WEBVTT NOTE Henry Hazlitt and the Rising Libertarian Generation 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:20.000 During the academic year that encompassed the fall term of 1964 and the spring term of 1965, 3 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:26.000 I was a freshman in college. I was also in my first year of intercollegiate debate, 4 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:30.400 Debate After Four Years of Interscholastic Debate in High School 5 00:00:30.400 --> 00:00:35.320 I'm sure debate has evolved in many ways in the last half century, and I don't really 6 00:00:35.320 --> 00:00:38.220 know what it's like to be a debater these days. 7 00:00:38.220 --> 00:00:43.840 But back then, being a debater meant spending most of your weekends, all school year long, 8 00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:47.120 at debate tournaments, which were held at other schools. 9 00:00:47.120 --> 00:00:52.220 They typically began on Friday afternoon and ended around midday on Sunday. 10 00:00:52.220 --> 00:00:58.120 If you went to a school with a highly developed debate program, you probably spent every weekend 11 00:00:58.120 --> 00:01:02.100 from October 1st through May 1st at such tournaments. 12 00:01:02.100 --> 00:01:06.700 Being a debater back then meant that all your best friends were either other debaters at 13 00:01:06.700 --> 00:01:12.560 your own school or debaters from other schools whom you saw every weekend at tournaments. 14 00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:15.740 You hardly had time to get to know anybody else. 15 00:01:15.740 --> 00:01:20.580 Outside of the time you spent in classes, debate was your life. 16 00:01:20.580 --> 00:01:25.980 Being a debater back then meant debating a single proposition or debate question all 17 00:01:25.980 --> 00:01:27.260 year long. 18 00:01:27.260 --> 00:01:31.640 But most tournaments also offered what they called individual events. 19 00:01:31.640 --> 00:01:36.620 That is, public speaking contests you could enter as an individual. 20 00:01:36.620 --> 00:01:40.060 Debating was done by teams, teams of two. 21 00:01:40.060 --> 00:01:45.140 You always entered one of the debate divisions at a debate tournament with a partner, your 22 00:01:45.140 --> 00:01:46.700 debate colleague. 23 00:01:46.700 --> 00:01:52.340 But you could enter extemporaneous speaking, or impromptu speaking, or original oratory 24 00:01:52.340 --> 00:01:55.640 all by yourself, as an individual. 25 00:01:55.640 --> 00:01:59.380 Most debaters also entered extemporaneous speaking. 26 00:01:59.380 --> 00:02:02.300 You drew a slip of paper out of a bowl. 27 00:02:02.300 --> 00:02:07.520 On it was a topic drawn from the world of recent news events and current controversies. 28 00:02:07.520 --> 00:02:12.460 You had 30 minutes to put together a 10-minute speech on whatever that topic turned out to 29 00:02:12.460 --> 00:02:13.660 be. 30 00:02:13.660 --> 00:02:18.780 The way to be prepared for whatever you might draw out of the bowl was to read the newspapers 31 00:02:18.780 --> 00:02:19.940 every day. 32 00:02:19.940 --> 00:02:26.900 But you had to read three magazines as well, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. 33 00:02:26.900 --> 00:02:32.700 So I read Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report every week all through high school 34 00:02:32.700 --> 00:02:37.820 and college and out of long ingrained habit for many years thereafter. 35 00:02:37.820 --> 00:02:42.000 In the end, I broke myself of this habit, but that's another story. 36 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:47.280 Back then, I read Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report every week. 37 00:02:47.280 --> 00:02:53.200 And part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960s was a weekly column called 38 00:02:53.200 --> 00:02:55.040 Business Tides. 39 00:02:55.040 --> 00:02:59.700 The title makes it sound as though it was a column about business news, but in fact 40 00:02:59.700 --> 00:03:05.320 it offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that had anything to 41 00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:08.580 do with the economy or with economics. 42 00:03:08.580 --> 00:03:13.940 It was written by a man named Henry Hazlitt, who, I had learned, was also the author of 43 00:03:13.940 --> 00:03:20.820 a short book called Economics in One Lesson, which had been published originally in 1946, 44 00:03:20.820 --> 00:03:23.140 a few months before I was born. 45 00:03:23.140 --> 00:03:30.820 I read Economics in One Lesson during academic year 1964-65, my freshman year in college, 46 00:03:30.820 --> 00:03:34.620 when we were debating the proposition that the federal government should establish a 47 00:03:34.620 --> 00:03:38.620 National Program of Public Works for the Unemployed 48 00:04:04.620 --> 00:04:10.200 minimum to take the affirmative side in at least two debates and to take the negative 49 00:04:10.200 --> 00:04:13.520 side in at least two other debates. 50 00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:18.980 Now most debaters, like most people, are not very imaginative, and they tend to be what 51 00:04:18.980 --> 00:04:25.760 Ayn Rand used to call concrete-bound, stuck in mundane details while failing to see the 52 00:04:25.760 --> 00:04:31.880 bigger, more abstract picture, in the old cliché, failing to see the forest by paying 53 00:04:31.880 --> 00:04:42.960 Thus most debate teams in academic year 1964-65 argued in favor of federal public works programs 54 00:04:42.960 --> 00:04:48.960 for the unemployed by describing the lamentable state of the nation's unemployed workers, 55 00:04:48.960 --> 00:04:54.960 talking briefly about how a free economy will always have a small percentage of unwillingly 56 00:04:54.960 --> 00:05:01.400 unemployed people in it, and asserting that the wonderful experience of the WPA and related 57 00:05:01.400 --> 00:05:07.440 programs under the New Deal had shown how successful public works projects could be 58 00:05:07.440 --> 00:05:09.640 at ameliorating this problem. 59 00:05:09.640 --> 00:05:15.120 I was unwilling to take such a case into a debate round against a competent opponent. 60 00:05:15.120 --> 00:05:17.280 It was too easy to shoot down. 61 00:05:17.280 --> 00:05:19.820 At bottom, it simply wasn't true. 62 00:05:19.820 --> 00:05:25.880 I knew that unemployed Americans in the mid-1960s were perhaps the most affluent poor people 63 00:05:25.880 --> 00:05:28.320 in human history up to that time. 64 00:05:28.320 --> 00:05:33.200 I knew from reading Henry Hazlitt's economics in one lesson at the beginning of the fall 65 00:05:33.200 --> 00:05:39.800 term that there is no involuntary unemployment in a free market economy other than that caused 66 00:05:39.800 --> 00:05:44.800 by government, and I knew that the public works programs of the New Deal era had been 67 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:50.800 far from a brilliant success, almost irrespective of which standard one chose to judge them 68 00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:51.840 by. 69 00:05:51.840 --> 00:05:56.760 So what would my debate colleague and I do when we had to take the affirmative on this 70 00:05:56.760 --> 00:05:57.840 question? 71 00:05:57.840 --> 00:06:04.120 I decided we'd rely on the surprise factor. We'd argue not that unemployment right now 72 00:06:04.120 --> 00:06:11.300 was particularly bad, or that structural unemployment was inescapable in a free market economy, 73 00:06:11.300 --> 00:06:17.660 but rather that a business cycle was inescapable in a free market economy, and that our wonderful 74 00:06:17.660 --> 00:06:23.140 experience during the New Deal made it clear that government could ameliorate the worst 75 00:06:23.140 --> 00:06:37.200 I knew from reading Henry Hazlitt that this wasn't true either. 76 00:06:37.200 --> 00:06:38.740 But what could I do? 77 00:06:38.740 --> 00:06:44.580 In truth, there weren't any good defensible reasons to support national public works programs 78 00:06:44.580 --> 00:06:46.280 for the unemployed. 79 00:06:46.280 --> 00:06:51.520 Yet the rules of debate required that you support them, at least part of the time, if 80 00:06:51.520 --> 00:06:58.040 If you wanted to win, or even do respectably well in, any tournaments that academic year, 81 00:06:58.040 --> 00:07:02.320 at least with a business cycle case, you'd have the benefit of surprise. 82 00:07:02.320 --> 00:07:07.040 Few teams, even among the best, would come into the round prepared to argue about the 83 00:07:07.040 --> 00:07:08.600 business cycle. 84 00:07:08.600 --> 00:07:15.360 They'd flounder around helplessly and cluelessly, particularly because, as I say, most of them, 85 00:07:15.360 --> 00:07:20.960 even the best of them, were rather unimaginative and concrete-bound, and unused to thinking 86 00:07:20.960 --> 00:07:36.960 As I say, I knew from reading Henry Hazlitt's column in Newsweek for a few years, and from 87 00:07:36.960 --> 00:07:42.160 reading his Economics in One Lesson at the beginning of the term, that the business cycle 88 00:07:42.160 --> 00:07:47.120 case was weak, but I also knew I had to cover my own ass. 89 00:07:47.120 --> 00:07:52.260 If I had thought of this argument for the proposition, other people would think of it too. 90 00:07:52.260 --> 00:07:58.060 I was smart, but not so smart others wouldn't see the possibilities I had seen in Keynesian 91 00:07:58.060 --> 00:08:00.000 business cycle theory. 92 00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:04.960 The possibilities for catching a negative team with their pants down by presenting a 93 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:08.560 non-standard argument in favor of the proposition. 94 00:08:08.560 --> 00:08:14.560 Therefore, I had to be prepared to destroy the business cycle argument if I ended up 95 00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:16.480 on the negative against it. 96 00:08:16.480 --> 00:08:20.080 I went to the library to look for intellectual ammunition. 97 00:08:20.080 --> 00:08:26.880 I found an extraordinary book called The Failure of the New Economics, An Analysis of the Keynesian 98 00:08:26.880 --> 00:08:31.680 Fallacies by none other than Henry Hazlitt. 99 00:08:31.680 --> 00:08:35.400 It utterly demolished my business cycle argument. 100 00:08:35.400 --> 00:08:40.880 And it made me wonder, just who was this Henry Hazlitt anyway? 101 00:08:40.880 --> 00:08:45.280 I didn't find out the full answer to that question for some years. 102 00:08:45.280 --> 00:08:59.280 This was the pre-internet era, remember, when information was harder to come by and often required an afternoon or two in a good library to find out what you can find out today in less than 30 minutes without leaving home. 103 00:08:59.280 --> 00:09:02.280 But what I eventually found out was this. 104 00:09:02.280 --> 00:09:10.280 Henry Hazlitt was born 116 years ago this month, on November 28, 1894, in Philadelphia. 105 00:09:10.280 --> 00:09:22.780 His father died when Henry was still a baby, and he and his mother had rather a rough time of it for the next nine years, when she remarried and moved with her son and his new stepfather to Brooklyn. 106 00:09:22.780 --> 00:09:30.480 It was in Brooklyn that Henry Haslett grew up, and it was in the Brooklyn public schools that he got his first taste of education. 107 00:09:30.480 --> 00:09:36.280 By the time his stepfather died, he was in his second year at City College in Manhattan, 108 00:09:36.280 --> 00:09:41.820 But his stepfather's death plunged the family back into poverty, and Haslett had to quit 109 00:09:41.820 --> 00:09:46.220 City College and find employment to support his widowed mother. 110 00:09:46.220 --> 00:09:50.960 After a few months in office jobs, he decided to try his hand at newspaper work. 111 00:09:50.960 --> 00:09:56.180 He liked writing, and in his spare time had nearly finished the manuscript of his first 112 00:09:56.180 --> 00:09:57.180 book. 113 00:09:57.180 --> 00:10:02.460 I decided I wanted to be a newspaper man, he told an interviewer many years later, because 114 00:10:02.460 --> 00:10:06.080 it was the only way I could see to get into writing. 115 00:10:06.080 --> 00:10:12.520 And so it was that in the year 1915, at the age of 20, Henry Hazlitt went to work for 116 00:10:12.520 --> 00:10:14.400 the Wall Street Journal. 117 00:10:14.400 --> 00:10:19.600 At first his job was basically taking dictation and typing. 118 00:10:19.600 --> 00:10:23.960 Reporters phoned in their stories, either dictating them from their notes or reading 119 00:10:23.960 --> 00:10:29.680 them aloud from already written, not infrequently handwritten copy. 120 00:10:29.680 --> 00:10:34.280 Hazlitt typed them up in fit form to be submitted to the copy desk. 121 00:10:34.280 --> 00:10:39.200 The problem was that Hazlitt could already write better than any of the journal reporters 122 00:10:39.200 --> 00:10:44.340 for whom he was acting as a stenographer, a fact that was evident to anybody who took 123 00:10:44.340 --> 00:10:50.120 a look at his precocious first book, which he finished just before joining the journal. 124 00:10:50.120 --> 00:10:56.640 It was published in the fall of 1915, shortly before Hazlitt's 21st birthday, at around 125 00:10:56.640 --> 00:11:01.080 the same time he was promoted from stenographer to reporter. 126 00:11:01.080 --> 00:11:21.880 Thinking as a science, it was called, a set of observations on the methodology of mentally digesting what one reads or otherwise learns about the world, written in a voice that was astonishingly mature, confident and measured, certainly not that of a mere boy hardly out of his teens. 127 00:11:21.880 --> 00:11:28.080 Hazlitt's thinking about thinking was a natural outgrowth of his voracious reading program, 128 00:11:28.080 --> 00:11:33.380 with which he was attempting to make up for the college education he felt he'd been denied 129 00:11:33.380 --> 00:11:36.880 when he had to drop out of school to support his mother. 130 00:11:36.880 --> 00:11:40.980 His learning wasn't entirely a product of reading, however. 131 00:11:40.980 --> 00:11:44.780 It was also based on observing people and talking with them. 132 00:11:44.780 --> 00:11:49.180 Hazlitt learned a great deal about how the economy worked, for example, 133 00:11:49.180 --> 00:12:00.580 While reporting on business for the Wall Street Journal and, a little later, for the New York Evening Mail, both from observing businessmen in their element and from interviewing them in depth. 134 00:12:00.580 --> 00:12:06.180 Of course, the information he obtained in these ways was inconclusive in itself. 135 00:12:06.180 --> 00:12:15.580 To know how to make sense of it all, what he read, what he observed, what he gleaned from conversation, he needed a comprehensive theory. 136 00:12:15.580 --> 00:12:23.020 to come up with one or to judge one proposed by somebody else would require thinking on his part 137 00:12:23.020 --> 00:12:30.380 and that entailed learning how to think it entailed learning something about what went into thinking 138 00:12:30.380 --> 00:12:38.380 what made thinking effective or ineffective useful or useless and so Henry Hazlitt found the subject 139 00:12:38.380 --> 00:12:45.100 of his first book meanwhile he was building a career as a journalist from the wall street 140 00:12:45.100 --> 00:12:47.100 Journal 141 00:13:15.100 --> 00:13:22.100 from the American Mercury, Hazlitt moved on to the New York Times, where he spent the late thirties and the war years writing editorials on economic issues, and reviewing books on economic topics for the weekly series. 142 00:13:45.100 --> 00:13:47.100 Sunday Book Review Section. 143 00:13:47.100 --> 00:13:54.140 Then, in 1946, he published Economics in One Lesson and left The Times for Newsweek. 144 00:13:54.140 --> 00:13:59.220 During all these years, Hazlitt continued the quest he had embarked upon in his late 145 00:13:59.220 --> 00:14:05.340 teens when he had dropped out of City College, his pursuit of the college education he felt 146 00:14:05.340 --> 00:14:11.980 he'd missed out on, and, with specific respect to what he had learned from reading, observation, 147 00:14:11.980 --> 00:14:17.740 and Conversation about the proper relation of the individual to society, his search for 148 00:14:17.740 --> 00:14:23.260 a comprehensive theory that would enable him to make sense of it all. 149 00:14:23.260 --> 00:14:28.980 Hazlitt seems to have first read Herbert Spencer around the time he left City College, and 150 00:14:28.980 --> 00:14:34.560 for some years it was Spencer's theory of human society that served as his guide. 151 00:14:34.560 --> 00:14:39.260 On the whole, it served him well, though it left a number of economic questions without 152 00:14:39.260 --> 00:14:42.260 without any really satisfactory answers. 153 00:14:42.260 --> 00:14:50.540 Then in 1938, Haslett read a book called Socialism, an economic and sociological analysis, a recent 154 00:14:50.540 --> 00:14:56.180 English translation, published a couple of years earlier in London, of a book first published 155 00:14:56.180 --> 00:15:03.660 in Germany in 1922 by someone Haslett had heard of but had never read before, an Austrian 156 00:15:03.660 --> 00:15:07.180 economist named Ludwig von Mises. 157 00:15:07.180 --> 00:15:13.180 Mises explained that subjective preference was the root of economic value, that it was 158 00:15:13.180 --> 00:15:19.320 the marginal value of any particular good or service to the purchasing public that determined 159 00:15:19.320 --> 00:15:26.400 its price, and that prices conveyed information to entrepreneurs about specifically where 160 00:15:26.400 --> 00:15:32.500 the purchasing public would most like to see productive investment in the economy. 161 00:15:32.500 --> 00:15:35.140 Mises blew Haslett away. 162 00:15:35.140 --> 00:15:40.380 Haslett was 44 years old and had been writing professionally about economic matters for 163 00:15:40.380 --> 00:15:46.560 more than 20 years, but he was by no means too old a dog to learn any new tricks. 164 00:15:46.560 --> 00:15:52.180 From that moment on, if you asked him, Haslett would tell you that the major intellectual 165 00:15:52.180 --> 00:15:57.780 influence on his thinking about human society was Ludwig von Mises. 166 00:15:57.780 --> 00:16:03.440 He wrote a piece for the New York Times about Mises' socialism, and exchanged a few letters 167 00:16:03.440 --> 00:16:07.340 with Mises himself, who was in Geneva at the time. 168 00:16:07.340 --> 00:16:12.320 Then one day, two years later, he picked up the ringing telephone in his apartment on 169 00:16:12.320 --> 00:16:16.100 New York's Washington Square, and heard a voice say, 170 00:16:16.100 --> 00:16:19.020 This is Mises speaking. 171 00:16:19.020 --> 00:16:21.340 Hazlitt was flabbergasted. 172 00:16:21.340 --> 00:16:27.340 As I've told many of my friends since, he explained to an interviewer in 1983, it was 173 00:16:27.340 --> 00:16:42.340 Mises was in New York now, it turned out, a refugee from a Europe largely overrun by Nazis, and in need of work. 174 00:16:42.340 --> 00:16:46.340 Haslett did what he could, and it proved to be quite a bit. 175 00:16:46.340 --> 00:16:55.340 He arranged for Mises to write several short articles for the New York Times to help bring his name to the attention of the American intellectual world. 176 00:16:55.340 --> 00:17:00.320 Mises obtained a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that made it possible for him to 177 00:17:00.320 --> 00:17:05.460 write two of his shorter books, Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy. 178 00:17:05.460 --> 00:17:11.940 He persuaded Yale University Press to publish those two shorter books in 1944, as well as 179 00:17:11.940 --> 00:17:18.380 a much longer one called Human Action, a few years later, in 1949. 180 00:17:18.380 --> 00:17:27.280 Hazlitt edited all three manuscripts, he told a 1983 interviewer, at the publisher's request, for English idiom. 181 00:17:27.280 --> 00:17:34.720 He helped Mises obtain a position as a visiting professor with the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration. 182 00:17:34.720 --> 00:17:41.680 He helped organize the Committee of Wealthy Donors, who put up the money to pay Mises' salary at NYU, 183 00:17:41.680 --> 00:17:50.680 since the University only grudgingly agreed to take the greatest economist and social theorist of the 20th century under its wing at all, 184 00:17:50.680 --> 00:17:56.680 and was determined not to actually spend any of its own money paying him for his time. 185 00:17:56.680 --> 00:18:02.680 Finally, Hazlitt introduced Mises to Leonard Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education, 186 00:18:02.680 --> 00:18:07.680 which brought him further employment as a lecturer and advisor on economic issues. 187 00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:11.680 When he wrote Economics in One Lesson in 1945, 188 00:18:11.680 --> 00:18:15.680 Haslett was thoroughly under the sway of Mises' ideas. 189 00:18:15.680 --> 00:18:20.680 Economics in One Lesson is the best short introduction to Misesian, 190 00:18:20.680 --> 00:18:24.680 which is to say, Austrian, economics. 191 00:18:24.680 --> 00:18:31.680 While he was making introductions, Haslett introduced Mises to a hot-headed young writer he had recently met, 192 00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:36.680 a Russian immigrant in her mid-thirties who called herself Ayn Rand. 193 00:18:36.680 --> 00:18:42.640 At this point, Rand had published one unsuccessful novel about the crushing of individualism 194 00:18:42.640 --> 00:18:49.240 in the Soviet Union, We the Living, and had seen a play, the night of January 16th, through 195 00:18:49.240 --> 00:18:52.580 a moderately successful run on Broadway. 196 00:18:52.580 --> 00:18:58.840 She had not yet written the classic individualist novel The Fountainhead, or the classic libertarian 197 00:18:58.840 --> 00:19:05.240 novel Atlas Shrugged, the books that would make her name, her reputation and her fortune. 198 00:19:05.240 --> 00:19:09.960 She was a young writer on her way up, at a time in her career when a bit of assistance 199 00:19:09.960 --> 00:19:15.320 from an older, more established writer, an introduction, for example, to an important 200 00:19:15.320 --> 00:19:22.180 older intellectual who was promoting ideas very similar to her own, would come in handy. 201 00:19:22.180 --> 00:19:28.080 As he had been for Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt was there for Ayn Rand. 202 00:19:28.080 --> 00:19:33.560 Shortly after Barry Goldwater's dramatic loss to Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election 203 00:19:33.560 --> 00:19:39.920 of 1964, in the fall term of the academic year in which I was debating public works 204 00:19:39.920 --> 00:19:46.960 programs for the unemployed, a gathering was held to celebrate Henry Hazlitt's 70th birthday. 205 00:19:46.960 --> 00:19:52.520 Many, perhaps all of the libertarians present, had thought of Goldwater as a candidate who 206 00:19:52.520 --> 00:19:58.340 genuinely wanted to move American public policies in a more libertarian direction. 207 00:19:58.340 --> 00:20:03.300 They regarded his defeat as a disaster for the cause of individual liberty. 208 00:20:03.300 --> 00:20:10.500 Still, when Ludwig von Mises, then 82 years old, rose to address the attendees, his remarks 209 00:20:10.500 --> 00:20:13.100 were, at least in part, hopeful. 210 00:20:13.100 --> 00:20:18.960 Every friend of freedom may today, in this post-election month, be rather pessimistic 211 00:20:18.960 --> 00:20:20.900 about the future, he said. 212 00:20:20.900 --> 00:20:27.260 But let us not forget that there is rising a new generation of defenders of freedom. 213 00:20:27.260 --> 00:20:34.160 Then, addressing Hazlitt, whom he called his distinguished friend, directly, Mises declared 214 00:20:34.160 --> 00:20:40.320 that if that new generation of defenders of freedom finds success in their efforts, this 215 00:20:40.320 --> 00:20:46.300 will be to a great extent your merit, the fruit of the work that you have done in the 216 00:20:46.300 --> 00:20:49.200 first seventy years of your life. 217 00:20:49.200 --> 00:20:54.300 For in this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which 218 00:20:54.300 --> 00:20:58.460 Such men can live as free men, Mises said. 219 00:20:58.460 --> 00:21:00.760 You are our leader. 220 00:21:00.760 --> 00:21:06.300 You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious 221 00:21:06.300 --> 00:21:13.320 to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries. 222 00:21:13.320 --> 00:21:18.460 You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation. 223 00:21:18.460 --> 00:21:25.420 Well, as a member of that generation of libertarians that was rising at the time of Mises' remarks, 224 00:21:25.420 --> 00:21:31.100 I may perhaps be permitted to crow a bit about the success we have enjoyed. 225 00:21:31.100 --> 00:21:35.740 In the nearly half-century that has gone by since Mises spoke, with the assistance of 226 00:21:35.740 --> 00:21:41.060 our elders and, increasingly, of our juniors in the movement, we have managed to grow the 227 00:21:41.060 --> 00:21:47.460 libertarian movement into something much, much larger, better integrated, and more intellectually 228 00:21:47.460 --> 00:21:54.460 We have found success in our efforts, and Henry Hazlitt is unquestionably among those to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for laying the groundwork and paving the way ahead of us.