 Welcome you all to Mises University, the best week of the year, and the best place in the year. Now for those I've not met yet, my name is Stowe Bishop. I'm an assistant editor for the Mises Wire, so you'll be meeting me throughout the week. If you have any interest in creating content for the institute, applying what you learned this week, you're please feel free to talk to me. Before we get to the main event tonight, there's a little bit of housekeeping notes. One of the things I do with the institute is social media, and we want to make the entire world know what's going on this week, so please, you tweet, Instagram. If you create your own podcast or things like that, and talking about your experiences here at MisesU, please let me know. We want to promote this as much as possible. When you're at the hotel, please remember that you are representing the Mises Institute, so act appropriately. I've been told that either it's breakfast at the hotel in the mornings, please take advantage of that before coming over. Something else is that air conditioning in the building can be strong at times, so even though it's going to be hot, it's going to be hot, it's going to be hot. In the building, it can be strong at times, so even though it's going to be hot, it might be worth bringing a sweater or something like that if you have one, it does get cold upstairs. So for any further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce our academic vice president, the dean of the Austrian school, Joe Salardo. This is my favorite event of any Mises event, and I'm proud to have been associated with it for 17 years now. I've directed it since 2005. That's not bragging on my part, just showing how honored I am that it has gone as well as it has, and it has touched so many people. Before I introduce our distinguished faculty, I want to give you an idea of how things were in the bad old days before Mises University. What were the opportunities for college students in the 1970s when I went to college? Don't try to do any math there. When I first discovered Austrian economics in my junior year in college, there were no educational conferences for students available like Mises University. My first Austrian conference was very, very small. It consisted of me. During the summer between my junior and senior year, during the summer between my junior and senior year, do you want to start reading? I worked as a janitor. I would finish my work early and I would rush into sort of a janitor's closet. It was a stuffy window list, it was a sort of naked yellow light above, and I would be in there for the rest of the day surrounded by mops, brooms, cleaning fluids, and I'd be reading Rothbard's America's Great Depression, and I felt so alone. I was alone. I was in the closet by myself. Until I graduated college, and I'm speaking literally here, I had never met another living Austrian. I was finally able to come out of the closet, the janitor's closet, and as an Austrian, and meet other real-life Austrians in 1974 when I attended, okay, good man, when I attended the first Austrian conference held in North America. It was held in a tiny and very spooky little town, they called it a hamlet, which you know is always in horror movies, there's hamlets, of South Wales in Vermont. The place had no street lights, and now you can literally hear wolves or coyotes or something. It's in New Jersey, so I don't know what the sounds are, but they're banging at the edge of town. The inhabitants you met, they never acknowledged you. They sort of looked past you like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Anyway, the Austrian movement has grown beyond belief since the famous South Royalton Conference, and Mises University has had a lot to do with it. Thousands of students have gone through Mises University since it started in 1986. More than 100 different faculty members have taught at Mises University over the years, so there are, starting with myself, there are my students, actually starting with Murray Rothbard, I was his student, he was my mentor, and there were a few of us like Hans Hoppe, and we then had students who are now teaching there, and these students have also had, now also have students who are teaching here. So there's been three generations of professors that have gone through Mises University and now are teaching at Mises University. So as the number of professional Austrian economists has grown, and Austrian research has expanded into new areas, the faculty has become larger, and the variety of courses has expanded, so you'll be treated to a wide variety of courses on a wide variety of subjects this week. And many of those subjects are very topical, and I envy you for being able to hear this for the first time, or some of you here are here a second or third time. So this week you will hear lectures from a very distinguished faculty of economists, historians, philosophers, and a brilliant legal scholar. I'm especially proud to inform you that more than half of the faculty has attended Mises U as students, some as recently as 2010 and 2011. On the other hand, some of the older faculty have sat in Murray Rothbard's living room, including myself, way back in the early 1970s. But regardless of age, all members of the faculty have devoted themselves to studying, very carefully, the teaching and writing of Austrian economics, especially as it has been passed down through what we call the mainline Austrian tradition, starting with Carl Manger, who I will talk about tomorrow morning in the first lecture, going through his student, Eugen von Bomberk, Eugene Bohm, you can call him, and then his student, Ludovan Mises and Hayek, but especially Mises Protégé, Murray Rothbard, who is really the spirit that vivifies the institute. So without further ado, I want to introduce the Mises faculty who are present. I'd like to begin with Pearl Byland. Please raise your hand as I call your name or stand up. Thomas DeLorenzo, Lucas Engelhardt, Jeffrey Herpenter, David Gordon. It was an entree for a joke, but he didn't bite. Peter Klein, his much better half, Sandy Klein, Ryan McMakin, who's also the editor of Mises.org. I know I shouldn't have called his name. Bob Murphy, Jonathan Newman, Patrick Newman, no relationship to the mutual relief of both of them. Sean Rittenauer, Timothy Terrell, Tim, Mark Thornton. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for the delayed ovation for my talk. You can now applaud the speakers. But this week our special guest lecturers will be Judge Andrew Napolitano, Walter Block, and the founder of the Mises Institute, Lou Rockwell. So now though, I'd like to introduce the president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate that. We'd get you all inside out of that terrible rain this evening, and we're very cozy and comfortable in here. Now, some of the more perceptive people in the room may notice something that I am not Tom Woods. I'm not Tom Woods. Tom Woods is scheduled to be speaking to you right now. But the fact that I'm not Tom Woods has some upside to it. It has a casual downside to it, but I'll take it. Tom Woods has attended every Mises University since apparently 2006 when he moved to Auburn and worked here for a while. Today he had a terrible travel snafu. He's also got to fly out to South Dakota this weekend. It's the first one he's had to miss in many, many, many years. So he sends his deepest regrets and is very sad and sorry not to be here. But nonetheless, the show must go on. So, you know, you're so fortunate. I never attended Mises U. I didn't really know about the Mises Institute. Probably told my late 20s. And I thought, wow, how fortunate you are to have not only all this great faculty, but the fact that they've created the syllabus, that they've taken all this economic theory and synthesized it and put it into some silos for you so you can just spend one week getting all the basics down. That's really quite an incredible achievement because most people, especially people that saved Joe's generation, really had to read a lot of original source material and go find it and do a lot of work to put things together. And it wasn't so synthesized for them. So you're very, very fortunate in that sense. And one of the great things about Mises U. is that it really, in some young people, it sparks a lifelong interest in economics. And some people decide that they perhaps want to view economics as a profession, whether in academia or otherwise. And then some people say, you know, what's about all the economics I think maybe I need? And I'm going to go into some other field. I'm going to go into technology or art or music or whatever it might be. But either way, I guarantee you this. You'll leave at the end of this week knowing more about economic theory and about the way the world really works than 99% of the people walking around outside. So it's well worth your time and I congratulate you and we appreciate you for taking a week out of your life. So Joe mentioned some of the great names in Austrian economics and the way things have passed down and that there have been generations. But I was thinking this evening earlier about, you know, just imagine this remarkable series of events that had to transpire for all of us to be in this room this evening. It's really almost impossible if you think about it. And we have to go back to before the Civil War. We have to go back to 1840 actually when Anton and Caroline Manger had a gleam in their eye and produced Karl Manger, who went on not too much later in 1871 to write the Principles of Economics, which is really considered the founding of the Austrian school and he's considered the ultimate founder. And then of course Ludwig von Mises was born later. Both of them were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, what is now Poland. And of course many, many, many other events had to occur, including Lou Rockwell meeting Ludwig von Mises when he was editing some of his work, getting to know Margit von Mises, and all these things came together. And now all these decades and decades later, we find ourselves together in this room tonight. So I think that's pretty neat in a sense, to just imagine how things could have been otherwise. So really, you know, there's been thousands of individuals connected that have made this evening possible and this week possible. And I always wonder whenever we have gatherings here or sometimes gatherings at my house, you know, what would Mises think if he could see this? What would be his impressionist? And I have to think that he would be very, very pleased because it's been almost 50 years since he died, almost half a century since this man died, and yet his work is still being read, and not only being read is being read more, more broadly, more widely, more vociferously than ever before, in multiple languages, oftentimes online, instantaneous, available free to anybody around the world. And so that's the greatest thing a scholar can enjoy, is to have their work read after they die. And Murray Rothbard, you can say the same thing. And you know, to be honest, we're not reading too many 20th century economists these days. I mean, there's the big names, people still read Keynes, but a lot of the great detractors of the Austrian school who are no longer with us are not being read. So, you know, honestly, if you're seeking some sort of immortality in life, you either got to be Mises or Rothbard, or you got to have a bunch of kids. So I'll leave it to you, which of those courses is easier. So one thing that Rothbard especially warned about, he called it the grave error of pessimism. And Mises talked about this quite a bit as well in his memoirs, and otherwise, the grave error of pessimism. And so it's very easy when we look at the world around us to get down about how things are going. And, you know, at my age, I worry a lot about the economy. I worry about politics. Obviously, I worry about my kid's future, you know, but at your age, you have a lot of concerns about just starting out your own careers. And you can look at the world and say, you know, this isn't really right because, you know, it's very, very expensive to go to college today. And then, you know, people have three degrees and there's still no jobs out there. And it's very, very expensive to buy a house. You know, a crappy little ranch house cost $900,000 in my town. And so it's a lot harder for me to go to college. It's a lot harder for me to pay for college. It's a lot harder for me to buy a house or to get married, to do all the things. And to be fair, a lot of your parents, you know, they might have gotten a 2.8 at State U and traipsed around Europe a little bit and enjoyed a little bit of a green, leafy substance and done all kinds of things. And then they still became a doctor, a dentist, or a lawyer and accountant, no problem. Or a teacher, let's say. And a lot of those avenues are much tougher today and they may even feel close to you. So I know that there's a lot of angst amongst your generation. Rothbard told us, he said, we have to fight constantly against this grave era of pessimism. So Mises had a term that he liked to use, a French term that I love. He actually uses it towards the end of human action. It's a French term called ilan vitale, our vital impulse, our life force. You've probably heard the term ilan. It's an adjective to refer to someone who's got style or panache or a puissance or whatever. So this term ilan vitale, Mises borrows it from a French philosopher named Henri Bergson. And so ilan vitale describes this sort of creative force within an organism. It drives growth and change in desirable adaptation, much like the economy. So Mises liked it so much that he used it towards, again, towards the end of human action. And he wanted to make the broader point against determinism. He wanted to remind us that human history isn't deterministic. We make our own ways and that individuals acting purposefully and willfully can change their fortunes. And I think that's absolutely true. I think he was right, that volition trumps fate. And there's a lot of determinism in the world. And it's not just, you know, on one side of the political spectrum or the other. There's a lot of people talking about identity. And frankly, on the more liberal side of what we would consider real liberal side, the libertarian side of things, there's this sort of happy-clappy deterministic talk that everything's getting better and, you know, markets are breaking out all over and, you know, the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's of the world are going to make us all incredibly happy if we just get out of the way of Amazon trucks or whatever. And I think that there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of hubris on both sides of that. So, but the idea that we control our own lives is not only very important in Mises' work, but I think it's very important in the mindset of anybody who wants a freer society. And that's certainly a big part of our mission here. And if you look at Mises, he suffered a lot of serious setbacks in his life, very serious setbacks, well beyond probably what most of us will ever experience. And he also didn't have a lot of money for most of his life, really for all of his life, despite his unbelievable brilliance and staying power that I mentioned earlier. So, at the Mises Institute, we have a broader mission than just Austrian economics and we hope that all of you embrace it. We hope that all of you consider yourselves alums after you leave Mises University. We hope that you all stay connected with us when we try to pursue that mission, which is basically convincing people that society does not need to be organized around the state or at least much around the state. And to think that today, to advocate that today, is really to rebelle against the prevailing orthodoxy, to be frank. So we're counting on all of you to be the leaders of the next counterculture. So with that, let's enjoy our evening and we have a reception outside and we're very much looking forward to having you this week. Thank you.