WEBVTT NOTE The Free Market: Fallacies and Facts 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.560 to look out here and see so many friends, 2 00:00:02.560 --> 00:00:06.480 Vedran Vuk and Jason Rink and Deanna down here, 3 00:00:06.480 --> 00:00:08.000 I haven't even gotten to say hello to, 4 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:11.080 and Jeremy Davis, a great donor and benefactor, 5 00:00:11.080 --> 00:00:13.760 how wonderful to see you all and thank you very much 6 00:00:13.760 --> 00:00:15.800 for your important contributions. 7 00:00:15.800 --> 00:00:17.720 Now here's what I'm going to do today, 8 00:00:17.720 --> 00:00:19.920 and I'm extremely dehydrated by the way, 9 00:00:19.920 --> 00:00:21.720 so I'm sorry I have to keep doing this, 10 00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:28.040 but this is our first week on the Primal Blueprint, 11 00:00:28.040 --> 00:00:29.040 and if you don't know what that is, 12 00:00:29.040 --> 00:00:59.040 Please go to primalblueprint.com and oh, some of you may either be dead set against it or not know what it is, but basically you can eat meat, fish, fowl, eggs, fruit, vegetables, seeds and nuts, which should keep you more or less occupied, but yet you find you have a hankering for Oreos, a hunk of bread, whatever, but you really need to drink a lot of water when you're transitioning to this and especially when you're traveling. 13 00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:01.240 so I am gonna have to do that. 14 00:01:01.240 --> 00:01:04.400 But it just goes to show that in every aspect of my life 15 00:01:04.400 --> 00:01:06.280 I don't listen to the government. 16 00:01:06.280 --> 00:01:07.520 Every aspect of my life. 17 00:01:07.520 --> 00:01:10.240 The Department of Agriculture says I should be consuming 18 00:01:10.240 --> 00:01:13.640 six to 11 servings of grain per day. 19 00:01:14.600 --> 00:01:15.440 Isn't that amazing? 20 00:01:15.440 --> 00:01:17.240 So that's the food pyramid. 21 00:01:17.240 --> 00:01:19.700 So as usual, everything they do is exactly the opposite. 22 00:01:19.700 --> 00:01:22.080 You gotta flip that pyramid over. 23 00:01:22.080 --> 00:01:23.840 All right, now you're thinking, 24 00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:26.840 I know why he's going on and on with all this chit chat. 25 00:01:26.840 --> 00:01:32.840 They just added him to the program three days ago. He doesn't have anything to say. 26 00:01:32.840 --> 00:01:35.840 No, I do, actually. I do have a little bit to say. 27 00:01:35.840 --> 00:01:40.840 And it actually involves, to one degree or another, Twitter. 28 00:01:40.840 --> 00:01:43.840 Now, I don't know, some of you probably are on Twitter. 29 00:01:43.840 --> 00:01:51.840 Some of you were cajoled into being on Twitter by me, namely Bob Murphy, who is on Twitter. 30 00:01:51.840 --> 00:01:55.840 I'm on as Thomas E. Woods, so please follow me. 31 00:01:55.840 --> 00:02:25.840 and you could come up with anything, like Liberty Avengers, I think I'm going to go the old-fashioned, the old-timey way, at Thomas E. Woods and I don't follow Twitter very much and for those of you who don't know what Twitter is, it's something where you can post a 140-character statement or update about what you're doing or opinion about the world or link to an article or whatever that can be only 140 characters so that really limits you in what you can say and it means you have to really economize on your letters and space 32 00:02:25.840 --> 00:02:36.840 So, you wind up seeing people saying, you know, I want to be you, and I think, oh, all right, I just hate this thing already. 33 00:02:36.840 --> 00:02:42.840 But people have said, you know, you got to, like, all the cool people are on it, and when somebody tells me that, I basically do it. 34 00:02:42.840 --> 00:02:51.840 So, I don't follow it that much, because how, how inane and frustrating is it to try to carry on an argument with somebody, 35 00:02:51.840 --> 00:02:56.000 and each argument you have can be only 140 characters. 36 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:58.880 Now, all right, if you're like a supporter of Obama, 37 00:02:58.880 --> 00:03:00.400 well, yeah, you could probably sum up 38 00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:02.720 everything you want to say in 140 characters. 39 00:03:02.720 --> 00:03:04.320 Everything's a bumper sticker, all right? 40 00:03:04.320 --> 00:03:07.600 But, you know, it takes a teensy-weensy bit longer 41 00:03:07.600 --> 00:03:09.840 to explain the Austrian theory of the business cycle 42 00:03:09.840 --> 00:03:14.320 than to say, hey, man, let's tax people or something like that. 43 00:03:14.320 --> 00:03:16.720 You can get in like 20 characters. 44 00:03:16.720 --> 00:03:18.960 So I just, most of the time, just pay no attention to it. 45 00:03:18.960 --> 00:03:20.320 I tweet on there. 46 00:03:20.320 --> 00:03:27.320 I do have statements that I make on Twitter, but I try not to read it because I know it's just going to enrage me. 47 00:03:27.320 --> 00:03:37.320 Not that I have a lot of people I'm following who are Obama supporters, but I do have people who apparently are supporters of non-Ron Paul candidates. 48 00:03:37.320 --> 00:03:46.320 I don't know how I ended up following them. I guess my view is if you want to follow me, I guess I'll more or less follow you as long as you don't seem to be completely insane. 49 00:03:46.320 --> 00:03:52.760 Well apparently my discernment capability is not as great as I thought, so I get some 50 00:03:52.760 --> 00:03:57.600 of these statements about America needs MIT and all this and that, so I just don't want 51 00:03:57.600 --> 00:03:59.320 to look at this. 52 00:03:59.320 --> 00:04:02.600 But I do try to see what people are saying in response to me because I feel like I'd 53 00:04:02.600 --> 00:04:04.600 be rude not to look at their comments. 54 00:04:04.600 --> 00:04:09.680 Well one day I woke up, I literally, this is what happened, I woke up in the morning 55 00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:15.320 and I was looking on Twitter and sure enough there was a really hostile response by somebody 56 00:04:15.320 --> 00:04:20.080 on the Left, and she was linking to, at least she had the DC to link to me, but she linked 57 00:04:20.080 --> 00:04:23.840 to this video of me speaking at the Mises Institute. 58 00:04:23.840 --> 00:04:26.120 So right away, you know I must have been up to no good. 59 00:04:26.120 --> 00:04:32.800 And she says, this is how these right-wing Ayn Rand followers want to destroy our country 60 00:04:32.800 --> 00:04:33.800 or whatever. 61 00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:36.360 So I went back and thought, what speech is she talking about? 62 00:04:36.360 --> 00:04:40.640 So this is a speech I gave to high school students where I basically went through some 63 00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:46.320 Some of the common arguments against the market economy that, well, capitalism is responsible 64 00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:50.880 for child labor, it's responsible for long working hours and terrible working conditions 65 00:04:50.880 --> 00:04:59.320 and low wages and exploding consumer products and whatever, wide wealth disparities and 66 00:04:59.320 --> 00:05:00.320 so on and on. 67 00:05:00.320 --> 00:05:04.720 The sorts of things that we've all heard growing up and since we were born. 68 00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:08.480 And I was answering some of these and she was not happy about this at all so she's got 69 00:05:08.480 --> 00:05:14.340 a whole bunch of tweets, but because she's not satisfied with the 140 characters, nobody 70 00:05:14.340 --> 00:05:19.820 really is, she would then link each tweet to a longer, some Twitter site where you can 71 00:05:19.820 --> 00:05:22.400 then expand on your 140 characters. 72 00:05:22.400 --> 00:05:24.300 She's cheating. 73 00:05:24.300 --> 00:05:29.680 And so she would expand on each of her complaints about me, and the statements she was making, 74 00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:33.160 again, were fairly conventional things. 75 00:05:33.160 --> 00:05:37.800 Now the normal response to this is to say, well, you know, people are going to disagree 76 00:05:37.800 --> 00:06:07.800 I agree with you, you gotta just go on, and that's what I do most of the time, and this is, I think this is good advice for a lot of people, you always shoot up, not down, when you're fighting against somebody, so if some guy with a blog with 12 visitors attacks you, it's not worth your time, you have other things to do, I don't mean that his worth as a human being is low, I mean you have a finite amount of time and many tasks to perform, 77 00:06:07.800 --> 00:06:15.240 But if Brad DeLong attacks you or if Paul Krugman attacks you, well, you darn well better respond. 78 00:06:15.240 --> 00:06:23.440 And so that's, for example, that's the rule that Rudy Giuliani broke in 2007 when he attacked Ron Paul in the debates who was well below him in the polls. 79 00:06:23.440 --> 00:06:24.920 He shouldn't have done that. 80 00:06:24.920 --> 00:06:31.400 Instead, he gave Ron Paul all this publicity that was really one of the turning points in that campaign and in the whole movement. 81 00:06:31.400 --> 00:06:37.560 That was a huge mistake for which we are very much in the former mayor's debt, of course. 82 00:06:37.560 --> 00:06:41.160 So, right now, I'm gonna tell you that I violated this rule. 83 00:06:41.160 --> 00:06:42.840 I violated this rule because I finally thought, 84 00:06:42.840 --> 00:06:44.760 you know, somebody has to make an example 85 00:06:44.760 --> 00:06:46.840 of people like this, you know? 86 00:06:46.840 --> 00:06:49.900 Enough is enough, who drive, these drive-by shootings 87 00:06:49.900 --> 00:06:52.440 of inane anti-market arguments that have been refuted 88 00:06:52.440 --> 00:06:54.120 a hundred times, like, that's it. 89 00:06:54.120 --> 00:06:57.320 Like, we have been so tolerant with this, that is it. 90 00:06:57.320 --> 00:06:59.060 So I said, all right, that's it, I am gonna reply 91 00:06:59.060 --> 00:07:01.320 to this woman, and no, I am not replying 92 00:07:01.320 --> 00:07:04.480 in 140-character bits, I refuse to do this. 93 00:07:04.480 --> 00:07:06.280 I am throwing over the table, baby, 94 00:07:06.280 --> 00:07:24.280 The new rules begin right now. Australian rules. That's my saying for something that's just totally new rules, because Australians have their own rules for football, so anytime I do something that's a little bit out of the ordinary, I say I'm following Australian rules, baby. So Australian Twitter is as many characters as you want. 95 00:07:24.280 --> 00:07:36.280 Alright, so here's the sort of thing, let me go down through some of the sorts of things that she said, and I think you're going to find these to be very familiar, the sort of things that you'll have thrown at you, and here are some of the kinds of responses that I gave. 96 00:07:36.280 --> 00:07:48.280 So the first one is, the market really encourages only the survival of the fittest. I'm sure no one's ever heard this, right, the survival of the fittest argument. 97 00:07:48.280 --> 00:07:50.920 Well, is that true? Is that really true? 98 00:07:50.920 --> 00:07:54.520 I think that's more true of pre-capitalist economies, 99 00:07:54.520 --> 00:07:58.040 economies that did not have functioning markets in them, 100 00:07:58.040 --> 00:08:02.240 pre-economies that came before the Industrial Revolution. 101 00:08:02.240 --> 00:08:05.920 And as F.A. Hayek pointed out in his great introduction 102 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:09.520 to a wonderful collection of essays in the 1950s, 103 00:08:09.520 --> 00:08:13.920 I think 1954, called Capitalism and the Historians, 104 00:08:13.920 --> 00:08:17.960 when you look at these pre-Industrial Revolution economies, 105 00:08:17.960 --> 00:08:24.960 People could not integrate themselves into these economies unless they either could succeed in agriculture 106 00:08:24.960 --> 00:08:31.960 or happened by some fortunate happenstance to possess the tools necessary to go into a craft of some kind. 107 00:08:31.960 --> 00:08:38.960 Otherwise, there was no way you couldn't go and sell your labor services to some factory owner. There weren't any. 108 00:08:38.960 --> 00:08:42.960 And so, really, people say, oh, who would ever want to work in a factory? 109 00:08:42.960 --> 00:08:46.960 Well, the question is, who would want to die? Because that was your other option. 110 00:08:46.960 --> 00:08:51.960 It's not like people said, you know, I think I'd like to work 16-hour days in miserable conditions. 111 00:08:51.960 --> 00:08:53.960 That seems like the best option I have. 112 00:08:53.960 --> 00:08:56.960 Well, that's because the other options were much worse. 113 00:08:56.960 --> 00:09:01.960 And this is why the economist David Henderson says whenever you want to help the poor, 114 00:09:01.960 --> 00:09:07.960 don't look at the list of their choices and cross off the one they actually chose. 115 00:09:07.960 --> 00:09:12.960 If they actually chose the factory system, it could be there was a reason for this. 116 00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:19.160 And it turns out that in fact there were, because their population was growing dramatically in Britain, 117 00:09:19.160 --> 00:09:27.160 there was a huge surplus population for which there was no existing outlet whatsoever in the economy as it existed. 118 00:09:27.160 --> 00:09:31.460 So the market with its employment opportunities was at least able to absorb these people, 119 00:09:31.460 --> 00:09:38.560 and even though obviously nobody would want to be a factory worker in 19th century England today, 120 00:09:38.560 --> 00:09:43.120 The fact is that in terms of housing space per capita, caloric intake, 121 00:09:43.120 --> 00:09:46.880 they compared favorably to the agricultural workers of their day. 122 00:09:48.480 --> 00:09:52.000 And in fact, in all these other metrics that we look at, it turns out that 123 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:57.680 indeed living standards were improving, even during this time of tremendous population growth, 124 00:09:57.680 --> 00:10:01.440 and even during a time when Britain was on and off engaged in war, 125 00:10:01.440 --> 00:10:04.320 in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. 126 00:10:04.320 --> 00:10:08.320 So the standard of living would have been even higher in the absence of that. 127 00:10:08.320 --> 00:10:11.320 So, now there's obviously a great deal more that one could say about the Industrial Revolution, 128 00:10:11.320 --> 00:10:17.320 but the point is that before we had the kind of sophisticated markets that we have today, 129 00:10:17.320 --> 00:10:22.320 there wasn't anything for a lot of these people to do that would have allowed them to earn an income at all. 130 00:10:22.320 --> 00:10:33.320 Moreover, the production processes in the economy were so primitive that we could produce only a tiny, tiny fraction of the consumer goods we can produce today. 131 00:10:33.320 --> 00:10:42.320 And so that means that each person, on average, had to content himself with a much tinier fraction of goods than we take for granted in our great abundance today. 132 00:10:42.320 --> 00:10:54.320 But when, under the free market, businesses are free to take their profits and reinvest them in their businesses and purchase capital equipment that makes the production process much more physically productive, 133 00:10:54.320 --> 00:11:00.320 That means we have a much greater abundance of goods, so we have a greater abundance of goods per capita. 134 00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:09.320 It becomes cheaper in terms of prices vis-a-vis wages for people to acquire the necessities of life than otherwise. 135 00:11:09.320 --> 00:11:15.320 And this is how our living standards increase, because we become physically capable of greater and greater abundance. 136 00:11:15.320 --> 00:11:20.320 I always use the example of my father, who was a forklift operator in a food warehouse for 15 years. 137 00:11:20.320 --> 00:11:50.320 of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of 138 00:11:50.320 --> 00:11:56.320 and wasting their time taking pallets and walking 100 yards with them and putting them somewhere and then walking all the way back. 139 00:11:56.320 --> 00:11:59.320 That's obviously not the best use of their services. 140 00:11:59.320 --> 00:12:03.320 Now that they're released to produce other goods, everybody is better off. 141 00:12:03.320 --> 00:12:09.320 There's a greater abundance of goods, the greater abundance through competition leads the prices of those goods to go down vis-a-vis wages, 142 00:12:09.320 --> 00:12:12.320 and we see our real incomes increase. 143 00:12:12.320 --> 00:12:15.320 And this is true in all lines of production. 144 00:12:45.320 --> 00:12:49.460 could be produced or ways that goods could be produced more cheaply now that labor is 145 00:12:49.460 --> 00:12:50.460 more abundant. 146 00:12:50.460 --> 00:12:52.400 But just think about any one of us. 147 00:12:52.400 --> 00:12:56.520 Any one of us would love to have the personal services of three or four people. 148 00:12:56.520 --> 00:13:02.600 Any one of us would love to have a gardener, a chef, and a chauffeur. 149 00:13:02.600 --> 00:13:06.380 Any one of us could put at least three or four people to work if labor were abundant 150 00:13:06.380 --> 00:13:08.500 enough for that to be possible, but it's not. 151 00:13:08.500 --> 00:13:11.880 The way we know it isn't is that nobody in this room can afford to do it, which means 152 00:13:11.880 --> 00:13:15.280 is they're being pulled away by something more urgent elsewhere in the economy. 153 00:13:15.280 --> 00:13:18.360 We always find some place in a free market, a genuine free market, we always find some 154 00:13:18.360 --> 00:13:19.440 place to put them. 155 00:13:19.440 --> 00:13:25.440 But the point is that what is this process doing for the most vulnerable people in society? 156 00:13:25.440 --> 00:13:28.640 It's dramatically increasing their standard of living. 157 00:13:28.640 --> 00:13:33.520 And in fact, in the United States throughout the 20th century, the purchasing power of 158 00:13:33.520 --> 00:13:38.820 the poorest increased by about 1900%, which was much higher than we saw for any other 159 00:13:38.820 --> 00:13:39.820 income quintile. 160 00:13:39.820 --> 00:13:45.460 In fact, if we look at the poverty statistics during the 20th century, we see that the beginning 161 00:13:45.460 --> 00:13:51.320 of the 20th century, we would say by today's standards that 95% of Americans were living 162 00:13:51.320 --> 00:13:54.200 in what we would today call poverty. 163 00:13:54.200 --> 00:13:59.420 By the late 1960s, that figure was down to between 12 and 14%. 164 00:13:59.420 --> 00:14:05.940 And that was with really almost no anti-poverty programs worth speaking of, very, very little. 165 00:14:05.940 --> 00:14:11.080 The great society programs of Lyndon Johnson really got going in terms of funding only 166 00:14:11.080 --> 00:14:13.220 in the late 60s. 167 00:14:13.220 --> 00:14:17.340 And then the poverty rate more or less stagnated. 168 00:14:17.340 --> 00:14:23.540 So you get, let's say 1994, they're spending quadruple per capita what they'd been spending 169 00:14:23.540 --> 00:14:28.380 in the late 60s and poverty rate had stagnated. 170 00:14:28.380 --> 00:14:31.300 Now suppose the situation had been reversed. 171 00:14:31.300 --> 00:14:36.220 Let's suppose we began with 95% poverty and that all through the 20th century, up through 172 00:14:36.220 --> 00:14:41.900 the late 60s, we had very well-funded anti-poverty programs, trillions of dollars poured in, 173 00:14:41.900 --> 00:14:46.020 and let's say that we saw the poverty rate fall to 12 to 14%. 174 00:14:46.020 --> 00:14:50.220 Let's say further that at that point we just decided we hate the poor and we're greedy 175 00:14:50.220 --> 00:14:54.180 and we want to stop giving them all this money, and we just cut off all those programs and 176 00:14:54.180 --> 00:14:56.260 then the poverty level stagnated. 177 00:14:56.260 --> 00:15:00.180 I think we know what the story that we would hear would be. 178 00:15:00.180 --> 00:15:03.460 To see, government programs are what eradicate poverty. 179 00:15:03.460 --> 00:15:09.260 Look at the great success we had, all from the 1900s, all the way down to the late 1960s. 180 00:15:09.260 --> 00:15:11.940 And then we got rid of the anti-poverty programs and poverty stagnated. 181 00:15:11.940 --> 00:15:15.300 Man, you stupid Neanderthals, isn't that all you need to know that we need more government 182 00:15:15.300 --> 00:15:16.420 funding? 183 00:15:16.420 --> 00:15:17.660 But you notice that that's not what happened. 184 00:15:17.660 --> 00:15:20.140 That's the exact opposite of what happened. 185 00:15:20.140 --> 00:15:21.860 So what do we hear about this? 186 00:15:21.860 --> 00:15:22.860 Nothing. 187 00:15:22.860 --> 00:15:23.860 No acknowledgement of this. 188 00:15:23.860 --> 00:15:26.380 Nothing in a textbook the kids are reading about in school. 189 00:15:26.380 --> 00:15:27.380 Nothing. 190 00:15:27.380 --> 00:15:28.720 No mention of it at all. 191 00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:34.120 So this is I think one of the explanations for my Twitter critic having this view. 192 00:15:34.120 --> 00:15:37.600 I understand, I don't think she's an idiot having this view, this is only what she's 193 00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:42.080 been taught every single day her whole life, what else would she think? 194 00:15:42.080 --> 00:15:47.220 But in terms of the survival of the fittest question, is that the market allows the survival 195 00:15:47.220 --> 00:15:51.560 of people who would surely have perished in a pre-market society. 196 00:15:51.560 --> 00:15:56.340 There simply wouldn't have been the resources to keep them alive. 197 00:15:56.340 --> 00:15:59.780 And so Murray Rothbard wrote in Man Economy and State, he says, 198 00:15:59.780 --> 00:16:05.580 The free market is precisely the diametric opposite of the jungle society. 199 00:16:05.580 --> 00:16:09.660 The jungle is characterized by the war of all against all. 200 00:16:09.660 --> 00:16:14.780 One man gains only at the expense of another, by seizure of the latter's property. 201 00:16:14.780 --> 00:16:19.040 With all on a subsistence level, there is a true struggle for survival, with the stronger 202 00:16:19.040 --> 00:16:21.060 force crushing the weaker. 203 00:16:21.060 --> 00:16:24.980 In the free market, on the other hand, one man gains only through serving another. 204 00:16:24.980 --> 00:16:29.820 It is precisely through the peaceful cooperation of the market that all men gain through the 205 00:16:29.820 --> 00:16:33.340 development of the division of labor and capital investment. 206 00:16:33.340 --> 00:16:37.460 To apply the principle of the survival of the fittest to both the jungle and the market 207 00:16:37.460 --> 00:16:41.540 is to ignore the basic question, fitness for what? 208 00:16:41.540 --> 00:16:46.880 The fit in the jungle are those most adept at the exercise of brute force. 209 00:16:46.880 --> 00:16:51.000 The fit on the market are those most adept in the service of society. 210 00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:56.720 The jungle is a brutish place where some seize from others and all live at the starvation 211 00:16:56.720 --> 00:16:57.720 level. 212 00:16:57.720 --> 00:17:02.640 The market is a peaceful and productive place where all serve themselves and others at the 213 00:17:02.640 --> 00:17:08.480 same time and live at infinitely higher levels of consumption. 214 00:17:08.480 --> 00:17:12.780 The free market, therefore, transmutes the jungle's destructive competition for meager 215 00:17:12.780 --> 00:17:18.960 subsistence into a peaceful, cooperative competition in the service of oneself and others. 216 00:17:18.960 --> 00:17:22.360 In the jungle, some gain only at the expense of others. 217 00:17:22.360 --> 00:17:24.440 On the market, everyone gains. 218 00:17:24.440 --> 00:17:29.640 It is the market, the contractual society, that rests order out of chaos, that subdues 219 00:17:29.640 --> 00:17:36.460 nature and eradicates the jungle, that permits the weak to live productively in a regal style 220 00:17:36.460 --> 00:17:39.200 compared to the life of the strong in the jungle. 221 00:17:39.200 --> 00:17:43.960 Furthermore, the market, by raising living standards, permits man the leisure to cultivate 222 00:17:43.960 --> 00:17:48.960 The Very Qualities of Civilization that Distinguish Him from the Brutes. 223 00:17:48.960 --> 00:17:57.960 Alright, so now my next attack that was directed my way came in the form of a statement, a 224 00:17:57.960 --> 00:18:01.520 series of sentences, and I'm just going to pull them apart one sentence at a time, and 225 00:18:01.520 --> 00:18:04.680 I'll give you my response. 226 00:18:04.680 --> 00:18:09.760 First sentence of the next response to me is, in the ideology of the free market, freedom 227 00:18:09.760 --> 00:18:16.240 Freedom is Conceived of as the Absence of Interference from Others. 228 00:18:16.240 --> 00:18:21.560 I guess that's a criticism? 229 00:18:21.560 --> 00:18:24.640 I'm not understanding how else freedom could be conceived. 230 00:18:24.640 --> 00:18:29.800 I mean, really, basically, if we just reword it, freedom is conceived of as the absence 231 00:18:29.800 --> 00:18:34.160 of the initiation of brute force against innocent, peaceful people. 232 00:18:34.160 --> 00:18:36.160 Well, okay. 233 00:18:36.160 --> 00:18:37.160 That one I accept. 234 00:18:37.160 --> 00:18:39.880 I'm gonna leave that arrow stuck in my back. 235 00:18:39.880 --> 00:18:40.880 So let's move on. 236 00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:46.960 There are no common ends to which our desires are directed. 237 00:18:47.960 --> 00:18:51.200 And this, I think, reveals a very, very unfortunate 238 00:18:51.200 --> 00:18:54.080 mentality that exists among a great many people 239 00:18:54.080 --> 00:18:55.560 in the world, and again, it's the sort of thing 240 00:18:55.560 --> 00:18:58.180 that they're just taught in the propaganda factories 241 00:18:58.180 --> 00:19:00.920 that a lot of our kids go through, 242 00:19:01.800 --> 00:19:04.700 is that society can't function unless there's some kind 243 00:19:34.700 --> 00:19:38.060 that they don't approve of, but what's bad about that? 244 00:19:38.060 --> 00:19:40.140 How do we know that the coercers 245 00:19:40.140 --> 00:19:42.940 will always have good ends in mind? 246 00:19:42.940 --> 00:19:45.940 How can we be assured of that? 247 00:19:45.940 --> 00:19:47.620 Can we be assured that we would all be coerced 248 00:19:47.620 --> 00:19:49.880 into pursuing laudable goals? 249 00:19:49.880 --> 00:19:51.700 Where do the coercers get the right 250 00:19:51.700 --> 00:19:54.220 to decide for everyone else what their goals should be? 251 00:19:54.220 --> 00:19:55.260 But at the same time, I would say 252 00:19:55.260 --> 00:19:57.460 there obviously are common goals 253 00:19:57.460 --> 00:19:59.820 that are carried out all the time on the free market, 254 00:19:59.820 --> 00:20:01.740 and it's almost a cliche now 255 00:20:01.740 --> 00:20:04.660 to refer to Leonard Reed's essay, Eye Pencil. 256 00:20:04.660 --> 00:20:06.080 But of course, if you haven't read Eye Pencil, 257 00:20:06.080 --> 00:20:07.900 go to Google and read Eye Pencil, 258 00:20:07.900 --> 00:20:09.640 where he talks about all the different, 259 00:20:09.640 --> 00:20:10.720 he basically tells the story 260 00:20:10.720 --> 00:20:12.520 from the point of view of the pencil. 261 00:20:12.520 --> 00:20:14.800 And all the different steps that go into making a pencil 262 00:20:14.800 --> 00:20:17.280 and the different production processes that need to be known 263 00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:20.160 and the raw materials that come from all over the place 264 00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:23.260 and then you need to know how to build the structures 265 00:20:23.260 --> 00:20:24.800 that are going to transport these goods 266 00:20:24.800 --> 00:20:26.360 from one place to another. 267 00:20:26.360 --> 00:20:28.320 There's so many things that you would need to know, 268 00:20:28.320 --> 00:20:30.420 no one could possibly master it all. 269 00:20:30.420 --> 00:20:33.060 So, even just simply from a technological point of view, 270 00:20:33.060 --> 00:20:35.020 it would not be possible to carry this out 271 00:20:35.020 --> 00:20:35.940 by just one individual. 272 00:20:35.940 --> 00:20:37.620 Nobody could be that smart. 273 00:20:37.620 --> 00:20:38.700 And this is a little different 274 00:20:38.700 --> 00:20:40.100 from the Hayek knowledge problem. 275 00:20:40.100 --> 00:20:42.440 This is just a strictly technical question. 276 00:20:42.440 --> 00:20:44.420 You have to know about rubber production. 277 00:20:44.420 --> 00:20:47.020 You gotta know about mining. 278 00:20:47.020 --> 00:20:49.380 You gotta know about lumber. 279 00:20:49.380 --> 00:20:51.620 You gotta know about all kinds of different things 280 00:20:51.620 --> 00:20:53.640 involved in transportation. 281 00:20:53.640 --> 00:20:55.180 Nobody could know all these things. 282 00:20:55.180 --> 00:20:57.060 So you would think, with her mentality, 283 00:20:57.060 --> 00:20:58.900 there's no way a pencil could ever be made. 284 00:20:58.900 --> 00:21:00.860 There can't be any pencils. 285 00:21:00.860 --> 00:21:03.980 There would have to be a worldwide pencil production board 286 00:21:03.980 --> 00:21:06.300 presided over by this person, presumably. 287 00:21:06.300 --> 00:21:07.980 Telling everybody what to do, when to do it, 288 00:21:07.980 --> 00:21:09.180 you better start growing the trees, 289 00:21:09.180 --> 00:21:12.420 because pretty soon Murphy's gonna need a pencil, 290 00:21:12.420 --> 00:21:13.660 and we're gonna need to chop that tree down 291 00:21:13.660 --> 00:21:16.660 for the wood and whatever, and yet it all happens. 292 00:21:16.660 --> 00:21:18.620 And you can think of this with any production process 293 00:21:18.620 --> 00:21:21.060 you can imagine for any consumer good. 294 00:21:21.060 --> 00:21:23.100 All these different firms at all different stages 295 00:21:23.100 --> 00:21:25.100 of the production process are all working 296 00:21:25.100 --> 00:21:26.580 on different things separately, 297 00:21:26.580 --> 00:21:28.560 and yet the finished consumer good is produced 298 00:21:28.560 --> 00:21:32.420 with no surpluses and no shortages, time and again, 299 00:21:32.420 --> 00:21:33.860 with no central direction. 300 00:21:34.800 --> 00:21:37.140 So it is absolutely false to say there are no shared ends. 301 00:21:37.140 --> 00:21:39.100 Look at that, that's a shared end. 302 00:21:39.100 --> 00:21:42.940 And every firm, every industry, every stage of production 303 00:21:42.940 --> 00:21:45.000 involved in this process, 304 00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:48.220 depends on the success of every other. 305 00:21:49.500 --> 00:21:51.760 Because the lower stages of the production structure 306 00:21:51.760 --> 00:21:55.240 need the supplies produced by the higher stages. 307 00:21:55.240 --> 00:21:56.380 They need those supplies. 308 00:21:56.380 --> 00:22:00.580 So this is a cooperative venture in the best sense of the term. 309 00:22:00.580 --> 00:22:03.540 Meanwhile, these higher stages depend for the profitability 310 00:22:03.540 --> 00:22:05.400 of what they're doing on the demand 311 00:22:05.400 --> 00:22:07.640 that comes from the lower stages. 312 00:22:07.640 --> 00:22:09.620 And that demand, of course, is a derived demand 313 00:22:09.620 --> 00:22:11.380 that derives from the demand of the consumers 314 00:22:11.380 --> 00:22:12.940 for the finished product, and that demand 315 00:22:12.940 --> 00:22:15.040 ripples up through the production structure. 316 00:22:15.040 --> 00:22:20.040 This is a tremendous example of how we all become integrated 317 00:22:20.160 --> 00:22:22.880 into a structure greater than ourselves 318 00:22:22.880 --> 00:22:24.980 that produces something that, on the face of it, 319 00:22:24.980 --> 00:22:29.260 if we're just looking at the dictator barking out orders model would seem impossible and 320 00:22:29.260 --> 00:22:34.700 yet it's done with no dictator and no orders barked out in a macro sense. 321 00:22:34.700 --> 00:22:38.560 So that's pretty interesting and yet there's no credit given to the market for this. 322 00:22:38.560 --> 00:22:40.000 Critics like this don't even notice this. 323 00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:43.900 They just go with, they just use up consumer goods every day as if they just fall from 324 00:22:43.900 --> 00:22:48.060 heaven and we don't need to be amazed and awed at it. 325 00:22:48.060 --> 00:22:50.500 Well, I am amazed and awed at it. 326 00:22:50.500 --> 00:22:55.020 I mean, I'm, to almost a ridiculously dorky extent, 327 00:22:55.020 --> 00:22:57.420 amazed and awed at this process. 328 00:22:57.420 --> 00:22:59.820 And I told the story at the Mises Institute over the summer, 329 00:22:59.820 --> 00:23:01.620 but there was a time a few years ago, 330 00:23:01.620 --> 00:23:04.260 one of our little kids was sick and really late at night, 331 00:23:04.260 --> 00:23:06.660 I had to go out and get her a vaporizer. 332 00:23:07.660 --> 00:23:09.220 And I was able to go out and get a vaporizer 333 00:23:09.220 --> 00:23:11.820 for 10 lousy bucks. 334 00:23:11.820 --> 00:23:13.740 In the middle of the night, I got a vaporizer, 335 00:23:13.740 --> 00:23:16.460 10 lousy bucks, and I actually stood there. 336 00:23:16.460 --> 00:23:22.660 I actually stood there in the store and said, this is amazing, that somehow, I mean the 337 00:23:22.660 --> 00:23:25.980 greatest king of Europe couldn't have done this. 338 00:23:25.980 --> 00:23:29.300 I can go and get, and then it occurred to me, I have a sick kid at home, I can't stand 339 00:23:29.300 --> 00:23:33.940 here philosophizing. 340 00:23:33.940 --> 00:23:38.980 But think also about the price system, which develops spontaneously. 341 00:23:38.980 --> 00:23:41.740 Nobody dictates the prices to us. 342 00:23:41.740 --> 00:23:45.220 The price system develops, as you can see through reading any of the Austrians, from 343 00:23:45.220 --> 00:23:52.220 The price system develops through a series of competitive bids by buyers and sellers. 344 00:23:52.220 --> 00:23:58.140 And the price system helps entrepreneurs decide between the literally trillions of options 345 00:23:58.140 --> 00:24:01.940 they have at their disposal in terms of what product to produce and how to produce it. 346 00:24:01.940 --> 00:24:04.100 They're all different combinations of inputs they could choose. 347 00:24:04.100 --> 00:24:09.380 It could be more labor-intensive, more capital-intensive, they could locate their plant here, they could 348 00:24:09.380 --> 00:24:16.780 located farther away, and they find that the transportation is not so expensive that it 349 00:24:16.780 --> 00:24:21.800 wouldn't have been better to just have a closer plant, I mean how do you decide between that? 350 00:24:21.800 --> 00:24:25.900 Should I have a plant that's closer to my market or one that's farther away given that 351 00:24:25.900 --> 00:24:29.780 the land values are lower back there, I'd save money there but then I'd have to pay 352 00:24:29.780 --> 00:24:30.780 for transportation? 353 00:24:30.780 --> 00:24:34.800 How would you know in what way you are burdening society more or less? 354 00:24:34.800 --> 00:24:39.220 In what way would you know that you are employing resources in a way that is sub-optimal from 355 00:24:39.220 --> 00:24:40.860 in the point of view of everybody's welfare. 356 00:24:40.860 --> 00:24:42.900 There's no non-arbitrary way to know that. 357 00:24:42.900 --> 00:24:46.300 Should I use 10 units of lumber and nine units of rubber 358 00:24:46.300 --> 00:24:48.620 or 10 units of rubber and nine units of lumber? 359 00:24:48.620 --> 00:24:50.660 There's no way to know that 360 00:24:50.660 --> 00:24:54.820 without the entrepreneurial calculation possibilities 361 00:24:54.820 --> 00:24:56.820 that the price system provides. 362 00:24:56.820 --> 00:25:01.140 And so if you're using an input in your production process 363 00:25:01.140 --> 00:25:03.580 that's demanded more urgently elsewhere 364 00:25:03.580 --> 00:25:06.100 by a product that people are more urgently demanding elsewhere 365 00:25:06.100 --> 00:25:07.620 then it's gonna be bid away from you 366 00:25:07.620 --> 00:25:10.020 and you're gonna have to look for a substitute. 367 00:25:10.020 --> 00:25:11.980 And this is the way these things just occur 368 00:25:11.980 --> 00:25:14.020 without absurdly destructive 369 00:25:14.020 --> 00:25:16.140 and uneconomic decisions being made 370 00:25:16.140 --> 00:25:17.620 that would impoverish us all. 371 00:25:17.620 --> 00:25:20.400 This makes certain that when we engage in production, 372 00:25:20.400 --> 00:25:22.500 we are doing it at the least cost 373 00:25:22.500 --> 00:25:24.700 in terms of opportunities foregone. 374 00:25:24.700 --> 00:25:26.060 So when I hear people say, 375 00:25:26.060 --> 00:25:28.380 we need to be great stewards of our resources, 376 00:25:28.380 --> 00:25:30.800 there is no greater steward than the free market. 377 00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:33.300 It's impossible for there to be a greater steward 378 00:25:33.300 --> 00:25:36.280 of resources because only the price system 379 00:25:36.280 --> 00:25:39.960 helps us to figure out how valued the resources are. 380 00:25:40.960 --> 00:25:45.340 Now there is no dictator that forces this happy outcome on us. 381 00:25:46.300 --> 00:25:50.680 Then she goes on, in the absence of such common shared ends, 382 00:25:50.680 --> 00:25:53.240 all that remains is the sheer arbitrary power 383 00:25:53.240 --> 00:25:54.960 of one will against another. 384 00:25:55.880 --> 00:25:57.680 Well that's not a description of the market economy, 385 00:25:57.680 --> 00:25:59.600 that's a description of government. 386 00:25:59.600 --> 00:26:03.120 How else would we describe the exercise of power 387 00:26:03.120 --> 00:26:07.020 by a privileged class against peaceful people 388 00:26:07.020 --> 00:26:09.880 with the aim of expropriating 389 00:26:09.880 --> 00:26:12.200 and ordering about those peaceful people 390 00:26:12.200 --> 00:26:13.480 by that privileged class. 391 00:26:13.480 --> 00:26:15.280 That is the sheer arbitrary will 392 00:26:15.280 --> 00:26:17.400 of one power against another. 393 00:26:17.400 --> 00:26:20.200 Nobody forces you to buy a Twinkie, 394 00:26:20.200 --> 00:26:22.600 but governments do force you to fight in their wars 395 00:26:22.600 --> 00:26:23.800 and pay for their bailouts. 396 00:26:23.800 --> 00:26:27.720 Now, some people might call that sheer arbitrary power. 397 00:26:29.960 --> 00:26:33.040 In fact, now, a friend of mine has a good analogy. 398 00:26:33.040 --> 00:26:39.040 If you want to say that corporations are just as dangerous as the government, think of it this way. 399 00:26:39.040 --> 00:26:45.040 What would alarm you more? And which call would you feel more comfortable hanging up on? 400 00:26:45.040 --> 00:26:50.040 An Apple computer marketing phone call? Or an IRS phone call? 401 00:26:50.040 --> 00:26:57.040 Then finally, freedom thus gives way to the aggrandizement of power 402 00:26:57.040 --> 00:27:00.040 and the manipulation of will and desire by the greater power. 403 00:27:00.040 --> 00:27:01.040 Power. 404 00:27:01.040 --> 00:27:03.240 Well, again, this has the situation entirely reversed. 405 00:27:03.240 --> 00:27:05.240 It's government that does these things. 406 00:27:05.240 --> 00:27:09.700 If you've ever seen government's propagandize for war, they can get people hating people 407 00:27:09.700 --> 00:27:13.400 not only they've never met, but they don't even know where these people are on the globe. 408 00:27:13.400 --> 00:27:18.240 I mean, that, you want to talk about manipulation of will and desire by the greater power. 409 00:27:18.240 --> 00:27:23.520 Well, she might start by looking first at the political class in which she reposes so much 410 00:27:23.520 --> 00:27:26.100 misplaced confidence. 411 00:27:26.100 --> 00:27:30.100 And then she says, in another one of her tweets, again, thinking that she's attacking me, so 412 00:27:30.100 --> 00:27:34.900 she doesn't even bother to take the time to figure out who I am or what my views are, 413 00:27:34.900 --> 00:27:38.140 even though she linked to my website, so she could have taken the three seconds to look 414 00:27:38.140 --> 00:27:39.140 at it. 415 00:27:39.140 --> 00:27:47.140 So she says, our main enemies, court protocracy, American Empire, okay, well, what, right, 416 00:27:47.140 --> 00:27:49.700 okay, so our would include me. 417 00:27:49.700 --> 00:27:50.920 So then what's your problem? 418 00:27:50.920 --> 00:27:55.480 But then her Twitter avatar includes the Obama 2012 logo. 419 00:27:55.480 --> 00:28:01.000 I mean, talk about being totally a captive, here she is talking about the free market 420 00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:05.660 brainwashes you into doing things you wouldn't otherwise do. 421 00:28:05.660 --> 00:28:10.080 And here she's somebody who's against corporatocracy in the American Empire, and she's supporting 422 00:28:10.080 --> 00:28:16.300 Obama, who hands out bailouts like crazy, and who, if you ask him, well, you're going 423 00:28:16.300 --> 00:28:19.180 to bring the troops home from all these various countries, he says, we can't retreat into 424 00:28:19.180 --> 00:28:20.180 isolationism. 425 00:28:20.180 --> 00:28:25.180 he's got the robot propaganda PC term down absolutely packed 426 00:28:25.740 --> 00:28:27.860 when anybody ever asks him a question like that. 427 00:28:27.860 --> 00:28:30.660 So my good friend Anthony Gregory, 428 00:28:30.660 --> 00:28:33.500 who in one of the best essays I've read in a long time, 429 00:28:33.500 --> 00:28:34.700 said this about Obama. 430 00:28:34.700 --> 00:28:37.140 So now we actually come down to earth. 431 00:28:37.140 --> 00:28:39.900 Obama shoveled money toward corporate America, 432 00:28:39.900 --> 00:28:41.860 banks and car manufacturers. 433 00:28:41.860 --> 00:28:44.620 He championed the bailouts of the same Wall Street firms 434 00:28:44.620 --> 00:28:47.660 his very partisans blamed for the financial collapse. 435 00:28:47.660 --> 00:28:49.780 He picked the CEO of General Electric 436 00:28:49.780 --> 00:28:52.260 to Oversee the Unemployment Problem. 437 00:28:52.260 --> 00:28:54.200 He appointed corporate state regulars 438 00:28:54.200 --> 00:28:57.600 for every major role in financial central planning. 439 00:28:57.600 --> 00:29:00.100 After guaranteeing a new era of transparency, 440 00:29:00.100 --> 00:29:02.260 he conducted all his regulatory business 441 00:29:02.260 --> 00:29:05.520 behind a shroud of unprecedented secrecy. 442 00:29:05.520 --> 00:29:07.160 He planned his healthcare scheme, 443 00:29:07.160 --> 00:29:09.500 the crown jewel of his domestic agenda 444 00:29:09.500 --> 00:29:13.100 in league with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. 445 00:29:13.100 --> 00:29:14.300 Now, as for foreign policy, 446 00:29:14.300 --> 00:29:15.920 again, my critic seems to think 447 00:29:15.920 --> 00:29:25.920 The American Empire is the result of a thoroughly bipartisan foreign policy that's gone on for over half a century. 448 00:29:25.920 --> 00:29:33.920 Andrew Bacevich, who is sort of a conservative foreign policy analyst, had a good book last year called Washington Rules. 449 00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:41.920 He uses this term Washington Rules. I think it's a more elegant term. I was referred to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. 450 00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:47.760 But what he's basically showing is that the foreign policy difference between Hillary Clinton and John McCain is basically cosmetic 451 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:55.020 I mean, there's nothing no really the fundamental assumptions behind it are really shared by by both these people and they're shared by the New 452 00:29:55.020 --> 00:29:58.880 York Times the Washington Post and pretty much all the major US newspapers 453 00:29:59.960 --> 00:30:07.240 Now again, Anthony Gregory, he says Obama continued the war in Iraq even extending Bush's schedule with a goal of staying longer than the last 454 00:30:07.480 --> 00:30:09.920 Administration planned and then finally the Iraqis said you've got to get out 455 00:30:09.920 --> 00:30:15.400 He tripled the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, then took over two years to announce the eventual 456 00:30:15.400 --> 00:30:19.060 drawdown to bring it back to only double the Bush presence. 457 00:30:19.060 --> 00:30:23.440 He widened the war in Pakistan, launching drone attacks at a dizzying pace. 458 00:30:23.440 --> 00:30:28.280 He started a war on false pretenses with Libya, shifting the goalposts and doing it all without 459 00:30:28.280 --> 00:30:29.680 congressional approval. 460 00:30:29.680 --> 00:30:32.080 He bombed Yemen and lied about it. 461 00:30:32.080 --> 00:30:36.800 He enthusiastically signed on to warrantless wiretapping, renditioning, the Patriot Act, 462 00:30:36.800 --> 00:30:42.680 Prison Abuse, Detention Without Trial, Violations of Habeas Corpus, and Invasive Airport Security 463 00:30:42.680 --> 00:30:46.760 Measures. He deported immigrants more than Bush did. He increased funding for the drug 464 00:30:46.760 --> 00:30:51.960 war in Mexico. He invoked the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined, 465 00:30:51.960 --> 00:30:56.160 tortured a whistleblower, and claimed the right to unilaterally kill any U.S. citizen 466 00:30:56.160 --> 00:31:01.920 on earth without even a nod from Congress or a shrug from the courts. 467 00:31:01.920 --> 00:31:06.180 But this is the opponent of corporatocracy and American Empire. 468 00:31:06.180 --> 00:31:12.600 Never underestimate the ability of politics and government to confuse people. 469 00:31:12.600 --> 00:31:17.320 That's what they're there for, is to fill our heads with this idea that they're the 470 00:31:17.320 --> 00:31:22.640 great saviors, or there's at least one party among them that's the great saviors. 471 00:31:22.640 --> 00:31:27.060 And without them, oh, it would all be terrible, we'd all have jobs earning us three cents 472 00:31:27.060 --> 00:31:31.200 an hour, we'd all be dead, just what you read in your seventh grade textbook. 473 00:31:31.200 --> 00:31:35.400 And she says, another problem with the idea of the free market is that humans make decisions 474 00:31:35.400 --> 00:31:37.920 based upon the short term rather than the long term. 475 00:31:37.920 --> 00:31:43.240 All right, now let's assume that I take, that I accept this dubious psychological proposition. 476 00:31:43.240 --> 00:31:45.600 Let's assume that it's true. 477 00:31:45.600 --> 00:31:49.440 Somebody who makes this type of criticism never applies it to government. 478 00:31:49.440 --> 00:31:52.640 Wouldn't governments also think in the short term? 479 00:31:52.640 --> 00:31:56.720 Wouldn't the voters who elect the people in governments also think in the short term? 480 00:31:56.720 --> 00:31:58.760 So how does government improve on this? 481 00:31:58.760 --> 00:32:28.760 and in fact when you think about what governments have done thinking about short-term I mean look at what Richard Nixon did on the eve of his re-election campaign in 1972 dramatically increasing social security benefits I'd say that was for a short-term benefit you know call me a cynic I don't think he was thinking about what the consequences would be 30 years down the road and in fact when you look at those programs the entitlement programs are underfunded right now to an amount greater than the GDP of two planet Earths so I would 482 00:32:28.760 --> 00:32:32.760 I'll say that the U.S. government has had a little bit of a problem not thinking in the long term. 483 00:32:32.760 --> 00:32:36.760 But supposedly, this is a problem that's exclusively confined to the free market. 484 00:32:36.760 --> 00:32:41.760 But again, to the contrary, the free market discourages people from short-term thinking. 485 00:32:41.760 --> 00:32:47.760 So, for example, think about this very critic. She probably drives a car. 486 00:32:47.760 --> 00:32:51.760 Does she wait 80,000 miles between oil changes? 487 00:32:51.760 --> 00:32:54.760 She should, if all she thinks about is the short term. 488 00:32:54.760 --> 00:32:57.760 In the short term, this is going to take half an hour out of my day. I don't have time for that, baby. 489 00:33:27.760 --> 00:33:33.160 by temporary caretakers who don't own the capital value of the resources of the country. 490 00:33:33.160 --> 00:33:34.420 So it doesn't matter to them. 491 00:33:34.420 --> 00:33:38.880 If the country was a giant car, they wouldn't do an oil change the whole career they were 492 00:33:38.880 --> 00:33:39.880 in office. 493 00:33:39.880 --> 00:33:40.880 What difference does it make to them? 494 00:33:40.880 --> 00:33:43.440 They don't have to drive that car. 495 00:33:43.440 --> 00:33:47.000 It doesn't matter to them to preserve the capital value. 496 00:33:47.000 --> 00:33:53.720 Instead, sure, we have to loot these people as much as we can right now because I may 497 00:33:53.720 --> 00:33:56.680 be out of office next year and I won't have the chance to loot them then. 498 00:33:56.680 --> 00:33:58.440 We have to think in the short term. 499 00:33:58.440 --> 00:34:01.800 We've got to use stuff up to benefit us politically. 500 00:34:03.200 --> 00:34:06.960 Then she says, and I'm not going to look over at Doug Frenton. 501 00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:07.800 Keep you a little bit, 502 00:34:07.800 --> 00:34:09.360 because I think I got started five minutes late. 503 00:34:09.360 --> 00:34:10.340 I'm going to keep you slightly late. 504 00:34:10.340 --> 00:34:13.160 Don't anybody boo and hiss, please. 505 00:34:13.160 --> 00:34:15.160 But I do want to get, she deserves this 506 00:34:15.160 --> 00:34:17.900 and I would feel bad if just time kept me. 507 00:34:20.280 --> 00:34:22.540 So then we get this. 508 00:34:22.540 --> 00:34:24.400 So now we've, so supposedly there's this law. 509 00:34:24.400 --> 00:34:25.720 People think only in the short term. 510 00:34:25.720 --> 00:34:30.200 She says, this enables shrewd individuals or groups, and by the way, this is copied 511 00:34:30.200 --> 00:34:32.980 and pasted from other people's stuff that she just put there. 512 00:34:32.980 --> 00:34:34.980 This is not her own creation. 513 00:34:34.980 --> 00:34:38.680 Enables shrewd individuals or groups to manipulate markets and exploit individuals for their 514 00:34:38.680 --> 00:34:39.840 own gain. 515 00:34:39.840 --> 00:34:44.660 The invisible hand Smith described is either too slow or becomes too entangled to effectively 516 00:34:44.660 --> 00:34:49.120 make corrections to the market in sufficient time to prevent real, long-term harm from 517 00:34:49.120 --> 00:34:50.120 occurring. 518 00:34:50.120 --> 00:34:54.180 Consequently, free market corrections can produce enormous misery for the many while 519 00:34:54.180 --> 00:34:56.740 Well, they take their sweet time to correct the market. 520 00:34:56.740 --> 00:35:01.220 Well, all right, so we're told that groups manipulate markets and exploit individuals, 521 00:35:01.220 --> 00:35:05.460 though we're given no examples of this and no definitions of any of these terms. 522 00:35:05.460 --> 00:35:10.460 This antisocial behavior, we're told, causes the whole market economy to suffer, such that 523 00:35:10.460 --> 00:35:13.180 a wrenching recovery process is necessary. 524 00:35:13.180 --> 00:35:17.220 And these recoveries, because of the market, take too long and cause further suffering. 525 00:35:17.220 --> 00:35:23.240 Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this is a coherent point that she's making. 526 00:35:23.240 --> 00:35:27.600 and with the relevant terms not being defined and a causal mechanism not even being hinted 527 00:35:27.600 --> 00:35:33.080 at, I rather suspect I'm ascribing more dignity to this position than it deserves, we're left 528 00:35:33.080 --> 00:35:37.760 to wonder why the economy's not in a constant state of recession, don't we have greedy manipulators 529 00:35:37.760 --> 00:35:43.300 all the time, why would we be in a recession only in a cyclical pattern, why is there no 530 00:35:43.300 --> 00:35:47.400 curiosity about this, nowhere in any of her tweets is any mention made of the Federal 531 00:35:47.400 --> 00:35:49.020 and the Federal Reserve System. 532 00:35:49.020 --> 00:35:52.960 It's absolutely typical of conventional thinking progressives. 533 00:35:52.960 --> 00:35:55.000 That if an institution's been around for a long time, 534 00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:56.680 it must be pretty good. 535 00:35:56.680 --> 00:35:59.880 Now their old slogan used to be question authority. 536 00:35:59.880 --> 00:36:02.680 Well now it's question authority except the Federal Reserve, 537 00:36:02.680 --> 00:36:05.120 the US President, the New York Times. 538 00:36:05.120 --> 00:36:08.280 Question authority except everybody who matters, pretty much. 539 00:36:08.280 --> 00:36:09.640 So nothing about the Federal Reserve. 540 00:36:09.640 --> 00:36:12.040 So our argument is that it's the Federal Reserve's 541 00:36:12.040 --> 00:36:14.440 intervention in the economy in terms of money 542 00:36:14.440 --> 00:36:16.680 and interest rates that sets the economy 543 00:36:16.680 --> 00:36:19.600 on an unsustainable path that ends in a bust, 544 00:36:19.600 --> 00:36:22.920 it has to end in a bust, and it's self-reversing. 545 00:36:22.920 --> 00:36:25.080 And this is talked about in any of the Austrian books 546 00:36:25.080 --> 00:36:29.680 and my meltdown in 2009 was one of the, 547 00:36:29.680 --> 00:36:31.280 was my opportunity to sort of explain this 548 00:36:31.280 --> 00:36:33.000 to the general public. 549 00:36:33.000 --> 00:36:35.360 So it's not caused, the boom bust cycle's not caused 550 00:36:35.360 --> 00:36:37.640 by the market economy per se, but by this sort of 551 00:36:37.640 --> 00:36:41.080 intervention, and the recoveries are brief or prolonged 552 00:36:41.080 --> 00:36:44.040 in terms of, well, how much interference is there 553 00:36:44.040 --> 00:36:45.680 from the government. 554 00:36:45.680 --> 00:36:48.760 and as Bob Murphy often points out, 555 00:36:48.760 --> 00:36:51.520 the Great Depression is the first time in U.S. history 556 00:36:51.520 --> 00:36:53.640 that the Federal Government actually rolled up its sleeves 557 00:36:53.640 --> 00:36:56.320 and said, okay, we're gonna try and solve this thing. 558 00:36:56.320 --> 00:36:59.920 And it just goes on and on and on and on. 559 00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:03.760 Whereas the 1920-21 downturn, relatively little was done 560 00:37:03.760 --> 00:37:05.760 and there was a relatively swift recovery 561 00:37:05.760 --> 00:37:07.200 compared to the Great Depression. 562 00:37:07.200 --> 00:37:09.160 If that had been, now today they try to say, 563 00:37:09.160 --> 00:37:11.120 oh, that's apples and oranges. 564 00:37:11.120 --> 00:37:14.200 No, it's not because imagine the situation's reversed. 565 00:37:14.200 --> 00:37:19.880 Imagine in 1921, we had a quick recovery because there was massive government involvement and 566 00:37:19.880 --> 00:37:22.840 the Great Depression went on forever because we had no government involvement. 567 00:37:22.840 --> 00:37:27.640 You better believe what they would say is, you see, this just goes to show you need the 568 00:37:27.640 --> 00:37:29.600 government to get you out of downturns. 569 00:37:29.600 --> 00:37:32.520 So you can't win with these people. 570 00:37:32.520 --> 00:37:36.520 They'll either just ignore it, they'll ignore you, or they'll spin the evidence in their 571 00:37:36.520 --> 00:37:37.520 directions. 572 00:37:37.520 --> 00:37:38.520 Why? 573 00:37:38.520 --> 00:37:40.480 You need good theory in addition to knowledge of history. 574 00:37:40.480 --> 00:37:43.880 Then I'm told the free market encourages the elimination of the weak. 575 00:37:43.880 --> 00:37:47.920 Well, if it's doing that, it's doing a really rotten job given the growth of population 576 00:37:47.920 --> 00:37:53.200 around the world and given the growth of living standards and life expectancy, particularly 577 00:37:53.200 --> 00:37:54.760 in the developing world. 578 00:37:54.760 --> 00:37:59.840 Why is it that the poorest enjoy the greatest material advantages and the fewest deprivations 579 00:37:59.840 --> 00:38:04.640 in countries that have the freest markets? 580 00:38:04.640 --> 00:38:08.700 It quickly became apparent that humans could be sold products with lower or even negative 581 00:38:08.700 --> 00:38:13.820 of Utility, by appealing to the consumer on a deeper emotional level, this discovery along 582 00:38:13.820 --> 00:38:18.880 with mass advertising enabled by mass communication effectively destroyed the free market observed 583 00:38:18.880 --> 00:38:19.880 by Adam Smith. 584 00:38:19.880 --> 00:38:24.380 All right, well, this is a bastardized version of John Kenneth Galbraith's argument that 585 00:38:24.380 --> 00:38:27.700 you don't really have a free market because people are manipulated by advertising. 586 00:38:27.700 --> 00:38:33.220 We just go out like zombies and whatever it is, they want us to buy some new kind of car 587 00:38:33.220 --> 00:38:37.580 or a new board game and we all just walk to the store and say, well, the TV told me to 588 00:38:37.580 --> 00:38:40.180 to do it, so here I am. 589 00:38:40.180 --> 00:38:42.940 But this, I mean, there are a lot of things you could say about this, but this leaves 590 00:38:42.940 --> 00:38:47.300 unanswered the question, if that were the case, why do companies spend so much money 591 00:38:47.300 --> 00:38:51.180 on marketing research to figure out what consumers want? 592 00:38:51.180 --> 00:38:55.180 If all you need is a snazzy commercial to dupe them into buying anything you want to 593 00:38:55.180 --> 00:39:01.700 produce, if you want to produce porcupine popsicles or something, just go ahead and 594 00:39:01.700 --> 00:39:05.300 produce it and just have a fan, you know, just get, I don't know, just get Barack Obama 595 00:39:05.300 --> 00:39:14.220 Well, if the product stinks, it doesn't matter how many ads you make for it. 596 00:39:14.220 --> 00:39:19.300 So if nobody wants the new Coke, you can make all the ads you want, they're not buying it. 597 00:39:19.300 --> 00:39:23.520 The Edsel is not going to be sold by a slick advertising campaign. 598 00:39:23.520 --> 00:39:31.020 Or once people can download music in MP3 format, or they can stream movies over the internet, 599 00:39:31.020 --> 00:39:36.380 All the advertising in the world is not going to save Sam Goodies or Blockbuster. 600 00:39:36.380 --> 00:39:40.580 And then finally, capitalism creates inequality. 601 00:39:40.580 --> 00:39:44.140 Well I love the example that Mises gives about inequality. 602 00:39:44.140 --> 00:39:51.060 Mises says that in the old days, the rich traveled via a coach and four, a coach driven 603 00:39:51.060 --> 00:39:57.660 by four horses, whereas the poor traveled on foot, often with no shoes. 604 00:39:57.660 --> 00:40:02.660 Today, the rich travel in a fancy car, and the poor travel in a beat-up car. 605 00:40:02.660 --> 00:40:05.660 And people talk about, oh gosh, inequality is so terrible. 606 00:40:05.660 --> 00:40:10.660 Well, this is obviously, in a qualitative sense, a dramatic reduction in inequality. 607 00:40:10.660 --> 00:40:15.660 Now, it's true we can talk in a minute about there are people who are fantastically wealthy because of state benefits, 608 00:40:15.660 --> 00:40:20.660 but that would be precisely our argument, that that's why the state is so antisocial and we have to fight against it. 609 00:40:20.660 --> 00:40:26.300 against it. But we all take for granted amenities that the richest of the rich couldn't have 610 00:40:26.300 --> 00:40:32.300 imagined a hundred years ago. I mean, flush toilets, even flush toilets, which apparently 611 00:40:32.300 --> 00:40:38.500 they had in ancient Crete, in Minoan Crete they had flush toilets, and then somehow that 612 00:40:38.500 --> 00:40:43.860 technology was lost to Western civilization until like the 19th century. So even, you 613 00:40:43.860 --> 00:40:47.580 know, the Habsburgs, well, I don't want to get too graphic about what they had to do, 614 00:40:47.580 --> 00:40:52.340 I mean, these are the sorts of things that, I mean, in my, you don't need to know the 615 00:40:52.340 --> 00:40:56.340 details of my master bathroom at home, but I'm going to tell you, because it illustrates, 616 00:40:56.340 --> 00:40:59.700 I'm going to go through, because it illustrates a larger point about capitalism. 617 00:40:59.700 --> 00:41:04.420 We moved into our house, the previous owner had lived there only five years, built the 618 00:41:04.420 --> 00:41:08.000 house and then something went wrong and he had to move away. 619 00:41:08.000 --> 00:41:11.780 And he installed a whole house audio system, we, for the life of us, couldn't figure out 620 00:41:11.780 --> 00:41:14.180 how this thing worked for a year. 621 00:41:14.180 --> 00:41:17.180 We've got speakers all over the house, we get nothing comes out of them, nothing. 622 00:41:17.180 --> 00:41:20.940 Turns out we had a technician look at it, he had it wired all wrong, it's lucky that 623 00:41:20.940 --> 00:41:23.900 we didn't blow the house up when we turned on the switch. 624 00:41:23.900 --> 00:41:31.020 So we got it fixed, but would you believe there are two speakers in my master bathroom? 625 00:41:31.020 --> 00:41:35.420 So now every day in the shower, I don't have to sing in the shower anymore, I can turn 626 00:41:35.420 --> 00:41:41.880 on Pandora and a computer system that figures out based on my tastes what music I might 627 00:41:41.880 --> 00:41:50.600 like is endlessly streaming music for me in my bathroom. 628 00:41:50.600 --> 00:41:53.360 And there was one day we had some little problem with it, you would have thought the world 629 00:41:53.360 --> 00:41:54.360 had ended. 630 00:41:54.360 --> 00:42:00.520 I mean we don't bother to stop and we are so ungrateful and critics like this are so 631 00:42:00.520 --> 00:42:06.900 ungrateful for the sacrifices made by people who in many cases just gave everything they 632 00:42:06.900 --> 00:42:11.580 and they had in terms of wealth and energy and entrepreneurial skill and foresight to 633 00:42:11.580 --> 00:42:19.460 provide these things for us, it's astonishing, but okay, again with inequality you can talk 634 00:42:19.460 --> 00:42:25.020 about are the statistics correct and so on and on and that they don't take account of 635 00:42:25.020 --> 00:42:30.840 mobility, so it's not enough to say the lowest 20% only owns X% of whatever because when 636 00:42:30.840 --> 00:42:35.340 you look over time the lowest 20%, it's not the same people, they move from the lowest 637 00:42:35.340 --> 00:42:40.340 25% to 30% of them, 10, 15 years later, are in the highest quintile. 638 00:42:40.340 --> 00:42:42.840 So it's not like there's just this group that's just, they never move. 639 00:42:42.840 --> 00:42:45.340 There might be a sliver of such people. 640 00:42:45.340 --> 00:42:48.340 But the mobility is completely left out of these statistics. 641 00:42:48.340 --> 00:42:50.340 Well then, finally, this is the last point, very quick. 642 00:42:50.340 --> 00:42:55.340 Didn't this yield us, didn't the free market give us the robber barons of the 19th century? 643 00:42:55.340 --> 00:42:59.340 Okay, well the quick answer to this is, read Tom DiLorenzo's book, 644 00:42:59.340 --> 00:43:02.340 How Capitalism Saved America, that talks a lot about this. 645 00:43:02.340 --> 00:43:07.260 about this, but just very quickly, it's true that you did have parasitical businessmen 646 00:43:07.260 --> 00:43:11.860 who grew wealthy through tariffs and through other benefits that came at the expense of 647 00:43:11.860 --> 00:43:15.740 their fellow Americans, but those aren't the people we should salute. 648 00:43:15.740 --> 00:43:22.300 The fact that Andrew Carnegie almost single-handedly could take the price of steel rails and lower 649 00:43:22.300 --> 00:43:28.900 them from like $160 a ton to $17 a ton, that reverberates through the whole economy. 650 00:43:28.900 --> 00:43:33.980 production process now becomes cheaper. Now it becomes possible for everybody's real income 651 00:43:33.980 --> 00:43:40.080 to increase. Or the efficiency of Carnegie, 4,000 people at his homestead plant could 652 00:43:40.080 --> 00:43:45.660 produce more steel than the 15,000 workers at the Krupp Steel Works in Germany, which 653 00:43:45.660 --> 00:43:50.360 was Europe's most renowned facility in the late 19th century. John D. Rockefeller brings 654 00:43:50.360 --> 00:43:58.200 the price of kerosene down from $1 a gallon to 10 cents a gallon. James J. Hill, who is 655 00:43:58.200 --> 00:44:03.060 was in charge of the Great Northern Railroad from St. Paul to Seattle, made money and 656 00:44:03.060 --> 00:44:06.120 prospered with no government subsidies at all. 657 00:44:06.120 --> 00:44:11.080 And in the panic of 1893 when a lot of railroads went bankrupt, he turned to profit and did 658 00:44:11.080 --> 00:44:15.040 very well and fares were decreasing on his line. 659 00:44:15.040 --> 00:44:22.220 Cornelius Vanderbilt, when he helped to defy New York steamboat monopoly, well he was able 660 00:44:22.220 --> 00:44:27.000 to go around the monopolist for like a quarter of the price and then later when the monopoly 661 00:44:27.000 --> 00:44:32.520 was lifted, he was able to transport people from one place to another around the New York 662 00:44:32.520 --> 00:44:38.000 area for not three dollars, but ten cents. And then later the ten cents he got rid of 663 00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:42.840 and just figured he'd make his money selling food aboard the ship. And then later, Edward 664 00:44:42.840 --> 00:44:47.600 Collins in the 1850s got a government subsidy for his steamship business to provide mail 665 00:44:47.600 --> 00:44:54.960 delivery across the Atlantic, $858,000 a year. Vanderbilt entered that field in 1855. He 666 00:44:54.960 --> 00:45:00.860 He outperformed Collins in passenger travel and mail delivery with no subsidy at all. 667 00:45:00.860 --> 00:45:04.620 Collins' subsidy was finally done away with and he eventually went bankrupt. 668 00:45:04.620 --> 00:45:10.340 But Vanderbilt consistently delivered mail and passengers to California for a quarter 669 00:45:10.340 --> 00:45:17.260 of the cost that protected subsidized institutions did, and he defeated them all. 670 00:45:17.260 --> 00:45:21.980 Now I don't see why I'm supposed to despise people like this who are obviously benefactors 671 00:45:21.980 --> 00:45:22.980 of mankind. 672 00:45:22.980 --> 00:45:28.660 and my whole life will never contribute a tiny fraction to the material well-being of my fellow man 673 00:45:28.660 --> 00:45:32.020 of what these people did. Now I hope that intellectually I might contribute something 674 00:45:32.020 --> 00:45:36.500 and you can't, these are incommensurable things so who knows what's worth more or whatever. Maybe 675 00:45:36.500 --> 00:45:40.820 you'll find that my books are worth more than heating your home more inexpensively but I'm a 676 00:45:40.820 --> 00:45:50.260 little dubious about that. Alright now finally I'll just conclude with this. I like to say we at the 677 00:45:50.260 --> 00:45:52.700 at the Mises Institute because I was there for four years 678 00:45:52.700 --> 00:45:57.700 as a resident scholar and I have never been more proud 679 00:45:58.220 --> 00:46:01.300 to be associated with an organization in my life 680 00:46:01.300 --> 00:46:04.260 because here we are at a time when above all 681 00:46:04.260 --> 00:46:06.580 we should be understanding how the market works. 682 00:46:06.580 --> 00:46:10.140 We see more attacks on it, more unfounded attacks 683 00:46:10.140 --> 00:46:13.980 than we have seen, I don't know, maybe in 30, 40 years. 684 00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:16.700 And the Institute has been, and I don't mean to disparage 685 00:46:16.700 --> 00:46:18.980 other institutions that have done perfectly good work, 686 00:46:18.980 --> 00:46:20.420 That's not my purpose here. 687 00:46:20.420 --> 00:46:23.260 But the institute, number one, is extremely good 688 00:46:23.260 --> 00:46:25.180 in how it spends money. 689 00:46:25.180 --> 00:46:27.500 I mean, not a penny is wasted. 690 00:46:27.500 --> 00:46:28.860 You don't have to worry about, oh, well, you know, 691 00:46:28.860 --> 00:46:31.460 they're all gonna go on fancy vacations if I donate money. 692 00:46:31.460 --> 00:46:33.400 It's very hard for nonprofits to be very good 693 00:46:33.400 --> 00:46:36.060 about watching their dollars, but boy, do they, 694 00:46:36.060 --> 00:46:38.800 at the institute, they're very careful with donor money. 695 00:46:38.800 --> 00:46:42.280 They're also fearless, and it's the Mises Institute 696 00:46:42.280 --> 00:46:45.740 that I owe my own intellectual trajectory to. 697 00:46:45.740 --> 00:46:48.580 I went to that Mises University program in 1993 698 00:46:48.580 --> 00:46:52.300 that was made possible by donors like yourselves. 699 00:46:52.300 --> 00:46:54.860 And that was where I got to meet Murray Rothbard, 700 00:46:54.860 --> 00:46:58.340 and I got to meet and talk with him about four or five times 701 00:46:58.340 --> 00:47:01.020 over those couple of years. 702 00:47:01.020 --> 00:47:03.900 And suddenly I became just a committed Austrian. 703 00:47:03.900 --> 00:47:06.340 And I went through a few intellectual phases here and there, 704 00:47:06.340 --> 00:47:08.020 but basically I stayed an Austrian, 705 00:47:08.020 --> 00:47:10.180 and now I've got to the point where in 2009, 706 00:47:10.180 --> 00:47:12.500 with the financial crisis, I thought, 707 00:47:12.500 --> 00:47:14.580 somebody better write an Austrian look 708 00:47:14.580 --> 00:47:17.020 at what just happened to the economy. 709 00:47:17.020 --> 00:47:19.140 And so I did it, I did it very quickly. 710 00:47:19.140 --> 00:47:19.980 We got it out there. 711 00:47:19.980 --> 00:47:21.540 It was a New York Times bestseller 712 00:47:21.540 --> 00:47:25.260 because a lot of people responded to the message in it. 713 00:47:25.260 --> 00:47:27.500 But how was I able to do that, to turn that around, 714 00:47:27.500 --> 00:47:30.500 to have that book be the first book off the presses 715 00:47:30.500 --> 00:47:32.400 about the financial crisis and the bailouts? 716 00:47:32.400 --> 00:47:33.580 How was that possible? 717 00:47:33.580 --> 00:47:35.780 Because of the training the Mises Institute had given me, 718 00:47:35.780 --> 00:47:37.620 because of the books that they had given me, 719 00:47:37.620 --> 00:47:39.460 the professors they had put me in touch with, 720 00:47:39.460 --> 00:47:42.500 the studying that they had encouraged me to do 721 00:47:42.500 --> 00:47:45.060 made this opportunity possible for me. 722 00:47:45.060 --> 00:47:47.860 and it's made possible my whole life. 723 00:47:47.860 --> 00:47:49.140 I get to go around the country 724 00:47:49.140 --> 00:47:50.860 and talk to people about this stuff 725 00:47:50.860 --> 00:47:52.260 and I'm hearing all the time 726 00:47:52.260 --> 00:47:54.460 about how the Mises Institute changed the way 727 00:47:54.460 --> 00:47:55.900 I think about things. 728 00:47:55.900 --> 00:47:57.660 And as I say, here we are at a time 729 00:47:57.660 --> 00:48:00.480 when the greatest benefactor, materially speaking, 730 00:48:00.480 --> 00:48:03.020 the world has ever seen, is under greater attack 731 00:48:03.020 --> 00:48:05.700 than it's been in the lifetimes of many of us. 732 00:48:05.700 --> 00:48:10.020 And the attacks are so unfounded and so unfair 733 00:48:10.020 --> 00:48:13.020 and so frankly deranged, made by people 734 00:48:13.020 --> 00:48:16.380 who wouldn't even have the leisure time to make these arguments 735 00:48:16.380 --> 00:48:18.940 had it not been for the pampering of them 736 00:48:18.940 --> 00:48:20.420 that the market provides. 737 00:48:20.420 --> 00:48:30.740 It is our responsibility, one person at a time, to change all this. 738 00:48:30.740 --> 00:48:34.540 I set up a little page that links to a lot of Mises' resources, 739 00:48:34.540 --> 00:48:39.260 learnaustrianeconomics.com, so that you can, at your leisure, 740 00:48:39.260 --> 00:48:42.420 know what would be best to read, what you can listen to in your car, 741 00:48:42.420 --> 00:48:46.140 and whatever, but ladies and gentlemen, together, 742 00:48:46.140 --> 00:48:50.180 we are on the cusp of an intellectual revolution 743 00:48:50.180 --> 00:48:52.780 because when you see that somebody like Ron Paul, 744 00:48:52.780 --> 00:48:56.020 the personification in politics of Austrian economics 745 00:48:56.020 --> 00:48:59.340 is getting nearly half the youth vote 746 00:48:59.340 --> 00:49:02.580 in Iowa and New Hampshire and this is just going on and on, 747 00:49:02.580 --> 00:49:05.400 that means these ideas are the future. 748 00:49:05.400 --> 00:49:08.500 But unlike the communists who believe that history moves 749 00:49:08.500 --> 00:49:11.060 according to inevitable historical laws 750 00:49:11.060 --> 00:49:13.300 and you can just sit back and watch it. 751 00:49:13.300 --> 00:49:16.700 Well, we believe that it couldn't hurt to give history 752 00:49:16.700 --> 00:49:19.100 a little bit of a push at a time like this 753 00:49:19.100 --> 00:49:22.420 when you got all these kids thirsting for knowledge. 754 00:49:22.420 --> 00:49:26.500 Please join and support the Mises Institute generously 755 00:49:26.500 --> 00:49:29.480 to give them the knowledge and the tools 756 00:49:29.480 --> 00:49:31.540 these kids are craving. 757 00:49:31.540 --> 00:49:32.820 Thank you very much. 758 00:49:32.820 --> 00:49:34.820 Thank you very much.