WEBVTT NOTE Authors Forum: Rothbard's "Betrayal of the American Right" 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.800 Well, ladies and gentlemen, when Jeff Tucker put me on the program for the New Authors Forum, 2 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:11.000 I think what he had in mind was a book that I myself have coming out in about four months, 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:14.560 but I decided that I would rather not speak about that until it actually comes out. 4 00:00:14.560 --> 00:00:16.400 I want to steal my own thunder. 5 00:00:16.400 --> 00:00:21.360 I will tell you that the title of the book, which I hate, by the way, actually, if I'm 6 00:00:21.360 --> 00:00:24.320 trying to think of how I would diagram that sentence, it's not the book I hate, it's 7 00:00:24.320 --> 00:00:26.940 the title of the book that I hate. 8 00:00:26.940 --> 00:00:33.900 But yet, if you could see the cover, the cover makes this clumsy title work, oddly enough. 9 00:00:33.900 --> 00:00:40.540 The title is, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask. 10 00:00:40.540 --> 00:00:45.620 And on the cover, there's an Uncle Sam who's going like this, you know, don't ask these 11 00:00:45.620 --> 00:00:49.780 questions now, you know, we've got to keep the propaganda going, so don't ask these questions. 12 00:00:49.780 --> 00:00:56.380 So you know, my international fan club will certainly love this one, so it'll be good 13 00:00:56.380 --> 00:01:03.380 Good fun to see that. The character assassins will be back in business once again. They're a little rusty by now, no doubt. 14 00:01:03.380 --> 00:01:09.380 But actually today I'm talking about a book that I didn't write at all, but for which I contributed the introduction. 15 00:01:09.380 --> 00:01:16.380 And that's a book by Murray Rothbard. It's a brand new book no one's ever read before, other than a few people, 16 00:01:16.380 --> 00:01:24.380 when this manuscript was circulating sort of in the underground, managed to get their hands on it and read it, but most people have not seen it. 17 00:01:24.380 --> 00:01:38.380 It's called The Betrayal of the American Right, and it's a book that Murray wrote in the 70s and then was continually editing it, revisiting it, adding a new chapter here and there, as publishing opportunities for it arose. 18 00:01:38.380 --> 00:01:49.380 But through one fluke or another, it always fell through until just now, until the Mises Institute has decided to bring it out this year, I understand. 19 00:01:49.380 --> 00:01:52.380 So I contributed the introduction. So this is just amazing. 20 00:01:52.380 --> 00:01:55.380 It's not like a collection of essays that are previously published. 21 00:01:55.380 --> 00:01:58.380 This is a brand new book by Murray Rothbard coming out this year. 22 00:01:58.380 --> 00:02:00.380 So it's quite something. 23 00:02:00.380 --> 00:02:04.380 And it just serves to remind us that there are many living professors today 24 00:02:04.380 --> 00:02:09.380 who only wish they could be as productive as a dead Murray Rothbard. 25 00:02:09.380 --> 00:02:16.380 Because, of course, we had his two-volume history of economic thought. 26 00:02:16.380 --> 00:02:27.380 The Center for Libertarian Studies published a monograph that he'd written on foreign policy for some obscure investment newsletter, I think. 27 00:02:27.380 --> 00:02:31.380 A 20,000-word article, no one would ever see. Now it's been published as a monograph. 28 00:02:31.380 --> 00:02:37.380 So all these things are still being dug out. Well, this manuscript is among those new things that are coming out. 29 00:02:37.380 --> 00:02:42.380 So it's just wonderful, and I'm thrilled to be able to take part in this, be a small part of it. 30 00:02:42.380 --> 00:03:01.380 So the book is called The Betrayal of the American Right, and Sean Rittner was saying to me today that the title of my presentation today, Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right, you know, sounds like he betrayed them, but I think it's more the other way around, actually, considering the way they treated him, particularly at his death. 31 00:03:01.380 --> 00:03:04.680 And usually, when somebody dies, you try to be nice to the guy, you know, not... 32 00:03:04.680 --> 00:03:08.880 Apparently, Bill Buckley, you know, Mr. Cultivated and Civilized, hadn't learned that lesson. 33 00:03:08.880 --> 00:03:13.680 But let's not dwell on that, folks. Let's dwell on... let's accentuate the positive here. 34 00:03:13.680 --> 00:03:21.980 And I want to hasten to assure you that if you have read Murray writing on the subject of what he called the old right before, 35 00:03:21.980 --> 00:03:27.580 you might have read him writing on this in the Journal of Libertarian Studies or in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report 36 00:03:27.580 --> 00:03:38.580 or in an excellent article in Continuum, which was a very hard to find journal from the 60s that his article in Continuum is available in the Rothbard Archive on lewrockwell.com, I'm fairly certain. 37 00:03:38.580 --> 00:03:48.580 You may be thinking, well, I sort of already kind of know about Rothbard's views about the American right and what happened to it and why he felt like he couldn't cooperate with it and so on. 38 00:03:48.580 --> 00:03:56.580 But I'm telling you, this is brand new material. It's not just rehashing these articles. It's a whole new book and it's astonishing. 39 00:03:56.580 --> 00:04:09.580 Well, let me first engage in some definitions here. Let's define some terms and then proceed, because I don't want to assume that everybody in the room knows what I'm talking about when I refer to the old right. 40 00:04:09.580 --> 00:04:20.580 When Rothbard used this term, the old right, he's not talking about a self-conscious, full-fledged movement, per se, with think tanks and institutions and so on and so forth. 41 00:04:20.580 --> 00:04:25.580 and so forth. It was much more of a loose coalition that may not even have been aware of itself really. 42 00:04:25.580 --> 00:04:34.580 It was a loose coalition of individuals who, around the time of the New Deal and afterward, persisting into World War II and after World War II, 43 00:04:34.580 --> 00:04:40.580 who were against the Leviathan state both in its domestic and its international manifestations. 44 00:04:40.580 --> 00:04:46.580 And these were wonderfully diverse people who disagreed with each other on different things, but that was all right. 45 00:04:46.580 --> 00:04:54.580 You can still be friendly, you can still carry on intellectual discourse, you don't have to excommunicate people because they disagree with you on one small thing. 46 00:04:54.580 --> 00:05:07.580 So, for instance, Murray Rothbard identifies H.L. Mencken, Albert J. Nock as belonged to the old right, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, a bunch of other people. 47 00:05:07.580 --> 00:05:13.580 Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, a bunch of these people, and then some people in politics as well. 48 00:05:13.580 --> 00:05:31.580 Well, the traditional sort of anti-interventionist Republicans who were still around even after World War II, still around in the early years of the Cold War, who were budget-conscious and who, along with Senator Robert Taft, were actually skeptical of Harry Truman's early Cold War measures. 49 00:05:31.580 --> 00:05:40.580 I mean, these were real old-timey conservatives who didn't buy into grandiose schemes to remake the world. They were skeptical of things like that. 50 00:05:40.580 --> 00:05:46.420 Well, here's a memorable brief discussion of the Old Right that some of you may be familiar with 51 00:05:46.420 --> 00:05:51.380 from one of my favorite Rothbard articles of all time from 1992. Rothbard says this, 52 00:05:52.020 --> 00:05:57.220 if we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for? In general terms, they were for 53 00:05:57.220 --> 00:06:01.620 a restoration of the liberty of the Old Republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense 54 00:06:01.620 --> 00:06:06.820 of the rights of private property. In the concrete, as in the case of any broad coalition, 55 00:06:06.820 --> 00:06:13.820 There were differences of opinion within this overall framework, but we can boil down those differences to this question. 56 00:06:13.820 --> 00:06:18.820 How much of existing government would you repeal? How far would you roll government back? 57 00:06:18.820 --> 00:06:26.820 The minimum demand, which almost all old rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the old right, was total abolition of the New Deal, 58 00:06:26.820 --> 00:06:34.820 the whole kit and caboodle of the Welfare State, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933 and all the rest. 59 00:06:34.820 --> 00:06:41.860 Fast. Beyond that, there were charming disagreements. Some would stop at repealing the New Deal. 60 00:06:41.860 --> 00:06:46.180 Others would press on to abolition of Woodrow Wilson's new freedom, including the Federal 61 00:06:46.180 --> 00:06:50.420 Reserve system and especially that mighty instrument of tyranny, the income tax and 62 00:06:50.420 --> 00:06:56.540 the Internal Revenue Service. Still others, extremists such as myself, would not stop 63 00:06:56.540 --> 00:07:02.400 until we repealed the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789 and maybe even think the unthinkable 64 00:07:02.400 --> 00:07:06.400 and Restore the Good Old Articles of Confederation. 65 00:07:06.400 --> 00:07:11.960 Well in addition to being a kind of a brief history of the old right, this book, The Betrayal 66 00:07:11.960 --> 00:07:17.360 of the American Right, is as close to an autobiography of Murray Rothbard as we're ever going to 67 00:07:17.360 --> 00:07:18.740 see. 68 00:07:18.740 --> 00:07:23.600 So we're getting here a very interesting story of the anti-interventionist tradition in America 69 00:07:23.600 --> 00:07:29.280 but we're also getting a kind of slice of Rothbard's own life and his own struggles 70 00:07:29.280 --> 00:07:34.480 and his alliances and his friendships and his institutional affiliations, and in addition 71 00:07:34.480 --> 00:07:39.400 to that we also are observing his own political and intellectual development, the books he 72 00:07:39.400 --> 00:07:45.360 read, the people he met, the organizations he joined, the positions he rethought, all 73 00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:51.060 these things are described in here, and the beautiful thing about this book, insofar as 74 00:07:51.060 --> 00:07:57.100 some of it is like a memoir, is that Murray does not portray himself the way so many memoir 75 00:07:57.100 --> 00:08:03.100 This is a genre full of people who are all far-seeing demigods, who knew everything. 76 00:08:03.100 --> 00:08:07.100 Of course we should have done this, but nobody listened to me, that sort of thing. 77 00:08:07.100 --> 00:08:12.100 Rothbard is not interested in running around trying to make excuses for things that went wrong. 78 00:08:12.100 --> 00:08:15.100 He freely acknowledges, okay, this was a strategic error on my part. 79 00:08:15.100 --> 00:08:18.100 I should have known not to do X, Y or Z. 80 00:08:18.100 --> 00:08:21.100 Or he'll even say, this was a philosophical error on my part. 81 00:08:21.100 --> 00:08:25.100 He doesn't simply say, well, I was considering the question under a different aspect. 82 00:08:25.100 --> 00:08:30.100 No, he admits his shortcomings. This is charming. This is wonderful to see. 83 00:08:30.100 --> 00:08:36.100 So he tells us about, he goes from his days as a young boy, he goes up through his education, 84 00:08:36.100 --> 00:08:42.100 through his time in Mises New York seminar, from which so many important libertarian thinkers emerged, 85 00:08:42.100 --> 00:08:48.100 his early writing career, his activism, all the way through his interaction with the New Left in the 1960s. 86 00:08:48.100 --> 00:08:51.100 And that's really where the book kind of leaves off. 87 00:08:51.100 --> 00:08:59.100 The introduction speaks of an additional final chapter that brought the story up to about the early 1990s. 88 00:08:59.100 --> 00:09:03.100 We've not been able to find that final chapter, which would have been great to see. 89 00:09:03.100 --> 00:09:07.100 So we pretty much leave off late 60s, early 70s here. 90 00:09:07.100 --> 00:09:12.100 He's filling, in my opinion, a very important gap in the history of American foreign policy, 91 00:09:12.100 --> 00:09:16.100 as well as in the histories of American libertarianism and conservatism. 92 00:09:16.100 --> 00:09:23.100 There are people and ideas and debates that are discussed here that are really appearing practically for the first time. 93 00:09:23.100 --> 00:09:30.100 And so I think there are dissertation topics to be mined out of this, articles, topics for full-fledged books. 94 00:09:30.100 --> 00:09:33.100 There's so much that's new in here and useful. 95 00:09:33.100 --> 00:09:39.100 It is interesting to note, now of course, that Murray was very interested in the subject of war and peace. 96 00:09:39.100 --> 00:09:45.100 And at one point in the 50s, he wrote in a private letter, he wrote that he was increasingly convinced 97 00:09:45.100 --> 00:09:51.100 I'm convinced that the issues of war and peace were really at the center of the whole libertarian business. 98 00:09:51.100 --> 00:09:57.100 That's a quotation that comes from an article called Rothbard's Time on the Left by John Payne 99 00:09:57.100 --> 00:10:02.100 from the Journal of Libertarian Studies some time ago. It's very good and worth reading. 100 00:10:02.100 --> 00:10:07.100 And so naturally, much of this manuscript is talking about that very subject 101 00:10:07.100 --> 00:10:13.100 and the fact that American conservatism suddenly went from being skeptical of foreign interventions 102 00:10:13.100 --> 00:10:20.600 to having foreign intervention and the degree of how gung-ho you were being the determining factors to whether you belonged. 103 00:10:20.600 --> 00:10:27.100 Suddenly something happened here. Something happened to the right and Rothbard felt no longer comfortable in it. 104 00:10:27.100 --> 00:10:33.600 It's interesting to note, though, that it was both mainstream conservatism and mainstream liberalism 105 00:10:33.600 --> 00:10:41.100 that was responsible for Rothbard's sort of alienation from American politics. 106 00:10:41.100 --> 00:10:47.100 Because even the liberals, now the liberals supposedly are not sufficiently anti-communist or whatever, 107 00:10:47.100 --> 00:10:54.100 but the fact is that the liberals were at least as vicious half the time as the conservatives toward people like Taft, 108 00:10:54.100 --> 00:10:58.100 who was a so-called isolationist and therefore a heretic. 109 00:10:58.100 --> 00:11:05.100 So interestingly, in 1948 it was said that Taft would be an unsuitable candidate for president, 110 00:11:05.100 --> 00:11:09.100 according to one prominent liberal columnist, because the next president, 111 00:11:09.100 --> 00:11:21.100 should be an executive of the human race who will boldly champion freedom before the world and for the world, which Taft simply could not do. 112 00:11:21.100 --> 00:11:26.100 Likewise, the nation, now this is the nation, right? Bold and cheeky, right? 113 00:11:26.100 --> 00:11:36.100 The nation described Taft and his allies in Congress as super appeasers whose policies should set the bells ringing in the Kremlin. 114 00:11:36.100 --> 00:11:42.100 This is the nation. Did they ever apologize for that? Boy, we sure were duped and dopey. 115 00:11:42.100 --> 00:11:45.100 I don't know, maybe they did, but probably not. 116 00:11:45.100 --> 00:11:48.100 I'm going to add, I think an additional one of Rothbard's laws could very well be, 117 00:11:48.100 --> 00:11:51.100 not only does nobody ever resign, nobody ever apologizes, right? 118 00:11:51.100 --> 00:11:55.100 Except for things other people did. I'm sorry that somebody held slaves a hundred years ago, 119 00:11:55.100 --> 00:11:58.100 but I'm not sorry that I'm a bum and a schmuck. 120 00:11:58.100 --> 00:12:06.580 Now, from time to time, Murray found himself red-baited. You know, ah, Murray's just a 121 00:12:06.580 --> 00:12:11.540 commie. You know, look, he's so anti-American, because he's against the U.S. government, 122 00:12:11.540 --> 00:12:16.340 therefore he's anti-American. There's a leftist idea there, you know, that the government 123 00:12:16.340 --> 00:12:20.540 and the people are the same thing. Sort of a Rousseauian idea. Rothbard, of course, he 124 00:12:20.540 --> 00:12:26.020 was so anti-communist, actually, because he was an economist, and he understood this system 125 00:12:26.020 --> 00:12:41.020 is not sustainable. That's why he held it in such contempt. He did not think that the Soviet Union's acquisition of a string of satellites, each of which was an economic basket case in need of subsidy, was a particularly menacing imperial strategy. 126 00:12:41.020 --> 00:12:53.020 So old right members of Congress, like Howard Buffett and others, argued that the cause of freedom was best served through good example and non-intervention, and this was Rothbard's view. 127 00:12:53.020 --> 00:13:00.120 Now, in the late 1970s, Murray was personally responsible for inserting the non-interventionist 128 00:13:00.120 --> 00:13:04.260 plank into the Libertarian Party platform at a time when a lot of Libertarians were totally 129 00:13:04.260 --> 00:13:09.480 uninterested in foreign policy, which was shocking to him because the issue to him was 130 00:13:09.480 --> 00:13:12.000 so fundamental. 131 00:13:12.000 --> 00:13:18.700 Now the 2003 Iraq War was justified, in my judgment, on the basis of propaganda that 132 00:13:18.700 --> 00:13:21.820 was worthy of the old Pravda. 133 00:13:21.820 --> 00:13:25.820 And the fact that people calling themselves libertarians, who after all are supposed to 134 00:13:25.820 --> 00:13:29.960 have an eye for government propaganda, the fact that some of these people swallowed the 135 00:13:29.960 --> 00:13:36.220 government's line whole on this, suggests that this problem has not altogether disappeared. 136 00:13:36.220 --> 00:13:41.220 There's not a lot of strategic sense in terms of foreign policy among some libertarians. 137 00:13:41.220 --> 00:13:45.020 I can only imagine on the subject of the old right, by the way, what Mencken would think 138 00:13:45.020 --> 00:13:49.900 if he were alive today, what he would have to say about this war, its architects and 139 00:13:49.900 --> 00:13:54.900 and the people who are still trying to defend the grounds on which it started. 140 00:13:54.900 --> 00:13:57.900 Oh, look, we found three canisters of some decayed gas. 141 00:13:57.900 --> 00:14:00.900 That justifies hundreds of thousands of deaths. 142 00:14:00.900 --> 00:14:03.900 I mean, there's no other way to deal with those decaying cans of gas. 143 00:14:03.900 --> 00:14:06.900 I mean, what would Mencken have had to say about that? 144 00:14:06.900 --> 00:14:07.900 One can only wonder. 145 00:14:07.900 --> 00:14:11.900 Well, what you really, I think, find interesting is that here's Rothbard talking about 146 00:14:11.900 --> 00:14:17.900 and explaining his alliance with the left, his alliance with the New Left in the 60s 147 00:14:17.900 --> 00:14:20.540 And he felt like he had nowhere to go. 148 00:14:20.540 --> 00:14:24.800 He felt like his old home, where he identified himself with the right, was just closed off 149 00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:26.340 to him. 150 00:14:26.340 --> 00:14:32.180 And so he pursued avenues like the New Left, where he saw anti-war activism, and he saw 151 00:14:32.180 --> 00:14:40.940 some good ideological foundation in some of the people that he felt could be sustained 152 00:14:40.940 --> 00:14:44.140 and in fact could be built upon, and so he worked with them. 153 00:14:44.140 --> 00:14:48.940 and in this book he talks about the successes and failures of that and why it was ultimately 154 00:14:48.940 --> 00:14:52.900 not sustainable or it just didn't work or it fell apart, but it's quite interesting 155 00:14:52.900 --> 00:14:58.300 and good and it's interesting to see that there was some reciprocal admiration on the 156 00:14:58.300 --> 00:15:02.540 part of those folks on the left vis-a-vis Rothbard. 157 00:15:02.540 --> 00:15:05.420 What I happen to like is just a little quotation from the book, I realize I want to make sure 158 00:15:05.420 --> 00:15:10.220 Ed Stringham gets his full time up here because he's got an extremely useful book to talk 159 00:15:10.220 --> 00:15:18.220 I just love this little quotation because it is so classic. It's just Murray himself talking. 160 00:15:18.220 --> 00:15:22.220 He's talking about in the late 60s there was something called the Peace and Freedom Party, 161 00:15:22.220 --> 00:15:27.220 which was established in California and went national in the late 60s. 162 00:15:27.220 --> 00:15:34.220 And the preliminary platform simply called for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam immediately. 163 00:15:34.220 --> 00:15:40.220 and Murray says that the second plank was some plank so vague about being nice to everyone 164 00:15:40.220 --> 00:15:43.220 that almost anyone, left, right or center, could have endorsed it. 165 00:15:43.220 --> 00:15:48.220 And so Murray says, great, this was a coalition party dedicated just to immediate withdrawal from Vietnam 166 00:15:48.220 --> 00:15:52.220 and no statism, which you get that a lot of times cooperating with the left. 167 00:15:52.220 --> 00:15:55.220 Well, we want to spend the money on school lunches instead of on wars. 168 00:15:55.220 --> 00:16:00.220 I'd rather spend it on school lunches, I suppose, but Murray just wanted just anti-war party. 169 00:16:00.220 --> 00:16:02.220 And here it was. He was so excited. 170 00:16:02.220 --> 00:16:08.220 So he said, our whole libertarian group in New York poured into the party, so they all left the phone booth and went into this party. 171 00:16:08.220 --> 00:16:13.220 So what he points out is that the Peace and Freedom Party was organized on the basis of clubs. 172 00:16:13.220 --> 00:16:20.220 So there would be the Greenwich Village Club, the West Side Club, but there were also some clubs based on occupation. 173 00:16:20.220 --> 00:16:23.220 So there was a faculty club represented in the Peace and Freedom Party. 174 00:16:23.220 --> 00:16:26.220 So, okay, so Murray's a professor, he belongs to the faculty club. 175 00:16:26.220 --> 00:16:30.220 The Faculty Club was entitled to two delegates at the Delegate Assembly. 176 00:16:30.220 --> 00:16:33.220 And so it was divided up between... 177 00:16:33.220 --> 00:16:38.220 One was given to the socialists among the professors, and the other one was given to Murray. 178 00:16:38.220 --> 00:16:40.220 But here's the quotation that I like. 179 00:16:40.220 --> 00:16:45.220 At the first meeting of the Delegate Assembly then, here I was, only in the party for about a week, 180 00:16:45.220 --> 00:16:50.220 but suddenly vaulted to top rank in the power elite. 181 00:16:50.220 --> 00:16:54.220 Then, early in the meeting, some people got up and advocated abolishing the Delegate Assembly 182 00:16:54.220 --> 00:17:02.220 Now, I'll just close with a couple of more little bits of this and then have Ed come up, but this is a quotation that I like, he says, 183 00:17:24.220 --> 00:17:31.220 and the system of majority rule, participatory democracy could only agree on decisions by means of persuasion and unanimous consensus. 184 00:17:31.220 --> 00:17:34.220 Voting was believed to violate minority rights. 185 00:17:34.220 --> 00:17:43.220 I still remember vividly the board meetings of the Free University of New York where equal votes were cast by staff, unpaid faculty and students alike. 186 00:17:43.220 --> 00:17:48.220 Since every decision, no matter how trivial, had to be attained by unanimous consent, 187 00:17:48.220 --> 00:17:59.220 The result was that the board meeting stretched on, indecisively and interminably, to become life itself. 188 00:17:59.220 --> 00:18:08.220 He says, those of us who left the meeting in the evening to go home were accused of betraying the meeting. 189 00:18:08.220 --> 00:18:14.220 But the last thing I want to leave you with, just to show you the kind of thing that you learn about in this book is, 190 00:18:14.220 --> 00:18:16.220 I don't know, maybe people already knew this, I didn't. 191 00:18:16.220 --> 00:18:18.220 What was it that made Murray finally say, 192 00:18:18.220 --> 00:18:20.220 you know, I can't support limited government, 193 00:18:20.220 --> 00:18:22.220 I'm going to go the whole way, you know, 194 00:18:22.220 --> 00:18:24.220 and just say, to heck with all of it, it's all a scam. 195 00:18:24.220 --> 00:18:26.220 Like, what was it? 196 00:18:26.220 --> 00:18:28.220 What idea made him take that step 197 00:18:28.220 --> 00:18:30.220 where he was so, basically so lonely? 198 00:18:30.220 --> 00:18:32.220 There were not a whole lot of people, but I know there's 199 00:18:32.220 --> 00:18:34.220 De Molinari and people like that, but I mean, it's not exactly 200 00:18:34.220 --> 00:18:36.220 like there are huge people waiting 201 00:18:36.220 --> 00:18:38.220 to greet him with open arms with that position. 202 00:18:38.220 --> 00:18:40.220 So, what was it? Here's his own description 203 00:18:40.220 --> 00:18:42.220 of what happened. He said, 204 00:18:42.220 --> 00:18:47.220 My conversion, this is in the book, my conversion to anarchism was a simple exercise in logic. 205 00:18:47.220 --> 00:18:53.220 I had engaged continually in friendly arguments about laissez-faire with liberal friends from graduate school. 206 00:18:53.220 --> 00:19:00.220 While condemning taxation, I still had felt that taxation was required for the provision of police and judicial protection and for that only. 207 00:19:00.220 --> 00:19:05.220 One night, two friends and I had one of our usual lengthy discussions, seemingly unprofitable. 208 00:19:05.220 --> 00:19:09.220 But this time when they'd left, I felt that for once something vital had actually been said. 209 00:19:09.220 --> 00:19:16.820 As I thought back on the discussion, I realized that my friends, as liberals, had posed the following challenge to my laissez-faire position, and they said, 210 00:19:16.820 --> 00:19:27.520 What is the legitimate basis for your laissez-faire government for this political entity confined solely to defending person and property? 211 00:19:27.520 --> 00:19:34.820 And Murray responded, well, the people get together and decide to establish such a government, and they came back with, well, but if the people can do that, 212 00:19:34.820 --> 00:19:41.220 Why can't they do exactly the same thing and get together to choose a government that will build steel plants and dams and whatever? 213 00:19:41.220 --> 00:19:49.980 And Murray says, I realized in a flash that their logic was impeccable, that laissez-faire was logically untenable and that either I had to become a liberal or move onward into anarchism. 214 00:19:49.980 --> 00:19:51.580 I became an anarchist. 215 00:19:51.580 --> 00:20:02.660 Furthermore, I saw the total incompatibility of the insights of Oppenheimer and Nock on the nature of the state as conquest with the vague social contract basis that I had been postulating for a laissez-faire government. 216 00:20:02.660 --> 00:20:08.660 I saw that the only genuine contract had to be an individual specifically disposing of or using his own property. 217 00:20:08.660 --> 00:20:12.660 Well, I'll stop there and given that I'm not the author of this book and that we're running low on time, 218 00:20:12.660 --> 00:20:17.660 maybe we'll just let Ed go right up. And if you want to talk to me about this, you know, we'll have lunch together today or something. 219 00:20:17.660 --> 00:20:21.660 There's a lot to talk about. But when this comes out, you've got to rush out and buy it. 220 00:20:21.660 --> 00:20:25.660 I don't make any money on it, so there's no self-interest here, but it's just wonderful. 221 00:20:25.660 --> 00:20:29.660 It's finally seeing the light of day. It's really something to celebrate. So thanks. 222 00:20:32.660 --> 00:20:34.660 Thank you for watching.