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NOTE The Lesson

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My name is Jeffrey Tucker. I'm working for the Mises Institute and we're doing a series

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of small videos, short videos, on our new book, Economics in One Listen. Of course not

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a new book. It's a very old book by Henry Haslett. And it's my great pleasure to sit

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here with the scholar who wrote the introduction to the book, Walter Block.

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I'm delighted to be here with you, Jeff. It's just wonderful.

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So how do you think the book turned out? Do you like the look of it?

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Oh, wow. It's a labor of love. It's magnificent. This is one of my very favorite books. I've

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all booked them, so to speak, and it looks very good. I'm delighted that I was asked

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to write the introduction, and I looked at it again, and I was amazed at me and Henry

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So, I was so inspired by your last paragraph of your introduction. Do you mind if I read it, please?

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Yeah, and this takes away all your good stuff for this interview. So, here we go.

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In summary, I feel like a party host introducing two guests to one another, who hope they will like each other.

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I hope you will like this book. But more, I hope it will affect your life in somewhat the same way it has mine.

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It has inspired me to promote economic freedom. Indeed, to never shut up about it. It has

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convinced me that free market economics is as beautiful in its way as a prism, a diamond,

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a sunset, the smile of a baby. We're talking the verbal equivalent of Mozart or Bach here.

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This book lit up my life and I hope you get something a lot from it too.

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Oh, you're very kind, thanks. That came right from the heart. I meant every word of it.

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You know, sometimes people say, well, you know, this laissez-faire capitalism, free market, it's so unlikely to occur.

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I mean, you know, you got Obama and you got McCain and neither of them are laissez-faire economist types.

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And poor Ron Paul, who is, you know, was given the back of the hand by the American electorate.

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and they say well you know it's so impractical and one of my retorts I have

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many is that it's so beautiful and even if it's never implemented it's just so

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glorious the idea of it it's sort of like I mean I love Mozart and Bach but I

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couldn't compose anything like that and and I couldn't appreciate I'm not a

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about professional musician. But to me, Mozart and Bach and Hazlitt and Mises and Rothbard

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are all intertwined, even though obviously there are differences. Some work in words,

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others work in musical notes. But I see, weirdo that I am, I see great connections between

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them. And I'm just honored to have been able to devote my professional life to creating

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Making beautiful music with words.

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Now there are obviously other retorts, more practical ones.

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For example, no one expected the Berlin Wall to topple when it toppled.

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No one expected the Soviet Union to go belly up when it went belly up.

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And if we didn't have a plan as to how to privatize and how the market would work, it's

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as if we'd be caught with our pants down around our ankles.

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So even though right now in the US things look gloomy for free enterprise, you know,

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John Paul Experience, what have you. He didn't win, so far anyway, we can always hope.

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Maybe one day the sea wall will fall, similar to the Berlin Wall.

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And unless and until we have some sort of understanding of free market economics, we will be greatly embarrassed.

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Why do you suppose we need a book like this to help us understand economics?

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Well, this I think is the best introduction to economics of our type, Austro-libertarian

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economics. I know of no better introduction. I know of better essays or long written works

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like Human Action and Man Economy and State, but those are five, six, seven hundred pages.

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This is, I don't know, a hundred and fifty pages or something like that. How many pages

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is it?

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It's $189 and that includes the index.

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Okay, so without the index, in my introduction, $150 isn't too far off, maybe it's $170.

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So you can give it to someone and say, look, read this as your first book.

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This is my first book in economics.

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I was converted to libertarianism by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon.

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And Nathaniel Brandon most of all gave me two books and he said, read these two books

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Economics, and then we'll discuss them. One was this one, Economics in One Lesson, the

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other was Alice Shrug. And in my introduction economics classes, I give my students what

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I was given, and it worked for me and has worked for some of my students. Some of my

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students really get the message, and I think they get it from Economics in One Lesson by

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Henry Haslip. So why is it that people can't just intuitively figure out economic science

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Oh, no, I think that their intuitions are very much the opposite.

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Every freshman class I get, when I say that the minimum wage law is not really a good

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thing for the poor, they think I'm callous and unfeeling, because obviously you raise

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the minimum wage and everyone's better off, and you know, it's sort of like the Grinch

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that stole Christmas to oppose that, or rent control lowers rents for poor people and who

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Who could be against that? So, instinctively good kids, 17, 18, 19-year-old freshmen,

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they're filled with the milk of human kindness and they want the poor to be helped, but they

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don't realize that it doesn't work. Now, could you call upon that Pythagorean thing that

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you wrote to me before we started out with you? Because that's very apropos to the point

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As a character in Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan replies when told of the theory of Pythagoras

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that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, what an utter fool! Couldn't he

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And he uses his eyes.

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Right. Sometimes, I mean, I think that's a beautiful passage and it really illustrates my answer to your question about

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young students and why do they need this book, why don't they instinctively see it.

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Their instincts are very much opposite.

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I mean, it looks as if the Sun revolves around the Earth.

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I mean, it starts in the East and it goes to the West.

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Can't you use your eyes, you dummy? You should be able to see that.

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In a similar way, you have to do more than your eyes or more than a superficial look

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at minimum wage, at rent control, at tariffs and free trade and all the other issues that

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Hazlitt goes through, to see beneath the surface.

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And I think also, socio-biologically, we all are hardwired to accept explicit cooperation.

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You know, you're hurt, I'll soothe you, I'll get a cold compress for you, what have you.

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But implicit cooperation through markets, we're not hardwired through biology to accept that.

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The best example I can think of is, I come from New Orleans, I teach at Loyola University

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and we had Katrina, and right after Katrina the prices rose of flashlight batteries and

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candles and orange juice and things like that, and everyone was saying, oh, they're price

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gougers, they're evil, instinctively, and when the governor of the state of Louisiana

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I said I'm going to put price gougers in jail. Everyone said, yeah, right on. Put those so-and-so's into jail.

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It takes economics of the sort that economics in one lesson provides you to understand that there's a function of higher prices.

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Namely, it rations goods and it calls forth new supplies. Otherwise, all we can rely on is benevolence. We can't rely on self-interest.

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But most people are not hardwired to see that. They can't appreciate implicit cooperation, namely through prices and markets and profits and property rights and things like that.

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All they can instinctively appreciate is charity. Okay, so Walmart brings in a whole bunch of things, that's good.

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That would be like seeing the sun going, you know, around the earth, or rather the earth going around the sun.

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So, I think the answer to your question is that people instinctively are anti-market and it takes an effort of will or understanding or knowledge of the sort that Henry Houslett so magnificently supplies to pierce through this ignorance.

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So, let me ask about that. Why is it that there's only one economics and one lesson? Is it very difficult to write a book like this, a clean, clear, timeless introduction to economics? Why is that so difficult?

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I think there are many, David Gordon has an introduction in economics, I think Callahan has one, there are others, but you know, it's sort of like why is there only one Mozart or one Bach, well there are others, I mean, there is Haydn and Salieri, I mean, my own book, Defending the Undefendable, is sort of an homage to this, at least the way I see it, what they both have in common, and I'm not comparing the quality but just the motif, both have a main message

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30 implications. For example, his main message is the lesson, my main message is the law of non-aggression, and then we both apply it to 30 places.

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So, in a sense, when I wrote my book, Defending the Undefendable, I had this one in mind, only it was my seeing it through my eyeglassesivid.

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Now, obviously, these two books don't deserve to be mentioned even in the same sentence, but, you know, if there's a Mozart and a Salieri, there can be a Haslett and a Block.

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I mean, all you can do is do your best, and there are many of us at the Mises Institute right now,

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the faculty, twelve of us or so, we're all trying to contribute, now none of us is a Hazlitt,

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none of us is a Mozart or a Mises or Rothbard, but we're all doing our best and we're trying to uphold the tradition.

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How do you account for why the book still seems so fresh, even though it was written so long ago?

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In my introduction, what I said is that except for that crack about Eleanor Roosevelt,

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it looks as if it was ripped from today's headlines.

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And if he would have just put Hillary instead of Eleanor Roosevelt,

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you probably couldn't tell. I mean, the book first came out in forty-six,

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and now it's

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2008. I think that's fifty-two years or something, or sixty-two years.

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Seventy-two years, my math is a little weak. It's a long time, it's almost the

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Soon it will be a hundred years. And that book will be as fresh in 2042 as it was in 1946.

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And apparently he just ripped it off. I mean, not ripped off, he just banged it out.

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He left the New York Times in a split and he just sat down on his typewriter and wrote this out and didn't think anything much would come of it. Isn't that interesting?

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Well, he was inspired maybe. Maybe he was channeling something higher than him, who knows.

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This is him, who knows, I'm not a religious person but he might have been inspired or something, it's just beautiful.

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You know, forget about the content for the moment, I mean the content is beautiful, it's perfect, there's no mistake.

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But the way he writes, I mean, he was inspired, I mean it's just so beautiful, just on an aesthetic basis apart from the economic basis.

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It's so well written. I mean, there are very few people who can write like that. Murray Rothbard was one.

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But the rest of us lesser beings, you know, convoluted sentences, and it's hard to understand, relatively speaking, to these geniuses.

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One of the things we had in mind when we put out the introduction is we wanted to make it a beautiful book, hardback, and cheap.

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So, I don't know, maybe this has happened to you, but often times I'll have people over to dinner just guess and

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the subject of economics will come up, and you don't want to waste the whole dinner talking about economic theory.

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What?

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How dare you!

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No, you do want to do that, right?

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But you want to give them even more... I've always wanted to have a stack of these. Yeah, in my house.

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Yeah, by the way, here. Oh, please take it. Take it with you.

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And so that's the idea, you know, is that you can have it, you can own some, and give them out.

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Lew Rockwell gave a brilliant speech at one of the Mises seminars. I forget in what city, I've been to so many, they all blend together.

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And what he said is, you're at a dinner party, and everyone's nice, and everyone's talking about, you know, the weather or the sports or something,

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and all of a sudden someone says something like, you know, we've got to have protective tariffs.

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And, you know, your spoon is halfway to your mouth and you sort of go, what?

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And I think that would be a perfect antidote to that. You don't have to, what's

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the expression, don't get mad, get even? Don't lose your soup halfway to your lip.

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But just resolve that after the dinner is over, say, you know, you might be

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interested in this book. And if you've got a stack of them, and what do they sell

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12 dollars, well at today's prices that's like three gallons of gas or something, you know, you can give them not promiscuously, but you know, on a needed basis.

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Right, once you see a spark of interest, here's an issue you need to confront, namely economic logic.

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You can hold whatever political views you want, but you need to think about the economics behind it.

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Yeah, another title for that book that would have been good would have been

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Economic Logic in one lesson. If you wanted other titles that would be

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equally good or roughly as good. I mean, I'm not changing the title, I'm not for

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that, but Economic Logic I think is a very good way of putting it. Do you suppose that

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it's one of the best-selling economics books that's ever been printed? I think it

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It is. I know that Atlas Shrugged is a magnificent bestseller and it came out in 56 and it's still selling by the bushel load.

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But it's not really an economics book, although it is, but it's a novel. But this is not a novel and Haslett has written novels.

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This is just a textbook, a very short textbook. I use it in my classes as an

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adjunct to, you know, a mainstream textbook and, you know, say, here's the

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good stuff. And a lot of times this attracts the student interest in a way

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that the dry textbook... It's nice to compare them, isn't it? Having both.

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Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Walter, not only for writing an

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introduction, but for agreeing to this quick interview. Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeff.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The Theory of Money and Credit