 You've read a lot about Murray, you probably have read a lot about some of the things that he has done for the movement, some of the things that he has always been so excellent at, keeping us online. He is radical, he is charming, and he is warm. And also, he and I can see eye to eye, so we don't have to adjust the microphone. Murray is a special friend, regardless of the optical illusion. And I think that after you have the opportunity to visit with him tonight, and I'd like the environment to be like that, that you too will come to care for him as much as many of us do. The format for tonight, since we couldn't really put you around on cushions and move the tables and have a fireplace and a little wine and all, is that basically Murray is going to talk to you for a while, just for a while, and then we have some floor mics set up, and you're going to have the opportunity to talk to him. And Murray always responds. This is one of those special historical events as part of our tenth anniversary convention that doesn't really have anything to do with a lot of the politics that we might get involved with over the course of the next few days, or some of the things that you might have read. This is for you getting to know Murray and for Murray to hear what you're thinking about. I guess the very first thing that I ever read by Murray was For a New Liberty, and it's been said that that book alone probably has converted more people to libertarian philosophy than any other piece of literature. But Murray, of course, never stopped with that. He is probably the most prolific writer of any of us in the movement, and has published in just about every journal, small magazine, some people call them rags, as well as having his own volumes. There isn't much more that I can tell you about him, since you know so much. It's with a great deal of pleasure that I share with you tonight one of my best friends, Murray Rothbard. Thank you, victory! Thank you very much, I'm now for a lovely, lovely introduction, and this is really a nostalgic city here for me tonight, keeping with the occasion of being an LP10 convention. So what I'm going to do is go back and talk about the old days, and whatever prominence I have in libertarian movement is probably mostly due to the fact that I've been around more than anybody else. So I can talk about the old days, and give new information. Two things, two landmarks for me that struck me is that the movement has really grown tremendously in the last 20 years or so, actually more than that. Two sort of landmarks that stick in my mind. One is that when I was sitting around my living room with my eight associates and colleagues, I thought it was the whole movement. I'm not saying it was the whole movement, I just didn't know about anybody else. I'm sure there were other living rooms around all over the place, I just never heard of them. And we used to joke around a lot about what future historians would write about us. Of course we just considered a big yuck because eight crackpots sitting around in the living room talking about wild ideas. That was sort of like an inside academic joke. But what happened about six or seven years ago, a friend of mine was a professional historian, started attacking me. One of my people was precious memorabilia from the old days, the early history of the movement. And I realized that by God future historians are now interested. So that was one landmark. Second landmark for me was that considering again that we started off with two or three people and then escalated to eight after about ten years, it was the first time about ten years ago when I was attacked by another budding libertarian for not being a pure-rothed bardian. That was a real shockeroo. And after I got over the first shocker I realized, well it was just great, the movement was really advanced but I could be attacked for not being a pure-rothed bardian. The first thing, in the old days, we used to ask people when we found another libertarian, which was a very rare occasion, like one a year. The first thing we'd ask him or her was, well how did you become a libertarian? Because it was obviously a rare event. I'm not sure whether you people ask each other that these days or not. But I'm looking forward to the great day in the future. I figure I'm now in a transition period. And someday, not too just in the future, it'll just be a matter of course everybody's a libertarian, you'll try to figure out why is this person not a libertarian. So however in the old days that was the big question, how did you get here? And so what I'm going to do tonight is sort of take you back to how I got started, which is a major area of my own expertise. Well, first place I started off, I think, my first libertarian instincts or expressions or whatever came about as a little tyke. I first entered the public school system as a young lad and hated the guts of it. That was the first experience. I hated everybody, I hated the teachers, I hated the administrators, I hated my fellow colleagues. So I made an enormous amount of trouble with my parents. They finally yanked me out, put me into a private school, which I loved. And then whatever, flourished. And so my teeny mind immediately made a connection. Public school, bad, private school, good. I did not of course articulate that to a full system at that point. Then I was growing up, you have to think back now. This is really an act of imagination, historical imagination to recall what growing up, or to realize what growing up in New York in the 1930s was like, 1930s and 40s. As a young middle class Jewish lad, everybody I knew, this is literally everybody, friends, relatives, acquaintances, whatever, was either a Communist Party member or else was thinking whether they should join it. Am I, do I have the spirit enough, do I have the spunk to join the CP? That was the range of discussion. Either you were a Party member, you were puzzling about whether or not you have the guts to join it. In that atmosphere, I guess my father was the first libertarian I knew, because he was strongly opposed to all of this. And so then the spirit, I kept shocking them, parties and relatives. I think four aunts and uncles were Communist Party members. And another two or three or four were pondering whether or not to join. So that was, I got more and more obnoxious to these people as I kept going, attacking them and saying this is all nonsense and so on. That was my first experience in political action in my poor beleaguered family. Actually, as I said, my father was really my inspiration for this thing so we got along very well and had just an immediate nuclear family. Just the rest of the people, it was a problem. Then in the swanky private school in which I was enrolled, everybody except, well, it was a very peculiar setup, which I don't go into great detail, but in New York City, the rich, in those days at least, rich people would send their sons to Deerfield Academy or whatever, out of town, to prep school, and the daughters being especially protected were sent to New York City schools. As a result, since this particular school tried to be coeducational, there were very few boys that would show up. In other words, there was a big boy shortage. And so in order to get boys to attend the school and make it really coeducational, they gave a lot of scholarships to poor and middle class young lads, including myself. So at any rate, we had a spectrum of all these wealthy, extreme liberal types. And who would be taken back and forth of school in Rolls-Royce Limousines, who were extreme new dealers or communists, party types or whatever. And I would trudge back and forth of this coming apartment, increasingly individualistic and pro-capitalist. At any rate, as I kept dealing with these people, I'm more and more pure. I was particularly interested in economics. And I remember in the eighth grade, I was arguing against the capital gains tax, which Roosevelt was introducing at the time. I don't remember my arguments, I don't know if they're sound or not, but anyway, I was arguing against it. Then it's true that the rumors have had it, and it's true that my parents both met at an anarchist dance. This is in 1920 or something like that. I had to realize the culture of that period, that there were a lot of anarchist dances and bowls and things like that. And it's true that they met there. And I remember one of my father's libraries, the first books I remember reading was Elsbacher's book on anarchism, which is a very exotic book, which I thought was very interesting. I was not yet converted, you understand, it was only ten or something. Anyway, but this is not, they were not, well, I guess what happened was my father was an anarchist for a couple years, then World War I arrived, and he found all his friends were being arrested, which they were, in opposition to the war. He decided it was healthier to drop out of political activity and become a pure chemist, which he did. He was the first retreatist movement. He felt retreatism was better than martyrdom at that point. At any rate, he sort of lost interest in politics, but what happened was in the recession of 1938, after following Keynesian policies, we had a big collapse inside of the Keynesianism where New Deal was wrong and so forth and became economically conservative. And so I followed right in there in that spirit. Anyway, then I guess what happened was my next brush with the state apparatus came in high school. But just as I was getting interested in the whole subject, purely for sociological reasons, you understand, Mayor LaGuardia, who was an extremely beloved figure at the time, among all the left liberal establishment, Mayor LaGuardia immediately closed down the Burlesque Houses, and I figured it was a personal blow, a personal front. So it was my first interest in civil liberties. You learn from experience. So when I got to Columbia University, I found out that on the campus at the time, there were, I mean, first of all, you have to literally remember, realize, literally true, on the entire campus, there were a whole bunch of communists and communists, fellow travelers, a whole bunch of social Democrats, and two Republicans. The other Republican, I was one Republican, the other Republican was an English major, we didn't have very much in common time, I wasn't interested in literature. So that was it. And after continuing brushes at Columbia, I got more and more conservative, and more and more free market oriented in the atmosphere, which was extremely, in those days, hostile of free market. However, so here's the situation, I thought it was the only free market person in the world at that point. And there weren't too many evidences that disproved me. So when I got to graduate school, which is I guess 1946, and 45, 46, all of a sudden there appeared this fantastic phenomenon. I have to realize, again, there's a huge number of people coming back from the Army. The graduate school has flooded probably a peak number of students in all of history. 500 people in the graduate economics class, things like that, never to be seen either before or since. And all of them were, the big argument at the time was, should you join the CP? Should you be a pro-Henry Wallace or pro-Henry Truman or whatever? And in that spirit, George Stiegler, this thing which freed my non-economist, arrived at Columbia University campus. His first two, I remember this very vividly, his first two lectures, one was on the evils of red control and the second was on the evils of minimum wage, at which point almost hysteria breaks out. He was almost lynched. It was unheard of. You have to realize that it's probably an act of imagination to realize it's unheard of for anybody with an economist, I think, well, maybe the Hearst Press might say it, but certainly nobody of academic pretensions. So I wrote away for a pamphlet, an anti-rent control pamphlet which Stiegler had mentioned, and thereby discovered the movement. It was my first experience in the movement. Before that, it was just me, my father, and that was it, as far as I knew. Two-man movement. Then I discovered the foundation for economic education, which in those days was the movement, and that was it. So it was a tremendous thing for me. That was the open sesame. I realized, yeah, a lot of the people around it weren't just one person. And I think they did a tremendous, there was a tremendous achievement on their part. They had, well, that was it. It was the movement. People who would say the same sort of things and it would be interesting. And recommend readings. But for reading this stuff, you see, it was all sort of, I don't know, sort of evolved, and no real readings on the topics of John Stuart Mill. I mean, nobody's since, say, 1848, as far as I knew. And so with Fee, which had seminars and cocktail parties and drew people together and so forth, I discovered the movement. And there are marvelous, particularly marvelous, two marvelous people, which I want to pay tribute to, Frank Chodorov and Bully Harper. Frank Chodorov was a fantastic person. He was an unbuttoned type in a three-button world and scattering ashes everywhere and so forth and so on. He was magnificent. And it also was very interesting discussing ideas. Many of the other people of these cocktail parties were really not. They were more agriculture-oriented. I have nothing against agriculture. I love agriculture. But many of their conversations were confined to agricultural metaphors, like the seed corn and butterflies. Because I know nothing about either a seed corn or butterflies. I just felt a little bit out of it. Chodorov being an urban type was not interested in seed corn. At any rate, he was a great individualist. I recommend just the new book of his essays, collected essays just come out, called Fugitive Essays. And it was my first experience in radical individualism. I remember he was a real shock for me. I arrived at the Columbia University bookstore one afternoon. I see a headline. Remember, the pamphlets, and I remember this, the atmosphere at the time, I was an old socialist, to a man. And I see this pamphlet, the headline, big bull red letter saying, don't buy bonds. Another one saying, taxation is robbery. That was a real shockeroo for me. Taxi, by God, it is robbery. And that was my first education in political theory. So Chodorov had a great little magazine in Boichi called Analysis, which he kept going, I guess, in his own meager funds, a very small circulation. And he has magnificent radical stuff. He was also a great writer, a marvellously clear, lucid writer. And so under the auspices of reading both Chodorov and the stuff that he recommended like Albert J. Nock, another magnificent political philosopher, and a great writer, and I hope you discover if you don't know about him yet, more of us will call Our Enemy the State, another great book called Memoirs of Superfluous Man, and H. L. Menken is my favorite writer as a style, Qua writer. So it took a very short period of time, I became a pure libertarian. In other words, before that, I was sort of moving in that direction. I was a sort of chamber of commerce type, or something like that. In a very short period of time, I became a pure menarchist, I mean, all out, radical. And, you know, favor of puting the debt, and everything else. I still was a menarchist. I still believe that point that the government, there should be a government, but strictly confined to these, you know, police and courts, and that was it. The third person, of course, I want to pay tribute to is another person I met through Foundation for Economic Education, namely my great mentor, Lili von Mises, who this year is Centennial. I said, yeah, it's a really amazing thing, considering Mises died very few years ago. He died almost about the same time as the Centennial was coming up. And I met him through Fee. I heard that he was giving lectures at New York University. At that point, I didn't know he was still alive because he wasn't mentioned in economics courses, either undergraduate or graduate, except that somebody who had tried to show that socialism couldn't work, and that had been refuted 30 years before, and therefore that was it. So, and they told me at Fee that he was coming out with a book that full, big new book. I said, oh, what's interesting, what's it about? And they said, everything. That, of course, was human action. And, of course, they were right. So I started taking Mises seminars in 449, 1949, which was the second year he was giving it. And two months later or so, human action came out. And so the combination had a synergistic effect. To me, it was a real conversion experience, human action. I read the thing, I think, you have to realize I'd gone through all the graduate economics courses, right? And I was unhappy with all of them. I felt somehow there was something missing somewhere in the picture. I was a free market person, but I didn't have the economic theory background. I realized that these things didn't work. I was politically in favor of it. But I didn't have the, I didn't really have a satisfactory economic theory to support this. And I felt that the Keynesians were right when they attacked the institutionalists. The institution was right when they attacked the Keynesians, but I didn't see any real positive way out. And so I read human action. I said it was a real conversion experience. I read it very fast. And it was really like leading, you know, being a new Bible. That was it. And so it was a tremendous experience. And at that point I became an Austrian and a Mesessian. The, providing with a, providing us with a satisfactory economic theory, solving all the problems such as what about monopoly or what about, what about business cycles and what about this and the other thing. And providing a firm foundation and analysis of human action itself. The, these are some self, another person to pay tribute to a person. They're just a magnificent person. And so when we used to, when we, before we met Mises, me and other people who were disciples or potential disciples, we were pretty, we were quaking in our boots. I know one friend of mine, it was just a kid and he just, he was going, he was still in high school. He was still a great libertarian. And he wanted to meet Mises in the worst way. He couldn't find a way to think of a way to do it. So he shows up at Mises door, rings the doorbell, and Mises opens the door and says yes. And he says, I'm selling subscriptions to the Freemen. This of course is a big joke because Freemen has no subscriptions. I mean, you write away for it and you get it free. But he didn't know what else to say. He hoped this would start a conversational gambit, you know, when Mises would say, well, that's it. Why are you interested in the Freemen or something? Mises said, I already have it and signs the door. Anyway. And the thing about Mises says, one of the reasons where everybody's afraid to meet him is he's fiercely polemical, of course, in his writings, attacking all of his enemies bitterly with no compromise, attacking them as babblers, et cetera, et cetera. And personally, however, he's just the opposite. He's a charming, wonderful person, courteous, bringing back to us the last days of pre-World War I Vienna, always trying to bring out the best productivity in his students. His students were many of them are very dumb. Many of them were packaging majors. You know, he was, he was unfortunately, he was unfortunately teaching, and this I would never forgive academia for. The only job he could really find was a job in a business school where most people were accounting majors, a packaging major, things like that. And no interest whatsoever on what Mises was talking about. Just an easy A for them. Mises didn't know anything about the American grading system. You know, Europe, they don't grade ABC. So you used to give everybody A's automatically. And they told him, you can't do that, professor. You can't. He was okay. He'll give automatic A's and B's go down the list and alternate. So since he was an easy marker, he had a lot of fillers in this little class. And yet he would try to, or try to think of research projects. Yes, yes, you should do such and such and have a book on this and an article on this. It was kind of pathetic, but he didn't seem to realize it. He just sailed ahead, never complained about this situation. And unfailingly cheerful, unfailingly telling marvelous anecdotes about the old days in Vienna. Magnificent anecdotes. And generally being extremely lovable as well as being brilliant. The one anecdote which I, those of you who are interested in philosophy will particularly appreciate. He was walking down the street with Max Schaler one day. It was the 1920s. Max Schaler was a distinguished German philosopher. Very much opposed as Mises was the logical positivism which for those days was flourishing in Vienna. Vienna was the homological positivist. And the walking down the street, Vienna you always walk of course. It's a great place to walk in. He's walking down the street with Mises and he says, tell me Lou, what is there on the climate of Vienna that makes, creates so many logical positivists? Mises struck his shoulders in typical Misesian gesture. He says, well after all Max and Vienna are now three million people and only 12 logical positivists. So it can't be the climate. Another of course great thing which you always say to very hesitant students would be afraid to speak up. They figure he knows everything and they know nothing. So don't hesitate to say anything you said because whatever you say regardless of how idiotic it is has already been said before by some eminent economist. So that was my introduction as a Misesian. We had in Mises seminar I met people who are still my very close friends who are my so-called living room that begins in this period. Before that there was no living room. It was just me and my father and I got married and that was it. Me and my wife I guess. That was the living room. And then we had, I found these people who were high school students or just beginning college who were Misesians and we had these living room sessions. And we call ourselves the circle Bostia after course Frederick Bostia. And we had about, I don't know how many people, maybe five hardcore people and six or seven fringe people. And that was it. And we sit around discussing abstract libertarian questions such as we now of course are very familiar with such as which in those days nobody ever talked about me because that was it. We were the only libertarians I knew about. At least the only ones interested in these abstruse topics like if somebody throws a gorilla into a plate glass window who's liable for the window? Is the guy who throws the gorilla is it the owner of the gorilla or is it the gorilla himself? These sort of burning questions are constantly on our minds. In those days of course we didn't argue about strategy. Even people are sort of flighty as we were to start discussing strategy with eight people. How are we going to win? It was like a set of two bazaars even for us. And about the same winter of 1949-50, this is I guess two or three months later after my conversion to Austrianism I became an anarchist and I can remember exactly what happened. It was pure logic that did it. I used to argue with two or three very close friends of mine who were liberals, were very intelligent. We'd have sessions sitting around arguing constantly. And we had a similar session in my house. I remember very vividly. And the usual argument is about three in the morning they leave because as many of you know I'm a night person. And three in the morning sort of, just about average for breaking up in the evening. And I thought to myself I think something important happened that night. It wasn't how it was. And it wasn't just like the usual argument. And I thought the thing over and I realized what it was because one of them said at one point, because I was in favor of laissez-faire. I was pure minnequist, laissez-faire minnequist. And they of course were regular liberals. And they said, look, why do you favor government supply of police force in courts? What's your justification for that? I said something like, why can't the people get together and they decide that you can have this monopoly court system and monopoly police? And they said, I think very intelligently now, they said, well, if the people can get together and say that, why can't the people get together and set up a steel plant and a dam and all the rest of it? Why can't they set up also other government industries? I thought to myself, I said, by God, they're right. I came to the conclusion of laissez-faire was inconsistent. Either you had to go over to anarchism and scrap government oil together, monopoly government, coercive government oil together, or else you have to become a liberal. Of course, since it was out of the question for me to become a liberal, that was it. That was my conversion. And then I started reading up on the stuff, anarchist writings and libertarian writings, et cetera, et cetera, and broaden my perspective. But that was the sense that it was a tremendous winter for me. It was a winter of a double barrel conversion. First to Austrian economics and second to anarchism. I remember as well as, yeah, then as the, also Columbia Graduate School, I still was located. Of course, I used to have arguments with these people all the time. At one point, interesting things happened which stunned my liberal associates. They said, look, here you want extreme right winger, which I consider the time extreme, right wing, crazy, anarchist or whatever. And then we got to meet up with Whitey. Whitey was the communist party leader on the campus. He was sort of a thuggish type of sort of like sweaters, six foot eight or whatever. And that stratosphere, who knows what the height is. A menacing looking figure in general. We got to get together with Whitey. So they introduced me on, they set up a meeting on the street and Broadway. And they figured they could get out fast, you see. And they introduced me formally. It was kind of sweet. They said, here, we introduce here, Murray and Rothbard, Whitey, whatever his name was, it was the outstanding Marxist Leninist on campus. And here is Murray Rothbard, who was attacking Senator Taff having sold out of the socialists. And then they figured that would be it. And we pummel each other to the death. And I was like, I get rid of two extremists. And oddly enough, what happened was that Whitey said, oh, an anarchist. That's great. And so we shook hands. We had a very friendly discussion, which Whitey tried to prove to me that the way to achieve and the withering way of the state is by maximizing state power. And I thought, fuck, that was a little cookie. So, and my liberal friends were totally confused. Why are these people conversing even? Why are they hitting each other over the head with clubs? And so that was an interesting ideological experience. The other interesting, I think another interesting political point was the, this is, when was this? Yeah, about this time. I had not, of course, libertarian party not yet existed. So I was not yet politically pure in a sense of politically organizationally pure. And the 1948 campaign, I supported Thurman for president. Thurman was the state's rights candidate. There was a little club on Columbia University campus called Students for Thurman. It was a very small club, as you might expect. And this was during the height of the political act that most of the people there on the campus were Wallis, Thurman supporters, two or three Dewey supporters, and here I was a Thurman supporter. So the Students for Thurman, I remember, had one meeting. And the meeting, there were four or five members and about 12 or 13 hostile observers trying to find out what kind of evil racism is going to be promoted here. And most of the people who got up and spoke were sort of, you know, southern state's rights types, didn't have much to say. I got up here as a New York Jewish lag, I got up on a street. I couldn't understand this at all. Anyway, the Students for Thurman Club is not flourish. It was my one experience with it. At any rate, we have, as I say, about six or seven people or something, this little circle Bastia. We got along very well. I think it was a very happy times. Small number, but pure in spirit. And arguing, as I say, about arcane matters and never about the I remember also then about this about this time is the first time in my life I ever got red baited. It's a big new experience for me. I mean, now those of you think I'm a commie now, it's nothing to it, but the I consider myself an extreme right winger. Okay, this is the the old right, the Republicans or the right wingers were semi-libertarian in those days. They were anti-military intervention or anti-conscription. They were sort of column for obscure little magazine called faith and freedom, which nobody's ever heard of, I'm sure, here. And was was written was was written. It was a very good actually very good libertarian magazine for today. It was written for right wing Protestant ministers. That was the market that they're writing for. People are writing it was a sort of a culture clash. And the one of my proud moments is when Chodorov left Washington, I became a Washington columnist even though I'd never been to Washington that point. And I wrote it under a pseudonym called Aubrey Herbert. And for various obscure reasons need not go into and unimportant reasons. And anyway, the I started this was the beginning of the Eisenhower administration. So I had a lot of fun attacking most of the status plans and dropping American blood supporting Chiang Kai-shek things like that. I was having a bull and the editor comes flying to the East before that six months before he said I was doing a great job great writer and all that. He comes to the East and I say I have to fire you. So why do you have to fire me? I thought you like that's the point he said my our constituents are writing letters calling you a communist. These are the right wing Protestant ministers. So I was kind of stunned it's the first time I've ever been red baited I'm now of course right I said this but since I always spent all the time attacking the government how can I be a communist as communist or favor of your law ownership of everything but logic was lost on the editor because he was just interested in his constituents. Fortunately unfortunately retribution divine retribution struck and magazine folded about three months later. Well I guess the see what brings me up to about late middle of late 1950s these let's see what's I guess I should well okay the well the late 50s they say the before that was essentially those of us who were libertarians again I guess it was about five or six or eight or whatever consider ourselves extreme right wingers in this in this spectrum context then what happened was the right wing was taken over and changed dramatically by national review 1955 and for various reasons one because it was a power vacuum because the old leaders had died off like Taft and Colonel McCormick it was easy for national review to take over and sort of change the whole picture into what the right wing is now the right wing in those days was not theocratic it was not pro-war or pro-conscription so anyway the face of the whole right wing was changed which point those of us who had considered as extreme right wingers had to start leaving to break as these things usually are I wrote quite a few economic articles and book reviews for national review the first few years it was pretty a pull by the by those days with the new right and split whether about 1959 or something about that period my best friend there was Frank Meyer a very interesting character he was the book review editor and general theoretician for national review now dead another very charming chap he was an extremely erudite intellectually exciting libertarian in many ways he was great on the public school system hated the guts of the public school system even hated private schools and as a result he raised his kids himself which is a heroic act as probably many of you would realize he was pretty good on most things unfortunately he was weak on one particular topic namely nuclear war he was well in favor of it to give you sort of the feel of what national review was in those days probably still is but I haven't had to contact with him in a long time the Frank and his wife Elsie also a very charming person the two of them used to argue bitterly about what the foreign policy move should be Frank was in favor of immediate nuclear attack on the Soviet Union Elsie wanted to give them 24 hours to resign from the attack that was the that was the matrix of a spectrum of opinion on the right wing the new right so we did not politically see eye to eye obviously for the first few years when I found out what was going on the other thing that struck me about the new right was the monarchistic aspect remember many many sessions or cocktail parties a big argument would be something like this should the bourbon monarchy be restored first of all the Habsburgs so that's the sort of thing I could relate very well to it was even worse than agricultural metaphors so what happened was after the small growth in the 40s in other words after finding the movement in the middle of late 40s and then sort of having some intellectual companions whatever in the 50s we're back in square one again more or less by 1959 or 60 also libertarians in that period beginning with swinging in a pro war direction or whoever they were mostly was swinging in a pro war direction one of my close friends who was an original member of the circle boss Robert Shuckman who died a tragic death very early was probably was the first chairman of the young Americans for freedom to give you an example of the aft spirit those days probably still still is the the founding meeting in Sharon, Connecticut of Yaff there was a small libertarian contingent this was the beginning of the libertarian conservative alliance not me but the other people and the they suggested the term young Americans for freedom the trads who are a billion majority traditionalists said no no we can't use the word freedom because it's a commie word to me it sort of symbolizes the right wing from then on freedom is a commie word but Shuckman was able to prevail with some of the cooler heads like Buckley the thing started so we had a situation by the early 60s I had to start battling on the foreign policy front both with libertarians as well as other people and and there was when the Vietnam War started and the draft of course this made the thing much more intense a whole problem and and Lennon Ligio myself founder left and right which tried I guess three times a year publication I don't even know how to say it try annual try annual or whatever and we figured nobody was reading it we had some subscribers unfortunately we were so ill-organized we never cashed anybody's check so the anyway as a result we had a heavy deficit imagine but we figured nobody was reading it it turned out later after the magazine died a lot of people seemed to have been influenced by it but that was that's the sort of thing what happens in writing sort of writing is sort of like putting a note on a bottle and putting it on the ocean hoping somebody reads it someday so it would be very surprising to find out a lot of people read it so with the position of being anti-war and anti-draft certainly a war question in a position which split us totally from the right-wingers who then again accused us of being commies for the second and not the last time then we suddenly then we really arrived at the famous Yaff split in other words we get to the point in 69 I guess it was all of a sudden the libertarian types pop up at Yaff and you will hear I'm sure at the so party more discussion of this the and I wasn't really close to that because the Yaff split happened in St. Louis where I wasn't I wasn't at I did contribute to the split by writing a inflammatory four-page article in libertarian four which I just found in 69 to replace left and right saying listen Yaff urging them all calling upon the splitless evil organization family has once again Boeing my cool but seemed to have a certain amount of effect the any rate the apparently Yaff was split of course the big issue being the draft the conservatives or the trans the Yaff convention being horrified in a pool and one of our people one of the libertarian caucus people is draft openly which point which point they try to lynch them and another another thing is our people at St. Louis were were shouting laissez-faire laissez-faire is there while they were running the draft car and the opposition the trans were shouting lazy fairies and which again shows the mentality of these people so with the me time in the and two because we figure that with the Nixon administration coming to power I just had certain parallels right now of course many libertarians at the time thought that Nixon was going to be the savior he was going to bring liberty to America I I swear it's true I've many several friends of mine who at this time become Nixon advisers were claiming Nixon was really a libertarian as a matter of fact some of them said Nixon was really an anarchist I said Nixon is one of us you'll see when he might now of course when he because he's a politician he's running for office he has to pretend he's a left wing and statist and all that but but you'll see boy when he gets in the office you'll see what he'll be I'll take all the gloves come out of the closet of course we did see or deep deep regret but this as a matter of fact I coined a little quip at that point Nixon had was one of the pioneers in the idea of having special interest groups for Nixon like Writers for Nixon Housewives for Nixon et cetera et cetera so I wrote a thing saying there should be a group called Anarchist for Nixon at any rate there was I guess quick disillusionment with that but we founded the Libertarian Forum largely because my publisher and close friend Joe Pete believe that we should have a voice pouring out of the public whoever reads it among Libertarian public pointing out that Nixon is not really a libertarian god damn it that's really how it got started the while about the same time the aft split was going on we we started supper clubs in New York Libertarian supper club there was now a Libertarian supper club which was very successful and peaceful our supper club was peaceful was successful but not very peaceful the this was during the Nixon repression period so we we figured out the meetings when my living room were getting a little too large I have a pretty small living room living room was legendary okay so we decided why don't we have a supper club when you have a hire a Chinese restaurant something nice something nice and cheap and have a meeting just announce it and have somebody reading a paper whatever some short thing having a discussion so we did that we met in a Chinese restaurant on the city but very good Chinese restaurant and Broadway and 103 103 something like that and we had we thought we got about 30 people we got about how many 80 people come from who are they well some of them unfortunately were police agents so these one because what happened was that the and these meetings have to realize these meetings were extremely innocuous right I mean my friend Leonard Ligio gave a paper on history of classical liberalism okay the next morning this is Saturday night the next morning we had a contact we had one student group at that time Fordham University it was our big student libertarian group one and only maybe it was and the people at Fordham knew the head of YAF it's New York State YAF at the time it was very friendly at Fordham campus so Saturday night Leonard Ligio gave a little talk on history of classical liberalism okay Sunday morning the the YAF guy would call up my friends at Fordham and say here's what happened last night Leonard Ligio gave a paper the following people attended it and they wheeled off a list of attendees he got that from his police spies he was friendly in New York City police department so that was a sort of atmosphere they didn't do anything particularly at the point but I guess we fell around the cutting edge of the pollution then we decided the supper clubs were fairly successful we were getting 80 people we did something very daring and turn out of retrospect it would be pretty crazy we issued a call okay in a libertarian forum come one come all first libertarian convention this was Columbus Day in 1969 everybody show up for this mammoth thing okay we expected we get about 200 people we got about 400 or something like that we who are these people never saw them before usually never saw them later either it's very strange the whole thing is very strange where this was Phantasmagoric because first of all we held this thing a notorious Kami Hangout Kami Hotel in Times Square the reason why we went there was it was the cheapest hotel we could find we're not the absolute movement we now are this is the old this is the old days so there's a place called the Hotel Diplomat which has a very cheap meeting room so we had these scholarly papers and everything stuff like that and we found peculiar things were happening all of a sudden somebody would pop we'd stand outside somebody would pop up with a flash ball and take our picture or somebody would swagger up and say the sort of there's anarchists in there and we'd say anarchists? who's that? we've never heard of we're just standing here going to a restaurant anyway that was the situation where it was sort of almost a police bust they didn't quite get to it but it was sort of close to it also the people there were kind of we never saw these people it was very strange and motley group don't forget we were used to eight people in the living room with 20 people here we find a tremendous spectrum of libertarian variety ranging from people walking around capes with dollar signs on them to to people with black armbands we were looking ties with black armbands who were constantly shouting kill loot so it was not a close meeting of the minds of this convention it probably turned off more people to set back the movement quite a few years I think at any rate that was the we had to learn through experience and all that obviously it was the essential learning process so we now we've now come I guess to the early days 1977 this is 1969 and a year or two later I guess I should talk about the first publicity of the movement what happened is that the 19 the fall of 1970 the campus was taking place in 69 and 70 basically all the burnings of the buildings whatever by the fall of 1970 the whole thing had died out very very fast so New York Times was looking around for something to write about and they went to the campus they couldn't find any political activity went to Columbia University a year or two before the heartland of sit-ins and burnings and all that couldn't find any any political activity at all except one peculiar group called the freedom conspiracy who are these people have ever heard of them before freedom conspiracy is the only political group on campus is 1970 they were favor of Jim Buckley for Senate a deviation which fortunately has now been corrected and a weird group because they were one handed talking all this stuff about laissez-faire and free market it was a very counterculture types and things like black flags and so on long hair and all the rest of it so New York Times felt it was a very interesting phenomenon they wrote a little article about it and then two or three months later in the media general opinion groups wrote a fun page article this is the early 1971 with a picture of these guys the two leaders Stan Laird and Lou Rosetto with a black flag and whatever an anarchy written on the back and so forth and so on and a long lead article on this strange new group called Libertarians and their favor of John Locke and so forth and so on this is the first time I think the modern Libertarian movement got any kind of media publicity and it kicked things off because then there was op-ed pieces about it and what happened then was that they asked me to write something about it and I got an argument with Buckley as usual and from that they asked me to write Four New Liberties the whole thing begins to snowball and of course about that year later that year the Libertarian Party was founded so I think since you're all familiar with the history of the party you'll hear much more about it from the founding members that were really here in person in Colorado I'll end my reminiscences and nostalgia at this point as we've now brought up the modern current period and brought you from the anti-Luvian period of my birth all the way up all the way up to modern times so thank you very much somebody want to talk to Murray somebody want to show him your bow tie there's some floor mics in case we have problems hearing you or in case I can't recognize you question here that's something I could spend at least two days on so it's a yeah we I met Arne actually through Mutual Friends in the early fifties and those days she was quite different she was talking to other the non-randians there was no randian movement at the time so she was yeah we had Mutual Friends and so forth and then when I'd been follow up on this then when Atlas Shrug came out our little group we were all ready and we were enthusiastic about it so we wrote her a fan letter and we got reintroduced this is late 58 58 yeah so the circle of Bastia meets the randian movement so like Godzilla meets the wolf man it was a very peculiar experience it was a very traumatic six months that I spent on the randian randian movement and how can I sum this up see the peculiar thing about first of all we didn't know about cults in those days there was no Harry Krishna all that sort of stuff and so but the thing is it was the total disjunction between the external and the internal the exoteric and exoteric creed in other words and religious cults as an exoteric creed which is the creed for the public the printed writings which draws people into the movement as the exoteric stuff that's the stuff you get when you're 33rd degree whatever right here's what we really believe fellas and you work your way up to that similar thing in the randian movement in other words the exoteric stuff was great I mean it's super stuff natural rights and liberty and reason and all that which is why most of us got into it and then the exoteric creed was quite different almost contradictory which created all sorts of fantastic problems obviously inner contradictions tensions the exoteric creed being essentially the iron rand was right on everything every conceivable topic so since you changed your mind a lot on concrete issues you know like is Henry Wallace is Mike Wallace a good guy or a bad guy in other words the line was handed down Mike Wallace great student of objectivism six weeks later Mike Wallace is a leper so if you weren't clued in you could get kicked out very easily so that's sort of atmosphere and it's the atmosphere which unfortunately lost of course a lot of good people because either you stay in and get robot ties or you leave so that's the essence of the experience I mean that's I don't like those until the cows come home I should get on another topic I'm going to be real unfair here because I actually don't have a question I have a quick announcement that's something that isn't in any of the information but there will be a short state chairs caucus at the back of the ballroom here if Murray ever decides to finish which I hope he doesn't I don't like caucuses hey where's that no what's your even you overlook me is there another question there a present that's very sweet that's great an homage to Murray from the Brazilian Libertarians and here is their magazine with a picture of Murray and obviously some of his writings are an article about him in a language that I don't know who next there the question is what is the orthodox Rothbard position on patents and copyright the orthodox position is oddly enough the same position as Henry George the only one I can find I have the same viewpoint namely copyrights good patents bad the reason for that is not as you might think I'm a writer and therefore a pro-copyrights the easy economic determinist argument it's really it's because a copyright is a common law device which says if you invent something or write something or write something it doesn't really make a difference you can copyright an industrial design for example right now what it says is that if you you stamp on it whatever it is whether it's an invention or a book or whatever you stamp on a copyright which means that you're selling it you're selling the full ownership of it except you're keeping you're observing something you can chop up property rights in different parts of course you're keeping yourself exclusive right to sell it to resell it or anything identical to it so that's the copyright which is perfectly legitimate the problem with a patent is the government steps in and says you have the exclusive right to this invention and nobody else can use it even if he's invented something 3,000 miles away completely independently of it in other words a patent is a monopoly privilege repressing people's right to do whatever they want to with their own property so and there are of course many in the history of inventions there are lots of independent inventions things are in the air like five or six people invented a telephone about the same time and Bella outraced them to the patent office which is responsible for the AT&T because Bella got the exclusive monopoly on any telephone so this is really illegitimate so for that reason in other words with copyright you have to prove a guy had access if somebody has a similar telephone let's say you copyright a telephone somebody else comes up with a telephone 500 miles away you have to prove a telephone but apparently you don't have to do that you just you have the thing and that's it so that's the orthodox line on that Murray when you were talking about the early New York years you didn't mention the attack on Fort Dix and I thought you might like to tell that story yeah that was at the that was at the this 1969 convention or whatever you want to call it the we had we were supposed to be very scholarly we had planned this for a long time it's going to be the first libertarian scholars conference basically we now have a libertarian scholars conference every year but that was the first planned one we had papers and things panels and all the rest of it and what happened was that the Saturday night we started I guess Friday night and Saturday night we had a contingent which said actually it was Carl Hesse who was here here this week said that heck with this intellectual stuff let's go and attack Fort Dix there was a movement on to invade Fort Dix and I was it's not that I was against the theory of it I thought it was premature and also we had a scholars thing planned and so and it wasn't on the agenda but anyway so we had a big split we had a big split in the movement that night and I guess about half the people marched on Fort Dix and the other half stayed with the scholars conference and what happened was that Sunday the march of Fort Dix occurred the lady who was the head of the Michigan contingent who in the whole history of the libertarian movement she was probably the wackiest person I've ever met that's saying a hell of a lot and she she her whole contingent came with a black armband and so forth and the so she came stomping back from Fort Dix marching down the hall seizing the microphone from a genteel discussion patterns and copyrights whatever it was it's not a cursing it's not no uncertain terms U.S.O.B. etc etc how dare you sit here while we're being gassed at Fort Dix of course they were gassed obviously one might have expected so that I guess that's that's about it Murray? Yeah I'd like to hear the origin of the Rothbardian pension for bow ties okay it's very it's very simple I have to admit that in my early days I was wearing regular plonky ties and and when I got married my wife decided I looked much better than that that was the end of the Over there Yes Murray how do you feel that the founding of the Libertarian International is going to affect the future of international libertarianism? I don't know there is a libertarian international being founded it's meeting like this first time next summer in Interlochen in Switzerland and it should be great it's hard to know I don't really touch the European movements but there are I know there I just met a few Norwegian Libertarians I've never heard of before very good people and there's a whole Icelandic Libertarian movement apparently there's there's a there's a Austrian Austrian professor of economics have been totally I can imagine how you're isolated in Iceland New York is one thing you're isolated in Iceland as well as something else and I've been carrying on the torch for 25 years or so there's now an Icelandic movement unfortunately most of us can't read Icelandic or cut off from this so this the libertarian international will be an opportunity to meet these people for one thing and find interchanged views and so forth and it should be great I don't know how many people will show up at the first meeting but it's you know you have to try and find out at the beginning of a Liberturn yes would you like to say something about this present this is this is a present from the people in Park County this is Phil Prosser how do you do people of the Park County Libertarian Party have published a free enterprise calendar honoring those people who have made the industrial and political revolution in the last 300 years rather than politicians and generals and we'd like to present this copy to Murray Rothbard for his pioneering efforts on behalf of Libertarianism Murray's getting all these new toys who else has a question a comment more presents over there I was just wondering how you would feel about when we finally get elected and get to disband this government as much as we'd like to would you favor keeping some of NASA as a defense measure strictly not to put nuclear weapons in orbit but as surveillance lights in an early warning system or would you rather see NASA totally disbanded and allow free enterprise to just take over space and free enterprise taking over space all the way easy one that seems like it's the best mic over there okay I hope I'm not missing somebody over there but the lights are kind of obscuring my vision so you might have to speak up is there somebody behind that mic this mic I understand that Mary has still not related the story of the free market White House at the Columbia Conference in 1971 and I think that is the story that Bear is repeating yes let me see the that was the that was the Columbia University one right conference yeah there was a whole thing I've had a series of javas with Bill Buckley over the years usually what happens is he thinks we're getting stronger and he attacks me and then ten years later same sort of thing he attacks me again so it's the degree of effectiveness is you know depending on the degree of attack any right one time he said that while these libertarians they can sit around busy little seminars worrying about denationalizing White Houses whereas we you know we conservatives are out there defending America from the communist hoards so I answer him that I was more interested in foreign policy and I wasn't denationalizing White Houses actually strangers might seem and of course I was opposing his view of it as my friend Ronald Hamill I wrote he refuses to thank Mr. Buckley for saving his life so anyway at the Columbia University conference a very sweet gesture I was presented with a White House as a symbol of so-called impractical purist libertarianism that was I think as I remember it it showed me more on it so the White House was sort of a symbol Murray you weren't initially a supporter of the L.P. what got you to join what turned you positive on it? Well I wasn't I was against it look what happened I'll tell you very frankly what happened you have to remember it was nobody ever heard of a libertarian party right as far as I know there were still only about eight libertarians in the country and I suddenly got a call one night we'd like to offer you we'd like to offer you the nomination for president of the United States so I figured there was another libertarian nut and hung up so I just didn't take the idea seriously at all I thought there were so few people I couldn't talk about running for president obviously the idea caught on it was a tremendous tactical strategic success and so about a year later I joined the party I joined the party after my first attendance at the FLP convention New York L.P. convention I was so impressed with the people there that's it so I've been here ever since he obviously believes in it now since he's accepted the title of Mr. Libertarianism Jack were you there? Yes Murray you could probably clear up an area of doctrine that's been bothering me I was told at one time and I don't know if this is apocryphal or not that you were in favor of the U.S. and Russia negotiating to get rid of nuclear arms and then I thought well that's nice the two governments get rid of nuclear arms but maybe private people will still continue to own them because as libertarians I don't think we take them away and then I was thinking of Leonid Brezhnev with his nuclear arms and I wasn't feeling very safe and I thought of Exxon with theirs and I wasn't feeling very safe and I wondered what the position really is on this there's no canonical position on that yet it's a tricky area within the spectrum of libertarian movement as far as I know there's every view on it some friends of mine believe that nuclear weapons should be illegal because they're per se aggressive in other words the very holding of them means you're threatening somebody others some of the science people believe every man should have his own every man and woman should have his own laser beam and missile nuclear missile I'm sort of middle of the road around that as I am in almost everything else I kind of my view is it should be legal but I would sort of be very wary about anybody sort of and organize a boycott you know don't trade with this guy's building a nuclear missile something like that but I don't think as I said it really needs a lot of discussion really does are you in favor of the two governments negotiating to for them as governments to take away their nuclear weapons whether or not other people are sure absolutely yeah the question is that the regular administration seems to be in the United States and would I comment on the Russians economic ability to wage war I don't really think they believe the Russians will invade the United States I don't think even they believe that I think what they want to do is to keep American hegemony over the all the rest of the world so that but they're worried about as a possible Russian invasion Western Europe or Persian Gulf or Afghanistan or whatever it's too bizarre to think they actually invade the United States it's too bizarre and getting worse all the time they can't even they can't even handle Poland I mean they communist empire is cracking up it's one of the great it's one of the great under in a sense under soul stories of the 20th century in fact they had a Russian empire communist empire which was monolithic the days of Stalin or the Kremlin gave the orders everybody jumped and Russia almost at war where Russia is much more paranoid about China than they are about the United States they're scared stiff of China and and they can't even keep Poland Poland is extremely important to them because Poland is the gateway of Eastern Europe and it's between them and East Germany and so the fact that they didn't feel they had the guts to invade Poland I think shows they're really in bad shape and weakest position economically, militarily, geographically, whatever and yet when now we've revived the whole Cold War nonsense about an imminent Russian threat and the bomb shelters and missiles are coming and the rest of it somebody hiding behind the lights over there Murray I'd like to ask you what you think is the best book for a comprehensive introduction to Austrian economics this is what sort of level introductory level something primary level something appropriate to college study the trouble is there's no really one book you can say is a textbook introduction in Austrian economics there's some good elementary stuff like full vase essentials of economics but it's really much lower level and there's some very good books monographs on different topics yeah that's not really a textbook type textbook type book yeah I would recommend many companies in other words it's difficult maybe O'Driscoll's book on Hayek might be a good introduction it's the nothing really unfortunately nothing's really hit the see the trouble is there's no incentive to write a college textbook in Austrian economics nobody would adopt it very few colleges would adopt it and so very few publishers would publish something which would only get three adoptions and very few writers would bother doing it so that's we have to break through that vicious circle which will I think happen in time because Austrian economics eventually would get a point where somebody would sit down and write a textbook and that would be it but I could recommend things in specific areas Murray did you have any involvement with the anti-war and peace movement of the 60s? did you or any of the people in your friends have any involvement with it? yeah well I was yeah I was involved in some extent I was more let's see the question was I involved in the anti-war movement of the 60s there was a free university in New York which opened up about that period the first couple of years of which was quite good and very good lecturers top experts all anti-war many of them Marxists not all and that was pretty enjoyable I mean some of the speakers there and so forth as far as activism goes not too much I did write stuff I did write inflammatory literature which caused my biggest success at that point there were two student groups I think two student libertarian groups in the country which I mentioned already the other was University of Kansas University of Kansas had a YAF chapter which was libertarian after reading libertarian form they all shifted and joined Students for Democratic Society the whole chapter kind of a chakaroo for them so that happened I wasn't really more involved I knew I got to know a lot of the new left revisionist historians like Ron Radosh and James Weinstein but other people were much more involved and Leonard Ligio was much more active in the actual organizational stuff than I was Tony I've just been asked if before I give my question if you'd make a request to the people in the back of the room to keep it down we're having a hard time listen if they could have heard you that would have been enough would the people in the back of the room try to keep their voices lower move into other areas that aren't going to interfere with the people here hearing Murray did you hear me did you hear me thanks Emerling is telling me I'm a pushy broad okay Tony it's all quiet for you Murray I just wondered if you thought that the gold commission was going to recommend a return to the gold standard and if so would you tell me what you think the price of gold will be no they're not going to recommend a gold standard the gold commission was mandated by the congress in the last days of the Carter administration when some writer to some bill appropriation bill the president was therefore mandated legally to appoint a commission to investigate return of the gold standard Reagan finally did it after about six months of tremendous pressure after all it's you have to do it right it's illegal not to so he finally appointed one I think about June they're 18 17 or 18 members of the commission of which 14 or 15 are dedicated or maybe slightly less are dedicated fanatical anti-goal people most of them are monetarists most of them are either from the treasury department of the Federal Reserve Board there are however a couple of very good pro-goal people Ron Paul particularly who's on the gold commission and representative Republican of Texas and Lou Lairman and Lairman Institute so what they're planning to do I think is write a minority report majority report will be the usual freemanite baloney okay the minority report should be I hope scholarly bang up historical theoretical and political justification for the gold standard which I hope will get a lot of publicity and influence so that's basically what's going to happen the gold commission for example mandated the original gold commission plan was the report will be in by October although they only got set up in July they don't have only three meetings so they got I think we got it extended to January but we're just about time enough to write a minority report what the price of gold would be if we really had a good setup if we really had a good gold commission I'm not sure it has to be studied be something like $1500 to $2000 an ounce something like that that would that would need a lot of work but around that what are your views on abortion and children's rights we just we just passed a very good platform two platform planks on the topic which I agree with 100% I sum up an abortion I'm 1000% in favor of everybody's right to own his or her own body which implies the right of terminating pregnancy so I'm very much in favor of the right to have an abortion I'm obviously not pro-abortionist I think everybody should have an abortion I don't think there's anybody in that camp I'm pro-choice pro ownership of one's body on children's rights I'm in favor of basically children have the right not to be molested attacked mutilated etc. and have the right to get out I think that's the key the right to run away or contract out with some other foster parent that I think would solve a lot of the whole problem but I recommend the two planks the two platform planks on that over on this Mike yeah Mary you mentioned in passing that it appeared to you the Soviet hegemony was breaking up but you know some might hold that makes them all the more dangerous and that they're going to have to resort to more drastic measures to defend the Soviet regime so I'd like to know how you stand on that in the light of an anarchist stand on who you know how armed forces ought to be organized and also how you stand on the question of unilateral disarmament well yeah I don't understand that the argument I don't understand the argument the weaker you are the more likely you are to attack I think I think I just bonkers that the variant of that by the way which is now fortunately dropped out of discussion was the so-called thirsty bear theory which was very popular around the spring of this year winter and spring which is now fortunately died out thirsty bear theory was that Russia is short of oil and therefore since they haven't got much oil they have to invade the Persian Gulf to get it to hide the oil I don't have to invade it I don't have to invade the Persian Gulf secondly then it turns out the CIA just recently come out a report saying shucks I guess they don't they're not short of oil they've got plenty of oil in Russia so the thirsty bear theory is now shot I just I just don't understand that argument I think it's bonkers I don't know of any any state in the history of the world which acted on that kind of basis on now what was the other part of your question about yeah that I think I've answered anyway this armament the we've passed the pro-unilateral this armament plank today the I think it's very intelligent plank what it says is we're a favor of unilateral this armament not pending that not being able to get it we favor the following thing joint mutual this armament no nuclear strike first nuclear strike pledge et cetera et cetera it's a little bit like the taxation plank and that sort of structure the reason why I haven't been advocating unilateral this armament fiercely for many years is I'm convinced that we could get joint this armament very easily in other words there's not much point of having unilateral this armament if you can easily get mutual joint this armament kind of so that's that's the only reason I've not advocated this thoroughly for a long time but I think the basic the basic problem is the bottom line as the nuclear weapons the big threat the survival of the human race I mean just as simple as all that that's mass slaughter and mass slaughter is the big thing which we're supposed to be against so I think that's to me that's the bottom line of the question Mark did you have a question? Yes your reminiscence is called to mind George Nash's excellent book The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in the U.S. since 1945 right where he discusses the tripartite composition of the conservative movement as consisting of the libertarian and anti-communist and traditional elements do you foresee a combination of circumstances arising in the next 10 to 25 years that would result in the re-emergence of that libertarian element and the right wing returning to its libertarian heritage? Well I'd love to see it but I don't see it I don't think it's going to happen the right wing has gotten worse on most questions on non-economic questions it's probably gotten worse since then nuclear nuclear policy is just as bad I mean yeah nuclear war policy is just as bad plus they've got all those terrorism nonsense which they're you know everybody under every bed is a KGB agent plus the moral majority which has shifted a lot of right wing opinion I mean see in the old days in 1950s and 60s nobody talked about re-establishing theocracy or outlawing a borscht or anything like that or bringing you know the only thing they were worried about was prayer in the public schools which seems pretty innocuous now looking back on it so the whole more majority thing I think a shift of the position which were compulsory morality viewpoint than it was in those days so it looks like it's swinging in the other direction except on economics where it's not that great anyway see the problem with the right wing and economics is they're not really that interested in it when I was going to right wing rallies back in the 50s I was distressed to find that nobody would ever cheer there'd be no standing ovation for the free market right for liberty or something only standing ovation was you know old power to Chiang Kai-shek so that was the it was not real they were essentially conservatives except for a few economists who are interested in economics obviously essentially they give lip service the free market their hearts are really elsewhere hearts are in compulsory compulsory theocracy in nuking them in the Russians so I'm not ruling it out obviously it's not logically impossible that could happen how do you account for the old rights and antipathy toward interventionist foreign policy and why was there a lack of theoretical connection between the free market and non-interventionist foreign policy yeah there has been the 19th century liberal classical liberals were totally all out anti-inventionists they were not anarchists by the way in those days you didn't have to be an anarchist nor to be against foreign intervention Richard Cobben Bright all these people who were classical liberals were very anti-foreign intervention they were so-called little inlanders they're very quote isolationist unquote and very anti-militarists Thomas Jefferson for example is one of his favorite disbanding in the entire army and navy not just against the draft against the whole army and navy so unfortunately what happened was we lost as the classical liberal tradition died out we lost these moorings we lost the remembrance of them or the whole tradition then the right wing was the modern right wing was essentially created by the New Deal 1930s and 40s a reaction against the excesses against the leap into statism of the New Deal so the the right wing was essentially a reactionary movement a sense of being reacting against this new leap so it was a coalition of everybody was against the New Deal which was a very broad coalition and most of these people weren't philosophically oriented they weren't really much even free market particularly so but they were against the further leap into statism and they were against World War II so you wound up after World War II with the right wing which was which was semi-libertarian or isolationist anti-war, anti-graph free market but they didn't have much of a philosophical they didn't have any theorists much they didn't have any readings it was really sort of it was a mass movement without a theory it used to be called a dumb right it was a sort of expression it was a it wasn't a very almost no intellectual content so what happened was in the middle 1950s Senator Taft died Colonel McCormick was the editor of the Chicago Tribune which those days was an all-out anti-war publication these people died out and just retired they left a power vacuum an electoral vacuum which National Review then could fill very well because National Review was a brilliantly edited magazine so it was just it cut through the right wing like a knife through butter the third part of my question was earlier this year when you visited us at the University of Colorado you said that you were coming out with a new book on the rise of statism in the 19th century can you tell us the status of that? status is in the middle of it in other words this was a a book I'm working on on the progressive era the origins of modern statism and the progressive era what happens to this is it has happened in all my books they get longer as I get into it when I first the way I started my history book was that I got a small grant to write a two-volume history of the United States somebody came to me and said Murray why don't you write a two-volume history of the United States take the usual facts which everybody agrees on like Lincoln was like the president something like that and write the libertarian interpretation of it should be a lead pipe cinch okay great could get it done in a year and a half what happened was unfortunately I found out that two-volume textbooks leave everything out you can't just take the facts and put a new interpretation on because the facts so I started bringing in the facts I find tax rebellions and colonial New Jersey I can't leave that out right so things started getting longer and longer like Popsie and I wind up with a five-volume book on colonial period the rest of it dropping out so in the progressive era as a fascinating era because I find out that you can't imagine the horrors that went on in the progressive period just can't imagine it and every front every conceivable front not just economic and foreign policy everything this is the era wreck everybody doctors social workers you name it they're all in it together so the topic got bigger I will however I'm in the middle of it I will however finish it that's the status of it it's not imminent my next imminent book is my ethics of liberty book which is coming out this full of humanities press which I'm quite proud of because I think it's sort of like the scholarly counterpart of foreign liberty it goes in advanced problems like blackmail theory children's rights things like that so a little plug for that yes you've had your hand up for a while the gentleman asked do I think there's a conspiracy for one world government and if so is the Toronto Commission important but I don't think there's a conspiracy for one world government there's a there's an establishment that's a favor of international political economic and mixture the basic objective on the monetary front for example they really was one world bank like one world reserve system issuing world paper money so that the whole world can inflate together and so you wouldn't have to worry about gold or exchange rates everybody would be happily inflating it that's one of the that's one of the programs the Toronto Commission sort of people I think in general though the we have to be sophisticated about conspiracy analysis because most conspiracy many conspiracy theorists tend to think there's one group of bad guys sitting somewhere in some room pushing all the buttons like saying okay Russia and China now fight but tend to your enemies and things like that well it doesn't work that way in other words what there are is a whole bunch of competing power structures or power oriented people who's trying to get control of a state apparatus and run it and so you have say four or five or six of these groups sometimes they're a coalition sometimes they're fighting each other and whatever that's the I think the essence of it and I think stuff is very important obviously the Toronto Commission was obviously running the Carter administration for example even the establishment media conceded that we only have time for about one or two more questions and there are a couple of people over at this mic here so if you go ahead Dr. Rockbar what do you see is the future of the acceptance of the Austrian school of economics and when do you expect to win the Nobel Prize for economics the answer to the second question is very easy absolutely not okay Austrian I think the future is very good the Austrian schools started with ZIP in 1940s or whatever so really only with Mises and Hayek and that was about it it's now grown tremendously since 1971 or three about this you know about coincidence I would advise the Libertarian Party by the way and we now have conferences and seminars we have two or three universities where we have several like a focos I used to call it of Austrian professors we still haven't broken through yet what we have to do is to capture so to speak a graduate department we have to be able to get a graduate school where we can turn out Austrian doctorates and we haven't gotten that yet but we're getting close to that sort of thing so I think the future is very bright see one of the problems is one of the reasons for that is that the Keynesian establishment is finished and they can't solve any of these problems and they know it they can't understand why is inflationary recession all the time why does it prices keep going up all the time even though we have recessions there's no way to explain Freedmen has kind of explained it either by the way only the Austrians have a solution to that kind of problem so I think I think the future is very good I think it's it's a rapidly growing movement it's still I guess it's the way the Libertarian Party was six years ago or something that's sort of that's sort of a parallel alright the last question St. Mike thanks Amel Murray I've got a little gift to commemorate a special occasion in Toronto a while back but I wonder if you could just tell the audience whether it's an anarchist principle to enter strange women's bedrooms in the middle of the night of course okay I want to get into a final plug there's a story at this moment there's a Center for Libertarian Studies Hospitality Suite Room 1217-18 at that point the Center for Libertarian Studies is an outfit which I'm intimately associated with I added the Journal of Libertarian Studies they're holding a scholars conference this fall the 5th or 6th or 8th annual one and we're kicking off the Libri Von Mises Fellowships which are fairly munificent post-doctored or pre-doctored graduate fellowships in any discipline this one related to Libertarianism so anyway I invite you all to attend Room 1217-18 I'll be there myself for a while so continue this and more informally thank you come on more for information there are probably a couple of other places that Murray's going to be tonight I don't know what this note from Mary Lou is about but this is a snack that was given to you and it says hugs the radical caucus of Libertarian Party has a hospitality suite in Room 1745 from now on and also the Society for Individual Liberty has a cocktail party also at this time in suite 2042 those two room numbers again are 1745 and 2042 and the first place I ever met Murray was at one of those cocktails