 The Mises Institute is in Asheville, North Carolina this weekend celebrating our Supporters Summit and we thought you might enjoy hearing a talk I gave entitled The Role of the Mises Institute. Here's a hint, it's not politics, it's not public policy and it's not lobbying, but rather to be a school, a new kind of school for the 21st century. Stay tuned. I'd like to speak briefly to all of you about where we are as a society and also the role that the Mises Institute plays in that society or ought to play. I'm sure that I'm not the only one in the room that's been operating under this assumption that the American people would view this Hillary versus Trump thing, or Hillary versus anyone even before Trump was the nominee, that while Hillary is the devil you know and that the American people would select her over the devil they don't, whether that's Ted Cruz or Scott Walker or now Donald Trump, but I think we've seen in the last couple of weeks with these strange health scares, I'm not 100% wedded to that anymore. I've been of the opinion that Hillary was going to win and win, maybe perhaps as easily as Obama did the second time against Mitt Romney, but just simply because as I said she's the devil you know versus the devil you don't, but maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're in for a very strange couple of months in a very rough ride, but we can bemoan this election from a libertarian perspective and say it doesn't seem to be going our way, but I think that there's really a great opportunity here with Hillary versus Trump because what we need to understand is that regardless of who wins, there are literally going to be millions and millions of Americans, maybe 40% of the country either way, who view the winner as illegitimate and irredeemable. I mean that's really where democracy has gotten us in the U.S. If Hillary wins there are going to be countless Americans who think she's ought to be in jail, that she's a felon, and if Trump wins there's going to be millions of Americans who view him as the retrograde leader of the deplorables, a man who has no business being near the White House. I mean this is where we are and you may have seen on the Drudge Report a couple of days ago there's a recent Gallup poll that says fully a third of Americans won't trust the election results regardless, so we don't even trust our government to hold an honest election. So I think we should forget about this nonsense, this is the most important election of our lifetimes, we hear that every time, I think we should forget about that in the conventional sense because there's not big ideological or policy, I don't even like that word policy differences between these candidates. I think Trump versus Hillary represents something much bigger. It's what we might call the end of politics or at least the limits of politics. I think Americans and Europeans too really the West are waking up and to the fact that there's this myth called the myth of democratic consensus, that somehow democratic voting yields this happy compromise between supposed left and right, but when all it really yields is this entrenched bureaucratic and political class and its system of patronage and spoils. Now those of us in this room might know that already, but what we're talking about here is something very different, we're talking about ordinary people, very ordinary Americans waking up to this reality. And we already know that government it simply can't deal with our macro structural problems. There are no political solutions to government debt, to what's going on with our currency, to the wars, to entitlements, to taxes and spending, to these intractable social issues. None of these things can be solved politically at this point in the United States and that's really a profound thing to think of. And so I think the public is waking up to this slowly, but surely and it's not necessarily an ideological awakening on their part, it's just simply a recognition of reality. There's no political will, there's no political consensus in DC to address any of these big picture problems. So from that perspective we might say that politics in the West, politics in America is broken. And I think there's something profoundly healthy from a libertarian perspective about witnessing this, this understanding that political solutions don't exist, that our grade school view of government is a sham. I mean this is really a profound opportunity for us if we think about it correctly. You know we can look at angry voters and populism and nationalism and anti-globalism and anti-elitism. These are all symptoms of a hostility for politics. Really a deep-rooted hostility and we can turn up our noses at these movements and say they're not libertarian or they're not intellectual or we can embrace this opportunity that they present. So I think that opportunity to make the case for a fully free society, one not organized around politics or the state whatsoever is at the heart of the Mises Institute's mission. And we've never been afraid to make that case. You know we can, we can term it Mises's view of self-determination taken to its ultimate conclusion. We can term it Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism. We can call it a private property society or private law society, whatever you like. The Mises Institute is never shied away from advocating pure stateless libertarianism. And I don't think that can be said of any other organization in the world necessarily, inside or outside the Beltway. But make no mistake, we're not trying to be overly ideological or shun people or keep them away. We're fellow travelers with anyone who wants to reduce the role of government on any issue for any reason or any motivation. This means you know conservatives as they abandon the GOP progressives who become sick of the Wall Street crony machine, anti-fed populace, homeschoolers, truck drivers, stay-at-home moms, soldiers, fed up non-voters and everybody in between. Anyone who's interested in liberty even if it's on a single issue only. Not everybody sees the world the way most of us in this room do and that's okay. We're here to provide a gateway to spark an interest to make free resources available and feed that interest. So as politics collapses around us, we want the institute to serve as an intellectual home for anyone interested in a society not organized around the state, but instead organized around markets and civil society. Not a utopia, but a world where the great economic and cultural and social questions of the day are increasingly not decided or determined by politics. We want the Mises Institute to stand as a counterbalance to this dominant political narrative. It's really I think at the heart of our mission, but it's far from our only mission. We have a very critical job in saving economics itself from economists because we can think about politics as being broken, but you want to talk about a broken profession, not just as a profession, but also as a field of study. The credibility of modern economics is hopelessly bound up in forecasting and mathematical modeling is shot. Its reputation, especially following the crash of 2008, is in tatters. It fails to inspire young people to go into economics while its PhD factories produce data historians who don't really understand economics at all. I mean if we consider for a moment that modern mainstream economists, they failed utterly to predict or understand, as I mentioned, the crash of 2008, they failed utterly to predict or understand the great housing crash of the last decade. They don't understand money as a market commodity. They think it's just something that could be conjured up at will as some central bank script. They don't understand inflation fundamentally as a monetary phenomenon. They don't understand interest rates in their role. They think interest rates are some sort of policy tool to nudge behavior. They don't understand malinvestment and how booms and busts really occur. They don't understand praxeology or the proper methodology. They're not even familiar with the concept, but they're absolutely wedded to proving out their hypotheses using empirical models. They don't understand the vital role of capital markets in allocating resources to their best and highest uses. They don't understand the role that bankruptcy plays in weeding out and liquidating unfit businesses. They don't understand or know much at all about economic history whatsoever. I was talking to Benjamin Powell, PhD professor at Armisa's University recently, and he confirmed my suspicion which is that it's entirely possible to obtain a PhD in economics today at most universities knowing nothing, literally nothing about the history of economic thought. It's as though we took these young economists and just sort of parachuted them in to a desert island, and there they find themselves with no previous knowledge of how we got there. And finally, consider that the Fed in the Eccles Building employs about 300 Ivy League PhD economists who can't even figure out whether to raise the Fed funds rate by a quarter point next month as though the fate of the civilized world hangs in the balance. So this is the state of orthodox economics today, and this is where the Mises Institute comes in because the correction is so obvious. We need a counter-revolution, a wholesale Austrian counter-revolution away from neoliberalism or neo-Kanzenism or whatever you want to term this jumbled set of beliefs that drives economics today, the set of beliefs that says it always comes down to governments or central banks stimulating demand at any cost. So the path forward for us as an organization for you as individuals is as always education. But it's not limited to academia by any means, and I think on the contrary, as Mises saw it, none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. You're probably familiar with his argument in the latter part of human action where he talks about the place of economics and learning and he cautions against relegating economics to what he calls academia in esoteric circles. I mean, Mises really believed that everyone had a duty to learn economics. In fact, in that same section, he talks about the question of the market economy versus socialism being as important in the 19th to 20th centuries as religious and monarchical absolutism had been in earlier centuries. He saw that really as the question of his day and our day. So note here his populist tone and I'm quoting him. He says, there's no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities, all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of Superman. In such vital matters, blind reliance upon experts, his quotes, and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices like income inequality, anyone, is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and yielding to other people's domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny is at stake. These are pretty tough words from a very gentle soul. So the call to duty, as Mises saw it, sounded for every intelligent layman. And that's really at the heart of how we see ourselves and what we do at the Mises Institute, teaching sound economics to lay people from all walks of life. Because, ladies and gentlemen, what exactly is a school in the 21st century use of the term? Well, it's a place where one learns, but beyond that, the term school is being radically redefined. It's no longer necessarily a physical place that a student physically attends. It's no longer for young people in their teens or 20s only. There are no administrators. There are no irrelevant classes or imposed curriculum. Learning takes place at the student's pace, on the student's time, any time of day, anywhere in the world. Students consume as much or as little as suits their needs. Schools become market focused. So by these measures and by this definition, the Mises Institute really is a modern school. We have students from all walks of life. And by students, we mean people who interact with us. Some of them become so involved that they actually come to the Institute, become a fellow, spend time researching and learning in our library, spend time with our faculty, and decide to commit their entire lives to the study of economics and go off somewhere and get a PhD. So that's a student. But there's another kind of student who might only choose to do nothing more than subscribe to our Twitter feed and occasionally consume an article by clicking on a link. And by doing so, that's as much education as they need or want from us and still put some light years ahead of most of their peers walking around. And I'm very pleased to say that Mises.org, the largest and best site in the world for Austrian and libertarian content, is now reaching upwards of 5.5 million individual people every year. That's a big increase over the last year, even in the face of Hillary versus Trump. And I'm also very pleased to say that the husband and wife duo of Peter and Sandy Klein have agreed to start producing some excellent new core classes for our online academy, which are going to give people all around the world an opportunity to experience a part of what Mises, you are summer program is all about. So from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen, we are the economics of the future and the school of the future. So thanks to all of you so much for making it possible. Thank you.