 So, Patrick Newman, as I mentioned earlier, is truly an economic historian, which for those of you who listen to the Human Action Podcast, might know that we have been going through the two-volume Rothbard and Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought. We did four shows on its two huge volumes, over 500 pages each, and it really is a lost art. It really is a tradition in America that is in deep, deep trouble, and I'm told by a lot of PhD economists, it's actually possible to go through an entire PhD program now and economics it and learn nothing about the history of your own field. And so we have these young, brilliant people who might go to Wharton or Harvard or Stanford and we're dropping them into investment banks and we're dropping them into places like the Fed, and they literally don't know anything. Maybe economics started with Adam Smith, that might be all they know. They know nothing about their own profession and its own history. And so Patrick Newman is a welcome addition to this genre, a needed addition to this genre. And he's going to be speaking tonight about his new book, Chronism in America in the Early Colonial Period, which is 1607 to 1849. When he's done, he will take a few questions, so please welcome Dr. Patrick Newman. Thank you, everyone, for attending and staying this long. Now would be a great time to go to the bathroom or to check your phone or to do anything of that nature. So for those of you who don't know me, who haven't met me, I am Patrick Newman. I live in Florida. I live in Tampa. I'm a stone's throw away from St. Pete, and it's my great honor to be giving this talk tonight, to be talking about my book, Chronism, Liberty vs. Power in Early America, 1607 to 1849. It's really an honor. This is something I've been working on for a long time, which I'll be talking about. It's kind of, you have your baby. Some people have actual babies. I have a book. That's my baby. And it's like, this is my book. This is something I've created. It's taken many months. It's taken years to write. And it's just, it's an incredible honor to have spent all this time on this, and now I'm selling it, we're selling it as a paperweight. So, no, but in all seriousness, it's a book. It's meant to be read. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the origins of the book, how did this book come to be? Where did the book come from? In the fall of 2018, Hunter Lewis, who is a donor of the Institute, he's unfortunately not here tonight, but he approached me after the Supporters Summit, and he asked if I'd be interested in writing a book on the history of crony capitalism in America. This is after I'd worked on the Progressive Era. I edited the Progressive Era by Murray Rothbard, came out in 2017. I was currently working on editing the fifth volume of Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty, and I said, well, crony capitalism, someone wants me to write a book on crony capitalism. Of course, I mean, I leapt at the opportunity. I was very interested in doing this. I said, well, I'm currently editing the fifth volume of Rothbard's book. I can start working on this next year. So about April of 2019, I started to work on the book. That's when I officially started to work on the book, and I'd really just both guns blazing. I was working a lot on this. I was reading. I was writing. I was trying to cover an incredible amount of material, and I had basically finished the book in about, let's just say, December of 2020. And then the Mises Institute, I was publishing it. I worked on the index over the summer, and then the book is out, and I'm just incredibly happy to have this book completed. So as I mentioned, the book is on cronyism or crony capitalism. What exactly does that mean? So traditionally, we're told that legislation is in the public interest. So to benefit the public welfare, you have central banking to eliminate business cycles and to iron out the fluctuations in the economy. Tariffs protect jobs, subsidies, or wise government investments, infrastructure subsidies. I'm sure many of us have been hearing this quite a bit in the news. This is all very important. This is all noble, these wise, enlightened, public-interested officials. They're all pushing for these policies. In reality, it's due to special interests. It's due to insider businesses, politicians, intellectuals, looking to get concentrated privileges at the expense of the public. Central banking does not stabilize the economy. Central banking benefits Wall Street bankers, and it basically causes business cycles. Protective tariffs do not protect workers. They privilege certain manufacturing businesses and create monopolies and cause higher prices at the expense of consumers and foreign firms. So I wanted to focus on the, really was supposed to be focusing on the history of cronyism, why it went up in certain eras, why it declined, so why special privileges increased during certain years, why special privileges didn't increase as much in other years. And originally, the book was supposed to be about a 500-page comprehensive history. And as I spent more time on this, projects, they evolved. You change your focus a little bit or you say you want to concentrate on one topic a little bit more than other topics. And I guess you could say in classic Rothbardian fashion, I said that, well, in order to accurately describe cronyism, I really wanted to concentrate initially on early America. Because early America, the time of the founding fathers, really up until the Civil War, you had significant political movements that were actually interested in reducing cronyism. Right? Nowadays, we're lucky if you have a politician speaking at a podium like this and they're going to use the word free market in a speech like this. We get all excited. We're like, wow. He said free market. Does he actually believe in the free market or is he just saying this? What's going on? Back then, you actually had politicians who believed in the free market and even better than that, they were pushing for policies that actually promoted the free market or tried to bring about a quasi free market. So you have Andrew Jackson as president. He vetoed the Recharter Bill for the second bank of the United States. We could only dream of a president standing up to a central banking institute like Andrew Jackson and his fellow Jacksonians. So we can only dream of having a founding father like Patrick Henry, who's really able to fight the centralization in the U.S. Constitution in the creation of an empire of power. Patrick Henry is my favorite founding father. I swear it has nothing to do with the fact that his name is Patrick, because my name is Patrick. Right? So as I was spending more time researching, I decided to really build upon something that Rothbard had focused on a lot and conceived in liberty in the progressive era, which is this eternal struggle between the forces of liberty and the forces of power. Because back in early American history, you actually had a significant political force composed of businessmen, politicians, intellectuals, et cetera, that were genuinely interested in bringing about free markets, decentralization, peace, private property, and personal liberty, so to speak. You know, the good, the real hardcore libertarians, okay? You had the anti-Federalists. You had the Jeffersonian Republicans. You had the Jacksonian Democrats, right? And when they had control of the government, cronyism declined. It didn't decline as much as we would have liked due to what I call the corrupting nature of power, but it still declined, right? We'll take our victories when we can get them, right? They were fighting the forces of power, so the forces of statism, of greater government control, of centralization, so I'm talking about the Federalists. I'm talking about the Hamiltonians, the Alexander Hamilton, and his cotere, you could say, talking about the national Republicans, the Whigs, et cetera. And when they had control of the government, power and cronyism increased, okay? So special interest legislation increased, okay? So I wanted to focus on this battle between liberty and power. And if you've read any of Rothbard's works, his historical works, such as the Progressive Error or the Four New Liberty, right? He talks about this early American history going through the clashes between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians, clashing between the Democrats and the Whigs. He talks about this in the span of, let's say, five pages in Four New Liberty in the revised edition. So I said, well, wow, this is a great story. I was really captivated by this. Let me use this as the framework for my book on cronyism. And this is what you're supposed to do as intellectuals in the Austrian tradition. You're supposed to try and stand on the shoulders of giants and not make too big of a contribution, but just make some sort of contribution, right? So later on, someone can look at your work and say, well, I want to expand upon them. This is how science evolves. This is how ideas evolve, right? So I said, well, I wanted to write a book focusing on this period of American history because I think as I'll be talking about in my discussion, there's a lot of these individuals, such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, I don't know if you know, but they're not exactly held in high regard now. You see their statues, their spray paint on them, or they've been erased from buildings and so on. It's a sad time to be someone who loves American history because there's a complete sort of revision taking a hold on all levels of our American history, especially at the K through 12 level, all right? So this is something that I wanted to write on. I had written this book and it's a great honor to have this book published and to now be able to talk about it, all right? So I said to myself, okay, I'm going to give this talk. I thought, okay, do I want to describe the book? Do I want to tell you what the book's about? I mean, I've told you it's about the history of cronyism. It's about this great struggle between liberty versus power. I could go through the whole plot of the book, tell you about the book, et cetera. But then I said to myself, well, wait a second. If I do that, then no one's going to want to buy the book, right? Or read the book. I got to only describe so much just so you say, well, that was a pretty mediocre job of explaining the plot. I guess I really do need to read the book in order to figure out what he's saying. So I said to myself, well, I'm pretty good at doing that. I think I can do that task quite well. What I'd like to talk about, so I've got a book called cronyism. It covers the period 1607 to 1849, all right? And I'm asking people in the year 2021 to read the book. So why should someone in 2021 or 2022 or through the rest of the 2020s, et cetera, read this book, all right? Another way of putting this is why should someone in 2021 buy this book, all right? Another way of putting it is why should someone in their friends in 2021 buy this book, right? So what is the importance of this book? Why should people care about this book? So I thought about this. Of course, after I wrote the book, I'm like, why are people going? Well, people have to find out, why do people want to read this book, right? So the first reason as to why this book is important and why other books such on similar topics are important is that history is how we learn. History is how we learn about the world around us. This is something that Rothbard wrote in a lot of grant proposals to write on American history, which eventually became his Conceived in Liberty series. And this is something that really stuck out because you have an economist and he said, look, most people find economics fairly dry and boring. It's abstract. Some people are really captivated by other people. It's tough, right? How most people learn is they'll learn through history. They will take a history course when they're in elementary school, then they'll take another history course in high school, then they might take something in college and then they will watch a documentary every now and then, or they're going to read some articles, read a book, go watch the news, et cetera. History is how we learn about various economic concepts, et cetera. And unfortunately, most people are learning the wrong history, right? Because when most people go through history class today on American history, they're going to learn that the Industrial Revolution was bad, so the emergence of capitalism was bad. They're going to learn that capitalism caused the Great Depression, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because one of the reasons why I would say the left are really just the forces of statism and government intervention are so successful now is because they've totally monopolized the history market, right? At every stage, they've totally monopolized the history market, whether it's in elementary school, you learn basically a very anti-free market perspective on American history, whether it's in college, whether it's on the news, whether it's a documentary on the history channel, et cetera. So your average person is going to say, OK, well, of course we need government regulations during COVID to keep us safe because without health regulations, people were poisoning the sausages. That's why we had this meat inspection act, right? Or of course we need the Federal Reserve to pump in reserves and to increase the money supply and to stimulate the economy during an economic downturn. Well, that didn't, when the Fed didn't do that, we had the Great Depression, right? So your average person, even though they might not consider themselves a historian or really consider themselves very knowledgeable in history, over the successive years they've sort of been, these ideas have really been packed into their mind. And so they're stuck with a certain perspective. Because if we want to change people's perspectives on the present, we have to change their perspective on the past, their length. OK, if we want to get people to support greater free markets, less government, we want to get people to be against central banking, against protective tariffs, against government spending, against the national debt, we have to show that all of these things were bad in the past. Otherwise, people are just going to say, well, I learned in my history class. Or wait, someone told me this, et cetera, OK? We need as many examples as the free market and the quasi-free market showing how private roads or private banking systems exist. This is something my book does. I go through this. We need as many examples as we can showing that prominent legislation in the past was not due to benevolent politicians trying to advance the public interest. It was due to cronies, right? It was due to individuals trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayer. My book goes through this as well. If we don't change people's perspectives of the past, unfortunately, we're not going to win. It's just going to be, this is the sad reality because basically the anti-free market forces have control of the history market, and it's going to continue to shape people's perspective on how we change the present. So history, it's very important. It's how we learn. That's the first reason. The second reason why I think my book is important is that it's interesting. I think it's interesting. And if I think it's interesting, then it must be interesting. So it's interesting. I go through a lot of examples of cronies in pushing for special interest legislation. A lot of stuff that your average person doesn't really know or even your average historian, someone who's read a lot of books on American history, doesn't really know. Because I didn't really know a lot of this stuff when I started, and I said, wow, that's incredible. That really happened for that reason, right? So I talk about how Robert Morris, the merchant prince of Philadelphia, was prominent in basically trying, during the Revolutionary War, was trying to install a big government basically to benefit himself and other elites through the Articles of Confederation. And he tried to do the same thing through the Constitution. I talk about how George Washington was actually very close to vetoing the bill for the Bank of the United States. He was actually gonna listen to Jefferson and not Hamilton. But why he didn't was because the Federalists would let him change, amend what was known as the Residents Act to place the capital, which was supposed to be somewhere on the Potomac, just a little bit closer to his land holdings in Alexandria. This is a true story. He signed the bill so the Federalists would allow him to basically put the capital right next to his land. And the value of his real estate shot up, obviously like a thousand percent. Most people don't know that. Most people don't know. That's why this may come as a surprise, but Washington DC has been crony from the start. So hopefully you're not too shocked by that. I talk about how the Boston Associates, this group of elite manufacturing firms, were not only very prominent in pushing for protectionist legislation in the 1820s, but they were actually crucial in getting Florida into the Union. And the treaty where we purchased Florida from Spain, they were able to get a very lucrative bail out that benefited their manufacturing companies and their shipping companies. I talk about how the reason why we declared war on Mexico during the Mexican War in the 1840s was not to spread slavery. It was actually to capture ports on the Western coast, particularly San Francisco, because then when we had cities on the Western coast, we could start to engage in various imperialistic policies with China. This is actually the reason why we started the Mexican War, and this is something that all of James K. Polk's cabinet officials admitted. So there's a lot of examples like this. Another example is that Chief Justice John Marshall, he was a prominent land speculator. He was very affiliated with Robert Morris, his younger brother James Marshall actually married Robert Morris' daughter. Stuff that you don't really read about in your average American history books. Stuff that makes you go, hmm, I wanna spend a little bit more time looking into that, right? So there's a lot of interesting examples of cronyism, a lot of interesting examples of genuine libertarian radicals trying to reduce cronyism, right? And that's very important, that's an important reason why people should read the book, right? It's interesting, and when it's interesting, then it's enjoyable to read, right? So far we've got history, right? It's how we learn. We have the books interesting, okay? What's another reason why this book is important? Is that, well, there's currently a revision going on in American history. There's the 1619 project. There is critical race theory. I don't know if many of you know this, but there's a gubernatorial election going on in Virginia right now, or at least it's going to be going on in a couple of weeks. This is sort of big in the news. And a big issue between the Republicans and the Democrats is over what is being taught in the public school system in Virginia, particularly how we teach American history, right? Because nowadays with the 1619 project and critical race theory, et cetera, we learn that America, it was all doom and gloom. Everything was just this plot to install and strengthen slavery. America was racist. It was sexist. It was all these badists. It was all capitalism's fault. So now you've got people saying that the history of capitalism is built off of slavery and that all of these prominent politicians, guys such as Thomas Jefferson, oh, when they were supporting free markets, it was all just this cover up for slavery. That's all it was. And now we need to tear down all these statues or we need to describe history through a different lens, right? Well, my book doesn't do that. My book goes through history as I believe it should be taught and is the correct way that it should be taught, early American history. Is it the way that fits with our current ethics? Were these people, we say they're ethically good from today's standards? Well, of course not, right? But that doesn't mean we change our interpretive lens on how we understand these individuals. We want to understand their strengths and weaknesses from how people back then understood their strengths and weaknesses. I don't want to demonize someone now just because I don't think what they did back then was socially acceptable. You want to demonize someone if people back then thought what they did was socially unacceptable, okay? So there's this very big revision going on in American history and particularly how it's being taught and people are learning that American history is all doom and gloom and that there's no heroes, it's all villains and that capitalism has led to all sorts of problems and what we really need is a thorough remaking of how we view history and as well as a thorough remaking of how we view the present world, okay? So my book, for people who are just interested in the old school American history, whether they're older individuals, whether they're their parents, whether they're their children or young adults, et cetera, having that sort of old school American history, I think is very important right now. It's missing in traditional history textbooks and just traditional history books, what you watch on the news, what you read online on various articles, et cetera. I want someone who's going to look at the strength and weaknesses of a Thomas Jefferson or an Andrew Jackson in not a biased light, okay? I want someone who's going to respect these individuals for the tremendous amount of effort they put into trying to create what was known as an empire of liberty, okay? So that's the third reason, right? So we've got, so far we've got three reasons, right? We've got history, it's how we learn, the book's interesting, right? Stop the 1619 project and what's the fourth reason, the last reason? Well, I want to show that there's light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, there's no light right here but there's still, if you read the book, there's still light at the end of the tunnel, right? Because when we're trying to change the world right now, we think that, well, there's no hope, right? The forces of power have won, the forces of big government have won, et cetera. How could we possibly try and change the world of today? Well, I think if we want to try and change the world of today, we have to understand and appreciate how similar movements, such as ours, changed the world in the past, right? And they were fairly successful, were they perfect? Now that they get everything they wanted done, obviously not, but they still got a good amount of stuff done. The Jacksonian Democrats still got rid of the central bank of the United States, they still got rid of protective tariffs. Yeah, we all gotta give them a round of applause. Exactly, I mean, how often can we say that a president actually stood up to a central bank, right, that's very important? How often can we say that a president actually paid down the national debt? These things are very important. If we want to try to achieve something like that, even a fraction of that in the present, we have to learn how people did that in the past, okay? So there were these mass movements of libertarians and forces for decentralization in small government, okay? They were very radical, they were very ideological, they used a variety of resistance tactics, nullifications, sometimes even threatening secession, et cetera, they were very strategic in how they tried to accomplish their aims, okay? So the anti-Federalists fought the Constitution in the 1780s, but once they realized that the Constitution had been created, they switched their tactics. They became very vocal defenders of the Constitution, or at least they created what's known as the strict constructionist view of the Constitution, interpreting it the way they wanted, okay? Patrick Henry was very prominent in this, right? So the Constitution that at least can be defended by many libertarians, that interpretation actually came from people who previously fought the Constitution, okay? The Jacksonians, they had previously fought executive power in the 1810s and 1820s, but then when Andrew Jackson became president, they championed executive power, why? Because they realized that Congress is too corrupt, you had to have the executive do the work, do most of the heavy lifting, in veto various bills, in rotate out various bureaucrats in the government to try and drain the swamp, so to speak, okay? So we wanna see that, well, we were able to achieve successes in the past, so why can't we achieve similar successes in the future? Why can't we do the same thing right now? So at least that fourth reason that there's light at the end of the tunnel, okay? People have made strides in the past, maybe they didn't get as far as they wanted to or it didn't work out in the end, but we can do it one more time and we can do it with feeling, okay? So that's an important reason why the book should be read. I go through a lot of this hidden sort of story. So we've got the four reasons why I think the book is important for someone in the 2020s history, it's how we learn, the book's interesting, okay? We wanna stop current revisionist takes on American history, right? And we wanna show that there's light at the end of the tunnel, okay? So, so I'm very, so I'm very honored to finally see this book out in print. I'm very honored to see it in physical form. I hope that for those of you who have purchased it and read it, I hope that you enjoy it. I hope that my talk has maybe changed some of the other people's minds to take a look at the book, to read it, to see if it will change your mind or to see if it will change someone else's mind in your life. I would once again like to thank Hunter Lewis for sponsoring the book. I would also like to thank the Mises Institute for graciously publishing the book, all right? It's organizations such as the Mises Institute. These are organizations that I've really grown up loving. My very first Mises Institute event was a Mises Circle event in New York in 2010. I'll never forget it. I went there, I picked up my name tag. I met Pat Barnett and I said, wow, this is a great organization. My first Mises University was in 2011 and here I am promoting my own book. So I think that's pretty cool. I'm very happy about that. I would like to end with a quote of sorts, right? So it's actually a quote by Thomas Jefferson. Well, it's technically a misquote. He didn't actually say this but a lot of people said he said this. It's that, so, well, we're just gonna say that he said it, right? It's that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. We now have computer programs that we can churn through all sorts of documents. Apparently, Thomas Jefferson never said it. That's saying originated around that this time. Andrew Jackson did say something like that in one of his presidential speeches but this is something that's generally attributed to Thomas Jefferson. So eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. What does that mean? Well, it means if you wanna protect liberty, if you wanna cherish liberty, if you wanna defend liberty, you constantly have to be learning about liberty. You constantly have to be reading about liberty. You have to be writing about liberty. You have to be talking about liberty. Because if you don't have people like that, the other side will just win. It's just what's gonna happen because there's going to be misguided government policies. There's going to be various special interests trying to get their own legislation and they're just successively going to win. So you need to be eternally vigilant in order to protect liberty. So in that spirit, what I'd like to say is that eternal research is the price of liberty. Okay, so in order to protect the liberty, you have to have people researching about liberty, reading about liberty, writing about liberty, constantly trying to defend liberty against its various critics. Because if we don't support people like that, then liberty won't survive. And it's thanks to the organization such as the Mises Institute that have really been instrumental, not only in my career, but it's also in many other individuals' careers who are here right now that has been truly dedicated to defending liberty. So I think with that, I would like to conclude and we have some time for some questions. So thank you very much. Patrick, we have a couple of mics in the room, please. If you would, just raise your hand and wait until the mic comes for you and ask your brief question for Dr. Newman. Dr. Newman, is it your opinion that cronyism today, the kinds of cronyism we're facing with Pfizer and all of the COVID stuff, is that unprecedented? Are we in an unprecedented time of cronyist turmoil or is there a precedent to that that we can look to to say there's a way out of this? That's a great question. Over the past couple of years, really since the 2020 crisis, we've seen a tremendous increase in cronyism. I would say a lot of this has been unprecedented, but we've seen similar explosions in cronyism, particularly during various national emergencies such as the Civil War, World War I, World War II, okay? And you've seen tremendous, during those periods, tremendous suppressions of personal liberty, increases in various special privileges to businesses and intellectuals and politicians and so on. After those episodes, cronyism declined a little bit, declined noticeably more back in the day, but it's been increasingly declining less and less after each successive crisis. But we have been in similar periods. Of course, history never repeats, it always rhymes, but I do think there is a way out of it. I do think that people are finally starting to get upset at the various restrictions, they're starting to get upset at the economic situation, the job market isn't recovering like people wanted to. Inflation is now becoming a problem. I'm very interested to see how that's turning out. The Fed, at least is somewhat thrown in the towel. They've switched from calling inflation transitory to now the word is episodic, right? So it's like Star Wars episodes, it's a new inflation, the inflation strikes back, return of the inflation, the inflation menace, attack of the inflation, revenge of the inflation, that's what we're moving to now. All right. But I think there is a way out, yeah. We have other questions. Can I talk now? Is it okay? We enjoyed your press release, I'm in your talk. But a question that, here I am, folks like me lie awake at night and think about is, and this should be in your wheelhouse and if you don't have the answer then I don't respect you. I'm just kidding. Why? Why, why, why? After the Bank of the United States Charter had expired in 1812, did Madison and the legislature sign off on renewing the Charter for a new Bank of the United States in 1816? Why would they do that when they knew that the institution was controlled and owned by private banking stockholders and had nothing to do with the benefits or the welfare of the people of the United States? Why would they do it again? What were they thinking? Yeah, that's a great question. So the first Bank of the United States, its Charter relapsed. It was not renewed in 1811. This was due to the tie-breaking vote by George Clinton, the former anti-Federalist governor of New York. He became vice president. It was a real relation when I say Clintons of New York. And then the new bank was chartered in 1816. So why would they do that? Well, the unfortunate reason is that as I discussed in my book there was various prominent financiers that had lobbied for this bank, another Bank of the United States, particularly John Jacob Astor and Stefan Gerard. They had lobbied for a bank. Even more importantly, they had lobbied to have their former lawyer, Alexander J. Dallas, become secretary of the Treasury. And so they were all pushing for this bank because they had bought a bunch of government bonds during the war of 1812. And they were looking to trade in these government bonds for stock in the Bank of the United States at par value, which drastically increased their holdings. I have admittedly a negative view on Madison. So I think he basically kind of went along with all of this because he was okay with it. By this time, the Republican Party, the Jeffersonians had become thoroughly Hamiltonian and very federalist. But that was why they pushed for it. They didn't have the courage to get rid of the bank. Jefferson didn't have the courage to get rid of the bank when he was president. But fortunately, that charter was not, the knot goes throughout its entire length thanks to Andrew Jackson basically vetoing the early recharter by Nicholas Biddle. But so to answer your question, why we had another central bank? Well, we had prominent cronies basically lobbying for it. So that's the unfortunate but correct answer. Yeah. We bought the book, so let me say that right up front. You can ask your question then. Okay. You know, talking about George Washington and buying the land and all these different, and when we constantly like to defend the founding fathers, is this going to be fodder for, you know, liberals to say we told you so? Yeah. The country was a mistake in the beginning. It's always been corrupt and it's time for the do-over. I haven't read the book and maybe you explain all that, but as you're talking, that thought came into my head and it's bothering me. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, so it's an important question. Will people now say that, well, they were all corrupt back then? I would like to say well, some of them are corrupt in particular. The founding fathers that are now champion the most now are the ones who are the most corrupt, right? So you have a musical for Alexander Hamilton. This is interestingly the same man. This is not even discussed at all in the musical, but this is something that I discussed. He had become the most powerful general in the late 1790s. He'd become Inspector General basically in charge of the army and he was trying to get the United States to declare war on France so we could invade Louisiana, we could even invade South America, et cetera, stuff that isn't even talked about now, right? Because people just say, well, Hamilton, he's great. He supported a central bank, right? So there were definitely bad people back then. There were cronies, but very importantly, there were also good guys, people who aren't even discussed at all, right? So if Washington was the most famous Virginian in the 1790s, well, there was also the second most famous Virginian in the 1790s. A lot of people don't know who this was. Even the second most famous American. And that was Patrick Henry, right? So there were good guys. And guys like Patrick Henry, they did fight the Constitution from the beginning. And I do think the Constitution was a mistake because it tried to basically centralize the 13 states and put it into a centralized government when in reality the correct approach was to have multiple confederacies. And this is something that Thomas Jefferson wanted. This was his empire of liberty, right? He thought it would be okay to have multiple confederacies. He even thought that the West Coast would eventually become its own independent nation, right? And this is the story that I think needs to be told because one of the important ways how we can change the present is actually through trying to support greater decentralization such as nullification or even the dreaded, as Tom Wood says, the dreaded S-word, you know, secession, right? These are the appropriate strategies that we need to pursue, right? I think there's a couple... Oh, over there. Hey, thank you so much for your talk. Congratulations on your new book. One of my questions... My question is, given the fact that you've done such an extensive review of the cronyism of the past, can you maybe give us just one example or one idea of maybe a strategy that we can apply today given kind of the theme of the talk this weekend? Yeah, so that's a great question relates to that fourth point I mentioned, light at the end of the tunnel. Well, now this is when I quickly leave, but I think an important sort of strategy that we can learn from, and this is something that I was deeply impressed by, was again how we can strategically look at documents such as the Constitution and see what are the appropriate ways in which we can enact reforms on the federal, state, or local level, right? So one of the great strategies that was created by basically anti-federalists, particularly an individual of Virginia, another great Virginia known as John Taylor of Caroline, was what became the compact theory, right? So arguing that the states entered the Constitution as a compact and when the federal government violates their end of the bargain, so to speak, states have a right to resist, to nullify, or potentially even to secede. I think getting more and more people comfortable with these ideas is very, very important because we're unfortunately not going to be able to reform Washington. It just simply won't happen. It's too concentrated. The only way we can try and do, we can really try and enact reforms is if we try and do it much more on the state and local level. And we've really seen a lot of strides towards nullification regarding various mask mandates or ordinances or vaccine requirements, et cetera. And this has gotten people a lot more states' rights oriented. Now people are like, oh, you're from Florida. Yes, I'm from Florida. I'm from the land of Florida. I'm a Tampainian. We enjoy our freedom. And it's like, how goes up into the land of Pennsylvania? Like, well, what's going on there? Tell us about that, right? And I think that's actually healthy because we've been getting much more of a decentralized, individualist spirit. And this is something that's very important. Hey, my question is, what would you say to the Richard Wolff types of the world who would say that there is no distinction between, they don't recognize the distinction between cronyism and capitalism, and his critique would be that wherever you see capitalism, there always has been cronyism that followed behind it. So at my college at Florida Southern College, we actually sent her for free enterprise in sort of part of the clashing battles. We had to invite Richard Wolff to speak. So I met him and I've actually discussed some of these issues with him. And unfortunately, I wasn't able to get my point across. So someone such as Richard Wolff, a very prominent Marxist who basically says everything in capitalism is bad and I was talking about how inflation is due to greedy capitalists exploiting the public. So of course we know what's coming and that's price controls, which this time it will work. I'm convinced that price controls will work this time. This is the one time in history, but they will work. I will say that one you, they just simply don't know their history. They don't simply understand how there were various quasi-free market, regulatory environments, right? So when people think of free banking in the United States, they think it was very chaotic. In reality, the problems were caused due to government intervention, but it was by far the best monetary system that we've had in terms of bank failures in the severity of business cycles, et cetera. So to explain that well, these weren't due to capitalism's fault, this was due to cronyism's fault, and to also explain the importance of economic education. This is something that Mises said that really to defend capitalism, its eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. To defend capitalism, you need people who are able to defend it against cronyism, right? The cronyism doesn't result from capitalism. The cronyism results from government intervention because whenever government starts to regulate and oversee business more and more, they're inevitably going to invite business into that partnership, so to speak. So this is the problem most people don't understand. They just think, well, if we get the right guy in charge, we get the right person, they're going to have the right rules, and they're going to be able to safely regulate everything and et cetera, et cetera. And the only way to combat that is through reason, it's through argumentation, it's through showing them historically. This is now what resulted, and it will certainly not result in the present. You said wonderful things about Jefferson and his idea of confederacies and notification so forth, but are those things in the book? Yes, yes. I talk about them significantly regarding the Empire of Liberty, regarding the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, regarding what was known as the Spirit of 1798 or the Spirit of 98, regarding the compact theory and et cetera. All of this is in the book because it relates to cronyism and it's how reformers genuinely did make a very serious dent in cronyism using these doctrines, and hopefully we can do the same thing. I'm confident that we can do the same thing in the present. We're talking about the position that some people take, which is just we need to get the right guy in charge. But in your view, is cronyist domination of the political system inevitable or is it containable? And if it's inevitable, then is that ultimately an argument against the state or against any state? I would say it's unfortunately inevitable, but it's really inevitable whenever you have a very large country, you have a country that's expanding and that's putting more power in the central government. The proximate reason I described this in my book, I didn't want to give it away, but it relates to the question that the approximate reason why the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats failed, at least they didn't succeed in fully removing cronyism was because they basically got corrupted by land. Jefferson's presidency, particularly his second term, was destroyed by his prior decision in 1803 to unconstitutionally, at least in his mind, purchase Louisiana. And there's this massive acquisition of land because once you do that, then you have to support internal improvements, building all sorts of roads, et cetera, to bind the empire together. Jefferson, once he purchased Louisiana, he then basically tried to maneuver to acquire Canada. And this is really the reason behind the War of 1812. The Jacksonians stumbled because over the Texas annexation question, as well as trying to acquire ports on the California coast, such as San Francisco, which led to the Mexican War. So really the cronyism is inevitable whenever we try and have these very large governments, like the central government of the United States, cronyism is inevitable because you have so many special interests and you're trying to, everyone's trying to get their own slice of the pie. Really the only way I think we can realistically try to reform the situation is by, through greater decentralization, at least trying to remove that power from Washington. So to have sort of limited smaller governments where the people are thoroughly imbibed with sort of this general free market or libertarian orientation, right? That's really the only way we can stop cronyism, I think. How much do you trust left-wing politicians who claim that they want to take steps against cronyism and lobbying people like Bernie Sanders? Not much, unfortunately. That's not the correct solution because in many times, as sometimes gets covered up, they are funded by various large financial banks and other institutions. So they're cronying themselves and it's the government is Mr. Fix It. It's the mentality. It's the nirvana fallacy. It's saying the market's not perfect so there's various errors and of course the market isn't perfect. Entrepreneurs make mistakes, et cetera. And they say, so therefore there's a government solution and if you just listen to me, I will be able to bring about the promised land, et cetera. It's not a sincere attack on cronyism. We can look at various socialist countries, not Scandinavia. They're not actually socialist. We look at the socialist countries that we would turn into places like Venezuela, et cetera. They're socialist, but they're very crony. So the left-wing politicians know I would not trust them to reduce special interests, privileges, and so on. We can very clearly see that with all of the landmark legislation that they've passed if you think of all the cronies involved in Obamacare or the Dodd-Frank Act, both of those in 2010. It's an incredible amount. People are generally less aware of this because they just simply say, well, these guys say they're fighting for the common man, the common person, so that means they must be. And well, politicians never lie. So therefore they're doing the right thing, but that's just simply false. And I think it's a very important goal of ours, a task of ours to actually try to really change people's mind on this, that politicians lie. This has happened historically, and they will continue to lie, and they'll continue to take advantage of a relatively uninformed public. Has there been a connection, historically speaking, and perhaps in your book, between the infrastructure that is initiated with the war and national defense and then maybe any cronyism that follows domestically? Yeah. That's a great question. There's been a lot of infrastructure that's been tagged along with war. In my book, I talk about the Erie Canal. So if any of you had to sing this old song when you're in music class at elementary school about the Erie Canal, you know what I'm talking about, the canal in New York, it was actually very linked with the War of 1812, because it was really pushed for by this former federalist. His name was Peter B. Porter, and he was trying to get a canal, particularly a canal in Lake Ontario, because that's where his business was, and he thought that if we've invaded Canada, we would be able to basically accomplish that, and it was basically tied in. It later became the Erie Canal, but I go through this whole story. A lot of people don't understand. I talk about how in the Mexican War, there was this big movement for a transcontinental railroad or to try and have a canal across Panama, stuff that the transcontinental railroad, especially during the Civil War, war and infrastructure has been very, very linked. And a lot of people think, oh, infrastructure, well, roads and canals, people aren't talking about canals now, but we still talk about roads and highways. Well, there can't be anything crony there. We all need roads. You know, who would build the road, so to speak, but actually you look at the historical record, there's tons of pork, there's tons of special interest privileges in various infrastructure legislation. So it's not something that's new. The current cronies have involved in the infrastructure bill is not new. It's been present in basically every infrastructure bill we've had, unfortunately. Hello. So this is sort of a general decentralization kind of question, but it's come up a lot in libertarian circles that I am in and people with whom I respect. But there seems to be sort of this question about whether state governors can usurp the authority of local governors, even though they're in a libertarian direction like mask mandates and stuff like that, whether or not they should supersede these local governments who may constitutionally have more authority, but whether libertarians should support these kind of, and to me instinctively they should, but whether or not sort of state governors who may not have constitutional authority can actually move us in a more libertarian direction with local ordinances and stuff like that, whether or not we should say, oh no, that's giving them too much power or whether we should support those things regardless if they're in a libertarian direction. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this is very prominent, especially regarding, say, the state of Florida and various local ordinances. So we say, well, if the people locally decided they want to do something, well, then why can't we respect them and et cetera, and I would say, well, certainly if local people want to do that, then yeah, we should let them do that, but local people didn't decide to do that. It wasn't a local decision. It was something at the federal level. See, the current, the critics of that, they never, it's not a one-way street. So they say, well, local, you know, local communities, towns, et cetera, they have a right to institute these ordinances and defy their governor, et cetera. But of course, if the governor's supporting restrictions and the local community decides to say, we know we don't want to restrict that, they never defend that, right? It's only in the direction of government intervention, right? So they say, well, you know, it's always the local community's right to decide they want these ordinances or not. They don't actually mean that because when local communities have tried to resist, they fall back on the authority of the state or the federal government. So I do support state governments basically saying, no, you're not allowed to do that, or no, you can't enforce vaccine requirements or mask mandates or something else, et cetera, because it's not, the other side isn't playing fair on that. And the local community doesn't have the right to do that anyway because it's not a collective decision. Local communities, local businesses have the right to say, oh, if you want to enter my business, you have to wear a mask or something, but they also have the right to say, if you want to enter my business, you don't have to wear a mask, right? It was never that way. It was always in the direction of more government intervention. So the people supporting these policies, they're not actually in favor of decentralization and local control. They're just in favor of basically greater control from Washington. This is just a giant sort of smoke screen for that. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Hopefully that's an easy one. So the book stops at 1849. Yeah. Why 1849? And are you planning a second book to cover the rest of Crowley? Yes. That's a good question. Why did the book stop at 1849? Well, the book stopped at 1849 because that was sort of the official collapse of, you could say, the Jacksonian movement. And I felt that that was a sufficient ending point for talking about the liberty versus power. I'd gone through the Jeffersonian. I'd gone through the anti-Federalists, excuse me. I'd gone through the Jeffersonians. I'd gone through the Jacksonians. I felt that was a natural stopping point. And yes, I would like to write a book or books continuing the story using a different interpretive framework. A great sort of period would be from the 1850s to the 1950s, basically covering all of the cronyism in there. And that would be a project that's something I'm working on. If there's demand, I'll supply. So, you know, those John Baptiste say, supply creates its own demand. So there is that. But that's the reason why it was a good thematic sort of conclusion. And I would definitely like to continue the story. Yeah. So thank you. All right, so I think we're good? Thanks. All right, well, big round of applause for Patrick. Thanks so much. Thank you. We'll see you in the morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for coming.