When Gülçin and I, in May of 2006, opened the Karia Princess for the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society (PFS), many questions, organizational as well as substantive, had been still unresolved in our minds. It took years of experimenting and learning: of defining, refining and fine-tuning the very product that now is the PFS and its annual salon. Throughout all changes occurring during the last 20 years of its existence, however, the PFS has remained steadfast in its commitment to what is now widely known as “Austro-Libertarianism,” the social philosophy developed and represented in the 20th century most prominently by Murray N. Rothbard. In the following chapter I have given an account of my personal association with Rothbard during the last decade of his life, from 1985 to 1995, in New York City and Las Vegas. Here it suffices to say that I learned first-hand from Rothbard’s personal example what was then to become the ethos and trademark of the PFS: uncompromising and interdisciplinary intellectual radicalism—the fearless pursuit of truth, justice and beauty. Today, on March 2, 2026, Rothbard would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Given his status as one of the patron saints of the PFS we deemed it appropriate, indeed obligatory, to pay tribute to this great man and his work with a small book in his honor, published by former students, colleagues and members of the PFS intimately familiar with his work. In the following chapter I have referred to Rothbard as the greatest of all social theorists, certainly of the 20th century. In our age of instant fame and fifteen-minute celebrities this claim might require some explanation. But that can be easily supplied. As an economist, his bread and butter profession, Rothbard ranks below only his own teacher Ludwig von Mises, probably the greatest economist of all time. But Rothbard is not an economist-economist. In distinct contrast to some contemporary contenders and upstarts now claiming his mantle, Rothbard’s voluminous work ranges over the entire field of the social sciences. He ranks among the 20th century’s most outstanding political philosophers, venturing out there even into the field of epistemology. Qua sociologist, he has greatly contributed to the study and analysis of power elites in the tradition of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels. As a historian, Rothbard is one of the foremost experts on Colonial America, as well as on US economic and financial history. Last but not least, with his last, unfortunately uncompleted work, his two volumes on the history of economic thought, Rothbard not only has established himself as a master historian of thought—of Ideengeschichte—but also, more generally, as a major contributor to the intellectual genre of universal history. Finally, to top it off, Rothbard was able to integrate and systematize all this: his wide-ranging interdisciplinary research program within a grand narrative of human history as an eternal and continuous struggle between power and market, spoliation and production, aggression and coercion versus freedom and liberty.

Naturally, a man who has somewhere commented on almost everything imaginable is also an easy target for the all-too-familiar type of the “intellectual nitpicker”: the type who gets obsessed or even enraged about one particular statement or comment made by someone and consequently roundly rejects and condemns anything and everything said or done by this very person. Rothbard had his fair share of such smartass critics, who dismissed him without having even the faintest idea of and familiarity with his massive intellectual oeuvre—and most likely also not the intellectual ability to actually comprehend it, even if they tried.

Fortunately, however, Rothbard has also a growing world-wide community of fans and friends: of readers, students and scholars from a great variety of intellectual fields and backgrounds following in his footsteps, trying to preserve, to re-present, popularize, polish, improve and enlarge the Austro-Libertarian edifice handed down to us by him. The present book presents only a tiny sample of such individuals.

Of course, there have been serious critics and criticisms of Rothbard and his work as well, also from among the contributors to this little book. Mises, for instance, his own revered teacher, defended the classical liberal “minimal” State model against Rothbard’s anarchism. Rothbard’s (and Mises’s) pure, time-preference theory of interest has come under scrutiny, and as have some aspects of his contract theory and his views on intellectual property and copyrights. As well, the issues of abortion and of children’s rights have remained contentious matters. Some critics deemed his treatment of Adam Smith as overly negative. I have criticized Rothbard for his unduly unfavorable treatment of the feudal Middle Ages and his comparatively mild criticism of democracy. But these criticisms, including Mises’s, have been essentially friendly. None was meant to distract from Rothbard’s greatness or tried to diminish his outstanding intellectual stature and standing. Still: to this day Rothbard has never achieved the public recognition owed to one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. I must speculate a bit, but it is not too difficult to come up with some plausible or even obvious explanations and reasons for this phenomenon. Rothbard is an anarchist—and not a confused leftist: socialist or syndicalist anarchist à la Noam Chomsky, who dreams of collective property and a social order without hierarchies. Rather, Rothbard is a hard-nosed rightist anarchist: a proponent of anarcho-capitalism, respectively a private law society, based squarely on the institution of private property and its acquisition by means of original appropriation (homesteading) or voluntary contract, and a society characterized by the division of labor and natural social hierarchies. Obviously, from the very outset this puts him in complete opposition to the near-universally shared secular religion of the present age: of Statism (Etatismus), i.e., the belief in the necessity and beneficial function of the institution of a State qua territorial monopolist of violence. More specifically, without a State there exists no public, tax-funded education system: no public schools and no public universities. Where, without this, would the present hordes of so-called intellectuals, especially in fields such as education, journalism, the social sciences and the humanities, find secure employment? Most couldn’t and wouldn’t and hence, most intellectuals will likely be strictly opposed to any such idea. As Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Further, without a State, there would also be no central banks with the monopoly of issuing fiat currencies. Yet central banks, and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements are the largest employers of economists in today’s world. Naturally, then, in particular also economists are overwhelmingly hostile to Rothbardian ideas. As well, without a tax-funded State and a central bank there may exist armed militias, but there will be no standing army and there will be no military-industrial complex that promotes international conflict and war. Hence, mighty industries, as well as all chauvinists, war-mongers and imperialists are lined up against the idea of anarchy and a private law society as envisioned by Rothbard.

And it is above all here, then: in connection with Rothbard’s strict and unwavering opposition to war, to the military-industrial complex, to the warfare State and the interventionist US foreign policy, where the ultimate—and yet least talked about—reason for his public disregard and lack of academic recognition can be found.

Jews make up no more than 2 to 3 percent of the US population, but as everyone there knows and yet is advised not to say so, US academia and mainstream media (and much more as we shall see) is dominated by (mostly secular) Jews. Rothbard too was a secular Jew. As such, regardless of his views: his anarchism, his “racism” (he favorably reviewed The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and Race, Evolution, and Behavior by Philippe Rushton) or whatever—a man of his talents could and should have still risen to the highest ranks of academia, owing to the enormous influence and extraordinary (but also un-mentionable) intra-group solidarity of his co-religionists. That this did not happen in his case and he instead became a persona non grata in much of “polite” society has two intimately related reasons: Rothbard’s views on Judaism and on Israel. While an agnostic, Rothbard was profoundly interested in the history and sociology of religion, and he considered Judaism, in particular the rabbinic Judaism as laid out in the Talmud, as a primitive tribal religion. In distinct contrast to modern Jewish apologists and apologetics and very much in agreement instead with Israel Shahak’s revisionist Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Rothbard viewed Judaism as a particularistic, ethnocentric and supremacist doctrine, according to which Jewish life was held to be inherently superior and more valuable than that of gentiles or goys. Tellingly, in the Talmud, Jesus has been described in exclusively negative terms: as an illegitimate bastard born to an adulteress, a sorcerer, and a criminal heretic to be sentenced to boiling in his own excrement. Accordingly, for Rothbard, then, to ramble on, again and again, almost ritually nowadays, of Judeo-Christianity as the intellectual foundation of the West and of so-called Western values, is plain nonsense, a fundamental distortion of history, and a sign of ignorance. As a matter of fact, in contrast to the open hostility to Christianity expressed in the Talmud, it is actually the much maligned Koran that shows itself as rather friendly toward Jesus and the Virgin Mary. (Incidentally, asked what religion Rothbard would adopt if forced to do so his answer was: Catholicism, as a decidedly universalistic religion.) As for Israel, Rothbard’s views likewise went against conventional wisdom or rather: public indoctrination. Not merely is Israel a State, and a socialist State without any private ownership in land (all land is held by the Israel Land Authority or the Jewish National Fund). Rather, unlike the typical case in this day and age, Israel is a State that did not grow up endogenously, from within some indigenous population, but Israel is instead the result of violent foreign conquest: the expropriation, expulsion and murder of an indigenous population by some alien invaders and occupiers. Enabled by Great Britain and the US, Jews from all over the world, especially of Zionist persuasion, were to move to Palestine, displace the indigenous, mostly Arab population by terrorist means and, in 1948, establish a Jewish State.

Moreover, Israel, qua Jewish State, and very much in accordance with the just mentioned Judaic superiority claim, practiced from the outset and still practices a strict apartheid regime, where every non-Jew is and can never be more than a second-class citizen, and it pursued and still pursues an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy at the expense of its supposedly inferior neighbors so as to re-establish modern Israel in its fancied ancient glory and territorial largess. The excuse given for all this—the earlier persecution of Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe—Rothbard considered phony. For one, because by no means all Jews assembled in Israel had been victims, and in any case, the indigenous population of Palestine that then and now had to suffer the Jewish invasion and occupation had nothing whatsoever to do with any prior crimes elsewhere committed against Jews. They were innocent as far as all that was concerned and accordingly did not owe any restitution to them.

Considered in isolation, these two claims may not exactly align with the officially approved mainstream view of the matter, but they are hardly scandalous. What turned Rothbard into a persona non grata in establishment circles and made for a scandal was to combine both claims and then to point out that the US foreign policy had been coming increasingly under the influence of the so-called neoconservatives or “neocons,” such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and their followers. Mostly of Jewish extraction, and often former leftists (in particular of the Trotskyist variety) who had turned “conservative” in reaction to the violent outgrowths of the so-called “Civil Rights” movement and legislation of the 1960s, the neocons represented the very opposite of the old, traditional American Right. The Old Right, that had been Rothbard’s intellectual home, stood for de-centralization at home, advocated a strictly non-interventionist foreign policy and warned against any foreign entanglements and alliances. In sharp contrast, the neocons, who would increasingly take over and come to dominate the foreign policy establishment in the US, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations, supported not only a powerful, centralized welfare State at home, but in particular also an interventionist foreign policy based and built on US military strength and motivated by imperial ambitions. To make the world safe for liberal democracy, the US, qua exceptional nation, was supposed to be established and installed as the world’s dominant power, by all means necessary, whether military, financial or economic. And it was Israel of all places that was to play a central role in these neocon plans. Neocon essentially meant Zionist and Zionism. Israel was considered their most highly valued strategic and moral ally: the only bastion of Western civilization in the Near- and Middle-East, surrounded by a sea of hostile, backward and primitive Arab and Moslem neighbors. Accordingly, whatever Israel did or does, it deserved the unconditional support of the almighty US. It received and still receives billions of US military aid, year after year, and it enjoys the closest possible cooperation and assistance of US intelligence agencies and services. Whether Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran or Yemen, whoever stood or stands in the way of Israel’s expansionist and supremacist ambitions and was or is considered Israel’s enemy is at the time also an enemy of the US and thus requires, to this day, the US’s constant involvement and interference in Near- and Middle-Eastern affairs. Rothbard was a vehement critic of the neocons and US interventionist foreign policy in general. It was immoral, economic waste, and a constant source of inter-national conflict and tension (instead of peace). But he was especially critical and outspoken about the Zionist and “Israel first” policy promoted by the neocons. Because what the neocons ultimately wanted, and have largely achieved as of today, was for US interests to become subordinate to the interests of Israel. That is, that for any and all foreign policy decision, the US should consult and ask Israel for approval. Rothbard considered this state of affairs “monstrous,” to use one of his favorite words used in this connection. Given the origin and location of the State of Israel and its nature as an explicitly and exclusive Jewish State, Rothbard predicted, the Near- and Middle-East would be turned into a powder keg: a permanent danger zone marked and marred by unending conflict and war, and the once exceptional US in particular would progressively (or rather regressively) grow into the world’s biggest war machine and threat to world peace. Rothbard turned out right with this prediction, of course, as is even more apparent now than it was 20 years ago at the time of his death. For the most powerful of all lobbies in the US, however, the Jewish lobby, represented prominently for instance by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Jewish Committee (AJC) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Rothbard’s criticism and his call for the withdrawal and disengagement of the US from Israel constituted the ultimate treachery and sin of “anti-Semitism.” If the man could not be silenced entirely, he should be ignored or belittled. And that is what they did; and it is above all they, then, the neocons and the Jewish lobby, who denied Rothbard the intellectual stardom that he deserved. Newsflash: Recently, since Javier Milei’s election as President of Argentina, in 2023, Rothbard’s name has come to be frequently mentioned also in some mainstream media. The reason: because Milei professed to be—“philosophically”—an anarcho-capitalist and cited Rothbard repeatedly as his main source of inspiration. Many self-professed libertarians, especially in the Spanish speaking world, have celebrated this as a great breakthrough of and for “our” ideas. This necessitates a brief critical comment, because Rothbard’s “resurrection” via Milei represents at best a rather mixed blessing and is actually more likely to do serious damage to the libertarian movement in the long run, and in any case involves a severe mis-representation and “falsification” of the real Rothbard.

To be sure, Milei has read some Rothbard, but his knowledge of Rothbard’s work is rather limited and superficial. He has also introduced some economic “free market” reforms in Argentina that have been inspired by “Austrians.” But he has done nothing truly radical, deserving the praise of any anarcho-capitalist. He has not closed the central bank, as originally promised, and there are no signs that this will happen any time soon. He has brought consumer price inflation down from 300% to some 30% (wow!), but the money supply (of all monetary aggregates) has continued to grow rapidly (even more so than under several of his predecessors). He has centralized rather than decentralized government power and is on record as being fundamentally opposed to secession. In addition to assuming (rather than repudiating, as Rothbard would have recommended) the existing government debt owed to the IMF of some 40 billion USD, he burdened the Argentinian people with another 42 billion USD of debt, solicited from the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and in order to avoid insolvency right before the Argentinian mid-term election, in October 2025, he further required a rescue package of some 20 billion USD from “his dear friend” Donald Trump. And with Donald Trump entering the picture, then, an entirely new and different Milei comes to light, typically ignored or made light of by his adoring libertarian fans. Trump, by sheer accident, may have heard the name of Rothbard, but he certainly never read a word of his. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Trump ever read a serious book in his entire life, and as far as economics in particular is concerned he must be essentially considered illiterate. Government spending (especially on the military and on so-called national security measures) and government debt have increased under his direction. He is a dedicated protectionist, as demonstrated by his erratic and punitive tariff policies, and in general he pursues an economic agenda that has more in common with the interventionist policies conducted under fascism or national socialism than with anything resembling a free-market economy.

More importantly still in the current context, of all previous US presidents, Trump is the most ardent Zionist and “Israel-Firster” ever (all the while claiming the mantle of an “America-Firster”). Never before has Israel received more military and financial aid and support, even while committing unspeakable atrocities in the Gaza strip as well as the West Bank, than under Trump. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, a war criminal of the first degree, a man with no compunction to admit to his own genocidal intentions vis-à-vis the Palestinian population (which he compares to the to be vanquished and eradicated Amalekites of the Old Testament and the Torah), is Trump’s “best friend” and always welcome guest at the White House or Mar-a-Lago. On behalf of Israel, and at the advice (or on the orders?) of Netanyahu, Trump even directly engages in war against Iran and Yemen, which both pose no threat to the US whatsoever.

And as if that is not enough of foreign entanglement, and as an unmistakable sign of Trump’s own megalomania, he continuously trumpets threats, bully-like, against everyone and anyone deemed disobedient, most prominently against Russia and China as the two main remaining obstacles on the way to US global dominance. While posing as a peace-maker, he still continues to support Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Jewish strongman of the Ukraine and fellow Zionist, in his losing war against Russia, initially provoked and designed by the US to weaken and bring Russia to its knees. He sends weaponry to Taiwan to provoke mainland China, he kidnaps Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro so as to take control of the country’s massive oil reserves, and he engages in open piracy by confiscating or sinking foreign ships or tankers in international waters and ordering its captains and crews to be killed.

Milei, the self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, then, is best friends with this man Trump. Again and again, he has hailed Trump as a champion of liberty and of so-called Western civilization and values. Trump’s America, according to Milei, represents the epitome of free-market capitalism. And he is not just friends with Trump and his name and that of Trump are regularly mentioned in one breath as closely associated, Milei is also best friends with Trump’s best friend Netanyahu. In his view, too, Israel can do no wrong, and whatever may appear to the outside observer as outright atrocities, mass-murder and wanton destruction is in reality nothing but justified defense according to him. For this outspoken solidarity and praise of Israel as a bastion of freedom and civilization, Milei was awarded the Genesis prize by Netanyahu, also referred to as the “Jewish Nobel Prize,” coming with a prize money of one million USD, that Milei then committed to be used for celebrating Israel and combatting “anti-Semitism” all over Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. And it is not only Trump’s and Netanyahu’s names that are closely associated with that of Milei, but Milei is also on hugging and kissing terms with Zelenskyy. Three interconnected questions then arise: How to explain this Milei-Trump-Netanyahu-Zelenskyy love affair? What consequences does this have for the name of libertarianism, i.e. its reputation and public recognition? And how does Rothbard fit into all this? The first question is answered easily. What all four have in common is their Zionism and “Israel First” stand as propounded and advocated by the neocons. Nominally, Milei is not a Jew, but he has toyed with the idea of converting to Judaism, several Jewish oligarchs such as the Werthein family have greatly helped his career, and he is constantly accompanied and advised by a personal rabbi. Trump too is not nominally Jewish (yet several of his family members are), but he has also enjoyed the largess of numerous Jewish oligarchs such as Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, and he has repeatedly claimed to be the most pro-Israel president in US history and the best friend that Israel ever had. Zelenskyy is Jewish and owes his entire career to various Ukrainian Jewish oligarchs such as Ihor Kolomoyskyi, and Netanyahu, of course, is the very super-Jew and Zionist. (Another commonality: all four of them have been noted for their talents as clowns and the vulgarity and profanity of their public speeches.) There is also a quick answer to the second question. The core of libertarianism is the recognition of private property and the non-aggression principle. How, then, can anyone seriously believe that libertarianism’s public image will be helped and improved by someone like Milei, who is intimately associated and engaged in closest cooperation with a bunch of welfare-warfare Statists, supremacists, imperialists, warmongers and murderous criminals?!

And finally, as for the third question concerning Rothbard: How can anyone seriously believe that Rothbard would be delighted to see his name, via Milei, connected and associated with those of Trump, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy?! “Monstrous!”—that would be Rothbard’s reaction!

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Istanbul, February 2026

Looking back at my intellectual development over my forty-five years of life, there stands a major landmark and inflection point around October 2008, when, for the first time, I read Murray Rothbard. I vividly recall being astonished by the clarity and depth of his ideas, so much so that I concluded I learned more from reading a page by him than from reading an entire book from the many drab texts I was assigned in my graduate studies. Looking back eighteen years later, I can confidently say the clarity and breadth of Rothbard’s work have been the guiding star and intellectual inspiration for my own work. I only made sense of the world after reading him. I only became an economist after understanding him. I only became a writer after being inspired by his unwavering courage, searing clarity, and ruthless honesty. To this great man I never met, I owe my entire intellectual output.

In October 2008, I was entering the last year of my graduate studies at Columbia University in New York City, where I was studying for a PhD in Sustainable Development, a program based heavily on the dominant mainstream economics of the fiat era. Until 2007, the extent of my familiarity with Austrian economists consisted mainly of hearing of them lumped in with Chicago and neoliberal economists as free-market fundamentalists personally responsible for the vast majority of the problems of the human race from the 1970s onwards through their nefarious influence on Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet. I had read Friedrich Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society when I was doing my Master’s degree at the London School of Economics, and I remember finding it mildly interesting, though it failed to make much of an impact on my way of thinking at the time. My Sustainable Development program was a perfect example of what Hayek would call scientism, the fatal conceit that human affairs can be managed coercively through the enlightened methods of science. Using the tools and methods of modern economics, my background in engineering, and armed with some vintage twentieth-century social science propaganda, I was expected to produce a multidisciplinary study that provides actionable policy insights for policymakers on the topic of alternative energy. In 2007, as I was supposed to get into writing in earnest, I was beginning to come to terms with the absurdity of this quest for central planning. My models were supposed to include the actions of billions of consumers and producers of fuels around the world, and decide for them what was best for them. There was no recognition of the dynamic importance of prices and how individual economic calculation drives human action. As I began to grapple with the methodological problems involved, I found some helpful insight from reading Karl Popper, which led me to Friedrich Hayek and his work on scientism and the limitations of central planning. Reading Hayek would soon guide me to the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, Mises.org, and its endless free PDFs of the works of the great Austrian economists. And down the rabbit hole I fell. I would soon find Rothbard’s PDFs among them, and they would become my indispensable guide and framework for navigating the world.

I spent months devouring these PDFs in my tiny Morningside Heights apartment, at the expense of writing my PhD dissertation. I felt a personal connection with Rothbard, who, like me, had also gotten his PhD from Columbia, and had grown up and lived a few blocks down Broadway from where I was living. In his last year in Columbia, Rothbard heard of Ludwig von Mises’s New York University seminar and began to attend it. Similarly, I discovered in my last year that the Mises seminar was still taking place in New York University under Professor Mario Rizzo, as it continues to this day. I emailed Professor Rizzo, and he graciously accepted my request to attend. Attending the seminar, over the next few months, I had the pleasure of meeting, learning from, and interacting with Professors Joseph Salerno, Ralph Raico, and Israel Kirzner, among many old and young Austrian scholars. I vividly remember the distinct feeling of relief I experienced when surrounded by serious academics who shared some of my heretic views. It was a relief for my sanity.

Meanwhile, a few blocks further down Broadway, the epicenter of global finance was imploding, providing me with a very useful learning aid on my journey into Austrian economics, and more incentive to dig into Rothbard’s endless PDFs. As one bank after another went bankrupt, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve bailed out the financial industry with trillions of dollars, arguably the first time the term “trillion” came into popular usage, a testament to the ease with which fiat currencies are created. As my Columbia University professors were hauled before TV cameras to explain to people why it is in their interest to continue destroying the value of the dollar to save the richest banks in the world, their rationales raised more questions than they answered. Then, in October 2008, I read Murray Rothbard for the first time, and I began to make sense of the world around me. Whereas the mainstream of economics distorted reality to justify the actions of those in power, Rothbard clarified reality, plainly indicting them. People’s natural instinctive suspicions about the dangers of an increase in the money supply and moral hazard are actually correct, and in no way can the mathematical sophistry of regime economists overrule them. Most startling to me was how plainly Rothbard employed a logical approach to analyzing economics, grounded in the realistic understanding that human beings’ actions and valuations shape economic reality. Here was a man who just looked at the actions of human beings to understand reality, and it made a lot more sense than my standard intellectual diet of ascribing cognizance to aggregates and abstract nouns, and appealing to authority and sophistry. Rothbard’s genius was to expose that what passes for policy debate is mostly incantations of propaganda and spell-casting by a priesthood loyal to power. He taught me how to translate the heart-warming incantations of “stabilization,” “liquidity shortage,” “systemic risk,” and “public interest” into their plain English translation and accounting terms: “destabilization,” “bankruptcy,” “politically favored,” and “politically favored private interests” respectively. He taught me to ignore the incantations and just look at who is paying whom. Once you apply that translation, the 2008 crisis stops being a mysterious accident and becomes the predictable outcome of a monetary and political structure rigged to favor a monopoly that privatizes its profits and socializes its losses. Contra propaganda, central banking is as essential to a society as tapeworms are to an individual. It is difficult to enumerate or summarize the important economic ideas I learned from Rothbard in such a short space, but I will highlight a few of the most important points. Perhaps the most influential piece of Rothbard’s writing for me was his brief chapter, “The Austrian Theory of Money.” I remember reading this in 2008 and being completely blown away by his distillation of the essence of Austrian monetary theory, and the most important lessons of Mises’s monumental works, Human Action and Theory of Money and Credit, into a mere 24 pages. The most mind-blowing lesson for me from that paper was Mises’s contention that money is a good acquired for its purchasing power, which can increase without the supply increasing. Any quantity of money, provided it is divisible enough, is thus sufficient to secure the service of money. The entire rationale for increasing the money supply disappeared. Rothbard further went on to contend:

A world of constant money supply would be one similar to that of much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marked by the successful flowering of the Industrial Revolution with increased capital investment increasing the supply of goods and with falling prices for those goods as well as falling costs of production.

I will never forget the moment I read that sentence in my apartment in New York in late 2008. Around the same time, on the internet, Satoshi Nakamoto was putting the final touches on the software for Bitcoin, the first, and still only, example of a money with a credible claim for having a constant supply.

It was this point, more than any other, that made me understand the value of bitcoin. When I first heard of it, I thought it would make a neat idea because it would fit Rothbard’s hypothetical fixed supply money, but I was dismissive of the possibility that it would work, blissfully and pathetically confident, in a way which only a PhD can bestow, that my ignorance of its technical details could not possibly bear on the question of its success or failure. After a few years of bitcoin’s stubborn refusal to go away, and its supply remaining fixed according to schedule, I began to study bitcoin, and finally understood how its decentralized, censorship-resistant nature could ensure its supply remains fixed, producing the Rothbardian monetary Holy Grail.

On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto launched bitcoin and I was in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the largest meeting of economists in the United States, which hosts the job interviews for prospective university professors. I remember spending the day outside of my interviews walking up to various celebrity fiat economists and asking them why they think the money supply should increase at all. I remember not getting a single coherent answer to that question, and plenty of flustered and confused looks. Rothbard’s work on money, banking, and economic history were indispensable in developing my own ideas on bitcoin, which culminated with the publication of The Bitcoin Standard in 2018. The Bitcoin Standard was my attempt to do with Bitcoin what Rothbard did with money: strip away the cant, understand the reality, and deduce its implications. In The Fiat Standard (2021) I applied what I learned from him about inflation to trace the long-term impact of monetary debasement and credit expansion on economics and society broadly, including family, culture, politics, time preference, and civilization itself. My Principles of Economics (2023) was heavily based on Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, and can be described as my attempt to distill its most important lessons into a shorter and more accessible alternative. The breadth of Rothbard’s writings is arguably unmatched. He covered all the important topics and fields of economics comprehensively and was the best guide to understanding these topics, as well as the debates around them and their historical evolution. From economic theory—money and banking, the business cycle, capital and interest, monopoly and antitrust—to policy controversies—taxation, regulation, welfare, education, immigration, war, and civil liberties—to economic history, and the history of economic ideas, Rothbard wrote about it all, and made you think every single time. It is difficult to pick a favorite among Rothbard’s economic books, but after much consideration, I would choose America’s Great Depression as my favorite, as it was Rothbard at the absolute pinnacle of his craft. He begins by explaining the Austrian theory of the business cycle in a very simple and intuitive way, which might actually be his best statement of the theory. He then completely dismantled the official story of The Great Depression, leaving nothing defensible. He summoned a mountain of historical evidence and research to combine with his Austrian economic framework and brilliantly illustrate the ugly truth.

But what makes this work so singularly important are the many profound implications of understanding the true history of the Great Depression: how its roots go back to the destruction of the gold standard and the first world war; how British manipulation of American policy makers exported Britain’s inflation to the US and fueled the unsustainable credit boom of the 1920s, which in turn led to the infamous market crash which mainstream economists treat as inexplicable; how Hoover’s interventionist policies turned the market crash into a depression, and how FDR exacerbated the policies of Hoover, dooming the gold standard. His account of how wage-and-price maintenance and cartelization policies prevented recovery, and turned a stock market crash into a depression, was the first time I saw the period explained with logical cause and effect rather than Keynesian folk mythology. Here was a fully detailed exposition of the civilization-shattering consequences of monetary fraud and inflation, exploding the official history as little more than the propaganda of the beneficiaries of inflation. Austrian theory makes for the best approach to understanding the Great Depression; and the Great Depression makes for the best object lesson in Austrian economics.

Rothbard’s contributions were not confined to economics. He also wrote extensively in history and political philosophy, as well as US politics, foreign policy, international politics, and beyond. If Rothbard’s work in history and political philosophy were published by two different authors, these two would have arguably been the most important and original contributions to these fields in the twentieth century. I do not think this is an exaggeration, because in both fields, as in economics, Rothbard’s uncompromising refusal to toe the fiat cartel line and serve as a court intellectual allows him to communicate much more powerful ideas with a clarity no court intellectual could ever muster. Whereas American historiography centers on the glorious success and legitimacy of the American government, Rothbard shows the ugly, real face of America’s leviathan in Conceived in Liberty, a book so encyclopedic you will not believe Rothbard had the time to write it, let alone research it. Whereas political philosophers are constantly bickering over their absurd attempts at legitimizing government aggression and violence, only Rothbard stands apart, like the child calling the emperor naked, consistently applying to the state the same moral and legal principles that apply to any other entity, and thus, convincingly, clearly, and coherently explaining the true nature of the state, and the damage it brings to society. The vast majority of political philosophers other than Rothbard will provide you with sophistry whose only purpose is to enhance your loyalty to the bank and government cartel that pays their salary. With this searing honesty, Rothbard’s works of political philosophy exit the realm of academic bloviation and government propaganda and enter the realm of essential practical life skills. Only by understanding the true nature of the state can you begin to understand how to liberate yourself from its yoke and extricate your life from its powerful claws. International politics, US foreign policy, and the warfare state are yet another group of topics on which Rothbard offered a substantial outcome with which any serious scholar must grapple. The modern American university has served as a faithful stenographer for US foreign policy, furnishing an ever-growing list of pseudo-intellectual, criminal, and idiotic justifications for the conveyor belt of death and destruction that is US foreign policy. For decades, Rothbard has provided a comprehensive refutation of all these justifications, small and large, and has given his readers the searing truth about the realities of the conflicts whose flames DC was fanning. My particular favorite piece here is Rothbard’s discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As a Palestinian who has spent my entire life living and learning about the tragedy that is Zionism, I could not find a better, more precise piece to understand the conflict. With his peerless clarity and sharp pen, Rothbard pinpointed the exact crux of the so-called conflict: the Zionist war of aggression and theft against the legitimate owners of the land of Palestine. He effortlessly cleared the large clouds of clichés, emotional blackmail, and confusion surrounding this topic, replacing them with the very simple and inarguable concrete reality: by denying the property rights of the rightful owners of the land based on their race, Israeli aggression inevitably generates conflict and requires endless subsidies from emotionally, violently, and sexually blackmailed Western nations to survive.

Underpinning all of Rothbard’s ethics and economics is the solid, even, and consistent intellectual foundation of property rights, which allowed him to build magnificent works arriving at solid conclusions published fearlessly. There was no special exception for any government or favored group that would destroy the consistency of Rothbard’s work and force him to write incoherent drivel to justify it. Once one adopts this lens to understand the world, everything becomes much clearer.

Yet my intellectual debt to Rothbard does not end with his scholarship; it extends to his writing style, and the courage of his convictions. Although I had always enjoyed writing, I struggled to write in my graduate studies as I could never muster the conviction to mimic the timid style of academia, and the complex ways in which academics twist words in order to impressively communicate nothing of substance. Rothbard was the first economist I encountered that wrote clearly, decisively, precisely, and unapologetically. For the first time, I found someone who wrote with the supreme purpose of being understood, not to obfuscate, prevaricate, impress, or flatter. Seeing that example convinced me to write clearly and honestly, and that was pivotal in my decision to pursue writing The Bitcoin Standard and my subsequent books.

I found value in Hayek, but found Rothbard and Mises on firmer and more consistent ground. I enjoyed and benefited from reading Mises, but Rothbard’s writing style was far more engaging and relatable to me. Rothbard, after all, wrote in his native English language, and most of his work was more recent than Mises, whose work was translated from German or written in the author’s third language, when it seemed like he thought in German and translated to English.

Along with this clarity of thought came the clarity of conviction, and the courage to communicate it plainly and honestly, regardless of the impact it might have on the delicate sensibilities of readers used to gentler and more flattering propaganda. Prevaricating, massaging reality, and flattering the reader’s prejudices may land you fancy job titles at modern universities, but they will ensure that you’re rarely ever read outside of mandatory curricula. More than three decades after his untimely passing, Rothbard remains one of the most widely read economists of the twentieth century. A cursory look at his books on Amazon shows a very large number of positive reviews, surpassing almost all the heavily-promoted regime economists, past and present. This feat is even more impressive when one remembers that his books are available for free download from mises.org, and have been downloaded by countless people from around the world. Toeing the line of the Federal Reserve cartel and the academic cartel it finances would have likely secured him a better job than the one he had, but it would have ensured his name is as obscure as the many thousands of his contemporaries who are never read or mentioned in today’s world. Recently, a friend shared with me a critical obituary of Rothbard written by an opportunist CIA agent and fiat regime propagandist named William F. Buckley, Jr., who spent decades drumming up support for US and Israeli wars of aggression among conservatives by writing flowery slop. Buckley’s bitter obituary brings to mind the difference in the lives and legacies of the two men born in New York a century ago. Rothbard toiled in obscurity in an unprestigious university, frozen out of all major media outlets, writing to the libertarian and intellectual fringe, and constantly attacked by regime mouthpieces like Buckley as a simpleton and traitor. Buckley, on the other hand, marched from his CIA job to one important media appointment after another, regularly featured on major TV, newspapers, and radio stations. Thirty-one years after Rothbard’s death, and 18 years after Buckley’s, it is now possible to assess their legacies. Rothbard’s books have around five times as many reviews as Buckley’s inconsequential and ephemeral drivel. Rothbard’s work has only become more important as inflation continues to accelerate societal decline. Countless people from all over the world download Rothbard’s books for free from Mises.org, but I know absolutely nobody who has any good reason to read Buckley today, and I can never recall hearing anyone reference an important idea of his relevant to today’s world. To the extent anyone ever mentions him, it is usually just sentimental boomer slop longing for the better-written propaganda of the past. For all of the media and promotion, regime agents like Buckley are forgotten, because there’s always a new and improved Buckley tailor-made to make war and despotism agree with the latest fads among conservative midwits. Rothbard was fully aware that actors like Buckley got the limelight during their lifetime, but he persistently continued on his path, churning out millions of words for posterity to read. Whereas Rothbard wrote with incredible breadth and depth, Buckley was essentially a slightly less dumb Sean Hannity, using flowery language to impress his readers with exhibitionist literacy. Buckley’s regime has delivered war and inflation and untold destruction, and an increasingly larger number of Americans are waking up to the fiat regime scam Buckley promoted, as their children struggle to afford homes while Netanyahu commandeers America’s people and their resources like they were his private farm.

Finding out how the world’s monetary and political system actually works by reading Rothbard can be unnerving. It is tempting to just ignore the Austrians, get back to the fiat plantation, make the right fiat noises, seek a safe career, and pay your bills until you die. But comparing Rothbard’s legacy to that of regime propagandists made that impossible for me. There is, and always will be, a massive conveyor belt producing imminently forgettable and interchangeable Buckley-like automatons. There will only ever be one Murray Rothbard. Regime propaganda will fade into obscurity, but clear, principled writing will age well. The Buckleys can enjoy the fleeting adulation of idiots, but to Rothbard goes posterity. Life is too short, and posterity too long, to mince words.

I first met Murray Rothbard in the summer of 1985. I was then 35 and Murray was 59. For the next ten years, until Murray’s premature death in 1995, I would be associated with Murray, first in New York City and then in Las Vegas, at UNLV, in closer, more immediate and direct contact than anyone else, except his wife Joey, of course.

Being almost as old now [Oct. 7, 2017] as Murray was at the time of his death I thought it appropriate to use this occasion to speak and reflect a bit on what I learned during my ten years with Murray. I was already an adult when I first met Murray, not just in the biological but also in the mental and intellectual sense, and yet, I only came of age while associated with him—and I want to talk about this experience. Before I met Murray I had already completed my Ph.D. and attained the rank of a Privatdozent (a tenured but unpaid university professor), the same rank incidentally that Ludwig von Mises once held in Vienna. Apart from my doctoral dissertation (Erkennen und Handeln), I had already completed two books. One, Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung, that revealed me as a Misesian, and another, about to be published in the following year (Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat), that revealed me as a Rothbardian. I had already read all of Mises’s and Rothbard’s theoretical works. (I had not yet read Murray’s voluminous journalistic work, however, which was essentially unavailable to me at the time.) Thus, it was not my personal encounter with Murray, then, that made me a Misesian and Rothbardian. Intellectually, I was already a Misesian and Rothbardian years before I ever met Murray personally. And so, notwithstanding the fact that I am myself foremost a theoretician, I do not want to speak here about the grand Austro-libertarian intellectual edifice that Mises and, in his succession, Rothbard have handed down to us, or about my own small contributions to this system, but about my long personal experience with Murray: about the practical and existential lessons that I learned through my encounters with him and that turned me from an adult to a man who had come of age.

I moved to New York City, because I considered Murray the greatest of all social theorists, certainly of the 20th century and possibly of all times, just as I considered Mises the greatest of all economists, and, with Mises having long gone and out of the picture, I wanted to meet, get to know and work with this man, Rothbard. I still hold this view concerning the greatness of Mises and Rothbard. Indeed, even more so today than 30 years ago. And since then, there has been no second Mises or Rothbard. Not even close, and we may have to wait for a long time for this to happen.

So I moved to NYC knowing Murray’s work, but knowing almost nothing about the man. Remember, this was 1985. I was still writing in longhand and then using a mechanical typewriter, acquainting myself with a computer for the first time only during the following year at UNLV. And Murray never used a computer but stayed with an electric typewriter until the end of his life. There were no cell-phones, there were no emails, no internet, no Google, no Wikipedia, and no YouTube. At the beginning, even fax-machines did not exist. My correspondence with Murray preceding my arrival in NYC, then, was by old, regular snail-mail. Murray expressed his enthusiasm about my wish to meet and work with him and immediately offered to enlist the help of Burton Blumert, and indeed, Burt then was of instrumental help in facilitating my move from Europe to the US. (The wonderful Burt Blumert, owner of Camino Coins, and founder of the original Center for Libertarian Studies that would ultimately be merged with the Mises Institute, was one of Murray’s dearest friends and confidants. He was also a great benefactor and dear friend to me.)

I had seen some photos of Murray, I knew that he, like Mises, was Jewish, that he taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (subsequently renamed New York Polytechnic University and nowadays Polytechnic Institute of NYU), that he was the editor of the much admired Journal of Libertarian Studies, and that he was closely associated, as its academic director, with the Ludwig von Mises Institute that Lew Rockwell had recently, 35 years ago, in 1982, founded. That was about it. And so, both unprepared, we met for the first time in Murray’s university office. Here was I, the “cool blonde from the North,” to cite a popular advertisement for bitter tasting northern German beers, young, tall and athletic, somewhat unsociable, dry and with a dry sense of humor, and more on the blunt, sarcastic and confrontational side. Perfect Wehrmacht-material, if you will. And there was Murray: the “big-city neurotic,” to use the German title of Woody Allen’s comedic Annie Hall, a generation older, short and round, non-athletic, even clumsy (except for typing), gregarious and hilarious, never moping but ever joyful, and, in his personal dealings (quite unlike in his writings), always non-confrontational, well-tempered or even tame. Not exactly Wehrmacht-material. Personality-wise, then, we could hardly have been more different. Indeed, we were quite an odd couple—and yet, we hit it off from the start. Given the long, special relationship between Germans and Jews, especially during the 12-year period of Nationalsocialist Party rule in Germany, from 1933–45, I, as a young German meeting an older Jew in America, had been afraid that this history might become a potential source of tension. Not so. Quite to the contrary. On the subject of religion itself, there was general agreement. We were both agnostics, yet with a profound interest in the sociology of religion and quite similar views on comparative religion. Yet Murray greatly deepened my understanding of the role of religion in history through his unfortunately uncompleted great work, during the last decade of his life, on the history of economic thought. Moreover, in our countless conversations, I learned from Murray about the importance of complementing Austro-libertarian theory with revisionist history in order to come up with a truly realistic assessment of historic events and global affairs. And it was I, then, as someone who had grown up in defeated and devastated post-WWII West-Germany with the then (and still) “official history” taught across all German schools and universities of (a) feeling guilty and ashamed of being German and German history and (b) believing that America and America’s democratic capitalism was “the greatest thing” since or even before the invention of sliced bread, who had to revise his formerly still, despite all Austro-libertarian theory, rather naïve views about world affairs in general and US-American and German history in particular. As a matter of fact, Murray made me fundamentally change my rather rosy view of the US (despite Vietnam and all that) and helped me, for the first time, to feel consoled, content and even happy about being German, and to develop a special concern for Germany and the fate of the German people.

To my initial surprise, then—and ultimately my great and pleasant relief—Murray was quite a Germanophile. He knew and highly appreciated the German contributions to philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering, scholarly history and literature. His beloved teacher Mises had originally written in German and was a product of German culture. Murray loved German music, he loved German baroque churches, he loved the Bavarian beer-garden atmosphere and the from-church-to-beer-garden-we-go tradition. His wife Joey was of German ancestry, her maiden-name being JoAnn Schumacher, and Joey was a member of the Richard-Wagner-Society and a lifelong opera buff. As well, most of Murray’s friends that I would eventually meet turned out to be Germanophiles.

Foremost among them Ralph Raico, the great historian of classical liberalism, who I had hoped to see again at this occasion but who sadly left us forever almost a year ago now. I met Ralph only a few months after my arrival in NYC, at a party held at Murray’s apartment on the upper Westside. I immediately took to his caustic sarcasm and over the years we developed a close friendship. Apart from our many meetings at various Mises Institute events, I still fondly remember in particular our extended joint travels in northern Italy and especially when, at a conference in Milano, sponsored by some friends and affiliates of the once (but no longer) secessionist Lega Nord, some self-proclaimed— who would have guessed that?!—“anti-fascist” demonstrators appeared in front of the conference hotel to denounce us, to our great amusement, as “libertari-fascisti.” Ralph was also the one who introduced me to the revisionist scholarship concerning WWI and WWII as well as the entire interwar period, and it was Ralph, who taught me about the history of German liberalism and in particular its radical 19th century libertarian representatives that had been almost completely forgotten in contemporary Germany. Incidentally, Lew Rockwell, too, early on showed his Germanophile credentials. When we first met in NYC in the fall of 1985, he drove a Mercedes 190, he then went astray for a few years, driving an American-made pickup truck, but ultimately returned to the fold by driving a Mini-Cooper, produced by BMW. But above all it was Murray, who taught me never to trust official history, invariably written by the victors, but to conduct all historical research instead like a detective investigating a crime. Always, first and foremost and as a first approximation, follow the money in search of a motive. Who is to gain, whether in terms of money, real estate or sheer power from this measure or that? In most cases, answering this question will lead you directly to the very actor or group of actors responsible for the measure or policy under consideration. Simple as it is to ask this question, however, it is much more difficult and requires often arduous research to answer it, and to unearth, from under a huge smokescreen of seemingly high-minded rhetoric and pious propaganda, the hard facts and indicators—the money flows and welfare-gains—to actually prove a crime and to identify and “out” its perpetrators. Murray was a master in this, and that at a time when you did not have access to computers, the internet and search machines such as Google. And to do this detective’s work, as I learned from Murray, you must go beyond official documents, the MSM, the big and famous names, the academic “stars” and the “prestigious” journals—in short: everything and everyone deemed “respectable” and “politically correct.” You must also, and in particular, pay attention to the work of outsiders, extremists and outcasts, i.e., to “disrespectable” or “deplorable” people and “obscure” publication outlets that you are supposed to ignore or not even know about. To this day, I have heeded, and indeed relished following this advice. Anyone who could see my list of bookmarks of frequently visited websites would likely be surprised, and any establishmentarian or leftist in particular would likely be shocked and shudder in disgust.

With this general perspective and outlook on things, revisionists such as Murray (and myself) are regularly charged, contemptuously, as some nutty conspiracy theorists. To this charge, Murray would typically respond: First, put bluntly and sarcastically, even if one were a certified paranoid this cannot be taken as proof that no one was actually after you and your money. And second and more systematically: Conspiracies are less likely, of course, the larger the number of supposed conspirators. Also, it is naïve to assume the existence of just one big all-encompassing conspiracy run by one all-powerful group of conspirators. But conspiracies, often rival or even contradictory conspiracies, i.e., confidential efforts of various groups of people acting in concert in the pursuit of some common goal, are indeed an ever-present feature of social reality. As any action, such conspiracies can succeed or they can fail and can lead to consequences that were un-intended by the conspirators. But realistically speaking, most if not all historical events are more or less exactly what some identifiable people or group of people acting in concert intended them to be. Indeed, to assume the opposite is to assume, incredibly, that history is nothing but a sequence of unintelligible accidents.

Moreover, in learning from Murray about the necessity of complementing Austro-libertarian theory with revisionist history so as to gain a complete, realistic picture of the world and worldly affairs, I also received constant training from him in the art of prudent and judicious judgment and evaluation of people, actions and events. Pure theory allows us to make rather clear-cut judgments of true or false, right or wrong, and effective, leading to the goal intended, or ineffective. But many if not most actions and events provoking or eliciting our judgments do not fall into the category of matters that can be thusly evaluated. We are surrounded, or better still: encircled, by a class of people—politicians and state-agents—that, day-in and day-out, renders and enforces decisions that systematically impact and affect our property and consequently our entire conduct of life without our consent and even against our explicit protestation. In short: we are confronted by an elite of rulers, instead of, in contradistinction, an elite of agents. And confronted with politicians and political decisions, then, our judgment concerns the evaluation of, at best, second-bests. The question is not true or false, right or wrong, effective or ineffective. Rather, it is this: Given that political decisions are per se false, wrong and ineffective, which of these decisions is less false, wrong and effective and comparatively closer to the truth, the right and the good, and which person represents a lesser evil or a greater one than another. Such questions do not allow for a scientific answer, because answering them involves the comparative evaluation of countless immeasurable and incommensurable variables. And in any case, newly discovered facts about the past or future developments may well reveal any such judgment as mistaken. But the answer is also not arbitrary. What is true, right and effective is given, as fix-points, and reasons must be supplied, whether based on logic or empirical evidence, for locating various second-bests as closer or more distant to such points. Rather, judgment-making in matters such as these is a difficult art, much like entrepreneurship is not a science but an art. And just as some people are good at entrepreneurship and others bad, indicated by monetary profits or losses, then, so are some people good at judging political events and actors and others bad, gaining or losing in the reputation as wise and prudent judges. Murray was of course not unfailing in his judgments. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, he misjudged the anti-war stand of the New Left as more principled than it really was, something that he afterwards readily admitted as a mistake. And I know of at least one, rather personal case, where Joey’s judgment was better and more on the mark than his. This notwithstanding however, I have not encountered anyone of sounder, subsequently vindicated judgment than Murray. With this I want to come to the second major lesson I learned during my long association with Murray. While the first lesson in revisionism concerned matters of practice and method, the second lesson concerned existential matters. Before I met Murray, I knew of course that he was a radical outsider in a predominantly leftist-liberal academia and I expected (and was willing to accept for myself) that this would involve some sacrifices, i.e., that one would have to pay a price for being a Rothbardian, not only, but also in terms of money. But I was quite surprised to realize how high this price was. I knew that Brooklyn Polytechnic was not a prestigious university, yet I expected Murray to occupy there a comfortable, well-paying post. Moreover, at the time I still fancied the US as a bastion and bulwark of free enterprise and consequently expected that Murray, as the foremost intellectual champion of capitalism and the personified anti-thesis to Marx, would be held in high esteem, if not in academia then certainly outside of it, in the world of commerce and business, and accordingly be rewarded with a certain degree of affluence.

In fact, at Brooklyn Polytechnic Murray occupied a small, grungy and windowless office that he had to share with a history professor. In Germany, even research assistants enjoyed more comfortable surroundings, not to speak of full professors. Murray ranked among the lowest paid full professors at his school. Indeed, my German National Science Foundation grant at the time—a Heisenberg scholarship— turned out to be considerably higher than Murray’s university salary (something that I was too ashamed to reveal to him after I had discovered it). And Murray’s apartment in Manhattan, large and filled to the ceiling with books, was dark and run-down. Certainly nothing like the penthouse that I had imagined him to occupy. This situation improved significantly with his move in 1986, at age 60, to Las Vegas and UNLV. While my salary went down there as compared to my previous compensation, Murray’s went sharply up, but was still below 100K, and he could afford to buy a roomy but spartan house. Even as the holder of an endowed chair at UNLV, however, Murray did not have command of any research assistants or a personal secretary.

Yet Murray never complained or showed any bitterness or signs of envy but always plugged along joyfully and pushed ahead instead with his writings. This was a hard lesson for me to learn and I am still having difficulties following it at times.

Apropos, Joey and Murray once told me laughingly how, at the time when they were still dating, both had expected the other to be a good catch. Joey, because Murray was Jewish, and Murray, because Joey was gentile—only to then find out that they were both wrong in their expectations. Moreover, despite his towering achievements as an intellectual champion of free market capitalism, Murray never won any prizes, awards or honors to speak of. That he did not win a Nobel prize in economics was not surprising, of course. After all, the great Mises also did not win it. But in the US alone there existed dozens of institutions—think-tanks, foundations, business associations, research centers and universities—that professed their dedication to free markets and liberty, and yet none of them ever awarded Murray any significant prize or honorary award, all the while they showered people with money and awards who had done little more than to suggest—“daringly”—some incremental reform such as, let’s say, lowering the marginal tax rate from 35% to 30 or cutting the budget of the EPA by some percentage points, or who had simply expressed their “personal love” of “freedom” and “free enterprise” often, loudly and emphatically enough. None of this fazed Murray in the slightest. Indeed, he expected nothing else, for reasons that I still had to learn. What Murray realized and I still had to learn was that the most vociferous and ferocious rejection and opposition to Austro-libertarianism would not come from the traditional socialist Left, but rather from these very self-proclaimed “anti-socialist,” “limited government,” “minimal state,” “pro-private enterprise” and “pro-freedom” outfits and their intellectual mouthpieces, and above all from what has become known as the Beltway-Libertarians. They simply could not stomach the fact that Murray had demonstrated with plain logic that their doctrines were nothing but inconsistent intellectual clap-trap, and that they were all, to use Mises’s verdict vis-a-vis Milton Friedman and his company, a “bunch of socialists,” too, notwithstanding their vehement protestations to the contrary. For, as Murray argued, once you admitted the existence of a State, any State, defined as a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving the State itself, then all private property had been effectively abolished, even if it remained provisionally, qua State-grant, nominally private, and had been replaced instead by a system of “collective” or rather State-property. State, any State, means socialism, defined as “the collective ownership of factors of production.” The institution of a State is praxeologically incompatible with private property and private property based enterprise. It is the very anti-thesis of private property, and any proponent of private property and private enterprise then must, as a matter of logic, be an anarchist. In this regard (as in many others) Murray was unwilling to compromise, or “intransigent,” as his detractors would say. Because in theory, in thinking, compromise is impermissible. In everyday life, compromise is a permanent, and ubiquitous feature, of course. But in theory, compromise is the ultimate sin, a strict and absolute “no no.” It is not permissible, for instance, to compromise between the two incompatible propositions that 1+1=2 or that 1+1=3 and accept that it is 2.5. Either some proposition is true or it is false. There can be no “meeting in the middle” of truth and falsehood.

Here, regarding Murray’s uncompromising radicalism, a little anecdote told by Ralph Raico seems apropos. To quote Ralph:

Murray was someone special. I recognized that fact the first night I met him. It was after the Mises seminar; a buddy of mine and I had been invited to attend, and afterwards Murray suggested we have coffee and talk. My friend and I were dazzled by the great Mises, and Murray, naturally, was pleased to see our enthusiasm. He assured us that Mises was at least the greatest economist of the century, if not the whole history of economic thought. As far as politics went, though, Murray said, lowering his voice conspiratorially: “Well, when it comes to politics, some of us consider Mises a member of the non-Communist Left.” Yes, it was easy to see we’d met someone very special.

Unlike Murray, quite a few individuals who had learned essentially everything they ever knew from Murray, in particular his Man, Economy and State, were willing to make such intellectual compromises, and they were richly rewarded for their intellectual “flexibility” and “tolerance.” But that was not Murray! And consequently, he was (and still is) ignored, excluded or denounced by the chieftains of the “limited-government-free-market-industry.” And he was essentially left without any institutional support, as a lone fighter, until the arrival of Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute. I experienced this Rothbard-phobia second-handedly, if you will. For as soon as word had gotten out that the new German arrival was Murray’s boy and also appeared rather “intransigent,” I found myself immediately placed on the same blacklists with him. Thus, I had quickly learned a first important real-life lesson of what it means to be a Rothbardian. Another lesson was in humility. Murray had a huge library, had read and digested an enormous amount of literature and was consequently a humble man. He was always reluctant and highly skeptical to assume or recognize any “originality” claims. “Originality” claims, he knew, are made most frequently by people with tiny libraries and little reading. In distinct contrast, Murray was highly generous in giving credit to others. And he was equally generous in giving advice to anyone asking. Indeed, on almost any conceivable subject, he was prepared, off the top of his head, to provide you with an extensive bibliography. As well, he encouraged any sign of productivity even among his lowliest students. While I always tried to follow this example, I could not bring myself to go quite as far as Murray did, however. Because I thought and still think that Murray’s humility was excessive, that he was humble almost to a fault. His students at Brooklyn Polytechnic, for instance, mostly engineering majors (or, as Murray described Mises’s students at NYU, “packaging majors”), had no idea who he was, because he never mentioned his own works. They were genuinely surprised to find out from me who their jolly professor was when I substituted teaching Murray’s class while he was out of town. And at UNLV the situation was not much different. While I actively promoted him as his unofficial PR-agent, Murray continued in his self-deprecation. Although he had written on almost any imaginable subject in the social sciences, he would, when he suggested or assigned term-papers to his students, mention his own related writings, if at all, only as some sort of afterthought or upon specific request.

Yet Murray’s extreme modesty had also another, unfortunate effect. When we moved to Las Vegas in 1986, we had expected to turn UNLV into a bastion of Austrian economics. At the time, UNLV’s basketball team, the Runnin’ Rebels, under coach Jerry Tarkanian, were a national powerhouse, always slightly scandalous, but impossible to overlook. We had hoped to become the Runnin’ Rebels of economics at UNLV. Several students had transferred and enrolled at the university in anticipation of such a development. But these hopes were quickly disappointed. Already at our arrival at UNLV the composition of the economics department had significantly changed, and then majority rule, democracy, set in. To balance the Austrian influence, only one year later, the department majority decided, against our opposition, to hire a no-name Marxist. I urged Murray to use his position and reputation to interfere with the university’s higher-ups and prevent this appointment. Except for Jerry Tarkanian, Murray was the only nationally recognized person at UNLV. He held the only endowed chair at the university. We knew the university’s president and provost socially and were on cordial terms with both of them. Accordingly, I believed that there was a realistic chance to overturn the department’s decision. But I could not persuade Murray of his own powers.

After this missed opportunity matters became worse. The department continued to hire anyone but an Austrian or Austrian sympathizer. Our students were maltreated and discriminated against. The department and the dean of the business college denied me tenure (which decision was overruled by the university’s provost and president, not least because of massive student protests and the intervention of several university donors). The department chairman wrote an outrageous, nasty and insulting annual evaluation of Murray’s professorial performance (upon which the university administration forced the chairman to resign from his position). (See the Appendix for more on this.) As a consequence, a second chance for us arose to turn matters around. Plans were developed and were discussed with the provost to split the department and establish a separate economics department in the College of Liberal Arts. This time Murray became involved. But the initial momentum to our advantage had been lost in the meantime, and after the first signs of resistance, Murray quickly resigned and gave up. He was not willing to take off his gloves, and our secessionist project soon fizzled out in defeat. Only to quickly finish our UNLV saga: After Murray’s death in 1995, I continued working at UNLV for another decade in an increasingly hostile environment. The once protective university administration had changed, and I felt ever more unappreciated and out of place. Even my great popularity among students was used against me, as proof of the “danger” emanating from my teaching. In 2004, I became embroiled in a scandal. In a lecture I had hypothetically suggested that homosexuals, on average, and owing to their characteristic lack of children, had a comparatively higher degree of time-preference, i.e., of present-orientation. A cry-baby student complained, and the university’s affirmative action commissar immediately, as if he had only waited for this opportunity, initiated official proceedings against me, threatening severe punitive measures if I were not to instantly and publicly recant and apologize. “Intransigent” as I was, I refused to do so. And I am certain that it was only this steadfast refusal of mine to beg for forgiveness that, after a full year of administrative harassment, I ultimately emerged victorious from this battle with the thought police, and the university administration suffered an embarrassing defeat. A year later I resigned from my position and left UNLV and the US for good. Coming back to Murray: Naturally, I was disappointed about the developments at UNLV. But they did not have the slightest effect on our continued cooperation. Maybe Murray had been right and more realistic all along and it was I, who had suffered from too much youthful optimism? And in any case, there was one more important lesson about the larger scheme of things that I still had to learn. Whereas most people tend to become milder and more “tolerant” in their views as they grow older, Murray grew increasingly more radical and less tolerant over time. Not in his personal dealings, as I already emphasized. In this regard Murray was and remained to the end a “softie,” but in his speeches and writings. This radicalization and increasing “intransigence” came in response to developments in the world of US-politics at large and in particular within the “limited-government-free-market” industry and among the so-called libertarians assembled around Washington D.C.’s Beltway. There, everywhere, a slow yet systematic drift toward the Left and leftist ideas could be observed. A drift that ever since, up to this day, has only further gained in momentum and grown in strength. Constantly, new “rights” were “discovered” and adopted in particular also by so-called libertarians. “Human rights” and “civil rights,” “women rights” and “gay rights,” the “right” not to be discriminated against, the “right” to free and unrestricted immigration, the “right” to a free lunch and free health care, and the “right” to be free of unpleasant speech and thought. Murray demolished all this allegedly “humanitarian” or, to use a German term, this “Gutmenschen” talk as intellectual rubbish in demonstrating that none of these supposed “rights” were compatible with private property rights. And that, as libertarians above all people should know, only private property rights, i.e., the right of every person in the ownership of his physical body and the ownership of all external objects justly (peacefully) acquired by him, can be argumentatively defended as universal and compossible human rights. Everything except private property rights, then, Murray demonstrated again and again, are phony, non-universalizable rights. Every call for “human rights” other than private property rights is ultimately motivated by egalitarianism and as such represents a revolt against human nature.

Moreover, Murray moved still further to the right—in accordance with Erik von Kuehneldt-Leddihn’s dictum that “the right is right”— in pointing out that in order to establish, maintain and defend a libertarian social order more is needed than the mere adherence to the non-aggression principle. The ideal of the left- or “modal”-libertarians, as Murray referred to them, of “live and let live as long as you don’t aggress against anyone else,” that sounds so appealing to adolescents in rebellion against parental authority and any social convention and control, may be sufficient for people living far apart and dealing and trading with each other only indirectly and from afar. But it is decidedly insufficient when it comes to people living in close proximity to each other, as neighbors and cohabitants of the same community. The peaceful cohabitation of neighbors and of people in regular direct contact with each other on some territory requires also a commonality of culture: of language, religion, custom and convention. There can be peaceful co-existence of different cultures on distant, physically separated territories, but multi-culturalism, cultural heterogeneity, cannot exist in one and the same place and territory without leading to diminishing social trust, increased conflict, and ultimately the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian social order. If Murray had been ignored, neglected or resented before by the usual suspects, now, with this stand against everything deemed “politically correct,” he was vilified and met with undisguised hatred. The by now only all-too-familiar litany of denunciatory terms followed: Murray was a reactionary, a racist, a sexist, an authoritarian, an elitist, a xenophobe, a fascist and, to top it all off, a self-hating Jewish Nazi. Murray shrugged it all off. Indeed, he laughed about it. And indeed, to the consternation of the “smear bund,” as Murray referred to the united popular front of his “anti-fascist” detractors, his influence only grew and has continued to grow still further since his death. It may not be widely recognized, but without Murray there would be no Ron Paul as we know him—and I say this without wishing thereby to diminish or belittle Ron Paul’s own, personal role and extraordinary achievements in the slightest—there would be no Ron Paul movement, and there would be no popular or, as the “smear bund” prefers to say, no “populist” libertarian agenda. As for me, my own views radicalized, too, along with Murray’s. My Democracy: The God That Failed was the first major documentation of this intellectual development, and if anything, my radical intolerance regarding anything left-libertarian and “politically correct” has been growing still ever since. Almost needless to say that I, too, then have been awarded the same and even a few extra honorary titles by the “smear bund” as Murray (except for the self-hating Jewish stuff). Yet I had learned to shrug all of it off, too, as I had seen Murray do it, and as Ralph Raico had always encouraged and continued to advise me. In addition, remembering a popular German saying helped me: “viel Feind, viel Ehr’.” And indeed, the ongoing success of my annual Property and Freedom Society conference-salon, now in its 12th year, held and conducted in a genuinely Rothbardian spirit, has demonstrated the utter failure of all defamation campaigns directed at me. If anything, they have helped rather than hindered me in attracting an ever larger circle of intellectual friends, affiliates and supporters.

I should add that during the last decade or so, under the wise and strict guidance of my lovely wife Gülçin, I have also made great strides in combining uncompromising intellectual radicalism with personal lovability, even though nature and natural disposition have prevented me from coming anywhere close to Murray in this regard.

I have said far too little here about Lew, and I sincerely apologize. But this I must say: Lew, apart from Murray has been one of the most important people helping me become the man that I am today. And to Murray, who I am sure is watching us today from up high, I say: thank you Murray, you are my hero, “I shall not look upon his like again,” and I hope you are happy with your student. I always felt tremendous joy when you told me “great Hans, Attaboy,” and even if I can’t hear you right now, nothing would give me greater pleasure than if you said it again right now up there, where the kings of thought are gathered.