 But I'm thrilled to speak to you on the happy occasion of the Mises Institute's 30th anniversary. I'm so delighted that Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano have been able to join us for this wonderful celebration, along with our great Mises Institute faculty from universities all over the country, some of our excellent students, and you the generous supporters who have made everything possible. My sincerest thanks to you all. Three decades ago, when I was contemplating the creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Austrian School of Economics, and its Misesian branch in particular, was very much in decline. The number of Misesian economists was so small that all of them knew each other personally and could probably have fit into Mises's small living room. This is a world that young people today, that young people today who find Austrian economics all over the place, can hardly imagine. I wanted to do what I could to promote the Austrian School in general in the life and work of Mises in particular. Mises was a hero, both as a scholar and as a man, and it was a shame that neither aspect of his life was being properly acknowledged. I first approached Mises's widow, Margit, who was what Murray Rothbard called a one-woman Mises industry. After her husband's death, she made sure his works stayed in print and promoted the translation of them into other languages. She agreed to be involved and to share her counsel as long as I pledged to dedicate the rest of my life to the Mises Institute. So I've kept that pledge. When Mises became our first chairman, how lucky we were to have on her passing the great libertarian businessman, Bert Blomert, who also was a wise advisor from the beginning to service her successor. When I told Murray Rothbard about the proposed institute, he literally clapped his hands in glee and of course said he would do whatever he could to support it. And he became our academic vice president and general inspiration. Ron Paul agreed to become our distinguished counselor and was also a huge help in assembling our early funding and also acting as a general inspiration. Murray would later say, quote, without the founding of the Mises Institute, I'm convinced the whole Misesian program would have collapsed. Of course, we can't know how things would have turned out had we made different choices. I simply wanted to do what I could with the help of dear friends like Murray and Bert to support the Austrian school during some very dark times and I was prepared to let the chips fall where they may. When I look back at all we've accomplished over these past 30 years, I can hardly believe it. Naturally, we promoted and kept in print works of Mises, the Nobel Prize-winning works of FA Hayek and the indispensable catalog of Murray Rothbard. Beyond that, we've made available to the world free of charge an enormous library of the most brilliant and important works ever written on Austrian economics and libertarian theory. Our own library and archives, based on the massive collections of Murray and Bob LeFave's Freedom School, are incomparable. Then there's the entire run of the quarterly journal of Austrian economics and its predecessor, the Review of Austrian Economics, which the Institute publishes. Murray Rothbard's Journal of Libertarian Studies and the publications, the many publications he edited during the especially dark days of the 1960s and 1970s, we also keep. Add to that many thousands of articles on every subject under the sun, thousands of hours of free audio and video from our seminars and other events, and you have a program of self-education that one time would have required access to major university libraries and a huge investment of time and money. The world now has access to all of this for free thanks to you. At Mises.org you can even hear recordings of Murray Rothbard teaching economics to engineering students at the former Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. But instead of teaching a room of 30 people, Murray's audience is now worldwide. Justice has been done. In fact, thanks to all these resources, the Mises Institute has become an intellectual foundation of the Ron Paul movement. When Ron inspires all those kids to look into Austrian economics, they flock to the Mises Institute. There they find the knowledge that Ron has given them a thirst for the pure, undiluted message of the Austrian school. Of all the things we do, I'd like to make special note of three in particular. Our Austrian Economics Research Conference brings together scholars working in the Austrian tradition from all over the world for what always turns out to be one of the intellectual events of the year. Our Mises University Summer Program has trained literally thousands of students in the Austrian school, including scholars who address you this weekend. Finally, our Summer Fellows Program gives rising Austrian scholars the opportunity to do original research under the supervision of Institute faculty and gives them a leg up in the job market as well. And I can tell you this. Graduate students, the graduate students coming out of the Institute's programs today would have thrilled Murray Rothbard. These are some of the sharpest young scholars I've ever seen. And you noted to take my word for it. You'll be hearing about them in the months and the years to come as they make their inevitable imprint on the world of ideas. Mises was confident that the ideas he championed would triumph someday if only because reality could not be postponed forever. But like Rothbard and so many other geniuses, he did not live to see his own vindication. Of course that makes his courage all the more admirable. Spurned by the establishment and ignored by his peers, Mises made no effort to cater to them nor to corrupt his message to advance his career. And of course neither did Murray. The conservative movement spurned Rothbard for the same official reason it spurned Ron Paul. We love him on economics, they protested, but we just can't stand his foreign policy. As early as 1956, Murray was coming to believe that war was the critical and defining issue, quote, the key to the whole libertarian business, as he put it. His essay War, Peace and the State that Tom and Walter both discussed provided a theoretical grounding for the libertarian position of non-intervention abroad. But Murray went beyond theory and became a full-fledged revisionist historian of war. This of course was what doomed him on the American right. Murray even rejected the US government's military interventions during the Cold War, which so many conservatives claimed was an exceptional case that required a massive global military presence. Bill Buckley even said it required a quote, totalitarian bureaucracy, unquote, here in the United States. But this would all be scaled back when the communist menace was defeated, conservatives assured us. Sure it would, Murray said. And in fact with the Soviet archives now open, Murray's been vindicated. The preposterous claims of Soviet capabilities and intentions find no support in the records, which show a Joseph Stalin who far from looking for a fight was still licking his wounds after losing 27 million lives in World War II, and of course presiding over a desperately poor socialist economy. Standing up against US foreign policy was just about the most unfashionable thing Murray could have done. He was a very great economist, and if only he had shut his mouth on sensitive issues like this, he could have been the well-known and celebrated figure he deserved to be. Instead, he followed his principles and his individual conscience, excuse me, he followed his principles and his conscience, reached whatever audiences cared to listen, and never felt sorry for himself. To the contrary, Murray was about the most cheerful ambassador the libertarian movement has ever had. Henry Haslett once told me that the greatest thing I'd ever done was to give Rothbard the platform he deserved by creating the Mises Institute. Now Murray could reach an audience that vastly exceeded anything he'd been able to garner in the past. And thanks to our fellowship programs, he can even, at long last, advise graduate students. So many of us wish Murray could have lived to see both the Internet Revolution as well as the victories of the past few years in particular. We can only dream of what the ongoing Austrian rebirth would have meant in practical terms for Murray. But students today are reading him to a far greater extent than ever before. So a genius who once edited newsletters that reached a handful of people would today be addressing packed lecture halls over the country and the world, and undoubtedly internet TV audiences too. And I feel sure the excitement of instantaneous commentary on current events would finally have pushed Murray, who famously used only a typewriter for his books and all his other writings, into the world of computers and technology. Everyone in the libertarian world, friend and foe alike, would have read his commentary every day and non-libertarians would have been drawn to him in greater and greater numbers. It was not to be. But these extraordinary men, Mises and Rothbard, paved the way for the intellectual triumphs which the experiences of the past few years are only a taste. Mises institutes have been formed spontaneously and without any direction from us in countries all over the world, including Brazil, Poland, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, Estonia, Ecuador, Finland, Israel, Portugal, Ukraine, Romania, Sweden, Belgium, Colombia, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. We've accomplished all these things without a billionaire and without an obsessive eye to mainstream respectability. We have achieved them thanks to you and thanks to a faculty and staff dedicated to the cause of truth. The works of Rothbard and Mises and the contributions of all the other greats of the Austrian school are the patrimony we have been fortunate to inherit. But that patrimony carries with it a tremendous moral responsibility. We have flourished for the past 30 years thanks to your help, but this is truly a critical moment in the history of the Austrian school. Thanks to Ron Paul, more young people than ever are interested in the venerable tradition of the Austrian school. More of them than ever are skeptical about their professors are teaching them. And more of them than ever want to absorb everything they can of the Austrian school even to the point of becoming teachers and professors themselves. Will we be able to help this huge cohort of budding Austrians? Will the renewed interest in Austrian economics continue and strengthen or diminish and fizzle out? These are questions we have to answer together. A tremendous opportunity greater than anything I've seen in my lifetime lies in our hands. Some of the brightest young kids are committed to the world that Mises and Rothbard work so courageously and without fanfare to bring about. We have already witnessed so many early victories. Help us build on them and make these men's dream a reality. Thank you.