 This weekend our show features two of our great Mises Institute summer fellows this year. Sasha Klaka, who is a German but is in a PhD program at a university in Sweden. And Louis Rene, who is a very young and promising up-and-coming academic who is finishing his master's program at Sciences Poe University in Paris. So it's a bit of an inside baseball discussion for people who like Austrian economics and are interested in the role of academics in it. We'll talk to these two young men about how they see the Mises Institute and what it ought to be doing, what its role is, their future or potential future as academics in Europe. And we discuss at length whether they're optimistic or pessimistic about what's happening in Europe in terms of academic freedom, in terms of culture and politics. So it's really a fascinating interview with two very bright young men, both of whom I'm sure are going to make a name for themselves in academia going forward. So stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises Weekends. Once again, I'm your host, Jeff Dice, very pleased to be joined today by two of our Mises Institute summer fellows, Sasha Klaka and Louis Rene, a German and a Parisian. Well not a Parisian, you're from the southern part of France. But studying in Paris. And Sasha, you're a PhD candidate and a PhD program in Sweden. So welcome to both of you and thanks for taking the time today. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Well, so I want to start out with a sort of a devil's advocate question. Obviously, Murray Rothbard was a big believer in a multi-pronged approach and we are as well. But what would you say to the criticism that going into academia as a way to promote or spread Austrian or libertarian ideals is not the best approach? We ought to be focusing on the lay person and that academia is so hopelessly lost to authoritarian or left-wing thought that it's a waste of time. Yeah, I think it's not quite true having studied African studies development now going into economic history. I think there's actually, especially in those more fringe fields, a lot more lively debate as compared to perhaps economics, which is very dominated by the mainstream. And yeah, people are not blind and in the development field, you can see how not much is working, especially with regard to. To African development, so people are looking for different ideas. People get more and more skeptical of state intervention, of central planning, of large scale social engineering. So I think they're coming with our ideas of spontaneous order or bottom-up human action-driven economy and economic development, economic processes can find fruitful ground to flourish there. Yeah, I think economic history is actually a good way to go for Austrians because you can talk with the mainstream without appearing like a crazy. The theoretical differences don't play that much. And you can talk with other efferrodocs. You know, Marxist historians are actually pretty good in many subjects. They are more rigorous and also they take care of the poor people, except real people and they are not like pro-business, pro-big-business and pro-cronies actually. So we can talk with them too. And so yeah, I think that it's great that the position that Sasha got and I actually myself is pretty interested by economic history. Well, let me ask you this. For both of you personally individually, how did you make the decision or why did you decide to come and be a fellow for a summer at the Mises Institute? How is this going to help you? So me, I came last year and I was so pleased with it that I decided to come back this year. Sort of like reveal preference of how valuable is the program here. For the third year of my bachelor, sorry, I had to go abroad. That's part of the program. And I asked Dr. Hulsman, who is teaching in Angers in France. And he's supporting my application. And I spent seven months here last year doing research in economic history of thought and on many other subjects. And it was very enriching. And that actually furthered my envy to continue in the academia because I think you have a very valuable way to contribute to the debate. And yes, it's very important to discuss with everybody and every man. But you also have to do some academic call work. Theoretical foundations are really important if we want to structure and have rational debate and arguments. Yeah, for me, I've been working on being a fellow here for a few years now. I came to Mises University 2013, the first time I really enjoyed it. And came a second time in 2014. And I saw already, I mean, you know a lot of the things. And you see where you can go more into detail and more into depth. So I figured, yeah, the fellowship is great for doing that, doing your own research, learning more in-depth Austrian economics. See what are the current research problems. Have a time to focus on a project here. Last year, it didn't work out for me to combat. I was at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, which was a fantastic experience. And showed me also the breadth of the discussion that actually exists within Austrian economics on certain theoretical issues. And I finished my master's program last year, gonna start my PhD. And I also was nice to also come here, work already on a little project that I might be able to present. Just get back into the whole research, academic writing. And yeah, the context I made during the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, it remixes you the context with all the fellows. They're just invaluable and there's no other place like the Institute and no other program like the fellowship anywhere. Yeah, actually achieve so many, so many things in such a short time. I think it's also a great human experience that you learn what humility really is. Because like during RGS this year, it was on human action with Dr. Ellsman, Dr. Herbner and all the faculty, Dr. Saleno. And we spent one week on human action, a book that we have read, most of us before. And you have so much to discover in this book, in one week, in a book that you actually already read. And you didn't get actually all the subsidies, et cetera. It's a very hard book. You have a lot of things in it. And so it really teaches us that you actually, we don't all agree on what exists as Austrians. We have discussions. Sometimes we don't really understand what's written in human action. So you have to spend a lot of time thinking and admit that you don't understand something. So I think that's great. And that's only at the Mises Institute that you can do that. You have so much material in the massive library. It's just amazing. The first year I was here, I was running all around the Mises Institute asking questions to everybody. And it was a wonderful experience. Well, for our listeners, a lot of people might not know. And we're being self-promotional here. That's fine. A lot of people might not know that in addition to Mises.org, we actually have a physical library here and a large physical campus. We have about 50,000 volumes, which makes us one of the largest private libraries in the entire Southeast US. And we also have active research going on here. So we're not just a website. It really is a unique organization, a unique building in that sense. But on that and be critical, don't hold back. What do you think the role of the Mises Institute ought to be in a broad sense? And do you think we're fulfilling that role or how are we falling down? Is the Mises Institute doing a good job? I'd certainly say so. Going back to your initial question, I was on this two-pronged strategy of promoting liberty more for the lay people or focusing on academia, I think the Mises Institute found a really good balance by now. And I've been following the work of the Institute and the Mises website for, I don't know, eight years at least now. I think you found a very good balance. Having the Mises Viya now with a lot of more accessible articles on current topics, having Mises University, which is more introductory, but then also focusing on people at the Rothbard Graduate seminar and in the fellowship, try to find amongst all the people who are a bit interested in Austrian economics and libertarianism, those who really want to pursue an academic career and help them really take it to the next level and then be new professors, join faculties all over the United States, all over the world. A lot of former fellows have been here this year giving lectures, giving presentations, networking with us, having a beer with us and a discussion on their research, our research. So I think it's a really good strategy because of course of the 150 people who come here for Mises, you know everybody wants to pursue an academic career or perhaps only a tiny fraction. And I think you found a very good balance. Well, you have some think tanks that focus on policy and that's not the Mises Institute's rights, it's just education and academic work, but also education for the wider public. And it's very hard to do because it's two different works, like the academic work and writing for the everyday man. But I think it's great. I mean, I came to the Mises Institute as just a curious young student a few years ago and just I remember me downloading almost every book that was on the Mises Institute website and reading them and thinking about all these reading articles. And I mean, that really plays a major role in my intellectual development. So I guess it's working at least for me. Well, let me ask you this, talking a little bit more because you're both Europeans. Austrian economics has a foothold of sorts in the US in academia, places like George Mason, Grove City, individual professors like Peter Klein, scattered universities across the country. Do you feel like Austrian economics has a foothold in European academia or is it really still something that's lost? Yeah, I think it does not have a very strong foothold in European academia. I think it's even very unknown that the modern day Austrian school exists. So if you mentioned something, well, of course it's Manger and Brimbaberg and Visa. Some people, most people know Hayek. Some people might know Mises. But yeah, in terms of German, Austrian academics or European Austrian academics, they're very few. They're not very well connected. This is their tradition. Why are a bunch of Americans carrying water for an Austro-Hungarian German tradition? Well, I guess that's a bit the fault of the Germans and the Second World War that this school, well, most German language schools of thought, I think kind of died out except for more left-wing schools. And they haven't been able to come back from their exile over here and establish a firm foothold again. Well, Louis, obviously the French have a liberty tradition and where does it stand? Yeah, of course, as for Austrians, I think despite everything, we still have some Austrian scholars in France. You have some in Troy in France, in Angers, of course, with Dr. Holtzmann in the south of France in Exemple-Vance. You have after like some professors that were former fellows, Xavier Mehra, et cetera. And that's great. I mean, it's developing, it's slow, it's a slow process. But despite everything, we believe we're on the right side. So we just do our work and that's what we should do. We should not care about if we're in the minority or not. We should not victimize ourselves and just do good work and it will be fine. Yeah, I think even though we're way behind the United States in terms of number of Austrian scholars or percentage of Austrian scholars in how well-known libertarianism, classical liberalism or Austrian economics are, there's places also like Universidad de Juan Carlos in Madrid and I've heard some people say it's really difficult to get into the master's program in Austrian economics by now because there's such a huge interest in it. In Prague this year, I was at the several institutes which is a private university also focusing on Austrian economics. So it's establishing itself slowly and it certainly is growing. When Students for Liberty, which I am a member of, came in Europe, they took a map and they said, well, France, no, doesn't even matter to try, it won't happen. And now, Students for Liberty, one of the strongest countries, France, because you have young students or young scholars that are really interested by the ideas of liberty but also by Austrian economics to really understand the words and they think it's unsatisfactory what they learn in school and in universities. So they find an alternative way and it's working very well. We have an amazing group of students in France that are Austro-Liberteans or just libertarians and I think I'm pretty optimistic about this. It will continue to go well. Well, in the US, the view of academia for a lot of people is that it is hopelessly ideological and authoritarian. It's illiberal and that it exists to pursue or promote an agenda rather than to do real academic work truth-seeking, we might say. Do you think that the state of academic freedom in European universities is greater or less than here? It's difficult to say, especially on a European, like for Europe, every country is different. A lot of universities are very different. So I have, yeah, I don't have a good overview but I've studied personally in Germany, Spain and Denmark. So far, Denmark, at least at my department in African studies, there was a phenomenal degree of academic freedom. I was doing research from an Austrian perspective. My professors, some of them were coming from more of a Marxist tradition of research and of course there were disagreements but not any real conflicts and nobody said, okay, what you're doing, you can't do this because you're wrong based on like an ideological judgment or anything. So I think there is in a lot of places free research as long as it's good research is encouraged and there's not one strong general agenda necessarily but I can't speak, of course, for all the social sciences or for economics that can't really say much about this. I think there it's more closed off. Do you think the hostility toward market solutions for development in Africa and other third world countries, do you think that's starting to crumble and people are starting to understand, even Bono from U2 said recently at Georgetown, capitalism is going to bring more people out of poverty than aid. Yeah, I think the acceptance starts growing especially because the whole state solution, external planning, Western countries giving aid and deciding for African countries, for African people what they have to do, what is the best way. It's not been working for decades. Oftentimes it's made things worse so people look for alternatives. I think for the acceptance of the market per se, what is lacking is the Austrian approach to it because our understanding of the market of course is completely different to a new classical understanding which is what most people would be familiar with. So when I talk about, we should value people's subjective valuations, we should respect their subjective choices, we should focus on what they want to do and all these kind of things, they resonate pretty strongly. And if I tell them, well, that's actually what the market is about. Sometimes they cannot wrap their head around it still because there's too much of, okay, there's these market forces and then people are just, well, like Hayek in his famous rap video says chessmen you move on a board or like little clocks in a machine that runs through like some forces. So it's still difficult to tell people what is the market really about and how can that help Africans, take their fate into their own hands and develop. How is this compatible also with the concerns the more traditional views of development, economic development have? But yeah, I'll dedicate my life trying to bring this in there and I think it's working okay already. You see more and more people taking more free market as perspective or at least being critical of government intervention. On this subject, I would like to say that in the 80s you had some very good development also in development economics. For example, somebody like Peter Bauer was liked very much Hayek and Mises. In one of his book, I remember him writing something like if you are a graduate student don't read Mises and Hayek before having finished your PhD because it will change your mind so much that you will have a hard time afterwards. But after about this mechanical view of the markets it's there that Australians are really different. For Australians, human action, every man is sort of an entrepreneur in every action he undertakes and it's a real cause of market phenomena. And yeah, that's very different because I'm sort of this mechanical view of equilibrium that is reached almost automatically. No, you have entrepreneurs doing the job and I think that's you have a renewal in development economics for like the entrepreneurs with people bringing solutions, not governments but people just seeing a problem and saying this is a solution, let's do it with their own fund, with responsibility and free markets. You know, Louis, the news we get in the US about Europe and about France in the last few years has tended to be bad. We hear a lot about debt crises. We hear a lot about immigration crises and more recently some terrorist events. What's your sense as a young person of France's future and Europe's future? Are you optimistic about living and working in Europe or are you pessimistic that statism, that the form of nationals that seems to be growing is going to be statist nationalism and that the future for Europe is rocky? I mean, you always have this tension, right? Between statism and more freedom. It's always existed. It will probably exist for a long time after us. But so you always have this pessimistic view and this optimistic view. You have some great development in our world. We live in a world with great material wealth and some really clear progress. At the same time, yes, our governments are doing really, really bad policies and it's quite impressive sometimes to things as they can do this. Like those past five years in France, you had a lot of complaints with taxes, for example, with regulations. But still, things are changing. For example, as a left, you have a new movement in the left and socialist party in France where they are more free markets. They are not free markets, but they have some good directions. And so therefore it pushes the right wing party more to the right, saying, well, we have to reduce the state budget by 100 billion euros or something. I don't think they will do it. But still, those developments are interesting. So I mean, yes, you have the migrant crisis that's unfortunate and it's really badly managed by also our governments. Like putting people in camps the stupidest ideas that they could have done. It creates tension. It creates nationalism. But still, you have other good developments. I think Brexit was pretty enthusiastic by it that it's counter attack against Brussels that's expanded and expanded some of its powers. I don't think they would be able to do that now because you have strong nationalist movements everywhere in Europe. People don't want this centralized Europe, federal Europe. And I think it's a good thing because we always had two visions of Europe. So decentralized, polycentric Europe where you have competition between states and people just vote with their feet where they believe they can have a better life. And the centralized Europe where you are going to force people with their differences but still you are going to force them in one centralized political entity which is completely fictitious and is not working. I mean, today, I don't think people really want it. For those reasons, I think you can be optimistic about Europe. We still live in a wonderful continent with a lot of diversity, cultural wealth, a good way of life. Even though we have problems, the terrorist attacks the last one was very near my hometown. It affected me very much. So I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about this but that's life and you have to go on and do your best to advance freedom and progress. Sasha, let me ask, do you think that the centralizers that Brussels, the technocrats will ultimately prevail or will the separate identities of European nations prevail? I think the bureaucrats in the EU and the top politicians in the European countries of the mainstream parties, they will try to force, like still continue forcing the centralization agenda but as Louis already said, yeah, nationalism is rising. I'm very sad about it because for me, it's not the choice between Europe under the rule of the European Union or a Europe of strong national identities and nation states. It's more Europe, like Louis said, a decentralized polycentric Europe of people with their national identity but also with a strong European identity only living together and cooperating and inter-million trading voluntarily and not through force. Why can't we have that in the US? Yeah, amongst our states as well. Well, in the US it's particularly acute because we have 320 million people under one highly centralized government and you have vast cultural and regional and economic and social and ethnic and all kinds of differences but I know to an extent I'm asking you questions that are unanswerable but I'm just looking for your thoughts. So we have time for one final question and I'll pose it to both of you. The great liberal tradition of the enlightenment of Locke of Hume came from Europe. It's a European enlightenment and I don't think we can hang our hat on that but neither should we run from that. Do you think it will take a conflagration of sorts for Europe to ever return to a liberal mindset or a liberal outlook or is there something short of a conflagration that could return Europe to the kind of place that we think of it historically, a liberal place? I think if the classic liberal, libertarian, Austrian movement picks up speed and the people rediscover liberalism that there is actually, I mean, as you said, there's a liberal tradition like liberalism is of interest to a lot of people like students for liberty are doing so well in also in countries like France and Germany where you'd say, okay, that's not really the place you would think of when you say liberal countries in the European sense but they're getting a lot stronger. I mean, here the fellows almost every year half of them are Europeans who want to go back to Europe who want to go into academia, spread these ideas. There's a lot of conferences. We ourselves organize a conference for graduate students to present their research which gets more and more interest every year. So people want to, and I mean, it's kind of a race between when is the EU like, when does it reach the breaking point? Are the liberals strong enough, the real liberals strong enough to either pick up the pieces or are we strong enough to prevent collapse or an unordered collapse and manage to go back to something and more sustainable than we have now? I really can't say, and I mean, stuff like even the Soviet Union, Mises said it's unworkable and it proved unworkable but it managed for 80 years. So it might be that the European Union hangs on for another 20, 30 years somehow. And then we have enough time to build up our moment because people get more and more dissatisfied. Our ideas are getting more and more attractive. If it collapses in the next five years, yeah, I would not like to see that because then it's gonna be the nationalists and the right wing who are gonna pick up the pieces and then it's gonna be even harder to rebuild like a liberal vision of Europe. So to put it in a historical perspective, you talked about John Locke. I'm reviewing a book by one of my friend on Vincent de Gaunet who is the one who coined the sentence laissez faire. A funny thing is that this thought, you know, laissez faire, radical free market thinking appeared after 50 years of total expansion of state power over the economy with Colbert during Louis XIV. And you had all those circles of intellectual coming together and finding ideas about freedom and expanding them. And after you have Turgo being a minister with the 16th and after you have more and more thinkers than you have this great French classical liberal tradition. So I think to a certain extent we have a rise of statism those past 50 years or after the Second World War. And now you have renewal in the interest of free markets, ideas, liberal, true liberalism. And that's why I think we should just work for it, go for it and not victimize ourselves and I think it will be fine. Well, maybe we should just wrap this up by saying the future is unwritten and it's up to us. We're not fatalists, we're libertarians. So Sasha Klaka and Louis Ronet, thank you so much for your time and we loved having you here this summer and safe travels back to Europe.