72. Rush, Rand, and Rothbard: A Brief Intellectual Biography

72

ALEXANDER TABARROK

RUSH, RAND, AND ROTHBARD:
A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

I GREW UP IN A HOME where the dining room was a chamber for debate and discussion. My father, a professor of mechanical engineering with wide interests, would usually introduce the topic of the day. Politics was rarely topical but moral conundrums, paradoxes, ideas from physics and mathematics and moral philosophy were often broached. Teenaged friends of mine would sometimes dine with us and were astounded that not only were they expected to have a position on whether the universe was fundamentally “analog or digital,” but that their answer would be listened to.

One such debate that occurred when I was perhaps 15 concerned classical music versus rock and roll with my father and mother arguing for the superiority of classical music. In my desperation to demonstrate that rock and roll appealed not just to the baser emotions of sex and rebellion, I referred to the rock band Rush who had dedicated one of their albums to the philosopher Ayn Rand. Never having read Rand, or any other philosopher for that matter, I had no idea what this meant. But a connection between rock and roll and higher thinking served my rhetorical goal to crush the opposition. Nevertheless, I had enough respect for ideas that when my mother replied “Oh yes, Ayn Rand—you would probably like her,” I felt ashamed. How could I argue that rock and roll had some connection with the ideas of philosophy if I myself did not pursue this connection? I resolved to go to the library.

At the school library I found The Fountainhead and with some trepidation—it was a long book and I secretly felt that philosophy would probably be boring—I began to read. Soon, however, I was overwhelmed, flattened, flabbergasted, and hooked. Rand changed everything! From Rand my reading spread further as I delved deeper into philosophy and followed up on her recommendations in other fields. One of Rand’s strongest recommendations was to the economics of Ludwig von Mises. Human Action, which I never much understood and Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson were my first introduction to economics.

Austrian economics, however, did not figure large in my thinking until my first summer conference—a week long event put on by the Institute for Humane Studies. The speakers at the conference were great, I especially remember George H. Smith, but the best part of the conference was the last day when Walter Grinder brought the student attendees into a room piled high with books! For a budding intellectual this was better than Christmas! Among those books was a weighty tome, Man, Economy and State by one Murray N. Rothbard.

I spent the rest of that summer, one of the most enjoyable of my life, reading Man, Economy and State while tanning on my balcony (how lucky teenagers are to have so much free time and no rent to worry about!). Each day was a revelation of new ideas. I remember being stunned so much by one idea that I couldn’t wait to explain it to my friends. Goods weren’t expensive because inputs were expensive rather the inputs were expensive because they produced goods that were in high demand. Wow! I never would have understood general equilibrium theory had it not been for Man, Economy, and State. This may seem like strange praise but MES is by far the best verbal explanation of general equilibrium theory that has ever been written. Rothbard captures, in a way that no fixed point theorem ever could, how markets interact to produce a logically coherent structure. Every reader of Gerard Debreu should read Man, Economy and State alongside!

The following summers were filled with more conferences, including those put on by IHS, an Objectivist group, and the Mises Institute. At these conferences I met many people of my age whom I would later run into again and again. These included Carl Close, a good friend with whom I later worked at the Independent Institute, and Bryan Caplan who today has an office next to mine. The highlight of these conferences were those put on by the Mises Institute where I actually was able to meet and talk with the great Murray Rothbard!

Rothbard was a wonder. At the conferences he would rarely appear until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. He would then give a great lecture on economics or history. Long after the other faculty members had retired for the evening, Rothbard would remain going strong. I remember one time when around midnight he declared that he was hungry. “Let’s go!” he said with his infectious enthusiasm and he, myself, and a handful of other students hopped in cars and proceeded to a local restaurant where we talked and debated for hours. At the time this seemed natural but in retrospect I am amazed that a man with such knowledge would be willing to spend so much time discussing ideas with quite ignorant people. I should add that Rothbard never encouraged sycophants and his manner was such that no one was ever afraid to debate with him.

I learned later one reason why Rothbard was pleased to talk with students at the Mises Institute summer conferences. He had no students to speak of during the rest of the year. As a naïve young person seeking out a university for graduate studies I immediately thought of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute where Rothbard was then teaching. I remember vividly the day I called BPI for an application to the graduate economics department. “But Sir, we don’t have an economics department,” the secretary told me. “What,” I said incredulously, “you must have an economics department; you have one of the world’s best economists on staff.” But sadly it was true. I still find this a damning indictment of my profession and the American university system.

As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria (Canada), I was introduced to public choice analysis by Robert Bish, a former student of James M. Buchanan, and also to law and economics by Ken Avio and both of these interests were influential in my decision to attend George Mason University for graduate studies. At GMU, I was fortunate to interact extensively with Tyler Cowen. I had had many intelligent professors as an undergraduate but few were equipped to answer my libertarian arguments; that had made me unduly cocky. Cowen knew the arguments and knew their weaknesses. His challenges led me to sometimes revise my views but also sometimes to improve my arguments! I am fortunate to count Cowen as among my present colleagues.

At George Mason and also at the University of Virginia where I studied for a time I came to greatly appreciate the power of neo-classical economics including mathematical economics and econometrics. Austrian insights into the market process are critical and everyone should read some Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard but it’s a shame that Austrian economics has become tied to constraining and sometimes absurd methodological strictures. My first published paper (in the Review of Austrian Economics) challenged the “Austrian” dislike of indifference curves by showing that anything you could prove with indifference curves could also be proved without them.

After graduate school I taught at the University of Virginia and then Ball State University which, under the direction of Norman van Cott, had developed a surprisingly strong department with a number of free market and Virginia political economy types. Eric Helland was hired that same year and has become a frequent co-author. David Theroux, a longtime Rothbardian who had been instrumental in starting the Cato Institute and the Pacific Research Institute, then approached me to become the research director for the Independent Institute, a think tank located in Oakland. I accepted and spent three years in sunny California editing books including, as general editor, Winners, Losers & Microsoft, Cutting Green Tape, Liberty for Women, The Voluntary City, Entrepreneurial Economics, and Changing the Guard. David Theroux is particularly well grounded in the anti-war libertarian tradition and his insights have been important to my thinking on these subjects.

More recently I have returned to my alma matter, George Mason University, to teach and do research.

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University.