The Lesson

0:00My name is Jeffrey Tucker. I'm working for the Mises Institute and we're doing a series of small videos, short videos, on our new book, Economics in One Listen. Of course not a new book. It's a very old book by Henry Haslett. And it's my great pleasure to sit here with the scholar who wrote the introduction to the book, Walter Block. I'm delighted to be here with you, Jeff. It's just wonderful. So how do you think the book turned out? Do you like the look of it? Oh, wow. It's a labor of love. It's magnificent. This is one of my very favorite books. I've all booked them, so to speak, and it looks very good. I'm delighted that I was asked to write the introduction, and I looked at it again, and I was amazed at me and Henry So, I was so inspired by your last paragraph of your introduction. Do you mind if I read it, please?

1:04Yeah, and this takes away all your good stuff for this interview. So, here we go. In summary, I feel like a party host introducing two guests to one another, who hope they will like each other. I hope you will like this book. But more, I hope it will affect your life in somewhat the same way it has mine. It has inspired me to promote economic freedom. Indeed, to never shut up about it. It has convinced me that free market economics is as beautiful in its way as a prism, a diamond, a sunset, the smile of a baby. We're talking the verbal equivalent of Mozart or Bach here. This book lit up my life and I hope you get something a lot from it too.

1:54Oh, you're very kind, thanks. That came right from the heart. I meant every word of it. You know, sometimes people say, well, you know, this laissez-faire capitalism, free market, it's so unlikely to occur. I mean, you know, you got Obama and you got McCain and neither of them are laissez-faire economist types. And poor Ron Paul, who is, you know, was given the back of the hand by the American electorate. and they say well you know it's so impractical and one of my retorts I have many is that it's so beautiful and even if it's never implemented it's just so glorious the idea of it it's sort of like I mean I love Mozart and Bach but I couldn't compose anything like that and and I couldn't appreciate I'm not a about professional musician. But to me, Mozart and Bach and Hazlitt and Mises and Rothbard are all intertwined, even though obviously there are differences. Some work in words, others work in musical notes. But I see, weirdo that I am, I see great connections between

3:04them. And I'm just honored to have been able to devote my professional life to creating Making beautiful music with words. Now there are obviously other retorts, more practical ones. For example, no one expected the Berlin Wall to topple when it toppled. No one expected the Soviet Union to go belly up when it went belly up. And if we didn't have a plan as to how to privatize and how the market would work, it's as if we'd be caught with our pants down around our ankles. So even though right now in the US things look gloomy for free enterprise, you know, John Paul Experience, what have you. He didn't win, so far anyway, we can always hope. Maybe one day the sea wall will fall, similar to the Berlin Wall.

3:51And unless and until we have some sort of understanding of free market economics, we will be greatly embarrassed. Why do you suppose we need a book like this to help us understand economics? Well, this I think is the best introduction to economics of our type, Austro-libertarian economics. I know of no better introduction. I know of better essays or long written works like Human Action and Man Economy and State, but those are five, six, seven hundred pages. This is, I don't know, a hundred and fifty pages or something like that. How many pages is it? It's $189 and that includes the index. Okay, so without the index, in my introduction, $150 isn't too far off, maybe it's $170.

4:40So you can give it to someone and say, look, read this as your first book. This is my first book in economics. I was converted to libertarianism by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon. And Nathaniel Brandon most of all gave me two books and he said, read these two books Economics, and then we'll discuss them. One was this one, Economics in One Lesson, the other was Alice Shrug. And in my introduction economics classes, I give my students what I was given, and it worked for me and has worked for some of my students. Some of my students really get the message, and I think they get it from Economics in One Lesson by Henry Haslip. So why is it that people can't just intuitively figure out economic science Oh, no, I think that their intuitions are very much the opposite.

5:30Every freshman class I get, when I say that the minimum wage law is not really a good thing for the poor, they think I'm callous and unfeeling, because obviously you raise the minimum wage and everyone's better off, and you know, it's sort of like the Grinch that stole Christmas to oppose that, or rent control lowers rents for poor people and who Who could be against that? So, instinctively good kids, 17, 18, 19-year-old freshmen, they're filled with the milk of human kindness and they want the poor to be helped, but they don't realize that it doesn't work. Now, could you call upon that Pythagorean thing that you wrote to me before we started out with you? Because that's very apropos to the point As a character in Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan replies when told of the theory of Pythagoras that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, what an utter fool! Couldn't he And he uses his eyes.

6:45Right. Sometimes, I mean, I think that's a beautiful passage and it really illustrates my answer to your question about young students and why do they need this book, why don't they instinctively see it. Their instincts are very much opposite. I mean, it looks as if the Sun revolves around the Earth. I mean, it starts in the East and it goes to the West. Can't you use your eyes, you dummy? You should be able to see that. In a similar way, you have to do more than your eyes or more than a superficial look at minimum wage, at rent control, at tariffs and free trade and all the other issues that Hazlitt goes through, to see beneath the surface. And I think also, socio-biologically, we all are hardwired to accept explicit cooperation.

7:36You know, you're hurt, I'll soothe you, I'll get a cold compress for you, what have you. But implicit cooperation through markets, we're not hardwired through biology to accept that. The best example I can think of is, I come from New Orleans, I teach at Loyola University and we had Katrina, and right after Katrina the prices rose of flashlight batteries and candles and orange juice and things like that, and everyone was saying, oh, they're price gougers, they're evil, instinctively, and when the governor of the state of Louisiana I said I'm going to put price gougers in jail. Everyone said, yeah, right on. Put those so-and-so's into jail. It takes economics of the sort that economics in one lesson provides you to understand that there's a function of higher prices.

8:28Namely, it rations goods and it calls forth new supplies. Otherwise, all we can rely on is benevolence. We can't rely on self-interest. But most people are not hardwired to see that. They can't appreciate implicit cooperation, namely through prices and markets and profits and property rights and things like that. All they can instinctively appreciate is charity. Okay, so Walmart brings in a whole bunch of things, that's good. That would be like seeing the sun going, you know, around the earth, or rather the earth going around the sun. So, I think the answer to your question is that people instinctively are anti-market and it takes an effort of will or understanding or knowledge of the sort that Henry Houslett so magnificently supplies to pierce through this ignorance.

9:18So, let me ask about that. Why is it that there's only one economics and one lesson? Is it very difficult to write a book like this, a clean, clear, timeless introduction to economics? Why is that so difficult? I think there are many, David Gordon has an introduction in economics, I think Callahan has one, there are others, but you know, it's sort of like why is there only one Mozart or one Bach, well there are others, I mean, there is Haydn and Salieri, I mean, my own book, Defending the Undefendable, is sort of an homage to this, at least the way I see it, what they both have in common, and I'm not comparing the quality but just the motif, both have a main message 30 implications. For example, his main message is the lesson, my main message is the law of non-aggression, and then we both apply it to 30 places.

10:11So, in a sense, when I wrote my book, Defending the Undefendable, I had this one in mind, only it was my seeing it through my eyeglassesivid. Now, obviously, these two books don't deserve to be mentioned even in the same sentence, but, you know, if there's a Mozart and a Salieri, there can be a Haslett and a Block. I mean, all you can do is do your best, and there are many of us at the Mises Institute right now, the faculty, twelve of us or so, we're all trying to contribute, now none of us is a Hazlitt, none of us is a Mozart or a Mises or Rothbard, but we're all doing our best and we're trying to uphold the tradition. How do you account for why the book still seems so fresh, even though it was written so long ago? In my introduction, what I said is that except for that crack about Eleanor Roosevelt, it looks as if it was ripped from today's headlines.

11:04And if he would have just put Hillary instead of Eleanor Roosevelt, you probably couldn't tell. I mean, the book first came out in forty-six, and now it's 2008. I think that's fifty-two years or something, or sixty-two years. Seventy-two years, my math is a little weak. It's a long time, it's almost the Soon it will be a hundred years. And that book will be as fresh in 2042 as it was in 1946. And apparently he just ripped it off. I mean, not ripped off, he just banged it out. He left the New York Times in a split and he just sat down on his typewriter and wrote this out and didn't think anything much would come of it. Isn't that interesting? Well, he was inspired maybe. Maybe he was channeling something higher than him, who knows. This is him, who knows, I'm not a religious person but he might have been inspired or something, it's just beautiful.

11:57You know, forget about the content for the moment, I mean the content is beautiful, it's perfect, there's no mistake. But the way he writes, I mean, he was inspired, I mean it's just so beautiful, just on an aesthetic basis apart from the economic basis. It's so well written. I mean, there are very few people who can write like that. Murray Rothbard was one. But the rest of us lesser beings, you know, convoluted sentences, and it's hard to understand, relatively speaking, to these geniuses. One of the things we had in mind when we put out the introduction is we wanted to make it a beautiful book, hardback, and cheap. So, I don't know, maybe this has happened to you, but often times I'll have people over to dinner just guess and the subject of economics will come up, and you don't want to waste the whole dinner talking about economic theory.

12:53What? How dare you! No, you do want to do that, right? But you want to give them even more... I've always wanted to have a stack of these. Yeah, in my house. Yeah, by the way, here. Oh, please take it. Take it with you. And so that's the idea, you know, is that you can have it, you can own some, and give them out. Lew Rockwell gave a brilliant speech at one of the Mises seminars. I forget in what city, I've been to so many, they all blend together. And what he said is, you're at a dinner party, and everyone's nice, and everyone's talking about, you know, the weather or the sports or something, and all of a sudden someone says something like, you know, we've got to have protective tariffs. And, you know, your spoon is halfway to your mouth and you sort of go, what?

13:38And I think that would be a perfect antidote to that. You don't have to, what's the expression, don't get mad, get even? Don't lose your soup halfway to your lip. But just resolve that after the dinner is over, say, you know, you might be interested in this book. And if you've got a stack of them, and what do they sell 12 dollars, well at today's prices that's like three gallons of gas or something, you know, you can give them not promiscuously, but you know, on a needed basis. Right, once you see a spark of interest, here's an issue you need to confront, namely economic logic. You can hold whatever political views you want, but you need to think about the economics behind it.

14:27Yeah, another title for that book that would have been good would have been Economic Logic in one lesson. If you wanted other titles that would be equally good or roughly as good. I mean, I'm not changing the title, I'm not for that, but Economic Logic I think is a very good way of putting it. Do you suppose that it's one of the best-selling economics books that's ever been printed? I think it It is. I know that Atlas Shrugged is a magnificent bestseller and it came out in 56 and it's still selling by the bushel load. But it's not really an economics book, although it is, but it's a novel. But this is not a novel and Haslett has written novels. This is just a textbook, a very short textbook. I use it in my classes as an adjunct to, you know, a mainstream textbook and, you know, say, here's the good stuff. And a lot of times this attracts the student interest in a way

15:25that the dry textbook... It's nice to compare them, isn't it? Having both. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Walter, not only for writing an introduction, but for agreeing to this quick interview. Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeff. The Theory of Money and Credit