 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and for those of you who have been following along, we have worked our way through almost 900 pages of human action. It's been really enjoyable. I hope you've gotten something out of it, and we have finally reached part 7 of the book. The final part of the book, the final three chapters, and it's dealing with, as Mises terms it, the place of economics in society. Now, if you recall, in part 6 we went through all kinds of interventions in the hampered market economy. We went through things like taxation, confiscation, and price controls, and minimum wage laws, and war. And finally, Mises made his ultimate point about interventionism in the last chapter of part 6, and so we went through all of that with Peter Klein and some other folks. But now we have reached the end. We're going through part 7 of the book, which is only about 30 odd pages, page 858-881, if you're following along in the scholars edition that the Mises Institute published. It's comprised of chapters 37 through 39. And because this is really an esoteric part of the book, it's really a portion of the book that is not like a text. It really brings home the nature of this book as a treatise. And because it's dealing with the broader questions of where economics resides, rather than the narrower questions of economics as a profession or technical discipline, I thought I would have my friend Tom Woods join us because we've had so many economists as guests as we've gone through the show. And I'm not an economist. Tom is, of course, a PhD historian, but I thought it'd be great to get his perspective on this final part. So Tom, all that said, welcome. It's great to hear from you. Thank you, Jeff. Glad to be here. Well, this is interesting. You know, I always like to find out first and foremost you were going through the Ivy Leagues becoming a history PhD. So how did you happen to hear about or come to read Human Action? Well, I'm thinking about it. I wonder if the conservative book club offered it at one point. Now, I had an old used copy that I certainly didn't get through a book club, but I think I first read about it in one of those little circulars we would get in the mail. And then when I saw it somewhere, I must have picked it up thinking, I think I need this book. So it was very low tech way of finding it out. But basically it was that I knew I was sort of right of center. I was a college kid. I didn't really know really where I stood on everything. I thought I did, but I didn't have a very well thought out worldview at that point. I just knew that all the leftists around me are making me crazy. And I know I'm not one of these people. But in terms of reading it, I did actually force my way through it. And I don't mean that it's a chore. I mean that you're very tempted not to read it. I know her page book. You know, there are all kinds of distractions, but I was determined to go through it. But the time that I really profit at the most reading through it was when back around 2001 or so, the Rothbard Graduate Seminar at the Mises Institute is a program for graduate students and young faculty of which I was one. And that year they were going through human action very intensely. So I took that opportunity to read it a second time much more carefully. So it was with the Mises scholars around me that I really had the opportunity to dig into it. And I mean, of course, that's a privilege not many people have. You know, the interesting thing about this book is it is daunting. It does feel like a chore in a sense. But once you actually crack it and get into the language, you'll find that it's really a pretty engaging book. And it's not nearly as tough a read. In my opinion anyway, not everyone shares this opinion. It's not as tough a read as man economy and state. But, you know, people may not know, Tom, that when, you know, first of all, when this book came out in 1949, it was published by Yale University Press. So we weren't in the same environment back then with respect to academic publishing. Yeah, no, that's for sure. You know, Mises could get a book like that published. And it was reviewed. It was reviewed by John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, in The New York Times. And it was reviewed by the great Henry Haslett in Newsweek. Obviously the latter more favorably. And so when we think about this book's place and we think about what it meant in 1949, it's really quite an achievement that Mises was able to come over here. That he was able to take his book National Economy and construct it into something much bigger. That he was able to do this in a second language. And poor Margaret had to type this thing chapter by chapter. And that he was able to get it published by a major house. And that it was a reasonable seller. And that, you know, it's just a very different time in America. I mean, people, I think people obviously read a lot more and they read more deeply then. Other than radio and TV, there weren't as many distractions. Free time was perhaps a little different then. And, you know, that this book still has legs today, that we're still reading it and talking about it. I think that that's really the most that any intellectual could hope for. That his or her work is actually appreciated and maybe even more appreciated after they're gone. This is a point that I've made when we think about Mises having his New York University seminar and no doubt looked down upon by the other faculty at the time. Who is this throwback to the 19th century with his little seminar about his outdated ideas, right? But what I've said to people is, OK, now try and think back to anybody else who was on the NYU faculty in 1965, for example. Can you name anybody? Whereas even Mises enemies, a lot of them know, OK, yeah, he was that guy at NYU. People will at least know that about him. There's not any of these people who looked down on him sneeringly, who left any mark whatsoever or distinguished the university in any way to the point that we think back on them as having been associated with the university. Well, this part of the book and the chapter titles within this part of the book, I think would never get passed a publisher today. In other words, what Mises was doing here is the kind of thing that irked people like John Kenneth Galbraith. What he was doing with Part 7, I should say, is that he was trying to frame economics with its place in a much broader world. And this kind of esoteria is not something that was going to jump off the shelves at the average reader who wants to read a Mickey Spillane novel or something like that. So this was in a sense, well, yes, it was a different world, but in a sense it was still a gutsy book. No doubt about it. I don't know how else to describe it. And this section that we're reading right now, I appreciate you gave me the least economic section as being the non-economist. Tom, I have a sense of your limitations. All right. Is Murphy supplying you with these lines here? All right. But this, you know, it's interesting that at the end of the book, you do see some frustration come out in Mises. And there's a sense in which I don't mean to put, I'm not putting human action down, I'm just drawing a contrast. Man economy in state is in some ways, dare I say it, a more disciplined book in the sense that Rothbard really stays laser focused on step-by-step building the economic edifice. Whereas in human action, you'll get a side discussion of the industrial revolution and the debate about whether it improved people's standard of living or romanticism or something. Just because Mises has so much to say about so many things. And so this last part that we're talking about is a part that really would not have appeared in man economy in state. But here it's where you see frustration. There are parts of it, not entirely. There are parts of this section where you can see Mises is frustrated that you may have the best arguments in the world. But unfortunately, the limitations of most people make it impossible for them to appreciate them because of the nature of economics. There are other sciences where you can clearly say to people, this drug cures this condition and you can all see this and they can understand that. But because economics by its nature has to proceed more theoretically and can't use the type of evidence that we might use in the other sciences, well it tends to be lost on the average person who needs to have that kind of basic form of argumentation for him to understand and appreciate something. So really what people tend to believe about economics is kind of what they already want to believe. They want to believe there's a giant pile of wealth somewhere that they could all go consume. So they're just going to believe that. And if you try to explain to them, but see there's nothing in economic theory that would justify that. It's all you head in the clouds, academics, you and your theories. Well the frustration to which you allude I think is really felt in chapter 37, the beginning chapter which is called the nondescript character of economics. And to me, this very brief chapter is a lament. That's what I got out of this chapter. And if you look at page 860, he talks about capitalism giving the world what it needed, a higher standard of living. And then he says a social system however beneficial cannot work if it is not supported by public opinion. They did not anticipate the success of the anti-capitalistic propaganda. And of course that's as true today, Tom, in 2020 as it was in 1949. Absolutely. And you know, the other thing that I love about this chapter is he starts it basically with a punch in the face. He says what assigns economics, it's peculiar and unique position in the orbit of both a pure knowledge and a practical utilization of knowledge and the fact that it's particular theorems are not open to any verification or falsification on the ground of experience. Now this is something that would drive howls of indignation for most economists today, the Noah Smiths of the world, the Greg Mancus of the world. And it really gets to the heart of what Joe Solerna discusses as Tom is what makes someone an Austrian? Or at least a proto-Austrian or semi-Austrian, something like that. He wrote that great essay back in the Fescher volume that the Mises Institute published back in like 08 or 09 for Hans Hermann Hoppe. And Solerna wrote a brief article for that about the sociology of the Austrian school. And in that he says, and I'm quoting Solerna, he says, the essence of Austrian economics may be defined then as the structure of economic theorems that has arrived at through the process of praxeological deduction. That is through logical deduction from the reality-based action axiom. So this is, again, what Mises is getting to here, what Solerna is summarizing for us is that this is what really distinguishes what we would call an Austrian perspective from even what Hayek devolved into, for example, that this is the essence of the nature of it. And even later in his career, writing a little later here, sort of mid to late career, Mises doesn't back down one iota from this. I have to say, I think for the most part, this is actually a pretty good point that Walter Block makes, which is that a lot of economists who would sniff at what Mises just said implicitly believe it. Because if you came up to them and said, okay, I just did a study on rent control, and it turns out that rent control has no effect on anything. That if you limit rents to $300 a month, it does not affect the quality of the properties, the number of properties available, you know, the supply in general, landlord behavior, none of that is affected by it. Well, any economist in his right mind would say, go back and redo that study. They wouldn't say, oh, well, I guess we've done a study and I'm inclined, I have to accept it as a scientist. They would know that's wrong. Now, why do they know that's wrong? Do they know that's wrong because of a strong series of empirical regularities? Or do they know that's wrong because the logic of it means that can't be right? So to some degree, they all believe this. But beyond that, the arguments Mises makes for this are not unreasonable. He's not dogmatic for the sake of being dogmatic. It's that if you can't isolate a single cause and then observe how society or how your lab experiment operates with one thing held constant, then you can't draw these types of conclusions. What you can do is what Guido Hulsman says you can do in his Journal of Libertarian Studies article. You can say the following. You can say the level of employment is lower than it would be otherwise because of the high minimum wage. But you can say that, but you can't derive conclusions about, oh, it turns out the minimum wage is actually a boon to employment. You can't conclude that. You can conclude that it's lower than it would have been otherwise. But you also can't know by how much. You can't have a quantitative answer to this. That's what you can say. You can think about contrary to fact scenarios. So the price level is higher than it would have been in the absence of the monetary inflation. That's what economics can do. And so economics has limitations, but economics takes what limitations it has and gives us as much knowledge as we have. We could possibly have a right to expect. Well, and what economics can or should give us is really the thrust of the next chapter, chapter 38, the place of economics and learning. Absolutely fascinating. For those of you who have been listening to podcast, maybe going in and out of the book or wanting to dive into it. I mean, you could really just read the 30 odd pages in part seven and have a wonderful walk through Mises's mind and thinking on economics. It's really a fun chapter, chapter 38 particular. And this gets to what you're talking about here. We almost get to a semantic difference here. What science? For some people, the idea of creating a hypothesis and then going out and testing it and then revising it, that is science. And so any discipline, the so-called social sciences, which doesn't apply this is not real science. Now, obviously Mises would disagree. I think we would disagree. But at the beginning of this chapter, chapter 38, where he talks about the epistemological differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences, he gets to what Hayek called scientism or Hayek's version of scientism, which is this sort of fetish for applying the methods of the physical sciences to political science or economics or sociology or whatever it is. And he also gets into the difference between the scientific method and economic history, which are two different things. You know, what do you think about us? I guess, first of all, Parabilan talks about this. Do you think social sciences are real sciences? I mean, give us your take on that almost semantic difference. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I certainly Mises believed that it was a science in the sense of trying to form cause and effect relationships about the world around us. Now, the way you form those cause and effect relationships is indeed different in economics. But that's why, again, Guido would use the term exact to say the laws of economics are exact laws because sometimes people will speak imprecisely. And they'll say, well, you know, economics isn't a hard science, so its laws aren't exact. No, the laws are exact. If you increase the money supply, the price level will be higher than it would have been. I mean, that sort of thing, that's just a fact where a division of labor society will be more physically productive than a non-division of labor society. That's an exact law. So I believe that certainly economics is a science in the sense that it's using the means appropriate to itself that is basically reflection and logical deduction to draw cause and effect relationships about the world around us. So I accept that. I think his point that he makes in this section that we're talking about now, in fact, the first section of that section, which is simply called the study of economics, is unassailable when he says if we were to study business cycles and I just gave you a lot of raw data, that's not going to help in any way because if you don't approach this data with some theoretical understanding that you've gained from reflection, these raw numbers couldn't possibly do you any good. They don't tell a story. You have to figure them out on the basis of how the world must work. And Rothbard makes this point too in his own work on on recessions and depressions is if you just stand there staring at sheeps of data, you're a theory is not going to pop out at you. And so and then moreover, he says, think about what the historian does. The historian does not write down every single thing that happened because then we would be talking about the three meals a day that every political leader had. Now, if the political leader was poisoned during one of those meals, then we would talk about that. But the historian has to discriminate between what's relevant, what isn't. And so that means he has to go to the raw data of history with some kind of theory. Otherwise, you're just looking at a series of data. Okay, this person walked from A to B. Is that relevant? There is always some theory governing how you look at the raw data that you have. And so then when you have an economic historian, you have two potential levels of problem. Because if the historian doesn't know what he's looking for, how's he going to even tell the history, much less explain to people the causal mechanisms from a theoretical standpoint. He's not even going to know one particular episode if he doesn't have the economic knowledge. I ended up writing an article for the QJ years ago called What Austrian Economics Can Teach Historians? Because I felt like it was almost unfair that I could go to history not unarmed the way Mises is describing here, but equipped with the knowledge of the Austrian school and tell a much more compelling story about the data that I was seeing than other historians could. And I wanted to flesh out, why was that? What exact advantages does Austrian economics give me? Now at the time when you wrote Meltdown after the crash of 2008, I don't recall offhand in terms of reviews and stuff, but did you get any pushback because you're not an economist? Do you consider yourself an economic historian or at least an amateur economic historian? I didn't get as much pushback on Meltdown as I thought I would. And part of that had to do with the fact that when it reached the New York Times bestseller list, it was not reviewed by the times. So I didn't get the Mises courtesy. I was not reviewed. I was reviewed in the Times with my politically incorrect guide to American history, but when that book was savagely reviewed, and it was so funny, they weren't even pointing out any mistakes. I swear to you, they were not pointing out mistakes. They were saying the nerve of this guy to say this, this, this. Do you believe he thinks the Marshall Plan wasn't responsible for the European recovery? Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, that is what I think. So show me where I'm wrong. It was at no time to show me where I was wrong. But the week after that happened, it hit the highest point on the list that it had ever been. So I don't know if it was a conscious thing or not, but they were not going to give me that publicity a second time. So I didn't get a review from there. So I did get some commentary here and there, but generally it wasn't Woods isn't an economist. I don't think most people who were critical of me even bothered to look at my background. When they saw PhD on the cover, which I don't like, but the publisher insisted on it, so I went with it. I think they assumed I was an economics PhD. So generally what I got, I got mostly favorable reviews because even from, you know, the Claremont review of books. Now, they have Angelo Cotavillo, whom you and I like very much, but they're, you know, they're Strausian and they're not particularly sympathetic to us in a lot of ways. And they're the sort of people who would give Donald Rumsfeld their statesman award that, you know, they're that type of outfit. And so they haven't particularly liked me because I'm a more decentralized, you know, lowercase our Republican type. And it hasn't been that friendly of relationship. But when Meltdown came out, well, the fact is these people on the right wing, they're not reading Mises. They don't know anything about business cycle theory. They didn't know what to say when the left would say this was a failure of capitalism. They hadn't been reading their human action. They don't know what on earth to say. So finally the Austrians, particularly people at the Mises Institute who'd been writing about this forever, had a contribution to make and could explain to them, here's how you defend capitalism during these difficult times. I got an extraordinarily favorable review of Meltdown in the Claremont Review of Books to the point where, and I was a little bit critical of Alexander Hamilton in the book because I did spend a little time going back in American history, looking at interventions into money, interventions into banking. And they, these people love Alexander Hamilton. They even said it may be necessary for us to go back and reexamine our views of Alexander Hamilton in light of this book. I mean, that's how great it was, Jeff. I can't, I don't know what else to say other than I was shocked. But this crossover between economics and economic history, of course when Mises was coming of age in the early 20th century, economics wasn't, was just becoming its own standalone discipline for the first time. And you, you really get that through everything he wrote, was that this was someone who was familiar with and comfortable with philosophy and logic and history and all kinds of disciplines and, and academics back then didn't jump down each other's throats with the stay in your lane business like they do today. Right. And by the way, I forgot your other question about being an economic historian. I do think that, but I'm not exclusively an economic historian. I write about a lot of things in history, but when it comes to an economic topic, I do feel like the frankly fairly vast reading I've done over these 25 plus years comes in handy. Robert Higgs would be another example, but he's coming at it as somebody with a PhD in economics who then applies it to history and he's an excellent economic historian. But yeah, the whole stay in your lane thing, I don't know, I sort of feel like some of that has to be projection from people who can barely stay in their, you know, in their lane when they try, like they barely know their own lane. So it just seems to them that it's impossible for somebody else to know enough about both, you know, two or three disciplines to say anything about them because I myself don't know. Well, you know, it is. I mean, and obviously these people have never met David Gordon. Yeah, there's certainly an insecurity to it, a nervousness to it. And I think you're right, it's projection people who don't even know their own lane that well. But if you understand praxeology, if you read Mises, I mean, human action isn't neatly siloed into different disciplines. I mean, we're all actors and we're all out there doing all kinds of things. But, you know, one thing that really stands out to me about these chapters, I think is exemplified in his little section here, forecasting as a profession. And when you talk about Mises referring to the limitations of economics, there's something almost unsatisfying about this. For example, he says here, the economist knows that the boom must result in a depression, but he does not and cannot know when the crisis will appear. You know, this is the kind of thing that makes people say, well, then what good is Austrian economics? You know, I need, I want to know what to do. I want to know what stocks to buy. I want to know if this is a good time to start my business or not. You know, there is something there where you say life is largely about timing. And if you, Austrians can't help us with this, then I'll go seek out someone who can. Do you know what I'm saying here, Tom? Yeah, sure. And a lot of times people want to know from the Austrian, so when should we expect such and such to happen? And there are some people who are good at that kind of thing. And I don't know how they do it. But it doesn't follow from Austrian economics per se that they would be able to do that. But I guess to me, I still want to know if I'm doing something wrong. If I'm doing something that in the long run is not going to help me. Even if the consequences may not be immediately apparent. So if I'm doing something in my private life, I mean, maybe I'm, maybe I drink too much or something like that. I don't, by the way, but let's say I did. I could probably keep that going for a while. But little by little, if it's chipping away at my productivity, at my genealogy, at my outlook on life. Well, I would want a friend to say to me, you're on an unsustainable path. You really should try and change this. I don't think I would come back with, oh yeah, tell me the exact date when I'm going to hit rock bottom. You know what I mean? Like I would want to just be told. Well, he takes pains also to point out that economic forecasting, which I think he considers largely bunkum, is different than entrepreneurial judgment. These are two different things. So when you take someone like a Mark Spitznagle, the hedge fund investor who goes out in shorts, lots of markets and has had a couple of huge months in March and April of 2020, obviously with the unfortunate decline in markets, you know, those are two very different things. Mark Spitznagle is not acting as an economist. He's acting as an entrepreneur with respect to his investing. So when it comes to today's academia though, Tom, an area where you're more familiar than I, you get to economics in the universities, this section where he has his famous statement where he calls them nurseries of socialism and this and that. You know, it strikes me that in a lot of ways the academic landscape is better today than it was in Mises' heyday, the 40s and 50s. In other words, there's always been Marxist, there'll always be Marxist, but there's a lot more free market voices today. There's also this idea that the Soviet Union was a grand experiment. Paul Samuelson thought that by the year 2000 or so they'd be outproducing America, which of course was absolute nonsense. Tom Di Lorenzo's written about that. But there's this sense in the 40s and 50s where academia is actually far more socialist and left wing perhaps than it even is today. And also there was the idea that socialism has not yet been proven wrong and that it's inevitable. That's one thing Mises wrote about in socialism. And so you fast forward to 2020 and I think in many ways as bad as we think universities are, maybe they're better in terms of academic presence of free marketers than in Mises' day. Yeah, it's somewhat better. Sure, there's no question about that. The Mises Institute itself has placed really great professors all over the place. It has produced people and helped to mentor people who have turned out to be really outstanding scholars. And it's no longer the case that you think, well, there's no chance that I could get an academic position if I have heterodox ideas. That's not necessarily so. Now you're not going to chair the economics department at Harvard. That's true. But okay, you can have a very, very satisfying life doing a lot of other things and at a lot of other institutions and some pretty good ones. I mean, you look at our own faculty at the Mises Institute and I think a good many of them have done pretty well for themselves. I mean, Mises seems to think that when he talks this way that when, like for example, when you break economics up into these sub-disciplines like we have labor economics or agricultural economics and things like that, what tends to happen is if you're an agricultural economist, first of all, a lot of them act as if they're an agricultural economist because there's somehow different rules governing agriculture. Or I'm a labor economist, why? Because why are you a labor economist? Are you saying that supply and demand aren't also at work in labor markets? When Austrians have these particular subdivisions, it's simply because they have a particular interest, but we always believe that all of economics is a single integrated whole. And it looks to me like Mises is saying that most people are not system builders. Most people are not wildly original. And frankly, most people don't write a book like Human Action. He doesn't quite say that, but it's very obvious that that's his point. Most people do not come up with systems where they synthesize a bunch of previous thinkers and present their treatise to the world. Most people are relative dunderheads who can specialize in the wage rates of Appalachian coal miners in the 19th century. That's about what they can do. And because that's all they can do, they focus all their attention on that one little thing, and they have nothing to say about the whole system. And if you have nothing to say about the whole system, then you don't understand economics seems to be his point. Yeah, it's funny. So it almost takes a little dig at academia where he says, people want to have some little hyper-specialized discipline where they're comfortable that nobody knows anything more than they do about the subject. But he says, that's pretty useless. So Tom, a lot of the famous Mises quotes over the years, the Mises Institute has tried to get out there about average people needing to know and read economics are really found in this chapter. And he's got this little section on economics and the citizen, which is really good. And I think it gets to the heart of what the Mises Institute has tried to be, which is an outlet for the intelligent lay audience. In other words, we have been forced, in a sense, to do a bit of an end run around academia, which, although as we said, is maybe more favorable today in some ways. It still has a gatekeeper role. And so we've always had sort of a dual role at the Mises Institute to try to help Austrian scholars in their own careers, but also to reach out to the intelligent lay reader. And so Mises has some real barn burner statement series where he says something like, as conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake. And of course, that's the opposite of what we hear from the expertise society, right? They want to say, oh, you know, this monetary policy stuff, this is really technical and complicated. You know, you plebe shouldn't really worry your pretty little heads too much about this. Just leave this to Jerome Powell and the Fed Open Market Committee so they can sort of figure it out. Because, you know, what no normal person sitting at home watching The Bachelor or whatever could possibly understand this stuff. So don't even try. And that to me is, A, deeply disturbing. And B, you know, it's fun to upset the apple cart. And, you know, we certainly feel this sometimes at the Mises Institute that there is this resistance even amongst free marketers in Austria and they're like, well, I have a PhD and that, you know, you should stay in your lane once again. Yeah. And that makes me crazy in any discipline, frankly. Economics, particularly because it is so urgent for the general public to understand it. History you can get away with if not everybody knows about Appalachian coal miners and stuff like that. But this, what's grown up around the universities is because of all the subsidies. If there weren't so much federal money, government money going into the universities, would we have most, I dare say, of these academic journals? I mean, you look at the history journals, almost none of them ever have anything interesting to say because at this point so much has been done already that finding something to work on for your PhD is a real challenge. Finding something to write for an academic journal is a real challenge. So you have to come up with increasingly obscure things that fewer and fewer people would care about. Now, maybe some of these articles occasionally do come up with something really worthwhile that helps us think about something differently. But as Mises says, the number of people who do that is very, very small. The number of people who just come up with some tiny little niche so that they can feel important is very great. And that's the kind of thing that's subsidized by the universities. And so it just seems that the amount of effort going into completely pointless study. And again, you should just look at some second and third tier U.S. history journals to get an idea of what I'm talking about. It's mind-blowing. There's no way this is the best use of anybody's time. Nobody reads the articles for one thing. It's another thing. Even in the economics journals, basically nobody reads them. You could round it to zero. Nobody basically reads them. They publish them for the credential, but nobody reads them. Is that really what you want your life to be about? Or do you want your life to be about taking the ideas you have and, yeah, not being able to convey them in all their complexity to everybody in the world, but at least making them matter, helping people to understand the world around them. If you don't want to do that, I don't understand why you're in this field. You know, that's really interesting time to think about that. And, of course, we can't imagine all the ways in which state funding of university has a ripple effect out into the world. I mean, that's almost incalculable at this point. But as a bit of a counterpoint, I do like the idea, if it could be funded privately, of people studying, whether that's history or whatever, studying arcane knowledge just for knowledge's sake. I do like that conceptually. I do think that in a free or private society, there would still be an intellectual class, I think it would be far smaller. And it would be subsidized or maintained, I guess, by rich people. Yeah, but hold on, but let me interrupt here, because the sorts of things they'd be studying, I tend to feel like, would be the kinds of things that really make people flourish. Now, I might not be interested in all of them myself, but the kinds of topics people choose for their PhD dissertations or for academic journal articles are so miserably dull and awful that I can't imagine they're doing it, except because they feel like this is my entry to this job that I want. It's just miserable. Whereas, yeah, I think people would be self-taught in a lot of things in a free society. Maybe they wouldn't learn, you know, Plato's dialogues in school as much, but they could absolutely savor every word of them in their own private study. I just feel like the super ultra-hyper-crazy specific conference paper topics that make you just want to jump out a window, I think those probably wouldn't be so numerous. But yes, plenty of independent study of things that give people joy, not that grind them into the dirt with their utter boringness and irrelevance. Well, okay, but in a private system, what about the concept of tenure? What about people who can live their lives knowing that they have a sinecure that allows them to conduct research or inquiry into any facet of human knowledge or the human past without having to worry about whether they uncover unpleasant facts or take unpopular positions that at least to an extent their livelihood, their paycheck, allows them to go wherever the facts or the logic takes them. What do you think of tenure? I don't know. I mean, ultimately, in a way, you can cop out on this the way presidential candidates cop out on abortion by saying it's a state issue. Well, likewise on tenure, I could say, well, it would be up to the individual institution. So I'm going to give a two-part answer. First part of my answer is that cop-out answer, right? That it really is a matter of, well, if that really is true, that you can have a more intellectually independent faculty and people value that, then institutions that offer tenure will have an advantage competitively, and that leaves it there. But the real question is, is that what really happens with tenure? I don't really see it. I see tenure making people lazy, and I see tenure not really very often protecting people with unpopular views. I mean, maybe in our circles, but generally, most of the people who are tenured are just repeating what the administration wants them to say anyway. They don't even need to be bribed with tenure to be a drone who repeats the conventional wisdom over and over again. So I'm not so sure that in most cases it fulfills its role, but honestly, it would be a matter of, as I say, I don't think we've ever had a really fair test of it in the marketplace. If it really has a significant effect on the intellectual freedom of the faculty and this is something valued by society, then they should be able to command a premium on the market. I'm not sure it would come out that way. Well, you mentioned earlier that Mises' name today is far better known than it ever was during his lifetime, and it's far better known than some of his peers from his time, tenured or otherwise. And so I know we've discussed this offline, but imagine upon arrival in the United States that Mises had been greeted warmly and lauded for his great work to date and praised for understanding capitalism and markets and told, well, here in America, we're capitalists, we're not like those bad Europeans, and so we're going to give you a position worthy of you. We're going to give you an endowed tenured chair at Yale or Harvard or Princeton or someplace like that. Had he received that treatment and given it a nice sinecure, probably may never have written human action, for example. That's possible, although there's something about Mises that just seems superhuman that I think nothing could have stopped him, but I understand what you're saying. Yeah, absolutely. You could say the same of Rothbard. He's far better known than many of his contemporaries today, but he was treated pretty shabbily by the academic establishment. Yeah. Now, once he got that endowed chair out at UNLV, I presume that was a more or less tenured position, and he's one of these rare cases where that just didn't make one bit of difference. That guy was as productive as he ever was during those years. But yeah, I don't know, I'm skeptical of the system, particularly for the lower, like if you want to talk about people in positions lower than the university, you know, tenured for them. What is even the point of that other than just, you know, pressure from a pressure group to help prevent their members from getting fired? But I guess what's so interesting here is that if you look at human action and if you look at Rothbard's man economy and state, both of these volumes were not written purely for an academic audience. They were written at least in part for lay audiences. That's pretty incredible if you think about it. It's incredible on a number of levels, not least of which is that years ago, I assigned my favorite Thomas Sowell book, which is obscure. Everybody has a different favorite Thomas Sowell book from me, because mine is Civil Rights, Rhetoric, or Reality. It's only 140 pages, and it's an amazing book. It smashes every myth you ever were foolish enough to believe, and I assigned it to my students. Now, Sowell, for the most part, maybe his book on Marxism was meant more for a scholarly audience than a lay-out. I don't know because I haven't read that book. But obviously, Thomas Sowell, he's a syndicated newspaper columnist. He was intending to write for the general public. And I would say four out of five students of mine could not even understand what his thesis was. They would write a paper about it saying that Thomas Sowell is very concerned about the effects that racism has on employment. That is literally the opposite of his thesis. They could not follow it at all. So on that level, the idea that some layman would read human action is quite extraordinary. It's obviously not meant for everybody, but the fact that you would even think there will be intelligent laymen who just want to know this stuff and they want to know it systematically, frankly, makes me feel happy. Well, it also shows that maybe 1949 and then 1962 are a lifetime ago. I know. I wonder about that. I have to wonder about is it a matter of people have gotten stupider or is it something else? It's hard to know. And I'm sorry this is a bit off topic, but it just reminds me I am a music aficionado and on my own podcast, the Tom Wood Show. Episode number three was with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tall. Now, Jethro Tall had two albums in the early 1970s that were each one long song. What radio play are you going to get from that? And yet they both hit number one, very complicated music. They hit number one on the Billboard chart. So I asked him, what do you think has changed between now and then no one would ever be able to get away with it. No one's sending an album with only one song on it to number one. And I so desperately wanted him to say because people have gotten stupider and he just couldn't bring himself to say it, Doug, on it. But we all know that's the case. So that surely has to be a part of it. Because, you know, sometimes these little tests come out. This is the kind of standardized test people took in the 1930s and you think our college grads couldn't do this test now. I wonder how much of that is, or if we see, like this is what they were studying in college. How much of that is fewer people went to college? So that's why they could afford to be more challenging in those days. I mean, I don't know what to make of this. I am inclined to think people are dumber and I don't know why that should be, but I think that's the case. Well, there's certainly less red. I don't think there's any question about that. And I don't think that chapters like the final chapter in this book, economics and the essential problems of human existence. I mean, just that kind of lofty title. I think today, Tom, you'd have to have some punchier chapter titles, for example. Oh my gosh, yeah. Oh my gosh, Mises is not a chapter title guy. I mean, that wouldn't get passed an editor today. No. This whole book wouldn't get passed an editor today. There's no question about that. You know, there's another thing here. Mises says somewhere in this section that the error of the liberals, and of course he means classical liberals, was sort of to think that all you need to do is just present people with the right arguments. And that's it. You have a good argument and they understand it and then you move on. But his point was that a lot of people, maybe I'm misreading this, but a lot of people don't respond that way. People respond to irrational appeals much more. So when we look back at Mises' book, liberalism, he has this passage toward the end where he says, look, we don't have any songs or banners or parades or whatever the way the irrational fascists or whoever else do. What we have are the arguments. And that's what we need, the arguments, to win the day. I don't know. In human action, I think he's a little more cynical about that, whether that really is going to be enough to win the day. But to me, what really tells us what we need to know about the human race is the fact that we now have the internet. Maybe we could have fooled ourselves in the past thinking that the thing holding us back is people don't have access to knowledge. You now can find anything you want to find. All the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips. And let's just put it this way. I don't think people are maximizing the benefit that they could derive from this phenomenon. Let's leave it there. No, but I did yesterday see a video of a bunch of dogs jumping into kiddie pool. So we've got that sort of thing out there for us. We have that covered. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, but that's really where we're getting at here with the final chapter of the book. I think, you know, he starts off with this idea that economics is value free. And I think that's, I understand that conceptually. That's always been a hallmark of the praxeological method. But there's something unsatisfying about that again. Most of us want to think that, you know, any scientist, social or otherwise, as he or she studies their discipline and develops, you know, they come to the discipline with a host of biases with their own political viewpoints, with their own normative or philosophical or ethical viewpoints, and that this idea that we have to sort of shut that side of ourselves off and become these robotic, you know, people who understand economics without reference to values, that's tough for a lot of people, Tom. And a lot of people would say, well, that's just BS. Do you right wing Austrians are value-laden in everything you do? Well, this is a tricky thing. And it's not helped by... There's no harm in, I guess, intended by folks. But when people say, what's the Austrian position on, you know, whether the minimum wage is... Right. You know, I mean, like, I understand what they mean, but strictly speaking, there is no Austrian position on whether the... What the Austrians do is explain cause-and-effect relationships. That's what economic science is. And then you take from that what you will. And so, again, Walter Block will joke about this and say, if you were a misanthrope, you could be an Austrian, take the cause-and-effect relationships we describe, and then proceed to act on the opposite basis because you know that will make mankind miserable. I mean, it's not inconceivable that you could do this. And in fact, I even had this happen to me once at the Mises Institute. I gave the Lute Church lecture back in, I think, 2004. And I was talking about clerics who don't know economics. And Morgan Reynolds stood up, who was a labor economist, and said, I don't buy this. I don't buy this, they just don't get it stuff. He said, they must get it at this point. This is not difficult to understand. You price people out of the labor market, they're not going to be employable. At this point, I have lost my patience with those people. It is that they do know that these are the effects of their policies and that the result of their policies would be to make these people more helpless and more dependent on them. And that is why they are doing it. So he actually did believe there were people who understood the logic of it. But their values said, instead of aiming at human flourishing, we want human dependency. Now, I wasn't sure I bought that, and I've kind of softened a bit over the years in how I treat clerics who don't understand economics, because my view is when the economists don't even understand economics, we'll get to the clergy later. Let's clean out the stables first when it comes to that. But, strictly speaking, we are value free, but I did give a talk on the attractiveness of Austrian economics as the opening talk at Mises You, because I tried to connect, what is it that draws us to Austrian economics? Why are we libertarians? Why is it that almost all of us are libertarians and Austrian economists? And I did try to pull that out, but Walter in his many, many writings is always very careful to keep the two conceptually distinct, because it is quite possible just simply to describe the workings of the economy and go from there. And, consequently, some of our best people, our most scholarly people, don't write any libertarian theory at all. They just do pure economic science. So, for example, Jeff Herbner. When does Jeff Herbner write about we need to vote for Ron Paul to improve the world, or this war was a terrible idea? That's not what he does. He writes purely technical economics, purely descriptive. Likewise, Joe Salerno. Now, a little bit he started to blog in recent years, but it's almost all just technical economics. So that's quite possible to do, and it goes to show that we really are a self-contained science that is trying to describe what's going on in the world. And I think we need that. And, unfortunately, most people want to moralize from economics. And in my background, I run into a lot of religious folks, and they want economics to be also morality. And I explained to them, economists have enough on their plate. The last people in the world I want to take moral instruction from half the time are academic economists. I say we don't have morality mixed up in chemistry or physics, or nuclear physics. We don't say, now that we've built this nuclear missile, we're going to use the same people who built it to theorize about whether we should use it or not. That's obviously two distinct things, and I think it's important to keep them distinct. And, of course, Mises makes the point here at the end of this book that economics cannot be annulled. You can ignore its teachings, you can ignore its warnings, but if you do so, you'll stamp out society and the human race. So, again, he uses grandiose language to adopt a grandiose pose with respect to economics and its place in society and in learning. And I think it's something where, you know, Mises is showing us a serious side towards the end of the book. And I think that he faced a problem, Tom, that persists today. I'll describe it like this. The left, I think, does not believe economics is a real science. They think it is just a bunch of made-up intellectual cover for business or corporate or wealthy interests, and they think that economies can basically be commanded at will via the legislative process, and that there are no laws of economics per se that cannot be overcome. So, I think we still have this problem. People don't think economics is real. And, again, we see that on both sides in the sense of left and right, because you're right, the progressive left really thinks that, well, you know what, the progressive left and, let's say, like the traditionalist right, both seem to think that economics is some sham discipline that was cobbled together by rich people, sometimes rich Jews, it would be the way the story will go, in order to rationalize their own greed. Now they have a whole science that justifies their own greed. So there aren't really any economic laws. And so when I was up against some folks who were more on the right-wing side of things, who were anti-capitalists, they thought capitalism was a creature of the Enlightenment, and this was not a compliment, and they had to be against it. And what they were attracted to was the very school that Mises had so much contempt for, or at least, let's say, so many critical remarks for, the German Historical School. The German Historical School denied that there were regularities in the social sciences or in society that were independent of time and place and culture. Maybe we Germans have our own thing. So don't tell me about your abstract economic laws, that sort of thing. They didn't believe that you could formulate an abstract economic law. At least some of them seem to have believed that was the case. And that is the kind of thing that my critics also wanted to hear. Because as Mises says, the Economist is never popular with the ruling class. Because they have all these dreams of what they can accomplish, and he's always there to tell them they can't do it. And these people were the same way. They didn't want to be told about my economic laws. And by the way, they didn't even do me the courtesy of understanding what's meant by an economic law. When they would hear the term economic law, they thought it meant, make sure you maximize your profits and screw everybody. They honestly think that's what we mean by economic law. There's nothing stopping an employer from saying, look, I'm going to give you all two weeks off for no particular reason, just because I'm a nice guy and here's the money you're going to be paid. That's just a consumption good from his point of view. And there's nothing irrational about that from an economic standpoint, because we don't use the word irrational in that way. We have no problem with somebody doing that because we're not in the job of finding problems. We're just in the business of understanding cause and effect relationships. But my gosh, the hostility toward economics as a science, because, I mean, they wouldn't put it this way, but because it puts constraints on what they think is possible. They honestly think that the goals they want to reach can be attained if we simply expropriate certain people or have impossible levels of taxation, whatever it is, they think they can reach their goals. I generally find that at that point it's not a good use of my time to continue the conversation. What I ended up doing was I wrote my book The Church and the Market to answer those people. And I feel like that thing gets to many thousands of people and makes the point and will be on the shelf forever. And me trying to argue with one person at a time through email is not accomplishing that. Yeah, there's no question about it. It's a struggle, but Mises understood that we all have to understand this. We can't be childish about this. We can't have high time preference. And Tom, I want to wrap up not only this podcast, but this series of podcasts on an upbeat note and draw the reader's attention to really one of my favorite passages, if not my favorite passage in this entire book. It's on page 878 of the Scholar's Edition where Mises says, as long as a man lives, he cannot help but still impulse the Elan Vitaal. It is man's innate nature that he seeks to preserve and strengthen his life. So Elan Vitaal, a French phrase that Mises borrowed from a philosopher named Henri Bersond who is not quite a contemporary Mises lived maybe about a generation older, but Bersond used it to say that there's a vital force that all organisms possess and that it gets into our consciousness. And so I think we think that we're up against it, that it's very daunting to get people to understand what we would consider proper or correct economics, that it's very daunting to get people to understand the nature of government, the role of the state, that it's very daunting to get people to understand the benefits of liberty. We can't lose force. We can't lose sight of our own Elan Vitaal, that impulse thing that drives us to better our own lives and hopefully to better the lives of our children and grandchildren in this situation. So I think if you've taken the time to go through this book, difficult as it may have been or at least go in and out of sections of this book, I think you're going to be a lot better positioned to have some arguments that back up that vital impulse that hopefully we all feel. So, Tom, I want to thank you for being the final guest on this series and I want to wish all of our listeners a great weekend. Stay tuned, as promised, on the series of Human Action Podcasts. So we are keeping the pedal to the metal. We are sticking to real Austrian theory and hopefully the audience is going to enjoy an array of economists who are going to help us work through Rothbard's magnum opus next. So Tom, you and all of our listeners, please have a great weekend. Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org.