Your mission, if you choose to accept it

By Don Watkins

Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash

As I was unpacking some boxes of books last night I came upon one I hadn’t thought of in a long time: Daniel Fischel’s Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution. 

Fischel is (was?) a law professor, but the book reads like it was written by a top notch financial journalist. He tells the story of Milken’s financial revolution, which helped break up the conglomerates and make American business far more productive and dynamic. 

And then we learn the twisted and tragic details of the political war on Milken and other financiers following their enormous success. Fischel makes a complicated story easy to follow, meticulously examines the evidence of bad behavior in finance (there was some and Fischel doesn’t hesitate to point it out), and in the process makes you experience the enormous injustice of a witch hunt that sent a great man to prison. 

What makes the book so extraordinary is that I can think of almost no other book like it except, possibly, The Myth of the Robber Barons, though Fischel’s book is far more powerful, and King of Capital, though Fischel is far more principled. 

To make a compelling case for freedom, we need more than big theoretical works like Mises’s Human Action. We need more than just polemical policy works like Equal Is Unfair and The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. We need more than data driven analyses like The Ultimate Resource or Rainer Zitelmann’s catalog. 

All of those are important, vital, indispensable. 

But we also need historical and journalistic books that allow us to see in crisp detail the benefits of freedom and the harms of coercion. We need real life stories that reveal the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtile destructiveness of innocuous and unheard of controls. There is a huge market for great stories—and great stories have a larger impact than great arguments alone.

We have abstractions. We have data. We need more concretes.

So those of you who love writing and are looking for a career, consider telling the real life stories that concretize the case for liberty. I’ll be your first customer.