WEBVTT NOTE An Interview with George Reisman 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 I'm sitting with George Reisman, a professor emeritus at Pepperdine University. Welcome, Dr. Reisman. 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Hi, Jeff. Glad to be here. 3 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:12.000 So glad to have you on this podcast, but also especially to have you at the Mises University. 4 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:20.000 It's wonderful for all of the students to be around brilliant academic superstars. 5 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:22.000 Oh, thank you. It's very flattering. 6 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.000 How many years have you been teaching now at the Mises University? 7 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:32.280 Well, I think the first time was 2001 and then two and three and five and now, so five times I think. 8 00:00:32.280 --> 00:00:40.280 That's tremendous. Have you noticed a change in the students or do you have any general observations about the students? 9 00:00:40.280 --> 00:00:48.760 Well, I think perhaps there are somewhat more of them and they seem to be coming from further afield. 10 00:00:48.760 --> 00:00:58.760 I was sitting with a young lady from Peru and a gentleman from Spain and another from Ecuador, so it's really quite a selection. 11 00:00:58.760 --> 00:01:02.760 And they're familiar with your writings too, aren't they, before they get here? 12 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:04.760 Well, many of them are, yes. 13 00:01:04.760 --> 00:01:14.760 That's great. And some of the topics you're dealing with this week, I want to ask you about environmentalism in particular because, 14 00:01:14.760 --> 00:01:29.760 Well, this is a huge and ubiquitous ideology of new vintage in some ways, or is it? Or is it just an old view applied in new ways? 15 00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:37.760 Well, in some respects it's old. There are very primitive religious aspects to it, worship of the earth. 16 00:01:37.760 --> 00:01:41.920 I think the American Indians, or some of them, had that sort of religion. 17 00:01:41.920 --> 00:01:47.440 I think very, very primitive religion in general may be of that character. 18 00:01:51.120 --> 00:01:56.240 It's just amazing to me how it can be so influential and have the influence it does. 19 00:01:58.960 --> 00:02:01.520 You mentioned the religious aspects, and there clearly are those. 20 00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:07.280 But there's also just economic fallacy behind it, isn't there? 21 00:02:07.760 --> 00:02:16.440 Well, there's a lot of economic fallacy and utter economic ignorance, but I personally 22 00:02:16.440 --> 00:02:25.920 believe that the movement is fueled by profound hatred of human beings. 23 00:02:25.920 --> 00:02:30.840 To an important extent, this is implied in the doctrine that the movement holds and which 24 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:32.840 The Theory of Money and Credit 25 00:03:00.840 --> 00:03:09.840 If the hillside is intrinsically valuable and you flatten the top to construct houses, 26 00:03:09.840 --> 00:03:12.840 you're destroying an intrinsic value. 27 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:17.840 Everything we do is destroying some intrinsic value. 28 00:03:17.840 --> 00:03:25.840 Our science and technology and capital equipment makes us wholesale destroyers of intrinsic values. 29 00:03:25.840 --> 00:03:32.120 because we do it on such a larger scale thanks to the science and technology and equipment. 30 00:03:32.120 --> 00:03:40.240 And so I think whoever holds the intrinsic value doctrine is implicitly led to hate, science, 31 00:03:40.240 --> 00:03:45.120 technology and reason because they destroy these alleged intrinsic values. 32 00:03:45.120 --> 00:03:46.120 Yeah. 33 00:03:46.120 --> 00:03:52.640 So there really is no economically productive activity that doesn't impact to some extent 34 00:03:52.640 --> 00:03:53.640 on the environment, right? 35 00:03:53.640 --> 00:04:00.360 Yeah, but now you see the amazing thing, and I was lecturing on this subject this morning. 36 00:04:00.360 --> 00:04:11.280 If you adopt a human standard, if you consider human beings as the source of value, then 37 00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:16.880 you come to the conclusion that productive and economic activity by their very nature 38 00:04:16.880 --> 00:04:24.880 improve the environment because one of the things to realize is that the whole world 39 00:04:24.880 --> 00:04:31.560 from a physical chemical point of view consists of nothing but solidly packed chemical elements. 40 00:04:31.560 --> 00:04:37.720 We don't add to them and we don't subtract from them, but all we do is change their combinations 41 00:04:37.720 --> 00:04:38.720 and locations. 42 00:04:38.720 --> 00:04:41.720 That's what all production does. 43 00:04:41.720 --> 00:04:47.880 The overriding purpose is to make the same chemical elements stand in a superior relationship 44 00:04:47.880 --> 00:04:50.280 to human life and well-being. 45 00:04:50.280 --> 00:04:56.140 So we start with a chemical element, iron, buried in the ground in the Masabi Range, 46 00:04:56.140 --> 00:05:03.440 and then thanks to our activity, it's transformed into automobile fenders, the sides of refrigerators, 47 00:05:03.440 --> 00:05:09.800 girders and bridges and skyscrapers, and the same chemical element, iron, is then of immensely 48 00:05:39.800 --> 00:05:43.800 because their starting point is an opposite standard of value. 49 00:05:43.800 --> 00:05:47.800 They confuse improvement with destruction. 50 00:05:47.800 --> 00:05:51.800 Yeah, because they're looking at it from an anti-human perspective. 51 00:05:51.800 --> 00:05:57.800 You've been teaching since what year? 52 00:05:57.800 --> 00:06:03.800 My first full-time teaching job was 1961-1962. 53 00:06:03.800 --> 00:06:04.800 1962. 54 00:06:04.800 --> 00:06:13.840 Do you recall a time when environmentalist ideology, as we see it now, was not part of 55 00:06:13.840 --> 00:06:15.960 the public culture? 56 00:06:15.960 --> 00:06:21.260 At the very beginning, I remember one of the first things I did, I was teaching at a place 57 00:06:21.260 --> 00:06:29.960 in Vermont, and early in the fall they still had drive-in movie theaters, and I saw a movie 58 00:06:29.960 --> 00:06:35.240 There was a story there, and one of them was about these people who were finding pollution 59 00:06:35.240 --> 00:06:38.800 in a stream, and I thought, wow, quaint this is. 60 00:06:38.800 --> 00:06:46.000 No one has been concerned with this since 1912 or something, and I even mentioned it 61 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:53.280 to my class, and then it was like five years later that environmentalism came on us like 62 00:06:53.280 --> 00:06:54.280 a flood. 63 00:06:54.280 --> 00:07:22.280 1967 or so. I remember I was spending the summer of 1967. I was in San Francisco and I was reading a newspaper and there was a column by a then prominent TV journalist named Eric Severide who was identifying environmentalism as the coming issue of the future. 64 00:07:22.280 --> 00:07:32.280 And I thought, this is ridiculous. It's such a stupid point of view. It's not going to have any influence at all. Boy, was I wrong. 65 00:07:32.280 --> 00:07:47.280 Do you think there's anything to the idea that being an environmentalist or purchasing environmentalist ideology is something that's a kind of a luxury of a well-developed society, economically advanced? 66 00:07:47.280 --> 00:07:53.720 I think that that's probably true, but more than that, people who seem to have no knowledge 67 00:07:53.720 --> 00:08:00.560 of history, no common sense, no understanding of the importance of wealth, I mean people 68 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:06.000 who are thoroughly divorced from reality. 69 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:07.000 This is an irony. 70 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:09.880 I wonder if you agree with this. 71 00:08:09.880 --> 00:08:14.120 There's so many products now that you can buy at the store and so many businesses that 72 00:08:14.120 --> 00:08:21.080 that are preying in some sense on the environmental historian to the consumer. Isn't that interesting? 73 00:08:21.080 --> 00:08:26.000 I saw at the grocery store this morning some very slickly marketed one-ply toilet paper. 74 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:33.000 Now it seems to be obvious that one-ply toilet paper is primitive and inferior to more advanced 75 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:38.360 forms of toilet paper. And yet it was beautifully marketed and you buy it and you feel like 76 00:08:38.360 --> 00:08:44.360 In some sense, you're combining being sort of hip with, you know, a certain social consciousness or something like that. 77 00:08:44.360 --> 00:08:48.360 Well, I don't want to make any connections to recycling here. 78 00:08:52.360 --> 00:08:56.360 But it says it's pervasive. I mean, you can go out and purchase all these goods that claim to be environmentally... 79 00:08:56.360 --> 00:09:03.360 Yeah, because there are so many people who think they're doing something of value. 80 00:09:03.360 --> 00:09:16.360 Do you think credit is due in any sense to the capitalists who have managed to turn this ideology into a marketable product? 81 00:09:16.360 --> 00:09:26.360 Well, they're doing what businessmen do. There's lots of rock and roll music that I can't stand. 82 00:09:26.360 --> 00:09:33.360 So there are records shops and CD places that cater to that, so I think it's the same thing. 83 00:09:33.360 --> 00:09:47.360 There are pornographers, so they're just making a living offering people what some segment of the market wants. 84 00:09:47.360 --> 00:09:54.360 In some senses, of course, it's ridiculous. I was thinking about this Fair Trade Coffee. Do you have these? 85 00:09:54.360 --> 00:09:59.440 Fair Trade Coffee? This is something I haven't come across. 86 00:09:59.440 --> 00:10:04.920 Yeah, very high-priced coffee. The idea is that you buy it and thereby help the ranchers 87 00:10:04.920 --> 00:10:10.280 that are paying high, the coffee plantations that are paying high wages, fair wages, in 88 00:10:10.280 --> 00:10:17.480 certain countries. But of course, I mean, if you wanted to help the poor, wouldn't you 89 00:10:17.480 --> 00:10:22.520 want to buy coffee from the smaller plantations that can't afford higher wages? 90 00:10:22.520 --> 00:10:30.160 This way, to the extent that it's like boycotting the soccer balls from Bangladesh or wherever. 91 00:10:30.160 --> 00:10:34.320 If you don't buy the products of these people, then they have no jobs and earn nothing instead 92 00:10:34.320 --> 00:10:36.400 of whatever they were earning. 93 00:10:36.400 --> 00:10:38.520 So it's totally perverse. 94 00:10:38.520 --> 00:10:45.800 Well, and here's another issue that seems to be completely misunderstood today, is development 95 00:10:45.800 --> 00:10:46.800 economics. 96 00:10:46.800 --> 00:10:49.080 Have you considered writing more on this subject? 97 00:10:49.080 --> 00:10:58.960 On Development Economics? No, not Development Economics. I've just finished a draft on globalization, 98 00:10:58.960 --> 00:11:01.160 which relates to Development Economics. 99 00:11:01.160 --> 00:11:07.320 Yes, very much so. Right. Will you send that to, is that a plan for Mises Org, you think? 100 00:11:07.320 --> 00:11:08.320 Well, possibly. 101 00:11:08.320 --> 00:11:12.920 I'd like to lobby for it, yeah. 102 00:11:12.920 --> 00:11:20.560 It's quite long, it's 56 double-spaced type pages at this point. 103 00:11:20.560 --> 00:11:27.840 So I don't know what the best outlet is for it, if there's any outlet. 104 00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:30.960 What are some of the main points that you make in there? 105 00:11:30.960 --> 00:11:40.320 Well, I deal with the fears people have of competition with the presently low-wage countries 106 00:11:40.320 --> 00:11:51.000 Globalization is a long-run big picture. 107 00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:57.800 One of the key points is I show where the world is now. 108 00:11:57.800 --> 00:12:02.880 Countries with a population of about a billion, mainly the U.S. and the European Union and 109 00:12:02.880 --> 00:12:11.220 in Japan, account presently for about 80% of the world's output, and countries of the 110 00:12:11.220 --> 00:12:20.880 population of over 5 billion account for the remaining 20%, and then I go into what could 111 00:12:20.880 --> 00:12:31.760 happen if, let's say, over the course of the next 100 years, the 80% of the population 112 00:12:31.760 --> 00:12:38.040 became as productive as the 20 percent, just what this would mean. They'd have to increase 113 00:12:38.040 --> 00:12:46.820 their productivity on the order of 20-fold to catch up. And I developed the analysis 114 00:12:46.820 --> 00:12:51.040 initially on the assumption there was just a fixed quantity of money, a fixed volume 115 00:12:51.040 --> 00:13:00.880 of spending. There'd be a huge decline in money income in the advanced countries. But 116 00:13:00.880 --> 00:13:06.880 Then I start to show that, in fact I developed this as a demonstrable proposition, that to 117 00:13:06.880 --> 00:13:11.760 whatever extent one group of producers loses money income because of the greater production 118 00:13:11.760 --> 00:13:17.080 of others, there's necessarily an equivalent fall in prices. 119 00:13:17.080 --> 00:13:26.120 So there is no real loss, plus the advantage of globalization would be that the division 120 00:13:26.120 --> 00:13:29.720 of labor would be carried further than it's ever been. 121 00:13:29.720 --> 00:13:37.040 and in particular in all the branches of science, technology and business. 122 00:13:37.040 --> 00:13:44.120 At present, we essentially just have one sixth of the world's population fully participating 123 00:13:44.120 --> 00:13:46.520 in the global division of labor. 124 00:13:46.520 --> 00:13:53.520 If the whole population of the world did, we'd have vastly more people discovering and 125 00:13:53.520 --> 00:13:58.960 applying new knowledge, so it should bring about a major acceleration of the rate of 126 00:13:58.960 --> 00:14:07.040 of Economic Progress, and if international equality were achieved, it would be at a vastly 127 00:14:07.040 --> 00:14:09.000 higher level for everybody. 128 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:16.080 There'd be more rapid economic progress in the present first world. 129 00:14:16.080 --> 00:14:21.800 The equalization would be achieved through a higher rate of progress here and a still 130 00:14:21.800 --> 00:14:27.880 more rapid rate in the presently backward countries, assuming they became capitalistic 131 00:14:27.880 --> 00:14:28.880 sufficiently. 132 00:14:28.880 --> 00:14:48.880 and of course even with a full gold standard the quantity of money would grow and all the different countries would end up having not only a vastly higher physical output but even a monetary output too and everyone would be tremendously better off for it. 133 00:14:48.880 --> 00:15:00.880 And you see this as an important model to lay out because you partially see this as our future. This is where things are headed. 134 00:15:00.880 --> 00:15:05.880 Yeah, hopefully it'll go this way. It doesn't have to. It could go the opposite way, too. 135 00:15:05.880 --> 00:15:13.880 You know, if there are wars that break out or major terrorist activity, then that undercuts the division of labor. 136 00:15:13.880 --> 00:15:37.160 in the US, but everywhere, I guess, and I don't deal with the fears in the third world, 137 00:15:37.160 --> 00:15:42.360 but there's apparently a lot of opposition there, too, for different reasons. 138 00:15:42.360 --> 00:15:49.900 I guess they don't want to give up growing their own crops for subsistence farming and 139 00:15:49.900 --> 00:15:52.120 get absorbed into producing for the world market. 140 00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:53.800 Well, I guess they don't have to, right? 141 00:15:53.800 --> 00:16:00.080 They can always refuse to take higher wages at the factory. 142 00:16:00.080 --> 00:16:05.080 What kind of impact did your trip to China have on the way you look at these issues? 143 00:16:05.080 --> 00:16:07.680 Well, I was astonished when we went to China. 144 00:16:07.680 --> 00:16:14.160 Before we went to China, we were in Seoul, Korea, and I was more or less dreading spending 145 00:16:14.160 --> 00:16:19.640 time in China, because I had the vision of it as being utterly backward and primitive. 146 00:16:19.640 --> 00:16:25.840 And so in Seoul, I stocked up on a supply of Snickers bars, thinking that that's what 147 00:16:25.840 --> 00:16:28.160 I would need to survive on in China. 148 00:16:28.160 --> 00:16:30.280 That's reasonable, yeah. 149 00:16:30.280 --> 00:16:37.880 And well, we stopped, it was a cruise ship, and they stopped briefly like for half a day 150 00:16:37.880 --> 00:16:45.080 in Shanghai, and Shanghai has an incredibly impressive skyline. 151 00:16:45.080 --> 00:16:49.240 I had been familiar with Hong Kong, I always thought very highly of Hong Kong, and I knew 152 00:16:49.240 --> 00:16:57.160 that I was comparable to Manhattan, but Shanghai I think even surpassed Hong Kong, and we had 153 00:16:57.160 --> 00:17:03.680 I had lunch at a five-star hotel, so my fears were totally groundless there. 154 00:17:03.680 --> 00:17:11.560 And then at the end of the trip, we disembarked in Tianjin, and I saw that it had a fair number 155 00:17:11.560 --> 00:17:18.920 of high-rise buildings, and there was a modern four-lane highway from Tianjin to Beijing, 156 00:17:18.920 --> 00:17:22.120 which is roughly, I think, 100 miles away. 157 00:17:22.120 --> 00:17:24.920 And Beijing was just incredible. 158 00:17:24.920 --> 00:17:32.200 It's filled with 40- and 50-story buildings, maybe some more, extremely ultra-modern super 159 00:17:32.200 --> 00:17:40.120 highways in the middle of the city, making the highways in Los Angeles look a few generations 160 00:17:40.120 --> 00:17:49.640 behind, and they have quite a few five-star hotels there, and it was just incredible. 161 00:17:49.640 --> 00:17:56.840 And along the same lines, backing up a bit, when we left Shanghai, the ship had to go 162 00:17:56.840 --> 00:18:02.960 along I guess the end of the Pearl River, and it was just mile after mile after mile 163 00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:11.480 of power plants and factories and wharves and cranes, front loading ships, and every 164 00:18:11.480 --> 00:18:18.520 so often I drive past the port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, and it looks, I'm sorry to 165 00:18:18.520 --> 00:18:27.240 I think the world will probably discover China next, or the year after next, when the Olympics 166 00:18:27.240 --> 00:18:32.800 are there, then the television cameras will be panning all over Beijing and probably the 167 00:18:32.800 --> 00:18:34.440 rest of China. 168 00:18:34.440 --> 00:18:38.920 So it's absolutely incredible to me. 169 00:18:38.920 --> 00:18:40.440 These pictures are not well known. 170 00:18:40.440 --> 00:18:46.680 I think most Americans feel or think that it was the same thing you thought, I guess. 171 00:18:46.680 --> 00:18:58.680 Well, it's just shocking. We were there four years ago. So, by now, they could be 25% more than they were then, at the rate that they're going. 172 00:18:58.680 --> 00:19:06.680 What does it tell you about capitalism as an engine of human progress? 173 00:19:06.680 --> 00:19:13.680 Well, it's unbelievable. They don't have full capitalism, but they have a significant degree. 174 00:19:13.680 --> 00:19:27.680 I don't think property rights are as secure there as here, but secure enough so that a great deal of investment has paid and it's just transformed their world. 175 00:19:27.680 --> 00:19:34.680 If they really cement property rights, then there would be no limit to how far they can go. 176 00:19:34.680 --> 00:19:44.840 In your studies of, or I'm not sure how much studies you've done on the reform, is all 177 00:19:44.840 --> 00:19:51.280 of this progress, was it something that was a state policy or did it come about because 178 00:19:51.280 --> 00:19:58.200 the state stepped away and just sort of permitted it to happen, just by de facto? 179 00:19:58.200 --> 00:20:03.880 Well, I think it was a state policy to step away, that's my understanding of it. 180 00:20:03.880 --> 00:20:12.040 Apparently, they picked a few key provinces and more or less decided to step back. 181 00:20:12.040 --> 00:20:20.200 Now, one of the things that impressed me in our tour of Beijing, the guide pointed to 182 00:20:20.200 --> 00:20:21.200 a McDonald's. 183 00:20:21.200 --> 00:20:27.360 They have all kinds of American fast food places, and this was something that connected 184 00:20:27.360 --> 00:20:35.000 with a story I had read some time earlier in The Times that the mayor of Beijing decided 185 00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:40.800 that he wanted to give the location occupied by McDonald's to someone else, just arbitrarily 186 00:20:40.800 --> 00:20:42.640 change it. 187 00:20:42.640 --> 00:20:48.280 And McDonald's fought that decision in their legal structure and won, and the mayor of 188 00:20:48.280 --> 00:20:51.000 Beijing ended up being fired. 189 00:20:51.000 --> 00:21:00.600 And this was apparently a key decision, because it showed that they would honor contracts. 190 00:21:00.600 --> 00:21:05.720 So they have to have given enough security of this kind, I think, for people to commit 191 00:21:05.720 --> 00:21:08.360 to invest vast sums of money there. 192 00:21:08.360 --> 00:21:13.500 I suppose the reform towards capitalism is going to be different in every country and 193 00:21:13.500 --> 00:21:20.760 every economy, but what do you suppose prompted the reforms in China? 194 00:21:20.760 --> 00:21:25.480 Was it just that socialism had just so completely bankrupted? 195 00:21:25.480 --> 00:21:31.320 Well, on the one hand, socialism was bankrupted, but I think on the other hand, they had the 196 00:21:31.320 --> 00:21:39.120 example of the tremendous relative success of Singapore and Taiwan, and also Hong Kong, 197 00:21:39.120 --> 00:21:44.400 of course, and they could see, well, these are fellow Chinese, and they're doing vastly 198 00:21:44.400 --> 00:21:50.640 better than we are, and they put that together with some common-sense knowledge about incentives 199 00:21:50.640 --> 00:22:11.640 And the real concern that I would have is do they intend to stay with it or do they regard it as some kind of move for one or two generations and then to be eliminated. 200 00:22:11.640 --> 00:22:14.640 At some point the private sector gets so large that it really is. 201 00:22:14.640 --> 00:22:15.640 I'm sorry. 202 00:22:15.640 --> 00:22:21.140 At some point, the private sector gets so large and the economy becomes so prosperous that you can't control it anymore. 203 00:22:21.140 --> 00:22:25.640 You look at something like the Internet in the US, or really, I guess, the world. 204 00:22:25.640 --> 00:22:31.640 I mean, how can the state really regulate something that vast and that fast-moving? 205 00:22:31.640 --> 00:22:35.140 They can destroy it. I mean, there's no doubt they could destroy it. 206 00:22:35.140 --> 00:22:41.640 I mean, the state could destroy the Internet or anything. 207 00:22:41.640 --> 00:22:52.080 When you look back at what Mises wrote about, when Mises was writing about socialism, he 208 00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:59.120 was really attacking the idea that socialism was capable of creating anything like a productive 209 00:22:59.120 --> 00:23:01.480 economy or an economy at all. 210 00:23:01.480 --> 00:23:07.300 The socialist at one time believed that they had a better system in mind for the progress 211 00:23:07.300 --> 00:23:08.840 of humanity, didn't they? 212 00:23:08.840 --> 00:23:17.080 They believe that, yeah, but I think it should not have taken all that long for them to realize 213 00:23:17.080 --> 00:23:23.040 that they were mistaken, and the bankruptcy of socialism would have been seen much, much 214 00:23:23.040 --> 00:23:29.360 sooner, generations earlier, if they had not been bailed out again and again by Western 215 00:23:29.360 --> 00:23:35.120 and Loan Guarantees. 216 00:23:35.120 --> 00:23:39.160 Their economy is chronically chaotic. 217 00:23:39.160 --> 00:23:45.380 If you're missing any one of hundreds of different things, I suppose you've got everything required 218 00:23:45.380 --> 00:23:50.360 to construct houses, except you don't have nails or screws or whatever. 219 00:23:50.360 --> 00:23:54.940 Or if you've got those, you're missing something else. 220 00:23:54.940 --> 00:23:59.820 They were always missing something and again and again they were bailed out by being able 221 00:23:59.820 --> 00:24:05.140 to get them in the world market and the only way they could get them in the world market 222 00:24:05.140 --> 00:24:11.860 is either we were giving them aid or loans they never had to repay or we created an export 223 00:24:11.860 --> 00:24:21.260 capacity for them like the German government guaranteed the investments to construct their 224 00:24:21.260 --> 00:24:23.900 Their Oil Pipeline to Western Europe 225 00:24:23.900 --> 00:24:28.660 And once they had the oil pipeline, then that gave them a substantial income from exports. 226 00:24:28.660 --> 00:24:31.420 So then they could buy in the world market. 227 00:24:31.420 --> 00:24:38.060 But suppose the West had not given them the ability to have those exports and wasn't giving 228 00:24:38.060 --> 00:24:44.500 them aid, well then they'd have had to deal with all of the chaotic effects of their system 229 00:24:44.500 --> 00:24:50.460 and they would have had a series of famines without massive imports of wheat from the 230 00:24:50.460 --> 00:24:56.180 in the West, and whatever level of development you have, suppose there's a famine, well that 231 00:24:56.180 --> 00:25:03.140 by itself wipes out a large part of the division of labor, and if there's any danger of a repetition, 232 00:25:03.140 --> 00:25:08.780 then people start fleeing to the countryside, and the natural outcome of socialism, I think, 233 00:25:08.780 --> 00:25:14.900 is a reversion to feudalism, and that would have started happening probably by 1920 or 234 00:25:14.900 --> 00:25:19.860 so if the Western world weren't stepping in to aid them. 235 00:25:19.860 --> 00:25:27.620 Yeah, it's a terrible, great tragedy in the untold history of the Cold War, in part, I suppose. 236 00:25:27.620 --> 00:25:37.860 Yeah, and the reason we were helping them, I think, is because in the West, the opinion of the intellectuals was that that's the wave of the future. 237 00:25:37.860 --> 00:25:38.860 Yeah. 238 00:25:38.860 --> 00:25:42.860 And so we need to aid them and let them get off the ground. 239 00:25:42.860 --> 00:25:43.860 Yeah. 240 00:25:43.860 --> 00:25:49.860 And now, what's left of that movement is the environmentalists. 241 00:25:49.860 --> 00:25:54.860 Who say, well, progress of humanity, forget it, that's the problem. 242 00:25:54.860 --> 00:26:00.860 Lew Rockwell had a great statement, I don't know if I can remember it verbatim, 243 00:26:00.860 --> 00:26:06.860 but it's as though the socialists learned that their plan leads to poverty, 244 00:26:06.860 --> 00:26:11.860 then they decided to call themselves environmentalists and make poverty their goal. 245 00:26:11.860 --> 00:26:32.860 After all your observations about China and these other parts of the world that are booming and there's so many, what is your sense of what's happening to Europe today with the vast overgrown welfare states, high unemployment, subsidized political paralysis? 246 00:26:32.860 --> 00:26:45.860 Yeah, well, it's amazing. There are people there who know that the unemployment is due to their intervention and the height of wages and benefits. 247 00:26:45.860 --> 00:26:53.860 And they're content with it. They think this is the price of their wonderful benefits. And they don't mind. 248 00:26:53.860 --> 00:27:05.860 Now, I think it's entirely possible the European Union will end up breaking up. I don't know when, but I know there's dissatisfaction. 249 00:27:05.860 --> 00:27:19.860 And in the nature of the case, there has to be, you know, like if you look within the United States, there are people at any given time who will say the Fed is pursuing too easy a monetary policy or too tight a monetary policy. 250 00:27:19.860 --> 00:27:49.860 Now, in Europe, this gets coupled with nationalism, because then, for example, the people in Germany where they traditionally had a more conservative monetary policy, if they're unhappy with the European policy, which should be easy for them to think, well, it's the fault of the Italians and the Spaniards who are governing the monetary policy, and in Italy and Spain, they take the opposite view. 251 00:27:49.860 --> 00:27:52.500 The Germans and the Dutch. 252 00:27:52.500 --> 00:27:59.340 Already I think in Italy there's some talk of, or maybe some necessity of, breaking away 253 00:27:59.340 --> 00:28:07.060 from the euro because they've been running major deficits in Italy. 254 00:28:07.060 --> 00:28:12.300 I don't know if they have the any power to expand euros on their own, I doubt it, but 255 00:28:12.300 --> 00:28:18.060 they're unhappy with their situation in Europe and many people there think they'd be better 256 00:28:18.060 --> 00:28:33.060 In so many ways, Dr. Wiesman, you are a living link with Mises. You knew him for how many years? 257 00:28:33.060 --> 00:28:35.060 A total of about 20. 258 00:28:35.060 --> 00:28:45.060 Isn't that remarkable? It just sounds amazing to us today. So often we think of Mises, especially the students here, 259 00:28:45.060 --> 00:29:01.060 Do you ever find yourself reflecting on what Mises would say or what Mises would think about this? 260 00:29:01.060 --> 00:29:08.060 Yeah, sometimes I do. I would have been very interested to know what he would have thought of the development of the Orient. 261 00:29:08.060 --> 00:29:13.060 It would have been nice for him to be able to travel to Tokyo and Beijing and Hong Kong. 262 00:29:13.060 --> 00:29:31.060 I think he underestimated their development at the time. I think he might even have remarked that they've only superficially adopted capitalism, but maybe he'd have thought differently now. 263 00:29:31.060 --> 00:29:41.060 You've translated some of his works into English and you've done other things by Boehm-Bawerk. Do you have any other translations plans in mind? 264 00:29:41.060 --> 00:30:10.060 There isn't anything that I feel a special urgency about. There are other projects I have. I wrote a doctoral dissertation many, many years ago that I had to drastically reduce to get it through my committee. 265 00:30:10.060 --> 00:30:17.220 and one of my hopes is to bring that out if in no other way at least as a PDF 266 00:30:17.220 --> 00:30:23.380 volume online and the subject is well it's titled is the theory of originary 267 00:30:23.380 --> 00:30:30.540 interest and I subsequently changed the originary interest to profit and many of 268 00:30:30.540 --> 00:30:36.100 or most of it I guess appears in in capitalism but not all of it and I have 269 00:30:36.100 --> 00:30:41.780 and something that predates that called the Consumption Theory of Interest. 270 00:30:41.780 --> 00:30:46.800 So those are two main manuscripts I'd like to bring out and I have my MBA thesis which 271 00:30:46.800 --> 00:30:52.000 was the Classical Economists and the Austrians on Value and Cost. 272 00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:57.500 So those three things I'd certainly like to get on with. 273 00:30:57.500 --> 00:31:12.500 and I gave lectures at Pepperdine for many, many years. I'd like to deliver them for recording, 274 00:31:12.500 --> 00:31:17.940 not being sidetracked by various irrelevant questions and so on. So that's another project 275 00:31:17.940 --> 00:31:21.180 I have in mind to deliver a set of lectures. 276 00:31:21.180 --> 00:31:26.500 It's very impressive how you've used all the new technology to help get the word out. You've 277 00:31:26.500 --> 00:31:42.500 You've got a blog, you blog also very frequently on the Mises blog, and you've got all your lectures on MP3, and your book in PDF distributable, and your book selling continues to sell very well. 278 00:31:42.500 --> 00:31:53.500 Capitalism is just continuing to fly out the door, we're always ordering new copies, so it's a book for the ages, you know, and have you been pleased with the continuing reception of it? 279 00:31:53.500 --> 00:31:57.260 So many books just come up here and then disappear, but yours, no, it stays. 280 00:31:57.260 --> 00:32:01.740 Well, I'm glad to hear that. I welcome anything that'll improve the sale of it. 281 00:32:01.740 --> 00:32:07.420 Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking time out of the schedule this week to visit on this podcast. 282 00:32:07.420 --> 00:32:08.940 Well, thank you. It's my pleasure.