How I Became A Libertarian
[This article is section 10.3 from How the World Works: Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life, Society, the Economic Crisis, Hip-Hop, and F.A. Hayek’s Coming Intellectual Revolution]
Like most Americans, even “college educated” ones like I was, I had little understanding of basic economic principles. Besides the necessary reading and studying needed to get my degree in Computer Science in 1998, I had barely even read a book cover to cover by the time I had graduated from college[74]. In the year 2000, in one of my first jobs out of college, I had the fortune of making a great new friend, Ted Chang, who seemed to me to have read a book on just about everything and whose opinion I took very seriously. He recommended I read two books, Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” and Steven Levy’s “Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology”. Dawkins’ book was amazing and sparked an interest in biology and human nature that led me to many more books on evolution and evolutionary psychology from Dawkins and other great authors like Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley and Robert Wright. Amazon.com and its reviews made it easy to stumble upon such great authors. Levy’s book, which I immediately followed with M. Mitchell Waldrop’s “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos”, showed how evolution was like an algorithm or mechanism for building order and complexity, and that just like it created biological life it also played a role in the economic order. The intellectual journey of Santa Fe Institute physicist James Doyle Farmer, as he grappled with basic concepts on the evolution of order and complex systems, was mentioned in both books. The sentence in which Levy mentions Herbert Spencer’s influence on Farmer summarizes a profound point:
“Farmer sought alternative views of evolution, and in the works of Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin, he came across ideas of self-organization. Spencer was perhaps the first to identify evolution as an apparent foe of the second law of thermodynamics. While entropy dissolved order, evolution, by drawing on the force of self-organization, bootstrapped increasingly complex eddies of order, seemingly ignoring the insistent one-way sign posted by the second law” (Levy, p. 89)
Herbert Spencer’s name kept popping up in books I read and my curiosity and respect for him began to grow. When I first stumbled upon him in a college Anthropology course, I thought his extension of biological evolution to the social order was interesting but found the short paragraph I read about his criticisms of government to be absurd. Since the class quickly went on to other supposedly newer and greater thinkers, I just assumed his ideas had been supplanted by better ones. Little did I know, I should have stuck to Spencer and what seemed interesting instead of the boring guys that went afterward as I recall. Having faith in some kind of evolutionary explanation to everything a la Herbert Spencer and a growing interest and fascination with evolution/biology/genetics I tried to push my career closer to biology and went back to school to study genetics and bioinformatics (which is about using computers to do genetic analysis). In the back of my mind I felt like the more I understood how evolution had created the biological order, eventually, the more I would understand how it also shaped the social one. For various reasons I threw in the towel to my potential bioinformatics career after a year of studying and during that last semester, when I felt like I was just going to finish the semester and get back to the real world, I decided to finally read an introduction to economics.
I remember watching some of the Sunday morning political shows feeling clueless as to the differences between democrats and republicans and where I “stood on the issues”. During the time I was having this curiosity (circa 2003) places like Amazon.com had inadvertently created an ecosystem where ideas compete with each other based on the books that describe them and how well and how often these books are reviewed. Thanks to this, anyone with a slight interest could quickly research many books and stumble upon great knowledge. Searching on Amazon.com for a few minutes turned up a recent and well-reviewed book that I thought had the perfect title for me, it was Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy”. “Perfect!” I thought, a “Citizen’s Guide”, not some book full of intimidating mathematical equations. I just wanted something that would make me a well-informed voter/citizen. The thing I remember striking me the most was Sowell’s explanation of the German hyperinflation during the 1920s. I thought to myself: “If the bureaucrats in Germany managed to screw the economy, can’t our bureaucrats be wrong here as well?” Sowell described many instances in which our own government was doing things that went counter to sound economic principles; things like imposing price and wage controls as in minimum wage legislation, etc. After reading the book my thoughts must have been along the lines of: “How could this happen? There must be a catch. Perhaps this worked ok ‘in theory’ but the complexities of the modern world would require that the government did things that didn’t fit economic ideals some of the time. Surely if minimum wage laws did not have some benefit, all those government economic experts would oppose them and make the politicians look foolish.” There were still many fears in my mind, many scenarios that I felt needed government intervention and helped justify the status quo in my mind, but my interest in reading a few more introductory books intensified. Next came Henry Hazlitt’s classic “Economics in One Lesson” which opened up my mind some more but I still felt like there must be a missing argument that would justify the way things actually worked. Maybe I just hadn’t looked enough and I would find another book that did a good job of showing why government did things that went counter to the basic principles these books were showing. This reminds me of how hard it can be to go against the mainstream, even after reading at least two great books on economics, books whose logic was irrefutable, I still could not shake from the idea that there must be a catch somewhere, that somehow there must be a good reason why our government, with its thousands of economic experts and bureaucracies, did things differently than what sound economic thinking advised. At around this time Ted hit another one out of the park for me by telling me about this F.A. Hayek guy who had written a “classic” on political theory called “The Road to Serfdom”. It was a tough read for me, I doubt I understood a tenth of it upon my first reading, but it introduced me to Hayek nonetheless. Also at around this time, I stumbled upon the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s website at mises.org. Their daily articles, and more importantly, the growing collection of mp3s in their media section, made learning economics and history efficient and entertaining. I have fond memories of going for a walk or jog or workout listening to many great lectures, feeling as if the socioeconomic world was fitting into a coherent and logical framework. I even wrote a computer program that would download all the media files so that I could burn them onto a CD, a CD which I later boasted to a friend was “the greatest CD ever made.” Soon after stumbling upon mises.org I finally felt convinced that the so called “Austrian School” of economics had it right and the government and America’s educational establishment had it wrong.
My interest in Hayek really intensified on August 24th 2004. I know the exact date because that was the day lewrockwell.com columnist Gary North wrote an excellent piece on Hayek titled “Imitate Hayek” in which he praised Hayek for his great productivity in his late years even though he disagreed with some of Hayek’s ideas. The following line really struck me:
“He was still sharp at 86. I did not read The Fatal Conceit until a couple of years ago. It is an intelligent book. In some ways, it is his most profound book in terms of laying out his first principles, which I don’t accept: Darwinian evolution.”[510] (emphasis mine)
Up until reading that sentence I was not aware that there was something related to Darwinian evolution about Hayek’s work and I was eager to see what it was. Once again, thanks to amazon.com, I was able to see the table of contents to Hayek’s trilogy “Law, Legislation, and Liberty” and see subheadings like “The concept of order” and “Spontaneous orders in nature”. Finally I had really stumbled upon the Hayek who not only explained the subtleties of order at the macro world of economics, but who also dealt with them at the micro world of atoms, everything in between and a whole lot more. More on Hayek later…
Wanting to meet likeminded individuals and take part in a pro-Capitalism revolution I soon stumbled upon the Libertarian Party and eagerly attended the 2004 Libertarian Party convention in Gainesville, FL in order to run for congress as a way to help educate the public. I had bought a box of copies of Hazlitt’s classic “Economics in One Lesson” and figured that if I could simply help educate some people around me, they too would become as fervent as me; eventually ideas would go viral, and bam, problem solved. That was the youthful dreamy-eyed version. I was somewhat disappointed in the Gainesville trip though, instead of finding many people interested in preaching the Austrian econogospel or sound economics I ran into religious Libertarians who think government is bad for religious reasons; constitutional experts who liked to talk about the illegality of much of what government does; and a few other types of libertarians, but not much in the way of those who like myself felt like simply teaching basic economic concepts was the key. I was somewhat turned off by some who did know economics because they tended to refer to the public in general as being a bunch of idiots/sheep and too stupid to ever see the light, a viewpoint which I totally disagreed with. By that time I had read many books on evolutionary psychology and human nature and thus knew how alike all human beings were, and it’s not like I even needed to read such books to be turned off by the pompous elitist attitude. In many ways libertarians have been their own worst enemies. While going through the process of gathering the necessary signatures needed to put my name on the ballot(a process I did not finish) I got a chance to interact with many potential voters and got to see even more first-hand just how difficult getting people not to fear freedom was. It was during this time that I began thinking of writing this book. A book that would provide a brief introduction to economics but also why our nature makes us so susceptible to socialism. Enough about this…
This section was inspired by Prof. Walter Block’s “How I became a Libertarian” series. Google “How I became a Libertarian” to stumble upon many great authors/bloggers essays on how they became libertarians. The most important thing to take away from their essays is how they stumbled upon a solid understanding of economics, which is again, the key to overcoming our fears of the freedom that vital to socioeconomic prosperity. Looking back at my own experience stumbling upon such ideas I realize how fortunate I was to have ran into Ted who quickly pointed me in a great intellectual direction, but I really wasn’t that lucky. In a free society, the truth inevitably out-competes falsehoods and spreads, making it easier and easier for minds to stumble upon such truths. If mankind is to reach higher states of order and prosperity it seems inevitable that such ideas would eventually spread. Prior to the Internet and the wonderful online free-market think tanks that emerged it was much harder to stumble upon Libertarian thinkers. By today the Internet is exploding with a rapidly expanding generation of libertarian intellectuals/bloggers that are making it even easier to learn economics via their videos and avid proselytizing. The Ron Paul presidential campaign of 2008 led to an explosion of interest in and spreading of the Austrian School, and Ron’s campaign of 2012 is poised to continue spreading these ideas.
