What the Enemy Fears Most

0:00Okay, I just got an instant message from my mother who's informing me that she was going on a trip or something, wanted me to know where she was going. And I said, okay, great, Mom, it's great to hear from you. Listen, if you want to, I'm in San Francisco, if you want to watch my speech in a few minutes, you can just click here. And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'm giving a talk and you can watch it right there. She said, but now what channel is that again? Sorry, it was great. I said, the Mises channel. So, I hope she's watching. Actually, I can say it, right? I can say, hi, mom. Hi, mom. The confidence is, I hope it all goes well, being broadcast all over the world.

0:51These kinds of things are just unimaginable. I guess I feel like a kid sometimes in dealing with all this technology stuff. It's just every day it's a miracle. And what we're doing with the website right now in terms of delivering information far surpasses anything I could have imagined happening just a few years ago. In a sense it makes our working for the Mises Institute every day a new kind of experience. Experience. You know, I've had people ask me, you know, look, you've been working for the Institute since 1985. Isn't this sort of unusual? Isn't a person supposed to change jobs from time to time, you know, in one's professional life? Well, it is like changing jobs. You know, every day I get up and I think, where do I want to work today? Where do I most want to be employed? And the Mises Institute is, every day, it's always the same answer. The Mises Institute is perfect.

1:51And not only the colleagues, not only the opportunity to promote and distribute the ideas of the greatest thinkers of our time, of all time, but with technology the way it is, the job is endlessly changing. So, I had the great pleasure of spending the next 20 minutes talking about one of the things I love most in this world, and that is the Mises Institute website. I was talking to a fellow the other day who actually assisted me over the summer with doing some massive upgrades. I don't know if you read the story, we co-wrote a story about this.

2:38So we were trying to think of what sites in the world compare in terms of the size and just the sheer amount of distribution of MP3s, of PDF files, of just sheer downloads throughout the day. And we thought of sites like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, JSTOR for academic purposes, these kinds of sites. of Sites. This is what Mises or compares to. These other sites have hundreds of employees. We have just a few of us. In a way, we've been very blessed and very lucky and benefited so immensely from technology. It's difficult to explain it all. I know there are probably Some people here, when I said the word MP3, thought, what is he talking about?

3:34Actually, somebody came up and said, oh, so now we're going to get the big high-tech thing, you know, with the screen and the website, and yeah, I guess so. I guess that's what we're going to get over the next few minutes here. I mean, quite simply put, what we have with Mises Org, to my mind, is the greatest example of the unity of technology and truth anywhere in the world. It does precisely what the enemy fears the most, it provides instantaneous access to the whole world of scholarship and the defense of freedom, a tradition of thought that the state and its affiliated institutions have been trying to suppress for centuries. And so compelling is this tradition and so strong is this persuasive power that it works on its own to draw and maintain interest and adherence.

4:22Just yesterday, Jim Zostrosky posted on the blog some happy birthday greetings to Lew Rockwell. And you're welcome to read the thread that's developed as a result of that posting. Last I checked, there were 50 some odd posts of people talking about what Mises.org and Lew's own personal site has meant in their own intellectual development. And it would be very difficult, there's nothing I could say that can compare to what you can read right now, That's what people have posted from 5 a.m. this morning up until just now. It's remarkable in so many ways the site is changing the world. But let me begin by announcing, and I've saved this to today, a new addition to Mises Org that to me somehow captures the marvelous power of this technology to do things that no one would have imagined only a few years ago to say nothing about all of human history.

5:15And I'm going to do something very dangerous. I'm going to click on that button, and we're going to see if it works. Very nice. Okay. The story of the newest addition to the site begins in March 1934, when Mises received a letter from the Institute of Higher International Studies in Geneva Asking him to be a visiting professor. Accepting this position would entail a big pay cut and leaving his beloved Vienna, but the offer also meant security and relief from his growing disgust at Austrian politics and the rise of a great menace just outside his door.

6:06The National Social German Workers Party was an adjunct to Hitler's growing power in Germany. He was rising there in Austria and he knew he would be personally threatened. But he also knew that from Geneva he could think and he could write and he could even travel as time allowed. It was an ideal setting with constant seminars and a good library and cordial environments. and he went there and he found wonderful opportunities. There were 6 staff, 12 faculty, and 100 students, of whom half were working towards their PhD. And as I read that sentence, does that remind you of any other setting you might know of?

6:51of Mises University, six staff, twelve faculty, a hundred students, it's about right. Guido Holzman's forthcoming biography of Mises contains many wonderful details of this period of Mises' life. I can spend the next 20 minutes just talking about that. I have the privilege of having read it in draft form. But let me just raise the point that's relevant for this talk. Jesus was working on a book during these years, a very large book, it would be a synthesis of all of his previous work on money and banking, the methodology of the social sciences, business cycles, political economy and socialism, and his studies of war and collectivism, everything would be combined and he would add additional theoretical details on production and development and interest rates, value theory and history, and a range of other fields. And most importantly, he would attempt to tie it all together in a unified System of Economic Thought, one large enough to stand next to the great classical treatments but surpass them in scientific rigor. This book would seek to construct an entire intellectual

7:58system in opposition to nearly all the trends of his time and ours. It would employ deductive methods in the social sciences when positivism was on the march. It would reject mechanical analogies in economics, science, and focus instead on human choice. It would advocate laissez-faire, not just in trade, but in all areas of political economy, including money and banking. And this would be the book that would come to be nuts in all economy, forgive my German. And he would work six years on it, six years. But as he worked, he could not neglect to see what was happening outside his window. Europe was going to be torn apart by war again.

8:45The second time in his lifetime, he was observing the rise of two competing forms of socialism, competing the speed at which they could smash civilization and the rise of Keynesianism in the US, which he recognized as just a very cranky form of economics that had long been overthrown. When the war came in 1939, he was probably examining the page proofs of his book, and he must have had a great sense of foreboding even now. And the book appeared in 1940, a treatise on economics, written in German, published in Geneva, and appearing in wartime. And you can guess what happened. It was a disaster. The book went nowhere. It sank, almost without a trace.

9:36And even worse, Mises was just then being pressured to leave for the US. It wasn't sure at all that he would be safe in Geneva. Now keep in mind he was 60 years old, 60 years old at this time. This is supposed to be, things are supposed to be secure for a man like Mises. He was asked to start a new life and a new career. He would have to become proficient in a new language. His French was very good, his English was less so. And it was during this period that he wrote his darkest thoughts about how he started off as a reformer and only ended up as a historian of decline. Now, after he came to the U.S., this great book, Nuts and All Economy, would end up being rewritten in English and published as Human Action nine years later.

10:26And when you dig through the archives of the letters back and forth, it's striking to see how close this book came to not being published at all. The publisher didn't really want to publish a book of this length. Profession economist wouldn't write in support of his publication. He had a friend at Yale University Press who talked to some of his former colleagues, some of whom wouldn't even support the publication of this book because they said there was nothing new in it. It was thanks to Fritz Machlup and Henry Hazlitt at the New York Times that finally Yale University ended up publishing the thing. Anyway, Human Action was a work of genius. It came out in 1949. It's been a bestseller ever since. What disappeared from history was this 1940 book, and I'm not sure why, of course we have Human Action now, but to me there's something very, very special about being able to give you this 1940 predecessor.

11:31Thanks to Firefox, we get a pretty good, there it is. There's the book. That's the one that sank without a trace. The whole treatise is right here for anyone in the world to download and look at. It's completely scannable. It's very fast. This is one of something on the order of 100, 150 books or so that we have on the website. website. This was scanned in by our dear friend, George Reisman, and it took just a few moments to upload it and make it live and active. Now, can you imagine such a thing? To the young people here, you think, well, that's just the way the world works. But to guys And as my age, this is amazing, and it's just one of many amazing things on the site.

12:31We also offer our own scholars edition, completely free. That's the book we published a few years ago. I've written quite a lot in support of the idea of online books. So, people say, why would you put a book online when you're also selling it? Well, the answer, the first answer to that is, that's our job. That's what we're here for. We're here to get the ideas out there. That's the job of the Mises Institute. And it would be absurd for us, if we have the technology, we have the server space, we have the ability to pull it off, we should get the truth out there. That's what the whole site is dedicated to doing. It just so happens that having books online actually increases sales. The Omnipotent Government, we put online, you know, the great book, it was a great book.

13:20We put it online about four months ago. We hadn't sold any copies of that thing in years. And suddenly hundreds were flying out the door as soon as we put it online, you know. And we had to persuade, as a matter of fact, we had to pay a lease to the publisher to put it online. And he said that the purpose of the lease was to reimburse him for all the lost sales. I'm old enough to remember a time when in order to get a book or an article in the hands of another person, you had to hand deliver it. You had to give it to them or rely on the government to get it there for you. This, as far as I can tell in my massive research, this situation lasted from the ancient world until the fax machine of the 1980s and finally the invention of the web browser in the mid-1990s.

14:16That's how quickly everything has changed for us. Communication technology has meant so much for us. For a marginal radical intellectual movement like ours, it means that students can, for the first time, discover that we exist. When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor warn me not to read Mises, so what's the first thing that a person does, you know, you go talk to them. That was great advertising. And I had read many works of Mises at the time. I didn't know there was a Mises Institute, you know, who knew? In 1985, I happened to be walking down Massachusetts Avenue and looked up and saw a brass sign, a gleaming brass plaque on a building that said the Mises Institute.

15:05And I'll never forget this moment. I mean, you can imagine, it was an amazing thing. An institute devoted to the thought of Mises, the unity of radical laissez-faire politics and economic science all coming together to oppose every trend of our time, To, you know, bring about a free world, I couldn't imagine such a thing. It was thrilling. I mean, my heart just jumped, you know, and I remember going in and having my first conversation with Lew Rockwell at the time, and things went well, but now look at it. I had to be walking along the street to see this thing. You could, of course, look in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. How many remember doing this, you know? Yeah, okay, so those days are gone. Now, all you have to do What we have to do is type the word Mises into Google and you get this amazing world of information.

15:59We have, I'm not going to have time to take you through it, but we have a good friend of ours who keeps track of how many audio files we have going up there. And I asked him this morning, I said, did you say we have 100 or 150 hours? of Audio Files 250 hours of audio files we have up here and it just occurred to me that's as much as the average Frenchman works in a year It's amazing Most tenured professors don't lecture that much in a lifetime It's an enormous amount of material I've mentioned this in the past, this left and right over here you see in the bottom.

16:50You know, Murray put out this journal back in the 60s to see it in a few friends and distributing it only to those people who were very interested. You know, it came out three years, brilliant stuff, but when it stopped coming out, you figure that's the end of it, right? That's the end of the journal, it was fun while it lasted, and well, Murray died before knowing that his journal would be resurrected and it's now there for the world to see. It's linked websites all over the place. Mises Institute, Mises org has thousands of links coming into it from student sites, from professional sites, from professors' classrooms all over the world. And I keep saying all over the world, it's very important to remember that the Austrian School isn't just an American school, it is an international school.

17:41Jeffrey Herbiner a few years ago mentioned at the Austrian Scholars Conference that the Austrian School is the closest thing we have to matching the power that Marxism had in the 19th century, in the late 19th century. It's truly an international school and it's been the website that's made this possible for us. This blog itself is one of the most trafficked areas of the site. I'm not going to take you through it. Let me just mention a few other things that we're very excited about. Man Economy and State is also online. I need to do another dangerous thing. I'm going to click on the link that says entire text in PDF just to show you how fast the site is going.

18:30It's amazing. Okay, there you go. Page book comes up like that. It's great. Yeah, it's very nice. We've got Ethics of Liberty up there. Within the next month, we'll have Menger's Principles of Economics. Menger's Principles of Economics is going online in PDF and in text and every other kind of thing. You know what? I'm going to stop right there, although I could talk about this all day, because ever since I got to this conference, I've been hit with a ton of questions about What's it costing us every month?

19:29actually to run this site because it was very expensive, but we did some shopping around and discovered that bandwidth prices had plummeted in the meantime and we did some little competitive work and dropped our costs down to just a small fraction of what they were a few months before. That was great fun. I tell you, to be able to go to our current provider and say, you know, you can go ahead and turn off the server. We've moved. We found the same service for virtually nothing. It was great. The big cost is time. Let me just say this. People always ask, how is it possible that this kind of site could be put together by this kind of organization, as I say, a site that compares to JACE or the Wall Street Journal? How do you do it? How is it possible that this could happen to only a handful of employees and none of us are totally devoted to this?

20:28The answer is that we're all just fnafs. That is the answer. The title of this conference is Radical Scholarship. We're radicals, we're crazy for what we do, we love the ideas, and there's nothing we'd rather do, so we work on it just constantly. I've been saving a complete collection of the Journal of Libertarian Studies from issue one, planning to sell it and finance my retirement.

21:13What am I supposed to do with this?

21:43You can hit, it's very important, you can cite it this way, you can continue to reference back to it, you can read something online and say, well, this is getting tedious, I hit the screen, and go and pull out the book, you know, they work together. The value of a book is enhanced by having the same thing online. We've gone to enormous effort. Oh, listen, I have to show you one other thing. Mark is going to be leaning on me about time. And again, I'm going to take a big risk here because, you know, not everything is supposed to work this well. Okay, Joe mentioned, what was the book you mentioned, Joe? Where's Joe? The Tussig's Tariff History, right? Okay, so I'm going to click on the word Tussig. What do we have here? Tariff History of the United States.

22:29Please. Look at that. Now, let me tell you, this book, you can go to Bookfinder and get old dumpy copies. It's not in print anymore. You can get a cheap old paperback with crazy print or whatever. Look, this is a flawless edition. And this isn't just a graphic scam. This is, oh, look at that. This is, we reset this book completely. We scanned every word

23:29Oh, wonderful! A shill. Yeah, a shill. Gosh, look at all these jokes I passed up here. The future. Oh, this is a section called the future. Okay, mass media. Obviously we're going to do more of what we're doing right now with audio and video. I'm very excited about this. We have converted about a third of the site into .net. David Wexler is listening and laughing. We have converted a third of the site to .NET, which reduced the load enormously, which is the newest technology. We want to complete that conversion starting in January, I hope, and we're going to be working from January to August to totally revamp the thing.

24:14It's hard for you to imagine. This site has not had a broken link or no pattern of broken links, I should probably say, Since we first made our conversion to .asp, which was in something like 1997. This is unprecedented. I mean, no site is this old and yet works this well. You know, a lot of institutions dump a million dollars on some, you know, set of geeks to revamp the whole site and chuck the old thing away. We never did that. We always believed that you should keep a link active, you know. So we've been constantly refurbishing it. The Refurbishing, you can imagine, it's like a house built two centuries ago that you're continually adding to, you know, that's what Mises Ord really is. So anyway, we've converted about a third of it to .NET. We want to do the whole thing to reduce the load, to increase the delivery.

25:04So we want better delivery and better expertise. There's all sorts of things that I would like to do on a database that we haven't been able to do. The commercial end of the site, the catalog is a little bit weak right now. I mean, it works fine for us, but there's a lot more that we could be doing. More interactivity. There's an unlimited number of books that we can get online. I have a stack this high that we're working on. We just want to make sure that they're all perfect. So it takes a lot of time. To calibrate where we're going from here, is it fair to say that you have hundreds of books now available online, and how long will it take to double that number?

26:11Other books you can scan and just throw them right up. If you want to do things like we've done, Man Economy and State, and like we're going to do Minger, you provide text, PDF, complete searchability, or fun things like on Human Action we have a fully interactive index, yeah, that's neat, so let's go to bureaucratic management. So, things like this, the little tricks like this take a long time, a lot longer. So it really depends on the product that we're doing. And this is one of the things, this took a few months, actually it took far less time than I ever imagined. Oh, by the way, I want to just say on this, on this Man Economy and State, this is really exciting.

27:00This is an example of what we're going to do for the future. Part of the difficulty with this book, as you know, is that it's very, very long Robert Murphy, economist at Hillsdale, is working right now on a wonderful study guide, and this thing is really great. It's a study guide to Man Economy and State. It's going to be about 150 pages, so it's like 4 or 5 pages per chapter, and he summarizes all the important points, directs you to the key things in the chapter and helps guide you through the thing. Starting Monday, I'm going to put these things up chapter by chapter here. So you can go to this, you can read the book, or you can go through the guide. And I hope also to be able to make the study guide interactive with our quiz software.

27:48I'm sure you've all taken the quiz. We've got a nice little quiz program so we can write quiz and generate tests for people as they're going through Man Economy. Anything to make it easier to read. We've all been convinced for some time that if everybody could just have the patience to sit down and read this amazing book, What about traffic rankings? I don't see any traffic rankings.

28:37in terms of traffic. It's the largest. It's the best. I mean, it delivers the most of anybody else, of any institutional sites dealing with economics. And as far as I can tell, the Mises Institute has the highest Alexa rating of any policy-oriented nonprofit in the country, left, right or center, as far as I can tell. How about Economist Magazine?

29:29Okay, I really need to stop. Thank you so much.