Our next speaker is one of those old fellows.
Now he's a senior fellow in history at the Mises Institute.
He holds a bachelor's degree of history from Harvard and his master's and PhD from Columbia University.
Author of a number of books, New York Times bestseller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,
33 Questions About American History You Weren't Supposed to Ask, The Church and the Market.
He's a contributing editor to the American conservative. He has contributed to six encyclopedias.
He's been on Fox News all over the place, Hannity and Combs, Fox and Friends, The Big Story,
Scarborough Country, Michael Medved, various radio programs.
And last spring, he had a New York Times bestseller called Meltdown, which was a Keynesian, or a Keynesian,
he had an Austrian explanation, sorry about that, Austrian explanation of the Meltdown.
Today, he's going to speak to us, the Keynesian Predictions versus American History.
Would you please help me welcome Thomas Woods.
Thank you very much. Doug left me an extra five minutes.
Let's see what I use it for before you applaud that.
I should point out first of all, my wife and I,
Roughly two weeks from now, we're expecting our fourth child.
So you might wonder, thanks.
How would I be allowed to travel so close to her due date?
And the single answer is that my wife has such esteem for the sponsor of this event, Mr. Jeremy Davis.
She said it was OK for me to go to this.
Months ago, when we calculated it out,
I said to her, this baby's going to be coming right near the Houston Mises circle.
She said, that's OK. We'll work it out one way or another.
So again, thank you, Mr. Davis, for your very important contributions.
And especially since I have the extra time, I'd like to acknowledge someone who,
I would say, number two to Ron Paul would most hate being singled out.
But, you know, I got the podium and he doesn't.
And that's the person who really got the ball rolling with the Mises Institute, and that of course is Lew Rockwell.
And let's just hold the applause, because let me get my rip-roaring thing, and then you'll really want to applaud like crazy.
Lew has been a great benefactor of mine over the years, ever since I was at Mises University, 1993.
He's been a source of inspiration and, in fact, I've been influenced by Lew as much as I have by anybody because I read his opinions and I'm embarrassed that I held any opinion other than the one he just put forth.
Gosh, it's so obvious when I hear it coming from Lew, but when he started the Mises Institute, he did it with very little support, with a lot of opposition from people who should have supported him.
He had an uphill battle, no major foundation grants, just the power of the ideas and knowing that, you know, the truth ultimately wins out and that the country, by and large, one of these days there would be a critical mass of the people who would follow along and he wanted to help change the tenor of the national conversation, even though he would hate a term like that, but also he wanted to help change the economics profession and I dare say within the next ten years we are going to see
see very substantial changes that have already begun taking place, in which the Austrians are going to have a disproportionate influence, because the average person can understand what the Austrians are saying, it seems to make sense, it resonates with them, so I want to say thank you, Lew Rockwell, for doing this.
I'm fired now, of course.
All right, well, let's begin very briefly with the essence of Keynesianism, to make sure we all understand this.
I don't want to take for granted everybody knows what Keynes is all about.
In a sense, you're better off not knowing.
Thomas Jefferson once said that speaking of the newspapers in his day, you would actually be better informed if you read no newspaper whatsoever than if you read the newspapers of his day.
And if you read Keynes' General Theory, that was published in 1936, you find that he puts forth a great many propositions.
The Capitalist Economy tends chronically toward unemployment or underemployment of resources.
It's not self-correcting either. If there's a downturn, it's not self-correcting.
We need to employ fiscal and monetary tools to keep it from falling into depression.
It has this natural tendency.
What is also sort of related to this is interest rates are chronically too high.
We can make that statement across the board. They are too high.
And when we combine this with the animal spirits and skittishness that characterize investors,
well, the result is that investment is just much too low.
So in other words, the economy is something that needs to be managed.
It cannot be left to its own devices. It must be managed.
Paul Samuelson, who died recently, was of course a great student of Keynes, and Samuelson
wrote the following about Keynes's general theory.
It is a badly written book, poorly organized.
Many laymen who, beguiled by the author's previous reputation, bought the book was cheated
of his five shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use. It is arrogant, bad-tempered,
polemical and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares' nests and confusions.
In short, it is a work of genius.
What I'm going to talk about today a little bit is the ability of Keynesians to predict
what's going to happen.
Now we understand that it is very hard in economics to make predictions in the sense
of timing.
You know, that next week the price of orange juice is going to be thus and so.
I mean, nobody can do that.
But I'm talking about broad statements that are falsifiable, you know, statements like
next year there will be a depression because of this factor.
And if there isn't one, then that statement was wrong.
And if that statement is derived from Keynesian principles, well, as these statements pile
up, eventually, you wonder, do we need to go back to the drawing board?
Henry Hazlitt, whom many of us learned economics from initially from his book, Economics in
One Lesson, wrote, forecasts based on Keynesian theory have had a pathetically bad record.
And I think the greatest example of this involves World War II.
After World War II, or during and after World War II, the prediction, Keynesian prediction
was there's going to be a massive depression because with all these men being demobilized
from the armed forces, it's going to overwhelm the economy.
Again, the economy can't adjust, right?
It needs to be pushed along one way or another.
The economy will not be able to adjust to this on its own.
And so we're going to have a massive depression.
And you can verify this, you're going to hear economists saying this.
Robert Gordon, a Keynesian economist who's written on economic history quite a bit, writes,
In the summer of 1945, the belief was fairly widely held in Washington that unemployment
would be a serious problem during the winter of 1945 to 1946. During the war in 1943, Alvin
Hanson, who was considered to be Keynes' best known American disciple, Alvin Hanson said,
When the war is over, the government can't just disband the army, close down munitions
factories, stop building ships and remove all economic controls. So we should keep building
ships for a war we're not even fighting. This is considered to be a good Keynesian sense.
So we can't do any of these things. But the government did do those things. That's exactly
what they did. They did exactly those things, although it may have taken up to a year to
And as far as I know the earth did not break free of its axis and go spinning toward the sun. I mean things still still continue on. In fact, the Keynesian remedies for unemployment, various Keynesian stimulus proposals like a massive public work spending, were not used. By late 1945, economists are still predicting there's going to be massive unemployment.
Unemployment. This transition is going to be accompanied by massive unemployment. Ten million people, by some accounts, will be unemployed. Others said six to nine million people.
Even these less pessimistic estimates were exaggerations of three or more times. Because it turns out that in 1946, the United States experienced the single greatest year
for the private economy in all of American history before or since this is
the year by the way when the sky was supposed to fall because the economy
won't be able to adjust with a massive depression no we not have the massive
depression it wasn't like you know we just managed to scrape by we had the
best most robust year you know production up 30% that we've ever seen
ever so a lot of them said you know what I guess we're just wrong I guess maybe
Maybe this whole thing needs to be revisited.
I made that part up.
That actually did not happen.
No, they came up with some other explanation.
Okay, okay, okay.
We admit there really wasn't an unemployment problem.
That was wrong.
So instead, the explanation for why we didn't have a depression was pent-up demand.
You see, consumers had just built up all this pent-up demand during the war years, like
They were just dying to go out and buy some stuff as soon as they were allowed to again and so suddenly, bang, it's off to the races everybody, the controls are being lifted, go out and buy some shirts that haven't had the quality in them reduced through all the various fillers that are used during wartime, go out and buy some good quality products and that's what did it. So once again, the consumer is going out and using up stuff is what really got us out of this. But one of the problems, leaving aside the logical problem,
One of the problems with that explanation is that the timing and the magnitudes are completely off.
So that when you look at the magnitude, because the argument is that the government reduces its expenditures dramatically.
But don't worry, the consumer is filled in the gap. Because spending, just spending, is what drives everything.
So we had enough spending to make up for the lack of spending by the government.
Okay, but you look at the actual statistics, the government is reducing its spending far, far more
to a magnitude that's far greater than was made up for by investment and consumption spending at the same time.
So there wasn't enough pent-up demand. In fact, there was already a smooth transition, production up,
unemployment way down, long before consumption returned to its expected levels in 1947.
7. The transition is already over, very smooth and seamless, so the timing can't vindicate
this pent-up demand theory, and the magnitudes are off. So even if we accept, even from their
own point of view, this is not the explanatory factor. So what in fact did happen? Well,
here I recommend an article that you can find at the Mises Institute website. You can just
The Great Depression of 1946 is an ironic title by two authors who know perfectly well we did not have a Great Depression in 1946, Richard Vetter and Lowell Galloway, professors at Ohio University.
The point of their article is not to argue that we in fact had a depression in those years. They know we didn't. We had an extremely robust year.
The point of their article is to say that everybody was expecting, you know, all the experts, the Keynesian experts, were all expecting a Great Depression.
And if you look at the aggregates like national income accounting, which is extremely misleading during war, according to those statistics, which told us that the war was a time of fantastic prosperity, the very same statistics told us 1946, we were in the toilet, which should be enough to make you question the statistics.
So, their argument in the Great Depression of 1946, which again I highly recommend that you read,
is that the market simply absorbed the additional labor.
It absorbed it in part because a lot of women left the labor force.
This is it. This is not really what they signed up for.
They wanted to go back to their lives as homemakers, so a great many of them did.
But beyond that, wages were freely allowed to fluctuate, to absorb all the workers willing to work.
This is not supposed to work according to Keynesians.
The adjustment of wages is not sufficient to absorb workers, but in fact it did.
So, I mean, you know, who are you going to believe?
You know, these people or your own eyes looking at what actually happened. It did in fact happen.
And then they also, I won't have time to go into this today,
They also show how certain peculiarities of the wartime transition to peace help to mitigate some of the anti-employment effects of various New Deal measures, but I leave you to discover that in their article.
Well meanwhile, at a time when Keynesian economists everywhere are predicting disaster and depression and there won't be enough purchasing power and all the rest of the lingo,
Benjamin Anderson was saying something pretty much the opposite.
Benjamin Anderson, we could more or less think of as like an Austrian fellow traveler, free
market economist.
And he contributed to a book that was compiled during the war, you know, what's going to
happen after the war?
What do you predict is going to happen to the economy?
And what do you recommend to sort of see things through from a policy perspective?
And the first contribution is by Benjamin Anderson.
And listen to his absolute confidence, the market will solve this, and this doesn't mean
that he worships the market or any of this other crazy nonsense, it's just common sense.
He says, how can we expect in the post-war years to give employment to 55 or 56 million
people when we employed few more than 45 million in 1939?
And he goes on, there are those who see in this an almost insurmountable problem which
calls for heroic efforts on the part of government to create new purchasing power through governmental
People borrowing from the banks, heroic programs of public works expenditures, make-work policies
on the part of business enterprises, taxation schemes to force investment, and vast monetary
and credit schemes to force a big export trade.
I see in it merely the problem of relaxing the restraints and inhibitions which government
itself in recent years has placed upon capital, business enterprise and labor, which prevent
they are getting together on mutually advantageous terms, producing goods and services the sale
of which will give them the income which makes them good customers for other producers.
And then he goes on, who will employ the 10 million workers? The answer is in part they
will give employment to each other. And then he continues from there and reminds us that
in the days when the making of jobs was not looked upon as a federal government function,
The problem solved itself amazingly well, which is something that typically Keynesians
would rather that we forget. That's why when I talked about the Great Depression of 1920-21,
this is never mentioned, because there the economy adjusts completely with no problems
and without Keynesian stimulus.
Now another issue I want to talk about, which we're not supposed to talk about because it's
supposed to be not his fault, is not just Paul Samuelson, but other Keynesian economists.
And what they said about, there's another aspect of American history, the likelihood
that the United States would fall behind the Soviet Union economically. Now, you may say
to yourself, well, Paul Samuelson just died. I mean, isn't it the case that, you know,
you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead? Well, that's actually an incorrect rendering
of the, the maxim actually is that you should not speak untruths of the dead. And I don't
I don't intend to do that, so we'll stay in line with the maxim.
Paul Samuelson had an economics textbook, Economics, that was a bestseller, it was used
in classrooms all over the place, he was the guy.
There's a famous photograph of him that appeared next to all the obituaries where there he is standing
and behind him on the blackboard is all this incomprehensible math.
This is going to explain the economy, all this math, this accounts for human beings behavior.
And so here he is a guy who at some level is a very smart guy. I mean he knows an awful lot and yet this guy who knows all his math thinks the Soviet Union is going to overtake the U.S.
Like at some level, the synapses just aren't firing or something here. Like there's something, kind of a blockage or something.
So how did this happen? Like what is it that he's actually saying? Well the 1973 edition of his book, his textbook, so American kids are learning from this thing,
He predicts that, okay, the Soviet Union, sure, its per capita income is about half that of the U.S., but it's going to catch up to the U.S. in per capita income by 1990.
But certainly, at the very least by 2015, it will catch up or it will have exceeded it.
In the 1976 edition of the book, Samuelson wrote that it was a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.
Notice, Samuelson did not himself move to Eastern Europe at the time.
In the edition issued the next year, he removed the word vulgar from before vulgar mistake, but he kept the rest.
Well, then in 1985, that whole passage is gone.
Okay, he had the good sense to just ink that one out.
Instead, he substituted something that's even worse.
Now we have, instead of that passage, the question of whether Soviet political repression was, quote,
worth the economic gains.
I mean, talk about completely misunderstanding the question, right?
The economic gain. Like, no toilet paper. Is this a good trade-off for going to the gulag?
Now you folks seem to think this is an easy matter.
Samuelson describes this as one of the most profound dilemmas of human society.
He writes, it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings.
Every economy has its contradictions.
Yeah, every economy has tractors rusting because they don't have enough gas to power them.
Yeah, that characterizes a lot of economies, right?
Everybody's got a rear end and nobody's got toilet paper.
I mean, that's a contradiction most economies don't have, but every economy has its contradictions.
What counts is results.
And there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine,
a powerful engine for economic growth.
Let me also mention to you the 1989 edition of the textbook.
I mean, this is where really, I mean, unless you're some type of serious shill you are seeing,
he says, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed,
the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
Function and even Thrive.
Now, he's been excused for this.
Well, how could he have known that the Soviet Union is putting out phony numbers?
Oh yeah, who would ever suspect that, right?
I mean, they lie about every single thing on earth, but the GDP figures, those are sound, right?
And the GDP figures are extremely misleading, even on a good day.
But at the hands of the Soviet Union, what could the figures possibly mean?
I mean, none of this has anything to do with consumer choice. The capital markets are all controlled.
There's no freedom, there's no free competition in consumer goods markets, so
the prices don't have their roots in consumer choice, which is the only way they
would be meaningful.
So yeah, if you add up
all the concrete that the Soviets are producing and all the steel,
you get a great big number.
But in the 1980s, other people are producing things like, you know, computer
chips.
and the Soviets are still boasting about,
Conrad, look at all the concrete we produced this year.
Look at the figures.
Yeah, okay.
Well, at a time when the United States in the 1980s
had 25 million personal computers,
the Soviet Union had 150,000.
Something tells me the various apparatchiks
and Politburo members had those
and the average person did not.
So yeah, you could add up a lot of numbers.
What did they mean?
Do they mean that consumers are having their needs met?
They don't mean anything.
Again, this seems, for all this math that's behind Samuelson in the picture, how do you
miss such a fundamental, obvious point?
And again, don't tell me, oh, how could he have known?
Of course you have to know.
This is what an economy is.
It's to produce things for use by consumers.
This economy was some kind of crazy, nightmarish scenario in which a group of bureaucrats made
a bunch of arbitrary decisions.
You add up the sum of arbitrary decisions, you get a gigantic arbitrary number.
I want to point out by the way what Gene Epstein said in Barron's, he's the economics writer
in Barron's, talking about this Samuelson thing, like, you know, shouldn't he have
known?
He says, a bona fide economist, or even just a non-economist with common sense, would have
realized that the Soviet Union was not producing gross national product to begin with, much
and much less price-adjusted GNP. In the Soviet system of non-market prices, with no capital markets and no competition in the consumer markets, there was no role for entrepreneurship, which drives meaningful growth and development.
Well, this is not an isolated instance. Arthur Oaken, who was on the President's Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s and who chaired it in 1968 and 1969,
He wrote a book immediately on the conclusion of his tenure there, called The Political
Economy of Prosperity, and in that book he writes, so this is Arthur Oaken, great, well
known Keynesian, he writes, between 1956 and 1961, real gross national product rose at
an average rate of 2.1% in the US, so far below the 6.4% estimated rate of the Soviet
Union, that it made credible Khrushchev's threat to bury us economically.
Yeah, that's, there's our expert. That's the guy in charge of giving the president's advice.
Great. So, who is this Arthur Oaken fellow anyway?
Well, all through his book, he's telling us about the wonderful experience of the 1960s, right?
We had robust growth, you know, unemployment was reasonable, inflation was reasonable.
So he predicts throughout this book, we're just going to continue on, we've gotten rid of the business cycle. There's no need for recessions anymore.
Well, here's another law that you can memorize. Anytime you're being promised that the business cycle has been conquered forever, that means a big one is coming.
It's consistently true. In the 20s, that was the consensus. In the 60s, that was the consensus. In the 90s, that was the consensus.
So yeah, we don't need these things, everything's going great.
Okay, well, let's delve into this a bit, because he argues that recessions are not necessary,
and he condemns those, particularly by implication the Austrians,
who would argue that recessions perform a healthy, purgative function for the economy.
The Keynesian solution to recessions, remember,
The Keynesian solution is keep the boom going, somehow. Just keep interest rates super low, just keep fueling it. There's no reason that we shouldn't jump off this train, even if it's headed for a cliff. We step on the accelerators, keep it going.
And that is not a caricature. In the general theory, Keynes makes this clear, that the solution to a bust is not to let it occur, but to keep the economy in a quasi-boom, permanently.
permanently, and this can be done through various Keynesian measures.
And so likewise, this was Oaken's view, whereas the Austrian view, of course, which I have
to summarize with great brevity here, is that interest rates are real things, they actually
mean something, they can't just be arbitrarily interfered with without causing massive discoordination.
And so the Austrian argument is that during a boom, an artificial boom, when the economy
is going gangbusters because of artificially low interest rates. What's actually happening
is the economy is being set up for a crash because the artificially low interest rates
encourage investment in stages of production that won't be sustainable in the long run.
The economy is trying to do too many things at once. It's become too ambitious because
of these artificially low rates. We're consuming as much or more than before and at the same
At the same time, the long-term sectors of investment or interest rate-sensitive sectors of the economy are being stretched at the same time, and this is an incompatible mix of market forces, and eventually it has to come to grief.
And you can't solve that by just pushing interest rates lower. That just intensifies the problem.
But for guys like this, for the Keynesians, this is exactly what you do. You just push interest rates lower, you fiddle with fiscal policy, and you just keep the boom going.
Now, what in fact happened? Well, one month after the guy's book is published, the recession hits.
So one month after he says, well, we've licked it forever, then it hits.
I mean, perfect, beautiful, poetic justice, right, that this happens.
And what he and all other Keynesians are doing are thinking in terms of gigantic aggregates,
like consumption and labor and investment, when in fact the problems that beset the economy,
particularly in a bust following an artificial boom are not of this sort of
aggregate nature, macro nature. There are a series of micro problems. We've had
this stage has been artificially expanded, this one has been artificially
starved, we need more of this type of labor, less of that type of labor. It's a
series of little micro problems and they're trying to fix this with
extremely crude macro tools. Well, let's just increase the supply of money overall.
Well, that doesn't fix micro-level adjustments that need to be made.
And so Hayek, writing in the 60s, so at this time, so there were sane people, says full
employment policies, as at present practiced, attempt the quick and easy way of giving men
employment where they happen to be, while the real problem is to bring about a distribution
of Labor, which makes continuous high employment without artificial stimulus possible.
What this distribution is, we can never know beforehand. The only way to find out is to
let the unhampered market act under conditions which will bring about a stable equilibrium
between demand and supply. So that is to say, the market will have to adjust as the government
can't possibly know what the various resource allocations ought to be, what the optimal
Now, we hear in Oaken's book the typical trade-off that we can stimulate the economy through various ways, public works, whatever, increase the money supply, to lower unemployment.
We can do the opposite if we need to lower price inflation.
But what if both unemployment and price inflation are rising at once?
How can you implement a policy that's intended to lower one when you need to do the opposite policy to lower the other?
Well, the answer is at that point a lot of Keynesians kind of figured out, well, this one is going to be a little tricky to overcome,
because now we're coming up against the law of non-contradiction and there's just really no going against that.
So what happens during so-called stagflation, you know, inflationary recession?
What are you going to do? Are you going to stimulate and contract simultaneously?
But yet, Oaken does not see this coming. He has this great confidence in this new way of managing the economy.
And it's a new way, he says, it's really an old way. It's an old way that goes back to Keynes.
And we're just implementing it more faithfully and consistently.
Okay, well, let's see what the results were.
Well, consumer price index from 1965 to 1980 goes up by over 176%.
During and after this recession that we saw in the 70s, the unemployment rate remains above the normal 5%, what had become sort of accepted as normal for two decades, including the ten double-digit months in the early 80s, 82, 83.
Corrected for inflation, the Dow lost 80% from its peak, and so if you look at an inflation-adjusted graph of the Dow from 1965 to 1985, you see some ups and downs, but what you really see is an unmistakable trend sharply downward.
Meanwhile, Hayek had written in the 1960s a government which uses inflation as an instrument of policy but wants it to produce only the desired effects is soon driven to control ever-increasing parts of the economy.
And so we got Nixon's wage and price controls. Hayek, in fact, could have been consulted if anybody had been listening.
He had repeatedly, both before and after the fact, warned about the problems caused by making inflation a part of your policy.
Inflation merely postpones problems. It diverts resources into sectors where they wouldn't otherwise go and where an undisturbed economy would not have allocated them.
Eventually, resources, including labor, need to go where the market wants them to go.
There's no avoiding that. There's no fairytale way of avoiding that with these juvenile Keynesian methods.
Hayek says,
To aim at securing to men who in the social interest ought to move elsewhere, the continued receipt of their former wages can only delay movements which ultimately must take place.
If a policy is pursued over a long period which postpones and delays movements, which keeps people in their old jobs who ought to move elsewhere,
So again, the micro-corrections that need to be made.
The result must be that what ought to have been a gradual process of change becomes in the end
a problem of the necessity of mass transfers within a short period.
Continued monetary pressure, which has helped people to earn an unchanged money wage
in jobs which they ought to have left, will have created accumulated arrears of necessary changes
which, as soon as monetary pressure ceases, will have to be made up in a much shorter space of time
and then result in a period of acute mass unemployment which might have been avoided.
And this is why Hayek says that the stimulus provided by inflation is due to the errors
which it produces. That's where your stimulus comes from. Inflation is making possible the
propping up of things that shouldn't be propped up and the starting of things that shouldn't
be started. So these things have to be liquidated anyway and the correction will be all the
Well, I thought I might say something about Paul Krugman, but I think Doug pretty much got him.
I will say that Krugman claims that he predicted the bust because he saw the housing bubble coming.
Okay, he saw the housing bubble coming the way I saw the Mises circle coming, in a certain sense.
Well, not quite, because I didn't have much to do with it.
It's more like I predicted that the Pepsi I put in my refrigerator would get cold.
And the reason I put it that way is that in 2001, what is Krugman calling for? And thanks
to the internet, we now have all his crummy columns at our fingertips, so we can go back
and nail them. He says, what we need now are lower interest rates to spur housing. We need
to get housing going. And then he predicts there's a housing bubble. Gee, wow, how did
you do that? You predicted a housing bubble after you called for the very factors that
That's exactly the problem are these Keynesian methods to get us out of recession.
That recession we had following the Nasdaq collapse, the dot-com bust was relatively mild
because we had Greenspan pumping up the money supply and getting interest rates super low
and this encourages housing.
Housing was actually housing, we had the first recession ever where there was no decline
and Housing starts, and in fact, housing prices are going up 8.8%, so people think,
wow, well, housing is great, it's robust even during a recession, this is where I should
be. So Krugman and others encourage the economy to continue on a path that should have been
halted so that when the crash came, it was all the worse because of this Keynesian fantasy
world in which we can keep booms going through these artificial means, if only it had been
Well, I'll conclude here by noting two things. Number one is, in spite of all the damage Paul Krugman has done, if you know anything about the finances of the New York Times, a prospect has opened before us that none of us could dream of, which is a world without the New York Times.
But the second thing is this. Students all over the country now are challenging their professors, which, by the way, I don't encourage that till after you're safely out, you've gotten your A and whatever, but if you can't restrain yourself, you've got to be who you are, right?
And these students, you know, they want to know about business cycle theory. Most of these professors haven't got the foggiest idea of what in the world the kids are even talking about.
Somebody was writing to me the other day and said his professor came out first day of class and wrote John Maynard Keynes on the board.
Well now I want to live in a world in which a professor who dares to do that trembles as he walks into the classroom, knowing there are people who are going to call him on.
Thanks to the internet which extends our reach beyond anything we could have dreamed of
and combined with the enthusiasm of a rising generation of students and these factors reinforce each other.
We're facing the greatest opportunity we've ever had. We are really seeing changes.
The Austrian School is being discussed all the time. It's gaining a foothold all over the place.
Students are studying it. Bright young kids are coming up in this tradition.
And so I hope you will support us. And everybody wants you to support them. I understand that.
I understand that and our wallets are stretched and I understand that, but I mean we really are changing things, I mean we're observing this, it is measurable that we are influencing kids, we're influencing adults, we're influencing public opinion, all of us, all of us here collaborating in this great cause actually have the chance to be a part of history, and that's not just a cliché, that's real, this is what we're living through, a change, the possibility of a dramatic change in intellectual life.
And I'll leave with this, when the Korean translation of my book Meltdown came out a few months ago,
of course, I can't read Korean, so I didn't actually know what some of the things on the cover said till I asked people who do.
One of the lines on the cover says,
Canes must die so the economy may live.
So join the Institute and help make that possible.
Thank you very much.