The International Language of the Austrian School

0:00My talk today is going to be all business, all about the Mises Institute despite the highfalutin title. What I'd like to do is give you a little introduction to some of what we're up to in terms of our management of the website and of our publications program and I hope to be able to open it up for some questions because I know there's a lot of questions about the new electronic media and what's going on. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, okay. Some time ago, it was earlier this year, there's a young kid from Georgia, not far from here, and he worked his way up in journalism and started writing articles for a major financial daily, perhaps the most important financial daily in the United States, which also has a European edition.

0:52Anyway, he got the dream job and he started writing for this publication from Italy. And everywhere he went, all over Italy, he kept hearing about one thing from all the intellectuals that were friendly to market economics and that was namely about the town that wasn't far from his hometown, Auburn, Alabama, and the Mises Institute. Very strange. He couldn't understand it. He'd gone so far and yet all he hears about is the glories of the place near to his home. He came and paid us a visit and the result was a very nice article. But it's true that everywhere he went, no matter what language they spoke, whatever their first language, he kept hearing about the institute where everybody regarded, all these intellectuals he admired, Auburn as they really the citadel of freedom and free thought and scientifically advanced economics.

1:57It's very pleasing to hear that sort of thing. One of the most striking aspects of the Austro-libertarian worldview has come in for criticism over the years and namely it's internationalism. Why this should be a criticism I don't entirely understand but there are people Many commentators have remarked that Austrian theory has this much in common with Marxism. It strives for a kind of universality and hopes to have an international impact. And there really are two senses in which this is true. First, the Institute's scholars and students and supporters are in every country in the world. And there really are two senses in which this is true. First, the Institute's scholars and students and supporters are in every country in the world, and a map of our website's users shows a remarkable international distribution.

2:45The preponderance are in the US and Canada and Mexico, but in all states in Europe, Great Britain and the Netherlands are all well represented, as are China and Australia and New Zealand. Every day we get requests for reprint rights and translations and requests for some sort of cooperation. Our logs show that every country in the world with an internet presence has people who spend time reading and studying on Mises.org. And the second sense in which it is true that the Austro-libertarian theory is international is that it really is applicable in all times and all places. in all places. Economic laws know no borders. The logic of action is immutably true for all peoples in all times. Price sealings do not create shortages in one country, surpluses in another, an all-around equilibrium in yet another.

3:34In all cases where prices are rising and yet fixed with an upward limit, the result will be the same. And a thriving black market for the goods and services will appear. It is not only the laws of the market that are the same, the nature of the state in all times and places is also identical. Cultural colorations can make a difference in how much damage the state can do to society and bigger states are surely more harmful than smaller ones, but these are matters of degree and not in kind. And so what Austro-libertarianism represents is not just a research program in one area for one time and one place but an overarching theory of how the world works including politics, economics, history, law and society in general. But this alone is not the basis of its appeal.

4:20The reason it attracts adherents is its explanatory power and how that compares favorably with with every alternative. The benefits of enterprise in Beijing are the same as in San Juan and Seattle and the struggle against power is carried on in all times and all places. As Rothbard said in his introduction to Conceived in Liberty, the central theme of history is the race or the constant conflict between social power and state power everywhere. It was for holding such universally applicable views that the Austrian School was originally It was a term of derision applied by the German historical school that believed that there were no universals. And of course today the Austrians face an oddly similar environment in which the claim of universal truth is dismissed and disparaged.

5:08A theme of the multicultural movement, what Mises would call polylogism, is that the same theoretical logic cannot be used to study or understand radically different groups, times and cultures. and Cultures. All truth, the claim goes, is embedded in particular groups and peoples. Then anyone seeking universal theory is derided, both at the turn of the century and today. We are called neo-scholastic, you know, people who try to explain too much and end up in explaining nothing. But in this case, I think the best way to address it is just to simply and let the market speak, the appeal of the Austrian School has expanded dramatically and it is expanding month by month and while the growth path really dates from the founding of the Mises Institute, the exponential increases date from the precise time when we've had the means to get the word out both in electronic publication and in print and yes, print still does exist and the market is thriving.

6:15As we look back at our history, we can only observe one overarching error that we ever made and that was probably underestimating the extent of the appeal of Misesian ideas. We never imagined a time would come when every work day would be a struggle to keep up with demand from the ever-growing population of students and professors, from business professionals, homeschoolers, money managers and just every concerned citizen of all sorts from all over the world. So with that introduction, let me just tell you about some of the books we've come out with this year, explain why I think they're important, and tell you about how they're doing in the market. The first book here, Causes of the Economic Crisis, has a remarkable history. This is a series of papers that Mises wrote in the interwar period.

7:06He founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research research and got busy writing about the dangers of inflation in the central banking age. He had hired Hayek at the time and they both were doing wonderful work trying to warn about the coming depression, explain the business cycle and apply it to the realities of the time. Hayek, as you know, left to go to England and a lot of his work was, he wrote it in in English, he re-did a lot of his papers in English and they were published in England and he became a major competitor to the Keynesian world view and it was his papers of this period that were eventually cited by the Nobel Prize committee in 1974 as having been the ones that ended up providing a scientific alternative to Keynesian theory.

7:59Meanwhile Mises was just as busy but all of his work was in German and as we know he went to Geneva, not England, and there he was for six years before he came to the United States and wrote Human Action and did remarkable work in the States, but the interwar papers never appeared in English until after Mises' death, actually. So he's never really gotten the credit he deserves for having been a pioneer in business cycle theory and for having forecasted The Great Depression and also having seen a way out of it. So the book originally came out in 1978, Bettina Graves translated his work in 1978 and it came out in a book called On the Manipulation of Money and Credit which ends up being very difficult to get and had long been out of print. So earlier this year we collected these papers into a single volume, put a new title on it, The Causes of the Economic Crisis and collected all these papers by Mises

9:06and there you go. It has a new introduction by Frank Szostak and includes some of the introductory remarks by Percy Graves that he originally wrote for this book and I forget now what the price is but it's a very good price, it's a very beautiful book. So, in some ways, we feel very good about this, because it undoes a kind of historical wrong and draws attention to Mises, who was, after all, the pioneer in this area, and probably deserved to at least share the Nobel Prize with Hayek for that work. So, that's a great thing, and that's just out, and if you think about it, it's a remarkable thing how well the book is selling, and here you have papers on the business cycle that were written in the interwar period in Austria, and here it is, 2006, and there's a booming market for this stuff, and that's a great thing.

10:02It's because Mises' work not only explains his own world, but it explains our world too, because it's dealing with the universal theory. The second little innovative study that we came up with earlier this year is this red one. It's a study guide to Man Economy and State. I'm sure you've all seen Man Economy and State. It's 1,400 pages or something. It's beautifully written and very clear and a wonderful book to go through, but a little bit daunting. This is the first study guide that's ever been written on this treatise, and really the first published study guide of any major Austrian manifesto, written by Robert Murphy for use in the classroom and also for private study. It turns out professors find it very useful if they're using Man Economy and State in their classroom because they use this book as a way to prepare for their classes, you know, the next day after a lecture on capital theory or something.

10:54He's got the summary right there written up. And it also includes study questions in the back. So it helps guide you through the book. We were very alarmed to discover, it was about 10 or 15 years ago, that many of the people who considered themselves Austrians hadn't really gone through Rothbard's book as well as they might have. And so this is one of the ways we're seeking to fix that, make sure that everybody who's studying Austrian economics has a very clear and easy way to get into the modern literature. And these are all entrepreneurial guesses. How do you know something like this isn't just going to be a bust? Well, it turns out that most people who own Man Economy and State want to own the Study Guide, too. So it's done very well.

11:40Foreigner Liberty has also been long out of print. Murray Rothbard wrote this book in, I think it was 1972, maybe 1973. in reaction to the wage and price controls put on by Nixon. He saw that conservatism and Republican party politics was not going to provide a clear way out for libertarian, for the free market. And so this book was calling for a complete secession from that old style of conservatism. And it went through many editions and then once again fell out of print. By the way, it's remarkable. Every couple of days we find that there's another book that is a great and important classic that can be teaching people right now that is out of print and unavailable and constantly overwhelmed with the burdens and opportunities that we face to get this material out.

12:36So we're very pleased to put out Foreigner Liberty and a very beautiful edition. I think it's the most beautiful edition that's yet appeared. I only wish Murray could have been around to see this little treasure. This is the complete libertarian forum. I'm not sure what the height of the circulation was, but, gosh, I don't know if anybody could tell you, but it certainly wasn't, maybe it wasn't over a thousand, I don't know at the time, but Murray was very diligent in filling it with great book reviews, essays, comments on politics, politics, movie reviews, cultural analysis, everything from month to month, and everybody who got it just adored this publication, and it went away, and it was impossible to get, in fact when we put this little collection together we had to get people to send us, Murray himself hadn't kept copies, so it wasn't in our archive, so we had to have people volunteer to send us copies, and we put them all together into a two volume set, we also put them online,

13:39and that created a real demand for them and then we were able to come out with them in print and that's doing very well for us, so that all of Murray's work from that period is suddenly alive again. This is Rothbard's History of Economic Thought that came out in two volumes, it was initially published by a prestigious English publisher that these days, I saw a book published the other day by the same publisher that they were asking $550 for the book. How do they do that? I don't know. But these books are enormously expensive. For one volume, it was $125. And so, Lew Rockwell managed to strike a deal, and we were able to acquire the permission to print them ourselves.

14:27And I forget now what we're selling them for, $40, $45, something like that, for both books. And so Rothbard's most important work of his last years to reconstruct the history of economics from the ancient world up until Marx has now found a completely new audience. He couldn't get these books before. So they've done very, very well. And we can't be happier than the fact that they're out there now. It's just great. Four other books we put out this year. Hans Hoppe's Economics and Ethics of Private Property, another published by a prestigious English publisher that charged way too much money for the book. You know, one of the reasons they do this, do you know why?

15:12A lot of them sell to EU libraries, which aren't always private institutions, so they're not paying very close attention to issues of price. In any case, we're glad for EU libraries to buy our books, but the main people we're trying to reach are people who actually spend their own money. We want to be able to publish these books at affordable prices. and so Hans Hoppe's great work, Economics and Ethics and Private Property, is out. Jesus Huerta de Soto, this very fat treatise on money and banking, first appeared in Spanish and he himself worked with the translator to come out with an English edition and wanted the Mises Institute to do it because he knew that he could count on excellent production values, wide distribution and a good affordable price.

16:06And once again, as with all these books, one of the reasons we're able to distribute them in a way that's competitive is because our own supporters have been so generous in assisting with the publication and underwriting publication costs, otherwise it wouldn't be possible. And so this book came out about six months ago and it's remained a bestseller. Two other books, The Century of War by John Benson, a collection of essays about the origins of American wars and about how the political classes so often use propaganda and lies to trick the country into war. And this little monograph, this book came out as a result of a monograph that you wrote by the same title, we sold out of it, and so we faced the problem, do we want to reprint the monograph or do we just want to put together a book?

16:56So we decided to put together a book, and it's done beautifully. The last book that just recently came out with this wonderful cover is Power and Market. That is part of the Man Economy and State. He wrote Power and Market as the final section of Man Economy and State. This was in the height of the Cold War, I guess in 1962, when the manuscript was sent off to the publisher, and they sent it off to a referee. The Referee said, you know, it's a great book until he gets to the end, where he actually applies all the theory, you know, the book's much more powerful, it's just pure theory, why don't we leave all the applications out? So the whole last section of the book was sliced out of it for its first publication run. When we put Man Economy and State out in a scholars edition earlier this, well, I guess it was last year, we united it together with Power and Market.

17:45But it turns out there is an existing demand for Power and Market as a separate treatise, as a separate book about interventionism. So, we made it available in that format as well, and that's been a big seller in classrooms. Let me just show you a little bit about what we've got coming up here in the next year. Panic of 1819, Rothbard's dissertation that he wrote about the first major financial crisis in the United States that was resolved very nicely because it wasn't an FDR to run the show in 1819. This is the dissertation and still the definitive work on the topic. That will be coming out. The book called Tune Ceri Mali is actually a collection of essays that makes a very nice integrated book by our own Lew Rockwell. So his second big book will be coming out sometime within the next six The Complete Tergo. It's amazing how few writings by A.R.J. Tergo are available in English anywhere, even on bookfinder.com, very expensive.

18:59So we're coming out with a complete collection of all of his work. He was a favorite economist of Rothbard. And also equally important, importantly, we've got a t-shirt actually with Tergo's picture on it out there. out there, so of course we have to have the book too. Anytime you make a t-shirt you have to have a treatise to go with it. Economic Controversy is another major book, it's going to be 800-900 pages by Rothbard, of all of his criticisms of non-Austrian theories, and that's a major book. Mystery Book 1, what can I tell you, it's a very important book and I can't tell you any more about it than that other than, well it doesn't, it doesn't exist yet but it will and you'll know about it when it happens. It will be a very exciting day when it happens, I can't tell you more than that. The Betrayal of the American Ride is being edited right by Tom Woods and that's Murray Rothbard's unpublished history of the right and you

20:05know I probably every six weeks you know we get a phone call from somebody asking about this book when's it gonna appear when's it gonna appear this is gonna be very exciting and Tom tells me that there's material in there that he's never read anywhere else so that's coming out and no there aren't any pre-publication copies available we just got the good news to the other good This also is a very nice thing. I wish I could tell you more about it, but it's got to remain a mystery, but the day that it appears will be a very good day. Oh, and I see here also we have mystery book three. I can't quite remember, oh I do remember which one that is, similarly I can't tell you any more about that one, except that it's going to be a very important day when it appears.

21:07Okay, so now if you want to come to a Mises Institute staffer before the end of the conference and try to, you know, find out the name of it, you can attempt to do so. And I don't know, do we have methods for keeping people quiet and secret? I don't know, but anyway, yeah. Another book by Walter Block, Discrimination in the Market, a collection of essays, a book by David Gordon, The Essential Rothbard, it's an intellectual biography, complete with a bibliography, a complete bibliography if you can imagine, huge, and a new treatise by Guido Holzman, the first ever written on the ethics of money production, and all of these will be within the next six months.

21:57A little bit about the website, six months to a year, a little bit about the website. James Fogel was looking for some data to compare us with other nonprofits to see how we were doing. And I told him, I said, you know, I think, I'm not sure this is correct, but I think that Mises org may be the most highly trafficked nonprofit site in the world. That sounds implausible, doesn't it? But I could never found any exceptions, really. So we began to kind of run through a series of other nonprofits, but who else, who else? And every one I looked up, they didn't even compare, they weren't even on the chart with the Mises Institute. We were so much higher than all the rest of it. We did find the red crosses in red here, and then here we are kind of going this way.

22:45So these are traffic rankings according to Alexa, and the way they rank you is they take I look at all websites in the world and I try to assemble them where the most viewed website in the world is number one and the least viewed is number, you know, 500 billion or whatever. And so here's the kind of race between the two of us and I thought that was sort of charming to see how Mises Institute relates to the only other, another big non-profit that I could think of. You can always look all this data up for yourself using Alexa. Here we are compared to OpinionJournal.com. This is the free site of the Wall Street Journal. They have paid subscriptions, but this is their free site. It was very heavily trafficked, and you can see that they're higher than we are, but they're very close.

23:33So that kind of gives you an idea of where the website stands. Here's some interesting comparisons. Federal Reserve. Neat, huh? So, you know, we're consistently above the Federal Reserve. That's nice. The International Monetary Fund. Let's see. There we are. IMF in red, Mises, Oregon, blue. And it would be very, you know, tacky and unseemly to compare us with our direct competitors, you know, so I'm not going to do that by pointing to the first chart, you know.

24:18Can you read the name up there? I could write it up, yeah. And then, yeah, the, well, the higher you are on the scales, the, you know, relative to other websites. So that, yeah, so it's, you know, we're between 20,000 and 10,000, somewhere we've ranged between those two amounts. I see that I mistaken, I meant to put a different organization here in the middle, but I didn't. It's still a repeat of the second, which just as well, you might imagine which free market institute or libertarian-oriented institute in Washington the second was supposed to be, but it's fine. And the third one is American Enterprise Institute. Most of the rest of them don't even register.

25:10Okay. There are a few other comments and I know you have some questions. Online books. So as a result of some research we did earlier this year, we found that many of the great classics of our tradition are in fact available to us to publish in the most immediate form possible, namely a download in the PDF format. So among the hundreds and hundreds of books that we now have online on Mises Org, we recently just in the last several months added Essentials of Economic Theory by John Bates Clark, Jefferson by Albert J. Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, a great book, Man vs. the Welfare State by Hazlitt, Country Squire in the White House, Flynn, As We Go Marching by Flynn and Our Enemy is a State, NOC, Foundations of the Market Price System, a wonderful book by Milton Shapiro, Murray Rothbard loved this book and probably there wouldn't be a market for it if it were in print, it would be cost prohibitive, but we can easily put it online and we did this

26:28Other things we've put online in recent times. Mises, as he taught all of his classes and seminars, he used to always throw out topics for research, ideas for dissertations and things, and Bettina Graves and Percy Graves began to write them down on note cards, and they collected a big, huge stack of these things. So she sent all these cards to us, and we scanned them all and put them all online. So now there's a complete record of all of Mises' suggested research. Research Topics between 1950 and 1968. Charles Holt Carroll's Organization of Debt into Currency, we had a donor, very interested in that book. We were able to put that up online. Most of the books we've published, we've published simultaneously online.

27:14So if a person complains about paying the minimal cost to the bookstore, you can always go to the PDF and read it that way. And the PDF, as I've explained many times, having the book simultaneously published free The theory online and also in hard copy, these two things complement each other. They're not substitutes. Well, there's other things I want to talk about, the online classroom and the RR archive project. So I'm going to leave it there and open it up to questions. We're actually out of time, but I do want to ask you, which of the three mysteries books is your favorite? Yeah, that's a tough one.

28:02Anybody have a question for the audience? Unprofitable is our publishing business. Profitable? Yes, I would say it is. It most certainly is. But one of the reasons it is, is that we are able to count on generous donors. That's a major factor. But it's not as if these books are just being published and stored. The bookstore, I have to say, it does very, very well. You know, just in the last several days, our traffic has been immense. You know, the articles get cited by the social networking sites like dig.com and these other places.

28:49These places crash servers all the time, every day, you know. But Mises work is running .NET 2, and it's very robust software. We've never had any trouble. And at the same time, we're able to do that and host all these downloads,

29:33I have to say, one of the saddest things that I see happening is when you have a very important book by an economist who feels the need to have a book published by an academic press house, like a university press, for reasons of tenure or whatever, and whereas we would otherwise like to publish it and to see the book be published at the prices of two or three hundred dollars and then land in a bunch of libraries where nobody's ever going to read it, it's not going to have the kind of impact it should. That makes me very sad. So I think our publishing program is doing wonderful work right now in getting the ideas out there. They continue to be archived and referenced.

30:36That was actually a miracle.