 Let me express again how sorry I am that Norman Stone couldn't be here because this is supposed to be a little bit about current world affairs. And of course, he's far more knowledgeable on that subject than all of us are. So but you have to put up with us now. And I want to talk about, set the tone by talking very briefly about the two great crises that we had in Europe. The first one is actually, in my view, a minor crisis. It is the Greek crisis that we had. My solution to the Greek crisis would have been the Greeks simply should have repudiated their debt. After all, it was the government incurred the debt. There is no reason for the Greek population to repay debt that other people incurred. What would have happened if the Greeks would have repudiated their debt? A few banks would have gone bankrupt. All those people who would have loaned money to Greece would be in bad shape. But after all, they were the ones who bought government bonds. Remember, Murray Rosebard was also a big fan of debt repudiation. The greatest thing that would come out of that would be that people in the future would no longer be so stupid to ever lend money to the government again. Now, the deeper problem of the Greek crisis was, of course, that it is part of Europe, of European Union. And the European Union is the attempt to centralize governmental power in Europe and has adopted the same policy, the European Union, that existed prior to that also in each of the European nation states, namely redistribution of wealth and income. You have in Germany the situation that those states like Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, for instance, have to subsidize lousy states like Berlin and Bremen. Those are the places where you have all the welfare bumps hanging around in those places. But the brave good Bavarians, they have to pay for the bumps in the north. And on the European continent, in Europe as a whole, has basically adopted exactly the same policy. That is, those states that engaged in lousy economic policies were rewarded for engaging in lousy economic policies. And those states that conducted slightly more, slightly more sober policies were punished for this. So what you had in each individual state was now repeated also on the international scale. And then the final reason for this, why could you possibly manage this type of bailout? So of course, because we have a central bank. The central banks can simply print the money. They can bail out anything. You can bail out anyone, anytime. Central banks can never go bankrupt because all they have to do is turn on the printing presses, or nowadays simply create money per computer and add digits to your accounts at will. So that's what I thought about the Greek crisis. And then we have the other crisis that is this invasion that Europe currently sees of refugees from all over the world coming. In particular, of course, to Germany because the German Chancellor Angela Merkel has, and I think Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary is quite right in that, has said, the table is set. Please come. And if you say something like that, of course they will come. But if you look for the cause here, why did this all of a sudden happen on such a massive scale? Just one little remark. There is a book, a novel by Jean-Raspay. The English title is The Camp of the Saints. The German translation is as her Lager der Heiligen. It was written 40 years ago. He describes exactly in excruciating detail what we currently experience. In his case, it is a fleet of Indians setting out on a long tour to land in the south of France. And France is so degenerate in the meantime that they are welcomed in the same way as we welcome everyone nowadays. And of course, after that, France is no longer what France once used to be. So what is the cause of all of this? The cause, in my view, is the main cause, is indeed what Tom talked about, this American feeling of exceptionalism, thinking that they have to make the world whole. The main cause is the destruction of anything even remotely resembling internal stability in the Near East, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the boycott against Iran, the spillover of this to Syria, the destruction of Libya. And the result of this is, of course, this huge flood of immigrants. I mean, after all, you have to keep in mind, the welfare state in Western Europe existed, of course, before. But the numbers increased in such a drastic way would not have been possible if, in these regions, some sort of stability had remained. One almost wishes that Saddam Hussein would be back, that Gaddafi would be back, that Assad would regain his power in Syria, and so forth. And what is the motive behind that? I believe it's maybe not in the heads of all decision-makers, but of some, of those people who want to create some sort of world state, of course, dominated by the United States. The European project is just a sub-chapter in this chapter of trying to create a world state. But what do you need to do in order to create a world state where you can no longer vote with your feet anymore at all, because everything is regulated in text exactly the same way everywhere? What do you need to do in order to achieve this goal is, of course, to destroy the identity of all nations and countries. And how do you achieve the destruction of the identity of people is you promote a policy of multiculturalism. And this multicultural project, as you can see in front of your eyes, has already made great advances for decades. And now we see that point of culmination has been reached. And if you have multicultural societies, as Rahim has pointed out, plus you have democracy, then you get civil strife. And under some circumstances, you get even civil war. And these are, of course, great opportunities to increase state power. So with this, I'll let some other people say something. And then I open the forum up for questions. Rahim and Sean, Tom, please. I'll just put the words out of my mouth. I didn't want to do that. Yeah, please. In that case, we just have you ask questions right away. Thank you. My question is for Professor DeLorenzo. Do you know of any sociological treatise on the issue of the commonalities of exceptionalism? Because this is a very common trait for empires, the Spaniards, the British. It goes back to Rome of having this mission of civilizing other ethnicities in non-imperial territories. Americans aren't the only ones playing here. Exceptional for Roman and Bukker. Yeah, usually. Well, they may be similar claims, so there's been many other societies. I'm not a sociologist. So you asked for a sociological study. I try not to read sociology, because the American sociologists are so horrible. That you make yourself stupid by reading their books. So I'm afraid I don't have a book that I can recommend on that. But you're right. Americans are not the only ones to claim that. All empires have made similar claims. I have been a very harsh critic of the United States and of its foreign policy. However, there is no doubt that the Roman Empire carried civilization over a very large area of at least Western Europe. And I don't think I need to say anything specific about the civilizing mission and the civilizing effect of the British Empire. Now, we are living through the age of American hegemony. And of course, we can see the faults of that hegemony. And I think when a balance sheet is drawn up for American history, what has been done recently in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and in Syria will be a very heavy debit. But perhaps we are overlooking, perhaps, the credit items on that balance sheet are not entirely visible to us. Perhaps America has provided many benefits to the world, which we have tended to overlook simply because we take them for granted. I won't bother saying what those benefits might be, but I'm just questioning whether America is an entirely awful empire. Do you see how balanced we are? One must always consider the other side of an argument of an English classical liberal. And the answer is yes, it is an awful empire. But I'm thinking I distinguish between the government and the rest of the people. I'm not the government. When Sean says America has done a lot of different things, we, a lot of individuals and a lot of groups of individuals have done good things. But looking at the government that uses this ideology of American exceptionalism to justify military intervention, that's what it's all about. It's hard to think of anything on the credit side. From my perspective in the past, oh, 150 years, as far as that goes, I'm sure you could find a few things if you thought long and hard enough, but I can't. Question for Rahim. If I'm not mistaken, the author of Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, who himself is Lebanese, he has commented that Lebanese society has never quite recovered from the exodus of Christians that happened during their civil war, that somehow it never found the balance of cooperation that they had earlier in their history. Can you comment on that? Yeah, I think when I said that Lebanon is, in a way, a success story, I didn't look at only the country because, of course, if you have immigration, it's usually, if it's not immigration into a welfare state, that the best tend to leave. And most of Lebanese immigration was this way, that the real or more qualified people left the country. But on the whole, it was an amazing success story because Lebanon has given to the world a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs and thinkers. They are very overrepresented among successful entrepreneurs. And I think profound thinkers as Nassim Taleb is a recent example in the world. So somehow, this cultural affirmant that was there has not died out completely. So if you have a global perspective, me without being a globalist in a way, I think it adds something positive to the picture. But of course, for the country itself, as I said, immigration not only makes important people leave, that's why that's the other side of immigration. It's probably you are not doing good to a country by just opening the gates because it also means that a lot of energy creativity is leaving a place and will maybe be missed in the future. And then, of course, you have the problem of remittances, as I said, and I think the economic effects are really bad after that because at the home country, as in Mexico is a little bit the case, it increases consumption and just detaches people from the economic activity of saving and entrepreneurship and just makes them recipients of money that is generated elsewhere. And that, of course, will be a future negative side effect of the mass immigration that's going on. I don't think it will help the country, those remittances that might arise out of welfare money that is then somehow transferred to the families that are waiting in the home countries. The question is ready to be answered, but you welcome the multi-racial society. I think he's right that some of them do want to destroy our national identity, but I'd like to raise in particular the psychology of J.F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, between them were responsible for the 1964 Immigration Act into the United States. This was the act, of course, which introduced the admission into the United States at immigrants from all over the world replacing the previous system by which immigrants from northeast, north, west Europe were favored. The act was initiated by J.F. Kennedy's book, A Nation of Immigrants, of which the theme was, we are all immigrants, we must welcome the multi-racial society. And he was killed before it could be enacted and was enacted by his successor, Johnson. But I wonder whether Professor Hoppe would like to, or some of the members on panel would like to comment on what is the psychology of J.F. Kennedy? What motivated him to want to destroy the United States as a northeast, northwest Protestant population? Was it perhaps that he, as a Catholic, was an outsider and didn't like the United States dominated by this wasp establishment? Or what other comments might the panel have on the psychology of Kennedy? I'll give you my, I've thought about this for a long time and that doesn't mean my thoughts are very valuable. I've just been thinking about it, I've been asking the same question to myself. But it was Senator Ted Kennedy who sponsored the legislation and I believe it was 1965. And you're right, it did skew immigration away from northern Europe primarily to the third world. And I've always just assumed, more or less, that the main reason was that third world, poverty-stricken third world people were much more likely to vote Democrat. And so I think Ted Kennedy saw this as a grand scheme to solidify power of the Democratic Party forever. And so, and it certainly was. That's why even to this day, the Obama administration is not enforcing in any way immigration restrictions that still do exist. There were literally bussing people in from Mexico that providing buses and the Democratic Party has cities in America that are called sanctuary cities where the officials refuse to enforce federal immigration laws there. And I think it's all about votes. It's all about whether easily manipulable people, throw them a few crumbs in welfare payments and they'll vote for you forever or give them a government job. So I think just crude politics was primarily behind it. And I'm not sure Kennedy wrote that book himself anyway. They probably had some political insiders in the Democratic Party who had this grand scheme in mind to import millions of voters for the Democrats. And that's my two cents on the motivation behind this. If I could keep my comments within a reasonable length, I will, as, oh, do forgive me, as libertarians, we spend a lot of time trying to work out what is true. What, for example, is the true position that we should take on, I don't know, intellectual property, let's say. What I suggest we do with regard to immigration is not spending more time asking ourselves what do I believe ought to be the case. We ought to look instead to what the overwhelming majority of people in all times and places have always thought. And what most people have always thought is that they are a people. They look to an identity based, maybe, on bloodshed blood, maybe shared religion, maybe shared history. At some point of perceived unity between people, they believe that they have a right to the territory which they inhabit. And indeed, they believe that the nation exists, whether or not it does exist, whether or not we deny the legitimacy of a nation is beside the point. They believe in the legitimate existence of their nation. They even believe that the nation is a kind of head landlord and that individuals have only a leasehold interest in their properties and, indeed, in their own lives. And that these leaseholders have a duty to rise in defense of the nation if they perceive it to be attacked. Now, I'm not saying that any of this can be proved in the sense that we may try to prove the rightness or wrongness of intellectual property. I'm just saying that this is what the great majority of people have always believed and continue to believe to this day, which indicates the extreme folly of admitting very large numbers of strangers into a country, so many strangers indeed, that majorities may be at some risk in the future of becoming minorities. I have no doubt, and this is not simply American exceptionalism, I have no doubt that many people in the modern West believe that history came to an end some time ago and none of the rather grim lessons of history can possibly apply to us. History ended, or one cycle of history ended and another began with the release of Windows 95, perhaps. And ever since then, past experience does not apply to ourselves. Well, it does apply to ourselves. And you do not need to have any uncharitable belief about the moral or genetic or other fitness of the newcomers to see that if the numbers continue to increase, as seems likely to be the case, there will be a collapse into civil war of some kind, inter-communal ethnic violence. And it possibly will happen. There's no reason why it won't. It's always happened in the past. And competitive rioting, slaughter, all sorts of terrible things that have happened elsewhere in the world. Indeed, all the terrible things which happened in central Europe during the middle of the 20th century may well occur again because of the naivety and the folly of our own elites. Just to add something to the psychology of welcoming immigrants, I think Chesterton pointed out something important. It was a Catholic thinker. He said that the problem with secularized society is not so much that the vices are let loose, but it's the virtues that are let loose. They are not structured anymore. So you have remainders of the Christian universalism and so on that are not structured, but are running loose kind of virtues. And I see that in particular among the thousands of young people that now in Austria and Germany are actively welcoming and helping refugees. I don't think that there's a conscious ideological motivation. I think for them it works this way. It is something that obviously seems to be the moral thing to do. And at the same time, it is something where you can find meaning in a world that leaves very little room for young people to create something, to build something, to have meaningful interaction with someone. All the kind of charity in Europe is usually done by the state. So it's for most of those young people, it's the first time they themselves are doing something which leads to a real person being happy, being grateful, smiling to them. So it's a strong experience, which of course being linked to those virtues running loose seems like it's the moral thing to do. It seems meaningful, therefore why shouldn't you do it? You must be a really bad person not to do that. Of course, the ideological motives are usually unconscious. And I think Paul Gottfried has analyzed it frequently. I think there's a relation between JFK's Catholicism but not in a theological sense. It's just the Catholics are the minority in the US while the Catholics are majority in many European countries. So it all changes the common political affiliations that you have. And once you are in a position where you're skeptical towards the majority population, you tend to have incentives to just not or in a way follow ways that might harm this majority population, even though you don't want to consciously harm someone, but you wouldn't be that happy with the structure remaining as it is. So you tend to challenge the prevailing morals or prevailing setup of a population. And so many young people, I think, are by default leftists in Europe. And one of the reasons might also be that they don't really feel at home in the structures and the society that they see. The trust is decreasing, trust towards politicians, towards the elites that they perceive as the elites. So there are a lot of phenomena combined that instill this unconscious motive of the way it's running. Maybe it's not the best way. So one positive aspect of all the refugee welcome culture is that it tends to be anti-state in a sense that young people are saying, we're doing it privately because the state is not doing what it should. We're doing it privately with our own means. We're spending our own money. So that's a kind of positive reaction. But of course, it's turned into a leftist motive because the state as it is, it somehow assumed that it's representative for the majority population of the grown-ups. And that's partly true. I think the population is, of course, largely brainwashed. I mean, you should just watch German TV. All the journalists, all the politicians tell you, you as Germans, with your past in particular, you must do this sort of thing. Most of the help is not individual help, even though that is shown on TV. Most of the help is, of course, social workers. There is an entire industry in the meantime that lives of this phenomenon, of the refugees, as an employment program for social workers that has been created. I still, again, these sorts of things are difficult to assess. But I still think that there is probably a majority in the German public and in most other countries also who take a very sober view on the issue of immigration. And namely, that is the view, no one would be against immigration per se. But you take people that you think that will add value to your country, to your place that you like and love. And you want to exclude people who do not add value, but are parasites and looters, people who live off other people's work. You cannot express this attitude in Germany. Certainly not in Germany. If you say something like this, you are automatically, as everyone who deviates only in the slightest from the political correct way, in Germany, you are, of course, immediately called a Nazi if you say something like this. But look at everyone's personal life. Who do you employ, whether it is house personnel or who do you want to have as neighbors? You want to have neighbors that somehow increase the value of your own life, increase the value of your own property. And to do this, again, there are some states that obviously do a more reasonable policy than the European community does at the current time. I mean, to take a look at Australia, I think what Australia has done is by and large to be recommended. There is the huge number of boatloads of people from Southeast Asia who wanted to come to Australia were simply turned away. And since that, practically no boat tries to come over. Canada pursues a more reasonable immigration policy than Germany does because you have to prove that you have certain qualifications, otherwise they won't take you. You might criticize what they look at, what type of qualifications they look at. And there might be certain misjudgments there too. But the principle of all of this, that is, yes, you select people. You want to make your country better. I could very much rely to your introductory speech about this aspect of a new World War order that is being prepared in a sense that it might be on purpose. And my question, Mr. Gapp said that there are these side effects, these side effects that we don't really see. One of the side effects of all these interventions in the Middle East is ISIS. And it wasn't mentioned yet. My question is, what's your position on ISIS? How now we should deal with it or not? And it seems that ISIS somehow is not seen as a threat by the Western elites yet. Or they might even sort of support it if you see all the weapons that ISIS is operating with. Most of them come from US Army, either stolen or donated to the rebels against Assad. So that's my question. I think the only non-interventionist way to cope with a phenomenon like ISIS is containment and neutrality. It was the stance, ISIS is not a new phenomenon. The Wahhabism as a political element is behind the formation of Saudi Arabia. So in the best possible scenario, containment and policy of neutrality leads to it really establishing its in the areas that it controls according to, I think, international law. It can already be considered a state. It controls the territory. I think in running a state usually corrupts the regime in a positive way. As it has corrupted Saudi Arabia, in order to survive, they will need to become more pragmatic. And of course, all the slot that they do for media is always tuned into triggering some more interventionism. Otherwise, they wouldn't care for the media if it's just an internal policy of combating dissidents. So they have an active interest in foreign involvement. And I think there's no other way to deal with such a phenomenon if you have an anti-interventionist stance to contain it. But you might be hopeful that by running a state sooner or later the momentum it has would disappear because it needs to go on, provide services to a population. It means it needs to go on taxing the population. And without the inflow of money, of foreign powers, I don't think ISIS would have come this way. But all kinds of different powers have financed it for a while. Even Iran was affiliated, but it was a short while and the smallest amount that they invested. But usually, mostly, it's Saudi Arabia and Turkey. And interestingly, Saudi Arabia does not take any refugees. Neither does Qatar take any refugees, despite the fact that they are culturally, so to speak, closer to people from Syria than, let's say, Germans. Germans are. And amazingly, there is very little criticism of these countries by Western countries. Why don't you do this? They also, in Syria, there exists the Golan Heights, which is, I think, United Nations-controlled territory. From what I notice, a pretty nice area. There would be plenty of room to house people there. But Israel, of course, prevents that that will happen. Israel also doesn't take a single refugee, of course. So pressure should be exercised on those countries to have a responsibility in this whole thing, to do their fair share. Some people have also proposed, and I think that should be also considered, it might be much cheaper to pay some states, let's say, in Africa per head. Take these people. Here we have a million people for you. And we pay you such and such and around. Why don't you take them? And you might even find some willing takers who would accept that deal like this. But this, again, will not be acceptable to the Western elites. One other aspect I might point out is the dominant ideology in the West, in particular in the United States. But also in Europe is some form of egalitarianism. That is, all people are just the same. We just have to mold them right, send them to the right schools, and have them educated in the right way. And they will all turn out the same. You see, somehow, from the social workers themselves, that they obviously did not become Einstein's. But they believe that if people fall into the hands of enough social workers, at the end, we will be a world full of Einstein's. And if you believe in all people being the same, all cultures being the same, then, of course, you adopt an idiotic immigration policy. It is just the same as if the Germans multiply a little bit instead of having 1.5 kids. Maybe they create 3.5. And the German population internally grows. But that would have exactly the same effect as if you import 5 million people from whatever, Sudan, Nigeria, or Kenya, or whatever the country is. This is increasingly more people who believe in this type of nonsense, and the consequence will be drastic. Mr. Gaddafi from Libya is set to have tried and set up a gold currency, an Arab gold currency. Some months later, it was America who set a condition for supporting the rebels to set up a central bank in Libya. So far as money is a quite a good idea. Is there any evidence about that? I must say I don't... I have heard this, but I've never investigated it. If I could come back very briefly on American foreign policy, what may be most damaging about American imperialism is its hypocrisy. When the Romans conquered Western Europe, they were extraordinarily bloody. Caesar killed a million people in Gaul. That's by his own reckoning, in an age of much lower populations. But once the killing was over, the Romans stayed, and they stayed for hundreds of years. Indeed, perhaps they are still there. They spread their language and their culture to France and to Spain. And when the Christian faith was established in the Empire, they spread that to France and Spain. And our own conquest of India was rather less than peaceful. And when we put down the mutiny in the 1850s, we did so partly by tying people to the barrels of guns and blowing them in half. But once we had finished killing, we made it quite clear that we were staying and we stayed for 200 years. And by the time we left India, we had changed the place fundamentally and maybe permanently. The problem with American imperialism is that it is not called imperialism. The Americans do not set out to conquer Iraq and to rule it through American pro-concels. No, the Americans scatter bombs all over the place. They destroy existing state structures, which may be rather oppressive, I will confess. And then they just... They create a void and then expect it to be automatically filled with Western-style liberal Democrats. And, of course, that doesn't happen. What we get is organisations like ISIS. Now, my answer to ISIS would be that if Britain were the kind of hegemonic power today that it was 150 years ago, I would be entirely in favour of invading Iraq and Syria, hanging these people, securing the ancient monuments under attack, rebalancing those societies and ruling them as crown colonies from London and telling everybody, we have come to help you and we are not going away. Sadly, Britain is not a hegemonic power in that respect. And although the Americans are, they just don't have the staying power. And so you get the smashing up of local state structures and these lunatics fill the void. And although it would be nice to do something about them, there is nothing that we can do. It is really, as Raheem said, just a case of neutrality and containment. There is nothing that we can do and therefore there's nothing that we should do. There is one kind of more pro-libertarian policy that could potentially open the doors to productive immigrants and that's simply abolishing licensing laws and abolishing minimum wage. So we are opening the doors to people to commit and what we're essentially doing is saying, well, you can't get a license to get a decent job and you can't get a job that's below minimum wage. So isn't it perhaps more productive instead of saying keep everyone out, say, right, well, we're going to abolish minimum wage laws, we're going to enable, for instance, a doctor who's practiced in Romania can't practice as a doctor in England and they're a highly qualified person. They have to go through the testing all over again. So isn't it much more productive to say, we'll create the infrastructure to open up professions to people and let people be in below minimum wage jobs rather than saying, let's just keep everyone out? But nobody takes a position that you should take everyone out. I mean, I emphasized before that of course you want to have productive people coming to your country. And of course I agree perfectly that minimum wages, licensing laws, all of that stuff should be abolished. But we live in a world where we have all these laws, where we have welfare payments that in Germany, for instance, that are higher than middle-class incomes in most countries in the world. And if you have that, and I think in that regard, Milton Friedman, I'm not a great fan of Milton Friedman's, but his insight, you can have a welfare state and you can have free immigration, but you cannot have free immigration and a welfare state together. He is perfectly right in that regard. And I do not see any possibility of dismantling the welfare state at the current moment. And if we let people come in without screening them in some way for their qualifications, the welfare state will astronomically increase. And we do have empirical data that of course of all of these immigrants that are coming from non-Western countries, so the majority of them is on the welfare dough. They are still on the welfare dough in the second generation and on the third generation even more so. May I add something? I think it's important to say that today we don't have a policy of open borders. It might look like it, but actually it's closed borders except for those that are able to pay the 5,000 euro to transfer risk their lives and those people then get handouts as well. So it's far from an open border situation. It's already a botched situations with wrong incentives that we have. Okay, I think we have reached our time limit, right? So we will stop this discussion. What? Would you like to say something? Oh, you want to say something? I thought you were talking something afterwards. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to add something on the subject of IS. Some acquaintance of us got some threats from some terrorist group and they were talking to some insider people. And the remark was, I mean the consensus of their talk was that in the Middle East there are so many subcontractors to all the terrorist organizations that even the terrorist who blows himself up doesn't know for who he's actually blowing himself up, you know, in reality. And this, as a person living in the Middle East, of course we are living this reality and it looks different from far away. And what else? You made me forget what I else wanted to say. It will come back. For later, okay. So that was what I wanted to add. On immigration, of course also, it is easier to have an American passport or a European passport and talk about it. It is very different if you are living in the Middle East. We have, for example, an 80-year-old democracy and tried very hard. We defended ourselves against Britain, against France, and we did win all the wars. It's very famous, Gallipoli and Chinacola and so on and so forth. But right now we are very afraid that the whole thing will spill over to our country and even I think, what if I become a refugee? But on that I believe, I share your views, Anita, because I trust that the market is the best thing which will solve everything. And it is anyway, right now there is also a market because the market transfers via boardroom and cause for a certain price of around 10,000 euros, people to Europe. I mean, that's right now the market. And like whatever government does, it produces always bads. As long as government regulates immigration, it is done in a bad way. So this I want to talk. And on terrorism, to find out who is doing what, my view is we have to be Rothbardians and follow the money. Who is the one profiting from all this? Sure, it's not easy, but follow the money in my humble way. So thank you. Okay, I thank you.