 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. This is the Human Action Podcast, and we're joined today by our friend, Dr. Sean Rittenauer, a professor of economics at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. It's been almost a hundred years since Mises literally wrote the book on socialism, where he explains why central planning can't work, why socialism isn't moral or ethical or inevitable, but in fact destructive of civilization and everything good that civilization produces. This book from 1922 is titled Socialism and Economic and Sociological Analysis. It's the book you need to read or be reading if you want to counter your socialist friends or the nonsense you hear coming out of Washington, D.C. You can find it at Mises.org by searching for socialism and read it for free in PDF format. Or go to Mises.org slash socialism, the book that's Mises.org slash socialism, the book and enter the special code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast to get a discount on it. So stay tuned for a discussion of socialism. Well, good morning, Dr. Sean Rittenauer, and thank you for joining us today. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, you know, you and I, when we were kids growing up under Reagan, could you know, could we ever have imagined that Americans would be talking about socialism this openly, at least certain Democrats in Congress would be talking about socialism this openly just a couple of decades later? It seemed like such a golden time, relative to now almost. Oh, I know. It's as if, well, we've completely forgot history and we've taken leave of our senses. It's amazing to me. Yeah. And the other thing that's amazing is that Mises wrote this book a hundred years ago and so much of it reads perfectly fine today, perfectly descriptive today. I mean, that is, I think, a tribute to him when you write something lasting that applies a hundred years later. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, timely as today's headlines. There's so much in that in this book that is relevant for, you know, political discussions that are going on right now. Well, I want to give our listeners a little bit of the backdrop in which Mises writes this book. He finishes it in 22. So this is the famous interwar period and a prolific period for Mises. He produces nation, state and economy in 1919, socialism in 22, liberalism in 1927, and of course, national economy a few years later in 1940. This is a prolific interwar period for him. And we have to recall that he is coming out of having been a first lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War One. He was an artillery officer, and he wasn't particularly young. As a matter of fact, when he went off as a first lieutenant in 1914, he was already over 30 years of age. He had already produced a major work in the theory of money and credit. This isn't a 17 year old kid going off to war. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think that just his age made the effects of the war a little bit even more prescient to him. Well, and I know he talks about during his darkest moments in the war and typical people of his generation, he doesn't talk about it a lot. Right. But but he talks about dark moments in the war and he tells himself, he promises himself that he is going to write a book on, among other things, socialism and what it really means. So I think that's it's so interesting that he that he was able to follow through with that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it was pretty clear that at the time when he wrote the book, he thought he was sort of standing against the tide, both with regard to academics, the academia and the masses in general. I mean, the aftermath of World War One saw significant uprisings in socialist ideology, socialist even revolution in Europe. And so this wasn't this this wasn't merely an academic exercise for Mises. And of course, he's writing this book where in an era where Marx and Engels are really coming into sway in Europe. I mean, these are not remote ideas at the time. Oh, yeah. And and, you know, people who we now, you know, we'd be shocked to think that they were sympathetic to socialism, but people like Lionel Robbins and Hayek even were attracted to to socialist ideology. And so this, you know, Mises's book did a tremendous service, you know, to the Western world. One thing I note about it, if you just look at the table of contents, the sweep of the book, this is not an economics book per se. Of course, it's famous for his his refutation of the of socialism in terms of the calculation issue. But this is a book that is about history. It's about politics. It's about sociology. And I'm struck by this, the temerity of someone who would write such a book because he really came up as an economist at a time where that wasn't so much seen as a stand alone discipline to which one remain cloistered. I mean, he's he's writing a sweeping book, and that was just a lot more common back then. Economics hadn't become this specialized discipline yet. Right. I mean, it had become, you know, the main issues that economists would look at had become a little more focused. But it was it was standard practice for even economic thinkers to put economics in the broader sociological context. I mean, I do think it's it's interesting that the the subtitle of the English edition was an economic and sociological analysis. And that's definitely what he was trying to do. He was trying to bring, as he said, history to bear, political philosophy to bear, sociology to bear, as well as economics on the issue of the nature and consequences of socialism. Do you think of an economist wrote a book like this today that he or she would be attacked and told to stay in their lane and and stick to economics? Well, especially by people that disagreed with them, for sure. You say, look, you're not an expert on these other issues. So just, you know, go play with your marbles. But why is that? How did that happen? What it seems to me as a layperson that economists today don't talk enough to other fields and disciplines and that they're a little bit stuck in their own space and that they ought to be talking more about sociology or history or or politics? Yeah, well, I think a couple of reasons. I think I think I do think on the one hand, the sort of the nature of specialization can lend one to being overly narrow. And that's what's happened in all academic branches. On the other hand, I think, too, I think that the nature of the development of economics as a profession becoming more focused on abstract modeling has made economists more inclined to sort of stay in their their intellectual ivory tower, so to speak. Because these other areas, it's hard, it's hard to model a lot of these other, you know, these other issues that come from history or political philosophy or what have you. Sociology, it's hard to fit it in a nice maximization model in some ways. I think that that has a role to play. And then, and then quite frankly, I think that a lot of professional economists are just are really consumed with economic modeling day in, day out. They don't they interpret everything, their entire experience within the realm of economics. And I remember one of the maxims that I was taught by one of my professors at Auburn was, you know, if you're going to be a good economist, you have to have a life outside of economics. And I think that it's it's imperative if you're going to if you're going to be wise about economic theory and economic policy, you have to have it has to touch the real world. And of course, I think Austrians are very suited to do that because they build their economic analysis on realistic human action. Well, of course, Mises was uniquely suited to do that. I think he's coming out of the monarchy, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. He's seeing World War One. He's seeing the birth almost of a new Europe and the new patchwork quilt of small countries. Austria shrinks to a tiny country relative to its its past. I mean, he's he's he's anything but an ivory tower economist. He's working for the Vietnamese government or the Vietnamese government. He's involved in fiscal policy, he's involved in all kinds of things. That's right. Right. He was he was also at the time of writing this book, hosting his private seminar already. So he was becoming I mean, like personally engaged with the great intellects of his day as well. Well, so as he dives into this book, let's just talk a little bit about the the milieu. In other words, the environment, Marxism, socialism really on the rise. And there was this sort of at that point, an existing argument that, look, people wouldn't dislike work so much, they wouldn't be so alienated from it if they shared more of their products of their own labor. And so Mises replies to this by saying, socialism is almost a non-economic system. And this is really the genesis of Part One, which is called liberalism and socialism. He really gets into a lot of history and getting at the root of what socialism really is as a counter force to liberalism. Yeah, that's that's right. I mean, he's very clear by distinguishing between liberalism or the free society with socialism, and he begins at the inside. I mean, looking back, it's like exactly the right place to start, which is you distinguish the two based on the nature of ownership and the ownership of goods. And what type of ownership does the does a system possess? And socialism, he defines it as a system where the state owns all the material factors of production. The free society or liberalism would be where we have private ownership of the means of production. And then the the the consequences of in many ways, the consequences of the rest of the book flows from that distinction. And he's foreshadowing or making a nascent argument that he developed more in liberalism about five years later. I mean, we can clearly see the framework for that. He's stressing property, for example. Absolutely. And I think it's interesting that he builds specifically on Manger's exposition of the interrelationship of goods that you and Joe Salerno talked about a couple of a few weeks ago, looking at Manger's principles, where he talks about the, you know, he sees that the economy, if you will, is not a monolithic thing. It's a network of exchange relationships, shall we say, between the producers of consumer goods and then producers of various stage higher order goods. And it's it's this understanding that also fuels his his understanding of the weakness of socialism as an economic system. Well, I want to get back to your definition real quick, that Mises provides a definition for socialism. That's a little different than a Rothbardian or Hopian definition. In other words, they they took it a little farther than I think Mises would have. You know, I think that's probably true. I think Mises was it's interesting. You know, Mises did write this book that is very broad in terms of its connection with these other disciplines. But at the same time, he's very careful to wanted to define the socialism in economic terms and and focuses very narrowly on issues of ownership and property. Right. But he points out he takes pains, actually, to point out that, you know, the idea of having a social safety net or something is not socialism per se in the Misesian sets. That's that's right. Yes, exactly right. The things that, for instance, if you look at, say, Hoppa's social theory of socialism and capitalism, he develops these types of socialism and certain types of socialism. I think Mises may have just identified as interventionism that Mises was very much a state, a de facto state ownership. And by that, he meant ultimate control of factors of production. Whereas later writers like Rothbard and Hoppa would have maybe expanded the definition a little bit and talk about, you know, tendencies towards socialism or socialistic type of arrangements that perhaps weren't as full blown as what Mises was talking about. But let's get to his his idea of private ownership versus collective or state or communal ownership or something. America in 2019, in Sean Rittenauer's view, we have all kinds of partial diminutions of property rights, whether that's regulations or taxes or whatever it might be. Do you see this as making America a semi-socialist country? Or would you side more with Mises that, no, we're talking about, at least in an abstract or theoretical concept, a country where the state truly owns outright the factors of production? Yeah, that's a good, I would say it kind of depends on the day that you ask me. Some days, it just feels more socialistic than others. I think that there's value in Mises's definition because what can happen is, I mean, if we define socialism as any sort of broad sweeping interventionist policy, we can lose some of the force of our critique by sort of finding a socialist under every bush. And so I think we need to be careful about that. On the other hand, I do think that any type of intervention, when the state intervenes, the state is controlling how people can use their property. And so in that sense, every intervention is tending toward socialism, I would say, even if the rulers that are trying to do this will say absolutely not. We don't want to own all the means of production. But when you start controlling how people can use their means of production and what means that you can use and what's off limits and what's not, that just definitely pushes us towards socialism. So I think it kind of just depends, for my money, it depends on the context. I mean, I don't see how anybody could look at, say, the government school system and not today and not see it pretty socialist. And so there are different areas of our lives that I think are definitely more socialist than others. Right. Of course, there's also a semantic or a conceptual difference. Libertarians have always called public school socialist. That's right. And I'm sure Ronald Reagan in 1980 would have scoffed at that. But so what this book is perhaps most famous for in Austro-libertarian circles is that Mises demolishes the idea that planned economies can somehow coherently allocate resources. So he's not making a moral or really even an ideological critique of socialism so much as he's saying it can't work. And here we have the famous socialist calculation issue. So give us the broad strokes of the argument that Mises makes in this book. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. This is a very important argument in some sense, the core argument for the entire book. And he essentially reproduces a large part of his 1920 article on economic calculation in the socialist Commonwealth. And it's core because so many of his other arguments related to socialism's desirability or lack thereof hinge on this just fact that it's impractical. And so he roots this argument in his analysis of human action. And here again, I think you find the what should one say, the beginnings of Mises's, shall we say, praxeology at work, his praxeological framework, beginning the analysis with rational human action, purposeful behavior. And he notes that all action involves a choice of achieving some end. But when we do that, when we choose to do anything, we necessarily are leaving some other end unfulfilled because we can't do everything. And one thing that comes through this book again and again is just the fact of scarcity. We can't quote the Rolling Stones. We can't always get what we want. And so we have to make choices. And such a choice to achieve some ends and leave others unfulfilled requires evaluation. We have to we value things. We have to we decide we're going to do what we most prefer and not do what we prefer less. Then he makes a jump then and says, OK, this is what humans do all the time. When we're trying to decide how to produce goods or provide goods and commodities and services in a complex market division of labor, which is the type of society that is a growing, flourishing society, it becomes complicated making decisions. What should we do and what should we not do? And this type of productive activity in a complex market division of labor requires careful consideration about what should we produce? What's the best way we should produce it in order that we're not wasting scarce resources? He uses the example of if we want to produce more electricity, should we use a waterfall or should we extend coal mining? How are we going to make that decision? And he stresses that we need to make objective decisions about production. And the only way we can do that rationally is we have to have some type of unit, some magnitude that we can use to compare. Like we use feet and inches to compare people height. And we can say, well, this person is taller because this person is six foot tall. This person, the other person is five foot tall. We can make an objective comparison because we know we have units. We have feet and inches and those are objective. Well, what do we have? What does the economic decision maker have? Well, he notes we have money prices. Market prices become our unit of comparison. We can compare the expected selling price of a house with the sum of all the prices of the factors it takes to produce that house. And we can then, on the basis of that comparison, say, yes, we want to produce this house or we don't. Or we can say, yes, we want to produce the house, but we want to use wooden 2x4s instead of metal studs to produce the house. So we can make these kind of comparisons if we have market prices. And so market prices are what people use, what economic decision makers use to calculate expected profit and loss. And if we don't have that, then it's just pure guesswork. If we don't have that, then we're stuck. And so that is precisely what socialism doesn't have because in socialism, where all means of production are owned by the state, they must be controlled by one will, either the economic czar or the central planning board. But with no private ownership, there's no real exchange of land or labor or capital goods. And so there are no true prices for any of these factors. And so there's no actual economic calculation that can take place. Now, the central planner could arbitrarily assign numbers to these things and call them prices, but those prices don't represent, they're not the products of the subjective values of people actually in society, they're just arbitrary numbers. And so the socialist central planner has no way to rationally decide how to produce a good and what goods to produce. So the central planner can't do calculations in kind. They just own all this stuff centrally. That's exactly correct. But I want to recognize that we're talking about two different things here, prices and values. So MISA says exchange is the foundation of the economy. And when we compare things, would I rather have this or that? These comparisons necessarily involve acts of valuation, but we can't measure acts of valuation. We can just sort of have prices. And so it's not just the ownership, it's the actual money prices that give us the ability to calculate. It's not just our values, it's having a price attached to things. That's exactly right. That's why he notes that if we're going to have a system where we can engage in economic calculation, we do have to have the private ownership of the means of production, but we also have to have a general medium of exchange. In other words, these goods, these land and labor, the different capital goods and consumer goods all need to be traded against a common medium of exchange money so that the prices of all these goods, the exchange ratios for all these goods are enumerated in the same unit. And that's what allows for the actual rational calculation. So what's the socialist response to this? I saw a Twitter exchange a couple of days ago where someone was saying, look at Walmart, they're so big, they have the equivalent of the GDP of a country. And within Walmart, they apply centralized planning. And so if Walmart could do it, why couldn't a country do it? So this was sort of the line of attack of someone from the left saying, well, wait a minute. You know, centralized planning happens all the time. It happens in gigantic firms, for example. Yeah, I think that that's an argument where they're sort of mistaking the rational planning on the part of an organization with the planning that would be necessary for an actual nation. I mean, to say that, well, Walmart, quote unquote, Walmart nation is so big, well, yeah, it's big. In some sense, that's precisely Mises' point. The only way that they could exist is that they have, they're able to use market prices for all the factors that they employ, all the labor, all the land, all of the goods that they buy at wholesale, they know what the prices of these things are. And they have expected prices based on their forecast of demand in their various stores. So they know, or they think they have a good idea of how they can price these goods. And if they price them incorrectly, they know fairly quickly that this is not working, so they're going to make adjustments. I mean that, to me, I mean that completely misses the point. Walmart doesn't have to decide what's the best, Walmart doesn't have to decide what's the best way to make a dress shirt that they're going to use. They just have to know that this is the kind of dress shirt that we want and this is the price we have to pay the manufacturer for the dress shirt and this is the price that we can charge our customer. They don't have to plan how the shirt's made and that's just one good. I mean, imagine all, think about all the consumer goods that they sell. They don't have to plan how many of that's made because they're not, they're only dealing with one, basically one or two types of transactions and all of the other planning for all the previous stages it takes to get to that point has already been done in a decentralized market. So I guess to me, I mean just on the face of it, that argument seems, it misses the point. Well, I'd like to add here, anybody who's familiar with the concept of transfer pricing in tax law, big companies generally subdivide themselves into separate legal entities. They have subsidiary corporations. And for all we know, Walmart, each store might be a separate corporation. We don't know. But I will say this, having worked in transfer pricing in tax and big four accounting firms, companies care very much about assigning dollar costs to everything they've got in their inventory, everything they use in parts, everything that moves intercompany. Now, the tax man gets involved when they say, you know, gee, you ought to apply a markup to this and have some income between your various companies that's taxable. But apart from that, I would say that big companies absolutely assign or apply money prices in their own internal dealings with each other. Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And again, they can do that if there is, shall we say an outside market where these goods are traded. And that's another point, by the way, that Mises makes in socialism, that, you know, there can be, as he calls it, sort of oasis of socialism in a broader global market division of labor. And these socialist, individual socialist countries, isolated socialist countries, can exist and sort of get along for some period of time as long as they can look outside their country and see what are the global market prices for various goods. And they can sort of use those as benchmarks to calculate for and to try to make economic decisions based on those types of, on those types of, on those types of prices. Sure. And we know actually as a fact that the former Soviet Union, when they were making trepents or zills, they took a look at Ford's and Chevy's and figured out how much Ford and Chevy were spending on everything and charging for everything when they decided how to build their own factories. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, it's interesting, though, that Mises brings up John Stuart Mill in all this conversation. And Mill had this kind of strange distinction. He said, well, you know, ownership and appropriation of things, who owns things and who gets things, the distribution of them, that's not really part of economics. Economics is just production. But all these questions about distributing and appropriating stuff, which of course socialism attempts to do, that's really not for economists. And they shouldn't talk about that sort of thing. And these are questions we can deal with politically or even morally or even from a utilitarian perspective. I thought that was interesting that because Mill continues to be seen not by Mises, but he continues to be seen by a lot of people as sort of an early exemplar free markets and someone who believed in liberty to an extent. Yeah, I mean, I think Mill's a classic case of someone, depending on where you look in his work, he seems like almost like a classical liberal. And then you look at other parts and you think, oh, well, no, he's not. And Mises makes that point at the end of, I believe, liberalism makes that point. But yeah, I mean, Mises is again, Mises rooting his analysis in reality, and then building on mangers in relationship between the higher and lower goods draws out the fact that, look, it's not like we produce wealth and then the wealth is redistributed. The production and exchange process that goes on the market, production and income formation happens together. He distinguishes between the free market formation of income to the socialist alleged distribution of income. And he notes that in a free market, the income is not distributed. Income is formed as people provide productive services or provide goods that can be used for production. And, or of course, providing consumer goods to consumers, that income is formed by giving people what they want. Well, socialism has as completely, as it severs the organic link, shall we say, between production and income distribution, and Mises would have none of it. Well, there's so many things that relate to this central argument in the book, the socialist calculation debate. And oftentimes they relate because, again, of when Mises was writing this, wasn't just an economics book and he's writing against a backdrop of rising collectivism. But that said, Sean, some of them seem a little strange 100 years later. For example, towards the beginning of the book, he goes into this discursion of sorts about the social order and the family. And he gets into, you know, relationships between men and women and children and sex and free love and prostitution. And that chapter reads a bit odd today. I wonder if we could resurrect him, if he would say, well, I wish I hadn't written that, or I wonder if he would say, oh, I 100% agree with that. Give us your take on when Mises gets a little far afield from what we're used to. Yeah, I think it is interesting. It makes for fascinating reading, I will say. I do think that, again, he's writing in the context where socialist, for instance, we're making certain arguments in favor of so-called free love and that that is sort of the be all and end all of freedom. And we're making the case that a socialist order is necessary for us to be truly free from a whole host of things, including sort of traditional sexual mores. And Mises was trying to make the case that, well, actually, again, he's almost saying, look, you guys are engaging in romantic fantasy, because in reality, there's always going to be, I don't know what should one say, certain perspectives on the relationship between men and women, which will cause, you sort of drive women to always want to pursue marriage. And many are very interesting when he was talking about how, in his mind, and this is contrary to what we normally think of in his mind, women, sometimes are consumed with sex, because in some sense, they can't get away from it. In other words, that they want, as he puts it, to the desire to be, in some sense, under the protection of a man. But then if they engage in sexual relations, then, of course, they have offspring, and the man can do his thing and walk away, but the woman can't. And so there's just fundamental biological differences that sort of leads women to want to engage in not just romantic relationships, want to engage in marriage. That, of course, Mises thinks is more socially stable than the socialist call for free love. But he also makes the point, however, in classical liberal societies, where we move past the idea that wives are owned by their husbands, that wives cannot own property, that wives are somehow trapped in horrible relationships and they can't get out. He said, no, it's the classical liberal view of marriage that, in some sense, elevates the dignity of the woman more than socialism ever could or would. But isn't this so interesting, though? Marx and Engels thought that they were going to liberate the family, and in fact, it's Western capitalism, which has liberated individuals, including women, far more. And now, one thing I think Mises says that would not be popular today is he talks about property fills an important social function. And again, part of the suite for this book is the social order, not just the economic order. So if property fills a social function, so does marriage. And I think that would be pretty contentious, certainly with a lot of feminists today. They would say, well, this is just a patriarchal thing. But again, he's writing this in 1922 or finishing it, publishing it in 1922. And also, again, it's interesting that in his personal life, he actually advanced a lot of female academics in ways that perhaps his male peers weren't doing at the time. Absolutely. I mean, you couldn't look at the number of female participants in his private seminars, etc. Yeah, that must have been an amazing thing to witness back then. And it was almost a bit of a bold thing for a woman to attend an economic seminar and have an interest in that at that, you know, 100 years ago. But I want to get into the two big meaty portions of the book beyond the socialist calculation debate. And that's where he attacks basically two ideas. One is that socialism is inevitable. And two is that socialism is moral, that it operates on an ethically higher plane regardless of whether it actually produces the results it says it will produce. So in his section on the alleged inevitability of socialism, he gets into, really, he gets pretty deep into class theory. And he gives us a pretty in-depth critique of that. And of course, Hoppe would do that later as well. Again, this is pretty far afield for an economist. I mean, in some sense, he just recognized that if you're going to provide, say, a full critique of socialism, you have to get into these areas because so much of socialist policy and advocacy was based not purely on economic practitability, but also on these broader political and social issues, such as the class struggle. I mean, the whole point of Marx is trying to supposedly scientifically show why socialism is inevitable. And Marx sees that the class war and the class struggle is the, in sense, the engine that pushes the dialect of history along. And so Mises has to get into the nature of a so-called class struggle. And is there even one that is pushing history along? Well, and he asked the important question, but why do humans cooperate? And that is an important question. And the answer is, division of labor makes them more productive and better off. And this is something that Marx and Engels just simply refuse to contemplate. Absolutely. I mean, the core of his response is that, and again, I mean, what makes Mises such a pleasure to read is that he begins just with reality, right? Mises doesn't like to entertain romantic notions of how we wish things were. He wants to provide analysis that helps us live in the world that we actually live in. And so he notes that the true nature of society is cooperation. It's community in action. People coming together and by participating in the division of labor help each other out. And so society develops, as Mises explains, as the market division of labor develops. And he makes a really important point that once we understand that the division of labor is the essence of society, then there is no more sort of antithesis between the individual and society, right? That the individuals perceive the participating in the division of labor as beneficial to them. And then as they participate, they form society. They have an interest that this society then would flourish. But here we are 100 years later, and we're still enthralled with this idea of class struggle, that everything is about one group against the other and oppressor and oppressed. And of course, we have a hard time making the case which we know to be absolutely true, the case that markets are actually cooperative and communitarian, and centralized planning is the opposite. It creates a cabal of ruthless leaders and leaves everyone outside that leadership worse off. But again, we still have to fight these age-old ideas that Mises fought. Absolutely, because it's in people's political interests, to foment class distinctions, just like it was in Marx and Engels' interest to foment class distinctions and class interests, class consciousness, as they would call it. Again, like you started off, we started a discussion saying it's hard to imagine back in the 80s, or back in the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 80s, it's hard to imagine how open people are advocating socialism today. To me, it's hard to, my entire life, I heard again and again in my schooling and in society is, can we all get along? Can we all get along? We're all, there's a fundamental similarity amongst human beings, and let's focus on that. And within, man, the last 10, 15 years, it's identity politics and class politics. And it's amazing how rapidly the worm has turned on this. Well, the other thing he mentions in this analysis of this sort of bureaucratic overclass that's necessitated, by the way, by central planning, is the concept of moral hazard. And this sort of pre-shadows what would later become a debate among some Austrians about the Massessian versus Hayekian knowledge problem. In other words, and it relates to the socialist calculation issue, is it a knowledge problem or is it a property ownership problem? And when he discusses moral hazard, we get sort of an inkling of the idea that, no, there's, in socialism, there's no incentive to avoid losses. There's no skin in the game. And so it's not just calculation. It's also this idea of ownership that compels and impels people to act better than they will under socialism. In other words, people respond to incentives. I mean, this isn't rocket science. Absolutely. When he gets to, you know, a later part of the book, especially he, he goes through a number of various policies advocated by a variety of socialists. And he notes a number of places where the policy itself actually promotes the very thing that the policy is supposed to ameliorate in the case, for instance, of social insurance, or in the case of unemployment insurance. The idea that the person who has unemployment insurance is able to bring about the condition of being unemployed or at the very least can extend his period of unemployment if he wants to by not accepting a job. And when we have the ability, again, it gets back to when you, when we have the ability to live off of the income, not that we have earned through production, but we live off somebody else's income, then we have adulterers, the incentives we have to be productive or not be productive. Well, when he gets into this idea of not just the inevitability, but the moral or ethical arguments for socialism, he takes another little discursion and he goes off into Christianity quite a bit. Let's talk about that. His conception of Christian socialism is coming very much from Germany, having grown up in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. And he goes on at length about, well, Christ's teachings are really not about the material world they're about to hear after and so that not only are they compatible with socialism, they may even require it. So talk a little bit, you happen to be a Christian. Talk a little bit about Mises is again an agnostic Jew and his conception of Christianity and how it shaped his arguments in this book. Yeah, I think, frankly, I think that this section, I would say, I don't know, I can't remember how many pages it covers, but it's the worst part of Mises. Of all, of all, and I've read a lot of Mises and I think Mises is great. I just think he misses it here. His point is that he thinks that primitive Christianity in some sense has no social ethics, that they weren't really interested in laying out social principles of how people should relate to one another because they thought that the second coming of Christ is imminent and the kingdom of God is coming very quickly. And so what need do we have of creating or thinking about principles of social ethics? And then he does make the point because Christianity doesn't have any clear social principles in the New Testament, as he puts it, then it's true that it doesn't explicitly navigate socialism, he would say, but then it also opens a door for socialism because as he puts it, no art of interpretation can find a single passage in the New Testament that can be read as upholding private property. Then he goes on to say, Jesus's words are full of resentment against the rich, the rich man is condemned because he is rich, the beggar is praised because he is poor. Now I think it's important that the readers know he quotes Scripture in a couple of places, but he also cites a number of what I would call liberal German theologians and interpreters of these passages. And by liberal, I don't mean classical liberal, I mean theologically liberal. So I think that he is in some sense relying on their interpretations of these passages, and I just don't think he gets it right. I think that there is a case to be made in even in sticking to the New Testament for private property. I lay it out some in my own book. So I just think that it's unfortunate because there are a number of Christians, I know people who will point to this passage in Mises is socialism and say, see, even Mises argues that Christianity is incompatible with capitalism. And that, of course, that conveniently ignores it later. I mean, he modifies his opinion on this over time. Again, this is something that was written in 1922 when, quite frankly, if you think of the Christian leaders in Europe in 1922, a lot of them were somewhat socialist. And so if he takes them at their word, he's responding to them. In some sense, I would say he's not responding to the text of the Scriptures per se. Well, whether you think it caused it or was in spite of it, I mean, the plain truth is that some of the most free market economies came out of the Christian West. Absolutely. It was indisputable. But this is also a man who's just come out of fighting World War I, which was, in many ways, the end of civilization. It certainly had to feel like that during the worst parts of the war. But it's interesting to note that he softens his take a little bit in the second German edition of this book, which is 10 years later. He's a little softer on the question of whether liberalism is opposed to Christianity or whether they could uneasily sort of coexist. That's right. And later works, I think, in a page or two, and even in human action, I think that he seems more open-minded. I think that I think actually my own personal opinion, I think him coming to the United States and interacting with, say, Christian industrialists like J. Howard Pugh, I think actually helped him to broaden his views on this idea. I don't think, by the end of his life, I don't think he would say that Christianity cannot exist side by side with capitalism. I don't think he would say that at the end of his life. But like he said it in 1922. Well, there's also the case, I think atheists and agnostics in general tend to soften and mellow a bit with age. It's very common. Yeah, that's true. That's right. And some don't stay that way. You're right. I mean, people change. So he finishes the book with this section he calls destructionism. Yes. And a couple years ago, our own Tom Di Lorenzo gave a talk here at the Mises Institute on political correctness as Massessian destructionism. It's really an interesting part of the book. It's a really zingy way to end it. I mean, he talks about socialism as the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. Talk a little bit about the end of the book and what he's getting at here. Yeah, I think what he's really making the point here that socialism is utterly destructive. That there's no way around it. Socialism does not build society. It destroys society by destroying what society is, which is the market division of labor. And also it destroys prosperity by capital consumption. And so the beginning and end of socialist policy, he would say is destruction. Socialism wants to it wants to and it's not just something that happens accidentally. On the one hand, they want to destroy the social order under private property so they can get to the socialist utopia. In some sense, it does get zingy and fiery because I think Mises is wanting to point is just wanting to make it clear that look, this is socialism is not something you want to play with because it's not innocuous. It's not something that we can sort of try. And then if it doesn't work, we're no worse off. No, socialism destroys. And then he goes through the varieties of destructionist policy. He talks about labor legislation. He talks about social security insurance. He talks about trade unionism. He talks about unemployment insurance. He talks about the socialization of industry and nationalization of industry. And he talks about taxation and confiscatory taxation and how rapidly a state will move from taxing to cover the night watchman state to taxation for confiscatory purposes and taxing the productive and hence the wealthy so that we can redistribute income to the unproductive. You know what's interesting though is just five years later, he produces liberalism and some of the glowing things he says in there about democracy almost seem at odds with some of the cautions he's giving here. Well, it could seem that way, but we want to remember that Mises, the virtues of democracy get back to this idea of the need for peace, the need that the market division of labor has for peace in order for it to develop. And that the chief virtue of democracy is that it allows for peaceful transition of power so we don't have continual revolutions and violent up-evil in society. Typical of Mises, he doesn't hinge democracy on some type of ethical principle per se, but he places democracy, sees democracy as something that is it's beneficial in the sense that it promotes peace and then if we have peace then that allows for more commercial activity which allows for the extension of the division of labor and the building of society. So that would fit quite you know the democracy is not something that we the democracy is a means to achieve the end of a flourishing market division of labor, but of course it can be used for evil purposes and that's why I think Mises makes the point that defeating socialism or being able to enjoy prosperity that comes from the market division of labor and society and a free market requires a battle of ideas because in democracy you have people voting for rulers and then rulers voting for making laws and so we have to win the battle of ideas. But when we're talking about ideas we also have to have arguments, we have to have intellectualism, we have to have speech and one of the things he talks about is what socialism doesn't just destroy the economy, it also destroys free inquiry, it destroys our ability to speak out, it destroys our ability to engage in democracy meaningfully if democracy is your thing. Absolutely, it really what should one say, it puts the individual under the thumb of the central planner. He has this really I think interesting section in the middle of the book where he talks about how when the central planner, it's a socialism, we have a central planner that determines who works where that also applies to the cultural activities and scientific activities and art and culture and other areas, intellectual areas become more and more routine because those who don't please the ruler are not allowed to paint, they're not allowed to write literature, they're not allowed to compose music, they're not allowed to pursue scientific inquiry that doesn't please the state. So what you have is a culture that becomes very sort of ossified, very routine, almost just a dead repetition almost of the past. Well, let me leave you with this thought. I think what we can get from this book is we have created an artificial distinction between so-called social or cultural issues and economic issues in our politics. I think Mises's socialism shows us that this is all part of a complete whole and we need to consider them as one instead of making this distinction. Yes, I think that's right. One's economic ideas and policies always occur in the midst of a broader culture and always have impacts that are broader than just what we might say just narrow economic effects and so that's why, again, I think it's so important that economic analysis is, as Mises has done, rooted in reality so that in that sense, economics is not disconnected from the rest of reality, it's part of reality. Well, Dr. Sean Rittenauer at Grove City, we want to thank you for your time and I want to reiterate to our audience, as I did in the introduction, if you go to our website and use the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast, you can get a discount on your own copy of Socialism by Mises, the copy that we sell. It's an excellent read. I think you will enjoy it and of course, you can go to Mises.org and read it for free in PDF form on our website. So, Sean, thanks again. Oh, thank you very much.