WEBVTT NOTE Current Market Conditions: 6 Oct. 2008 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:16.600 Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan, many other books, a great scholar of what 2 00:00:16.600 --> 00:00:23.400 government does in times of calamity and also the editor of the Independent Review and we 3 00:00:23.400 --> 00:00:26.560 are living in interesting times as they say. 4 00:00:26.560 --> 00:00:32.520 I suppose for many people this is a shock. For you, having studied this your whole life, 5 00:00:32.520 --> 00:00:33.520 how does it make you feel? 6 00:00:33.520 --> 00:00:42.320 Well, both good and bad, Jeff. I think a lot of extremely unfortunate things are being 7 00:00:42.320 --> 00:00:48.440 done by the government right now, so I feel bad about that. But at the same time, there's 8 00:00:48.440 --> 00:00:56.440 a kind of exhilaration for the scholar who studied the history of such episodes to be 9 00:00:56.440 --> 00:01:03.320 to be living in the midst of one and to see so many of the common patterns showing up 10 00:01:03.320 --> 00:01:07.840 again this time. 11 00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:15.640 What's the most closest historical parallel I suppose you would point us to the New Deal? 12 00:01:15.640 --> 00:01:23.400 Well in some ways there are parallels to the New Deal, certainly one important aspect of 13 00:01:23.400 --> 00:01:33.000 The Great Depression was a financial collapse. Of course, the banking catastrophe of the 14 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:42.440 early 1930s was many, many times worse than what's happening right now. Between 1930 15 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:54.060 In 1934, inclusive, more than 10,000 commercial banks failed, so we're certainly not witnessing 16 00:01:54.060 --> 00:01:59.120 anything like that right now, but there have been some bank failures, including some large 17 00:01:59.120 --> 00:02:10.800 bank failures, and especially in the housing sector, we see some parallels because many, 18 00:02:10.800 --> 00:02:18.000 Too many people found themselves in the early 1930s unable to make their mortgage payments 19 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:25.240 or in some cases unable to pay the taxes on their property and as a result lenders foreclosed 20 00:02:25.240 --> 00:02:30.320 on them, they lost their homes or tax authorities. 21 00:02:30.320 --> 00:02:39.040 And so we're seeing certainly a rerun of some of those housing sector difficulties 22 00:02:39.040 --> 00:02:40.040 Right Now. 23 00:02:40.040 --> 00:02:48.160 Although, again, I would emphasize that what has occurred thus far is not nearly as extreme 24 00:02:48.160 --> 00:02:54.120 as what happened in the early thirties, and of course nowadays people are much, much richer 25 00:02:54.120 --> 00:03:03.040 than they were at that time, and so losing a home or losing employment does not leave 26 00:03:03.040 --> 00:03:08.600 people in the same situation that they were left in the early 1930s. 27 00:03:08.600 --> 00:03:18.760 But there are these parallels and now as then the government purported to come in and rescue 28 00:03:18.760 --> 00:03:25.320 people from these unfortunate circumstances by a variety of measures. 29 00:03:25.320 --> 00:03:35.320 A number of states put moratoria on foreclosures of mortgages, as I recall about 30 states 30 00:03:35.320 --> 00:03:38.240 that did that. 31 00:03:38.240 --> 00:04:07.240 The federal government, after Roosevelt's election especially, created a number of programs to adjust mortgages, to refinance mortgages, to steer public money to lenders to help people pay or to have taxpayers pay in their stead so that they could retain possession of their homes. 32 00:04:08.240 --> 00:04:38.240 So some of what we see in this bailout has parallels in the early 30s and also of course even before Roosevelt's election we had measures especially including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was created in 1932 to bail out big failing firms including banks and insurance companies so there are all sorts of parallels between now and the early 1930s 33 00:04:38.240 --> 00:04:44.240 with regard to what's going on in housing and banking and what the government is doing about it. 34 00:04:45.760 --> 00:04:50.720 What you're describing is, well let me ask it this way, are you surprised at what sounds like a 35 00:04:52.160 --> 00:04:59.280 disproportionate response by Washington relative to the crisis as it's developed so far? 36 00:05:00.080 --> 00:05:06.480 I am a little surprised, Jeff, because as I've been writing in the recent weeks, 37 00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:13.280 It seems to me that this so-called crisis is in large part bogus, which is to say not 38 00:05:13.280 --> 00:05:16.760 that nobody is in a bind. 39 00:05:16.760 --> 00:05:26.400 Certainly some of these big lending institutions, Fannie and Freddie for certain, and some of 40 00:05:26.400 --> 00:05:34.880 the big banks are in a lot of trouble, that is to say they're actually bankrupt. 41 00:05:34.880 --> 00:05:41.120 I think what has happened is that because these people have a lot of political clout, they've, 42 00:05:41.120 --> 00:05:51.040 as it were, joined forces to represent their difficulties as systemic or as portending 43 00:05:51.040 --> 00:05:57.800 some generalized economic collapse in order to frighten people and frighten members of 44 00:05:57.800 --> 00:06:27.800 and then to propose or to have proposed on their behalf rescue measures like this bailout law passed on Friday that the government claims will prevent or ameliorate recession or even worse developments but which in effect simply amounts to 45 00:06:27.800 --> 00:06:38.680 to taking money from taxpayers and using it to give to lending institutions that hold more 46 00:06:38.680 --> 00:06:40.760 or less worthless assets. 47 00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:50.160 So it's rewarding the very people who acted most imprudently in the past five or six years 48 00:06:50.160 --> 00:07:01.160 of the Real Estate Run-Up and the Credit Bubble and penalizing the massive people, including 49 00:07:01.160 --> 00:07:06.460 all those people who were prudent, who did not get themselves into situations they couldn't 50 00:07:06.460 --> 00:07:15.760 deal with, and it is the worst imaginable kind of incentive situation and if you wanted 51 00:07:15.760 --> 00:07:25.520 to create a program to maximally encourage moral hazard, you couldn't beat this current 52 00:07:25.520 --> 00:07:26.520 bailout program. 53 00:07:26.520 --> 00:07:37.000 It's tailor-made to reward the unwise and the imprudent, people who entered into undertakings 54 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:45.600 that they, in many cases, didn't even understand in mortgage-backed securities and derivatives 55 00:07:45.600 --> 00:07:52.280 and what have you, and to reward them for their foolishness by penalizing taxpayers. 56 00:07:52.280 --> 00:08:00.680 And, of course, the fact that taxes may not be increased, but the government simply borrow 57 00:08:00.680 --> 00:08:10.760 The money to pay for these goals to lending institutions doesn't mean taxpayers aren't 58 00:08:10.760 --> 00:08:12.720 being put on the hook, of course. 59 00:08:12.720 --> 00:08:18.960 They're going to have to be responsible for servicing this increased debt and ultimately 60 00:08:18.960 --> 00:08:22.400 for paying it off in one way or another. 61 00:08:22.400 --> 00:08:29.920 I noticed, by the way, just this morning reading that between now and the end of December, 62 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:36.400 People are saying the Treasury is going to have to, in that period, that's just three 63 00:08:36.400 --> 00:08:37.400 months. 64 00:08:37.400 --> 00:08:47.920 The Treasury is going to have to sell an additional $500 billion worth of debt. 65 00:08:47.920 --> 00:08:52.400 That's just extraordinary amount of additional debt. 66 00:08:52.400 --> 00:09:00.120 And that's on top of all the debt they were having to sell already because of the large 67 00:09:00.120 --> 00:09:01.920 government deficit. 68 00:09:01.920 --> 00:09:10.320 So amazing things are being done right now and every episode is a little different from 69 00:09:10.320 --> 00:09:16.200 every other one, but there are many parallels, particularly in the way that the government 70 00:09:16.200 --> 00:09:24.200 is exploiting frightened people and actually cultivating that fright in order to justify 71 00:09:24.200 --> 00:09:32.640 extreme measures which purport to be aimed at helping everybody but which on the face 72 00:09:32.640 --> 00:09:41.160 of them amount mainly to robbery, to taking from taxpayers and giving to privileged recipients. 73 00:09:41.160 --> 00:09:46.460 It does seem like the bailout and all the hysterical rhetoric coming from Washington 74 00:09:46.460 --> 00:09:56.080 and Wall Street has actually panicked people to the point that they're taking the inherently 75 00:09:56.080 --> 00:10:01.440 unstable system of banking and the highly leveraged corporate sector and actually exacerbating 76 00:10:01.440 --> 00:10:02.440 all the problems. 77 00:10:02.440 --> 00:10:04.440 Doesn't it seem that way to you? 78 00:10:04.440 --> 00:10:08.820 Can you say that the bailout in a way is actually getting worse even in the short run? 79 00:10:08.820 --> 00:10:14.420 I think that's true, Jeff, and you look at things like the sort of runs on these money 80 00:10:14.420 --> 00:10:20.740 market funds, that looks to me like evidence for what you're saying, that the measures 81 00:10:20.740 --> 00:10:27.240 the government is taking are spooking people and making them think the sky is falling. 82 00:10:27.240 --> 00:10:33.340 What I've been saying for months is that when you step back from the financial sector and 83 00:10:33.340 --> 00:10:38.060 perhaps also from the housing sector and look at the rest of the economy, the sky is not 84 00:10:38.060 --> 00:10:47.060 It doesn't mean all is well out there, but this is a big productive economy that's clicking along pretty well. 85 00:10:47.060 --> 00:11:01.060 It doesn't mean it can't be dragged down, but the idea that somehow we stand on the brink of a collapse akin to the early 1930s is, in my mind, a preposterous idea. 86 00:11:01.060 --> 00:11:07.060 But is it possible that this kind of behavior and these sort of assumptions will actually cause the sky to fall after all? 87 00:11:07.060 --> 00:11:15.060 It can move us in that direction. It just depends on what the government continues to do in reaction. 88 00:11:15.060 --> 00:11:24.060 What happened in the 1930s that turned that situation into a Great Depression was that rather than doing nothing, 89 00:11:24.060 --> 00:11:33.060 rather than actually acting as a laissez-faire government, which later people accused it of being, 90 00:11:33.060 --> 00:11:41.180 I mean, the government under Hoover did all sorts of things that in almost every instance 91 00:11:41.180 --> 00:11:45.180 made the situation worse than it otherwise would have been. 92 00:11:45.180 --> 00:11:50.540 And then when you put all of those things together, their aggregate effect and their 93 00:11:50.540 --> 00:11:58.180 cumulative effect was to turn a recession that probably would have been over in a year 94 00:11:58.180 --> 00:12:04.380 into this enormous economic collapse that was not only generalized in our economy 95 00:12:04.380 --> 00:12:08.180 but dragged practically the whole world down with it. 96 00:12:08.180 --> 00:12:16.180 Well, it seems like all the stuff is going on fast forward if you read the headlines from Europe over the weekend. 97 00:12:16.180 --> 00:12:20.180 Yeah, the Europeans seem to be following along with a lag. 98 00:12:20.180 --> 00:12:27.180 I don't pretend to be expert on conditions in Europe, but from what I've read it looks to me as if 99 00:12:27.180 --> 00:12:35.340 They've made a lot of the same mistakes, but not to the same extent that these mistakes 100 00:12:35.340 --> 00:12:38.500 have been made in the United States. 101 00:12:38.500 --> 00:12:46.540 Right now, of course, the Fed is conspiring constantly with the European Central Bank and 102 00:12:46.540 --> 00:12:58.460 with other central banks in the world to try to throw new money at this problem, as if 103 00:12:58.460 --> 00:13:06.460 you can take problems of specific localized insolvency, which is what we have here, and 104 00:13:06.460 --> 00:13:15.180 solve those problems by creating a lot of liquidity, and I think it's an idiotic approach 105 00:13:15.180 --> 00:13:22.940 to these problems. The fact that you've got millions of people who've taken out mortgages 106 00:13:22.940 --> 00:13:30.100 and can't make the payments, it really isn't going to be changed significantly by flooding 107 00:13:30.100 --> 00:13:36.500 the world with money. You've got a lot of bad securities. You've got all these derivatives 108 00:13:36.500 --> 00:13:46.880 that were in effect represented on the basis of theoretical arguments to be sort of secure 109 00:13:46.880 --> 00:13:52.540 within limits that turn out to be even unpricable, unsaleable. 110 00:13:52.540 --> 00:13:56.260 Nobody knows what to offer for these things. 111 00:13:56.260 --> 00:14:02.380 And so that's created a certain amount of uncertainty in turmoil in financial markets, 112 00:14:02.380 --> 00:14:05.300 at least in part of those markets. 113 00:14:05.300 --> 00:14:10.940 But that problem won't be resolved by flooding the world with new money. 114 00:14:10.940 --> 00:14:17.100 That problem will only be resolved by letting markets find ways of pricing those securities. 115 00:14:17.100 --> 00:14:22.100 If it turns out the market price is zero, well, that's the market price and we're 116 00:14:22.100 --> 00:14:23.740 going to have to adjust to that. 117 00:14:23.740 --> 00:14:30.260 But if it's not zero, if they actually have values, the only way we know to converge on 118 00:14:30.260 --> 00:14:35.180 those values is through the operation of free markets. 119 00:14:35.180 --> 00:14:44.580 Right now we've got this situation where the Treasury is going to hire a bunch of financial 120 00:14:44.580 --> 00:14:52.980 management contractors, and you can just imagine who these guys are going to be, you know, 121 00:14:52.980 --> 00:14:56.260 relative to Hank Paulson. 122 00:14:56.260 --> 00:15:02.260 They're going to hire these guys and they're going to set them loose to go out and, as it 123 00:15:02.260 --> 00:15:07.860 for creating their own algorithms for how much they pay for what and this to me looks like 124 00:15:07.860 --> 00:15:14.940 a recipe for just creating a massive amount of noise in the financial markets, this is 125 00:15:14.940 --> 00:15:22.540 not a true market process and of course when you're dealing in funds that have been extorted 126 00:15:22.540 --> 00:15:27.700 from taxpayers in the first place, you can never have a true market process. 127 00:15:27.700 --> 00:15:38.820 So I think the upshot of this bailout procedure is potentially very, very, very harmful because 128 00:15:38.820 --> 00:15:44.740 it's an attempt to centrally plan the pricing of financial instruments and we know that 129 00:15:44.740 --> 00:15:45.740 can't be done. 130 00:15:45.740 --> 00:15:46.740 Isn't it remarkable? 131 00:15:46.740 --> 00:15:50.380 Through my whole life I've heard these campaigns for cheap housing. 132 00:15:50.380 --> 00:15:52.540 This has been a top part of Washington. 133 00:15:52.540 --> 00:15:56.540 We need to make sure the houses are available to the poor and to the lower middle class. 134 00:15:56.540 --> 00:16:03.940 Here we have a chance to actually make that reality happen through all of these foreclosures 135 00:16:03.940 --> 00:16:09.940 and what are they doing? They're blowing it. Now we can't have cheap houses. 136 00:16:09.940 --> 00:16:16.940 Well, as you know, Jeff, we live in a world where letting any asset price fall is viewed 137 00:16:16.940 --> 00:16:25.180 as catastrophic. No matter how high it's run up in a bubble or a boom, somehow the 138 00:16:25.180 --> 00:16:30.220 The idea that it starts coming down portends generalized disaster. 139 00:16:30.220 --> 00:16:39.460 And I think this is just a cock and bull story that the owners of these assets circulate. 140 00:16:39.460 --> 00:16:42.740 But it's remarkable how well it works. 141 00:16:42.740 --> 00:16:50.780 In fact, I mean, the past month has just astonished me at how the press in particular has fallen 142 00:16:50.780 --> 00:17:00.700 And for every anecdote some Wall Street trader has been willing to spout and there's been 143 00:17:00.700 --> 00:17:09.060 really no effort at all to look at broader measures or more substantial data and they've 144 00:17:09.060 --> 00:17:18.900 just repeated these sky is falling stories they've got from Wall Street and then the 145 00:17:18.900 --> 00:17:26.820 The media repeat what the media say and it's very incestuous, you've probably noticed 146 00:17:26.820 --> 00:17:37.700 how often different sources of news have identical verbiage, so they're obviously cannibalizing 147 00:17:37.700 --> 00:17:44.300 one another, but very often if you go back to the source of these stories they have extremely 148 00:17:44.300 --> 00:17:45.300 flimsy foundations. 149 00:17:45.300 --> 00:17:51.060 I was reading this morning in the New York Times about the collapse in consumer spending 150 00:17:51.060 --> 00:18:00.060 that are being reported by specific sectors, among which the airline industry, which made 151 00:18:00.060 --> 00:18:07.380 me wonder how long the airlines are going to be able to last under a situation in which 152 00:18:07.380 --> 00:18:10.580 consumers are unwilling to spend money on flights. 153 00:18:10.580 --> 00:18:15.780 We can see there are already very precarious positions as a result of all the regulation 154 00:18:15.780 --> 00:18:18.460 that's gone on since 9-11. 155 00:18:18.460 --> 00:18:23.860 There are also historically chronic feeders at the public trough. 156 00:18:23.860 --> 00:18:33.380 You may remember they went and got an infusion of $5 billion in grants and $10 billion in 157 00:18:33.380 --> 00:18:38.780 loan guarantees right after 9-11. 158 00:18:38.780 --> 00:18:46.140 We can certainly expect the airlines, whenever they get in serious trouble, to be appealing 159 00:18:46.140 --> 00:18:50.980 for taxpayer money in some fashion. 160 00:18:50.980 --> 00:18:56.580 And I wouldn't be surprised, because their fortunes are highly cyclical, so that during 161 00:18:56.580 --> 00:19:04.780 the boom, airlines tend to do pretty well, and then during every recession, a bunch of 162 00:19:04.780 --> 00:19:07.780 them go bankrupt. 163 00:19:07.780 --> 00:19:15.380 You've written several books that try to link economic calamity with bad foreign policy and war. 164 00:19:15.380 --> 00:19:19.060 Do you see a linkage here? 165 00:19:19.060 --> 00:19:26.900 Well, in some ways I do. 166 00:19:26.900 --> 00:19:38.820 One of the most basic aspects of the artificial boom of the past seven, eight years is very 167 00:19:38.820 --> 00:19:44.820 easy credit, particularly between 2001 and 2005. 168 00:19:44.820 --> 00:19:52.260 And of course, those are the years when the Bush administration launched its wars in Afghanistan 169 00:19:52.260 --> 00:20:01.440 and Iraq, which turned out to be much more expensive than expected, certainly much more 170 00:20:01.440 --> 00:20:10.740 expensive than anyone in the administration ever indicated they expected. 171 00:20:10.740 --> 00:20:18.300 Maybe they're just very good at keeping their expectations to themselves, but it does look 172 00:20:18.300 --> 00:20:25.500 as if they, too, were shocked because the cakewalk didn't occur, of course, and when 173 00:20:25.500 --> 00:20:34.540 the wars got extended and they required more troops, more equipment, lost equipment, damaged 174 00:20:34.540 --> 00:20:41.500 equipment had to be replaced and so forth, these wars became extremely expensive. 175 00:20:41.500 --> 00:20:46.940 And so the government's deficit got very big. 176 00:20:46.940 --> 00:20:55.180 Now, it's generally the case that when the federal government is running a big deficit, 177 00:20:55.180 --> 00:21:03.260 the Fed is working hand-in-glove to ease credit conditions, to make the government's borrowing 178 00:21:03.260 --> 00:21:04.260 easier. 179 00:21:04.260 --> 00:21:13.100 And so, I think that was part of the reason why the Fed was so extraordinarily careless, 180 00:21:13.100 --> 00:21:19.260 Reckless between 2001 and 2005 or so. 181 00:21:19.260 --> 00:21:24.100 But that recklessness, of course, had effects other than making government borrowing easier. 182 00:21:24.100 --> 00:21:33.460 It had all these effects in promoting terrible investments and the purchase of subprime and 183 00:21:33.460 --> 00:21:41.140 and all-day mortgages and derivatives based on those, and a great deal of over-building 184 00:21:41.140 --> 00:21:48.460 in housing and even to some extent in commercial real estate and real estate development. 185 00:21:48.460 --> 00:21:57.020 All the things that Austrian economists expect to be the form that malinvestment takes when 186 00:21:57.020 --> 00:22:04.600 Interest rates are artificially shoved below market levels, so I think we can track some 187 00:22:04.600 --> 00:22:14.820 of this ease in Fed policy to the Fed's desire to facilitate the government's big deficits 188 00:22:14.820 --> 00:22:19.420 that arose from the expenses of those wars. 189 00:22:19.420 --> 00:22:23.380 So there's that connection, and there are many other connections, of course. 190 00:22:23.380 --> 00:22:30.740 The U.S. government and the Fed are part of an international establishment, if you want 191 00:22:30.740 --> 00:22:34.820 to call it that. 192 00:22:34.820 --> 00:22:42.740 What that means is that considerations having to do with foreign economies and foreign governments 193 00:22:42.740 --> 00:22:48.300 always enter to some extent into U.S. government policy making, and it certainly was the case 194 00:22:48.300 --> 00:22:52.820 in the past few years. 195 00:22:52.820 --> 00:22:59.460 The way the war, the way the depression finally came to a sort of culminating moment was in 196 00:22:59.460 --> 00:23:03.620 catastrophic World War II. 197 00:23:03.620 --> 00:23:09.700 Looking way down the line, if the U.S. government manages to make this crisis much worse through 198 00:23:09.700 --> 00:23:15.300 its interventions and it doesn't seem to be any other way out, can we expect to see 199 00:23:15.300 --> 00:23:20.540 more foreign policy belligerence from the state? 200 00:23:20.540 --> 00:23:24.700 I don't know, Jeff, they're going to have to work pretty hard to be more belligerent 201 00:23:24.700 --> 00:23:29.500 than they have been in recent years. 202 00:23:29.500 --> 00:23:42.620 They haven't attacked Iran yet, they still may, but if they should, and I personally 203 00:23:42.620 --> 00:23:57.020 If the U.S. or its proxy, Israel, attacks Iran, I think the consequences are going to 204 00:23:57.020 --> 00:24:06.660 be just horrendous worldwide, both economic and political. 205 00:24:06.660 --> 00:24:15.060 Certainly, if we think we cultivated a lot of new terrorists by occupying Iraq, I don't 206 00:24:15.060 --> 00:24:23.180 think we've seen anything compared with what will happen if there's an attack on Iran, 207 00:24:23.180 --> 00:24:26.580 especially if nuclear weapons are used. 208 00:24:26.580 --> 00:24:35.740 So I think the reaction will be great and terrible, and I don't know what would unravel 209 00:24:35.740 --> 00:25:05.740 from all of that. But right now, we're in a little different situation from the United States circa 1939 because one of the things that almost everybody thought was a silver cloud of hearing up for war at that time was that the U.S. had massive unemployment and right now the country does not have massive unemployment and if the government 210 00:25:05.740 --> 00:25:21.740 grows even more than it has in the military buildup under the Bush administration to fight some Iran-related massive war in various parts of the world. 211 00:25:21.740 --> 00:25:30.740 It's not going to have the same effect. It's going to have more of an effect of probably creating very, very high rates of inflation. 212 00:25:30.740 --> 00:25:40.580 and that of course will be the trigger for price and wage controls and with 213 00:25:40.580 --> 00:25:46.100 those have to come all kinds of other controls so we we may be looking at at 214 00:25:46.100 --> 00:25:53.420 something if if we get into a much wider war that leads to a kind of controlled 215 00:25:53.420 --> 00:25:59.060 economy something like we saw in the early 1970s. I never would have imagined 216 00:25:59.060 --> 00:26:04.740 and that five years ago, now it seems eminently plausible. 217 00:26:04.740 --> 00:26:16.940 Yeah, I think both parties have shown that they have no regard for free markets, economic 218 00:26:16.940 --> 00:26:24.580 liberty at all, and almost none, except for a few people in the Democratic Party for personal 219 00:26:24.580 --> 00:26:25.580 liberty. 220 00:26:25.580 --> 00:26:44.060 So the idea of a full-fledged kind of fascism being fastened on this country, I don't think is cookie stuff anymore, I think it's within the realm of imagination, without imagining a whole lot of things that don't have a basis. 221 00:26:44.060 --> 00:26:48.220 Cheered by left, cheered by right, cheered by the business class, everybody. 222 00:26:48.220 --> 00:26:55.180 Yeah, everybody wins except the masses who get screwed by everything this government does. 223 00:26:55.180 --> 00:26:58.180 I must tell you, I spent the weekend reading Crisis of Leviathan. 224 00:26:58.180 --> 00:27:01.180 That's old news. 225 00:27:01.180 --> 00:27:07.180 I've read it several times before, but somehow it all took on a special vibrancy that it hadn't had before. 226 00:27:07.180 --> 00:27:15.180 Every paragraph was magnificent and oddly provides something like, I don't know, I don't want to describe it as hope, 227 00:27:15.180 --> 00:27:22.180 but there was some solace associated with knowing that we've been down this road before and more or less come out of it. 228 00:27:22.180 --> 00:27:29.620 Well, one of the things about knowing some history is that one knows that terrible times 229 00:27:29.620 --> 00:27:37.100 have occurred before, very, very terrible times have occurred before, and mankind survived. 230 00:27:37.100 --> 00:27:42.860 So, you know, we can hope that things don't get as terrible as they were at their darkest 231 00:27:42.860 --> 00:27:48.180 moments in the past, but if they should, we may still survive. 232 00:27:48.180 --> 00:27:58.180 Well Dr. Higgs, all lovers of liberty are grateful to you for all of your great work in the past and also for this interview today. Thank you so much. 233 00:27:58.180 --> 00:27:59.180 Thank you, Jeff.