 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Jeff is out of town this week, so we are featuring Tom Wood's opening lecture at Mises University. In his talk, Tom shares his experiences meeting Murray Rothbard, how Murray shaped Tom's intellectual development, plus some valuable lessons for us all. Stay tuned. What could be more fun than talking about Murray Rothbard in the opening lecture at Mises University? The answer is actually having Murray Rothbard give the opening lecture at Mises University, which is what I got to experience as a student, and all you get is this pale imitation talking about him. But that's the difference between 1993 and 2017. But Murray Rothbard was one of my most significant intellectual influences, and I'm always glad to have an opportunity to talk about him. So I've been asked to talk about how he influenced me, what I learned from him. And in order to do that, I want to in part review some of his achievements, because as I do that, I'm recalling indeed the things that I did learn from him. I think some of you may have, I don't know if some of you know that I have a podcast that I, episode I release every weekday. And if you happen to live, by the way, in Florida, you should come to my 1,000th episode live event. It's for free September 9th. Tom DeLorenzo is going to be there. TomWoods.com slash Orlando. Sign up and be there. We're going to have a lot of fun. We're going to teach you nothing, lots of fun. And the spirit of Rothbard would be very much alive in that room. Well, even more so here. My favorite place on earth, my favorite week of the year, Bob don't, I know I wasn't supposed to say that. Bob and I host a cruise together. We now call that our favorite week of the year. So we're in a bit of a conundrum about how to describe Mises University. I don't know, it's our favorite week of the year on land. We'll put it that way. So in fact, by the way, I am going to be referring to a lot of Rothbard books. So this is just the way my brain works. I created a page on my site listing all these books and linking you to free copies. So if any of them catch your attention, in particular, there's one of some of his previously unpublished work. And I look at it, I think, this is his unpublished work? What hope is there for me, like nothing I've ever published has come close to something he was going to say, eh, let's just leave that in the archives forever. So I put them all up at tomwoods.com slash Rothbard. So all these books that I'm mentioning and a couple of articles are already linked there. Don't go there now. Go there later. All right. So there are several ways that you could say you learned from Rothbard. On the one hand, you could say he taught you a lot of facts about a lot of things. Another way you could say he was a careful, conscientious scholar. And so he inspires you in that way. The fact that he looked all over for the truth. He would learn from people he disagreed with in other areas. They had a glimmer of the truth he was interested in finding it. You can also learn from him that no matter how hard you work and how carefully you look for the truth, you will have enemies. It cannot be helped. If you are doing anything worthwhile, you will have enemies. If you don't have enemies, then you're probably a lazy bum. That's just the fact, okay? So it'll make you feel better about having them. All right. Now, I am going to also tell a few stories because I'm a storyteller and I can't restrain myself. I did have, unlike people in some of the faculty who knew him very well, I had a handful of opportunities to meet him. And I first met him at Mises University 1993. And he came out and delivered the opening lecture. And he started talking about the Panic of 1819. And he explained to us rather immodestly that he was the world's foremost expert on the subject of the Panic of 1819 because he's the only person who's ever written a book about it. Then he laughed about that. Okay, we'll let him get away with that. And indeed, the only book about the Panic of 1819 is indeed, to this day, by Murray Rothbard. Why would you need to write another book on the Panic of 1819 after that? So I got to meet him there and he was extremely generous with his time with students. And I chatted with him because I had a lot of questions for him. I'd been reading about him because I found out about him in the most bizarre way. I used to, in the old days, I subscribed to National Review Magazine back when it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now, I will say, in my defense. They had some literate people who could construct sentences containing both a subject and a predicate. So I happened to read an insert in one of the issues in which various people responded to a very critical essay Bill Buckley had written. And one of the people responding was this guy I had never heard of before, Murray Rothbard. And Rothbard just lit into Buckley for being a hyper-interventionist, for being for big government, and I thought, wait a minute, Bill Buckley's like my hero. How can you say these things about him? Who is this Rothbard who's more free market than Bill Buckley? Is that even possible? Well, right around that time, I also was getting ready to go to the Mises University program and I realized, wait a minute, I looked at the books that I had been assigned, I looked at this thing, looked at the books. These are written by that same guy. So I started reading him thinking, all right, you better have something to say for yourself after what you said about Bill Buckley. And I read him and read him and I thought, man, this guy is great. So then I thought, wow, maybe Buckley is a bum. You know, I started thinking, I can trust this man. You know, if he tells me something, it's the truth. So I came here and I had all these questions because I had read what Rothbard had written about the old right, the old feisty right wing before Buckley turned it into the Cold War crusading right wing. And I wanted to know about these people who were anti-war and pro-market, whatever. And boy, that was like, I couldn't have asked him a question that made him happier. He could not tell me enough about it. In fact, there was one time I saw him reading, I saw him writing about a pamphlet written by Robert LeFave called Why, I think, no, no, no, I can't remember what it was called. But I read it, I read about this pamphlet and I thought, I'd love to have this pamphlet and there's no way in the world I'd ever be able to find it. So I wrote Rothbard a letter. I wrote him a physical letter saying, if there's any way you can tell me how I would find this pamphlet, I'd love to have it. He wrote me back and mailed me two copies of the pamphlet from the 1960s. He still had them. And he wrote me this nice letter and I've got it in my files. I'm not going to throw away a letter from Murray Rothbard for goodness sake. But he sent me this pamphlet and then when I did an anti-war anthology with basic books. And one of the things we put in there was this pamphlet that would have been forgotten. There was no way to find it. Murray Rothbard had two copies in his apartment and that was it. And now we got it in that book and it is available for everybody to read forever because he took the time to write to some kid. You know, he barely even knew. Just unbelievable. So anyway, so I got to talk to him and I said, now look, I also heard, I figured like I got to hurry up and talk like 100 miles an hour because I don't know how long I'm going to have to talk to Murray Rothbard. Is Lou Rockwell going to come and drag him away at some point? I better hurry up and get all the questions asked. So I asked him, I heard you said that in 1952 the Eisenhower forces stole the Republican nomination from Taft. Now, I mean, how do you justify like where is the evidence for that? He said, oh, you should read a book by Chesley Manley called The 20 Year Revolution. So, OK, so I did. I went to my college library and you'll never guess. No one had checked out. Chesley Manley, The 20 Year Revolution. But I thought, wait a minute, how would you even know? How would you know about an obscure book like that? That's the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what this guy knew. I got to meet him at several other conferences as well. And oh my goodness, OK, so I'm just getting a text about one of my children. But I think everything is going to be OK. Just so you know, I'm not being rude like doing email while I'm up here giving the talk. Was kind of important. OK, anyway, one of my favorite memories, though, and some of you may have heard me tell this, was in 1994, I had just started graduate school in New York. And the Mises Institute put on a one day event because it was 100 years since the birth of Henry Haslund. So they did a one day event in New York. I thought, that's great. All I had to do was hop on the subway and I'm at a Mises event. So I went and Rothbard came in a little bit late during one of the presentations, sits right next to me. And this was the day Jeffrey Dahmer had been killed in prison. Now some of you who were too young, you may not even remember who Jeffrey Dahmer was. This was a guy who he ate people. So when they caught him, he had stuff in his refrigerator that you should not have. And he went to prison. And the prisoners apparently were of the opinion that, look, we may have our problems. But you just don't do that. So one of them killed him. And so Rothbard turns to me, well, somebody's giving a speech. He turns to me and under his breath, he says, did you hear about Jeffrey Dahmer? They got him. My favorite memory is from December of 1994. I get an email from Lou Rockwell. That's how old I am in 1994. I'm getting an email from Lou Rockwell. And it says, Murray would like to get together with you over the Christmas break at his apartment in New York. So here's his number. Why don't you give him a call? Yeah, here's Murray Rothbard's number. Why don't I give him a call? So I treated this like there's some girl I want to ask out on a date, but I'm afraid if I call her, I'm going to go blank and I won't remember what to say. So I better write something. So I wrote out a whole conversation I was ready to have. And of course, he's such a warm person that that went right out the window. He put me right at ease. But then I got the terrible email beginning of January of 1995 from Lou announcing that he had passed away. And it was a terrible thing. And I remember several months later, there was a memorial service in New York and a lot of people who had not been on good terms with Rothbard toward the end of his life even came to this memorial service. And I remember at a reception afterward talking to Walter Block. And obviously, Walter, if you know anything about Walter Block, all he does is write articles all day. It's incredible. I mean, he recently passed 500 peer-reviewed articles. If you had one-tenth of that, that would be considered a distinguished career. You could retire and feel good about yourself. But he passed 500. He's still going. He's still doing this. To him, that is playing golf, is writing peer-reviewed articles. So when he was at that reception, he told me that after Rothbard died, it's a very hard thing for a lot of people who knew him really well. He said, I went out and I rented a lot. I was going to watch some movies. I went out and rented a lot of movies. I was just going to watch them. He said, and I got part way through one of them, and I said, Doc, God, I should be writing. That's what Murray would want me to do. I should be writing. So he returned to all the movies, and he got back to work. And I thought, yeah, that's what we should do, just like in Animal Farm, Boxer. I will work harder. That's our answer to everything. All right, so let's think then about, I can't even really summarize all the things that he did. But when we think, for example, just about man economy and state, his great treatise, this is significant for a great many reasons, but one of which we read in a paper that Joe Celerno wrote trying to situate Rothbard within the history of economic thought. And he said that Rothbard really kept the school going at a critical point. And he tells the story a bit of the South Royalton Conference, which was a conference that, 1974, the year Hayek won the Nobel Prize. Basically, practically all the Austrians there were got together in South Royalton, Vermont, for this very important conference. And I believe we have at least two faculty members here who were at that historic event. Roger, were you at that? OK, so Roger Garrison and Joe Celerno were actually there, which was amazing. And Joe says, when you go back and look through all these people, they were all influenced by man economy and state. And when you read it, and when you look at the footnotes, you see that Rothbard is not engaged in naval gazing. He knows the mainstream literature, and he's very eager to engage with it. It's an incredibly impressive and systematic building of an economic theoretical edifice from first principles. And in terms of his contributions, original contributions, there are many. He fills in gaps in production theory that are in Mises, because Mises assumed that we're all super geniuses and we already know this. And for those of us who are mortals, Rothbard explained it all to us. But also innovations in monopoly theory, in economic calculation. He'd already done, by 1956, he'd already done important pioneering work in welfare economics as well. And meanwhile, by the way, later on, he winds up editing the review of Austrian economics. So there's a journal for Austrian economics. He edits the Journal of Libertarian Studies. So he does these things. He's also publishing newsletters of various kinds, like the Libertarian Forum, or left and right. He keeps busy. When you look at his correspondence, you would think if all he did was write these letters, that would be impressive. Or if all he did was review all these movies that he reviewed, that would be impressive. He did all that. But he also did economic history. He was an economist who was also interested in history. And I learned, certainly from him, about the Great Depression. He has a book called America's Great Depression. This comes out in 1963. Significance of this book is that it helps to fill in a major gap in our case, which is, what do you say about the Great Depression? Was this not a failure of capitalism? After all, the 1920s were the roaring 20s with crazy laissez-faire capitalism, just the way you crazy libertarians like it. And look what went and happened. Stock market crash followed by a lengthy and deep depression. Well, we can't ever test that again. Now we all heard that, right? Rothbard emancipates us from that terrible plantation forever. Because what he shows is that the Austrian theory of the business cycle applies to America's Great Depression. That it was not a matter of, there was no intervention by the government or the central bank. They were just innocent bystanders. And then out of the blue, for no apparent reason, the economy crashed. That is not what Rothbard is going to tell us. He's going to say the exact opposite. That you had the Fed meddling the whole time. You have the New York, because at that time, the head of the New York Fed was really, like today, what we would think of as the Fed Chairman in terms of the economy, saying in the late 20s that he wanted to give a coup de whisky to the stock market, which indeed was done. But like what happens in normal life when you have a coup de whisky, something happens after you've been doing that for a while. And the same thing happened to the economy. So Rothbard very painstakingly documents this. He begins his book with a theoretical exposition of different business cycle theories. And if you go to Amazon, you look at America's Great Depression. There's one review in there by some schmuck who's saying, this book is boring. This isn't what I want. He wants a book about what it was like to eat ketchup sandwiches during the 1930s. All right, well, you know, I'm sure that was terrible. Just imagine it. Imagine it. You don't instead want to know why it happened. What was going on? Like that doesn't. So I was in a particularly foul mood the day I saw that review on Amazon. So I commented on that. And I basically said, pearls before swine here, right? You have the greatest book ever on the Great Depression. I want more anecdotes. Get the heck out of what is the. So it's a great book and very readable book too. His coverage of the monetary history of the 19th century is tremendous. In fact, I remember it was at another conference I was talking to him and I said, I would love to have a history of money in the US written from a pro gold standard perspective. Do you know of anything? And he said, well, there's some good material on this in the minority report of the US Gold Commission. Because around 1983, there was a commission set up to investigate whether the gold standard was something desirable. And of course, they stacked the deck so that it would come out. Well, no, after careful deliberation, we've decided to everyone's surprise that we don't want to do this. But Ron Paul was on there. And he issued his committee. There was the minority report arguing in favor of the gold standard. And there was a lot of historical material in there. A lot going from the colonial period up to the 20th century, going through the different 19th century, panics, all the information you would want. And it turns out Rothbard had written that material. But he didn't tell me. He just said, yeah, there's some good material on that in this report. Now, he could have said, you know, I wrote that. I mean, it's not going to be bragging. I wrote the thing in a report no one's ever going to read again. I wouldn't have thought, oh, man, what an arrogant jerk this guy is. But he didn't even tell me that. I found that out later. Basically, he wrote that material. And now that material can be found in the history of money and banking from colonial times to 1945, I think, is the volume that Joe Salerno edited of Rothbard's writings on monetary history, the monetary history of the US. Very significant. Because, of course, for one thing, the panics, the different panics that occurred in the 19th century, have been used as arguments against our position. That, well, there wasn't a Federal Reserve in 1857, Mr. Wise Guy, and we had a panic then. So what caused that? And then they, you know, as Bob Murphy would say, they run victory laps and they can't hear what you're saying at that point. And Rothbard takes a lot of this on. And on my tomwoods.com slash Rothbard thing, I link to some resources, some Austrian resources on how to answer that whole, but we had panics in the 19th century. Yeah, and we have, you get questions, we have answers. So we deal with that. But also as a historian, as a pure historian, Rothbard was tremendous. I mean, he wrote conceived in liberty, which began as a four volume history of colonial America. He started writing a fifth volume that was never finished. Now the Mises Institute, just, I don't know, to emphasize how much work this was, took all four volumes, put them into one giant book. Right, like the size of, like a guy. And it is unbelievable. It's incredible. And he did this, and this was a spare time project, conceived in liberty, was a spare. Yeah, I think I'll write a history of colonial America while I'm also doing the other thing. And you think, all right, well a guy like this, he must have had no social life maybe. Or he didn't have friends or whatever. But to the contrary, he hosted people in his living room constantly. It was like a enlightenment salon kind of situation. People coming in and out and staying up to all hours and laughing and sharing stories and so on. So somehow he balanced all this with a rather healthy social life as a matter of fact. So hard to know how that's possible, but it happened. But let me share with you though, really what may be my all-time favorite writing by Rothbard. And it's one that it would not surprise me if almost nobody in this room had ever read it. It can be found in a collection edited by David Gordon called Strictly Confidential. It's the private Volcker fund memos of Murray Rothbard. He was hired to write a great many memos, a lot of them book reviews, and he wrote them. They were read by a small handful of people and that was it. So he wrote a review. And man, do I feel sorry for the, it's a good thing they never had to actually endure this review. He wrote a review of a standard American history text written by George de Housar and Thomas Stevenson. And Rothbard rakes these people over the coals, not even for having an ideological bias, although he finds a little bit of that, but mainly for acts of omission or misunderstandings and confusion. And his indictment of this book goes on for 100 pages. Now he says, so for example, in the colonial period, he says, you know, our authors say many people could vote and Rothbard says, this is fuzzy and imprecise. They should make more use of recent voting studies of which Rothbard recommends too. He happened to know about what was going on in that area of scholarship. He says, the ordinance of 1785 was a dictatorial intrusion into the Western region which set too high a minimum land sale and price, thus restricting settlement and also enforced rectangular surveying, thus forcing the purchase of sub-marginal land within an otherwise good rectangle, instead of conforming as in the Southern methods of surveying to the natural topography of the land in question. I bet a lot of you overlooked that when you studied the ordinance of 1785. And then he says, now, okay, it's bad enough. There's not enough discussion of US imperialism regarding Hawaii. But there's no mention at all, Rothbard says, of the US Samoan Treaty for a naval base in Samoa or the US joining the Madrid Convention in 1880 or the Burlingame Treaty with China. And there's no mention at all of the Freeling-Heisen-Zavala Treaty of 1884. That could be the worst offense of all. How could there be? And the thing goes on like this and on and on. And as I said, he does find a, oh, a slight hint of ideological bias. And so, I mean, his main critique is there's no big picture understanding in this book. It's just a dry chronicling of events that just conform to the typical textbook retelling of the story. But he does find a little bias because at one point he says, the authors appear to approve of the public library movement. Leave it to Rothbard to dig that little gem out of there. But then on top of that, we have his work in philosophy like the Ethics of Liberty, his popularizing work as well. I mean, here he is, incredible genius writing these tremendous theoretical works, but he also is able to write to reach the general public in short articles in various places, but also in books like For a New Liberty, which was not intended for specialists. It was intended to introduce libertarianism to Americans at large. So then, but another thing, as I mentioned earlier, I learned an awful lot from Rothbard about the so-called old right. So it was a tremendous privilege for me some years ago to have the opportunity to be the editor and introduction writer to a previously unpublished Rothbard manuscript. Now, by the way, we're gonna be talking later in the week about yet another previously unpublished Rothbard work. This is a work on the progressive era. So Rothbard died in early 1995. Here it is, 2017. And for the past at least 20 years, there have been additional Rothbard books coming out every few years as another book by Rothbard. And there are entire academic departments at universities in this country that have not been as productive as a dead Murray Rothbard. So the book was called The Betrayal of the American Right. And it's available, again, you can get the hard copy version, but you can also read it for free online. And that's a book where Rothbard, this is the closest we're going to get unless there's something else in the archives we don't know about to a Rothbard memoir because he really is gonna tell you his story about how he got to be who he was. He even tells you about how he came to be an anarcho-capitalist. I always wondered that. I get how people become for limited government, but how do you become the one guy? Yeah, I know about Gustav de Molinari, but I mean, the one guy who's gonna compose an entire intellectual edifice in defense of statelessness, how do you get to be that guy? And so he talks about that in there too. But he talks about what was going on in the 40s and 50s and the different changes that took place in American intellectual life because he says that at the time of the New Deal, we had a lot of people who were anti-New Deal. And what they wanted was the Jeffersonian Republic. They didn't want war, they didn't want intervention in the economy. They wanted something kind of like what we want. And we call these people the old right. But then by the late 40s, things began to change for a variety of reasons. Some of them being that some key figures in the old right, both literary and political, died at especially inopportune moments and left an intellectual vacuum behind. But that old right, there was not much left of it. And so Rothbard himself had to drift a bit in the late 50s. He used to be welcomed in some right of center circles, but if you're not gonna be for the Vietnam War, I don't think that's happening anymore. So he was on his own and he did not say, well, maybe I can rationalize just staying silent about the Vietnam War, just so I can have an audience to talk about the other things that I believe in that are important. And you could easily persuade yourself of that. And he just wouldn't, he just carried on, he wrote newslet, he wrote left and right for what must have been a small audience. He reached out to all different sorts of groups where he thought he might see a spark of something and just carried on, uncomplainingly, under impossible conditions and facing impossible odds. I'm so impossible that it has to make those of us in this room ask ourselves the very, very important and indeed humbling question. If we had been in that situation, what would we have done? Would we have stuck to our guns and continue to forge ahead even with pretty much no audience? Because there are two, you know, there's the Republicans and the Democrats, there's the conservatives and the liberals, there's no room for Rothbard. Why doesn't he just give it up and just take his place in one of those groups? And he just didn't. And it would have been sorely tempting to do that. And you never at any time in any of his writings get the sense that he was tempted to do that. To me, that's one of the most amazing things about him. That's one of the things he has in common with Ron Paul. When you look through his career, you don't ever get the sense that well, in 1982, you can see he was wavering and thinking, maybe I should jump on board this bandwagon. Just doesn't occur to people like this. This is a very, very rare breed. So what a privilege it was for those in this room who knew him to have had the chance to know a guy like this. Quite something. So he tells this story. So I wrote the introduction for this book. We released it. It tells this story. And there were in that manuscript, there were a lot of markings that Rothbard had made. And there were a lot of cross-outs of things that he didn't want to say. That he thought, you know, on second thought, I'm not sure that's quite right or I want to put it quite this way. And I had somebody telling me, we should get rid of those erasures and put them back in. I mean, we'll take the cross-outs and remove them so we can read what he was crossing out. We'll put that in. And I thought that is just, that's not somebody who's with the Mises Institute, by the way, at this moment. But I thought that's just a betrayal of an author. You can't do that. If he crossed it out, he doesn't want it. I would not want my manuscripts to have my cross-outs put back in. I crossed them out because they're terrible, right? Don't put them back in. But other than that, the easiest thing in the world is to be the editor of a Rothbard. But what else did I have to do? All I said was, well, my editorial job is make sure that the things he wanted crossed out stayed crossed out. And that was it. You know, whatever they paid me to do that, I got it and that was done. It was great. What a privilege that was to be involved with that. All right, but beyond even that, I think the thing that most affected me about his work was his idea about how we should think about the state. That the state encourages us to internalize a double standard, that we all understand that in our private lives, there are certain behaviors that would be considered unacceptable and immoral. We can't engage in them. We can't just go and steal people's money and steal their goods. We can't kidnap them and say, now go shoot at my neighbor because he's a really, really bad guy. And if you happen to shoot other people, we'll issue a press release saying we really didn't intend for that to happen, but really just do what you gotta do. Like, we couldn't do that. And we couldn't say, hey, you can't smoke that thing. So I'm gonna go put you in this cage for a while. And there are gonna be some really, really gigantic people in this cage who might not like you that much. I mean, I can't do that. I can't do that. People would think I was crazy, but the state does it. And we all say, well, you know, it's the sovereign. Of course, of course it can do what it wants. And it was Rothbard who finally got through to me. There's some screwy about that. And here he's of course developing Frederick Bastiat in the law. You know, if we can't do this, then how does it become moral when a bunch of them do it with guns? How does that become moral? It can't be. So try and think about what would happen if private people did these various things. And then it really, really gets you to think. And that finally woke me up because man, did I need to be awakened. I was the worst of the worst, okay? I was a moderate Republican. Which means I was bad on every issue you can possibly think of I was on the wrong side. It doesn't matter if it's the drug war or spending or, you know, war war, whatever it was. I was so absurdly, laughably on the wrong side of it. I don't know how I ever got out, frankly. Although actually I do know how I get out. When I went off to college, I was surrounded by, okay, I'll grant you, it wasn't as crazy as the campuses are now. I'm sorry, you guys have to endure that. But it was crazy enough. And I remember thinking these people are so unbelievably crazy that whatever these people are, I am determined to be the exact opposite. And so that was when I began to get exposed to some of these things and to Mises University. I was ripe for it and ready, baby. That is it. I'm gonna be consistent. I know these people are nuts. So I can't have my, I just began to examine my own philosophy. And I thought it's gotta be not so ad hoc. Because what kind of a philosophy does a moderate Republican have? You know, like, well, we needed the interventions of the 1930s and some of the ones in the 1960s and maybe a few of the ones in the 1990s. But that is it and that's my philosophy. What, where would that come from? What principles could that be based on? So I thought, no, no, no, no. There's gotta be something, something I can stick to and hang my hat on that's consistent. And then I encountered Murray Rothbard for the first time. And I, man, I love this guy. I loved his economics. I loved his style of writing. I loved a lot of the things he had to say. But I thought this guy takes it just a little bit too far. I just couldn't get out. And in fact, Bob Murphy was saying to me on the air the other day that when he first encountered the more radical Rothbard stuff about how we can indeed privatize everything, which just means we can do it on a voluntary basis. These other words, even privatize is supposed to scare you because you hear private and you think like, you know, even private property. Like when you were growing up, you would see signs that says, you know, stay away, private property. So you'd think, yeah, private property sucks, man. Don't bounce your ball against this wall. It's private property. I hate private property. So I just try and use things like, voluntary, you know, just voluntary. Don't you like voluntary things? So Bob was telling, you thought I was going to forget to get back to Bob's remark, I remembered. So Bob was saying that when he first encountered this stuff, he said, he turned to his parents and said, get a load of this guy. He thinks we can privatize everything. And then he thought about it and read about it and thought, wow, holy cow, the guy is right. In fact, Bob has written study guides to some of the major treatises in the Austrian school, including Rothbard's work, Man, Economy and State. And at one point, Bob said, he just can't get over Rothbard's contributions. And he says, the older I get, the smarter Rothbard becomes. So I glean more and more from this guy. Amazing. So he got me, he started to get me thinking, but it took me a while. At first I thought, you know, I can go with you up to a certain point. And then for a number of years, I kind of went on all different weird ideological tangents and people like to go back and dig that all out. And at none of that time did I call myself a libertarian. I was still thinking about it. I thought, I don't know, I'm really attracted to it, but I so despise the left. I just tried all kinds of anti-left things. And then thanks to Hans Hoppe, I got right back into libertarianism in 2001. But it was Rothbard that first got that, all that stuff moving in my head. And I'm really glad about that because even I don't wanna think what I would have been otherwise. I mean, I sometimes think about where would I have been without my father who was a forklift operator in a food warehouse who did not complete high school? But because of that, he was extremely self-conscious. He felt like he had to learn everything he could. He had to read voraciously, he had to learn, learn, learn to make up for that. And I mean, again, maybe you've heard me say this, but one day I caught him reading Voltaire's Candid. And I said, Dad, I think your education is all complete now. It says that you do not have to put yourself through this. There's no need to read that. Can stop now. But my father was like a sort of right of center guy who initially gave me the right instincts about things. Whether it was taxes or communism, which was still very much alive when I was a kid. He taught me about, and about people who would make excuses for communism or cover up the crimes. And I thought, man, I am gonna devote my life to fighting whoever those people are. It turns out that there were people like that who covered up communist crimes. But Dad was right, Doug, on it. Wow. So I had that foundation thanks to him. Otherwise, I am sure I would have been a leftist. I'm absolutely sure of it. Because that I think is the default position. You're surrounded by it. It's everywhere. You know, you want something? Pass a law and get it. You know, because it's easy. It's low IQ. It's easy. You want something? Pass a law and you'll get it. And he got me thinking another way. And then Rothbard took me, you know, I had to at one point say, Dad, I got some books for you to read here. We're gonna be moving a little bit ideologically. So what I wanna think about at the end here is that you would think with a guy like Rothbard as intellectually curious and creative as he was, as interested as he was in reaching out to other people and other schools of thought, as much as he wanted to engage the mainstream of the economics profession. In fact, he hardly ever, in man economy and state, even refers to Austrian economics. And even when he does, it's in quotation marks because he conceives of what he's doing as just plain vanilla economics. He's trying to call the profession back. So here he is trying to do all these things. He has this infectious laugh. I was asking David Gordon about this just the other day and David said he was an extremely friendly person. And he encouraged everybody he met. He encouraged students who knew like they knew one thing. He would encourage them to pursue that one thing. So you would think this must be the most beloved man in the world. Who in the world could be an enemy of Murray Rothbard? I am not going to mention names, but there are many. And I'm not even going to give you my theory as to why they exist. It's not just that they're envious losers. I mean, there are other reasons. But what it goes to show is, now I've already given a talk at previous Mises U on the anti-Rothbard cult and it is powerful in the libertarian world. It's powerful. It's so powerful it barely acknowledges its existence, but you know it's there. Because these are people who will say, you know, as so and so as Milton Friedman said, now Milton Friedman had his virtues. I grant that he was not the only libertarian who ever lived. As John Stossel said, now John Stossel was a brave journalist. I'll grant you at a time when there's nobody talking about free markets in television news, very important guy. But there were other people in the libertarian movement like Murray Rothbard. Not a word about him. He's, for every hundred times, Milton Friedman is quoted by some official libertarians, Rothbard is quoted zero times. For every hundred, it's zero. Now that's, like that's gotta be happening on purpose. I mean, this is a guy who did this and this and this and this and this and this. This and this and this and this and this and this. And this, you got all these people that they're calling themselves anarcho-capitalists who never on their own would have come up with that if there hadn't been a Rothbard, don't you tell me. They would not have come up with that on their own. And they act like he's not even there. And that is just wrong. The man is a benefactor. And one of the worst things you can do is be ungrateful toward a benefactor. So we should show gratitude toward the guy. Doesn't mean that you, they'll say things like, you people worship Rothbard. Just because you admire somebody doesn't mean you worship the guy. We don't have any incense or an altar or images. We don't bow down before them. We just say, you know what, this guy did a lot of important pioneering work. You know, you don't have to like every single thing. You don't have to agree with every single conclusion. But wow, he was a one man show for a long time who had every temptation in the world to sell out who didn't mind that he was teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute where they didn't even have an economics major until he got an endowed chair out in the West in 1986. He just kept on doing it. You can't honor that. I'm, you know, I don't want to be mean. I'm just saying you'd have to be some kind of pathetic loser not to honor that. Because I wonder how many people would have had that kind of courage. But it makes you realize, though, if Rothbard has enemies among libertarians, what hope is there for the rest of us? The answer is there's no hope. Now, when I say that, I don't mean there's no hope for the future and everything we do is pointless and forget about it. I mean, it is pointless to hope not to make any enemies. When I wrote a book in 2004 called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, I genuinely thought, well, people are gonna sit down and read it and they'll read it sincerely and they'll know that I'm being sincere and that I'm just trying to explain the way I look at American history because I think the historians have gotten some things wrong. I really thought that was gonna happen. That did not happen, as it turns out. That did not happen. I got savaged in all kinds of quarters. I was almost never corrected on anything. It was all, man, that guy, I can't believe, the things that he said. It was never, he's wrong and here's the correct thing. It was always, can you get over the nerve of this guy? So I really thought that. But that's the way the world is. In fact, today, if you even accidentally use the wrong pronoun, you're like Hitler. I mean, the word Nazi is thrown at everybody. I mean, there are people who think Bob Dole is a Nazi. I mean, Bob Dole has never felt that strongly about anything to be anything. So it can't be helped, but there's a part of you that says I'm a good person and those people who are saying I'm a bad person, I need to go answer them because it's terrible to have my name dragged through the mud and that is how I felt. I thought, whatever you may think about my opinions, you may even find them offensive. I'm not a bad guy. Ask my kids, ask people who know me. I'm not a bad guy, so stop saying that. Say I wrote a crummy book if you want to, but stop saying I'm a bad guy. And I used to think, I gotta run around and correct all these people. No, you don't because if you're doing good work, you'll also have supporters and you'll have way more supporters than you have detractors in general and they will feel a lot more strongly about what you're doing than your detractors who write one blog post about you, then they forget it, but they don't even know what your name is the next day. So don't worry about it. If that's making you gun shy or afraid to speak out, don't. Everybody has enemies at one time or another, but you also have a gigantic community of supporters, including everybody in this room and all our friends and all their friends. So don't let that scare you. And moreover, think about the cause we're involved in here and what Rothbard was fighting for. He was fighting against the state, which is the worst superstition. I guess I'm quoting Larkin Rose here. He doesn't call it the worst superstition, but it's an outrageous superstition that we're all taught to believe in. It claims to enrich us when every policy it engages in impoverishes us, but it's hard to see it because it looks like they're making us richer, but they're not. You have to investigate it, but we're not taught to investigate it. It claims to provide stability for us, for the economy, but it gives us the business cycle. It pits us all against each other. It pits men against women and young against old and one region against another and another industry against another and whatever and races against each other, pits us all against each other. It makes people thirsty for the blood of innocents in countries they've never even heard of. We don't do that. We're supposed to be the most immoral people in the world. We don't do that. That's evil. Now, there are some libertarians out there, I will not mention names, who wanna focus on tame stuff. They wanna write articles about why price controls don't work or why people in the government, they always do things that have unintended consequences. What a bunch of jokers. I guess they don't understand that if you do A, B will follow. How silly. They ain't that stupid. A lot of the things they do, they do on purpose. They wanna keep people poor because that's just the way they like them. Easily manipulated, that's the way they like them. But these libertarians are the sorts who wanna say to the New York Times, hey, New York Times, I know libertarians are kinda cheeky and a little bit out of the mainstream, but we're different, you know, we're respectable libertarians. We're not like those people over there. We just wanna write harmless little pamphlets about tariffs. Well, you know what we wanna do? Like Rothbard, we wanna de-bamboozle the public. We wanna tell them the whole truth about the state. Come what may. Well, of those two approaches, I know which one appeals to me and I hope it appeals to all of you too. Thank you. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.