 We are going to hear from Lou Rockwell on the founding of the Mises Institute and Ron Paul with his thoughts on the founding of the Mises Institute as well. But before, I know most of you are here for Tom Woods talk today at lunch about Lou and about the founding of this organization. So, to Lou Rockwell, I'm speaking tonight on behalf of all the patrons and donors and supporters and friends and family of yours here tonight. On behalf of Marty Rockwell and Pep Barnett, your longtime associates, on behalf of Judge John Benson, the great trustee at Auburn University, he brought the Institute to Auburn on behalf of the Mises Institute Board. For everything you've done to help revive the Austrian school, for putting Mises and Rothbard at the fore of that school, for putting the great Austrian economics works online for anyone for free, for supporting so many scholars and students over the years, for providing a platform for discussing anarcho-capitalism openly, secession openly, private law openly, for creating LouRockwell.com as a truly independent, uncensored source for unapproved dissident thought, and most of all for creating an intellectual home for thousands and thousands of people around the world. I would ask Dr. Paul to present you with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Lou Rockwell. You're the gold standard man. That's beautiful. Thank you, Dr. Paul. Congratulations. The gold standard man. Thank you. Many years ago when I escaped college, I took a job in Boston with a small publishing company which taught me pretty quickly that if I was going to be happy in my work, I had to have an ideological dimension to it. I had to be advanced in the cause of liberty and I wouldn't be happy. So I wrote to Neil McCaffrey, who was the founder and the president of Arlington House Publishers in New Rochelle, New York, and asked him for a job. And he wrote back and he said he would like to have me come to New York and to apply. And so I did and we hit it off and he offered me the job and it was to be an editor, which is something I'd been interested in really from the time. I was a very young boy, negotiating contracts with authors, coming up with ideas for books and that sort of thing. So Neil, it was just a tremendous experience to work for him. He was a great intellectual himself as well as a brilliant businessman. And he did me many great favors, but the one that I want to mention today is when he called me into his office and he said, how do you like to be Ludwig von Mises's editor? So of course I was gobsmacked but I said I would love to do that. And he said that he wanted to bring back into print three of Mises's books. They were out of print, omnipotent government and bureaucracy and theory and history. And also to fix some problems with the texts in one of those books. And to just work with Mises, work with Mrs. Mises, who was a tremendous force for Misesianism and for good, I might say. And so I had the great honor of working with them and bringing those books into print when they were available, the great Leonard Reed of the Foundation for Economic Freedom held a conference to celebrate the fact that these three books come back into print. And I don't know if there are people here who remember the old fee. It was a magnificent building in New York, north of New York City. And it had a gigantic kitchen, a gigantic dining room, among of course many other things in their building. And so Leonard invited me to go first into the get my dinner on the tray. So I'm walking with the tray into the dining room and there are two people in there, Ludwig and Margit von Mises, at the other table. So I went over and I asked them if I could sit with them and introduce myself to them because I dealt with them, especially with her on the phone and by mail, but never in person. So that was the only time that I got to meet Mises, but it was obviously a thrilling experience. And I always remember Murray Rothbard saying that Mises, and for that matter, Mrs. Mises, came from an older and a better civilization than the ones we had now. And it was a tremendous experience to meet him. He was so beautifully dressed, such beautiful manners, and that was true of Mrs. Mises, too. Again, they're just people from another era and a better era. So that was a tremendous experience to work for Neil. And I was offered a job at another enterprise, which turned out not to be exactly what they had advertised themselves to be. But while I was there, Mises passed away. And of course I was very, very saddened by that, but it was a number of years after that when I began to realize that I thought Mises was losing his reputation, not only as a great intellectual, but as a great man of tremendous courage, I mean, just immense courage. So I was worried about that. But at this time I was working for a place that was a big place, a successful place. The Law and Economic Center at Emory University, and I was the guy who ran the place from an administrative sense. And I should have known that it was going to be bad because right near it, and I had to go right by it every day when I went to work, was the CDC. And Fauci was already there, so I should have known that the whole place was poison. But as I was worried about Mises's reputation, I was worried about the importance of his work. And I remember one day looking around, it was a good-sized place, looking around and thinking, I could do this. And so I went into D.C. where I got the Institute's approval from the city government, which, you know, that sounds odd for a libertarian, but it's really the best place in the country to get permission to have a business or a nonprofit who knows what reasons. But anyway, I was able to get that. Then I applied again to the U.S. government for a 501c3 status. And in those days you could get it pretty quickly. And I was successful, I think, in writing this sort of book. Maybe some people would say I was fooling them, but I wasn't. I was, of course, helped by the fact that Mises had been a refugee, and they liked that. So I got it, and when that happened, I left the law and economics center and got to work to start the Mises Institute. And in those days it consisted really just of an electric typewriter on my kitchen table. But I was defined very quickly. I should say I had a friend who ran the Charles Koch Foundation for Charles Koch, and he'd been a friend of mine, and so I'd written him about this new institute and I would appreciate their support. And he called me and he said, Lou, do you have any idea how much money we've spent to demolish Mises and to make Hayek the key figure in economics? I said no, but there was money ill spent. And he told me that they would do everything possible to oppose us, which I think happened then and not so much now. But I think for a lot of people that would have bothered them, but I must say it stimulated me. I thought it'd be great to have this gigantic operation trying to oppose us. And they told me, also he told me that you're not going to raise money because everybody hated Mises. They all said, even Milton Friedman hated Mises. And I said, well that would be a medal on Mises' chest. That was the case. So I wrote everybody on my roller decks, remember those? And I got immediate tremendous response from people. It turned out, despite what I've been told by this gentleman from the Koch Foundation, that there were a lot of people who loved Mises, who had known Mises as a man and loved his work and had also been worried about his standing at the cost of Austrian economics. So that was great. But I should say that I'm leaving the most important aspect of my life outside of the Mises Institute. It was when I had the chance to work for Ron Paul. I was his Chief of Staff. And when I left for Ron and started the Institute, he did something that I must say unheard of in fundraising. He signed a letter promoting the Institute with the money to go to the Institute and he sent that letter to his own list. And so we got about more than $50,000 from that mailing rod. And this is many, many years ago. And it was that money that started us off, I must say, in a good fashion. And I also thought in those days, perhaps incorrectly, that the Institute needed a connection to a university. So how other people went to colleges and universities all over the country who claimed to be conservative. None of them were interested in us, needless to say. They pretty much invited me out the door when I would talk to them. But there was one place that was interested in. It was Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. And there was a board member, John Denson, Judge Denson, who was our champion there. This was something he'd been thinking about himself for years. And so he brought about our connection to Auburn. And we had many good years there. And he also protected us when they came after us. And they weren't able to harm us as some other libertarian or conservative organizations had been damaged on college campuses when they turned more and more leftists. That's the question that virtually all do now. And so John, we owe a lot to you. And I want you to know that anybody who sees you, I tell them, you should see the other guy. John always wins his fights, I might say. So we moved to Auburn. And it was a good experience. And Mrs. Mises was not happy about that. She wanted us to be in New York. But I said, I didn't think we could afford it. And it was much more difficult to bring students there and many other reasons. But Mrs. Mises was a strong supporter of the institute. And something else I did in the early days was to invite her to lunch at her favorite restaurant in New York, which was the Russian tea room. And talk to her about it. About what I wanted to do for the institute. So she said, I'll be your chairman. But I want you to promise me that you're never going to leave the institute and you're always going to be dedicated to it. And I said, well, I did give her that promise that would never happen. I want to say she was such a great lady. She said to me, I know you only want my name. That's all you're really interested in. And I said, well, I said, I do want your name. But I want your guidance as well. Because she was extremely smart, a brilliant woman. And she gave us great guidance. And just for almost 10 years that she lived after our luncheon. And just a tremendous lady. She loved Marty. She loved Pat Barnett. And so both of them were in aid to a good relationship with Mrs. Mises. And again, she was somebody from another era, but she worked so hard. I met Marty Rothbard. Some years later said that she was a one woman Mises industry. And she really was. I mean, she just dedicated her life to her husband while he was alive. And then after, of course, after his death. So that she was a great person. And the second person I talked to after Mrs. Mises was Marty Rothbard. And when I told him what I'm planning to do and I wanted him to be the academic vice president, he actually jumped in the air and clapped his hands. I've never, I've seen it on movies or TV or whatever. I've never seen anybody do that at birth. But he was, he dedicated himself to the institute. And I must say I still miss him every day. He was so much fun. Just extraordinary. You couldn't be in his presence for more than several minutes before you were laughing. He, just a sense of humor was just tremendous. And of course, we heard from Joseph Lander today about another aspect of just how what a great thinker Marty Rothbard was. And here I edited the newsletter. He published these papers in and I didn't realize what was going on, obviously, until I heard Joe today. So that was a great experience. We continue to learn from Marty. We continue to learn new things that Marty talked about. And like Mises, of course, he's our, in a sense, the guardian saint of the institute. And those two men, just extraordinary. So it's been a long fight, but a fun fight. And the people who opposed us ideologically, the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, and other creeps, it was fun to fight them. And I must say John Denson shows the kind of influence he had when they came after us at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He phoned the head of it and they stopped. So, again, John's a great man to have on your son. So I must say these 40 years have gone by very quickly for me, the things that took place 40 years ago just seemed like the other day. But I'm thrilled to have Jeff running things now. And obviously, I'm great scholars. Today, the board voted to make Joseph Lerno a member of the Institute of the Board of Directors. Not to vote, but to make sure that we have the academic view that Joe can give us. And I can tell many stories about Joe, but the one that sticks in my mind is I had the honor to go in after Joey Rothbard died. And of course, Murray had already passed away to go and take care of their apartment, ship the books and papers to the Institute, the furniture to Joey's relatives in Virginia and all that sort of thing. And Murray had a reading chair in their living room and a table next to it. And on the top of the table was Joe's PhD dissertation. And I wish I could have asked Murray, what were you looking at? Because obviously, this has been a few years ago before when Joe received it. But I thought that shows what... And of course, Murray loved Joe and trusted him and thought he was a great economist. And he'd be very pleased to know that he was on our board helping guide us. So I think the Institute has only started. I think that it's tremendous. And this is now a worldwide operation. I mean, the interest in Austrian economics is worldwide. And once these creeps in Washington allow us, the foreign students to come to our programs in the summer, which they're now blocking, or people have to get shots, which thank goodness they won't do. But they're eventually going to have to stop that. We'll get our foreign students back. We have all our brilliant American students. And I think the future is very, very bright for the Mises Institute. And the support of all of you here and many, many thousands of others is going to keep us going, keep us growing, and keep us achieving. And of all the... I've talked about various individuals who supported the Institute intellectually, but the people who support us financially are not only important, we'd go out of business very quickly if they weren't helping us. And so we appreciate your support so much. Appreciate your being here. And thank you, thank you very, very much.