41. My Path to Libertarianism

41

ROBERT LAWSON

MY PATH TO LIBERTARIANISM

I WASN’T EXACTLY A CHILD PRODIGY, but at the same time, I knew I was a bit brighter than the average kid in my Catholic school class in Cincinnati, Ohio. Oddly enough for a pacifist libertarian, I was enthralled by the military in my early days. I loved war movies—you know the bad ones where John Wayne takes out an entire mountainside of Japanese soldiers? In fact, I remember being made fun of for talking to my 5th grade schoolmates about Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. I must’ve had ten thousand plastic toy soldiers representing dozens of different nationalities in my collection. I also played Avalon Hill war board games like crazy in my teens.

There was one hint of my libertarian future in my grade school years. I spent three or four years doing routine maintenance for a fellow who owned apartment complexes. This is hardly unusual, except that I was about 11 years old when I began. He taught me electrical work, plumbing, carpentry, and many other skills. I could replace a kitchen disposal by myself at age 12 without difficulty. Only years later did it occur to me that we were breaking many laws designed to “protect” me. We violated child labor laws, minimum wage laws, tax laws (I was paid in cash), and occupational licensing laws. But thank goodness we didn’t follow those silly laws. To this day, I benefit greatly from that experience.

I think I began high school with the notion of going into the military after graduation. We didn’t have a lot of money in my family, and college seemed so remote to me. In my very first day in high school I met a friend, Paul Goins, who was reading National Review in class! He shared my fascination with the military, and turned me on to conservatism. The next thing I knew I was a good old-fashioned Commie-hating conservative with my own NR subscription. Paul and I are still best of friends. He was my best man at my wedding, and I was his at his wedding.

Fortunately, NR, then as now, had enough of a libertarian bent that I started to think a bit about the idea of free markets in particular and freedom in general. After all, this is what we were fighting against the Commies for right? And then something important happened. I still have no idea how he found out about me, because I wasn’t even in his class, but the AP Government teacher came to me in the hallway and said, “Here, read this,” as he thrust something into my hands. It was a copy of The Freeman. I think I was a libertarian from that point on. I devoured it and every copy that I got from then onward. The teacher’s name was Mr. Eaton—I don’t even remember his first name—and I still have no idea how he came to know about me. I’m glad that he did.

Throughout high school, I was an excellent student and luckily fell into the right crowd of other nerdy-intellectual types, but I hadn’t given up the idea of the military completely. I dallied for a while in the Civil Air Patrol and considered applying to the Naval Academy. In the end, I was tempted to take a full NROTC scholarship that was offered to me at Miami University. Fortunately for me, my girlfriend (who is now my wife, Tracy) went to Ohio University, so I followed her there. I enrolled in the Honors Tutorial College at OU which allows you to graduate in three years.

During freshman orientation, one of the leftist student advisors told me I should seek out Richard Vedder in the economics department if I was one of those “right-wingers.” I could tell this was not a compliment. Although I was planning to major in political science, I was able to enroll in Vedder’s “tutorial” in the principles of microeconomics with 3 other students. By the end of my first quarter, I had changed my major to economics and decided that I wanted to be an economist. I also became active in the College Republicans, which Vedder advised, eventually becoming the president of the group. As it turned out, most of the CRs were libertarians and we learned a lot from each other at our Friday afternoon happy-hour sessions. Those were fun days. Reagan was president and we knew we were on the right side! It was in the CRs that Paul and I (we were still inseparable) met David Sollars. Dave was another one of Vedder’s econ students, a senior.

I was groomed to go to graduate school by Vedder from day one. I took graduate level micro and macro as a sophomore, and all the mathematics I could muster. I took a fantastic special topics course in Public Choice economics from him, which made me decide to study that topic in graduate school. Vedder was a distinguished professor at OU which afforded him the right to give away one full academic scholarship to a student each year. As money was always tight, I was unbelievably happy when he offered me the scholarship in my final two years. He set me up in an internship with the Joint Economic Committee in Washington, D.C., and he urged me to attend the second Mises Institute Conference in Austrian Economics in 1987 at Stanford. I probably officially admitted to myself that I was a libertarian and not a conservative at this conference. It was Walter Block in fact whose argument that government redistribution was theft that solidified the case. It was classic Walter Block: “If taking property by force from A to give to B is theft, then welfare spending is theft.” I do consider myself a neoclassical economist, but I like to fool myself into thinking that I have avoided the worst of the neoclassical mistakes by studying the Austrians.

Over the winter break in my final year, I stayed in Athens to work for the local County Auditor processing dog tags (a bit of political patronage related to our work with the CRs). I was trying to make some dough to buy an engagement ring. In the long, cold, dark evenings of this December, I read Atlas Shrugged. Wow! It is hard to explain the power of this book. After reading it, I knew that the free market not only worked better than the alternative, but that it was moral too.

I also shared housing with John Moser. John went on to get his doctorate in history. He worked for the Institute for Humane Studies for a while, and is now a libertarian history professor. I take a measure of credit for John’s conversion to libertarianism by making him read the essay, “Not Yours to Give,” which the Foundation for Economic Education had sent to me.

The graduate school decision was tough. I got into Chicago, but they didn’t give me any money, which I desperately needed. George Mason and Florida State offered me comparable financial packages. In the end, I decided to go to FSU because my old friend, Dave Sollars had gone there ahead of me, and because FSU actively recruited me (no doubt on Dave’s and Rich Vedder’s recommendation) by flying me to Tallahassee and treating me royally. I was married after graduation from Ohio University (in three years) and we spent our honeymoon in a rented moving truck on the road to Tallahassee.

At FSU, I found the grad school work hard but not overwhelmingly so. There were many good libertarian students at FSU such as Dave Sollars, Dirk Mateer, Russ Sobel, and Mike Stroup. We had several libertarian faculty including Bruce Benson, Randy Holcombe (who had just replaced Richard Wagner), and most importantly for me Jim Gwartney. I think the plan was for me to study and write under Randy Holcombe. But Jim Gwartney and I really hit it off and I ended up writing under him.

As I was entering my dissertation stage, which was to be on a topic in fiscal federalism, Jim asked me to work up some numbers on the side for a project he had begun with Walter Block. The idea was to create an “economic freedom index” using a few easy to get variables. We presented our first attempt, consisting of about 11 variables covering about 70 countries, at a Liberty Fund meeting hosted by Milton Friedman and Michael Walker of Canada’s Fraser Institute. For me, this was my first taste of the libertarian big-leagues. I played tennis with Milton at this meeting, and still consider this a highlight of my career!

Soon enough, I was spending a lot more time on the economic freedom index project than my own dissertation. And it showed. I still consider it nothing short of a miracle that I was allowed to graduate with the doctorate. I think Jim must’ve twisted a few arms on my behalf to get the committee to sign off on my dissertation!

In the final analysis, it was pretty rational to spend the time on the economic freedom project. The Economic Freedom of the World project is now an internationally respected product. Now I am a college professor and love turning young students on to economics and libertarian ideas. I am most proud though of having mentored a number of young libertarian students who themselves are in graduate school studying to become economists.

Many libertarians mistakenly argue that success in life is based solely on the individual’s own hard work and determination. Of course hard work and determination matter a lot. But we all know that each one of us was helped along the way by countless others. Unlike the left, libertarians understand that this help, which was voluntarily given, does not justify using force to “repay society.” While I owe society nothing, I do feel that I owe those individuals who helped me along the way. I hope that Mr. Eaton, Rich Vedder, Jim Gwartney, and many others will accept my gratitude as partial repayment for their encouragement and guidance.

Robert Lawson is associate professor of finance at Auburn University.