 I'm really pleased to be here and to see this very large group of attendees that we have, and I'm looking forward to a very interesting and stimulating week. I think that maybe it was implied, but Dr. Thornton, I'm sure, meant to say that in the course of the week, during mealtime or during social hour at other times, feel free to go up to any of the instructors for our week-long seminar and any of the questions you have, problems you have, things that you'd like to discuss, that's there would be a time to bring them up. Now I'm going to be talking about Ludwig von Mises, his life to an extent, his work. I've been involved with Mises's work ever since high school when my buddy George Reisman, who was I think 16 years old at the time, maybe brought up for a line of 14, had finished reading Human Action and was very enthusiastic about it and introduced me to this to this thinker and a smaller or larger degree have been involved with Mises and his thought ever since. Now many years ago, when William F. Buckley Jr. was at the beginning, many years ago, the beginning of his career of lecturing at colleges and then he went on to other groups and in the days when he was somewhat more tolerant of libertarians than he is today, he used to begin his talks by writing two names on the blackboard in those days. One was the Defender of Democratic Socialism. I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, it could have been Lasky or John Dewey, was recognized at most of those present. He was trying to sort of incarnate the great world historical debate between socialism and the private enterprise system. So that was the Democratic Socialist and almost all the students had heard of, I think it was probably Galbraith, so they raised their hand. And then Buckley would put on the blackboard the name of Ludwig von Mises, who was entirely unknown to them. Needless to say, this situation has not basically improved since then except perhaps in the sense that many college students now have heard of William F. Buckley Jr. Now, how has it been possible that the great majority of economics and social science students at fine colleges and universities are totally unfamiliar with Mises? At the time of his death in October 1973, even the New York Times, in its notice, in its obituary, termed Mises one of the foremost economists of this century, unquote. And Milton Friedman, you'll hear something during the week about the differences between Milton Friedman and the Austrian school, but even Milton Friedman, for a totally different tradition of economics, called Mises, quote, one of the great economists of all time, unquote, I think typically generous tribute on the part of Friedman. But actually, Mises was even more than a great economist. Throughout the world, among knowledgeable people, in German-speaking Europe, in France, in Britain, in Latin America, in Japan, in our own country, Mises was famous as the great 20th century champion of a certain school of thought, a school of thought that could be said to have a certain historical importance and maybe even intellectual respectability. The school of thought that began with Adam Smith, David Hulme, Mitergo, included Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bentham, Benjamin Constan, Alexis de Tocqueville, Acton, Berenbauerk, William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer, Alfredo Pareto, and many others. The tradition of classical liberalism. Mises was understood to be the great representative of classical liberalism in the mid-20th century. Offhand, one would have thought that this acknowledged position alone would have entitled Mises to being presented within the pluralistic setting of left liberal American academia. And then there were Mises, Mises' scientific achievements, which were extraordinary. And most or maybe all of our instructors could address those questions much better than I could, but let me just mention his pioneering work in monetary theory and in the theory of the business cycle, his profound work in the methodology of economics and the a priori derivation of economic truths, his systemizing of all economic theory and his magnum opus human action. But let's take another example. It is conceited on all sides that the whole discussion revolving around the viability of the system of central economic planning, in this discussion, Mises played the key role. Now, socialism in that sense is dead, it's over with, but it shaped the larger part of the 20th century. And so therefore it's of great historical importance. Now, quite possibly the great intellectual scandal, still unadmitted of the last century, has been that the vast international Marxian movement, including thousands upon thousands of professional thinkers in all fields, famous names, was for generations content to discuss the whole issue of capitalism versus socialism solely in terms of the alleged defects of capitalism. Capitalism is responsible for everything. I mean, it's just just the beginning of a litany you can find in the communist manifesto. And it was responsible for contradictory things also was responsible for undermining the family was responsible for promoting the bourgeois family. It was responsible for destroying religion on the view of many conservatives. It was also responsible for propping up religion. But whatever it was, capitalism was responsible. The question of how and how well a socialist economy would function was avoided as taboo. It was Mises great accomplishment and a sign of his superb independence of mind. To brush aside this pious one just doesn't speak of such things and to have presented comprehensively and arrestingly the problems inherent in attempting rational economic calculation in a situation where no market exists for production goods. Anyone familiar with the structural problems with which all the more advanced communist countries continually faced will understand the significance of Mises work in this one field alone. It was in fact the irrationality inherent in the socialist system that finally brought communism down. It was not having forced them to spend more on defense because of the of the Star Wars system that the U.S. was undertaking. It was something that had been going on from the very beginning because of the of the deep-seated entrenched irrationality of their economic system that became totally manifest, impossible to avoid when the information revolution came around and people in the Soviet Union could see on television and in video cassettes in all the new on the Internet for that matter, the difference between the way of life of people in the Soviet Union or in the East zone, satellite states and the people in the West. It just became too much of a burden of lies to maintain at that point. But the root cause of this was their irrational economic system. As a man named Robert Heilbruner, who wrote an influential history of economic thought that was used in many undergraduate courses. And he was a socialist or democratic socialist and he refers in an article in The New Yorker from 1990 to this debate on the feasibility of socialist planning. He says in the 1930s when I was studying economics, a few economists had already expressed doubts about the feasibility of centrally planned socialism. One of them was Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian of extremely conservative views. Right, he's another Jesse Helms or Jim Sessions or something who had written of the impossibility of socialism arguing that no central planning board could ever gather the enormous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system. Well, that really wasn't the whole argument. The whole argument was basically based in terms of property rights and price system. Our skepticism was fortified when Oscar Lange, a brilliant young Polish economist who would become the first post-war Polish ambassador to the US, in other words, a member of the Communist Party, wrote two dazzling articles showing that a board would not need all the information that Mises said it couldn't collect. All that such a board would have to do than Lange said in these dazzlingly brilliant articles was to watch the levels of inventories in its warehouses. If inventories rose, the obvious thing to do was to lower prices so that goods would move out. So he knows that much. And if inventories were too rapidly depleted to raise prices in order to discourage sales. That really sounds like the recipe for a dynamic, entrepreneurial, innovative economy, doesn't it? You just watch the warehouse and look at the inventories for the goods that you have on hand and follow this rule. Fifty years ago, it was felt that Lange had decisively won the argument for socialist planning. Well, you can imagine what that means in terms of the state of the profession in those days. Okay. And then, and then, Brunner, Robert Heilbrunner says that it turns out, of course, that Mises was right. Oh, really? The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of efforts. And then he says they had some spectacular results. The dams and mills in entire new cities of 1930s astonished the world. Right. Fellow travelers were taken on trips of Potemkin villages. But listen to this. As did the Chinese Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, which performed similar miracles from a still lower base. The miracles consisted in hundreds or tens of millions of Chinese peasants trying to smelt steel in their backyards. Decentralization of production and every little communist mind adding to the process of production. And he thinks that the world was astonished by this Great Leap Forward. I was around for this Great Leap Forward of the 1950s. Some of us were also, and it wasn't the world that was astonished. It was communist fellow travelers who talked up the thing. Well, in any case, he says that Mises was right. So what's the result of that? Well, you just have to say, oops, sorry, we were wrong about the feasibility of socialism. But these intellectual mistakes were taken out of the hides of the people of Soviet Russia and then out of the hides of the people of Poland and Hungary and other countries. So that when the communist system was overturned, huge demonstrations in the streets, Russian cities, 75 years on the road to nowhere. 75 years of deprivation because the world's intellectuals thought that the communist argument was basically sound. So, how do we account then for the fact that those who lionized men like, I don't know if you even know these names, but they were world famous intellectuals, considered liberals by the way. Lionized men like Raymond Aaron, a very banal Cajun, and Isaiah Berlin, pardon me, Sir Isaiah Berlin, a high level popularizer of ideas, who lionized them seriously as important social philosophers, somehow could never bring themselves to familiarize their students with Mises or familiarize themselves with that matter, but to show him the marks of public recognition and respect that were his due. He was, for instance, a never president of the American Economic Association. His salary at NYU was not even paid for by the university. It wouldn't even pay, I mean all they did was provide him with a room for his seminar at NYU. It was paid for by the Volcker Fund, a libertarian leaning foundation in those days. However, Mises did produce a handful of PhD students. They include names like Israel Kursner, Hans Den Holtz, and George Reisman. But similarly to Mises' situation, Hayek's salary at Chicago was paid for by outside sources. His salary at the Committee on Social Thought, where he was my professor, since Hayek could not get a job in the Economics Department of Milton Friedman and George Stigler. He was not a real economist in their view. That's exactly what they held against him. He didn't deal with empirical data and empirically falsifiable theories. So, part of the answer to the great neglect of Mises, I think, lies in what Jacques Rouf, a famous French economist of his day, in a warm tribute called his intransigence. Mises was a complete doctrinaire, not a dogmatist but a doctrinaire, a relentless and implacable fighter for his doctrine. For over 60 years he was at war with the spirit of his age, with every one of the advancing victorious, modish, collectivist political schools left and right. The times that he lived in Central Europe, I try sometimes to imagine what it must have been like for him. There was nobody who could remotely be called a liberal east of the Rhine. There were some semi-liberals in France and Britain and even in America. But he was all alone and he had to face the socialists who considered him some bourgeois apologist, some class enemy, as well as the right wing and especially the Nazis, the rising Nazi movement who attacked him as a Jew. And it never phased him. I mean, George and I knew him when he was still about in his 70s or something, very spry, very alert, all his faculties about him. And he never displayed any trauma, right, any psychological wounds from what would have been, or would have been other people that had been a very daunting early years experience. Decade after decade, Mises fought against militarism, protectionism, inflationism, every variety of socialism, every policy of the interventionist state, and through most of the time he stood alone or close to it. The totality and enduring intensity of Mises' battle could only be fueled from a profound innocence of the truth and supreme value of the ideas that he was struggling for. This, as well as its temperament, one might say, one might admit, produced definite arrogance maybe in its tone or apodictic quality. As some of us in the Mises seminar at NYU called it, using one of his own favorite words, that struck others as very inappropriate. Such arrogance and sense of superiority was the last thing academic left liberals and Democrats could accept in the defender of a view that considered only marginally worthy of toleration to begin with. This would largely account, I think, for the somewhat greater recognition that has been accorded to Friedrich Hayek even before Hayek received his greatly deserved Nobel Prize. Hayek was temperamentally much more moderate in expression than Mises ever was. Hayek preferred, for instance, to avoid the old slogan of laissez-faire. Hayek has said it many times, and people keep saying he was a defender of laissez-faire capitalism and so on. Time and time again he rejected the laissez-faire. He said there's no need to go back to that old extreme point of view. And it is hard to imagine Mises making such a gesture as Hayek did in dedicating the road to serfdom to socialists of all parties. It would be like I ran dedicated Atlas to thugs of every description. But the lack of recognition had deflected Mises not on the least. Instead, he continued his work decade after decade accumulating contributions to economic theory, developing the theoretical structure of the Austrian school, and from his understanding of the laws of economic activity, elaborating, correcting, and bringing up to date the great social philosophy of classical liberalism. I want to mention something that is sometimes forgotten about Mises. He was all his life an ardent student of history. And people think that because he based his economics on an a priori methodology, he had no interest or little interest in history or that history was irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know more history than the whole Chicago school put together. But history was not the way to establish the principles, the theories of economic science. But history was very valuable in other ways. And it was his understanding of economic principles that enabled him to penetrate to the heart of crucial historical questions. And I'll give two examples. A question that has occupied economic historians in recent decades is a question of what is called the European miracle. Why did economic growth occur in the West and not elsewhere in the world? There's an enormous literature devoted to this nowadays, enormous literature. And in one of his essays, it's almost a throwaway line. One of his essays, not even one of the books, Mises identifies the underlying reason for the growth of development of economic welfare in the West compared to the rest of the world. He says, the idea of liberty is and always has been peculiar to the West. The East lacked the primordial thing, the idea of freedom from the state. It never called into question the arbitrariness of the despots. And the East, he means from the Middle East all the way to the Far East. And first of all, it never established the legal framework that would protect the private citizen's wealth against confiscation on the part of tyrants. Now, as I say, there are many economic historians who have developed this economic, this European miracle idea. Rosenblatt and Birdsall and how the West crew were rich. Douglas North won a Nobel Prize, made me for his work in economic history of this kind and many others. And again and again, they point out there are different causes that Europe had favorable geographical position in many ways. However, the root cause and the root difference between Europe and other civilizations was the limitation of the predatory taxation and confiscation policy of governments. The sort of thing that was in the Ottoman Empire, in Persia, in India, in China also, for instance, through long periods, that was standard. The right of, or ancient times in ancient Egypt, the right of the ruler to take private property at will. There were reasons why Europe was different having to do with the feudal system, having to do with the international church and other things. But the fact is that this is what eventuated in Europe, limitations on the predatory taxing and confiscating power of the state. And what I'm saying is that there is this vast literature and it's very interesting and very elaborate, but Mises got to the heart of the matter in just a few sentences. Or take the question of the Industrial Revolution. As Hayek wrote, the myth of the emissary of the working class in the Industrial Revolution is a supreme historical myth of socialism. Hayek edited a little book called Capitalism and the Historians, which is still in print after, I don't know, 50 years or something. University of Chicago Press. And there are a number of good essays there and Hayek has this essay on the historians in capitalism. On history and politics. And he says that this, people, you'd think that people would get their political opinions from philosophy maybe or from economics, certainly. But what seems to be the case is that they mainly get it from history, filtered down from philosophy and economics. But historians then deal with the different periods of history. And they typically approach it in an anti-capitalist way. You consider your own background in history. We had a period that was called the age of the robber barons, didn't we? When you had unfettered capitalism and it went wild and crazy and they stole everything from everybody. And but thankfully the progressive movement and progressive presidents came in and there's a statue of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. Do you have ever seen them? It's a kind of a hard relief of a man taming a wild horse or a big fierce horse. Why is it the Federal Trade Commission? Because that's government regulation taming unfettered capitalism. And so that's part of the interpretation of American history. And then somehow again we had unfettered capitalism in the 1920s and it brought about the Great Depression. And thankfully, there's a God that looks over the fate of the United States of America. We got Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression was cured and capitalism was fettered again. So my point is that this is a basic view that people have of American history and that more than anything else really colors their view, their approach to political questions. Now, and I could say that the greatest of all of these was this myth of the Industrial Revolution and how because of unfettered capitalism, the working class was practically enslaved and reduced to terrible conditions. I don't think that I could work that, that looks complicated. So let me give you some figures. This is the population of England. In 1750, population of England in Wales was 6 million. It had never been more than 6 million in all the history since the time of the ancient Britons. By 1800, the population was 12 million. By 1850, the population was 24 million. By 1900, it was 42 million. And Mises points this out in the similar population figures for most of the West, not France, but for most other countries. The question is, well, first of all, why did this come about? Well, demographers are not sure. There could be various reasons. But certainly one of the consequences was that people had to face the problem. These new tens of millions of people are going to live. And Mises says the solution was the Industrial Revolution. The solution was the factory system, the industrialization of the West that created jobs for all these tens of millions of people. And then, of course, there was a tremendous downward pressure on wages, but they didn't go down as much as they might have and sometimes didn't really go down at all. Simply, there wasn't an increase during certain years in wages. But the end result was that then the working class was in a position to begin enjoying things by the end of the 19th century. Western workers in oil countries, let's say England, for instance, were better off than workers that have ever been in history. They could eat and drink at will. Famines were a thing of the past, although they had existed just a few decades before in England and in other countries. They had insurance policies. They own their own homes sometimes, own their own furniture, savings accounts. And what does this do to? Well, the history books will tell you it's due to the unions. Somehow the unions came in, which were a minute part of the labor force in any western country except Germany, but England, which didn't have the highest economic growth for working class people. But they were a minute part of the working class in England, certainly in the United States. Oregon benevolent government came in and somehow raised living standards, but that doesn't stand up to elementary economic analysis. That's not how real wages are increased for a whole class, for tens of millions of people. And the famous economic historian T.S. Ashton said, if you want to see a country that has experienced a population explosion of the kind that England did, but no industrial revolution, go to Calcutta. Or you could say just go across the channel to Ireland. Right? Ireland didn't have any of these terrible dark satanic mills. Right? They're fouling God's green earth where you might have thought that Jesus warped in the Blake poem. And when the potato crop failed, people starved or immigrated. I'm not saying that the Irish shouldn't have come to America. That's a whole different question. We don't have to get into that. But my point is it's here, you know, people spend so much time talking about this. And here Mises pinpointed what was involved. Industrial revolution took place against the background of an unprecedented population explosion, which explains why it was a benign thing. You don't have to go as far as I did. She was after all a novelist and poetic person. Working people should get down and worship these smokestacks. But what you were saying essentially was true that it was a solution for the survival question of working people. Now, let me just say something a moment. Since I mentioned the treatment before, we're talking about Mises character. I'm going to say something about Mises fabled intolerance. I have a great deal of respect for Milton Friedman. I was at the London meeting of the more tolerant society a few years ago, when I think they just invaded Iraq for the first time and the first George Bush. And not apropos of this in particular, but they had messages or in some cases in-person appearances from their stable of center-right Nobel Prize winners. Gary Becker, Kose and I guess some others. And a recorded statement from Friedman who made it a point to warn against the erosion of civil liberties in any wartime situation. These others, they couldn't be concerned about anything but reducing the capital gains tax, which is an important point, but question of war and peace is at least on the same level. But Friedman was concerned about that. He warned against the rush to war. So as I say, I have a good deal of respect for him. But he has gone on record as saying some very foolish and indefensible things about Mises in connection with Mises methodology. Mises intolerance, allegedly, was due to his methodological doctrine of praxeology. Friedman says, his fundamental idea was that we knew things about human action, the title of his famous book, because we are human beings. As a result, he argued we have absolutely certain knowledge of the motivations of human actions. That's not what Mises said at all, motivations of human actions. And he maintained that we can derive substantive conclusions from that basic knowledge. Facts, statistical or other evidence cannot, he argued, be used to test these conclusions. That philosophy converts an asserted body of substantive conclusions into a religion. And he's not using religion in a favorable sense. Friedman posits this. Supposing two people, Friedman says, who share from Mises' praxeological view, come to contradictory conclusions about anything. How can they reconcile the difference? The only way they can do so is by a purely logical argument. One has to say to the other, you made a mistake in reasoning. And the other has to say, no, you made a mistake in reasoning. Supposing neither believes he has made a mistake in reasoning. The only thing left to do is fight. I don't know what to... Now, Mises, I mean, Friedman said this in some popular article in some libertarian journal. But I'm afraid that he has also repeated this in public. I was on a panel with him years ago at Stanford on the welfare state where, for some reason, these kids from Stanford never heard of Mises. Friedman launches into an attack on Mises' intolerance on this basis. So I don't think it's unfair to hold him to it. So this is one of the problems. Friedman's theory would predict the occurrence of incessant, bloody brawling among mathematicians and logicians, right? Since they maybe don't agree and they would have to fight. But the non-occurrence of which falsifies the theory in Friedman's own positivist terms. Friedman's position also entails that no religious person who felt certain about his religious beliefs could have any principled reason to respect the conflicting religious beliefs of others, which is absurd, which the talk by my friend Laurence Vance should convince you of. Finally, Friedman's explanation of Mises' alleged personal intolerance, even if we want to accept that as a fact, fails to account for the personal tolerance of other practitioners of the a priori method. So that's a really unfortunate episode in Friedman's career as far as I'm concerned. A much more veridical view of Mises' character, you can find on the Mises.org website and their archives. It's an article from the free market from July 2004 by Lou Rockwell called Heart of a Fighter. And that gives you, I think, a much better idea of Mises' character than you'll gather from Friedman. Now, Mises went through a certain personal crisis, not depersonal in the sense of any to do with his personal life, but in his mind because of the world situation and how it conflicted with his own vision. And also he thought out how it has to in the modern world, not just happens to but how it has to. Now, what is the role of economics? Well, he says the people must eventually decide we have democracy no way around that. It is true economists have the duty to inform their fellow men, but what happens if these economists do not measure up to the dialectic task and are pushed aside by demagogues or if the masses lack the intelligence to understand the teachings of the economists? Is the attempt to guide the people on the right road not hopeless? Especially when we recognize that men like John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Harold Lasky and Albert Einstein could not comprehend economic problems. I like that typical Mises' touch of Keynes not being able to comprehend. But he does mention Einstein. Remember reading a pamphlet by Einstein years ago, just a pamphlet entitled Why Socialism? And Einstein's basic reason for socialism is that socialism puts profits ahead of people. As some Mises says, if Einstein can't get any deeper than that, what can you expect from the masses of people? This is an expression of the despair that assailed Mises at the time of the First World War. By what conceivable means could the masses in democratic societies be won for the principles of private property and the free market? This is a problem as the world entered the age of democracy from the middle of the 19th century on that claimed the attention of liberals, in fact, earlier from the time of the French Adilogues at the beginning of the century. Richard Cobden was a great English liberal, a German liberal leader, among those who followed these French writers, the Adilogues, in proposing to use the public education system to instill the principles of sound economics in the masses. Right? I mean, that certainly worked out that way. More generally, it was supposed to be this task of all true liberals to foster public enlightenment in order to forestall popular acceptance of disastrous economic and social policies. I mean, if the majority were in control of the government, what would prevent them simply from confiscating the wealth of anybody richer than they were? Thinking that, you know, so what? So what if they'd followed that principle of confiscating the wealth of any reasonably affluent person we would still be living in grass huts, as Camille Paulius said about something else. You can't have civilization without private property. You can't have civilization on the basis of confiscating the wealth of anybody. It stands a little above the average. Mises considered this problem about using public enlightenment. But he says, we are badly deceived to believe that more schools and lectures, popularization of books and journals could produce the right doctrine. In fact, false doctrines can recruit their followers in the same way. The evil consists precisely in the people's intellectual disqualification to choose the means that lead to the desired objectives. The fact that this is what I think Brian Kaplan deals with in his book, the myth of the uninsured voter. The fact that facile decisions can be foisted upon the people demonstrates that they are incapable of independent judgment. This is precisely the great danger. Mises says, I thus arrived at this hopeless pessimism that for a long time had burdened the best minds of Europe. Mises means by this the best mind, Jacob Burkhardt, called Manger and Max Weber. But what is enlightening and exemplary is how Mises dealt with this pessimistic conclusion. There's a good deal of Albert J. Knox, Isaiah in his response. It must be on the Fee website. It's a great essay by Albert J. Knox, Isaiah's job. Isaiah's job is to not to convert the whole world, but to find and inform the remnant. Mises says, it is a matter of temperament how we shape our lives and the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. He mentions that when in high school he chose a verse of Virgil as a personal motto, you can see it all over the institute, do not yield to the bad but always oppose it with courage. It's not clear psychologically what led Mises to this change of mind, to turn them towards a great positive work to which he devoted the rest of his long life. He said again and again I face situations from which rational deliberations could find no escape, but then something unexpected occurred that brought deliverance. What seems to have happened is that Mises became possessed of an interior courage and led him recklessly and against all odds to fight for the good cause as he saw it. He said I made heavy personal sacrifices although I always foresaw that success would be denied me, but I do not regret that I attempted the impossible. I could not act otherwise. I fought because I could do no other. An obvious self-conscious deliberate echo of Martin Luther's, here I stand, I can do no other. The outcome of this powerful inner resolution is described by Mises. I would not tire in professing what I knew to be right and so I decided to write a book on socialism, which I had contemplated before the war. I now set about executing my plan and the result was his book Socialism. It is a landmark in 20th century social science, a landmark in history of thought. You can find this book in a nice Liberty Press edition with a new essay by Hayek, and the book found it's remnant. Hayek explained in his introduction. When socialism first appeared in 1922, its impact was profound. It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War I. A number of my contemporaries, who later became well-known, but who were then unknown to each other, went through the same experience. Wilhelm Röpke in Germany, Lionel Robbins in England, and Hayek himself. They had been fuzzy-minded socialists, although it's hard to imagine Hayek as a fuzzy-minded socialist, but nonetheless that was their inclination and Mises turned them around. And the message was passed on through the famous Mises Seminar, or the first one in Vienna. Participants over the years included not only Hayek, but Gottfried Habler, Fritz Machlup, Oscar Morgenstern, Eric Fierglen, and others, who went on to achieve fame. Now, I don't want to give the, nobody is infallible, and I don't want to give the impression that Mises was invariably correct. I think Mises was incorrect, unfortunately, importantly incorrect when he defended British imperialism in the 19th century, because it promoted free trade. For instance, in the Opium Wars with China. So he says that that's not even imperialism. If you wage war in order to open up a market, that's not even imperialism. Well, I don't know. The United States was a protectionist country in the later part of the 19th century, and what England had been justified in attacking the United States to open up the American market, or was just a question of the fact that the United States was too strong and China was weak, and that allowed for free trade imperialism. The root of Mises' problem, I think, is his conception, antiseptic, immaculate conception of the state. For him, the state is simply the apparatus of compulsion and coercion. He contemptuously rejects Nietzsche's dictum. The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Finally, something Mises said, Nietzsche says it's sensible. Mises says the state is neither cold nor warm. All human activity is human activity, and its goal is a preservation. All state activity is human activity, not monsters, and its goal is a preservation of society. But what if this state apparatus has a dynamism of its own? For instance, what if imperialism and the military and civilian bureaucracies it brings into being lead to state activism beyond merely assuring free trade? I see that just as Schumpeter's book, there's two essays on imperialism and social classes, are available outside. And Schumpeter wrote, The Evolution of Imperialism, created by wars that required it. The machine now created the wars it required. Which I think is a very profound statement and bears thinking about military apparatuses. Yet none of this appears to entomese his economic calculations. Nor, to take British imperialism as an example, does he consider the effect of British imperialism as a model and spur to expansionist strivings of other nations, above all Germany, with all the baleful consequences that followed it. So, Mises was not perfect in my view anyway, but there's no, I hope I've given an idea that there's no getting away from his greatness. Mises is what could be called a culture hero. Now a culture hero is somebody who has great achievements to his credit, but also a great and heroic character, a fighting character often, a Galileo is considered in that sense a culture hero, or Beethoven who fought against the restrictions on music of his time. But Mises I would say is such a culture hero for me. I've known a great many very smart people in my time, it's one of the best things that's happened to me. Murray of course, Ein, Milton Friedman, Hayek, Bob Nozick and so on, but to my mind no one had ever made this kind of impression that Ludwig von Mises did. Now what I've done is give you the briefest kind of introduction for a mere 40 bucks or so. Right? Yeah. You will soon have available a work of magnificent real grandeur of intellectual history, the life and times of Ludwig von Mises by Professor Giedor Hilsmann. This is the definitive work on von Mises. It's easy enough to find out on Mises' website all the effort Giedor put in. You went to Vienna, you went to Moscow, you went to Grove City, to gather the documents and so on. And it's a huge work also. I was happy to be able to read it in an early draft and now it's funding to come out. It'll be out probably in a few weeks. However, if you do what you're supposed to do and come to the 25th anniversary meeting of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in New York in October, then you'll have the privilege of having Giedor. You can buy the book there and you have the privilege of having Giedor sign it for you. You'll find out about this meeting, it's really going to be fine, it's going to be great. And the Schlarbaum Award, which I was the second recipient after Otto von Hapsburg, the natural progression, Hapsburg, Raco, it'll be given to Bob Higgs. If you followed his work and so on, this guy is becoming a radical. This guy makes Bob Murphy look like a neocon. And it'll be in New York at the Grand Hyatt on 42nd. Pat Barnett is arranging for a bus tour of the places in Manhattan that were important in the lives of Mises and of Murray, including a trip up to Columbia University where Murray's research library was located. And altogether it's going to be a very enjoyable time. Well, thanks very much.