 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. We've been on a bit of a hiatus, but we are back. We're going to be doing shows on a number of books in the coming weeks and months, including a multi-part show that we're going to work our way through human action with a couple different scholars. And I think you're really going to enjoy that, especially if you have not had an opportunity to tackle that book already. Our show might make it easier for you. But this week, we are happy to be joined for the first time by our great friend in New Orleans at Loyola, Dr. Walter Block. And we haven't spoken to him on the show before, so Walter, it is great to hear from you. Thanks for having me on your show. It's always a pleasure. And of course, I'm allowed to call him Walter, but the rest of you can call him Dr. Block as it goes. Now, as I mentioned to you off air, Dr. Block, our subject is Henry Haslett. And we want to talk a little bit about his great book, Economics in One Lesson, which of course he is perhaps most widely known for, but he had absolutely prolific career otherwise. By way of background people, anyone listening to the show who has not yet read Economics in One Lesson, you need to rush out and get it. We have a copy available at the Mises Institute. Unfortunately, we do not own the copyright to this book. It is owned by a major publishing house who shall go unnamed for purposes of the show. But we have paid them to print our own version of it. There are PDFs out there online illicitly floating around. We sell an inexpensive paperback copy. But also, as I hope many of you know, we are re-releasing another hardback Mises Institute copy later this fall. We had a great fundraising kick for it. We're going to be using this book as a giveaway. We are not going to include it for sale as inventory in our bookstore. We are going to give it away due to an excellent arrangement with a particular house. We were able to get our costs down for a very nice hardcover down below $2. So it's going to be an absolutely great tool as a giveaway. And as I mentioned, if anybody hasn't read it, I mean, really, this is one of the very first economics books I ever read. I had the good fortune to stumble across it in undergraduate 25, 28 years ago. It's a very, very, very well-written and straightforward book. It really has led us best. It is comprised of very short chapters, each of which tackle a particular issue. For example, rent control, minimum wage, etc. And what's so beautiful about it is other than a couple of introductory chapters about the big lessons, the big picture in economics, the rest of the chapters really read well as stand-alones, even if someone hasn't read it chronologically. So you could give them to a friend or family member and say, hey, read the chapter about rent control. So it is a fantastic book. It came out in 1946. Hazlet was born at the end of the 1800s. We'll get into some of his bio here in a bit with Dr. Block. But it was written in 1946, which was actually a time where, although we don't think of it this way, it was actually a very tough time in academia during World War II in America. And a lot of academia was still enthralled to communism. It saw socialism as inevitable and scientific. In the 30s and 40s were not particularly good eras for free market thinking in the West or in the U.S. in particular. But in 44, Hayek releases The Road to Serfdom, which Henry has it reviewed for The New York Times. And also in 44, Mises releases Unipotent Government and Bureaucracy. And then just a couple years later, Hazlet releases his own book. So it's a really fantastic read. You have to read it. You have to get it. You have to own this book. It's not good enough to just have this book via PDF or an e-book. So this is one of those books. This is one of those five or 10 that you have to own physically. And we're going to make it available to you free because we want to get this book out of there. We're going to get about 50,000 of these books this fall and make a huge campaign with it. So with all that as background, Walter, I want to start out by saying, you know, you wrote an introduction to this book for a version of the Mises Institute released about 10 years ago. And I think you wrote it in 2007. So tell us a little bit about that. Well, before I do that, I'm a professor. I'm never supposed to answer direct questions. I want to attack you for damning this book with faint praise, Jeff. Your economies toward this book were pathetic. This is a magnificent book. And Jeff underestimated the importance of it. I'm just kidding, of course. I was privileged to do an interview about the book. And it came out as a forward of the book. And I'm just delighted with the book. My own two books, Defending the Undefendable One and Two, were sort of modeled after it, what they both have in common. When I say what they both have in common, it sort of reminds me of the joke. There's an elephant and a mouse. And the elephant and the mouse go over a bridge and they make the bridge sway. And the mouse says, well, we made the bridge sway. Well, on the mouse, Henry Haslett is the elephant. Henry Haslett, this book is terrific. It's the best introduction to economics. And I was privileged and honored to do an interview on it, which became a forward to it. And what I said was that my own books were an homage to this. What they have in common is they each offer a general principle and then they'll 30, 35 different instances of it. And in the case of Henry Haslett, what he said is, when we look at economic issues, let's not just look at the immediate effects on some people, but rather let's look at the long-term effects also on all people. And then he gave 30, 35 instances of it, among which are free trade, minimum wage, rent control and just the three dozen other instances of it. So I emphasize the generality of it and also the particularity of it, namely the generality of these two major principles of economics, namely looking at any given public policy or economic law and enactment, not just for one or a few people, but for everyone and not just for right now, what's going to happen next day, next week, next month, next year. So I can't say enough about this book. It is a magnificent book. And of course, he's borrowing that concept in part from Bastiat's concept of the scene and the unseen. Why do you think we still struggle with that so much today? People can look at, let's say, a government-funded housing complex and say, well, Jeff, the federal government took some taxpayer money and built these houses and they weren't there before. And now some people live in them, they have homes. Maybe they didn't have homes before. That's very tangible. That's a good thing, Jeff. Why don't you support that? Right. And you're certainly right that, look, we all stand on the shoulders of other people who came before us without any exception. Even Mises and Rothbard stood on the shoulders of people who came before them. And you can't say too much about Mises and Rothbard. And certainly Henry Haslitz stood on the shoulders of Bastiat with the scene and the unseen. And this is one of the main reasons why it's so difficult to espouse and convince people of the merits of the Friana price system because they see a government housing project and it's new and it's gleaming. They don't see it 10 years later when it's got rats in it and has to be knocked down like Pruitt-Igo houses in St. Louis. They don't see that. They see the new house. But what they don't see, the unseen, is all the things that could have been built had those public housing projects not been built. They don't see the toasters and the air conditioners and the shoes and maybe the airplanes and the boats or whatever. They don't see that. All they do is they see what the government gave them. And people, what's that expression? Who are you going to believe in me or your lying eyes? Well, of course, your eyes will see the public housing or they see the bridge or the tunnel or the public library that the government built. They say, what they do? Government is great. Look what they just did. Isn't that nice? And it's easy to see things with your own lying eyes. I'm kidding about lying eyes. With your own eyes, you can see it. Whereas you never see or even think without the help of Henry Haslett about the other things that could have been built. So it's not a question of, isn't public housing great? Isn't a public library or a university great? The question is, which is greater? The thing that the government did or the thing that we would have done had we been free to do whatever we wanted to do. And the assumption that the government is better is that they know best how to spend our money and our behalf, which is a little silly because most people realize when push comes to shove that they know their own best interests a lot better than someone in Washington, D.C. does and they'd just be happy to spend their own money the way they want it, spend it maybe on a rowboat or a house or whatever it is instead of a public work. And of course, when he talks about looking at the effects of a particular policy over the long run on everyone, he's also tangentially introducing, I think, the idea of time preference. Oh yes, certainly time preference is crucially important. The idea here is that we all have a certain rate of time preference. Some people look for immediate gratification right away and other people have a much longer time horizon. And we should each, and I'm not saying that a long time horizon is better than a short run immediate one. I'm just saying it's sort of like vanilla versus chocolate ice cream. They goose the best non-dispute tandem in case there is no disputing. So if people are impatient for immediate gratification and the government builds a long-term highway or a bridge or tunnel or whatever, their time preferences will not be taken into account. On the other hand, if the government gives breakfast for kids in school, which is an immediate benefit, what about people who have a longer time preference? They can't be met. So in the market, everyone's desires can be met because the market caters to everyone. But when we pool our money through government and forget about the fact that, you know, for every dollar we send to Washington, we get, I don't know, 10, 20 cents worth out of them because most of it goes, is wasteful in transfers and in people lining politicians' pockets. I just heard that Obama bought a $15 million house and if you look at all of the income that he made and he was always on the government payroll, a $15 million house is hard to justify. And also if you ask which of the richest counties in the U.S., I think seven or eight out of 10 of the richest counties are all clustered around Washington, D.C. So there's a lot of money that gets left in Washington, D.C. when people all over the country send money there and then the money comes back. Well, a lot of it doesn't come back. So I think whether it's in terms of time preference or in terms of just desires for goods, government expenditures of disaster and Henry Haslitt's better than pretty much anyone else points that out. But put on your hazard cap for a moment. What do you think he'd say today? In other words, some of these fallacies that he just absolutely demolishes in such plain language in this book, the broken window fallacy, the scene in the unseen narrative. You know, we still struggle with these, even as libertarians, we struggle to explain these things today. So what's the blocky and Haslitt antidote to this? That's a vicious, underhanded question, Jeff. You're a nasty man. How do we fix this, though? How do we fix these errors in the public's perception? Well, you know, I hate to be negative and I hate to be pessimistic. But one of my recent articles is on why it is that we have so much trouble in convincing people. Why it is that Saint Ron Paul, a lot of people think he's just a doctor. I've promoted him to a saint. Why Saint Ron Paul gets 1% of the vote when he runs on the libertarian ticket and why he didn't make president candidate for the Republican Party when he ran for that? And, you know, why are so few people libertarian when libertarian is, you know, clearly just and leads to prosperity? And my answer is, and this is the case for pessimism, that it's biological. We are hardwired not to appreciate markets because markets are only, oh, I don't know, 10,000 years old, maybe 20,000 years old, where we've had markets and people exchanging stuff. Whereas our need for and desire for either benevolence or a leader is much more deeply embedded for many, many more eons, maybe all the way back to our mammalian stages. When I get freshman economic students and I tell them about Katrina and the price gouging that occurred after that, you know, they're instinctively viscerally appalled and disgusted that anyone would raise prices when other people needed stuff. And I think that's biologically determined that, you know, we have a strong benevolence hardwiring. If you're sick this week and we're a million years ago in the caves or the trees and I help you this week and next week I'm sick, you help me, our tribe survives. Whereas if we don't have a strong sense of benevolence, the whole tribe fails and we are descended from people who lived and left Pranjane. So my answer to the question of why Haslwood, brilliant as he is, and all the Haslidians, and I certainly include you and me and all the people associated with the Mises Institute, why are we not doing any better? Why will this podcast be heard by, oh, I don't know, five or 10,000 people, why not by 50 million or a billion people? Well, I think it's hardwiring that we are like rocking, what is it not rocking? Rolling the rock of Sisyphus up the mountain and it keeps rolling back. Why is it biology? Does this mean we shouldn't try? No, you and I have devoted our lives to trying and I can't for myself, and I'm sure I speak for you and this can't imagine any other life other than one of promoting liberty and good economics. But, you know, we want to be accurate. We want to tell the truth and I think part of the truth is that the reason we're not more successful is biologically based, not determined, but biologically based. We are inclined in that direction. You and I, Jeff, are mutants. We are mutants. Not that we started out favoring free enterprise, but that we were at least open to it. Whereas a lot of people are not open to it. You tell them stuff of the Haslid variety, the broken window fallacy, and they call you a fascist, or something like that. You know, so close are they to it. And a lot of people are like that. And I'm talking about decent people who if they see you choking they'll give you a Heimlich maneuver. If they see you suffering, they'll give you private charity. These are decent people. But when it comes to, push comes to shove about economics, they are literally closed. That's my very pessimistic answer to your nasty vicious question. Well, so you heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Libertarians are just more highly evolved. That's why we believe in this. But to your earlier part about tribes and cohesion and trust, which was probably baked into our DNA as a matter of survival, I would say that as societies advance beyond tribes, that markets are in fact the social cohesion, markets are the benevolent force that bring us together in cooperative ways. So, you know, it really is an interesting question. But Haslett didn't ignore this, by the way, as Plain spoke and as he is in his book, he also wrote, for example, an essay on the task confronting Libertarians. He wrote this later in the 1960s, which we'll link to online, which is very interesting. Walter, I wanted to ask a little bit or discuss a little bit his style. This is a journalist. And this is a guy who is able to take complex or even opaque economic theory and put it forth very plainly in a lively style with great prose that makes you want to read it. That's not boring. That short, almost all of his books are just a few hundred pages. And I was thinking to myself, who writes like this today in economic circles? I mean, to an extent you do, because you write a lot of books for popular audiences and you're very prolific. I think Bill Anderson, a lot of readers of Mises.org will recognize William Anderson. He's a prophet, Frosberg State, who was a journalist before. He's really a superb writer. You know, who might be a modern Haslitt, Walter? I mean, we've got people like John Tamney who writes for Forbes in Real Clear Market. Gene Epstein was a very clear Libertarian writer who wrote for Barons, edited for Barons for a long, long time. I don't know if he might have written for Forbes as well. Has anybody come to mind as approaching a modern-day Haslitt? Well, I would say a lot of the people who write for Mises.org and also for the lurockwell.com fit this bill. And among the people there, I would add Tom Woods and Lawrence Vance, Tom Di Lorenzo, especially Tom Woods. I think he's one of our best writers and certainly one of our best public speakers. So we do have people who are literate and brilliant writers and brilliant speakers and talk about making opaque and difficult concepts clear. I think you have to mention those people. I think it was H. L. Menken, another person who could really write well, who once said that, I think it was Menken who said of Haslitt, the man could really write, or he said that he was a brilliant writer. But, you know, I wouldn't say it's scarce and then, Jeff, I would include you as well. You are a very, very good, clear writer. And I think a lot of the people associated with the Mises Institute or with lurockwell.com fit that bill of being beautiful writers. So happily, we've got some good people. John Paul also, Andrew Napolitano. You know, I've got the screen of lurockwell.com right on my screen and, you know, you just sort of look down the list of people that he picks for lurockwell. And lurockwell himself, obviously, is a brilliant writer. So we do have very, very good writers in the Haslitt mold, maybe not as good as Haslitt, but, you know, it's hard to be as good as the best. And Haslitt was really one of the top people, just as a clear writer. Yeah, and while you're mentioning LRC, let me also throw out Butler Schaefer as someone who I think is just such a superb writer. Of course, we don't have Macon. We've got his writings. We don't have Joe Soburn anymore, who had a particular gift. But I just want, for our listeners, I want to read a quick list of the outlets for which Henry Haslitt wrote in his career. And when I say that career, let me give you some stats that Bettina B. Engraves compiled. He wrote about 15 books, thousands and thousands of articles. She estimates his total output at about 10 million words. So maybe that's not approaching Rothbard, but I'll tell you what, it's up there. He wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Evening Post, The New York Evening Mail, The New York Herald, The Sun, The Nation, HL Macon's American Mercury, The New York Times, of course, Newsweek for many, many years. And then, of course, The Freeman, which was the magazine newsletter that Fee put out for many years. And he finished out as a columnist with the L.A. Times syndicate. So what a career. I mean, this guy's a writer and a journalist first and foremost. And it's just so rare, Walter, that we get writers and journalists in our camp. Yes. Look, as I said, I've got Lou Rockwell right on my screen. And I'm just going to read today's contributors all of whom are really good writers. Otherwise, Lou wouldn't have them included. So who do we have? Davis Stockman, Jerry Barnett, Paul Gottfried, excellent writer, Philip Girardi, Pat Buchanan. Now, I don't agree with Pat Buchanan on everything. Certainly not on free trade, but he's a great writer. Whitney Webb, Arjun Wallya, Michael Krieger, Israel Shamir. Wait, I've got to push down Charles U. Smith, Victor Marchione. So, you know, the problem with naming names is you're always going to forget someone. If I looked at Davey Four or Two Days Before on lourockwell.com, I'd get another 10 or 12 people who are just brilliant writers. Now, you know, David Gordon, you don't think of him as a journalist. You think of him as, I don't know, a genius. But he's a good writer, too. He's an excellent writer. He's very funny. He's very amiable. Well, not all that amiable always. He sticks the shiv in people brilliantly and witting in a very witty way. So, you know, the problem with naming names like this is you're going to leave out another three dozen people who also ought to be included. But the Mises Institute and lourockwell.com are blessed by having people who are not, and I'm not talking about substance now. We're not talking about substance. We're just asking about, you know, writing style. They have beautiful writing styles, and I recommend these two. I read them every day. I wake up in the morning, and then sometimes I work late at night, and I can read the next morning stuff the night before. So, I can't say enough about these two websites. What things are very interesting about Haslett, unlike a lot of libertarians, he really focused on inflation. In fact, he lists in the essay on strategy I mentioned earlier that the inflation issue is the most important. And if libertarians could win on that, they would indirectly win on all others. And a lot of his work during his years at Newsweek were about inflation and about money, and those were assembled together in a book entitled 1960, What You Should Know About Inflation. Again, that's comprised of many of his Newsweek articles. So, you know, talk about that. Talk about the importance of Haslett to the American public's understanding of money and inflation. Well, I think you've touched on a very important point. I mean, you know, there's always the risk of the diamond's water fallacy or the diamond's water, well, fallacy. You know, why is it that diamonds are so valuable and water is not, and yet if all diamonds disappeared tomorrow, we'd live life pretty much as now. Diamonds are a girl's best friend, but she could deal with emeralds or rubies. Whereas if we got rid of all water, life would end in a matter of days or even hours. So, you don't want to make... I guess what we're now going to do is engage in the diamond's water fallacy, and the obvious answer to that is marginalism. You know, all of water versus all of diamonds, we pick all of water, but this little cup full of water versus this little cup full of diamonds, we're going to pick diamonds. So, the issue is, which is more important? Is it inflation or... I mean, there are other industries like steel. The steel industry is important. The energy industry is important. The educational industry is important. So, if you look at things from the non-marginal, but the total, even then I would say inflation wins out and money wins out, because as important as steel and energy and oil and education and other industries are, money is involved in every transaction, including all those industries plus every other industry. The only time money is not involved is in water or maybe gifts. And now we don't have much water. We have gifts, but we don't have much water. So, money is absolutely crucial. And I would say that, you know, Henry Haslund has been instrumental in pointing out the inflation, pointing out the evils of the Fed. I mean, the Fed started in 1913, roughly 100 years ago, give or take. And if you look at the 100 years before 1913 and the 100 years a little bit plus after 1913, you know, the inflation with the Fed is way worse than before the Fed and not only that, but the business cycle theory. And the business cycle is, you know, great amplitudes before and rather after the Fed in 1913 and not so much before. Haslund also wrote a book, The Fallacy of, what is it, Canesianism. That was one of his longer books. It's like a line by Lyon or paragraph by paragraph, evisceration of Keynes' book in 1936, The General Theory. And Haslund is just nothing short of magnificent in pointing out that inflation is a very bad thing and that it impoverishes people and the business cycle theory of makes us less prosperous than it otherwise would be. To just give you an illustration of how important this is, according to some theories, the reason we had Nazism, the rise of Nazism was because of World War I. At the end of World War I we had the Treaty of Versailles which blamed Germany for the whole shooting mess. And then we had the hyperinflation in 1923 which is traceable to the Treaty of Versailles which is obviously traceable to World War I. Well, the hyperinflation of 1923 when people were carrying the German currency around in wheelbarrows to buy a loaf of bread led to the rise of Hitler. At least this is a plausible theory. I'm not a historian enough to know whether it's true or not but it's certainly plausible. So this gives an indication that inflation is deleterious, not only in the sense of nowadays it costs more than earlier days but in creating a monster such as Hitler. Getting back to just ordinary difficulties of inflation, when I was a kid, I was born in 1941, you could buy a hot dog and a can of Coke or a bottle of Coke or Coca-Cola for, I don't know, 15 cents. Now it's, I don't know, it's a lot more. You could buy a gallon of gas for 20 cents. Now it's 10 times as much. According to more exact figures, the Fed has been responsible for the leaching out of the dollar of something like 96 or 97 cents, namely a dollar now is only worth four cents of what it was when the Fed started. And Henry Haslitt has been foremost among all economists, you call them a journalist, I call them an economist too. Yes, he had no credentials but by gum and by golly there are a lot of people with PhDs in economics who shouldn't have them. I mean we have recalls for cause, we should have recalls for PhDs. Haslitt didn't have a PhD but as far as I'm concerned he was an economist and a journalist and he did more than pretty much anyone else on the planet to point out the evils and the horrors of inflation. Well, and let's go a little deeper there. Not only did he not have a PhD, this was an entirely self-taught guy. He had to drop out of school at a young age to support his mother. He was interrupted in his schooling later by being sent off to World War I for about a year. He came back and like a lot of young people was struggling with how he might make a living without any formal education and he found out that secretaries were making more than some labor positions were, some physical labor jobs. So he ultimately became a secretary, I think about $15 a week at the Wall Street Journal and that was how he began reading and writing and editing and then of course economics came later but as you mentioned this is an economist. This is a self-taught guy. I mean anybody who tackles Keynes's general theory line by line is an economist by any measure of the word. Oh, absolutely. Let me tell you how I first came to know of Henry Haslund if I might. I was a senior in college, Brooklyn College and I ran, was invited by the I ran study club to give a speech at Brooklyn College and there must have been 2,000 kids in the audience and I came to boo in his heart because everyone knew she favored free enterprise and everyone also knew that free enterprise meant starvation and evil and exploitation. I was a fellow student with Bernie Sanders, we're both on the track team together and my views then were roughly his views. So I came to boo in his I ran and at the end of her lecture they announced that there was this I ran study club lunch and her honor and anyone come even if you disagreed and I wanted to show her that socialism was the way to go. So I came to the room and I ran was sitting at the head of the table and near her were Leonard Peacoff and Alan Greenspan and Nathaniel Brandon and all of her buddies and there must have been 50 people on the side of a long thin table and I was relegated to the foot of the table and I sat down and I turned to my buddy there, my next door neighbor and I said, you know, socialism the way to go, capitalism is evil. And he said, well, you know, I don't really know all that much about it but the people who do are at the under the table. So I went and I stuck my head between Nathaniel's and Ein's. I was maybe 20 years old, Brandon maybe 35, ran maybe 50, they were the adults. I was a kid and I said, you know, there's someone here wants to base them on socialism and capitalism. I said, who? And I said, me. I was a hoodspinik in those days, still am a little bit. And Brandon was very, very nice. He said, look, there's no room at this end of the table but I'll come to the other end of the table and talk to you about this on two conditions. One, you promised not to let this conversation lapse but we continue until we settle it. And two, you'll read two books that I recommend. And we talked and I came to his house and I'm Rand's house and guess what the two books were? Well, one of them was Atlas Shrug, which I regard as the best novel ever written. And the other was economics in one lesson by Henry Halfwood. So that's how I got into it. That book, plus the discussions with them, converted me to minarchism. I was now a sort of, not an iron-ran cultist, but I agreed with minarchism. Roughly, you know, a free enterprise, maybe armies, courts and police for the government, but that's about it. And then just to continue this discussion a little bit more, I met Larry Moss, who was a fellow student in the Monarch Columbia, and he and his roommate Jerry Wallows ganged up on me and they said, you have to meet this guy, Murray Rothbard. And I said, no, no, no, Murray Rothbard's an anarchist, anarchist is evil. But finally they got me there and I met Murray and Murray converted me to a free market anarchism in about 10 minutes, guess how, using economics in one lesson, Henry Halfwood's insights. Namely what Murray said is, look, you know, you learn from Henry Haslitt that we should privatize the post office and, you know, we should privatize roads and we should privatize education. Well, why not armies, courts and police too, also? And, you know, Murray sort of was not a karate guy, but a judo guy, he used my momentum against me and tossed me over his shoulder into anarcho capitalism and he used the same economics in one lesson, Henry Haslitt insights Murray did to show that it should apply also to armies, courts and police. And if it applies to those things, well, then we're anarchists. So I sort of owe Henry Haslitt my present views with a lot of help, a little help from Murray. One other anecdote, my son Matthew, when I was trying to convert him to the one true faith, I used economics in one lesson by Henry Haslitt and Matthew wrote a letter to Henry Haslitt and Matthew was maybe 10 or 12 years old and Henry Haslitt was kind enough to write a letter back to Matthew and I kicked myself for having lost that letter and I asked Matthew if he had it and he didn't have it either. That letter is probably worth a lot of money now. A letter from Henry Haslitt to my son aged 10 or 12 or whatever, just another indication of what kind of a guy Henry Haslitt was to write a letter back to some kid who wrote a nice note to him about his book. Well, for our audience who are not familiar, not only was Haslitt a self-made guy, if you talk to Lou Rockwell you'll find out that he was almost a self-made aristocrat. In other words, this is a man who came from very modest background in born in Philadelphia but lived most of his life in New York and not only his learnedness but his speech, his bearing, his dress, his mannerisms were very aristocratic. People may not know that he lived a very long life all the way until 1993 when he died at the age of 98. He was actually one of the first board members of the Mises Institute along with Lou Rockwell and along with Margit von Mises, Mises his widow. And people in addition might not know that Henry Haslitt left us some money in his estate which helped build our original building in 1997 when the Institute completely broke away from Auburn University across the street. So I guess if you want to say that this podcast is overly fatuous towards Henry Haslitt, you can say, well that's just because he gave the Mises Institute some money when he died in 1993. I guess you can say that if you wish. But a lot of people don't necessarily know Haslitt's background with Lou Rockwell and with the Institute itself. Now Walter, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, did you have an opportunity to meet Haslitt when he was still alive? Yes, I certainly did. I think I was even a speaker at the Mises Institute that dinner in his honor when he was 70 or 80, I forget when it was exactly. I think it was his 70th birthday. His 70th birthday was in New York City and I think I was one of the speakers then, I'm not sure, but I was certainly there and I shook his hand and said hello to him and sort of reveled in his presence. He was just a great man. I regard what you just said as I think underappreciative of him, what you said as well, people will say, well the only reason we like him is because he gave the Mises Institute money. I would look at it and I certainly think that that's true. No, that's false, sorry. I don't think the only reason we like him is because he gave the Mises Institute money. But the way I see it is he gave the Mises Institute his imprimatur. He put his money where his mouth is. I didn't even know he gave money to the Mises Institute. I knew he was a fan and a supporter. But the fact that he gave money to the Mises Institute shows something glorious for the Mises Institute that a man of Hasslet's stature would single out the Mises Institute. I don't know how to single out, but would support the Mises Institute is certainly a big feather in the cap of the Mises Institute. Well, and of course, again, his main profession or his paid profession was journalists. How many journalists amass the financial wherewithal to leave money to organizations like our significant money, seven-figure money to an organization like ours at their death? It's really a testament to not only his acumen, but his work ethic. I mean, this was a very, very hard-working guy and, again, prolific. And people may not know that he involved himself in debates. He appeared on TV, not infrequently. He even debated vice president, candidates. This was a guy who, today, even though there are far more mediums available to us, media available to us, Libertarians often struggle to break across into larger forums. 30 or 40 years ago, you wanted to be on, talk to Walter Cronkite. Today, maybe you want to talk to Joe Rogan or whatever it might be. But nonetheless, we still continue in our time as in Haslitz. We struggle to get our message out. But this is a guy who was writing for and appearing in very mainstream outlets. So for that alone, I think he deserves more credit as a Libertarian leading light, as a superstar of our movement, as an originator of our movement, as someone who ought to be discussed in the same breath as an Ayn Rand or a Murray Rothbard, because his influence was really that great. Now, I would be, again, remiss if I didn't turn to at least one point of contention, however small, perhaps, between the Walter Block worldview and the Henry Hazard worldview. And that's in the area of ethics and all of its permutations. He's, again, a guy who was really, really knowledgeable and wrote on a lot of things beyond just economics. But he wrote a very interesting book in 1964. It was released called The Foundations of Morality. And this is his ethics book. He goes into the idea of what's proper for society. He determines that because there are differing opinions on religion, no ethicist is able to say what particularly religious view ought to hold for all ethical worldviews. But instead, he says we ought to determine what's rational and what's beneficial for humankind. And so basically he arrives at a form very similar to Mises' rule utilitarianism. In other words, his utilitarianism, Mises' utilitarianism, is different from that of a John Stuart Mill or a Jeremy Bentham. But it's more means and ends related. And so he was not a natural law guy. In fact, in that same book he criticized his natural law at a few different points as well. Part of its appeal is that nobody really understands exactly what it is. And so I was hoping to get your thoughts on this, Walter, because I know this is something where you are very much a Rothbardian. You're not a consequentialist. And you're someone who believes in a normative, ethical support for a libertarian worldview rather than a utilitarian support for a libertarian or a laissez-faire worldview. So that's a lot. That's a mouthful. But give us your thoughts. OK, well, thanks. I think that that's a very intriguing and interesting point. Look, I'm not a supporter of Mises and Haslitt on utilitarianism. But when you attack Mises and Haslitt, you better be careful because they are eminent people in terms of ideology and intelligence. And they're two of the great minds of Western civilization of any year. I'm sort of a moderate on this. As I think Murray was, it's not that we're against utilitarianism, broadly speaking. It's just that when push comes to shove, if we're forced to distinguish between day ontology and utilitarianism, we go day ontology. Day ontology is rights. And utilitarian, broadly speaking, is happiness or benefit or utility. If I can speak for Murray on this, where we agree with you, utilitarianism is that the free enterprise system is broadly based conducive to human happiness. So if we follow the non-aggression principle, which is sort of the basis of Rothbardian, libertarian day ontology, the non-aggression principle, law-free association, private property rights based on homesteading, we will come up with a situation which, broadly speaking, is very utilitarian. Namely, it brings about prosperity and the greatest happiness for the most people. Where we diverge is that it is possible, maybe not practically, but at least theoretically, to say, well, look, suppose we kill innocent person Joe, and all of cancer will be cured, and war live forever, or something like that. Well, should we do it? Well, the utilitarian might be very tempted and say, well, yeah, it's tough on old Joe, but we got to kill him, because the benefits of no more cancer will kill many, many more people than just Joe. Whereas the day ontologist says, look, the non-aggression principle was serious about the non-aggression principle, and we don't kill Joe no matter what, innocent Joe. I mean, if Joe was guilty in self-defense, we can kill him, but an innocent person, we can kill him for whatever reason. So here we have some sort of bifurcation or diversion between the two views, but this is very theoretical and very hypothetical, killing Joe and we get rid of cancer. I concocted that, not originally, but this is a total concoction. But if we forget about those sorts of things, we can make not only a day ontological right-space case in favor of free enterprise, but also utilitarian one. Look, right now, I'm sitting at a desk, and let's say I bought this desk for $200. Well, if I bought the desk for $200, how much did I value it at? I had to value it at more than $200, otherwise I wouldn't have bought it for $200. If I only value it at $150, and I bought it for $200, I'd lose $50. So let's say I value it at $250. So I made a profit of $50 off the deal. Well, how much did the guy who sold me the desk, the $200 value of the desk at? Probably $10, because he had 10,000 of them and he wanted to get rid of them. He had them all in his inventory. He wanted to push them. So he made a profit of $250 minus $10 or $240. Now, the way the Marxists would say it is, well, we exploited the other, but that's silly. The way a rational person would look at it is, as you said before, the market is a way of cooperating with each other. We each made a profit off of the deal, off of each other, namely, we cooperated with each other and we bettered our situation. As Mises would say, human action is the attempt to make the future a better situation for us than it would otherwise be had we not done what it is that we just did. And I bought a desk at $250 or $200, and I value it at $250, and the seller sold it to me for $250 and value it at $10, so there was mutual benefit. Well, the free enterprise system consists of nothing else but voluntary interactions of that sort. Yes, there's buying and selling, there's renting, there's lending, there's gift giving, but all the free enterprise system is mutual agreeable exchanges of that sort, and each one necessarily, in the ex-ante sense, benefits this mutually beneficial. Ex-post, maybe I regretted it buying it because it's splintering or something, and maybe the seller regretted it, there's gold in that desk and he didn't realize it, but you buy shirts or shoes or eyeglasses or air conditioning, you necessarily benefit ex-ante, which means that you improve human welfare ex-ante, and usually ex-post as well. So here's where the aspect of utilitarianism comes in with deontology, namely, if you stick to the non-aggression principle and private property rights and free association, you're left with laissez-faire capitalism, and laissez-faire capitalism, necessarily ex-ante, improves human welfare. So if you want to improve human welfare, which is what the utilitarianists want, well then you have to favor laissez-faire capitalism, maybe for different reasons, not because of adherence to the principles, not because of human betterment, but the two are not that far apart is what I'm trying to say. The big mystery is how any utilitarian could be against the free enterprise system, and yet many critics of the market are utilitarians. Bernie Sanders and all the people running for the Democratic nomination, they think they're utilitarians, they think that what they're going to do is for the human betterment, they're wrong. Well, although he never, to my knowledge, directly addressed at any length Rothbard's ethics of liberty in the 70s, he was, of course, someone who knew Rothbard and who, on a couple different occasions, praised Rothbard's work. I want to close with this. He did, in fact, take a look at Robert Nozick's book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, which is in the same general era as Rothbard's work on ethics, and I'll post a link to that essay, along with the other one I mentioned. This essay is called The Case for the Minimal State, and it gives a good, concise view of Haslitz, very respectful and mild criticisms of natural law and some of their proponents. But Walter, I want to close with this. He was the kind of guy who helped friends, he not only helped the Misesuit, he was a personal close friend of Ludwig von Mises. He, for The New York Times, a book review, reviewed Mises's great classic socialism favorably, quite favorably, and was surprised only about a year later or so to receive a call from Mises himself saying, hello, this is Mises. And he later said it was like getting a call from John Stuart Mill or something like that. It stunned him at the time. And of course, the first thing he did when Mises arrived in New York was to begin trying to help him obtain contacts, get his name out there and earn money. And one of the things he did to that later end is he got him a brief gig for a couple of years writing editorials for The New York Times. And Mises was paid the whopping sum of $10 per editorial for that work. But more importantly, far more importantly is it helped get Mises his name out there in America. And of course, less than 10 years later, he would produce in English, by the way, not his first language, the magnum opus human action. So that was the kind of guy Haslitz was. He wasn't only self-made, but he helped to make other men as well. So, Walter, you have helped make a lot of young people great Austrian scholars. You've helped a lot of people understand the world better. You've helped a lot of people get jobs. You've helped a lot of people get educated. And I was so happy today to discuss Haslitz with you. Let me just add one more vignette along the lines that you mentioned. Henry Haslitz at one time had a regular column for Newsweek. And when he left, he was supplanted by three people, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuels, and I forget who else it was. And Milton Friedman, who I'm not a big fan of, but I'm a fan of his, said something nice about Henry Haslitz. He said it took three of us to replace him. So that was a very nice statement by Milton Friedman about Henry Haslitz. And I want to add that to the mix as well. Well, Walter Block, thank you so much for joining us today. Ladies and gentlemen, go to Mises.org. Find out about our upcoming edition, new edition of Henry Haslitz Economics in One Lesson. If you care to donate to that project, we've been very happy, thrilled with the fundraising on that so far. If you care to donate, I believe $500 or more, you will get your name in the plate in the front of that book along with other names. But even if you don't care to donate, be sure to follow the project and get yourself some free copies of the book when it comes out. Thanks again, Walter. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. 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.