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

The Legacy of Two Jewish Men

by Michael Miles

As for me, I’m a full-blown anarcho-capitalist. For many years I was a minarchist, i.e. a believer in a very limited form of government. Within that framework I began to seriously doubt democracy and became a believer in monarchy as a lesser, but necessary, evil. The thought of no civil government at all was simply beyond my comprehension. But the irresistible logic of the writings of Murray Rothbard and my own inquiring mind eventually led me to embrace the concepts of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism. In a million years you could have never convinced me that this is where I would end up ideologically, having grown up as a full blown liberal, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Many folks got on this road through the writings of Ayn Rand. As far as I was concerned Ms. Rand was one of those boring writers I had to read in junior high school, along with Shakespeare and Alexander Dumas. Although later I would fall in love with Shakespeare and take great interest in Dumas, Ms. Rand never registered on my radar screen, and at the time had little if any impact on my thinking.

I was raised in a liberal Catholic milieu and her writings would have been considered nothing short of heresy. We were good Democrats and the government was nothing if not an agent for good in bringing about social change. Like so many Americans I believed in salvation by government, and for all intents and purposes, our Father, to whom we prayed every Sunday and thanked for every meal, resided in Washington, not heaven.

While in junior high I remember fully embracing the American Revolution and having a strange distaste for the French Revolution. Today I consider what happened in France a monstrosity, and I believe it was during this period of my life that I had my first libertarian stirrings.

That episode is all I can recall of any real reflective thinking about what I was being taught or what I believed before going off to college. I grew up in Detroit when Motown was still the sound of young America. My Dad played professional basketball and Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and some of the Temptations lived in our area, which was originally mostly Jewish. The teachers at the Catholic school I attended carried big sticks in those days (literally) and neighbors had no problem punishing you if you stepped out of line.

I was always an avid reader. Today my parents and I are a world apart ideologically but they seemed to be always reading when I was growing up and I remember lots of books being in the house. My mother says I was actually reading the Bible at the age of three. When I announced years later that I was going back to college to study for the ministry, to my surprise she remarked she always thought I would be a "fisher of men."

Coming out of high school I had an opportunity to attend the United States Naval Academy. My parents were gung ho about the whole idea. I remember sitting in the admissions office reading the catalog. Page one said something along the lines of if you have no desire to be a professional soldier this is not the place for you. That was the end of the matter for me. I eventually accepted an athletic scholarship to Seattle University, a Jesuit school with (at the time) a great basketball and sports tradition, which included Elgin Baylor, one of the top 50 basketball players of all time, and Jim Whittaker, the first man to climb Mt. Everest.

There were several reasons for not pursuing a career via the US Naval Academy. One, I wanted to be like my Dad and play professional basketball. After finishing at the Academy you owed the US Government a five-year tour of duty which precluded (then) any professional athletic endeavors. Second, I did not want to be a professional soldier. I just had this vague feeling that I would be more an emissary of the state rather than a patriot along the lines of the American revolutionary war. Again my latent libertarianism was stirring.

After discovering C.S. Lewis’ non-fiction work (among others) as a precocious twenty year old, I was converted to evangelical Christianity. My whole mindset changed at this point. I’m became serious about my studies and scholarship. Not surprisingly, I was often at odds with my teachers. I would go to the library and check out twenty books on one topic just to make sure I had an adequate grasp of the subject matter. Education became a new and exciting experience and ninety nine percent of it occurred outside of the classroom. I later discovered Dorothy Sayers and her fantastic essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, and realized how porous my education was. I had a lot of ground to make up.

As far as matters economic, I immediately became a conservative. I couldn’t understand how anyone who thought Holy Writ was something other than a Jewish fable, or a secret agent book fit only to be read by a special class of people, could come to any other conclusion. St. Paul said any able-bodied adults who didn’t work shouldn’t eat, right? Pretty unambiguous statement whether one reads it in English or Greek. And didn’t he speak directly as to how we should care for the poor and widows? Wasn’t that, according to St. Paul, the job of families and churches? I couldn’t find any approving reference to government bureaucracy coming to anyone’s social aid anywhere in the apostolic record.

This was a strange time for me. Up until that point in my life the only people who I knew called Christians were the liberal type where Christianity didn’t seem to have much bearing on anything except Sunday worship, and what some folks referred to as the bible thumpers, who were, as they say, so heavenly minded they were of no earthly good. For them Christianity extended to the family and maybe a few other social areas, but certainly not economics, or penology, or some other "secular" pursuit.

But now I was reading practical stuff. Stuff that could impact everyday living. I discovered the prophet Isaiah called inflation a sin. Imagine that! He invalidated nearly all my schooling in economics. Then I discovered there were no jails in Israel. Restitution was the order of the day. Whoa! This was radical stuff, bound to put one at odds with society at large. No wonder it’s not preached from too many pulpits.

The clincher was the story of the Good Samaritan. When Christ was asked what is the greatest commandment he responds with this narrative. The Samaritan attended to the wounded traveler by paying for his care out of his own pocket. He expends his own wine and his own oil to minister to this unfortunate soul. This is how Christ illustrated the concept of loving thy neighbor as thyself, not with a federal bureaucracy that coerced money from people (theft) to take care of others, but rather through the illustration of taking personal responsibility for those in need who come across our path.

It suddenly dawned on me that all those federal entitlement programs had no moral legitimacy. This was before I ran into Ron Sider and the left wing of the so-called evangelical movement, which believes exactly the opposite. He was having quite an impact among the young people in my church. I was a lone voice in the wilderness in criticizing his thought. Along the way I discovered David Chilton (and his publisher Gary North), who had written Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, as a rebuttal to Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my libertarian odyssey had begun.

Of course many (not all) of those same economically conservative evangelicals seemed to waffle on social issues like drinking, drugs and smoking. Just as a good interpretation of the Bible seemed to deny government bureaucracy in regards to federal welfare, so a careful perusal of Holy Writ seemed to do the same for things like drugs and drinking. I recall reading that St. Paul said do not be drunk with wine…hmmm…that must mean it was okay to drink, since without drinking there could be no drunkenness. The great apostle could have easily said do not drink wine, which he did not. And anyone who has studied closely the biblical text knows that Saint Paul chose his words carefully.

About this time I had started reading the economic writings of many who thought the world as we knew it, politically speaking, was coming to an end. These books were popular in nature and often not very profound but they got me thinking more specifically about economic matters.

Then I picked up a book by the popular financial writer Howard Ruff. I don’t even remember the title. I couldn’t read a financial page intelligently back then and such was required to get through the book. So I determined I would read it with a fine tooth comb until I understood it. I don’t remember much of its contents but I do remember him saying that while the Democrats had their issues and the Republicans had their issues, they all used the same vehicle to achieve their ends, centralized government.

This statement caught me off guard. I had never considered such a view. While both parties differed in the details, they still required the heavy hand of government to achieve their ends. One wanted to steal your money to fight things like poverty, the other wanted to steal your money to fight things like drugs. It wasn’t that either party was interested in getting government out of our pocketbooks and off our backs, but rather what the disposition of the money they had immorally appropriated would ultimately be.

Wow! It was like someone had set my mind on fire. Later I read an essay (author forgotten) arguing that both parties had their philosophical roots in the left and right wing of the enlightenment, and that at bottom, methodologically, they were the same. From that point on I cast an extremely wary eye at government and those who were involved in it. I knew as long as government was in session, filled with real people with real agendas (often contrary to my own) our freedoms and our pocketbooks were in danger, no matter the party label.

It took many years for me to work out the implications of Ruff’s sentiment, but I got there by bits and pieces. Walter Williams’s book, The State against Blacks, was an ideological bombshell for me, as was just about anything Thomas Sowell wrote. I just happened across Williams’ book one day in the school library of Seattle University, where I was a student. I had no formal training in economics but these two gentlemen provided me with a first-class education. I was slowly integrating theology, philosophy, economics and history, and was able to articulate more effectively my economic beliefs because of what they wrote.

In retrospect it must have been a strange sight. Here I was a student at a liberal Catholic university, being influenced by a conservative black economist (Sowell), a very libertarian leaning black economist (Williams), later a radical anarchist Jew (Rothbard), and a group of Protestant Reformed scholars who thought a dead white Genevan scholar/theologian/minister named Calvin modeled much that was important for our culture (North and Rushdoony). Whew! What an eclectic bunch of folks.

Somewhere along the way I got a copy of the Freeman put out by the Foundation of Economic Education. I became a subscriber and always looked forward to the many libertarian articles. I don’t know but I think this is how I got on the mailing list (years later) for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report and various other libertarian organs. I was reading voraciously – learning, changing, and growing – slowly but surely.

After undergoing some changes in my theology and seeking what I considered to be a more comprehensive expression of the Christian faith, I once again ran into the writings and publishing of Dr. North. Many conservative traditionalists (and many liberals as well) simply are not able to make a consistent distinction between that which is worthy of moral opprobrium and that which should be subject to civil censure. The latter category is much smaller than the former. Dr. North, his father in law R. J. Rushdoony, and others, many who wrote under Dr. North’s imprint, helped me to make this distinction more clearly.

This phase of my life led me deeper into the study of economics, epistemology, history, philosophy, theology, sociology, political philosophy and casuistry. Surprisingly, it also led me to embrace the one holy catholic apostolic faith as expressed in Eastern Orthodoxy. As an aside, I was surprised to discover that Byzantium had a time when the Church openly taught that the King was subject to the law just as the people were. You don’t read much about this in the history of the Western monarchies.

It was while reading Dr. North that I was introduced to Austrian economics. It was one of his voluminous footnotes (and long appendices) that introduced me to Ludwig Von Mises. As you might imagine, I was in scholarly heaven. There was Rushdoony, Nisbet, the Church Fathers, Mises and finally Rothbard (along with a host of thinkers too numerous to mention). Along the way, in my second incarnation at Seattle University over a decade later, I even took an introductory economics course taught by Robert Higgs.

By the time I started reading Rothbard deeply I was ready. I was nearly twenty years removed from high school but by the late 1990’s the soil was extremely fertile. Mises was one thing, but Murray, by my way of thinking, was radical. He had gone one step further than Mises, and I was gobbling it all up.

The one overriding question in my mind, and the final hurdle, was the question of defense. If the government fumbles everything else, why would it be any different here? In fact, why would we entrust such folks with the most awesome of earthly powers, i.e., a monopoly on force. St. Paul said these people were the least esteemed among us. There was originally no central government in Israel, and when they finally got one it was greatly to their detriment.

My Christian minarchist friends would answer by saying defense is one of the civil government’s few God-given duties. But that interpretation is not iron clad, and doesn’t explain Israel without government and their warning from God through the prophet Samuel about desiring a King (the monarchy after all being a type of centralized government) as a form of idolatry. I was no longer willing to baptize the state (no matter its form), and assume a few changes here and there would make a difference, especially since any change would ultimately rest on the ability of the state to check itself, a dubious hope at best. It seemed to me that the very legitimacy of the state was called into question by these two Jewish men, Samuel and Murray, and no good answers were forthcoming as a rebuttal.

Until I ran into Murray, every answer I got to the question of defense involved some form of "if our guys are in power, then it will work." Funny, this sounded a lot like the Democrats and Republicans. This always struck me as a denial of human nature, without historical precedent, at odds with Holy Writ, and flat out utopian. In other words, exactly what people thought of my own evolving anarchist position.

Tolkien taught me that no man could handle the ring of power, no matter how virtuous or godly. But it took two Jewish men, separated by thousands of years, to explain to me exactly why. And thus with Rothbard’s scintillating analysis, my evolution to anarcho-capitalism was complete.

January 3, 2003

Michael Miles [send him mail] writes from Seattle, WA.

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