I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

400 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
Which brings me closer to a subject most of you will want to know about: Murray
Newton Rothbard.
If you were to ask me, 11 years after Murray died (and many more years since I last
spoke with him), what was the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Murray
Rothbard now—I’m skipping for the moment the extraordinary brainpower, the powerful
books and essays, and the infectious personality—then it would be his cackle. It was not
the timbre of the cackle, nor its loudness, nor its length; indeed, it was not a particularly
unusual cackle at all. What made Murray’s cackle noteworthy to me was its frequency.
Predicting precisely when Murray would cackle was not necessarily easy; what was easy,
though, was predicting that it would surely emerge from him very often.
When I think about Murray’s cackle, I am reminded of the title of a long essay he
wrote about one of our mutual heroes, the journalist H.L. Mencken. The headline for
Murray’s piece referred to Mencken as a “joyous libertarian.” Anyone who spent time with
Murray and had frequent exposure to his cackle realized pretty quickly that the mantle
“joyous libertarian” had switched easily from Mencken to Murray. (When I attended the
Mises seminar in the early Sixties, by contrast, I found Mises anything but joyous; indeed,
he appeared extremely dour. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that
I was still a teenager, while Mises was then over 80; such an age difference can be quite
intimidating!)
But back to Murray. How did I first meet him? I became interested in the conservative
movement after, as a high school student, I heard a speech by an unknown Senator named
Barry Goldwater (I can even now hear Murray shouting “fascist!” at the mere mention of
Goldwater’s name) at Hunter College in May of 1960; he was introduced by William F.
Buckley, Jr., by the way. So notable was the occasion that I even think I remember the date:
May 14, 1960. I was piqued enough by Goldwater’s passionate speech to buy Conscience of
a Conservative.
This was also about the time that I was thinking about college. Just about when I first
encountered Goldwater, and I was trying to figure out what to major in, an uncle of mine
suggested economics; as a journalist, my instinct was to major in English, but my uncle
told me that economics might be more practical for me.
That decision, and my growing interest in the conservative movement, gradually led
me to the names of Mises, Hazlitt and Hayek. And I did indeed get my bachelor’s degree
in economics at Queens College, which seemed a hotbed of Keynesians to me, and I got
half of an M.A. in economics at New York University.
I may have been a sophomore at Queens College when my childhood friend Larry
Moss and I started to attend the Mises seminar at New York University. (Larry has gone
on to a distinguished career as an author, economist—with a decidedly Austrian bent—and
professor at Babson College.) At some point around that time, someone mentioned the
name Murray Rothbard to me. I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I remember well that
he was described to me as—I am not joking!—“an anarchist dwarf.” And so, of course, I
thought that this guy Rothbard must be some kind of wacko, and I hardly gave him another
thought. (When I met Murray and saw that he was certainly not unusually short, I discounted
the noun—but not the word preceding it.)