 Welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist and we're very pleased to have you join us. We're going to take a little bit different tack this weekend and talk to one of our summer fellows here at the Mises Institute. If you're not familiar with the Summer Fellow Program, basically we have young doctoral candidates, generally PhD candidates come and spend their summers with us in Auburn to work on specific topics in the Austrian school tradition. Many of these PhD candidates are working under Austro-libertarian professors like Peter Klein, Huerta de Soto, Guido Halsman, Edangé in France, etc. And this summer we're very very pleased to have students, young people from several countries, Poland, Germany, Taiwan, France, Brazil, Guatemala, and of course the US as well. So our guest this weekend is Louis Rene. He is French but not Parisian and he's doing some work here this summer on the French regulatory regime among other things. And although he's only about 21 years old, he's already a very brilliant young scholar and an emerging force to be reckoned with in Austro-libertarian circles. He has written several daily articles for Mises.org on subjects like Paul Krugman's love of all things French and on French socialism as it pertains to their train system and analogies to our own Amtrak mess. Louis and I have an interesting discussion about the deep and long French tradition of liberty, obviously a tradition that's been lost in the 20th and now 21st century. But if you're interested in our Summer Fellowes Program, if you're interested in French liberal traditions, which actually go deeper than Bastiat and Jean-Baptiste say, I'm sure you will enjoy my conversation with Louis. So stay tuned. So Louis, tell us a little bit first and foremost about how you became interested in Austrian economics, how you found the Mises Institute, and how you ultimately came to join us here. Well, at first I became libertarians thanks to Milton Friedman. Who is this guy? Nobody is speaking about. And so I watched several of his videos on YouTube. And after I discovered some libertarian websites and Austrian economics and I was, wait, what is Austrian economics? So I discovered the Mises Institute and yeah. But you're only, I believe 21 years of age now. So you must have been a young guy, a teenager when you started to develop this interest. I was 18. Okay. Okay. And it's interesting how you bring up Milton Friedman. That's a name that we don't hear quite as much anymore. Milton and his wife wrote the famous Free to Choose series. On that topic, we have this image of French politics and French ideology in the West and particularly in the US that's modern that most French people are very socialist and their outlook. What is considered fairly right wing in France would not be so right wing in the US, et cetera. But as you pointed out in some of the articles you've written for us already, French has a very strong tradition of liberty. There are some incredible French philosophers and economists who carried on this tradition. And it goes beyond Bastiat. It goes beyond Jean-Baptiste Sey, for example. So talk a little bit about French libertarian history. Well, it started very early, but even for example, Adam Smith started to write the wealth of nation in Toulouse in France and met with the physiocrats at the time, so Turgo and other French economists. John Adams, former president, was influenced by a French economist. Destin Tracey wrote treaties of political economy. And John Adams really liked the part on money written by Destin de Tracey. So you really have a strong influence of French classical liberals. Even for three economics, it's very important. And the French School of Political Economy, which now disappeared, strongly influenced, for example, Bombarder called Karl Munger. If you read the principle of economics by Karl Munger, you can see that you have dozens and dozens of French authors quoted by him. France was the last country to really accept the Keynesian revolution. There were like very strong oppositions to Keynesianism, even after the Second World War. De Gaulle was known as being good on money. He obviously gave a very famous speech in 1965 about a warning that America's status as a superpower and its reserve currency would cause problems for the world and that we should go back onto a gold standard. And it was also in the 60s that the French finance minister, she scarred, called the US dollar reserve currency status an exorbitant privilege. It's really sort of a ultra-modern trend that France has become in the mind of the West, sort of a socialist country, was not always thus even in the 20th century. I'm not sure the exorbitant privilege was just because maybe it was the goal of Jacques Rueff. So yeah, for example, Jacques Rueff was friends with Ludwig von Mises. And he was a very influential economist in the 60s and in the 50s, too. And so he helped to reform the French economy after the Second World War. But in general, the two world wars destroyed liberalism in France. So for example, my school was created by classical liberals, Paul Le Rois-Boliou, Jean-Baptiste Sey's grandson was teaching in my school. And so it was really forming the administration and the elite, the bureaucrats, and they were convinced by classical liberalism. But after you had the First World War, the classical gold standard was ended and the classical economists were killed. And same during the Second World War, for example, Hayek had a French student, Etienne Mantoux, at the London School of Economics, and he was killed during Second World War. And so this really influenced bad luck and political pressures made the French classical liberal tradition just disappear through time. And now it's very weak. It's mainly amongst the young generations that we have a rebirth. Classical liberalism, of course. When I say liberalism, I mean libertarianism, because in France we still use the word liberal. How big of a star, how big of a phenomenon is Piketty? Obviously, his book was a big splash in the US. Krugman loves the guy, loves his book. Do you think his book represents sort of modern French mainstream thinking? I don't think so. In fact, I think the book was more popular in the US than in France, because it was published first in France and nobody heard of it. And it's really when it was translated into English that Piketty became like a sort of superstar. For example, in my school, you have one economist, Etienne Matt Vassmer, who did one of the first critic of Piketty based on housing and the housing bubble. And you are one really famous journalist who said that Piketty was a Marxist super effector. So super effector is like a political division. You know, you are like regions and departments, departments of like pretty small political entities. So it was very pejorative. It was saying his book is not good. You have logical errors everywhere. And so you really have a conflict as in the US also really today between mathematician economists and very formal mathematics. And those who call themselves economists but who are more doing sociology or anthropology and trying to justify a statist's policies and socialists style policies. And so with Piketty not a star prior to the publication of this book, I noticed that he got a PhD at a very young age, the London School of Economics. It was known because he wrote a book on the evolution of income in France. It was a pretty known book. But the capital in the 21st century wasn't really this bestseller before it was translated into English in France. So you wrote a daily article for Mises.org recently about Krugman, whom we mentioned a moment ago. And he does seem to have a love affair with France in a certain way. And of course, he's been railing against austerity. And there's a very amorphous view in the United States what austerity means in certain European countries. I'm not sure that we understand it correctly. But as you point out in the article, there's been no actual reduction in spending your tax levels in France. Well, it's increased in fact, like both the tax level and spending. And the French government has just a complete inability to reduce spending, mainly because government is sort of a tragedy of the commons. Everybody tries to live at the expense of everyone. As we'll have said, Frederick Basia. And so today, nothing moves. And it's very hard to reform. Because if you try to touch a privilege, you have like, huge contestations. So even if the government would like to reform, not this one, but even if it was the case, I don't think it will happen because it's too complicated. And so now today, maybe how best chance is really either competition between states, the fiscal competition in Europe, new technologies, for example, Uber or some sort of things. And yes, people basically ignoring the state and doing something by by themselves. Beyond the economics of it, though, do you have a sense that there that there's a movement in France to reclaim a degree of French sovereignty? In other words, do people dislike the ECB as a project? Do they dislike the Euro? Do they pine for the days of the French franc? I don't think so. I think some are critical of the European Union. So you have the far right party, which is pretty weak for now. But I don't think the majority of French wants to end Euro and return to the franc. Right. I think they don't even see how it's possible. Now people accepted zero Euro. And so yes, but clearly, there is more contestation against the European Union. And so the far right party is growing pretty fast. And I just want to say that it's not only nationalist party, it's also a very status party. And they have a lot of similarities with five left, like left wing party, they are competing for the same electorate with the Communist Party, basically, and the Mélenchon saw the left front. So you have the left front and national front and they are competing for the same electorate. And they have often quite similar ideas on the economy, at least. Sure, protectionism, that sort of thing. Yes, protectionism, what they call so the strategic state interventionism. In France, you have this myth of Colbert with a 14th minister who was a mercantilist and an interventionist, he nationalized some industries. And what people don't realize that at the time, he was completely hated by people. In fact, when he was buried, he was buried in secret because people hated him so much, they had to do this in secret. So and he was a very corrupt man. And that's funny how history has been like rewritten, because it's the 19th century, everybody was agreeing that Colbert and Colbertism was a bad thing. And now it's the opposite. Tell us in closing here what you're working on this summer and what you hope to achieve this summer here at the Institute. Okay, so I already finished one paper on French classical economies and his views on patents and intellectual property. So his name is Michel Chevalier, and he was presiding influential in the second part of the 19th century. And he was strongly opposed to the patent system. And so now I wrote also several articles for Mrs Daly about France, about classical liberal tradition in France. And now I'm working on the right ways in the 19th century in France, and how the state intervention for the right ways and put the second industrial revolution because they gave like huge amount of money and subsidies to private companies, right ways companies. And so a huge amount of like savings were monopolized by the right ways sector. And so France was very late in the development of electricity or tramways, all those new technologies at the time. Louis Rolne, a summer fellow here at the Mises Institute. Thank you so much for your time today. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.