There are only two times when the press is interested in the opinions of economists,
when the economy crashes or when there's a presidential election.
And sadly, most of their opinions amount to pretending omniscience or to shilling for government power.
It seems remarkable that in the 18th and 19th century, to be an economist meant, above all,
to be a pain in the neck to the powers that be.
An economist was a person who warned that government could not improve society and that
any attempt to do so only created more problems.
That is the sort of economist Mises was, that is the sort of economist that the Mises Institute
set out to cultivate 25 years ago with the success we see today.
The Mises Institute has become much more than that.
The Institute has accomplished not only what it set out to do, that is to support Mises' ideas,
it has sparked a revolution in learning and is leading the way to a future of liberty.
All those who have played a part deserve our gratitude, our benefactors, and we have many of them here in this room,
our scholars also, many of them here with us, our students, our readers all over the world.
Ironically, as I learned only through the research of Guido Holzman, it was Mises himself
who had dreamed of what would happen in the last 25 years.
Nearing the end of his life, he urged the establishment of a center for the study and
promotion of liberty with economics at its core.
He must have spoken to Margaret von Mises about this.
Certainly she was enthusiastic when I approached her with the idea here in New York City.
Her husband's memo was the fruit of decades of frustration with the growing role of the
state in education and the complicity of the universities in the corruption of education
towards statist ends.
A new institution to teach and advance the ideas of liberty was his answer, to make an
and run around official propaganda. Note that this institution was not to be a think tank
in the traditional sense of that term. Think tanks are a product of the age of the political
party, a holding tank for politicians out of office and a repository for schemes to
secure power for partisans. In this model, which originated in Germany and was perfected
in Britain. The think tank was a private ally of the state, prepared to cheer on the leaders
or be the loyal opposition, whatever was called for at the moment. This is not what Mises
had in mind. He wanted an intellectually activist institution that would be devoted to teaching,
researching, publishing, preserving and advancing ideas, and above all, to doing what he believed
should have to be done convincing the masses of people of the merits of a fully free society.
Why do we need institutions to advance and support particular ideas? If an idea is good,
why should it need an apparatus behind it? With the advent and the advance of the modern
state, freedom to think has come under ever more fire. When the state took over education
itself. We had the most serious problem. After World War I, for example, Mises
warned that government schools and multilingual territories pose an
intractable cultural problem. Few issues drive people to extremes like the
attempt to impose on them a foreign language. This creates conflicts that the
state cannot solve. If it teaches in one language, it irritates the people who
The dominant language will become the symbol of a dominant political power, which further antagonizes the minorities.
There is only one solution to this problem, said Mises. Education must be private, if only to preserve peace among groups.
But of course, Mises' point can be extended to all issues that concern the human intellect.
and Intellect. The party in power is in a position to control the debate, to punish
those who refuse to toe the party line, to indoctrinate the young, to whip up fever on
behalf of the regime's prospects and projects, and to hire and fire intellectuals. In the
case of communism and Nazism, it meant liquidating political enemies. In the case of democracy,
It means denying economic livelihoods to academics and demonizing people who think differently.
In the United States, our first real crisis occurred because the dominant power wanted
to crack down on free speech with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The result was the first nullification controversy that nearly led to a breakup of the country,
and it would have had Jefferson not been elected in 1800.
But the lesson wasn't learned. People were jailed during the Civil War and World War
I for expressing points of view the government didn't like, and this tradition has continued
to the present day. The ideas of liberty need room to breathe. They are almost always expressed
in opposition to the regime. The future is always uncertain, and liberty is always fragile
when the state is on the loose.
Recall that Mises was never given a paid professorship at the University of Vienna, and the reasons
are detailed in Guido Holzman's New Biography.
His liberal politics barred him, but he nevertheless carved out a niche for himself as a volunteer
professor.
His private seminar in Vienna, which he taught while holding down a high-pressure job at
The Chamber of Commerce wielded vast influence.
But when he realized that the growing Nazi power
meant that Vienna was becoming dangerous for him,
he was able to flee to Geneva,
where an institution in a neutral country cared for him,
gave him space and freedom to work,
protected him from the state.
The result was the German language edition of Human Action,
a book that is a classic of the modern age.
Then the war meant he had to leave again, coming this time to America, where sympathetic
business owners and philanthropists supported him.
So there is a real sense in which Mises' own experience underscores the need for politically
independent institutions that guard and preserve the right to think creatively, particularly
when thought leads in the directions of which the regime disapproves.
In today's highly politicized society, independence from the state is ever more important.
And that is precisely what the Mises Institute provides on many levels.
For our faculty, and for our students, and everyone, and that includes our faculty and
students in many, many different countries, as Guido points out, and really for everyone
interested in Austrian economics and libertarianism.
When the Mises Institute was founded in 1982, Mises had been dead for nine years. His widow
Margaret was working hard to keep his books in print. Murray Rothbard had referred to
her as a one-woman Mises industry, and she was indeed that. I'd been able to assist
in this work, as John Denson pointed out at Arlington House Publishers under Neil McCaffrey,
The Theory, where he brought back three of Mises' books into print, Bureaucracy, Theory
in History and Omnipotent Government, and I only met Mises once over dinner, but I recall
every moment as if watching a film frame by frame, and when I approached Margaret, there
was renewed interest in Austrian economics, but there was still a serious deficiency that
had been noted by Murray Rothbard, Mises' own contributions were being overlooked, even swept away.
Yes, he was treated as a worthy champion of free enterprise, but his scientific work and his sweeping sociological outlook were being neglected or actively demonized.
So the first job of the Mises Institute was to provide a home for Mises' ideas, for great books, and also for his best and most productive students,
The most notable among them was, of course, Murray Rothbard, who agreed to join the fledgling effort as academic vice president.
The founding of the Mises Institute lifted his spirits, and he gave the work of the institute wings to fly.
Murray's own scholarly career had followed a path eerily similar to Mises's.
He had all the credentials, he'd written pioneering works, he'd made huge strides in pushing forward
both economics and political thought, and for this he was repaid by academia with an
extremely low-paid job at a backwater school. Though Murray never complained. He had good
students in New York, but none that he could work with on a formal basis into graduate
School. These were difficult times for Murray politically. He was a brilliant libertarian,
which meant he was neither a Reaganite nor a Carterite. He had doubts about the inflationist
aspects and pro-deficit aspects of supply-side economics. He was not, of course, a backer
of war. In fact, he descended from the war party that otherwise liked at least some of
But he favored both tax cuts and spending cuts, which certainly made him an outlier, someone respected by young students but shunned by mainstream venues.
He had still done well in developing a salon out of his living room, and he achieved renown by publishing with non-establishment book houses.
But what he needed was some institutional backing that was not working for a particular political party.
The Institute gave Rothbard this very thing. First there was our new edition of Mises' neglected work, Theory and History, to which Murray contributed the introduction. Then there was the new journal, which became the basis of the Misesian revival in academia for him to edit.
As the Institute began to develop a base of financial support, and there is nothing I could say here, especially to the supporters in this room, that could possibly exaggerate the central role of this generosity, there were ever more advances.
Finally, they came to the classroom setting, and what later became known as the Mises University.
While I recall the days when Murray headed our faculty, there he was rushing from class
to class, teaching with his legendary exuberance, talking to all the students between classes
and then staying up late at night surrounded by the hard core. He would teach in effect
until two, three and even four o'clock in the morning. The students would arrive again
the next day for classes at eight o'clock. The staff was there too, although by week's
and we were looking like death warmed over.
Except of course Murray who was still going strong.
Because I think back to those days I recall several major things.
I recall looking at the review of Austrian Economics, our journal, just after the first issue came out of the press.
I recall the faces of all the young students.
And I recall getting the news that a free market champion and an endowed chair of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
and that Murray would hold it. He would have a well-paying job at a good school. He would have students and he could cultivate and write, excuse me, that he could cultivate. He would be secure and free to teach and write and it was a remarkable thing. He would be spared the fate that befell Mises. We were surrounded by evidence now. The work of the Institute was making a difference. Over the last 25 years all these programs
programs have blossomed beyond our wildest dreams. We have had the great pleasure of working, as John pointed out, with remarkable scholars like Efe Hayek, Henry Haslett, Hans Sennholz, and so many more.
We have worked closely with the greatest statesmen of our epoch, Ron Paul, whose generosity
She was essential to our early success, with great donors like the late Parthenia de Merald,
Opie Alford, Lawrence Ferdig, Henry Hazlitt himself, and Peg Rowley.
We've seen so many new scholars appear and dazzle us with their writings, lectures and
contributions.
The Mises University has educated nearly every Austrian working today, the world over.
Our publications programs expanded to films and audiobooks. Our library, rooted in the
collections of Murray Rothbard and Robert Lefebvre's Freedom School, have extended
in a thousand directions with the goal of preserving what other libraries carelessly
or maliciously discard. We don't just keep these for our own scholars and students. We've
put almost 400 books online, as Jeff Tucker pointed out, vast amounts of amazing material
which hasn't seen the light of day for decades, is now just a click away, and if you happen
to be on a college campus and see kids walking around with t-shirts with the images of Mises
or Menger, Rothbard or Bastiat on them, you can know that the source is the Mises Institute.
We still have a small staff, we all work very hard doing what we love, making available
the scholarship of liberty in the Missessian tradition and encouraging the studying and
and advancement in that tradition.
We want to bring back into print the whole of the Austrian and libertarian library.
Just this year that includes the books of Hazlitt, Trotterhof, Fedder, Garrett, Hutt,
Mackliffe, Nock, Flynn and others.
In fact, the Institute has become the main spring of old liberal theory the world over.
And yet that reality has raised a question in some areas that we might be tempted to
dismiss, but one I think we should engage.
The question is this, by doing what we do, are we not somehow skewing the marketplace
of ideas, tilting the great intellectual debate in our favor, and is it right to enter into
the rarefied world of academics with an agenda that is scientific, moral and political?
In short, if liberty is such a good idea, and if the Misesian tradition is so hot, why does it need our help?
For centuries, the intellectuals of the old liberal bent, as Mises was, had believed that education alone would work to the benefit of liberty.
Jefferson is a classic case in point. As people became more prosperous under liberty, he thought, they could devote ever more personal resources towards schooling.
Children would not need to work but rather could be taught literacy in all important subjects.
The most promising students among them would continue their education to eventually become leaders of society at all levels.
In civic life there was one end sought, the protection, preservation and promotion of human liberty.
The city of man as embodied in liberty was to be advanced through the single tool of education.
They saw education and liberty as a unified project, one that would not really be separable in theory or fact.
They believed that the blessings of liberty would be so apparent that in all forms of learning would assist in the grand goal of enhancing the cultural understanding of liberty.
Nor did they imagine the possibility of failure, much less of de-civilization.
That entire generation was convinced that progress was inevitable through the spread of freedom.
Now that freedom had been discovered, there would be no going back.
In retrospect, that generation that absorbed enlightenment ideals was naive in the extreme.
If we look around the world today, we see that education has advanced in every sector.
We cannot conceive of a child not attempting to gain admission to college.
We tell the youth that the secret to success is to stay in school. As for elementary school and high school, we regard them as so important, they are public goods to be provided by the state.
And just to make sure that everyone gets an education, the law forbids kids from working, a fact which labor unions like and support, if only to keep cheap labor off the market.
Access to great books, great minds, the best ideas of all human history are everywhere.
But has this education assisted in the bolstering of liberty?
All data indicate that the more objectively educated people become today,
the more likely they are to trust the state as the means of social salvation.
You can map this demographically.
The higher the level of education, the more the inclination towards socialist thinking.
Why is this? Hayek might tell us that it has something to do with the hubris of intellectuals
who believe that they can concoct a better social order in their minds than the one that
freedom can create. Mises might draw attention to the resentment on the part of the intellectuals
that they are not as valued by society as entrepreneurs or sports or music stars.
Rothbard might point out that intellectuals are drawn to the state as a way of legitimizing
their ideas and securing their financial well-being.
Whatever the case, it is a fact that would have astounded people in the 18th century
that the more education a person receives, the more they are drawn to social ideals that
can only be realized under complete despotism if then.
A person like Jefferson would have found this inconceivable.
Meanwhile, the students who were taught in public school
are being socialized in a critical attitude
towards the state and are often made
victims of political fashion.
Rather than read Jefferson or the great books,
they are being instructed in recycling and phony history
designed to bolster political agendas.
The Enlightenment intellectual's attitude to his education
was oddly defective for three reasons.
The first is that the structure of the institution
during the educating matters a great deal.
If the institution is owned and managed by the state,
we can expect that the ideas it promotes
will be favorable to the regime.
This should not be a controversial claim.
If, for example, Wal-Mart were running our schools, who would be surprised that criticism
of Wal-Mart would be kept to a minimum and that pro-Wal-Mart attitudes would be cultivated
among the students? We would expect that. It would not shock us. We would just consider
the source. But how rarely do we consider the source when it comes to state-funded education?
There is an assumption that people make that education, when sponsored by the state, will
will be objective and keep the students' best interests at heart.
This assumption makes no sense whatsoever, but it is nonetheless widely held.
We encounter often in dealing with the issue of elementary and secondary schools.
If someone attends a Baptist or a Catholic school, people can ask them how can they stand
all that religious indoctrination.
But have you ever heard of a public school student being questioned how they can stand
and all that statist indoctrination.
The ownership and control of institutions does in fact matter for the quality of education
a student receives and what the student will be taught.
The second point overlooked by the Enlightenment generation is that ideology is more powerful
over human minds than the mere abstraction of ideas in general.
Especially today, it is nearly impossible to escape the pervasiveness of ideology.
In the guise of biology or earth science, students are routinely fed environmentalist
propaganda that blames capitalism for all the world's ills.
In the guise of social science, socialist plans for political reconstruction are fobbed
off on the unsuspecting.
There is such a thing as pure knowledge, but it is increasingly hard to find.
What this means is that more knowledge does not necessarily lead to social progress.
depends on the structure of the institution during the teaching and its ideological perspective.
The third point overlooked in the Enlightenment view of knowledge is that those with the strongest
motive to influence the future will tend to dominate the debate and thus control the purposes
to which education is directed. And in any society, the state seeks to be the leading
influence in the culture and it often succeeds. At some point in the life of every libertarian
We come to realize that vast amounts of what the media report are taking directly from
government press releases. This is just one of the ways in which the government manages
to market itself and its priorities throughout society. And this point about marketing ideas
is a critical one. And let me explain this by way of analogy to the marketplace for goods
and services. We've all had friends who claim to have come up with the idea for some product
that is currently making a big splash in the marketplace, but this is an uninteresting claim
because it overlooks a critical fact. The hard work of enterprise is not so much in
having an idea but in acting on it. Here is the step that makes the difference that leads
to profitability. An idea must have economic viability, that is to say it must become an
efficient part of the structure of the social allocation of goods and services. The iPhone
might have been technologically viable five years ago, but only this summer did it become
economically viable.
And technical superiority does not necessarily equate to economic superiority.
Once the problem of economics is overcome, there is the all-important issue of marketing,
which means nothing other than getting the word out to others concerning the availability
of the world.
Without economic and marketing considerations, the best ideas in the world will lie dormant.
Your next door neighbor might be sitting on the greatest formula for a car wash that has
yet to be found. But what does that mean in the real world? Essentially it means nothing
until your neighbor discovers a way to turn that formula into the real thing and further
finds a way for others in society to acquire it. It is precisely the same with ideas. If
If Mises had merely imagined the ideas in human action, but never wrote them down, the
world would be a very different place.
If he had written them down, but never sought a publisher, nothing would have come of them.
And even after finding a publisher and seeing the physical book appear in 1940 in German,
he had an additional problem.
His ideas were not yet accessible in English, and so to accomplish this goal, he worked
Why did he do all this? Mises understood that ideas are what drive history forward, but
ideas alone are not enough. They must be presented in an effective format that can be marketed,
so to speak, and then they must be presented in a way that draws people to them. Mises,
Mises, in contrast to the Enlightenment thinkers, knew that these last two stages of intellectual
work could not be overlooked.
He saw that the world of ideas is subject to the laws of economics in the same way that
the market for goods and services is.
There was a strong element of entrepreneurship necessary for ideas to succeed.
Mises was so emphatic on this point that he went so far as to place the blame for social
In theory and history, Mises wrote that all ideas, whether good or bad, originate in the
minds of individuals, but these ideas can only take hold if they are accepted by society.
There is no guarantee that these ideas will be accepted.
People will embrace bad ideas even unto their own self-destruction.
But if they choose what is destructive, Mises wrote, quote, the fault is not theirs alone.
It is no less the fault of the pioneers of the good causes in not having succeeded in
bringing forward their thoughts in a more convincing form, unquote.
He sums up the point with the following claim, quote, the favorable evolution of human affairs
depends ultimately on the ability of the human race to beget not only authors but also heralds
and disseminators of beneficial ideas. Thus did Mises know that it was not enough to hold
the right ideas, although this is an essential step. It is just as important to do everything
possible to see that these views are propagated and made compelling in a way that will transform
society and politics. And this is why he became an advocate of a new institution that would
would be dedicated to liberty.
This institution, he hoped, would not only be a source of new ideas, it would work to
bring them about and realize them within the affairs of the human population.
Is this somehow skewing the marketplace for ideas?
The claim is absurd, since the marketplace for ideas is built entirely upon ideas that
have been discovered, heralded and disseminated, and thereby become part of the structure of
of the world in which we live.
In the same way that an entrepreneur cannot be content
to merely imagine a new shopping mall or a new search engine,
but must also see these dreams realized economically
and then market it, in that same way we must not
and cannot be content to merely hold sound views.
We must work to see them realized.
And yet we are an impatient people, are we not?
We want to see the effects of our work
We might consider that were it not for the opposition voices of the Misesians, the state
would have had a freer hand and our despotism would be worse than it is.
We might also consider that there is a time lag between the propagation of an idea and
its realization.
Finally, consider that the crumbling of a failed ideology is not always observable.
We only know what has happened once the effects are plain to the world.
For example, in retrospect, we know now that the socialist idea in Russia had been in continual
downfall for some 50 years before the state finally crumbled.
And yet, only a few years before that crumbling, Western academics were assuring us that Soviet
Communism was a permanent feature of the world and that its wonderful economic system would someday overtake ours.
We are so fortunate to live in times when we do in fact see the evidence of burgeoning all around us.
From new technologies, to new economic developments, to the practical decline of the state in managing world affairs.
We have seen undeniable evidence of the failure of all-out planning and the amazing beauty created by the market economy.
We have seen the complete collapse of the socialist idea. Mises had no such luxury.
He saw war, depression, central planning, Nazism, communism, inflationism,
Murray Rothbard once wrote an entire paper discussing this very point.
He said that Mises' social philosophy reinforced his battle for what is true.
He knew that civilization and human existence were at stake.
High theory is important, but it is not enough.
The advocate of the free market must carry the struggle to all levels of society.
For Mises, no form of education was beneath his dignity.
There was no separating theory from practice.
This is why we must be wholly dedicated to liberty, peace, and free markets.
When it has come out squarely in favor of human life and flourishing, Rothbard concludes
Science may be value-free, but men can never be, and Ludwig von Mises never shirked the responsibilities of being human.
Murray, of course, might as well have been writing about himself.
The Spirit is with us today in this room, in all we do, and all we will do for the next 25 years.
For neither have you shirked your responsibilities.
Thanks to your generosity and help, in this year alone, we have seen an unbelievable increase in all our activities from publishing to distribution to education.
We have a new masterful biography of Mises that reconstructs the history and meaning of his time.
We have ever more students and professors. Our ideas are reaching more and more people every day, and yet our work is nowhere near being done.
A day must never pass when we cannot point to progress. We have inspiring models, and
not only in the work, but also in the lives of Mises and Rothbard. History, as always,
hangs in the balance. In our last days, may we all say that we did everything possible
May we all say that we do all we can to serve the cause of humanity, to never give into
evil, to not merely oppose it in our hearts and minds, but also to proceed ever more boldly
against it, and to displace the evil of statism with the blessings of liberty, which is the
basis of civilization itself.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank all of you for your support of this cause, and now
And now onward to another and more astonishing 25 years. Thank you.