 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. And this week we are wrapping up part four of the book. We're going to be getting into some shorter sections. Part five, which is about the socialist economy, is actually just two chapters. But part four, as I explained earlier, is a really meaty and lengthy part of the book. It explains a lot of core foundational stuff. And as a result, it's quite lengthy and it required, apparently, three separate podcasts to get through. And we're going to get through the remainder of part four today with our guest, Dr. Mark Thornton. This section of the book, chapters 21 through 24, or about 100 pages from 584 to 684 in the scholar's edition for those of you who are reading along and following along. And Mark, first of all, it's great to hear your voice. We've all been on a bit of lockdown and quarantine here in Auburn. And I always start out the show by asking guests where and when, and I guess how, did you first hear of Human Action? Well, I heard of the book Human Action as an undergraduate student. I had a professor at St. Bonaventure University, Scott Sumner. And I went to his office one day and he had a copy in his bookshelf. Apparently, his grandfather had given him that copy of the book and his grandfather is a donor to the Institute. So in any case, I couldn't afford Human Action, but I asked him to do an independent research class on the theory of money and credit, which was much cheaper. And so when I went to graduate school, I did buy a copy of Human Action and I tried to read it and I failed. And in 1982 and then in 1983, the Institute arrived at Auburn University and we formed a reading group. The reading group failed as well to get through it. So in the mid 90s, I got a course listed in the catalog at Auburn University on Austrian economics and I chose Human Action as the textbook. And so then I was really forced to go through and read it and learn it and be able to interpret it, which was very difficult. So after that, I basically told people not to read Human Action, to read some of Mises' more popular pieces and shorter books and work your way up to Human Action. And then you could really explain it. But now with the study guide and now the series of podcasts, people can get through it. So in undergrad, I'm sure a hard cover back then was $40 or $50 or something. You felt like you couldn't afford it. Right. It was $40 or $50 and I just couldn't cut that. But I think the theory of money and credit was like $12. Well, we're getting through it and we're making sense of it. And to be fair, I think people read this book on different levels, on higher and lower levels, on deeper and shallower levels. And people who are PhD economists probably get more out of it or see angles and understand layers that lay readers like myself don't. And I think that's okay. There's certainly something in this book for everyone. And now part four has been all about time and money and interest and prices and exchange and trade cycles so far. And now we're getting into this sort of the residual of part four, which is the entire part of this book is about catalactics or exchange on the market society. But now we're sort of wrapping up this section with a discussion of wages and land and original non-human factors of production and then harmony and conflict of interest, which is the final chapter in the part. So Mark, first and foremost, this chapter on work and wages is a little different. From what he's been talking about in other parts of the book, he starts out with this idea of disutility of labor. But this is really the only place in the book where he focuses at length on workers and wages. Yeah, that's right. And in some sense, a good part of this chapter is rather conventional. However, he does start at a very basic level as the chapter opens with introversive and extroversive labor. And, you know, so he's separating a lot of the things we do as human actors, worshiping church, exercising and various other things that appear like work, but are not really work with respect to catalactics. So work for money or work for production for yourself is this extroversive labor where you're getting things back in response that is supposed to offset the disutility of labor. And so he starts at a very basic level. But, you know, when I think about it, it's rather conventional, you know, in terms of his discussion and description of the labor market, so that you wouldn't get, you know, if you had a non-Austrian free market economist, you wouldn't get much of a different explanation and much controversy with respect to the analysis of labor markets per se. For instance, when he says labor is a scarce factor of production, that's a pretty standard line you might find in another e-context book. That's right. And, you know, there's different labor markets. So there's, you know, the labor market for doctors, the labor market for lawyers. And then even within those markets, you have better doctors and worse doctors, better lawyers and worse lawyers. And so it's a very complex market, obviously. And Mises points out all of those essential distinctions. Do you agree with this idea? Well, I think you do, but I mean, a lot of people would disagree with his proposition here that in an unhampered market economy, there's no such thing as unemployment per se if you're just willing to lower a reduced amount of pay you're willing to take for a job. And so unemployment in part arises two ways, one through state intervention and two through what we might call voluntary unemployment. Oh, yeah. I think that's perfectly sensible. You know, in all markets, basically, you have some resources that are available but aren't willing to come forward at the prices being offered. So, you know, it's perfectly logical to see people who have the ability to do certain things that are on the sidelines that aren't participating. I just saw my old doctor who's retired. You know, he's perfectly able to perform the same services that he used to, but he's just not willing to continue to offer those services. Right. And of course, Mises makes the point a couple places in the chapter that part of the reason that we have more of a trade off mindset with respect to the disutility of labor, things we don't want to do in exchange for money is because the modern West has gotten so rich. And so leisure has become available to us. And there's this great, you know, we've always tried to point out when he uses language in a compelling way. In age 612, he says the improvement in his material well-being has changed the workers' valuation of leisure. And so I think that that's an important point is that we're rich enough to even talk about these trade-offs because we're beyond, you know, eking out a subsistence living and we can actually think about whether we want to make more money and work harder or more hours or whatever that might be, or whether we prefer some kind of other activity. Yeah, that's absolutely right. You know, one of the things that almost nobody recognizes is that the standard of living for humans over the last 200 years have increased many times. The incomes, the life expectancies, the literacy rates, every possible manifestation of the standard of living has increased greatly. You know, that we live now in an age where people can retire, where people can take vacations. And I think that's one of the things that is very much underappreciated. Yeah, he's got an interesting little, not a deviation, but he goes off on a little tangent about the Industrial Revolution in the middle of this chapter. I thought Mark was so interesting because he talks about what a great achievement it was to get women out of the workforce. You know, the idea that a stay at home mob was an achievement of the Industrial Age. And of course, now we think that women have to be back in the workforce that were economically better off and more prosperous if they are. When he goes through some of the factors, or what he calls the fundamental facts affecting the supply of labor, I'd just like to wrap up on this chapter by mentioning one of the things he points out is that, you know, obviously we only have so much time. We only have so much physical energy. We require sleep and rest. We're not machines that just need oiling or something. And that we prefer leisure to labor, of course. So that's sort of the starting point of disutility. But, you know, one thing that's really interesting to me is that he reminds us that not every individual is able to perform any kind of labor. And while this seems so obvious to us like you and I can't go perform a brain surgery competently and a few people can. But this almost seems like something that the left doesn't fully accept. This idea that humans aren't fungible, that they differ in abilities and temperament and desires. But also that, you know, you hear this almost applied to CEOs, for example. Like, oh, he makes $50 million a year. And he's, you know, really it's the workers providing all the value and he's no better. And, well, he might not be worth $50 million. That may well be true. But the idea that anyone given the right conditions or circumstances could do any job, I think, still has some sort of purchase on the left. Yes, that's absolutely true. And I think Mises' discussion of the Industrial Revolution and the fact that by dividing labor and by socially cooperating was so fundamental. To the launching of the Industrial Revolution, you know, for 1200 years after the downfall of the Roman Empire, the standard of living around the world and even in Western Europe was very much stagnant. It was very much like Malthus' population theorem, which said that if there was an increase in income, that people would simply procreate and create more mouths to feed and increase the supply of labor and drive wages back down to sort of the iron law of wages. And during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, for the first time, we started to increase the standard of living, you know, and differentiate the supply of labor to specialize in certain occupations. And that was, you know, along the lines of your capabilities and your own interests. And so, you know, that's continued to this day. And yes, very special people are leading very special corporations and they're getting enormous amounts of income. But we have to also realize that in allowing people to specialize and make outstanding amounts of money, it's also driving up the standard of living and the incomes of everybody throughout the labor market. So, you know, one of the great fallacies of the modern age is that the highest incomes are getting everything. They're taking away from others who are more deserving. And that just simply isn't true. Basically, everybody is benefiting from expansion in the economy. And that does involve people at the very top getting very high incomes and wealth. And of course, as we became richer and more specialized, we stopped as to the extent using our bodies as much in sheer physical labor. And as he points out that as countries get richer, they tend to slow their population growth. People have fewer kids in a purely agricultural society. Children might be an asset on the balance sheet. But when you start to move into a more advanced society, they can quickly become a liability on the balance sheet. Is anyone listening who has kids' nose? They can cost a lot more than they earn. So Chapter 22, you know, he's discussed wages. Now he goes into, it's not called land. He titles the chapter Non-Human Original Factors of Production, which is, I guess, a long title for land. And he starts off with this theory of rent. So do you think he's talking about wages and now land simply because they need to be included in a pervasive look at Cadillactics? Oh, absolutely. You know, the Austrian School of Economics is a reaction to the heirs of the classical school. And the classical school of economics, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, etc., David Ricardo, they had very faulty notions about wage rates. They had labor theory of value. They didn't have a good theory of the entrepreneur or the capitalist or interest. And these weaknesses are what Karl Marx used to build his model of the economy. And the Austrians came in with Karl Mengehr providing a subjectivist theory of value and Bombavric providing a time preference view of interest. And so Mises is bringing all this out and into the open about wage rates, about land rents and the other Non-Human Factors of Production and providing a consistent theory of their enumeration. So I think it was just inevitable that he would include chapters on these things and sort of look over and provide a sort of a general characteristic of why the factors of production get paid. You know, they get paid according to their discounted market value. And so I think it was inevitable that he would bring these things up and he treats this in rather short form. But the reason for the Austrian School of Economics was the correction of all these heirs of the classical school. And so he's just rehearsing why the factors of production are getting paid, what they're paid. It's not exploitation of labor or any of that. It's that things like the entrepreneur, the capitalist, the landholder, the resource producer are getting paid because of what they're worth. Well, he takes pains to point out early in this chapter that the old, the trichotomy, which still exists in, I assume, in the context of the land, capital and labor as the three main factors of production, that those don't by themselves give us any kind of satisfactory theory of value and prices. And that I think is what you're alluding to here is that we needed something more than just understanding these things statically or individually. That's correct. You know, it's useful to have these separate categories, but we have to realize that in general, there's a general explanation for why these factors of production are paid for what they are paid. It's because of what they're worth, what they contribute to the social division of labor and ultimately to our standard of living. And of course, he's writing here in the 40s, but he's someone who was born in the late 1800s. So you get a sense, Mark, that he's really thinking about land in terms of farmland because he mentioned soil a lot. He's talking about the quality of soil as it relates to prices of land and better farming soil and worse farming soil. So he's still writing as someone who's coming out of that era as opposed to someone who's viewing land as someplace where we're going to build condos, let's say. And there's a lot of that, but he makes the point that you're alluding to here on page 633 where economics made a mistake in treating land as somehow different. And I think we still have that today. People say, well, they're not making any more real estate. We have Georgism, that land is the original product of the earth. And so you ought not to be divvied up more equitably and that profits that come from land ought to be shared. And he disabuses us of this, I think. He says, no, no, no, the land is in an economic sense of factor production. And so there's nothing that really makes it any different conceptually or per se than any other factor of production. Yes, that's correct. And what he's harking back to is that David Ricardo treated land rents as a monopoly privilege and that somehow landowners had this monopoly to territory. And Mises wants to disabuse us of this. He says, for example, that you can exploit land and not renew it. Or in other cases, you need to keep up the productivity of the soil. He says that we need standing room. In other words, it's not just farmland that we're dealing with here. But we also have land for urban areas, for people to live, for houses, for factories, for business complexes and so forth. And so it's a lot more complex than what people were thinking in the age of classical economics is somebody having control of something that nobody else has control over and is therefore exploiting everybody else who doesn't have title to the land. But the inequality and the ownership of land is a necessary and permanent condition of humanity. And it's not really the case that we should, you know, what was common after Mises wrote was discussion of land reform. So that we take away land ownership from the wealthy and divided up amongst everybody. Of course, Mises realizes that that would be a disaster in both the short run and in the long run, because of course it will talk about private property. There's some necessary and sufficient conditions that private property, whether it's land or anything else, has to be sank or sank. Well, he finishes this chapter on land. And again, we're not talking about property generally, we're talking about real estate here in this chapter with this great little sort of essay called The Myth of the Soil, which I really enjoyed because it's all about this romanticism of environmentalism, which is of course intensified since he died. But this is a guy coming from, he lived in an alpine country in Austria for many, many years and then lived in an alpine country in Switzerland for a while. But he basically says that it's only with the wealth produced by the modern era that people began to look at land romantically for its beauty, for love of nature itself. And he says this was all foreign to the rural population. They were looking at land in terms of what it could yield them because they were trying to survive. They're trying to have food. And he says, you know, I like his language here on 641 where he says the inhabitants of the cities brought them to the countryside, meaning the love of nature and appreciation of beauty. He said it was the city dwellers who began to appreciate land as nature. While the countrymen valued it only from the point of view of its productivity for hunting, lumbering, crop raising and cattle breeding. So it's really, we're very fortunate that we're rich enough to appreciate, let's say, snow-capped mountains. Whereas a few hundred years ago, those, you know, maybe the mentality is that that's just worth this rock that we can't use. That's right. And he's really criticizing the romantic writers who were writing in the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. And they made these portrayals of the pre-industrial era romantic, as their name implies, that somehow that people in the country were happy, content, where the father would farm the land, the mother would take care of the children, the children would be about playing. But that just really wasn't the case. I mean, prior to the Industrial Revolution, working the land was very difficult. And things like famines and plagues were very common. So this was not an idyllic society at all. It was very difficult. You know, in those romantics and later the Victorians, they would write how evil the factory was and how unsanitary it was. But the reality was that life in the factory was much better than life out in the country where you were subject to irregular incomes, plagues and famines. When you moved to the city, you had basically a regular job that paid a regular wage. And your standard of living was higher, not lower, and that your life expectancy was higher, not lower. Otherwise, why would people move from this idyllic countryside into the city working in the factories? Well, the factory owners couldn't force workers off of the land into the factories. I mean, they had no way of doing that, basically. It was just the incentive of higher wages, more regular wages, a higher standard of living that drove people en masse from the countryside into the cities working in the factories. So, Mark, as you point out, things weren't so bucolic and easy. And we imagine that life was somehow simpler, more in keeping with man's nature prior to the Industrial Revolution. But I think Mises is taking a laying waste to that idea. Yeah, I mean, our historical perspective is still that of the romantics and the Victorians, Ebenezer Scrooge. All of that is still infecting our mindset. Historian T.S. Ashton wrote that his college students, in their essays, they still reflected these Victorian views of the Industrial Revolution, that somehow life in the country was wonderful. And then that was all destroyed by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the factory. And I think that view still infects a lot of our thinking. And yes, it's great to go out to the lake and it's great to go hiking in the mountains. I mean, those are wonderful things. But they're only permissible by the fact that our standard of living is risen to the point where we can take time out for vacations and to buy boats, to fish on the lake and take hikes up into the mountain. Those were things that just couldn't happen when we were trapped in the Malthusian population theorem and the iron law of wages, which existed pretty much everywhere prior to the Industrial Revolution. So, yeah, I think we can be romantic in the sense of all these things that we like to do, hiking, skiing, boating, fishing and so forth. But we have to remember that all of that is really only possible because of the Industrial Revolution and the Social Division of Labor. Well, thank God we have leisure. And right now, I think most of the country has more of it than they care to have. Chapter 23, the data of the market. Again, a very short chapter starts out talking about the universality of catalactics. It goes into a section about power. And here we might think of power in the sense that Murray Rothbard used it in power and marketing. He's talking about state power. And I was struck, Mark, on page 644 about where he points out that state action, some sort of control over you or your property or your life or taxes or whatever, is just a form of data in the market. And it doesn't matter whether that comes strictly through catalactics or it comes through state power, that we have to view state action too as data which affects people's decision making when it comes to exchange. And I was wondering if this isn't sort of, in a sense, presaging the idea of public choice theory that there's sort of a marketplace for even the political world. Well, yes, I think that's right. And I think Mises was a precursor to the public choice school. James Buchanan told me that himself directly upon reading human action, he developed a subjectivist view of cost. And of course, Murray Rothbard also was a great precursor to the public choice school where you could say bad things about the government and about the role of power in an objective way, which is basically what the public choice school tries to do. I mean, we think it goes a little too far. But Mises and Rothbard were precursors to the public choice school. Gordon Tullock told me that the only book on economics that he read before becoming an economic teacher was human action. And so the broad foundation of public choice analysis about how the government intervenes in the economy. I mean, we have to take for granted, you know, as actors in the economy, the impact of taxation on prices. I mean, that's just inevitable. But we also want to be able to analyze the role of power in the economy. So I find this unsatisfying. He's got this sentence here where he says the direct or indirect might of an ideology and the threat of physical compulsion, meaning the state's enforcement, are merely data of the market situation. And I mean, I understand that. But I guess something, and I don't know if you agree, Mark, I like to think that the state and especially war are phenomenon that exists outside of the market, because there's they're they're happening by force, which is a breakdown of exchange. But is that the right way to think about it or am I being a little, you know, dogmatic here? I think that's right. I mean, I think the role of power is certainly not generated by the market. The market itself does not generate the conditions that create wars and conquests. More generally, it's just, you know, it's just, you know, it's just, you know, fundamentally, we want to trace back the role of power in government and the outcomes of such things like war. And, you know, Mises and Bastiat and others have shown that, for example, protectionism of preventing your resources being traded to other countries, goods being traded to other countries, that kind of protectionism is what more fundamentally drives the pursuit of war. I think we've seen this even recently, you know, the more protectionist countries have become, including the United States, the more conflict is rising to the surface. And I think it's a pretty disturbing factor in today's world. Well, he gets to power, meaning state power vis-a-vis property at some length here on the page. 652, but he talks about if land's not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. And he almost sounds like Hoppe here with regard to democracy. He says, those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns, lumber and game of the forest, fish, of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. So this is an inherent problem with power, meaning state control of real estate, that it's not used ably or competently when there's no skin in the water. Yeah, I think that's right. I think what he's getting at is setting up for his discussion about the catalytic view of private property and about the legalistic view of private property, where you're going to see some deviations from what you would expect coming out from the market economy and the social economy. You're going to see those kinds of deviations, which can lead to problems. So what's the deviation? What's the difference between the catalactic conception of private property and the formal or legal conception of private property? Well, there's a lot of differences. I don't think I can explain them all, but the catalytic view of private property is you basically have full control over your property without any kind of intervention from the government. But in reality, of course, there's lots of government interventions that impact your private property, even in a relatively free market society like the United States, you have property taxes, property regulations, social restrictions, and some of that would come about or be very similar to what private property is in the market economy. For example, in housing associations, there still is regulations. There still is private property. There still is things that look like taxes, but they're agreed to in advance. They're contractual, in other words. Whereas the government interventions can be arbitrary and onerous in a market economy with a catalactic view of property. All of that would be voluntary and contractual. So there's a lot of similarities. As Mises points out, but the big difference is that catalactic property rights are free and contractual rather than arbitrary and driven by power. Well, he finishes the chapter with a little note, believe it or not, on what he calls intellectual creations, but what today we would call IP or intellectual property. And I know that there's a lot of similarities as Mises points out, but what today we would call IP or intellectual property. And I know that a lot of people in our audience are not big fans of IP, pat and copyright, and may take the Stefan Kinsella perspective. And if you want to know what Mises thought about IP, at least when he was writing in the 40s, just find him here very briefly at page 657 to the end of the chapter, just a couple of pages where he lays out sort of the idea that, first of all, I think, and I tend to agree with Kinsella, he lays out the idea that thoughts and ideas aren't scarce, which I agree with. He does make what is, I think, a debatable argument where he says it is unlikely that people would undertake the laborious task of writing such publications, meaning like textbooks or handbooks, if everyone were free to reproduce them. This is still more manifest in the field of technological innovation and discovery. So that's sort of an empirical or factual question. Would people innovate less if they didn't have, for example, patent monopoly over the fruits? Well, it turns out that's not so cut and dried, but I just want to point out that he doesn't come down firmly on either side. He says that it's beyond the scope of catalytic center and examination. The argument's brought forth for and against the institution of copyrights and patents. So he's just talking about them in terms of, first of all, property and second of all, catalactics, and we get a little, but we do get sort of a proto-view of Mises on IP, which I thought was interesting. So do you recall this, Mark, from having read the book, or did this come up during, you know, when there was a time in libertarian circles before my time here, but there was a time when this was really a hot issue and Stefan Kinsell had written his book, you know, and there was a lot of back and forth over there. IP was libertarian. Well, I get the sense from rereading this section that Mises was actually more anti-intellectual property than I did in the past. He seems to say, well, there is a role for it, but not really. I mean, I think he's more or less basically saying that you don't need intellectual property rights, that once a formula is produced, it can be used universally at no cost and that he's basically saying, well, you know, people who write books such as himself, you know, there is an opportunity to make profits for a while, but inevitably there's going to be copying, reproducing things of that nature which drives down the full returns. But I think he's coming down on the side, well, that doesn't matter, that it's better to make these things available freely and not to restrict by the government in any way, people from using thoughts, recipes, formulas and so forth. So I think he's actually a little more anti-intellectual property than I thought of him in the past and he basically says, you know, the fact that you can't keep this imaginary full return really doesn't matter. It's not a factor of the market and it discourages social cooperation and the better expansion of the social division of labor. And so I think he's actually more anti-intellectual property than I did in the past. Well, it's interesting just to know that people were thinking about it and writing about it a long time before tech came along, or at least what we think of as tech today. Yes, and you know, there's always been a debate about this, about the pros and cons of intellectual property, but in Mises' time it was basically he was writing at a time when people were very much pro-intellectual property. Well, in the final chapter of part four, the long part four of this book, which has really been great, is called Harmony and Conflict of Interest is chapter 24. And Mark, what he gets to here I think is something that still plagues us today, the idea of zero-sumism, the idea that one man's gain is at the damage of another and one man's profit is at the loss of another. And he starts the chapter out with that and he's still struggling to explain this to people today. Yeah, this chapter is very reminiscent of Frederick Bastiat's work, where he shows basically that there's a harmony of interest between the buyer and the seller, between the employer and the employee, between the borrower and the lender. In reality, we don't want to see our bank go out of business. We don't want to see our employer go out of business. We don't want to see the pizza store go out of business. And so this chapter really fills all this out basically with respect to the harmony of interest in the economy. You know, I think that's really the most important lesson because I think the ideology today is that we're all against one another. We don't like the CEO making so much money. We don't like the bank charging us interest. We don't like this and that. And so the ideology of the state today is to divide us when in reality, our interests are all in the market economy in harmony with one another. Right. I would venture that a lot of people, maybe most people, even people on the right, even supposed free marketeers view markets not necessarily as harmonious or a mechanism for social cooperation society, but as a mechanism for competition and dispute, and of course, inequality. So we got a big job ahead of us. I mean, we're still fighting the same battles Mises fought, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, and I think things are maybe worse today with respect to that. I think the educational system has polluted our minds. And this goes back through time. It's amazing how we've done so well when the teachers and the professors are teaching things that are antithetical to the market society. Dividing us, splitting us up, the scourge of inequality and poverty when the reality is that our standard of living is rising. We're very much providing welfare in enormous amounts to the poor, to the unemployed, to the disabled, to the extent never seen in the history of society. We're basically propping up the bottom 20% of the population in a very luxurious style. We have 89 welfare programs, for example, that cover way beyond what most people understand welfare is. And we're providing, of course, in the last couple of weeks, the number of people who have gone on unemployment is just absolutely astounding. It's unbelievable. And I really worry about how we're going to back out of this in terms of unemploying tens of millions of people, putting them on unemployment and welfare programs and how we get those people off of all those programs and back into the division of labor. Well, we know the left has an answer for that and the answer is socialism, which has spread the wealth. And Mises discusses that here a little farther on in the chapter he says, well, first of all, socialists argue if you take the total wealth in society, divide it by the number of people and divvy it out equally, some people will certainly be made better off, the poorest people in a society. And then Mises goes on to say that some socialists argue, even if everyone's made a little worse off, it's still good because it's more equal, it's more fair. We don't have these fat cats in society and that alone has a value to it. And he's got this great language on page 675 where he says, it cannot be denied that this haughty indifference with regard to material well-being. In other words, if socialism made the overall economy or country worse off, is a privilege reserved to ivory tower intellectuals secluded from reality and to ascetic anchorites. So, you know, this isn't something that we've managed to disabuse the public of. I think socialism is probably, you know, with the Bernieites and what's going on right now in the country, it might be as popular as it's been in a long while, Mark. That's absolutely right. And the thesis was writing Human Action, even the third edition. We essentially didn't have any welfare programs in the U.S. or very, very little. And starting in the mid-60s, you know, we started developing all sorts of welfare programs. And, you know, we started out with three welfare programs and it's continued on. So now we have 89 welfare programs and it's just amazing, you know, how the ideology has changed and how popular Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC have become and how they've stolen the minds and ideologies of the younger people in society and how it's become so acceptable, really, when it's actually very, actually destructive and it puts people's lives in an untenable way, basically, that, you know, they're not involved in the social division of labor they're not contributing when they certainly could be and the fact that we've gone so far down this path and the appeal is to still increase this redistribution of income. It's actually very sad. So what does this chapter do for us? What's its place in the book and how does it help us to refute some of these arguments for socialism? Well, I think it rounds everything up, you know, that there's a harmony of interest in the market economy. There's a conflict of interest in the political economy that, you know, the progress that we made since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is such that we're no longer in the Malthusian population trap that we can expand our standards of living and that the key there is private property and the destruction comes in terms of conflict by government intervention. And, you know, I think that's the real key is that ultimately we have to study and research and understand the world in those terms and that the problems that we see in society we need to look at them carefully and ultimately what we'll find is that the problems are the result of government intervention of various sorts and that the keys to our progress are based on private property, the social division of labor, social cooperation, not government intervention. Well, that wraps it up about as good as it could be wrapped up and I want to thank you, Mark Thornton, for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen, everything we've been talking about, social cooperation is going to be continued in greater length next week when we get into Part 5 of the book which is all about the socialist economy, social cooperation without a market. It's the name of that part of the book and we hope that you're reading along. We hope that you have availed yourself at Mises.org of the free HTML version of this book or if you choose to at Mises.org slash store to go in and buy the scholars edition either in a very affordable paperback which I believe is only $5 with the code HAPOD, Human Action Podcast, or the beautiful hardcover scholars edition which I think is only $20 with the same code. So we hope you're getting something out of this book and again, with the world as crazy as it is around us, it's easy to be sucked into current events and it's easy to lose sight of first principles but the things Mises is talking about in this book, the points he's making and the education he's giving us is as relevant now as it ever was and we need it more than ever. So we hope that you have a little extra time maybe to delve into a book of this length and depth and that you're getting something out of the podcast. So we appreciate all of you listening. We'll look forward to hearing and speaking with you all next week. Thanks, Mark Thornton. You're welcome, Jeff. And thank you for doing these podcasts. I think it's going to be a very valuable addition to our understanding of economics in general. All right, ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Find this on Mises.org.