WEBVTT NOTE War, Fear, and Trembling (video) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 The Theory of Money and Credit 2 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:44.520 I have a whole stack of books I want to talk about. 3 00:00:44.520 --> 00:00:51.740 So I think we're going to have to extend the session by an hour. 4 00:00:51.740 --> 00:00:55.560 So I'll let equal time per book. 5 00:00:55.560 --> 00:01:02.980 The first book I want to mention is one I wrote under my pen name, Adam Nicholson. 6 00:01:02.980 --> 00:01:09.320 This is called God's Secretaries, The Making of the King James Bible. 7 00:01:09.320 --> 00:01:17.120 For those of you who don't know about the people who made the King James Bible, I'm 8 00:01:17.120 --> 00:01:22.160 willing to tell you that this was perhaps the only successful committee project of all 9 00:01:22.160 --> 00:01:32.160 I myself regard this version of the Bible as a jewel of the English language. 10 00:01:32.160 --> 00:01:40.160 In fact, it's hard to think of anything that has influenced the language more in the past 400 years. 11 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:45.160 For many people, this was the only book they ever read or knew anything about, 12 00:01:45.160 --> 00:01:50.160 and its phrases have entered the language so widely that most of us are completely unaware 13 00:01:50.160 --> 00:01:58.160 The English language is pervaded by metaphors taken from the King James Version of the Bible. 14 00:01:58.160 --> 00:02:08.160 I actually take offense at these modern translations, recognizing they have their virtues and they may be better as translations and so forth, 15 00:02:08.160 --> 00:02:16.160 but I don't think they'll ever equal the beauty of the poetry of the King James Version. 16 00:02:16.160 --> 00:02:23.160 One of the members of this committee was a man named Lancelot Andrews. 17 00:02:23.160 --> 00:02:33.160 This book of mine, which I've just begun reading, I've only made it to page 33 so far, so I don't know a great deal. 18 00:02:33.160 --> 00:02:44.160 But it's clear that one of the main characters of this book will be Lancelot Andrews, and Andrews was clearly a fascinating man. 19 00:02:44.160 --> 00:02:54.160 I identified with him immediately when I encountered the description that he could speak 15 modern languages and 6 ancient, 20 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:00.160 but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. 21 00:03:00.160 --> 00:03:06.160 Except that I don't know any of those languages. 22 00:03:06.160 --> 00:03:11.160 He and I, I feel, have much in common. 23 00:03:11.160 --> 00:03:23.160 But in 1603, Andrews, who was the Dean of Winchester, he was a high official in the clergy of the Church of England, 24 00:03:23.160 --> 00:03:29.160 he preached a sermon, and what I really want to tell you is one of the things he said. 25 00:03:29.160 --> 00:03:36.160 The sermon was basically railing against the inclination of so many people in Jacobean, England, 26 00:03:36.160 --> 00:03:46.160 to be innovative, to be doing new things, to be forsaking the ways and traditions of their forebears. 27 00:03:46.160 --> 00:03:53.160 And this seemed to Andrews to be a scandalous thing, and so he preached mightily against it. 28 00:03:53.160 --> 00:04:05.160 One of the things he said is, what could be more wicked than the idea of being an author, let alone witty? 29 00:04:05.160 --> 00:04:13.160 So, I'm going to try to bear that in mind in case I'm ever tempted to be witty. 30 00:04:15.160 --> 00:04:25.160 Last year when I spoke to you at the book session, I mentioned that a book called Rethinking Green was going to be published pretty soon. 31 00:04:25.160 --> 00:04:30.160 And it was. And so I just want you to know that this book is available. 32 00:04:30.160 --> 00:04:59.160 If you have any interest at all in environmental policy making, and you may have an interest, not because you're an environmentalist, but perhaps because you recognize that in various guises, environmentalism is one of the principal forms in which the forces that oppose what most of us in this room face, 33 00:04:59.160 --> 00:05:08.160 are expressing themselves and gaining public policies to implement their views. 34 00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:13.160 We don't have to worry too much about organized communism anymore, 35 00:05:13.160 --> 00:05:18.160 but in some ways the environmental movement, the green movement, 36 00:05:18.160 --> 00:05:25.160 has simply replaced the reds with greens to somewhat similar effects. 37 00:05:25.160 --> 00:05:39.160 So, the authors in this book are all at pains to, I'm only the editor here with Carl Close of this book, so I wrote the introduction and nothing more. 38 00:05:39.160 --> 00:05:53.160 They're all at pains to demonstrate both the failings of current environmental policies and alternatives by which desirable objectives might be achieved 39 00:05:53.160 --> 00:05:56.160 through private property and the market. 40 00:05:56.160 --> 00:06:07.160 So, if you have an interest in this field, I encourage you to have a look at Rethinking Green, Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy. 41 00:06:07.160 --> 00:06:16.160 Now, I'll tell you about several books that have been published in the past year. 42 00:06:16.160 --> 00:06:41.160 The first one is called Resurgence of the Warfare State, subtitled The Crisis Since 9-11, and this consists of my own writing, and is an odd book, it's unlike anything I ever put forth as a book before. 43 00:06:41.160 --> 00:06:55.160 Right after 9-11, I was contacted by a number of journalists who were familiar with my work on the growth of government and particularly my book Crisis in Leviathan. 44 00:06:55.160 --> 00:07:10.160 And they recognized that what had happened on 9-11 might trigger a kind of crisis that would set in train the same sort of spurt in the growth of government 45 00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:28.160 I had documented, many people had documented, having taken place in connection with the World Wars and the Great Depression and to some extent lesser national emergencies as well in U.S. history. 46 00:07:28.160 --> 00:07:33.160 And so I did respond to these journalists in various ways. 47 00:07:33.160 --> 00:07:50.160 I was invited to write things and for the most part I simply took it upon myself from time to time to express my views about what was being done by the U.S. government in response to the events of 9-11. 48 00:07:50.160 --> 00:08:20.160 And so the book puts between covers here about three and a half years worth of what I had to say from time to time about what I take to be the utter immorality and idiocy of the U.S. government's response to 9-11 and if you're interested in that subject and I think you should be because it poses a great threat to our freedoms 49 00:08:20.160 --> 00:08:47.160 of Mankind, I think, the way it's unfolding, then it affects us all, so this was one man's attempt to at least to show that not everybody stood by and just allowed these terrible things to be done without protest. 50 00:08:50.160 --> 00:08:58.160 The next book I want to mention is another edited volume by Carl Close and me. 51 00:08:58.160 --> 00:09:04.160 It's called The Challenge of Liberty, Classical Liberalism Today. 52 00:09:04.160 --> 00:09:14.160 And like the book I mentioned, Rethinking Green, this book also consists entirely, 53 00:09:14.160 --> 00:09:24.160 Except for the introduction that Carl and I wrote of articles first published in the Independent Review. 54 00:09:24.160 --> 00:09:29.160 I don't know who brought this, but it's a good show and tell too. 55 00:09:29.160 --> 00:09:35.160 It's the cover of the current issue of the journal, the Independent Review. 56 00:09:35.160 --> 00:09:41.160 Many of you know about this journal and many of you in fact have written for it or refereed for it 57 00:09:41.160 --> 00:09:55.160 I want to say thank you again. Making a journal successful is a definite group enterprise. 58 00:09:55.160 --> 00:10:03.160 No matter how hard an editor works, an editor is nothing without raw material and people to help. 59 00:10:03.160 --> 00:10:10.160 I appreciate all the help that so many of you have given to me over the years. 60 00:10:10.160 --> 00:10:22.160 The General is now 10 years old, we're working now on the 11th year, and I think along the way we've managed to put out some pretty good stuff. 61 00:10:22.160 --> 00:10:31.160 Much of it is here in The Challenge of Liberty, and some of these authors are very well known. 62 00:10:31.160 --> 00:10:44.160 John Buchanan for example, Anthony DeGiasse, others not so well known but wrote nice pieces for the journal. 63 00:10:44.160 --> 00:10:55.160 Tom Sawes has a nice article here, Charles Rowley, Dan Klein, many others whose names are familiar to you. 64 00:10:55.160 --> 00:11:21.160 And what we tried to do in this book was to show that classical liberalism is not just some moldy thing, some doctrine that was espoused by people in the 18th and 19th centuries and then passed away to sit on the shelves of libraries unread, but classical liberalism is a living doctrine. 65 00:11:21.160 --> 00:11:30.160 It was not refuted. It was simply ignored for a long time, and it's very much alive. 66 00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:44.160 In the introduction, Carl and I, among other things, I think, bring back Mises as perhaps the leading figure of classical liberalism in the 20th century. 67 00:11:44.160 --> 00:11:52.160 And that too, I think, comes as actual news to many people. They don't even know about Mises. 68 00:11:52.160 --> 00:12:01.160 Many people who write in political science and political philosophy nowadays have no idea of even who Mises was. 69 00:12:01.160 --> 00:12:10.160 They've never read anything by him. Even though I was trained in economics when I went to school, I was never assigned anything by Mises. 70 00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:17.080 and I'm sure that that's still the case today unfortunately so we we have 71 00:12:17.080 --> 00:12:23.340 attempted here to demonstrate not just to say look we think classical liberalism 72 00:12:23.340 --> 00:12:27.880 holds great promise there's a meat in this book and I think it shows that 73 00:12:27.880 --> 00:12:37.040 classical liberalism is a living vital doctrine that is worthy of anybody's 74 00:12:37.040 --> 00:12:44.000 There's intellectual attention, and so I recommend that book to you. 75 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:51.400 Now I just got here this morning, I don't know if Joe Siemens is here yet, but you back 76 00:12:51.400 --> 00:12:52.400 there Joe? 77 00:12:52.400 --> 00:12:54.920 I see him in the back. 78 00:12:54.920 --> 00:12:59.600 He talked to Joe about another book I have coming out next month. 79 00:12:59.600 --> 00:13:06.100 He tells me it's coming out, and I trust him. 80 00:13:06.100 --> 00:13:11.660 And I also trust him to tell me what's in it, because this book is in the Czech language, 81 00:13:11.660 --> 00:13:19.020 and I don't read that language, and so, as I told Joe at one point, I mean, this could 82 00:13:19.020 --> 00:13:28.060 actually be the history of Donald Duck, and I'd never know. 83 00:13:28.060 --> 00:13:38.060 But for all of you who read Czech language, I have a book coming out in Prague next month, I think. 84 00:13:38.060 --> 00:13:48.060 Now one I'm a little more certain about, and I don't have the book to show you, and it's slated for publication at the end of April, 85 00:13:48.060 --> 00:13:58.060 is different from anything I've mentioned so far and this one is being published by Oxford University Press 86 00:13:58.060 --> 00:14:05.060 and it's called Depression War and Cold War Studies in Political Economy 87 00:14:05.060 --> 00:14:13.060 and that's what the cover is going to look like at least, so you can look for that. 88 00:14:13.060 --> 00:14:29.060 I'm rather interested in this book compared to the others I've written in recent years because I've done several collections of articles and edited volumes and things of that sort. 89 00:14:29.060 --> 00:14:35.060 This book from Oxford is a meteor book. 90 00:14:35.060 --> 00:14:44.060 It consists of ten chapters, all of which were in some form previously published. 91 00:14:44.060 --> 00:14:51.060 Everything has been redone for this book and integrated so that it's all part of a coherent book. 92 00:14:51.060 --> 00:15:02.060 These papers are, in a sense, among my more serious follow-ups to Crisis and Leviathan. 93 00:15:02.060 --> 00:15:09.060 I complain sometimes that people think, you know, this guy Higgs, what did he ever do? 94 00:15:09.060 --> 00:15:14.060 Well, he wrote a book. He wrote a book called Crisis and Leviathan. That's what he did. 95 00:15:14.060 --> 00:15:20.060 Well, it's true I did that, but I've done other things, believe it or not. 96 00:15:20.060 --> 00:15:35.060 And I don't think they're all just trivial, and so I hope this book will show that after Crisis and Leviathan I continued to do some worthwhile work in this area. 97 00:15:35.060 --> 00:15:44.060 It deals with such topics as why the Great Depression lasted so long, far longer than in any other country. 98 00:15:44.060 --> 00:16:09.060 What the relationship was between the end of the depression and World War II, there's a received doctrine that says the war ended the depression, and I have long disputed that and tried to clarify in what sense, if any, the war may be taken to have ended the depression. 99 00:16:09.060 --> 00:16:19.060 And so there's a number of chapters on the nature of the war economy during World War II. 100 00:16:19.060 --> 00:16:26.060 This has been held up for a long time as the prime validation of the vulgar Keynesian model. 101 00:16:26.060 --> 00:16:34.060 And I think it's anything but that, and so I'm at pains here to demonstrate 102 00:16:34.060 --> 00:16:45.060 I don't know exactly why that's a bankrupt view, even though it's held to this day, not only by general public, but by most economists. 103 00:16:45.060 --> 00:16:53.060 I think still, I see it every time I open books that have anything to do with this, people are asserting the war ended the Depression. 104 00:16:53.060 --> 00:16:59.060 Just as if it's as obvious as anything can be. 105 00:16:59.060 --> 00:17:20.060 So, I deal a lot with the war economy. I think it's been totally misunderstood and this is a good topic for an Austrian because it's been misunderstood for the same reasons that people misunderstood the socialist calculation problem, basically. 106 00:17:20.060 --> 00:17:31.060 They just didn't know what was a meaningful number, basically. 107 00:17:31.060 --> 00:17:43.060 People look at the reduction of the unemployment rate in World War II, or the rise in measured GDP, and they think prosperity, and they're wrong. 108 00:17:43.060 --> 00:18:02.060 The second five chapters in this book are about the Cold War period and in different ways analyze what that involved in terms of the relationship between the war economy and the rest of the economy. 109 00:18:02.060 --> 00:18:15.060 and deal with things like the nature of business fluctuations, even the dating of business cycles is altered if we get more serious about the role of the war economy. 110 00:18:15.060 --> 00:18:29.060 And I take up questions of the profitability of big defense contractors and the role of public opinion in sustaining high levels of military spending and a number of other things. 111 00:18:29.060 --> 00:18:39.060 So, I hope you will have a look at Depression War and Cold War when it comes out, should be available in May. 112 00:18:39.060 --> 00:18:41.060 Thank you very much.