 What we're going to do is just give you a ground level view of Murray, the person, his humor, warmth, his temperament. We all were personal acquaintances, everyone on the stage, with Murray Rothbard. And so what we'll do is we'll just give some impressions that we had of him as fellow academics and friends. I think we'll start with just talking about our first meeting with Murray. I'll start and then we can go along. And then other things we might address if we have time is what surprised you most about Murray. I have a story about that. And about how Murray was a real person who loved real things. He loved American culture. He didn't just love liberty in the abstract. He loved the fruits of liberty. He loved American movies. He loved certain kinds of American food, especially Pepsi and Wonder Bread, true. And he was in love with American culture. He didn't hold himself above it. He felt part of it and he was very proud of it. So when I first saw Murray at a libertarian conference in the early 1970s in New York City, and the person, the speaker that had come on before him was named Robert LaFave, who was a pretty well-known libertarian back then, and was also a pacifist. And he sort of gave a spiel about why you shouldn't defend yourself. Murray came up after him and gave a talk. And people wanted to know what Murray's views were of pacifism. So Murray said, well, if someone was coming at me with a mallet, I'd pull out a gun and I'd plug them. So I was very... But the first time I met him was at a New Jersey Libertarian Party convention. I was a vice president, unfortunately. I quickly learned to distance myself from the Libertarian Party. And I had him there as a speaker and he consented to come for $75 and this lousy chicken dinner that we provided him with. But so when we met, he was very interested in the fact that I was an economic student, a graduate student in economics. And he immediately started searching frantically for a pen. And he was sort of like an absent mind professor. So I handed him a pen and took my name and number until I had some people call you that are involved with Austrian economics. So I didn't think much of it. I didn't know if he was really going to do it, but he did. And so the next few days later on Monday, somebody, a student called me and said, you know, we'd like to have you join our reading group. So they sort of vetted me in advance. And a few weeks later, I guess I had passed the test and they asked me to... Murray called me up and asked me to come to his apartment. So I was very, very nervous. Another student drove me there. And so I was worried that he would be questioning me, grilling me about Austrian economics and libertarianism and see how little I really knew. And I was terrified. But we knocked on the door and he opened the door and he said, John, my boy, come on in. So he made me feel just like we were friends for years. Some of the discussion was very, very interesting that evening. And the evening extended to 2 or 3 a.m. We spoke about... He asked me about looters. What do I think? What do you do with looters? This was back in the 70s when that may have been a problem. And so he said, you know, his position was that if someone was looting your property, you could defend it up to... even up to deadly force, if need be. But that if the looter got your property and was running away, that you couldn't use deadly force, you had to call the cops. Even if there were the government cops, you had to call the cops. So I kind of piped up and I said, well, I think you have a right to defend your property and recover it and use force doing that. And if it means shooting a looter down after they've run running away, I would be in favor of that. So Murray said, oh, now that's a conversation that I'm willing to have. He always liked if you were more hardcore than he was. He loved that. Then the subject of what we would do with state property after a libertarian or successful libertarian revolution. So I suggested selling it, watching it off and giving the money, returning the money to the taxpayers. Murray dismissed that. He said, no, no, no, he says, you need the government to do that. And it would prolong the process. What you should do is get the private property back into the hands of the people right away. So it could be used efficiently. So then I suggested, well, what about giving the factories to the workers and these public schools to the teachers? I said, no, no, they don't deserve that. So I asked him, I said, what would you do? He says, well, he says, the property should go to the heroes of the libertarian revolution. And finally, I'll end this little anecdote about my first meeting with Murray. Across the street was kind of a seedy parking lot. Across the street from the second floor apartment. And yet it was a hot summer night, the window was opened. And there were some of the two parking attendants. One of them had a trumpet, and they were blowing on it. It was really dissonant and cacophonous, and it was just terrible. So it was really annoying Murray. He was getting visibly upset. So he finally, in the best New York accent, yelled out the window. Without getting at the window, he's kind of standing by, shut up, shut up. And then his wife, Joey, immediately came in and got him away from the window, shushed him, and then closed the window and brought a fan in. And so he was pacified. But David, do you want to talk about first meeting Murray, or right? Yeah. Well, I had read Murray Rothbard's book, Man Economy in State, when it came out. That was 1962. But I didn't get to meet Murray until 1979. And it was at a conference in June 1979 put on by the Cato Institute. And I got along with Murray very well, and I met his great friends, came some of my greatest friends, Ralph Rayco and Ronald Hamaway. And one thing I realized when I met them, they had a terrific sense of humor, especially when the three of them were together. Murray was always laughing. One story that comes to mind, Tom Woods was mentioning the revisionist movement after World War I. One of the great revisionist historians was Harry Elmer Barnes, whom Murray knew. And at one point Murray was going to be the editor of a fesshrift collection of essays in honor of a scholar. It was a gigantic fesshrift, later published under title, Harry Elmer Barnes' Learned Crusader. So Murray was going to be the editor. Now, usually a fesshrift is supposed to be a surprise for the scholar being honored. But Barnes found out about it and when contributors would send in essays. If there was anything critical of him in it, Barnes would insert something to the effect. Professor Barnes would probably reply in this way to the comment. So when Murray was telling me about this, he said, eh, he wrote his own fesshrift. Oh, then one thing about Murray was he had a tremendous intellectual curiosity with just constantly absorbed information. Quite some time ago, there was a lot of discussion about a problem, a math problem called the Monty Hall Paradox. And Murray called me up. It was quite late at night and he was going over this and he said, eh, why are you just beginning to dawn? He was figuring this out. When he would go into a bookstore, sometimes in New York, we'd go to the Strand bookstore, which was his favorite bookstore. He would just also Barnes and Noble sale annex. He could just go through books, every book on the shelf and give comments about it. And he would just, if you ask him about any book he'd read, he could immediately tell you what was in it and various what was on particular pages. I remember on one occasion after a talk, I said to him, oh, didn't Mises reply to Ludwig Lachmann's criticism of him on the Austrian theory of business cycle? Somebody said, eh, that's right, economic in 1943. So he really knew everything and he was, although he's mainly, of course, known as an economist and a historian, he was interested in, he had a very good knowledge of philosophy, especially Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. He studied that very closely and one thing you find in reading Rothbard, this is very, I think very important when you read Rothbard, he thought tremendously fast, so although he was a very clear writer, he very often will compress the arguments and you have to read each sentence to see why he's saying a particular thing that he was just saw the connections in between things much faster than really anybody else. In that way, he was similar to someone who, another famous libertarian philosopher, Bob Nozick, the two of them really didn't like each other at all, but in that way, they were very similar, they were extremely fast in argument, but Murray was the biggest influence on my political and economic views and he was the person who meant the most to me over many years and it was a great privilege in my life to know him. Thank you. I met Murray Rothbard in 1988, so in the spring of 1988, I was making plans to attend graduate school in economics that fall and I was already sort of an aspiring Austrian economist, I knew who sort of the big names were, I never met an Austrian economist, I didn't know if there were any still alive, but I happened to see a paper flyer on a bulletin board that said, Mises Institute, scholarships available and I was flabbergasted that someone had created an institute named for Ludwig von Mises and you have to remember this was pre-internet, so there was no Mises.org where you could go and learn all about it and the history and see who all the people were, but there was an address and so I wrote in an application letter and sent in a transcript or an essay, whatever was required to send it in the mail, figured well, that's probably the end of that. So then I get a letter back from someone at the institute saying we're interested in your application, we'd like to pursue it further. The next step in the interview process is for you to have a telephone interview with our Vice President for Academic Affairs, Murray Rothbard. So of course, as a very young person, I was kind of like Joe Salerno, I was completely terrified of what would take place during this interview and studied and had a script written out and everything and so finally it's arranged, he calls and he was, it was a lot of fun. I mean, he was warm and engaging and encouraging. He wasn't grilling me in any way. Before long I was talking about professors I'd had as an undergraduate and problems, the disagreements that I had with my professors and Murray's, wow, he's completely wrong because I'm like, I felt like I was one of the guys and so eventually I did get the scholarship and I was invited to attend what was then called the Advanced Summer Seminar in Austrian Economics at Stanford University, what later grew into Mises University and I went out in the summer of 1988. I remember going to the registration table. I never met any of these people. Right, I go to the registration table and there's Pat Barnett and she's, oh, you're Peter Klein, oh welcome, here's your name tag. She had a big cooler of beer at the registration table. So here's your name tag, you want a beer? And I said, these are my people. As you've probably heard and others have mentioned, Murray liked to have fun, he liked to go out, he was a night owl and so one of the great things about those early days is, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night the adults are all sort of winding down but Murray was just ready to go and so he and the students, we would go out to, we would find a late night diner and we would shoot the breeze and tell stories till late into the night. Tom Woods mentioned that he met Murray in 1993 and I remember that, I was at Mises University that year as well and I remember going to some diner with Murray and Tom who I met that year. Although I noticed Tom doesn't describe 1993 as the year he met Peter Klein but we also had the responsibility of getting the kind of vodka that he liked and keeping it on ice during the conference so he could get it out when needed. One other thing I remember about those days is at some Mises conference being asked to pick up Murray at his hotel which was some distance from the venue and then deliver him to the venue and so I'd go, I'd pick him up and we're driving to the venue and he's just mile a minute telling stories and of course they're all hilarious. Now this was in the days before Google Maps and I really didn't know this area all that well and all of a sudden I realized I'm completely lost and Murray's oblivious to where we are. He's just going on with his stories and somehow eventually I made it to the venue like one minute before Murray's lecture was scheduled to begin and there's Pat out in the parking lot glaring at me with a death stare but I'd almost ruined the whole conference but somehow we made it work. When I was a PhD student I had the privilege of working with Murray as the managing editor for the Journal of Libertarian Studies for which Murray was at that time editor in chief and I've learned a lot more in subsequent years about how academic journals work and what the peer review process is all about. The scientific literature is supposed to be peer reviewed and that gives it this sign of approval and having submitted many papers to peer reviewed journals and been a peer reviewer for these journals and serving now as an editor of an academic journal and managing the peer review process. I know how complicated it can be and how seriously people take peer review. Well Murray had a more laissez-faire attitude towards peer review as the editor of the journal but just to give you a sense of the amazing breadth of his knowledge, which David and others have already mentioned, authors would submit a manuscript. The way it works with a typical journal, you submit a manuscript, you wait a few weeks, you get back anonymous peer reviews that will assess your argument and make suggestions for improvement or whatever. So authors would submit papers to the Journal of Libertarian Studies on a huge range of topics, not just on Austrian economic theory but on every topic under the sun, philosophy, history, cultural studies, science and so forth, and they would get back to these lengthy, multiple page, single spaced, referee reports, often destroying the entire thesis of the paper, a few carefully worded sentences and then here's 100 books and articles you need to read to really understand this topic. Well they were all written by Murray because I was the one behind the scenes who was like managing the flow of papers and I would send the manuscript to Murray and then this peer review that was as long as the manuscript itself would come back and he could do this, as others have mentioned, quickly and efficiently because the range of his knowledge was so broad. So like David, it was a tremendous privilege to know him and it was a huge loss of course when he passed away unexpectedly in 1995 and I'd like to say that in a lot of my own professional work I've tried to take ideas from Murray's, from his economics and try to spin them out and elaborate on them. My basic understanding of entrepreneurship comes from an article written by Murray for a conference published in 87 or 88, 89. No I'm sorry, 85 is when it was first published where he just in a few sentences lays out what I take to be the correct theory of entrepreneurship. Among contemporary Austrians, Murray is sometimes described as a polemicist or a great libertarian theoretician, political economist, but not as a great technical economist and I think that's completely wrong. I think his technical economics work, especially as displayed in Man Economy and State but also in many other books and articles, is really forms the core of our current understanding of Austrian economics and we're so fortunate to have his written legacy and we're also fortunate to have these great memories of him as a person, thank you. I think my own memories of Murray go back to that first meeting which took place either in 1987 or 1989. I suspect that the 1989 was the more accurate date for our first meeting. But I think from that time on I was very impressed as Peter said by the depth of Murray's knowledge and by something that he, a skill or talent that he showed that I have never found to the same degree in anyone else. We editors speak about people being writing machines. I've never met anybody who could write as much as Murray and write things that were coherent and eloquent like he would write a letter to me in the middle of the night, which went on for 10 pages, made up of perfectly constructed sentences and making very logical arguments and bringing to bear all kinds of historical data. And I find I was very, although I only knew him for four or five years and then sort of met him intermittently at conferences, we did have a steady correspondence. I think Joe Salerno referred to that and as I point out of my own memories of people who my, famous people whom I met called Encounters, came about 10 years ago, some of my books were clearly inspired by Murray. My book After Liberalism, which deals with the replacement of classical liberal ideas by social democracy in the 20th century is clearly influenced by Murray. And I think you can see the skeletal form of some of the ideas that went into that book in the correspondence that Murray sent me and in the exchange of opinions that we had over a period of four to five years. I think my position that social democracy is ultimately much more destructive for Western societies than communism definitely came from Murray. And you have to sort of go back and remember these things because they were late to works that I wrote back in the 1990s. But the fact is that I was influenced by Murray in ways that I was not even aware of at the time that I wrote these books. I think he may have picked up the reference to Karl Schmidt for my biography of Karl Schmidt, which we discussed in some of the correspondence. But his allusions to or his application of Schmidt is perfectly correct. Murray also had an interest in something that interests me, which is looking for where ideas come from, right? From where they arise. And of course his work on the history of economic thought goes back and looks at the Jesuit thinkers at the Salamanca School and says, this is where Austrian economics really has its foundation or its origin, not in the thinking of Adam Smith. Well, I'm sure that came from years of reflection and from reading other people. And in a more, I suppose, contemporary sense, he was interested in where neoconservatism came from, something which both of us detested quite profoundly, but he was interested in, I remember he was always, the first neoconservative was Sidney Hook. Then he said, I may have been wrong, it may have been Max Lerner. Well, very few people, I think, remember who Max Lerner was. He was sort of a social democratic journalist who later became a neocon. Not a very interesting or good journalist, but Murray believed that he found the origin of neoconservatism and then there was somebody else to whom he traced these ideas. I'm sure we can find multiple sources for these diabolical concepts, but only Murray would have taken time to look for the source, the ultimate source. And I think he pursued this with the same seriousness with which he looked for the origins of Austrian economics in 16th century Spain. He was very much interested in historical problems. A book of his which he gave me, maybe Lou Rockwell gave this to me, but I've looked at many times this study of the Great Depression. And it's a brilliant study. And from listening to Peter Klein, I discovered that Carl Manger was the one from whom he had taken some of these concepts about the higher orders and capitalism. And it was in the Volkswirtschafts layer of Manger, published in 1871. But those ideas were there and Murray applied this to his study of the Depression. And it's a very cogent study. I mean, it changed my thinking permanently about that crisis. There's one other thing I'd like to say, and this is in response to something that came earlier, it's not about revisionism, since I've always prided myself on being an historical revisionist. There are some things that liberals are able to sell us or the left is able to sell us, although their accounts are totally inconsistent. Like for many years of my life, in fact, most of my life, I was told by my liberal friends or liberal teachers that the CIA and the FBI are very bad institutions. And we have to be on guard against them. And J. Edgar Hoover is like the worst person that ever lived. And this is this, and we can't trust the government. Also, the government is full of bigoted anti-communist. You listen to liberals today, they love the government. They love the secret service. They can't have enough of it. They can't use it to arrest enough people in this country. And it's sort of difficult to see exactly how that works. There's another point that was earlier made about which Ryan made about the, how liberals understand the 19th century or how the left understands the 19th century. Well, actually they have two conflicting understanding of capitalism. One of them is Marx's understanding. Marx did not glorify pre-capitalist society. Remember, he spoke about the idiocy of rural life and so forth. He had no, he thought capitalism was great. It just had to be replaced by socialism. He had no nostalgia for the past. Who were the ones who had the nostalgia for the past in the 19th century? Romantic conservatives, people like Thomas Carlisle in England hated the factories and it was the reactionary right that didn't like. The left, most of the left was very much in love with capitalism in its time, though it had to be replaced. Now there were two groups, there was two groups on the left that did not share this view. One of them were the anarchist who had some vague notion of a primitive matriarchal society, right? In which things were still good. And then we moved on to patriarchy and all these other problems. And of course you already have this in Jean-Jacques Housseau. The other group are the current climate alarmist, right? Because they hate capitalism. They hate industrialism and so forth. So it wasn't that people were living any more morally before because at least in the Western world we were all sexist and racist, right? And homophobes. But at least we didn't destroy the environment, right? It's the capitalist who are destroying the environment. But then only Western capitalist because China is an Indian capitalist, don't do anything bad, right? It's just the capitalist here who are bad. So I think with the exception, those two groups are the exception, but I think the general view of the left in the 19th century, including the socialist, was that capitalism did have its negative side. It caused us some temporary pain, but in the end we'd be better because we'd be able to move on toward industrial socialism. I think that is probably the more general view held by the left in the 19th century. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay. We could go on and on, but. Thank you.