THE SMITH CENTER

for Private Enterprise Studies

My Journey Toward Libertarianism

by

Charles W. Baird

Director of The Smith Center

Professor of Economics

California State University, Hayward

I didn't know it at the time, but my first step toward libertarianism was taken during a violent labor union strike, circa 1950, against the factory that employed my father. I grew up in a classic company town, Whitinsville, Massachusetts. Dad's employer, Whitin Machine Works, employed something like 80% of the workers in the town, and we lived in a company-owned tenement. The union that, by force of law, represented both willing and unwilling factory workers decided to call a strike. My father and his older brother were members of the union only because they had to be as a condition of employment by the factory. They and several other workers were opposed to the strike and decided to attempt to cross the picket line. The town police were there ostensibly to keep the peace, but they did not. My father and my uncle, and other workers, were beaten. Union thugs threatened all the "scabs" with violence against their families if they continued not to support the strike. Through violence and threats of violence by the unionists no one made it across the picket line, and the police did nothing. Worse, they blamed the would-be line crossers for inciting the unionists to violence. This puzzled me because my government school teachers taught me that the police were supposed to prevent, or at least punish, the private use of force and violence. I asked my father why the police sided with the strikers against workers who wanted to work. He said it was because of a federal law, the Wagner Act, which gave special privileges to people who ran labor unions. This was the first time, in my memory, that I realized that government laws could be stupid, even unjust. I discovered my civics teacher was wrong: laws are not always passed in the interest of the general public.

A year later in school my class was discussing the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution. When it came to the bit about "a more perfect union" I raised my hand and asked the teacher why the founders supported bad organizations like unions. The son of the local union president was a classmate. He glowered at me and later denied the legitimacy of my birth. But I was bigger than he was, so it went no further.

That experience is the source of my life-long opposition to compulsory unionism. But throughout high school I was innocent of all the other ways that the law can be, in the words of Dickens, "an ass." My government school teachers did what they were paid to do: they convinced me that most of what government does is in the public interest, and those who enter "public service" are noble. Some things never change.

I graduated high school in 1956 and spent one successful, and apolitical, year as a freshman at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In a vain (and what now seems silly) attempt to get into Annapolis I enlisted in the U. S. Navy in July 1957. I soon lost my appetite for the military, but I was stuck in the Navy until 1961. My second step toward libertarianism occurred while I was stationed in Pensacola, Florida in 1959. I was in a training program which was almost completed. My classmates and I thought it would be a good idea to have a going away party for ourselves before we were split up and sent to diverse duty stations. There were three blacks in our group. I was given the responsibility of hiring a private facility for our party. I found the right place at the right price, the owner and I shook hands, and I filled out the rental agreement. At the bottom of the form was a statement to the effect that Florida law prohibited mixed race functions in public accommodations. When I explained that there were three blacks in our group, he said that if he rented to us he would lose his license and pay a fine. The deal fell through. I have no idea what the owner's private views were on blacks. He claimed he was perfectly willing to include them, but he was prevented by state law from doing so. I remember thinking that I had found another example of the law being "an ass." I was outraged that this owner could not accept us even if he wanted to because of a law that restricted what he could do with his own property. It seemed unfair to the owner as well as to us. (Tragically, even to this day, the law still doesn't allow a private owner of a public accommodation to make his own contracts with willing exchange partners.)

I was honorably discharged from the Navy in June 1961, and in September I returned to Clark University as a sophomore. I ended up majoring in economics. My first text was Samuelson's third edition, and my economics teachers were very mainstream. I remember a senior honors seminar in which I was assigned to read Galbraith's The Affluent Society and Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom and to write an essay explaining why Galbraith was right. I received an "A" on that assignment, but Friedman's arguments intrigued me. I resolved to look at these issues more deeply sometime in the future, but I didn't do so until much later.

In the meantime I received both a Woodrow Wilson and a Danforth Foundation Fellowship to pursue a Ph. D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in September 1964. At that time (it may even still be true) the dominant view among the Berkeley economics faculty was that economics was simply applied mathematics and statistics. However, one of my professors in microeconomic theory took a brief holiday from mathematics and, for one hour, discussed Austrian economics as an example of an alternative paradigm in the sense of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution. That was the most interesting lecture of the course, but I didn't pursue it because it was clearly intended as an aside. I remained focused on the real stuff ­ mathematics. I received my Ph. D. in June 1968 (the famous market socialist, Abba Lerner, was a member of my dissertation committee) having received much instruction on market failures and magical government remedies and knowing a lot of mathematics and statistics, but very little economics. As I said to John Baden several years later, as a new Ph. D. I knew how to border a Hessian and invert a matrix , but I had no idea why vendors gave out coupons and green stamps.

Then I got the most important break in my professional life. I was hired as an assistant professor of economics at UCLA to commence in September 1968. Before moving south I taught summer school at Berkeley, and I met William Breit , now at Trinity University, who was a guest professor at Berkeley for the summer. Bill was astonished to learn that although I was going to UCLA I knew nothing about Armen Alchian, Bill Allen, Jack Hirshleifer, George Hilton, et. al. Moreover, Jim Buchanan was joining the UCLA faculty at the same time I was, and I had never heard of him. The reading lists at Berkeley didn't include any of these guys (although they did include Friedman on macro issues). Bill soon put that right, launching me into reading University Economics, and Calculus of Consent. It was a wonderful summer of discovery of free market economics. Bill was a great tutor, and he taught me something else, too ­ economics could be fun.

I often say that I have the best of both worlds ­ a Berkeley degree and a UCLA education (although UCLA today is not what it used to be). Bill Breit whetted my appetite for free market economics. During my first two years at UCLA I sat in on courses taught by Alchian, Hirshleifer, Buchanan, Demsetz, Clower and Leijonhufvud. I was more a post-doctoral student than a faculty member. In my third year I was misdiagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. That greatly shortened my planning horizon, and I turned my attention to writing textbooks to make as much money as possible in a short time. In my fourth year I was turned down for tenure but I was permitted to stay on for a fifth year. During those last two years I got to know Jerry O'Driscoll who was writing his dissertation on Hayek under the supervision of Axel Leijonhufvud. Jerry introduced me to Austrian economics through the work of Hayek.

After I moved to Hayward in 1973, I read Israel Kirzner's Competition and Entrepreneurship and then Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia. I became a convinced minimal state libertarian and acquired a deepening interest in Austrian economics. In 1977 Jerry O'Driscoll arranged for me to be the administrator of a two-week Liberty Fund conference on Austrian economics at Mills College in Oakland, California. That was a wonderful experience. I picked Hayek up from the airport in my VW Beetle and drove him to the Mills campus. I tried to talk with him about his work, but he seemed much more interested in learning about me. I met Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, Roger Garrison and several other Austrians. I learned a lot from all of them. Following that conference I finally read Mises' Human Action and began reading more of Kirzner and other Austrians. Notwithstanding several years of friendship and active communication with Rothbard, I have always been more a Hayekian or a Kirznerian than a Misesian. Murray never held it against me, but he always tried to enlighten me.

I never became a pure Austrian (whatever that means) of any type. I have always thought of free market neoclassical economics (at least in its Chicago/UCLA/Virginia expression) and Austrian economics as complements. I wrote two articles, one on James Buchanan and the other on Armen Alchian, making that case. Not all Austrians agree with me.

In 1986 I became a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and in 2000 I was elected to a six year term on the MPS Board of Directors.

I remain in Hayward running a free market think tank and the department of economics, writing too much about the evils of compulsory unionism, teaching a course in market process economics, another in public choice, and a third I call the law and economics of labor relations. In sum, as Saint James put it, I "look into the perfect law of liberty and continue therein."