge and raw thinking power dwarfed mine, it wasn’t as though I sat at his feet in awe. In a back-and-forth process of testing and reformulation, even though I had usually not read anything about what we were discussing, we decided whether we liked an idea. I think there has always been a division of intellectual disposition and tendencies between us. Each has talents and shortcomings the other learned to rely on, play off, and profit from. I don’t recall us ever really differing on anything substantive.

For me, the real focus has always been libertarianism as a movement. This I knew to be worthy at a visceral level. I knew that a “philosophical foundation” was at best a dreary stand-in for the rage you feel. At college we were officially Austrians and I suppose non-aggression-axiom libertarians, but by the second or third year our attitude was pretty independent of all that. A friend and peer whom we called “The Master” used to play Mises’s “Liberty and Property” audio-tape over and over again, squealing with hysterical laughter over Mises’s emphatic barking. The Master, Tyler, and I would repeat long passages. “Zhe gahrment induhstry makes cloaddths not only for normal people but also der shtout. Book publishers publish not only vesterns and trillers for zhe crowwdd, but also books for zhe discrrimminating rrreader.”

After doing my bachelor’s in economics at George Mason I went directly for the Ph.D. I went to NYU, funded by the Austrian program of Mario Rizzo, Israel Kirzner, and Larry White. Within the program I criticized Austrianism from a McCloskeyan perspective, but was comradely, and learned much from them (I took courses from Rizzo and White). I pursued game theory pretty hotly. I never took model building at all seriously, but career sensibilities led me to think in those terms at the time. Later on, after graduate school, I came to appreciate how valiant the NYU Austrians have been in holding up against the madness and creating the enclave that I was fortunate enough to be part of. Actually I’ve made a return to Austrian thinking, especially in distinguishing knowledge from information, and have articulated the instinctive admiration I really always had for Kirzner, but my formulation of central Austrian themes is, I think, pretty distinct from that of any of the Austrians, and I now push for retiring the term “Austrian economics.”

I did some lecturing for Greg Rehmke’s economics-for-debate seminars, and at one such program at Bellarmine College in Kentucky I met John Majewski. John and I hit it off and ventured into toll road history. Together we explored the mysteries and wonders of Plank Road Fever.

In a sense Tyler has been my greatest influence, but throughout those early days Tyler, Randy, and I interacted as peers. Of people with a guiding influence on me, more as idols or role models, there seem to be four who stand out, mentioned here in the order they entered my life.

The first was Tyler’s father, Jim Cowen. It would be hard to try to convey his greatness without going on at length. He has influenced me most.

The second is Walter Grinder. For me and many others Walter is the bearer and teacher of the big intellectual picture. He tells you to know the big picture and think of yourself as part of it. There is no separating his being from his vision for the vibrant libertarian pursuit of scholarship. Moreover, Walter maintains a lofty and austere existence, a remarkably independent judgment, upon which a pupil may build certain key ideas and deeply personal scruples and aspirations. Walter’s judgment is a sort of North Star for me. His mission is full of integrity and never satisfied. Along with Leonard Liggio, Walter headed most of the academic programs at the Institute of Humane Studies, and our relationship developed with my participation. Walter and I for a time lived about 20 minutes apart and we got together regularly for coffee. For hours we talked of the movement, its history, its ideas, and so on. He’s just a great person. Leonard, too, has always been a good friend and supporter, and I am very grateful for the institutions and communities that he, as well, did so much to create. Christine and John Blundell, too.

The third is Prof. McCloskey—Donald then, Deirdre now. She was very important in my formulating why it is perfectly legitimate to be merely a libertarian economist, indeed, merely a libertarian or even just a plain man, why you don’t need an Austrian economics or any other protective scientific armor. She is right that, like Samuelson and Arrow, some Austrians fall prey to anxieties about their scientific status. As someone who has established an appealing and powerful persona within economics, she has been a rare and great role model. Also, she taught me how to write.

The fourth is H.L. Mencken. Although the first author I read avidly was Albert Jay Nock, in 1989 I became really taken with Mencken. His influence on me has been deep and multifaceted. I am half persuaded—but only half—of his thesis that at bottom statism is a mentality of inferior men in opposition to superior men.

Since the age of 30 (1992), I have developed a great admiration for Hayek and Smith.

Of course I’ve learned from many other friends and collaborators.

On my webpage I offer some ideas about libertarianism as political persuasion and movement in “Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard.”

In writing out these remarks I experience a satisfaction in knowing that I and most of my friends have secured a rewarding, active intellectual life for ourselves. We are capable and in our good work learn to breathe cleaner cultural air. But day to day I focus on the baneful forces and my sentiments are less serene.

Daniel Klein is professor of economics at George Mason University and associate fellow and academic advisor of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm.