 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. It is Friday, January 1st, 2021. I want to wish each and every one of you a very, very happy new year. And I want to thank you for listening over the past year, as we have increasingly dedicated this podcast, this show, to a series of great books. As a matter of fact, the Human Action Podcast is all about books. It's about reading books, sometimes tough books. Mostly economics, but also philosophy and history and related subjects. And it's been a great ride for those of you who have stuck with the show and worked our way through both Human Action and Man Economy and State this past year in multiple shows and multiple stages. So that was, it was a little bit of heavy lifting, but I think it was worth it. And I hope that this show encourages people to get out there, to find original sources, to read primary sources, to become vigorous readers and thinkers, and to go beyond the superficial of our social media feeds and the nonsense coming at us in terms of white noise from 24-hour cable networks and the like. So all that said, we are going to do a bit of a retrospective and try to make the argument for enlarging the scope of our listenership by getting people into reading serious books. And so I want to make the case for that. And I'm joined today by my good friend, Dr. Tom Wood. So Tom, welcome. Thanks, Jeff. Glad to be here. Well, I ran across a great quote today, Tom, by Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi writer. I love him. He said, you don't have to get people to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. And I thought that was interesting because, you know, you and I struggle with this. There are a lot of people who see the world and the state in a manner much the way we do, and they can be very, very impatient and say, you know, 900-page books, Jeff, they just aren't cutting it anymore. We need activism. We need action. We need to be building institutions. We need to be building platforms. And, you know, sometimes you even get this sense that, well, that stuff from the 20th century or even the 19th century, that's kind of old economics. And there's new economics today that we ought to be talking about. So there's also an element of presentism to all this. So I guess, you know, with that background, what's the Tom Wood's case for actually taking the time and making the effort to read tough books? I'm getting this a lot, too, from people who say, look, this strategy of yours is way too late. Right now, we are in the death throes of a civilization, and so we've got to do X, Y, or Z. But in my experience, that's just laziness. That's an excuse not to do anything. Because these people who say, now we need to do X, Y, or Z are not doing X, they're not doing Y, they're not doing Z, they're not doing anything, and they're not reading. So I don't go for that. And secondly, if you are in the death throes of a civilization, let's say that is the case, well, at some point, you're going to want to rebuild something. And you're going to have to rebuild that on some kind of foundation. How can you rebuild it if you haven't immersed yourself in the foundations on which you would want a civilization to be built? So I'm not going for any of these defeatist reasons not to read. And then, of course, there are the, as you say, the presentist reasons. I think that's less likely to come from our people because, you know, in some ways, the only good economist is a dead economist. And now that's not true anymore. We have some great Austrian ones out there. But you know what I mean? That I actually wouldn't want to be reading what the current people are writing all that much. I mean, you can get some insight from it to be sure. But if you really want to be grounded step by step in the edifice of authentic economic thought, you're going to want to read older works. And then you can see how we build on those older works. But you're not going to read the classic texts of Austrian economics and feel like this was not a good use of your time. It's going to help you in multiple ways. You'll understand the world better. You'll be a better, I think you'll be a better writer because you're reading some really outstanding writers. I think Rothbard's best prose really is in his economic works. That's where he comes across so beautifully and elegantly. Same with Mises. And these are the kind of things that you want your children as they get older to absorb. So maybe you think it's hopeless to bother reading because of transgender bathrooms. But I don't think that way. And in particular, I think that my kids need to have, even if I for some reason had given up on everything, my kids deserve better than that. And they should be immersed in it. And I don't want my kids just to grow up to learn how to make widgets and how to fit themselves into a factory job somewhere or just to master video games. I want them to know and to be absorbed in the great tradition of which they are a part. Well, the other thing, Tom, is throughout the last year, but also we've been doing this show a couple of years now, is we always find examples in every book where the author was particularly prescient. We always find things that absolutely apply in spades, what's going on today, whether we're talking about interest rates, whether we're talking about socialism, whether we're talking about market failure, monopoly or anything else. So that was always really the goal of the show was to tie these books into the real world and also to bring them to life to an extent. Some people who listen to the show probably won't read the book, so the show itself will serve as the cliff notes of a sort for the book. But more importantly to just say, you know, if you pause for a minute, you only have so much time. You only have so much energy. You have a job. You might have a family. You might have a mortgage. You might have school. You might have all kinds of things in your life. And so life is about trade-offs. And in terms of your spare time and what you're reading, you can read pop stuff. You can read garbage stuff. It's kind of like eating Doritos. Or you can read tougher stuff that's kind of like eating your broccoli and going to the gym. But when you're done, you feel better. So, you know, it's hard to, I guess, argue that people ought to spend their spare time doing heavy intellectual lifting. It's not the easiest sell. I get that. So you can get around that in a number of ways. For one thing, not every item you need to read has to be the heaviest thing we have to offer. You don't have to read dense and heavy philosophical treatises all the time. You can intersperse that with some of the, let's say, the collections of short pieces by Rothbard that are going to teach you an awful lot and are going to point back to some of the larger texts that are also very entertaining and enjoyable to read. Bob Murphy is an example of somebody who's a more recent thinker who's written great many books that are very accessible that are not going to twist your brain into a pretzel and that are pleasurable to read. And, you know, there's always all woods here who tries to make books that make the books into something that you learn from and that there isn't any fluff in. You're really learning something on every page. But where you do feel, nevertheless, entertained like the prose is punchy and keeps your attention. So I think we have ways to balance all this so that even that can't be an excuse. Well, this argument you need to build your own institutions, I think we have done that to an extent. I mean, you have your Liberty classroom. We have our new master's program, which is absolutely going gangbusters. We have way more people signing up for it than we can accept because it's very, very cheap and it's purely Austrian and soon to be accredited, already licensed so that it basically gives you a master's degree in economics with an Austrian take at a fraction of the cost of going to a traditional program somewhere and also, you know, completely online. You don't have to uproot your life and move. You don't have to take out student loans, this sort of thing. But frankly, every week, this showed Human Action Podcast, all of our events, we managed to hold a bunch of live events even in the midst of COVID around the country last year and I'm saying last year, meaning yesterday. And so the idea here is to be a school of sorts, to be an alternative school that's free, that's accessible, that's online. And so when it comes to building your own institutions and what comes after, if we really are in this terrible crash and this terrible malaise, you know, Tom, I've always had this sense. You're familiar with the concept of accelerationism that we envision this Mad Max scenario and who wants that? Who wants to be planning a flag in the rubble and saying, see, Mises was right, right? And we don't want that. That's not the goal. The goal here is to say that human history has a lot of ups and downs. It has some sideways as well. And so this is the, you know, the lot we've chosen and we need to work within the scope of reality and try to make things better regardless of whether it seems like things are particularly illiberal. When you look at the tone of some of Mises' work, he wasn't super optimistic a lot of the time. Yes, not a happy-clappy guy always. No, and yet he produced an awful lot. I think Carl Minger was somewhat pessimistic and maybe it was that he fell into despair. I don't know, but he didn't produce nearly as much as Mises did and yet they both looked at the world, perhaps not very optimistically, but for whatever reason, Mises just carried on because, look, win or lose, I have to do what I feel morally obligated to do and what seems to be the task of the scholar. I have to carry it out, come what may. Maybe better days will come and people will appreciate what I'm doing, but I can't, it's like the Martin Luther quotation, you know, whether it's apocryphal or not, here I stand, I can do no other. Well, that's how he felt in this situation. And then you have Murray Rothbard, who was much more optimistic in the long run, but even if he hadn't been, I think that was his feeling. Here I stand, I can do no other. I understand the world, I understand the interests at stake, I understand the nature of the state and that it's the opposite of what people think. I can't not tell people about that. And all you have to do is consume what they've written. And as you're consuming it, stop to appreciate the fact that sometimes it can be heavy lifting just to consume what they produced. Imagine the labor involved in producing it. Well, we also have to imagine that there are benefits to generations beyond our own lifetimes. We all benefit from writings and knowledge of scholars dozens or hundreds of years ago, in some cases even thousands of years ago, and they produce something of lasting value for society. We're not year zero people. We actually believe in benefiting from the total, the sum total of human knowledge. We're all standing on the shoulders of our ancestors despite this crazed blank slate thinking. And so when it comes to building something beyond your own lifetime, I think that gives you a particular form of comfort. It helps you to feel like you're building something. People built cathedrals over a period of many, many hundreds of years and somehow they stayed true to that original vision and managed to find the funding and managed to maintain the architectural plans and all this and that. And so they built something that's lasting. And so we have this presentist outlook where we imagine everything is new today and the old modes don't apply. And Tom, that isn't really true. The only thing that's constantly new is technology. What is not new is some sort of new economics or new human nature or new way of organizing society between markets and the state. That's what I don't like in libertarian thought, which is hubris and the idea that we are sort of raising the past and building something brand new. Yes, indeed. And this is I think why there are let's say parts of the libertarian world that don't place as much emphasis on the old texts on which our tradition is based. And frankly on reading, especially on reading these older texts and honoring these people who gave them to us. And yeah, that's a problem. Of course there are occasionally times in history when something genuinely new is produced. So the marginal revolution in the 1870s that really was something new under the sun in understanding economics. But they didn't chuck the entire inheritance of classical economics. And they didn't say there's absolutely nothing of value in any of this anymore. And they didn't, I mean for example Rothbard goes back and even 500 years to find pre-Austrian insights in the works of the late scholastics. So yes, occasionally there are innovations but the innovations are usually building upon an existing structure or they're answering questions that were posed by a previous structure. And so in order to get the full picture of what's going on, you have to understand what came before it. I think it's not a coincidence that the Austrians are among let's say the biggest supporters of the study of the history of economic thought who still remain. History of economic thought in the discipline, within the field of economics is viewed as a kind of weird curiosity these days. Why would somebody want to study something like that? It used to be taken for granted that you would study that. It's not a surprise to me that the Austrians do that, partly because as Rothbard said, it is possible that some great insights do get lost. The value theory of the classical economists was represented a loss of knowledge in some ways when you look at what the late scholastics were saying. So we want to go and pick out what were the insights that got lost. Because we don't have a wig theory of history whereby everybody absorbs all of what is best in the predecessor and then continues on to the future. Not necessarily so. And so sometimes we want to go back and dig out what was lost in the past. But I guess for me, I just think about my own intellectual journey and the pure, I realize how nerdy this sounds, believe me, but once you're out of high school, you can be as much of a nerd as you want. Nobody's going to bother you about it anymore. You're not going to get made fun of or beat up or whatever. And I proudly say that I took immense intellectual pleasure from reading the works that were assigned to me at the Mises University Program. Before you would attend the Mises University Summer Program, this was 1993, the first time I went, you should read certain texts and then there were some recommended readings as well. Now there was not really much of an internet in those days, so for me to track down some of the scholarly articles, not the stuff that you guys sent me in the mail, but the scholarly pieces, I had to go to an academic library and dig them out and I dug them all out and I found every article I could find and I felt like with each one I was being initiated into some secret teaching that had somehow been kept from the rest of my peers and I just can't imagine not wanting to have that experience because once you start having it, once you start heading down that path, you just can't stop. Well it also shows it's never been easier to obtain and access all of these books. Oh for heaven's sake, right. I mean right at your fingertips, not only can you order them and have them shipped to your door, you can sometimes read them instantly online and if you're a cheapskate you can just print them all out and read them on paper and a lot of times you can have them read to you because there are audio versions and of course at the Mises Institute a lot of people, particularly Floyd Lilly, have gone to a lot of trouble to record these books. Man economy and state and human action are available in audio format. That's amazing. These entire works can be listened to. So at this point, yeah there really isn't much of an excuse. It's incredible how readily these resources are at your fingertips. Not to mention you can find courses, you can find discussion groups of people who want to talk about this stuff. So it's never been easier to learn and master it. Well Tom, indulge me for a second. But I want to refresh the audience's memory. People who have stuck with the podcast over the just the past year, just the past 12 months, I want to just quickly review what we've learned. I mean mangress principles which wasn't translated into English for almost 80 years. We went through mangress principles with Joe Salander. We went through Mises's theory of money and credit with Jeff Herbner up at Grove City, who's probably our best pure time preference theory of interest guy. We went through socialism with Sean Rittenauer also up at Grove City really delved into some of the lesser discussed parts of that book and that talk about pressure. That book basically predicted today's political correctness movement. We went through the second volume of the three volume of Bombarevac Capital and Interest treatise again with Jeff Herbner. So we learned all about interest in that. We went through liberalism from the 1920s Mises's book on political theory and self-determination and succession with Ryan McMacon. We went through the Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science which is his longest treatment of method in praxeology. We went through that with Joe Salerno. Bureaucracy the great 1944 book based on his experience with German officialdom. We went through the anti-capitalistic mentality. We went through omnipotent government. Mark Thornton joined us to go through an essay on economic theory by Cantillon a book and a thinker about which Mark is an expert. We went through nation-state and economy again with Ryan McMacon we went through Henry Hazel's economics and lesson with Walter Block. We went through a proto book which is now in its final stages a serial book written by Bob Murphy called Understanding Money Mechanics so we're going to produce that in physical form this year. Obviously we had a ton of guests as we broke up human action and man economy and state into multiple shows. We had people like Byland and Kline and of course Tom Woods joining us today. David Gordon, Jonathan Newman, Patrick Newman Christopher Hansen, Bob the aforementioned Bob Murphy we went through Hoppe's democracy, the God that failed with Stephen Cansella. We went through Books by Pere Bieland. We went through some books by folks on the left including Stephanie Calten's deficit myth and No Me Prins's collusion The Marginal Revolutionary is written by a left academic up at University of Alabama I mean that's just about two thirds of the books we did just this past year so you know Tom you put all that in a blender and that's an advancement in your understanding in just a year even if you didn't read any of them just listen to the podcast and if you did read them or if you read them in the past not only is your memory refreshed but I would love to hear the analysis of some of these texts by some of our people and in some cases in particular books written by people we disagree with yeah I'd love to hear what what Joe and Peter and Bob all think of these particular texts I'd love to hear what David Gordon thinks about any book whatsoever in the entire universe so I love the first of all I just love the idea of the podcast well I have some books in mind for this coming year but I'd like to hear some of your thoughts or suggestions on that score ah jeez well do you want to hear my list do you want to hear my list first I have some definites I'll make some notes okay so we're definitely going to do Adam Smith Wealth of Nations probably take more than one show for that we're definitely going to do Keynes's General Theory um I can't handle Dusk Coppital because it's just it's just drag it's not even the Marxists don't read it so why should we it's not well written yeah it's um we're going to do a couple more hop-up books we're going to do a theory of socialism capitalism and the economics and ethics of private property we'll probably do a couple more Edward Bernays books because I think increasingly persuasion is um leading or a lack of persuasion is perhaps giving rise to the need for separation so all of us understanding how language works against what's happened the madness out there I think is important we'll probably do a couple more James Burnham books we'll do the Machiavellians for sure and beyond that we'll probably get into some of the smaller Rothbard books as well I haven't yet done the Ethics of Liberty just because it's it's you know obviously it's a normative book it's fraught and I've tried to be stay away from libertarian theory and stick more to economics but we haven't always stuck to that idea so at some point we definitely will have to work through the Ethics of Liberty and then of course we've got a whole host of smaller Rothbard books so there's plenty to do there's more books than there are weeks in the year yes no kidding well I'll mention that we did do before there was a Jeff Deist at the Mises Institute a video series where each of us talked about one chapter in economics in one lesson by Haslott so that already exists so we wouldn't need to probably need to reproduce that I'm looking through some of the books that I myself list among the books that I recommend and certainly I think those that you mentioned a theory of socialism and capitalism and the economics and ethics of private property those are the two books that got me into Hans Hoppe the democracy book really helped solidify me as an end cap but those two are really really amazing books because you know a lot of times there are only so many ways you can say and argue certain things so if I read five books on monetary theory I'm going to have a lot of overlap but I read books by Hans Hoppe and I would say 90% of it is absolutely original I've never read anything like this before that's very unusual now of course it would be nice also to do but it's a huge book but to do something some day with where to the sodos book money bank credit and economic cycles it's a gigantic book but it's such a great book and an important book in fact it's so great that our friend David Howden who was a Mises summer fellow and who now is a professor in Spain David Howden read that book as a student and was so impressed by it that he decided he had to learn Spanish so that he could go get a PhD under the author of that book like that's pretty impressive well and that's the goal the goal is to reach people perhaps more narrowly but also somewhere deeply and we're hoping that we're going to spark something in someone whether just a lifetime of learning purely for personal edification or a career change or a light bulb moment an aha moment for somebody that's really the reason that we're reviewing these books and the other thing Tom is I've avoided getting into the broader I don't know if I want to say libertarian sphere but the sphere of popular books because the idea of the podcast here is to be really unique and really different and nobody else is out there actually reading and discussing econ books in podcast format Russ Roberts podcast is a little bit of that but that's not particularly about books and certainly not about older or established books so there's that way we sort of carved out a niche and we've accepted the limitations of the niche because we're not doing a it's not a Nickelback video with girls and bikinis it's a podcast where you might have to do some work and some thinking and that's okay but that said I don't want to read Jordan Peterson I don't want to read the latest greatest Bitcoin book necessarily I stuck to Saifidin which is about all the Bitcoin we've done on the show I don't necessarily want to read much about libertarian theory because I think once you get past just in the 20th century forget all the centuries that came before just in the 20th century you have Zik you have Albert J. Nock you have the Tana Hills you have Rothbard introducing making the normative case in the Ethics of Liberty you have Hoppe expanding on that I'm not sure that there's a lot of just pure libertarian theory that interests me anymore I'm not sure how much more scholarship there's left to be done in that area so it's you know there's we have to sort of strike a balance between interesting and appealing to people but also books that are rigorous enough or lasting enough that we don't get sucked into sort of popular reviews well let me make a couple of recommendations and these won't come as a surprise to you but they're ones that I like and that I think deserve more attention even though it is a normative book maybe you can make an exception in this case Guido Holstmann's book the Ethics of Money Production sure he makes a very very interesting, unique and convincing case there and there is plenty of economics in that and then another one would be a Rothbard's book on the Great Depression and did you mention that one no I did not because that's a good one because there is there's history in it there's economics in it and there is some controversy in it because of the definition of the money supply and stuff like that but that would be a good one for Joe Salerno to be a guest for because that is a an absolutely tremendous work and you read it and what I love about it is yes you get the Austrian theory of the business cycle you get the revisionist history of Herbert Hoover but then you look at the footnotes and stuff and Rothbard knows that this guy was married to this woman who was connected to this bank I don't know how he found out all this stuff but my gosh it's like he knew everything so it's very very worth reading and again he makes a very convincing case and it's an important topic because some of our people get the Great Depression wrong and for heaven's sake we're going on a hundred years since it happened it's about time we figured that one out well I definitely think that we want to make the human action podcast a part of people's lives in this coming year you know maybe we really are a spot where you ought to be doing deadlifts and canning food and buying bullets and that sort of thing but even if you are doing that you need to be working on your mind as well and I think there's no easier and better place to do that than every Friday or thereabouts with the human action podcast because we got a lot of books to read and we're going to make it easier for you we're going to make it more fun for you we're going to continue to provide discounts in the bookstore tell your friends you can find us at Google Podcast at Apple Podcast at Stitcher at SoundCloud and at Spotify you all know how to find Tom and his great show the Tom Wood Show and we look forward to having him join us at least once or twice to cover a couple of books maybe even one he wrote in the coming year so Tom with all that said I want to wish you and yours a very happy new year and the same to our listeners Thank you Jeff same to you The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org