Mises Institute Publications

0:00Unfortunately, Mr. Denson couldn't be with us today to talk a little bit about his book, but let me just tell you something about the origins of that book. The title is A Century of War, and it's about, I think it's about maybe 200 pages, something like this. It began in a lecture he gave at the Mises Institute, and we published as a monograph, and put it online, but it was a hard copy and online and everybody was downloading it online. It's a wonderful sort of sweeping and a single lengthy essay, it's a sweeping account of the relationship between the rise of war and the rise of big government and the decline of freedom. And if you've heard John speak, he has just a wonderful mastery of the historical detail and he's not an academic, He's an attorney and currently a judge, but in some ways it's a wonderful thing because it frees him up to just look at everything completely in a sort of fresh way without

1:06having to worry about colleagues breathing down his neck, you know. So you get a really beautiful story in his writings, and this one essay illustrates that very well. Well, we ran out of the hard copy, which is an intriguing thing, you know. This is an essay that you can download from the website and it's about, I don't know, maybe it's 20 pages or something like that. Anybody can download it. Well, we began to offer it online and they all sold very quickly. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the relationship between online and offline copy here in a minute. So we ran out of those copies and we thought, well, if we're going to reprint it, let's just put it in a book together with some of his other essays. And he's written some wonderful material on the origins of about the Civil War, and we're talking about pioneering stuff here, and World War I and World War II, about how a state can bring about a war, well, can desire a war, but have to overcome the obstacle of public resistance, and the best way to overcome that is by getting the enemy to fire the first shot.

2:17So he's written a series of studies using this little sort of motif to re-understand American history in a way that's very surprising and interesting. So these essays are in there as well, and also some reflections on current literature. So altogether it makes a wonderful little package, and that will probably be available in a couple of months. And let me just, before I go on with some of the other projects we have here, talk a little bit about the relationship between online and offline texts. Now, you'll notice that in the last few days we've come out with this new book by Jesus Huerta de Soto. It's called Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, if you saw it out there.

3:03Does everybody know about this book? Have you been reading about it? Okay, it's all the rage. It's the new happening thing. It's about 900 pages, so it's very large. An undergraduate wrote me recently, he was in the second year of economics, and he said, gosh, I'm not sure that I really need some huge treatise on fiduciary media, Roman law, the origins of banking in the Middle Ages, You know, detailed comic critiques of fractional reserve theory, I mean, is this really necessary? But I told him, I said, look, this is absolutely essential for you, because let's say you have an economics professor who is sort of dismissing Austrian economics as a theory not worthy of his consideration.

3:56I have to just walk up with this enormous book, which is huge, big, thick, huge thing, heavy, and say, oh, would you like to see my new book I'm reading on money, bank, credit, and business cycles? It's very large, and it's quite an undertaking, and I'd be glad to let you borrow it any time. And so I explained to him that this has a great psychological impact on a professor who hasn't done any reading in years, you know, a ten-year-old professor, and so he'll And somehow I get the impression that my students are, could it be that my students are even more advanced than I am, and I can't even conceive of sitting down and reading such a huge book, you know. And from then on, you know, the kid gets straight A's, he's left alone, and that's it, so. In any case, this book, we're hoping that this book is not just going to serve that purpose but is going to be a very lasting contribution to literature, and I don't think

4:50there's any doubt that it's going to take half a decade or a decade or two for it to A Treatise on this level doesn't come out very often, and when it does, it takes a while to take hold, so it's very exciting. Guido Holzman is always reminding us that theory is very, very difficult to write and very difficult to sort of originate, and history is easier in general from his point of view as a theoretician, and there are many other kinds of scholarship that are slightly easier but writing pure theory is very difficult and that's why we so rarely see a big treatise of pure theory and that's really what this is but also integrates with Roman law and you know there was parts of it that I wanted to excerpt on the website for a day of the article but you know it's very detailed and very systematic and super super scholarly with lots of footnotes and I wasn't quite sure so what we did instead is we just put the whole

5:49and the whole book up online the same day we began to offer it for sale. It's up there, you can go to it. Look under the study guide and up comes a PDF file, very fast, of 900 pages. And you're welcome to sit and read it. And we encourage everybody to do so. And the advantage of this, of course, is that, well, there's many advantages. One is it gets the word out. But you look at it and you think, you know, maybe I do just need to order this. And sure enough, many people have bought the book and it's just great. You know, to have a book like that online as well as in your bookshelf is a wonderful thing, especially if you're writing papers, because we all sort of live and work in different places. We have home, we have office, we have our cars, you know.

6:34The book is not always where you want it to be, the Internet is. So if you remember a passage, you can go to the online resource, you can copy and paste out of that text, The online copy enhances the value of the offline copy and the other way around too. There are many people who don't understand the new media who are somehow hardly panicked about this. And for some reason, these same people are very concerned about issues of copyright, and they're just obsessed about this. I don't know, I'm really just about fed up. I mean, it's a very narrow, uncreative way to think.

7:20You know, don't we need to not give people information they desperately desire, even if we can do so for free, because then that would somehow prevent us from squeezing that last dime out of them, you know, which we feel like they should pay us. I mean, this is really the mentality that goes on here. And really, I think the fallacy here is you're really underestimating your market. And I can tell you, you know, ever since the age of the Web came about, we've discovered that the Austrian School is not a small school. Austrian libertarianism is not just a small group of people just adding one or two members every year. This is a massive international movement that is growing all the time.

8:06The Mises Institute website is, I'm quite certain, the largest, most heavily trafficked non-profit research institute site of its kind anywhere in the world. And we compete very closely with large commercial ventures like The Economist magazine, and we beat the World Bank and the Federal Reserve and the IMF. You know, this is a very large movement, and we're doing our job and we get the word out in whatever way we can. So that means print, offline, online, offline, any way we possibly can, podcasting, we want to do it all. And if we can do it at zero price, as you pretty much can do, well, that's not really true, but I want to go into that, online, then that's all to the good.

8:57Some other books we have coming out in the near future, we're putting together the Libertarian Forum and a two-volume paperback volume that's been online for a long time, you can download it, and this is a case where truly having the book in your hand is a wonderful advantage, I can tell you, mainly because these are eight, sometimes eight, sixteen-page issues that, you know, you go to page one and it continues to page three and then you go back, you know, like that, like in the old days when they used to do this kind of stuff. So it's very difficult, you have to print it out, so we're offering that whole thing in book form very soon. Other publishing projects we have in the future, a vast collection of Rothbard's theoretical work, applications and criticisms, a kind of an elaboration of Man Economy and State, that could be anywhere between 900 and 1,000 pages.

9:51It's going to be called Economic Controversies, and a book by Mises of essays written in the interwar period on, in which, well, let me put it this way, for many years, I think many of us have been under the impression somehow that Mises didn't write anything on business cycles between 1912, where there was just the sort of a kernel of a theory, and then Human Action. This is not true at all. I have some idea that Hayek did all the business cycle work in the interwar period and predicted the Great Depression, which is true. He didn't do all the work. Mises wrote a vast amount, but it didn't get translated until 1978. And then when it was translated and published, it was not in a form that was readily available.

10:42These are wonderful essays, very powerful stuff, where Mises all throughout the late 20s is warning about the consequences of inflationary monetary policy and not in the sense that it's going to cause prices to rise but it distorts the structure of production and we're going to see any collapse and it's going to sneak up on us very quickly. and not only did he anticipate what was going to happen in a few years down the road, but he also anticipated what the typical policy response would be and argued against the New Deal long before there was a New Deal. So it's just incredibly great. It's tragic that these essays didn't appear in English at all until 1978. They were all published in German. They were very famous until Mises was forced out of Vienna.

11:29but they've not been well known in English and I reread the other day where we were going through this manuscript the Nobel Prize which Hayek received so justly but they specifically named his work on business cycles as his preeminent contribution and his anticipation of the Great Depression well and that's wonderful but Hayek learned from Mises and Mises too wrote about this subject, and did so brilliantly. So that's coming out, and the name of the book is The Causes of the Economic Crisis and other essays before and after the Great Depression. It'll be, I forget now how many pages, 250, something like that. For a New Liberty, Rothbard's book, you know, this is a book The book that founded the, in many ways, was the founding manifesto of the American libertarian movement and it's a very interesting case because I guess Rothbard had an article in the New York Times discussing the new libertarianism and why it's different from right and left.

12:38Actually, in many ways, the modern libertarian movement was founded as a response to Nixon's egregious economic policies and price and wage controls, and the collapse of the gold standard. And so it was a very strong argument that conservatism and republicanism, as we've known it, is not going to guarantee, is not going to protect your liberty, and we need something completely new. So Rothbard wrote this in New York Times, a publisher contacted him, asked him to write up a complete treatise, it was the one and only large commercial, how do you say, commission that Rothbard ever really received. But instead of writing a watered-down treatise designed to appeal to the broadest possible numbers, he wrote a very tough-minded piece of scholarship that covers philosophy and history and American politics and everything else.

13:32And there is something in there for everybody to dislike, I promise you. But it's great. The book just rattles you to your very core. And it hasn't been available for a long time. You know, we were just discussing outside a little bit ago how absolutely important it is for us to be able to have our ideas out there. That's the only weapon we have. We have a lot of brilliant people who have written some very powerful things. and doesn't do any good for anybody unless you can find them, unless they're available, unless they're circulating. So it's absolutely critical that we do this. This is pretty much everything we do. I mean, we want to get the ideas out there and as Mises believed and we believe here, that the right ideas alive in the culture are going to transform a society.

14:25And we have to believe that and we do believe that. and so that's why publishing is the most important thing and let us never forget too that time marches forward and there's always a new generation that has to be re-taught and rediscovered things. We find this out all the time. I don't know how many of you have been on the Mises chat room but there's a lot of young people there who have limited exposure to literature but they're very anxious to learn. I've made a passing reference in one discussion I was having with somebody to the book Brave New World. He said, oh, well, that's very interesting. Who wrote that? And where can I get it? You know, so sort of taken aback, you know, who doesn't know about Brave New World? But there's always a new generation and people need to be reintroduced to these ideas and literature has to be available for them.

15:16It's absolutely heartbreaking when any of our wonderful, one of the treasures of Austrian literature Literature becomes unavailable as has happened in a number of cases, Henry Hazlitt is a case in point, we all adore his work, it's very sad that some of his books are not available and we're doing whatever we can to assist with this. I should say something about the, so we're in a publishing boom right now, the Institute is, partially made possible by technological changes that have made it more financially feasible for us to do this, but also absolutely critical in this work has been our donors who have also seen the importance of our publishing program Program and are assisting us to underwrite these projects so that we can make them affordable.

16:14You know, Ed Stringham's book, Ed, how much is your book? $110. Yeah, $110. And I remember when we published, when a publisher put out Rothbard's History of Economic Thought initially, it was totally, it was completely unaffordable. One of the reasons that these publishers can get away with this is that they face a kind

17:07One of the reasons of what the economics of the book publishing industry requires of them is because there are donors who are very interested and understand the importance of the thriving of good ideas in a culture that we've been able to undertake the kind of publishing projects we're doing and we're able to put out this De Soto book. Right now it's available for $45 and it's a wonderful book, beautiful production values in every way. The Scholar's Edition of Human Action is very low-priced. And it's true for all of these projects, and it's made only possible because people are willing to underwrite them for us and assist in making them available to students.

17:52Okay, my time is up, but let me say something about other things that we're doing. I've talked a lot about the new Mises Institute bow tie, and this is a very important topic. You know, bow ties aren't for everybody, and this one was six months in design, please look at it, just appreciate it, if you're not going to buy it, it's fine, just go out and appreciate it. This is a thing of great beauty. When we put it together, the idea was that we would do a bow tie that not only reflected Mises' heritage and history and his family, so you can see the detail on the crest is absolutely beautiful.

18:42You can see the little ten commandments and everything. It's just great. The colors are perfect, but I was thinking that we wanted to create a tie that would be the kind of tie that you would look in your wardrobe and say that this one was stood out above all the rest. The goal was to create the most beautiful tie you've ever seen. And not just another institutional tie, oh, Mises Institute tie. No, not that. It's going to be great, and sure enough, it turned out just great. So now, just last night, I was wearing a bow tie, and I took my son to his baseball practice, and it was his first baseball practice, and the coach... There is a coach personality. I don't know if you know this, but there's a coach thing. And anyway, I said to the coach, I had to leave, I said, Coach, I'm so sorry that I can't assist you this year in coaching, you know, the team.

19:31And, you know, he stood back a little bit and he looked me up and down like that. He said, well, that's fine, really. That's fine. Don't worry about it. And I thought later, did he think that because I was wearing a bow tie that I somehow could not coach? So, I went back to the practice later, and, true, this is what he was yelling to the boys. He said, boys, you need to hustle out there. You look weak. They're going to start calling us the bow ties, if you're not careful. That's what he said. There's a coach way. Well, I'll leave you with that. If you have any other questions about publishing or any of our projects, please ask.

20:18We all love to talk about the subject, so thank you very much.