 This session's on the great Murray Rothbard, who's the reason why most of us are here. What we'll do is we're going to have four people talk that had significant interaction and we're friends of Murray Rothbard. We'll begin with Roger Garrison, then David Gordon, Walter Block, and then myself. And we'll each speak for eight minutes or so, and we'll just reminisce and talk about Murray's qualities and what he meant to us and his influence on our research. So we'll begin with Roger Garrison. In 1972, there's a book that appeared called It Usually Begins with Ein Rand by Jerome Tuchelli. It's gone through several editions since then. You can still buy it on amazon.com. Now, by 1972, I had long since started reading Ein Rand. And I read it while I was doing four-year service as commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force. I had graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering from Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. That title tells you it was an awfully hardcore engineering school, no social sciences. So I was sort of an unlikely person to be attracted by Jerome Tuchelli or by Murray Rothbard. But that's exactly what happened. Milton Friedman, as I mentioned the other day, did that work? Had been very instrumental in ending the military draft. And my complaint about him is that he didn't do it quite soon enough to keep me out of the military, such as it was. So I had one of the first edition copies of Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. That was 1967. I was in Upstate New York, Rome, New York, and I had to either go west to Syracuse or east to Albany to find a decent bookstore where I could get these Rand books. And in that Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, there were about 26 chapters, including the appendix. 20 of them from Rand, three from Alan Greenspan, one from Nathaniel Brand and one from Robert Hessen. I suppose the most economics-oriented one was Alan Greenspan. I hate to say that's what got me started in economics by reading Alan Greenspan in the late 1960s. But that book also had a list of references, which included Mises, about eight references, Bombaverk one, Benjamin Anderson, Henry Haslett, Lawrence Furtig. But nothing, no references to F.A. Hayek or to Murray Rothbard. But it turns out if you start following the literature, you find both of those pretty quickly. And I found Rothbard, Man, Economy and State and read that with a lot of excitement. Eventually I got out of the Air Force and I went to University of Missouri, Kansas City and got a master's degree in economics. And while I was there, I wrote the Austrian Macroeconomics. This is the original edition that the Institute now has reprints for. And I wrote it as a term paper in a master's level macro course. The instructor, Bob Brasilton, appreciated the effort and asked me to present it at a conference in Chicago. I think it was a Midwest Economic Conference, I'm not even sure of that because I was kind of into days at that point anyhow. But it struck fear in me. I didn't think I was prepared to lecture on Austrian economics or Austrian macro, especially at a national convention like that. And I needed more feedback. Was this paper really any good? So I sent it to Murray Rothbard. And just in a few days I got a call, actually the call came from Joey, and I talked to her for a minute and she said, well Murray wants to talk to you. And it struck fear in me again. Murray was. And of course Murray was Murray. I mean he came on the phone cackling and carrying on and cracking jokes. And I was wondering, is this the right Murray Rothbard? I can't really tell. But anyhow he liked the thing, which sort of surprised me because he's not really into graphics. But he saw it as beating the Keynesians at their own game and that's what he was chuckling about. That was good and it was funny. So he asked me, were you going to be in New York anytime soon? Well I had no plans whatsoever to go to New York. So I said, yes. And was soon on my way to New York. He invited me over for dinner. And I went to dinner and then we had, it was just a three of us, Joey and Murray and myself for dinner. And then guests arose including none other than Walter Block and also Walter Grinder and Bill Stewart. And I think we'd figure it out was actually a student of Grinders. And we went through that article page by page and it was quite a long article, mostly graphs, but quite a long article. And it got to be three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning. And I didn't realize that Rothbard stayed up late, to say the least. And several times I started edging towards the front door thinking of where we stayed. And there seemed to be insulted by this. Where are you going? We're not through with this paper. So anyhow I left somewhere between 3.30 and 4. Because I remember I was kind of bleary-eyed so I couldn't, not sure I could read my watch at that point. But it was a wonderful evening, unforgettable actually. And he had invited me the next day to come and sit in on his class at Brock and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. I did that and that was fun. And then it turns out he was signing books for a new Liberty at Lausse-Faire Books. And I went with him with that. And first time I'd been in Lausse-Faire Bookstore obviously. Hadn't been in New York for a long time even. And so it was just a wonderful trip and something I'd never forget. And I considered him a friend from that day on. Now when I finally got out of the Air Force and got the degree at UMKC, I took a wrong turn. And it, don't tell anyone this, but ended up working for the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank for about two and a half years. But then went to Virginia, University of Virginia and got my doctorate degree. But in the meantime Murray was going to be doing a conference at Cornell on economic history. He and Forrest McDonnell invited me to that. And so I went. And then the very next year is 74. That was a big South Royalton blowout. And I came to that. And then there were two more conferences year by year after that. One at Hartford, University of Hartford and Hayek was at that one, I remember. And then the next year at Windsor Castle in England and Hayek was at that. So I was sort of on a roll at that point after which I took a job. Left the Fed and went to the University of Virginia where I got my doctorate degree in economics. And then soon after that came to Auburn about five years ahead of the Institute. And I was certainly happy to see the Institute come to. Okay. Well, that's my story. Thank you. Well, I think when you met Murray Rothbard, the first thing would impress people was that he knew everything. He really did. I often used to go in the way he was able to know everything was he had an amazing ability to read very fast and absorb all the material. In that way, he was like his teacher, Joseph Dorfman, the one who got his PhD with at Columbia. I often used to go to bookstores with him. For example, one we like in Manhattan where the Strand bookstore was his favorite. And there were ones in the Bay Area that he liked to go to. And he would go into the bookstore and he could go down the shelves. And he would read every book and he would be able to say what was in this one, what was in that one. He would do no matter what the subject. He had an amazing range of reference. He would just know everything. I'll give you a few illustrations. Some of you may know that there was a libertarian philosopher very famous one, Robert Nozick, that he didn't get along with all that well. But the reason they initially didn't get along very well was that when Nozick met Rothbard, they had a big argument about whether you could measure utility. And Nozick took the point of view that you couldn't. Rothbard didn't. And if you look, Rothbard knew all the philosophical literature on this topic, not just the economics. For example, if you look in his toward reconstruction of utility and welfare economics, he not only knew Carl Hempel's work, but there was an unpublished part of the Hempel's book that he was able to refer to. So this gave him, it was very hard to ask him something that he didn't know. I remember once I like history trivia questions, and I was telling Murray that I had a conversation with Mel Bradford, who was an outstanding scholar that we both knew. And I was able to, Bradford really knew American history extremely well, but I was able to give Bradford a question he didn't know which was what was Rutherford Hayes' middle name. So I was telling Murray about that, and he said, ah, it was birchard, of course. He didn't know just economics and philosophy and political theory, but he was very interested in art history. His specialty was German Baroque churches, and turned out he'd been friends. He'd known in the 1940s Leo Steinberg, who became one of the great art historians, a specialist in the Renaissance. He was very, very much interested in Leo Steinberg's work on art history. So many things that Murray didn't publish about, he knew a lot about. If you just read his published works, you just get a small idea of the range of his knowledge. Another example comes to mind. In 1980, there was a conference at the Albany held in honor of Thomas Zas. So Murray gave a paper on psycho history, which was the use of psychoanalysis in trying to understand history. Murray was very critical of it, and he was able to absorb all the literature on psychoanalysis. He knew all the books critical of Freud. He had a complete bibliography. So again, any topic you were to ask him, he would know an enormous about. Now, in addition to his wide range of knowledge, he had a tremendous analytical mind. If you gave him an argument, he would see instantly what was wrong with it, what were the flaws in it. He would know all sorts of references that could be cited about it. I can't really think of anyone that I've met who could really match him in the quickness and sharpness of his intellect. Certainly, of the people I've met, he's the one who influenced me the most. He and his wonderful wife, Joey, were very kind to me, and I'll never forget what they did for me. I should tell you also that Murray was interested not only in information scholarship, but he had a very keen interest in people. For example, at the Mises University programs that we had when he was here and was teaching them, he would be very interested in what all the students were doing. I remember on one occasion I was sitting with him at that time and we had them at Stanford. Everyone would go to all the lectures and I was sitting with him and we were making notes. A woman came up who was in the class and said, you seem to be having a good time during the lecture. What we didn't tell her was we were making lists of which students should be kicked out of the program. Another time, Murray was, I was telling Murray about some item about, he was very interested in about concerned of some item, something had been going on. He really wanted to know, I was talking to him about this. It was sort of a very confidential item. It was, as they say, hot gossip item. So a student came up and was sort of standing there while we were talking. Murray looked around and said, can't you see we're busy? He wanted to know what everybody was doing about everything. He really was a wonderful person. I don't think I'd ever meet anyone as great as he was and I'm very fortunate to have known him. The big problem I had with Murray Rothbard was stomach cramps. He was so funny. He just had me in stitches for hours. I almost died of stomach something or other. I mean, he was just hilarious, making fun of everybody and Bill Buckley. He was just, he was horrible. He was the sort of person that my parents warned me against. He would drink alcohol and he would maybe smoke and he would stay up late. He would stay up till five in the morning and all these bad things. It was just very bad. Murray would just cackle like a banshee about playing risk and he would say, you know, we anarchists are the only ones who can play risk, which is the idea you take over the world. Where nobody, everyone else wanted to take over the world. We didn't, so we could sort of play it honestly. One of the most admirable things about Murray is the way he treated Hans Hoppe. Murray grounded libertarianism in natural law, natural rights. And along comes this punk kid, Hans. Murray is 15 years older than me and Hans is maybe 10 years younger. So Murray is like 25 years older than Hans and maybe Murray was 50 and Hans was 25. I forget the exact years. And Hans came along with this much better grounding of libertarianism in Murray's view, the argument from argument. And usually what happens is when you're the leader of a group like Murray was and some kid comes along and does you better, what you do is like if somebody ever tried this online ranch, you'd kick them right out. And Murray embraced this. And to me, this was one of the sort of an indication of where he was at, where he was coming from. He was after the truth and if Hans did something better than him, he acknowledged that and thanked Hans and supported Hans. When I first started writing my writing career, I would keep track of how many words per day I could do. And I would keep track in terms of number of pages and each page had around 300 words. So if I did five pages a day, that was pretty good, 1,500 words. And most days I wouldn't do five pages, but every once in a while, sometimes I would do five and sometimes 10, sometimes 15. One day I got up really early at eight in the morning and I worked until two the next morning and I did 23 pages, which was way more than anything I'd ever done. So I'm, you know, feeling macho and I'm going to compare myself with a man. I would never compare myself about quality. I mean, that's sort of like my chest against Bobby Fisher's chest. I'm just talking about quantity. So I called Murray and I said, well, how many pages can you do in a day? And he goes, who keeps tracking that? But I pressed. I was sort of pushy and though, well, I still am now. Shut up. It's true, but, you know, so finally Murray says, eight pages an hour. Eight pages an hour. I mean, so my whole day of 23 pages was roughly three of his hours. And, you know, a good typist who does 100 words a minute could beat Murray in terms of typing eight pages an hour. But I mean, Murray is typing on a typewriter. None of these computer things. And, you know, and it's just original work. I remember one time Murray was, we were sitting around in the living room and Murray was saying, well, he has to prepare this paper for, you know, two weeks from now. And Joey says, what? Two weeks from now you have to do it tomorrow. So Murray disappears into his office for an hour or two. And he comes out with 12 pages or something like that. It's really, he was just phenomenal. When I, I was born in Brooklyn. I was a track teammate in high school at Bernie Sanders. My views on economics were roughly like his views then. I went through an iron ran phase and then I was a minarchist like iron ran. And then Larry Moss and Jerry Wallows, his roommate, tried to convince me to meet Murray Rothbard. And the attraction was that Murray was an anarchist. So I didn't want to meet him because he, you know, an anarchist is crazy. You can't be an anarchist. You know, that's just chaos and weirdness. So I didn't want to meet Murray. And finally the two of them ganged up on me and prevailed upon me to meet with Murray. And he converted me into anarchists in about five minutes. I mean, it was the fastest conversion ever, I think. I'm not sure about that. But he just sort of used my arguments that I got from Henry Haslitz's economics in one lesson about market failure. And if you do well, you prosper. And if you do badly, you lose out. And he just applied it to the government, which I had never thought to do. He just really wanted to be my friend. And I could never understand that because I'd read man economy in the state all during the day and at night I'd go to his dinner parties. And what would a genius like that want to do with me? And the only way I could be worthy of him was to argue with him. So I would just say, well, on page 202, this is a mistake. And he was just, I was a real pain in the neck. And he was so nice. He had a picture of Mises on his wall. And I said, how could you have a picture of Mises on you while Mises wasn't an anarchist? And Murray just sort of smiled at me and said, well, you know, read Mises, you'll find it. He was so gentle and so kind to me. And I was such a pain in the neck. And I'm glad he was tolerant of me. And I try to be tolerant of my students to pass on the baton that Murray passed on to me. I have one distinction that I think no one else on this planet has, and that I think I'm the only co-author with Murray on anything. Virtually everything that Murray wrote, he wrote as a single author. And one thing he and I are the co-author, this is when I was the associate editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, which was the predecessor to the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, of which Joe Salerno is now editor. I wanted to mention something about Joe. There was this debate. When did the modern Austrian revival start? Was it in 1973 with the South Royalton thing? And then Hayek's Nobel Prize around that time. And the South Royalton thing, you had three speakers. You had Murray, Izzy Kursner, and Ludwig Lachmann. And there must have been, oh, 40 or so of us, 30. Roger was there, I think Joe was there, and 30 other people in their 30s like me. And Joe made the point, well, if the revival of modern Austrian economics started in 1973, how did you get 30 young people to attend this thing? And Joe quite clearly says, and I think very accurately, that it wasn't in 1973 started, it was in 1962, which was the publication of Man, Economy, and State. So I think that Murray's, that book was really the key element of the start. I remember one time I have a friend, Michael Adelstein, and he is a mentor, Albert Ellis, the therapist is a mentor of my friend, Michael Adelstein. And me and Michael and Murray went over to Albert Ellis' house and we sung rational songs. It was sort of one of the highlights in my career. I have so many many other stories to tell about Murray. I regard him as a friend, he regarded me as a friend. I'm honored in that. I think he is the second best economist in the history of the universe, second to Mises, and he is certainly the first best libertarian and historian. And he philosopher, I mean, sociologist, he was a real Renaissance person. I'm honored to have known Murray, my dear friend. Thank you, Walter. I like Robert Higgs still more than Murray to this day. I came across his name in my junior year in college. I read an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine in which it happened to mention that Murray Rothbard was the leader of the libertarian movement in the U.S. and also was an Austrian economist. And I had heard the term Austrian economist in my history of economic thought class. So I thought it was simply a closed chapter of economic thought. Well, I mentioned this to some of the people I hung around with at the Young Americans for Freedom. There was sort of a libertarian wing and then there were some conservatives. And one of the people handed me a little booklet. I was an economic major at the time. And it was this booklet, Economic Depressions, They're Causing Cure. But it was in the form of what was called a Bramble Mini Book. I think it was published by the Constitutional Alliance in Michigan. But then it was about a third of the sizes. It was literally a mini book. It was very small. So I read it right away and it took about 45 minutes to read. And it completely changed my intellectual outlook. I learned more from that book in those 45 minutes. And I had in two and a half years of sitting through dull, dreary, dismal courses on macroeconomics and the principles of macroeconomics and fiscal policy. So that was the point at which I first became familiar with Murray Rothbard. I then was, when I went to graduate school, I was elected Vice President of the New Jersey Libertarian Party. And so myself and the president heard that Murray Rothbard was speaking over in New York at a libertarian conference. So we went to see him and I was very excited. And in the meantime, between reading the small mini book and going to the conference, I had read most of his other things. So I had in my mind, of course, an image of him as a very scholarly and grave presence. And when we got there and it was his turn to speak, this short, jolly, actually joyous guy just bound it up onto the stage and says, you know, I just came back from Europe and I'm glad I'm here. He says, I can say the word anarchist without being hooded down. And so one thing that stood out my memory was that the speaker before Murray Rothbard was Robert Lefebvre, who was a pacifist as well as a libertarian and didn't even believe in self-defense against violence. So at the end of Murray's talk, someone raised their hand and said, well, do you accept Lefebvre's position? And so Murray, who always was great at giving you examples, instead of answering the question directly, he said, well, if somebody was across the room with a mallet and was coming at me, I plug him. So this guy's great. I mean, you know, he's just a wonderful personality as well as a great, great scholar. So a few months later, I decided as the vice president of the Libertarian Party in New Jersey to have him speak at our convention. And so he was, you know, I called him up and I told him that we didn't really have much money and so on. And so I was going to try to bargain him down to $100 to come across the river to New Jersey. But he says, I'll do it for $75. And I said, fine, that's great. So he came and some people, I think he didn't drive. Or he only, as he said to me, said, I formally drive. I have a license, but I really don't drive. So he came over and so we were talking and I happened to mention that I was a graduate student in economics at Rutgers University. And he immediately, we were talking about something else. He immediately stopped and he was overjoyed. So he started looking around for a pen or pencil to write my name down. So I gave him a pen, he wrote my name down. He said, I'll have people get in touch with you on Monday. I don't know what that meant. But sure enough, on Monday somebody called me up and said that we heard from our Rothbard that you're a good Austrian and that we want you to join our reading group. And I did. I joined the reading group and Walter was in it actually, Richard Fink and a few others. And so I guess there were reports back to Murray by members of the group that I was good. So at some point I was asked to come to Murray's apartment. And I, you know, like Roger, I was very, very afraid. But you know, I knew he was jolly and pleasant and everything, but I didn't know how it would be one-on-one. And basically he was vetting me to see how hardcore I was. So Richard Fink drove me over there. I went to his apartment and we were in a living room. And it was, you know, midnight, one o'clock, we were still discussing things. So he asked me about the looter question, you know, because the riots had occurred in 6768. And his position was that, you know, if a looter's coming into your store, you can shoot them. But if they take your property and they're running down the street, then you have to resort to the police or, you know, you can't shoot them in the back. I said, why not? He said, I never thought of that. So, you know, you're someone I could have a conversation with. So I think I passed the audition, you know, with that answer. So that was right before South Royalton. Then I got an invitation to South Royalton and as Walter sort of covered South Royalton. But at the time I saw, you know, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kurzer and Ludwig Lachman. I had read their works by then and I, you know, I was very, you know, in awe of all of them. But when I thought more about it, I think Lou Rockwell had asked me to give a talk about man economy and state sometime in the 1980s. And I thought about it and it struck me that, as Walter pointed out, in 1974, when we had the conference at South Royalton, which was the first North American Austrian conference, that all these young people showed up, young PhDs, graduate students like myself and so on. And I said, well, where do they all come from? I mean, you know, it wasn't like a field of dreams. If you hold it, they will come. I mean, it didn't happen like that. It wasn't a big bang. It wasn't a big bang. But then I look back and it wasn't only man economy and state, but Rothbard had written America's Great Depression, what has government done to our money, power and market, and Four New Liberty, all within between 1962 and 1973. And to a man or to a man and woman, because Karen Vaughan was there, a woman, everyone, everyone there was really a Rothbardian at that point. He was the main reason behind the revival of Austrian economics. I just want to say a few other things. One of the greatest memories I have of Murray was meeting him at his favorite delicatessen in New York, a Wolf's Delicatessen on the corner of 46th Street and Fifth Avenue, a Jewish deli that just has great food and he loved. So we would meet there maybe a few times a year, three times a year, four times a year. He was teaching at Brooklyn Poly. I was teaching at Pace University in New York City. But in the 1990s, he was teaching at Las Vegas, but he'd come back in the summers. And so we were meeting while he was writing his History of Economic Thought. And he would talk and exchange pleasantries and then he would tell me about the new things he was finding in the history of economic thought and how this guy was really a bad guy and how this guy who he thought was a bad guy was actually a good guy, how this guy had deviations and so on and so forth. And it was great and he would go on and then he'd stop and he'd say, I'm so sorry, I haven't let you talk, do you want to talk? He was giving me a private seminar. I mean, it was the greatest thing that he would think that I wouldn't want to hear him more. I mean, he was really a humble seeker of truth and I really, really appreciated that. And I think that really sums him up. There was one other point I wanted to make. I'll stop there and then we'll have some time for some questions. Thank you. I know the point I wanted to make. He used to love Matt Helm novels. And Matt Helm was kind of a lower rent but American version of James Bond. And he told me the one thing he learned from Matt Helm novels and so he had to actually have some props and stuff. He said, well, the first thing you learn is that when you come into a room, you've got to come in blasting. He says, you can't ask any questions, come in blasting. Blasting. But so that was the other side of Murray. I mean, he was just a wonderful individual and a great man.