The Most Important Books for Preserving Civilization | David Gordon

I trying to recommend books they're great many titles available I just selected a few of them and I'd like to begin with one of the classics of a nineteenth-century short pamphlet by the great French economist Frederic Bastiat probably the greatest economic journalist of all time also an original theorist he was one economist who Karl Marx particularly despised so at least that's one point in his favor the work is the law many of you will have read this already it made a big impression on me when I first read it so long ago as 1962 what theme in the law is that I think is of fundamental importance is that Basquiat says that the state or the government can't get new powers or rights that individuals don't have so for example since individuals don't have the right to take property to redistribute to poor people say if I said that oh there's someone I think is very deserving of getting a lot more money so I'm going to take some money from a rich person give it to that person I wouldn't have the right to do it I wouldn't have the right to steal the rich person's property so Basquiat says similarly the state doesn't have the right to do that the state can't get any new rights that individuals don't have and he criticizes on this basis many of the programs of various political parties in France at the time he was writing for example there were programs by the French socialists Louis Blanc to have a system of workers workshops would be making jobs available to poor people and he criticizes that for violating this principle of the state can't acquire new rights another basic theme in that book which i think is of great importance and it prefigures an argument that friedrich hayek made in his book of 1944 the road to serfdom was that Basquiat says that socialists and other planners view themselves as above society that they are the ones who are educating people or compelling people to behave in a certain fashion that the people are unenlightened and need to be controlled by experts that there's an elite group of educated or people who are really know the truth and it's their job to teach the rest of us how to behave this is a thing that's very pop goes back you find it in Plato's Republic and that it we find that even today I wrote a column recently on Cass Sunstein who's a very prominent legal academic who has similar view so Basquiat has a very penetrating criticism of this idea now the second book I think is very important again a very short book I'm starting off with the easier works then we'll get into the somewhat longer and perhaps more difficult ones later is a pamphlet by Murray Rothbard called what his government done to our money this was originally published by the freedom school robert LaFave I can remember when that one first came out and what Rothbard argues in that book it's point essential to grasping a proper monetary system is that money is a commodity today we often think of my Fiat money money is just a creation of the government a popular view holds that money is whatever is accepted as money so money is doesn't have any real basis just whatever people take to be money is money but Rothbard following look upon Mises famous money regressions theorem there's no money must originate as a commodity and he on that basis favors a strict gold standard and in defending that strict gold standard he very much opposes fractional reserve banking seeing this is the key to the visit to the business cycle it's through expansion of the money supply by by the bank credit by bankers because of the fractional reserve system that creates an artificial boom leading to depression so although this is a very short pamphlet if you read this I think you'll get a fundamental grass of monetary theory and this will enable you to progress further extending from monetary theory more widely into other parts of economics I recommend another popular work relatively short although longer than the first two and this is Henry Hazlitt book 1946 economics in one lesson it's not please no it's not one easy lesson it's just one lesson it's for many people in government various Keynesian economists it's not a lesson a very easy lesson at all I should say just if you'll permit me a digression one story on Keynesian economics when Lord God Mises was teaching at New York University for a while in addition to his famous seminar he gave another course which was an introductory course in economics and he used hazlit's economics in one lesson as a textbook so on one occasion Mises said mentioned something and he said no economist would ever say this and his student was unwise enough to put up his hand and said professor that professor Mises so-and-so said in this textbook says exactly that it Mises replied he is not an economist he's the Keynesian so to return to economics in one lesson the lesson that Haslett has in mind which is one that's so hard to grasp is an addition chickens considering the immediate consequences of a particularly policy measure that we also need to consider the long-run consequences and also what would happen if we didn't have this policy what would have taken it's a counterfactual proposition say supposing we have minimum wage laws what would would have happened if we didn't have the minimum wage laws and hazlit shows for all sorts of interventionist measures that the measures will have disastrous long-run consequences they won't work at all for example to take a topic that's quite relevant today many people say we need protective tariffs because otherwise people will lose jobs because they'll be foreign industries will out-compete them and then the American workers will lose their job so isn't this terrible that workers will be out of work but what hazard points out is that if as a result of lower prices people buy more products this will create jobs for other workers so it's not the case that tariffs really promote employment of American workers overall if we consider the full effects of the measure another fallacy he may he exposes is one that workers need to have wages high enough so can buy back the product if the argument by the interventions in favor they said well if workers can't afford to buy the product then the people selling it just won't make any money they they'll go out of business but this has it points out there's no reason to think that the workers in say who were producing automobiles are the ones who are going to be purchasing those very automobiles and the weather the wages you the worker Guzzi term by the marginal their marginal productivity and whether it doesn't follow that workers who make more expensive products that sell for higher prices would have to get higher wages in order to have enough money to buy the product it's if the product will be successful will be dependent on whether it sells on the market not just to the workers of who are producing it now the three books I've given you so far are quite easy perhaps hazlit's is bit more difficult in the first year so now we can get into the the really the harder stuff and one I think I one mention one by look at von Mises a great book of 1922 socialism this developed the one argument there the famous calculation argument based on his article of 1920 but developed much more detail is that a socialist economy is really impossible if you take a socialist economy to mean something like a economy on a large scale say the scale of a nation with changing consumer demands because the argument was that if you have certain lists of consumer goods to be produced then if you take the production goods there are various combinations of these production goods that will produce the consumers goods so you need some means of saying how determining how efficient what is most efficient combination of factors production to produce these consumer goods and to do that you have to have a system of market prices and Mises said without market prices we can't have any economy at all one thing in addition to the calculation argument sometimes people think of socialism as the book socialism and they think only of a calculation are you but there's a great deal else in the book for example Mises gives a very strong defense of the traditional or bourgeois family he wouldn't had he lived today it's safe to say that he wouldn't view with much favor the modern feminist movement or other movements that designed to overthrow the traditional family and he's very much in favor of that and argues in in defense of that now I'd like now to turn to that's a fairly long book I like now to turn to an even longer book which is Murray Rothbard man economy and state we had this past June in the rothbard graduate seminar we covered the book and I reread the book I read it over the years I again this is one I remember that one when it came out also in 1962 is you know I'm quite old so I I was around when some of these books originally came out so when I reread the book I was impressed by the enormous intellectual scope of the book that rothbard shows how builds up the entire structure production showing how income is imputed to the original factories of land and labor and how they structure of capital is built up through the various stages of production and in the book he there's a enormous number of arguments on particular topics so every page is filled with interesting arguments in that respect in having a large number of arguments that just coming at you one after another he resembles very much a philosopher Robert Nozick whom he didn't get along with so well but they had a very similar intellectual style in my opinion of just having very series of argument and one points very important in reading Rothbart he he moved very fast in his process of thought so he expects readers to be able to really fill in the steps of his argument that one sometimes you might think that you wonder well how did he get to this so you have to reconstruct it in order to understand what he's saying and in the book I comes along with it in this edition published recent issue published right amazing suit in who's his power and market and this gives a very detailed and systematic analysis of all forums of government intervention in the economy and this I would and I think if you want to get into economic theory in a detailed level this is one of the two books I think you have to read the other one of course is the great work of lagron Mises human action which came out in 1949 and what Mises does here it's his really his he gives a very detailed account of the basis in the theory of knowledge for economics he also had an earlier book a collection of essays epistemological problems of economics and what he tries to do and does carries us off with his enormous knowledge of the philosophical literature he tries to he shows how economics can is can be developed as a science of human action from thinking about the concept of action and drawing out the consequences of that concept he develops the whole systematic structure of economics on that basis and the last book I want to mention is the great two-volume work of Murray Rothbard an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought and this is much more than a history of economics it's a comprehensive picture of the European civilization during the period Roth art was writing about and I don't have time just for one topic in the book in the second volume which I think is a particular interest is Mary Roff arts analysis of Marxism and here he follows the political philosopher Eric vogelin who had been a member of Mises private seminar that Marxism is a kind of what he calls a gnostic movement the Gnostics were group of early Christian Christian heretics there was also a non-christian gnosis who thought that the world was a dark place and only some kind of secret knowledge possessed by experts could save us so Rothbard views Marxism in this perspective and shows how there are various parallels between Gnostic and millenarian movements and modern Marxist he's here following the books of Vogel in political religious and came out 1938 and Vogons book new science of politics in 1952 so he's very much influenced that by Vova one story on this I think he it became more influenced by Vogel he had been at an earlier period I remember he once asked me I'm voguing said do you think this when leapin being means anything not his key concept of Eric Bolling so he was a bit skeptical about some of Vogel ins more general philosophy but he applied and developed his ideas in analyzing Marxist so I think those are a few of the books I think would help you and in understanding the crisis we face today and as you will see you see if you read them none of them have anything to say about the opioid crisis you [Applause]

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Keywords: David Gordon, Literature, Books, Mises, Civilization, Liberty, Economics, Feredom, Austrian School

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Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018