 This weekend, our guest is none other than our old friend Tom Woods. Tom was recently here at the Mises Institute during our Mises U Week, and he gave a great talk not only about his own development as a libertarian, but also about the role the Mises Institute and Mises University played in that development. So if you'll allow us, we'll toot our own horn a bit this weekend and welcome Tom Woods talking about Mises University. Alright, well, thanks everybody. I have a couple of stories I have to start with before I do that. Everybody has one of these just about, one of these devices, so I'd like you to take these out, make sure they're turned on, turn them on, and I want you to text the word Liberty to 33444, and I'm going to send you a free book while you're sitting there. This book is called 14 Hard Questions for Libertarians Answered, and it covers, it has Bob Murphy in it talking about law, talking about defense, has Walter Block talking about the environment, has Jeff Herbiner talking about what would we do after we get rid of the Fed. We have chapters on banking, on drugs, on sweatshops, all the sorts of things you get nailed on by your friends all in there, and you get it for nothing while you're sitting here. That's just a miracle to me. That's awesome. Alright, anyway, let me say some hello's here because apparently my wife and children are watching on the live stream. I just found out while I was sitting here over where Jeff Deist is, they said they could see me, so I tried to look professional and decent for them in my t-shirt. So that brings me to my story, why am I not wearing a proper dress shirt? I know you're not necessarily wanting to know the answer, but it actually is a very interesting answer. I am what Pat Barnett has called the reverse mystery speaker in that everybody knew I was going to be speaking except me. On my way to the institute yesterday, I got a telephone call asking if I would do it, and very, very shortly thereafter I looked at the schedule of me's issue and I was on the schedule already and I thought, could she really have had time to change the schedule after I said yes? So I had this funny feeling, the schedule came first and the asking of the question came second, that's perfectly fine. But all the same, what happened to me was I had a lot of family things going on. I felt like I needed to be with the family this week, even though this is my favorite week of the year and it absolutely killed me not to be here. And especially thanks a lot, the social media people at Mises giving me photos of the event all week long and video of the chess thing and I'm just dying. Oh my gosh, you got to be kidding me. Well, my wife, so appreciative of the various sacrifices that I made more or less without fanfare, I didn't whine about it constantly, surprised me. The other day she more or less pulled me out of my office. I was in the, I was just finishing up episode 453 of the Tom Wood Show, which you can subscribe to on iTunes of course. And she said, we're going somewhere and you're getting in the car and we're going, all the kids were in the car. She said, it's an early birthday because I'm going to be out of town on my birthday oddly enough, so it's an early birthday lunch. It's a special lunch in Kansas City. Well, we live in Topeka, Kansas, so it seemed entirely plausible that we would have a lunch in Kansas City because that's the only place anything of interest ever happens. I mean, if I, if I want mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, we can stick around in Topeka, but we got to go to Kansas City for anything else, so off we went. And as we're going and I'm thinking we're going for some lunch, we get to about 20 minutes of the airport and she hands me the itinerary for my trip and says, this is actually your present. We're not going for lunch, she's taking me to the airport because she made arrangements for me to come here for the tail end of this. And it, she got me a rental car and the hotel all set up. It's the most astonishing thing you can imagine that, that happened. She's just extraordinary. And she knew how much it means to me to be here and how, how weird it was for me not to be here. So what about the dress shirt? Well, I have, I have dozens of dress shirts and they all need to go to the cleaners. I have them all laundered. So I got them in a corner of the closet that she doesn't know about. So as far as she knows, I have no dress shirts available. So she packed for me the best she could because of course I had, I need clothes so she packed me a suitcase and I could have gone to the store to get a dress shirt for this. But going to the store would have meant half an hour not here at the Mises Institute. And to me, I'd rather look like an idiot and, and be here at the Mises Institute than wait, than spend the time. All right, so there you go. I'm just going to say a few little, a few little things today about, about this program that I myself went through beginning in 1993. That was the first time I was here upstairs in the research wing. I'm pretty sure they still have the group photos of all of us from those years and earlier. And you can see me in those pictures, in 93, 94. And then in 95, I was actually one of the first summer fellows of the Institute. And you can see me there. And I have got the mo, now I need a haircut. And my wife's been trying to get me to get a haircut this week because she knew I was coming. I kept saying I'm too busy. Well, anyway, you think this is bad. You should see the 80s haircut that's staring in the face in 1995 in these pictures, right? It's not pleasant to recall. But what is pleasant to recall is the overall experience that I had here. The Mises Institute saved me from moderate GOPdom. And I owe them a lot for that. What kind of a fate is that for any, any person to be a moderate Republican? So I was bad on everything. I mean, you name it, I was terrible on it. It really is true. It really, really is true. The old Joe Sobren adage that, you know, the liberal, the left liberal favors intervention domestically and the conservative favors it overseas. And the moderate favors intervention both domestically and overseas. That makes you a moderate. But if you favor none of this intervention, you're an extremist. So there's where the Mises Institute took me step by step. But thank goodness. Oh, when I think back to the stupid things I used to believe, but this is why I can talk to people so easily who still hold the kind of views I held in the late 80s, early 90s. Because I wasn't an idiot. I just wasn't frankly creative enough to think outside the constraints of American politics. You're either Rush Limbaugh or you're, well, this is a little bit of an anachronism, or you're Rachel Maddow. But there's no third thing. But the Mises Institute taught me that there is a third thing. And I've been very happily part of that third thing for quite some time. Now what I cherish about the Mises Institute is of course it's not just what I learned here, but that's very important. But it's also the friendships that I've made. I've made friendships with students. I've made friendships with the faculty. And even with the very chairman of the Mises Institute, and I don't even know if he'll remember this, but it was 20 years ago this year that I spent the summer at the Mises Institute. And during that summer, my grandfather, whom I was very close to, was extremely ill. And it looked as if basically he was on his deathbed. And I wasn't gonna be returning until maybe the middle of August. And the doctors were saying he was desperately hanging on because he wanted to see me one last time. And he wasn't sure he was gonna make it that long. So Lou Rockwell stuck his hand in his own pocket to pay to fly me back to see my grandfather one last time before he died. Now there are a lot of think tank presidents who ride around in limousines, and that's where your donation money goes. But here you have people who believe deeply in this mission. You have institutions out there that I won't name that exist for the sake of existing. They raise money for the sake of raising money. But none of that is true of the Mises Institute. Now having spent some time here and having gone through this program, I can tell you that I know the feeling that you're having right now, absolute exhaustion. But at the same time, you think I wouldn't change a thing. I'm glad to be exhausted because I spent this week learning fascinating things from wonderful people and making friends from all over the world in Auburn, Alabama. It's amazing. Sometimes you wonder how your life takes the turns that it takes, but what an extraordinary wonderful thing this is. Now I had the great fortune of being at Mises University while Murray Rothbard was still alive. He passed away in January of a bigger part of 1995. So I got to meet him four or five times. And I'm pretty sure on YouTube, somewhere or other, you can hear me telling Rothbard stories. I don't have that many. I wish I had more, but they're all super great. And if you ask me later, we can gather around and I'll tell them to you, but as I say, they are probably on YouTube somewhere. But I remember the introductions of the faculty on that opening night. And the faculty would be introduced in alphabetical order except Rothbard. He was in a class of his own. And he would be introduced separately and everyone stood up for him. In an age where there was no internet, there was no YouTube, people knew about Rothbard because they somehow stumbled upon his books. They dug up his work and they loved him. And he was so wonderful to talk to and he didn't wanna stop talking. And even though I was some kid, 21 year old kid, completely beneath him in every way, he spent inordinate amounts of time talking to me and very interested in what I was working on and very generous. I even remember a time when I wrote him a letter almost daring him because I had heard that Rothbard will write back to you if you're right to him. So I thought, well, I'm gonna test this theory. What have I got to lose? So I wrote him a letter saying that I was interested in this pamphlet that he kept referring to from the 1960s by Robert LeFave on the subject of the Cold War and being non-interventionist during the Cold War. I found that very interesting, but there's nowhere you can find a pamphlet like this. So Rothbard writes me a letter back and sends me two copies of this pamphlet. And I thought, okay, how does he, first of all, I don't know how he had time to do the things that he did anyway. Again, that he did with no modern research techniques, no internet, nothing on a regular typewriter. Then he writes all these letters and then the fact that he sent me this precious pamphlet, that this pamphlet is now immortalized because Murray Polner and I published it in a book published by Basic Books, which is a huge publisher. My anti-war anthology, We Who Dared to Say No to War, now has that pamphlet in there published because Rothbard took the time to write to me. You know, that's, I had no right to expect that, but sure enough, you're right to Rothbard, he writes back to you. I don't think it works anymore, but what's interesting is, what's interesting is even though he died in 1995, the books though did keep coming. The books from Rothbard's pen kept on coming year after year, collections of his articles, his history of economic thought that we only got two volumes of before he passed away. The book that had been a manuscript form for a long time and never quite made it on the betrayal of the American right, which I wrote the forward or the introduction to came out later, which made me say that there are a lot of professors who only wish they could be as productive as a dead Murray Rothbard, indeed. Now when we talk about economics, people think we must be obsessed with money. That's what they think. A lot of average Americans think it's money. We just love money. Well, you know, who doesn't like money? But that is not what motivates us. And this puts me in mind of an insight of a friend of mine that progressives understand us far less than we understand them. Like, I mean, we may not agree with them, but we have a basic idea of what their program is. They don't seem to have the slightest idea what motivates us or who we are. We say one thing and it comes out in their ears as another. We say hello and it comes out to them as I hate the poor. I don't know quite how that happens. So you say economics and they hear greed. There's a blockage. I can't seem to get this across. And it turns out that really when you think about it, that's not what really interests us. What we're fascinated by is not money, but social cooperation. That's what we find so interesting. How is it possible that we can understand in a household with three people in it, how people can cooperate and accomplish their goals? But it's much more difficult to understand how it's possible for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people to implicitly be cooperating in a worldwide division of labor to produce goods that keep everybody alive without anybody being in charge of the whole thing and barking out commands to people. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing and we have no right to expect that that just happens automatically. How does that happen? That's what we're fascinated by. And once you get to that point, I think you get to a point where you wanna know how else can we imagine society running itself? We know that we can produce goods without these people interfering, but do we need violent intervention to prevent so-called monopoly? Do we need it to provide public goods? Whatever, once we've gotten that taste of how society can be run on its own, we begin to look for ways other problems can be solved on their own without the state's involvement. And before you know it, we've built up this elegant edifice, not just of theory, but also of many, many empirical examples of how intractable problems can in fact be solved without coercion. When Rothbard wrote Man Economy and State, he used a very detached scientific idiom. You'll notice that he's not in any way speaking the way he would speak if he were reviewing a James Bond movie or giving a speech to a group of people. He wrote it in the kind of language that a scientist would use, but even in that mode, Rothbard could not resist using words like beautiful to describe the order that we see in the market economy, that we can have this incredible latticework of stages of production, again, all over the world, and it all works out without shortages or surpluses with no guy with a bullhorn running it. He says, this is a beautiful thing, the way it operates on its own. Now, of course, we're supposed to be naive for believing that, but it's not at all naive to think that one guy issuing commands might be a good system. That's not naive, but our view is naive. I still am fond, even though I've talked about it a million times, we've all heard it a million times, but I'm still fond of eye pencil, because I do think there are a lot of really great insights in eye pencil. The old story I've told from the point of view of the pencil and how difficult it is to build a pencil, because when you think about it, it's not just a matter of taking a few things and gluing them together. It's where do you get the glue? And what are the different inputs into glue? And how do you get those? And where does the wood come from? And what do you saw the tree with? And where does that material come from? And there are all these different stages that no one could possibly be able to do. No one could possibly know how to do them all. And yet somehow it all comes together. So in my own capacity as a father, by the way, I'm trying to instill into my five children this sense of wonder that I have when I go to the store, for instance, and it's full of things. Now it's not like things on the shelf is all that life is about, but when my kid is sick and I can go get medicine at three in the morning, I'd say that's an advance. There's nothing wrong with, and by the way, for people who say, material things don't make you happy, that's not where happiness comes from. Okay, I understand that if I go out and buy a vaporizer and a new hat, that's probably not gonna be the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. But on the other hand, although money can't buy you a true friend and so on and on, it can buy you a refrigerator and preserve your food. It can allow you to travel to Auburn, Alabama and meet all these wonderful people. So I mean, for people who say, oh, money doesn't make you happy, well then, your people are impossible to please. What are you talking about? Look at all the options that are available to me now. Anyway, I mean, I have the services of the greatest chefs in the world if I so choose, and apparently that's not gonna make me happy while I'm telling you, it makes me super happy. I am super happy. But anyway, I have this sense of wonder when I imagine, think of all the things that had to happen for these things to be available for me, and they're available for the equivalent of 10 minutes of my labor. And I teach my kids this. Now one way I've done that, by the way, is with the help of those Tuttle Twins books that you see out there, tomwoods.com slash twins for people who are online and can't see them out there. It's a series of children's books trying to get, so that one of them is connected to the eye pencil story and it teaches it to children so that they'll have this sense of wonder. The next book in that series, by the way, is gonna be The Tuttle Twins and The Creature from Jekyll Island. Yeah, so much for your innocent childhood. We're gonna teach you about the Fed right now, okay? So much for your happiness, it's all gone. And I wanna add to this an insight from Gustav de Molinari. I want to know who the geeks are in the, not geeks, I suppose, nerds, let me be precise, who the nerds are in the room. How many of you know by show of hands the name Gustav de Molinari? Oh my gosh, that is scary. That's great. All right, well for those of you who don't, welcome to nerddom. I'm going to tell you who Gustav de Molinari was. He's a 19th century writer who wrote, according to Rothbard, was really a trailblazer in the idea of a stateless society because he wrote a famous essay on the private production of security. And in that essay, he points out that there are economic laws that we observe. And he goes through what some of these economic laws might be, and one of them for him was that when you have a system of free competition, you have lower prices, more consumer satisfaction than you would have otherwise. And he says, now, the laws of economics that we observe seem to be akin to the natural laws of the physical world, to the law of gravitation, for example. They seem to admit of no exceptions. And given that they seem to admit of no exceptions, they probably admit of no exceptions. So why do we make an exception for the production of security? So let me read you this one passage. He says, it offends reason to believe that a well-established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and always or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law of gravitation, which governs the physical world, is ever suspended in any instance or at any point of the universe. Now, I consider economic laws comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed, they admit of no exceptions. But if this is the case, the production of security should not be removed from the jurisdiction of free competition. And if it is removed, society as a whole suffers a loss. Either this is logical and true, or else the principles on which economic science is based are invalid. Wow, that is pretty hard core stuff coming from Gustav de Molinari. And by the way, some of you may know, I've been working on the Ron Paul home school curriculum. In my government course, the students learn about Gustav de Molinari. I think that's unusual in a government course. I haven't checked them all, but I think it's a good reason to believe that that doesn't typically happen. So he identifies this, and this is why we all think this way. It's not that we're naive. It's that there's a beautiful elegance to the idea that things run on their own. And so until you can definitively show me that they don't, this is my worldview. And yet most people have the opposite worldview. They don't in any way need to be persuaded or it takes two minutes to persuade them that coercion is necessary. And they go ahead and repeat the same old shibboleths over and over and over again. And what you're learning at the Mises Institute is exactly the opposite. The research that's done here is of the greatest importance. The quarterly journal of Austrian economics keeps the discipline moving. And so the Mises Institute is not just doing educational conferences for students, which is important, or popular conferences and popular publications for the general public, but is also advancing Austrian economics as a field in ways that are cutting edge and thrilling. The Mises Institute was pinpointing the Federal Reserve as a crucial ingredient in understanding the economic problems that we experienced long before that had become fashionable. And this is a problem that we see both among so-called free market economists and among progressives, neither of which really wanted to talk about the Federal Reserve until we forced them to. So you have plenty of free market economists who will find every problem in the world, but no mention of the Fed. You can find progressives. And as a matter of fact, I found one just the other day in my last night in my hotel, in my Facebook feed. I should have just gone to sleep, stupid me. Looking through my feed and I get this stupid image in my head and it's keeping me awake because I'm thinking of responses. But it's this image from one of these occupy groups. And they're saying, they're responding to a very typical kind of free market argument. Typical free market argument would be if the minimum wage goes up, prices are gonna go up too, so quit bothering with the minimum wage. And they came back with, well, prices have been going up year after year, even though the minimum wage hasn't been going up. So you can't blame the minimum wage. And then they said, maybe we could blame corporate greed. Corporate greed. For every single price in the economy going up, they wanna blame corporate greed. All right, I'm actually gonna pause and refute that for you. I know by the end of this week, you know how to refute it, but let's just think about this. Let's imagine you have an economy where one good is produced by a greedy corporation. And through corporate greed, they can just arbitrarily set the price. And by the way, if corporate greed, why haven't they set all prices at $1,000 a unit? If corporate greed can just arbitrarily raise all the prices to arbitrary levels. All right, anyway, suppose you got one industry, it's corporate greed, the prices have gone up. All right, well, I'll be able to afford less of that good, right? Let's say I still buy one unit of that good, I have less money to spend on other goods. And that's gonna put downward pressure on the prices of the other goods. So on balance, it's a wash. If I'm spending more on this thing, like let's say it's gasoline, like I gotta get around, you know, I gotta drive my car, so I'll pay. But now I have less money to buy, you know, rutabagas. So the price of rutabagas will go down. So there's no overall rise in prices. So likewise, I mean, if you have three goods that are produced by greedy corporate, okay, that gets more expensive, I have less money to buy other things. So what could possibly make all prices go up simultaneously? Only an increase in the supply of money. And it ain't corporate greed doing that. It's a particular institution that you would think progressives who are supposed to believe in questioning authority would be all over. They would be talking about this thing forever. But you almost never, not quite never, but almost never hear them talk about the Federal Reserve. Except to say that you're a crank for thinking there's something wrong with it. But their whole slogan is question authority. Here's the most important economic authority in America, and they're going do do do, corporate greed, do do do. So that's another reason that what's going on at the Mises Institute is so important, that we're cutting through this silence, this self-imposed silence on such an important topic. And it's a confusion too. Because it was Richard Posner, who's sometimes, I think he's called a libertarian by some people. And he wrote a book on the financial crisis and he's blaming it on laissez-faire. And somebody said to him, but don't you see that the Federal Reserve had a role to play? And you know, and he was saying capitalism caused the crisis. But people said, what about the Federal Reserve? He said, well, the Federal Reserve is part of capitalism. Well, then now we're just arguing about stupid definitions. But how helpful is that? But finally, we cut through. You can't understand boom and bust if you don't talk about the Federal Reserve, the central bank. Well, in any case, I truly cherish my experiences here. Again, not just for the friendships, not just for the hospitality, the things I learned opened up just so many doors for me, both opportunities and just intellectually for the sheer intellectual pleasure of it. But for instance, in 2009, when I wrote a book on the financial crisis called Meltdown, I couldn't have done that if I hadn't had the training I got from the Mises Institute, because they were saying, you got to produce that book in three weeks. By the way, you're the first audience I've ever admitted that to. I was given three weeks to write Meltdown. And they said, because everybody's gonna write a book on the financial crisis. So you have to be the first one or not out at all. And we will rush the book out for you. So we made a compromise and I wrote it in four weeks. You can see I drive a hard bargain. And that book did quite well. And it helped to get the word out about these sorts of topics. I mean, mainstream radio was talking about the Federal Reserve. Okay, there's no way I could have done that that fast and therefore it wouldn't have been done at all if it hadn't been for the Mises Institute. There's no way I could, I would be doing the things I do today if it hadn't been for the Mises Institute. They are what, when I left that Mises University, I said, this is the truth and I wanted to vote myself to it. I wouldn't necessarily have done that otherwise. And now this is all I do. Like it's almost ridiculous. I've got 453 podcast episodes, somebody stop me. Like this is getting, who can listen to all that? I don't know, people do apparently. That's super, I'm glad. But as you leave here, think of ways you can help the Mises Institute. You know that old expression? You gotta give back to society. And I thought, I didn't take anything from society. Why do I have to give it back? All right, maybe that guy's car. But other than that, I don't have anything to give back. I didn't take anything. But you kind of did take a little something from the Mises Institute, right? I mean like food and shelter and all these awesome people and the materials and everything. So I'm not trying to guilt you about that. I mean, we told you it was gonna be free. All you have to do is listen to this one guilt inducing talk and that's the only thing you have to pay. But as you think about that, think of ways you can help. And it can be simple ways. Follow the Mises Institute on Facebook and like every single post. Because the more likes you get, the more other people will get to see. It's the Facebook algorithm. The more likes a post gets, the more widespread that post becomes. Little things like that. Retweet everything from the Mises Institute's Twitter account. I mean, they've just doubled their followers on Twitter and Facebook. Let's double it again. That's a simple thing you can do. You can tell people about the Mises Institute. You can tell all about the wonderful times you had. You can share the YouTubes. You can someday, when you're super wealthy, you can donate to the Mises Institute. You can support. And by the way, I'm not on salary here or anything. So I'm saying this because I believe in it. Like there is nowhere on earth I would rather be than in this building right now at this particular event. Think of ways you can help because after a week here, you know how great it is, how important what's going on here is. And you also remember the thrill that you had as you were first encountering these ideas. Well, help other people have that thrill too. Don't keep it to yourselves. Help them to have it too by helping and supporting the Mises Institute and remembering and cherishing the time you had here this week. Thank you very much.