Speaker A
Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for the invitation. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here in Porto and a pleasure and an honor to be speaking about my hero, Murray Rothbard. And I've read a lot of Rothbard over the years.
Saifedean Ammous discusses Murray Rothbard's legacy, his views on economics, Bitcoin, and the Palestine conflict at the Rothbard at 100 Conference.
Key Takeaways
- Rothbard's fearless truth-telling often led to professional isolation but ensured his ideas' longevity.
- His fixed supply money theory was foundational for understanding Bitcoin.
- Rothbard's views on Palestine challenge conventional narratives and expose deeper geopolitical realities.
- Criticism of central banking and inflation remains relevant and increasingly accepted today.
- Libertarianism, as shaped by Rothbard, continues to have significant intellectual impact beyond electoral politics.
Summary
- Saifedean Ammous honors Murray Rothbard, highlighting his influence on economics and his sharp, unapologetic truth-telling.
- Rothbard's perspective on the Palestine conflict is explored, emphasizing his ability to cut through propaganda and emotional manipulation.
- Rothbard was a prolific scholar with limited academic success due to his unpopular views, especially his criticism of central banks and inflation.
- He was a pioneer in advocating for a fixed money supply, which laid intellectual groundwork for understanding Bitcoin.
- Rothbard's ideas were often unpopular but have proven prescient and timeless, especially regarding inflation and central banking.
- The video discusses Rothbard's critique of Zionism and Western imperialism in the Middle East.
- Rothbard embraced unpopularity and hate as a source of inspiration for his work.
- The challenges Rothbard faced in academia due to his opposition to the Federal Reserve and mainstream economic thought are detailed.
- Ammous connects Rothbard's economic theories to modern issues like Bitcoin and critiques of fiat currency.
- The talk situates Rothbard as a key figure in libertarian thought with enduring influence despite limited mainstream acceptance.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Rothbard's Influence
- 06:03Rothbard's Fixed Money Supply and Bitcoin
- 11:33Bitcoin and Economic Thought
- 17:13Rothbard on Zionism and Palestine Conflict
- 28:40Rothbard's Academic Challenges and Legacy
- 34:08Libertarianism and Rothbard's Ethical Views
- 42:20Rothbard's Critique of Central Banking
- 46:46Concluding Thoughts on Rothbard's Impact
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
and I've usually discussed his work on economics. He has been the most influential on economist on my development and I discuss this in the book uh that this available outside. I discuss how important it was. But today I'm going to talk about something
Speaker A
I've usually discussed his work on economics. He has been the most influential economist on my development, and I discuss this in the book that is available outside. I discuss how important it was. But today, I'm going to talk about something
Speaker A
I'm going [snorts] to be talking today about his perspective on the conflict in Palestine and the conflict in the Middle East in general.
Speaker A
different, which is not usually mentioned when Rothbard is discussed. Understandably, because Rothbard wrote about so many different topics.
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him. But whenever you read Rothbard, you may agree or you may disagree but you can't question just the sharpness and the ability to strip away the lies, the propaganda, the romance, the emotional manipulation, and the obfuscation [snorts] to put it all aside, get to the heart of
Speaker A
I'm going to be talking today about his perspective on the conflict in Palestine and the conflict in the Middle East in general.
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things. In all of these topics, we see a constant three wherein Rothbard sticks his neck out like the child who says the emperor has no clothes. And he just stands there and he says something extremely unpopular, extremely hurtful
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And as I was saying, he wrote on many, many, many topics, and it's actually astonishing to see how many of these topics he had a very strong grasp of, even though they may not obviously appear to be things that are relevant to
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been in such a prolific scholar and he's produced things that have been read so widely and yet his success in academia is very limited. He was at a relatively low-ranking university compared to the more established universities and he
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him. But whenever you read Rothbard, you may agree or you may disagree, but you can't question just the sharpness and the ability to strip away the lies, the propaganda, the romance, the emotional manipulation, and the obfuscation to put it all aside, get to the heart of
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But in everything, he always went with the truth and he embraced the hate and the unpopularity. He used to call I think he he said hate was his muse that was inspiring to him. He didn't care and it
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the matter. And I think Palestine, Rothbard on Palestine is interesting because it's important to understanding the topic, but it's also an illustration of Rothbard at his best in his ability to really get to the bottom of
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have been very prescient and very important. So in Econ, you know, he spoke up against inflation and you know now there are a lot more people talking about inflation than there was back then in the 1960s or 70s
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things. In all of these topics, we see a constant theme wherein Rothbard sticks his neck out like the child who says the emperor has no clothes. And he just stands there and he says something extremely unpopular, extremely hurtful
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central bank. So everybody went along with the inflation story. Everybody agreed that the central bank needed to operate. It was necessary for a modern economy to have a central bank and very few people questioned that. And of course
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to the feelings of the majority of adult children in the world who are incapable of handling ideas like Rothbard, and it gets him into all kinds of trouble. It's nothing good for his career, as you know, as you can imagine. I mean, he's
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are in an industry where the Central Bank pays roughly 90% of the salaries. About 90% of journal of academics published in the journals of monetary economics are paid directly by the Federal Reserve or by institutions that are paid paid by the Federal Reserve.
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been such a prolific scholar, and he's produced things that have been read so widely, and yet his success in academia is very limited. He was at a relatively low-ranking university compared to the more established universities, and he
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fixed supply of money, which in the '60s and '70s and '80s must have seemed, you know, not just heretic, but also deeply silly. Why would you even imagine something like this? Even gold would always be making more gold.
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could have easily had a career in those established universities if he told the lie, if he went along with what was popular.
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when Rothbard was writing them. They're a lot less ridiculous now. You still will ruin your career by talking about the Fed, but you can maybe find people outside who will talk to you, not just the homeless guy on the street. You can make
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But in everything, he always went with the truth, and he embraced the hate and the unpopularity. He used to call, I think he said hate was his muse, that was inspiring to him. He didn't care, and
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It's a very different world. Now, we think it was a lot easier for him to do those things, but he was in a very tiny minority of people at that time. And we see a parallel with what is happening
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you see this in economics, and you see this in all kinds of topics where his ideas survive the test of time even though they're unpopular when they come out, but then in the long term, they come out to
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active in the '60s and '70s and '80s, practically none of them are having conferences about them on their 100th birthday of 100th birthday today.
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have been very prescient and very important. So in economics, you know, he spoke up against inflation, and you know, now there are a lot more people talking about inflation than there was back then in the 1960s or 70s
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the fixed supply, he really talked to something very, very profound. He was the only one who gave us the tools to think about Bitcoin. And the reason why I think I understood Bitcoin and understood the significance of Bitcoin
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or 80s. There was no internet. There were very few avenues for talking about the damage that inflation does because the vast majority of media and academic journals were controlled largely by governments and their central banks and the economists, or they were paid by the
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And once you think about that idea of fixed supply money, then Bitcoin becomes possible and it workable and then you're able to understand it much better. You get the feeling when reading Rothbard that he wrote for the future. He knew
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central bank. So everybody went along with the inflation story. Everybody agreed that the central bank needed to operate. It was necessary for a modern economy to have a central bank, and very few people questioned that. And of course,
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now, people would make sense of what he said and they would appreciate it a lot more. I think it was absolutely correct because truth and wisdom are timeless. They do not go and come with fads. They are timeless
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when you question that, you know, it doesn't help your career prospects. And so Rothbard spoke up against inflation. He spoke against legal tender laws. He criticized the entire existence of the central bank, which is a very bad career move if you
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Um if you read his work on Palestine, you're struck and I say this as a Palestinian who had been very familiar with the Palestinian issue and I studied the history for all of my life. Basically, I had lived the
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are in an industry where the central bank pays roughly 90% of the salaries. About 90% of journals of academics published in the journals of monetary economics are paid directly by the Federal Reserve or by institutions that are paid by the Federal Reserve.
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a continuation of Western imperialism and it's all because of Westerners being bad and colonialism being bad and all of that and it's just very uh very clichéd and not very useful to what I understand what's happening in the
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So, really, the best way to destroy your career in economics is to go against the Federal Reserve. So, obviously, Rothbard embraced that opportunity. And he opposed central, he opposed the role of the government. And he argued for a
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all kinds of horrible things to them. Essentially, Ayn Rand level cartoonish nonsense. Uh but here was a Murray Rothbard presenting a very very very powerful dissection of the conflict and with remarkable clarity and precision identifying the root of the problem.
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fixed supply of money, which in the '60s and '70s and '80s must have seemed, you know, not just heretic, but also deeply silly. Why would you even imagine something like this? Even gold would always be making more gold.
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And he pinpoints the problem for the first couple of pages. The cause of the problem is the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their property rights. It's a very Austrian perspective and it is inevitable that you would see this if you were an
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Why would anybody want a fixed supply of money? And as far as I can tell, Rothbard was the only and first one to ever discuss the possibility of a fixed supply of money. All of these ideas were very ridiculous in the 1960s and '70s
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So, Rothbard pinpoints the historical root of the problem as Zionism. He says Zionism is a political movement that Bane knows. He says, "Western Western European Jewry assimilated into Western European societies after the French Revolution.
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when Rothbard was writing them. They're a lot less ridiculous now. You still will ruin your career by talking about the Fed, but you can maybe find people outside who will talk to you, not just the homeless guy on the street. You can make
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is assimilation, which is what Western Europeans chose, but see like it was not very practical solution in Eastern Europe as Rothbard puts it. The second was Bundism or Jewish nationalism on Jewish land in Europe. So, territories in Europe that were
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friends, and you can join the organizations and discuss this, and there's Bitcoiners, and you can go online and you can make fun of the fiat people.
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Uganda, Argentina. Um in the turn of the 20th century these were seriously discussed by a lot of the people in the Zionist movement, but none of these really took off.
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It's a very different world now. We think it was a lot easier for him to do those things, but he was in a very tiny minority of people at that time. And we see a parallel with what is happening
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It's Jewish nationalism on somebody else's land. So, it's not unowned land and it's not Jewish land, it's somebody else's land. And so, you can see where the problem is. You can see why inevitably this is going to lead to all
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when he talks about the Mises Institute. His career suffered. He didn't get the recognition that Mises economists would have gotten, but he's today much more widely read than most of those economists. So, when you think about the economists that were
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people." You're going to get conflict. There's just no way around it. It's very, very simple.
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active in the '60s and '70s and '80s, practically none of them are having conferences about them on their 100th birthday today.
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population of Palestine was Jewish and 10% may be a vast overstatement. Might be as low as 4 or 5%, but it's not very clear what the number was. But by all accounts it can't possibly have not been over 12 or 13%.
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Practically none of them are selling any substantive number of books. Practically none of them have hundreds of reviews on Amazon, thousands of reviews on Amazon from people that are still reading their books these days. And with his identification of
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And so, how do you build a national homeland for a group of people that don't own the land on which you want to build the home lot.
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the fixed supply, he really talked to something very, very profound. He was the only one who gave us the tools to think about Bitcoin. And the reason why I think I understood Bitcoin and understood the significance of Bitcoin
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You know, it's not like you're selling your one property and you buy another one in your own same town or in the town next door. You're talking about displacing all of the people who live in that land. So, if they're not going to
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is because I read through this paper, particularly a paper called the Austrian Theory of Money. It's a brief paper that summarizes a lot of the work of the Austrians and does a terrific job of it.
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possible. And Rothbard identifies all of this in the 1960s. And uh you know, more and more has come clear about what actually was happening during that time over time that vindicates what he had seen and what he had written in the
Speaker A
And once you think about that idea of fixed supply money, then Bitcoin becomes possible and workable, and then you're able to understand it much better. You get the feeling when reading Rothbard that he wrote for the future. He knew
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clarity of the situation. That's a property rights violation and so clearly we can see what's going on. And so, he understood what was happening under the British when and one of the roots of the problem was that when the British took
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that in the present, this was not going to get him jobs. It was not going to win him a lot of friends. But he didn't care. He knew that he was writing for us. He knew that 20, 30, 50 years from
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preventing them from building any institutions and from building a military. And that was really the key point. From 1936 to 1939, the British and the Zionists disarmed the Palestinians and everything that has happened to at the Palestinians since
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now, people would make sense of what he said, and they would appreciate it a lot more. I think it was absolutely correct because truth and wisdom are timeless. They do not go and come with fads. They are timeless,
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part of terrorist militias that were out there massacring civilians as well as British soldiers and British civilians.
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and I think this is what Rothbard shows us. And in the same way that he did that with economics, he did it with Palestine. So I'm going to try to illustrate this with some of his discussion.
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And then, of course, the uh culmination of this was in 1947 with the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe.
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If you read his work on Palestine, you're struck, and I say this as a Palestinian who had been very familiar with the Palestinian issue, and I studied the history for all of my life. Basically, I had lived the
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Soviet Union, from Nazi Germany, incidentally, as well. The Nazis were quite happy to get European Jews out to join the Zionist project in 1930s.
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history. And you start reading Western perspectives on the conflict, and it's very rare that you come across somebody who understands the issue. If you read people on the left, it's usually presented from the perspective of, you know, leftists and colonialism, and it's
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This is really the most important fact, perhaps, in the history of the conflict. This is it. This glaring fact that you have this entire piece of land, and if you look at the map, it shows you independent and individual
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a continuation of Western imperialism, and it's all because of Westerners being bad and colonialism being bad and all of that, and it's just very clichéd and not very useful to what I understand what's happening on the
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Jews, and it is essentially uh only in some of the districts, and it's not a majority of any of the districts.
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ground today. On the other hand, if you read perspectives from the right, you are constantly inundated with idiotic Israeli propaganda along the lines of, you know, we have to...
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swan.com/safe, s a i f. And so, the Zionists, of course, understood this very, very well. And over the years, you know, Rothbard wrote this article in the 1960s, but over the years, a lot more resources have come out and a lot more explanations have
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come out with quotes and diaries and uh uh classified documents and secret documents that have revealed the reality of what was going on. So, now we know that yes, it may set that it could only work through mass
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expulsion and murder. And so, and Rothbard isn't very familiar with all of the details that have come out decades after he wrote that article, obviously, but he still arrives at the right conclusion because he gets it because the property rights belong to the
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Palestinians, the land belonged to the Palestinians predominantly, and all of human history shows us there are no examples of people just picking up and leaving their land voluntarily because other people nicely asked to have their land. It just doesn't happen. So, if
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somebody wants your land, there's going to be conflict. There's no way around it. So, this was the plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, we later find out in the 1990s, was developed in the 1930s. It was very clear that where the
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population centers were in Palestine, the Jewish population centers were, and that there were areas that needed to be cleaned in the middle between those areas so that the Jewish population areas could be contiguous and defensible. And so, all of the
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population that was between those areas had to go. And so, this was a plan laid out in the 1930s. It was not something that happened in the fog of war as Israeli propaganda likes to pretend. It was systematically laid out in the 1930s
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by David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel's first Prime Minister, and the uh uh uh and the the Haganah and all the other terrorist organizations that were part of the Zionist movement at that time.
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One of the most important factoids, which Brog doesn't mention but supplements Druses' point, he says the idea, you know, most Americans think that the refugees were a result of the war. The Arabs invaded and there was a fight and
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as the first Israeli president, uh Weizmann, put it, a miracle happened and they left. Um and that's essentially the extent of intellectual work in your average brainwashed Ziobot in academia and media today. A miracle happened and people just decided to leave their home
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and now they can't have them back and that's just how we're going to have peace and prosperity for the future. But in reality, of course, 300,000 Palestinians, between quarter million and 300,000 Palestinians, were expelled before Israel announced its
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independence and before a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine. So, the notion that they were expelled as a result of the war is completely fabricated bold-faced lie.
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250,000 were already been expelled from their homes and when the Arab armies invaded, they didn't invade Israel. They invaded primarily almost all of the land in which Arab military operated was the land that was not partitioned to Israel
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as part of the partition plan. The plan was I mean, the partition plan was done by the UN at that point. It gave the Zionist movement something like 55% of Palestine and even though they owned only about 5% of it. And it gave the
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Palestinians the other part. And even the the supposedly Jewish state that was planned from the partition plan would have still had a majority of its land owned by Palestinians.
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The majority of the land of the Jewish state was still owned by Palestinians. So, the rest of that country, which was under which was supposed to become a Palestinian state or an Arab state at that point, that was where the Arab armies entered
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mainly in order to defend these territories from also being taken over by the Israelis. There was very little Arab incursions into Israeli territory.
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And yet, the ethnic cleansing happened before then and it continued throughout 1948 until 1945.
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Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed and depopulated. And there's been a very systematic attempt of looting and the looting of private property. And this has been uh only recently revealed that the extent of this has only recently been revealed by this book by an Israeli
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scholar called Adam Raz. It's called Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property. And it's an absolutely astonishing book. I had not heard of a more systematic attempt to just rob an entire country. We're talking about divisions of the military that would go
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into villages and just go into the houses and rob every single object in the house. Every single thing you can imagine. And it was, you know, a lot of a lot of people that were involved in it and it was it it it was a bit of a
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scandal amongst the high ranks of the Israeli military at that time, but it wasn't very well publicized.
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And of course, the other very important book about this is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé, which shows us Morris Pappé's intuition was absolutely correct. And it shows us the you know, that this is the Morris Pappé shows us the um motive and
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the and concludes that clearly it must have happened because it's inevitable. But Ilan Pappé shows us the exact details of how this took place and how it was planned meticulously from first uh from first sources.
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Now, and as I was saying, uh you know, two decades to establish most of the stuff Rothbard understood from the 1960s and as I was saying I was in the debate.
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And so, essentially, Rothbard really understood the problem of Zionism very early, back when the vast majority of people in the US were completely hoodwinked by this ideology. And he just understood that if it's a criminal project that has
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displaced and murdered hundreds of thousands of people and that you can't have peace based on that. There's not going to be a peaceful solution for this. An interesting contrast here is with Ayn Rand who many of her followers continued to be
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very ardent supporters of Zionism. And I find that to I found that to be really puzzling at a certain point because you know, the entire ideas about individualism and not wanting to support others and not being altruistic and not being a socialist and that's all
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that Ayn Rand talks about and yet all of that is thrown out of the window when it comes to the issue of Palestine and Israel. Famously, Ayn Rand said that is the US should do everything the US government should do everything to
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support Israel. And so, that includes taxation of Americans. Some of the taxation is good.
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Let's tax Americans so we can take their money and send it to Israel. Ayn Rand's become a fan of socialism and taxation when it comes to Israel. And um it's really remarkable to think about why this would be the case from somebody who
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spent their entire life talking about the evil of altruism. Altruism is evil. Why would you want to give anybody anything? You have to work for yourself. Except in one case, if there's an ethno-state in the Middle East that needs to murder its neighbors
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so that it can expand, then your altruism is acceptable. Then altruism is good in that case. Only when funding mass murder of the then altruism is acceptable. And of course, when asked to and pressed to explain this moronic contention, Ms. Rand said,
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"Well, Israel is civilized and it's fighting a barbarian foe. And so therefore, we must stand by the civilized person." And this is, of course, ridiculous, uh, to put it mildly. Uh, essentially, she was arguing that it's okay to murder peaceful people if
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they're uncivilized. But if you're murdering peaceful people, then you're the one who's uncivilized. And if they're peaceful, then they're the ones who are civilized. It's it's such an idiotic and childish and moronic view of what civilization constitutes because it
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looks at civilization as essentially being the uh the candy and fruits that we can gain from civilization rather than the process that makes civilization possible. So, civilization is not about having nicer clothes. Civilization is about behaving in a civilized way,
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respecting property rights, and therefore being able to coexist with humans in a society and trade and and be part of the division of labor. That's what civilization is. So, if your clothes aren't nice, but you're you're more civilized than a person who
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is dressed in clothes that are nice, but is a violent person and who she hates causing. So, this you see this, uh, and you see this tension in the libertarian movement until today. There are still people who want to cling to this very,
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very idiotic idea that it's okay to murder people if we did call them uncivilized, and somehow this doesn't make us the ones who are uncivilized.
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And it's just completely, um, it's completely baseless. And of course, it's built on the idea which Rothbard also explodes. He's got an article he's discussing Ayn Rand particularly on this point.
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The entire premise is built on the idea that the Arabs who lived in Palestine were savages who didn't have civilization. But Palestine had a system of property rights that had existed for hundreds of thousands of years and had
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been a working system of property rights. How do we know that it's a working system of property rights? Well, what the what is the point of property?
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The point of property is that it is the solution for the problem of scarcity.
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It's the only way that we can avoid conflict over scarce resources. So, how do we know that the property system in Palestine was working? Because for 1,300 years, there were practically no conflicts. There were the Crusades for a
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couple of hundred years, which was a foreign invasion, but domestically, in 1,300 years, there was practically no civil unrest. There was no civil war.
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There were no people who were denied the property rights under that property system. Whether you were Muslim or Christian or Jewish or Druze or belonging to any group, you still had the right to own property, and you could
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sell and buy property to people from other religion without this being an issue. It was never an issue, and therefore conflict was never an issue.
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And once property stops being something that is available for everybody, once a group of people are denied the right to have property because the of whatever reason, there's going to be conflict.
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This is the very simple idea that Mises explained and Rothbard reiterated. We have a very simple choice as a human civilization, as a human race, property or conflict. As Mises put it, "If history could teach us anything, it
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would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization." Incidentally, I've looked on over and asked a lot of LLM models about Mises on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He basically never written anything about it except for one very tiny passing
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mention about um new sort of Zionist movement for pretending that the language can make a national woman something like that, but he never got into it, which I think is really interesting because he wrote also about a very wide variety of issues.
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And you would imagine that if he had any kind of sympathy towards the Zionist project, he would have expressed it somewhere or the other. So, I think the silence there is quite interesting.
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Uh but you know, Mises was a lot more diplomatic than Rothbard. So, Mises chose silence. Rothbard did not.
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Rothbard was very, very outspoken about it. So, his conclusion of the article was The Bitcoin Standard podcast is brought to you by Coin Kite. Coin Kite are my favorite makers of Bitcoin hardware.
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So, he concludes this article by saying, "Israel therefore faces a long-run dilemma, which she must someday meet.
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Either to continue on her present course and, after years of mutual hostility and conflict, be overthrown by Arab peoples' guerrilla war, or to change direction drastically, to cut herself loose completely from Western imperial ties, and become simply Jewish citizens of the
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Middle East. If she did that, then peace and harmony and well, before we get into that, I should say maybe there's one thing that's wrong with Rothbard here is that he presents the two possibilities but they keep he somehow ignores the third possibility
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which is looking like the most likely one unfortunately now which is the idea that uh Israel is just going to genocide everybody in the region. And you know, they're certainly working on it as quickly as they can while continuing to allow the money and
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the weapons to come from the dumb Americans who uh believe that they're helping the good side.
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But that is a distinct possibility now, but I think you know, as uh it's Rothbard is still correct on the idea.
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It's either conflict to the death or accepting property rights and joining in the uh normal operation of a civilized society in the Middle East.
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If she did that, that peace and harmony and justice would at last reign in that tortured region. There is ample precedence for this peaceful coexistence. For in the centuries before 19th and 20th century Western imperialism, Jew and Arab had always
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lived well and peacefully together in the Middle East. There's no inherent Sorry, there's no inherent enmity or conflict between Arab and Jew.
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I think this is entirely entirely accurate and very important that something amazing to come from somebody who wasn't primarily a Middle East historian because the vast majority of Middle East historians completely step over this point. And it's a very very
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important point to ask when your uh local Zionist idiot is telling you the Palestinians just want to murder the Israelis and throw them in the sea. Ask them, why did they only decide to start murdering them after 1948? And what
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happened in 1948 that made them somehow wake up after 1,300 years when Jews were a tiny minority of Palestine? When they were 5 or 10% of the population, why didn't they just kill them then? Why wait until 1940 Did something happen in
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1947-48 that created this kind of animosity or is it just, you know, 1,300 years of pent-up hate that decided to manifest for no reason whatsoever in 1948?
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No, obviously it's ridiculous conjecture. We have There's a There's a well-known story of a rabbi who traveled from Poland to Palestine in 1747, and he describes just how friendly the relationships were between the local Palestinian community, and the local
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Jewish community. And specifically, he talks about how on the Sabbath they that the Jewish community leave all of their property unattended, and that nobody from the Palestinian ever from the ever touches them or abuses their property. And as a result, he talks
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about how whenever there's a celebration of the Jewish community, the Muslims come and they dance with them, and they celebrate with them, and they have very friendly and cordial relationships. And indeed, this is the case. Why? Cuz they
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have property rights. The Jews have property rights, the Muslims have property rights. They could dance together in their circumcision parties.
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Now, we don't have property rights. Nobody dances in those parties anymore. It's a really, really simple thing. It's not an enmity of an Arab and a Jew, and it's not racial and ethnic hatred, and it's not any of these stories that many
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of these people try and sell us to justify the crimes. It is simply a matter of property rights, and I truly and genuinely thank Rothbard for writing this because not only is it so important analytically, not only is it so
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important because it's a very powerful voice among the libertarian movement that I think libertarianism continues to be an intellectually very powerful movement. You can't measure it by whether it wins elections, you can measure it in terms of its impact on
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ideas and its impact on the development of civilization. And he's played a very important role in that, but also, I think it's really it's a really beautiful thing because Rothbard himself was Jewish, and he can step back from all this, put off all
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this aside and understand the issue. And for me, it makes me truly wish that I had had the fortune of meeting him, but unfortunately, I never did. I think we would have made uh great friends and would have been a great testament to
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what he says that there is no inherent energy or conflict between heir and Jew.
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Thank you very much. [applause] Very good. All of you have a forest like a different style from the previous lectures. I I am also a low-tech person.
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Um So, we know no slides uh of any kind. Um And it is my objective um to tell you a little bit uh step-by-step uh how I became a Rothbardian.
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Um What obstacles were in the way of of doing this. Um The steps are not all in chronological order. Uh But in a way, you can say uh how a stand-up person like myself happened to be a Rothbardian
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at the end of his life. Um I had no uh parents or uh uh immediate relatives who were libertarians.
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Um And as a matter of fact, I was born shortly after World War II.
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Um And uh I absorbed in a way uh all those things as right and true uh that were taught at that time in West Germany.
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Um My parents had been refugees. Uh Uh, my mother was expropriated as a major landowner in East Germany.
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My My father, uh, had, uh, been a prisoner of war with the Americans. Uh, only later in his his life he told me, for instance, um, how, uh, German prisoners of war were treated by Americans.
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They were fenced in concentration camps and tens of thousands died from hunger, to crawl to the Rhine, to drink to drink water without any, uh, outside help from German civilians allowed to send over packages or so to these,
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uh, prisoners prisoners of war. But these things are up to this day almost unknown in Germany because this are these were taboo subjects. So, when I grew up, America was, of course, the greatest and everything that we learned,
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uh, as being normal and part of the normal life, um, were things that Americans, in some edu- re-education campaign, taught the new Germans, of which I am, of course, one.
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Um, so it was absolutely normal, um, that you had democracy, um, that you had, uh, legislation, that you had paper money, um, that you had governments being in charge of infrastructure and that Germans were guilty for everything bad that had happened
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in the 20th in the 20th century. All our parents were considered to be guilty.
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There was no proof or anything required for that. It was self-understood that Germans were evil people. We had after all lost two wars.
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World War I was was caused by Germany. World War II was caused by Germany.
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And all Germans have been somehow responsible for having done evil things to the Jews.
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This is the It was a standard view of that was preached and taught to all Germans of my generation.
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Then gradually questions emerged in my mind. We all understood what parental authority was. But parental authority was something that if Of course, like most people, we also sometimes had difficulties with our parents.
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But you could evade that. There existed exit. At one point you could leave the household and you got rid of the authority that your parents exercised over you.
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It was very different with [clears throat] democracy. So my first doubts about democracy arose.
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Um they just had no exit. It was also obvious that there was no contract with any of these people who ruled over you.
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You were subjects. Um you never agreed to being taxed. You never agreed to the laws that were passed and impose on your conduct or on your property.
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Um There existed people that ruled over you. And you had never selected these people.
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Yes, they just just said uh elections, but the people who finally came to power were not people that you personally knew, that you had personally entrusted with doing anything.
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Um They did not know anything about you, and you did not know anything about them.
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That was astonishing insight. Um you also then, in a way, discovered as you grow up, or reading, becoming a little bit smarter, that many of these people were not exactly very smart.
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Um you just have to look at the present crop of politicians that we have.
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Let's say, take a look at Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, um who are obviously senile and uh belonging to the nut house, instead of being people who should rule over you. Now, this applies into the politicians in Germany. Either we had a
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foreign minister, for instance, for 4 years, the only qualification was that she was very good at trampoline jumping.
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Uh but nonetheless, she represents she represented Germany and the rest of the rest of the world.
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Um we had an economics minister who did not know what an insolvency of a company was.
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Uh but he was minister of of the economics in Germany. And I'm sure in Portugal, you find many of these wonderful examples just as well.
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Um then you then I discovered, of course, that if you are an institution that can tax and that can legislate, this institution has a tendency to continuously grow.
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If you can tax other people, of course, you prefer to get more taxes um rather than less taxes.
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Um if you can make laws, you tend to make laws that benefit you, regardless of what they do to other people.
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Um there is a tendency that a minimal state, a state that was maybe very small at the beginning, will grow and grow.
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The number of employees working for the state or being dependent on the state will continuously grow.
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You have a secretary, but then your secretary needs an under secretary, and that under secretary needs an under under secretary. So, the number of people working for the state and being dependent on the state, getting their salaries from taxes will continuously
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grow and the number of people that have to provide the taxes to pay for all of these people will continuously diminish, ultimately of course resulting in in a impoverishment of society at large.
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Um Then you would then I discovered of course that the majority principle itself is somehow an immoral principle.
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Um it leads to relativist. Does truth depend on uh on majority? Uh the answer is of truth has nothing to do with majorities. Um Does justice depend on majorities? And the answer is justice has nothing to do with
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uh with majorities. Then I discovered of course again being all of these readings of different people helped me. Most important of course was Professor readings of Rothbard's. There I discovered what type of justice system is it if one one guy
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in every case of conflict with other people can decide who is right and wrong.
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That is if you have a conflict with a state complain about what some state agent has done to you.
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Who decides then who is right in this conflict? It is an employee of the same company with who you have these difficulties.
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You have a conflict with a policeman. Complain about it. Who decides then was I you were right was a policeman?
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A judge. Who is an employee of the same company that also employs a policeman. You can roughly predict that this will not lead to just verdicts, but this will lead to a systematic unjust verdicts in almost all cases.
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Now then, coming to um coming to the question of of war um and and war guilt.
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My reading had indicated that it was not always as easy as we were taught at school. You can remember I mentioned that all school books in Germany after World War II were licensed licensed by the occupying forces.
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Germany like many other countries in in Europe uh is in a way a vassal state state of the United States indicated by the fact that you have troops stationed all over Europe. After World War I, the American troops
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withdrew to the United States. After World War II, the United States stayed in Europe.
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There are troops stationed in Germany, there are troops stationed in Portugal, there are American troops stationed in Italy, in Spain, uh in Turkey Turkey. There's practically no country in Europe that does not have American troops stationed there.
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um Imagine that would be the other way around if there would be a German and a Portuguese and a Turkish troops stationed in the United States. What the United States would then say in this case? You We are not a sovereign
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country, obviously. So this is also true for Germany. All the books were licensed by um the occupying forces in in Germany.
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And of course, what they presented as the correct version of modern history was World War I was German guilt.
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Even it was quite clear that America was not threatened by Germany in World War Uh America was protected by two oceans in between. Uh and it was an inner-European war. America got involved in the war uh and in a way decided the outcome of
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World War I because it was persuaded by England to join World War What was the result of the involvement of America in World War I?
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It was that Nazism, fascism rose in Europe and communism. Um America got that involved in World War II.
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Again, there had been no reason. Germany did not threaten the United States. Germany also did not even declare war.
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The first country that declared war against Germany was England and France. All of these things were of course not taught in school.
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Um it was always Germany did the wars and we were the only guilty only guilty ones. What was the outcome of World War II? The America rises to the rank of the supreme power in the world.
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And the result is all of central and eastern Europe turn communist. Um Why did the United States get involved in these wars and continues to get involved in in wars up to this day.
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Uh there is no country in the world after World War II who has bombed as many other countries as the United States.
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Why is that? Again, all of these things we could learn from from Rothbard. Uh there exists what I call the paradox of imperials.
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All states like to expand their territory and their reach of influence. Um there's a tendency towards a world state.
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And what places, what countries will proceed furthest on this way? Those countries that are internally liberal, comparatively liberal, and the United States is, of course, internally comparatively liberal as compared to most other countries.
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And on the basis of the greater economic power that results from being internally liberal, the chances that you will win in war in in in wars and expand your territories are higher. So, it is paradoxically those countries that seem to be the
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nicest countries, um the most the freest countries, that tend to pursue the most aggressive foreign policy.
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So, this explains, in my view and also the view of Rothbard, the imperialist tendencies that you can see in particular in the United States.
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Um I should also mention, of course, it is easy to see why states tend to be more aggressive than private citizens uh or it to even uh mafia groups, gangster groups.
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Uh for the simple reason that private citizens or private gangs fight each other, they must bear the cost involved in fighting.
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You have to just There might be injuries. You have to get the weapons. It is a There There are uh is economics involved in these types of problems.
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But if you have a state, you can externalize the cost of your aggressiveness onto other people. You can draft people into the army. You can tax people who have no business and no interest in uh in warlike endeavors in the rest of the
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world to nonetheless fund those people who are interested taking over uh other countries or exercising control over the policies in other in other countries.
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Then another thing that that I learned uh especially after moving to the United States um was the importance of monetary policy.
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Um it became clearer and clearer to me um that the most important institution for a state at the growth of state power is a central bank.
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Um the abolishing of a commodity money such as gold and silver, the replacement of commodity money by a fiat money, by a paper money or electronic money that can be created at will that can be created out of nothing.
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That is easier important to enrich yourself at the expense of other people by simply printing additional money that it does by imposing ever more taxes on people.
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Um no state will be easily if ever give up this privilege of being the printer of this monopolistic printer of uh of money.
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And you will get enormous amount of support from all sorts of people once they find out that you have the privilege of printing money out of out of nothing.
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I always told my students, imagine you would be the only person in the country that can print money and everybody else who would do it would be locked up as a counterfeiter.
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How many friends do you think you will have the next day of which you didn't even know before?
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They will all come and think you can come and rescue them out of any type of difficulties because you have some magic the magic wand.
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Because of that Mises and of course Rothbard as well were strict opponents uh of the central bank and of paper and of paper money.
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Um it allows you also of course to go far more easily to war than without having a central bank that can create money out of thin air. Uh if you would have to borrow the money from the public
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uh the public might might sometimes not cooperate, but if you can simply print the money for the war, there you go. It's much easier.
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Um another thing I discovered and that was uh something that uh did not appear when I was younger a problem at all in Europe.
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America was a multicultural society. Uh America had black people. Um there were different races in the United States. It Germany was relatively homogeneous as it Portugal until the more relatively recently was also very homogeneous. France was very homogeneous. Most countries in Europe
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were rather herp homogeneous groups, people very much alike. The United States was very different in this regard.
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And what took place there was first you had compulsory discrimination against blacks for instance.
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Blacks were not allowed to do certain things. Um and then this was turned around to the complete opposite.
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That is instead of simply saying all these compulsory discrimination laws will simply be abolished, they turned it around and said, "Now we have to make good on the discrimination, the unjust discrimination that existed before. Now we have compulsory non-discrimination
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or which is called in the United States affirmative action. That is we have to give those people special privileges.
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Um which caused of course tremendous problems and increased the racial hatred that that to a level that had not existed before. Schools that were before been segregated were now compulsorily integrated.
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And then this non-discrimination uh or compulsory non-discrimination was extended to ever more groups. So, the next discriminatory groups they found out was were women.
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Uh then the next discriminated group that they they found out were homosexuals or lesbians or transsexuals or whatever it is.
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Um so these sorts of things led them to a perversion of justice in un- unexplainable way.
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And Europe followed the American pattern. Um of course, not as fast because the initial problem, that is, the racial problem of blacks versus whites did not exist to this extent in Europe.
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But as soon as the extension came females homosexuals lesbians whatever it is, um this this whole thing caught on in in Europe as as well.
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Um I also learned then that it is important not only to learn about the differences between different races and different sexes.
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Um that it is also an error to believe you should only look at individuals. No, you also sometimes need to know something about averages.
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Not only individuals are different one from the other. Also groups of people are different from other groups.
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Sometimes you don't have enough information about individual about people on the individual level to make decisions but what to do with this guy and that guy.
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Sometimes you lack information and you have to just make decision based on your knowledge of averages.
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You know that if you meet a group of girls coming home at night um from some party and then and then a group of what is a black males for instance coming home at night and you have to choose which side
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of the street you should use in order not to be mugged. It is good to know which group is likely less aggressive and which group is likely more aggressive.
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These sorts of insights were basically made taboo to talk about in the United States.
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And what I did learn and again Oswald helped me in this was uh you have to be discriminating.
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Discriminating between people and groups of people is a good thing. In the old days when people said this person has a discriminating taste that meant this person knows his way around in the world.
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Nowadays if people say this person is a discriminating person that is considered to be a negative thing.
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I am a discriminating person. There are many libertarians that claim to be libertarians. I would never want to go out with them.
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Um and there are many people who are non-libertarians who I think behave in a way that I consider to be polite, good, uh admirable, with whom I would like to go out and who do uh would like to have
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as my neighbors. And many libertarians who I would not like to have as my neighbors.
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So discriminating is a very important thing to do. Um lastly, [clears throat] I should mention uh I will make to the topic that Saifedean spoke about.
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You also learn, of course, who's the ruling class in the United States is. The ruling class are those people about whom you are not allowed to speak.
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And you are not allowed to say in the United States that the United States is ruled by the Jewish elite.
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Um all academic top academic posts, all top academic top posts in in Hollywood, uh in the news in the newspapers, if in if politics are predominantly occupied by Jews.
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Um but this that is something that you are not supposed to say. You're not supposed to notice this.
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Also, the American foreign policy that is pursued is a foreign policy that is dominated by Jewish influences.
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Israel is of enormous influence in the United States. The Jewish lobbying groups are the most powerful groups that exist in the United States.
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They destroy careers. You will not be able to get a job if you have said certain things that about certain types of people.
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It was also these lobbies that destroyed Ralph Ringold career. Ralph Ringold was outspoken uh about the power of the Jewish lobbying groups and the power of Jewish elites as far as American foreign policy is concerned and their ardent
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pursuit of destroying the countries in the middle in the Middle East. Um So, his career was hampered and ruined despite his enormous talents that he had, his unrivaled talents um by his own Yeah. Coreligionists, if you want.
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Um To speak about these types of things that I said at the end here or discriminating between different people.
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Learning what the what the talents or the faults of certain groups are and certain individuals and saying so is a very dangerous thing.
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Um And I encourage people to become courageous enough to not hesitate to point these things out.
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I do I'm uh I'm not partic- I'm not the most liked person among the libertarians because I make these types of remarks.
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You should just see some some con- conventions of libertarian party chief par- party uh people and uh you will be surprised what you see there and they are not very appealing.
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So, as libertarians, we also have to make an attempt um to be accomplished people to have something to show for um to be proud of uh achievements and to behave in a in a way um that lets other people uh try to
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emulate what we do and not behave in a way that abhors other people once they look at what we do.
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Thank you very much. [applause] I thank you very much. I'm going to do something I learned at a Queen uh concert.
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So, everyone, you love liberty and the Rothbard, raise your That'll be good. That's a lot better.
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Okay. Uh All right, let me start here. Uh so, the book our book today was published actually today in print. Hans and I thought of this a few months ago. Uh it's uh as you know, Rothbard at 100, a
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tribute and assessment. And it's just a wonderful collection that came together pretty quickly. And uh I think it's a very meaningful tribute to Rothbard.
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Um and it's out there for sale today and Saifedean Ammous is in there and he he graciously offered to publish it in very high quality from his his wonderful publishing house, uh, the Saf House. Um, I'm going to I'm going to just go
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through some of Rothbard's greatest hits, I'm calling it. Um, uh, this will be a little bit personal, which I think I can be forgiven because, uh, I love Rothbard and we all have our personal stories with Rothbard. Um, so
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what I'd like to say first is, um, um, you know, I've been a libertarian since about high school, since I was about 15 years old, over I don't know, 40 years ago. And, um, around the same time I was also, um,
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um, a fan of of, uh, of uh, of rock music and also of Rothbard soon after that.
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And if and as I've written before, in in law school, I started becoming against intellectual property as soon as I passed the patent bar and started practicing it. So, I've been against patent law and intellectual property for about the same time. So, I've had a lot
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of experience under my belt with, uh, with all of these ideas. Um, Roth, we have an embarrassment of riches with with embarrassment of riches with Rothbard.
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Let me see if I can Okay. So, what I'm going to do here today is just highlight some of his interesting writings. Some are obscure, some of them known, but just the things that I think they go. So, I'm thinking
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of this like as a as a mixtape, you know, I don't know if you some of you guys remember this back in the '70s and the '80s and '90s, some of us would take our favorite songs and make a mixtape
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um, for our girlfriends or whatever just to impress them, which which rarely ever works, but it made them think you like them.
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[laughter] So, you know, uh, I I mentioned here that one time I I took my my favorite album, which was Rush, uh, my favorite group, which was Rush, which I was also a fan of since about the age of 15, and I made a
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mixtape of their guitar solos, so just the the best stuff. So, that's kind of what this talk is a little bit. It's the cuz the Rothbard guitar solos.
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Uh Uh in fact, I'm going to see the Rush concert uh next month with Greg here and some of my my libertarian friends. Um So, anyway, he was an embarrassment of riches. It would If you were to try to
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comprehensively survey all of his thought, it would take hours and hours and hours and then and then you would only touch the surface. Uh I do remember back in 2002, I was on a a panel of nine faculty members at the Mises Institute
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in Auburn and we did five full days of lectures just on Rothbard's thought. And uh even that wasn't enough. So, you know, we can only you can only touch touch on the surface of his of his writing.
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Um Now, what are his most famous works and other people's favorites? Uh let me say for being just a mention his War Guilt in the Middle East, which is one of his classics. You know, his most famous and most popular works are Man,
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Economy, and State and Power and Market, For a New Liberty, The Ethics of Liberty, Conceived to Liberty, America's Great Depression. It's just incredible all the things he's written, right? Um And then he also wrote a great deal in
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periodicals, some of which he started, some of our earlier speakers mentioned. He wrote in the Libertarian Review, which most of you have probably never heard of, The Libertarian Forum, Reason Magazine, Liberty Magazine, New New Individualist Review, Left and Right,
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Rampart Journal, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, Libertarian Vanguard, and others. And then there's some great collections of Rothbard's thought. There's The Free Market Reader, which is one of my early books that I read, which helped make me a strong libertarian. It's a great
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selection of articles, which I believe Jeff Tucker told me he actually edited behind the scenes, but it's Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard and a couple others.
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Mostly collections of their articles in The Free Market. So, that's a great little introduction to libertarianism.
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It's sort of up there with Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson for me, The Free Market Reader.
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There's Irrepressible Rothbard. There's Making Economic Sense, which I love. Um and Economic controversies. Um and then of course there's the Festschrift that was done for him in 1988. It's called Man, Economy, and Liberty, which is a great selection of
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articles including a great one by Hoppe on his argumentation ethics. And now we have this book which is like a Festschrift, but it's we call I learned the word um from Hans as Gedächtnisschrift. It's a memory book for someone who's who's passed away.
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Um Now in my view one of the greatest surveys ever written of Rothbard's work is is the introduction in the 1988 a 1998 version of Ethics of Liberty by by Professor Hoppe. It's called Murray Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty. It's
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just a great survey of his thought and what is important about it. And one great thing about it is is is Hans uh uh differentiates Rothbard from Robert Nozick, who was another famous like Harvard libertarian who was a
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respectable libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist libertarian who in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which I thought was an anarchist book because of the title. I read it a long time ago and when I got to the end I'm like, "Oh,
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he's in favor of a state. He's not an anarchist." But in addition to him not being a really good libertarian, he was a dilettante and he also wasn't serious about it and he moved on. And Hoppe, you know, Hoppe pointed out that Nozick had
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a methodologically non-committal approach to libertarianism as opposed to Rothbard who took ideas of liberty seriously. Right? As one of our previous speakers mentioned, he was about the battle for ideas and the fight for liberty. But um but Nozick had a
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disparate and loosely jointed arguments, conjectures puzzles counterexamples experiments paradoxes surprising terms, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and philosophical razzle-dazzle. I love that concept uh by Hans. Uh So that's Rothbard.
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Now, I'm going to pick out a few here while I have time. Um just my personal favorites. Some substantive, some more humorous.
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Um a lot of them are from The Ethics of Liberty and and Economic Controversies, which is one of my favorite collections by Rothbard.
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Uh, which was originally called The Logic of Action, but republished because of a copyright problem, I believe. Um, so, one one of my favorite things of Rothbard's is something he did not say.
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If you guys have heard of uh, The Dog Who Did Not Bark, which is a famous uh, Sherlock Holmes uh, story. Um, um, so, as I've mentioned in some of my writing on intellectual property, Rothbard was was getting to he had some
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criticisms of intellectual property, but he didn't go all the way. He he made a few errors and missteps.
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Um, but it is my view and it's the view of Professor Hoppe uh, Professor Hoppe that if he had just lived a little bit longer, he died in '95 right at the beginning of the internet age, right when we started uh, addressing the
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intellectual property issue and and examining it more closely. If he had just lived a few more few more years longer, we're we're confident he would have he would have seen the light and embraced the anti-IP position wholeheartedly. And part of the evidence
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for that is in 1988, um, when I was still in law school and not writing on this, uh, there was a panel discussion um, at the Mises Institute on ethics with Rothbard and Hoppe on the panel and a couple of others. Um, it was
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called Owning Thoughts and well, and and uh, someone from the audience said, "I have a question for Professor Hoppe.
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Does the ideal of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge? Am I a sovereign over my thoughts, ideas, and theories?" And Professor Hoppe immediately answered, and this is before I believe he had given any thought to the intellectual property idea, but he because he understood
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praxeology so well and understood the distinction between the role of of scarce resources and action and the role of ideas, which guide action, right?
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They're two different roles. He instantly said, "In order to have a thought, you must have property rights over your body, but that doesn't imply that you own your thoughts. The thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of
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understanding them. So, Hoppe immediately expressed an anti-IP position and the point is Rothbard said nothing. He didn't say, "Oh, no, I I've written on this and I think you could have a contract argument." So, the fact that Rothbard didn't say anything, I
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think it's telling um that he would have been amenable to a deeper criticism than a wish property.
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So, that's one of my favorite little Hoppe things. Um Uh now, there's something really funny.
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I don't know if you've all heard this, you know, Rothbard was earlier involved with the Ayn Rand circles and he left soon after because he didn't have any taste for all the their kind of cultish behavior. So, he wrote a parody called
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Mozart was a red. It's a really funny play. Um there is a YouTube version online with Jeff Tucker and some others um acting out the characters in that play.
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So, that is something worth worth watching. Um In 1993, he had an article um he was talking about a controversy where Lou Rockwell had written a kind of humorous article about this affair America. There was a guy named Rodney
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King who had been beaten by the cops. He was some thug who could be beaten by the cops and it turned into a big racial incident. And Rockwell wrote something with a humorous line about how um he wished uh he wished video cameras would
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be banned. He was obviously joking, but all the all these cereal-so libertarians went crazy. And so, Rothbard uh called them the dimwit and cereal-so libertarians and I use that term all the time. Someone who's a dimwit and cereal-so libertarian.
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Um And it reminds me of something Professor Hoppe said several years ago in 2017, or nine years ago now. Uh he referred to the Students for Liberty as stupids for Liberty and then liberal liberal-la-la libertarians.
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[laughter] And and Rothbard also derided all these kind of Star Trek libertarians, the ones that you know, wanted to explore longevity and freezing their heads in blocks of ice and things. He called them uh space cadets.
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That was kind of funny. Um There was another funny one um in 1988 Professor Hoppe published his groundbreaking uh argumentation ethics in Liberty magazine and uh he got a lot of heat from the other commentators who didn't like someone who actually could
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prove individual rights because it left them with nothing else to do. Uh Rothbard defended of course in this this this this uh this well-known libertarian philosopher named Loren Lomasky from Minnesota who looks like an anarchist because he got a
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big beard, but he's he was just a minarchist. Um All right, he looks a little bit like Spooner or or or or Lysander Lysander Spooner or or Benjamin Tucker or something, but he's just a he's just a normal uh minarchist or as we call it a
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mini statist. Um uh But anyway, he had he had a savage review of Hoppe's book and uh he he's like, "Oh, I can't believe he's in favor of anarchy in Liberty magazine. This is a libertarian magazine, you know, that
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Rothbard was a a main contributor to." Um and so uh Rothbard wrote in re- response to this in an article called Hoppephobia, um which we don't have here. Um he said he said that the Lomasky review is an
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interesting example of what is going to be a fairly common phenomenon, Hoppephobia. Although he is an amiable man personally, Hoppe's written work seems to have the remarkable capacity to send some readers up the wall, blood pressure soaring, muttering and chewing
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the carpet. All right. I just I love that line, chewing the carpet. I've used that one, too. Uh every time I can I I use that.
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Um and then he went on, "Look, Loren Lomasky is shocked and stunned that Hoppe is not simply a defender of existing capitalism. His book is no less than a manifesto for untrammeled anarchism." Well, heavens to Betsy, anarchism. One wonders where Lomasky has
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been for the last 20 years. Perhaps the knowledge has not yet penetrated to the to the fastnesses of Minnesota, but anarchism has been a vibrant part of the libertarian dialogue for a long time as most readers of Liberty will know.
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Uh I just love the head head of his fancy light. Uh now, there is a Libertarian of sorts named Andrew Galambos. There was all these kind of weird, you know, back in the 1920s and 30s, there was these weird
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preachers in America that developed these cult followings like little little girls and women who would preach and and then the the had the then they had alcohol being prohibited by the women's temperance movement. It all these bizarre little culty things happened.
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Something like that started happening in California. Not all not only with like L. Ron Hubbard, you know, and Dianetics and um and then Scientology, you know, I guess also the Mormons to a degree. Um and um but also this this Galambos guy, you
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know, he he started it in Ayn Rand of course had her a little kind of quasi cult in the in the late 60s and the 70s after he she published um The Fountainhead and then Atlas Shrugged.
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And then there was this guy Galambos who was this uh you know, retired space engineer who wanted to get to the stars.
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So, he named his books uh sic itur ad astra. You know, let's get to the stars. You know, you had the Latin made it sound important and interesting. But um he was a serious intellectual property nut. I mean, he was even worse than
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Lysander Spooner who was terrible on intellectual property, by the way, uh just like Ayn Rand was. I mean, he he not only believed in intellectual property like Ayn Rand did, but he believed it was the the main form of
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property or the only form. He called it primary property and that it was inalienable. You couldn't even give it away by contract and that it lasted forever. So, if he had his way, the human race would be dead by now cuz we
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couldn't cook with fire because we wouldn't know who to get permission to get to make fire.
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But uh but so Galambos was a joke. He was he was parodied in a really funny Libertarian book. If some of you have not read it, it's called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome to Chilling. It's all a hilarious great
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book. Um but anyway, Rothbard said um um there was some author who was influenced by Galambos and he published a book, but the book drew heavily on Rothbard's ideas. So he sent a copy to Rothbard and he sent him a $100 check to pay him
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royalties for using Rothbard's ideas. So Rothbard returned the book and the check and he said he didn't agree with Galambos's idea that you could own ideas.
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Uh but if the author did believe this and he owed Rothbard all of his royalties, not just $100. So I mean, why does $100 And by the way, this is another sign that Rothbard would have rejected intellectual property because
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when he disagreed with Galambos, he said he doesn't agree you can own ideas. So you see he was he was almost there. So um There's some great work by Rothbard on um on um on Robert Nozick as I mentioned
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earlier. Um so Nozick So Rothbard has a great uh article scoring uh Nozick's case for the minimal state. I mean, basically Nozick's argument falls apart cuz Nozick basically says you have this this these protective defense agencies emerging from anarchy one at a time and then one
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of them finally outlaws all the others because they're too risky. And then that's the that's the fatal mistake as Rothbard points out. So you you Nozick's argument depends upon there being a legitimacy to every step going from anarchy to minarchy and he just he
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fails cuz you can't do it. Um and also Georgism, which I absolutely despise. I mean, Georgism is one of those cranky crazy ideas. It's the idea that you didn't create the land so you can't get rent from it. I mean,
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I don't want to get rent from it. I just want to use it, okay, without you taking it from me.
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Um so Rothbard did a great job uh attacking uh Georgism. So that was a a great thing he did, too. Uh now, my favorite stuff on Roth by Rothbard is is of course in The Ethics of Liberty.
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That's his his his probably single best work. But also, if I had to have only one other book I could keep at my hand at hand, it would be um Economic Controversies, especially part one on method. His his a
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priorism I'm sorry his extreme his extreme praxeology and his method. Um Um it's it's for the similar reason that my my favorite part of Mises is the first 100 pages or so of human action on methodology and also his last book the
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ultimate foundation of economic science which is my favorite book of his which is all on method and epistemology. Um Now, in my but in my view substantively my my my favorite and I think the most important and the most overlooked
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contribution of Rothbard is his title transfer theory of contract. Um and one interesting other thing about that is um Rothbard was very humble. So, you'll hear stories about people saying, "Oh, I want to research this topic." And Rothbard will say,
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um "Read this book and read this book." like on the Great Depression. And I think one day someone asked him about the Great Depression and Rothbard said, "Yeah, I think I wrote something about that." on his desk and he found his PhD
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thesis which turned into America's Great Depression. So, like he's so humble he didn't even didn't even take credit for things when he should have. Um Uh in in the video I was looking at the other day he mentioned he was
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criticizing Alan Greenspan and he just casually mentioned, "Yeah, I knew Alan." But he didn't say how. I mean, of course he knew him closely because of the Ayn Rand circles. They were both in Ayn Rand circles.
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Um so, everyone associates Williamson Evers. So, in 1977 in in the first issue I believe it was the first article of Rothbard's Journal of Libertarian Studies. The first article is is the title transfer theory of contract by Williamson Evers who's a historian and
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he was used to be a libertarian. He's I think at Hoover now. Um and it's a great article. It's pathbreaking article on contract theory which is a very important aspect of libertarian property rights. Um and in The Ethics of Liberty a few 2
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later 1982 Rothbard repeated Evers' argument. So, you would think that Rothbard is borrowing from Evers. Well, a few years ago, I discovered, in 1974, I believe, Rothbard had several paragraphs in an early version of one of his books where he he
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had the germs of this idea of the title transfer theory contract. So, after about six or seven or eight years of pestering ways with Evers to give me an interview, I finally got him on the phone and I talked to him, and he
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confirmed that my hunch was right, which was that um he got the he got the idea from Rothbard. So, Rothbard and he were talking in 1974, something like that.
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Rothbard said, "You know, William said Evers, you should develop the theory of contract, um um based upon his ideas." So, then Evers writes the article for the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and then Rothbard takes it and repurposes it for his book.
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So, it was I mean, I call it now the the the Rothbard-Evers transfer theory title. I give Evers credit, but it was really Rothbard's genius. And to me, that is Rothbard's most one of his most profound insights. It has a lot of
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implications. Um another one, of course, is Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Ethics. Um and it's in it's in Economic Controversies. First of all, it's in 1977, which in which he talks about how the importance of recognizing that value
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is is not a measurable cardinal quantity that could be interpersonally compared, which of course Mises himself emphasizes when he emphasizes in Human Action and other books that that um prices are not a measure of value.
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He also has a fascinating taxonomy in I believe it's in Power and Market, and he he he he separates government intervention or state intervention into three different types: autistic, no offense libertarians, um binary, and and triangular.
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[laughter] And so, he gives examples. It's a really useful way to classify different state interventions, whether the state's just taking from you like taxing or whether they're doing something for Peter to benefit Paul to get credit with them.
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So I've used that actually in my work on intellectual property. I've tried to explain that um that the fundamental problem with intellectual property is ultimately it's a it's a non-consensual negative servitude. It's it's a right to control someone else's owned resource which is
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acceptable if it's consented to which is part of what a homeowners associations and restrictive covenants are. But if you don't consent to it then it's basically stealing and theft.
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Um Uh so that right I believe falls into Rothbard's category of triangular intervention. So I've used Rothbard's taxonomy in my own writing. Another really important thing is I've written in in Hoppe's 2024 Festschrift that Guido Hülsmann and I published at the PFS.
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Um I have a chapter on defamation which is a really important I argue that defamation law is not only unjust but it should be viewed as a type of intellectual property for various reasons. So just like patent law,
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trademark law, copyright, trade secret law, boat hold signs, things like that. They are illegitimate monopoly privileges or or negative servitude granted by the state. Uh defamation law also protects a reputation right which is unjust. Now Rothbard saw this. He was one of the
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Until recently most libertarians were in favor of reputation rights just like most libertarians were Indians and in favor of intellectual property. But Walter Block and Murray Rothbard were early on two of the clearest on defamation being um being an unjust law.
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Uh so he was really good on that early on. So that's another one of the important arguments. That's another reason that's the third part of the reason why I think Rothbard would have come come around and be totally against
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intellectual property cuz you would see that his argument against defamation is the same argument that you use against trademark law.
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In any case, um one more thing I'll I have several others here, but I'll I'll stop here to help get us back on track.
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He's got a great comment which I I remembered reading a long time ago and I had trouble finding it. I finally found it the other day researching for this speech. It was in the Libertarian Review, another another journal almost
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no one's ever heard of. It was back in 1977. He was responding to um retired older philosopher now named Eric Mack who's sort of a neo-objectivist anarchist-ish um libertarian philosopher. He's a very smart guy, Eric Mack. Uh kind of natural
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law oriented, Randian oriented. But, you know, he like a lot like a lot of the Randians he's in favor of war.
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Like Walter Block is now apparently too, our old our our former friend. Um Um and a lot of the Randians. Um um and so, you know, part of their argument for war is that, well, anything goes in war because self-defense is fine
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for men and by an individual. So, self-defense by a state is fine, too. And if you have to shoot through a hostage or harm innocent civilians or call call cause collateral damage, that's perfectly justified because that's really the fault of the
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that of the bad guy. You know, as if a state being attacked by one state is one of them's a good guy, one's a bad guy.
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They're you know, they're both evil guys. They're not individuals. Um but the hypothetical is that, you know, if if someone is shooting at you, a bad guy, and he's got a hostage, can you shoot through the hostage to to defend
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yourself? I think Walter Block even argues that you can. Um and then Rothbard put it up, well, the question is not whether you have the right to shoot the hostage. The question is if you have a bodyguard, can your bodyguard
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shoot the guy that's trying to shoot you? Like, yeah, that's a great point. And he could, which shows that you don't have the right to shoot a hostage because the hostage could defend himself from being shot uh or his bodyguard could defend him. Um
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He also talks about pollution and hermeneutics as the two other great articles. And he's got a great argument for individual self-ownership by rejecting universal communism that would be the only alternative is that everyone owns each other or everyone owns or some
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one class of people own another class, which is slavery. So, the only thing left is is self-ownership. So, uh that's some of my favorite things about Rothbard, but I would just like to say um happy birthday this year to Professor
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to Murray Rothbard, and thank you all for your love of liberty and your love of Rothbard and for your interest and for for your wonderful welcome today and and for the excitement you guys have for liberty. I I've loved this. This may be
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my favorite conference I've ever been to. So, I loved it and thank you all so much.
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Olá. Bom dia a todos. You guys say it correctly? Unfortunately, I will stop there in Portuguese.
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I'm very happy to attend this amazing event. It's really a nice event. And I must tell you that it was not It was not very easy to to organize. It was organized by a very small team, and they dedicated a lot of
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time, and the result is really impressive. So, I want to say a big thank you and congrats to the team, especially to Manuel Ogando.
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So, I'm very happy to talk about my favorite author, Rothbard, and my favorite technology, Bitcoin.
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As you know, Rothbard was one of the main proponent to separate money and the state, but he wanted to do that with gold.
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So, since Bitcoin is often described as digital gold, what would Rothbard think of Bitcoin?
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Let's try together to imagine that. Knowing that it's not easy to imagine that because he was a genius. So, very obviously, he would come up with something much more intelligent that what I can guess.
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But, let's try anyway. Uh as regards the political aspect of Bitcoin, I think that he would love Bitcoin. He would love the censorship-resistant aspect, the individual sovereignty aspect.
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But, as regards the economic aspect, probably it would be a bit more tricky, a bit more complex.
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So, I will focus on the economic aspects. And I don't know what you think, but my guess is that he would like Bitcoin as a potential sound money.
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But, paradoxically, he would still propose to remonetize gold. He would still propose to remonetize gold.
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And this type of that, he would agree that Bitcoin may win in the competition against gold later on. So, I will try to um argue in favor of this thesis in three uh steps. First, I will make a
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short synthesis of Rothbard's view on money. Second, I will say why, according to Bitcoin, Rothbard may think that uh according to Rothbard, Bitcoin may become sound money sound money.
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[clears throat] And then, I will explain why, according to Bitcoin, government should still remonetize gold.
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So, first uh short view uh short summary of Rothbard's view on money. As you know, uh his theory and history of money is based based on Carl Menger and Mises.
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According to them, governments should have no role in money. They have uh taken control gradually of money with very bad results. Fiat money is a disaster.
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Fractional reserve banking is not a good idea. It's not viable on a truly free market with real free banking.
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And uh actually, it's fraudulent. And uh it's not economical. And it was promoted by the states.
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And if it survived, it's mainly thanks to the states, especially thanks to central banking, which is a catalyzation device in favor of big banks and in favor of the governments.
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So, this has very bad consequences, price inflation, business cycle, the destruction of the price system, and finally the destruction of money and the destruction of the market, the market economy.
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So, the consequence is that we should I mean, gold became money over the centuries, and it was artificially demonetized by the governments. So, then we should remonetize gold.
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[snorts] Of course, it was a very short summary, and his analysis is much richer in his book.
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And he proposed to remonetize gold. What does it mean exactly? He had a very original theory of how to remonetize gold.
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Of course, the first step is to abolish legal tender. And then we should define the dollar as a fixed weight of gold.
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Dollar should be a fixed weight of gold as it was uh, before the 20th century.
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So, every existing dollar currently should be considered as a claim on some specific weight of gold.
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There should be genuine redeemability of dollar in gold. And all the gold of the governments and the central banks should be transferred to the banks and to the people.
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And after that, no more Fed notes. They can be destroyed. Uh, we don't need any uh, Fed notes anymore, and each bank can issue their own notes with their own name on the notes, but each of them will be some
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specific weight of gold. And then there would be free private private coinage of gold coins as before long time ago.
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And we can close the central bank. We don't need it anymore. And we can even later on we can suppress the name dollar. We can replace it with a grain of dollar or ounce of dollar so that people understand that the dollar
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doesn't exist anymore. It's not a autonomous independent entity anymore. Gold should be dollar, dollar should be gold.
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And then we can do that with the other currencies. Euros about dollar, but the analysis is the same for the other currencies.
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So now a few words about how to define the the dollar in terms of weight of gold.
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So this is a tricky slide. It's a bit technical. So if you are not crazy about economic theory, you can skip it. There's no problem.
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But personally, yeah, I I struggled to understand that. So I wanted to share it with you.
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What what it's not really a price. It's a weight of gold. It's a definition.
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What definition should we adopt for the dollar? The first element to take into consideration is that this definition should not be too low.
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For example, if we take the Bretton Woods system price of $35 per ounce of gold, this would be too low because that it would have a very big deflationary impact on the economy. Why? Because since that time a lot of dollars have
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been created, so there would be too much dollar too too many dollars. So we would need to destroy a lot of dollars. It would be hard. The commercial banks should call in all existing loans and stop lending money. Stop lending money.
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So it will not be a good idea. So, um Rothbard was very pragmatic. He didn't want to impose a solution, but he explored various scenarios, and then two main scenarios. The first option is that we should define the dollar so that the
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Fed's gold stock covers all the Fed's liability. What are the Fed's liability? It's the Fed's notes plus the deposits due to commercial banks, the reserves of the commercial banks at at the central bank.
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So, in that case, he made the calculation, the definition of the dollar would bring the price of gold which would be $676 per ounce of gold.
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But, there's a second option which is more interesting according to Rothbard. Instead of covering only Fed's liabilities, the gold stock of the Fed should cover the whole money supply.
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The whole money supply. All the liabilities issued by all the banks, not only the central bank, but also the commercial banks.
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It's more or less the monetary aggregate one M1 as it was defined at the time of Rothbard. The notes plus the checkable deposits. So, according to his So, why does he favor that? It's because it it would allow 100% full reserve
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banking, full reserve banking, which he favors against fractional reserve banking. And in his calculation, it would bring a definition of 1,696 per ounce of gold.
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And according to my own calculation, then it would be between $35,000 and $40,000 for 1 ounce of gold. So, of course, the owners of gold would be very, very happy.
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So, now why can we think that Rothbard would think that Bitcoin can can become money?
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So, what money is not according to him? Money is not an abstract unit of account divisible from a concrete good. This is not the case of Bitcoin. It's not divorced from a concrete good. It's based on energy, compute computers,
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infrastructure. Money is not a useless token only good for exchanging. Money is not a claim on society, a very fashionable theory nowadays. It's not a guarantee of a fixed price level.
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Money is simply a commodity. But not so simply a commodity actually. It's a commodity that is a general medium of exchange. Money is a commodity that serves as a general medium of exchange.
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Very important definition. Every word is important. And the concept of general medium of exchange is not so easy to grasp. And Rothbard is very honest on that.
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He adds that it's impossible to define very precisely at what step something becomes a general medium of exchange.
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So, what about Bitcoin? We can argue that Bitcoin is a commodity. We know that Bitcoin is already a means of exchange.
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But we can guess that Rothbard will say that Bitcoin is still not a general medium of exchange.
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Whatever you define general medium of exchange, you can't say that Bitcoin is a general medium of exchange now.
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So, he would think that Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is not yet money. But it can become money. So, if it's not money, what is it?
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I think that he would use a very important concept in human action by Mises, the concept of secondary medium of exchange. What is it?
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It's something It's an asset that you keep with you. You know that you can't use it to buy a coffee, but you know that you can sell it very easily the day you need some fiat money to buy your coffee.
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For centuries, those kinds of assets were jewels, and now they are government bonds or very liquid assets.
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They are the most marketable non-monetary goods. You know that money is the most marketable goods, but among non-monetary goods, there are goods that are more or less marketable. And the most marketable non-monetary goods, they are what Mises called secondary medium of exchange. I
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don't know what you think, but for me, Bitcoin is exactly that. Exactly that. It's a secondary medium of exchange. You can own You can hold it, and you know that you can sell it when you want to get some fiat if you want to buy a
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Lamborghini or a coffee. And the those The the the The interest of those assets is to reduce the opportunity cost of holding cash.
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And from an economic point of view, and it's exactly Bitcoin. So, another aspect important is that you can't really own Bitcoin because it's information, and there's no intellectual property as per Rothbard.
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Um you can control it. You can possess it because you can have practical control on this scarce resource because it's a scarce resource. You can have a practical control if you have your private keys.
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So, I think that Rothbard would agree on that, especially if he sees this fascinating talk by Stephan Kinsella, who's here today, and in 2019. So, I advise you to to to watch it on YouTube.
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But a very tricky question is if you can't own Bitcoin, if there's no property title, can it become money?
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And and libertarians are not the don't agree on that. And a possible answer by by by Stefan Kinsella is that um money is not legal phenomena, is an economic phenomena. And it's the economic phenomena of a medium of
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exchange to to to avoid the problems of barter. So, even if there's no property title, even if you can't own something, it can be money. So, we can conclude that Bitcoin could be money despite of that. It's not
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It's not the only aspect, but it's an aspect that is important. Another aspect is that Bitcoin has all the necessary physical properties to become money, even if it's not a physical thing. And we can argue that it's a digital commodity,
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even if the fungibility is not completely perfect. on if you talk about the fungibility on the on on on the protocol level or on the social and legal level. It's a tricky question.
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But it's divisible, homogeneous, portable tradeable auditable etc. Like gold, actually. And of course, it's scarce. And it's emerging through a market process, which is very important in the Rothbardian analysis for something to be money.
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And I think that Rothbard would agree that there's an increasing demand for kind of assets that is very useful to protect savings against monetary inflation and political control and surveillance.
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So, the context is is good for Bitcoin to become money. And it will not violate the regression theorem, which is very important thing.
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I insist on that because there here again, there's a lot of controversy among Austrians. Before May 2010, the first purchase of good with Bitcoin, pizza, there was a non-monetary use of Bitcoin, which is the criteria for the regression
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theory. There was a non-monetary use. What was it? Bitcoin was a collectible. It was an object of interest for geeks, uh computer scientists, cryptographers, um activists, libertarians, uh anarcho um capitalists and anybody.
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And even today, we can say that Bitcoin has a non-monetary use. What is it?
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First, it's a decentralized um timestamping system, very efficient, more efficient than other timestamping systems, and it's useful in the industry, in legal services, and more importantly, it's a payment infrastructure. It's a infrastructure of trend of value transfer, and it's not a monetary use.
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If I want to send you $1 billion, dollars, I can I can use this um infrastructure by converting my fiat into Bitcoin, send you some Bitcoin, and then you convert the Bitcoin into dollars. So, I have used the Bitcoin infrastructure as a
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payment infrastructure, but even if Bitcoin is not money, it's it's a non-monetary use of Bitcoin. So, if Bitcoin becomes money later on, if we agree on that, there will be no violation of the regression theory.
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So, in that case, Bitcoin will be uh part of money in the narrower sense, according to Mises, and Bitcoin on layers two, like Lightning Network, will be considered as money certificates, and not as fiduciary money. So, this is a
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very interesting typology of money by Ludwig von Mises. Um I don't have time to explain it, but it's very very interesting. You should read Mises, and you should read also Settelino Mose because in his very good book, Principles of Economics, he made a very
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good synthesis of this psychology by by Mises. So, I think that according to Rothbard, Bitcoin could become sound money.
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Why? [snorts] Because it's hard money. I mean, it will it will be hard money. It's very costly to produce, and the government has no influence.
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And he will consider that there is a very impressive volatility today, but it's probably a very temporary phenomenon. It will decrease if the adoption continue.
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And he will love the disinflationary emission of Bitcoin. He will understand that this is going to bring a price deflation, and it's perfectly okay. Natural deflation is okay for Austrian economists.
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And he will agree that in a Bitcoin economy, there will be less debt to fund investments and business, but there will be more equity funding, which is fine.
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And he could even think that Bitcoin can be better than gold on certain aspects.
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First, because there's a supply cap. Um And second, because we don't need an additional money for small transactions as we needed from silver for transactions that are too small to use gold.
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Um We can use Bitcoin for very small amounts, especially on the lightning network or or other layers too.
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And contrary to gold, Bitcoin is an improving technology. There's some progress over time. It can be It can be improved over time, so it's a huge advantage.
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So Bitcoin according to Rothbard, will be can be called money, and will be sound money.
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But, paradoxically, I think that he would still propose to remonetize gold. Why? Uh first, let's disregard three wrong options. The first wrong option is to give legal tender to Bitcoin. It's the the choice that was made in El
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Salvador, but the problem is that it's imposed by the governance. So, Rothbard would not favor that. It's just impossible.
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Second, we should disregard the avoid the strategic reserve as proposed by Trump because it would be government managed.
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Of course, Rothbard wouldn't wouldn't like that. And more uh more interesting, we should avoid the Hayek's proposal because of private uh currencies competing each others.
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Why? Because uh as Rothbard explained very extensively, in the Hayek's system, um fiat money still exists. We don't suppress fiat money. There's this competition between fiat money and private monies.
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And it's not so obvious that people would choose the new private monies because they would they they they would prefer to to continue to use something they know.
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They already know. They have known the dollar and other currencies for a long time.
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So, Rothbard explained that the Hayek's proposal is not a good idea. It will fail. It will fail.
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So, in in a Bitcoin probably Bitcoin would be would be more attract- attractive for the public than new monies um issued by banks. But, we can't be sure that Rothbard would think that it's enough for Bitcoin to win in this kind of
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competition where fiat still exists. I'm not totally sure, but I think Rothbard would be skeptical on that.
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So, I think he would still propose to get rid of fiat. This is the priority to get rid of fiat.
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How do we do it? According to him, the only way to denationalize fiat, denationalize fiat is to link it to a commodity. It's the only way.
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And what commodity? It would be could be a market-based market basket of commodities. He analyzes this scenario but doesn't like it because it would be a government imposed and managed even if there is some Bitcoin in this commodity basket.
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So, we should link fiat money to a single commodity and could it be Bitcoin?
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Maybe Rothbard would we think, "Okay, let's ask the government to link to define fiat money into Bitcoin." This is possible but I I don't believe that. I think that it will not propose that because it would think that Bitcoin
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is not money. It would be arbitrary to ask the government to define fiat money into something that is not yet money. I think that's the analysis that Rothbard would have.
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So, he would propose to remonetize gold. It was chosen by the market. And there's an interesting question is would it be unlibertarian to ask the government to define dollar in gold? And he has an interesting answer. He says, "Take the
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example of price control. If government creates price control, of course we should abolish the price control. But the only way to abolish the price control, what is it? It's a government law.
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It's a government decree. It's a government bill. The government has to undo what it has done.
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It's the only way and it's the same with money. The analysis of Rothbard on that is very interesting. The government should undo the demonetization of gold by redefining the dollar in gold.
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And of course we should remove taxes on Bitcoin and then let the market decide.
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There will be competition between Bitcoin and gold. And maybe Bitcoin would go we we win according to to to Robert. I think he would would accept this this possibility. So in conclusion, if you like Bitcoin, I would still remain
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attached gold. You would accept that Bitcoin may win. And at the in the conclusion of his book chapter The Case for Genuine Dollar, he wrote, "I would not advise anyone to bet their life savings on any of these proposed new currencies
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getting anywhere in this competitive race." So he would he would would he was talking about the potential new monies issued by banks. And probably today if he was talking about new currencies getting anywhere, he would talk about the shitcoins.
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All the altcoins that are pretending to compete against Bitcoin. I think he would say I would not advise anyone not to own any Bitcoin. He would he would not say Bitcoin is money. We should adopt Bitcoin. He should say, "I would
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not advise anyone not to own Bitcoin." And I think maybe he would buy some Bitcoin.
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Uh thank you.
Topics:Murray RothbardSaifedean AmmousBitcoinLibertarianismCentral BankingInflationPalestine ConflictFixed Money SupplyFederal ReserveEconomic Thought
