ROCKWELL: At the recent Mises University, Tom Woods gave quite an extraordinary talk on the anti-Rothbard Cult within some parts of the Libertarian movement. This talk is so important, so compelling, so extraordinary, so fascinating, moving, thrilling – what else can I say about it? It’s an extraordinary talk, even for Tom Woods, who, of course, is one of the great speakers of our time. So I can’t recommend this talk to you enough. You’ll love it. You’ll find it fascinating. And it’s educational in the best sense.
Tom Woods, thanks for doing this.
WOODS: So this being the evening session and it’s optional, it means I can get away with saying things that I wouldn’t say during the formal sessions. Because, remember, after all, that Austrian economics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s positive rather than normative. It’s describing social phenomena but it’s not saying, therefore, you ought to do X or Y. So it’s not really right to be giving lectures on – to talk entirely about Libertarianism because you could be – you know, as Walter Block points out repeatedly, you could be an Austrian economist and be a Totalitarian Socialist because you know that the free market yields social harmony, but you hate mankind –
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– so you want to impose Socialism. That is possible. So I don’t want – for all you Totalitarian Socialists –
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– who applied to the Mises University, I don’t want to offend you. But this being –
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But this being the after-hours session, I can sort of get away with some of that.
I want to really – in talking tonight, I want to inoculate you against kind of a cult that’s out there. There is a cult out there in the Libertarian world, and I call it the cult of anti-Rothbard. And you will encounter this – I’m not going to name names. I’m not going to name places or institutions because that’s not what I’m here for. I just want to talk about ideas and a great man.
But it’s a cult of anti-Rothbard. Because you will encounter people who will be delighted to tell you all about the times they met Milton Friedman. Oh, my goodness, I meet Milton Friedman; I served him dinner; I sat next to him; I paid his bill – whatever the story is.
(LAUGHTER)
They’re all thrilled to tell you their story about Milton Friedman. And you begin to realize that, with some people, there are only three Libertarians in the whole world. There was Hayek, sometimes.
(LAUGHTER)
Hayek is OK sometimes, but let’s never mention his actual economic contributions. So nothing from the ’30s, no pure theory of capital in the early 40s, none of that, none of the stuff he won the Nobel Prize for. We don’t want to talk about that. But we’ll talk about things about Hayek. Hayek, sometimes. But basically, it’s Milton Friedman and John Stossel, and that’s the Libertarian panel.
(LAUGHTER)
Now, that is not to take away from Milton Friedman or John Stossel. I mean, for example, it must have been very, very difficult for John Stossel, being with ABC, and trying to say anything remotely Libertarian year after year. So I do respect that contribution.
And likewise, we all know and, perfectly well, happier to concede that Milton Friedman was quite good on some things, and was a very good debater, and could present many of the ideas of a free society very, very effectively, and could win converts. Nobody takes any of that away from him.
But it’s very odd to me that you would have someone as accomplished as Murray Rothbard, who basically created the Libertarian movement as we know it, who was known as Mr. Libertarian, and there is absolute silence about him. It’s not that for every 100 times Milton Friedman is mentioned, Rothbard is mentioned only once. I started to say that to Lew once in an interview I did. I interviewed Lew on his own podcast once. And I stopped myself, and I said it’s not for every 100 mentions of Friedman, it’s one of Rothbard; it’s for every 100, it’s zero. It’s like what is happening here? Well, I can’t speculate as to what the motives are. I’ve got some thoughts. And maybe at the end I’ll share them with you, or especially if I have a few drinks tonight, I’ll definitely share them.
(LAUGHTER)
But let’s just think about the contributions of this guy. All right? And then you’ll see how creepy this cult is. I mean, the fact that this guy’s got all these contributions, and you still pretend he doesn’t exist, it’s starting to – it creeps me out. Man, Economy, and State – all right, so he writes Man, Economy, and State, this thing – all right, so it’s about, what, like 1,000 pages, even if you don’t include Power and Market. You should includePower and Market. Then, it’s on the order of 1,400 pages. You look at this thing closely and you can see that Rothbard was deeply steeped in the literature, the economic literature. He was reading the mainstream journals. He was interacting with them. And, in fact, it’s interesting to note – I think Joe points this out in his introduction – that, in fact, Rothbard very infrequently even uses the term “Austrian economics” in that book. And when he does use it, it’s in quotation marks. It’s so-called Austrian economics, because what he’s trying to teach is just economics. He is trying to engage the profession and steer it in a particular direction. So he knows. He’s not just some kid, you know, who studied under Mises and learned some funny one-liners or something. He absorbed what he learned from Mises. He built on what he learned from Mises. And he also knew what the profession was saying. And this particular book plays a central role in the history of the modern Austrian school. And it’s written in a beautiful, elegant style. It’s written with the tone of a scientist. It’s not written as a polemic. And it’s something that you – you feel a sense of accomplishment just reading it. Well, imagine what it was like writing it. We’ll, he wrote it – he started writing it in his late 20s, and then it came out when he was 36 years old. Now, I’m turning 40 next week, and that’s really depressing me very much.
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So I insist this week, I want you to ask me repeatedly how old I am, so I can say “39” the last few times.
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But I remember when I turned 36, I thought to myself, well, guess no big treatise for me. My 36th year has come and gone and there was no – all right, so if he stopped there, we would say, well, that’s a pretty good job, right? Most people go through their lives not writing original pioneering economic treatises, right?
(LAUGHTER)
That’s good. But he also, in that same year, published The Panic of 1819, which is more of less his doctoral dissertation for Columbia University. The Panic of 1819, a case study, a real study of an episode in U.S. history. And this book, if you look at the major historical journals, the American Historical Review, all of these historical journals, they all praise this book unreservedly. This is the definitive work. And it gave me great pleasure years ago in grad school – I was reading a book on Jacksonian America, and in the bibliographical essay, it said, “For the Panic of 1819, see Murray Rothbard’s book, The Panic of 1819, which is likely to remain definitive.” And I thought, well, good. See, it goes to show, he – again, he interacted with the mainstream. He made real contributions that were appreciated and recognized.
But that was not always so. 1963 came America’s Great Depression. Now, that was the same year of the Friedman and Schwartz book, The Monetary History of the United States book. And that book got all the attention, but particularly the sections involving – the part involving the Great Depression got a lot of attention. Rothbard’s book did not get that much attention. Yet, today, it’s in a fifth edition. And the fifth edition has a forward by Paul Johnson, the British historian, sort of iconoclastic, sort of conservative British historian. And it was he who recognized the merits of this book when he wrote his – I think it’s a terrific book by Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. Now, I recommend, by the way, if you ever read that book, don’t get his later edition, The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. Just get the Modern Times, up through the ’80s. Because, in the ’90s, then he starts supporting the Iraq War. And, yes, it’s terrible. Neo-Con, terrible. But the rest of it is pretty good. And he recognized the importance of the Rothbard book.
Basically, Rothbard was saying that the Federal Reserve was to blame for the crash. And then, subsequent economic policy by the government is to blame for why the depression itself went on so long. And it does this – he’s performing two revisionist tasks in this book. The better-known one is that he’s showing that Herbert Hoover was not actually just sitting back doing nothing like some dufus and, while Depression is washing over the country, he’s just sitting there. If only that had been the case. To the contrary, he’s intervening in all different areas, as many of you know. That was an innovation, historically speaking. But secondly, to go back and trace out Federal Reserve policy in the 1920s and to identify inflation that was ongoing, this is also a contribution. Now, he wasn’t the first one. There’s a book from ’37 that does a little bit of analysis like this. Lionel Robbins had an Austrian view of the Great Depression in 1934, called The Great Depression, but that was more looking at Europe than the United States.
But still, to say that the Fed did it but not for the reasons that Friedman says the Fed did it – it’s not that the Fed didn’t just create enough money. In fact, that was not the explanation. That was the issue that the 1920s were fine and tranquil, but the problem was that once the downturn came the Fed didn’t do enough to increase the money supply when there was a collapse of the money supply by about one-third. Rothbard won’t have any of this. And he goes and counters all of this.
Well, this is very important. And why is this important? Well, for one thing, it’s important to tell the truth. But secondly, right now, today, with the Austrian School getting all of this attention, well, now, naturally, what are people going to ask? What are people going to ask after the Austrian school is now getting some attention because our people disproportionately predicted the crisis? People are going to ask, well, how did you know? And did you predict other things? Is this just some one-off fluke? Did you just happen to have a crystal ball or tea leaves or a deck of Tarot cards for this case, but you were clueless on the other ones? Because of the contributions like America’s Great Depression, The Panic of 1819, we can see that there are Austrian explanations to these earlier things. And this is driving the establishment crazy that now, suddenly, there’s an interest in the Rothbardian view, not only of current events but also the Great Depression.
I just made a video on my YouTube channel against David Frum. And those of you who are from Canada, you have a lot of explaining to do. All right?
(LAUGHTER)
Take this guy back with you on your way out.
But David Frum was so upset the other day. He said, I can’t believe how many conservatives now have moved from believing in Milton Friedman’s view of the Great Depression over to – he can’t bring himself to say Rothbard, so he said Mises’ view of the Great Depression. And this just appalls him. Now, for one thing, if only most conservatives in America even knew who, you know, who Milton Friedman was, much less Murray Rothbard.
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I mean, I think we are giving these people a little bit more credit then they have shown they deserve, I mean, with their Operation Desert Storm hats and whatever else.
(LAUGHTER)
But secondly, of course, the key thing is not just that it annoys him but the fact that this is happening on a scale that it would come to the attention of a David Frum that there are young people, probably not in the conservative movement, naturally, but there are young people who are interested in these alternative explanations. Well, there wouldn’t have been one if there hadn’t have been a Rothbard. Rothbard did that. And at the time, he got – this was published to very little fanfare, and it never bothered him. Never bothered him. He had a much smaller audience than the merits of this man demanded, and he just carried on.
We have here a publication, a book called Economic Controversies, a collection of a lot of Rothbard’s scholarly articles. Well, that’s great. I mean, these are wonderful articles and they’re all great contributions, too. Then I love the book of essays,Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. In there, you’ll find two essays that are absolutely mind blowing in a book that’s mind blowing. But War, Peace, and the State is absolutely pioneering on Libertarian theory of foreign policy, number one. And then Roderick has built on that. And then, secondly, Anatomy of the State. You’ll never look at the world the same way again after you read those things. And these are just a couple of essays. Again, if somebody wrote just those essays – well, people have been spinning out thought based on that ever since he did those – that would be considered a contribution. He wrote a two-volume history of economic thought, so he knows pretty much what everybody who ever said anything about economics ever said. And he can evaluate it and critique it. I mean, you know, believe it or not, there are some people who would be impressed by that.
(LAUGHTER)
Now, this is a pretty smart guy. Maybe I should talk about him. Not if you belong to the cult of anti-Rothbard. You are not to mention this man. Not to mention him, Citizen! Look the other way!
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WOODS: Then, as a spare-time project, he writes a four-volume history of Colonial America, called Conceived in Liberty. Now, the institute has now put that out as a single volume, which I think they did partly because they have a good sense of humor. Because if you look at the size of this thing – (laughing) – it’s like they’re looking to set the world record or something. You won’t believe the size of this book. But if you look at how conversant he is with the secondary literature of Colonial America, it’s unbelievable. The guy’s an economist who has so mastered the Austrian school that by the time he was 36, he wrote a pioneering treatise 1,000 pages long, but he also knows so much about Colonial America, and then foreign new liberties, like The Libertarian Manifesto, from the early 1970s. And here at the Mises Institute, you can actually listen to that for free on audio book, if you look at the Mises media section. The Ethics of Liberty, a work of philosophy, extending the Lockean self-ownership principle and spinning out what its implications are. And then we have smaller works like – I like this one called Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. This is a thing that he wrote for an investment newsletter, like a 20,000-word essay for an investment newsletter. Maybe it had 200 subscribers. And it was never seen again until somebody found it in the archives and it was published. I mean, this gem would have just been lost forever. I mean, who knows how many things like this he wrote that we don’t even know about. So he wrote zillions of articles on top of it. He wrote a book on education, the history of education; The Mystery of Banking, on how banking works. Of course, you guys have read What Has Government Done to Our Money?, which is a great classic. He wrote chapters in books. He edited The Libertarian Review. He edited Left and Right. He founded and edited The Journal of Libertarian Studies. He founded and edited The Review of Austrian Economics. He was also a movie reviewer; wrote a zillion movie reviews. He kept up correspondence with a whole bunch of people. We’ve got the archives to prove it.
Now, if you heard about a guy like this, pioneering in so many areas and extending Libertarian insights into so many areas, would your first instinct be, “I better not ever mention this man”? Like, there’s something deranged about this, right? I mean, like there’s something not right in the head. If you were to say, now this guy, nah. Nah. Nah.
(LAUGHTER)
I just want to talk about – I don’t want to mention names – but lesser figures, we’ll say.
Now, I think back to my own experiences with the guy, which were very limited. I only met him about four or five times, but memorable, obviously, you meet somebody like this. And by the way, I should point out, obviously, I’m not saying that anybody in this world is infallible or that you have to kneel down before his image and kiss it or pray to him or any of this. This is a ridiculous caricature. No one has ever said this. But the same thing with Mises or any other great man, you should admire a great man, right? It doesn’t mean every single word you have to agree with. But you should admire a great man. It’s just simple.
But I remember I got to meet him at the Mises University program in 1993 and in 1994. And he came out – Mises U., 1993 – he gave the opening-night lecture. He gave the lecture that Bob Higgs gave the other night. And he was talking about a whole bunch of things. He started off talking about the Panic of 1819. Now, I didn’t know he had written a book on this. So he started off by saying, “I’m the world’s foremost expert on the Panic of 1819.” And I thought, my gosh. Boy, this guy’s got a big head.
(LAUGHTER)
Then he said, “Because I’m the only one who’s ever written a book on it.” And he laughs, cackles.
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And goes on. And then the next time – and then I met him at a conference later that year. So Mises U., 1994, I’m standing there talking to some students and Rothbard walks in and he waves and says, “Hi, Tom.” And I just – yes, that was Murray Rothbard waving to me.
(LAUGHTER)
Hey. How are you doing?
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At that event, actually, at one point, we were having a conversation, and I said, “Now, Professor Rothbard, I’ve always wanted to ask you” – and he said, “Oh, call me Murray.” You know, I just don’t think I can. I mean, thanks –
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– I appreciate that but I just – that’s just not going to happen.
But I remember, Lew called me, Lew Rockwell – or he e-mailed me in December, 1994, and said – because Murray maintained two residences. He was out in – I can call him Murray now that he’s gone because I don’t feel so intimidated anymore. But out in Las Vegas, he had a place, and then, in New York, he kept his apartment. So he was going to be in New York over the holidays. And Lew said, “Murray, would like to get together with you. Here’s his number. Give him a call.” And it was kind of like how you feel like the first time – I’m sure I’m the only guy who has ever done this – but the first time you call up a girl on a date, like, you write out the thing that you’re going to say or whatever.
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Because, like, what if I draw a blank? This would be a disaster.
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So I did that. But, of course, with Rothbard – of course, he would fill in all the blanks, right? Ah, da, da, da, da. I’m very glad to talk to you. But, of course, that was not to be. You know, I did talk to him on the phone but then he passed away in January in ’95.
Now, I think back though about things that he sort of taught me. And it’s not just the stuff that I could learn reading the books. It’s also about how to live as a human being and how to be a scholar. And one of the things that everybody concedes about him – even the people who can’t bring themselves to mention his name – if they did mention his name, they would never claim that he was arrogant. No one ever said that – they would say other things about him. They’d never say he was arrogant because everybody would know that’s a lie. I mean, Rothbard was so interested. He was convinced that the world was just such a fascinating place. There were things to be learned everywhere. And people’s brains were full of nuggets that maybe he could extract somehow. He could learn from everybody. And so you would be some dumb student – well, present company excepted, you understand?
(LAUGHTER)
But, you know, you’d just be some kid, right, and he would listen to you respectfully. You know, none of this air of, you know, “I’m Murray Rothbard. How dare you – you’re not even worthy to walk on my ground or ” – none of this stuff. And then he would encourage people. If he saw any glimmer of interest in anything, he would encourage it. He would build people up. I mean, Walter carries on that tradition today with his students. If he sees any inkling of literacy at all among people –
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– he says, you know, man, you’ve got – you might be the next Mises.
(LAUGHTER)
Well, he doesn’t quite –
(LAUGHTER)
He doesn’t quite do that. But the point is he encourages. And that was how Rothbard was.
I remember particularly, so there I am, 1994, it’s an event that the Mises Institute is putting on, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Hazlitt, and they had an event in New York City. Now, I was living in New York City at that time for grad school, so I went. It was incredible. I just get on the subway and I go to a Mises event. Unbelievable. And I sit down, and then later in the program, who walks in but Rothbard, and he sits right next to me. So I thought, geez, this is just keeps getting better and better all the time. So then he’s sitting there listening. And he’ll make little side comments during people’s talks – ah, da, da, da, da – which is sort of like what David Gordon does today.
(LAUGHTER)
Except you could repeat to your mother the things that Rothbard said.
(LAUGHTER)
But I specifically recall, I mean, just how – what a genuine, regular guy he was. Like, here’s a guy who had written – done theoretical work on the subject of punishment and proportionality. If you commit a crime, what is the appropriate punishment for that crime? It’s super, super sophisticated stuff. And then there he is at this Hazlitt event, and he – this was right around the time that Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news. You know, Jeffrey Dahmer was the – you guys are too young to know this, maybe. But he was a serial killer who ate his victims. Like, there would be body parts in the refrigerator. It was horrible. And he was killed in prison. The other prisoner just said, look, you know, we’re pretty rotten, but that –
(LAUGHTER)
– you just can’t do that. And so Rothbard leaned over to me at one point and said, “Oh, by the way, did you hear about Jeffrey Dahmer? They got him.”
(LAUGHTER)
Come on. It’s a regular guy. He’s a regular guy.
But another aspect of this lack of arrogance is that he – I heard this rumor about him that he would correspond with you, even if you were just some schmo. You wrote him a letter, he would write back to you. Where he found the time, I don’t know. But he would write back to you, even if you’re some schmo. And I thought to myself, I’m going to test out this theory. I’m some schmo.
(LAUGHTER)
Let’s see if he writes to me. So I wrote. Actually, I wrote to him because I had read somewhere about this pamphlet by Robert LeFevre about the transformation of the American Right and the evolution of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, and I thought, this would be great. I would love to get this but where in the world would I find a pamphlet from, like, 1964? So I wrote to Rothbard. All right, let’s see if this guy is going to write back. Not only did he write back to me, but he sent me two copies of the pamphlet.
(LAUGHTER)
And so, in our anthology I did with a friend of mine on the left, which you can find in the book store here, We Who Dared to Say No to War, we reproduced this pamphlet. So it now sees the light of day. Now, it will be immortal. And it’s great. It’s because Rothbard wrote back to me. And I probably wouldn’t have written back to him if he had been – if it had been reversed. I’m too busy. How could I do it? And yet, he did a simple little thing. He was not discouraged, as I said, by the size of his audience. Now, he should have had a gigantic audience. I mean, this is – again, a guy with one-tenth of these accomplishments could retire with pride. And yet, this was before the Internet and this was an age of even more statist outlook than we have now, because at least now we have more people who have come out. More of the remnant is visible because of Ron Paul. And yet, this didn’t bother him. It didn’t occur to him, well, if I keep writing these books, maybe not that many people would read them. He couldn’t have known that there would be a day like today when – I don’t know – a gazillion people can read his stuff for free all over the world any time of the day or night. And they want to, because they realize, whoa, this guy, who has been kept from me – no wonder he’s been kept from me. Like, there seems to be some rule in the world that the most awesome things are always smashed and criticized by the bad guys. Well, this guy is like the awesomest of the awesome. And now there’s this – if there was an attempt to try to remove him, to erase him from history hoping that the young people wouldn’t discover him, it has failed abysmally. Everybody wants to be a Rothbardian. I mean, what is the coolest Libertarian shirt there is? It’s the “Enemy of the State” shirt, which, by the way, the institute has now made in a different kind of style so you don’t have that sort of plastic white Rothbard head on a black shirt on a summer day, so it’s little easier to wear. So buy a second copy of that shirt.
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Get a second one.
So that’s one thing that I liked. He also felt that he could – when I say that he could learn from everyone, I don’t just mean that he thought everybody had some nugget of knowledge, because probably that’s not really true. But what I also mean is –
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– even if somebody might have disagreed with him on something important, well, that doesn’t mean – well, this guy disagreed with me on something important, so he’s probably a horrible person who should never be listened to or talked to. And yet, there are people in the Libertarian movement today who will treat you like this. They think you’re wrong on two or three things, you are like an un-person. That was not Rothbard’s view at all. There’s just too much for me to learn. So he was perfectly willing to learn from people on the left. So what? So what? You know, people have insights. And these insights are not evenly distributed. And I’ve got to find them. And find them, he did.
But I think the thing that you learn the most from the cult of anti-Rothbard, though, is that you will have enemies. If you take any position whatsoever in public life, it is absolutely unavoidable that you will have enemies. Now, I thought that I would be exempt from this. When I wrote –
(LAUGHTER)
I know. It sounds stupid and naïve. But I thought, when I wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, I – honest to goodness, this is the absolute truth – I thought to myself, well, people might not agree with me, but as long as I put forth my views sincerely and as persuasively as I can, then they at least have to respect me.
(LAUGHTER)
So, in case you were thinking that, that’s not going to happen. But particularly, think of it this way. If Rothbard had enemies among Libertarians, what hope is there for the rest of us? You just have to accept it. You have to just – (laughing) – live with it and move on. And don’t dwell on it. Don’t spend your life bitter, dwelling on every angry blog comment or – I mean, just don’t do it. Rothbard wouldn’t have done that. He spent his life in laughter; laughter, cackling laughter. That’s what you should do. And I say this as somebody who – initially, when I started getting attacked. I go, oh, my gosh, I’ve got all this damage control to do. You know what? I sleep so wonderfully and soundly at night, not caring anymore.
(LAUGHTER)
So ultimately, then, what I am recommending is to resist the cult. Now, as I say, you’re going to encounter this everywhere. Not everywhere. But in big, influential places, no mention of this man. I don’t care that you disagreed with some strategic decision he made 20 years ago or 30 ago, I don’t care. How unbelievably, disgustingly petty would you have to be to say, well, gee, I don’t know, he shouldn’t have allied with that small group of seven leftists because he was desperate and there was no Libertarian presence anywhere in the world so, therefore, today, I should never talk – you know, a guy who writes – what? I don’t know – 20 million words? You’re going to put all that aside? I don’t believe that’s the real reason. They’ll come up with all these phony-boloney reasons. I am convinced the real reason, at least a good 80% of it, is just sheer envy. And you may be skeptical of this explanation. And I would have been 10 or 15 years ago, too. I would have been skeptical. But as I’ve grown older, and as I’ve observed people, I see that envy plays a much bigger role in the world than I ever dreamed. And there are a lot of people in the Libertarian world who have not been as successful as Murray Rothbard. Like everybody, for example.
(LAUGHTER)
But some of us are at peace with that. Some of us say, he’s a great man, I’m not a great man, but I’m at peace with that; I’m doing what I can with the talents that I’ve been given. And that’s all you can ask of yourself.
But there are some people who feel like they can build themselves up only by tearing other people down, and in this case, erasing them from existence. Well, I would say to you, don’t let them get away with this. In fact, to the contrary, there is now a positive – we are positively compelled to mention, to break through this black out and give this man his due, not simply because one man deserves it as a matter of justice, but because the cause of freedom will be all the more readily pursued if the ideas of Rothbard are shining through. Join me against the cult, everybody.
Thank you very much.
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