Forty years ago, I was worried. I was working at a free-market think tank at a major university, and I could see that Austrian economics was becoming less and less influential.

Who would speak for untrammeled freedom and capitalism? Sound money and no central banking? Would economics entirely betray its great advocates of liberty from Menger and Mises in favor of monsters like Keynes and Marx?

Who would teach students the truth, and inspire them never to give up or give in? To dedicate their lives to the ideas that build civilization, and to fight the left-wing destructionists?

Just as bad, for me, was the lessened interest in Mises himself. I had worked with him fourteen years before, and although I was very young, the experience changed my life.

Here was the economist of the century, a world-class genius in his writing and teaching, and a hero in his deeds besides. Progressives, New Dealers, Communists, Nazis—nothing could stop him. Neither could the resulting hardship.

As a boy, he had adopted a motto from Virgil: "Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more bodly against it." Until his dying day at ninety-two, despite oppression and proffered inducements to compromise, he never betrayed that principle.

Read the full letter here.