 Good morning, everyone. Some people last night expected me to welcome you, but that was not the tradition in the past years. I never offered any welcomes on the first night. So you were all unwelcome last night. But now, of course, you are officially welcome. I want to break this tradition right now, too, and will be extremely brief in my introductory remarks, because more about that sort of subject will be set in the afternoon. I make you aware that the program for the afternoon has been slightly changed. You should have a piece of paper indicating what the changes are. The main reason for this is that Norman Stone unexpectedly had to cancel his participation a couple of days ago because he had an eye operation and his eye became clouded for a while, so he had to go back. Everything was fixed, but he was asked to stay in town for regular checkups and was not permitted to travel. So Norman Stone sends his greetings and felt very sorry that he could not attend this meeting. The only other thing that I want to mention before we start with our morning panel is an organizational matter, namely the boat trip on Monday. We do need to know as soon as possible who wants to participate in the boat trip and with how many people. There is a list at the front desk. Write your name in there. Indicate how many people are in your party. At the latest tomorrow or so, we must have the exact number in order to charter the right amount of boats. So please do that during the breaks. And now to our morning session. Jeff Barr, who unfortunately also cannot come because his father fell ill on a trip to Europe with him, suggested last year we should have the panel on Murray Rospart because 2015 is 20 years after his death. And Murray Rospart, in a way, was for me the greatest inspiration of my life without him. I would never have undertaken something like this here. And I'm sure he would have been an enthusiastic participant in meetings such as this. Most of you guys are familiar with his name. Far less, I assume, are really familiar with his work. Some of you might not be familiar with his work at all. And in Europe, almost no people exist anymore who ever knew him. In the United States, there exist a few more. But what I can offer here is two people who are his direct students, in the normal sense of being his students, namely Lee Iglodi and Doug French. And on the other hand, two people for whom Murray Rospart was a teacher and a mentor who had relationships with him more as colleagues, namely Tom Di Lorenzo and myself. So we will report a little bit about his work and life and share some memories that we have in order to raise your curiosity, who may be study his work in greater detail. And I will now join this panel and begin making a few introductory remarks about Murray Rospart. And then the other panelists will comment on that, add something to it. There will be a little bit back and forth. And then, of course, we will also open the discussion for all of you participants here. You ask questions, difficult ones or easy ones, whatever it may be. Thank you so much so far. So let me begin by giving a very brief overview of who Murray Rospart was and how I met him and what relationship I had with him. If you read the description of the program of the Property and Freedom Society, you will find that there are two people that are explicitly mentioned as people who inspired this entire event. Those two people were also the two most important people in my intellectual development and life. On the one hand, Ludwig von Mises, who I never met. I wasn't even, I knew his name, but I had never read anything of his before his death in 1971. But I did have the good fortune to meet Ludwig von Mises' most important student, which was Murray Rospart. And let me say from the outset that something that Ralph Rayco, an old friend of ours, historian, a student of Hayek's dissertation at the University of Chicago under Hayek, what he who met Mises as a young man said about Mises. And that was something to the effect of whoever has met Mises as a young man. We'll think that all the other professors at the main universities of Columbia and Chicago and Yale and Harvard and Princeton, in comparison with Mises, all these other professors were just a joke. And I can confidently say that whoever has met Murray Rospart would think the same that any other professor in the United States was simply a joke as compared with what this man could do, what this man represented. Very briefly, Murray Rospart was probably, after Mises, the greatest economist who ever lived. I think in the field of economics, I rank Mises higher than I rank Rospart. Mises was, in my view, the greatest economist ever. There is no book like his Human Action that matches his achievement. I think nobody will be able to surpass this in the next 100 years or more. Murray Rospart himself also wrote a major treatise on economics, a treatise like they are no longer written, covering everything from the beginning to the end, leaving nothing out, beginning from very simple principles and advancing to the most complicated subjects. But Murray Rospart was far more than an economist. Murray Rospart was also one of the greatest political philosophers that ever existed. And as such, I would rank him even higher than Mises because he did far more in terms of interdisciplinary work. His most important works in the field of political philosophy are, on the one hand, for a new liberty and the ethics of liberty. And on top of this, Murray Rospart was also a magnificent historian. He wrote a four-volume history of colonial America. He wrote a history of banking in the United States. He wrote a book on the power elites at a time when no internet or anything like this was available that astonishes you simply by the number of people that he knew in detail and all the family connections between various members of the power elite. Nowadays, these sorts of things are easy to do because all you have to do is Google around a little bit and you find all the relationships. But Murray Rospart never used a computer in his life. He always typed with an electric typewriter. So he was, as far as technical skills goes, an absolutely low-tech person. Very briefly how I met him. I became aware of Mises' work and indirectly then also of his work. And I had a big grant from the German National Science Foundation that allowed me to go to the United States. I knew that I would not be able to land a job in Germany. It was my views, so I went to the United States and I sought out Rospart. And I saw that Rospart would be a superstar in the United States. I was so impressed by his work that he will probably live in a penthouse in Manhattan and has groupies all around him, only to find out that none of that was true at all. So I contacted him, asked if I could come and work with him, and then he worked at that time at a university that was called Brooklyn Polytechnic. That was an engineering school with a very small social science department with some economists, some historians, some sociologists, things like this. Every one of these professors had to share his office with somebody else. In Murray Rospart's office there was not even a window. The building had been a converted razor blade factory. And I shared an office with some historian of that department. And listened to all his lectures. None of the students knew who he was. It's not the faintest idea. And when he was out of town giving lectures, then I took over and I covered his classes. And after a year, for the first time in his life he received some big time offer for an endowed chair at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. And he told me that there was another opening in the same year and why don't you apply there also? And by lucky circumstances I got that job. And we both moved from in 1986 to Las Vegas. And the last 10 years of his life, for the first few years I attended all his lectures. But for the last 10 years I was his lieutenant bodyguard helper and had almost daily contact with him. So I think in the last 10 years of his life I probably got to know him better than anybody else. Nobody had as much contact with him as I did. So now I'll stop. There are lots of little anecdotes to be told. I will now let Tom say something first and then his two direct students. Okay, one little story related to something Hans just said is Ralph Raco grew up with his friend George Reisman, who's another friend of ours. And Ralph once told the story that how he met Von Mises, that he and George were at the same age, 16 years old, and they had read an article by Mises in the Freeman magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education. And they found Mises' address in New York City. He says, oh these two 16-year-olds just went and knocked on the door and they needed some sort of guys. So they said they pretended to be selling copies of the Freeman and they asked Von Mises if he wanted to subscribe to the Freeman. And I think the way the story goes is Mises pretty much slammed the door on him. He didn't go away. I already read the Freeman. But that's all Ralph says. He first met Von Mises and then of course our friend Ralph ended up writing his dissertation at Chicago under Hayek. And Murray did have groupies. I first got to know Murray when I started teaching at Mises University which is the annual week-long seminar for students that the Mises Institute in the U.S. holds. We just had the 30th. And I started teaching these about 25, 26 years ago. We had them at Stanford University for a while before the Mises Institute building was erected. And Murray was indefatigable. You could not tire him out. He would teach all during the day and of course the students would swarm him all during the day. And then he would stay up all night if they wanted to. If the students wanted to stay up all night and talk about economics, he would do it. And one night at Stanford, the dormitory, there was a keg of beer that the Mises Institute provided for the students right outside the dormitory. And some of the faculty were trying to sleep because they had to work the next day, election next day. And I recall, I think Murray was actually with his group late at night, 3 o'clock in the morning or something like that. And Professor Roger Garrison got so frustrated that he opened his dormitory window and threw a light bulb under the sidewalk to break up the party because it was so late. So Murray was such high energy. And as far as how I always looked at Murray, not always, but when I discovered him, there's a real high bar model of scholarship, the kind of person that I thought I could never be because I didn't have the intelligence that Mark Rothbard did. He did these things that Hans referred to, writing man economy and state at such a young age that it's just almost beyond belief to an academic like myself that somebody so young could have such wisdom that he did. But the high bar that Murray said was the first inkling of that was given to me by somebody else. When I first got in my real introduction to Austrian economics in graduate school, when my first semester in graduate school, I took a microeconomics course taught by Richard Wagner and he used human action as a textbook. And the second textbook was Price Theory by Milton Friedman. And Wagner, the first day of class, passed out a quotation. I forget who the quotation was now, from now, but it's about what it takes to be an economist. It was one of the Austrians. I don't think it was Mises, but I have to try to dig this up on my own files. But it was about how a real economist is schooled in economics and the history of economic thought, but he also needs to know something about philosophy, history, mathematics, logic. And I think this is the kind of person Mises was as far as his education. And Hayek was like that, too. I can recall listening to a talk by Hayek's son and after his father died and he went through Hayek's papers and he had letters that Hayek had written home when he was a student, when he was in school, about how he was reading, on average, about 20 books a month. And these were not light books. These were big heavy-duty philosophical treatises and mathematical science and things like this. And so these were the old school Austrians. This is how they looked at themselves and how they should educate themselves. And I never was so foolish as to think that I could achieve that myself, but I thought that was a good bar to set for yourself and try to come as close to it as possible. So Murray did have some groupies. And it is true that compared to the other economics professors, it's like comparing an elephant to an ant. Most economists these days, you know, I've been in the business for 35 years, they're basically uneducated frauds in my opinion, especially if you compare them to someone like Murray Rothbard who really was a supremely educated person and quite a few others that we know of. And so that is true of what Hans says about Murray compared to the rest of them. And so the final thing I'll say for now is that part of my training, when I was in school, I studied under James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, the public choice school economics thing. They applied economics, economic analysis to the study of political decision making. And that at the time seemed extremely radical for the economics profession because the economics profession was all about churning out tales of market failure. Markets failed everywhere because they weren't perfect. And then along came Buchanan and Tullock and others who started saying, well, governments fail too, you know, what a novel idea. And they developed this whole scientific looking apparatus to explain why it is inherent that government will fail. They called it a theory of government failure. And so far so good. But then the whole methodology sort of ended up making recommendations to improve the operation of government. Buchanan himself, for example, crusaded for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution for many, many years. And I always thought there's something wrong about this. There's something wrong. Who is to enforce such an amendment? You know, we have a constitution and there are a lot of things in there that supposedly restrict the powers of government. But even back then in the 1970s, when I was in school, they had all been pretty much abandoned. So I remember thinking, well, why would this more amendment be enforced? None of the other ones are enforced very well, if at all. You know, certainly the 10th amendment had been destroyed 100 years earlier than that. And then when I read across Rothbard, his writings, it was a much different approach to government. You know, everyone here, if you haven't, you should read his article on the state and the anatomy of the state, where he says things such as, theft is a sin and a crime. But when government does it, it's okay. It's called taxation, fairness. You know, murder is a crime and a sin. But when the state does it, it's called war or defense. And so you start reading Murray on the nature of the state and you realize it really is a fool's errand to try to reform the state. It cannot be reformed at all. And that guided a lot of my work, a lot of my research. Earlier in my career, I wrote books on how politicians escaped restrictions on spending and borrowing. It was called Underground Government, the off-budget public sector. I wrote another book called Official Lies, How Government Misleads Us. So I wrote a co-author to a string of books basically on this is how government plunders you. But I made no recommendations on how we could reform government, you know, to reduce the plunder because it's not possible to reform government. It only has to be abolished and rooted out, you know, root and branch, somehow or another. And we can talk about that forever, I guess. And maybe that's all I'll say for now. And I'd like to hand this over to one of the youngsters on the panel. The youngster. Well, I moved to Las Vegas in 1986 myself. And after a couple of years, got the bright idea to pursue a master's in economics and took a couple of courses that were uneventful. And I was looking through the catalog and I saw this course called EC 742, History of Economic Thought. And the teacher was Rothbard. And I had no idea who Rothbard was. Didn't know anything about Austrian economics. Didn't know anything about anything, really. And although I had tended bar for 10 years, so I'm not a fair amount about that. It's my last honest job, as I like to tell people. But so I asked one of my classmates that I'd had in a couple of the other courses, a guy named Joel Volpe. And I have no idea what Mr. Volpe's doing these days. But I said, hey, what's the deal with this Rothbard guy? Should I take him for this History of Economic Thought? And he said, no, he's a kook. You don't want to take him. Go ahead and take an independent study and so and so I can't remember who the instructor would have been. And at the time I was working during the day at a bank and I didn't want to fool around with trying to line up some kind of special instructor or something like that. So I went ahead and took this Rothbard guy. And I still remember the first night he walked in because there was a guy named James Philbin who you guys will remember. But Murray came walking in. He had a pocket full of pens and like five or six pens in his pocket. And he had this guy following him carrying a stool for him to sit on while he lectured. And I thought, wow, this guy's a big enough deal. He's got a guy following him around with a stool. And then he just immediately started talking. There was no syllabus. There was no take and roll. There wasn't anything like that. He just immediately started talking about it. And at the time it was the first Gulf War. So he was going, oh, these crazy politicians, they want to cap gas prices. And he just went on and on about this. And I noticed everybody around me just started furiously taking notes. And I thought he was just yakking kind of as a warm-up for the class. But no, they were just taking everything down as fast as they could. And so I started doing the same thing. Little did I know that you could never catch up to Murray's just stream of consciousness sort of lectures that were peppered with 10 or 12 reading references per class. And the reading references were not only the title of the book or the author of the book, but what year they were published and which edition it was in. So he had this incredible recall for these sources that he had. But I went ahead and took history of thought and did okay. And I took U.S. history from him as well. Wrote a professional paper under him and then decided to, as it turned out, write my thesis under him. But just to prove that I had no idea who Murray Rothbard was, I have a paper in front of me because Murray wrote this book called The Great Depression. Perhaps some of you have heard about it. It is the book about the Great Depression. So Murray had everybody write a paper and you just had to okay the topic with him. So I go in and I said, you know, I want to write about the Great Depression. He goes, oh, great, Douglas, that's great. And he started ticking off about five, six sources that I could use. And then finally at the end he goes, oh, yeah, I guess I wrote a book about that. It's called The Great Depression. And I don't think anybody who knew who he was would write a paper for Murray Rothbard called The Great Depression. You just wouldn't do it if you knew who he was. So it just goes to show you that I had no idea. Really, I just thought he was a good guy. And eventually I went to one of the Stanford events for the Mises Institute. And I was sitting around some people and they saw my name tag that I was from Las Vegas. And they said, oh, do you know Murray Rothbard? And I said, yeah, I took classes under him. And their jaws dropped. And they said, can we have your notes? Can we have your class notes? And I just, it was at that moment that it finally kind of hit me that I had been in the presence of greatness. And obviously, like Hans, my life's been changed forever. I wouldn't be here, wouldn't have worked at the Mises Institute or have the outlook that I have of the world. So Murray is, you know, every once in a while, we tend to downplay what college can do for young people, especially right now, because you can do so much of it online or you can, you know, what good are these degrees. And I, you know, I fully support that. But then I'm not a very good example, because in my case, I went in as, you know, nothing. And then I run into a guy named Murray Rothbard and it changes my life forever. So for those of you who are teaching, you can change somebody's life forever. And I know it can happen, it can happen to me, but I've got more show and tell for you later, but I'll turn it back to our host and we'll see where it goes from here. I'd like to point out that Doug's paper on the Great Depression in Murray Rothbard's writing is a grade of A, and it says, excellent, underneath it. Hello? Yeah. Regarding his, he taught two classes typically this semester. I think at the end it was one. And they were always 6 p.m. classes, usually very much a owl preferred to wake up around noon or so and some morning classes were out. Many students were converted. The best part about the evening classes were that they were always different. They were titled the same each time, but they were always different. And a typical story would be the dean walking in the classroom because only one student had registered for the class and there's a dozen kids sitting in the classroom furiously taking notes. So what are you all doing here? We're listening to Murray Rothbard. And so of course he couldn't cancel a class, but it was a different series of recollections, thoughts, reflections by Murray Rothbard every time he took a class, which for a lot of us was about as close as you could get to being in his apartment on the Upper West Side to the wee hours of the night, listening to his latest thoughts based on whatever he was reading at the time. I ran his last study group as his bodyguard and chauffeur and bag carrier. I carried a stool, but I carried a bag. And I'd gone out to Vegas in 1990. I'd started out in Brooklyn Polytech in 86, oddly enough. Professor Svedri, who I think has passed away since then, told me to look up. Murray Rothbard actually pointed to him in his little dark, dank, crappy office in the crappy building that we were in. But I'd heard from other students that he was off his rocker and so I had avoided him. And then sure enough, literally within months of him leaving, I had gone through the usual. In America, you end up being a libertarian through Enrand. So I started reading Enrand, went through the footnotes, got to Mises, and then finally got to Rothbard. And I said, oh, I messed up, worked for a little bit, saved some money, ended up going to Vegas in 90. Worked my way up to being his last study group leader. And the process, the bodyguard part was to keep out people who were not interested in grappling with the material, mastering the material, and having sincere and honest questions as part of their quest for truth. In other words, the annoying nutcases. Our locations were secret, but we all knew what the location was. And then, of course, make sure that we pick up Murray, Professor Rothbard, at the front of the business building and drive him across the street to the restaurant. We were having our meetings because he was very much adverse to physical activity. I think the brain metabolizes a lot of glucose and I think his brain probably consumed more than your typical Olympic athlete. And if you were around him, you figured it out pretty quickly. Now, the last memory I have of him, unfortunately, was at the restaurant having one of these evening sessions, which were semi-discipline in the sense that there was an assigned reading. You were expected to read the reading. And then he would start talking about the reading, entertain questions, and then, boom, like a rocket, go from there. So, let's say we're reading a chapter in human action, and then we'll go through the World Series, a really good movie, back to the Spartans, then go back to medieval Europe, go through the Renaissance, back to whatever it is, World Series, and then back to human action. That was Murray Rothbard. And so he did have groupies, and the reason he had groupies was because it was really an exciting ride each and every time you took it, and it was never the same ride. You learn something every single time. Anyway, the last thing he was eating on the last night that I saw him was a jelly donut on a plate that he was eating, and he had the powdered sugar on his lip, and this was at 7.30 at night, no, 8 o'clock at night. Like many people, after he passed away, I just sort of wandered the earth for a while, did some accounting, and then eventually went to law school and became an attorney. Before he passed away, I went through the typical process of a student trying to figure out what my destiny was and what my purpose was, and I had many, many, many discussions with him, and most of these discussions ended with more assignments of reading material followed up by me coming into his office and saying, okay, did you read this? All right, so what do you think? And then he'd say, okay, well now you need to read this. And we eventually came to the conclusion that I should have gotten a PhD in accounting because my background was in accounting, but after he passed away, I gave up on that, and so like I said, I ended up becoming an attorney. Everybody who met him liked him. He was very personable, very charming, had a phenomenal, phenomenal sense of humor. Sometime off-color, it's not like David Gordon or so, but he definitely had a sense of humor. He loved making fun of people, loved making fun of ideas, especially when we had visiting dignitaries. We'd have people visit in Vegas. They'd come, they'd sort of do a pilgrimage, and either they'd visit us in Professor Hoppe's group, which was once a week as well, much more informal, or Murray's, which was, like I said, a little bit more structured, a lot less drinking. I'll just put it that way. And sometimes he'd agree with them, and other times he'd nod, and then next time we'd meet, he'd say, ah, did you hear what he said? And then he'd go on for an hour and just completely dismantle whatever the position was that the person had taken that he felt was wrong. I'll conclude by saying that what brought me to Murray and which is why I still adore him in my thoughts is that he was one of those individual, well, first of all, he was a genius. There's no question about it. You can sit here and debate that all day long, but he was absolutely a genius. But he was a genius who was dedicated to trying to discover truth wherever he could find it. He looked for truth in economics, found it, philosophy found it, history found it, politics found it. In this day and age where people are talking about Trump and Sanders and all these other crazy candidates in the United States, we have to remember Murray was excited back when Perot was running, and the main reason he was excited was, first of all, he liked the idea of somebody speaking, frankly, very entertaining. But what he liked the idea was he said, look, if the American political system gets so debased, to the point where there's no truth or value in any label whatsoever, how refreshing it is to find a guy who's actually going to stand up and say, hey, this is the way I'm going to do it and I'll call it and this is who I am. And so I really wish, and I think everybody who knew Murray would agree that he was around today, just so he could criticize, comment on whatever's going on today, whether it be crisis in Europe or presidential candidates in the United States. I really have to say that to have been around him to almost daily, it just literally was like a drug. And I miss it very much, and I still like going back to read some of Murray's old stuff, his articles, the things he blasted off at, what was it, eight pages a minute? No, eight pages an hour, eight pages an hour on his typewriter. Short bursts of just sheer brilliance. Yeah, I feel like maybe a few stories about what type of personality he was. Murray was of Jewish background. His parents came from Poland and Russia, and he grew up in Manhattan. And they lived basically all of his life in Manhattan. He looked a little bit like Woody Allen and also had clear similarity with Kissinger. Once he took a trip to Italy and came back and told me, Hans, you know what happened to me? I was sitting in a restaurant and somebody approached me and said, are you Henry Kissinger? And he was quite a party. If he would have said, you look like Woody Allen, I would have accepted that. But the comparison with Henry Kissinger did not please him very well. Murray was a late night person. He never got up before noon. He had his sleeping room darkened completely. He was shocked in the first semester in Vegas when they assigned him to a class in the morning. In the next semester, that was changed because that was not for him. But he worked then until 3, 4 at night every day. He attended parties, left parties, let's say at 1 or 2 at night. And in the morning when I met him, he had written an entire article of 15, 16 pages on the typewriter, showed me with almost no corrections, just teeny, teeny hand corrections. He could write in enormous speed. A striking difference existed between his writing and his teaching. There's almost no one who is as organized in his writings as he is. It always starts from the beginning and goes step by step by step. In his lecturing in regular classes, not necessarily in his public speeches, they were also somewhat organized. But in the lectures in his class, he was very disorganized. You would not recognize that that is the same person who writes what he writes. Because as you said, he jumped from topic to topic, from Plato to Nixon's price controls and from Nixon's price controls to St. Thomas. And from that, explanations of how you derive the slope of demand curves. Everything jumping back and forth so he was not particularly popular with students unless the students somehow had some idea of who he was. But most of the students that I encountered at Brooklyn Polytechnic first and then also in Vegas, they thought, I can't follow this guy. It makes no sense. It was enormously difficult to take notes because of that because you had to just make a decision. This is something that is just a side remark. This is something that is of importance and most of the students are not capable of making these simple distinctions. They take notes on even the most trivial things that were just offside remarks. Murray was also a great comedian. I think he would have had the capability of becoming a famous Jewish comedian also. Like Woody Allen. He was a great imitator of voices, a great imitations of Bill Buckley, who was at the time the leader of the conservative movement in the United States. He despised him. But you could hardly tell the difference and the marvelous imitations of people. He lived in Manhattan in a rent-controlled apartment only on the first floor because he was afraid of height. He never took the subway because he was afraid of subways. He took the bus to get to his office in Brooklyn, which was quite far away from his apartment in the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Murray was initially afraid to drive in a car, so they had to teach him how to sit in a car. They put him in the back seat on both sides of the back seat. Somebody else was sitting so that he wouldn't look out of the window and get confused, so he had to learn this. He was also afraid of flying, so they took training sessions. They flew from New York City to Hartford, which is just a few miles away, back and forth, so that he would learn how to overcome his fear of flying. He did get a driver's license, but his wife prohibited him from driving because he would have been a danger on the road. So he was a GPS system for his wife when they drove across the country from Vegas to New York in the last few years. As Lee said, he was absolutely opposed to physical exercise. They had been invited by some people to go to the mountains. He was afraid of the height. In Vegas, when we went to lunch, we always went to the same restaurant for lunch, not because it was any good, but that was the shortest distance between the office and the first restaurant. When I suggested, don't worry, why don't we 100 yards away? That is a much better place. No, no, no, just no walking. I should also mention that Murray not only had a huge library and had read all these things because every book was underlined with marks on the side. To not sense what kind of a jerk who believes this full of remarks. Some of them I would not want to repeat here. But not only did he read all of these things, on the side of it, he was interested in almost any subject under the sun. He knew everything about the baseball results, the football results. He knew the history of almost any place. He also had the time to know most of the American soap operas. So it was almost mind-boggling. You could never understand how can somebody find the time to do all of this. But it was this enormous mental quickness that impressed you. Again, what I said before, he could write articles in one or two hours that went out the next day for print. When he died, the Neue Ziericher Zeitung, at that time it was still a more liberal in the classical sense newspaper than it has become in the meantime like all major newspapers, he asked me to write an obituary. And I mentioned that Miroslav has written more than 20 books and more than 10,000 articles. And they didn't believe me. They took the 10,000 out and said 1,000 or something like that. But it is literally two Miroslavs but wrote more than 10,000 articles, plus 20 books, some of them have 1,000 pages. As I said, people have not experienced the speed with which he could work. I cannot imagine that that is even possible. We tried. I was the last person in Las Vegas who began using a computer. The only one who never even made an attempt was Miroslav. Leave me alone with this. I love my electric typewriter and he thought that was already a technological upgrade because few years before he just had a mechanical typewriter. Another little anecdote to tell you how he lived. The first time I went to his apartment in New York that was some New Year's party or something like this, I walked up the stairs and he came rushing down and said, Maria, I thought we have a party. Yeah, but I have to get 10 New York Times. I said, why do you have to get 10 New York Times with Sunday editions? Why do you have to get 10 New York Times? Oh, the sink is dripping and the super is out of town and New York Times suck up a lot of water. So I have a few more things to say. We'll just return the microphone to some of my fellows here. Yeah, Murray was very proudly low tech. He announced that to me more than once in his office. But, you know, you run into a lot of geniuses who don't necessarily have the best, you know, people skills. But Murray had the people skills and, you know, the intellectual chops and, you know, the day I defended my thesis, of course, you know, Murray's there and Hans is there and so forth. And the graduate coordinator had issued a department-wide memo that said, on Thursday, April 2nd, at 3 p.m., Doug French will defend his thesis in Room 518. Since he has not shared his thesis topic with me, you will have to learn that on Thursday. As far as I know, his committee consists of Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, and Terry Ridgway. Nevertheless, all graduate faculty from the department are permitted to attend the presentation, ask questions, and to make recommendations to the candidates' committee. Well, Murray did not share this memo with me because he knew I'd be outraged because, and just to prove it, since I know there are so many lawyers in the room, I have the documentation for the proposed graduate degree program signed by one Tom Carroll. Also, the document of the appointment of my examination committee signed by none other than Tom Carroll. So he did know all those facts, and of course Murray knew it, and Tom Carroll knew it, but as good a guy as Murray was, and as Lee said, everybody liked him. He was not treated very well in the department. I run into a lot of people who think that UNLV was some kind of, you know, galt's gulch, if you will, of Austrian thought, and that the department was very supportive of all this, and it just wasn't true. Of course Hans knows this very well. And the last time I saw Murray, and if I remember right, Murray had a phobia about elevators too, right, at one time, and he had to get over the elevator phobia. And ironically the last time I ever saw him before he died, which is a couple weeks before, I ran into him on the elevator. I had waited for him for about an hour and a half, and then there he was coming off the elevator, but he gave me a copy of his annual evaluation from the department chair, Chairman Thayer. Now Chairman Thayer had the distinction of, I think, one article on sunscreen. Yeah, something like that. But he had the brass to say that Professor Rothbard's performance in the area of professional growth has been disappointing, and that his professional growth in scholarship was also disappointing. And as you can imagine, Murray was somewhat outraged and wrote about 3,000 words in response to Dr. Thayer. And so Murray wasn't treated terribly well on campus. And those of us who studied under Murray, studied under Hans, were not embraced by the Tom Carrolls of the world and the other people who were running the department. But all that aside, the happiest guy I ever knew was Murray Rothbard. And that was probably part of the reason that I used to wait in the hall for an hour and hour and a half sitting on the floor. Eventually chairs began to appear outside his office so that we could all sit down, because we would all line up to wait and talk to Murray. And as Lee mentioned, you talk about everything, from UNLV basketball to soap operas or whatever it might be. Of course soap operas are starting to be canceled these days, and I made a post on Facebook that, I can't remember what soap opera would just got canceled, but this is very sad. Murray would be very sad today. Well supposedly one of Murray's big fans was outraged that Murray Rothbard would have any interest in soap operas. He said, that's just so ridiculous. But some of the people who were fans of his work don't realize his many, many interest well beyond scholarship. Maybe I say a few words about our situation that existed in Las Vegas. When we went to Las Vegas, as I said before, Murray Rothbard received an endowed share. That was the first time that he had a big salary. I think in Brooklyn Polytechnic, his salary was $37,000 I found out afterwards. And I must say, I feel still ashamed to admit that during that year I had a grand, and that grand paid me well above $50,000. I did not know this. I mean I thought that Murray was a pop star, a superstar, and there was huge salaries. When we came to Las Vegas, Las Vegas was of course, and still is to a certain extent, a scandalous place. At that time, Vegas also had one of the most famous basketball teams. They were running Rebels in the first few years. They won the American basketball championship, and the next year they came in second or something like that. And we thought the University of Las Vegas would want to have an economics department that was just as scandalous as their basketball team, which were called the Running Rebels. So we thought that maybe the University wants to have a Running Rebels economics department. And that we both got the job there. In my case in particular was due to the fact that several people who made the decision who should be hired in that year would retire as the next year. So they didn't have to deal with those people who came in new. So they liked me personally and that's why I got the job. Then immediately the department of the still remaining department turned against us almost instantly because they've mentioned Tom Carroll for instance. He always blamed me for I would be working to achieve a goal that people like him would never ever find a job anymore. Because I was of course in favor of privatizing all of these things. And the next year in order to counter balance these two evil Austrians that they had there, the department then hired a Marxist. At that point I approached Murray and said, Murray look we know the president, both knew the higher ups at the university because we were in the Gourmet Club and the higher ups were also in the Gourmet Club. So we knew them socially. I said why don't you go to the president and put in your weight after all you as the most prestigious member of this department and prevent this Marxist will get the position. But Murray did not like personal confrontation at all. That was the only point where we did not agree. So I was in favor of personal confrontation. Now in my old age not quite as much anymore but I was a big fighter. But Murray was in personal relationships more coward. He smashed the people in his writings like nobody else smashes people in his writings. But personally he was just a nice teddy bear. I was just telling jokes and changing the subject whenever he didn't like things the way they went. So we lost that opportunity of taking over the department and then things became from year to year more hostile. That chairman without any accomplishments whatsoever would the right nasty evaluations of a man like Murray Rossport was unbelievable. I won't tell you what these chairman wrote about me. They tried to get rid of me, prevent me from getting tenure. But I was a very popular teacher. I actually fed Murray students because as I said Murray's lectures were somewhat disorganized. Without me feeding him students he would have very few people who would have dared to take his class. So when they did not want to give me tenure there were some sort of student riots going on. There was also donors of the university protesting at the president. And I was turned down first by the department, also by the dean. And then it was overruled by the president of the university because the president said, you know, I travel around the country and I have met many people who know Hoppe but I have never met anybody who knows any of the other guys in the department. So it was only because of some protection that I had from the upper ranks of the university that I survived, that I survived, otherwise it was extremely hostile. Even our students were mistreated. As soon as somebody figured out this guy is a Rossport guy, or a Hoppe person, he was not safe to pass classes with other professors. So the situation was terrible. And after Murray's death, of course, the thing became even worse and I was completely, completely alone. And I never spent any hour in my office except my official office hour that I had to attend and immediately left the place and just came five minutes before I had to start my lecture at no conversation with any of the colleagues. Let me just add to that. It's absolutely true that they discriminated and tried to force out students who followed Murray and Hans. For example, I was there on two separate scholarships and at one point I think it was Carol or it could have been the other guy who made some sort of hint that bad things could happen to me and I basically told him he can do whatever he can do to himself because I didn't really care. I think that's one of the reasons Murray said go on to graduate program in accounting, not economics because at least there they won't care and it's true, they didn't care. Also I was a great student. I think the only grade less than an A ever got was from you and the A minus you gave me once. No point, no student. Anyway, Murray used to say that people oftentimes specialize in what they're least good at and so he used to make that story about Milton Friedman and unfortunately Murray, he loved politics, he loved playing in politics because he was a great force for the Libertarian Party, found that a lot of organizations like Cato obviously helped found the Muses Institute, wrote, I mean he was a great polemicist, brilliant polemicist and in that role he was of course, I mean second to none, I mean he inspired legions, unfortunately face to face in person like Hans was saying, he was a teddy bear. He was no Machiavellian by any means. He was nice to everybody, even people who are really, really mean to him writing crappy evaluations that were full of whatever. That unfortunately was a little bit of a weakness because I was there as one of the groupies of Hans and Murray when the department just went out of their way again and again to crush Hans and isolate Murray as much as they could. Countless stories of interested students, students from great schools, whether it be, you know, Stanford or Harvard or what, not wanting to come out to UNLV and being heavily discouraged from coming. I remember one of the reasons I think Hans got his tenure was because the President University became aware of some software millionaire who was getting ready to move to Las Vegas, just to study under Murray for no other reason than to study under Murray and had met. It was Carol or it was, who was the other one? Do you remember? One of the guys from the department and he literally told him, don't come. And that man wrote a letter to the President University and I think it probably had some effect because the higher you are in the administration, the more you realize money needs to come in in order to make this all work or if you're just a tenured faculty member check comes every two weeks no matter what you do. But nonetheless, Murray was never discouraged and I'm thankful that his productivity that I could tell was really affected by all the negativity that was thrown his way because he was just fundamentally a very positive person, full of energy. I don't think I ever saw him depressed or down or moody. I mean, he would make fun of people and he'd say, that's ridiculous, who says that? But he was never in a bad mood and in that sense he was amazing and inspirational too. I've got one more anecdote. Just sitting here thinking of my contacts with Murray is one of my very first contacts in the very early days of the Mises Institute. One of the very first conferences was on, the American government had just passed a law called the Americans with Disabilities Act and there was a conference on regulation and I was asked to write a paper on the likely effects of this new law and that's one of the things we economists do. We use supply and demand analysis to figure out the likely consequences intended and unintended of these interventions in the marketplace like this and I knew Murray Rothbard was going to be there so I spent a lot of time on this paper that I wrote and I wrote several drafts of it and I just spent a lot of time thinking about it. I thought that I had pretty much covered every possible consequence of this new law that was likely to happen in the future and I'd already published several books and lots of journal articles on this type of thing so I was pretty good at the economic analysis of regulation. That was one of my areas and I remember on the plane ride too when the conference was one more thing popped into my head and I thought well I should have had that but it's too late now the paper's already been sent in and all that and so I get there and I gave my presentation and Murray was sitting there in the audience and wouldn't you know the one comment he had was about that one thing that popped into my head on the airplane and he had thought of the one thing that I left out also he was so sharp about things like that and at that same conference after we were done for the day I remember going into the Rathskeller the basement of this hotel where there was a beer garden and Murray was leading everybody in German war anthems and drinking beer. Yeah you know and Murray didn't you know once you graduated and moved on he didn't forget about you and in my case I moved to Reno and in part of my thesis I had wrote a little something about Tula Mania putting an Austrian spin on it that he thought was a contribution and so he urged me to try to get this published in a mainstream journal and so you know I tried one time two times three times and finally I got up to six or seven you know denials and I wrote him a letter and said gee Murray I'm just you know I've had it with this and Murray who obviously had a lot of things to do actually answered my letter very promptly told me this was the same sort of treatment that he had received when he tried to get published in mainstream journals went on to say how moronic they were and they didn't have any suggestions or anything like that but he continued to urge me to press on and I did and I did and of course the last time I saw him he said well of course we're going to publish it in the Journal of Austrian Economics called at the time it wasn't a QJ it was the review of Austrian economics well unfortunately Murray passed in between and then I got a letter turning it down by the review of Austrian economics and I can tell by the wording of that review I know who did it and that person shall remain nameless today but Murray continued to serve as an inspiration well beyond you know your time in class and so it was he was just extraordinary in you know the energy that he tried to infuse into you and he could have easily with the treatment he was receiving on campus he could have easily you know drop students very quickly and become bitter and resentful and he just like I say he's the happiest guy I ever met he was called the happy warrior I should there's one one subject that I should touch upon too Murray Rothbard was the creator of the libertarian movement in the United States without Murray Rothbard there would be no libertarian movement in the world there was a movement that started basically in his living room and Tom and I know all of these participants more or less well Murray also had Murray also had some contact with Ein Rand for he had a little circle that was called the Bastia circle and Rand had a little circle of her followers in in Manhattan and they met a few times these two circles but had a very quick fall out Rand as you know is an avid asiist and she found out that Murray Rothbard was married to a Christian woman who somehow unbelievably believed in God and since the belief in God was considered to be absolutely intolerable and irrational in Rand's view Rand told him that he should give his wife a little pamphlet by I think Barbara Brandon that was one of their followers Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon that was not their real name they changed that name in order to sound like the son of Rand Rand's name was of course also not Rand but in any case he was supposed to present his wife with his pamphlet by Barbara Brandon and if she would not become convinced that it is absolutely stupid to believe in God then he should divorce her and believe it or not Rothbard thought that was a silly demand and stopped having contact with them as far as a libertarian movement as a libertarian movement is concerned Murray was the founder of the Cato Institute the intellectual founder the financial founder was David Koch there are a number of brothers here the biggest privately owned company in the United States the three Koch brothers rank always among the top 10 of the richest people in the United States and David Koch was for a while a fan of Murray Rothbard he funded him for a while actually one of his books is dedicated to David Koch and then they had a fallout because the Cato Institute in the view of Murray Rothbard was supposed to be dedicated to radical Austrian economics and in particular the economics of Ludwig von Mises whereas he considered Hayek to be some sort of sell-out which in my view indeed he is and the Koch however wanted to gain influence in politics and move the Cato Institute in a direction to be moderate, acceptable willing to make compromises moving from the West Coast to Washington D.C. in order to be closer to the center of power and Rothbard didn't follow this line and even though he was a stock owner of Cato he was then ousted by the Koch and told me I'm not going to sue a multi-billion there's no chance in hell that I will win so he gave up the struggle the Cato Institute is still a very moderate place they invite all central bankers constantly to give speeches and so forth and after the fallout with the Cato Institute then Lou Rockwell approached Rothbard and suggested to found the Mises Institute and make the Mises Institute in a way the facility that would promote Rothbard's writings and work in the Mises Institute is in many ways a Rothbard Institute nowadays I noticed among these modern libertarians Rothbard is in many circles also in the meantime hated because he was culturally of course a conservative man and the libertarian movement has become a cultural Marxist movement in many ways hippy lifestyle and that sort of stuff is more important than really fundamental questions and the last thing I should mention however is this without Rothbard there would have been also no Ron Paul Ron Paul owes his entire ideas to Mises and Rothbard and Ron Paul who ran for presidency in the United States never thinking that he would have the slightest chance but he did of course a great job in popularizing this when we had maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people who knew about what we were doing Ron Paul made it possible that all of a sudden millions of people knew there exists something like Austrian economics and libertarianism but there would have been no Ron Paul without the brain behind it and that was Maria Rothbard so now I think that if you have any curiosity questions so I would be happy to have those questions addressed whereas our guy with the microphone I have a question for Professor Hoppe you contended that Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economist we in Britain think that this distinction should be bestowed on Adam Smith and in particular for his principle of the invisible hand that is to say the principle that if every individual works to promote his own financial self-interest this leads to the optimum economic outcome for society I wonder if you could comment on how far Adam Smith could be regarded as a predecessor to this libertarian school which you've been discussing that is to a certain extent that is true Henry Hazlett when the human action came out he said something to the effect Smith was a great economist but as compared with the achievements of Mises it is almost dilettante-ish to work but of course there is a general sympathy for Smith in the free market movement except Maria Rothbard has written a two-volume history of economic thought which is not just economic thought it is just general history and history of ideas blended in a story of history of economic thought Maria Rothbard also pointed out that Adam Smith of course was also to a certain extent a forerunner of Karl Marx because he did believe in a moderate form of the labor theory of value so he was quite critical of Adam Smith which is something that you might be interested into Maria Rothbard of course also wrote reviews of Charles Murray and Richard Harnstein's Bell Curve book a very positive review and actually pointed out that Philip Rushten was even better so you see these sorts of things that Rothbard also did also make him unpopular in many libertarian circles nowadays because Rothbard's interest was enormous there was not a field in which he was not interested in and he had not the slightest hesitation to endorse Charles Murray and Harnstein book and even pointing out hey Hans, you should also read Rushten which I then immediately did Please Hans, add something also about his bunnies because I think it's so endearing it's not at all intellectual but it's very sweet Again, I'm not 100% sure if the story is correct but a man named George Kötter who was the editor of Margaret von Mises' memoirs and also belonged to the Mises circle and lived until the age of 105 or something that was with whom I became a little bit of a friend he told me that first part is definitely true Murray Rushten also had some rabbits in his apartment the rabbits of course always destroyed the furniture and then George Kötter told me his son was walking on Broadway he lives close to Broadway on 88th Street that he had seen Murray Rushten walking on Broadway with a rabbit on a leash when I met him he didn't have a rabbit anymore so maybe the rabbit was run over while he was taking one of the walks with him I forget which one of you said Murray pursued truth in wherever he went he pursued truth in history and found it and so on which questions was he fascinated with that he did not know the answer to yet by the time he died for example Einstein sought the unified field three and never found it were there any questions like that that he was fascinated with that he didn't have an answer for yet? he was an agnostic so in terms of religion he knew that he didn't know the answer he said if I would have to convert to any religion then it would be probably Catholicism but maybe I should say even though he grew up in a Jewish family and all his relatives were Jewish he was highly skeptical of Jewish religion and was an anti-Zionist so he has been described in the United States of course as a self-hating Jew so Mises was also an anti-Zionist so Mises was also a self-hating Jew like Paul Gottfried is a self-hating Jew but as far as, I mean were there unanswered questions as far as history is concerned of course there are always unanswered questions he was interested in a revisionist history I mean his, the way he conducted history was like a detective works he was like follow the money that's the most important thing that you have to do that might not give you the exact answer to all the questions that you are seeking but that's what every detective does in every detective story you look for a motive and you look where does the money go and he was very good in the age before computers before Google and all the rest of it to follow the money and identify those people who were responsible for certain activities if certain laws were passed it was always clear who benefits from this law and who loses from this law so you know almost instantly you have to if whatever a trade barrier is created you can immediately identify almost what types of firms would gain the most if this law is passed and in almost every case you find out that is true if you look at the personal connections and you find yes indeed that's where the money was flowing now in history the questions are never fully answered history is a different discipline than political philosophy or economics where you just the logical deductions is what counts in history it is of course facts, circumstances and things like that so there are always lots of open questions when it comes to historical questions whereas in the field of political philosophy in the field of theoretical economics you can have killing arguments I mean that is just finishes you off there's nothing that you can say anymore once the proof has been presented to you and Wolfspart was a great philosopher too so he knew of course the difference between theory on the one hand and history as an entirely different discipline on the other hand Just a quick question did Murray Rothbard ever let you know why he became interested in becoming an economist? What inspired him to take that path? Actually his first field was mathematics his undergraduate degree is in mathematics at Columbia and then I think he became interested in economics also because they lived next door when he was a boy living at his parents house with Arthur Burns Arthur Burns was an economist at Columbia University who then played a fateful role in preventing Murray from getting his PhD for a number of years later on but they were personal acquaintances from very young age on so I'm not quite sure but I can imagine that after his mathematics studies he then turned to economics maybe because he knew there's a famous economist living in the building and my parents know him and all the rest of it Can I ask you, you mentioned that he lived for most of his life in a rent controlled apartment which from a free market thinker is interesting did he continue to do that for sort of personal irony or did he simply think well if that's the market price for me why don't I take it? Did he ever comment on that? I think his attitude there was I would never advocate it I actually write articles that should be abolished now I'm in it as long as it's not abolished I stay in here The apartment was pretty big but it was as you would expect of a rent controlled apartment was dilapidated it was a lousy apartment it was big, it was cheap it was on the first floor but he stayed there until the end of his life Arthur Burns prevented him from getting his dissertation approved and that Rospart was only successful doing it after Arthur Burns first I think became chief of economic advisors under the Nixon administration then afterwards became head of the Federal Reserve System and finally in his life Arthur Burns was I think ambassador to Austria because he was a Jew of German origin could speak fluent German and was sent by the Reagan administration I believe to Austria that was his last post I have a question about academic hostility towards Austrian school professors or their students where do you think the hostility comes from what is it that makes them hostile to you? I'm just curious as a scientist of human action what's driving it? I think most intellectuals are hostile towards free markets because they realize that the demand for intellectuals the demand for words for writing is low among the public and it's also fluctuating a lot and of course seek the help of the state to get secure employment and he who pays you usually determines your attitudes towards many things not necessarily so but by and large I think in this respect Marx is not entirely incorrect who said does sein bestimmt, does bewusst sein being determines consciousness so where the money comes from determines pretty much what you think and as I said some of my enemies in my department they were always attacking me you are working for me to be unemployed and that doesn't make you very popular yeah hello I had the grace to meet him a couple of times and I have to testify to that he's an inspiration that you can be earnest and serious and still happy and this is nice to do you follow this tradition with this conference and I think it's in the tradition of Rothbard the question is I think he was as my understanding he's a natural rights argument for liberty and you then developed it into even stronger a prioristic argument for radical freedom did he push you to do that or how did that go? no that sort of stuff I developed before I thought that was a different improvement of what he had done and what was great about Murray was he immediately saw that too and saw that this is great great great was not that he was jealous or tried to find something that was wrong no he was very generous giving credit to other people he was not ever jealous of anybody who had done something maybe a little bit better in some areas and he had and quite to the contrary he always encouraged me you should do this you should do this read this guy we also had great fun when we had our lunches when we talked about who should be smashed next so he said to me Hans you should smash that guy and he was full of glee when I then presented him with a paper saying that's a great smash that's wonderful what you do a quick question to the former students of Murray Rothbard what were his exams like and how did he create students well they weren't multiple choice and I just happened to have one as you would expect but he would give you about six seven questions and was that same so six or seven questions and you ask four you'd answer four of them and this was in a blue book but a question and I'll just give you an answer an example of one of them and this is one question how did Adam Smith speaking of Adam Smith in the wealth of nations changes earlier views on the paradox of value and on his friend David Hume's international monetary analysis what fundamental attitude of Smith might account for these changes as well as his positions on usury laws and on taxation of consumer luxuries what were these positions explained fully now if you were an MBA student and you suddenly thought oh EC 742 I think this will fill up one of my you know one of my electives those folks when they got one of these they were shall we say unhappy so if you were if you understood Rothbard if you were a groupie a fellow traveler I mean his exams are almost like catnip because it gave you a chance to be a little minimery and and and see how much you were able to absorb during the lectures and in your own independent reading when you did papers for him he made me need make me told me to write a paper on the history of accounting and that process was more evolutionary process so you'd come and you'd give him the first paper and say I you know here's list of ten books you need to read about accounting and history of accounting and then you'd go back say oh this is professor in New Jersey or whatever seat and hall yeah here's his number call him he'll fill you on some more so you keep going back to him until you finally got to a stopping point in other words you'd figured everything out and maybe came up with something that might add to the body of knowledge but yeah and gave you a chance to really show him that maybe you listened a little bit yeah in contrast my exams were all true and false but a lot of I mean 180 questions true and false but I had I must say in my defense I taught classes of 200 people and Murray taught classes of maybe at the most ten