There is a tradition of libertarian thought at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that reaches back to the ’80s. And one man who helped put UNLV on the free-market map was Murray N. Rothbard, a prolific intellectual who carried the torch of the Austrian School of Economics into the 20th century. Rothbard’s position as the S.J. Hall Professor in UNLV’s Economics Department serves as a direct link to the Austrian School of Economics, which came into fruition during the early 20th century.
After Rothbard died in 1995, the S.J. Hall Professorship simply vanished. However, Hall had set up an endowment prior to his own death, an endowment that S.J. Hall’s widow had actually expanded in the ’80s.
So where did the money from the endowment go? Into a seminar series on Marxism, heaven forbid?
Well, the endowment still finds its way into UNLV’s Economics Department, leaving many Las Vegas libertarians to wonder why the money, which many assume had been set aside for the purpose of studying free-market principles, no longer funds a position for a free-market academic.
First though, a little historical context.
The origins of the Austrian School reach as far back as 15th-century Spain at the University of Salamanca, where a group of scholars known as the Late Scholastics advocated such freedoms as property rights and sided with business interests instead of government control when it came to the betterment of society. The ideas articulated by the Late Scholastics went to be developed by such pre-Austrian figures as Richard Cantillon (Essay on the Nature of Commerce, 1730), who saw the market as an entrepreneurial arena, and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a pro-market Frenchman who believed in a classical liberal approach to economic policy. The ideas were also developed by Jean Baptiste Say and Claude-Frederic Bastiat, who established the notions of “overproduction” and “undersconsumption,” and who put forth the economic allegory of the “broken-window fallacy.”
Of course the British tradition, with its emphasis on cost and production, led to the rise of Marxism, which dominated 19th- and 20th century economic philosophy. But Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871) nonetheless resurrected the free-market approach to economics, providing a counter tradition to growing socialist thought. Menger’s disciple included Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, whose books, including Positive Theory of Capital, cemented the status of the Austrian School as a group of German free-market thinkers. Boehm-Bawerk had his own protégé: Ludwig von Mises. Mises’ book, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), helped launch a laissez-faire approach to economic thought and inspired an Austrian School in the United States, which finds its home at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala.
Rothbard was one of Mises’ students at New York University. Born in 1926, Rothbard was a prolific writer with 25 books and thousands of articles to his credit. His position as the S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor, however, was only partially funded by the S.J. Hall Endowment. Rothbard’s death also marked the death of his chaired position.
“The endowment came to us in 1979 with the death of Sherwood James Hall,” says UNLV Economics Professor Lewis Karstensson. “Hall was a timber magnate from Oregon who retired in Las Vegas. The endowment’s stipulation is that it be used for ‘economic education.’ And we’ve used it for different pursuits for 20 years.”
Some of the confusion on the part of many libertarians stems from the fact that the endowed position was given to a free-market thinker and that therefore one should reasonably expect the money to continue to finance purely free-market research. Indeed, more than one libertarian sneered that the money was undoubtedly being used to indoctrinate students with socialism.
But according to Karstensson, who has been a UNLV faculty member since the ’70s, the Economics Department has always taken a broad definition of the phrase “economic education.” Before the endowment was used to supplement Rothbard’s position, for instance, the department used the money in 1981 to put on a conference on Inflation in the Performing Arts. (The papers presented at this conference were later published in book form by New York University Press.)
“My impression,” says Karstensson, “is that we’re using that money to support anywhere from four to six graduate students.”
“But we do have a legacy of libertarian philosophy at UNLV,” Karstensson continues. “And it’s an important part of UNLV’s history and its future. A professor like Hans Hoppe carries on that tradition.” LW
Editor’s note: The historical summary of the Austrian School in this article is derived from the Ludwig von Mises Institute website:
mises.org.
