The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

How I Became an Austrian School Libertarian

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, in a working-class household dominated by my father. He regarded all Democratic politicians and labor leaders as thieves and voted Republican; however, his political views had little effect on me at the time because they were theoretically uninformed and I saw no bearing on my life of the cupidity of others. His caustic rants did provide a residue of skepticism regarding the actions and motives of politicians that has served to temper my disappointment when appearance usually gives way to the corrupt reality of their lives and deeds.

In general, my father paid little attention to his children or their education, although he allowed my sister and me to read anything we wished. Consequently, I read everything in the house and used his library card to access the general collection of the public library – much to the dismay of library employees who feared for my moral development. To their credit, they hired me as a library "page" when I was old enough to work there and I spent the last few years of high school working in the central library. For me, it was like being a chocoholic working in Willy Wonka’s factory.

My reading throughout the teen years was eclectic and self-indulgent. I had no particular direction in life and no real ambitions. I was intelligent and well read (in some things) and was thus tolerated by the more serious kids, but I didn’t share their aspirations for university. When I was a senior, I wondered why my girlfriend was looking forward to Smith College and one of my best friends could hardly wait to begin his first year in "the college" of the University of Chicago. Near the end of the spring semester, a drinking buddy convinced me that the Marine Corps would make men of us and we enlisted together. It was a decision that introduced me to the seriousness of life and, especially, of one uninformed by the life of the mind.

The Marine Corps taught me discipline; it also taught me what it was like to descend to the level of the lowest common denominator and be ruled by the ignorant and stupid. I realized that without an education, it would be the same in civilian life – just less regimented. After my release from active duty and transfer to the Marine Corps Reserve, I resolved to go to university and to find a way to get out of the Corps and out of the ignorant underclass.

Atlas Shrugged came out my senior year in high school and several of my friends read it and raved about it. At the time, I was in my Thomas Wolfe period and couldn’t be bothered with a popular-level novel. It wasn’t until the summer before my first year in college that I finally read it. Well, every libertarian romantic (whether you knew you were at the time or not) knows what it was like to read that book for the first time. Crack cocaine couldn’t be better. Suddenly, the whole horizon of my thought expanded beyond any previous bounds. The everyday world became simpler, understandable, and people could be sorted out into the good guys and the rest. My own existence became important, portentous, directed by principle. For several years afterwards I lived in that intellectual context and suffered the comparison with my actual existence.

I worked my way through Texas Christian University in Fort Worth while fully employed at various jobs. I refused to go to a public university and be a receiver of stolen goods, nor did I apply for financial aid because one of the criteria was "financial need." I applied the litmus test of agreement with Rand and her cabal to weed out undesirable friends and to sabotage my various romances. I wrote Randianisms into every term paper; took taped courses from Nathaniel Branden Institute; became a contract salesman of NBI publications to a chain of local bookstores; etc. I also enrolled in ROTC to substitute a commission in the U.S. Army for my enlisted status in the Marine Corps. At graduation, the Marines discharged me and the Army commissioned me.

My best friend at the time was a physics major, and we discussed Randianism endlessly. I say "discussed" because as much as we tried we could find nothing with which to disagree. When NBI courses were offered, we drove to Dallas every week to listen to NBI tapes in a hotel conference room along with a group of twenty or so other "students of objectivism." The others seemed a bit strange to us for two reasons: first, because the notion of disagreement was not even on their horizon; and, second, because of their pessimism and "Three Hundred Spartans" mentality. I recall one of the course organizers once saying that in some far distant future someone might unearth a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say, "Gosh, there were rational people way back then." My friend replied, 'I hope it’s a copy of Das Kapital and they say, "Jeez, who could have ever believed this crap!' "

This Randroid period mostly came to an end after I met Nathaniel Branden. As a member of the university Student Forums committee, I arranged for him to give a lecture on campus. My reward was to share a ride to the lecture and have dinner afterwards with the great man himself. Rand’s heroes were tall and athletic, with faces composed of angular planes; Branden was overweight, dumpy, beady eyed. I cut him no slack, asking during dinner how he could allow himself to be fat. He replied that it was "a personal decision." My naïve, twenty-four-year-old self wasn’t accepting this dodge; Rand had painted a verbal picture of ideal people and I hadn’t found any – even at the top of her social pyramid. I wondered if the whole Randian "movement" was a hypocritical fraud and decided to steer clear of any more involvement with the organized aspects of it.

Needless to say, it was some years before I realized that there is often a disjunction between the world of the mind and that of the conduct even of some of the most principled people – and that includes myself. At the time, I decided that Branden was a plaster saint, and I became more reflective and more explorative of wider political, philosophical and economic literature – although I continued to subscribe to Randian publications and to buy and read books recommended in them.

As an undergraduate, I had become an economics major and purchased books by Mises from NBI and the Conservative Book Club. A friend of my family had tried to get me involved in conservative circles, but I hadn’t found it very satisfying. Conservatism seemed too considerate of the status quo at the expense of broader political philosophical and free market principles. It was near beer; Randianism was 200 proof. When I met them during this period, Fred Schwartz seemed too much like an evangelist, Russell Kirk was a glowering presence, wreathed in cigar smoke as he pontificated, and "Taiwan Tony" Kubek was frightening (to a nineteen-year-old) in the intensity of his vilification of President J.F. Kennedy.

I read Mises’s Human Action and Boehm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest. Neither made much sense to me in comparison with the contents of the neoclassical and institutionalist textbooks used in my undergraduate program. Nevertheless, my senior thesis attacked the neoclassical perfect competition model as lacking in competition. It was termed "sophomoric" by the department chairman and he refused to accept it. Years later, as I read an article by Israel Kirzner, I was amused to find some of the same arguments I had crudely presented in that early thesis.

While a college senior I applied to several graduate programs in economics. I really had no idea where to go, since I wanted to study free market theory and the Randians had convinced me that it wasn’t taught anywhere except in the NBI course by Alan Greenspan. I had heard something positive about the "Virginia School" but a respected business faculty member whom I asked about it said the people there were "a bunch of wackos." I had applied to one program where my best undergraduate economics teacher at TCU had emigrated. It was Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and I was offered a full ride in contrast to my next best alternative, which offered to consider aid after my first year. So, I went to SIU-C. The Army agreed to defer my active duty service until after the Ph.D. was completed.

I was miserable. Coursework was the same-old neoclassical model-building done in higher mathematics. At the end of the first semester, I wrote a letter to Alan Greenspan asking his advice on switching to another program. To my surprise, he replied, noting that my difficulties were common among academic objectivists, most of whom completed their Ph.D.’s and then continued their education afterwards. I stuck it out for two more years, then told the Army I was ready for active duty, and dropped out of grad school.

Most of my three years of active duty service as an intelligence officer was spent in Germany, and it was intellectual dead space. The last year there I decided that finishing the Ph.D., as Greenspan had suggested, was the only option for me. Meanwhile, I had met and married an American opera singer studying in Germany, and when I was released from active duty we returned to Carbondale where I completed the Ph.D. and she completed the master’s in vocal performance.

At the same time, I was reading Mises and Hayek with a vengeance, determined to learn some real economics. In my reading, I became aware of the Methodenstreit and decided to write my dissertation on it. My director was a Veblenian institutionalist, but an intellectually honest man who drove me to complete it in a year. After it was accepted, I sent a copy to Israel Kirzner, whose book The Economic Point of View I had read. Israel replied with a letter inviting me to stop by and visit with him the next time I was in New York. Since my first teaching job was on the faculty of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y, my visit with Israel occurred within a few months. One result of that visit was an invitation to submit a paper for consideration for a Liberty Fund conference on methodology to be held the next year in Newark, N.J.

I spent the summer writing the paper, submitted it, and it was accepted. That conference opened up a whole new aspect of existence for me. By the end of it, I knew that I was a libertarian and was no longer intellectually alone in this world. I also knew that I had broken out of Randroidism and could think and argue on my own with a rather richly varying spectrum of personalities and beliefs. I recall one session where a participant referred to Rand’s epistemological writings as "painstakingly careful." David Ramsay Steele retorted, "If Ayn Rand’s epistemological writings can be described as ‘painstakingly careful’, then I suppose her political writing could be described as ‘softly persuasive’, and her novels – such as Atlas Shrugged– as ‘subtly evocative’." I laughed with many others as I realized how clearly David had hit the mark. I still believe that Rand’s – and Aristotelian – epistemological views are correct in the main, but hers are hardly "painstakingly careful." Nor are they scholarly in that she fails to reference the literature on which she draws so one can hardly turn to it for a fuller understanding and clues for extension. The same is true of her writing on other subjects. Good, but limited, and limiting if treated as catechism.

The Newark conference was followed by other invitations over the next few years that allowed me to meet and converse with most of the main figures in academic Austrian economics and libertarianism in general. For this, I will be forever grateful to Liberty Fund, and to Israel Kirzner in particular. On one occasion, I made Friedrich Hayek mad enough to glare at me and, despite our generally congenial acquaintanceship, Murray Rothbard once wrote me a scathing letter in response to an early paper on Mises. From Hamilton I moved to Western Maryland College, then to Pace University and, finally, to the University of Dallas in 1981, where I remain. My own research has not followed a consistent line over the past twenty years, although I’ve recently returned to Austrian topics. Seven years ago, a by-pass operation reminded me of the fragility of life and reawakened my desire to make positive contributions to the advancement of Austrian School thought. I intend to devote the next twenty years to doing so.

January 11, 2003

Sam Bostaph, PhD (send him mail), is Associate Professor of Economics and Chairman, Department of Economics, University of Dallas. He expects that by the time his four-year-old and eighteen-month-old daughters matriculate to university, the only economics taught will be that of the Austrian School.

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