 Well, it's an honor tonight to get to introduce Dr. Tom Woods. Thomas Vrandover, Massachusetts. He went to Harvard University. And while he was at Harvard, after just finishing his junior year in 1993, he came to his first Mises University. It was a Claremont. And I can remember so clearly walking past the barbecue area on the night the final night of the conference. And he'd gone up to Murray Rothbard and started talking to him. And a couple hours later, I came back by that same area. And they're like this, they're like this, still going. And I thought, well, Murray sees as we all did. When we first encountered Tom, this was going to be, was already a significant young man who was going to do significant things. And of course, he didn't disappoint us. He went on to Columbia, got his M. Phil and his PhD and be taught for a while formally. But as I guess Gary North wouldn't be surprised to know as an historian himself, history is an even tougher profession for somebody with our sorts of views than economics, if you can believe it. So what Tom ended up doing quite extraordinarily is creating his own career as a teacher and as a scholar independently. Author, of course, of 11 books, many of them New York Times bestsellers. Famous speaker all over the United States. And Europe and Latin America's books translated into many foreign languages. TV star, he's had TV series on EWTN. And they're after him right now to do another one as, of course, a famous YouTube network. Speaks all over the place, debates all over the place. His most recent achievement is starting this new Ron Paul Super PAC, the Revolution PAC that enables people who have more money than the $2,500 limit to give unlimited funds to the Paul campaign. So something else exciting. Tom used to be here at the Mises Institute. He defected to Kansas. But we're very glad that he came back this summer to be with us. I'll just end by saying that there are a lot of speakers. If you saw the title, An Evening with X, that you might have some trepidation. You might even have outright panic. But if you see an evening with Tom Woods, you can only have happy anticipation, Dr. Woods. Thank you, guys. Ladies and gentlemen, let me prepare myself up here. OK, so indeed it is an evening with Tom Woods. And it does sound like a variety hour. But now I'm sorry to say, now that you're stuck here, it's just me yapping. However, I have some interesting things to yap to you about, I hope, beginning with the fact that we should all cheer Professor Walter Block, who defeated me and is now the Mises Institute chess champion. Let's hear it for Walter. Now, let me say this. I was ahead for a good portion of this game. And I thought to myself, slow and steady wins the race. I got this thing wrapped up. I was two ponds ahead. And the ponds in front of his king were all smashed up. It was a very difficult position for him to hold. And yet he managed to hang on. He had this really just an extraordinary defense. And I thought to myself, why should I be surprised at this? After all, it's just Walter defending the undefendable. Now, that's my wife's joke, she thought of that last night. And I just sat there in stunned silence and said, oh my gosh. I think that's the best thing you've ever said, which yeah, I know. She's got a whole bunch of these. She's just fantastic. Now, the other thing, this is also true. As Lou said, we've spent a couple of months down here this summer. I mean, we love coming to Auburn during the very months that anybody in his right mind is getting out of Auburn when it turns 115 degrees. But we got down here, they were kind enough to help arrange for us to find housing. It's hard to find a house where you can have four children in it. And you're near the Institute. And it's just the two months that you need. And we are very lucky, although it's not just luck. It's the great skill of my wife that we have extremely non-Brady children. However, one of them, by accident, felt terrible about it, accidentally she cracked one of the window panes. Now, at first, my wife was tempted to get upset at this. I said, no, wait a minute. This is going to boost the economy. Don't you know anything? That's not just a joke, by the way. The glass company is coming, and we're going to have it all prepared. I didn't just make that up. That actually happened. Now, the first night that you guys were here, Mark Thornton got up here and told you to pace yourselves. And you might not have known exactly what he was driving at by then. Well, have any of you, I don't know if I really want to make you answer this question, but have any of you gone out after the Institute has closed any night this week? Maybe I think I saw a few of you at the Sky Bar. I didn't take any embarrassing photos of any of you, although some got some video of Bob Murphy, but you can watch that at the evening with Bob Murphy. But you know how you feel the next morning after you've done that? You're here at 9 AM, because I said I would be at all the sessions, and it's really painful. That's what Mark meant by pace yourselves. He didn't mean don't learn too much Austrian economics all at once. It wasn't that. But now here we are at the end. So now I think you can just go all out, although those of you who want to take the oral exam tomorrow, I would recommend waiting till tomorrow night to have a big blow out at the very end. All right, so when I spoke yesterday morning about economic cycles before the Fed, I mentioned that I was at a bit of a loss as to what to discuss during this evening. And I think the reason they hitched it this way was that I just simply hadn't given them a topic, and they just felt like, well, we're not going to leave this slot open forever for this jerk, so we're just going to name it this name and force him to come up with something, which is exactly what I deserve. I think I just forgot about it, or I think I thought I would just talk about a book of mine or something like that. But I'm glad. I'm glad it worked out this way. So I solicited some suggestions, and I got some, and I think we're pretty good. And so I've kind of patched something together that starts off and persists a little bit throughout something a little bit autobiographical. And I realize I go into this with some trepidation because it is a bit, I don't want to come off as some ego case. Like, oh, gee, I mean, you all must be dying to know all about me. I mean, I know that comes off kind of badly. But I'm telling this not because my story is interesting in and of itself, but because it, I think it says something about the movement. The experiences that I had, I think, can be useful for us. I have had some very oddball sorts of experiences. And I hope it will also help you to appreciate the significance, not only of this event, but of this Institute. And I will tell you right now in all honesty that my highest secular goal is to be in a position someday to be a substantial benefactor of the Mises Institute. And this is one of these cases. You know how you always hear the government with a propaganda about, you know what, you kids, you've got to give something back to society. When you grow up, you've got to give something back. I always hate that expression because I didn't take anything. Why should I have to give anything back? So it's just propaganda. But in this case, the Mises Institute is giving you a free week of fun and funny jokes and so on and on and learning all these great resources at Mises.org. 24 hours a day, you could spend the rest of your life as a hermit studying on Mises.org. It's unbelievable. So in this case, you have been given something. And of course, neither the chairman nor the president of the Institute would make nearly so crude an appeal to you as I'm about to make. But someday, think of how you can give something back. Because this Institute has done so much. Just in its, and it's not to say other institutions haven't done wonderful things, too. But when you consider how few people actually work at the Mises Institute, then you look at the output. How can this be, what is like, is Jeff Tucker like seven people? How is this, how is this even happening? They work very hard. They don't waste donors' money. And they have, I think they're among the greatest benefactors of mankind in the world today. And I don't say that lightly. So give something back. All right, so some people have sort of asked me, how is it possible that you go through Harvard and you're living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it's obviously a loony bin? And how do you come out of that more or less sane? So I'm going to sort of start a little bit there because it indicates how I got on this path and how the Mises Institute rescued me from what would otherwise have been quite a terrible fate. And I'll tell you in a moment what that fate was. By the way, when did it go from being frigid to sweltering in this room? Did anybody notice, is there like a frigid and sweltering switch that somebody's accidentally flipped on the way out or something? Because I may actually do what I never do. Jeff were in the room. He would be appalled if I took my jacket off. The jacket is part of what the man is wearing. It's not a coat. All right, so you know what, I'm going to keep it on and just suffer through it. But I want to start off just by saying that I owe an enormous amount, I know this is going to sound incredibly sappy, but an enormous amount to my parents. And with regard to my thinking, the trajectory of thought that I eventually wound up on, I owe it to my father. Now my father did not finish high school. And then in his 40s, he got his GED. And then he died in 1996 very suddenly. And I dedicated one of my books to him. And of course, it made my mother cry. But he was an unbelievable guy, because he was just a blue collar worker who was just consumed with a desire to know things. And he was very self-conscious about the fact that he hadn't finished high school, even though he knew more than 99% of the people who finished high school. He was always reading. And he was always reading something substantial. You would never see him reading a novel. It's not to say that you can't ever enjoy yourself by reading a novel, but I don't know. I have too much I need to know, too much I want to learn. One day I actually caught him reading Voltaire's Candide. I said to him, Dad, come on now. I mean, really, I don't want to read Voltaire's Candide. I mean, at some point, you can cut this off here. But he was just obsessed. He wanted to know something about everything. And it was he who sort of got me on the right track. For example, it was from him that I learned about communism and how rotten and horrible it was. I couldn't believe in a system like this existed. And so then from there on, I learned more or less the rudiments of the free market from him. So that when I went off to college, I had some kind of defense mechanism built in to use against the commies. And when I say against the commies, I don't mean the people on the faculty, because although I think we often have this image of the Ivy League institutions as just being nothing but rampant leftism. That's really not the case. Some universities, that is the case. But by and large, I don't know, Columbia might be an exception. But by and large, what really is it's a bastion of the establishment really more than anything else. And I basically got, I mean, I learned history of US foreign policy from Ernest May, who had been a minor US official in numerous administrations. And so he gave, he didn't give a left wing line. He didn't give a right wing line. He gave a fairly predictable standard establishment line. And so if you figured out which professors were the propagandists, you simply avoided them. And you could, in fact, get a fairly decent education, but there'd be a lot of gaps. There'd be a lot of learning you had to do on your own. You really had to be an autodidact. And the best place in the world, before the advent of the internet, to be an autodidact, in terms of a private institution, was Harvard, because its library system was just second to none. And because the things I was interested in, nobody else on campus was interested in, I never had the problem, oh, that book has been checked out. No, they were all conveniently there waiting for me on the shelf. No, the commies I have in mind are the ones I encountered on the way to the dining hall for dinner, my freshman year, when they used to have the meals in what was called the freshman union. You know what, I am going to do this. Sorry about this, but I'm just afraid I'm going to collapse in front of you. And then all these jokes will have gone to waste. This will turn from a sort of pleasant evening into an extremely disturbing one that no one will ever mention again. By the way, in case you all were thinking to yourselves today, at Bob Murphy, what a smart tie he's wearing today. He borrowed that from me. I just want you to know. So on the way to the dining hall, we got these people selling copies of the Workers Vanguard newspaper. Now, this was a newspaper that was put out by an organization called the Friends of the Spartacus Youth Club. And they were commies. They were outright commies. And as I would go to the dining hall, this was, now remember, I got to Harvard 1990, end of 1990, going into 1991. That was my freshman year. So that's the year, 1989, all the exciting events of that year had just occurred. The Soviet Union is beginning to fall apart 1990, falls apart 1991. So this is a very critical moment in history. And these people are holding up newspapers saying we've got to rescue the great fruits of the Bolshevik Revolution for being stamped down by the forces of reaction. We've got to vindicate these principles. We've got to stand up for them in their time of need. So notice they didn't say the Soviet Union is a terrible perversion of wonderful socialism. And we all know it. And if only we could try it again, we'd do it right the next time. They weren't saying that. They were saying the Soviet Union is a progressive force. And we've got to save them. Now, any normal person going to dinner, passing this, immediately thinks, all right, well, the world is full of crazy people, nothing you can do about it. Obviously, there is nothing you can do to persuade someone rationally that maybe there might be something a teensy-weensy bit wrong with one of the great totalitarian nightmares in all of history. They don't already see this. What argument are you going to pull out of your pocket that's going to win them over? But I'm the sort of person, though, and I've sort of gotten over this. But you notice that some of my articles or like a weird proportion of my articles are actually attempts to refute other people? It's just part of my personality. Like, I can't let an error go unreplied to. It just eats away at me. Which is why sometimes people will send me an article and say, oh, so-and-so is arguing this. I mean, you've got to click this and see it. And I can't do it. Because I seriously, I'll be up all night. I won't be thinking, oh, jeez, I can say this. I can say that. And then I've got seven other things to do. I don't have time to write that article. So I can't even look at it in the first place. So I would get into the freshman union. I'd sit down at my meal. And whatever blockheaded thing these people were saying is still spinning around in my brain. So I mean, they're wolfing my food down so I can get out there and talk to them. Or in the middle of the meal, I would just say, I need to get another napkin. And I'd just go out and I'd be talking to them. All right, now look, I would say, how can you argue this? I would say, how can you argue that Lenin was somebody to admire? And they bought into what my 20th century Russia professor called the good Lenin bad Stalin myth, that everything was going great up to the early 1920s. And then maybe through the 20s, and then Stalin came in and things got bad. But if you look at Lenin's record, it means pretty rotten. And his prose is just full of hate, blood thirsty. And there are already tens of thousands of people being confined in concentration camps by the time of his death. We've got the crazy new economic policy. We've got arbitrary killings of one type or another. There's already terror campaigns going on. The guy was not, we wouldn't want to invite this guy for dinner, let's put it that way. So I said, how can you overlook this? And so they would come back at me with other arguments. And I just, my gosh, what in the world? Why am I not winning this argument? So this is actually what got me interested in history because I thought, well, look, the more I know about this stuff, the more likely I am to persuade these people. Now, obviously you're never gonna persuade somebody who thinks Lenin is a good guy, right? I mean, it's possible, I suppose, one in a million. So the more I started reading, the less I wanted to be a math major. I was originally gonna be in applied math and I decided to switch into history because I decided I wanted to be somehow involved in the world of ideas. And it was at this moment that history sort of presented itself to me as not only something that I could do as a profession and I have written some scholarly work that's not obviously taking one side or the other, but it appeared to me that it was also possible that in my spare time as a historian, I could also use history to refute lives and to go after people who are distorting the record or glorifying mass murderers or whatever. In fact, while I was an undergraduate, one of my professors required us to buy our required books at a store called Revolution Books and that's not the same thing as the Ron Paul Revolution because they had Mao and all this horrible mass murderers, they're portraits up on the wall. You know, like some people would think that's, you know, kind of in bad taste, even hateful. But no, these are progressive people, you know, the more, if it's in the tens of millions, then it somehow becomes progressive. And I just said, I am not doing this. This is one of my first acts of protest ever. I am not buying my books from this crummy store. Even if I have to go all around this crazy city to get them, I'll get them some other way. So one day, I actually decided I wanted to start writing. And so what am I gonna write about? What do I know a lot about at this point on the Harvard campus, the commies? So I went to one of the meetings of the friends of the Spartacus youth corps. And this was a meeting about what we can do to put the Soviet Union back together. It's fallen apart. I'm not making this up. The guy stood up there and said to us that the Bolshevik Revolution ushered in, these are his exact words. I included them in my article. The freest society on the face of the earth. Freest society. Now, of course, he's contrasting it with what occurred under the czars. And well, it turns out that under the Bolsheviks, you also had a secret police, but it was 16 times larger than the secret police under the czars. So I mean, yeah, right, okay, the czars, no one's giving them any awards for good citizenship or anything, but it's one of these things. It's like animal farm. The substitute is as bad or worse. At one point, they actually handed around a collection plate asking us to donate to help keep the Soviet Union together. Now, I have no idea what that $21.43 did. It was apparently not sufficient. But you got to give them an E for effort. You know what I mean? They did their best in trying times. But as I began to read and think and I got interested in history, but just I still think about them glorifying Lenin. I mean, here's a guy who there's a famine going on in 1890 and 91 on the Volga River, and he's discouraging people from helping the starving. He's telling them, no, no, no, no, no, this famine will be a useful pedagogical device for these people. It'll teach them the evils of capitalism. Let them starve. They want to put this guy up on the wall. And then they look at us and call us names. Yeah, you know, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, I would starve with yourself, position and heal thyself. So what I decided after I kept encountering people like this was, look, whatever these crazy, loony people in Cambridge are, I think I want to be the exact opposite. So I thought, whatever principles I hold, I either want to hold them the whole way or not at all. Either the free market is the ideal form of social organization or it's not. But I'm going to either believe it or I'm not going to believe it. So I became interested in learning about this. And I went to, in 1992, I went to a libertarian seminar and that got me interested in some things. But in 1993, the seminal event in my own intellectual development took place. That was Mises University, 1993, which I attended out on the West Coast. And what a time I had. I mean, first of all, just the students. I'm sure you've gotten to realize that the students are half the fun here, right? I mean, three quarters of the fun. I would say of the faculty, Bob Murphy is a good 83% of the fun. I will grant you that. But I remember, since we were on the West Coast, we were near Hollywood. And one of the days of the week, we got a half day off. So a bunch of us, we'd gotten to know each other, became friends, decided we're going to rent a car, we're going to drive to Hollywood. And we got there, and we're walking along the streets, and somebody is handing out flyers about a new television pilot you could sit in the audience for. We thought, all right, that might be fun to do. And it starred Star Jones, you know her? That's good. A couple of people, that's good. The fewer of you do, the better. So it's all just fluff. So the name of the show, which was very short lived, was called Jones and Jury. And the idea was it was a courtroom show, but this time, instead of there being some loudmouth judge who makes the decisions, the audience makes the decision. So we thought, this'll be great. We got like eight of us here. We're going to have a blast doing this. Now, I don't remember the nature of the case, but it was a case where, to us at least, and I say this, I realize that being an Austrian economist and being a libertarian are indeed two separate things. But remember, this is an informal evening with Tom Woods, so anything goes. So to us, it was clear what the answer to the case, clearly the guy was not guilty. There's just no two ways about it. So we thought, this is great. This guy's going to get off, and he deserves it, right? I mean, he didn't do anything. And then we see the numbers up on the screen, like everybody else voted him guilty. It was just us who tried to vindicate the guy. We thought, oh man, it's a good thing we were here at all. At least the guy knows somebody was pulling form out here. But what a time we had. And of course, I'm not trying to make the faculty out to seem old, but I will say that Mark Thornton was there, and Jeff Herbner was there, and Tom Di Lorenzo was there. I mean, a lot of the same people who've been fighting this fight for years were there, and I got to meet them. And of course, I got to meet Murray Rothbard, which I got to meet four or five times, since between then and late 94. And what wonderful times these were, and Lou has mentioned that already. I never forgot this. Once I started reading the Austrian stuff, it just clicked. I just said, this is correct. This is the correct way to understand the world, and I was just a goner after that. But the next sort of thing, though, that kind of completed the circle, and now I want to get into some broader sorts of themes other than just me, was the issue of war. Because remember, I was a middle-of-the-road GOP guy going into the early 90s, so high school into college, graduated high school in 1990, going into college. That's what I was. I was the very thing I most despise today. That was me, okay? I'm gonna confess this to you, right? Nobody's perfect. We all have things we're not proud of, but I'm gonna tell it to you. So when that, you guys are, a lot of you guys are too young to remember this, but there was a war in early 1991, the Persian Gulf War. And it involved a George Bush and it involved Iraq. And this one, supposedly the other argument was that Iraq has invaded Kuwait, and this has to be reversed because we have to stand up for democracy and Kuwait, after all, is run by a royal family and we can't have them be deposed. And then Saddam, he's massing his troops on the border with Saudi Arabia and he's gonna take over Saudi Arabia and then he'll have all the oil, which presumably he'll just drink it all or something. And never occur to them, he's gonna have to sell it, right? I mean, he's not like he's just gonna pour it down the drain or something, like do something with it. But anyway, all right, so we got all the propaganda about, you know, there's a bad guy. And of course we all know Saddam's a bad guy. You know, duh, everybody, we all see that. But we got these stories about how the Iraqi troops, when they went into Kuwait, were just so arbitrarily wicked that they would go into hospitals and open up incubators where babies were in, like, you know, the intensive care units. I mean, just throw the babies onto the hospital floor. Like, it seems like that would just be, in addition to cruel, that's just like a waste of time. You have to invade the country, right? What do you have time to stop at the hospital to commit atrocities? But people believe this because we got this testimony on TV about, oh, in my country, you can't believe what's going on. The babies are on the floor or whatever. Turns out, this woman who made this testimony was the daughter of the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. Hello, you know, he thinks it's a teensy, weensy chance the story's being made up. And it turns out that the Kuwaiti government had hired a PR firm to pull the wool over American's eye. And everybody's like, oh my goodness, you know, it's just like every single time in history we have to demonize these people. They're your enemies. And immediately people thought, my gosh, I'm just terrified of the Saddam Hussein. Here's a guy, like the military budget of Iraq is like one billionth of a percent of the U.S. government's budget, but oh my gosh, we better get him before the world comes to an end. So I was all for that. I was all for that. When I was, I remember one of the earliest conversations I had with the guy who became my first roommate was in the months building up for the war. I was telling him how much I was in favor of military intervention. We've got to get in there. We've got to get Saddam, a guy I had never even heard of. But as soon as the opinion molders told me that I was supposed to dislike him, I disliked him. I was right on the team. All right, but then after that war was over, I actually did a little bit of soul searching because I remember thinking about what had actually transpired. Because the version of events we got was that this was a very clean war with few casualties. And it's true, there were relatively few American casualties. But it turns out that like 100,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers are being burned alive with a chemical agent from the sky. I mean, OK, I understand they're soldiers, so I'm supposed to hate them according to the rules of how this all works. But I didn't. Why should I hate? I mean, these people are all terrified. They're all in an impossible situation. None of them know what to do. And now they're all being slaughtered. And then I'm supposed to celebrate this by tying yellow ribbons on a tree and having a Bob Hope special. I thought, this is something not right about this. I mean, this institution, this US federal government, has made me so callous to the welfare of my fellow human beings that I could sit here and all this time have been treating this as some kind of glorified video game that's really super cool to watch on TV. How have I let this happen to me? And these are the same people. I don't trust a word out of their mouths when they talk about the economy or taxes or the budget or whatever it is, drugs, whatever. I don't believe a word they say. But when it comes to foreign policy, yes, sir, yes, whatever you want, I'll go along with it. And I began to wonder about that. And I tried to find out. I asked my European history professor. I won't mention his name. I think he's still teaching. I don't want to. Well, Charles Mayer, he was a European history historian. Now, he was a left liberal in the New Republic mold. So he wasn't a, again, he was not a Marxist. Very rare to find them at Harvard. He could find a couple. But he was a left liberal. And I went in and I said, I'm having real moral qualms about this Iraq war after the slaughter. And I said, even though I know these aren't even civilians, I still feel like it's a slaughter. And I still feel like I can't celebrate it. What's wrong with me? And he told me to go read the article in favor of the war that was in the New Republic magazine, that that was the left liberal position that we had to do this. It was the greatest thing ever. So I more or less contented myself with that for a while and it went on. But as time went on, I began rethinking, rethinking, because it just occurred. I read Rothbard's essay, War, Peace, and the State. And I can't urge you enough to read that, especially if you are now where I was then. You owe it to yourself at least to read this essay. It'll change the way you think. Like so much of what Rothbard did, this essay will change the way you think. Because it suddenly occurred to me, how is it possible that a mere politician just utters a word, just utters the word war? I declare war. He utters the word war. And suddenly, the rights of a whole group of people, just an arbitrary group of people who just happened to live within some arbitrary boundary line, their rights are just canceled. And so you can torture them, you can kill them. And maybe it's regrettable, but hey, it's war. There's that word again. So this word, it's like some magical word that provides moral cover for what in any other circumstance would be an atrocity. And we're all taught to parrot this. Well, it's war, war is hell, war, terrible things happen in war. And it's like you can't even have a rational argument. You say, now look, objectively speaking, it's wrong to kill this many people. I don't care what your grievance is with the leader of that country. I don't care what your grievance is with him. You have no grievance with these people. So how could it possibly be right to do this? And you can't even get an answer. It's always you're a stupid commie, leave me alone, you left this, or hey, it's war. No, that just can't be. And that was confirmed for me later when we saw what Bill Clinton did. So Bill Clinton's the liberal supposedly, right? I mean, I don't know how to describe him. I think he's just an opportunist really. But Clinton helped to carry out and Bush had a part in this too, but it was really under Clinton that we saw the enforcement teeth carried out the sanctions policy against Iraq. So now we hear as the 1990s go on that half a million children died from causes related to the sanctions and they're malnutrition or they didn't get proper medicine or whatever it was or the water cleaning facilities, the water purification facilities were not allowed to be repaired. So also there's disease everywhere. So these kids, like we never even met these people. And the policy was that, well, we don't like that one guy. So it becomes okay to do this. And when the Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, was asked about this on 60 Minutes, you know, gee, my goodness, half a million kids and the guy's still in power anyway. Like how can you defend that? And she said, well, we believe the price has been worth it. Now that's on YouTube. We believe the price has been worth it. Bill Richardson was the US ambassador to the UN and I think he might've been the energy secretary at one point. But he was asked the same thing. He was on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. And she asked him, you know, well, this is what Madeline Albright said. Do you think it was worth it to have half a million kids die? And he answered that it was. Now, so here's how I want to tie this in here. And again, I'm sorry this is still about me and I don't mean to be, again, I'm sorry I don't mean to come across as an ego case. But as I relate these stories, they're so, it's also vivid in my mind. It's like I'm reliving some of this. I remember earlier this year, I was about to give a speech in a room full of people of all different philosophical persuasions. It was an event in Los Angeles, one of these Nullify Now events, a little tour that the 10th Amendment Center has been putting on. And I was the last speaker of the night. And I intended to go out there with a pretty rip-roaring speech and it would have a lot of red meat in it. The only thing that really held everybody in that room together was they didn't like Obama and they didn't like Obama's healthcare. But there were people, there were everything from pot smokers to businessmen, by the way, those are not mutually exclusive categories. All kinds of different people in that room, but also a lot of military veterans. And I saw a guy, we even had a hat that said Desert Storm Veteran, which was the code name for the Persian Gulf War. Because I was also gonna talk about foreign policy. And I remember thinking to myself for that split second, do I have the guts to stand up in front of these people and tell them that the policy they're supporting is just evil and immoral and they just can't keep doing it. And then I thought to myself, what would any of the people I admired do? Would they even have hesitated the way I did? They would have just come out and given the speech. So I said, all right, well then that's what I'm gonna do. So you get to the last section of it and that's where I say, look, I'm gonna be saying some things that not everybody here is gonna like. And at that point, I kinda won them over. I told jokes and I didn't like Obama and I thought, yeah, boy, this is my kinda guy. So I thought, all right, now I can drop the, of course, metaphorical bomb, that's the whole point. And so I said to them, I don't trust the government on the foreign policy either. And then I just went through it. And then by the time I got to the sanctions and the 500,000 children and I just looked at them and I said, you people are better than this. I mean, how have we allowed ourselves to become so dehumanized that we can treat the death of half a million children as just a public policy option? What's wrong with us? And it worked. I didn't persuade everybody in the room, but I know because I've got testimony from people that a lot of them walked away saying, I'm gonna have to think about this. Well, okay, so I thought, I guess I did do the right thing. That was the right thing to do. And I'm gonna point out to you, not because I make any money from this, because believe me, you write an anthology. This is how much you make, okay? If you ever wanna write an anthology, just know you're doing it because you love writing anthologies, okay? I did this book called We Who Dared to Say No to War that came out in 2008 that's down in the bookstore. Oh, thank you. And this was, I did this, because I have a literary agent and he told me, anthologies don't sell, you're on your own with this one, I'm not pitching this one around. We did get it published by Basic Books, which is a big house, so that was very nice. But I thought, this is my way of, I'm not gonna make money off this, but it's my way of doing penance for being such a stupid shill of the military industrial complex earlier in my life. I produced this thing. And my friend Angela Keaton from antiwar.com says that it brought tears to her eyes, and I asked if I could put that on my website next to the book, because that's what we wanted to do. What we did with this book was we just took some of the best and most compelling writing, articles, book excerpts, poetry, whatever, about all the major American wars and collected them. And the only requirement was, you couldn't be a commie or a fascist, otherwise you're welcome in this volume. So we've got people from all over the spectrum, left, right, middle, non-descript, you know, green, libertarian. We've got Lou Rockwell in there. We've got Murray Rothbard in there. These are people who wouldn't normally, people who'd be ignored in an antiwar anthology. So I got them in there because the guy I did it with, Murray Polner is a guy on the left. And we didn't agree on very much. We certainly didn't agree on the economy. But we got to meet each other on Long Island and we liked each other's antiwar writing and we decided, well, both of us are against mass murder. So this can be the start of a good friendship together. So we did that. But now having said that, you know, I began to rethink war and the logic of it and all that, that's just a piece of a much larger picture. And that picture is what the classical liberal, libertarian tradition has to teach us, which is a beautiful lesson, which is that society is not fundamentally characterized by conflict ultimately. That we are not naturally each other's enemies. That in fact, human society is the most cooperative enterprise you can imagine. We all need each other. We gain from each other's existence. And this runs counter to what people had thought for a good long time. I mean, if you see, if you listen to Karl Marx, he's arguing that there is a condition of inherent class conflict on the free market. Or David Ricardo is arguing that wages and profits necessarily have to run in opposite directions. Or even earlier, Montaigne said that one man's gain is another man's loss. So if you gain something, it means somebody else must have lost. Lubig von Mies is named a fallacy after him. Because of course, it is the Misesian and Austrian and libertarian insight that to the contrary, when we exchange with each other, both of us gain. Or otherwise we wouldn't have exchanged in the first place. What you have, I want more than what I have and you have the reverse valuation and the exchange takes place. Well, this is fundamentally what characterizes human society and the division of labor. That's why Friedrich Bastiat could write a wonderful book called Economic Harmonies. Harmonies. Now there is a T-shirt of Bastiat down there and it says Economic Harmonies on it. And I know that, well, I don't know, but I think maybe there's a chance that at least somebody I know thinks I'm kind of a sap for going around with a shirt that says Economic Harmonies on it. But to me, this is the most beautiful thing. It's not enough to just talk about the law of comparative advantage. I mean, I like the Misesian formulation of the law of association. That even if, I mean, we can all see that we benefit if I'm a better truck driver than you are and you're a better brain surgeon than I am, then you be a brain surgeon, I be a truck driver. But what if the brain surgeon is also a better truck driver than the truck driver? The beauty of the law of association is that it shows that the brain surgeon is still benefited by the truck driver. It's still beneficial for us to interact and cooperate with each other. And of course we've discussed this week why that is, the beautiful mechanisms by which we learn, we appreciate, we rationally apprehend the benefits that accrue to us from the extension of the division of labor. Ultimately it means that society can function without central direction. It can function without, now it's not to say that we don't have to defend ourselves, but do we need this done by a coercive monopolistic institution as a separate matter. But we can resolve all the difficulties that arise in society. How are people gonna get fed? How are they going to be clothed? All these sorts of questions without a central planning board directing everybody's activities. I mean, we've rarely stopped to appreciate how astonishing this is. And I just the other day posted on the lurockwell.com blog a fantastic video that somebody right here at Mises University was telling me about the very first night. It was about a guy just last year who decided he wanted to make a toaster from scratch. He was gonna make his own toaster. He's gonna get all the things that he needs for the toaster on his own and he's gonna make his own toaster. Now you know, you can go to the store and get a toaster for, I don't know, seven bucks or something. But he thought, let's just see what it would take for me acting in isolation without the benefit of the division of labor. I'm gonna just do it all myself. All right, so it shows how he goes through this. First he gets a toaster, he opens it up and he says, oh my gosh, I had no idea how many parts there were in a toaster. Well then it turns out he has to go to several countries. It takes him nine months to produce this toaster. And the toaster wound up costing him 300 times as much as a toaster in the store. And to add insult to injury, he plugs a thing in and it toasts for five seconds. So we don't even realize what an amazing thing it is that everything you need to know about making a toaster, that knowledge is not, now again, this is not the Hayekian knowledge problem. Just think in terms of, when you think of steel production, well, some people know about steel production but they're not gonna know about all the other things that go into the toaster. Or you could think of Leonard Reed's example of the pencil. All that, we all benefit from the knowledge that other people have, the skills that other people have, and all the necessary parts, the component parts of the toaster, all come together. They all come together at the right moment in the right quantities without any surpluses or shortages, without anybody directing the whole process. There's no central planter, toaster, central planning board, global toaster planning board for the whole world that says, okay, now you have to go over and make the steel and you better go over and start getting the wiring and you, it just happens. It happens through the price system which emerges voluntarily. Now Rothbard himself used to talk about this because he taught economics for part of his career anyway primarily to engineering students. So right away, the first class session, he's gotta get their attention. He's gotta explain to them that they're stuck in there learning economics and they don't wanna be, he's gotta tell them why you do wanna be in here. Why does this matter? And you can listen, thanks to Hans Hoppe who recorded these lectures in Brooklyn in 1986, I think, you can listen to Rothbard's microeconomics course on Mises.org for free as usual. And it's wonderful what he says to them on that first night. And some of you have heard me explain this, I'm not gonna spend much time on it, but he just says, just think of a simple ham sandwich. And we won't even go that deep into it. We'll just look at the basic ingredients of the ham sandwich. So the ham, the bread, the cheese, whatever else you might imagine. And then, and forget about all the things that might go into the mustard. Just, we're gonna keep it simple. So think of what it would take to make a ham sandwich. Well, first of all, you're gonna need refrigeration units, so you need steel, you need rubber. Those have lengthy, complex production processes attached to them. You need chairs and counter space. You need aprons. And those, to produce those things, requires, again, a lengthy production process with various stages. And then, okay, just for the ham. Forget anything else. For the ham, you know, how are you gonna get the ham? There are all different stages involved, the ham. I mean, you gotta get it from a, it's gotta be transported to you. It's gonna come from a meat packer. It's gonna go to a slaughterhouse. It's gonna get it from a farmer, who then in turn has to raise, has to produce corn to feed the pigs and whatever. And this is all just to produce one lousy ham sandwich. And yet, that occurs, again, this occurs every day, all day, with all different people involved in all different aspects of this. And nobody overseeing the whole thing saying, okay, now you better, you know, Rothbard's gonna want a ham sandwich in 20 years, so you better get going with your steel production. And you bet, and it just happens. And so, in effect, what Rothbard is saying is, if it doesn't intrigue you, how it's possible for that to happen, for all of us, even, we could hate each other. We don't even have to be friends. For us all to come together in this cooperative venture, and make this possible, if that doesn't interest you, then yeah, I guess economics is gonna bore you. That's true. But if you have, if your heart isn't made of stone, and there is something that wells up in there about this, well, then this is the course for you. I mean, good for him, standing up for his discipline. Good for him. But there is a contrary view that we get constantly from the state, which is not that we have this naturally harmonious relationship as human beings with differing talents who can come together in mutually beneficial exchange. No. What we're told instead is that, oh, left to our own devices, it would be nothing but chaos. It would be misery. And this is the sort of shtick that I've adopted in recent months, because I've had the second other title I'll just mention, the incorrectly packaged book, Rollback, which is my book, basically just, I knew that I wasn't gonna write another book for a while, so I just thought, okay, everything in the world that frustrates me, that I feel like it's just propaganda for the government, I'm gonna put as much of that in here as I can and refute it. So in particular, what I'm going after is this version of things in which, if it weren't for our wise political leaders, well, where would we be? Well, kids would all be working in mines for 10 cents a day and they'd be getting their limbs blown off and we would have no art in our society. There'd be no science because without government funding, where would there be any science coming from? We'd all be stupid ignoramuses. We would probably be running around doing rain dances to appease the rain god to make it rain and so on. So we can't have that. Instead, we need all these of the regulatory agencies and what kind of a neanderthal would you have to be to think that society could be arranged differently from this. And that's what I've enjoyed going after. I've enjoyed sort of completing the circle and showing that all these supposed problems are problems that can be solved precisely by us. One of my favorite parts of the second part of the Keynes Hayek rap, the second episode as it were, is when Hayek says that the market is us. Like we are the market. It's not like the market is something out there. We cooperating solve these problems. So poverty, I mean, we have this view that, well, gee, everybody would be poor if it weren't for these government poverty programs, right? I mean, trying to alleviate poverty, we'd have all this poverty, wouldn't it be terrible? The market has done more to alleviate poverty than all the government programs and blow hard celebrities put together. I mean, the statistics speak to themselves. You don't have to look at them. Or I talked about this a little bit in other contexts, but the child labor issue, I mean, I'm trying to take on the hardest, most difficult objections. Nobody wants to see some little kid working in a factory. Of course, nobody wants that. But the question is, what can you realistically do about that? Is it the case that up until factories came along, children just skipped through meadows all day? And then the factories came along and then suddenly they were whisked into the factories? Like, could reality really be that cartoonish? What was really happening? Well, what was really happening is that children have pretty much worked through all of recorded history. And you notice that nobody protested child labor in the 13th century? There wasn't one protest. Why? Because they like seeing kids engage in backbreaking labor, which, by the way, is what pre-industrial agricultural work was like. If you think the factories were bad, you don't know anything that they were doing before that. Well, it's because, of course, it never occurred to them that you could get rid of it. Never occurred to them that the society could be wealthy enough that the family could afford to dispense with the income that the children's contribution yields. That's why the kids are working in these poor societies. It's not like a place like Bangladesh is just like all the bad parents in the world move to Bangladesh. And that's why all their kids work. I mean, there must be some other explanation. So as the society grows wealthier, as it grows more capital intensive, as the private sector invests, as there is saving and investment going on and they invest in equipment that allows us to produce in greater abundance and therefore to enjoy a higher standard of living than people's individual productivity as laborers increases. And so the parents can therefore produce enough so that the purchasing power of their wages per capita yields them enough sustenance to feed the whole family without the children having to work. So it's true, the state does come along at the very end of the process and gets rid of the last 10% of child labor. But it's the market that makes it possible. If we, and I said this on Stossel a week or so ago, what if we took all the US government imposed private sector regulations and introduced them into Bangladesh next week? Would that mean that all of a sudden everybody in Bangladesh would have air conditioned workplaces and three weeks of vacation a year or like whatever? Like would they all have a nice working conditions and time and a half for overtime? Is that what it would mean? And all we have to do is just take our laws and bring them there and it's sunshine and lollipops for everybody? No, to the contrary, everybody would be instantly unemployable because these workers at that state of capital intensiveness are not productive enough to justify those expenditures. So the only non-arbitrary way to introduce these improvements in working conditions is through the market. Is not in isolation from market exchange but in conformity with what the market is telling you. In other words, as soon as air conditioning was introduced everybody would love to have an air conditioned workplace. We'd all love that. We'd all love to have a view of Niagara Falls. We'd like to have massages during the day, which by the way is one of the things that the United Auto Workers wanted in their contract was they wanted massages during the day. So we'd all like to have that, but if we all insisted on that, none of us could be employed. So it's through compensating differentials. It's through, for example, there's a workplace that's air conditioned, there's a workplace that's not air conditioned. The non air conditioned workplace has to pay more to get people to work and suffer in an environment like that. Eventually it gets to a point where they're paying their workers so much more to compensate for no air conditioning, it's cheaper to just install the air conditioned. And that's how you make sure that these improvements in working conditions don't, are not introduced at such a rate that they disemploy people. And that they're introduced in at the wrong time such that people suffer more than they gain. Now other things though, I mean I talk about like work, again we think that if it weren't for the government everybody would be ground up in a sausage machine and you guys would all be eating sausages made out of some guy's leg. You know, like we all, right, isn't that what we all are under that impression? And thanks to a federal government agency called OSHA, well now we don't have that problem. And the way they justify this is they bring you out a little graph and they say look at workplace fatality since we had OSHA, look at them going down. But you know what they don't show you? Workplace fatalities before we had OSHA, they were already going down. Just like that, going down even faster. So what's the deal with it? Well it turns out that most workplace fatalities do not involve a guy falling into the grinding machine. Most of the vast majority or at least a clear majority involve either assaults by fellow employees which is not the classic case that you think of when you think of unsafe workplaces. You don't think of, you know, old Joe gets upset and belches you in the face. But that is 20% of the injuries or casualties come in that way. Or it's people, you know, they're driving on the highway while they're working and they get into an accident and that's considered to be workplace related incident. All right, well it's not really clear what the government could do really about that anyway. But beyond that, I mean there are other things. I mean when we look at, when you actually look at what OSHA does, we have a lot of testimonies from business owners who say, you know, I have a very, very dangerous plant here and there are all kinds of things that could go wrong. But the bureaucrats who come to inspect my plant know nothing about what I do, know nothing about the plant. So they're walking right underneath things that if they fell down would kill everybody in the room. They don't even look at that. They're saying, hey, you know, you need to sweep this corner. It hurts a little bit, a little bit dirty. I mean like, this is just pathetic. I need to give them a seminar on what their own job is. But where would we be without them? And so it's all our electrical things would blow up that weren't for the government even though we've got underwriters laboratories doing that for us in the private sector. I might mention, by the way, there's a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, some kind of thing with eight letters in the acronym, that was started in the mid-1960s and this is supposed to give us safety on the highways. And ever since we had that, every year we have seen the number of highway fatalities decrease at a rate of 3.5% a year. So doesn't that go to show that the government has helped us and where would we be without this? But you know, in the 35 years before we had that, you know the rate at which highway fatalities were decreasing, 3.5% a year. Now I know it could be that they were just on the verge of spiking upward and the government intervened just in time to keep them, but I, I, I don't know. I mean like, do you think that today we would still have a car with the features of a car from like 1930? Like you think we'd still have a car, you know, like with no windshield wipers on it, or what I mean, eventually as, again, as the society becomes wealthier, they demand safety, they demand these things. And I'm sure Professor Terrell pointed that out in his lecture about consumer products and safety and so on and so forth. I'm gonna leave out the Americans with Disabilities Act, I talked about that and roll back a little bit too. But in other words, there are ways that we could survive. We would figure out ways to provide for ourselves. We would figure out ways with all our technological advances and all the extraordinary achievements of human ingenuity. I think we would figure out some way for us to be able to shop for a non-lethal sandwich. I'm convinced of this. So Jeff Tucker has a new book out that I recommend called It's a Jetsons World. And he's summing up really what I'm saying, that here we are living in this unbelievable world. I mean, it's a world that even the Jetsons looks kind of pathetic next to it. Because, I mean, right now you can get a Skype app even now for the droid. You see, you walk around, you can be talking to some person, you know, halfway around the world, walking around doing, you know, seven other things, having another conversation with somebody else. It's unbelievable, but on the Jetsons, if you wanted to have that picture sort of conversation, you had to sit in a special chair and watch it. So even the Jetsons look stupid compared to what we live in now. And we kind of feel like, eh, you know, come on now. You know, like when the iPad came out, the iPad is unbelievable, right? I mean, it's just unbelievable all the things it can do. And it comes out and the immediate response is, oh, I can't believe it doesn't do X and Y. I mean, this is just, this is an outrage against human rights. What? Like nobody stops and, you know, and it's great to run into a kindred spirit. You know, I've known Jeff Tucker for years and we were just talking the other day, he says, you know, and Jeff gets a little bit worked up on things like this, but he says, you know, sometimes I go to the store and I just stop there in amazement at all. How did this all come to be? How? Imagine the cooperation that was necessary. It's incredible. And I remember, I remember this in New York, one of our kids needed a vaporizer late at night. And I'm gonna go a little bit, five minutes over. So it needed a vaporizer. So I went to the store in the middle of the night, basically, and there's a vaporizer for 10 bucks. And I thought, in the middle of the night, I'm able to come here and get a vaporizer for 10 bucks, right? How was it? And I actually stood there. I thought, no, I have a sick kid. I can't stand here and meditate on this. I gotta go, but it was incredible. All right, all right. Now, for you guys, for you guys. Now I've had, as Lou kind of said in more diplomatic language, kind of an oddball career because I did teach formally for a while. But now, I'm not even really sure if the sense, if a government official like in the Labor Department were to call me, I'm not even sure if I could list myself as employed. Like I mean, I do speaking, I write, I, whatever, but I do it whenever I want. But I am enough of a workaholic that I don't, I'm just working reading and whatever all the time. I've got some big projects I'm working on. But it's a weird situation that I'm in that I'm able to make this work. I'm not with any university. We just have our, I have a home office. And that's what I just, every morning I wake up and I just walk into my home office. I have a five second commute and off I go. And it's interesting because it's revealing about the age we live in, how this was possible for me. This was possible entirely because of the internet. Because somebody with views like ours is just not going to get mainstream exposure. Now it's true, I've been able to be on TV a bunch of times and that has helped. But that's not where my main base of readership and moral support has come from. It's basically come from YouTube and the Mises Institute, the audio archive here and various other things that I've done. And somehow this is to the point where, I don't know, I'm able to do what Gary North said and it sounds so implausible, but I kind of, I can support us and yet I'm doing, like what else would I rather do than this? I love this. I get to read and learn and meet interesting people. And meet people who have talents that if I had three lifetimes I couldn't acquire. It's been wonderful for me, but now it's not just me. All you guys have this fantastic opportunity because we're living at a time that's the most exciting time in history for people interested in ideas, as Jeff Tucker has pointed out, because your ideas can be immortal. They can actually be immortal. Because you make videos for YouTube and Gary North calls YouTube a second coming website because he believes it's gonna be here until the second coming. It's not going anywhere. So your YouTube, long after you're dead, that'll still be up there. So he told me by the way that when you put a website name as a watermark on your YouTube video, don't direct it to your website, which I do at this point, but he says I shouldn't, direct it to a YouTube channel. Because your website, maybe your heirs won't appreciate your brilliance and they won't renew the web address and then you lose it. But that YouTube channel will be there forever. Now, it's incredible what we can accomplish because we have knowledge that other people crave. And this is not, we're not ego cases to think this. This is a fact. Now I know that the Tea Party movement is a big dud and a disappointment. We all know that. But these people don't like Paul Krugman any more than you or I do. So if you make videos refuting Paul Krugman's columns or somebody else's column or you do something consistently on a weekly basis on YouTube, you will attract viewers over time and you will attract people who aren't necessarily Austrians but they just know Krugman's got a hole in his head. And you can make them Austrians because they will subscribe and follow you. So we shouldn't give up on peers because they're not Austrians yet. We all had something that brought us to this. For me, it was a magazine ad. I don't know if anybody even reads magazines anymore. But for this generation, it's gonna be YouTube's. Now what I recommend is when you make a YouTube, if you can possibly afford it, you make sure that you get a decent camera. It's gonna be super fantastic, a decent HD camera and you get decent lighting and you have a reasonable background, not like a pile of clothes you haven't washed. You know, just something stupid, like flowers, whatever it is, so that it looks professional. Because if it looks like you're bending over, looking into your webcam on your laptop, the credibility level is way down. But if it looks like you're comfortably sitting there in your home talking, well, George, I wonder what this guy has to say. Do that, it adds 15 times the value to your videos. But think about what your niche is. It might not even be economics, it might be some field of history, it might be some subfield of economics, something that you know a lot about. But whatever it is, there are tremendous opportunities for you, not just blogging and videos, but really the sky is the limit. I mean, anybody who's an animator or a graphic designer or whatever, there are all kinds of things. Talk about the division of labor here. People who are good organizers, who are good fundraisers, everybody has a role to play here. And here I bring the thing full circle because that was what the people at the Friends of the Spartacus Youth Club told me about the Socialist Society. That when that day arrives, that socialism comes here, there will be a job for everyone, citizen. Yeah, the problem is you won't get to choose it. That'll be it. You'll be the garbage man, okay? The people who ran the revolution, they'll be sipping the wine and all that. Well, finally, my last point is that I don't want you to keep to yourself the things that you've learned here at Mises University. Austrian economics is value free, that's true. It makes technical descriptive statements about cause and effect in the world of human interaction. But there are certain implications of Austrian economics. Because as you study it, you realize that the welfare of mankind is improved as the division of labor is extended, as the parasitic sector, by of course I mean government, is curtailed, all these sorts of things about human cooperation, the all these sorts of things are implied by what the Austrian school teaches. And this runs directly counter the philosophy that all of us have been taught and that people are hearing about all the time that the best way to organize society is for everybody to grab something. So the farmers grab and the industrialists grab and the scientists grab and the social workers grab and the education bureaucrats grab and the space program grabs. But our alternative is different. What if we stopped this civil war of everyone against everyone? What if we abandoned this project? What Frederick Bastiat called the state, the great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else? We dropped that and said we are going to proceed on the basis of social peace, of respect for one another as human beings, not looting and exploiting each other by of course most of us wouldn't take a gun to our neighbor and grab his stuff, but we think nothing of voting for somebody who will get the police to come put a gun in your neighbor's stomach and take his stuff through taxation. What if we stopped doing that? Isn't there a more humane way to arrange society? Well, ladies and gentlemen, for my money, the institution that is doing the most to promote this vision of society is the Mises Institute, which I hope you will support and I remind you of that most glorious quotation from Ludwig von Mises that should haunt us when he said, everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders. No one is relieved of his share of the burden by others and no one can find a safe way out for himself when society is sweeping toward destruction. And he says that all of us have a role to play in this great intellectual battle that we find ourselves in. Mises is the example for us intellectually and morally. His was a life well lived. He stood up to fashionable opinion regardless of what it cost him professionally and personally. And meanwhile, we're told to admire and look to politicians. But I'm reminded of that favorite poem of mine, Osamandias, in which we see this statue, this tribute to a long fallen leader, look upon my works ye mighty and despair. But of course, time has passed him by and has been forgotten. The statue is in ruins and we remember how that ends. The lone and level sands stretch far away. They will be forgotten. Ah, you'll find them in the history books, but it's us. It's the intellectuals. It's the pen is mightier than the sword because ideas are immortal. These people who are looting and taking advantage of us and brainwashing our kids are not. Let's all fight this thing to the finish, to the victory, to the free society. Thank you very much. Thank you.