If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen Greg Ransom’s posts below discussing what Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev’s appearance on Glenn Beck did for Hayek exposure (watch the whole thing here).
I’m optimistic about the world we’re building for our children. The Road to Sefdom became the hottest seller on Amazon.com after Tom and Yuri appeared on Glenn Beck. FEE is hosting an Austrian seminar right now. IHS is running seminars all summer. Mises U is in less than two months. There are Mises Institutes in the US, Brazil, Sweden, and Poland (and probably more in the works).
The students who organized the “In Defense of Capitalism” conference in Copenhagen in April have put my lecture and Peter Klein’s lecture online. I got an email last week in which a graduate student in Tehran directed me to a link where he has translated my paper “The Market’s Benevolent Tendencies” into Farsi. If you like electronic copies of books to go with your paper versions, you can download Peter Klein’s book for a price of $0. You can do the same with Paul Cantor and Stephen D. Cox’s edited volume Literature and the Economics of Liberty. And with the new edition of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which features a fantastic introduction by Bryan Caplan.
Henry Hazlitt has said that good ideas need to be re-learned every generation. That’s now easier than ever. I tweeted the other day that I’m optimistic because while books can be burned, digital files can’t (I like to think the author of XKCD saw that tweet; see here).
The game is changing day by day. For an inspirational look at how, check out Jeffrey Tucker’s talk “Dissident Publishing: Then and Now.”
Update: thanks to the commenters who pointed out broken links.
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Thank you for this post. I’m also increasingly convinced that failing to digitize files is the equivalent of burning books. People use hard copy and digital copy as complementary goods. We need the both. And not behind pay walls. There really is no excuse left. In any case, that “our side” sees this gives us a huge advantage over mainline publishers right now.
Great post. Thank you.
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Thanks for everything Mises. Your wonderful and free resources are changing the world by leaps and bounds.
Now we need them to push Man, Economy and State! I’m sure Fox News would love that.
The link for “Dissident Publishing: Then and Now” appears to be broken.
The link that should lead to Paul Cantor and Stephen D. Cox’s edited volume Literature and the Economics of Liberty, leads to this page:
http://mises.org/resources/5367/The-Capitalist-and-the-Entrepreneur-Essays-on-Organizations-and-Markets
That is, to Peter Kleins book not to the book edited by Paul Cantor and D. Cox
i am curious to know how many people will finish the road to serfdom. it is not an easy read. however, i remain optimistic.
Mises should think outside of the box and exploit the opportunities fox news is and can give them going forward. The Judge, I just heard today is going to get his own tv show on Fox Business now as well — add Stossel [Fox Business] and Beck [Fox News].
Ideas:
Have a Welcome page on Mises for these viewers, so when rep’s from mises are on any of the shows, there’s a nice consistent welcome page targeted for those type of views. How hard is it for a Mises rep to get in, “goto M I S E S.org” in their spot? Which would then have a link on the homepage, “Welcome _____ Viewers, please start here.”. On Beck’s show, I noticed that no one was able to sneak in the mises.org plug.
This welcome page, could offer a digital library section targeted for those views . A one-click check out so to speak for the persons kindle, nook, and so forth. It should be under 500MB’s of data and maybe offer in packs – 50MB, 150MB’s, and whole intro – 500MB’s. Throw in a book purchase bundle special as well.
Mises should setup a group or a volunteer group that would wade through the free online titles that are hosted here and come up with what should be included. Double check the formating, the MIME information on the titles, and so forth. Convert to epub rather than the larger pdf’s. I spent hours this weekend with Calibre cleaning up MIME data for the downloads I did for my new nook.
This welcome page should also be encourage people to check out other organizations with similar philosophies.
libertyfund.org — they have many excellent works that aren’t on mises, I’m almost finished with both works by Rose Wilder Lane — I think her work would be a great recommendation to the Beck crowd.
jonathangullible.com — definitely have the little video on the intro page
fff.org
fee.org
cato.org
reason.com
independent.org
heritage.org
mackinac.org
perc.org
economictheories.org
inflation.us
measuringworth.com
freedomandprosperity.org
libertyunbound.com
I second this suggestion, at least some kind of obvious link to said page at the top.
lewrockwell.com as well
PDF has the advantage of viewers being nearly universally installed; epub don’t. As mentioned below, HTML would probably be a better option.
For digitized books, I much prefer HTML to PDF. It’s easier to search, and it’s nice that paragraphs resize automagically for my itty-bitty-Zaurus that I take to bed so I don’t keep my family awake reading at night.
Regardless of your feelings towards the Cato Institute, another reason to be optimistic is because the Cato Institute awarded Akbar Ganji the Milton Freedman Award. A particularly moving video of him accepting the award can be found here: http://www.cato.org/featuredvids/
While I have always aligned myself with the anarcho-capitalist philosophy, I still respect (more or less) what Cato is doing and the work they put out (compared to, say, what the Brookings Institute puts out).
I am not sure how much you know about him, but I am from Iran and get the impression that the opposition movement is like mainstream republicans – they sound good now, but we have seen what they do in power. I think Hans Herman Hoppe for example would see the current regime as like a monarchy, preferable to to democracy because of the increased pressure they are under not to get overthrown. Imagine if everytime Obama passed a major bill he thought it might be the final straw causing a revolution. Do you think Ganji and his ilk understand our economics and political philosophy? I’d be really interested in what you know about this.
People Are Reading About Austrian Economics!!!
I think the victories will be in surges, and knowing that we should do everything in our powers to take advantage of these periods of surge. The opposition will try to marshal its forces and will eventually counter with deception to regain some traction.
Now is the time to maximize the surge of victory!!!
Really good article, thank you for sharing, I will always look at the future, too talented.
(Rolls eyes). The thinning of the ideals of liberty thanks to traditional mass-communications companies like Fox is pressing liberty into a gradual synthesis with Republican Values and Electoral Reform scams and killing any chance of a vibrant movement to abolish the State. It allows people to be acquainted with libertarian philosophy but hold the conflicting view that anarchy is a Scary Evil.
If Republicans ever come to power again, their war on terror will be directed at “homegrown anarchist dissidents”.
Case in point, thanks to Fox news finding the buzzwords Ron Paul drew crowds with. Glenn Beck adopted them and used them on his television show to create the Pro-War, Pro-Torture, Pro-Present Unfree Market economy Tea Party electoral reform movement: http://www.webcitation.org/5qNlZLbbI
(Rolls eyes) Okay, professor.
I understand being optimistic about the developments Art mentions, but people all over the world are going to suffer tremendous pain before we manage to get government’s boot off our necks. I can’t feel optimistic about that.
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