War, Fear, and Trembling (video)

0:00The Theory of Money and Credit

0:30I have a whole stack of books I want to talk about. So I think we're going to have to extend the session by an hour. So I'll let equal time per book. The first book I want to mention is one I wrote under my pen name, Adam Nicholson. This is called God's Secretaries, The Making of the King James Bible. For those of you who don't know about the people who made the King James Bible, I'm willing to tell you that this was perhaps the only successful committee project of all I myself regard this version of the Bible as a jewel of the English language.

1:32In fact, it's hard to think of anything that has influenced the language more in the past 400 years. For many people, this was the only book they ever read or knew anything about, and its phrases have entered the language so widely that most of us are completely unaware The English language is pervaded by metaphors taken from the King James Version of the Bible. I actually take offense at these modern translations, recognizing they have their virtues and they may be better as translations and so forth, but I don't think they'll ever equal the beauty of the poetry of the King James Version. One of the members of this committee was a man named Lancelot Andrews.

2:23This book of mine, which I've just begun reading, I've only made it to page 33 so far, so I don't know a great deal. But it's clear that one of the main characters of this book will be Lancelot Andrews, and Andrews was clearly a fascinating man. I identified with him immediately when I encountered the description that he could speak 15 modern languages and 6 ancient, but the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. Except that I don't know any of those languages. He and I, I feel, have much in common.

3:11But in 1603, Andrews, who was the Dean of Winchester, he was a high official in the clergy of the Church of England, he preached a sermon, and what I really want to tell you is one of the things he said. The sermon was basically railing against the inclination of so many people in Jacobean, England, to be innovative, to be doing new things, to be forsaking the ways and traditions of their forebears. And this seemed to Andrews to be a scandalous thing, and so he preached mightily against it. One of the things he said is, what could be more wicked than the idea of being an author, let alone witty?

4:05So, I'm going to try to bear that in mind in case I'm ever tempted to be witty. Last year when I spoke to you at the book session, I mentioned that a book called Rethinking Green was going to be published pretty soon. And it was. And so I just want you to know that this book is available. If you have any interest at all in environmental policy making, and you may have an interest, not because you're an environmentalist, but perhaps because you recognize that in various guises, environmentalism is one of the principal forms in which the forces that oppose what most of us in this room face, are expressing themselves and gaining public policies to implement their views.

5:08We don't have to worry too much about organized communism anymore, but in some ways the environmental movement, the green movement, has simply replaced the reds with greens to somewhat similar effects. So, the authors in this book are all at pains to, I'm only the editor here with Carl Close of this book, so I wrote the introduction and nothing more. They're all at pains to demonstrate both the failings of current environmental policies and alternatives by which desirable objectives might be achieved through private property and the market.

5:56So, if you have an interest in this field, I encourage you to have a look at Rethinking Green, Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy. Now, I'll tell you about several books that have been published in the past year. The first one is called Resurgence of the Warfare State, subtitled The Crisis Since 9-11, and this consists of my own writing, and is an odd book, it's unlike anything I ever put forth as a book before.

6:41Right after 9-11, I was contacted by a number of journalists who were familiar with my work on the growth of government and particularly my book Crisis in Leviathan. And they recognized that what had happened on 9-11 might trigger a kind of crisis that would set in train the same sort of spurt in the growth of government I had documented, many people had documented, having taken place in connection with the World Wars and the Great Depression and to some extent lesser national emergencies as well in U.S. history.

7:28And so I did respond to these journalists in various ways. I was invited to write things and for the most part I simply took it upon myself from time to time to express my views about what was being done by the U.S. government in response to the events of 9-11. And so the book puts between covers here about three and a half years worth of what I had to say from time to time about what I take to be the utter immorality and idiocy of the U.S. government's response to 9-11 and if you're interested in that subject and I think you should be because it poses a great threat to our freedoms of Mankind, I think, the way it's unfolding, then it affects us all, so this was one man's attempt to at least to show that not everybody stood by and just allowed these terrible things to be done without protest.

8:50The next book I want to mention is another edited volume by Carl Close and me. It's called The Challenge of Liberty, Classical Liberalism Today. And like the book I mentioned, Rethinking Green, this book also consists entirely, Except for the introduction that Carl and I wrote of articles first published in the Independent Review. I don't know who brought this, but it's a good show and tell too. It's the cover of the current issue of the journal, the Independent Review.

9:35Many of you know about this journal and many of you in fact have written for it or refereed for it I want to say thank you again. Making a journal successful is a definite group enterprise. No matter how hard an editor works, an editor is nothing without raw material and people to help. I appreciate all the help that so many of you have given to me over the years. The General is now 10 years old, we're working now on the 11th year, and I think along the way we've managed to put out some pretty good stuff.

10:22Much of it is here in The Challenge of Liberty, and some of these authors are very well known. John Buchanan for example, Anthony DeGiasse, others not so well known but wrote nice pieces for the journal. Tom Sawes has a nice article here, Charles Rowley, Dan Klein, many others whose names are familiar to you. And what we tried to do in this book was to show that classical liberalism is not just some moldy thing, some doctrine that was espoused by people in the 18th and 19th centuries and then passed away to sit on the shelves of libraries unread, but classical liberalism is a living doctrine.

11:21It was not refuted. It was simply ignored for a long time, and it's very much alive. In the introduction, Carl and I, among other things, I think, bring back Mises as perhaps the leading figure of classical liberalism in the 20th century. And that too, I think, comes as actual news to many people. They don't even know about Mises. Many people who write in political science and political philosophy nowadays have no idea of even who Mises was. They've never read anything by him. Even though I was trained in economics when I went to school, I was never assigned anything by Mises.

12:10and I'm sure that that's still the case today unfortunately so we we have attempted here to demonstrate not just to say look we think classical liberalism holds great promise there's a meat in this book and I think it shows that classical liberalism is a living vital doctrine that is worthy of anybody's There's intellectual attention, and so I recommend that book to you. Now I just got here this morning, I don't know if Joe Siemens is here yet, but you back there Joe? I see him in the back. He talked to Joe about another book I have coming out next month.

12:59He tells me it's coming out, and I trust him. And I also trust him to tell me what's in it, because this book is in the Czech language, and I don't read that language, and so, as I told Joe at one point, I mean, this could actually be the history of Donald Duck, and I'd never know. But for all of you who read Czech language, I have a book coming out in Prague next month, I think. Now one I'm a little more certain about, and I don't have the book to show you, and it's slated for publication at the end of April, is different from anything I've mentioned so far and this one is being published by Oxford University Press and it's called Depression War and Cold War Studies in Political Economy and that's what the cover is going to look like at least, so you can look for that.

14:13I'm rather interested in this book compared to the others I've written in recent years because I've done several collections of articles and edited volumes and things of that sort. This book from Oxford is a meteor book. It consists of ten chapters, all of which were in some form previously published. Everything has been redone for this book and integrated so that it's all part of a coherent book. These papers are, in a sense, among my more serious follow-ups to Crisis and Leviathan.

15:02I complain sometimes that people think, you know, this guy Higgs, what did he ever do? Well, he wrote a book. He wrote a book called Crisis and Leviathan. That's what he did. Well, it's true I did that, but I've done other things, believe it or not. And I don't think they're all just trivial, and so I hope this book will show that after Crisis and Leviathan I continued to do some worthwhile work in this area. It deals with such topics as why the Great Depression lasted so long, far longer than in any other country. What the relationship was between the end of the depression and World War II, there's a received doctrine that says the war ended the depression, and I have long disputed that and tried to clarify in what sense, if any, the war may be taken to have ended the depression.

16:09And so there's a number of chapters on the nature of the war economy during World War II. This has been held up for a long time as the prime validation of the vulgar Keynesian model. And I think it's anything but that, and so I'm at pains here to demonstrate I don't know exactly why that's a bankrupt view, even though it's held to this day, not only by general public, but by most economists. I think still, I see it every time I open books that have anything to do with this, people are asserting the war ended the Depression. Just as if it's as obvious as anything can be.

16:59So, I deal a lot with the war economy. I think it's been totally misunderstood and this is a good topic for an Austrian because it's been misunderstood for the same reasons that people misunderstood the socialist calculation problem, basically. They just didn't know what was a meaningful number, basically. People look at the reduction of the unemployment rate in World War II, or the rise in measured GDP, and they think prosperity, and they're wrong. The second five chapters in this book are about the Cold War period and in different ways analyze what that involved in terms of the relationship between the war economy and the rest of the economy.

18:02and deal with things like the nature of business fluctuations, even the dating of business cycles is altered if we get more serious about the role of the war economy. And I take up questions of the profitability of big defense contractors and the role of public opinion in sustaining high levels of military spending and a number of other things. So, I hope you will have a look at Depression War and Cold War when it comes out, should be available in May. Thank you very much.