A World of Mises and Mises.org

0:00We've got three minutes so I can just kill it, browsing the web. I never kill time browsing the web, right? None of us do. None of us just kill time browsing the web. This is the Google News site and it's really nice. The Google News actually sort of trolls around Mises org every morning and digs up any news stories and puts them up on the news site. and they can deliver to you, down at the bottom you'll see this little link says get the latest news on Mises with Google Alert so they can deliver to you on your email address any new content from Mises.org, it's actually quite remarkable, also sometimes the front page will, it's really amusing, you go to the business page and sometimes they'll have a Mises Institute story right up at the top, it's just startling, it's amazing, we're competing with all the Forbes I'm going to just go through this little presentation here real quickly so we can have plenty of

1:03time for questions since I know that there's a lot of questions about the relationship between the web and our work here at the Mises Institute. Can everybody hear me okay? For some reason it feels like I'm speaking softly, it's the new high-tech thing I guess, were you? Anyway, it's long ago that in order to have light, one had to rely exclusively on the is nearly impossible for us to imagine such deprivation, and when the power goes out, as it does more than we would like, owing to government intervention in the industry, we are all reminded how dependent we are on electricity and lighting technology for our everyday lives, and contrary to what the Luddites say, this dependency is a good thing, because it improves our quality of life, and provides evidence of the merit of human cooperation through market means.

1:54In order to, there was a time when in order to read a text of anything, you had to have a physical copy in your hands that had to be sent to the mails or delivered in person. There was no way that one copy could be read by multiple people at the same time. The generation now being raised finds this nearly impossible to believe. How did this system work? My nine-year-old daughter asks me. I explained that the Internet became consumer accessible only ten years ago. But she hears that as before her lifetime, so it might as well be before cars, electricity and indoor plumbing. It's all the dark ages to her. And in some ways it was.

2:39Before Mises Orger went online on October 2, 1995, the mails and hand delivery were the only two ways that the material we produced could be distributed and made available. and how well I recall spending hours every day searching through back issues of the Austrian Economics newsletter, the free market, the review of Austrian Economics and all of our publications just to find the article that a caller on the phone was requesting and copying it on the photocopy machine, at least we had those, and we put it in an envelope and give it to a government employee to take it to the person who wanted to receive it. to receive it, and so then the advent of the fax machine was a wonderful thing, of course the fax machine in those days was the size of a washing machine, but it was amazing technology, it was a stunning breakthrough, and in some ways it's remarkable to think that our ideas ever got a hearing though, given all the barriers we faced, in order to discover of the existence of the Mises Institute or Misesian ideas, you had to have heard a speech somewhere,

3:46or searched the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and found our publications listed among the millions upon millions. In my own case, I was walking along the street in Washington, D.C., looked up and saw a sign that said the Mises Institute. I couldn't believe my eyes because I had already read something like five Mises books at the time. Very impressive, a Mises Institute. Amazing. Just looking at the sign gave me great hope. Hope. But unless a professor assigned a reading or was warned students not to read Mises or Rothbard, censorship being the best form of advertising, it was very likely that students would go through many years of schooling, even in economics, without ever having heard about the Austrian School. In my own case, a professor warned me not to read Rothbard. That was it. I couldn't. I ran, grabbed Man Economy and State, read the whole thing cover to cover. What am I not supposed to read?

4:44Yet somehow we managed, but rather than focusing on the bad old days, let's talk about the age when the information lights came on. Our first site was put online by our current adjunct scholar Peter Klein, and then our membership coordinator Susan Thomas took it over. Later it became a group project, and remains so today, as it must be, because Mises, Oregon is far more than a website, it is a city, even a civilization unto itself. With the web, it became possible to put every word ever written by the Austrian economists online so that the magnificence of this tradition of thought could be made available to the entire world and thus amplifying and extending the hard work of thousands over a period of more than a hundred years.

5:32It became possible to provide instantaneous delivery of every publication ever put out in the history of the Institute, to provide a running commentary on world affairs that competes with major news organizations. I already mentioned that we're chronicled by the Google news page, but also moreover.com, which provides news feeds to websites all over the world based on topics. moreover.com puts a spider through our site every day. We provide interactive research guides and bibliographies, and other bibliographies reducing from months to minutes the time that it used to take to assemble these bibliographies with far more accuracy and became possible to share files and hold books across the world with only a few clicks and to listen to the voices of Mises and Margaret von Mises even and Murray Rothbard and all of our scholars and any recording ever made in the history of the Austrian School just by pointing and clicking became possible to deliver news of the Austrian School on an ongoing basis and with our new RSS feed any changes in the weblog or available articles can be mirrored on thousands and millions of sites and blogs anywhere in the world all thanks to a few lines of computer code I'm just going to pause here just a second and point you to the RSS feed links here this is our new gizmo it's syndication code you put these little lines of code

7:05in your blog or your site, and you immediately have access to the following files.

7:21These little things right here, down here at the bottom, these boxes. They give the front page articles on all items from the blog. and we can also syndicate on Mises.org any other RSS compatible software, for example lewrockwell.com has an RSS feed, it can immediately appear there every day including the blog, so remarkable, instantaneous and multiplies our impact by potentially million times. Most fundamentally, Mises does the most important thing extremely well and efficiently, it lets the world know that these ideas exist and interested students don't need to scour the libraries to find out about our work anymore.

8:08They can go there in an instant with a quick Google search or any other search, type the word Mises and you're there, and the world opens up to you. Before getting into what is available, just a few comments on usage. I know you'll have some questions about this in the few minutes that I've got left. In September 2003, Mises Org logged 1,209,295 page views. This is individual users examining a particular URL in the site. site. The site logged a total hit count in September of last month of 11,255,688 hits.

8:55This is huge and a commercial site would gladly pay a huge price for this level of interest. At any one time, day or night, every day, year round, between 300 and 600 people are on the Mises Institute site reading short articles or whole books or listening to lectures are doing research of one sort or another. It's like an ongoing seminar, three times the size of this conference. And it goes on constantly. In fact, the daily traffic of the site dwarfs any government agency you can name. It exceeds that of the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. It beats the Fed, the American Economic Association, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute and all the rest. And in fact, if there's a more trafficked institutional site focusing on economics and liberty anywhere in the world, I don't know about it.

9:48It's not bad for a movement that used to think of itself as a remnant. What we've learned is that interest in our tradition of thought is far vaster than we ever imagined. We've also learned that our potential market is far larger than we ever thought. Our daily email list for receiving full article texts is nearing the 11,000 mark. That's every day. Our news and blog lists are similarly large. By the way, if you're not on these email lists, click that button, sign up, and we'll inundate you. Our working papers and study guide and journals

10:33and audio files, bibliographies, biographies are linked and imitated the world over, our site is extra rich, content rich, so you don't have to get through a lot of baloney to get to the stuff you want. And it never talks down to anyone. Let me say a few words about the financials of running a site like this. It's very interesting and not many people understand this. It's very common for people who have never managed sites of this size and reached to believe that the goal of all websites is to garner hits. And in some sense, this is true, but beyond a certain level, usage can be very expensive. Hits become costly because bandwidth itself is very expensive. A linked file that delivers rich content can cost a service provider thousands of dollars.

11:22Costs which contracts typically specify are to be passed on to the domain owner. By that I mean, you know, whoever it is, Mises Institute. What at first seems to be a wonderful boon, a link from dread, for example, can turn into a bust overnight. That's like a futures market or something, you know, margin calls. This is why you're increasingly seeing do-not-link signs posted on smaller sites. If you're wondering what those are about, that's what it's about. It can be very expensive. It's especially expensive for a non-profit institute to keep shelves of books and journals available, And yet it must exist, it must thrive, even for one student out there who could become the next Mises, or Hayek, or Rothbard, and that's why the Mises Institute is so grateful for its benefactors who keep us online to donate or support the Mises Institute is similar to piously supporting a great archive, or a media archive, and that's why the Mises Institute is so valuable.

12:28Museum or Rare Book Collection, to which great editions are made every day, every hour. It's an investment for the ages and one that benefits all of humankind. Onward now to some treasures in Mises or you may not have discovered, starting with some of my favorite audio files, the Robert Lefebvre Commentaries. Chad and I were talking the other day. These are amazing. He's an unsung hero of the movement of liberty. In the 1950s, he had the idea of starting a school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that provided a forum for radical thinkers in our tradition to have students to teach.

13:13Mises taught there, as did Rosewilder Lane and Frank Trotterhoff, James Martin, and many others, but the biggest impact he might have had was through his own speeches. They were legendary. He might have been the greatest speaker in the history of libertarian ideas. You can hear passion in every word that reflect extremely careful thought and his capacity for distilling complicated ideas down to their essence. He was utterly tireless as a speaker. But when he died in 1986, he surely had no idea that 16 years later his words would come back to life with his permanent collection on Mises org, now available to the world. The Mises Institute is grateful to be the recipient of the Lafive Archives and the successor institution to the one he founded in Colorado. If you've not done so, take a few hours and listen. You might start with this talk on human rights or who owns what.

14:03You'll be immediately hooked, and let's see if I can actually pull this off. Conflict in Ownership In thinking of the various ways that human beings own property, we discover that property can be owned, it can be unowned, and it can be in a state of conflict. And it's extremely important, if we're going to maximize human well-being, which I think that's something we would all like to do, it's extremely important, it seems to me, that we begin avoiding or at least minimizing the areas of conflict. And one of the most important things here, it seems to me, would be to remove as much as possible types of ownership which automatically are going to lead into conflict of one sort or another.

14:59So he's great, isn't he? What a voice. He's just, he's amazing. There's something about it. I'm looking forward to my children get old enough to listen to this, and we make them Sit down and listen to every one of these files. Look at this. There's your mark. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So there they are. There they are. No charges, no access fees, nothing. They're just there. And so long as we're on the topic of audio files, how many of you have listened to Mises speak? Have you ever heard Mises speak? Okay. He's on here. And we've got his 1956 speech, Liberty and Property, and you can read along with it while you listen to the speech. And there's this 1962 talk on the origins of the Austrian School.

15:47He's introduced by William Peterson, or you can listen to Margit. Oh, let's listen to Margit. This is Margit von Mises. Chad, what are we going to, help me, okay, here we go. I was asked to tell you about Ludwig von Mises, the man. I most willingly agree that I shall I cannot talk to you about him as my name, for you already know that. I want to tell you about the man in terms of his personality.

16:37In this sense, he was first of all a human being, concerned about the state of the world, and foremost, he was a fighter. Perhaps you didn't take a course from Murray Rothbard on economics and you always wanted to, well you can do it. We've got an entire semester of lectures from Murray up here. Or perhaps you regret missing the Austrian Scholars Conference for the last several years, you can listen to all that Going back to text, MisesHorg features all the writings of Mises that we can possibly put online given copyright restrictions.

17:26I'll get calls sometimes that tell me what an outrage it is that we don't have Menger's Principles online. I would love to put Menger's Principles online, but we can't get copyright. Anything we can get copyright to, we put up in as many formats as possible. PDF, text, palm, often with links to reviews and other source material. People sometimes ask, why are we putting this text online if we're also selling Mises' books? Does that make any sense? Well, there's two ways to answer that. The first is that the primary job of the Mises Institute is to get the information out to the world. And it would be contrary to our mission to have that information available to us and somehow withhold it from the world pending the sales of books and essays. That's not the point. The idea is to get stuff out there.

18:11But there's a second point that's kind of complicated, and it speaks to an issue that's becoming increasingly obvious to booksellers themselves. Putting text online is not always competitive with hard copy sales that can often even increase sales, simply because making the text available increases interests in the book or article. My own impression is that whenever we put a text online, it tends to be talked about sighted, discussed, and otherwise goes from being invisible to becoming highly visible, and from the point of sales, this is all to the good. Continuing with my own picks of great material on Mises.org, we have many readers who write to say that there are words in our articles or Mises's writings that they don't understand. No? Okay. We've got a really neat thing here.

18:58It was done several years ago, but it holds up. This is Mises Made Easier, Percy Graves. It's a little online dictionary of Mises' works of sorts. And all these are links, so let's just click one randomly. Classical Liberalism, it takes you to it, and stop. The Doctrines and Policies of Traditional Liberal. Whoop, we gotta click again. And there you get Liberalism. And look at this, down here at the bottom, all these links, they go to, I'm stating them in here, they all go to Human Action.

19:46So it takes you everywhere. The thing involves unbelievable hours of work, and it's a wonderful thing. The linking was done several years ago, but it holds up as a marble, and you can find a way around this definitional book very easily. Or you can go to the source directly via this little amazing thing here. This is the Human Action Interactive Index. Yeah, that's all of Human Action, indexed with links. Unbelievable. We were joking the other day that if any of us had any idea what was going to be involved in getting Human Action online, we probably never would have begun the project.

20:40In any case, now it's online in many formats with that extraordinary interactive index. Within the last year, we've placed ever greater emphasis on getting inaccessible books online. Two in particular are worth mentioning here that we've put up recently. Let me just go to those. Study Guide. No, no, no, not that. Mock Loop. and Stock Market, Credit and Capital Formation. It's one of those books that every Austrian wishes that he or she owned, but you can't get it from anywhere. You can't get it from bookfinder.com. You can't find it anywhere. It was produced under the auspices of the Institute for Business Cycle Research that Mises headed. And well, we got copyright to it. Put it right up. There it is. Print it out. That's a great Austrian treatise on Frank Fetter's Principles of Economics

22:12or into an email or anything else. They're extremely high quality editions. You hardly ever see this kind of stuff online. I hardly ever see anything of this quality online. There were days of worldwide celebration after the release of both of these books, I can tell you. Students and professors have been desperate for copies for years. Recently too, we've been working to put more and more outstanding articles, scholarly articles by Rothbard online. Now, as we all know, Rothbard wrote a lot of stuff. Many of these, that was the study guide by the way, you just click the word Rothbard and up comes all this, all these things. Many of these articles are, you know, there's so much of it that it's very easy to overlook some things.

23:02So, we've been hard at work getting these things online. Let's see if I can find one that we put up recently. Panic of 1819 is one of those books we put up recently. Okay, here's one. Praxeology, Value Judgments and Public Policy. A tremendous short description of the Austrian method of economics. Inaccessible until two weeks ago, and already classrooms are linking to that URL and asking students to read it. So it went from invisible to visible just by putting it up there. As we work more and more to getting text online, the database in which they're linked is the study guide, and that was the thing that I was just fiddling with over here, is that, that.

23:57It's a 20-year project and it's added to on a daily basis. The work represents the work of many dozens of scholars. They're not only a, we started in 1982 with something like a 12-page handout. And now look what it's become. I forget now how many entries it has. Thousands and thousands and thousands of entries. All these guys here, you just click on their link and up comes their bibliographies and then go to their article by the name. You can search here under all the topics, arranged according to Austrian categorizations. So you want to know about competition in the Austrian tradition, there it is. The stuff in blue is all online, all linked and available. We have bibliographies online.

24:44There's a complete interactive Mises bibliography. Rothbard, Hazlitt, Fetter, our working papers section of the site. gives an opportunity to scholars from all over the world to upload their papers and get harm, sorry, I was just reading, yeah, that's Mark Thornton's article, and get comments from readers. There's a fellow who put a working paper online two years ago and he's never published the paper because he continues to get comments, you know, on an ongoing basis and he keeps adding to the paper.

25:51Well, we're starting to put up these syllabuses online now so that other professors that are teaching the course can immediately go to the syllabus and dig it up and see what other people are doing and create their own. Why not make it public? You know, it's useful information. And you can see, of course, that these little things in blue down here are links to what we have online. And if you know the way students are, they're far more likely to click what's on their computer than they are to dig through libraries. Let me just take you back to the periodical section. This is all the periodicals that we publish, and we've got everything online dating all the way back from the beginning of the institute.

26:38In some ways, this section of the site is the most pious towards those who have preceded us. When Murray Rothbard started left and right on a shoestring and sent this fledgling journal out to a few hundred people, it's the one down here in the far left corner, he never would have imagined that all these years later it would become a part of the structure of the history of ideas in the 20th century, but thanks to this technology that permits us to keep the entire run available, it continues to educate, and you can read for example his original version of Left and Right and the Prospects for Liberty here. The Complete Austrian Economics Newsletter, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Review Review of Austrian Economics, Free Market, Mises Review, it's all here. And for those who are visiting us locally, we've got our complete, we've got about 24,000 books. They're all chronicled by the title and the last name and the subject, so you can find your way around here.

27:31By the way, Google put every URL in this library into their search engine, so we're constantly Getting Phone Calls and Emails from People Saying, Oh, you have an extremely rare book, I'd like to borrow it. Sorry, you know, it didn't work that way.

27:54Just to show you that Mises's work is not only about monetary policy methodology, we've got a little thing here we listed just as fun. and I know everyone's idea of fun is playing Austrian economics crossword puzzles. So there you go.

28:16We have film reviews by our own Steven Carson who's here with us, who's done wonderful film reviews. And how many films have you reviewed now? You're telling me 30 or something like that? Yeah, just wonderful. And some very silly stuff, which I'll play for you here at the end. I've left so much out, but if you use Mises's work and find it valuable, you might consider supporting this work in particular. It was so crucial to the advancement of liberty itself. And just as a power failure reminds us how much we depend on electricity, we need to be aware how central this medium has become for the delivery of ideas in our time. My son asked me the other day whether life is boring before the advent of lego.com. I told him that it wasn't really that boring, but life is surely more exciting now with lego.com.

29:05We might similarly ask whether Liberty stood a chance before the advent of Mises Org. It did stand a chance, but our own chances are much greater now, now much more than ever before. And let me just conclude by playing a song that my wife is very unhappy with me for having taught to my children. It's the Money Python money song. I've got £90,000 in my pyjamas, I've got £40,000 French francs in my fridge, I've got lots of lovely lira, now the Deutsche Bank's getting dearer, and my dollar bills would buy the Brooklyn Bridge. There is nothing quite as wonderful as money, there is nothing quite as beautiful as cash. Some people say it's holly, but I'd rather have the lolly, with money you can make a splash.

29:57There is nothing quite as wonderful as money There is nothing like a newly minted pound Everyone must anchor for the goodness of a banker It's accountancy that waits the world around You can keep your Marxist ways, but it's only just a phase For it's money, money, money makes the world go round Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money I don't understand a word she said. You can keep your Marxist ways, it's only just a phase.