Dissident Publishing: Then and Now

0:00This is a very exciting moment. Well, first of all, I should say I'm Jeffrey Tucker and I'm in charge, I guess you could say, of editorial affairs at the Mises Institute and the website and other stuff. I've been working at the Institute for many years. Every day is like a brand new job, new challenges, new stuff to do. So I always thought I would work at the Institute as long as every day I woke up in the morning and I thought, where would I like to work today? and the answer would be the Institute, then I would say with the Institute, and that's the way it is every single day. Where would I like to work today? The Mises Institute. I love my work and it's a special pleasure to work with our wonderful staff. Just now I was wandering around the hall and I saw this book. It wasn't even out on the table I don't think this morning, was it? This is Doug French's book, Early Speculative Bubbles

0:52and Increases in the Supply of Money. So I'm getting my first look at it in physical reality It's very interesting publishing these days. Everything is digital. It's just screens and things until the printing actually arrives and then you get to see the physical embodiment of all these abstractions. So it's a very exciting thing to see this book come out. 134 pages, beautiful size. What Doug does in this book is really the first book to ever be in print that's fully solved the mystery of tulip mania. Can you imagine? Right, there's many books out there on the topic and I'm sure you've all read that famous account by, forget his name, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds, great, I read it as an undergraduate and loved that, but it lacks an explanation for why tulip mania happened. Well, Doug French, with his training under Murray Rothbard, actually looked into it in depth and discovered that the reason had to do with increases in the supply of

1:50money. That's what led to tulip mania, right? Simple, right? But he was the first one to And this is the first book to ever fully explain it, and it's out here right now, and you're going to be the first to see it. So it's just thrilling. It's got a gorgeous cover designed by Chad Parrish, who is also the photographer over here, so he's a man of many talents. Beautiful, beautiful cover. It's beautifully written, written under the mentorship of Murray Rothbard. So I hope you pick up a copy. I think we only got about 50 here, which I suspect is too few. But be sure and pick up a copy if you can and read it, enjoy it, pass it around. I personally think this is a very important book in the history of ideas. He also covers the Mississippi bubble, John Law, all these South Sea bubble.

2:38Everything's in here. He'll autograph them, I'm sure, if you can get them. It's just part of our publishing mission, just one book. You've probably noticed that it seems like we're coming out with one or two books a week, sometimes almost every day. This is all a result of a technology that's come our way within the last, really, 24 months. So our publishing mission has exploded beyond belief, and this is a very exciting thing to me, and I think it's one reason that all of us in this room should be very optimistic, actually, about the impact that Austrian ideas are going to have on the world in the near term and also in the long term. This is one of something like 340 books that are now in our catalog. It's a remarkable thing.

3:25And everyone that is available to us that we can put online for free, we do that as well. As you probably have noticed, we have tens of thousands of books online. So you can buy it or read it for free either way. Whichever one suits your interest, do both. I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those strategies at the end of this talk today. Who in this room knows why we call this meeting the Mises Circle? Raise your hand if you know why we call it the Mises Circle. Okay, very few, right? So it turns out, maybe you didn't know this, you know, Mises didn't actually have a chair at the University of Vienna.

4:11He was not a full professor at the University of Vienna. He was not permitted to have a Chair of the University of Vienna, F. A. Hayek, when he talked about why this is so, discussed three general reasons. One, that he was Jewish. Two, that he was not a socialist. And three, that he was dogmatic, and very principled, and wouldn't bend, and was hardcore, tough-edged. He wouldn't relent on his laissez-faire position. So one strike maybe, two strikes maybe, three strikes, no way. So Mises was not, as incredible as it seems, Mises was not a professor of Vienna. Now he had written this book in 1912 called Theory of Money and Credit, respect all over Europe for his wonderful contributions to monetary theory. In that In that book you find the explanation of the business cycle theory, the first really coherent one in the history of economic ideas, which came out in 1912 with Mises' book. But then he made the mistake later in the 1920s of also going after a socialist ideology and interventionist

5:26ideology and pressing further with his program. If he had just stuck to pure economic theory in the realm of monetary theory and banking theory, he probably could have gotten away So what did Mises do? Did he despair? Did he sit and wring his hands and grouse about how unfair everybody was to him? No. He found a work around. What he did was establish, he took a job with the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna and he established a private seminar. So he just said, well, what the heck, I'll teach students myself and we'll have great colleagues and he established this private seminar which was called the Mises Circle and it met in the offices of the Chamber of Commerce. This made it fun for everybody. It was very rigorous. It lasted something like the typical meeting, I think it was fortnightly, and it lasted two and three hours of discussions with academics.

6:19And they covered everything, you know, business cycle theory, methodology, the social sciences, price theory. They would discuss all the new books. They discussed the Boehm-Bawerk's treatises that were coming out. And to get into the meeting, it was very difficult. You had to have certain credentials and qualifications had to be admitted. So they would have these three-hour discussions and then they would go out afterwards for dinner and then after dinner they would go out to drinks and they would sing songs, very geeky sort of songs that were taking popular Viennese melodies and putting them to words that relate to economics. Very funny stuff. I just imagine what the staff of the bars used to think with all these economists and philosophers and legal theorists sitting around singing these ridiculous songs.

7:06One of them keeps, well, we had them translated some years ago and we variously performed them at the Mises Institute with popular demand. So if you're interested in having this done again, please just inundate Doug French with emails and I'll be glad to sing them again. One of the frustrations for the group was that all the people that were working on business cycle theory outside of the Austrians tended to do what economists do now, which is issue theory and fundamental analysis of cause and effect and just look at the stupid numbers coming across the screen and try to discern what to do based on data alone. This is the application of natural sciences to social sciences. This is what Mises fought relentlessly and the whole Mises circle agreed with him about this. But this is how the business cycle was pursued outside the Austrians and they used to make fun of this. And one of the songs, and I can't get it out of my mind so I'm just going to sing it. One of the verses

8:08says, the end of the verse says something like, The ways of science provide for Rothbard have one small slice, but it alone cannot a nation feed. It's very nice, yeah, right. Some of the... Some of these... The Viennese were very good singers, you know, so some of the songs actually span like two and a half octaves. You have to have extraordinary... I guess all the economists were amazing tenors and things at the time. Anyway, so this is why we call this the Mises Circle. The Mises circle, it's an homage to this great tradition, you know, it was difficult to get into the Mises circle in those days. But we are today benefiting from the fact that they met all those many years and hammered out these ideas and discussed these ideas just among themselves, a small circle, hugely influential.

8:58We're still today benefiting from the fact that they did this, they found the work around, they didn't despair, you know, they didn't complain, they just found the work around and that's what the Mises Institute is about. We go outside of official channels and we try to make a difference and we've inherited this tradition. So you're invited here today in the same spirit that Mises invited his colleagues to his private meetings. And why do they have any confidence that they would make a difference? The reason they believe this is because they were convinced that it's not states, really, that rule the world in the end, but the ideas that people hold, it's the ideas that we believe, it's the things we believe about how the world works The Theory of Money and Credit

10:03Of course they broke apart because of political turmoil in Vienna and Hayek left for England, Mises left eventually in 1934, left for Geneva, he had to leave, it was a good thing he left because he might not have lived otherwise and in Geneva he stayed there for six years writing Human Action. The model for the Mises Institute, in fact, is in part based on this institute that was there for him in Geneva that provided a sanctuary for him to think and write and do this great work. The Mises Institute is attempting to do the same for scholars today, provide that safe house, that place of free thought and free ideas where people can really work out serious intellectual problems in peace and do important work for the future.

10:57We just came out with a Human Action Study Guide and a new printing of Human Action that's selling like crazy fifty years later. So it's good that that Geneva Institute was there. So the effects of the work of the Mises Institute similarly will be felt fifty to a hundred years, two hundred years from now, as well as being felt every single day. So my talk today is going to be comparing the intellectual environment of the early 1930s, late 1920s, early 1930s to what we face today. I'm really struck by this because I remember when I was an undergraduate, a professor sent me out looking for data on some of this, what the intellectual climate was like in the 1930s, and you know, if you go through and you read the journals, you read the newspapers, you read the books on economics and politics that were published in that decade, you find that there were very few choices available to anybody apart from socialism and fascism. Almost everybody

11:54It's very strange if you do this, go through the popular magazines at the time, the New York Times, it's just presumed that free enterprise was a catastrophic failure and wasn't an option and everybody just assumed that the future was a planned society, everybody left and right. Murray Rothbard had noted this, the Austrian perspective was not anywhere to be in popular culture at the time. Now, there were a handful of activists that Murray Rothbard later writes about in his wonderful book called Betrayal of the American Right. He called this group the old right. Walter Block mentioned some of the names earlier today, among whom Garrett Garrett, and I would like to talk a little bit about his life. And Benjamin Anderson, he mentioned, and Henry Houselot. All three of those I would like to discuss right now. They were pretty much it. Remember that Mises' books were not in print in the 1920s.

12:52His book Theory of Money and Credit came out in 1912. It wasn't translated into English until 1934 when it appeared in Britain in 1935 and it came out in the United States. None of Mises' essays that were written all throughout the 1920s warning of the coming calamity, the bubble that was there and the coming bust that was going to happen, and all of his essays following the crash in which he warned against the very policies that FDR was pursuing none of that stuff was appearing in English at all in fact it didn't appear until 1978 hardly anybody even knew that Mises was saying these things until 1978 when when Bettina Graves came out with her book on the manipulation of money and credit but even then it would didn't get a very wide circulation so the first book that came out of Mises's essays from the 1920s in Early 1930s. You know when it came out? It was two years ago from the Mises Institute.

13:47It's called Causes of the Economic Crisis. You can read it out. It's on sale on the book table there. You can read it online. Here you have the whole thing. Here is the great prophet. He saw everything that was coming, warned against it, and wrote a series of fabulous essays immediately following in the early stages of the Great Depression, warning against everything that FDR was doing. But nobody even knew he was doing it because it wasn't Translated English, and of course with the dispersal of the Mises circle, there was a catastrophe for the Austrian School. Everybody went in all different directions and everything fell apart. So that very much limited the Austrian influence. Of course, Human Action hadn't been written. That came out in 1940 in German, and he was in Geneva when it came out.

14:34and you know you can imagine a German book by an economist in Geneva writing in 1940 you know what was going on in the world in 1940 this book just fell flat I mean it just nothing happened to it after it was hardly any copies were sold in fact I'm sure that this year we've sold more we published this edition the 1940 edition we published it today I'm sure we sold more copies within the last year than it sold in the first 50 years after it was published and then it came out in 1949 Just barely, Yale did not want to publish a 900-page book and the editors there were desperately trying to find somebody who had read the book and could endorse the idea of his doing a translation of the thing. It barely came out and they were shocked at the high sales figures. In fact, it's been a big seller ever since then. Hayek was busy working in Britain giving lectures along with John Robbins, which Walter Block mentioned him earlier

15:33on Business Cycle Theory, but these did not have a wide U.S. circulation, and they couldn't come anywhere near competing with the shocking prominence of Keynes, the appearance of whom on the intellectual landscape shocked many economists who had thought that all these fallacies had long ago been abandoned by the economics profession. If you're interested in this topic, where did Keynes come from? There's a book by L. Albert Hahn we published last year called The Economics of Illusion, Economics of Illusion, and it came out something like in the 1960s but he was a proto-Keynesian economist, he was sort of a pre-Keynesian, he believed in Keynesian ideas in the teens and 20s and then rejected them and was astounded to see the pace at which they had taken over the world with the appearance of the general theory. Now it's also good to remember that in the 19th century there were many great American banking writers in this country who really We did understand the problems of fiat money and loose credit and had a good understanding

16:32of the business cycle. Some names I'll mention to you here, Charles Holt Carroll, Condé Regé, William Graham Sumner. They're all amazing writers and pre-Austrians by any standard. And all of their books are again in print. Again, you know, these books, it's very funny what happens, I love watching this stuff, you know, you kind of Google up these books and you see that, oh, there's a rare edition and it's $900 from some bookseller or whatever and then we'll get it and put it out and put it in print for you know 18 bucks or whatever and you can just watch the prices just collapse you know just it's very fun it's great that's what you want you want low prices for books this is very good so we're wrecking use bookseller markets all over the all over the world but By the progressive era, none of these theorists had any prominence whatsoever and their ideas were not even known about at all. The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle had no presence

17:34at all in American academia. You know, when Rothbard came out with his book, America's Great Depression in 1963, it was widely reviewed with shock and astonishment. Not only had he argued against the idea that capitalism was the cause of the Great Depression, but and he managed to marshal impressive evidence that Hoover was not a free market president and the New Deal planning measures did not work. This was complete news to everybody in 1963. Who was around in the 1930s to point the way? Let me discuss first of all an economist named Benjamin Anderson. He wrote a book called Economics and the Public Welfare. It came came out in 1948. It's really a collection of memos that he wrote for a bank that he worked at. I'll give you the name here. Yeah, he worked at the National Bank of Commerce and he wrote a thing called the Chase Economic Bulletin. So it wasn't seen by too many people, but his memos during the 20s and 30s are a remarkable inside look at the truth behind

18:36the headlines. He was definitely a pre-Austrian. He got his training at Columbia, actually, and taught for five years at Harvard before he went to work for the bank, but there wasn't a great deal of circulation. You can see how rare these ideas were at the time of the 1930s. You have to look at a small bulletin published by a bank coming out. His book, Economics and Public Welfare, provides an excellent account of the boom and the bust, and it's back today. Next, let me say something about Henry Hazlitt. Now, here's an interesting in Case, because Henry Hazlitt thought of himself as an old school liberal, a journalist that had written for the Wall Street Journal, many other outlets at the time, never thought of himself, certainly not as a conservative, not really as a free market guy, he just thought of himself in the mainstream of opinion in the teens and twenties when he was writing, And he was so talented, actually, you know, he didn't really get beyond a high school

19:42education, which is remarkable, but he had read so widely and was such a compelling writer that he was actually hired as a literary editor of a publication you probably know. It's called The Nation, right? You know The Nation. Okay, so Henry Hazlitt was hired to work for The Nation in 1930. He was a literary editor. And he thought of himself as being in the the mainstream of opinion and everybody thought of himself the same way and everything was fine. He was an old school liberal, they were sort of new school liberals, but he was willing to live with that. They believed in civil liberties and generally on the left, but there wasn't that sort of wicked anti-capitalism around in those days that you get from the left today. So everything was going along swimmingly and you can read some of his reviews in The Nation. He was a big deal until the New Deal came. Now, has it had a background in economics, which is more than anybody else at the publication here,

20:36and he saw things like the National Recovery Act and he thought well now what is the liberal position on this it's corporate statism deliberate crushing of competition on behalf of industrial elites in cooperation with large bankers and unions this is in a liberal policy it's a form of regiment in society a crushing of liberty and contrary to economic sanity and from his perspective this is a no-brainer of course we're against this stuff right guys we're against the stuff, right? So he began to write against the NRA. Well, that's when the problems came. It turns out he was, much to his shock, everybody at the magazine disagreed with him. And, you know, he was really, he was at the very heart of a culture at the magazine where you saw, well, he witnessed it firsthand, the utter and complete corruption of the American left, really, that they sold out totally to this authoritarian regimentation, industrial statism.

21:32They sold out everything on behalf of the New Deal. He wasn't willing to go along with this. He said, no, this is not liberalism as I understand it. They gave him, because he had some capital built up in his position as a director of literary studies at the publication, and so he was able to write a series of articles and got into debates. well eventually of course the editorial team rejected his position and he was pushed out of the magazine in 1933 and I really think this is a very important event because it represents a watershed event in the history of American ideas really and left-wing ideas that at that point the left went with went with everything that was illiberal and abandoned their heritage completely well it wasn't Hazlitt who had changed it was the left that had changed and Hazlitt for his part was disgusted he spent a brief stint at the American Mercury and then moved on to the New York Times where he wrote editorials between 1934

22:31and 1946 and almost I would say maybe two-thirds of the editorials you read in the New York Times in those years were actually written by Hazlitt, Henry Hazlitt, the man we know and love. He was great blasting unions for raising wages in the pages and price controls and attacking inflation, everything was going on going well until the Britain Woods agreement was being talked about on the world stage, you know, how do you cobble together a monetary system out after World War II, Keynes was very prominent in that, he attacked it in the pages of the New York Times and the ceiling caved in on the paper and they got in big trouble for has its editorials and they pushed him out the door once again. So in disgust, he thought, you know, the problem with the world is that they don't People just don't understand basic economics, people just don't understand the first thing about economics, so in about ten days he wrote Economics in One Lesson. It took him about ten days. And that remains today our best-selling book.

23:33He's a great hero of liberty. So Hazlitt's essays, Writing Against the New Deal, are still there for everybody to see. We're coming out with a book, I hope, within the next two years that's going to collect all of these essays and put them out in print. Another figure that I have a personal devotion to is this Garrett Garrett, you know, he was a great novelist in the 1920s and we've brought all those novels back. If you're interested in the idea of capitalism as a, I can't think of another phrase, I wish I could, a manly art. That's not the right phrase, but it's the only one that occurs to me right now. The way that the environment of capitalism provides an excellent tableau for the working out of great virtues like courage and creativity and the struggle of good against evil, you know, that's all in these books.

24:31There are three of them, actually four of them. All of them are excellent, just they're great works of fiction, He, too, thought of himself as an old liberal, not saying anything contrary to mainstream opinion until the New Deal hit. Actually, he swung into action before FDR got in control and wrote a book that came out in 1932 called The Bubble That Broke the World. It's the only real popular book at the time that I know of anyway that explained the stock market crash and explained why the world had entered a depression. It's called The Bubble That Broke the World. And it got some circulation, some attention. But he threw out his literary career as a novelist to take The Bubble at the Broke of the World is, I think, the best single account of the Great Depression and the stock market crash before the academic economists got involved, John Robbins and Benjamin Anderson and the others. I strongly recommend it to you, which we've also republished that one.

25:57Now, I only have a few minutes left and I know everybody is very interested in this topic, so I want to talk a little bit about what we're doing today that makes such a difference. You can't even compare the intellectual environment of then with today. The prominence of the Austrian explanation and of free market generally today is astonishing by comparison. The number The digital media has made a huge difference. Mises.org remains, I believe, the largest, most well-trafficked economics website in the world. And I didn't bring any data with me. It changes every day, and it's impossible to keep up with. But it's massive, and it's It's true that Misesorg gets more traffic than the Fed or the UN or anybody else.

27:00This is great and we have of course now thousands of books online and tens of thousands of articles and I don't know how many hours of media we have recorded now and I know many of you listen to the podcasts constantly and watch the videos constantly, many people. I think you could probably live a full-time Misesorg life if you wanted to. Wake up in the morning and just live in Mises, Oregon until you go to bed, and this can last for years. So, one of the problems we faced recently is that our traffic has just really gotten larger than we can handle, and we wanted to create space for uploading ever more books. For example, Doug French mentioned that we're putting 50 years of the Freeman online, very exciting stuff. We want to have the freedom to do that. There's lots more out there we want to work on, many more. You look at the bookshelves of the Mises Institute, all this stuff needs to get out, and nobody

27:48Somebody else is doing it, somebody's got to do it, so we're going to do it, but we have to create the space. We have to have the service space. You bump up against the limits of physical reality at some point. So our webmaster, David Vexler, had this idea that in light of all the recent studies we've been doing on intellectual property and the virtues of going open source, now that phrase is not going to mean a lot to everybody in the room. What it really means is being as open as you possibly can with your copyright permissions. We've put the whole of Mises Org in creative commons so that anybody can take anything without permission. Part of the driving force is this, we get so many requests for reprint rights, we don't even have the staff to handle it, so we just set out to heck with it, take whatever you want and print it, you know. Leonard Reed had the same view as far as fees come through.

28:36We went a step further. Not only have we made all the books online for free, for free download, but we took the the underlying source code of Mises.org. And we started giving it away completely. Now this happened what? It was about a month ago or something, a big radical step. It's been great for us because we were hitting downloads of three, four, five terabytes per month. You know, at some point you can't handle this anymore. It's crazy. You know, where's the limit on this stuff? It was becoming nuts. I got tired of going into Doug's office begging for another couple hundred bucks I'll have to, you know, buy some more bandwidth for one thing, but what we did is we just open sourced all the codes so anybody can run a full copy of Mises.org on your home server if you want to do it. And we've created these torrent downloads that for kids, you know, I don't know how many people know the word torrent. If you don't know the word

29:25torrent, you're definitely older than the age of 20. So, we've created torrent downloads for all of our media files, all the books and everything. And so these have, torrents have feeders and they have feeders and it's a way for the world to share information with each other. Well, the last we checked, I think it was just yesterday, we have 72 feeders now for all the content on Mises.org, full-time feeders now, 72. Isn't that great? And last count, there are now 12 full versions of Mises.org in operation around the world in various Service. Isn't that something? 12 full versions. It's just the beginning. Give us another year. There's going to be 24, there's going to be 50, and eventually thousands. There'll be thousands of copies of Mises's work, and then let them try to shut us down. There'll be nothing they can do. And all this literature that has been accumulated over the last 100 years, 200 years, will be completely saturated all over the the entire world and will never go away again. This is a gift that the Mises Institute is able to give the world and you are helping us do it. It's a revolutionary approach and if we want to talk about reasons for optimism of the future, I can speak with utter and complete confidence about the subject of optimism. I know that history is on our side now because in this material you find the truth, you find compelling truth and for the first time in the history of the world it is universally available.

30:55with infinite numbers of copies that can be made until the very end of time. That's what we're looking at today. So that's the end. Thank you.