 Welcome to the podcast that takes apart Paul Krugman's New York Times column. Join us as Tom Woods and Bob Murphy teach economics by uncovering and dissecting the arrows of Krugman. Nobel Prize winner, newspaper columnist and destroyer of nations. It's time for Contra Krugman. Hey everybody, Tom and Bob here with an all-star cast here at Mises University where we are recording before a live audience. Hello! Alright, this is episode 148 and for this episode we're going to talk about a generic topic. We're not going to do a Krugman column, thank heavens. Instead, with this illustrious panel, we're going to talk about why Austrian economics ought to matter to just the average person. Yeah, we're all nerds and scholars, but why should some guy on the street care about Austrian economics? That's what we're going to hash out today. Bob Murphy, of course, is with me here. I'm joined also by Dave Smith of the Part of the Problem podcast who is just the best guy in the world. It's so much fun to hang around with. He does answer probably one out of every 12 emails you send him. It makes it all the more special when that one reply does come first. Dave, of course, you've got to get his Libertas comedy special because it was the number one comedy album on iTunes for three weeks, solid, in 2017. He's the best, so we're glad to have him. And he's on CNN, I don't understand how that's happening. Jonathan Newman of Bryan College, I'm glad, is also with us. He's one of the youngsters. He has that beard to make him look older, but he's like 15 or something. And then Peter Klein. The other end of the spectrum. We have the oldster of the panel, Peter Klein, who has a PhD from Berkeley, back when it, by comparison to today, Berkeley then was like Hillsdale. But Peter is at Baylor University. So we're going to just hash out this topic. And Bob, now that I've done the easy part, you figure out how we start this thing. Sure, I think we should turn it over to Dave. I'd like to ask him the first question. Why do you keep following us around? You don't see us going on TV, right? No, I certainly don't. That is a very good point, Bob. I never see you on television at all. Wait, so what are we starting with? I just wanted to get on the Contra Krugman podcast finally, because it's, you know, it's way overdue. Yes, so you are a stand-up comedian that's your job. And one might not have thought you, it's like refreshing. You see a comic occasionally flirt with something fairly solid economically. You actually read Rothbard and so forth. So can you just give us a sense? Were you into like Milton Friedman first and got into this? Why, the average person, why should they care about Austrian economics? Okay, well, the Milton Friedman part, no, I was never into Milton Friedman and I'm still not. But no, I was just, I was not a super political person. I was just kind of, I guess, a left-wing guy who hated the wars under George W. Bush. And then I saw Ron Paul, Ron Paul Giuliani moment, and I was like, who the hell is that guy? Because that was awesome. And then he was just, I thought he was so on point with the war stuff that I was like, okay, I'll hear him out on this Austrian economics that he keeps talking about. Then I found Tom and Peter Schiff and then Tom kept talking about this Rothbard Jew and I was like, well, I gotta check that guy out. And then I started reading Rothbard and my life has been a nightmare ever since because reading Rothbard, it's like getting punched in the chest and I just never recovered from it. So that's how I got into libertarianism and Austrian economics kind of all together. Now to say why it matters to like the average person, I would say this was also at a time where there was just the big financial crisis and I think if you give the Austrians nothing else, which I think it's all great, but nothing else, they figured out this boom bust stuff that nobody else has an answer to. And no matter who you are, this stuff really affects your life. Like, I mean, I'm not as young as a lot of you guys, I'm 35, but I've already lived through a couple boom bust cycles and they're always happening and no one else has an answer for it. I mean, the mainstream answer is either something ridiculous about greed. I think that's like the official CNBC response. Like, I don't know, these guys all of a sudden they started being really greedy around 2006 and there was a greed bubble. And then like the lefty answer is that the most hyper regulated market in our entire economy was 2D regulated. Like the 3,200 regulations, if we had just had 10 more, we could have avoided this. So they have no idea, the Austrian economists are the only ones who get this right and that is something that you may not, you know, the majority of people aren't interested in maybe a lot of the topics that we are, but they are interested in why all of a sudden the economy is wrecked every few years. I kind of like this idea of telling our so to speak conversion story. So Jonathan, your turn, where did you come from philosophically, let's say? I was also a convert of the Ron Paul Rejuliani exchange in that debate. It was just mind blowing to me that somebody could have this sort of position and be a Republican. And so I was sort of old school, so I went to Ron Paul's website, looked at the issues and he had, and it was sort of interesting to read all of his different stances on issues. And then I read his book, The Revolution, and then there was some recommended reading in the back of that. And so I read Economics in One Lesson, which led me to Mises.org. And then I realized, so I was in Birmingham, Alabama at the time, and I realized that there was this great organization just down the road, just down Highway 280, that was sort of the center of all this thought and idea. And so then I came to Mises University and the rest is history. Good man. Great. Okay, maybe just to continue the pattern. Peter, can you tell, I'm guessing it was the famous exchange between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas? Well, you know, Carl Manger, the founder of the Austrian school with his famous book in 1871, His Principles of Economics. Carl and I used to sit around the cafes in Vienna. He persuaded me step by step. No, it's interesting to me hearing about kind of Ron Paul-led conversion stories, because there are so many for people who are in Dave's and Jonathan's generation and for many of you. In my day, the kind of gateway drug was more likely to be Ayn Rand. And when I was a high school student, a friend of mine handed me Ayn Rand's book to Fountainhead and said, oh, I think you ought to read this. And I read it. And like a lot of adolescents who sort of were unsatisfied with what they were hearing in their classrooms and from their parents or whatever, I started reading those books and got very enthusiastic about kind of Ayn Rand's worldview. And I started reading her nonfiction books, which included that famous essay on why the gold standard is so great by Alan Greenspan. Yeah, the pre-sellout Alan Greenspan. And from there I heard about Mises and so forth. So I was kind of interested in free markets and liberty from a general perspective before I discovered the kind of technical writings of the Austrian school. And I realized those were the only solid foundation for understanding what's really going on around us. Kind of the same thing that Dave was saying. On the Ayn Rand point, I recently, I read Atlas Shrugged a long time ago, but I recently reread what is my favorite thing Ayn Rand ever wrote, which is the speech in Atlas Shrugged by the worker at the 20th century motor company. And this is where they tried to implement the principle of from each according to his ability to each according to his need. And that sounds very noble on the face of it. But you watch and you read this story, which there's nothing implausible about. You can absolutely see it unfolding that way. How it becomes more and more inhuman and horrible as time goes on. I read it to my 15 year old daughter and it's a long, long, long passage. But I just kept going and reading it and reading it and she was just drawn in and drawn in. And I felt like, although she's already on board with this stuff, I feel like if people read just that, they will be inoculated against socialism forever. And I say that as somebody who doesn't mention Ayn Rand very much. I mean, on my podcast, she doesn't come up much because I wouldn't say she was one of my major influences, but that particular speech needs to be read by everybody. Now, in terms of our general topic, I agree with Dave that the boom bus cycle, if that doesn't matter to the average person, what does? That's really where you see the role of economic knowledge. What in the world just happened to me? What happened to my house price? What happened to what pathetic portfolio I might have? What happened and why? You got to get that right. Now, I have other things to say. Let me just jump in real fast on that point specifically, too. That's also an area where the Austrian school really sharply differs from the Chicago school. So it's true, there's a lot of areas people ask all the time. I like free markets. What's the difference? You guys are basically the same except for minor technical. But that's one where there's a huge difference. And you can see that there were supply side economists in 2006, 2007. George Bush had mildly cut tax rates or whatever. So if you didn't think that there was this issue with the Fed being there, possibly screwing things up, you wouldn't have had anything on your radar. And also famously in the 20s, Irving Fisher and others, people out of the Chicago tradition thought everything was great because they didn't have the Austrian theory of the boom bus cycle. So again, an area where there is a distinction, it's not that they're all the same. They're all just anti Keynesians or something. And this really matters. It's relevant. I was going to say that a nice thing about the Austrian school, by the way, just kind of an added bonus in addition to helping you understand individual issues is that there's something extremely elegant about the whole thing. But for one thing, we don't say, well, we have microeconomics. And then in a completely different unrelated matter, we also have macroeconomics that seems to operate according to different principles or should be studied from a different point of view. That's not really the way the Austrians think. It all goes back to some first principles that then get spun out. And, I mean, for instance, if you read Man economy and state, you see you're observing the building of an edifice right before your eyes, step by elegant step. And that's, I think, what conveys more than anything else. The idea that you are genuinely learning how the world works. It's not a bunch of ad hoc propositions that might be changeable or testable or that don't seem to integrate with one another. Everything builds on everything else. Now, I say that as somebody who studies economics in his spare time. Tom, can I elaborate on that point a little bit? Something else that I think is really attractive about the Austrian approach to economics is that, you know, while it is, you know, very precise and very scientific in the correct sense of that word, it's also very accessible and interesting to all sorts of people. If you look at sort of most mainstream economists who teach at prestigious universities and so forth, you know, the style in which they write and argue, they use these extremely complicated mathematical models that are almost designed to be incomprehensible to anybody but a very specialized group of experts. You listen to the typical, you know, Treasury Secretary or Fed official talk about the economy. It's like a, you know, it's like a priest. It's like the old days when, you know, only the priest could read the Bible because only the priest knew Latin. There's this sort of priestly class of economists who speak only to each other and then occasionally give these pronouncements to the lay public. You know, and the lay public is supposed to just take it on faith that what these technocrats are doing and saying is right and that's why the Fed has to be completely independent of interference from the rabble, you know, us. Now, while the Austrian school, of course, has its professors who write articles and books and teach at top universities and so forth, Austrian economics is also a lot more interesting to lay people. And it's funny, among academic economists, that's considered, you know, a great defect. Oh, well, the Austrian school, that's got all these populists and sort of cranky people who write newsletters and have podcasts and blogs and so forth. That sort of delegitimize it somehow in the eyes of the elite economists. But to me, that's a huge feature and not a bug. I mean, the fact that lots of people, not only professional economists, really care about what we're saying and are able to engage with us and we can engage with them in dialogue, that's a great advantage of Austrian economics as opposed to this other kind that is almost designed to be accessible only to sort of an elite few. Yeah, just to jump in on that, so I've given plenty of talks to financial professionals and I'll walk through, you know, what we would all recognize as Austrian business cycle theory to explain the housing boom and bust, and then here's what Bernanke's been doing and everybody, oh my gosh, and afterwards one of the common things, the feedback of good people will say, I hated economics in college, but you just said that was great, you know, and they think that this, I thought economics was just all about drawing curves and so forth. So I think Peter's right about that. They also sometimes say, for an economist, you're really funny. And I'm wondering, do you ever get people to say for a comedian you actually know a lot about economics or is that probably, because you do, you know, it's really, it's charming. I mean, I don't even think I'm going out on a limb and saying I am the most economically literate comedian on the planet. There's no one else more. And by the way, that's not really high praise. Like, I'm not, yeah, there's nobody else. But there is, I mean, I think your point and what you're touching on, I mean, for me personally, like, that was so true. There was something about, look, I never liked school. I hated high school, I hated college, I never liked any of it. And nothing to me was ever as interesting or exciting as, like, libertarianism and Austrian economics. And the fact that it was something that, like, what you were saying, it wasn't just like, okay, here, here's this very complicated thing and you either have to understand this and then you're in and if you don't, you're out. Austrian economics actually teaches you to think. It's teaching you to actually think things through yourself and logically deduce them. And as you were pointing out, it's this wonderfully consistent ideology that nobody else has. And even in the Chicago guys, I mean, they wildly contradict their own worldview. And so anyway, for me, that was like what drew me in. Yeah, just to follow up on that train of thought. Like, notice, for those of you who are here at Mises U, the lecture, obviously we cover a whole wide range of topics. But notice, it's not that at the beginning, we spent five minutes saying, here are my assumptions for this talk. There's gonna be, you know, three firms and they have six different inputs and we're gonna have constant returns. Whereas if you go and listen to, you know, you've went to a conference with a bunch of mainstream economists, they would get up there and talk about different things. For one thing, oh, is this labor economics? Okay, then I know the kind of package assumptions we use here. Oh, this is international trade. Oh, this is macro. This is micro. And it's not just that the focus of what they're talking about would be different. It's that their whole method and the assumptions they make and the types of models they build would be completely different. Whereas again, you're not getting that here. We're all coming from the same starting point. We're just applying the analysis to a particular area. One other thing too, regarding what Peter was saying, Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, Nobel Prize winner, he tells in one of his autobiographical works that he was given a talk at some international conference on like solving the problem of inequality or something and they were just asking all these big thought leaders. And so as a huge, famous physicist, he came over and he gave his thoughts and other people were getting up there and pontificating and afterward he was leaving and he said the janitors were cleaning up and one of them came over to him and said, hey, you know what? We could kind of hear what was going on. You were the only guy who I could even understand what you were saying up there, that everybody else, it was just gobbledygook. And so that's, I think, to show that basically we're all as smart as Richard Feynman. What's been cool to see over the past few years is that especially in macroeconomics, there have been a few of the top economists saying that the models have broken down. The models don't work. Specifically, Paul Romer has a great paper and he's regretted the increasing mathiness in economics and saying that when economists are doing a paper presentation at a conference, for example, it's like they're doing a magic trick that nobody really understands how the model works. There's this big, long equation, our big, long system of equations and nobody in the audience knows how this equation works and we're all just supposed to be amazed at the outcome just sort of like the economists just did a magic trick. And many other top economists have also said that these mathematical models that we're using to try to guess what's going to happen in the economy or predict what's going to happen to the economy totally failed in predicting the most recent boom and bust cycle and so there is at least some introspection going on in the mainstream macroeconomics field. Can I just touch on that? A friend of mine who was, this is like right around I guess 2009 and he was getting a Series 7 license to sell stocks and bonds and he was telling me that the guy teaching the course, basically what they teach in the course is this like Keynesian, like you can either have high unemployment or inflation but you can't have both. And he said he just asked the instructor of the course at one point he was like, but don't we have high unemployment and inflation right now? And he said the instructor just goes, this is textbook stuff, not real world stuff. Like that was his response to it. And it's like what, like how could any student, how could you like not look at that and go, this is just all ridiculous. So anyway, sorry, just made me think of that. A couple years ago at the opening talk I was given the topic of the role of Austrian economics in the liberty movement. And I was at pains to emphasize that libertarianism and Austrian economics are of course two distinct things. But at the same time, I wanted to show that it's not complete coincidence that we happen to, you know, most of us be libertarians. So why should that be? So I was talking about different aspects of Austrian economics that even though Austrian economics is value free seem to be congenial to us. And one of those things is if you look through man economy and state, it's not till the very last chapter the economics of violent intervention into the market that we even get the state at all. It's not this benign institution in the background throughout the text. It's not even there. We're describing how production and, well, life proceeds and then all of a sudden it's, oh no, by the way, if you had a group of thugs here's what the economics of that would look like. So that, you know, I get that that's not saying therefore be a libertarian, but that's a pretty conspicuous omission throughout the text. And so I think it's particularly helpful for the average person to be knowledgeable in Austrian economics or at least get the basics because it inoculates them against the worst kinds of populism where you have a demagogue who is promising you all kinds of benefits delivered via the state that on the surface of it sound pretty plausible. Yeah, sure, I'd like to get a free X or a free Y. But when you see, when you get the Austrian understanding of the world and the way it works and the benefits of voluntary cooperation you become instantly skeptical of anything outside that voluntary nexus. So that's a good thing to have under your belt. Maybe following up on that I'm curious as the panel's thoughts, why is it that it seems politicians can get away with promising stuff that's clearly absurd for those who are trained in economics or why is it so hard to get the public perhaps to be on their guard with that stuff. For example, stuff that's happening in Venezuela they're running the printing press and then they put in price controls food disappears from the shelves. I mean that is so obviously what's going to happen. And so it seems impossible. How can the people there not know that and they blame greed or speculators or oil prices collapse? I'm just wondering, is there something about economics per se that makes it trickier or you don't see politicians promising perpetual motion machines and the physicists having to say, man, we just get the public to stop. So what is it? I guess some of the conclusions or claims that politicians make they can seem very easy and achievable just superficially that if you don't put at least five minutes worth of thought behind it then you would just sort of nod your head. Yeah, that sounds great. I would love free healthcare. I would love everybody to have a college education. And so it takes just a few minutes of thinking critically about the claims that politicians make and I guess maybe there's a deficiency of that sort of thing happening. The analogy with physics is pretty interesting. I don't know for some reason, I think contrary to what most people believe economics in some sense is harder in that you've got to think through the consequences of different things. I mean anybody can do it but it takes a few moments of reflection. It's not like a bumper sticker thing, right? Most economic propositions don't fit on a bumper sticker. I think everyone understands like, you know, why don't we have flying cars? Well, it's just really hard to have flying cars. Okay, I accept that. But why can't we all have free healthcare and why can't we have free housing and why don't I get paid more money? It takes like a few steps to sort of explain that. And I think sometimes it's hard people don't have the patience and that's why when, you know, the Bernie Sanders types or whatever come along and say, oh, well, of course, vote for me. I'll give you this, I'll give you this. You can have free this and free that. It just sounds so great and people don't want to take the time to have to, you know, to sort of think through why that's impossible, why that can't work. But I think also it's because those sorts of things involve parts of life that they're intimately familiar with. They know what healthcare is. They know what education is. They know what housing is. But if they had 58 lifetimes, couldn't even conceive of how to build a flying car. So that they're willing to let the experts deal with. But when it comes to healthcare, they say, well, look, I see a doctor. I see a patient. I see a rich person. Well, that's all I need. What would be the problem? So that's the thing is that they, that's the case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Well, also zero knowledge is even worse. And by the way, just the other day I was driving around, don't you hate that bumper sticker? Do you think education is expensive? Try ignorance? Yeah, I know. So Tom gave it a try. Yeah. I'll call your bluff. Well, now my stupid little punch line seems ridiculous. Why don't you just, actually, you know what won't seem ridiculous? You know where you won't be following us this year. That's right. I'm so bummed, but I won't be on the Contra cruise this year. I got to do this silly little thing, having a kid. And that's, I asked my wife, well, thank you. Yeah. She's been a jerk. She's making me come to the delivery. So anyway. But okay, now I completely lost my job. Oh, on the, well, this is like what the worst element, well, maybe not the worst, but one of the worst elements of the state and democracy in general is that we all, you know, people end up voting on stuff that they don't know anything about. And we don't do this in any other area of life. Like if we're, if we're in a car and the car broke down and there's like five of us in the car and one of the people in the car is a mechanic. And he was like, okay, well, this is what we got to do to fix the car. I wouldn't be like, let's just all vote on that. And we'll see what, you know, it's like people are voting in things that they don't have any expertise in. And there's, there's a lot of things that everyone in this room doesn't know anything about. I mean, if everybody in the world were obsessed with economics the way we are, we, we are all starved to death. And like we'd have some perfect model of why no one's producing any food or something. But like people have to specialize in different things. And the problem is the state comes in and then it's like, well, you, you, everyone's going to vote on what sounds more popular and giving away free stuff is always going to win. Yeah, you actually reminded me of something that happened. I was at a Thanksgiving meal with relatives and, you know, people, I was just meeting for the first time and we're going to the guy next to me said, oh, what do, you know, what do you do? And I'm an economist. And so we were talking about the federal reserve because this was when QE was going on and he asked me my opinion and I was believing in social segment. My goal is not to convert people or anything like that. I just try to keep my head down. And so I lightly said something, well, you know, I think it's kind of risky and it could lead to some problems down the road. And you know, that kind of something, a truthful statement, but not volunteering to which. And so he goes, yeah, I don't agree with that. And he proceeded to tell me his views on quantitative easing. And I was thinking, if I had said I was a heart surgeon and said something about how valves work, he wouldn't be like, yeah, I don't think that's how it worked. So, I mean, that is funny. But on the other hand, you can sort of give them the benefit or you can see why people would think that because he could go on TV and see economists saying diametrically opposed things where you probably wouldn't see two heart surgeons on TV disagreeing on such a fundamental level, you know, where they were saying one person said, yeah, we cut the heart out. The other one said, we put in 16 hearts. That's what the person needs. That's kind of how economists are sounding, you know, in terms of the recommendation about QE or not. Some are saying this is great. We need 10 times more. Other people are saying this is awful. It's setting us up. So you can understand why the public doesn't trust economists, even though, as these guys are saying, it does lead to the absurdity of people just voting on things where economists who know what's going on can say this clearly is not going to work. What do you think is going to happen? All right, let me try this again. You know where you will find some economists who know what's going on. There you go. Yeah, I was thinking we could just ask the panel to tell, you know, why are we interested in economics? Why should everyone go on the Contra Cruise? I think that would be... Well, you should go to contracruise.com and then look at it lovingly and say, I'm just a poor student. So either I'll have to beg my parents or I'll just have to go out and work and someday you'll be able to come with us because it's so great. And Jeff Deist is coming this year. I mean, could you imagine a week hanging out with Jeff Deist? Yeah, they probably have no idea. A week with Jeff Deist. What would that even be like? I don't even know. Yeah, that's right. Well, what would we compare it to? All right, what else do we want to talk about? Anything? While we have them here, let me ask Dave this. Do you... Okay, you see one sees people on TV and they're espousing things. Is it the case? Are they just putting on a show and behind the scenes they're more reasonable? Like people who say crazy stuff are Bill O'Reilly. I'm not saying him in particular, but the people you've interacted with, is it like they're doing pro-wrestling and behind the scenes they're all in on the joke or anything along those lines? Because again, I'm not on TV like Dave is, so how would I know? Yeah, I think there's a little bit of a split. There are a lot of people who are straight up doing pro-wrestling who know this is... I mean, I've had experiences before. There was one military guy, this is back when I was doing Fox News shows, and he was talking to me backstage and he was like... We were talking about waterboarding and he goes, Yeah, waterboarding. We were waterboarding. It's absolutely torture. There's no question about it. And then he got asked on the panel, do you consider waterboarding torture? And he goes, I consider it enhanced interrogation. And you're like, Oh man, what a liar. And that... So there is stuff like that. And I've had moments with people like... I was on Essie Cupp's show the other day and it was, you know, she's going... She had Max Boot on the show. You guys know the wonderful Max Boot. And yeah, I was in a room with Max Boot and I felt dirty for the rest of the day. But he... And they're just going off about this crazy Russia hysteria. And I came on to the panel and she just asked me, like, off camera. She was like, Well, what do you think of the whole Trump-Putin summit? And I was like, Well, I wish he would get as much scrutiny when he say, bombed another country as to when he spoke to somebody. And she just goes, Fair point. Fair point. And... But then she continued on with the crazy hysteria. So I don't know. The whole thing is wrestling. It's ridiculous. The whole cable news is the most ridiculous thing ever. It's like these big red, blue screens and you have like five seconds to talk about the most important issue ever. It's like, Hey, what's that cable? They all... You know, what is it? John Stewart said that thing where all the names are like, Hardball and Crossfire and I'm going to kick your ass news. It's just these ridiculous things. And they're like, Hey, what's going on, everybody? Okay, five seconds. Dave, Iraq war. What do you think? And I'm like, bad. And they're like, good point. Next. And it's just... This is all insane. And there's something interesting about the psychology of people who watch cable news, who don't, you know, read further or aren't interested in things like this. It's like they almost want to... They know they don't know anything, but they want to feel like not... They don't want to feel bad about that. So they're like, Oh, no, you know, I watched Hannity. So I'm good. And but yeah, it's all... It is pro wrestling. But then also, aren't you afraid that if you, in your zeal to get a word in edgewise, you know, and you got all this pressure and sometimes it's live television. If you say something that's a little bit off, then media matters going to slam you forward. I mean, you're going to get smashed on all sides. I mean, it's risky. Yeah, it is. But I've always, from the very beginning, when I started getting these cable news shows, I was just kind of like, in my mind, I thought, well, it's a matter of time until I get fired from this. And then I'll have an awesome, like they can't handle what I have to bring to them story. But they just never fired me and kept bringing me back. And now I'm like, I guess this is cool too. But truthfully, it's... You know what, I think, and I think part of the reason, because people ask me, they're like, why does Essie Cup keep having you on her show? Because you make her look bad in times and all. And I think it's just that I'm interested. And at the end of the day, they are driven by ratings. And it's like, it's so... Have you ever seen that show? It would be so freaking boring without Mayanna. It would just be the most... People agreeing on nonsense. And I at least make the panel... But they can kind of... Since there'll be like four people in me, they can kind of keep me in that box where it's almost like what they used to do to Ron Paul on the debate stages. It's like, there's crazy Uncle Ron. But anyway, I don't know. As co-host, I get the privilege of telling an unrelated story. Totally unrelated. It has nothing to do with anything. But there are people we know in the story. Years ago, when Glenn Beck used to have his show on Fox News, they wanted to do a whole hour on the road to surfdom. So they invited me to come on. And then they said, well, so who else should come on? Is there anybody else? So I thought Yuri Maltsev. Because I mean, he's a defector. He had to read the road to surfdom in a special room at Moscow State University. He had to read a special room and he had to sign something promising he would not disclose anything he had read to anybody else, any of this bourgeois nonsense. So I thought he'd be great. So they called him up and the producers called me back and said, Glenn is gonna love this guy. Thank you for the tip. So anyway, so we did this full hour. So as we went to the commercials live TV, he said to me, Glenn says to me, during the commercial break, go in the green room, flip through whatever chapter it was, and just find three points that we'll talk about. And I kind of felt like, shouldn't you have done, don't you have like a staff of 35? Why am I doing this? So I went in the green room and who walks in but Judge Napolitano and he says, Tom Woods, you come to my backyard, you don't even tell me you're gonna be here. So then he's lecturing me about, you know, we really gotta, we should be having lunch. And I'm thinking, two minutes is ticking away, live television is coming up, I have not found one out of the three points. So by the time, I had 20 seconds by the time I got the judge to be quiet. It was not fun. So that's it, has nothing to do with anything, but we know the judge and Yuri, so I thought I would tell it. It involves TV. What was the point? What was the point that you found? Oh, I have no idea. I don't even remember. Really? I have no idea. It's a fairness. Do any of us remember anything Haig wrote down? All right, so basically what I've done by bringing that up is to give you all the freedom to say anything you like about any topic. Well, I can say something relevant to what Dave just said. So he was talking about, he's on the show and just the very fact that he has a different opinion than everybody else that makes it interesting. And to connect that to the theme of this episode, why should Austrian economics be important or why should the ordinary person care? The ordinary person cares about diversity of opinion. It's interesting to at least see diverse views presented. And so if you go to a history class or a literature class or really any other field, people will value different perspectives on the subject. But for some reason in economics, if there's like one little bit of diverse opinion, then it just gets knocked down and gets hammered down. So that's one reason why the ordinary person should value learning about Austrian economics or at least be okay with it being presented alongside other views. I guess also, can you guys maybe suggest for people who are out there who are saying, yeah, you know what, this has really pushed me over the edge. I want to either read my first thing or go watch somebody's lecture or whatever. The three of you guys, you could just say, what's your recommendation for a newcomer who's interested in this? Someone who listens to Contra Krugman actually has not done any other work. What's the analog of Tom just cribbing in 20 seconds trying to pretend he knows Hayek? Well, I think Henry Hazlitz's economics in one lesson is the best introduction. If you don't know anything about economics or even if you know a little bit about economics, his book does a really good job of taking you through those, you know, the first, at least the first two steps to think critically about different policy proposals. I can't recommend that enough. Yeah, and if you prefer other media besides reading, if you go to the Mises Academy website, we have a large number of courses, many of them free, including introduction to economics, sort of economic principles, level talks, all the way up to more advanced talks, and of course just the media archive on Mises.org has lots and lots of material at all different levels. But I agree that Henry Hazlitz's book is extremely well done and a lot of Ron Paul's books, which are not sort of academic books, but they're very accessible and there's actually a lot of content, especially about things like business cycles and inflation and other phenomena that Ron Paul's interested in that also serve as great introductions to the Austrian theories. Yeah, so I completely agree. The first book, especially if it's someone new getting into it is always economics in one lesson. I just think it's a great one because it just gets you thinking. It's very easy. It's not a difficult read at all and it gets you thinking the right way. Unrelated to Austrian economics, the two essays that I always recommend by Rothbard just because they had such a profound effect on me are Anatomy of the State and War Peace in the State. Those two just really hit me hard and I think if you get into that way of thinking it probably will make you more interested in Rothbard's other work. But the other book that I would recommend specifically about economics is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I thought it was just great and it's pretty easy. You wouldn't want to give someone man economy and state to start with. I think that might have the effect of just being like, okay, there's no way I can do this. But if you do, once you get into that stuff, then I mean human action and man economy and state are the ones that'll finish it off for you. Another great short Rothbard book is What Has Government Done to Our Money for Money and Macro is probably the best introduction. I want to just say a quick something about what do you do when you've read economics in one lesson but you still feel intimidated by human action. And I think some people are in that situation where okay I've got the basics but man that book looks heavy. So there are some intermediate texts that you might consider and of course the primary one is Bob's book Choice. And that way you can start getting into Misesianism without having to go all the way through human action. And then you'll feel much more confident going through human action. So that was a gap that needed to be filled. From Haslet to human action is a huge leap and Bob has basically given you some lily pads in between. I might also mention I had a book a bunch of years ago called The Church and the Market which you do not have to be a Catholic to read this book. The idea is I was trying to explain not to left-wing Catholics whom I've given up on more or less. I mean absent divine intervention. But on the right the so-called traditionalists who won't listen to you because they think the free market came out of the Enlightenment which they hate. So I was trying to explain a lot of basics to them and that I think is also a useful intermediate text because that starts off talking about praxeology and shows you how you get from human beings act to the law of demand. You know because people say oh there's this action axiom. But I'm not sure everybody knows exactly how you go from the action axiom to something like that and so I start from there and then go on. So those are two intermediate texts and then I kind of came up with a bunch of good resources that would take you from beginner to advanced and I posted them at learnostrianeconomics.com. So we're going to link to that and we're going to link to all the stuff that our folks here on the stage are up to at contracrugman.com slash 148. Now obviously if you're watching this streaming that page doesn't exist yet because we're recording it now. This episode now. But when this episode goes live at contracrugman.com we'll have that stuff up there. So I'd like to say thank you to Peter Klein, Jonathan Newman, Dave Smith, as always Bob. Any parting words before I wrap this baby up? Thank you Tom for all you've done. I sure appreciate that. Thank you everybody. Thanks for listening to Contracrugman. Subscribe to the show for free on iTunes or Stitcher at contracrugman.com. You'll also find detailed show notes pages on blog, books by Tom and Bob, and more at contracrugman.com. See you next week.