Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen and first of all you, our distinguished friend Hazlitt.

We are here assembled tonight to celebrate your 70th birthday. We are only a small group out of the great number of your admirers. But our meeting is not simply a private affair because you do not belong only to us, you belong to the nation and to the world. 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.

Last week I lectured on economic policies and economics in a foreign city. After my lecture, as usual, there was a question period and a discussion of the problems which I had touched in my lectures. There was one question that startled me. It said, "You are building your reasoning upon the prejudice that freedom is something to be aimed at. Why? What is this prejudice?" I mention this fact in order to show how difficult the task is that faces today a champion of freedom. But you have successfully fought against all these prejudices and errors established for more than a hundred years in all countries of the West. In a long series of books and essays, books on philosophy, economics, and on literary criticism, and also in your brilliant novel, The Great Idea, you have demonstrated to the world the value of freedom and of the free market economy.

You have demonstrated again that the economic policy recommended by the liberal economists of the nineteenth century is the only policy fit to improve the material conditions of all of the people. There is no other method available for this purpose than to accelerate the accumulation of capital as against the increase in population figures.

Only when the per head quota of capital invested is increasing are the material and ideal conditions of the masses improving. One has to repeat this truth again and again because, as an eminent author once said, the liars are repeating again and again their lies.

You have not only written eminent books and essays, you are also a journalist and you are writing every week in Newsweek a column which deals with all the important issues of our age. You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation. And what you are saying in this country is repeated again and again in other countries and will remain victorious, repelling all the criticism levelled against it from the "left."

Edwin Cannan, the last in the long line of eminent British economists, considered as his most important contribution the article which he had written in the press, again and again criticizing the economic policies and fallacies of his own country. He collected these writings in which he had "protested," as he said, "against everything that had been done in his country," in a volume under the title An Economist's Protest. We hope that you will collect in the same way your weekly contributions and that this volume will one day, together with the volume of Edwin Cannan and with the immortal contributions of Frederic Bastiat, form the most precious unit in The Free Man's Library which you have so lucidly described and analyzed.

Every friend of freedom may today, in this post-election month, be rather pessimistic about the future. But let us not forget that there is rising a new generation of defenders of freedom. There is a real resurrection of the idea of liberty on the campuses. There is a steadily growing organization, Young Americans For Freedom, on the advisory board of which we both, you and I, and some of our friends present in this room are serving. Let us hope that these young men will succeed where we in our generation failed. But if they succeed, 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.

Notes

*  Remarks by Ludwig von Mises on the occasion of Henry Hazlitt's 70th birthday, on November 28, 1964.

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