Man, Economy, and Liberty

29

Testimonial

Margit von Mises

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to say Happy Birthday to my dear friend, Murray Rothbard, and to congratulate him on the great work he has done and is still doing to return the world to freedom.

I cannot say this without—at the same time—praising the warm friendship and thoughtfulness of Murray’s devoted wife, Joey Rothbard. It gives me great pleasure, Joey, to thank you tonight and to tell this gathering what a wonderful friend you have been to me all these years since my husband died.

Tonight, I have only one regret, and that is that Ludwig von Mises cannot be here to see and hear the out-pouring of admiration and love for his pupil Murray Rothbard, another great scholar in the Austrian tradition.

Surely all of you must know that Murray Rothbard was one of my husband’s most devoted pupils and loyal followers. No one—with exception of Professor Kirzner—can claim to having done more to advance my husband’s ideas than has Murray Rothbard. And no one could have described my husband’s work more effectively than did Murray Rothbard in his short but elegant essay, The Essential von Mises.

To state that Murray Rothbard admired my husband, hardly does him justice:—He loved my husband, I would say, as a devoted son loves a father. Yet Murray did not slavishly parrot every one of my husband’s ideas without reasoning things out on his own and developing his own ideas.

And sometimes his daring led him to conclusions with which my husband did not agree. Specifically, if I remember well, they differed in their views about Russia. Yet that did not diminish their mutual affection and respect.

An even greater difference in their convictions, however, involved their beliefs on government. Although my husband, in all his books constantly criticized the interventions of government into the market, and the tendency of governments to control people and their lives, he still believed government to be a necessity for society. Professor Rothbard, on the other hand, as you probably all know, thinks that we will never have a peaceful society until—to take a phrase from the title of one of his own books—we replace POWER OVER MARKET with MARKET OVER POWER. In other words, until we replace all of the functionaries of government by the mechanism of the market.

There were other, smaller, differences between them, involving not government but economic theory. Not about the fundamentals of Austrian economics, mind you, only some very fine points concerned with monopoly theory.

Those of you who have read my book, My Years with Ludwig von Mises will remember that my husband had great respect for Murray’s abilities and opinions, even when he did not agree completely with them.

In that book I described an incident that took place at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stresa, Italy. Dr. Joaquin Reig, a lawyer from Madrid, approached my husband and asked him to comment on the fact that his pupil, Professor Rothbard, did not agree with him on monopoly theory. My husband’s answer came immediately. He replied: “Whatever Rothbard has written in this work is of the greatest importance.”

And I shall take the liberty of extending my husband’s remark to say: “Whatever Murray Rothbard writes in any book is of the greatest importance.”

My dear friend Murray, I toast your birthday and your past accomplishments, and I wish you continued success in bringing the message of the free market to more and more people in the coming years. Do carry on your good work.

Thank you.

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Delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s birthday party celebration, New York, March 1, 1986, in honor of Murray N. Rothbard on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.