Walter Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar, endowed chair in economics at Loyola
University. Of course, he's a scholar at the Mises Institute and the Hoover Institute, author
of Defending the Undefendable, Privatization of Roads and Highways, which we have here,
Labor Economics with Free Market Perspective, which is on sale out front employing the undefendable.
And it goes on and on and on, as you've heard, he's the author of thousands of articles,
who knows how many refereed articles, this man has been nothing but a machine of production
since he took up this cause many, many years ago.
And I think he said numerous times, and hopefully talks about it in his talk, that he had a
The man who very much inspired him and showed him the way, a guy named Murray Rothbard.
And I am so pleased to be awarding this award tonight because I think Murray looks down
upon both of us right now with a big smile on his face and says, that a boy to Walter
and myself.
And anybody who's been to Mises University will know that after a grueling day of classes
from 8 in the morning till 8 at night, probably somewhere around 9 o'clock, somewhere either
in the bookstore or somewhere in the building, you're gonna see a covey of people, a circle
School of People, and you're going to know who's, and these people are students, still
there, very hungry for knowledge, plenty of questions, and you absolutely know who's in
the middle of that circle, and it's the man to my right, Walter Block. And he has taken
up a tradition, I think, that Murray started, that as long as there were questions, as long
As long as there were students to be asking those questions, he was there to answer them.
I've called him many times the Pied Piper of Austrian economics. I've called him the
Father Flanagan of Austrian economics because he tends to get a very diverse group that
you just saw follow him around to pursue economics as a profession. And there is really no one
There is no one else in our movement who has done this like Walter Block.
There is no one who has produced what is now a thousand points of light, Austrian lights,
like Walter Block has, and he has done it the old-fashioned way.
There is probably no one other than Murray Rothbard who was more low-tech than Walter
Walter Block. But one person at a time that he influenced has turned into dozens, has
turned into hundreds, and now those hundreds teach thousands. And those thousands have
technology that who knows, they are going to change the world. This is a guy who's
changed the world. I agree with Dan D'Amico. Walter Block has set the standard for what
The Gary G. Schlarbom Award should be going forward.
And it is my pleasure, with the help of Deanna Forbush, my wife, Pat Sajak has Vanna, I
have Deanna, to award Walter Block the 2011 Gary G. Schlarbom Award.
This medal is as heavy as a manhole cover. So believe me, Walter is in great shape.
always has been, just had a little work on his hip, I guess, but he's certainly very,
very deserving. Walter, take it away.
Thank you, thank you very much. It's an honor to get the Schlabarm Award. I just wanted
to mention the FAST company that I'm in with by winning this award. Otto von Hopsburg,
1999, Ralph Reiko, 2000, Anthony Flew, 2001, Bettina Biengraves, 2002, Ron Paul, 2003,
Hans Sennholz, 2004, William Peterson, confidant of Mises, 2005, Hans Hoppe, 2006, Robert Higgs,
my buddy down here, 2007, Pascal Salon, 2008, Jesus Huerta de Soto, 2009, Jim Rogers, 2010,
And I'm very, very happy and delighted to be part of this august company.
To give a retrospective talk as opposed to a substantive talk, you have to have accomplished
something.
And the way we tell whether you've accomplished something or not, modern day, is, is there
a t-shirt in your honor?
And I'm happy to say that there's not only one t-shirt, but two t-shirts in my honor.
The first one is Old Guy's Rule. That was meant for me. The other is my first book in
1976, which is still selling, so go out and buy some. Not only you have to have something
In order to be accomplished, you have to be old. And I'm now old. I just turned 70. I used to be the Enfant terrible. I don't know what happened. I'm an old guy. I get on a plane and these young guys that want to put my luggage up on the top of the thing, and I feel like smacking them, but they're way bigger and stronger than me, so I better not. I'm trying to put groceries in the car and they try to help me. It's sort of like I'm an old doffer or something. It's just horrible. I can't even pick stuff off the floor. The floor has gotten lower.
every year. And this is before my hip operation. Now, you know, I can just sort of wave at the floor. It's just horrible.
Not only am I getting old physically, but I'm, well, I was going to say I'm getting old mentally, but I think I've always been old mentally, even when I was young.
I sort of have this intellectual solipsism or incest or something weird, like I'll write a lot of stuff and I'll forget what I wrote, and I'll start reading it, and I'll forget that I wrote it.
I've had two experiences that I have to share with you.
One is this guy, Brooks, who criticized me on Coase and Demsets, and I wrote a rejoinder.
And then six months later, I forgot that I wrote that rejoinder, and I wrote another rejoinder.
That's amazing. And then I wrote two book reviews of William Easterly's book, White Man's Burden.
And I didn't realize that I'd written one before. I wouldn't write two of them if I'd known.
And those are the only two I'm aware of. I mean, there might be others. I don't know.
But I'd better not keep continuing with my four balls, otherwise they'll take this award away from me.
They'll say, what? What a maniac. You know, give us back that award.
Award. So, I'm going to stop right now on that. I want to give three topics. I've been assigned a half hour, so I'm going to try to do 10 minutes each. I haven't given the speech, so I don't know how it'll work out, but let me try. I want to give my personal story. I want to talk a little bit about me and libertarianism, and then a little bit about me and Austrian economics. I justify the first on the grounds that being old, I actually
I've actually touched hands or shook hands with people like Mises, Rothbard, Rand, Friedman, Hayek.
I once played chess with Hayek. I've got a picture of me playing chess with Hayek.
Hutt, people like that. So if you come up and shake my hand, I can channel these people for you.
You know, you shake my hand, you're shaking Mises' hand. I haven't washed my hand. No, I've washed my hand since then.
Murray Rothbard has been, for me, the inspiration, and I've got a lot of similarities with Murray.
We're both short, fat Jews from New York City. We both married Christian girls. Murray Betts,
say hello. There's my wife. We both had PhDs from Columbia University in economics. We
both had trouble with Arthur Burns there. Murray's trouble with Arthur Burns was Arthur
My problem with him is I had to pass a macro prelim and he was teaching and all he was talking about is his days with Nixon, so I never learned macro.
We both have silly senses of humor. We're both Austro-libertarians and co-capitalists.
We both publish a lot. Now, I won't compare my publications with Murray in terms of quality,
but in terms of quantity, I'm getting close because I do publish a lot.
Usually, in my early career, I would keep track of how many pages I published in a day,
and if I did five a day, that is double-spaced typewritten pages of 300 words or 1,500 words
I did 23 pages. It took me 8 in the morning until 2 in the morning. I called up Murray and said,
How many pages do you do? Murray goes, Who keeps track of a thing like that?
Doug was kind enough to call me various things about the movement. I'm also the Jewish mother of the movement.
And as Jewish mother, I'm a great whiner, and I have threats. I can throw good filter fish at you, or, you know, wine, stuff like that.
So I was very pestery with Murray. I said, Murray, I'm not getting off the phone until you tell me.
He's at eight pages an hour. Eight pages an hour. I mean, my whole, my biggest day of work was like three hours of his.
Now, a professional typist could type faster than that, but Murray is creating stuff right out of the top of his head at that rate.
I think I'm the only person who have ever co-authored anything with Murray. I've co-authored a lot of stuff, and of course I'm the most proud that I've co-authored stuff with him.
I also channel him in some weird ways. He stole a lot of my ideas. It's true, he published them 20 years before I even thought of them, but still he stole my ideas.
Because I thought of them independently and then I go read about him saying it.
Here's something very interesting.
I wrote a review essay of the book by Eleanor Ostrom, who just won the Nobel Prize governing the Commons.
And what I said was, this is an evil book.
I use that pejorative advisedly.
He's also a basically mistaken volume, but we'll get to that in a moment.
Why is it a wicked publication, a description rarely applied to a dry term in economics?
That's my opening statement on the Ostrom book.
Here is Murray on Hayek's Constitution of Liberty as written by Roberta Madugno in these
secret letters that just came out.
And I swear I wrote my thing on Ostrom before I read this thing in Madugno.
Here's Murray on Hayek.
F.A. Hayek's Constitution of Liberty is surprisingly and distressingly an extremely bad and I would
I would even say, evil book.
Who writes like that?
I don't know of anyone else, except me and Murray.
We're sort of, I don't know, weirdly connected.
Another motto I've adopted from Murray is, hatred is my muse.
And what Murray would mean like that, he'd say he'd read something and say,
I'm going to get this if it takes me the rest of my life.
I'm not going to let that stand without a rejoinder.
And a lot of my writing is based on hatred.
Another parallel, you know, I've written a book, Defending the Undefendable, where I have a whole bunch of articles defending people who are a little off the beaten track, to say the least, but they're compatible with a non-aggression axiom and they're reviled or illegal.
Well, I just read in Murray, the demagogue. The demagogue is hero. Now, I've been thinking
about that, but he stole that from me. He wrote it many years ago, but the demagogue
is hero. It's just so defending the undefendable-ish, and he beat me to it again. Murray had great
patience with me. When I first met him, and I'll tell you how I got to him in a second,
When I first met him, he converted me to anarchism in about five minutes.
Austrianism took a little longer, and I saw a picture of Mises on his wall, and I said,
Murray, how can you have a picture of Mises on his wall?
He's not an anarchist.
He believes in government opera or something.
And Murray just smiled very patiently at me, whereas a lot of people would have kicked
me out of their apartment or something, you know, saying, why do you have a picture of
Mises?
Isn't that a little pushy?
But you know, we Jewish mothers, we're pushy.
I also had some interaction with Mises. I attended Mises' last seminar at NYU, because Murray took a whole bunch of us living room crowd people there, and Mises was very elderly then, and he could hardly hear, and Percy Graves had to translate both ways, but it was still an honor and a pleasure to be in the same room with Ludwig von Mises. I regard Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard as two of the greatest economists that ever lived, ever wrote.
Let me tell you about Ayn Rand. I was a pinko, commie Jew in Brooklyn, which is sort of redundancy because everyone I knew was like that.
The big question in my family was, well, do you actually carry a commie card or are you just a fellow traveler?
That was sort of the level of discourse in my family.
I was at Brooklyn College and I heard Ayn Rand is coming to lecture and I said, oh, I'm going to boo her and hiss her because she's evil.
She believes in free enterprise and, you know, there'll be dead babies in the street and stuff like that.
And so I came and I listened to her and I booed lustily and there must have been about 3,000 of us in the audience.
And afterward the Ayn Rand Study Society or whoever was the host and invited her said,
well, there's going to be a luncheon in her honor and anyone can come to the luncheon even if you disagree.
And I haven't had enough of booing and hissing at her and I really wanted to smash her.
So I came to the lunch and there was this long, long table, maybe 50 people on a side, and there was Ayn Rand sitting over there, and Nathaniel Brannon, and Alan Greenspan, and a few others of her at Coterie, and I was relegated to the foot of the table over here, and I turned to my neighbor and I said, what is this capitalist crap, you know, socialism is the way to go, and he says, well you know, I don't really know about that, but the people who do are over there. So I was a chutzpahnik in those days, still am, and I stuck my head between Ayn Rand's and Nathan's, and I said,
And he said, you know, there's a socialist here who wants to debate someone on socialism and capitalism.
And they said, who was that? And I said, me. I was a senior in college. I was, you know, 21 and, you know, filling my oats.
And Brandon was very generous. He said, I'll come to the other end of the table and I'll talk to you during lunch on two conditions.
One, you don't allow this conversation to lapse and be the end of it, but we keep going until we settle this.
And two, you read two books that I'll recommend to you.
Well, the two books were Atlas Shrugged and Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.
And I read that Atlas Shrugged. It took me one week and I couldn't put it down.
It's 1,100 pages of small type. It just sort of blew me away.
And I read Hazlitt and I went to Ayn Rand's apartment several times and I was sort of a classical liberal.
I was a libertarian, not an anarchist, but a classical liberal.
The problem with the Rand, it was really cultish.
You couldn't, you know, the typical question that you could ask after the event was,
well, Miss Rand, on page 456 you said this, could you please expound?
Well, you know, that's really a softball. You can't say, well, you said over here on page 727,
here on page 32, and they're contradictory. How do you account for that?
I always encourage my students to argue with me, but she didn't.
And, you know, if you asked her a tough question, she would just kick you out.
So it wasn't really very nice. It wasn't academic. It wasn't intellectual. It was a little cultish.
But these were the only people I knew that were free enterprises. And then I met Larry Moss, who was a student at Columbia with me.
And he said, you've got to meet this guy, Murray Rothbard. He's an anarchist. And I said, oh, an anarchist? That's crazy. I don't want to meet Murray Rothbard.
But somehow Larry Moss and Jerry Wallow, his roommate, prevailed upon me to go meet Murray, and then, as I said, in about five minutes, he converted me.
You know, I would say, well, how can we have armies, courts and police privately? He said, well, how about the post office?
And the post office will have competition, the usual argument, and that was it. I was an anarchist.
It took me a lot longer to become an Austrian because I had a vested interest. I was now getting my PhD in mainstream economics.
and, you know, you ask those guys about Austrianism and they think that's a cult.
So I had a hard time getting my hands around the idea of monopoly and a few other things,
and certainly praxeological stuff.
But finally I did become an Austrian.
I want to mention another person in addition to Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises,
on Rand, who've affected my persona, my abilities, my career, and that's my buddy Bill Barnett.
He mentioned that we have offices next door to each other, and a lot of times we'll pound
on the door, which is a signal for me to go scurrying into his office to see what he wants.
I got to Loyola University in 2001, and I just looked it up, and I had 135 publications
and Referee Journals, and now I have 395, so I published 260 in the last ten years,
an average of 26 each, each year. I'm sort of a workaholic. Bill had about 10 articles
or maybe five or eight or something like that before I came, and now he's got about 60,
so he did 50 in the interim, roughly. These are rough numbers. And a lot of people think,
well, he never published squat before I got there, now he publishes a lot, a lot in co-authorship
with me and therefore he is riding on my coattails. Well, the very opposite is the truth. He's
been my mentor. I've learned more from him than I've learned from anyone else with the
exception of Mises and Rothbard, especially in macroeconomics and it's been a delirious
pleasure for me to be part of Loyola University mainly because of Bill. I have two other good
colleagues, Dan is one of them, John Levin is another and a few other good people, but
Without Bill, it wouldn't be the same. There was a week where we didn't have lunch. We
have lunch every day, pretty much. And it was, the wind sort of fell out of the balloon
a little bit. So I think that you've heard Bill before. You can see his knowledge of
what's going on with Austrian economics. He's been my tutor, my mentor, and I'm deliriously
happy with him.
Oh, another thing in addition to being the Jewish mother of the movement, I'm also known
I'm not a full anarchist. I've agreed that the government has got to step in. There is one market failure, and that is that not everyone has read Atlas Shrug, Man Economy and State, and Human Action.
And the sole function of the government is to coerce everyone to read those three books. But apart from that, I'm an anarchist. So you see, I'm really moderate. I'm not an extremist. I'm a moderate anarchist.
Okay, I think I've given you a little bit of my personal stuff, and I said I would do that for the first third, and now I want to talk very briefly about my connection with libertarianism, and then a little bit about my connection with Austrianism.
In libertarianism, I think my most famous book is Defending the Undefendable.
Let me tell you how I came to write that. What happened was I was writing my PhD dissertation on rent control for Gary Becker.
He was my thesis advisor and I hated it. I absolutely hated it because all it was was math and stat and econometrics and stuff like that.
And the whole thing was sort of neoclassical because what I'm supposed to show is that rent control screws up housing.
And I had an econometric equation model and most of the time I got the right signs
and most of the time I got significant t-values and all was well.
But every once in a while I'd get the wrong sign, and every once in a while the wrong sign would be statistically significant.
And I'd show it to Gary Becker, and you'd think if he were consistent with his own neoclassical view, he would say,
wow, I've got this genius block who's going to change everything we know about the rent control.
Instead he said, block you moron, go out and do it again until you get it right.
So what's testing what? Is the theory testing the econometrics or is the econometrics testing the theory?
So the whole experience was, if anything, worse than my experience with Arthur Burns.
But I had to get the dissertation because my alternative was to go be shot out in Vietnam or shoot people,
and I didn't want to do that, so I was churning it away.
But I had to come up with a reward system. So every time I did one more equation or I found one more thing,
And one more thing, I would reward myself with a whole day to do anything I wanted.
And what would I do in a day?
I'd write about what a great guy the pimp was or what a great guy the drug pusher was
or something like that or how blackmailers really should be legalized and the blackmailer
is a great guy.
And at the end of the dissertation, I had like 35 of these essays and I put them together
in a book and that was the Defending the Undefendable, so that was my reward for getting through
with a PhD. Murray wrote one sentence about blackmail and man economy and state for which
he was severely excoriated by reviewers. I have written a lot more, not more wisely, but
a lot more. I must have written maybe 35 journal articles on why blackmail is great and why
everyone who says blackmail is bad is wrong, and I'm coming out with a book of all these
So that's one of my things in libertarianism. Another is on abortion and evictionism, pro-life, pro-choice.
What I'm trying to say is that the usual view is this pro-life and pro-choice, but the true libertarian view is a third view.
It's a completely distinct view and it's called evictionism. I believe that life starts with the fertilized egg,
but the unwanted fetus is a trespasser because the mother owns the womb. It's a little complicated.
This is complicated, you have to get into it. If you're interested, email me and I'll give you some stuff on that.
By the way, I'm associated with very good colleagues here, John Lavendis, Bill Barnett, Dan D'Amico,
and talk about creation of students. When I was at Holy Cross, I was the only one,
and the other econ professors would tell the students not to take my courses.
Here, we're a team, and I can produce a lot more with three colleagues who are sympathetic to me than with others who are not.
Of course, the people over in sociology tell their students not to take any economics, but that's a whole different question.
The point I'm getting at is we do have seminars on Friday afternoon, twice a month. We have seminars on Thursday lunches.
So if you want to be on my list of people to notify of events, libertarian events that occur, like the Mises Institute coming here or Ron Paul, email me and I'll put you on my email list and I will notify you of upcoming events.
Another thing I did was punishment theory. Two teeth for a tooth plus cost of capture and scaring. My view there. We're very draconian. We don't like crime.
So suppose I steal your TV. Well, the first thing to do is I've got to give you your TV back.
And if I broke it, I have to give you an equivalent amount of money.
But if all I do is give it back, well, that's hardly a utilitarian punishment, I have to give you one of mine.
I have to give you my TV. But even there, that's not very draconian.
And if what I did after I stole your TV is I turned myself into the police and I said,
Hey, sorry, I stole a TV. It was a moment of weakness. Here I am. Do with me what the law requires.
Well, then there are no costs of capture.
But if I worsen my crime by not only stealing your TV but then trying to hide,
well, then anyone who's been deputized to look for me, I've got to pay them too.
But when I stole your TV, I scared you.
Your feeling for private property is lessened.
So we've got to scare me.
And how are we going to scare me? Go boo or something like that? No.
You make me play Russian roulette with the number of bullets in a number of chambers
proportionate to how badly I scared you, the average man.
I mean, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't going to be too scared because he's macho,
but the average guy.
So this is a very draconian thing.
It's been very controversial among libertarians, but what the heck?
I sort of like controversy.
I don't know if you got that yet, but I do.
Another one is voluntary slavery.
My child has a dread disease. It will cost five million to cure him. I don't have five
million, but I love him. Whereas Doug over here has long wanted me to be his slave and
he's very rich, so Doug pays me five million. I give the five million to the doctors and
now I become Doug's slave. Is this justified in libertarian law? Well, the only other person
that I've found who agreed with me is Robert Nozick, which is sort of wonky because he's
not really, I'm not a big fan of his. Every other libertarian disagrees, including Murray
Murray Rothbard, but that's my view, and all I can say is, you know, I've got a paper trail on this, and if you don't like it, get off your rear end and write something about it. You know, let's get it on. Not physically, but that's the way you get to the truth. You write something, somebody else writes something else. I'm involved with Andy Young in an article or two or three, I forget how many, where we're disputing a real business cycle and other things, and that's the way you get closer to the truth. You never get fully there, but you move in that direction.
So, my open invitation is to those who disagree, I've got a paper trail, don't just say I'm wrong, write something about it, write a rejoinder.
I'm forever writing criticism to people like Coase and Friedman and Buchanan and Hayek, and Mises and Rothbard.
We're not a cult, we're allowed to criticize each other.
That's the academic way of trying to get that one inch closer to the truth.
Other areas that I've contributed a little bit to, libertarianism or on immigration.
I don't usually attack lefties, it's sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, so I usually go for other libertarians or conservatives.
Okay, that's my bit on libertarianism. I now want to do a little bit of substance with you.
I realize it's late in the day, but the hell with it. We're going to kick some butt here.
These interest rate tables? Everyone got one? If you don't have one, I've got a few extras, and there's going to be a quiz after this.
You're not going to be allowed out of the room unless you answer these correctly, so you better have one.
Are there any people that don't have one? I've got extras here. No? Everyone's got one?
Okay, so let's get to it. I have made some contributions to Austrian economics, mostly as Bill Barnett's junior partner.
We've really ripped in Roger Garrison and Hayek on his triangle. Roger had a very interesting response when I asked him about it.
He said, triangles yesterday, triangles today, triangles tomorrow, triangles forever.
He's from Alabama, so you can understand why he would say that.
also on fractional reserve banking, borrowing, short lending, long, optimal amount of currency.
These are some other articles that I've done with Bill Barnett.
Okay, on to the interest rate tables and I think this is very complementary,
building on what Joe Salerno said. Joe Salerno said there was a misallocation
and I'm going to try to illustrate Austrian business cycle theory misallocation of resources based on interest rate tables.
It's sort of a way of putting numbers on it, because not only do we Austrians have numbers on the pages for the page numbers, but we actually do look at numbers.
We do look at econometrics. It's just we have a different interpretation. We say that econometrics illustrates, or not, economic law. It doesn't test economic law. Economic law comes first.
Okay, the top thing on the compound interest multiplier, that's if you take a dollar and
you put it in the bank and you leave it for any number of years at various rates of interest,
how much will you have at the end of the time period?
So for example, if you leave a dollar in the bank for four years at 4% interest rate, you
will have how much at the end of the time period?
$1.17, everyone with me?
If you leave money in the bank at 8% for 30 years, you'll have $10.06.
If you leave $10 in the bank for 2 years at 2%, you'll have not $1.04 but $10.40 because
you move a decimal point over.
Okay, that's the easy one.
That's just the ordinary stuff that little kids are told when they're 5 years old about
interest rate tables and you see the lights perk up in their eye about greed and, you
The second part is present discounted value. What's present discounted value? Present discounted value is the value that you place now on money receivable in the future.
In order to make things simpler, I'm going to assume that you get the money for sure and that there's no inflation, just to abstract from those problems.
So, what would be the profit maximizing bid for a dollar receivable in 10 years at 10% interest?
The right answer is minus infinity, namely, I have to pay you an infinite amount of money to take this off my hands, right?
But, what would be the present discounted value of the thing where you'd make no profit?
In other words, I'm offering you in 10 years that I'll deliver you a dollar, and the interest rate is 10%.
If you bid this amount, you'll make no profit off the deal. And what's that amount? 38.6 cents. Everyone with me there?
You look in the 10-year column and the 10% column. Why is this?
Why is it that you'll make no profit if you did 38.6 cents for a dollar receivable in 10 years at 10% interest rate?
Because if you would have put 38.6 cents in the bank and leave it in the bank for 10 years at a 10% interest rate,
guess how much the bank would give you? A dollar. So that's present discounted value.
Let's take one more case. What's the present discounted value?
The value, namely the value right now of money receivable in three years at 3%, 91.5 cents. Yes, everyone? Okay. I want more enthusiasm. Yeah, yeah, right on. Okay, good. That's better.
That means that if you put 91.5 cents in the bank and leave it there for three years at 3%, they'll give you a dollar. So the value of the thing receivable in three years from now at 3% is 91.5.
Now that I've given you the preliminary, let me give you the Austrian take on the business cycle.
Suppose that the Fed, in its glory and in its wisdom, lowers the rate of interest from 5% to 3%.
The Fed lowers the rate of interest from 5% to 3%.
And let's think of an investment that has only a one-year duration.
Well, at 5%, if the interest rate were 5%, what would the value of a dollar receivable or an investment made now where the fruits of it would come through in a year, what would it be worth right now?
What is the present discounted value of a dollar receivable in a year at 5%? 95.2.
But we lower the rate of interest to 3% and now the value of it is 97 cents.
So by lowering the rate of interest, we've made an investment of one year worth 2% more than it was before, give or take, without rounding numbers, namely 97 is 2% more than 95 cents.
So there will be a slight misallocation of resources toward investment made for a one year duration.
Now come down with me to 40 years, what is the present discounted value of an investment that will come to fruition or bear fruit in 40 years at 5%?
14.2 cents, but now we lower the rate of interest to 3% and what's the value of it?
30.7 or 31 cents, roughly double?
So, if you have a slight teeny incentive to start investing more in short-term stuff,
you've got a gigantic, stupendous incentive to invest in a 40-year project, or in a 50-year
project, when it goes from 8 cents to 22 cents, which is almost triple. Do you see that?
So, what a lowering of the rate of interest. You see, the mainstream, when they think of a lowering of the rate of interest,
They don't realize that interest rates intermediate present and future money or investments.
So what happens is that you have, when you lower the rate of interest and they've lowered it to, I don't know, a couple of basis points,
they've lowered it practically down to zero and they're complaining that they can't go below zero.
What this means is that they've given an incentive to make long-range investments very heavy and very, very slightly for short-range investments, so is it any wonder that we have too many houses and too many cars?
Because it takes a long time to make a house and a car if you start with the mining of the stuff and the making of the bricks and the pipes for the house and all sorts of stuff.
and all sorts of stuff. Now, yes, there is the CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, and there's Fannie, and there's Freddie, and there's HUD, and they also pushed us toward too much housing. I don't deny that. But everyone knows that, or even a mainstream economist would realize that. But it's only the Austrians that see that this, too, is another cause pushing us in the direction of heavy investment. That's the misallocation or the boom. I think it was Joe Salerno who said that, I forget who it was, Tom,
In the recession, Bob Higgs was saying that the recession is a cleansing of these misallocation, misallocative investments.
Okay, I've done a little of my personal story, I've done a little bit of libertarianism, I've done a little bit of Austrian economics.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the Schlabam Award. I am just delighted to be a winner of that award. Thank you.
Thank you very much.