 OK, so the panelists are those who gave lectures today. And so I'm going to open it up to questions for any of the panelists on the topics that they spoke about today. OK, yes? I'd like to ask a question about political entrepreneurship, even if that's something we could talk about. So if the firm is a creation of the entrepreneur, what kind of role does a political entrepreneur play within, I don't know, a market process? Sorry. With a junior faculty member, with all that implies. Well, I mean, a political entrepreneur is someone who has the characteristics of an entrepreneur, but can't really calculate, but has the ability to, I don't remember the thesis of the paper, actually. But no, our thesis was that the political entrepreneur could forecast, could invest time, effort, and so on. Could, in a way, compare the payoff from the politicians with the time invested and so on. And there was a primitive feedback mechanism in the political process. But it's not the same kind of entrepreneurship. I talked about calculation today. There's no way to calculate. So it's really crude valuing of the return versus the cost. But it is something that could be, there are psychic profits. The difference between what you've, the value of what you've given up and what you've gotten, that can be captured by the political entrepreneur in the political process. Yes. I had a question related to Dr. Klein's lecture on monopoly. And Dr. Klein, you stated that many of the artificial monopolies that we see are flown from government regulations, such as, say, patents or subsidies or whatever. And I was curious that, as long as we have a state, given that they're all monopolies that are propped up by government regulation, now we certainly want to remove the regulation benefiting them. Is there any room for government intervention to try and remove the artificial market share that they have gained? Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting political economy question. So let's say, for example, you have a, the government gives a license to a private company to be the only provider of electricity on some community, as is typically the case in the US. So these are private companies with investors and owners, but they have an exclusive franchise on delivering electricity in that area. So let's say we agree that the ultimate solution to this problem would be to remove that artificial protection and allow free entry into the provision of electricity, let entrepreneurs figure out how to make that work. But if we can't do that, is the second best solution to let them charge whatever prices they want or to regulate the prices and say they can't go above a certain level or mandate universal service or whatever it might be. I mean, I don't think that, I don't think praxeology gives us a clear answer to that, but we can certainly, we can describe how the situation might look. In other words, if we add an additional regulatory layer, we could say as long as we're giving you, as long as you have the exclusive franchise, we're gonna demand that you, we're gonna control your behavior in some way. But of course, that's also gonna have secondary effects. There was a famous, in fact, there was a series of studies in the 1960s and 70s that the way utility companies were regulated on price, they had an incentive to over-invest in equipment and certain kinds of capacity because that was a way that they could legally earn a higher rate of return than what they could get from charging electricity. Plus you've got, now you've got a regulatory agency that's set up and empowered to do these things subject to political pressures, subject to lobbying and so forth. So I mean, it's a complicated question, but yeah, I think it's not an unreasonable argument to say if you have monopoly privilege, you can't then, any restrictions on your behavior are not automatically a restriction on freedom in some sense or an interference with the free market. I think we'd have to look at that on a case-by-case basis. Yes. So I actually have two questions, one for Dr. Gordon and one for Dr. Salerno and I'll ask Dr. Gordon's questions first. So earlier you mentioned in the praxeology lecture, talked about Rothbard's view on praxeology and you mentioned specifically something where he did say that some of praxeology is based on the senses, but earlier you said that Mises's view and then the view in general on praxeology is that it's independent of our senses. It's something we can come to without prior experience. So is this kind of Rothbard contradicting Mises or is it they're more to it? Well, that would be a contradiction if in fact that was what Rothbard and Mises said, but that isn't what they said, at least as I'm understanding it. What Mises thought is that there's from the notion of action, we can derive certain concepts from it, we can explicate the notion of action and then we can grasp and this requires observation of the world that the system of concepts applies to the actual world. And Rothbard thought that the concepts themselves are abstracted from the actual world so that it isn't that there's concepts or some sort of conceptual grid that are imposed on the world but they're abstracted from the world. So that at least the way I understand it is the basic difference between them. Okay, I wanna ask you to hold the second question because we have a limited amount of time and a lot of questions here. Tam in the back. This is a question for Dr. Baylon and Dr. Klein, whichever. I remember either in one of your presentation, you talked about the need for market prices, how companies need market prices to make decisions, but I recently, some time ago, I recently read David Koch's books where he talks about in his company, how he knows that certain services are important and useful, especially those parts of the business that are not necessarily profit-making is that they sell their services even within the company so he can compare prices with prices outside. If this is a decision that we should either keep using or something that we should outsource. I wanted to get your thoughts on that. Basically, as an accountant department, they basically sell their accountant services to other parts of the business. What are your thoughts on basically market prices within the firm? I mean, the short answer is that I think those are, sorry, it's kind of, I would think of that as more like a managerial technology, right? So I mean, the calculation argument requires the ability to calculate for the entrepreneur requires the existence of objective market prices. There has to be private property and competition for those prices to be established. But given that I'm operating a large entity, let's say in a market setting, I've still got to do some, I've got to make a lot of decisions about how to allocate my capital among these different branches or subdivisions or teams or project groups within the firm. How do I do that? Well, I could do that using my own conjectures. I could simply impose by fiat a kind of a structure or I could set up some kind of an internal competition, like a tournament among employees. I mean, a lot of firms have employee of the month award to get employees to work harder to try to produce more output or get more sales or whatever. And I could certainly set up something that looks like a market. I could tell a sub unit that it has to bargain with this other sub unit about how much it's willing to pay for its services as kind of a simulation. Or I could, I don't know, maybe I do a computer simulation. I mean, these are all, I don't think economic theory tells us that one of these approaches is necessarily preferred to another. They're just different managerial techniques that the operators of a large enterprise might use to try to figure out how best to allocate resources inside the firm. So I think Rothbard, correct me if I'm wrong, talks about internal prices within the corporation in many kind of states. And he talks about how those prices are just a technology like that. They do not represent actual valuations, which means, well, they're tokens, but they're made up. So you're still blind to what the market actually values those parts in the business as. Okay, gentlemen right there. Second row at the end, yes. Hey, thank you gentlemen so much for your talks. I have a question for Salerno. Okay. During your talk on calculation within socialism, you ran out of time talking about the more sophisticated responses to socialism. Do you mind just kind of going over in a little bit more detail some of the responses to some of those specifically when it comes to trying to use mathematics or computer modeling or more popularly is the artificial intelligence. You could just kind of go over a little bit of that. Well, so there were two more sophisticated, neoclassical objections. They were brought mainly by British economists who were trained in neoclassical theory, but were socialists. Well, actually, Appulsion Cops, Oskar Lange, Abel Lerner, and there were a few others, a guy named H.D. Dickinson. But in any case, so they came up with two solutions. One was the mathematical solution in which you collect all the data necessary to form a system of simultaneous supply and demand equations. And then you solve that, and it spits out the equilibrium quantities and equilibrium prices. And then there was the market socialist solution in which prices are arbitrarily set for various factors of production. If there's a surplus, you lower it. If there's a shortage, you raise it. So to make a long story short, Hayek and Robbins answered that by saying, well, the mathematical solution is extremely impractical to collect the data and to convey it to the director. And then you would have a long lag in trying to compute this. This would be for electronic computers if you could do it at all. So then your calculations would be a day late or a month late and dollar short. It wouldn't fly, it'd be very impractical. And Hayek went on to point out that market socialism had a problem of having people on the spot who had the knowledge. A lot of this knowledge was dispersed. So the prices that were formed by bidding on the market socialism, where the prices were set by the planners then changed. So Hayek said, well, how frequently would they be changed? And in any case, those planners wouldn't have the prices that emerge would not be the same prices with the same amount of information contained in them, that they would be if entrepreneurs on the spot made those. So he said, this is improbable. And he did admit that if one mind had all the knowledge in the economy, if it wasn't dispersed, they could in some sense come up with an equilibrium solution. Mises said this is all nonsense. The equilibrium solution is a solution that has nothing, no bearing on the real world where we have disequilibrium continual change. So Mises basically said, the mathematical solution is completely irrelevant to a world of people that aren't robots and aren't doing the same things over and over again. And he said that regarding market socialism, this is children at play, children making up a game because there's no investment. The investment is controlled by the state. And the state sets up the different firms and the industries, sets up the structure of the whole economy and then tells these managers to play at setting prices or at adjusting prices or producing at prices that they set and then they'll change the prices. This is just a game. So basically what Rothbard had asked Mises at one point, at what point does an economy become socialist? Mises' answer was when you abolished the stock market. That's the market where firms are created, destroyed, merged, and so on. So I mean, thanks for answering that question because I finished my lecture just saying. So she can turn it to get up to the table. Yeah, okay, this lady right here. My question is for Dr. Thornton. It's kind of a two-part question. So I'm wondering what your opinion is on what you think would happen if the United States did decide to legalize all drugs. Do you think that Mexico and other Central American countries that smuggle drugs into the United States would just create something new and synthetic? Or do you think it would have any effect on form relations, like if violence would occur or anything like that? Or do you think it would all just kind of go away, the smuggling and stuff like that? Well, if the United States legalized all drugs, Portugal has decriminalized all drugs and they've actually seen their social indicators, statistics improve. So the basic question is I'm not threatened by that or intimidated by that. I think it would be a wholly good thing except for the transition. Now, in terms of the US doing it alone, the issue here is that the US has been leading the global war on drugs from the very beginning along with Great Britain at the time. They're the ones that wanted to superimpose the will of the United States and its foreign policy on all other countries. And back in the late 19th century, early 20th century, the drug problem and drug control was the avenue, which they saw that they could get the biggest bang for the buck. And so the US has been a leader internationally and at the United Nations. And I think that if the US back down on the war on drugs that most countries would go along with that, even the producing countries, they're not happy with the situation because they're getting all the negative so-called unintended consequences in their own economies and in their own political system. So I think there's a lot of countries that would jump at the chance to follow the United States in a legalization of all drugs movement. And I don't see anybody fighting back, except for possibly those pesky Canadians, against all that. So it's a great question and I think it's an area of great hope. Someone on this side? Okay, this gentleman in the second row right here. Thank you all for your lectures, they're all awesome. My question is directed at David Doctor Gordon. And it's about how you went over briefly determinism. Now Mises was open to the idea, but I think assumed more of a free will or a compabilist worldview. And I was just wondering if Mises had any sort of pro free will arguments against sort of the determinist claim or if you had any arguments that you thought really gave free will a very strong case in the field of human action. Well, I think what Mises said was he didn't, he thought that the determinist view couldn't be proved. So he thought this was just speculation. So for at least free will is an ultimate given. Now this raises, which I didn't mention in the lecture, what does he mean by free will? Does he mean something like, put it in very oversimplified? Does he mean something like if we can choose to do something, if we had chosen otherwise something else would have happened, how is if we had chosen otherwise to be taken, there are various ways to take that in one way it doesn't go against determinism. It would just be if we had chosen otherwise something else would have happened but it doesn't follow that we could have chosen otherwise. It's just if we had chosen otherwise something would have happened. And I don't think Mises committed himself on this. I think he was sympathetic to that's called a compatibilist answer. I think he was sympathetic to that. Hayek explicitly took that position, this compatibilist position. Now on arguments for free will, one would be it seems given to us in our experience that we choose in a stronger sense of that. It's not just that if we had chosen otherwise we would have done something else but that in fact it's not the case that we could have chosen otherwise. It's just if we had, we would have done something. So it seems to us that we have free willingness in the stronger sense and absent any strong reasons not to accept what seems given to us then we should accept that. Now if you say, oh, but look isn't the determinist argument itself a strong reason for rejecting this ordinary view. I would say I don't think so. I don't think in fact that the determinists have given any real arguments for this view. It certainly, sometimes people will mention that appeal to various quantum phenomena and say well that quantum physics isn't deterministic but to me that isn't the most significant point it is classical physics isn't deterministic either. As people think sometimes said that it is but in fact it isn't or at least that would be involved rather difficult issues to go into but I don't think it's been shown it is. So I don't think there's any reason to reject what's given to us an experience and also it would seem that in our ordinary holding people morally responsible for things our whole language of responsibility seems to depend on the notion that someone could have done otherwise in a strong sense of that term. So I think as I say absent strong reason to the contrary we should accept that. Even the people who favor determinism will usually often admit that when we're acting we act as if we had free will but they claim this is just an illusion of our first person perspective but I don't see why we should think of it as an illusion. So this takes a very difficult issue but those are at least a few things I would suggest. Okay one more person on this side and then I'll go back to that side over there. Yeah. So my question is for Dr. Byland and Dr. Newman it's in regards to what entrepreneurs or management should do under artificial credit and like when facing a lot of over consumption and malinvestment like for instance the housing market. Like what does Austrian economics say when you see a huge housing price inflation should you continue getting a lot of like credit hire really expensive employers or save up your money until you see the market adjust itself. He said your name. Okay so praxeologically that's pretty easy because it doesn't say we should do anything at all. I mean the other question what kind of advice can I as a praxeologist give business owners? I would say invest like hell when the boom starts get out before it turns into a bust. So I mean it's hard to expand much more on that. If we had the answer to that then I probably wouldn't be sitting on the stage I would be in a big mansion somewhere. So like if I could perfectly time the market in such a way to make all the money during the boom and then exit right at the top then I wouldn't be here. So I don't think that there's nothing in economic theory that says exactly how to time those sorts of things because it's dependent on all of the many complex variables that are even the most complex AI like we were talking about with socialism wouldn't be able to boil it all down into something that says now exit, now exit the market. Question on this side. Can I add something quickly? Oh go ahead I'm sorry. When you're an entrepreneur I mean if investing in a boom means that the resources are pretty expensive and since entrepreneurs are expecting them to go up too prices have already increased which means if you enter as started new business in a bust things are actually on sale. So if you have a good idea and you imagine that there will be a market opportunity for you then starting a business during the bust is actually not a bad idea. But the problem with that is if everybody knows that like so suppose everybody knew that oh everything is undervalued then nothing would be undervalued. So like I said it's even yeah it's just impossible to time it because you don't know what other people know and what other people are expecting. Okay I'll take one more question on that side. Back there woman back there. Thank you. I think Dr. Dr. Violin sorry. I mentioned how to many entrepreneurs at the very least find the concepts of Austrian economics fairly intuitive. And I would say in my personal experience many more people than you would think find Austrian economics very correct in their own minds even if they can't put words to it. For example my mother who's never had a day of economic education in her entire life besides perhaps NPR went off about subjective value and like the layman summarization of a few of your talks this evening. But when they hear about Austrian economics they're kind of put off by it though they agree with it. What would you say that the solution to that initial libertarianism sort of reaction is? So the question is your mother is put off with. No. No. No. Her mother is not like her tall. Yeah okay. I think it's actually really sad that Austrian economics and libertarianism that there's no clear distinction between the two. And I try to have a very clear distinction. So when I talk about Austrian economics I do not talk about, well I do not say screw the government even though I would really like to. But instead I talk about the economics and then I put on a different hat and I talk about libertarianism. So I think we can do ourselves a big favor by separating the two. Because yes Austrian economics is free market economics but you have to start with a free market in order to see the impact of regulations. So it's theoretical tool but it's not a normative tool. I mean I'm not sure I can go further than that. All right thank you. We have to stop the panel now and at 545 buses will pick you up in the front. If anyone has any questions David Gordon will remain behind so you can answer.