 Okay everyone good evening on behalf of the Mises Institute we're so excited for you all to be here for the best week of the year I think this year that hurdle might be a little bit lower than past years but again this is gonna be a great week you know as Jeff Deis described it a few years ago Mises University is the week where the civilized world fights back and I think especially with everything that's been going on the last few months it's exactly what we need so for those that don't know me my name is Snow Bishop and among my responsibilities at the Institute I help with social media so you can do me a big favor you just by using social media throughout the week Instagram Twitter all that your hashtag Mises you you know always love retweeting Mises you students so we can kind of you know bump up your numbers during this week for followers which always helps also one note that it's going to be very warm this week as it usually is in July and Auburn but it will be cold inside so you know when you are coming over no matter how hot it is outside it sometimes you may want to bring something a little bit warmer while you're here so all that being said it's my great honor to introduce Dr. Joe Salerno. Thank you and welcome to the 35th year of Mises University we've had more than that because in some years we've had two it's great to see everybody's fresh and unmasked face in front of me here I love it I'm not gonna say anything about the guy with the mask back here okay so I'm the director of rather vice president of academic affairs and the director of Mises University and it's actually my 31st or 32nd year of being here at the Mises University either as a professor or or as a director so to begin with I would like to thank our generous donors who make make Mises University possible so please join me in a round of applause my main reason for for giving a few remarks tonight is to give you an idea of what it was like in the bad old days before Mises University if you were a college student who wanted to learn about Austrian economics so I'll take my own example I was a college student in the 1970s and when I first discovered Austrian economics in my junior year in college there was no educational conferences available like Mises University my first Austrian conference was very small it consisted of me during the summer between my junior and senior years I worked as a janitor I would usually finish my work early and then hide in a sort of a window list and then stuffy cramped closet you know amidst brooms and mops and cleaning fluid and I would read Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression so I felt so alone I mean I was alone I was in the closet by myself reading a book until I graduated college I had never met another living Austrian so I was finally able to come out of the closet the janitor's closet that is as an Austrian and meet other live Austrians in 1974 when I attended the first Austrian conference held in North America it was held in a tiny and actually very spooky town in Vermont South called South Royalton the place had no street lights and that now you could hear you could actually hear wolves or coyotes I am mine my New Jersey ears couldn't tell which which it was but maybe you can talk to Jeff Herbner later lives in Western Pennsylvania and you can but anyway so they'll be bang at the edge of town the inhabitants you met never acknowledged you they just stared blankly ahead like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers anyway the Austrian movement was has grown way beyond my belief since the famous South Royalton Conference and and Mises University has had a lot to do with that tremendous amount to do with that thousands of students have gone through Mises University since it first started in 1986 more than a hundred different faculty members have taught at Mises University over the years as a number of professional Austrian economists has grown and Austrian research has expanded into new areas the faculty has become larger and are the variety of our courses has expanded so this year for example at Mises you we have courses on topics as diverse as praxeology and social calculation to how entrepreneurs built the world and the economics of winning an election so you have have very abstract lectures and lectures that are very very applied and all of it is in informed by Murray Rothbard's view of economics which was based on on Ludwig von Mises so let me say a few words about Murray Rothbard so amid all the progress and change one thing remains has remained constant and that is that Mises you has remained true to the founding vision of Murray Rothbard who really was the inspiration and designing as a venue to teach and disseminate Mises approach to economics let me just say a few words about the relationship between Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard because recently there's been some some confusion I would say about this issue Rothbard always considered himself a student follower of Mises he devoted himself heart and soul to advancing and applying Mises's praxeological approach economics. In fact Rothbard doubled down on this mission in the late 1970s and early 1980s when some Austrians tried to downplay Mises because they thought Mises was too radical and uncompromising and therefore would not appeal to mainstream economists and potential donors to the Austrian movement because the Austrian movement didn't have many resources prior to the founding of the Mises Institute in 1982. So the intransigent as some people have called Mises the intransigent or very stubborn Mises was supposed to be replaced as the guiding light of Austrian economics by his student Frederick Hayek. Hayek was supposedly and he really wasn't but he was supposedly much more tolerant towards mathematical and Keynesian economists and more restrained and tactful than Mises in his criticisms and to some extent he was the latter. Hayek to give you an idea of the attitude toward Mises that prevailed in those dark days I will recount two personal experiences. One day I met with two other Austrian professors after I had just completed reading Mises's intellectual autobiography notes and recollections and I recommend that to everyone it's very simple and quick read and it's very very informative about the early Austrian movement and Mises own place in it. In any case all three of us were involved in starting a program in Austrian economics at Rutgers University that was funded by a private donor. When I praised the book to my two colleagues they just smiled indulgently at me as adults sometimes do when children say stupid things. They then told me the book was a complete disaster for modern Austrian economics because Mises sounded like a cranky and tolerant and bitter old man. Similarly when Lou Rockwell announced that he intended to found the Mises Institute he was literally ordered not to do so by the representative of a big donor to the Austrian libertarian movement. Incidents like these explain why Rothbard literally clapped his hands for joy when Lou Rockwell informed him that he was founding the Mises Institute. What about Mises' attitude toward Rothbard? As we said Rothbard was a devoted follower and student of Mises. Mises considered Rothbard to be his intellectual heir and in the past decade this has been denied by many of the same Austrians who had earlier tried and failed to read Mises out of the Austrian movement. They realized that that just could not be done because of the great body of Mises' work so they tried another tactic and that was to deny that Rothbard was really a follower of Mises. But there's an abundance of evidence some of which has come to light in the last year as we go through the archives of Rothbard which we have here we have all this papers and memos and correspondence. So much of this evidence suggests that these critics are very wrong and that Mises himself explicitly regarded Rothbard as a brilliant contributor to praxeological economics. Mises even indicated that he himself had learned from Rothbard's writings. Mises reviewed Rothbard's treatise on economic theory, man economy and state and enthusiastically endorsed it. He praised the book as an ethical contribution to the general science of human action unquote. He went on to declare quote, henceforth all essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard unquote. Anyone who's at all familiar with Mises' writing knows that Mises was rarely lavish and or generous in his praise of the works of other authors. In fact, he said once quote, they're never lived at the same time more than a score of men, 20 men whose work contributed anything essential to economics unquote. Yet Mises extravagantly praised Rothbard's treatise despite the fact that parts of the book were intended to correct improve upon and fill in the gaps that Mises left in human action. This interpretation of Mises' very positive attitude toward Rothbard is reinforced when we examine Mises' reaction to the most notable instance in which Rothbard explicitly rejected one of Mises' doctrines. And you'll learn about that this week. I'm referring to the theory of monopoly price. Mises had conceded that the formation of monopoly price above the competitive price was theoretically conceivable in a free market, but highly unlikely to occur in practice. Rothbard argued to the contrary that the distinction between a monopoly and a competitive price was conceptually meaningless in a free market where there were no government barriers. Monopoly price can only emerge as a result of a government grant to some group or industry, a grant of privilege, of special legal privilege. Now Mises was once asked his opinion of Rothbard's disagreement with his theory of monopoly price by the Spanish economists who translated human actions. His name was Joaquin Rice. This occurred at the Mont Pelerin Society in 1965. The Spanish economist Jesus Werther de Soto reported that when Rice himself used to recount this incident, he would quote Mises' response as, and I'm quoting, I agree with every word Professor Rothbard has written on the subject, unquote. Just recently, another piece of evidence turned up confirming Mises' approval of Rothbard's interpretation of his economic theory and method. In a letter he wrote in late 1962 to a fellow Mont Pelerin Society member, which was an international society, the Mont Pelerin Society of Free Market Economists and other social scientists. In this letter that he wrote to the French philosopher Louis Rougier, Mises responded to criticisms of one of his books by Rougier. In summing up his position, Mises wrote, the proof of the cake is in the eating. I can only refer to the systematic exposition of the whole doctrine of praxeology in my book, Human Action. And then he goes on and says, and nowadays in the brilliant book of a younger man, Marianne Rothbard, man economy and state. So he's looking on Marie Rothbard as a successor, as his heir. So Mises clearly considered Rothbard's treatise as an updating and development of his own economic theory. But this isn't all. After a paragraph recommending Rougier, his earlier book on the methodology of economics, that is the earlier book that Mises had written, Mises closed the letter with a plea to Rougier. He said, but please, first of all, read the book of Rothbard. It is very interesting also from the epistemological point of view. So he's saying, first of all, read Rothbard's book, which was, in Mises' view, sort of the completion of the system of praxeology. So given the evidence, including the words of Mises himself, I think that there remains little doubt that the mainline Misesian tradition in economic theory and method runs through Marie Rothbard, who is the inspiration behind the founding of the Mises Institute and who the faculty have either known or have read his works with great diligence. Over the past year, we have found a small treasure in the Rothbard archives here at Mises University that corroborates the evidence I just cited. And one small nugget in this treasure trove is an inscription that Mises wrote into Rothbard's copy of his third edition, Mises' third edition of the human action. And it says, to Marie N. Rothbard, pioneer of praxeological analysis with all good wishes. So I mean, he's called Rothbard a pioneer. I mean, that's someone who's breaking new ground. So given this evidence, I cannot understand how Israel Kursner, who was a student and graduate assistant of Louis von Mises, how he could say in an interview in 2006, Marie Rothbard was a genius. There was no doubt about it. I don't believe that he fully understood Mises. I believe that he struggled honestly to do so, but he didn't provide a satisfactory Misesian economics as far as I am concerned. Unquote. Well, I think there's abundant evidence that Mises would have disagreed with Professor Kursner. Okay, with that background, now I want to get to the faculty introductions. This week, you'll hear lectures from a very distinguished faculty of economists, historians, philosophers, and a very brilliant legal scholar, Judge Andrew Napolitano. I am especially proud to inform you that more than half of the faculty has attended, or even more, more than half, well more, has attended Mises University of Students, some recently as 2010. Excuse me. On the other hand, some of the older faculty of Saturn, Murray, Rothbard's living room at the very beginning of the Austrian economics revival, way back in the 1970s. But regardless of age, all members of the faculty have devoted themselves to studying, teaching, and writing Austrian economics for their entire adult lives. And all have been greatly influenced by the works of Mises and Rothbard. So this week, you have a wonderful opportunity to learn from the leading lights of the modern Austrian school. So all we ask of you is that you really take full advantage of the program and show up on time and be eager and listen and ask questions. We like to have questions. We like to be pushed on the things that we're telling you. We don't want you just to sit here and be automatons or receptacles for what we're saying. We want to see a spark of energy. We want to see a spark of descent. But as we go along, we'll have faculty panels where you're able to express yourselves and ask your questions. Before I do introduce the Mises U faculty present, I have several reminders for students. Please remember to wear your name tags when attending Mises U sessions and meals. All students on scholarship are required to attend classes each class period. No visitors are allowed at meals, sessions, or social hours because of the so-called pandemic. Finally, please do not rearrange chairs at meals. Social distancing requires a limit on the number of chairs at each table. I better not see a seventh or eighth chair at a given table. I know if you get stuck at Professor Klein's table, he's not a great conversationalist. He may want to move to the Salerno or Patrick Newman. Please refrain from doing that. Sit there and listen to Peter. Listen closely. He's interesting. If you violate any of these policies, there will be a mask crew, especially trained by Professor Hans Hoppe, in the a priori of argumentation. They'll physically remove you from the premises. Now, faculty introductions forthwith. Walter Block will come to us on Zoom. He will not be here in person. If you're here, please stand up and hold your applause until the end. Mark Branley, Mark, please stand up. Hold your applause. Pair Bieland, Pair. Thomas DeLorenzo, Jeffrey Herbiner, Peter, yeah, for mention Peter Klein. Don't say anything, Peter. Judge Andrew Napolitano was not here. He'll be here tomorrow. Jonathan Newman, Patrick Newman. Now, both, you can sit down, Patrick. Both new ones refer to the other as the bad Newman, but since value subjective, you guys can figure it out for yourselves. Who's who? Sean Rittenauer, Timothy Terrell. I don't think he's here, but he will be here shortly. Mark Thornton, who's not here, and Tom Woods, who will also be here tomorrow. Okay, thank you very much. And now the president of Mises Institute will address us, Jeff Deist. Thanks, Joe. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces and people I've met before, either here or down the road somewhere. I see Mr. Jamie in there in the back has joined us. Good to see you. You know, so much in civilization earlier, and it struck me that all of you had to come to Auburn, Alabama this week to find it. And of course, we're very enthused that we're actually having a live event, a physical event, but it's interesting that we couldn't hold something like this in New York City right now, not in Mises' New York, in Rothbard's New York, not even in Judge Andrew Napolitano's New York, because at the moment anyway, some of the most expensive real estate on earth, and some of the most luxurious retail stores on the planet, are boarded up, graffitied, vandalized, burned, looted, while the government's security agents retreated and let it happen. We certainly couldn't be meeting in Portland this week, where Antifa has held violent riots for 45 straight nights, unopposed. And we couldn't be meeting in Seattle, at least not in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, which over the past decade or so has gentrified and produced condominiums which sell for a million dollars, or did, we'll see. So instead, we're meeting in Auburn, Alabama, and I think that's worth noting. Now, it doesn't mean, of course, that we've been unaffected by COVID here, or by some of the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd. We have been affected in Auburn for several months. We had a 10-person limit, I guess, on events. Fortunately, that was lifted, which allowed us to plan this event. We have had, you know, some problems with Auburn University. Normally, we read a dormitory from them, and that allows us to have about 125 students. But because they wouldn't allow us to have a dormitory, we had to limit attendance here to only 50, and we reduced the faculty about a half to just the most essential 10. Is that right, Peter? The most truly, yes. The cheapest. The most available faculty here this week. And so that certainly affected us, and we are engaging in social distancing, just in case any of the powers that be in the city of Auburn should come snooping around. And this week, as a matter of fact, tomorrow, they are getting set to have a Zoom meeting with the city council and consider a mandatory mask ordinance for the city. We don't think that that's going to be voted on or possible before Thursday, so it shouldn't affect me as you. But the point here is that we're not immune from these things in our bucolic little college town. But as a result of all this, one of the happy occurrences for all of you is you're staying at the Auburn Hotel, which I think some of the people who have attended me since you before will tell you might be preferable to the dorm and a roommate when it comes to television and Wi-Fi and other things, and so we hope that you all enjoy that and get together and, you know, socialize on your own because we won't be having some of the things we normally have in the evening, some of the happy hours, some of the karaoke and bars, and because of the COVID circumstances, and we're confident that all of you will quit yourselves well at the Auburn Hotel as representatives of this organization and at a facility where we do a lot of business, by the way, so they ought to be very, very nice to you because we're a big customer. But speaking of civilization, I wanted to just talk briefly about sort of the task before you, not only this week, but more generally as young people as students, as intellectually-minded people, and I really do commend you for finding your way here, which is something that I never did. It's certainly an advantage to you at this stage in your undergraduate lives or your graduate life to sort of have the accelerated program that meets as you provide, and you'll definitely learn more in a week here in terms of what we would consider anyway, correct economics, then you would in probably several courses in undergrad anywhere. But you know the question is what should you do, what can you do regardless of whether you're an economics major or someone interested in the Austrian school, and I was struck earlier this year that PBS has a new program, a frontline program if you recall that series, called Divided America and it featured a bunch of people like Robert Reich and Mitt Romney and people you don't much want to hear from. And of course Divided America was filmed before the George Floyd protests and before COVID, so looking back on it now the degree of division being discussed seems sort of quaint almost, but there was one that which featured Steve Bannon who is sort of a populist architect on the right and was influential, important in Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, and he spoke about how in his view we live in post persuasion America meaning that you know the cost of information is so cheap we all have these cell phones and it comes to us instantaneously, you don't have to really go out and search very hard to to develop your politics or your ideology or your worldview and so we're really everyone's sort of dug in and just believes what they believe and so now it's all just about mobilization of forces and we aren't really working on ideas or persuasion any longer at this point. Sort of a jaded or pessimistic view but I understand what he's saying and of course by mobilization he met mobilization at the polls now a few months later we were talking about mobilization in the streets so a little bit different animal, but I was really struck by that and it made me recall some of you will know the great social theorist and libertarian writer Albert J. Nock who was famous for among other things his memoirs of a superfluous man and you know wherein he describes from an earlier article the idea of the remnant and for Nock the remnant is consists of sort of a small minority who understands the nature of the state and society and who would become influential only after the current dangerous course has become thoroughly and obviously untenable and we don't know when that degree of untenable happens and so he was speaking of people like you and let me quote Nock here saying that when speaking of the remnant we do not pretend to believe that everyone is educable for we know on the contrary that very few are educable very few indeed so again a little fatalistic a bit pessimistic and I wonder how true that is but I also take a look at a lot of organizations in this country and I realize that majoritarianism is not really what it takes Nassim Taleb has a really interesting essay on the tyranny of the minority and how minorities get what they want and if you read that I think you'll find that it might bear a lot of application to the kind of political worldview we would like to see forwarded so the task before all of you as I see it is really twofold and and sort of at odds almost there's a dichotomy between disengaging in many ways with the culture with the mindset with the system but then also engaging with it in a meaningful way in a way that will hopefully at least improve your life if not improve the broader society so by disengagement what do I mean I mean that there's an awful lot of white noise out there there's an awful lot of dumbed down content there's an awful lot of social media vying for your precious time and attention there's an awful lot of podcasters out there who don't know very much and just sort of have banter for hours at a time and I would argue that there's a lot of value to you in disengaging from all this and being the kind of people who will actually read thousand page books and sometimes when you look at the news cycle and you think of everything going on it seems sort of useless oh my gosh why are we bothering with this man economy and state we ought to be out there on the ramparts and I get that but my question for you is as fewer and fewer people in our society are actually capable of any sort of serious or sustained intellectual work or even capable of reading or having the attention span to read a 900 page book does that make the people who can do it more important or less I would argue it makes them more important so maybe instead of thinking in terms of the remnant you ought to be thinking of yourselves more in terms of the vanguard so once you disengage from certain parts of the culture and engage with the better parts of the culture the more cerebral parts of the culture I think you'll find yourself armed with truth and knowledge that your peers lack and the problem with arming yourself with truth and knowledge is that once you have it once you know it it's awfully hard to ignore it it almost imposes on you a duty of sorts to go out there and do what you can do once you know it's hard to unknow and I do think that my own views on this have changed a little bit even maybe a decade ago I would have argued or counseled for a younger person to to basically ignore politics to lead a non political life to avoid ideology to certainly learn economics but that you should work on just bettering yourself setting yourself up to maybe have a financially rewarding life to have a family to do all the kinds of things that make you personally happy and then improve the world on the sort of the granular level and forget about politics but you know today it's awfully hard to argue that you know the wokesters are coming for you and they're interested in you whether you're interested in them or not so I'll leave with this we're going to go downstairs have a happy hour with some beer and wine outside or sort of in the conservatory I don't know if it's still raining but I'll leave you with this you know there's this this bizarre idea within sort of I guess I'll say small l libertarian circles that economic issues and social issues are two different things and that you have to focus on one or the other and that they're very very different and all you econ people care about is you know GP and money and you know you you'd sell your grandmother for another couple points of GDP you know you this this sort of idea of homo economicists as a caricature right and that's sort of the Steve Forbes Wall Street Journal concept of economics but if you think about that and if you really learn what you should learn this week you'll find that human action and scarcity and choice and especially the division of labor and trade among humans is that is the absolute source of all social cooperation as a matter of fact Mies is almost called human action social cooperation that was a working title for the book at one point so there's no dichotomy between economics and and the stuff of life between economics and social or cultural issues these are all bound up they're all one thing and by learning just what you learn this week if you apply yourself I guarantee you that you will you will find yourself in better stead than 99% of your peers at school so thanks very much and we'll see you downstairs