 I'll introduce Lou Rockwell our founder who started the Mises Institute with with Ron Paul's help with Murray Rothbard's help With the help of Margaret von Mises in the early 1980s and he's he's really seen the organization grow And I know that it means a lot to him to see this kind of turnout. So doctor So Dr. Paul, thank you so much and Lou Rockwell Today's event is all about looking ahead and what awaits us in 2016 and beyond We have plenty to be concerned about to be sure Usual bad guys are up to their usual wickedness At the same time we're living through some extremely positive changes and I like to discuss several of them today These changes have occurred so quickly and I suspect few of us have fully absorbed their true significance If we had we might have a much more confident view of the future than many of us do today One of them is obvious and has been happening for some time living standards Whether it's child mortality Chloric intake living space environmental quality life expectancy real income or many other Contributions to human well-being the movement has not only been up, but dramatically so Now our material standard of living is in everything But it sure is something Consider these facts in the England of the late just the late 19th century The differences between rich and poor were evident not only in income But also in such metrics as life expectancy and even height The rich lived 17 years longer than the poor and were a full five inches taller Today that is discrepancy has been reduced to two years and less than a single inch In the United States material progress has been so great that the incomes of the average poor household in the year 2000 would have placed it in the top five or ten percent of all households in 1900 If you think there hasn't been progress even over the past generation or so ask yourself if you'd like to go back to 1977 and the manual typewriter those gigantic heavy televisions with three channels cars without air conditioning not to mention no internet no instant communication With anyone anywhere in the world and no access to the great literary and scholarly achievements of mankind at the push of a button This explosion of material wealth in the standard of living had its origin the industrial revolution a Period and a phenomena portrayed in most government classrooms as a terrible Catastrophe for the working class The state's preferred narrative is obvious enough without state intervention. The condition of the average person is bound to deteriorate a Scholarly discussion among historians of that period has become known as the standard of living debate And it took in the later half of this in the last half of the 20th century Largely unbeknownst to the general public so-called optimists the people who believed the industrial revolution had raised the standard of living Yes, there are people who don't don't believe that were the clear winners The only debate that still takes place today Involves pinpointing exactly when the improvement in living standards began not whether it occurred excuse me the extent of mankind's material progress and especially that of the poorest has been astonishing and much have occurred Long before the creation of modern welfare states in case the state wanted to try to take credit for it Which of course it does We live much better than people have ever lived And liberation from destitution has allowed us to pursue on a much greater scale than ever before Pursuits that we find it intellectually and spiritually fulfilling pursuits that have been impossible and unthinkable to those who came before us So that's an obvious one obvious in the facts obvious in the implications Human beings continue to live better and better despite all the best efforts of the state Here's a more subtle one as long as liberty has fought against power It has been at a decided disadvantage In one way or another the state has dominated the molding of opinion This is an essential state activity because it is the way that the population is indoctrinated into the need for and Consequently made amenable to the exercise of state power Is a Murray and Rothbard described our situation quote in past centuries the church has constituted the exclusive opinion molding classes in society Hence the importance to the state and its rulers of an established church And the importance to libertarians of the concept of separating church and state Which really means not allowing the state to confer upon one group a monopoly of the opinion molding function In the 20th century the church was replaced in its opinion molding rule or in that lovely phrase the engineering of consent by a swarm of intellectuals academics social scientists technocrats Policy scientists social workers journalists and the media generally and on and on Often included for old-time's sake so to speak is the sprinkling of social gospel ministers and counselors from mainstream churches So to sum up the problem is that the bad guys the ruling classes have gathered unto themselves the intellectual and media elites Who are able to bamboozle the masses into consenting to their rule to indoctrinate them As the Marxist would say with false consciousness unquote More than anything else this has been the problem that has faced libertarians Libertarianism since its first began to emerge as a distinct school of thought What we stand for runs directly contrary to the interest of power and it is power that dominates the opinion molding function First in the schools then in the media That means people do not get exposed to our ideas except perhaps in caricature In the schools our ideas have been ignored in the media. They have gone from being ignored Always the media's preferred strategy when our numbers were so much smaller to being distorted and demonized I always get a laugh out of the conservatives who say The the dissemination of propaganda in public schools is a recent phenomenon If only the schools hadn't strayed from their noble pursuit of the truth Well, sure as fact in Murray Rothbard pointed out in his little book education free and compulsory The purpose of government-run schooling from the very beginning was to indoctrinate the students into a set of Established beliefs in order to bolster the priorities of established authority The homeschooling movement attacks this route and branch It is one of the most significant social phenomena of our times and almost no time it became so large that even the state couldn't abolish it With millions of people withdrawing from the state's primary apparatus of opinion molding what remains for these people Was to be sure that they themselves were teaching Things that were sound and reliable and not partially still enthralled to the state propaganda Ron Paul's new homeschooling curriculum helped solve this very problem Students won't go through a dozen years of formal education without ever hearing the names Mises Bastia Rothbard. They'll realize there's another side to the state's threadbare story at the click of a mouse The entire curriculum is available to any family anywhere in the world Likewise Khan Academy teaches mathematics to the most elementary to the most advanced concepts in a large series of amazing free online videos It's ventured into other areas Really math is its strength millions of kids use it The very existence of resources like this and there are more of them than you can believe Can help it raise the question if kids can get a top-notch education for little or nothing Why are we paying such humongous property taxes every year? at the university level 2015 was a very very bad Year for their public relations on one campus after another Horrified parents discovered that if anything left wing hysteria and intimidation were far worse than any of them had realized before now Institutions were shut down over bizarre absurd and even impossible demands the demands themselves Were outgrows of campus in incidents the student activists insisted evidence of systemic racism But which on closer examination turned out to be exceedingly mild actually benign or often made up out of whole cloth as Usually the diversity ideologues have no interest in diversity at all and take for granted that everyone should be herded into the conventional four-year ordeal But what if different people could choose the educational paths that suited them We're beginning to see this already The places like hack reactor whose 12-week intensive course of study yields programmers who are in high demand They have a 99% hiring rate and their graduates earn an average starting salary of a hundred and five thousand dollars a year Or how about this? Could they be at Google University someday now a Google University will teach Mainstream views to be sure But it will acclimatize the American people more and more to the recreation of educational materials Curriculum and delivery mechanisms by institutions other than the state and as Gary North wonders if there's a Google University went out of Google High School and on down through the grade levels The University itself is a dinosaur propped up by social inertia and government subsidy The last thing we should want is to make it free Any professor can tell you that the majority Sometimes the great majority of college students have little aptitude for academic pursuits and even less intellectual curiosity Diverting still more people onto this path is socially undesirable and economically wasteful to a disastrous degree The Mises Institute on the other hand is a microcosm of the university system of the future scholarly high-tech and cheap With technology pushing the price of instruction dramatically lower What reason will there be to in the future to shell out perhaps upwards of $60,000 a year for the privilege of being intimidated and propagandized Just as significant in terms of opinion molding and the state's crumbling monopoly are the blows suffered by the traditional media particularly in its print form None of us could have expected to be living in a world in which the New York Times and the Washington Post are losing money Which is a very neat thing to see Both are shrinking the Times has even floated the idea that someday there may be no be no more printed New York Times at all But uh, talk about a great dream The numbers for print newspapers in fact are even worse than you might think just in the two-year period from 2013 2015 saw catastrophic losses and subcribers Wall Street journals numbers fell from 1.5 million to less than 1.1 million the New York Times went from 731,000 to 528,000 the Washington Post its decline from 431,000 to 330,000 the numbers for USA today are truly horrific from 1.4 million to less than 300,000 or maybe not so horrific This is extremely bad news for the establishment media Meanwhile alternative news and commentary sources continue to grow and flourish The establishment is helpless to do anything about it during the various run-ups to war with Iran for example The world was able to find out the real truth about the war makers claims Thanks to a variety of news sources, which most people now have access to More extraordinary still were the YouTube videos created by Westerners who traveled to Iran Explored the country and spoke to its people Instead of the alien culture full of scary angry people who wanted to kill us all They found normal people normal families normal businesses and people who love the people of the West Even if they didn't think much of its governments smart Iranians When in the history of the world is anything so gloriously subversive and possible and if it wasn't Westerners trying to convey the truth about the Iranian people It was ordinary Israelis and Iranians exchanging messages of peace Everyone knows knew that politicians were hopeless. So they appealed directly to each other conveying unforgettable sentiments of goodwill The American media's traditional function has been to limit the extent of permissible debate and to promote the regime's official narrative about current events Even when the media appears to oppose the state as say with Watergate, this is only an illusion Richard Nixon's journalistic critics were concerned that the 37th president's enormities had tarnished the presidency Of course, that's Nixon's great legacy So whenever you attempted to become discouraged Remember that the state's monopoly and the opinion molding function is weaker and more vulnerable than it has ever been This is a development few could have predicted In identifying these important and favorable trends. I do not wish to be misunderstood I'm not suggesting that victory is already within our grasp or that we're also we're not also not witnessing some truly horrific trends and developments. I Know the horror is all too well as to you But the struggle for liberty which has existed to the beginning of time Is likely to carry on until it's very end what I am saying is this We should not permit our present prevails to blind us to the momentous changes through which we are living and whose Consequences are so potentially far-reaching that even now we can't predict their future But what the state's monopoly on opinion dissemination? Crumbling year by year. It's hard to believe the future of the cause of liberty is in brighter Than it has ever been in our lifetimes In fact when people say the situation is hopeless. I think back to what life was like during Murray's life Which wasn't all that long ago Not only was the libertarian movement if we can even call it that Vanishing would be small but the prospects for its growth were virtually nil with a hostile media completely Dominant in the opinion-molding feel Libertarians face an extremely slow and uphill battle that never bothered Murray, of course Who relished the struggle and did the right thing whatever the obstacles? But the chances you must have thought of is ever reaching millions of people essentially zero Or I think back to the early days of the Mises Institute if someone wanted an article We'd written he'd have to call or write us We had to photocopy the article put in an envelope put a government stamp on it put in the government mail and sent it to him By today's standards that seems hopeless Today not only can anyone in the whole world easily browse our entire collection of tens of thousands of articles not to mention books Courses and videos, but you can also share any of our materials in an instant and indeed people can do and Can and do stumble on our material quite by accident Unlike our inquirer who called us about an article any computer user anywhere in the world can come across something We've produced whether in the course of his own research or discovering us through a social media post or having it sent to him by a friend And as I'll bet many people in this very room can attest that one article video or book is Often the door that leads someone irreversibly down the path to Austrian economics and libertarians As the state's opinion molding Monopoly collapses the Mises Institute is poised to play a more significant role than ever But with our speakers our scholars our YouTube channel our events Our vast media collection and our educational programs for students the brightest lights of libertarianism Today came through our programs as students or were taught by those who did There is no organization anywhere that has been more steadfast and principal and more tireless in transmitting our ideas to future generations We cannot do what we do without your help, of course Please join us as supporters of the Mises Institute together Let's work to make the sure that the old world we hope is passing away before our eyes a world of lies propaganda central planning and war Can be replaced by another for without not another form of central planning, but by a world of peace Liberty truth and prosperity. Thank you