WEBVTT NOTE Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.920 The genesis of this book, Organized Crime, was I got a bunch of emails from people who 2 00:00:05.920 --> 00:00:10.880 have been reading my articles for years, and they kept saying, you know, we read all your 3 00:00:10.880 --> 00:00:16.080 stuff about Lincoln, all these books, and, you know, why don't you write a book, sort 4 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:20.480 of like an economics in one lesson style book, and all this other stuff you've written about. 5 00:00:20.480 --> 00:00:25.120 So, you know, they get fascinated with one of your books, like my books on Lincoln, they 6 00:00:25.120 --> 00:00:30.480 do a web search and they find that I've been writing about antitrust regulation and banking 7 00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:33.040 and all these things for 30 years. 8 00:00:33.040 --> 00:00:36.840 And so I said, yeah, it's about time to do something like that. 9 00:00:36.840 --> 00:00:44.640 And I had all these web articles, they go back maybe 25 years, some of them, and they've 10 00:00:44.640 --> 00:00:48.840 never been in print anywhere, just on the internet, maybe 20 years. 11 00:00:48.840 --> 00:00:56.920 And so I rewrote all of these articles, and I organized the book into several sections. 12 00:00:56.920 --> 00:01:02.400 The first one is coercion and regulation, so there's eight short chapters or 55 essays 13 00:01:02.400 --> 00:01:03.400 in it. 14 00:01:03.400 --> 00:01:08.760 The second one is politics and thieves, it's sort of redundant, but that's what I think 15 00:01:08.760 --> 00:01:14.360 Lew Rockwell actually chose that word in politics and thieves, centralization versus liberty. 16 00:01:14.360 --> 00:01:19.440 So I have some, what I think, sort of very clear articles that sort of state my case 17 00:01:19.440 --> 00:01:27.080 for decentralized government, states' rights, federalism, why you should hate Lincoln, that 18 00:01:27.080 --> 00:01:28.560 sort of thing. 19 00:01:28.560 --> 00:01:34.200 Then Money in the State, I've done some writing on Money in the State, you know, I was, not 20 00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:42.360 to brag, but I was writing about the dangers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mae, government-sponsored 21 00:01:42.360 --> 00:01:47.880 Enterprises in my first book in 1983, it was called Underground Government, The Off-Budget 22 00:01:47.880 --> 00:01:48.880 Public Sector. 23 00:01:48.880 --> 00:01:55.320 So, I'm one of the few who's been writing about this stuff for decades, and you didn't 24 00:01:55.320 --> 00:01:59.620 have to be much of a genius to know that this was going to blow up in our face someday, 25 00:01:59.620 --> 00:02:03.160 if you understood what these institutions were like back then. 26 00:02:03.160 --> 00:02:08.240 And so, I wrote a few short articles, and I'd been writing about the Community Reinvestment 27 00:02:08.240 --> 00:02:17.180 Act for 20-some years, which was a federal law that forced mortgage bankers to make bad 28 00:02:17.180 --> 00:02:21.180 loans to unqualified borrowers by the trillions. 29 00:02:21.180 --> 00:02:23.960 And these are called subprime loans. 30 00:02:23.960 --> 00:02:28.120 So you know, if you have a credit rating of, say, 850, which is almost like as high as 31 00:02:28.120 --> 00:02:33.300 you can get, 850, I guess subprime would be 849, 848. 32 00:02:33.300 --> 00:02:37.040 So the government gave us that word, subprime, but of course, in reality, these are people 33 00:02:37.040 --> 00:02:42.720 with non-existent credit ratings. I don't think they go below 400. And so that's who 34 00:02:42.720 --> 00:02:49.240 these people are. And so I put some of these articles, I rewrote and put them in there. 35 00:02:49.240 --> 00:02:54.360 And the workers and unions. I've written several, quite a few articles on workers and unions. 36 00:02:54.360 --> 00:02:58.000 I've always had an interest in labor economics. It was one of my fields in graduate school 37 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:05.240 back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. And so I put some articles there about unions 38 00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:11.240 and what unions are up to, and then Truth and Lies about Markets, that could be a whole 39 00:03:11.240 --> 00:03:17.360 big fat book, bigger than Man Economy and State, Truth and Lies about Markets, and so 40 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:23.840 I had several essays on that in the final section, and for example the Truth about the 41 00:03:23.840 --> 00:03:31.640 Robber Barons, Truth about the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Myth of Natural Monopoly, and sometimes 42 00:03:31.640 --> 00:03:37.540 Sometimes I question myself, am I being delusional about this? I mean, is it really that many 43 00:03:37.540 --> 00:03:44.580 lies about markets and governments? Well, no, not at all. We need to reveal much, much 44 00:03:44.580 --> 00:03:50.380 more because of the nature of the economics profession. Peter Klein just sent around an 45 00:03:50.380 --> 00:03:57.140 article a couple of days ago that I blogged about, about sort of the latest effort by 46 00:03:57.140 --> 00:03:58.500 by a Fed Economist. 47 00:03:58.500 --> 00:04:03.860 He wrote an article called On the Instability of Private Money. 48 00:04:03.860 --> 00:04:05.660 And it's a mathematical article. 49 00:04:05.660 --> 00:04:07.460 And it's the same old routine. 50 00:04:07.460 --> 00:04:09.940 When I was in graduate school in the 70s, 51 00:04:09.940 --> 00:04:13.860 I was taught why this is a bogus form of analysis. 52 00:04:13.860 --> 00:04:16.220 It's called the Nirvana Fallacy. 53 00:04:16.220 --> 00:04:20.220 You whip up some theory of a perfect economic world, 54 00:04:20.220 --> 00:04:22.460 perfect competition, or something like that. 55 00:04:22.460 --> 00:04:24.420 And then you look at the real world, 56 00:04:24.420 --> 00:04:33.420 And you discover, you know, who would ever have thought that the real world is not the identical twin of Nirvana. 57 00:04:33.420 --> 00:04:43.420 And so you condemn the real world, and then step two is to recommend perfect government intervention to correct the real world and make it perfect. 58 00:04:43.420 --> 00:04:48.420 And you would never ask any question about any possibility of imperfections in government. 59 00:04:48.420 --> 00:04:51.420 You just assume government will correct the market failure. 60 00:04:51.420 --> 00:04:52.420 Failure. 61 00:04:52.420 --> 00:05:01.620 So this is the latest that I got from Peter, that the inherent instability of private money, 62 00:05:01.620 --> 00:05:05.860 and it was the author is a Fed economist, works for the Fed. 63 00:05:05.860 --> 00:05:12.860 So I blogged on, I think that the blog I put was, what do these publications have in common? 64 00:05:12.860 --> 00:05:19.060 And I made several of them up, the first one was on the inherent instability of Apple computer 65 00:05:19.060 --> 00:05:48.060 And so for a Fed economist to write an article on the inherent instability of competing money it's just laughable and of course it's just one big blur of math that nobody can understand and that's the game that is played, but this book I intended to be an antidote to that sort of thing and it really, really aggravates the status in academe when books are published. 66 00:05:48.060 --> 00:06:18.060 when books like this are written, not this one, but things like economics in one lesson, it's still out there in print, what, 60 years in the running, it's online, it's everywhere, and so flashing that in front of one of these market failure theorists is like flashing a cross in front of Dracula, because their students read it, the students suffer through these classes with the math and the graphs and they don't learn anything, and then they read Mises Institute, 67 00:06:18.060 --> 00:06:24.260 Literature and they understand economics and their professors hate that. 68 00:06:24.260 --> 00:06:30.060 And so the purpose of this book is to be sort of a primer on Austrian economics, Austrian 69 00:06:30.060 --> 00:06:35.260 political economy and in the back of my mind I had in terms of the market for this is I've 70 00:06:35.260 --> 00:06:40.860 given several speeches to Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty and where there's like a thousand 71 00:06:40.860 --> 00:06:46.020 people or more and the average age is very young and I've met hundreds of these young 72 00:06:46.020 --> 00:06:51.620 people, I've given speeches to campaign for liberty groups in Florida and elsewhere, and 73 00:06:51.620 --> 00:06:57.100 they're just eager and hungry to learn more about Austrian economics, and so I keep telling 74 00:06:57.100 --> 00:07:02.740 them whenever I come across them, not just to sell books or promote myself, but the purpose 75 00:07:02.740 --> 00:07:07.180 of this is if you've never run across this stuff, I consider this to be a pretty good 76 00:07:07.180 --> 00:07:11.460 primer for students like that, or for anybody. 77 00:07:11.460 --> 00:07:17.820 And so that's the purpose of organized crime, and of course that's a Rothbardian theme isn't it, 78 00:07:17.820 --> 00:07:20.620 or government as organized crime. 79 00:07:20.620 --> 00:07:24.500 And I've been thinking more and more the way things are going, that the time is ripe for 80 00:07:24.500 --> 00:07:32.040 a whole book on government as a criminal enterprise, and so it wouldn't be hard to do that. 81 00:07:32.040 --> 00:07:37.060 The big challenge would be how to keep it down to a manageable length, if you wrote that. 82 00:07:37.060 --> 00:07:42.460 And so we're just going to make sort of overviews of these books here and I think that's about 83 00:07:42.460 --> 00:07:46.260 all I'll say for now and Mark will give us our next speaker.