Mises.org vs. The State

0:00This is the Mises Institute annual gizmo report. So the most I can hope to do in the short time is just present some of the newest stuff that's on the site and then, oh, the music? Yes. Yeah. And then take you, and then maybe take a lot of Q&A because I know a lot of people have questions. What we're looking at now is a kind of a neat thing. You know that there's this road to serfdom in cartoons that came out sometime in the late 1940s, I think. I forget now who put it up. Does anybody remember? We just did. Well, there's a cartoon version in a little comic book. In any case, so that was available.

0:47So we just put it online. I'll show it to you in a second. And some guy was really intrigued by it and took this and took pieces out of the cartoon and kind of used Photoshop to add this sort of grainy scary look and added this very scary music, you know, to it, well, it's ended now, and made a really dramatic presentation, you know, out of the road to serfdom and sent it to us and then we were able just to put it right online and make it available to everybody. So that's, I'll just take you over to the front page. Here's the road to serfdom in cartoons. So that's kind of neat, kind of neat, kind of neat.

1:32That's from the original print. You can see, actually, General Motors. Imagine that. They were against the road to serfdom in those days, I guess.

1:48And then right underneath it, we just stuck this little road I was on this page the other day and my son who hears me say the word Mises a lot and hears himself say the word Batman a lot was very intrigued to see the words Mises and Batman together and said, Dad, what could that possibly mean? Well, you know, actually it turns out that there is a Batman, there was an issue of Batman that featured the story of Mises' papers being burned in Vienna. And Batman comes along and I think he blows up the train or something. There he is.

2:35He says, everyone has a right to their own thoughts and actions. Von Mises is no exception, says Batman. So he decides to plot the blowing up of this chain that was taking Mises' papers away from his apartment. I mean, it's probably a good thing that didn't happen in real life. Because the papers actually ended up in Berlin and then in Moscow, so we have them after all. Batman didn't destroy them. I wanted to point to that Road to Serfdom video as an example of how the website really depends on the collaborative effort of geeks all over the world who contribute great stuff to it and send us their stuff and we put it up.

3:33Chad Parrish, who is running your audio video right now, handles the uploads and the perfecting of all audio and video because of his work that we are able to broadcast today to all over the world. So, if you couldn't make this conference, you can attend it anywhere with a hookup. And just the other day, we were experimenting with these fun little things we had to show to you. A lot of people think that you're stuck with the desktop that your computer comes with. Okay, so I just put this one on this computer, but we have many others. This is the new stuff. And let's just look at this. So there's Rothbard.

4:19That is desktop background, and we'll stretch it. You've got a very cool libertarian desktop and you might think well that's just ridiculous and what does that do? But who cares what your desktop looks like? A lot of people care and you know it's very difficult for me to fully understand this. But for people under a certain age, what technology you use and how you use it is a mark of who you are. I mean it's a sign of your personality and your values. I know a young girl of the age of 11 for whom the browser wars between Firefox and Internet Explorer are the key thing in her life.

5:08I mean she just has to know what the latest data is. It's my daughter actually. But she lives for this, and she makes and breaks friendships over this question, so this is the world we live in, so things like these desktops are everything, and if you don't have them, it means that you're just in the past or something. If you're doing anything worthwhile, you have to have a desktop, so we have lots of wonderful little desktops. I'll spare you them all. The screen saver is the next, by the way the link here is the fun page, which this page actually became fun after I initially called it the fun page and it only had one or two things like the Monty Python money song, money, money, money, money, you know that, so that was fun, but it was only fun for a couple of months, so I sent out a thing on the blog where our fun page turns out to be actually sort of dull, so if you have any suggestions, so lots of people sent in wonderful little ideas to make our fun page

6:10So we've got these wonderful desktop backgrounds, we've got the comic books and videos, and the screen saver, which still has some bugs, but it's pretty great, it's pretty advanced actually because it's a screen saver that pulls live data off the site, it uses so-called web services, very nice. And then we have these little, what we call here, Mises Institute Banners with Moving Parts. These are banners you can put on your website to change. Chad made these. There's two separate banners you can put up. Anybody can do that. We have a random quote generator which generates Mises quotes. This quote that you see right up here from here to here, this is what it would generate. If you put this little piece of code on your website you can have a Mises quote every time you refresh.

6:59And we have a database of nine thousand or something different quotations for Mises that are constantly there. and it's great. By the way, I'll get to that in a second. Okay, so then moving on, we have this daily article display. You can put the daily article on your website or your blog or whatever, just take that code and put it right up there and you'll be surfing the web and run across this all the time. You know, there's the daily article. It's fed through RSS. And then a ticker display that has a little ticker. Ticker is very old tech, so that's uninteresting, but if you're just living in the Stone Age and want to ticker, then that's fine. You can get a ticker there. And on we go, all the way down to the Monty Python money song, if you want to listen to the money song, if you're no longer bored with that.

7:47Okay, there was something I said that I wanted to go back to really quickly. What was that? Oh, yeah, continuing the Gizmo Report, the newest stuff. That's what we care about. So, you see up here on the top right hand corner, this Mises quotation right here. Estate taxes of the height they have already attained to the upper brackets are no longer qualified as taxes, they are measures of expropriation from planning for freedom. I can refresh that and it will generate another one. Grumblers may blame Western civilization for its materialism and may assert that it gratified It gratified nobody but a small class of rugged exploiters, but their laments cannot wipe out the fact. Millions of mothers have been made happier by the drop of an infant mortality, famines have disappeared and epidemics have been curbed.

8:37These are wonderful things. Sometimes if a person only reads that, it may be their first introduction, their introduction to the first sensible thing they've ever heard. Who knows? And they think, well, what could that possibly mean? When you click on that, it takes you to this amazing little thing. That quote was the subject of capitalism and so it was listed by subject here. So you get to read all these wonderful quotations by Mises on capitalism, all generated by a database where you can look at different kinds of subjects and go through anything of what Mises said on any of these subjects. Conscription. Lots of people think that Mises was, well, that he had mixed views on conscription.

9:26Well, there's a number of things where he associates conscription with socialism. But anyway, you can look up any subject. This turns out to be very useful for scholars. What I find most interesting about these Mises quotations, I subscribe to these Google News alerts Google News Alerts, where you get, where the Google News goes through, you know, everything printed and tries to find, find the word Ludwig von Mises, and then if it does find it, it sends you an email. Oh gosh, how well I remember when, 20 years ago, when we would, we were curious about where our articles appeared. You had to subscribe to a, what was it, Burroughs?

10:11The Clipping Service, Burrells, which was just this warehouse of people who took newspapers and they said they were with scissors, this is true, and they'd read newspapers trying to find the word Mises and if you'd subscribe to them they'd send you a little clipping in the mail and you'd pay unbelievable amounts of money for the service, there's a clipping service, well, Google News, I guess, I don't know, clipping services even exist, maybe they do, but in any case, so I get a little There's no email for any time where Mises appears in print, so ever since this crazy quotation machine, it's totally brilliant. Ever since it went up, I see Mises quotes everywhere. They're coming in constantly, you know, like op-ed writers for papers all over the country, editorial pages from the smallest to largest newspapers on every topic you can imagine.

11:00And you say, well, as Mises himself pointed out, you know, and they have something. And you think, wow, this guy is really literate. Well, it's the quote machine that's doing it. It's amazing, you know, so you can look up what Mises says on any such thing. As Mises said about Gandhi, right, so that's been a great benefit. Let me just show you the network. So, okay, the network, the Austrian network. So we get emails all the time, people asking us to link them or somehow be involved with this. And it's not always easy to give an answer to that, you know, what precisely do. We decided to come up with this Austrian network.

11:51This has an unlimited capacity for putting people who want to be associated with something, mostly students. You can see it's not a student link, but anybody can sign it. You just add He read your name and he says he's an engineer at Washington DC and he's interested in economics and optical physics. He didn't fill us out very completely but you can put your blog URL, you can put a photo of yourself, favorite thinkers, favorite books, everything. So it gives you a little web page that you can use for yourself and it's really nice. So we've got 30 people per page and 15 pages so you can do the math. And it hasn't been up that long. So it's growing, the network. Oh, what's neat about it is it allows you to email these people.

12:40There's a gentleman who works at the State Bank of Pakistan. You want to send him an email? There he is. Isn't that great? And look, you can't see his email address. It turns out to be very important because if your email address is published online, So here's a system that you can email people without ever seeing their email address and it goes right to his email box. That's it. So all Austrians from all over the world can contact each other, but if you don't want to be annoyed by some pest or something, then you won't be. And you can answer it or not. So anyway, it allows people to stay in touch with each other. I have to say something about this. I still don't entirely understand this. This is made for us by David Bexler. You know how you go in and re-edit your name? There's no username or password.

13:30You don't have to register for it. Registrations are just annoying. I mean, they just are. And you think, well, I've gotten used to registering a million things and juggling passwords, but nobody really wants to do that. Well, what this allows is, all you have to do is put in your email address, you can re-edit your entry just by entering your email address, there's no password. And nobody knows your email address so they can't edit your entry, and that's it, I mean, you can't know it from this program, so that's how you manage it. It's absolutely secure, and there's no juggling of passwords. It's an ingenious thing, and it's just in its infancy. I think it's really going to grow. What you see is the latest registrations there. So a lot of the neatest things are over here.

14:22Let me just take you over here. This is our newest thing. This is the Mises classroom. This all began really this summer. Bob Murphy, here's what Bob did, we were thinking we really needed some organized way for people to study Austrian economics at home. We've had a demand for this for a number of years and my thought was always, well there's all the materials there, if anybody wants to study Austrian economics you can go online. I mean we have about 10,000 entries in our study guide. You know you can go through and click by subject. We've got 500 hours of media files, what do you want?

15:10But of course it turns out what people want is organization and a clear program that starts from the beginning and takes you through things very carefully. Well After working here 20 years, it never occurred to me that this is the case. It did occur to Bob. So Bob put together a very nice home study course in Austrian economics that is 52 lessons and it's an audio lecture tied to a reading, tied to question and answers, a study guide, a sort of Question and Answer Study Guide. So it's just great and it takes you from the beginning and goes through every subject.

15:57Some of the things we didn't have lectures on, like I think what was the subject we decided to cover? You said, people are emailing me all the time about consumer protection. How do I keep capitalists from poisoning me with food or whatever? We all know that capitalists want to poison their customers. But we needed a lecturer addressing this, and we had no lecturer addressing this topic, so Bob and I sat down, you know, did an hour-long interview, it was great, it was fun, and I mean, I talked to Bob, he says brilliant things, just constantly, asking questions, he says something amazing, that's the way he is, so we put him on tape, and that's one of the lectures, one of the 50 lectures, packaged it up into a wonderful package, so it has all the readings and a study guide and everything that's associated with it, and we sell it now through But also, for the first time too, we have an online classroom, which is the future, this little machine right here.

17:01This is where you can go, you can enroll and experience a real-time classroom environment. And there's ways in which this is better than a regular classroom. And here's why, because you can benefit not only from the interactions of the student with the professor that are going on right then, but also the archive of last month's discussions and six months ago's discussions. And so everybody can assist each other in this way. So if you've had a wonderful exchange with the professor on a particular topic, future students will benefit from that very exchange. It's a wonderful learning environment. One of the reasons we hadn't done this up to now is we couldn't think through how to make it really what we wanted it to be and finally, as a result of all of our thought and work this summer, we've gone live with this. It's just the beginning. We've got one course now and it's the first course that we're going to do.

18:10full home study course so you can you can get the package in the store and go through it on your own or you can get online tutoring with it you know either way or both but that's just the first that's the first of many things to come in this classroom I mean there's really an unlimited potential here we can we can teach the world economics in a real-time classroom environment now and this wasn't even true six months ago so you see why I wanted to tell you about Okay, Adam, right. Does everybody know what podcasting is? Oh, there we go, yeah. So the

19:01format that's the preferred format for delivering audio online is mp3, and podcasting doesn't does this automatically. If you have a program on your computer, iTunes is one, or if you use an iPod, a little mp3 player, that's another way you can sync it up with your computer. What we do is we send out these audio files and they're delivered through a technology called RSS, a really simple syndication, automatically. So you subscribe to this podcast and you get You get the audio file automatically. You wake up in the morning and your iPod is filled with Mises Institute lectures. You take the train to work. You listen to all these lectures on the way there.

19:49And sometimes there have been days when we've sent out 30 podcasts. There will be a few days when we go by and we haven't sent out any. But you can subscribe to this podcast. There's no charge at all. And I thought, well, this podcast would be a great thing for the seven people under the age of 15 who care about this junk. Last I checked, we had 15,000 subscribers to the podcast. So everything we send, this goes to 15,000 different audio things, and it's growing just exponentially all the time, all the time. What is this strange-looking site here? My daughter, when she looked at this, she said, Dad, your site's been hacked!

20:37And in a sense, she was right. I mean, these are two graduate students, Adam's over here, and the two graduates and Dan D'Amico, I guess Dan's not at the conference, but what they're doing is they're in graduate school and they're doing weekly shows about their classes and their Experiences in Graduate School, and an ongoing chronicle of life of a graduate student in economics. You think it doesn't have mass appeal? It does! It really does. And they talk about every kind of idea you can think of, and it's really fascinating. They don't try to make it into some sort of, you know, it's not super organized, it's just spontaneous. And it's very interesting. It's like a reality graduate school or something, you know.

21:25It's very interesting, and so these go out every week, every Monday, you get another podcast of this, and they call themselves the Mises clients. It's really fun, and there's an archive of all their shows that are right here. The current episode is all the way back to the beginning. I don't know, how about some basic data before we... Let me just say, the Mises Institute is a very large site. It's very fast, and for that we can thank a particular technology called .NET. My wonderful web developer, David Wexler, is very funny. I used to think that you should never use beta technology, and beta means that it's still got a few bugs.

22:15And he uses alpha technology, so we're always on the bleeding edge and always got the newest thing and it keeps us very much on our toes. But as a result of his efforts, the site is very large but very fast. I already mentioned that we have something like 400 hours, maybe it's more by now, of media files, 10,000 items in the study guide. And last I checked, it looked like we had 35 or 40, maybe 50 databases on the site as it is now. It's remarkable. 18 gigs of hard drive space, I'm just reading off the data that I checked. Average monthly outgoing bandwidth, 400 gigs. Our server company that we use didn't believe me when we negotiated a price for that much. And let me just say too, there's a popular understanding that when people use your website that's good for you and there's There's a sense in which that's true, but it's also costly for you after a certain point.

23:14I can promise you it's very, very costly for us to deliver that level of bandwidth. I mean, people dragging, drawing down as many files and PDFs and movie files and everything from the site, it's very costly. We have to pay for every bit of that. But it's what we do. It's why we're the Mises Institute. It's why we exist. So that's why we do it. 400 gigs outgoing bandwidth per month. Average monthly hits, 15 million. Average monthly pages served, 1.5 million. Average monthly visitors, 400,000. Unique visitors, 172,000. Podcast subscribers, 15,000. I mentioned daily subscribers to the daily article, 15,000. And we also have many other lists that you can get onto, like a store list, a news list, and many other lists.

24:06And I know I've forgotten a ton of things. Let me just quickly just say something about our publications page. There isn't one person who manages the site. Judy Thomason is head of the publications here, keeps all the files for the quarterly journal of Austrian Economics. Up to date, we have complete archives there at just a click, you can see. These are all wonderful, very fast moving PDF files. And she keeps the JLS completely up to date. We graciously host recent papers here. We have complete archives of Austrian economics news that are left and right. Left and right is a journal that Murray Rothbard edited in the 1960s. And, you know, I didn't have that many subscribers at the time and then after it went defunct in 1968, I'm sure he just thought that was the end of it, you know, well, here it is, 2005, it's online, complete for everybody, libertarian form, which everybody was desperate to get for the longest time, you couldn't get copies of it anywhere, and look at that,

25:08it's all completely there. Dan, who works with me on the side, is very proud that this is one of the few pages on the whole site that is W3 compliant. it's got not a single font tag he says okay that's really great and then our our media server and there's so many areas I don't even want to get into I can't possibly get into it we are we also serve up lewrockwell.com content from a really from a really RSS page entirely devoted to to lose sight which which is a great source of traffic for Mises Org. You can go through it anyway. Frequently asked questions, every kind of thing. I've only got a few minutes left.

25:54I'm going to stop. I know you have many questions. So, go ahead, please. Anything occur to you? Do you have any problems using the site you want to raise? Okay, go ahead. One problem I noticed is that when you use the search function on a page that isn't the main page. Yeah. One problem I noticed is that when you use the search function on a page that isn't the main page. It's because these little pull-down menus here are not JavaScript. Those are run with cascading style sheets, so they can change all the time. But it requires that we be very economical in the use of graphics. And so the top thing is just one graphic, and the rest is entirely controlled by CSS.

26:39And there's some bugs to work out in that search engine yet, that if you add a bar like that, then it works. But you see what just happened? It didn't work without the bar, and it does work with the bar. So, that's just the trade-off is that there's a few bugs in the search engine, not in the engine, but in the display, but that's in exchange for which we get these super, super fast pull-down menus. For years, people were asking us to put up a sitemap, a sitemap, you know. That would take me like, you know, I don't know, six months just to do the map and then it would change again.

27:25Well, it turns out our problem is solved with these little pull-down menus, which as I say are entirely governed by cascading style sheets. I know that doesn't mean that much to many of you, but let's just say it's very impressive. Let me just say a few words about this. I can't believe I hadn't mentioned this thing. This is the glorious, wonderful Mises store, which is just the thing to go to right now. Our customer base is increasing dramatically. Our sales are going way up. What this means for us is just that more people are getting our material and are excited about what we're doing.

28:12It's totally thrilling to be working in this kind of environment where people are just coming in and buying books. We can't even keep books. We can't keep books in stock anymore. I was just talking to, well, and everything sells. Everything sells. It's just great. People love Austrian economics. People love what we do. It's a great thing to be a part of an institution that, you know, generates this level of excitement. It's exciting for us, exciting for the customers. So, we do need things these days like, oh yeah, you can see that everything changes every time you refresh it, you know, you've got the, so you can go to what's new, we've got the ability to have a wish list here, and you can go to your account and look at all your past stuff, and look at this, I said this is the geek report, we're going to get only new stuff, this is the new stuff, this came about two weeks ago, look at that.

29:06So it's a gift certificate, and you can buy a gift certificate for anyone at any price. It generates a beautiful little code and a pretty thing you can print out. And this code is not attached to any particular individual. You can give it to anybody you want. Anybody who has the code can use it up to the amount that you pay. And so if you have a bout of selfishness and you decide you don't want to give away this gift certificate, you can use it yourself. Not that the Mises Institute would ever promote, you know, greed or selfishness, no. But that's what's available. This wasn't there three weeks ago. So there's a great deal of excitement about that. And, of course, I can't shut up about the wonderful memorabilia we're offering nowadays.

29:51We have great t-shirts. We can't keep them in stock. They're selling like crazy. People love the t-shirts. They love the t-shirts. There's the Rothbard t-shirt. You've seen it outside. Le Palpens, COPS, power bands, and I have to laugh about these things because I mean when the idea first came up that we would have power bands, of course they can't be called power bands, we had to call them liberty bands, right, we're against power, for liberties, so not power bands, and people said well look those are only for kids and yeah it's true, well we got them printed and you know they come and you think well you know I paid three dollars for that ridiculous chintzy little nothing, you You know what? What's that? But then you put it on and you think, hey, that's kind of cool. And you always get to read Trinidad and Chedimales. The writing doesn't rub off.

30:36You swim with it. You go to the beach and everything is still there. And it inspires you constantly. Then you can't take it off and you totally adore it. I mean, if somebody came up to me the night, cut it and stole it, I would just panic and pay another $3 for another one. I mean, I'm telling you, these things are great. So it's $3 well-respected. Some license plates, frames, everything. We've got four new shirts coming in next week. We've got a Hazlitt shirt, a Hayek shirt, a Boehm-Bawerk shirt. That's going to be a smash hit, I know. Everybody wants a picture of Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk on their t-shirt. And then a Menger shirt. The Hazlitt shirt in particular is fun because it says, it's got Hazlitt in this very sort of nice style that we're developing here.

31:22and underneath it says one lesson very obscurely one lesson and then on the back it's got the famous has a quotation about what economics consists in you know looking at the effects of policies on all groups not just small groups and the effects not just in the short run but the long run and that's it that's the one lesson so that's on the back of the t-shirt so it's neat so that gives us six and I'm out of time I'm so sorry thank you for listening Thank you very much.