The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [26]
This was capitalism no economist would recognize, but Galambos had the chutzpah to sell it with passion, and many of us carried his ideas out into the world—to the extent that we were allowed, anyway; we all had to sign a contract promising that we would not disclose his ideas to anyone, while we were also encouraged to solicit others to enroll. As in the case with Rand, some of my politics and economics were shaped by Galambos, but my skepticism kicked in after the inchoate enthusiasm waned—most notably the translation of theory into practice. Property definitions are all well and good, but what happens when we cannot agree on property rights infringements? The answer was inevitably something like this: “In a truly free society all such disputes will be peacefully resolved through private arbitration.” Such counterfactual fantasies reminded me of my Marxist professors who answered challenges along the same lines (“in a truly communist society, X would not be a problem”).
Through the people who recommended Galambos to me I met one of his protégés named Jay Stuart Snelson, who taught courses under his own Institute for Human Progress after he had a falling out with Galambos. To distance himself from his mentor, Snelson built his theory of a free market society on the Austrian School of Economics, most notably the work of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and his 1949 magnum opus Human Action. Outlining the countless and varied governmental actions that attenuate freedom, Snelson explained that “Freedom exists where the individual’s discretion to choose is not confiscated by interventionism. The free market exists where people have the unrestricted freedom to buy and sell.” Although thieves, thugs, muggers, and murderers confiscate our freedoms, Snelson continued, congressmen, senators, governors, and presidents restrict our freedoms on a scale orders of magnitude greater than all private criminals combined. And they do so, Snelson showed, with the best of intentions, because they believe that the “confiscation of the people’s freedom to choose will achieve the greatest satisfaction for the greatest number.” With such good intentions, and the political power to enforce them, states have intervened in business, education, transportation, communications, health services, environmental protection, crime prevention, free trade overseas, and countless other areas.
How these services could all be successfully privatized was the primary thrust of Snelson’s work. He believed that the social system that optimizes peace, prosperity, and freedom is one “where anyone at any time can choose to produce or provide any product or service, hire any employee, choose any production, distribution, or sales site, and offer to sell products or services at any price.” The only allowable restrictions are from the market itself. So employed, systematically throughout the world, a free market society would “open the world to all people.”9
These were heady words for a heady time in my life, before formal commitments to career and family were congealed. For several years I taught Snelson’s principles course, along with my own courses on the history of science and the history of war. I also developed a monthly discussion group I named the “Lunar Society”—after the famous eighteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham—centered on books such as Human Action. As a social scientist in search of a research project, I accepted Ludwig von Mises’s challenge: “One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature.”10 We were going to build a new science, and out of that science we would build a new society.