WEBVTT NOTE Mises's Liberalism Revisited 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 I'm very happy to be here today addressing this great conference of the Mises Institute, 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:15.360 especially on the occasion of its 25th anniversary and the presentation of the Gary Schlarbaum 3 00:00:15.360 --> 00:00:19.720 Award to my friend Bob Higgs. 4 00:00:19.720 --> 00:00:24.440 I feel somewhat funny about addressing you on the thought of Ludwig von Mises. 5 00:00:24.440 --> 00:00:31.200 As far as economics goes, most, probably all, of our speakers are in a better position to 6 00:00:31.200 --> 00:00:34.600 inform you than I am. 7 00:00:34.600 --> 00:00:41.760 And most of all, we now have Guido Hülsmann's magnificent work on the life and thought of 8 00:00:41.760 --> 00:00:42.760 Mises. 9 00:00:42.760 --> 00:00:48.120 I think you've seen it all, I hope you've considered at least buying it. 10 00:00:48.120 --> 00:00:57.220 has remarkably few references in the index to me that's surprising that Judy 11 00:00:57.220 --> 00:01:04.920 Thomason is one of the best index makers in the country besides a proofreader and 12 00:01:04.920 --> 00:01:12.480 copy editor and I don't know shoot well I don't believe in I do believe in 13 00:01:12.480 --> 00:01:22.840 My friend Murray Rothbard used to say, every conspiracy is true, and there certainly is 14 00:01:22.840 --> 00:01:31.120 a point to that. Nonetheless, Dieter Holtzman's magnificent work is a landmark in intellectual 15 00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:37.480 history and the definitive work on Mises, of course, but also on the whole history of 16 00:01:37.480 --> 00:01:40.920 of the Austrian School. 17 00:01:40.920 --> 00:01:46.040 All I can claim is that I personally was acquainted with Mises and have been familiar with his 18 00:01:46.040 --> 00:01:49.040 work for a very long time. 19 00:01:49.040 --> 00:02:01.080 You know, on the other hand, I was acquainted with Cobden and Bright, according to Dr. Thornton. 20 00:02:01.080 --> 00:02:05.720 I was introduced to the thought of Mises by my high school buddy George Reisman, who had 21 00:02:05.720 --> 00:02:09.720 I had already read Human Action when we were at the Bronx High School of Science. 22 00:02:09.720 --> 00:02:17.720 Then, by some chance of fate, we met Leonard Reed and his staff at the Foundation for Economic Education. 23 00:02:17.720 --> 00:02:23.720 Through Reed, we were invited to attend the Mises Seminar at New York University. 24 00:02:23.720 --> 00:02:33.720 That's where I first met Murray Rothbard, another very fateful encounter, and a friend of mine until his untimely death. 25 00:02:33.720 --> 00:02:40.280 As soon as we entered college, George and I began an intensive study of the German language. 26 00:02:40.280 --> 00:02:46.760 After a couple of years of German, George translated Mises's epistemological foundations 27 00:02:46.760 --> 00:02:54.000 of economics and also a work that Mises admired very much on the philosophy of history by 28 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:59.720 Heinrich Rickert, which Mises had suggested to George. 29 00:02:59.720 --> 00:03:02.680 And I translated Mises's liberalism. 30 00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:08.000 Both translations were funded modestly because they didn't have much money by the William 31 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:10.400 Volcker Fund. 32 00:03:10.400 --> 00:03:15.800 The William Volcker Fund was a small libertarian and old right foundation which also helped 33 00:03:15.800 --> 00:03:19.120 to support Murray Rothbard. 34 00:03:19.120 --> 00:03:24.600 And ever since then I followed the vicissitudes of Mises' reputation. 35 00:03:24.600 --> 00:03:30.040 I was interested to see that when Mises died in October 1973, and as a matter of fact just 36 00:03:30.040 --> 00:03:37.120 a couple of days ago, it was the 34th anniversary. Even the New York Times, and it's an obituary, 37 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:44.080 called him one of the foremost economists of this century. And later Milton Friedman, though 38 00:03:44.080 --> 00:03:49.760 he was from a totally different positivist tradition of economics, called Mises one of 39 00:03:49.760 --> 00:03:58.360 the great economists of all time. Mises' scientific achievements were indeed awesome. There's 40 00:03:58.360 --> 00:04:05.480 his pioneering work in monetary theory and the business cycle going back to 1912, his 41 00:04:05.480 --> 00:04:11.920 profound work in the methodology of economics and the a priori derivation of economic truths, 42 00:04:11.920 --> 00:04:19.680 systematizing all of economic theory in his magnum opus, Human Action and much, much more. 43 00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:24.680 But I want to focus for a moment on another of his great contributions. 44 00:04:24.680 --> 00:04:31.800 At one time, people who called themselves socialists had an ideal and a goal. 45 00:04:31.800 --> 00:04:36.480 Now socialism just means constantly carping on the ever-changing critique of the free 46 00:04:36.480 --> 00:04:37.480 market. 47 00:04:37.480 --> 00:04:43.000 In my own lifetime, it was that the free market produces tail fins on cars. 48 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:46.200 I don't know if you remember that. 49 00:04:46.200 --> 00:04:48.440 That it advertising seduces people. 50 00:04:48.440 --> 00:04:51.480 It goes, oh, it never ends. 51 00:04:51.480 --> 00:04:59.480 At that time, in the old days, the socialists had a definite program. It was a centrally planned economy. 52 00:04:59.480 --> 00:05:07.480 It was the rejection of the anarchy of the market. They called it the scientific wave of the future. 53 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:15.480 This was the faith of thousands upon thousands of professional intellectuals in all countries, 54 00:05:15.480 --> 00:05:19.480 the people that my friend Hans was just talking about. 55 00:05:19.480 --> 00:05:27.480 One example, just read Albert Einstein's article, Why Socialism. You can easily find it on the internet. 56 00:05:27.480 --> 00:05:34.480 Read it, it's a short article, an unbelievable bunch of cliched rubbish. 57 00:05:34.480 --> 00:05:45.480 Sometimes, as with Einstein, socialists did raise the possibility that there might be some excessive bureaucracy in a socialist society. 58 00:05:45.480 --> 00:05:55.480 One might also wonder how it would be possible to combine a centrally established plan with a democracy which they also favored in any normal sense. 59 00:05:55.480 --> 00:05:59.480 But anyway, the socialists didn't deal with this. 60 00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:04.480 In any case, these were by no means the main problem. 61 00:06:04.480 --> 00:06:09.480 What of the feasibility of abolishing private property in the first place? 62 00:06:09.480 --> 00:06:22.480 How can there be any rational economic calculation if there is no market for capital goods, as there cannot be under socialism because the government owns all capital goods? 63 00:06:22.480 --> 00:06:36.480 How would the scientific socialist planners know how to allocate capital? They have to allocate capital among all the possible competing uses, as our Randian friends would say, blank out. 64 00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:48.480 It was Mises' accomplishment, the sign of his superb independence of mind, to have brushed aside this pious, one just doesn't speak of such matters. 65 00:06:48.480 --> 00:06:57.480 Instead he presented comprehensively and arrestingly the insoluble problems of socialist economic calculation. 66 00:06:57.480 --> 00:07:05.480 The socialists attempted some weak rebuttals. They argued for something called market socialism. 67 00:07:05.480 --> 00:07:10.920 where you can have a market and yet the government owns everything and there was 68 00:07:10.920 --> 00:07:17.240 a big debate and of course the mainstream writers all said that Mises was wrong. 69 00:07:17.240 --> 00:07:23.840 Socialism would work just fine. About 15 years ago after the experience of the 70 00:07:23.840 --> 00:07:30.920 Soviet Union in every real existing socialist system, the socialist economist 71 00:07:30.920 --> 00:07:37.720 As Robert Heilbrunner wrote, in the end, it turns out, of course, that Mises was right. 72 00:07:37.720 --> 00:07:46.880 Whoops! I love that, of course, it turns out. 73 00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:52.040 The consequences of neglecting Mises can be seen in the history of the 20th century, in 74 00:07:52.040 --> 00:07:59.360 the tens of millions of diminished and destroyed lives in Russia, Poland, Hungary, China and 75 00:07:59.360 --> 00:08:08.800 and elsewhere. Now, Mises lived in Vienna, which was not only the city of art and music, 76 00:08:08.800 --> 00:08:17.160 the great composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, whose patronage, by the way, was 77 00:08:17.160 --> 00:08:26.000 afforded by the monarchy and the aristocracy. But after a while, democracy arrived in Vienna 78 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:35.200 and the beginning of the 20th century and Vienna became the city that three times elected 79 00:08:35.200 --> 00:08:43.200 a violently anti-Semitic mayor, a man named Carl Lueger, who was the original National 80 00:08:43.200 --> 00:08:50.520 Socialist. Adolf Hitler lived in Vienna at that time and Hitler's world view was shaped 81 00:08:50.520 --> 00:09:02.080 by Carl Lueger. The Viennese still in the great Ringstrasse belt of avenues and plazas 82 00:09:02.080 --> 00:09:12.880 that surrounds the downtown, they have a Carl Lueger plots because he was loved by the Viennese. 83 00:09:12.880 --> 00:09:21.760 And here is Mises in Indiana, the grandson of the high rabbi of Lemberg, not only a Jew 84 00:09:21.760 --> 00:09:27.000 but already the leading classical liberal, east of the Rhine, maybe the last authentic 85 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:28.880 liberal in Europe. 86 00:09:28.880 --> 00:09:34.240 So Mises was woefully isolated. 87 00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:41.040 But as he wrote in his memoirs, I would not lose courage even now, I would not tire in 88 00:09:41.040 --> 00:09:46.560 When professing what I knew to be right, so I decided to write a book on socialism, which 89 00:09:46.560 --> 00:09:52.880 I had contemplated before the war, before the first world war, I now set about executing 90 00:09:52.880 --> 00:09:55.160 my plan. 91 00:09:55.160 --> 00:09:58.880 The book Mises Contemplated appeared in 1922. 92 00:09:58.880 --> 00:10:06.400 It was called Socialism, and that book found its remnant, as Albert J. Nock would say. 93 00:10:06.400 --> 00:10:12.120 Hayek explained in the introduction he wrote to the new edition of Socialism, published 94 00:10:12.120 --> 00:10:17.720 by the Liberty Press, when socialism first appeared its impact was profound. 95 00:10:17.720 --> 00:10:23.800 It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning 96 00:10:23.800 --> 00:10:27.800 to their university studies after World War I. 97 00:10:27.800 --> 00:10:32.580 A number of my contemporaries who later became well known but who were then unknown to each 98 00:10:32.580 --> 00:10:36.040 other went through the same experience. 99 00:10:36.040 --> 00:10:47.040 Wilhelm Röpke in Germany and Lionel Robbins in England, about two examples, and Hayek himself, of course, but there were many others. 100 00:10:47.040 --> 00:11:04.040 So Mises began to find supporters of his views. His influence was spread through his famous seminar in Vienna, which included many thinkers who went on to achieve international eminence. 101 00:11:04.040 --> 00:11:09.040 and he continued to write for the rest of his life. 102 00:11:09.040 --> 00:11:14.040 One book is the one I translated, Liberalism, published in 1927. 103 00:11:14.040 --> 00:11:22.040 The translation has gone through a number of different names since it was published in 1962, but never gone out of print. 104 00:11:22.040 --> 00:11:27.040 The work is a short but excellent introduction to Mises' social philosophy. 105 00:11:27.040 --> 00:11:36.040 What stands out in Mises's work is that he places at the very head of the liberal program, private property. 106 00:11:36.040 --> 00:11:48.040 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had stated in the Communist Manifesto that the theory of communism can be summed up in one expression, the abolition of private property. 107 00:11:48.040 --> 00:12:05.040 So in liberalism, Mises begins with private property, and he maintains that all the rest of the liberal theory, liberty, peace, rule of law and all the other principles, follow from this one principle of private property. 108 00:12:05.040 --> 00:12:15.040 This distinguished Mises boldly from the rest of the writers, who were now calling themselves liberals in those days, as they do today. 109 00:12:15.040 --> 00:12:22.040 They had hijacked the name of liberal, but in reality they were nothing but social democrats in disguise. 110 00:12:22.040 --> 00:12:26.040 So why was Mises ignored for so many years? 111 00:12:26.040 --> 00:12:32.040 At his seminar at NYU, for instance, NYU did not even pay his salary. 112 00:12:32.040 --> 00:12:35.040 It was paid by the Volcker Fund. 113 00:12:35.040 --> 00:12:41.040 Just as at Chicago, the University of Chicago did not pay Hayek's salary. 114 00:12:41.040 --> 00:12:43.040 It was paid by an outside foundation. 115 00:12:43.040 --> 00:12:58.040 In fact, F. A. Hayek could not even get a job in the economics department at Chicago, the department of Milton Friedman and George Stigler, because they did not consider him a scientific economist. 116 00:12:58.040 --> 00:13:03.040 Instead, he taught at the Committee on Social Thought, where I studied. 117 00:13:03.040 --> 00:13:11.080 Still at NYU, Mises had a handful of PhD students. Among them were Hans Zenholz, 118 00:13:11.080 --> 00:13:17.360 Israel Kirzner, and George Reisman. What could account for this lack of respect 119 00:13:17.360 --> 00:13:24.880 shown to Mises? I think it was what Jacques Rouef, famous economist in his 120 00:13:24.880 --> 00:13:54.880 Mises never budged an inch. He never gave an inch. As all the changing fads came and went that captured the loyalty of generation after generation of the intellectuals that Hans was talking about, from militarism and imperialism, which were all a rage at one time, to fascism, considered the wave of the future in the 1930s, 121 00:13:54.880 --> 00:13:58.880 Agenism, every variety of socialism. 122 00:13:58.880 --> 00:14:02.880 Lew Rockwell wrote an excellent article a few years ago 123 00:14:02.880 --> 00:14:06.880 called Heart of a Fighter, which you can find 124 00:14:06.880 --> 00:14:10.880 in the archive of the Mises Institute. 125 00:14:10.880 --> 00:14:14.880 And the thought of Ludwig von Mises lives on, 126 00:14:14.880 --> 00:14:18.880 has been spread today to many new thousands by the work of Lew Rockwell 127 00:14:18.880 --> 00:14:22.880 and his wonderful staff at the Mises Institute. 128 00:14:22.880 --> 00:14:30.520 It has shaped the thinking of Ron Paul, whom you've heard of, the great Ron Paul. 129 00:14:30.520 --> 00:14:38.880 I've shaken the hand of Ron Paul, as I did many, many years ago, shake the hand of Robert Taft. 130 00:14:38.880 --> 00:15:03.440 And in my view, Ron Paul is greater than Taft was even, and Mises' influence can be seen directly in the Mises Institute and the thinking of many of us, 131 00:15:03.440 --> 00:15:17.440 and directly or indirectly, in the heroic young fanatics who show up whenever Ron Paul is there and keep chanting Ron Paul, Ron Paul. 132 00:15:17.440 --> 00:15:28.440 I love those guys. 133 00:15:28.440 --> 00:15:35.240 And I think the influence of Mises' ideas will be spread even further by this great work of Guido Hülsmann. 134 00:15:35.240 --> 00:15:44.440 This is a great work. You don't have to read it all the way through, it's kind of like an encyclopedia, 135 00:15:44.440 --> 00:15:48.920 dip into, no you couldn't, if you want to read it all the way through. But you can dip into it, 136 00:15:49.880 --> 00:15:52.440 check out the references to me. 137 00:15:52.440 --> 00:16:14.440 Mises The Last Night of Liberalism 138 00:16:14.440 --> 00:16:23.440 When I first learned of the title, Mises The Last Night of Liberalism, I was a little puzzled, but eventually understood. 139 00:16:23.440 --> 00:16:32.440 It has come down to us from the late Middle Ages the phrase, night without fear and without reproach. 140 00:16:32.440 --> 00:16:48.960 and that was what Mises was, a night without fear and without reproach, filled with courage 141 00:16:48.960 --> 00:16:55.320 from beginning to the end, with an intellectual integrity that remains an inspiration to us 142 00:16:55.320 --> 00:16:59.560 all and will inspire those who come after us.