 Mises seminar used to meet on Thursday evenings and Mises would walk in precisely at 7.25 when the meeting started. Very proper, very trim, always dressed in a suit and vest and tie. You never saw him in an informal attire. Maybe not never. Isn't quite right because in one of those books you'll see him without a vest. But he was always very proper, very prompt, and very much of the gentleman. And the seminar was not a very large seminar. On Thursday evening November 14, 1968, there was a huge affair going on at NYU school graduate school of business where Mises held a seminar. An overflow crowd for Friedman, Milton Friedman, and Walter Heller, the representative of the Keynesian School and the Monitor School. And there were so many people who came to attend this meeting that they had to have microphones and have an overflow crowd in another room. And Mises was holding forth to a seminar of maybe 12 or 15 people that same evening. Mises didn't get a large group of people to these seminars but he got some very important people. He got some of the regulars, well my husband and I went more than anybody else. But Israel Kursner, whose name you may have told, known, he came and he became assistant to Mises. Murray Rockbart used to come quite regularly for a few years until we moved into a building with an elevator. And Rockbart at that time had phobias and he couldn't get in elevators. The Sennheises came. And matter of fact, when I went to the foundation and man Percy persuaded me to come down to the Mises seminar, we didn't meet at the Mises seminar. I persuaded Mary, Holman then, to come down with me. And once or twice we would be late and Mises would come and say we can't start, the girls aren't here yet. But we'd sit all around a great big table and Hazlett also came quite regularly. At first he said he came mainly because he wanted to encourage Mises, to let him know that with a small group there were still some people who were really interested in hearing what he had to say. But he later said that he came because he always got something out of the lecture, some new insight, some new understanding of history. And Mises had a way of talking about history that made it seem, well it was always a different approach from what most people expected. Talked about the industrial revolution, about before the industrial revolution when the countries were, most countries were agricultural and trade was very little foreign trade. Farmers were self-sufficient and they had practically no money economy at all. And the farmers, one of the biggest troubles was trying to find the money they needed to buy salt, which was usually a government monopoly. And to pay the taxes they had to. Gradually trade came and there was more trade but this trade was not what you'd call big business trade today. There were little peddlers, little traders who went around from one place to another and they were sometimes robbed and sometimes killed. It was not a very safe business to be in. But they moved around and they developed an idea that they could hire women at home to do spinning and weaving and they would take wool and yarn and go from house to house and delivered in sort of a cottage industry developed. This was the beginning of the industrial revolution. These women worked at home and the peddler came around with the yarn and so forth and so on. Then with new ideas people began to invent machines and conceive of the idea of putting many spinning wheels in one room and having the women move and have the yarn there. And so this began to have factories, began to have factories. This was of course hundreds of years ago but it was a small, small beginning. And then someone in England dreamed up the idea that maybe they could grow wool in Australia and import the wool and manufactured in England. And this was the beginning of the wool industry in Australia, New Zealand too probably. But it was a long, slow process from very small beginnings. And one of the important things that had to be developed for business to become big was bookkeeping, accounting and calculation which came about with money. Now Mises had every semester we had a broad general subject like epistemology, capital theory, interest theory, Marxism, socialism, money and banking, intervention, economic calculation, competition, history and historiography. And Mises had a gift for saying things in quite an unexpected sort of way. Of course, the basis of the Austrian school theory is of course that values that men act and that values are subjective and everybody is always aiming at the thing they want most. And in economics, people begin to look on the goods and services that are produced as the economic action. But goods and services are physical things and the action is a mental thing. You can't understand or you can't share, you don't have the same values as somebody else. Everybody has separate values, values are subjective. And he said, just as there is no standard and no measurement of sexual love or friendship or sympathy, aesthetic enjoyment. So there is no measurement of the value of commodities. You can't measure subjective values. prices are not anything that you can grasp that you can hang on to. They are ratios between goods and services and the money that exchange at a particular time and place. It's an exchange ratio. And once a price is paid over for a good, that price no longer exists. He says the price is like a snowflake. You can see it and then as soon as you see it, it's gone. The next instant, there's no price. You can't add these things up. A government can no more determine prices. Seeing that prices are ratios that exist between the values of one person and the values of another. That's what a price is. And governments can't determine those any more than a goose can lay hen eggs. Feel as though I've just been swept all the way down here from New York and my notes are just all over the place. And I'm well about government and education. I can just read you a lot of these quotes. Government, government versus private education is a philist philosophical dispute, whether or not you should have government education, political education, or whether or not you should have private education. It's something that depends on ethics and moral and religious. And it's not a political question. If the government teaches students more than the three hours than the three hours, then the situation becomes complicated. The government can teach students to read the sign no smoking or 45 mile 55 miles per limit. But if it goes beyond teaching the three hours, it gets into history, political philosophy, religion, even literature, then there are problems with the governments being in the field of education. Government education is in effect government brainwashing. If you're in favor of brainwashing, then you're in favor of government schools. About he says the same government that says 17 million people go to bed in the United States hungry every night, have spent billions to make food prices more expensive. He thinks that a good slogan a good political slogan would be a party that was in favor of cheap goods, making things cheaply. He says countries inflate in the war in order to deceive the people. People are willing to die for a cause, but they don't want to pay the prices in taxes. In 1904, Russia paid for the war with Japan by taxes, even though they were unpopular, because they preferred the criticism that they would get from their people for having to pay such high prices to the unpopularity at that time of going off the gold standard. By 1914, 10 years later, the opinion had changed and Russia inflated in World War one. He said that, as I say, he gave insight into historical knowledge that you didn't think of. He said public works for relief as were proposed in the New Deal and as proposed by Keynes to solve unemployment was not new. They were doing the same thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. Keynes probably didn't know, but in the French Revolution of 1848, there were public workshops to employ people. And after a few weeks in 1848, people became so much disillusioned with the project that the large majority of the parliament, even the socialists wanted to abandon that program. And price controls, of course, as you probably have all heard, are not something new. But they were established 3000 years ago by Hammurabi. In Austria, there was so much anti big business sentiment that in and big business was even considered one with only 21 employees. And they were attacking the big business of that size. He's talking about advertising. The only thing advertised in the socialist system is the greatness of the dictator. In a free economy, advertising teaches us there are planes, baby foods, refrigerators. Advertising is very expensive. But I would say it is more effective in educating people than our high schools. People blame the liquor trust for the people or the liquor advertisers for the fact that people are drinking liquor, they blame the gun manufacturers for the people that they buy guns. But he says beginning with Omar Khayyam, wine has been advertised by the poets with the poets in the pay of the whiskey trust. Why not say that the desire for cleanliness is the result of the soap trust and it's advertising. There is a distinction between an institution like an orphan asylum or a prison, which tries to feed the inmate inmates what they like. And the restaurant, which loses customers to other restaurants if they don't like the food, if the cook and the institution burns the cake, the supervisor may say that the boys or men were bad, and there won't be any dessert that day. And why should the members of Congress be so nasty that they fix a minimum wage lower than their own. They're talking using that kind of language today, arguing for medical insurance all across the country that we ought at least have as good medical insurance as the as the government Congress mess for itself about farm price supports. The French government buys and stores wine. Just as this government buys and stores wheat and butter, but wines improve with age. The same cannot be said for wheat and butter. Most people get their economic ideas from plays and novels. Dickens novel hard times had a tremendous influence through a nice little girl character Dickens criticized the capitalist ideas of Bentham. Bernard Shaw wrote economic tracks, but his great influence as a socialist came from his plays and novels. Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde were willing to sacrifice the truth that they could make a witty remark. I was reading I think maybe in some of the other notes that I had from Mises today that even people who don't read books when they express opinions, they're expressing ideas that other people have expressed in books and that they've heard about by a third or fourth hand. Mises was not an anarchist and he we there were several subjects that came up frequently in the seminar and the students just couldn't understand what Mises was saying. One was on monopoly. One was on mathematical economic statistics and the use of statistics and economics. And of course the subject of government also came up and intervention. One of his favorite remarks, one of his I think prize winning remarks was about government intervention. Someone asked him once, you mean to say that if we had such and such a high unemployment and we had factories that were idle and so forth and so on and people unemployed and people just not able to eat. When you think the government should do nothing and Mises said, yes, but the government should start doing nothing much sooner. What he meant of course was that the unemployment and the hunger and the starvation and the factories being idle with the result of prior government policies, the government had probably in almost every instant expanded the money, increased subsidies to some people and not to others had granted extra credit so that businesses had expanded and there wasn't the demand for them. And then by some maybe getting scared because they were worried about inflation coming along that they had to contract and then you have a realization of what had been done before it was the government activity before that should have been stopped. And that's the trouble that Mises was always arguing about people bankers. Oh, another thing he said was about being a banker in the 20th century. If you were smart, you wouldn't be. But when the government tries, if the government ever tries to contract the quantity of money or to get on the gold standard to reduce the credit expansion to just reduce the amount of credit expansion, there's so much opposition from the people who have been used to the expanded credit, the subsidies and the things that the government has been doing that the tremendous political pressure has put on them. And they just are the bankers cannot resist that pressure. And that is the reason. And as a matter of fact, that's one of the disputes between Mises and Hayek, I think, as to whether or not it's something in the system that causes the banks to expand or whether it's political pressure. And but that's one of the minor fine points. Well, so they couldn't understand what he had to say about monopoly with and they couldn't understand what he had to say about mathematical and statistical economics. He said the averages and the statistics don't explain anything. He said, if you have a man standing with one foot in the fire, and the other foot in an iceberg, the average is all right. And this is what you lose the the important factors, which are the individual, the micro field, the actions, the activities, the incidents, the micro activities you lose when you start talking in macro terms, if you know what I mean, when you make combined statistics, use averages and aggregates, you don't know what's going on that's lost in the in the macro figure. He said it's less harmful to tax losses than to tax profits. Because if you tax the man who makes profits, you're taking the greatest contributors, the people who make profits, what the people who make profits are doing is taking goods and services that are undervalued on the market, considering their potential uses, combining them, transforming them and moving them around and turning him into something that the consumers willing to pay a higher price for because he wants it more. So they're taking undervalued goods and turning it into something that's more valuable. That's what a profit is. And when they try to take away the profits, they are destroying the incentive and the production of the people who are the most capable, the most productive. He said, perhaps orangutans could talk if they wanted to, but they don't want to because they don't want to pay taxes. He says economic forecasters are like men who sell pills against earthquakes. When challenged as to their effectiveness, they replied, well, do you know anything better? Oh, and he said about Marx's Das Kapital, it's good for insomnia. And Marxism came to this country only very late, he said, in installments. Marx didn't say the worst things. He had angles for that purpose. He said, there are wholesale and retail soothsayers, those who presume to know the destiny of nations as opposed to those who presume to know the destiny of individuals. There's really no difference between these two classes of soothsayers because the destiny of a nation is the sum total of the destinies of all the individuals in the nation at any period of time. Marx was a wholesale soothsayer. He knew precisely what the end of human history was being. That was the coming of socialism. That knew that was inevitable. Well, he used to get into arguments with people about government. And we had some anarchists, maybe we have some anarchists here tonight, I don't know. And he maintained that the government was necessary to prevent and to ensure social cooperation to protect life and property so that people could trade, could exchange goods, and could live free. That you had to have that minimum government, a night watchman state. The night watchman state was necessary so people could live their own lives. And people would try to press him and say the government shouldn't tax, we should have voluntary contributions. He says then you'll start having wars. And when really pressed he would say go and write it in a book. He felt that writing it down in a book would help you to understand. Now you asked about Rothbard. He thought Rothbard was brilliant and Rothbard is brilliant. He couldn't understand how a man as brilliant and as bright as Murray Rothbard could be an anarchist. He once asked my husband to debate Murray Rothbard on the subject of anarchy. But Rothbard's a slippery debater. He doesn't debate. He name calls. He just wouldn't debate the issue. Are you folks Rothbardian fans? I wrote an article for the Sennholz Festivals. Did any of you read that Roger? Or anybody? I said that Rothbard was like a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. He's a Dr. Jekyll and that he's brilliant. He's a Mr. Hyde and that he's vicious and vitriolic at times. There are just two sides to him. He writes brilliant economics and then he turns around and is just vitriolic. I enjoy reading him but so far I haven't been a butt of any of his criticism. I don't know what I'd say if I'm an insignificant sort of person. I'm not important enough to attack. But anyway he says government can do things with bayonets but the question is what will be the consequences and that's what of course government is. Government is the policeman he says if you're a polite or the hangman if you are not quite so polite because government is the hangman. When government interferes it is a new factor and it brings about definite effects. He says you can't easily escape governments today not even on the moon. The difference between a gang and the government is that the gang has only a short life and in a limited area. If its life is prolonged you must say it is no longer a gang it may become the government and that of course has happened in many times. But he thinks that government is necessary and if you don't have a government you can't have social cooperation and you can't have peaceful society. You can't have people trading with one another without they're having to carry their own guns and then you start having warring factions. So he made it very clear that he was not an amicus. He said there will always be a market for new production. When everybody has a TV set this was in 1951 he was saying this and I didn't have a TV set then. When everybody has a TV set what will the industrialists produce? I don't know but they will. Now what have they done since then? Like it's really amazing. We hoard silver, we have hideaways, we try to hedge against inflation, we try to do all kinds of things to guard against the big government and to keep our money from being taxed completely away and everything else. And yet the entrepreneurs, the businessmen are so productive, so ingenious, so innovative and so clever that since 1951 when not everybody had a TV set they have produced fax machines, microwaves. What else can you think of? 101 things and they're still doing it. The entrepreneurs are just remarkable but they have to do this oftentimes with their hands tied behind them because they're being hampered and now there are more and more schemes being proposed to hamper people still more. You have OSHA, you have EPA, you have and who knows what kind of medical program we're going to have in the future. Well he says bankers and this is the quote about bankers that I mentioned bankers in the 20th century don't think. If they did think they wouldn't be bankers in the 20th century. The study of history shows how easy it is to make mistakes. An intelligent forecast is based on the lack of intelligent on the part of those whose behavior is being forecast. Saints don't usually serve in the offices of foreign exchange controls nor do they serve in the offices of government. If you look on deflation the opposite of inflation and of course now this is another thing he had problems with definitions inflation to him was an increase in the quantity of money and credit and most everybody today speaks of inflation as an increase in prices but where the increase money to pay the increased prices come from if everybody's paying increased prices there has to be more money coming from somewhere to a lot and there's more money still being pumped out now the much of this new money that's coming is going abroad as Jeff Wayne's gone who somebody else from abroad but either many many people overseas and abroad are hoarding dollars and this is helping to keep prices down in this country but the deflation is the opposite now most governments don't want to deflate because that means taxing money and then burning it or destroying it or not using it and governments don't like the tax in the first place they'd much rather increase more the spending more with new dollars but he says if you look on deflation which is a contraction of the quantity of money and credit from the ethical point of view you will assume that is a cure for inflation this is like saying that if a man has been hurt by being run over by an automobile you can cure him by running the automobile backwards over him or by running over his other leg or by running over a different man this is why haslet used to come even when he was a a mature man and had been writing and was writing for news week every week he came because mises always had a different some kind of a different insight some different comment to make on what was going on now when he was asked in class what do you think about linden johnson this when linden johnson was present linden johnson's proposal for this that the other thing he says well let's talk about ancient Greece or Rome because they had the same problem then he didn't get into personalities he did say once and this was not actually in the seminar but I heard him say that he thought the two most dangerous men in this country were samuelson the man whose textbook was used in hundreds of colleges and millton freedman because freedman was considered a free marketer and freedman is well I don't know what to say freedman's an inflationist he doesn't understand what prices are and he thinks you can have a negative income tax and help the poor that way that means of course handing money out to them which is what they're doing in many ways so what he thought about the other person you mentioned here that I should talk about the schumpeter what did I do my notes on schumpeter well I'll find them he said prices I this is the quote I didn't have exactly right prices are like the snows of last winter they come but at the moment we catch them they are already something of the past infant industry protection this is on trade and sub and tariffs to protect the infant industries infant industry protection means development of the very industries for which the country does not have an aptitude import duties levied to make the standard of living higher leads to the protection of those items that are most expensive I don't know how I keep running across well schumpeter was a contemporary of mises and schumpeter very early went into more or less mathematical economics and schumpeter also believed and wrote books to say that calculation was possible into socialism and he thought that the socialists would be able to plan their central government even better than the uh in the in the capitalist society schumpeter happened to be the head of a prominent bank in Germany I think it was when the 1923 inflation came yet schumpeter came to this country and got an important position at harvard university I think that although mises never said so I think he was jealous and resentful of schumpeter schumpeter got so much recognition he said that schumpeter was susceptible to changes in fashions and economic fads he went along with the times that's probably why he got a position at harvard so there was no particular love lost between the two men I don't know that they saw each other after they left Vienna I really don't know but schumpeter still gets a lot of recognition and is considered a an advocate of capitalism I think well I thought I was going to have someone here in the audience who would be able to say I was wrong about some of these things I figured nobody knew what I what I know about mises seminars if bill peterson had been here he might have been able to say I was not telling the truth but I think I told the truth the seminars were not well attended there were about half of the students that came there came because it was an easy grade and the other half were ones who came and got hooked and there were many who came and went I came year after year after year and the early years after the sessions were over we used to go and have coffee more or less a viennese custom after the lecture and we had coffee at child's restaurant not too far from there and later years well they moved uptown because they tore down the building we were meeting in and we so that sort of stopped that habit mrs. mises used to invite the seminar people up for tea and I'll tell us a little story I don't know how many something you most of you are familiar with the foundation and with the where I work and you probably many of you know Hans Sennholz as I told you when I came to New York I started going down to I was working at the came to work to the foundation I started going down to the seminar and I got Mary Holman to go down with me and Mary and we went regularly Mary and I and one time mrs. mises said invited the whole seminar group up to tea and mrs. mises is it was an inveterate matchmaker and she said to Mary one time not very subtly why aren't you married or why aren't you something like that she's well all the men she met were married and she says well dr. Sennholz isn't married shortly after that Mary got up and sat he went over and sat down and started talking to Hans well uh I also suspect that mrs. mises had something to do with asking when Hans was working on the translation of bombard which is a great big fat book translating it from German to English his English was not that good at that time he knew the German and he recognized if the English was right but he didn't know how to phrase it in proper English so they said he needed an English editor so mrs or doctor mises recommended Mary as I say I think mrs. mises may have had something to do with it but anyway they did work on that together and finally did get married and they are married and both back at the foundation again after being away for many many years uh the um so we I know a number of people who came to mises seminar and they were registered at NYU and people ask them uh about it and they said well they told us not to take this you don't want to take that course that isn't economics that's religion so they discouraged actively discouraged people from going to mrs seminar and I would say there were fewer coming at the end most of the ones that came at the end were regulars who came irrespective mrs I don't know that he ever received any money from NYU as a teacher there he was subsidized the whole time by either foundations mostly the vulgar foundation out in california and then when the vulgar foundation went out of existence businessmen took over especially mr. Lawrence furtick whom some of you may have heard of he was a advertising man and also wrote a column for the um new york world telegram and son which is no longer in existence and there were some other wealthy men who put up mrs money even paid for his office rent and I suspect paid for kersner as an uh pro teachers assistant or whatever he was supposed to be and a secretary so mrs in spite of the fact that his influence has been substantial and I suspect will be still more substantial in the future through people like you folks and other people who studied and read his writings never had a real job as a professor he uh in in vienna he worked in as a in the well I guess sort of as an economic advisor to their parliament and what they call their chamber of commerce was uh and that was his job and all his writings were done on the side he you may have heard from richard ebbeling of course about this but he was in the office early in the morning gave the seminars and also lectured at the university as a private lecturer he was not on the payroll at the university of vienna either and then he went home and did his writing I guess he never talked about the book a book he was working on until it was out and um the one that made the big impression on the viennese of that day was the book socialism that came out in 1922 which was influential with hayek especially he's mentioned it and attributed much of his education to that in his understanding and he kept on working and writing finally in 34 he left vienna because he knew the nazis were likely to take over and that it wouldn't be too good for jews he went to geneva switzerland his he was back in geneva i mean in vienna in february 38 to make arrangements to get married and then left and it was a hitler came in in 19 in march 38 and he didn't go back his wife future wife came and joined him and they were married in geneva came to this country in 1940 started teaching at nyu in an electric horse in 45 and the seminar in 48 i went there from 1951 until he retired in 1969 at the age of 89 so i have all these notes i've read you some of the highlights but as i was reading them over they were i i found them fascinating again and i hope when i finish my other projects i can get to them i have a few handouts here and if you'd like to pass them out now they're not i brought only i did an article about mesis seminar and i don't know what is 81 yes 81 it's 100th anniversary i only have 10 copies of that but i brought also another article a very short thing i have it tape and if i'd known we're going to be here i could have cassette tape audio i would i was told the place was so noisy that i knew you wouldn't be able to hear but this we did transcribe it and we printed it in the freeman and it's just a short piece but it's an excellent piece i think i'll keep but you said you haven't ever wanted yeah uh-huh why don't i keep a copy of the other one and if anybody wants to just contact my office and i'll you can run off copies y'all you got a vicinity uh-huh well uh that wasn't very well organized that's great what about rand uh what i ran well yes um he did he has one famous quote about rine now some of these quotes you will find other places and i know where if you read in this book you can find out just where they appeared but he did say he read iron rand's atlas shrugged and i guess he read the fountainhead i don't know but he was impressed by what she wrote about the bureaucrats he said nobody's writing about the bureaucrats like that in atlas shrugged and he said you have to say she's one of the best greatest men of the century they did get into a big scrap though and that also has been written up and i've had stories i've had it from haslet and other people haslet the haslet's invited iron rand and her husband frank o'connor and the mrs mr mrs ms professor mrs mrs down to their apartment in washington square in new york and manhattan one evening and um uh haslet i mean uh mrs and iron rand got into a big argument nobody knows what they were arguing about i can have my ideas i suspect um well it could have been as as iron rand says values that that which mrs says a subjective and of course she has an objective basis for her values and she thinks this is anyway i i don't know what it was about but they got into a big scrap and haslet i mean just the two of them together and haslet came into the room where they were arguing and um iron rand said he thinks i'm just nothing but a stupid little jew girl and haslet said i'm sure lou didn't mean it and haslet and mrs said i meant exactly what i said so i think it's barbara brandon says that mrs mrs finally got them to make friends again but no it was after that that he said made her remark about her being one of the great men of the century so um he gave her a lot of credit but um you know everybody in this world has to fight in their own way she fought with novels he couldn't write a novel if he tried to and uh haslet wrote in his way uh different way higher something else and uh i would have to say freedmen in another way and rock bardon's still another way everybody uh we had a man at the office in the foundation once who was an excellent speaker unfortunately he died but he said i think of it as a great big mountain of truth and everybody's tapping around at a different angle trying to get at this truth and we all are getting little pieces of this truth from this mountain but we aren't we each use our own different method we each but we're aiming at the same thing and i think in some ways that's what all these people are doing bumper in his way michael in his way everybody's trying to get at the truth and trying to promote the truth and express the truth as best they can nieces had his way and there were people who didn't understand his way and didn't understand him and i suppose that's the fate of anybody who's saying anything that's significant some people understand and other people don't and they can't do anything about it except to express the truth as they see it in their way