 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. I'd like to welcome you back after a bit of a hiatus as we announced earlier. We are about to embark into a series of weekly podcasts on the book Human Action. It's something we've been planning to do for quite a while, and it's something which really represents, in a sense, the culmination of where we've been trying to go with this show. If you think back to earlier episodes, and hopefully you've been listening to those, we have had a bit of an economics education already. We started way back with Karl Manger, and we walked through his principles of economics and his ideas about, for example, the marginal revolution, his ideas about the origins of money. We worked through Bomberwerk's second volume, which is basically also about the labor theory of value and how we arrive at value for interest, how time preference works and why we pay interest when we borrow money. And then, of course, we walked through several of Mises' books. We started out going through liberalism, which lays out his case for the liberal state, for laissez-faire economics. We went through socialism, which gives his case against the ability of socialist economies to calculate properly and allocate resources efficiently. We went through national economy, which lays out, I would argue anyway, a strongly decentralized and secessionist case. We went through some of his other books. We went through omnipotent government. We went through bureaucracy. We went through the anti-capitalist mentality. We went through one of his actually last full-length books, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which really lays out his method. But we've been thinking about and talking about and always looming in the background, considering human action. His Magnum Opus, really written in America, released in the late 1940s. And it's the kind of book that a lot of you probably know about. You probably think I ought to read that. You may own it. You may think I should read that. And it may look daunting. It may feel like going to the gym or eating your broccoli or something like that. So it's good for you. You know you ought to do it, but it's not so much fun. But I'm here to tell you that it actually is fun once you crack it and put your mind to it. Now, there is a little bit of work. I won't lie to you. Not everybody is equipped to read 900-page books in the society. And as I mentioned the other day when I was at Grove City College, giving a talk, does that make people who are actually willing to read 900-page books more important or less important in society? I would argue it makes them more important because there's fewer of them. So this is a book that you really, really, really want to sit down and make yourself read. When I say make yourself, I mean start it. And I think then it'll flow pretty naturally for you. Now, of course, it's a tough book. I'm not going to lie about that. And if you haven't, let's say, got much of a background in economics, if you have not yet already, let's say, read Economics in One Less by Henry Hazard, well, then you should turn off this podcast and you should go get that book and you should hit me up for a free copy. I'll send you one. But if you've been developing as an Austrian or as a thinker, as a libertarian, this is a book that at some point you're going to have to grapple with. Now, like a lot of people, you may have read it in fits and starts. That's certainly how I read it. I was introduced to this book in the 1990s, so I was not as young as some of you. I was already in my 20s and I've been through it in fits and starts and I've really only gone through it straight through once. And it's pretty daunting. But if you give yourself the opportunity, if you convince yourself that it's worthwhile, you've got about 881 pages, divide that over 365 days in a year. You only have to read two and a half pages a day. And at the end of this, you're going to be a better person. We live in a world full of basically fast food for our minds. If you eat Doritos all day or eat Twinkies all day, there's a certain amount of enjoyment and pleasure in that, but you're probably going to feel pretty crappy at the end of it. And if you consume nothing more than lightweight YouTubes or Twitter or Facebook posts from your friends about Bernie Sanders or something like that, at the end of the day, you're probably going to feel like you've eaten saccharin and not much substance. So this is substance. So there's a lot going on in 2020. It's an election year. There is an awful lot of white noise out there, and this is the kind of book that can give you a refuge. It can calm the mind. It can take you away from the white noise, and it can give you a sense that you're accomplishing something and how many books can do that. So all that said to help us open this series and to really make the case today for reading it first and foremost, why this book's important, why laypeople should read it, is our great friend, Dr. Sean Rittenauer, who teaches at Grove City College. I recently had the opportunity to see him. I was up there for a student conference they hold every March, excuse me, every February. He's also the editor of the Mises Reader, which is a fantastic collection of curated Mises. If you're interested in that book, we will link to Human Action in Hardcover. We're going to be going through the 1998 Scholars Edition. Even in Hardcover, folks, it's only $20. The softcover is only $10. We're going to have a coupon code, HAPOD, that stands for Human Action Podcast, HAPOD, which is going to give you $5 off either one of them. So if you really want the tiny little print softcover, you can get it for $5, folks. We have an HTML version, which you can read entirely free online. We have a PDF version, but I'm here to tell you this is one of those rare books that you're going to want to own. You're going to want to have this physically in your possession for the rest of your life. You can open it up at any page and benefit from it. It's not a perfect book by any stretch. We'll probably get into perhaps some of the organizational flaws in this book, which Lou Rockwell has alluded to. But nonetheless, it's an important book, and if you read it, you are going to be so far ahead of 99% of the population when it comes to economics. So Sean Rittenauer, Dr. Rittenauer, Professor Rittenauer, thanks so much. And what do you think of that lengthy, long-winded introduction I just gave? Oh, it was fantastic. And you could have probably even said more and not plumb the depths of introducing this book. Well, it really is something. I want to start with the introduction and preface written in 1998 by Drs. Herbner, your colleague, by Joe Salerno, Hans Herman Hoppe, which introduced the book and gave it some context. A lot of people might know that in the 30s, Mises had to flee Vienna and go to Switzerland and to Geneva, where he spent several years writing what came to be national economy. But as we find out from both their introduction and his, this is not national economy warmed over. This is a fully rewritten book. That's right. He got to the United States and was persuaded in some sense to give it another try because the national economy hit the public and rapidly sunk because the publisher went out of business and World War II caused everything to be put on hold. And so he gets to the U.S. And I mean, it's really pretty amazing in a place where he has to start all over and doesn't have access to his past papers and library. He constructs this second version, if you will, or rewritten version in English. He writes it in English and it's not a translation. It's tremendous. Well, imagine being someone a man of his age in your 50s and having to flee your home twice. Yes. Coming to a new country and writing a book this dense and this substantively complex, with real tough theoretical conceptual ideas in a new language, it's incredible. It's clear that he had been meditating on these ideas for a long time and some people, they can do it and then they just continue to do it and do it and do it and never really get to the end product. You sort of get the sense that maybe that may have been what happened to Carl Manger the last 20, 30 years of his life. With Mises, he's no doubt thinking about this and sort of meditating on these ideas and outcomes, human action. It's really monumental achievement. I mean, it's hard to overstate how important this book is for economics and for social science in general. Yes. And he's not writing this book from some comfy perch at Harvard with a bunch of assistants and secretaries. He's writing this presumably from his apartment in New York City and I would like to add that Margit, his wife, typed it for him. We have that typewriter here in our building at the Mises Institute in Auburn. Yeah. I mean, it's an excellent, it is really a lovely story about a husband and wife working together each in some sense according to their comparative advantage, each supporting the other and you can see the fruit of their labors. Right. And of course, it had to be a bit daunting in the sense that this is a serious labor and he may not have known that it would ever be widely read. His work hadn't been that well received and he faced the very real possibility of this book languishing in obscurity. That's right. I mean, in some sense, the introduction that you referenced to the Scholes edition mentions this. It did sort of, in some ways, the cards were stacked against it. I mean, on the one hand, the cards were stacked against national economy because of the war and everything but then even by the time human action comes out, the cards were stacked against it in the sense that in a way, the profession, one could view the profession at having passed Mises by it. It was already sort of coming to, and Mises mentions this in the book itself, that the profession was coming to sort of post World War II social engineering mindset. It had become progressively mathematical even by 1949 and the, shall we say, the hot young economists such as Paul Samuelson were really less and less interested in economics treatises that developed a whole system of economics using verbal logic. So in some sense, it was a calling of the profession back and a lot of the profession just didn't want to listen and so it easily could have, you could easily conceive of this book falling into oblivion and in some sense, the last you ever heard of Mises. And I think Lou Rockwell and the Mises Institute deserve some credit for keeping Mises in the fore and for making this book available and honestly, it's far more widely read today than it ever was during his lifetime. So that's what more could any intellectual want than that. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I think, you know, from what was it? 1963 when the third revised edition came out published by Regnery. I don't think it's, I don't think the book itself has ever been out of, fully out of print since then. And so we're, I mean, we're, that's what, over 50 years where the book in one form has always been for sale by somebody. And I mean, I would be willing to wager if I was a wagering man that Mises really didn't anticipate that type of longevity. The other thing you mentioned is nobody writes treatises anymore. The treatise is a, is it sort of an archaic relic at this point. Why do you think that is? Oh, I think it's true. I think that the profession itself is more and more, you know, it likens itself as an empirical science, you know, quantitative, you know, developing mathematical theories for sure. But at the end of the day also wanting to very narrowly answer some type of narrow theoretical question or some narrow empirical study. And so there's much more emphasis placed on individual articles now. Even back, this is in, you know, in the mid 90s when I was getting my PhD, it was, it was common. I mean, very common for the dissertation to essentially be three distinct articles, you know, thrown together in a book and we'll put an introduction and a conclusion chapter and call it a book. But it was really three separate individual studies and that was a standard operating procedure. And I think, you know, there just was not, if you assume, if you assume that basically all good price theory derives from Alfred Marshall, essentially, you don't really need a second Marshall. You don't need a second set. You don't need a second treatise. And so yeah, with the exception of Austrians, you don't see a lot of general economic treatises written. The other thing I think we should consider is that, you know, he's born in the 1880s, so he's coming of age training as a student and as a young economist in the early 20th century and really at that point, economics was hardly a standalone discipline as we think of it today as hyper technical and hyper specialized. It was a much broader tradition in the early 20th century that encompassed things like logic and history and philosophy and sociology and it was not at all the same discipline that we think of today. Oh, absolutely not. There were, you know, I think the economists felt somewhat compelled to establish the foundation upon which they are making their claims about various economic principles and actually deriving and develop these principles from clear starting points, axioms, or premises, or what have you. There was this philosophical bent to it, if you want to call it that, and there was an interest in that. Those that departed from that way were more the outliers, I would say, at least to World War II. Right, and of course this was true intersectionality across discipline. Mises felt comfortable writing across all, you know, several disciplines in a way that I think economists would be very scared to do today because they would be told to stay in their lane. Oh, I mean, you read through human action, you see him bringing to bear philosophy, history, aesthetics from time to time, even. And, you know, making inroads, providing sort of a pre-postmodern critique of postmodernism in his chapter when he's dealing with polylogism. He's dealing with all these things always in service of economics. His goal was not to be a philosopher or to be a historian, but he shows, as he said, the intersection of economics with these disciplines, he writes about and talks about these disciplines, other disciplines in the service of economics, so that, and on the one hand, he's establishing economics as a true social science, and then he's also showing how economic knowledge is necessary to do history well. And so, he makes the point elsewhere that a good economist has to be familiar with these other disciplines, or it's easy to get lost in the weeds. Yeah, I think about that a lot, too. I think, Sean, about, let's say, some brilliant young quant who graduates from Wharton Business School or Harvard PhD and econ and goes off, works at the Fed or someplace like that, works at the Treasury Department and knows nothing about World War II or poetry or literature or anything much beyond spreadsheets and 600-level math. Is that an educated person? I mean, not in the Massessian sense, it is. Exactly. I mean, it's a very skillful technician, but life's much more than that. And as exciting as a consumption function may be or as a spreadsheet may be, I mean, from the beginning, I gravitated towards human action and the Massessian framework because of its understanding of the cause of all economic phenomena is the whole man, the whole person. And that was very attractive for me. Well, yeah. And the way he made his case in page after page is with dense text and argument. What you won't find in this book is any graphs or charts or numbers or equations. And even back in 1949, a long time ago now, he was derided for this as a so-called literary economist. They were already bringing out the long knives in service of the new mathematical, empirical economics. And so I guess in a sense, this was viewed as old-fashioned when it came out. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you get sort of said, Hobbler sort of implied as much when he reviewed the book for the publisher before it was released, when Hobbler was asked about whether or not it should be published. Hobbler sort of gave a sort of a backhanded compliment that this is, you know, in some sense, vintage Mises, but wondered if the profession hadn't passed Mises by already. And as certain, I mean, again, that you can look and see that the people like Paul Samuelson and his crowd, he published his introductory treatise in 1948 and right around the same time, I believe Friedman's essay on positivism was around 50, 51, something like that. So at the same time, that that seemed to be the vanguard, like Mises writes his treatise in some sense to call economics back or to stem the tide and try to put economics on a firmer, realistic footing. And I think that's one of the things he was clearly passionate about. And it's like you'd mentioned, it's one of the things that he continued to be concerned about when he started up to his right into the ultimate foundation, his last main work. And of course, if we look at the profession and the science of economics since, let's say, Mises's death in the early 70s, it's a disaster. I mean, the profession's going the wrong direction and it's not doing well. It's not predicting anything. It's models don't work. It doesn't serve humanity. It doesn't really make us healthier or wealthier or wiser. It doesn't help us understand the world. It's mostly a sinecure from what I can tell from a personal economist. But I'd like to make this interesting point and this certainly, for me as a lay person who hasn't studied economics at the college level per se, when you read this book, what's so great about it is it's sort of his fullest and final expression of a lot of thoughts because it came later in his career. So some of the things he introduces in theory of money and credit about the origins of money and business cycles and interests, some of the things he introduces in socialism and liberalism about governance and about the impossibility of status regimes to calculate, some of the things he introduces in books throughout his career are now sort of culminated and given his best and fullest expression because he's had more years to think about them and expand them more fully. So if you don't read anything earlier by Mises, you sort of get his greatest hits. It's sort of like a rock band has several albums and they finally reach full maturity on one. There's like Led Zeppelin II or something. I think in a sense that's what human action is. Yeah, it's his sort of the richest, fullest treatment of these things. Again, like I said, he's been meditating on and probably thinking about for well in the case of say, business cycle theory for decades. You see his fullest treatment of the business cycle and sort of the finished, like I said, his last word in essence is the argument and the importance of economic calculation is really driven home in human action in a fuller, riper extent. So you get to see a product of a lifetime of thinking in this work. Well, speaking of the introduction by Salerno Herbner-Hoppe, one of the things that's so interesting to me and it is they say because he was in America at the time because he wrote in English, because Europe was coming out of World War II and America was sort of the forward-looking young kid on the block, as a result, this book has been predominantly an American phenomena. It's best known here. It's most widely read here. It had less of an impact in Europe despite him being a man of old Europe. Yeah, that's right. And it is interesting, I think in large part because it was in English, so his followers were in America. His greatest champions who are familiar with the work of people like Henry Haslett, his students, Marie Rothbard, Israel Kursner, Hans Sennholz, they were working, living in America. So in some sense, it's just a natural, that was a natural reason why it became so popular in America. I'm not exactly sure if the language barrier was one reason why it was not as popular in Europe. Of course, there's ideological reasons why. If he was sort of going against the grain of American thought, he certainly was going against the grain more so, I would think, in the thoughts of Europeans in general, in terms of just like the intelligent layperson. Sure. In the 1950s, there was not a lot of libertarian or classical liberal thought in Europe. To the extent it existed, I think it was mostly in America. Right, exactly. So when does Hayek arrive at Chicago? Maybe a tad later than 50? Yeah, I'm not sure, actually. Yeah, so at some point, Friedrich von Hayek, his student and mentee in many ways, leaves the London School of Economics at the University of Chicago and ends up spending much of the rest of his life. Not all of it. He returns to Germany ultimately, but spends much of the rest of his life in the U.S. and ultimately receives a Nobel in economics. And in a certain sense, some people consider that Mises is Nobel because Hayek gets it about a year after Mises dies. And in the minds of a lot of people, without Mises, we wouldn't have Hayek or at least not the Hayek we know. Yeah, I mean, I think that is understood. I think it needs to be understood that Hayek had a lot of influences. Clearly, he was influenced by Mises in terms of his business cycle, but then in terms of his pure theory, in some ways, well, in clear ways, I mean, Hayek acknowledges this. He's more influenced by Wieser and Schumpeter in a way, too. And so even Hayek, Hayek is identified as Mises's student, but even Hayek is not, you know, a pure Misesian in that regard. Now, you know, it's interesting in terms of the Nobel, and there's a piece written by Paul Samuelson of all people, where he and a footnote, and I can't remember now even the reference, but it's a fascinating little piece. It's a tribute to Okan. And in any event, he has a little footnote about who he thinks that they had survived would have won a Nobel Prize in economics. And he lists Mises as one of the economists that he thought would. Not necessarily that Samuelson thought he should, but he thought that, I mean, Mises was highly regarded enough if he would have survived into, you know, survived for a longer period of time. So, I mean, I do think given that Hayek's Nobel Prize is given for his business cycle theory, I mean, that has to be an affirmation of what Mises was doing. Yeah, and of course, it's interesting, the Nobel is supposed to be a particularist prize of sorts for work in an area. It's not supposed to be a lifetime achievement award. That's right, exactly. So, it's interesting that Samuelson said that and I didn't know that. So, that's very interesting to me. Absolutely. Yeah, my colleague Caleb Fuller pointed that out, Jim. So, you know, as an aside, you mentioned Henry Haslett. Henry Haslett was a huge benefactor of Mises upon the latter's arrival here in New York. He was a financial benefactor to Mises. He promoted him wherever he could. He reviewed human action quite favorably in the popular press and I'm going to have to go back and check whether at that point that was New York Times or Newsweek. I believe it was Newsweek. And so, it was people like this, certain businessmen Leonard Reid was a big backer of Mises. And it's, you know, maybe because of his, I would say, shabby treatment at the hands of academia, what, you know, the man who's coming over here from Europe is really an economics master. And he's not getting the credit and the position he deserves in American academia. Any university should have been thrilled to have him. So, instead he turns to businessmen and makes not the greatest living through their largesse. And I just wonder, you know, academics don't like that. They don't like intellectuals who are paid by businessmen and they tend to resent that because of that. I wonder how much that shaped Mises' view because in effect he wrote for a popular audience in many cases. He wrote for the lay person. I mean, human action is not necessarily a book for a PhD student in economics. It's written for anyone, I think of modern intelligence and interest in the field. And so, you know, I think to understand Mises, we have to understand the person or how much that shaped him, you know, having to find work, paid work where he could. Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think clearly his experience in having to leave Europe, I mean, well, even when he was there, even when he was in Vienna and the political up-evil and, you know, the real concern is that that Europe was going to go communist or the hyperinflation they lived through, all of those experiences, you can sense how those experiences influenced certain turns of phrase. There are certain parts of this book where some of his passions just comes out. And it's kind of interesting, you're reading along and it's always a well-reasoned argument. And you can get sort of get yourself in the mindset, I'm reading this logical treatise and then all of a sudden a really good beautiful turn of phrase with a little bit of bite to it when he's talking about people that want to promote ideas that are bent on destroying civilization. You get a little bit of a prick there and a little bit of a tweak and you get a sense that he's already lived through a lot. I think it's interesting, I believe in a capitalist mentality, he talks about how in Europe one of the things Europe had that we didn't have so much in the United States is in Europe the intellectual classes and the entrepreneurial class interacted with one another more. And so there wasn't quite the same suspicion in the old say in the old days. But when you come to the United States there was a sort of distrust between the intellectual class and the business class and I mean it would be easy to for a number of academic economists to see Mises' income arrangements at New York University and just assume well here we go it's a classic a psychophant for the bourgeois businessman so we don't have to pay any attention to him because he's obviously on their payroll and it would be that is the nastiest way to ignore somebody that trumped up a reason like that. And of course that's the same accusation level that Koch supported academics today. Oh absolutely and you know people Mises always said is true the truthfulness or the truth or the falsity of a theory is based upon whether or not the theory is true or false not by who's paying the person you know at some point the argument has to stand or fall on its own and if the argument is true it's true it doesn't matter the income arrangements. Yeah and it's interesting maybe this is not what he would have wanted maybe he would have preferred a tenured faculty post at a prestigious U.S. university when he arrived here and maybe he and Margit would have enjoyed more money and their lives would have been more comfortable but you wonder if things didn't turn out for the best in the sense that this forced him into writing and having the time to write books that are much more enduring how much do we really know about let's say articles written by the head of the Princeton or Harvard economics department in 1949 when Mises came out with this book the answer is not much the Keynes and Samuelson and Krugman and a few others I mean he's as well or better known than scores of dead economists who enjoyed at least ostensibly on paper more prestige at the time. Oh that's right you can go one of the blessings of the internet you can go online and look at archived versions of long standing journals like The View or Journal of Political Economy Drilbama Economics etc and you can go back and go back to say the 40s and 50s on the one hand you can find journals that were publishing and did publish articles by Mises and but then you can also look okay who else is doing what and there are a good number of articles written by people that you have you still heard of like Jacob Biner like that but but the difference there too is there are articles that right now you think oh I'd kind of like to read that they're interesting but then there are a whole host of people that of course were publishing in their day and then you've never heard of again I mean on the other hand I suppose some of that's going to be true anyway I mean at any given moment there's only a small handful of really great thinkers in a discipline and so in some sense we shouldn't be surprised that you know say the vast majority of economists even who were published even back then when the number of journals were much smaller we don't hear of as much one thing I have been impressed with is a website that's managed by Irwin Collier economics in the review mirror and it goes up a number of exams old exams and syllabuses syllabi and reading lists from past economics courses going from the late 1800s through most of them say into the 1960s maybe and these and from top programs like Harvard, Columbia MIT, Chicago etc and I've always been I look through there from time to time and it's interesting how how many times in these in these top programs where Austrians including Mises Hayek and especially the Bovericks writings were on the main reading lists of basic theory classes and not history of thought classes but your basic theory classes in other words your profession recognize these as viable options and alternatives that you have to deal with in economic theory and that was the case back say before 1950 it was common now not so much as you said the profession is in disarray and of course his private seminars at NYU in Manhattan produced a lot of great thinkers there were a lot of young people at the time who sat in on those seminars who went on to prominence later on at least in our circles people like Hans Sennholz, people like George Reisman people like Murray Rothbard people like Ralph Raco, people like Paul Cantor talk a little bit about Hans Sennholz who is a protege of Mises and also obviously an important figure at Grove City and in developing Grove City as a home where Austrian economics can be considered and taught if it wasn't for Hans Sennholz I wouldn't be here probably because we wouldn't have the Austrian economic tradition that we do have he was one of four Sennholz was one of four students that had their PhDs directed by Mises in the United States and soon after he completed that he was hired by J. Howard Pugh I think at Mises's suggestion to head the economics program here at Grove City and so he starts I believe in 55 or 56 as the chairman of the economics program and the department and remained here until he retired in 1992 and so I mean that's that's several decades where he was the main the main voice of economics and of course his economics was all Misesian teaching Austrian economics throughout the curriculum and he once I was able to interact with him a number of times before he passed and one time he told me he knew it was time to retire when he had students of his saying to him not that you taught my father but you taught my grandfather economics and I mean can you imagine teaching essentially two full generations of students sound economics and then of course I mean he wrote a lot for the Freeman which played an important role in educating the layman in sound economics and he was very busy in lecturing and teaching classes he didn't his articles are always solid but he didn't write very many shall we say purely scholarly works but whenever he did they were always top-notch well he also cared about teaching which is a lost art today amongst academics now did he stay in Grove City till he died he yes he maintained his residence in Grove City even after I mean after he retired from teaching here he then served for a few years as president of the foundation of economic education but he still maintained his residence here he and his wife stayed here and then when Hans passed his wife Mary remained in the same house until she passed away sadly just a few years ago so yeah they maintained a residence here he had some rental properties in different places in the state but they remained here an interesting story about Hans Sennholz relating to Mises and this comes courtesy of Richard Ebeling people who don't know who Dr. Ebeling is he teaches at the Citadel in South Carolina and at one point earlier in his career he was tasked by Hillsdale College to go to Moscow of all places and retrieve some of Mises' personal papers and documents that had been taken from him by the Nazis when he was forced to flee his apartment in Vienna and it's a long circuitous story how they ended up in Moscow in a railroad car but at any rate they did and Richard Ebeling went to the former Soviet Union to bring back some of these papers which now reside at Hillsdale College and Dr. Ebeling recounts a story where apparently in Grove City, Pennsylvania Margit and Ludwig van Mises were in church for the christening of one of Hans Sennholz's children and sat in the back pew and sat through the ceremony and at the end of it he turned to Margit and said that's enough religion for today and of course this goes to his professed atheism also his views on religiosity shifted over time if one reads from let's say socialism in the 1920s to human action in the late 1940s he seems to have softened a bit about the compatibility of Christianity or other monotheistic religions like Judaism with laissez-faire capitalism so talk about that Mises' lack of religion and how that world view of his played into human action that's a good question we mentioned this in the podcast we did on socialism his remarks about Christianity and socialism were pretty negative and to the point of asserting that Christianity is incompatible with a liberal free society and a free market is incompatible with private property and by the time he writes human action he says very clearly there's nothing in Christian dogma that is necessarily in conflict with a free market with private property there's other words and he points out that the anybody that has any type of Christian or I think he says Christian I think he mentions Christians but he may just sentiment cannot be opposed to an economic system that provides for the reduction of poverty for the masses there's been a significant change between his book socialism and human action and his willingness to allow for compatibility between the two I always of course as a Christian I find that very satisfying it would be hard to to if it actually is indeed true it would be hard to embrace a body of work that is explicitly contrary to what one thinks is the case especially if you don't think it's so and so I often wonder I don't know this for fact but I do know that in Europe the Christians he would have been acquainted with would be different than the Christians that he became acquainted with in the United States for instance in Europe the leading religious voices were by and large socialist or highly interventionist and he did have a way of sort of deferring to experts in other fields I think the way he expected those people in other fields to defer to his expertise in economics and so if you have a leading Christian who themselves are saying that socialism is really the only or at least the best economic system or social system for Christian to embrace well then he's going to think well if that's the case what's the question about well then I guess Christianity is not compatible but by the time he comes to the United States and he's interacting personally with Christians who are successful industrialists successful entrepreneurs who believe strongly in the free enterprise system in the free market somebody like Jay Howard Pugh where Senholds once told me a story Jay Howard Pugh were sitting in the lobby of a hotel in New York and they were sort of playing something playing stump the professor in other words that they were each trying to stump each other on some type of I don't know trivia fact or historical factor economic principle or something and so they were playing this little game amongst themselves well if they're that comfortable you can just imagine that at some point in time there must have been some discussions that Jesus recognized that wow there are sincere Christians who are not at all opposed to a free market and don't see it as incompatible and so I just sometimes wonder if his experience in the United States even given his trying circumstances helped him to see things a little bit differently or of course the understanding that the Christian West had produced the free economies in the world oh sure I mean in some sense that proof is definitely in the pudding so let me just read to our listeners a quick sentence from page 155 of the scholars edition here where he says in our time the most powerful theocratic parties are opposed to Christianity and to all other religions which evolved from Jewish monotheism so I think he's talking about basically this again this is 1949 so the Nazi experience is still a fresh scar a fresh wound for the world yes and so he is sort of professing an understanding of the omnipotent state's hostility to a competitor for people's hearts and minds in the form of let's say Christianity yes I think that's right yes the theocratic system he's talking about or is the system that thinks that the the fear is divine it's definitely state allotry it's not Christianity or Judaism of any sort well before we plug the book again and get everybody on board to get into this book for next week let me just ask you to conclude here by talking about the organization of the book into seven parts they're pretty long especially part seven gets a little esoteric part one is very densely philosophical and here's what I've noticed about it is that non-economists like myself tend to like part one I was an English major in undergraduate that appeals to me I like dealing with it conceptually the economist types tend to not like part one so much I mentioned earlier that Lou Rockwell had said to Christy Holmes here on her staff one time she was digging through this book and saying Lou this book so tough he said Christy it could have been organized differently and of course he's saying that from the perspective of someone way back at Arlington house publishers so give us your thoughts on how this book is laid out and did did that do a disservice to the reader that's a good question I mean I guess I would not say in general it does a disservice to the reader I do think as you identified already that different people will warm up to different parts naturally for me I I picked it up as an economics major in college so I already was an economics major but the thing that still well I was on the verge of becoming an economics major I really liked economics but the thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was is economics real is it really closer to intellectual game playing or is it about is it real in the sense that it's worthy of study and pouring your life into sinking teeth and the first that first part of the book when Mises is begins with discussing the nature of human action what it is and what it's not dealing with why do we start with human action because all economic phenomena is a consequence of human action so that's where it all begins and then delineating distinguishing economics between economics and history and then defending economics against claims of claims that economics isn't real science or economics is too rationalistic etc etc and then building from that the first analysis of human action what are the general principles of human action and then what are the principles of action the fact that all action takes place in time the fact that from action we manifest the law of margin utility all of those things come out of just the basics all of those principles are inferences of human action and to me starting where he does is ultimately what convinced me that economics is a real social science that's worthy of study and so even me one who I had an appreciation for literature I had an appreciation for philosophy I sort of I like asking the but why questions why is this important why should we care what's the basis I like those kind of questions and so I also like the first part of the book even that is setting the stage for the rest of the book if we can't root the determination of prices in realistic human action then we are in some sort of playing mental games and so starting with human action is really important and to me it's the right place to begin it does get somewhat philosophical and he is using categories that were very much in recognizable in his day some of them the terminology is different so you kind of have to be a little bit aware of that but nothing that makes it unintelligible one of the benefits of the book is it's very intelligible and as he moves on he sets the stage about human action so then he can start talking about okay how do humans interact in society because economics is about human interaction primarily through exchange so he begins and he starts talking about what are some principles of human action that apply to action in society and then he notes that and he highlights the importance of economic calculation that in this diverse complex social economic order is market division of labor the only way that economic activity can be coordinated throughout the social order and throughout the inter temporal production structure what is required is economic calculation there has to be economic decision makers that have access to loss calculations based on market prices because there has to be some way of producers satisfying the subjective preferences of other people and these producers cannot read the minds of other people and so they have to have a way of doing this well they do it through economic calculation and so economic calculation is of great great import in this book and then as he goes along that's why I mean the chapter on prices is quite lengthy the discussion of indirect exchange and monetary prices is quite lengthy because it's these monetary market prices that entrepreneurs use to calculate profit and loss and then also it's monetary prices that are used to calculate interest rates so that producers can decide how capitalist how capital intensive do we need our production to be and then then moves on to talk about and apply these same principles discussing very realistic determination processes of factors of production the prices of labor the wage rate the price of land rent etc then he brings all of the analysis to bear on shall we say alternative economic arrangements what kind of social cooperation if any could we have in an economy without a market and that's where he brings presents his full mature statement on the possibility of economic calculation in the socialist system and then following that it's a fairly lengthy section on what he calls the hampered market what are the consequences of government invention in various ways through taxation or price controls etc it's in that chapter in that section he has a chapter on the economics of war and how destructive war is and then finally in part 7 he gets in some sense it's an interesting way to end the book he talks about the place of economics in society and it's in that section where he really emphasizes that look economics is not a body of knowledge that is important merely or even primarily for professional economists economics is important for the citizen the person in a free society who has a role in shaping the institutions and the laws of a nation if we try to alter or change or put down or affirm institutions without a knowledge of economics it's a disaster waiting to happen and so he ends the book with his sort of final statement on why economics and the study of economics is important for our society well that's about as good exposition as anyone could hope for so ladies and gentlemen if you've read a little bit of this book if you've thought about it, if you own it if you're thinking about owning it now is the time we're going to provide some links to buy the book to read the book for free in html format which you can skip from chapter to chapter easily you can search it to Sean Rittenauer's Mises Reader we're going to provide a link to Bob Murphy's study guide for human action there's never been a better time because over the next coming seven weeks we're going to have a variety of great economists walk you through this and simplify it and put it into terms that we can all understand so I really recommend this project to you, I'm excited about it it's a thrill for me personally to go back and spend time inside the mind to read God Mises and I can't think of anything better I would rather be doing late at night watching some goofy YouTube about dogs or something so we'll be back in about a week and we'll have a variety of great guests as mentioned, people whose names you know people who are thoroughgoing the sessians so you won't have a better opportunity to walk through this book with some people who are going to help you make that a lot easier and more enjoyable all that said I want to thank you so much for your time and we hope to speak with you soon thank you so much, it was my pleasure The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud Stitcher, Spotify 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