 But by this time in the week, everybody's relaxing a little bit and feel like you might be getting a handle of this Austrian economics thing. So I'm going to try to keep my time schedule here for the benefit of the next speaker. I'm not between you and lunch now, am I? There is someone after me. That's good. All right. Well, my task here is to give you some of the common objections to capitalism, and then a very brief response as we might hear some of these objections on campuses and from journalists and elsewhere. I think it's important to have a ready response to those who would argue that capitalism is actually detrimental to human well-being, and so that's what I'd like for us to do quickly here today. I do not have time to do very much with any of these, but at least perhaps give you a start on how to acknowledge the opposition and come up with a way to answer. Now, some people define capitalism as a free market economy like what we have in Western industrialized society, and then they proceed to blame capitalism for whatever they don't like about Western industrialized society. That's really a problem that I run into frequently. This assumption that what we have in the United States is really free market or that Western Europe and parts of Central Europe have is really a free market society. Borrowing from philosopher Roderick Long, suppose I invent a word, I think he used the word Zaks and Bax, and then he says he defines it as a metallic sphere like the Washington Monument. Well, then I proceed to show that Zaks and Bax would be better if it were rounder and shinier and not tall and pointy. So I'm not defending the economic system of the United States or any other country. I was talking with a student last night, and she's from Southern Europe. She said that a lot of people in her home country have this idea that the choice that they face is either between communism or cronyism, and that they don't like cronyism, so they'll have to be communist. That's a false dichotomy. Those are not the only two options ahead of us. Of course, I'm not arguing that what we have in the United States is anything close to free market, though it may be closer than other countries. The first objection that I hear to capitalism is that capitalism exploits the poor. I'm going to give you a quote here from Ludwig von Mises. He wrote an excellent little book. Actually, it was a series of speeches transcribed in the 1950s. It appears in the form of economic policy thoughts for today and tomorrow, which I believe is available in full online. And he said, you know that the population of this planet is now 10 times greater than it was in the ages preceding capitalism. You know that all men today enjoy a higher standard of living than your ancestors did before the age of capitalism. But how do you know that you are the one out of 10 who would have lived in the absence of capitalism? The mere fact that you are living today is proof that capitalism has succeeded whether or not you consider your own life very valuable. Mises says it is a fact that the hatred of capitalism originated not with the masses, not among the workers themselves, but among the landed aristocracy, the gentry, the nobility of England and the European continent. They blamed capitalism for something that was not very pleasant for them. At the beginning of the 19th century, the higher wages paid by industry to its workers forced the landed gentry to pay equally higher wages to their agricultural workers. The aristocracy attacked the industries by criticizing the standard of living of the masses of the workers. Now, Mises goes on to say that if you look at things from our point of view, the standard of living of the industrial workers in the early 1800s was extremely low, shockingly low, but not because the capitalistic industries were harming the workers. People who were working in the factories had already been working at this very, very low standard of living. Mises says that the famous old story that these factories employed women and children and that these women and children before they were working in factories had lived under satisfactory conditions is one of the greatest falsehoods of history. The mothers who worked in the factories had nothing to cook with. They did not leave their homes and their kitchens to go into the factories. They went into the factories because they had no kitchens. And if they had a kitchen, they had no food to cook in those kitchens. And the children did not come from comfortable nurseries. They were starving and dying. And all the talk about the so-called unspeakable horror of early capitalism can be refuted by a single statistic. Precisely in these years in which British capitalism developed, precisely in the age call the Industrial Revolution in England at the years from 1760 to 1830, precisely in those years the population of England doubled, which means that hundreds or thousands of children who would have died in preceding times survived and grew to become men and women. I am very deeply concerned about the fate of what we might say are pre-capitalist or pre-industrial societies, where people are living in a shockingly bad condition. And the approach of many in the industrialized society is that any introduction of a capital or of modern conveniences into these societies is destroying their culture and therefore would make these people worse off. It's almost as though the goal of some anti-capitalists is to preserve a kind of human zoo where we can observe people living without the trappings of modern civilization. Well, those trappings of modern civilization are what made us able to live to ripe old ages, avoid much pain and suffering and enjoy a number of other conveniences. Art Cardin mentions the drop in mortality in industrialized society, capitalistic societies. He says that infant mortality and maternal mortality are miniscule fractions of what they used to be and life expectancy has increased radically. It was 24 at the height of the Roman Empire, 30 in Britain at the end of the 15th century, 45 in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century and it is pushing 80 today. Another comment you'll hear sometimes is that capitalism is unjust and I won't spend all my time here this morning quoting from Mises, but Mises has an excellent section in the anti-capitalistic mentality. I'll just read a couple of sentences here. He says that it's a delusion that nature has bestowed upon every man certain rights. He said, according to this doctrine, nature is open-handed toward every child born. There's plenty of everything for everybody. So everybody has a fair inalienable claim against all his fellow men and against society that he should get the full portion which nature has allotted to him. The eternal laws of natural and divine justice require that nobody should appropriate to himself by what by rights belongs to other people. So he says in this mentality that the poor are needy only because unjust people have deprived them of their birthright. So many have taken it upon themselves to rectify the situation by employing the government to reallocate wealth, make everybody prosperous. Well, Mises says this is false, completely false. Nature is not bountiful, nature is stingy. It's restricted the supply of everything that's indispensable to the preservation of human life. We are surrounded by scarcity. So Mises says that men cooperating under the system of the division of labor have created all the wealth which these, he calls them daydreamers, considers a free gift of nature. Now, you will find a number of groups who will make arguments along these lines that poor countries are poor because the capitalistic countries have exploited them as though the stock of wealth in the world were fixed and the only way for one person or country to become wealthy is for some other country to become poor, that economics is some sort of zero-sum game, but we understand that with trade, both parties to the transaction can expect to be better off the end of the transaction. Wealth is created every time somebody trades with another individual, every time another country trades with another country. There is a gain. So the more we can extend the capacity to trade, the freedom to trade around the world, the better off we will be. Wealth is being created every day and not simply transferred. Third, there's this very common idea that capitalism does not make us happy. I had suggested a number of readings, I don't know whether you had taken advantage of those that posted on the website. One of these was an article by Cameron Mofeed called Global Capitalism in Crisis and he argues that Western wealth creation has caused depression and neuroses and anxiety. He says, people in Southern Ethiopia don't spend billions of dollars on diet and slimming products to combat obesity. Of course not, they have a more serious concern. Starvation. Now a lot of this is based on a 1974 study by Richard Easterlin which unfortunately became the prevailing myth in sociological studies and understanding of happiness in industrialized societies. And Easterlin purported to show what has been called the Easterlin paradox. Countries that are wealthier are populated by people who are less happy. So for over a quarter century, close to 35 years now I guess, people have had this idea that you can make wealth with capitalism but you can't make happiness. Well, there are a lot of things that contribute to a person's happiness and it's certainly possible for some people to find happiness by dispensing of physical possessions and finding happiness in something that is immaterial. I have no problem with that, that's fine. But as to the Easterlin paradox, making this some sort of general statement that societies that grow wealthier are also growing unhappy. There were two 2008 studies that looked at this data and they showed that in fact, Easterlin paradox simply doesn't exist. Countries that are wealthier tend to be populated by happier people. As countries grow wealthier, they grow happier and people who are wealthier within the wealthy countries are happier than the people who are poorer in wealthier countries. There's a good section on this and a book by Matt Ridley that came out not too long ago called A Rational Optimist. I'm not advocating everything Ridley says. I don't agree with him on some things that he says in the book, but he's got a pretty good section beginning of that book on the Easterlin paradox, which as Ridley points out, does not exist. Furthermore, we might ask whether the goals of a person are appropriate. If my goals are to accomplish wealth and I find that wealth doesn't make me happier is that the fault of capitalism that I chose the wrong goals or made a mistake in what I chose to do. Read the book of Ecclesiastes sometime. There's a lot of truth in this idea that physical wealth does not necessarily make one happier and yet in general, it seems that when you can live a longer, healthier life, when you have a better education, when there's less infant mortality and maternal mortality, when you have a more varied and consistent diet, when there's easier communication with family and friends and the ability to see new places and all of these things are products of the material and other kinds of wealth that capitalism has made available. Cameron Mofi, who I mentioned earlier, says that if a free economy can't make us free of all anxiety or depression or these other neuroses, then it's a failure and it should be replaced, I guess, with interventionism or socialism or something and of course, this is also a false dichotomy. This makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Problem free life is not to be obtained through markets and capitalism. As Gary North mentioned a couple of days ago here, libertarianism is not a magic pill, solve all of society's problems. Free economy is not sufficient to produce morality or happiness, but it certainly can go a long way to alleviating some of those things that cause us to be unhappy. Fourth, I can get my, there we go. Capitalism is said to leave no account for non-material goals. Another way of saying this would be it puts profits ahead of people. Well, I think this is one of the most important criticisms of capitalism, I see it frequently and I don't think economists have done a terribly good job of addressing this. The critics of capitalism will readily admit that capitalism creates a lot of material goods, but they'll say, well, it's morally bad because you're not including non-material goods. Cameron Moffitt again defines economism as regarding human societies primarily as economic systems in which economic considerations alone govern our choice and decisions. Tawny in a book called Religion and the Rise of Capitalism says, a reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria that are not purely economic. Now those two statements, I think, betray a misunderstanding of economics. If I give food charitably to my neighbor that involves using resources to accomplish goals and therefore that action is within the realm of economics. Economics is about how we use resources of many kinds to accomplish our goals. Now it doesn't say anything about the validity or the goodness of the goals, but economics does play a role in how we exercise our views of morality and charity and so forth. Moffitt says that economic considerations have displaced values such as faith, spirituality, justice, love, compassion, sympathy, empathy and cooperation. Well, faith requires action. Human action brings us into the realm of praxeology and economics is a large and well-developed subset of praxeology. Human action, whether it's motivated by faith or greed, is within the realm of economics. So if our spiritual goals require feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, access to material things helps us in this and we are not confronted with some sort of conflict between physical things and spiritual goals. And in a free economy, as I pointed out earlier, if you want to be an ascetic and you want to reject modern tools and consumption goods, you're free to do that, it's the nature of freedom. It's even Weinberg, another reading that I had posted for you to look at prior to this lecture as a section on what he calls the free market utopia. Weinberg makes it pretty clear that what he wants is equal wealth distribution regardless of the inequalities of talent and experience that he admits exist. But he wants an ex post equality, whatever, however much you produce, then you have to share that with those who don't. Well, okay, this is the typical problem of communism. How do you motivate people if they know that however hard they work, then their gains, their income has to be shared? Well, Weinberg says, well, people won't be motivated by money in my ideal world. People will be motivated by having a higher title or greater fame or greater authority and that these things would be enough to encourage people to produce. Okay, well, how do we know? I'm reminded of one of the old Star Trek. This went through multiple versions. The one with Jean-Luc Picard, all-headed fellow at the captain of the spaceship. And there's some sort of, I didn't watch much of this, honestly, really. But apparently, there's one episode that I do remember seeing where this sort of the greedy bartender character who's the representative of all things evil about capitalistic society and the show trades with people. And Jean-Luc Picard says at some point, we don't need money now in our society. You never see money changing hands on Star Trek. Because of course, people are motivated by these other things. And well, only one person gets to be the captain of the Starship. Not quite sure how that's supposed to be an equal distribution of privileges. But nevertheless, Weinberg's utopian vision really defies belief. He says, and this is a quote, for many Americans, the danger of tyranny lies not in the government, but employers or insurance companies or health maintenance organizations in which we need government to protect us. To say that any worker is free to escape an oppressive employer by getting a different job is about as realistic as to say that any citizen is free to escape an oppressive government by immigrating. Really? Okay, I don't know where. Shall I point out the tens or hundreds of millions of people killed by war, political purges, genocide, state-induced famines in the last century, the political imprisonment of millions of people? Read the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. The slave camps, the crystal knocks, the police brutality, the siege warfare of economic sanctions and other horrors produced by governments. And then you're gonna compare this to the fact that your insurance company did not pay up as you thought they should. You know, I had a dispute with my insurance company not too long ago. I never worried that they were gonna shoot me or tase me even. I didn't worry about this. I said, well, next opportunity, I'm just gonna change my insurance company. You know how long that would take? Less than an hour, given that I don't know what I'm doing. How long would it take me to immigrate? I have a good friend that wants to immigrate to Chile or power to and fine. But how hard is that gonna be compared to changing your insurance company when Weinberg wants to say, do we have more to worry about from our insurance companies than we do from our governments? My insurance company is not gonna fill me up when I travel through an airport. I do get a little worked up on this stuff. Fifth, I got all agitated and forgot to catch up with my slides here. Well, number five, my students don't know what to think of me back to Wofford. They just sort of sit there and stun silence. Fifth, capitalism is said to be aesthetically obnoxious and environmentally irresponsible. Well, I mentioned in my talk yesterday on environmental resource issues, the BP crisis, the tragedy of the commons and the Gulf of Mexico and how it's an unfortunate spill, but we can point quite easily to incentives that were created by the laws governing drilling in deep water. The management of those resources by the Minerals Management Service and other interventions of government, I don't think that it's justifiable to point to capitalism as being responsible for these massive accidents. Now, neither am I saying that if we have this sort of perfectly free market society, there will never be oil spills and there will never be accidents. I mean, human society is not perfect, but neither do I think that it's justifiable to say that government would improve upon things with its interventions into things like oil drilling. Mises, again, in the anti-capitalistic mentality says only romantic pre-possession can induce an observer to ignore the fact that more and more citizens of the capitalistic countries live in an environment which cannot be simply dismissed as ugly. Take a look. We have 33 countries represented here and I mean no offense to anyone who might happen to be from one of these countries, but I've spent more than the average amount of time in Eastern Europe and I've seen some of the leftovers of the communist regimes in these countries and you see these kinds of buildings all over the place. Maybe my artistic sensibilities are not well-developed enough, but I call that ugly. I'm sure there are people who would say, well, that's beautiful in some sort of abstract way, but these kind of shoebox style apartment buildings which are replicated ad nauseam in many cities in the former communist areas are, you know, we wanna say that capitalistic societies don't produce things of beauty as well as societies in which governments have more say over architectural styles. I had an article in the Freeman magazine several years ago on urban sprawl and I have a colleague of mine, an English professor who took students on a tour of coastal South Carolina, North Carolina and pointed out all of the tragedies of urban sprawl and he concluded that it was a bad idea to turn the whole future of a region over only to people with money to make. He said that there were neglected landscapes along the route, meaning that land use had been left to market forces rather than being regulated by a group of central planners. He said for two days we'd passed miles and miles of shabby strip malls, big box development blocks and back to back burbs. As we clicked off bulging coastal county after coastal county, it felt as if the whole South had sold out to the asphalt contractors and the burger merchants. The safe zones in his view were areas where the government had sealed off or locked up some property to be safe as he said from the ugly changes brought about by millions of people still rushing to the coast. In contrast he pointed out an area in Virginia where he said good county planning had protected the landscape. Now I think I probably agree with my English professor friend on the desirability of unpolluted mountain streams and rolling pasture land and unpolluted marshes and mature forests and I grew up in the low country of South Carolina. There's coastal rivers, brown coastal rivers, all the tannin from the trees and you see, I love spending time in the outdoors. I don't want to see strip malls and burger joints in these places either unless of course I want what they offer for sale. And I may not see this development as some sort of apocalypse but I understand the desire to see part of nature untouched by humans. And a lot of Americans seem to have similar desires which is why you see coastal resorts that have these undeveloped enclaves within the resort, fairly low density housing, beach restrictions and so forth and these places command very high prices because people put a value on untouched property. Now there are several ways in which you could accomplish those goals. You could say maybe we can convince fewer people to spend time at the coast and therefore we would have fewer parking lots and cars and so forth. We'd have more undeveloped property. Okay, well if you can convince people to change their preferences, it's nothing inconsistent with market ideas to do that. Another approach would be for people to prefer undeveloped land to buy the undeveloped land and then resist the various offers to sell it. And there are groups like the Nature Conservancy which, as I understand it, acquire land by gift or purchase and then they retain it in this sort of undeveloped state. Of course that's expensive and you are gonna have to have the discipline to resist the urge to sell out but it's perfectly within a market system to do things that way. Alternatively, you could bring in the heavy hand of the state and you could say, well the government can prevent people from exercising their preferences by restricting development in some way. Restrict land density requirements restrictions, zoning restrictions and this kind of thing. Now if you do this, if you do restrict development along the coast and prices of things along the coast are going to go up, beaches are going to turn into the domain of the wealthy even more than they now are. But to someone who can afford to visit these places that may not seem as much of a problem. You find a lot of hidden elitism in environmentalism. Anyway, if you're looking for answers to why we have urban sprawl and why I think so ugly, well the state encourages sprawl in many cases with subsidized infrastructure, with the incentives to individual home ownership as opposed to more dense housing that might leave more land untouched. You cannot say that the current development scheme is the product of the free market. It's not. Sixth, corporate scandals prove that capitalism doesn't work. So you'll have people who oppose a free economy who will say, well there's Enron, there's WorldCon, there's all these corporations that cheated their stockholders or whatever. Now there's nothing about capitalism that endorses unethical business practices, but I mean frankly I run into people who teach business ethics and it's almost as though they treat business ethics as though it's an oxymoron, like military intelligence or something. Business and ethics just can't go together. But they can, but unfortunately people like Cameron Mofi, whom I mentioned earlier, would like to use these kinds of scandals as a way to introduce state intervention to promote various social goals. They say, well the market has failed, therefore the state must intervene. If you remember from your, maybe you had a class in logic or something, this is called a known sequitur. It does not follow. It's not followed because you had a corporate scandal that the state must intervene. State's intervention is going to be very, very far from perfect. And sort of like saying, well your parents didn't feed you a balanced diet and they yell at you a few times and you ought to be placed in foster care. Does the state really have such a good record of promoting social goals? And we've got, again, war, famine, genocide, corporate welfare, political scandal, bribery, corruption, police brutality, deadly regulation, fascism, more war, and this is supposed to be an improvement over Enron and WorldCom, which by the way, when you have these scandals like this, the market tends to heavily discount their stock. It punishes these companies effectively by driving them out of business. Once it becomes known that your firm or suspected that your firm is doing something out of order, the owners of that firm will find themselves with lost value. There are principal agent problems, but if you want to see a principal agent problem, look at the principal, the citizen, and the agent, the government, and see if you don't find a few major gaps between ownership and control. Not that citizens own their government in any realistic sense. They don't. The United States may be one of the less scandal-ridden governments in the world, but that's not saying much. You can go back as long as you like, you can go back to the 1860s and 70s and see the Republican Party shunting vast sums of money to incredibly wasteful transcontinental railroad projects. As Tom DiLorenzo has pointed out, one of the largest corporate welfare schemes of that time was Franklin Roosevelt, who I remember when I was in graduate school and I read this and I just was shocked, would no longer be shocked, but Roosevelt added about $4 billion, which was a lot of money at one point, to the federal government's books in 1934 by requiring people to turn in their gold to the government, paid them $20.67 an ounce for it, and then said after he had it all that it was now worth $35 an ounce. What, $4 billion added to the government's books. If that's not in Ron's style financing, I don't know what is. Then there's the Social Security Racket, which is the largest government program in the world, which has a longer life than any other pyramid scheme only because it's forced on everyone. This is the Marshall Plan, I just was last semester, I was teaching my students who offered about the Marshall Plan, and basically American taxpayers cough up money involuntarily to the US government, which sends the money to European governments, which then engage in this kind of matching program where if they can extract more money from their citizens, they get more from the US government, and then the US government says, well, that's great, you've got all this money from us and from your own citizens. Now you have to spend it on American corporations. So effectively this is this giant money laundering scheme in which American taxpayers through via several governments are transferring money over to American corporations. And yet nobody thinks of this welfare. Few people think of this as some sort of scandal. It is, or should be, seventh. Capitalism is racist and sexist. In a free society, people are allowed to have whatever taste and preferences they like. But in a free society, if you ignore productivity in order to favor one group or favor another group, then that will come at a cost. In contrast, when government intervention is brought into the picture, this can shield people from the real economic consequences of their views. First, couple of weeks of my Principles of Microeconomics class, I spent some time talking about rent control. Most of you have had class in rent controls or the classic example of what happens when you have a price control, in this case a price ceiling on rent. And of course, as you know, if you impose a price ceiling above the equilibrium price, you're going to get a shortage, I'm sorry, below the equilibrium price, you're going to get a shortage. Which means that there's going to be more people now wanting each available apartment than there would be under a market system in which we're moving toward the equilibrium all the time. Now, if you're a terrible, racist landlord and you don't want people of some particular ethnic group staying in your apartment building and you have no price controls, no rent control, when you turn away a willing tenant, would be tenant, an applicant, you are more likely to end up with a vacant apartment that costs you some hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. If you have rent control, you've got in effect a line of people who want your apartment, you can pick and choose from among that group that would like to have the apartment, according to your own taste and preferences. So, you are insulated from the consequences, the financial consequences of your exercising your taste and preferences. Employers have an incentive to hire on the basis of ability, customers have the incentive to take a good deal no matter what the race or religion of the person who's selling, store owners have an incentive to sell to anyone. One article by Jeff Jacobi, which appeared on, I think it was on Cafe Hayek a while back, it deals with this issue of the early segregation of street cars. Jacobi says, far from craving the authority to relegate blacks to the back of buses and street cars, for example, the owners of municipal transportation systems actively resisted segregation. They did so not out of some lofty commitment to racial equality or integration, but for economic reasons. Segregation hurt their bottom line. It drove up their expenses by requiring them as a manager of Houston's street car company complained in 1904 to haul around a good deal of empty space that is assigned to the colored people and not available to both races. In many cities, segregation also provoked blacks to boycott street cars cutting sharply into the company's profit. Jennifer Roback in an article in the Journal of Economic History shows that in one southern city after another, private transit companies tried to scuttle segregation laws or simply ignored them. Thus, Jacobi says, in Jacksonville, Florida, a 1901 ordinance requiring black passengers to be segregated went unenforced until 1905 when the state legislature mandated segregation statewide. He says, the new statute was passed by the legislature much against the will of street car companies. So well known was the company's hostility to segregation that when a group of black citizens challenged the law in court, their attorney felt compelled to deny being in cahoots with the railroad lines in Jacksonville. Capitalism was opposed to this artificial government-imposed segregation. George Leaf says, not many businessmen prefer prejudice to profits. In a free market, you will tend to see people who select employees or customers on the basis of something other than willingness to pay or willingness to produce, you're gonna see that disappear over time because they're competitive disadvantage in doing so. In South Africa, the reason for the adoption of the policy of apartheid in the 1930s was that white workers were incensed that so many blacks were being hired and were competing with them in pay and promotions. So they persuaded the government to restrict the better paying jobs to whites only. So once again, we see that business was the enemy of discrimination government was the cause. The Jim Crow laws in the states of the South specified that certain jobs in industry could only be done by white workers, but if the industrialists were intent on discriminating, why did this need to become a law? Leaf says that the answer is that to preserve the status of the white worker, there had to be a legal restraint upon employers. In the absence of the law, competition would have encouraged employers to dispense with this nonsense. Kaplan and Stringham say that competitive pressure reinforces statistical discrimination based on real group differences. That is, people who broke contracts in the past are more likely to break them in the future. That's why credit rating matters individually. But at the same time, competitive pressure dissolves taste-based discrimination against, say, redheads or something. In Kaplan and Stringham referenced Seoul in 1994, Seoul's done some good work in this area. They say unregulated markets are not going to be generically discriminatory or non-discriminatory. It depends on whether there are real group differences or not. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on number eight here because there's much more that's been done this week in several of the talks. But you've seen this argument. Capitalism is prone to bubbles and panics, and it's distressing to me, although I do try to make some argument against it when I have an opportunity. It's distressing that so many people believe that the recent economic crisis, or I should say current economic crisis, is due to greedy banks or mortgage lenders. And it's almost as though people would like to form a theory of business cycles based on variations in greed. So I say, well, look, if greed among mortgage lenders caused this housing bubble to pop and then, or cause the housing bubble and then created this kind of lingering recession that we seem to be in. If greed caused that, then why did greed get so much worse in the last several years? I mean, was greed worse between 2000 and 2006, or what? Was it better earlier? Was greed not so prevalent earlier? If you're going to explain business cycles on the basis of some sort of capitalistic greed, you've got to offer some sort of explanation as to why greed rises and falls and therefore causes these cycles. Sort of like the discussions I have with people who complain about high gas prices and how BP and his other companies are just raking consumers over the coals and forcing them to pay these high prices and they're all in cahoots with one another and they're trying to force you to, every time gas prices go up, it's because of the greedy oil companies. Okay, well, how do you explain gas prices falling then? Pray tell. Is that because gas oil companies got less greedy? It's almost as though greed only goes in one direction, but if the prices fall, there must be something else. Obama threatened them or something. I don't know. But if you look at Austrian business cycle theory and you see that it's actually the government intervention that causes the bubbles, the intervention to alleviate the recessions once they start is going to generally make things worse. You don't have to look too far in this building to find a dozen books on the subject. Here's several older one by Mises, The Causes of the Economic Crisis. Of course, the classic by Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression, and then by Murphy's more recent book, Politically Injured Guide to Great Depression and the New Deal. He gave a talk yesterday. I couldn't attend, I was speaking at the same time. I was actually flattered that somebody showed up for me. Murphy's great on this stuff. And if you missed his talk yesterday on the depression, then you may want to pick up his book. Ninth, capitalism won't pursue important projects. Well, it's, again, it's just distressing to me how often I run into this. Well, what would happen if we didn't have the government building roads or big things that are too big for the market to handle? Oh, well, how big is too big for the market to handle? Well, roads. Okay, Reed-Walter Block, I'm not gonna say too much more about that. It's not impossible. In fact, De Lorenzo points out in an essay that he did some years ago on the role of private transportation in early American history. I'm struggling to recall the exact source, but if you contact me later, I'll give it to you. He says most roads were privately run. In fact, state governments were turning over roads to private companies because private companies managed them better. I did an article for Mises Daly, I guess it was about a month ago on the space shuttle program, which is the last one, mercifully, last one landed and it prompted a bit of a retrospective on what this program did or did not do. And you can look up my article on that. Vexler's got another one that just appeared a few days ago, also on the space shuttle and he provides some more data. He says the cost for the project was estimated to be about $5 billion to deliver stuff to orbit at $118 a pound. Now, this was predicated on a number of assumptions that never did actually come to be. They were gonna have flights every few weeks, they were gonna have this massive cargo capacity. When in fact they completed the shuttle, Vexler says the reality was a bit different. He said the shuttle was 20% too heavy. Cost was actually $27,000 per pound delivered to orbit. Overhaul after each flight actually took many months and cost a one and a half billion dollars making this regular shuttle service impractical. Shuttle unfortunately has this incredibly complex machine and things go wrong and we've seen two of them crash, one on lift off and one on landing. In other words, the program has been a total failure. Incredibly expensive. If a car manufacturer, Vexler says, tried to sell a car that cost 228 times what was promised could fit only half the advertised passengers and had to be refurbished after every drive. They might not do so well in the market especially when a much cheaper alternative was available. The Soviet launcher designed in 1965 actually cost a tenth of what the shuttle cost and now has in fact replaced it. I'm not defending the Soviet space program any more than I'm defending NASA but the Vexler's article is great on this. You can find this on the Mises blog. I think it was about the 23rd, 24th, 25th that it appeared but it's there. The problem I think with programs like the Space Shuttle program is that governments don't calculate very well. I mentioned this in my talk yesterday but there's this fundamental socialist calculation problem that Mises mentioned as early as 1920. Governments are trying to operate in the absence of prices. They don't have the ability to decide easily which method of production to use, which product to produce, what nature the product should be. There's no way for them to do this. It's why we call it the impossibility of socialist calculation. Furthermore, there are these political variables. The politicians and the bureaucrats have their own goals. They have their own objectives which are not necessarily consistent with these lofty objectives that we're told about like doing scientific research and exploration and that kind of thing. I ask my students often in trying to decide what's the best use of our resources, how do we know that sending little robot cars to land on Mars and drive around, take pictures and drill holes and rocks? How do we know that that's the best use of the money that it took to do that? And I had somebody tell me, well, actually this is only $7, I don't remember what the figure was, $7 per citizen per year or something like that. It's not voluntary. I don't, you have no way of telling whether $7 is a reasonable price or not because you have no information on that, no reliable information. And when I posted this article on the Space Shuttle program, I had people giving me their responses to this and I was shocked, dismayed by the number of people who came back with some kind of thing, like, well, it's better for the government to spend the money on the Space Shuttle than spend the money on war. Yes, but that's a false dichotomy. Again, that's not our choice. It's not, well, the government's gonna spend the money somewhere so we might as well spend it on something that's less harmful. I don't give it, I don't take it as a given that the government has to spend the money in the first place. And I would rather they spend the money on Space Shuttle than spend the equivalent amount of money killing people but this is not an argument for the Space Shuttle program. Tenth and last, I've only got a couple of minutes here. I won't spend a lot of time on this. The idea that capitalism leads to the production of objectionable goods and services. Well, people who want to make money tend to provide what their customers want which could include a number of things that we might regard as distasteful or undesirable or immoral or sinful, pornography, prostitution, drugs, whatever it is that is considered undesirable. Well, Mises, again in this book that I quoted first in my talk today, Economic Policy, he's got this great line in there, the paragraph in there on freedom really means the ability of people to choose things even if they're bad for them, okay? That's freedom. It's not freedom if I have somebody telling me you can't eat that Twinkie because it's bad for you. It's going to make you overweight or give you some kind of disease or increase your chance of a heart attack or something like that. A free society does not condone the production or consumption of what people want. The way I put it sometimes is that sin does not equal crime just because something might be bad morally does not mean it ought to be illegal. Again, if you want further reading on this kind of thing, one of the now classics, if I could say that in this line is Walter Blox defending the undefendable. It's been, I think, through several editions, many printings and I don't know, most of you probably have it by now. If you're not, then I would encourage you to pick it up and give it a read. So just because you've got market leanings doesn't make you into some sort of moral reprobate. Although you may be and you're free to be. All right, well I'll stop here and thank you for your time.