I am quite impressed with the article on the Mises Institute on Wikipedia. It has come into its own in recent months and does a great job of detailing the extent of the work done at 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, AL.
I also enjoyed the interview with Lew Rockwell that the article links to where he reveals that on his twelfth birthday a friend of his father’s gave him Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and thus his future was set in stone.
12? That means he had a three year head start on Dr. Raico and Dr. Reisman, as they were 15-year-old high school students when they first knocked on Ludwig von Mises’s door! That said, it wasn’t until I was 16 that I first encountered Hayek and the Austrian school from the pages of a P.J. O’Rourke book (and yet the New Individualist Review sat on the bookshelf all those years). Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Moreover, one must respect the mind that states:
That book taught me how to think in economic terms, and I have been reading in economics ever since, with a special appreciation for the old French liberal school and the modern Austrians from Menger to Rothbard.
Once oriented, I gained reinforcement from a wide range of literature in high school and as an English major. I found property rights in German literature, skepticism against the state in English literature, and a love of liberty in American literature.
I was also taken with Cicero: his love of liberty and the old republic; his celebration of natural elites and opposition to egalitarianism; and, most of all, his fighting, indefatigable spirit. I believed that he was no less right because his principled stand did not prevail. There is virtue in the fight regardless of the outcome. The eloquence and courage of Tacitus influenced me for the same reasons.
{ 5 comments }
I didn’t discover any Austrian until my 20th birthday… does that make me a late bloomer?
I only discovered it at 19, and accidentally…
it = Austrianism
Josh,
I would hardly call you a late bloomer. I didn’t find out about Austrian econ ’til I was 50.
I also discovered libertarianism through P.J. O’Rourke, who is from my hometown. I was about 21 or 22.
Unfortunately, I first started out down the Cato/Friedman path. I wasn’t an Austrian until I was 26 or 27, and not an anarchist until 28.
It is disappointing to see how much more a libertarian I am than the man who got me started down the path.
Comments on this entry are closed.