 Why is Austrian economics attractive? What are the features of it that make it so attractive? What is it that makes this exciting? There are two features of what you're going to be studying this week that I think are attractive. The first is that you feel practically compelled by what is presented to you when you learn, for example, Hungarian price theory. There's nothing about this that requires heroic assumptions or any kind of unreasonable postulates. It practically compels your assent, because it seems so obvious. Again, it's going to seem so obvious that you almost feel like I don't need to write this down. That's how obvious it'll seem. But that's because it's realistic. It rings true when you hear it. It's not like we're not claiming that human beings are economic agents for whom economists may invent mathematically tractable utility functions to try to understand them. We're actually treating people as people. This wild experiment we're running here is to treat human beings like human beings. So when you read in Slate or Salon or on the Internet about how unreasonable and crazy the Austrians are, bear that in mind. What we're really doing with causal realist economics is treating human beings with the dignity that human beings deserve, not trying to mathematics them, but treat them as actual human beings. In fact, if you read Menger's 1871 book, Principles of Economics, you will not walk away from that book thinking that was too complicated for me to understand. You will not think that. You'll say, wow, that actually was a lot easier for me to understand than I thought it would be. Well, that's true of a lot of Austrian texts. Now, as you get more advanced, it does become more difficult. To the person who is reasonably educated, has made his way step-by-step through the literature, I dare say that the major treatises of the Austrian school, for example Rothbard's Maneconomy and State or Mises' Human Action, are not out of reach of the educated person who has worked his way up to those books. It is not impossible. You don't need some kind of special training to be able to understand that. They would have considered themselves failures if that was the case. That's the way that spoke to contemporary economists. Certainly that's true of Rothbard. If you look at his footnotes, absolutely filled with references to the contemporary literature, which he knew backwards and forwards. But he could speak in a way that could resonate with an economist and could resonate with a normal human being. This is an extremely rare talent that Rothbard had. But I think more than this is the second thing that makes the school so attractive to us. There's a connection, and I know I'm going to get some objection here, but the connection between Austrian economics and liberty. Now, I know we have to be careful here because Austrian economics is not libertarianism, and libertarianism is not Austrian economics. And it is very important to distinguish these things because what we're doing as Austrian economists is not engaging in special pleading on behalf of a political philosophy. That is certainly not the case. And especially when you look at the early Austrians, Manger and Bombaver, for example, they're really not writing a whole lot that would be policy advocacy. They really are doing scientific economics. And that really is what the Austrian school is doing. And a lot of the people you're going to be hearing from today, that's what they do all the time. So these things are different, and it's important to distinguish them. The Austrians are descriptive, and libertarians are prescriptive. So the Austrians are simply describing to you how the world works and describing cause-and-effect relationships that exist in the world. What you do with that knowledge is a separate question. So as I say, it's important to distinguish these things. So when people say to you, well, what's the Austrian position on government spending? Well, there isn't. There is no Austrian position on government spending. There's no Austrian position on the minimum wage. There's no Austrian position on monopolies. In terms of policy. But there is an Austrian position in terms of, when we think about monopoly theory, what's the correct monopoly theory? Well, sure, there's an Austrian view on that. But an Austrian per se does not go around and say, it is wicked for the government to do X or the government ought to do Y. At the same time, though, it seems like it can't just be a coincidence that most people who become interested in the Austrian school happen to be libertarians. So why would that be? It is worth looking into. I think that's where a lot of the excitement comes from, is that people are interested in the question of human liberty, the question of the Austrian's, and they're obviously perceiving something. They're perceiving some kind of connection and I want to try to figure out what that might be.