 See, one of the great things about these events is that it allows us to have conversations we can't have in many other rooms. And I think it's amazing how many people have already talked to today that have talked about how they moved here in the Tampa area or Florida as a state very recently. And so again, being in this room I think in particular with the ideas that are unique to the Institute, the fellowship I think is always one of the strengths of these events and it's something you can never get from watching it online or something like that. So that's a pitch for everyone out there watching some YouTube to make sure you make it out to Amisa's event. So my name is Ishto Bishop. I'm going to talk a little bit, when we were talking about this event the traders asked for to have some talks about entrepreneurship and unfortunately I'm not an entrepreneur. I've been a laborer, I've been a part of the laptop class probably too long. My wife is an entrepreneur, she's a caterer, but so I can't really speak about the entrepreneurial view of things really. But I do want to offer what I think is a dynamic of really this global shift that's going on right now in the way that I think Florida provides some comparative advantages. And I think what we're seeing right now is I think we all kind of feel it in our gut, right? There's something just not right with America with the global economy and I'm trying to I'm going to try to help identify why I think Florida might be a solution for getting something that is can stop, provide some easiness in uneasy times. So I want to start by identifying one thinker because I think that there's been a renewed interest in his work. It's James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution. And in this book, they published in 1941, he wrote about how he saw a new form of society, sovereignty is localized and administrative bureaus. They proclaimed the rules, make the law, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureau occurs in a global scale. The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried out by new men, a new type of men, and it's specifically the managerial type. The active heads of the bureaus and the managers in government, the same as or nearly the same in training functions, skills, habits of thoughts as the managers in industry. And what he was describing at the time was what he saw arising in the world. This is what was happening in Germany. This was what was happening in Russia, and this is what was happening in FDR's America. Now the problem is that for James Burnham, he saw this as a good thing. Burnham's work celebrated this change. He thought that free market capitalism was dead. It would never recover from the Great Depression. He would never be able to provide housing and employment for everyone that needed it. And so he was celebrating the managerial revolution and made a lot of big predictions about what he thought was going to happen. And most of his predictions did not come true. It wasn't until they repealed the great new deal that we actually saw real economic gains, Germany lost to the Western world. And so Burnham's predictions were wrong. And yet his work still resonates today. And I think it's because he's describing something that is true now. And so the question is, what makes it true now when it wasn't back then? Rothbard commented as well on Burnham's work. This is actually from an article in 1993 referring to a work by a Sam Francis, a book called Beautiful Losers. Francis himself inspired by Burnham's work. Burnham writing his managerial revolution after leaving the Trotsky movement in 1941, brilliantly saw the rising collectivism of the age, communism, Nazism, fascism, the new deal as different manifestations of the same phenomenon, the takeover of power from private property owners by the new managerial elite. In short, the managers, the intellectuals, what he aired on though, said in short the managers, the intellectuals, the PR men are hired hands. Often, of course, they are extremely influential, but they are only influential so long as their advice suits big daddy, the large corporate owners and financiers, the Rockefellers, the Goldman Sachs, et cetera. So what he was identifying is that this new managerial elite was not going to have some sort of lofty ideology that was going to bring in new wisdom to the economy better guided, but ultimately this would always serve a new powerful elite, the same as which has always existed. So if we're thinking about today what kind of embodies this new managerial revolution, I think we can see it in Davos. We can see it in Klaus Schwab. Now, I think understanding his ideology on this take and what Florida and other states are doing to combat it provide usefulness on how entrepreneurs can adjust to an economy increasingly controlled by this class of people unless by traditional property owners. So Schwab has been on this intellectual course for quite a while. He's written several books about it and his main sort of project is a promotion of what he calls stakeholder capitalism. And this he contrasts it to two other forms of capitalism. State capitalism, which is largely dictated by the desires of the state, and shareholder capitalism, which is controlled by property owners and he sees as being short-sighted, guided by petty profit. And contrast, stakeholder capitalism will be guided by a managerial elite. It will take into account long-word concerns, such as global warming and things like this, and therefore can create sustainability and be less prone to the sort of crises that all of the very serious people would tell you is embedded within laissez-faire. But of course, these are simply fancy names for other ideologies, right? State capitalism, just socialism or communism, right? Shareholder capitalism, it's just capitalism, right? And that kind of makes stakeholder capitalism, well, you know, goes with the German accent. Now, at the end of those, you know, sometimes people can make a say that we're making too big of a deal about the World Economic Forum after all. It's true they don't have their own military force, right? They only have their security force outside of whatever they rent from Switzerland for the time of their very serious, very important delegates being there. The problem is though is that within attendance and the people that parrot the ideology of men like Klaus Schwab are very influential people. Here I'm just highlighting a small group of them. Now, we've got Brian T. Moynihan, who's the CEO of Bank of America. We have Larry Fink of BlackRock. We've got Ursula Vanderland, who is the president of Europe, which is a nice title, nice gig if you can get it. And we have John Kerry, who's been around the spectrum for a while. We've got Christine Lagarde, who's the president of ECB. We've got Janet Yellen, who's making tax policy not only for the US, but hopefully for the world in her view, right? It also had a nice gig at the Fed that paid quite well in between stints. These people have real power. And so the ideologies of Klaus Schwab are being, I think, effectively implemented around the world. And I often get asked the question, well, do you think this is cynical? Are they true believers? I think for the most part, I think if you saw John Kerry's remarks, and he compared the people in the room as kind of extraterrestrial beings, because they care so much. They're on such a different plane than the rest of us just because they're so concerned about the ideas talked about in this room. Well, again, John Kerry referring to himself as a lizard person was not on my bingo card for 2023, but I'll take it. Now, one of the issues, of course, the way this is affecting financial markets and capital markets. Louis von Mises is claimed to have said, when it was asked what really distinguishes a capitalist economy, he said the stock market. And so this kind of thing is creating a very difficult dynamic when what happens when large funds that have so much influence over the boards of various companies through their asset management when they become beholden to these ideologies? So Larry Fink, he's made it clear that he views SEG and DEI sort of grades on companies as just simply part of capitalism as usual. Climate risk is investment risk. He has promised a sectoral shift in capital and increased acceleration of investments going to sustainably focused companies. And if you're on the outside of that, well, tough luck. Brian Moynihan, who though is simply the CEO of Bank of America, a very big bank, he also is part of one of the big panels with World Economic Forum this past event. He was leading a stewarding responsible capitalism panel. And he identified that over 300 major banks are signatories of the UN's Principles for Responsible Banking, which represents almost half of the global banking industry. That's a lot of failure power. Ursula, though, is someone who I want to identify. Here she is, marching in front of the European Guard. Even though she is a leader of a foreign country, it's important to understand that in many ways the rules in Europe have a very big consequence to us here in the United States. After all, it is the European regulators that Elon Musk has had to go grovel over. A lot of the big tech companies, their legal foundations for their policies are certainly not grounded in the Constitution. They are grounded within European understandings of free speech. And so the regulatory control the EU has has a tremendous amount of impact on how these companies actually operate within the United States. Perhaps even more concerning is their efforts on food supply issues. The way that they are going to get us to eat the bugs is by strengthening their controls over European agriculture. Again, all of this has an impact here in the United States beyond simply what the president of Europe can do to the constituents of that continent. We are also seeing other domestic challenges on the financial front of this managerial class undermining capitalism, as it was once known. Here we've seen the banking industry start discriminating specifically against industries. Not that long ago, early 2021, there was an attempt to have the comptroller create an equal banking environment to try to prevent this. Well, guess what? The Biden administration has stopped those rules from being implemented, which is them dumbling down on policies of discrimination. We've also seen, you know, once upon a time, the solution to this that libertarians had was, oh, we're going to have crypto take care of, the blockchain, remove everything in the blockchain. We don't need to worry about these archaic regulations. Well, Caitlin Long, who's a great supporter of the Institute, a great Austrian. I mean, truly a heroic individual. She's been trying to get her custodia bank, which would be a full reserve bank. I mean, it's a really incredible project. She's been discriminated against by the Federal Reserve. They're depriving her of access that other institutions would get. And they're using the argument of safety and soundness for a full reserve banking, full reserve bank is what they're worried about undermining the safety and soundness of the U.S. economy. You know, that makes sense only in Biden's America. But this is a larger issue, too. What we have right now is that it's a renewed of, in the Obama administration, there was something called Operation Choke Point, which was the way that they systemically pressured banking institutions to de-platform online gamblers. I'm actually, I know at one point on Fox Business, a poker player, an online poker player, showed up on a Fox Business hit with a Rothbard shirt, which was great, and actually pushed a lot of gambling companies into Bitcoin. Well, they're doing it now on crypto companies. And so again, we're seeing the administrative state, the managerial state, effectively and systemically phase out those entrepreneurs who have gotten in their way. And I think this poses a real challenge for us as libertarians. There's ways, obviously, that we can build businesses in our communities. But what happens when that ISR on gets focused upon us for any reason? And of course, you know, Canadian truckers can tell you exactly how that feels. But, and of course, don't worry, they're not gonna come after you, right? Well, you know, got a whole bunch of new IRS agents prepared to go after transitions, a transaction as small as, you know, $600. That takes this sort of line of scrutiny. Again, for someone like my wife, a caterer, you know, she doesn't do a lot of $10,000 transactions. She has a lot of $600 transactions. And so the way that DC can't intervene into the way she conducts her business has increased a lot in the last few years. Now, there is good news, however. Sure, we have a global economic system guided by, you know, a very boring collection of bond villains. But there is good news. There are the big threat buzzword of this year's forum was fractionalism. They're concerned that things like Elon Musk buying Twitter are creating challenges to their approach of increasingly centralized power. And so, like Evan Europe, one example is that it turns out when you take away and confiscate farms that have been held for generations, people don't like that, you know, they protest. Well, in the United States, we have our own form of protest. Again, I can make a mistake. You know, there is, I think, a political dynamic that is necessary to engaging with this global threat. And I think Governor Santos has provided an example. I think the lessons from what has been effective are gonna be useful not only to what, speaking about Florida issues, but hopefully creating models that can pose a real threat to this global centralized power. Now, he has made this sort of the mission of his last year and a half. Now, part of this might play into a presidential campaign. We should certainly always be aware of the cynical aspects of politics. But it's effective. One aspect of it, one of the most headlines, is him going after BlackRock and its SEG portfolio. This is part of several states. It's not just Florida, West Virginia, I believe was the first one to do it. They've moving some of their funds, whether it's pension funds, state funds, things like that, outside of portfolios that are marked for DEI grades. Now, there is a part of a showmanship aspect to it. The actual percentage of the Florida portfolios within this are fairly small compared. I think Florida has like $2 billion parked with BlackRock. The percentage of this that is within an SEG kind of marked portfolios is very small. It's, I think, less than $200 million. There is talk of legislation that would pull everything from BlackRock, right? So if we view Larry Fink as a bad guy and we want to protect Floridians from bad guy, well, then you kind of have to go beyond simply that's very small portfolio. But this is at least a start, right? This is state governments utilizing funds of work. We even had taken from us. Let's not get too romantic a bit with it. But trying to make little chinks in the armor of this global managerial class. The problem is, though, we need to understand there is a cost to this. One of the ways that BlackRock and these head-funged managers are fighting back is arguing that you're basically, I mean, so this goes in one way or the other, they're fighting back is that they're arguing, and there will be lawyers, a lot of billable hours in this, that these states are undermining their own fiduciary responsibilities. And this, again, creates a very real dynamic where there is a financial cost to going against the great reset. It's not simply, oh, we're going to prevent our funds from going into the next cylindra, right? And therefore, in the long run where we get vindicated, there's a very interesting article a couple of weeks ago in Bloomberg that highlighted that red state efforts to push back against BlackRock, against these firms, have a cost. It is actually cheaper for the state of California to underwrite their debt with a lower credit rating than Florida and Texas. And so again, these are costs that the state is bearing to make this. I would argue, however, that they are necessary challenges, right? If you view that what we have right now is not simply kind of a market-driven actors, but rather people pursuing a specific agenda, then there might be a cost that goes beyond simply market efficiency. This is where the political aspect, I think really comes in. So that is Florida versus BlackRock on some of those asset management issues. And again, I think this is gonna be a constant battleground. Again, I'm very interested to see the next legislation is, but there are some other fronts where Florida is trying to create some pushback to the environment that we have right now. Let's go back to the IRS issue. There's a new bill out that was gonna get passed because the advantage of a supermajority and a popular governor is that pretty much anything the governor wants gets done. This is a very interesting maneuver. There's been efforts in a variety of fronts to nullify federal encroachment. We've seen it with Second Amendment sanctuary cities. We've seen it actually, the 10 minute center has been effective at limiting state funds for like a cooling surveillance outfits for the NSA, which I think is really cool. Well, here's an attempt to kind of curtail some of the IRS abuse, curtail not eliminate. One of which would be that Florida state chartered banks will be notified if the IRS starts kind of arbitrarily auditing customers. Now, this has not applied to federally chartered banks, the majority of banks in Florida are federally chartered, but we have now is a very interesting dynamic where there are now benefits to being in Florida chartered banks. And so if one of the ways that we can kind of defend ourselves against this consolidated global elite is by creating parallel institutions to have economic fragmentation. Well, now we actually have political statutes that can help tip off from federal abuse. I would like to see, hopefully, I mean, there's reasons to think that this might lead to a strengthening of Florida chartered banks against federally chartered ones. One of the most controversial aspects in libertarian circles of the way that Florida approach things has been its response to the civil rights state. I'm gonna quote Rothbard again. He identified, and this is Rothbard, some of his most politically incorrect, so consider that as a trigger warning. But he identified the way that effectively the civil rights apparatus, the transition from a property rights environment to a civil rights dynamic, has created a very much a patronized class that the left has been able to use to gradually expand its power. Government has been used to create a phony set of rights for every designated victim group under the sun, to be used to dominate and exploit the rest of us for the special gains of these castrated groups. On and on the assault goes, in every case, government technocrats, official therapists, and the malignant new class, grant themselves and associated victim groups with ever increasing power to exploit, dominate, and loot an ever dwindling group of middle-aged, white, English-speaking, Christian, and especially heterosexual male parents. Again, I think this is exactly, I think a lot of people are seeing this play out in our day-to-day life. Well, what DeSantis has done, though, is it's kind of flipped this dynamic on its head by advocating for essentially civil rights protections on our own, on constituencies that look to DeSantis for help. We saw this with the unvaccinated, right, where he prevented private discrimination from employment. Those restrictions are actually gonna be, I think, further strengthened this time around. There are still some issues with contract work. We saw it with preventing vaccine passports, which Florida, doing that, was a major issue of creating a major dynamic globally, right? So its impact was felt beyond our own state borders. Did it with mask mandates within private businesses. And so there were appropriate, very sound concerns from libertarians, right? This is an infringement upon property rights. This is an infringement upon the right to association. And this is all true. What it is, though, is that it created a dynamic where those that went against the narrative of the regime were the ones benefiting from these strengthened civil rights protections. Now, the ideal, the libertarian approach would be to eliminate all civil rights protections entirely. You know, that would restore property rights. But I think in the short term, so long as we're living in this, you know, manipulated environment, we're seeing the gains that DeSantis has made. And this is the address that he made at the National Conservative Conference. And in particular here, he was talking about civil rights discrimination against conservatives. And of course, you know, we've now seen it play out. Of course, you know, these decisions, in spite of how much we might have read and read the magazine and elsewhere, that banning Alex Jones was simply the market at work, turns out the discrimination policies of big tech were being directed, you know, explicitly by the Biden administration or Biden's campaign or the FBI or other bad actors. Another aspect of the civil rights sort of lens that DeSantis is using is playing out is within his attacks on CRT. Wolkism, as Florida is where Wolk goes to die, is his bumper slicker, right? And one of the people that have been, one of his kind of chief generals, and this is Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute. And so part of the legislation that Chris Rufo has, you know, kind of been the face of in Florida is banned CRT within public education. He's actually banned CRT within private trainings. So if you were a business in Florida, I mean, right now there's a court federal pause, maybe that's why he's looking at going to Washington probably, but there is a pause in, you know, if you want to make your employee read white fragility, this legislation would stop that. Again, an infringement upon property rights, yes, but, you know, is doing so in an opposite direction the way they're usually used. What I'm most excited about though, and I think the aspect that could lead the biggest payoff here in Florida and really help create the true defense that we need from the ideology of this managerial class, is what's going on down the street at New College in Sarasota. Now, for those who may not be aware, it's a very small college. New College is, you know, one of the most left-wing universities in the country. In the 1970s actually became an official state college. There's, I think like 600-something students, they have open drug use, they don't wear shoes, go into class. I had one friend from my high school graduation that went there, he is now a her, right? This is what this school is. Well, it's also a state university. And as a state university, the governor gets to appoint the board of trustees for that state university. And so he appointed a majority of New College's state board. One of those is Chris Rufo. And so what you have right now is the school president was immediately fired. He was replaced by Richard Corcoran, who was the former secretary of education here. He's the person that every Florida teacher union rep, you know, cut your curses before they go to bed. You know, if you're gonna hire someone as counterinsurgency, that's who you do it. He contrasts, I think, quite well to former senator Ben Sasse, who was put in Gainesville, not quite the same sort of warrior at that point, maybe might as good as they could have done in Gainesville at that time. But it is very curious right now. If you look around state universities, a whole lot of state university president positions that are being filled by interums, they're vacant. I have a feeling you're gonna start seeing more and more of these filled with people that have a very specific worldview. So the status had last weekend I was over in Orlando for a meeting that had to say to speak. And he outlined his approach to higher education, his platform over the next year. And, you know, I think it's good stuff. It's worth highlighting. First and foremost is they are auditing every single DEI diversity, equity and inclusion program that these universities are supporting. And this includes multicultural centers and women's studies programs. And they're axing them. They're getting rid of majors. They're getting rid of centers. They're getting rid of administrative positions. There's gonna be a lot of fired progressives. Maybe they will move elsewhere. I think that's worth a part. Last session has kind of went on to the radar but we implemented tenure reform. Every five years, a state professor can be fired. Hmm, I wonder if that's gonna be used. And so that means that maybe we have new college, maybe in the next five years we've got an entire new class of people. What if some of them are Mises people? That'd be good. You also have, he actively talked about how one of the issues that they have is that, you know, you have these red states. They create these research centers. You know, we're gonna study the classics. We're gonna study the documents. And the problem is is that the faculty they bring on to staff these centers go through the traditional faculty hiring process. And so therefore the ideological viewpoints of the current faculty end up being a filter by which they consider new candidates for these positions. And so one of the things that DeSantis is outlining as one of the policy proposals is that the hiring decisions of these faculty members are gonna come through the boards and not through existing tenure or the tenured faculty. And so we've now created a situation where Florida state universities are gonna have the ability to churn out woke faculty members and they're going to need to fill them with others. Now, you know, obviously at a place called the Mises Institute I have a tremendous amount of, one of my favorite books, if you haven't read it, Mises Biography by Guido Holzman. It's also a fantastic audio book. If you got a long drive going back, highly recommend it, narrator's grade. Guido Holzman for being a German economist. He's incredible. He's a much better storyteller than he probably should be. There was something unique in pre-war Vienna. And a big part of that was the intellectual environment. The universities were not decaying society. They were actually elevating society. We had incredible scholars developed in this process. Someone like Carl Menger was able to have an entire school of thought around him from that. If we can create a similar intellectual environment than Florida, if we can double, triple, quadruple, you know, if we can create the amount of Mises Institute-style faculty within the state, if we can create entire Austrian economic programs within the state, that creates an intellectual environment that will outlast any politician. And best of all, kind of going to the backlash issue, there was some concern here. If you'll talk to Curtis Yarvin, he'll say like, oh, the concern about doing anything like this is that you're gonna get a backlash of people. They had a protest earlier this week. UCF has, you know what, 50, 60,000 people. They had like a few hundred showed up. They looked like a Nikki Freed rally. That's a good sign. So I think about Florida going forward. What's important is that we are about to come in, I don't know if you saw it a couple of weeks ago, George Soros kind of gave his ideal state of the next couple of years. And what he wants is a desantis to beat a Trump in a presidential race for Trump to run third party, which would divide the Republican party, empower the Democrats again, force the Republican party to once again neuter itself, yada, yada. This is a very real possibility. If it's not, then it's a good chance that the governor who's responsible for a lot of this stuff, sort of legislature was not doing this sort of cool stuff before desantis. They're doing so because desantis wins by 20 points and people like to be popular, right? Let's be clear here. Politicians are reacting to their own self-interest. We have to maintain their self-interest on defending our freedoms to be that stone in the shoe to the managerial elite. I was thinking about Brett's comment earlier about the need to have a business class that is motivated ideologically. I wanna show you something. This is a little handout. It's a kind of illustrative version of the road to serfdom. You can't see it, but at the bottom, there's a very interesting notion there. Originally published and distributed by the General Motors Company. Now, imagine General Motors cranking out Jeff Dice propaganda in 2023. It's impossible to fathom. And this is what, 70 years we get GM publishing road to serfdom. Mises is his first benefactors, the National Association for Manufacturers. In 70 years, we get GM publishing that to GM, you know, pushing for transgenderism in elementary schools. We need a business class that recognizes that standing up to these managerial elites is in their own self-interest as well. We need a Florida that can maintain its own culture, intellectually, spiritually, and politically that is equipped to deal with the enemies ahead. And thank you all for being in this room, for being a part of this. And hopefully the Mises Institute on the intellectual side will continue to play a foundation and asset in that continuing battle. Thank you very much.