Well, it's been another year of lies in Washington, D.C.
But these days, they seem more brazen than ever.
Here are some from just the past few weeks.
Robert Reich says that raising the minimum wage will help the poor.
Alan Greenspan professes to be fighting inflation with all his might.
Bill Clinton says the era of big government is over.
and Bill Kristol's weekly standard agrees and takes credit for it.
These examples illustrate Washington as a wonderland of distortions and deceptions.
Let's examine, for example, the claim that we're living through a congressional revolution against big government.
For a year, Washington has promised us, assured us, and pleaded with us to believe that it is so.
There's no question that the people want it.
But somehow the supply of revolution has fallen far short of the demand.
Never has so much rhetorical hoopla surrounded so little political substance.
This is a revolution. It is of the kind that fits Bertrand de Juvenal's classic description.
It rends the air with denunciations of tyrants, yet raises up its own.
The purpose of this revolution is to placate the people's hatred of the federal government, which grows more intense year by year.
Indeed, this phony revolution is being conducted in classic Washington style.
One party pretends to cut, the other pretends to panic.
One party celebrates its victories, the other vows reprisals.
But in the end, Leviathan grows and grows.
Spending, taxing, debt all go up, and Washington holds its breath, hopes we will forget its past promises, and waits for the next election to distract us from our task.
What can we do about the intellectual bankruptcy and political cowardice in Washington?
Well, for one thing, we can expose their lies.
The first step is to remember that this year, Leviathan was supposed to be slain.
For more than four decades, the Republicans have begged for a majority in Congress.
The absence of one was what supposedly kept the government big and the budget unbalanced.
The voters gave the Republican Party a majority. Let's remember what was supposed to happen.
The welfare state was to be overthrown. We were to get huge tax cuts and regulatory relief.
The 10th Amendment would be enforced. There would be no more police state tactics as in Waco and Ruby Ridge.
A year ago November, a Wall Street Journal columnist wrote that he fully expected federal deposit insurance and the SEC to be abolished.
The same writer wrote that there was a slight chance the Fed itself would be terminated.
What's more, in the glorious anti-government environment of November 1994, these did not seem like idle speculations.
One year later, the Wall Street Journal has lowered its sights and is pretending as if they were never high to begin with.
How fair is the revolution, an editorial asked on December 29th?
Just fine, considering that its purpose was to, quote,
inject some discipline in the welfare state.
In judging Congress by the standard of the original revolutionary promise
and not that truncated version,
I'm not making the perfect the enemy of the good as some high-level Republicans
have accused the Mises Institute of doing.
No one is faulting Congress for not giving us a full loaf.
Indeed, we'd be happy with just a slice, no matter how thin.
But if we look at the facts, we see that there has been no progress towards dismantling government
or making the people of this country freer.
I wrote in a column in January 1995 that if next year's Congressional spending is higher
than this year's, Congress will have failed.
The reaction I received was that it was silly to even suggest that the budget would grow.
But Murray and Rothbard saw problems developing in the first days after the November 1994
election, when lame ducks in the House and Senate voted to implement the GATT Treaty and
its World Trade Organization, even though the public rightly saw it as an insider deal.
The Mises Institute worked very hard to expose that treaty and its cousin NAFTA as the essence
of managed trade, while at the same time upholding the ideal of free trade.
These treaties have of course exacted a horrible price.
For example, one year ago this month, a Congressional leadership conspired with the White House
to commit one of the greatest financial crimes of the last half century, the 50 billion dollar
bailout of the Mexican government and the banks and corporations whose fate was linked
to the peso.
It was a consequence of two years of massive peso inflation, encouraged by the U.S. to
pass NAFTA.
The U.S. government knew at least eight months in advance that the peso was going to be devalued,
but did nothing.
Moreover, the bailout itself was conducted in secret, greased with drug money, laced with political corruption, and even linked to outright murders.
Yet to hear the U.S. government tell the story of the Mexican economy in NAFTA, things are better and better every day, in every way.
What this really means is that the profits of Goldman Sachs are at historic highs.
This fiscal year, total government spending will be up at least $53 billion over last year.
And that's by the estimates provided by the Congress itself and its own plans.
No programs, departments or functions of the Federal Government have been abolished.
None have even been seriously challenged.
The few programs that have experienced marginal cuts are more than swamped
by the programs that have experienced real increases.
Even under this Congress, the government's grip grows tighter by the day.
The government is still destroying the American economy, society, culture and way of life.
We're still ruled by the largest government in the history of the world.
No government has ever presumed to spend so much, regulate so much, or tax so much, but
somehow it's never enough.
The congressional leadership blames the president, but that's a suspicious charge on the face
of it.
The truth is that even with today's unconstitutional executive branch tyranny, the government cannot
spend one dime without congressional approval.
Congress, particularly its leadership, must take ultimate responsibility.
The freshmen did their best, their best, but the problem goes much deeper.
In private, several of the best freshmen have admitted that their worst vote of last year was the one that made Mr. Gingrich the Speaker.
Some in the leadership have reacted to Institute criticism by blaming the President for striking down good legislation.
In fact, this is not the case. Mr. Clinton's most famous veto was of the Congressional Welfare Bill.
as its supporters said it was supposed to revolutionize the welfare state
but not even the most objectionable parts of the welfare state were challenged
not even AFDC, the program that subsidizes illegitimate children was touched
the republican leadership backed off even minor changes like family caps
instead of getting rid of programs the final bill merely created
a fancy financial technique for channeling more money to republican states
meanwhile they claim this bill was returning welfare to the states
in a Federalist fashion. All it actually did was make state bureaucracies even more dependent
on Washington. Central control remains untouched in the area of environmental socialism. Just
this week we received a call from a gentleman who inherited 30 acres of family property
near Louisville, Kentucky. Then he discovered, unbeknownst to the family, that two years
ago the Feds had flown over it in a helicopter and declared it a federally protected wetland.
That means it has an effective net worth of zero, although, of course, he's still responsible
for paying the property taxes.
With the stroke of a pen, the federal government was able to, in effect, nationalize property
that had been in his generation, excuse me, in his family for generations.
As he told us, he didn't believe such a thing was possible in America.
His only hope was that the Republicans would do something about the wetlands laws.
But after months of calls, he realized that our complaints, he said, as aired in the free
If every market were correct, the Republican leadership is not interested in stopping this injustice.
If you ask this gentleman what's wrong in Washington, he'll tell you in a word, everything.
But the focus of his anger is Mr. Gingrich, who should have defunded the wetlands police on the first day of Congress.
In many ways, Mr. Gingrich is the liberals' favorite conservative.
He's a strong partisan, but not an opponent of state power.
He was never very good as a congressman and his national taxpayers union rating was always poor.
As speaker, he's done far more damage as the mastermind behind the Mexican bailout.
He's kept the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban off the congressional table.
He refuses to discuss any defunding of international agencies like the IMF or the World Bank or the United Nations.
He opposed strenuously an amendment to defund the Export-Import Bank.
And when several freshmen recently voted against reopening the government, he canceled campaign appearances for them.
Now I understand this view defies the conventional wisdom as presented in the media.
But the conventional wisdom is also wrong when it comes to the great budget debate that we've been going through.
One side says it wants to balance the budget in nine years. The other side says seven years.
This is like a debate between two alcoholics and when they should stop drinking. Seven or nine years in the future.
Certainly such an argument can be fierce without being serious.
When it comes to the budget, neither side has got any credibility.
Neither this President nor this Congress can control any budget but this year's.
The Congress certainly can't bind a future Congress. This White House can't bind a future administration.
And Mrs. Clinton and Gingrich are free to, quote, change their minds on any solemn agreement reached today.
Even sillier are the economic assumptions that both sides are using to estimate future budgets.
Nothing has been more thoroughly discredited in the last half century than economic forecasting.
Mises tells us why. There are no constants in human action.
We cannot know precise magnitudes of any economic data in the future.
Yet, as usual, economists in the service of politicians pretend to do what no mortal man can do.
If the goal is to cut the budget, and indeed it should be, it should be cut right now.
At the very least, we could freeze the budget.
But for heaven sakes, let's not spend any more time pretending to balance the budget at some point in the future while running deficits today.
We could fret a similar problem on tax reform. The Republicans are making huge claims for themselves here as well.
They say they'll defang the IRS, make the tax code simple, eliminate the horrible burden that we all bear, reduce the incentive for cheating, and the people cheer their every word.
But listen carefully, what they have emphatically not said is that they will lower rates or collect less revenue.
And so long as the government attempts to extract 1.7 trillion dollars in private wealth from the economy every year,
the tax code cannot be anything but coercive, complex and counterproductive.
The Mises Institute was one of the very few economic organizations in the country to join pro-family groups
in supporting the attempt to raise the child deduction.
At least it would have allowed people to keep a little more of what they earn.
Similarly, right now, we're one of the few economic organizations to support the home mortgage and charitable tax deductions while still favoring lower taxes.
Many politicians and economists say these deductions cause distortions in the economy.
But it's hard to take that line of thinking seriously.
These same people prove remarkably shy about pointing out the economic distortions caused by the taxes that the government collects.
The Mises Institute defends any and all deductions for a simple reason.
Deductions allow some private property to remain in private hands.
Private property is the basis of free enterprise, which in turn is the basis of prosperity.
It can never be a cure for economic stagnation to tax people more than they are already being
taxed, which is what repealing deductions really does.
Other tax reform proposals that get us off the track are schemes like the flat tax and
the national sales tax.
So long as these are proposed as new schemes to collect the same amount of revenue or sometimes
even more, they are steps in the wrong direction.
There's no inherent virtue to flatness as such.
The social security tax, for example, is flat and no one enjoys paying it.
And the national sales tax would penalize people who have worked and saved and tax them all
over again on those savings when they spend them.
If our target is more economic freedom, there is no way to achieve it except by cutting taxes and cutting government.
Freedom is the one way out, and all these policy detours merely distract from the fact.
The Republican leadership doesn't want us to think this way.
So long as the Congress is not working from a consistent intellectual framework, it will be prone to gimmicks.
And these gimmicks can be dangerous.
I'll give you one example.
The Republican budget proposals builds in assumptions that the government will collect more revenue than present trends suggested will.
The key to this is a new law that allows the IRS to contract out its tax collections to private law firms.
This is the ultimate perversion of the idea of privatization.
There are certain functions, and certainly tax collection is among them, that we do not want to have privatized.
In many ways, governmentally blessed and empowered private coercion can be far worse than plain government coercion because, of course, it can be far more effective.
If the Republicans wanted to do the right thing, the first good step back to freedom would be to simply cut taxes, by any amount.
But if we abolish the income taxes, of course we would like to see, other taxes would still raise a tremendous amount of money, $760 billion, which is about the size of the entire 1982 budget.
The idea of getting rid of the income tax and not replacing it is of course ruled out entirely.
Let's take the Republicans off the hot seat and talk for a moment about the lying socialist who inhabits the White House.
The head one.
Although Hillary was just here in San Francisco last night, you may have seen the papers.
In a State of the Union address, Mr. Clinton told us that we've entered the era of small
and the dollar government, which has to be one of the least credible statements ever uttered by any president.
He even refuted it himself by proposing to create four new giveaway programs, expand three old programs, add three new regulatory bills, and vastly increase federal police power.
He also called for an increase in the minimum wage as a blatant stop to labor unions who want to shut low-wage employment out of the market.
And again, he proposed to socialize the medical industry, this time in the form of severe insurance regulations.
Given the logic of interventionism, we would have Hillary Care by the end of the century, if his plan were adopted.
Mr. Clinton also told us the economy is the best we've seen in 30 years. But which economy is he talking about?
In the American economy, consumer confidence is at the lowest that it's been in more than two years.
Retailers at a terrible holiday season and unemployment is on the rise.
The Fed continues an attempt to forestall recession with short-term interest rate cuts,
On the inflation front, the Commodity Research Bureau Index is at its highest level in five years. Gold is above 400 and December registered a wholesale inflation rate of 7%.
There's no basis for ruling out a serious return of price increases this year, but even at a 3% rate, which the media call non-inflationary, prices double every 25 years.
Even if theft is stretched out over a period of time, it's still theft and it still creates the business cycle.
The experts assure us that if we take out food and energy, the inflation rate is not so bad.
I'll agree to that once people stop eating, driving and heating their homes.
It's instructive to look at the financial habits of one member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
In December, Lawrence Lindsay was turned down for a credit card by Toys R Us.
After he went public and complained that the computer selection methods that turned him down were actually racist, the company quickly issued him a card with a $15,000 line of credit, which is a lot of toys.
But in the course of the controversy this generated, we learned that Mr. Lindsay has a great big mortgage, a big second mortgage, an overdraft credit line on his checking account, three major credit cards, and no savings.
Mr. Lindsay refused to show me his credit history. It was hilarious. He was shocked that he was being asked for such a thing, saying that it was private, but on the other hand, he'd made his credit standing a matter of public record, or what he claimed about his credit standing, and used it to try to advance socialist policy, so it seemed to me that we should be able to get a look at his actual credit rate and see whether maybe Toys R Us had a point in their original turndown. But even without seeing that, I think we can see why
and as everyone who studies inflation knows, price increases benefit debtors of the expensive savers.
So Mr. Lindsay's credit status doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the future of the dollar.
Both parties have an even better solution to the problem of perpetual inflation.
However, they've agreed to redefine the consumer price index so that it shows a lower inflation rate.
They say the purpose is to reduce the cost of living adjustments paid out.
They don't tell us, however, that the additional purposes increase taxes by reducing the pace of indexation.
But if these budget negotiators had any integrity, they would simply propose to eliminate these so-called cost of living adjustments,
because they actually give federal employees and others higher payments than the so-called cost of living.
Or even better, just eliminate these programs.
But so much for the short-term economic picture. Let's talk about the long-term.
Median wages and incomes have been falling since the final elimination of the gold standard in 1971 and the pace of decline accelerated in 1995.
The group hit hardest as young white men whose wages have fallen as much as 8% in the last six years.
25 years ago, most women with children could choose not to have a professional career if they did not desire one.
The economy could support whole families living on one income.
Today, this is the exception.
And the effect of this change has been a virtual social revolution.
Yet I received a press release the other day that said, quote,
standards of living are rising, sixty experts say.
Well, if it were really true, of course, we wouldn't need experts to tell us.
It turns out that the study has a way of explaining away every one of our current difficulties.
For example, the study argues that while it's true that wages and incomes are going down,
job benefits are going up, so on that we're all richer.
What are these alleged benefits? Well, unfunded social security liabilities,
unfunded Medicare liabilities, unfunded pension liabilities, along with health
care as prices higher and higher while its value is lower and lower and service
less responsive, because of government of course. Truth is very different from
what the experts are paid to propagate. The American middle class is being
strangled alive by taxes and wealthy Americans suffer from taxes that are as
The first time in our nation's history we are developing a brain drain problem in peacetime.
Wealthy Americans are leaving the country and even renouncing their citizenship to escape
confiscatory inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, income taxes and high labor costs.
The phenomenon should be a wake-up call.
A country that runs out its wealthiest and most successful citizens is on the road to
economic death.
Instead, the President, Congress and some presidential candidates have toyed with the idea of limiting the amount of money expatriates can take out of the country, an idea only a despot could support or enforce.
The silent killer of inflation and the inflation machine at the Federal Reserve are, of course, still with us.
FED has done more to destroy the standard of living than any other institution.
The FED continues to prop up big government, prop up governments abroad, manipulate currency markets and loot the nation's pool of saved wealth.
The Fed is the central government's lifeblood and also its most feared, beloved, and respected bureaucracy.
Rush Limbaugh is so sensitive on the subject that he won't take any calls from anyone critical of the Federal Reserve.
The leadership of both parties have sworn their devotion to the Fed, the biggest enemy the middle class has ever had.
The only voices, aside from ours, raised in opposition to central banking are those of a few principled freshmen.
But given the intellectual environment in Washington, this, of course, is a sure path to getting yourself labeled as part of the lunatic right-wing fringe.
When I hear that label applied to anyone, I always assume that they're making good sense.
What is the point of all this taxing, spending, inflating and manipulating?
Well, to fund sky-high budgets for welfare and military spending.
The purpose of the welfare, warfare state is not defense and charity, but a good living for the huge class of parasites that has grown up around the transfer process.
The pretense of charity and defense are nothing more than a propaganda cover to make the transfer appear to be in the common good, even while it destroys capital and entrepreneurs the basis of future prosperity.
The survival of military, industry, socialism in the post-Cold War world is particularly despicable.
Bill Clinton got into this war in hopes of shoring up his support among the public. He
based his hopes on past data, showing that presidents are hated less when our troops
are involved in conflicts overseas. At the same time, he sensed that the public's tolerance
for international wars is not what it once was.
Some people say there's nothing at stake for America in what happens in Bosnia. I wish
Of course this is true, but anytime the U.S. government is acting in the manner of an empire, it diminishes American liberty here at home.
Just last March, the White House issued a presidential order penalizing companies who use replacement workers instead of union goons to fulfill federal contracts.
Federal appeals court just voided this order. Robert Reich blasted back, relying on the war motif.
The president, he said, has the authority to make sure that taxpayers get the quality of goods and services they deserve.
We don't want American servicemen and women in Bosnia driving around in tires made by
replacement workers.
Thus in his mind we are supposed to socialize the American labor force at home to prevent
flat tires in Bosnia.
That's the way empire works and it's why the framers and every great western thinker
from Augustin to Rothbard emphasize the importance of peace to the preservation of liberty.
Righteous remarks about tires in Bosnia is no different in substance from the thousands
by liberals that somehow we are all morally obligated to surrender our bank accounts to help any inner city child who grows up without the right level of self-esteem and therefore is mugging people.
Both views follow from the assumption that the Federal Government is in charge, properly in charge at home and abroad, and that the idea of liberty is outdated and unworkable.
Yet the system of propaganda and lies designed to put a gloss on all forms of Federal tyranny is not working as well as it once did.
In 1964, three of every four Americans said they trusted Washington to do the right thing.
Today, fewer than one in five Americans say that, but the percentage is connected to government in some way, by the way.
I said this data not because I think the polls should determine policy, but to explain why the political class is in such a panic.
The government no longer consent to being ruled by the largest government in world history.
Americans know in their heart that something has gone very wrong.
And of course, in blaming the government, they are not scapegoating, but making a rational deduction from the evidence.
When Mr. Clinton said we were doing better than 30 years ago, perhaps he had in mind Capitol Hill's current economic boom.
Construction workers are in the process of building the second largest bureaucratic building in Washington history, and by the way, in the history of the world.
Only the Pentagon exceeds it in size. It will house many thousands employed in lifetime jobs to rule over us.
It's called the Ronald Reagan Building, in honor of the last president who proclaimed that the era of big government was over,
and then doubled the size of the welfare state, added a cabinet department and raised our taxes six times.
Having the government shut for weeks at a time brought home a very important truth to the American people,
and reminds them why their voting patterns have turned decisively against Washington.
The truth is that the civics techs were lying to us when they said that under a democracy, we are the government.
The American people discovered that when the government shut down, life went on pretty much the way it always had.
They didn't feel the government's pain, although of course the middle classes continue to feel their own pain.
During the budget battle, Clinton was reduced to warning, as he did in a radio address, that if the government didn't reopen,
the nation would soon be threatened by poison water, wild outbreaks of disease, and a deadly crime wave.
Although, we'll say that sounds like today.
Of course, we didn't get poisoned water, but the worst consequence of the government shutdown was that many of the nation's parks, museums and monuments were closed, and that proved to be an inconvenience.
But this time more people saw through the fraud. If there is a public demand to visit these places, then why not just let them be run by private money, as for example, Mount Vernon, George Washington's home is. It did not close.
The hysteria over the Vermeer exhibit at the National Gallery proved the point.
The government took great joy in shutting down an exhibit where people were lined up around the block to get in.
The government may have thought that this would show the public how much the nation relies on the government.
Well, it didn't. Could it seem to be more preposterous?
People coming from all over the country to see a beautiful art exhibit, but despite huge demand, the government refusing to let them in.
How different a government bureaucracy is from the private sector.
A business strives to get consumers in the door to purchase its products and services,
while the government holds its consumers hostage for more money for the ruling regime.
The message of the Vermeer exhibit backfired in a safe phase.
The government decided to allow a private foundation to run the exhibit and open it up.
Unfortunately, not all of the government's bad effects disappear when the government shuts down.
As a result of civil rights laws, lawyers in the private sector have been enlisted as the government's private enforcement army, bringing suits against any business that dares not to obey the discrimination police.
In a recent case of enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act, the nuttiest civil rights law in American history, a morgue was forbidden from charging a premium to handle the cadavers of people who had died of AIDS.
No discrimination against corpses that had carried deadly diseases.
Presumably next time we'll have to hire them and rent them apartments too.
This is just one of tens of thousands of cases of ADA enforcement that defy the most basic notions of common sense.
The Denny's Restaurant case is another tragic example of civil rights socialism.
The company was mugged, stripped, humiliated and looted of hundreds of millions of dollars
The government didn't even need to assist directly. Civil rights socialism works on autopilot so long as there are lawyers malicious enough to enrich themselves by bankrupting American companies through the courts.
Here's the background of the Denny's case. In early 1993, six routed government agents went into a crowded Denny's at noon in Maryland and ordered food. Their orders didn't arrive in a time frame that met their approval.
Discrimination, of course, as I'm sure you all think when you don't get served quickly enough in a Denny's or a similar kind of restaurant.
But because they were black and well connected, they went to the press and the Justice Department, and the crimes of Denny's were quickly international news.
An Oakland, California lawyer read the papers and began to elicit other anecdotes, and sure enough, the tales of criminality began rolling in.
A black woman's hamburger was overcooked bigotry.
Black teenagers were asked to prepay for a meal after skipping out on their check several nights before.
Racism.
Denny's settled these initial suits for an astounding $34.8 million.
Then the NAACP stepped in to grab its pound of flesh.
It immediately demanded negotiations with Denny's, and more than a year later, Denny's announced another agreement, this time much more costly.
The parent company agreed to never let black employment fall below 20%,
To raise the percentage of black managers to 12% to give, and I mean give, 47 restaurants to new black owners and to buy a minimum of 12% of its food and other products from black owned businesses.
These free restaurants went, of course, to pals of the NAACP leadership who undoubtedly expressed their thanks in concrete ways to that leadership.
Leadership, and to prevent more restaurant races than the NAACP said they would enforce
the agreement with random visits and the threat of pickets and boycotts.
Then with the court's permission, the original suit was broadened to the fabled class action
status.
Plaintiff's lawyers placed ads in all the nation's newspapers inviting even more litigants.
They looked for blacks who felt they had to wait too long to be seated, segregation.
Blacks who felt the service was too slow, apartheid, and blacks whose food wasn't cooked
To Their Looking, To Their Liking, Slavery
Toll-free number was provided for anyone who claimed that one or more of these hate crimes had happened to him.
In the end, the attorneys rounded up 294,537 plaintiffs, each of whom recently got a check in the mail.
Then his reputation had been dragged through the mud, its property looted, its management forced to beg for mercy
from the equality police and the bitter, hate-filled lobbies they serve.
Then his reputation had been dragged through the mud, its property looted, its management forced to beg for mercy from the equality police and the bitter hate-filled lobbies they serve.
When this kind of thing can happen to a great American business, it's a very dark day.
So long as this episode, which so far as I know has never been condemned or even criticized by any mainstream conservative, can take place in this country, there is no free enterprise and there is no freedom.
of Freedom. Any company anywhere can be held hostage and looted with impunity so long as
the lawyer is fighting on behalf of socialist causes. And there have been no steps whatsoever
in Congress to improve the situation. The only way to end this kind of mass theft is
to end the ability of the central state to enforce the right of trespass against private
property. That's why the Mises Institute steadfastly holds out as the only solution
consistent with private property and the freedom of association, the repeal of the 1964 Civil
Act, and its subsequent amendments in the abolition of the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission as vicious infringements on the rights of every property owner.
Every year, the cost of affirmative action and civil rights enforcement could be as high
as several hundred billion dollars.
As this example illustrates, the real burden of government goes way beyond the 47 percent
of the economy that it loots in cash every year.
The burden also extends to the borrowing that finances the federal deficit, the hundreds
The millions of billions spent on such stupid programs as asbestos removal and the trillion or so dollars lost every year by the dictates of the regulatory state.
As Austrian School economists have always emphasized, the largest cost of interventionism is not what we can see and calculate directly.
The cost that must concern us the most is the prosperity we would have experienced but will never experience as a result of the interventionist state.
Mainstream economists have been recently debating why it is that the so-called information revolution has failed to increase our standard of living, or even caused the national output to increase.
After all, the Industrial Revolution caused two centuries of increases in the standard of living.
Economists debate and debate this question, but miss the obvious reason.
At the Industrial Revolution the economy was largely free and the masses of men could benefit from the massive gains in productivity that it brought about.
Today nearly every area but the high-tech sector is heavily controlled and regulated and that prevents the gains from spreading much beyond the employees and stockholders of the high-tech industries.
And of course those gains have been looted by the central state as it has expropriated the gains of the private sector in general for decades.
In this case is that every other government intervention has stolen our past, our present, and our future wealth.
It's depleting the reserve fund of private capital built up over so many generations.
This is why there's a moral and a practical urgency to dismantling the apparatus of the Leviathan.
Those who promise to do so and do not must be held accountable.
At the same time, however, there's another seed of evil.
In academia, leftists are still largely in charge.
By using affirmative action laws, departments and all the social sciences and arts have conspired to keep out good teachers on grounds that they are the wrong race and sex.
In practice, white male students are no longer seriously considered for any merit-based scholarships at any college or university in the country.
The economics profession in subtle ways still remains hostile to free enterprise.
But nevertheless the Austrian School is gaining in strength and the Central State faces no greater foe than this band of deeply committed intellectuals who reject the dominant assumptions of our age.
To understand why we must understand the dynamics of power. State power is inherently unstable because the ruled must always outnumber the rulers.
The regime must always concern itself therefore with public opinion and moral legitimacy if it is to get away with the high level of expropriation we experience today.
That is where the intellectuals could play the crucial role.
If we have a priority today, it is to build up an alternative intellectual culture that affirms the principles of liberty.
This and only this can genuinely threaten the ruling regime and provide the basis for a secure liberty for the next generation and the next and the next.
We must promote a view of man that grants him an inherent dignity not to be controlled and manipulated by the state.
We must have a view of economic life that defends the inviolability of private property and free exchange.
We must adopt a view of the government's role in society that rules out empires at home or abroad.
And our attempts at radical form must affirm the morality and the practicality of freedom above all else.
Intellectuals and the social sciences face a choice.
They can spend their lives playing the game, saying the right thing, providing a cover for tyrannical rule.
like the German Historicists before the turn of the century or elite faculties today.
Or they can seek out truth above all else, propagate that truth among students and truly advance knowledge in the classical sense.
What Mises said in his day is true in our own.
If the centralized state tyranny faces no fundamental challenge, we can expect only worsening social, cultural and economic conditions.
Living standards will continue to fall and do so within business cycles of increasing severity.
Crime will rise as the dysgenic effects of the well-served welfare state have terrifying demographic consequences.
Our children and their children and their children will have fewer opportunities for employment and for schooling.
Our communities will become less and less safe.
Property will become ever more insecure.
Our money could someday be made nearly worthless and government brutality will increase.
We must face up to the seriousness of our task, or the hope that was once America will be gone.
Truly what's at stake is the future of our own civilization.
That is why we must not slacken our efforts in either public life or in academic life.
Most universities are like Capitol Hill.
No serious intellectual culture to speak of, but only people on the dole promoting their self-interest.
But through generous people like you, who believe in freedom,
we at the Mises Institute have been able to take large steps towards creating
that alternative culture of ideas that upholds the traditional standards of scholarship and truth
and holds out freedom as the only way out of our nation's dilemma.
As a result, our nation's campuses are beginning to experience a wave of rebellion against the corruption of the top.
This rebellion doesn't take the stupid and destructive form that it did in the 1960s.
Because these new rebels are true intellectual dissidents.
These student rebels are reading forbidden works like Mises' Socialism and Rothbard's Power and Market,
receiving our periodicals, attending our conferences,
following Mises Institute activities on our homepage on the World Wide Web.
We have a well-rounded strategy designed to meet our shared goals.
The Review of Austrian Economics is our forum for the deep research that's necessary in economics,
and it's in libraries all over the world.
Students have complained that it's hard to get the recent issue in college libraries because somebody's always pulled it down to read it.
Our quarterly Austrian Economics newsletter publishes speeches and interviews with important economists in the Austrian tradition.
The Mises Review tackles new literature from an Austrian perspective so that at last we get a break from reading the left on the left.
And the free market translates much of this into insights about the contemporary political and economic scene.
These publication programs are backed up by a larger publishing program that emphasizes quality above all else.
In the last year, we've published Murray and Rothbard's The Case Against the Fed and his Making Economic Sense, two classics, of clear thinking.
Rothbard's history of economic thought has already become required reading in the field.
We continue to reprint Man Economy and State, next to Human Action remains the top-selling economic treatise.
Treatise. We hold conferences on everything from central banking to war, from welfare
to secessionism. These and our other teaching programs replicate our publishing structure
of production on a different level. Our fellowship program seeks out the best graduate students,
tutors them and guides them through their entire graduate education. Our workshops and
colloquia at Auburn University attract some of the best scholars working today. Our annual
summer school, the Mises University, brings the best students from all over America to
10 years of the Mises University has paid off. Thousands of economics teachers assigned these great thinkers in their classroom. Every important young Austrian working today has attended the program. Students often tell us that the Mises University and our other teaching programs provide the education, the real education, that they hoped that they would get at their college or university, but instead have been denied. And it's not just the students that lack good tutoring and mentoring.
We also find that good scholars lack for colleagues they can trust.
That's why we just held the first Austrian Scholars Conference, an international and interdisciplinary professional meeting.
Many of the people who came, and they came from all over the world, all came at their own expense and called it the highlight of their professional career.
Freshman congressmen have told us that our editorials and our publications give them hope and shore up their courage to confront statism head on.
Activists of the grassroots say we provide them guidance through clarity of thought and tough-minded intellectual leadership.
We work hard because, like you, we believe in the ideas of liberty and because it brings us joy to do the right thing.
We exist to enter the public argument where the principles stand for free markets, sound money, and very limited government, emphasis on the very.
In doing so we uphold the highest standards of scholarship as we seek to move beyond the century of statism into a millennium of liberty.
If we follow through in this vision, we can expect the revival of the philosophy of liberty to continue and to grow.
When our arguments overwhelm our opponents as they have begun to do,
and the lies that undergird our present tyranny are exposed, we can be saved from the apocalypse.
Then and only then, with your help, will we be able to lead an authentic revolution for liberty,
or more precisely, to bring about an authentic counterrevolution
against those who have stolen what is rightfully ours and witness in our time a new flowering of human freedom and a return to justice and prosperity.
Then and only then will we be able to say that the era of big government is over.