Mises.org's Monetary Mania

0:00I was just bragging to Doug yesterday. I said, you know, you know, I didn't know anything about PowerPoint. And you can't believe it, but I learned it in one hour and put together this whole presentation. He said, you know, that's pretty impressive. Just one hour, huh? I said, yeah, it's nothing. You know, it was, yeah, I know. I mean, maybe for some it might have taken a lot longer, but for me, it's one hour. Well, so I made the mistake of having my daughter, who's sitting over here to the left of me here, at that conversation. As And she says, she doesn't know her place yet, she says, Dad, PowerPoint, I mean, look, even professors know how to do that. I mean, it's like saying, I learned how to, you know, sit on a bar stool or something. I mean, it's just pathetic that you would brag about this, so, anyway, lots of things are not impressive to the young that are impressive to the old.

0:49The title of the talk is Mises' Monetary Mania, which I must admit to you, Pat Barnett had had written me and said what are you going to talk about and at the at our next conference I had no idea so I just sort of made up this title you know it's kind of stuck it out there it's kind of got three M's and it seems sort of cool and I didn't know really what the content was going to amount to well sometimes it's nice to give yourself a title like that and then force yourself to come up with a talk around it I mean at least it works for me and I think it works this time because what I've done is gone through lots of things on the website that relate to the topic of money but Before we get to that, I want to kind of give you a brief history of the website, which I think is tremendously fascinating. We're living in a very interesting age, all of us, in which the digital media has just utterly and completely transformed the way information is distributed around the world.

1:46and this is very exciting for us for any movement dedicated to ideas and to the notion that ideas are the stuff that really move history forward. And so this is Mises' view and it's our view and so digital media has been for us an amazing thing for a variety of reasons I would like to talk to you about. In particular the area of money is an interesting one because did you notice this until very Very recently, hardly anybody seemed to care much about this topic, particularly about central banking. You know, we've been talking about this subject ever since our founding. Our first conference in 1982 was on the gold standard, and everybody thought it was kind of a crazy idea.

2:31Why are you talking about this subject? It doesn't... And have you had this experience where you're trying to explain something about economics to people, and you raise the topic of money and its quality and its soundness, and you You see that people don't, for the most part, have never thought about it before, you know? And it's really true that you need an institute like the Mises Institute to constantly harp on the topic and sponsor scholarship on it and publish writings about it, otherwise it goes completely ignored until it's too late, like the German hyperinflation or something like that. So, you know, this is what the Mises Institute has been doing ever since our founding in 1982. We've been publishing on the topic and, you know, when the whole crisis hit last year, It was a marvelous thing because we had this huge infrastructure already in place about the topic of money and banking. And we were there and nobody else was. And as a result,

3:22our books took off and Misesorg traffic soared and we had everything in place. And at that moment I was deeply grateful to all the people who had supported us for all those previous years even though it seemed like we were doing sort of weird cranky irrelevant stuff, you You know, like what are we doing? Why are we writing books about the gold standard? Why do we have this constant harping on the problem of central banking? Well, you know, they knew and we knew that there would come a time when this would be crucial not only to the topic of economics but to the very survival of civilization itself. So, you know, you have to think ahead. So I put together this little presentation that's a little bit of a history of the website which today, let me tell you why it matters. Mises.org is easily, it might in fact be the largest non-profit website in the world. It certainly is in the area of economics. The

4:15traffic is immense. I've been following the analytics tables for years on the website. They're really too big for one person to even keep up with. There's just so much, so much usage and it's all over the world, all kind of age groups. The demographics are extremely is very broad and we have no close competition at all within our sector of the world. I mean just simply at all. It's immense, which is an interesting thing that it could be such a highly trafficked website that's just devoted to this seemingly narrow topic of the Austrian school. So I'd like to just show you with a little bit of help from the Wayback Machine, you know, nothing you ever post on the internet ever goes away. You know, it's always there. So you can go through the Wayback Machine and find out anything, so I found out a lot of the history of Mises' work here.

5:06In the early days of the World Wide Web, I'm dating it from 1995, with the invention of the web browser, which is when this stuff really became possible. Incidentally, that was the year that Murray Rothbard died, and it was also the year that his writings of a lifetime really took flight. and are now, I mean, he's a more popular writer than he ever was in his life, he is today. So anyway, in the early years of the World Wide Web, people thought of the website as kind of a billboard, which isn't a bad thing. So I just kind of put this old 1950s ad up there. It's not really actually delivering gasoline, it's just sort of advertising the existence of gasoline and sort of promoting it.

5:52And that's why we thought of Mises Orgasm being, you know, you just kind of put up a billboard as a way of telling people that you exist. It's hard for us to remember this, but before the advent of the World Wide Web, there wasn't any way to find out about the existence of the Mises Institute at all. You know, you had to kind of scrounge around the libraries and go through social science research index or something, which in fact is the way I found out about it sometime in the mid-1980s. Found out about a periodical called The Free Market this way. Just digging through this hard copy stuff. It was very difficult to get the word out. You had to get it out through mails and it was hard to, you had to advertise and print publications, which is very expensive in those days. So just to have a billboard was a great thing. Oh, I gave another example of an advertisement here just as a kind of

6:43We're illustrating the way advertisement can work, you know, billboard. So this is our first, our first website, this is our first website, have you ever seen this before? How many of you have seen this before? No? Oh, there we go. Hey, fantastica! Yeah. So that was it, that was our, that's our first, our first website. So we had, you know, information, we had, you know, here's a list of conferences of how to get fellowships and a list of publications, no actual publications, something about how How to join us, you know, I don't know, what did it say, call our number, I guess that's what it said, I don't know, feedback so you could actually like send an email, you know, very exciting stuff. In those days, it was huge. And the big moment came for us in the next incarnation in 1996 because we realized for the first time, as I said earlier, the advertisement about oil delivered just information about Chevron, not the actual gasoline itself

7:39and the advertisement about vodka, they didn't just told about the vodka, didn't give the vodka itself. Okay, so now we began to realize after the website went up that we couldn't, we didn't just have to advertise our existence, we could actually give them the stuff that they wanted. We could give them the gasoline, we could give them the vodka, you know, I mean this is the real thing. So here we have, here on the, over here, we can use the pointer, right? Yeah. So here we have the free market. So we started publishing our actual publication here. This is a very interesting thing, even to this day, that's very controversial, like many old-line publishers are thinking, well, if we make it available digitally, nobody will ever buy our books, so we can't possibly do that. You know, it's against our fiduciary interest, you know, to do this.

8:26As a charitable organization, as an organization totally dedicated to getting the word out, this is never a problem for us. Of course, we're going to give away. If somebody wants to read the stuff that we're producing, then we're going to make it available through this medium. It wasn't a controversy at all for us. It seemed to be like just something that we should just do. And it was very exciting for me because in the early days of the Mises Institute, mostly what we did was photocopy articles and send them through the mails. I mean, we'd answer the phone, somebody wanted a certain article that they had read, go make photocopy, you send a copy in the mail. That was a large part of the work. I was just kind of getting the information out. Now we had a way to actually distribute our material online. And I guess maybe even from this vantage point, from this, at this, in 2009, it's difficult to understand how revolutionary this was. I mean, it's sort of like the invention of

9:19the printing press. I don't know what else to compare it to, but it was an amazing, amazing thing to be able to send the stuff that we're actually doing through digital media, through through an email or whatever and just draw attention to it online, solving all the problems of hard copy. So it was an amazing thing for us and it gave rise to new insights. And here I just want to discuss briefly the significance of what it means to have things delivered digitally. And I think this is a very helpful exercise to go through to try to understand that the world includes two types of goods. On the left-hand side we have scarce goods and on the right-hand side, non-scarce goods. Two kinds of goods that are in the world. And let me just kind of march through this a little bit.

10:05Under scarce goods, there's not enough goods to satisfy all needs. That's essentially what scarcity means, just a finite number. So after they're produced, they must be apportioned out and they have to be conserved somehow. I mean, scarce goods would include like the lunch we had, The cheesecake we have for dessert here, the glasses, the tablecloths, everything you see physically in this room, and most all goods in the world. This allocation requires private ownership, lest there be overutilization. If things aren't owned privately, then they'll be consumed and they'll be gone, which is essentially the story of socialism. Overutilization of resources leads to calamity. Private ownership permits trades, permits prices emerge. Merge, so you have exchange ratios as you trade private property back and forth, and these prices permit comparison of heterogeneous goods and services, so you can develop a cost accounting legend and discover the priorities associated with production and allocating goods.

11:07This is the essence of what Mises discovered is the key to the market economy. For all scarce things, you have to have the system in place. If it's not in place, it leads to disaster. That's why socialism can't work and that's why medical socialism can't work, it's why the post office doesn't work, it's why the public schools don't work, it's why all public organization of anything doesn't work right because you have scarce resources attempting to allocate it not through a price system but through administrative decrees or collective ownership or some other bureaucratic arrangement that ignores pricing signals and the need for rational allocation of resources. All of the stuff on the left is what you learn when you study economics.

11:53The stuff on the right, slightly different, non-scarce goods, now they might have to be produced, they may or may not have to be produced, but they certainly can be in need of production, but once they're produced, they don't need to be allocated or conserved. They can be, I think I have a typo, they can be one simultaneously by one, one or all. I think that's supposed to be owned. They can be owned simultaneously by one or all, unless artificially restricted. So one person can own it, or everyone can own it. They can be shared and copied infinitely without reducing the quality of the original. Cost accounting might be necessary in the delivery, but not in the goods themselves.

12:41So there's no calculation of a problem associated with non-scarce goods. So you're probably wondering what would be an example of a non-scarce good. I have one. Oh, let me just illustrate that I'm not deviating here from Austrian theory by drawing attention to the existence of non-scarce goods. Mises called them the free goods. A factor of production may consist in the control of technological knowledge required for production. The recipe, for example. First Recipes are, as a rule, free goods, as their ability to produce definite effects is unlimited. So he draws attention to the fact that certain kinds of knowledge, knowledge required for production is an example of a free good, potentially limitless distribution, infinitely reproducible.

13:40I have it listed as fire as an example of a non-scarce good because you have one small flame but if I take another candle to that I get another flame but it doesn't reduce the quality of the original at all it can be infinitely extended without ever taking away the integrity of the original flame So, on the bottom is this huge fire, I don't know, some kind of volcanic thing on fire, and on the top is one small flame. So, fire is an example of a physical, but non-scarce group. So, you don't need economics to allocate fire. So, you don't go, I'd like to buy some fire today. You know what I mean? That doesn't happen, right? You can buy lighters, you can buy fuel for fire, all these things, but the fire itself is not a good that's bought in So, the kind of non-scarce good that Mises deals with is information. It's the thing that Mises himself talked about. It's knowledge.

14:49And knowledge is potentially infinite. By the way, the more I think about this, there's a slight mystical aspect to it. Anytime you think of famous miracles in human history, they always seem to involve the taking of a scarce good and turning it into a non-scarce good. So there's this scene where there's a big crowd, and Jesus is speaking before them. And it's a long speech or something, lunch comes, everybody's dying of hunger, they start complaining, what are we going to have, there's no food, and a couple of his followers show Show up and they have some loaves and fishes, you know, masters is all we have, we can't possibly feed the multitude with these little things, something happens, you don't entirely know what, and there's enough loaves and fishes for the entire multitude and there's some left over. Miracle. It's a miracle. You take a scarce good, turn it into a non-scarce good.

15:42Something similar happened I think earlier in the series of miracles here. There's that Seen at the wedding, you know, there are wines running out and then Jesus sort of comes up into water, into barrels or something, he turns it into what? So he's taken what seems like a scarce good and turning it into a non-scarce good. It's a miracle. Well, so, you know, there's an element of digital media that shares in these qualities of this capacity for infinite reproducibility. And we experience this any time you send a file to anybody through email, You've got the file on your computer, you upload it in your email, you attach it, you send it off to them. They've now got an exact duplicate of your file. Your file still exists on your hard drive, but they have now one too.

16:31And how many times can this be repeated? You know, ten times, a hundred times, a million times, an infinite number of times. It can be repeated without ever diminishing the original ownership over what he has. Everybody has copies, exact copies, the same exact thing. So it's infinitely multiplied. This is the essence of what digital media is all about. And for us, for Misesians, for people who believe in the power of ideas, this was everything to discover this. So the website continued to expand. We had a book catalogue, Free Marketers, 1997. And here we started, this is, I think this is the only generation of the website that was ever sort of left flush. I became obsessed with this as the years went on, no matter what else happened, the website had to appear in the middle of the page. It caused a lot of design problems as the years went on. But anyway, this is the one compromise. So we started delivering the Austrian Economics News Editor, the free market, the Mises Review,

17:32the Mises Memo, everything we possibly could put online, we started putting online. Everything in HTML so far. PDFs weren't, were a little bit too heavy back in those days. It was hard It's hard to deliver things with too much memory because that, of course, computer memory itself is a scarce good. The good that you're delivering through the medium of the website is non-scarce, but all the stuff associated with the delivery itself is scarce. 1999 we started, this is back when websites were sort of, there wasn't the big wide screens, you know, so this looks a little ridiculous, but in those days it took up the whole screen. I think that's 750 pixels we kept it at, right in the middle of the page. That was the total redesign. We started adding coming events and news, and we had the book catalog, and then we had a very primitive store that worked for, you had to take the afternoon off just to order a book or something, you know, nothing worked right, but, you know, that's the way it was in those days, and started running articles every day. 1999, that's only ten years ago. How quickly time is moving, isn't it? It's amazing what times we live in. Another generation started adding more and more content here.

18:40See, there's eight books by Ludwig von Mises, and we're very fortunate, most of Mises' works have fallen into the public domain, which is another way of saying that the state does not restrict your access to them. That's all that really means, so that's what public domain means, it means like a free market or something close to it. So, Mises' books, and how blessed we are, because if these books have been published anytime between 1964 and the present, they'd be owned by some mega-publisher, you know, be restricting your access to them, you know, but they were all written before then. And fortunately, they were published by institutions that didn't really care that much about his work, and so they didn't renew them.

19:27So most of them fell into the public domain, it was a great gift to the world, fortuitous This is for Mises and for us. I started putting them all online, one after another. It was hard work. You can see the expansion here. I think this is 2001. I think we get now here our first media files that appear on the site. Those were very heavy in those days and they drained a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth was very expensive. We were paying high bills for downloads in those days. We had very few things. We went from just these small, they're very small clips, you know, like two minutes of Murray speaking, not even that, sometimes 20 seconds, and Mises speaking, which was a great thing in those days.

20:152002, we started expanding the width of the website, adding never more content, I had absolutely no organizational sense in my head, you know, things just began to pile up, so it just became a huge list of everything possible I could think of. Anything that was on the site got its own hard link, you know. So, and then Chad was busy creating all these infinite graphics, I think the page went down for another 15 feet down here, you know, with the graphics and we got a blog you know and couldn't find anything but you know this way it was and so ever wider 2004 started expanding the width of it gave the the header a nice high-tech look that was fashionable in those days you know and then 2005 ever more ever more development I'm showing you just the front page we have to understand that behind this of course is it's like a The city of Mises, Oregon, went from like New York in 1820 or something to the way it

21:20looks today in just this period of time, because then we could spend endless hours here. And during this time, too, we started recruiting ever more students, as you can imagine, because students around the world are Googling around and learning to Mises. I mean, this is the way I found Mises. I was just an economics major at Texas Tech University. I loved economics. This is fine. This is a wonderful subject. If I study it long enough, surely I'll find all the secrets of civilization among these graphs. And then, at some point, somebody pointed me to a book by Mises and the whole world just opened up. It's a glorious thing to bump into an economist of his range and his substance and talking about the real stuff, the stuff that really matters. And he seems to have it on everybody. And that's all we really need to do is highlight the school of the thought and attracts people to the school.

22:08School. It began to expand ever more. We had this fun quiz that, you know, everybody took are you an Austrian? You take it and if you're 100% Austrian, you know, then that's a great thing or something. People would write us. I remember when they'd first start taking the quiz, they'd say, could you please change my score? You know, I didn't really understand question three. Yeah, I really meant to answer B, not A, as if we're keeping track, you know. Yeah, well, we'll change that in the ledger, you know, it's very strange. We began to get great gizmos like, I remember one time David Vexer, who's the actual webmaster of Mises' work, came to Auburn and he said, look, I want to do something big, something glorious. And I said, well, I just don't know what that would be. He said, well, how about a little widget that displays a random quote by Mises? So I said, okay, so we put together a database of thousands of small quotations by Mises that you can run anywhere in that

23:04website saw the world run this thing now. It's over here in the corner. It's the first time that thing appeared. And it also began to illustrate to us the power of RSS feeds. And eventually, of course, we began to drive the whole site by its digital feeds, not so much hard-coded, so it wasn't in there, you know, every second of the day. Now, you know, the site would more or less run itself. And this was the first big feed site. I mean, this was a little bit hysterical because absolutely everything on this page was generated by feeds, and it went all the way down to the bottom. So, you know, this is two years ago, and it really became more and more common to have everything under feeds. It's like ancient history now, two years ago. And you could drag and drop these. This is also a big thing, drag and drop. You had to drag and drop. Everything had to be drag and drop. If you couldn't drag it and drop it, it was just useless. You know,

23:57That was the view. So everything on this page moved around. You could move it around. You could put the Mises blog post on top and then article that. Why? Anybody want to do that? I don't know, but we had some sense. Finally, things began to stabilize the previous year. I'm sorry, this thumbnail is missing. Wayback Machine couldn't grab it. I don't know, probably because I had a relative link. But anyway, this is our first incarnation of the new site where we had an actual design team, not just sort of me working on Saturday morning or with a couple of guys. We had an actual design team come in and show us how to make something really beautiful and then we end up with this all the way today. That's the current site, which as you can see has a vast number of things. One of the things we put up over here is this community right here. You know, you dig into this, it's another world, forums

24:52and a chat room, you know, it's really fun to go in the chat room late at night, you don't have anything to do, so you go in the chat room, everybody greets you like a star, hey, there you are, and you're kind of chatting. So there's a big crowd hanging out there all the time.

25:09Some data, I see that you can't actually see this data very well, so I may be able to just blast past this. I tried to blow it up here, this is the Mises Org compared to the Federal Reserve, we've been in a constant race here, you know. See that we kind of passed them, you know, once the crisis hit, you know, they kind of went down. And here we are, Mises versus Brookings versus the Federal Reserve versus the National Bureau of Economic Research, you know. Killing them across the board. Okay. I don't know, you know, I had so many wonderful things that I would like to go through with you here. I'm just going to click through some of these things. I'm told they have exactly five minutes here. I have like 50 slides. I mean, you know, if I do like one every three seconds, maybe we can actually blast through it.

25:58I just want to show you some of the books we have online, which there are thousands. And do you understand what this means? It's a full text of these books that in the old days, you know, you're so fortunate to find them in the library. Now it's just like, you know, a couple of quick search. We're now running our own internal Google search engine. We have a box, a Google box running on our site. Not Google itself, but our own Google box, you know, that renders all these PDFs in text. So you can copy and paste out of all of them. Every single PDF has a complete table of plans in front of the left. And every one of them is fully searchable. I thought I would put the first book up. And as I say, we have thousands. I'm just displaying the ones that discuss money and banking here. All of Austrian economics always begins with Principles of Economics by Carl Menger.

26:45He discusses the origin of money, not in terms of social consensus or state decree, but emerging out of the market. This is a book by William Goudge, or Goudge, I guess, is 18, 39, I can't quite read it, but one of the hard money banking theorists of the American tradition that Tom de Lorenzo was talking about. And again, a book that nobody's ever heard of, now it's available to the whole world. Ron Paul talks a lot about this book, and this book in the Fed. Another 19th century banking treatise blasting fractional reserve banking in the Tennessee. See all the table contents around the left? One click and you're in. This is a 1917 book that we just found the other day, Our Money and the State. You know, we make these discoveries like, huh, who knew this existed?

27:33This is a great book, who ever knew? And then you scan it, you put it online. infinite distribution. And by the way, the entire website is open source. So anybody anywhere in the world can download the entire website and run it themselves on their own servers. We do this. So there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of copies of all of this stuff running on servers all over the world. So that if something terrible happens, you know, so that our server facility in Dallas blows up or something, it's not going to make This is part of, I think, the moral obligation of our generation. We have a chance now to liberate all of these works for all time. After we're all gone in this room, people will still be using these editions. Still. I mean, they're perfect. 300 DPI, every one of them is flawless. Any one of them can be downloaded and published instantly.

28:35Depression, who knew? Value of Money. This book had a huge influence on George Selgin and Leland Yeager and their monetary theory. Nobody even heard about it until a few weeks ago when it went online. Hayek's great book, we're cooperating with the Institute of Economic Affairs to put all of Hayek's work online, all of Murray's work on the Federal Reserve. This is an 800 page, how many pages is that? It's not 800, it's 542 I think it says. All All of Hayek's greatest work on business cycle theory published last year. This was a case where we put it online before it went into the hard copy, you know. We still sell the hard copy, by the way. This is a master's thesis written under Murray Rothbard on history of bubbles by Douglas French. And we like to keep up his original type manuscript just for old time's sake. It's also published in hard copy. Ron Paul is the great prophet out of our age, all of his speeches from congress. Look at this. Anybody know what that is?

29:37That's Mises' 1912 treatise on money. 1912. You couldn't get it. And now there it is. The original German, 1912. I mean, I don't even think you couldn't pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a hard copy of that. Now it's online. William, what's his name, Benjamin Anderson's This is great work from the 1920s. Vixel were the only publishers of Vixel's work on money and interest rates in the world. Value of Money, fantastic attack on quantity theory of money, showing that actually the world doesn't work according to that formula. An explanation of how the French Revolution took place due to fiat money inflation.

30:23The Theory of Money and Credit, the first English translation in the 1950s, now available to everybody. This is a book we published just two years ago, Money, Bank, Credit and Economic Cycles, the most comprehensive book on Austrian business cycle theory and monetary theory ever, and it remains just the definitive treatise. 900 pages, all there for you. What has government done to our money? Probably the best-selling book on money ever written by Murray Rothbard, Now in its 137th edition or something like that. When the crisis hit, this book, A History of Money and Banking in the United States, was an unexpected bestseller. Mises' essays collected into a single volume. This is the book in which Mises predicted the Great Depression. We put it up in German.

31:10Also in English. But this is Condor Vergea, another one of those great hard-money 19th century American theorists that everybody's forgotten about. A wonderful book, Bob Higgs the other day said this is the best book on business cycles he had ever read and he had never even heard about it until he read this online edition. Larry Seacrest wrote this book. It was on the verge of death or obscurity and he gave us permission to put it online. It's a great attack on central banking and we got permission from him to put it online so it wasn't trapped under copyright anymore and he saw it online. We put out a hard copy edition and then he tragically died of a heart attack, but there he stands immortalized.

31:59Another 19th century defense of free banking, Hayek's Free Market Monetary System, this book, Mystery of Banking, which our donors made possible that we republished, came out just in the nick of time, just as soon as the banking crisis hit last year, and suddenly Rothbard was flying out the door. Gold is Money, Hans Sindholz, here's one of Murray's favorite economists, Edwin Kammerer in the 1940s, explaining why we should better go back to our gold center, we're going to face hyperinflation in the future, this man was a prophet. Here's our book from 1982, one of the best books in the Federal Reserve ever written, Elgin Gross Close, that makes for some harrowing reading, I tell you.

32:46And Murray Rothbard's broadside against the Fed. And then Ron Paul's case for gold comes out of the gold commission. And I think I'm just going to have to stop, and I'm going to just kind of, from Britain World Inflation, inflation crisis, how it resolved this book, Murray's book, kind of of 1819. I put this one up just to let you know we have thousands of journals, articles up there too. Gottfried Habler, Explaining the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. There's Mises' collected essays on the Great Depression. John Robbins, Tom Woods loves that book. Murray Rothbard's Great Tributes, William Rupka, and that's it. That's just a slight look at Mises' work. 0.005%. Thank you.