 I have a distinct honor and privilege that I'm going to be speaking about my friend Murray Rothbard and what I'm going to do is a little bit about what he stood for intellectually and movement-building wise and a little bit about my own personal stories with him. The benefit of that is it's not really that public, whereas what Murray has done is there for everyone to know, so I'm going to do a little of each. Plus I'll tell a little bit about my own story and I'd like to recommend this book which is a compilation of the stories of how did you become a libertarian or had you first become an Austrian economist and the most of the people in this book are the professors at this week's long lecture. The one that if you're perusing it that brings tears to my eyes every time I read it is Joe Salerno's who is not known as a dramatic person but his story in here is worth the whole price of admission as far as I'm concerned. Okay so a little bit about myself. I was born in Brooklyn and I went to Madison High School with Bernie Sanders. He and I were friends, we were both on the track team. He was one of the best runners in the city. I was sort of not that good of a runner. I saw the rear end of him disappearing around the track many times and I had the same views as he did and we both went to Madison High School for four years and then Brooklyn College for one year and when I was a senior at Brooklyn College Bernie went off to Chicago so we sort of diverged in many ways but when I was a senior in Brooklyn College I was still a Pinko Kami like Bernie or a Bernieite and Ayn Rand came to lecture at Brooklyn College and I came to boo and hiss her because she was evil because she favored free enterprise and everyone knew that if you favored capitalism you hated the poor and you wanted to see starvation and and you wanted to see the rich you know exploit the poor so I was booing and hissing her and I didn't get enough booing and hissing but by the at the end of the lecture what happened was they announced that the Ayn Rand study club that had invited her to speak there was having a lunch in honor honor and anyone could come and I was ready to you know kick some more butt and show her that she was wrong and converted to the true socialist faith and there was this long long table maybe 50 people on the side and Ayn Rand was sitting at the head of it and Nathaniel Brennan and Leonard Peacoff and Greenspan and all the senior collective as they called it I was relegated to the foot of the table at the way at the other end and I turned to my neighbor and said this capitalist stuff is no good socialism is the way to go and they said well you know I don't really know about that but go up to the other end of the table and I was maybe oh I don't know 22 or so maybe 21 I was a senior in college and Ayn Rand was maybe 50 Nathaniel Brennan 35 or so and the others were adults older than me and I said I was a husband in those days still am sort of pushy and I and I stuck my head between Ayns and Nathaniel Brennan's and I said there's a socialist here who wants to debate someone on socialism and capitalism and I said who is it I said me and they were amazed and but Brennan was very nice he said look I'll come to the other end of the table and sit and talk with you on two conditions can't sit here there's no room the two conditions are one that I promised not to let the conversation lapse after this time but we continue until we settle this and I promised and the second thing is he said read two books that I'll recommend one was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand the other was Economics and One Lesson by Henry Haslett and I went to I agreed we discussed things and I must have gone to his house oh four or five times Ayn Rand's house his house and I read the two books and lo and behold I was converted to not libertarianism but to objectivism and I wasn't really interested in most of objectivism the philosophy metaphysics epistemology I was mainly interested in economics of it and I got the Henry Haslett message and the Ayn Rand message that markets are good and markets help people I would then go to the NBI lectures and if you asked a nice question of Ayn Rand like on page 32 you said this could you please elaborate or what did you get the idea from she would be very nice and gentle and talk to you but if you settle on page 32 you said this but on page 403 you said that and I see a contradiction she would say get out and she was serious I mean I mean when Tom Woods asked me nasty questions I joke about you know kicking him out of the room but wasn't serious so I would sort of leave in disgust because that's not the way to do anything but then I would have an approach avoidance because that there was the only group that I knew of that was free market and then I met Larry Moss who was my fellow student in at Columbia and he said you got to meet this guy Murray Rothbard he's an anarchist I said anarchist you know that's evil I don't want to meet Murray Rothbard he's you know crazy and Jerry Wallace was his roommate and Jerry and Larry ganged up on me and somehow after four or five threats to my life that I should meet Murray I finally met Murray and I thought you know Murray be sort of like one of these guys you know six foot two and muscles from here to there and and carrying a gun and a spear sort of like those black panther types and he was this short fat little guy and just giggling away it sort of blew my mind Murray and I have a lot in common with both short fat New York City Jews we're both atheists we both married shix's who were taller than us shix's a Christian girl for those who don't know that neither of us got a divorce we both write a lot both got PhDs at Columbia both have a sense of humor both Austro-Libitarians my big problem with Murray was stomach cramps because I'd be in his house from six in the evening till about six in the next morning and I'd leave and my stomach hurt from laughing because he'd have you in stitches for 12 hours straight it was really cruel and unusual punishment I mean Murray was just so funny and gossip and talking about this guy and we used to play risk and in risk the idea is to take over the world and Murray would cackle I'm gonna take over the world you know I'm gonna be the dictator of the world and it was just ludicrous because you know Murray was against taking over the world by anyone so we also were born in New York City we both went west him to UNLV me to the Fraser Institute in Canada so we have a lot in common but I have one thing over Murray I won the Murray Rothbard Medal of Freedom and he never did of course the reason he didn't win it was named after him so he could hardly win the medal in his own honor so in about ten minutes or so he he convinced me about the anarchism and and I was a dead set against this anarchism stuff it couldn't work it's evil whatever and Murray made the following points he said well right now the relationship of China and Chile is one of anarchy there's no world government above them the relationship of the US and Spain is one of anarchy there's no world government do you want world government and obviously I didn't and that was a very very powerful argument that sort of upended me another one was he was using you know in karate when somebody comes at you punch him in judo when someone comes at you sort of toss him over the shoulder use his momentum well Murray used judo on me I was into the haslet stuff about why markets work for carrots and shoes and he said well why couldn't it work for police and courts and he sort of explained that and it sort of clicked into me the other one that Murray meant mentioned at that time was well how does government start up is it unanimous when did any government ever start up that was unanimous and I couldn't come up with any reason and then the idea of secession we believe in anything between consenting adults and and nobody should be forced to do anything but government is unless they allow you to secede and down to the individual level which is anarchy I mean what we really want we're not against government we want to have seven billion governments one for each you get it so like if you ask a girl out for a date you have to get your foreign minister to deal with her foreign minister so in other words we're all sovereign and Murray was very much against public choice which I was sort of into and you know this theoretical unanimity that Buchanan and Tala come up with so Murray really did a number on me and I was converted to anarchism in about 15 minutes it was probably one of the quickest conversions ever and it took a little longer for me to get into Austrian economics because the synthetic a priori which I went into in my other lecture and also I had a vested interest I was still getting my PhD under Gary Becker who was a logical positivist so it was a harder sell but eventually I got it I want to tell you a few stories one is with Roger Garrison is Roger here oh there he is Roger is a very nice guy very polite and he came to Murray's living room and there were a whole bunch of us there and it must maybe we had dinner it was 9 o'clock and Roger was just writing his stuff about the the triangle and and and the stuff that's now in his books that was the very beginning of it and 9 30 came 10 o'clock 10 30 and Roger starts making motions to leave because he was a polite guy and you knew visit someone's house and it's 10 30 or 11 o'clock and you start to leave and Murray saying what are you doing Roger why are you leaving Murray's schedule he would get up at around 2 in the afternoon and go to sleep at around 6 in the morning 7 in the morning so Murray salon lasted until 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and you know poor Roger is probably on a normal schedule so that was one interesting story about how Murray and Roger somehow had a reconcile their time time dimensions another one I wanted to tell you about as Murray and Hans Hans hoppy Murray is 15 years older than me I'm 75 I think Hans about 10 or 12 years younger than me so Murray is about 25 years older than Hans and I remember when Hans first came to to the city and became part of our group and I have to draw a little picture of the way I see libertarianism and nobody better laugh at my art this is this is modern art and later on I'm going to sing a song and nobody better laugh at how I sing which is equally pathetic but anyway this is a tipi like the native Indians have a tipi and this here for me is the non-aggression principle and private property rights based on homesteading homesteading and that's what the libertarianism is for me libertarianism is for me this little bit of non-aggression principle and and homesteading private property rights and what these are are implications implications of of the theory you know what's our view on the minimum wage well it's coercive because someone has told that they can't rent their labor at a certain price what's our view on legalizing marijuana what's our view on war these are all implications of the non-aggression principle so what's up here what's up here is the justifications of the non-aggression principle now the Randians would say a equals a that's their justification don't ask they have a whole song and dance about that the religious people would say God God is the one who ordained that we have the non-aggression principle I'm talking about libertarians different justifications of it Murray had this thing called natural rights other people have other justifications for it my own justification was sort of if you don't believe in it you're you're an idiot wasn't very sophisticated but you know we all have our justifications and my own interests are not so much in justifying the non-aggression principle and homesteading and property rights but rather the implications of them in any case Hans comes along with this thing called argument from argument the idea here very briefly I won't do full justice to it but you must read Hans on this is that the only way to settle anything is through argument so what's true in argument well what's true in argument is that you're conceding that your opponent has a right to speak otherwise you can't have much of an argument and if he has the right to speak he has lungs and a larynx and a pharynx and he has a place to stand on namely he's conceding private property rights so if he denies private property rights if he stands there and has the audacity to say private property rights are wrong he's using private property rights to say that and therefore he can't say it has to shut up which is a very nice argument but Murray had natural rights as his argument and how did Murray react to Hans I mean Hans was this young pup kid and Murray was 50 years old or so and Hans was 25 or so and what Murray said was Hans was right I mean you wouldn't find Ayn Rand doing anything like that I mean this sort of shows Murray's character that Murray would follow Hans a young kid who was a follower of Murray and loved and revered Murray as we all did and to me this sort of bespeaks Murray's personality which is perhaps even more important than his contribution I don't want to get into which is more important I mean he's made magnificent contributions but this idea that he would be so open to his followers like or students Hans was never a formal student nor was I but we were students in the very important sense of that. Another thing that I follow from Murray is when I first met Murray I called him Dr. Rothbard or Professor Rothbard I said no no no Murray Murray and that's the way I try to treat my students and people when you call me Professor Block I mean a lot of what I am is because of Murray I just sort of follow him not slavishly I don't agree with him on everything just 99.9% of everything but I follow him whenever I'm in doubt I ask what would Murray think about this I think about Murray pretty much every day I have this horrible experience that I have to tell you about my present wife Mary Beth once asked if if she and Murray were drowning who would I save and like an idiot I said Murray and I'm lucky she didn't break up with me in my next life I'll be cooler so this is a word of advice for you people here Murray used to say we kept looking around for the in crowd and finally we realized we were the in crowd so I think in some sense the way I see the Mises Institute and I mean no disrespect to Mises but the way I see the Mises Institute this is sort of Murray Rothbard's living room writ large Murray Rothbard had a living room which was a big living room and we'd all sit around and cackle and discuss stuff and there was this long long hallway that looked sort of like the walls here namely it had books from floor to ceiling and the way I see it it's almost that the Mises Institute is more the spirit of Murray Rothbard than Mises I'm just speculating here and I hope I'm not insulting anyone but Mises was sort of more narrow mainly economics whereas Murray was economics but everything else under the sun from sociology to politics the strategy to anarchism to a war and peace to history so and the Mises Institute to me is more like the spirit of Murray than Mises but Mises came first and Mises was Murray's teacher let me talk a little bit about Murray's strategy Murray's been criticized for his strategy because sometimes he's a lefty and sometimes he's a righty sometimes he's a peace and freedom person sometimes he's a what do you call it paleo conservative what's going on there well you have to realize that when I first met Murray this was in 1965 or 66 something like that we libertarians were very few I once asked Murray how many libertarians were there in the whole world and he said 25 25 libertarians in the whole world in 1966 nowadays I mean you walk down the street in every fifth person well I'm exaggerating it's a libertarian but we are everywhere the gay say we're everywhere well we are everywhere also not that we're gay well some of us let me let me let me not go into that I get I get distracted by my own eloquence here so I remember the peace and freedom party and this is during the war in Vietnam and how many libertarians were in Murray's little coterie oh six or eight or ten that was it and we joined the peace and freedom party and the peace and freedom party had oh maybe 300 progressive labor these were the Maoists and maybe 150 Trotskyites both bad guys but they were against the war in Vietnam so we made a common cause with them and there must have been eight or ten of us libertarians I forget exactly who was there Joe were you a part of that the peace and Joe Joe was a baby he was in diapers at that time so he his mother wouldn't let him stay out later so yeah I mean he looks like an old man now but he was a baby when I first met him I think Jerry to Chile and maybe Larry Moss and Jerry Wallows and Leonard Ligio and Joe Peden and people like and maybe Ralph and Ron Ralph Raco and Ron Hamaway so we were about ten of us and we had to make a common cause we were on the side of the progressive labor against the Trotskyites whenever there was a dispute and I remember one time remember I was doing my PhD dissertation on rent control and we had a deal with the progressive labor they would come out and favor the gold standard and we would come out in favor of rent control so we were having a vote and I was sort of like that guy in that movie you know the Nazi salute and all they want Murray told me to vote for rent control and I said Murray I can't vote for vote for rent control so I voted for rent control and and the interesting part was how did the progressive labor people justify to their group that we should favor the gold standard of all things so it was sort of a hoot I mean I sort of followed Murray around like a slavish dog I mean I you know I mean I was just so much in love with him now comes the song are you ready for the song to know know know him is to love love love him and I do no applause for my singing is roughly on par with my art artistry and but I love Murray I had a bromance with him I look if Donald can have a bromance with Putin I can have one with Mary I mean I just my big problem with Murray is I would I was this young kid just getting my PhD and I would read man economy in state and then I knew that that night I would go and speak to Murray and he would he would be friendly with me and I didn't think I was deserving of friendship with this genius I mean it's sort of like like I was having dinner with Mozart or something it's just I I seen Murray as the Mozart or the Bach of libertarianism and Austrianism I'm a big fan of Mozart and Bach in music and I had to be worthy of him and how could I be worthy of him the only way I could think of being worthy with him is to be very critical hypercritical so you know just make stupid things up to be worthy of him and he just wanted to be friends with me I couldn't get that through my stupid thick head that he would want to be friends with me and I think I speak for all of the faculty members here when I say that we want to be friends with you we don't want to be put on a pedestal or anything like that we see you as the next generation we see you as the people that we are handing over the baton that Murray and Mises handed over to us so think of that when you think of us faculty members I have to tell you another story I the last Mises had a well Mises had a tough career as did Murray as did I we three had that in common as well I didn't get tenure until I was 61 when I went to Loyola University and I got fired in 04 or 5 or 6 jobs not because I'm not amiable and not because I can't draw and not because I can't sing but because of my views obviously and Ludwig von Mises had a hard time also he was a professor at NYU but NYU didn't pay his salary it was paid for by businessmen who liked Mises and Mises had seminars and the very last seminar Murray dragged all of his living room crowd to Mises and Mises was very old and he could hardly hear and he could hardly speak and Percy Graves would sort of translate for him he would tell Mises the question Percy Graves had a very loud voice this is the husband of Bettina the engraves who was Mises secretary for many years and I got to shape Mises's hand and I never washed it since so if you shape my hand you channel Mises that's my my Mises story okay what else do I have Murray let me talk a little bit about his public accomplishments and I get off me and Murray and my relationship with him just for a minute I'll get back to that Murray was a magnificent Austrian economist in the tradition of Manger, Bomberwerk, Mises, Hayek and then Rothbard his man economy in state is is a trip you must read I'm very jealous of you people because some of you will be reading man economy in state for the first time I will never be able again to read man economy in state for the first time maybe for the sixth time the first time but not for the first time so you people are lucky he made contributions in the depressions the logic of action one and two every area of economics micro macro labor money methodology history trade public choice law and economics air pollution in air pollution the best thing ever written on environmental economics as far as I'm concerned is a thing that Murray wrote in 1982 I forget the exact title but it has air pollution in it and for me the the breakthrough was seeing that dust particles are a trespass and once I could put things in the in the system of property rights then then the problems seemed easy to me to solve but air pollution before looking at it that way was difficult in other words it's not so much clean air that we're worried about it's rather dust particles coming from my factory into your lungs and into your laundry when we had laundry out on clothesline and once I saw that I it was sort of like the the curtains came apart and I could see the problem for what it for what it was and I've done a lot of work on my own on that another one is blackmail the other day I showed you an entire book that I wrote on blackmail where did I get that from I got that from many economy in state and I think Murray mentioned blackmail in three sentences sort of as a throwaway that blackmail is not per se a violation of property rights because all you're threatening is to be a gossip so a lot of my work comes from little bits and pieces that Murray wrote and I just sort of expanded on them I have to tell you another story when I was a youngster I used to keep track of how many pages I could write in a day pages with 300 words so if I did three pages that was 900 words and I figured you know it's okay pretty good most days or many days I would do five pages with 1500 words and I was very happy when I did five pages every once in a rare while I could do 10 or 15 pages one day I got up early in the morning maybe 8 in the morning and I worked until 2 the next morning and I did 23 pages so I'm you know full of myself and I call up Murray say well how many pages do you do in a day and Murray goes that's yes Murray what do you think of the state he says so he said to me and he says who counts you know what are you an idiot counting pages he didn't say that it was too polite but that was what he meant and I was very persistent very pushy and he was so gentle with me I remember one time I saw a picture of Mises on the wall and I said Murray why do you have a picture of Mises on the wall Mises isn't an anarchist and Murray was so kind and generally he could have said get out or something he said you know just read a little Mises you'll you'll come to understand but it shows you how weird I was when I well I'm still weird in many ways but how super weird I was when I was very young and being tutored by Murray so anyway I persisted I said Murray you got to tell me how many pages you do and he said what was it eight hundred eight pages and thanks I need I need all the help I can get you see I'm getting seen all eight pages an hour so in my best day of 23 call 24 pages I did three hours of his work now look I'm not comparing quality I would never dare compare quality but just quantity in my best day of a whole day I did call it 24 and he did eight pages an hour now a good typist could do better than that good typist does a hundred words an hour could do better than that but this is Murray creating new stuff Lou tells me the story just the other day that Murray was once supposed to do a paper from for some conference and he figured he had another month to do it and Joey his wife his beloved wife I said no no it's due tomorrow so Murray just went into another room in the middle of the party and typed out some 15 pages or something like that and took him three hours of 15 well two hours eight pages an hour 16 page paper Murray was very very prolific I mean Murray is written if you stretched on on a on a bookcase how many pages of stuff Murray ever published it's amazing and now Murray is still publishing stuff from the Volcker Fund days that books keep coming out where Murray would give the Volcker Fund his idea well what does he think of Kersner what does he think of Buchanan and and Murray would write 30 or 40 pages on each of them and these are now being published by the Mises Institute and they are precious so Murray is just a monumental writer but he wasn't just a an economist he was also a libertarian theorist he brought together history and sociology and politics and economics and and made a libertarian philosophy that had never been existing before and in this I would recommend the ethics of liberty and for new liberty which are both magnificent monumental works on on liberty he was also a historian he did the 1819 that was his dissertation the well sort of economic history and he did a four or five volume thing on on the early United States and just that is is this wide on on a bookshelf I mean when Murray writes a book it's 1,100 pages he was just a phenomenon okay so I was telling you a little bit about the peace and freedom party that's one sort of activist thing that he did why did he do it he wasn't a lefty even though Buckley was accusing Murray of being a commie or something like that he just wanted the war in Vietnam to end and that was the only way that his group of 10 people could have any effect so he joined the left on on a limited basis not for everything he didn't follow communism or anything like that but just in terms of anti-war he joined that group later on he joined the paleo conservative group for very similar reasons because we were very small and they were much larger than us and there were certain overlaps between us and the paleo conservative so this was his attempt to magnify the power of the few people that he was associated with and his critics say well he's inconsistent well I don't think he's inconsistent one of the very first things I ever wrote under Murray's tutelage was an attack on Milton Friedman who wanted to get rid of the draft during the Vietnam War well you might think what do we favor the draft of course we don't favor the draft but the reason that he wanted to favor the draft getting rid of the draft was to make the US Army more efficient in Vietnam and I certainly didn't favor that at this I think was one of the first things that I ever wrote and published in a little bit turn forum which was Murray's magazine or newsletter and you get similar problems like suppose we have the Laffer curve business where we're right now taxes are 90% we're thinking we're reducing the tax rate from 90 to 85 will do we favor it yes we favor it even though the government will have more money namely we favor it in spite of the government having more money similarly if we legalize drugs the government will tax it and the government will have more money which we don't favor so some people say well we shouldn't legalize drugs no I think the right answer that I get from Murray is yes we want to legalize drugs in spite of the fact that the government will have more money because freedom is freedom and we're more deontological than we are utilitarian what else do I have here the Carl Hess episode Carl Hess was when Murray first met Carl Hess Carl Hess was a writer for Barry Goldwater and I think he was responsible for the famous Barry Goldwater statement that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in pursuit of virtue is no is not a good thing and when Murray first met Carl Carl was a very much of a righty and not in the good sense because the way I see it and I'll draw something else for you people you know a lot of people see that this is the left and that's the right and where does libertarianism fit in whenever I take a survey I answer the economic questions like a righty and then the personal liberties like a lefty so I come out as a moderate and even though I call myself Walter moderate block I'm really not moderate but a much better way to look at it is here is libertarianism here is the right and here is the left and I think that we are equidistant from both we're not part of the right we're not part of the left we're something unique we agree with the right a little bit on economics and with the left a little bit on foreign policy and and we don't agree with them at all on on on foreign policy rather on domestic policy personal liberties we agree a little bit more with the left although the left isn't all that good and the right isn't all that good on economics well the way I see it where we're unique philosophy we're different than the other two we're not part of either of them and Murray was attacked Frank Meyer for fusionism Frank Meyer was trying to say well the libertarians and the right are really buddies and the Federalist Society is predicated on this idea that libertarians are sort of part of the right I personally don't see it every once in a while some libertarian will say we're really part of the left the right is hateful or what they say we're really part of the the left the right is hateful I agree with both the left and the right are equally hateful and and we're very different than them so anyway Carl has thoughts in with Murray and Carl is very much over here and then Carl starts moving toward libertarianism and he did his interview with the penthouse or playboy or one of those and at that time he was really a Rothbard and he was magnificent and then Carl just sort of kept moving toward the left and it wasn't a good experience Murray didn't fully succeed Murray succeeded in getting him to to libertarianism but then Carl flitted away and was not a libertarian anymore toward the end of his life another thing is this thing called CLS Center for Libertarian Studies this was a precursor if you will to the Mises Institute this was a group where we met in New York City Walter Grinder was there Peden, Hamaway, Ralph Fraco, Ron Hamaway, John Hagel, Randy Barnett, some of Murray's confidants and we try to have a institute sort of like the Mises Institute and it didn't work all that well it lasted for a few years there were some disputes with the funding source and thank God for the Mises Institute which is now what Murray had always hoped CLS would be something just like this where we get young people and we do a research and we have the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and we have other publications and many many books that are made available for a very low price so people can can learn about it and we have LouRockwell.com which is another favorite of mine I contributed a bit to it and then there's a blog there's just so much that the Mises Institute is offering what else have I got here I want to read something from a friend of mine Wendy McElroy Wendy McElroy and I are fellow Murray Rothbard I won't say worshipers but big fans of and here's what Wendy said in 45 years of scholarship and activism Rothbard produced over two dozen books and thousands of articles that made sense of the world from a radical individualist perspective and doing so it is no exaggeration to say that Rothbard created the modern libertarian movement specifically he refined and fused together natural law theory using a basic Aristotelian or Randian approach the radical civil libertarianism of the 19th century individualist anarchists especially Lysander, Spooner and Benjamin Tucker the free market philosophy of Austrian economists in particular Ludwig von Mises into which he incorporated sweeping economic histories and the foreign policy of the American old right that is isolationism Ron Paul wouldn't call it isolationism but that would be one term for you know US staying out of other people's business what was it John Quincy Adams said we don't go searching for monsters to destroy and George Washington said peace with all nations no no entangling alliances that sort of a thing continuing Wendy as a result of the fusion libertarianism blossomed into the 60s as the philosophy of absolute individual rights based on natural law of rights that were expressed domestically through the free market and internationally through the non-aggression isolationism with its corollary of unbridled free trade the unbridled free trade means none of these NAFTA CAFTA IPP things you just have a unilateral decoration of free trade with every country and if the other countries want to have tariffs on our products God bless them let them do it if there are two men in the rowboat one guy shoots a hole in the rowboat the other guy shouldn't shoot another hole in the rowboat if they're stupid enough to shoot a whole one hole in the rowboat that's their problem we don't have to do that we favor full free trade with everyone the sort of the Hong Kong principle but more than this continuing Wendy following the footsteps of his mentor the pioneering Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises Rothbard grounded human liberty and human nature developing an explicit philosophy of liberty he drove his insights through history to reexamine the real implication and meaning of events such as the American Revolution he laid a moral foundation for freedom and then used it to springboard into a strategy by which to achieve it the integration was a stunning accomplishment and one that stirred the love of liberty when in a generation of scholars and activists who proudly call themselves Rothbardians I include myself in these ranks unquote from Wendy well I certainly include myself in those ranks I think that this was I mean Murray was just a gargantuan intellect and leader of our movement I want to tell you another story Ralph Freiko and I think Ron Hamway once went to Mises's house in New York City and they try to sell Mises a subscription to the Freeman now I don't know if you understand the context but this was maybe in the 60s early 60s and Mises said I already have a subscription and slammed the door on them there were there was a misunderstanding Mises didn't understand he was just new into this country I guess he thought it was like the New York Times everyone had a subscription to the Freeman that was the the journal that people use there another story that I want to tell you is about Murray Bookchin B-O-O-K Chin book book Chin Murray was Murray Bookchin was a famous left Marxist person who Murray Rothbard was sort of friendly with because they had an overlap on on foreign policy but Murray Bookchin insisted on his leftism and you know exploitation he's sort of like a guy like Chomsky Chomsky is sort of a libertarian and Chomsky is and Bookchin were very very good on foreign policy and they were even good on US imperialism in foreign policy and on ruling class theory let me just mention a little bit about ruling class theory a lot of people reject ruling class theory because they think it's a Marxist the wholly owned subsidiary of the Marxist that you know the ruling class theory is that the proletariat are the exploited and the bourgeois are the exploiters but we also have a ruling class theory and sometimes when I tell my students of this they rebel they think you know this is Marxism have I gone off the deep left end but we too have a ruling class theory thanks to Murray and others and our view is sort of the Calhounian idea that there are certain people that benefit from the tax subsidy system and they are the exploiters and then there are other people who are the victims of it take this thing with Uber Uber Uber the the taxicab thing they're the good guys and the traditional taxicab people are the are the ruling class in this particular case or Airbnb where you can rent someone's house and and the hotel people don't much like this kind of competition well Libiturn ruling class theory can can apply to that okay what else do I have I want to talk about Murray with hatred is my muse when I first started writing I had I had a little sign the next article I write will be perfect this one I'll just write why because if I try to make it perfect I'll never write it because I had never written anything perfect in my life and I never will and I don't think anyone will even Murray no one writes anything perfectly so I wrote the next article I write will be perfect this one I'll just write and then I could write well Murray I don't think you ever put anything on his wall but his motto was hatred is my muse and what he meant by that is he'd read somebody like I don't know Chomsky or New York Times or something like that or who are the people that Tom and Bob are after against I'm sorry Krugman you read Krugman and you get filled with hatred because you know I mean Krugman is supposed to be a good guy and rather he's supposed to be bright he has a Nobel Prize in economics and he favors the minimum wage you know so you read that stuff and you get sort of filled with hatred and you got to get it out of you the venom get it out and you get it out on paper so that was Murray's Murray's idea another one I think Murray was very instrumental in Tom Di Lorenzo here Tom Di Lorenzo the little soft on Lincoln I'm kidding I'm kidding Murray also made points about the Civil War it was just the war of secession or the war of Northern aggression so it's not just me that follows Murray's lead in various ways but I think Peter Klein with entrepreneurship and Jeff Herbner and and most of the faculty here are Murray's Murray students now some of the faculty are not Murray students because Murray died in 1995 and some of the faculty are very young I don't know what happened I used to be the on-fond Tareeb the young madman and now I'm the old duffer I it goes so fast when you're having fun when you're enjoying when you're enjoying your career and I wouldn't give up this career for anything it's just the the most marvelous thing one of the my favorite piece of music is by Handel the Messiah and one of the songs is about Jesus Christ that he was a man who suffered Murray suffered to Murray had lieutenants friends colleagues who I wouldn't say betrayed him but went off into the deep end I've already mentioned Carl Hess another person would be Randy Barnett who was one of Murray's when Randy came on scene he was a very very bright guy and he's sort of a warmongering libertarian and then Bill Evers another colleague of Murray's who went off into the Hoover institution and try to help the Iraqi government have education or what have you George Reisman also was a follower of Murray's it was part of the circle boss Jad the circle boss Jad was a group of people about four or five years older than me Ron Hamway Ralph Reiko who stayed with Murray and were friends Ron was friends with Murray to till he passed away and Ralph Reiko still is but then this George Reisman Hesson and Ligio and Grindr who went off in various ways let me just mention one word about Walter Grindr when I first met Murray everyone was focused on Murray and Walter Grindr sort of took me under his wing he was not credentialed very much but he was very good in Austrian economics and libertarianism and he's another person who flitted away from Murray I am a Murray loyalist I am a bromance of Murray I love Murray thanks for your attention