As I await the launch of my book on dispensationalist Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992),[1] I’m reflecting on materials on oikonomia, the Greek behind “dispensation” (e.g., Ephesians 3:2), from the late Reformed historian and economist Gary North (1942–2022). I’m alive to the danger of equivocation, in this case of reading theological dispensationalism into North’s understanding of “economics.” Still, the theological system and the modern field of inquiry must be related even as they’re distinguished. A dispensationalist myself,[2] I cite the anti-dispensationalist North “against interest,” if you will. Please charitably consider what follows in this long post not a finished treatise, but rather a collection of unfinished notes that will feed into such work. Criticism is welcome!
What I’m finding, without looking for it, is the metaphysical significance of God’s sovereignty as the ground of ownership. The sovereign God of Scripture is the first and ultimate moral owner (not merely physical possessor) of all things, the One Who delegates stewardship responsibility to His created image-bearers. Non-Christian free market economists have grounded deductive systems, but fail to establish that anyone owns anything morally. At best, these utilitarians demonstrate that failure to respect property rights leads to consequences that they (or the audience for whom they presume to write) find undesirable. Natural law theorists try to avoid the subjectivism of the utilitarians, but unless they start with the sovereign God of Scripture, they’re no better off than their utilitarian rivals. The matter in a nutshell: God prohibits stealing, which implies that its victims owned the things stolen.
The economic (oikonomic?) dimension of Christian Individualism
North discusses the etymology of oikonomia explicitly, but not, as far as I know, in his multivolume Economic Commentary on the Bible.[3] See, however, his Unconditional Surrender:
The Bible says that God owns the entire creation, including all the souls in the universe. He proposes and disposes. None can resist His will. But man, who was made in the image of God and who still has a twisted image of God at his very being, has been appointed to be God’s steward.
In only six years, this post already reads like a time capsule. It’s sprinkled with tidbits that friends I’ve made since 2020 might be interested in. For this and other reasons, it deserves another airing. I’ve deleted only the closing section that lists posts to be reincarnated in my Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers.—A.G.F.
Last December 15th [i.e., 2029], in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend, I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:
President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.
World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.
No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence.
Herbert Aptheker, 1915-2003
In 1949 Communist Herbert Aptheker, a 34-year-old World War II veteran and a Columbia University Ph.D. (and my future comrade, friend, and employer), was compiling material for his A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, whose first volume came out in 1951. (The series would grow to seven.) In April, Aptheker received W. E. B. Du Bois’s letter in reply to Aptheker’s request that he testify for the defense at the Foley Square trial of Communist Party leaders. The trial had begun in January; Aptheker himself testified on August 19th.[1]
Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness” (2019). Buy on Amazon.
Du Bois’s letter shows the address from which he sent it: 23 West 26th Street in Manhattan, originally a John Jacob Astor townhouse, built in 1881. In 1924 Astor’s son Vincent “sold the building for $30,000 to Frederick Vanderbilt Field [1905-2000]”—yes, those Vanderbilts—“a Communist who wrote for the Daily Worker published by Political Affairs Publishers, Inc.”[2]
Alphaeus Hunton on his release from prison 1951; Dorothy Hunton; Paul Robeson; W. E. B. Du Bois
The New York State Communist Party expressed interest in buying the building from Field in 1957. This was six years before Du Bois joined the Party. In 1949, however, Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and Max Yergen had been meeting there since 1942 as officers of the Council on African Affairs, a Field-funded operation. In 1950 Du Bois ran for U.S. Senate on the American Labor Party ticket (the New York incarnation of the national Progressive Party). Field’s 1983 autobiography, From Left to Right (New York: Lawrence Hill), is a good read.
C. L. R. James (1901-1989)
The month Birdland opened, C. L. R. James slammed Herbert Aptheker’s work in African-American history.[3]But Aptheker the Stalinist wouldn’t give James, the author of The Black Jacobinsand Trotskyist scholar, the time of day, let alone answer his criticisms. Aptheker had more in common with James, a fellow Marxist-Leninist, than with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom Aptheker preferred to debate. Schlesinger, historian of American liberalism, sparred with Aptheker at Harvard University about the Cold War and “The Vital Center” (the title of Schlesinger’s just-published book).[4]
Genuine believers in free institutions must be anti-Communists, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ‘38, associate professor of History, said last night at a John Reed Club debate which overflowed Emerson D. Opposing Schlesinger in the discussion, entitled “The Center and the Left,” Herbert Aptheker, associate editor of Masses and Mainstream, charged that the “vital center” of which Schlesinger is a proponent, “only maintains what exists, namely monopoly capitalism.” He called for a unity among all non-conservatives “so that a war against Fascism and capitalism can and must be successful.”[5]
Left totalitarians love to smear their opponents as “fascists,” don’t they.
Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). This was taken in 1943.
Murray Rothbard’s first publication, a review of A Mencken Chrestomathy, appeared in Analysis, August 1949.[6] The author, who became my friend when he was 58, was then all of 23. Earlier that year he heard Ludwig von Mises was going to lead a seminar at New York University in the fall. Murray was already a defender of free markets, but not yet a Misesian. Human Action, the expansion and translation of Mises’s Nationalökonomie, was published that October, intellectually converted the young man.
I was scarcely familiar with Mises’s name, outside of the usual distorted story of the socialist calculation debate, and was therefore surprised to learn in the spring of 1949 that Mises was going to begin a regular seminar at NYU [New York University]. I was also told that Mises was going to publish a magnum opus in the fall. “Oh,” I asked, “what’s the book about?” “About everything,” they replied. Human Action was indeed about everything. The book was a revelation to those of us drenched in modern economics; it solved all problems and inconsistencies that I had sensed in economic theory, and it provided an entirely new and superb structure of correct economic methodology and theory. Furthermore, it provided eager libertarians with a policy of uncompromising laissez-faire; in contrast to all other free market economists of that day or later, there were no escape hatches, no giving the case away with “of course, the government must break up monopolies,” or “of course, the government must provide and regulate the money supply.”[7]
Sidney Hook (1902-1989) and John Dewey (1859-1952), 1949.
Anti-Communist demonstrators outside the Waldorf Astoria, March 25, 1949
In March 1949, Hook and other anticommunist academics and cultural figures protested the Communist front operation that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which met at the Waldorf Astoria in 1949 and 1950, revealed itself to be.[8] That year Hook also penned, among many other articles and reviews, a tribute to his mentor, John Dewey.[9]
Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). This was taken in the 1940s.Brand Blanshard (1892-1987). This was taken at Swarthmore College in 1941, two years after The Nature of Thought was published.
In 1949 Bernard Lonergan, S.J., whose magnum opus I used to extricate myself from the rationalism of Brand Blanshard’s The Nature of Thought, began to present to small groups papers that would eventually become Insight, his “essay in aid self-appropriation” published in 1953. That year also saw the publication of the fourth and fifth installments in his series, “The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas” in Theological Studies.[10] In 1983, when he was convalescing at the Campion Center (a Jesuit infirmary in Weston, Massachusetts), I spoke with him about Austrian economists. “Well, they’re deductivists. And you know what I think of deductivists.”
Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985). Fortune Magazine, March 1945
What could Langer, a materialist (or naturalist) in all but name, offer Lonergan a Transcendental Thomist? Monsignor Richard M. Liddy, who wrote his dissertation on Langer after studying under Lonergan in Rome, supplied an answer in “What Bernard Lonergan Learned from Susanne K. Langer.”[11]
Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Early 1930s.
In 1949 Eric Voegelin, another profound influence with whom I had a chance to speak (also in 1983, my annus mirabilis), published a paper on Plato’s Gorgias.[12] The publication of the first volume of his Order and History still lay seven years in the future.
Will Durant (1885-1981), Ariel Durant (1889-1981). This was taken in 1948.
In 1949 Will Durant was struggling to finish the fourth volume of The Story of Civilization. The Age of Faith, a five-year project, was taking six. From its inception, Ariel, Mrs. Durant, had been a partner in this enterprise; her name joined his on the covers of the series beginning with the seventh volume, The Age of Reason Begins.
M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015)
A teenaged Medford Stanton Evans, a future conservative thought leader and author of, among many other writings, the myth-shattering Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies, realized he was a man of the Right in 1949 after reading George Orwell’s 1984. “It was about communism . . . I said: ‘Well, I’m against communism. What am I for?’” As for becoming a writer, “No, it never crossed my mind. I did not even think in that day and age about becoming a writer of any type. If I’d had my druthers in 1949, I would have played left field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). This was taken in 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an early influence, but one from whom I walked away to chase my intellectual lusts and to whom I’ve returned as a prodigal son, was testing his discovery of the premillennial Kingdom of God. He announced this in The Word of Truth, Volumes XI, 1949-1950 under the series entitled “The Order of Things to Come.” He’d develop this idea during the 1950s, but he was ready to present it publicly in that volume’s fifth issue, dated January 1950 and therefore written probably during the last weeks of 1949. Here’s a passage:
Many there are who believe that the next great event of prophecy is the rapture or catching away of all living believers, followed by the resurrection of the dead in Christ, this to be followed by the great tribulation upon the earth, the second coming of Christ, the millennial kingdom, then the new heavens and the new earth. This, in brief, is the position held by most dispensational fundamentalists, a position which we have often designated in these pages as the Darby-Scofield system of prophetic interpretation. However, it is my conviction that this system has failed to recognize those prophecies which reveal an aspect of the kingdom of heavens which precedes the millennial kingdom, and, therefore, precedes the second coming of Christ. This I call the premillennial kingdom of the heavens since it precedes the millennial kingdom.
I continue to appreciate the intellectual delights afforded by the scholars named above, especially those who, like Blanshard, had a literary gift. Compared to the joy of grasping Sellers’s insights into God’s Word, however, and reflecting upon the industry and integrity which he brought to his pursuit of that pearl of great price, those erstwhile pleasures pale. I no longer long for the fleshpots of academia.
Notes
[1] Here’s the letter. For a discussion of the trial, see Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 76-77.
[4] As Schlesinger recalled the event: “The ever reliable Herbert Aptheker denounced ‘The Schlesinger Fraud’ in the Communist monthly Masses & Mainstream as a program groomed to the needs of a ruling class seeking war and fascism.’ In 1949 Aptheker and I held a debate. Neither of us persuaded the other of anything.” A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000, 519. The Aptheker article had appeared in the October 1949 issue of Masses & Mainstream and reprinted in a collection of Aptheker’s essays entitled The Era of McCarthyism, New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1955, 115-129.
[6] For Rothbard’s appreciation of analysis’s founder Frank Chodorov who gave Murray’s “fledgling work” a platform, see “Frank Chodorov, R. I. P.,” Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, 1967; republished here. For Rothbard’s mature celebration of Mencken, see “H.L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian,” New Individualist Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 15–27; republished here.
[7] Murray N. Rothbard, The Essential von Mises, Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, 108. The link will take you to an expanded edition of an essay Rothbard wrote in 1973.
I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.
For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).
For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.
I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.
Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.
Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.
Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”
Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:
President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.
World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.
No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”
The “national conversation” Leftists urge us to have about social order is about as genuine as Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign and, for patriots tempted to participate, about as safe. Debate has spiritual conditions, and the Left-dominated academedia complex guarantees that they’re rarely, if ever, met (except perhaps among family, friends, and trusted associates, at least for now).
No one made that point with greater profundity and learning than Eric Voegelin. On November 2, 2018 I posted a vignette of my interaction with the great philosopher of consciousness, enriched by extensive quotes from his classic essay, “On Debate and Existence.” Our perilous times call for reposting it. Those who vaguely remember it should take another look; it’ll be new for those who don’t.—Anthony Flood
Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order
That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).
He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)
Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.)
At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned.
[NOTE: I hit “publish” too late on January 7th, 2020, apparently, so this post is unfortunately date-stamped January 8th. Murray Rothbard passed away on January 7, 1995, 25 years ago “yesterday.”—Anthony Flood]
Twenty-five years ago the world lost Murray Newton Rothbard; someday, maybe, it will find him. He died pre-Y2K, pre-9/11, heck, even pre-Oklahoma City Bombing. What he would have thought about subsequent events is the subject of educated conjecture, but no more.
That’s how my friend Father James A. Sadowsky (1923-2012) confirmed the news of the passing of Murray Newton Rothbard (1926–1995) two dozen years ago today [written in 2019].
It was after Sunday Mass at St. Agnes. Finishing breakfast with friends in a 42nd Street coffee shop, I excused myself to call (using a 20th-century pay phone) my wife who, enduring a cold, couldn’t join me in Manhattan that wintry day.
“Father Sadowsky called,” she said. “Murray Rothbard died yesterday.”
It’s now been almost 36 years [now 37] since the first chat that began my friendship with Murray, which continued through his last dozen years. His writings, illuminated by conversations, formed a major part of my education in economics, history, and politics. His personal influence makes it difficult to make a selection among the many memories.
In “Anatomy of the State” (1965) Murray summed up his insight into the State, his lifelong object of demystification:
Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area.
In particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.
Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.
One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.
How ought we evaluate this insight? It seems to suggest, rather un-Rothbardianly, that a collective called “the State” has intentions (and agency to carry them out) over and above the individuals who comprise it. But let’s attribute this inaccurate suggestion to the need for an efficient (if roundabout) way to refer to the State’s constituent individuals. That is, the need for shorthand. There is, however, a less tractable problem with this historical generalization.
To me, it is plain that the same sin-warped mammalian species that has for millennia generated polymorphic structures of compulsion, regulation and dictatorship—parasitic upon free, peaceful and voluntary markets—is unlikely to ditch those structures for any meaningful interval. The same all-too-human material is found both in markets and in their hampering. Or rather, in the individuals who are both market actors and governmental aggressors and/or victims.
The legacy of Murray Rothbard is primarily one of polymathic erudition in the service of the natural right to liberty, suffused with optimism and humor. I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion, however, that his conceit that sustained statelessness is possible—and worth devoting one’s life to achieve—was an error. But it is also my conviction that we can learn more from Rothbard’s viewing of history through that conceit’s lens than from statists who never took that inspiring possibility seriously.
Murray’s error, if error it be, is nearly inexhaustibly instructive.
Complementing last week’s post is another unfinished essay from my Rothbard biography project, aborted two decades ago.
“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty.”1
Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he expresses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.
Murray Newton Rothbard denied that liberty was man’s highest end and that it may excuse license. He did believe, however, that man must protect liberty above all else in his political life, the realm of legitimate interpersonal violence. There is of course much more to life than politics. There is, for instance, religion, philosophy, and art, not to mention the love of family and friends. To enjoy them, however, requires liberty. It is therefore incoherent to constrict liberty in the name of art, religion, philosophy, or love. An attack on liberty is an attack on the great goods that presuppose it. Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point”
I may be fairly described as (among other things) road-kill along the way to the definitive biography of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). In 1997 I sought and gained the cooperation of his widow, Joann, and Lew Rockwell, then president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to begin that project.
All I managed to do, however, was fulfill the prediction that this effort would overwhelm me. My enthusiasm for the idea of telling Murray’s story and expounding his ideas blinded me to the fact, obvious to everyone but me (and perhaps my mother), that I was not up to the task. The life of Rothbard, an intellectual giant, awaits its Hülsmann. And if the interval between the death of Ludwig von Mises and the production of Guido Hülsmann’s Mises: Last Knight of Liberalismis any guide, the wait is far from over.
I was pleasantly surprised when, in 2010, Gerard N. Casey, Professor (Emeritus), School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin, and Associate Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute cited my unfinished essay (first published on my old site in 2008) in his fine monograph Murray Rothbard, a sure milestone on the road to the “definitive biography” project.1
Murray Newton Rothbard was born in the Bronx on March 2, 1926. His father, David Rothbard, a shoemaker’s son, was raised in Vishigorod, Ukraine, 40 miles north of Warsaw on the Vistula. David, who had attended Hebrew school as a child, abandoned Judaism because its scriptures told of a God who had instigated the violent behavior of the Israelites, and that horrified him. Continue reading “Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography”
When it comes to the fate of Western civilization, I often wonder whether “it’s all over but the shouting,” whether the odds favor our enemies.
(Secularly speaking. The Kingdom of God will interrupt the current evil flow. If you think the secular is all there is, we need to have another conversation.)
The sheer volume of material one has to grapple with to come to a responsible answer overwhelms me. And then there’s what one might call the secondary literature, the thousands of worthwhile blogs and other platforms on which pro-Westerners can hash things out and find their way through the maze. One cannot responsibly dismiss it with a wave of the hand or pretend to have mastered it.
Only today I stumbled upon the text of the talk that Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s gave to the Property and Freedom Society last year. (Once upon a time I was au courant on all things libertarian. Better late than never.) Hoppe’s frank discussion of our parlous estate is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time (but you may discount the appraisal of one who’s just admitted to being late to the party).
It’s long. You’ll probably skip it. After all, life is short. I understand.
It ends with a list of imperatives I agree must be carried out. But how? I’m left with skepticism, if not despair, about what those who agree with Hoppe’s diagnosis can reasonably hope to do. It seems there is much more sand in the bottom of the hour glass than the top.
I invite debate not only about Hoppe’s remedies but also about the prospects for their ever being applied in time. Ludwig von Mises‘s aphorism* doesn’t allay my pessimism. (Yes, Mises believed this while escaping the grip of the Nazis, and the Institute that bears his name promotes his ideas, and yet . . . here we are.)
Let’s affiliate, help each other find the truth of the matter, support each other’s efforts, build each other up, encourage each other.
Our enemies need to be more than ridiculed, exposed, and refuted. They need to be defeated.
*Tu ne cede malis [Virgil wrote] sed contra audentior ito. That is, “do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against them.” (Part of it is the motto of The Bronx.) Is giving up tantamount to giving in?
Soon my autobiographical vignette of Murray Rothbard will join those of Herbert Aptheker, Sidney Hook, Bernard Lonergan, and Eric Voegelin. In preparation for that post I’m sharing, with the author’s permission, a recent letter from Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. the Founder and Chairman of the Mises Institute. It’s a fundraising letter, one to which I hope you’ll respond. But it’s more than that: it’s his personal story of Mises, Murray, and the Institute, one he must have told a thousand times, but never more vividly and concisely. Let’s listen to Lew. — AGF
November 13, 2018
Dear Friend,
When I met Ludwig von Mises, he was exactly as I had imagined him: kind, brilliant, dignified, beautifully mannered and dressed, a gentleman from what Murray Rothbard called “an older and better world.” His wife, Margit, had been an actress, and she had great beauty, intelligence, and presence as well.
A genius, Mises was the greatest economist of the 20th century, and a hero in his courageous battles with Marxists, National Socialists, and Keynesians. Never did he put his own career ahead of teaching the truth, which he did in brilliant book after brilliant book. As a result, he never had the professorships and honors that were his due. Forced to flee the Nazi occupiers, he found American Keynesians a hostile bunch as well. So his career was stunted, but not his spirit, and not the legacy and example he left to all who cherish freedom.
Murray Rothbard I had the privilege of knowing well. He was funny, charming, and a genius, too. Like his mentor Mises, Murray suffered in his career for his integrity and truth-telling, which he also displayed in brilliant book after brilliant book. Even billionaire oligarchs couldn’t stop him. A model scholar, teacher, and polymath, he seemed, like Mises, to know everything.
As I await the launch of my book on dispensationalist Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992),[1] I’m reflecting on materials on oikonomia, the Greek behind “dispensation” (e.g., Ephesians 3:2), from the late Reformed historian and economist Gary North (1942–2022). I’m alive to the danger of equivocation, in this case of reading theological dispensationalism into North’s understanding of “economics.” Still, the theological system and the modern field of inquiry must be related even as they’re distinguished. A dispensationalist myself,[2] I cite the anti-dispensationalist North “against interest,” if you will. Please charitably consider what follows in this long post not a finished treatise, but rather a collection of unfinished notes that will feed into such work. Criticism is welcome!
North discusses the etymology of oikonomia explicitly, but not, as far as I know, in his multivolume Economic Commentary on the Bible.[3] See, however, his Unconditional Surrender:
Last December 15th [i.e., 2029], in 
“It was about communism . . . I said: ‘Well, I’m against communism. What am I for?’” As for becoming a writer, “No, it never crossed my mind. I did not even think in that day and age about becoming a writer of any type. If I’d had my druthers in 1949, I would have played left field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
rapture or catching away of all living believers, followed by the resurrection of the dead in Christ, this to be followed by the great tribulation upon the earth, the second coming of Christ, the millennial kingdom, then the new heavens and the new earth. This, in brief, is the position held by most dispensational fundamentalists, a position which we have often designated in these pages as 
[10]
Last December 15th in 
I can’t recommend it highly enough to those interested in the formation of a future (six years later!) student of Ludwig von Mises and author of 
Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he expresses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.
His wife, Margit, had been an actress, and she had great beauty, intelligence, and presence as well.
