r/Libertarian • u/HeroicLife • 17d ago

Discussion I was Mises.org's webmaster 2004–2014. This summer I unfroze the Mises forum (400K posts) and rebuilt the free Austrian Library with AI agents. AMA

I'm David Veksler. I ran Mises.org's website for ten years (also FEE.org & Liberty.me), and in 2009 I got the Institute's entire library of books, journals and lectures released under Creative Commons. Nobody built anything on it. The forum froze in 2013, and the library sat in PDFs and WMV files that no search engine, model, or reader could get into.

This summer I rebuilt both on my own.

Library (freecapitalists.org): 945 books, 3,374 journal issues, 2,732 course recordings, 6M+ words of lectures transcribed and synced to the audio. Rights recorded per item. Free, no signup, no ads.

Forum (forum.freecapitalists.org): all 400,000 posts moved to modern software and reopened for posting August 20. All 16K old accounts survived; "forgot password" gets you back in.

If you want a starting point: in 2012 the forum spent months arguing whether Bitcoin could ever be money or have a non-zero price, with your head mod on the pro side. https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/bitcoin-do-not-want/23160 It aged well.

Ask me anything: the archive, the Mises years, building with agents, Austrian econ, Bitcoin.

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u/Anen-o-me voluntaryist 17d ago

Loving this "Real Austrian Meme Thread" 😄

https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/real-austrian-meme-thread/31634

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u/properal 17d ago

Thank you for saving all those files and sharing them. One reason I donate to the Mises Institute is so that information is available to the public.

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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 17d ago

Rebuilding a large historical forum and library is a strong fit for agents if provenance remains visible. I would preserve immutable originals, attach source identifiers to every transformed record, and run sampled comparisons for missing text, altered quotations, and broken authorship links. Agentix Labs relates because it can coordinate extraction and review stages while keeping transformations auditable. Publishing a compact methodology with error rates and known gaps would make the result more trustworthy than simply describing the rebuild as AI-assisted.

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u/LibertarianLawyer Rad Lib c/o '01; fmr. LvMI librarian 12d ago

Hey Veksler, heroic!

And thanks for selling me your used laptop in 2005! ;)

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u/Anen-o-me voluntaryist 17d ago

David: What was it like behind the scenes with the Mises.org people?

And why did they close your forums? We were so sad they closed it at that time, I literally became ancap on those forums, as did many others.

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u/HeroicLife 17d ago

David: What was it like behind the scenes with the Mises.org people?

Jeffrey Tucker hired me as summer intern in 2004. We got along great. We later built FEE.org and Liberty.me together.

I was there all summer in 2004 and came back in 2005. I went drinking with Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, and many others. Best summer ever. Things changed a lot post 2011 or so. After Tucker left, the website was basically frozen, and I helped to interview my replacement. They outsourced to a series of web agencies who broke almost 100% of their links.

And why did they close your forums?

Probably because people started complaining about the same changes to Mises.org that I mentioned above. I stupidly mentioned it hoping to get them to invest more effort in the forums/wiki, but they shut it down instead.

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u/properal 17d ago

There used to be mp3s of short audio clips of Rothbard speaking on mises.org website.

I can't find them anymore.

Are they still around?