Mises Institute Oral History Project: The Lost Rothbard History (2013)

by Stephan Kinsella on April 17, 2026

Hoppe Removed as Mises Institute Senior Distinguished Fellow
KOL486 | Mark Edge Show: Kinsella, Hoppe, Mises Institute
An Interview with Ralph Raico
David Gordon, The History of Our Movement
David Gordon on IP
Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?: Postscript,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 17, 2026)
——, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?”, Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026)

In 2013, the Mises Institute launched an “Oral History Project” to preserve memories of key figures and events important to our ideas. As David Gordon notes in The History of Our Movement:

Through the Oral History Project, the Mises Institute is preserving the personal recollections and wisdom of the great men and women of our movement for the students and scholars of the future. Mises Institute faculty sat down this year to discuss the past and the future with champions of the Austrian tradition including economist Leland B. Yeager and Mises’s long-time assistant Bettina Bien Greaves. These are two of the many life stories we hope to record. The recorded interviews will be archived on mises.org and transcribed to text so they will be easily accessible, searchable, and usable to researchers everywhere.

In February, David Gordon spoke with the foremost historian of classical liberalism, Ralph Raico, about his life and career, including insights into the views and personalities of Rand, Hayek, and Rothbard. David Gordon provides a bit of a sneak peek at the Raico interview (below).

Now a bit of context: this was all in the aftermath of Jeff Tucker’s and Doug French’s departure from the Mises Institute in 2011 and 2012, and before it had hired Jeff Deist to be the second non-Rockwell President, and while Peter Klein was acting executive director. After Tucker and French left—the main purpose of the Oral History Project and other changes was, perhaps, to rewrite the MI history minus their central roles—the MI and its website was inexplicably changed several times—Mises Daily became Mises Wire, comments were removed from articles and the blog and old comments to the blog were lost, links were changed but there as no redirect function so many old links are now 404s; the Austrian Scholars Conference was split into the AERC and the LSC; the copyright policy went from open (CC-BY) to closed, and so on. The MI website is virtually unusable now, whether through neglect, incompetence, or sabotage, making it hard to find media, books, journal articles, and so on. For example, the JLS and QJAE are inexplicably split into two collections: old material in one place, and newer in another, with the older JLS material, at least, no longer being organized by issue or volume and with an unreliable search capability (older JLS articles and older QJAE articles; newer JLS articles and newer QJAE articles). (I have complained about this, and the copyright policy, and books disappearing, several times over the years, but it falls on deaf ears; they just don’t give a damn.)

Now I was finally able to find Raico’s interview (An Interview with Ralph Raico) but I have been unable to find other entries in the series, such as the noted interviews with Yeager and Greaves—though Gordon’s The History of Our Movement piece prominently begs for money to fund it (“To help sponsor this important ongoing project, make your donation today. Donors who can give $1,000 or more will be listed as Patrons“) but failing to link to any of these. Raico’s interview was released February 20, 2013, and the interviews with Greaves and Yeager must have been released occurred sometime in 2013 before Gordon’s May 17, 2013 article asking for money but failing to link to any of these pieces. (If anyone finds the Yeager and Greaves entries, or any others, in the Oral History Project series, please send me the links.) (Update: A reader sent me some suggestions but most were posted years later so it is not clear if they are the ones mentioned in Gordon’s article. In interest of completeness, they are:

An Interview with Bettina Bien Greaves, Mises Wire (01/22/2018)
An Interview with Leland B. Yeager, Austrian Economics Newsletter 12, no. 3 (Summer 1991)
Leland B. Yeager, What I Learned from Ludwig von Mises, Mises U 2012 (04/24/2018) (Anyway, see my post Thumbs Down on Leland Yeager) )

And now we turn to the subject of this post. There was at least one other entry in the series, a discussion by David Gordon, Joe Salerno, and Lew Rockwell, with memories of Rothbard, released Oct. 4, 2013. However, as I mentioned previously,¹ in this discussion Gordon inexplicably criticized me in the first 7 or so minutes, as can be heard in this youtube clip someone preserved:

Now a bit more context: I had been involved with MI since about 1995, had helped Hans with the JLS while he was editor from 1995–2005 (before he was inexplicably fired—more on this in a forthcoming article), and had participated in many ASCs and other events. I presented a paper, “The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property,” at the ASC on March 25, 2000. I published a condensed version of this argument, “In Defense of Napster and Against the Second Homesteading Rule,” later that year in LewRockwell.com² and a longer article, “Against Intellectual Property,” in the Spring 2001 issue of the JLS. (( Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property,” J. Libertarian Stud. 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 1–53. )) It was long enough to be republished by the Mises Institute as a monograph in 2008. For that paper, I was given the MI’s first awarded O.P. Alford III Prize for scholarly article published during 2001–2002 that best advances libertarian scholarship, at the Mises Institute’s Eighth Austrian Scholars Conference, March 16, 2002. Meanwhile Tucker and later French were adopting the CC-BY and open publishing anti-copyright model. In 2008, I was invited to deliver the Rothbard Memorial Lecture for the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008, “The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism.”³ The next year, I was invited to present a paper for the 2009 Mises University, “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism.”⁴ I was praised and interviewed by Rockwell for his podcast, and so on. And then I was invited by Joe Salerno in 2009 to be a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute.

Kinsella facbook post 2013 gordon criticism

Kinsella October 8, 2013 Facebook Post

So against this backdrop, I was flabbergasted that they chose to spend 7 minutes criticizing me and my IP and related ideas in the 2 hour two-part Rothbard entry in the Oral History Project. I quoted their words in a Facebook post (see screenshot above). (I think Gordon is confused about some of this or perhaps has some weird axe to grind, I don’t know; perhaps more on this in a later article. For now, see David Gordon on IP and Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property.)

After my Facebook post, Peter Klein, the temporary acting executive director, whom at the time I thought of as a friend, messaged me to ask me if I thought it was appropriate for a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute to be criticizing other senior members of the MI; I was thinking, umm, yeah-no, what’s actually inappropriate is for them to be attacking me, their Senior Fellow—and for work they have been supporting and praising! So I immediately resigned. I do not put up with that kind of bizarre, sneaky bullshit. My decision to stay independent, and to be my own benefactor, paid off yet again.⁵

And then the murky powers-that-be at MI instantly deleted the podcast. I figured they would scrub the first 7 minutes and re-post it; after all, it was not about me and contained some good material. But … no. They just deleted it and let it disappear. And since their site was then and since then has been in chaos, it was nowhere to be found, not even on archive.org. I thought it was sad that this oral history of Rothbard had been lost. I believed this for the last 12 years. However, just recently someone noticed a post of mine mentioning this and apparently has better archive.org-fu than I, because he found Part 2, and that clue allowed me to find Part 2. So: here is the archived information I was able to find: archived MI page, which linked to “Oral History Project >> An Interview with David Gordon (Part 2)” (Oct. 04, 2013) and “Oral History Project >> An Interview with David Gordon (Part 1)” (Oct. 04, 2013). As for the MP3 files: see MP3 file for Part 1; MP3 file for Part 2.

These MP3 files are slow to load since they are archived. It is a shame that they are not on Youtube. If any Rothbard lover out there wants to help out, I would suggest you download these Mp3 files (hopefully MI will not contact archive.org to try to purge these archived files), use the two images above to make two videos, upload them to Youtube, and then send me the links so I can link to the Youtube versions. In the meantime—enjoy this long-lost treasure.