HOW DID I BECOME A LIBERTARIAN? It happened in the fifth grade at Public School #6 in Woodmere, New York at approximately 9:10 in the morning. In my elementary school, we began every day with the Pledge of Allegiance.

WALTER BLOCK ASKED ME to relate the events that led them to libertarian and Austrian ideas. Several others began their stories in high school, but I was completely unaware of these ideas until I was a graduate student. I was always a good student, but when I entered college I saw it as a way to make myself more employable, and also as a place to have a good time with my friends. I wanted to do well in my classes, but I was not seeking out ideas.

I WAS BORN IN PELLA, a town of about 5,000 in central Iowa. It began as a Dutch colony in 1847, settled by a group of emigrants from Holland who were rebelling against certain Dutch laws and regulations of the State Church of Holland. My great-grandfather, John Hospers, was leader of the Second Emigration to Iowa in 1849. He and his wife and eight children made the move to Iowa on the suggestion of a missionary who said that this portion of Iowa had the richest soil in the world.

UNLIKE MANY LIBERTARIANS WHO DALLY with socialism before seeing the light, I have never been attracted to leftism. Indeed, although I of course welcome former pinkos to our ranks, I’m always a bit suspicious of anyone who could ever be swayed by that bunk.

ISN’T IT CURIOUS HOW SO many individuals arrive at more or less the same place by following their own path? And this in an egalitarian age where to think for yourself is anathema? How can this be?

I WAS DELIGHTED THAT Walter Block wanted me to participate in his collection of libertarian memoirs. Reading back over my own, I see that it is a general account of my intellectual bearings up to age 30, rather than a narrow telling of how I became a libertarian.

I don’t recall hating my kindergarten or 1st grade teachers, but from the 2nd grade I think I hated most of them. Now I am a teacher, and I think I am popular as a teacher because I have a natural hatred of teachers.

AS A TEENAGER YOU ARE usually an ideological accident waiting to happen: You are either so eager to conform to your surroundings that you may end up supporting anything mainstream, or you are so rebellious that you are willing to advocate basically any odd-sounding idea as long as it will make your family and teachers go nuts. In my case, being a 14-year-old in the welfare state of Denmark A.D. 1981, I guess I was plenty of both.

I WASN’T EXACTLY A CHILD PRODIGY, but at the same time, I knew I was a bit brighter than the average kid in my Catholic school class in Cincinnati, Ohio. Oddly enough for a pacifist libertarian, I was enthralled by the military in my early days. I loved war movies—you know the bad ones where John Wayne takes out an entire mountainside of Japanese soldiers? In fact, I remember being made fun of for talking to my 5th grade schoolmates about Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps.

MY PROGRESS TO CLASSICAL LIBERALISM began when I was a child. Until the summer of 1941 we lived in Miami Beach, Florida. Then and until the early 1950s there were many fifteen minute radio commentaries on politics on the four radio networks. My parents listened to them and the news broadcasts. They held opposing views.

I’VE BEEN FORTUNATE ENOUGH to have spent over half my life in the libertarian movement, and I am very grateful to have received so much in the way of friendship, insight, intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and material assistance from its members over the years.

I owe my libertarianism to two women: my mother, and Ayn Rand.