 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, you have once again found the Human Action Podcast, and we're so glad that you've joined us. And as a reminder, you know, the purpose behind this podcast is to get people going to original sources. So many of us are sort of consuming information and news and social media, and we're listening to Jordan Peterson or somebody like that tell us about Kant. Well, why not go read Kant? And when it comes to Austrian economics, we want you to do the same thing. We want you to check out the original works of Mises of Manger of Hayek of Rothbard. And that's really what this podcast is all about. So we're hoping that we wet your appetite for some of these books. And people who have been listening the last few weeks know that we have gotten into some of the more obscure, perhaps underappreciated books by Mises. Some of his smaller books like bureaucracy, the anti-capitalistic mentality, the ultimate foundation of economic science. These are shorter, more discreet reads. So if you're not quite ready to tackle human action and spend the next 10 months of your life by your bedside, reading six pages of human action every day, you can read Mises and some of his smaller works. And that'll give you a tremendous taste for him. And so we hope you do that. Of course, if you go to our bookstore at Mises.org, use the code HAPOD. That's for Human Action Podcast, HAPOD. You'll get a discount on any of the books that we're talking about. So use that code, get the book. And of course, all these books are also available for free online at Mises.org. If you want to read them in PDF form or whatever. But today we're joined by a friend of ours, Matt McCaffrey. Matt is a former senior fellow here at the Mises Institute. He is also a professor in the UK at the University of Manchester. He got his PhD in economics from Guido Halsman at the University of Angers in France. And he also spent some time in Auburn getting his master's in economics from the program here at Auburn University. So he's someone we've known for a long time. And it's so great to talk to you, Matt. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm nip it in government. I mean, what a book. First of all, let's set some context. 1944, although he actually started writing it much earlier in 38. It's the same year that he released his bureaucracy. So Yale University Press, a very mainstream publishing house, releases both omnipotent government bureaucracy that year. Also the same year as Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Keich. So a big year. And of course, what's really different, Matt, now in the late 30s versus, let's say, when he wrote Nation-State and Economy in the late teens is that we've got World War II. We've got the Nazis. We have his experiences first fleeing to Switzerland and then a couple years after he starts writing this book to America. So that's really the backdrop against which this book is written. Yeah, that's correct. And in a way, it's not an exaggeration to say that Mises had, you know, almost a lifetime's worth of experiences between writing these two books, Nation-State and Economy and Omnipotent Government, experience on which he was able to draw in writing the second book. Because as you say, his whole life really had been taken away from him, what with the rise of Nazi power and eventually fleeing to, first to Switzerland and then to the United States. So it's an extraordinary year for publishing, so to speak, as you pointed out, but also a very significant one for Mises as well. Because by this point, he was firmly established in the United States and was beginning to try and put the pieces of his life back together again and to make a fresh start. And to that end was writing books like Bureaucracy and Omnipotent Government that he had been thinking about for a number of years as a way to once more, like he did at the end of the First World War, summarize all of the economic and the ideological conditions that had led to that particular moment in his life and also much more broadly in world history. So he was setting himself up with a task that I think was really important for him personally, but also very important ideologically and economically to explain some of these broader trends that had been dominating world affairs for the previous few decades. But when you say putting his life back together, I mean, we're talking about also his career and his own personal finances. This is a gentleman who's now, you know, older. He's in a new country, a new language without a lot of great career prospects and without a lot of money. I mean, these aren't pop books he's writing to put it mildly. Oh, that's absolutely the case. And I mean, of course, the most significant example of this relates to Mises developing human action, which was published a few years later in 1949. But these smaller books are no less examples in a way of the fact that even though he was at an advanced age at that point in his life, he really was still thinking in very serious terms about the development of his economic ideas and the development of his own version of liberalism and trying to use these to make sense of all of the chaotic events around him in the world. So unlike some other writers, it's not as if in his old age, he sort of drifted away from doing serious work to doing maybe more popular writing or something like that. He did a little bit of that in the United States, of course. But the bulk of his time was still spent in developing some very serious economic and philosophical ideas. So in that sense, some of these books are really tremendous achievements in the sense that he already was at a fairly advanced age when he had had to just discard his entire life up to that point and move to a totally new country where he didn't have any friends or allies and where he was really just starting from scratch. One thing about this book is he really shows his chops as an historian. I mean, the original working title in the late 1930s was The Way of the German People Toward National Socialism. So this book is very much a historical account of what he calls the fall of German liberalism. In other words, he writes a lot about Germany in all of his books. He really knows the history of old Germany, of German nobility. This is a historical work. That's correct. And in understanding it, I think it's important to acknowledge that it is a work of history as opposed to, say, a comprehensive treatise on economic theory or something in the vein of human action or of socialism or theory of money and credit. Like nation-state and economy, omnipotent government is a much more specific kind of study. And as you say, this one focuses on Germany. A good deal of nation-state and economy had addressed the former Austro-Hungarian empire. But now omnipotent government means this is very much focused on Germany and in explaining basically the rise of Nazi power. So the focus is much more explicit. But as you say, he does really demonstrate that he had read quite widely on a pretty extraordinary range of historical topics relating to Germany. And you can see that he's very much engaged with as much literature as he could be regarding German history and sort of the sociology of the German intellectuals and so on. And not just from friendly writers like other liberals, but also from many socialists, many Marxist writers as well. He displays a really wonderful command of quite a few literatures in that respect. So it's another small way in which I think the book is impressive. You know, we see these quotes from Mises really throughout his whole career. But again, in this book, he goes back to this idea that we have to understand history. If we don't understand history in context, we really don't understand not just the economic ills, but the political and social ills of our day. And in a sense, it's depressing, Matt, because somebody, the errors we read about in this book are being repeated ad nauseum today, for example. Yes, exactly. I mean, it's sort of a cliche when reading a historical book like this to say and, you know, we see parallels to what's going on in the world around us. But in this case, it really is true nonetheless. Mises is very much analyzing a lot of the same kind of ideological trends, a lot of the same kind of economic errors that we see coming back again and again in history. And in particular in the last few years in different forms, particularly the ideas relating to nationalism, to economic nationalism specifically, but also the other branches of nationalism and it's sort of other ideological implications. For instance, the Nazis views about all kinds of problems relating to things like race, and language, and nationality and so forth. Mises unpacks all of those, sometimes in great detail. And the more he does so, the more you start to hear those echoes from all kinds of other events and pundits around us today. Yeah, it's interesting is that this is probably his lengthiest and deepest treatment of the Nazis. And it would be, I'd like some of his critics who call him an illiberal or whatever they call him today. I'd like some of his critics maybe on the left to have a look at the particular section about national socialism in Germany and they might disabuse themselves that he was some sort of right-winger or in any way providing economic cover for Nazism. He's quite the opposite, in fact. And one thing I'd like to point out is that he really takes pains at the beginning of this book to make a distinction between Etihadism, statism, and nationalism. So why do we start there? Because with Mises we always got to understand our terms and our definitions. So talk about what he sees as a difference between statism, the total state, and nationalism. So one of the key themes of this book is the rise of what Mises calls Etihadism or perhaps statism. Mises has kind of a funny footnote where he says he doesn't like the then newly coined terms statism because he thinks it's too narrow in some historical respects. But the theme of the book is this Etihadism and the rise of, as the subtitle says, the total state and total war. And one of the things that Mises does in the book is look at the different branches of Etihadism and the different ways that it manifests. And so there's an interesting sort of family tree of these different ideologies. So for Mises, starting with Etihadism, which is the belief in what could ultimately be called undivided government that is an all embracing state with near absolute power over its particular geographical area. And the belief in this data is sort of the solution of all social and economic issues. This sort of very broad view gives birth to a number of different variations. And for Mises, the two real branches of Etihadism are socialism on the one hand and interventionism on the other. And he has a good deal of discussion in this book and then later in Human Action as well about exactly what the differences between socialism and interventionism are and sort of how they manifest in reality. But for both of these, related to both of these, is the question of nationalism. And for Mises, with interventionism in particular, there is a very close relationship with nationalism because interventionism tends to breed according to Mises' nationalist attitudes. And then nationalist attitudes then sort of feed back into economic policy and help promote further interventionism. So for Mises, nationalism in this sort of broad sense is the elevation of one's nation over the interests of one's nation, over the interests of other nations, and particularly this attitude of the idea of conflict between nations. The idea that to advance one's own interests, or the interests of one's own social group, requires doing damage to the interests of other social groups or other nations or what have you. So for Mises, this specific idea of conflict among nations is at the basis of what he calls nationalism. And this, as I said, is sort of a necessary implication of interventionism. And that relationship is one of the themes that he really develops throughout the whole book. So our listeners will understand what he means by socialism. And many of them have read the book. We covered the book earlier. So he's already given a very thorough account of what his conception of socialism is. But when he uses the term interventionism, he describes it as a third way or a halfway measure between capitalism and socialism. We've heard the term over the years like mixed economy. Do you think his definition of interventionism and the distinction between interventionism and full socialism, interventionism and full capitalism, do you think that's basically correct? Do you think it holds up today? Yes, I think it's useful. And particularly the definition of interventionism is one that I think will seem familiar to anybody who looks at current economic relations and economic policy. Because for me, it's the interventionist society is one in which many where nominally and on paper, a lot of the market economy is preserved or seems to be at least. Whereas the reality is that there is a significant degree of control over the economy over decisions about what entrepreneurs should produce and when and where and how and so forth. So it involves a lot of the same practical effects of socialism, but very often maintains at least this sort of veneer of private property in the division of labor and the market economy. So that I think is much more familiar to us today than say a strict definition of socialism as Mises employs it, which involves state ownership of the means of production, which is a situation that is extremely rare. You know, it's actually fairly rare just in history in general, but especially today, there aren't very many places that could be deemed to fit under this definition of socialism. Whereas practically all countries in one way or another fall under his definition of interventionism. So it's one is a distinction that I think is useful to make. And it helps us avoid falling into rhetorical traps where we begin to sort of describe everything as socialism that involves some kind of hampering of the market economy. So it's good to be careful with our language and having a notion like interventionism, I think helps us do that. But Matt, the problem is as libertarians, we fall into this trap of saying, you know, that's not real capitalism. Just like the lefties fall into the trap of saying, oh, Venezuela is not real socialism. So so if most countries actually aren't at either, you know, this poll of pure capitalism and this poll of pure actual state ownership, most countries, including the United States, which is considered this hyper capitalist bastion. If most countries, you know, have a lie somewhere in between in what Mises would we call interventionism. I'm not sure our friends on the left are buying it when we say no, no, no, that's not real capitalism. It's never been tried. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, it's a it's a very real and an important problem that we currently face. And as a way to answer it, one important thing that I think libertarians don't do enough is admit that maybe some of our pet cases and pet examples aren't actually as as good as we might like them to be. You know, we'd like to look around us and point to, you know, our newest phones and say, hey, look, the wonders of capitalism right there. But maybe that's not the best example. Maybe we can't always justify using these kinds of examples, or we should at least be a little more careful about how we how we use them. Because it is very easy to fall into this trap of, well, so called vulgar libertarianism and constantly pointing to everything that you like and saying, oh, look, the benefits of capitalism and pointed everything that you hated saying, oh, look, the problems of socialism. So I do think this is a problem. And I know my approach is less popular. But I really do think that we should take more care with how we use these things. Now, of course, one perfectly valid point that defenders of capitalism will bring up is that even a little bit of the market economy has been proven so many times to so effectively improve standards of living and our general human welfare. Whereas time and time again, only a little bit of socialism has proved so disastrous for human life and welfare. So that is a perfectly reasonable objection when it comes to this issue of saying, oh, well, it's never really been tried. So that's important to work out as well. But overall, once again, I tend to be a stickler for insisting that we should be as careful with our examples as we possibly can be so that we can avoid being caught out in some kind of trap where people say, you know, you say that this latest innovation is proof of the efficacy of free markets, but you admit that we don't have free markets. So how could you possibly make that argument? It's important to be as careful as possible to avoid those kind of traps. Well, so Mises also gets almost a little bogged down here in this idea of nationalism versus nationality. And he talks about this actually at some length in liberalism a couple of decades or 15 years earlier. But he comes back again and again to this idea of linguistic groups. And this seems to be a bit of a hang up for him. And do you think this is just because he's coming out of the patchwork of principalities and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and what Europe, even in the 1800s, looked like, which was recent memory for him? You know, because this seems to not matter very much in the West today. No one really, you know, a lot of people speak Spanish in America, in the U.S., South or Southwest. It doesn't really matter. But so talk about nationalism and nationality and his idea that linguistic groups will conflict with each other if they're sort of yoke together in an artificial nation. Okay, so this is one more very important theme for Mises in this book, as you point out. But to get at it, I would go back to something that we were discussing just a moment ago when we were saying that, unlike Mises's comprehensive theoretical works, this is a very specific historical study. And just like in nation-state and economy where Mises was trying to explain the economic and the ideological conditions that led to the First World War and so ended up explaining quite a few issues that were specific to the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this book, Mises is doing a very similar thing with the Nazis and with World War II and with the German-speaking world, essentially. So it rather than provide a sort of general theoretical account of the state and of war and so forth, Mises is being pretty specific. And so that's the reason why he talks about a lot of these issues relating to things like language and language groups is because they were a very specific part of the explanation of the rise of Nazi ideology and then more broadly nationalist ideology. So that's why Mises talks about this. He makes a very interesting comments in omnipotent government about the importance of language and of language groups. And in particular, he's focused on sort of the, what I'll call the kind of obsession with language groups and with defining nations as groups of common language speakers. So in omnipotent government, Mises is very critical of this idea. This for him was what is behind a lot of the German, the Nazi view of how to distinguish between different peoples and different races. The language one is Mises, he calls it arbitrary, but he points out that it was used quite commonly by the Germans and by the Nazis to distinguish the people that they wanted to include in their own nation versus the people that they wanted to exclude. So it's all part and parcel of explaining this much broader problem of the emergence of nationalism, the emergence of ideology, but Mises is pretty critical of this notion of defining nations based on common language groups. And he's emphatic that the problems of having groups within a particular nation of different language speakers has a lot to do with the institutional setup. And it has a lot to do with these questions about how we resolve conflicts and how we make choices about things like what languages are taught in schools, what languages are used in the press. For Mises, these are the fundamental questions about language that are very important. And as he points out, if you have different language groups within a particular state, it inevitably leads to a kind of conflict because inevitably there will be minorities who speak a different language who will be discriminated against. And so Mises mentions a series of examples, but a lot of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the various areas that the Nazis conquered would fall into this category. So again, this is one of the, in terms of economic policy, this is one of those broader themes that are informing what Mises is trying to say about this bigger question of where Nazi ideology came from in the first place. Sure. And I would say, well, in general, I think we would all agree that Europe is much better off today in terms of these suspicious or cloistered groups or linguistic conflict. But some of the problems he identified, as you say specifically, I mean, they did still crop up later in the 20th century. We can look at the former Yugoslavia, for example. I mean, there's still frictions here that I think he correctly identifies. But I think his prescription for these frictions is not Bellicose nationalism. Of course, of course, his prescription is a quality before the law and not discriminating against these different groups. But a part of making that argument is him also pointing out that it's really impossible to define nations adequately based on this sort of common language being spoken. As he says, that's an arbitrary way of distinguishing. And it's a way of thinking about the problem that was only ever really embraced by this one part of Europe. He provides a number of examples from around the world of countries or nations, linguistic groups that never thought of the nationality principle in this exact way. So once more, he's trying to get at some of these very specific tensions and also point out about how they relate to political institutions and how they relate to economic policy. Because for him, a lot of these problems emerge when you try to force different potentially different groups together under the law. For me, as a liberal, he didn't believe that there were any inherent tensions between, say, different language groups. But for him, the policies of interventionism are what create conflicts, what create a kind of a class war based on things like language distinctions. And so that's something that he was very, very critical of. Well, another thing this book gives us is a fairly robust sense of Misesi in free trade arguments. Protectionism is a big theme throughout this book, which he views as a symptom of aggressive nationalism. And there was this German concept, of course, this Nazi concept of Lebensraum, this settler colonialism where you don't go out and get resources through trade. You get resources through conquest, in effect. And that the German people ought to have some form of autarky. They ought to have enough resources. And if that if that requires annexing a few nearby countries, so be it, they ought to have enough resources to be this autarky. And so talk about his protectionism as a theme in this book. Yes, so protectionism is, in a way, the bridge between a lot of these different concepts and a lot of these different attempts to organize the economy in different ways, particularly along some the lines of some kind of state planning, because it's always protectionism for Misesi that incentivizes and that institutionalizes all of these different problems, whether it's sort of mercantilist ideas that lead to restrictive protectionist trade policies that hurt one country and damage another and help minorities in another country. Whatever the exact connection is, the theme is always the same, which is that it's protectionism that creates conflict between different groups, whether it's domestic or international, and it's protectionism that sets the stage and incentivizes all different types of political conflict, ultimately leading to war. So for Misesi protectionism and the rejection of laissez-faire and of laissez-passe, that that is behind these much broader ideological movements that inevitably led to the rise of Nazi power and then the Second World War. So for Misesi, the connection is always there. You can always find some kind of protectionism lurking beneath the surface that is actually motivating these other seemingly different types of ideological changes. So protectionism is perhaps a nasty or subtle form of war, but then there's outright war too, and Misesi talks about this. He uses this expression, total war, and by this he means war between peoples as opposed to the more limited wars of armies between armies in a monarchical era. So on the one hand, he's identifying democracy and liberalism as avenues towards a freer and better and more prosperous society, but he also identifies that under so-called democracy, under modern nation states, war has actually become more total than perhaps it was when someone didn't care as he puts it if they were ruled by the Habsburgs or the Bourbons. Right. Well, I think Misesi's view of democracy here would allow him to say that it was not in fact democratic states that produced total war, but states that were essentially interventionists that had been thoroughly co-opted by nationalist ideology and that had done away with all but maybe a few sort of nominal elements of democracy. That was his view of the situation at least. Mises was convinced that sort of minimal state form of democratic government was the only political option going forward. And as he does point out, which I think is perfectly true, when you look at a lot of the major combatants in World War II, they either didn't have very strong democratic elements or they abandoned them very quickly once the going got tough and adopted some type of system of war planning that enabled them to move towards total war, the total subservience of the economic system to the war planning effort. Now, you know, as libertarians looking at the problem today, we might disagree a bit with how Mises characterizes democratic decision making. But nevertheless, I think from within his own viewpoint, I think he was consistent in saying that really it wasn't the democratic process that resulted in total war, but rather this thoroughgoing nationalism integrated with domestic and then international interventionism. But Matt, let's be fair a little bit. I mean, this is literally a man of old Europe, a man born in the 1880s. So he didn't have all of our century and a half to get a little more jaded about democracy. It was still sort of a new concept, democratic voting, or at least mass democratic voting coming out of all the duchies and feudal parts of old Europe. Yeah, that's sort of my point is that for Mises, he was looking at things from the perspective of essentially a sort of a 19th century liberal who was very interested in getting rid of, you know, the older monarchical very hierarchical forms of government and replacing them with some type of self determination Self determination obviously is a very key concept in Mises's liberalism. So I do think that had he lived a little bit longer, I think he would have become a good deal more cynical about democratic governments. But that's that's not really sort of I would say his point in omnipotent government. What he really means that what matters I think most for this discussion is that what he was really getting at was self determination as a principle. So again, obviously, you know, contemporary libertarians could argue that democratic forms of government are not true self determination. But for Mises, that was the central issue. So I would say that that was probably have been less important for writing this book. Yeah. And again, we have a lot more hindsight than he had writing and then the 40 or the 30s. Yeah, you know, we've seen a lot of things that that Mises didn't know about or that couldn't have anticipated. He couldn't have anticipated. In fact, I think you look at the last part of this book a little bit when Mises talks about sort of the future and what will come after the Second World War. In some ways, you know, he really he didn't quite, he didn't get it right, you know, he did not all of his predictions about the kind of institutions that would arise after the war was over came true. And there were some things that he I think he didn't predict quite accurately, such as for example, the complete sort of collapse of formal Nazi ideology after the war. I think Mises, if you look at those last chapters, was convinced that like after the First World War, there was going to be this sort of Nazi party and hiding that was just waiting to start World War Three as soon as it got half a chance. But I think he was ended up being mistaken about that. So yes, the long story short, we do have hindsight and we do. We are able to see things that Mises wasn't able to at the time. Well, also he's writing this book without the certainty of the outcome of the war. Again, he starts writing this in 1938. And there's a few references to what he calls it this new war. So he doesn't know that the Nazis are going to lose. He doesn't know what's going to happen in France. He doesn't know what's going to happen in the South Pacific. Right. You can definitely see that parts of the book were written at different times. And some of them are, I think, a little more confident, the material that he was finishing at the end of 1943 or maybe the beginning of 1944. I think there are some passages where he is a little more confident and he seems to think that the destruction of the Third Reich is inevitable at that point because the fortunes of the war had taken a better turn for the allies than it did in the early years. But nevertheless, you're correct. I mean, there is this degree of uncertainty in what Mises is writing and also especially the uncertainty about exactly what the end of the war would look like, whether it would involve a negotiated peace or as became, you know, increasing the likely is the war on the total military destruction of the Third Reich. I think Mises couldn't quite see that when he was writing this book. He couldn't quite predict that that was the way it was going to go. Well, he has an interesting section towards the end of the book called Delusions of World Planning. And in this section he talks about, for instance, global trade agreements. He talks about concepts of world government, world trade authorities. And I have to say, maybe he doesn't completely contradict some of the things he said on that same topic in liberalism. But he sure sounds less enthusiastic about the prospects for some sort of international cooperation when it comes to either to trade protectionism or preventing wars. He sounds a little dubious, let's say. Yeah, in the early days, especially in the early interwar period, I think he was a lot more hopeful about the possibilities for the success of an organization like the League of Nations, or for various kind of trade agreements between countries that would sort of safeguard laissez faire and laissez passer and enable nations to deal more peacefully with each other. Definitely, by the time World War II rolls around, he was a lot more disillusioned about the possibility of, say, international organizations or trade agreements or what would you do to really achieve lasting peace? And I think the reason for that, which is discussed elsewhere in omnipotent government, is that he had, in the meantime, thought a lot more about these larger ideological issues. So something that comes up again and again toward the end of omnipotent government is this question about what to do when people emphatically reject liberalism, no matter what arguments you use, no matter what evidence they see when they just cling to itatism or to nationalism. And just in the face of all the evidence to the contrary to suggesting that those are not methods of political or economic organization that actually improve human well-being, that they destroy those things. What do you do in this case? And I think Mises was finding himself a little bit frustrated over this issue because he recognized that ideological change and the rejection of protectionism, nationalism and ultimately statism was the only way forward for people. But nevertheless, he recognized that that was not the situation that existed in the world around him. So he sort of, I think, struggles through discussing various alternative options that would hopefully keep the peace and prevent World War III even in a world of statism. So I think that's the central problem that he was struggling with is he was writing those last sections and trying to come up with a plan for the future. Matt, you know what I love about reading Mises is that you and I can have this conversation in relative comfort. But this is not an ivory tower guy. This is a guy who suffered personally because of illiberalism. He's not writing this in a vacuum. He had to flee his own country. He had some of his possessions dispossessed by the Nazis. He has to come to America with very little money, very few teaching prospects. I mean, he's not writing this from an ivory tower at all. No, no, as you say, he had a lot of practical experience. And, you know, even in the interwar period when he was working at the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna, he was dealing with in practice with a lot of the people whose arguments he would later criticize, whether they were politicians or economists or the socialists of the chair, as he likes to call them the those those socialist and nationalist intellectuals from the major German and Austrian universities. These were people that he was dealing with on a daily basis for a large part of his life. And in a sense, in that sense, he really was an insider. He wasn't looking at it, say, from the perspective that we do today, not only with the knowledge of history, but, you know, with a good deal of distance from these events. Now, he was very much a part of those events himself. You know, he witnessed all of this firsthand. And one interesting theme along those lines that he doesn't really discuss in a lot of his other writings, maybe it was too personal or something like that. But in omnipotent government, he spends an entire chapter discussing a wide range of issues relating to things like the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which is something that I think would have hit very, very close to home for him being Jewish. But this is one case where I think he had a lot of firsthand experience because he'd seen this himself. But he wasn't looking at it from the perspective of a detached academic who was just trying to understand what was going on in some very distant part of the world. Well, and as you mentioned, he actually has a chapter in this book discussing anti-Semitism, and he goes back to the Great War, the World War I, in which, of course, he fought as an Austro-Hungarian officer, an artillery officer. So he says that, you know, a lot of German nationalism is based, or coming out of World War I was based on this myth of German military superiority. So once the German citizenry found out that wasn't true towards the end of the war, and then, of course, the Versailles Treaty, which Germans found humiliating, that Jewishness and Jews emerged as a scapegoat. Something had to explain, you know, why they lost, and that some of the Nazi anti-Semitism has its roots in this need to explain World War I. Yeah, it's a very interesting discussion in the book when he talks about this. It's interesting that he traces the roots of the ideology of the Nazis further back in time and says that it was actually consistent with a lot of the nationalist sentiment and the militarist sentiment that had existed in Germany prior to the First World War, going all the way back to the 1870s and even earlier. But then, yes, as you point out, he pinpoints this moment when Germany suffers a crushing defeat in the First World War, and suddenly this whole mythology of German military superiority comes crashing down, and everyone is looking for a scapegoat. Everyone's looking for an excuse to explain how, well, the Germans hadn't really lost. They were winning or they were about to achieve total victory, but then they suffered this so-called stab in the back. And here, sadly, this is where the Jewish scapegoat comes from, and a big part of how this mythology was built up. As Mises chronicles in some of his historical reflections, of course anti-Semitism was nothing new in Germany or in Europe. But World War I and the defeat of Germany in that war created a necessity to identify some group, some interest who could be blamed for this. And as Mises points out, because of some historical conditions, it became very, very easy for that group to be the Jews. And so this ended up obviously having a tremendous impact on the way Germany developed in the interwar period and, of course, in Nazi ideology. In fact, Mises identifies one of the key distinguishing components of Nazism versus other types of nationalism or versus sort of fascism more broadly as anti-Semitism. So for him, I think it played a very crucial role. And so it's interesting to see him discuss this in omnipotent government because, as I said, he doesn't really talk about it a lot in his other writings, even though it must surely have been a very personal and important topic for him. Well, he also brings up the inability of German nobility to serve as any kind of bulwark. They actually succumb to Nazism. He talks about 1933 in particular. And he contrasts this with aristocratic classes in other countries like England, for example, where nobility had more success in business, in military strategy, in being officers, in being statesmen. So he basically characterizes German nobility as weak and malleable and in part responsible for not standing up to Hitler. That's absolutely correct. And he traces all of this back to the mid-19th century and the rise of liberalism and the desire of the then ruling classes to do anything they could to fight liberalism, to fight the principle of self-determination, retain their power. And as he chronicles through a series of historical periods, what the older aristocracy did was essentially look for any and every excuse that they could to prevent the realization of liberal principles in German politics. And it was this that led to a lot of the rise of Autotism and then of the particularly nationalist version of this that became so prominent in Germany and then eventually over time because of the First World War and other reasons morphed into Nazism. So it's part of this much larger process that Mises is identifying. And later, as you said, in the interwar period, a lot of these older groups, the older political parties were just completely unable to do anything to stop the rise of Nazism. Mises actually has an interesting passage where he says, you know, right now, during the war, everyone is asking, how could it have been the case that Nazism just triumphed overnight? Did everyone just suddenly change their opinions? And his answer is no, they didn't because people had already been imbued with much of Nazi ideology because of the early rise of nationalist sentiment and the obsession with protectionism, the obsession with the, as you say, the labors around the idea that Germany must expand and conquer if it's to obtain the resources it needs to survive. As Mises points out, a lot of this goes fairly far back in history and the Nazis were able to harness that and combine it with things like myths about anti-Semitism in order to create their own unique brand of nationalism and fascism. And it's this that ultimately the other parties and the other political forces in Germany weren't able to stop because people, in a sense, already agreed with a lot of basic Nazi ideas. And the other parties, as Mises emphasizes repeatedly, they didn't have an alternative program. They didn't have an explanation. The Nazis did. It was a completely false explanation. They had a totally bogus ideology and as well as ideas about economic policy, but they had something to offer, which none of the other groups in Germany did. And as a result of that, there's another reason why they were just utter failures in terms of stopping the spread of Nazism. So when you read this book, as with, let's say, the theory of money and credit, sometimes you read a sentence and you say, wow, that sentence could apply today. That sentence fits perfectly with the current political situation, the current economic situation, whatever it might be. Give us your pitch. What's Matt McCaffrey's pitch for why somebody should read this book in 2019? Why is it relevant today? Well, I think it's relevant because it gets most at a lot of the core ideas that drive political ideology even to this day. And if you read omnipotent government, you will see many references to the right to the left that will strike you as being very, very similar to what you see today. But it's especially about these, with Mises, a lot of the interesting material is in the broader implications of economic ideas because for Mises, these are in a sense, I don't want to say the driving force of history, that sounds too much like Marx, but they are very, very important for explaining historical events, the economic ideology. And so if you look at some of the ideas that Mises discusses in this book, ideas about the liberal, the rejection of the liberal notion of the harmony of interest between peoples, the rejection of that idea and embracing an idea of inevitable conflicts between peoples or between different groups or races or what have you. You look at a broad idea like that, and what Mises says about some of its historical origins, and you begin to see parallels between that and other ideas today, whether they're from the left or from the right, notions about dividing people, whether it's by language or by race or by some cultural characteristic, dividing different groups and then developing an ideology of conflict between them to explain why they must be at war with each other and why we must use protectionist economic policy or something else to enhance our own interest at the expense of these other groups with which we're locked in an inevitable battle to the death. These kind of very broad ideas are still very much at play in the world today. And so I think if you read a book like I'm never in government, you will begin to see this and to be able to draw some of these interesting parallels and understand that sadly there really isn't anything new under the sun, both the right and the left, love their ideologies of conflict, and they are united in a sense in their rejection of some of these liberal principles on which Mises based his life's work such as the idea that we do have a harmony of interests and that it really is each toward to our own benefit, as well as the benefit of others in the world to organize under peaceful social cooperation and what Mises emphasizes is really the international division of labor and the market economy. Well, Matt, I want to wrap this up with a really interesting anecdote for some of our listeners and I had to actually jar your memory a little bit this morning. But so your grandfather, the late Neil McAvery Jr. was of course the head publisher and owner of Arlington House books, which at one point employed Lou Rockwell and Lou served in part as one of Mises's editors there. So in 1969, 25 years after this book came out, originally published by Yale University Press, Arlington House published it. So you have a family connection to this book. In fact, the copy I'm holding here that used to belong to Bettina Graves was actually an Arlington House copy. So what do you think of that? And well, what do you know of your grandfather in Arlington House? A very important man, by the way. Yeah, well, my grandfather was, I think in his own way, very influential in publishing in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and so on. He was friends with and acquainted with a lot of people sort of in and around the libertarian movement. He wasn't a libertarian himself, really. He was more sort of an old right conservative type, but he had some libertarian sympathies and those amongst other things were what led him to take an interest in Mises's work and to encourage the republication of several of Mises's books. And he was also friends with people like Murray Rothbard. In fact, they ended up passing away within a relatively short time of each other. So he was someone I really only knew as a child because I was about 10 years old when he passed away. But he had, I think, a very positive influence on economics and on sort of contemporary liberalism or libertarianism through some of his republishing efforts. And so for that, I think, I at least am very grateful for that because he was one of those people, those relatively few people who kept the Mises banner flying in some of those dark years when there weren't a lot of people around who supported Mises or his ideas or who were willing to republish some of his books like that. So I at least am very grateful to him for that. Well, and we'll finish on that note. And also, let's remember that you never know the seeds we plant today in people's heads like Neil McCaffrey Jr. was planting back in the 50s and 60s, may bear fruit half a century from now in ways we can't know. So it really is to his credit that he kept the flame of Mises alive during those years when Mises first came to America. So Matt McCaffrey, I want to thank you for your time. And, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to encourage you to check out this book for free. I'm nipping in government at our website, Mises.org, or go to our bookstore and enter the code H-A-P-O-D for Human Action Podcast and get a copy of it. Very, very cheap. So, Matt, great to talk to you. Thanks a million. Great. Thank you very much. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and on Mises.org. 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