 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. We're so pleased that you have joined us today. And we're also very pleased that Mises University is happening this week. We have a lot of great scholars here in Auburn visiting us. We have our resident economist and also editor of Mises.org, Ryan McMakin joining us for the conversation today. And as a lot of you know, we have been going through several of Ludwig von Mises' shorter works. And happily, they're mostly his earlier works. In other words, most of his lengthier writings predated Human Action. And so for a lot of people who might have a little trepidation about approaching Human Action, there's plenty of Mises you can be reading that's simpler and shorter. And of course, we've gone through some great books like The Theory of Money and Credit. We went through socialism and bureaucracy and the anti-capitalistic mentality. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, et cetera. So we are going to tackle one last book before we begin to go through a multi-episode podcast based on Human Action. So that's going to be fun. You want to stay tuned for that. And it's going to be really a way to help you work through that book and perhaps get more enjoyment out of it or tackle it for the first time if you've been waiting for the right moment. But before we do that, we are going to get back to really his second sort of full-length book. It is Nation, State and Economy, written in 1919 where he is just home from what was then called the Great War during his stint as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army and an artillery officer. And of course, he's already written his treatise on money before the war, The Theory of Money and Credit. But now he is home. He is working by day in the new Republican legislature, working on this book at night. And he's about to enter what's really a prolific period for him, the 1920s, the inner war years. And so much of what he writes in this book in liberalism, which came later in the 20s, is so absolutely prescient. He was foreseeing what might happen in Germany. He was foreseeing the possibility of another great complication following what became World War I. He is talking about things that are absolutely relevant today that people are talking about. As our guest, Ryan and I, were discussing earlier offline, even today, concepts like nation and sovereignty and trade are absolutely at the forefront. Even as we speak, there is a two-day conference going on in Washington, D.C., amongst what national conservatives is what they call themselves. And they're led, among other people, by Yoram Hezoni, who many of you know, I interviewed. He had a book called The Virtue of Nationalism that came out about a year ago. And they've got some speakers like John Bolton, the awful John Bolton, Tucker Carlson. They had Peter Thiel the other night. So they are talking about concepts around nationalism and nationality and immigration, of course. And even in the libertarian sphere amongst organizations like the NISC Center, there are people saying that nationalism is completely irrational, completely illiberal by definition. In other words, that nationalism is illiberal per se. I'm not 100% convinced that that was Mises' view. I'm not 100% convinced that's my view. And of course, one of the things we're going to get into is the notion that Mises Entertainment, also Murray Rothbard, elaborated on, that nation is a spontaneous order of sorts, that nations predate political arrangements. And there's just a whole host of questions and challenges around the nation-state and also a hot issue today of migration and immigration. That we get some early sense of what Mises thought about all these things. So by way of all that backdrop and introduction, I'd like to say welcome, Ryan. It's great to have you here in Auburn. Thank you. It's great to be here. Wow. Well, this book, less than 180 pages. So again, a great read for somebody who wants to get into Mises, dip their toe. And it's really organized, interestingly, in just three sections. And so why don't we go through it that way? One of the things that Guido Halsman talks about, and he addresses an entire chapter, chapter 8 of his biography of Mises to the writing of this book. He says, what he's given us here is the political economy of nations. And what was so interesting to me about the first part of this book is that Mises' nations and nationalism is kind of a new concept. I mean, before this, we had feudalism and monarchs, and they were always looking to expand. And so the idea of a nation or nation say, this is modern. We think of it as ancient, but it's modern. Right. It really comes in fruition in the 19th century. And it's closely associated with the revolutions or rebellions or resistance movements, if you want to call them of 1848 in Europe. And Americans are mostly pretty not familiar with this stuff. But in the mid-19th century, there was a big movement in all of these larger states and empires. That this idea that we as a linguistic or a national community should have more autonomy, should we should have more self-determination as a group within a larger group. This was especially relevant in Eastern and Central Europe, where there had been less consolidation. And in France, they had already largely kind of exterminated, not necessarily in the sense of murder, but just through national institutions, gotten rid of many of the smaller language groups and so on. And so there was a lot more uniform ethnically by then. But in Central and Eastern Europe, there was a lot more variety, especially in the Austrian Empire, the Hungarians, Romanians, all of these different groups that existed side by side. But they were dominated in many cases by some other language group, by some other ethnic group. So in the mid-19th century, especially, they really tried to assert themselves and get more local autonomy. And Mises is pretty sympathetic to those movements, recognizing that in many cases these larger states were simply one group dominating another group. And in that sense, there was a lot of co-development or a parallel development between liberalism, classical liberalism, and nationalism. So they're certainly not opposites. They certainly don't cancel each other out. As far as I can see in Mises' view, he's recognizing that these were related movements, and that in many cases the nationalists were claiming to want liberal goals in terms of self-determination, maybe more freedom of trade as well. I certainly wouldn't call them radical liberal movements in that sense, but they certainly wanted to decentralize and weaken these large states that had dominated them. And so to now say, to remove the concept of nationalism totally from that historical context and say, oh, nationalism is basically synonymous with hardcore imperialism or domination of other groups and so on, that's a bit of an anachronistic way of looking at it. Well, it's interesting. He had intended for this book to be titled Imperialism. And there was a change with this publisher. They wanted nation, state, and economy. And as Mises himself points out, and also Leland Yeager, the late Leland Yeager, who was of course here at Auburn University, provided the German to English translation of this book in the 1980s. And wow, is Leland just an unbelievable man, an unbelievable writer, an unbelievable scholar, and a polyglot speaker of many languages. I mean, what a guy. So get this book from our website. It's in cheap paperback, and you're going to enjoy Leland Yeager's introduction. But as he points out, one of the things Mises was trying to do here is make sense of or explain the economies of pre-war and post-war Germany, and also pre-war and post-war, what is now Austria, which had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So talk about that. The book's nation, state, and economy, three things that are very related but different. Well, yes, it's tied to a very specific historical problem. In his note, his introductory note Leland Yeager talks a lot about, this book is compared to Keynes's book on the Versailles Treaty and the economic consequences of the peace, I believe, was the name of Keynes's book. And just comparing the two and how they both attempted to deal with a lot of the same issues. And so Mises is here trying to look at the problem of nationalism, which was a huge problem after the war in terms of, okay, well, you've got a city like Danzig. Is this a Polish city or is this a German city? What should we do with it? Who should it belong to? Who's in the majority in these places? And that was so much of the project that came out of World War I, was this redrawing of borders based on linguistic majority and national groups. And that led to a lot of problems later, but it also was, in some cases, solved problems as well. And because there had been groups that were dominated by other groups. But then that leads us to the issue. So, okay, we work out this national issue. We decentralize these empires. We grant local cities and regions to whoever's in the linguistic majority there. And that, of course, is then going to lead to maybe some refugee situations where, oh, you're suddenly now in the minority and you've got to move somewhere else 100 miles down the road and so on. So those are all issues that are significant. However, Mises also wants to look at the issue of that. Okay, let's say that we've now worked out this issue of everybody gets to live in their own state with their own majority and internally within that they have some autonomy and they're not dominated by another group. Fine. But what does that mean in terms of relations between all those different groups? And so that's an important economic issue is how much trade should happen. What is the issue of maintaining a national defense? Should we be autarkic? Should we have peaceful trade with other countries? And that's what comes in then to his comparison between peaceful and liberal nationalism, which he creates that one category, and then there's imperialistic nationalism, which is the other one. And obviously he comes down on the side of pacifistic nationalism and that that's a good thing because the general vision is, okay, it would be ideal to have all of these different groups have their own state, essentially. And however, that's not a good end point in the sense that we can't then just make all those groups be self-sufficient. It's not even practical, even if it were. But even if it were possible, it wouldn't be a good thing because all these groups could greatly increase the standard of living and also promote peace by trading with everyone else. So it seems that what Mises is trying to do here is just create a whole vision of political economy where domestically speaking, people are able to exercise their political rights and their influence on legislation and domestic policy at this local level where they're part of the national group that has largely just control within that one area. However, outside those boundaries, there should be also be an attitude of liberalism and free trade and open engagement with all of these other groups, as well as also relatively free migration as well. And so all of those issues come together and it's nicely woven together. I mean, I think at reading it, you would come across a lot of examples that if you don't have historical interest, you might grow bored, I suppose, with long discussions about the history of German politics in the late 19th century and so on. But those are all in the service of illustrating his points about why this is what we should be doing. And so it starts out, as you would expect with a discussion of what nationhood is and what the nations are, but then gets into the economics of warfare and the economics of trade and how one national group should view another national group. And of course, throughout it all is the strain of just this liberal attitude that Mises adopted that we should be open toward engaging with other groups, but not to the point of absorbing them and attempting to impose our own way of life upon those other groups. So let's draw this out a little bit. Mises sort of lays out three elements of what he calls the nationality principle. First and foremost is self-determination, which we've been talking about, which by the way oftentimes requires an allowance of secession. This is a secessionist book, just like liberalism is a secessionist book, I would argue. So self-determination is the first element of the nationality principle. The second one is peace, which means that this self-deterministic nation of sorts is not, hopefully outwardly expansive or aggressive. And the third element, which he lists a little later in the book, is that we recognize the division of labor via trade. We're not trying to create self-sufficient, autarky nations. We recognize the benefits, material benefits and otherwise, the cultural benefits of trade and division of labor. And so we need to separate economy and state. He actually has a very delicious sentence in this book about the separation of economy and state, which I really enjoy. That's the kind of writing that you get from Mises. You just get these sentences that even in translation, even 100 years later, are just so pithy and just so applicable today. That's why you have to read this man. If you want to consider yourself educated in economics or liberalism, as an American today, I would argue you have to read this man. Now, maybe you don't have to read this whole canon, but a place like nation-state and economies, a great place to start. So let's talk about that, the division of labor and trade and how important that is in his worldview. Well, just because, well, as he points out, the world is physically different from place to place. And those different places are going to have different physical realities, and those people are going to have different resources and different skills because of that. And the only way then that you can really improve people's standard of living is then by allowing trade between all those different groups. And it really shouldn't be a problem that that group next to you has a different language than you. And that's the point he consistently makes, is if all the world is actually liberal, then none of these distinctions really make any difference that people are just going to be willing to trade with each other, and it won't even matter. And he even has an interesting side in there about how really the true ideal situation is when all the world speaks one language. And then we wouldn't even have to overcome these problems anymore. It would be totally, it would be so much more efficient if we didn't have to waste time translating books is basically what he says. Well, that's basically what's happened a hundred years later, the whole world speaks English. Right, and that's greatly to everyone's advantage, I think. And really, if you were to speculate about what is the legacy of this book, I think you could talk about how part of the reason, I mean, extrapolating from Mises, we could argue that part of the reason the global economy has globalized so much is because of the language issue, is that it's much easier to communicate. Obviously, I'm joking. There are tens of millions of people in China and India and other places who don't speak English. But if you could only speak one language and you were coming out of the womb today, English should probably be it. And in a sense, we, you know, those of us who are American, benefit greatly from that because our native tongue is also, we have the world's reserve currency now, we have the world's reserve language. And it really is interesting. And I noticed that sentence you pointed out where he says, look, even from the perspective of cosmopolitanism, another word in the news today amongst the Tucker Carlson's and the Yoram Hisonis and versus the Nisqansen centers, you know, even from a cosmopolitan world view, it would almost make the world more seamless. It would reduce friction and transaction costs of a sort if we all spoke the same language. And, you know, the other thing that struck me is you hear even libertarians mention this with respect to travel in the Eurozone and the Euro itself. You know, it wasn't that long ago when you went to Europe, you had to get a bunch of currencies and pay whatever 2% at the little kiosk if you're going to go from Germany to France to Switzerland. And well, in Switzerland, you still do. But that's interesting that he was seeing that. The other thing that really strikes me and Ben Powell notices this as well, we'll get to him later on the topic of migration as it relates to this book, is Mises is obsessed with languages. We saw this in liberalism, which we had an earlier podcast with you as well as the guest. He keeps talking about polyglot nations and linguistic minorities. And he even says that nation is a speech community. Well, this seems a little weird today. What's his hang up on languages? Well, it relates to the time again, of course, because as we're talking about post-World War I Europe, it's easy to see how the different groups would divide out by language. And Europe still very much reflects that reality, right? Norwegians speak Norwegian and the Swedes speak Swedish. Now, of course, most people in the cities speak English, or I mean the Swedes speak Swedish, but most people in the cities speak English. If you go out to the countryside or people who are older, they don't speak English, but that seems to be coming the international language more and more. But that, of course, was much less the case. I suppose maybe the educated people spoke French 100 years ago. But in Romania, I mean, you just, you didn't encounter, except in certain population centers, there were always German speakers, because the Germans had populated so many of the cities in Eastern Europe. So there were these, they were truly polyglot, but German speakers in the cities had different interests than the Polish speaking people in the countryside in that part of Europe. And so that then happened to coincide with different economic interests, partly because the global economy had not permeated all those groups to a different extent, and that if you were in rural Poland or rural Hungary or whatever, you just simply didn't participate in the global economy the way someone in Prague would have. And so all of these different divisions, which, of course, political scientists would all find, we would call, cross-cutting cleavages, these different groups. How do they divide out and how do they have some things in common? And so he's looking at all of that. He's very brilliant political scientist, actually. I mean, it's really shameful that he isn't read more often in those departments. And he's trying to figure out what are some of the things we can point to that really would define these different groups and how can we help them organize themselves better. So he probably just settled on language as something that seemed to be a good, convenient way of doing that. And he also seems to be arguing from the point of view of his experience in war in that he noted, of course, that the United States and Canada and Britain all happened to be fighting on the same side. And he would say, well, that's not a coincidence. And he explicitly says the United States and England are the same nation, which I've never seen anyone just come out and say before. But since he's defining these nations as linguistic groups, he just says, oh, well, they're different states, but they're the same nation. And I guess he was arguing that Austria, proper at least, and Germany are the same nation as well. But look at World War I, the English called the German the Hun. They were foreign. They seemed weird. And if they'd all spoken English, I mean, that's why we view Canadians as almost half brothers or something. I think there's a lot to it. They seem if they're demystified. Yes. I mean, it's not a coincidence that people are far less concerned about the Canadian border than the Mexican border. It's not just the economic difference. It's also the cultural and linguistic difference as well. Plus, you never walk around and you see some Canadians at the next table at a restaurant. And you think, I can tell those people are Canadians. They barely even have an accent that's identifiable. And so those are all real world things that make these people seem more like they're just your neighbors. And yeah, Mises, who was very adroit and not at all naive on issues like this, certainly I'm sure would have noticed that sort of thing. Well, as interested as he is in language, he expressly rejects the idea of racial nationalism. And I'll give you a couple examples. One, as he said, someone can be a German living in Germany, speaking German, thinking in German, without a drop of German blood. And he also said, there are plenty of people in England and France, for example, who do have German blood from various conquests in Europe over the years, but they're not Germans because they're thinking and speaking in English or French. So elaborate on that. And as you mentioned offline here, he anticipated possibly the type of racial cleansing that occurred in Nazi Germany. Right. He was very explicit and careful to note that nation and race are two different things, that you can have people of various racial groups or ethnic backgrounds who are just subsumed into the same national group. And of course, Mises was a German speaking Jew and probably considered himself as the same nation, as other middle class people from his city and wherever it was that he was interacting with others. And so, I mean, certainly given our experience, that would make perfect sense. If you encounter someone in this country that may look slightly different from you, but they speak with the same accent and they speak the same language, you're probably not going to have a negative reaction to that person. You're just going to view them as someone who's very similar to you for the most part. And so anybody then, and he speaks of that in terms of migration as well, in terms of small numbers migrating to a new place by the third or fourth generation, he says explicitly, they're going to be, they're going to be well within that language group. They're going to be assimilated within that national group. Their background doesn't really matter in those cases. Only if you have an enclave that forms where people maintain their old national groups, does that become an issue. And he noted this as well from the issue of colonies and so on. This is very important for the British. So he noted, okay, so you're an Englishman. You want to move somewhere else. Well, there are any number of places in the world where you can move and not even have to change your Anglo-Saxon-ness. And he uses Anglo-Saxon really to just kind of describe this cultural group as far as I can see. So you can move to the U.S., you can move to Canada, you can move to Australia, you can move to South Africa at the time as he saw it. And you're still Anglo-Saxon. You're no longer an Englishman, he says, but you're still an Anglo-Saxon. You're still part of that national group. And then he points out that Germany never had that. I mean, there were like, like Namibia, I think is the German language place. I think it was called Southwest Africa back then. But I mean, your options are extremely limited as a German in terms of going somewhere else. Now those Germans, as many, many did, they could go to immigrate to North America. But they would eventually lose their language and their German-ness over time. And they would just become basically Anglo-Saxons. And we've seen that happen, right? Nobody considers Germans to be really a perceptibly different group from the Anglo-Saxon. Although right up until World War I, that was true, right? There was all this anti-German sentiment and violence and so on. And they finally got rid of all the German-language schools that were common in the United States. But I mean, it's hard to argue with them that at least on some level, I think I would dispute the idea that this is by far the most overriding factor. I think that's what he seems to be. I think he goes a little too far in there saying that, well, it mostly almost totally comes down to your language group. And he barely discusses religion as an important issue. I think that's actually quite important. But just taking it by itself as an important factor, yeah, if you can move to Canada, if you can move to Australia and barely have to change really even the literature you read, right? If you send your kid to school in Australia, he's still going to read like Jane Eyre, right? There's not even going to be a difference in national literature. He probably won't read, I don't know, Moby Dick, but as he would in America. Well, of course, I'm optimistic. I don't think our schools have people read those things anymore, maybe, but you don't even have to change that. So your history is almost unchanged if you move to another English-speaking place. And yeah, I think all those are very important issues. And other nations don't necessarily have that experience. And he uses the term assimilation a few different times, which has a right-wingy connotation in the U.S. today. And we see this in the news. I mean, Donald Trump just tweeted something about a couple of these members, Congress Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim, I guess he's originally from Somalia, in talking about if you don't like it, go back. If you don't love America, if you don't assimilate. So these tensions aren't new. But I also think Mises recognized that it can be problematic if a linguistic group, he talks about like the Dutch experience in New York City. Most new immigrants do live in immigrant neighborhoods, oftentimes, with people from the same nation or the same language or the same religion. So what's interesting to me is that Mises is pretty clear-eyed about all this stuff and that a thin reader just says, oh, Mises is a cosmopolitan globalist. And there's a lot of truth to that, but there's also a lot of truth to the idea that he saw all this stuff without rose-tinted glasses that he understood that tension and friction could be part of all this and that the real point of the liberal program, the real cosmopolitan outlook is the ability to understand and respect a life and a culture and society unlike one's own. Rather than the desire to impose worldwide sort of a cosmopolitan globalism in the form of certain kinds of rights, certain kinds of governance, which I certainly think that globalism represents today, political globalism. And so we can always argue about what someone would think about things today. But one thing that crops up again, you got to read Mises carefully and in context. And this book gives you a lot of both. I want to consider this idea that he gets into about war. And, you know, as we mentioned earlier, one of the ideas of a good nationalism is self-deterministic and not aggressive outwardly. But that's, of course, not always what happens. And World War I, the Great War, was still very, very fresh on his mind. So a couple points for you, Ryan. First, he makes the point that socialism is actually not, doesn't generate peace because when you begin to control the means of production, you're sort of ready made for war. It's easier than in a free economy to sort of ramp up for war because you're already telling people what to produce and how much and where and why. And the second point he makes is that, but the flip side is that socialism destroys property which destroys your economic power and the wealth that gives you the ability to go wage war. Right. Yeah, to that point, something that states should always keep in mind is that if you wish to have the ability to wage war well, you want to be as prosperous a society as you can because those societies will be able to purchase more in armaments and to have just more sway internationally in terms of economic power. You're less likely to be bombed and invaded by a country that depends upon you for capital and goods and for lots of other things. And this has always been, although people talk all the time about the U.S.'s military power, the real strength of the U.S. has been in the fact that it has such a gigantic economy that it could win any war of attrition. And this is a point that has been made by some historians, is that it wasn't really the U.S.'s nuclear arms, for example, that prevented Stalin from invading Eastern Europe. It was the fact that Stalin knew how the U.S. had beat the Nazis. And it was the fact that the U.S. could just crank out limitless numbers of airplanes and tanks. And Stalin knew that even if it doesn't escalate to a nuclear war, the U.S. is just going to completely outdo us in terms of producing armaments because they're so much richer. And so they're eventually going to win whatever war, whether it be a war of attrition or whatever that we try to do. So there's no point in even trying because they're just so much richer. And some countries have been very adroit on that point. And some have not. I don't know how they think they're going to wage war successfully without a high standard of living that they need to finance a war. But of course, Mises makes that obvious point. I mean, he understood this. And he notes that that's a choice you have to make as a regime. It's the issue of do we want to be on a constant war footing and pursue an autarkic type of economy. And in that case, Mises said, that's possible. You can have this kind of self-protecting economy that relies only on domestic producers. He says the problem, though, is that your economy, your standard of living, is about 50 years behind what it could be. And writing in 1919, he's saying, if most of these European countries pursued a truly self-sufficient economy, assuming that a war could strike at any minute, they'd have to go back to basically an 1830s standard of living was his idea. And also it then becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is that, oh, well, we're not going to trade with anybody else because we have to be able to produce all of our goods ourselves. So that increases the likelihood that you can actually end up having a war with your neighbors because the costs then become much lower. And so, of course, he was always pushing the idea of liberalism. The core of his writing is always the idea that we should constantly promote the idea of liberalism because as he says explicitly, liberalism is both nationalist and cosmopolitan because it's interested in the idea of letting people have local self-determination, but it also recognizes the idea that you'd have to have peaceful relations with all of your neighbors as well. So he says, sure, yeah, you could be paranoid and just assume that a war is always around the corner, but in the meantime, you're just shooting yourself in the foot for two reasons. You're going to be poor compared to your neighbors. And then on top of that, you're probably going to be able to wage war less well because you're not going to have the riches that you need to wage a successful campaign. And so the whole system really tends toward then encouraging international trade and liberalism in international relations as well. And that's a nice thing about reading these. He's never pie in the sky about the need for self-defense and that sort of thing, and he recognizes the value of alliances. And after World War II, he even wrote a long essay, which we ran on our website a little while ago talking about how really all of these different ethnic groups of Eastern Europe need to form kind of this federation together for defense from the Soviets. And this was right after the war. But all those ethnic groups need to have total self-determination at the local level. So there'd be like the Slavic groups and there'd be the Poles and Hungarians and so on. Internally, they all need to do their own thing because we don't want the Poles trying to dominate the Hungarians and vice versa. But then they could just have this permanent military alliance that would then help them then defend themselves from outside threats. So we recognize those needs. But at the core was still the same program that he does here 30 years earlier is the idea that at the local level you need to have majorities that are limited to whoever's a lopsided majority in that linguistic group because otherwise one group's going to try and dominate a neighbor group. But the way you can avoid that is just ensuring peaceful relations between those groups. Now there's going to be changes over the time. People are going to move depending on where it's relatively overpopulated in terms of population size compared to the amount of capital available because of course overpopulation doesn't just mean a lot of people. It means a lot of people compared to the amount of capital available. People are going to move around but he discusses this in liberalism as well as that there will be slow demographic changes in places and you can deal with that through secession movements and one part of a state joining another part of a state so that they still are able to take advantage of the local linguistic or ethnic majority and so on. So it's a very fluid system but at the core of it is always free and liberal economic relations between all of the different groups. Well Ben Powell makes this point. He says, you know, if nations are spontaneous then by definition they are ever in flux and changing and I think that's an important point but I also think it's important to point out, you know, you said something that Mises said which is pretty astonishing that the liberal program can include both a national and a cosmopolitan global element and if we think about that it's just always so hard seemingly if we look at history to prevent any sort of nationalism from becoming outward facing aggressive but we can certainly understand a love or affection for a place and an identification with a place and I would say Mises had both for Vienna not so much as hometown but Vienna and it hurt him to leave and obviously under horrible circumstances. So I would say Mises was probably Viennese. Does that make him a bad guy by today's libertarian standards? I think the answer is no. Well just on a practical level, say you've lived in a city for 20, 30 years. If you hate it you should move. Right, that's a good point. And wouldn't you feel a natural affinity for the people who live within a 20-mile radius of you and you've lived there? New Yorkers don't. They hate each other. They hate everybody. But no, continue. But that's just natural, right? These are the people who are familiar to you. You of course speak the same language. You frequent the same parks. All of those issues, you have friends in those neighborhoods. Why shouldn't you feel differently about those people than someone who lives 2,000 miles away even though they're technically in the same nation state? As you, it seems weird to claim that I should feel exactly the same about Bostonians as I feel about people in my neighborhood. I guess that's something we're told growing up that all Americans are the same and all parts of America deserve your equal loyalty. But I'm not quite sure that's practical just on a human level. But I mean, going back to the European and to the point you were making a little bit about how liberalism is, of course it can be compatible with both cosmopolitanism and nationalism. I always think of the Poles in cases like this. Now the Poles, ever since the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the Middle Ages ended, they no longer were a large, powerful state in Europe and they then began to be dominated by larger, more powerful neighboring states, largely because they were richer and more urbanized. They were then began to be dominated by the Russians and the Prussians. Now the only reason Poland exists today as a nation or a group or a nation state or anything like that is because they were highly nationalistic in the sense that they were always very self-conscious in trying to preserve their culture from those around them who were basically trying to exterminate them. So all those different partitions that Poland underwent in the 17th and 18th century where Poland was divided up and ceased to be a state and so on, is if it means, if cosmopolitanism means lecturing the Poles about how they should have just given up on trying to be Polish, then I'm not real sympathetic to that view. I don't think there was anything wrong with the Poles attempting to maintain their culture, their language and their people as something separate from the Prussians and the Russians. I would not define cosmopolitanism though. I think it would be wrong to say, oh, well, just invite people in. Just invite the Prussians and the Russians to kind of come on in and dominate your cities and do whatever and split you up because these are just all arbitrary borders and they don't mean anything. All those borders around Poland that the Russians just came in and erased, that never meant anything anyway. So what are you Poles complaining about? And I don't think the world would be a better place if the Poles had just given up on that and said, you know, whatever we give up of being Polish is meaningless and will just be nothing or something else. And I think, and of course we know that reading from his other works that Mises was extremely well versed in Polish history because of course he was born and I believe in a region that's now Poland and was familiar with that part of the world very much so. He was well aware of this and probably was familiar with all those various battles that took place between those ethnic groups. But to be fair, time has changed this. It matters less today, presumably, what's the difference between a German and a Prussian and a Pole than it did 100, 100 years ago. These things have ameliorated somewhat and if whatever sort of a bizarro version of global capitalism we have today as jaundice as it might be has still been an absolute glorious achievement by any standards and not only has it made us all immeasurably richer but it's reduced tensions and in other words it's politics that keeps us inflamed but markets have absolutely increased the case for peace in Europe, absolutely. Well and Mises would say it is not necessary that you have your own state as an ethnic group. Say that the Prussians and the Russians had always granted great political economy or political freedom and economic freedom to the Poles as an ethnic group they probably wouldn't have tried very hard to get their own state. It wouldn't have been very important to them and the point that Mises makes is Switzerland and he notes well the German speaking Swiss have declined on many occasions to join Germany or join Austria just as the French speaking Swiss have declined to join France because they were already free in Switzerland to do whatever they wanted relatively and exercise their own freedoms there. So Switzerland of course is a polyglot place where you have lots of different people speaking languages and this of course as you know meant more historically they're much more integrated now but they still have their different language communities and so on. But since they are all pretty much guaranteed their own autonomy depending on what canton they're in and so on, no one is agitating for well we need to break off and form our just our own German Swiss state and things like that. And so Mises would say anywhere you look where you have probably groups driving real hard to get their own autonomous state nation state of their own is probably because they're being denied some sort of autonomy wherever it is. And Mises always makes that point through all of his early works is that a state that is liberal or a situation that is liberal then boundaries don't matter then who's in charge of the state doesn't matter because the state isn't oppressing anybody and so it very much depends on that just how abusive is the state is going to drive just how much an ethnic or language group wants its own state or to be separate? Well that's a perfect segue I want to turn to the issue of when a state isn't liberal so the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics had its annual meeting in 2018 and they had a panel among other things commemorating the 100th anniversary of this book 1919 to 2019 and we did the same thing at the conference earlier this year and as part of that Ben Powell I mentioned in earlier he's a professor at Texas Tech University he wrote a paper called Solving the Massessian Migration Conundrum and what the paper attempts to address is how should migration and immigration work when states aren't liberal and he makes some really interesting points here one of which I made back in our Immigration Roundtable series of articles which is that Mises wrote really quite scant few pages on the exact issue of immigration relative to the thousands of pages in his total work there's literally three or four mentions in human action and really liberalism and this book Nation, State and Economy are where we get a few pages here and there and moreover he was concerned about not only polyglot nations you know, assimilation and other things that we still find ourselves concerned about with migration but he's generally viewed and I think correctly so for his time as a guy who is for open immigration you know Ben Powell who's a big open borders guy actually you know drills down a little bit in this paper unfortunately the review of Austrian Economics which published it I believe still has it beyond a paywall if I can get a copy from him that we can turn into a PDF I'll post it on the site along with this podcast but you know he really brings up some of the questions about how do we address things when countries aren't liberal how do we deal with the inducements and everything and one thing that he points out in Nation, State and Economy and that Powell also brings up is this you know we always think of immigration problems because we live in America and a lot of people want to come here even today with all of our screwed up government but for the Germans for example you know losing people migration was a big problem so we think of walls and borders on the incoming side well a lot of countries had a problem with losing people it makes you poorer especially back in a time when agricultural labor was in demand Well it's funny Mises uses the phrase there's a sentence in here where he says this place was I forget what place he was referring to he says this place was relatively liberal you need to emigrate if you wanted to and people forget that restrictions on emigration were a real thing and I did an article on this last year I believe making precisely this point everybody thinks immigration when they think about migrations but really emigration was a big issue in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th century and states, non-liberal states especially would attempt to use emigration controls as a way of manipulating demographics and the population to favor the majority ethnic or language group so in many cases they would of course extract money from you if you wanted to leave because they thought if you were leaving to avoid paying taxes well we're going to hit you hard on the way out or worse if you were leaving to avoid conscription we're going to make you pay through the nose on your way out but in other cases if you were a Jew in many cases and you left Russia for example they didn't want you back so if you ever tried to come back and visit family so I'm sorry we revoked your citizenship while you were gone so there were a lot of strategies used like this to try and choke out the smaller ethnic minority groups and so that was a big issue we don't think about that much today but it's still an issue in terms of I think a lot the controlling political coalitions try to use immigration then to actress their own side and you hear a lot about that from especially restrictionists who are convinced that the other side is bringing in too many people that are going to help them and so on and Mises most of the time he's looking at it and seeing well most of the time you just don't see huge migrations of people at least in the time that he's writing so this is the teens and 20s and part of that was because immigration to go across the national border back then whereas you're from some other country in American culture probably seems like a very very different thing and it was so different and communication was so bad back with the home country and so on that actually you can find this in research on American immigration at least a lot of people went back they would come here and make their fortune and then go back to Italy or whatever with the people in the home country but I think there's been an easing of the problems of migration so that it's no longer seen as big a deal to go to the country next door or just a couple doors over and this is what we see of course in the Northern Triangle of Central America and Mexico and so on and of course these people feel more familiar with American culture because they just see so much of it on TV and in popular culture and so on and so I think there's just a much different feeling about it well it's different for a country like the U.S. although the U.S. talks a lot about it's sovereignty being a problem so on the reality is the U.S. is so huge that the entire country of El Salvador could move to the U.S. and it wouldn't really make that big a difference because you're talking about 6.5 million people out of 320 million people it's not going to cause a major national upheaval especially since those people would probably be spread around however for a smaller country that's a much bigger deal and so often when I hear people complaining about the idea of nationalism and sovereignty and so on being diluted in the U.S. they seem to have an excessive focus on just the United States not recognize the importance of these ideas of sovereignty and borders and so on to these smaller states especially because those small states can be much more easily overcome by migrations and so the stakes are much higher for them and so I think when you look at those issues Mises doesn't actually talk about that much at all the small countries when he uses his examples to talk about immigration he talks mostly about the U.S. or about Australia and he does note that Australia has a small population so that it could be much more easily overcome then by migrations from say Indonesia or Japan and in those cases he comes off as a restrictionist where he's talking about the smaller countries and he does say well the U.S. doesn't really have to worry about that because it's just so big and vast that it would take just huge amounts of migration and far but we need to think of this in terms of smaller countries and how they deal with those issues and of course one of the things that Mises I think would say is that okay well free trade is I think your starting point and you always need to just assume the free trade is extremely important it's going to help to mitigate some of those issues also prevent conflict to some extent and at least limited migration is always important in terms of matching up capital with necessary labor and so he's certainly not a hardliner on it but he recognizes the peril that some small population countries are in in terms of immigration and especially in by the 20s and so he doesn't spell out really a clear program here but underneath it all is always the issue of well it wouldn't even matter that much in a truly liberal state because even if you had a new influx population there wouldn't be any big state apparatus to use to oppress whatever group is now suddenly in the minority but also recognizing then that the nature of the state would change as different groups come in and so Mises just is going to take as he often does a more limited and pragmatic approach here and it's very much going to depend on the situation on how big the countries are involved and what the stakes are and those are things that need to be considered it's I don't think you can just make a blanket statement about people who assert some sort of concern about their local ethnic group as being naturally xenophobic or so on I don't think that's clear but I would say that it's much more important for a smaller country than a large country as an American I think fears are somewhat overstated but I don't think you should take the reality in America and impose it on then some small Eastern European country and say hey you know it's no big deal for us so therefore it's no big deal for you well this is a point that Powell makes in his paper and he's trying to come up with some actual concrete policy guidelines for immigration he says well because for instance Latin American immigrants in the U.S. are such a small percentage of the population relatively small percentage and Islamic immigrants in Europe are relatively small percentage of the overall population that sort of the general default of open migration both for economic benefits and also for you know for humanity's sake ought to stand when there's no problem due to the numbers but he actually talks about the institutions of freedom and he's paraphrasing Mises here he says if the immigrants own belief systems were in part responsible for that dysfunctional system and they bring those beliefs with them to the destination country in two grade of numbers too rapidly to assimilate to the beliefs in the destination country they could erode the very institutions responsible for the high productivity that attracted them in the first place thus immigration could in principle turn a relatively free destination country where Mises wouldn't see immigrants as a problem into a more interventionist state where immigration does create the problems Mises fears and again I'm quoting from Ben Powell in his paper so you know again that sounds a little right wingy like these you know these newcomers are going to bring their own new fangled ways and they're going to swamp the locals but again it's Mises seeing this with a clear eye and I think to his great credit Ben Powell attempting to straddle a little bit here and say hey look I can address some of these concerns of the immigration restrictionists and propose a policy which is based on a reflexive open borders approach but allows for an analysis of events on the ground or instant events or whatever it might be so again it's called solving the Misesian migration conundrum and I'm going to try to to link to the paper so sometimes the Mises Institute is criticized for being for close borders I don't think that's true we have a lot of different writers, Ryan McMacon sitting across me, one of them I would characterize you as I guess a relatively open borders person I would certainly characterize Parabyland or Walter Block as people who advocate open borders and even do so on Mises.org on our website and their perspectives provided by Lou Rockwell, Hans Herman Hoppe I've written a little bit on immigration and summarizing others so we have a lot of different views on it here and none of those views revolve around using a federal or even a local state apparatus to apprehend people and boss people around but even the pure open borders perspective usually comes with a caveat subject to health and criminal background checks and if you accept even that caveat that means you're going to have to have some sort of intake center which some people will try to skirt and that intake center while this processing for background and disease and criminality is going on is going to have to have some sort of detention element to it is as awful as that sounds and you know is that mean barbed wire does that mean does that mean you're going to draw blood from people to determine whether they have certain diseases I mean that's a pretty invasive thing are you going to detain them for days or weeks while these imagine having to do a background check in China on a name that's very foreign to us and there might be a thousand people with that name it's not so easy to say well of course we can just have basic criminal background and health checks that actually requires quite a bit of state apparatus and some sort of centers that are currently being I think rightfully criticized on our borders and you know when we have people in bad conditions who have attempted to enter the country so it's you know these are thorny things and Libertarians don't do thorny too well sometimes we like to be black and white and I get that so you know if critics including listeners want to say you know we got to be just absolutely for open borders and the Mises Institute is full of it I think that's fine and I think that that's a view I'm willing to entertain it and read more about which I do regularly but I'm not going to accept a criticism that says that this is somehow this you know this closed border status perspective and that you want big government to kidnap people that just isn't an honest characterization neither is that well you don't want Mexicans in the country I actually do want Mexicans in the country including some friends of ours in Auburn so you know I guess the point here is that there's some complexity and reading Mises provides some clarity of course not dispositive on this or anything else as a human being and you know just give us your closing thoughts here about immigration in general and what we can take from this book in particular well one issue that just continues to permeate the immigration issue is the idea of nationhood and who's similar enough to us that they would easily assimilate this notion and I think something we've been kind of skirting around is the idea that maybe our idea of nation has grown more broad over time right so you would think about how differently the British thought about the hun back in the early 20th century or so on do the British really view the Germans as you know some alien culture now and do Americans view them that way very few would I think and you see this also in an ongoing debate about immigration is oh well we want people to immigrate here who are of they never put it this way but who are you know basically the same nation as us and kind of you know when they say we just want western Europeans or whatever what they mean is those people are close enough to us that they would easily kind of fit in to our nation but what's interesting there is that that's changed massively over time I continue to read stuff where people say oh well you know back in the Ellis Island days a hundred years ago that was really just white immigration but if you go read that stuff back then they didn't consider the Irish they didn't consider the polls in the Italians to really be white people so they had a very definition a different definition of what white was back then and so the definition of white is really broadened and so you know when you look at all of these issues of race and nationalism and all this there seems to be kind of a broader view there so we've changed our definition now of who potentially is an easily assimilatable group and that continues then to be a major issue I think in the debate over immigration and it's different for Europe than for the US right you have non-Christian immigrants over there coming into Europe here most overwhelmingly the Christians or the people who come from Latin America are Christians they also speak a European language already I mean those things make a real difference and I think are relevant even to the linguistic stuff that Mises talked about and so we haven't really gotten away from all of these issues even though I think the issues are broader now we encompass our idea of the same group or potentially the same nation has gotten bigger it's not nearly as limited just people come from another Anglo-Saxon country and so on but the same issues remain and so yeah we haven't been freed from this idea of nation being an important issue in terms of trade I mean we see that in trade all the time right the Chinese are this alien culture we can't trade with them and they're fundamentally deep down they're all trying to conquer us and take over and this represents an alien culture and so that stuff just comes up again and again and again Mises would say you're wrong at the domestic level then with making sure that you have political borders and jurisdictions drawn in such a way that your majority ethnic group or I guess he would say linguistic group is pretty much unified and I think to use that analysis then in the US the US should of course me and many other secessionist type people would say oh of course the US should be broken up into smaller pieces that reflect the different majorities in different places or at least have more autonomy and be less of just this big conglomerate nation and that would actually solve a lot of the issues of immigration just imagine if there were a couple of countries between the eastern United States and what is now the Mexican border I mean if Texas had never joined the US the border situation would be significantly different for the US and Texas both and those things shouldn't be explored but the book is still relevant because even though borders have changed and ideas of nationhood have changed the issues of trade of war of the necessary nature of interacting with all these groups in a liberal and open way continue to be true and Mises continues to be right and that as globalization spreads as trade spreads to other groups now yeah we're kind of in a situation where a lot of people are arguing against that but I think the larger trend is clear that we're moving more toward international trade the stakes are simply too high people are not going to willing not be willing to settle for a setback of 20 or 30 years in the standard of living in order to eliminate trade with foreign countries and so I say the basic premises of the book just are true the same as ever I mean we've updated in terms of most people aren't going to really engage with examples of Weimar well I guess this is before the Weimar Republic really existed but his Potsdam examples I suppose aren't terribly relevant to the modern American but I think we could take this and just rewrite it with some new examples and we continue to instruct us a lot today. Well ladies and gentlemen as always if you really want to know what Mises thought about X, Y or Z the best thing to do Mises and find out for yourself what he thought about X, Y and Z and don't listen to these secondhand dealers like me and Ryan this book nation state and economy again an easy read about 175 pages you can read it really in two sittings if you go to our website Mises.org go to our bookstore you can get this in paperback very cheaply if you enter the code HAPOD that's H-A-P-O-D which stands for Human Action Podcast you're going to get a 10% discount and it's just one of those little sleeper books that doesn't get the credit it's due and it's really an excellent addition to your library and of course you can also read it for free on our website in PDF form so Ryan I want to thank you for your time ladies and gentlemen we're going to be back with another Human Action Podcast in just a few days with Dr. Liliana Stern who is across the street at Auburn University and Ukrainian immigrant to the US and a woman who has some really interesting ideas about higher ed and how it's failing us so stay tuned for a great podcast with her and we will catch you in just a few days