 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure and honor to talk to you this morning Especially since of all the speakers I looked through the list I'm probably the one who had the least exposure to Murray Rothbard. In fact, I met him only once I looked up the date was November 26 1994 Okay That was when I I had just was in the process of finishing my doctoral dissertation and it was an Austrian Dissertation which did not find much applause for my research director so my my girlfriend at the time my wife now Natalie here. She had the good sense as well. Maybe she'll get in touch with people who actually like what you're doing so She she sent me to to the US. So I took part in this this conference was 1994 Was a conference in honor of Henry Haslett's 100th birthday. He had died the year before at the age of 99 in the in Essex house and Was the closest place I could get to the US so I went there was under very adventurous Circumstances I flew with Pakistan Airlines and because I did have no budget. I stayed in Harlem 125th Street and Lenox. Okay. Yeah, so so when you're young, you have no money You need to be a risk taker when you're old and other factors that come into place So that was the the only time I met him and I'll say a few words later on about this and Actually, but I have one connection that is much much stronger than any of the other speakers to Rothbard Which is that I possess his tie And so this is this is a relic. This is a Rothbard relic. It's his wife Joanne who gave it to me Water block yet. Yes. They have this joke. We were sitting in the bus and said well I actually shook me's his hand and I I didn't wash it ever since So when you come and shake my hand, you'll have The touch with Danny went to the washroom. He said now I've washed it now. It's too late Well, I didn't shake. Well, I shook a Rothbard sand and but I also got his tie from from his wife for reasons Which we cannot fully explain but I mean she must have had a good sense Yeah, to give it to me rather than you Well, it's a great pleasure to be with you here, it's As in for an academic it's rather rare to have the opportunity to speak to non academics because this is what academic academics do most of the time to talk to each other on On on subjects that interest about five people in the world Of course, sometimes you have a different setting Academics talk at political rally rallies and so on but this is also not quite the same thing because the political rallies or political Parties and so on are actually large movements to Rip off other people. All right, so it's there's no personal commitment. There's no Contributions people don't start at the wrong end, right? They want that everybody else changes so that everybody else pays them rather than starting with themselves and us themselves. What could I do? Personally to make this place this world a better place And that's of course the right thing to do and it's for me It's a great honor and I'm always awestruck if I look at individual careers of all the people who are in this room What they've accomplished in there and their lives and on top of this You are interested in The foundation of a free society which are ideas and you're ready to commit to to help Institutions, especially the Mises Institute who is the foremost institution in the defense of what we cherish so much Namely a free society. So I'm very happy to be here My talk is supposed to deal with how Rothbard crosses the pond or Rothbard has crossed The pond because as a matter of fact today Rothbard is known all over the world and they're young people Reading Rothbard studying Rothbard and especially that's the most important thing developing right the ideas of Rothbard criticizing Rothbard applying Rothbard's ideas to to new problems Solving the problems of our day One of the worst things that can happen to an intellectual movement is that it turns into some sort of a museum Right, so you you just look at the Great Master and says, oh, yes And you roll out the prayer carpet and then say yes, yes great master And you you don't tolerate the slightest deviants from the recital of the words of the great master and so on That's a sure sign of brain death, right? So you're close and we don't have this this is one of the wonderful things of the Mises Institute and The movement at the center of which it is that we don't have this kind of problem So Rothbard is today all over the world. How did it come? What were the circumstances that brought this about? Yeah, so here again, I can relate a little bit out of my own experience 1994 But I'll say a few words of how the world was in 1994 and how the world was before 1994 So in my own case, I did not come to Austrian economics through Rothbard I came to Austrian economics through Mises and I did not discover Mises in Germany where I was Born and did my studies but in France out of all places Okay, so France is rather more socialistic both in intellectual orientation and in actual policy than Germany by But I had the good fortune. I was probably an accident But I had the good fortune anyway to to study for a year in France and I was studying with an economist who was very enthusiastic Pedagogue in the good sense of the word. So he understood his main task not as inculcating any predefined ideas into our heads but in raising enthusiasm in our minds for research you wanted to Have us Do carry on research and develop the science and so on in whatever field We might be attracted to this is very rare But so I had the good fortune coming of this man and he was very curious great intellectual curiosity was not an Austrian at all But he had read his name was Claude Couture and he died shortly after I met him He had me read two books that had been published in in France in French translations at the time one of which Was a book with essays by Murray Rothbard Believe it or not 1991. So there was this book that had the title Economist a charlatan economists and charlatans It was not a rock part who made up this title was the translator as a man with the name of Francois Guillaume He's still around very anti idiosyncratic person, but he had discovered Rothbard in In the 1980s and had become an enthusiastic follower and promoter of Rothbard thought in France and Francois is a very brilliant brilliant man is a very wide-ranging interest he is a splendid speaker and had an enormous outbirth of Energy in in the 1980s and 1990s since translating. I don't know how many books but among These books were this one by Rothbard, which contained essays such as a reconstruction of utility and welfare economics Few essays on the epistemology of Economics and things like this. So this was my first exposure to Rothbard my first exposure to Austrian economics So it came there, but this not did not make me an Austrian It it spiked my interest so then I would when I go on to read Hayek and then I discovered Mises and Mises was Somebody who Impressed me very strongly because Mises said this depth that is so absent in most of the economics Profession because he reaches from the epistemological foundations to the applications of the theory So the entire corpus of economic theory and then with various applications But build on a philosophical foundation, which he which is original also with him So this I didn't know at the time, but I sense this depth So when I started off my doctoral studies, I would read Mises in more detail and when I read this theory of money and credit This would convert me and make me an Austrian economist that I only want to do Research based on this because this for some strange reason has been neglected in the science Right where people just don't know it for somebody that has been forgotten and all I this is a huge opportunity a huge Market niche for me and because all the other people have Simply they ignore this all I need to do as well to tell them. This is how it is and All doors will flung open because this is the right approach Yeah, so it was a little bit naive But yeah, so this was what made to Austrian economics and then when I studied Mises more systematically once I was through His major work, then I started tackling the other authors. So I came to Rothbard and So I still remember how I took many column in state out of the University bookshelves because the book was present at several university libraries in in Germany At the technical University of Berlin where I was there was a copy So I took the book and I spend quite a substantial time reading it And then I put it back on the shelves Very irritated and also slightly in in in disgust because Rothbard he had this very weird way of tackling Economics he would in the second chapter of the book. He would suddenly talk about property rights Okay, no economist does this no economist talk talks about I mean today We have a discipline called law and economics. So there's sometimes you talk about property rights But only to explain how property rights should be From an economic point of view, right? So you should give property rights to those people who maximize social welfare or whatever coming out of this with a very perverse Way of thinking about property rights. So Rothbard has this in this book and I was completely unprepared to even consider the The merit that this might have in an economics book and then of course there was this political radicalism Which was very shocking to me. I mean I was a good European after all and so so pretty much a social democrat and Then in me this of course in human action he talks about the consequences of government interventionism, but He wouldn't get the impression that he's Libertarian or some libertarian agenda, but in Rothbard it's pretty strong And this yeah, this shocked me as well. So I was not prepared to well To base my readings and my research on Rothbard, but I returned to him a few years later I think the situation was similar for most people at the time the reason is Rooted in a very simple psychological fact that if you have somebody Propounding views that are unconventional and especially lead to political conclusions that are unfamiliar You are likely to reject it on the ground simply to say well this if this at any merit then it would be better known right Of course, there's a circular reasoning right? It's like the old voucher Marx jokes, right? I would never join a club that would exact me as a member Is a little similar there But but still right there is a sort of conviction that comes with success and when you see okay There are professors who actually do not consider it to be the nonsense But to take this seriously and who build on it. That's completely different thing if they institutes Research institutions who are Actively discussing this and teaching this to students is a very different thing But this didn't exist in 1994 It only existed a few years later so by 1994 there were very few Rothbardians of course also in the US, but Even even less outside of Europe some people had found their way accidentally to to Rothbard Because they Had for some reason known about option economics and then went to give the United States to study there one early example is Hans Sennals I became a professor in Grove City College and he went to the United States because he didn't Couldn't imagine building a career building a life in Germany after after the war And the only thing he had heard he had studied economics and got a doctoral degree in in Cologne at the University of Cologne That the only thing he had heard about option economics was well, there's this Mises guy who's a sharp Jew Sounds rather pleonastic, but oh anyway, and And another example is a Frenchman none of whom you don't know is a good friend of mine Philippe Natas, so he went to to France in the late 1960s and he studied with then also Grove City College They got a doctoral degree with with Sennals He also taught at the summer University about 15 years ago and And Hans Hopper of course so Hans Hopper discovered Mises independently In the in the mid 1970s. There was nobody there to there was no classes on Mises. There was no Seminars in Austrian economics no conferences and so on and he well by by some references That he found in in the academic literature So found his way to Mises and then from there to to Rothbard eventually so there were no Conferences there was no organization No associations, right? There were of course Libertarians in a wider sense in Europe But they were most strongly influenced by by Hayek Not by Mises for Reasons which after all are quite superficial but so they were there that it's simply because Hayek got a Nobel Prize in 1974 so this carried a lot of weight is again the success that the conviction that comes with success and There were institutions such as Whether it was in Prague Was a Liberali Institute which was created after 1989 At the same time there was also in Vilnius and Lithuania Libertarian think tank what was created but all of these initially at least they were very strongly under the influence of Hayek rather than of Mises and if not under the influence of Mises then of course certainly not under the influence of Rothbard so By the early 1990s there were various beginnings Especially another wake of the collapse of socialism, but there was no Rothbard has not had not yet crossed the pond Rather what happened rather was that those who liked Rothbard crossed the pond or had crossed the pond and had come to the United States So I think I was one of the first who crossed the pond in the other direction and started spreading Rothbard's idea because it's by 1994 I Had become convinced Contrary to my earlier readings that Rothbard indeed was the true heir of Mises as professor Salerno has just explained to us And that he has a lot of important things to To tell us that should be known by a wide public that moreover Rothbard has qualities that Mises did not have One of which is the brilliant ability as a writer Rothbard has this very rare ability among Economists, but academics more generally that he has great depth and great clarity and you know that very often depth And in clarity are supposed not to go together right so people look into the ground They say well this must be shallow because I see to the ground and if they look at some some Muddy pond they think well must be deep because I cannot see to the ground Doesn't mean that there might be not some waters that are both muddy and deep But of course, they're not very interesting because you spend most of your time filtering So in Rothbard you have this you have this depth and you have Great great clarity. So it's it's it's an enormously powerful tool to spread the ideas of Libertarian philosophy and the virtues of a free society that we have with Rothbard's writings So returning them back to Europe. I Translated two works into German that had not been I think was the first two German Rothbard translations. I translated the ethics of liberty And I translated what has government done to our money and Both books are still in print the ethics of liberty in the German edition is the third edition What is government done to our money has a very nice title is the shine gel system the fake money system It's actually it's a word play because what shine what it means both note It's a note, but it also means just outer appearance and appearance. So it's a shine gelt the appearance money system the fake money system and so this is in the fifth fifth edition and both books since then right so have been translated in Into what are ten other European? Languages so they're made there around The big but of course This is nothing right so this this would not have spread Rothbard's idea significantly in Europe and across the rest of the world What really brought turn things around Was the was the rise of the internet so as from 1995 the rise of the internet combined with great entrepreneurship in the Among the leaders of the Mises Institute, of course who Rockwell in particular who Rockwell immediately seized on this opportunity and Built the communication strategy of the Mises Institute on the internet and also created his own separate Enterprise who Rockwell comm Then there was Jeff Tucker at the time working for the Institute was Splendid a genius of marketing and he understood all the possibilities that came with Using the internet as a communications tool So this is what really what boosted the the presence of of the Mises Institute and the ideas of Rothbard Mises Hopper Solano and and so on all over the world And this is what then also a greatly increased our attractiveness for foreign students To our teaching programs. All right, so I Don't know exactly what the composition was of the Mises Summer University by 1992, but probably it was something like 80% Americans, right? Right and some 20% Foreigners and by the time I had Joined the crowd so we're talking about 1996 97th or the first year of the internet We already had almost half of the people coming from abroad and today We have so many people applying for the summer University from outside of the US that it's impossible for us to take them all Okay Plus we have these teaching programs in which we we have taught and will continue to teach the professors of tomorrow all over the world right so we have the Graduate program for doctoral students during the summer people coming to the Mises Institute and you're spending two months on their research projects and Out of this program that we have created in 1999 I don't know how many that literally dozens of professors who have turned out of the program who are teaching today Not only in the US, but all of the rest of the place Well, ladies and gentlemen, this this is how finally Rothbard crossed the pond Right, so we had both conditions. We had this brilliant writer who just was not largely acknowledged enough and who finally Obtained the audience that he deserved so much and in exchange gave to the world all that he had to give With us Books and with us articles and they're like contributed to to a better world. I think also thanks to you. Thank you very much