 What I'd like to talk about briefly this evening is Murray Rothbard's legacy. And as I mentioned earlier, Dr. Paul's office was sort of a frequent gathering spot for libertarians in DC on the hill during his time there. We held a lot of great lectures for staff and some members of Congress, including one with the great Dr. Walter Williams, who I'm sure many of you know from George Mason University and otherwise. So at the time, and he may still live there, Dr. Williams lived on a farm in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and he would commute down to the Northern Virginia area to George Mason University to teach mid-week and then he would commute home again at the end of the week. And it was a long drive back, apparently. He told us this story and he would get home late and his wife used to worry about him driving home in the dark. So in the seminar he gave to us, he made a little joke. He said, well, I wanna make sure I have enough life insurance to take care of my family if something should ever happen to me. But I don't wanna have so much life insurance. The deep down, my wife starts to think about all the possibilities. She might enact with the proceeds. So obviously he was joking, but his point that he made to us that day was that nobody is indispensable and nobody's so important the world can't live without them. The best we can hope for is to leave some kind of legacy for the future. And in Dr. Williams' talk, he pointed out how great men and women leave a legacy through their work. And this is certainly true for Murray Rothbard. Even though he died much too young, what we're left with, of course, is Murray's work, which is to say a lot. We're left with a lot. Here I have his 62 page bibliography spanning from 1949 until his death in 1995. It includes 30 full length books, 100 book chapters, over 1,000 scholarly and popular articles. And goodness knows how many talks at conferences and symposias and debates over the years. It's almost unimaginable. And just imagine if he had lived another 10 or 20 years even if his output had been halved by age. I saw Guido Holtzman, I think, is here. I saw him earlier. He says it's impossible for anyone to read everything Rothbard ever wrote. I don't know if that's true or not, but it turns out we're still finding stuff. So I think it's safe to say that it's rare. And that's one of the things about Murray is his critics oftentimes dismiss him based on his non-academic work and his willingness to write for lay audiences on philosophy and ethics and political theory and all kinds of areas beyond economics. And we can only ask them, how many academics are more wildly read than ever 20 years after they're gone? How many have 500 page manuscripts lying around to be published as new books 20 years after they die? Which is the case with Murray. You'll see this weekend we have a beautiful new book on the progressive era edited by Patrick Newman who's in the audience. Who today even remembers Arthur Burns? Does anyone in the audience know that name? Former Chairman of the Fed. He was also a Columbia professor who very unkindly tried to block Murray's dissertation when he was there. His dissertation on the Panic of 1819. So today, whose legacy endures between Murray and the former Fed Chairman, Arthur Burns? Millions of people around the world know and read Rothbard because he didn't limit himself to academic journals. There's this sort of recurring theme that replayed itself throughout his life. If only he had tempered himself a bit, downplayed his more radical views, especially on foreign policy and war and anarchism and banking, especially politics. He absolutely could have secured a comfortable tenure position at a major university. He certainly had the pedigree and the intelligence and the resume for it with multiple degrees from Columbia, an incredible publishing ethic. So when we consider this, it's hard not to see parallels between Murray's work and life and legacy and that of Ludwig von Mises and his squirrel. They were by all accounts two very, very different individuals in temperament and otherwise. But both were treated shabbily by academia, despite having written major treatises. Both were seen as intransigent, even by their ideological compatriots and neither ever made much money. Their reward has to lie, therefore, in their legacies. And some of you in this room know, maybe many of you in this room know, that there was actually an effort to downplay the work of Mises for strategic reasons. Dr. Joe Salerno spoke to me the other day. He recalls this shift beginning in the late 1970s in libertarian circles. And Joe was actually present for some of these conversations. This wasn't a conspiracy or some attempt to hurt Mises personally. It was just a tactical decision made not by his enemies, his intellectual enemies, but actually by his fellow travelers in the libertarian movement. See, his intransigence was a problem. And his memoirs were a problem. And thus, more palatable voices who could win over the mainstream were needed. And as a result of this, a sort of tacit decision was made to promote in particular the work of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and of course James Buchanan, all brilliant and good men with brilliant careers. Hayek and Friedman at this time had already won no bells, already had the cachet of this. Buchanan would win one later in 1986. But arguably none of those three men approached the depth and breadth of Mises or wrote anything approaching the level of human action. But despite all of this, despite everything Mises faced, of course, before he came to America, but also after, his work was just too important to be ignored. His work broke through all these boundaries and spoke for itself. And as a result, his legacy today is secure. Even his worst critics now admit that he was among the most influential economists and thinkers of the 20th century. He absolutely earned his status. And many people in this room along with Murray and Lerakwa played a role in this in securing Mises' legacy and making sure he held his rightful place in their history of economics. And I think it's interesting if we judge Mises' influence by how vocal and highly placed his critics are, then his legacy absolutely remains intact. And we know this because every six months or so, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paul Krugman, et cetera, produce an article lamenting how libertarians have taken over everything. And how they've stolen democracy. And they always mention Mises in these articles now. I think that's as good an indicator as any that you've made it. Now it's interesting as a side note, these same outlets frequently attack Hayek and Friedman and Buchanan as well. In fact, the latter, James Buchanan was recently the particular target of a very dishonest and shameful hit job book called Democracy in Chains. So maybe there's a lesson there for all of us. Maybe in transagents it's not quite the vice we thought it was and maybe even small compromises will never win the favor of those with a political axe to grind. Those who will never support good economics or liberty. Maybe Austro-libertarian thinkers should focus just on the truth. Now Rothbard certainly took this lesson to heart and he did not hesitate to challenge even his own great mentors and certainly not the academic orthodoxy. But for all of Murray's output, for all of his brilliance, his legacy is still very much in question. Murray's place in history as an economist and as a thinker is not secure. Like Mises, Rothbard continues to face headwinds even after his death. Many libertarians consider his work too radical, too focused on narco-capitalism or insufficiently devoted to egalitarianism. They don't like his insistence on a natural rights justification for laissez-faire. They don't like his ironclad anti-war, anti-interventionist views. And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of economists don't like his forays into political theory despite of course Hayek having done so as well. Some don't like his strategic overtures to both the left and the right in different periods of his life. But we do. And by we, I mean the people who care about the Austrian tradition. This certainly doesn't mean that his work can't be refuted or criticized or expanded upon. Certainly everybody here probably disagrees with Murray about something because he wrote about everything, right? We don't have to lionize him but he deserves to have his legacy made secure to take his rightful place in the ranks of the great 20th century economists and political theorists. As I would say, I would argue as the rightful heir to the Austrian tradition. And we shouldn't worry about his legacy out of spite for his detractors or not because we want to prove he was right and not even out of a sense of justice for Murray personally because he contributed so much. We should care about his legacy because the world still needs him. It still needs a distinctly Rothbardian worldview to counter the economic and political orthodoxy of our time, just as he did throughout his career. And he still has plenty to teach us as his new book shows, which you're gonna love. You know, the world, especially young people who don't know his work needs Murray Rothbard. We still need his unbelievably trenchant analysis of politics and culture. If you go back and read some of the early issues of the Rothbard Rockwell Report, articles from the early 1990s on Rwanda or Kosovo or the Clintons or PC or politics ruining sports, every word of those articles holds up today. And economists, especially economic students, desperately need Rothbard. They need man economy and state as the bridge, I would say the more accessible bridge back to human action and to the Austrian tradition, even as they suffer through their 800 level math classes and learn how to force data into predictive models that don't work. Libertarians certainly still need Rothbard for his uncompromising ethical case for Lausse Faire to prevent libertarianism from sliding any further into some sort of hybrid ideology of low tax liberalism that sells out principles but still doesn't win anything. And we need Murray more than ever to show us the progressives far from being the champions of the poor and marginalized actually represent nothing more than an unholy alliance of state interests and court intellectuals. And we need Murray to remind us that conservatives are nothing more than a jobs and war program who consolidate the gains of the left. We need his wit, wisdom and spirit, all of which are in short supply today. The world still needs Murray because he still matters and it's up to all of us in this room and beyond to secure his legacy as one of the 20th century's great thinkers. In closing, I'll just say that the world has Mises, but it still needs Rothbard. Thank you very much.