The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.
The first day of this month marked the passage of four years since the death of Harry Brown.
Brown died March 1, 2006, from the effects of Lou Gehrig's disease, a progressive degenerative neural disorder
Brown is best known to younger Americans and to younger libertarians, people under 40 let us say, as the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party during the 1996 and 2000 election campaigns.
To those of us more long in the tooth, he may be better known as the libertarian investment
guru who spent a lot of time on the national bestseller lists back in the 1970s.
Remember How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation?
It was one of the big bestsellers of 1970.
And then there was You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis four years later.
There was also How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Brown's 1973 bestseller, which persuaded
many libertarians to abandon political activism and concentrate on finding ways to free themselves
personally from the worst effects of living in close proximity to the biggest and most
powerful state in human history, the U.S. government.
Brownouts, or Harry Brownouts, we used to call such libertarians, those of us who still
invested any of our time at all in political action.
By the time of How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Brown was 40 years old.
He had been born in New York City in 1933, but had grown up in Los Angeles.
He graduated from Van Nuys High School in LA in the early 50s and spent a couple of
He had a verbal gift, a gift for gab, a talent for writing.
So he moved into the business world in marketing and sales, and a few years down the road,
sales management and sales consulting.
He began writing articles for magazines and newspapers, too.
At first, articles intended to promote his business interests.
But after a while more and more articles that simply promoted the truth as Harry Brown saw
it.
These activities led to gigs as a lecturer and motivational speaker and to a nationally
syndicated newspaper column called The American Way that ran in 110 newspapers.
All this was happening back in the 1950s and early 1960s when Brown was still in his 20s
and very early 30s.
Then in 1963, at the age of 30, Brown met Andrew J. Galambos.
Galambos, nine years older than Brown, had immigrated to the United States as a small
child when his parents had moved from their native Hungary to New York.
Galambos had grown up in New York, attended City College there, then shipped himself
off to graduate school in Minnesota, where he earned a master's degree in physics.
In 1952, now 28 years old, Galambos had moved to Los Angeles to take a job with a defense
contractor working on development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A few years later, in the late 50s, during a stint at TRW's Space Technology Laboratories,
he had developed a taste for teaching after being asked to put together a series of lectures
to bring his colleagues up to speed on the latest developments in ballistics and astronautics.
In 1960, at the age of 36, Galambos had abandoned his aerospace career and taken a job teaching
physics at Whittier College.
During this interlude in the academic world, he had also taken stock of himself and his
goals.
He had decided that what really interested him was manned spaceflight.
He wanted to be the entrepreneur who opened the first commercial airline offering trips
to the moon.
But he had concluded that no such airline was ever likely to open its doors in America
until Americans lived in a free society.
So he began reading up on the theory and requisites of a free society.
He read Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.
He read Henry Hazlitt and various authors associated with Leonard Reed's Foundation for Economic Education.
Then, in 1961, at the age of 37, he made a pilgrimage to New York to meet these writers he'd been reading.
Shortly after his return, later that year, he launched the Free Enterprise Institute, FEI, in Los Angeles,
where, as Harry Brown put it in a 1997 article,
Galambos proceeded to offer lecture courses to the paying public on the construction of a free society.
Thousands of students passed through his courses over the next two decades.
He was one of the most successful freedom entrepreneurs ever,
making very good money preaching the gospel of liberty and capitalism.
Some of his later courses cost $500 or more.
The equivalent of $2,000 in 1997, and each were attended by several hundred people.
He had very little overhead.
Advertising was mostly word of mouth, and he didn't spend money to make his students
comfortable in the classes.
Altogether you might say that Andrew J. Galambos and his Free Enterprise Institute were to
the Los Angeles of the 60s, what Ayn Rand and the Nathaniel Brandon Institute were to
to the New York City of the same period.
But if Brown was right in his contention that Galambos' advertising was mostly word-of-mouth,
it is nothing short of astonishing that the system worked at all, for Galambos forbade
his students from revealing to anyone else anything they had learned in his courses.
As Brown wrote in 1997, Galambos required every student entering one of his courses
is to sign a contract agreeing not to divulge any of the course ideas without permission
from Galambos, and not even to use the ideas, in business or elsewhere, without permission.
In effect, the course tuition bought you the right to become aware of the ideas, but not
to use them or even to talk about them to outsiders.
This led to the humorous situation in which a graduate would rave about the course and
Jerome Tuccilli in his satirical portrayal of the libertarian movement circa 1970-1971
it usually begins with Ayn Rand, presents a very similar portrait of Galambos' concept
of protecting his intellectual property.
Ucili wrote that the most peculiar thing about the whole Galambosian concept was the impossibility
of finding out anything about it.
Galambos' disciples were not at liberty to disseminate his philosophy without paying
a royalty to their leader.
More important, they'd need Galambos' permission, and that was not forthcoming.
Not that the royalty was unimportant.
Thomas seems to have taken his notions about royalties very seriously indeed.
Tuccilli reports that somewhere along the line, Galambos picked up the notion that Thomas
Payne had invented the word liberty, whereupon he established the Thomas Payne royalty fund,
and every time he gave a lecture and used the word liberty, he dropped a nickel into
his fund box as a royalty payment to Tom.
How he determined that a nickel was the proper measure of homage to Mr. Payne I have no idea.
Legend even had it that Galambos was still diligently searching for Thomas Payne's descendants
so he could turn over monies due their famous ancestor.
Brown signed up for one of Galambos' courses and found that by any normal standards he
was a very poor lecturer.
Although the course, Capitalism, the Key to Survival, was billed as a series of sixteen
two-hour lectures, each one ran well over two hours.
And as the course went on, the lectures were longer and longer, with the last few running
over four hours apiece.
He used no script, and very few notes, and sometimes rambled so far from his main thread
that you didn't know whether he'd ever find his way back.
He always did.
Overall however, Brown decided that though the chairs were uncomfortable and the lecturer
was insensitive, the course was fascinating.
He stuck around, took more courses, began teaching some free enterprise institute courses
himself.
Then Galambos said he had heard from some of my students that I was presenting his ideas
but not giving him credit.
Brown was teaching a course in free market economics.
I explained, Brown recalled, that there was very little in the course that hadn't been
a part of my repertoire for some time, and that I did, in fact, give credit to him for
any ideas I had gleaned from him.
But Galambos, Brown recalled, remained unconvinced.
He was willing to acknowledge that I, or anyone else, could have been exposed to similar
The Theory of Money and Credit
from Someone Else.
Brown didn't buy that, and he and Galambos parted company.
Less than a decade later, Brown recalled, when I became somewhat well known through
my books, people would sometimes ask Andrew what he thought of my ideas.
Andrew would shout that I had stolen all my ideas from him.
In fact, though, Harry Brown's ideas don't seem to owe that much to the ideas of Andrew
Andrew J. Galambos, to the extent, that is, that anything is known with certainty about
exactly what the ideas of Andrew J. Galambos were.
For example, we know that Galambos, the physicist, wanted to apply the scientific method as it
was used in physics to the social sciences, including economics.
Brown says that within a few years of his period as a Galambosian, he began to see that
this was impossible.
A few years later, he wrote in 1997, I realized that the inability to conduct controlled,
repeatable experiments made it impossible to transfer the methods of the physical sciences
to the social sciences, including economics and investments.
Still later, I came across Ludwig von Mises' The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science,
in which he explains this point better than I could.
On the other hand, the ideas in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World might have owed
a little something to Galambos, who always taught the futility and wastefulness of participating
in the political process, one of the key points in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
In general, Galambos' ideas seem to have had a sort of hit-or-miss effect on Harry
Brown.
Some of them stuck, others didn't.
And other things about Galambos, on the other hand, seem to have rubbed off on Brown much
more profoundly.
Brown reports, for example, that during the exact same period when Galambos was running
the Free Enterprise Institute as a profit-making business, in addition, he made money selling
mutual funds, advocating his own investment strategy of cost-averaging and holding for
the long term.
Brown recalled that Galambos had no reservations about selling mutual funds to his students.
He thought that earning investment profits would make them stronger advocates of capitalism.
And his idea of combining a career as an investment advisor with a career as a libertarian educator
would seem to have appealed to Brown very strongly.
When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, both Brown and Galambos were locally famous.
Brown as the best-selling libertarian investment advisor, Galambos as the mysterious lecturer
whose students couldn't tell you anything about the content of his mysterious lectures.
There was a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills called, believe it or not,
The Eaters Digest, which reputedly belonged to a Golembosian who made it available for
libertarian meetings once or twice a month during evening hours when the restaurant was
closed.
The Eaters Digest didn't serve dinner, just breakfast and lunch.
Harry Brown was on the New York Times bestseller list.
Andrew J. Golombos was still giving his mysterious lectures under the auspices of his mysterious
Company, the Free Enterprise Institute.
There was objectivist activity in LA in the early 70s as well.
Ayn Rand was still in New York, but Barbara Brandon was in Los Angeles, running academic
associates out of an office on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.
Up the hill on Sunset Boulevard, Nathaniel Brandon and Roger Callahan were practicing
psychotherapy with objectivist overtones.
Robert Lefebvre was in the L.A. area in the early 70s, too.
Technically, of course, he was in Orange County, just down the road a piece.
And just up the road a piece, in Santa Barbara, libertarians were publishing Reason Magazine,
the closest thing to a professionally written and edited and published monthly magazine
that the movement had seen since around the time of World War II.
Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, meanwhile, under the pseudonyms Sky Dorius and Natalie Hall,
were publishing the defiantly amateurish but indispensable libertarian connection right
in Los Angeles itself.
Pearson took courses from Galambos, and later conveyed much information about the ideas
in those courses to a Michigan libertarian named Morris Tannehill, who wrote them up,
The Market for Liberty
In addition to the vibrant local libertarian social scene in L.A. and vicinity would suddenly emerge a few years down the road in 1975.
Samuel Edward Conkin III, who almost immediately upon his arrival in town began publishing New Libertarian Weekly,
the first modern libertarian publication to attempt so frequent a publication schedule.
and Kaken managed to get an issue out every week for two full years
before announcing that he was converting to magazine format and a monthly publication schedule.
In short, L.A. was to the libertarian movement in the 1970s what New York had been to the libertarian movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
The principal center of libertarian intellectual activity and libertarian political activism in the United States.
Things had, after all, changed in New York since the 1960s. Leonard Reed and the Foundation for Economic Education were still there, as were Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises.
But the Nathaniel Brandon Institute was history. It closed its doors in 1968.
So was Mises' famous seminar at NYU, which had folded its tent in 1969.
Henry Hazlitt was still there in New York, but he was no longer writing his column for Newsweek.
And though Murray Rothbard of New York would become the most influential living libertarian during the 1970s,
his influence would tend, somewhat ironically, to further confirm California's new status
as the principal libertarian center in the United States, rather than resurrecting New
York's claims to any such status.
When in the mid-1970s, Rothbard gained a position of great influence over exactly how tens of
millions of dollars newly contributed to the libertarian movement by the Kansas oilmen
Charles and David Koch would be spent.
He saw to it that most of that money was spent in the San Francisco Bay area of California
rather than in New York.
Rothbard himself moved to California for several years in the late 1970s and very early 1980s,
though he never let go of his rent-controlled West 88th Street apartment, and he managed
to hang on also to his job at Brooklyn Polytechnic so that he could just move right back into
to the one, at the same time he moved right back into the other.
Just as Rothbard left New York, if only for what turned out to be a rather short while,
so Harry Brown left Los Angeles.
In his case, though, he never returned, except on business and for visits, though he did
return to California for a brief period in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
He lived for a time in the Vancouver, British Columbia area, and for a time in Switzerland.
He spent the last ten years of his life in a small town near Nashville, Tennessee.
After his years on the bestseller lists in the 1970s, Brown settled down for a couple
of decades of writing, speaking, investment counseling, and enjoying the measure of freedom
he had managed to win for himself in an unfree world.
He wrote 19 books that sold more than 2 million copies.
He wrote a financial newsletter for 23 years.
He lectured and did motivational speaking all over the United States and beyond its
borders as well.
Then, in the mid-1990s, now in his early 60s, he decided perhaps he'd been wrong two
decades earlier.
Perhaps after all, there was some value in running political campaigns.
This or maybe even especially when those campaigns were doomed from the beginning, when those
campaigns hadn't the ghost of a chance of winning any elections, so that, after all,
their efforts were mainly educational rather than political in nature.
Efforts to acquaint the American electorate with important ideas about individual liberty
that ought, by rights, to guide their decisions about future candidates and ballot propositions
in Future Elections.
Brown ran for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in 1996, won it handily, and represented
the LP in two presidential elections, 1996 and 2000.
He was far and away the most articulate candidate the LP has ever fielded, and during his last
six years he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, speaking out vociferously, eloquently
against the War in Iraq and against all the depredations of W. George Bush the Younger,
George Bush Fies, call him what you will.
In his last years, the first years of the new century, Harry Brown was one of the most
consistent, most principled libertarian voices with a national audience to be found anywhere
in the United States.
He was a treasure and an inspiration to a whole generation of younger libertarians.
Lew Rockwell said it very well four years ago when Brown died.
In his last years, Lew wrote, few writers have been as good as Harry on all aspects
of the Bush administration.
After 9-11, when others fell silent or acquiesced to regime priorities, he stuck his neck out
and defended personal liberty against the surveillance state, less government against
the Homeland Security State and Peace Against the War on Terror.
He never hesitated.
As we look back on the history of the libertarian movement, and we think of those who have contributed
mightily to making the idea of radical liberty more mainstream and popular, Harry Brown emerges
as a giant.
He was talented, dignified, sincere and dedicated, and he showed genuine courage in the face
That was Lew Rockwell.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
www.fieggen.com