During his years at graduate school in the late 1940s, Rothbard considered whether a strict adherence to libertarian and "laissez-faire" principles required the abolition of the state altogether. He visited Baldy Harper, a founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, who doubted the need for any government whatsoever. Rothbard said that during this period, he was influenced by 19th-century American individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari who wrote about how such a system could work. Thus, he "combined the "laissez-faire" economics of Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state" from individualist anarchists.