WEBVTT NOTE 28. Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.440 Chapter 28, Mises.org in the context of publishing history, October 26, 2009. 2 00:00:10.440 --> 00:00:17.100 This speech was given on October 24, 2009 at the Birthplace of Economic Theory conference 3 00:00:17.100 --> 00:00:20.640 in Salamanca, Spain. 4 00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:27.500 Stand-up comedian Louis C.K. has a routine called Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy. 5 00:00:27.500 --> 00:00:33.680 The gag has people on an airplane sitting on comfy chairs and flying through clouds. 6 00:00:33.680 --> 00:00:37.600 They are complaining that the wireless connection is too slow. 7 00:00:37.600 --> 00:00:39.820 There is a truth here. 8 00:00:39.820 --> 00:00:41.880 Capitalism has made everything amazing. 9 00:00:41.880 --> 00:00:47.000 And yet, everyone these days seems to hate capitalism. 10 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:52.800 Let's leave aside the problem that it takes economic understanding to see cause and effect. 11 00:00:52.800 --> 00:00:58.220 There is a more general tendency to take whatever material goods surround us as something granted 12 00:00:58.220 --> 00:01:03.740 by fate, our own personal state of nature, and a human right that is ours by a grant 13 00:01:03.740 --> 00:01:05.880 of justice. 14 00:01:05.880 --> 00:01:11.880 We fail to see our current wealth for what it is, a historical contingency that came 15 00:01:11.880 --> 00:01:17.200 about through the sweat and toil of generations that preceded us. 16 00:01:17.200 --> 00:01:23.720 Its permanence is presumed. The goods are ours to redistribute by force if necessary. 17 00:01:23.720 --> 00:01:28.800 The services and the tools they require belong not to individuals but to all so they can 18 00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:35.000 be taxed at will. Nothing can harm them or reduce their number. 19 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:40.520 I fear that the same is true with publishing. For only five hundred years a book's been 20 00:01:40.520 --> 00:01:45.680 copied by machines after several millennia in which handwork was the only way to spread 21 00:01:45.680 --> 00:01:50.320 the Written Word For only 150 years have books been made available 22 00:01:50.320 --> 00:01:53.440 to all classes of society. 23 00:01:53.440 --> 00:01:59.520 Every innovation in publishing has meant greater distribution at ever lower prices, culminating 24 00:01:59.520 --> 00:02:04.040 in today's print-on-demand methods and universal access. 25 00:02:04.040 --> 00:02:08.680 Digital methods have set the written word free as never before. 26 00:02:08.680 --> 00:02:13.480 Kids today ask their parents, were you born before the Internet? 27 00:02:13.480 --> 00:02:18.320 They are vaguely aware that there was life before the web, but they conglomerate it with 28 00:02:18.320 --> 00:02:22.120 the days before automobiles and running water. 29 00:02:22.120 --> 00:02:24.180 There is something to this. 30 00:02:24.180 --> 00:02:29.380 The advent of digital media has meant a complete revolution in publishing, which makes Johannes 31 00:02:29.380 --> 00:02:34.480 Gutenberg's movable type appear as a mere stage of progress. 32 00:02:34.480 --> 00:02:37.880 And yet, do we appreciate what this means for us? 33 00:02:37.880 --> 00:02:41.600 I don't think we do, not fully. 34 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:47.200 And I worry that, failing to appreciate this, liberals in the Misesian tradition will not 35 00:02:47.200 --> 00:02:53.580 fully comprehend what it means to push the literature of our tradition into digital form. 36 00:02:53.580 --> 00:02:59.100 If we could understand this meaning, we would be far more optimistic about the future, provided 37 00:02:59.100 --> 00:03:02.500 only that we believe in the power of ideas. 38 00:03:02.500 --> 00:03:06.900 So I would like to take a step back and have a look at the role of digital media in the 39 00:03:06.900 --> 00:03:09.940 history of publication generally. 40 00:03:09.940 --> 00:03:15.940 Looking at the sweep of publishing history, the goal of all innovation has been the same. 41 00:03:15.940 --> 00:03:21.560 Lower the cost, widen distribution, make the result permanent. 42 00:03:21.560 --> 00:03:27.740 There is no success for anyone who attempts to resist these three motivating forces. 43 00:03:27.740 --> 00:03:30.620 There were sometimes trade-offs between goals. 44 00:03:30.620 --> 00:03:35.640 For example, the early scribes chose parchment over papyrus. 45 00:03:35.640 --> 00:03:41.520 This was less expensive, but parchment was seen as more durable, and therefore the scribe's 46 00:03:41.520 --> 00:03:44.220 work would be preserved. 47 00:03:44.220 --> 00:03:48.920 The work of a scribe was largely unchanged from the beginning of recorded history to 48 00:03:48.920 --> 00:03:51.560 the middle of the 15th century. 49 00:03:51.560 --> 00:03:57.480 The scribe in a monastery such as Salamanca would work every day for up to eight hours, 50 00:03:57.480 --> 00:04:02.800 breaking for psalm singing en masse, and working with a whole team of other specialists in 51 00:04:02.800 --> 00:04:08.000 and Graphics and Ink to produce perhaps one book per year. 52 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:12.520 Until this point in history, it might have been easy to believe that the book and all 53 00:04:12.520 --> 00:04:17.620 that it represents fell within the economic classification of a scarce good. 54 00:04:17.620 --> 00:04:23.920 This is to say that by its nature, a book cannot satisfy existing demand, must be rationed 55 00:04:23.920 --> 00:04:31.120 by price and is radically finite, capable of being duplicated only with time and sweat. 56 00:04:31.120 --> 00:04:35.560 It might have been easy to conflate the work that went into making the book, the physical 57 00:04:35.560 --> 00:04:40.820 properties of the book, with the message and the signs in the book itself. 58 00:04:40.820 --> 00:04:45.920 In fact, these are really two different things, and all of the progress since has worked to 59 00:04:45.920 --> 00:04:52.580 delineate the difference between what is scarce by its nature, paper, binding, time, versus 60 00:04:52.580 --> 00:05:00.480 what is potentially capable of infinite duplication, the ideas and formulations in the book itself. 61 00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:05.680 It was out of the institution of the scribe that the invention of printing came. 62 00:05:05.680 --> 00:05:11.000 Not all at once, but over the hundreds of years preceding movable type, using leather 63 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:15.000 and woodcuts and a variety of other techniques. 64 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:18.080 The innovations began in monasteries. 65 00:05:18.080 --> 00:05:22.680 But with commercial printing came the most remarkable thing of all, a phenomenon that 66 00:05:22.680 --> 00:05:27.680 took books out of their scarce state toward their potential of being a completely non-scarce 67 00:05:27.680 --> 00:05:29.240 good. 68 00:05:29.240 --> 00:05:35.640 That phenomenon is known as the mechanized copy. We can understand this by reference 69 00:05:35.640 --> 00:05:42.060 to the parable of the loaves and fishes. An apostle attending a sermon by Jesus had brought 70 00:05:42.060 --> 00:05:48.280 only enough food for himself. When the crowd became hungry, Jesus was able to copy his 71 00:05:48.280 --> 00:05:53.880 lunch infinitely and feed the entire multitude. The Gospels are careful to add that there 72 00:05:53.880 --> 00:05:57.160 There was still more left over at the end. 73 00:05:57.160 --> 00:06:00.400 This is precisely what printing made possible. 74 00:06:00.400 --> 00:06:04.720 The work on the ideas and the preparation of the first manuscript required time and 75 00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:08.760 labor on a scale few of us can ever imagine today. 76 00:06:08.760 --> 00:06:13.520 But once the tools for printing were in place, an approximate copy of the original could 77 00:06:13.520 --> 00:06:15.320 be made. 78 00:06:15.320 --> 00:06:19.720 Aside from paper and machines, there was nothing that limited the number of copies that could 79 00:06:19.720 --> 00:06:21.000 be made. 80 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:24.500 The text itself was a non-scarce thing. 81 00:06:24.500 --> 00:06:29.140 To realize the unlimited potential of print became the dream of anyone with an idea to 82 00:06:29.140 --> 00:06:34.820 spread whether it was in philosophy, music, law or theology. 83 00:06:34.820 --> 00:06:41.280 When movable type printing appeared with the Mainz Salter in 1457, it seemed that the institution 84 00:06:41.280 --> 00:06:46.760 of the scribe would be no more, and monks all over Europe debated what to do. 85 00:06:46.760 --> 00:06:52.860 On the one hand, the religious communities had the strongest interest in printing advances. 86 00:06:52.860 --> 00:06:57.880 On the other hand, the class of professional scribes associated with monasteries of course 87 00:06:57.880 --> 00:07:04.680 opposed the advance, in order to protect the high status of their specialized services. 88 00:07:04.680 --> 00:07:10.540 After the development of printing, and then movable type, German abbot Johannes Trithemius 89 00:07:10.540 --> 00:07:14.040 exhorted his monks to continue to copy books. 90 00:07:14.040 --> 00:07:18.600 He claimed that printing had a shorter life, and that the automated printing technique 91 00:07:18.600 --> 00:07:23.000 denied monks the discipline associated with hand scribing. 92 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:28.720 He worried too that the monks would have idle hands if printing became more fashionable. 93 00:07:28.720 --> 00:07:32.280 But this concern didn't last longer than a few decades. 94 00:07:32.280 --> 00:07:38.400 By the late 15th century, the printing houses were working almost exclusively for monasteries, 95 00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:42.280 and monasteries themselves had established printing houses. 96 00:07:42.280 --> 00:07:47.600 Far from having taken away work from the monks, it became obvious that the new tool made their 97 00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:49.800 work more efficient. 98 00:07:49.800 --> 00:07:52.920 Their work could be made ever more valuable. 99 00:07:52.920 --> 00:07:58.600 The works of Trithemius himself on a variety of topics would eventually be printed in many 100 00:07:58.600 --> 00:08:01.240 editions. 101 00:08:01.240 --> 00:08:06.640 Movable type made possible an unprecedented explosion in literary work. 102 00:08:06.640 --> 00:08:12.200 Michael Clapham says in his three-volume work on the history of printing technology, a man-born 103 00:08:12.200 --> 00:08:19.780 In 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back on his 50th year on a lifetime 104 00:08:19.780 --> 00:08:25.520 in which about 8 million books have been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe 105 00:08:25.520 --> 00:08:31.400 had produced since Constantine founded his city in 8336. 106 00:08:31.400 --> 00:08:37.200 Other experts suggest that Gutenberg's commercial innovations led to an increase in book production 107 00:08:37.200 --> 00:08:39.620 by a factor of a thousand. 108 00:08:39.620 --> 00:08:44.460 About 115 books are attributed to the early movable type printers. 109 00:08:44.460 --> 00:08:50.100 About 30,000 editions are attributed to the latter half of the 15th century. 110 00:08:50.100 --> 00:08:55.940 This increase is astonishing by the standards of the time, but it is a blip on the screen 111 00:08:55.940 --> 00:08:57.940 in ours. 112 00:08:57.940 --> 00:09:03.900 After all, looking at Mises.org data, we can estimate to have sent some 100 million editions 113 00:09:03.900 --> 00:09:07.300 of our articles and books flying around the world. 114 00:09:07.300 --> 00:09:12.020 And keep in mind that this measures only the work of our servers and doesn't include 115 00:09:12.020 --> 00:09:16.940 the thousands of servers around the world that host versions of our content. 116 00:09:16.940 --> 00:09:21.700 Since we are in Spain, I would like to say a few words about the printing entrepreneurs 117 00:09:21.700 --> 00:09:25.300 from this country's 16th century. 118 00:09:25.300 --> 00:09:30.540 Their role in pushing history forward is not noted often enough. 119 00:09:30.540 --> 00:09:36.460 Lambert Palmart, 1440-1493, was the first printer in Spain. 120 00:09:36.460 --> 00:09:41.260 He worked from Valencia, the headquarters of commerce. He printed some fifteen books 121 00:09:41.260 --> 00:09:49.480 in his career, which was an incredible accomplishment, the first in 1475. In Zaragoza, there was 122 00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:54.980 also Matthew of Flanders who printed four additional books. Seville was the third most 123 00:09:54.980 --> 00:10:01.700 prominent city for the expansion of printing in Spain. Here lived Antonio Martinez, Alonso 124 00:10:01.700 --> 00:10:09.220 de Puerto and Bartolomé Segura, all of whom printed throughout the 1480s. Tortosa was 125 00:10:09.220 --> 00:10:15.020 home to what became a vibrant and organized printing firm, which printed fully 28 books 126 00:10:15.020 --> 00:10:21.900 by 1500. Burgos was host to the firm of Frederic of Basel, who was in business with Michael 127 00:10:21.900 --> 00:10:26.400 Wenzler, and they made 35 books. 128 00:10:26.400 --> 00:10:32.120 Another addition to the list of Spanish printing heroes is Arnaldo Güellén de Bocar, one 129 00:10:32.120 --> 00:10:40.040 of the so-called wandering printers who set up shop in Logorno, Alcala, and Valladolid. 130 00:10:40.040 --> 00:10:44.320 He like others printed many Bibles and theological works. 131 00:10:44.320 --> 00:10:50.080 Finally, our list would not be complete without mention of John and Jacob Kornberger who set 132 00:10:50.080 --> 00:10:54.680 up shop in Seville with some partners and local workers and eventually came to print 133 00:10:54.680 --> 00:11:00.780 and some 239 books of theology, law, medicine and music. 134 00:11:00.780 --> 00:11:06.260 It was this firm that printed missionary tracts in Spanish to be sent to the New World and 135 00:11:06.260 --> 00:11:08.700 Mexico in particular. 136 00:11:08.700 --> 00:11:10.900 They did even more than that. 137 00:11:10.900 --> 00:11:16.900 In 1539, they put together a full printing outfit and sent it directly to Mexico where 138 00:11:16.900 --> 00:11:19.460 it printed eight books. 139 00:11:19.460 --> 00:11:23.540 This was the first printing press to appear in the New World. 140 00:11:23.540 --> 00:11:28.980 So on behalf of the New World, I say thank you to Spain not only for the economic thought 141 00:11:28.980 --> 00:11:34.420 that made free enterprise thrive in the Western Hemisphere, but also for the first printing 142 00:11:34.420 --> 00:11:38.020 press to ever come to our shores. 143 00:11:38.020 --> 00:11:43.860 For anyone in love with free markets, the 16th and 17th centuries was a time to witness 144 00:11:43.860 --> 00:11:47.680 that wonderful beauty of ordered production. 145 00:11:47.680 --> 00:11:54.080 New capital combined with new skills to bring the world more of what it needed and wanted. 146 00:11:54.080 --> 00:11:58.600 The rush into the book market by printers of all shapes and sizes and in all countries 147 00:11:58.600 --> 00:12:02.000 of Europe was a wonderful thing to behold. 148 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:04.560 But there was a threat on the horizon. 149 00:12:04.560 --> 00:12:09.960 Mercantilism, the theory that producers needed special protection by government in order 150 00:12:09.960 --> 00:12:15.140 to remain healthy in an atmosphere of extreme competitive pressure. 151 00:12:15.140 --> 00:12:19.100 Producers were beginning to discover then what every business knows today. 152 00:12:19.100 --> 00:12:26.560 Namely, that one aspect of free enterprise is that it denies long-run profits to producers. 153 00:12:26.560 --> 00:12:32.220 The market process is always driving profits to zero, as profitable companies are imitated 154 00:12:32.220 --> 00:12:36.980 by innovative upstarts using cheaper and more efficient methods. 155 00:12:36.980 --> 00:12:42.280 Society benefits from this process, but in order for an established firm to stay on top, 156 00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:46.320 It can never stop innovating and striving for excellence. 157 00:12:46.320 --> 00:12:52.000 The answer to this reality in many trades was to seek government protection from competition 158 00:12:52.000 --> 00:12:58.240 abroad, and to ask favors from the prince to be the only in favor producer. 159 00:12:58.240 --> 00:13:02.400 This served both as a guarantee that people would continue to be provided with the goods 160 00:13:02.400 --> 00:13:07.620 and services they needed, and as a guarantee that the producer would be protected against 161 00:13:07.620 --> 00:13:11.480 the distractions of competitive pressure from others. 162 00:13:11.480 --> 00:13:18.620 That's the theory and practice of mercantilism, and it's a perfect recipe for hobbling progress. 163 00:13:18.620 --> 00:13:23.660 Just as printers had driven the scribes out of business, the printers were facing extreme 164 00:13:23.660 --> 00:13:26.820 competition by the 18th century. 165 00:13:26.820 --> 00:13:32.180 They sought protection from efficient upstarts, often called pirates, who were making life 166 00:13:32.180 --> 00:13:36.420 hard for this very profitable industry. 167 00:13:36.420 --> 00:13:41.460 These pirate firms were publishing older works and distributing them very cheaply and widely 168 00:13:41.460 --> 00:13:50.460 The dominant firms claimed that this practice was undermining their ability to fund new works and was thus inhibiting innovation. 169 00:13:50.460 --> 00:13:56.460 The established printers tapped into the mercantilist spirit, but with a special twist. 170 00:13:56.460 --> 00:14:02.460 They claimed that words on the page constituted a special form of property. 171 00:14:02.460 --> 00:14:09.460 When they were copied by a firm other than the current publisher, they claimed their property rights were being invaded. 172 00:14:09.460 --> 00:14:20.900 The idea of money being a property is a preposterous claim. Once ideas are known by others, they 173 00:14:20.900 --> 00:14:27.220 are copied. They cannot be owned in the conventional sense. Another way of putting this is that 174 00:14:27.220 --> 00:14:33.340 the ownership of the ideas becomes multiplied without end. The only way to possess an idea 175 00:14:33.340 --> 00:14:38.900 as exclusive property is to never share it with another person. Once shared, the idea 176 00:14:38.900 --> 00:14:44.220 takes flight. What's more, the entire industry had been born in the world of 177 00:14:44.220 --> 00:14:50.660 copying, not in making original work. Most famously, the most profitable text to 178 00:14:50.660 --> 00:14:54.860 publish was the Bible itself and its most ancient transcriptions and 179 00:14:54.860 --> 00:15:00.060 translations. In fact, this had been the driving motivation of the invention of 180 00:15:00.060 --> 00:15:04.220 the press in the beginning, just as it had been the driving motivation of the 181 00:15:04.220 --> 00:15:10.940 for this reason, it is crucial to understand the appearance of copyright as nothing other 182 00:15:10.940 --> 00:15:16.900 than an aspect of the mercantilist principle. The claims about intellectual property were 183 00:15:16.900 --> 00:15:21.860 nothing but a ruse offered up by printers as a way of seeking legal protection from 184 00:15:21.860 --> 00:15:28.220 competition. On the continent, no one bought into this gibberish, seeing it for exactly 185 00:15:28.220 --> 00:15:30.220 The Theory of Money and Credit 186 00:15:58.220 --> 00:16:15.220 Copyright became useful to the Crown in order to suppress works incompatible with the official religion, whatever it happened to be at the time, and so in the 18th century there were endless fights in England over this matter. 187 00:16:15.220 --> 00:16:21.340 Meanwhile, on the continent, publishing remained competitive and free for the hundred years 188 00:16:21.340 --> 00:16:25.500 after the first copyright statute was imposed on England. 189 00:16:25.500 --> 00:16:31.020 Even given England's laws, copyright statutes were largely ineffective at hobbling the market 190 00:16:31.020 --> 00:16:37.660 process until the imposition of international copyright law in the late 19th century. 191 00:16:37.660 --> 00:16:41.980 Laws have grown tighter and tighter in the 20th century until we have reached the point 192 00:16:41.980 --> 00:16:48.280 of Absurdity since 1995 in the United States, with laws that have pretty well doomed a half 193 00:16:48.280 --> 00:16:51.460 century of scholarship to ruin. 194 00:16:51.460 --> 00:16:56.340 If you leave the state and state-protected industries in charge long enough, they will 195 00:16:56.340 --> 00:17:01.840 strangle progress to the point that civilization completely stagnates. 196 00:17:01.840 --> 00:17:06.520 In the publishing industry, digital media couldn't have come at a better time. 197 00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:11.640 It is saving what the state and dominant publishers are trying to kill. 198 00:17:11.640 --> 00:17:16.800 The digital and web media are to the establishment what the printers were to the scribes and 199 00:17:16.800 --> 00:17:20.960 what pamphleteers were to the established bookmakers. 200 00:17:20.960 --> 00:17:25.600 Digital media threatens what they believe to be the core of their existence right now, 201 00:17:25.600 --> 00:17:30.680 namely the restriction of what should be completely free, and the imposition of scarcities on 202 00:17:30.680 --> 00:17:34.200 what really should be non-scarce. 203 00:17:34.200 --> 00:17:38.720 Let us return now to the three principles that drive progress in publishing. 204 00:17:38.720 --> 00:17:47.760 The Web has achieved all three in the most spectacular way. 205 00:17:47.760 --> 00:17:53.360 The marginal cost of downloads is approaching zero, the access is approaching universal, 206 00:17:53.360 --> 00:17:59.160 the capacity for copying is infinite, and the results are everlasting. 207 00:17:59.160 --> 00:18:04.600 As you know, the Mises Institute is furiously posting as many works in the australiberal 208 00:18:04.600 --> 00:18:09.340 Digital Tradition as we can scan, and we are working at a pace and with a discipline 209 00:18:09.340 --> 00:18:15.100 that is on the order of the older scribes. Our entire literature archive is completely 210 00:18:15.100 --> 00:18:21.680 open source, meaning that anyone in the world is free to simultaneously host our results. 211 00:18:21.680 --> 00:18:27.060 These editions are like fire. A spark can create a roaring blaze stretching hundreds 212 00:18:27.060 --> 00:18:34.060 of miles. This is the power of digital media. It has achieved the dream of every publishing 213 00:18:34.060 --> 00:18:49.060 When a new edition goes up on Mises.org, even before it is publicly linked, it is sent out via torrent to servers worldwide and immediately achieves immortality. 214 00:18:49.060 --> 00:18:55.060 It is archived on the site and thus available to researchers and students all over the world. 215 00:18:55.060 --> 00:18:59.060 We have thousands of works available and the number grows daily. 216 00:18:59.060 --> 00:19:05.580 We are limited right now by copyright restrictions, but these are being chipped away steadily, 217 00:19:05.580 --> 00:19:09.380 and we push the envelope as far as we can. 218 00:19:09.380 --> 00:19:13.540 One of the works that has been copied for hundreds of years both before and after the 219 00:19:13.540 --> 00:19:19.860 printing press was the Etymologiae by the 7th century Spanish archbishop Saint Isidore 220 00:19:19.860 --> 00:19:21.740 Seville. 221 00:19:21.740 --> 00:19:26.860 The book summarized all knowledge up to the time it was written, including that of the 222 00:19:26.860 --> 00:19:39.740 Many of the Spanish printers of the 15th and 16th century busily printed Isidore of Seville's 223 00:19:39.740 --> 00:19:40.740 work. 224 00:19:40.740 --> 00:19:46.100 He not only was a brilliant intellectual, he had a passion for two great tasks – the 225 00:19:46.100 --> 00:19:50.700 preservation of knowledge through writing and the spreading of knowledge through copying 226 00:19:50.700 --> 00:19:52.980 and distribution. 227 00:19:52.980 --> 00:19:58.880 It is for this reason that St. Isidore was proposed as a patron saint of the Internet. 228 00:19:58.880 --> 00:20:05.700 I think too of Mises himself, who labored for six years between 1934 and 1940 to write 229 00:20:05.700 --> 00:20:11.100 Human Action, only to have it published in German and Geneva and have it vanish down the 230 00:20:11.100 --> 00:20:17.100 memory hole in the midst of ghastly war and global upheaval. He emigrated to the United 231 00:20:17.100 --> 00:20:21.940 States where he started over again with an English translation which was published in 232 00:20:21.940 --> 00:20:28.020 1949 after much internal debate at Yale University Press. 233 00:20:28.020 --> 00:20:32.900 After we became conscious of the power of the web, Human Action was our first giant 234 00:20:32.900 --> 00:20:38.700 project. Now we have it out in EPUB format in which it can be downloaded an infinite 235 00:20:38.700 --> 00:20:44.740 number of times and fly around the planet at the speed of light. 70 years ago, this 236 00:20:44.740 --> 00:20:51.840 This work had a very unpromising start. It is now immortal. May we someday say the same 237 00:20:51.840 --> 00:20:57.980 of human liberty itself. With Mises.org and its supporters around the world, I do think 238 00:20:57.980 --> 00:20:59.820 that day will eventually come.