 OK, all right. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Mark, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, that's right. I'm delivering a pro Mises University talk here at the Mises University. So I've had to summon all my courage to stand before you. Make such a controversial statement. Well, this is the 20th anniversary of my first attendance at Mises University. I first attended in 1993. And the opening talk was given by Murray Rothbard himself. So how we have fallen in those 20 years. This week, though, I want you to understand, nothing is done by accident. Nothing is done in vain. So for example, you'll be listening to some of these presentations. And some of the points that are going to be made will sound extremely elementary. You'll say, I don't even need to write this down. This is such an elementary insight. But as I say, nothing is going to be said to you in vain. Everything builds on something that comes before. So what seems like a forgettable, trivial insight is in fact, in many cases, the foundation stone of the whole thing. So even tonight in that buffet line, when you were getting your drink and you were trying to get ice out of that ice bucket with those horrible tongs where you could take like one ice cube at a time, this was a lesson in marginal utility. Do I really want to go to the effort to reach in here like an idiot? Do I really need another ice cube that much? And do I value it that much? So everything. Everything is secretly a test that's going on here. Well, what I want to talk about tonight, though, is not just about how great the program is and give you some guideposts here, but also to try to look at why it's exciting. Like why do we find this stuff exciting? Because as Mark sort of indicated, maybe not everybody in your circles finds it as exciting as you do. So what is it about it that makes us so feel like, why do I call this my favorite week of the year? Why should that be? Shouldn't my family vacation be the best week of the year? But now my family's here with me. So this is like a vacation and work at the same time. But what is it about it? So I'm going to try to get to the bottom of this. Why is Austrian economics attractive? What are the features of it that make it so attractive? But I do want to acknowledge that there are some people here, it's true in the faculty, who are relatively speaking spring chickens. And by that I mean people who went through the Mises University program themselves in the past. But also there are on the faculty seven people who were on the faculty when I was a student at Mises U 20 years ago. So now I get to point out all the oldsters to you. Mark Thornton, Tom DiLorenzo, Jeff Herbiner, David Gordon, Roger Garrison, Joe Salerno, and Walter Block were all there. So how about that? They're sticking it out, here they are, carrying forward. And 20 years ago, we had much less reason for optimism about the Austrian school than we do today. And Walter was as happy and thrilled to be there then as he is today. Walter is like the happy stoic. He's actually got emotions and he's thrilled, but the emotions are unaffected by outside events. It does not matter what's going on. Walter is cheery. I mean, he's got that Rothbardian aspect to him, so I'm just thrilled to be able to be here with you guys. So what is it that makes this exciting? There are two features of what you're going to be studying this week that I think are attractive. The first is that you feel practically compelled by what is presented to you when you learn, for example, Hungarian price theory. There's nothing about this that requires heroic assumptions or any kind of unreasonable postulates. It practically compels your assent, because it seems so obvious. Again, it's going to seem so obvious that you almost feel like I don't need to write this down. That's how obvious it'll seem. But that's because it's realistic. It rings true when you hear it. We're not claiming that human beings are economic agents for whom economists may invent mathematically tractable utility functions to try to understand them. We're actually treating people as people. This wild experiment we're running here is to treat human beings like human beings. So when you read in Slate or Salon or on the internet about how unreasonable and crazy the Austrians are, bear that in mind. What we're really doing with causal realist economics is treating human beings with the dignity that human beings deserve, not trying to mathematicalize them, but treat them as actual human beings. In fact, if you read Menger's 1871 book, Principles of Economics, you will not walk away from that book thinking that was too complicated for me to understand. You will not think that. You'll say, wow, that actually was a lot easier for me to understand than I thought it would be. Well, that's true of a lot of Austrian texts. Now, as you get more advanced, it does become more difficult, but again, to the person who is reasonably educated has made his way step by step through the literature. I dare say that the major treatises of the Austrian school, for example, Rothbard's Mannequin State or Mises Human Action, are not out of reach of the educated person who has worked his way up to those books. It is not impossible. You don't need some kind of special training to be able to understand that. They would have considered themselves failures if that was the case. And yet at the same time, they were writing in a way that spoke to contemporary economists. Certainly that's true of Rothbard. If you look at his footnotes, absolutely filled with references to the contemporary literature, which he knew backwards and forwards. But he could speak in a way that could resonate with an economist and could resonate with a normal human being. This is an extremely rare talent that Rothbard had. But I think more than this is the second thing that makes the school so attractive to us, and that is the connection, and I know I'm gonna get some objection here, but the connection between Austrian economics and liberty, now I know we have to be careful here because Austrian economics is not libertarianism, and libertarianism is not Austrian economics, and it is very important to distinguish these things. Because what we're doing as Austrian economists is not engaging in special pleading on behalf of a political philosophy. That is certainly not the case, and especially when you look at the early Austrians, Manger and Bombaver, for example, they're really not writing a whole lot that would be policy advocacy. They really are doing scientific economics, and that really is what the Austrian school is doing, and a lot of the people you're gonna be hearing from today, that's what they do all the time. Professor Herbner, for example, writes technical works on economics. Joe Salerno writes works in a lot of works, in particular on monetary theory, but also price theory and other things, and these are not just people who write polemics on libertarian theory. In fact, a lot of them don't write anything about libertarian theory. So these things are different, and it's important to distinguish them. The Austrians are descriptive, and libertarians are prescriptive. So the Austrians are simply describing to you how the world works, and describing cause and effect relationships that exist in the world. What you do with that knowledge is a separate question. So as I say, it's important to distinguish these things. So when people say to you, well, what's the Austrian position on government spending? Well, there isn't. There is no Austrian position on government spending. There's no Austrian position on the minimum wage. There's no Austrian position on monopolies. There's a, in terms of policy, but there is an Austrian position in terms of when we think about monopoly theory, what's the correct monopoly theory? Well, sure, there's an Austrian view on that, but an Austrian per se does not go around and say it is wicked for the government to do X or the government ought to do Y. In your capacity as a human being, you can certainly advocate these things, but the Austrians are simply describing the world we live in. They're describing. That's all they're doing. At the same time though, it seems like it can't just be a coincidence that most people who become interested in the Austrian school happen to be libertarians. So why would that be? It is worth looking into. I think that's where a lot of the excitement comes from, is that people are interested in the question of human liberty, and then they read the Austrians and they're obviously perceiving something. They're perceiving some kind of connection and I wanna try to figure out what that might be. And I think the main one is that when you look at the Austrian description of the economy, and by that I'm talking about production, for example, and how a good is produced, and it goes from raw materials or nature-given factors, and it goes through a series of stages and then ultimately is transformed into a consumer good, and we understand the process by which producer prices are derived and the consumer price is derived, and we see this incredible, beautiful, elegant interlocking structure, and we note that it all comes about without anybody overall in charge of the thing. There's no guy with a bullhorn saying, all right, if you're gonna make a ballpoint pen, there are a bunch of different things you need to do to do that, so I'm gonna now tell everybody you have to go make the plastic and for the plastic you've gotta go build a plant and to do that I'm gonna tell you how to do that and here are the resources we're gonna need and there is no guy overall in charge of that and yet it happens and it happens in such an interesting and elegant way with no coercion that this makes us interested. Well, gee, isn't that interesting? That can come about that when you stop to pause as you would, for example, when you read the Leonard Reid SAI pencil and in fact how involved even the simplest consumer good is when you get right down to it, it really is impressive that this entire process occurs without coercion, that there isn't a guy with a bullhorn and yet it occurs, so there is some, this is I think where there is some overlap with the libertarians whose view is that society more or less can run itself without a guy with a bullhorn. Well, here the Austrians are describing a situation in which we are led to understand how production occurs and at no time do they introduce into the equation a guy with a bullhorn. Only later does the guy with a bullhorn come in, only in, for example, in power and market, in the part of man economy and state that was originally published separately, but then later in our scholars edition we made things right and put it back together. Only after the pure market economy has been examined do we look at the guy with the bullhorn. The guy, and it's not just a bullhorn, of course, he's got a gun, the hangman's noose, I mean, let's not sugarcoat it. And we note that the only thing this person can do is interrupt this process or screw it up or reduce people's welfare. That's all that the guy with the bullhorn can do. Now that doesn't immediately make us conclude that therefore we don't need guys with bullhorns because maybe we are misanthropes who hate mankind and we want people to be impoverished and we want the production process to be screwed up and so maybe our value system tells us no, then indeed I do want to lord it over people and shout at them with bullhorns and hang them and execute them for producing things, but most people, I think, do want to see human welfare improved and that's why we see this connection. They realize that human welfare seems to be maximized when the guys with bullhorns don't have any offices to fill. And this runs counter to what I think the average person believes. The average person, for the average person, the idea of a planned economy has been discredited with the collapse of communism but yet in the back of his mind, I think, he still believes there's something sort of plausible about it. That, well, gee, it does seem to make more sense that with all the different things that need to be produced and all the different resources scattered over all these different geographical areas all over the world and all the differing talents that people have and just the wide distribution of resources everywhere, surely it would be better to have a guy or a committee of people who would bark out orders at everybody to make sure everything gets done the right way. I mean, surely that would be better than just saying, all right, everybody, go ahead and do whatever you feel like doing. That's just gonna lead to chaos. There's no way that could be the best outcome and yet oddly enough, it is. And that is counterintuitive. It certainly is counterintuitive of the average person. The average person, I think, looks at the social world through a military sort of lens. The average person through grade school all the way up through high school and college is sort of taught a kind of military model of society that if you want to get things done, you need somebody in charge. Because look at how armies get things done, there's somebody in charge and man, they can destroy a lot of things. Yeah. Wonder if anybody pauses to note that's all they do, right? Okay, that's destroying things is kind of the easy part, right? You were already terrorizing your parents when you were three, destroying everything, right? That was not the hard part. Like for example, we look at example after example of cases that people don't consider in which there is no guy in charge and yet again, you have an elegant order, it runs itself. No one even stops to pause to consider this. So for example, an academic discipline like physics has nobody in charge of it. There's no physics guy who runs physics. And then we all just bow down before him and if he kind of loses his mind and starts spitting out crazy nonsense about physics, we just have to erase all our notes and change them to what he says. There's no guy running physics. So then according to this military metaphor, physics should be just a world of utter chaos where nothing gets accomplished and every once in a while, we're led to believe, well, I guess we don't understand motion after all, it must just be aliens that are invisible that make things move. And yet that doesn't happen because what seems to happen is that you have a community of scientists and they run their journals and they examine the articles that are submitted and they reject and accept and people build on and criticize each other's work and they move on and we get more knowledge. And this happens without any person running. Or the classic example would be the English language. There's no guy running the English language. You know, as Bob Murphy who's not here yet says it's not like the dictionary companies are in charge of English. The dictionary companies, after the fact, are merely codifying our customary usage. They're not the ones who say, all right, everybody, from now on, we're gonna call this a watch. Did everybody get that? It's a watch. That's not how, after the fact, they say this thing's a watch. And yet you would think that something as complicated as language, surely they needed to be an English language commissar with a bullhorn every day announcing to people what the new words are that we've decided on. And yet there isn't. And then of course, I've already alluded to, there is the classic case of the pencil. Now this is one of these, a lot of times when there are famous free market stories that go around, some of them are just kind of lame or cheesy or you get tired of hearing them. But the exception of this rule is that I pencil essay. I mean, if Leonard Reed had done nothing else, that would be his contribution to mankind. Because when you read that thing, it's actually, it's told from the point of view of the pencil, this famous essay. And this is like the most arrogant pencil you have ever heard. Because he starts off basically saying, you know, hey, nobody in the world knows how to make me. And you think, I'd like to smack this pencil right in the face. And of course, what the pencil is driving at is that it's not enough to just say, okay, for a pencil you need wood and you need graphite, you need rubber, you need some metal, you need some paint. It's that each one of those things has an extended production process and the inputs for each of those inputs to the pencil, likewise, has a production process behind it. And so you need, it's not enough just to say we need wood or whatever, which is complicated enough, but you also need gasoline because you have to transport all these things. You need rubber for the tires on the vehicles that transport these things. And when you look at all what's involved in all the resources from all different parts of the world, you realize that yeah, it is hard to imagine somebody who would have all that knowledge, technical knowledge, I'm talking about technical knowledge just to do that. So it's not correct to say, I have a friend named George who works at a pencil factory and I'm sure he could make a pencil. That's not what's being driven at here is that actually for all these production processes and all these products to come together all at once and in just the right quantities and no surpluses or shortages is an extremely impressive thing that you should pause to reflect on how impressive this is that this extremely complicated scenario I've just described again involves no guy running it. And yet we are so spoiled by the way the market works that unfortunately nobody, you pick up a pencil on the street you just throw it in the garbage. You don't pause to say, oh my gosh, you are a miracle that I'm observing. Okay, now that might be too far in the other direction. Maybe this is the case for an Aristotelian goal and mean here but all the same there ought to be some pausing to acknowledge and yet we don't. No one's led to think about that because what do people learn in school? One of the first things they learn in school is kids they learn how a bill becomes a law and they watch school house rock and it teaches them how a bill becomes a law. So right away they're taught the military model of society. You wanna get something done? You make a bill become a law and you get that hangman and that police man out there forcing order on society. That's what they learn. They don't learn this, they don't learn eye pencil, they don't learn how markets work or the price, they don't learn any of this. So they're indoctrinated into the military model of society and that's the opposite of what a libertarian thinks and yet here you have something that is describing to you how it is that we can get by without the people with the bullhorns. That's very interesting. And in particular the Austrians are gonna be explaining to us the role of the price system in taking individuals' preferences and organizing production in such a way that the most urgent needs are met in a manner that is the least costly in terms of opportunities foregone. And that in fact brings us to the issue of economic calculation which you'll learn about this week in more detail. But the key problem that the central planner has and the reason that this contrary to what you would sort of expect fact is true that the central planner is actually gonna give you chaos and freedom is going to give you order is because they can't calculate economically and what that means is that if you had a society that was based on central planning, economic central planning and the state owns all the means of production so the state owns all the things that go into making stuff, they wouldn't have any prices of producer goods. So note that when we talk about the economic calculation problem, socialist calculation problem, we're not talking about consumer prices. People stumble on this every year. We're not saying that if you went to Poland in 1979 that if you went into a store there'd be no price for toothbrushes. We're not saying that, just there would. We're talking about producer goods, the goods that are used to produce the toothbrushes. There are no prices for these things, the reason is that to give rise to prices you need exchange, you need buying and selling and as people make bids and as sellers make offers ultimately you wind up with prices but if one entity owns everything there is no buying and selling and so there are no prices and what this means is that the central planner is completely in the dark as to what to produce and how to produce it because there are many different ways to produce many different things and any way that you use to produce one thing, any combination of resources you use necessarily comes at the expense of another production process producing something else that people want. Well how do you know that your use of 10 units of lumber and nine units of rubber instead of 10 units of rubber and nine units of lumber isn't coming at the disproportionate expense of another production process producing some other good that needs the lumber more urgently than you do. How would you know that? These goods are all incommenturable, there's no way to know that and again with there being only one big owner there's no way for the various owners to compete with each other for the use of those goods. These goods are assigned politically and so it's completely arbitrary. So just for example, I mean just today you're gonna open up of a plant somewhere producing widgets. Well even just the very beginning question of where am I gonna put my plant? You could physically locate your plant right next to your major supplier and you might think that's the best way because then I could just walk next door to get my supplies. I don't have to have trucks and come ship me the supplies. But on the other hand, suppose that the land right next to your supplier is highly valued. A lot of people wanna use that land. Maybe it might actually be better for you to locate your plant at a distance and that even if you include the cost of transportation to transport the supplies to you, that it actually makes more sense from the point of view of all the desires of people in the economy for you to be located at a distance and for something that really needs to be located there to be located there. But how would you know that unless you could compare, unless you had prices, unless you could calculate profit and loss? How would you know that yeah, even with the transportation cost it still makes sense for me to be over here and not to be right next. I mean and that's just one decision. Forget about all the different possible, should I be more capital intensive or labor intensive. All these different questions involve a lot of different entities that want control of labor and all these different capital goods and how do you know that, who made you king? How do you know that your process is the most important from the point of view of consumer welfare? You don't. But if you have no way of calculating this you are simply going to be making decisions that make no sense economically. Whereas under the free market, the free market brings the division of labor under economic calculation as thoroughly as possible so that we are the best possible stewards with the resources we have that we can possibly be. And so here again is a link between liberty and the Austrian school. We realize that the Austrian school teaches us what the value of economic calculation is and the perils that come from not being able to calculate economically. Well if you believe in liberty you believe in a free market and the free market is where economic calculation is maximized where the greatest possible number of decisions are made under the cope of economic calculation. So again it's not just some freakish coincidence that people who are interested in human liberty happen to migrate here. Even bearing in mind that these are separate things. Moreover it is not just the key Austrian insight is not that the free market produces the greatest quantity of overall stuff. It does do that but that is not the unique Austrian insight. The unique Austrian insight at least when it comes to this stuff is that it's individual preferences that govern the entire structure. That all through the different stages of production which will be talked about this week the prices of these goods and the extent of the market for each of these goods is determined by the consumers' demand for the final product. And that demand gets filtered up through the various stages of production. So that it is ultimately the consumer indirectly that winds up setting the prices of all the intermediate goods that go into making that final good. And when you get into the discussion of the setting of producer prices on the market you're really beginning to get into the meat of the Austrian system. So don't go to sleep when that stuff comes up. You'll be missing the key sort of point. Israel Kersner is a well-known Austrian economist who said this that the market economy is a system driven entirely and independently by the choices and valuations of consumers. With these valuations transmitted upwards through the system to goods of higher order determining how these scarce higher order goods are allocated among industries and how they are valued and remunerated as part of a single consumer driven process. Now when you read Mannequinian State by Murray Rothbard one thing you'll note is the scholarly reserve of his prose. He speaks in a very sober tone in this book. He speaks in the tone of a scientist. And this will come as a surprise if you've read some of Rothbard's more popular writing where it's like there's a fist coming through the pages like right at you when you read some of Rothbard's more popular stuff. So then you read Mannequinian State and it's hard to believe this is the same person. But this is how seriously he treated this topic and yet even there even when Rothbard is at his most scientific even he can't resist calling the market in Mannequinian State calling the market beautiful and another part awe-inspiring. So here's Rothbard. He says the value scales of the consumers determine given the stocks of original factors all the various results of the market economy that need to be explained. The prices of the original factors the allocation of original factors the incomes to original factors the rate of time preferences and interest the length of the production processes and use and the amounts and types of the final products. And then he goes on to refer to this as this beautiful and orderly structure of the market economy. And then very late in the book he says superficially it looks to many people as if the free market is a chaotic and anarchic place while government intervention imposes order and community values upon this anarchy. Actually praxeology economics branch of praxeology shows us that the truth is quite the reverse. We may divide our analysis into the direct or palpable effects and the indirect hidden effects of the two principles. Directly voluntary action free exchange leads to the mutual benefit of both parties to the exchange. Indirectly as our investigations have shown the network of these free exchanges in society known as the free market creates a delicate and even awe inspiring mechanism of harmony adjustment and precision in allocating productive resources deciding upon prices and gently but swiftly guiding the economic system toward the greatest possible satisfaction and the desires of all the consumers. In short not only does the free market directly benefit all parties and leave them free and uncoerced it also creates a mighty and efficient instrument of social order. Proudhon indeed wrote better than he knew when he called liberty the mother not the daughter of order. We might also note the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Karl Marx was far from being the first to who looked for the causes of the boom bus cycle in the market economy itself. So therefore it is a strike in favor of the market economy. No matter how scientific the Austrian approach is and value free it is. Nevertheless it is indirectly a strike in favor of the free society to point out that no the free market is not responsible for the business cycle but it's an artificial intervention into the market that yields you the business cycle. So it takes only one step then to say if you want to avoid the business cycle then you draw certain conclusions. Or another in fact much more central tenet of Marxism was the labor theory of value. Now it's true that the labor theory of value has undergone some rough times over the years. So there are some Marxists who will claim that even though we don't believe in the labor theory of value anymore it doesn't destroy Marxism but I think that's special pleading if you ask me because if you don't have the labor theory of value you don't have surplus value, you don't have exploitation and therefore you don't have any proletarian revolution. So it's kind of hamlet without the prince if you ask me if Marxism without the labor theory of value. But now the Austrians are not the only ones who attack the labor theory of value but all the same when Bombavirk explains that what's going on in the market is not exploitation that the capitalist earns X but the laborers only earn X minus Y is that because the capitalist is wickedly keeping the difference for himself and exploiting his laborers? No, what Bombavirk explains famously that what's actually going on here is a reflection of time preference that we all know that if I say to you I have a key to a treasure chest and the treasure chest has $100,000 in it but you can only use the key one year from now what would you pay for the key now? You would not pay $100,000 now. You would pay maybe $95,000. You would pay some lesser amount now because you have to wait to get the $100,000, okay? This is a basic observation and this is central to understanding what's going on in the employee-employer relationship that what's actually happening is if I'm producing widgets and I'm giving the laborer his paycheck today but I'm not gonna sell those widgets for one or two years, I am, what I'm contributing as the capitalist to this is the waiting. I'm waiting for the revenues to come in. The worker does not have to bear that waiting. The worker can get his income right now whereas the capitalist has to wait a long time and so in the same way that you would have to wait a year to open that chest the capitalist has to wait and so you're not gonna pay the full amount of the chest because you have to wait well likewise you wouldn't pay the laborers that full amount either because there's a waiting involved and so you are bearing that waiting for them and they want that. None of them want to have to save up for years and years and years before they can go do any work. They want to be paid today and so again this insight as to what's actually going on in the market has implications for liberty because it shows that one of the most anti-liberty systems in the history of the world is dead wrong in its fundamental analysis. So maybe this saves us two or three piles of corpses fewer people becoming communists. I mean that's something, right? That's a contribution. And then just one other thing if you read the tremendous article by Rothbard from 1956 or it appeared in the collection in 1956 toward a reconstruction of utility and welfare economics now Rothbard did not write that essay which you should all read he didn't write that essay as a defense of the free market. That was not his intention but it kind of is indirectly because what he's doing there is he's trying to deal with this sub-field of economics called welfare economics has nothing to do with welfare payments to people by the way welfare programs and poor Jeff Herbner gave a lecture on welfare economics at Mises U and it goes up on YouTube and one of the first comments was how do you like that? Another rich white guy who thinks we shouldn't have a safety net in society. I mean dumb, dumb. No. What Rothbard is pointing out in welfare economics is he's dealing with this Pareto superior, Pareto inferior system. So the idea is this that when some kind of social interaction makes at least one person better off and nobody worse off we call this outcome Pareto superior. But when we have a case where we cannot say whether social welfare has increased we call this Pareto inferior. Now notice that Pareto inferior does not mean that social welfare has unambiguously decreased because that could only be a case where both people entering into an exchange are going to lose and no one would enter into an exchange like that. So Pareto inferior just means we can't say one way or the other. Well, now obviously Rothbard goes into much, much more detail than this but his point is that when you see an exchange taking place on the market where people voluntarily engage in an exchange then ex-ante each one of them stands to benefit or they wouldn't enter into the exchange and so we can say that okay, well this is clearly a Pareto superior outcome but when we have the guy with the bullhorn and the hangman's noose and the gun coercing an exchange, well we still see an exchange going on but this is Pareto inferior because the only way we can be sure that somebody has benefited is that he engages in a voluntary action. Well, what is the nexus of voluntary action? The free market. So again, it's not some arbitrary thing that we find this all very interesting because it does point in a certain direction. It doesn't compel us to go in that direction but as I say if we value the well-being of mankind and we like to see social cooperation instead of degradation and decay we will support the market society and the division of labor. Now finally let me say a little something about the Mises Institute itself because it's easy to misunderstand what the Mises Institute is and what it's all about because this too is something that's exciting. It's easy to think that the Mises Institute is Mises.org which make no mistake that is a central ingredient of what the Mises Institute is. I mean the Mises.org is one of the great examples of, I don't know, the greatest benefactor of mankind basically is Mises.org in a way. When you consider all the stuff you can get for free. You know we get a lot of people out there. I want, give me stuff for free. Well, you got it, okay? You got books you can read. If you were a real cheapskate and you have a lot of paper you can print out a lot of books from Mises.org. You can print out articles on basically everything under the sun. Everything you can imagine on Mises.org. Technical economic questions and questions involving current events. The entire print runs of scholarly journals are on there. Entire seminars in video and audio are on there. I mean it's just unbelievable what's on there. So you could very easily pass the rest of your life just sitting in front of Mises.org. But don't, don't do that. It's much more fun to be here, right? We're having a super time already. Mises Institute puts out a monthly publication that it mails out to people, the free market. Okay, that's great too. And it puts on events like this. Now we get into something that's different because there are websites out there, not as good as Mises.org, there are other websites and there are monthly publications. But now, events for students. This is important. Because as I say, a lot of us got our start because of this particular event. I mean I went to these fancy schools. I went to Harvard and Columbia and I can tell you that by far the best academic experience I ever had was the Mises University Week. Not even a competition. It was by far the best. So this is forming the next generation. This is a critical, a critical thing. We also have seminars that take place around the country and sometimes here at the Mises Institute. We have the Austrian Economics Research Conference. Used to be the Austrian Scholars Conference. Now it's the Austrian Economics Research Conference or ERC as we affectionately refer to it now. Which brings scholars from all over the world who are doing brand new research into Austrian economics. But then we have student programs and in particular we have the fellows programs. We have graduate students who come here for the summer under the direction of Joe. And do research, do scholarly work and try and get a paper published in a journal. Very important. This will help them to stand out when they go on the job market. Which by the way, thanks in large part to the Mises Institute is no longer, being an Austrian is no longer the kiss of death when you go on the academic job market. The research wing of the Mises Institute is where again, new work is being done. See a lot of times today because of social media we rate the value of something by how many likes it gets on Facebook and how many retweets it gets. And so some of our most important work will get like five retweets. It'll be some scholarly article that somebody wrote. But that doesn't, yes I love Facebook and Twitter too. I use it, I use them myself. But sometimes the most important work is the work that we're doing for the ages because you know that tweet that you wrote the other day probably 50 years from now no one's gonna be reading that. But they might be reading a scholarly article. Like I just referred you to an article by Rothbard from 1956. Okay that's more important than some of the tweets. So for instance right now, what would be more important than some tweets, you understand, they're really cutting edge tweets. Just caught myself there. But like right now what would be one of the most important areas for us to do research in? Well Austrian economics and financial markets, right? Because of the financial crisis and the Mises Institute's right on top of that. Guido Holzmann in France is focusing on that doing at least one book on this subject and conducting research on that. And his PhD student who was a summer fellow here for at least a couple of years, Xavier Merin is doing his work on the general subject of Austrian economics and derivatives. Well again, we all want that. I already said well gee, how should we think about derivatives? Well this is being done thanks to the Mises Institute. We're not just putting out policy reports telling government officials how they should run things. In fact I don't think we've done that at all. We're trying to advance the Austrian school. So it's highly unusual to have an institution that does all these things. You know you have some institution that do the student events or they have a website or you have a strictly scholarly institution. We do it all. And sitting here you are at the epicenter of this whole movement. Now as Mark Thornton said at the beginning we are indeed a minority, a growing one, but a minority. And that means you have a special responsibility. It's fun being a minority because it's kind of cool like we have some kind of secret insight into things that other people don't have but we don't really want to be a Gnostic sect. We want to spread the knowledge to the world not just hoard it for ourselves. So first of all this week work hard at this. And again I can't emphasize enough if something sounds obvious to you I don't care write it down anyway because it's not being told to you in vain. Everything builds on these fundamentals. But then ask yourself what am I gonna do with this? Am I gonna go home and be really satisfied with myself that I've acquired a lot of knowledge in Austrian economics or I'm gonna do something with it? What can you do with it? Well think about that now. You're gonna go into economics or you're gonna be a writer, a journalist of some kind who just happens to have some economic knowledge. I'm not sure there is such a thing. You could be the first. Whatever. Maybe you're really funny. You could make funny videos or you're a good animator. You could make a good three minute animated video on some subject. Whatever it is do it. Don't just sit there and hoard this information for yourselves but make no mistake a tremendous responsibility is resting on your shoulders and especially at this kind of critical watershed moment in history where people really are looking for answers. Why do things seem so screwed up? Why does it seem that even though we hear the occasional protest that things are getting better? What are you naysayers talking about? Things are getting better? That nobody really believes that. They feel like we've entered into a permanent condition of secular stagnation. Like why should we be in that position? People wanna know the answers. And we have some answers for them. But there are two different approaches that you might take when you're in a situation like this where it seems like everything's going in the wrong direction. That intellectually, indeed, we're having some great victories. But politically, things are going in the wrong direction. There's a tremendous mismatch. And these two approaches that you might take are laid out by Mises in his notes and recollections. And he's writing around 1940. And he begins by talking about Karl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school. Menger's book, Principles of Economics was published in 1871. Mises read that book in 1903. And he says this. Personally, I met Karl Menger only many years later. He was then already more than 70 years old, hard of hearing, and plagued by an eye disorder. But his mind was young and vigorous. Again and again, I have asked myself why this man did not make better use of the last decades of his life. I believe I know what discouraged Menger and what silenced him so early. His sharp mind had recognized the destiny of Austria, of Europe, and of the world. He saw the greatest and most advanced of all civilizations rushing to the abyss of destruction. He foresaw all the horrors we are experiencing today. He knew the consequences of the world's turning away from true liberalism, which means libertarianism, of course, not Hillary Clinton..(audience laughing and clapping loudly turning away from true liberalism and capitalism. Nonetheless, he did what he could to stem the tide. The knowledge that his fight was without expectation of success, however, sapped his strength. But then we have the example of Mises himself. Mises says this. It is a matter of temperament how we shape our lives and the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. In high school, I had chosen a verse by Virgil as my motto, and the translation that we have here in the Institute is, do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. In the darkest hours of the war, he's talking about World War I, I recalled this dictum. I would not lose courage even now. I would do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in professing what I knew to be right. Well, there's the man we imitate. Now, as an Austrian economist, are you going to have a chair at Harvard? Probably not, but you also won't be a cog in the machine. There's something to be said for that. Mises had an unpaid position at NYU. And no doubt, his colleagues looked at him as an old-fashioned Neanderthal throwback to the superseded 19th century. Look at this funny old man with this silly seminar. And yet, does anybody remember anybody who was teaching at NYU in the economics department in 1957? And yet, here we are at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Somebody had the last laugh. For that matter, who remembers anybody teaching in the Stanford Economics Department? Now, I'm not asking the specialist in the room. The average person. Who was teaching at Stanford in 1980? And yet, where was Rothbard teaching, for most of his career, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute? Where he had a heavy teaching load, and yet, he made people with a two-two load look like pathetic, lazy bums with his output. He had the output of 15 people, of 15 really good people, who could have retired at age 50 and said, I've had a spectacular career. And he did this without any real prospect of his books being bestsellers or cracking through beyond a small circle. But he did that. He wasn't seeking fame. He wasn't saying, well, I better not say this because then some people will criticize me or call me names. I don't wanna bring current controversies into this, you understand, but so he did these things. He did these things because they were the right thing to do because he valued the truth. And you think, oh, that just sounds so cheese ball. But how else can you explain this man? He valued the truth. And he didn't live to see the incredible renaissance in interest in his work that we're living through today. He didn't try to be well-known, and yet he is. Mises didn't try to be well-known. The only thing he reproaches himself for in the notes and recollections, you can read this for yourselves, is that he was too compromising early on in his life. He should have been more uncompromising. Mises should have been more uncompromising. And so he is the one you would least expect to make a mark on the world, and yet very often those are the ones who make the most lasting marks. So those are our models. Not the people who are with the free market when it's fashionable, or who confine themselves to uncontroversial things like price controls are bad. Well, boy, I bet you're risking your career with a bold statement like that. But people who are on fire for the truth who just don't care, I don't care that Salon doesn't like me. Because years from now, no one's gonna be reading a Salon article, but if my work stands the test of time, then I will have helped to advance this most important school that is all about the truth and that indirectly is all about liberty. So if what you want more than anything else is to be liked, then you should abandon this path right away. But if you do value the truth over popularity, then make your examples Mises and Rothbard. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them on every technical issue. That doesn't mean you have to treat them as cult figures. No one at the Institute has ever even remotely thought this, all you need to do is take a quick glance at Walter Bloch's bibliography where he's got 8,000 articles critical of different Austrians, all of whom he loves. And they would have wanted him to do this, to advance the school, but make them your models in your scholarly rigor and in your moral courage. And don't let this week pass you by. Absorb at all and make yourselves worthy successors of the great men who have come before you. Thank you very much.