And noisiness and the lack of the basic civility reminds me of the remark of Tsar Nicholas the first after he told us, was reading to his grandson stories of what happened in the French Revolution and then he finally said, now you see why men must be treated like dogs.
As a matter of fact, I didn't mean that at all, because now it occurs to me that there's an evaluation form that some of you maybe have not filled out yet, and I simply wanted to point out that there'll be a little presence for all of you at the end, from me, personal presence from me.
It was really tough getting a hold of as many Fabergé eggs as I needed.
Now, we're coming to the end of the seminar, and I have to tell you, I think that it is certainly one of the best seminars we've ever had.
and in fact that I'm not sure exactly when we had one that I would put ahead of it and many people have told me that they ascribe that to the to the work of the Dean but that can't be the whole story as a matter of fact that Pat isn't here but
that Lew Rockwell is, and I think Jeff is. Is Jeff here? Jeff is not here, but you know
who's ultimately responsible for this seminar and everything that the Institute does.
Now I'm going to be discussing today the perennial question of the role of the intellectuals.
intellectuals.
This is a question which has been discussed especially by people from our point of view
for many, many years.
There was a great anthology called The Intellectuals written by a man who was a friend of Murray
Rothbard's that is collected, George de Husser, and you'll only find it in used bookstores
nowadays, a big anthology, and things by Mises, everywhere from Mises to Stalin, and George
de Husser was a great guy, explained his principle of selection, which was that anybody who had
If you had anything to say against the intellectuals, who was included in this anthology, which is a good principle of selection.
The issue of the intellectuals has come up very often.
You'll find it discussed in a number of important and good essays in a book that's been mentioned already, edited by Hayek, called Capitalism and the Historians.
And the question is, basically, why do the intellectuals act the way they do?
I mean, it's no secret, one of the speakers gave Dr. Higgs statistics on the number of Republicans and Democrats, even Republicans, for heaven's sake, at the major universities, and you saw what was involved.
One Republican in history departments, 18 Democrats and on and at whatever it was, Cornell or something, Stanford, on and on and on.
Now, one particular free market man who's written about this is Max Hartwell, R.M. Hartwell, an expert on the Industrial Revolution.
And he gave a very good talk one time at the Mont Pelerin Society.
and he pointed out that there is of course this aversion to to the free
market system on the part of intellectuals but his lecture was
especially noteworthy for drawing attention to the systematic quality of
this hostility especially as experienced by the typical educated citizen in a
for Western Democracy, he noted that historians against capitalism is only one element in a battery of self-reinforcing prejudice against private property and the market economy.
This is the way a student goes through college nowadays.
In literature, economics, philosophy, sociology and other subjects, the student is continually subjected to data and interpretations that converge on a single point.
The Viciousness of Private Enterprise and the Virtuousness of State Intervention and State Supported Labor Unions
And as he says, what people experience in the universities is then reinforced, of course, by the media, by the cultural establishment, by the churches
So this question, why this hostility on the part of intellectuals?
There have been a number of theories.
Joseph Schumpeter had a famous theory having to do with the overproduction of intellectuals or would-be intellectuals in a capitalist system.
There's just too much money spent on higher education.
And I'm going to be telling, I've decided I'm going to be telling my students this from now on.
What are you doing here?
Bill Gates left Harvard without a degree, Michael Dell left the University of Texas at Austin without a degree, and one could go on and on.
So what are you doing here? What they're doing there actually is training for some career that will give them some guaranteed low-level income for the rest of their lives, public school teachers or something of that kind.
When we hear from these intellectuals, as Schumpeter said, a never-ending condemnation.
Now the particular indictment of capitalism, why capitalism is bad or doomed and so on, changes.
It changes from generation to generation.
It used to be that capitalism cannot provide wage slaves subsistence in their own slavery,
Capitalism promotes slavery, they'll get poorer and poorer, or capitalism creates wars unnecessarily among imperialist powers.
When I was a kid, it cannot compete with socialist societies in technological progress.
That was the line at the end of the 50s after Sputnik.
Capitalism promotes automation, as they used to say back then, with permanent unemployment.
It both creates a consumer society and its piggish affluence, as Galbraith told us,
and it also proves incapable of extending this piggishness to the masses, to the underclass.
It oppresses women, racial minorities, that's a more recent condemnation, meretricious popular
culture, as the Frankfurt School tells us, and on and on. And somebody says it doesn't matter the
and the specifics of the indictment, what matters is the verdict that the intellectuals have in their pocket from the beginning and it's a verdict of death.
It's a verdict of death on capitalism.
So, why?
Hayek had some ideas which I find typically refined and benign.
He thought the intellectuals judged capitalism to be wrong because they have an engineering model of society and capitalism doesn't permit itself to be planned and so on.
But I would say that probably intellectuals in the humanities are more anti-capitalist than intellectuals in engineering or in the sciences.
Hayek also maintained that you have to, the intellectuals, he actually said that you cannot present any kind of orthodoxy to the intellectuals because that's the one thing that they decline to accept.
That was really a blinkered view on Hayek's part.
Look at the 20th century, with tens and tens of thousands of intellectuals supporting Stalinism, right, so that Raymond Ayron wrote a book in 1957, The Opium of the Intellectuals, about Marxism and Communism, and it wasn't just the left that intellectuals adhered to.
We look at the examples of Martin Heidegger, Robert Braselach, Giovanni Gentili, Ezra Pound, and so on, who were very attracted to fascism and national socialism.
I came across a great, I think, a very interesting entry in the diaries of Golemann, who was a German historian and the son of Thomas Mann.
And in his diary of 1933, he wrote, 18th of May, Joseph Goebbels spoke in front of a writer's meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof.
And Goebbels, who was a propaganda minister of the Nazis, as you know, Goebbels said,
we Nazis have been reproached with not being concerned with the intellectuals. That was
not necessary for us. We knew quite well, if we first have power, then the intellectuals
when will come on their own.
And Gullemann wrote in his diary,
thunderous applause from the intellectuals.
Now there are various views.
So Champeter's idea then is that
with the overproduction of college educated people,
they can't get jobs they think are commensurate
to their value.
They're consumed with resentment and envy.
Where they see some business man or business woman making a very decent income and they
think to themselves, why should they be making this income?
They can't deconstruct William Blake and the other things which are desperately demanded
on the market.
But the real problem is that very successful intellectuals, rich as well as famous intellectuals,
became socialist, Zola, Gerhard Hauptmann, Brecht, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, John Dewey in the United States.
They were not unemployables, so there's a problem.
Now, Mises has, to my mind, a number of theories about the root of the anti-capitalistic mentality.
Sometimes he says it is because of envy.
And he actually, in liberalism, does some volunteer psychiatric nosology by categorizing a new mental illness, as if the Shrinks needed a new one, called the Fourier Complex, after the French Utopian Socialist, that has to do with envy, failure, the loser, and life blames the system.
But again, I don't think that that's sufficient considering that, you know, these news anchors
make whatever, you know, cantaloupe brains make two million dollars a year.
However, in another essay, Mises has, I think, a more accurate theory, which is that
Our whole culture is permeated in America less than elsewhere, so Europe is really the
better example of this, with a contempt for money making and this contempt nurtured and
sustained through the centuries under changing regimes is a natural outgrowth, he says, of
It's a way of a specific class morality. It's a way that a certain class within society sees life and the world.
And specifically, it is the morality and way of looking at the world of the classes that are sheltered from the market by the circumstance that they live from taxes.
You see, they don't have any appreciation of the market.
They are, of course, professors, as he says, priests, bureaucrats, professors and army officers.
In our society, professors, but also from the churches.
I mean, the Methodist and Episcopalian bishops who generate this constant stream of rubbish about the economy,
right, there's a terrible unemployment in society.
Well, the Catholic Council of Bishops will come up with a recommendation, we have to increase the minimum wage.
These are people who have no idea of the market. Why should they? Especially professors.
Why shouldn't everybody just live from a check that comes from some source somewhere that they have no idea of?
And so Mises says, so this class is in control of the, kind of a pre-Gramscian analysis,
This class is in control of the ideology of society, and that is what creates this anti-capitalistic mentality.
There is something that should be mentioned here, and that is that a certain group of writers, principally George Stigler...
George Stigler, a great economist and one of the leaders of the Chicago School, he and then Gary Becker and some others came up with the theory,
intellectuals and ideology don't matter very much, because what matters are individuals acting in their own narrow self-interest,
and they will then create coalitions according to the public choice way of looking at things
and that's what increases the government little by little and that's what accounts for the
large government we have.
Now I want to make clear, not only do I get no royalties from sales of Chrysos and Leviathan,
Professor Higgs doesn't get any royalties since he signed away his rights to it many
years ago.
So this is not any kind of self-promoting thing as some other speakers have been engaged
in at this seminar.
But if you want the definitive reply to that and the definitive defense of the idea that
ideology is crucial and ideas are crucial and so that what intellectuals do for good
or bad is very, very important, you should read the chapter, it's only about 12 or 15
pages, in Crisis and Leviathan where Professor Higgs deals with that.
And really, we see in a very important historical example, the crucial role of ideology.
And that was in the rise and fall of Soviet communism.
I mean, there's no way of explaining Lenin's activity throughout his life on the basis
that, what do you say, future, discounted future flow of income or something.
The idea that somehow, yeah, I'm going to get into power and then I'll have everything
I Need and all the best caviar and babes and so on.
Lenin was not interested in those sort of things, he was an ascetic and Lenin
created this Bolshevik movement and basically the Bolsheviks, now of course
there was a lot of self-interest that played into it once they got into power
but they came to power on the basis of ideology and the Soviet regime through
The Soviet regime, for 70 years, spent enormous amounts of resources on propagating ideology so that on a stigorous basis that you can explain action on the basis solely of immediate self-interest.
Well, the general spread of ideology on the part of the Soviet authorities over this length of time, I think, is very significant.
Why Did the Soviet Regime Fall?
We raised the question before, did it fall because of Reagan's arms buildup?
Well, I agree with Dr. Higgs that it was in the cards, and especially that the regime
was doomed because of the lack of economic calculation.
It was basically a third world country with nuclear weapons.
Really, as I saw when I was in Moscow in 1987 and went to Gum's department store, you know, their Bloomingdale's, it was not laughable, it was pitiful.
It really was pitiful that there were people in Soweto who had an enormously larger range of consumer goods at their disposal, or in Jakarta, than these citizens of Moscow.
And Moscow, of course, always had the best of what was available in the Soviet Union.
So it was an economic disaster and then the information revolution came.
And then it wasn't simply the international ballet dancers and chess players and musicians and so on
who knew what the West was really like.
Everybody got to know what the West was really like.
because of computers, because of the video cassettes, because of all of the methods of information transmission that became available.
And the regime could not withstand that, and Gorbachev tried to somehow reform communism.
It didn't work, and they fell apart.
So that the question is still why the intellectuals, going back to this idea of why they're adversarial to the capitalist system.
Now there was a very interesting book, a fascinating book, written about 15 years ago or so by Henry Ashby Turner of the Yale History Department.
In those days, it was the best history department in the United States, in my opinion, a magnificent
history department.
And this is German big business and the rise of Hitler.
There had for a long time been the notion that big business was responsible for the
rise and triumph of the Nazis by bankrolling them, basically.
And Turner did a magnificent job of research and debunking.
But at the end of this book, he raises the question, how come all of these other historians,
famous historians, Alan Bullock, Norman Stone, Stuart Hughes of Harvard and so on, and on
and on and on, repeated these myths that somehow big business was behind Hitler.
And he said sometimes it was because of distortion, deliberate distortion of the evidence.
But that was a small part of the case. The real reason was that they began with a natural
bias against business. As intellectuals, as academics, they distrusted business and especially
big business. They're willing to accept any story about big business and the terrible
machinations and their conspiracies against workers and consumers because they had no
No Knowledge and, in fact, a deep suspicion and animosity towards business.
Well, these are professors and what I want to present is the idea that why the media
is anti-capitalist, why the churches and so on, because ultimately all these people go
through higher education, are processed by these anti-business academics.
So this, in a way, goes back to what Mises said, that the people who determine the official ideology in the country are people who know nothing about business and, in fact, find it very distasteful, and much could be said about that.
Basically, you know, business people, as some of you know, and those are students here who may eventually get a job and make a living, will also learn, business people live and die by the market.
They have to respond to the market. They cannot depend on a guaranteed source of income.
Now, I personally do believe that professors should have a guaranteed source of income
and in fact lifetime tenure, I mean that's very important because of the special lofty
work that we're engaged in.
During the faculty meetings, for instance, we argue about merit increases, you know,
I'm going to get an extra $150, no, I'm going to get an extra $150.
We argue about dividing up the travel budget, you'd be I think very interested in hearing
conversation of professors over lunch. It almost always has to do with their
pension plans. The idea that somehow it's a feast of the intellect when
professors get together. Nonetheless I do believe that that professors are in a
special position and should be given this guaranteed lifetime job just as I
believe very strongly that all of the young people here have a moral
and the Federal obligation to pay their Social Security taxes.
Really, that's very important.
And really, I want to leave you with that bit of wisdom.
So this is a big question why the intellectuals feel this way,
and that would be my response.
Ultimately, it has to do with the class character.
And in a way, in a Marxist sense, the limited consciousness, the limited social consciousness of academic intellectuals because they only exist in a certain spot in society.
They don't really see the way the rest of society works because of their own way of life.
So in a way, you might say you can't hold it against them. On the other hand, it's intellectuals.
The intellectuals are the ones who are supposed to have a wider vision and try to see things the way they really are.
They have signally failed with that.
Well, since this is our last session, I want to spend a lot more time discussing what you might have to say about it
and raise a few questions.
What do you think accounts for the anti-capitalist mentality in society and especially among intellectuals?
Also, you might try to consider and offer your own ideas. What lies ahead?
Are we faced with the rosy Pollyanna future that Professor Gottfried has presented?
In his typical cock-eyed optimism?
And if it threatens to be darker than that, what can we do about it?
Is it possible that somehow we are going to be able to change the larger society, or instead
of trying to change the larger society, I mean really running against the tide, it's
not becoming better, it's becoming worse.
They now say things that they wouldn't have dared say 20, even 20 years ago, let alone
40 or 50 years ago, and propose things that nobody would have thought of.
So should we try to change the larger society or should we concentrate our efforts on building
smaller communities as Professor Livingston has suggested?
Homeschooling would be an element of that for instance.
And when the time comes and you have kids, I think that's something you really have
to consider and certainly consider removing them from the public schools and also the
The private schools, to a large extent, because they're beginning to emulate the public schools.
Catholic schools teach the same ecological stuff to first graders that the public schools
do.
A friend of mine decided that he and his wife were going to raise their three kids by homeschooling
when the oldest child came back from kindergarten and with a list of things to look for in the
in a house, you know, where all the litter was put in the right place and so on, and
this was going to be reported back as an assignment.
So should we then concentrate on smaller communities and building up from there, or what would
that mean?
Also if things are as pessimistic as some might claim, what would be the point of a
a seminar like this. It seems to me that, it seems to me obvious that this is, the seminar was a good thing. But then, in what way, what will, what will, what will it lead us towards that, that is worthwhile? Well, these are some questions and we have some time and I really appreciate anything you have to say about this. Yes.
Well, Professor Ranko, first on behalf of our family, I want to applaud you and your faculty for your extraordinary venture, as we thought you would in parallel.
You wanted to, thank you very much.
And then the observation. You're blessed, all of you, or many of you, please, who have now embraced the intellectual aspects and some fractional applications of the world in the mind as it attaches to libertarian concepts.
And among those primordial values you've discovered is ownership of yourself.
That's primordial.
And some told us how they can it, but they're clearly defensible.
You need now, understand, it seems to me, only financial leverage to secure for yourself
your future in a way that is not going to be learned, it is not taught,
and therefore will not be learned in the colleges and universities of higher education.
So ownership of yourself is something with which you've gained a certain level of comfort.
The fruits of your labor should be always remembered as yours, and there are ways in
leverage in the financial community that can assure for you a future of independence from
your job in no more than ten years.
If you simply apply the knowledge of leverage in the financial community, you'll be independent
of the state, independent of your job, you'll have the means of income flowing to you that
gives you a great deal more latitude than the dependency you'll end up with if you don't.
So you're blessed to have had a mindset developed over time that precludes intervention in your life by those who otherwise have no interest in it.
That's a very good suggestion. And you're going to be at the party tonight?
Unfortunately.
Not?
Unfortunately, I'm a capitalist. I have to get back and earn a living.
Well, you have been the blessing from Nelson and Nash, a great book that's available for you, and you have things in there that would be very useful.
Seems like that lever is going to get him out of that work this afternoon with an accident.
But I believe that the ideas that are generated here are worthy, obviously, and should be promulgated through the political process at the county level is one that I concentrate on personally.
But that is very important. The homeschooling invention, get the ideas into the homeschooling.
And into that arena, there are a number of homeschooling organizations that are important.
I'm sure they'll belong right on the Austrian concept, and it can be taught at the lower levels.
Well, I've got to see the need for some kind of university or something that is controlled by people who are like-minded with us,
somewhere in the United States at least, where at least I feel like I can go.
What this conference has made me realize is that I'm going to have to proceed with caution in my next years in college when I learn philosophy and history and I can learn what someone said, but as far as the perspective, it's all going to have to be in my own.
I would like to have some kind of place where I knew that there would be allies or something where I could degree or something like that.
Yes. There are a couple of colleges like that in the United States. They are, in fact, Grove City College and Hillsdale.
Pretty, pretty good institutions of higher learning.
They don't have the prestige and reputation of other colleges.
It's kind of a vicious circle, though, isn't it?
I mean, how are we going to get a college when the whole academic world is tending in the opposite direction?
How do you get people into positions there and so on?
Rachel, you have any ideas?
Help us, Rachel, Rachel, please, dig a bit.
I mean, I think, I don't know if I'm quite as negative.
Good.
Well, first of all, I do think it's...
I hope, I hope, yeah, I hope so.
I think it's important to be constructive and not just negative, like in terms of, you know,
yes, we're anti-state, but we also have, as Dr. Livingston's talked about, ideas for communities
and constructive realms of choice for people to live in and overlapping realms of authority and so forth.
But I also think, I mean, I think economics has changed the scene somewhat.
For instance, in philosophy, you see people like David Gaultier.
And I'm not saying that I agree with him, I'm just saying that different economic views and gave theoretic views have become respectable.
And that's a big change, you know what I mean? In terms of talking about extremely minimal state.
So, you know, maybe there's, and there's always that one or two conservative people on the, on the faculty everywhere, I mean, you know, it's true, he was saying about the history department, you were saying about the history department, that there's always twenty-nine in one, but that's something.
But there are signs in different disciplines like philosophy, you're saying.
In the case of philosophy, Bob Nozick's book, Anarchy, State and Utopia, made a big difference years ago.
I remember when Bob came to Murray Rothbard's apartment for the first time,
began discussing some of these ideas and so on.
Now, the thing about Bob Nozick is that he's known as a young hotshot at the time,
Peter Singer was one of the most brilliant younger philosophers, so that his saying these things, which, honestly speaking, other people, especially Murray, had been saying before, that made a big difference.
And then, you know, Peter Singer was one who had a big review in the New York Review of books praising Bob's book.
Really?
Yeah, Peter Singer, right, before he became...
That's not since he wants to redistribute all our wealth to the Third World.
and to the animals, and to the animals, don't forget the animals.
So Bob Nozick made a big difference there.
Actually, I can tell you the story of it.
Bob was a social democrat when he entered Princeton Graduate School.
And it was my friend Bruce Goldberg, who was in the same entering year in the grad school at Princeton,
Robert Mises, who you can say converted him, gave him Hayek and Mises to read and so on.
And then Bob went back to his friends at Dissent Magazine.
Now if you're not from New York, you've never heard of Dissent Magazine.
You might remember that there was an early Woody Allen movie, I think it was Bananas,
where he's in a magazine shop in New York and he sees Dissent Magazine and he also sees
Commentary Magazine.
And he thinks to himself, it'd be a really good idea if those magazines combined, they could call themselves dysentery.
Anyway, Bob went to his friends at Dissent Magazine, these democratic socialists, and he said,
If the minimum wage is good, why don't we have a minimum wage of $20 an hour?
And they couldn't answer that.
In other words, they could not answer the first step in the argument.
It was simply a matter of belief, of faith on their part, a minimum wage, and that shook his social democratic position.
And then he became, at least for a while, a libertarian.
That made a big difference in philosophy, I think.
But there was nothing, there's been nothing similar in other fields.
Well, with the exception of what I discussed in my first talk on this new paradigm of the rise of the West based on guarantees for individual rights, especially property rights.
But that has not percolated down. I don't think too many people that you've ever heard about that in your history courses. No.
But it has made, again, some difference.
So Rachel is on the on the optimistic side together with the professor Gottfried
Anybody else have any feelings about this? Yeah, what do you think?
All right good
during the 300 years
We lived what you folks have been telling us is why things happen for the good. Mm-hmm, but there was no
There's no explanation of that to the same extent that has happened in the last 10 or 15 years.
So the collectivists were able, with a handful of people, Fabians, etc., to replace their values with ours.
Now, if a handful of people is able to have the revolution that they have, what you've done, what you are doing here in educating a large group.
We're going to cross out, you're an American, I think, gives ground for some optimism.
And I think that, whether, I think Lou maybe, if he wants to continue on this thing, this is a big enough job for the Institute.
But there should be parallel efforts. Crisis is coming.
You know, we've been living high on the hog, buying from overseas, they've been taking our checks and putting them in their checkbook and not asking us for the money.
So at some particular point, there's going to be some crisis. So prior to, it'll be too late at the time of crisis for us to get any kind of a program. So prior to the crisis, we should have a program developed as to what we think should be done to meet that crisis.
and at the vocal level, I personally think that our emphasis should be on educating the state legislatures.
Now, I don't have any more faith in state legislatures than I do in national legislatures,
but state legislatures don't have the power and they've got to compete with big things, so I would stroke them.
I would say, hey, crisis is coming only because you let this federal monster usurp your duties.
Well, yeah. Go ahead, please.
And then I'd lay out the program. I would not be afraid of initiative at the federal level.
I'd use the word initiative for a change of the Constitution, because everybody's afraid of changing the Constitution.
I've got some ideas, and I'm sure others do, as to what some of those initiatives should be.
Well, state legislators, I don't know, many of them tend to be very venal and just the representatives of special interests.
Special Interests, I think of the New Jersey State Legislature, where you can go into the
chamber there and point out the legislators who belong to the Gambino family and the ones
who belong to the Bonanno family and other families.
Not in the sense of family value.
They don't have a printing press.
Potentially they're not as...
It's possible.
As I say, I have no more confidence in them, but they've got to compete against the other
states.
Well, it's possible, it's possible. Anybody have any other comments or feelings about this?
I mean, it's not that anybody knows what's going to be happening. Yes.
from a misapplication of Christianity, just the social work, trying to do good for mankind, and they get the feeling superior because we are doing business.
What's more obvious than that Jesus never called on the tax collector to help the poor, but he called on individuals for their own sake and for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and for the sake of the poor to help the poor?
One of the things is that it's very important to distribute the publication of the Institute and other organizations to the campuses of two students.
I know that the Interpolated Studies Institute does a lot of that, and in the past the Foundation for Economic Education, FBE, did that as well.
And I know that Gary North is going to do some things about how they've done that.
At first that might be quite expensive to distribute a lot of literature to college students,
But it pays off because if the college students themselves do their part by getting involved by not only thinking of things through for themselves, but also by producing publications on their campuses and things like that.
For example, I know that you had the New Individualist Review at the University of Chicago. That really, that lifts things up.
That is what makes someone go from just being a sort of passive observer and reader of books to being someone who is actively involved in writing the books and is getting, fighting for the market in academia.
Well, many of you are on college and university campuses. Is this something that could work? Is this something that could make a difference?
Not to mention op-ed.
Op-ed pieces.
Do you have one problem, Peter Morton?
Well, okay.
I'm not necessarily on the totally pessimist side,
but let me play the devil's advocate for a moment.
As many booklets and pamphlets as you want,
As many op-ed pieces as you want.
And all it takes is one phony baloney statistic of the sort that has been described here of the part of Tom Brokow.
A consumer advocate group has just released a study saying that American apples are bad for you.
Do you remember the apple thing years ago?
Right. And it turned out there was nothing to it. What was it about? Well, I mean, I don't know if any study has been made.
I'm morally certain what it was about was to destroy confidence in the American food supply and on the people who supply it.
That was the point of it. There was another attack on the capitalist system. This was another lie, basically.
or about the three million homeless and everything else, all the others.
So all it takes is one time on prime news where 10 million people or 20 million people see it.
Or else I'll take the war part, the anti-war part of our position.
You know, we can talk all we want.
All it takes is this Christiane Amanpour on CNN, you know her?
professional fermenter of war and of terror bombing of small countries to
start talking about some terrible genocide that's occurring in Kosovo or
whatever right and then and then and the TV does things the way it does people
talked about movies I never see movies but one movie that I did see a number of
times over on cable was a wag the dog if you haven't seen that okay you see how a
How a war is produced. The television war is actually produced.
So in other words, I mean, they have control of the media.
Do you think that what we can do really can counteract that?
What do you feel about that?
You think that we can in some small way in our own communities counteract that?
You do. Yeah.
I was going to say, yeah, I think you can. A lot of times, conservative libertarian organizations don't even take the time to do a press release and send it to the media when they have a meeting.
And that's something a lot of times papers are looking for news, and there are a lot of opportunities.
And then there was a case recently with Gorbachev out west speaking to some globalist conference, where a group of concerned citizens got together, maybe a dozen people.
One of them put some money up for a full page ad in the paper. They passed out flyers at the door.
It got into the news, the television picked it up, it became a major controversy, and I think the following speaking engagement had to be cancelled, so that's an example of how a small group that's active can do something, and that can be done, there's a lot of opportunities that we miss, just because we sit back and say, there's nothing we can do, it's all bad, and letters to the editor do make a difference too, people respond and you respond back, other people get involved in the debate...
Call C-SPAN, call CNN, or your local radio talk show. I did that the other day, and people in our community were saying we heard somebody was from Charleston, and it was me.
I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but C-SPAN used to just
televised the calls and answer the calls as they came in, right? I mean that was the old days a few years ago.
Then they changed and what they do now is you're on the Republican line or the Democratic line or other line.
And the reason for that was that, I don't know if libertarians had more time on their hands or were unemployed or something,
But a very large proportion, a disproportion, a great disproportion of the calls that came in were from libertarians.
So they had to change that. And I would suggest if you have a call C-SPAN, call on the Democratic line.
I'm a Democrat, but you know, I believe a lot of what the libertarians say.
My opinion doesn't count because I'm a 200% optimistic person, but you can see that in, for example, about the media, for example, in Spain, last year we created a web newspaper called Digital Liberty, and today it's the most hit on, the number one on the web.
After the normal newspapers like El País, it's the number one of the digital newspapers.
In Italy, I know that they have also a few new libertarian newspapers, and now all of them in the top rank.
How did your libertarian website in Spain become so popular?
Well, we managed to have some of the...
It's not that you have special illustrations.
...popular radio speakers, they wrote for us and so they spoke about this newspaper in the radio and they started clicking the web page.
Well, that's certainly hopeful. Some other? Yeah.
I think it's important from my perspective to remember that even if this turned out to be during the lifetime of everyone here,
not the opportunity that we hoped for, for a rebirth of liberty, that doesn't make the enterprise any less important or exciting.
I think about the people that I've talked to here tell me about the times when it was 10 of them getting together in a room with Mises.
Things are certainly better in our situation in that we can have a meeting of this size.
It doesn't mean that we've won anymore in the public, but I don't think we have to win the award to have it be meaningful, have it be important, and also have it be very exciting.
If only for the reason that we keep alive the ideas so that at some point when the rest of the world is ready for them, this rebirth can happen.
I think you can be just as proud of being in a group that kept the ideas alive as you are about being in a group that was there when the floodgates opened and we had this rebirth.
It's very interesting what you say. I think you can find it on the fees website
There was a famous essay by Albert J. Nock this man. We've mentioned a few times called Isaiah's job and
and what he says there was talks about the Isaiah the prophet and Isaiah's
Mandate from God and it was not to convert the world but to find the remnant
As he as he called it and to keep the remnant going and the remnant is
is a minority in every generation, but it's always there, it's always potentially there.
May I ask you if you think that this view of yours, that it doesn't ultimately matter,
that success comes in one's own lifetime, do you think that necessarily has a religious basis to it?
Certainly can, I think. But I think that something I heard from Dr. or Professor Higgs my first time here, he made the statement that, you know, people have been happy in all times and people have found meaning in their life.
and for some people it's a religious institution or experience that provides it, but I think it can be philosophical, I think it can have to do with your local community, it can have to do with a group of intellectuals like we have here that you derive your support and your meaning from.
So I think it comes from a lot of different places. What's important is that I think ultimately for all of us our happiness is going to come out of our own life and the life of the people around us that we care about and that a miserable personal life or a miserable life among the people that are important to you will drown out any kind of global happiness or liberty or prosperity.
They were talking about pamphlets and sending out pamphlets. There are a lot of available pamphlets on the internet, Mises.org, that they use for the university, Mises University.
12 of those, and you could always download them and then grab them and do something with them, and everybody can do that, whether it's great or not.
This has been done about 4,000 times, but it never has happened. We don't have a major media network. We don't have a TV station. Box is really not it, but that would take a heck of a lot of money.
And you and I together have, yeah.
Well, maybe the thing is to concentrate on converting billionaires.
Yes?
You might have seen the book by Dr. David Gordon out there, the high school type book, which the name of which, excuse me, I read this moment.
I think it would be, I think it's got to be done on aggressors one to one, basically.
And I think that something I'm trying to do with that, because I like the book very much, if you like it,
to approach homeschoolers and private schools that you think might be open to that kind of thing
to teach students at the high school level, get them real early into basic sound economics
The book is available for inspection right here. David, does your book have a title?
I've only read a third of it, but it's quite good, but I've read so far, and I think that it's really important to get good economics into the classroom or into the homeschool and the private schools of thought.
I would second your recommendation of that book, as much as I have reservations about the author.
Are there any other comments or questions?
I think there is good fortune in the ranks on multiple levels, one is you did convert a billionaire, and that's the Koch family,
the love is right behind them, which is often said, it is strong as a bull, and that tendency has supported citizens with non-economy,
which is the largest public asset group in the country, and is a libertarian group.
No, no. No, no. No. There was a big split among the brothers, an old story, but there
was at one time some talk about them buying NBC. I think it was NBC or maybe ABC, but
that never panned out, unfortunately.
If they're this wealthy and they're really on our page, what are their contributions going to? Because I'm not aware of it.
Two quick ones here.
Hold on a second. Wait a minute. Who's the dean? Are you the dean or am I the dean?
Yes. Very briefly, are there any clubs and colleges, von Mises clubs and colleges?
Well, I don't know. I don't think von Mises clubs. There are libertarian
organizations. Yeah? We just started the College of Libertarians on our campus last year. We also have a group called the
We've got a great deal of people in there and we've been able to have a wide group of conservatives, not just neocons, but in fact they're a minority as far as I know.
We've been able to do a lot of outreach, we have discussions, we have a web list where we talk about various issues and you know, kind of paleo-conservative and libertarian talk dominates the entire state.
What Professor Gottfried was talking about before kicks in here, because this thought control, which is becoming more prevalent on campuses, including and not stopping short of violence, for instance, to prevent the conservative speakers from appearing on campuses, that seems to be becoming more widespread.
Well, I think we had some good ideas and thank you very much for the seminar.