 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. And if you've been following along, you know that we are making our way through man economy and state. Murray Rothbard's probably most famous work, really his treatise on economics. We're using the second edition, which is available from the Mises Institute. So if you're reading along in terms of page numbers and all that good stuff, that's the edition you want. It's available for free at Mises.org as an HTML searchable broken up by chapter. So it's really a great resource for you. But you can also buy the book via our website if you choose to do so. And we've already worked our way through the opening chapter on sort of human action, and then the subsequent couple of chapters on price and exchange, where Rothbard's really laying out some of the basic concepts of the book, really being precise with his definitions and really giving us a mini course of sorts in those early chapters on money, going through manger and the origins, going through Mises, going through the concept of the regression theorem, going through concepts of commodity. So we have finished that. And moving on to the next section of the book, which is all about production and the structure. This consists of about five chapters. It's a huge chunk of the book, several hundred pages. And so for today's purposes, we're just going to go through that introductory chapter, chapter five called Production and Structure. And I'm very pleased to have with me in studio our great friend, Dr. Sean Rittenauer, a personal friend of mine, someone I've gotten to know over the last couple of years, visited him at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Also a thoroughgoing Rothbardian. And just so happens to be in Auburn this week for our great Mises U seminar, which has been a lot of fun to have some live people in a live event. And one of the lectures he gives at Mises U is called Austrian Capital Theory. So that relates very closely to what we're talking about. And so all that said, Sean, it's so good to have you here this week. Appreciate it. Oh, thank you. It's a delight to be here as always. Well, I want to start with this, just the fact that there's so many chapters given to this concept of production by Rothbard in his treatise. I think that arrangement of the book almost tells us something in and of itself. Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that he thought that that was, say, one area in Austrian economics that needed to be more developed. I think that, you know, he, it's understood he set out to write Man economy state as sort of an introduction to Mises or a popularization of human action. And then I think he got to the production part of the theory and realized there's a lot in human action that Mises sort of assumes that we know about production and he thought it needed to be fleshed out. And the more, and so he goes, he goes back to Bambavrak. And the more he thinks about it, the more he decides we need to be, he just needs to be more exhaustive. And that's what he was. I mean, he ended up having an exhaustive treatment of production in some sense from a very sort of, what should one say, simple and abstract case. And then he builds and builds and builds to account for the full dynamic, full production in a dynamic economy. So it's a tremendous, it's really, it is important. And it's an important contribution of the development of Austrian economics. Well, unfortunately, it looks like America needs a refresher course because we even see economists like Krugman and politicians like AOC right now are just saying, well, everyone should just be home and government should send them a check and this is crazy, government should be taking care of people as though nothing has to be produced. It's insane. I know. It's as if, you know, somehow, in a way, it's like Rexford Tugwell all over again. We've conquered scarcity. Now it's just a matter of how can we distribute it to people that are in need. And it forgets the fact that we can only, we only have consumer goods if they are first produced. And so if we don't somehow enable people to be productive, you can live relatively high on the hog through government largesse for a short period of time. I just heard from the James Grant podcast that because of the unemployment and other government assistance that averaged disposable income for the American family for the last, I don't know, few months has actually gone slightly up just in terms of in dollar terms. But obviously this can't go on forever because at some point, I mean, the prices can still go up, but you're not going to be able to buy anything because things aren't being produced if everyone's stuck in their home. And so it's one thing that politicians are saying this, but when other people who are supposed to be economists talk this way, it's in some ways relatively depressing. Well, I think James Grant has identified why things might still seem sort of quasi-normal in your town, why are police being paid, why are yards being mowed, there's still stuff at the grocery and at CVS. I think that's it. I think the federal government is just passing out money. I want to mention that the great Huerta de Soto, Hayesus Huerta de Soto in his huge treatise on banking, he has a couple of graphs and charts in that book and one of them says that capital theory is lacking in other schools. And your lecture this week is called Austrian Capital Theories. Can you help us understand what does he mean by a theory of capital is lacking in Keynesian or mainstream economics? Yes. When he says it's lacking, it really means that there's either there's not much of a capital theory or a theory of how capital goods, the importance of capital goods or there's certainly no structure of capital structure in modern mainstream macro. And if there is, it's not done very well. So there is sort of a school of thought that says, well, yes, of course, capital goods are important for production, but we're going to model capital one as if capital is just sort of a blob of homogenous units. So every unit of a capital good is exactly like every other unit. In which case, I mean, if that was the case, then yes, we don't have to, we don't have to talk much about capital theory because it's real simple. You just insert, take a unit from one place and put it someplace else, just like a Lego block or something and everything is, it's a simple, it's simple. But of course, capital goods are very heterogeneous, right? A hammer is very unlike a personal computer. And so it requires entrepreneurs to allocate capital goods effectively. But beyond that, those that say, well, okay, maybe yes, capital goods are heterogeneous, but capital itself, what we call capital, is a perpetually reproducing fund, right? So we don't have to actually think about, well, once we have capital and we use it, we don't have to think about, well, what does it take to maintain our availability of capital goods or maintain a company's capital, the value of those capital goods? If it's perpetual, then, you know, if it's always going to be there, we don't have to worry about it. We don't even have to consider it so we don't have to develop a theory or analyze it in any way. And what Austrian economics brings to the table, if you will, is this understanding that the means that people use to achieve ends are means that are chosen by people based on their subjective preferences. And specific means are chosen to achieve specific ends. And for producers, that means when, you know, there's always a number of alternatives of ways you can try to arrange production to produce a particular thing. If you want to produce a shirt, you have different types of fabric to choose from. You have different types of colors of fabric to choose from. You'd have different styles of shirts that you can choose from, all requiring slightly different things. If I want to make a t-shirt, I don't need to have plastic buttons, but if I want to make a dress shirt, I need buttons, things like that. There's all these different types of capital goods that go into the production of a particular product, and Austrians understand this. And then what they also understand is that all production takes time. That's one thing that's emphasized by Rothbard and Huerta de Soto. And all Austrians, all production takes time, which means when people engage in production, they have to make investments first in obtaining factors of production, land-limber capital goods, produce the product that then they hope to sell at some point in time in the future. And so if you're going to make a t-shirt, you need to have the fabric. But then where does the fabric come from? To have the fabric, you, of course, have to have, say, if it's naturally have to have the raw cotton that can be spun into fibers that can then be weaved or woven into a fabric that then can be cut and then sewn together to make the shirt. That is a multi-stage, time-intensive process. And the Austrians understand that. And because they understand that, they know that the whole capital structure for you, the whole production structure has to fit together in a way. In other words, for the shirt to come together, it's not enough for, say, the fabric to be made sometime, somewhere. The fabric has to be made at the right time, available in the right place. And so there's a lot of coordination that needs to take place for just a t-shirt to be made. And the same thing holds true for all other types of consumer goods. And so, you know, given that complexity and the decentralization of production in a market division of labor that we enjoy in a market economy because it allows it to be way more productive and more prosperous than we would be otherwise. To enjoy that, again, it requires a lot of economic decisions made by a lot of different entrepreneurs. And if entrepreneurs at different times are led astray, it can cause bottlenecks and it can cause markets to get snarled. And if it happens on a large enough scale, we could have, you know, recession and depression. And that's all hard to see when you have this lack of capital theory. Well, so if we think about the structure of production as having multiple vertical stages, think of it sort of like a ladder. You mentioned a shirt. And by the way, buttons should be made of mother and pearl, not plastic. We're not savages here at the Mises Institute. That's an aside. But think of it as a ladder. And let's say there's a, let's say, you know, right now one of the hottest lower order goods, a retail good, is a Ford F-150, which they're selling a ton of with the aforementioned stimulus and fed funny money. So between that Ford F-150 that the consumer wants and purchases and way, way up at the top of that ladder would be, I guess, the public shareholders of Ford. There's an awful lot of stages in between suppliers, parts, the dealership, all kinds of things. And so one thing Rothbard does in this chapter is to, first of all, give you an easier construct is to say, well, let's assume that that whole ladder is owned by one owner. And of course, that's, you know, later on in the chapter he says, well, okay, here's how we look at it if we have amalgamated owners. So just talk a little bit more about the ladder. Yeah, so the ladder is simply what he calls the structure production. It's the, shall we say, the intertemporal connection between the different stages of producer goods that ultimately culminate in the production of consumer good. Really it's Carl Manger who really sort of contributes this idea of the relationship between the consumer good and then what he calls the goods of the higher order or the factors of production it takes to produce the consumer good. And so every, the production of every consumer good is supported by this several stages high structure where production has to take place first at the higher stages, right? If we're going to make a pickup, iron ore has to be mined first and then that iron ore has to be processed into steel of a certain type and then the steel has to be cut in a certain way and then shaped and then formed and then into a chassis or into the outer frame and then of course along with that there has to be the rest of the stuff that goes into making the vehicle and that all has to be brought to bear, right? But you don't first make the F-150 and then get the parts it takes to make it, right? All of those things have to be made first and so if you look at the production process, if you will you look at that I like in the production structure sort of to the family tree of a consumer good. You can sort of trace it back to its genealogy and you realize that production effort begins at the highest stages and moves down the structure production. So we have to start with the iron ore and then we get to the steel and then we get to the frame and then we get to the finished product. We don't start with the finished product and then somehow get the iron ore that goes into it and so that's very important because what that tells us is that and this is one of the great applications of Rothbard here is that to benefit from prosperity to work towards economic progress or to grow the economy if you want to use this sort of a faulty metaphor we're not going to achieve that by stimulating consumption, right? If we just want to, like you said, we just want to spend more money buying F-150s well that's great, we can do that until we run out of F-150s but if that's all we do and we don't, if there's been no investment in mining, in refining in mixing steel with other things we're not going to have any more F-150s once we run out and so we cannot sustainably maintain an economic order or expand the economic order and expand prosperity by trying to stimulate consumption. It has to happen through saving and investment. People have to be willing to put off present consumption. Say in the short term, reduce their consumption of shirts and pickup trucks and what have you and save the resources that make so those resources are available to invest in iron ore mining and steel manufacturing so that they will be available for more consumer goods in the future and so that's one important implication, if you will, of this structure production, the sort of family tree of the consumer good. Now, there's an interesting treatment in Chapter 5 by Rothbard of cost and this is something where a professor of Parabyland at Oklahoma State does a great job of slicing and dicing people on Twitter with this one but cost, you know, how much something costs to produce in dollar terms, which we need to calculate, it really sounds like a kissing cousin of the labor theory of value and we keep having people talk about cost even today and so Rothbard has this great quote at page 342 where he says cost has no influence on the price of the product and he goes on to quote, thoroughly it's saying cost is ephemeral. So help us understand why we still have to disabuse people of this idea that cost determines price. Yeah, I think he helpfully fingers in some sense Alfred Marshall drawing upon the classical economics which the classical and when he says classical, he really means in this context British classical economics, British classical tradition which Marshall thought he was updating and so Marshall had this idea that, well, yes, if we look at the demand side of things, yes, I guess the prices that consumers willing to pay for a product is determined by their subjective values. Fine, there's margin to lead, that's great. But the producers, the sellers, they're obviously not going to want to sell any product and not make a profit or at least not, they want to at least break even and so the price that they're going to charge has to be at least equal to the cost of production and in equilibrium, the prices will be driven to cost of production, ergo cost of production determines what the price is going to be and Rothbard mentions Marshall's scissors analogy that is like supply and demand are two blades of the scissors and both of them cut together. So, yes, margin utility matters a little bit but cost of production matters too and in fact in the long run, in terms of long run costs, it's cost of production that are dominant. And what Rothbard points out in this chapter is that first of all, cost, what you want to call it, ultimate economic cost is first of all subjective. The cost of something is what we give up to do something. So, if I need to buy a shirt and in buying the shirt, I cannot, I have to do without, say, a basketball, then the cost of the shirt is really the foregone satisfaction I would have from the basketball and that's subjective. And so, if you understand that that is the nature of cost, right, once the good is produced, once the good is produced, the costs are sunk, the costs are sunk. And so, the decision of what price I'm willing to accept for the product is determined by the preferences of the seller. Again, we're back to subjective preferences and so what Rothbard does an excellent job of showing that, no, it's not, in no case do objective costs of production determine the price of the good. Now, what he does say is that, okay, the costs of production, the monetary expenses that it takes to obtain the factors used to produce a product, that is going to determine or help determine how many units you can produce. And so, you know, the amount of money you invest in production and the prices of the factors, the costs of the fact, those that will determine, help determine the quantity of the goods produced. But once the goods are produced, those costs are, they don't determine the selling price that the seller is willing to accept. And I guess what throwby means when it's ephemeral, right? The costs of production are there but they don't determine the price of the product. What determines the price of the product is the subjective preference of the seller and the subjective preference of the buyer at that time. And in some sense, we know this is the case, right? I mean, what happens when, you know, a retailer brings some products to the market and they have the price on the offer price that they have on the price tag and people aren't buying. What do they do? Do they just sit and let them sit and say, well, this is the cost of production and this is what the price is and I'm not going to lower it because I heard in my micro class from Alfred Marshall that the price is determined by cost of production. Well, no, they lower the price, right? And so, it's the, you know, costs costs have an impact on the quantity of the goodness produced but once it's produced, it's that those cost considerations fade away. Well, it's interesting during the aforementioned, again, Dr. Bylin's talk yesterday, he pointed out how sometimes entrepreneurs give us things we didn't know we needed or wanted. And the left thinks that's a bad thing, of course. But, you know, let's take Apple, for example. Let's say they're going to come out with some new shiny gadget. And we haven't even thought of beyond the smartphone or the tablet or whatever it's going to be. And let's say they have really smart internal cost accounting and they can sort of figure out all their R&D and labor and parts costs and really get down to an accurate number for what this new gadget is going to cost per unit. I bet you they go out of their way not to let anybody know what that number is. And I bet you it has very little to do with the psychology of what they sell it for. Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I mean, because if you don't want, they know that they would much prefer if the cost of an item is, say, $200, they would much rather sell it for $1,000. So they're not aiming to sell it for a price equal to marginal cost at all. And so I think this, you know, going way back to Carl Manger, Carl Manger's goal was to develop a theory that explained actual prices, right? Not hypothetical prices in a hypothetical world. And in essence, that is what the Austrian tradition through Bambavark, Mises and Rothbard is doing, right? They're not interested in, you know, trying to conform reality to an artificial general equilibrium construct. They're trying to explain what actually determines real prices that people actually pay and businesses actually receive. But I thought Austrians were the pie in the sky theorists. I know. I know that is, there are certain myths that, man, it's just like banging your head against the wall. I know. I know. It is interesting though. I mean, whenever the sort of the recession hits the fan, you can read, for instance, investment literature and who do they turn to? Who do the theorists they turn to more often than not? It's Austrians because the Austrians actually help people who actually have money on the line to make wiser decisions. What's interesting talking about cost is there are currently across America and beyond vast parking lots full of rental cars sitting idly. There are, especially in desert settings, vast fields full of aircraft which are parked unused. And if this COVID-slash travel debacle continues, many of those might ultimately be sold, wholesale or however, and cost is going to have much to do with it. That's right. Yes. Exactly right. And they're going to let those things go for whatever price they can get for it regardless of the cost of production. And we just think all of that represents a significant amount of capital consumption. The resources were sacrificed so that those things could be produced because entrepreneurs anticipated those would be productive assets, providing productive services, generating a stream of income. And now that by having those things just sort of sitting there, it's essentially consuming capital. And you know, over time, the machines can, you let a machine sit for any length of time. It doesn't run well. And it's, you know, who knows how much additional saving and investment it will take to get these machines up to running. Even if now we get back to a so-called normal. Well, and not just from a cost perspective, but also in the ladder where you, that we were discussing earlier, the vertical ladder and the time element of all that, of course introduces uncertainty. Right. And so that uncertainty is exactly the source, potentially a profit for people who are, you know, smart and entrepreneurial and willing to take risks. And I noticed an article recently, this is before COVID, maybe I read it in the last year or so, about those damnable hand blower things in the, in the bathroom. Yeah. Like give me a paper towel, please. Yes. And so the article was positing, this is before COVID, mind you, that, you know, they don't really work. They actually spray the nasties in the public bathroom around as opposed to being more hygienic. And there's the old school ones with that sort of metal thing coming out. But there's some fancier ones now by dice in the vacuum people. Yeah. And I thought to myself, you know, if this article were to spread and whether true or not, if the public's perception were to be affected with respect to those hand blower things, I mean, imagine how many people and time and money and industry and R&D and just, you know, pure human energy had gone into developing them could be, in a matter of months, an industry could effectively be sort of snuffed. Yeah. And that, and to me, that element of risk is exactly why I don't begrudge people with a lot more money and a lot more brain power than me, making themselves quite rich. Whoever came up with those hand dryers. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if, to the extent that we have an unhampered market, to the extent that we don't have people making money because the government gives them sexual privilege, the only way you can generate income is by providing a good or productive service to those that demand it, who are going to pay money. And so the more productive you are, the more services you provide to your fellow man, the larger your profits are going to be. And the real big profits go to the people that are providing a particular, a product or service that is particularly in high demand at a time when they're the only one or one of the early ones that have seen it and nobody else has seen it or nobody else figured it out or gave it a try or what have you. And so that's another thing by the way you see that's rooted in the production structure is developed by Rothbard and the Austrians is that the money income, the money, while we talked about production effort being, you know, moving down the structural production, but monetary income flows up the structural production. So for instance, the manufacturer of the pickup receives income from the consumer, but then the manufacturer of the pickup spends money up the structural production obtaining the land and the labor and the factory and the tires and the windshields, et cetera. And then of course the manufacturer of the windshield spends money, sends money up the structural production to the glass manufacturer or what have you and so monetary income goes up the structural production and at every stage, at every stage income is earned by providing a good that is in demand. And so that's I think one of the great social benefits this understanding of the production structure helps us see that one of the great benefits of a free market is that even the most greedy capitalist pig can only satisfy his desire to earn the biggest profits he can by serving other people. And it's only in the free market. If you don't have a free market, there are many other ways that people who are greedy can satisfy their desires. They just do it by taking other people's stuff. But in a free unhampered market, the only way to reap a large profit is by satisfying the preferences of other people. So entrepreneurial profit is of course uncertain. Yes. Entrepreneurial loss and risk is very, very possible. And there's a difference between profit and interest. To help us understand this Rothbard goes back at the beginning of this chapter to Mises this concept of the evenly rotating economy. Help us understand, I guess first of all the written hour definition of the ERE and the written hour explanation of why this construct helps us better understand. Yeah. So in order to understand the dynamic changing world in which we live, it's helpful to consider the mental construct of what the economic order would be like if we didn't have change. And so Rothbard says, okay, and this is actually again developed by Mises and others. It's an Austrian form of general equilibrium. But the idea is that let's suppose that at any given time there's different rates of return that can be earned in different investments. And if that's the case, then where's the money going to go? Well, entrepreneurs will channel money into the high rate of return industries and take it out of the low rate of return industries. Now, if there are no further changes in consumer preferences, in the quantity of natural resources available, in time preferences, in population, the changes that will be taking place will be just adjustments to, out of the low rate of return industries into the high rate of return industries. Now, as that happens, that sets in motion a process by which the rate of return and the high rate of return industries starts to fall and the rate of return industries starts to rise until we get to a point of equilibrium where they're essentially equal. And if we get there, the next day, the exact same thing, the exact same patterns of production and consumption would take place where there's no change in consumer preferences, no change in resources available, no change in technology, no change in population. And so we would be in this, it's, again, artificial world, but we'd be in this world where everything happens exactly the same and that's why it's called the evenly rotating economy. The economy, every day, there would be things happening that would revolve around the same equilibrium point, right? And so that's what it means by the evenly rotating economy. Now, that's a construct that is helpful because we know in that construct, in the evenly rotating economy, we know that, well, we know what the future is going to hold because it's going to be exactly the same as was, you know, tomorrow's going to be in terms of the economy, tomorrow's going to be exactly the same as the day before, the day after tomorrow's going to be exactly the same as tomorrow and so nothing changes, so producers will know what their demand is, they'll know what the prices or factors are going to be and they know it's not going to change and so there will not be any uncertainty and therefore there will not be any opportunity for entrepreneurs to error. And there will also be no opportunity for certain entrepreneurs to sort of be more insightful or to be just better at satisfying other people's preferences and in other words, there will be no profit and loss. Profit and loss would not be there. Well, so then you ask, well, there would still be money incomes, yes, there should be incomes. Well, who's going to reap those incomes? Well, it will be landowners and laborers, the landowners will get the land rent, the laborers will get their economic rent called wages. And there's still time preference, right? The preferences that are fixed are still manifest positive time preference and so people would still prefer present money to future money and so there would still be interest income. So interest income is the income reaped by a saver capitalist of supplying present money in exchange for future money and of course it's easiest in some sense to see ineligible funds in the market when people borrow and lend but the same basic action of supplying present money in exchange for future money also takes place in the production structure which is another important point that Rothbard brings out that the act of production is also the act of supplying money in the present to owners of the factories of production to get control of those factories to produce a product that they are going to sell for money in the future and so every act of production is also an act of supplying present money in exchange for future money and so interest income is something that is something that's desired and required by every producer and also then it becomes a cost to the producer. In other words, if some company invests a million dollars in something to produce a certain product to produce t-shirts, well that million dollars could have been invested someplace else maybe just stuck in bonds or something or in 5% and so that 5% of interest that he foregoes to engage in t-shirt production, that 5% is a cost and so if the return in an economy in a dynamic economy is less than 5% if he borrows it 5% or if he invests his own money and so he has to incur the opportunity cost of foregoing that 5% if his rate of return is only 3% we get a positive rate of return but he would have done better investing and getting 5% elsewhere so he actually earned an economic loss. That happens in the dynamic economy in the evenly retaining economy of course there is no profit in loss and so in essence the sale price of every product is equal to the sum of the prices of the factors of production and interest and so by sort of painting that world that again here we go again I said the superior, the realistic superior the Austrians, the Austrians know we don't live in that world and there is nothing special or more meaningful or ethically better about that world and so that evenly retaining economy and the relationships that we think would attain the evenly retaining economy that's not something we're trying to achieve it's a mental construct that we use to say this is the way things would be in this world without change and so what is life like when there is change well when there is change there is this other economic category of income dealing with how well the entrepreneur forecasts future demand based on this uncertain future and that other economic category is profit and when the entrepreneur is successful more successful than others is satisfying his customers he will reap a profit and if he is really bad and not just in general but just the beauty of the market is you could be bad one time and you could learn from that and be better the next time and if you are really good you can't just rest on your laurels because the minute you start to not be the best at satisfying customers you're not going to start either reaping lower profits or earning losses it's funny that you bring up the idea that the ERE is not something we should be striving to accomplish because my recollection from my undergrad econ classes was that there is always this sort of vague sense that equilibrium really was the goal and that supply and demand should meet at some happy price and the fact that they don't is sort of unfortunate or at least inefficient and that it somehow implicates that state planners can do a better job I mean that's my vague recollection Oh absolutely I mean the benchmark if you will for a lot of economic policy especially sort of well regulation policy and antitrust regulation the benchmark criteria is this false unrealistic sort of equilibrium equilibrium that would obtain in perfect competition and so you've got two problems there one you've got the world of perfect competition that doesn't exist and then we're going to use as a criteria the equilibrium that would obtain in that world of perfect competition that also doesn't and never will exist I think what may have been Harold Demsett's actually that referred to this as the nirvana fallacy we use the criteria of a state that doesn't exist as our criteria for reality and surprise, surprise, reality is not like that and so that is used as justification for all sorts of intervention to somehow try to get as closer to what doesn't exist now that's the most well known nirvana fallacy there's a second nirvana fallacy which is that nirvana was a good musical group but that's a different, that's a time for another lecture well ladies and gentlemen that is sort of the background on chapter 5 I want to encourage you to pick up this book and read it if you yourself or you have any young people in your life children, grandchildren who are thinking about undergraduate you might want to take a look at Grove City College it has a Dr. Jeffrey Herbner is there Dr. Sean Rittenauer is there and also a great young GMU professor who is Austrian friendly Caleb Fuller and I apologize for not recalling his last name but someone I was able to meet when I visited a great guy a cadre of economists there that would give you an excellent environment to learn from so you can find the book at mises.org there's a little shopping cart at the top of mises.org we have a beautiful hardcover scholars edition which I believe with the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast comes down to only $20 and we have a really tiny print softcover edition which I think comes down to $10 or maybe even $5 forgive me for not recalling but it's a book that you, it's one of those books it's certainly one of those four or five like I have way too many books at home but it's one of those four or five that I think you want to own physically it just is it's the kind of book you want to scratch in you want to make notes, you want to go back you want to doggie or the pages but if you're a Kindle or EPUB kind of person then just go to mises.org keep in man economy state and you're going to pull up a beautiful HTML file edited by our great editor Judy Thomason and you can just skip ahead to wherever you want to be and it's really a fantastic book so we hope you'll read this book and go along with us because as was mentioned earlier during this week at Mises U somebody has to do the hard work and actually know what the hell they're talking about we can't all just live in a world of social media and platitudes and 140 characters it's very important if we are going to offer an alternative vision of society one that I think would be far more just and humane and fair that we also have the ideological or technical background to at least help defend that and so that's the idea the podcast here is for me to act as conduit between you and some of the great economists in our circles so we'll be back next week we will tear into how interest rates arise as one of the factors of production and we'll be moving through the book and it's going to make it a lot easier and more enjoyable for you to read along with us so all that said thank you for being a listener of the Human Action Podcast and have a great weekend, thanks Sean thank you The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org