Will Lew Rockwell Show at the Next Meeting of the Cato Board?

by Robert Wenzel
Economic Policy Journal

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Lew Rockwell writes:

David Gordon calls to say that since the court filings in the Koch Bros. v. Cato and Ed Crane lawsuit admit that Murray Rothbard was an original stockholder of the Cato Institute, which was his idea and his name, but pass over what happened to his shares (they were illegally taken from him before he was purged), the shares – still his property – would have passed, with the rest of his estate, to his widow Joey, and then to my control. So do I own stock in the Cato Institute?

I spoke to David Gordon last night and David made clear to me that the only reason Murray did not fight on in his battle against Ed Crane and Charles Koch is that he did not have proof of his ownership, since Charles Koch held the stock and the shareholder agreement. The agreement that is now a public document, decades later, because of the Koch brothers lawsuit against Ed Crane and the widow of Bill Niskanen, proves that Murray was an original shareholder.

What is most significant, is that according to David, Murray never signed his certificate over to Cato or Koch. Since the current Koch brothers lawsuit is all about turning a certificate over, the Koch brothers obviously understand that the turning over of a certificate is important.

Since Murray didn't sign his and he left his entire estate to his wife and his wife left Lew Rockwell as the executor upon her death, in a logic endorsed by the Koch brothers (via the lawsuit), Lew has a strong argument that because the Rothbard certificate has not been endorsed over to Cato, Lew represents those certificates in the goings on at Cato.

Lew probably has more important things to do, but somewhere Murray is having a good laugh.

Reprinted with permission from Economic Policy Journal.

March 3, 2012

©2012 Economic Policy Journal

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