 And now it's my pleasure to introduce Gary North, who'll give us some reminiscences and reflections. I suppose the tragedy is that there were no recordings made of any of those speeches, which is extraordinary when you think about it. The Mises Institute, you can't blow your nose, but Chad's got it on the web within about five minutes. So it's a very different approach in terms of handling ideas. That was an almost extraordinary oversight that nothing came out of it in terms of the actual presentations. I remember scattered bits and pieces, and sometimes you'll hear the statement that it seems like yesterday, but to me at least it does not. It was a long time ago. So when you get an older guy who says, I'm going to tell you exactly what happened, that means generally that some of it may actually be true. So I'm going to tell you what exactly happened, at least that I remember. What I don't remember extraordinarily, I don't literally remember how I got there. I don't remember flying, I don't remember driving up, complete blank. All I remember is walking into the first room that I was assigned, and the paint was coming off the walls. And my first thought was if my life's on the line in a Vermont case, I don't want any graduate of this school to defend me, because it had only been open actually about eight or nine months, and it hadn't been accredited yet, and it was clearly a very strange venture. The description that Joe gave of the family that he stayed with, I can very well understand. The food was pretty good, but I remember two things. The two things I remember, one was the cook who was this incredibly very strange woman. And she had a son who kind of waited tables, and he was an incredibly strange, very strange person. We'd been there maybe three or four days, and a group of us were sitting around talking about our experiences. And it finally hit me, it finally hit me. And I said, I think what has happened is that we have come into the twilight zone, and we're around, these people are aliens who are practicing to be people. And there was this roar of laughter that I remember, and kind of an Amen Charlie. I think that's kind of what the situation was. That really was what it was like. It was a very very strange experience. Now what can I tell you about the intellectual side of it? The speeches, the content I don't remember, quite frankly. I do remember, of course, some of Kersner's entrepreneurship, which they were very good. Of course, he's very precise, very rigorous, and a good speaker, good communicator, so he was the right guy to have come in and talk to us. He was very very good. And Murray was, I remember, of course, not so much what he said, but the usual Murray that was just remarkable. I'd known him before, I'd met him before when I had been at the Foundation for Economic Education. We went down one night and spent an evening at his apartment in New York, so I knew Murray, and I knew what to expect to some extent. One of the things you never hear, he had many many gifts, one of the things you never hear is the incredible knowledge he had of music, of all kinds. And he would sing these songs. He said, Murray, how would you possibly learn these songs? Not always in English. The only time I ever heard anyone break into a round of the Hitler Horse Vessel Song was Murray. He had the thing exactly right. I'm thinking, you know, this short Jew who would not have survived six months during the period is singing the Horse Vessel Song. And then his song he had about, give me that old time preference. That old time preference, that old time preference, it's good enough for me. And the next round, as I remember, it was good enough for Manger. It was good enough for Mises, good enough for Hayek, and it's good enough for me, and he would make this stuff up as he'd go along. It was a unique experience, certainly that side of it. The thing that stands out most remarkably from an academic standpoint was the series of lectures by Lachman. And the imitation that Ebeling gave was really, really good. There are a few Lachman videos, YouTube videos, one or two. I recommend you spend some time at least watching one of the videos. Now I've been in competitive speech since 1958, either speaking professionally or speaking competitively. And at the time, I thought that from a rhetorical standpoint, Ludwig Lachman was simply the worst speaker I had ever heard. I don't remember much about the content, but I do remember the extraordinary event of listening to this peculiar sing-song voice I thought, I'm certainly glad I'm not a student in one of his classes. That really is true. The content was colidic, as he would have said, and did say repeatedly. In terms of the people, actually the person I most remembered was Joe Salerno. I came home to my wife, I had just read the book Type A Behavior in the Human Heart, and I thought he won't make it till 50. I told my wife that. I said, I see a dead man walking. There's no way he's going to survive. But I was wrong. I was wrong. Somehow he did survive the Type A Behavior. It was good to know that there were other people around who were at least interested in these ideas. Now I'm going to offer at least a brief assessment, which I would call the Austrian theory of the academic cycle, or the academic business cycle. And that is, it's gone through a series of these cycles. And clearly in the era after World War I, Mises was part of what I would say was a bottom period of the cycle. Socialism was extremely popular at the time. And he with his, whatever you call it, salon, essentially it was a salon activity. If it had been in the late 18th century in France, that's what you'd call it. But what it amounted to was sitting down at coffee tables in Austria and talking with young men. Mises began to change the opinion of a generation of younger men. Hayek is the most famous. Wilhelm Rebke was another. Clearly, Lord Robbins, Lionel Robbins was another. Haberler was another. Maklop was another. I mean he, through the power of his writing and the power of his thoughts, like a magnet they came from around Europe to sit with him and talk with him. He was never being in a classroom with him because he was never in a classroom until he escaped from Austria and was given a position at the Graduate Institute in Geneva because Rebke was able to arrange that. But he had extraordinary impact at the bottom of a cycle. And he began to change the minds of young men and later years turned out to be extraordinarily influential in their own fields. And that was remarkable. And he came here, finally arriving in the United States during the war, essentially unemployed, unemployable. He was able to get a job at NYU only because Volker Fund and some men like Lawrence Ferdig put up the money to bring him. And they never gave him a full professorship. He was always a visiting professor. And there he sat in this at best second tier and probably third tier university in graduate seminars with the students coming from the university with the exception, I think, of Kersner as being not particularly cream of the crop but Murray came in and others came in and sat as auditors and they became very much like what had taken place at the end of World War I in Austria. Similar phenomenon in New York City. And that was late 40s. And clearly Keynes had completely triumphed by 49 or 50. And no one knew Mises. And even on the faculty, they really did regard him as a crackpot. They really did. Now, Sennholz was one of the bright ones who came through the system. And he was a first rate, not first rate economist in the sense of theoretical material but first rate entrepreneur of ideas, spreading those ideas over a generation of young men and young women at Grove City College. And he died in October, October 10, 1973. And there was no university where you could go to get an Austrian perspective. And so gathered in South Royalton was the next phase of the Austrian academic cycle at the bottom. It was the bottom. And then it turned up that October because Hayek did win the Nobel Prize, co-won the Nobel Prize with Gunnar Murdoch. And the line afterwards was it was a dual award given to one man who never thought he would get it and the other man who never thought he would share it. And if you knew Murdoch, that was certainly the case. That was the bottom. And so it came back up. And it came back up amazingly fast. As entrepreneurs, you always want to be at the bottom of a market and that really is what happened to us. And a lot of the people who came became, if not academically prominent, certainly influential in limited circles. And we had other things going for us such as the newsletter industry was beginning to take off in the 70s. It began in the late 60s, mid-60s. Now it was really moving. And then we had, we were coming in, the Nixon crisis, 7172, terrible recession, breaking of the last traces of the gold exchange standard, August 15th of 71, when he unilaterally closed the gold window. You had the massive inflation, the worst peacetime inflation in American history. That was just beginning. So Keynesianism was being called into question, because you were having rapid price inflation at the same time that unemployment was going up and the Phillips Curve said that wasn't supposed to happen, but it was happening and everybody knew it was happening. So this gave us an edge. This gave us a wedge, not into academia, but into what I would call the general, literate, public, investment public, people who would listen to Austrian school ideas. And we have that great advantage is that we can communicate without graphs. We don't need equations to communicate our ideas and this is a tremendous advantage in the world of newsletters and books. And then of course came the web and then of course came the entrepreneurial venture of Lou Rockwell starting the Mises Institute in 82 and keeping it going for 13 years until the web appears. And then the web has in fact changed everything. The Mises site gets about four times the traffic of the site of the American Economic Association. I've never looked at the Alexa rating. I will say very briefly, very, very briefly, the dark side of it was that was when the Austrian school split and it was between the Lachmanites and the Colitech entrepreneurial ideas versus the Rothbardians and it did split and it split at that conference. And I could sense it splitting at that time. And Kirzner was kind of in the middle but Kirzner had brought Lachman into NYU and so he was generally, at least on the entrepreneurial side of it, he tended I believed at the time to be more, at least in the line, closer to Lachman than to Rothbard. I won't say that categorically because I could be wrong but certainly it seemed to me to be that at the time. And there was that split. The split still exists I think because of the Mises Institute and because of the materials. The tremendous advantage that we all have is that I think in terms of clarity. As I said in 1988 in an article in the Rothbard fescher, if there were a Nobel Prize in clarity that Rothbard would have won it. And of course because it's a Nobel Prize in economics and because of his clarity I wrote the article and it said why Murray Rothbard will never win the Nobel Prize because you can really understand anything that he wrote. And from a scientific standpoint that's always been, that's the one criterion that is consistently applied in the Nobel Prize that if you can understand it you don't get it. Hayek did sneak in but that was a rarity. I think essentially we've won that fight. The Lachmanians are forgotten. The epistemological battles that he introduced I think there may be some people who still fool around with them but I don't think they ever really penetrated them. The newsletter industry or the worldwide web. So I would say that because of the Mises Institute the Rothbardian tradition is the dominant force within Austrian circles. And from my perspective that certainly is a tremendous advantage.