Mises.org: Freedom Through Technology

0:00What I wanted to talk about is the Mises Institute, say, 30 years ago when it started. Now I wasn't there, wasn't part of the Mises Institute, but I just wanted to talk about the idea that if someone were made aware of Austrian economics 30 years ago, if by chance they came into contact with the Austrian School wanting to learn more and they wanted to to find the Mises Institute, what did they have to do? What would they have to do if they were interested? And what they would have to do is go to considerable trouble to find, first of all, the phone number for the Mises Institute.

0:45And once they had found the phone number of the Mises Institute, they had to make a call and they'd have to have a conversation and they would call somebody at the staff of the institute and say, And they'd say, boy, I've heard about this Rothbard guy, I've heard about Mises, do you have any materials? And the Mises Institute staff person would say, yeah, we have it available, it's for free. And the person would then give the staff person at the Mises Institute their address, their postal address. The staff then at the Institute would make copies, remember old mimeograph copies, You know, that purple stuff smelled real bad, came in the drum, kind of thing, then eventually they upgraded the copying, but eventually the Institute would make copies of this stuff, then they'd go to find an envelope, and then they'd go find stamps, or they'd go to the postal meter, and they'd put the information in the envelope, and they'd seal it, and they'd put a stamp on it.

1:57So here would be the ideas of Rothbard and Mises, Hazlitt, printed on the page. It's wrapped up at considerable time and expense. We have a person waiting anxiously. They want to know about freedom. They want to know about free market economics and it sits and it waits and it waits until A friendly worker dressed in blue, driving a nice blue white truck from the United States Postal Service, drives up to pick up that package. And then the Postal Service would take the information, so desperately desired by our person who is interested, who would work very hard to find the Mises Institute, and they would run it through their shipping process, is handled by dozens of US dedicated, no doubt, USPS employees at different points along the way.

2:59Finally, at the end of the journey, a smiling, happy male carrier would drop off the information at the appointed destination. Time? How long did that take? Well, it took days, maybe weeks in some cases. From the time the person got interested in the Mises Institute, they found out about Austrian economics to the time they get the information. Paper and ink and people and the post office. There's only so much time in the day. And the books, you couldn't find them. I mean you absolutely couldn't, you absolutely couldn't find And I read one of his books in the UNLV library, and it was called The Mystery of Banking.

4:11And I read it, and working in the banking industry, this is the clearest explanation of fractionalized banking I'd ever read. I mean, I couldn't believe it. So I had to have a copy of this book. And I couldn't get it. Nobody had it. It was out of print. So then one Saturday, I went to the UNLV library, I bought a couple rolls of dimes, and I plugged It took what seemed like hours to create my own copy of The Mystery of Banking.

4:58I never saw Austrian books in the bookstore. Occasionally in a used bookstore, I bought every copy of Human Action that I could find. When book searches became easy on the internet, I actually found a couple of copies of The Mystery of Banking and I paid several hundred dollars for each copy that I bought. I was that goofy for the book. Well, then everything 1995. Enter the internet browser and scalability comes to moving the Mises message. 1999, just as an example, the Institute published Human Action for $65. The cloth edition today sells $20. We have a pocket paperback of it for $10. We have it online for free. In 1996, Man Economy and State was $24.95 in paperback. And then in 2004, we combined Man Economy and State with Power and Market into a one-volume hardback, we charged $50.

6:22Up until recently, we charged $32. We've run out of them. When we get them reprinted, we're going to charge $25. And we're going to do a pocket edition and probably charge $14. By the way, that book is online for free. This book, Mystery of Banking, the Institute published it. You can buy it many places, certainly on our website. We sell it for 18 bucks online. It is free, 2000 Rothbard's History of Economic Thought, two volumes. Edward Elger wanted $199 for this book, $199 for the History of Economic Thought today.

7:10The Institute bought those rights out, we want $47, but it's online for free. Elcher wanted $125 for Rothbard's two volumes of The Logic of Action. We just printed a book called Economic Controversies, includes all those essays except one, plus many other essays by Rothbard were charging $18 for the paper and ink online. You get the idea. It's free. Of course, we have Kindle versions. We have audio. You can pay for disc. You can listen online for free. It's all about scale. Successful products and services must scale. And now in the digital world, ideas have truly been set free. You can have Rothbard and Mises ideas for nothing. We charge for the paper.

8:09and it's all we charge for. At the same time, the digital world has forced actual printers to come down on their costs to become more efficient. As we get these books priced for printing now, we can pass on those discounts to the customer. But imagine how easy it is for Someone to Take Action, and that's the point. The Mises Institute wasn't selling T-shirts and hats 20 years ago. But if the Institute did have a shirt like this, if somebody saw this message on its shirt, how quickly could they take action?

8:58If they saw this and they saw, wow, Murray Rothbard, enemy of the state, what could they have done? I mean, a young person would go, boy, that's radical, I want to know more about that, right? So what would they have to do? Well, first they'd take a note, they'd pull out a pencil, paper, write down Rothbard. Then they might go ask their professor about Rothbard. Well, good luck with that.

9:29Not a lot of professors were going, yeah, go check out that Rothbard guy. So then you have to go to the library and you chat with the librarian and then you go to the card file. You remember the card file? Anybody remember the card file?

9:48Looking at these, you know, these little bitty cards. And if they did have one of Rothbard's books, then you had to troop into the stacks to actually find the book and find out if someone had checked it out. And if nobody had checked it out, then great. That's great. So let's say it's a book called For a New Liberty. The student sits down at the table and starts reading, and they find out, hey, the state's not necessary. Rothbard says the state is not necessary, in fact he says it's a criminal gang with a monopoly on force.

10:35Now if this doesn't appeal to every young person, I don't know what does. But you know, it's supper time, and the library's closing. So what's our Rothbardian going to do? Our new Rothbardian? Well, he's got to go check the book out. Remember they stamp the book and you get two weeks with the book. It's mind-blowing stuff. Our student reads through it, Rothbard bats away any objection that anyone has. He's ready to give anarchy a chance, our student is. He wants all his friends to read it. all of them. But, you know, the library only has one copy. And it's already checked out.

11:22So maybe when he gets done with his, then he makes sure his friends could check it out and so on and so forth. And the book's out of print. Can't find the book. So what's our person going to do? You see, the clock is always ticking. That's what's always worked Worked against liberty is the clock. It's been time and space and physical, the physical presence of books, and that's what you just couldn't pass books around fast enough. Everybody's got stories about this. Ideas and good and bad are free and plentiful. What is scarce is time. So our new Rothbardian remains lonely. I mean, time, space, library rules, IP laws, keep him from being able to shout from the mountaintop, we can get rid of government.

12:18And he's ready to do it, but he's this lone wolf, lone voice in the woods. Well, that Someone walks out of here with a Rothbard t-shirt. We sell them, please buy a Rothbard t-shirt, please buy a Mises org hat, mainly because My staff have told me that we won't sell any of this stuff today. And I said, if I can't sell t-shirts today with this slide, I'll never sell them.

13:04Thank you, sir, for buying that shirt. Yes. Alright. That is a start. So we've got Jack Ash, who's one of our big fans. He's wearing Rothbard, Enemy of the State. This is some kind of frat party somewhere in Alabama. And this is, this is Pacey. She's also in the band. And me thinks Pacey can send a lot of people to Mises or it's just my thought. So we see people now and they see Jack Ash or they see Pacy and they say, wow, I want to check this Rothbard guy out. So what do you do? Well, you pull out your droid, right, or your iPhone, you know, one of these things in your pocket and you type in Rothbard. You You go to Google and you type in Rothbard, and what comes up?

14:18You get a Wikipedia entry, and that's what you get with Murray Rothbard now when you click in Google Wikipedia. There's over half a million entries now. I did this earlier in the week, there'd be more than that now. And they'd read about, they'd read the Wikipedia entry or something else, and they'd go, wow, radical guy. Austrian School of Economics, free markets, self-ownership, non-interventionalism, there's this biography, and there's a book called For a New Liberty, explains an anarchist society. of the Anarchist Society. So, they click, and down at the bottom of the page, you click around, external links, the PDF edition, you'll find yourself at the Mises website, and you have some choices. You can go to the store and buy the book, you get the PDF file, so on and so forth, but we've got a starving student here. So the starving student, How long did this take? They've got it on their iPhone, their droid, their iPod, something or some other device that I have no idea about, and they have this in seconds, in seconds, whereas 20 years ago it was days before our budding anarchist could have the information.

16:00And that's the power of ideas. We've got the ideas, now we have the platform to make those ideas work. Now the reader's world's rocked. Rothbard's amazing. What's our budding anarchist to do? He wants to tell everybody about it. You remember last time, there was a book, he wanted to pass it to the next guy, have him check it out from the library. Well now, you put it on your Facebook page. You click and put the PDF on your Facebook page and send it to your two or three hundred friends or two or three thousand friends as the case may be. You Twitter it however you want to do it. And then two or three other people or 20 people or 30 people or 100 people send it to their two or three hundred friends.

16:56and How Many People Suddenly Know about Murray Rothbard. And a few people along the way will notice that the Mises Institute is the publisher of For a New Liberty and we host the book on our Misesorts site. And so we have dozens that will start visiting the site, forwarding dailies and searching the archives. And you remember how this started? It started with someone leaving here with a shirt from Mises Org with Murray Rothbard on it. You wear a shirt out of here, someone sees Rothbard and within seconds they can be doing this.

17:44And that's the power that we have now that we never had before. Oh, by the way, do not change your clothes and put your Rothbard t-shirt on because there's a dress code in this building. I just use that as a metaphor, if you will. But if someone goes to our site and they get interested, right, they want to know things. They don't know everything about Austrian economics, so they want to go to the wiki. I've talked about Wikipedia before, and maybe you know about Wikipedia, the big Wikipedia that's on the World Wide Web's encyclopedia, if you will.

18:29But who started Wikipedia? If you don't know, it was Jimmy Wales. He was a kid from Huntsville, Alabama, and he actually went to Auburn. And he was urged by Mark Thornton, who is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, to read a book by F.A. Hayek called The Use of Knowledge in Society. And Wales has said that book and Hayek are the inspiration for Wikipedia. Mark Thornton is the godfather of Wikipedia. Now, imagine what a big job it would be, imagine what a big job it would be to have an encyclopedia on the web for free.

19:15I mean, imagine if you were going to do that job yourself. I mean, who would you hire? How would you go about? Who am I going to do what? How am I going to pay them? How am I going to make the numbers work? I mean, it's a huge job. It's similar to having 30 yards of board fence 9 feet high. It faced Tom Sawyer one Saturday afternoon, who was charged with whitewashing that 30 yards aboard feet, nine feet high. But his friend Ben showed up and he said, like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day? And there was no lack of material. Tom provided the brushes and the whitewash, and he had the fence to pay.

20:00So the boys would show up thinking they'd make fun of Tom, but they stuck around and painted the fence. Ben and Billy Fisher, Johnny Miller, they all traded Tom their baubles for a chance to whitewash his fence. Of course, Tom had a nice idle day of it, plenty of company, and the fence ended up with three coats of whitewash on it. Now, in Tom Sawyer's words, he had discovered a great law of human action without knowing it, namely that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain. Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do, or saying it another way, people do what they want to do.

20:57And people want to contribute. They want to share what they know. Or as Andy Kessler writes, intelligence moves to the edge of a network. So if you build a platform, like Tom's fence, you give them brushes and whitewash and let them work. People want to share what they have. They'll paint your fence. And so now Mises Org has a wiki. And we just started this a couple months ago. And we have over 630 entries so far from volunteers. They want to contribute. They want to paint our fence. They want to share what they know. Just like Now, are all the entries complete? No. But over time, the blanks get filled in, the work gets done.

21:50And think about the guys at Google. I mean, I said this yesterday, and some people didn't believe it, but I think they may have done more for liberty than anyone. I mean, I don't know whether Sir J. Brinkley is a good guy or a bad guy. I don't know if he's a good guy or a bad guy. I think they may have done more for Liberty than anyone. I mean, I don't know whether Sir J. Brinn and Larry Page or Austrians or libertarians or what. Doesn't matter to me. I don't know, I don't care. What I do know is if you type in free market economics into Google, in less than a second, you get 10.4 million entries for free.

22:36If you type in Liberty, you get 267 million entries for free in less than a second. So instead of a student having to wander around a library, you type into Google, free market economics, click, a whole new world opens up to you. If you clicked Murray Rothbard, you get half a million responses. And if Murray were here today, believe me, he wouldn't be able to believe it. You couldn't get him to stop laughing, I guarantee you.

23:25Free is good, and advertisers make it work for Google. from Google. That's why we can, that's why what we get from Google is free. Now, for the Institute, our donors make it free. We depend on our donors to keep what we're doing online every day up and running. So, I want to ask you what political movement The political movement can match this. Sure, politicians use technology, typically badly, but they only do it when they're looking for votes. After that, what do they do when they're elected? They're passing laws, they're using more force, they're stealing through taxation.

24:15That's old school. It's been done since the Romans, probably before, and they're going to continue on with that. They talk in sound bites and television. Television, I mean really. Television is for entertainment. I mean they might as well be sending up smoke signals. I mean, Jay Leno said that politics is just show business for ugly people and that's what it's amounted to. I mean, you have to be careful watching anything, even the weather channel. I remember living in Vegas and my mother called me from Kansas and she says, oh, I watch the weather channel, the entire city of Vegas looks like it's underwater, are you okay?

25:06Yeah, there was one street that was underwater where helicopters had to rescue some idiot who had driven into eight feet of water, but that was one street. But that's how, that's what makes news. That's what makes entertainment, whether it's the Weather Channel or MSNBC or CNN. I was sitting in the airport on my way here and the CNN reporter said that if the government had been shut down, if 800 employees had been laid off, GDP would go down 1%. Now how on earth could that be true? And if it is true, what the heck does GDP mean in any way, right?

25:58I mean, think just the way votes are cast. I mean, you get early voting and absolute voting, they make it somewhat easier, but walk behind a curtain and pull levers and hanging chads and all kinds of stuff, they can't figure it out. I mean, good grief. This is old school stuff. The political world is hanging by its dear life. Technology is running over it. Government is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's big, it's scary, it has sharp teeth, it has a huge body and head, but the T-Rex has a tiny, tiny brain, and it is very slow to turn. It can go only in a straight line.

26:46Technology is nimble, it is fast, and it is uber, uber smart. Government wants humans to adapt to them. We use technology to adapt to humans. We're constantly trying to figure out what people want. We're trying to try to figure out what you want. We want to figure out how you want it. We know you want it for free. We got that, figured that deal out. And we figured out that you wanted an audio, video, paper, ink, E-pad, iPad, who knows, whatever pad. I swear there are people who want us to cut the top Now, no doubt a few people in the audience are thinking, well, you're up here saying all this, but government could shut Mises Org down tomorrow.

27:47Well, they could. that there are hundreds or thousands of Misesorgs running in what are known as torrents around the world. There are thousands of copies of Misesorgs running as we speak right now. The ideas we've put out cannot be destroyed. The only thing they can do is grow and grow exponentially. are open source, please steal it, everything, the books, the articles, the code, it's open to everybody, you can have it. And if you think it's heard book sales at the Mises org store, well, it's just the opposite.

28:40Paper and ink sales have grown by leaps and bounds. It's kind of like the Grateful Dead. They let their fans tape their shows for years. Did it stop them from selling records? No, they had 19 gold albums. They had six platinum albums. They had four albums that went multi-platinum. The dead charge for live performances we're charging today. Also, we have the Mises Academy. for those who want more than a free book. You want to learn from Tom Woods, the Constitution, or learn about the New Deal, Tom DiLorenzo on competition, Stephan Kinsella on intellectual property, Art Cardin on capitalism, David Gordon on logic, Bob Murphy on the Fed or business cycles, Peter Klein on entrepreneurship, I even taught a course on speculative bubbles where I had people from all over the world tune in to the live lectures. I had a guy in Europe where it was 3 a.m., I had a guy in Tokyo where it was 8 a.m. It's a listen to me, can you believe it? It's a laugh line

30:02by the way. But students from all over the world will tune into these class and by the way, there's no paper, there's no degree, not yet, I'm not saying that it couldn't happen, but people just wanna learn and we have it here. And if government is a dying T-Rex, brick and mortar institutions will be swallowed The College Dinosaur won't die easily either, believe me, they are bloated institutions that in my view provide little more than a four to six year slumber party, but they stand behind accreditation and other politically erected barriers to entry, and those barriers to entry are significant.

30:56But if you didn't have Griggs vs. Duke Power, a decision that keeps employers from giving applicants aptitude tests and giving them an equivalent of an SAT score, the college industry would probably be kaput already. Colleges can require certain SAT scores, employers And speaking all over the world, there are Mises Institutes and similar organizations popping up all over the world. You've got the Swiss, it's not going to be in the order of, you've got the Czechs, you've got Mises Denmark, you've got Mises Ecuador, you've got Mises Finland, Finland, Mises Japan, Mises Brazil, Mises Russia, Mises Poland, Mises Romania, Mises Turkey, Sweden, Canada, the Rothbardian Institute in Belgium, Wanda Mariana Group in Spain, the Cobden Center in London.

32:11What makes these organizations possible? Technology, digits. Find a web guide, build a site, and go. Steal ours, do translations, start holding conferences. This isn't something that's local, it's global. It's a global revolution. The barriers have come down. Anybody can get in the freedom business now. In 1982, there was no Mises org website to start with. It was paper, it was ink, it was mail carriers. But it's a different world now. Yeah, governments on all levels are doing terrible things. They're like wounded animals lashing out, striking irrationally.

32:57I mean, this isn't Mayberry anymore. I mean, if your young person is out late at night, experimenting with alcohol, used to be the sheriff, friendly sheriff, stick them in the car, drive them home, make sure they get home safe, let mom and dad take care of it. Now, DUIs are a profit center. DUIs are a profit center for City Hall. And if your kid's a star of the football team, his picture's probably going to be on the front page. This is not the government we used to have. And DC, they just passed two monster pieces of legislation, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, they have no idea what the laws mean, how they will be administered, which agencies will administer them, thousands of pages of law that bureaucrats will interpret and decide how they wish to enforce.

33:57And we have a president who was elected in 08 because it was thought that the other guy was so crazy that he was going to bomb the rest of the world. Well guess what? The smooth, cool guy from Chicago, he's got Iraq clean up, double down in Afghanistan, and now this no-fly deal in Libya for whatever that is. And there's no outrage from his supporters. This is somehow smart politics. This is moving to the center, is somehow getting in three wars. That's how he's going to win in 2012. Listen, it's easy to be down with everything that's going on. But entrepreneurs everywhere, every day, are trying to figure out how to make our lives better. And the best example is the post office.

34:52For decades, libertarians, as I mentioned, we were shouting, free the mail, undo the Government Monopoly. Well, the monopoly is still there. But first, there is FedEx, then fax, then email, PDFs, social networking, and a bunch of technology I have no idea about. But what I do know is the USPS isn't dead, but it's increasingly irrelevant. The irony The funny is, decades ago, the freedom movement was completely dependent on a government monopoly to spread its message, to disperse information, and it did it very, very slowly.

35:39Now the USPS is hanging by a thread and they know it. We are not dependent on them anymore. Mises wrote an amazing book called Liberalism, and he ends that book with a quote that I think is wonderful. No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forego advancing its cause by appealing to men's senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and sound resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as Symbols, and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their passion. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this.

36:25It has no party flower, it has no party color, no party song, and no party idols. No symbols and no slogans. It has substance and it has arguments. These must lead it to victory. Party songs and party idols and government monopolies are dinosaurs. The message of freedom is timeless and it's technology that will bring us liberty.