This is a special session of the Brown Bag today.
I'm taking over from Mark Thornton, who couldn't be here today.
But we're very honored to have today in town with us George Cother,
who knew all the greats and socialized with them.
Lee, Ayn Rand, Emma Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises.
And very honored to have him here today to be able to speak with us
about some of his experiences.
He's also responsible for the Mises bus that's out front here.
Mr. Cotter arranged the entire project and supervised it and was a benefactor towards it and also right now he's doing the same thing for Professor Rothbard.
Unfortunately, he never was able to get actually measured for the vessel. The person who will do it has to do it entirely from pictures.
But Mr. Cotter's arranging that. Also, he's a great benefactor for the Mises Institute. We're very pleased to have you here today, sir. Please.
Thank you very much. I'm honored to be here. I'm not an economist, as they say, but I'm a journalist economist, and I've often thought of writing a book titled, Some Economists Aren't, because there are some economists teaching in some places I feel confident who don't really know as much about it as I do, but that's your problem, that's what you're going to change.
I'll try to confine this entirely to memories of Mises, after which I'll add on memories of Rothbard, because I met Mises first, and as a result of that, that's how I met Rothbard.
So one stroke of good luck led to another, and both became very warm friends.
and it started when I was working for the foundation for economic education which
at that time was planning to produce a periodical which has now evolved into
the Freeman and at that time there was Baldy Harper there and Paul Perot and
maybe some others whose names might not mean much to you but after six months
there, it was determined that well maybe we shouldn't put out a periodical, should we
take advertising or shouldn't we and so on, it was a problem in entrepreneurial judgment
which was a little bit too much down to earth for the lofty discussions that were taking
place at the time with fellows like Leonard Reed and Baldy Harper, I must say one thing
Well, what are you? What is your answer? He said, would you believe Russia? That's the kind of a mind-ball he had. He could be right, but he couldn't. That doesn't look much like it yet.
Well, while I was at the Foundation, one, eating lunch all alone in the cafeteria, they had taken this old home and turned it into an institute.
What was, what had been a big spacious kitchen, they'd cut up into little dining nooks.
And I was in one of these dining nooks alone at a table for four.
And in walked Leonard Reed, with a stranger, short man, about, in fact, a little bit shorter
than I am, I think.
Completely dressed, you know, not casual, jacket and tie and all that.
And Leonard came in, he walked over to the table, he said, George, I'd like to have you meet Dr. Mises.
Well, I didn't know if Dr. Mises was an economist or a medical doctor or what he was.
So he said, may we join you for lunch? I said, sure.
So Mises is on one side of me and Reed's on the other.
And it wasn't, as I later described to a newspaper man who interviewed me for,
for, I was going to make a talk in my hometown in Connecticut on inflation and they interviewed
me and he said, well, how did you get this way? And I said, well, it all starts with
a young man sitting down with a man named Mises. He was like a physics student sitting
down with Einstein for lunch, something like that. But it wasn't long into that lunch when
I realized I was talking to an intellectual giant. I mean, I was blinded, really. I was
bowled over by it. And I guess my interest showed through pretty rapidly, and some of
my comments must have pleased him, or questions, or whatever. He said to me in a very, almost,
and I wouldn't say pleading but in a very inviting way. He said, would you like to join my seminar?
And I said, oh, you bet I would. He says, come to New York University next Tuesday, 725. Yes, sir. Okay.
Well, I was there as a chappy, young guy. I'm about 20 years older than Murray, 19 to be exact, I guess.
so here's this young feisty fellow sitting I don't I don't think we sat
next to each other except and when the thing was over we sat next to each other
on the subway coming up some of the New York University was was down as you know
downtown and we were riding up the subway together and Murray and I got
talking and I instantly realized here's another real smart guy and a very
This was a very affable one and he had some books in his hand and I said, what are you reading? He says, there, look at this one, title, Knox, Our Enemy, The State, the first book Murray handed me, and later, well, I'll tell you more about Murray later, but as the seminars went on, I not only attended myself, but this is the, this is a
Characteristic, it was a characteristic of Lou Rises. If you showed any interest, he had the time, he had the patience, he didn't disdain, even the stupidest person, if the stupidest person asked a question, he would give them an answer in a way that he hoped that this uninitiated could understand.
it was nothing haughty about him he was for a man of his mind he was amazingly humble in his manner and very almost bashful in his behavior especially around ladies and he would welcome my wife and I took my wife many times which was a good thing to do and then she understood the way I was acting
I was pretty well before she passed on, and I took my two sons, and they are ardent Misesians, free market, and one of them, I hope, is sending you some checks now, and if he isn't, I'm going to kick him in the pants.
But this was characteristic, Mises was a man who was generous with his mind, much more
so than, the only contrast I can make is, I had attended many meetings at the Montelerin
Society and I wasn't sure where Professor Friedman stood because I'd heard stories
at his last meeting, I was out, maybe I had to go to the washroom, I was out of the hall,
Friedman just said, as far as he's concerned, you can do away with the Federal Reserve.
I had never, of course, I haven't read all of Friedman, so one time I wrote Friedman
and I said, what is your position at this moment on money?
He had been quoted as having favored a discount rate or so and so one time and another rate
and another time somewhat like the fellow of Harvard up at Boston, but I got a letter back
from Friedman.
My position on money is precisely what it always has been sincerely, you know, something.
In other words, I've got a real brush-off answer.
Well, I've seen Mises meet very ignorant people who are asking ignorant questions, but he
never brushed them off.
He was a gentleman, he was courteous, he listened, and took his time, patience, which I think
is exceptional for a man with all that brilliance.
Now the other thing, oh, he also had a very soft, gentle voice.
He never pounded, he never did a Rothbard.
Murray was just the opposite, because Murray was outgoing and effusive and Mises was quiet.
In the seminar, we had Henry Haslett there, Larry Fertig, Percy Graves.
We had a very interesting collection of people.
I was the only journalist, there was a manufacturer, there was a young Japanese student, Toshio
by Murata, who has translated this book, I think, yes, in the Japanese, he's translated
Human Action in the Japanese, he finished that I think about a year, maybe two years,
a year and a half ago, and a prodigious result that you can see coming out of that Mises seminar.
I didn't produce anything, but as Hayek said to me, he said to us in Oxford, it's important
that we talk to these dealers in secondhand ideas.
Well, at that time I didn't realize that Hayek himself was a dealer in secondhand ideas.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, we're all dealing with lots of secondhand ideas.
But Mises never threw his weight around except in his books, that's why he threw his weight
around.
Now the other characteristics about him that you might be interested in, I was sitting,
the seminar room was just about this large and the table was just about this big actually
and I was way down in the other, the room was oval and I was way down in the end of the oval and Mises was in the middle. He's where this gentleman here would be and he was talking this way and that way and I didn't know that Mises had a very bad hearing problem. That's the one thing, one touch of vanity that he had. He didn't want anybody in the know. He couldn't hear very well. He had a hearing aid but he didn't even want, he was not, he was a little embarrassed about it.
So I'd ask a question or make a comment, and his habit was to tell from his prodigious memory, he would make a point, an economic theory, and then he would say, for example, then he'd go into an anecdote from the Napoleonic Wars, or the potato war in Austria, or some incident in history, to demonstrate, not demonstrate, but to
would characterize the point he was trying to make, and then he would finish his little narrative, then he'd stop, and he'd look around the table, waiting for somebody, well, everybody was so overawed by this man's mind, there were very few people who would speak up, even Hazlitt, although Hazlitt remained silent, largely out of deference to the rest of us in the room, give the rest of the chance, you know, and Hazlitt himself a very modest man.
didn't want to keep making a comment after Mises that I would be down at the end there
and I was really, well I was terribly disappointed, I thought the man was ignoring my question
and I didn't realize later he couldn't even hear what I said and he didn't want to say
I can't hear you. It's just a little bit of vanity, which is understandable. He always
There's another personality thing is his dress, he never, anybody who's read this book, the
market mentions it in there, he would never appear in public or even in private without
a coat, without a jacket and tie, he was very fussy.
And when he came out to the house for dinner, he'd be invited for dinner at seven o'clock
and you could you knew you could be fooling around in the kitchen in the dining room when the doorbell rang you look at seven o'clock right on that dot just like if you've seen pictures of him in his military uniform you know there's one in this book he was a really smart pressure Austrian officer when he was in the military and his military preciseness and his exact exactness on time in addition to coming to my house and
When we go for a walk, they went to, Lew and Margaret went up in the country, up in Vermont
every summer to have a little vacation.
And they invited us to come up and see them.
We'd go up there and we'd check into the nearby inn, you know, and we'd go out to dinner together
and we'd take a walk in the woods and you'd be walking along and Mises would discover
I had a friend who was a sculptor, and a good one, and I asked her, would you, if I gave you a commission, she said, for Mises, you know, she knew who he was, she had met him at dinner parties at our house, and she said, I won't charge you anything, it's an honor for you to ask me to do it, and I said, all right, I'll ask him, so I asked, I asked Lewis,
Again, you see, humility. You wouldn't have that trouble with Hayek. No way. Am I right, Professor?
For example, the first Mont Pelerin meeting I attended as a guest was in Switzerland,
That lovely resort hotel over the valley of the Angadine there and Professor Hayek, for
whom I have the most profound respect of course, I never forgot the speech he made at the end
of the meeting.
He announced that after, this was in 57, which is exactly ten years after the founding of
of the Society.
He announced that he had carried the burden of this presidency of this society for ten
years and he felt it was time to lay down the reins and so on.
And then he expatiated a little more on a few words and I said to my wife, it reminds
me of, was it Mark Anthony, thrice upon the lubrical he fused the crown, you know, like
Speaking of Caesar. After refusing it thrice, he took it. Old Hayek, you know, he loved
the limelight, no question about it. And his brother, I got a letter from his brother the
other day in England who had heard that I had a bus ride to Hayek through pictures the
same way we were going to do Murray. And it turned out very well. I had my own pictures
and when the sculptor put the calipers on his head, Mises turned red. He blushed like a baby. He was so embarrassed to have his tic-tac-tac.
And another thing about him that amazed me, on the wall in his apartment, you remember the old pictures of Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, the grey mutton chop.
He had a nice picture of old Franz Joseph, his emperor, still hanging on the wall, which
illustrates again the difference between Mises and his student Rothbard.
I can't imagine Rothbard ever hanging a picture of an emperor on the wall.
But the other things that might be worth telling about him, well I probably shouldn't tell
this but I will because it's embarrassing for myself, being a writer and being asked
sometimes to write all sorts of things including some which were a little, not salacious but
a little naughty, you know, Ogden Nash was an expert at that,
Limericks and so on.
So I had dashed off something for this chap who was having
a birthday party across the street.
And I made the mistake when Mises came to dinner one night.
I said, what do you think of this or something?
And of course, he assumed I had written it, which I had.
I didn't mention it when I handed it to him, but he looked at it.
That was his answer. Sorry when he could express his thorough disgust that I would ponder with such a thing.
But he, oh, there are so many things. My memory is not what it was, of course, but he, oh, yes.
Near the end of his days when his mind was beginning to get fuzzy, we went down to dinner
at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park in New York City because I knew they were
going to be playing some Viennese music and so on, and there was Mrs. Mises, of course,
Margaret and my wife and I, and I think perhaps their daughter from England was there.
But Lew was sitting next to me and the music came on.
He didn't say much during the dinner because, you know, he wasn't alone before he passed
on.
And when the music started he started to hum and he started to go this way and he was humming
Viennese Music. So he was typically, as Murray has written many times, he was the quintessence
of the Viennese gentleman, you know. And I don't know whether Murray ever told you this,
but they used to go, in Europe they used to go to the opera. But when they got to New
York they had lost a lot of money and spent a lot of money on trying to get there, fleeing,
you know Margaret tells about the I titled the chapter for a flight from Europe in fact I titled all the chapters in her book but she tells how difficult it was getting out of Europe and he arrived here pretty hard up I think although nobody told me that but that was of course he was a very prudent man and he lived very humbly he I spoke to Larry Ferdy about that once I said what are we gonna do I said what are we
What can they do when Lew gets, you know, unable to continue his work?
Are we going to raise a fund for Frederic's own true worry, he says, the old boy is all right.
Well, the inference was that the old boy had made enough money in the market, or in the economy, to take care of himself, which I'm sure...
I can say one thing about it, there was one line in his book, just one line and I read
it and that line was, in fact when I did the condensation, did you ever see that little
thing I did on human action? I should have brought some copies. I boiled down human action
into one, not human action, but I boiled down the essence, like you concentrate orange juice,
and I took the principal points of his economic philosophy and without putting
any words of mine in at all, I took all the German construction out, reversed the
sentences, I took phrases out of one sentence and added them to another to
express the same thought that took him three or four sentences because of the
German language, he was thinking in German and writing in English. Anyway this
little book came out and as I was putting this book together there was one line
And it hit me, it said, the falling exchange rate predicts the coming inflation, and I
read it again, I started to think, well I can't tell you how much that one sentence
I bought my first Swiss francs in 1957, and all I can remember is that in 1972 the Swiss
franc was worth 25 cents U.S. Yesterday or the day before it was worth 85 cents.
So I can credit Professor Mises at one sentence, got me to think, and I figured it backwards
because I knew the inflation was coming, but I hadn't realized the impact of the import
of the exchange rates and when it began to, it's been sliding a long time, but recently
it's been diving.
So anyway, Lew, we didn't have to, I didn't have to work at Raising Money.
And Frederic, who himself was quite a wealthy man, for all I know, Frederic, I don't know
whether he needed any help, but I do know that his last days were comfortable.
But they never, to show you how frugal they must have been, when he came to New York he
settled in this apartment up in the upper, I don't know, any of you, Roger, you've probably
been there, haven't you?
No, I haven't.
was up on Central Park West, the corner of 77th Street, and it was a very, it was a rent
control, the anomaly is that here's a professor who's opposed to rent control, he's living
in a rent control, he had to, all apartments were rent controlled at the time he moved
in, and he stayed there, never moved, never lived anywhere else as his permanent home
in the United States, that one apartment, and one thing I can tell about is this must
relate to his military bearing and he walked like a military.
When I was helping Margaret on this book she, sometimes the first time she came out to my
house in Connecticut and we sat down at the table and she had this manuscript and it was
Law.
It was a two-hour drive and sometimes I had to go into New York anyway.
I would wind up working at her place.
And she kept saying, just stay overnight, you don't have to stay overnight and work
some more on the book.
Let's get the book.
Push.
He was a pusher.
And all right, so I stayed overnight twice and then I couldn't stay any more because
Lew Mises' bed, he said, you can sleep in Lew's bed. His bedroom, his bed was in his office, which is about a little larger, like, if you squared this, no, it wouldn't be. It would be if you didn't, if you cut it off here, and his bed, by golly, was like an army cot. It was a flat thing, you know, about so wide, it went this way. God's name, did that man sleep in his bed?
Maybe he slept in the bedroom where I never saw the bedroom, presumably, but she said you can sleep in Lou's bed.
She said, Lou's bed? Maybe that's where he took his naps. But it was Army style, I'll tell you that.
I can't recall any other incidents that could bear taping.
Now, I'd like to add a couple of things about Murray.
Murray, when we first met, we came up together on the subway quite often.
I came up to catch the train up to Pelham, where I lived then, and sometimes I'd actually
drive down there and park the car and I'd drive Murray home.
and not very often, a couple of times, I think, but the first time I did, insisted, oh, you
must come up and have a piece of, have a coffee and a piece of cake, and I met Murray's parents,
very nice people, he worked, his father worked for an oil company, very nice, and I could
tell right offhand, it was a fine family relationship, and they're pretty proud of their son even
before he had achieved what he has. I could sense that. And of course, I realized, I figured
I knew, I didn't realize how far Murray would go, but I could certainly see the potential.
And Murray and I, and Joey and my wife became good friends and they came down and we had
another thing I learned through Mises in economics. I went down to the Virgin Islands on a vacation
with no intention of buying anything, didn't have that much to buy anyway, to buy with.
A real estate man got me up on a hill overlooking the sea on two sides, St. Croix, and it was
a beautiful view, and I said, how much is this two-acre lot?
He said, $16,000, right away.
Well, a 100-foot lot, tell them New York, down the street from me, is worth about $16,000, $150 feet.
And here you've got two acres over, no snow, no slush, no train going by, no traffic.
So I said, something's wrong with this ratio.
So I said, all right, I went down, I put down a down payment to hold a lot. If I hadn't
had a sense of relative values, you know, I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't studied
what little economics I gleaned from Mises, which I consider for me quite a lot actually.
But I owe that man not only what he did for my mind, but what he did for my pocketbook.
Very practical.
And maybe you should put that in some of your lectures to these young guys, you know.
Did you ever expect to make any money if you can't read Human Action?
But Murray came down there with Joey, and we had a wonderful time.
I'm going to use most of that all of the time that I can to helping the cause of freedom
in one way or another and of course with all these institutes fee, this one.
I might have an anecdote about going to Russia with what's his name in Cato, I think my memory
I heard that they were going to have a Cato seminar in Moscow and I called up, oh my heavens I'm embarrassed I can't remember the name, Ed Crane, I called him Ed Crane, I said, Ed how would you like to take a bus to Ludwig von Mises to Moscow and present it to the Mayor?
," and he said, Well, that's lovely. I said, Well, I can get you one. I'll get you one.
Well, he said, That's very nice, George, but he said, I'd rather have one of Hayek.
I said, Why? Good Lord. I said, Mises was Hayek's teacher. Hayek praised Mises as his
He says, teach, why do you want to take? Well, you know, he says, Hayek won the Nobel Prize.
All right, if we got to do it with Hayek, we'll do it with Hayek. So I said, Hayek's
on his deathbed in Germany, in Freiburg, Freiburg, Freiburg. So we can't, we'll have to try it.
I'll find out if it can be done from photographs. And of course I'm happy that it did turn out well. I'm pleased that I sponsored and helped raise the money. In fact, the Mises bus, I paid all of it, it wasn't a big deal, the Mises bus, the casting of that cost $150 back in 1950.
To cast that bust today is 975. And to cast a Hayek's 1001 or something, because the Hayek bust is a little bigger than me, Hayek actually had a larger head than me.
I won't make a pun and say it in more ways than I want. Having said that, I would, I did.
Hayek, God bless him, he tried up to the end, he wrote that bloody book, I don't know what you think of it, The Fatal Conceit and the interesting thing was, just about the time that we took that, I took two bus, I was determined to take a bus to Mises, so I went along, I crated up the bus to Hayek and I crated up the bus to Mises, two of them made specially for this occasion and got on a plane to
Germany, we went from Germany to Moscow, we went from Frankfurt then on to Moscow.
And we uncrated the Mises bus, in fact we uncrated, no that was another time, the Hayek.
And I turned it over to Crane and his boys and on the day of the presentation in order
In order to make the flight to Poland in time for a reception into Warsaw, in order to make
that I had to forego the presentation to the mayor.
So Ed Crane wanted to, said I want you to be there and we'll present it.
So I had to leave early and I said, I'll tell you what, I'll write you out two paragraphs
you can read, a statement from me to the mayor and I'll just hand it to you.
So he did it.
Then I got on to Warsaw and they took me in the Oscar Long study, you know, the famous
Oscar Long with whom Mises had a little post-mortem confrontation.
But I don't know, of course, a lot of the books were in foreign languages and I couldn't
spot them.
But, incidentally, I went through Kane's private library in Cambridge, and his books, his library,
private library was three quarters the size of this, and ninety percent of the books in
that library were on mathematics.
And I went to the King's College library shelf, and, of course, there was nothing of
I think it was Hayek's, one of Hayek's, I don't think it was even the Road to Serfdom.
No, it wasn't. But that was King's College. I forgot what year that was, but the thing
that struck me about Keynes, very few books on economics, most of them about mathematics.
We had a little memorial service for Mises, a very small one, up in the cemeteries where his ashes are deposited.
And we had a wonderful memorial service for him in New York, and I dare say the one for Murray will be the same, and I'll be there.
I think I get my plane reservations at the time.
and I just can't imagine anything really new in economics, and of course this is speaking as a non-economist, but if Rothbard, the only thing, you've probably heard the story of somebody who went up to Mises one day after Rothbard's Man Economy and State came out and said,
Professor, you realize of course that Professor Rothbard has differed with you on the point
of monopolistic competition and so on.
What do you have to say about that?
And Mises said, all I have to say to you sir is that Professor Rothbard is a fine economist.
That's another example of his humility and his intellectual purity.
I mean he wouldn't, he just wouldn't, there was nothing, nothing, nothing, Mises never
acted.
His only action was all up here.
Hayek was, Friedman was pretty good, well Friedman doesn't do too much of it.
These didn't have time for any of the persiflage that goes with the profession and having,
I don't know what else I can tell unless if you have any questions I can't imagine that
I could be able to answer them and I would try.
Someone told me once that Mises actually owned a car but was a terrible driver.
That's right.
Yeah, he was and in fact, that's a thank you anecdote I've forgotten, Margaret called me
For me, I think it was in Connecticut then, she said, George, I have a favor to ask you.
I said, yes.
You know, she said, Lew is a scholar, he's not a businessman, he's a scholar, and we
have to buy a car, and I want to know what you think, is the Pontiac so-and-so good on
He was a hardy fellow, though. There's mountain climbing. They used to climb mountains. Well,
he was in the mountain troops, you know, in Austria during World War I. I wonder if he
ever ran into Fritz Kreisler. He was in the troops, too, in World War I. And Kreisler
wrote a book about it. And it's hard. I don't know where you'd find that book anywhere.
I got a whole little copy and I Xeroxed one chapter where Chrysler tells how on Christmas day the troops fighting on both sides got out of the trenches, went and had a cake and rum party in no man's land and so on, got along fine, jolly, and they went back and started shooting at each other.
Chrysler tells us out of his own personal prints.
Mr. Koffman, you mentioned Toshio Murata.
What did you say?
You mentioned Toshio Murata.
Oh, yeah.
He's been in contact with the Institute in the last couple of years.
I would imagine, yeah.
We were glad to hear from him.
He's a very dedicated scholar and a good one.
He's got the free market economic theory right down the path.
Mr. Coffin, how much time did Henry Hazlitt spend with Ludwig von Mises?
Well, Henry Hazlitt was a pivotal character in the whole tale.
He was in touch with Mises by mail before Mises came to America, and I think probably
The only one, unless Mises had been in touch with that fairly sound economist in Columbia back in the early days.
Mockle?
No, no, no, before Mockle. Was he at Columbia? His name began with a B.
Beckhart?
No, Benjamin Beckhart.
Now, he goes way back. This is back in really 1900, 1920 back in there.
Oh, another thing I forgot that that's right. I forgot to tell you. This was interesting about Mises.
The first seminar, he mentioned, well, I didn't mention all the three books.
The first book he said, now you should all read the Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method.
That's by Cohen, who was quite a logician. Wrote several books on logic and philosophy.
Cohen was at the City College at the time. That's the first book you should get.
Then the next book was, when we got into money, you should read Lombard Street by Badgett.
And I ran out, and every time he mentioned a book, I'd run right out to use the bookstore
and get a hold of it.
That's how I built my library on the books that he mentioned.
And I still have my copy of Lombard Street, and that book bears re-reading right now in
view of what's going on in world monetary markets.
It's a fantastic book in which Badgett says, I have described the financial manipulations
go on with the Bank of England in Lombard Street and I disapprove of them entirely but
I must confess I don't see any hope.
He said that before Hayek's Constitutional Liberty came out and if you happen to read
There was a review, Mises did a review of the Constitution of Liberty for a paper called Christian Economics which I fought tooth and nail to try to change it.
I was one of the first ones hired by the foundation to publish Christian Economics.
I said, look at this, economics is economics. It's not Christian, it's not Jewish, it's not Muslim, it's economics.
You're going to put bad labor on it. Well, I know, but this is going to ministers, you know, it's going to the weirs, you know, and I'm going to interpret the Bible, and I'm going to get stories out of the Bible to illustrate the market, you know something like that.
We've got to call it Christian. Okay, I can't fight Wall Street, only this time it was the Sun Oil Company. This foundation was bankrolled by J. Howard Pugh, the famous Sun Oil, two or three brothers, I think.
So we call it Christian economics. Well, out comes Constitutional Liberty and the head
of the foundation, Kirzner. I imagine he asked Lew to write a review of it. I doubt that Lew
Who did? Maybe, I don't know. At any rate, I know it was published. And Mises paid any
compliments all through his review and then did his little demonstration of his intellectual
honesty by saying, however, however. You know, you could tell that he was gentrifying his
writing, to be gentle to Hayek. I could see that if he were talking personally to some
close friend, he'd say, but the way I could just sense the way he worded this thing, he
soft-chewed his criticism at this one point. I forgot what it is now. But otherwise, it
was praising the book. It was two volumes, I think, wasn't it? Constitutional Litigants?
What did Mises think of Ayn Rand?
Oh, God, that's another...
We were walking down the street one day and I said something about it.
About Rand, I told him I'd been out to Hollywood to be interviewed by the great Cecil B. DeMille
to Mill for a job, running his Right to Work Foundation, and while I was there I was in
the home of Herb Cornell, who was Leonard Reed's number two man when they started the
Foundation for Economic Education. Being in Hollywood and being in Herb Cornell's home,
with Ayn Rand out there in the Paramount Studio writing for Paramount, I said, this was after
the famous, that was shrugged, had been published, I said, I say, yeah, Ayn Rand's over here,
I said, I thought I might drop in and see what she sounds like.
I read her book, he said, oh, why don't you call her up?
He says, I've got her, I've got her home phone number.
I said, all right, I'll call her up and make an appointment. So I called up from his home that very evening, at six o'clock in the evening, and she said, hello.
I said, Miss Rand? Yes. I said, you don't know me, but I'm recalling you from Herb Cornell's home. My name is George Couture. I'm a journalist.
I don't know you. What's your name, Peter? How do I know you're not a communist?
That was enough for me. I was going to take that and go. Slammed the phone down.
Well, the name must have gotten through to her somehow, because she starts showing up at the Mises seminars
When they were held in Gallatin House, which was the home of the former Secretary of the
Treasury years ago, Gallatin, on Washington Square, one of those nice old homes, and the
room was smaller than the room in the York University, but the table was beautiful. It
must have been Mr. Gallatin's original antique furniture. It was an antique, yeah. And it's
It's an oval table again, Mises at this end, and this time I'm right next to him, and right
across the table, who's clearing it, me and Ayn Rand, and I saw her come in.
I spotted her right away from her picture recording.
So I thought, well, I'm not going to give this dame a nod of my head.
All the other people in the seminar went, oh, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, so I walked
Right by her, didn't even look at her, sat down, and she's right across me. I still didn't like that.
And every now and then I turn over and I try to catch her, look at her out of the corner of my eyes, she be glaring at me.
I was not recognizing her importance, and she didn't like that.
But Mises said one day, I said, what do you think of Ayn Rand?
He says, fair, he says, one thing, she's no philosopher, she's no philosopher.
But can't he say it jutly, you know, instead of unloading on her, which I would have done.
You mean that shrew, that...
and everything, her famous speech on money, and that was struck, which is the only part of the book worth reading, and that long speech, it's a tour de force, it's really worth reading, because she includes in that speech the concept of the morality of money, that you can tell where the morality of a country is by its money, and it's that simple.
Gold is real money. Gold is silver, but especially gold. Not silver, it was silver and it was in India, but the difference between real money and phony money and credit money and checks and the rest of it, he could have unloaded on Rand, but I'm sure he would love that, I'm sure he didn't take time to read it, but that speech on money, and it was all Misesian,
and all, philosophy and one of the whole things. So she, where she learned it along the way,
I don't know, but she must have learned something from Mises. She must have been reading a lot
of Mises before she came to the seminar, whether she's done it in the net, whether she's done
more harm than good or who knows. She certainly followed up a couple of lives I know about
Well, thank you very much. I've talked too much, too long.
Thank you for watching.