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A ROUND UNIVERSE 143
free market a wily competitor would always undercut any attempt to
establish artifi cially high prices. True monopoly prices could arise only
if another party, such as the government, raised barriers to entry into
the market, thereby preventing competition. Accordingly, antitrust laws
were misguided and dangerous attempts to solve a problem that had
been created in the fi rst place by the state. 28 Rand now had two arguments
to deploy against antitrust. The fi rst was her moralistic argument
that antitrust laws unfairly punished the successful. The second
was Mises’s contention that monopolies were not the fault of business,
but of government regulation. Rand could therefore cite monopolies as
evidence that the United States had never experienced true free- market
capitalism. As Paterson had before, Mises helped Rand strengthen,
defi ne, and defend her ideas.
Cultural connections also bound the two. Mises was about twentyfi
ve years older than Rand, but they both hailed from the same cosmopolitan
European Jewish milieu. His Viennese family was similar to
the Rosenbaums in many respects, secular yet conservative, cultured yet
commercial. Mises had fl ed Austria in advance of the Nazis, an experience
that profoundly shaped his views of the state. His style also suggested
a model for Rand. He was famous for his Thursday evening
Privatseminar, where curious NYU students mingled with libertarians
of all ages, including the occasional famous visitor, such as the actor
Adolph Menjou. Mises was formal and reserved toward his students,
who in turn treated him reverently. Discussions were often so intense
that the group typically reconvened at a nearby restaurant, with a number
of students carrying on discussion without the professor until late
in the night. Snubbed by the American intellectual establishment, Mises
had nonetheless managed to establish himself as the leader of a small
movement.
Soon Rand had her own salon to match Mises’s. As she grew closer
to Nathan and Barbara, Rand became ensconced within a new surrogate
family, a tight kinship network consisting primarily of the couple’s
relatives and friends. The group included Barbara and Nathan’s cousins,
Leonard Peikoff and Allan Blumenthal, Nathan’s sister and her husband,
Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Barbara’s childhood friend Joan Mitchell,
and Joan’s college roommate, Mary Ann Rukovina. Joan’s boyfriend
and briefl y her husband, Alan Greenspan, was also a regular. Many were
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