WEBVTT NOTE Mises's Criticisms of Rothbard on Natural Law 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:28.000 When I found I was asked to speak on Mises' criticisms of Rothbard on natural law, I found myself with a problem that, so far as I've been able to find out, Mises didn't make any criticisms of Rothbard on natural law. 2 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:48.000 In fact, the situation is much rather the reverse, that Rothbard had criticisms of Mises' position, but I think if we look at the two great economists together, we can find kind of interesting exchanges or dialectic between the positions the two adopted. 3 00:00:48.000 --> 00:01:11.000 The criticisms that Murray Rothbard advanced of Mises on ethics were, as far as I know, first presented in 1960. Rothbard attended a conference that was put on under sponsorship of the William Volcker Fund on relativism and the study of man. 4 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:20.440 Mises gave a paper on that and then Rothbard in a report for the Volcker Fund raised some 5 00:01:20.440 --> 00:01:28.960 criticisms of Mises and these were later developed in Power and Market and more extensively in 6 00:01:28.960 --> 00:01:34.920 Ethics of Liberty but before we can understand Rothbard's criticisms I think we first need 7 00:01:34.920 --> 00:01:40.040 to look at what Mises' views on ethics were. 8 00:01:40.040 --> 00:01:46.640 If you look at human action, you see, as everyone knows, Mises has the structure of economics 9 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:53.960 perceived from a self-evident axiom, the axiom that human beings act. 10 00:01:53.960 --> 00:01:59.840 Then the various theorems of economics are deduced from that axiom. 11 00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:04.360 Everything follows deductively from the single axiom, the group of axioms that are held to 12 00:02:04.360 --> 00:02:05.360 be self-evident. 13 00:02:05.360 --> 00:02:23.720 The question would come up, wouldn't it be nice if we could have together with the descriptive 14 00:02:23.720 --> 00:02:28.000 science of economics that proceeds from self-evident axioms, wouldn't it be nice if we could also 15 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:32.640 have when questions of practical rationality are considered questions of what we should 16 00:02:32.640 --> 00:02:49.640 It wouldn't be nice if we could have an axiom, self-evident axiom. We could derive an ethics deductively from that. So we'd have together with the action axiom, we'd have an ethical axiom. It was self-evident. We could get a deductive science of ethics. 17 00:02:49.640 --> 00:02:56.920 various people have tried to do that most famously in manual cons with a categorical imperative 18 00:02:56.920 --> 00:03:02.880 Hans Hoppe has a libertarian version of this where he comes up and claims to have a deductive 19 00:03:02.880 --> 00:03:08.920 proof of the self-ownership acts and derive ethics, at least part of an ethics from that 20 00:03:08.920 --> 00:03:15.660 actually his argument I think is best understood as a variation of the argument that Alan Gewirth 21 00:03:15.660 --> 00:03:21.260 proposing his reason and morality, but taking it in a much more libertarian way. 22 00:03:21.260 --> 00:03:27.300 Now, as I say, one might say, if you weren't familiar with Mises' views on ethics, one 23 00:03:27.300 --> 00:03:30.540 might say, well, wouldn't Mises find this sort of view very appealing? 24 00:03:30.540 --> 00:03:34.100 It would seem like it would be very much in accord with the way he's developing economics. 25 00:03:34.100 --> 00:03:39.220 But quite the contrary, Mises didn't like this idea at all. 26 00:03:39.220 --> 00:03:41.660 He thought this was not the way to proceed. 27 00:03:41.660 --> 00:03:48.980 He thought he didn't give any detailed criticisms of Kant, for example, on the categorical 28 00:03:48.980 --> 00:03:55.740 imperative, but he felt, he said, in matters of practical rationality questions of what 29 00:03:55.740 --> 00:04:01.780 we're supposed to do, reason couldn't say anything about the ends we choose. 30 00:04:01.780 --> 00:04:08.780 We might choose anything we want, depending on how, whatever we want, however we, whatever 31 00:04:08.780 --> 00:04:22.780 The reason was confined to questions of means. In his view, reason strictly means ends. We could say, given a certain end, how could I achieve this? 32 00:04:22.780 --> 00:04:36.780 Given that I want to blow up the World Trade Center, how might I best do this? We could ask this. This would be a strict question of rationality. 33 00:04:36.780 --> 00:04:37.780 Nationality. 34 00:04:37.780 --> 00:04:41.740 The question, is it a good idea, is it good to blow up the World Trade Center? 35 00:04:41.740 --> 00:04:48.140 That wouldn't be a question that could be asked rationally, we might have preferences 36 00:04:48.140 --> 00:04:56.700 about it one way or the other, but it's not a matter that reason can address. 37 00:04:56.700 --> 00:05:04.660 Mises in dealing with this question takes the view, although he doesn't give specific 38 00:05:04.660 --> 00:05:13.300 arguments against people who try to deduce, claim that the ends can be known rationally 39 00:05:13.300 --> 00:05:23.220 or there are certain things, but reason requires us to do, he contends that these postulates 40 00:05:23.220 --> 00:05:28.700 are purely arbitrary and that people who say this, such as Kant and others, he had in mind 41 00:05:28.700 --> 00:05:44.700 I think certain followers of Kant who were socialists such as the late 19th, early 20th century Herman Cohen who claimed that socialism could be ethically derived from Kant's category of comparative. 42 00:05:44.700 --> 00:05:53.700 He said this is just an attempt by those people to impose their own valuations on others and claim that these valuations are demanded by reason. 43 00:05:53.700 --> 00:06:10.700 But in fact, they're not, they're just, since reason is a matter exclusively of means to achieve ends, when they say that reason demands that we establish socialism, they're just making an arbitrary supposition. 44 00:06:10.700 --> 00:06:19.700 And he felt that by doing so, and here he's displaying his own values, he thought this is a very totalitarian thing to do. 45 00:06:19.700 --> 00:06:26.500 It's wrong for people to impose values on others. We should respect each other's preferences 46 00:06:26.500 --> 00:06:32.260 and not try to claim that our own values have a certain sanction of reason behind them when 47 00:06:32.260 --> 00:06:39.420 they don't. In arguing this way, Mises was here a follower of very much of John Stuart 48 00:06:39.420 --> 00:06:46.020 Mill, by whom in ethics, if not in economics, he was very much influenced. Mill was very 49 00:06:46.020 --> 00:06:53.540 One of the big themes in Mills writings is that people who claim that certain principles 50 00:06:53.540 --> 00:07:00.800 of ethics are known self-evidently to be true or known by certain ethical intuitions 51 00:07:00.800 --> 00:07:02.380 are just completely wrong. 52 00:07:02.380 --> 00:07:10.540 They're just using these principles to give artificial support to their own views and 53 00:07:10.540 --> 00:07:12.780 that, again, we shouldn't do this. 54 00:07:12.780 --> 00:07:36.340 It's interesting here that the criticisms Mises gives of these attempts to derive ethics by reason are very similar to criticisms that non-praxeologists give of Mises' praxeology. 55 00:07:36.340 --> 00:07:42.340 Mises is just presenting his own views as if they were self-evident truths and they're not. 56 00:07:42.340 --> 00:07:43.340 He's being very dogmatic. 57 00:07:43.340 --> 00:07:48.340 So just a sort of criticism that other economists have given of Mises on praxeology. 58 00:07:48.340 --> 00:07:57.340 Mises gave of ethical systems that claim to be based on reason. 59 00:07:57.340 --> 00:08:06.740 So, this seems, if one takes this view, then does this leave, does it mean we have to give 60 00:08:06.740 --> 00:08:13.460 up any kind of ethics at all, or is it just an arbitrary, are we just left with arbitrary 61 00:08:13.460 --> 00:08:14.460 subjective judgment? 62 00:08:14.460 --> 00:08:23.420 Well, one possible escape is to say that not ethical, ethics values are, if not demanded 63 00:08:23.420 --> 00:08:31.020 by Reason are somehow objectively out there in the world, just as, say, Jean Moore said 64 00:08:31.020 --> 00:08:35.440 we don't have certain objects have color. 65 00:08:35.440 --> 00:08:40.460 We could say objects have certain other properties, ethical properties that are directly perceived 66 00:08:40.460 --> 00:08:46.340 in various continental philosophies, such as Nikolai Hartmann and Max Shailer took this 67 00:08:46.340 --> 00:08:47.340 view. 68 00:08:47.340 --> 00:08:56.340 Ethics doesn't depend on acknowledging that certain demands are put upon us by reason, 69 00:08:56.340 --> 00:08:59.340 but we can just sort of see that certain things are good or bad. 70 00:08:59.340 --> 00:09:01.340 We can perceive this in some way. 71 00:09:01.340 --> 00:09:03.340 Mises rejected that altogether. 72 00:09:03.340 --> 00:09:08.340 Also, he just said, no, preferences are purely subjective. 73 00:09:08.340 --> 00:09:13.340 We can ask that each individual is trying to achieve his own happiness, 74 00:09:13.340 --> 00:09:20.460 and Happiness, where happiness is defined purely formally as whatever is highest, individuals 75 00:09:20.460 --> 00:09:23.140 trying to achieve whatever is highest on his preference scale. 76 00:09:23.140 --> 00:09:30.700 We can't make any claims, we can't rightly make any claims that individuals are wrong 77 00:09:30.700 --> 00:09:35.380 if they have certain kinds of values and not others. 78 00:09:35.380 --> 00:09:39.700 We might say, for example, suppose somebody thought that it's right to crash, it's a 79 00:09:39.700 --> 00:10:09.700 The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit 80 00:10:09.700 --> 00:10:33.140 And Mises has an extremely ingenious way of getting around this problem. 81 00:10:33.140 --> 00:10:41.260 He says, well, remember, he says, we can say how can, it is a question for a reason, given 82 00:10:41.260 --> 00:10:48.780 that we have certain ends, how can we achieve these ends rationally, what is the best way 83 00:10:48.780 --> 00:10:49.780 to achieve them? 84 00:10:49.780 --> 00:10:58.100 So he said, practically everyone is interested in material prosperity, there are very few 85 00:10:58.100 --> 00:11:03.300 for People who want to be poor or starving or homeless. 86 00:11:03.300 --> 00:11:10.180 So given that nearly everybody has this end of wanting to achieve material prosperity, 87 00:11:10.180 --> 00:11:13.420 we can ask, how can we do this? 88 00:11:13.420 --> 00:11:20.420 And he said the way we do this is through a system of social cooperation, namely the 89 00:11:20.420 --> 00:11:21.420 free market. 90 00:11:21.420 --> 00:11:43.420 by having the free market, we would have a, we would be taking the fact that people have, given the fact that people have certain ends, namely to achieve prosperity, you could ask, how can they achieve these ends, this end, achieve material prosperity, in the way to do that is to establish the free market. 91 00:11:43.420 --> 00:12:01.420 So here he's saying the ultimate values are subjective. After all, we could imagine there probably have been people who don't care at all about material prosperity or people who want other people to be very poor, people who want to get rid of other people. 92 00:12:01.420 --> 00:12:11.420 But given that we start with the value of that we do want to achieve material prosperity, how can we do this to establish a free market? 93 00:12:11.420 --> 00:12:35.780 And along with this detailed how he argued this way, he claimed that he could show strictly objectively that interventionism in the free market would not achieve the purposes of the people who themselves favor the intervention. 94 00:12:35.780 --> 00:12:55.420 For example, he said, supposing we have, someone says that the workers aren't making enough money, so we should have a living wage as a very popular movement now in certain, very popular among certain theological circles, I think that we should have a living wage. 95 00:12:55.420 --> 00:13:03.620 So he says, supposing we have, then have legislation say, employers have to pay workers a certain amount of money. 96 00:13:03.620 --> 00:13:08.820 So if this is above the market, then the result will be unemployment of workers who aren't 97 00:13:08.820 --> 00:13:16.540 generating that enough marginal product for that new wage. 98 00:13:16.540 --> 00:13:22.340 So he said, well, obviously, this is not what the proponents of the measure said they wanted. 99 00:13:22.340 --> 00:13:28.420 So without making any controversial value judgment, we can say that minimum wage and 100 00:13:28.420 --> 00:13:30.860 similar types of intervention are to be rejected. 101 00:13:30.860 --> 00:13:37.860 Supposing somebody says we want to have a socialist system, equality is an extremely 102 00:13:37.860 --> 00:13:44.180 important value and someone says, I don't care if this means some kind of loss in economic 103 00:13:44.180 --> 00:13:45.180 prosperity. 104 00:13:45.180 --> 00:13:46.180 I favor equality. 105 00:13:46.180 --> 00:13:52.140 Then he said to Mises, well, you can't say that this is wrong because after all you say 106 00:13:52.140 --> 00:13:56.020 value judgments are subjective and I happen to favor equality. 107 00:13:56.020 --> 00:14:00.620 So if you don't like this, you're opposing your judgment to mine. 108 00:14:00.620 --> 00:14:23.620 So Mises said, no, this isn't right, that in fact a socialist system would totally collapse into chaos, so this isn't a rational choice at all that we would have, it isn't a matter of just balancing one value equality against others, such as slightly higher material prosperity, it's a question of not having a viable economic system at all. 109 00:14:23.620 --> 00:14:35.620 So Mises then says, well then socialism and interventionism aren't choices that we really have to, aren't really rational for us to consider. 110 00:14:35.620 --> 00:14:46.620 So what Mises has done then is starting from the seemingly very difficult standpoint to get any ethical system, mainly complete ethical subjectivism, 111 00:14:46.620 --> 00:14:56.620 He comes up with what is in effect a very objective ethics, at least in questions of political ethics, that we have to have a free market system. 112 00:14:56.620 --> 00:15:09.620 And at one point in Human Action, he goes even further, he seems to suggest that it's not simply that all or almost all human beings choose to value material prosperity. 113 00:15:39.620 --> 00:16:09.620 It's absolutely to do this, namely establish a free market. It's still a hypothetical imperative rather than categorical. It's a special kind of hypothetical imperative that everyone in fact will accept the antecedent clause if you want to achieve material prosperity, so what we call an ascertoric imperative is one where you can drop out the conditional, so it's sort of, given the way human beings are, this is what we should do. 114 00:16:09.620 --> 00:16:22.620 Mises actually comes pretty close, at least in this passage, to having a saying that establishment capitalism is ethically mandated, a continuation of capitalism is ethically mandated. 115 00:16:22.620 --> 00:16:30.620 Now Rothbard thought there were some problems with this analysis. 116 00:16:30.620 --> 00:16:38.060 He said, first of all, what happens if an interventionist says, well, all right, these 117 00:16:38.060 --> 00:16:46.020 measures will have certain effects that you say we don't want? 118 00:16:46.020 --> 00:16:51.580 But what if the interventionist says, well, I'm willing to put up with these consequences 119 00:16:51.580 --> 00:16:58.060 or that in fact he has other ends that he wants to achieve, such as power for himself? 120 00:16:58.060 --> 00:17:00.060 The Theory of Money and Credit 121 00:17:28.060 --> 00:17:40.060 Now supposing Mises then said, oh, but look, supposing people thought that way and just did that, then various other, all sorts of people would do the same thing. 122 00:17:40.060 --> 00:17:51.060 We could see that in the long run this would lead to disastrous consequences because we would have various people trying to interfere with the free market to promote their own goals in some way. 123 00:17:51.060 --> 00:17:56.620 in some way, but when they all did this, these policies would get in the way of each other 124 00:17:56.620 --> 00:18:05.620 and we would soon face a collapse in the economy and everyone would find the results very bad. 125 00:18:05.620 --> 00:18:11.740 Well, according to Rothbard, Mises is making another assumption here, which is that the 126 00:18:11.740 --> 00:18:19.820 long-term consequences of our actions should outweigh the short-term consequences. 127 00:18:19.820 --> 00:18:43.820 Rothbard says, what if people have very high time preference rates? What if somebody says what I care about is what happens right now? Maybe this will have very bad, something I support will have very bad consequences later, but I don't really care about that. What I care about is what's to be done right now. 128 00:18:43.820 --> 00:18:51.980 Now if Mises were to say, would Mises be able to say anything in answer to this other than 129 00:18:51.980 --> 00:18:54.820 he didn't share that valuation? 130 00:18:54.820 --> 00:18:59.220 He thought that people should take account more of the long-term consequences, but if 131 00:18:59.220 --> 00:19:04.780 he does that, isn't he again just imposing his own or suggesting that other people follow 132 00:19:04.780 --> 00:19:06.780 his subjective preferences? 133 00:19:06.780 --> 00:19:14.060 Is he able to do anything more than indicate his own views of things? 134 00:19:14.060 --> 00:19:21.580 Has he entirely gotten out of the apparent predicament that his ethical subjectiveism 135 00:19:21.580 --> 00:19:23.380 seems to not get him into? 136 00:19:23.380 --> 00:19:28.220 Remember, he tried to get out of this by saying we could come up with some sort of strong 137 00:19:28.220 --> 00:19:33.020 justification for the free market, even starting from ethical subjectivism, but Rothbard says 138 00:19:33.020 --> 00:19:38.420 Maybe he can't do that or at least not do that fully. 139 00:19:38.420 --> 00:19:41.860 What would Mises say in reply to this? 140 00:19:41.860 --> 00:19:48.220 Mises, as far as I know, never addressed Rothbard's worries, but I think he might say something 141 00:19:48.220 --> 00:19:53.300 like this, well, maybe you're right in pointing out these problems, but this is the best we 142 00:19:53.300 --> 00:19:58.740 can do because, after all, ethical judgments just are subjective and might be nice or good 143 00:19:58.740 --> 00:20:02.500 if they weren't, but that's just the way things are. 144 00:20:02.500 --> 00:20:09.220 So this raises the question, which Rothbard was very concerned with in his natural law, 145 00:20:09.220 --> 00:20:15.300 why are ethical judgments in fact subjective in the way Mises was saying? 146 00:20:15.300 --> 00:20:19.660 Now the view that they are seems to be based on something like this. 147 00:20:19.660 --> 00:20:26.780 We say we have a description, we can get a description of any event or situation, and 148 00:20:26.780 --> 00:20:32.460 then given this description we have a choice to make of what are we going to do about it. 149 00:20:32.460 --> 00:20:41.460 How do we like this? For example, suppose we say that smoking causes lung cancer. Well, 150 00:20:41.460 --> 00:20:46.860 supposing someone is thinking, should he smoke? He could say, given that situation, smoking 151 00:20:46.860 --> 00:20:55.140 causes lung cancer, how do I feel about this? It would be very unusual if somebody said 152 00:20:55.140 --> 00:21:01.820 that he liked lung cancer, but at least it's conceivable that somebody might. I remember 153 00:21:01.820 --> 00:21:11.460 There was a joke years ago, they warned me not to tell jokes, but when the information 154 00:21:11.460 --> 00:21:21.180 started circulating in the 1950s or 60s that smoking was causing all sorts of diseases, 155 00:21:21.180 --> 00:21:26.220 somebody suggested that the tobacco companies should counter this with the slogan, cancer 156 00:21:26.220 --> 00:21:30.100 is good for you. 157 00:21:30.100 --> 00:21:35.580 So although this leaves a point there you see would be even if this is extremely unusual 158 00:21:35.580 --> 00:21:38.380 don't we still have the fact that we could make this kind of choice. 159 00:21:38.380 --> 00:21:44.280 Most people wouldn't but still we have a situation of choice given any description we can make 160 00:21:44.280 --> 00:21:49.200 we have to evaluate it in some way and this is really up to us to do. 161 00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:56.480 Now the natural law position that Rothbard adopts doesn't deny that given the description 162 00:22:26.480 --> 00:22:29.160 The qualifying term applies to certain things. 163 00:22:29.160 --> 00:22:34.220 Say we say something is a good knife, it has certain qualities that are not ones that we 164 00:22:34.220 --> 00:22:39.160 choose, but given the function of the knife, we could say a good knife is sharp or has 165 00:22:39.160 --> 00:22:43.240 certain other features that will cut in a certain way. 166 00:22:43.240 --> 00:22:47.800 We could list these features and these are parts, these are the qualities that make the 167 00:22:47.800 --> 00:22:49.280 knife good. 168 00:22:49.280 --> 00:22:56.240 So we could say that the goodness of the knife doesn't depend on our making some kind of 169 00:22:56.240 --> 00:23:05.300 choice about a certain description is just an objective property of whatever is in question. 170 00:23:05.300 --> 00:23:09.760 This would apply, we could say, well, for human beings, what's good is what would promote 171 00:23:09.760 --> 00:23:14.920 the flourishing of human beings and we could then try to come up with what we think human 172 00:23:14.920 --> 00:23:17.640 nature requires for flourishing. 173 00:23:17.640 --> 00:23:23.040 And people might have all sorts of choices or attitudes about this, but this wouldn't 174 00:23:23.040 --> 00:23:30.080 in itself determine whether the thing, whether good was properly applied, given that human 175 00:23:30.080 --> 00:23:35.480 nature in a certain way just certain things are good regardless of how particular people 176 00:23:35.480 --> 00:23:37.520 might feel about this. 177 00:23:37.520 --> 00:23:47.040 Now, Rothbard developed, as he developed his natural law ethics, he placed particular stress 178 00:23:47.040 --> 00:23:54.640 as everyone knows on the self-ownership axiom that each person is the owner of his or her 179 00:23:54.640 --> 00:24:00.920 own body and from that he went on to develop a system of property rights that given that 180 00:24:00.920 --> 00:24:07.560 there's unowned land people have a right to acquire property by mixing their labor with 181 00:24:07.560 --> 00:24:08.560 it. 182 00:24:08.560 --> 00:24:11.720 This is really the basis of his ethical system. 183 00:24:11.720 --> 00:24:17.000 I think we could see, again, in this dialect that I've tried to construct between Mises 184 00:24:17.000 --> 00:24:23.260 and Rothbard, Mises had, principally in his book Socialist, had a criticism of this kind 185 00:24:23.260 --> 00:24:28.800 of natural law ethics, specifically of the right to appropriate property. 186 00:24:28.800 --> 00:24:35.280 I think I'll conclude by just giving what this criticism is and how Rothbard attempted 187 00:24:35.280 --> 00:24:36.280 to answer it. 188 00:24:36.280 --> 00:24:43.800 Mises, of course, in general, didn't like the notion of natural rights. He quotes with 189 00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:52.840 apparent approval Jeremy Bentham, the great English legal philosopher, who said natural 190 00:24:52.840 --> 00:24:59.080 rights is nonsense and natural and prescriptible rights, which is a phrase found in the French 191 00:24:59.080 --> 00:25:05.680 Declaration of Rights. He says nonsense on stilts. So Mises didn't like natural rights 192 00:25:05.680 --> 00:25:35.680 at all. But he said, supposing somebody wants to try to accept this system, he would say people could acquire property if they mix their labor with unowned property. Well, he said, suppose we say this, this has no relevance to the actual world at all, because if you take any actual property, you try to trace it back in time to see if you could come up with an original owner, you'd be either unable to do so or you'd come into a certain 193 00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:39.840 Act of Violence by which certain people were dispossessed of their property. You can never 194 00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:46.360 really establish who the original owner was of any property. So according to Mises, doesn't 195 00:25:46.360 --> 00:25:52.400 this really make this whole Lockean principle really of no relevance? 196 00:25:52.400 --> 00:25:59.400 Now Rothbard, in reply to this advanced rule, said, well supposing this is right, we can't 197 00:25:59.400 --> 00:26:15.400 We can't trace the actual title of, we can't find out who's the original owner of a given piece of property, we should say that whoever is occupying it should count as the title holder because other people can't show he's wrong. 198 00:26:15.400 --> 00:26:27.400 So he said, well, the presumption is that we should try that the person who's occupying the property should be taken as the owner of the property in terms of the Lockean natural right. 199 00:26:27.400 --> 00:26:28.400 and Financial Rights. 200 00:26:28.400 --> 00:26:33.560 So I think the key point here is just to see, which I'll leave open for discussion, is this 201 00:26:33.560 --> 00:26:37.600 an adequate response to Mises' objection? 202 00:26:37.600 --> 00:26:45.480 Should we say that if you acquire property that so far as can be established doesn't 203 00:26:45.480 --> 00:26:54.560 have any, no one has clear title to, does this give you a strong, there's nearly a strong 204 00:26:54.560 --> 00:27:02.480 Claim it on a natural rise basis, say you could acquire the property if no one had clear title to it, sort of. 205 00:27:02.480 --> 00:27:13.000 So I think this seems to be an extremely important issue that I hope other people will address in future work, but I certainly won't do so. 206 00:27:13.000 --> 00:27:15.440 All right. Well, thanks very much.