I was a little worried that this particular time slot comes right after lunch and I had
the vision of people sitting back for a post-lunch rest and it falls to me to somehow disturb
the slumber and somehow, well, I immediately hit upon the only solution to this and that
was I thought I would lead you all in a rousing rendition of that anti-Semitic classic Fiddler
And anti-Semitic, of course, simply because there's no Jew on earth who would sing a song
if I was a rich man.
I don't know about you, but we sing when I am a rich man.
But apparently the enthusiasm everybody has for the work of the institute will make that
painful song completely unnecessary.
And still, I thank you all very much indeed for this opportunity and for this honor.
And if I can also thank those, many of whom, or some of whom at least, are responsible
for me being here, but more importantly, people from whom I've learned an enormous amount.
And Lew Rockwell, of course, tops the list. I really appreciate the opportunity to be
here. And also, all I've learned from you, Lew, over the years. Appreciate that. Walter
Walter Block, there he is, so much, learned so much from Walter and he's done so much
for me, so thank you very much indeed as well, I really appreciate that.
Kurt Doolittle, is he here? Kurt Maked? Kurt doesn't seem to be here, but he's somebody
in that category. Sam Silver from Atlanta, who really was one of the first to expose
who's me to the interface between religion and economics, drove me here from Atlanta
this morning. And needless to say, obviously, the spirit of Murray Rothbard hovering palpably
in the room, I think. I think Murray used to enjoy being a rabbi to a rabbi. And for
my part, of course, I was very happy to sit at his feet and drink of the wisdom, which
I did in good measure, so that was always a great pleasure and something that was very
comfortable for me.
One of the first things I did when Lew extended this invitation, and he didn't give me a lot
of time to say yes or no.
I was ready to say yes right away, which I did before I even knew what was entailed.
But the first thing I did was I went to see who are the people who have given this Lew
Church Memorial Lecture in the past.
And I've got to be honest, I was immediately overwhelmed by an extremely uncomfortable inferiority complex.
The list was one after the other, prominent economists, people who have published, in some cases, dozens of books,
and I really, I thought I was going to have to come here with a paper bag over my head somehow and just do my thing.
But, you know, then I thought about it and I thought it's the Lew Church Memorial Lecture.
Lew Church made money. He was a businessman.
And so it doesn't matter how many books you've published,
it matters how many books you've sold.
That's the way I looked at it. And so,
so we're, you know, I may not have published that many books, audio CDs,
but we are approaching a quarter million
I do believe passionately in the business system. I believe in making money. I do. And I believe in making money because my culture and religious background assures me that in a reasonably free market, I can make a lot of money.
I do, and I believe in making money because my culture and religious background assures me
that in a reasonably free market and in a world of honest transparency in interactions,
a world where I don't believe I have to pull a fast one over somebody else in order to make a dollar
because I don't think my dollar represents his loss,
In such a world, making money is a certificate of good performance.
It's a mark of virtue. That's exactly what it is.
And so I began realizing a number of years ago that there was an area of research that needed looking at.
And the area of research was very simple, which was why is it that Jews are disproportionately good with money?
Good with Money. Now I realized of course that if anybody tried to do this, anyone studied
this who was not circumcised, they would be instantly demonized for bigoted anti-Semitism.
How dare you even notice that Jews are disproportionately good with money? Well, Jews represent just
about 2% of the American population and in the Forbes 400 list that means there should
between 8 and 9, Jews maybe, and there's never fewer than 60, usually closer to 100.
Stop that!
It doesn't mean there are no poor Jews, it just means Jews are disproportionately good with money.
And I realized that if this area of research was going to be done, it would have to be done by me,
because I realized this is probably the only field in all of academia where removal of a small piece of skin
converts bigotry to research.
Okay, it doesn't have to be that small.
I mean, just a piece of skin.
All right, there it is.
Okay.
That's what does it.
And I thought we need to really study this and understand why is it that Jews have excelled.
And I obviously looked at all the main myths and theories.
One of them obviously is taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, where the word Jew appears as a verb, as in to Jew somebody, and I thought, well, you know, maybe Jews excel because they rip people off all the time, and there's no question about it that feeling free to rip people off all the time is a massive advantage in business for a limited period of time.
So, I studied that and found that, in fact, by the way, I researched, particularly through the South, I really enjoyed that,
because I found small town after small town, Natchez was one town in the South,
where there were Jewish people who had done business with non-Jews in the vicinity for years, decades.
The relationships were long and durable and warm and positive and friendships were part of the business relationships.
and I found this to be standard across the country. It's not possible to have long-term friendly relationships with people you're doing business with if the theory and governing principles of those people is rip them off.
So I had to reject that theory and there were a number of other such theories. One of them, of course, is the well-known racial theory that the Cossacks killed off all the poor Jews, leaving the rich ones to pass the money gene down in their sperm.
And needless to say, modern medical sciences yet fail to identify this mysterious gene.
And in any event, if there was such a thing, you wouldn't find the popular phenomenon of usually third or fourth generation of wealthy dynasties frittering it away and somehow or another being populated by scions and heirs with zero economic capacity whatsoever.
So the notion that somehow rich Jews managed to save themselves and pass this on, that just made absolutely no sense, and neither did any of the other theories.
Leaving only one explanation for why it is that Jews are disproportionately good with money.
The primary main explanation has to do with Roger Bannister.
Roger Bannister was the first human being in history to run a mile in under four minutes in the year...
You're good. You are good. Have you noticed that?
People who are into economics are into reality. They're people who know things.
How many... Now, you know, most... You go to a college audience...
Nobody knows. May 1954. Anyway, there it is. May 1954. Does the mile in four minutes.
Anybody know how many people ran the mile in four minutes the next year?
Approximately one, ten, hundred, how many?
Yeah, actually a few dozen. And how about in the last five years?
Hundreds, right? Thousands probably. I don't know the exact number, but it's limitless.
Well, if it's so easy to run a mile in four minutes that thousands of people have done it since May 1954,
how come nobody did it in January 1954 and they could have got all the fame and fortune?
It's one very simple thing. It's the same reason that last year hundreds of people went up Everest,
but when Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay did it a year earlier in 1953, it was astounding.
Now, I'm not saying I could do it, and I couldn't run a mile in four minutes either, but it's totally doable.
You know why? Because we now know that it can be done.
That makes all the difference, because we are predominantly spiritual creatures with a physical outfit.
We are not physical creatures with a spiritual dimension. We are not people with a soul. We are souls with a body.
That's how important your mental state is. That's how important it is in health. When people speak about holistic health, we're talking about the ability of the mind to impact the body.
Lewis Thomas writes engagingly about the ability of the human mind to get rid of warts, using placebos.
It's astonishing we can do anything with our minds as long as we believe in it.
You've got to believe it can be done, you've got to believe it's worth doing.
And ladies and gentlemen, the single most important reason why Jews have excelled in business over the years
is because they have believed, implicitly, without a shadow of a doubt,
that making money is in and of itself a good thing.
That when you make money, you are de facto doing something good.
You do not have to give it away afterwards in order to validate your virtue.
You don't have to be the modern equivalent of the ancient pirate
who raped and plundered all his life and then built a palace and a church for the
bishop in order to acquire legitimacy and respectability and prestige in the
community. Not like that at all. If you became wealthy and were not a
charitable person, you've still done good. It's reprehensible, but you've certainly
and certainly still done good. And so, for Jews, it's a perfectly natural phenomenon.
By the way, I wish what I was saying were true, for all Jews.
But, you know, I can't mislead you without stating clearly that, unfortunately,
somewhere between 60 and 75% of the people who identify as Jews in the United States of America
would happily stone me for almost everything I am saying today, because they don't believe it.
That's one of the reasons that you do not find quite the same level of Jewish entrepreneurship
in the community that you used to find a few generations ago.
So there have been serious and tragic changes, and I'll probably have a minute or two to sort of explain
how and why that has come about.
But if you think about the generation of Jews that came over and were peddlers, my grandfather, a peddler, in Judaism an honorable calling, an honorable calling, traveled from town to town, welcomed wherever he went.
Now, today, most people think, peddler, you're going to knock on somebody's door, you're bothering them, you're disturbing them, that's not what used to happen to Grandpa Lapin.
They used to like it when he used to knock on the door. So, I will give you through a Jewish lens what life was like for Grandpa Lapin.
And I'll save all the disappointments and I'm going to compress a long and grueling day into the next 60 seconds.
They load it up on the wagon and Grandpa Lappen trundles off with their table.
At this point, if we did a quick financial statement on this family, they are better off by how much?
Ten dollars.
Ten dollars, okay. On most campuses they say five.
So, this is fun.
Grandpa Lappen stops at the hardware store, spends a dollar on some paint and a few nails, knocks on the next house.
Again, I'm leaving out all the people that weren't home, the people who didn't want anything, we're just moving along quickly here.
Knocks on the next house, say, hey, anybody here want a table? And the woman says, well, just a moment, my daughter's getting married in two weeks' time.
Agatha? Agatha comes right up, she says, do you need a table? She says, well, we're actually going to buy a table at Ethan Allen.
My grandpa Lappen says, how much are you going to pay for it? She says, $20.
He says, well, I got one on my wagon you can have for $10.
Now, mind you, it had some scratches and one leg was loose, but I put some nails in, gave it a new coat of paint.
She says, let me take a look at it. She comes down and takes a look.
She says, yeah, this will do for a starter table.
And they carry the table in and they give Grandpa Lapin $10.
Now, how much better off does the financial statement of the second family show they are?
Also $10. So now we're better off on aggregate. The village is better off by $20.
Well, no, you forgot the dollar in the till of the hardware store, and you've also forgotten
the arbitrage.
How much has Grandpa Lapin got in his pocket?
Four dollars still.
And there's always somebody in an audience, not an audience like this, but at a university
audience, there's usually somebody who thinks this is smoke and mirrors, and that I've somehow
played fast with the figures here.
I haven't.
It's very, very simple.
I'm about to give you the finest economic definition of one of the most successful companies on the internet that made money from day number one I'm referring to, eBay.
The best definition of eBay is 70,000 grandpa lapens working simultaneously.
That's all it is. It's the greatest peddler in the world.
all it does is finds people who want to rather get some money instead of the
whatever it is that they've got sitting in their garage so they're better off at
the end of that transaction and then it finds somebody who wants to give money
in exchange for that particular thing because it's exactly what they want and
it makes them better off and guess what there's an arbitrage eBay's got a few
dollars in their pocket as well just like Grandpa Lapin that's how it works
Works, and so there is this deep conviction that by engaging in commerce, you're doing
something good and you're doing something wonderful and you're doing something helpful
for people.
And so it was no surprise to Grandpa Lapin and to his descendants that when he knocked
on the door to offer a transaction, people responded warmly and enthusiastically because
Well, somehow mysteriously, after he had passed through, everybody felt better off, because
they actually were.
Exactly so.
When you do something for another human being, and there is an exchange that takes place,
everybody is better off, that is not a hard thing to understand.
And this thing is rooted within the morality of the biblically-based Judeo-Christian system.
And that's why it is, both in the Lord's language, which is Hebrew, which was well known to most
of the founders of our country, was well known to most of the colonial clergymen, one of
whom Cotton Mather used to refer to Yale as our New England Batemidrash, Batemidrash is
House of Study
They were very, very familiar with these texts, very familiar, and I do believe that had a lot to do with the United States of America becoming the world's greatest engine of prosperity and freedom.
You don't really have to say prosperity and freedom for people in the know because people in the know know those two always go together.
And so it's no wonder because within Hebrew, and by the way it's been retained in English, we use exactly the same word for how to treat a customer as how to worship God.
This past weekend you might have attended a worship service, and if you go to Seattle, or maybe you don't have to go as far as Seattle, but you go somewhere where there's a Nordstrom store and you buy a pair of shoes,
You will find that as you want to try on a pair of shoes, without feeling that he's engaging in anything menial whatsoever,
the salesman does this in front of you, right here, and he's down on his knees changing your shoe.
That's called customer service, because if you please one of God's children,
Then you're obviously pleasing God as well.
Now, my wife and I have been blessed with seven children,
and so we've experienced something over the years that most of you probably are,
your families are immune to, our family's just been really rough on this,
and that is bickering and squabbling between siblings when they're little.
And one of the great delights of watching them get a little bit older
is when that fades away and they start taking care of one another.
And it's really it's hard to measure the joy as a parent when you see your children relating to one another with with closeness and compassion and consideration. It's wonderful.
And so for me it's no mystery that in the same way that as a father I'm thrilled when all my kids take care of one another that our father in heaven should be thrilled and delighted and get a great big smile on his face when he sees somebody take care of a customer in a store.
Well, yeah, that makes sense. And somebody might say, well, he's doing it for profit.
Again, in the culture of the Torah,
actions trump intent. Our belief is that only the good Lord himself knows what lies inside the hearts of men.
How can I possibly attribute a motive to you when I barely know why I do things myself sometimes?
And so the notion that I can discredit the virtue of your action, because your motive might be selfish, well you only have to ask yourself, would you rather have a next door neighbor, who deep in his heart really, really loves you, but he keys your car and kicks your kids and kills your cat, but he really, really loves you, or would you like a next door neighbor, who deep in his heart is not really sure how he feels about Jews or Southerners,
or academics or whatever you are, but my goodness, for the last 15 years, what a great neighbor you've got, what would you rather have?
Actions trump intentions and so if somebody is taking care of you in the store and yes, he's hoping to get a tip, he's hoping to make a profit or whatever it is, what's that got to do with anything?
The action is taking care of another one of God's children.
And so we've got to understand that what's going on is a recognition that the process of economic
interaction is deeply linked to the process of relationships between human beings. And our
understanding there is that we live in a world that somehow or another appears to have been created
somehow for the purpose of bonding and connection. The Good Lord creates a world
with about 110 elements, a little more than that as of last weekend, they keep
cropping up, but basically 110 elements. And you look around you today and I would
bet that there is probably not a single element that has played a useful part in
in your life today or yesterday.
Anything that's played a useful part in your life has always been a mixture of elements,
a bonding of elements.
The very air you breathe is oxygen and nitrogen.
The water we drink is hydrogen and oxygen.
Iron is an element, but it's not good for much more than making cast iron lawn ornaments.
If you want to build a machine, you need steel.
Steel is a big complicated compound.
It's a mixture of everything.
And so we go all the way to something as simple as salt.
Salt was something that played a role in the sacrifices in the temple.
That is why, by the way, that in the Western tradition, this is not true in Africa, it's
not true in Asia, but in the Western tradition, we put salt on the table, and this is how
it's been since the very beginning of Western thought.
Salt on the table, why?
Our bodies need all kinds of minerals, but nobody says, excuse me, could you pass the
iron filings, please?
Your body needs iron.
Your body needs potassium.
Can anybody see the potassium flakes, please?
Could you pass them down to the center of the table?
No, because all the minerals you need, you get from the food you eat, and that's true for salt as well.
Any doctor will tell you, you don't need to add salt.
So why do they put salt on the table? Because there was always this understanding that the table
was a miniature altar. It was a place where people got together, not just to feed their bodies, but to also
partake of a soul-expanding experience.
And if it's going to represent the old altar in the temple, then it needs salt as well, and that's what they did.
Why did salt play a role? What's the point of salt? Well, salt is a perfect example of God's blueprint of connectivity,
where you can take two toxic substances like sodium and chlorine, each on its own, a real problem.
I mean, you know, you might say, why don't we just put shakers on the table labeled sodium, chlorine?
And then you could say, when your chicken soup comes, you could say, pass the chlorine, I'm on a low sodium diet.
The trouble is it would kill you, because chlorine is as toxic as sodium is.
But mysteriously, with the alchemy of relationships and the alchemy of bonding, even toxic things
become tasty and benevolent.
So it is possible to take a toxic thing like a single male, bond him to a single female,
And all of a sudden you've created something benevolent, which is why it is that God during
the beginning of Genesis appears to be a very good natured deity, I mean everything is good,
whatever he makes is good.
And the very first time he turns grumpy is when he says, not good for what?
Not good for man to be alone, because we're in a world where things depend on bonding
and Things Depend on Connectivity.
Does God want us to have great sex?
Well, I cannot pretend to really know
the inner workings of God's mind when it comes to these matters.
I really don't know.
But it doesn't surprise me as somebody who believes in a kind and loving God.
It doesn't surprise me one little bit that since God does want a man and a woman to be married to one another
and to be dedicated to one another and to their children, that he should provide as a blessing or as a benefit
to those who fulfill his wishes in that area, that he should provide them with a blessing of great sensual pleasure.
It doesn't shock me. This doesn't surprise me in any way at all.
Does God want us to be rich? I have the same answer.
To tell you the truth, I can't say with any certainty on that subject.
However, I do know that God does want us to be obsessively preoccupied
with the needs and desires of other people,
whether they're your clients or your customers,
whether they're your vendors or your employees.
Be obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people.
and it shouldn't surprise anybody who believes in a loving deity that the
result of that is the great blessing of prosperity and wealth. Surely the ultimate
way to achieve prosperity become obsessively preoccupied with the needs of
other people. Do not insist on making buggy whips while Henry Ford is building
a car down the road because now you're not focused on what other people need or
want you focused on what you want to do and this is again one of the principles
that has been very helpful to Jews over the years and that is recognizing that
the advice you sometimes get when you're graduating high school when you're
graduating college or at different stages of your life people sometimes say
to you the important thing in life is to find a job that you really love go and
and work in an area that you've really got passion for.
Wrong.
Sounds very nice, but it's wrong.
It's wrong because it's selfish.
What it's saying is, I want to make a living doing what I like doing.
You're missing the point.
This isn't about the money.
It's about your relationship with other people.
You've got to find what other people need and want and then learn how to get passionate
about supplying it.
The passion follows what needs doing.
You don't need to do what you're already passionate about.
For those few lucky people who are able to synthesize from day one, that's a blessing.
That's wonderful.
For most of the rest of us, prosperity is the result of building relationships first.
And that of course is the answer to one of the big questions, which is Abraham was a
pretty cool guy.
I mean, to this day we speak of, you know, the monotheistic religions, that flows from Abraham, it's very nice, and, but how come the children of Israel, Israel is just another name for Jacob, Abraham's grandson, but how come the people, the Jewish people or the Israelites, how come they didn't start with Abraham? We could have been the children of Abraham, we could have been the Abrahamites, it's just a neat name, what's wrong with that? What do we have to be the Israelites for? Well, because God wasn't ready to start a people with Abraham.
Abraham, there was a little bit of a problem there. One of the problems was that Abraham
was not able to convey the sense of dedication and obsession with what your brother or sister
need to his own children. Isaac and Ishmael had slight misunderstandings along the way.
Well, Abraham had at least one great son. Isaac, why don't we have the Jewish people
starting off with Isaac? No, it didn't work either because Isaac also had two sons, Jacob
Benesor, slight disagreement there over his transaction, by the way.
One of them thought a contract meant a contract, the other didn't.
Jacob purchased the birthright solemnly by means of a contract for the payment of some
food.
And later on, Esau said, I didn't know you meant it for real.
Well, pal, that's what a contract means.
That's why the Old Testament is filled with contractual relationships, because contracts
are wonderful things.
They make relationships between people thrive and flower.
They're good things.
Didn't work with Isaac.
Now we come to Jacob, whose other name was Israel.
Now Jacob has 12 sons, one of whom is Joseph.
Joseph upsets his brothers for a variety of reasons, and the brothers gather to kill him.
And they're about to slaughter him when main son, Judah, after whom the word Judaism comes,
Judah makes this profound statement.
He gathers the men around and he says to his brothers, hey, wait a sec, we're just about
to kill Joseph, but help me understand this again, how do you make a buck from selling
your brother, from killing your brother?
In Hebrew, where's the prophet, meaning monetary prophet in killing our brother?
So all the brothers sit around saying, well, let's see, who can we get to pay us for the
carcass?
I guess nobody will do that.
Wait a second!
I got it!
Instead of killing him, why don't we sell him?
Oh yeah!
That's how you make a profit off your brother!
So they sell him, and everybody's happy, except Joseph, of course.
As time goes by, Joseph becomes ruler of Egypt.
The brothers come down in a famine to buy bread, they don't know who this guy is, and
He recognizes them, gives them all the bread they want and then instructs his officers to do what?
Some of you may remember, put the money back in the bag.
The brothers that night arrive in a hotel, they open their bag to see they've got enough food to take home to dad
and everyone sees his money on the top of the bag, total terror.
We're being set up, they're going to accuse us of theft.
The brothers didn't get the message. You know what the message is?
It's not about the money idiots, it's about the relationship.
We've got to fix you guys up. You thought relationships are there to be
squandered in the name of profit
and you don't understand it's the other way around. Relationships produce profit.
And so we're going to have to show you it's not about the money, it's about the
relationships.
And it's not until the brothers catch on to that,
that we're able to actually reach the point
where Jacob is finally able to come to Egypt and be reconciled with all his sons and to
give a blessing to his grandsons, and there begins the children of Israel, and that's
exactly how it worked back then.
Because relationships depend on the uniqueness of every human being.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I mean, if you've got a friend, a friend is really nice.
You have a friend, and if nothing else, you can tell that friend a joke, because it's
just fun to tell people jokes, that's all there is to it, particularly if they laugh.
But if all of us were identical, and your friend is identical to you, that means we're
just clones of one another, as soon as you tell him a joke, his answer is, hey, stop,
I've already heard that one, I know it, in fact, I was going to tell it to you, oh, okay,
how about this one, no, no, that one also, I'm the same as you, remember?
Not only could there be no joke-telling among people who are not unique, there would also
be no trading.
There can be no commerce among people who are identical to one another.
If people are not unique, no trading, no telling jokes.
It is only through our uniqueness, it is only because I would rather have a pair of sneakers
with a red light in the heel that flashes when I walk than $20.
And if you're the shoe store in the mall, you'd rather have $20 than your inventory
of a pair of sneakers with a red flashing light.
But if we were identical, and that's one of the reasons, you never see dogs trading with
one another.
No dog says, well, I see we both want this bone.
Tell you what, why don't you take the bone now and then you can do something else for
me tomorrow.
No, because we are dogs.
We both want the bone now.
It's all we see.
The world is just one big bone taking up our total eyeballs.
That's all there is.
It is precisely the uniqueness that makes it possible.
The uniqueness is what?
Well, that's what being created in God's image actually means.
It means each and every one of us is as unique, monotheism.
We recognize God as this unique being, and so similarly, if we're created in the image
of God, then each and every one of us is unique, and there's one other similarity.
We are also able to create things just like God. We are able to create. I always resented
when we were called consumers in the textbooks. I'm not a consumer. And if we were all consumers
there wouldn't be roads, sewerage systems and museums. Those things only exist because
we create more than we consume. So we are net creators, not consumers. This is not a
a Validation of Confiscatory Rates of Taxation and so we find invariably invariably in societies
that are capable of building and creating wealth those societies also are committed
to the idea of the uniqueness of the human being by the way another way of saying the
The uniqueness of the human being is freedom. The freedom to each and everybody to be unique,
to be your own person with your own desires and drives and goals. Conversely, those societies
that are incapable of creating wealth, the socialist model invariably insist that all
human beings are the same. Have you ever seen what government housing looks like? Whether
Whether it's in Moscow or Chicago makes absolutely no difference.
You will all stay in exactly the same type house and don't you dare think of painting
your front door purple, you'll have the government on you.
Have you noticed that folks who subscribe to the world view of zero wealth creation
but just moving wealth around, they like public transport, they hate the motor car and they
are furiously and ferociously and stubbornly insisting on getting every American into a
bus or a light rail system, regardless of the fact that in virtually every major city
in America you can take a look at light rail systems going by empty with not a soul inside.
It doesn't matter.
You will learn because we will make the alternative impossible.
You are all identical to one another.
Which brings us to the point that there really are only two models for human organization.
I'm not counting tribalism.
It is true that tribalism is a way you can live.
It's not exactly a way of organizing because nobody organizes tribal societies.
They just are extended families and so three and a half thousand rulers and bureaucrats
and political power brokers in Saudi Arabia are all cousins of one another.
The tribal system, by and large, has not yet figured out how to build a bicycle.
And so I discount the tribal system as a really great way of organizing human beings.
But that leads to two ways of organizing human beings that really do work.
One of them is the Abramidic model.
And that is the model subscribed to by the founding fathers of the United States of America.
The idea that there are two aspects of life, the unchangeable and the must change.
There is the system of immutable values within which framework it is possible to generate
the kinds of behaviors and characteristics that create wealth.
And then there's another set of lives, there's another aspect of life in which things must
change all the time.
Think of it as the spiritual and the material.
Schumpeter's Creative Destruction, the idea that yesterday's economic model, if it doesn't
get destroyed today, it'll get destroyed tomorrow, it is going to go, it's painful for everyone
when it happens, but it gives birth to a completely new beginning, it is the caterpillar going
in to the cocoon and the butterfly coming out. That particular understanding that our
fundamental values underpin and provide a matrix of security for an economic system
that depends on the principle that everything must change constantly and the faster you
change and the faster you adapt the more you will be blessed with reward, monetary reward,
Prosperity and Wealth, that's the idea, but it only works within a framework of the unchangeable.
And then you've got the other version, you've got the socialist version, that's the other
way of organizing human society, and that model has an enormous advantage because it
seems to imply a moral system wrapped up within the economic system.
And so the evil is camouflaged and obscured by the terminology of for the people and caring
about people and compassion and it's for the poor and so on and so forth.
And here you've got these two models presented very clearly in the 11th chapter of Genesis.
It's the story of the Tower of Babel.
And there again there are several very important points that are just a part of a traditional
biblical understanding of human life and the organizing of human life and the story and the point in a nutshell is very simple imagine if you would that we pause and we carry on with the program and then later on this evening I get as many of you as I can to cluster around and I say hey everybody I saw there's a Home Depot store not that far from here come on tonight when the program's done let's go to the Home Depot store and buy a whole bunch of two by
Come on, look at each other, the sun getting to the sky, what's with him?
But how about if instead of that I said, hey everybody we've got an evening clear before
the program reconvenes in the morning, why don't we build an extra room for the Institute,
they're out of space, let's build them another room, let's work through the night and just
Let's make this happen, the sun's going to come up, there's going to be another one,
you're all going to look at me and say, interesting, how do we do it?
I say, no problem, we're going to go down to Home Depot, buy a whole lot of lumber,
and then we'll work through the night and somebody will go and get beer that we can
keep ourselves refreshed, and this is going to be a lot of fun, and there's a possibility
I actually might get a few of you to join me doing that.
But only if I tell you what the goal is before I tell you how you do it.
If I tell you about the doing, you know, let's go get lumber, I haven't fired your spirit,
I haven't excited your imagination, there's nothing there.
With that as background, you'll probably be astonished to hear that in those mysterious
nine verses in chapter 11 of Genesis, and again, you've got to realize, I mean, this
is a book that lies at the heart of Western civilization.
In the middle of the 15th century, when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press, you
know, he didn't run off as his first venture, the Düsseldorf Telephone Directory.
I mean, it was the Bible.
This was the center of Western civilization.
The words were studied and poured over for meaning and people understood.
This wasn't just a narrative about long forgotten people.
This was a blueprint to existence.
It was a comprehensive theory on the totality of all reality.
And so they really looked at this section and they said, oh, wait a second, this is
very striking.
This is very amazing.
Do you know what it actually says in Chapter 11?
It says that the people gather together and say,
Hey everybody, let's make bricks!
Wow! Let's make bricks!
And everybody says, Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go make bricks!
And then afterwards they say,
Now, what will we do with the bricks?
Well, we'll build a big city with a tower that goes all the way up to the sky
that Bruegel can make a painting of this and everything is fine.
So, well, why didn't you tell us what you wanted to do first?
I did. You missed the point.
The essence here is the bricks, not the tower.
You see, there are two building materials available out there.
One is stones, and the other is bricks.
And there's two fundamental differences between stones and bricks.
Stones are made by God, and each and every one of them is unique.
Bricks are made by people, and they're all absolutely identical to one another.
That's the whole point of bricks.
And that was what the Tower of Babel was all about.
It was a model of, let's make bricks out of everybody.
You're all going to be treated as if you're identical to one another,
and this is going to be a creation of man.
And what will come out of it? Yeah, it will be a tower and so on and so forth.
And it's not going to last very long, but that doesn't matter,
because the important thing is to turn all human beings into bricks, not stones.
That is very central to this understanding.
The tower was led by a man called Nimrod.
The guy he hated like poison was a guy called Abraham.
And there was this eternal struggle between the two competing visions of how to organize
society.
The Abraham model, which is what built the United States of America.
It's also what built ancient Israel.
Then you've got the Nimrod model, the centralized control from the center tower where everything
is controlled and everybody is forced to be exactly like everybody else.
And it is not hard in that matrix to recognize the difference between moral and immoral,
between right and wrong, between freedom and tyranny.
There are not halfway measures.
And let me do something at this point that I enjoy doing because one of the key things
about the Abrahamic model is that it is based on giving.
It is not based on taking.
It is based on creating and making, not on consuming and taking.
The Abrahamic model is based on figuring out how can I bless other people?
What can I do for other human beings?
I alluded earlier to the fact that my work is based on writing on a lot of this material,
producing ancient Jewish wisdom in formats that make it accessible to each and every
person in the United States of America.
And what I would like to do, if I may, is perhaps express my appreciation by the process
of perhaps doing the following.
Let me ask this, who has traveled the furthest to be here today?
Well, I guess that would be me, Seattle.
Well, thanks very much indeed.
Where did you come from?
I came from Honduras.
Oh my goodness.
Does Honduras, do I hear anything higher than Honduras?
Oh, come on, you came to this conference from Sydney, Australia?
No, did you come here from Honduras for the conference?
You did?
And you're here for the conference?
And now when are you going back?
Oh my goodness.
Really, Guatemala, Honduras, and Germany, where about?
Really? Well, come up here. Really? Well, that's very generous. You come up here anyways. Come up here because I would like to give you this.
This is a package of some of the products that we make available. I'm not going to take time to tell you about them now because they're all here, but this is the one that we're discussing tonight, Thou Shall Prosper.
And this one on the top I see here is called the perils of profanity.
This is very helpful for people who find themselves using bad language
and realize how it impacts their money-making ability,
how damaging it is to use language that is profane and destructive.
Have you ever used any bad languages?
Do you want to just tell me some of the things you really say?
No, no, no, I'm just joking. I'm just joking.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to meet you. Enjoy.
There you go.
And so, what we see are two fundamental models, an Abram model and a Nimrod model.
And what we see is a Nimrod model is based on taking from people, treating them as disposable,
Nothing but Bricks, an Abraham model that recognizes the creative power of every single individual human being.
And these two models flow from how we answer the three fundamental and transcendent questions of life.
And if you don't know what the three transcendent questions of life are, just go on an airplane ride,
particularly one that has lots of delays which sort of and it's frustrating and
they don't have beverage service pretty soon you start talking to your neighbor
you start off grumbling and complaining to each other pretty soon there's
communication going on and you find the same questions being asked all the time
particularly if you're sitting next to a child and the question is always the
same where are you from where are you going and what do you do how do you help
your fellow human beings what do you do for them I'm not nosy I don't want to
I'm not just saying how do you make a living, how do you make money, I'm saying, gee, what do you do for your fellow human beings?
And those are the three basic questions.
The three basic questions lie at the heart of the entire human experience.
The three questions are, how did we get on this planet?
And there really are only two answers to that.
And the answers have real implications.
The two answers are, number one, the good Lord created us in His image and put us here.
and a whole lot of people follow that view and that is a belief but don't forget all the major decisions in our lives are made on the basis of beliefs not knowledge when you get married you believe she's fantastic and you'll live happily ever after or vice versa it doesn't guarantee it there are no facts what's more statistics I hate that phrase alright well people know I think that folks who try and obtain all the facts by living together before
for Marriage, which seems to make all the sense in the world.
Would you buy a car without driving it around the block, they say.
But paradoxically, the marriage statistics for folks who actually try and get all the
facts are not good, because there are certain major actions in life we do on the basis of
belief and it works better that way.
You invest on belief, you do diligence, you find out everything you can, but if you actually
had all the facts, there wouldn't be any profit left, that's how the market works, it's belief.
And so people either believe that humans are on this planet because the good Lord created
us in His image with each and every one of us, with a capacity to create and with a capacity
to be unique, and He put us here.
The only other way I'm aware of answering that question is that by a lengthy process
of unaided materialistic evolution, primitive protoplasm turned into Bach and Beethoven.
Oh, don't laugh, it's really rude to laugh at people's religions.
So, do you know the third way? The only third way I know is little green men in spaceships
came and put us here, but that only postpones the question, doesn't it? Where did they come
from? So, that doesn't really help. And so it is with the question of where we're going
to end up and the question of what we're doing over here, but this fundamental question of
are we here by a process that renders us nothing but sophisticated animals or are we here as
as unique beings touched by the finger of God.
It's very, very important.
Because if we are here only as a process
of unearthed materialistic evolution,
then I am nothing but a primate.
I have less hair than many other primates.
You didn't have to laugh at that one.
You know, I don't have as good eyesight.
I can't run as quickly.
But I'm basically an animal.
I happen to have a brain that other animals don't
have the same.
But that's all I am. If that's the case, then it is only right and appropriate that
I should be taken care of by a zookeeper or a farmer in the great belt way. That makes
all the sense in the world. Because if I am an animal, and that makes me the same as all
my other animals, and that is, a farmer or a zookeeper does exactly what he has to do.
If he gives all the cows the same amount of food, comes back a few hours later and finds
that one cow has accumulated most of it and all the other cows have nothing left, he'll
do what any smart farmer does, he'll redistribute the food, it's the moral right thing to do.
And so, through this mechanism it becomes apparent that if indeed our vision is one
without any shred of spirit and without a shred of moral foundation, then I would have
have to conclude that socialism is the default position for good and decent people, barbarism
and maybe tribalism is the default position for people who don't have the act together.
But if you strip away the foundations of faith and the belief system by means of which the
human being is something unique and wondrous and special, then you also have stripped away
The foundations of a system that says freedom is more important than equality.
Because for animals, equality is more important than freedom.
The two don't go together.
And for human beings, freedom trumps equality.
That's really what it's all about.
And so we ask the question of what's right about the free market economic system.
The answer is almost everything.
In and of itself, you mustn't make the mistake of thinking that it is a moral system as well.
It's an economic system, but it's an economic system that is held up and propped and maintained
by the existence of a spiritually based moral system as well.
And that is an unbreakable combination.
It's one that is endured and it is one that has created for us all here the greatest model
of Prosperity and Freedom that the world has ever seen in all of our time.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you all so much for being part of the Mises Institute.
I thank you all for being here and I particularly thank you for the kind reception you've given
me this afternoon.
I hope that the rest of the program is uplifting and exciting and thrilling and inspiring and
helps us all spread the message of freedom across the United States in perhaps its greatest
is an hour of need for that in our lifetimes. Thank you.