MY TRANSITION FROM A liberal Democrat to a libertarian began in Brooklyn, New York in the mid-1970s when I met Walter Block.

Two of my passions then were chess and Dr. Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT.) At about this time, I met Bill Shooman through the REBT network. As Bill and I became friends, he introduced me to his REBT friend, Walter, a chess devotee and Brooklynite.

I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO comment briefly on the formative influences that have led me to fall into what may be generally called the libertarian camp. I use this term with a certain amount of caution because, like all great concepts, it has attracted multiple meanings that can easily impede analysis. Many individuals regard themselves as civil libertarians.

BASED ON MY FAMILY BACKGROUND, I should still worship central government and “service public,” like the great majority of French. My family shared two traditions: on my father’s side, conservative provincial and provençal bourgeoisie engaged in farming a family estate since the 16th century, and on my mother’s side, the value of the liberal, intellectual, Catholic beliefs. But everybody agreed about the sanctity of bureaucracy.

I GREW UP IN A JFK-democratic household and was a standard liberal through undergraduate work. While in the Army after being drafted in early 1969, I came to have a good deal of free time to pursue things that I had never before much enjoyed—things like reading.

IT WAS ONLY THROUGH a series of lucky breaks that I studied under Murray Rothbard.

After moving to Las Vegas in 1986, I decided to go back to school and pursue a Masters degree in Economics in the fall of 1989. Why economics? I minored in the subject as an undergrad and kind of liked it. But, at the time MBA degrees were all the rage, and I was advised that an MBA would be better for my career, I decided on economics. This was my first lucky break.

MY INTEREST IN MISES BEGAN after I answered a “Help Wanted” ad in The Washington Star. But a lot of history and living came before that.

IT IS INTERESTING TO REFLECT on the people and events that shape one’s fundamental views. My parents taught me both personal responsibility and accountability. These are cornerstones of liberal thinking. My father was a farmer and my mother a teacher, and they typified the middle America of the 1950s.

THE FIRST ONE TO INFLUENCE my thinking in a libertarian way must have been my lifelong friend (since we were each about 4 years old), Steven Schwartzman. Steve is the libertarian son of Jack Schwartzman, who is the author of Rebels of Individualism and was Editor-in-Chief of Fragments, a libertarian/Georgist publication that Jack produced from 1963 until his death in 2001. The Schwartzman family lived right around the corner from my family in Franklin Square on Long Island.

BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINES OF THE LIFE and work of Murray N. Rothbard and F.A. Hayek—listing their major achievements and their accomplishments, awards and honors—are easily available. Rather, I thought I would recount a few of the many fond memories I have of these two men, which might give you a small sense of what they were like and how I felt toward them.

BY THE TIME I WAS 28 years of age in 1989, I had been lied to far too many times by representatives of the government for me to put any faith in what they had to say.