 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. We are coming to a conclusion of our treatment of man economy and state. The magnum opus written by Professor Murray Rothbard in the 1950s came out in the early 1960s. And if you've been listening to the show, you know that we have worked our way through this huge book. And we have now come to what was originally intended to be part of the main book, but was ultimately published as a separate volume called Power and Market, which consists of seven chapters. We already covered the opening couple chapters of that section of the book or that separate book, depending on how you want to look at it with our great friend, Professor Patrick Newman. And now we're finishing chapters three through seven of this book again with Patrick. And it's amazing to come to the end of this book. I mean, I've read it a couple different times, but sometimes jumping around and it fits and starts. So this opportunity to go through it and revisit it has been amazing for me. And I hope some of you listening have had the opportunity to tackle it for the first time. But all that said, Patrick, happy Friday. It's great to talk to you. Yeah, it's great to be on and it's great to talk about one of my favorite books and particularly the final sort of concluding part on government intervention, which I think is, you know, that itself is well worth the price of admission, so to speak. Well, I'm not sure I've done a good job of this, but do you think the average person should read this book? I mean, it's a tough one. Let's be honest. Is this is this worthwhile for people? Absolutely. I think it's the average person should read this book. Is it the first economics book the average person should read? Absolutely not. But I think someone who's got a basic understanding of economics or sort of free market economics, I think it's a very important book to read because it really kind of grounds, it provides a lot more theoretical understanding of how it works. I'm the type of person who says I prefer man economy and state to human action, at least in terms of the economic analysis, or you should at least read man economy and state before you read human action. I think, you know, people should read books still. And I think, you know, sort of the great classics are, you know, you should read sort of a take the time to actually read a very large book that is sort of in a coherent structure. And yeah, I think it's once you read this book, you can't think of economics the same way. So if you're the average person interested in enhancing your worldview, interested in learning more, you know, then yeah, I think, you know, it's an important book to read. Well, the power and market section has a lot of appeal as a standalone book to me anyway, because you're really getting into understanding all the things government does from a pure economic analysis point of view. So that's where I think this book differs because, I mean, you tell me, but in the literature prior to this book coming out, I guess in 62, you know, was there a lot of hardcore purely economic analysis of all these things like regulations and taxes and government spending, or was that just sort of assumed to be part of the atmosphere and people didn't really give it hardcore analysis? Yeah, well, you definitely didn't have an overall systematic theory of intervention or intervention of like taxes, like the actual is a tax itself, you know, intervention is intervening, you know, you wouldn't get that type of analysis because people would assume, oh, you need taxes on the market, you know, even something like someone like Mises, you know, the concept of a quote neutral tax, etc. But you know, you didn't really get a systematic theory of government regulation particularly from the perspective, especially from the perspective that doesn't assume government or, you know, people who are intervening the bureaucrats, the politicians, etc., have the public interest in mind. You know, in the 50s, you had the heyday of Keynesianism, so fiscal policy was paramount and it was well, you know, during recessions, you've got the government expansionary fiscal policy and you need to also have the income tax to redistribute, you know, promoting greater equality, equalization of incomes, etc. And it was much more from like, to the extent intervention was discussed, it was much more from a planning perspective on how can we maximize economic efficiency and output by, you know, embracing a wide degree of government intervention. Nothing like a sort of a serious critique of, OK, this is what government does. This is why it leads to inefficiency. It's not needed, etc., etc. So he was really kind of breaking ground in that sense. Yeah. And I wish people who have read or considered the ethics of liberty would go and read this first because I think it gives you a grounding in Rothbard's economic analysis before you get into any sort of normative concepts. Now, people who listened to the last show know that we started out with the first couple of chapters of Power & Market wherein Rothbard sets out his typology of interventionism. There's autistic and binary and triangular. And this whole section of the book is, in a sense, an analog to Mises' section, or part, I should say, of human action called the hampered market economy. So we're not talking about full laissez-faire, you know, an ideal system of full laissez-faire or, in some people's minds, an idealized full system of socialism. We're talking about that vast middle ground. And so that's what this part of the book is all about. And Patrick, in Chapter 3, he's talking about all the different kinds of triangular interventions. And it's almost a laundry list. I mean, I feel like did Rothbard think he had to at least touch on all these? You've got price controls and prohibitions and cartels and licenses and tariffs and labor laws. And he even goes into conscription, which I thought was a very Rothbardian touch. I don't think most economics treatises talk about conscription. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the triangular intervention, I've always enjoyed that part of Power & Market, particularly because he ties it in with this whole theory of monopoly grants. And so, you know, he famously sort of criticized the idea of a monopoly price entrepreneurs being able to establish a monopoly price on the free market, saying you can't conceptually distinguish it and all these other arguments, et cetera. And now that the element of coercion in a government restriction has entered in, you can potentially see those form. And one of Rothbard, one of his goals, why he's listed all these various interventions of, say, with triangular intervention going through a laundry list of various regulations and restrictions is he wanted to kind of tie them under one unifying principle. So that was his goal. And that was, you know, partially with his welfare theory of showing that government can never increase social utility, et cetera. But wanted to show how all of these interventions, the various restrictions, conscription, the various regulations, safety regulations, et cetera, antitrust, and so on and so forth. You know, you could all tie that in. You could all be explained by his, basically his theory of, you know, government-induced monopoly prices. And he had sort of a similar idea with his taxation, you know, his theory of taxation going through all the various taxes. Because sort of tying this in with what we were saying earlier, economists, to the extent they analyzed these topics, it was kind of done in a very hodgepodge fashion. So, all right, I'm going to talk about this intervention here. I'm going to talk about this intervention here. And so on. And not really being unified either under a classification of triangular, binary intervention, et cetera. Or just, okay, how do all these taxes or how have all these regulations, et cetera, similar. And yeah, it's a very impressive achievement, in my opinion. Right. And in chapter three, to me, even though these are disparate topics, and most economists, as you say, wouldn't treat them under, you know, sort of house them under one umbrella. But here, it makes a lot of sense to me, conceptually, now, that I've reread it to say, okay, well, I understand there's sort of a three-legged stool here with all of these. And these feel like what, you know, ordinary people think of as government intervention in the economy. Now, they might well think that that intervention is benign and justified. But nonetheless, when you talk about antitrust or licenses or tariffs, I think the average person would understand that as, hey, government is coming in and doing something in an otherwise market economy. Whereas when you get to chapter four on taxes, I'm not sure the average person thinks of taxes as intervention. No, not at all. I mean, because even many economists would say that I think your average person definitely doesn't view it as that because I think, you know, for the vast majority of people, and I emphasize I guess fast, is the basic conception of government is necessary. So the idea is that, well, you know, people can criticize taxes, but, you know, you got to have some taxes, so to speak, you know, the line of reasoning, you know, that the argument goes. So the idea of taxes being an actual intervention or something that is harmful per se is definitely shocking to a lot of people because most people would reason to say, well, at the very least, you got to have police, X, Y, and Z, and all sorts of other stuff law and order the government has to provide and so forth. And that's obviously where he's his most radical because he's, you know, the whole, you know, center of this book is the, you know, an argument that he later explained and built upon for New Liberty and so forth is that, well, you can have like a purely free market society, which would have no taxes, no taxes whatsoever. And this is where Mises struggled maybe a bit to describe a neutral tax because I don't think there isn't such a thing. Yeah, exactly because you can't have it because Rothbard was showing that, well, the actual act of attacks, the coercive levy, you know, it's always introducing distortions. And this is Rothbard sort of, it permeates throughout his overall treatise, man economy and state as he has this whole interrelated approach. And this comes especially to the forefront when he's analyzing taxes because he's showing that, you know, when the government's taxing something, it's restricting a particular industry, it's reducing the incomes, the wages, etc. of say, you know, the alcohol industry if there's a tax on alcohol, and then the government's spending that money on something else. And that's leading to a increase in production in that industry, like the overall distortion. So you can't say that it's a neutral tax because a neutral taxes, oh, it has, you know, it doesn't affect the market at all. But Rothbard shows that, no, it has to affect the market. You know, you can't, yeah, exactly. It's the neutral taxes and impossibility. Well, what's so fascinating to me anyway about chapter four is these discussions of tax incidents. In other words, where does the burden of attacks fall and how do you analyze that in purely economics terms and then tax shifting? You know, how do different consumers or producers or employers and employees, you know, there are attempts to shift the burden of tax, but it's not always clear and it's not always successful. So give us a little bit of your take on tax incidents and tax shifting. Yeah, so I find this very fascinating, you know, Rothbard's analysis when he goes into his theory of tax incidents and the idea that, you know, he says, well, the income tax, you can't shift it to anyone. The burden falls on the person paying the, you know, paying the tax and the sales tax. You know, no tax can be shifted forward, you know, because traditionally, I think when most people think of, say, something like a sales tax, say, oh, you know, the government places a tax on alcohol that say, oh, well, this is going to go to the consumers. It's going to go to higher prices. The consumers in Rothbard kind of shows this step-by-step analysis, when using his theory of pricing, we're already produced stock of the good, showing that, well, the reasoning is more complicated. You know, that will happen, but you have to show that, you know, it's not initially going to raise prices to consumers because the demand curve hasn't changed. Instead, it's just going to result in reduced production. Some businesses are going to leave that line of industry. The effect of both of those, you know, decreased entry, reduced production is the supply curves going to decrease, and that's going to raise the prices. And it's a much more uneven kind of jagged analysis than sort of a simple traditional, I guess you could say, Marshallian theory, which sort of implies the cost of production theory of value. So it's a very interesting theory of taxing, taxation, because he goes through the whole production process, the whole production structure of how the tax affects it. And I think it's a great analysis. I think it really sort of elucidates, you know, clarifies how taxes affect the economy. Well, I want to stress, one point Rothbard makes is that all taxes are income taxes ultimately, because they go back, they shift the burden back to the income from the original factors of production. So there's been this movement, I would say, political movement, especially I guess on the right, let's say the last 20 years or so, to try to move towards a consumption-based tax system or some sort of national retail sales tax, and that this would provide transparency and everyone would pay it and it wouldn't have all these, you know, crazy deductions and expensive income tax burdens and, you know, that this would be a better and fair way to tax. I think Rothbard is sort of ahead of this and says at the end of the day, even a sales tax is an income tax, but can you sort of expound on that? Yeah, so, you know, one of the Rothbard's arguments is, you know, related to what you're saying is he's trying to, you know, you're always searching for, I guess, a neutral tax or the tax that's going to cause the least harm. You know, I guess the, I think it was John Baptiste Colbert who once said the art of taxation consists in of so plucking the feathers from the goose as to induce the least amount of hissing. So it's like, how much money can you build from the public without them sort of revolting, I guess? And related to kind of conservatives doing this, we're now, oh, you know, taxes, oh, we can raise more money by lowering taxes. That's the traditional argument like a supply side theory or by closing deductions, et cetera. So the goal of a tax policy is trying to maximize revenue. You know, they would look for, say, like a consumption tax like this to try and, okay, well, it's at least less harmful and they'll make arguments about how it will encourage, you know, bringing more money to the government so they don't have to cut spending when they cut taxes. And Rothbard's trying to show that, no, this isn't going to work too, you know, at the end of the day, it's still going to affect savings and it's still not neutral. So again, the tax, like a quote, a consumption tax still always becomes an income tax. It might be at a slightly lower rate or less harmful, but it's still going to affect savings. It's still going to distort the structure of production, et cetera. And that's what he's really trying to get at here, which is that, you know, no tax, every tax is always going to cause problems and every tax is always, you know, he's got his, you know, you can't shift the tax forward and then the tax will be, you know, the taxes will become an income tax to affect various people that hit on them. You know, there's no free lunch. There's no great tax basically. Yeah, and it's so interesting how he points out, everyone assumes that sellers will just raise prices. So if something costs $85 and the government wants to come along and put a $15 tax on it, they'll charge $100 and they'll just collect the $15 and send it to the government and they really know where it's off. But as Rothbard points out, if they could just raise prices $15 without any diminution in demand, they'd have been doing that already. You can't just raise prices. That's not how it works. Yeah, exactly. You know, that's a big argument for him saying, well, you know, we assume we're already sort of in an equilibrium establishing that price that maximizes revenue. So that's going to be, you know, like you can't just simply raise prices on the consumers. That's not how it actually works in economic, you know, in analysis. And one other thing just wanted to sort of tie into this related to kind of what I was discussing earlier is in this theory of taxing, you know, either sales tax or the income tax, et cetera, and especially talking about savings, is Rothbard always brings in the concept of time preference and how changes in income affect time preferences and that's going to affect consumption and savings. And this isn't something that always kind of gets discussed. It's sort of similar to the fallacy of the raising the prices. Oh, you can just sort of shift the prices is that, oh, it won't affect that. So it won't affect savings, but very clearly an income tax will affect that because someone's real income has gone down and they're going to save less. And that in turn will cause, you know, artificially increased time preferences. Again, it's a very novel analysis that I don't think always gets appreciated as much as it should. Well, on the one hand, Rothbard points out, and I used to point this out when I worked in Ron Paul's office, that what we should really care about is the total level of taxes in society, you know, amongst government at all levels. So how much are local, county, state, and federal government, how much overall is the tax burden in the nation? How much are they pulling out of what you and I would consider the legitimate private economy? And that's important, I think, to understand, but the flip side of that is there really are winners and losers here. I think it's important to understand ourselves. The incidence of taxation is affected by lobbying and legislation and special interests. Yes, absolutely. And so it's the idea that, okay, it's like the, this also gets, this is something Rothbard emphasized, especially later on, not necessarily in the book, but when supply side arguments were bigger when it was saying, oh, cutting taxes is going to, you know, increase tax revenue. So it's good. Well, and Rothbard said, well, the goal of cutting taxes shouldn't be to increase tax revenue. It should be to decrease the burden of the tax, right? Like, you know, you shouldn't try and close the loopholes or various other things, simply to boost tax revenue. And yeah, going into how a tax actually will, you know, create winners and losers, et cetera. And I think even earlier on in the triangular intervention, he goes into how something like a withholding tax in many ways can act as sort of a compliance cost on a business. If there's, you know, if a new tax requires new government reports or et cetera, and you got to hire an accountant or whatever, you know, it's obviously going to impact certain firms. Certain larger firms are going to be able to benefit more. And that's, you know, that's a way special interests can distort the tax structures by imposing greater burdens on their competitors relative to themselves. Yeah, there absolutely are winners and losers in the tax structure. Yeah, so it's interesting how so much this is hidden from us, either through withholding or, you know, our mortgage company just takes the property tax when you send in your monthly fee. This is actually something I like about retail in the United States, you know, when you're traveling in Europe, or actually much of the world, the price is just the price. Something's 10 euro and embedded in that is the tax. Whereas here we say something's 9.99, but then when you rig it up at the cash register, it's actually $10.70 or something, and you actually see that. So Patrick, I recently bought a cheap flight on Southwest Airlines. If I recall, it was from Houston to Hobby Airport, excuse me, from Atlanta to Hobby Airport in Houston. So cheap flight is $104 or something like that. If you actually look at the little printed receipt that you can obtain via email from Southwest, Southwest only got like 65 bucks of it. I mean, they laid out all these different taxes that in particular apply to aviation and that, you know, and the federal FAA and fees and all that sort of thing. But that was pretty remarkable. And I'd say kudos to Southwest for itemizing that. I mean, wow. I mean, they are acting as an unpaid tax collector to the tune of 40% or something on that flight. That's astonishing. It's a lot especially. Yeah, if you said you look at the fine print and you don't realize, I think your average person doesn't realize Uncle Sam's cut, so to speak. Like it gets a cut or it gets the claws on the money and how much of that actually, in a sense, is collected by the government. You know, okay, someone's obviously going to spend that money and et cetera on that in turn will impose its own distortions. But yeah, it is fascinating. You know, you look at just how a price and what you pay, actually how much of that goes through tax revenue, so to speak. Well, as an aside, we'll leave this chapter, but I just want to mention, you know, personally I have a background in tax and mergers and acquisitions. And people think taxes are just a cost. They're just a financial fee to the government. But they actually influence business behavior in ways that are just almost unimaginable. I mean, we can't even begin to think about when you look at a company, especially a multinational company, and if you look at their capital structure, how their debt versus equity, oftentimes that is driven by tax considerations. Now back when we used to have interest rates, we don't have interest rates anymore. But interest, most interest on corporate debt is tax deductible, whereas dividend payments to shareholders are not. So there's one huge distortive effect in how business is organized. And also if you look at a company, especially a big company like an Apple or Google, and you look at their organization chart, and you see all these jurisdictions and all these holding companies in different countries, and especially if you see so-called intellectual property housed in certain jurisdictions like Ireland, and there's this Byzantine structure of joint ventures and LLCs and holding companies and offshore companies. The reason for that is very simple. It's the tax treatment of their income. And so they are shifting legal entities and creating legal entities all over the globe in an attempt to reduce their total tax burden as a result. And by organizing your business affairs to reduce or minimize taxes, which is absolutely rational and necessary, it's a cost-to-doing business. Every competitive company has to do this once they reach a certain size. It has huge effects on how that business operates day-to-day, where its people are situated, where it concentrates sales, its shipping and distribution. I mean, this cascades throughout the economy in so many unseen ways, and it's really a shame because who knows how much economic inefficiency is wrapped up in the fact that a company like Apple has to house its IP in a country which treats IP revenue, revenue, royalty streams, at a lower rate of tax than the United States does. Absolutely. And what's even, I guess, what's more fascinating, maybe from my perspective, is the special interests behind keeping that tax structure. So not even in terms of certain businesses, but just, you could say, tax lawyers, tax accountants, tax policy advisors, et cetera. They all have a vested interest in creating a very complicated structure, obviously, because that will create demand for their work. And so that Byzantine tax structure you were mentioning, someone's benefiting just simply from the actual complicated morass of it because that way people will pay for them because these companies are going to hire an army of tax accountants and lawyers to find the most efficient way of doing business. Well, if you ever want to spend a couple hours going on a rabbit hole, just Google double Dutch or double Irish structure and you'll find out exactly what we're talking about here. But that's enough on taxes. I mean, a really incredible chapter. And nobody else talks about taxes the way Rothbard does. But moving along, I've got a couple of chapter stuff. I've got chapter five, which is all about government expenditures. And this, when I'm going through this chapter last night, Patrick, this chapter, I don't agree, but I understand why the original publisher thought that this kind of stuff was a little hot maybe and wanted to have power and market as a separate book because he's really attacking the sacred cow of democracy in this chapter. Yeah, he is. I've always loved that section. I like this entire section in general because I guess even from a weird perspective as an economist, I just think it's fascinating, Rothbard trying to calculate what he does in America's Great Depression, calculate real GDP or economic output taking consideration of the fact that government's a burden. That even aside though, the fact that the chapter of the section on democracy is worth the price of admission, so to speak, because he goes through that, oh, actually democracy isn't this great system that everyone always will vote in sort of their best interest or it will benefit everyone. And this is something that, again, even many free market economists would say, well, you would have, obviously, you'd have to have a government that'd be monarchist and they'd say, well, it would be a democratic government too because that's the best. And in today's society, how democracy originally arose or various forms of it in the United States is a different story altogether. But in today's society, democracy is really just kind of one way of the larger group sort of plundering the other group and it leads to all sorts of problems people don't consider. I think it's wrapped up with everyone's view on equality and things of that nature were now the fact that, once you're at that mythical 51% or 50.1%, then it's just, whatever the majority wants is, that's just the better alternative that people have spoken, so to speak. And that Rothbard shows is just simply not true. Yeah, and he does go after this, what he calls the myth of public ownership because we know that ownership is about control and direction. So when we think of something like a national park, who owns that? Well, unfortunately, nobody and everybody. So what that really means is that whoever sort of currently controls the national parks system and they won't be here forever, the administrations will change, people will come and go, people will die. They have this short-term control and that's not a recipe for long-term thinking. Yeah, exactly. And one of the arguments that he makes against democracy, which I've always found the most fascinating, most convincing is that, it's actually the idea that the market is in many ways, quote-unquote, more democratic. It's not that the market is an imperfect democracy. It's really the democracy, that the term of political voting and allocation of resources is an efficient and imperfect market because democracy is like a winner-take-all. You vote for two candidates, you're going to get one guy, you're not going to get the other guy. Unlike on the market, when you quote, vote as a consumer, you decide what business you're going to buy goods from, what businesses you're not going to buy goods from. It's not a winner-take-all. The market can segment among different groups. So if more people want an Italian restaurant, you might get a bigger Italian restaurant, but there's room for a whole other groups of restaurants, French restaurants, Chinese restaurants, et cetera, that you don't get a similar thing in democracy. Instead, that winner-take-all promotes a lot of inefficiency that most people don't even think about. Most people will think, oh, democracy is the perfect thing. The markets aren't perfect. In reality, Rothbard shows it's the complete opposite. What about the contradictions? What if people democratically vote in a dictator, for example? I would say that even most free market types today give strong lip service to democracy. It has become a synonym in the 20th and 21st century west for legitimate state. Oh, absolutely. Democracy is seen as the best system of governance. You always have to, oh, democracy is the best way of doing things. It's tied in with that. Even, fortunately, free market economists will be in varying degrees of support of the free market. It's tied in with how much government intervention is supposed to occur, and it always just seems that, well, as long as you have a mythical democracy doing it, that's the one calling the shots, so to speak, that is going to be okay. Related to this is, I think, this is something that Rothbard touches on here. He talks about a lot as other writings, but he's got the basic theoretical analysis of power and market. One of the reasons why people love democracy so much is it supports their idea of a pluralist theory of governance, which is the idea that, well, we choose our rulers. The people will vote. We'll choose the politicians who will get a run for president, and then we'll choose, you know, we exercise control as opposed to the elitist theory of government, which you might clearly see under something like a monarchy or a dictatorship or something like that, but people just assume under a democracy, at least in the United States, you don't have that. But in reality, democracies are still controlled by elites. You've got two political parties. You've got various elites in each of the parties. Of course, they could be clashing, but it's still an elite. The people really don't choose under democracy, and that's the real sacred cow that people always get uncomfortable with, because that's what you learn in your high school civics class, your history class. We, the people, so to speak, but that's an illusion. It's a total illusion. And importantly, it's an illusion of consent. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The idea that we are consenting to this process is that it's all related. The government is a voluntary agency in that if we participate in democracy, then it's showing that it's voluntary. That's simply not true. And this is all part of that type of reasoning is very important, because that's how the government convinces people that all their various taxes and regulations, et cetera, that benefit special interests are to the benefit of the public else the public would rise up and revolt. They get out of their pitchforks, and you wouldn't see that, you know, the existing structure for a long. It's all tied in with that idea that democracy is good, and the democracy that exists, we're all benefiting together. It's sort of like a collective entity. But again, Rothbard in this section, as well as elsewhere in the man economy and state, and in other writings, he demolishes that argument. And I found that particularly convincing. Well, again, I bet the publisher was reading this saying, hey, this is not what we had in mind when we commissioned an economics treatise, right? And again, this presages a lot of work. It presages some of Hoppe's work on the topic. Jason Brennan, I think he's a philosophy prof at Georgetown, also a Rothbard hater, by the way, but he's written some work on democracy against democracy. I think that's the title of his book. So not all of the libertarian sphere is as bad on this topic. And, you know, it's still given a lot of lip service in this sort of Cato world of things. But there's been some critics, and I think that that criticism is growing. I think people are seeing that democracy just leads us to the same old oligarchy that other systems lead us to. And that's encouraging to me that people are starting to question this and at least understand that if you're going to have democracy, it's most effective locally. And the further away the democratic decision-making goes, the more attenuated your ability to, you know, exercise any sort of meaningful consent becomes. You know, Patrick, when I look at chapter 6 and 7, the conclusion of this book, 6 is titled Anti-Market Ethics, a Praxeological Critique. This is, again, another sort of catch-all chapter. And then chapter 7, Conclusion, Economics and Public Property. You know, here he's getting a little high level here. This is sort of a more overarching stuff. This is a little bit philosophical. It reminds me of the way Mises wraps up human action with a little bit of philosophical discourse on the role of economics in society and in learning. So what's Rothbard getting at here? What's his goal? Well, so you're at the end of the book, so to speak. So the finish line is, you're seeing it on the horizon. You've learned all this exhaustive analysis of economics on the free market, on the government, you know, the individual. So you've learned about the man. You've learned about the economy. And you've learned about the state, in other words. So the title explains it all. And now you're kind of sort of, what do you go from here? What is the point of economics? How can we sort of, can economics actually advise people that can an economist not have any value judgments and talk about economic policy or so on? Can ethics, what is the role of ethics in this? What's the validity of ethical criticism of the free market and so on? So he's kind of extending, now you're sort of going into a little bit of other disciplines. And at the beginning of chapter one of man-economy and state way at the beginning, he mentions ethics. He touches a little bit on it in chapter two when he goes into private property. And then he goes through his economic analysis. And this is kind of leading into Rothbard's natural rights theory of ethics, his later criticisms of Mises on the economist as an advisor and so on. And he's kind of wrapping it up here, trying to show that, well, I've gone through the economic criticisms of the free market and refuted those. Now I'm going to go through the ethical criticisms of the free market and just kind of conclude that, well, in reality, showing all these things are criticizing the market from order or having a romanticized view of things. We should go back to the jungle, so to speak, or the equality and so on, showing that, well, the market actually does these things so much better than the government or the market really promotes altruism. I love his criticism of, well, it's actually the psychic stuff is the selfish. The altruistic is helping the consumers by earning monetary profits, things like that. So it's kind of a wrapping up. He's segwaying into other disciplines and just again trying to show that, well, now it's easy to see the free market is the best system as opposed to any sort of government intervention. Yeah, and I'm reminded here, we've got this delicious German phrase, term, vert fry, which means value free. And so Rothbard agrees with Mises in the sense that economics purely as a discipline, economics as economics is value free. It's a positive rather than normative science. But Mises argues the case for laissez-faire from a utilitarian approach. Rothbard comes along and he shows us the seeds here, but he later expounds upon that in For a New Liberty and the Ethics of Liberty of making the normative case, the ethical case for laissez-faire. And then you move ahead a few years and Hoppe comes along in attempts in his argumentation ethics to create a purely logical defense of laissez-faire. So you have an evolution here. Yeah, you definitely see that and it's very interesting reading this, especially in this. He's clearer in the early 70s on some of his criticisms of Mises. In this book, he's still kind of beating around the bush, so to speak. He's not mentioning him or not really kind of linking the connection, even though judging by his personal private letters in the 1950s and so on sort of relates to a project Joe Salerno and I are working on that he had these criticisms before. He had the development of his theory just when he felt comfortable enough to kind of formally, I guess, criticize his mentor on this approach who sort of also described his own ethical defense of the market and his own system of natural law. It's kind of ironic. It's fitting, I guess, because it's at the end of the book and with sort of power and market, the published Writing, Manicheim, and Stay in Power Market, Rothbard definitely wrote on other he wrote on economics, but he kind of segued into some more ethical projects, ethics of liberty for New Liberty and so on. And it's kind of like, well, it's him transitioning into those projects, kind of these last two chapters. That's always one observation I've had about it. Well, you know, it's a great book. It's a fascinating book. For me anyway, it's a tough book, tougher than Human Action by far. I wonder how our listeners think about that, but you know, it's really been great and you've been a big part of helping us work through this book and we appreciate that. We hope that people gain something from reading and listening along with us and also using Bob Murphy's study guide. And we're going to keep going with our book series. That's what the Human Action podcast is all about. It's about delving into real books and not being afraid to do that. We've got enough podcasts out there that are sort of superficial and lightweight and topical, and that's great. That's fine. Our sister Radio Rothbard podcast, which we're really starting to roll out more heavily, attempts to do just that, but we need to have a greater degree of intellectual verve in this country. I mean, there's no question that anti-intellectualism is on the rise and that ideas still matter and have purchase, but they only have purchase through individuals who go out there and promulgate them and advance them and support them. So that's what this podcast is all about. We'll probably take a break from the big heavy-duty books. We went through Human Action and Man Economy State. We'll probably do some more one-off, single shows. We recently did Jeff Booth's new book called The Price of Tomorrow about deflation and so that was interesting. So we'll probably do a few stand-alone shows on a few stand-alone books and if anybody has suggestions, by all means shoot those to me via Twitter or email. But I think very soon we will tackle Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. So we will work our way through that book and something pre-Austrian and I think we're all going to benefit from that and we're going to have a lot of critiques of that book, but we're also going to show the genius and how that book was really seminal and lasting, it still has a lasting influence. So all that said, Patrick Newman, I'm glad that you've been part of the Human Action podcast, especially with regard to this book because I think you're one of our real rising stars in terms of Rothbardians and I hope that ladies and gentlemen, you enjoyed the show and that you'll tune in next week. Thank you so much for having me on, Jeff and I think the Human Action podcast is a great podcast and look forward to talking about more books. 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.