WEBVTT NOTE Practicing Law in Light of Rothbard 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 First of all, I want to thank Joseph Salerno for putting this panel on as early as he did. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:16.000 If Murray Rothbard would have been on the panel, he would have refused to appear, 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:22.000 because nothing happened before 12 o'clock in his life. 4 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:28.000 In my life, things do not start before 10.30 typically, 5 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:36.000 But since I'm not Murray Rothbard, I had to just accept the discipline that was imposed on me. 6 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:48.000 The reason why I ended up on the panel is also not quite clear to me, because I'm the only non-lawyer. 7 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:54.000 So I ended up here like the virgin with a child. 8 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:05.000 But I want to use the opportunity to make a plea for the study of law. 9 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:22.000 You're all probably aware of the fact that Walter Block promotes that people should go to graduate school in economics and then become an economics professor. 10 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:38.000 So that might be good for some people who go through the painful experience of graduate school in economics and who don't mind learning lots of useless things. 11 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:50.000 But there are other alternatives and I want to briefly say something about another alternative and also give you some historical reasons why I suggest this alternative. 12 00:01:50.000 --> 00:02:02.000 So, I think for many people, especially those who are afraid of the mass requirements that are necessary to go through graduate school in economics, 13 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:19.000 that what you should do instead as an undergraduate, take courses in philosophy, in politics and history, 14 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:37.000 and programs that are offered for instance by Oxford University. You get a broad interdisciplinary education. You take economics classes, but undergraduate economics classes. 15 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:50.000 In my classes, economics is far more sober as a discipline on the undergraduate level, especially if you concentrate on microeconomics. 16 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:59.000 And once you are finished with that, which in this education you can get basically at any type of university, 17 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:03.000 you have to just pick your particular teachers, 18 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:10.000 When you have some solid grounding of elementary economics, then you should go, then you might want to consider studying law, and economics is extremely helpful when it comes to studying law. 19 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:40.000 Study Law, because microeconomics in particular allows you to predict, so to speak, the effects 20 00:03:40.560 --> 00:03:47.560 that various laws and legislation procedures will have. It gives you an automatic advantage 21 00:03:47.840 --> 00:03:54.840 as a lawyer as compared to those who had no economics training whatsoever. 22 00:03:54.840 --> 00:04:05.440 whatsoever. In addition, whereas if you pursue a career in pure economics, if you look at 23 00:04:05.440 --> 00:04:11.640 the job prospects that you have, they almost do not exist unless you become an academic 24 00:04:11.640 --> 00:04:20.040 or you work for the central bank or some major governmental institutions. There is practically 25 00:04:20.040 --> 00:04:27.000 There is really no outside market for economists except in academia, whereas of course for 26 00:04:27.000 --> 00:04:34.120 lawyers there does exist an outside market and it actually allows you to make a far better 27 00:04:34.120 --> 00:04:43.960 salary than would be possible for regular economists. 28 00:04:43.960 --> 00:04:56.960 I want to make an additional point that this proposal that I advance here, that we can 29 00:04:56.960 --> 00:05:03.160 find, so to speak, historical precedents that go in a similar direction. 30 00:05:03.160 --> 00:05:10.000 Austrian economists, original Austrian economists, the Austrian Austrian economists, were all 31 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:13.400 trained lawyers. 32 00:05:13.400 --> 00:05:19.720 In the Austrian system, in contrast to the German university system, economics was always 33 00:05:19.720 --> 00:05:28.720 part of the law faculty. In the German system, economics was always part of the philosophical 34 00:05:28.720 --> 00:05:37.080 faculty. And they received an entirely different training. I should mention that the European 35 00:05:37.080 --> 00:05:52.080 The human brain system does not have undergraduate studies. You are automatically a graduate student because the schools that lead up to universities tended to be elitist schools. 36 00:05:52.080 --> 00:06:04.080 So you begin immediately as a graduate student in the United States. Obviously law is only something that you study after you finish your undergraduate studies. 37 00:06:04.080 --> 00:06:11.080 I want to read you a quote from a book that was published a year ago, also in German, by a friend of mine, the book The Theory of Money and Credit. 38 00:06:34.080 --> 00:06:44.080 and the Vienna School of Economics, which has today been posted in English translation in PDF form on the Internet. 39 00:06:44.080 --> 00:06:52.080 And I recommend that book very, very highly. It deals with the history of the Austrian School, 40 00:06:52.080 --> 00:06:59.080 concentrating mainly on the older people, on Carl Menger and all of his students that he had. 41 00:06:59.080 --> 00:07:06.040 It would be the perfect complement in a way to Guido Hülsmann's biography of Mises. 42 00:07:06.040 --> 00:07:11.280 It is so to speak the book that you should read before you read Hülsmann's biography 43 00:07:11.280 --> 00:07:16.520 because it deals heavily, most heavily with earlier developments. 44 00:07:16.520 --> 00:07:22.800 Very interesting historical research that was done there. 45 00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:33.200 And in this book, they say that the German economists and the Austrian economists were 46 00:07:33.200 --> 00:07:43.800 an entirely different breed of people. They say, for instance, this here. The institutions 47 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:50.600 in which they were trained in Austria as compared to Germany determined a different intellectual 48 00:07:50.600 --> 00:07:56.200 and a significantly different scholarly socialization. 49 00:07:56.200 --> 00:08:02.880 In order to graduate as an economist in Austria, one had to complete a course in law, which 50 00:08:02.880 --> 00:08:07.480 included a substantial part about the history of law. 51 00:08:07.480 --> 00:08:14.920 While working on abstract law terms, terminology analysis, methods of interpretation and their 52 00:08:14.920 --> 00:08:21.920 and their practical applications. Above all, students were being coached in analytical thinking, 53 00:08:21.920 --> 00:08:29.920 linguistic precision and logic. The major subjects of jurisprudence were oriented toward 54 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:38.920 hermeneutics, which is interpreting of text. In contrast, at the German universities, 55 00:08:38.920 --> 00:08:43.440 Cameralistics, that was the name that they used frequently at that time 56 00:08:43.440 --> 00:08:44.920 for economics, 57 00:08:44.920 --> 00:08:49.840 Cameralistics was based on a predominantly descriptive empirical approach 58 00:08:49.840 --> 00:08:55.440 which was evident from the encyclopedic breadth of the course alone. 59 00:08:55.440 --> 00:09:01.200 Areas of study ranged from farming, agriculture, mining, trade, 60 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:06.120 and industry to finance, political science and government accounting 61 00:09:06.120 --> 00:09:13.120 and the course was closely associated both institutionally and methodically with the natural sciences. 62 00:09:13.760 --> 00:09:20.560 As far as their intellectual self-conception, career goals, career options, scientific culture 63 00:09:20.560 --> 00:09:26.720 and methodological repertoire were concerned, economists trained in Austria and in Germany 64 00:09:26.720 --> 00:09:33.720 basically came from two different worlds. The German economists were all members or most 65 00:09:33.720 --> 00:09:40.720 or most of them members of the so-called historical school following an empirical empiricist methodology 66 00:09:41.100 --> 00:09:46.120 collecting data, establishing correlations and this sort of stuff. All the things that 67 00:09:46.120 --> 00:09:51.200 are now dominating so to speak the economics profession in the United States and practically 68 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:58.200 everywhere. An entirely different situation for the Austrians who were trained in logical 69 00:09:58.200 --> 00:10:04.400 People Reasoning, the type of method that is featured, of course, most prominently in 70 00:10:04.400 --> 00:10:08.040 Mises' Human Action. 71 00:10:08.040 --> 00:10:17.040 And not only this, this different type of training that Austrian economists received 72 00:10:17.040 --> 00:10:24.040 in contrast to German economists also was reflected in the fact that they came from 73 00:10:24.040 --> 00:10:25.520 different social backgrounds. 74 00:10:25.520 --> 00:10:31.640 So these, Eugen Schulag and his friend who wrote this book, said the establishment of 75 00:10:31.640 --> 00:10:38.640 economics at various faculties also resulted in the typical Austrian and German graduate 76 00:10:38.840 --> 00:10:45.840 having remarkably different social profiles. Evidence exists showing that law students 77 00:10:46.560 --> 00:10:53.560 at the University of Vienna, which comprised about 40% of the empire's total law students, 78 00:10:53.560 --> 00:11:04.560 originated largely from the middle and upper classes, that is, high-level civil servants, officers, lawyers, factory owners, businessmen, and so forth. 79 00:11:04.560 --> 00:11:11.560 The same can be said of law students as a whole in Germany, that is, those who studied law in Germany. 80 00:11:11.560 --> 00:11:19.560 The Faculty of Philosophy, however, that is where economics was taught in Germany, 81 00:11:19.560 --> 00:11:26.560 attracted primarily members of the lower classes. 82 00:11:26.560 --> 00:11:36.560 So Austrian economists, Austrian economists and German economists were a completely different set of people. 83 00:11:36.560 --> 00:11:48.080 Again, the purpose of my remark is simply to point out that there do exist promising 84 00:11:48.080 --> 00:11:59.000 alternatives if you want to promote the Austro-libertarian movement besides going into a graduate program 85 00:11:59.000 --> 00:12:09.520 in Economics and the program, the best alternative that I can see is a law career building on 86 00:12:09.520 --> 00:12:18.680 top of a solid undergraduate training, especially in microeconomics, which you can get almost 87 00:12:18.680 --> 00:12:27.900 anywhere in some sort of decent form and you might want to add to this some rigorous training 88 00:12:27.900 --> 00:12:35.380 in Logic, Epistemology and fields like this. So take a few additional philosophy classes 89 00:12:35.380 --> 00:12:42.740 and again, if you study philosophy, it is not that difficult to find particular individuals 90 00:12:42.740 --> 00:12:53.820 that teach decent courses, finish your undergraduate stuff and then go on, do something different. 91 00:12:53.820 --> 00:12:59.500 And what I have to offer now is to give you a few examples of people who did it basically 92 00:12:59.500 --> 00:13:08.500 like this. Some of my former students, Jeff Barr and Lee Iglodi, who belonged to my Las 93 00:13:08.500 --> 00:13:16.580 Vegas gang, and Deanna Forbush, who did not belong to my gang, became later on a member 94 00:13:16.580 --> 00:13:23.580 or of my gang, so to speak, but she also comes from Vegas and is of course familiar with 95 00:13:26.640 --> 00:13:33.040 the Rothbardian tradition. And then finally we have the complete outsider, Jacob Hubert, 96 00:13:33.040 --> 00:13:39.160 who did this stuff without being advised by me in any way, just on his own bright mind. 97 00:13:39.160 --> 00:13:46.160 He came up with the same idea that I think should be somewhat promoted. Thank you, Sophomore. 98 00:13:46.580 --> 00:13:53.580 I forgot the name for a moment, but Jeff Tucker has put it on the website in pdf form today, so you can take a look at it, and I cannot recommend the book highly enough, it is more a historical type thing, it's not, 99 00:14:16.580 --> 00:14:29.580 Neither Schulag nor his Unterköfler. Both of them are not professional economists. One is a philosopher, one is a historian. 100 00:14:29.580 --> 00:14:43.580 But what they have done in this book is they went to the archives in Vienna and have dug out biographical information that has not been known before. 101 00:14:43.580 --> 00:14:52.580 It is a beautiful book in terms of the additional information that we see from it that we did not know before. 102 00:14:52.580 --> 00:15:03.580 They also correct certain observations and interpretations of Mises about the situation in Vienna. 103 00:15:03.580 --> 00:15:07.460 in Vienna. Just to, again I'm going a little bit 104 00:15:07.460 --> 00:15:13.980 offside here, the reasons for instance why Menger resigned from his post. 105 00:15:13.980 --> 00:15:17.220 In Mises it sounds like he did this 106 00:15:17.220 --> 00:15:21.660 because he was just depressed about the world will go down the drain and then 107 00:15:21.660 --> 00:15:23.780 retired from his post. 108 00:15:23.780 --> 00:15:25.940 They make the point that 109 00:15:25.940 --> 00:15:30.340 Menger was basically forced to resign because he had isolated himself 110 00:15:30.340 --> 00:15:31.540 completely 111 00:15:31.540 --> 00:15:58.540 because he was a very combative man, and in addition he had an illegitimate son, the famous mathematician Carl Menger was a K, and having an illegitimate child at that time was considered to be an absolute no-no in Vienna and that forced him basically to retire before he needed to retire. 112 00:15:58.540 --> 00:16:03.040 and many other things like this where their judgment is somewhat different. 113 00:16:03.040 --> 00:16:10.040 Also they show, for instance, that most Austrian economists were, in fact, statists. 114 00:16:10.040 --> 00:16:26.040 They all became very high officials in the Austrian government and only Mises was, so to speak, an exception from this general tendency and to a certain extent Menger himself. 115 00:16:26.040 --> 00:16:42.040 But all the other ones had, in Menger, there were dozens of people who got their habillitation that is the requirement that you have to fulfill in order to become a university professor. 116 00:16:42.040 --> 00:16:55.040 Many of the people who got their habillitation under Menger, most of them became high ranking government officials being responsible for quite ridiculous measures at times. 117 00:16:55.040 --> 00:17:02.040 In any case, the next speaker will be Deanna Forbusch.