 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, on today's Human Action Podcast, we are discussing a really underrated and often overlooked book called The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, which Ludwig of Mises wrote in the 1950s. As you know, one of the big reasons for this podcast is to get people to interested in and going to original sources. We want to get people to go and read these books. It's really our raison d'etre here. We've already been through the theory of money and credit. We've been through the ultimate foundation of economic science, socialism, bureaucracy, some other great books by Mises. But this book is very much in line with some of the shorter works we've discussed of late. This book clocks in at just a little bit over 100 pages. It's a very easy sit-down read. You can read it over a weekend. You can read it one evening. And so if you haven't yet gotten up the willpower to tackle Human Action, let's say, or to tackle some of his denser econ work, this is really more of a book about philosophy and psychology. And as I'll discuss here with our guest, Andy Duncan from the UK, Mises UK. It's a book he wrote a little later in his career and presumably wrote completely in English because by 1950s he is, of course, in Scots in New York City. And I think it really shows. I think his language here is a bit breezier. I think his language here is a bit more lay-friendly. And I think if you haven't read this book, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, you're really going to enjoy it. So that said, Mr. Andy Duncan, hello and welcome. Nice to speak with you again, Jeff. Yeah, this is so fantastic. You actually wrote a review of this book, which we published on our site in January. We'll link to that. And I want to start off by just saying the overarching sense one gets of this book is that Mises is touching a nerve and that capitalism's opponents have envy undergirding all of their arguments. Yeah. Well, it really was like a stem of a flower for me because as you know, I'm a recovering socialist and I'd grown up into my adult life as a Marxist, which I'm sorry to tell everybody that. It's very, very embarrassing. I knew it was wrong. I knew Marxism was wrong. I just didn't know why. So for years and years and years, I tried to find out why I was wrong. And I stumbled across a book, I think, called by PJ O'Rour called Eat the Rich, and in the back of that, which is a fabulous book, by the way, if anyone wants a bit of entertainment. And in the back of that, there's a little bibliography of about 10 books. And one of them took me on to Ayn Rand. So I read Atlas Shroged and so on and fought my way manthfully through that. But then I got into all of her nonfiction books too. And one of those, I think, was The Virtue of Selfishness. And in there, one of those books, I found a reference to this, I'll say the wrong pronunciation, Mice's Guy, and she kept talking about him. And I thought, who is this guy? So this was back in the early days of the internet. I mean, this is 1998, I think. And you couldn't get hold of this book in the UK. So I don't think even Amazon was going at the time. Or if it was, it was only for the US. But Mises.org was going. So I found Mises.org. I got onto your bookstore and I ordered this book. It was nice and short. I didn't know who this Mice's Guy was. And I sat there and I waited for it and I got it. And it was like a stem of a flower. When I was reading it, it felt like I was a man in a desert and I just found a bottle of cold water. It was unbelievable. The scales were falling from my eyes. And I mentioned in the review that I read it in a car park at lunchtime. Because I got it on a Monday morning or something like that. And I couldn't read it until lunchtime. So I drove away from where I was working and went to the supermarket car park and just got it out and started reading it. And I didn't stop reading it. I read it in one hit. And it was like mainlining cocaine or heroin or something. It was unbelievable. And it was just smashed away all of my socialist ideas that were still remaining after reading Iron Rand and PGO Rourke and so on. It just smashed them away, drove them away. And I've been in Austria ever since. And after reading this book, I got back onto your website and immediately ordered a human action. So this is the first Mice's book I ever read. And it led me directly into human action, which to me is like the Holy Grail. This book is like John the Baptist, if human action is Jesus Christ. It's a real open. And I think you're right as well. Human action is written in quite stilted English because he's thinking in German and he's writing in English. In this book, he's thinking in English, I think. So it flows. He's a beautiful writer. Mice is a beautiful writer. And I think this flows absolutely beautifully. And anyway, that's the story of how I found this book. And it woke me up and sorry to use the word woke. It's a wonderful, amazing, brilliant book. And I recommend it to anyone who's a bit scared of Mises as a kind of as a kind of taster or kind of started to get into the body of Mises. Well, I'm so glad to hear that this was a gateway for you because I don't think too many Mice's readers started with this book. As I said, it's a bit remote. We don't hear a lot about it. But I want to mention this. Of course, Mice's is a man of old Europe born in the 1800s. And so most of his career as an economist is made and created in the first half of the 20th century. And here we're getting into the second half later on in his life and later in his career. And I'm struck by the fact so few economists today would dare write a book that has this much sort of psychology and almost psychiatry. And they would say, stay in your lane, Mr. Economist. You're writing about the psychology of people's thoughts about collectivism. And that's outside of your expertise as an economist. But he didn't see it that way. And neither did most economists in the first half of the 20th century. They saw economics as part of an integrated, broader worldview. And this suited me, actually, because when I was younger, I actually did a degree in psychology. I actually started at medical school and I wanted to be a psychiatrist. But for one reason or another, that didn't work out. The psychology department at my university, which is in Sheffield in England, they said, OK, you can come on to our course instead. And I much preferred doing psychology. So I've always approached Austrian economics from the psychological point of view about motivations. I mean, to me, the human mind is all one thing. It's not divided into homo-economics in one part and something else in another part. To me, it's all one thing. And so I really liked his psychological approach. I think that's why I really got attracted to this. And I like the way he mixes in the psychology of Envy particularly and all the other human vices and so on. And he mixes in the seven sins, which is the kind of root of socialism, the seven sins. And he mixes that into economics. I think it's actually a very good approach. And it really suited me at the time. You know, there's obviously the famous Marxist statement where people should get things according to their needs and provide things according to their abilities. And Mises has a couple of statements in this book about capitalism being the opposite, one in which he says, in capitalism, everybody's station in life depends on his own doing. And later he says, material success under capitalism depends on the appreciation of a man's achievement on the part of the sovereign consumers. And when I read this, I know what his critics are going to say and did say at the time. They're going to say, you know, Mises is taking this idea of meritocracy and capitalism way too far that, you know, your, your, your station in life is actually far more up to chance and circumstances than your own abilities. And so Mises overstates meritocracy. Yeah. And I think that's why a lot of, I mean, Mises himself explains this in the book. This is why a lot of people hate capitalism because a lot of things are down to you as an individual. So if I have a twin brother who's identical to me in every way and he forms a really, really successful business and he becomes a multimillionaire because he's serving the consumer. Whereas I go off and be an intellectual university and study proof store, go and do worthy things like study Eskimos or whatever it is I fancy doing. And he makes all this money and I make hardly anything as a university professor or lecturer. I said that's because he got lucky. It's not because he's talented or he's intellectual or anything like that. He's lucky. He's serving this horrible cheap market. He's he's maybe publishing horrible nasty kind of novels, you know, it's like supermarket trash novels, whereas I the worthy intellectual. Here I am studying much greater intellectual pursuit at university. So I think this is this is why so good that Mises examines this area and really delves into it because he uncovers why so many intellectuals hate capitalism so much. I mean, I can't remember who said it, but it doesn't matter what the what crime capitalism is accused of the verdict is always guilty, whatever it is. And so capitalism is evil, mostly because capitalism shows up who's good at serving consumers and who isn't. And most people don't like being shown up against other people. Well, talk about this more, talk about the resentment of the intellectuals because it's it's a theme throughout this book. Well, it's mostly that I'm this great intellectual and I consider myself greater than this common ordinary man who's a mere capitalist. And yet this mere capitalist, I don't know what he's doing, selling selling flat screen televisions or whatever, so that people can watch awful pulp fiction television programs. I'm so much better than him, and yet he's got all these resources and all these people speaking to him. He's interviewed, let's imagine it's Jeff Bezos. Think of the hatred that goes towards Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos has done amazing things. He started with a tiny, tiny little office. He gives hundreds of thousands of people jobs. He he brings me things in the post I couldn't get hold of 10, 15 years ago. He brings the prices down of all these things for all of us all around the world. We all voluntarily choose to use his services but he's denigrated and slated. And but they have it both ways, of course, because one, they say, all his work conditions, his work practices are terrible. People are having to work 10 hour shifts and they're not allowed to go for toilet breaks. So he says, yes, this is just the way I have to do it to make my business work. So what I'll do then to make you happy is I'll get rid of all these people. I'll let them go back out into the world and I'll robotize everything. And now he's evil again for for turning all of his his warehouses into robot driven places where people don't have to work these these awful conditions. So no matter no matter what he does and no matter how much he's serving the consumer, because he's so wealthy, I mean, a multi multi billionaire. And of course, his soon to be ex-wife is also going to be a multi billionaire. No matter what he does, he's seen as being evil by the by the anti capitalists. Isn't it interesting, though, to think that maybe without government funding that the harsh truth is that we would need far fewer intellectuals in society? Maybe that's just the truth. Well, yes, I mean, I think is it Rothbard who talks about this? I think he talks about the need for economists. I mean, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of very well paid economists. I know quite a few working in the bank industry. So for instance, a typical large investment bank in London will have a whole department of economists, maybe 20 or 30. Most of them on very, very good salaries. And what they're trying to do is basically guess what the central bank's going to do next to the money supply. But yeah, if we if we have simple Austrian economics and we have proper money, we'd need far, far, far, far, far fewer economists. We just need a few Murray Rothbard's and a few Mises is kicking around the place. And I think it's the same in in the academics world. We've got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, university professors, people who work on public radio and public television, people who work in the mainstream media and so on, all on large salaries. And yet if we took away government funding and government grants to universities in the in the UK, if we took away the BBC license fee, which pays a lot of these people, we would suddenly be cut with all of these people who would have to go out and get proper jobs. I know I know these jobs would be demeaning to them. You know, they'd have to go and work in a in an in an airline, you know, serving customers or something dreadful like that rather than sitting in an office two or three hours a day, two or three days a week, writing essays on on human consciousness. But we would be rid of a huge mass of these people if we stopped funding these people. I think it was Roger Scruton recently who said that. I mean, Roger Scruton, Sir Roger Scruton, sorry, is one of the the most erudite and brilliant men in Britain. And he even he's saying, let's just get rid of these universes. They've just become socialist indoctrination farms. It's interesting, though, he doesn't just attack intellectuals and academics. He also talks about the psychology of the common man. And so in Mises's conception, you know, in the capitalist system, you have a lot more responsibility. But as you mentioned earlier, you still have this envy. You saw this idea that you compare yourselves to others. So maybe in a capitalist meritocracy, you are faced with your own failings, somewhat relative to your more successful twin brother, for example. So common people, too, have some inherent envious biases against capitalism. Yeah, it's in the second half of the book where he starts getting into this. I mean, the first half is about how interventionism or at least the socialism and and so on. But yeah, it is nice. Let's say, for instance, I don't have a television. And then I'm the first man in my street. This is I don't know if you can remember. I can actually remember having a black and white television. So you're the first man in the street to get a black and white television and you feel great. But then your neighbor, your next door neighbor, gets a 20 inch color television. And rather than stepping back and thinking, isn't it great that I have a television and he has a television? You look at this other person and now you have envy because everyone goes around to his house to watch the television, to watch the football games rather than your house, where they used to come. So now, everyone, in your mind, you think other people think he's better than you and that upsets you. So this constant kind of comparing yourself to others. And and then you think, oh, he got that television not because he's better than me, because you cannot imagine that someone might be better than you also in capitalist terms, serve consumers better than you serve consumers. So he must be evil in some other way. He must have cheated in some way. He must be blackmailing the boss who promoted him to get enough money to buy the better television than you. You've been unlucky in life, someone's against you somewhere, which is why you can only and enough to have the black and white television. So there's always this this this this politics of envy going on with ordinary people. I think as well as well as the materialism, as well, you've kind of got this spiritual thing going on as well. Oh, I don't need televisions to make me feel happier. I'm happy within myself. This other person needs material goods to be happy. Therefore, I'm better than they are. So capitalism has eaten away at them. It's provided them with all this trash. And so therefore, I'm a better person. So also, we get into the kind of ideas of justice as well, where people think everyone in the world should have a 48 inch flat screen colour television. And if not everyone in the world can have one, then no one can have one. And Mises smashes this apart. He says, of course, all advances in society are going to be from a very, very small group of people initially. And then gradually these things will work their way out into the marketplace. So, you know, 100 years ago, probably very, very few people had fridges. Now, these current bonehead socialists that we have at the moment would probably say, oh, if not everyone can have a fridge, everyone has a right to a fridge. And if not everyone can have a fridge, then no one can have one. But yet 100 years ago, a few people have fridges and then gradually fridges sort of seep into society slowly and gradually most of us end up being able to refrigerate our food. So even in this 112 pages, Mises manages to explore so many ideas and go down so many rabbit holes. And he just keeps taking out these socialist nostrums again and again. And again, it's such a wonderful book. It is. I think it's some. I do like socialism by Mises, which is a very heavy book. And then after that human action, but really sort of pound for pound. This is distilled pure Mises in his finest form. You know, it's so interesting about this book because he identifies something in the 1950s. And of course, 65 odd years later now, we're much more wealthy materially. But he identifies that the biggest critics of capitalism and materialism come from modern, wealthy countries. Right. And so Hapa identifies this as well. Most people don't understand how radically human society changed in just the last couple of hundred years relative to centuries prior to that. So they don't understand how capitalism brought us to this comfortable, warm, soft place where we can opine about capitalism to begin with. I think it's hilarious, isn't it? I mean, you see these conferences where all these socialists are gathered saying how capitalism is evil. Every single one of them is drinking Starbucks coffee. Every single one of them has an Apple or an Android phone. They all got there probably by flying in from wherever they live. And if say you live in the United States, the United Kingdom, you just take this wealth for granted. You don't see back 200, 300 years ago. And even before then, the time before then is kind of romanticized. It's as if in England in 1400, people were living in the haywain painting. You know, everyone was happy and eating apples and the sun was always shining. And then suddenly these evil people with big tall top hats came along with smoking factories and chained children into these awful places and made everything horrible. No, no, no, no, no, people flooded out of the countryside to get away from the grinding 18 hours a day, seven days a week, poverty that they were in, scraping up turnips from the ground. And they wanted to work in these factories because it was much nicer. It was warmer. You had a roof over your head. You got paid much more money than working in a field. So people have forgotten this thing, particularly these these socialists going around in their fancy and their fancy clothes with their airline tickets and their phones, they just think wealth is normal. Or in some way, the village created this. No, no, no, no. The reason the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, despite everything that's happened to it, is because, as Robert LeFevre says, it started interfering in business later than any other government. Because people were freer in it once that you seceded from Great Britain, which, you know, I still have a tear in my eye over that sometimes. Once you managed to secede and you were basically an arco-capitalist for about 10, 15 years until you got railroaded with the the Constitution in 1785 or whenever it was. Gradually, the US Federal State started interfering and it eventually reached the point where it interferes as much as any other government. But up to that point, you managed to generate this huge amount of capital that did make wealth normal in the United States. And all the socialists just forget that all these all these people in the United States now who don't actually want to go and live in Venezuela. I wish they would all just take one way tickets to Venezuela and go and live there and make socialism work if they can. But people have just forgotten that the default condition for humanity is absolute grinding poverty. Isn't that amazing? We're still dealing with this image of Bukalic family farming in 2019. But one of the delicious things about this book is that Mises manages to turn turn things around and basically say that the opponents of capitalism are the reactionaries and the conservatives, because after all, for many, many centuries under monarchs and under feudalism and today under socialism, your station in life is somewhat determined for you. Whereas only capitalism allows for upward mobility and class mobility in a way that really ruffles the feathers, not only of progressives, egalitarian progressives, but also reactionary conservatives. They don't like all this constant change in upheaval. They don't like the fact that man has more control of his destiny. Yeah, I mean, in the Middle Ages, the land did the landed gentry in the feudal system, the kind of Game of Thrones feudal system. They had these lands and they were immune from the pressures of the market. They would take rents off their surface and they'd live on these rents if those rents were paid in goods and food and so on. They hated the rise of the mercantile system. They hated the trade fairs. They hated the new towns with the merchants in them that were becoming wealthier than them and eventually got to capitalism because it took away their kind of that they regarded themselves as better than everybody else. And yet these merchants were now making more money than them. I think there's a really nice scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love where Colin Firth is playing one of these landed gentry and he has to soil himself by by marrying beneath himself, marrying one of these merchants in order to to to get the money to go and invest in America, which is quite nice. But yeah, the wealthy people hate the landed gentry, the feudal people hated capitalism because it undercut them. It took away their their station in life. And so that's why so many of them support socialism. That's why so many of them pay for socialism. That's why so many of them use socialism in order to keep their businesses going by buying state privileges and so on. But going back to an earlier point as well, I think this wealthy people are hating capitalism is really odd, isn't it? I think the case in Hollywood is the strangest case. But that case is explained in Mises's book, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, because he explains why so many people in Hollywood who are living gated, palatial mansions and who have millions of dollars a year coming in, why they hate capitalism and why they love socialism. He explains that again, psychologically, because it's the entertainment market is an incredibly fickle market. You can be a movie star making twenty million dollars a movie one minute and you think you're amazing and all your friends think you're amazing. And then maybe you do something silly or one of your movies crashes at the box office and you're not hired again. And now you're out. Now you're the person who used to be famous. So a lot of the a lot of the Hollywood people are very, very, very sensitive to this. And that's why they like socialism, too. I haven't explained that very well. But if you do want to understand why people in Hollywood do tend to go towards socialism, even though capitalism has given them these amazing, wonderful lifestyles, it's all explained by Mises very, very succinctly and very, very beautifully. It's so interesting. There actually is a chapter on Hollywood in the book that applies equally today. So Mises as a fairly recent immigrant to America understands this already. But he also goes on at some length to talk about this idea that capitalism produces lowbrow culture and Mickey's blade novels are are purchased in greater numbers than the works of Shakespeare. So talk about all this. He defends this. He defends the idea of consumer sovereignty, even when those consumers don't necessarily share our highbrow aesthetic sensibilities. Yeah. So I imagine I'm an English lecturer at a university, a professor of English, and I've got all these wonderful Shakespeare plays and people don't read them or go and watch them. They watch Game of Thrones and they watch Mad Men, which I love. And they watch Breaking Bad and all these terrible, terrible things. Well, I mean, let's just say, you know, Suzanne Summers' diet books sell more copies than human action. That's not something that I particularly care to fret about. Yeah, I probably need one of those myself after I've eaten a few too many carbs in the last few weeks. I've got to work on that again. Anyway, that's another story. Yeah. How he explains it is that back in Shakespeare's day, it wasn't just Shakespeare who was around. There were hundreds of other authors, there were hundreds of other playwrights. Most people couldn't write because to be a writer, you had to be it didn't make a living. So you had to be someone who either was in a church or was a monk being supported by the church, or you had to be patronized by a wealthy person who liked to have poetry coming into his or her life so that they could impress their friends with this this poetry written by somebody. Shakespeare was very unusual because he could make enough money. Again, there's this the hatred of capitalism. And yet the reason Shakespeare is so good is because he was a great capitalist. He knew how to sell a play. So that was he was making money. Anyway, so there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of writers. There's thousands of plays. And yet over time, most of those plays have withered away. Let's say we're down to maybe 0.1 percent of the plays written or things written in 1550 are still around today. And of course we have the Shakespeare plays. Time has distilled out the best. And people forget that all the dross has gone away. And so we come to the modern age and we do have how many books coming out of a thousand books coming out every single day, diet books, NLP books, business books, whatever books. But they're not going to make it into the future. The only books which are going to make it into the future. You know, if you take the diet in one day book and the thousand variants of that and human action, which one of those books do you think is going to be around in five hundred years time? I'd say only one of them. The only one of those books, which is going to be around in the future, is human action. That's because it's brilliant. That's because it's a work of genius and explains the human condition from from alpha to omega completely. And so all the dross will disappear. And what's wrong with people being entertained? I get to seven p.m. in the evening. I want to be entertained. I want to I want to watch Game of Thrones. I want to watch Mad Men. I want to I want to have some entertainment. What's wrong with people having a little bit of innocent entertainment? It might not be brilliant and better call soul isn't as good as breaking bad. And these Game of Thrones sequels or prequels or whatever, they're not going to be as good as the original. But what's wrong with people having a little bit of entertainment in their lives? Right. And of course, it's a capitalist society that gave us enough wealth to even consider the trade off of leisure time. Yeah, I mean, back in the medieval times, I mean, my ancestors were probably very poor, common folk. I don't have any any Normans, I think, in my my background. Yeah, they were working from sun up until sundown. And the only reason they stopped working at sundown is because they couldn't see the turnips anymore that they were having to pick. And then they after working for 12, 13, 14 hours a day, they just go back to their hovel and just lie down and rest. And until then, and I have some broth, which probably had very little meat in it, if ever, cooked by a single with a single candle. Maybe the rich people had a single candle in the village, or maybe you all sat round one fire in the middle of the village if it wasn't raining and then you lay down until the sun came up and then up you got again back into the field and pick in turnips. So it's only the rise of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism has enabled I mean, the kings and the queens, obviously, were feasting and and someone drinking wine in their halls and their keeps. But the ninety nine percent of the population weren't living this bucolic, wonderful life that we see in all these paintings. They were living a life of absolute total poverty, stricken misery. And only capitalism has enabled us to have six or seven hours each evening to entertain ourselves. But as he points out, he takes great pains to point this out at the beginning of the book, actually, is a lot of modern talk about economics and politics and social systems has lost sight of this, that the idea of the urge for economic betterment, as he puts it, is at the heart of every decent civilization and that this is not some academic or rhetorical exercise. This is this is real life stuff. And if we're not even using that yardstick as our starting point, if we're fretting about inequality and we're fretting about envy, then we're in big trouble. I mean, if if that if getting richer isn't our goal, then we're in big trouble. Well, this is what I like about me is he really is uncompromising because some socialists say this this constant desire to have better things. Let's say let's say I've got my 14 inch black and white television. But as soon as it's delivered, I want a 20 inch color television. And as soon as that's delivered, I want a 48 inch flat screen. And as soon as that's delivered, I want a 72 inch flat screen. They say this is terrible. This materialism is awful, but Mises celebrates it because he says it's this constant dissatisfaction with life, which drives economics. And if it didn't, we'd we'd probably still be back in the Stone Age, sitting on the top of mountains looking at sunsets and so on without going any further forward into the future. It we need this constant drives in order to improve things, to to have better, bigger families, to have cleaner food, to have better conditions and to not live in this grinding poverty where we're competing with vultures for for lion carrying. So he absolutely celebrates this this constant drive. And we should work with it because all the socialists try and do all the time is they just try and they just try and dam up these flows, don't they? So if you think of capitalism as being a river, the socialists are like beavers. They're constantly trying to dam it up. And every time they dam it up with one regulation or tax, the water flows a different way and gets around them in some way. And then as soon as that happens, they're unhappy. And the beef, the socialist beavers start trying to dam that water up. And then eventually, let's say they do manage to completely hold the water back, let's say in the Soviet Union, with a gulag and fences all around the country. Every the water builds up and builds up and builds up and eventually breaks through 70 years later and completely smashes communism away because the private market will always find a way and it found a way in the Soviet Union. I can't remember the figures and please don't quote me on this, but something like about five percent of the land was basically people's back gardens, the people were allowed to have back gardens. And in their back gardens, they grew more food than all of the state collective farms, I think to a huge degree. And of course, this was all being traded privately. And Socialist zealots would say, oh, let's take these people selling, selling their back. They can eat their own back garden food. That's fine, but they can't sell it because that's that's that's evil. That's capitalist. But the Soviet authorities turned a blind eye to this because they knew if they didn't, the country would star within a matter of months. Isn't that amazing, though, how wants become needs? In other words, when socialists today talk about universal health care, that wasn't something that was available in any sense in medieval times. And yet today we can talk about this. But I think for sake of argument, when we talk about this urge for economic betterment, this idea that humans naturally want more, that humans naturally want to improve their material conditions around them. I think Mises's critics say, well, you know, that sounds harsh because they because economics is a social science. And they say, well, that sounds harsh and striving and inegalitarian. But nobody says gravity sounds harsh in physics because airplanes fall out of the sky if we don't have the wings and the engines working properly. But somehow there's I think there is a sense that Mises is harsh and that he's too direct in this book. He's just being truthful, isn't he? He's just describing the world the way it is. Not even maybe the way the world that he would like. But this is the way the world is. We as humans have evolved the way we have because this is a successful form that probably have been other human species, let's say Neanderthal and maybe a few others, Homo habilis and whatever that didn't think like us. That didn't constantly imagine new and better ways of doing things. They just kind of went along. And that's why they died out. The reason we're around is because we're like this. It's not despite us being the way we are. So we should celebrate the way we are because that's that's how we got here. And that's why we didn't die out. So it I think as well as arrogance of the socialists, too, because they give in to all these desires themselves, too. When a new phone comes out, they still want the new phone. They don't keep their old Nokia. You don't see many socialists at conferences with Nokia's. They've got their air pods in, not the wired headphones. So they give in to all these things themselves. But that's OK, because, you know, they're intellectuals. They can think higher thoughts than people like me in the Hoipa Loy. So just this arrogance that they can socially engineer anything they want. That they think that we're blank slates and that they can turn us into these perfect socialists, men and women like in the I think the Iran novel, which sums that up best, is the the anthem novel, which is one of my favourite novellas by by Iran. Much better than that. The struggle, actually, we see this in 1984 by George Orwell. Of course, we got this engineering going on all the time. Oh, in brave new world as well, my oldest Huxley. So the socialists think that that the reason we're bad is because capitalism has taken our blank slates and made us bad. And they can take our blank slates and and make us good. Whereas, to my mind, all capitalism does is it's just when it's in its purest form, which is anarcho-capitalism, to my mind, sort of Rothbardian, Hopian, Misesianism, when it's allowed to be pure like that and the beavers aren't blocking the rivers and the water can flow properly. Capitalism is the purest expression of the human form and the human mind. And that's why it leads to these wonderful civilizational effects and leads to this massive accumulation of wealth, which makes everybody's life better. You know, Mises in this book and elsewhere uses this fantastic term, the daily plebiscite. And I think what you're describing here, this this insistence that if we just let people do what they want to do without controlling them, without planning things, they won't do the right things. But in fact, this daily plebiscite, what he would consider consumer sovereignty, a term Rothbard didn't love, but we understand what he means, that that daily plebiscite is actually quite expressive, quite egalitarian and quite democratic, despite, you know, this dislike of what they view as crass materialism. Yes, they can't stand to see other people being happy, can they? I do like the idea is that every penny that everyone has is used to decide what kind of toothpaste should there be. Well, let the people buy their favourite toothpaste, use their pennies and their taste of fickle and maybe they'll change. But we do get to a better situation. You've just got to look at those photographs of East Germany and West Germany before East Germany managed to throw off communism. Or now you take photographs of North Korea and South Korea. Which of those two places would you rather live in? Would you rather live in socialist North Korea with its perfect socialism? Or would you rather live in the crass and evil and horrible South Korea? Well, you know, even the socialists would rather live in South Korea. Although once they were there, they tried to change it to make it like North Korea. This crass commercialism takes us forward. People have better lives. We go forward. We have nice toothpaste. We have shelves full of food rather than empty shelves like they have in Venezuela. It is incredible how the socialists just object so much to ordinary people just having voluntary choices. Of course, they want to be in charge. A lot of the time, there are far too many. There are far more intellectuals than there should be, as we discussed earlier. But they want to be the ones in charge of all of this. Of course, they want to be the ones having the largest incomes in bureaucracies as commissars, deciding who gets what. Of course, naturally, they usually decide that they need more than anyone else. They'll be flying first class. They'll have dachas in the countryside for the weekends. They'll have as much champagne as they want to drink. It just seems that it's an amazing coincidence, isn't it? That whenever we let the intellectuals form the ruling class, the wealthiest people in society typically end up very quickly being the intellectuals, while everyone else becomes impoverished. Well, and there's this abiding hang-up over inequality. And Mises talks about in the 1950s, it's perhaps stronger today if we listen to at least the political rhetoric about we're such an unequal society. And what struck me as I was reading the section toward the end of the book called Non-Economic Objections to Capitalism. And of course, inequality is one of those objections Mises tackles. I wonder if we could create some objective measure today, whereby we could say the poorest amongst us in the West, it will press a magic button. And instantaneously, the poorest among us will become objectively, measurably better off in terms of their housing, food, education and healthcare, let's say, tangible objective measures. But when we press that same magic button, the wealthiest one or five or 10% will become objectively better off plus X. In other words, the delta between the now objectively better off poorest people and the objectively better off wealthiest people will grow, even though the people at the bottom who are closest to the bone on things like going to the doctor and having enough food to eat and having transportation and a decent place to live will be better off. I wonder how many people in the West today wouldn't press that button. I think it's an open question. I think the politics of envy is so deep now that I think people would rather be poorer than let the wealthy people get wealthier. These are the Gramskine ideas, of course, aren't they from the 1930s? The left taking over the schools, the left taking over journalism and television news and so on, and eventually becoming politicians as well. I think this is why envy is one of the major seven sins. And I think this is one of the reasons why religions, if you look at most religions, they all have a list of sins and they all try to fight against them, you know, sloth and envy and so on. But the one they particularly try to fight against is envy, because it is the most destructive. It's the one which brings civilization down quicker than anything else. I mean, there's some great books on envy. This book, The Anticapitalistic Mentality, is a great book and it does explain envy and its psychological roots quite well. This is why letting the left take control of schools and so on and universities has been such a bad idea, because people are now in this hateful kind of state where they would press the button where we don't get wealthier. Well, Andy, I'll leave you with this. The rotters at the economists back in the 1950s panned this book. They called it a caricature of economic liberalism. So if we think the economists just got bad 10 years ago or something, that's not true. And actually, none other than Whitaker Chambers, the famous Whitaker Chambers, panned it in National Review. He called it the worst example of no-nothing conservatism. So I'm going to tell you that if you haven't read any Mises or much Mises, this is a fantastic introduction. You can be like Andy. You can go on a new journey as a result of reading a book in about an hour. You can find it for free on our website. Just go to Mises.org and type in The Anticapitalistic Mentality. There's a PDF there. We also have a beautiful little paperback version. We're going to give you a code. It's H-A-P-O-D. That stands for Human Action Podcast, H-A-P-O-D. So go to the Mises bookstore on our website. Search for The Anticapitalistic Mentality. You can get this book for $5, $5 in paperback form if you simply enter that code H-A-P-O-D. It's a great, easy read. We're thrilled to be introducing people to some of these lesser known works by people like Mises. Soon we'll be getting into Rothbard and other writers as well. And Andy, I think you were the perfect guy for the task today. We really appreciate your time and we hope everybody stays in touch with us, listens to the podcast and spreads it because we need to get the ideas of civilization out to our friends and family and we need to find the remnant and we need to fight back against the tide of darkness, the tides of darkness that really are growing around us. So Andy Duncan, thank you so much for your time. My absolute pleasure, Jeff. And I hope you have a great week ahead down there in Auburn, Alabama.