Rather than give you a title of the speech, we can just play a little game at the end of the day.
We can just maybe toss around some ideas for what we want to call the title of the speech,
you know, based on whatever content emerges. Is that okay?
Sure.
Okay, all right.
Well, first I wanted to thank you all for coming today and supporting the Mises Institute.
To me it's very inspiring because we live in a world where idealism seems to be sort of banished.
People consider idealists to be sort of crazy, you know, this is not a world where ideals of the sort that Mises held, that Hayek held and Rothbard held are very welcome anymore and yet they're absolutely essential because ideals of the sort that Mises had and that Rothbard held and Mises held are what's sustaining human liberty, it's the very ideas of liberty that are the source of
There is no liberty at all. They have to be believed in, they have to be supported, there has to be cultural backing for them, there has to be a profound understanding of how freedom works, or we'll default back into the normal state of humanity, which is a state of despotism and desperation and struggle and hand-to-mouth existence.
That's the bottom line. We need supporters of freedom in order to have freedom.
Back to once said that freedom is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization and I think
it's so true in some way. So for you to see that makes you the exception really among
the whole swath of humanity to understand this important point and it also gives and
poses upon all of us I think a special obligation to work as hard as we can to educate our fellow
and to promote liberty in whatever way we can because by promoting liberty we're promoting civilization, prosperity and peace and all the stuff we really care about that makes life beautiful, makes life grand and makes our lives on this earth worth living.
So you understand that, that's why you're here today and that makes you very special and really the most special kind of people there are.
are. So I want to express my gratitude to you for that. And also, we haven't made this
announcement yet. I thought, well, let's just save it until this conference. Normally, I
have this pathology to blog every single thing I can possibly think, every minute. That's
why I did my hotel room yesterday. Rather than hanging out at the beach, I just blogged.
How many of you do this on vacations? This is what I do, you know.
But fortunately, capitalism makes this possible. You know, when I came into Fort Myers Airport,
they had a store that allows you to buy anything that's related to Florida at all. So you get
to like the whole Florida experience in one little store, you know. It's great. And I've
I've learned over time, the more I travel, the more I want to be enticed by these so-called
tourist traps.
They've become tourist traps, like we're somehow trapped, coerced into buying a 10-gallon hat
in Texas, or a rosary blessed by the Pope in Rome, or a ticket to paradise in Mecca.
Well, look, if you go to Mecca, what do you want?
You want a ticket to paradise, right?
So the capitalists are there to give it to you. So in Florida, you come into the airport
and the first thing you get are, you get presented these shells, seashells that you can buy.
Well this is great for me, because we don't have really seashells in Auburn, Alabama,
so it's very exciting. So I'm buying these seashells, five for ten dollars, which I think
is a bargain, and the guy behind me whispers to me, he goes, hey man, don't pay for that
stuff, you can get that stuff free on the beach. Well, I'm not at the beach, right?
So, and I didn't go to the beach, and I'm not planning to go to the beach, I like to
blog in my hotel room, and that's what I like to do.
So I get the whole seashell thing, you know, in my suitcase and take it home.
But the thing that was really great, I didn't expect to get at all, I've never seen anything
like it before, it was truly the head of an alligator.
And it was about this big, you know, and so how much is this head of this alligator?
Now, if they had said, well, it's $400. I thought, that's a bargain. But they didn't
say that. They said, it's $14. I'm thinking, how is this possible that I can buy the head
of an alligator for $14? I mean, so, of course I did, instantly. And I'm thinking about this.
So there's some guy out there raising alligators. It's not a job I want. And so then, I don't
know, at a young age, how old does an alligator have to be before his head gets that big?
I don't know, two year, I don't know how long, and they chop off the head and then they freeze dry it or whatever you do with an alligator head and they paint it with some sort of glossy paint and preserving the teeth, you know, his smile, everything, and then they put them all in a bag and slug it all the way to the airport where this tourist trap guy has to pay for them and buy all these alligator heads at some price. Okay, so maybe he paid three dollars.
and then they put them on a shelf and wait for suckers like me to come along and buy them.
Well, it's great because I now have an alligator head and I'm taking this alligator head home to my son,
who I promise you is going to go wild for this thing when he sees it.
He's going to have an alligator head at his desk.
Anyway, this is to me the essence of the market.
It's people coming together to collaborate in the service of humanity.
How can anybody object to this? This is a great system.
And yet we call them tourist traps and we have disdain for these shysters trying to sell us seashells.
Well, I'm all for it. It deserves our support.
Back to what I would like to tell you about.
An extraordinary thing happened about two months ago.
So we get this email from a rare book dealer in the UK and they say we have three boxes of papers that belonged to Ludwig von Mises and we'd like to sell them to you.
Okay, we thought we had everything. We've got a third floor filled with Mises papers from Moscow, from Grove City, from Stanford University.
I mean, I've written to every publisher who ever published one of Mises' books and got their complete papers.
There's three boxes of papers.
And they tell us that inside these boxes are manuscripts of Mises' books that he had typed, or that somebody had typed,
and he went through and hand-corrected these manuscripts.
And that's what's in the boxes, mostly are his hand-corrected manuscripts.
Well, in all the cases and cases of file cabinets and papers we have by Mises, we have nothing like this.
We don't have hand-corrected things. I don't know why that is, but we just don't.
So here, a rare book dealer came upon these things, turns out they've had them for 12 years, didn't know what to do with them, you know.
So, in the boxes, it includes, for example, the German edition of Omnipotent Government
that he wrote when he was, let's see, I believe he must have written that when he was in Geneva,
in exile, you know, so, and it's a passionate and brilliant attack on National Socialism.
People have a hard time understanding this, you know, like, wait a minute, there's a guy,
He was a brilliant economist and he opposed both socialism and fascism.
How does that work?
The 20th century gave us two options.
You can be a socialist or you can be a fascist.
And there's no other option, really.
Well, as a matter of fact, isn't that pretty much what they're still telling us today,
for the most part?
Well, Mises was a passionate opponent of both and in fact, he did more than write about
the subject.
He was driven out of Austria because of his anti-fascist writings and driven out, before he was driven out of Austria itself, he was driven out of the University of Vienna for his anti-socialist writings, you know.
So he ends up in Geneva, spends six years in exile there, comes to the United States, had a hard time getting a job here because neither the right wing nor the left wing liked the guy, you know.
is a sport of human freedom. It makes him unusual, like you, an unusual person with unusual views, unusually consistent, idealistic views that makes us the enemy of the state, whether it's a left-wing state or a right-wing state, and that was certainly Mises.
Well, in any case, these papers, which not only include manuscripts, they include documents from the early years of his life, like when he was in high school,
you know some photographs and things and and we don't know what else is in there
lots of wonderful things Toby Baxdell a friend of ours in the UK went to visit to make sure we weren't being
you know ripped off by some sort of tourist trap you know and and he said these are unbelievable
they're amazing i can't i can't believe we've come across these things well we would have had
them two weeks ago but there's some special paperwork we had to fill out or they had the
the book dealer had to export them just to get papers from the UK to here you have to go through a government bureaucracy in any case they arrived just I think yesterday right Doug they just arrived yesterday so we've really got them now so I want to tell you what our plan is because it's very exciting archives for most of human history have been really boring and here's why an institution gets them and they go into the
The Attic, you know, and the managers of this place say, well, we'll get to those papers
at some point. But that point never really arrives because somebody always has something
better to do than slog through a bunch of archives and catalog them and archive them
and detail what's in them and write finders guides and all the rest of it. It's a very
Very expensive undertaking. It's time intensive. You spend hundreds and thousands of hours
doing it and then one guy shows up every couple of decades to come and thumb through them
and leave. So you can see it's not really economically very viable. Archiving has always
been this way. I remember one time going to Boston College and looking at the archives
of, hello, Belloc, a very famous writer, very famous guy. Well, they were just a mess. They're
I understand why this happens. It's very difficult, the archiving task, and you have to have experts do it, but experts always have better things to do. That's the problem.
So, how are we going to get around it this time? Here's the plan, and this is just great.
Within the last year, we created a thing on the website called the Mises Wiki, and you can find it at wiki.mesis.org.
Now, what Wikis make possible is this glorious thing called human collaboration, simultaneous work by any two individuals or 2,000 or 200,000 or 2 million individuals in the world,
Even though they're not sitting in the same room, they're not in the same factory, they're
not in the same office, they're not in the same intranet, didn't we used to call it ten
years ago that was the big thing, we all had internal networks, well, who cares about that
anymore, right?
Our networks are global, it's fantastic.
So we don't need contiguous states anymore, or contiguous office spaces to do our work.
We can cooperate with the whole of humanity on tasks at the same time. You understand all this has come about just within the last few years.
And cloud computing, you know, I was talking to Max here, a young student who's working in this field.
You know, this is like 12, 24 months old now. You know, you see what this means?
It means that the prospects for human cooperation are now global and potentially infinite.
So, we've deployed one of these things on the Mises website. So the idea here is, and this is great, the idea is that we're going to upload all of these documents right away to the Mises wiki so you will see them at the same time that we see them and they'll be a mess, right? Just documents, just pictures and things, but you can inflate them, look at them, look at them just as if they're in real life.
And, at the wiki, you are free to go and annotate them as you please, and discover for yourself what you want to discover within them, and compare the knowledge you gained with the knowledge you have, and cooperate with other people who have knowledge, and we'll all come together, all of humanity, to make sense of these papers that Mises, that have come to us so strangely at this time in human history.
So, that's the plan. Isn't it wonderful?
And it's a... Yeah.
Something that technology makes possible at the Mises Institute,
we're always looking for ways to use technology to the benefit of human freedom.
And the reason is that technology isn't really about cogs and wheels and machinery and code.
What it's really about is the service of humanity,
because no technology comes about in the marketplace except and to the extent that it serves the human population.
So that's why technology is so important to us because it's a tool for social progress.
And this Mises Wiki is just an example of this.
So why do we care so much about Mises?
Well, and I know that there are some people here who are unaware of what the Mises Institute is about.
So, I just want to talk a little bit about this, why Mises is such an important thinker for understanding our world and, you know, we all have to have a theory of society, a theory of how things work, if we're to go about our lives in a rational way, and the Austrian School of Economics has provided that and particularly the theories of Mises has provided that, that lens that permits us to understand the course of human events.
The core of Mises' understanding was, of course, to praise the free market and to condemn the government.
That's the superficial view. I don't have a problem with that. Nobody at the Mises Institute does.
But it's a little more sophisticated than that.
Mises re-rendered market theory in a way that helps us understand it more precisely.
Traditionally, capitalism has been seen about the power of capital or the incentives that it gives producers when they compete with each other to do a better job and build a better mousetrap, and all of that's fine, but for Mises, his core understanding of the market was that the market is the place that permits the greatest amount of human cooperation
of Association, so that we can come together cooperatively to apply all of our individual
talents in ways that benefit ourselves individually and benefit the whole of society also. So
for Mises, the market system is a system of social cooperation. That's a kind of a different
understanding of the market than you're going to get from the media or from most professors
in the Department of Literature or for most sociologists or anybody else.
And once you understand this point, you begin to understand too that the agency of the state
is constantly at war with the system of social cooperation because rather than working through
mutual agreement and exchange, mutually beneficial exchange, the state works based on one principle
So when you understand this difference between the market on the one hand as a system of
social cooperation, collaboration, it's like one gigantic global cloud computing solution,
that's the free market, and then the state, which really consists of a gang with a bunch
The Theory of Money and Credit
by Murray Rothbard. It's called Power and Market, where he lays out really this Misesian
theory in the clearest possible terms. I remember some years ago hearing some speech by a politician
saying that we needed protectionism to bolster our domestic industry and save such and such
Research Industry from Foreign Competition, and he said in particular, too, that it's
really regrettable that US workers have to compete with foreign workers who work at such
low wages.
I remember thinking at the time, I thought, you know, that's really stupid.
But he doesn't know why it's stupid.
And thinking that if I could just send this guy one book to understand that subject and
and all other subjects related to interventionism, it would be this book, because what Murray
does in this book is he classifies all forms of government intervention into three types,
autistic, which affect only the individual, binary, which affect the trade between two
individuals and triangular, which affect trade between, that affect groups, attempts to trade
between three or more individuals and he classifies all interventions and explains really patiently
but very quickly in two or three pages what's wrong with each of them and how each of these
types of interventions fail to achieve their stated aim in every single case and the case
is so comprehensive, you know, you're left kind of at the end with, you know, almost
When we're left breathless, we realize, oh, there's nothing good that the state can do for us, that we can't do for ourselves even better.
That's the upshot of this book. And it's a remarkable thing to discover, really. And it's so comprehensive.
And what's also nice about this book is that it adopts the Misesian view.
You know, it says power and market, and I should be clear that in the Austrian view, when we talk about the market,
We're not just talking about commercial exchange, we're not just talking about Jeffrey Tucker
buying the head of an alligator from a tourist trap, all right?
It's a lot more than that, we're not talking about just stock markets, we're talking about
the whole matrix of human association, whether it involves money or not.
So every kind of voluntary decision you take is in some way, in the Rothbardian understanding,
of the Market Economy because it represents a human choice.
And the logic of choice is the same whether we're talking about volunteering for a soup
kitchen on Sunday afternoon or going to our e-trade accounts and selling one stock and
buying another stock.
The logic of human choice is governed by certain universal principles that we can understand
rationally.
That's the Austrian conception of the market.
How many of you saw the movie called Social Network?
It's one of my favorite movies, this Facebook movie.
In the movie there's a guy,
these twins, the Winklevoss twins claim they sue
Mark Zuckerberg because they claim that they first had the idea
of bringing people together based on
Collaborative Human Associations to come online to socialize.
So I was thinking as a preposterous claim.
I mean, it's true that Winklevoss has thought of the idea, but it was Zuckerberg himself who put it into place.
And in the free market, it doesn't matter so much what you're thinking about, what matters is what you do.
But this absurd thing that the Winklevosses are somehow the founders of Facebook,
I was looking back and I re-read Mises' section in Human Action on human association, so I'm concluding here by reading Mises.
It wasn't the Winklevoss twins who founded Facebook, it was Mises who founded Facebook.
He's the one who figured it out first that if we put people together and let them rationally understand what's in their self-interest and cooperate,
And then no matter what your talents, no matter what your skills, there's something to be gained by cooperating with other people.
And that's the essence of the Facebook effect, really. It's the market at work. It's taking that dynamism that drives the market forward and puts it into place in the digital world.
That's a beautiful thing to see, and Zuckerberg was the first one, really, who put it all together in this way.
Understanding market logic helps us understand many things about the world that would otherwise bypass us completely.
And I want to tell you a story that's a local story related to Alabama here in a second,
Let's talk about the first part of this equation, the power part, and that deals with the state.
We're not only living in times of extraordinary human achievement in the digital world, the
advent of cloud computing, just one example, but we've seen, really within the last month,
An explosion in all the states from North Africa all the way up to the Gulf states of interest
in this idea of human liberty and a mass revulsion against dictatorships and governments.
And we're seeing the effects of this play out, which in many ways is analogous to what
What happened in 1999 against the socialist states, you know, not 1989, 1989 against
socialism.
So we're seeing yet another wave of push for human freedom against the state.
And we've seen now, most conspicuously, two responses by the state, by people saying,
look, we're sick of being ruled by you and your gang.
In the case of Egypt, Mubarak left after things got pretty intense and it became obvious to
him that he wasn't wanted.
In Libya, on the other hand, we've got a dictator who says, look, I don't know what's going
on here.
Don't you understand?
It doesn't matter what you guys think.
I'm the ruler and I'm in charge and I alone have the right to use coercion against you.
and I'm going to use it if you disagree with me. You do the things that I don't want, you're
probably going to die. If you want peace, there's a simple solution. Stop doing things I don't
want you to do and start doing things I do want you to do. Then we'll all be happy. That's
essentially Gaddafi's view of the world. Well, it's a very intriguing assertion because
If you think about it, his assertion is no different from the assertion made by any government
at any place and all times throughout all of human history.
I mean, Gaddafi is sort of embarrassing to people like Obama and all the governments
of the world that are condemning his human rights abuses.
It's very embarrassing for a state leader just to take off the mask, the mask of democracy
or morality or whatever other masks states like to wear and just say, hey, look, here's
the point, I'm the ruler, you're not, you're going to obey. That's why everybody's condemning
this guy. I mean, he's an embarrassment. He's an honest leader in some ways. He's
being absolutely truthful. This is the core. I don't care what kind of ideological cloak
The state happens to be wearing at the time democracy, education, you know, got to promote
human rights, you know, we're going to make you thin, you know, the latest thing from
Michelle Obama, you know, make sure that you're eating the right foods or not drinking the
wrong substances or, you know, the state's got a better idea for your life than you have.
And here's the thing, the state operates under different sets of laws than you operate under,
So, the state can steal, you can't. You can't kidnap, but the state can. You can't counterfeit, but the state can.
All these things that are forbidden to you because they would be wrong and immoral are permitted to the state because it claims the right to do it.
That's the essence of the state. It operates under a different law.
This is a point made very beautifully by Bastiat. And so it has been throughout all times and all places.
Now, a state is different from what we might call just law, like government, you could call it, I suppose.
There are such things as voluntary associations that involve rules and regulations, right?
So, if somebody brought into this room like a foghorn and started blowing it right now in the middle of my talk,
we would say, hey, that is against the rules, and you've got to go, so we kick the guy out.
And that's the way civilized societies handle what we might call trolls.
In the online world, there's always trolls.
You open up a forum, and like, hey, we're going to have a happy time, and everybody's going great,
There's one jerk that comes in and starts saying nasty things and making life miserable for everybody.
Well, okay, so maybe that's two or three percent of the population. I don't know.
So what do you do in the online world? You get the guy's IP address, you ban it.
You know, you ban his username. You know, then you ban his account and you kind of stay after him and you get rid of him.
Has it been coerced? No.
Okay, this is a society of agreement, all right?
And we don't agree to let you in. We're going to exclude you.
And then we have peace, we have a beautiful forum, and we all get along.
So this is roughly analogous to how society would work
in absence of this thing we call the state.
We would have governments, plenty of them.
For example, I live in a subdivision,
and they seem to have rules against, for example,
painting your front door like a psychedelic color,
or something like that, right?
Even, you know, I might want to do that,
but I'm not permitted to do that.
They would invite me to leave.
There was a guy, I remember, who just insisted on putting a trampoline in his front yard.
I don't know why.
He had a trampoline.
So I went to the homeowners' meeting, and everybody was against the guy, you know?
And I kind of felt sorry for him, really.
I mean, his trampoline wasn't bothering me, but you know what subdivisions are like, right?
They're filled with people, and they're nosy, and they want to control other people's lives
or whatever.
and so they, you know, they go, no, you can't have trampolines, it violates the covenant or whatever
and he said, well, you know, if that's the way you feel about it, if that's the way you feel about my trampoline, you know what I gotta do? I gotta move.
And everybody went, yay! And the whole place began cheering, you know, and
no, I thought this was an interesting case because I'm in this homeowners meeting, now
yeah, I live in a college town and that just means that most people are communists, you know, and
So, all my fellow homeowners, we've got lefties, every kind of commie, I don't know, maybe there's some member of the Nazi party, I don't know, I don't know who's there. Their politics don't matter.
I mean, all these people, we don't even care about each other's views. How is it that we're all able to come to an agreement to get rid of the guy with the trampling in his front yard?
Well, because we all own property, and we all have a view that we want to maximize this value.
Because we agree on the core thing that matters.
It doesn't matter what else we think. I mean, every religion is represented there.
Every point of view. You know, there's probably some people there that believe in
Sharia law, that scary thing, you know, for all I know. I don't know.
I mean, it doesn't matter. The point was, we're all there on mutual agreement, so we all cooperate, we all get along.
It's a beautiful vision. It's a small microcosm of how society would work in absence of this thing we call the state.
Well, the television and the internet has provided us very beautiful examples recently of the truth about how the state works.
And the state works through jails, bloodshed, and hangings, and aggression.
That's the core of the state. There's nothing else.
Strip away all the propaganda, that's the one thing that the state does.
That's the very essence of its being.
Well, that's a very ugly thing to my mind.
And we've seen a hundred years of horrible things done by states from the left to the
right in the name of some great slogan, 100 million people slaughtered, many more than
that if you include in wars and socialist starvation campaign, a grim bloody century.
In contrast to the market, so on one hand we have power, on the other hand we have the
market. Within the market framework, on the other hand, what do we see? I mean, for one
thing, and we've talked about it already, in the digital world, we see, really, the digital
world is one gigantic metaphor for the voluntary society. It's a beautiful thing. The state
has created virtually nothing online apart from a few crappy websites, alright?
Everything else has been created by the market through innovation, through human cooperation
and service of individuals coming together to try to do something beautiful and something
wonderful.
And so often the results are contrary to our expectations, I mean there are surprises every
day online.
It's a beautiful thing, you know, to fire up your computer and see a new innovation
I hadn't checked such-and-such website in a week and you open it up and it's more beautiful than ever. It's constant improvement. How great is that to live in a society, the digital world, that's constantly improving?
I think we all, maybe it's just the nature of the Western mind or something, we want to live in a world of progress. My mother lives in Brownwood, Texas and I've enjoyed going back and visiting her for years.
and you know when businesses are leaving, Brownwood, Texas is one of those towns like many others, it's constantly struggling, you know, there's like this ebb and flow all the time, so when businesses are leaving, everybody in the town is kind of depressed, you know, everybody's kind of down in the dumps, you can tell it, you know, if you go visit a place, people are kind of down in the dumps, you know, well things aren't so hot around here and then when business is booming, hotels are coming, new restaurants, everybody's upbeat, wow, Brownwood's a great town, love to be here, it's great to be here, you know, there's a good mood all around, you know, so this is what social technological
economic progress means for people gives people a sense of lift well that's what
the digital world does
it's always improving all the time but it's not just the digital world
I want to tell you a story about an extraordinary thing that happened in
Montgomery Alabama
which is the town just south of us okay so there's this plant
a car plant run by a company called Hyundai
the most implausible company you can possibly ever imagine
This is a Korean company that probably faced with all kinds of protectionist problems, or I don't know what, in 1986 opens up a small factory in Montgomery, Alabama to sell its cars to Americans.
And hardly anybody took notice of this. This was 1986. What was going on in 1986? I don't know. There was some political controversy about the Contras, Iran, Oliver North, Reagan.
I don't remember. There's vague, weird stuff happening in the political world, but the really exciting thing was happening in Montgomery, Alabama. A little factory is opening up.
Well, here we are 25 years later. He has a sister company called Kia in Georgia, and together they are the fourth largest seller of automobiles to Americans in this country, and they're outpacing sales of Ford.
extraordinary. And in Montgomery, they employ 2,650 people, you know, a Korean company,
that finally come to Montgomery and refer us to a place. You know, Montgomery politicians
have been trying to improve that rotten city now for like a century. You know, oh, let's
build a bridge, you know, we're going to float some bonds and build, we need a pretty bridge
coming into town. That's going to make, you know, we need a new library. How about a fountain?
Well, we need a fountain, you know. All this stupid stuff and, you know, none of it works.
You know, there's infrastructure projects, you know, the pay big consulting company.
How can we fix up our town? Well, you know, meet with the Chamber of Commerce.
Well, no, the Koreans come in and they fix up Montgomery.
The Koreans are fixing up Montgomery, Alabama.
So everybody wants to work for this place. It's just fantastic.
They produce 300,000 brilliant, beautiful cars every year.
They run 24 hours, so two shifts a day, producing cars, six days a week, and the demand, they can't keep up with it.
The latest thing I just saw is that there's so much demand for this car called the Elantra,
that they're having to import them, of all things from South Korea, just to me.
Okay, but what is, I mean this is the most important, if you listen to the central planners, this is the way it was supposed to work.
Americans would make cars for Americans forever. That was the idea. Well, we must have American cars. Why? Because Americans want to buy, Americans want to make cars, we want to make them for ourselves, and that's the way it's supposed to work.
Well, thank goodness markets don't pay any attention to central planners. The Koreans are fixing up Montgomery. So what's happening to the Montgomery culture as a result? It's never just about a factory.
Enterprise isn't just about a building, you know, pumping out some products for people to buy.
It's transformed the town.
There are ten Korean restaurants.
We know we have a place to go to eat, you know, it's great.
The churches in town are filled.
You know, everybody talks about how, you know, mainline churches are dying, you know,
well you can't, you know, all the parishioners are old, you know, nobody's having kids.
Not true in Montgomery. All the churches are packed.
All the Koreans are giving money and they're building and they're expanding, all the churches are expanding.
There's new Korean churches but they're also going to the Baptist, Methodist and everything else.
And get this, one of the worst things about Alabama, I guess everybody knows this, it's no secret,
there's a perception that we're somehow backward culturally.
I don't know if you have that view or not, but many people have this view.
Well, listen to this. So, my son plays violin. He goes to Allstate Orchestra this year, played
in an orchestra of 300 kids, 14 year olds, playing violin, cello, viola, bass. Half of
the members of this orchestra are Korean. So, this Hyundai plant has brought classical
Music and training and art to our backward state. Who could have believed it? And how
is it possible? How is it possible that these people, these Koreans, are nothing like Alabamians?
These people come from different religions, different heritages, different everything.
How is it we all get along so well? And I tell you, people love Koreans in Alabama.
We love them. I mean, everybody gets along. You know what it is? It's commerce. How great
What is that? It's the magic that connects people. It's the thing that brings together humanity, people from different parts of the world, different religions, different backgrounds.
And we all come together cooperatively through this magic thing called, and people put down the cash matrix, look down on capitalism, look what it's doing.
I mean, it's the source of peace and prosperity in our lives. It's the source of civilization.
It's the thing that's going to save us in ways we don't entirely expect.
So, why does the Mises Institute exist?
It exists to support this system because it's the key to life itself.
And economic science, as Mises said, is the pith of life.
It must be understood in order to understand our world, in order to improve our world,
in order to make this a livable, beautiful, lovely place.
A place that is more like the digital world, more like Montgomery, Alabama, with the Hyundai plant there,
and less like a place like Libya, where life is ruled by bloodshed and coercion and aggression.
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