WEBVTT NOTE The Good Life of Murray N. Rothbard 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Some 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. 2 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:20.000 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. 3 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:26.000 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. 4 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:30.800 And then we heard from Jimmy Davidson what she thought of Murray at their meeting. She said, 5 00:00:30.800 --> 00:00:33.400 That guy can't be an economist. He's too funny. 6 00:00:33.400 --> 00:00:42.400 Well, he was funny and like all funny people that I know, he appreciated a good audience 7 00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:47.400 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 8 00:00:47.400 --> 00:00:49.400 and woe be to the class that didn't get it. 9 00:00:49.400 --> 00:00:56.600 If you have read the interview with Peter Klein, it was in the folders that everybody 10 00:00:56.600 --> 00:01:00.800 got. You see, Peter said that he discovered Austrian economics when he was in high school. 11 00:01:00.800 --> 00:01:06.840 And of course nowadays we see Austrian economics all around us, largely due to the Mises Institute. 12 00:01:06.840 --> 00:01:11.760 So I thought I'd tell you how Murray discovered Austrian economics almost 50 years ago. But 13 00:01:11.760 --> 00:01:16.000 I have to go back a little bit. Murray started Columbia with a class of 46, but he got out 14 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:21.320 in 45. Everybody at Columbia at this time was 4F, Murray because of his eyesight, and 15 00:01:21.320 --> 00:01:27.040 they were a weird bunch. Alan Ginsberg was there, Jack Kerouac was there, Lucien Carr, 16 00:01:27.040 --> 00:01:33.460 but Murray wasn't part of that group, of course. But he was a good student, but he wasn't much 17 00:01:33.460 --> 00:01:41.420 of an athlete. At Columbia, they have an indoor track that goes around like a balcony above 18 00:02:11.420 --> 00:02:19.420 Murray walked up to it, looked up and said, you've got to be kidding, and walked around it. 19 00:02:19.420 --> 00:02:25.420 But he did what was necessary, phys-ed-wise, to get out at 45, and he got a master's degree in 46. 20 00:02:25.420 --> 00:02:35.420 46, 47, he took the last courses for a PhD, and then he passed the oral exams for his PhD. 21 00:02:35.420 --> 00:02:41.420 And barring the exception, which I'll tell you about in a minute, he'd never heard of Austrian economics. 22 00:02:41.420 --> 00:02:50.420 So overwhelming had been the Keynesian Revolution that Austrian economics was just down the memory hole, as if it hadn't existed. 23 00:02:50.420 --> 00:02:54.420 He'd never heard of Mises or Hayek or Menger or Boehm-Bawerk. 24 00:02:54.420 --> 00:03:04.420 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. 25 00:03:04.420 --> 00:03:11.180 Now, the exception was that during the last year of his courses, he took a class with 26 00:03:11.180 --> 00:03:16.180 George Stiegler, and Stiegler said that he had written a pamphlet, Attacking Rent Control, 27 00:03:16.180 --> 00:03:23.620 a very radical idea in 1947, as a matter of fact, in New York City, it's radical today. 28 00:03:23.620 --> 00:03:29.460 And from this pamphlet, he heard about Mises, and then in 1949, Human Action came out in 29 00:03:29.460 --> 00:03:35.620 in English and the Mises Lectures started that he went to for 10 years and so soon he 30 00:03:35.620 --> 00:03:40.760 was reading in Mises and Hayek and Boehm-Bawerk and Menger and so on but it was almost by 31 00:03:40.760 --> 00:03:46.460 chance that he found out about it and now we see that I don't think anybody can get 32 00:03:46.460 --> 00:03:51.980 a PhD without having known at least it existed. 33 00:03:51.980 --> 00:03:58.260 Since so many people came into what we broadly think of as the right-wing movement through 34 00:03:58.260 --> 00:04:08.260 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. 35 00:04:08.260 --> 00:04:19.260 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. 36 00:04:19.260 --> 00:04:26.260 They always said, why didn't you see her more often? We always thought that was plenty. 37 00:04:26.260 --> 00:04:35.080 not a restful person to be around and you know I should tell you that as I'm 38 00:04:35.080 --> 00:04:40.060 sure you know Ayn Rand was a very smart woman anyone who can devise a philosophy 39 00:04:40.060 --> 00:04:43.860 one of the main tenets of which is that she is the most sexually desirable person 40 00:04:43.860 --> 00:04:48.100 in the world has got a lot on the ball 41 00:04:48.100 --> 00:05:02.340 Murray had been invited the winter before, the winter of 1957-58, to go to a conference 42 00:05:02.340 --> 00:05:07.980 that was going to be held in September of 1958 at Sea Island, Georgia on scientism, 43 00:05:07.980 --> 00:05:08.980 run by Shook and Wiggins. 44 00:05:08.980 --> 00:05:10.060 Maybe you've seen their books. 45 00:05:10.060 --> 00:05:14.820 They had a number of books that came out for the Institute for Humane Studies published. 46 00:05:14.820 --> 00:05:21.220 and to write a paper on scientism for this conference and Murray accepted and he wrote 47 00:05:21.220 --> 00:05:23.260 the paper. 48 00:05:23.260 --> 00:05:28.380 And he showed the paper, another thing was he had read, besides going to lectures and 49 00:05:28.380 --> 00:05:35.580 having of course read Atlas Shrugged, he had read Barbara Brandon's M.A. thesis that she 50 00:05:35.580 --> 00:05:40.380 got in philosophy at NYU. 51 00:05:40.380 --> 00:05:47.280 So he wrote this paper for the Scientism Conference, and he gave a copy to Nathan, and part of 52 00:05:47.280 --> 00:05:52.720 the problem was, he could see that in the future he was not going to be getting along 53 00:05:52.720 --> 00:05:57.820 too well with the Randians, and the problem was that he had a Christian wife and didn't 54 00:05:57.820 --> 00:05:58.820 mind it. 55 00:05:58.820 --> 00:06:04.220 That was the worst thing. 56 00:06:04.220 --> 00:06:07.800 Nathan once said to Murray, if Barbara and I ever disagreed on anything, we would go 57 00:06:07.800 --> 00:06:11.800 Go in a room, close the door, and we wouldn't come out, and so we agreed on it. 58 00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:15.800 I mean, does this sound like a fun marriage? 59 00:06:15.800 --> 00:06:25.800 Anyway, so when Nathan had his lecture, the series of lectures, the lecture on why God didn't exist, 60 00:06:25.800 --> 00:06:31.800 I was out of town, so I had to go up to Nathan's apartment and listen to this lecture on a tape. 61 00:06:31.800 --> 00:06:35.800 Well, he simply didn't have a clue. 62 00:06:35.800 --> 00:06:45.800 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. 63 00:06:45.800 --> 00:06:56.800 So 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. 64 00:06:56.800 --> 00:07:03.800 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. 65 00:07:03.800 --> 00:07:10.880 You know. But as I said, he simply didn't have a clue about religion. Murray always 66 00:07:10.880 --> 00:07:18.840 said that they would have denied this, but he thought that they were going to give me 67 00:07:18.840 --> 00:07:22.840 a chance, a reasonable chance, to eschew my faith. And if I didn't, then Murray would 68 00:07:22.840 --> 00:07:28.120 be expected to divorce me. And since Nathan knew all the rational females in the area, 69 00:07:58.120 --> 00:08:07.120 I 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. 70 00:08:07.120 --> 00:08:15.120 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. 71 00:08:15.120 --> 00:08:27.120 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. 72 00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:31.520 September. So I'm going to tell you a couple of the things that I have all 73 00:08:31.520 --> 00:08:35.840 ten of these. There were ten points that they claimed were plagiarized from Ayn and 74 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:39.640 Barbara. I'll just tell you a couple things that they said. Well in the first 75 00:08:39.640 --> 00:08:44.000 place, one of the things that she claims to have invented, Ayn Rand, maybe 76 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:50.400 invented is the wrong word, but is that if you give a gun to a savage or a child 77 00:08:50.400 --> 00:08:53.640 they won't be afraid of it because they don't know what the gun is. Can you 78 00:08:53.640 --> 00:09:07.560 You took the concept that man has no automatic knowledge of how to survive, and the task 79 00:09:07.560 --> 00:09:12.080 of his reason is to discover the values and virtues, the ends and means needed to keep 80 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:41.080 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. 81 00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:53.080 In 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, 82 00:09:53.080 --> 00:10:12.080 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. 83 00:10:12.080 --> 00:10:22.080 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. 84 00:10:22.080 --> 00:10:35.720 It is true you use the example of the savage or the child in order to illustrate the proposition 85 00:10:35.720 --> 00:10:39.560 that the reaction depends on the meaning the actor ascribes to the stimulus. 86 00:10:39.560 --> 00:10:45.160 I pointed this out again and again in order to refute the crude behaviorist stimulus response 87 00:10:45.160 --> 00:10:50.000 scheme for the first time in an article by Greifed and Verstehen published in 1933 and 88 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:54.160 and reprinted in Gunnpromblammer in 1933. 89 00:10:54.160 --> 00:10:59.160 But I never claimed authorship of this fundamental idea, neither did Max Weber, who died in 1920. 90 00:10:59.160 --> 00:11:07.360 Anyway, they did write to all these people. 91 00:11:07.360 --> 00:11:12.320 I have here the first page, I don't know why only the first page, but of the letter that 92 00:11:12.320 --> 00:11:29.480 This morning, I could not quite believe my eyes, though forewarned by Mr. Tullock, that 93 00:11:29.480 --> 00:11:34.260 when the enclosed letter and material from the law firm of Ernst Kahn and Berner arrived, 94 00:11:34.260 --> 00:11:38.160 it appears that these two female psychoanalysts are more in need of psychiatric treatment 95 00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:39.160 than Dr. Rothbard. 96 00:11:39.160 --> 00:11:45.160 They clearly suffer from a serious case of what Sorokin and Fadds and Feubels called the discoverer's complex. 97 00:11:45.160 --> 00:11:50.160 They seem to think that they, the female innovators of unique ideas, were robbed by a bad male. 98 00:11:50.160 --> 00:11:57.160 Of course, this was before feminism. You can say things like that. 99 00:11:57.160 --> 00:12:05.160 He says, none of the ideas, the law firm, of course, he mentions that they were the stylistic similarities. 100 00:12:05.160 --> 00:12:10.160 says, none of the ideas, the law firm, parenthesis, the law firm, of course, misses the crucial 101 00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:15.160 distinction between the infringement of form and ideas, unquote, that the Rand and Brandon's 102 00:12:15.160 --> 00:12:19.160 claim can any longer be considered private literary property. They are part and parcel 103 00:12:19.160 --> 00:12:22.800 of hundreds if not thousands of books and treatises which were published in the last 104 00:12:22.800 --> 00:12:28.080 sixty years, in some cases the past few hundred years. Item number six, for example, here 105 00:12:28.080 --> 00:12:32.760 in Edith Carr, a few hundred years ago, had written as much. The long item seven of a 106 00:12:32.760 --> 00:12:39.760 The complaint, all has been rehashed in hundreds of articles since Friedrich Nietzsche. 107 00:12:39.760 --> 00:12:43.760 The Marxists and Sigmund Freud began to relativize intellectual positions. 108 00:12:43.760 --> 00:12:46.760 It is a well-known argument taught in any introductory course in logic. 109 00:12:46.760 --> 00:12:51.760 Most ridiculous of all is item number ten, on which the plaintiff based most of their case. 110 00:12:51.760 --> 00:13:00.760 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. 111 00:13:00.760 --> 00:13:08.760 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. 112 00:13:08.760 --> 00:13:15.760 I suggest Dr. Rothbard ignore these crackpots. 113 00:13:15.760 --> 00:13:25.760 Anyway, you know, to Ayn Rand, you know, she was always attacking altruism. To Ayn Rand, the enemy was religion. 114 00:13:25.760 --> 00:13:30.760 To Murray, the enemy was the state. So they really didn't have that much in common. 115 00:13:30.760 --> 00:13:36.760 There's some Aristotelian philosophy. But she was just a mild conservative. 116 00:13:36.760 --> 00:13:39.760 She only wanted to reign in the state enough so that capitalism could flourish. 117 00:13:39.760 --> 00:13:46.760 If she was alive now, she'd probably be hanging around with those red diaper babies that run the neocon movement. 118 00:13:46.760 --> 00:13:54.760 Anyway, the conference took place. The book was published. 119 00:14:24.760 --> 00:14:31.760 A friend of ours, Ralph Rico, went down to the public library and got citations for all ten points that they claimed he'd plagiarized, 120 00:14:31.760 --> 00:14:35.760 every one previous to Ayn Rand and every one by a Catholic cleric. 121 00:14:35.760 --> 00:14:42.760 With an S.J. or an O.P. after them, they thought it was a wonderful touch, a wonderful touch. 122 00:14:42.760 --> 00:14:48.760 So if any of you ever see this book, it's called Scientism and Values, you'll wonder why all these footnotes were Catholics. 123 00:14:48.760 --> 00:14:51.760 And that's the reason. 124 00:14:51.760 --> 00:14:55.040 Anyway, they were never heard from again around the end. 125 00:14:55.040 --> 00:14:59.040 With Murray, you didn't always get what you thought you'd get. 126 00:14:59.040 --> 00:15:01.520 If you asked for a 20-page paper, you got a 30-page paper. 127 00:15:01.520 --> 00:15:05.880 If you asked for a 40-page paper, you got a 65-page paper. 128 00:15:05.880 --> 00:15:09.320 The two volumes of the projected three-volume history 129 00:15:09.320 --> 00:15:13.200 of economic thought that came out about the time Murray died 130 00:15:13.200 --> 00:15:19.200 was supposed to be an answer to the Heidbrenner book, which 131 00:15:19.200 --> 00:15:21.160 is only a few hundred pages. 132 00:15:21.160 --> 00:15:34.160 and 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. 133 00:15:34.160 --> 00:15:45.160 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. 134 00:15:45.160 --> 00:16:14.080 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.