There's a certain distinction that there is in my life with Professor North, an incident
that I think is part of the history of modern Austrian economics. It's not very important,
but it turns out Gary North was the first Austrian economist I ever met in person and
heard speak in person. So I thought, you know, pretty cool guy. I think I want to do this.
It was in Camden, New Jersey, which before Philadelphia was known for being the murder
capital of the world, or of the US, excuse me.
Dr. North received his PhD in history from the University of California at Riverside.
He served on the senior staff at the Foundation for Economic Education and then at the Caledon
Foundation.
He has been the editor of the Remnant Review since 1974 and of GaryNorth.com since 2006.
In 1976 he was a research assistant for Ron Paul.
Dr. North's publications have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Journal of Political
Economy, the Freeman, National Review, LewRockwell.com, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Reason and
dozens of other periodicals and websites.
He will speak to us today on Keynes and his influence.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in extending a warm welcome to Dr. North.
In discussing Keynes and his impact, I'm going to take you through basically four points.
Four points. The main thing I'm going to be talking about is the way in which the influence
of Keynes spread in the United States, the English speaking world, which is I think not
what you generally find in the standard histories of economic thought. Then I want to talk about
Keynes's influence today, very specifically today, within the last 24 months, where there
has been, I think, a significant change.
Third part of my presentation is going to be on the positioning of the Austrian School
in relation to Keynes and why I think the situation that we're facing at the present
time offers greater opportunity than anything we've had in the past seven decades.
And then finally I want to talk about a potential, I would say, research and publication agenda,
which I'm going to invite some of you to participate in, because I think the division of labor
is the effective way to accomplish certain goals that I think need to be met.
I begin then with Keynes's influence.
Keynes was an extremely good writer when he wanted to be.
And in 1919, when his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, first appeared,
It created almost an immediate sensation.
The basic argument of the book was that the Versailles Treaty imposed unreasonable reparation
demands on Germany, and that those demands were going to cripple the economy, would not
lead to anything like peace and prosperity for Germany.
In many ways, this, I would say, would be a free market argument.
He was not trusting of the wisdom of the gathered victors at Versailles in working out any kind
of an economic arrangement in some centrally planned way which was going to guarantee the
repayment of the war debts.
Now the book was well timed because this was the beginning of second thoughts about the
and the Wisdom of the war, and in fact, I think you could almost argue that it was the most important initial document to receive wide attention with respect to the lack of wisdom associated with the war, and it made his reputation rapidly.
He continued to write, usually smaller pieces, very often on monetary affairs, and the difficulty
in assessing his influence is that time and again he changed his policy prescription depending
on the external circumstances.
You could find him when he was favorable towards free trade, you could find him when he was
is favorable towards tariffs.
He made a famous statement in The Economic Consequences of the Peace regarding a statement
he attributed to Lenin with respect to the breakdown of capitalism.
And he said that Lenin had taught that inflation is an extremely effective way to undermine
the capitalist system.
And he repeated that time and again in subsequent writings.
The difficulty is that we've never been able to find any primary source document that indicated
that Lenin said it.
But on the other hand, it was certainly a cogent observation that he really should have made.
The oddity, however, is that this made Keynes's reputation early as a man who was highly suspicious
of price inflation. And then, within really months of the publication of the economic consequences of the piece, both Germany and Austria began their nearly suicidal policies of expanding the money supply in order to create a boom in the economy.
And that led, of course, to the most famous of the modern inflations in Germany between 1921 and 1923.
So again, what took place as not the consequences of Cain's book, but which took place consistent with what he had said, elevated his reputation.
And so he was, no question about it, influential in the sense of a man that the intellectual class would look to when he would publish something.
He certainly had his ideas discussed.
I don't think, however, you could say that he was a major influence at the time in terms of getting anybody in the British Treasury or anywhere else to adopt specific policies based on the cogency of his reasoning.
So it was a peculiar form of influence. He would make cogent statements, many times consistent with what free market economists would have said.
He got attention in literary magazines and in circles that are certainly outside the purview of most people with economics degrees and, of course, one of the reasons was that he never earned an economics degree.
His field was mathematics. His father put up the money to get him the chair at Cambridge, at which he taught, as the leading economist, as it turned out, of the 20th century, when, in fact, he never received a degree in economics and certainly not an advanced degree.
And in that respect, I kind of say, well, that's not a bad deal either. I'm always glad to see somebody beat the system, and he certainly did beat the system.
The influence that we think in our day, that Keynes had, has come down as a result of what Lenin would have called a transmission belt, but it was not the standard transmission belt,
In terms of an individual rights for an economic journal, that idea becomes widespread, the idea seeps down to the treasury or to some other government agency and that thereafter the particular idea is implemented.
In fact, the strange phenomenon about Keynes is that almost none of that ever happened.
In the early 1930s, the two most prominent economists, certainly in the English-speaking world and in Great Britain, were Keynes and F.A. Hayek. Hayek, having come over in the late 20s to the London School of Economics and was gaining a reputation, a very deserved reputation at the time,
by translating into terms and charts acceptable to academia the ideas of Ludwig von Mises with respect to monetary policy and also with respect to the trade cycle.
And he gained his reputation basically, to be quite honest, as a second-hand dealer in Mises' ideas.
But that was okay because Mises wrote in German and he was not widely read in the English-speaking world and so it was perfectly legitimate for one of his disciples to begin to translate not the words but the concepts that Mises had taught him and had converted him from socialism on the basis of the power of the ideas that he should sit down and begin to gain an audience for Mises' ideas, I think,
and certainly legitimate and valuable service to the English-speaking world.
And it became very obvious very early that Keynes was being challenged in a systematic way by Hayek's arguments.
And the debate began specifically in the Economic Journal, and the Economic Journal Keynes had edited,
that is now being edited by Roy Herod, and in that journal a series of exchanges took place over Keynes' treatise on money, which first volume appeared in 1930,
and Hayek spent hours, really more than hours, he spent an enormous amount of time going through Keynes' book, published a critique of it, Keynes responded,
Hayek responded, and finally, in discussing the matter with Keynes, because he knew Keynes, they were on good speaking terms,
Keynes made this remarkable statement, according to Hayek.
He said, oh well, I really don't believe it anyway, I'm onto something now completely different,
So I'm not really interested in continuing the debate.
That, at least, is how Hayek summarized what Keynes had told him.
This would have been probably 1934 or 1935, that period.
So the debate ended.
When the General Theory was published in 1936,
Hayek made what had to be one of the great
strategic intellectual miscalculations of the 20th century.
He decided he would not respond to the book
because he said, I will spend an enormous amount of time
responding to this book and then Keynes will shrug it off
and be on to something else.
And so he did not respond.
And the problem was that the world
of anything resembling classical political economy
expected him to respond because of his reputation, and when he didn't respond, there were questions
then raised as to whether he was capable of responding or whether Keynes had made this
monumental advance in economic thought in which defenders of the old political economy
could not effectively respond at all.
Hayek expressed regret on repeated occasions through the rest of his life that he had not
taken up the challenge as he personally should have done.
The book is unreadable.
That was its great strength because then nobody got in trouble for never having read it.
The ideas certainly motivated a younger group of scholars in Great Britain, especially at
Cambridge.
They believe that Keynes had done what Keynes said he had done, which Keynes had not done,
which was to overcome Say's law, that is the clearing of markets, by means of price
adjustments.
Keynes basically said, yes, the answers that I provided here have refuted Say, but he had
a caricature of Say, did not really analyze Say, and the academic world, being deep in
its heart, almost congenitally lazy, figured, I guess Keynes refuted Say because now we
don't have to go read Say, which they hadn't done in a hundred years anyway.
And that really did happen. And so you have from time to time a free market economist
going back to reread Say. And what you find is that when that perfectly cogent economist
gets done with his book, his book is almost as incomprehensible as the general theory.
Say has not really been given a fair shake in our time. And if I were to say of any 19th
The 19th century economists who really should be studied in depth and taught in depth say would be my choice if I had a choice at least for the first half of the 19th century.
Mises created his own reputation as having destroyed the argument that market pricing
clears the market.
Now when the book appeared, the world had been in a crisis for six years.
A crisis of massive unemployment of both resources and individuals.
Now there were answers provided, and the answers are the standard ones that any economist should
go to.
Price floors, higher taxes, government intervention into markets, political intervention for the
sake of votes, which led to the disruption of market exchange, all the standard answers
and the years that we would go to, to say why is this long-term unemployment continuing?
But by 1936, free market economists, even those within the camp of the faithful, even
those who had been followers of Mises, were beginning to lose faith.
We have an example, the most egregious example, I guess, of all of them, would be Lionel Robin's
book in 1934 on the Great Depression, which is a fine analysis of the Great Depression.
He later repudiated the book, and he once told Mark Skousen that he wished he had never
were written. You had others who had been obvious messesians in the 1920s.
Gottfried Haberler would be one, Fritz Machlup would be another, who steadily by the 1940s
were beginning to drift away from anything openly attributable to any idea or work that
Mises Roke. I believe the Great Depression basically shell-shocked some of the best minds of its era.
Now that was not true of Hayek, but then Hayek was in that stupid position of saying,
I'm not going to respond. Keynes, in effect, got a free ride, and he got a free ride for a very short period of time,
And then it was no longer an issue.
And the free ride was from 1936 to, in Britain's case, 1939.
And then World War II began.
And the printing presses began.
And government rationing began.
And everybody accepted it as a war effort.
And they solved the unemployment problem
by drafting men into the armed forces
and sending them into Europe.
and then, in our case, Asia, in the 40s, taking them out of the labor force.
So certainly that reduced the problem of unemployed resources.
We made bombs and we bombed whatever we could find.
And then on the other side, they rebuilt whatever we had recently bombed.
And so the world did not have a problem any longer with unemployed resources.
They just had a problem with approximately 60 million dead people, most of whom were
civilians. That was the problem.
So Keynes went to the Treasury after the war began and was part of Treasury finance, part
of the whole system of rationing and financing of the war effort. And across the world we
We had the war effort and war financing overcome the problems of the 1930s by means of vastly
worse problems.
Mises would have understood that and did understand that.
The middle-of-the-road policy, as he said, leads to socialism, however, in that case
it was wartime socialism and much more destructive than any other kind.
So Keynes during the period from 36 until his death in 46 received almost a free ride
academically speaking.
So his followers went to work as good followers did, extending the insights of the master
and then the wartime economy eliminated the problem.
The curious phenomenon that is never discussed in the textbooks is the chronology of that period.
That is, the book appeared in 1936. Now consider the United States.
The United States had been suffering from deflation because of the collapse of the fractional reserve banking system.
And so from 1930 through 1933, 9,000 banks went under.
And when they went under, they took the deposits, and when the deposits went under, the money supply shrank.
And then you couple that with the various forms of price floors that were established initially in the Hoover administration and then carried forward into the Roosevelt administration.
So naturally, you got massive unemployment.
In 1934, the FDIC went into effect.
That was the end of the bank runs. That was the end of the deflation.
From that point on, the inflationary policy of the Federal Reserve system
were able to be transformed into actual M1,
and the money supply went up and the price level also began to move.
Then, in 1936, after the change had already been going on for at least two years in the United States,
then comes the general theory calling for the expansion of money and the running of massive federal deficits
as a means of curing the economy's problems.
Well, the main problem, which had been deflation, which had been the result of the fractional reserve banking system,
That problem was no longer a problem, certainly in the United States.
So again, Keynes got a free ride.
It looked as though what he had recommended was working,
when in fact, by the time he got into print recommending it,
the policies had already been implemented.
And they were political facts throughout the West,
and the politicians wanted to see that they had been validated by an economist and that is exactly what Keynes did.
He didn't change the policy, he didn't establish the policy, he simply wrote the footnote to justify the policy and his reputation soared.
Hayek gave an interview, which is on YouTube, which I posted on my site this week, in which
he talked about Keynes's influence, and he made a cogent observation, which is very rarely
referred to.
He said Keynes in 46 at the time of his death did not have overwhelming support within the
Community of Economists.
He said that overwhelming support came later.
Well, it came very fast.
By 1950, there was a survey made, or at least published, by the American Economic Review
on the opinions, the general opinions of members.
And something in the range of 80% of them had by then adopted the Keynesian position.
They didn't do it by reading Keynes. They did it by reading Samuelson's textbook published
in 1948. That was the source of the enormous extension of the influence of John Maynard
Keynes. Samuelson put it into something at least remotely resembling English, in arguments
Notice that if you struggled, you might occasionally begin to follow, and it was assigned as a
textbook to almost every student in the country.
No economic textbook has ever matched it.
I would go so far as to say that at the collegiate level, no other textbook has ever matched
it in terms of the number of sales and the royalties generated.
And by the time that the book began to get competitors, the competitors had basically
They all adopted some version of Samuelson's approach to the discipline of teaching first-year students.
They did not read Keynes, and he did not use the Keynesian formulas.
He used his own formulas, and he was certainly famous for his book, his monumental study,
which I guess was an extension of his doctoral dissertation on the foundations of economics.
Now, nobody read that either.
In fact, there was an old statement when I was in grad school that said nobody, meaning professors,
nobody ever got fired for assigning Keynes's textbook
and nobody ever got fired for not having read foundations of economic analysis.
So I guess you'd have to say, Samuelson got the best of both worlds.
He established his reputation with a book nobody read, and he established multimillion-dollar
stream of income with a book that everybody had to read.
So I contend that it was the writers of the textbooks, especially Samuelson, as the model
that led to the enormous influence of Keynes.
But remember, by the time those policies were being recommended, in the name of the general theory,
in fact the conditions that had led to the crisis had been gone for at least 15 years.
That is, collapsing banks, collapsing money supply, and the inability of markets to clear.
That world in the post-war world of inflation,
That world, in the post-war world of the FDIC, no longer existed.
And what happened was, the general theory, which was not general, which was applied to
a unique historical set of circumstances which no longer really existed by the time the book
came into print, that was transmuted and translated into textbook applications that said, you've
You've got to run massive deficits, and if need be, you've got to fund them by the expansion
of money, when the conditions which generated the initial demand for the book and the popularity
of the book were long gone.
So the solution that the politicians had applied before Keynes wrote the book, for which Keynes
got the credit, now those solutions were translated into a world in which the problems no longer
existed. Now it became clear by the mid 1960s that Keynes had had this enormous
triumph. There was the famous cover of Time magazine in which they featured
Keynes. They had that famous quote of Friedman that we're all Keynesians now. He
backed off later and said he meant methodologically but then that's kind of
a decade later, under the enormous impact of, first, the Nixon recession, then the Nixon-Arthur
Sanderburn's inflation, the abolition of what remained of the gold standard, followed by
whip inflation now under Ford, followed by an even worse recession than Nixon had.
By that time, the old Phillips curve was being called into question, that you could have
expansion of money, rise of prices and rising unemployment all at the same time.
And that event called into question, at least in some people's minds, the legitimacy of
the Keynesian paradigm.
And Keynes began to get a challenge.
And the main challenge he got was from Friedman and the Chicago School of Economists.
But at least there was a challenge.
And then other schools of thought came along that were not tied openly to Keynes' worldview
on the absolute necessity of running the government deficits in times of crisis.
And then you actually had, lo and behold, you had a Federal Reserve chairman under Volcker
who said, if we don't stop expanding the money supply, we're going to destroy the capital
market.
He said, we're going to stop.
And he did stop.
And he got the recession that any good Austrian economist would have predicted.
And he pretty much stuck to his guns.
And the inflation of the money supply certainly slowed.
And you did get marginal tax cuts in the income taxes under Reagan's reforms.
So at least you had plausible alternatives to the Keynesian orthodoxy that had certainly
prevailed from 48 to say 71, 72, maybe 73. There was at least debate. Now we're into
another adventure, like the 1930s, and we went through that adventure in 2008. And in
In a period from the beginning of September to the end of October, the American economic
system was hijacked, I don't know what else to call it, it was hijacked.
A secretary of the treasury comes before the public and unilaterally announces the nationalization
of what constitutes 90% of the mortgage market, and there is not a whimper, there is not a
A hand go up in Congress, other than one hand go up in Congress.
Ron Paul's hand that said there was anything wrong with this.
And then, the next month, you have the bailouts of the largest banks.
You have the beginning of massive expansion of the monetary base, approaching a trillion
dollars by the Federal Reserve.
You have swaps at face value of treasury debt in exchange for unmarketable pieces of paper that the banks were holding,
which if you want an image for it, it was like trading the family heirloom sterling silver for crushed beer cans at face value in terms of pounds.
and nobody said a word save one.
So you have a situation in which the entire
academic community of economists said
we don't like it
but it is necessary
with the only exceptions being the Austrians
who said don't expand the money supply, don't intervene into the mortgage markets,
Don't swap federal debt. Don't bail out the banks. Stop, stop, stop.
Now, that's a standard response of Austrian economists.
What made it different in 2008 is that in 2006, a lot of them said the thing's going to break.
And it's going to break soon. It's going to crash.
And the conventional economist riding high on the bubbles that Greenspan had created said,
there is no such crash coming, it is not going to happen.
And the archetype of it, the standing testimony, which I hope will be here on YouTube up to the final judgment,
was the confrontation between Peter Schiff and Arthur Laffer, which many of you have seen,
in which Schiff says it's going down, and Laffer basically said,
I don't know what kind of economics this man is basing his theories on, but it is not going down.
And Schiff spoke representatively for the Austrian perspective, and he was right.
And he was not the only man to do it.
But certainly he did it, he did it on television and in a very short period of time it was on YouTube where it remains.
Because you need a representative crisis once in a while and you need a representative confrontation once in a while and if it happens to be videoed and on YouTube it becomes a permanent testimony.
So the Austrians got credit in retrospect for having predicted it, and therefore when
they said don't intervene to bail it out, they established themselves as people who
had the bona fides of having predicted the crisis.
And the Chicago School and the Rational Expectations School and the Behavioral Economists and all
the other subdivisions of the profession sat on the sidelines and basically said either
Is there nothing, or they said, well we don't like it, but I guess it's necessary?
Now that is my, I guess you would say, my second point.
That is, the Austrian School between 2006 and late 2008 established territory, marked out territory
said we can explain causation, we predicted it, and now we're going to tell you why the
next round isn't going to work. And this is an historic opportunity. And this is what
I hope is not going to be followed by what might be called a Hayek moment of 1935. This
This is an extraordinary opportunity.
The 2008 recession was like what was known in Vietnam as the bouncing beddy, which was
a landmine which would pop out of the ground and scatter shrapnel in all directions.
And that's what it did to every school of thought out there except the Austrian School.
And we didn't get taken down by that event, because we had buried ourselves, in effect,
behind a barrier.
And the barrier was, we predicted it was going to happen, and it's happening in exactly the
way that we said it was going to happen.
And by the way, we're going to show you, once again, why it happened.
Now Lew Rockwell has a rule.
He says, you really don't get very far by telling somebody, I told you so.
But you can get a long way with the general public by saying, we told them so.
There is a difference.
And that is our opportunity.
In my view, Keynesianism now is taking all of the credit for illegitimate reasons.
I did not know literally until yesterday that there is a concept so wide in the public today
called the Keynesian resurgence that wiki has a long extended paper on it with all the footnotes
on Keynesian resurgence on Wikipedia.
They are taking the credit for having saved the economy just like they did in the 1930
to 1940 era, just like they did after 36. They're taking credit for what wasn't Keynesianism.
Look, you can't find any Keynesian economist, including Keynes, who would have said that
you should nationalize the mortgage market unilaterally and bail it out by 1.25 trillion
dollars of Federal Reserve credit as a means of keeping the American economy going.
There would not have been any Keynesian so mad as to have gone into print with something
like that in 2006 or 2007.
There's nothing Keynesian about that policy.
It's ad hocery to the core.
It's just Bernanke sitting up there saying, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
I know, we'll write checks. And that's what he did. There's no systematic policy or theory
of causation behind that other than, wait a minute, Goldman Sachs is going down. Citibank
may go down. That's the only cause and effect. We've got to keep the doors open. There's
no rationality behind it. There's no paradigm behind it. It's just a central banker creating
Making Digits and Buying Anything He Could Get His Hands On.
Now yes, there was a bailout of what, $787 billion, we don't know how much, but some
number in that range, after the bailout, after the checks were written, after the mortgage
markets were nationalized.
Yeah, yeah, then sure, they get the Keynesian bailout, which in terms of the percentage
that you're talking about, compared to this vast expansion of fiat money by the Fed, is nickel and dime stuff.
It's not in the same league at all.
And they say, well, see, the economy has been sold.
The recovery is here.
Oh, yeah, you've got this problem of about 10% unemployment, but the recovery is here, right?
Banks are lending less money today than they did last year, and they lent less money in 2009 than they did in 2008.
The greatest contraction of bank loans since the Great Depression, the continuing collapse of the housing price market,
and we're told this is a recovery, and furthermore, it was the stimulus policy that gave us the benefit.
ad hocery, retroactive assessment.
Now, we know where it's going to...
Well, there are two scenarios of where this can lead.
Two basic scenarios.
And I'm a great fan of country music,
and there is a country music figure
who appeared almost out of nowhere
about a year and a half ago,
who laid down the basic framework of what we've got in front of us.
He goes by the name of Merle Hazard, and his partner is Bretton Wood.
And they recorded this song, and it's on YouTube.
And the song is called, Will It Be Zimbabwe or Japan?
Now I'm not saying that Breton and Merle are the most talented musicians, certainly, and
musically they're not the best of Nashville, but certainly methodologically they are.
This massive expansion of the monetary base, once the banks begin to lend again, is going
to lead to massive expansion of M1, a reversal of the money multiplier where it will actually
should be multiplying money and we're going to get massive price inflation and the only
way out of that is Japan, the banks never start lending and the government becomes the
primary buyer of all assets practically in the economy, this massive expansion of federal
presence in the capital markets because the banks have given up.
So we know where it's going to lead and I think of course it will lead ultimately to
Monetary Expansion and Bankruptcy because of the massive size of the deficits all over
the world.
And we have the advantages that we have a system of analysis that tells people why it
is going to happen and we have held to this analysis since certainly 1912 which is a long
Now this leads me to the part of my presentation which in the other part of my life I would
call the close, which is the sales pitch.
And that sales pitch is basically let us not have another Hayekian moment.
What we need, I believe now, for the first time, is a full-scale attack on the general
theory from every possible angle in every venue we have access to.
This has not been done.
We have bits and pieces.
We have a book here and a book there.
But what we have not had within the Austrian camp is a systematic analysis of all aspects of the general theory.
And that is needed at the present time in order finally to, in effect, finally to get a stake through the heart of this vampire.
We have got to undermine the confidence that younger economists have in the basic Keynesian paradigm which is spend and spend, tax and tax, inflate and inflate, because that's all they got.
That is the Keynesian paradigm.
We have to go back to the basics and say we've got to do what Hayek didn't do, but now we have tremendous advantages.
We have print on demand, we have blog sites, we have YouTube, we have conventional books.
We have tremendous opportunities now once and for all to go back to the general theory from an Austrian perspective to say what's wrong with it.
Now I've created a site, for those of you who want to go through this, called canesproject.com.
And if you'll go to that site, you'll get an outline of at least 13 separate areas that I think
Keynes is vulnerable to the core, and that any one of you with any kind of training,
training, master's level training could sit down and begin working on vision of labor opportunity and when you get materials out get a blog site up and do some videos of whatever you've come across and put them on YouTube and create a YouTube channel if necessary and if it's really any good send it to Tucker and see if he'll publish it in one venue or another and if Tucker rejects it then send it to Rockwell
Well, because maybe he can use it.
This is the way we literally use the division of intellectual labor and the tremendous advantage
which we've been given in terms of the ever lower cost of technology, which means the
ever lower cost of communicating ideas.
This is perfect for folks like us.
Our ship has basically come in, what I'm saying is, don't be at the bus station.
This is a tremendous opportunity.
Rockwell has created, with Tucker's assistance, this digital nightmare for the Keynesians,
in which we have something like even ground.
And as the New York Times and the other outlets become less and less profitable, I think the
decentralization of ideas is going to lead to a time in which essentially it's the ants
versus the elephant. And one bite at a time you take the elephant down. Now I've said
that I didn't think that the Keynesian ideas in the form of Keynes' original ideas were
were the major source of the influence. I've said that I think it was the textbooks. And so then why bother with Keynes? That's only stage one.
Going after Keynes, eliminating that as a challenge, is the first step in this, what I call, if not spontaneous order in a Hayekian sense,
at least a spontaneous nudge or two to get people in terms of division of labor to begin
concentrating on one or another aspect of the general theory and take the thing down.
Once and for all, just take it down.
Then once that is done, then we move to the next stage of teaching, which can be in part
conventional forms of textbooks, although I don't think it's probably the best way to
to do it, where we go to videos, where we go to short presentations, again, the ants
versus the elephant.
The other side has controlled this distribution of ideas, and the old A.J. Liebling comment
that freedom of the press is a great thing if you own one was true, but now because of
of the Web and because of programs like Wordpress, anybody can have a printing press and because
of Google it is possible that the ideas will be found and then that amazing thing begins
to take over that I labeled years ago the word mouse that the ideas begin to spread.
People are forwarding videos, forwarding whatever it is they've found that they think is fascinating
to their friends. And now this phenomenon, really, this phenomenon with Facebook, which
is beyond me, but I understand what's going on. Facebook is just extraordinary. The number
of people who can be mobilized. And this is what shook Washington, the core, shook them
to the core when Ron Paul raised over $20 million. It couldn't be true. It could not
be true. I remember watching, it's on YouTube, remember watching the interview on Face the
of the Nation with Schieffer who really sat there with his jaw down listening to Ron describe
how the money just kind of rolled in.
It stunned them.
Now this is what they're up against.
And the elephant can stomp.
And the elephant can dance, but there are a lot of ants.
And so what I am recommending is that we take advantage of this particular opportunity in
history.
That Cain's got a free ride and almost from a point of view of Austrian economics, he
almost still gets a free ride.
Now he would not have had a free ride if Murray Rothbard had not died in 95 and had been able
to finish the third volume of his history of economic thought.
The free ride clearly would have ended, but he did die.
So you have to move in 15 years later and begin filling that gap.
And I've talked about the various media that you can use, right down to what we all love,
the rap video, the Keynes-Hayek rap video, tremendous presentation, creative, but that
only is sort of a tantalizing hint at what can be done.
And I'm hoping that those of you who are here
will say, I think I'm gonna devote some years to doing this.
Now it may be, for some of you who are non-tenured,
it may be a career derailing operation,
but Mises had his career derailed on several occasions.
And Rothbard never had a career through the first, what, 30 years of his career.
He didn't have a career because of his position, but he didn't care and neither did Mises.
And it's that attitude that does make the difference. That is, I don't care.
And Murray would have loved the technology. I realized that he sat there with his electric typewriter
And he resisted until his dying day the idea of even correction tape on a typewriter.
But he would have loved the web because of the enormous power to get ideas out cheap and fast.
And ideas can compete now.
And we need to have a full-scale frontal assault on the general theory.
And then once that's done, take it out to all the other areas of communication.
We have positioned ourselves in terms of a piece of economic analysis published in 1912
that has proven accurate time and time again, and proven unsaleable time and time again.
That's the problem.
But now we're into a situation in which you can deliver, free of charge, except for time,
ideas that challenge the whole system.
And I remember Matt Drudge, several years ago, almost ten years ago, was invited, I
think, to speak to the National Association of whoever invited him.
I think it was somebody, it was a group connected with reporters.
And he said, do you have any ideas?
So I dropped him an email and he actually got it and he read it and responded.
I said, look what the situation is here.
The web has destroyed the function of the gatekeepers.
And it has.
And do you realize it's the first time in the history of man, or this is true, as far
as I can tell, first time in man's history, or this is true, the gatekeepers were doomed.
Oh, yeah, sure, they're at the gate, but the walls are down.
The walls are down.
They can't stop the flow of information.
The only area where they're really still in power is the collegiate degree-granting system,
and that is because they have government control over what is defined as a university degree.
So they still maintain that monopoly as a kind of fiefdom.
But it's the last, it is the last.
The rest of it, in the immortal words of Mr. T, is going down.
The gates are down.
And we are coming in with a systematic approach to these questions, with a lot of documentation,
although we can always use more, to say Keynes was wrong in 36 and he is wrong now and his
His disciples are wrong and they are in control and they're either going to destroy the dollar
or if in its wisdom finally the Federal Reserve pulls a Volcker, we're going to get another
massive recession maybe leading to a depression.
But at least we've got the analysis.
We have got the background.
We have got, if you date it at 1912, we've got 98 years of an answer to these people.
And I think now we should take advantage, if we can, as we can, of undermining the system.
The old line about if you see something wobble, push it, I think is where the Keynesians are
now.
They seem to be in place.
They seem to be unmovable, but they are no more unmovable than the status of the capital
markets and the next time we have another massive breakdown, they're going to do the
same old thing and it isn't going to work and we have positioned ourselves to tell people
why it won't work and to give them a systematic, comprehensive outlook and analysis of economics
as an alternative.
The old line is you can't beat something with nothing, and we are not going in trying to
beat something with nothing.
The only problem we've had is they have been able, through the gatekeeping system, to lock
us out for a long time.
I think that's breaking down, and a big part of it is what the Mises Institute has done
and LewRockwell.com has done, taken advantage of the digits.
And I think they're going to be hard-pressed to catch up. I really do.
I think this is an outstanding opportunity that we have in front of us.
And I would say get back to your word processors, find a topic, buy a copy of the General Theory
and begin picking some area of that book, if it's only for a monograph, if it's only
for a blog, it doesn't matter, begin to take on that book which has been like an albatross
around our necks for over 70 years.
I think it can be done.
I think this is the group to do it.
And I would encourage all of you not to take the approach that Hayek took all those years
ago to say it's just not worth my time.
It was worth his time and it is worth our time and I encourage you to get at it.