I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 299
them, but these days, we run out of candidates long before the requests for our students
stop. Demand is outstripping supply.
Hazlitt told me that he thought the great success of the Mises Institute was providing
a forum for Rothbard at a time when everyone else had turned his back on him. I am indeed
proud of that. I also think that the Mises Institute has helped raise up an alternative intellectual
framework as freedom of thought and speech has played a smaller and smaller role
in academia.
The faculty at our conferences speak of their elation at escaping the stultifying political
rules of their home campuses. Our students feel it too. That kind of freedom and collegiality
is what a university is supposed to be about.
But I think the key achievement of the Mises Institute is the one Murray pointed to.
Before the Institute, Austrian economics was in danger of becoming a hard-money investment
strategy or an anti-rationalist process analysis—ironic indeed for a school rooted in
Aristotelianism. The Institute rescued the praxeologically based main trunk of the school,
and restored it to prominence and fruitfulness. Thus the Austrian School of Menger, Böhm-
Bawerk, Mises, and Rothbard lives and grows and has increasing influence.
Doherty: Tell me about your involvement with the Libertarian Party, and the specific
reasons for your disenchantment with it.
Rockwell: I was never an LP person, though I generally like the platform, which was
largely written by Murray. People say that he wasted his time in the LP. That judgment
presumes that geniuses like Murray should not be allowed to have hobbies and amusements.
He loved Baroque church architecture and 1920s jazz. He loved soap operas and sports.
He loved chess and eighteenth-century oratorios. And he enjoyed, for many years, his
activities with the LP, particularly since it was a hobby that intersected with his professional
interests. It certainly didn’t distract from his scholarly work, which continued unabated
through this entire period.
For years, as close as we were, I largely ignored what Murray was doing in the LP. But
Ron Paul decided to run for the 1988 presidential nomination, and he announced in 1986.
That’s when I got involved. I feared he wasn’t going to get the nomination. To my astonishment,
Russell Means, who didn’t seem to be a libertarian at all, had a real shot at it. I swung
into action, and helped orchestrate Ron’s bid for the nomination. But that pretty much
burned me out.
I wasn’t pleased with what I saw in the party. I sensed a lack of interest in ideas and an
absurd obsession with petty organizing details. There was a lot of waste of time and money.
I also felt like the party was creating a false hope of successfully bringing about reform through
politics. And yet, in all these ways, I suppose it was no different from any other party.
What bugged me the most, however, was a general tendency among the party types
to downplay libertarian theory in a host of areas. They were generally sound on tax cuts
and drug policy and the like. But there was no interest at all in foreign policy. In fact, the
largest faction in the party was actually hawkish on war and strangely conventional on
policy particulars. Then there was the perpetual focus on living a life of liberty. A life of
liberty meant, in the first instance, never wearing a tie or a white shirt.