 Good afternoon. Almost every summer at the Mises University, some students will come up and say, when did you get started into libertarianism? And how did the Mises Institute get to Auburn? But about four or five years ago, a student came up with a look. He wanted to know the answer to those questions. But he brought me this book, the failure of the new economics by Henry Hazley. And he showed me the inside inscription. And he bought this for about $2. And he said, I was really shocked that Henry Hazley gave this to you in 1959. It says to John Denson, with warmest regards, Henry Hazley, May 1959. I said, well, I really do appreciate you bringing me this book. But that John Denson is not me. And I said, however, I met John Denson, that John Denson in 1960. He's a cousin of mine, that he had been the editor of Newsweek in 1959. And Henry Hazley was one of the columnists. And I think Walter Lippman was the other. So in 1960, I was in graduate law school at NYU. And that was the year of the presidential election, Nixon and Kennedy. And a lot of speakers came. And it was pretty exciting. And I had two other cousins from Birmingham that were practicing law in New York, too. And one of them, Nell, had known John Denson when they were both living in Washington. And she called me and said, look, John Denson is leaving Newsweek. And he's coming to New York to be added to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. And would you like to meet him? I said, well, absolutely. And so after the election was over, he came to New York. And I met him at a luncheon. And it was a working luncheon for him. And we sat in a booth and these various reporters had come in and he would have conversations with him. So the luncheon lasted for about two and a half hours. But anyway, at the end, we talked about the election. I said, I'm really worried about the election. I said, one of the speakers that came to campus to support Kennedy was John Kenneth Galbraith. And he said, you know, there's still some Neanderthals that believe in a balanced budget. And everybody started laughing. And I thought, I must be a Neanderthal. And he said, we don't need to worry about deficit spending. We owe it to ourselves. I mean, how does that look to date with China and Japan on there? So I said, I really don't feel like I took economics in college, but I don't know how to respond to all that. And he said, look, I've got a good friend named Henry Haslett that wrote a column for me at Newsweek. And he wrote one of the best books you'll ever read. And so he recommended I read economics in one lesson. So that was 58 years ago that I started becoming a libertarian. And so when I came back to like the practice law, one of my theories on getting involved, because I was really worried about things, was to break the power of the Democrat Party on the south. And that was a guy named John Grenier that was Goldwater's southern strategist. And he started working in 1962 to build a Republican Party. So I went to a Republican meeting and got elected the county chairman on a two-to-one vote. One person nominated me and the other was second. And we voted and I voted against me. But anyway, I got real active in the Republican Party. And hardly enough, somebody came up to me and said, you know, you need to read a book. You sound like a character in a book, I know. And I said, what is it? He said, Atlas Shrugged. And blowed me this book. I said, well, that's over a thousand pages. I can't read that. But anyway, I got into that book and it really had an effect on me. You know, a novel can really sort of get inside and see how things work. But I and Rand's organization objectives were recommended to economists. Henry Haslett and Ludwig von Mises. So that's how I came to know about Ludwig von Mises. So immediately I started reading socialism and eventually omnipotent government and kept on going that way. But I also discovered other libertarian think tanks like Fee and Freedom School in Colorado. And LeFave, we have all of his stuff now, I think. We have all those books in our library. And I don't know which one of those organizations, but I also heard an audio, had an audio tape of Percy Greaves talking about Pearl Harbor. And he had been employed by the Republicans to do the research for the hearings in 1945 and 46. And I mean, that really blew my mind. I mean, he said Roosevelt knew there was going to be a attack. He baited the Japanese into it and then didn't tell the commanders it would be a surprise attack to get America into the war. And I said, gosh, government is lying to us. And so I got real interested in revisionist history and got into World War One. A lot of great historians of Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Tansall and Charles Beard did a magnificent job on World War One. But anyway, I got elected as an alternate delegate to the Republican Convention in 68. And our delegation was divided between Nixon and Reagan. Finally, everybody went with Nixon. And then I was a delegate for the 72 convention. And as you may recall, I think Ron Paul probably recalls this, that in 71, Nixon put on waging price controls, severed gold from the dollar, and now he was a Keynesian. So I refused to vote for him as a delegate and refused to support him. And I saw, I just decided to give up on the Republicans. And oddly enough, John Hospice, who was running for the Libertarian as a candidate for the Libertarian Party for President, was here in Auburn in 72 and had a friend called Dr. Anelson of the Philosophy Department. So he invited me to have lunch with John Hospice. So that was my first connection to the Libertarian Party. So I became a delegate in 1976. Going back a little bit, for about four years, I wrote an article for the local paper called A Libertarian Viewpoint by John Galt. So that, not to be confused with John Galt and that, in a shrug I spelled it J-O-N-G-A-U-L-T. But once I wrote about Pearl Harbor as John Galt, you thought I dropped a bomb. I mean, people just got so upset about hearing that. But anyway, I went to the 76 Libertarian Convention as a delegate and I think that's probably where I met Jew Herbert. I think Jew was always involved in Libertarian things at that time. That's when I first met Rory Rothbard. And he was, he presented the platform for the Libertarian Party with non-interventionist foreign policy and free market, all the things that I wanted for Republicans and didn't get. And I was also a delegate to the next convention in 1970, in 1980. But the thing that I got interested in was the creation of the Cato Institute and Mary Rothbard was one of the founders, I think Ed Crane and Charles Cote. And they were going to put on seminars. So I signed up for a seminar in, I think it was 1979. I was asking Roger Garrison, he was there. And I can't remember what year it was. He was in Dartmouth College the whole week. And one of the things that I liked was Ralph Raco was speaking on World War I and I was into all of that, so I got to speak a lot to Ralph Raco. But I met the person that was in charge of that Cato Conference named Marsha Friedman and told her about my background and what I was trying to do and how disappointed I was in the political situation and I thought they were doing the right thing. I would love to do something like that at Auburn. And in 1980, Governor Bob James that I knew appointed me to the Board of Trustees at Auburn and I think, I don't know if Marsha Friedman found that out or whether I was already a trustee in 1980. But the next thing that happened, I got a phone call in 1982 from a guy I'd never heard of before named Lou Rock and he said he would like to come over and talk to me about creating the Ludwig von Mises Institute and having it connected to Auburn University because I was a trustee. I mean, prayers do get answered. I thought, wow, because I didn't know how to run an institute. So anyway, Lou came over and told me part of that background and he's just told you. But one of the things he said, I don't think he mentioned here that impressed me at that time was that he said when he asked Mrs. Mises for her support she said, well, I will if you will commit to me that you will devote the rest of your life to promoting my husband's ideas and he committed and I thought, wow, you know, that's quite a commitment to make. There's no structure in place and he's committed to this and of course he told me about Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul were going to help and I said whatever it takes, what do you want to do? And he said, well, I want to get on campus with the facilities so Lou drew up a contract that he and I reviewed where the institute would get facilities in the academic buildings and pay a certain percentage of the income to the university limited to the economics department, so it sort of recycled. So we met and I took him to meet the president, Winford Bailey back then, a very, very good president and Lou presented that and I endorsed it and the president said he would support that but he wanted me to present it to the board of trustees. So I presented it and one of the old-time members there, Red Bamberg was big in agriculture and so forth and he said, what are y'all going to be teaching over there? And I said, free market economics. He said, well, I like free market economics but don't mess with my government subsidies. So I told him we'd take a note about that and I pretended to write that down. But anyway, Dr. Bailey created a little office at Thatch Hall and there were just three employees. Guess who they were? Lou, his wife Marty and Pat. They were there then, they were there today, all the way through those three. And then we graduated to a little building over in the stadium at Petrie Hall and I've got a picture here. I showed Ron. He came to that place and brought us some books. We didn't have any books in our bookshelves. There's a picture of me meeting with Ron in, I don't know, 84 or something like that and brought us a federal code and we didn't have many books then. So I think we still got those books. We had a new president, Jim Martin came along. He was very sympathetic to what we were doing. He said, look, I'd like for y'all to have a better place. We're going to build a new business school and you beat with the architect and tell him what you need. And so I did and the design was that as you went in the front door of the business school, there was the Mises Institute. The reception office for Lou conference room had access to the classrooms. And as I learned as being a trust advocate, I guess 19 years, I learned a little bit about academic politics and I bet that can be. And so I advised Lou, I said, Lou, I hate for you to pin on Auburn all the time. Why don't you get your own place? And so Lou found this spot and built the building which is much smaller than it is. This is a massive improvement. But that in a short span of my 15 minutes, that's how I got into libertarianism 58 years ago and how the Mises Institute came to be at Auburn. Thank you very much.