I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 295
the Austrian School as a player in the world of ideas, so that statism of the left and right
could be fought and defeated.
The main criticism directed against Austrian economics in those days was that it was
not formal or rigorous because it rejected the use of mathematics as the tool for constructing
economic theory. But this is absurd. In fact, Murray actually had two majors as an undergraduate:
one in economics and the other in math. What was at stake here was not the
competence of the Austrians but a fundamental methodological question: can the methods
of the physical sciences be imported to the social sciences via economics? The Austrian
answer was no.
At the same time, there was a grain of truth in the criticisms. American academia
provided no formal setting to study economics from the Austrian perspective. Most of the
then-current practitioners were self-taught, so even they had a limited perspective on the
possibilities of creating an alternative formal system of economics.
I wanted to make up for this deficiency by creating a shadow university setting in
which students could study economics under the post-Mises generation of Austrian scholars,
especially Murray.
Murray loved our programs. He would teach all afternoon and stay up until 3:00 and
4:00 a.m. talking to students about ideas. He was always accessible, laughed easily, and was
never foreboding. He learned from everyone around him and rejected the “guru” persona
he could have so easily adopted.
Students who came to us expecting a stern setting of judgmental theorizing were
shocked to discover something closer to a salon where intellectual inquiry was free and
open-ended. It had to be that way to balance out the rigor of the content. Murray’s spirit
still animates all our programs.
The funding problem was one I dealt with from the beginning. I had wanted to give
Murray a platform, but I quickly discovered that old-line foundations would not help so
long as he was on board. They certainly would not support an organization that argued for
positions like the abolition of central banking, or funded revisionist historical scholarship
and disagreed with the two-party consensus in Washington.
Corporate foundations, meanwhile are not very interested in ideas generally, particularly
not ones that threatened the status quo. It’s a cliche now, but I also found that big corporations
are not the strongest supporters of free enterprise.
I also found that most old-line foundation and corporate money comes with strings
attached. And if there is one institutional feature I desired for the Mises Institute, beyond
its ideological stance, it was independence.
I did not want to get roped into supporting cranky policy projects like vouchers or
enterprise zones, and I did not want to be forced into emphasizing some aspects of Misesian
theory simply because they were trendy, while feeling compelled to deemphasize others. I
never wanted to find myself censoring an associated scholar because some foundation
bigshot didn’t like what he was saying.
I wanted to see the fullness of the Austrian program funded and represented, consistently,
fearlessly, and regardless of the fallout. The Mises Institute needed to do work that
is deep and wide. It needed to be free to support research in areas like economic