 Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure to moderate this panel on the 50th anniversary of the South Royalton Conference. I'm Peter Klein. I'm a professor at Baylor University and was not present at the South Royalton Conference. So I was alive at that time, but I was not deeply into Austrian economics as I was drooling over my baby food. But we're so privileged to have five distinguished panelists, all of whom were present at the 1974 conference and to repeat a remark that one of them just made. I hope by the end of this session, we'll still have five fully functioning panelists. One announcement before we get started is, and I think Joe, you asked me to remind everyone, that for all participants at the conference this weekend, we welcome your submissions to the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics or the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can talk to Joe, the academic vice president, Timothy Terrell, with the QJAE, or any of the staff or senior faculty for advice in how to position your paper or anything about those procedures. But we would love to see the papers presented here eventually make their way into publication. So June of 1974 was a remarkable event held at a small town in Vermont. And I don't know if you've had a chance to look at some of the materials that are downstairs in New Hampshire. I said Vermont, New Hampshire. It was Vermont, yeah. Yeah, OK, well, I'm done. I had some notes, but I'm so worried about their well-being that I get nervous. You don't study camera. Let's get nervous. Yeah, that's true. But we have, I should have been an economic geographer, like Professor Saber. I think you all know these five gentlemen. They really don't need any introduction. But very briefly, we have Walter Block, who is the Harold E. Worth Eminence Scholar at Loyola University, New Orleans. Jack High, who is Professor Emeritus at George Mason University. Randy Holcomb, who is the DeVoe Moore Professor at Florida State University in the Economics Department. Murray Sabrin, who you heard already, is Professor Emeritus at Ramapoke College in New Jersey. And Joseph Salerno, Professor Emeritus at Pace University in New York and Academic Vice President of the Mises Institute. So quite a few professors emeriti. But if you do the math and you think about how old someone would have to be to attend an academic conference in 1974, that shouldn't come as too big a surprise. I think it is widely acknowledged within the Austrian community that the South Royalton Conference in 1974, if not the substantive beginning of the modern Austrian school or the Austrian revival, was at least a very important institutional beginning of the school. And I think it's hard for most of us in our modern high tech networked age to remember that in the 1950s, 60s, early 70s, you had a few Austrian economists. Mises, of course, Hayek, a few others. The students of Mises and Hayek, a few others scattered around the world. But there was very little ability to communicate. People didn't know each other. They hadn't met in person. And the sort of social networking and institution building aspects of an intellectual movement, something that we often take for granted today in the digital age, that was a much bigger challenge to the rebirth of the Austrian tradition at that time. And so a group of individuals will get into some of the details centered at the Institute for Humane Studies had the idea to put this conference together. And there were actually a series of conferences. There were three or really four. There was the South Royalton Conference in 74. There was a follow-up conference in Hartford, Connecticut, 75. There was a conference at Windsor Castle in 1976. And then a fourth conference at the University of Delaware, I think also later in 1976. Those were the first sort of Austrian conferences to be held in the United States in the 20th century. And as you remember, the Austrian school was sort of at a low point in the 60s and 70s. You had Rothbard, Kersinger, a few others writing some very important works. But as a whole, the Austrian school was regarded as sort of a historical footnote. Remember that June of 1974 was before Hayek's Nobel Prize, which was later that year in 1974. So if Hayek's Nobel Prize sort of reignited interest in the Austrian school at a larger level among those sort of insiders in the Austrian movement, the revival actually begun earlier that same year. So I've asked the panelists to participate in a sort of unstructured, free-flowing, fireside chat kind of atmosphere. So they're not going to make any prepared no speeches. Thank goodness. I'm going to throw out some questions and let them respond and reflect and maybe reflect on each other's comments. And then we'll have plenty of time at the end. I think we go until four for questions from the audience. OK, so once again, everybody, thank you for being here. Let me start by asking some of you a little bit more about how you heard about this conference. How did you come to be invited to it? And what did you think when you got a letter or a phone call or someone saying, come to a small town in Vermont for a conference on Austrian economics? Walter, let me begin with you. So you're going age without beauty? Right. Mental acuity. Hello. Before I answer that question, I just wanted to mention something that was previously mentioned as to why did we have this revival given that Hayek didn't win his Nobel Prize until afterward? And Joe Salerno wrote a beautiful paper on this saying why it was and his reason, correct me if I'm wrong, was the 1962 publication of Man, Economy, and State. That's why we were there. So it wasn't Hayek's Nobel Prize, which came later. It was because of Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard. Who invited you to the conference? And how did they get your name? I was, I don't know, a fan of Murray Rothbard. I started in with the libertarian movement through the Ein Rand situation. She came to Brooklyn College to lecture, and I came to boo and hiss her, not to cancel her. We didn't cancel in those days. We just polite booing. And Brandon was very nice to me. He had a little debate with me, and he recommended Atlas Shroud and Economics in one lesson. And then my next stage in development was I was at Columbia University with Larry Moss. And Larry Moss says, you must meet this guy Murray Rothbard. He's an anarchist. And I said, I don't want to meet an anarchist because I was a rand in. So I put it off. But finally, I met Murray. And this was in 1966, maybe, or maybe 65, I'm not sure. So I was a member of the living room crowd. I sometimes think of the Mises Institute as Murray Rothbard's living room writ large. So I was a fan of Murray Rothbard's. And I attended the living room sessions, where we played risk and stuff like that. And I was a fan of Murray Rothbard. And that's how I got invited. So Joe and Murray, you both also knew Murray Rothbard personally. Prior to 1974, you had interacted with him. And presumably, your connection to the organizers of this event, the way you got on the radar screen, was maybe a recommendation from Murray Rothbard or someone else who was close to IHS. Is that correct? Actually, as I mentioned this morning, I read Manneconomy and State in February of 1974, while I was bogged down with pneumonia, thanks to Nixon's horrific oil policy, trying to get gasoline and commuting to Rutgers four times a week. And so I read Manneconomy and State. I wrote Murray a letter, didn't hear from him. And I went to Brooklyn Polytech to meet him and to invite him to be on my dissertation committee. And a few days later, a week or so later, I get a letter from Ed Dolan inviting me to the conference. And to me, this was like an incredible invitation to meet young economists and listen to Austrian school economists lecture on topics that I was just learning about. And so I met Joe there. We roomed together. And that was me. We both had a lot more hair according to the pictures there. So you were both PhD students at that time? Yes. And Walter, you had finished your PhD by that time. And I think you invited Rothbard to speak at Rutgers in February. OK. And I missed that because I was sick. So here you go. So just briefly, not your whole history with Rutgers. So I was the vice president of the New Jersey Libertarian Party. And I was in charge of getting a speaker for our first convention. And this was the year before South Royalton. And so I got up the courage. And I called up Murray Rothbard, who lived right across the river. And he agreed to come over for $75 and a bad chicken dinner. And but when he found out I was a graduate student to make a long story short, he was very excited. He's trying to look around. Where's my pen? And so he wrote my number down. And he said, I'll have somebody call you or to join a book club, a book reading circle. And Walter happened to be there. And that Monday, someone called me because the convention was on a weekend. And then after that, I began talking to Murray once in a while on the phone. And then that following summer, I was invited to his living room, almost alone, just with one other person. And in which he asked me a lot. I was very nervous. But as soon as he came to the door, he was just very friendly and welcoming, like he had known me for 10 years. And he said, oh, Joe, my boy, welcome. And so I went in and from there, I became friendly with him. And I got my invitation from Ed Dolan at Murray's recommendation. So partly what I'm trying to figure out among the panelists, some of you were sort of part of or would soon be part of the Murray Rothbard living room crowd. And Murray Rothbard was regarded by Ed Dolan, who was the organizer of the event. By the way, the reason it was in South Royalton, Vermont is because Ed Dolan was a professor at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, which is what confused me earlier. And South Royalton was quite close to his headquarters at Dartmouth. But Randy and Jack, so you guys were not part of the Rothbard circle. You were not in the New York area, either one of you. Do you recall how you first got connected with IHS or with the people who organized that conference? How did you come to be at an event of young Austrians? Randy and then Jack. So I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, economics major, never heard of the Austrian school. I mean, that just wasn't this kind of stuff that was taught. When I got to graduate school at Virginia Tech at the time, I think my professor's a lot more sympathetic with Austrian ideas, but it wasn't in the classes. Actually, I credit Jack, who was a classmate of mine, first year in graduate school, very familiar with the Austrian schools, and like gave me a reading list. And so I've read Rothbard and Kirchner's Competition Entrepreneurship. No, I guess that came out the next year. Oh, yeah, but yeah. So I had read that and some Mises and stuff, so I'm familiar with the Austrian ideas. And we had a group of us, graduate students, who we talk about that stuff and basically had to read it, had to be familiar with it. And so the way I found out about the conference was faculty member Richard Wagner at Virginia Tech said, there's this conference going on. You might be interested in it. You might want to apply. I applied. I got accepted. So that's my story. It was an application? I could apply. Yeah, I just sent in an application. I'd never met Murray or Israel or anybody before. I just sent in an application, was accepted. And Jack, what about you? Well, while these guys were in New York and New Jersey, I was wandering around in the desert. I got my undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. There wasn't an Austrian within 1,000 miles. And I had learned about Austrian economics through Rand. And in fact, I studied economics because I read this book called Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. From there, I found my way to Haslitz Economics in one lesson. And I thought, gee, what a great discipline this is. I think I'll try this. So I enrolled in economics at the University of Utah and spent three years never meeting, never learning anything about Austrian economics. But I was interested. I read what I could. I went to Virginia Tech. I met Randy, John Metcalf. There weren't a number of us students who were interested and were self-taught. And I went to Virginia Tech for one year. It was a very depressing experience for me. Randy and John aside, Blacksburg is not much of a metropolis. And so I had quit and was in LA. And either Randy or John Metcalf, one of my fellow students told me about South Royalton. So I wrote a letter to IHS and I asked if I could attend the conference. And what really thrilled me is they paved my way. Terrific, thank you. Actually, my own introduction to the Austrian school was also from reading Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, and Chasing Down the References in the Back. So for some of you, was this your first academic conference of any kind? Had you been to the American Economic Association or the Southern Economic Association or some similar event? Did you know what an academic conference was? I had not been to any other economic. OK, so I'm wondering about kind of expectations going in. So some of you already knew Murray Rothbard, but maybe you didn't know Israel Kershner. I'm guessing you probably didn't know about Ludwig Lachman. So the three primary lecturers were Rothbard, Kershner, and Lachman. So when you got the program and you saw the speakers and the readings, what did you think? Were you excited? Did you think this is going to be a transformational event? Were you puzzled and confused by who some of the speakers were? No, I mean, I'll speak to that because I had read Kershner's work and Rothbard's work. And so I mean, one of the attractions to me was I get to meet these guys. I've read their work. I get to meet them. And so I did know, I mean, I only knew about them through their work. And having read, in particular, having read Murray's stuff, I'm thinking, there's probably some bitter old man here. So I show up in South Royalton, and Murray's there. And it's like almost the opposite of what I expected. I mean, he's like Santa Claus. He's like this fat, jolly guy, he's telling jokes and stories and everything. I mean, it's so delightful. And if you knew Murray, I mean, he had this magnetic personality. I mean, if he came in the room, people would flock around him. He was a great storyteller. He was so entertaining. And so I was expecting to meet those guys. I knew who was on the program, expecting to meet them. And it was a pleasant surprise, actually for all of them. But it was a pleasant surprise to meet Murray. And of course, Israel Kershner, such a gentleman, such a great individual. I mean, so I didn't know exactly what to expect having met him. But that's one of the attractions, was actually getting to meet those guys after reading their work. The same for others, too. You were excited to get to meet in person, folks that you'd read about or heard about? Well, the person that I really was interested in meeting was Henry Hazlett, because I'd read economics in one lesson earlier that year. So economics in one lesson, to me, was an epiphany. I said, how could anybody not agree with what's written here, because it's so clear, it's concise, it's logical. And he challenged every status premise there was in economic policy. And meeting him at age 80 was unbelievable, because he was vibrant. He was standing tall. And it was just a great joy to meet him, because at that time, I had been reading his column that was divided into three economists, Milton Friedman being one of them, who attended. We'll talk about him later. But meeting Hazlett, to me, was, I think, just as important as meeting the other economists, more so, because Hazlett was the quintessential public intellectual. He took very difficult concepts and presented to the public that even Joe Biden could understand. And that's not easy to do, because Joe doesn't know it. Joe doesn't know it. But to me, meeting Hazlett, I think, was a great experience, because he said something to me, which I'll talk about later, which I think was quite interesting. I'm glad you mentioned Hazlett. He was present at the opening dinner as sort of an honored guest, although he was not one of the speakers at the second two days of the conference. Others, had you, like Walter, had you met Kirchner and Lachman prior to the conference, or no? I have to brag in two ways. First of all, I might be the only person in the room who actually shook the hand of Ludwig von Mises. I never washed the hand since. It's a little dirty, but if you shake my hand, you channel Mises. The other way I'd like to brag is that I, along with Walter Grinder, I think, to a great degree, was responsible for Ludwig Lachman being there. Walter Grinder, my mentor, when I was in Murray's living room, Walter sort of took me aside and took me under his arm because Murray was busy with a lot of people. But Walter Grinder was sort of my assistant mentor. And he and I were bugging the hell out of Israel Kirchner. And finally, Israel threw up his arms in dismay. And so what do you want me to do? And what we suggested was that he invite Ludwig Lachman to be a visiting professor at NYU, which was why Ludwig was there. So I was knowledgeable about all three. I dug the hell out of Israel, along with Walter Grinder, sort of semi-responsible for Ludwig being there. And certainly, I knew Murray beforehand. OK, thank you, Joe. Yeah. One of the people that I was very impressed with, and I don't think I knew that this person would be there, is a great British economist and a great gentleman, William H. Hutt, who was sort of the leading anti-Keynesian of the post-war period, even more than Henry Haslitz. He detested Keynes. But so Richard Ebling and myself, Richard Ebling, cannot be here. He had an illness and a family. But we were sitting at a table with W. H. Hutt. And I had read some of his works before, and so had Richard Ebling. So we were very excited to meet him, because we didn't know he was going to be there. But when Ludwig Lachman came in, he said, what is he doing there here? And we said, well, he's in Austria. And he says, no, he isn't. He's a Keynesian. So everybody was his greatest curse. But I highly recommend reading some of Hutt's works. And he did contribute a lot to the conference. I was going to come back later to this comment by Hutt about Lachman on kind of the, I was going to come to it later, but let's go there now, some of the kind of variety of opinions among the participants, both the keynote speakers and the other distinguished panelists and even some of the junior folks. In particular, as most of you know, if you've read any of the accounts of this period, Milton Friedman was sort of an uninvited guest. I guess he was sort of invited by Ed Dolan. But Friedman was not a participant in the conference. But because he had a summer house nearby, he was somehow invited to drop in, I guess, on the Friday, maybe at the opening dinner. And he made a few impromptu remarks that did not go over completely well. At least according to the reminiscences that have been published, including famously saying, there's no such thing as Austrian economics, only good economics and bad economics. Of course, he did seem to think there was such a thing as Chicago economics. But so what I wanted to ask you, you were younger, younger, impressionable young lads at that time. I mean, when Milton Friedman showed up, obviously you knew who he was. Did you know that there was some friction between Friedman and the Austrians? And what did you think of Friedman being there? Let me just give you the background on that. Murray Rothbard had just published an article in his libertarian form entitled, Uncle Milti Rides Again, in which he called Friedman because Friedman wanted an index scheme. He said, well, inflation, we can neutralize inflation. Even if there's inflation, if we can index people's incomes and contracts, there wouldn't be any problem. So Rothbard called Friedman a monetary crank and an inflationist. So when Friedman showed up, we had all read this. We all read Rothbard. And many of us went over to Friedman and asked what he thought. And he was very upset. And so he would say a few things about Rothbard. Then we'd go across the room to Rothbard and tell him what. And that went on for a good 20, 30 minutes. Anybody else have memories of that? Yeah. As I recall, Friedman made some remarks about Mises at the Mont Pelerin Society. And I don't know. And I guess he told the story. Yeah, he told the story about that. About me? Yeah, Friedman told the story about Mises being on, I guess on the boat over to the Mont Pelerin, first Mont Pelerin Society meeting, or there in one of the meeting rooms. And we're discussing withholding tax, which Friedman had implemented or had formulated during World War II while he was working for the Treasury Department. And so they were talking about progressive versus other types of taxes and how the income tax was necessary, but maybe the progressivity isn't. So according to Friedman, Mises stood up, stomped his foot and said, you're all a bunch of socialists, and stomped out of the room. And so that did something like that did happen. But the way he told it was like a little bit too much relish for Murray to take. Well, he said some other things which I don't remember because I think that Mises was intolerant. But Henry Hazard came up to me afterwards. Why he came up to me, I don't know. And he said, Friedman lied. And I was taken back by what Hazard said because I guess he was at the meeting. And it just showed you that sometimes interpersonal relationships in academia are not copacetic to say the least. But he came up and he looked visibly upset that Friedman said what he did. And I'll never forget that because why he picked me out to say that? I don't know. But it was just kind of interesting that he said that. Well, to give a little more context on Friedman, he was very engaging to the students. He came around. He took an interest in this. He wanted to know what schools we were going to, what had attracted us to, Austrian economics. Same is true of Hazlett. He really engaged. I mean, we went behind the ears of graduate students. And here are these distinguished gentlemen really taking an interest in us. The statement by Friedman that upset me, they just ignored me that he would deny at an Austrian conference that there were. But the statement that upset me is that he said that Mises had great integrity, but that some of his followers did not. And that seemed to me to be directed at Murray. And I didn't know this background, but it bothered me that Friedman would cast an aspersion like that at Murray at this conference. That does seem a little odd to be sort of crashing someone else's party. I guess I will say in Friedman's defense, some of these folks back then, at that time, they were not as polished and diplomatic as they are now, like Walter, for example. But like Walter is now. But I mean, more than one of the reminiscences suggests that apparently Milton Friedman's son David at a previous meeting of the Philadelphia Society had said of his father, Milton, that Milton had fascist tendencies or fascist sympathies. And apparently some of you asked Friedman about this on Friday night. And he gave a sort of a grumpy kind of a response. But I will say Friedman might have mellowed a little bit because sometime in the early 90s when the Mises summer conference was being held at Stanford University, I was a student, graduate student at that time. And not myself, but another group of graduate students on walking from the dorm to the place where the sessions were held had bumped into Friedman, who was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford at that time. And apparently told him, hey, we're at the Mises Institute summer conference. Murray Rothbard is giving the keynote speech. Would you like to come and hear it? And Friedman just sort of laughed. Or he made some kind of a polite. He didn't bite their heads off. But he just sort of laughed like, no, I don't think that's for me. And kind of walked off. So OK, let's turn back to the substance of the conference for a moment. As I think most of you know, the keynote, the main lectures were subsequently published in the book edited by Dolan, which I think you can buy downstairs, called The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, which for many of us was one of the most important early books that we read summarizing the modern Austrian tradition. But do you remember what were your impressions of the substance of the lectures? I mean, were Rothbard, Kersner, and Lachman? Were they good speakers? Were they easy to understand? Were you thinking, oh, gosh, I'm starstruck. There's my hero up there. Or were you like taking notes thinking, oh, that's an important point. I need to remember that for my dissertation. Talk about what you remember of the lectures themselves. Jack? I remember both Rothbard and Kersner being very easy to understand, lucid. Now, realize, I spent four years sitting in classrooms, never heard a lecture on Austrian economics. This was a thrill to me. It was, I mean, it was like drinking from a fountain when you're in the desert. They were just, it was a fabulous experience for me that way. Lachman was a different story. And is there anyone in here who has seen videos as I don't know if he, you've got to see this guy to believe the way he speaks. And he came out. Now, this room is a big L-shaped room. I'm sitting maybe 10 feet from Lachman, right in the front row, not far from him. He comes out and opens his mouth. And it's all I can do to keep him laughing. I mean, it's a terrible, and what's worse, way back in the back of the room. So you can't see way back in the back of the L. There's Murray back there, just castling like hell. I mean, and it's embarrassing. So I'm embarrassed. I'm trying to keep him laughing. I don't think I understood a word that Lachman, I mean, this delivery went right by me. Now, I later really came to appreciate Lachman. He was a great gentleman, a great scholar. I studied under him at NYU. I had the most respect for him. But I have to say that first encounter was one of the most painful things that I've sat through trying to sit there looking intelligent while he's here. Anyone else have a different impression? I sat pretty close to Lachman when he was speaking. And the thing that I noticed immediately is that those of you that remember old photographs, 78, RPMs, 45, and 33, Lachman was speaking no more than 16, RPM. I mean, it was really slow and deliberate. And what Rothbard had. Sorry, can I translate that to the younger crowd? It's like on YouTube, you put it to like 0.5X on the playback. Sorry, please continue. And I'm watching him turn over his papers since giving his talk. And Rothbard has such depth and breadth of the topic. And you can see that in the book with all the footnotes. And I was just blown away by his knowledge of the prehistory of the Austrian school. Lachman's paper was, I think, five pages long. And it took him an hour to read it. It was really incredible. And I don't remember the substance of it. I had to go back and read it in the book. I think it was capital and the structure of what I think. That was the title of his book. But he was so slow and deliberate. And I wasn't amused by that. I just felt he was real. I don't know if he had a medical condition or what. But it was really slow. And I don't know, Jack was having that Giggly's moment in the room there. But yeah, that's what I remember about Lachman. It was really slow. Kursner was right on point. And a lot of substance, as I recall. And for so and me, who was a newbie, this was like getting a semester's worth of economics in one week. And to me, that was a highlight of my academic career. Because I never had so much substance delivered in one week. And since then, I've been running with the ideas that were there to explain how the world works. Yeah, I would say I just echo what both of these guys said that Rothbard, a very engaging speaker, Kursner was great. I couldn't understand anything Lachman said. We were talking over the dinner of the other night, I think. Because I read the book afterwards. Been a while since I've looked at it. And I could understand what was in the book. I said, is that an actual transcript of what he said? Because when he was saying it, I couldn't understand the thing. Walter's now eager to defend his recommendation of Lachman to Kursner. He was very spirited. My favorite expression of his is, thee must smash a zem. There were differences between the three of them. For example, Lachman not only didn't believe in equilibrium as a theoretical construct, he didn't believe it at all. Most mainstream live or die by equilibrium. Austrians, I think, to the main degree, at least believe we're moving in that direction. We never reach it, because something else is always going to change. But at least it's a reasonable construct, whereas he just rejected it entirely. And then there were differences between Murray and Israel. Israel was always talking about entrepreneurship, about seeking pure profit. And Murray was saying, but entrepreneurs sometimes get losses, had a losses figure in. And Israel had no response in my view. So of the three, I was certainly much more agreeing with Murray Rothbard than with the other two. So could some of you talk a little bit about how attendance at this event changed your professional trajectory in terms of what you chose to study or write about afterward, and to what extent was the conference itself responsible as opposed to just other Austrian works that you began to read? Any thoughts on, especially those of you who are still working on dissertations at that time, which I guess is everybody up your butt, Walter. Yeah, I finished my degree in 1972. I just want to mention one thing, one bit of advice on that. At Columbia, where I got my PhD in order to defend your dissertation, which is the most important thing, because a lot of people get out with an A-B-D, they never all butt to a citation. At Columbia, you needed three people from the economics department, one person, a professor from Columbia, but not in the economics department, and a total outsider. So I picked three guys from economics, and then I picked this guy from the business school who seemed nice, and he said, my dissertation was on rent control. He said, well, I know somebody who's interested in rent control. Shall I invite him? And I said, sure. This guy was a rent control commissioner. And it took two hours for me to defend the dissertation. And then for three hours, they were just sitting there arguing as to whether I would pass or not. And if I didn't pass, I'd have to another year and a half, two years. So my advice to you young people who are getting your PhDs, pack that department. Don't be picking a rent control commissioner if you're writing on rent control. And you have the power, at least I did at Columbia to pick whoever I wanted. So my advice to you is to pick any of the professors at the Mesa Institute as your fifth person. Yeah, you never know what one of us might be moonlighting as a rent control commissioner. Well, one thing I'll say about- Randy, talk about your current trajectory. Yeah, well, one thing I'll say about that conference is reading the Austrians sort of on your own and everything. When that conference was held, you saw, hey, actually there's a community of people who have similar ideas. And that conference and the follow-on conferences helped to build a community of people. And it's lasted and built. I mean, here, there's still a community of people stemming from that 1974 meeting. And I mean, my own career, I've done a lot of public choice stuff and not strictly Austrian stuff, but at the same time, I was a faculty member here at Auburn when the Mesa Institute was founded. Roger Garrison was here. He's somebody that I had met at the conference. And so I think the network that started in 1970 and 1974 has pretty long legs. Yeah, how important was that for all of you to know that there was this community beyond the people that you were already in with your classmates? It was very important. It was very inspirational. First, it was very inspiring to see three great scholars and the way they went about presenting their ideas. But beyond that, the interaction between all of us, seeing that there were other people out there. I've told the story before, but about two years before that when I started reading Austrian economics, I was working as a janitor and I would finish my work very quickly. And so by two o'clock in the afternoon, I would go into the broom closet under a naked yellow bulb and I'd be reading America's Great Depression. And at the end of the summer, I came out of that closet. I came out of the closet as an Austrian. But I felt so alone. I was alone. I was in a closet. For me, 74 was a transformative year because I had to really get up to speed on the literature of the economics of inflation. There was nothing on the geography inflation. In fact, I just kept on reading every case study I could. Bresciani-Toroni about the German hyperinflation. There was a book on the Chinese hyperinflation and all these wonderful case studies. And for the students who may not know, 1974 was a very high inflationary year. It was the highest inflation we had since World War II. And so I was interested not only in current events, but how did we get here? And then I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index to see exactly how inflation impacted local communities differently because the national CPI that we get every month is an aggregate of local CPIs. So that meant that CPIs were different according to region. And my thesis was because of the Fed's monetary policy, money enters the system and diffuses through. And where does the money begin to diffuse from? The major city banks. And so therefore we would expect the hypothesis that the inflation rate would be higher in large cities than smaller cities. And that's what the data tended to show. In fact, right now it shows a little bit differently because of the South being a recipient of a lot of money coming in from other parts of the country. And so I just kept on reading and reading. And eventually I got a job as a staff economist at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington and then worked for their investment subsidiary in the investment services. And eventually I got my job at Ramapo teaching finance on an emergency basis because there was an opening. And so I was at the right place at the right time in the late 70s learning about inflation, monetary policy, government spending, whatever. And I was using those skills to become a staff economist even though I didn't have a degree in economics, not only not a PhD in economics, but not even an undergraduate degree in economics. So the lesson for my students was keep on learning. You don't have to have a degree in a specialty to get a job in an area that you enjoy. And that is basically why that conference was so important in my academic and personal career, professional career because without that knowledge, there's no way I would have gotten a job as a finance professor at Ramapo in 1985. And the way it worked out is I had three emergency appointments and they liked me there and I got a tenure-track position and as they say the rest is history. So the real success of my career, if you want to measure that, really began in 1974 at this conference. So needs to say I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Murray, to Joe for his ability to get information to me that I requested and it was just an incredible, incredible experience. How one event can change your life so dramatically? Yeah, for me, I was just about to start UCLA, I hadn't been and UCLA students showed up at that conference, I made friends with them. They were big help to me when I got to UCLA. I also met at that conference, Don LaBoy. Now Don died young, he died 50 from cancer. But he and I later became colleagues at the Market Process, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. David Henderson and Harry Watson, I became lifelong friends with them. I met them at the South's Royalton Conference. I mean, it's like now I didn't study in a closet, Joe, but it really, that was the significance of that conference to me, professionally and personally, all the friends I made. The other significance and I think this is still true today. I made contacts there, so the rest of my graduate work was supported by charitable contributions. That conference was my first experience of that. I met George Pearson from IHS, Ken Templeton. And those foundations supported my graduate work and research during the early part of my career. I think Austrian economics exists today. This movement exists today because of those non-profit activities. And South Royalton, I think for Austrian economics was the beginning of that. I think one thing you're picking up here is the importance of community. Now all of our panelists, we have three who were in the New York, greater New York area and were able to hang out at libertarian or Austrian events there. And I guess Randy and Jack, you were both at Virginia Tech at that time, which had several students interested in these ideas and Jack, you went on to UCLA. I mean, I think if we had some other participants here who were not in any of those networks, like Roger Garrison, who I think was at University of Missouri, Kansas City, where he was the only Austrian-inclined person. Suda Chenoy was in Australia. Of course, her father was friendly with Hayek, so she had family connections to this sort of broader movement. But there must have been many other participants too who really were the only Austrian-inclined person in their circles. Yeah, Roger was a student at University of Virginia at the time in the PhD program, and Larry Moss was there also. And at the time, he was an assistant professor at University of Virginia. Yeah, cool. Okay, so there were some other connections too, but I guess the point is for those of you earlier in your careers now, the relationships that you make, not only at face-to-face events like this, but also through other kinds of networking that you can do online are obviously hugely important for one's career. I want to talk about one other participant that was there, and was actually very inspirational, because his name was Dan Marmentano. He wrote the really the first book among our generation, and he applied to Austrian economics to industrial organization, and it was called The Myths of Antitrust. And he's probably five, six years older than the rest of us. But because he was younger, and he was the first one to write a book after Kerser had and Rothbard and so on, I think he, well he certainly inspired me personally to be more productive, to want to write more, because Rothbard highly praised the book. And so he sort of wanted to be noticed in your master's eye. And so I think that was very inspirational. Great. We want to give you guys a chance to participate in this conversation as well. So if you have a question that you would like to address to a specific panelist or the panel as a whole, please raise your hand. And we don't have an audience mic, so be sure and speak loudly, Professor Hulsman, which I know you can do. Yes, yeah, I was trying to stand out that Joseph Sennado wants to talk to you. I think we're supposed to list the numbers off, but just how many people have done it? It was about 50, right? No, no, no, according to the roster. Yeah, according to the roster, there were 50. Yeah. Well, so if I understand correctly, I mean there were only the three formal speakers, Rothbard, Kerser and Lachman, but then there were what they called informal, well there was Haslitt, but during the afternoons, if you look at the schedule downstairs, they called them like informal presentation breakouts, and it looks like maybe Rizzo or O'Driscoll presented something, O'Driscoll and Chenoy, but there were three or four. Do you guys have any recollection of those informal student presentations? I don't even remember O'Driscoll and Chenoy. I know they did one. I don't think I attended it, and I don't think there were any others. Were there, do you remember? Yeah, I don't remember it, but I do remember Larry Moss doing magic tricks. He, and I mean, I can't, he is a professional magician, so it was just spectacular the magic tricks that he did. If you read the written accounts, there are a lot of stories we haven't gotten into this about the physical infrastructure, this small town in the middle of nowhere, apparently was completely dead, the housing was not so good, the conference was at a broken down, rundown hotel, and one of the stories said that it was raining, and a bunch of you guys were like hanging out with Murray Rothbard, laying to the night giggling, and W.H. Hut came out in his pajamas, and apparently with a night cap on, like a character from a Dickens novel, and said that the roof was leaking onto his bed. So, yeah, I remember Hut coming down and distressed, and this is the worst venue for a conference that I have ever attended in my life. It was just God awful. You couldn't call it a small town. I think it was a ghost town that had been abandoned, right? I mean, you could actually hear wolves or coyotes baying, and the people in the town, if you saw the movie, Deliverance. No, the Pod People, where there's invaders that take people's bodies over, it was a famous movie in the 50s in which we made, Invasion of Vodies. The people when they were walking down the streets, they just looked off, they never looked in the eye, it's looked off to this very strange look in their eye. These were mountain people, too. Well, from some of the accounts, apparently you were housed in, like people's houses that weren't like abandoned houses or empty houses. We were in a house, I don't know, a few hundred feet away from the main building, and... A regular family lived down there. Yeah, we stayed upstairs, and we didn't stay that much, just to sleep, I guess, and we were at the main building for most of the day. They never said a word to us. We'd come in, they'd be watching television, they'd look, and we'd look and we'd run up the stairs. Yeah. You made sure you locked your door before you went to sleep. You know, Murray was a night person, I earned this, so he's up till all hours, kind of holding court, laughing, and he, along about midnight, he gets hungry, he said, ah, let's go get something to eat. Well, there was one little store in town, we walk over to that, of course it's closed, he sends us around to try the back door. You know, this is Mr. Property Rights, we're going in the back door. It was closed, and so we went rummaging around the dorms, and he found, like, some ham and cheese in one of the fridges. And I said to him, Murray, what about property rights? I said, property rights? Of course, we'll replace it the next day, but it must have been hell for Murray to be in South Royalston, Vermont. Yeah, imagine a lifelong New Yorker being in this little town. Oh yeah, Bob, Bader-Marco. Don't you want to tell why you're in such facilities? I think that's sort of an interesting question. I mean, I don't know the answer to it. You know, I was going down to Dartmouth, basically. Well, maybe you could tell the story. I've always been curious. Yeah, why was it that we were supposed to have a conference at Dartmouth? Yeah. And everything was set up, and all of a sudden some other professor's there, who would eat these Austrian, we don't want them coming around, and they canceled, isn't that? I don't know what happened. I must have heard that from one of the Kaiser's. Yeah, I had heard that, and I'm not sure where from. Well, if they didn't teach Austrian... If the woman overcame that, right? If the woman overcame that, and that's your inspiration. I mean, I thought most economists didn't understand or heard of the Austrian schools at that time, so why would they object to it? Yeah, that's the point, but unless they heard of what they heard, they maybe... I don't know. Maybe somebody... It could have been that she was one person that did that. I don't know. Hmm. Who does? Yeah. Gary Norm. That was the event. Yeah. So just to clarify, and thanks to Susie for putting our archivist, for putting together these materials. Again, if you haven't looked downstairs, there's a binder, and maybe some of you guys should have looked, too. There's a binder that has copies of the original program. Right, I saw that. And the reading list, and also several articles that have been written over the years, looking back at the event. It's interesting. Adversity builds resilience, and kind of maybe a foxhole experience of being in this less than desirable location was good for the movement. So I look around at this beautiful facility here, and the nice accommodations in Auburn, and I think you guys are soft. So we need a little more adversity to build some more modern Austrian community. Yes. I wondered about the organizing force. I understand it was IHS, right? And so does that mean the Koch brothers are? Not that. Yes. They were? It was them. Yes, it was. He had just, I think, taken over IHS at the time. In 1974? Yeah. I think that's where the money came from. The documents suggest that, yeah, IHS was kind of a broker institution, was getting funding from Charles Koch, but also probably from the Earhart Foundation and Lilly Foundation, scape some of the other organizations that were promoting free market scholarship in that time. That's when they were the good Kochs. I mean, Joe may know, or some of these people may know, but I mean, I was just a student showing up, you know, hey, this looks like an interesting conference and where the money came from. I had no idea. I didn't know that. But according to the letter from Ed Dolan to the participants, it doesn't look like there was a lot of money to go around because some of you had to pay for your own transportation, I guess. The letter said Ruhmann Board are provided. But there's a letter saying, we've run out of money to pay for travel costs. That's why I took a train. That's why I took a train. Tom. I have a lot of stories. I was in a graduate school. It was called Virginia Polytechnic. Richard Wabner ran the lecture series for the economics department. Jack's story about 30 or so of us graduate students sitting in the back. And we had the same reaction. Jack did. He just couldn't, he didn't want to worry. Couldn't stop laughing. He didn't want to worry. He's never done that. Just a way of talking. He was very slow. But in every word, he was a grub. Other questions? Yeah, Jonathan. So you mentioned not to take the program, the Mises Institute of Resources here. I wonder if the panelists could comment on what they see as like modern manifestations or modern versions of that conference. Things offered by the institute perhaps. What sort of programs today are maybe performing a similar role? Although the circumstances are obviously different. The fortunes of the Austrian school are obviously much better now than they were back then. I think what's going on here at the Mises Institute is that's carrying on what started in South Royalton. Also there's a society for development of Austrian economics. It meets concurrent with the Southern Economic Association. So it's really a pretty big network today. Unlike, I mean before South Royalton there was no network. So, you know, that's a kind of legacy there. But I don't know that there's anything that's comparable because the Austrian movement is so much better organized now. Yeah, Jonathan, it's a cliche I guess for older people to talk about life before the internet. But I mean it really was different. You just couldn't get access to materials unless you were close to a university library. Excuse me. Now you can binge read every issue of the Libertarian Forum in one afternoon. But back then it came once a month and you ran to the mailbox to get it. You devoured it in a few pages. Then it was over. And then you had to wait till the next month. Back in the closet. Back in the closet, exactly. Peter, I wanted to put in a good word for Ludwig Lachmann. In terms of organizing movement, Israel Kursner was a zero. He just wasn't interested in it. He was a scholar and that was it. Murray a little bit, but Ludwig was much more spirited than anyone else in terms of developing interaction with people. So I think we owe him some sort of credit. Yes, he was hard to understand. He had to know him a little bit and get used to him. But still we owe him a debt. I want to mention that there was a significant correspondence between Ludwig Lachmann and Murray during the 1950s. We found that in the archives of Patrick Newman and I in writing our book on Rothbard. Another connection is that Lachmann spent his professional career in South Africa, Johannesburg, but Hutt was in Cape Town. Kursner, of course, grew up in South Africa. There were some connections, other international connections, people who knew each other. Some of them may be going back to the Montpeler in society from the 1940s and 50s. There was a network of free market oriented folks but it was very scattered. It wasn't focused on Austrian economics. But those personal connections really make a big difference. Lachmann, of all the Austrian professors that I've had, he was the most strategically oriented. He really thought a lot about how Austrian should try to talk to the profession to other economists, to policy makers. Although he had us, I attended his macroeconomics class at NYU during my year there. He was very favorably disposed to a lot of aspects of John Maynard Keynes. He made us read Keynes, he made us think about Keynes, he made us discuss Keynes. I can see why Hutt would be so upset with him and it was a part of his scholarly intellectual outlook. He also introduced me to George Shackle, who's a very interesting, I would say Austrian oriented economist, a man whose work is still worth stunning today. So I have great respect despite the fact that he was responsible for a very painful lecture. I have great admiration for Ludwig Lachmann. Stephen? I was just remembering that Mises died the year before this conference. Right, right. So I was just curious about that. I mean, I guess you all knew that. I had the significance of Mises to this tool. Can I actually add to that? I mean, Karen Vaughan in her account suggests that Mises passing sort of opened things up a little bit. She says that during Mises day, you know, there was too much, this is her interpretation, there was too much sort of deference to the master, but since he had passed, people felt more free to speak about disagreements they might have had with Mises. Did any of you have that impression at the conference? Murray's chapter nine in Man's Economy and State was a critique of Mises, and this was long before Mises died, so I think that that's problematic. Yeah, and Mises retired in 1969, didn't write much since his book in 1962, and Rothbard was very open to forming a movement of all Austrians, so I would disagree with her interpretation. Fernando? I would also say that from the beginnings of my interactions with Austrian economists, these are people who love to argue, and I have never felt quashed or like I shouldn't say something or that I was going to be somehow run out of town on a rail. No, debate, disagreement, and I see it here. I see it in the papers that are given here. Now, it's a great part of the Austrian tradition, is our freedom to disagree with one another. Thank you. Fernando? So I think it's a complementary question too. Why not hide it? Did you guys talk about him in the conference, and why was he not there? Just as an aside, he was invited according to the documents, but was not able to attend for health reasons. Well, he attended the next year. Yeah, he went to the one in Hartford. Yeah, he was at the one in Hartford. Yeah, after he won the Nobel Prize, so that was a pretty big event for a student like me. The Nobel Laureate, Hayek, shows up as a... When he got there, and you were like, wow, now there's a... like... Yeah, and it was more than just seeing him. I mean, he was there the whole week. There was a week-long conference, and he was there participating the whole week. Yeah, I gave my first academic paper that the next year after South Rolton at the Hartford Conference, and Hayek was one of the ones that commented on it, because I had the senior scholars commenting on Junior Scholars Paper, and I had written about International Monetary Theory, and I cited his work from 1937, which I think is one of his greatest books ever, even though it's like 99 pages. It's a wonderful book. And when he got up, he says, I've forgotten I made a contribution in this area. He didn't even remember... He didn't remember the book. I have to brag again. I beat Hayek in chess. Now, the way I win is I grab... I say, look over there, and I grab the guy's queen. I wrote... If Ernest Hayek was 76 years old at that time... This was at the Windsor Castle meeting. I don't remember. I regard him as an excellent economist, but as a libertarian, not as rabid as I would like, I wrote a critique of his road to serfdom, and then Milton Friedman, who had blackballed him for getting a position in the Economics Department at Chicago, he got a position at Chicago, but it was in the... What was it? Committee of Social Thought, but not Economics. Friedman and I had a back and forth for five or six iterations, and he was defending Hayek because Friedman is not much better of a libertarian than Hayek. I think... Okay, yeah, right here, and then... So, I can add two questions. We can have a grocery call. There's a lot of Sennholz there. And then number two, how much of Objectivist philosophy was at the South Island Conference? Sennholz was not present. I don't know if he was invited. Yeah, I don't remember anything Objectivist. I mean, you're asking old people to remember something 50 years ago. But pretty much what I remember is Rothbard talking about his work, Kirstner talking about his work, Lockwood talking about his work, that was already in the body of Austrian economics, and they're just passing... It's lectures based on their earlier work. I have an anecdote to tell about that. One time, Einran's lieutenants were criticizing Mises for not being randy and enough, and Ran was very nice to leave him alone. He's done a great work. He's made a great contribution, so I support Einran on that. I think you mentioned Frieden at the first and South Rose, were there any other outsiders that came in and tried to argue, or maybe in the first one, or at their future conferences? Anything in their names? I don't think so. Just as a follow-up, I don't think people know this, or maybe they do, that in October of that year, there was a Libertarian Scholars Conference organized for New York City. Remember? Walter, I remember, was one of the key speakers, and there were some left-wingers who attended, and Walter criticized some of these left-wingers, and one of the left-wingers got out and was very upset that Walter criticized him. So it shows you that open discourse is not, like, very much by the left. We can take it, they can't. One thing to keep in mind, if you look at the histories of this time and the accounts of these several conferences that we're talking about, there's a little bit of, when you look at a distinguished crowd like this, there's a little bit of what, you know, statisticians would call sampling on the dependent variable, meaning we only have examples here of people who have been great successes and made great contributions to the Austrian school. You will also, especially as you get to 75, 76, 77, see the names of some conference participants and some people who never went into academia or public life, they may have benefited personally from attending the conference, but it's not the case that the organizers were able to pick all of the, correctly anticipate in an entrepreneurial sense who would end up being the major contributors to the modern Austrian school. A lot of you guys were there and at least some of that has to do with the impact of being part of that community. But it's not the case that everyone who was invited turned out to be a household name in our circles. I mean, that's a great observation. But at, you know, for most of us, we were graduate students, so how do you know how people are going to turn out? But you look at the list of people who were there, there's a lot of people who had big impact on economics subsequently. So I mean, actually, you know, maybe it was the influence of the conference or good choices of who was invited. But there's a lot of people who went on to make big contributions. I guess what I'm thinking in response to your question, like for the Hartford and the Windsor Castle conference, there's some names of people who maybe we don't know how sympathetic they were, but maybe they went in a different direction later. I wanted to mention another person who's part of the history of our movement, that's Carl Hess. Carl Hess was the speechwriter for Goldwater. And at that time he was an extreme right winger and then he moved left, I guess, to libertarianism and then he moved further left and became a new leftist and try to bring leftism in and I was critical of that. John Blundell says that Roy Childs showed up at the Windsor Castle conference without an invitation. He just showed up and he was sleeping in his car. Oh, at Hartford. That's true. Good point. Thank you for that correction. Geography is important. Do you have a question, Max? I have a very fine question. Obviously, I knew that most of our members of the Mises School and I know that Lionel was and Kirtzner was Kirtzner was as well. How many other, was Israel Kirtzner a part of Mises' seminar as well? How many other? He was his assistant. He was his graduate assistant. Kirtzner. Haslett showed up. Haslett attended the seminar. Larry Furtig was a sort of a labor lawyer but on the right on the other side. Larry Moss attended although he attended Columbia and Larry Moss attended the Mises' seminar. You're talking about New York University. I think Larry Moss was part of that. And so did Karen Boyle. Yeah, Karen. Percy Greaves. Bettina Graves. And Bettina. Bill Peterson. Please. You mentioned that before this conference the output was scattered. It was in snapples. In the 40s and the 30s and the 20s where Mises and I had at least institutions that did separate research. There was a lot of society, for example. Why is the movement fractured? It had a long history with war. But in some around 40s and 50s and 60s it just broke apart. Why would it fractured? Well, you've got a theory on this, Joe Salerno. Well, it didn't fracture. I mean people left Austria during the 30s because of the enchilos or the coming events that they foresaw. And so many of the Austrian economists that came to the United States such as Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Habler, all students of Mises or at least members of his private seminar wanted to get jobs. And Austrian economics at that point by the mid to late 30s was beginning to lose its whatever influence that it had had and accumulate a lot of influence. So and then Mises left in 34 right, yeah. And Hayek had left in 31. And so it was really an Austrian diaspora. They dispersed and it just broke up the movement, the network. Yeah, but you also have a more doctrinal interpretation too, right? That price theory was underdeveloped in the 1920s, 1930s. The seeds of the decline were already there, right? So Alfred Marshall and partial equilibrium, the Alfred Marshall approach, the British approach, the price theory and the Valrasian approach, the continental European approach sort of began to dominate in the 1930s and the Austrians weren't a group that was together. And so the Austrian price theory never developed and that's the core of economics that's one of the reasons why it died. Not because of the Keynesian Revolution. It was already dying in the early 30s. Well, I was just going to say that this book on the marginal revolutionaries is quite good on the social and professional interactions of the Austrian economics in Austria. That is the origins of the school, what happened after the First World War which was a real blow to the Austrians and the Austrians, the loss of that empire. They had a lot of influence in the empire and then the rise of Nazism, Hitler the dispersal of the school to the United States. Which book are you talking about? It's called the Newer Book, The Marginal Revolutionaries by Janak Wasserman. Now this book has some real flaws and in particular no one in this room will like the ending of that book where he just basically cast dispersions at the Mises Institute but there are parts of that book that are very well done, very well researched and worth reading if you want to understand the history of the Austrian school as a school not the doctrine. This guy doesn't understand economic theory well but he understands the school as a school. This is another job for David Gordon. David's already reviewed that book. Yeah. John Lundell Lundell? Sudicinoi? Sudicinoi? Not very messy I think. It was from Australia. How did she know about Lundell? Well I mean her father was taught by Hayek and she had some connect and I think she gets as far as kind of with Mari. Must have been, yeah. Yeah he was, I think Lundell was working for IHS at that time. Last question. I've heard some names associated with Phi but apparently they probably weren't at this conference so I'm curious what was the interaction between this buddy and academic and the folks over at Phi? That's an interesting question. What was the answer at that time? I spent the year 76-77 at New York University and I think it was Richard Ebeling. Anyway someone took me up to Phi where I met Percy Graves, Bettina Graves. They were very active, very supportive of the Austrian movement at New York University. But we didn't interact much with them and I don't think they supported financially or otherwise the program at New York University. Interesting. I think both Mises and Hayek were at least advisors to Phi maybe even on their board when it started. I think Israel Kirsten was on their board as well. Yeah and Phi published that Red Control pamphlet by Friedman and Stigler that was influential to some of you. That's true. Well thank you all very much and thanks to our panelists for the reminisce.