 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. In the last episode, I talked about the possibility of a crash landing. And I was actually hopeful that that would be the result rather than a soft landing or a hard landing, that a crash landing would be best. And I got a lot of negative feedback. People thought I was insensitive to say the least, that I was uncaring for the poor, that I was just a horrible person. I'm not surprised, frankly. I think that this is a good sign that non-Austrian influenced listeners are actually tuning into the podcast and don't understand the complete background for the reasons why a crash landing is almost optimal once the Fed has created a boom in the economy and a business cycle to follow. I did not explain, for example, that a crash landing or a hard landing would help minimize the pain on most people in the economy, including the productive class, workers, managers, that sort of thing. And that it doesn't maximize the pain for the maximum number of people. But it's really the best way. It's the most correct way of solving the problem of the boom that we're still experiencing today. Above and beyond all is the necessity of correcting all of the male investments of the past. These male investments are created by the artificially low interest rates by the Fed, which helps some people, investors, the elite, politically powerful people. But those male investments have to be unwound financially. Prices must adjust. And we're having a terrible time with that. We see that in interest rate market. We certainly see it in the housing market, where people are looking for housing, but they can't find any. And prices of housing are still very high. And we have hedge funds who soaked up millions of houses in the previous great financial crisis. And of course, stocks and bonds, stocks going up 16 times since the last meltdown. And of course, we have all sorts of other male investments in the economy, particularly in corporate real estate markets. And so all of those things have to be unwound. And we have to digest all of those male investments. In other words, their prices have to fall dramatically. And the sooner that we do that, the better, not the slower, the better. The sooner the better would be better off economically. We can get down to a floor in the economy and start the recovery process. We'll be better off financially in many, many different ways. And psychologically, I think we'll also be better if the pain is short and severe and we recover and we know that we can recover rather than slow and monotonous and dragging on and people losing their faith in the economy the way they did during the Great Depression. The quicker the economy can respond, the quicker we can return to prosperity. The pain will be over with quickly, but it will be felt most at the top, not at the bottom. The people who hold all these stocks and bonds and all this excessive real estate and corporate real estate and commercial real estate, the better. The pain will be felt at the top rather than at the bottom. The productive class, the laboring class. So it's very, very important that we all understand this. And so I'm going to ask you to all go back and we're going to link to these articles. October 7th, 2022, I talked about the Fed's real mandate, which is to protect the political class and government itself. On October 29th, I wrote on Mises.org was the correction in the economy, a black hole that we can never come out of or a shock absorber. And what I showed in there is how the corrective forces of recessions and corrections and crashes has a shock absorbing impact. It's not a black hole that we can never come out of. So how does a free market economy respond to an economic crisis? The mainstream economists will tell you it's a black hole that only the Fed can solve. November 19th, I presented the real solution to the coming economic crisis. And then in November 23rd, 2022, I had an article showing how we could eliminate all future economic crises. December 15th, 2022, I showed that austerity in government where they have to cut expenditures on everything, they have to cut government employment wages, benefits, cut their real estate holdings and so forth is the real solution that would greatly enhance the ability of the U.S. economy to heal itself. A couple of weeks later, December 22nd, 2022, I looked at U.S. labor markets and why they needed a great deal of help. And in this year, I've done a couple of podcasts with Radio Rothbard and we looked at after this boom must come a bust. OK, so that this is absolutely necessary, that we go through a period of suffering in order to get back in a stable, growing, free market economy where we can all help each other solve our economic problems. Even later on Radio Rothbard, I did a podcast with Ryan and Thoe on why inflation is not going away any time soon. So we have a lot to do out there. The political process is stalling, protecting itself. They're not protecting us. So it's time that everybody get on board with the Austrian schools perspective and prescriptions for the economic malaise and trouble that we're having today. I hope you'll go back and read those articles. They're also available in audio format on Mises.org.