 This is the Human Action Podcast, the weekly show looking at politics and events through the lens of economics with your hosts, Jeff Deist and Dr. Robert Murphy. Welcome back everybody to the Human Action Podcast. As many of you know, we've been on a brief hiatus. We've been rejiggering the format a little bit into more of a pure political economy show where me and my new co-host, Dr. Robert Murphy, are going to be looking at current events and politics and society through more of an economic lens and particularly an Austrian economics lens. So I'm excited to get into a new format to be a little more topical, to get away from some of the book reviews we've been doing for the last couple years, which though we enjoyed them mightily, I think there's a lot of pressing issues going on. And Bob, it is great to see you. How are you? I'm doing great, Jeff. Thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to this new format. Well, did you suffer through that state of the union? Yes. And it was, I think I should get hazard pay for that, but yes, I did listen to the whole thing. Yeah. Well, so obviously we've got events in Ukraine and closely related to those are sanctions. And man, oh man, over the last couple of days, I have seen more nonsense about sanctions. Well, for starters, Bob, this idea that they're costless, that they just hurt the Russians. And even then, the Russian government, but that, you know, what about the other side of the equation? I mean, if you're sanctioning Russia and not allowing, let's say, dollar or euro to flow into Russia, guess what? There's a flip side to that, which is oil and weed or whatever else is not going to flow out of Russia. Well, it's interesting. And I think, you know, the Biden administration and the other allies implicitly admit that because at least as of March 2nd, they were not officially applying the sanctions to the energy flows out of Russia. And the reason, and as I'm reading this Reuters article, and it was funny, they say the United States is open to imposing sanctions on Russia's oil and gas flows. But going after exports now could help Moscow, the White House said on Wednesday, as oil prices surged. And so, you know, you read in like, how is that? And they're making the obvious point that you're making. They're saying, oh, well, if we just totally didn't accept, you know, Russian exports of oil and gas that would raise prices at the pump for Americans. And that helps Moscow. So that's why we're not going to do that because we're onto them. You know, we're wily. But you're right. I mean, it's the same principle with everything else, too. But also, if anything, sanctions are less targeted than actual physical or kinetic forms of warfare, right? I mean, you can, horrific as it might be, you can target missiles in theory. You can send troops into military targets rather than civilian populations. But when it comes to sanctions, I think it's very, very difficult to have the force or the brunt of the effects of the sanctions only hit the bad guys you want them to, which in this case, I guess, are Russian politicians or oligarchs. Right. I mean, the whole premise of sanctions, you know, the idea being that, oh, we're going to apply pressure to the general population, and then they're going to in turn, you know, apply pressure to their leader to, you know, get that person to either change course or overthrow him. And so for one thing, just to make sure I don't forget to say this, they don't work, right? Like, for example, how long did we have sanctions on Cuba? And that didn't get Castro out of power. If anything, it allows the local dictator whose policies presumably are pretty bad for the people to then blame all the problems on the big bad US and, you know, and not unreasonably so. So I think, and I know that like when I was in grad school, my roommate was a literal Marxist at one point and she was all excited that she was going to get to go visit Cuba. And, you know, and I said at the time, I remember when you see it on how, how poor it is, that's because of socialism, not because of the US. And she was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's it's a very convenient thing to, you know, that's gives an explanation for how come these policies aren't are helping our people. It's because, well, if the most mighty nations on earth are sanctioning us, it's not surprising. So again, as a rally around the flag on 9 11, everybody was behind George W. Bush, except for a few of us, obviously. And so why would people think that that flips somehow, you know, in other countries, when the US and other powerful nations impose sanctions, if anything, that makes the local population more supportive of their leader? Yeah. Well, when I see, for example, that the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ have stopped trading certain Russian owned companies, you know, we have the ruble at a record low against the dollar. So that's certainly hurting the Russian people more than so called Russian oligarchs. And, you know, when Biden kept saying oligarchs, it struck me that an oligarchs are rich guy from a country we don't like, right? A billionaire is a rich guy from a country like ours. So that this this idea that we're going to seize the wealth of oligarchs, that strikes me regardless of where they are in the world, regardless of their attachment to our participation with the Putin regime. That strikes me, Bob, is a pretty dangerous precedent. I mean, you know, where are we going with this? Yeah, I agree entirely with you. And in fact, depending on how well the wealthy person is in the good graces of the intelligentsia, he could be called a philanthropist. That's even better than a billionaire, right? And so if he gives a lot of money to their pet causes. Yes, right. A philanthropist is a left wing rich guy. Yep. Yeah. So yeah, I think you're exactly right. And it's with all this stuff that, you know, bad cases are tough cases, make bad law, that sort of thing that here it's they have the boogeyman, they have these oligarchs, like you say, just the very term they're using. And so, oh, well, we have to throw rule of law out the window and just target them. It's, you know, it's not as if there has been a formal court proceeding, I think, to show that, oh, this particular individual actually, yes, is guilty of, you know, what, some conspiracy against the Ukrainian people. You know, it's not that they've been formally convicted in a court of law. And therefore, these punitive sanctions can be applied to them as a punishment that none of that is going on. And so, again, regardless of one's views on the particulars of Russia moving troops and firing missiles at Ukraine, they the question is, do we want to set the precedent that, oh, yes, the Western governments, if they don't like certain people, they can just basically, you know, blockade them from global commerce, which is what they're doing. And as governments around the world are getting more capable of monitoring people's transactions as we're moving more towards a cashless society, and that's not just, you know, a random thing. Obviously, forces are pushing for that. People need to realize that's going to be the way in the future. Governments are going to deal with dissenters. They don't need to actually lock them up or disappear in the middle of the night. They can just flip a switch and all of a sudden you can't buy anything at the store. Yeah, domestic dissenters, I mean, that's what we have to understand here is that they're going to use this stuff on us. The idea that you can seize wealth or freeze wealth without any due process or legal proceeding, I think, is very, very scary. And we look, we've seen bank runs in Russia and Ukraine. We've even seen them in Canada when during the trucker convoy, the Canadian Trudeau government seized and shut off access to bank accounts for some of the people who had at least allegedly donated that. So this is this isn't just some far away thing. But some of this other stuff. Also, Jeff, if I could just jump in on that, I've seen stories about how people and I don't know if they've taken action on this yet, but certain officials are now investigating like, well, how can we get into and regulate Bitcoin because now these oligarchs and others in Russia, they're evading sanctions by switching to crypto. So again, it's they're going. It's a full court press. They're going after everything in the guise of, well, we got to stop, you know, these bloodthirsty Russians from invading their poor neighbor. And I've seen lots of normies on Twitter saying, well, this is a good reason for Western governments to ban Bitcoin because, you know, otherwise people are just going to be able to send money wherever they want to whomever they want. And governments won't be able to control it. And of course, that's related to the Swift system, which controls clearing transactions across the world for banks. And the U.S. effectively controls the Swift system, which, you know, the Russians have now been kicked off of. So again, the workaround for that is going to be that the Russians are will be more interested in the emerging Chinese system, the Chinese competitor to the Swift system for clearing interbank transactions in different currencies. You know, I mean, there's a lot of bad fallout from all of this. I think people need to understand, look, as I agree with Bob, I don't think sanctions work, but I understand people who are like, come on, we got to do something. And you claim to be non-interventionist. At least we got to at least apply economic pressure on the Soviets or else they're just going to be this rogue nation to look there. They've made this military incursion into a sovereign Ukraine. And so, you know, you can't be such a pacifist. But look at some of the fallout from this. I mean, we have this Valerie Gergiev. I hope I'm saying that correctly. He's, supposedly, close to Putin, but he is the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. Well, he's been kicked out of his job because, you know, like a prisoner of war, he wouldn't sign a sheet of paper denouncing Putin and the war. I mean, that's sort of stuff. This guy hasn't lived in Russia for a long time. I'm reading about Canadian Junior Hockey banning Russian and Belarusian athletes from joining it. I mean, even from the Paralympics, the Paralympics, the handicapped people, Russians and Belarusians are being prohibited from participating in that. I mean, you know, look, if we're going to start seizing people's money because they have some involvement, maybe we need to seize the Biden's family money. I mean, this is just unbelievable. And I guess what bothers me, Bob, is that you'd think with social media, especially on the ground social media, we would be able to cut through the fog better than we could during, let's say, when W was invading Iraq. But we find this the opposite, is that sort of the mainstream narratives get boosted and amplified by these credulous social media users, at least that's my experience. Yes, same with me. And you would have thought that, at least with Twitter and things like that, people on the ground, and they can do that in sort of guerrilla journalism. But and we know why it's because they've adopted policies and learn from the top down to sort of clean that stuff up and get rid of disinformation. Speaking of which, it's hilarious to me. I was listening to NPR and the coverage of this stuff. And they were talking about how, oh, the Russian government, they're cracking down on like the ability of people to get accurate information. And so not in the commentator was saying how there was this divide among the Russian people, that the younger people, those who have access, and I think they even use the term alternative media, are getting the real message, whereas the older Russian population who rely on state media, they're being fed the Kremlin's line. And I'm listening to this on national public radio, who of course are totally pro-Biden and everything. So it was just kind of ironic that, oh my goodness, can you believe that the Russian government is using official state sponsored media to get its message out there. And they're cracking down on the ability of people to get the alternatives. And meanwhile, we're cracking down on COVID disinformation, et cetera, et cetera, according to them. So the whole thing, I do want to circle back to if you made a great point about even, no matter how much you try to target these things, it's gonna have a general fallout. And you explained why, if for no other reason that if the Russian ruble falls, right? So even if they just targeted very specific things in terms of exports out of Russia, will that other things equal is gonna make it harder for them? In other words, if foreigners who have their own currencies are prevented from buying those particular exports, then in general, the Russian ruble falls against other currencies, which makes foreign goods more expensive for domestic Russians, even if they had nothing to do with the particular industry being targeted. So again, the economy is a very interrelated thing and it's hard just to punish one little segment of these people over here without hurting their neighbors. Yeah, and it's hard to do it without unintended consequences too. You know, we talk about like Apple Pay and Google Pay have been shut off for Russians. So apparently people use them in the subway in Moscow. So there's these huge lines because people are trying to get the tokens or the physical rubles or whatever they need to pay without having Apple or Google on their phone working. And so I know for a fact, Apple and Google both have so much cash on their balance sheets. I mean, they're like hedge funds unto themselves. So they're not sweating this loss of business. And more importantly, they can have good press. They can say, we're part of the war effort. We shut off access for these Russians to our products and they can get some good press out of it. But think of like a smaller US business, which had just recently in the last five or 10 years started getting some sort of access into selling goods or services in Russia. And now all of a sudden, you know, and that's 80% of their business or something. I mean, they're blameless in this. They're just some business in the US. I mean, it's really, it's really stupid and short-sighted and people, we need to oppose these sanctions. I think good people, moral people, you know, just because they feel good folks, that's not enough. We have to think about things and think a few levels through and not just be emotive about this. It's really, it's really bad. I mean, we're talking about people who are already far poorer in terms of their annual income than most Americans. And with Ukrainians, we're talking about people who are in turn far poorer than the average Russian. So these countries are not, you know, nearly as economically strong as we think they are. And if we start just imposing ourselves on them with sanctions, I mean, that's really a form of war. Sanctions are war. And it's easier to think of, I've just been reading RFK Jr.'s book on his family. It's easier to think of with an island like Cuba, right? Because Cuba, when we had a blockade on Cuba during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, we could literally militarily prevent ships and planes from bringing any stuff to Cuba, including food. And you can imagine how desperate Cuba was in the early 60s. But Cuba is very, very small and economically dependent on, you know, they don't produce a lot of agricultural products. They don't produce a lot of oil. They don't have a lot of natural resources. So they're really dependent on imports to survive, much like modern-day Japan. Now Russia is a little different because Russia is vast, something like 11 time zones. Russia produces a lot of ag. It has a lot of oil. Presumably Russia could feed itself for a good long while. So when we think of sanctions as circling and cutting off an island, maybe that helps us understand it better. But, you know, Bob, you mentioned that the older Soviets are getting state-run or state-controlled messages where all the younger Hipper Russians are getting, you know, social media, and they know the real story. But look at the United States. I mean, there's no media network here that has been good on this war, this putative war. I hope it doesn't turn into a full blown war. Or sanctions. Even Fox, other than Tucker Carlson, who's been questioning the narrative, I mean, if you look at Fox, which has plenty of older Americans who are not very plugged in, I mean, the coverage, Bob, has just been dreadful. I mean, just embarrassing for our country, really. Yeah, just, I imagine, I haven't watched it too much, but just toeing the line and, you know, oh, Putin's bad, the U.S. is good. And, you know, this is just, he just invaded out of nowhere for no reason. And, you know, we're just here minding our own business. Yeah, that's basically it. And, you know, I think the other thing is that Fox News viewers, I said this the other day, it's like crack cocaine for them to show a young female with some sort of assault style rifle, you know, getting ready to dig in and fight back against the Russian bear. And, you know, they love that kind of story. I don't particularly like to see women getting killed and maimed in combat by a much stronger invading military force. That doesn't sort of get me going. But more importantly, I think it does a real disservice to the Ukrainians to feed this idea that, you know, irregular forces of untrained people, it can really defend the cities. Maybe they can. I mean, you know, that's a military question. But, I mean, this is a very serious situation to make light of it, I think. And, to view it in such oversimplified terms the Fox shows have really been doing. You know, it's not healthy. It's not healthy for our country. And, Bob, as you know better than anybody, war and money tend to be deeply entwined, right? We can't separate those two issues. Monetary policy and foreign policy, especially in the United States, where I would argue that monetary policy has really enabled a lot of bad and dangerous foreign policy. We can't separate these things. And so what's going on with the ruble and what's going on with oil and what's going on with the dollar here at home, which is not a very happy thing, all this has to be considered. And so war is not good for anybody. It's certainly not good for supply chain. It's not good for our own situation here at home. We've already discussed oil. But Jerome Powell had his annual or twice annual hearing before the Financial Services Committee yesterday. And wow, it wasn't a kumbaya warm and fuzzy thing. He basically said, yeah, this inflation isn't transitory. We're gonna get it under control, but prices aren't rolling back to what they were before. So I guess transitory now is out the window. Right, yeah, he's definitely said that. I think he even signaled that before too, that saying we're not using that word transitory anymore. So that's certainly gone, they're pivoting. And what is interesting though, as of the most recent official numbers, so the headline CPI number is the highest it's been in 40 years, while the official unemployment rate is 4% in change. And so according to their own exposition of, here's what our doctrine is in terms of balancing these two forces, they should be hawkishly raising rates. And so far, rates are still rock bottom levels. If you look at the Fed's balance sheet, they're still buying assets every month. They slowed the rate of accumulation a few months ago, but still the Fed's balance sheet, you look at it, it's rising steadily. So according to their own metrics, they should have been tightening a lot sooner than they have and yet they're not. And it's mostly at this point just mere talk. So I'm curious to see what happens and there's lots of reasons, one of which is we've talked about and you've talked with other guests, Jeff, that they sort of painted themselves into a corner with how much debt they've issued. And so there's so much outstanding treasury debt at this point just to, if the whole yield curve shifts up a few points, I mean, that's gonna have devastating consequences on the federal government's finances. Well, it's awfully ironic that the last time they started to supposedly attempt to reduce the balance sheet, COVID came along. And so COVID gave them the excuse and maybe it even kind of bailed out the Fed to say, oh, well, this is a pandemic. Clearly we need to take extraordinary measures. And now with COVID settling down, just as they were about to, and Powell announced this, start reducing the balance sheet. Well, oh, now we've got a war with Russia. I mean, I suspect they're not gonna do it, at least in 2022. In citing because all the markets are so fragile right now because of the international situation that it would raising rates right now would be a mistake. Well, I just, I think that they will use this situation and the perilous global economy as an excuse to say, well, we wanted to have some half point basis hikes, which they haven't done since a long time ago, 20 years ago, as opposed to quarter point basis hikes. And we wanted to really start aggressively rolling some of this, however, $10 trillion of Treasury and other assets off the Fed's balance sheet. But I think that they're going to gin up a reason that this will be a war year and we need a war economy. Yeah, you're probably right. And just to circle back to what you were saying, one thing when I was teaching an undergrad classes, I would show a chart of the Fed's balance sheet for the 20th century and just say, hey, if you ever forget when there were major U.S. wars, just look at the Fed's balance sheet and you can tell. And except for a few things like the great inflation of the 70s, once they went off the gold standard. But certainly when the Fed was nominally tied to gold somewhat, that you could tell whenever the Fed's balance sheet mushroomed is, because, oh yeah, there's World War I, there's World War II, there's a career Vietnam. So it's not surprising if they have. And what's interesting too is that's not a conspiracy theory. If you read like Milton Friedman, I don't know if it's in capitalism, freedom or somewhere else, but even some of his pop writings to explain why he's not for the gold standard. One of the reasons he gave was, one thing he said is that no one believes in it anymore so it wouldn't stick, so okay, fair enough. But another one was, hey, if there's a crisis like a major war, you don't want the government's hands tied. So even the opponents of the gold standard implicitly admit that if all the belligerents had stayed on gold during World War I, the war would have been short-lived. Everybody admits that. Well, I will say this, Jerome Powell is a smart guy. He's a very well-read guy and he speaks carefully at these hearings, as all Fed shares have done. He's not as opaque as Alan Greenspan, who is absolute maestro at saying nothing in many, many words. But Powell's careful, he's a careful guy, he's a lawyer by training, not an academic economist. So when he says things like, well, which he did yesterday, well, earlier this week for those listening to the show over the weekend, when he says things like, well, you know, the world can have more than one reserve currency. That strikes me as something, well, that's true, first of all. The world already uses the dollar and it uses the euro quite a bit. It uses the yuan, et cetera, but okay, but that strikes me as something, A, he didn't say off the cuff or unintentionally, and B, he said to sort of begin softening us up to a new reality, a new status, where the US dollar is not king anymore and we can't just always rely on very low inflation, cheap imports to have lots and lots of cheap stuff with our dollars. So when he says that, I think you gotta read between the lines. Oh, exactly, I agree with you totally, that they know 10 years from now, the US is not gonna be the global superpower that it is right now, and maybe there won't be a replacement that might just be a bunch of regional powers and so forth, but you're right. They don't want there to be a huge crash. They don't want the dollar just to fall one Thursday morning when everybody wakes up and realizes the problem, and so yeah, how do you get out of it? You gotta just make it sound real matter of fact. Like you said, just state true statements, so they're not to say, hey, the US is no longer gonna be the, have the world's reserve currency just to make a factual statement that doesn't need to be won and just sort of ease people into it, and it's, I think that's sort of the, with these things, is there gonna be a currency crisis and when's it gonna come? Well, when it comes, it'll be real fast. That's kind of how it is. There won't be one until there is one, and then when there is one, it's gonna be fast. Yeah, I wonder what his status is with renomination, my Biden. I mean, I wonder if anyone in the Senate would be questioning that with if inflation stays where it is over the next six months. I mean, I don't know when he ultimately needs to be confirmed, to get reconfirmed by the Senate, but if I were him and I wanted to be reconfirmed, I think I'd want that sooner rather than later. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Cause things are just gonna get more awkward. And again, I don't relish his position. What are you supposed to do when you come in and the Fed's balance sheet's looking like it is. And then during the crisis and what the COVID, when things were depressed, okay, but at this point, as things slowly start going back to normal and prices start rising, what are you supposed to do? That he, no matter what he does, it's gonna be bad for somebody, for some groups. Yeah, boy, he's in a box. I mean, you've got so many people dependent on stock market returns or housing going up for their own 401K or their retirement or their golden years. Man, oh man, because social security is not right. Cost of living adjustments with social security and Medicare payments are not gonna rise that quick. The other interesting thing from the hearing earlier this week, Bob, was that Powell was talking about cryptocurrencies are vehicles for speculation. So I think this was brought up in the context of cryptos being used for international payments. He said, well, these are vehicles for speculation like gold. And again, that struck me as something he wouldn't just say off the cuff because even Ben Bernanke, who is no fan of gold, believe me, or gold standard, he had a lot of back and forth with Ron Paul over the years because Ron was in the same house financial services. Used to be called the banking committee. After the Enron crisis, they gave it this highfalutin name, financial services committee. But nonetheless, Ron always got at least a couple opportunities to grill Bernanke over the years. And I think it was 2011 or thereabouts, he said, well, what is money? So these are the kind of questions that central bankers don't normally get at hearing. So, excuse me, Bernanke got through that and then he said, is gold money? And Bernanke basically said, no, it's a precious metal and it's an asset. It's an asset and a capital asset. And so Ron said, well, why don't central banks keep diamonds or other kinds of assets on their balance sheet? Why gold? And Bernanke kind of hemmed and hawed on that. But he never said it's a speculative asset. And I would argue that 6,000 years of using gold as money makes it far, far less speculative than just about anything else you can own. You might not make money on the gold of a calling. It's speculative. That strikes me as a tell if Powell was playing poker. Right, so I agree with you, Jeff, that most certainly institutional holders and so forth of gold, if anything, it's a hedge. They're trying to protect themselves in case other assets perform a certain way. Their fixed income, for example, gets crushed because of unexpectedly high price inflation. You have your gold as a hedge. And so, on the one hand, you could say, oh, I'm speculating that the price of gold is gonna go up because I think this is a high inflationary environment. But if why you're doing that is to hedge against your other stuff. It's sort of like when you take out life insurance, people sometimes say, oh, you're betting you're gonna die. And no, that's not really, it's more you're hedging yourself or insuring is the actual verb against the possibility that you might die early. So I think there is that. And then when you say, so not only is it not correct, but then why did he go out of his way to say that I think you're right, that he is trying to set up a paradigm and shift people's views. And as we were chatting before, we started recording, I've seen too that there are people floating out ideas about, oh, hey, with these sanctions on Russia, now the oligarchs and their ilk are switching over to try to using crypto. So we need to get more serious about that and regulating and cracking down on crypto. So it does seem like they are just trying to isolate and just get the public to have this distaste for, ooh, these are these other things that are besides government issued fiat money, those are scary things that they're speculative, they're volatile, ooh, and that's what those oligarchs use. Well, if there's one thing we can take away from these events of late inflation and also this hearing earlier this week, it's that the so-called independence of the Fed and of central bankers from political events, from Congress, from pressures from a president is just absolute nonsense. And frankly, I hope anyway, from my perspective, that people are losing faith in this whole concept of monetary policy. I mean, it doesn't work. We don't need monetary policy anymore than we need housing policy or oil policy or automobile policies, right? We need to let the market work here. And if you want an example of how hacky and politicized and unserious this whole process is, just go to the C-SPAN hearing earlier this week, put your own pile, because it opens with the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters. Okay, so, you know, the Mercatus or Cato can send as many white papers as it wants about rules-based monetary policy over to Capitol Hill. Maxine Waters is a partisan hack. She has no particular background in banking or money. She is dumb as the day is long. She's mean as a snake, and she's outrageously partisan. And so the idea that this is the person in charge of the congressional oversight of monetary policy, I mean, no offense to her, most of us, you know, most people don't know a lot about monetary policy, but the fact that she's charged with it shows you that this is a process which is too far gone, folks. It's too far gone. So we need to be thinking outside the box. We need to be protecting ourselves and figuring out how we're gonna deal with what's coming with the dollar. I don't think there's any other way to think about it. So all that said, Bob, why don't you give us your final statements? So number one, I think Maxine Waters could be brought around to NGDP targeting if it were just explained to her in the appropriate vocabulary. So, I agree entirely with you on that one, that it's, I get why people go through the motions of, hey, we gotta try, but yes, the idea of reforming the current system right now, it's, again, it's under the old Soviet Union, if they asked a bunch of economists, hey, how much wheat should be grown? Where should we put the stores? There's no right answer. All you can say is, we don't know. Let the market decide, and there's some things are worse than others, but obviously, if you're in a system like that, you should lead off with what the correct answer is, and that's not what we do in US politics, even among a lot of so-called free market economists. Yeah, more generally again, sanctions, they're immoral, right? They're not targeting the bad guys, even if you accept the official narrative of who's to blame for these things in terms of the military action, and they don't work, right? It's not just like, well, yeah, some innocent people get thrown under the bus, but at least they don't work in terms of stopping the regime in question. Again, just look around the history of US sanctions on allegedly bad dictators and so forth, they're still in power, they don't work, and there's blowback, it hurts us as well. So we're hurting innocent foreigners, we're hurting ourselves for something that doesn't even achieve the stated objective. So again, this is crazy, and we need to talk more about that. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it, the first installment of the new reformatted Human Action Podcast. We're gonna be coming at you every Friday with a new show on what's happening in the world around us from the lens of economics. So share it with your friends and we'll see you next Friday, thanks so much. Catch Jeff and Bob next week for another show. But in the meantime, you can find a world of content like this at Mises.org.