We hear a lot about young people turning to socialism. Ashton is not one of them. She worked for a Texas congressman not named Ron Paul when I met her. You’d be shocked at how many young fans Murray Rothbard and the Mises Institute have in DC. There are more of them out there than you think, on Capitol Hill and agencies and think tanks.

Those of us who read and enjoy Mises, and he wrote so much about so many things, might well wonder what he would have to say about the state of America and the West in 2019. After all, he was a sociologist and philosopher and political theorist as well as an economist. Surely we could use his perspective today, and so much of what he wrote was prescient and still relevant.

Many mises.org readers know that Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute and quiet benefactor to countless individuals in libertarian circles over the decades, continues to recover from a recent back injury. While the episode has not quelled his enthusiasm for liberty, recovery is no picnic.

When Dr. Ron Paul suffered a health scare during his live Liberty Report show last Friday, I was perhaps less worried than most. His remarkable vitality, vigor, and energy are well known to those around him, along with his penchant for exercise, clean living, and light eating. Having known him thirty years, I simply had no recollection of him ever being sick or out of commission. This is a man who had never missed a day of work or an event, at least in my memory. In my mind he was simply always there, a fixed feature of life.

At this conference and others like it, dealing with alternative legal and monetary structures, I’ve noticed in recent years a strong bias in favor of action over argument, for building over persuading, for practice over theory. This is laudable and understandable for all of us frustrated by statism and all its terrible offspring: war, bad money, division, along with economic, social, and cultural degradation. We understandably want out, and not one hundred years from now but within our lifetimes.

The topic of our symposium this morning is “What Must Be Done,” which originally was the title of a talk given by Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe at a Mises Institute conference in 1997. Hoppe posed his title as a declarative, but it’s also the question we all wrestle with as libertarians in a world so dominated by the state and its apologists.

What a week for our sacred democracy. Wow! You know, it’s so sacred that just a few thousand votes in a few states here and there could have turned it from sacred into profane, couldn’t it? Real easy. But no, as long as it goes a certain way, it shows the wisdom of the crowd.

Mises surely would be pleased by the thought of this gathering today, to know that his Vienna still has a heartbeat in Europe, even as its politicians and bankers and academics all go in the wrong direction. He certainly would be pleased and amazed to know his work would become available across the world, in many languages, free and instantly online. Most of all he would be thrilled to know his name is better known today, and his work more widely read, than during his lifetime. What more could any intellectual or writer want? This alone is a huge achievement.