What I'd like to talk about today is, well, as Doug said, the ultimate workaround to the
problem of statism. We find ourselves doing this in all of our lives in every way these
days, constantly having to find the workaround to the barriers that the state is putting
up to our capacity to manage our lives, to progress, to profit, just to make do. Well,
I'd like to think of the website that we're running as the ultimate workaround and you
know as soon as I say that it occurs to me that there might be some people that would
immediately dispute that idea that a website could be somehow a way to battle power or
to find a workaround to the state or do anything at all other than you know provide some entertainment
for value for something like okay so we're running our own version of Facebook so what
By the way, I should say, in the old days, before the internet came along, people used
to say about the Mises Institute, well, I like the work you're doing, but the problem
is, you're only preaching to the choir, used to say that all the time, you're only preaching
to the choir.
The only people who are listening to you are those who are already persuaded of your views,
so what good are you really doing?
Well, I never really believed that then, because the truth was that before the age of, before
the digital media came along, before the age of the internet, we were in fact using every
means that was available to us, you know, in publishing and through the mails, you know,
we would stick stamps on things and give them to government employees and they would deliver
them to whomever happened to want them, you know, and we'd give interviews to the press
and try any way we possibly could to get the word out. So it wasn't the case that we had
The Internet is a little choir that we're preaching to at all and in fact we did expand dramatically in those years between 1982 and 1995 when the Internet opened up. But of course the advent of the Internet and the web browser provided all new opportunities for us just as technological events always does. You can look at the history of technology has been one long series of attempts to make communication ever more effective and ever more universal and that's in effect what Mises
So, I never hear any more that the Mises Institute is merely preaching to the choir. You never hear that anymore. With 40,000 visitors per day on the website, and something like a million visitors per month coming and downloading our books and looking at our media, and that's just what we can take account of. Everything we publish is open source, so it appears on other venues as well.
Well. So the influence of the Mises Institute is in fact very, very vast and it's so vast
that it's not really possible to even begin to account for it fully in one's own mind.
So nowadays I hear a different complaint. Well, it's one thing to burrow down in the
World of Ideas and put up old dusty books and do podcasts and things as something else
to change the world through real activities, you know, getting out in the streets and doing
protests and running for political office and accumulating vast stockpiles of gold coins
and joining a militia. You can think of all these various other ways that you can go about
trying to make change on behalf of liberty. And there are many of them and I don't want
to disparage any of these things. But I would like to defend this idea that working in the
realm of ideas is in fact the best way to bring about social change. And for years I've
I've been to conferences and speakers have often used the phrase by Richard Weaver. They say, well, ideas have consequences, ideas have consequences.
We're just supposed to take that for granted. But I would like to ask the question today, what does that really mean?
What are ideas and why do they matter and how do they matter and how can they in fact change the world?
Why are they an effective weapon in the battle for liberty?
So, and trying to answer the question, I started going through the work of Mises himself, who was just after all, you know, completely dedicated to the idea of that intellectual work was the most important kind of work that we could ever do to bring about freedom.
Obviously, he believed this. I mean, you know, here's a guy who was driven out of his home country in 1933 and had to take a kind of political refuge in Geneva.
He lands there and instead of sulking and doing absolutely nothing and sitting around
disparaging and being pessimistic about the state of the world, he sat down and wrote
the book that became Human Action.
And it's a remarkable thing when you go through the book and you're reading it.
It's pure philosophy, it's pure ideology in the old-fashioned use of that term ideology.
It's pure ideas from the first page to the last.
You don't pick up anything in there that would suggest that he was, after all, writing this
in a kind of a sanctuary in the midst of war. You don't catch this at all as you're reading
the book. He had a way of thinking outside of the physical world itself because he knew
that his ideas that he wrote on paper had the possibility of outlasting these times,
the war, and his own life to, and in fact, become immortal in a way. And he took that
very seriously. He took very seriously everything he put down on those pages because he knew
that if he said things the right way that there could come a time when the whole world
could turn on a dime because of what he wrote. Extraordinary, isn't it? To have that level
of faith and ideas. So, I began to look into why he did. So, I began to kind of accumulate
some quotations from him and I assembled one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, I think
There may be seven principles here that Mises himself believed applied to the world of ideas
and I think it makes a case for why it's important to do things like put up a website at Mises
Oregon to publish books and to put out videos and mp3s and do the kind of educational work
that the Mises Institute does.
So in the first place, Mises said that ideas are effective.
are effective. Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the
course of human affairs. That's what he wrote. Now in saying this, he's rejecting the historicist's
view, the Hegelian view, which surrounded him really throughout his whole life in Vienna.
The view that somehow history is on some kind of auto drive, that there's gears that are
working that are independent completely of human action and human choice and human reason
and Independent of Ideas. We can think whatever we want, but it doesn't matter. History has got this own logic to it that's driving it forward towards some end, you know, whether it's socialism or whatever other kind of thing.
And this is, of course, the view of Marx and the view of many socialists that history is on this predetermined course.
Mises completely rejected this. So that's the most important thing about Mises' view of history, is he thought it was shaped completely by human action and human choices.
So, of course, the ideas that people hold are the driving force behind the choices they
make and the actions they take, and so history itself then becomes the determining force
for the unfolding of history. So, ideas are effective.
The second thing that Mises said is that ideas are real. He says, thoughts and ideas are
not phantoms, they are real things, although intangible and immaterial, there are factors
in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.
And here I think it's interesting to reflect on the difference between what Mises calls
the intangible things that are nonetheless real and those tangible things.
Public science deals primarily with the world of scarce goods, by which economists mean
that there's just not enough of them to go around.
So they have to be allocated and they have to be rationed through some means.
The prices are one way, the voluntary way.
The other way to ration things is just by stealing things from people and overcoming
them with clubs and guns and power and that sort of thing.
That's another way to ration goods.
Some people believe in one way, other people believe in the other way.
Well, it turns out that ideas are not like this at all.
They are intangible, they're immaterial, but they're still real things in the sense that
you can carry them with you.
This hasn't always been clearly understood.
You know, it was, I think, in the fourth century, Augustine addressed this question about ideas,
and he was given a sermon, and he was talking about the difference between the physical
world and the world of ideas, and he isolated it to this one specific point.
He said, you know, my sermon I'm giving you today, I don't have to ration my words for
for fear that in saying them, you will take them from me.
In fact, I can be as liberal and generous as I want to with my ideas and my words because
I know that you can take them with you.
You can retain them and pass them on to somebody else but I can retain them as well.
So I keep my ideas and I keep my words but I can also share them with you.
So there is no scarcity in the sense that economists talk about in the realm of ideas because they're
non-material.
It's a kind of utopia of endless abundance.
Once an idea is stated, then it becomes there's more than enough for everybody forever.
That's a remarkable thing.
So there's a strict line really that divides these two realms.
The realm of the scarce good and the realm of the non-scarce good.
So the realm of scarce goods will always be in some sense limited, and so long as we're
on this earth, by the need that it always be rationed.
The realm of the non-scarce good, once the good comes into existence, a real thing, Mises
says, though intangible, though immaterial, it is not a phantom, it is a real thing.
can be infinitely abundant. That's a remarkable thing to think about. It's real. The third
thing Mises mentions is that it's reproducible. And he gives the analogy, the ideas are reproducible.
He gives the analogy of a recipe. So you can make a recipe for a cake and I can hand it
on to anybody in this room and you can go home and make the cake and I suddenly don't
find myself with the inability to make that same cake. I can continue to make that same
The Recipe itself is reproducible unto infinity in this way and this is the most powerful aspect of what's happened to us really in our time with digital media is we've seen that ever more things have entered into this category of infinite reproducibility so that I can have a file in my hard drive and it can be a very large file in fact that file can contain records of all the world's financial transactions
It's over who owns it, but it's not true in the realm of digital goods, which fall into the category of ideas like recipes that Mises talks about.
So look up that passage in Human Action on recipes.
You can see everything he says about recipes applies to every kind of good in the digital universe.
Striking.
So, coming to the next point, in this sense that distribution can in fact be universal.
And they take an unpredictable path. So, everything I say in this lecture, you can pass on to
anybody you want to, and they can pass it on to anybody they want to. I've quickly lost
track of it, haven't I? There's no way, no possible way that can trace where this idea
is headed and who owns it, who possesses it next. Once it's out here into an audience,
once it's stated publicly, it contains within itself the possibility and the prospect of
becoming absolutely universal. Universal. So that every living soul could potentially
possess that idea simultaneously without ever diminishing the integrity, the quality of
Mises says one cannot organize or institutionalize the emergence of new ideas. In this way, ideas
are completely different from other material goods. So in the material world, because things
These are scarce. You have to have a system and an institution for their production. You
have to have a structure of production. You have to have prices and profits, and you have
to have strict limits of who owns what in order for this thing to emerge. So the whole
business cycle theory, for example, in the Austrian tradition is based on this idea of
a structure of production. The structure of production, in turn, is based on the existence
of prices and interest and money and profit and loss tests and all these things that apply
in the realm of scarce goods. None of them apply in the realm of non-scarce goods like ideas.
So one cannot organize or institutionalize the emergence of ideas. There doesn't need to be a
structure of production for them. Once they exist and they can come, they can exist at any
point in time in an unpredictable way, there doesn't need to be a structure of production
for them because the distribution can be instantaneously, especially these days,
Absolutely Universal. Now, of course, this is also true in the ancient world, right?
It was also true in the 5th century, it is true in the 500 BC. Ideas have always had this capacity for being universally distributed.
So what limited that in the past? Well, communication technology. But that's no longer a limit for us, is it?
We now have the technology to make possible, make it possible to realize the full potential of any single idea,
The potential for absolute universal distribution. Extraordinary.
And Mises further goes on. He says that ideas live longer than walls or other material artifacts.
And by this he means that ideas are indestructible.
That's another feature of the realm of non-scarce goods. Ideas cannot be destroyed once they're set.
So, I think this is why Mises had that sense when he was writing Human Action, not of despair, but of absolute optimism and hope, because he knew that even if he died after finishing the last sentence, the ideas wouldn't die. They would be indestructible. They would continue to live.
And I think about Mises, too, you think about an indestructible idea. For example, his theory of money and credit, okay, is written in 1912. It's a full theory of banking and a case against inflation. And just the other day, a bill was introduced in parliament that would have brought about 100% reserve or at least made banking reserve contracts with customers
completely open so that the customers have to make contracts with the banks
based on full disclosure of what's happening to the reserves. I think
certainly would have driven us to a hundred percent reserve position.
Now we're talking about a hundred years after an idea was first advanced
and suddenly it kind of comes in fruition in the form of this
of this legislation before parliament.
It's extraordinary. Sometimes it takes a hundred years for an idea
to be realized.
And the other great thing about the indestructibility of ideas
is that any idea can be rediscovered
at any moment in history by anyone, anywhere,
no matter when it was ever said.
So every writer who's ever written
a text that is distributed universally
is, therefore, immortal in some way,
just for the fact that he put his ideas on paper
or that he shared a thought with someone at some point in his life.
That's the path to immortality.
Your ideas are indestructible.
So people ask, why do you keep putting up these old books on Mises org?
That's because ideas are indestructible.
It only takes one person reading one sentence at the right time.
The whole world could change.
Unbelievable.
Another factor about ideas, they're malleable, Mises said. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or at least it adds something new to it.
That was what Mises said about ideas. So it's not just so much that you take an idea and copy it completely. No, it's because you take an idea and you learn from it and you change it a little bit to create something completely new.
and ideas become malleable just because they exist.
Anytime we hear a thought or read a book,
it will be changed in some sense, transformed
just by the way in which our own minds and our own spirits
understand that idea and we will change it when we
present it in a new way. And this is a wonderful thing
to have that ideas are malleable.
is for this reason that the Mises Institute publishes all of our material in Creative Commons, for example,
because we know that it can always be reproduced somewhere else in a different form.
I can't count the number of times that I've gone to YouTube and seen some podcast, for example, that I've done.
It's just a pure audio podcast put into a video with new kind of backgrounds and pictures and things like that by somebody else.
Now, if we were really hung up on the idea of intellectual property, trying to take a
non-scarce good and fit it into the category of the scarce good, right, we would complain
about this. Well, it's ridiculous. It's a wonderful thing to see somebody do something
creative with something that we've done. All of life is creativity in the world of ideas.
Another point that Mises makes is that ideas enable progress. This is a striking claim.
A technological invention is not something material. It is the product of a mental process of reasoning and conceiving new ideas. The tools and machines may be called material, but the operation of the mind, which created them, is certainly spiritual.
So he says that it enables progress and that it is the fundamental factor in all of human progress, not material goods.
We talk about technological inventions, Mises says, well they're not really material, they're all the product of the human mind.
And the final point that Mises makes here is that, and this is a striking claim,
only ideas can overcome ideas so if all of human history is a result of the
ideas we hold because that's what drives our choices it's what drives our actions
forwards it's what shapes our institutions these real reproducible
universally distributable indestructible malleable progressive things we call
All Ideas. How do we supplant bad ideas with good ideas? Well, we simply have to advance
good ideas. Well, let's say I wanted to take another tactic. Let's say I wanted to do
it with tanks and guns and clubs and power. How far will that get me? Well, it'll get
me a little bit of the way, won't it? You think about the armies in the world, the large
What are the empires that are occupying countries that they ultimately can't control?
What do they control?
They control the ground on which the physical objects like tanks and the feet of soldiers
are standing, or where the tanks are sitting.
They control the human body that is accepting a bullet at that moment and dies.
That's all they control.
But do they control the country?
No.
It's because the country is controlled ultimately by ideas.
If you want to control the country, you have to change the minds of the people who live there.
So what I'm saying is that if you read Mises properly, you get a striking sense that we've chosen, by choosing ideas, the most powerful weapon of all.
It's the one that lives outside all the limits of physical reality.
It's the one that's the only thing that's infinitely reproducible, the only thing that's infinitely malleable,
the only thing that can ultimately reach the whole of human society and bring about changes of any sort,
and in particular, changes towards liberty, because governments specialize in what?
And the production of ideas? Not really. No. No.
We're trying to specialize in the production of ideas. And we think, following Mises, that this is the way that we can win.
I want to say some words about the development of Mises.org, some comments about the strategy that we've used.
And I want to talk to you in a way that I end up talking to people all the time because I get relentless phone calls from people.
They call up and they say, uh, gee, you know, we were just wondering, how do you do this whole thing with Mises work? How does this happen?
You know, we're starting a new institute and my answer to that is, well, work every day relentlessly for 15 years and you'll be where we are today, essentially.
But other people who have other websites, they want to copy us. In any case, we're absolutely open, completely open about everything we do.
I just listed a few principles that we use in our own development. We always choose content over Flash, over Zip and Pazazz.
We go for the substance first, so that's why we have thousands of books online.
Online, and we try to make it look as pretty as possible, but ultimately it's all about
the content, and the content is text, and the content is video, and the content is audio,
and every other form we can do, and it gets crazy these days. You have to distribute everything
in every possible format, so if you put it up in HTML, people say, well gee, can I have
I don't like that Kindle is proprietary. Can you do it in EPUB format so I can read it on my thingamajig over here?
Not a problem. We'll make it available in EPUB format.
Well, look, I don't like to read my iPad while I drive most of the time. I do read it at stoplights.
But when I'm driving I like to listen to stuff, so can you put it in audio?
Yes, we'll put it in audio. We put it in audio. Well, you know, audio is a little abstract. Can you put it in video, too?
So these are all the possibilities and I promise you whatever one of these things you haven't done,
you'll get a call about it in an email and a request to do it that way.
People are sometimes startled that we put up all of our books that we publish in physical form also in
PDF and I get calls all the time from people saying, now,
Mr. Tucker, can you promise me that if we distribute
Institute, our book free online in a PDF form that will sell more copies of the physical
book. Can you promise me that? And, of course, there's no way to make such a promise. There's
no way to perform controlled experiments in the realm of human sciences. That's the way
I usually put it. What I really want to say is, if your book's not any good, nobody's
going to buy it. So, but you know, it changes all the time. Like, recently we had Bob Murray
Bob Murphy's book, Economics for High School Students, I finished it over the summer, he's
teaching a class on it right now, so we had to put it up on PDF. We're doing this more
and more all the time, we put it up now online long before we ever print the thing, you know,
the physical world is so darn slow, I don't know what we're going to do about that, we're
working on that too, but essentially we don't have the physical book yet, so now we get
complaints, hey, when are you ever going to print this book, you know? I mean, it's been
two months now, well, it's going to be out in a couple of weeks, but I can promise you
There are very few publishers in the world that do this sort of thing. We put it up in EPUB, we put it up in PDF, we distribute it in HTML, every format you can possibly think of, and that at some point it will come out in physical form too, and restart the whole process all over again.
Another principle you saw, we're relentless, I already mentioned that, another principle we use is that no text is too old.
Just yesterday, I'm always about the newest thing, right? So I put up this really cool book, which I just happened to bump into.
It's just a fantastic history of British liberalism from the 18th century to our own time, and it was one of the great pleasures of doing this kind of work,
I get to speed read, you know, bookmarking and putting them up and everything. It's just
such a kick. You know, you read through this book, you swept up into the whole world of
liberalism. Imagine a society and a time in which the answer to every social problem,
every economic problem was, well, we just need more liberty. You know, this is a statement
that states we've got a problem over here. Well, clearly we need more liberty. Well,
What about this problem over here? You know, why don't we try liberty? This went on for
like 200 years. Extraordinary. Unbelievable. So this book documents this. It says from
Fox to Keynes. Keynes was, by the way, the end of this over. Everything was turned on
its head, you know. Anyway, no text is too old. There is lost... Murray Rothbard always
taught us that there's lost knowledge. You know, it's not the case that all knowledge
College is cumulative? No, some drops away. So, no text is too old. We don't want to
miss anything. We post as much as possible. It's a big world. Sometimes people say, well,
you know, Mises work just post too much. I can't read it all. Well, that's, of course
you can't read it all. Nobody can read it all. But, you know, you're not the only person.
You know, there are many other people with whom you're cooperating in this grand project
and they're all over the world. So read what you can. Learn what you can. Do what you can.
Never assume a fixed audience. The goal is always to be as generous as possible with
your content. And it bothers me, actually, when I see other nonprofit organizations like
ours that are doing good work and you go and you want to hear their lectures and they want
I'm going to charge you $1.99 for every mp3. They imagine that this is capitalism, charging people for things. Well, you know what? If it's a non-scarce good, you don't have to. There's no cost. We can distribute them at zero price, and it's a wonderful thing. So we're as generous as possible. We never assume a fixed audience. We always assume that there are going to be more people coming around to the Misesian point of view.
Sometimes it's hard. There's always a new generation. There are always young people.
Young people who don't know things, but they want to know things. And we unfortunately
have not developed the capacity to upload our brains to theirs just yet. So we have
to rely on teaching them. And they're always new. There's always a new class. Every year
There's a new group of young people that need to learn, that are starting fresh, we must never forget them.
And if we ever despair, we can remember them too.
Rothbard used to say that the young people were our hope, so we never want to lose track of them.
There are a couple of things I wanted to show you, and I'm not sure that I'll really have time.
I do want to just mention this, okay?
You've heard about this, it opened up in the spring.
We worked for 10 years to try to open up an online academy. We didn't think the time had come yet, but we do, this spring, about a year of work, actually, is behind this little operation here. We finally released it, and I must say that it's exceeded my expectations. I'm thrilled. If you don't know what it is, really, it's a complete, well, we've called it an online learning environment. The potential here is to be
University for the Whole World.
We've already had, I think, about 10 classes.
Doug, we've run 10 classes just since the spring.
And we have four classes running right now.
We've had, I think, on the level of maybe 1,300,
1,200 or 1,300 students already come through the academy.
The important thing here is it's not just a static environment.
We're not just talking about texts and forums and Q&A,
sessions, tests and multiple choice quizzes and things to read and all of that is true.
But it's also a live environment so we can have the professor lecturing to students who
are able to ask questions and talk to the professor while he's lecturing and it's so
funny to me.
You know, you see what's happening here, we've reestablished, it's like Adam Smith's dream,
right?
We've established the producer-consumer relationship between the professor and the student.
It's a remarkable thing to see the way this dynamic is starting to work.
So the students are the consumers, the professor is the producer, we put them in contact with each other,
wherever they happen to be anywhere in the world.
David Gordon did his class last night, he had a session, and he did it right here.
He didn't have to be in Los Angeles, and he taught students from all over the world.
Lectures are archived so you can watch them any time when students are graded and I tell you it's a real kick to be in the classroom because it's fancy, it's wonderful, it's intimate, I mean you really do have a sense that you're having Bob Murphy over for dinner you know and as my family can tell you I quite often watch these lectures during dinner right and it is like having a professor you know right there for you so you it's a wonderful environment for learning I think it really
You almost could say that nothing is lost by the absence of a regular physical classroom
and that there's a lot to be gained.
The whole environment is much more advanced than I ever expected it to be.
I do want to show you one more thing.
This will be the first time anybody has seen this publicly.
We have a community now.
It's sort of community 1.0 with forums and blogs and blah, blah, blah, all the things
you want in a community.
Well, okay, so this is the new thing. We hope to release it by the end of the year. It's
a much more robust community that allows the creation of an unlimited number of groups
and group wikis and forums that are group-specific forums and also general forums and unlimited
numbers of user blogs. We've never been afraid of allowing user content on Mises work. Look
Look around the think tank world, see how many other think tanks trust their users enough
to add content to their own sites, not many, but we do it because our readers are smart
and they're just like all of you. They love the mission and they love liberty.
Thank you so much for supporting our work.
Thank you very much.