 Murray Rothbard, who of course was a historian as well as an economist, used to dream of the day that there might someday, some place, be an historian who understood Austrian economics. And I must say he wasn't, he was optimistic about everything he hoped for, but it's so great that he got to meet and to know Tom Woods before he passed away. I remember when Tom first came as a student at Mises University in 1993, and at the closing barbecue he had wanted to meet Murray and I wanted, Murray wanted to meet him. So I noticed them talking together and I come back maybe two hours later, and they're still right like this, just, you know, talking away. And it was, it was, I thought very moving to see it. I know it was a great experience for Tom and it was a great experience for Murray too. So you know Tom Woods, he is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He's the author of 11 books, including two bestsellers, on his way to the proverbial five foot shelf of books, I guess Tom, as they used to say in the 19th century for the scholar would aim at. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. He got his M. Phil and his PhD from Columbia University. He has a wonderful and innovative website, TomWoods.com and also Liberty Classroom. And appropriately enough Tom is going to talk to us tonight about Murray Rothbard, so Dr. Tom Woods. Okay, all right, thanks everybody. I am christening this thing. This has never been used, but in fact, how about this? Just to indicate there's no egalitarianism here, okay? There's no free access to back here. Yeah, it's closed. All right, now by the way, I'm not reading off this, but there are points I want to make when I do talk about Murray Rothbard that if I forgot to make them I would be very sad. So they're just there to remind me. But anyway, I have been working on the speech all day. And of course I don't mean this speech. I mean the victory speech I'm going to give after I beat Walter in chess. Now, incidentally, just so you know how this got started, last year we had a chess tournament at the Mises Institute because we had a bunch of grad students who were interested in chess and it was six Europeans and me. And like all Americans, I have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Europeans. So being in the tournament, I thought, you know, I have no business even being in the same room with these people. Right, of course I'm going to get slaughtered. And the first game of the tournament I lost. So I thought, ah, just goes to show. What am I doing? I'm not even in the same league with these people. And then I won all the others and I ended up winning the whole tournament. So I actually walked around, I don't know if Lou knew this, but I actually went around the institute going USA. Well anyway, we decided for some reason, because we knew Walter was a good chess player, that whoever wins earns the right to play him at Mises U. So we decided we would do this. And to our amazement, people showed up, right? It was a room full of people watching us play chess. And I thought, wow, these kids are even dorkier than I could have dreamed. So anyway, we played and just don't get your hopes up. I mean, Walter and I are pretty decent amateurs, but we're not grandmasters, so don't laugh at us if we commit a blunder or whatever. But it was one of these sort of games where I was clearly ahead. I mean, let's face it, I'm not just saying this. I was clearly ahead. I was ahead two pawns. Like a grandmaster would have resigned out of sheer embarrassment by that point. But Walter tenaciously hung on because after all, what does he do other than defend the undefendable? So he just carried on doing that. And I had busted up all the pawns in front of his king but I just couldn't stick the knife all the way in. And then I got into time trouble and I just couldn't keep it up. And finally, one little error and then bang! Walter got me. And so I realized that it's not just the defending the undefendable. I mean, this really is. He plays chess the way he fights the fight. He finds somebody, there's just one little deviation with somebody and Walter's there, bang! You're not a libertarian. So watch out. So anyway, so tonight we're going to revisit this and the one request we have everybody is no wagering. But otherwise, we would be really glad if you sat here. But otherwise, if you would rather be drunk, that is fine too. We're completely indifferent between these options. All right, so anyway, so tonight... I beg your pardon? Indifference? Oh, yeah, right. Of course, yeah, maybe not an Austrian or something, right? Now, okay, now, this being the evening session and it's optional, it means I can get away with saying things that I wouldn't say during the formal sessions. Because remember after all that Austrian economics is dealing with is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's positive rather than normative. It's describing social phenomena. But it's not saying therefore you ought to do X or Y. So it's not really right to be giving lectures talking entirely about libertarianism because you could be, you know, as Walter Block points out repeatedly, you could be an Austrian economist and be a totalitarian socialist because you know that the free market yields social harmony, but you hate mankind so you want to impose socialism. That is possible. So I don't want... For all you totalitarian socialists who applied to the Mises University, I don't want to offend you. But this being the after-hours session, I can sort of get away with some of that. So in a little bit of what I say and then later on in the second half of what I'm going to do tonight, it'll be a little bit more free-wheeling libertarian stuff rather than strictly Austrian economics. But I want to really, in talking to you tonight, I want to inoculate you against kind of a cult that's out there. There is a cult out there in the libertarian world and I call it the cult of anti-Rothbard. And you will encounter this, I'm not going to name names, I'm not going to name places or institutions because that's not what I'm here for. I just want to talk about ideas and a great man. But it's a cult of anti-Rothbard because you will encounter people who will be delighted to tell you all about the times they met Milton Friedman. Oh my goodness, I met Milton Friedman. I served him dinner. I sat next to him. I paid his bill, whatever the story is. They're all thrilled to tell you they're straight about Milton Friedman. And you begin to realize that with some people there are only three libertarians in the whole world. There was Hayek sometimes. Hayek is okay sometimes, but let's never mention his actual economic contributions. So nothing from the 30s, no pure theory of capital in the early 40s, none of that. None of the stuff he won the Nobel Prize for. We don't want to talk about that, but we'll talk about other things about Hayek sometimes. But basically it's Milton Friedman and John Stossel and that's the libertarian opinion. Now that is not to take away from Milton Friedman or John Stossel. For example, it must have been very, very difficult for John Stossel being with ABC and trying to say anything remotely libertarian year after year. So I do respect that contribution. And likewise we all know and perfectly well are happier to concede that Milton Friedman was quite good on some things and was a very good debater and could present many of the ideas of a free society very, very effectively and could win converts. Nobody takes any of that away from him. But it's very odd to me that you would have someone as accomplished as Murray Rothbard who basically created the libertarian movement as we know it, who was known as Mr. Libertarian and there is absolute silence about him. It's not that for every 100 times Milton Friedman is mentioned, Rothbard is mentioned only once. I started to say that to Lou once in an interview I did. I interviewed Lou on his own podcast once. And I stopped myself and I said, it's not for every 100 mentions of Friedman, it's one of Rothbard, it's for every 100, it's zero. Like what is happening here? Well, I can't speculate as to what the motives are. I've got some thoughts and maybe at the end I'll share them with you or especially if I have a few drinks tonight I'll definitely share them. But let's just think about the contributions of this guy. And then you'll see how creepy this cult is. The fact that this guy's got all these contributions and you still pretend he doesn't exist, it creeps me out. Man economy and state. So he writes man economy and state. This thing, so it's about a thousand pages even if you don't include power and market. You should include power and market. Then it's on the order of 1400 pages. You look at this thing closely and you can see that Rothbard was deeply steeped in the literature, the economic literature. He was reading the mainstream journals. He was interacting with them. And in fact, it's interesting to know and I think Joe points this out in his introduction that in fact Rothbard very infrequently even uses the term Austrian economics in that book. And when he does use it, it's in quotation marks. It's so-called Austrian economics because what he's trying to teach is just economics. He is trying to engage the profession and steer it in a particular direction. So he knows, he's not just some kid who studied under Mises and learned some funny one line or something. He absorbed what he learned from Mises. He built on what he learned from Mises and he also knew what the profession was saying. And this particular book plays a central role in the history of the modern Austrian school. And it's written in a beautiful, elegant style. It's written with the tone of a scientist. It's not written as a polemic and it's something that you feel a sense of accomplishment just reading it. Well, imagine what it was like writing it. Well, he wrote, he started writing it in his late 20s and then it came out when he was 36 years old. Now, I'm turning 40 next week and that's really depressing me very much. So I insist this week, I want you to ask me repeatedly how old I am. So I can say 39 last few times. But I remember when I turned 36 I thought to myself, well, yes, no big treatise for me. My 36th year has come and gone and there was no... All right, so if he stopped there, we would say, well, that's a pretty good job, right? Most people go through their lives not writing original pioneering economic treatises, right? That's good. But he also in that same year published The Panic of 1819, which is more or less his doctoral dissertation from Columbia University. The Panic of 1819, a case study, a real study of an episode in US history. And this book, if you look at the major historical journals like American Historical Review, all these historical journals, they all praise this book unreservedly. This is the definitive work. And it gave me great pleasure years ago in grad school, I was reading a book on Jacksonian America and in the bibliographical essay it said, for The Panic of 1819, see Murray Rothbard's book, The Panic of 1819, which is likely to remain definitive. I thought, well, good, see? This goes to show. Again, he interacted with the mainstream. He made real contributions that were appreciated and recognized. But that was not always so. 1963 came America's Great Depression. Now, that was the same year of the Friedman and Schwartz book, the Monetary History of the United States book. And that book got all the attention, but particularly the sections involving, the part involving the Great Depression got a lot of attention. Rothbard's book did not get that much attention. Yet today it's in a fifth edition. And the fifth edition has a forward by Paul Johnson, the British historian, sort of iconoclastic sort of conservative British historian. And it was he who recognized the merits of this book when he wrote his, I think it's a terrific book, by Paul Johnson Modern Times, The World from the 20s to the 80s. Now, I recommend, by the way, if you ever read that book, don't get his later edition, The World from the 20s to the 90s. Don't get the Modern Times up through the 80s, because in the 90s then he starts supporting the Iraq war and it gets terrible, neocon, terrible. But the rest of it's pretty good. And he recognized the importance of the Rothbard book. Basically Rothbard was saying that the Federal Reserve was to blame for the crash. And then subsequent economic policy by the government is to blame for why the depression itself went on so long. And he does this, he's doing, he's performing two revisionist tasks in this book. I mean, the better known one is that he's showing that Herbert Hoover was not actually just sitting back doing nothing like some doofus and while depression is washing over the country he's just sitting there. If only that had been the case. To the contrary, he's intervening in all different areas as many of you know. That was an innovation. I mean, historically speaking. But secondly, to go back and trace out Federal Reserve policy in the 1920s and to identify inflation that was ongoing this is also a contribution. Now it's not, he wasn't the first one but you can find, there's a book from 37 that does a little bit of analysis like this and Lionel Robbins had an Austrian view of the Great Depression in 1934 called The Great Depression. But that was more looking at Europe than the United States. But still to say that the Fed did it but not for the reasons that Friedman says the Fed did it. It's not that the Fed just didn't create enough money. That's not the explanation. It's not the issue that the 1920s were fine and tranquil but the problem was that once the downturn came the Fed didn't do enough to increase the money supply when there was a collapse of the money supply by about one third. Rothbard won't have any of this and he goes and counters all this. Well this is very important and why is this important? Well for one thing it's important to tell the truth. But secondly, right now today with the Austrian school getting all this attention well now naturally what are people going to ask? What are people going to ask after the Austrian school is now getting some attention because our people disproportionately predicted the crisis. People are going to ask well how did you know and did you predict other things? Is this just some one-off fluke? Did you just happen to have a crystal ball or tea leaves or a deck of tarot cards for this case but you were clueless on the other ones? Because of contributions like America's Great Depression and the Panic of 1819 we can see that there are Austrian explanations of these earlier things and this is driving the establishment crazy that now suddenly there is an interest in the Rothbardian view not only of current events but also of the Great Depression. I just made a video on my YouTube channel against David Frum and those of you who are from Canada you have a lot of explaining to do. Take this guy back with you on your way out but David Frum was so upset the other day he said I can't believe how many conservatives now have moved from believing in Milton Friedman's view of the Great Depression over to he can't bring himself to say Rothbard so he said Mises' view of the Great Depression and this just appalls him. Now for one thing if only most conservatives in America even knew who even Milton Friedman was much less Murray Rothbard. I mean I think we are giving these people a little bit more credit than they have shown to serve with their Operation Desert Storm hats and whatever else but secondly of course the key thing is not just that it annoys him but the fact that this is happening on a scale that it would come to the attention of a David Frum that there are young people probably not in the conservative movement naturally but there are young people who are interested in these alternative explanations. Well there wouldn't have been one if there hadn't been a Rothbard. Rothbard did that and at the time he got this was published to very little fanfare and it never bothered him. He had a much smaller audience than his merits of this man demanded and he just carried on. We have here a publication a book called Economic Controversies a collection of a lot of Rothbard's scholarly articles. Well that's great. I mean these are wonderful articles and they are all great contributions too. Then I love the Book of Essays a Gallitarianism as a revolt against nature. In there you'll find two essays that are absolutely mind-blowing in a book that's mind-blowing but War, Peace and the State is absolutely pioneering on Libertarian Theory of Foreign Policy number one and then Roderick has built on that and then secondly Anatomy of the State you never look at the world the same way again after you read those things and these are just a couple of essays. If somebody wrote just those essays well people have been spinning out thought based on that ever since he did those that would be considered a contribution. He wrote a two-volume history of economic thought so he knows pretty much what everybody who ever said anything about economics ever said and he can evaluate it and critique it. I mean believe it or not there are some people who would be impressed by that. This is a pretty smart guy. Maybe I should talk about him. Not if you belong to the cult of anti-Rothbard you are not to mention this man not to mention him citizen look the other way then as a spare time project he writes a four-volume history of colonial America called Conceived in Liberty now the Institute has now put that out as a single volume which I think they did partly because they have a good sense of humor because if you look at the size of this thing it's like they are looking to set the world record or something, look at the size of this book but you look at how conversant he is with the secondary literature of colonial America the guy is an economist who has so mastered the Austrian school that by the time he was 36 he wrote a pioneering treatise a thousand pages long but he also knows so much about colonial America and then foreign new liberties like the libertarian manifesto from the early 1970s again and here at the Mises Institute you can actually listen to that for free on audiobook if you look at the Mises media section the ethics of liberty a work of philosophy extending the Lockean self-ownership principle and spinning out what its implications are and then we have smaller works like I like this one called Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy this is a thing that he wrote for an investment newsletter like a 20,000 word essay for an investment newsletter maybe it had 200 subscribers and it was never seen again until somebody found it in the archives and it was published I mean this gem would have just been lost forever like who knows how many things like this he wrote that we don't even know about so he wrote zillions of articles on top of it he wrote a book on education the history of education the mystery of banking on how banking works of course you guys read what has government done to our money which is a great classic he wrote chapters in books he edited the libertarian review he edited left and right he founded and edited the Journal of Libertarian Studies he founded and edited the review of Austrian economics he was also a movie reviewer wrote a zillion movie reviews he kept up correspondence with a whole bunch of people we've got the archives to prove it now if you heard about a guy like this pioneering in so many areas and extending libertarian insights into so many areas would your first instinct be I better not ever mention this man like there's something deranged about this right I mean like there's something not right in the head if you were to say no this guy nah nah nah I just want to talk about I don't want to mention names but lesser figures will say now I think back to my own experiences with the guy which were very limited I only met him about four or five times but memorable obviously you meet somebody like this and again by the way I should point out obviously I'm not saying that anybody in this world is infallible or that you have to kneel down before his image and kiss it or pray to him or any of this this is a ridiculous caricature no one has ever said this but the same thing with Mises or any great man you should admire a great man right doesn't mean every single word you have to agree with but you should admire a great man just simple but I remember so I got to meet him at the Mises University program in 1993 and in 1994 and he came out Mises U 1993 he gave the opening night lecture he gave the lecture that Bob Higgs gave the other night and he was talking about a whole bunch of things and he started off talking about the Panic of 1819 now I didn't know he had written a book on this so he started off by saying I'm the world's foremost expert on the Panic of 1819 and I thought my gosh boy this guy's got a big head and then he said he said because I'm the only one who's ever written a book on it and then he laughs, cackles and goes on and so then the next time then I met him at a conference later that year and so Mises U 1994 I'm standing there talking to some students and Rothbard walks in and he waves and says hi Tom and I just thought yeah that was Murray Rothbard waving to me hey how you doing so then at that event actually at one point we were having a conversation and I said now Professor Rothbard I've always wanted to ask you and he said oh call me Murray you know I just don't think I can I mean thanks I appreciate that but I just that's just not going to happen but I remember Lou called me Lou Rockwell or he emailed me in December 1994 and said Murray maintained two residences he was out in Las Vegas I can call him Murray now that he's gone I don't feel so intimidated anymore but out in Las Vegas he had a place and then in New York he kept his apartment so he was going to be in New York over the holidays and Lou said Murray would like to get together with you here's his number give him a call and I thought and it's kind of like how you feel like the first time you I'm sure I'm the only guy who's ever done this but the first time you call up a girl on a date like you write out the thing that you're going to say or whatever blank this would be a disaster so I did that but of course with Rockbar he would fill in all the blanks I'm very glad to talk to you but of course that was not to be I did talk to him on the phone but then he passed away in January of 1995 now I think back though about things that he sort of taught me and it's not just the stuff that I could learn reading in the books it's also about how to live as a human being and how to be a scholar and one of the things that everybody concedes about him even the people who can't bring themselves to mention his name if they did mention his name they would never claim that he was arrogant no one ever said that they'd say other things about him they would never say he was arrogant because everybody would know that's a lie I mean Rothbard was so interested he was convinced that there were the world was just such a fascinating place there were things to be learned everywhere and people's brains were full of nuggets that maybe he could extract somehow he could learn from everybody and so you know you would be some dumb student well present company accepted you understand but you know you'd just be some kid right and he would be he would listen to you respectfully you know none of this air of you know I'm Murray Rothbard how dare you you're not even worthy to walk on my ground or anything none of this stuff he would be you know and then he would encourage people and you know if he saw any glimmer of interest in anything he would encourage it he would build people up and Walter carries on that tradition today with his students if he sees any inkling of literacy at all among people he says you know you might be the next Mises well he doesn't quite do that but the point is he encouraged it and that was how Rothbard was I remember in particular alright so there I am 1994 it's an event that the Mises Institute is putting on commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Haslett they had an event in New York City now I was I was living in New York City at that time for grad school so I went this is incredible I just get on the subway and I go to a Mises event unbelievable and I sit down and then later in the program who walks in but Rothbard and he sits right next to me so I thought geez this is just getting better and better all the time so then he's sitting there listening and he'll make little side comments during people's talks you know which is sort of like what David Gordon does today except you could repeat to your mother the things that Rothbard said but I specifically recall I mean just how what a genuine regular guy he was like here's a guy who had written done theoretical work on the subject of punishment and proportionality he would commit a crime what is the appropriate punishment for that crime he's super super sophisticated stuff and then there he is at this Haslett event and this was right around the time that Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news Jeffrey Dahmer was the he was a serial killer who ate his victims and there would be body parts in the refrigerator it was horrible and he was killed in prison the other prisoners just said look we're pretty rotten but that you just can't do that and so Rothbard leaned over to me at one point and said oh by the way did you hear about Jeffrey Dahmer come on it's a regular guy it's a regular guy but another aspect of this lack of arrogance is that he I heard this rumor about him that he would correspond with you even if you were just some schmo you wrote him a letter he would write back to you where he found the time I don't know but he would write back to you even if you're some schmo and I thought to myself I'm gonna test out this theory I'm some schmo let's see if he writes to me actually I wrote to him because I had read somewhere about this pamphlet by Robert Lefebvre about the transformation of the American right and the evolution of US foreign policy during the Cold War and I thought this would be great I would love to get this but where in the world would I find a pamphlet from like 1964 so I wrote to Rothbard let's see if this guy's gonna write back to me not only did he write back to me he sent me two copies of the pamphlet so in our anthology I did with a friend of mine on the left which you can find in the bookstore here we who dared to say no to war we reproduced this pamphlet so it now sees the light of day now it will be immoral and it's great because Rothbard wrote back to me and I probably wouldn't have written back to him if it had been reversed I'm too busy how could I do it and yet he did simple little thing he was not discouraged as I said by the size of his audience now he should have had a gigantic audience I mean this is again a guy with one tenth of these accomplishments could retire with pride and yet this was an age before the internet and this was an age of even more status outlook than we have now because at least now we have more people who have come out more of the remnant is visible because of Ron Paul and yet this didn't bother him it didn't occur to him well if I keep writing these books maybe not that many people will read them he couldn't have known that there'd be a day like today when I don't know a gazillion people can read his stuff for free all over the world any time of day or night and they want to because they realize well this guy who's been kept from me no wonder he's been kept from me there seems to be some rule in the world that the most awesome things are always smashed and criticized by the bad guys well this guy is like the awesomeest of the awesome and now there's this if there was an attempt to try to remove him to erase him from history the thing that the young people wouldn't discover him it has failed abysmally everybody wants to be a Rothbardian I mean what is the coolest libertarian shirt there is it's the enemy of the state shirt which by the way the institute has now made in a different kind of style so that you don't have that sort of plastic white Rothbard head on a black shirt on a summer day so it's a little easier to wear so buy a second copy of that shirt get a second one so that's one thing that I liked but he also felt that he could when I say that he could learn from everyone I don't just mean that he thought everybody had some nugget of knowledge because probably that's not really true but I also but what I also mean is even if somebody might disagree with him on something important well that doesn't mean well this guy disagrees on something important so he's probably a horrible person who should never be listened to or talked to and yet there are people in the libertarian movement today who will treat you like this if you were three things you are like an unperson that was not Rothbard's view at all there's just too much for me to learn so he was perfectly willing to learn from people on the left so what people have insights and these insights are not evenly distributed and I've got to find them and find them he did but I think the thing that you learn the most from the cult of anti Rothbard though is that you will have enemies if you are if you take any position whatsoever in public life it is absolutely unavoidable that you will have enemies now I thought that I would be exempt from this when I wrote I know it sounds stupid and naive but I thought when I wrote the politically incorrect guide to American history I honest to good is the absolute truth I thought to myself well people might not agree with me but as long as I put forth my views sincerely and as persuasively as I can then they at least have to respect me so if in case you were thinking that that's just not going to happen but particularly think of it this way if Rothbard had enemies among libertarians what hope is there for the rest of us you just have to accept it you have to just live with it and move on and don't dwell on it don't spend your life bitter dwelling on every angry blog comment or whatever I mean just don't do it Rothbard wouldn't done that he spent his life in laughter cackling laughter that's what you should do and I say this as somebody who initially when I started getting attacked that is what I had to go oh my gosh I got all this damage control to do you know what I sleep so wonderfully and soundly at night not caring so ultimately then what I am recommending to you in this first half of my remarks tonight is to resist the cult now as I say you are going to account of this everywhere not everywhere but in big influential places no mention of this man I don't care that you disagreed with some strategic decision he made 20 years ago or 30 years ago I don't care how unbelievably disgustingly petty would you have to be to say well gee I don't know he shouldn't have allied with that small group of seven leftists because he was desperate and there was no libertarian presence anywhere in the world so therefore today I should never you know a guy who writes what I don't know 20 million words you're you're going to put all that aside I don't believe that's the real reason they'll come up with all these phony below any reason I am convinced the real reason at least good 80% of it is just a sheer envy and you may be skeptical of this explanation and I would have been 10 or 15 years ago too I would have been skeptical but as I've grown older and as I've observed people I see that envy plays a much bigger role in the world that I ever dreamed and there are a lot of people in the libertarian world who have not been as successful as Murray Rothbard like everybody for example but some of us are at peace with that some of us say he's a great man I'm not a great man but I'm at peace with that I'm doing what I can with the talents that I've been given and that's all you can ask of yourself but there are some people who feel like they can build themselves up only by tearing other people down and in this case erasing them from existence well I would say to you don't let them get away with this in fact to the contrary there is now we are positively compelled to mention him to break through this blackout and give this man his due not simply because one man deserves it as a matter of justice but because the cause of freedom will be all the more readily pursued if the ideas of Rothbard are shining through join me against the cult everybody thank you very much