| My Mother, David Rockefeller, and the World Economy  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
This is the week that my mother, Anne Alsop Palmer, reaches her 102nd birthday. She is a competitive lady, that’s for sure. When asked what motivates her in her 100s, my mother, who retains a collection of incandescent mental marbles, has been telling us with a gleam in her eye, “I just want to beat David!” 102 means that in the longevity stakes, she has passed her old pal and my father’s college roommate David Rockefeller. After a rewarding 101 years of terrestrial labors, David went to his transcendental reward some two years ago. Now that she has definitively “beaten David,” she is looking forward to another concert with cellist paragon and impresario Yo-Yo Ma. My mother still plays the piano in a style that Yo-Yo told me and friends at a party near Tanglewood a few years ago represents “a precious archive of all the forgotten techniques of European piano.” Yo-Yo Ma is a great friend of my mother’s and has been playing an informal concert with her for the past decade or so since he moved to my home town in the summer. One of their rare specialties together is to transcribe Schubert songs for the cello and piano. My mother is a quiet person who has spent most of her life between her Steinway concert grand and piles of erudite literature, from the novels of George Macdonald to books on perplexities of physics by her granddaughter Louisa Gilder and on biological destiny by Michael Denton. She represents a generation that understood the reality, beautifully explained by Denton, that science makes no sense without a belief in God. My mother is a conservative, and her most consistent lifelong friends were David Rockefeller and his wife Peggy, whom my mother helped teach the piano. A lot of people, particularly friends of mine in the conservative and libertarian movements, failed to understand David Rockefeller. All Real Capitalists and Libertarians are Globalists On the year of his death, Mark Skousen and I tried to organize a memorial room for David at FreedomFest in Vegas. But the powers that be in Libertarianism rose up to thwart it. They said he was a “globalist” or something. He certainly was. In my view, all real capitalists and libertarians are globalists. As my friend Jude Wanniski told me decades ago, the only closed economy is the world economy. As I mentioned, David was the college roommate of my father, at Eliot House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A student of eminent Austrian economists Gottfried Haberler and Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard, my father persuaded David to go to the London School of Economics and study the subject under the tutelage of Austrian titan Friedrich Hayek. Hayek would soon write the libertarian masterpiece The Road to Serfdom. Before going to London, though, David and my father had a globalist epiphany. They made a visit to Germany in 1936. There they saw the goose-stepping Nazi troops and the ranting Adolf Hitler with his frothing anti-Semitism and resolved that the Nazis would have to be stopped at all costs. A futurist before me and author of an unfinished book on knowledge and intangible capital in economics, my father saw that determining the outcome of the impending war would be technology, chiefly air power. He began civilian flight training and joined the Army Air Corps at the outset of the war. The technologists of the day made the mistake of attempting to combine a bomber with a fighter in the B-17 “Flying Fortress.” With four radial engines and bristling with machine gun turrets, in its early versions the contraption often could not cross the Atlantic in a storm. My father commanded a squadron of early B17s that was lost in passage to Britain in 1942 like all too many of these planes. David, though, had learned the globalist lesson and in his leadership of the Chase Manhattan Bank, spearheaded its worldwide reach into some 60 countries. In dealing with the menagerie of foreign governments, he discovered early on that compromise and negotiation would be imperative. This was a lesson that Hayek himself understood. But next to Ronald Reagan and David Stockman, David Rockefeller was the most important enthusiast for my “capitalist manifesto” Wealth and Poverty. With a gleam in his eye, much like my mother’s, he always expressed the hope that his autobiography, with its tribute to my father, would eventually outsell my worldwide bestseller. Still he was enough of a globalist to have enjoyed the irony of a new edition of my Wealth and Poverty, published last year in communist China. | 
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