 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. This is the Human Action Podcast and as our listeners know, just over a hundred years ago, Ludwig von Mises literally wrote the book on socialism. Well, a few years later, he wrote the definitive book on liberalism, true liberalism. What its foundations are, what it means for property and liberty and economic policy and foreign policy and immigration and self-determination. This is the definitive podcast on Mises's definitive book on liberalism with our guest, our in-house economist and editor of Mises.org, Ryan McMakin. Welcome everyone to the Human Action Podcast. And as I stated early on when we started this new series, the goal here is to do deep dives into economic theory and present economic theory in the form of a podcast and hopefully encourage our listeners to go check out some of the original sources of economic theory and read some of the great books and some of the great writers. Now, today's podcast, because we are discussing Mises's seminal and important book, liberalism, is not really about economic theory per se. It's certainly about political economy, which this book contains plenty of, but it's also about political theory. It's about foreign policy. It's about trade policy. It's about immigration. So, unlike some of our more recent podcasts that we really got into some economic theory, we're going to do a deep dive into this book, but I'm going to warn you that the book per se is not Mises giving us economic theory. But nonetheless, it's a fascinating book. It's an important book. I think it's probably the most important book on liberal policy ever written and it clocks in at a very short couple of hundred pages. It's very accessible and easy to read. And we have a free HTML and PDF version on our site at Mises.org. So just go there and look for the book liberalism and you can read this book for free and it's available very inexpensively from our website as well. That said, Ryan McBankin, thanks so much for joining us. Hello. It's good to be talking with you again. Well, what a book, you know, written in 1920s. And again, during this incredibly prolific period, we've already covered some of the books. We've already covered socialism, which he wrote in this interwar period, having come back from being an artillery officer in World War One. It's so prolific time for him. But as I went through this book again over the weekend, Ryan, one thing that struck me is, again, there's history, there's sociology. Economists were so less specialized when Mises wrote this book. I mean, it's not a jargony book. I mean, this is clearly a guy with a grasp of a lot of philosophy, history, sociology, et cetera. Yeah, this book tries to tie in economics with lots of other disciplines. And you see that, of course, in human action. What's interesting about this book is one thing is how you see a lot of the themes that he had early on developed that are then fleshed out in human action later. And you can see just his mind working early on developing some of the stuff that he didn't even really change much later, but made much more broad and much more completely explained. But for the beginner, I would say any undergraduate is interested in these issues. You can learn a lot of not just economics, but political economy overall history of Europe. There's a lot of examples in here. And so history overall. And he looks at broader issues, too, like colonialism at the global economy at the time. And it's amazing how some of it really does continue to be relevant. I mean, yes, he's talking about the colonialist issues at the time back in the 20s, but a lot of these same issues continue today. And so I was actually a little surprised upon coming back and reading again how well it's aged. The economic theory, especially, doesn't seem dated at all. Some of the historical examples are a little bit old. But still still relevant, we still learn from them. It's also a fairly easy read. I think if someone has never read Mises, this would be the best place to start in some senses. Although, for me, I started with human action just because a friend introduced it to me and obviously struggled as most people do with that book. But this book is not a struggle. No, not at all. Any, I don't know, junior in college should read this if they're all at all interested in free markets and capitalism. And it's easy. Yeah, it's short, it's to the point and it's broad. So you don't have to be an economist to get this by any means, that's for sure. Well, and again, he's writing this in the interwar period. He's already served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War One. And he wasn't a particularly young guy relative to some of his fellow soldiers. He was already close to 30 when he went off to war. So his experiences are shaped by that. He determines during the war that he's going to write an important book on socialism. He does that a little earlier in 1922. This book comes about about five years later, but he's coming out of old Europe. He's seeing really the centralizing push in Europe, what had been a patchwork of principalities and small empires. He's seeing now in the 20th century, although he doesn't have the foresight yet of a Second World War, basically continuing the first. Nonetheless, he's seeing this centralizing effect and that his former Austro-Hungarian empire is now a much, much smaller thing. So what do you think about his mindset as he's writing this book? Where does he think Europe is as he writes it? Well, there's some pessimism in here. Obviously he didn't know exactly what was coming, but writing about the rise of more trade controls and a decline in liberalism, which is a theme that comes up again and again. He talks about, yes, liberalism made great strides in the 18th and 19th centuries, and however, unfortunately, a lot of that old, earlier stuff, the mercantilism, the absolutism of earlier periods, this has started to make a comeback. And if Europe continues upon this path, and he says basically, especially in issues of economic nationalism and a control of trade, he says disaster will result. And so I think he's trying to really stave off what he sees as an excessive decline in trade, in the idea of a truly global marketplace. He addresses the issues of fascism and communism and all of those issues that he considers to be obviously very damaging to what could have been a much better state of affairs had Europe continued upon its path of liberalism in the 19th century, but that didn't happen. And so I think he's trying to move people back in the right direction with this book and is concerned about what's going on in the 20s. Well, I like in the introduction, so maybe we'll start there. He does use the phrase once or twice true liberalism, but he does not use the term, and I'm convinced it did not yet exist, classical liberal. David Gordon argues that that's kind of a made up term in the second half of the 20th century. So for me, since he's using the term liberal in its original and best sense, but he still feels the impulse to sort of hedge a bit and say, wait, wait, wait, I'm not talking about what some liberals called the term, called themselves today. We're talking about something older and older understanding of the term. Yes. Well, and of course, that's a whole issue with this book specifically is it had started out as a book called liberalism or in its German version of the word. And he didn't at the time consider that to be particularly confusing. However, in the US by the 1930s, the term liberalism had basically been taken over by people who would probably be described as interventionists or syndicalists. And we'll get we'll get into that a little bit later. And so by the time Ralph Raco translated this book into English, which would have been in the 1960s. And I think that's really the only translation that's out there of this is the Ralph Raco translation. I have got an old hardcover from the 70s. And by then its title had gone back to liberalism, a socio economic exposition is the title on this 1970s version. But in that after Raco had originally translated it, they used for a while the title, the free and prosperous Commonwealth, which Mises had had wanted to use because he was concerned that the title liberalism would be confusing to people. However, eventually decided, liberalism is just too great a word to abandon. And we're going to go back to using this as the title. And I certainly in our editorial policy at the Mises Institute has been to to use the word liberalism as much as possible. You will make a nod to the classical modifier on it when necessary. But if there's going to be a lengthy article about liberalism, we're just going to use the word liberalism, especially since people outside the US and Canada know what that means for the most part, and are familiar with that overall larger tradition. And so it's not a term that should be abandoned, even though this book was completely retitled to take that into account. But now we're we're going to stick with the word liberalism. And so with so much on this on Mises.org, and of course, with our discussion here today, liberalism should probably you want to see in what context you're in. And if we're ever talking in a global context, anything beyond US parochial politics, liberalism usually should be taken as a word to me in this larger tradition of freedom and free markets that grew up after the 17th century. But even though we have that tradition, or we think we do, he takes pains to point out that, look, you can't understand liberalism just by looking to history. Because even the people who call themselves liberals or the political programs that term themselves liberal in history weren't really liberal. And in other words, it's the old, there's no true liberalism, just like today, you know, people say, well, Venezuela as well isn't real socialism. He's basically saying there hasn't been real liberalism. Yeah. And he makes, of course, those distinctions too, where he's got, well, you've got capitalism and you've got interventionism. And he uses capitalism to mean basically a totally free market system. Now, of course, in our usage, when we talk about a generally market oriented system, we're usually describing everywhere in the world, the places that are called somewhat market oriented, a market system. Usually that's an interventionist system. It's a third way system of some sort. I think because this is a more theoretical work in some ways, I think he just, he wants to be clear about when he uses the word capitalism or free market, he just means something with very little state intervention at all. Although in the real world, we rarely find that. So we've got, of course, people like modern day leftists who think of themselves as, oh, well, look at Elizabeth Warren, right? Oh, I'm a capitalism capitalist. I think markets are great and everything. They just need to be regulated. And so I think Mises would look at that and say, well, this person obviously isn't really a liberal or a capitalist at all, because she's endorsing a whole bunch of third way interventionism. And so I think it just kind of depends on how rigorous you want to be about the use of your terms. But I think one thing about liberalism is that since the very beginning, it's always had these great ideas behind it, these ideas of individualism, ideas of real freedom, peace, free markets, letting people do what they want. And this is always obviously very attractive to people. And so other ideologies have tried to steal all of those terms and fit it into their own program, which is usually a interventionist program or maybe even an outright socialist program in some cases. And so I think liberalism has suffered from the fact that it has historically defended very good, wonderful ideas, but those same terms have been taken over by other groups. He also introduces the term rationalism as a basis or justification for liberalism. This is, I think, where Mises sometimes antagonizes his critics. Well, and also I think he starts to get into some of Mises' weaknesses when you look at some of his moral justifications. I mean, can you even call that in the way Mises uses them? Mises seems very uncomfortable with making any sort of moral argument. He tends to couch these arguments. His morality seems to be a rationalist, scientific sort of justification. And so he seems to place a lot of faith in the idea, well, if we just embrace the science of sound economics, we will see that liberalism is clearly the best system. And then he provides a lot of examples of how this is clearly good for most people. And one example, which kind of rings hollow for me is when he talks about free labor versus slave labor. Now, of course, a natural law theorist would say, well, we're opposed to slavery, because it's bad to steal people's labor and to kidnap people and force them to work. Mises avoids that. He talks about how, well, clearly slave labor is less efficient, and it doesn't lend itself as well to building a prosperous world as much as free labor does. Now, that's true, too. And so Mises is always helpful in terms of making, I think, an empirical claim and looking at stuff that helps actually make your life better off. But he tends to really shy away from just coming out and saying, look, this is an immoral thing to do. Clearly, the right thing to do is not enslave people. Instead, he couches everything in terms of an economic efficiency argument. And I think that has its downsides. Yeah. Isn't that interesting how he goes, he falls back on to utilitarianism at every chance? And there's, you know, even in the section in socialism, which we discussed in a previous show, there's kind of a strange section about family, relationships and sex. And even then, he doesn't like getting moralistic. And of course, personally, he was an atheist in his worldview, so maybe that collars it a bit. But it really is interesting to me how he, and I think this is a great thing, how he avoids stepping too far outside his social science role in talking about motivations and morality behind actions. And of course, Ayn Rand lambasted him for this. There's an interesting book of her margin notes. And her marginalia, and included in that book, is some of her margin notes to human action. And she's constantly writing little things like, you know, this is monstrous. Why doesn't, why doesn't, why does Mises allow this whenever he sort of is a little ambivalent rather than strident? But for us, for a scientist, I like it. It's refreshing, I think, that he's, that he is not strident always. Well, it's interesting you mentioned Rand, right? Rand is kind of like the opposite of Mises in this regard. For Rand, everything was a moral decision. And everything came down to right or wrong and has lots of black and white stuff in there. Whereas, yeah, Mises wanted to take the opposite approaches. This decision is not imbued with some sort of metaphysical morality. This is just simply clearly the more scientific, this is the more efficient thing. This is, this is what will give us the outcome we desire. And it's, it's just practical. It's, it's a pragmatic view rather than a moral view. But at the same time Mises was, and so, yeah, I appreciate that he's looking to be an economic scientist on this. And his arguments are useful in many cases because of that. Since he was so devoted to, to providing explanations that were based on a empirically better solution as in, if you want X, you should do Y. That's very good. And that, because that, that provides extra ammunition. If you're, if you don't want to make a moral argument, because a moral argument is all, isn't necessarily always the best one to make in various cases. And we have other theorists that can do that. And, but Mises provides us a lot of ammunition for the non-moral arguments. So that's, that's not necessarily a problem, as you say. However, it is interesting to read this stuff because Mises clearly was bourgeois in his general daily habits and outlook, but he seems really uncomfortable in relying on bourgeois morality to make any sort of argument. Yeah. But, you know, we all have that impulse, Ryan. We want a normative or ethical justification for the way we see the world. I mean, we want it. Yes. But I think, personally, you got to know your audience and sometimes appreciate that maybe you could, you could bring some people over to your point of view on just one particular issue maybe by just pointing out that, look, this is simply, this is good for you. And maybe you should embrace this even if we, we greatly differ on some moral issue. I mean, it's a similar issue where I think, I mean, being a religious person myself, I think that my views on that happen to feed into the importance of embracing views that promote peace and freedom. But other people might be coming from a very different place. But so many of the arguments of Mises, I think, could illustrate that regardless of your moral views on X, that the outcomes are simply going to be better if you embrace this market view. And so that can be very helpful at times. Well, in the first section of the book, we'll move on. It's called the Foundation of Liberal Policy. He really starts off with a stiff jab. And he says, if liberalism could be distilled down to one idea or thought or word, it would be property. So that's not a concept that would resonate too well today with a lot of people both on the left and right in America, frankly, or in the West. And he doesn't hedge on that. He basically says property is the basis of a liberal order. And I think in doing so, he eliminates the arguments that are still being made that he was some sort of neoliberal. I wrote an article, we'll link to it a year or two back, called was Mises a neoliberal. And I concluded, no, he wasn't in large part because he roots his entire program in property, even left libertarians today don't like this. They want to make this distinction between sort of physical or personal liberty and property rights. They want to have these things to be two different things. And Mises certainly wasn't seeing it that way. Yeah, he certainly just on a policy level wasn't a neoliberal because he opposed so many of the central banking institutions that neoliberal support. But yeah, he kept it simple in terms of that foundation and that those things that came in and violated the use of property for whatever reason, usually of course, for purposes of profit, that he felt that these should be decisions made by the person who owned that property and not that their decisions should not be short circuited by some institution and in pursuit of efficiency at the global level or what policymakers decided would be best at some macro level. And I think that illustrates for us again the value of Austrian economics as focusing more so on micro econ and on the decisions being made by individual producers and consumers. Because he's not getting distracted by these macro views that a lot of neoliberals focus on. Now, he takes pains though to support our left libertarian friends. He takes pains to point out that freedom and peace, those two terms could follow property and stand alongside property as equally important in the liberal program. Now here he's talking about freedom and the political function of the word. He's talking about peace in the sense that war coming out of World War One, the Great War, is the father of all bad things. So he does recognize that property alone doesn't suffice to describe or characterize liberalism in a holistic sense. Well, of course, you need peace and freedom then to get the full benefit of private property. Of course, can you really exercise private property rights in times of war? And I think Mises would say no, because war just leads to so many violations of property rights that the two things are basically totally incompatible. And then at the same time, he starts to get into his more complex political views here, is that if you have authoritarian regimes that don't respect freedom, then people don't have the freedom to make decisions either in regarding their property. So I guess property is just part of this trifecta where, yep, okay, good, property is good. We should start from a point where people have property and they should be able to use it as they see fit. And this all leads into the division of labor and so on. However, once you have issues, once you have problems like a communist regime that is not letting people exercise any property rights, or you have war, which is coming and destroying property wholesale, or tempting a regime to take over property, which he covers in his other writings about total war, that basically private property then ceases to function in the way it should under these conditions. So you need all three things in order to have truly functioning markets. And it's easy to see that how people benefit from the existence of peace and freedom. But that also I think if you don't have private property in there, you start to get into trouble. And this can be seen then in issues related to trade and just in terms of helping people become better off economically. If you don't have the private property, then you're lacking that key piece that leads to people becoming much more economically better off. And that's a common theme that Mises starts talking about early on in this book, because he offers the proper view of history in my view, which is that capitalism and economic freedom have all along been making people better and better off. And this is something I think that maybe a lot of free market people fail to emphasize is that industrialization, capitalism, that is the main engine between gains in worker productivity, gains in technology, all those issues that make it so that we can live in nice houses and have effective medical science and drive cars and use forks. This is an example he uses in both this book and in human action talking about how we used to have to eat with our hands, but then somebody decided that we should be using forks, which had then up to then been unavailable. And just as a basic illustration of how what we continue to be basic refinements and things that make daily life nice and clean and more enjoyable are the sorts of things that capitalism made possible through trade, through international trade, but also through the technology that made it easier to make these things that we want to do. So for him, history is, and I don't think he necessarily imbues it with some sort of metaphysical value, but just saying that the growth over time, capital accumulation, freedom, peace, when it has existed, has enabled capitalism to exist and has allowed people to become much more wealthy. And that's just makes us better off. Right. And he takes pains to point out that none of this is an egalitarian program. In fact, Massessian capitalism is based on differences between people and nations. And that's why we trade. Now, he does bring up the idea of equal political treatment before the law, but he has some very open sentences where he says, man, they're all together unequal, for example. So he's not, he's not talking about an egalitarian program. So a lot of people would say that freedom or liberalism, true liberalism, requires some sort of equality or egalitarianism. That's very popular of you today. Obviously, he's writing this 100 years ago, but he doesn't think that. And I think he's explicit about it for a reason. Well, and he recognizes that inequality is something that drives the division of labor, it drives trade. Now, of course, this doesn't necessarily mean inequality in the way people think about it. Now, a lot of people, when they use the term inequality, they mean, oh, look, there's very rich people. And this somehow makes poor people poor. That's, unfortunately, in argument, he doesn't talk about a whole lot here, although that's a big deal right now. But at the same time, he doesn't have a problem with people becoming more equal, right? He makes the point that if you have two societies that have free movement of labor and free movement of trade, especially, that these societies will equalize over time. But, of course, there will still be some form of inequality. People won't have all the same skills. And there will continue to be trade forever. He doesn't, however, he certainly would deny, I would think, although I don't think he explicitly makes that argument here, that as societies become more equal, that this is somehow a problem. I think what he points out is that trade actually is a solution. If you view inequality as a problem, that trade will make people more equal because it then spreads out wealth across these two populations who are then benefiting mutually. And that's an important thing to consider is that since trade and markets are beneficial to all sides transacting, that this will have the overall effect of reducing these inequalities over time. And that seems to be fine. I noticed that sometimes people in defending the issue of inequality tried to make some arcane arguments about how you need inequality in order to have a functioning market. But I don't think that's Mises' argument. I think he simply points out that natural inequalities among people, whether they're extreme economic inequalities or in differences between where people live and differences in climates, that different people are going to have different needs and desires and they're going to be different in their skill levels. And so they're all going to trade. And this leads to specialization and labor. And that's all a good thing. Well, we would be remiss, I think, if we did not mention that he does list democracy, small D democracy as one of the foundations of the rural policy. And obviously, for the most part, we're not Democrats, small D Democrats in libertarian circles. That varies, that different people have different opinions on what ought to be subject to democratic voting and what ought to be beyond democratic voting. But what I want to say in Mises' defense is that he points out that one of the purposes of democracy is to allow the peaceful transition of political power. And since he wrote that in the West, that has largely been true. I mean, if we look at the last 100 years in the West, there are some exceptions, the former Yugoslavia, Spain. But for the most part, in the West, since Mises wrote that, we people have handed over political power from not really ideological or policy power, but political power from one party to the other grudgingly, but without violence. So he was right. Yeah. Well, Mises, of course, if you get into some of his more historical works, he's acutely aware of a lot of these wars over who will inherit the throne and lots of conflicts over which part of the regime is going to take the reins of this state. And I think he saw that in some ways democracy was a solution to that. Now, of course, undergirding all of this, I think, is a continual theme that Mises explores in that if the state is weak, if the state is a liberal state, in which case he kind of makes the point that the word liberal in state are kind of at conflict. If you have a liberal regime, it's not going to act much like a state at all. It's simply going to keep the peace and that's it. But let's just use the term liberal state. So you've got a liberal government and it's there, but it hardly does anything. Well, then the stakes are going to be much lower overall. And so that in itself is going to support more peaceful transition of power. But even to the extent that states have power, I think he imagined that you could have democracy employed in such a way that it would make people feel that they were included in the governance of the regime and were more likely to tolerate a handover of power. Now, it's not naive. When you phrase it that way, maybe it sounds a little bit naive. But of course, when you get into Mises' work on minorities, linguistic minorities usually is what he means. But just a minority of any kind, he notes that one big state, of course, wouldn't serve these purposes. So you can't have just like one big, mega-democratic state that has lots of different groups in it that are going to be in conflict with each other. There are definite limits to how big, how broad your democratic state can be, as well as limits to how much it can do as a state before it turns every election into a huge, possibly blood-soaked competition over who gets the power. So there are lots of other issues at work here. The state has to be decentralized. The state has to be relatively small, both geographically and in terms of its remit. But I think he sees a role for democracy there. It's not a naive view, in my opinion. Right. And even World War II, after which he wrote Human Action, didn't change his view entirely on that. And of course, he lived up until the 70s and never renounced democracy, despite having seen what I guess you and I would view as very illiberal trends in Europe and in the United States. So I think we have to plan a flag and say that he remained a small d-democrat and emphatically so. Yes, very much so. And you really don't find much at all in here where he writes against democracy. I think where he saw the problems with democratic regimes, I think he would have blamed mostly on ideology, problems in ideology, and that too many people saw as desirable a big, robust, powerful state that could do lots of different things and redistribute lots of wealth and control the economy in a variety of ways. And then people vote their conscience in that sense and that they vote for the things they want, which are contrary to a prosperous Commonwealth. And Mises, who of course has made many comments to the effect of the power of ideas and all of that, would have said, look, the main problem here is that you've got a bunch of voters who don't understand how the economy works. And you should probably do something about that. And of course, this is true everywhere. You can see where places where there is no latent liberalism in the ideology of the people, that those places have much worse regimes for the most part. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the former Soviet Union, there are still 80 and 90-year-olds in Russia today who pine for the good old days. You can change circumstances, but it's awfully hard to change people's core ideas once they reach a certain age. Yeah, and I think that there is no magic democratic formula in the sense, well, if we just have this sort of democracy, then this will solve all the problems. I mean, if the people who are voting have a certain view, that's what they're going to ask for. And I think you can say that Mises was a little bit trapped by his own time period, like all people are, because he's thinking about, especially in this book, he's thinking about a Europe that's coming out of the 19th century, where liberalism still had a fair amount of currency. And so most people would have still been affected very much by ideas of freedom and peace and trade. And Marxism had not really won the day completely. It certainly had won over influence in more backward places in Europe, like Russia, or places outside Europe. But I think he's looking around at Western Europe, and he's seeing that most people probably could appreciate the benefits of industrialization and trade and all of that, because their lives had improved so much during the 19th century. He's saying, okay, well, people probably will see that and vote reasonably well based on that. And I think that's still true to this day, and that those places that have some tradition of thinking as liberals, or thinking that liberalism is a good thing, that those places just tend to be better off because there's some still built in suspicion of a huge centralized state. Now, of course, in the US, we would look around and say, oh, no, people are perfectly fine with a huge centralized state. But I think if you looked in some parts of the world, you'd be shocked by how fine people are with huge authoritarian states that Americans would be still somewhat uncomfortable with. And of course, for Mises, and certainly his parents, monarchism wasn't some faraway academic idea. This is something they had actually seen and experienced up close, and been close to or all around Europe. And so democratic voting was a truly new and liberalizing force in society, just like we would today consider libertarianism a liberalizing force compared to the Democrats and the Republicans that we've endured for the 20th century. So this was a bit radical. Yes. And I think that Mises is definitely, like Rothbard would say, Lord Acton was similar in that his way. We need to overcome a lot of these chains that we inherited from the past. And it's interesting to see, though, what Mises' views were in terms of when he speaks of the past. What does he mean by the past? And you can contrast him a little bit with Rothbard here. Rothbard made a much more clean distinction between the Middle Ages and what came after in terms of absolutism during the Renaissance and the big centralization of government that came after that. Mises seems to be a little bit more down on the Middle Ages and doesn't seem to make much of a distinction there between the Middle Ages and the age of absolutism. Whereas I think if you would read Rothbard's history of economic thought, you see a big distinction that's made there. So I'm not quite sure what Mises would say in response to what is liberalism a revolt against. I think Rothbard would say, and you can see this a little bit in that, Rothbard supported a lot of these liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, even if they had some excesses and significant excesses, like say the French Revolution did. I think if you read his stuff, you see that so much of that was a revolt against the absolutist monarchies of this period. I don't think necessarily today we could speak of monarchism or monarchy as one thing clearly the monarchs of say the 13th century were very, very different from the monarchs of the 17th century. And Rothbard would say the ones of the 17th century were much, much worse. I don't see Mises making much of a distinction there, and some of that may be just due to the state of historians at that time. A lot of the work on how the Renaissance was different and even worse than the Middle Ages has been done by historians since the 1920s because I think at that time, especially in the English-speaking world, everything that occurred before the liberal revolutions was seen as just one big authoritarian blob where there was no freedom and everything was a dark age. Rothbard made much bigger distinctions there. So when he's talking about the liberal revolutions and what they were revolting against, I think he was much more specific in that. And I don't think Mises made that distinction, which is part of the reason why he seems so eager to embrace the modern in this case. And that, oh, we've embraced this new way of doing things. We've got industrialization now. We've got new modern ways of thinking. We can't go back to the way things were. I don't think he sees a whole lot of benefit in any of that stuff from the old days. And Rothbard was always careful to denounce this wig theory of history that everything's getting better all the time. I think Mises went straight much more into the territory of thinking that improvement was more or less constant and that we had discovered new ways of doing things and that we hadn't really forgotten anything from the past that was better. Almost everything new was better. At least that's the way I read. I see much less ambivalence about what could we learn from the past in Mises' writing. Yeah. And if you read really throughout his lifetime of work, he talks about Hume. He talks about Bentham. He talks about John Stuart Mill. He talks about Kant. But he's not giving much lip service to the medieval period or to Latin Christendom. And I think that really informs his work because he was a new thinker. I wouldn't call him a futurist, but he was certainly in a sense a radical for his time. And as we move ahead in this book and we get into his section on what liberal economic policy would look like, I think we really see that because he starts off, again, pulling no punches. He basically says, well, government always sort of looks to skants at private property because private property would put restrictions or restraints on its operation. And so government doesn't really like that. And it's kind of always at odds. Well, yes. And back to that idea that what matters are the ideas of making sure that people resist state power. He says in here that basically the extent to which government can rule over people is the extent to which people will tolerate it. That there isn't some magic formula, some barrier we can erect around the state that will keep it hemmed in and we can go about our daily lives. It basically says you constantly have to keep a watch, keep an eye on the state and not let it constantly expand its abilities to rule over you. And private property, of course, was a significant barrier and the state was constantly at war with private property because it removed from the state the power to manage people's daily lives. And he talks a little bit in here about things like prohibition, which of course in today's part of what we would just say, the drug war, where he says, look, one of these big areas where the state thinks it can do every last, every little thing is on the issue of prohibition, where it's basically telling people, what can you drink? You can't drink booze because it's bad for your health. And Misa says, well, once you allow the state to start telling you what you can do for your own health, basically the state can do anything. Then if I can justify, oh, you do X because it's for your own good, well, then on what grounds can I resist the state? And so he starts pointing out all of these different ways that private property should be respected in order to buttress our resistance to state power. And of course, private property is a key issue there. Now, he's just a few years removed from having published his book, Socialism. And he does go through a little bit of the same argument he makes in that book. In other words, Socialism is impossible. But unlike Rothbard, he does allow for outright socialism and then interventionism and then capitalism. In other words, where Murray would say interventionism is just a lesser degree of socialism, Mises actually contrasts it. So talk about this. He even uses the term third way, interventionism, which I would say a lot of people are proposing today. I think Ray Dalio last night on 60 Minutes, I think people like the MMTers, they imagine they've thought up something new and they really haven't. Well, boy, I mean, how old are these guys? I remember in the 1990s, the third way was a huge topic of discussion. So I'm pretty sure those guys are older than me. So yeah, shame on them for acting like this is anything new here. I should note, though, that Mises talks about four methods here, though, capitalism, socialism, interventionism, and then syndicalism, which is important because it's so relevant to the issue of the equality debate now. But let's answer your question a little bit. Let's just go through them. So we've got socialism, which Mises would define as truly the public ownership of the means of production. So when he says socialism, he means like Soviet style socialism, basically, central planning, government ownership of the capital. And so this is something we often try to make a distinction about it at Mises.org and our articles and not be sloppy about it, not use the Bernie Sanders definition of socialism, by which he really means the third way. He really means the type of interventionism for the most part. But so we've got socialism, which is real hardcore stuff. It's basically government ownership of everything. And that's when government might expropriate whole private industries, take over the oil industry, or maybe take over something like the schooling and all that. If it's a government-owned school, a government-owned oil refinery, that's socialism. And then, of course, he uses capitalism to mean the opposite of that, which is just truly, it's overwhelmingly a free market system. And then there's interventionism, which is a regulated capitalism. And that would include things like price controls, minimum wages, public works programs, all of this stuff designed to tinker with the economy, make it more efficient, make it more affordable to people. Maybe we can make more goods and services available. Now, of course, Mises would point out that it doesn't accomplish any of those things. More government intervention will simply fail to make unemployment go away. It will not make things more affordable. And so a lot of his careers is spent fighting interventionism. But also socialism, because Soviet-style socialism was still very much a thing in his day. And I think we can look at his arguments against socialism, like on the value of prices, on how socialist calculation is impossible, because you don't have market prices. And that still, to this day, illustrates why socialism just simply can't work, in that you have no idea of how to distribute goods to people. And so we've got, and that, I think, is one of the reasons you don't have people say, oh, let's go back to true socialism in the means that Mises meant it, is because I think most people recognize, well, how do we distribute goods and services? And they know there's some pretty big economic weaknesses there. And a lot of that is thanks to Mises, even if people don't know it, even if they never actually read Mises. So we get interventionism then, which is, well, capitalism's too extreme, and it hurts the poor and all that. So we'll just have a minimum wage, and we'll make sure stuff isn't too expensive with price controls, and we'll subsidize things, and that'll make everything better. Well, we'll take off the hard edge of capitalism with interventionism. The problem is that it doesn't accomplish those goals. Interestingly, however, of course, Mises has this other thing, which is syndicalism. Now, I noticed that in reading about interventionism, Mises doesn't talk about a lot of issues about redistribution of income. So from what I can see, it looks like something like just Medicaid or Social Security into the extent that it just redistributes income and doesn't regulate the economy. That would seem to fall more under this idea of syndicalism, which was an attempt to make things more equal through taking wealth from a whole group of people and then giving it to another group of people. And he doesn't give a whole lot of examples of this, interestingly, because he dismisses the idea as something that no serious thinker would do. And I think he uses the term muddleheads to describe people who embrace the syndicalist idea. And he just says, well, you can never achieve real equality by using syndicalism. And so just ignore it. It's not really an important thing right now. But I think if we were to look out there, a lot of what Mises discusses in human action later about syndicalism and such actually continues to be important because a lot of the problem we see today is that we've got to look at these issues of making things more equal and this attempt at making, eliminating problems of the very rich and the very poor through the syndicalist idea that Mises talks about. And that seems to be just as relevant today as the interventionist idea. Because sure, it's one thing to regulate price controls and subsidize and put minimum wage in place. It's a slightly different thing to talk about where we're going to take a bunch of wealth from one group and give it to another group. And so probably it might be actually useful to look at some of his arguments against syndicalism a little bit more closely. But here's the thing. There's so many tensions here. One, he's talking about how the state has to constantly be watched lest it exceed its bounds. And then he's calling for democratic voting. And then he'll pull out a sentence like this. And again, as you mentioned, he uses a specific definition for capitalism. He says, capitalism is the only possible system of social organization. That's a pretty strong statement. And it's, it almost seems somewhat at odds with other things he's calling for. Yes, he makes some very broad statements to that effect. I think that's based on just his idea that you can only have one type of rational organization. I think maybe there's a missing modifier there that he means this is the only way of organizing society along scientific and rational grounds. I mean, clearly you can have a society that could function for many years that is horribly despotic and centrally planned. That would require a lot of people to go into abject poverty and die and that sort of thing. But it can endure. It's not necessarily the sort of thing that fails overnight. Yeah. And at the end of this section, he has a chapter or a section about bureaucracy and how, you know, can big companies get to bureaucratic? What happens? How do we compare and contrast that with government bureaucracies? And in a way, this section or chapter presages his book, I guess, 1944 book, Bureaucracy, where he expounded on this. But what's interesting to me is he says, look, no matter how big or slow-witted a company might be, it's always got a P and L at the end of the day. It's got a profit and loss statement. Government doesn't. And because of that, you know, you don't have to worry about it. But with government, especially in a fully socialist system where there's no outside price, prices to even look at when allocating resources, you know, but even when you just have a middle third-way system, you know, without a P and L, bureaucracy is always going to grow in government and it's always going to exceed its mission. So I think in a sense he gave us a glimpse of the book he was going to write. Yes, very much so. And the fundamental argument I don't think is even very different here. The book has a lot more examples and more details, but he's addressing the claim that, well, capitalism isn't really any better than interventionism because, yes, back in the olden days when capitalism was a bunch of small business people and we were looking at a bunch of shopkeepers and it was all on a small scale, then it was easy to do economic calculation in the private sector. So a shopkeeper could look around at his inventory and he could understand it all and he didn't need dozens of people or maybe even thousands of people to run this business. But once you do get to that point, you get to this high level of industrialization and you need all of these middle managers to run a company, well, now it's just as bureaucratic and inefficient as any interventionist system. So hey, Mises, you can't even really say that this is a more efficient system. Mises then says, well, that's not true at all, it's going to continue to be more efficient because all of these pieces of any profit-making entity are going to have to continue to justify themselves as being profitable. So you have a division of a company that is doing X and if it ceases to justify its own existence and it's not making the sales it needs to make, it's going to disappear because the company is no longer going to support the existence of that. And then he contrasts that then with government administration, which is this can go on indefinitely since it's not based on serving the customers, i.e., making a profit. So all you got to do is continue to tax people and you can funnel money into this government department and it can go on for centuries and never be eliminated whether it meets the needs of any person or not because its value is totally arbitrary and based on some idea of public policy and whether this is a valuable thing or not. Whereas in the private sector, everything has to be judged on how well it's serving the customers. It's not arbitrary at all. It's based on how much wealth people are voluntarily handing over to this private sector company and if it's not serving those people, they're not going to voluntarily hand over their money. And so then it ceases to exist. So that's a very different standard between government bureaucracy and private sector administration. And of course, he had not yet seen or lived to witness the rise of the administrative state in the West and the rise of huge standing military, especially in the United States. So we've seen what bureaucratic creep really means. We've seen it up close and personal. Well, yes. And of course, that just perpetuates itself forever. Right. The Cold War ceases to exist and the CIA, which was created to address the needs of the Cold War, only gets larger and nobody talks about getting rid of it in spite of multiple failures, by the way. And so, yeah, all you got to do is come up with some arbitrary claim about, well, you need us for national security. Well, what's the measure of national security? There isn't one. And people aren't voluntarily giving over their money for it. So there's really no way to measure how much value is being delivered for the dollars given over. I'd love to see a standalone P&L for the CIA. That would be something to witness. But I don't think I shall see that. I don't think that'll be forthcoming. But we're talking about the CIA and the military. Let's move into this really juicy section of the book about liberal foreign policy. And he starts right out by saying, look, liberal foreign policy starts with cosmopolitanism, a view that goes beyond one's own nation or borders. This is a universal doctrine. And this contrasts a bit with some criticisms he made about universal political programs 20 odd years later when he writes human action. But he comes out and he says, look, this is not a parochial or provincial worldview. This liberalism requires cosmopolitanism. So I'd like to get your thoughts on that. I'm going to provide a link to David Gordon's article on this as well, because I think a lot of Mises's fans and critics don't necessarily use that term the way he would have used it and that they want to ascribe to it a whole host of, let's say, left cultural attachments, which I don't think are accurate. But describe what he means. Give us the sense of why cosmopolitanism enters this section on liberal foreign policy. Well, Mises simply just doesn't see real fundamental differences between different people in different countries, as of course many hardcore nationalists do. He certainly does not deny that there are cultural differences between different countries and that people have different values and different desires. And that people have different levels of education and different levels of productivity. Certainly all those things exist. However, he explicitly in other essays denies that there's any difference in the level of rationalism that people can achieve from different places on earth and dismisses that as a Marxist idea. Really, this idea that, oh, well, you have bourgeois ways of thinking and then you have enlightened Marxist ways of thinking. He applies that to racial and ethnic issues and says, no, that's not true at all. People aren't. People's ethnic background doesn't dictate how they see the world. And so he says anybody is capable of understanding the benefits of free trade and that this just arises naturally. And so that if you have countries that actually have free relations with each other, free trade, free movement of people, that these countries are naturally going to tend toward cooperation and that people are going to move from place to place and that they're going to discover ways that trading can help bring the necessary capital, the necessary goods into each place and that we will find what India's good for. That India is poor now, but they can supply a lot of labor to produce a good that can be shipped to other places. And that this will then facilitate a transfer of capital and wealth from the rich world then to India. And they're going to benefit from that transfer of capital because people are going to want to then match up their capital with the lower cost labor in another country. So both sides benefit. And so we see he, in his view, both sides can envision and understand how this can all be benefited, how this all can all be beneficial to everyone involved. And that it's probably, if left alone, if people are allowed to do this, they're going to naturally form a bond of some sort and they're going to pursue peace and that there's really no need to erect these theories, these barriers between people in country A and people in country B because the marketplace naturally will lead to cooperation. Yeah, it's interesting how much time he devotes to talking about self-determination. We don't hear as much about that today because it's more of a global world. And it's a bit at odds with his insistence on a transnational cosmopolitan worldview, but he goes on and on about how important self-determination is as part of foreign policy. And he really gets some pretty strident quotes, one of which is where he says the situation of having to belong to a state that one does not wish to belong to politically. And that could apply to lots of Hillary Clinton voters today in the United States. They don't like being part of the U.S. or the federal state under Donald Trump's administration. They feel vanquished. And he says, well, it doesn't really matter if that's the result of an election or of military conquest. The end result is the same either way. That's a pretty strong statement, especially from a guy who's actually seen combat in war. Oh, well, he definitely appreciates the necessity of different groups being able to attain some sort of self-government. And I think coming out of the war, he apparently seems to be sympathetic to, of course, to a lot of these nationalist movements of the 19th century. And that different groups should be able to have some sort of, different linguistic groups, which is his primary stand-in for different ethnic groups, should be able to have government over themselves. Because he understands that people are going to divide up and not see their interests from German-speaking groups are not necessarily going to be naturally sympathetic toward English-speaking groups within a similar country or people who are speaking Polish within that country and so on. So he does see a natural tendency for people to divide themselves up. He sees, of course, as an antidote to that and something that evens it out and makes it better is free trade. But he sees when it comes to using the power of the state that it's best to keep people as uniform as possible within a certain polity. And so what you don't want, of course, the worst thing to have is a country that's 53% German and 47% Polish. And that naturally one group is going to tend to, and then the reverse is the same, one group is going to try to oppress the other group. And that's going to be a big problem. So you should just really just have two countries then, one that's 98% Polish and another one that's 98% German. And that's going to lead to less conflict because it's going to have the state exercising less control over a minority group. Now again, he says that this should not mean that you erect barriers between those two groups. So those two groups are going to get along better if the political coercive apparatus is controlled by two different groups. However, trade should continue and there should be actually free migration, free trade between the two groups. And you're going to end up with cosmopolitan cities and there's going to be certain an element of each of those populations that views themselves as basically indistinguishable that they're not going to care about the differences. But nevertheless, linguistic and ethnic differences are going to endure, but that you need to take care to make sure you don't have a government group that can be used to exercise control of one or the other. Whenever we read an important thing or sometimes I wonder whether certain lines that we all seize on in a book were sort of throwaway lines that the author wouldn't think we should seize on. For example, some of his sentences about cosmopolitanism were seized on by Yoram Hezoni who wrote the Israeli who recently wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism. And then there's other lines that people who are perhaps think more like you and I think have seized upon when he talks about the right of self-determination if it was practicable should be given all the way down to the individual. And so the idea being that there has to be some sort of maybe small administration, a city, a town, a province or whatever just as a practical matter. But in theory anyway, Mises says that the right of self-determination goes all the way to the individual level and that no individual should be forced to live as part of a state and we're talking about state versus nation to which he does not want to belong. So that's a pretty bold statement 100 years ago. Yeah. And I think Mises, depending on how much importance he attributed to this section, this is basically anarchist Mises, right? Is that, yep, you should be able to join or leave a state all the way down to the individual level. But let's just say he's just a radical decentralist and he just wants it down to the county level or a metropolitan area that wants to leave and join another government. Yeah, that's radical even today. It's radical then, it's radical now. And this fit into his much larger idea of how society would change over time. And it feeds into his ideas of migration also where he imagined, and you can look at Joe Salerno's lengthy piece on Mises on Immigration and Nationalism, where he looks at much what Mises imagined was that people would move around, that nation states would not be static and that people would move around based upon the needs of capital and the needs of labor and that you weren't going to have states that had these totally impermeable membranes and that states weren't going to remain static in their borders forever, which of course is true. But he'd say over time people would move in to certain regions in a neighboring state and so on because they were needed for labor and so on. And over time, the character of that city which is probably on a border would change over time. And so eventually now what you've got is this border city where now the majority in that city is the same as the majority in the neighboring country. Well, why should that city that now has a new majority be required to stay forever in this country that they're now in where they're a minority to another ethnic group or another linguistic group? Shouldn't they then be able to secede and join this neighboring country where they would then be part of the majority? So he's seeing this as a means of addressing future conflict, of really smoothing out issues where you would then have basically a secessionist enclave within this country, within this larger country if that metro area were forced to stay in there indefinitely. Next thing you know, you got civil wars, you got lots of conflict that was unnecessary, had that group just been allowed to leave and join another country where they were the majority. Now you can see a lot of this coming in from these conflicts that arose after World War I where they were looking at, well, where does Gdansk belong or Danzig? Is the Germans called it? Is this a Polish city or is this a German city and which country should this be in? And so I think Mises is taking a very pragmatic view of that and trying to see, well, we should probably allow these groups if they have a plebiscite and the overwhelming majority wants to be in country A instead of country B, it makes sense that they should be able to change. And this then would help all those countries deal with issues related to migration or just cultural changes over time. Well, I agree with him entirely here. I just wish he'd proposed more of a mechanism for how this ought to happen. And I would say, I think the majority of the world does not agree with him on this. I think the vast majority of Westerners anyway are political centralists. We see this with the EU. We see this here in the United States as well where so much power is devolved to Washington. And when people talk about states' rights or secession or decentralization, they get a tremendous amount of pushback. I want to go a little further into immigration. Mises is clearly a guy as he shows here who believes in free human migration. He writes more extensively about this here in liberalism and also in nation state and economy a few years earlier in 1919. Now, he barely touches the immigration question in a thousand pages of human action. There's only a few tiny references here and there. But I'd like to point out, there's some critics of the Mises Institute will say, well, Mises was for open borders and you guys aren't. First, I would say we have writers of all stripes. I would say Walter Block is certainly for open borders. And then we have other writers like Per Byland who are as well. And then there are people who come up with some alternative perspectives. We did an immigration roundtable where we talked about Block and Hoppe and Rothbard and Mises. And of course, Ryan McMakin, our guest, has written on this. So it's a little disingenuous when people just say, well, Mises was one way because A, we don't know exactly what he would think today. And that applies to his thought across economics, too. And B, Ben Powell, who's an open borders guy, the professor at Texas Tech, has a paper coming out pretty soon, the review of Austrian economics where he points out that Mises didn't really advocate a political program of open borders. He certainly, from a labor and an econ perspective, favored the migration of people. But he didn't so much do so on cultural grounds or even, and again, this is utilitarian. He wasn't doing so on normative grounds of people just ought to be free. And so Ben Powell points out that, look, he has this quote in liberalism where he says, there's no solution to the problem of immigration as possible when you have an interventionist state. So this goes back to the old idea, well, we have this big government and it produces all the roads and we have welfare inducements and this and that. And gee whiz, more immigrants puts a strain on those resources. Now, you can argue from a utilitarian or an empirical perspective either way on that. But my point here, we're not able to post a link to Ben's RAE article because it's not out yet. But the point here is that even with Mises, this is a bit more nuanced than maybe we think. And if we look at his terminology throughout this book, he talks about polyglot countries. He talks about nations as distinct from states. He talks about nationality quite a bit. This is a guy, this is not the one worlder that Yoram Hezoni perhaps imagined Mises to be. This is a guy who's actually looking with a pretty clear eye, having suffered through World War I at some of these differences between people and how we ought to best move them over. And yes, migration is a good way to do so. Self-determination is a good way to do so. But he's not writing as a utopian here. That's certainly not what I get from the book. No, and I think Mises makes a clear distinction here. He talks about immigration in two ways. He presents the economic argument. And the economic argument is that everyone's better off if labor goes where it's most needed. And so both free trade is essentially the same argument with free trade and with free migration. You want to get the workers to the capital that will make them more productive. And you can move capital to the workers or workers will come to the capital. Those two things are beneficial at different times. Sometimes it's cheaper and easier to move the capital to the workers. Sometimes it's easier for the workers to go to the capital. Mises says the outcome's the same, everybody benefits when you have laborers and capital come together and they deliver more goods at a lower price and everyone's standard of living improves. And so I think he would say there is no economic argument against free migration or against free trade. I mean, people make those arguments, but they're not good. But then openly admits that there are other non-economic arguments against immigration. And he says this explicitly. He says, look, if Australia were to just totally open up its borders and cease controlling the flow of people in any way, that country is so small and so essentially underpopulated that it would be overwhelmed by people coming in from far more populous neighboring countries. And what you've got is a whole continent with 25 million people on it. So if you took everyone in Texas and you spread them over a whole continent, that would be not very many people per square mile. And he notes that, okay, the United States, which has had a policy of very open migration for the most part historically, he's saying, look, lots of people moved to the US, but the US is so populous now and so large that it can absorb large numbers of migrants. He says, but Australia, if they embraced similar policies or more liberal policies than that, that they would be overwhelmed. And he's noting that there are real sociological and political effects that would occur in those cases. Now he says you could stave off any sort of political problems by having basically a non-existent state. You could have an Australian state that was so small, so decentralized, so weak that as people moved in, there would be no point in trying to take over the state. There would be no point in organizing the migrant vote to change the nature of the Australian state. But based on his earlier arguments in the book, he'd probably still argue that what would happen over time is that you get it then a linguistic majority that then takes over a certain province. Let's say it's in the north, which is close to Indonesia. And so they take over that province. And now it's a province controlled by a Indonesian speaker. I don't know what the languages are in Indonesia, but it's controlled by the majority language of those migrants. Now that's going to change the reality for the people who were there before. Now should we just claim that that's no big deal, that that doesn't really matter, that that might not lead to civil war? It's definitely not going to lead to any sort of conflict or violence or anything. I mean, that would be a pretty naive view. So he's trying to take a pragmatic view of saying, look, if you just have this free flow of labor and there's any sort of government coercion that can be taken over by new people coming in, that that's probably going to lead to problems. And so I don't think it takes a hard line here. He's saying, however, that, look, if you want to have a better economy, you want to have a quickly increasing standard of living, you should figure out a way to have a political economy that encourages generally free flowing labor without providing a temptation to take over the state and then use it to oppress people. He sees a downside to it, but he thinks you could address it by minimizing state power. But even as he's saying this, he's talking about nationality and migration and the friction that some of these things call cause. In the same section, we're still in this section about liberal foreign policy. He gets into a discourse about the League of Nations. And I want to read a quote because this is an amazing quote, and it's in many ways directly at odds with his call for self-determination as an organizing principle. And he's talking about the idea of some kind of supranational body. And he says, the liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended. So that's not decentralizing. He's talking about the opposite. Until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason, he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law. I don't think Pat Buchanan would like that. And that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with maintenance of peace within its own territory. So he's not talking about the abandonment of sovereignty here. He's talking about intrastate relationships and whether he would have agreed with the creation of the EU, whether he would agree with the world court, whether he would agree with what the IMF and World Bank are doing, with what the UN is doing today, some of these international supranational political organizations. Of course, all of that is open questions. But nonetheless, he's clearly a guy who believes in an international order of some kind. And so, as I mentioned earlier, he seems to be saying that liberalism is a universal doctrine. And you can see this in some of his later works too, where I think his overall view on the way the world should be organized was a world that had a lot of states that were essentially self-governing, so that you could deal with this issue of linguistic majorities and so on by having a large number of states broken up by the characteristics of the people who lived in them, who would then have the ability to almost everything that they did would then be self-governing. But Mises also appreciated issues of geopolitics and the problem of, say, and in the 40s, after the war, he wrote a paper on what should Eastern Europe do to deal with the Russian issue. And so he saw that you had Eastern Europe placed between two powerful states. At that point, Germany had been greatly diminished, but they were still next to Russia. And he said, look, these are tiny states that could easily be overrun by the Russians. And how could they deal with this issue? And so he proposed this idea of this federalist Eastern European state, where the little pieces of it, so you had the Hungarian-speaking majority and the Czechs and so on, that all of these groups would then be totally self-governing within their little national group. But then they would also be part of this larger federal majority. And I think he's still riffing on the same idea of the League of Nations here, where he's saying, look, you can have these international institutions where you have some sort of check on state power so that it can't become totally despotic and that one state can't just simply overrun another state and can't perhaps embargo another state and cut off its trade and those sorts of things. I think he imagined some way that you could have international organizations that would deal with that issue. I think he was perhaps maybe more hopeful in the 20s, where he thought, okay, maybe this is within our grasp in the next century or so, where we could have the whole world participate in this way. I think after World War II he's more pessimistic about it, that maybe we could just have some blocks where they could then be put into a federalist group and look out for their own interests. But I think that the idea was the same, is that it wasn't enough necessarily to just have a bunch of totally independent countries, that these countries could work together through the concept of international law to help the people within those countries maintain free trade and to maintain the freedoms of moving from country to country. And I think Mises thought that was important. And of course, Ryan, there's nothing wrong with the defensive federation of nations where they pool resources to have some sort of military defense. And of course, that's what things like NATO were supposed to be before they just became US puppets and organs. So I think his idea here is sound enough. It just hasn't, again, it just hasn't worked in practice. And that's what's so disturbing is you go back and read that now, 100 years later, and you see what the so-called international, the illiberal international community of nations has become. And you see just how scummy organizations like the IMF and World Bank and UN really are. And it's depressing. I mean, maybe he just had a better perspective on human nature when he wrote it. Well, and of course, these international organizations do so much more than what Mises, I think, would have imagined. I think he just imagined an international court where if a state or a group of people had their rights violated, they were not being permitted to trade with a neighboring country, that there would be some way to intervene, just in the way any sort of Supreme Court does now when there's a conflict between two local governments or something like that. But this whole idea of, well, okay, we're going to go in and we're going to fund a bunch of public works programs, or we're going to basically dictate to this country what their internal policies are. I mean, all of that stuff, I think, was well beyond anything that he imagined. I think the important issue was that, I think you imagine for the most part, internal local government would all be based on democratic processes at the local level and that these international organizations were just there to mediate disputes between different groups or different countries. And so all of this other stuff, it fits the definition of all the worst sort of bureaucracy that Mises would have criticized and that there's no objective measure for the value of any of these things these states are doing and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. And then, of course, on the issue of central banking, of course, I mean, he would have just hated that. And that's one big way he differentiated himself from the neoliberals, was that he opposed all this stuff like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and all of that stuff, which many people today would say, oh, well, that's part of the big international order Mises would have wanted to abolish all of that, most likely. Yeah. So, Ryan, he wraps up this book with two short sections, one of them on liberalism and political parties and then also on the future of liberalism. So, as regards the former, it's interesting to me that he really bashes political parties. He says, well, these parties in the West today are nothing more than expressions of group interest and they'll always be in conflict. They're inherently illiberal and they're going to be form factions and these conflicts can only be reconciled by having a political victor and loser and then someone's imposed upon. And so, he's pointing out that political parties create this zero-sum outcome, but he never goes back and says, well, this is just an inherent or fundamental with small D democracy itself. So, that sort of struck me. What do you think of this section? I think he wants to conclude that there's some way that he can make it work. I think, in this case, it's a problem with the way that democracy is employed in practice. But I think if he fell back just on his ideas that he supplies in the book itself, I think he could address a lot of these issues because he's looking at how parliaments are being used to impose one group's will upon another and that maybe these groups need to be devolved in some way into smaller groups. I think, however, this is maybe influenced by another discussion that he has earlier in the book where he insists repeatedly that capitalism is based on the idea of there are no groups. This is not a matter of the bourgeoisie imposing its free market ideas on other groups. The idea of free market is beneficial to everybody and everybody equally. And there are no special interests that assert their own special interests in the use of private property and in the use of markets and trade. And so he seemed to have this worldview that we can minimize the very idea of one group imposing itself on another if we just all embrace trade. But I think maybe this was a slightly naive view in that even if everybody embraced the idea that trade was good, which are constantly going to have our groups that are thinking up little ideas how, well, of course we all appreciate that free trade is a good thing. But if you just tax this one thing, it's going to be better for the country or if you just regulate this one thing, it's going to create more employment. So I think there's just that this constant need to justify one's own political advantages along the lines of claiming that just this one tweak will benefit this one group. But what's good for this one group is good for the whole country. It's the old idea of what's good for General Motors is good for America. And that of course occurs in all of these countries. And I think he's annoyed and upset that people are then using economic arguments to justify some sort of government policy that promotes their own one little group. And I think he sees this as a huge distortion and kind of making a mockery of democracy and the way it's supposed to work under a liberal system. Well, the closing portion of the book, The Future of Liberalism, I would paint it as cautiously optimistic. Of course, he has not yet seen World War II. He hasn't had to flee his native Austria. He hasn't had to come to America and basically see the world go up in flames. And if you read his memoirs, if you get some of the tone and tenor of human action, you'll see maybe a more pessimistic view. But what they all point out, Ryan, and I hope we do this at Mises.org, but he really defends materialism. He even says it is in the nature of men continually to strive for an improvement in his material condition. And I think a lot of anti-capitalists and even pro-capitalists tend to poo-poo materialism. And whenever I hear this, I just think to my own childhood in the 1970s, I think of the dentistry and the automobiles and the iceberg lettuce at the grocery store when I was a little kid. And this is just absurd, but materialism is part and parcel of human flourishing. And the fact that it's not spiritual doesn't mean it's not important at all not to be celebrated. Well, Mises basically points out is that liberalism is only even attempting to address the material well-being of people. He doesn't deny that other things are important. He just says that liberalism isn't attempting to address those. And so I'm not even sure that he takes a materialist view in the big sense. He's just saying that materialism is the place where liberalism is valuable, in that liberalism is extremely useful and important in helping people lead better, more full lives in terms of the sorts of wealth and quote-unquote luxuries that they can obtain. And of course, we see this all the time in medical science, especially, but also just in keeping warm and being able to travel safely and spend more time with our families. And he makes the correct point. He's like, if you want to see the real difference here, just look at how things were 100 years ago rather than last year. I think a lot of the problems we get into is that people don't know enough history, so they certainly don't know enough economic history to know how people were living 20, 30 years ago. They might have a sense about how people lived 100 years ago, but even then, they don't even attribute those gains being made to markets and to capitalism. That's, of course, what made those gains possible, is it's trade, it's entrepreneurship, it's all of those issues. And Mises would say, look, look at how things were 100 years ago. Look at the luxuries from the past that are now just everyday things that we use. He would say, look, markets made all of that possible. And the fact that some people seem to argue that they don't care about all of those things, I think we should ask them, well, just at what point are you willing to abandon the luxuries made available to you by capitalism? Are they willing to stop using forks? Are they willing to stop using washing machines? Are they willing to stop using automobiles at all? Because, oh, sure, they're willing to not do with some luxury that came in five or 10 years ago or something that maybe appeared since they were teenagers. Oh, well, we know we don't need that. But how about things that were invented 50 years ago or 100 years ago? Do they not need any of those things or those just materialistic frippery? And I would say the farther back you go, the more unwilling people are willing, are able to do without that. And I think that's a point that Mises made. In fact, in human action, he says that modern man is so delicate and fragile now that they can't even deal with the sorts of things that our more animalistic ancestors would have been able to survive. And so these things have essentially made us soft. Now, he doesn't say that's a problem. He doesn't think the fact that people now have easier lives is a bad thing. He doesn't think it's spiritually impoverishing or anything like that. But he would say that, look, your life is better off now, thanks to capitalism. And also, you have the freedom to not buy these things that you don't want, that you think are damaging people, but maybe other people want them. He just thinks people should be free to buy things that they feel make their lives better off. And it really comes off as kind of crass when you start telling people that they shouldn't have air conditioning or they shouldn't have a car. And of course, we encounter this all the time in policy debates, right? People in developing countries, they can't all have air conditioning. They can't all have automobiles. Too bad for them, but the climate simply isn't going to tolerate it. But I'll keep my car and I'll keep my air conditioning, by the way. And I think Mises would have certainly frowned upon that attitude. Well, let's just hope that materialism is the one thing that we all share in common, a desire for material advancement and a betterment of our physical lives. Because with the exception of, you know, you can talk about the Amish or some retreatist Ted Kaczynski type person out in the woods or something. But for the most part, all humans across the globe do share this in common. I remember a few years back, a few cycles back, there was that DNC, the Democratic National Committee put out that ad that basically said, you know, government's the one thing we all have in common. And of course, that was pretty ugly from our perspective. But let's hope it's actually markets and human flourishing are the things that we all have in common. That said, Ryan McMakin, I want to thank you so much for your time. Again, ladies and gentlemen, find this book online. The first person who retweets a link to the show and also mentions not only the band, but the name of the song of our intro and outro music, the first person who retreats that from my Twitter after we post the show later today, well, we can get a copy of this book in the mail. I'll send you a copy, a hardcover copy of liberalism with a nice little introduction by none other than Tom Woods. You're going to love this book. It's a very important book. And if you want to understand right and left, you want to understand true liberalism, you need to read it. So Ryan, thanks a million. Thank you.