 Now we say this is my favorite week of the year. It's just thrilling to be here, especially being on this side of things, having attended this myself for the first time in 1993. And those days, we had Murray Rothbard delivering the opening talk. And you guys have to be content with me. But in this room are so many illustrious folks who have toiled in the vineyard many years. And we're very, very fortunate, all of us, to be able to take part in this and to learn from them. Now it's been a sacred tradition for many years here at the Mises Institute that Mark Thornton comes up here and tells the same darn jokes over and over again. First move of the Jeff Dice administration was to cut that out right away. That said, fresh jokes will be told from now on at the Mises Institute. But, but I, you know, I'm a traditionalist, you know? So I feel compelled to tell you the old jokes. Now Mark will often come up here and say, right away, even before everybody's had a chance to meet each other, you all have something in common, Mark would say. And that is, in the weeks leading up to this event, you all had somebody among your friends and family say to you, you're going to Alabama to do what? Mm. Then secondly, Mark would say, not intended as a joke, over the course of this week, pace yourselves. And I was wondering what he really meant by that, pace yourselves? Don't learn too much Austrian economics all at once? What does he mean by this? Well, I think having been a veteran of Mises U for many years, both as a student and a faculty member, I think he knows that there is a great temptation at the end of the day with a college town. We know what that means. You can get drunk 87 different ways within 10 feet of here. Try to resist the temptation because, oh, nine o'clock AM comes so quickly the next day. So keep an eye out for that. All right. Tonight, the topic I've been given is the role of Austrian economics in the Liberty Movement. Now, people who are watching this on YouTube, watching it live or watching it later on, probably know what we mean by Austrian economics. Obviously, everybody in this room knows what we mean. That is, by the way, that's the minimal requirement to get in, that you do have to know what the Austrian school is. Anybody who, on the application, talks about Australian economics is automatically cut right out. So, of course, we're talking about the school of economic thought that we associate with such names as Minger, Bombaver, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and many others. Now, the Liberty Movement is more of a neologism. I mean, this term was not used before 2007. I think the Oldsters in the room, my fellow Oldsters can attest to this. We never used this term. I don't really use this term even today, but I think it developed because when Ron Paul became something of a household name, a lot of people flocked to him and they weren't all libertarians. Most of them were libertarians, but enough of them weren't that it seemed that there was maybe a need for a different term than to talk about libertarianism. So sometimes people would use the term liberty movement. So that would include libertarians, it would include anarcho-libertarians, it would include constitutionalists, minimal government people, whatever. It would include some single-issue people. I just care about homeschooling, I just care about raw milk or whatever it is, and they all together constituted the Liberty Movement. So like it or not, that term exists. So what is the relationship between Austrian economics and the Liberty Movement? There seems to be one because practically everybody in the Liberty Movement is interested in Austrian economics. In fact, I found it quite interesting to note that there is basically no interest in the Chicago School of Economics within the Liberty Movement. I mean, that's quite something. And I travel quite a bit in these circles. I hear no interest in that at all. Now you may come back at me and say, now wait a minute Woods, people in the Liberty Movement have a lot of respect for Milton Friedman. Well, no doubt. But they're talking about Friedman as a general popularizer of capitalism. That's not the same thing. The Chicago School is not generating the kind of excitement that we see within the Austrian School. Now I just note that as a very interesting aside, there's been a complete route of the Chicago people by the Austrian people. Now I'm ecumenical, I like to find people who are right on anything and I'm glad to talk to them and work with them. But there are so many wonderful great Austrians I wanna focus on the Austrian School because I believe it to be correct. So I'm glad that Austrian economics has become so prominent. I consider Austrian economics to be the indispensable anchor of the Liberty Movement. Now I can already hear the objections floating around in Walter Bloch's head. So let me get them out in the open here. And Walter, although who falls into this problem more than he recognizes, wants to distinguish as do we all between the scientific discipline of economics and the Austrian School on the one hand and the value laden normative liberty movement on the other. In other words, the liberty movement is saying we ought to do this, we ought to do that. It is better to do this than it is to do that. Good things are to be pursued, bad things are to be avoided. That is the standard absolutely indispensable postulate of natural law, that good things are to be embraced and bad things avoided. Whereas the Austrian School is not saying anything like that. The Austrian School is entirely descriptive. It does not say government policy should be X. Government policy should be Y. Well, and as a matter of fact, Rothbard doesn't even get to government until he's all done talking about how normal society works. And then finally he says, oh, by the way, there are insane violent people and we call these people the government, but so I guess I have to talk about them. But it's almost as an afterthought because he's describing how society functions. So the Austrian School then is telling you here's how prices arise. Here's how the price system works. Here's where interest rates come from. Here's what time preference is. There are no values in this. Just telling you these things. This is what causes the business cycle. On the other hand, it's not a very far stretch to go from here are the causes of the business cycle to therefore we should avoid that, right? Because if we think that business cycles are bad things and they cause damage and we favor mankind, we are advocates of mankind, therefore if there's a scientific school that tells you this causes the business cycle, then as a humanitarian in the Liberty Movement, you will say then therefore we should avoid this. The Liberty Movement is taking the information from the Austrian School and adding the therefore. This is how society works without violent intervention. The Liberty Movement says therefore we should live this way. So there is a commonality here. It's not just an interesting oddball coincidence that so many of us are walking around in the Liberty Movement wearing Rothbard t-shirts or Manger t-shirts. I think the more obscure the economist on your shirt, the better. We all have the Rothbard shirt, but come on, how many people have Turgo? You know, I mean really, oh good, we got a Turgo fan somewhere in the room, that's good. This person's obviously a repeat customer of the Mises University. All right, so what I wanna do though is draw first of all some more parallels between Austrian economics and Liberty, as indeed I did last year, and then show how the Austrian School keeps us on the right path in the Liberty Movement because it's very easy to go off on destructive, unproductive tangents. And I'll give some examples of those. But for example, I've already told you about the business cycle, you're gonna hear all about this. We've got Roger Garrison here, and he's got a presentation that now everybody knows about because it's been in part immortalized by having been the inspiration behind the Keynes Hayek rap videos, which when you first hear the term Keynes Hayek rap video, you think this just sounds like a bad idea. But it actually turns out to be fantastic, right? And I remember Professor Garrison saying, I hope these videos convert some people to Austrian economics, but they're liable to convert me to rap music because they were that well done. So we're gonna talk about the business cycle over the course of the week, but that's one link between the Austrian School and the Liberty Movement. Here's what causes the business cycle. And it has something to do with artificial credit creation. And in the current context, it has something to do with central banks and the whole cartel systems over which they preside. So you want to avoid the business cycle, then you must be critical of these institutions. Secondly, we might say a word about economic calculation, another theme that will be discussed in much greater detail later this week, probably by Joe if the same people are covering the usual topics. But economic calculation is a topic that presumably you have read about or encountered. So I won't spend as much time on it this year as I did in my opening remarks last year, but we'll just leave it at this, that Mises wrote this famous article, Economic Calculation and the Socialist Common Wealth in 1920, and he was identifying the primary difficulty facing the Socialist Planning Board, which is that in allocating resources, it is allocating them in the absence of a price system. It does not have prices for the means of production, the factors of production, because the state in these systems owns all the means of production. And as you'll see over the course of the week, what gives rise to prices are the interactions, the buying and selling between owners and would-be owners. But when you have one owner of everything in effect of all producer goods, let's say, you have one owner, one person, one institution that already owns all these things, there is no buying and selling, and therefore prices do not emerge. So when you're deciding then how to engage in production, what things to produce, how to produce them, using what sorts of resources and production processes, you're operating in the dark, you have no profit and loss calculation to guide you, to make sure that you are employing these scarce resources in such a way that human welfare is as maximized as we can possibly get it in this world full of uncertainty in the future. And economic calculation is carried out by entrepreneurs who make use of the price system, who anticipate the future, and who decide that it's likely that this combination of resources will yield me a profit, this one will yield me losses, and then after the fact they go and assess what actually happened. But if you don't have this essential ingredient, then you are operating completely in the dark. So for instance, I sometimes give this example. This is just an example that deals with one firm, one person, one thinker in one situation answering one question. And you have to consider that the real socialist calculation problem deals with millions, if not billions of people making just as many decisions. But think of just this one decision, you're opening up a plant, and you may think that the most natural thing in the world is to locate my plant right next to where I get my resources from, for my production process, right? Because then the transportation cost will be minimized. But that's not the only cost you face, transportation. What if it so happens that the land you are intending to locate your plant on is so highly valued that many other firms engaged in the production of other goods are competing for that land, would like to produce a plant, a build a plant on that land. Well, maybe it could turn out that even with the transportation cost factored in, it would be better, more cost effective for you to be located at a distance. Because somebody else needs this land more urgently than you do because the consumers indirectly sent them there. The consumers demand what they're producing, perhaps more urgently than they do what you're producing, and they're able to outbid you for that land. But if you were to make that decision without these different prices available to you, how would you know which is the best combination of distance from my suppliers as opposed to where I might wanna locate my plant? And so these questions would be entirely arbitrary. And of course, in a socialist setting, they are politically determined. They're not determined on the basis of consumer demand percolating up through the production process, determining the prices of all the producer goods, and thereby indirectly allocating those goods. None of that is present. The socialist planning board is entirely in the dark. So what we learn from the Austrians because of their emphasis on economic calculation is that if we want to be sure that the limited resources we have are placed at our disposal in such a way that the welfare of mankind is maximized and with the fewest opportunities foregone, the lowest valued opportunities foregone, we need these decisions to be made under the cope of economic calculation. Now, how is economic calculation maximized under the purest free market there is? As soon as government is involved, calculation is disrupted. Whether or not this government happens to own all the means of production, government always interferes with economic calculation because it's not a firm. It's not a firm earning genuine sales revenues. And therefore, its expenditures, its decision-making is always arbitrary. I'll return to this later in the week in one of my other talks. So therefore, again, the Austrians are not saying, therefore, given that economic calculation is the way we can be sure that resources go to their most highly valued ends, well, I mean, that's what Austrian economics is telling us about economic calculation. We can conclude from that as human beings that, well, I do want resources to go to their most highly valued ends. I don't want resources to be politically directed into this or that channel. Therefore, I want as many production processes as possible, if not all of them to be determined on the market by voluntary decision-making by private property owners. So you can see how a liberty conclusion can very easily be drawn from a purely positive economic statement. I talked last year briefly about Bombavirk, the important early Austrian economist who among many other things wrote a well-known critique of Karl Marx and explained, again, among many other things, problems with Marx's system, that he's wrong about exploitation, that the wage relation is necessarily exploitation of the worker. How come the worker isn't earning the full value of his product? That must be because surplus value is being arbitrarily skimmed off the top by the blood-sucking capitalist who serves no purpose other to sit on his behind and do nothing but cackle at the suffering workers. Bombavirk said, you know, I have a funny feeling that is a bit of a caricature of what's really going on. And he basically, the way we ought to understand what's going on is as follows. There is a phenomenon known as time preference that we prefer a good in the present as opposed to the same good in the future. Now, we could perhaps state it more technically than that, but this is the opening night after all and much can be forgiven on the opening night. But take, for example, the old example I remember from Mises Yu 21 years ago, the old trunk with $1,000 in it, right? Eventually, it's gonna get to a point where $1,000 is worth so little that people are just not even gonna pay attention to the trunk with a $1,000 example anymore. But for now, $1,000 to a college student is still a lot. So we're gonna stick with the $1,000 trunk. Imagine you got a trunk, it's got $1,000 in it, and we're gonna open up bids on it. What would you bid for? Assume the trunk itself is worth nothing. What would you be willing to bid on this trunk? And basically, people would be bidding and eventually we would get so close to $1,000 that it may as well be $1,000. But suppose I said to you, what would you pay for a key to that trunk and the key works one year from now? Well, only an idiot is gonna bid $1,000. Why would you pay $1,000 for $1,000 in a year? You got $1,000 right now in the present and you would be depriving yourself of the use of the $1,000 for a year. Presumably, you play some value on that. So maybe you would bid $900, $950. There'd be some difference between the $1,000 that you're gonna get in a year and the amount you'd be willing to pay today. Well, von Bavrak is willing to say that there's something analogous going on in the wage relation between the employer and the employee. The employee does not have to wait for his product that he contributes to the production of. He doesn't have to wait for it to sell before he gets paid. He gets paid every week, every two weeks. He gets his paycheck. Doesn't matter. The product might not even be ready for six months. It might not sell for a year, but he doesn't have to wait a year. He gets his pay right now. The capitalist takes upon himself the function of waiting. This is something we value because we would rather have the pay right now. So for the same reason that only an idiot would pay $1,000 today for a trunk yielding you $1,000 in the future, likewise, this is why the worker will be paid slightly less because the capitalist far from doing nothing is shouldering the burden of waiting. So there's nothing sinister going on here. Any more than there's anything sinister about the fact that I would be willing to bid only 950 for a trunk yielding me $1,000 a year from now. Now Marxism is probably just about the most anti-liberty system in the history of the world. So if the Austrians are able to show, and that's just one example of things the Austrians are able to show, you should read Rothbard on Marx in his book, Classical Economics. But if the Austrians can show there's something seriously wrong with the analysis there, I would say that's a contribution to liberty. Then of course we have Rothbard's work in welfare economics. He has a famous article that appeared in a collection in 1956 and his article is called Torda Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics. There has been some criticism of this article, but very ably responded to by Professor Herbner, who was among our faculty. But the long and the short of it is this, that when a social interaction makes at least one person better off and nobody worse off, we call this Pareto Superior. Whereas whenever we cannot say whether social welfare has increased, we call this Pareto Inferior. And what Rothbard is at pains to show in his article, and again, I'm giving you the reader's digest version. But what Rothbard is showing is that of course when we see voluntary interaction among individuals, we know that, and again, for people who have been in the Austrian school for like 30, 40 years, they think I can't believe we still are saying the same darn thing over and over. Someday the world will get it, I know, but we do still have to bring them along. When people engage in voluntary interaction, that means they think they're gonna be better off at the end, otherwise they wouldn't do it. And you know, it's funny, that seems like such an obvious thing, you know, that I pay the 10 bucks to the guy at the music store, I'm gonna use an oldie example because I'm an oldie guy. 10 bucks and I get my CD, let's say. The store values the 10 bucks more than the CD and I value the CD more than the 10 bucks and so we're both made better off. I bring that particular example up because years ago I actually got an email from somebody who said, you're not gonna believe this, but that insight actually really made me feel a lot better about my job, I actually work at a music store and I used to feel like we were just screwing people. You know, we were just trying to milk them for every cent we could and then I realized, wait a minute, no, we're all happy, right? We're all better off as a result of this and it's okay, right? People don't like the price we're offering, they don't have to buy, right? Whereas let's introduce some official guns and Hangmen's nooses and state officials and if they coerce a transaction, how can we know if social welfare has been increased? How could you possibly know that? I know that their pockets have been lined and I know that they use some of that money to build a playground or whatever it is, whatever flimflam it is, they pocket 80% of it and 20% of it is a playground that takes them five years to build by the way and whatever and then three years later, they take the seesaws away, which they did by the way in the Engage Park in Topeka, that one year we showed up, all the seesaws gone. I think we had actually been taxed for those seesaws and then they told us we're too stupid to know how to use a seesaw, so for our own good, they ripped them out. Anyway, the seesaw's not really the main point of the story. But what is the point is that how can we know if somebody violently takes the resources of somebody else if, well, okay, maybe the violent taker of resources has had his utility increased, but what about the other guy? So Rothbard draws some conclusions about this so we can unambiguously say social welfare has increased when there are voluntary interactions. Now, that's a scientific statement, but now you can see how that would feed into a liberty message. If you would like to see mankind's welfare improve, then you would wanna have as many decisions made voluntarily without coercion as possible. How do you do that by minimizing government intervention? So you see how the one leads to the other. Now, having said all that, I think that there are specific ways that the Austrian school has guided the liberty movement away from some very, very unfortunate detours. Not entirely, there are some people who are not Austrians who still say that they're in the liberty movement, but for example, the Federal Reserve, there are a lot of people who these days say they wanna end the Federal Reserve, but then you talk to them, you say, why? Why do you wanna end the Federal Reserve? You get all different answers. Now, among the Austrians, we have a particular group of answers, but there will be some people who associate with the liberty movement who say that I don't like the Federal Reserve because it's privately owned. Like the problem with the Fed is that it isn't socialistic enough. I don't see that that's the problem, and plus I don't like people who slander the idea of private property, which is what they're doing every time they say, you know, the private Fed is doing such and such. Well, what do you have against private things? If the Fed were private, what would you, like, what's the problem? If the Fed were fully private, it would be no threat to anybody. If it were fully private, it wouldn't have its, well, personnel appointed by the president, it wouldn't have been established by an act of Congress. It wouldn't be something that could be closed by an act of Congress. It wouldn't have a monopoly privilege of creating legal tender money out of thin air. If it didn't have that government-granted privilege, it would be nothing. It would be nothing. So the problem with it is not that it's private. It is a weird sort of hybrid. It's sort of public, it's sort of private, but it's definitely not fully private, and that's not the issue with it. The problem with the Fed is not that it's not inflationist enough. And there is actually a group of people who loosely associate with the Liberty Movement who say this is one thing Ron Paul got wrong. The problem with the Fed is it is not inflationist enough because one person said to me, I don't know anybody who has come up to me and said, I don't know anybody who's come up to me and said, I have too many Federal Reserve notes. The Fed is creating too many. I don't know anybody who has said that. So therefore the Fed is not creating enough money. That's not the problem. Or we sometimes get this, and this goes all the way back to Father Coglin in the 1930s. Sometimes we'll hear this argument that what we need is the U.S. Treasury to issue the money. And this is all stated by the way, by people who don't trust one thing the government does, they all believe the government is just sociopaths and terrible, but forget this going through a middleman, going through the Fed thing. No, no, no. We need the U.S. Treasury issuing the money directly. I don't need Nancy Pelosi for anything except the most important thing in the whole economy. I just need that. And they say money should be issued, a lot of them will say money should be issued on the basis of the nation's productive capacity as measured in estimated national wealth. Now the flaw in that approach is that this estimate of the nation's wealth is itself denominated in money. So as soon as the money bureaucracy issues more money on the basis of this estimate, the result will be higher prices and therefore a higher nominal value of the nation's wealth. And so this higher figure will then be used to justify another infusion of money. And these theorists will be heard to complain of yet another so-called scarcity of money. The process will repeat itself again and again all the while debasing and destroying the currency. Now the reason to oppose the Fed is in timing. Of course you can think of political reasons. Maybe you don't favor monopolies of any sort. But it's an economic reason. And it has to do with the relationship between central banking and the business cycle. And again, I'm not gonna steal the thunder. I've talked about this quite a bit. I have meltdown, a book I wrote on this. I'm not gonna steal the thunder of the rest of the week. But the long and the short of it is that the intervention of the Fed puts the economy on an unsustainable trajectory that winds up leaving wreckage in its wake. And this is not exactly a hypothetical idea that I'm presenting to you here. I mean, we are actually witnessing the consequences of it. But there are still other features of Austrian economics that contribute to the liberty movement. For example, the Austrians do not believe in the so-called perfect competition model, which we'll probably encounter this week if you haven't already. The Austrians reject this. And on this topic, by the way, the best thing I have come across is a chapter toward the end of a little-known book by Milton Shapiro called Foundations of the Market Price System. You read his takedown of the perfect competition model. There are many difficulties with it. And people who use that model, by the way, we'll say, we know it's unrealistic, we're just using it for such and such purpose. But it's not just that it's unrealistic, it falsifies the market economy. It removes the scope for entrepreneurial error because of the existence of so-called perfect information. So it's the perfect competition model that in turn has been used, in many cases, to justify antitrust action. And the only people I know who are opposed to antitrust, again, are the Austrians because they reject this model. The Austrians are the only economists I know to reject the public goods rationale for government spending on various projects. Here I refer you to, you can Google, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and public goods on that. But the issue of public goods is really, that's what's been used to justify so many government projects. They say, well, such and such is a public good that the market can't produce. And so therefore we're justified in taxing people to go produce it. But when you look at the way they define public and private goods, it's a complete theoretical mess. And really almost anything could be justified in terms of government spending on public goods, the way they define it. So when I had Bob Murphy on my podcast not too long ago and I said, for example, the etiquette courses that I took to make me the wonderful person that I am today, given that you all benefit from that and none of you contributed to it, it seems like I'm going to take fewer etiquette courses than I probably would otherwise if it were being subsidized. So all this, my wonderful personality that keeps getting better and better every year is something you guys are all free riding on. Now, you think that's a silly example, but you could come up with many, many examples. In other words, this is why government loves this because it could be used, this rationale could be used to justify government expenditures on pretty much anything. And the Austrians object to this on many grounds and they have alternative ways of thinking about how various goods might be provided. Fred Foldery, for example, has a book, Public Goods, Private Communities where he says what you need to do is just make the unit a lot larger. For example, you don't think about how do I get one guy to contribute to the sewer system or you don't think how do I get one guy to contribute to the streetlight fund? You have the Homeowners Association provide the streetlights. I mean, you think of it this way, it's up to entrepreneurs to figure this out. That's what they do. It's up to entrepreneurs to figure out if people want something, I have to figure out a way to make it pay, even though authors of textbooks after thinking about it for five minutes can't think of a way I could turn a profit. That's why I'm an entrepreneur and they are the authors of economics textbooks. I'll figure something out. So I talked to Jeff Herbner about this so you can look in the archive, heaven knows what month it is. I gotta redo that archive, but it's tomwoodsradio.com. I do this Monday through Friday. I've talked about public goods on there and I refer you to that and that HAPPA article. But then of course there is a key line of Austrian thought. It's true that does not include Manger, Wombavirk or Mises, but that does include figures like Rothbard and HAPPA that views the state itself as being superfluous. Now this is again, this is a conclusion that is not compelled by Austrian economics, but one could see you could use the conclusions of Austrian economics to buttress it. And you could see that in terms of economic calculation. We wanna maximize the scope of economic calculation. The state interferes with economic calculation. The various rationales that are advanced for state activity are rejected as unscientific by this line of Austrian economics. The state is superfluous when it comes to money. That's something that Manger and certainly Mises would agree with, that you don't need the state for money, the creation of money. And this was the view by the way, it was the view of basically everybody. Everybody until Mises came along, I mean Manger first talked about it, then Mises really systematized it. It was assumed that of course, of course you need the state for money. I mean that was the theory of money. It was that the state was the origin, was the originator of money. But it turns out it's superfluous that actually what we actually need is the separation of money and state, and this is conceivable. Now it's true again that there are some Austrians who did not think it through to this whole way, but it follows completely logically from Austrian premises. But then we also have the personal examples of figures from the Austrian school to inspire us, because sometimes it's pretty frustrating being in the liberty movement. You got all the arguments in the world and yet people just carry on their merry way. It is frustrating to observe an entire society beset with Stockholm syndrome. Everybody in society is sitting around making excuses for the very people who loot and exploit them systematically every day. I think that's what motivates me more than anything, is that I have just got to lift these people out of this. You know what? I mean, even when sometimes you're inclined to think, you know what, forget these people, forget it. I'm just gonna go live my life and forget. But I just can't help myself. I just gotta keep fighting the bad guys, whether or not any good guys are listening. But take the example of Ludwig von Mises. Now Mises is to my knowledge, the only economist who has ever been featured in a Batman comic. Now I have a copy of it actually in my briefcase, and there's one, it's hanging in the research wing right near the Schlarbaum seminar room. So this is for real that Mises was featured there because he had such an exciting life. Now we say exciting, I mean, for him it was terrifying because of course, let's see, he's a Jewish man teaching the free market and opposing autarky and imperialism in the 1930s. You could see this running aground a bit, coming face to face with another school of thought, let's say, that is not so persuaded of classical liberalism. And so Mises, it so happens that in early 1938, Mises had actually gone to Vienna. He'd been teaching in Geneva for some time. He's going to Vienna. And then the Nazis, of course, you know in 1938, Austria comes into the Nazi orbit. And so Mises knows that he's not particularly liked by the Nazis, so he winds up fleeing Vienna. And they confiscate his books, his papers, many boxes of his personal effects. I mean, even his laundry is taken. He has some precious metal coins that were a gift to him as part of his inheritance. These are taken. He never finds out what happens to these things. Meanwhile, a Margit, who was to be his wife, is still in Vienna. She's awaiting the necessary paperwork to leave and he greets her finally at the train station in Zurich. And she recalls the scene this way. In the 13 years we shared before our marriage, I had never seen Lou cry. Nor did I ever see him cry in all the 35 years of our married life. He wept unrestrained and unabashed. Well, few of any of us would have to endure something like that. He flees to the United States. Meanwhile, in May of 1940, Nazi Onal Economy is released. He's been working on for quite some time. This is his systematic treatise. This is nine years prior to the release of human action, the English language treatise. But everything's collapsing now because of World War II. And it so happens that many copies of this important treatise by Mises failed to reach their intended recipients and Mises tried to stay in good humor about the whole thing. He said, quote, I suppose the Nazis used them as fuel. After Hitler's rise to power, the Nazis ordered the publisher of Mises' book, Liberalism, to destroy all the remaining copies. And again, none of it, we've never had anything like this happen to us. And he just carries on, carries on at a time when he gets to the U.S. in which his views are so out of fashion. The academic community and the public at large are so out of sympathy with what he's saying that it appears that his task is absolutely hopeless. And yet he carries on with it. He carries on with it courageously after having to move to the United States at age 59. Now, he spoke some English to be sure, but Henry Haslett worked very closely with him to work on his English prose in the books that he wrote over the course of the 1940s. This was a terrible and difficult dislocation for Mises. Now Rothbard, who was of course a student of Mises at Mises Seminar at NYU, Rothbard was confined most of his academic career to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he had a full teaching load. There was not an economics major. He had a lot of students who weren't that interested in what he was teaching, and yet this did not deter him one bit. There was very little prospect of his books being bestsellers, and yet he just churned them out. And at no time did he deplore the fact that his audience was so small when it deserved indeed to be so large. In fact, he was so productive that after his death, books by Rothbard kept coming out. His two-volume history of economic thought came out of collection of his economic journalism came out. His book, The Betrayal of the American Right, came out. And it just on and on. So there are professors today who only wish they could be as productive as a dead Murray Rothbard. I remember actually after, I remember going to Rothbard's memorial service because I lived in New York at the time. It was easy for me to go. And it was a who's who. I mean, everybody was there. Even people who maybe had not been on the closest of terms with Rothbard showed up to pay their respects to this man. And I remember not long after that, talking to Walter Block. And I remember him telling me that shortly after Rothbard's death, he went out and rented a bunch of movies. Just gonna sit and just spend the day watching movies. And he said, you know, I started watching one of them and I said, what am I doing? I have so many articles to write. And I thought that was Walter's tribute to Rothbard. Because when I think about Rothbard, I think about that character. Rothbard wasn't as naive as this, of course, but the character from Animal Farm, Boxer, whose motto was, I will work harder. And we all sort of felt after this giant had died that the only thing we can do, both practically and as a tribute to him, was indeed to work harder. And of course, there's nothing wrong with enjoying some leisure to charge yourself up again. But the fact that Walter just had to bring those movies back, I never forgot that. I thought that that's a beautiful thing that he was basically doing and saying for Murray. Wait, I have work to do. I have things that need to be done that are undone so far. Rothbard was ready to learn from everyone. Everybody potentially has something to teach me. He didn't have to agree with him on everything. Very few people are gonna agree with us on everything. But he learned from everybody. And it's that type of attitude that if there is a liberty movement, should be shared by everyone. Because we get so tempted to think of other people, not as human beings, but as belonging to large categories. Well, that person is a such and such. That person is a such and such. But you know, these people are our neighbors. Some of these people are our friends, our family. And we should think of them as human beings. For example, I have a book in the Mises bookstore called We Who Dare to Say No to War. It's a collection of the best anti-war writings that were released at the time of all the major U.S. wars from 1812 to the present. And I did that book with a guy way on the left. And our rule was you can't be a commie or a fascist, but otherwise you can be in this book. And the guy's name was Murray Polner. And we didn't agree on very much, but we agreed on war. And on paper, on paper, we should never have worked together. But thank God we don't live our lives on paper. We live them in flesh and blood. And I'm really grateful that I had a chance to work on that project. And Rothbard worked with people on the left. He worked with Ron Radosh back when he was a decent person and not a neocon character assassin on that great book on the corporate state. I mean, very important, wonderful things that's wonderful to see. You're not gonna convert every single person you run into, but gosh, we're on this earth for so little time. If we find common ground, let's use it. And I know I'm getting to be kind of a softy as I approach middle age here. But I really do believe very strongly in this. And that very much impressed me about Rothbard. But also, he didn't just go out half cocked talking about stuff he knew nothing about. He knew his stuff. And we're very tempted sometimes to wanna go out there and be in the arena, part of the conversation, part of the debate, after having read two articles on something. And as soon as one strong argument comes our way, we're rushing to the internet asking our friends for help. You know, and it's not that you gotta keep your mouth shut until you're the world's foremost expert, but aspire to that, to having that kind of command like Rothbard had. And he knew the mainstream stuff, backwards and forwards, look at man economy and state, look at the footnotes, filled with references to the mainstream literature. All right, now that I've badgered you about you should be like Rothbard, I feel like Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin in his autobiography has 13 steps for how you can become a better person, you know, and get up early in the morning and stuff like that. And you know, you follow them the first 12 steps and you think, all right, I think I could probably do all those things. And then step number 13 is, oh, and by the way, imitate Jesus and Socrates. Okay, that's it. So just be like Rothbard and this'll solve our problems. But I do wanna say a little something though before as I wrap up about this place itself. Both it's place in the Liberty Movement, but it's place really in, I know this is sappy. This is what I get for drinking before talking. No, that's a joke. I haven't had anything to drink. No, no, no, that's Thursday. No, the place it has in our hearts, frankly, but the place it has in the Liberty Movement, the place it has in scholarship. Because here, you know, sometimes you think the Mises Institute is that great website, Mises.org. And that is a great website, right? I mean, all these free things available there, it's fantastic, that's wonderful. But there's also a monthly print publication, the free market, that's great. We have seminars of different sorts, the Rothbard Graduate Seminar for outstanding graduate students. We have events around the country from time to time. We have events here at the Mises Institute, periodically during the year. We have the Austrian Scholars Conference where new and exciting research in Austrian economics and related fields is being carried out. It's wonderful. It all takes place here and thanks to the Mises Institute. And of course this, which I consider the capstone event of all, Mises U, that so many of us came through and to which I am myself deeply indebted. But we can't neglect the other aspect of what the Mises Institute is because there are a lot of free market websites out there, not as good as Mises.org, but there are a lot of free market websites. There are a lot of scholarly institutions, but very, very few, not zero, but very few that combine all these things. And we have the Mises Institute's Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics publishing scholarly work. And it's very easy to overlook that because we like to read Mises' daily articles that we can zing and ship over to our friends to shut them up about some topic. And it gets a lot of retweets and likes on Facebook. And a lot of these articles in the Quarterly Journal go unsung. People aren't aware of them. But this is likely to be what stands the test of time is the scholarly contribution. The research wing, so much important work goes on in that research wing. Guido Holzmann, who's on the faculty here, is not only a tremendous biographer of Mises, but he's been doing indispensable work on Austrian economics and financial markets. Well, boy, do we need that in this day and age. His PhD student, who just got his PhD in the past month, Xavier Merra, has done his work on derivatives and Austrian insights into derivatives. I mean, so this is not just repeating stuff from 50 years ago. This is boldly going into the future and taking Austrian economics where it needs to be. We have GP Manish doing important work in development economics about developing countries and what Austrian insights we can share there. He's actually from India, as a matter of fact. And he came through this program. So this is where it's at. And you guys to be in this room, you guys are the cream of the crop. Not everybody is called to do what you are now called to do. Because some people are just gonna read articles and promote the Austrian school in that way and tell their friends about it. And there's nothing wrong with that. We need a lot of people doing that. But there's a small sliver of that liberty movement that's called to do more. There's a small sliver that is called to engage in the hard work of mastering and advancing the school. Are you part of that small sliver? That's the question that you're gonna be answering as you go through this week. You are here at the Mises University. Many people over the years have wanted to be in your shoes and have not been able to do it. A lot of people watch or read some of the Austrian economists. They see Peter Schiff take on some confused people on TV and they say, oh, that would be so cool to be that guy. But it's not just reading a few articles or listening to a few lectures. It is hard work to get to that point. So this week, don't zone out. Don't say, oh, this is obvious stuff. I already know this. You think you do. But you're gonna get it presented to you systematically. Follow it along closely. Pay the more close attention than you've ever paid before. Work as hard as you can because right now we need a bunch of Rothbard's right now. Maybe they're sitting in this room, but we need that now. We have a lot of people out there who love this stuff and that's wonderful, but we need the people who are gonna move it forward into the future. And don't get discouraged. It's so easy to get discouraged. Remember that you're not talking to the present generation only. You're talking, if you're writing a scholarly article, you're talking to people, generations and generations from now. And even if this generation isn't ready for this message, remember anywhere, anywhere that a mind is awakened to the truth of our situation, to the truths of society, the truths of economy, of social cooperation, this is a victory for the human spirit. And yes, it is tempting to give in to discouragement. And I'd be lying to you if I said that I hadn't felt that way myself. But here I want to bring to your attention an interesting contrast between Manger, the founder of the Austrian school, and Mises. This is Mises' own observation. After Mises in 1903 read Principles of Economics by Manger, he said, personally, I met Carl Manger only many years later. He was then already more than 70 years old, hard of hearing and plagued by an eye disorder. But his mind was young and vigorous. Again and again, I have asked myself, why did this man, why this man did not make better use of the last decades of his life? I believe I know what discouraged Manger and what silenced him so early, Mises continues. His sharp mind had recognized the destiny of Austria, of Europe, and of the world. He saw the greatest and most advanced of all civilizations rushing to the abyss of destruction. He foresaw all the horrors which we are experiencing today, 1940. He knew the consequences of the worlds turning away from true liberalism. And of course true liberalism means classical liberalism. He's not talking about Hillary Clinton. True liberalism and capitalism. Nonetheless, he did what he could to stem the tide. The knowledge that his fight was without expectation of success, however, sapped his strength. But now here's Mises. It is a matter of temperament, how we shape our lives in the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. In high school, I had chosen a verse by Virgil as my motto. And of course, the rendering that we have of it here in the Institute is do not give into evil but proceed ever more boldly against it. In the darkest hours of the war, I recalled this dictum. Again and again, I faced situations from which rational deliberations could find no escape. But then something unexpected occurred that brought deliverance. I would not lose courage even now. I would do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in professing what I knew to be right. That's the person we all have to be. We are about to embark this week on what I can tell you after having gone to Harvard and Columbia was by far, without a doubt, the most inspiring and important intellectual event of my life. And I am confident that at the end of this week, you will be able to say the same. Thank you very much.