A Free Week-Long Economics Seminar (On Wednesday, July 28, at 11:30 a.m.)

On Wednesday, July 28, at 11:30 a.m. central daylight time, I will lecture to about 250 college students at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

You can go to the Web and watch it for free. Free is good. I'll give you the link later in this report.

Each summer, the Mises Institute hosts Mises University. This seminar is worth paying for, and thousands of students have either paid or have received scholarships to attend. Anyway, someone has paid. They come to Alabama from all over the world. The Mises Institute has a strong Web presence. Foreign students learn of Mises U and fly to attend.

Without question, this is the finest week-long training program for free market economics in the world. I say this as the former Director of Seminars at a non-profit free market foundation. I know what a good seminar is. Nothing matches this one for the high quality of its presentations.

If it's so good, how can it be free? Because of that unsung marvel, Ustream. Ustream was developed by an ex-G.I. so that soldiers stationed abroad could communicate in real time with relatives back home. The service has grown. It recently raised $90 million from investors. How, I do not know. It has yet to make a profit.

Mises U is broadcast live over Ustream each year. Anyone can go to Ustream's site and view every major presentation. The seminar is so packed with presentations that some are held at the same time. So, Mises U cannot broadcast all of them on the same day. But there is enough material to keep viewers occupied all day long. The presentations that are not broadcast live will be posted as audio files the same day . . . for free.

If students can watch for free, why do they pay the money to fly in? Because Mises U is a networking opportunity. Students make contacts that can last a lifetime. They can also meet with professors whose books they have read. Normally, this is not possible. The faculty is assembled under one roof for a week. They, too, fly in from all over the world.

I drive in. I don't give lectures that I cannot drive to in a couple of hours. I just cannot spare the time.

This is an advanced seminar, by anyone's standards. It used to be mostly graduate students. These days, it is 55% undergrads. I have interacted with them at previous seminars. They are way above average. Average students do not sit in lecture rooms in July from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., taking notes, when there are no grades involved.

As Lew Rockwell commented, "After the day is over, when you walk by groups of students, they are talking about economic imputation, not Lindsey Lohan."

GIVE IT AWAY

Mises Institute is on the cutting edge of digital communications. It posts all of its books and journals online for free. You might think that this would hurt the sale of the Institute's physical copies of these books. On the contrary, it sells huge quantities of printed books, because it gives the PDFs away. People who like books like to hold them. They do not like printouts in binders. They suffer from what I have called Picard's Syndrome.

By positioning itself as the #1 publisher and clearing house of Austrian School economic ideas, the Mises Institute has been able to raise money precisely because it does give everything away. When your self-appointed task is to spread an unpopular word, people who agree with that word will write checks. The word gets out. But why not sell some of those words in a format that people want? No good reason. So, the outfit sells a lot of books.

It is possible to get an advanced economic education for the price of toner, paper, and time. This is the miracle of the Web. This technology did not exist in 1982, when Lew Rockwell launched the Mises Institute. The possibility of getting these ideas behind the Iron Curtain 24x7 did not occur to him. Then, without warning in 1991, there was no more Iron Curtain. More amazingly, he found that the ideas of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard had been circulating behind the Iron Curtain for years. There was a ready market for more of their ideas.

So, there was perfect synergy, a term used by people who don't like to talk about providence. In 1990, the first Website went up. In 1991, the Soviet Union went down. In 1995 came the Netscape browser. That same year, the Mises Institute set up its Website.

Digits are not free. Bandwidth costs money. But it costs a whole lot less than pieces of paper and postage.

Mises Institute was positioned well. It made good use of this new technology. It made better use of it, and faster, than any other non-profit economics institution, including the American Economic Association, the main professional association of American economists. The AEA does not even have its own Website. It's a subdomain of Vanderbilt University's site. Mises is rated higher in terms of traffic and links into its site (over 5,000) than all of Vanderbilt.

This is why the organization has stayed ahead of the digital revolution. It is honoring that fundamental principle of economics: "As the price falls, more is demanded." It finds ways of cutting the price to zero for the user.

Free is good. Free sells. Free is the second most powerful word in marketing, after "you." As one marketing expert has put it, "the two most powerful offers in marketing are 'free' and 'all you can eat.'" When it comes to ideas, the Mises Institute offers all you can eat for free.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?

We are under assault. Two decades ago, we were officially under assault by the USSR. Red China was busy transforming itself out of its status as a socialist paradise, but the Russian Communists were still officially on board the Good Ship Marx. It sank.

This left us in the clutches of the central bankers and the Keynesians. They proved their competence in the recessions of 1990, 2001, and 2008. We are barely out of the last one, and another one looms on the horizon. They are visibly bankrupting the West.

The Keynesian economists say we need more deficits. The Chicago School economists say little, but they generally concur that a doubling of the monetary base in October 2008 was necessary, despite all the negatives.

In any case, only the Austrians predicted 2008, and they suggest that the cure is going to prove worse than the disease.

If you are unaware of the logic of the Austrian position, Mises U lectures can get you up to speed fast. If you don't have time to watch them during the day, you can watch the re-runs. You can also download the audio files.

If you have a child or grandchild taking economics during the school year, you can offer some sort of deal for a written summary of what will be broadcast next week. Make it worth the student's while. That could turn out to be the best money you'll spend in 2010.

Drive time is free time, mentally speaking. So is puttering time. When you can convert free time into educational time, you should. Reading time is expensive time. You can get cogent summaries by men who are paid to read and digest what they read. This will not cost you a dime.

Education is changing because prices are changing. But one thing has not changed in recorded history: the lecture as a way to impart new information rapidly and effectively. You can survey a topic and decide if it's worth pursuing by an investment of costly reading time. There is nothing better than a good lecture to help you make that decision accurately.

[link to www.lewrockwell.com]