The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

Meeting Murray Rothbard On the Road to Libertarianism

by Jeff Riggenbach

I took my first steps down the road to libertarianism during my junior year in high school (1962–1963), when, within about one month’s time, I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and subscribed to The Freeman – the latter in hopes of reading more by and about the 19^th Century French journalist Frederic Bastiat, whose writings I had discovered, to my delight, in the packages of information and intellectual ammunition provided to high school debaters by the Foundation for Economic Education. A few months later, the first issue of my Freeman subscription arrived, and in it I found a definition (offered by a writer named Leonard Read, of whom I had never heard) of a word that was also new to me: the word libertarian. With something of a start, I realized that this word described me. I was a "libertarian" – and not, as I had thought, a conservative.

Eventually, this realization was to have profound implications for my thinking. At the time, though, it did nothing to dampen my burgeoning enthusiasm for William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 1963 collection Rumbles Left & Right: A Book About Troublesome People & Ideas and U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1960 polemic The Conscience of a Conservative. Nor did it prevent me from signing up (albeit rather briefly) with the local branch of Teenage Republicans for Goldwater during my senior year, early in 1964.

It was during this period also that I read my first issues of The Objectivist Newsletter, edited by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden (whose book Who Is Ayn Rand? I read during the summer between my junior and senior years), and attended my first Nathaniel Branden Institute lecture at the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. At the University of Houston, where I spent the later part of the 1960s, I became involved in a campus Ayn Rand club and there met people who introduced me to other writers and other works – Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, Robert Le Fevre’s This Bread is Mine, Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, & State. The seeds planted in my mind by these authors and their books would bear fruit a few years later. But for now, my chief intellectual influence was Ayn Rand.

The Society of New Intellectuals (SNI), as our campus group was rather pretentiously known, published a tabloid newspaper, The SNI Alternative, which was distributed free at the U of H and at one small, off-campus bookstore whose proprietor was a conservative teetering on the edge of libertarianism. I served as editor and principal writer, analyzing current issues from an Objectivist perspective. I had planned to go on to graduate school after finishing up at the U of H, but when the time came I decided I simply couldn’t tolerate any more schooling. For most of a decade, all of the books and ideas I had found most exciting and compelling were ones I had encountered outside of school. And when I attempted to talk about Objectivism or libertarianism with my professors, I ran into a stone wall of ignorance and hostility. I decided I’d had enough formal education. I decided to forget about becoming a professor; I’d pursue a career in journalism instead. I had worked my way through college as an evening newsman at a local radio station, KNUZ. I began looking for better jobs in more interesting places.

By 1972 I had moved to Los Angeles to take my first job at an all-news radio station – KFWB. On the side, I continued my education in libertarianism, scouring the local used bookstores (so much bigger and more numerous than the ones in Houston!) for copies of libertarian works I had heard of but had had trouble finding. I was particularly successful with regard to the works of Robert LeFevre. I found The Nature of Man and His Government, The Philosophy of Ownership, and perhaps most important of all, several back issues of the Rampart Journal, the quarterly LeFevre had edited in the mid-1960s when he was running Rampart College in Colorado. In one of these I found an amazing essay called "The Anatomy of the State" by a writer I had known up to then only as an economist, Murray N. Rothbard. Here, Rothbard was writing not about economics but about history and political philosophy, and what he told me shook me to my foundations.

I still thought of myself at this time as a Student of Objectivism and as an advocate of Ayn Rand’s version of limited government. Reading Bob LeFevre and attending his lectures (he too now lived in Southern California) had piqued my interest in individualist anarchism and left me struggling for arguments against his position, but they had not converted me to that position. When I read "The Anatomy of the State," however, I felt the first pangs of conversion. I followed up the leads in Rothbard’s essay. I read Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State. I read LeFevre’s Pine Tree Press edition of Lysander Spooner’s No Treason VI. Then, in search of more information on Spooner, I read James J. Martin’s Men Against the State. Within months, I was an anarchist.

Since 1972, the year I arrived in L.A., I had been writing for Objectivist and libertarian publications that had a little further reach than the confines of the University of Houston campus. My byline was appearing in Academic Associates’ Book News (an Objectivist monthly edited by Barbara Branden), Roy Childs’s Books for Libertarians (soon to evolve into The Libertarian Review), and Reason (then in Santa Barbara, where its editors – Bob Poole, Lynn Kinsky, Tibor Machan, and Manny Klausner – had only a short time before been University of California graduate students). I continued to write regularly for Reason throughout the '70s and '80s. From 1984 to 1990, I was listed on the magazine’s masthead as a contributing editor. Earlier, from 1978 to 1982, I had been Roy Childs’s editorial second-in-command at The Libertarian Review (LR). Then, from 1982, when LR merged with Inquiry, to 1985, when Inquiry ceased publication, I was a contributing editor of Inquiry. From 1977 to around 1990, when (amid continual promises to resume regular publication) it effectively ceased publication, I was a contributing editor of Samuel Edward Konkin III's New Libertarian.

Meanwhile, my career in mainstream journalism was coming along nicely. Over a nearly twenty year span (1977–1995) I freelanced for newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, among others, publishing more than three hundred bylined articles, mostly Op-Eds and book reviews. During the mid-’80s, I worked as an editorial writer at the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, as an editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County (Calif.) Register, and as the daily (Mon.–Fri.) economics commentator for CNN Radio. Whenever possible, I did pieces, whether for newspapers or for radio, that promoted libertarian ideas. And throughout the ’80s, I was able to put my expertise as a broadcaster in the direct service of those ideas by producing and syndicating the daily radio program Byline for the Cato Institute. This award-winning program, which was heard Monday through Friday on more than two hundred stations coast to coast between 1979 and 1990, featured commentary on current issues and events from liberals and conservatives who were sympathetic to certain libertarian positions (Howard Jarvis, Nat Hentoff, Nicholas von Hoffman, Tom Bethell) as well as commentary from conscious libertarians like Ed Crane, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Susan Love Brown, Robert Hessen, Tom Hazlett, and me.

When I moved up to San Francisco in 1978 to join the staff of The Libertarian Review and began producing Byline for the Cato Institute, I had an opportunity to meet and work directly with several legendary figures in the movement, first among them Murray N. Rothbard. Murray was living on the peninsula south of San Francisco, about forty miles out of town. But he spent a day or two each week in his office at the Cato Institute, and about once a week he showed up at the somewhat less impressive building down the street where the offices of The Libertarian Review, Students for a Libertarian Society, and the Libertarian Party of California were to be found. He was always available for conversation – about economics, history, the movement, strategy, tactics, whatever anybody wanted to talk about.

Today I regret not having taken the time to engage in more of those conversations. I was young and expected to live forever. Naively, I thought Murray would always be there – oh, maybe not in the next office, but within easy reach by telephone or the U.S. Mail. Had I had more of the common sense the young so often lack I would have taken better advantage of the opportunity I’d been afforded: I’d have had more of those spur-of-the-moment conversations with Murray. The ones I remember best focused mostly on historical issues, and they left me with a cornucopia of tips for further research that I still haven’t exhausted.

Looking back, I realize now that my earlier enthusiasms – for the political works of Ayn Rand, for example, and for the works of Bob LeFevre – though they taught me much, were really just way stations along a road that would eventually lead to a fully coherent and systematic grasp of both libertarianism itself and its implications for the humanities and social sciences. The thinker who finally provided me with the basic elements of that sort of understanding of libertarianism, I have belatedly come to realize, was Murray N. Rothbard.

January 4, 2003

Jeff Riggenbach [send him mail] is the author of In Praise of Decadence. He is a contributing editor of Liberty magazine and of The Philosophe.

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