WEBVTT NOTE Mises Institute Publications 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Unfortunately, Mr. Denson couldn't be with us today to talk a little bit about his book, 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:11.000 but let me just tell you something about the origins of that book. 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:18.000 The title is A Century of War, and it's about, I think it's about maybe 200 pages, something like this. 4 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 It began in a lecture he gave at the Mises Institute, and we published as a monograph, 5 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:32.500 and put it online, but it was a hard copy and online and everybody was downloading it online. 6 00:00:32.500 --> 00:00:43.000 It's a wonderful sort of sweeping and a single lengthy essay, it's a sweeping account of the relationship between the rise of war and the rise of big government and the decline of freedom. 7 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:53.000 And if you've heard John speak, he has just a wonderful mastery of the historical detail and he's not an academic, 8 00:00:53.000 --> 00:01:00.320 He's an attorney and currently a judge, but in some ways it's a wonderful thing because 9 00:01:00.320 --> 00:01:06.000 it frees him up to just look at everything completely in a sort of fresh way without 10 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:09.840 having to worry about colleagues breathing down his neck, you know. 11 00:01:09.840 --> 00:01:15.800 So you get a really beautiful story in his writings, and this one essay illustrates that 12 00:01:15.800 --> 00:01:17.080 very well. 13 00:01:17.080 --> 00:01:21.960 Well, we ran out of the hard copy, which is an intriguing thing, you know. 14 00:01:21.960 --> 00:01:26.720 This is an essay that you can download from the website and it's about, I don't know, 15 00:01:26.720 --> 00:01:29.920 maybe it's 20 pages or something like that. Anybody can download it. Well, we began to 16 00:01:29.920 --> 00:01:37.480 offer it online and they all sold very quickly. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the 17 00:01:37.480 --> 00:01:41.480 relationship between online and offline copy here in a minute. So we ran out of those copies 18 00:01:41.480 --> 00:01:45.000 and we thought, well, if we're going to reprint it, let's just put it in a book together with 19 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:50.720 some of his other essays. And he's written some wonderful material on the origins of 20 00:01:50.720 --> 00:02:17.720 about the Civil War, and we're talking about pioneering stuff here, and World War I and World War II, about how a state can bring about a war, well, can desire a war, but have to overcome the obstacle of public resistance, and the best way to overcome that is by getting the enemy to fire the first shot. 21 00:02:17.720 --> 00:02:26.720 So he's written a series of studies using this little sort of motif to re-understand American history in a way that's very surprising and interesting. 22 00:02:26.720 --> 00:02:31.720 So these essays are in there as well, and also some reflections on current literature. 23 00:02:31.720 --> 00:02:37.720 So altogether it makes a wonderful little package, and that will probably be available in a couple of months. 24 00:02:37.720 --> 00:02:49.720 And let me just, before I go on with some of the other projects we have here, talk a little bit about the relationship between online and offline texts. 25 00:02:49.720 --> 00:02:57.720 Now, you'll notice that in the last few days we've come out with this new book by Jesus Huerta de Soto. 26 00:02:57.720 --> 00:03:03.720 It's called Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, if you saw it out there. 27 00:03:03.720 --> 00:03:05.720 Does everybody know about this book? Have you been reading about it? 28 00:03:05.720 --> 00:03:07.160 Okay, it's all the rage. 29 00:03:07.160 --> 00:03:08.900 It's the new happening thing. 30 00:03:08.900 --> 00:03:13.900 It's about 900 pages, so it's very large. 31 00:03:16.160 --> 00:03:18.760 An undergraduate wrote me recently, 32 00:03:18.760 --> 00:03:20.120 he was in the second year of economics, 33 00:03:20.120 --> 00:03:22.480 and he said, gosh, I'm not sure that I really need 34 00:03:22.480 --> 00:03:26.920 some huge treatise on fiduciary media, Roman law, 35 00:03:27.840 --> 00:03:30.840 the origins of banking in the Middle Ages, 36 00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:40.280 You know, detailed comic critiques of fractional reserve theory, I mean, is this really necessary? 37 00:03:40.280 --> 00:03:46.680 But I told him, I said, look, this is absolutely essential for you, because let's say you have 38 00:03:46.680 --> 00:03:55.720 an economics professor who is sort of dismissing Austrian economics as a theory not worthy of 39 00:03:55.720 --> 00:03:56.720 his consideration. 40 00:03:56.720 --> 00:04:03.640 I have to just walk up with this enormous book, which is huge, big, thick, huge thing, heavy, 41 00:04:03.640 --> 00:04:08.960 and say, oh, would you like to see my new book I'm reading on money, bank, credit, and 42 00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:09.960 business cycles? 43 00:04:09.960 --> 00:04:15.240 It's very large, and it's quite an undertaking, and I'd be glad to let you borrow it any time. 44 00:04:15.240 --> 00:04:21.040 And so I explained to him that this has a great psychological impact on a professor 45 00:04:21.040 --> 00:04:26.600 who hasn't done any reading in years, you know, a ten-year-old professor, and so he'll 46 00:04:26.600 --> 00:04:30.360 And somehow I get the impression that my students are, could it be that my students are even 47 00:04:30.360 --> 00:04:35.000 more advanced than I am, and I can't even conceive of sitting down and reading such a 48 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:36.000 huge book, you know. 49 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.920 And from then on, you know, the kid gets straight A's, he's left alone, and that's it, so. 50 00:04:40.920 --> 00:04:45.000 In any case, this book, we're hoping that this book is not just going to serve that 51 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:50.480 purpose but is going to be a very lasting contribution to literature, and I don't think 52 00:04:50.480 --> 00:04:56.080 there's any doubt that it's going to take half a decade or a decade or two for it to 53 00:04:56.080 --> 00:05:06.080 A Treatise on this level doesn't come out very often, and when it does, it takes a while to take hold, so it's very exciting. 54 00:05:06.080 --> 00:05:15.080 Guido Holzman is always reminding us that theory is very, very difficult to write and very difficult to sort of originate, 55 00:05:15.080 --> 00:05:19.080 and history is easier in general from his point of view as a theoretician, 56 00:05:19.080 --> 00:05:49.080 and there are many other kinds of scholarship that are slightly easier but writing pure theory is very difficult and that's why we so rarely see a big treatise of pure theory and that's really what this is but also integrates with Roman law and you know there was parts of it that I wanted to excerpt on the website for a day of the article but you know it's very detailed and very systematic and super super scholarly with lots of footnotes and I wasn't quite sure so what we did instead is we just put the whole 57 00:05:49.080 --> 00:05:52.080 and the whole book up online the same day we began to offer it for sale. 58 00:05:52.080 --> 00:05:54.080 It's up there, you can go to it. 59 00:05:54.080 --> 00:06:00.080 Look under the study guide and up comes a PDF file, very fast, of 900 pages. 60 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:02.080 And you're welcome to sit and read it. 61 00:06:02.080 --> 00:06:06.080 And we encourage everybody to do so. 62 00:06:06.080 --> 00:06:10.080 And the advantage of this, of course, is that, well, there's many advantages. 63 00:06:10.080 --> 00:06:12.080 One is it gets the word out. 64 00:06:12.080 --> 00:06:16.080 But you look at it and you think, you know, maybe I do just need to order this. 65 00:06:16.080 --> 00:06:20.080 And sure enough, many people have bought the book and it's just great. 66 00:06:20.080 --> 00:06:26.080 You know, to have a book like that online as well as in your bookshelf is a wonderful thing, 67 00:06:26.080 --> 00:06:31.080 especially if you're writing papers, because we all sort of live and work in different places. 68 00:06:31.080 --> 00:06:34.080 We have home, we have office, we have our cars, you know. 69 00:06:34.080 --> 00:06:38.080 The book is not always where you want it to be, the Internet is. 70 00:06:38.080 --> 00:06:43.080 So if you remember a passage, you can go to the online resource, you can copy and paste out of that text, 71 00:06:43.080 --> 00:06:55.080 The online copy enhances the value of the offline copy and the other way around too. 72 00:06:55.080 --> 00:07:06.080 There are many people who don't understand the new media who are somehow hardly panicked about this. 73 00:07:06.080 --> 00:07:13.080 And for some reason, these same people are very concerned about issues of copyright, and they're just obsessed about this. 74 00:07:13.080 --> 00:07:20.080 I don't know, I'm really just about fed up. I mean, it's a very narrow, uncreative way to think. 75 00:07:20.080 --> 00:07:27.080 You know, don't we need to not give people information they desperately desire, even if we can do so for free, 76 00:07:27.080 --> 00:07:33.080 because then that would somehow prevent us from squeezing that last dime out of them, you know, 77 00:07:33.080 --> 00:07:36.080 which we feel like they should pay us. 78 00:07:36.080 --> 00:07:39.080 I mean, this is really the mentality that goes on here. 79 00:07:39.080 --> 00:07:43.080 And really, I think the fallacy here is you're really underestimating your market. 80 00:07:43.080 --> 00:07:49.080 And I can tell you, you know, ever since the age of the Web came about, 81 00:07:49.080 --> 00:07:55.080 we've discovered that the Austrian School is not a small school. 82 00:07:55.080 --> 00:07:59.080 Austrian libertarianism is not just a small group of people 83 00:07:59.080 --> 00:08:02.080 just adding one or two members every year. 84 00:08:02.080 --> 00:08:06.080 This is a massive international movement that is growing all the time. 85 00:08:06.080 --> 00:08:18.080 The Mises Institute website is, I'm quite certain, the largest, most heavily trafficked non-profit research institute site of its kind anywhere in the world. 86 00:08:18.080 --> 00:08:28.080 And we compete very closely with large commercial ventures like The Economist magazine, and we beat the World Bank and the Federal Reserve and the IMF. 87 00:08:28.080 --> 00:08:39.280 You know, this is a very large movement, and we're doing our job and we get the word out in whatever way we can. 88 00:08:39.280 --> 00:08:46.480 So that means print, offline, online, offline, any way we possibly can, podcasting, we want to do it all. 89 00:08:46.480 --> 00:08:57.680 And if we can do it at zero price, as you pretty much can do, well, that's not really true, but I want to go into that, online, then that's all to the good. 90 00:08:57.680 --> 00:09:27.680 Some other books we have coming out in the near future, we're putting together the Libertarian Forum and a two-volume paperback volume that's been online for a long time, you can download it, and this is a case where truly having the book in your hand is a wonderful advantage, I can tell you, mainly because these are eight, sometimes eight, sixteen-page issues that, you know, you go to page one and it continues to page three and then you go back, you know, like that, like in the old days when they used to do this kind of stuff. 91 00:09:27.680 --> 00:09:35.180 So it's very difficult, you have to print it out, so we're offering that whole thing in book form very soon. 92 00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:45.180 Other publishing projects we have in the future, a vast collection of Rothbard's theoretical work, applications and criticisms, 93 00:09:45.180 --> 00:09:51.180 a kind of an elaboration of Man Economy and State, that could be anywhere between 900 and 1,000 pages. 94 00:09:51.180 --> 00:10:21.180 It's going to be called Economic Controversies, and a book by Mises of essays written in the interwar period on, in which, well, let me put it this way, for many years, I think many of us have been under the impression somehow that Mises didn't write anything on business cycles between 1912, where there was just the sort of a kernel of a theory, and then Human Action. This is not true at all. 95 00:10:21.180 --> 00:10:28.180 I have some idea that Hayek did all the business cycle work in the interwar period and predicted the Great Depression, which is true. 96 00:10:28.180 --> 00:10:35.180 He didn't do all the work. Mises wrote a vast amount, but it didn't get translated until 1978. 97 00:10:35.180 --> 00:10:42.180 And then when it was translated and published, it was not in a form that was readily available. 98 00:10:42.180 --> 00:11:02.180 These are wonderful essays, very powerful stuff, where Mises all throughout the late 20s is warning about the consequences of inflationary monetary policy and not in the sense that it's going to cause prices to rise but it distorts the structure of production and we're going to see any collapse and it's going to sneak up on us very quickly. 99 00:11:02.180 --> 00:11:06.180 and not only did he anticipate what was going to happen in a few years down the road, 100 00:11:06.180 --> 00:11:10.180 but he also anticipated what the typical policy response would be 101 00:11:10.180 --> 00:11:15.180 and argued against the New Deal long before there was a New Deal. 102 00:11:15.180 --> 00:11:19.180 So it's just incredibly great. 103 00:11:19.180 --> 00:11:23.180 It's tragic that these essays didn't appear in English at all until 1978. 104 00:11:23.180 --> 00:11:29.180 They were all published in German. They were very famous until Mises was forced out of Vienna. 105 00:11:29.180 --> 00:11:35.740 but they've not been well known in English and I reread the other day 106 00:11:35.740 --> 00:11:40.460 where we were going through this manuscript the Nobel Prize which Hayek 107 00:11:40.460 --> 00:11:45.940 received so justly but they specifically named his work on business cycles as 108 00:11:45.940 --> 00:11:50.260 his preeminent contribution and his anticipation of the Great Depression 109 00:11:50.260 --> 00:11:57.020 well and that's wonderful but Hayek learned from Mises and Mises too wrote 110 00:11:57.020 --> 00:12:03.420 about this subject, and did so brilliantly. So that's coming out, and the 111 00:12:03.420 --> 00:12:10.060 name of the book is The Causes of the Economic Crisis and other essays before 112 00:12:10.060 --> 00:12:13.720 and after the Great Depression. It'll be, I forget now how many pages, 250, 113 00:12:13.720 --> 00:12:19.940 something like that. For a New Liberty, Rothbard's book, you know, this is a book 114 00:12:19.940 --> 00:12:38.940 The book that founded the, in many ways, was the founding manifesto of the American libertarian movement and it's a very interesting case because I guess Rothbard had an article in the New York Times discussing the new libertarianism and why it's different from right and left. 115 00:12:38.940 --> 00:12:53.540 Actually, in many ways, the modern libertarian movement was founded as a response to Nixon's egregious economic policies and price and wage controls, and the collapse of the gold standard. 116 00:12:53.540 --> 00:13:03.440 And so it was a very strong argument that conservatism and republicanism, as we've known it, is not going to guarantee, is not going to protect your liberty, and we need something completely new. 117 00:13:03.440 --> 00:13:17.440 So Rothbard wrote this in New York Times, a publisher contacted him, asked him to write up a complete treatise, it was the one and only large commercial, how do you say, commission that Rothbard ever really received. 118 00:13:17.440 --> 00:13:32.440 But instead of writing a watered-down treatise designed to appeal to the broadest possible numbers, he wrote a very tough-minded piece of scholarship that covers philosophy and history and American politics and everything else. 119 00:13:32.440 --> 00:13:38.440 And there is something in there for everybody to dislike, I promise you. 120 00:13:38.440 --> 00:13:42.440 But it's great. The book just rattles you to your very core. 121 00:13:42.440 --> 00:13:46.440 And it hasn't been available for a long time. 122 00:13:46.440 --> 00:13:50.440 You know, we were just discussing outside a little bit ago 123 00:13:50.440 --> 00:13:54.440 how absolutely important it is for us to be able to have our ideas out there. 124 00:13:54.440 --> 00:13:56.440 That's the only weapon we have. 125 00:13:56.440 --> 00:14:01.440 We have a lot of brilliant people who have written some very powerful things. 126 00:14:01.440 --> 00:14:08.440 and doesn't do any good for anybody unless you can find them, unless they're available, unless they're circulating. 127 00:14:08.440 --> 00:14:13.440 So it's absolutely critical that we do this. This is pretty much everything we do. 128 00:14:13.440 --> 00:14:17.440 I mean, we want to get the ideas out there and as Mises believed and we believe here, 129 00:14:17.440 --> 00:14:25.440 that the right ideas alive in the culture are going to transform a society. 130 00:14:25.440 --> 00:14:29.440 And we have to believe that and we do believe that. 131 00:14:29.440 --> 00:14:42.440 and so that's why publishing is the most important thing and let us never forget too that time marches forward and there's always a new generation that has to be re-taught and rediscovered things. 132 00:14:42.440 --> 00:14:54.440 We find this out all the time. I don't know how many of you have been on the Mises chat room but there's a lot of young people there who have limited exposure to literature but they're very anxious to learn. 133 00:14:54.440 --> 00:15:00.940 I've made a passing reference in one discussion I was having with somebody to the book Brave New World. 134 00:15:00.940 --> 00:15:05.940 He said, oh, well, that's very interesting. Who wrote that? And where can I get it? 135 00:15:05.940 --> 00:15:09.940 You know, so sort of taken aback, you know, who doesn't know about Brave New World? 136 00:15:09.940 --> 00:15:14.940 But there's always a new generation and people need to be reintroduced to these ideas 137 00:15:14.940 --> 00:15:16.940 and literature has to be available for them. 138 00:15:16.940 --> 00:15:23.940 It's absolutely heartbreaking when any of our wonderful, one of the treasures of Austrian literature 139 00:15:23.940 --> 00:15:40.500 Literature becomes unavailable as has happened in a number of cases, Henry Hazlitt is a case in point, we all adore his work, it's very sad that some of his books are not available and we're doing whatever we can to assist with this. 140 00:15:40.500 --> 00:15:47.500 I should say something about the, so we're in a publishing boom right now, the Institute is, 141 00:15:47.500 --> 00:15:56.500 partially made possible by technological changes that have made it more financially feasible for us to do this, 142 00:15:56.500 --> 00:16:09.500 but also absolutely critical in this work has been our donors who have also seen the importance of our publishing program 143 00:16:09.500 --> 00:16:14.940 Program and are assisting us to underwrite these projects so that we can make them affordable. 144 00:16:14.940 --> 00:16:20.060 You know, Ed Stringham's book, Ed, how much is your book? 145 00:16:20.060 --> 00:16:21.060 $110. 146 00:16:21.060 --> 00:16:23.780 Yeah, $110. 147 00:16:23.780 --> 00:16:28.860 And I remember when we published, when a publisher put out Rothbard's History of Economic Thought 148 00:16:28.860 --> 00:16:32.660 initially, it was totally, it was completely unaffordable. 149 00:16:32.660 --> 00:16:37.460 One of the reasons that these publishers can get away with this is that they face a kind 150 00:17:07.460 --> 00:17:37.460 One of the reasons of what the economics of the book publishing industry requires of them is because there are donors who are very interested and understand the importance of the thriving of good ideas in a culture that we've been able to undertake the kind of publishing projects we're doing and we're able to put out this De Soto book. Right now it's available for $45 and it's a wonderful book, beautiful production values in every way. The Scholar's Edition of Human Action is very low-priced. 151 00:17:37.460 --> 00:17:52.460 And it's true for all of these projects, and it's made only possible because people are willing to underwrite them for us and assist in making them available to students. 152 00:17:52.460 --> 00:18:02.460 Okay, my time is up, but let me say something about other things that we're doing. 153 00:18:02.460 --> 00:18:15.460 I've talked a lot about the new Mises Institute bow tie, and this is a very important topic. 154 00:18:15.460 --> 00:18:23.240 You know, bow ties aren't for everybody, and this one was six months in design, please 155 00:18:23.240 --> 00:18:25.660 look at it, just appreciate it, if you're not going to buy it, it's fine, just go out 156 00:18:25.660 --> 00:18:26.660 and appreciate it. 157 00:18:26.660 --> 00:18:29.160 This is a thing of great beauty. 158 00:18:29.160 --> 00:18:34.360 When we put it together, the idea was that we would do a bow tie that not only reflected 159 00:18:34.360 --> 00:18:41.200 Mises' heritage and history and his family, so you can see the detail on the crest is 160 00:18:41.200 --> 00:18:42.200 absolutely beautiful. 161 00:18:42.200 --> 00:18:43.600 You can see the little ten commandments and everything. 162 00:18:43.600 --> 00:18:45.120 It's just great. 163 00:18:45.120 --> 00:18:49.120 The colors are perfect, but I was thinking that we wanted to create a tie that would 164 00:18:49.120 --> 00:18:55.140 be the kind of tie that you would look in your wardrobe and say that this one was stood 165 00:18:55.140 --> 00:18:57.400 out above all the rest. 166 00:18:57.400 --> 00:19:01.000 The goal was to create the most beautiful tie you've ever seen. 167 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:04.440 And not just another institutional tie, oh, Mises Institute tie. 168 00:19:04.440 --> 00:19:05.440 No, not that. 169 00:19:05.440 --> 00:19:08.600 It's going to be great, and sure enough, it turned out just great. 170 00:19:08.600 --> 00:19:13.320 So now, just last night, I was wearing a bow tie, 171 00:19:13.320 --> 00:19:15.600 and I took my son to his baseball practice, 172 00:19:15.600 --> 00:19:18.200 and it was his first baseball practice, and the coach... 173 00:19:18.200 --> 00:19:21.200 There is a coach personality. 174 00:19:21.200 --> 00:19:24.120 I don't know if you know this, but there's a coach thing. 175 00:19:24.120 --> 00:19:26.200 And anyway, I said to the coach, I had to leave, 176 00:19:26.200 --> 00:19:31.700 I said, Coach, I'm so sorry that I can't assist you this year in coaching, you know, the team. 177 00:19:31.700 --> 00:19:36.200 And, you know, he stood back a little bit and he looked me up and down like that. 178 00:19:36.200 --> 00:19:41.200 He said, well, that's fine, really. That's fine. Don't worry about it. 179 00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:49.200 And I thought later, did he think that because I was wearing a bow tie that I somehow could not coach? 180 00:19:49.200 --> 00:19:56.200 So, I went back to the practice later, and, true, this is what he was yelling to the boys. 181 00:19:56.200 --> 00:20:06.200 He said, boys, you need to hustle out there. You look weak. They're going to start calling us the bow ties, if you're not careful. 182 00:20:06.200 --> 00:20:11.200 That's what he said. There's a coach way. 183 00:20:11.200 --> 00:20:18.200 Well, I'll leave you with that. If you have any other questions about publishing or any of our projects, please ask. 184 00:20:18.200 --> 00:20:22.200 We all love to talk about the subject, so thank you very much.