Our next lecturer, Helio Beltrau, is the rarest of men, a financial and ideological entrepreneur
who has been stunningly successful in both arenas while remaining uncompromising in his
devotion to the principles of a free society as propounded by Ludwig von Mises and Murray
Rothbard. Helio trained as an electrical engineer at Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
He received his MBA from Columbia Business School, majoring in finance and graduating
with honors. He was an investment banking executive at Banco Guarantia, the leading
Brazilian investment bank in the 1990s. He was also a hedge fund manager and advisor
for merger and acquisition transactions. He's currently a board member of several companies
whose businesses range from fuel distribution, chemicals and logistics to women's fashion
and education. He's a co-founder and board member of Instituto Millennium, a libertarian
Initiative co-founded by leading owners and CEOs, both of media organizations and of some
of the largest industrial firms in Brazil. Most important, he is the founder and president
of Mises Brazil Institute. On a personal note, I had the pleasure of enjoying the wonderful
hospitality of Helio and his lovely wife, Graciela, last year when he invited me to
to speak at the first conference held by Mises Brazil.
I'm also in his debt for introducing me
to the Brazilian steakhouse, or Rodezio.
Comparing a Brazilian Rodezio to an American steakhouse
is like comparing Austrian economics to Keynesian economics,
or even happiness research.
So without further delay, I present you Helio.
Guys, I apologize because I don't have any books or paper to present to you tonight.
But I have submitted something to Joe, this, and he had accepted it.
So in case you have any problem with my lecture, please take it up with Joe, his in the first
It is... First, let me tell you a story. When I arrived at Atlanta Airport, I had a very nice conversation with the immigration officer that reminded me of Gary North's lecture last year, which was Keynes and his influence.
And I guess the immigration officer really liked economics. He asked me, what are you doing in the US?
And I said, I'm going to a conference. Where are you going to?
So I said, the Mises Institute Scholars Conference.
And he said, Mises? Who's this guy?
An economist. Is he alive?
I said, no, he was dead in 1973.
He said, oh, so he must be a Keynesian.
As I try to control myself as an immigration officer,
I said, no, no, no, absolutely not.
He's a free market guy.
And he said, I don't understand, aren't Keynesians free-marketeers?
And I asked him, do you have kids, sir?
And he said, yes, I do.
So do you think guys spending money in Washington
and sending the bill to your kids, is that a free market?
And the guy said, I guess not.
And he said, do you have kids?
I said, yes.
So they are paying for it as well.
And I said, well, but I'm in Brazil
and they're doing a better job, and etc.
And then he said, sir, we live in a globalized world.
Your children are paying for it as well.
And he won the argument.
My only consolation was that, wait a minute, sir.
How do you spell Mises?
I want to look it up.
And that was good.
So it's the most privileged honor to be here with you.
and deliver this Mises lecture.
I don't know if you know, but it's Carnival in Brazil this week
and Brazilians are right now pursuing their constitutional right to pursue the happiness
in the biblical sense.
But to me, the feast is happening here, so it's a pleasure to be here.
I thank you for inviting me.
Joel wanted me to speak about how Misesian ideals could
change Brazil and Latin America.
And I'll talk a little bit about that.
But what I really want to talk about
is Austro-libertarianism, that is our freedom philosophy,
whose pillars are the non-initiation of force
and Private Property, and related to two aspects.
First of all, my experience as an executive
of a performance-based organization,
the one founded by Brazilian partners led by Jorge Paulo
Lehmann, who are now the controlling shareholders
of Unhauser-Busch in BEV, whose CEO is today's Carlos Brito,
and they own several other companies,
but that's the most famous one.
So I want to relate to Austro-libertarianism
to that experience and from these great guys,
on the one hand.
And on the other hand, I would like
to relate Austro-libertarianism and our freedom movement
to the book Starfish and the Spider.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, so let me start with the flavor of the book.
It's a five-year-old book that talks about what exactly is a decentralized organization,
its strengths, its weaknesses, and the authors compare it to two animals whose structure superficially looks similar,
the spider on the one hand and the starfish on the other.
The spider has a central body, 8 legs. The starfish, central body, 5 arms.
Internally, however, their biology is completely different.
If you cut a leg of a spider, what you get is a 7-legged crippled spider.
If you cut the head, though, it dies. It cannot live without its command center.
We are familiar a lot with spider organizations, be it government, corporations and even traditional think tanks.
They have boards, they have CEOs, hierarchies, headquarters, etc.
Now, the starfish, if you cut an arm of a starfish, it will grow one back.
And if you cut the starfish in half, an amazing thing happens.
Two organisms survive. Two different starfish survive.
There's even a species of starfish called the Linkea, that if you cut all five arms of it, it will grow five separate organisms.
So, each arm has its own different organs.
Each arm has its own stomach, its own muscles, its own way of feeding itself, and there's
no central organ except for a nerve ring that connects the arms.
That's a decentralized organization, organism in this case.
When you look at the world today, there are more and more starfish organizations that
are sprouting.
And at our own Austrian libertarian freedom movement, I would argue that we are starting
to behave like an adaptable, hard-to-combat starfish, with each institute or any other
Organized Initiative, behaving as an arm of the starfish and the nerve ring being the Austrian libertarian doctrine, but I'll get back to that.
First of all, let me say a few words about Brazil. Brazil has always had a status mentality.
For example, why in the US you would ask a person how much do you make, in Brazil you
would ask how much do you receive, as if it were a gift or a grant as opposed to the get
what you give mentality in the US.
My father used to say that Brazil is an island of initiative completely surrounded by government.
Brazil also has an ingrained red tape mentality, and there's another sentence by my father.
He used to say that Brazilians place more trust in the death certificate than in the
presence of the dead body itself.
We were famous, famous back in the 80s for holding a world record, and I bet Joe knows
about that.
It was the world record of inflation.
And even between 1990 and 1994, less than 20 years ago, the average annual inflation
in Brazil was above 1000%.
At the peak, prices would rise 1% every day according to the official inflation index
which had a daily adjustment.
Of course, prices could rise a little bit more or less according to supply and demand,
But everything would rise, all prices would rise according to the official inflation.
So in all retail shops everything was being marked up every day.
And also investments were being marked up every day.
If you had any savings it would go up every day, even your current account.
Wages though were adjusted only every month or every 15 days depending on the company
you work for.
So you see the wage earners were the losers in this process.
And as they received their salaries, they would go straight to the huge hypermarkets
we had in Brazil at the time to purchase non-perishables.
That was the way that they used to defend themselves.
But by 1994, after about 20 years or so of very high inflation, the Brazilian people
So had had enough of this corrosive inflation of exchange rates, super devaluations and
government surprise plans and packages to confiscate savings and that were usually accompanied
by a week long bank holidays and demanded a halt.
So politicians finally decided to act because they were suffering.
We had presidents being impeached, central bank presidents were being changed every six
In the last few weeks, months or so, everything was in chaos, so the government had to do something, so what they did, they increased taxes, which is bad, but they did that, and also balanced the budget, drastically decreased money creation, and floated the currency.
Since then, we are now considered a normal country, that is like a social democracy with a big government, like a European country or so, because we took care, in Brazil, of the most pressing problems, which were very high inflation, government finances out of control, and balance of payment problems that would cause exchange rate super devaluations.
We are now then reaping the benefits of that commitment for stability while the
rest of the world on the other hand and also America is doing the exact opposite
and running and the government governments running huge deficits and
printing money like crazy and we Brazilians know very well that this is a
The first organized effort in Brazil to promote the ideas of liberty was the founding of the Instituto Liberal in Rio de Janeiro back in 1982 by a construction businessman called Donald Stewart.
He started the Instituto Liberal basically to translate and publish books, basically
the books we like, the libertarian line, Mises, Austrian libertarian, etc.
Donald himself translated Human Action and Interventionism.
The Instituto Liberal was initially very successful, so business people from other capitals decided
to start in a decentralized fashion their own Instituto Liberals in other capitals of
of Brazil.
And they had substantial funding, there are a few business people in six or seven capitals
of Brazil that decided to do that.
The problem was that most of those funders had a special interest agenda, their own interest,
and didn't stick to the libertarian line as adopted by Donald Stewart.
So the substantial money that they raised was spent in bad books and lavish headquarters.
So the pseudo network of Instituto Liberais didn't have the libertarian nerve ring connecting
the cells and capitulated to those special interests.
So they share the same name but segregated into different creatures, not a single creature,
losing its status as a functioning network.
The Instituto Liberais in Rio is still around.
It was always small but it has shrunk further and it's only a shadow of what it was in its
at the same time in about 1983 a group of people from Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil started an elite study group for entrepreneurs an elite leadership study group for entrepreneurs should I say with a free market doctrine they also started an annual conference that is now on its 24th edition which is called the Fórum da Liberdade and which had last year
6,000 people attending. It's definitely the largest libertarian gathering in Brazil and maybe South America.
Mises Brazil was officially founded immediately with the conference, immediately before the last year's Forum da Liberdade.
And it was a success with 200 people attending per day. We had two days.
And there were mostly young people that already followed us through the site and through our publications.
Lew, Joe, Mark, Tom were there. We had very positive coverage by the mainstream media.
The two main weekly magazines in Brazil, with over 1.5 million copies in circulation weekly,
had two full pages on us and two very positive stories on us.
In the liberal libertarian spectrum, we are already the largest by following base, arguably the largest in Portuguese in the world, with over 3,000 people visiting our site every day.
And we already published 17 books, either published or republished books that are long out of print.
The Forum da Liberdade that was there had at its theme Mises and the economic policy
book which we call in Brazil the Six Lessons.
Each of the 6,000 participants got a copy of the Six Lessons.
Tom spoke at the forum.
Each panel of the forum was modeled after a chapter of the book, one of the lessons.
And they also had a wonderful exhibit quoting Mises and heralding pictures and stories about
his life.
We are hosting our second conference next month where we have speakers Hoppe, Holzman,
Murphy, Klein and others.
And we expect a larger public than last year.
So the mainstream media is beginning to pay attention to us.
And in summary, we have huge, huge challenges. And we're just starting. We started basically
last year. But we are on a roll. So that's great. So much for Mises Brazil. Let's get
back to Austro-libertarianism and our big challenges.
In my opinion, we have some of the best ideas and the best people developing ideas. So why
How are we still a marginal fringe movement and school of economics?
We are standing on the shoulders of giants like the scholastics of Bastiat, Menger, Mises,
Rothbard, the present-day stars, Hayek.
Our ideas have better explanatory power of the consequences of government intervention
than any other competing theory.
Our ideas are consolidated.
They have been tested for over a hundred years, even more, so ideas are not holding us back.
So which barriers are making us drag?
What's more, we are small, we are bottom-up, we are voluntary, we are flexible, and the
status organizations, starting with the government itself, but also the UN, the IMF, whatever,
They are big, they are coercive, they are centralized, they are inefficient, slow, corrupt.
Think of the Katrina reaction, the disastrous reaction of the government or the war on drugs
or any other example that we might think they have behaved badly.
So how come we do not dominate mainstream as we once did, maybe a hundred or so years
ago?
Let me first differentiate how we behave as individuals and how we behave as teams.
What is the actual role played by organizations?
I mean organizations such as Mises Institute, such as Mises Brazil, or any other organized
effort to promote ideas.
Do we actually need them?
Can we have a starfish made only by individuals?
Or in order to be a well-functioning starfish, we must work with organizations or teams or
cells behaving as the arms. Can individuals behave as cells? I would argue it is very
difficult to do so and it's an uphill battle for individuals. Freedom lovers and freedom
fighting individuals, ourselves, participate in the ongoing battle of ideas. And there
There are those who discuss and write every day. They are very important. However, individuals
alone are not equipped with what's necessary to pursue objective goals in a systematic,
organized and effective way. What we need is a great team of great people working together.
A great organization, a company, an institute is formed by great people working together,
period, not ideas, not books.
It is formed by people that understand the social environment, that have insights, that
know how to market the insights, that have the best connections, which helps with funding,
and that translate all that behind the objectives.
So what I mean by great people are those people that with some years and some training may
may become better than me, Lou, Joe, Doug, everyone.
So those are the guys who make a great team and we need to attract and retain those people.
A team of great people needs to filter, to translate and transmit the ideas to journalists,
to writers, to editors and other opinion leaders.
And I call opinion leaders those of maybe 15 or 20 percent of the population that can
Grasp and Act on an Idea.
Those are our most obvious customers.
Now, think about John Poppola and the Hayek vs.
Keynes video and other short materials
that we see from time to time on the internet and inspire us.
Maria was telling me, reminding me
this story, the video about love with Hayek.
I'm in love with Hayek, which is also great.
But these examples, I would argue, they are wonderful exceptions of individuals working
without the support of a great team and doing the almost impossible, guided only by their
dream and passion. But if a team of good people could do even more and systematically, for
every popula, unfortunately, there are thousands that act individually, spend their time and
and Energy, but are not able to effect change.
Good organizations, they are systematic and they are effective.
They avoid floating ideas in a disorganized way through channels and forms that might
not work.
And that happens because they are goal-based.
They have metrics, they have goals, they measure them, they benchmark, they are slim, they
They are adaptable and they localize, or as we say in Mises Brazil, we tropicalize the product and the strategy.
In some places and times, a natural rights approach may be effective. In others, a value-free approach might be more appropriate.
In some places, articles might work better than books. In other, radio shows or video clips might be better solutions.
Imagine a beer company. Its product is beer. Our product is Austro-libertarianism.
The beer company may have different flavors of beer, different labels of beer, and it's the same with us.
Provided, however, there is no toxic substance. They have their quality standards, we have our quality standards.
The product cannot be one that advocates the initiation of force or an attack of private property, of course.
but it may have different flavors for different consumers.
That's tropicalization.
And tropicalization does not only affect ideas in the way we market ideas
but also how you attract talents and funding.
Brazil, for example, does not have a culture of donations by individuals
nor do we get tax breaks for donations.
So what we do at Mises Brazil, we go for sponsorships by big business
Business, and we stay close to the mainstream media.
The Brazilian controlling shareholders of the mainstream media in Brazil are very sympathetic
to libertarian ideas.
Veja, for example, the main weekly magazine, has recently announced they will always write
state with a small S. They wrote a marvelous editorial justifying it, and that really took
Because by surprise, and it's something we do at Mises Brazil as well, our editorial policy.
But whatever we choose to do in terms of marketing and funding, we must always keep our quality
standard of the product, as does the beer company.
Otherwise, we will fail like the pseudo network of Instituto Liberais failed in Brazil back
in the 80s.
Okay, so we have ideas.
We have different flavors and a team of great people working together.
How do we manage the team?
An organization the same as individuals need dreams.
Dreams are natural.
Dreams keep us going, be it being with a person, traveling to some place, being employed by
some company, doing well at school, buying a car, whatever.
So we need dreams.
And thinking big takes the same amount of energy than thinking small.
So we should always think big.
But we need to set realistic dreams and goals.
One must know about 80% how to get to those objectives and dreams and may learn 20% along
the way.
If it is the opposite, if you only know 20% how to get there and must learn 80% along
the way, that's not an objective.
That's an adventure.
So it's not a realistic goal.
Some individuals do have some goals such as, for example, end the state.
If it were a goal for a real-life organization, it will be definitely an adventure.
But it's okay if it is for an individual, it doesn't affect the team or others.
The only downside may be that this person gets frustrated because there is a good chance
that it may not happen in his lifetime.
But for organizations though, it cannot be an adventure type goal.
For our institute in Brazil, we need metrics, we use metrics, and those may be the reach
of our ideas in the mainstream media and in internet, book sales, fundraising for projects,
or any other performance indicator that correlates well with the objectives, with the efforts
of the team.
And what kind of pressure should we put on the future?
What kind of pressure should we put on the team?
What we know is that we have to constantly raise the bar.
That's a given.
Too much pressure is bad because people may panic.
But too little pressure is bad as well.
We are at our best when we are under pressure and we have deadlines.
I bet that the people that made this conference perfect were working at their best over the
last few days and weeks.
I bet that people would be shutting off their Facebooks and not gossiping too much over
the corridors.
It was the same with me.
I knew I was going to deliver this lecture for some time, but I really concentrated over
Over the last few days during carnival, so that's the way human beings work.
We need deadlines, we need pressure, we need goals like that.
And as catalyst managers, team leaders, we need to apply that same kind of pressure all
year round because then people would be at their best.
It's like the high jump.
If you put the bar here, which person would jump here?
Nobody would jump here, because we are rational.
We minimize our efforts and energy.
We'll do like that.
So we need to constantly raise the bar and keep the pressure.
We also need meritocracy.
We need candor, and we need informality.
Meritocracy.
We should reward the best.
The best should be promoted to have more space,
to have more responsibility, regardless of seniority, or even regardless of the strict commitment to our ideology.
If a person is young, and does not yet agree 100% with our ideology, but is very talented,
I think he or she should be promoted.
We can always train this person with time, that's not a problem, as long as he or she helps we reach our objectives.
and the risk is if we don't have the courage to do that, the real talented people would see through it and would probably leave the team and we may be stuck with a mediocre team and that's not how we may reach our goals.
Candor. People must know where they stand. They always need constructive and
respectful feedback, and they need that. Talented people especially. So you should
be here, you're doing well, here you need to improve, etc. In the company I used to
work for, the Jorge Paulo Lemon Company, actually the Banco Garantia, which was
as a precursor to all his ventures, we used to do this twice a year, and we need to constantly have this feedback process operating, because we also know that the status quo is not our friend, that's exactly what we want to change, so if we need to achieve our dreams, we need this constant feedback working.
Sometimes you may have a person who is not delivering.
You might feel pity, you might delay the decision to let him or her go.
You might say, well, he studied under Rothbard or she's such a nice girl.
Let's wait some more time to see if he improves and delivers.
It's not going to happen.
So in this case, don't waste his or her time.
Let her go, let her pursue her best in some place else which might fit better with her abilities.
As a professor in a classroom, you would never do that with grades. Grades are grades.
There can be no rationalizations. You have to grade people according to their ability because it's the best for the person as well.
For scholarships, the same thing. So people are different, we are individuals. That's our philosophy, right?
So we need to tackle that.
Informality, I think that's something
that we need that we do well because we are small still.
And I think people should be able to speak
their mind in open spaces, do not get behind closed doors
and things like that.
And I have an example of that.
When we decided to start Mises Brazil, we didn't yet know Lou.
So I sent an email asking whether we could translate material and publish material of the Mises Institute.
And I got that typical one-liner by Ludwig just, please do translate.
That's informality, very prompt email, quick response, right to the point.
The Brazilians are not very used to that direct, and I love it.
I love it.
I'm getting used to it.
A great team must also raise funds for the projects, be it a conference, books, whatever
project we want to pursue.
And funding for projects, in my experience, is much easier because the sponsor sees the
result of his funding, the immediate result of it.
But as importantly, we must raise funds to pay for the great team's work.
Since we need a team of talented people, staying for a whole career, probably, they must know
they will be rewarded and that they will have a good life doing this.
So we need funding specifically for that as well.
But that won't necessarily be endowment funds and I'll explain that with an example from
From the Starfish and the Spider, the book.
It's the story of the Apache Indians.
When the Spaniards arrived in America back in 1519, they found huge empires.
Cortes and his 80 men arrived at central Mexico and found Tenochtitlan, which was one of the
largest cities in the world, second only to Constantinople.
And it was a centralized empire with Montezuma II as supreme leader.
Cortés had a meeting with Montezuma in which he said, give me all your gold and I won't
kill you.
Well what happened is Montezuma did give the gold.
He was scared of the powers of the Spaniards and the different things they had, they might
have even thought they were gods or something like that, so he gave his gold, but Cortes
didn't fulfill his promise.
He took Montezuma prisoner and then he killed Montezuma.
And what happened is the Aztec people lost completely their drive after the death of
Montezuma and crumbled.
In a very short time, they were quickly defeated, a huge empire quickly defeated.
The same happened in South America with the Inca Empire.
Pizarro went there with the kill the leader, get the gold strategy and he killed Atahualpa
and same result, a very quick defeat of the Inca Empire.
Now further north in Mexico, they encountered the Apache.
And the Apache were a much less sophisticated people than the Incas or the Aztecas.
They had never built a pyramid, never built a paved road or built a town or anything like
that.
But they distributed political power.
They weren't a coercive leader called the Schott's people like the Aztecas or the Incas.
They worked voluntarily without a supreme leader.
They had leaders, but they were spiritual leaders who led by example only.
They were called the Nantans.
And one of the famous Nantans was, of course, Geronimo, who never commanded an army.
When he decided to fight, all Apaches joined him, not because Geronimo said so, but because
they thought it was a good idea, because of his track record of having good ideas.
But you didn't need to.
That's the way the Apache made their decisions.
When they planned a raid, for example, on the Spanish forces, decisions were made at
different places.
An attack might have been planned in one place, organized in another, and executed at a third
place.
There's an anthropologist called Tom Nevins that explains that the Spaniards then came
came in and decided to pursue the same strategy of killing the leaders and started killing
Nantans.
But immediately after they started to kill Nantans, new Nantans emerged.
And they also tried to put fire to the villages.
And what happened is the Apaches became nomads.
Try to catch them now.
So the Apaches then unwillingly gained control over territory they didn't control before
because of this attack by the Spaniards.
So they resisted for 200 years.
They defeated the Spaniards.
The Mexicans came later.
They defeated the Mexicans as well.
And the Americans were able to defeat the Apache.
And the way they did it, and they had already
experimented that with the Navajo, which
is an Apache tribe as well, they gave cattle
to the Nantans, to the leaders.
They gave resources to the leaders, so now the leaders were able to punish and reward
tribe members.
So the Nantans started fighting in city councils over control of the resources and built hierarchies
and things like that and that eventually destroyed the Apache society because they became centralized.
So that explains why I am skeptical of endowment funds, because with funds like that, people
may join the organization to be chasing the funds, it's natural, and people would be looking
at those funds over there.
So that makes fundraising more difficult because it must be a full-time job, a continual full-time
to pay for the team's efforts and to do the projects, but I would go for that instead of making the same mistake that the Apache made.
Another interesting example from the book was the AA, the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is totally decentralized.
of Money, Human Action, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit
He started creating different circles of AAA, different towns, and he had to make a decision whether to centralize the structure or let it go.
And he decided to let it go, and the AAA became flexible, equal and mutating because of that.
The Apaches mutated, becoming nomads, and the AAA also mutated and helps food addicts and gamblers today.
Hey, they may even mutate to cure Charlie Sheen, who knows?
Another example from the book is the record industry.
When they faced Napster 10 years ago, it was tough for them to fight Napster, because Napster
was very decentralized, but they still had central servers and identifiable CEO and manager
And of course the music industry reacted with the P2P networks and etc. and further developed
the P2P technology to become anonymous as well.
So nobody would know who was trading the information.
But in some of those initiatives, the customer's information was still centralized.
So these guys were being chased like the Napster and eventually the music industry again decentralized
and now we have Torrent and they can't get anyone.
We don't recognize the industry as it was ten years ago because of this attack that
provoked further decentralization.
I would argue that Lew is like Bill Wilson of the AA, not on the alcoholic side.
I mean, he catalyzed the idea, he built the main cell and got out of the way for the talents
to rise and the cells to spring up, like Brazil and the other efforts that we are seeing today.
At first, the Mises Institute might look like a spider.
It has a board, it has a CEO, it has some hierarchy, a physical address.
But look again, Auburn is not where the organization exists.
Professors are spread all over the world.
There's no formal hierarchy.
And we have the Mises and Rothbard Institutes acting independently and at the same time
as a network.
So if you would thump the Mises Institute on the head, and I'm sorry, Lou, for that, would
Austro-libertarianism die?
No.
Is there a clear division of roles among the cells?
No.
Is knowledge concentrated?
No.
Are the cells self-funded or are they centrally funded?
I wish that Lou would throw some checks at us, at Brazil, but no, we're not centrally
be funded. So, ladies and gentlemen, we then reach the conclusion that we are genuine starfish.
As with the internet, if you would kill half the sites on the internet, it would survive.
And the same happens with our movement. We are a cell-based, independent, underground
network, and I hope on the ground not for long. We are building the network as we speak.
And since it is an open system, more and more people want to join and contribute, first
as individuals, and then, which I think is what really makes a difference, as part of
teams or independent cells.
And if we're talking about people that would like to start an Austrian libertarian organization
or cell or something like that, you don't need more than to put up a site or start translating
and Publishing Material or starting a podcast or whatever. Just do it. It's simple and virtually
costless. We have done it in Brazil. Gabriel Calzada has done it in Spain. Vlad has done
it in Romania. The Swedish mafia, the Joaquins have done it in Sweden, Poland, Japan, Chile,
Russia, everywhere. To build a great team, of course, is much more of a challenge. But
They are sprouting because we have the example of the Mises Institute and of Loo.
When the network fully develops and the network effect kicks in, the network effect being
as the network grows more and more people want to join and contribute, there will be
no stopping us.
The centralized statists won't be a match for us.
That's it.
With that, there are about 15 minutes for questions.
Yes, sir.
How do you think you have the support of the Brazilian media as opposed to here where they work stream?
Some of them are immigrants and they made it in Brazil despite the government but I'm
not sure what the answer is but I'm telling you, Global, which is the main media company
in Brazil, their shareholders are very sympathetic to libertarian ideas, Abril, which is the
owner of Veja, the second largest media company, they're also very sympathetic to the ideas
but i'm not sure i don't know where it comes from
Yes, the question was how Brazilians came to realize and came to react to the inflation
problem and to compare that with the U.S. reality in which you still don't have that
I think it's easy to explain the Brazilian side of it because it was twenty years of
corrosive inflation, continual corrosive, actually started even before when they built
with Brasilia back in the 50s.
So they built Brasilia in the middle of nothing using printing money.
And inflation really started there back in the 50s.
And by the 80s, inflation was out of control and Brazilians, the Brazilian business people
are very smart, so they adapt.
And I explained the thing about indexing everything.
And it behaves a little bit like the Einstein's Relativity Theory.
If the bar is rising for everyone at the same time, of course you have when it's not neutral,
but you have the impression that everything is sort of working.
And of course it isn't.
It takes time for people to understand that.
And Brazil in the 50s, I think it had about 50% of the US per capita GDP.
And still today it's like 40 after rising from 25% or so.
So after this huge poverty that arose from that, I think the Brazilian people finally
realized they had to act.
And that's a problem you might have here.
People may still need to see that it's not working for some time.
No, no, no, the Brazilian people are not forgetting that at all.
Inflation has risen a little bit, but our central bank, I don't know if you know the
interest rate in Brazil, 11.75.
Tell me how you're going to have bubbles with that interest rate.
So it's Germanic central banking in Brazil.
So they're not forgetting, politicians don't get elected if inflation really comes back.
Of course, it's risen a little bit and it has risen recently because with the crisis
in 2008, they decided to release some of the reserve requirements.
They have now already taken it back.
It takes some time to work through the process.
They had done it like maybe four or five months ago, and they have already recent two times
fifty basis points.
So Brazilians have not forgotten that.
That's not a problem in Brazil.
Mateus.
What advice would you give to the US for the US?
The question was, what advice would I give for the US to react to what's going on and
all this money printing, et cetera?
And you also mentioned the success we had in Brazil.
We didn't have any success in Brazil as far as Austrian libertarianism yet.
We have been doing some good stuff recently in Brazil, but not much result.
And what happened when we decided to stop inflation in 1994 was not an Austrian libertarian
thing or anything like that, it was just enough.
We had enough, like the Egyptian people or something like that.
They had enough and Brazilians had enough.
I think Venezuela might go through this process in a short time and even maybe the Cubans.
So I don't know what advice would I give.
I think my actions are the best I can say, I think what works is doing what we do, which
is promoting ideas in an efficient way with the most talented people you can find.
I think that's what works.
And being connected as well is very important.
Yes?
Would you consider the Marxists and the progressive groups starfish and that they're all pulling together to pull out capitalism, and if you do think that they're starfish, how do you kill them?
Yeah, there's a story about starfish in the coral reef in Australia, and they were not
aware of how starfish behave, and they sent divers, because the starfish were killing
the corals, or actually the, how do you call it, the shell-based animals in the corals.
And they sent divers there to kill them, and actually they multiplied.
It didn't work.
I think yes, I think the Marxist movement is a starfish.
Lew told me that in Brazil, that the two only global movements are Marxism and Austrian libertarianism,
in terms of ideology, organized movements.
How do you kill them? I suggest you read the book, Starfish and the Spider.
It has very good ideas of how to deal with that, but I'll leave it at that.
Yes?
When you were talking about the independent self-working, I just thought, well that's how the Al-Qaeda and many of the Muslim terrorists self-work too.
and so we favor smaller government and de-sexualization and no longer like properly fund things like the CIA or FBI or the military, how do you think these groups are going to go away or what do you do about this type of threat in the class of civilizations and all these other menaces that we have in the world today, in Iran and other countries?
looks like, it behaves like a decentralized organization and what we then, since we support
decentralized organizations, how do we deal with that sort of threat?
And I think it's similar to what we are talking about the Marxists, in some way there are
some starfish which we may consider enemies.
And we need to understand how they work.
Of course we have the best ideas on our side.
That helps a lot.
And if we have also the best management on our side, then I think it makes things much
easier.
It's very difficult to destroy a starfish.
And the book, again, it mentions exactly which strategies you should use to do that.
Actually one of the authors went to the US government to work for the US government for
for some time.
Then he became disappointed.
Maybe he understood how centralized organizations worked and they wouldn't hear him.
But I'm not answering your question.
I don't know how to, first of all, if we should go about destroying other people or only do
our jobs and if we for any reason decide to go after them, then we have to study and see
the best we can do.
But I think we have ideas and I hope to have the best people on our side.
So that's what we can do today.
There's one over there.
Yes, earlier in your speech, you were describing the inflationary curbing in Brazil and the breaking interest rates and what not.
You wish the United States what? I mean, considering, you know, the $3.7 trillion at this point,
As the US dollar is a low reserve currency, isn't the Central Bank of Brazil going to take a hit if we enter our hyper-economic scenario here in the US?
The United States is the World Reserve currency and the dollar is the World Reserve currency.
So how does that relate to what the Central Bank of Brazil will do and how we'll react to it and if it's going to take a hit as well or not?
Yes, that's a very good question, a very complicated question.
I think things are definitely connected because, as you know, if the US prints money,
This money travels to the rest of the world, for example to Brazil, and the export lobby of any country, Brazil also, would not want the currency to appreciate.
So they would make the politicians in the central bank to inflate at the same rhythm. And that's what's the natural scenario.
What's been happening in Brazil, it's not quite that yet.
I think it may happen because the Brazilian currency was 4 to 1 dollar and now it's 1.65 to 1 dollar.
So it's accepting an amount of shielding from the disaster management of Ben Bernanke.
But it can't do that indefinitely. It's a huge pressure.
Pressure.
So the Brazilian central bank has been buying and has been increasing its foreign exchange
currencies and trying, dollars, and trying to sterilize that.
But we all know that sterilize is only to postpone the problem.
And it's a dilemma.
But I would say that one of the few areas that Brazil is good at is at central banking
Management lately, at least over the last eight years or so.
So I think it will happen, this scenario will happen to other countries first, and Brazil
may be protected.
And the Brazilian Central Bank, as you were saying, holds treasury bonds.
And honestly, I don't see a better asset than you guys as collateral.
Here are still the best, most productive guys in the world.
So the Central Bank of Brazil is doing really well.
They could have bought gold, would be even better, but nobody's doing that.
I don't know if there's that much gold to buy around without moving prices.
But the second best asset in the world are treasury bonds, believe it or not.
I know that's being polemical here, but it's definitely the best asset that you can have
have, because it's you and your children.
Thank you very much.