WEBVTT NOTE Taking the Capitalist Road 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.880 Perhaps a better title for my talk would be 2 00:00:02.880 --> 00:00:07.560 A Personal Odyssey with the Mises Institute. 3 00:00:07.560 --> 00:00:10.160 But before I get into that, what I'd like to do, 4 00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:13.080 I've never been invited to give a speech to graduates. 5 00:00:13.080 --> 00:00:14.800 So you people are going to be my guinea pigs, 6 00:00:14.800 --> 00:00:16.800 and I'm now going to make believe you are graduating 7 00:00:16.800 --> 00:00:22.200 a four-year university, and I am the graduation speaker. 8 00:00:22.200 --> 00:00:24.920 Congratulations on four years of study and hard work, 9 00:00:24.920 --> 00:00:27.400 for at least some of you. 10 00:00:27.400 --> 00:00:31.600 Graduation speeches invariably exhort students to do charity. 11 00:00:31.600 --> 00:00:32.680 Now, I'm not against charity. 12 00:00:32.680 --> 00:00:34.320 Some of us friends are into charity. 13 00:00:34.320 --> 00:00:36.360 Charity is a good thing. 14 00:00:36.360 --> 00:00:38.160 But Adam Smith, who wasn't all bad, 15 00:00:38.160 --> 00:00:42.320 despite what Murray has correctly said about him, said, 16 00:00:42.320 --> 00:00:44.400 it's not from benevolence of the butcher, the baker, 17 00:00:44.400 --> 00:00:46.680 and the brewer that we expect our dinner, 18 00:00:46.680 --> 00:00:48.440 but from regard to their own interests. 19 00:00:48.440 --> 00:00:50.440 We address ourselves not to their humanity, 20 00:00:50.440 --> 00:00:52.400 but to their advantages. 21 00:00:52.400 --> 00:00:54.400 Contrary to most graduation addresses, 22 00:00:54.400 --> 00:01:01.400 Look around you, students. See the ordinary basic things that make life enjoyable. Toilet paper, yes, imagine life without it. Wristwatches, cars, gasoline, hot dogs, paperclips, pizzas, soap, celery, oranges, the list goes on and on. 23 00:01:11.680 --> 00:01:18.680 Look, if all of you join Doctors Without Borders, the Peace Corps, the Red Cross, the March of Dimes, who will produce these things? What will life be like without breakfast, cereal, bacon and eggs, watermelons, computers, penicillin, underwear, etc.? 24 00:01:24.400 --> 00:01:39.400 It used to be when I was in airports, people who would speak on phones would go to where the phones were, but nowadays they've got these little things, I don't know, I'm the old school, I don't have one yet, and they sit right next to you and they start talking. 25 00:01:39.400 --> 00:01:47.400 And they say things like, yes, we've got to set up a meeting, hire him, don't hire him, if you don't get that delivery to this guy, you know, they'll fire us. 26 00:01:47.400 --> 00:01:55.400 When I'm at an airport, I like to read or write, and I can't do it with these guys yapping. 27 00:01:55.400 --> 00:02:00.400 But I have a soft spot in my heart for them because they are taking care of business. 28 00:02:00.400 --> 00:02:04.400 Without those guys, we wouldn't have all these things that I just read off on our list. 29 00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:09.400 These people, these businessmen, these business people are very important to our lives. 30 00:02:09.400 --> 00:02:16.400 And yet we're told that this is the problem of capitalism, and capitalism is evil, greedy, 31 00:02:16.400 --> 00:02:31.400 Capitalism is just a capitalist act between consenting adults. Markets too should be allowed along with deviant sex and drugs. Markets too are okay. 32 00:02:31.400 --> 00:02:37.400 This is the province of cooperation. This is the way we cooperate with each other. 33 00:02:37.400 --> 00:03:07.400 Yet you students, I think, are socio-biologically hard-wired to not accept this because in our gut or in our brain or in our brain stem, which stems from our life a million years ago, when we lived in societies of 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 people, the only cooperation possible was explicit cooperation, you know, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, help me lift this boulder, I'll help you catch that deer or whatever, but we live now in a society of millions and millions of people and there's no way, simply no way, 34 00:03:07.400 --> 00:03:16.400 In order to cooperate with each other, many of us, that is explicitly, we can only cooperate implicitly through the intermediation of a market. 35 00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:28.400 Yes, the way to cooperate now when in Florida they have a storm is that the prices of oranges or whatever it is that gets lost or batteries or gasoline, water, milk, goes up, 36 00:03:28.400 --> 00:03:34.400 which is a signal to other people to bring the stuff to the bad areas or the areas that have been struck by a storm. 37 00:03:34.400 --> 00:03:45.400 Yes, profits are the way we get each other to cooperate with each other. There's nothing wrong with profits. 38 00:03:45.400 --> 00:03:50.400 My claim is that you people have been bamboozled, you've been fooled, you've been cheated in your education, 39 00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:55.400 you've been lied to, you've been undermined, your intelligence has been insulted, you've been bullied and pushed. 40 00:03:55.400 --> 00:04:00.400 Who's been doing all this stuff that I'm now trying to undo in a 10-minute speech? 41 00:04:00.400 --> 00:04:06.400 Well, you professors of sociology, literature, classics, political science, history, anthropology, communication. 42 00:04:06.400 --> 00:04:11.400 To say nothing of black studies, queer studies, I'm not kidding you, there is queer studies nowadays. 43 00:04:11.400 --> 00:04:15.400 Feminist studies and other elements of socialist studies. 44 00:04:15.400 --> 00:04:19.400 You have been taught by these people that capitalism equals greed and immorality, 45 00:04:19.400 --> 00:04:25.400 that socialism is the wave of the future, that profits are evil, that firms discriminate on the basis of sex and race, 46 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:32.400 that greed is what causes pollution, that free enterprise leads to war, that all men are rapists. 47 00:04:32.400 --> 00:04:37.400 This is stuff that's actually taught in school, and it's just horrible. 48 00:04:37.400 --> 00:04:41.400 Nor have even economics departments been free of this stuff, 49 00:04:41.400 --> 00:04:48.400 although economists are usually better than sociologists in terms of economic liberty. 50 00:04:48.400 --> 00:04:51.400 Well, what are you taught in economics, in the typical economics class? 51 00:04:51.400 --> 00:04:54.400 First of all, you're not taught economics, you're taught math or statistics. 52 00:04:54.400 --> 00:05:02.400 You learn about market failure, that markets are imperfect, which justifies government intervention and regulation, that there are public goods that only government can supply. 53 00:05:02.400 --> 00:05:08.400 Hans just gave you a long list of how government supplies public goods. 54 00:05:08.400 --> 00:05:12.400 One of my favorite examples is the roads, which kill 40,000 people a year. 55 00:05:12.400 --> 00:05:20.400 Somehow they tell you that it's because of fast driving and drunken driving and vehicle error and stuff like that, 56 00:05:20.400 --> 00:05:26.400 and stuff like that, but it's really the failure of the road managers to eradicate this sort of behavior. 57 00:05:26.400 --> 00:05:32.400 If we had private competitive roads, they would compete, among other things, on reducing the death toll. 58 00:05:32.400 --> 00:05:36.400 So when people take statistics on how many people governments have killed, 59 00:05:36.400 --> 00:05:40.400 and they don't include that 40,000 minus the number of people that would be killed on private roads, 60 00:05:40.400 --> 00:05:45.400 which would be way less, those statistics are erroneous. 61 00:05:45.400 --> 00:05:53.400 You know, when you go to law school or medical school, they say good things about law and medicine. 62 00:05:53.400 --> 00:05:56.400 Other people might say bad things, but at least they say good things. 63 00:05:56.400 --> 00:05:59.400 I teach in a business school, and in a business school, we have business ethics. 64 00:05:59.400 --> 00:06:02.400 Happily, in my school, it's not so bad. Actually, it's very good. 65 00:06:02.400 --> 00:06:04.400 I have Nick Capaldi, a libertarian. 66 00:06:04.400 --> 00:06:10.400 But in many business schools, the business ethics is, you know, you're greedy, you're a capitalist pig, things like that. 67 00:06:10.400 --> 00:06:15.400 Socialism is the way to go and charity is the only good way to produce anything. 68 00:06:15.400 --> 00:06:21.400 And in marketing departments they'll come out with things like, you know, advertising is evil. 69 00:06:21.400 --> 00:06:26.400 I mean, you know, it destroys people's minds or what have you. 70 00:06:26.400 --> 00:06:32.400 According to the mainstream economists, education is an external economy. 71 00:06:32.400 --> 00:06:38.400 Namely, it confers benefits on people who don't pay for it, so therefore what the government ought to do is subsidize it. 72 00:06:38.400 --> 00:06:45.400 I would say, not that I favor the government taxing anything, God forbid, but if they're going to do anything with this public education, they ought to tax it. 73 00:06:45.400 --> 00:06:53.760 They shouldn't subsidize it because it's really miseducating people in all these ways that I've been indicating. 74 00:06:53.760 --> 00:07:00.240 So I say to you students, look around, realize that without free enterprise, your lives would become uncivilized. 75 00:07:00.240 --> 00:07:03.600 Economic freedom is the last best hope for humanity. 76 00:07:03.600 --> 00:07:33.600 We have some examples of this, East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea, the same people, the same culture, the same capital, the same education, the same weather, the same everything were split asunder by an accident of war and then one system went one way and the other, the North and the South and the East and West went one way and the other went the other way and then years later we see in North Korea they're starving. And East Germany is an economic basket case. Now happily in the German case it's not so bad but in the Korean case it's a horror. 77 00:07:33.600 --> 00:07:41.480 even in the Soviet Union free enterprise works the quick statistic on farming 78 00:07:41.480 --> 00:07:45.240 there the amount of land that was privately owned in the form of front 79 00:07:45.240 --> 00:07:49.680 yards and backyards was 3% and on that 3% they produced 25% of the crops 80 00:07:49.680 --> 00:07:55.000 whereas the public land was 97 and they only produced 75% of the crops so even 81 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:59.680 in the bowels of the Soviet Union free enterprise is like a hardy weed you just 82 00:07:59.680 --> 00:08:07.680 So, students, as you go out there, look kindly upon business. Business is the lifeblood of the economy. 83 00:08:07.680 --> 00:08:13.680 End of my speech to you graduates. Now I'd like to make a speech to you, so pay attention. 84 00:08:13.680 --> 00:08:17.680 This you didn't have to pay attention to before. 85 00:08:17.680 --> 00:08:19.680 And here's my speech to you. 86 00:08:19.680 --> 00:08:25.680 A ten-minute speech to graduates can't realistically undo four years of our perversity, evil. 87 00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:30.480 evil. The only way you can do that is to get professors in the classroom that teach a slightly 88 00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:37.200 different version of things. Now have you been, people been given out the thing? Everyone's 89 00:08:37.200 --> 00:08:46.960 got copies of successes and failures and all that? Okay. So what's going on with, I think 90 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:54.320 I've got it on the, I think I can put it up here as well. First I'll talk about some of 91 00:08:54.320 --> 00:09:23.320 What the Mises Institute does in general, and what Mises University does in particular, is it takes students, and it tries to make them professors of economics mainly, but of any subject really, to instill the message further to students. 92 00:09:23.320 --> 00:09:27.200 Now, when I say successes, first of all, this is just my own list. 93 00:09:27.200 --> 00:09:29.560 I never asked Jeff or Lou for a list. 94 00:09:29.560 --> 00:09:31.160 This is based on my own recollection. 95 00:09:31.160 --> 00:09:35.040 I said to myself, well, which kids did we have 5, 10, and 15 years ago 96 00:09:35.040 --> 00:09:36.480 who are now professors? 97 00:09:36.480 --> 00:09:38.120 I'm sure this is the tip of the iceberg. 98 00:09:38.120 --> 00:09:39.560 I'm sure there are many, many more. 99 00:09:42.520 --> 00:09:45.840 And I'm also, so I'm sure that I'm leaving out people. 100 00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:48.160 And also, I might have included one or two by mistake. 101 00:09:48.160 --> 00:09:48.640 I don't know. 102 00:09:48.640 --> 00:09:50.680 My memory is, you know, I'm an old duffer now, 103 00:09:50.680 --> 00:09:52.280 and I forget just who was a student. 104 00:09:52.280 --> 00:09:58.160 I think most of these people were students of Mises University and also by 105 00:09:58.160 --> 00:10:03.160 see I'm defining success very narrowly the success here is does a person who 106 00:10:03.160 --> 00:10:07.100 goes through Mises University become a professor later but this is hardly the 107 00:10:07.100 --> 00:10:10.720 only success obviously if they become business people and then they contribute 108 00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:15.200 to places like the Mises University that's that's a magnificent success it's 109 00:10:15.200 --> 00:10:18.800 just that I don't teach that so from my own bird's-eye view I'm not looking at 110 00:10:18.800 --> 00:10:29.800 I see it as a partnership. On the one hand, there are those of us that are trying to get kids to become good professors, and on the other hand, there are business people who support our efforts without which this couldn't be done. 111 00:10:29.800 --> 00:10:39.800 Not only does the Mises Institute get kids through PhDs, like here, but it also helps isolated professors. 112 00:10:39.800 --> 00:10:43.960 Professors. Now, there are two or three like Sandy Klein and Peter Klein. Peter is one of our speakers. 113 00:10:44.760 --> 00:10:50.440 Murphy and Pun Graesic in Hillsdale and Powell and Stringham, who are both here, one of whom was a 114 00:10:50.440 --> 00:10:58.360 former student of mine, Ed Stringham at Holy Cross. Not only does it help them get PhDs and have the 115 00:10:58.360 --> 00:11:03.560 right attitude or the right perspective on economic freedom, but when they're isolated, when they're 116 00:11:03.560 --> 00:11:08.560 You know, the only professor at their school, it brings them together. 117 00:11:08.560 --> 00:11:13.600 It'll have an Austrian Scholar's Conference, it'll have places for them to get published 118 00:11:13.600 --> 00:11:16.240 with and without getting published you can't get tenure. 119 00:11:16.240 --> 00:11:21.120 Places like the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. 120 00:11:21.120 --> 00:11:24.660 So it has a web which connects people. 121 00:11:24.660 --> 00:11:27.480 And this is very, very helpful for isolated professors. 122 00:11:27.480 --> 00:11:33.200 But even places myself, I now have, I'm at a place, Loyola University, New Orleans, where 123 00:11:33.200 --> 00:11:39.000 We've got about seven Austrian economists and maybe another seven or eight libertarians 124 00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:44.240 in the law school, in the political science, and this business ethics professor. 125 00:11:44.240 --> 00:11:47.560 We might have established some sort of world's record at the last Austrian Scholars Conference 126 00:11:47.560 --> 00:11:52.920 by bringing about 20 students and eight or ten professors, although I have to admit that 127 00:11:52.920 --> 00:11:58.920 the University in St. Louis, without any professor help at all, had about 15 or 18 students, 128 00:11:58.920 --> 00:12:03.280 Which was just utterly and totally magnificent. 129 00:12:03.280 --> 00:12:10.120 So the Mises Institute plays a magnificent role in this process. 130 00:12:10.120 --> 00:12:16.160 Notice there are no placements at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, but you have to start somewhere. 131 00:12:16.160 --> 00:12:20.080 There was a time not too long ago, maybe a decade or two or three ago when people such 132 00:12:20.080 --> 00:12:24.920 as Mises and Hayek were musing publicly that with them Austrian economics would die. 133 00:12:24.920 --> 00:12:29.920 Well, thanks to the Mises Institute, this is very, very unlikely because of the sheer numbers of people. 134 00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:38.920 I think at the last Austrian Scholars Conference, there were 200, 250 scholars, professors who were reading papers to each other and helping each other get published. 135 00:12:38.920 --> 00:12:42.920 It's just grown like topsy. So I don't think there's any chance of that. 136 00:12:42.920 --> 00:12:48.920 And one of the thrills that I get is when former students of mine send their present students to the Mises University. 137 00:12:48.920 --> 00:12:54.920 We just sent four students off to get PhDs, Jenny Dernmeier, Emily Schaeffer, Eric Matei and Dan D'Amico. 138 00:12:54.920 --> 00:12:59.920 I made them all promise that when they get jobs and become professors that they'll send their students to us 139 00:12:59.920 --> 00:13:04.920 and maybe one of these kids will become the new Mises Institute people. 140 00:13:04.920 --> 00:13:10.920 So I think the Mises Institute is doing a magnificent job in this regard. 141 00:13:10.920 --> 00:13:16.920 In addition to successes, there are failures, and I want to speak about two failures. 142 00:13:16.920 --> 00:13:28.920 I apologize in advance for talking about failures, but you know, we're all friends here, and if we can't wash dirty linen, then here, where can we wash dirty linen? 143 00:13:28.920 --> 00:13:32.920 Now again, by failure, and there are many more failures than these two. Remember, I'm defining failures. 144 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:44.920 Everyone who went through the Mises University, which is 100, maybe about 100 kids every year, something like that, and we've done it for 20 years or so, so it's 2,000 people, minus overlap, and there are not all professors. 145 00:13:44.920 --> 00:13:50.920 So I'm just picking out two quote failures, and I should put the failure in quote. 146 00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:57.920 One of the failures is Brian Kaplan, who is a professor at George Mason, where three of my students are now studying. 147 00:13:57.920 --> 00:14:04.920 Brian is a magnificent libertarian, but he is, I would say, the most gifted Austrian critic. 148 00:14:04.920 --> 00:14:10.920 Why is he a gifted Austrian critic? Well, he's a bright guy and, too, he's been to the Mises University, so he really understands it. 149 00:14:10.920 --> 00:14:19.920 When other people criticize Austrian economists, they don't really understand it, so their criticisms are sort of off the point and silly. 150 00:14:19.920 --> 00:14:26.920 And we do reply to them, but his are very much on point, plus he's created a sort of a cottage industry of publications. 151 00:14:26.920 --> 00:14:40.920 Now, as you look down this list, what I've got here, and there's one mistake, Kaplan wrote articles 1, 2 and 3. One was 99, one was 2001 instead of 2000, and then the other one was 2003. 152 00:14:40.920 --> 00:14:54.920 The first article, his 99 article, gave rise to two articles, one by me and one by Guido. He published in the Southern Economic Journal, which is a semi-prestigious mainstream journal we published in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. 153 00:14:54.920 --> 00:14:59.180 his second one was in the quarterly journal Boston Economics and I have a 154 00:14:59.180 --> 00:15:06.480 reply also in there and then his third article also appeared in the QJ and now 155 00:15:06.480 --> 00:15:12.080 there are three more articles attacking him so what he's doing in effect is very 156 00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:16.720 good criticism in so far as there can be any good criticism or at least insightful 157 00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:22.800 criticism about this stuff I want to read a quote to you from David Gordon's 158 00:15:22.800 --> 00:15:36.800 Mises' most recent magnificent, well I shouldn't say that, all of them are magnificent, not just this one, but this one is pertinent to my case and what he's doing now, David, as you see I list David on this list as a critic of Kaplan, 159 00:15:36.800 --> 00:15:49.800 and what David says is, quote, debate over Mises' socialist calculation argument has been going on since 1920 and one might have thought that at this late date it would be difficult to say something new. 160 00:15:49.800 --> 00:15:56.800 Brian Kaplan has done exactly that, and then he goes on to say what Brian said and why Brian is wrong. 161 00:15:56.800 --> 00:16:02.800 But the point is that there's got to be some quality here, otherwise David wouldn't reply to it. 162 00:16:02.800 --> 00:16:12.800 And David does give the devil his due, or give the critic his due, and says that, you know, he did come up with something new, and he really did. 163 00:16:12.800 --> 00:16:19.640 So this is one of our failures, and what this failure has done is created, oh, six or eight 164 00:16:19.640 --> 00:16:24.160 or ten other articles, and there will be more forthcoming, and he talks about things like 165 00:16:24.160 --> 00:16:30.560 probability and difference in the synthetic a priori and methodology, and he has called 166 00:16:30.560 --> 00:16:36.800 forth a response from other Austrians, and this is one of our failures. 167 00:16:36.800 --> 00:16:41.280 Okay, the next failure is my own son. 168 00:16:41.280 --> 00:16:53.280 Now, before I tell you why my son is a failure, 169 00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:55.280 boy, my wife is going to kill me for this. 170 00:16:55.280 --> 00:17:01.280 He's only a failure in this very narrow sense that he's not a professor of economics, teaching free market economics. 171 00:17:01.280 --> 00:17:03.280 Actually, he works for Microsoft. 172 00:17:03.280 --> 00:17:07.320 He tells me what he does there, but it sounds like computer babble, I don't understand it, 173 00:17:07.320 --> 00:17:13.120 but he must be doing pretty well because he keeps getting promoted, so in some sense, he's a success. 174 00:17:13.120 --> 00:17:18.520 But let me tell you the story there. I had a sort of a bi-coastal marriage from 1991, 175 00:17:18.520 --> 00:17:27.480 when he was about 12 years old, until, well, still going on, don't ask, that's another problem. 176 00:17:27.480 --> 00:17:32.800 And I could only see my kids when school was out, which was the summers, Christmas, Easter, things like that. 177 00:17:32.800 --> 00:18:02.800 So there was a year or two or three when I couldn't go to the Mises Institute because my wife would kill me and she'd say look you're only with us so many weeks a year now you're going to go off to the Mises for a week or two and she'd smack me around so I couldn't go but then when my son became 15 or so I got this bright idea I'll grab him along it'll be like babysitting and Lou was kind enough to let him in and I think the next youngest kid was four or five years older than him so he was like a baby but you know he would sort of do it for a year or two and and then he got into it more and more 178 00:18:02.800 --> 00:18:12.800 But in the end he went to the dark side, namely he didn't follow me into Austrian libertarianism. 179 00:18:12.800 --> 00:18:19.800 But he did do some interesting work as I show on this list here. 180 00:18:19.800 --> 00:18:22.800 And let me just talk about two of the articles. 181 00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:29.800 What happened was, with regard to the first article on Rhodes, Matthew and I, he must have been 14 or so, 182 00:18:29.800 --> 00:18:33.600 And I took him to another conference in Vancouver where we lived. 183 00:18:33.600 --> 00:18:39.480 And Gordon Tulloch, a very famous economist who almost won a Nobel Prize and might yet win one in the future, 184 00:18:39.480 --> 00:18:43.400 tapped me on the shoulder and said, Block, I hear you believe in private roads. 185 00:18:43.400 --> 00:18:47.320 I said, yeah, I believe in private roads, but that's all wrong, that's idiotic. 186 00:18:47.320 --> 00:18:51.160 Because if I had a private road from Boston to LA and I could cut off the whole country 187 00:18:51.160 --> 00:18:55.360 and I wouldn't let people get from one place to the other and this and that and the other. 188 00:18:55.360 --> 00:19:01.020 And Matthew and I, for the next two or three years, practically discussed nothing else but, 189 00:19:01.020 --> 00:19:06.000 well, suppose you build a bridge over the road, or a tunnel under, well, would you be violating the property rights? 190 00:19:06.000 --> 00:19:10.860 Do property rights extend up into the stratosphere and down into the core of the earth or not? 191 00:19:10.860 --> 00:19:17.060 And we went through this, and finally I wrote it up, and now the question came, well, do I just give him credit for it? 192 00:19:17.060 --> 00:19:20.860 I mean, I wrote it all, he didn't write it all, but it came out of our discussions. 193 00:19:20.860 --> 00:19:23.800 And I finally decided, well, you know, he was an integral part of this, 194 00:19:23.800 --> 00:19:27.880 And then he said, well, no, don't put me down because no one will believe it. 195 00:19:27.880 --> 00:19:29.600 And then I said, well, is it true or not? 196 00:19:29.600 --> 00:19:32.200 And now with what they'll believe, I'm after the truth here. 197 00:19:32.200 --> 00:19:33.760 And he said, well, yeah, it's obviously true. 198 00:19:33.760 --> 00:19:35.560 So I put him down as a co-author. 199 00:19:35.560 --> 00:19:40.280 And Gordon Tullock wrote a reply, and then I wrote a reply to him. 200 00:19:40.280 --> 00:19:43.480 The other article Matthew and I did was on gun control, 201 00:19:43.480 --> 00:19:48.360 where we talked about whether atom bombs are per se invasive 202 00:19:48.360 --> 00:19:51.240 because you can't focus it on guilty people or not. 203 00:19:51.240 --> 00:20:06.240 And our analysis of that was, well, if you live on Jupiter, and maybe one day we'll colonize Jupiter and it's big enough so that you can confine the effect of an atomic bomb to your own area, well, then they would not be per se, but around here, yes. 204 00:20:06.240 --> 00:20:18.240 So, he is my second failure. And there are a lot of people who came through and didn't become professors and were failures in this narrow sense. 205 00:20:18.240 --> 00:20:25.240 But what I guess I'm trying to say is that even these two failures, my son gained immeasurably from being involved in this. He learned about it. 206 00:20:25.240 --> 00:20:32.240 I couldn't get my daughter to come for hella high water. Another problem. She's not a failure, but she didn't come and not. 207 00:20:32.240 --> 00:20:39.240 But in any case, Matthew gained immeasurably. There are hundreds of students that have gone through the Mises University, 208 00:20:39.240 --> 00:20:46.240 which has been funded by people such as yourselves that we don't know about, we've lost touch with, that are failures in this very narrow sense, 209 00:20:46.240 --> 00:21:03.400 Let me close with a question. Why is Austrian economics important? Because after all, Austrian 210 00:21:03.400 --> 00:21:09.360 economics consists mainly the bullseye part of Austrian economics is praxeology, subjectivism, 211 00:21:09.360 --> 00:21:15.120 market process, methodology, tax on math and economics. What's that got to do with liberty? 212 00:21:15.120 --> 00:21:17.120 What's that got to do with freedom? 213 00:21:17.120 --> 00:21:22.920 Lew wrote a magnificent little pamphlet called, I think, something like, The Importance of 214 00:21:22.920 --> 00:21:28.240 Austrian Economics, and I recommend that for your perusal. 215 00:21:28.240 --> 00:21:34.280 The way I see it, while there are some things that are directly relevant to economic freedom, 216 00:21:34.280 --> 00:21:44.480 say the Austrian attack on market calculation under socialism, a lot of Austrianism is a 217 00:21:44.480 --> 00:21:50.440 positive field. It's not a normative field. It tries to explain and understand reality. 218 00:21:50.440 --> 00:21:55.320 It doesn't say what you should do. For example, the Austrian analysis of the business cycle 219 00:21:55.320 --> 00:21:58.320 is that it's caused by government. But it doesn't say you shouldn't do that. It just 220 00:21:58.320 --> 00:22:01.920 says, you know, if you don't want business cycles, then you shouldn't do that. But you 221 00:22:01.920 --> 00:22:07.680 know, if you're a masochist or people hater, you could say, well, look, I favor depressions 222 00:22:07.680 --> 00:22:15.880 and here's how to do it. So, Austrianism is not really, how shall I say, on the bull's 223 00:22:15.880 --> 00:22:22.200 eye of libertarianism. And in my musings on this, the way I see it is, I used to play 224 00:22:22.200 --> 00:22:26.160 the violin, I'm sort of like a hit violinist, if you hate your neighbor and you hire me 225 00:22:26.160 --> 00:22:32.920 to play the violin next to him, it's all over for him. Scales. Scales have nothing to do 226 00:22:32.920 --> 00:22:43.920 I think it's something like that. I think that if you're really immersed in Austrian economics, if you're really into subjectivism, then you don't get weaned away from liberty. 227 00:22:43.920 --> 00:22:51.920 There are non-Austrian libertarians who are very good libertarians, but all too many of them, I find they sort of hype off after a few years. 228 00:22:51.920 --> 00:22:58.920 They get into math, or they get into socialism, or God knows what. I don't equate the two. 229 00:22:58.920 --> 00:23:08.680 Thank you. So I think that the Mises Institute does yeoman work in promoting liberty directly 230 00:23:08.680 --> 00:23:13.120 and indirectly because the Austrian Scholars Conference isn't limited to just economics, 231 00:23:13.120 --> 00:23:19.080 it has law, it has even literature, certainly philosophy and other things like that. So 232 00:23:19.080 --> 00:23:23.200 thanks for listening to two of my speeches, one to you as graduates and one to you as 233 00:23:23.200 --> 00:23:24.600 Mises supporters. Thank you. 234 00:23:28.920 --> 00:23:30.920 Thank you very much.