Robert Higgs ... "A few people rouse themselves from the prescribed slumber. Scott Gibb is one of them."
In graduate school, in the spring of 2008, I noticed that my advisor had a bumper sticker on his car that read:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
One day I asked him what he meant by it. He said that America was turning into an Orwellian state. I promptly disagreed with him. I though he seemed kind of nutty for thinking that.
Less than a year later I had quit graduate school and started working for the government (actually an FFRDC), helping the Air Force and NRO build cameras that stare at the Earth from space. I was proud to be doing this work.
I had a huge American flag hung up above my desk which my co-workers sometimes made fun of. In my introductory speech for my Toastmaster club during that time, I described my passion for national security. I gave another speech in which I defended the Iraq War.
During my clearance interview the questioning got so intense that I felt as though the government interviewer was physically sticking probes into my brain - a clear violation of my privacy.
And then the economy turned sour, I grew increasingly bummed about housing prices, and Obamacare was in the news. Most of the women I met through dating were "progressives." Not a good fit, even though I was a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz and U.C. Berkeley. I went to Barnes and Nobel, and bought a bunch of economics books, one called Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. Even though I had a B.A. in economics, I didn't know who he was and couldn't get through the book, but had read enough to get the feel for it. Some of it stuck. I gave another speech at Toastmasters that talked about freedom, but my reviewer commented that he didn't know where I was going with the speech. I didn't either.
Months later, while scanning my aunt's blog, Mrs. Du Toit, I found an economics book she recommended. She had stopped blogging, but her site was still there, waiting for someone like me to come along and find it. She recommended a book called Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I read it and then searched for Sowell on the internet and found this place called the Hoover Institution. At Hoover, I found this podcast called Econtalk and from there I found Cafe Hayek. From there I eventually found Robert Higgs. By this time I had quit working for the FFRDC, but was still working in the military-industrial complex, but for a small private company. Then my father died. Then Steve Jobs died. My daughter was a few months old and my wife was getting ready to start work again. I took some time off work. I sat down and read a number of books by Higgs. I was alarmed by his history of WWII and the Civil War. It was all accurate though. This effectively destroyed the foundation upon which I had justified my career. The good wars weren't actually all that good.
A few weeks later, there was this huge contradiction. I was helping improve the video download rate for government drone aircraft 40 hours a week at work, and then blogging on my blog which was a spin-off of Cafe Hayek called Studio Hayek. Why was I helping the government become more powerful during the day and then criticizing the government at night?
Not long after I walked into my boss's office and told him I couldn't do it anymore. Tears were rolling down my face. I felt like I had misled him. I quit my job. He was totally shocked. He probably thought I had turned into some leftist pacifist.
Now when I talk with my friends who still work in the military industrial complex, I hear them defending the War on Terror, I see them helping the NSA, the NRO, the CIA and the FBI. I try to persuade them. I see the police state, but they don't. I think they see me as nutty, just like I saw my advisor as nutty.
I'm actually optimistic most of the time, though occasionally like yesterday when learning that the government resembles Big Brother I get worried. I have to remind myself that there are many talented people in the liberty movement. Maybe I put too much hope in a few people, but I believe people like John Papola and Russell Roberts are going to persuade hundreds of millions of people in the years to come. I think Students for Liberty is going to alter the conversation at universities around the world. I feel better knowing that one or two LearnLiberty videos comes out each week. I think that the Institute for Justice and the Independent Institute are going to flourish. I think that people will see governments to be more and more illegitimate.
Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this one. Maybe someone at the NSA will read this and research things a bit more. Maybe those at the NSA should ask if things are really as they appear to be? Are the war stories they've built their careers on accurate?
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