 It's a delight to be here. Before I start, I want to thank Lou and Jeff for putting this on and Joe Salerno and the entire staff of the Mises Institute. This is my home away from home. I'm a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. Always looking for good students. So if you're thinking of transferring, come on down. The water's fine. But this is my second home, my second intellectual home. I've been at the Mises University for many, many years, and it's always a delight to meet new people and some of my old friends. Joe Salerno sent me the following note. He said, this is fake economic news. Basically, what we would like you to do is take a few hot topics from the news, like inflation targeting, minimum wage increases, the attempt to repeal Obamacare, Yellen's recent claim that there will never be another financial crisis. And he knew that would get a laugh. So what I did is I just, when I saw it, I picked up the newspaper and I was in Canada. So it's the National Post, which is sort of like the Wall Street Journal of Canada. And the first one I saw there was polygamy. Ex-bishops found guilty of polygamy. Winston Blackmore, 60 years old, was married to Jane Blackmore and then married 24 additional women. I don't know what it has to do with economics, but what the heck, I couldn't resist. He's going to be a busy boy. The second one is a little more serious that I saw also in the newspaper. And this is that little boy, Charlie Gard, who was a year old and had various, very serious problems. And the authorities wouldn't allow his parents to determine his fate. They decided that they wanted the plug pulled and they wouldn't let the little boy die at home. And this is just part and parcel of the government. The government is not a good institution. The government is based on compulsion. And here, you see it in the most raw way imaginable. Poor little guy. There was somebody from the US, a doctor from the US, who had an experimental drug that might or might not have saved him. And the British powers that they wouldn't allow the parents to bring the little boy to the US to possibly save his life, which makes you look at these people in not a very good way. Nowadays, Bernie Sanders wanted to have single payer. In Canada, there is single payer health care, health system. And there's now a big kerfuffle as to we got to get rid of Obamacare, but what are we going to get? And the progressives want single payer. The problem with single payer is if you just get a supply and demand curve out there, there's supply, there's demand, there's quantity, there's price, a single payer means you pay nothing. I mean, you pay through taxes. It's sort of like they call it a freeway. It's really a tax way. So Canada or Great Britain or these other European countries, the progressive countries, you're sick. You have care for free. Well, then demand has got to be greater than supply, no matter how you do it. And there's going to be a waiting line, a long, long waiting line for people to get the service. And there's really no way around that. I have to read you a little thing. Tale of two doctors, two patients limped into two different medical clinics with the same complaint. Both have trouble walking and appear to require a hip surgery. First patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the same day, and it's harmful for surgery the following week. The second sees his family doctor after waiting three weeks for an appointment, then waits eight weeks to see a specialist, then gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed for another week, and finally has surgery scheduled for six months later, pending the review board's decision on his age and remaining value to society. Why the different treatment for the two patients? The first is a golden retriever, and the second is a human being. In many countries, in Canada especially, if you let an animal suffer, you can be put in jail. Whereas a human being, you wait six months, and you're lucky sometimes to get service within six months. And there is no single payer for dogs, or for horses, or cows, or anyone like that. There's none of this for them. But for us human beings, we have to have special privileges. Why is it that we have the present system where health care is linked to your job? The reason for it stems from something very different, namely maximum wages, maximum wage laws. Now later on, I will be discussing minimum wage laws, but there is such a thing as maximum wage laws. This was during World War II when we had to keep wages down. So here is a supply and demand of wages, or supply and demand of labor. Demand for labor, quantity of labor, and this is wages. And when you have a maximum wage, the demand for workers is greater than the supply of workers. So employers are desperate to get workers. And what do they do? Well, they'll do something very similar to what was done when they had usury laws or laws against banks giving too high an interest rate. And here we have supply and demand of loans and quantity of money loans. And what you had there was banks could only pay so much interest. So the demand on the part of banks for the loans was high and the supply of lending to the banks, supply of deposits was very small. So what did the banks do? They offered a TV set, or in other words, they tried to get around this. They couldn't offer a high enough interest rate. So they offered toasters, or refrigerators, or lottery tickets. Well, it's the same thing here. Now what they could have done is they could have offered toasters or refrigerators to workers who would come and work for them at the low wage. They could have even offered car insurance. Don't ask me why they offered health insurance, but they offered health insurance. So all of a sudden health insurance is somehow tied to the job. Why should health insurance be tied to the job? It stems from an initial rights violation or initial interference on the part of the market, on the part of the government in the market, which exemplifies Mises' insight that whenever you have a government intervention, it creates a problem. And then you have to have another government intervention to cure that, and then you have to have another one to keep going in that way. You only end up in one place. So what I'd like to do is apply this not only to single payer, but also to the FDA. One of the problems I have with freshman students is they love the FDA. Food and drug administration, you know, okay, maybe this group is no good, maybe war is no good, but the FDA is sacrosanct. And the FDA is to its patients, the way the British people were to trolley guard in his family, see the moderate view would be let the FDA just give advice. Say, well, we don't think that this drug is good, but you're on your own. You're an adult, we're not paternalists. I mean paternalism, this whole idea is very incompatible with democracy. Because on the one hand, we say you're smart enough to vote, but you're too stupid to pick your own drugs. I mean, if you're smart enough to vote, you should be able to pick your own drugs. And if you can't pick your own drugs, shouldn't be allowed to vote. There's a little inconsistency here. Whenever you decrease people's options, you don't help them. If I say that there are 25 drugs, 26 drugs, A through Z, and you can only use the first 15 and not the last 11 or whatever it is, how am I helping you? I'm precluding you from some options. Which would be better? A, an FDA that we now have, which is a monopoly permission granting decider in Bush's terms, or a free market industry, not giving permits, but just giving advice. Certainly, if we had many, many private companies all certifying drugs and saying, yes, we approve of this, we know that. Sort of like the consumer's report of a good housekeeping seal of approval for drugs, that would be much better than a monopoly institution that no matter what it does, it can never go broke. Whereas if a private company tells you that, yes, you can use this drug and then the drug has very bad effects later on, well, it goes broke. And the remaining ones are pretty good, or at least better than the one that went by the board. I mean, that's why we have pretty good wristwatches and pretty good pens and pretty good shirts and pretty good everything, because we have a market. And you have, if you don't do a good job, you have to exit the market and come up with some other way to produce. Whereas when we put all of our monopoly, everything in, I'm sorry. Yes, if we put everything in one basket, and that basket goes badly, we're in trouble. Whereas if we have many competing agencies to certify drugs, we're in much better shape. Okay, right now, the big argument is, well, there are 40 million Americans with no health insurance. Well, they don't have peanut butter insurance either. They don't have automobile insurance for oil changes. Nobody gets insurance for an oil change. And yet, in effect, you're having insurance for a medical checkup, which is sort of like an oil change if I can use that analogy. Why is it? Why do we worry about that? And the answer is because it's so bloody expensive. If it was cheap, if it was like peanut butter or a wristwatch or a car, cars are pretty expensive, there'd be no problem. So why is it so expensive? Well, people say, well, it's because you have a lot of medical technology, but we have medical technology with computers, with TVs, with all sorts of cell phones and stuff, and the price keeps coming down, down, down. So that could hardly be the thing. The thing is because in the medical field, what we have is restricted entry. Namely, we have a supply shift. The supply gets shifted from S to S prime. Namely, there are many fewer doctors than there should be. In some of my research, I did a few years ago, I found out that I compare doctors with PhDs in biology. Why PhDs in biology? I figured if you got a PhD in biology, you have enough upstairs to become a doctor if you wanted to and you're not really afraid of blood, so I didn't pick a PhD in math or something like that because they might be afraid of blood. And the salaries of doctors is something like six-fold, five or six-fold what a PhD in biology gets, which indicates that there's a vast shift in the supply curve to the left. Namely, if you and I wanna be partners and set up a new medical school, now we're not doctors, although I think there might be a doctor or two in the audience here, but we're not doctors, but we hire doctors to run it, what will happen to us, we put in jail. You just can't set up a medical school without the permission of the AMA, and the AMA is the labor union of doctors and they don't want this. Or take any medical school now, if they doubled or added 10% to their incoming freshman class without AMA permission, no, no, no. A cousin of mine applied to medical schools, oh, maybe 10 medical schools after he graduated, didn't get into any. Next year he applied to all medical schools in the U.S. and didn't get into any, and he had very good marks. The third year he went off to Europe, and five years later he came back and had a sue to get his way back in to becoming a doctor. That he understood English, but there are many, many doctors who come to this country and they have to drive cab, or they have to take a job behind a broom or ask if you want fries with that, or something like that, because the exams are in English. Now you might say, well, that's reasonable, I mean, you come to a doctor, and you say your elbow hurts, and he starts digging into your knee, we don't want that. So maybe there's some sense in making the exams in English, but no. There are unconscious patients. No language needed, you know, there's a guy lying there, and you don't ask him anything because he's unconscious, and you can deal with him. A second one is same language patients. The Jewish doctors in Vienna were known as the best doctors in the world in the 30s and the 40s. They, many Jews came from Austria to escape Hitler, and the economists got jobs, the physicists got jobs, all the other intellectuals got jobs, the doctors couldn't get jobs in the US. The same thing happened with Cuba. When the, I think it was in the 1970s, a lot of Cubans came over, very intellectual, very accomplished, and every last one of them got a job except the doctors. They couldn't do it because their English wasn't good enough. So one thing is they could treat, you know, the Cuban doctors could treat other Hispanic people who speak the same language, and the third one is that's why God invented translators so that we can have doctors who don't speak the same language. Now it'll cost a little more because you have to pay a translator, but still you shouldn't be precluded from practicing if you're a good doctor. So that's the supply side. What's going on in the demand side? Well, what's going on in the demand side is that if it's for free, you overuse it. Imagine if we did this with milk. Supposed to be said we should have single payer for milk. Namely, everybody pays through taxes and now the government gives out milk for free. Well, you know, kids have water gun fights. They'll have milk gun fights. I understand that taking a bath and milk is good for the skinners. I don't know. I think it's good for them. I've been told it's good. I don't do it myself, but I've been told it's good. Well, people will have a bath and milk and then we'll run out of milk for babies, which is roughly what we're doing with medical care. So I'm not a big fan of government involvement there. Okay, the next thing that came up in my newspaper was, this is a Canadian newspaper, the Looney Crests Above Threshold. The Looney is a Canadian dollar. For those of you who are ignorant of this, Canadians know everything about the U.S. Americans know nothing about Canada. I spend half my year in Canada. I used to work there at the Fraser Institute so I got fired for being too libertarian, but that's a whole other issue. What's this Looney business? What's this Lyra business? What's this pound or Euro or any of that stuff? You know, it used to be in the good old days that the Lyra was the name of a certain amount of gold. And the pound was a name for a certain amount of gold, namely a pound, and the same thing with the yen and all these other things. And see, I don't think that we libertarians or Austrians are a favor of the gold standard. We just favor free market money, whatever it is. Well, we use the word gold standard sort of as a substitute because whenever we were free to choose the name of Milton Friedman's series, Free to Choose, we chose gold. And yet Milton Friedman was a diabolical opponent of the gold standard. He thought that we shouldn't have it because it's expensive to dig it up and well, it's expensive to have locks also and chains and fences. So we need that as an insurance policy against government. When I was a kid, I'm Jewish from Brooklyn so I talk about bagels. You could buy three bagels for a dime. Now it's a dollar a bagel. What has the Fed been doing? They're supposed to stop inflation. Well, they haven't stopped inflation now. So my answer to that one is let's go to the gold standard. Okay, what next do I have? What next I have is, here we go. Yellen's recent claim that there will never be another financial crisis in our lifetime. Well, what she's doing is keeping interest rates very low. And here we have, I'm gonna use the triangle. Thanks to Roger Garrison, we now have triangles on their side with time on the horizontal axis. It used to be with Murray and Mises and Hayek especially, not so much Mises, that the time was on the vertical axis and I think Roger made a great breakthrough in the attempt to make Austrian economics, business cycle theory more palatable to the mainstream. Not that he succeeded but it was poor crewmen, still hasn't read this stuff but it was a good try. So here you have an ordinary, what do you call it? This is time over here and this is money over here and the interest rate is right there. That's the angle of this thing and what happens is when you artificially lower the rate of interest, what you get is some sort of curve like that with a much lower interest rate than otherwise. And this area over here, where is my pen? This area over here is unsustainable investments that is too roundabout, too long lived it depends upon an interest rate being much lower than the interest rate of the consumers or the populace based on their time preferences. So you have excessive investment in very, very long roundabout processes which are unsustainable unless the interest rate is kept low which they're keeping low which means that we get more and more malinvestment which eventually has got to be undermined and then we have a recession. And for the Austrians the recession is a cleansing. It's sort of like if you get drunk last night and now in the morning you're throwing up, well throwing up is good, you're getting rid of the poisons. Whereas the way the mainstream sees this, recessions are to be avoided at all costs and the way to avoid recessions to lower the interest rate even more and get you even drunker. So I'm not a big fan of Janet Yellen which will come as a surprise to a lot of people. So I think that there will be more crises of this sort as long as the Fed exists and certainly as long as it artificially lowers interest rates below what otherwise would it prevail? Okay, the next one I want to touch upon. Joe said the minimum wage increases in Seattle and other cities. Let's talk a little bit about the minimum wage law. Now the minimum wage law is a snare and a delusion. It's a big problem. This is another one that I have a lot of trouble with my freshman students to try to convince them that the minimum wage law isn't great because who can be against higher wages? You raise wages higher and things are better than they otherwise would be. Well, one refutation of this is that if it's so good why be so cheapskatey about it? Why just raise it to 15? Why not raise it 250 or 1500 or 10,000 an hour? I mean, if by mere stroke of a legislative pen you can increase well-being of everyone, why 15? Why should we just do it to 15? Why not just raise it way up there? And the obvious answer is that a lot of people think that the minimum wage law is a floor on the wages and the higher you raise it, the higher wages go. No, the correct answer is that the minimum wage law is like a barrier over which you have to jump and the higher it is, the harder it is to jump over. And if you keep raising it, well, I mean, you raise it to 20, that means people who have a marginal revenue product or a productivity level of 18 are gonna cost the employer $2 an hour. So even if you're productive at $18 an hour, you still are going to either not get a job or if you get a job and there are too many people like you, you're gonna unemployed your employer. You're gonna put your employer bankrupt and then the whole kit and caboodle of you are unemployed. Let me offer you a sort of trick question that I posed to my intermediate micro students. I'm sure you'll all get it, but some of you might not, so it'll be perhaps of some help. Where is that? There it is. Okay, we have a supply and demand and right now the minimum wage law is $5 an hour and there are 1,000 people working. Quantity of labor, wage, supply, demand. And the wage bill, namely how much money per hour are all the workers getting? Well, there are 1,000 of them, they're getting $5, so they're getting $5,000. And now we raise the minimum wage law to seven and some people now get $7, other people are gonna be unemployed and let's say that there are 900 people that still remain employed, okay? So 100 people lose their jobs, but 900 people get a increase in their wage from five to seven. And what's the wage bill now? Well, it's 6,300, right? Namely seven times 900, everyone with me, so forth. Okay, now it's sort of a problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility to say, well, which are we better off with? Which are all 1,000 people better off with? With some of them making more money going from five to seven and others making zip? Or with the original situation where everyone makes five? So it's sort of a quandary, but a way out of that is to posit that these workers are all buddies and what they do is they say, look, we realize you're gonna have 100 unemployed, but let's share the wealth, let's share it around. Let's, everybody works one, everyone works nine weeks out of 10 and we take turns. So this week you're working, next week you're working, next week you're working and one-tenth of all the people are unemployed for a week or a month or whatever it is and we share all the money. Well, how much money will all the people get? Well, the way to figure that out is now we have 6,300 and we're not gonna divide it by 900 because that would give us seven, we were gonna divide it by 1,000, so everyone gets $6.30 an hour, got it? Now it's not as good as seven, but everyone's getting 6.30 so we can get around this interpersonal comparisons of utility problem and we can say, look, this is unambiguously good because everyone used to be getting $5 an hour, now everybody is getting 6.30, true they're not getting seven, but they're getting 6.30, it's better than five, even though it's not up to seven, so this looks pretty good. What's the problem with this? What error did I make? Because I like to fudge, we know the minimum wage law is no good and this makes it look a little good, yes? There's my man, elasticity. Look, the reason that in baseball, you know those pitchers, they throw the ball 90 miles an hour, why do they do that? They don't want the batter to hit it and the faster you throw the ball, the harder it is to hit the ball. During batting practice when they wanna give the batters good feelings and when even the shortstop can hit it over the fence, they throw it around 45, 50 miles an hour and now everybody hits well. The reason they throw it so fast is because they don't want to have people a chance to adjust. Well, it's the same thing here. The market has to adjust. There was this wonderful case in the 30s where here is the demand for labor, the orders of supply and quantity, wage, quantity of labor. What happened was that the minimum wage law went up from 40 cents to 75 cents and that was the highest percentage increase ever of a minimum wage. The next day, how many people lost their jobs? Nobody. And what I have in mind is elevator operators. Yeah, the next day, nobody fired a single elevator operator because there are contracts. You're a tenant in a high rise building and you pay a certain amount of rent and if you don't have enough elevators, the tenants are gonna get snarky. But what happened is little by little, the demand curve started going flatter and flatter, namely automatic elevators came in. In the old days, you get into an elevator and there was a guy sitting there. He wasn't a pervert. He was the elevator operator. And he would say, what floor? And he would get you to the floor and sometimes he would say, well, wait, I can get a little closer because automatic elevators get really flat but he had to adjust. So he'd say step up or step down. It's only an inch so that's as close as he could get it. Well, the next day, nobody got fired but as more and more automatic elevators came in, more and more elevator operators were fired and eventually the curb gets very flat-ish. And it's the same thing nowadays with the $15 minimum wage in Seattle. And now you've got people, when you go into McDonald's, you no longer ask somebody for a drink. You press the button yourself and Microsoft is now working on places where the only people in McDonald's will be the cooks because you'll pay automatically. Everything will be automatic. Well, at 40 cents an hour, the manually operated elevator operators were very competitive with technology. At 75 cents, they were no longer. Well, it's the same thing now. So it's not as if the minimum wage law is going to raise wages. It's rather going to be a barrier over which you have to jump to get a job. My favorite example of this is to tell your friends, your progressive friends who love foreign aid and say, look, let's not give foreign aid to these poor countries. Just telling them to raise their minimum wage. And they'll all be rich. And they're gonna scratch their heads because I mean, that's the logic of it. The logic of it would be that we don't need foreign aid. Not that foreign aid works. I mean, Peter Bauer has shown that foreign aid is another scenario of delusion. So I'm not favoring foreign aid, but I'm saying that people who love foreign aid, this might be a wedge into which you can undermine their security about interventionistic economics. By the way, where is the minimum wage law the most popular in college towns in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, the People's Republic of Cambridge Mass, People's Republic of Berkeley, or wherever there are People's Republics of college students. Why is this? Because they take sociology and they take feminist studies and queer studies and black studies and gay studies and all sorts of studies, but not economics. If they took any economics and most of them are well-intentioned, I don't think they really want to unemployed unskilled workers. Maybe a few curmudgens do, but I think that they favor helping the poor and they think that a minimum wage law can help the poor, but it really can't. It's interesting that in many other areas, everyone knows that if you raise the price, less will be purchased, namely downward sloping demand curves, namely there's an inverse relationship between price and quantity. Everyone knows that if our friends on the left, they want to get rid of tobacco smoking, so what do they do? Do they lower the price of tobacco? No, they raise the price of tobacco with special tobacco taxes. You don't want plastic bags to be used and you don't want to ban them, well then you just raise the prices of them and everyone knows that at a higher price, fewer plastic bags will be purchased. You want fewer abortions, raise the price through requirements of additional licenses, hospital associations, things like that. These are things that the lefties know full well that if you want to do something, you want to get rid of something, raise the price. Another one is you want more purchases of fruits than vegetables, lower their price through subsidies. Our friends on the left all would favor this. Want more kids to be educated, lower the price. Bernie and Hillary were having a little competition as to how low can you go in terms of college costs because they wanted more education, so they believe that demand curves slow down where they want more education, make the price lower, not higher. Uber is really good. The way the Uber system works is ordinarily you're charged a certain amount, but if there's a ball game or whatever, a parade or something, and everyone wants a cab, well what they do is they double or triple the Uber price, which helps because fewer people want it, and then people who are asleep or people who are at home who are Uber drivers, they say, well, it's triple the price, I'm gonna get off my rear end, off the couch and go drive around. So this is a good way of applying supply and demand. Obama wants community college for free. He wants more people to go there. So in every other way, the left acknowledges that the higher the price, the less will be demanded, but when it comes to the minimum wage, there's a little slippage between cup and lip, although Hillary, to give my favorite gal a plug, Hillary, bless her heart, said, the minimum wage law should only be $15 an hour in New York City, it shouldn't be 15 an hour in upper New York state because upper New York state is less well-developed and downstate New York. So even she sees that maybe 15 is too high and they never come up with 20 or 25. So deep down in their souls, if they have any, they realize this, but somehow it's gotta be 15. But what about people whose productivity is $2? If your productivity is $2 an hour, you're unemployed now because the minimum wage law is seven. And people say, well, you can't live on $2 an hour. And my response is, well, two is higher than zero. But somehow they don't realize that two is higher than zero. And then they come up with fallacious things, but well, then the government will give you subsidies if you make zero. Well, that's true, but then you're not holding center as paravis. What you've got to do is hold all other things constant in order to see what the effects on the minimum wage law are. If minimum wage law comes in at $7 an hour and a person who has productivity of $2 an hour is unemployed, but then gets plenty of money, well, then give that amount of money to the guy who's making $2 an hour to hold other things constant. I'm not saying put this program in a practice. I'm saying we have to do this in our mind's eye. Okay, let me now criticize a little bit of the mainstream economists from an Austrian point of view. And what you have is the minimum wage law is almost like a full employment bill for economists because economists are doing econometric studies up the wazoo, you know, just the American economic review is full of econometric studies studying this sort of thing. And yet, as this gentleman over here said, it depends upon timing and the elasticity. So it depends upon what kind of results you're gonna get, depends upon how long you allow the market to work because the market doesn't work instantaneously. From a libertarian point of view, what you're doing is you're offering to put people in jail who pay less than $7 an hour. I'm now gonna hire you, young lady, what's your name? Curly, I'm gonna hire you to wash my car for $3 an hour. And she agrees. We both go to jail and they're not gonna put her in jail because I'm exploiting her. But they'll put me in jail if I do it on, and it's known. Well, this is a capitalist act between consenting adults. I mean, our friends on the left are always saying that acts between consenting adults should be legitimate. Robert Nozick says, well, how about capitalist acts between consenting adults? Well, here's a capitalist act between consenting adults, and I'm gonna go to jail for it. And if she took the $3 an hour, it's because she thought that that was the best option open to her, and now what I'm doing is giving her her second best option because my option was the best. I know that because she took the job. And yet this is precluded. So the minimum wage law is not an employment law. The minimum wage law is an unemployment law. In order to see this, we have to go a little deeper and we have to ask, well, how are wages set in the first place? Why are wages the way they are? And the answer is, wages tend to equal marginal revenue product or marginal productivity. So for example, if my marginal revenue product is $10 an hour, I say that my wage will tend to equal $10 an hour and will equal it in equilibrium. Now we're never in equilibrium, but we're always moving toward equilibrium. So we can sort of assume that we'll get to equilibrium. I weigh about 185. If I jump on a scale, if it has the lever like this, it'll go up to 300 pounds down to 20 pounds and it'll move toward 185, which is my weight. If I keep running on the scale, it'll keep moving, which is more what the market is, it keeps moving around, but there's always a tendency toward 10. So if my wage is $15 an hour, this means that the profit of the employer will be minus five and he'll go broke. On the other hand, if my wage is $7 an hour, then the profit of the employer will be $3 an hour. He'll make $3 an hour off of me, right? And then what will happen is that someone else is gonna come along and offer me $7.01 or $7.02 and it'll move toward $10 an hour. So if my productivity is $10 an hour and the minimum wage is $15 or $20, I'm unemployed. So this is sort of a basic analysis of the minimum wage. Let's see if I have anything else on my list. I've only got five more minutes, so I'll open it for questions and discussion. Please raise your hand or pipe up. Yes, sir. Can we talk about the... Monopsony. Okay. Well, let me do monopoly first and then I'll do monopsony because the two are very, very similar. In the monopoly argument, here you have an average cost. Here you have a marginal cost. Here you have a demand curve and here you have a marginal revenue curve. This is quantity. This is price. And this is a point C where the perfect competitor will be at the bottom part of the average cost curve. And where the monopolist will pick his quantity is where marginal revenue hits marginal cost. And then you move up to the demand curve and this is the monopoly point. And the criticism of monopoly is, first of all, the price of the monopolist will be higher than the price of the competitor and high prices are bad. Don't ask why high prices are bad, they're bad. Secondly, the quantity of the competitor will be greater than the quantity of the monopolist and more quantity is good. Don't ask why it's more, but it's more. Third point is that there will be profit on the monopolist's side. The monopolist will make profit because he's selling this amount and the total revenue is this big box. The total cost is the smaller box so the profit is the difference whereas the perfect competitor makes no profit and profit is evil. And fourth, even worse, is you have a thing called the dead weight loss. Here's the dead weight loss. And this is seen as a market failure because we want QC, they're only giving us QM they're monopolistically withholding, right? By the way, if you believe in this you have to be against monogamous marriage because in monogamous marriage there's also withholding of trade. Certain types of trade are withheld so if you really believe in this crap you have to be a polygamous, no, not a polygamous you just can't be a monogamous, right? Okay, now let's do monopsony. Monopsony is very similar. I mean all monopsony is monopoly on the buyer side and what we have here is again we have quantity and price and we have average cost or supply and marginal cost. And here we have demand and here is where the competitor will be. So this will be QC, we shouldn't put QC here, just Q. And here is where the monopsonist will locate. He'll locate where marginal cost is the demand curve and this will be quantity of the monopsonist. Now that we're in monopsony, not monopoly. And again what we have is between these two points a minimum wage will actually increase not only wage but also what do you call it, wage but also quantity. See the problem with the minimum wage is it raises the wage but it reduces the quantity namely it went from 1,900. But now what we'll do is we'll be moving along this axis here and if the minimum wage law is higher than here then even the mainstream people will say well okay now the minimum wage law is too high. But within this area they will say minimum wage law is good and they'll justify minimum wage laws based on monopsonistic power. Now the example that they use for monopsony the idea here is that the only buyer of labor just like in monopoly is the only seller of labor. In monopsony the example they use is what's that place in Pennsylvania that makes chocolate Hershey, Pennsylvania. In Hershey, Pennsylvania a small town apart from a grocery store and a filling station everyone is employed by Hershey, Pennsylvania. So you have this sort of monopsonistic kind of thing and they're hiring too few people and all that. They're engaged in restriction on trade as well. Well maybe this made sense in the 18th century or the 19th century but certainly it's silly now there are no monopsonies even on their part. But we Austrians can go deeper than that in undermining monopsony or monopoly. One of the ways to undermine this is you see they talk about an industry. You monopolize this industry, you monopolize that labor force, what have you. But how do you define an industry? In anti-trust cases if you want what the defense will say is that we're gonna define the product very, very narrowly rather than very, very broadly, like all food. And my client Heinz Katchip or whatever is a very small part of all food whereas the plaintiff is gonna say no, no, let's just define it in terms of Katchip. And now Heinz is a monopolist of Katchip because there's only one or two others and Heinz is 95% of Katchip. Well what's the proper definition of industry? It's silly that there's no definition of industry because Katchip is in competition with bagels, with pens, with everything. So thanks for the question and that would be my short answer and I think I'm out of time so thanks for your attention.