 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Welcome back ladies and gentlemen to what is going to be the last Mises Weekends podcast, or at least the last weekend podcast under the moniker of Mises Weekends. We have decided to rebrand and reformat our weekly podcast a bit. Anyway, it's still going to be a show featuring me, it's still going to be an interview show and it's still going to come out once a week, although not necessarily on the weekends, but we just wanted to change the format up a little bit. For a long time, I've been a believer that, especially in the YouTube platform, that podcasts really need to be about 20 minutes and you lose interest from people if you go any longer than that, but we've really found that there is a market and a desire for longer, more in-depth interviews. I think really in the econ sphere, Russ Roberts at Econ Talk is probably the industry leader and so we're going to format a little bit more like how he does it. We're going to have more in-depth interviews and we're going to be a little more economics focused, a little more Austrian and a little deeper on subject matters. We're going to have great guests, we're going to let them go a little longer. Our inaugural podcast next week is going to feature David Gordon, who is obviously a very deep thinker, a philosopher, somebody who really knows everything about Austrian economics, about some of the key characters, brilliant minds in Austrian economics. He's also somebody who knows where the bodies are buried. David is someone who has a lot of fans, but he's perhaps underutilized and underappreciated by some of those fans. But we're still going to touch on other topics, of course, Mises himself and certainly Murray Rothbard talked about all kinds of things. They talked about politics and sociology and ethics and history. So we're still going to touch on things like secession and strategy and libertarianism and even to maybe to a lesser extent taxes and regulations, but the main thrust of the new podcast format is going to be economics and in particular, of course, our version of correct economics or in general Austrian economics. And we decided to also rebrand the title, the name of the podcast, where you're going to call it simply the Human Action Podcast, which I think is a lot more catchy than Mises' weekends, and I think it will attract maybe some more listeners and some more eyeballs just based on the name and, of course, the popularity of the great book, Human Action. Now, don't worry about missing out on it. It's still going to be fed via RSS to all of our standard outlets, Stitcher, SoundCloud, et cetera. You're still going to be able to find the Human Action Podcast at Mises.org and listen to it either streaming on the site or download the MP3 file. And, of course, on iTunes, the Mises' weekends podcast will redirect you to the new Human Action Podcast. So you're still going to be able to get a hold of us and listen in from all of these various platforms, but we're excited about it. I think it's going to be an opportunity to let the conversations go a little longer because oftentimes I get feedback where people say, look, it was just getting good. I want to hear more from this particular guest. So we're excited about it. It should be something that you hopefully get some enjoyment and also learn quite a bit from. We're looking to get more in-depth, not only with some of the topics, but with some of the books behind them. We're going to go deeper into books like Human Action and Man Economy and State and Liberalism and Socialism, et cetera. So it's really going to be not necessarily an everyman podcast. It's not going to be just a general banter like Joe Rogan or something like that. It's really going to be something for people who want to take the time and make the effort to be a little more in-depth in their own personal learning, their own personal knowledge, their own personal edification. So stay tuned. In just about a week, we will unveil the Human Action podcast. I think it's going to be great. That said, we do not have a guest this week, but I want to talk a little bit about really one of the biggest topics facing us today, which is socialism. A week or so ago, I wrote an article for Mises.org called Still Fighting the Last War Against Socialism because it seems like we can never suppress this bad idea that keeps cropping up. And it's very timely. I mean, you have people like Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City, the new member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You have people like Bernie Sanders. You have members of the Democratic Socialists of America who now serve in Congress. Socialism kind of has cool kid status now. And I want to talk a little bit about how and why that is. And that was the topic of my article last week. So first and foremost, the question that those of us who are, of course, vehemently opposed to socialism as an economic or social or political system have to ask ourselves, why does it persist? Why does it keep cropping up? Why is it so popular or seemingly so popular again among the young? It's not an easy question to answer. I've heard some different theories. Doug Casey has the idea that maybe certain people's brains are just wired a little differently. We don't have any proof, of course, but maybe there's a genetic component to people who sort of naturally or reflexively trend towards libertarianism. Who knows about that? And also, there's human nature. People like the idea of a system that's caring, of a system that provides a free lunch. People like the idea of free stuff. So it's easy, I think, psychologically and conceptually to understand why socialism is, at least on paper, sounds good to a lot of people. It sounds collaborative. It sounds communitarian. It sounds peaceful. Of course, it's anything but. And it sounds just. And again, it's anything but once you understand that the only way to achieve equality among unequal people is to treat them very unequally using force and coercion at the hands of the state, which is the opposite of justice from our perspective. There's probably no better book you can read on socialism than Mises' book by the same title, Socialism, where the original version in German came out in 1922. And he has a really interesting explanation in that book about why socialism is popular. And he says, you know, there's sort of two reasons why socialism sells. And they're actually not only very different, but they're contradictory if we think about them. The first reason that it sounds moral, in other words, socialism is an appeal to the ethical high ground. And so it has this appeal, especially amongst, let's say, the more educated classes that it's noble and virtuous and that the advocate of socialism is somehow operating on a higher ethical plane. And we all want to feel superior. That's kind of a natural human instinct. So for reasons of pseudo-morality, socialism is popular, or at least theoretically popular. The other reason he posits is the idea that socialism is inevitable, that it represents some sort of end goal of human evolution towards which we're always progressing. And that in this sense, it's almost self-evident that socialism is a perfected form of organizing society that will come about inevitably, of course, because that's just how humans naturally will evolve. And so these two reasons, one, the idea of morality and two, the idea of inevitability are actually very different because if something's about morality, it's something where we're making a choice and we have to fight perhaps against our lesser angels. Whereas if something's inevitable, it's not really moral. It's something that just evolves inexorably without human volition or without human choice. It's just self-evident and better. So this is a point that he makes in socialism. And it's really kind of an interesting way to look at it. It's also a very accessible book. If you struggle with human action, I think you'll find socialism is a pretty fast and easy read relative to human action. It's much shorter and it's really like, just like the theory of money and credit. It's an incredibly prescient book in the sense that Mies is writing this in the interwar period. Now keep in mind, he's come home from World War I where he did see action and combat. He was a little, he was actually a fair bit older than your average soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. He was not, you know, 19 or 20 during that period. But he comes back and it's now the interwar years in 1922 where he writes socialism, a book that he says he determined to write in his darkest moments or darkest hours during the war and we can only imagine what those might have been. So he determined that when he got out or if he got out of that war alive, the Great War, that he would write the definitive book on socialism and its ills and of course socialism, collectivism, communism, all variants really that we can use under the term socialism resulted in war and violence between nations. This was something he believed very strongly whereas I think most people today when they think of socialism they think of Scandinavia or something like that. They don't think of warring countries but of course the perspective and landscape was very different in the 1920s. So he writes this book and it's important to get from the book sort of his definition of it and of course his definition is more of the classical or dictionary definition where you actually have common or public or the people's ownership of the means of production. And he takes pains to point out that there are all kinds of what he calls pseudo-socialist economic systems which are not actually wholly or fully socialist and so it's a mistake in the eyes of Mises to refer to them as socialism. In other words just egalitarian movements or movements to equalize income or wealth. You know those are different things to Mises than actual outright socialism. Rothbard, Murray Rothbard took a very different view. He talked about how there could be degrees of socialism so if we think of private ownership of the means of production then we think of public ownership. To Murray Rothbard you'd say look, you either own something outright or you don't so when the government or the state comes along and just imposes a regulation or a tax on your property however minute it might seem, that regulation or tax dilutes your ownership however in some small measure it dilutes your ownership and as a result you don't have the full control over your property that you should have in a market economy and control is really the measure of true ownership. Whether you can do whatever you want with your property whether you can sell it, whether you can lend or borrow against it, excuse me, borrow against it whether you can use it or dispose of it however you see fit. That's true ownership and any dilution of that let's say you own a piece of real estate and the government comes along and says you know on the very far reach of that we're going to create a public easement for the electric company to come through because there's some electrical lines overhead and they might need to maintain them and maybe that's, maybe it's on such a far distant part of your property you don't much care and it doesn't really affect you in any way and you feel like well that hasn't affected my ownership at all but maybe it was on a portion of your property that you hope to one day partition and sell for housing development all of a sudden you'll be unable to do that and what you thought of as a 100% undiluted ownership of your property is now actually compromised quite a bit in a sense since you no longer fully control what you can do with that piece of real estate the state, the government let's say the local or city government in this case has become a de facto partial owner of it so in the Rothbardian conception that is semi-socialism just something as ordinary as a zoning law or an easement and of course Rothbard tended to be very absolutist in all kinds of things in his view that represents semi-socialism because the government now partially controls and thus partially owns your property so we have to understand that there are sort of different ways to look at the meaning of the word socialism and even amongst classical liberals or libertarians like Mises and Rothbard there can be a little bit of difference of opinion and of course what we're seeing today with the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of the world is a very muddled view of what socialism really is I had an opportunity to talk to Ben Powell a lot of you know who he is he's a professor at Texas Tech University he is occasionally taught here at Mises U a great guy he's especially known for his work among other things on sweatshops which really represent a form of opportunity for a lot of people and he's taken some heat for that as you can imagine so it's brave of him to sort of stick his neck out and say hey look maybe sweatshops are better than the other alternatives available in any instant situation in an impoverished nation but that's a bit of a digression anyway along with one of his colleagues at Texas Tech named Robert Lawson Ben Powell has a new book out called Socialism Sucks two economists drink their way through the unfree world and I have not had an opportunity to read it yet but Ben described it to me a little bit and what him and Professor Lawson did was they went to a lot of socialist conferences I think mostly if not all in the U.S. and they sort of infiltrated and eavesdropped and spoke to people and interviewed people and there were a lot of young people at these events and they found out that a lot of people really don't mean the collective or common ownership of the means of production when they talk about socialism what they really mean are just sort of elements of social democracy free education, free healthcare really highly progressive income tax rates maybe a wealth tax that sort of thing so they're not really talking about going out and seizing oil production or seizing mining or having the state nationalize Walmart and Amazon and their distribution systems they mean something south of that something softer but nonetheless there are plenty of just standard issue democrats and progressives in America who would outright nationalize let's say healthcare I think there are plenty of people who would nationalize energy production make it completely green and state run I think there are plenty of people who would basically nationalize education that they would eliminate private schooling and have that completely funded and provided by the state and really there are plenty of fields like law and banking where the regulatory burdens are such that the state is almost running those industries even though it doesn't own them there's so much state intervention that those are sort of almost government run in a sense there's whole industries like banking that are so heavily regulated that the state really has a big interest in them so I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself what kind of degrees of socialism can exist and of course as Matt McCaffrey points out he wrote a great article about Mises's view that not every bad policy is socials we ought to be careful in using the term because we can sound like the sky is falling and we can have people scoffing at us because oh you know you guys will say social security is socialism ha ha ha well it is to an extent but I understand Matt McCaffrey's point and I think it's a good one so when we write an article let's say for Mises.org most of the audience is going to understand where we're coming from but maybe when we're debating or talking to our friends or to the general public we need to be a little bit more precise I think it's a lack of precision in terms and definitions that really allows the Bernie Sanders types to gain a foothold and gain traction. One point I made in the article and I really think it is an important point is that someone like Bernie Sanders is not necessarily an outlier amongst let's say Democrats or liberals or progressives today I mean someone who would really who admired the former Soviet Union who would really institute pretty radical degrees of taxation and regulation in this country he very nearly became the Democratic nominee for president in 2016 and a lot of people think that the Hillary Clinton campaign was involved in subterfuge or dirty dealings that kept him from obtaining that nomination I'm not going to opine on that I don't know enough about the factual background of that but the point is that Bernie Sanders got pretty close to the US presidency and he's an open avowed Democratic socialist he's a member of the Democratic socialist of America so it's not alarmist or outrageous to say that socialism has a real foothold in America I mean this isn't something where the left can just dismiss us and say oh you right wingers, you libertarians you guys are always saying the sky is falling and all we're talking about is free college and we're not socialist well okay but the guy that you almost nominated for president says he is and advocates things that are much closer to the textbook definition of socialism than the Rothbardian definition of socialism so let's consider that whereas on the right I'm not a person of the right I think right ideology is deeply flawed and as pernicious militarism corporatism etc central banking as pernicious in that sense as left wing ideology but I don't think that culturally philosophically intellectually that the right is as unreachable as the left seems to be headed these days so someone like a Thomas Massey in the US House or Rand Paul in the US Senate these guys are outliers rank and file conservatives apart from the GOP will talk a good game we ought to get rid of the department of energy we ought to abolish the department of education we ought to get rid of the income tax we ought to do all these things get rid of the EPA they say these things but they don't mean them they don't act on them whereas I think the left really means what they say I think that the left really intends to have single payer health care and I think they will not rest and they will not sleep until they get it now it might take longer than they wished because if we know anything about the history of the 20th century we see that incrementalism worked very very well for progressive causes but sometimes that means that changes that people work for happen long after they're dead but nonetheless incrementalism was a one way street in the 20th century in the west in other words one way in the direction of greater statism there weren't too many rollbacks I mean you can talk about little tax cuts here and there you know but really the only sort of positive legislative rollbacks for the last few decades have been more at the state level things like marijuana decriminalization or right to work laws that sort of thing there haven't really been at the federal level in the United States and really across the west western Europe budgets have grown and the degree of regulation has grown the degree of state control has undeniably grown in the west and moved us closer to a socialist or collectivist position however incrementally I know a lot of people on the left will disagree with that but that's certainly the way I see it and I think facts in history would back that up so that's the difference is that the left today in America is serious and the right is just sort of kidding the right doesn't have any coherent ideology right now what they ought to be talking about is ownership and opportunity they ought to be saying the left is the party or the movement of dependency and worthy movement and party of opportunity and we want you to own things we want even average people who make $40,000 a year whatever to own stocks and to have opportunities and to be entrepreneurial and do things but they don't talk about that they just talk about ridiculous things whereas the left is pretty focused towards their goals and so I think it's a big difference and I think it's something that we ought to recognize the importance of incrementalism so where does that really leave us today you know Trumpism is I think not conservatism in any way I think it's an odd mixture of left and right and I think there's probably a reasonable chance that Donald Trump does not serve a second term maybe that's 50-50 at this point so it's going to be interesting to see who the Democrats nominate and whether socialism really becomes part of the conversation to the extent it does I think those of us who are antisocialists have to take stock of things and we have to understand that our efforts whether that's political or cultural or social or educational at least in the case of the Mises Institute are failing to an extent and we have to figure out how to comment things perhaps in a different way that helps people to understand why socialism is not just unworkable but it's also evil that there's a moral component to it and it's the opposite of what Mises identified socialist actually think it's actually quite an immoral system because it uses force and laws and guns and jails to enforce it all so it's the kind of thing where if socialism is really gaining a foothold at least rhetorically in this next 2020 election then we have to think about why that is and we have to be better prepared to fight against it I think with the facts and the history at our disposal because look two things we know is that both the theoretical and historical empirical case against socialism have been made absolutely over and over again airtight this is not in question what is in question is I suppose our marketing efforts and also our ability to reach people especially young people I do wonder sometimes whether my own media bubbles my own social media bubbles much like yours affects how we see things in other words we hear and read that younger people are more and more open to socialism and that makes us worry of course very much about the future but imagine what people were hearing in the 60s coming out of college campuses I mean I'm sure that they imagine that all those young people coming of age in the summer of love smoking pot what seemed to the older people at the time sort of a bacchanalia on campus that these people were going to be very very left wing and there was a famous slogan never trust anyone over 30 and of course a lot of those people when they just stopped being campus radicals and went and became doctors and lawyers and accountants and very normal ordinary people and unfortunately voted for people like Reagan and George H.W. Bush might have become collectivist in their own right wing ways but didn't end up socialist so I think there's a tendency sometimes to look at young people and shake our heads and say oh my gosh they're so socialist because apart from what I read and see on social media experiences of course working at the Mises Institute having worked for Ron Paul for many years and going to a lot of events and conferences I meet all kinds of young people millennials and younger who are anything but socialists who are doing all kinds of amazing things and working very hard in their entrepreneurial and so that gives me a lot of hope but I understand the millennials who are angry who don't have a lot of hope who look at their own economic fortunes versus those of their baby boomer parents and say this is a rip-off college costs too much I have to get into debt and the degree I get doesn't guarantee me anything like it did my dad and my grandfather and houses cost way too much in all the cities I want to live in and an overnight visit to the ER I end up with a $20,000 bill from various doctors I mean from the average person's perspective you can understand why they would look at all that and say you know I don't even know if I'm going to be able to get married I don't know if I'm going to be able to buy a house I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all the ordinary things the rites of passage that my parents did and on top of that they had a fair degree of job security at some of their companies like an IBM or a blue chick company from the 70s or 80s and they got a pension and social security will presumably or hopefully be solvent for them until they die I mean that you know a younger person can look at all this and say this deal has been broken the social compact is not working for me and therefore I'm open to looking at things like socialism okay well what we want to do is say are you open at looking at things like liberty are you open to looking at things like property are you open at looking to things like decentralization and subsidiarity and anti-statism to better understand what plagues us and why the economy is not what it ought to be and why your economic fortunes are perhaps not what they ought to be and why schools are not what they ought to be and why a lot of college degrees are not what they ought to be so there's two ways of looking at any problem crisis and opportunity so from our perspective it's incumbent upon all of us to look at this as an opportunity to reach young people who are really questioning the status quo who are really looking for something different and more importantly you're looking for optimism and hope so yes socialism seems to be on the rise but the fact that people are questioning things is certainly an opening and an opportunity for us and we hope that you will direct as many people you know especially younger people towards Mises Institute and again in a week towards our new human action podcast because I think it's going to be very interesting I think it's going to be very different and something that they're just not hearing in their normal consumption of social media and platforms like youtube so that said we will post a link to the article still fighting last war against socialism we appreciate very much all of you for listening over the last three or four years a couple hundred episodes to the Mises weekend show and it is going to continue I'm not promising some great change it's just going to change formats a bit it's still going to be me and I'm just talking about economics in a slightly longer and hopefully more enjoyable and more effective format it's going to be called the human action podcast we're going to have a lot of great guests and a lot of great topics starting with as I mentioned earlier our first guest the great polymath David Gordon so be sure and find the podcast next week and that said for the last time have a great weekend subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes you stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises dot org and youtube