Practicing Law in Light of Rothbard

0:00First of all, I want to thank Joseph Salerno for putting this panel on as early as he did. If Murray Rothbard would have been on the panel, he would have refused to appear, because nothing happened before 12 o'clock in his life. In my life, things do not start before 10.30 typically, But since I'm not Murray Rothbard, I had to just accept the discipline that was imposed on me. The reason why I ended up on the panel is also not quite clear to me, because I'm the only non-lawyer.

0:48So I ended up here like the virgin with a child. But I want to use the opportunity to make a plea for the study of law. You're all probably aware of the fact that Walter Block promotes that people should go to graduate school in economics and then become an economics professor. So that might be good for some people who go through the painful experience of graduate school in economics and who don't mind learning lots of useless things.

1:38But there are other alternatives and I want to briefly say something about another alternative and also give you some historical reasons why I suggest this alternative. So, I think for many people, especially those who are afraid of the mass requirements that are necessary to go through graduate school in economics, that what you should do instead as an undergraduate, take courses in philosophy, in politics and history, and programs that are offered for instance by Oxford University. You get a broad interdisciplinary education. You take economics classes, but undergraduate economics classes.

2:37In my classes, economics is far more sober as a discipline on the undergraduate level, especially if you concentrate on microeconomics. And once you are finished with that, which in this education you can get basically at any type of university, you have to just pick your particular teachers, When you have some solid grounding of elementary economics, then you should go, then you might want to consider studying law, and economics is extremely helpful when it comes to studying law.

3:33Study Law, because microeconomics in particular allows you to predict, so to speak, the effects that various laws and legislation procedures will have. It gives you an automatic advantage as a lawyer as compared to those who had no economics training whatsoever. whatsoever. In addition, whereas if you pursue a career in pure economics, if you look at the job prospects that you have, they almost do not exist unless you become an academic or you work for the central bank or some major governmental institutions. There is practically There is really no outside market for economists except in academia, whereas of course for lawyers there does exist an outside market and it actually allows you to make a far better salary than would be possible for regular economists.

4:43I want to make an additional point that this proposal that I advance here, that we can find, so to speak, historical precedents that go in a similar direction. Austrian economists, original Austrian economists, the Austrian Austrian economists, were all trained lawyers. In the Austrian system, in contrast to the German university system, economics was always part of the law faculty. In the German system, economics was always part of the philosophical faculty. And they received an entirely different training. I should mention that the European The human brain system does not have undergraduate studies. You are automatically a graduate student because the schools that lead up to universities tended to be elitist schools.

5:52So you begin immediately as a graduate student in the United States. Obviously law is only something that you study after you finish your undergraduate studies. I want to read you a quote from a book that was published a year ago, also in German, by a friend of mine, the book The Theory of Money and Credit.

6:34and the Vienna School of Economics, which has today been posted in English translation in PDF form on the Internet. And I recommend that book very, very highly. It deals with the history of the Austrian School, concentrating mainly on the older people, on Carl Menger and all of his students that he had. It would be the perfect complement in a way to Guido Hülsmann's biography of Mises. It is so to speak the book that you should read before you read Hülsmann's biography because it deals heavily, most heavily with earlier developments. Very interesting historical research that was done there.

7:22And in this book, they say that the German economists and the Austrian economists were an entirely different breed of people. They say, for instance, this here. The institutions in which they were trained in Austria as compared to Germany determined a different intellectual and a significantly different scholarly socialization. In order to graduate as an economist in Austria, one had to complete a course in law, which included a substantial part about the history of law. While working on abstract law terms, terminology analysis, methods of interpretation and their and their practical applications. Above all, students were being coached in analytical thinking, linguistic precision and logic. The major subjects of jurisprudence were oriented toward hermeneutics, which is interpreting of text. In contrast, at the German universities, Cameralistics, that was the name that they used frequently at that time for economics, Cameralistics was based on a predominantly descriptive empirical approach which was evident from the encyclopedic breadth of the course alone.

8:55Areas of study ranged from farming, agriculture, mining, trade, and industry to finance, political science and government accounting and the course was closely associated both institutionally and methodically with the natural sciences. As far as their intellectual self-conception, career goals, career options, scientific culture and methodological repertoire were concerned, economists trained in Austria and in Germany basically came from two different worlds. The German economists were all members or most or most of them members of the so-called historical school following an empirical empiricist methodology collecting data, establishing correlations and this sort of stuff. All the things that are now dominating so to speak the economics profession in the United States and practically everywhere. An entirely different situation for the Austrians who were trained in logical People Reasoning, the type of method that is featured, of course, most prominently in Mises' Human Action.

10:08And not only this, this different type of training that Austrian economists received in contrast to German economists also was reflected in the fact that they came from different social backgrounds. So these, Eugen Schulag and his friend who wrote this book, said the establishment of economics at various faculties also resulted in the typical Austrian and German graduate having remarkably different social profiles. Evidence exists showing that law students at the University of Vienna, which comprised about 40% of the empire's total law students, originated largely from the middle and upper classes, that is, high-level civil servants, officers, lawyers, factory owners, businessmen, and so forth.

11:04The same can be said of law students as a whole in Germany, that is, those who studied law in Germany. The Faculty of Philosophy, however, that is where economics was taught in Germany, attracted primarily members of the lower classes. So Austrian economists, Austrian economists and German economists were a completely different set of people. Again, the purpose of my remark is simply to point out that there do exist promising alternatives if you want to promote the Austro-libertarian movement besides going into a graduate program in Economics and the program, the best alternative that I can see is a law career building on top of a solid undergraduate training, especially in microeconomics, which you can get almost anywhere in some sort of decent form and you might want to add to this some rigorous training in Logic, Epistemology and fields like this. So take a few additional philosophy classes and again, if you study philosophy, it is not that difficult to find particular individuals that teach decent courses, finish your undergraduate stuff and then go on, do something different.

12:53And what I have to offer now is to give you a few examples of people who did it basically like this. Some of my former students, Jeff Barr and Lee Iglodi, who belonged to my Las Vegas gang, and Deanna Forbush, who did not belong to my gang, became later on a member or of my gang, so to speak, but she also comes from Vegas and is of course familiar with

13:26the Rothbardian tradition. And then finally we have the complete outsider, Jacob Hubert, who did this stuff without being advised by me in any way, just on his own bright mind. He came up with the same idea that I think should be somewhat promoted. Thank you, Sophomore. I forgot the name for a moment, but Jeff Tucker has put it on the website in pdf form today, so you can take a look at it, and I cannot recommend the book highly enough, it is more a historical type thing, it's not,

14:16Neither Schulag nor his Unterköfler. Both of them are not professional economists. One is a philosopher, one is a historian. But what they have done in this book is they went to the archives in Vienna and have dug out biographical information that has not been known before. It is a beautiful book in terms of the additional information that we see from it that we did not know before. They also correct certain observations and interpretations of Mises about the situation in Vienna.

15:03in Vienna. Just to, again I'm going a little bit offside here, the reasons for instance why Menger resigned from his post. In Mises it sounds like he did this because he was just depressed about the world will go down the drain and then retired from his post. They make the point that Menger was basically forced to resign because he had isolated himself completely because he was a very combative man, and in addition he had an illegitimate son, the famous mathematician Carl Menger was a K, and having an illegitimate child at that time was considered to be an absolute no-no in Vienna and that forced him basically to retire before he needed to retire.

15:58and many other things like this where their judgment is somewhat different. Also they show, for instance, that most Austrian economists were, in fact, statists. They all became very high officials in the Austrian government and only Mises was, so to speak, an exception from this general tendency and to a certain extent Menger himself. But all the other ones had, in Menger, there were dozens of people who got their habillitation that is the requirement that you have to fulfill in order to become a university professor. Many of the people who got their habillitation under Menger, most of them became high ranking government officials being responsible for quite ridiculous measures at times.

16:55In any case, the next speaker will be Deanna Forbusch.