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- [00:00]
Saifedean Ammous
Foreign. Principles of Economics. My complete guide to Understanding Economics is now available in hardcover, audiobook and ebook from seifeddin.com, amazon and many more booksellers worldwide. And now I am also teaching a course based on this book on my website seyfeddin.com Principles of Economics will run the whole academic year from September to June and will have a new lecture every two weeks as well as weekly live online discussion seminars open to learners from all over the world and from all walks of life. Whether you're a student, a professional, or a retiree, you are making economic decisions every day and this course will arm you with the wisdom of centuries of economists to improve your economic decision making. You'll also get a free book of Principles of Economics. If you sign up for the course, go to safedine.com and sign up now.
- [00:59]
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Preface by Stefan Kinsella the Property and Freedom Society was founded in 2006 by Hans Hoppe, 11 years after Murray Rothbard's death. As Hoppe was Rothbard's most intimate associate partner, friend, and student for the last decade of his life, the PFS is naturally home to admirers of Rothbard and his brand of Austrian economics and anarcho libertarianism. Many of its founding members knew Rothbard personally, and all were admirers. Most of its other members are also heavily influenced by and indebted to Rothbard's powerful body of ideas. The PFS and all its members are, in an important sense, Rothbard's children. The PFS is thus in a sense a sort of Rothbard Institute, under a different name. In fact, some writers and even admirers of the Louis von Mises Institute have also suggested that it too should instead be named the Rothbard Institute, as its members and supporters are so obviously influenced by Rothbardianism. There is some merit to this charge, though this is not the insult the critics imagine it to be. Rothbard was Mises most important student and expositor and the primary intellectual force behind the institute from its founding in 1982 until his death in 1995. As is also the case with the PFS, those drawn to Mzizian Austrian economics also tend to have an affinity for Mises quite radical classical liberal political views, and even more so for Rothbard's even more radical and better developed anarcho capitalism. This is natural progression, not a surprise at all and no cause for criticism. It is only fitting, then, that an international array of PFS scholars commemorate his 100th birthday with this collection of tributes and reflections. This collection, released online at the Property and Freedom Society website on his 100th birthday March 2, 2026, will be published in book form in upcoming months and presented and discussed at the 20th annual meeting of the PFS in Bodrum, Turkey, in September 2026. The contributions are all by longtime PFS members or supporters and friends, many of them founding members since its inaugural meeting in 2006, and most of them scholars and Rothbardians of one type or another. Many of them knew Rothbard personally, some intimately, such as Hans Hoppe, Rothbard students Doug French, Leah Glode, and Jeff Barr, and colleagues such as Tom DiLorenzo and Jeffrey Tucker. The contributors, in fact, include all three past presidents of the Mises Institute, as well as Mr. Tucker, who, in his key role at the Mises Institute, associated closely with Rothbard in the last decade of his life, the same period as Hoppe's close association with Murray. We have arranged the essays into two parts, Part one by those who actually knew or met Rothbard in person, and Part two others who have never met him but who have been deeply influenced by his work. As the essays in this volume attest, Rothbard was in our eyes, the most important social theorist of the 20th century. Rothbard built on the soundest and most rigorous and developed school of economics, the praxeological branch best developed and formalized by Mises, and combined it with an individualist libertarian political philosophy even more consistent, radical, and uncompromising than Mises, already admirable classical liberalism. Footnote 1 I almost wish Hoppe had not discovered Mises until later, in his own path to discovering economic science, to see how his own version of praxeology might have developed. As I wrote previously. Quote Professor Hoppe's real education was autodidactic. First, as a mainstream left winger, his eyes were opened by the Austrian economist Eugen von Bamborg's critique of Marxism. Later, after encountering and then rejecting the logical positivism of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, he discovered Mises and his unique approach. As he wrote in an interview in the Austrian Economics Newsletter, independently, I had concluded that economic laws were a priori and discoverable through deduction. Then I stumbled on Mises, Human Action. That was the first time I found someone who had the same view. Not only that, he had already worked out the entire system. From that point on I was a Mzezian. End quotes in footnote 1 Mises systematized, formalized, improved on, and advanced the Austrian economics. First initiated by Karl Manger and further developed by others such as Eugen von Bambark, Rothbard built on and extended Mzesian economics and incorporated it into his radical anarchist libertarian views. Rothbard was the first modern libertarian with a complete, comprehensive radical and Mzesian Austrian informed political philosophy. To paraphrase Isaac Newton writing in 1675, if Rothbard has seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, in particular on the shoulders of Mises, who many of us regard as the most brilliant economic thinker not only of the last century but of all time. There is a reason Guido Holzmann entitled his biography of Mises the Last Night of Liberalism, and it is also fitting that Fernando Chiocca entitled his tribute to Rothbard in this volume the First Night of Libertarianism, and it is why I refer to him, along with Hoppe and Mises in my chapter, as the indispensable framework for Austro libertarianism. A Festschrift, or Liber Immacorum is a collection of scholarly and personal reflections in honor of an important thinker on some important occasions, such as retirement and so on. It is rare for a scholar's oeuvre to be significant and influential enough to merit this. Even rarer is the scholar who warrants two Mises himself had two the first was published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1906 the second was published on the occasion of his 90th birthday, about which Mises wrote his wife the only good thing about being a nonagenarian is that you are able to read your obituaries while you are still alive. Rothbard's only Festschrift was published when he was 62 and based on papers produced from a conference discussing Rothbard's work in the year of his 60th birthday, there can be little doubt that had he lived past the age of 68, another festruck in his honor would have been produced by now, as was the case for his teacher Mises, as well as for his most important informal student and colleague, Professor Hoppe, who has also received two such accolades on the occasion of his 60th and 75th birthdays. We, his intellectual children and students at the PFS, could not let his 100th birthday pass without giving recognition and tribute to this great and good man to whom we are so grateful. We hope this volume serves as a fitting Gedink shrift, a posthumous Festschrift in his honor. We are now in Rothbard's world, a world that is better and changed for his having been in it. Happy Birthday, Murray. We love you,
- [08:15]
Hopper. Introduction When Guin and I in May of 2006 opened the career Princess for the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society. Many questions, organizational as well as substantive, had been still been unresolved in our minds. It took years of experimenting and learning, of defining, refining and fine tuning the very product that now is the PFS and its annual salon. Throughout all changes occurring during the last 20 years of its existence, however, the PFS has remained steadfast in its commitment to what is now widely known as as Austro libertarianism, the social philosophy developed and represented in the 20th century, most prominently by Marianne Ros Bard. In the following chapter I have given an account of my personal association with Rosbard during the last decade of his life, from 1985 to 1995 in New York City and in Las Vegas. Here it suffices to say that I learned firsthand from Rosbard's personal example what was then to become the ethos and trademark of the pfs. Uncompromising and interdisciplinary intellectual radicalism. The fearless pursuit of truth, justice and beauty. Today, on March 2, 2026, Rosbard would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Given his status as one of the patron saint of the pfs, we deemed it appropriate and indeed obligatory to pay tribute to this great man and his work with a small book in his honor, published by former students, colleagues and members of the PFS intimately familiar with his work. In the following chapter I have referred to Rosebard as the greatest of all social theorists, certainly of the 20th century. In our age of instant fame and 15 minute celebrities, this claim might require some explanation, but that can be easily supplied. As an economist, his bread and butter profession, Rosebard ranks below only his own teacher, Ludwig von Mises, probably the greatest economist of all times. But Rosbard is not an economist economist. In distinct contrast to some contemporary contenders and upstarts now claiming his mantle, Rosbard's voluminous work ranges over the entire field of the social sciences. He ranks among the 20th century's most outstanding political philosophers, venturing out there even into the field of epistemology. Qua sociologist, he has greatly contributed to the study and analysis of power elites in the tradition of Gaetano Mosca, Wilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. As a historian, Rosbard is one of the foremost experts on colonial America as well as on US economic and financial history. Last but not least, with his last unfortunately uncompleted work, his two volumes on the history of economic thought, Rosbard not only has established himself as a master historian of sort of iden geschichte, but also more generally as a major contributor to the intellectual genre of universal history. Finally, to top it off, Rosbard was able to integrate and systematize all of this, his wide ranging interdisciplinary research program, within a grand narrative of human history as an eternal and continuous struggle between power and market, spoliation and production, aggression and coercion versus freedom and liberty. Naturally, a man who has somewhere commented on almost everything imaginable is also an easy target for the all too familiar type of the intellectual nitpicker. The type who gets obsessed or even enraged about one particular statement or comment made by someone and consequently roundly rejects and condemns anything and everything said or done by this very person. Rosebard had his fair share of such smart ass critics who dismissed him without having even the faintest idea of and familiarity with his massive intellectual oeuvre, and most likely also not the intellectual ability to actually comprehend it, even if they tried. Fortunately, however, Rosebard has also a growing worldwide community of fans and friends, of readers, students and and scholars from a great variety of intellectual fields and backgrounds following in his footsteps, trying to preserve, to represent, to popularize, polish, improve and enlarge the Austro libertarian edifice handed down to us by him. The present book only presents a small sample of such intellectuals. Of course there have been serious critic critics and criticisms of Rosbart and his work as well, also from among the contributors of this little book. Mises, for instance, his own revered teacher, defended the classical liberal minimal state model against Rosbart's anarchism. Rosbart and and Mises pure time preference theory of interest has come under scrutiny and as have some aspects of his contract theory and his views on intellectual property and copyrights as well. The issues of abortion and of children's rights have remained contentious matters. Some critics deemed his treatment of Adam Smith as overly negative. I have criticized Rosbard for his unduly unfavorable treatment of the feudal Middle Ages and his comparatively mild criticism of democracy. But these criticisms, including Mises, have been essentially friendly criticisms. None was meant to distract from Rosbard's greatness or try to diminish his outstanding intellectual stature and standing. Still, to this day, Rosebard has never achieved the public recognition owed to one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. I must speculate a bit, but it is not too difficult to come up with some plausible or even obvious explanations and reasons for for this phenomenon. Rosbard is an anarchist and not a confused leftist socialist or syndicalist anarchist. Alan Noam Chomsky, who dreams of collective property and a social order without hierarchies. Rather, Rosbard is a hard nosed rightist anarchist, a proponent of anarcho capitalism respectively, a private law society based squarely on the institution of private property and its acquisition by means of original appropriation or homesteading or by voluntary contract, and a society characterized by the division of labor and natural social hierarchies. Obviously from the very outset this puts him in complete opposition to the near universally shared secular religion of the present age, that is of statism, that is the belief in the necessity and beneficial function of the institution of a state qua territorial monopolist of violence. More specifically, without the state there exists no public tax funded education system, no public schools and no public universities. Where without this would the present hordes of so called intellectuals, especially in fields such as education, journalism, the social sciences and the humanities, find secure employment? Most wouldn't and couldn't, and hence most intellectuals will likely be strictly opposed to any such idea. As Upton Sinclair noted, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And further, without a state there would also be no central banks with a monopoly of issuing fiat currencies. Yet central banks and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World bank and the bank of International Settlements are the largest employers of economists in today's world. Naturally then in particular also economists are overwhelmingly hostile to Rosebardian ideas as well. Without a tax funded state and a central bank, there may exist armed militias, but there will be no standing army and there will be no military industrial complex that promotes international conflict and war. Hence mighty industries as well as all chauvinists, will warmongers and imperialists are lined up against the idea of anarchy and a private law society as envisioned by Rosebard. And it is above all here then, in connection with Rosebard's strict and unwavering opposition to war, to the military industrial complex, to the welfare state and the interventionist US foreign policy were the ultimate and yet least talked about reason for his public disregard and lack of academic recognition may be found. Jews make up no more than 2 to 3% of the US population. But as everyone there knows and yet is advised not to say so, US academia and mainstream media and much more as we shall see, is dominated by mostly secular Jews. Rosbard too was a secular Jew. As such, regardless of his views, his anarchism, his racism, he favorably reviewed the Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray for instance, and Race, evolution and Behavior by Philip Rushton. Regardless of all this, a man of his talents could and should have still risen to the highest ranks of academia, owing to the enormous influence and extraordinary but also unmentionable intra group solidarity of his coreligionists. That this did not happen in his case and he instead became a Persona non grata in much of polite society has two intimately related reasons. Rosbard's view on Judaism and on Israel While an agnostic, Rosbard was profoundly interested in the history and sociology of religion, and he regarded Judaism, in particular the Rabbinic Judaism as laid out in the Talmud, as a primitive tribal religion in distinct contrast to modern Jewish apologists and apologetics, and very much in agreement instead with Israel Shahak's revisionist Jewish history Jewish Religion the weight of 3,000 years Rosbard viewed Judaism as a particularistic, ethnocentric and and supremacist doctrine according to which Jewish life was held to be inherently superior and more valuable than that of gentiles or guys. Tellingly, in the Talmud, Jesus has been described in exclusively negative terms as an illegitimate bastard born to an adulteress, a sorcerer and a criminal heretic to be sentenced to boiling in his own excrement. Accordingly, for Rosbard then to ramble on again and again, almost ritually nowadays, of Judeo Christianity as intellectual foundation of the west and of so called Western values is plain nonsense, a fundamental distortion of history and a sign of ignorance. As a matter of fact, in contrast to the open hostility to Christianity expressed in the Talmud, it is actually the much maligned Quran that shows itself rather friendly towards Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Incidentally, asked what religion Rosbard would adopt if forced to do so, his answer was Catholicism as a decidedly universalistic religion. As for Israel, Rosbard's view likewise went against conventional wisdom, or rather public indoctrination. Not merely is Israel a state and a socialist state without any private ownership in land, because all land is held by the Israel Land Authority or or the Jewish National Fund. Rather unlike the typical case in this day and age, Israel is a state that did not grow up endogenously from within some endogenous population. But Israel is instead the result of violent foreign conquest, the expropriation, expulsion and murder of an indigenous population by some alien invaders and occupiers enabled by Great Britain and then the US Jews from all over the world, especially of Zionist persuasion, were to move to Palestine, displace the indigenous, mostly Arab population by terrorist means, and in 1948 establish a Jewish state. Moreover, Israel as a Jewish state and very much in accordance with the just mentioned Judaic superiority claim, practiced from the outset and still practices a strict apartheid regime where every non Jew is and never can be more than a second class citizen. And it pursued and still pursues and aggressive expansionist foreign policy at the expense of its supposedly inferior neighbors so as to re establish modern Israel in its fancied ancient glory and territorial largess. The excuse given for all this, the earlier persecution of Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe. Rosbart considered phony for one, because by no means all Jews assembled in Israel had been victims and in any case the indigenous population of Palestine that then and now had to suffer the Jewish invasion and occupation had nothing whatsoever to do with any prior crimes elsewhere committed against Jews. They were innocent and as far as all that was concerned and accordingly did not owe any restitution to them. Considered in isolation, these two claims may not exactly align with the officially approved mainstream view on the matter, but they hardly are scandalous. What turned Rosbard into a Persona non grata in establishment circles and made for a scandal was to combine these two claims and to point out that the US foreign policy had been coming increasingly under the influence of so called neoconservatives or neocons such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podoretz and their followers, mostly of Jewish extraction and often formerly leftists, in particular of the Trotskyist variety, who had turned conservative in reaction to the violent outgrowth of the so called civil rights movement and legislation of the 1960s. The neocons represented the very opposite of the old traditional American right. The old right that had been Rosbard's intellectual home stood for decentralization at home, advocated a strictly non interventionist foreign policy and warned against any foreign entanglements and alliances. In sharp contrast, the neocons who would increasingly take over and come to dominate the foreign policy establishment in the United States, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations, supported not only a powerful centralized welfare state at home, but in particular also an interventionist foreign policy based and built on US military strengths and motivated by imperial ambitions to make the world safe for liberal democracy. The US Qua exceptional nation was supposed to be established and installed as the world's dominant power by all necessary means, whether military, financial or economic. And it was Israel of all places, that was to play a central role in these neocon plans. Neocon essentially meant Zionist and Zionism. Israel was considered their most highly valued strategic and moral ally, the only bastion of Western civilization in the near and Middle east, surrounded by a sea of hostile, backward and primitive Arab and Muslim neighbors. Accordingly Whatever Israel did or does, it deserved the unconditional support of the almighty US it received and still receives billions of US Military aid year after year, and it enjoys the closest possible cooperation and assistance of US Intelligence agencies and services, whether Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran or Yemen. Whoever stood or stands in the way of Israel's expansionist and supremacist ambitions and was or is considered Israel's enemy, is at the same time also an enemy of the U.S. and thus requires to this day the U.S. s constant involvement interference in near and Middle Eastern affairs. Rosbard was a vehement critic of the neocons and US Interventionist foreign policy in general. It was immoral and an economic waste and a constant source of international conflict and tension instead of peace. But he was especially critical and outspoken about the Zionist and and Israel first policy promoted by the neocons, because what the neocons ultimately wanted and have largely achieved as of today was for US Interests to become subordinate to the interests of Israel. That is, for any and all foreign policy decisions, the US should consult and ask Israel for for approval. Rosebard considered this state of affairs monstrous, to use one of his favorite words used in this connection. Given the origin and location of the State of Israel and its nature as an explicitly and exclusively Jewish state, Rosbard predicted the near and Middle east would be turned into a powder keg, a permanent danger zone marked and marred by an unending conflict and war, and the once exceptional US in particular would progressively or rather regressively grow into the world's biggest war machine and threat to world peace. Rosebar turned out right with this prediction, of course, as is even more apparent nowadays than it was 20 years ago at the time of his death. For the most powerful of all lobbies in the United States, however, the Jewish Lobby represented prominently for instance by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee, or the Anti Defamation League. Rosebud's criticism and his call for the withdrawal and disengagement of of the US From Israel constituted the ultimate treachery and sin of anti Semitism. If the man could not be silenced entirely, he should be ignored or belittled. And that is what they did and is above all they then the neocons in the Jewish lobby who denied Rosbart the intellectual stardom the that he deserved. News FLASH recently, since Yav? M's election as president of Argentina in 2023, Rose Bart's name has come to be frequently mentioned also in some mainstream media. The reason? Because Melee professed to be philosophically an anarcho capitalist and cited Rosbard repeatedly as his main source of inspiration. Many self professed libertarians, especially in the Spanish speaking world, have celebrated this as a great breakthrough of and for our ideas. This necessitates a brief critical comment because Rosbart's resurrection via melee represents at best a rather mixed blessing and is actually more likely to do serious damage to the libertarian movement in the long run and in any case involves a severe misrepresentation and falsification of the real Rothbard. To be sure, Milei has read some Rose Bart, but his knowledge of Rosbard's work is rather limited and superficial. He has also introduced some economic free market reforms in Argentina that have been inspired by Austrians, but he has done nothing truly radical deserving the praise of any anarcho capitalist. He has not closed the central bank as originally promised and there are no signs that this will happen anytime soon. He has brought consumer price inflation down from 300 to some 30%, but the money supply of all monetary aggregates has continued to grow rapidly, even more so than under several of his predecessors. He has centralized rather than decentralized government power and is on record as being fundamentally opposed to the session. In addition to assuming rather than repudiating as Rosbard would have recommended, the existing government debt owed to the International Monetary fund of some US$40 billion, he burdened the Argentinian people with another US$42 billion of debt solicited from the IMF, the World bank and the Inter American Development Bank. And in order to avoid insolvency, right before the Argentinian midterm elections in October 2025, he further required a rescue package of some US$20 billion from his dear friend Donald Trump. And with Donald Trump entering the pictures and an entirely new and different melee comes to light. Typically ignored or made light of by his adoring libertarian fans, Trump by sheer accident may have heard the name of Rosbard, but he certainly never read a word of his. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Trump ever read a serious book in his entire life and as far as economics in particular is concerned, he must be considered essentially illiterate. Government spending, especially on the military and on so called national security measures and government debt have increased under his direction. He is a dedicated protectionist, as demonstrated by his erratic and punitive tariff policies, and in general he pursues an economic agenda that has more in common with the interventionist policies conducted under Fascism or National Socialism than with anything resembling a free market economy. More importantly still, in the current context of all previous US Presidents. Trump is the most ardent Zionist and Israel firster ever, all the while claiming the mantle of an American firster. Never before has Israel received more military and financial aid and support, even while committing unspeakable atrocities in the Gaza Strip as well as the west bank than under Trump. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, a war criminal of the first degree, a man with no compunction to admit to his own genocidal intentions vis a vis the Palestinian population, which he compares to the to be vanquished and eradicated Amalekites of the Old Testament and the Torah is Trump's best friend and always welcome guests at the White House or at Mar a Lago on behalf of Israel and at the advice or the orders of Netanyahu. Trump even directly engages in war against Iran and Yemen, which both pose no threat whatsoever to the United States.
- [38:27]
Saifedean Ammous
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- [40:23]
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
And if that is not enough of foreign entanglement as an unmistakable sign of Trump's own megalomania, he continuously trumpets threats, bully like against everyone and anyone deemed disobedient. Most prominent against Russia in China as the two main remaining obstacles on the way to US global dominance. While posing as a peacemaker, he still continues to support Vladimir Zelensky, the Jewish strongman of the Ukraine and fellow Zionist in his losing war against Russia. Initially provoked and designed by the United States to weaken and bring Russia to its knees, he sends weaponry to Taiwan to provoke mainland China. He kidnaps Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro so as to take control of the country's massive oil reserves. And he engages in open piracy by confiscating or sinking foreign ships or tankers in international waters and ordering its captains and crews to be killed. Milei, the self proclaimed anarcho capitalist then is best friend with this man Trump. Again and again he has hailed Trump as a champion of liberty and of so called Western civilization and values. Trump's America, according to Milei, represents the epitome of of free market capitalism. And he is not just friends with Trump and his name and that of Trump are regularly mentioned in one breath as closely associated. Milei is also best friend with Trump's best friend Netanyahu. In his view too, Israel can do no wrong and whatever may appear to the outside observer as outright atrocities, mass murder and wanton destruction is in reality nothing but justified self defense according to Milei. For this outspoken solidarity and praise of Israel as a bastion of freedom and civilization, Milei was awarded the Genesis Prize by Netanyahu, also referred to as a Jewish Nobel Prize, coming with a prize money of US$1 million that Milei then committed to be used for celebrating Israel on combating anti Semitism all over Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. And it is not only Trump's and Netanyahu's names that are closely associated with that of Milei then, but Milei is also on hugging and kissing terms with Zelensky. Three interconnected questions then arise. How to explain this melee? Trump, Netanyahu, Zelensky, love affair? What consequences does this have for the name of libertarianism, that is its reputation and public recognition? And how does Rosbard fit into all this? The first question is answered easily. What all four have in common is their Zionism and Israel first stand as propounded and advocated by the neocons. Nominally, Milei is not a Jew, but he has toyed with the idea of converting to Judaism. Several Jewish oligarchs, such as the Wertheim family, have greatly helped his career, and he is constantly accompanied and advised by a personal rabbi. Trump, too, is not nominally Jewish, yet several of his family members are. But he has also enjoyed the largesse of numerous Jewish oligarchs such as Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, and he has repeatedly claimed to be the most pro Israel president in US history and the best friend that Israel ever had. Zelensky is Jewish and owes his entire career to various Ukrainian Jewish oligarchs such as IHOR Kolomoisky, and Netanyahu, of course, is a very super Jew and Zionist. Another commonality, by the way, all four of them have been noted for their talents as clowns and the vulgarity and profanity of their public speeches. There is also a quick answer to the second question. The core of libertarianism is a recognition of private property and the non aggression principle. How then can anyone seriously believe that libertarianism's public image will be helped and improved by someone like Milei who is intimately associated, engaged in closest cooperation with a bunch of welfare warfare, statist supremacists, imperialists, warmongers and murderous criminals? And finally, as for the third question concerning Rosbard, how can anyone seriously believe that Rosbard would be delighted to see his name, via Milei, connected and associated with those of Trump, Netanyahu and Zelensky? Monstrous? That would be Rosbard's reaction.
- [46:16]
Joachim Klement
I first met Murray Rosbard in the summer of 1985. I was then 35 years old and Murray was 59. And for the next 10 years until Murray's premature death in 1995, I would be associated with Murray, first in New York City and then in Las Vegas at unlv, in closer and more immediate and direct contact than anyone else except his wife Julia, of course. Now being almost as old now as Murray was at the time of his death, I thought that it would be appropriate to use this occasion to speak and reflect a little bit on what I Learned during my 10 years with Murray. I was already an adult when I first met Murray, not just in the biological but also in the mental and intellectual sense. And yet I only came of age while associated with him, and I want to talk about this experience. Before I met Murray, I had already completed my PhD and attained the rank of a privato send, that is a tenured but unpaid University professor, incidentally, the same rank that Ludwig von Mises once held in Vienna. Apart from my doctoral dissertation, I had already completed two books, one that revealed me as a musician and another, about to be published in the following year, 1986, that revealed me as a Rosbardian. I had already read all of Mises and Rosbard's theoretical works, but I must admit that I had not yet read Murray's voluminous journalistic work, which was essentially unavailable to me at that time in Germany. Thus, it was not my personal encounter with Murray then that made me a musician and a Rosbardian. Intellectually, I was already a musician and Rosbardian years before I ever met Murray personally, and so, notwithstanding the fact that I am, and consider myself also foremost a theoretician, I do not want to speak here about the grand Austro libertarian intellectual edifice that Mises and in his succession Rosebard, have handed down to us, or about my own small contributions to this system, but about my long personal experience with Murray, about the practical and existential lessons that I learned through my encounters with him, and that turned me from an adult to a man who had come of age. I moved to New York City because I considered Murray the greatest of all social theorists, at least in the 20th century, if not of all times, just as I considered Mises the greatest of all economists of all times. And with Mises having gone long ago and out of the picture, I wanted to meet, get to know, and work with this man, Rosbard. I still hold this view concerning the greatness of Mises and Rosbard, indeed, even more so than 30 years ago. And since then there has been no second Mises or Rothbard, not even close. And we may have to wait for a long time to come for this to happen again. So I moved to New York City, knowing Murray's work, but knowing almost nothing about the men. Remember, this was 1985. I was still writing in longhand and then using a mechanical typewriter, acquainting myself with a computer for the first time only during the following year at unlv. And Murray never used a computer, but stayed with an electric typewriter until the end of his life. There were no cell phones. There were no emails, no Internet, no Google, no wikipedia, and no YouTube. At the beginning, even fax machines did not exist. So my correspondence with Murray preceding my arrival in New York City was by old regular snail mail.
- [51:15]
Saifedean Ammous
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- [52:10]
Joachim Klement
where
- [52:10]
Saifedean Ammous
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- [53:12]
Joachim Klement
Murray expressed his enthusiasm about my wish to meet and work with him and immediately offered to enlist the help of Bert Blumer and indeed Bert Bloomer then was of instrumental help in facilitating my move from Europe to the us. The wonderful Bert Blumert, incidentally, was the owner of Camino Coins and also the founder of the original center for Libertarian Studies that would ultimately be integrated and merged with the Mises Institute. Bert Blumad was one of Murray's dearest friends and and confidence and he was also a great benefactor and dear friend to Me, I had seen some photos of Murray. I knew that he, like Mises, was Jewish, that he taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, which was subsequently renamed as New York Polytechnic University and nowadays Polytechnic Institute of nyu that he was the editor of the much admired journal of Libertarian Studies and that he was closely associated as its academic director with the Ludwig von Mises Institute that Lew Rockwell had recently, then 35 years ago in 1982, founded. And that was about it. And so, both unprepared, we met for the first time in Murray's university office. Here was I, the cool blonde from the north that was a popular advertisement for bitter tasting Norse and German beers, young, tall and athletic and somewhat unsociable, dry and with a dry sense of humor and more on the blunt, sarcastic and confrontational side. So you might say I was perfect Wehrmacht material, if you will. And there was Murray, the big city neurotic, to use the German title of Woody Allen's comedic Annie Hall. A generation older, short and round, non athletic, even clumsy except for typing, gregarious and hilarious, never moping, but ever joyful and in his personal dealings quite unlike in his writings, always non confrontational, well tempered or even tame. Not exactly Wehrmacht material. So personality wise then we could hardly have been more different. Indeed we were quite an odd couple. And yet we hit it off from the start, given the long special historical relationship between Germans and Jews.
- [56:36]
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
So
- [56:38]
Joachim Klement
I, as a young German meeting an older Jew in America, had been afraid that this history might become a potential source of tension, but not so. Quite to the contrary, on the subject of religion itself, there was general agreement we were both agnostics, yet with a profound interest in the sociology of religion and quite similar views on comparative religion. Yet Murray greatly deepened my understanding of the role of religion in history through his unfortunately uncompleted great work during the last decade of his life on the history of economic thought. Moreover, in our countless conversations I learned from Murray about the importance of complementing Austro libertarian theory with revisionist history in order to come up with a truly realistic assessment of historic events and global affairs. And it was I then, as someone who had grown up in defeated and devastated post World War II West Germany with a then and still official history taught across all German schools and universities of a feeling guilty and ashamed of being German and German history and b believing that America and America's democratic capitalism was the greatest thing since or even before the invention of sliced bread. So it was I who had to revise his formerly still, despite all Austrial libertarian theory, still quite rather naive views about World affairs in general, and U.S. american and German history in particular. As a matter of fact, Murray made me fundamentally change my rather rosy view of the United States and helped me for the first time to feel consoled, content, and even happy about being just a German and to develop a special concern for Germany and the fate of the German people. To my initial surprise, then, and ultimately my great and pleasant relief, Murray was quite a Germanophile. He knew and highly appreciated the German contributions to philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering, scholarly history and literature. His beloved teacher Mises had originally written in Germany and was a product of German culture. Murray loved German music. He loved German baroque churches. He loved the Bavarian beer garden atmosphere and the from church to beer garden we go tradition. His wife Joey was of German ancestry, her maiden name being Joanne Schumacher. And Joey was a member of the Richard Wagner Society of all societies and a lifelong opera buff as well. Most of Murray's friends that I would eventually meet turned out Germanophiles foremost among them Ralph Raco, the great historian of classical liberalism, who I had hoped to see again at this occasion, but who sadly left us forever almost a year ago now. I met Ralph only a few months after my arrival in New York City at the party held at Murray's apartment on the Upper west side. I immediately took to his caustic sarcasm and over the years we developed a close friendship. Apart from our many meetings at various Mises Institute events, I still fondly remember in particular our extended joint travels in northern Italy and especially when at a conference in Milano sponsored by some friends and affiliates of the once but no longer secessionist Lega Nord, some self proclaimed who would have guessed that anti fascist demonstrators appeared in front of the conference hotel to denounce us to our great amusement as libertari fascisti. Ralph was also the one who introduced me to the revisionist scholarship concerning World War I and World War II as well as the entire interwar period. And it was Ralph who taught me about the history of German liberalism and in particular its radical 19th century libertarian representatives that had been almost completely forgotten in contemporary Germany. Incidentally, Lew Rockwell, too early on, showed his Germanophile credentials when we first met in New York City in the fall of 1985. He drove a Mercedes 190. He then went astray for a few years driving an American made pickup truck, but ultimately returned to the fold by driving a Mini Cooper produced by BMW. But above all, it was Murray who taught me never to trust official history, invariably written by the victors, but to conduct all historical research instead Like a detective investigating a crime, always first and foremost, and as a first approximation, follow the money in search of a motive. Who is to gain, whether in terms of money, real estate or sheer power, from from this measure or that? In most cases, answering this question will lead you directly to the very actor or group of actors responsible for the measure or policy under consideration. Simple as it is to ask this question, however, it is much more difficult and requires often arduous research to answer it and to unearth from under a huge smokescreen of seemingly high minded rhetoric and pious propaganda the hard facts and indicators, the money flows and the welfare gains in order to actually prove a crime and to identify and out its perpetrators. Murray was a master in this and that at a time when you did not have access to computers, the Internet and search machines such as Google. And to do this detectives work, as I learned from Murray, you must go beyond official documents, the mainstream media, the big and famous names, the academic stars and the prestigious journals. In short, everything and everyone deemed respectable and politically correct. You must also, and in particular, pay attention to the work of outsiders, extremists and outcasts, that is to disrespectable or deplorable people and obscure publication outlets that you are supposed to ignore or not even know about. To this day I have heeded and indeed relished following this advice. Anyone who could see my list of bookmarks of frequently visited websites would likely be surprised, and any establishmentarian or leftist in particular would likely be shocked and shudder in disgust. Now, with this general perspective and outlook on things, revisionists such as Murray, and then in his footsteps also myself, are regularly charged contemptuously as some nutty conspiracy theorists. To this charge Murray would typically respond first, put bluntly and sarcastically, even if one were a certified paranoid, this cannot be taken as pro proof that no one was actually after you and your money after all. And second and more systematically, conspiracies are of course less likely of the larger the number of supposed conspirators. Also, it is naive to assume the existence of just one big orc encompassing conspiracy run by one all powerful group of conspirators. But conspiracies often rival or even contradictory conspiracies, that is confidential efforts of various groups of people acting in concert in the pursuit of some common goal are indeed an ever present feature of social reality, as any action such conspiracies can succeed or they can fail and can lead to consequences that were unintended by the conspirators. But realistically speaking, most if not all historical events are more or less exactly what some identifiable people or group of people acting in concert intended them to be. Indeed, to assume the opposite is to assume, incredibly, that history is nothing but a sequence of unintelligible events and accidents. Moreover, in learning from Murray about the necessity of complementing Austro libertarian theory with revisionist history so as to gain a complete realistic picture of the world and worldly affairs, I also received constant training from him in the art of prudent and judicious judgment and evaluation of people, actions and events. Pure theory allows us to make rather clear cut judgments of true or false, right or wrong, and effective leading to the goal intended or ineffective. But many if not most actions and events provoking or eliciting our judgment do not fall into the category of matters that can be evaluated in this simple yes or no matter. We are surrounded or better encircled by a class of people, politicians and state agents that day in and day out renders and enforces decisions that are systematically impact and affect our property and consequently our entire conduct of life. Without our consent and against our explicit protestation, we are confronted by an elite of rulers and confronted with politicians and political decisions. Then our judgment concerns the evaluation of, at best, second bests. The question is not true or false, right or wrong, effective or ineffective? Rather, it is given that political decisions are per se, false, wrong and ineffective, which of these decisions is less false, wrong and effective, and comparatively closer to the truth, the right and the good? And which person represents a lesser evil or a greater one than another? Such questions do not allow for a scientific answer because answering them involves the comparative evaluation of countless immeasurable and incommensurable variables. And in any case, newly discovered facts about the past or future developments may well reveal any such judgment as mistaken. But the answer is also not arbitrary. What is true, right and effective is given as fixed points and reasons must be supplied, whether based on logic or empirical evidence, for locating various second bests as closer or more distant to such points. Rather, judgment making in matters such as these is a difficult art, much like entrepreneurship is not a science but an art. And just as some people are good at entrepreneurship and others bad, indicated by monetary profits or losses, so are some people good at judging political events and actors, and others bad, gaining or losing in reputation as wise or prudent judges. Now, Murray was of course not unfailing in his judgments. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, he misjudged the anti war stand of the New Left as more principled than as actually was, something that he afterwards readily admitted as a mistake. And I know of at least one rather personal case where Joey's judgment was better and more on the mark than his. But this notwithstanding, I have not encountered anyone of sounder and subsequently vindicated judgment than Murray. Now, with this, I want to come to a second major lesson I learned during my long association with Murray. While the first lesson in revisionism concerned matters of practice and method, the second lesson concerned an existential matter. Before I met Murray, I knew, of course, that he was a radical outsider in a predominantly leftist liberal academia. And I expected, and I was willing to accept for myself, that this would involve some sacrifices, that is, that one would have to pay a price for being a Rosbardian not only but also in terms of money. But I was quite surprised to realize how high this price was. I knew that Brooklyn Polytechnic was not a prestigious university, yet I expected Murray to occupy there a comfortable, well paying post. Moreover, at the time I still fancied the United States as Sebastian and Bulwark of free enterprise, and consequently expected that Murray, as a foremost intellectual champion of capitalism and the personified antithesis of Marx, would be held in high esteem, if not in academia, then certainly outside of it, in the world of commerce and business, and accordingly be rewarded with a certain degree of affluence. In fact, at Brooklyn Polytechnic, Murray occupied a small, grungy and windowless office that he had to share with a history professor in Germany. Even research assistants enjoyed more more comfortable surroundings, not to speak of full professors. Murray ranked among the lowest paid full professors at his school. Indeed, my German National Science foundation grant at the time, a Heisenberg Scholarship, turned out to be considerably higher than Murray's university salary, something that I was too ashamed to reveal to him after I had discovered it. And Murray's apartment in Manhattan, large and filled to the ceiling with books, was dark and run down, certainly nothing like the penthouse that I had imagined him to occupy. Now. This situation improved significantly with his move in 1986 at the age of 60 to Las Vegas and UNLV. While my salary went down there as compared to my previous compensation, Murray's went sharply up but was still well below 100k, and he could afford to buy a roomy but spartan house. Even as the holder of an endowed chair at unlv, however, Murray did not have command of any research assistance or a personal secretary. Yet Murray never complained or showed any bitterness or signs of envy, but always plugged along joyfully and pushed ahead instead with his writings. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, and I'M still having difficulties following it at times. Apropos, Joey and Murray once told me laughingly how at the time when they were still dating, both had expected the other to be a good catch. Joey because Murray was Jewish and Murray because Joey was gentile, only to then find out that they were both wrong in their explanation expectation. Moreover, despite his towering achievements as an intellectual champion of free market capitalism, Murray never won any prizes, awards or honors. To speak of that he did not win a Nobel Prize in economics was not surprising. After all, the great Mises also did not win it. But in the US alone existed dozens of institutions, think tanks, foundations, business associations, research centers and universities that professed their dedication to free markets and liberty. And yet none of them ever awarded Murray any significant prize or honorary award. All the while, they showered people with money and awards who had done little more than to suggest, daringly some incremental reform, such as, let's say, lowering the marginal tax rate from 35 to 30%, who are cutting the budget of the EPA by some percentage points, or who had simply expressed their personal love of freedom and free enterprise on often loudly and emphatically enough. None of this fazed Murray in the slightest. Indeed, he expected nothing else, for reasons that I still had to learn. What Murray realized, and I still had to learn, was that the most vociferous and ferocious rejection and opposition to Austro libertarianism would not come from the top traditional socialist left, but rather from these very self proclaimed anti socialist, pro minimal state, pro private enterprise and pro freedom outfits and their intellectual mouthpieces, and above all from what has become known as the Beltway libertarians. They simply, They simply could not stomach the fact that Murray had demonstrated with plain logic that their doctrines were nothing but inconsistent intellectual clap trap and that they were all, to use Mises verdict vis a vis Milton Friedman and his company, a bunch of socialists. Socialists notwithstanding of course, their vehement protestations to the contrary. For as Murray argued, once you admitted the existence of a state, any state defined as a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making, in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the state itself itself, then all private property had been effectively abolished, even if it remained provisionally as a state grant, nominally private, and all of that had been replaced instead by a system of collective, or rather state property. State, any state means socialism, defined as the collective ownership of factors of production. The institution of a state is praxeologically incompatible with private property and private property based enterprise. It is the very antithesis of private property. And any proponent of private property and private enterprise and money must, as a matter of logic, be an anarchist. In this regard, as in many others, Murray was unwilling to compromise, or intransigent, as his detractors would say, because in theory, in thinking, compromise is impermissible. In everyday life, compromise is a permanent and ubiquitous feature, of course. But in theory, compromise is the ultimate sin, a strict and absolute no, no, it is not permissible, for instance, to recompromise between the two incompatible propositions that one plus one equals two or that one plus one equals three. And except that it is 2.5, either some proposition is true or it is false, there can be no men meeting in the middle of truth and falsehood. Now here regarding Murray's uncompromising radicalism, a little anecdote told by Ralph Reicho seems appropo. To quote Ralph Murray was someone special. I recognized that fact the first night I met him. It was after the Mises seminar. A buddy of mine and I had been invited to attend, and afterwards Murray suggested we have coffee and talk. My friend and I were dazzled by the great Mises, and Murray naturally was pleased to see our enthusiasm. He assured us that Mises was at least the greatest economy of the century, if not the whole history of economic thought. As far as politics went, though, Murray said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, well, when it comes to politics, some of us consider Mises a member of the non communist left. And Raff concludes this by saying yes, it was easy to see we had met someone very special. Unlike Murray, quite a few individuals who had learned essentially everything they ever knew from Murray, in particular from his man, economy and state. Quite a few people were willing to make such intellectual compromises, and they were richly rewarded for their intellectual flexibility and tolerance. But that was not Murray, and consequently he was and is still ignored, excluded or denounced by the chieftains of the limited government free market industry, and he was essentially left without any institutional support. As a lone fighter until the arrival of Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute, I experienced this Rothbard phobia secondhandedly, if you will, for as soon as word had gotten out that the new German arrival was Murray's boy and also appeared rather intransigent, I found myself immediately placed on the same blacklists with him. Thus I had quickly learned the first important real life lesson of what it means to be a Rose Bardian. You will be blackballed. Another lesson was in humility. Jos Alerno talked about that a little bit. I have to add a few things. Murray had a huge library and read and digested an enormous amount of literature and was consequently a humble man. He was always reluctant and highly skeptical to assume or recognize any originality claims. Originality claims, he knew, are made most frequently by people with teeny libraries and little reading. In distinct contrast, Murray was highly generous in giving credit credit to others, and he was equally generous in giving advice to anyone asking, indeed on almost any conceivable subject. He was prepared on the top of his head to provide you with an extensive bibliography as well. He encouraged any sign of productivity, even among his lowliest students. Why I always try to follow this example. I could not bring myself to go quite as far as Murray did because I thought, and still think that Murray's humility was excessive, that he was humble almost to a fault. His students at Brooklyn Polytechnic, for instance, mostly engineering majors, or as Murray described, Mises students at NYU packaging majors. They had no idea who he was because he never mentioned his own works. They were genuinely surprised to find out from me who their jolly professor was when I substituted teaching Murray's class while he was out of town. And at unlv, the situation was not much different. While I actively promoted him as his unofficial PR agent, Murray continued in his self deprecation. Although he had written on almost any imaginable subject in the social sciences, he would, when he suggested or assigned term papers to his students, mention his own related writings, if at all, only as some sort of afterthought or upon specific request. Yet Murray's extreme modesty had also another unfortunate effect. When we moved to Las Vegas in 1986, we had expected to turn UNLV into a bastion of Austrian economics. At the time, UNLV's basketball team, the Running Rebels under coach Jerry Tarkanian, were a national powerhouse, always slightly scandalous but impossible to overlook. Now we had hoped to become the running rebels of economics at unlv. Several students had transferred and enrolled at the university in anticipation of such a development. But these hopes were quickly disappointed. Already at our arrival at unlv, the composition of the Economics department had significantly changed. And then majority rule democracy set in to balance the Austrian influence. Only one year later, the department majority decided, against our opposition, to hire a no name Marxist. I urged Murray to use his position and reputation to interfere with the university's higher ups and prevent his appointment. Except for Jerry Tarkanian, Murray was the only nationally recognized person at unlv. He held the only endowed chair at the university. We knew the university's president and provost socially and were on cordial terms with both of them. Accordingly, I believed that there was a realistic chance to overturn the department's decision, but I could not persuade Murray of his own power that I thought he clearly had. After this missed opportunity, matters became worse. The department continued to hire anyone but an Austrian or Austrian sympathizer. Our students were maltreated and discriminated against. The department and the dean of the Business college denied me tenure, which decision was overruled by the university's provost and president, not least because of massive student protests and the intervention of several university donors. The department chairman wrote an outrageous, nasty, and insulting annual evaluation of Murray's professorial performance, upon which the university administration forced the chairman to resign from his position. As a consequence, a second chance for us arose to turn matters around. Plans were developed and were discussed with the provost to split the department and establish a separate economics department in the College of Liberal Arts. This time, Murray became involved, but the initial momentum to our advantage had been lost. In the meantime, and after the first signs of resistance, Murray quickly resigned and gave up. He was not willing to take off his gloves, and our secessionist movement project soon fizzled out in defeat, only to quickly finish our UNLV saga. After Murray's death in 1995, I continued working at UNLV for another decade in an increasingly hostile environment. The once protective university administration had changed, and I felt ever more unappreciated and out of place. Even my great popularity among students was used against me as proof of the great danger emanating from my teaching. In 2004, I became embroiled in a scandal. In a lecture, I had hypothetically suggested that homosexuals, on average and owing to their characteristic lack of children, had a comparatively higher degree of time preference, that is of present orientation. A crybaby student complained, And the university's affirmative action commissar, immediately, as if he had only waited for this opportunity, initiated official proceedings against me, threatening severe punitive measures if I were not to instantly and publicly recant and apologize. Intransigent as I was, I refused to do so, And I must say I'm quite certain that it was only this steadfast refusal of mine to beg for forgiveness, that after a full year of administrative harassment, I ultimately emerged victorious from this battle with assault police and the university administration. And the university administration suffered an embarrassing defeat a year later. Then I resigned from my position and left UNLV and the US for good. Now coming back to Murray. Naturally, I was disappointed about the development at unlv, but they did not have the slightest effect on our continued cooperation. Maybe Murray had been right and more realistic all along, and it was I who had suffered from too much useful optimism. Who knows? And in any case, there was one more important lesson about the larger scheme of things that I still had to learn. Whereas most people tend to become milder and more tolerant in their views as they grow older, Murray grew increasingly more radical and less tolerant over time. Not in his personal dealings, as I already emphasized. In this regard, Murray was and remained to the end a softie, but in his speeches and in his writings. This radicalization and increasing intransigence came in response to developments in the world of US politics at large, and in particular within the limited government, free market industry and among the so called libertarians assembled by around Washington DC's Beltway. There everywhere a slow yet systematic drift towards the left and leftist ideas could be observed. A drift that ever since up to this day has only further gained in momentum and grown in strength constantly new rights were discovered and adopted in particular also by so called libertarians. Human rights and civil rights, women rights and gay rights, the right not to be discriminated against, the right to free and unrestricted immigration, the right to a free lunch and free health care, and the right to be free of unpleasant speech and thought. Murray demolished all of this allegedly humanitarian, or to use a German word, gut mentioned talk as intellectual rubbish in demonstrating that none of these supposed rights were compatible with private property rights and that as libertarians above all people should know only private property rights, that is the right of every person in the ownership of his physical body and the ownership of all external objects justly peacefully acquired by him, can be argumentatively defended as universal and compossible human rights. Everything except private property rights, then, Murray demonstrate again and again, are phony, non universalizable rights. Every call for human rights other than private property rights is ultimately motivated by by egalitarianism and as such represents a revolt against nature. Moreover, Murray moved still further to the right in accordance with Erich von Kunit Ludin's dictum that the right is right and the left is wrong in pointing out that in order to establish, maintain and defend a libertarian social order, more is needed than the mere adherence to the non aggression principle. The ideal of the left or modal libertarians as Murray referred to them, of live and let live as long as you don't aggress anyone else that that sounds so appealing to adolescents in rebellion against parental authority and any social convention and control may be sufficient for people living far apart and dealing with each other and trading with each other only indirectly and from afar. But it is decidedly insufficient when it comes to people living in close, close proximity to each other and as neighbors and cohabitants of the same community. The peaceful cohabitation of neighbors and of people in regular direct contact with each other on some territory requires also a commonality of culture, of language, religion, custom and convention. There can be peaceful coexistence of different cultures on distant from physically separated territories. But multiculturalism, cultural heterogeneity cannot exist in one and the same place and territory without leading to diminishing social trust, increased conflict, and ultimately the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian social order. Now, if Murray had been ignored, neglected or resented before by the usual suspects, now with this stand against everything deemed politically correct, he was vilified and met with undisguised hatred. The by now only all too familiar litany of denunciatory terms followed. Murray was a reactionary, a racist, a sexist, an authoritarian, an elitist, a xenophobe, a fascist, and to, to top it all off, a self hating Jewish Nazi. Now Murray shrugged it all off. Indeed he laughed about it, and indeed, to the consternation of the Smear Bund, as Murray referred to the united Popular Front of his anti fascist detractors, his influence only grew and has continued to grow still further since his death. It may not be widely recognized, but without Murray there would be no Ron Paul as we know him. And I say this without wishing thereby to minish or belittle Ron Paul's own personal role and extraordinary achievements in the slightest. There would be no Ron Paul movement and there would be no popular, or as Smear Bund prefers to say, no populist libertarian agenda. As for me, my own views radicalized too, along with Murray's. My Democracy, the God that Failed, was the first major documentation of this intellectual development. And if anything, my radical intolerance regarding anything left libertarian and politically correct has been growing still ever since. Almost needless to say that I too then have been awarded the same and even a few extra honorary titles by the Smear Bund as Murray, except for the self hating Jewish stuff. Yet I had learned to shrug it off too, as I had seen Murray do it, and as Ralph Reicho had always encouraged and continued to advise me. In addition, remembering a popular German saying helped me feel fine, feel air, many enemies, much honor. And indeed the ongoing success of my own property and Freedom society, which is now in its 12th year, helped and conducted in a genuinely Rosbardian spirit, has demonstrated the utter failure of all defamation campaigns directed at me. If anything, they have helped rather than hindered me. In attracting an ever larger circle. Of intellectual friends, affiliates and supporters. I should add that during the last decade or so, under the wise and strict guidance of my lovely wife, Gulchen. I have also made some strides in combining uncompromising intellectual radicalism. With a certain degree of personal lovability. Even though I must admit that nature and natural dispositions. Have prevented me from coming anywhere close to Murray. In this regard, I have said far too little here about Lou, and I apologize. But I must say, apart from Murray, Lou has played a tremendously important role. In helping me become the man that I am today. And to Murray, who I'm sure is watching us today from up high, I say, thank you, Murray. You are my hero. I shall not look upon his like again. And I hope you are happy with your student. I always felt tremendous joy when you told me Great Hans Other Boy. And even if I can't hear you right now, Nothing would give me greater pleasure than if you said it again right now up there where the kings of thought are gathered.