Man, Economy, and Liberty

0:00This is Jeffrey Tuckow with the Mises Institute. It's my pleasure to be here with Lew Rockwell, the founder and chairman of the Mises Institute. The subject today concerns an older book that the Mises Institute published back in the 1980s. It was a Fesh Riff from Murray Rothbard. The subject comes to mind because of the feshriff for Hans Hoppe that the institute recently published, which has been compared to the Rothbard feshriff and also to two Mises feshriffs, right, Lew? There were two. Well, there was... You mean the one edited by Mary Sendholz and then the earlier one.

0:49Yes. What were the circumstances that led to the production of this wonderful feshriff, which This is called Man, Economy and Liberty, edited by you and also by Walter Block. What led to it, can you recall the moment and where the idea came from and what the plan was and how it was released and some of the details like that? I thought that Murray had gotten so little praise and recognition during his life that I thought his 60th birthday was a good time to have a dinner in his honor and to have a press trip. And Walter was good enough to co-edit it. He's the senior editor. And so we asked libertarians and Austrians to write papers for it.

1:38And it's quite a wonderful book. Just going through the table of contents, I note it must be the only time that Hoppe and Kirzner ever appeared together in the same volume. That's funny. Can you tell us what is the idea of a Feshrift? You get the sense that it's... Is it the idea that other scholars giving their most treasured thing, namely their scholarship, to another scholar they admire? Is that... Well, that certainly is the official view. Typically, it's scholars rummaging in their attic and finding the paper that they couldn't use for anything else and giving it to the Feshrift. But this is unusual. I mean, the sense that virtually all these papers were written for the Feshrift and they were all people who were either students of Murray in some sense or admirers of his in the scholarly community and it's I think quite a wonderful book, it's about Mr. Libertarian and the man who was the Dean of the Austrian School and so it reflects both aspects of

2:36Murray's life and it includes a wonderful piece by Margaret von Mises and a wonderful by Joey Rothbard, his wife, and just by a whole host of libertarians and Austrian economists. Now, when a scholar is given a festschrift, what do you suppose the effect is psychologically for them? I mean, to receive a book that's published with all these tributes to them, it's not just tributes, right? It's real scholarship. Well, virtually none of these are tributes. Yeah. And there are a few that are tributes. But they're all tributes to Rothbard in a broader sense, in the sense that these men and women were all influenced by him. But I think it's a, you know, it must be a thrilling thing. There must be scholars who by their positions in the academy or with the state are able in effect to almost command a fesh rift. So maybe they, maybe it doesn't actually thrill them. It's just their due.

3:33But it certainly thrilled Murray. It was a surprise just as the whole The whole dinner was a surprise. We held a dinner the day before his 60th birthday in New York City at the Halloran House Hotel. There were hundreds of people there and it was quite a wonderful occasion. Margaret and Joey Rothbard gave wonderful talks. We had a terrific performance of Murray's one-act play. Anyway, so far as I know the only live performance so far, Mozart was a red, you were in that, Diane Peterson, Nando Pellucci played Murray and he entered very dramatically into the room just in a trench coat and had Murray's accent down to a T, although Murray denied it and said he sounds nothing like me.

4:26Margaret had a very detailed critique of everything that went on and the people in it, but it's on, I believe, the Mises site. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's got a lot of hits. Yeah. It's not exactly a high-definition video, but what the heck, I mean, it's very neat. And typically, the person who receives the Festschrift is a scholar of a certain age usually, right? It's an older scholar, and it's part of the message that your work is going to continue. We've all been, we're all your students, long after you're gone, we'll still be here influencing others, so in a way, it's a way of saying your ideas are immortal, and certainly in the case of Murray, that's true. It's true, and he was, I would say 60 is typically slightly young for a fish rift, but I was concerned that Murray get this while he was still around, he could enjoy it.

5:13And he died. Well, it wasn't it wasn't too many years later. Yeah, so so I was very glad and certainly enjoyed it. It was a huge surprise a total surprise how the heck it was ever Kept a secret Bob Kephart helped Lead donor helped helped us put together and fund the whole event. It was it was a lot of people involved and Amazing that it was kept secret. He was thrilled. The only thing Murray didn't like about the entire thing was we had a clown with a bunch of balloons singing Happy Birthday to him in the manner of Stephen Sondheim. Well, as Joey later confided to me, Murray hated it. Stephen Sondheim hated him, hated his music.

5:59So he had a very very puzzled look on his face as this guy was singing songs to him, but With that exception, it was quite a wonderful event. We did have one, only one sort of, yeah, we had some guy from the back of the room screaming about the Cato Institute. I mean, it sounds like a joke, but it happened. And he was very, very angry, and I had the precaution of getting an off-duty cop to be with us that night. And so he hastened the man out and didn't arrest him or anything, just sent him on his way and that was maybe that was in some sense typical of many other things that was happening also there was a as is some has been so often the case there was an organized effort to try to keep people from participating in this dinner and in the Fesh Rift so it's a tribute to everyone in there that they didn't pay any attention to that and the book turns out

7:00It's got to be 421 pages. It's huge. It's actually a massive thing. Many of the essays in here have gone on to some degree of fame. I mean, we have Hoppe's first probably full statement about the idea of argumentation ethics. And of course, Hans had come to New York City not long before this specifically to study under Murray, and I remember him initially he's welcomed to New York by his car being broken into and all his and his family's possessions being stolen from it, so that was in one sense a welcome to New York, but he of course loved Murray immediately, Murray was thrilled with him and he studied under Murray and so this paper was and the first indication of a long fruitful relationship between Rothbard and Hoppe.

7:57And Kirzner is his only essay on welfare economics from an Austrian perspective. No, it's a wonderful piece, of course. Yeah, and so many other things. Garrison on his defense of pure time preference theory of interest. and, you know, you've got this piece, Haroldine Rothbard and Hazlitt and Hutt, Flew is in here, and David Gordon, Tibor McCann, Holcomb, his defense is almost anarchy, right? It's not quite anarchy, but it's close. Oh, it's a wonderful piece, of course. Yeah. Really, it's a very high standard, this picture. Yeah, yeah. Even the Osterfeld article. You know, and I remember at the time you loved so much Joey's contribution, which is just so funny.

8:46Well, Joey was a lady of just, how shall I say, a Rothbardian sense of humor. And her talk is very moving, very sweet, extremely funny. But Margaret's talk, which is not funny, but quite moving and wonderful, it's great to have it. Great to have it, and I still remember, certainly the grandest entrance, forget Nando Pellucci for a moment, the grandest entrance made into the room was by Margaret, who of course had been an actress, and a successful actress, and a play translator, and she knew how to enter a room, and she was quite something, I mean just amazing. So, a great lady. Would you be interested in actually reading what Joey wrote? Maybe the first paragraph, it's just so charming.

9:38When Murray was in school, he always went out for the class play because, as anyone who is acquainted with him knows, he is a great ham. One year he discovered that the two male leads were the handsome young prince and the fat old king. He also found out that he was expected to play the part of the fat old king. Now this annoyed him and he began a campaign to get the part of the handsome young prince. There were two reasons for this. First, the assumption that he would be the fatal king, rather than the handsome young prince, rankled. And secondly, the handsome young prince at one point in the play kissed the hand of the beautiful young princess, and the part of the beautiful young princess was being played by a girl whom he had a crush on.

10:23He was determined to get to kiss her hand. Such a fuss did he make that finally he was awarded the part of the handsome young prince, then began rehearsals and the devastating directions quote you take her hand in your palm, raise her hand, bow over it, and kiss your own thumb. Joy is a wonderful writer. Yes, she's great. I'll never forget this last sentence in here where she says recently I woke up in the middle of the night and Murray was delighted to have someone tell his to tell his newest discovery to That bastard Eli Whitney didn't invent the cotton gin after all and you know I was just reading about Eli Whitney a couple of days ago, and that's exactly right. The guy did figure, right?

11:09Yeah, yeah, he had the patent, but he didn't invent the thing, so that's great, you know. There's more work for more research or even a Joey's contribution here, right? So, Murray, before the Institute came along, really didn't have a good institutional base to support. Nothing that would have provided anything on this level. So it must have been a very proud moment for you. Well, it was, and I always remember Henry Hazlitt when he called up to get the full legal name of the Institute, which I thought and hoped meant that we would be in his will, and indeed he was very, very generous to us in his will, as he was throughout everything he did with the Institute.

11:55He said to me, you know, the great achievement of the Mises Institute is to have given Murray Rothbard a platform. So, I think that's correct. And you were able to hand him this completed book that night? Yes, yes. It was not printed yet, or text set, but in manuscript form, yes. The Institute was not that old. It was about three and a half years old, something like that. And before publishing prices went down, before it was a lot easier to create... No, that was, of course, in the old days when you had to... A 3,000-book print run was a small print run. So it was a huge investment for the Institute.

12:40Resources... Everything was, right, in those days. Every book publishing was a big deal and a real risk, yes. This was a thrill and it would be great to see it come back because I think that there are many essays in this book that we pay reading by younger scholars and really anybody interested in the work of Murray Rothbard. And just on its own, it is a tribute to his life and to his work. Just to have it and own it is a way of giving tribute to Murray. You know, and it's true, and like everything else about the Institute's books these days, thanks to you, they're all cheap. This is an expensive dome, and very handsome. It's got some delicious photographs of Murray and Joanna, and very, very fun.

13:34Thank you so much, Ludwig, for giving your memories here. Hope you can do this again. Great. Thank you, Joe.

13:44The Theory of Money and Credit