1993 mises institute accomplishments
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In 1993, rhc cencRal goveRnmenremployed neai merhods oF expansion,
concRol, and tuealrh conFiscarion. Ir
Raised an aRRoganr aRmy oF academ
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r i sm and Redis rRi&ur ion i sm FoRced a
neai de&ace, on campus and among
rhe AmeRican people, and allocued
rhe ideas oF rhe Ludaiig von CDises
Insrirure ro 6e heaRd cuirh sraRrling
eFFecr .
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F rom th e P re sid en t
We confront the greatest challenge in 50 years. Not
since the New Deal has th ere been such an assaul t
on our liberties and property. The central state is swelling be
yond imagination. ANewer Deal is being piled on the old
New Deal and the Great Society, to engineer a Great Leap For
ward in s ta t i sm.
Like the commissars of old, our rulers believe they havethe mental equipment to make the economy conform to their
idea of perfection. There is no inequality they cannot end, no
unfairness they cannot cure, no private inefficiency they can
not repair, and no public hostility they cannot overcome.
They are impervious to economic logic, the necessity of
private property, the needs of small business and the middle
class, or America's tradition of free enterprise.
Only a body of ideas, inculcated in the right people, can
stop this, which is why the Mises Institute is devoted entirely
and uncompromisingly to those ideas. In particular, we up
hold private property, free contract, free association, free en
terprise, and decentralized political institutions. The Aus
trian School of economics, our intellectual foundation, has
successfully battled statism for more than a century. It can do
so again, as it is renewed and strengthened through the Insti
t u t e .
In 1993, however, we lost two of freedom's greatest de
fenders, Margit von Mises (1890-1993) and Henry Hazlitt
(1894-1993). Mrs. Mises, her husband's strongest advo
cate and helpmate, and after his death a "one-womanMises industry," was an invaluable advisor and supporter
o f the Institute, which she called "a dream come true." We
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4 The Ludwig von Mhos Institute
were honored to receive as a bequest her bronze bust of her
husband, and his personal copy of Human Action.
Hazlitt, a brilliant journalist, economist, and colleague of
Mises's, battled statism all his life. We were honored when he
made the Institute a principal heir. He thought this appropri
ate because we shared not only his ideas, but his spirit.
In a 1964 speech, Hazlitt addressed the disaster of Lyndon
Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater, and his words resonate
for us today. "None of us is yet on the torture rack. We arenot yet in jail. We're getting various harassments and annoy
ances, but what we mainly risk is merely our popularity, the
danger that we will be called nasty names."
Given this, we "have a duty to speak even more clearly and
courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle
while the strength is still in us... . Even those of us who havereached and passed our 70th birthdays cannot afford to rest
on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Flor
id a sun .
"The times call for courage. The times call for hard work.
But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even
higher. They are nothing less than the future of human lib
erty, which means the future of civilization."
To that end, the Institute adopts a strategy that is princi
pled and diverse: we bridge academics and public affairs
without sacrificing either contemporary relevance or intellec
tual integrity.
Our student scholarships and book programs are in high
gear. Our academic journal, The Review ofAustrian Economics,is consulted by students and scholars in the world's great uni
versities and l ibraries. Our s tudent-edi ted Austrian Econ omics
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Nezusletter is the key source on news and views within the
Austrian School. And when The Free Market appears each
month, interviews and reprints quickly follow, which refutethe purveyors of fallacy and deception.
Our Essays in PoliticalEconomy give comprehensive over
views on topics from taxes to secessionism. And our op-ed pro
gram has penetrated major newspapers and magazines, a re
markable achievement given our admittedly radical perspec
t ive .
But the ever-growing demand for our product far exceeds
our resources. As you read through this essay, please con
sider making a substantial investment in our work. As
Hazlitt said, the future of f reedom and of civil ization itself is
a t s take .
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.Auburn, Alabama
Dec embe r 1993
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A Program for Liberty
The battle of ideas begins with the academic leaders of
tomorrow. That's why the highlight of our year is the
Mises University, our acclaimed annual program for serious
students of the Austrian School. Sponsored by our O.P.Al-
ford III Center, it took place in July at Claremont McKenna
College. Applications began to pour in by late 1992, and they
nearly flooded us two months before the program began.This high demand allows us to choose students who are
learned and creative, principled and hard working.
Throughout an extraordinary week, they learned from a
faculty of top Austrian economists, headed by Murray N.
Rothbard, the S. J. Hall distinguished professor of econom
ics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and head of academic affairs for the Institute. The students choose many of
the classes they attend based on their level and interests.
After class, and at the s em inar s and meals and social
hours, they can talk with great scholars who share their
values. "I'd love to kidnap this faculty and take them back to
my university," said Tyler Welt, a student at the University of
Oregon.
Our first priority is always students. This year, we were
pleased to be able to teach them at 657 colleges and universi
ties. And for our scholarships, we selected only high-achiev
ing and committed students, and guided them through their
economic education. They in turn help steer academic opin
ion toward liberty when they become professors themselves.
Wealso sponsored seminars and publications to teach young
people the ideas that are shut out of their colleges and univer
s i t i e s .
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute 7
Our senior fellows and adjunct scholars taught at our con
ferences and conducted workshops and colloquia devoted to
a careful reading of the classics and the presentation of new
ideas. They published widely, so that the economics profes
sion, as well as the other social sciences, know that we are a
force to con tend with .
For the fourth year, we held our Austrian Economics
Weekend at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It's the best
popular introduction to the Austrian School for businessmen,reporters, homemakers, students, and others. This year, we
had a special emphasis on Austrian economics vs. Clin-
tonomics .
Will the we lf ar e s ta te e v er cease its r el ent le s s march? To
understand the social and economic mechanics behind it , we
assembled outstanding scholars in Chicago to discuss the
"Evils of the Welfare State," a conference attended by academ
ics and professionals. Adjunct scholar Professor Ralph Raico
of SUNY College at Buffalo spoke on the German origins of
welfarism, and Rockford Institute president Allan Carlson ex
plained the internal contradictions of mixed systems. Senior Fel
low Hans-Hermann Hoppe of the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, distinguished insurance from welfare, as Hillary Clin
ton fails to do, and adjunct scholar Samuel Francis, syndicated
columnist for the Washington Times and adjunct scholar Paul
Gottfried of Elizabethtown College pointed to redistribution as a
source of illicit cultural and political therapy. Senior Fellow
Joseph Salerno of Pace University applied the Misesian theory
of calculation to the mixed economy, and Rothbard explored
the American origins of redistrubtion.
The economics of freedom requires not only sound theory,
but also a sense of history. That is why we are so pleased
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8 The Lucking von Mises Institute
about the publication of volumes one and two of Rothbard's
massive history of economic thought. This year he signed the
contract with Edward Elgar, the premier English economic
publisher. Volumes one and twoalready finishedtake us
from the ancient Greeks to the laissez-faire thinkers of the la t
ter half of the 19th century. The third volume, now being writ
ten, will take us to the present.
This scholarly publication is a landmark for the Austrian
School, as is the two-volume set of classic Rothbard essaysalso published by Elgar in its prestigious "Economists of the
20th Century" series edited by Professor Mark Blaug of the
University of London. These two books include not only
Rothbard's seminal articles from the fifties and sixties, but the
scholarship that dramatically extended the Austrian School in
later decades. Best of all, these books will entrench Rothbard's
own high position in the history of economic thought. We arepleased to have helped bring this about.
Kluwer Academic Publishers brings out our highly re
spected Reviezu ofAustrian Economics, the only scholarly jour
nal in the world devoted to the Austrian School. Adjunct
scholar Larry Eshelman's article on Mises and natural law, ap
pearing in volume six, number two, shows why the RAE is soimportant. So too does Florida State University's professor
Bruce L. Benson, who writes on the origins of private prop
erty in the same issue. Former Mises Institute graduate stu
dent and current Clemson economics professor Donald
Boudreaux, together with our adjunct scholar and Loyola Col
lege professor Thomas DiLorenzo, write on anti-trust and
protectionism in the same issue.
The previous issue of the RAE was just as interesting, with
Salerno's demonstration that J. M. Keyneswas a millennialist,
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute 9
and two pathbreaking pieces on dismantling socialism, one
by Washington and Jefferson College professor Jeffrey
Herbener, a member of the Mises University faculty, and
the other by Rothbard. Salerno, we should add, is also the
stellar advocate of the gold standard and 100% reserve
banking among young Austrians, and Herbener one of the
most adept exposers of the errors and pretenses of the main
s t re am .
As academic vice president and editor of the RAE, Rothbard has done more than enough for the Institute this year.
But we could also mention his articles and reviews in jour
nals of opinion all over the world, the thousands of reprints
that others make of his Free Market pieces, his monthly chroni
cling of world affairs in the Center for Libertarian Studies'
Rothbard-Rockzoell Report, his essays on New York politics for
Chronicles, the articles on him in major newspapers and magazines, and much more.
When Rothbard's Man, Economy and State appeared in
1962, it caused a sensation. It was the first economic treatise
in t he Aust ri an School s ince Mises' s Human Action, and it
helped define the School. Now we have brought it back into
print in a handsome new edition. Students again have access
to the most complete and integrated presentation of econom
ics written in the latter half of this century.
Another aspect of Rothbard is his willingness to speak
out fearlessly on current policy, as his total demolition of
"The Clinton Economic Plan" demonstrated. We printed
and distributed thousands of copies of his analysis, written
with the support of the American Cause Foundation, and
newspaper spinoffs and radio interviews were in the hun
dreds .
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10 The Ludxvig von Mises Institute
Are moral philosophy and economics entirely separate?
No great economist has ever thought so, which is why we
are proud that Dr. David Gordon, one of the finest philoso
phers working today, is a senior fellow of the Institute.
And he is co-editor of an outstanding collection of essays on
The Morals ofMarkets. Gordon is also author of The Philosophi
calOrigins ofAustrian Economics, a monograph we published
this year to bolster the essential foundations of Misesian eco
nomi c s .
Hoppe islike Misesan economist who deals with
philosophical issues. His new book, The Economics and Eth
ics of Private Property, published this year by Kluwer in our
Studies in Austrian Economics Series, delves into morality
and efficiency, the sociology of taxation, Marxian class
analysis, and much more. And his paper on immigration,
secessionism, and democracy in Europe is one of our Essays
in Political Economy. He also wrote an article on the subject
for Chronicles. And his paper was translated into German
and French, and caused quite a stir in those countries.
Speaking of translations, a Russian edition of one of our
books was in preparation as soon as ours rolled off the press.
The book is Requiem forMarx, edited by our senior fellow andCarthage College economics professor Yuri N. Maltsev.
The book features Gordon on Marxist philosophy, Hoppe
on the class struggle, the American Bureau of Economic Re
search's Gary North on the shocking private life of Marx, the
late Professor David Osterfeld of St. Joseph's College on
Marx and mercantilism, Raico on the roots of Marxist
thought, and, finally, Rothbard on communism as a heretical
religion. It is a tour de force, with Maltsev's riveting introduc
tion on his years as an economist under Gorbachev, and it is
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute 11
already in classroom use in this country, like all Institute pub
l icat ions .
As the last notable Soviet defector, Maltsev is frequently
called upon to comment on Russian affairs. He also deserves
a medal for all the work he does, speaking on behalf of the In
sti tute and Misesian economics all over the Midwest , and
writing for newspapers all over the country through our op
ed program.
We also need reference books, and one of the more useful
is The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, which now has Roth
bard as a contributor. Not everything is in this encyclopedia,
of course, so when the Nobel Prize in economics was an
nounced this year, many editors called on us to explain
what it meant . Within hou rs , Ma rk Thornton, our Auburn
University academic coordinator and O.P. Alford III assis
tant professor sent off an article on prize winners Robert
Fogel and Douglas North, which appeared in a number of
newspapers including the Washington Times and Mobile Press
Register.
Last year's Nobel Prize went to Gary S. Becker, and our
senior fellow, executive editor of the RAE, and professor Wal
ter Block of Holy Cross College wrote about him in the AustrianEconomics Newsletter.The AEN is edited by our student
Peter Klein, the top economics graduate s tudent at Berkeley,
who also writes a beautiful tribute to F.A. Hayek in a recent
i s sue .
Thomas Jefferson's 250th birthday was in 1993, and we
celebrated it at the Institute. Almost everywhere else, the day
passed with little comment, except for politically correct slan
ders, but Thornton had an outstanding essay in several major
papers, including the DallasMorning News.
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12 The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Thornton, in addition to teaching a course on Austrian
economics, straightens out popular myths on drugs, crime,
and jail sentencing. His book The Economics of Prohibition,
based on his Institute-sponsored PhD dissertation, estab
lished him as a national expert.
The Modern Guide to Macroeconomics, due out soon from El
gar, covers the Austrian School along with the others, and
our adjunct scholar Roger Garrison of the Auburn University
economics department wrote the section showing that the
Fede ra l Reserve is to b lame fo r booms and bus t s . O ne o f th e
most popular professors at Auburn, Garrison is a mentor to
our students and an active participant in our Auburn pro
grams and the Mises University.
Hazlitt was right when he said we should never retire in
tellectually, and he never did (see Institute president Lew Rockwell's article in the Journal ofCommerce for details). As proof, we
are publishing TFM editor Jeffrey Tucker's 6,000-entry bibliog
raphy of Hazlitt's work, featuring annotations by Rothbard
and an essay on Hazlitt by Rockwell.
If you're coming through Auburn, Ala., on a Wednes
day, attend our "Brown Bag Seminar." These weekly discus
sions at lunchtime, directed by Thornton and held in our li
brary, include students, professors, and supporters. Also, un
der Thornton's direction, we taught two groups of professors
and businessmen about monetary economics. Our Auburn
graduate students lectured.
We are proud of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost
Legacyof the Conservative Movement by our media fellowJustin Raimondo. Pat ri ck J. Buchanan called it "thor
oughly researched, beautifully written, passionately ar
gued," a "veritable Iliad of the American Right." It tells the
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute 13
story of our intellectual ancestors, the heroic men and
wom en w ho batt led the New Deal.
The Conservative Movement by Gottfried tells the
story of decline, compromise, and betrayal since World War
II, and of those few who stand out from the miasma.
Gottfried speaks at our conferences and writes for our publi
ca t i ons .
Attorney John V. Denson's "Democracy and the Free Mar
ket," appearing in our Essays in Political Economy series,
shows that political and economic freedom are mutually sus
taining. He also draws on the Vanderbilt Agrarians to show
the importance of rightly ordered values in a free society.
Back in the fifties, Cliches of Socialism, published by the
Foundation for Economic Education, changed people's minds
on subjects ranging from unions to central banking. We arepleased that FEE is issuing a new edition, and that Rockwell
was asked to refute some of the new cliches. Congratulations,
by the way, to FEE on securing the great Misesian economist
Hans F. Sennholz as president, and on the publication of our
Senior Mises Scholar (and FEE senior s taffer) Bet tina Bien
Greaves's stunning Mises: An AnnotatedBibliography.
Our adjunct scholar Roy Cordato now teaches at Camp
bell University, replacing Institute adjunct scholar and former
Mises student William Peterson, who retired to write a book
on democracy.
On unemployment, the media fails to point out how the
cost of labor, driven through the roof by government inter
ventions from civil rights to family leave, is the culprit. Pro
fessor Francois Melese of the Defense Resources Manage
ment Institute wrote an attack on "civil rights," published
in TFM. And our adjunct scholars Richard K. Vedder and
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14 The Ludzvig von Mises Institute
Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University produced a masterful
demonstration of the effects of government intervention in
their book Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twen
tieth-Century America. They credit the Review ofAustrian Eco
nomics for running early chapters of the book, and Garrison
for h is invaluable advice .
Academic panels allow colleagues to learn from each
other, and panels on the Austrian School are growing more
common. For example, Salerno organized one at the EasternEconomics Assoc ia t ion with Institute-affiliated scholars.
We are always proud of the achievements of our former
students. For example, there is the new book on free banking
by Sul Ross's Larry Sechrest. Part of it was previously pub
l ished in the R A E .
The Austrian view on bankingmoney should be hardand loans should be based on real savingsmay sound old
fashioned, but Rush Limbaugh was persuaded by our mate
rial and promoted the Austrian theory of prices and the gold
standard on the air. On several occasions, he mentioned the
Institute, and each time, our phones lit up.
We also get calls from publications such as National Review
and Chronicles asking us to suggest book reviewers, and in sev
eral cases, Rockwell has reviewed books for these publications.
As a result of an essay on two books for NR, investment writer
Richard Band said Rockwell did "the best commentary of any
body on the Right since the young Pat Buchanan." For his
"outstanding commentary," the Birmingham News made Rock
wel l a membe r of i ts Board of Contr ibutors .
When Washington, D.C., announces a new policy, we be
lieve in giving it a gimlet-eyed review while assuming that
the government is guilty until proven innocent. Case in
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point: a "free trade" agreement that is actually a cover for
trade blocs and transnational taxation and regulation.
Rather than take someone's word about Nafta , the North
American Free Trade Agreement, we got the documents and
assembled a coalition of institutions, journalists, and schol
ars to provide an objective readingone not tainted by la
bor unions, government-Subsidized industries, the Clinton
administration, or foreign governments. In short, we
looked at Nafta as Mises would have, asking: does it reduce or increase government entanglement in international
t rade? We discovered that Nafta was not free trade at all,
but a trade bloc that cartelizes taxes and regulations across
borders and costs billions in new taxes and foreign aid.
The demand for our point of view increased as the ad
ministration became more strident in its support for this men
acing agreement. When it was difficult for anyone to be
heard, the Institute had articles in the Los Angeles Times, Hu
man Events, the Christian ScienceMonitor, the influential Capi
tol Hill newspaper Roll Call, and dozens of others. One par
ticular argument struck George Will as persuasivethat
Nafta enlarges the dictatorial executive over the legislature
and he cal led to tell us so.
We collected some of our best articles on the subject, as
well as relevant documents from the Competitive Enterprise
Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and printed up a Nafta
Reader, acclaimed as the best research tool on the subject.
Rockwell was kept busy with all the radio stations and news
sourcesfrom Investor's Business Daily to the London Daily
Telegraphasking for interviews.
Obse rv e r s s a id w e had an e no rmou s effec t . R e a s o n
magazine and pro-Nafta think tanks conceded that Nafta
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16 The Ludwig von Mises Institute
represented managed, and not free, trade. And though we're
not in the business of lobbying Congress, our arguments
added considerable pressure, especially Rockwell's Washing
ton Times articles on Nafta's dangerous side agreements and
infringements on states' rights. These and his other publica
tions led Sennholz to call Rockwell a "one-person Austrian
army in the U.S." In the Nafta connection, you might have
h eard th e Insti tute ment ioned a number of t imes on the Cable
NewsNetwork, on the Today Show, and, if you looked closely,seen Rockwell's photo in the New York Times at an anti-Nafta
press conference.
If Nafta teaches us anything, it is that things are seldom
what the politicians and national media say they are. No
where is th at mo re tru e than in educat ion reform. Our idea l is
a decentralized and diverse system of privately funded, com
petitive schools. That means the public school monopoly
needs to be broken up, and the power of unions destroyed,
for th e sa ke o f ou r chi ldren 's educat ion .
Massive tax cuts and the concomitant economic growth
would give families more discretionary income to choose
private over declining public schools. But when we looked
at various voucher initiatives, we found that they actually
meant more government spending, more regulation of pri
vate schools, and more centralized control of local public
schools. We made avai lable a ser ies of a rti cl es i n fav or o f rea l
privatization and against new state controls by Professors
Dwight Lee and Robert Sexton (of the University of Georgia
and PepperdineUniversity), Gottfried, DiLorenzo, Tucker,
Rockwell, Rothbard, and others. They appeared in publica
tions from the Los Angeles Times and Human Events to National
R e v i e w an d T he W an de re r.
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The New Republic makes you want to tear your hair out
(and some of us don ' t have much left), but it watches our
scholars, and our work on vouchers prompted them to write
on "conservatives against school choice." Insight magazine
did the same, pointing to the dangers we had identified.
Part of our strategy is to use every possible occasion to
make a free-market point. When the new Catholic catechism
came out, Rockwell published articles on the old teaching
that any taxation beyond the minimal is akin to theft, andprominent secular and religious publications ran his
thoughts.
Does a year go by when Ralph Nader doesn't make
trouble? It was inevitable that he would complain about "rac
ist" lending patterns. But after his press conference announc
ing a new study, he was hardly out of the National Press
Building when the Institute ruined his day. All the major wire
services called Rockwell for interviews, and he explained
that Nader's problem is with a free market in credit alloca
tion, not "discrimination." And many newspapers, includ
ing the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Times, publish
ed Rockwel l ' s refu ta t ion of Nader .
Let's back up. For about 20 years, liberals have complained about mortgage lending and race. Rockwell had a
long article in National Review refuting a malicious Washing
ton Post series on this subject, and another piece in Forbes de
fending the rationality of credit markets. Tucker and
DiLorenzo have also cri ticized, in the Christian Science Mo n i
torand through the Capital Research Center, racially moti
vated i n te r ven ti on i n the c red i t ma rket s.
The Washington Times has published five articles on race
and mortgages from the Mises Institute, and others have run
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28 TheLudwigvonMisesInstitute
in the Montgomery Advertiser. A reader saw one of Rockwell's
articles in the Cleveland PlainDealer and wrote "I appreciate
the determination and courage you showed. Undoubtedly
you will be attacked by the usual pressure groups, but I en
courage you to stand up to them."
We will indeed, as we confront the Clinton administra
tion's plan to force mutual funds to put investors' savings
into shaky businesses owned by the politically correct.
It's hard to imagine that once upon a time, American
businessmen were free to hire and fire as they saw fit, and
famil ies were f ree of bureaucra t i c in te r fe rence . I ns ti tu te m e
d ia fe l low Bill Kau ffm a n d emo lis he d th e f irs t in te rven t ions
in to these f r e edoms in "T he C hild Labo r Amendmen t De
bate of the 1920s" for our Essays in Political Economy series.
Later came civil rights, which trampled on freedom of associat ion. And now we have the Americans With Disabili t ies
Act, which forbids discrimination even on the ground of
mental incompetence. Rockwell talked about the swarm of
anti-business lawsuits generated by this law in a long Na
tional Review article, "Wheelchairs at Third Base." It drove the
ADA bureaucrats crazy (now a protected disability), and they
denounc ed h imas a "Communis t " ! A
shor ter v ers io n o fhis
article hit the op-ed pages (Washington Times, Houston
Chronicle, Human Events, etc.) just after the government's Na
tional Council on Disability bragged about all the lawsuits.
In another series of art ic les on the disabilities act, Rai-
mondo pointed out that the ADAeven defends mass murder
ers from discrimination, and editors in California, New York,
and Nebraska gobbled up our analysis.
Civil rights may be the main infringement on work free
dom today, but it is far from the only one. We got word that
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the Clinton Labor Department planned to crack down on the
temporary agencies that help people get short-term jobs. In
the Journal of Commerce, in an article reprinted all over, Rock
well defended temp agencies as a market response to govern
men t i n t e r ven t i on .
There w as also a t ime when famil ies cou ld hand dow n
property without inheritance taxes. When we learned that
Clinton planned to raise these taxes, we asked one of our top
graduate students, Alexander Tabarroknow a holder of anew PhD from George Mason Universityto look at the is
sue, and the result was "The Inheritance Tangle" for our Es
says in Political Economy.
As with so many other issues, we were the only ones who
seemed to be doing work on the subject. So when we publish
ed a shorter version in The Free Market, and sent out another
version to newspapers around the country, they ran it promi
nently. The publication Philanthropy called attention to it as
wel l .
Higher inheritance taxes have long been a favorite of
Alicia Munnell, Clinton's head of economic policy at the
Treasury. She also advocates other dangerous policies,
from credit redistributionism to taxing pensions. Wewere among the first to oppose her ideas, and when writ
ing on them for the Journal of Commerce, Rockwell noted that
the present pension system is precarious because it did not
develop as an authentic free-market institution.
Clinton 's cha irman of the Council of Economic Advisors,
Laura Tyson, had praised the economics of Communist Ro
man ia unde r N iko la i C e au se sc u. Wh e n Rockwel l cr i t ic ized
this in a series of articles, a reporter for Fox Television
Morning News confronted her. But she lied, denying she
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20 The Ludzuig von MisesInstitute
had ever wri t ten on Romania . National Review th en to ok her
to task and defended Rockwell. In an opening editorial, the
magazine quoted Tyson's public denial, and then her book
praising Ceausescu's policies.
Clinton's pick to head the civil rights police, Lani Guinier
of anti-white fame, ended up as they all should have: leaving
town. Human Eventswas first in print on Guinier's paper trail
when the weekly published Rockwell's expose. The Jewish
Daily Forward, the Wall Street Journal, and others followed,and she was through.
The Institute even helped drive a Marxist from the Com
merce Department. When our adjunct scholars and Rockwell
went to press exposing Derek Shearer's past associations
with far-left causes, the heat was on. After serving a few
weeks as deputy undersecretary for economic affairs, he quit
and dropped out of sight.
Unfortunately, Roberta Achtenberg is still around as head
of civil rights at HUD. As Raimondo revealed in The Free
Market and elsewhere, Achtenberg's politics are virtually
Leni nis t. Bu t ou r ar t ic les d id cause h er tr ou ble a t he r Sen
ate confirmation hearings, and are on the record for future
ac t i on .
Why the focus on personnel? It's important to put pres
sure on the people who are imposing the Newer Deal, just as
the Old Right railed against Harry Hopkins and FDR's
other red appointees. To further understand our present dif
ficulties, we published Grove City College's economics pro
fessor Tom Rose's outstanding essay on how Roosevelt de
stroyed the gold standard.
One consequence of government intervention that
most everyone ignores is the creation of the underground
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute 22
economy. It is huge, as Tucker pointed out in a probing es
say in Policy Review. Health nationalizationto which the
year's final Free Market was devotedwill dramatically ex
pand this sector.
We would be remiss if we did not report the criticism we
get. For example, the New Yorker said Rothbard's call for "full-
scale abolition of the New Deal" is "positively frightening."
And we received hate mail for Rockwell's post-election arti
cle in theLos
AngelesTimes
predicting thatClinton would
raise our taxes, attack gun ownership, socialize medicine,
and promote euthanasia.
La P r e n s a of Buenos Aire s h as a new con t r ibu to r in Roth
bard, and Rockwell has long appeared in its pages. Our arti
cles run in papers in El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and
Peru, thanks to Carlos Ball, president of the Agenda Intera-
mericana de Prensa Economica, who translates The Free Mar
ket. Augustin Navarro of Mexico City's "Centro Mises"an
opponent of Naftais also a great help in promotion and
translation. The ideas of liberty are what this region needs,
not government-managed trade.
We fear for Cuba 's fate after Castro, because the IMF and
World Bank are circling like vultures to prevent a free mar
ket, as they did in Russia and Eastern Europe. But Rockwell's
call for rejecting those plans has circulated widely within the
anti-Castro Cuban community.
As early as 1927, Mises argued that the only foreign pol
icy compatible with a free market was what is today de
nounced as "isolationism." This was also the foreign policy of
the Founding Fathers, as outlined in George Washington'sFarewell Address. In this tradition, our distinguished coun
se lo r R on Pau l warned in the H o u s t o n C h r o n i c l e tha t the
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22 The Ludwig von MisesInstitute
"humani t a r i an" miss ion in Somal ia would lead t o d i sa st er .
"We must stop spending our liberty and property on for
eign nations. No matter the excuse, it only engorges our
government, equipping it for more depredations at home
and abroad." Paul speaks at our annual Supporters Sum
mitheld this year in Palm Springsand continues to help
lead the cause of liberty, as he did in Congress, as chairman
of the National Endowment for Liberty.
Everyone who has been interviewed knows the risks of be
ing misquoted, which is why some people avoid interviews. We
always take the risk, and this year we had quite a few suc
cesses, in friendly magazines like Insight and more hostile fo
rums l ike the Associa ted Press and Federa l News Service.
It's always a pleasure to help those who share our ideals,
and in 1993 both Rothbard and Rockwell served on advisory
commit te e s o f the American Cause and the Rock fo rd Ins ti
tute, and the boards of the Center for Libertarian Studies and
the John Randolph Club.
The Randolph Club, an intellectual society for pro-liberty
writers, scholars, and activists, was co-founded by the Mises
Institute, and with Rothbard as president this year, the club
met to discuss the "W ar on the Real America"and how we
can win it. Attendance was the highest ever.
Rockwell also made many speeches, including at the Na
tional ReviewSummit on "Economy and Enterprise in the
Age of Clinton," at a Claremont Institute conferenceon mid
dle-class welfare, at a Claremont panel at the American
Political Science Association, where he debated global-
democrat Joshua Muravchik, at FEE on taxes with Sennholz
and Paul, and at the American Cause, where he defended
free t rade .
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The Ludwig vonMises Institute 23
Among the speakers at the Randolph Club was Greg
Pavlik, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. His anti-
PC. columns for the student newspaper led leftist black students to steal the entire print run of 14,000copies. The univer
sity administration responded by punishing the campus cops
who tried to stop the theft. The administration also tried to
kick Pavlik out of school in a kangaroo-court proceeding. But
with our help and Gottfried's, Pavlik triumphed. The Insti
tute and its people were his intellectual influences.
Speaking of campus wars, David Felton of the University
of Maryland got sick of seeing students with Karl Marx but
tons, so he had a local company make up Ludwig von
Mises buttons. He and his fellow students wore them in op
position and protest, and the resulting campus-wide com
ment was a great occasion for teaching our ideas.
Collectivism will swamp us unless we reestablish, in large
and small ways, the ideas of liberty in our institutions of higher
learning, and in the hearts of our people. Thanks to our sup
porters, the Mises Institute reached students on more than 600
campuses in 1993, and influenced the national debate in a
host of unprecedented and unexpected ways.
For 1994, with your help, we will redouble our efforts. As
Hazlitt said, "if the demands are high, it is because the stakesare even higher. They are nothing less than the future of hu
man liberty, which means the future of civilization."
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