 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. This is the Human Action Podcast, and today we are joined by William Anderson, a professor of economics at Frostburg State University, to discuss Mises' great book, Bureaucracy. In 1944, Yale University Press releases the book the same year, by the way, as Hayek's Road deserved him. Mises, having seen in Germany the supremacy of officialdom, as he puts it, issued this book as a cautionary tale against a bureaucratic revolution in his newly adopted home of America. It's a fascinating book, a quick, easy read, and Bill Anderson does a tremendous job of discussing not only the book itself, but what's happened to America since Mises wrote it. Well, Bill Anderson, first time on the Human Action Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. All right, it's great to be here. Well, as we mentioned in the introduction, today we're talking about Mises' great, punchy little 1944 book, Bureaucracy. And as I mentioned to Bill off air, by Misesian standards, this is a quick, easy read. It's a little over 100 pages. And I want to start with this, Bill. He wrote this book, released this book in 1944. Same year he released Nippon and Government. He's been in the United States a few years by that time. But another book comes out that same year, Hayek's Road to Serfdom. So talk a little bit about where Mises was when he writes this book. Well, Mises, if you remember, came to the United States, I believe, in 1940. And he had that harrowing escape out of Europe. And I think he understood, even though he was in Switzerland, and Switzerland was neutral as a Jew, that he was still vulnerable. And at the time, around 1940, nobody knows if the Nazis are going to invade or not. And they actually had bombed one of the suburbs, I believe, of Geneva a little bit. And so there was a lot of consternation. And so Mises, I think, believed in rightly so that what he needed to do, if he was going to be safe, he needed to have at least one ocean between him and Adolf Hitler. And so they came to the United States in 1940 pretty much penniless. And they got some people to help sponsor them. I can only imagine, if you think about coming to USA in 1940, the Great Depression is still going on. The economics of Ludwig von Mises is not very popular. It's going to even become less popular later on. And so he did not get greeted like the Bauhaus architects when they came out of Germany and were treated like the gods coming out of the sky, or some of the other economists who actually were not in Mises class, I'm afraid, people like Gottfried Harbour, who was good, and even Hayek at the London School of Economics. But Mises came over. You had some people, I think, who understood. And I think the last night really goes into a lot more detail on that. But I think the point is that he came over, and here's a man, he had to start from scratch. And he was not a young man. I mean, he's almost 60 years old. He might have well stepped onto another planet, because here's a man really sort of a product of the older world, of the older Europe, very courtly, very gentlemanly. And he's coming into the United States, which is now turned into the big experiment for the New Deal. And so he's got a lot going against him. But he took that time and did a lot of writing. And the things that he wrote were really quite good. It's just that if you read the style, and remember English is probably like his third language, all right, if you read the style, it's an older style than what you start seeing in writing style at that time. And so that's going to be one of the things working against him, or you would hear people say, well, capitalism has been discredited. No, it hadn't been. But nonetheless, that's the way that people are thinking. And so you think of all of these things coming together. Mises has just come out of a collectivist society. He's seen collectivism in economics firsthand. He already has dealt with socialism, and he's been through the infinite socialist calculation debate. And so if you start thinking about all of these things, the point where he is right now, it's absolutely amazing that he was able to come out with the kind of works that he did. And it's something like bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is, in my view, it's very much underrated because he takes everything that he's already done and he puts in this really small, very readable volume. The concept of economic calculation, I don't go to human action. When I give my students something on economic calculation, I pull out bureaucracy. I assign bureaucracy because this, you know, Mises in a very short space explains what it is and explains in a way that people can understand. So I think it's a marvelous volume. Now, something else to keep in mind. Bill Peterson, so rest in peace, gave me a copy of bureaucracy from 1944, one of the originals, okay? And you open the book and it says this is in compliance with some sort of law or something regarding the use of paper. Remember that you're in a wartime economy and we are talking about total war with the United States. So Mises had to write something pretty short because there just wasn't paper available to actually put the book out. You know, you can't put books online or, you know, no e-books here. It's got to be between a couple of hard covers. So that's another thing that you have to remember that Mises had to condense things because otherwise it wouldn't have been published at all. This sounds like a great idea. We should ration paper in general for academics and force them all to write really short books for the rest of us. But I want to get back to something. You're mentioning his time in Switzerland prior to coming to the U.S. In the interwar years, he really saw German bureaucracy a little closer up than he wanted to see it in neighboring Vienna. And he has this great phrase where he says, in Germany, you see the supremacy of officialdom where bureaucratism, what I guess most of us would call bureaucratization today, was really a hallmark of German rule. Yes. Something to keep in mind that the civil service in Europe was looked at in a very different way than, for example, in the United States. That it was more established and that these bureaucracies were already springing up in the 1800s and growing there. And you had, don't forget, you had a much more hierarchical society that you've got nobility. And keep in mind that most of the nobility in Europe was very much anti-capitalist. Remember how the nobility got their wealth? They didn't get it through enterprise. They got it from stealing from other people and just by essentially being the strongman that was able to control other people, had people following orders and keeping other people down. So their economic and social viewpoints are going to be very different than what you saw in the United States. I think that's something that we forget. And Mises grew up in that. Mises understood the civil service. For example, with the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce in the Austria-Hungary Empire and later in Austria was very different than what our Chamber of Commerce would have been. And this was more of a tied in with the government. And so Mises already had seen that, I think, very much from the inside out. He understood it. I'm going to tell you, he understood it in a way that the average American could not. That he could see the layers of hierarchy there. And hierarchy was a big deal. You had the draft. You had somewhat after World War I because it was so awful. You had this sort of anti-war mentality coming up for a while. For example, All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in the late 1920s. It's very much an anti-war book. And then the movie that came out afterwards. But that doesn't last very long. And then, of course, with Hitler, you see this growing on steroids and very much wanting people wanting now to be in the civil service, partly, because it'd be one way to get a job and to be paid. But also, it was, again, this establishment of the hierarchy. Something that was still very much foreign to most Americans. And let's not forget, he's not an ivory tower academic talking about bureaucracy here. He was in the Viennese Cama, the Chamber. Yes. And he was doing nuts and bolts work with trade policy and monetary policy. And actually, rolling up his sleeve and getting into the number. So he had lived this to an extent. Yes, absolutely. And that's the thing. I mean, here's the thing that you've got to remember about Mises, is that he lived it without getting corrupted by it. And when I mean corrupted, it doesn't mean you're taking payoffs under the table. It means looking at the system and accepting it and in your mind saying, hey, we could run an entire society like this. Mises did not have an administrative view of the world. If you look, socialist in general, and what are you talking about Bernie Sanders or AOC or Nancy Pelosi for that matter or Elizabeth Warren or somebody from, you know, from Hitler's time or the Soviet Union. What they believe is that you can administratively run an economy. Mises is looking at that and saying, you can't do it. You cannot administratively run an economy, even if you have prices. Remember the socialist calculation debate. What these guys are saying is you can have an administrative economy and market prices at the same time. And since we have market prices, that means we'll be able to make this thing run. We'll make it better. It'll be better than, you know, because we'll already have all the answers. You know, we know what needs to be done. We don't have to wait for markets and for buyer consumers and all that to exercise choice. We already know what people need. And so in their minds, running an economy administratively like this through central offices, in fact, would result in a better life for all. But he also understands that this administrative state can become almost an ideology unto itself. And he takes pains to point out his hope that this doesn't come to America. Yes, and I think that that's exactly right. He makes a number of points like that when he's talking about bureaucratic management. And as you notice, he goes into a history of Europe, at least of European bureaucracies. And bureaucracies are a way of life in Europe. And they had been there for a while. And the Europeans always had accepted a larger role of the state in their lives. I remember several years, about 20 years ago, having a conversation with a guy from France. He worked for Michelin. Michelin, I was teaching at a place now called North Greenville University. It's in the Carolina Upstate. And Michelin has a plant there near Spartanburg. And so you had these guys coming over from France to work there. And we were on a walk at Furman University, a very lovely campus. And so we were out walking there and ran into some French people. And so one of the things that he told me, he said that, look, he said, Americans, you do not like or you have a fear of having too much of the state in your lives, whereas we don't have that fear in France. We accept it. We think it's a good thing. And so they had, yes, they had absorbed that into what Mises would say, the ideology of statism. And here's something, Jeff, you've got to keep in mind that an ideology does matter. In other words, that in the European view, this was not something that shouldn't be. This was a desirable state of affairs. This was a state of affairs that made life better. And I think that it's very, very easy to get away from that, to forget that point. But they had accepted it in a way at the time, as Mises points out, that the Americans had not. But nonetheless, bureaucracy is still bureaucracy. That bureaucracies we have here are still very much in terms of the warp and woof of bureaucracy, whether it's Soviet bureaucracy, whether it's your normal European bureaucracy or American bureaucracy, that there is still a lot of sameness there. So maybe it's to our great credit that the term bureaucratic is viewed as a negative in the United States today, that we've managed to hold on to that. Well, it's interesting in this introduction. Okay, let me read that as you're saying that, remember, this is published in 1944. So he's probably writing in 1943, maybe 44, probably 43 when he writes this. He writes in the introduction, very first sentence, the terms bureaucrat, bureaucratic and bureaucracy are clearly invectives. Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat or his own methods of management bureaucratic. These words are always applied with an approprious connotation. They always imply a disparaging criticism of persons, institutions or procedures. Nobody doubts that bureaucracy is thoroughly bad and should not exist in a perfect world. Okay, now here's a point. He said, even in Prussia, the paragon of authoritarian government, nobody wanted to be called a bureaucrat. I think this is a very interesting point that to a certain extent, I think it's a state of denial that everybody wants the bureaucrat that supposedly can make decisions. If you think about it, what is it about the bureaucrat that we don't like? Well, the bureaucrat is enforcing rules. It's like going to the DMV. What do they do at the DMV? They ruin your day. The TSA employee who does whatever it is that feel you up inspection, whatever. What are they really doing? I mean, they're following orders. And you see them, should we let this person go and they can't make a decision? All they can tell you, well, you're supposed to have this or this. Nobody can wave you to the next thing. Nobody can say, well, look, I'm going to use some of my judgment here. And you end up having to go to a manager. I'll give you an example. I have a daughter that I adopted from Latvia and she is fetal alcohol. She's always going to be 12 years old. I mean, she's 20 years old now, she's going to be 12. A wonderful child, by the way, and she has a job and does it very, very well. But I mean, she is limited. And she has an ID, not a driver's license, but an ID. And we were flying at last November. We were flying out to California for Thanksgiving with my wife's family. And I had kept her ID in a lock box. And I forgot to bring it to the airport. So we go up to the TSA line. Of course, they cannot let her on the plane without an ID. Well, what we did, we went to a, they hooked us up with a supervisor. They decided, let's see what we can do. And so we had somebody in there who actually was given some kind of authority. And she went over everything. It's kind of interesting. She could tell, you know, I'm very, very protective of her. And they were going to, I guess, take her to a room and question her and do the pat-down. And she had said to me, look, it's going to be okay. We're not going to be aggressive. The pat-down, I promise, will not be aggressive. And, you know, that what you had was a woman who understood the situation. And in that perfect world, she could have just said, look, get on the plane and, you know, you're going to be fine. But even there, she had to go through all of these procedures to justify her decision. And that is the thing about bureaucracy, that, you know, you want somebody who can make a decision. And a bureaucracy, you know, the drones of the bureaucracy, that's the last thing they can do. You know, all they can do is, if you have met all of the requirements, all the rules, then they can pass you on to the next level. But you see, we want America to be, or we used to think of America as a freewheeling place. A place where we focused on results and not process. And Europe, Europe is old and focuses on process and not results. So this is disheartening. Yes. Oh, yes. And I think that one of the things that, that in the United States that we seem to have this idea of that we could somehow do an end run around this. I mean, let's go back in the 1930s. They formed the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public corporation, right? And, I mean, a government corporation. And the TVA was given this mission. And in its charter, they wrote that they wanted, I guess, sort of a dynamic outfit, you know, that not to be weighed down by bureaucratic infighting, by all of the, the stuff that happens with bureaucracies. And they wanted to create this, this outfit where people could make decisions. And, you know, that was the genesis of it. And of course, what happened? I mean, the TVA is very, very hierarchical. It's a bureaucracy. They actually produce something that they sell. It's called electricity. But even there, what happened was that they made decisions, not on the basis of profit management, but in the end on the basis of what would promote the government's interest. And I think that's something that you keep, you know, that Mises really emphasizes that, look, profit management is a good thing. Profit management is going to make your lives better. And something that both Mises and later Rothbard, that they really, I think, make clear, is that profit in a market system, in a free market system, is not an extraction of wealth from the community. You know, it directs entrepreneurs where to bring resources. It allows you to bring resources from lower value to higher value uses. And it's a good thing. It adds to the wealth of the community. It does not take away. You know, that's the thing with Marxism. You know, Marxism, the idea is that profit is an expropriation of wealth that the capitalists make from the worker. And even if people don't quote Marx today, I mean, if you look at all, you know, what do you hear, Jeff, you always hear, well, we want people above profits, but they want profits above people. What do they mean by that? Somehow they're going to crush people. They're going to make their lives worse so they can extract profits. Profit being, you know, an extraction of wealth from the community. Now, if you go to what, if you remember at the last Austrian conference when Randy Holcomb did that piece on political capitalism, I mean, Randy's point is this, that political capitalism does result in an extraction of wealth from the community. It's because that resources are now directed by, you know, not through profit, you know, through or profit and loss, I should say, but instead they're direct, they're politically directed. And that is going to mean that somebody that is politically connected is going to get the benefits, and it's going to be at the expense of people who are not politically connected. And so I think that's, again, this notion that what they wanted was somebody who could, you know, who could make decisions. But here's a problem that we're talking about an institutional problem. Mises understood that. I mean, if you read bureaucracy, one of the things you really get throughout the book, I mean, it's a reoccurring theme, even if he does not use the exact words wherever, but you're looking at an institutional problem. This is not something that gets fixed by simply changing the charter, you know, to say, hey, we're going to have actually bureaucrats who can make decisions that no, the bureaucrats are not going to be able to make decisions because they're institutionally incapable of doing it. The organization, because it does not make profits, because it exists to pursue political goals that you're going to see everything, every factor of production acting differently than it would in the for-profit world. Can I give you an example of a test question that I give my MBA students? Sure. All right. It's usually homework number three, and I say, let's take two entities. The Federal Aviation Administration, these guys are in the tower, control towers. They're making planes of landing and taking off at their direction. You've got them, and you've got Apple Computer. Which organization is more likely to have outdated and worn-out capital in its operations? Apple or the FAA? All right. Well, yeah. And they generally get it. They understand the FAA is probably going to do it. Now, but why? What's the reason? Okay. Institutionally speaking. Why is that the case? Because, you know, if you talk to many Congress, well, they just got to get on the, they've got to get on the stick. They've got to care more about the people, blah, blah, blah. No. It's very simple. The FAA does not try to make a profit. Everything there is off congressional appropriation. It is carrying out orders given to it by Congress, right, and that it will oversee, you know, planes and, you know, air travel and the like, and air freight. And then you've got Apple, all right. Now, when Apple purchases a capital good, that capital good is there to help them make a profit. It is a valuable piece of machinery, and it exists for the purpose of helping Apple make a profit. At the FAA, a piece of capital exists to try to help the air traffic controllers get the planes up and down more safely. However, it does not have financial value to the FAA as an organization. It's useful. Nobody is saying it's not useful. It is useful, but it does not have financial value. Therefore, how do you evaluate? Because, well, they're operating already with the equipment that they have. I mean, nobody's not making planes crash. Yeah. It's a little outdated and all that, but it still, it still works. All right. And, hey, we're trying to save money around here. And for that matter, maybe these guys need a raise, you know, and we've only got so much money to appropriate to the FAA. Maybe we should pay these guys a little bit better. And, yeah, so what if your radar system has vacuum tubes and everybody else is on microchips, you know, that as long as it's working. And here's the thing. It doesn't have financial value to the company. And this is one of Mises' great points. Again, he's making it in 1944 where he says bureaucrats are self-interested and they can't calculate rashly. They don't own things. And so in this sense, I think by about 15 years or so, he's ahead of, let's say, Tillich and Buchanan and the public choice theories. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And not only that, Mises would never ever make what I think the error of speaking of political markets, okay, that Mises does not recognize what goes, you know, voting, trading all that as any kind of a market per se. I mean, Mises is when Mises talks about a market, he talks about real-life prices. I mean, votes are not prices. Votes are something that you try to purchase, but you purchase them indirectly. That, you know, the public choice tries to say, well, look, we've got our political markets and these operate a lot more, a lot like, you know, like economic markets. And maybe in a very large, very crude sense, you can kind of say that, but it's not at all what Mises would mean by a market. Well, you know, earlier you brought up his introduction from the early, the 1944 edition, which I think was Yale University Press. Later on there's a 62 edition put out by Arlington House. Again, in his preface, here's this mild-mannered guy basically opening with a punch to the face. And he comes out and he says, well, there's two ways to organize a peaceful society. One is profit, one's bureaucratic management. And that conjures up Oppenheimer's distinction between the political and the economic means. So he's not pulling any punches here. No, I think you're right. And, you know, it means this, but not only that, Mises is in his book, in bureaucracy. He's explaining what is going to happen. All right. In other words, that if you read, if you read bureaucracy, okay, if you read that, you will know why something like Medicare for all would not work. Okay. Although you have to be very careful when you say it would not work. Medicare for all would be a godsend for Congress. And why? Think about it. Every single member of Congress or for that matter, president could run on a platform of, I'm going to make this system work better. Look at this. These people are not getting healthcare. I'm going to make sure you get healthcare. You can't do that with, if everything's under a private enterprise, nobody would run on a platform. I want to make sure you're going to be able to buy a car. But a car may be just as important for transportation, but there's some R about healthcare. But the thing is that under bureaucratic management, this is what we will find. Now, the only thing that I would have liked to have seen Mises better explain would have been what I call the political calculation. Mises basically, and rightly so says, look, if you do not have profits and losses and market prices and private property, you will not be able to have an economy as we know it. You'll have something very crude, very basic, but you won't have a real economy. And that what we have though, of course, are things politicians directing resources that have already been created through a market system and through private enterprise, and now what politicians are trying to do is redirect those resources elsewhere. And so it's what I would call they use a political calculation. Now, political calculation is very different, but still what are they doing? Like entrepreneurs, they are directing resources in certain ways, but they're directing resources in a way that will improve their own political benefits. And of course politics, anything done in politics is always done at the expense of somebody else. That's why you'll hear what we need to have or we need these guys to stop bickering in Congress and they need to start working together in the public interest. Well, what's the public interest? That politics, by its very nature, involves taking from some one person and giving to somebody else. It is, by its very nature, an act of wealth transfer and political services, whatever they are, they've always been available one way or the other through private enterprise, through a market system or through charity. It's not like government events anything. Government did not invent defense. Government did not invent medical care and the like. And so what you're doing, you're taking these resources, you're redirecting them, but you're directing them through a political calculus. And I would have liked to have seen, and that's one thing I would have liked to have seen, Mises and frankly Rothbard too, better explaining. Well, one great thing about this book as an aside is Mises provides an excellent short summary of the arguments made in a much longer book, Socialism, about why bureaucratic or planned economies can't properly calculate and thus they're reduced to a very low subsistence level. But I want to bring up his section in this book on bureaucratic management as it applies to private businesses or at least quasi-private businesses in the West today. And what's interesting is just lately we've heard that first of all, the digital age and artificial intelligence are going to wipe out some of what Hayek called a knowledge problem and that big companies like Amazon and Walmart calculate internally and thus these refute Mises' argument against socialism. Oh yeah, I remember reading that article, just what publication was it in? It might have been Bloomberg, I can't recall. No, it was Jacobin. That's right, Jacobin. And I'm always wondering who would name your publication after mass murders? We know the Jacobins gave us the reign of terror, which some probably should tell something about the motives of some of these progressives, right? If they are going to give honor and fealty to the people who openly created the reign of terror, well then maybe just maybe they approve of it themselves. But that's an aside. But yes, I saw that and it was kind of funny because if you remember one of Rothbard's, I think maybe, well certainly one of his really good contributions, taking the whole socialist calculation argument he said, okay, let's apply this to the size and the scope of the firm. And I think it was brilliant, it was very simple. I mean it's not like he had to do some super calculation to do it, it was just a very logical leap. What happens if an organization grows so large that it's the exchanges there, there's nothing in there that would be reflected elsewhere in an external market that they're arguing that Amazon and Google and others are able to do all of these internal exchanges. But obviously there has to be exterior markets for these things. I mean let's look at Amazon. I mean Amazon, you go on Amazon and you buy something. Well you know, Amazon's not the only place in the world that you buy something. You know that this week I'm in the process of looking for a laptop computer for my wife. And I have been looking all over the place. Amazon is one of the places. eBay is another, Best Buy, I've gone to Walmart. You get the picture, right, that everything sold on Amazon is sold someplace else. And not only that, but labor is a factor of production that people who work for Amazon, their labor, their skills and their labor have market value in the economy as a whole. And of course, if you look at these modern companies, they're also doing everything they can to not be bureaucratic. In other words, they're not employing a hub and spoke model of inventory. They're having teams instead of hierarchical management. In other words, they're doing all kinds of things to not look like IBM in 1970. Yeah, and I think that, in fact, you really brought up something important. If you remember, and I remember it well because I was a young adult, and probably a lot of you listening to this podcast are going to be people that were not around in the 1970s and the early 80s. But in the late 70s and the early 80s, the Japanese manufacturing really had was surpassing in quality what you could get with American-made manufacturing. And it was real that people are looking at why is this so? And one of the things that the Japanese had was what we call form of participative management that they allowed people on the assembly lines, people, you're talking about your grunts or whatever, they could make decisions. They could look. One of the powers they had was to stop the whole line if they saw a problem. Some of this had been thought of through J. Edwards Deming. And now, of course, Deming tried to bring TQM to like the IRS. The IRS calls taxpayers customers, which is a joke because they're not customers. You know, they're serfs. But the point there is that part of this was to allow people to make decisions when they were working in positions that were seen generally as not being positions where people normally made decisions that would have an effect on the company on production as a whole. And so the point that you make is very, very good. I was watching something on Smithsonian last night. And in the early years of World War II, for example, the American naval fighter plane, the Wildcat, was getting shot out of the sky by the Japanese Zero. And so when the Navy asked Grumman to make a plane, you know, at least be competitive with the Zero. And one of the things that they did was they met. The company executives met with fighter pilots. Now, again, you have to be careful because we're not talking about a good, you know, that you ordinarily would buy. This is a war good, but the same principles there. In other words, the people are going to use it. You meet with them. All right. The pilots instead of, you know, this is what you're going to fly. You're going to like it or lump it. They're, you know, they're saying, how can we make this better? But let's face it with something like the, you know, the internal revenue service. All right. You know, they may ask, you know, they may have even have questionnaires about the service or whatever, but it's not a service that you would purchase. You know, nobody would pay taxes if they didn't have to. Or maybe, no, even Bernie Sanders wouldn't pay taxes if they didn't have to. And so I think you have to understand that, again, this gets back into the institutional issues. All right. Institutionally speaking, you cannot turn a bureaucracy into a company. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they know something. They understand something that the average politician doesn't. And that is that they know that if they make a mistake, if they do the wrong thing, they can turn out like IBM. They can turn out like General Motors. That, you know, I guarantee that people at Apple do not think, hey, you know, we're going to be here forever. We're just, you know, we're beyond, you know, we don't have to worry about pleasing the customers. They know better than that. You know, they almost went out of business themselves back at what? When they brought, you know, when they fired, I forget the guy, the guy had been at Pepsi and they brought back Steve Jobs. And they had to make some hard decisions with him. But, you know, as Joe Salerno is so, you know, often points out in his lectures, IBM. And remember, Jeff, during the 1980s, IBM moved to Dow. That the movement every day of IBM would, let's just say, strongly influenced how the whole American stock market moved. And what did they do in the 1980s? They decided that mainframes were the future. And now IBM is a consulting firm. You know, they essentially gave it all away. All right, because they made a serious error in seeing the future. And part of it, I think, probably was your culture and the like. I mean, look, Xerox invented the mouse. Steve Jobs didn't invent the mouse, Xerox did. But Jobs saw in the mouse something that the people in Xerox did not. And that sort of thing, if you think about it, some advancements simply could not be made institutionally in a bureaucratic setting, in bureaucratic management of private enterprise. It just would not be possible. Isn't that amazing, though? Sony used to be a dominant global corporation making 50-year plans, and now they scarcely exist. So we see that, as Mises points out, that this, that bureaucratic indulgence can apply to private companies as well. I want to wrap up with getting back to something we touched on earlier. Mises has this great sentence in his introduction. We must realize that delegation of power is the main instrument of modern dictatorship. So I think what he's saying here is, you know, you don't need an ideological revolution. You don't necessarily need politics. That the real revolution, which I believe has come to America, is bureaucratic. Yeah. Oh, yes. Absolutely. And here's something that people don't understand. They think somehow that bureaucracy is something that naturally happens. I remember years ago reading a historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. I used to refer to him as a historian, as opposed to a historian. But he talked about, well, yeah, American bureaucracy is bad, but the bureaucracy of American companies is also bad. All right. Mises, I think, and I think this is something that's often overlooked. Mises points out something. Purocracy does not add to the value of a firm. It is a cost. Okay. No firm, no profit making firm is going to needlessly add to its costs. And by the way, a lot of politicians believe that. They believe that firms just, they'll have marketing or do marketing because, well, now they can charge more. Well, wait a second. Any cost they incur, they had better have something on the other side as a benefit. And I remember one time being in a plant, they made foam, like mattress foam. And a guy told me, he said, look, he said almost all of our capital installation now involves pollution abatement devices. But what's the return on that? Well, the return is zero. In fact, it's a negative return for that matter because it doesn't help you to produce anything more. What it allows you to do is obey a rule. Okay. So it's a cost. And the benefit is you don't get put out of business by the government. I think that you have to remember that bureaucracy is a cost. It does not make your operation more profitable. It makes it less profitable. And that's why Mises said, if a firm has a bureaucracy, then it's because of government, not because of profit management. Well, Bill, I understand. I want to thank you so much for your time today. And ladies and gentlemen, I hope you'll read this book. Again, a slim 134-page paperback. It's available for just a few dollars, I believe, at Mises.org. We'll put up some links to that. And I hope, Bill, that we're all working towards a less bureaucratic world. And I hope that we're all starting to come to the conclusion that maybe all of government, everything government does, is useless overhead. So thanks very much for joining us on the Human Action Podcast. Thank you. We'll see you next week.