WEBVTT NOTE Socialism: Utopia and Reality 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:22.000 Well, it's a great pleasure to be here, it's Mises Institute, it's my first lab in the United States and the institute is making such a great difference in thinking of young people using fantastic resources on the website of the institute as well. 2 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:29.720 Yes, I was listening to my kind of bizarre biography. I lived in Moscow, and at the end 3 00:00:29.720 --> 00:00:36.360 of my career there, I worked as one of economic advisors to the Soviet government. I wasn't 4 00:00:36.360 --> 00:00:41.360 the advisor. I wouldn't take the blame for what happened over there. Can you imagine? 5 00:00:41.360 --> 00:00:46.200 Eleven time zones, one-sixth of the world's surface, failed miserably. It was destroyed 6 00:00:46.200 --> 00:00:49.000 by ideas of this person. 7 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:54.920 So when we wrote this book, Franklin from Marx, it's kind of a little bit premature 8 00:00:54.920 --> 00:01:02.080 in the sense that today his ideas are still reading supreme in many capitals of the world 9 00:01:02.080 --> 00:01:05.400 and it looks like in Washington D.C. as well. 10 00:01:05.400 --> 00:01:13.920 So Marxism is a very sad corruption saying that the only lesson of history is that it 11 00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:23.320 does not teach us anything. And definitely, what is Marxism? And why I am referring to 12 00:01:23.320 --> 00:01:28.320 Socialism? Because what if we will look at it, because that's a lot of confusion, for 13 00:01:28.320 --> 00:01:33.840 example, among my students. What is Socialism? What is Communism? And many Socialists are 14 00:01:33.840 --> 00:01:39.040 presenting the case like Socialism is pretty good, it's Communism which is bad. It's Communism 15 00:01:39.040 --> 00:01:44.040 which made so many errors in the book of human history. 16 00:01:45.240 --> 00:01:50.240 But Karl Marx himself, he was a German philosopher. 17 00:01:53.960 --> 00:01:56.280 However, we don't know interestingly enough 18 00:01:56.280 --> 00:02:00.020 that even in Soviet Union, some of his writings 19 00:02:00.020 --> 00:02:02.380 were considered to be so horrific 20 00:02:02.380 --> 00:02:04.120 that they were kept on the lead. 21 00:02:04.120 --> 00:02:07.560 They were classified, they were in archives. 22 00:02:07.560 --> 00:02:25.560 There is another wonderful movie, I think Silver Circle is must to see, but there is another movie I would recommend you strongly, called Soviet Story, it's the best inoculation against socialism, The Soviet Story, you can either watch it on the internet or buy a DVD. 23 00:02:25.560 --> 00:02:41.560 And they recovered some of these archives. And Marx in 1848, writing in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, that's a newspaper he edited, he's writing that in Europe we have a lot of racial trash. 24 00:02:41.560 --> 00:02:54.560 He was the one who came up with this term first. And by racial trash in Europe he believed that racial trash would be Scottish islanders, would be Basques, would be Serbs and other Slavs. 25 00:02:54.560 --> 00:03:06.560 and other Slavs, and these people are so backward that they should be burned, as he wrote, in the fire of the revolutionary holocaust. 26 00:03:06.560 --> 00:03:14.560 So Marx came up with two ideas, one socialism and another communism. 27 00:03:14.560 --> 00:03:23.560 However, communism is a utopia which, according to Marx, would occur only 400 or 500 years from now. 28 00:03:23.560 --> 00:03:35.560 Socialism is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union, in the People's Republic of China, in Cuba, in North Korea, and in other oppressed countries. 29 00:03:35.560 --> 00:03:50.560 What is socialist revolution? According to Marx, we will go through Marx a little bit, the major goal of socialism is to eliminate private property. 30 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:58.560 So, private property was considered by Marx to be theft, to be a means of exploiting other men. 31 00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:05.560 So, the bourgeoisie will fight back. The owners of property will be fighting back. 32 00:04:05.560 --> 00:04:12.560 And so, because of that, it's inevitable that the blood should be spilled. 33 00:04:12.560 --> 00:04:20.560 A dictatorship of the proletariat, which would be established by this revolution, will follow to weed out remaining capitalist elements. 34 00:04:20.560 --> 00:04:24.560 That's kind of a great design. 35 00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:26.560 What is communism? 36 00:04:26.560 --> 00:04:33.560 Communism is, in four or five hundred years, there will be a classless society. 37 00:04:33.560 --> 00:04:35.560 There will be a classless society. 38 00:04:35.560 --> 00:04:37.560 People will choose everything. 39 00:04:37.560 --> 00:04:38.560 There will be no money. 40 00:04:38.560 --> 00:04:49.160 There will be huge warehouses like Costco, Sam's Clubs, but with no money, no cashiers, you just go and help yourself with anything you like, with anything you like. 41 00:04:49.160 --> 00:04:54.060 And you work for that. Again, you work selflessly, not for money, not for anything else. 42 00:04:54.060 --> 00:04:58.460 And you will never take more, you will never take more than you really need. 43 00:04:58.460 --> 00:05:04.360 So that's the utopia. That's, I think it's worth a reading. 44 00:05:04.360 --> 00:05:11.960 So I would say that it is nothing but secular religion. 45 00:05:11.960 --> 00:05:16.960 It's a religious faith because, look, this is heaven and earth, right? 46 00:05:16.960 --> 00:05:20.660 In communist society, nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, 47 00:05:20.660 --> 00:05:24.660 but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. 48 00:05:24.660 --> 00:05:28.560 To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rare cattle in the evening, 49 00:05:28.560 --> 00:05:34.060 criticize after dinner without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic. 50 00:05:34.060 --> 00:05:40.060 That would be this man of tomorrow, according to Karl Marx. 51 00:05:40.060 --> 00:05:44.060 And you can see why these ideas can be attractive. 52 00:05:44.060 --> 00:05:50.060 You can see why these ideas would be picked up, especially by intellectuals. 53 00:05:50.060 --> 00:05:55.060 Why intellectuals love socialism? Why intellectuals, so many intellectuals, are Marxists? 54 00:05:55.060 --> 00:06:03.060 Because it gives them a claim to power, that they know more, they are more educated than everybody else. 55 00:06:03.060 --> 00:06:14.060 And so they should run the world. They know better what should be done, who should live, who should die, and what kind of new men of tomorrow we will have. 56 00:06:16.060 --> 00:06:31.060 So his ideas were first implemented by Lenin. Vladimir Lenin was the founder of the first socialist state, the Soviet Union. 57 00:06:31.060 --> 00:06:40.060 Lenin was pretty unscrupulous. I'm working right now at the Library of Congress quite a lot on something called Volkogonov Archives. 58 00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:50.060 It's a very interesting kind of story of Dmitry Volkogonov, who was a full general of the Soviet Army and he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party. 59 00:06:50.060 --> 00:06:58.060 He was one of the most kind of visible propaganda people in the Soviet Union. When he would show up on TV, I would switch it off right away. 60 00:06:58.060 --> 00:07:02.220 in a way, because I just could not stand his lies. 61 00:07:02.220 --> 00:07:08.620 But interestingly enough, since 1980, he was secretly making copies of everything going 62 00:07:08.620 --> 00:07:09.620 through his desk. 63 00:07:09.620 --> 00:07:15.220 And today, there in the Library of Congress, when Soviet Union Talapsky became National 64 00:07:15.220 --> 00:07:21.220 Security Advisor to Yeltsin, approached the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, the U.S. Ambassador 65 00:07:21.220 --> 00:07:42.220 Well, what if we move all these archives, 46 huge boxes, huge boxes of secret correspondents of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and the US ambassador said, well, what if we move that to the CIA? 66 00:07:42.220 --> 00:07:54.220 and general documents, no CIA, Library of Congress, if CIA guys want to read that, let them get a reader's card and go there. 67 00:07:54.220 --> 00:08:00.220 And it's such a wealth of materials, nobody knows about it, it's not sorted even, it's kind of, I would randomly look at it, 68 00:08:00.220 --> 00:08:05.220 It is horrendous, horrific letters by Lenin. 69 00:08:05.220 --> 00:08:14.220 For example, Lenin received a letter from another party leader in the Southern Russia. 70 00:08:14.220 --> 00:08:20.220 In that letter, that party commissar is asking, 71 00:08:20.220 --> 00:08:25.220 Dear comrade Lenin, you sent us a memo that we should fight religion. 72 00:08:25.220 --> 00:08:27.220 How can we fight religion? 73 00:08:27.220 --> 00:08:44.220 And Menger is writing just on the bottom of the same page, Dear Comrade Imbecile, kill religious people, that's how, and post script, kill them the way that people will tremble 150 miles around. And they did, and they did. 74 00:08:44.220 --> 00:09:01.220 And the argument was very simple of Lenin, the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true, so we can see it's based on faith, it's based on faith, more than on anything else. 75 00:09:01.220 --> 00:09:11.220 That's another serial political killer, Leo Trotsky, he is all covered with blood and minced meat. 76 00:09:11.220 --> 00:09:24.220 This is the mega-murderer. Under his auspices, more people were killed than by almost every other dictator of the world combined. 77 00:09:26.220 --> 00:09:31.220 Funny enough, he looked like Borat in 1915. 78 00:09:31.220 --> 00:09:43.440 This is kind of a plump and joyful mass murderer Nikita Khrushchev. 79 00:09:43.440 --> 00:09:48.660 On his watch, seven million Ukrainians were starved to death in the dreadful winter of 80 00:09:48.660 --> 00:09:49.660 1932-1933. 81 00:09:49.660 --> 00:09:56.020 Seven million people, all the food was confiscated from them, and they were starved to death 82 00:09:56.020 --> 00:10:05.220 to the point that today Ukrainian people cannot still recover from that awful calamity. Khrushchev 83 00:10:05.220 --> 00:10:11.900 came to the United Nations, was banging his shoe on the podium saying, we will bury you, 84 00:10:11.900 --> 00:10:21.540 we will bury you. What he meant is that capitalism will be buried by socialism. Now his son, Sergey 85 00:10:21.540 --> 00:10:26.180 Sergei Khrushchev, defector to the United States and teaching in Brown University in 86 00:10:26.180 --> 00:10:27.180 Rhode Island. 87 00:10:27.180 --> 00:10:33.660 So his father probably is propelling in his coffin. 88 00:10:33.660 --> 00:10:38.380 Another kind of dictator, Leonid Brezhnev. 89 00:10:38.380 --> 00:10:41.540 Why am I showing you this person? 90 00:10:41.540 --> 00:10:48.540 Because interestingly enough, he was so old and frail that he couldn't, at the end of 91 00:10:48.540 --> 00:10:53.980 and then his term, he couldn't even walk or talk by himself. 92 00:10:53.980 --> 00:10:58.460 We call back in Soviet Union that period a reign of corpses, 93 00:10:58.460 --> 00:11:01.620 and a reign of corpses in Kremlin. 94 00:11:01.620 --> 00:11:04.100 And the joke was that every working day 95 00:11:04.100 --> 00:11:06.580 would begin resuscitation. 96 00:11:06.580 --> 00:11:09.860 So they would resuscitate him and he would prop him up. 97 00:11:09.860 --> 00:11:14.980 So he would be like a weekend with Bernie kind of character. 98 00:11:14.980 --> 00:11:30.980 I think McCain made the point that if Alan Greenstein would die, he would still prop him up and pretend that he is alive because he is such a great person, a great inflationist. 99 00:11:30.980 --> 00:11:50.380 Today, and today is, yes, the sad legacy of communism is, right, so what I want to talk 100 00:11:50.380 --> 00:11:57.060 right now about is that most people in the West kind of do not know about horrendous 101 00:11:57.060 --> 00:12:05.060 The first crimes committed under the name of socialism, that socialism inevitably leads to mass murder. 102 00:12:05.060 --> 00:12:11.060 That people who were the members of the first Soviet government were also very nice people. 103 00:12:11.060 --> 00:12:18.060 For example, Lenin could play piano, could speak seven languages, Trotsky would write poetry in French. 104 00:12:18.060 --> 00:12:26.060 But the logic of this utopia, the logic of that system, which was a system of public slavery, nothing else, 105 00:12:26.060 --> 00:12:36.060 That made them mass-murderers. Why would that be? Because socialism does not have any incentives to work, 106 00:12:36.060 --> 00:12:42.060 many incentives to do anything. So the only way to make people work is to shoot them. 107 00:12:42.060 --> 00:12:49.060 And they realized that in a very hard way in the 1920s, when Lenin was writing to Zerzhinsky, 108 00:12:49.060 --> 00:12:57.820 I was the first boss of Wechi Kai, that time it was KGB, today, and he wrote to him, Felix, 109 00:12:57.820 --> 00:13:02.680 I'm telling people what to do, they don't listen, what if we will take a couple of these 110 00:13:02.680 --> 00:13:06.020 absent-minded comrades and shoot them publicly? 111 00:13:06.020 --> 00:13:08.500 And they didn't, people began to listen. 112 00:13:08.500 --> 00:13:13.740 And so the only way to glue socialist system together is to shoot people and to shoot as 113 00:13:13.740 --> 00:13:14.740 many as you wish. 114 00:13:14.740 --> 00:13:21.180 In 1930s, when they had the highest rates of economic growth, they were shooting more 115 00:13:21.180 --> 00:13:28.420 people than anybody else in human history, 10-12,000 a day, 10-12,000 a day. 116 00:13:28.420 --> 00:13:37.540 In the Soviet Union itself, that was the first order of Lenin to kill members of Tsar's family. 117 00:13:37.540 --> 00:13:57.540 In the course of the Soviet history, 11 million children were murdered by the government. 118 00:13:57.540 --> 00:13:58.540 For what reason? 119 00:13:58.540 --> 00:14:04.140 Because Stalin used to say that apple doesn't fall far from the apple tree. 120 00:14:04.140 --> 00:14:11.020 So if you kill a father or kill a mother, then probably children would not like you. 121 00:14:11.020 --> 00:14:18.220 And so his point is, why should we reform these people, why it's easy to make new ones? 122 00:14:18.220 --> 00:14:19.220 Can you imagine? 123 00:14:19.220 --> 00:14:21.940 It's kind of a horrific idea. 124 00:14:21.940 --> 00:14:29.180 And according to all kinds of estimates, according to all kinds of estimates, they murdered in 125 00:14:29.180 --> 00:14:35.180 in the Soviet Union, anywhere from 43 to 60 million people, 43 to 60 million people. 126 00:14:35.180 --> 00:14:38.180 Not many people in the West are aware of that. 127 00:14:38.180 --> 00:14:42.180 And I don't care even whether it's 43 or 60. 128 00:14:42.180 --> 00:14:45.180 Both numbers are completely horrific. 129 00:14:45.180 --> 00:14:50.180 Stalin used to say, death of one person is a tragedy. 130 00:14:50.180 --> 00:14:53.180 Death of millions is just statistics. 131 00:14:53.180 --> 00:14:56.180 It's just statistics. He used to solve all problems. 132 00:14:56.180 --> 00:15:06.180 He would say, every problem has a man lurking behind it. No man, no problem. So that would be the death sentence. 133 00:15:06.180 --> 00:15:21.180 Ludwig von Mises, he talked about and wrote about two patterns of socialism. One is the Russian pattern. 134 00:15:21.180 --> 00:15:30.180 It's purely bureaucratic. That means that the whole country is run like one huge post office. 135 00:15:30.180 --> 00:15:38.180 So it's something called command economy. It's not even an economic system. It's a simple system of management. 136 00:15:38.180 --> 00:15:46.180 People are being told what to do, and if they don't, they're being shot. They're shot, being sent to Siberia. 137 00:15:46.180 --> 00:15:53.180 So this is one system. Another system is, second system is German system. 138 00:15:53.180 --> 00:15:58.180 And the Nazism, another form of socialism is National Socialism. 139 00:15:58.180 --> 00:16:07.180 If you remember that Hitler's party, the official name of that was National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. 140 00:16:07.180 --> 00:16:14.180 So the only difference between him and Marx in the thinking or Lenin would be that 141 00:16:14.180 --> 00:16:18.380 He would combine socialism with racism together. 142 00:16:18.380 --> 00:16:21.780 He would think that people should be new people of tomorrow, 143 00:16:21.780 --> 00:16:27.880 should not only be enlightened, but they should look and act differently from people of today. 144 00:16:27.880 --> 00:16:36.480 And because of that, we should discard this racial trash, as Marx referred to in 1848. 145 00:16:36.480 --> 00:16:43.480 and, sure enough, there were target groups, Jews, gypsies, and... 146 00:16:46.640 --> 00:16:49.720 This is from a wonderful, this table, 147 00:16:49.720 --> 00:16:52.520 from a wonderful book called Death by Government. 148 00:16:52.520 --> 00:16:55.840 It's also, I would recommend you to read that. 149 00:16:55.840 --> 00:16:59.560 It's Rudi Rommel, a demographer from University of Hawaii. 150 00:16:59.560 --> 00:17:01.520 He just now retired. 151 00:17:01.520 --> 00:17:05.480 He made a list of databases. 152 00:17:05.480 --> 00:17:13.280 You can look at him on Google, he has a wonderful website, DemoSight.org, look how many people 153 00:17:13.280 --> 00:17:17.960 were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century. 154 00:17:17.960 --> 00:17:26.200 He called them mortocracies, 76, 77 almost million in China, 61 million in the Soviet 155 00:17:26.200 --> 00:17:30.960 Union, in Germany 21 million. 156 00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:41.400 So these are the most... This number of people murdered by socialists is about 170 million. 157 00:17:41.400 --> 00:17:46.680 It's several times more than 38 million people who were killed on the battlefield in the 158 00:17:46.680 --> 00:17:52.140 20th century. The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of human race. And 159 00:17:52.140 --> 00:17:59.740 and 38 million people were murdered because of senseless wars in Europe. 160 00:17:59.740 --> 00:18:06.940 However, by the Soviet Union alone, they murdered 60 million and 38 million, they just dwarfed 161 00:18:06.940 --> 00:18:09.740 all the battlefield. 162 00:18:09.740 --> 00:18:21.860 So the Soviet Union is a perfect killer state, according to Rudi Rammel and Stalin, 43 million 163 00:18:51.860 --> 00:19:11.860 Communist China, the worst mega-murderer 164 00:19:11.860 --> 00:19:14.580 to illustrate it with today's world. 165 00:19:14.580 --> 00:19:21.220 I think that the best inoculation against socialism would be, well, one is to watch 166 00:19:21.220 --> 00:19:25.900 Soviet story and to read history of real world socialism. 167 00:19:25.900 --> 00:19:29.460 Another is to visit Cuba, Cuba or North Korea. 168 00:19:29.460 --> 00:19:36.140 North Korea probably is far away and difficult to get into or get out of because they arrest 169 00:19:36.140 --> 00:19:39.380 a lot of people who come to visit. 170 00:19:39.380 --> 00:19:45.980 But Cuba is nearby, and you can see this, for example, this is a Cuban store, Cuban 171 00:19:45.980 --> 00:19:46.980 store. 172 00:19:46.980 --> 00:19:47.980 That's the result of socialism. 173 00:19:47.980 --> 00:19:50.980 It reminded me of Soviet, of Soviet store. 174 00:19:50.980 --> 00:19:56.580 In the Soviet Union, there was nothing to, can you imagine, 11 time zones, 11 time zones, 175 00:19:56.580 --> 00:20:02.020 all natural resources possible and impossible, and people would have shortage of almost everything. 176 00:20:02.020 --> 00:20:07.760 There would be no sausage, no soap, no nothing. 177 00:20:07.760 --> 00:20:16.680 So if we can come to that store, I was definitely, when I went to this Cuban store, I was definitely 178 00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:21.480 intrigued, what is that, these boxes, what's in that box, is that something you can buy 179 00:20:21.480 --> 00:20:24.480 right away without rationing card? 180 00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:30.380 And this is baking soda, baking soda, so there's probably nothing to bake with. 181 00:20:30.380 --> 00:20:38.820 This is how Cuban cities look like right now. 182 00:20:38.820 --> 00:20:45.700 These are all people waiting for reception in the U.S. Embassy, they want to get out. 183 00:20:45.700 --> 00:20:48.100 This is Cuban real estate today. 184 00:20:48.100 --> 00:20:53.560 It's very sad to see that since 1959 they didn't have any money, didn't put any money 185 00:20:53.560 --> 00:20:56.900 in maintenance of buildings. 186 00:20:56.900 --> 00:21:03.660 You can see sometimes buildings, we can see sometimes buildings, high rises without houses 187 00:21:03.660 --> 00:21:07.980 because plumbing is not working. Can you imagine? You live on the seventh floor and you need 188 00:21:07.980 --> 00:21:15.940 to go and you run down to the middle of the night to the outhouse and the one outhouse 189 00:21:15.940 --> 00:21:24.940 was 26, for 26 people, can you imagine? It's just a gruesome thing, yes, and it's very 190 00:21:24.940 --> 00:21:31.900 very nice and proud people reduced by socialists to rubble, as well as their housing. 191 00:21:31.900 --> 00:21:36.700 And the last thing I want to say is that maybe you've watched a movie by Michael Moore of 192 00:21:36.700 --> 00:21:45.180 the CICO, CICO about the glorious healthcare system in Cuba, and because I travel to Cuba, 193 00:21:45.180 --> 00:21:49.700 I have some friends, Cuban friends, friends that I made back in Moscow because a lot of 194 00:21:49.700 --> 00:21:55.740 The students studied in Moscow or brainwashed in Moscow and I invited one of them to talk 195 00:21:55.740 --> 00:22:03.740 to my students and one young student, she said, well, we see this disaster around, but how 196 00:22:03.740 --> 00:22:04.740 about health care? 197 00:22:04.740 --> 00:22:09.620 We heard that you have the best health care in the world and she said, sure, we have the 198 00:22:09.620 --> 00:22:14.420 best health care in the world, but it would be much better if we would have medicines 199 00:22:14.420 --> 00:22:22.420 and we have ambulances and we would have clinics and hospitals and this is an ambulance from Cuba. 200 00:22:22.420 --> 00:22:32.420 This is a person who is driving his father to the hospice. 201 00:22:32.420 --> 00:22:39.420 This is a picture from a Cuban hospital given to me by a Cuban doctor. 202 00:22:39.420 --> 00:23:08.180 The lesson that we should learn from these millions of people who died is that when government 203 00:23:08.180 --> 00:23:15.620 is out of control when government is too big, that's the only marks I like, and I think 204 00:23:15.620 --> 00:23:22.380 he was pretty right, yes. 205 00:23:22.380 --> 00:23:27.420 And that's the most important for us to keep in mind that freedom is a very rare and precious 206 00:23:27.420 --> 00:23:33.500 gift, that most people today in the world do not live under freedom, a lot of people 207 00:23:33.500 --> 00:23:38.700 People still live under socialism, people in Cuba live under socialism. 208 00:23:38.700 --> 00:23:42.940 People in Cuba do not have health care, do not have housing, do not have rights, do not 209 00:23:42.940 --> 00:23:43.940 have property rights. 210 00:23:43.940 --> 00:23:51.900 Amazingly enough that Rodrigo, that friend of mine, when we were already finished this 211 00:23:51.900 --> 00:23:58.380 meeting and he speaks Russian, we were getting out of the audience and he said best health 212 00:23:58.380 --> 00:23:59.380 care in the world. 213 00:23:59.380 --> 00:24:05.380 He said the only health care we have is to swim to Miami regularly. 214 00:24:05.380 --> 00:24:10.380 There's no other health care possible. 215 00:24:10.380 --> 00:24:17.380 However, we should keep in mind that for themselves, they did a good kind of health care. 216 00:24:17.380 --> 00:24:28.380 For the leaders, they would have a different type of health care. 217 00:24:28.380 --> 00:24:37.380 In the United States now, we face a lot of problems. Government is getting bigger and bigger and out of control. 218 00:24:37.380 --> 00:24:57.380 Inflation is looming, and socialists, amazingly enough, they hate gold, they hate precious metals, because you have a gold standard, you cannot inflate, you cannot take power from the people. 219 00:24:57.380 --> 00:25:03.380 So the gold standard is the only secure way to preserve people's wealth. 220 00:25:03.380 --> 00:25:15.380 And amazingly enough, one Chinese billionaire, yes, he read Lenin. 221 00:25:15.380 --> 00:25:21.380 Lenin wrote that in the future society we will make toilet commodes out of gold. 222 00:25:21.380 --> 00:25:24.380 Because that's what gold is for. 223 00:25:24.380 --> 00:25:27.380 Gold does not have any value, his point is. 224 00:25:27.380 --> 00:25:31.380 The only value of gold is to build toilet commons. 225 00:25:31.380 --> 00:25:33.380 And this billionaire, he did that. 226 00:25:33.380 --> 00:25:38.380 And amazingly enough, the Chinese billionaire, who was communist in his youth, 227 00:25:38.380 --> 00:25:42.380 he made this at the cost of $7 million. 228 00:25:42.380 --> 00:25:46.380 Today the cost of this is $32 million already. 229 00:25:46.380 --> 00:25:49.380 So some people would say, what an idiot. 230 00:25:49.380 --> 00:25:57.380 From another hand, he has a nice reply that, no, that was the best investment probably he made, best investment he made. 231 00:25:57.380 --> 00:26:07.380 So, we should, I have, I think, my email is there. If you would, I'm also on Facebook. 232 00:26:07.380 --> 00:26:14.380 I would be happy to send you this presentation and whatever materials you need, 233 00:26:14.380 --> 00:26:22.380 because it's very important for you to keep in mind that your future right now is being mortgaged by the government 234 00:26:22.380 --> 00:26:30.380 because you do not vote, your children, your children and your grandchildren, amazingly enough, would be mortgaged 235 00:26:30.380 --> 00:26:39.380 because there was a conference on the Fed about issuing 100 years maturity bonds. 236 00:26:39.380 --> 00:26:47.060 and Bonds. Can you imagine? Bonds was 100 years in its unitive. So that means that not only 237 00:26:47.060 --> 00:26:53.140 you will be paying back, but your children and children of your children. So that's 238 00:26:53.140 --> 00:26:58.940 the federal government now still saying, well, we are still thinking about that. It's pushed 239 00:26:58.940 --> 00:27:04.660 by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, they want to issue these bonds, to sell them, to get 240 00:27:04.660 --> 00:27:08.180 Rich Again, at the expense of the United States tax payers. 241 00:27:08.180 --> 00:27:16.060 So I think I kind of depressed you enough before, I know that I'm not last I think, 242 00:27:16.060 --> 00:27:19.340 one before last obstacle between you and lunch. 243 00:27:19.340 --> 00:27:26.420 So I would like to thank you so much for coming here and definitely it's enjoyable to see 244 00:27:26.420 --> 00:27:32.940 so many young people interested in economics, in liberty, in free markets and free minds. 245 00:27:32.940 --> 00:27:34.940 That's very, very nice. Thank you.