Jeff Riggenbach tells this personal story about Henry Hazlitt’s 70th birthday party in 1964 after the Goldwater defeat on the Mises Daily. 

Shortly after Barry Goldwater’s dramatic loss to Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election of 1964, in the fall term of the academic year in which I was debating public works programs for the unemployed, a gathering was held to celebrate Henry Hazlitt’s 70th birthday. Many ? perhaps all ? of the libertarians present had thought of Goldwater as a candidate who genuinely wanted to move American public policies in a more libertarian direction; they regarded his defeat as a disaster for the cause of individual liberty. Still, when Ludwig von Mises, then 82 years old, rose to address the attendees, his remarks were, at least in part, hopeful. “Every friend of freedom may today, in this post-election month, be rather pessimistic about the future,” he said. “But let us not forget that there is rising a new generation of defenders of freedom.”

Then, addressing Hazlitt, whom he called his “distinguished friend,” directly, Mises declared that if that new generation of defenders of freedom were to find success in their efforts, “this will be to a great extent your merit, the fruit of the work that you have done in the first 70 years of your life.” For

“You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation.”
Ludwig von Mises

in this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries. ? You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation.


As a member of that generation of libertarians that was rising at the time of Mises’s remarks, I may perhaps be permitted to crow a bit about the success we have enjoyed. In the nearly half century that has gone by since Mises spoke, with the assistance of our elders and, increasingly, of our juniors in the movement, we have managed to grow the libertarian movement into something much, much larger, better integrated, and more intellectually and institutionally powerful than it has ever been before. We have found success in our efforts. And Henry Hazlitt is unquestionably among those to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for laying the groundwork and paving the way ahead of us.