09/04/14 – Dan Sanchez – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
You younger people might not believe it, but there was actually a time when I was a kid that was considered peacetime.
There were various proxy wars going on and that kind of thing, but it's all war all the time now.
It's normal in American life now.
But anyway, it seems to me like it doesn't have to be this way.
Dan Sanchez has this great piece he just wrote for antiwar.com slash blog, Squandered Lives and Snuffed Out Genius, Mises, Tolkien, and World War I.
Just kind of reminding us a little bit about what is and what has been and what might have been.
Welcome back to the show.
Dan, how are you doing?
I'm very good, thanks.
Good, good.
Good to be with you.
Happy to have you here.
And what's your official title at the Mises Institute now?
The Director of the Mises Academy.
The Director of the Mises Academy, all right.
I need to write that down so I remember.
And that's at mises.org, named after Ludwig von Mises, who you're writing about here, of course, the center of Austrian economic thought in America.
And so, I don't know, go ahead and talk about it.
You start off by bringing up an article from the Times of London.
That's right.
In the Times, they had an article called The Musicians Silenced in the Carnage of the Great War.
And it ended on a really poignant note.
He says, as with so many of that horribly ill-fated generation, you wonder what might have been had mankind not slaughtered so many of its brightest and best.
And it really reminded me of two people, two people that a lot of people might not think of in the same thought.
But I think that there's a big parallel here.
Ludwig von Mises, again, the person my institute is named after, I consider the greatest economist who ever lived, a great champion of liberty.
And J.R.R. Tolkien, they both served in World War I on opposite sides.
And I just remembered a special documentary that was included in the bonus features of the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings films that talked about J.R.R. Tolkien.
And they talked about this literary circle that he had been part of before the war.
It was called the TCBS, the Tea Club Barovian Society.
And they had these dreams about changing the world through their art, creating a better world.
And Tolkien, especially, he had this dream, he had these dreams about Anglo-Saxon mythology and how he felt that with the Norman conquest, that the culture was just kind of supplanted by the Normans and that he thought it was really regrettable that the Anglo-Saxons didn't have their own mythology.
And so he had this dream about creating one.
So he and his friends had these kinds of dreams and they really inspired each other.
And what was so sad is that two of them died.
And Tolkien really, I remember in the documentary, it said that Tolkien really felt like he had to carry the torch for his departed friends to accomplish what they couldn't.
And there's this really devastating letter that the last friend who died had wrote to Tolkien right before he set out on the mission in which he died.
He says, My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight, I'm off on duty in a few minutes, there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.
For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the TCBS.
Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four, a discovery I'm going to communicate to Rob before I go off tonight.
And do you write it also to Christopher?
May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, that's J.R. Tolkien's first two names, and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.
And so just the fact that he died right after he wrote that, I mean, you have to imagine what an impact that must have had on J.R. Tolkien and how devastating it was.
And so I just think of people like Smith, the person who died, his friend who died, and what did he not get to say?
What did he never get to say?
Maybe he wouldn't have been quite as much of a genius as Tolkien, but his writings and the effect that he had on Tolkien, it really made it seem that he had a lot to offer, that he was a great soul, that he was a very sensitive soul, that he could have maybe written something great.
And what did we lose because of that?
And if Tolkien's own circle was decimated like that, how many geniuses were left in the trenches?
And so I also think about, it made me think about Mises, and Guido Hülsmann in his great biography on Ludwig von Mises talked about how there was this really great time before the war at the University of Vienna, and it was a time in which some of the greatest Austrian economists, whoever wrote, were teaching at the same time, Eugen von Bombarvark and Friedrich Wieser and Mises himself, for example.
But then he writes that the all-star Austrian faculty lasted only three semesters.
In August 1914, Bombarvark, who was Mises' teacher, died and Mises was sent to the front, his best students perished in the war.
And again, you just have to wonder, if they were so great that they were able to impress Mises of all people, what could they have accomplished if they hadn't been sent off to war?
And I just think it's just really a tragic example of something that Mises himself really illuminated, and it's just that how the state misallocates resources.
Of course, they're not really resources, their lives are precious for their own sake.
But to really get a full accounting of the cost of war, you have to also think about what was lost to civilization.
What were the contributions that these people lost, that we lost when we lost them?
And so it's just the whole notion of someone like Mises, I mean, the mind who wrote human action, the mind who figured out the Austrian business cycle theory that I know you're a big fan of, who figured out the calculation problem that showed that socialism cannot work, that this mind was sent out to direct how best to blow up Russians.
I mean, that is just a huge misallocation to me and just a huge squandering of potential.
Yeah, especially, you know, I mean, I don't know about every battle on every front of World War One, but it's universally remembered as just a bunch of people dying in sort of the lowest way imaginable, laying down in the mud and, you know, bleed to death or, you know, of course, no modern medicine to save you if you get your leg blown off, you just bleed out, you know, like modern American bug splat in Afghanistan, something like that.
And yeah, like you're saying, these people, of all people that they were able to impress, Mises, who was not easily impressed, these brilliant minds, just think, never even mind all the brilliant ideas they might have advanced, just think of all the hokum they could have debunked in the 20th century, you know what I mean?
That's right.
Even anything, if they were anything like Mises at all, you know?
Right, even if they were, if they only contributed spreading Mises' teachings, being educators, even that by itself could have, maybe it could have prevented World War Two.
Maybe it could have prevented the, you know, the rise of totalitarianism.
All right, now we got to hold it and take this break, but we'll be back with Dan Sanchez on the other side of this break, and what is it you're the director of the Mises what again?
Academy.
Oh, the Mises Academy.
Yeah, I should have finished taking that note.
Dan Sanchez, director of the Mises Academy.
We're going to talk about that too, actually, on the other side of this break.
Hang tight, y'all.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm at scotthorton.org and, of course, the Liberty Radio Network talking with Dan Sanchez from the Mises Institute, actually the director of the Mises Academy, and I'm going to ask you about that in more detail right now because it's along the same lines of what we're talking about.
Mises Academy actually teaches.
Is it you that teaches a course on World War I?
No, it's not me.
It's an expert on World War I, Hunt Tooley, a professor of history at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and he has written books, many books on 20th century history especially.
For example, he wrote The Western Front, Battleground, and Homefront in the First World War, and he taught a course for the Mises Academy called World War I, Crucible of the Age of Statism, and we have that available as part of the Mises curriculum, and so it's not just that course but over 50 courses, including many courses that your listeners would probably be interested in because they cover war.
We have a course called The Political Economy of War by Thomas DiLorenzo.
He also teaches imperialism and anti-imperialism.
Hunt Tooley, who taught the World War I course, taught a course called The Interwar Years, a course called The Totalitarians.
So there's a lot of great material in there, and again, if you go to mises.org slash curriculum, or if you just go to mises.org and click on Academy and then click on Curriculum, then you can sign up for that.
It's a really great deal.
Man, that sounds really cool.
Now I just need to find the time.
If only I had it.
All right.
Well, anyway, I'm glad you got a chance to tell people about that.
Sounds great.
Well, what's great is that you don't have to have the time right away because you don't have to be there at a scheduled time.
They're independent studies, so you can just watch the recordings and take the quizzes whenever you're available.
Cool.
Very cool.
All right, and again, that's at mises.org, easy to find.
Just click on Academy.
All right.
Now, so what we're talking about here, everybody, is really the worst thing that ever happened because World War I, even though, of course, tens and tens of millions of people were killed, it also set up, as you just mentioned, the totalitarians, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Terror War, and every damn horrible thing ever happened since then, too.
And I forget, I don't know if William S. Linde was the first one to say it or if he was paraphrasing someone else but said, this is when Western civilization took out the revolver and blew its own brains out.
And now it's just the mopping up exercise or the death spiral, which I think he's a conservative and not a libertarian, so maybe a bit more pessimistic view, but there sure was a hell of a lot squandered and lost.
It's almost impossible to calculate.
But on the other hand, of course, and I don't know if I really have a question here other than what you think of it or something, or I don't know how important a point is to me, but I think a lot of us, like me, I know I wouldn't exist at all if it hadn't been for the World War because my grandparents had to be in the right place at the right time and all those kinds of things, and it's determined the entire fate of the world since then.
Everything would be different.
Everything that's good that we have now would be different, too, you know?
It was including our own loved ones.
Well, Mises really also identifies World War I as the time where civilization just basically committed suicide, that it was the end of what he called the age of liberalism, that he really thought that civilization had found something amazing, that the laissez-faire economists and the classical liberal political philosophers, that they had been winning the day for quite a while, and there was the Industrial Revolution had come about because of their influence, and so there was a lot of great things that were happening, a lot of terrible things that were happening, too, especially on the imperial front.
It really spiraled out of control with World War I, not only the warfare state, but just the totalitarianism, the planning state, and I was talking about how, who knows, Mises' students could have helped him turn the tide, and that might seem a little hard to swallow, but actually, as Mises taught, that ideas really determine the direction of society, and Mises himself, his indirect impact, but even just during his lifetime, he had some pretty huge direct impacts, just applying the ideas that he discovered in his scholarly work.
For example, he wrote The Theory of Money and Credit, and in that book, he explained money and monetary policy, and the dangers of inflation, and how that does lead to the business cycle, but also how hyperinflation works.
He actually used his influence in interwar Austria to save his homeland from the hyperinflation that would soon after fall upon Weimar Germany, and that contributed towards the rise of Nazism.
That's a really good point.
Yeah, I had forgotten that.
He also wrote The Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis, and in that book, and in the essay that preceded it, he showed the calculation problem reveals how socialism just cannot function as an industrial division of labor, that there's no way to rationally allocate resources under socialism, because you don't have prices for higher order goods, and so there's no profit and loss test for entrepreneurs to guide their production with.
But he not only discovered that, but he also personally dissuaded the most powerful man in Vienna from imposing Bolshevism on that city, the same Bolshevism that would soon after lead to famine in Russia.
So he wasn't just an armchair academic.
He really applied the ideas that he discovered and probably saved thousands of lives by doing so.
Yeah, well, and it's just too bad that the consequences of World War II, or of World War I continuing to play out, ended up with his exile and having to flee.
I mean, to our benefit, I guess he fled to the United States, first to Switzerland, then the United States, but he was unable to stop the rise of Nazism in Germany.
It was a bit more than even Mises could handle there.
That's right, although it's not for want of trying, because one of the little-known details that Guido Holzmann talks about in his book is that he wasn't just influencing people in Austria, he was also influencing a young generation of German economists.
Holzmann writes, just as Mises was finally beginning to stir the spirit of liberty among the young generation of German economists, the old Katheder Sozialisten, which is German for the socialists of the chair, the socialists in academia, had a final and devastating triumph on January 30, 1933, that intellectual scion Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the German Reich.
Man, all right.
And then, so, now to fast forward to the end of your essay into our modern times, the American government's killed over a million people, or certainly gotten over a million people killed in the last decade.
And I was just thinking about the same subject the other week when it was announced that this young lady from Iran had won the smartest mathematician on earth award or something like that, which is a hell of a thing, because there's some small proportion, but therefore a great number in a world with 7 billion people in it, of real math geniuses, and she whooped all of their asses to be the very best one out of all of them.
And I was thinking, wow, and you know what?
George Bush could have killed her a few years back, and we'd have never got to know, or maybe we won't ever know, but the world would have been denied what her genius has to provide.
And then, you know, you turn on the news and there's dead Gazan babies that never got a chance to be, you know, who knows what.
Maybe they'd have been nothing, but maybe they would have been the most special person we could ever think of.
And like you said, every life is priceless for its own sake and that kind of thing.
I wouldn't argue otherwise, but to think of what we might have lost by getting a million Iraqis killed in that war between 2003 and 2010 over there, there's just, there's no way to know, but it must be, you know, if you had to count it in dollar costs, it would have to be in the trillions and trillions and trillions.
That's right.
And not only the ones that are killed, but the ones that are impoverished because we're either propping up dictators that are keeping them impoverished, either through, there's two ways that we prop them up, either through our direct support of them or perversely by threatening them because that creates a bunker mentality where they rally around the leader and it actually, like with Castro and with the regime in North Korea, where it makes them actually less liable to reform.
And also just all the people that we terrorize that, or I shouldn't say we, that the United States government terrorizes, just all the children in Pakistan and in Yemen who have drones buzzing over their head.
I mean, talk about a challenging learning environment.
Right.
Yep.
And well, you know, it's funny and horrible that it's unique that we're having this conversation.
This is the kind of thing that, I mean, it's not like it's outside of people's ability to think of or whatever, but it's just not really worthy of note most of the time.
When have you ever heard people outside of libertarianism anyway, have this kind of discussion of you know, just what could have been if it wasn't for, you know, people going along with these idiot politicians in the name of their country.
Right.
And then when you do have them even think of talk about it at all, you have like Madeline Albright's just saying, well, it was worth it.
They just think it's worth it anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
When Bill Clinton left office, he said, well, you know, at the end of the day, I try to tell myself that I've done more good than bad.
Like, really?
That's your only measure, huh?
And you're the one doing the measuring.
Great.
Screw the rest of us anyway.
All right.
Well, I kept you over time.
Thanks so much for your time on the show, Dan.
It's good to talk to you again.
Well, thanks.
Great talk to you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Dan Sanchez.
Check out the Mises Academy.
He's the director of it over there at Mises dot org.
We'll be right back.
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