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Rothbard and Greenspan: 2 New Yorkers Born Together, Chose 2 Different Paths

Murray’s Dream Fulfilled

By 

August 15, 2022

Murray would have loved what took place at the Mises Institute on Friday, July 29, 2022, near the end of Mises University 2022. All his academic life, he dreamed of a graduate school where Austrian economics could be studied at an advanced level and where the torch could be passed to a new generation of young scholars. Last Friday, this dream was fulfilled. In a beautiful ceremony, two students received their MA in Austrian Economics

The program these students followed is rigorous. Here it is: “The Mises Institute’s Master of Arts in Austrian Economics is unique. It is the first graduate program in the United States dedicated exclusively to the teaching of economics as expounded in the works and great treatises of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. The goal of the program is to assist students in mastering the principles of this great body of work and putting these principles to use in their chosen endeavors.

To this end, the Institute has carefully selected an outstanding faculty, with PhDs from prestigious universities including New York University, UCLA, Columbia University, Cal-Berkeley, Rutgers University, and Virginia Tech. All are accomplished scholars who have lectured or taught at Mises Institute events and published in its journals, books, or online publications. Many were personal friends or protégés of Murray Rothbard.

Thanks to the generosity of the Mises Institute’s donors, the cost of the program is well below that of other M.A. programs in economics or the related social sciences, whether traditional or online.

The program consists of the following coursework:

  • Microeconomics
  • Monetary Economics
  • Quantitative Economics:  Uses and Limitations
  • Macroeconomics
  • History of Economic Thought I
  • History of Economic Thought II
  • Comparative Economic Systems
  • History of Economic Regulation and Financial Crises
  • Rothbard Graduate Seminar
  • Thesis Requirement​” https://mises.org/edu

To understand why this program fulfills Murray’s dream, we need to look at his life. Murray was born in New York City in 1926. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and studied for more than 10 years under Mises at New York University. However, his degree was delayed for years, and he came close to not receiving it at all, because of the unprecedented intervention of a faculty member.

Rothbard’s dissertation —  — showed how the Bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve’s ancestor, caused the first American depression. This offended Professor Arthur Burns, later chairman of the Federal Reserve under Nixon, who was horrified by Rothbard’s anti-central bank and pro-gold standard position.

Rothbard eventually got his Ph.D., and he began writing for the libertarian Volker Fund in New York. Like his great teacher Mises, Rothbard’s views prevented him from getting a teaching position at a major American university. Finally he was hired by Brooklyn Polytechnic, an engineering school with no economics majors, where his department consisted of Keynesians and Marxists.

He worked there, in a dark and dingy basement office, until 1986, when — thanks to free-market businessman S.J. Hall — he was offered a distinguished professorship of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

But this lack of a prestigious academic base did not prevent Rothbard, any more than it had Hazlitt, Hutt, or Mises, from reaching a wide audience of scholars, students, and the general public. Rothbard is the author of hundreds of pathbreaking scholarly articles and 16 books, including  (1962),  (1963),  (1970),  (1973),  (1976),  (1982), and  (1983)

Because of his genius, Murray could have become famous in the world of academic economists—if only he were willing to compromise, like the Chicago School economists who are satisfied with a few reforms of the welfare-warfare state. But he never would.

We can contrast Murray’s career with that of another economist who was born around the same time and came from a similar background. As Charles Burris has pointed out, they were both born in New York City, in 1926. Rothbard was born on Tuesday, March 2. The following Saturday, March 6, Alan Greenspan was born. Both attended private schools and pursued their respective passions.

Although Murray was in the graduate program at Columbia, he attended classes at NYU with the great Ludwig von Mises. Greenspan was a student at NYU but did not study with Mises, whom he might have regarded as a washed-up old man who could do nothing for his primary concern, which was his career. Instead, he chose the division called “the factory”: 9,000 students competed in various fields of specialization in business. He graduated with honors in 1945 and enrolled in the Master’s program, graduating in 1948.

At this point, the lives of Rothbard and Greenspan briefly intersect in an interesting way: at Columbia University. Two years earlier, Rothbard had received his own Masters in economics from Columbia, and had enrolled in the PhD program. Professor Arthur Burns was the most prominent faculty member. Burns would later become Eisenhower’s head of the Council of Economic Advisers and head of the Federal Reserve. One might say that he was the Greenspan of his day.

Greenspan dropped out of the Columbia economics program to follow Burns to Washington and model himself after his tendency toward chasing powerful positions and powerful people. Greenspan watched Burns carefully, very impressed at how economics in an age of positivism can be used in the service of state-connected careers.

Rothbard meanwhile stayed behind at Columbia, writing and studying. One of his seminal articles in this period was published in a book in honor of Mises — that supposedly washed-up old man who just so happened to have a penchant for speaking truth to power.

As I said above, Burns was the man who gave Murray so much trouble in getting his dissertation accepted. There were times when Burns’s recalcitrance drove Murray to despair. He felt that he could not comply with Burns’s dictates and could not please Burns and that Burns seemed to be sabotaging his work.

Ironically, Rothbard and Burns had known each other since childhood. They lived in the same apartment building since high school. There can be no question that this was a personal attack against Murray. One thing makes this certain. Murray’s dissertation adviser was the great economic historian Joseph Dorfman who liked his work. Murray dropped Burns from his committee. But, even though he wasn’t on the committee, he still intervened to prevent Murray from getting his doctorate. This is virtually unprecedented in academic life. Only once Burns became so wrapped up in Washington politics that he could no longer care did Rothbard finally win out.

As for Rothbard’s own character, the contrast with Greenspan could not be starker. If Greenspan was the dreary undertaker, Rothbard was the happy warrior. Rothbard thrilled to spend time with students and faculty and anyone interested in liberty. When you spoke to him, he was glad to talk about the field of interest that was the other person’s specialization. Whether it was history, philosophy, ethics, economics, politics, religion, Renaissance painting, music, sports, Baroque church architecture, or even the soaps on TV, he always made others feel more important.

He was always excited to give credit to others and to draw attention to the contribution of everyone to the great cause. He never held a grudge for long: even for those who betrayed him personally, there was always an opportunity for reconciliation open. All of these traits extended from his amazing generosity of spirit, which I attribute to his love of truth above all else.

We all do well to emulate this master when we go about our work. When Rothbard would take on a subject, his very first stop was not to sit in an easy chair and think off the top of his head. Instead, he went to the literature and sought to master it. He read everything he could from all points of view. He sought to become as much an expert in the topic as the other experts in the field.

In other words, Rothbard’s first step toward writing was to learn as much as possible. He never stopped taking this step for his entire life. There was never a point when he woke up feeling as if he knew all that he needed to know. No matter how much he wrote, he was always careful to read even more.

If you follow his model, you will not regard this as an arduous task, but rather a thrilling journey. A trip through the world of ideas is more exciting and exhilarating than the grandest excursion to the seven wonders of the world, more daring and adventurous than wild game hunting, and far more momentous than any moon shot.

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

Arab Columnist Counters Western Democracy Mongers

In defense of monarchies post the Afghanistan collapse

Ali Shihabi

With the Afghanistan collapse, the time has come to revisit an ongoing obsession among Western politicians and pundits: the promotion of democracy in the Arab and Muslim world.

The fundamental flaw in Western thinking has always been the assumption that democracy is some sort of a plug-and-play program that can be rapidly and successfully activated in any country. This type of thinking resulted in the disastrous experiment in Iraq, where the war and subsequent “rebuilding” process killed more than 800,000 people. It also left the oil-rich country, nearly two decades after the invasion and imposition of a “democracy,” devoid of even basic security for its people and often lacking in essential services like electricity and water.

This flawed thinking was further exposed as we saw the much-heralded Tunisian experiment come to a grinding halt after a decade of “democracy” that produced 10 governments in 10 years, continuously deadlocked, corrupt, and unable to deliver any of the inflated promises that politicians had to make to get themselves elected. Concurrently, for the last two years we have been witnessing the implosion of Lebanon’s corrupt, bankrupt, sectarian “democracy” led by criminal warlords that not only has succeeded in stealing its people’s savings from the country’s collapsed banking system but has now failed to deliver even the most basic elements of daily life such as fuel, electricity, and medicine.

And now with the disastrous Afghanistan collapse, we have another failed experiment in democracy leading to state breakdown, and the return of a medieval Taliban regime to power.

Will all this trigger a rethink in Washington, DC, about governance in the wider Middle East? Maybe numerous failed experiments in democracy set against the stability and prosperity delivered by Arab monarchical rulers for over 100 years will lead the West to appreciate that autocratic forms of governance, while unfashionable in the West, have been by far the most successful in the region.

Accepted dogma in the West ignores the centuries – in the UK, a millennium since the Magna Carta – of turmoil and bloodshed that ultimately forced its exhausted people to accept the rules and outcomes of democracy. The people of Europe, after all, only finally achieved widespread democracy in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Western Europe itself had only achieved it after 1945, under a US occupation.

The Western focus on democracy in the Middle East has obscured what could have been a much more productive and substantive focus on better governance – not so much how a government gains or holds power, but how it governs and delivers basic services and legal rights. Placing the focus on governance would enable the establishment of realistic metrics for any government to work toward. This could involve ensuring, first, the delivery of basic services such as security, electricity, and water – which many governments today do not even deliver – then medical care, education, and jobs, followed by working to ensure the fairness of the legal system – a level playing field – with the ultimate goal of ensuring freedom of speech and other freedoms.

It should not be overlooked that successful democracies need to be underpinned by a relatively narrow political spectrum in society like that between the Republicans/Conservatives and Democrats/Labor Party in the US and United Kingdom. Even Trump’s alt-right movement tested this balance in the last administration in Washington, and the divide between communism and fascism in the first half of the 20th Century in Europe made the accommodation of a democratic process impossible.

Such a wide spectrum unfortunately pervades the Middle East today, where radical Islam, such as ISIS or the Taliban, competes with Westernized political and social liberalism, a divide that simply does not lend itself to any compromise. Hence the fact that only autocracy has been able to deliver the stability required to guarantee the basic right of security and the services required for daily life.

The art of the practical and the possible should be the focus here, rather than the loud, self-righteous, and often cynical virtue signaling that so many in the West love to indulge in. The daily lived experiences of the region’s people are the ultimate proof of concept. The absolute Arab monarchies, even the ones without oil wealth such as Morocco and Jordan, have, despite all their faults, delivered a better experience to their people over the last century than any other form of government.

They took their countries, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula, out of the dark ages of massive underdevelopment and brought them into the 21st century with a good standard of infrastructure, education, and medical care underpinned by decades of stability that allowed these gains to be retained by society.

They also provided them with globally respected passports that facilitate travel, trade, and education for their people, a privilege that Westerners take for granted but one that the millions of Arabs and Muslims lining up at Western consulates, or post the Afghanistan collapse at Kabul airport, in mostly futile quests for visas understand very well. While all this progress has hardly been accompanied by any political freedoms, it has at least delivered the critical building blocks of a modern society.

Today post the Afghanistan collapse, its people, the people of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and so many others in the region’s failed, and failing states can only look upon the citizens of these autocratic monarchies with envy given what their own regimes, theocracies, and “democracies” have deprived them of and destroyed.

________________________________

Ali Shihabi is an author and commentator on Middle Eastern politics and economics with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia. His website is www.alishihabi.com. He tweets @alishihabi

From Al Arabia English News, here.

The Moral and Psychological Evils of Inflation

Inflationary Vice

AUGUST 8, 2022

Samuel Gregg, in his article on the French economist, Jacques Rueff, provides a timely reminder that inflation is much more than a merely economic phenomenon. It also has profound social effects. This, of course, was recognised by Keynes himself in the book that made him famous, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He recognised that inflation functioned as a transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, thus upsetting the previous social equilibrium; and he also quoted Lenin to the effect that the debasement of the currency was a sovereign method of producing revolutionary change.

Not all inflation is equally dramatic, of course. The grandfather of a German friend of mine once owned a portfolio of mortgages on valuable properties and soon found himself in possession of pieces of paper of less value than yesterday’s newspaper. Apparently, he took this loss philosophically and never turned to political extremism; he was later sent to Buchenwald. Not everyone in these circumstances stayed sane or decent, however.

But even less catastrophic levels of inflation have profound psychological, or perhaps I should say characterological, consequences. For one thing, inflation destroys the very idea of enough, because no one can have any confidence that a monetary income that at present is adequate will not be whittled down to very little in a matter of a few years. Not everyone desires to be rich, but most people desire not to be poor, especially in old age. Unfortunately, when there is inflation, the only way to insure against poverty in old age is either to be in possession of a government-guaranteed index-linked pension (which, however, is a social injustice in itself, and may one day be undermined by statistical manipulation by a government under force of economic circumstances, partly brought about by the very existence of such pensions), or to become much richer than one would otherwise aim or desire to be. And the latter turns financial speculation from a minority into a mass pursuit, either directly or, more usually, by proxy: for not to speculate, but rather to place one’s trust in the value of money at a given modest return, is to risk impoverishment. I saw this with my own father: once prosperous, he fell by his aversion to speculation into comparative penury.

When inflation rises to a certain level, it is prudent to turn one’s money into something tangible as soon as it comes to hand, for tomorrow, as the song goes, will be too late. Everything becomes now or never.

With the concept of enough go those of modesty and humility. They are replaced by triumph and failure, the latter certain almost by definition to be the more frequent. The humble person becomes someone not laudable but careless of his future, possibly someone who will be a drain on others insofar as he has failed to make adequate provision for himself – even if, given his circumstances, it would have been impossible for him to have done so. For notwithstanding technical progress, automation, and robotics, we shall need people of humble and comparatively ill-paid employment for the foreseeable future.

Inflation plays havoc with the virtue of prudence, for what is prudence among the shifting sands of inflation? When inflation rises to a certain level, it is prudent to turn one’s money into something tangible as soon as it comes to hand, for tomorrow, as the song goes, will be too late. Everything becomes now or never. Traditional prudence becomes imprudence, or naivety, and vice versa.

Continue reading…

From Law and Liberty, here.

The Many Excuses of Harry Truman for Nuking Japan

Harry Truman and the Atomic Bomb

08/08/2022 Ralph Raico

The most spectacular episode of Harry Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve US Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.1

Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start was that the decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded testily,

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.2

Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”3

This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the US Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.

On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the US Strategic Bombing Survey, “all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city — and escaped serious damage.”4 The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” he said; he didn’t like the idea of killing “all those kids.”5 Wiping out another one hundred thousand people … all those kids.

Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.6

Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency — that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that had been needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.7 The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll — nearly twice the total of US dead in all theaters in the Second World War — is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb “spared millions of American lives.”8

“The rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication — that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives.”

Still, Truman’s multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the US occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.9 Otherwise, Americans — and the rest of the world — might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.

The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.10 The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff, was typical:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.11

Continue reading…

From Mises.org, here.

Browbeat the Bachur into Learning More on Bein Hazmanim?

What Ever Happened to Training a Child According to His Way

written by Yardena Slater
August 8, 2022

Parents need to wake up. If kids aren’t interested in learning, there is a REASON for it (especially if they are on vacation)!

Last week something really exciting happened! I finally put a very important concept from my Parenting / Homeschooling Mentor group into Action!

One of the things our mentor, Chana Rus Cohen, keeps reminding us about is the concept of inspiring, rather than requiring from our kids. In other words, we want to inspire our kids to learn, not require it of them. As a bonus, this helps their natural genius unfold organically.

We do this by serving as an example to our children through doing the things we want them to be doing.

This means that we keep learning and growing too. We also support rather than enforce their learning interests by planning, sourcing books and other resources, being present for them, setting up a functional and inspiring work environment, taking day trips, helping them get hands on involvement in their interests, and offering guidance.

Enter: my 14 year old son who just graduated 8th grade with five weeks off of school. Straight A student, loved and admired by his teachers, super talented with a lot of leadership and shall we say – entertainment skills. Anyway, for the first almost two weeks of his vacation, this boy did not learn one word of Torah. Not one word. He got up every day for davening, prayed in a minyan three times a day. But no learning. I was  starting to get so annoyed. I tried bribing him, taking away privileges, harassing him. Nothing worked.

Finally, the light bulb went on and Chana Rus’s teachings of inspire not require came to the forefront of my mind. I thought about this kid and what he actually loves to do. Well, he does enjoy public speaking and entertaining, that’s for sure…

 In other words, we want to inspire our kids to learn, not require it of them. As a bonus, this helps their natural genius unfold organically.

That very day he had gone to an introductory day at next year’s high school yeshiva. My husband asked him over dinner, “So what did the Rosh Yeshiva speak to you about today?” He immediately jumped up and went straight into explaining the laws of the nine days of mourning, as they apply to certain obscure situations. He knew it cold. He explained this very clearly and in such an interesting way.

I then asked him if anyone else other than the Rosh Yeshiva taught them. He said that yes, and proceeded to tell us a story, a dvar Torah, and an explanation about the difficulty in new beginnings and why next year will be challenging at first but how this is normal and what to do about it. His speaking skills never cease to amaze me.

And that’s when it dawned on me: I will ask him if he would teach me Torah every day. Some parsha, more laws about the 9 days of mourning; his favorite mishnayos and Gemaras from this past year.

I said, “Would you be willing to teach me some Torah once a day? The way you give it over is so interesting and when I learn Torah alone, i have a hard time understanding a lot of it”.

Now this was something that he could actually get into and enjoy. Teaching, showing off his knowledge and how well he can give it over. Yes, this he was more than happy to do! So now, once a day, we have a little Torah session going. He teaches me and he gets to understand the Torah teachings on a deeper level because that is what happens when you teach something.

Wow.

Who did I think this child was to try and bribe or harass him into learning Torah? How ridiculous is that? What good would come out of such a thing? Sometimes I wonder if I’m brain dead. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one treating my child in this way.

Which brings me to the question – what ever happened to the teaching in Mishley 22\6? “Train a child according to his way; even when he grows old, he will not turn away from it.”

Does anyone do this anymore? I know that the schools don’t, but how many parents out there are putting this verse into action?

The GRA says about this verse that a parent must raise and teach a child in accordance with his nature and natural inclination and in this way, when he grows older, he will not turn away from the way he was raised. However, should a parent force a child to go against his nature, even through the child will listen to him when he is younger, once he grows older, he will turn away from the way he was raised and what he was taught since it is impossible for someone to go against their nature.

Parents need to wake up. If kids aren’t interested in learning, there is a REASON for it (especially if they are on vacation). Bribing, forcing or demeaning kids to learn anything is useless and a very detrimental thing to do for the long run if you really think about it. Parents must take responsibility to figure out what will make a child WANT to learn. And if they can’t figure it out, they shouldn’t expect their child to figure out how to want to learn something that they are not interested in either.

 Next time your child seems uninterested in learning Torah, studying for a math test, doing his required reading, etc. Remember: inspire not require. Think about what makes this child tick, how you can inspire him by personal example, and of course, ask Hashem for help in training your child according to his way.

From Breslov.org, here.