 The late Murray Rothbard is, in many ways, the godfather of the modern libertarian movement, starting with the publication of his great tract, Man, Economy and State, back in 1962. And of course Rothbard played an instrumental role in helping Lou Rockwell get the Mises Institute off the ground. So to honor Murray, we're holding an event at the upcoming Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C., and the event's called Why Rothbard Matters. It'll be a cocktail reception on the evening of Saturday, February 27th. And in the meantime, this weekend's show features a great panel discussion about Murray, not just the economist and the intellectual scholar, but also Murray the man. The panel features our own David Gordon, Walter Block and Joe Salerno, all three of whom worked with Murray and knew him personally for many, many years prior to his death in the early 1990s. So if you're a fan of Rothbard, I guarantee you will enjoy this freewheeling panel discussion of what Murray was like, not just as an intellectual and as a scholar, but also as a person. Stay tuned for a great panel discussion on Murray Rothbard. I think when you met Murray Rothbard, the first thing would impress people was that he knew everything. The way he was able to know everything was he had an amazing ability to read very fast and absorb all the material. In that way, he was like his teacher, Joseph Dorfman, the one who got his PhD with at Columbia. I often used to go to bookstores with him. One we like in Manhattan where the Strand bookstore was his favorite. And there were ones in the Bay Area that he liked to go to. And he would go into the bookstore and he could go down the shelves and he would read every book and he would be able to say what was in this one, what was in that one. He would do no matter what the subject. He had an amazing range of reference. He would just know everything. I'll give you a few illustrations. Some of you may know that there was a libertarian philosopher, a very famous one, Robert Nozick, that he didn't get along with all that well. The reason they initially didn't get along very well was that when Nozick met Rothbard, they had a big argument about whether you could measure utility. And Nozick took the point of view that you couldn't. Rothbard didn't. And if you look, Rothbard knew all the philosophical literature on this topic, the economics, for example, he not only knew Carl Hempel's work, but there was an unpublished part of the Hempel's book that he was able to refer to. So this gave him, it was very hard to ask him something that he didn't know. I remember once I like history trivia questions, I was telling Murray that I'd had a conversation with Mel Bradford, who was an outstanding scholar that we both knew. And I was able to, Bradford really knew American history extremely well, but I was able to give Bradford a question he didn't know, which was what was Rutherford Hayes' middle name. So I was telling Murray about that, and he said, eh, it was birchard, of course. He didn't know just economics and philosophy and political theory, but he was very interested in art history. His specialty was German Baroque churches, and turned out he'd been friends. So in the 1940s, Leo Steinberg, who became one of the great art historians, a specialist in the Renaissance, he was very, very much interested in Leo Steinberg's work on art history. So many things that Murray didn't publish about, he knew a lot about, if you just read his published works, you just get a small idea of the range of his knowledge. Another example comes to mind. In 1980, there was a conference at the Albany held in honor of Thomas Saas. So Murray gave a paper on psycho history, which was the use of psychoanalysis in trying to understand history. Murray was very critical of it. And he was able to absorb all the literature on psychoanalysis. He knew all the books critical of Freud. He had a complete bibliography of that. So again, any topic you were to ask him, he would know an enormous amount about. Now, in addition to his wide range of knowledge, he had a tremendous analytical mind. He gave him an argument. He would see instantly what was wrong with it, what were the flaws in it. He would know all sorts of references that could be cited about it. I can't really think of anyone that I've met who could really match him in the quickness and sharpness of his intellect. And he certainly of the people I've met, he's the one who influenced me the most. He and his wonderful wife, Joey, were very kind to me. I'll never forget what they did for me. I should tell you also that Murray was interested not only in information scholarship. He had a very keen interest in people. For example, at the Mises University programs that we had when he was here and was teaching them, he would be very interested in what all the students were doing. I remember on one occasion I was sitting with him at that time and we had them at Stanford. Everyone would go to all the lectures and I was sitting with him and we were making notes. A woman came up who was in the class and said, you seem to be having a good time during the lecture. And what we didn't tell her was we were making lists of which students should be kicked out of the program. Another time Murray was, I was telling Murray about some item about, he was very interested in about concerned of some item, something had been going on. He really wanted to know. I was talking to him about this. It was sort of a very confidential item. It was, as they say, hot gossip item. So a student came up and was sort of standing there while we were talking. Murray looked around and said, can't you see we're busy? He wanted to know what everybody was doing about everything. He really was a wonderful person. I don't think I'd ever meet anyone as great as he was and I'm very fortunate to have known him. The big problem I had with Murray Rothbard was stomach cramps. He was so funny. He just had me in stitches for hours. I almost died of stomach something or other. I mean, he was just hilarious, making fun of everybody and Bill Buckley. He was just, he was horrible. He was the sort of person that my parents warned me against. He would drink alcohol and he would maybe smoke and he would stay up late. He would stay up until five in the morning and all these bad things. It was just very bad. Murray would just cackle like a banshee about playing risk and he would say, you know, we anarchists are the only ones who can play risk, which is the idea you take over the world. Where nobody else, everyone else wanted to take over the world. We didn't, so we could sort of play it honestly. One of the most admirable things about Murray is the way he treated Hans Hoppe. Murray grounded libertarianism in natural law, natural rights. And along comes this punk kid, Hans. Murray is 15 years older than me and Hans is maybe 10 years younger. Murray is like 25 years older than Hans and maybe Murray was 50 and Hans was 25. I forget the exact years. And Hans came along with this much better grounding of libertarianism in Murray's view, the argument from argument. And usually what happens is when you're the leader of a group like Murray was and some kid comes along and does you better, what you do is, like if somebody ever tried this online ranch you'd kick them right out. And Murray embraced this. And to me this was sort of an indication of where he was at, where he was coming from. He was after the truth. And if Hans did something better than him he acknowledged that and thanked Hans and supported Hans. When I first started writing my writing career I would keep track of how many words per day I could do. And I would keep track in terms of number of pages and each page had around 300 words. So if I did five pages a day that was pretty good, 1500 words. And most days I wouldn't do five pages but every once in a while I'd do... Sometimes I would do five and sometimes 10, sometimes 15. One day I got up really early at eight in the morning and I worked until two the next morning and I did 23 pages. Which was way more than anything I had ever done. So I'm feeling macho and I'm going to compare myself with a man. I would never compare myself about quality. I mean that's sort of like my chess against Bobby Fisher's chess. I'm just talking about quantity. And I said, well how many pages can you do in a day? And he goes, who keeps track of that? But I pressed. I was sort of pushy and though, well I still am now. Shut up. It's true but... So finally Murray says, eight pages an hour. Eight pages an hour? I mean so my whole day of 23 pages was roughly three of his hours. And a good typist who does a hundred words a minute could beat Murray in terms of typing eight pages an hour. But Murray is typing on a typewriter. None of these computer things. And it's just original work. I remember one time Murray was sitting around in the living room and Murray was saying well he has to prepare this paper for two weeks from now. And Joe says, why two weeks from now you have to do it tomorrow? So Murray disappears into his office for an hour or two and he comes out with 12 pages or something like that. It's really... He was just phenomenal. When I... I was born in Brooklyn. I was a track teammate in high school at Bernie Sanders. My views on economics were roughly like his views then. I went through an iron ran phase and then I was a minarchist like iron ran. And then Larry Moss and Jerry Wallows, his roommate, tried to convince me to meet Murray Rothbard and the attraction was that Murray was an anarchist so I didn't want to meet him because he was... An anarchist is crazy. You can't be an anarchist. That's just chaos and weirdness. So I didn't want to meet Murray and finally the two of them ganged up on me and prevailed upon me to meet with Murray and converted me into anarchists in about five minutes. I mean, who's the fastest conversion ever, I think. I'm not sure about that. But he just sort of used my arguments that I got from Henry Haslitz's economics in one lesson about market failure and if you do well, you prosper and if you do badly, you lose out. And he just applied it to the government which I had never thought to do. He just really wanted to be my friend and I could never understand that because I'd read man economy and stayed all during the day and then at night I'd go to his dinner parties and what would a genius like that want to do with me? And the only way I could be worthy of him was to argue with him. So I would just say, well, on page 202, this is a mistake and he was just... I was a real pain in the neck. And he was so nice. He had a picture of Mises on his wall and I said, how could you have a picture of Mises on your wall? Mises wasn't an anarchist. And Murray just sort of smiled at me and said, well, you know, read Mises, you'll find it. He was so gentle and so kind to me and I was such a pain in the neck and I'm glad he was tolerant of me and I try to be tolerant of my students to pass on the baton that Murray passed on to me. I have one distinction that I think no one else on this planet has and that I think I'm the only co-author with Murray on anything. Virtually everything that Murray wrote, he wrote as a single author and one thing he and I are the co-author. This was when I was the associate editor of the Review of Austrian Economics which was the predecessor to the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics of which Joe Salerno is now editor. I wanted to mention something about Joe. There was this debate. When did the modern Austrian revival start? Was it in 1973 with the South-Western thing? And then Hayek's Nobel Prize around that time. And the South-Western thing, you had three speakers. You had Murray, Izzy Kursner and Ludwig Lachmann and there must have been 40 or so of us, 30. Roger was there, I think Joe was there and 30 other people in their 30s like me. And Joe made the point, well if the revival of modern Austrian economics started in 1973, how did you get 30 young people to attend this thing? And Joe quite clearly says and I think very accurately that it wasn't in 1973 started, it was in 1962 which was the publication of Man, Economy and State. So I think that Murray's, that book was really the key element of the start. I remember one time, I have a friend Michael Adelstein and he is a mentor, Albert Ellis, the therapist is a mentor of my friend Michael Adelstein and me and Michael and Murray went over to Albert Ellis's house and we sung rational songs. It was sort of one of the highlights in my career. I have so many many other stories to tell about Murray. I regard him as a friend. He regarded me as a friend. I'm honored in that. I think he is the second best economist in the history of the universe, second to Mises, and he is certainly the first best libertarian and historian and he, philosopher, I mean, sociologist, he was a real renaissance person. I'm honored to have known Murray, my dear friend. I like Robert Higgs still more in Murray to this day. I came across his name in my junior year in college. I read an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine in which it mentioned, Murray Rothbard was the leader of the libertarian movement in the US and also was an Austrian economist and I had heard the term Austrian economist in my history of economic thought class. It was simply a closed chapter of economic thought. Well, I mentioned this to some of the people I hung around with at the Young Americans for Freedom. There was sort of a libertarian wing and then there were some conservatives and one of the people handed me a little booklet. I was an economic major at the time and it was this booklet, Economic Depressions, They're Cause and Cure but it was in the form of what was called a Bramble Mini Book. It was published by the Constitutional Alliance in Michigan. It was about a third of the sizes. It was literally a mini book. It was very small. So I read it right away and it took about 45 minutes to read and it completely changed my intellectual outlook. I learned more from that book in those 45 minutes and I had in two and a half years of sitting through dull, dreary, dismal courses on macroeconomics and the principles of macroeconomics and fiscal policy. So that was the point which I first became familiar with Murray Rothbard. I then was when I went to graduate school, I was elected Vice President of the New Jersey Libertarian Party and so myself and the president heard that Murray Rothbard was speaking over in New York at a Libertarian conference. So we went to see him and I was very excited. In the meantime, between reading the small mini book and going to the conference, I had read most of his other things. So I had in my mind of course an image of him as a very scholarly and grave presence and when we got there and it was his turn to speak, this short, jolly, actually joyous guy just bound it up onto the stage and says, you know, I just came back from Europe and I'm glad I'm here. He says I can say the word anarchist without being hooded down and so one thing that stood out my memory was that the speaker before Murray Rothbard was Robert Luffave who was a pacifist as well as a libertarian and didn't even believe in self-defense against violence. So at the end of Murray's talk someone raised their hand and said, well, do you accept Luffave's position? And so Murray who always was great at giving you examples instead of answering the question directly, he said, well, if somebody was across the room with a mallet and was coming at me, I plug him. So this guy's great. I mean, you know, he's just a wonderful personality as well as a great, great scholar. So a few months later I decided as the Vice President of the Libertarian Party in New Jersey to have him speak at our our convention and so he was you know, I called him up and I told him that we didn't really have much money and so on and so I was going to try to bargain him down to $100 to come across the river to New Jersey, but he says, I'll do it for $75 and I said, fine, that's great. So he came and some people I think someone, he didn't drive or he only, as he said to me says I formally drive, I have a license but I really, I don't drive. So he came over and so we were talking and I happen to mention that I was a graduate student in economics at Rutgers University and he immediately, we were talking about something else, he immediately stopped and he was overjoyed. So he started looking around for a pen or pencil to write my name down. So I gave him a pen and he wrote my name down. He said, I'll have people get in touch with you on Monday. I don't know what that meant. But sure enough on Monday somebody called me up and said we heard from our Rothbard that you're a good Austrian and that, you know, we want you to join our reading group and I did. I joined the reading group and Walter was in it actually, Richard Fink and a few others. And so I guess that we reports back to Murray by members of the group that I was good. So at some point I was asked to come to Murray's apartment and I, you know, like Roger I was very, very afraid. But you know, I knew he was jolly and pleasant and everything but I didn't know how it would be one-on-one and basically he was vetting me to see how hard core I was. So Richard Fink drove me over there. I went to his apartment and we were in a living room and it was, you know, midnight one o'clock we were still discussing things. So he asked me about the looter question, you know, because the riots had occurred in 67-68 and his position was that you know, if a looter is coming into your store you can shoot them. But if they take your property and they're running down the street then you have to resort to the police or, you know, you can't shoot them in the back and say, why not? He said, I never thought of that. So, you know, you're someone I could have a conversation with. So I think I passed the audition with that answer. So that was right before South Royalton. Then I got an invitation to South Royalton and as Walter sort of covered South Royalton, but at the time I saw, you know, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kurser and Ludwig Lachman. I had read their works by then and I, you know, I was very in awe of all of them. But when I thought more about it, I think Lou Rockwell had asked me to give a talk about man economy and state sometime in the 1980s and I thought about it and it struck me that as Walter pointed out in 1974 when we had the conference at South Royalton, which was the first North American Austrian conference, that all these young people showed up, young PhDs, graduate students like myself and so on and I said, well, where do they all come from? I mean, what, you know, it wasn't like a field of dreams. If you hold it, they will come. I mean, it didn't happen like that. It wasn't a big bang. It wasn't a big bang. But then I look back and it wasn't only man economy and state, but Rothbard had written America's Great Depression, what has government done to our money, power and market and For New Liberty, all within this between 1962 and 1973. And to a man or to a man and woman, because there was a, Karen Vaughan was there, a woman, everyone everyone there was really a Rothbardian at that point. He was the main reason behind the revival of Austrian economics. I just want to say a few other things. One of the greatest memories I have of Murray was meeting him at his favorite delicatessen in New York, a Wolf's delicatessen on the corner of 46th Street and Fifth Avenue, a Jewish deli that just has great food and he loved and but during the, so you would meet there maybe a few times a year, three times a year, four times a year. He was teaching at Brooklyn Valley, I was teaching at Pace University in New York City. But in the 1990s he was teaching at Las Vegas, but he come back in the summers and so we were meeting while he was writing a history of economic thought and he, we would talk and exchange pleasantries and then he would tell me about the new things he was finding in the history of economic thought and how this guy was really a bad guy and how this guy who he thought was a bad guy was actually a good guy how this guy had deviations and so on and so forth and it was great and he would go on and then he'd stop and he'd say, I'm so sorry, I haven't let you talk, do you want to talk? He was giving me a private seminar, I mean it was the greatest thing that he would think that I wouldn't want to hear him more, I mean he was really a humble seeker of truth and I really, really appreciated that and I think that really sums him up. He was just a wonderful individual and a great man.