Speaking of Liberty

5. Interviews and Tributes

ROCKWELL-DOHERTY INTERVIEW

[An interview by Brian Doherty which appeared in the May 12, 1999 issue of SpintechMag.com as “Libertarianism and the Old Right.”]

Doherty: How and under what circumstances did you first become interested in political philosophy/work? Was it of an individualist/libertarian orientation from the beginning?

Rockwell: I’ve been interested in ideological matters from the earliest age. My father was a Taft Republican, and trained me well. A good thing too, for even as a schoolboy, I argued with my teachers over the New Deal, public accommodations laws, US entry into World War II, and McCarthy’s questioning of the military elites (I’d still like to know who promoted Peress).

I told them that Tailgunner Joe should have been attacking the US government all along, because it was the real threat to our liberties. That drove my teachers crazy. None of them would be surprised that I grew up to be a full-time gadfly against the conventional wisdom.

My influences included Taft, Garrett, Flynn, Nock, Mencken, Chodorov, Tansill, and the scholastic just-war tradition. Though a Yankee, I never subscribed to the Lincoln cult, and I admired the Southern secessionists for taking the original constitutional compact seriously.

For my twelfth birthday, a friend of my father’s gave me Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. That book taught me how to think in economic terms, and I have been reading in economics ever since, with a special appreciation for the old French Liberal School and the modern Austrians from Menger to Rothbard.

Once oriented, I gained reinforcement from a wide range of literature in high school and as an English major. I found property rights in German literature, skepticism against the State in English literature, and a love of liberty in American literature.

I was also taken with Cicero: his love of liberty and the old republic; his celebration of natural elites and opposition to egalitarianism; and, most of all, his fighting, indefatigable spirit. I believed that he was no less right because his principled stand did not prevail. There is virtue in the fight regardless of the outcome. The eloquence and courage of Tacitus influenced me for the same reasons.

Over time, I became aware that I was not only dissenting from the left but also from the conservative establishment, which was embroiled in the Cold War as a first principle. I grew increasingly skeptical of the official right, especially during the war on Vietnam.

Back then, the establishment meant National Review. There were some good people on the masthead, and it wasn’t as neoconservative domestically as it later became, but the magazine’s position on the Cold War came close to calling for a murderous first strike use of nuclear weapons. I could never understand how a person claiming to understand the merits of liberty and property, much less a person schooled in Christian ethics, could entertain such a bloody fantasy.

In the 1960s, like Murray, my sympathies were with the antiwar crowd (but not the unrelated Age of Aquarius bunch). I liked the willingness to resist, the commitment to principle, the moral tone, the defiance of the power elites. I had been a reluctant Goldwaterite in 1964, but by 1968 I worked briefly for Gene McCarthy.

There were some very sophisticated antistatist writings coming out of the left at that point. This is what distinguished the New Left from the Old Left. The Old Left, at least since the Stalin-Hitler pact, had become cautiously pro-empire and unflinchingly pro-DC bureaucracy. To believe in any central planning, as the Old Left did, is to cease to be a radical, of course. It means to love what the bureaucracy was doing and aspired to do.

This is why the New Left was a breath of fresh air. Its orientation was antigovernment. It focused on a fundamental moral issue—whether the US government should be waging war on foreign peoples—and it was open to historically revisionist scholarship that demonstrated the evils of the corporate State in American history. The focus was also correct: on the war profits being garnered by the munitions manufacturers, exactly as the Old Right had done in the interwar period. If you read Mises’s Liberalism, you see the same ideological disposition at work at a different time and a different place.

In some ways, there was a dovetailing of the New Left and the little that remained of the Old Right. For instance, hardly anyone remembers this, but the right was actually divided on Vietnam.

I remember when Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, harkening back to a praiseworthy Americanist impulse, criticized the war. It was then that National Review turned its guns on the JBS, citing a book Welch had written on Eisenhower some 10 years earlier. It was sheer farce. Buckley tolerated dissent on a wide range of issues—even allied himself with anti-Soviet Marxists like Max Eastman and Sidney Hook—so long as he could consolidate a consensus for the buildup of the military State.

The civil-rights movement of the 1960s complicates the picture. My ideological sympathies were and are with those who resisted the federal government’s attacks on the freedom of association (not to mention the federalist structure of the Constitution) in the name of racial integration. At first I didn’t like Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought he was a fraud and a tool. But when he turned his attention to the evils of the US war on Vietnam, I began to like him. That’s also when the establishment turned against him, and soon he was murdered.

These days, the neocons say the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an attempt to remove barriers to opportunity, and only later was distorted with quotas. That’s absurd. Everyone, both proponents and opponents, knew exactly what that law was: a statist, centralizing measure that fundamentally attacked the rights of property and empowered the State as mind reader. To judge not only our actions, but our motives, and to criminalize them.

The good folks who resisted the civil-rights juggernaut were not necessarily ideologically driven. Mostly they resented horrible intrusions into their communities, the media smears, and the attacks on their fundamental freedoms that civil rights represented. The brighter lights among the resistance movement correctly forecasted quotas, though few could have imagined monstrosities like the Americans with Disabilities Act. Of course, they were and continue to be viciously caricatured by the partisans of central power.

By the way, I’ve recently noticed that mild neoconish critics of the ADA are saying that it too was passed with the best of intentions, and only went wrong later. This is a fantasy based on an impulse to always believe the best of the State and its edicts.

In the early 1920s, Mises said that no man who has contributed to art, science, or letters has had anything good to say about the State and its laws. That is exactly right. Intellectual secession from the ruling regime is the first step to clear, creative thought.

How can all these threads in my personal history be reconciled? What was missing in those days, that the ascendancy of libertarian theory in Rothbard’s hands later provided, was an overarching framework to explain why war resistance, opposing forced integration, and celebrating individual enterprise were all of a piece. Liberty rooted in private property is the highest political virtue, and its enemy is the consolidated State. I have made that my lifetime credo.

But those were frustrating days and ideological confusion was everywhere. When Nixon was in power, I could not stand him (though I will admit to once having had a sneaking appreciation of Agnew). Like many later political leaders on the right, he talked a good game but expanded government power in ways the left never could have gotten away with.

Affirmative action, the EPA, the CPSC, the CFTC, destruction of the gold standard, massive inflation, welfarist ideology, huge deficits, price controls, and a host of other DC monstrosities were Nixon creations—not to mention the bloodiest years of the war. Nixon’s carpet bombing of Cambodia, for example, destroyed the monarchy and brought the Khmer Rouge to power. Nixon, Kissinger, and the rest have the blood of millions on their hands.

In intellectual circles, you could find conservatives who would write passionate articles and give riveting speeches on the glories of free enterprise. But then the other shoe would drop. Nixon is the answer, they said, because at least he has his priorities straight: before restoring free enterprise at home, the US needed to be a world empire to defeat the Russian army. The Russian army was defeated, or rather fell under its own weight, and all we’re left with is another evil empire. We’re still waiting for free enterprise.

Doherty: How did you get involved with Arlington House? When did Arlington House begin, who financed it, what was its philosophy, and why did it die?

Rockwell: In the early 1930s, most libertarian literature was published by mainstream houses. There wasn’t much of it, but our ideas did get a hearing. Hazlitt was published in Nation and the American Century, Garrett appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and Nock was in the Atlantic, while the Southern Agrarians were at the height of the literary profession and Mencken had the American Mercury. American Austrian economists like Benjamin Anderson and Frank Fetter had very high profiles in academia and business. And there was Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune.

But a decade of the Depression and the New Deal killed off most mainstream outlets. Opposing the federal government became politically incorrect, and publishers didn’t want to take the risk of calling down the price-control police or being accused of sedition. The generation that opposed the New Deal’s welfare-warfare State did not reproduce itself on any serious scale, and those who remained couldn’t get a hearing.

After Roosevelt tricked the Japanese into firing the first shot, the America First Committee, which had been a major vehicle for the resistance, shut down, and after the war, dissident, pro-liberty publishing houses survived only in a handful of places.

Our professors had mostly retired, and our journalists were reduced to the status of pamphleteers. The left enjoyed ridiculing libertarian political commentary because it was so unmainstream, and they were able to point to the existence of all these cranky pamphlets to prove it wasn’t serious material. Of course, Trotskyite pamphlets were never similarly attacked.

The only real publishers out there were Caxton, Regnery, and Devin-Adair, which did heroic work, but their distribution channels were limited, and in the latter case, some of the material cranky and tainted. Think about it: it was something of a miracle that Mises’s books were able to come to print at Yale University. But we should appreciate the fact that there was massive internal and external resistance to each one.

In the middle fifties, as a consequence of Russell Kirk’s book Conservative Mind, the word “conservative” came to describe anyone who was a nonsocialist skeptic of federal policy. I was unhappy with the word, because I was a conscious disciple of the pre-war Nock-Mencken-libertarian school.

There was a fundamental difference between the Old and New Right of Kirk’s making. Kirk’s book celebrated some good writers and statesmen. But he distorted what it was that drove them, which was not the “politics of prudence” but implacable moral and philosophical conviction. The main thrust of Kirk’s influence, I believe, was to turn the right against its best pre-war instincts.

In Kirk’s hands, conservatism became a posture, a demeanor, a mannerism. In practice, it asked nothing more of people than to acquire a classical education, sniff at the modern world, and privately long for times past. And if there was a constant strain in Kirkian conservatism, it was opposition to ideology, a word that Kirk demonized. This allowed him to accuse Mises and Marx of the same supposed error.

In fact, ideology means nothing more than systematic social thought. Without systematic thought, the intellectual shiftiness of statist impulse gets a free ride. You can’t fight the massive and organized powers of statist, centralist, and generally destructionist social forces armed only with a watch chain and an antique vocabulary. Ultimately, the question that must be asked and definitively answered in the world of ideas was posed most famously by Lenin: What is to be done?

On the answer to that question rides the fate of civilization itself. And if those of us who believe in the magnificence of the classical-liberal vision of society do not answer it definitively, we will lose. Seeing this, men like Frank Meyer—who was a libertarian on all matters but war and peace—blasted Kirk as a statist and an irrationalist. In the end, however Kirk’s moderatism and escapism prevailed because it was an easier path.

Rejecting this easier path was Neil McCaffrey, an extraordinary man who later became my friend and professional mentor on many levels. He was a very close friend of Meyer’s, as was Murray. Neil had founded the Conservative Book Club in 1964, and built a booming market among National Review and Human Events readers. But he soon noted that there were not enough books for people to buy.

That’s why Neil founded Arlington House in 1965, and named it after Robert E. Lee’s ancestral home, stolen by Lincoln for a Union cemetery. (I still hope to see it returned some day.) McCaffrey had hoped to create a major publishing house that would bring conservative classics and contemporary titles to a broad public for the first time in the postwar period.

There was a series of books forecasting the death of the gold standard and its consequences, by Bill Rickenbacker and Harry Browne, preeminently. The only bestseller Arlington ever had was Harry’s How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, and I worked as his editor. I also edited George Roche’s books, and the works of many other conservative leaders. I was peripherally involved in the publication of Hazlitt’s books.

Preeminently, I served as editor for new editions of Mises’s Theory and History, Bureaucracy, and Omnipotent Government. Reading those books, I became a thoroughgoing Misesian. I was so thrilled to meet him at a dinner in 1968. He was already in serious decline, but it was still wonderful. That is also when I got to know his wife, Margit, who later helped me found the Mises Institute.

Neil and I disagreed about foreign policy, and it was an uncomfortable topic. He was opposed to US entry into the two world wars, and sound on the so-called Civil War, but he was a complete cold warrior, like most people of his generation. However, on economics, Mises was his guide. One of his favorite topics was the moral and economic justification of charging interest. He was also a brilliant student of Catholic theology, literature, and history, and a saintly man.

Intellectually, I was a libertarian, but I stayed out of the movement, mainly because I had other interests in the publishing world, and the libertarians struck me as a strange bunch in the early 1970s. It seemed to be more a lifestyle movement than a political one, a problem that still persists. There was a very clear distinction in those days between libertarian intellectuals like Murray Rothbard, whom I admired, and the developing movement at large.

Neil had partners in the business, and he lost control, with Buckley playing a malicious role. The company was sold to Roy Disney in the mid-1970s, and eventually phased out.

By this time, I had gone to work for Hillsdale College. I had known George Roche while at Arlington, and admired the fact that he was both antiwar, having written his doctoral dissertation on 1930s war resistance on the right, and a free enterpriser with Austrian sympathies. At Hillsdale, I started Imprimis and Hillsdale College Press, set up a speakers’ series, oversaw public and movement relations, and helped with fundraising.

It was clear to me at the time that Murray Rothbard was Mises’s successor, and I followed his writings carefully. I first met him 1975, and knew immediately that he was a kindred spirit. Like all the other living intellectuals I respected, he was on the margins, laboring at a fraction of the salary he deserved, and excluded from conventional outlets of academic and political opinion.

I cannot remember the day that I finally came around to the position that the State is unnecessary and destructive by its nature—that it cannot improve on, and indeed only destroys, the social and economic system that grows out of property rights, exchange, and natural social authority—but I do know that it was Rothbard who finally convinced me to take this last step.

Unfortunately, I could only admire his writings at a distance. I tried to get Hillsdale to invite him to speak, but that was ruled out immediately. I was told that he might be a fine economist, but he was a loose cannon, unconnected from an organized apparatus of conservative thinking.

But what really did Murray in was not his conviction that the State was unnecessary, but his position on the Cold War. Libertarians were said to be tacit supporters of the Sovietization of the world. It was utter nonsense, but this accusation that Rothbard was a “fine economist” but nothing else would dog him until the end. I always saw this as a rationalization to justify fear of a fundamental rethinking of political philosophy and world affairs.

After Hillsdale, I turned to editing a journal of socioeconomic medicine called Private Practice. I worked to integrate the work of the Austrians and apply it to health economics and government intervention in that industry. It proved to be a fruitful mix, and in my mind demonstrated the possibilities of using the Austrian tradition to explain the way the world works in a very practical way.

Doherty: How did you end up working with Ron Paul?

Rockwell: In those days, unlike today, I had a keen interest in the affairs of Congress: the members of each committee, the legislation that was being considered, and the like. Being a congressional aide had always been a dream of mine, as absurd as that may sound today. When Ron won his first full term, he asked me to work for him.

We never saw his office as a conventionally political one. It was a bully pulpit to get the message out. We sent out hundreds of thousands of tracts on freedom, inserted amazing articles in the Congressional Record, and drafted libertarian legislation as an educational effort.

As for his voting record, Ron had a clear standard: if it meant stealing people’s money, he was against it. If it gave people back the liberty and property the government had taken, he was for it. Most of the lobbyists eventually stopped visiting our offices.

He was always respected by fellow legislators, but they thought of him as a bit off-kilter. It was Mr. Paul Goes to Washington. Politicians view their job as trading votes, getting their share of pork, expanding government, and generally playing the game. They believe they are being productive when they have helped pass more spending and regulatory legislation, and the price for their vote gets high indeed.

Ron was the opposite. He was a standing rebuke, not only to his colleagues but to the entire system. He still is.

Not many people in DC understood what Ron was up to. I remember once when a lobbyist came by and demanded that Ron oppose foreign aid to the Philippines on grounds that people there killed dogs for food. Ron was glad to support cutting foreign aid for any reason. He introduced the bill, and overnight he was celebrated by animal-rights activists all over the country.

Of course, the bill didn’t pass. It’s important to remember that ideology plays a very small role in legislative affairs except as a kind of public relations gloss. If a farming bill is passed by a Republican Congress, it is called the “Freedom To Farm Act.” If it is passed by a Democratic Congress, it is called the “Family Farm Fairness Act.” The text can be identical; only the coloring changes.

Watching this system up close, all my worst suspicions about government were confirmed. When I later started the Mises Institute, I swore that it would not function the way party think tanks in Britain do: as intellectual veneer to a gruesome system of legislative exploitation.

Washington has its own version, of course, and if anyone thinks congressmen or their aides study some group’s “policy report” on this or that bill, he knows nothing about the imperial capital of the world. Its animating force is not ideas but graft, lies, and power. Those policy studies are for PR. On the other hand, there is a cost to treating the policy game as if it were some sort of intellectual club to which we all belong: it imbues the process with a moral legitimacy it does not deserve.

A scam was perfected in the early 1980s among leading politicians and the think tanks. A group celebrates a politician’s supposed achievements in exchange for which the politician pretends to be influenced by the group. It’s all a public-relations game. This is a major reason why Murray was never able to work within that system. He had an irrepressible urge to tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Sure, he was a loose cannon, as any cannon should be on the ship of an imperial State.

Doherty: What was the genesis of the Mises Institute? How difficult was it to get off the ground?

Rockwell: When I was in DC, my happiest moments were receiving calls from students who wanted to know more about Ron and his ideas. He had a huge amount of support on Texas campuses. He struck students as smart, principled, and radical. But sending students speeches and pamphlets only took matters so far. I wanted to do more, but as I looked around, I didn’t see any libertarian organization that focused on advancing academic scholarship specifically focused on the Austrian School.

Also, I worried that Mises had been losing status as a thinker since his death. Hayek’s place was secure because of the Nobel Prize. But the rationalism of Mises, the tough-edged quality of his thinking and his prose, the conviction that economics is a logical system that can justly claim the mantle of science, seemed to be fading.

The free enterprisers were turning toward murkier thinkers, monetarists, positivists, and even institutionalists who had no interest in the grand Misesian project. This also seemed to go along with an unwillingness to consider difficult and radical questions on grounds that they were politically unviable.

There was overlap here with what was happening in politics. Since the early 1970s, the conservative movement was increasingly dominated by former members of the Old Left who had made their way over to the Right. These so-called neoconservatives made the switch in opposition to George McGovern’s foreign policy “isolationism,” but they had not really changed their views on domestic issues.

To give them credit, the neocons always admitted that they hadn’t left the Democrats; the Democrats had left them. They openly celebrated the legacies of Wilson, FDR, and Truman—mass-murdering would-be dictators all.

That position needed to be refuted and fought, but instead, a military-minded conservative movement embraced the neocons as allies on the only issue that really mattered to them, the expansion of the warfare state. There was no place for Mises, whose writings on war and statism were numerous and profound, in this new consensus.

There were few alternatives to the Reaganized right. The Beltway libertarians were drifting more and more toward policy and a generalized concern with respectability (the two go hand in hand), and away from Austrian economics and anything that smacked of idealism or a high theoretical concern. Hosting Alan Greenspan at a cocktail party became the goal.

I noticed a similar tendency among scholarship-granting institutions. They seemed interested in subsidizing only Ivy-League students of a soft classical-liberal bent, rather than promoting the concrete development and application of radical thought.

Another approach I rejected was quietism. I’ve never been impressed with the idea that we should sit back in complacent satisfaction that we constitute the remnant, while others eventually join us or not. Surely ideas do have consequences, but reality dictates that they need passionate scholars to advance them on every front.

Hence, Mises as a thinker, who had done so much to resuscitate old-fashioned, tough-minded liberalism, was falling by the wayside, a victim of a movement that eschewed all such unrespectable thinkers. Misesian theory and practice were fading fast. I set out to change that, and to serve a neglected generation of students. Idealism is what stirs the young heart, and the only idealism that seemed to be available to students in those days was from the left. I harkened back to my lifetime love of Mises, of his brilliance and his courage, and talked with Margit about the project. She was thrilled, made me promise to make it my lifetime work, and we got busy.

When I asked Murray to head academic affairs, he brightened up like a kid on Christmas morning. We agreed that the goal should be to provide a support system that would revive the Austrian School as a player in the world of ideas, so that statism of the left and right could be fought and defeated.

The main criticism directed against Austrian economics in those days was that it was not formal or rigorous because it rejected the use of mathematics as the tool for constructing economic theory. But this is absurd. In fact, Murray actually had two majors as an undergraduate: one in economics and the other in math. What was at stake here was not the competence of the Austrians but a fundamental methodological question: can the methods of the physical sciences be imported to the social sciences via economics? The Austrian answer was no.

At the same time, there was a grain of truth in the criticisms. American academia provided no formal setting to study economics from the Austrian perspective. Most of the then-current practitioners were self-taught, so even they had a limited perspective on the possibilities of creating an alternative formal system of economics.

I wanted to make up for this deficiency by creating a shadow university setting in which students could study economics under the post-Mises generation of Austrian scholars, especially Murray.

Murray loved our programs. He would teach all afternoon and stay up until 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. talking to students about ideas. He was always accessible, laughed easily, and was never foreboding. He learned from everyone around him and rejected the “guru” persona he could have so easily adopted.

Students who came to us expecting a stern setting of judgmental theorizing were shocked to discover something closer to a salon where intellectual inquiry was free and open-ended. It had to be that way to balance out the rigor of the content. Murray’s spirit still animates all our programs.

The funding problem was one I dealt with from the beginning. I had wanted to give Murray a platform, but I quickly discovered that old-line foundations would not help so long as he was on board. They certainly would not support an organization that argued for positions like the abolition of central banking, or funded revisionist historical scholarship and disagreed with the two-party consensus in Washington.

Corporate foundations, meanwhile are not very interested in ideas generally, particularly not ones that threatened the status quo. It’s a cliché now, but I also found that big corporations are not the strongest supporters of free enterprise.

I also found that most old-line foundation and corporate money comes with strings attached. And if there is one institutional feature I desired for the Mises Institute, beyond its ideological stance, it was independence.

I did not want to get roped into supporting cranky policy projects like vouchers or enterprise zones, and I did not want to be forced into emphasizing some aspects of Misesian theory simply because they were trendy, while feeling compelled to deemphasize others. I never wanted to find myself censoring an associated scholar because some foundation bigshot didn’t like what he was saying.

I wanted to see the fullness of the Austrian program funded and represented, consistently, fearlessly, and regardless of the fallout. The Mises Institute needed to do work that is deep and wide. It needed to be free to support research in areas like economic methodology, which doesn’t interest corporations, or blast the newest policy gimmick, a stance that doesn’t interest foundations. Finally, government money was not ever a consideration.

In the end, our support has come from individual donors and nearly exclusively so. I had a good-size Rolodex, so I started there. Ron Paul and others signed letters to their lists, which was a big help, and I had enough savings to work a few years without a salary.

We’ve been in business now for 17 years, and it took a long time to become viable. But we built slowly and carefully, brick by brick, and now have a solid edifice. And we still have our independence, and we still have an edge.

Doherty: I’ve heard intimations that Koch interests attempted to stymie the Mises Institute’s development. Is this so, and if so, specifically how?

Rockwell: It wasn’t exactly subtle. In the early eighties, Charles Koch monopolized the libertarian think-tank world by giving and promising millions. That’s fine, but he was gradually edging away from radical thought, which included Austrian economics, and toward mainstreaming libertarian theory (as opposed to libertarianizing the mainstream) that attracted him in the first place.

I have never understood this type of thinking. If being mainstream is what you want, there are easier ways to go about it than attempting to remake an intellectual movement that is hostile to government into a mildly dissenting subgroup within the ideological structure of the ruling class.

Murray and Charles broke at this point, and I won’t go into the details. But it was clear that Koch saw their break as the beginning of a long war. Early on, I received a call from George Pearson, head of the Koch Foundation. He said that Mises was too radical and that I mustn’t name the organization after him, or promote his ideas. I was told that Mises was “so extreme even Milton Friedman doesn’t like him.” If I insisted on going against their diktat, they would oppose me tooth and nail.

Later, I heard from other Koch men. One objected to the name of our monthly newsletter, The Free Market. The idea this time was that the word “free” was off-putting. Another said that the idea of an Austrian academic journal was wrong, since it implied we were a separate school, and mustn’t be. All urged me to dump Murray and then shun him, if I expected any support.

I was taken aback by what I interpreted as pettifoggery, and I had no idea what we would yet face. I negotiated a contract with Lexington Books for an annual journal, and put together a pretty good list of editorial advisers with Murray as the editor. Soon after, what came to be called “the boycott” began. Letters and calls poured in from those associated with Koch-dominated organizations. They resigned and swore eternal enmity. We even lost some big donors. It was my baptism by fire into the world of research institutes.

It may seem absurd to talk about this as if it were some sort of conspiracy against the Mises Institute. Why would a multi-billionaire care if the Institute existed or not? I mean, we were a gnat compared to his water buffalo. It’s a mystery that even today I do not entirely understand. In any case, there was blood all over the place by the time it was over.

Among threatened programs, the Review of Austrian Economics was nearly killed, but Murray persevered and the first issue came out in 1986. We went through 10 volumes of that journal, and it was the key to building up the Austro-Misesian movement as we know it today. The entire collection is on Mises.org, and downloaded by students all over the world. And now we have the higher-profile Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Today, I regard all these early conflicts as water under the bridge. The Koch Foundation uses our texts in their seminars, and the old antipathies are dwindling. Koch organizations are no longer shocked to see us taking different views in areas like vouchers and trade treaties. They serve one agenda with a particular style, approach, and audience, and we serve another with a different style, approach, and audience.

One note about competition among nonprofits. From time to time, well-meaning people suggest that the Mises Institute join with other like-minded groups. By pooling our resources, we would have a greater impact. But this rationale is flawed. Competition is as essential in the nonprofit world as it is in enterprise generally. The early opposition spurred us on to do a better job, never to give up, and never to give in.

I still get harassed from time to time about something someone connected to us has written or said. I’m told that I should do something to shut him up, and indeed policy institutes can be very restrictive in the way they treat their scholars. If they are pursuing a political agenda, I suppose they have to be. But I don’t believe in telling any of our associated scholars—and there are fully 200 of them—what to think or what to write.

That’s because I founded the Mises Institute to provide a setting for unrestricted intellectual exploration in the Austrian tradition, no matter how radical the conclusions may be. There are no speech controls at our conferences. There is no fear that someone will say something that lies outside the preset boundaries of respectable opinion.

I cannot let the temptation to get along with everybody, or fit into someone else’s strategic agenda, stand in the way. In the political and academic worlds, taboos are piling up by the day, but they are enemies of serious thought.

The Mises Institute has a unique place in the division of labor, and it is to make possible a radical reevaluation of the intellectual foundations of the modern statist enterprise. Our senior scholars—Walter Block, David Gordon, Jeff Herbener, Hans Hoppe, Guido Hülsmann, Peter Klein, Yuri Maltsev, Ralph Raico, Joe Salerno, and Mark Thornton—lead the way. Some people say our approach is reckless. I can only hope that it always remains so.

Doherty: Relate to me what you think the Mises Institute’s greatest successes have been.

Rockwell: Most recently, I’m thrilled with the restored Human Action. I was astounded when I first realized how far later editions of this book had strayed from the original. I mean, the third edition has Mises endorsing conscription, which was not only not in the original, but Mises had specifically and persuasively condemned conscription in his writings.

There were other problems. Important passages on Nazi economic planning were eliminated as were whole paragraphs from the section on monopoly. By comparison, the first edition is a seamless web and I’m so pleased that it is back in print in a Scholar’s Edition. It’s been flying out of our offices.

By the way, what economics text of 900 pages is still a huge seller 50 years after it first appeared? I can’t think of one. Facts like this tell me that Mises is here to stay. In the next century, I’m convinced he’ll have a much higher profile than he did in this one. He was a prophet and a fantastic genius. Not that his work shouldn’t ever be improved or criticized. We have such papers at every session of our Austrian Scholars Conferences. But we have to have the material available to learn from before it can be revised, improved, and reinterpreted.

The first book the Mises Institute printed was Mises’s Theory and History, with an introduction by Murray. It is still a big seller. We have brought Murray’s Ethics of Liberty back into print, along with two dozen monographs on the Austrian School that we have distributed all over the world.

Our book Costs of War has been called the most important piece of antiwar revisionist scholarship in the second half of this century. Our book Secession, State, and Liberty is a success. We brought Man, Economy, and State back into print, as well as a dozen other books.

We even have a new edition of Murray’s America’s Great Depression, with an introduction by Paul Johnson, and an Austrian economics text for smart high-school students in the works.

Oddly, I never envisioned the Mises Institute as a publishing house, though it could easily be mistaken for one. We are funding the research and writing of a major intellectual biography of Mises, a massive two-volume project. We want one of Rothbard as well. And we have five regular periodicals: a newsletter on current trends, an interview publication, a literary review, a scholarly journal, and a news and information sheet on the Austrian School.

Meanwhile, our summer Mises University has put a host of PhD students in economics through a rigorous program that would otherwise be unavailable. We’ve trained plenty of historians, philosophers, theologians, and others too. We’ve also started a summer Rothbard Graduate Seminar for advanced PhD students and post-docs, and been overwhelmed by the worldwide response. There’s also our weekly Austrian Economics Workshop.

We spend the bulk of our money on students and student programs. When we take on a graduate student in economics, we stick by him or her for up to six years. That’s a huge investment, but look at the results. We now have professors honeycombed through academia, and they have made Austrian economics a vital part of their curricula.

Our Mises and Rothbard Fellows are in demand, and not only because more and more departments seek genuine diversity at a time of Austrian renaissance. They are among the best young economists working today. Not only can they run rings around the mainstream with the mainstream’s own tools, but their praxeological grounding gives them a real leg-up in understanding actual economic events. They are also blessed with the vocation to teach, to be scholars in the classical tradition. This is no way to get rich, and it’s not for everyone, but in the secular world, there is no higher calling.

Over the long term, this will be where the Mises Institute makes the biggest difference. Seventeen years ago, Austrians had a hard time finding positions, much less holding on to them, but these days, we run out of candidates long before the requests for our students stop. Demand is outstripping supply.

Hazlitt told me that he thought the great success of the Mises Institute was providing a forum for Rothbard at a time when everyone else had turned his back on him. I am indeed proud of that. I also think that the Mises Institute has helped raise up an alternative intellectual framework as freedom of thought and speech has played a smaller and smaller role in academia.

The faculty at our conferences speak of their elation at escaping the stultifying political rules of their home campuses. Our students feel it too. That kind of freedom and collegiality is what a university is supposed to be about.

But I think the key achievement of the Mises Institute is the one Murray pointed to. Before the Institute, Austrian economics was in danger of becoming a hard-money investment strategy or an antirationalist process analysis—ironic indeed for a school rooted in Aristotelianism. The Institute rescued the praxeologically based main trunk of the school, and restored it to prominence and fruitfulness. Thus the Austrian School of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and Rothbard lives and grows and has increasing influence.

Doherty: Tell me about your involvement with the Libertarian Party, and the specific reasons for your disenchantment with it.

Rockwell: I was never an LP person, though I generally like the platform, which was largely written by Murray. People say that he wasted his time in the LP. That judgment presumes that geniuses like Murray should not be allowed to have hobbies and amusements. He loved Baroque church architecture and 1920s jazz. He loved soap operas and sports. He loved chess and 18th-century oratorios. And he enjoyed, for many years, his activities with the LP, particularly since it was a hobby that intersected with his professional interests. It certainly didn’t distract from his scholarly work, which continued unabated through this entire period.

For years, as close as we were, I largely ignored what Murray was doing in the LP. But Ron Paul decided to run for the 1988 presidential nomination, and he announced in 1986. That’s when I got involved. I feared he wasn’t going to get the nomination. To my astonishment, Russell Means, who didn’t seem to be a libertarian at all, had a real shot at it. I swung into action, and helped manage Ron’s bid for the nomination. But that pretty much burned me out.

I wasn’t pleased with what I saw in the party. I sensed a lack of interest in ideas and an absurd obsession with petty organizing details. There was a lot of waste of time and money. I also felt like the party was creating a false hope of successfully bringing about reform through politics. And yet, in all these ways, I suppose it was no different from any other party.

What bugged me the most, however, was a general tendency among the party types to downplay libertarian theory in a host of areas. They were generally sound on tax cuts and drug policy and the like. But there was no interest at all in foreign policy. In fact, the largest faction in the party was actually hawkish on war and strangely conventional on policy particulars. Then there was the perpetual focus on living a life of liberty. A life of liberty meant, in the first instance, never wearing a tie or a white shirt.

The last time I had any contact with the LP was the summer of 1989 in Philadelphia. Sweet, sweet Murray, eternally optimistic and good-hearted Murray, rose to the platform to make the case for electing this chairman over that chairman. I forget the details. In any case, they hissed at him. They booed him. They shouted him down and denounced him. I thought: this is just amazing.

The greatest libertarian thinker in history, and they can’t even treat him politely? Even more astounding, Murray thought nothing of it. To him, this was just life in the LP. It was then that I thought: This is it. I reemphasized to Murray my views on these people, which he had come to share, and suggested we get out. We did, and his wife Joey cheered.

Again, this is water under the bridge. I’m perfectly happy for the LP to go about its business. Harry Browne said some good things in the last election. He’s generally a man after my own heart. I’m just not cut out for politics, and I don’t think politics holds out much hope for the future of human liberty.

Doherty: Tell me about your relationships with Pat Buchanan and the Randolph Club.

Rockwell: Before I do that, let me just emphasize that all these political goings-on were a mere sidelight in Murray’s life. His main project in these years was the magisterial History of Economic Thought that came out just after he died. For most academics, these two volumes would be more than enough to show for an entire career. But for Murray, they were just a slight piece of a massive literary output.

His output was huge, even aside from scholarship. On a typical morning, I would find a 20-page article on politics on my fax, and a five-page article on strategy. For him, pounding out these gems was just a way to pass the time between 100-page scholarly articles and whole book manuscripts. His output was beyond human comprehension.

That’s why Burt Blumert and I started the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, whose name Murray was kind enough to suggest. At the Mises Institute, we could have spent all our time marketing his material to newspapers and magazines. Instead, we needed a steady place to publish all his short pieces on political and cultural topics, and—as Joey has mentioned—it was one of the joys of his last years.

At the same time, Murray needed practical ideological recreation to make his scholarly work possible and add leaven to his life. Leaving the LP lifted a burden off Murray’s shoulders, but I worried that it would also leave something of a hole in his life. A part of him loved ideological organization on a grand scale.

Our first contacts with the paleoconservatives came after their huge break with the neoconservatives, the most warlike and statist intellectuals in the country. Murray and Tom Fleming, editor of Chronicles, exchanged letters and found they agreed on the intellectual errors on the right. Some people say Murray was becoming more conservative and conventional. This is unbelievably uncomprehending.

Murray rejected what Mises called the cultural destructionism of the Left because he saw it as a back-door to State building. If you attack the family by impinging on its autonomy, the family can no longer serve as a bulwark against State power. So it is with leftist rhetoric that ridicules the habits, prejudices, traditions, and institutions that form the basis of settled, middle-class community life. He saw the relentless attacks on these as paving the way for government managers to claim more territory as their own.

Moreover, it was Murray’s conviction that government power is the greatest enemy that a rich cultural heritage has. It is not capitalism that wrecks the foundations of civilized life but the State. In this, he was in full agreement with Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter. And incidentally, this line of argument, which Murray had long used, has been picked up by other libertarians in the meantime.

But the real bond between Tom and Murray was their shared hatred of the statism, centralism, and global warfarism of the conservative movement. They were both fed up with a Buckleyized conservatism, and now, at last, here was a chance to do something about it.

Together Murray and I watched as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved, and we were intensely curious as to how the conservatives would respond. Would they return to their pre-war, antiwar roots? Or would they continue to push for the American empire? Well, we got our answer in 1990 with the beginnings of the Gulf War. It seemed obvious that this was Bush’s attempt to keep the warfare State fat and thriving.

The US gave permission to Iraq to annex Kuwait, and then suddenly reversed positions. The US paid off countries around the world to be part of its “coalition” and waged a bloody war on Iraq, burying innocents in the sand and proclaiming victory over the aggressor.

We waited for the conservatives to denounce the war, but of course it didn’t happen, although I’ll always treasure Kirk’s last letter to me, in which he called for hanging the “war criminal Bush” on the White House lawn. Too bad he never wrote like that in public. But the neocons were entirely in control of the right and cheered Bush to the Heavens.

These were disgusting days. Bush dragged out all his tax-funded missiles and other weapons of mass destruction and put them on the Washington, DC, mall for the booboisie to admire. Yellow ribbons were everywhere.

But the paleos were a different matter. Paul Gottfried, Allan Carlson, Clyde Wilson, Fleming, and others associated with the Rockford Institute blasted the war without qualification. They openly called the US an imperial power and made the argument that we had always made: that the greatest threat to our liberties was not overseas but in the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, we were alarmed that not even the libertarians seemed prepared to go this far. Reason magazine and the Republican Liberty Caucus were for the Gulf War, and Liberty magazine, for whom Murray had written, was ambivalent on the question. In general, there was silence from the people who should have been our natural allies. To us, that merely underscored a more deeply rooted problem in libertarian circles: the strange combination of cultural alienation and political conventionality.

We began to write about the errors of the “modal” libertarians. They were soft on war, sanguine about centralization of power, and friendly toward the rise of the social-therapeutic aspects of the State inherent in civil-rights egalitarianism. They were uninterested in scholarship and unschooled in history. They were culturally fringy and politically mainstream, which is precisely the opposite of what Murray and Mises were. I couldn’t imagine the old libertarian school of Nock, Chodorov, Garrett, Flynn, and Mencken at home with this.

The best of the paleoconservatives, in contrast, were old-fashioned constitutionalists who took libertarian positions on a range of issues. They wanted the troops home and the government out of people’s lives. They wanted to abolish the welfare state, and had a very telling critique of it. Their critique was not based on rights, but it was serious and sophisticated.

The Center for Libertarian Studies cofounded the John Randolph Club, which I named for the aristocratic, antiegalitarian battler of centralized power of the early nineteenth century. The word “paleolibertarian” was mine too, and the purpose was to recapture the political edge and intellectual rigor and radicalism of the pre-war libertarian right. There was no change in core ideology but a reapplication of fundamental principles in ways that corrected the obvious failures of the Reason and National Review sets.

I remember people at the time saying: “Oh no! You’re falling in bed with a bunch of religious rightists!” I would just rub my eyes in dismay. In the first place, if a person believes in liberty and also happens to be religious, what is wrong with that? Since when did atheism become a mandatory view within libertarian circles? Also, the point was not to fall in bed with anybody but to organize a new intellectual movement precisely to do battle with the statists on all sides.

Much good came out of this. We took out ads in the New York Times attacking war and we gave the neocons a run for their money. We had some very good and fun meetings, and Murray had the chance for a productive exchange of ideas with some of the smartest thinkers in the country.

But there were limits to what could be accomplished. As old-fashioned Burkeans, somewhat influenced by Kirk, they resisted ideology in principle. That meant an impatience with the rationalism of economic theory and libertarian political theory. That eventually caused us problems on issues like trade. All sides opposed Nafta, which was mercantilist, but we couldn’t agree on the urgency of eliminating trade barriers. Still, the debates were fun. We agreed to cooperate where we could, and disagree where we must.

Another problem was that usual evil force in the world: politics. Nearly alone among Republicans, Pat Buchanan was a strong opponent of the war on Iraq, denouncing it up until the troops actually landed. He then began to offer a radical critique of the interventionist State in a host of areas. In 1991, he challenged Bush for the nomination, speaking out against Bush’s tax increases and welfarism. In some ways, it appeared that he could become a dream candidate, uniting a passionate concern for both free enterprise and peace.

Conventional libertarians didn’t like Pat, in part because he was against open immigration. But it seemed obvious that the patterns of immigration since 1965 have increased rather than decreased the government’s control over the economy. And there is no obvious libertarian position on this subject: whether immigration is peaceful or invasive depends entirely on who owns the property onto which they immigrate, and whether they make their own way once here. The welfare state and public schools complicate the picture enormously.

Unfortunately for everyone, as the campaign progressed, Pat got more and more protectionist and nationalist. Murray saw that Buchanan was in danger of jettisoning all his good principles. If the State can and must plan trade to protect the nation, then why not the rest of the economy? Sure enough, by 1996, Pat’s protectionist theories mutated and took over his economic thinking entirely. For example, he advocated a 100-percent tax on estates over $1 million. Pat still says good things on foreign policy, but the lesson for me is an old one: never hinge the hopes of a movement on a politician.

Chronicles is open to libertarians, and the Randolph Club still meets. But, for me, this chapter in the history of ideological organizing came to a close with Murray’s death. With Murray, anything seemed possible. We could dabble in practical tactics and strategy, write on every topic under the sun, and keep cranking out the students and academic conferences and publications. But without Murray, I needed to concentrate on what I do best, which was and is internal development. At the same time, the Mises Institute began to develop the resources to expand its horizons as broadly as Murray had always wanted.

Doherty: Do you feel you succeeded in creating the paleo movement you speculated about when you departed from the “modal” libertarian movement?

Rockwell: To some extent, I would say the present decline in the moral legitimacy of the executive State represents a paleoization, if you will, a systematic radicalization of the middle class. As Frank Rich has pointed out in the New York Times, all the real political dissidents and radicals, the people who are raising fundamental objections to the status quo of the American civil project, are on the right.

They are homeschoolers fed up with the propaganda in public schools. They are average Americans who fear and resent anyone with a federal badge and gun. The pro-lifers are pushing the boundaries of permissible civil disobedience. Antiwar rallies are as likely to be populated by old-line constitutionalists as aging New Lefties.

Meanwhile, the mainstream left is increasingly censorious. It is there that you find the book burners, the taboo enforcers, the thought police, and the apologists for federal tyranny.

On the other hand, and despite the continued growth of the State, we are seeing the flourishing of enterprise across the country and the world, an intense and renewed interest in the art of private life, and a continuing secession from establishment political institutions. Another way of putting this is that the classical ideal of liberty and private life is again gaining currency, and a major reason is the successes that an intellectual vanguard of Austrian scholars and political dissidents have had in undermining the ideological foundations of the State.

Murray anticipated all this with his outreach efforts to marginalized conservatives. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, he had an outstanding strategic sense. It’s just that he was always ahead of everyone else in his thinking, and so he suffered detraction and calumny. Not that it mattered to him. Early in his career, he decided to take a certain path, inspired by the example of Mises, and he stuck with it to the end.

Doherty: What about plans for the future?

Rockwell: These days, we have more than enough work to do in publishing, funding, and supporting Austrian and libertarian scholarship, both of which are in a boom phase. People on the left thought that the collapse of socialism would mean that antisocialist intellectual forces would decline as well. The opposite has happened. At last, it is clear to anyone who cares about liberty that the real enemy is the ruling regime in government and academia, and that this ruling regime resides within our own borders.

The Internet has been a tremendous boost to the Austrian School and the classical liberal perspective. Since World War II, the biggest hurdle our side has had is in getting the message out. At last, the Net evens the score. Not a day goes by without hosts of people around the world discovering the world of Misesian-Rothbardian theory for the first time, just because they run across our Website at Mises.org. Our goal always is to provide the resources that keep people’s attention on the conceptual fundamentals: liberty and property versus the State and its power.

Right now, we are faced with a historic opportunity. In academia, the old guard no longer has the same credibility among students. The Left has surrendered the mantle of idealism and radicalism. The Austrian School is perfectly suited to be the new and fresh alternative. And in public affairs, we need to take advantage of the declining status and moral legitimacy of the central State to make a major push for libertarian ideas. The revolution that struck Eastern Europe a decade ago has come home in surprising ways, and we need to work to encourage these trends and direct them toward a consistent stand for liberty and property.

Many years ago, Hazlitt gave a speech in which he said it is our moral obligation to continue the battle no matter what the odds. What he said then is still true today: we are not threatened with bankruptcy or jail for holding the opinions we do. All we risk is being called nasty names. Surely that is not too high a price to pay for defending the very foundations of civilization.

ROCKWELL-KANTOR INTERVIEW

[Myles Kantor interviewed Lew Rockwell on March 12, 2002, for the pages of Frontpagemag.com, on “September 11 and the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.”]

Kantor: Ludwig von Mises entitled one of his books the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. What did Mises mean by this title?

Rockwell: It’s a marvelous book, written in 1956. It still holds up. Mises addressed the question: why are the cultural elites so biased against the free-market economy, and all it represents, despite the evidence that it is the only system compatible with a developed civilization?

He took it for granted that huge sectors of the intelligentsia and media are deeply ignorant of economics. In this book he addresses the problem not of ignorance but hate: hatred of the businessman and entrepreneur, and the assumptions that the business class is secretly criminal, that the rich never deserve what they own, that businesses that rake in profits by serving others through enterprise somehow “owe” something to the “community,” so, if they don’t give it up voluntarily, it should be taken from them.

We see this on display in these disgusting Enron hearings, lovingly reported by the echo-chamber press. It’s one thing to prosecute crime, but this is anticapitalism running wild. Nobody remembers that during the ‘90s boom phase of the market created by loose credit, investors cared only about accounting in order to sell companies with real earnings and buy those without. The conventional wisdom on the street was that any company that paid dividends was worthless. That’s the topsy-turvy world that easy money created in the late 90s.

So Enron was typical of major corporate high-flyers during the boom phase of the business cycle, but in 2001 the free market struck back with a dose of reality. Unviable businesses melted. Thank goodness for that! And now investors are wary, as they should be. There is a wonderful witch hunt on for companies that bury debt as subsidiaries, and there is ‘fessing up all over the place. Truth at last, courtesy of the market economy.

Now contrast this process with HUD, the post office, or any other federal bureau. The GAO comes out with regular reports showing that these agencies’ books are in complete chaos, with tens of billions missing, unaccounted for, or uncollectible. There are no earnings. There are no dividends. And who cares? No one. In Washington, GAO reports are used for scrap paper and birdcage lining.

And so now we have these politicos who specialize in public relations and wealth redistribution putting Enron on trial for alleged accounting malpractice. And why? Because the company went belly-up. But the market is supposed to punish unviable enterprises by shutting them down. Lord knows that would never happen to a government agency. Government specializes in keeping unprofitable operations going: look at the history of industry in the Soviet Union, or at American farming, or the TVA.

Kantor: What type of anticapitalism did Mises draw attention to?

Rockwell: All of the same types of bias were present 46 years ago when Mises wrote his book. He noticed in those days that detective novels, for example, frequently made the rich businessman the villain. In movies, bureaucrats are heroic and public spirited while businessmen are greedy, racist, and vaguely criminal. In popular music, the “suits” are the ones ‘dissed.

As for academia, outside one or two economics professors, nearly the entire liberal arts faculty of the typical university is reliably anticapitalist. As a class, liberal arts academics can be depended on to oppose economic development, support high taxes, and latch on to every anti-enterprise cause that comes along.

Some of the anticapitalism of the intellectuals is self-interest at work: those paid by the State identify with the State and its interests. There’s also snobbery at work—most intellectuals hate commercial culture. Well, folks, the glory of capitalism is that it permits you to choose what to consume and what not to consume. If intellectuals prefer the music of Anton Webern to Britney Spears, fine. Tower Records offers both.

But Mises’s analysis goes further to identify the problem of envy at the root of anticapitalism. Whether in the arts, entertainment, or academia, the dominant players are talented people who believe that they are wiser and better than the masses. They are appalled that capitalism permits a B-school dropout to become a billionaire while they scrape by for a measly raise when promoted from assistant to associate professor. They set out to cripple the system that brings this about.

And yet this is not new. Since ancient times, the merchant has been scorned and his profession considered ignoble. The philosopher who strolls around speculating on the meaning of life is seen as the highest form of humanity, while the man who risks his own money to make available food, shelter, medicine, clothing, and all the other material goods that make life livable is despised.

Now I’m all for philosophy and other academic disciplines; like the priesthood, this is a vocation that requires sacrifice, and that is essential. But celebrate the risk-taking merchant too. He is a benefactor of mankind.

Kantor: Radical environmentalists in Europe often vandalize and perpetrate arson against McDonald’s restaurants. Is there a parallel between this aggression and the attacks on the World Trade Center?

Rockwell: Notice that whenever looting of businesses occur, at these antiglobalist events or in Europe when McDonald’s restaurants are burned, the press will frequently write that no violence has occurred, on grounds that no one was hurt or killed. No violence? What do you call it when gangsters destroy property for ideological reasons? You can call it violence, or you might even call it terrorism. The Earth Liberation Front has been doing this for years in the US, wrecking research labs and burning the cars of scientists. It’s hardly ever reported.

Think about the people who worked at the WTC—traders, insurers, speculators, retailers, lenders—all financial experts whose contributions are essential to our daily lives. They labored every day to overcome linguistic, cultural, and regulatory barriers to unite the world in a great commercial project to improve the lot of mankind. But public schools teach that they are exploiters, Hollywood regards them as somewhat criminal, and not one person in ten thousand can tell you why what they do matters.

When the hijackers were choosing targets, they figured that they would smash these buildings because they somehow represented the “money power.” Well, not many among the culture elites in this country or the rest of the world would really disagree with them. The urge to destroy business and finance as a sector plays itself out in politics and the media every day.

The attack on the WTC put into action what millions of students are taught every day in their college classrooms, what prime-time television suggests night after night, what the sociology journals seek to prove year after year: entrepreneurs and what they create are antisocial and wholly dispensable.

Yet enterprise and its symbols do not represent “money power” or any other kind of power. They represent the coming together of people to trade voluntarily with the hope of achieving material advancement and progress.

The watchwords of capitalism are persuasion and contract. Buying and selling is a cooperative act. No one ever forced a Parisian to eat a Big Mac. The urge to smash the system that makes it possible for people to have more choices in life stems from ignorance and evil. Without free enterprise, civilization would crumble and we would all starve and die.

Kantor: Has popular culture’s appreciation of these individuals increased since September 11?

Rockwell: I wouldn’t say so. We’ve gained a greater appreciation of rescue workers, and that’s great, though I notice that many of them are seizing the opportunity to sue the city for personal damages. But what about the people and the occupations that were actually targeted by the killers?

Hardly anyone can name a single business that was smashed. Among them: Morgan Stanley, Fred Alger Management, Cantor Fitzgerald, MassMutual, Fiduciary Trust, Harris Beach & Wilcox, OppenheimerFunds, Bank of America, Kemper Insurance, Lehman Brothers, and Credit Suisse First Boston.

I don’t recall a single tribute to these institutions printed in the popular press. I don’t even rule out that many people among the US intelligentsia thought that because these people were on the front lines of capitalism, they had it coming. Yet these are the brokers who worked every day to invest our savings and channel resources to their most profitable uses. These insurance companies provide the valuable service of securing our lives and property against accidents, and did far more to achieve their aims than the Office of Homeland Security, which in fact has no real stake in the security of anything but its own budget.

Kantor:: Have federal policies after September 11 reflected a greater appreciation of capitalism?

Rockwell: Again, the opposite has happened. At the World Economic Forum, held in New York in memory of September 11, you couldn’t tell the protesters from the main speakers. The podium always seemed to be held by some demagogue railing against the wealth of the West. Not one speaker bothered to give a tribute to free enterprise, not even the corporate people there. In all, it was a disgusting show.

The conventional wisdom now is that multinational corporations are just elaborate shell games covering every manner of criminality. The recent talk is not about whether there should be new regulation of business, but how severe should it be.

Just recently, Pat Buchanan announced that the Enron collapse shows that “capitalism may contain the seed of its own destruction.” That’s a good summary of the Marxian view. Next he’ll endorse a dictatorship of the proletariat and the expropriation of the Kulaks.

Kantor:: To what extent was September 11 facilitated by domestic anticapitalism, namely, regulatory impositions?

Rockwell: This is an interesting case. Of course the FAA has long prevented airlines from defending their own property. I know many pilots who saw the need for guns on planes long ago. But the regulatory view was that this was unthinkable. They were told that hijackers need to be placated and talked to by experts on the ground, while passengers and crew should be compliant.

This is what all the terrorism experts were saying before September 11. If you think about it, this entire war and the huge increase in government power that has resulted, including the thousands dead and the billions in destroyed property, might not ever have occurred had the pilots had the right to protect property from invasion and theft.

So, yes, regulators are to blame in part. Of course that doesn’t remove responsibility from the hijackers themselves. But let’s say you have a town council that forbids banks from installing alarm systems, and then all the local banks are robbed. Should the town council be held morally culpable along with the robbers? I think so.

There is also the interesting case of asbestos and the WTC. Might the steel in the building have weakened more slowly if asbestos had been able to be used on the upper floors as it was on the lower? Might that have given people more time to leave the buildings? Some engineers have said so.

As for restrictions on trade, those who support ongoing sanctions against Iraq and other countries need to consider that these policies violate free trade, and give rise to hatreds that can fuel terrorism. Long before the terrorists cited these sanctions as an excuse, people from groups like the Institute of International Economics had raised serious questions about the effects of these sanctions. Remember too that this is a region rich with oil profits made possible in part by domestic restrictions on energy production. This is why a policy of free trade with all peoples of the world needs to be matched by loosened energy regulations at home.

Kantor:: Despite the devastation inflicted by socialism from Russia to Ethiopia to Cuba, its apologists maintain these regimes have perverted socialist principles. Is socialism inherently hostile to freedom? Is capitalism a precondition for peace?

Rockwell: That’s right, there’s always a new form of socialism being proposed in some new books. A bestseller on the college circuit called Empire, for example, calls for a new communism which, the authors promise, will be different from the old. But anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total State. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.

What the socialists hate most is that the masses have never risen up to overthrow the free-enterprise society. This had already frustrated them by the turn of the 20th century, so many of them hatched a new scheme to impose socialism by crisis. In Europe, and to some extent in the US, war was their preferred method of getting rid of the market economy. They saw that war puts the government in charge of economic life. They knew that if they ever stood a chance to impose central planning, it was to be through war socialism.

This is why the socialists and the Left generally were such strong advocates of entry into World War I, and why FDR so badly wanted to enter World War II. Hitler too believed that war was the best way to bring about National Socialism. Mussolini felt the same about fascism. Dictators love war. We even saw elements of this in the Clinton years; he turned to war when his collectivist domestic programs weren’t panning out. And the left is correct in this—people are more prone to give up liberty in wartime.

Ludwig von Mises, who saw his country and civilization wrecked in two world wars, used to say, “The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.” People on the left and right today reject that view, and we live with the destructive aims and policies of anticapitalism, and we have perpetual war.

This is why, so far as the Mises Institute is concerned, we will keep doing what we have always done—defend the economics of capitalism against its myriad enemies—because it is the very foundation of peace, prosperity, and civilization, and the best, and perhaps only, source of effective security as well.

THE WISDOM OF LEFEVRE

[A tribute to Robert LeFevre at the Mises Institute Conference “The Philosophy of a Free Society,” Auburn, Alabama, September 28, 2001.]

In 1957, a businessman and radio personality named Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) founded a very special institution in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In his private studies, he had discovered the libertarian intellectual tradition. He noted the dire need for an institution that would educate people from all walks of life in the philosophy of freedom. He took it upon himself and named it the Freedom School, later changing the name to Rampart College before it shut down in 1968. Afterward, he carried on his work in South Carolina under the patronage of business giant Roger Milliken.

The Freedom School in Colorado was one of the most important institutions for teaching free-market economics in its day. Among its rotating faculty were Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, F.A. Harper, Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Gordon Tullock, G. Warren Nutter, Bruno Leoni, James J. Martin, and even Ludwig von Mises. Among its graduates were Roy Childs, Fred and Charles Koch, Roger MacBride, and many other intellectual activists still working today.

It is a testament to the power of ideas—and the fruit of the personal initiative of this intellectual entrepreneur—that Robert LeFevre could have sought to create a new teaching institution devoted to liberty, and succeed in so many ways.

He wanted to be remembered for what he believed. The individual actor was at the heart of his political worldview. He saw that civilization stemmed from the voluntary actions of men, not the laws of the State. Through their interactions in voluntary associations, of which the free market is only one of many, people build the structures of security and prosperity. That is the basis of cultural flourishing. Once created, civilization “breeds further desire and necessity for voluntary individual action. The one aids and abets the other.”

He recounted how legions of historians have failed to understand this fundamental point. They write about the rise and fall of civilizations, of prosperity and famine, of peace and war. While noticing that government is often responsible for bad things, they incorrectly conclude it must be credited for all good in society as well. This leap of logic is what keeps the truth of freedom under wraps.

Crediting government for the good in society was, to his mind, like crediting the criminal class whenever it leaves us alone to go about our affairs. If we build a house, landscape it perfectly, and raise a wonderful family, we don’t say: thanks be to the criminals who didn’t interfere with our family’s domestic bliss! Neither should the State be praised for the flowering of civilization, which is always and everywhere the result of individual action.

So important was this truth to him that he founded a school to explain it and apply it. He was an expert teacher with a razor-sharp understanding of the ways of government. He liked to distinguish between its true and artificial forms. True government is made up of the customs (habits, manners, folkways) and institutions (family, workplace, church) that regulate our daily life. Artificial government (the State) is the institution that steals our property, restricts our freedom, and endangers our lives in the name of protecting us.

He saw his main role as a teacher as dislodging the false consciousness that keeps so many from seeing artificial government as a parasite. Whether the form is democratic or autocratic, the State adds nothing to the development of civilization but rather hinders it. The extent to which it hinders freedom and prosperity depends on its size and its reach, which in turn depends on how much abuse people are willing to tolerate.

He astutely observed that all States are prone to expansion and always at the expense of liberty. Neither did he see socialism as a special form of social organization. It is just a word that indicates control of society by the State instead of individual actors. “All governments tend to move toward socialism,” he said. “The larger and more vigorous they become, the more surely are they practicing socialism.”

His views on patriotism (and remember that he was writing during the Cold War) followed logically:

Patriotism cannot be a love of government. Patriotism rises above the government as a mountain towers above a blade of grass. When we think of our country and a feeling of love and devotion wells up within us, it should spring from the reality of what our country is and means, and not from the government, which is the least of all our blessings.

The most obvious retort to the LeFevreian vision is that the State may be an unfortunate institution but it is nonetheless necessary to provide protection. But LeFevre had great faith in the power of the market to provide every service that is usually monopolized by government. He applied the Austrian insight concerning entrepreneurship to see that defense and protection services, precisely because they are so necessary, can also be provided by the market.

How? He spoke about the role of insurance companies as businesses that have a strong incentive to secure insured property against invasion. He talked about the possibilities of private security police and private arbitration. In our own time, when the failure of the State to protect us is so obvious, we see that he was remarkably prescient. There are more police and court services available in the private sector than the State sector.

But LeFevre also understood the limitations of looking for examples of private services that equal that of government.

[W]henever a government invades any normal field of human endeavor, the tendency of human beings is to surrender that field and to make no further effort in it. Had market entrepreneurs been free all these ages to examine and explore adequate means of defense rather than relying upon the government to provide it, who can tell what marvelous means of protecting ourselves and our property might now be available to all?

LeFevre did not believe that all States are morally equivalent. He had a particular admiration for the American system, and he became an outstanding interpreter of American history. Whereas most others view the Constitution as the event that marks the “founding,” he saw the American separation from Britain as the decisive event for liberty. It was the Declaration of Independence that firmly established the right of a people to resist and secede from State control.

So important is the right and duty of the people to dispense with despotism, this great Declaration contains the sentence not once, but twice. In its final utterance, the choice of words does not call for the formation of a government. Rather, it calls for “new guards” which may or may not entail such a unit as an artificial agency.

He further said that “the bill of grievances contained in the immortal Declaration of Independence could be extended by our own citizens in modern times, had they the stomach for it.”

He went so far as to draft an excellent preamble to a new Declaration. He included this witty and wise sentence:

That to secure these rights, each man is qualified to select for himself that agency or those agencies which seem to him best suited to protect his life and his property, to maintain his freedom, and which lie within his ability to afford.

To underscore the voluntarism at the heart of individual rights, he added: “that whenever any agency evinces characteristics of tyranny, he is well within his rights and his powers to discharge that agency and to find another more suitable to his inclinations and his finances.”

Though he was concerned with political topics, his hope was a world without politics, which to him meant a world without the coercion inherent in all collective action. It was his own creative interpretation of the message of his intellectual mentors, among which he counted Ludwig von Mises.

The Mises Institute is honored and thrilled to be entrusted with the literary legacy of Robert LeFevre and the Freedom School, and grateful to Ross and Charlotte Anderson for making it possible. There are 10,000 books, and among the papers are transcripts of lectures by many giants of the libertarian cause, Mises among them. What a collection it is. Here is one piece of his legacy.

HANS SENNHOLZ: MISESIAN FOR LIFE

[Delivered at Grove City College on the 81st birthday celebration of Hans Sennholz, February 3, 2003.]

Hans F. Sennholz is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival, and did so with eloquence, precision, and brilliance. From his post at Grove City College, and his lectures around the world, he has produced untold numbers of students who look to him as the formative influence in their lives. He has been a leading public voice for freedom in times when such voices have been exceedingly rare.

This much is well-known about him. But there are other aspects to his life and career you may not know. Sennholz was the first student in the United States to write a dissertation and receive a PhD under the guidance of Ludwig von Mises. Mises had only recently completed Human Action. Imagine how having such an outstanding student, and a native German speaker no less, must have affected Mises’s life, how it must have encouraged him to know that his work could continue through outstanding thinkers such as this.

When Mises arrived in New York, determined to make a new life for himself after having first fled Austria and then sensing the need to leave Geneva too, he had no academic position waiting for him. He had no students and no prospects for students. But then came Sennholz. Here was living proof that ideas know no national boundaries, that even in the darkest hour there was hope for a new generation of economic scientists who cherished freedom, and were not fooled by the promise of government planning.

And think of the crucial time in which he entered the Austrian picture. Mises was by now carrying the school by himself. Most of his students had moved on to other things, whether Keynesian economics or social theory. For the Austrian School to survive in a profession now fully dominated by interventionists, it needed economists. The School desperately needed the new life that only new faces, names, books, and ideas provide.

When Sennholz began studying with Mises, it would still be another 12 years before Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State would appear, and nearly a quarter century before Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship would be published. Sennholz provided exactly what was needed: that crucial bridge from the pre-war School to the postwar School in America, where the Austrian School would now make its home.

His dissertation became the book How Can Europe Survive?, published in 1955. It remains the best and most complete critique of European political union ever written. Sennholz demonstrated, some 50 years before others even cared, that political union under the interventionist-welfare state was only a prescription for chaos and bureaucratic rule. True union, he demonstrated, comes from free trade and decentralized States that do not attempt to plan their economies.

Europe today has a burgeoning movement of intellectuals who realize this same thing, and are working to curb the power of Brussels even as they attempt to preserve the free-trade zone. But we must remember that Sennholz anticipated this critique and agenda by nearly five decades. By taking a detailed look at all the programs for unification that were then being batted around, he saw precisely what was ahead for Europe: not prosperity and peace, but stagnation and conflict. So it is and will continue to be, so long as Sennholz’s final chapters, which present a blueprint for authentic unity, are not followed.

Sennholz followed up this treatise, which included an account of the Great Depression and the onset of war, with a long string of trenchant writings on monetary theory and history, on employment, on fiscal policy, and even on the moral basis of freedom. Truly he followed in Mises’s footsteps, and, like Mises, he refused to let the ideological hostility of his age and ours deter him from speaking truth to power, using every means at his disposal.

Let me provide one example of just how he carries the torch. During the 1980s, there were two camps on fiscal policy: the left, which wanted more spending and no tax cuts, and the supply-siders who wanted tax cuts plus spending increases. Sennholz became the voice for sanity: in Misesian terms, he called for tax cuts to be matched by spending cuts. In doing so, he dismissed the magic fiscal dust called “dynamic scoring” as well as the socialist demand for bigger government, while warning against the dangers of inflationary finance. Here was a lone voice for fiscal conservatism! During the early eighties, too, he wrote an extended Austrian critique of supply-side economics that anticipated all future trends of the decade.

At Margit von Mises’s request, Sennholz was the translator of Mises’s Notes and Recollections, which is the closest thing we have to an autobiography. It has been this book, above all else, that has shaped the way the generations that never had the chance to meet Mises have come to know the way an economist thinks about science and life amidst personal tragedy. Sennholz and his wife and partner Mary produced the first Mises Festschrift, presented to Mises on February 20, 1956, before Mises’s fame in the United States would grow. Sennholz alone took the initiative to do Mises this honor.

Sennholz acquired Mises’s papers for Grove City College, where they have been guarded as the treasures they are. He made Grove City stand out among American colleges as one of the few places where economic sense was taught during the heyday of Keynesian orthodoxy.

Sennholz did not only work to promote the Misesian school. He has been the great benefactor to all economists and scholars by being the translator and promoter of the work of Mises’s teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. This was an act of great intellectual piety, since the market was not exactly clamoring for 100-year old books on interest-rate theory. And he did it all on the urging of Mises.

And though an outstanding theoretician, Sennholz placed a strong emphasis on the application of Austrian theory to the timing of the business cycle, and to explaining the current state of affairs. This is, by itself, highly unusual in the economics profession. If you know anything about academic economists, you know that they are the last people you want to ask about the state of the economy. But Sennholz made it his job to explain the world around him, a trait which drew many to his thought.

The Mises Institute, for which he serves as an adjunct scholar, is grateful to Professor Sennholz for his early support of our work. He wrote a wonderful paper on Carl Menger, later published in a volume on the gold standard, in which he showed that Menger was not just a theorist, but an activist in the cause of sound money. That paper changed the way we viewed Menger. We came to see him more clearly for what he was: an old-world liberal concerned about the fate of his country in difficult times—much like Sennholz himself.

Finally, I must add that Sennholz has never been shy about insisting on the centrality of ethics in the study of economics. He has decried the welfare state as confiscatory and immoral. He has called inflation a form of theft. He has identified government intervention as coercion contrary to the true spirit of cooperation. He did this at a time when saying such things was taboo in the profession. Here again, he was keeping alive the spirit of Mises, and the spirit of truth.

Sennholz told the Austrian Economics Newsletter that he has long been at work on his autobiography, which I’m sure will settle all scores. It cannot come too soon.

Nobody can ever gauge the full impact of a great intellectual in the development of culture. His influence spreads like waves in a lake; by the time the waves hit the shore, few are in a position to remember the source. But this much I’m sure of: We are in Hans Sennholz’s debt far more than we know.

THE HAYEK MOMENT

[Delivered at the Mises Institute’s Rothbard Graduate Seminar, Auburn, Alabama, June 2, 2003, to inaugurate the Hayek Lecture Series at the London School of Economics.]

Lecturing at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, F.A. Hayek was nicely positioned to counter the rising influence of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s new vision of macroeconomics was a resurrection of old fallacies, but with a modern twist: an open call for a consolidated State to manage investment. More than anyone else, and under the pretense of explaining the economic crisis of the time, Keynes gave intellectual credence to the rise of managerial States in America, the UK, and Europe during the 30s and the war.

Hayek countered with a defense of laissez-faire beefed up by the insights of the Austrian School of economics. He had worked with Ludwig von Mises in Vienna after the period in which Mises first laid out his business cycle theory. The danger of central banks, wrote Mises, is that they exercise power over interest rates, and can thereby distort the production structure of an economy. They can create artificial booms, which either lead to hyperinflation or economic bust.

Hayek advanced this theory as the alternative explanation for the global depression, and worked mightily all those years to show how the stock market crash was not the onset of the crisis, but rather the much-needed liquidation of a preceding boom. He further showed how the actions of the British and American governments were prolonging the crisis.

In the great debates of the period, it was said that Hayek had lost to the New Economics of Keynes and his followers. It was more precisely true that the Keynesians had won not by having a better argument, but by force of government policy. The Misesians and Hayekians of the time decided that they would fight the battle of ideas, and thus sprang up a host of institutions that would continue the work of liberty, despite all political impediments.

In a series of lectures named in honor of Hayek and sponsored by the Mises Institute and businessman Toby Baxendale, the spirit of those years at the London School of Economics is back. The Mises-Hayek explanation for economic booms and busts is receiving new attention during this current period of recession and market meltdown. The usual Keynesian prescriptions of more consumer spending, ever cheaper credit, and government spending have done nothing to solve the problems in the US, Europe, or Japan. The series begins with lectures by Roger W. Garrison, who has provided the most extended and comprehensive elaboration on the Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle.

The relevance of Hayek in our times extends beyond just business-cycle analysis. In later years, Hayek turned his attention to other matters concerning the methods of science (he decried the “pretense of knowledge” affected by social scientists) and the uses of power in society. His Road to Serfdom warned that the regimentation of totalitarian societies can only come to Britain and the US through central planning. What is at stake, he wrote, is not just productive economies but freedom itself.

In our time, that freedom is threatened by intervention in every aspect of economic life, but also through the uses of the military power. Government not only claims it is smart enough to manage the economy, fix up our communities, run our schools, but also to decide which foreign politicians deserve to be protected and which deserve to be destroyed.

The implicit assumption is always that government knows more and better than the rest of us, and that this knowledge is sufficient to give it rights the rest of us do not have. It is often said that knowledge is power. In the case of government, however, its power vastly exceeds its knowledge.

When Alan Greenspan of the Fed (a branch of government in every important respect) testifies before Congress, legislators listen attentively to find out what he knows about the state of the economy, as if he has some privileged access to high-level data not reported elsewhere. It is further assumed that he knows precisely how to act on it. It is this knowledge that allows him to operate the gears and levers of the economy, so it is believed.

The same assumptions are made about many aspects of government. Many people who have backed war with Iraq assume that the government must know something awful about Saddam that it cannot share with the general public. It’s true, they admit, that Saddam does not have nuclear weapons and that there is no public information that suggests he is plotting the destruction of America as we know it. But surely the White House must know something we do not, and know what to do about it, or else why would the administration be so intent on removing him from power?

The belief that powerful people know more than the rest of us is a main source of their power. It’s true only to this extent: powerful people are likely to know when they are telling the truth and when they are not. The rest of us are put in a position of having to guess or dig to verify their claims point by point. Experience teaches that politicians often lie. But there’s an even more important point: because government activity takes place outside the framework of the market economy, government has no idea how to use the information it does have to achieve social good.

Think of all the bits of information the government had been collecting to assess the likelihood of a terrorist incident. A few warnings among tens of thousands of tips did not suffice to prevent this destructive attack. The accumulation of information has grown steadily more voluminous. The government is in no better position to make judgments about it today than it was two years ago.

In contrast, insurance companies are in the business of assessing risk all the time, and they do this by means of a system of profit and loss, which Mises demonstrated is essential to a rationally organized society. Government, on the other hand, just collects piles of data and is completely at a loss on how to assess the relative likelihood of any particular scenario, or what to do about it.

Remember this winter’s now-famous announcement that Americans should stock up on duct tape to protect themselves from chemical warfare. People rushed to the stores and cleaned out the shelves. Later it turned out that duct taping windows can be very dangerous and even cause asphyxiation. Not only that: the tip concerning the coming bioterrorism was a hoax. The “high alert”—as if that means anything to regular people—that government told Americans to be on was not justified.

In contrast, the private sector enhances security through peaceful and normal means. Home insurance companies give premium breaks for people who install alarm systems. Health insurers charge more for people who live dangerously. Premiums go up when risk is high, and they fall when it is low. Through this mechanism, people are encouraged to adopt safe ways of living or pay the difference if they choose not to. Those who contract to provide security face competition and have the incentive and means to provide what they promise. What a contrast with the chaotic and fumbling ways of government security provision!

But failure does not deter the State. Indeed, we are now asked to believe that the White House is not only omnipotent but omniscient as well. These people in government presume to make definitive judgments about the entire Iraqi ruling class, even going so far as to say that they know the secret hostility of a huge range of people toward Saddam, which thus qualifies them (who just happen to have essential technical knowledge) to help in administering the country. They can’t possibly know this. That they believe they can, or they believe we will believe their claims to know, is incredible and frightening.

The alarming reality brings to mind Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture in 1974. With great courage, Hayek spoke of the tendency of economists to presume that they know things about human behavior that they do not and cannot know. They do this because they try to apply the models of the physical sciences to explain human action, always with an aim toward controlling the outcomes of human choice.

In truth, human action is too complex and subjective to be accessed by social scientists, and the attempt will always lead to abysmal failure. Hayek went on to explain how his critique of positivist economic modeling applies more broadly to anyone who would attempt to imitate the form while missing the substance of scientific procedure.

But it is by no means only in the field of economics that far-reaching claims are made on behalf of a more scientific direction of all human activities and the desirability of replacing spontaneous processes by “conscious human control.”

He mentions that the point applies to sociology, psychiatry, and the philosophy of history.

Hayek was raising an objection to the idea not of omniscience but of the possibility of accessing even mundane knowledge. No small group in government, much less a single person, can accumulate and sort through the kinds of information necessary to administer society, much less destroy and reconstruct one, as the Bush administration proposes to do throughout the Gulf region and the Middle East.

The attempt to assemble such a list is an act of power, not intelligence. We are being asked to make an enormous leap of faith that the Bush administration has somehow solved the great problem that afflicts us all: the limits of human comprehension. Because of those limits, we are right to try to limit the ability of men to exercise power over their fellows, at home or abroad.

Thus does Hayek’s point apply to politics, especially to politics, even more especially to the politics of the military machine. The social scientist who believes he has the master plan to run the world is enough of a menace. But the politician who believes this, and is contemplating war, can bring about massive amounts of destruction and death. In these nuclear days—and let us say what we don’t like to contemplate but which is nonetheless true—he can bring about the end of the world as we know it. As Hayek notes, a tyrant who carries the pretense of knowledge too far can become “a destroyer of civilization.”

“If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order,” said Hayek, “he will have to learn that ... he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.” To believe otherwise is foolhardy and dangerous.

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society.

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD: IN MEMORIAM

[Delivered at a memorial service at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 20, 1995.]

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a worldwide renewal in the scholarship of liberty.

“Give me a short description of his thought and contributions,” said the reporter when this free-market giant died at the age of 68. But how do you sum up Beethoven’s music or Dante’s poetry?

In 45 years of teaching and writing, Rothbard produced 25 books, thousands of articles, and three generations of students. He was a teacher who never stopped learning, an intellectual prize fighter who always punched cleanly. He battled every destructive trend in this century—socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism—and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists. At once a genius and a gentleman, his causes were honesty in scholarship, truth in history, principle in politics, and—first and foremost—human liberty itself.

Filled with laughter and principled beyond measure, Rothbard rejected the compromises and pretensions of the modern world. He was unaffected by intellectual fashion, undeterred by attacks, and untempted by opportunism. Quite simply, nothing stopped him. And as the Happy Warrior of economics, as Forbes called him, he made singular contributions to banking history, price theory, monopoly and antitrust, and business cycles, to name just a few areas.

For many years, he taught economics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, working in a dingy, windowless office on the fifth floor, surrounded by Marxists. He never once complained, except to wonder why an engineering school couldn’t make the elevator work. His admirers celebrated his appointment as the S.J. Hall distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Teaching in New York, Las Vegas, Auburn, and at conferences around the world, Rothbard led the renaissance of the Austrian School of economics. He galvanized an academic and popular fight for liberty and property, against the omnipotent State and its court intellectuals.

Like his beloved teacher Mises, Rothbard wrote for the public as well as professionals. “Civilization and human existence are at stake, and to preserve and expand it, high theory and scholarship, though important, are not enough,” he wrote in 1993. “Especially in an age of galloping statism, the classical liberal, the advocate of the free market, has an obligation to carry the struggle to all levels of society.”

Rothbard’s theory was his practice. He was involved in nearly every political and social development of his time, from Robert Taft’s presidential campaign to the 1994 elections. His last article, appearing in the Washington Post, warned that Newt Gingrich is more likely to betray the revolution than lead it.

The Mises Institute is honored that Rothbard headed our academic programs for 13 years. He spoke at all our conferences and teaching seminars, edited our Review of Austrian Economics, consulted on our books and monographs, and wrote for our Free Market. Most of all, he taught and inspired our students, who will carry his ideas into the future.

Rothbard has been compared to the greatest minds in social science, but his wisdom and character led him to show gratitude to his predecessors. His formative intellectual event was the 1949 publication of Mises’s Human Action.

“I had gone through all the doctoral courses at Columbia University,” Rothbard wrote, “without once discovering that there was such a thing as an Austrian School, let alone that Ludwig von Mises was its foremost living champion.” But this book “solved all the problems and inconsistencies that I had sensed in economic theory.”

Rothbard attended Mises’s seminar at New York University from its first meeting, and became the student who would defend and extend Mises’s ideas, push the Austrian School tradition to new heights, and integrate it with political theory. He taught the movement how to write, and was also an important cultural influence.

The Austrian School had previously been a largely European intellectual movement. Mises changed that with his migration to this country. Rothbard completed this process, so that the locus of the school is no longer Europe, but America, the nation whose founding principles Rothbard and Mises so deeply admired.

Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard’s great work, was the key to the resurgence of Austrian economics after Mises’s death. Beginning with the philosophical foundation, Rothbard built an edifice of economic theory and an unassailable case for the market. In many ways, the book rescued economics from its mostly deserved reputation. Instead of the dismal, statist, and incomprehensible pseudoscience students are used to, Rothbard gave us a tightly reasoned, sweeping case for the free market that is still used in classrooms all over the world.

The book treated economics as a humane science, not as a branch of physics. Every page took account of the uncertainty of economic conditions, the certainty of change, and the central place of the entrepreneur, while never losing sight of the implacability of economic law. No wonder Henry Hazlitt, writing in National Review, called it “brilliant and original and profound.”

Since its publication, the treatise has only grown in stature. Through it, Rothbard has taught countless students to think like real economists instead of number crunchers. He explained and applied the logic of human action in economic exchange, and refuted its opponents. Like Mises, he looked not at “economic man,” but acting man who deals with the scarcity of time and resources.

Rothbard breathed life into economic theory with his historical works, and refuted the charge that Austrians are only concerned with high theory. He was also one of the few intellectuals on the Right to champion revisionist history. Other historians have since picked up his works and built on them to create entire schools of thought.

He wrote America’s Great Depression, applying the Misesian theory of the business cycle to refute the most common anticapitalist slander: that the market caused the crash and economic downturn of the 1930s. He showed that the villain was government intervention, in the form of credit expansion and Herbert Hoover’s high wage policies. Paul Johnson adopted the thesis for his Modern Times. He also refuted the then-dominant view of Herbert Hoover as a laissez-faire conservative, by showing that he was actually a premature New Dealer. In journal articles, he showed that the New Deal followed logically from the economic regimentation of World War I and the Progressive Era, which gave us central banking and the income tax.

Rothbard was once asked to write a short book of American history. He agreed, and it eventually appeared. But Conceived in Liberty was four large volumes on the period 1620–1780. His purpose was to highlight forgotten events that demonstrate the libertarian character of our history and people. It is masterful, revisionist, and a pleasure to read. But what happened to the original project? Rothbard explained that he had discovered so much (tax revolts! uprisings! betrayals! power grabs!) that was left out of conventional accounts.

The American revolution threw off tyranny, he argued. It was not simply a continuation of British-style statism in another guise, as Hamilton claimed. The new social order would protect communities, properties, and essential rights. Rothbard also proved to be as proficient a military historian as he was an interpreter of ideological history.

Rothbard hardly let a moment go to waste, teaching through the day and writing through the night. His wife of 41 years, JoAnn, tells of being awakened once by his newest discovery: “That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin after all!”

In his work, as in his life, he always sided with the pro-liberty forces against the welfare-warfare State. He especially liked the anti-New Dealers, the anti-imperialists, the Confederates, the anti-federalists, the tax resisters, the underground businessmen, the anti-State pamphleteers, and other unsung heroes. Throughout history the power elite has found profitable uses for the State. Rothbard never passed up a chance to name them, to explain how they did it, and to show how their actions harmed everyone else in society.

Conflict was the central theme of Rothbardian political economy: the State vs. voluntary associations, and the struggle over the ownership and control of property. He showed that property must be in private hands and owners must be free to control it as they see fit. The only logical alternative is the total State. There is no room for a “third-way” like social democracy, the mixed economy, or “good government,” and the attempt to create it is always disruptive.

Power and Market, another enduring contribution, zeroed in on this conflict, and attacked every form of government intervention, confounding one antimarket cliché after another, and defending market competition as essential to social peace. Where others looked for “market failure,” Rothbard found only government flops.

The book discussed the most common intervention in the market: taxation, the direct taking of someone’s property by a group claiming a monopoly on coercion, i.e., the State. The taxing power defines the State in the same way that theft defines a robber.

He also showed that there can be no neutral tax, that is, one that leaves the market exactly as it would be without the tax. All taxes distort. And all taxes are taxes on production and hinder it, even so-called consumption taxes.

Taxation takes capital from private hands and prevents it from being used to serve private interests and the consuming public. This is true regardless of the type of tax. Also, the government spends taxes in ways that alter the production patterns of the market. If money is spent on market-oriented projects, it unjustly competes; if it is spent on nonmarket projects, it is economically inefficient.

Taxes are never “contributions,” he argued. “Precisely because taxation is compulsory there is no way to assure—as is done automatically on the free market—that the amount any person contributes is what he would otherwise be willing to pay.” As Rothbard said, it is not utopian to work for a society without taxation; it is utopian to think that the power to tax won’t be abused once it is granted.

No principle of taxation, he argued, can equal a market system of fairness. A progressive tax discriminates on the basis of income; the rich aren’t forced to pay more for bread than the poor. A flat tax forces the same result, since higher incomes contribute a greater dollar amount than lower ones. The least harmful tax is a head tax or equal tax: a flat fee low enough for even the poorest to pay.

As a steadfast believer in free trade, Rothbard argued that peace between nations cannot rest on negotiations between State managers. Peace is kept by the network of exchange that develops between private parties. This is why he opposed false “free trade” such as Nafta and Gatt, which have more in common with neomercantilism, and he was the first to forecast the disaster Nafta has become.

Interventionists have long used the language of markets to advance statism. Consider antitrust law enforced in the name of “competition.” Rothbard showed that the only authentic monopolies are those created by law: the government subsidizes a producer at others’ expense (public hospitals and schools) or forbids competition altogether (the postal service).

Other forms of monopoly include licensure, that is, deliberately restricting the supply of labor or number of firms in a certain industry. Government monopolies always deliver inferior service at exorbitant prices. And they are “triangular interventions,” because they subsidize one party while preventing others from exchanging as they would in a free market.

He showed that unemployment insurance (actually, unemployment subsidies) increases the number of people out of work. Child labor laws, a favorite of unions and the Department of Labor, subsidize adult employment while preventing young people from gaining valuable work experience. Even eminent domain (“a license for theft”) fails under Rothbard’s property-rights strictures.

What about “intellectual property rights”? Rothbard defended the copyright as a contract made with consumers not to reprint a work, resell it, or falsely attribute the source. A patent on the other hand, is a government grant of monopoly privilege to the first discoverer of certain types of inventions to get to the government patent office.

And under public ownership, he argued, the “public” owns nothing, and the ruling officialdom owns all. “Any citizen who doubts this,” Rothbard suggested, “may try to appropriate for his own individual use his allotted part of ‘public’ property and then try to argue his case in court.”

The government sector focuses on the short run, he argued; there is no such thing as “public-sector investment.” It is only the private sector, which is the real public sector, Rothbard said, where property owners take long-run considerations into account. Unlike government, they preserve the value of resources, and do not plunder or waste them.

In his last scholarly article, he developed the idea of the nation as something separate from either the State or the individual, a collective identity based on language, ethnicity, race, and religion. Rothbard celebrated the post-Cold War emergence of the nation as a countervailing power to the State, and presented the hope that “the brutal and repressive state will be gradually dissolved into a harmonious and increasingly prosperous social order.” It was the final hope of a lifetime of hopes.

Many economists think numbers are the sum of the discipline. Rothbard turned the tables to argue that government data are gathered and used for piecemeal planning and the destruction of the economy. Whatever information markets need about economic conditions can be garnered privately.

A good example is the “trade deficit” between nations, which he said is no more relevant than the trade deficit between towns. There is no justification for assuming that trade must equal out in accounts. The important point is that people are benefiting from exchange, whether across the street or across the world.

Aren’t historical statistics useful for research? Many are misleading. The Gross Domestic Product counts government spending as production, when it should be counted as consumption. Also, government taxing is considered neutral when it’s destructive. Deficits, which drain savings and crowd out production, also need to be accounted for when assessing productivity.

Rothbard looked at private production by subtracting out the government component. The result is the Private Product Remaining, or PPR, which has served scholars as a basis for more accurate historical work. Using the PPR, for example, we see national product increasing at a much slower rate than the GDP, thanks to big government.

Even money-supply statistics were in need of revision in Rothbard’s view. Long before people gave up on the Fed’s ability to generate anything useful (the “M’s” are laughable these days), Rothbard proposed his own measure based on the Austrian School theory of money. It counts cash, deposits easily turned into cash, and all other liquid financial assets.

The State and its banking cartel is the worst possible money manager, Rothbard argued, and free enterprise is the best. He produced many studies on the abuse of money and banking by central bankers and the central State. They include his doctoral thesis, Panic of 1819, Mystery of Banking, and papers on the banking debates of the mid and late 19th century, the monetary debauchery of FDR, the fiasco of Bretton Woods, and the following age of inflation and monetary chaos. Just out is his Case Against the Fed, the best book ever written on the subject.

View the Federal Reserve as a counterfeiting syndicate, and we have Rothbard’s theory of the central bank. But, he pointed out, at least the counterfeiter doesn’t pretend to be working in the public interest, to be smoothing out business cycles, and to be keeping prices stable. He was also the first to analyze in depth and from a free-market perspective the special-interest groups that created the Fed.

Rothbard added to Austrian theory a systematic model for how money is destroyed. The State conspires with the central bank and the banking industry to enhance their mutual power and wealth by devaluation, the equivalent of coin clipping. Little by little, society’s money has less to do with its original form, and eventually it is transformed into paper created out of thin air, to best serve the State’s interest.

As a part of this process, the State intervenes to forbid customers from insisting on 100-percent reserves in checkable deposits. From there, it is progressively easier to move from gold to paper, as has happened in this country from the turn of the century.

Like Mises, Rothbard saw inflation as a policy pursued by the banking industry in league with the government. Those who get the newly created money first—banks, government, institutional securities traders, and government contractors, for example—win out because they can spend it before prices go up and investments are distorted. Those who get the new money later lose.

A Rothbardian gold standard is no watered-down version. He wanted convertibility at home and abroad. Only that system—which would put depositors in charge of insuring the financial soundness of the banking system—can prevent the Fed’s monetary depredations, which have reduced the value of the 1913 dollar to 5 cents today.

The ultimate guarantor against inflation is a private banking system with private coinage, a great American system that was squeezed out by the central State. Rothbard’s writings on money and banking—extensive and deep—may eventually become the single most influential aspect of his thought.

Economists rarely talk about liberty and private property and even less about what constitutes just ownership. Rothbard did, arguing that property acquired through confiscation, whether by private criminals or the State, is unjustly owned. (He also pointed out that bureaucrats pay no taxes, since their entire salaries are taxes.)

Ethics of Liberty was his moral defense. “Liberty of the individual,” Rothbard wrote, is “not only a great moral good in itself” but “also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes”: virtue, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity, civilization itself. “Out of liberty, stem the glories of civilized life.”

Once we understand why private property should be inviolable, troublesome notions fall by the wayside. There can be no “civil rights” apart from property rights, because the necessary freedom to exclude is abolished. “Voting rights” are also a fiction, which—depending on how they are used—can also diminish freedom. Even the “right to immigrate” is phony: “On whose property does someone else have the right to trample?” he asked.

Thus, the Rothbardian social order is no ACLU free-for-all. The security of property provides lines of authority, restraints on behavior, and guarantees of order. The result is social peace and prosperity. The conflicts we face today, from affirmative action to environmentalism, are the result of false rights being put ahead of private property.

In defense of capitalism, Rothbard was uncompromising. But he did not see the market as the be-all and end-all of the social order. For him, capitalism was not a “system,” but a consequence of the natural order of liberty. Neither “growth” nor “greed” is the capitalist ideal. In the free economy, leisure and charity are goods like any other, to be “purchased” by giving up alternative uses of time and money.

And with growing prosperity the need for material goods falls relative to nonmaterial goods. “Rather than foster ‘material’ values, then, advancing capitalism does just the opposite.” No society has ever been as grasping and greedy as the Soviet Union, although the Left is still trying to convince us that State power equals compassion.

A Rothbardian world would be a world without politics. But Murray was no dropout, and in fact loved politics. Who else could write a 5,000-word essay on a random week of electoral life in New York City, and make every word fascinating?

His political writings date from the early 1950s, when he wrote for Faith and Freedom, a hard-Right, isolationist publication. In articles on the evils of the military buildup, he warned that American liberty would be sacrificed to the Cold War.

That led to his break with the Buckleyites, who ridiculed him and his ideas. They never took him on directly; they were smarter than that. Instead, they smeared him in private, and tried to deny him publishing and speaking opportunities.

As editor of Left and Right and Libertarian Forum, Rothbard also predicted that the Cold War would someday end because Soviet socialism would collapse. But, he said, the American military machine would keep on cranking out the planes and bombs. The real threat, he maintained, was not foreign Communism, but US militarism and socialism, which would do what the Soviets never could: steal our liberty.

Rothbard developed a large and growing audience for such views, and continued with this theme for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, writing against US military interventions in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. As the official Left and Right pushed for a New World Order, Rothbard, exasperated, suggested we save time and just invade the entire globe.

Well, here we are 40 years after Rothbard began his foreign-policy writings. The warfare State is as big as ever, and so is the welfare State. National Review—which has always cozied up to power, and, like other neoconservatives, even holds up the dictators Lincoln and Roosevelt for our admiration—is still cheerleading the Republican establishment to new levels of hypocrisy. And we can see that Rothbard was right all along: right about the military, right about politics, right about the Buckleyite conservatives and their love of State power.

That is why Rothbard has triumphed in the end. Despite its attempt to purge and destroy him, National Review’s influence on the intellectual world hasn’t come close to Rothbard’s. And when the Buckleyites are long forgotten, Rothbard’s authority will not have begun to peak.

For Rothbard, politics and criminal behavior are largely the same enterprise, to be treated with the same investigative rigor. Every day required another whodunit. His motivation in political writing was exposing crime and denouncing criminals.

Some people say that Rothbard’s politics were all over the map. That is not true. He set the political standard as liberty itself, and worked with anyone who pursued it. At the height of the Vietnam War, for example, when the official Right was countenancing mass murder, he looked to the New Left as a vehicle for stopping this most vicious form of statism.

But as the Cold War ended, Rothbard was overjoyed to reunite with the remnants of the Old Right. After he was in paleoconservative circles only a few months, we began to witness new ideological hybrids springing up: anarcho-Southern agrarianism, anarcho-anti-federalism, anarcho-protectionism, and anarcho-monarchism. Their advocates were his colleagues, and he was their conscience.

Rothbard’s political thought is simple at its core but astounding in its application. He believed that common moral strictures, and standards of evaluation, should apply to the State.

If theft is wrong, it is wrong. The same goes for murder, kidnapping, lying, and fraud. They are as wrong for the State as for everyone else.

“Always and ever,” he wrote, “the government and its rulers and operators have been considered above the general moral law.” It is this that Rothbard’s right-wing “anarchism” was devoted to ending: he wanted to make government subject to the rule of law. But Rothbard was no Utopian; his view was that government power should be limited in any way possible, and he worked to make it so.

His pioneering studies of private courts predated the popularity of private arbiters. (Rothbard wanted to abolish “jury slavery” and force courts to pay a market wage.) His work on private law enforcement predated the popularity of home protection and private security. His promotion of private roads predated their wide use in suburbs and malls. His promotion of private schools predated the anti-public school revolt.

What Rothbard wrote about Mises applies in his case as well:

never would Mises compromise his principles, never would he bow the knee to a quest for respectability or social or political favor. As a scholar, as an economist, and as a person, Ludwig von Mises was a joy and an inspiration, an exemplar for us all.

Like Mises, Rothbard gave up money and fame in academic economics to promote what is true and right. And he set all who knew him an example of how a man should live his life.

The Mises Institute was blessed to be associated with him, and he credited the Institute with having “at last forged an Austrian revival that Mises would be truly proud of.”

Rothbard’s ideas and character, like those of Mises, must be always before us, and before new generations as well. The Mises Institute will ensure that it is so. We are still discovering the breadth and depth of Rothbard’s literary legacy, with the publication of volumes one and two of Rothbard’s history of economic thought, put out by Edward Elgar shortly after his death. It is the most important work of its kind since Joseph Schumpeter’s.

Whereas other texts pretend to be an uninterrupted march toward higher levels of truth, Rothbard illuminated a history of unknown geniuses and lost knowledge, of respected charlatans and honored fallacies.

Later in 1995, a two-volume compilation of his important economic articles, totaling more than 1,000 pages, will appear in Elgar’s “Economists of the 20th Century” series edited by Mark Blaug. In addition, there are unpublished manuscripts, articles, and letters to fill many more volumes.

From Menger to Rothbard, Austrian School economists have argued that man is motivated by much more than mere self-interest and profit maximization. If the neoclassicals emphasize homo economicus, the Austrian School studies homo agens, the person who acts for a wide variety of reasons, including those that have nothing to do with material gain.

Murray N. Rothbard was empirical proof that the Austrian theory is correct. In his professional and personal life, he always put classical virtues ahead of his private interest. His generosity, his constancy, and his faith helped make him not only a giant among scholars, but also a giant among men.

His acts of charity were uncountable. How many times have I seen a student approach him at one or two in the morning at a teaching conference and ask a question about the gold standard, or economics as a purely logical science? He had been asked the same thing a thousand times before, but that student would never know it, as Rothbard enthusiastically explained everything.

Many, myself included, were schooled in economics, politics, philosophy, history, and much more at his feet. If his beneficiaries defaulted on their debts to him, as they so often did, he would shrug it off.

In an age of Limbaughvian self-promotion, Rothbard always pointed beyond himself, and never tired of extolling the greatness of his beloved teacher, Ludwig von Mises.

He never wanted, nor would he have tolerated, a cult of Rothbard. He lived to see the emergence and development of Rothbardian political economy, but he never once acknowledged its existence. Even his demeanor suggested this. Was there ever a genius with so little pretension?

Rothbard took ideas so seriously that he refuted even the most idiotic thoughts from the most irrelevant sources. How few of these people realized that he was paying them the ultimate compliment: treating them as if they were his equals.

Rothbard never sought academic or popular prestige. A first look at his bibliography seems to reveal a prolific genius with little marketing sense. But that was the point: despite his promotion of the free market, Rothbard never let the market determine what he would think or say. He adhered to what is right regardless of self-interest.

Imagine, for example, the courage it took to carry on the American isolationist tradition—almost single-handedly—in a time of hysterical pro-war propaganda.

He could have given up his anti-interventionism in foreign policy and been a big shot in conservatism. He might have been National Review’s favorite intellectual. Who knows? He might have even made the pages of Commentary. Or he could have given up his free-market and strict private-property views, or at least downplayed them, and been rewarded by the Left. At the height of the Vietnam War, this would have made him a star at the Nation.

Some say that Rothbard’s constancy was a vice, that he refused to change his mind. In fact, no one was more ready for correction. In recent years, to take just one example, he wrote that he had neglected the cultural foundations of liberty, and cheered those who hadn’t.

In a contradictory accusation, others have said that Rothbard’s consistency is a myth, that in his long political life he swung from Right to Left to Right. This is a smear. In moral and cultural matters, he was always a reactionary. In politics, Rothbard’s constancy was based on his belief in the primacy of foreign policy. When a nation becomes an empire, he argued, the prospects for liberty are nil. Look for the opponents of war and imperialism during his life, and there you would find Rothbard.

One final trait of Rothbard’s: he was a man of faith. He believed that there is order in the universe, that natural law is real and intractable, that truth exists and that it can set us free. His faith was the faith of all men who have put ideals ahead of selfish concerns.

If we are to live up to Rothbard’s example, what must we do? Read and research and produce quality scholarship, commit ourselves to promoting liberty and fighting the State, act on our convictions with tireless energy, never sell out, never give in, and never forget that we will win in the end.

We have one other duty. Without him here to object, we can at last tell the truth about the world-historical figure that was Murray N. Rothbard, who now belongs to the ages.

THE JOY OF JOANN

[Delivered at the memorial service for JoAnn Rothbard at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, February 26, 2000.]

The trouble with socialism,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is that it takes too many evenings.” Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything—not even their families—other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must be a microcosm of a socialist society: there must be no escape from the All-Embracing Theory.

The lives of Murray and JoAnn Beatrice Rothbard illustrated the opposite principle. He was the premier antisocialist of our time, the greatest economist of his generation, a philosopher and historian who made immense contributions. She was his lifetime helpmate, an excellent manager, an opera aficionado with a scholar’s level of knowledge, an enthusiast for liberty, a woman of remarkable personal patience, and, above all else, a wife supremely in love with her husband, as he was with her.

Together, their lives were a microcosm of liberty, with interests spanning an extraordinary range, and a private life just as rich and varied as what they accomplished together in their public life. In the months following her death, I came across a beautiful correspondence between them during their courtship, she at home in Virginia and he in graduate school at Columbia. His letters are hilarious and charming, and hers warm and witty. They corresponded about New York baseball, and why it was important to love the Yankees and launch a boycott against the Giants. He shared his view of child rearing, in particular the proper technique for teaching a child how to swim. Murray’s view: throw them in the water! She took a more moderate view. These were two bourgeois students in love with life, and they adored each other.

Murray was blessed with an astonishing brilliance and intellectual creativity, but he was never one for fitting into the usual social conventions of young adulthood. Joey appeared to have understood him like no one else. She loved his creativity, his humility, and his unrelenting laughter. He found her kind, gracious, and beautiful, the first person whom he could really pour his heart out to, and whom he thoroughly respected. She used to draw up schedules for him to prevent breakfast from overlapping with dinner hour. She would signal him when it was time to get off the phone, or write a paper for that next conference. What must it have been like to have lived with Murray, to have seen him work, to enjoy his insights and humor every day for so long? In some way, I think, we all felt a bit of jealousy.

Many of us were fortunate to be a part of their private life to some extent. And as many of us know, a Rothbardian evening was not like Wilde’s steely-eyed socialist one. They constantly entertained guests from all walks of life, freely talked to any callers curious about libertarian ideas, and spent endless hours with students and friends. They were generous with their time, food, and books, and as anxious to learn from others as others were from them. If the socialist evening served as a fearful look into the sternness and regimentation of a centrally planned society, a Rothbardian evening seemed to suggest the limitless possibilities and hope of freedom.

For them, it wasn’t always about the great political struggle of our time. They also attended concerts, plays, and films, and took classes in German baroque church architecture, the paintings of Caravaggio, early music, and American history. Like many great intellectuals—G.K. Chesterton comes to mind—Murray was somewhat disorganized. JoAnn was the practical partner of the team. She hosted all the parties, cooked all the food, and kept his schedule. She proofed and typed all of Murray’s manuscripts, inspired him in his research and writing, and sponsored a salon in their home that was crucial for the birth of the libertarian movement. Where he was naïve, she was knowing. Service of this variety is an old-fashioned virtue, not nearly as appreciated as it should be these days.

Once when Murray was discouraged from attending a Messiah sing because he would mistakenly attempt to sing all four parts, Joey began her own sing in their home. It became an annual staple for their always large and growing set of friends in New York City. Joey later developed and cultivated an intense interest in opera—more intense than Murray could ever muster—so she would frequently fly to large and important performances that couldn’t be missed, especially those of Wagner.

When Murray got to know novelist Ayn Rand, he was told by one of her devotees that he had a problem: Joey appeared to believe in God, a self-evidently irrational impulse. Joey was given time to listen to a tape series in atheism, and was not convinced. The Randians told Murray that if he wanted to be part of their group, he had to divorce her. Murray took her arm and they walked out, together.

Joey loved to tell stories about Murray: how they were once tossed out of the Columbia University library for laughing, and how she knew how to find him in a dark theater on their first date—by following the laughter. Indeed, to spend even a few minutes with Murray and Joey was to find yourself laughing uproariously. Frequently the laughter concerned politics, but it might also concern anything else. Their joy together was boundless, their intellectual curiosity deep, and their love of life complete.

Murray could not have accomplished what he did without her. He wrote tens of thousands of articles and 25 books, and developed the first, fully integrated science of liberty—with her by his side, providing indispensable encouragement and support. She made his breathtaking level of productivity possible. But even more importantly, they lived good and faithful lives, to each other, to the principles they shared, and to never letting their passion for politics squeeze out the moral obligation to care for others and to embrace life to its fullest.

His unexpected and untimely death in 1995 was a devastating blow to JoAnn. Her health was failing and her main source of joy gone. But she knew what Murray would have her do. She stayed constantly in touch by phone. She threw herself into reading and research, becoming a real expert on the depredations of Lincoln. She gave classes at our student conferences, and lectured about Murray’s thought at the Austrian Scholars Conference.

On the fourth anniversary of Murray’s death, she suffered a terrible stroke, and died months later. We are left with warm memories of their happiness together, and the multitude of ways in which she and he touched our lives. They had their priorities straight, and in their public and private lives, exemplified the spirit of liberty, and changed our world. Thank you Joey, for all you did to make everything possible.

A TRIBUTE TO TRADE

[Delivered at the Mises Institute, September 12, 2001, in memory of those who died in the World Trade Center disaster the day before.]

The sight of New York City’s twin World Trade Center towers falling to the ground, the result of an act of deliberate aggression, seems to symbolize two points that seem entirely forgotten today: the magnificent contribution that commerce makes to civilization, and just how vulnerable it is to its enemies. If the enemies of capitalist commerce are hell-bent on the destruction of the source of wealth, there are few means available to prevent it.

From the two towers soaring 1,300 feet above the city, a person on the 110th floor enjoyed a panoramic view stretching 55 miles: a broad vision of human civilization. Much more important for the flowering of civilization is what went on there: entrepreneurship, creativity, exchange, service, all of it peaceful, all of it to the benefit of mankind.

What kind of service? The financial firm of Morgan Stanley took 20 floors, and at the time of the explosion, the firm was hosting a meeting for the 400 members of the National Association of Business Economists. Fred Alger Management, a training ground for young traders and stock analysts, occupied the 93rd floor of the North Tower. Bond dealers for Cantor Fitzgerald took up floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower.

Fiduciary Trust, a wonderful money management company, employed 500 people who worked on five floors at the very top of the South Tower. Other companies there included Network Plus, Harris Beach & Wilcox, OppenheimerFunds, Bank of America, Kemper Insurance, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Sun Microsystems.

Here were the brokers who invest our savings, trying their best to channel resources to their most profitable uses. Here were insurance companies, which provide the valuable service of securing our lives and property against accidents. Here were many retailers, who risk their own livelihoods to provide us with goods and services we as consumers desire. Here were lenders, lawyers, agents, and architects whose contributions are so essential to our daily lives.

Some of us knew men and women who are now dead. But most of them will remain anonymous to us. Whether we knew them or not, they were our benefactors nonetheless, because in the commercial society, the actions of entrepreneurs benefit everyone, in mostly imperceptible ways. They all contribute to the stock of capital on which prosperity itself is based. They work daily to coordinate the use of resources to eliminate waste and inefficiency, and make products and services available that improve our everyday lives.

Think especially of the remarkable people in that place who facilitated international trade. They daily accomplished the seemingly impossible. Faced with a world of more than 200 countries, and hundreds more languages and dialects, with as many currencies and legal regimes, and thousands of local cultural differences, and billions of consumers, they found ways to make peaceful exchange possible. They looked for and seized on every opportunity that presented itself to enable human cooperation.

No government has been able to accomplish anything this remarkable. It is a miracle made possible by commerce, and by those who undertake the burden of making it happen.

We often hear platitudes about the brotherhood of man. But you don’t see it at the United Nations or at the summits of governments. There you see conflicts, resolved usually by the use of other people’s money taken by force. But at the World Trade Center, the brotherhood of man was an everyday affair.

It didn’t matter if you were a small rug merchant in Nepal, a fisherman off the Chinese coast, or a machine manufacturer in the American Midwest, the people who worked here put you in contact with others who valued what you did and what you could give to others. Consent and choice, not conflict and coercion, were at the core of everything. Their watchword was contract, not hegemony.

True, the objective of all these merchants and traders may have been their own personal betterment, but the effect of their work was to serve not just themselves but everyone else as well. Because the beneficial effects of trade are not just local but national, and not just national but international, the inhabitants of these buildings were in many ways the benefactors of all of us personally. The blessings we experienced from their work came to us every time we used a credit card, withdrew money from the bank, bought from a chain store, or ordered something online.

In short, these people were producers. Frédéric Bastiat said of them: they are the people who

create out of nothing the satisfactions that sustain and beautify life, so that an individual or a people is enabled to multiply these satisfactions indefinitely without inflicting privation of any kind on other men or other peoples.

Yes, they earned profits, but for the most part, their work went unrewarded. It was certainly unappreciated in the culture at large. They are not called public servants. They are not praised for their sacrifices to the common good. Popular culture treats these “money centers” as sources of greed and corruption. We are told that these people are the cause of environmental destruction and labor exploitation, that the “globalists” inside the World Trade Center were conspiring not to create but to destroy. Even after all the destruction wrought by socialism, capitalists must still bear the brunt of envy and hatred.

The impulse to hate the entrepreneurial class shows up in myriad ways. We see it when franchise restaurants are bombed, as they frequently are in France. In the United States, the government works to “protect” land from being used by commerce, and increasing numbers of our laws are built on the presumption that the business class is out to get us, not serve us. The business pages more often report on the villainy, rather then the victories, of enterprise. Or take a look at the typical college bookstore, where students are still required to read Marx and the Marxians rather than Mises and the Misesians.

All the enemies of capitalism act as if its elimination would have no ill consequences for our lives. In the classroom, on television, at the movies, we are continually presented a picture of what a perfect world of bliss we would enjoy if we could just get rid of those who make a living through owning, speculating, and amassing wealth.

For hundreds of years, in fact, the intellectual classes have demanded the expropriation and even the extermination of capitalistic expropriators. Since ancient times, the merchant and his trade have been considered ignoble. In fact, their absence would reduce us to barbarism and utter poverty. Even now, the destruction of the property and people at the once-mighty towers of the world has already impoverished us in more ways than we will ever know.

Those who understand economics and celebrate the creative power of commerce understand this higher truth, which is why we defend the market economy at every opportunity. That is why we seek to eliminate the barriers that governments and anticapitalists have erected against the businessmen’s freedom. We see them as the defenders of civilization, and so we seek to guard their interests in every way we know how.

We mourn the lost lives of those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, which are no more. We mourn their lost vocations. We owe it to them to appreciate anew their contribution to society.

As Mises wrote,

[No] one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.