The Misesian: Dr. Fegley, you were a Mises University student and a repeat Mises Research Fellow. Can you speak to the influence that had on your academic career?
Tate Fegley: My first Mises U was back in 2010, between my junior and senior years at Boise State, and it had a big effect on me. I wish I had done it sooner, since it connected me with other Austrians at Boise State for the first time.
In 2015, the summer before my second year of my master’s degree in criminal justice, I was a Mises Research Fellow for the first time, and it was really an amazing experience that I would recommend for any graduate student who is interested in Austrian ideas.
It’s really a complete package. You get the research facilities of the Institute along with access to the faculty, and just a great group of fellow students who are also working on their own research projects and who are providing you with feedback pretty much 24/7.
It was really unlike any other environment I’ve experienced.
Rothbard Graduate Seminar is also special. The great Austrian texts like Human Action and Man, Economy, and State, can be very intimidating. RGS gives you a reason to carefully read them, study them, and discuss them. I think of this as a great pedagogical experience that I try to replicate as a professor.
Really, it’s hard to overstate just how great my student experience at the Mises Institute was. It’s really how education is supposed to be.
TM: You became a member of the Mises University faculty just a few years ago. What does that mean to you?
TF: It’s a cliché to say, but it’s a dream.
I’ve always considered Mises U to be like a weeklong Christmas, and being able to continue to experience it, and also to vicariously experience the fascination of first-time students, for whom the week opens up a whole new world, is something I am grateful for.
TM: One of the topics that you’ve lectured on at Mises U the last couple of years has been the bureaucracy in the deep state. What are some unique insights that Austrian economics provides on the topic?
TF: When I first got into economics, it was through Thomas Sowell and his Basic Economics, which looked at things more from a Chicago perspective, emphasizing profit and loss primarily as financial incentives.
In contrast, reading Mises and his take on bureaucracy, you see everything in terms of economic calculation, and just how crucial that is for understanding how organizations work and what’s “rational” for actors within organizations that are subject to profit and loss calculation and within bureaucracies, where there is no profit and loss calculation.
Since bureaucracies are not checked by profit and loss, what are their ultimate constraints? It can get pretty complex.
During the last several years, there has been a lot of talk about a competency crisis. Right before the last Mises U, a presidential candidate was shot and there was a greater inquiry into the selection practices for US Secret Service personnel.
What kind of failure was there here, where an organization can engage in hiring practices based on considerations other than profit or competency?
The costs of such decisions don’t manifest themselves in monetary losses. So how do they manifest themselves? Perhaps in things like presidential candidates getting shot or Los Angeles burning or planes and ships crashing.
So, there still is a need for a distinctly Misesian lens to tackle questions of bureaucracy and understand this crucial distinction between bureaucracies and organizations subject to profit and loss calculation.
TM: You’ve done a lot of work on private policing. We’ve seen that from poor fire management in California to the consequences of “progressive” approaches to crime in cities, the public seems to be recognizing a breakdown in public services. Do you think that this is a unique moment to talk about market solutions to government failures?
TF: Absolutely. When I get Google alerts about private policing, they’re not about government policing working well, right?
If it were working well, then people wouldn’t see a need to find private alternatives. As the competency crisis grows and bureaucrats, government staff, and others continue to make decisions based not on serving the public, but rather on their own ideological projects, the costs will manifest themselves in failures like we mentioned.
As people find out that services that they have traditionally received from the government are not truly being provided, they will seek out alternatives.
So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens in California in the aftermath of these fires.
I am in western North Carolina, and post– Hurricane Helene I directly saw private initiative helping people, and that continues to go on. I think a lot of people now realize they can’t depend on FEMA. Thankfully, it’s heartwarming to see how much people are willing to help others.
As time goes on and as the competency crisis grows, I think we are only going to see more reliance on nongovernment alternatives.
TM: Who are some of the Austrian scholars that you find particularly interesting to engage with today?
TF: I would say the one I’ve been reading most is my frequent coauthor Łukasz Dominiak, a Polish political philosopher who was also a Mises Research Fellow. He’s really grown a body of PhD students and they’ve been publishing plenty. It’s really heartening to see the growth of Austrolibertarian ideas in Poland, and I would credit Dr. Dominiak with fostering it.
Usually I agree with him. Sometimes we have our disagreements, and we flesh those out in publications like the Journal of Libertarian Studies!
But I find his work fascinating to read, and I think he and his students are really pushing libertarian political philosophy forward.
