 Last week marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Livvivan Mises, and that's an appropriate moment to revisit Guido Hulsman's brilliant biography of this great man last night of liberalism. I commend this book to you, incidentally not simply as a profile of a seminal figure, but also as an outstanding work of intellectual history. As I reread the concluding sections I was struck as I have been frequently by the difference in temperament between Mises and Murray and Rothbard, his great seminar student for more than ten years, at least in terms of their outlooks on our prospects. Murray became known for his long-term optimism, Mises, not so much. Over the course of the 1950s, for example, George Reesman, one of the few students to earn a Ph.D. under Mises, thought that he was seeing more and more progress. More and more people he encountered seemed sympathetic to the cause of the free market. Mises was less sanguine. Reesman, he said, was a young man in the process of meeting existing supporters of free enterprise. There was no growth occurring. In fact, Mises went so far as to compare his own writings to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which might be found by someone a thousand years in the future. Rees did not anticipate that his friend, F.A. Hayek, would win the Nobel Prize for his work on Misesian business cycle theory. Much less could even imagine that a full-fledged Mises Institute, with its scholarly conferences and publications, week-long student immersion programs, and consistent and diverse forms of outreach to the general public, would one day flourish. When difficulty evident in Mises' day was that supporters of the free market, far and large, signed on to the emerging conservative movement, where by process of elimination they thought they belonged. There had been neither a conservative nor a libertarian movement before World War II, and what we call the old right, as Murray Rothbard dubbed it, was a series of individual writers and thinkers, the occasional periodical, the American First Committee, was a real movement to be sure, and a great one, but it dissolved on December 8, 1941. Within six years of Mises' arrival in the United States in 1949, the cause of laissez-faire was coming to be associated with a broader movement called conservatism. Remnants of the old right persisted after World War II, but before long they had also become a distinct minority within a conservative movement that began with the creation of national review in 1955. Murray tells the story in his posthumous book, The Betrayal of the American Right, which is at once history and memoir and a great book. What exactly did conservatives want? Well, national review described itself as standing a throat history, shouting, stop. As time went on, stop became slow down. Eventually became, hey, we'll join you in a minute or two. Conservatives bought foreign interventionism hook, line, and sinker. With the obsession with conservative came essentially a reconciliation with the status quo. Important conservative leaders began to describe Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nemesis of the old right, as one of the greatest American presidents, well, if I remember Ronald Reagan's of that. It had been a mistake from the beginning to adopt the word conservative, and an even bigger mistake for libertarians to consider themselves conservatives. If a high exaversion to this word is well known, thanks to his essay, Why I Am Not a Conservative. Murray Rothbard noted that in the days of the old right, no one called himself a conservative, and why should he? The old right had no intention of conserving the institutions of the American government of their day. Those institutions were to be overthrown. Less well known as nemesis felt about being called a conservative. Even though in culture, temperament, dress, manners, many, many other ways, nemesis gave the impression of being a conservative. He too considered the term a misnomer. When Yale University invited him to speak as part of its conservative lectures series in 1954, nemesis declined. To conserve, he said, means to preserve what exists. It is an empty program, really negative, rejecting any change. To conserve what exists in the present day, he said, is tantamount to saying that the laws and institutions that the new deal and the fair deal have bequeathed to the nation is a good thing. Today the conservative movement is in the shambles. Its constituent parts are at war with one another. Nobody can figure out what constitutes a, quote, true conservative. And the ease of which Donald Trump laid bare this astonishing fact that the seemingly formidable ray of magazines, think tanks, and pressure groups that constituted the conservative movement, none of which could stop him, had been paper tigers all along. The decline of conservatism has been accompanied by a tremendous growth in libertarianism. That growth has been the combined result of a huge number of young people, oftentimes because of Ron Paul, who became libertarians immediately never having gone through a conservative phase, as well as a considerable stream of refugees from the conservative movement, where many libertarians, where many libertarians finally realized they didn't really belong there. Mises of course did not live to see any of this, nor did he foresee it. Although Mises' activities and public appearances had slowed in the 1960s, it wasn't until 1971 that he actually ceased working. After physically recovering from an infection that year, Mises found himself no longer able to work. Even though he had been pessimistic about the progress of liberalism in the European sense of course, he still had a drive to carry on. So his poor health was an especially difficult cross to bear. According to his wife, Margit, he told her, the worst is that I still have so much to give to the people, to the world, and I can't put it together anymore. It's tormenting. Mises did receive some degree by the way of professional recognition in his lifetime, a fact that he might have overlooked in light of his lack of a salaried position at New York University. He received honorary doctorates from NYU, University of Freiburg, Grove City College, as well as the Austrian Medal of Honor awarded by the Austrian Embassy in Washington. He was even elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. But it was not this recognition, welcome as it was, that motivated Mises, who was the only rebuke of himself in his memoir's notes and recollection, was that he hadn't been uncompromising enough. He lived his life as an incorrigible truth seeker, regardless of the professional consequences. This is one of the many reasons he was such an inspiration to Murray and why it continues to inspire the rest of us. For the most part, Mises' economic views to say nothing of his epistemological arguments ensured that he would be scorned or ignored by his own profession. And of course, by the political classes, he would receive no large institutional backing from any source. How then do we account for the continued growth of Misesi in thought? Here's Guido's answer. The main explanation of the present-day growth of the Misesi in paradigm is the extraordinary vigor of the ideas that inspire it. Mises is a classic, but in our day he is more than that. A classic author has given mankind a tireless formulation of essential questions and sometimes time-tested answers, but these questions and answers are not necessarily the ones that move us today, nor they may be relevant to the problems that we confront, not so in the case of Mises. All these years after his death, his writings still strike the reader, academic and layman alike, as relevant and thought-provoking. His books and articles are still being bought by many thousands each year, and most of all, ribbed. How many economic students today, Guido asks, actually read something by Adam Smith or David Ricardo? Any teacher of economics knows the answer. The same answer holds true for the writings of the 20th-century luminaries, such as Gustav Gasel or Frank Knight. It holds even true for the writings of John Maynard Keynes. The greatest champion ever of interventionism is constantly referenced in the classroom and in the media, but few people have ever held one of his books in their hands. By contrast, Mises is still read and studied attentively all over the world, and of course, as Guido points out, he is indeed. As our Mises University summer program, which attracts eager students from all over the world, demonstrates year after year. At our most recent Mises U, Walter Block were called an interesting exchange he'd had with Murray Rothbard in the late 1960s. Walter asked Murray, how many libertarians there were in the world? Murray answered with a bleak figure, 25. Not 25,000, but even 2,500, but 25. By that standard, and that figure, by the way, is the relevant benchmark. How can we be anything but delighted with our progress? Especially when our views are on counter to virtually everything that's taught to everyone in every school in America. And frankly, libertarianism is something truly new under the sun. It's true, of course, that we have intellectual forerunners, the 19th century individualist anarchists, French liberals like Frederick Bastiat, 17th and 18th century thinkers like John Locke, and groups like the Lovelers and the late Scholastics, to say the very least. Is that a consistent and systematic approach to the world that takes liberty as the non-negotiable foundation? There frankly was no such thing until the 20th century. Even the heroic figures that came before us, with the occasional exception like Gustav de Molinari, did not consider the possibility that so many state functions they took for granted could be provided within the market nexus they otherwise admired. For brand new philosophical school, and the one most people encounter only in caricature at the hands of the media, intellectuals and political figures who despise it, were doing extremely well. Our views are the opposite of what the ruling classes want to be here, and the opposite of the superstitions those classes seek to spread among the public. There are millions of us now. We have a greater ability to reach and educate people than ever before, and thereby increase our numbers still more. Libertarians of the future will look back on this period in history and wonder why many of us are so gloom. This was when the explosion and growth occurred, and we were too busy comparing ourselves to Democrats and Republicans. Libertarians we know, know that a lot of the news the public thinks is good is actually not so good. Whether it's the passage of destructive legislation with pleasant sounding names, or economic news that sounds positive but in fact indicates bubble conditions, we're skilled at finding hard truths beneath the sacred and sacrament, saccharine surface of state propaganda. When it comes to the growth of our movement and the spread of our ideas, but any reasonable standard, the news is all good. Let's recognize it and build on it. Thank you.