WEBVTT NOTE Mises as Inspiration 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.400 Congratulations again to Lew Rockwell and Jeff Tucker and all my friends associated with the Mises Institute on their 25th birthday. 2 00:00:07.400 --> 00:00:13.700 It's sort of my 25th anniversary also. I've been associated with them one way or another from the very beginning. 3 00:00:13.700 --> 00:00:23.400 In fact, I know some of the people in this room, including myself, can remember exactly where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. 4 00:00:23.400 --> 00:00:29.100 And I know probably everyone in this room remembers exactly where they were when they heard about 9-11. 5 00:00:29.100 --> 00:00:33.100 Well, I remember exactly where I was when I heard about the Mises Institute. 6 00:00:33.100 --> 00:00:38.100 I was in my faculty office at George Mason University and I opened a letter, a mail. 7 00:00:38.100 --> 00:00:42.100 It was a flyer announcing that something called the Mises Institute had been created. 8 00:00:42.100 --> 00:00:48.100 And the first thing I did was I whipped out my checkbook and I wrote, Lou, a very small check as a donation. 9 00:00:48.100 --> 00:00:51.100 I was an assistant professor of economics at the time. 10 00:00:51.100 --> 00:00:56.100 And I wasn't a wealthy multi-billionaire full professor like I am now. 11 00:00:56.100 --> 00:01:13.100 But Lew wrote back and he sent me a von Mises tie and I remember writing him back, him and Murray, saying I will wear it proudly and it's bound to have the same effect in academe as flashing a cross in front of Dracula. 12 00:01:13.100 --> 00:01:20.100 And I was told Murray got a big belly laugh out of that one. So I do remember that. 13 00:01:20.100 --> 00:01:25.100 If you remember that, that was the moment I heard about the Mises Institute and my first visit to Auburn, 14 00:01:25.100 --> 00:01:29.100 they were in an office about the size of this area where the fire extinguisher is, 15 00:01:29.100 --> 00:01:33.100 in a little building next to the football stadium that has since been bulldozed, 16 00:01:33.100 --> 00:01:37.100 and that was the beginnings of it. 17 00:01:37.100 --> 00:01:44.100 Well, Lewis asked me to talk about Mises as inspiration, and I only have 17 minutes, something like that, 18 00:01:44.100 --> 00:01:49.100 but Mises has always been an inspiration in much of my research and writing, 19 00:01:49.100 --> 00:01:58.100 And I first read Human Action my first semester in graduate school, way back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and is a very unusual thing. 20 00:01:58.100 --> 00:02:05.100 So I knew about Austrian economics long before the Mises Institute came around. 21 00:02:05.100 --> 00:02:13.100 And so what I thought I'd do in the little time I have is offer a few quotes from Mises on the topic of the study of history. 22 00:02:13.100 --> 00:02:23.100 In recent years, I've been interested in economic history, mostly in the history of the Civil War, or back in Alabama, we call it the war to prevent southern independence. 23 00:02:23.100 --> 00:02:32.100 And so I'll read you a few quotes from Mises and give you illustrations of how this has sort of influenced my thinking. 24 00:02:32.100 --> 00:02:36.100 And this is from Human Action, and one of the quotes is, 25 00:02:36.100 --> 00:02:43.420 It is obvious that the historian must not be biased by any prejudices and party tenets. 26 00:02:43.420 --> 00:02:48.580 Those writers who consider historical events as an arsenal of weapons for the conduct of 27 00:02:48.580 --> 00:02:54.060 their party feuds are not historians, but propagandists and apologists. 28 00:02:54.060 --> 00:02:59.660 They are not eager to acquire knowledge, but to justify the program of their parties. 29 00:02:59.660 --> 00:03:05.340 They usurp the name of history for their writings as a blind in order to deceive the incredulous. 30 00:03:05.340 --> 00:03:11.100 and Tom Woods gave us some good examples of this a little earlier and but to give 31 00:03:11.100 --> 00:03:14.300 you an example of how you know one of the reasons I got involved in writing a 32 00:03:14.300 --> 00:03:18.980 book on Lincoln for example as an economist is I was a Civil War buff as 33 00:03:18.980 --> 00:03:23.300 they call it I'd read dozens maybe hundreds of books on all the battles and 34 00:03:23.300 --> 00:03:27.620 the biographies and so forth and and I started thinking of how I could combine 35 00:03:27.620 --> 00:03:32.140 my profession with this hobby of mine and when I started reading a lot of the 36 00:03:32.140 --> 00:03:38.140 and mainstream historians, and just so much just didn't add up at all. 37 00:03:38.140 --> 00:03:45.140 And I'll just give you a few examples of works that seem to fit in this definition of just using history 38 00:03:45.140 --> 00:03:53.140 to justify a particular political program, not studying history to learn the truth about how the world works, 39 00:03:53.140 --> 00:03:56.140 but to justify some agenda. 40 00:03:56.140 --> 00:04:02.040 Well, one example is the book by Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer who's considered to be one 41 00:04:02.040 --> 00:04:08.020 of the preeminent Lincoln scholars. It's entitled Why Lincoln Matters Now More Than Ever and 42 00:04:08.020 --> 00:04:12.740 the theme of the book is that if Abe Lincoln were alive today, he would be a social democrat 43 00:04:12.740 --> 00:04:17.780 just like Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer and Hillary Clinton for that matter who's close 44 00:04:17.780 --> 00:04:22.740 friends of both of them. That's sort of an egregious example. I did some research a few 45 00:04:22.740 --> 00:04:52.740 A few years back on the economics and politics of Reconstruction, the post-Civil War Reconstruction and one of the real eye-openers, I ran across a book edited by Kenneth Stamp, who was a former president of the U.S. Historical Association, very well-known academic historian, and I was kind of surprised to read that in some of the introductory material in there, several of the authors came right out and said that their purpose, 46 00:04:52.740 --> 00:04:58.140 in the 1960s of sort of reexamining the history of reconstruction was that they wanted to 47 00:04:58.140 --> 00:05:04.500 use that history to promote Lyndon Johnson's legislative agenda that existed in the 1960s. 48 00:05:04.500 --> 00:05:09.700 And so, and I had read some of the earlier works that were done by such people as William 49 00:05:09.700 --> 00:05:14.300 Archibald Dunning that was just really a wonderful scholarship and you just get the idea on every 50 00:05:14.300 --> 00:05:19.820 page that these people really were interested in pursuing the truth, but at least these 51 00:05:19.820 --> 00:05:25.580 These people admitted it, that they had an agenda and they were literally rewriting history, 52 00:05:25.580 --> 00:05:27.420 which I didn't like at all. 53 00:05:27.420 --> 00:05:32.300 Another anecdote, Eric Foner, if you ever see a Civil War documentary on television, 54 00:05:32.300 --> 00:05:36.580 there's a good bet that they'll drag out Eric Foner from Columbia University to tell you 55 00:05:36.580 --> 00:05:39.180 how you should think about it. 56 00:05:39.180 --> 00:05:44.580 He's a Marxist historian and I quote him in my latest book on Lincoln in an article he 57 00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:54.020 He wrote in the Nation Magazine in October of 1991 and he made the case against the breakup 58 00:05:54.020 --> 00:05:55.020 of the Soviet Union. 59 00:05:55.020 --> 00:06:01.140 He was against the breakup of the Soviet Union and he said in the article, Abraham Lincoln 60 00:06:01.140 --> 00:06:06.460 would not have been such a softy as Gorbachev and allowed the 11 Soviet republics to secede 61 00:06:06.460 --> 00:06:07.820 peacefully like that. 62 00:06:07.820 --> 00:06:09.660 He would have kept the Soviet Union together. 63 00:06:09.660 --> 00:06:12.580 He called it a grand experiment and things like that. 64 00:06:12.580 --> 00:06:20.660 And the title of the article was Lincoln's Lesson, so he actually argues that thank goodness 65 00:06:20.660 --> 00:06:25.580 R. Lincoln was much more of a brutal dictator than the last dictator of the communist Soviet 66 00:06:25.580 --> 00:06:28.680 Union was. 67 00:06:28.680 --> 00:06:38.400 On the right, an example that I make a big deal of in my latest book is there's a political 68 00:06:38.400 --> 00:06:41.720 scientist named Walter Burns at Maryland, the University of Maryland, he wrote a book 69 00:06:41.720 --> 00:06:47.720 The book called Making Patriots a few years ago, and there's a chapter mostly about the civil war, Lincoln in particular, 70 00:06:47.720 --> 00:06:53.720 and he says the big problem with young Americans today, young people, 18 and 19 year olds, 71 00:06:53.720 --> 00:07:00.720 is that they may be willing to join the military if their country is genuinely threatened, national defense, 72 00:07:00.720 --> 00:07:06.720 but they're not willing to join the military in large numbers for global crusades for democracy, 73 00:07:06.720 --> 00:07:12.720 or if we turn the military into meals on wheels with tanks or something like that. 74 00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:16.720 They'll defend their country, but they won't go to Iran. 75 00:07:16.720 --> 00:07:23.720 And that's a problem. They're too self-centered. They're too interested in pursuing their careers and their education and raising their families. 76 00:07:23.720 --> 00:07:27.720 It's not a good thing. How can we persuade them to change their attitudes? 77 00:07:27.720 --> 00:07:35.720 And Walter Byrne says, well, we need a national poet who can more or less mesmerize the youth into marching in line 78 00:07:35.720 --> 00:08:05.720 Marching into Iran and Syria and Lebanon and you know I can just see Newt Gingrich getting goose bumps as he reads this kind of stuff and and then he says fortunately we already have one Abe Lincoln who he calls the the martyred Christ of democracies passion play and so that's my example of a right-winger associated with the American Enterprise Institute who just obviously just uses this history to promote that and speaking of Newt Gingrich he wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal 79 00:08:05.720 --> 00:08:35.720 The Wall Street Journal, a while back, in which he advocated the invasion and occupation of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, and I think one other, pretty much the whole Middle East plus North Korea, invasion and occupation, and the title of the article in The Wall Street Journal was Lincoln and Bush, and once again he started out, he strung together all these quotes of Abe Lincoln, and the idea is supposed to be, well, he would approve of this, but those of you who know anything 80 00:08:35.720 --> 00:08:45.720 But Lincoln, even if you hate Lincoln, he was a brilliant politician and I don't think he would have been so stupid as to follow Newt Gingrich's lead in something like this. 81 00:08:45.720 --> 00:08:49.720 And so I don't think he would have agreed with that at all. 82 00:08:49.720 --> 00:09:00.720 And so these are some of the things, you know, once I got into the whole literature and the use of this literature by politicians especially, that I smelled a rat, a very big rat. 83 00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:08.480 So that's, and von Mises sort of got me thinking along these lines of where to hunt for rats. 84 00:09:08.480 --> 00:09:14.200 That's a lot of what I do for my career as a, I'm sort of a rat hunter out there. 85 00:09:14.200 --> 00:09:21.840 And so another example, another quote, a couple of quotes from von Mises in Human Action about the study of history. 86 00:09:21.840 --> 00:09:28.240 No unanimity exists in regard to many theological, biological and economic issues. 87 00:09:28.240 --> 00:09:30.840 Accordingly, historians disagree. 88 00:09:30.840 --> 00:09:36.440 A mercantilist or neo-mercantilist must necessarily be at variance with an economist. 89 00:09:36.440 --> 00:09:41.840 An account of German monetary history is conditioned by the author's monetary doctrines. 90 00:09:41.840 --> 00:09:47.240 The historians disagree on such issues not in their capacity as historians, 91 00:09:47.240 --> 00:09:53.640 but in their application of the non-historical sciences to the subject matter of history. 92 00:09:53.640 --> 00:10:00.240 An economist looks at history through a different lens in that he or she will ask different questions, for example, 93 00:10:00.240 --> 00:10:05.980 and have different understandings of the role of tariffs, for example, in the Civil War and things like that. 94 00:10:05.980 --> 00:10:10.880 Another quote is that, quote, history can never be studied without presuppositions, 95 00:10:10.880 --> 00:10:22.140 and that dissension with regard to the presuppositions, i.e. the whole content of the non-historical branches of knowledge, 96 00:10:22.140 --> 00:10:25.380 must determine the establishment of historical facts. 97 00:10:25.380 --> 00:10:27.320 And then he says, changes in the teachings 98 00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:29.120 of the non-historical sciences 99 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:32.040 consequently must involve a rewriting of history. 100 00:10:32.040 --> 00:10:34.800 Subjective economics produces historical works 101 00:10:34.800 --> 00:10:38.960 very different from those based on mercantilist doctrines, 102 00:10:38.960 --> 00:10:40.500 which certainly is very true. 103 00:10:40.500 --> 00:10:44.060 And I'll give you one example from my own research again. 104 00:10:44.060 --> 00:10:45.960 About two years ago, 105 00:10:45.960 --> 00:10:49.060 probably the most preeminent Lincoln scholar in America 106 00:10:49.060 --> 00:10:50.760 is David Donald. 107 00:10:50.760 --> 00:10:54.760 He wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Lincoln. 108 00:10:54.760 --> 00:10:56.200 I think it's called Lincoln. 109 00:10:56.200 --> 00:10:57.720 It's likely that's all the books are. 110 00:10:57.720 --> 00:11:00.000 And he was invited by the Smithsonian Magazine 111 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:03.780 to write an article on what if the 1860 election 112 00:11:03.780 --> 00:11:04.760 had turned out differently? 113 00:11:04.760 --> 00:11:09.760 They had a whole series of what if the 1980 election 114 00:11:10.160 --> 00:11:11.160 had turned out differently? 115 00:11:11.160 --> 00:11:14.480 What if the 1932 election had turned out differently? 116 00:11:14.480 --> 00:11:17.680 And he did the 1860, and here's what he says. 117 00:11:17.680 --> 00:11:20.600 He said, had the Democrats won in 1860? 118 00:11:20.600 --> 00:11:23.140 and not Lincoln and the Republicans. 119 00:11:23.140 --> 00:11:25.680 It quote, would have blocked the important economic 120 00:11:25.680 --> 00:11:28.540 and social legislation enacted by the Republicans 121 00:11:28.540 --> 00:11:30.200 during the Civil War. 122 00:11:30.200 --> 00:11:32.460 So he doesn't even talk about slavery 123 00:11:32.460 --> 00:11:35.380 and these other issues, social legislation. 124 00:11:35.380 --> 00:11:39.380 So thus, there would likely have been no high tariff laws 125 00:11:39.380 --> 00:11:40.900 that protected the iron industry, 126 00:11:40.900 --> 00:11:43.600 so essential in post-war economic development. 127 00:11:43.600 --> 00:11:46.720 No Homestead Act, giving 160 acres to settlers 128 00:11:46.720 --> 00:11:50.260 willing to occupy and till land out west. 129 00:11:50.260 --> 00:11:52.900 No transcontinental railroad legislation. 130 00:11:52.900 --> 00:11:54.580 No land grant colleges. 131 00:11:54.580 --> 00:11:57.660 No currency or national banking legislation. 132 00:11:57.660 --> 00:11:58.620 Horrors. 133 00:11:58.620 --> 00:12:01.020 No Department of Agriculture. 134 00:12:01.020 --> 00:12:02.700 What a terrible thing. 135 00:12:02.700 --> 00:12:05.940 To offer expert guidance on better seeds. 136 00:12:07.180 --> 00:12:09.780 What a catastrophe that would have been. 137 00:12:09.780 --> 00:12:12.420 Without such legislation, the economic takeoff 138 00:12:12.420 --> 00:12:15.220 that made the United States a major industrial power 139 00:12:15.220 --> 00:12:17.900 by the end of the century would have been prevented 140 00:12:17.900 --> 00:12:19.180 altogether. 141 00:12:19.180 --> 00:12:21.780 And so, there are a lot of good economic historians 142 00:12:21.780 --> 00:12:24.820 that have written a lot of really good solid analysis 143 00:12:24.820 --> 00:12:25.800 of this period of history, 144 00:12:25.800 --> 00:12:30.700 but historian historians are uniformly very lame on this 145 00:12:30.700 --> 00:12:32.500 for the obvious reasons that Mises gave. 146 00:12:32.500 --> 00:12:35.260 They write about economic issues, 147 00:12:35.260 --> 00:12:36.980 but without the benefit of having studied 148 00:12:36.980 --> 00:12:39.540 even principles of economics in a lot of cases. 149 00:12:39.540 --> 00:12:42.340 And a lot of them I found tend to look, 150 00:12:42.340 --> 00:12:44.660 they come up with some idea that, 151 00:12:44.660 --> 00:12:46.620 well, this politician has good intentions. 152 00:12:46.620 --> 00:12:47.900 His heart is in the right place. 153 00:12:47.900 --> 00:12:58.900 Therefore, whatever legislation he supported must be good for the whole country or they're sort of neo-mercantilists of one sort or another like David Donald on these issues. 154 00:12:58.900 --> 00:13:05.900 But if you look at these things, he praises the high tariff laws, which existed until 1913 when the income tax came in. 155 00:13:05.900 --> 00:13:15.900 I don't have to tell this crowd that that was not a good idea to have 45 to 50 percent average tariff rates for all those years in terms of the economy. 156 00:13:15.900 --> 00:13:20.780 Even the Homestead Act, there's a historian named Ludwell Johnson who taught at William 157 00:13:20.780 --> 00:13:25.300 and Mary for many, many years. He's retired now. He did some research on the Homestead 158 00:13:25.300 --> 00:13:31.060 Act that I haven't seen anywhere else of this kind of research. He made the case that about 159 00:13:31.060 --> 00:13:36.820 three-fourths of all the land, he argues, was given to railroad corporations, mining 160 00:13:36.820 --> 00:13:42.900 corporations, timber companies, and a relatively small amount was given to real actual settlers, 161 00:13:42.900 --> 00:13:49.300 So it's not quite as libertarian-oriented idea as you would think. 162 00:13:49.300 --> 00:13:52.500 In other words, it was sort of a veiled form of corporate welfare. 163 00:13:52.500 --> 00:13:56.500 Not totally, but to a very large extent. 164 00:13:56.500 --> 00:13:59.600 No transcontinental railroad legislation. 165 00:13:59.600 --> 00:14:03.900 Well, I've written, and many others have written about the fact that James J. Hill 166 00:14:03.900 --> 00:14:07.400 built a transcontinental railroad without any government subsidies. 167 00:14:07.400 --> 00:14:12.000 So it probably would have happened a little later than it did. 168 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:16.040 and it wouldn't have had all the corruption and the swindling and probably the biggest 169 00:14:16.040 --> 00:14:22.040 political corruption in the history of American politics, the Crédit Mémobilier scandals 170 00:14:22.040 --> 00:14:27.760 of the Grant Administrations was associated with Transcontinental Railroad subsidies. 171 00:14:27.760 --> 00:14:33.680 And I even argued in some of my publications that this really strengthened the progressive 172 00:14:33.680 --> 00:14:38.160 movement several decades later because these people were corrupt. 173 00:14:38.160 --> 00:14:44.000 They were corrupt, and so a lot of the regulation that was put in place, some of it, 174 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:48.760 most of it was put in place by the corporations themselves actually, so it really wasn't harmful to them, 175 00:14:48.760 --> 00:14:55.660 but some of it was intended to be a response to all this corruption, but it wasn't capitalism that was corrupt, 176 00:14:55.660 --> 00:15:00.460 it was neo-mercantilism, which David Donald kind of likes. 177 00:15:00.460 --> 00:15:03.560 And the Department of Agriculture called it no currency or national banking system. 178 00:15:03.560 --> 00:15:08.560 We wouldn't have had the Fed, you know, decades later, heaven forbid, if it weren't for this. 179 00:15:08.560 --> 00:15:13.360 And, of course, the Department of Agriculture, I sort of lampooned this idea in my latest book 180 00:15:13.360 --> 00:15:17.860 that farmers need bureaucrats in Washington to tell them which seeds to plant. 181 00:15:17.860 --> 00:15:25.560 And, of course, the main impact of the Department of Agriculture has been to enforce agricultural cartels periodically over the years. 182 00:15:25.560 --> 00:15:32.360 And so that's the sort of silliness that you see from historians who don't understand the one thing about economics, 183 00:15:32.360 --> 00:15:34.720 praising all these institutions. 184 00:15:34.720 --> 00:15:37.880 And one final example, I've got about two or three minutes left, 185 00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:40.760 but something else I've written about 186 00:15:40.760 --> 00:15:43.600 is another application of these quotes 187 00:15:43.600 --> 00:15:45.240 that I just read from Mises is, 188 00:15:45.240 --> 00:15:47.480 I've always thought of macroeconomics 189 00:15:47.480 --> 00:15:51.360 as sort of warmed over mercantilism 190 00:15:51.360 --> 00:15:53.520 covered up with mathematics. 191 00:15:53.520 --> 00:15:55.720 When I first started studying it in school, 192 00:15:55.720 --> 00:15:59.600 after studying microeconomics, supply and demand, 193 00:15:59.600 --> 00:16:02.000 opportunity cost, real economics, 194 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:07.400 has always seemed like contrived engineering exercises to me, macro. 195 00:16:07.400 --> 00:16:11.000 And I ran across an article in the Journal of Political Economy, 196 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:17.100 which is one of the prestigious economics journals a couple of years ago, August 2004, 197 00:16:17.100 --> 00:16:20.600 by two UCLA economists, Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, 198 00:16:20.600 --> 00:16:25.000 and one of them is the editor of the American Economic Review, the other prestigious journal. 199 00:16:25.000 --> 00:16:30.300 And some 60 years after Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and Henry Hazlett 200 00:16:30.300 --> 00:16:35.700 explain why the New Deal made the Great Depression worse, not better. 201 00:16:35.700 --> 00:16:39.940 These guys finally discovered this and they published it and they wrote it up in the language 202 00:16:39.940 --> 00:16:40.940 of game theory. 203 00:16:40.940 --> 00:16:45.900 I guess that's what you have to do to assert truth nowadays in economics. 204 00:16:45.900 --> 00:16:51.180 And they say things like this, real gross domestic product per adult during the Depression, 205 00:16:51.180 --> 00:16:57.020 which was 39% below trend at the trough of the Depression in 1933, remained 27% below 206 00:16:57.020 --> 00:16:58.900 the trend in 1939. 207 00:16:58.900 --> 00:17:07.700 Similarly, private hours work were 27% below trend in 1933 and remained 21% below trend in 1939, end quote. 208 00:17:07.700 --> 00:17:12.000 So they finally discovered that the New Deal didn't work in 2004. 209 00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:16.900 Things like I said that the Austrians explained over and over and over again 60 years earlier. 210 00:17:16.900 --> 00:17:22.300 How did they come up? Why is this? Why did they miss this? How did the mainstream miss this? 211 00:17:22.300 --> 00:17:26.900 I think it's because of their theory, their bad, their sort of neo-mercantilist theory, 212 00:17:26.900 --> 00:17:31.900 which I call, in one of my writings, the Frankenstein monster theory of economics 213 00:17:31.900 --> 00:17:34.900 because the language of, and here's what they say, 214 00:17:34.900 --> 00:17:41.900 he says they're just surprised that, quote, the weak recovery from their depression and the New Deal policies 215 00:17:41.900 --> 00:17:47.900 is puzzling because of the large negative shocks that some economists believe cause the crash 216 00:17:47.900 --> 00:17:51.900 including monetary shocks, productivity shocks and banking shocks. 217 00:17:51.900 --> 00:17:55.900 I make the analogy to the movie Young Frankenstein where they try to shock the monster into life. 218 00:17:55.900 --> 00:18:01.900 That's how macroeconomics talks about trying to shock the economy back to life during a recession. 219 00:18:01.900 --> 00:18:07.900 And if that doesn't work, if you remember the movie, they try to inject him with some gigantic needle and make him come back to life. 220 00:18:07.900 --> 00:18:16.900 And of course, these authors talk about various injections of government spending or easy credit that would supposedly cause a roaring recovery. 221 00:18:16.900 --> 00:18:24.900 And I read this stuff, and I don't know, in my perverted mind, I think, well, they're shocking the monster, they're trying to inject it with something. 222 00:18:24.900 --> 00:18:29.900 Why? Because they want the monster to come roaring back, like the economy. 223 00:18:29.900 --> 00:18:34.900 They use this weird language. And this is economics, you know, shocks, injections. 224 00:18:34.900 --> 00:18:38.900 It reminds me of when I first took economics as an undergraduate. 225 00:18:38.900 --> 00:18:43.900 Time's up. I'm a little bit bigger than Mark, so I'll take two more seconds. 226 00:18:43.900 --> 00:18:46.900 Maybe many of you remember this. 227 00:18:46.900 --> 00:18:49.900 Chapter one had a bathtub in it, a picture of a bathtub. 228 00:18:49.900 --> 00:18:53.900 And there was water going in, and there was water leaking out somewhere. 229 00:18:53.900 --> 00:18:58.520 The water going in was supposed to be government, government spending, and the whole problem 230 00:18:58.520 --> 00:19:03.060 of economics was to patch up those leaks and keep the water going in the bathtub, and that's 231 00:19:03.060 --> 00:19:07.540 another reason why I thought, this is insane, this is not economics, what is this? 232 00:19:07.540 --> 00:19:13.780 And von Mises, he must have been having a very hard time in his day because I had a 233 00:19:13.780 --> 00:19:18.340 lot more people who agreed with me at the time and do today than von Mises did, who 234 00:19:18.340 --> 00:19:23.420 was really a lone wolf for which we should all ever be grateful, and thank you very much.