We're having today, for the Mises Institute Oral History Project, we're interviewing the
distinguished historian of
classical liberalism, Ralph Reiko, who was the
closest associate of Murray Rothbard, and
we're going to ask him a number of questions about his early life and career. And Ralph, I'd like to start off
By asking, I believe you were born in the Bronx. Can you tell us something about what it was like growing up there?
Well, no, I wasn't born in the Bronx. I was born in what was then Italian Harlem, now Spanish Harlem.
And David, you must know this, the Archbishop Usher in the 17th century?
Oh, yes.
Right. He dated the creation of the world from October 23rd, 4004 BC. Well, I don't
know about the 4004 BC, but October 23rd, I think, is very auspicious. I was born on
October 23, 1936, on 107th Street in Italian Harlem. But very soon my parents made a couple
of real good decisions. My Italian relatives were fine people, basically working people,
People, some of them on small shops, but very warm-hearted people.
But, nonetheless, when I was very young, we moved up to the Bronx, and that was a whole
different world.
The first good thing my parents did was put me in the public schools, not parochial schools.
I don't think I would have been very happy with those, being with those tough Irish kids
I was much better being in the public schools where everybody was Jewish, not some of the
old tenured teachers who were Irish or German, but all my friends were Jewish.
We lived in the Bronx also.
In my apartment building,
there was only one other non-Jewish family.
There was the Greeks, the Athos family next door,
very nice people, but everybody else was Jewish.
Down on the fourth floor,
this is a bit of an interesting anecdote.
Most of them were just FDR lovers, but there were some Norman Thomas socialists sitting
on the fourth floor in 4B, Mrs. Yerovitz, who was a communist. Her husband belonged
to the Furriers Union. And very early on, in my early teens, I started to get, as I'll
and I also wanted to spread my views so I sent a letter to I think it was the Daily News where I said that Joseph Stalin had been a bank robber, well everybody knows that, he was collecting funds for the Bolsheviks and the Corpuses in Georgia.
So my mother showed this around, she led her to the editor, wonderful and so on, but Mrs.
Shervitz got very angry, and she said, you know, Stalin could sue you for that.
And I panicked.
If Stalin sues me, my father's going to kill me.
How am I going to get an attorney?
Well, it turned out Stalin didn't sue me, but this is an indication, as I say, most
of them were just Roosevelt lovers, but there were some really quite nice people, and so
Growing up in the Bronx, yes, all of my friends, some of them were real smart. In junior high,
my best friend was Leon Levy. I don't know what age you are, maybe 14 or something. Anyway,
in his room, behind his desk, he had the periodic table of the elements. He was very much into
Chemistry, turned out to be, as I learned in later years, a geologist down in Texas.
But very smart kids, some of them were.
Now, well, let's talk about my political influences and so on.
My father used to bring home the Journal American, a big Hearst newspaper.
And we also saw the Daily News. They had, in those days, great isolationist Washington
correspondent, John O'Donnell, and got the Daily Mirror. So anyway, pretty much right-wing.
And on the radio, I started to listen to Fulton Lewis, Jr. He had a 15-minute program every
Weekday and very strongly anti-communist. So that was basically my orientation. And somehow,
I forget how, I heard about Hayek's Road to Serfdom. So I read that and that opened up a lot of
In 1952, I was a head of students for Taft in New York City.
It was not a large organization, but one thing that came of it was that one day at our headquarters,
I forget some hotel downtown, the General Taft headquarters, Leonard Ligio showed up,
and that was the start of a friendship that goes on to this day. Leonard has been very influential in my life.
and also I met George Reisman because George had set up a bridge table outside of the public library on 42nd Street collecting signatures and distributing pamphlets and leaflets for Taft.
So I went over to it one time and there was something about the way I came over because the first thing that George said to me was,
We became good friends and good friends at Bronx Science.
Leonard Ligia went on to college in Georgetown, but George and I were buddies for quite a
while.
And then I was heavily into my letter writing period, so I wrote a letter to just a little
magazine that I think was put out by the Chamber of Commerce called USA.
And I mentioned, because George had introduced me to Mises, George had read Human Action
by that time, whenever he was 14, 15 or something.
and as I mentioned Mises and somehow, they must have a clipping service or something,
they found out about this up at Fee, at the Foundation for Economic Education.
And I got a letter from them and they invited me and I think I mentioned Druid also to come
came up and we were sort of poster boys at their annual Board of Directors or Board of
Trustees meeting.
There were, so I met, I was pretty impressed, some big businessmen, there was Jasper Crane
from DuPont, I think, and some others, but also, oh, and I met the people of at Fee in
those days, a very different organization I think now, but there was Leonard Reed, there
was Paul Perot, Ivan Beerly, F. A. Harper. F. A. Harper was the first one I'd ever come
Robert M. McCross, who had Murray's point of view, which I guess I'll bring up in a few minutes, let's call it the Totally Voluntary Society, to get my drift.
And F. A. Hopper was universally known as Baldi Hopper, not because he was bald. His
brother was bald. For some reason, he was called Baldi. Well, one of the mysteries.
And the great thing that happened was that Leonard Reed or somebody suggested or sent
a letter to Ludwig von Mises. Now, Eugen and I, a couple of years before that, had found
out where Mises lived. Did I ever tell you this? It's one of the most embarrassing things
that ever happened.
Yeah, and we went up to meet his apartment. He came to the door, he was dressed in a tuxedo except for his bow tie, and we asked him whether he wanted to buy a subscription to the Freeman, which the fee was putting out.
And he said, the Freeman? I already have the Freeman. And he closed the door. And George and I went out of the apartment. We didn't make any eye contact. And that was that.
At this time, we were invited guests at the Mises seminar at NYU, and Mises, of course, was not a tenured professor at NYU.
All they did was give him the room. His salary was paid by the Volcker Fund, just as with Hayek, never a tenured professor in the economics department.
His salary was paid by outside organizations also.
Sometimes I've given some of my talks to student groups at the Mises Institute,
ask them, you know your professors, you know about professors.
Can you imagine Hayek and Mises not being tenured?
And they look a little stunned.
Well, down at the Mises seminar met a lot of people and the main one was Murray Rothbard.
One question I had was, it appears that although the dominant culture when you were growing
up, it was very left-wing, you started being interested in more classical, liberal and
and conservative views quite early on.
What do you think accounted for your reaction against the predominant views?
As I say, the Jewish subculture, or basically the culture in New York and in the Bronx in
those days, was quite left-wing, but neither my family.
My grandfather, for one, was a Republican, I think because his best years were in the
business-wise, were in the 20s, but anyway, there were no leftists in my own family, so
I didn't get that, I was sort of immunized against that.
and all of these other resources, the papers I read and the radio broadcasts and so on.
But now that meeting with Murray at the Mises seminar was decisive.
I mean, Murray is the greatest intellectual influence in my life.
And we went out for coffee afterwards, and I started to get an idea that Murray was a—but you really couldn't call him a conservative, or what is he exactly?
We expressed our appreciation of Mises, and Murray said, ah yes, Mises is a great man, greatest economist of all time.
But some of us refer to, as far as his political views go, some of us refer to him as being a member of the non-communist left.
So I got the idea that this guy is somebody really different and special and extremely interesting.
He really was. Well, you guys knew Murray to an extent, you know what I'm talking about.
He was fantastically well-read. His library, you know, thousands and thousands of books.
I think it's part of the library down in Auburn now, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
Yes, and his wife, Joey, she was his absolutely perfect wife and she was so generous as a
hostess to us.
We spent endless nights up to, Joey would finally go to bed, but up to two, three o'clock
In the morning, talking about everything, Murray would jump up and get one of his books and read us a passage from it.
He read us a lot of Mencken. By the way, that's the first time I'd ever come across Mencken.
We went to movies together. Arthur had mentioned that it wasn't just Georgian and me, but Leonard Litchey also very often came around.
A few other people, Bob Hessen for a while, and we would do other things, go to movies, play board games.
My favorite board game was Risk. It was taking over, you had to try to take over the world.
Murray was constantly giving advice to other players, really disinformation.
How to Attack Someone Else, and so on, but also Ron Hamoway was an important part of the group, and so we spent a lot of time socializing all the time, and as I say, Jerry was a terrific hostess, typical of us, or at least me,
Being a kid and old, never crossed my mind to bring a bottle of wine or anything. But, you know, water off the ducks, back to them.
But this was what we call the Circle Bastiat. I see that on the Mises org web page, Danny
Sencha has a column where he talks, reuses the phrase Circle Bastiat. By the way, that's
one of the few pictures, one of the few photos, if anybody ever bothers to visit that website
that the logo is one of the few photos that was ever taken of all of us until we took
it. And if anybody wonders, the person on the extreme right there, whose face is half
cut off, is Leonard, because he was the tallest of us. She was a great woman, not the greatest
Let's see now, oh yeah, when George and I entered college, Columbia, I was at City College,
and we started a very intensive study of German, of the German language. You know that Hans
So Hoppe gets a kick out of this. You know this P. J. O. Rourke? He's a neocon, he's very popular at the Cato Institute, and he said that, he's written that the German is a language that's designed to enable you to spit into the face of the person you're talking to.
Hans thought that was funny, but we studied a German master, I would say, because right
away George got a grant from the Volper Fund to translate Mises' book on epistemological
No Problems of Economics, and also another history book that Mises thought was important.
And I got a grant to translate Mises' book on liberalism.
And that book has gone by a number of different titles.
It was finally published, I think, in 67, but it's never been out of print.
and that got me into a closer relationship with Mises because he talked over his book from time to time.
And also it was a feather in my cap when I started applying for positions as a college instructor.
But, meanwhile, a couple of things happened while I was in grad school in Chicago.
We set up a magazine called New Individualist Review, NIR, and Friedman was a faculty advisor.
We had a couple of other faculty advisors, Ben Rogge from Wabash, Stigler, and we didn't
need very much money, but Friedman was able to raise whatever he needed amongst some business
men in Chicago.
It was very easy for him.
And there was about a four or five year run of the magazine.
I see that Liberty Fund has brought up the copyright to the magazine, but now it's available
in hardcover and available from Liberty Fund.
We got some very good articles, well the first article, the first issue was by Friedman,
Capitalism and Freedom, became then the name of a book of his.
And Hayek wrote for us, I see that Armand Alshon has just passed away. Alshon wrote
for StemSets, many other people. And so that was something that I was involved with very
closely while in grad school. Another thing that happened was back in New
of Europe, and that was the split between Murray and Ayn Rand. I'd met Ayn a few
times at her apartment just through Murray. She was looking to groom as a member of what
What They Called the Collective, a kind of Randian joke, as good a joke as the Randians
of America, and Murray was very enthusiastic about Ayn, and Ayn was a brilliant woman,
The most brilliant woman I've ever met, one of the most brilliant people.
However, she was, I would say, seduced or corrupted by her later followers.
In her earlier career, her friends were people like Henry Haslip, Leonard Reed, Roswolda Lane,
people who were, to some degree anyway, her equal.
Afterwards, after Found Head came out, I think, she gathered together, or they gathered around
her a group of Canadians, Nathaniel Brandon, his wife, Barbara Brandon, Peacoff, the people
The people who run the Ayn Rand Institute now, that is, Picoff, and they were simply gushing acolytes, so she didn't hang out with her former friends, and she was surrounded by these people, and I think that that's what finally led to bad things in her life.
and Their Life.
For one thing, it led to this ridiculous affair with Nathaniel Brandon, who afterwards, true
to his inner self and his inner Tad, he downplayed by saying that he was old enough to be his
mother.
So naturally, he had to break off and go with a younger woman.
That's the way those people were, but I remember one time, there was one time when I came down to the Mises seminar and it was really very heartwarming.
Mises was giving one of his lectures and then he started talking about the importance of spreading our ideas through literature
And he said, and I mention this because we have in our company tonight, a great novelist who has,
Apples had come out by that time, who has in fact spread her ideas to many, many thousands of people.
And I was sitting right next to Ein and she was, oh, smile, she was glowing. She loved flattery.
He was like a little girl, really. And it was very sweet to see. But Murray finally had to break with Brandon, the arrogance of those people.
Some of us were in what was referred to as therapy by Brandon. He was a psychotherapist.
They had a degree in education, I think.
Anyway, so we talked about personal things.
I had the suspicion that actually Brandon was communicating some of these personal things to Ein and perhaps to others,
but I never actually found out about that.
But Brandon confronted Murray one time and said that he had to divorce Joey.
Why did he have to divorce Joey?
Well, it's obvious. She's a Christian. She's a mystic.
She was a loving woman. She was a very intelligent woman, a very bright woman.
and there was a lot of Murray's life and he was not going to give her up for a group of bozos.
So that was then that and we all had to take our stand either with Murray or with the Randians
and George Reespin and Bob Hesson went with the Randians and I and the others in the Circo
Bastiat, Ron Hamerway and Leonard went with Murray, by the way those times when we went
up to Einstein's place to chat with her and converse with her.
I remember one time he went into some big thing about the need for having a basis in
metaphysics and epistemology and so on before you could argue that the post office should
be privatized, and Leonard just went to sleep, that was it, survival mechanism he had.
Her husband, Frank O'Connor, was the best of, as far as a human being goes, was the
best of the group.
He did some amateur painting, and some of his paintings and drawings were up on the wall in their apartment.
And one of their, one of the Randroids, who was an art history major or something, had verbally, at one point, said that this particular sketch, this watercolor by Frank, reminds her of the young Michelangelo, and that's the kind of people they were.
Well, I was looking disordered from that point of view, and Frank was there, and I said,
Frank, is there something wrong with the perspective?
Oh, by the way, of course, it was skyscrapers.
I forgot to mention that.
And so I said, is there something wrong with it?
And he said, yeah, there probably is.
He was a very easygoing guy.
That's the way he got along with Hine, I think.
He loved her.
They met out in Hollywood, I think,
when she was a wardrobe consultant.
I think he was a part-time actor.
He'd been very good-looking when he was a young man.
And I think that was a model of her heroes
in her novels.
They were all handsome-looking,
wasp types. But anyway, by that time, when the split with the Randians came, I was in
Chicago. So I was back in Chicago. So it didn't really affect me.
Can you say something about Hayek and your relationship with him at Chicago?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, he was the head of my dissertation committee, so I saw him
from Time to Time, and also I had some tutorials with him that the Committee on Social Thought
had a system that they called having tutorials on particular books with particular members
of their staff.
But Hayek once frankly told me the only reason he taught was so that he could have an income
to do his research.
He had very little interest in teaching or really very little interest in students.
He was always polite, super polite, a gentleman, a aristocrat, really, and of course an immensely
A learned man, I have disagreements with him on the history of thought and other issues,
but it doesn't take away the least of his greatness.
Mises, on the other hand, loved students, that's why he would go out for coffee very
often afterwards with them.
Well, he did a lot of particular students, students who were bright and who were interested in his work.
And he was always extremely friendly, always extremely accessible.
He had anything that we might bring up. I remember one time I had known Murray for a while and drew up some of his ideas.
And I said, what do you think about Murray's idea about competing courts and police departments and so on?
And he said, Rothbard, he's always, he's for everything that's against the government.
Development. And so, Mises never wanted to get into that issue, although it came up one
time at the seminar, but he wasn't really very open to the idea of a totally voluntary
society.
Okay, my college career, my first job was at Wabash College in Indiana. Ben Rogge got
We had a position there as an instructor, and it was in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and those days were, I know, even today a town of 12,000 people.
Before I lived in Crawfordsville, the smallest city I'd ever lived in was Paris.
In Coffinsville, they sold, I swear, they sold olive oil in the pharmacy. It was a cure for earaches. So it was not exactly my place, but my sort of place.
But my friend Bruce Goldberg was teaching at Champaign-Urbana at the time, not very far away, across the border in Illinois.
And so we got together quite often with his new wife, Gabriella von Natsma, I think her maiden name, a German woman.
Wonderful. I'm still in touch with her from time to time, although Bruce is gone.
And very sharp. But anyway, so that was partially a compensation for living in Crawford School.
And the students, it was an old boys' school, it still is, I think it's the only old boys' school in the country.
But they were very bright kids, most of them. They were going to be doctors and lawyers and take over their dad's business when the time came and so on.
So from that point of view, it was quite good. And it was my first teaching experience, so I learned a lot from that.
But I still hadn't gotten through with my Ph.D. So after a few years, they let me go.
And then I got down to it and finished it quite soon, but I got a job interview in the Buffalo, at Buffalo State College, or as they like to sometimes say, the State University of New York College at Buffalo, pretending that they're the University of Buffalo across town.
I'm long retired, but I taught there for a long time, whatever, what was it, 25, 30 years. It was a good time, and some of the students were okay, but not like the Wabesh kids and not like the kids that I meet at the seminars of the Mises Institute.
In the meantime, I did a lot of traveling, and mostly paid for, well, never paid for
by me, mostly paid for by foundations or by the people that invited me, all over the U.S.,
in Canada a few times also, but mainly in Europe, all over Europe. It was one of the best parts of my life really.
I visited Poland, went down to Krakow, Warsaw, Gdansk as they call it now, and Russia.
That was funded by the Cato Institute. I gave a talk in Moscow and then went to Leningrad
and met a couple of Russian students. The communist educational system was terrible
from the ideological point of view, but otherwise it was excellent. Their English was better
The Theory of Money and Credit
To Scandinavia, I see that the Café Hayek has an old talk of mine that I gave on the Industrial Revolution in Stockholm back in, whatever, early 2000.
And what I remember from Stockholm is they like herring a lot. They really like herring.
I had to, if you couldn't believe this, I had to take a plane down to Germany to get
a decent meal.
I've traveled all over Germany, Berlin a number of times, I traveled to Cologne, that
That was at the invitation of a professor at, somehow come across, I forget how, Christian
Wartling, and I addressed his seminar, and in fact a number of talks there.
That was the genesis of my book on German liberalism that Dieter Hülspann then translated
into German.
Yes, it was at Cologne at some point that I met Guido, who, as I don't have to tell
you, is simply amazing. He teaches at a French university now, the lectures in French. German
is his native language, English is his third language, and it's absolutely flawless, besides
and everything else, I mean, is a great skill as an analyst.
Travel, let's see, as far as traveling goes,
in Italy a lot, many times in the north.
Never got any further south than Rome.
Never visited my ancestral stamping grounds
in Calabria, Naples, Sicily.
but Italy was wonderful.
Well, much could be said, of course.
In Spain, also, I took some time.
I was given a talk in Mallorca,
off the coast, off the Mediterranean coast.
So it was paid by some foundation or other.
I stopped off at Barcelona to see the Gaudí buildings. He was a great architect from Barcelona.
That was memorable. Actually, there was this Vienna, of course, many times. I didn't get
to go along on the trip that the Mises Institute took to Vienna. When was that?
Well, there have been two of them, the one most recently last year.
So, what, late 1990s?
Well, the first one was in the late 1980s.
Oh, uh-huh.
And the second one was 2011?
I think 2011, yeah.
Ah, yes, but I visited Vienna a number of times, had some friends there. As I said somewhere
or other, I just heard myself saying it, I think maybe at one of the Mises Institute
Lectures. This is, you know, this was the Vienna of Mises and Hayek and the great composers
and so on. But by the time I visited, it was very different. The socialists had come in
and they threw out the aristocrats. The Nazis came in and they threw out the Jews. And what
What you see in Vienna now is what's left. Not very much. I never went to the Far East.
It was too far. And Latin America never interested me at all, really. But Europe, traveling in
My trip to Europe was a great experience. I'm not able, I can hardly go down to the store nowadays with my rheumatism and so on, so I'm not going to be traveling to Europe anymore, but I remember it.
And maybe I should say a few things about my connection with the Mises Institute.
Please, yes.
Yes. Well, now, you have to verify this, Lew, I am not on the Institute payroll, am I?
You are not.
Right, okay. And your books are open to anybody who wants to check that, right?
Yes.
Okay, the Mises Institute is, well, let me just put it this way, it's Murray's dream come true.
I can't say too much about it and about Lew and about the staff and about the people who work there and now with, I think, Chad Parrish is in charge of your technological outreach.
He is. He's responsible for this session today, in fact.
Is that right? Well, you know, it does a fantastic job. I mean, you have audio and video presentations
that go out across the world, tens of thousands of people seeing it all the time, and you're
According to great scholars, Hans is just one of the people, Hans Hoppe, just one of
the people you've nurtured, Joseph Salerno, Guido, and of course, David also, and so on.
So it's Murray's dream come true, and it is in a number of senses.
in the sense that it is totally dedicated to the totally voluntary society, nudge-nudge,
and beyond that, dedicated to the non-aggression principle. Now, because of the personnel at
the Mises Institute, and Murray would have been totally in sympathy with this, I think
But there's a strong inclination towards Christianity and Christian morality, and as long as there's
the non-aggression principle, I have no problem with that myself personally.
But Murray, I think, would have been very sympathetic to that.
Any last questions?
Tell us about your doctoral dissertation, speaking of Christianity.
Yes, this question of the connection of liberty and Christianity was on my mind for a long time.
And it came out in my doctoral dissertation. It was on the Committee on Social Thought,
and I studied the thought of three liberal thinkers, Benjamin Cronstein, Alexis de Tocqueville,
and Lord Acton and well basically Constable was a deist but very sympathetic to Christianity.
Torfield was extremely sympathetic to Christianity although there's evidence that he was actually
an agnostic but Lord Acton of course was a great Catholic historian so that was the general
," and allowed me to get into the thought of these men to a very great extent.
When I started out, you may be, well, David will know this, there's a famous history of political thought by George Sabine.
Oh, yes. Yes, it came out in Route 31.
It was a classic in its time. And Benjamin Constant was not even mentioned.
Nobody mentioned Constant in the English-speaking world.
I mean, it's part of the parochialism of Anglo-Saxons.
So I was one of the first people, really, to get into Constant to a large extent.
And Constant is still my favorite 19th century liberal.
Hayek said that Tocqueville and Acton were his favorite 19th century liberals,
But, well, that's Hayek, as far as I'm concerned, a mistake, but Constanze was terrific all the way through.
RALPH, you mentioned Bruce Goldberg. Isn't it right that you converted Bruce Goldberg to libertarianism?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did. Actually, I introduced him to libertarian ideas. The one who converted him was Murray.
Because Bruce came down to the Sarah Bastiat meetings at Murray's place and they talked
on and on and Bruce raised his questions and Murray answered them.
And it was Bruce that then went on to Princeton, the grad school, and I went down to Chicago.
And at Princeton, Bruce met Bob Nozick.
Bob Nozick, I think I have a little piece on that that's in my archive at lewrockwell.com
on what happened with Bob Nozick and Bob became great friends at Princeton and Bob read everything
anybody suggested that he thought might be interesting and so Bob started reading libertarian
Works, and became a libertarian for a while. Afterwards, I think he had some second thoughts.
He was basically a free enterprise man throughout his life, throughout his unfortunately short
life, but he was a libertarian for a while. Bruce also converted temporarily, another
My grand student at Princeton was George Will. But George Will went on to study at Oxford
and was seduced by the whole Tory business and wrote a book called Statecraft as Soulcraft.
You will probably hear the echoes of some communist slogan, engineers of the soul, intellectuals
or engineers of the soul, but Bob Nozick was also obviously a very interesting and I guess
philosophically important and influential man.
IHS was a great institution and you were long times associated with them.
What led to your disassociation from them?
What was my...?
Why did you kind of move away from the IHS?
I didn't really, my connection at IHS was Leonard, Leonard Ligio, who sponsored my giving
talks around the different campuses and so on for a while, but now I think it's become
quite a different organization, as they all do, they all become Mendeo Cond, sooner or
A little later it seems, but that was useful and helpful and valuable as it was going on.
And, you know, really, I don't want to say it, but anything to get out of Buffalo.
Really, I'm used to the place now.
Anything else come up?
One thing, is this right in your, you were influenced quite a bit by Paul Goodman. Could you tell us a bit about him?
Well, yeah, that was a mistake, unfortunately. I think he called himself a Tory anarchist. Anyway, his political views were quite attractive.
and I went through a phase where I believed in liberation and in the Goodman-esque sense.
But, I forget who sponsored it, it was some other foundation where a bunch of other speakers,
Tom Sauce was there, Paul Goodman, some others myself, and I got to know him a little better
personally, and I came to the conclusion that he was kind of phony. So, that was, as I say, a mistake.
One other question. A great many of your writings, you've done very important work in revisionist history.
Could you say something about how you became acquainted with that?
Oh, sure. I've got a connection with Murray. You know, all the things that I owe to him.
One of the main things I owe to him is my interest in revisionism, that is revising the government's line about how we got into wars, how we conducted wars, the aftermath of wars, and so on.
And Murray introduced me to that. He was a big revisionist in that sense.
and the first book that Mises Institute published of mine, Great Wars, Great Leaders, a Libertarian
Rebuttal, is basically a revisionist work and is dedicated to Murray for that reason
and I have a little introduction there about Murray and revisionist history.
You know, if we didn't have revisionism, we'd still believe that the USS Maine was in Havana Harbor on a goodwill tour,
It was blown up by the vicious Spaniards that Lincoln went to war, invaded the South to free the slaves, that Woodrow Wilson loved peace, that Franklin Roosevelt spent every day and night soiling ceaselessly for peace.
That's the sort of stuff we'd believe if we didn't have revisionism.
So I think another reason Murray would love the work of the Mises Institute is because of their interest in revisionism.
Anything else come up?
Could you talk a little bit about the relationship at Chicago between Friedman and Hayek and the rest of the economics department?
Yeah, well, as I say, Hayek was always punctilious in his politeness, so they were very civil
to each other.
I don't think they had very much to do with each other socially, because as you know,
Friedman and Stigler didn't think that Hayek was a real economist. I don't know what they thought he was, a rocketeer or something.
But of course, every year, whenever the Nobel Prizes are given out, the University of Chicago gets a full page ad in the New York Times,
Times, lists all the Nobel laureates and all the different disciplines connected with Chicago,
and they list Hayek also, giving the impression that Hayek had something to do with the economics
department, although he was purely on the Committee on Social Development.
So I don't think that Hayek had much to do with anybody in the economics department.
The last time I saw Hayek was in Freiburg, where he, I think, still having money problems
Problems or Money Issues, went to teach after he retired from the Committee on Social Threat.
And I think I was with Bruce Colbert at the time we were spending some time in Freiburg.
And it was an interesting note. I don't remember too much of the conversation.
Hayek told some anecdotes. We chatted a bit. We had Prankofen, which is a really great German pancake, which is the main thing that sticks in my mind. But that's as far as Hayek goes.
Did you ever attend first?
Wait, let me say that.
The Cato Institute.
You know, I was vice president of the Cato Institute
when it was set up in San Francisco.
And Murray was
the chief
theoretician.
That was
before
they moved to Washington
and wanted to get in with the
establishment.
Murray was finally
was kicked out and I didn't have anything more to do with it. But it's typical, they have a great modernistic new building in Washington and the great lecture hall where it seats, I don't know, hundreds of people, is called the Hayek Hall.
They would never name anything after Mises. Mises was too controversial. And of course, it doesn't bother them that Hayek and the Constitution of Liberty is, as Hans says, practically indistinguishable from a social democrat.
He's in favor of one welfare measure after the other, even no government housing.
Well, I hope that I sounded OK, that it worked out OK, and thanks for the opportunity to
make myself immortal.
Take care.
Thanks, Ralph.
Bye, Ralph.