WEBVTT NOTE Mises in New York 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.800 I want to thank Gary Schlaubauer for this award and honor. 2 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:18.800 From your gift, Mr. Schlaubauer, in loving memory of a genius in our time, Ludwig von Mises, 3 00:00:18.800 --> 00:00:26.160 You know, I say up front, as Bill Anderson tipped you off, 4 00:00:26.160 --> 00:00:34.200 serendipity is something that we all incur, but mostly not aware of it, 5 00:00:34.200 --> 00:00:46.200 but you had some instances where it was Lady Aston and Mary Bennett, now Mary Bennett Peterson, put that to good work. 6 00:00:46.200 --> 00:00:58.160 Now, I'm here, quite frankly, as Mr. Serendipity. I'm here by a fluke, by my view of myself 7 00:00:58.160 --> 00:01:06.520 as a son of fickle fate. For frankly, I never heard of famous Ludwig Mises when I took his 8 00:01:06.520 --> 00:01:15.520 and really chose the course for its time of Monday night from 8 to 10. 9 00:01:15.520 --> 00:01:20.520 It just fit my schedule beautifully. 10 00:01:20.520 --> 00:01:28.520 But Ms. Sessians, night school was fine for me an assistant economics prof at Brooklyn Polytech. 11 00:01:28.520 --> 00:01:31.520 But night school for genius like Mises? 12 00:01:31.520 --> 00:01:39.520 Ask why did no top university here or in Europe find him a chair? Good question. 13 00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:42.520 Murray Rothbard gave three reasons. 14 00:01:42.520 --> 00:01:51.520 One, Mises was a Jew in the first half of the 20th century when anti-Semitism ran high. 15 00:01:51.520 --> 00:02:00.520 Two, Mises was a laissez-faire for lean, non-interventionist government to protect person and property only. 16 00:02:00.520 --> 00:02:16.520 And three, Mises was a non-compromiser, a rock of Gibraltar, refusing to back politically correct Marxism, Keynesianism, welfareism, funny money or state hegemony. 17 00:02:16.520 --> 00:02:19.520 But what of academic freedom? 18 00:02:19.520 --> 00:02:35.520 Well, even NYU, if giving Mises a visiting professorship he's so visited for 24 years, denied him any pay whatsoever, that money had to be raised outside. 19 00:02:35.520 --> 00:02:42.520 Oh, for shame! For shame, you lords of academe, here and abroad! 20 00:02:42.520 --> 00:03:07.520 If happenstance became circumstance, I soon met like-minded fellow students like Murray Rothbard, George Riesman, Hans Senholtz, Israel Kirzner, Ralph Rago, and Louis Spadaro, who with Mises as a catalyst made names for themselves in Austrian literature. 21 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:14.520 Soul energy blossomed on NYU's Washington Square. 22 00:03:14.520 --> 00:03:18.520 So let me, Mr. Serendipity, add proudly, 23 00:03:18.520 --> 00:03:25.520 Ludwig became my mentor, a dear friend and colleague at NYU from 1950 on 24 00:03:25.520 --> 00:03:31.520 until the world lost him in 1973, lost but not forever, 25 00:03:31.520 --> 00:03:56.520 Thanks to his sweeping ideas, and to this lively, working memorial, the Mises Institute, the think tank that keys human action, that sees history as anything but pre-determined, that puts to America Hamlet's fateful question, explored here tonight, to be or not to be. 26 00:03:56.520 --> 00:04:04.520 fellow Mississians, Contrarians for now, but to me libertarians for ever. 27 00:04:04.520 --> 00:04:09.520 How well I remember Lou Mises and his dear wife Margaret. 28 00:04:09.520 --> 00:04:18.520 Margaret often came with him to class and after studying typing and stenography at a Manhattan Secretarial School, 29 00:04:18.520 --> 00:04:33.520 This glamorous star of the Berlin and Vienna stage came to type every page in English of all 900 pages of the Mises Magnum Opus, Human Action, 1949. 30 00:04:33.520 --> 00:04:39.520 I ask you, isn't such human action truly a labor of love? 31 00:04:39.520 --> 00:04:49.520 And also with Lew's firm rule of having Margaret correct an occasional typo by re-tapping the entire page. 32 00:04:49.520 --> 00:05:03.520 Here then, Margaret Mises, a giant in her own right, it was visionary, Margaret, who approved the founding of the Mises Institute in 1981, 33 00:05:03.520 --> 00:05:26.520 with that mission accomplished in 1982, backing the project with other giants such as F. A. Hayek, Lawrence Fertig, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray Rothbard, who led academic programs here until his death in 1995. 34 00:05:26.520 --> 00:05:44.520 Think Tank execs of the caliber of Lew Rockwell, Pat Barnett and Jeff Tucker closed the deal to put this great think tank of hope, of new reform on the intellectual idea front. 35 00:05:44.520 --> 00:06:01.520 Let's celebrate, then, the vast life of Lew Mises, a life in which he fused lifelong moral courage with crowning insight on how the world tackles or fumbles the law of scarcity. 36 00:06:01.520 --> 00:06:12.520 He showed that courage in class. As a great teacher, I was there. And in academic debate as a great fighter, as Margaret tells in a book, 37 00:06:12.520 --> 00:06:29.520 Look, my years with Ludwig von Mises. He was also, in the view of F. A. Hayek, his Nobel Prize student, a great radical, an intelligent and rational radical, but a radical on the right lines. 38 00:06:29.520 --> 00:06:43.520 Mises, a radical and non-conformist, yes, but so were Aristotle, Galileo, Adam Smith and Einstein in their own non-conforming day. 39 00:06:43.520 --> 00:06:55.520 In the light of such courage, yours as well as his, let's discuss some of his big ideas, dwelling on one, to me, most hopeful idea, 40 00:06:55.520 --> 00:07:07.520 The definition and application of a much overworked and much misunderstood word, democracy. 41 00:07:07.520 --> 00:07:14.520 Political democracy, I say, is commonly but wrongly equated with freedom. 42 00:07:14.520 --> 00:07:23.520 As shown in history, as I will cite, yet in the Mises market sense of the word, it does equate with freedom beautifully, effectively. 43 00:07:23.520 --> 00:07:38.520 Getting, for example, not a biennial 50% or so of election turnout, but 100% daily election turnout of Americans and other Westerners. 44 00:07:38.520 --> 00:07:50.520 Call it direct democracy. Call it market democracy. Above all, call it voluntary democracy. Why don't we call it what it is, America's true democracy? 45 00:07:50.520 --> 00:08:05.520 Now, Misesians, let's salute Lew Mises, the dean, the architect of Austrian Economics in the 20th century, as was Carl Menger in the 19th. 46 00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:17.520 Menger, it was well said, founded the Austrian School in 1871 on the intellectual bedrock of subjectivism and marginal utility as the basis of value. 47 00:08:17.520 --> 00:08:26.200 Mises built that idea into the very title and theme of Human Action, so Mises caught 48 00:08:26.200 --> 00:08:35.960 squally then, the role of the acting individual, a lost soul in most mainstream and all mathematical 49 00:08:35.960 --> 00:08:45.760 economics, thus what Mises forged intellectually is praxeology, the vision, that purposeful 50 00:08:45.760 --> 00:08:59.360 Human behavior and action, including division of labor, is central to society, central to social cooperation and to Western civilization itself. 51 00:08:59.360 --> 00:09:10.000 So to us, praxeologists here gathered, from thinking into individual behavior, 52 00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:22.300 Lew Mises saw human action affecting all of us in how we act and think and pursue our lives. 53 00:09:22.300 --> 00:09:28.000 An analogy, if you please, they can't held in 1637. 54 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:36.000 I think, therefore I am. I say Mises held. I think, therefore I act. 55 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:56.000 So thought begets action. Human action is acting consciously, voted by gain, perhaps after a snap judgment, perhaps after deliberation, from scratching your nose, to changing careers, to rethinking economics on Austrian lines. 56 00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:05.000 By the way, if every human action hangs on gain, pecuniary or non-pecuniary, doesn't 57 00:10:05.000 --> 00:10:12.000 every so-called non-profit organization become, if you will, a contradiction in terms? 58 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:22.000 No wonder our Brigham on Neocon and Neoconning White House worships the god of political democracy, 59 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:31.200 as do our media legislatures and school textbooks all echo the World War I President Wilson 60 00:10:31.200 --> 00:10:35.840 motto of make the world safe for democracy. 61 00:10:35.840 --> 00:10:43.460 But what of its curse of politics, timeless ubiquitous politics, the contagious corruptor 62 00:10:43.460 --> 00:10:48.900 of political democracy and its minions from ancient Greece to America today as implied 63 00:10:48.900 --> 00:10:56.340 in the title of Mises Institute Distinguished Scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2001 book, 64 00:10:56.340 --> 00:11:05.340 Democracy, the God that Failed. Or as implied by Hamlet, standing in a Danish graveyard 65 00:11:05.340 --> 00:11:13.220 at night and holding up a skull and wondering if it at once belonged to a politician whom 66 00:11:13.220 --> 00:11:28.620 All Misesians see how America's Founders themselves saw political democracy, quoting self-ruined 67 00:11:28.620 --> 00:11:32.300 as many voters joined factions of special interests. 68 00:11:32.300 --> 00:11:40.740 James Madison spoke for his peers in Federal Papers Number 10, seeing democracies as, I 69 00:11:40.740 --> 00:11:57.740 Spectacles of turbulence and contention, which have ever been found incompatible with personal security, all the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. 70 00:11:57.740 --> 00:12:11.740 It was Han Mises who lit up a near unknown, yet much safer and surer democracy, a way out of our definitional crisis, if you will. 71 00:12:11.740 --> 00:12:19.740 And in 1922, in another great book, Socialism, he saw a democracy at work in market action. 72 00:12:19.740 --> 00:12:27.540 Action, CD yourself, shopping malls, online buying, getting codes from vending machines, 73 00:12:27.540 --> 00:12:34.540 filling up the gas pump by credit card, business consumers ordering supplies for their operations. 74 00:12:34.540 --> 00:12:41.460 So these and other market voters vote not but every other year, but again and again 75 00:12:41.460 --> 00:12:49.940 every day, freely, directly, in a way one-on-one, you will like your supplier, you get what 76 00:12:49.940 --> 00:12:58.740 you order, you are sovereign, great, yet do take care, you and I are still under an ancient 77 00:12:58.740 --> 00:13:07.100 Roman edict, to consumers, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. 78 00:13:07.100 --> 00:13:24.100 Oh, I see Mises and Socialism giving market democracy a vital political edge today, if we use it, here and seek to put his brilliant edge, his near law, into public opinion play. 79 00:13:24.100 --> 00:13:27.100 Per, and I'm now quoting him, 80 00:13:27.100 --> 00:13:46.100 When we call a capitalist society, a consumer's democracy, we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumer's ballot, held dearly in the marketplace. 81 00:13:46.100 --> 00:13:55.420 Mises, right again, spent his life seeking limits on loudly trumpeted political democracy 82 00:13:55.420 --> 00:14:02.460 for ponder why so many big government snares and delusions today. 83 00:14:02.460 --> 00:14:06.140 For example, who rules whom? 84 00:14:06.140 --> 00:14:14.500 Why state hegemony, heavy taxation, intervention of the law, swelling bureaucracy and thick 85 00:14:14.500 --> 00:14:43.500 public, government, schools, that is sick from four basic ills, one, peddling, peddling, moral relativism, two, teacher unions, three, denial of competition and its kiss of death, denial of choice, where even every child in a very strong sense gets left behind, if you read me. 86 00:14:44.500 --> 00:15:08.500 Thank you. In the U.S., for example, we have an endless form of legal law, and I'm now referring to the constant deterioration of the buying power of money, fiat money. 87 00:15:08.500 --> 00:15:21.500 In the US, for example, NDs charged, when I was a boy, $2 for an office visit, $3 for a home visit, and we had several home visits. Now there are no more home visits. 88 00:15:21.500 --> 00:15:32.500 But now an office visit can cost $80 or more. When then, a first class stamp cost 2 cents, now it costs 37 cents. 89 00:15:32.500 --> 00:15:46.500 When a New York subway ride cost a nickel, but now it costs two dollars? Or ponder why, though, winner-take-all elections tend to split society, us versus them? 90 00:15:46.500 --> 00:15:55.500 How come the war on poverty tends to kill off its very cure by subtly sabotaging production? 91 00:15:55.500 --> 00:16:13.500 or why ongoing bungling, brain gaming, before and after Hurricane Katrina, or why endless Iraqi insurgency violence, or why suicide bombers in New York, Madrid, London and elsewhere. 92 00:16:13.500 --> 00:16:21.520 Three cheers then for Lew's perception of state intervention as the culprit, while market 93 00:16:21.520 --> 00:16:30.100 democracy is productive and peaceful, peaceful, look, mindful of terrorist about, doesn't 94 00:16:30.100 --> 00:16:37.100 capitalism or social cooperation across borders say it's stupid, stupid to shoot your customers 95 00:16:37.100 --> 00:16:48.700 or bomb your investors. So harming your very own people dependent on world prosperity. 96 00:16:48.700 --> 00:16:57.100 So in current debate on economic policy, I urge you to perceive and work for peaceful, 97 00:16:57.100 --> 00:17:06.820 productive democracy which could come to be rethought, reinforced, even reborn as it 98 00:17:06.820 --> 00:17:15.820 could, it follows, human liberty. Why? Well, call it power to the individual. Call it laissez-faire capitalism. 99 00:17:15.820 --> 00:17:22.820 Call it, in the so-called war on terrorism, world peace through world trade. 100 00:17:22.820 --> 00:17:30.820 The wise idea of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson in the interwar period of the 20s and 30s. 101 00:17:30.820 --> 00:17:40.660 is called the way of the choosy, choosing sovereign consumer. You, for example, just crass political 102 00:17:40.660 --> 00:17:54.180 democracy and a bipartisan welfare state persists. An initial, 2006, $2.5 trillion red ink federal 103 00:17:54.180 --> 00:18:04.180 The monster so frightful, mean, as to be hated, needs but to be seen, but seen too oft, familiar with the world, 104 00:18:04.180 --> 00:18:14.180 The monster so frightful, mean, as to be hated, needs but to be seen, but seen too oft, familiar with the world, 105 00:18:14.180 --> 00:18:30.180 Life, he said, is a monster, so frightful, mean, as to be hated, needs but to be seen, but seen too oft, familiar with the face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace. 106 00:18:30.180 --> 00:18:40.180 Or as Mae West cast such human frailty, she said, I began as Snow White, but I drifted. 107 00:18:40.180 --> 00:18:54.180 No wonder that in 1956, or 49 years ago, Mises felt pushed to publish a book, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. 108 00:18:54.180 --> 00:19:12.180 But now anti-capitalism is more rife than ever. Indeed, Hayek, Mises's star pupil, felt a duty in 1988, 32 years later, to do a book on the same lines that they will concede the errors of socialism. 109 00:19:12.180 --> 00:19:34.180 Recall this is the same Hayek who did the best-selling The Road to Serfdom in 1944 as we now half-serfs tread the very same road as President Bush II seeks to join IRAs to Social Security as part of his so-called ownership society. 110 00:19:34.180 --> 00:19:48.180 if with paternalistic control, if with a huge amount of unfunded lien on your property and heirs in the here and now as well as in the hereafter. 111 00:19:48.180 --> 00:19:57.180 Oh, how clever are compassionate conservatives, so compassionate with other people's money. 112 00:19:57.180 --> 00:20:09.180 Conservatives, I ask you, Ms. Sessians, ask a conservative friend of yours, how come Hayek added a PS, a postscript, 113 00:20:09.180 --> 00:20:14.180 why I am not a conservative, to his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty. 114 00:20:14.180 --> 00:20:22.180 To Hayek, conservatism is simply too unprincipled, too neocond in today's word. 115 00:20:22.180 --> 00:20:31.180 For our part, we Austrian economists and supporters are people of insight, not devotees of blind fate. 116 00:20:31.180 --> 00:20:38.180 I'm reminded of a story told by Margaret Mises, once watching her husband play tennis with a coach. 117 00:20:38.180 --> 00:20:47.180 I know the coach and I know the... I was on Larry Firding's court. 118 00:20:47.180 --> 00:20:56.180 Anyway, she called out, well, how come you don't put more effort into the game? 119 00:20:56.180 --> 00:21:03.180 He shouted back, why should I? The fate of the ball does not concern me. 120 00:21:03.180 --> 00:21:16.180 What did concern, what did concern was the folly of political democracy in pursuing state intervention or piecemeal socialism or its phase of planned chaos. 121 00:21:16.180 --> 00:21:29.180 The mirage that officialdom can somehow better our lot, nobly, selflessly, sure, just as it does now for government-battered, scattered New Orleans. 122 00:21:29.180 --> 00:21:35.180 Or as it did under prohibition, the noble experiment, 1920 to 1933. 123 00:21:35.180 --> 00:22:05.180 The U.S. ban on production and sale of alcoholic beverages, touching off a national epidemic of black markets and gangsters a la Legs Diamond and Lucky Luciano, making headlines, I remember the headlines, didn't understand them entirely, via street warfare, yet again, Congress got the 21st Amendment to repeal the 18th, great, but it's still left intact, the now nascent 124 00:22:05.180 --> 00:22:24.180 The then-Mason, now virulent, war on drugs, with deadly implications for domestic policy today in terms of renewed warfare, for foreign policy getting the U.S. into a hopeless war on drug traffic from Colombia in South America to Afghanistan in Asia. 125 00:22:24.180 --> 00:22:30.180 But our law would have had none of it. Here I meant human action, and I quote, 126 00:22:30.180 --> 00:22:36.180 Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous habit-forming drugs, but once the principles are meted, 127 00:22:36.180 --> 00:22:42.180 that is, it is the duty of government to guard the individual against his own foolishness, 128 00:22:42.180 --> 00:22:46.180 no serious objection can be made against further encroachments. 129 00:22:46.180 --> 00:22:53.180 If one ends man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. 130 00:22:53.180 --> 00:23:03.300 Way. We then are berated, underrated and misread capitalism. Isn't it still? Pay our founders, 131 00:23:03.300 --> 00:23:11.620 if Marx had yet to coin the word, a royal road to social cooperation, a vast vital network 132 00:23:11.620 --> 00:23:18.740 of private governments, all with highly used individual switchable assent. Switchable? 133 00:23:18.740 --> 00:23:25.400 All right. See in America, countless private governments such as the New York Times, Walmart, 134 00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:33.340 Salvation Army, the Mises Institute itself, and some 30 million other private firms, farms 135 00:23:33.340 --> 00:23:42.460 and NGOs of all kinds. Yet all rely on switchable individual ascent. So you're free to switch 136 00:23:42.460 --> 00:23:52.460 from Ford to Toyota, from Yale to MIT, from Wendy's to McDonald's, and vice versa, talk of true private democracy. 137 00:23:52.460 --> 00:24:04.460 So let's juxtapose, just now, America's coercive political democracy with Lew's voluntary market democracy to see which is which and why. 138 00:24:04.460 --> 00:24:12.460 I ask you, with both in need of reform, which needs all-out drastic reform. 139 00:24:12.460 --> 00:24:17.460 I know you know, but the general public doesn't. 140 00:24:17.460 --> 00:24:20.460 One democracy is public, the other private. 141 00:24:20.460 --> 00:24:26.460 One views socialistic and pro-state as it funds failing programs and public schools. 142 00:24:26.460 --> 00:24:34.460 The other view is capitalistic and pro-consumer and it lets failing firms and private schools fail. 143 00:24:34.460 --> 00:24:40.460 One is coercive and centralized, the other voluntary and decentralized. 144 00:24:40.460 --> 00:24:51.460 One runs inevitably a growth impeding, win-lose, zero-sum game without a guiding market system or economic calculation. 145 00:24:51.460 --> 00:24:55.460 And I'll spell that out in a moment via Mises. 146 00:24:55.460 --> 00:25:05.460 The other runs a pro-growth, win-win, positive-sum game via a guarding market system and economic calculation. 147 00:25:05.460 --> 00:25:23.460 One democracy, run by politics, monopoly, win-and-take-all, hoopla on mindful of H.L. Mencken's line that such democracy yields the worship of jackals by jackasses. 148 00:25:23.460 --> 00:25:35.260 Or on Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience of 1849 when he saw little virtue in the action of masses of men voting as a sort of gaming. 149 00:25:35.260 --> 00:25:39.460 The other democracy runs by human action and free trade. 150 00:25:39.460 --> 00:25:50.960 One democracy bears to the Machiavellian a morality in the short run, such as credit expansion aimed at winning elections as courting inflation and recession. 151 00:25:50.960 --> 00:26:00.960 I'm glad to get Lew's book by Rothbard on, and I commend the book to you, fiat money. 152 00:26:00.960 --> 00:26:08.960 Anyway, one with coercive power yields to Acton's law that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, 153 00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:17.960 or to Frank Chudorov's view of Washington's work as the rape of society, or to Harry Truman's truism 154 00:26:17.960 --> 00:26:42.960 That if you ever need a friend in Washington, buy a dog, or to the no-brainer, that someday the welfare welfare state will wise up and swear off sin, sure, but go to the side instead of Oakland, California, say we, Austrians, say a bankrupt state interventionism, there is no there there. 155 00:26:42.960 --> 00:27:01.960 One democracy glorifies war, including class warfare, and the other glorifies peaceful trade in a virtual global accord on exchanging private property, if widely derided as globalization. 156 00:27:01.960 --> 00:27:12.960 World War I, naively, as again, I said earlier, make the world safe for democracy, only to reap, how is this for a cast of characters? 157 00:27:12.960 --> 00:27:27.960 Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, France in Spain, Tojo in Japan, Tito in Yugoslavia, Mao in China, Peron in Argentina, 158 00:27:27.960 --> 00:27:46.960 Castro in Cuba, Allende in Chile, Paul Parton in Cambodia, Chavez in Venezuela, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, almost all of whom faked or fake political democracy, to get and hold power as have lesser imitators over the world. 159 00:27:46.960 --> 00:27:55.960 One democracy rules income disparity and like Robin Hood, blithely transfers wealth from the haves to the have-nots. 160 00:27:55.960 --> 00:28:10.960 The others saw both, including those of the poor. One denies itself key market feedback data, or what von Mises called, that aforementioned market-driven economic calculation. 161 00:28:10.960 --> 00:28:22.960 In 1920, he brilliantly saw its lack as the key to the sure failure of socialism, a thesis he expanded in his 1922 classic, Socialism. 162 00:28:22.960 --> 00:28:40.960 Socialism, so you saw or see Socialism collapse or incapability reign in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and welfare and intervention everywhere witnessed it in spades in America. 163 00:28:40.960 --> 00:28:56.960 Yet market democracy does capitalize on prices and profit and loss to get scarce resources to their perceived best uses, or he uses in his 1944 book, bureaucracy. 164 00:28:56.960 --> 00:29:02.960 There are two methods for the conduct of human affairs within the frame of human society. 165 00:29:02.960 --> 00:29:08.960 One is bureaucratic management, the other is profit management. 166 00:29:08.960 --> 00:29:14.960 But bureaucratic management, without market pricing and economic calculation, flies blind. 167 00:29:14.960 --> 00:29:19.960 It saps fairest capital and talent in the tragedy of the commons, 168 00:29:19.960 --> 00:29:23.960 as special interests horn in on each other to grab all they can, 169 00:29:23.960 --> 00:29:29.960 while profit management saves and invests capital, the very tools of economic growth. 170 00:29:29.960 --> 00:29:33.960 Self-interestedly, how else? 171 00:29:33.960 --> 00:29:41.960 Under private property rights and the rule of law, it does so spontaneously, harmoniously, creatively. 172 00:29:41.960 --> 00:29:53.960 Hayek called this remarkable, self-guiding market process of economization, productivity gain, economic growth, and this is his word, a marvel. 173 00:29:53.960 --> 00:30:08.760 No question then, capitalism, Lew's market democracy, is America's true democracy, that it's the opposite of a bipartisan, welfare, warfare state of coercive, 174 00:30:08.760 --> 00:30:33.260 When to take all democracy is the case of a great nation chasing its tail, or to cast Lewis as a kind of a role model, or a modern day Moses who implores Egypt's pharaoh, that is, myopic status rulers today, let my people, the consumers, go. 175 00:30:33.260 --> 00:30:46.260 Three challenges remain as I see it. First, the need of steady insight, or in loose words, the issue is always the same, the government or the markets. There is no third solution. 176 00:30:46.260 --> 00:30:58.260 The second challenge, how can we use market democracy and other means to help tame political democracy as our founding fathers did in 1776? 177 00:30:58.260 --> 00:31:06.260 or willy-nilly, let it slowly but surely snuff out our livelihood, our civilization. 178 00:31:06.260 --> 00:31:16.260 And challenge number three, the need for time, the free market idea, to a moral code based on virtue, dignity and wisdom. 179 00:31:16.260 --> 00:31:25.260 Or on the Ten Commandments, as shown on our Mises Institute shield, and there it is, up here, on the way out. 180 00:31:25.260 --> 00:31:41.260 Please study it, because in the lower left hand corner you will find the Ten Glorious Commandments, not spelled out, but enumerated from one to ten. Not bad. 181 00:31:41.260 --> 00:31:50.460 But given human weakness, while the supermarket, the free market is a super thing, as real 182 00:31:50.460 --> 00:31:58.140 as an ideal will ever get to see, I say, given human weakness, it's not nirvana, or instead 183 00:31:58.140 --> 00:32:09.260 of healthy living, eat well, stay fit and die anyway. 184 00:32:09.260 --> 00:32:17.020 But recall what happens right on, because we're back to Hamlin's question for America, 185 00:32:17.020 --> 00:32:20.340 to be or not to be. 186 00:32:20.340 --> 00:32:28.140 Right on in the soliloquy is yet another question, and I quote, whether it is noble in the mind 187 00:32:28.140 --> 00:32:34.580 to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles 188 00:32:34.580 --> 00:32:37.260 and by opposing end them. 189 00:32:37.260 --> 00:32:39.180 Let me tackle both questions. 190 00:32:39.180 --> 00:32:45.180 First, let's be Misesians alive, active, alert, able. 191 00:32:45.180 --> 00:32:57.180 Second, let us oppose hypocrisy in an increasingly unlimited, adversarial, anti-consumer, ultimately fatal, welfare, warfare, leviathan. 192 00:32:57.180 --> 00:33:04.180 It doesn't leviathan itself come down to one big, bad idea. 193 00:33:04.180 --> 00:33:14.180 Paul Misesians, Paul Adilou, Ideas Rule the World, Ideas Change, But Only Ideas Can Overcome Ideas 194 00:33:14.180 --> 00:33:19.180 So here is the sum of my summit visit with you. 195 00:33:19.180 --> 00:33:29.180 I enlist each one of you to personally scour and plug Austrian ideas, to stay tuned, stay resolute, 196 00:33:29.180 --> 00:33:46.180 Stay optimistic, stay strategic, stay innovative, stay responsive, stay responsible, stay entrepreneurial, stay profitable. Increasingly so if you can, so deserves society all the more. 197 00:33:46.180 --> 00:33:55.180 And last, stay strong and true for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, its people, programs, and above all, its ideas. 198 00:33:55.180 --> 00:34:05.300 Ideas. Think. Ideas breed consequences. Good and bad. Think. We shall overcome the bad. 199 00:34:05.300 --> 00:34:10.300 As your serendipitous friend Bill Peterson closes this pep rally with, thank you very 200 00:34:10.300 --> 00:34:12.900 much, fellow Misesians.