The Good Life of Murray N. Rothbard

0:00Some years ago, a woman named Ofer Bichel, an ex-wife of the actor Theodore Bichel, who works for the New York PBS TV station, thought of having a TV series on economics. A mutual friend of ours, Jimmy Davidson, said, why don't you speak to Murray Rothbard? He's an economist who lives in New York. So they had lunch. And when Murray came home from lunch, I asked him how it went, and he said, well, it's all right, but she doesn't know much about economics. And then we heard from Jimmy Davidson what she thought of Murray at their meeting. She said, That guy can't be an economist. He's too funny. Well, he was funny and like all funny people that I know, he appreciated a good audience and he probably married me because I laughed at his jokes. He certainly wouldn't have married anybody who didn't laugh at his jokes and woe be to the class that didn't get it.

0:49If you have read the interview with Peter Klein, it was in the folders that everybody got. You see, Peter said that he discovered Austrian economics when he was in high school. And of course nowadays we see Austrian economics all around us, largely due to the Mises Institute. So I thought I'd tell you how Murray discovered Austrian economics almost 50 years ago. But I have to go back a little bit. Murray started Columbia with a class of 46, but he got out in 45. Everybody at Columbia at this time was 4F, Murray because of his eyesight, and they were a weird bunch. Alan Ginsberg was there, Jack Kerouac was there, Lucien Carr, but Murray wasn't part of that group, of course. But he was a good student, but he wasn't much of an athlete. At Columbia, they have an indoor track that goes around like a balcony above

2:11Murray walked up to it, looked up and said, you've got to be kidding, and walked around it. But he did what was necessary, phys-ed-wise, to get out at 45, and he got a master's degree in 46. 46, 47, he took the last courses for a PhD, and then he passed the oral exams for his PhD. And barring the exception, which I'll tell you about in a minute, he'd never heard of Austrian economics. So overwhelming had been the Keynesian Revolution that Austrian economics was just down the memory hole, as if it hadn't existed. He'd never heard of Mises or Hayek or Menger or Boehm-Bawerk. And in other words, you could get a PhD in economics from a fairly good university and never have heard of Austrian economics in the late 40s.

3:04Now, the exception was that during the last year of his courses, he took a class with George Stiegler, and Stiegler said that he had written a pamphlet, Attacking Rent Control, a very radical idea in 1947, as a matter of fact, in New York City, it's radical today. And from this pamphlet, he heard about Mises, and then in 1949, Human Action came out in in English and the Mises Lectures started that he went to for 10 years and so soon he was reading in Mises and Hayek and Boehm-Bawerk and Menger and so on but it was almost by chance that he found out about it and now we see that I don't think anybody can get a PhD without having known at least it existed.

3:51Since so many people came into what we broadly think of as the right-wing movement through Eyn Rand and her writings, especially some years ago. I thought I'd tell you about Murray's breakup with Eyn Rand, which was a big thing to us at the time anyway. In 1958 Nathaniel Brownlee was giving his first course of lectures and we were going to them and we used to see Eyn Rand socially. They always said, why didn't you see her more often? We always thought that was plenty. not a restful person to be around and you know I should tell you that as I'm sure you know Ayn Rand was a very smart woman anyone who can devise a philosophy one of the main tenets of which is that she is the most sexually desirable person in the world has got a lot on the ball Murray had been invited the winter before, the winter of 1957-58, to go to a conference that was going to be held in September of 1958 at Sea Island, Georgia on scientism,

5:07run by Shook and Wiggins. Maybe you've seen their books. They had a number of books that came out for the Institute for Humane Studies published. and to write a paper on scientism for this conference and Murray accepted and he wrote the paper. And he showed the paper, another thing was he had read, besides going to lectures and having of course read Atlas Shrugged, he had read Barbara Brandon's M.A. thesis that she got in philosophy at NYU. So he wrote this paper for the Scientism Conference, and he gave a copy to Nathan, and part of the problem was, he could see that in the future he was not going to be getting along too well with the Randians, and the problem was that he had a Christian wife and didn't mind it.

5:58That was the worst thing. Nathan once said to Murray, if Barbara and I ever disagreed on anything, we would go Go in a room, close the door, and we wouldn't come out, and so we agreed on it. I mean, does this sound like a fun marriage? Anyway, so when Nathan had his lecture, the series of lectures, the lecture on why God didn't exist, I was out of town, so I had to go up to Nathan's apartment and listen to this lecture on a tape. Well, he simply didn't have a clue. You see, not being able to read the things that you are criticizing, because that means giving your sanction to the enemy, really is a big deterrent to giving a criticism of any value.

6:45So he said, this is the argument for the existence of God by design, and he gave some straw man, and he told these different reasons. And if people who were religious had believed the things that he claimed they did, they would have been the nincompoops he said they were. You know. But as I said, he simply didn't have a clue about religion. Murray always said that they would have denied this, but he thought that they were going to give me a chance, a reasonable chance, to eschew my faith. And if I didn't, then Murray would be expected to divorce me. And since Nathan knew all the rational females in the area,

7:58I have plagiarized from Ayn Rand and from Atlas Shrug, you have plagiarized from Barbara Zemei thesis, and you've got to come up to Ayn's apartment and we're going to discuss this and blah blah blah. And Murray said, thanks for calling Nathan and hung up. People didn't hang up on Nathaniel Rand and Murray often, they were intimidating people. So after that, all relationship between them was by correspondence. So then Nathan wrote, and this was the middle of July, Murray had written this essay for the conference in September. September. So I'm going to tell you a couple of the things that I have all ten of these. There were ten points that they claimed were plagiarized from Ayn and Barbara. I'll just tell you a couple things that they said. Well in the first place, one of the things that she claims to have invented, Ayn Rand, maybe invented is the wrong word, but is that if you give a gun to a savage or a child

8:50they won't be afraid of it because they don't know what the gun is. Can you You took the concept that man has no automatic knowledge of how to survive, and the task of his reason is to discover the values and virtues, the ends and means needed to keep They threatened to tell the leaders of the conference and the Volcker Fund, for whom Murray worked at that time, that they had this awful plagiarist on their staff, and Murray wrote back letters, and they wrote letters detailing all ten points of this thing.

9:41In the meantime, Mises was up in Jackson, New Hampshire for the summer, and Murray had written to him, because we were all upset about this, and Mises says in a letter that he wrote in July, I really did not know that, quote, the concept that man has no automatic knowledge of how to survive and that the task of his reason is to discover the values and virtues, the ends and means needed to keep him alive, unquote, was not known to mankind before the fall of 1957. I did not see Mrs. Brandon's thesis. Did she, in printing, that one must not confuse freedom and power acknowledge Hayek's road to serfdom? Of course she didn't. It is true you use the example of the savage or the child in order to illustrate the proposition that the reaction depends on the meaning the actor ascribes to the stimulus.

10:39I pointed this out again and again in order to refute the crude behaviorist stimulus response scheme for the first time in an article by Greifed and Verstehen published in 1933 and and reprinted in Gunnpromblammer in 1933. But I never claimed authorship of this fundamental idea, neither did Max Weber, who died in 1920. Anyway, they did write to all these people. I have here the first page, I don't know why only the first page, but of the letter that This morning, I could not quite believe my eyes, though forewarned by Mr. Tullock, that when the enclosed letter and material from the law firm of Ernst Kahn and Berner arrived, it appears that these two female psychoanalysts are more in need of psychiatric treatment than Dr. Rothbard.

11:39They clearly suffer from a serious case of what Sorokin and Fadds and Feubels called the discoverer's complex. They seem to think that they, the female innovators of unique ideas, were robbed by a bad male. Of course, this was before feminism. You can say things like that. He says, none of the ideas, the law firm, of course, he mentions that they were the stylistic similarities. says, none of the ideas, the law firm, parenthesis, the law firm, of course, misses the crucial distinction between the infringement of form and ideas, unquote, that the Rand and Brandon's claim can any longer be considered private literary property. They are part and parcel of hundreds if not thousands of books and treatises which were published in the last sixty years, in some cases the past few hundred years. Item number six, for example, here in Edith Carr, a few hundred years ago, had written as much. The long item seven of a The complaint, all has been rehashed in hundreds of articles since Friedrich Nietzsche.

12:39The Marxists and Sigmund Freud began to relativize intellectual positions. It is a well-known argument taught in any introductory course in logic. Most ridiculous of all is item number ten, on which the plaintiff based most of their case. The example of a savage or child who does not respond to a gun can be found in every textbook in social psychology, social control, and related subjects over the past 60 years. I have used this example spontaneously in many lectures. It is the most obvious one to come to the mind of anyone to make that point. I suggest Dr. Rothbard ignore these crackpots. Anyway, you know, to Ayn Rand, you know, she was always attacking altruism. To Ayn Rand, the enemy was religion.

13:25To Murray, the enemy was the state. So they really didn't have that much in common. There's some Aristotelian philosophy. But she was just a mild conservative. She only wanted to reign in the state enough so that capitalism could flourish. If she was alive now, she'd probably be hanging around with those red diaper babies that run the neocon movement. Anyway, the conference took place. The book was published.

14:24A friend of ours, Ralph Rico, went down to the public library and got citations for all ten points that they claimed he'd plagiarized, every one previous to Ayn Rand and every one by a Catholic cleric. With an S.J. or an O.P. after them, they thought it was a wonderful touch, a wonderful touch. So if any of you ever see this book, it's called Scientism and Values, you'll wonder why all these footnotes were Catholics. And that's the reason. Anyway, they were never heard from again around the end. With Murray, you didn't always get what you thought you'd get. If you asked for a 20-page paper, you got a 30-page paper. If you asked for a 40-page paper, you got a 65-page paper. The two volumes of the projected three-volume history of economic thought that came out about the time Murray died was supposed to be an answer to the Heidbrenner book, which is only a few hundred pages.

15:21and but he couldn't leave out these great people. How about these Spanish scholastics that were so wonderful he couldn't leave those out and John Stuart Mill, he despised John Stuart Mill so he wanted to get that in too. You know there were too many wonderful things that can't be left out. Murray was enthusiastic about an enormous number of things other than economics and history. He loved German Baroque churches, he loved chess, many, many things, and a lot of things that I didn't even know about he was enthusiastic about, and he wrote very easily, he patterned his writing after Mencken, and he wrote very easily, and he knew that almost everything he wrote would be published, and if that's not a good life, I don't know what is. Thank you.