 Our final speaker this morning before a time for some Q&A is a name that I'm sure is familiar and a voice that I'm sure is Familiar to many of you Charles Goyette. It's not only a longtime radio host in the Phoenix area on several stations He's also someone who's done so much to forward and assist the Ron Paul revolution by working with Ron on his radio podcast and finally I will only I will just note that Charles should be lauded by everyone in this room for having the courage to stand up against The foreign policy disaster and misadventure known as the Iraq war at personal cost to himself Ladies and gentlemen Charles Goyette Good morning everybody. It's great to see so many friends and friends of liberty in one place dangerous to be in one place there aren't enough of us but And it's always an honor for me to get an opportunity to participate in anything that the Mises Institute does Because I consider it and I'm sure you'll agree that it is the vital and intellectual center of the freedom movement in America today It's an honor. It's a real honor for all of us to think and Be able to tell our kids and our grandkids in the future that we had a chance to hear from and break bread with The two most effective champions of liberty of our era Lou Rockwell and Ron Paul today So the question before the house is what is to be done. It's actually a question as a very old pedigree linen addressed it Murray Rothbard addressed it We've in the meantime had a lot of linen very little a very little of Rothbard about what is to be done so as I pondered how to get into the topic this morning the The Arizona Republic landed on my doorstep with the answer yesterday morning And the answer was this a story here on the front page that says the United States spent 384 million dollars to train 180 Syrians now it notes in the lead That's two million dollars a piece of course to train them now It notes in the lead so that you won't be alarmed. It says these are the moderate Syrians Just like the other ones that we do all the moderate they're all moderates when we when we train them and And then it notes it assures us by the way that although this might seem like an exorbitant amount of money That it's not all money down the drain because they didn't spend it all a whole bunch of it is still sitting in Warehouses in the form of weapons equipment and ammunition in Syria. Oh great You know, you know how that will be used. Don't you? So the state engages though in violence and economic waste like this like a like a meth addict and When you ask, what is to be done? It seems to me clearly there is only one answer and we must Decent to disempower the state by any means possible Before they engage in any more ruin and any more any more violence And I will frame this with two examples of the the presidents of this new millennium one example from each of them dealing with both violence and fiscal madness and Let me start with George W. Bush just a couple of weeks before he launched his his war in Iraq the president met in the White House with a couple of Iraqi-American businessmen To discuss What is to be done in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone and so help me now I This isn't an internet rumor. I have this from a US ambassador in his book The conversation Went something like this the president said Sunnis Shia I Thought Iraqis were Muslims And of course this is the the intellectual enlightenment that led to you know taking the Letting the genie out of the bottle in the Middle East and the you know the increased polarization and radicalization of the region and the the destruction and the deaths and You know the migration now throughout Europe and the threat to Western civilization over the next hundred years and all of this stuff I thought they were all well. I thought they were all Muslims So but to be nonpartisan I don't like to say bipartisan nonpartisan. Let me tell you about the last presidential election Barack Obama showed up on David Letterman show and And David Letterman happened to ask early in the conversation. He said so how much is the national debt? Oh, you've never seen Obama so nervous Clearly he had no idea Now I mean this is absolutely astonishing You know for somebody that's so kind in and talking about whether the debt limit should be raised how much he spent It's no idea and so he kind of you know And and and so Letterman came to his rescue and he said he Obama said well, I don't know precisely So Letterman said well is it ten trillion dollars? Now for the record the national jet debt had just climbed to ten trillion dollars at about the time Barack Obama was elected At the time he showed up on Letterman show it was sixteen trillion dollars You know, it's about eighteen and a half now and it would be twenty trillion dollars when Obama leaves office so Obama is very widely and he said he said well in in in ducking the question. He said well The thing you have to know about the national debt is We owe it to ourselves Now I was a little shocked to hear this because I heard this all in my public education in college I heard this Keynesian nonsense was all my formative years But I thought they had stopped it Because you know even if you could say it back then you can't say it now You know we owe we over six we own over six trillion dollars with all deference to Lou Let me put it a little better. He reminded us the other day The government owes over six trillion dollars to foreign. I'm not a part of it. Leave me out of this the The government owes over six trillion dollars to foreigners so you can't two and a half trillion dollars to the Chinese the Japanese so you cannot say that you know, we owe it to ourselves, but Listen, I was always on the alert for this kind of Balderdash in from my teachers and so on and I got a lot of it In my formative years, you know a child of the 50s and 60s And I suppose one of the reasons I got I got wary about the things that they would say was in the first grade interested in things about government politics and stuff and I remember asking my first grade teacher to explain to me the difference between a king and a president Now it would be generous and say that I'm sure that she was trying to you know to address my little Vibre six-year-old consciousness and Teach me something about democracy. So she said so help me Well, the people don't necessarily want the king But they want the president Man you haven't been around my house long you should hear my dad So So I feel like I was somewhat immunized against a lot of this this Conventional wisdom stuff went on but there was one I will confess to you That bothered me a great deal In high school and into college when you would talk about you talk about the regulatory state the imposition of the state when you talk about a centralized economic planning when you talk about free markets and This was was a meme that was repeated over and over again. It was well Charles All of that stuff, you know, that might have been that might have been fine for simpler times. Oh That that was okay for you know at the time of the founders and so on but this is a you know This is hopelessly outdated. Oh, that stuff was was okay in a simple agrarian Economy, but you know things are far too complex and we're far too large for any of this kind of freedom stuff And you know, it's an assertion I mean I you can deal with somebody who says we owe it to ourselves and you can point out how absurd that is But when somebody makes an assertion like this, you know, it's there's nothing really to grab on just to sort of oh it's not appropriate for our complex era and It bothered me a lot not not because I thought it was true But I didn't really know how to refute it and the problem with something like that of course is that taken to its logical extreme You know with increasing complexity with increasing growth if it mandates more and more state intervention in our lives You know the end game of obviously totalitarianism, which is clearly where we were all all headed So I embarked in a media career when I was still a teenager and this put me in the company of people with life Accomplishments that were well above my pay grade, you know authors and opinion mongers and people kind of worldly accomplishment and and When I would find one who I thought was you know friendly to our ideas about About about freedom about liberty about markets and so on so forth. I would start to inquire of them You know, what do you say about this now? I? Will tell you Nobody ever could give me an answer. I Never got a satisfactory answer. I got a sir. Oh, no, it's still it's fine everything. No, they're wrong So but I wanted an answer I wanted something that I could hang my hat on and I did not get one now eventually I discovered Austrian economics thank goodness and I discovered Mises and discovered Rothbard and discovered haslet and I discovered the whole corpus the whole body of of Austrian economics and So it was all Suddenly it was like, you know, it was like mana from heaven. It was like a intellectual feast for me that we you know I now had a means of refuting things that what that I knew wasn't true, but I couldn't refute as an adolescent and So and I wonder to this day How any self-respecting or intellectually honest if there is one socialist can have Frankly confronted Mises's critique of socialism and its inevitable failure can't calculate How they can have encountered this and not jumped out the window I Apparently it hasn't gotten to Bernie Sanders yet. Yeah. Oh, I just learned you probably all know this. I just learned Bernie Sanders Took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union Now that's yeah, now, I mean if you want to show solidarity with you know with the socialist classes You could have gone to you know, Italy or France. That's something a little more romantic But he went to he went to the Soviet in any event it may not have been known Hasn't been learned yet By Bernie Sanders, but they knew it in the Kremlin and that's why they had the Sears catalog this poor pathetic effort to To impute the prices and the relative value of things in the absence of a price system and they used they turned to the American Sears catalog to try to fake it so Austrian business cycle theory how can anybody Be fooled how can anybody be taken in how can anybody? accept, you know QE 1 2 3 4 5 whatever they've got planned for us however far fed manipulation of interest rates without seeing the hard record that all of this stuff means as though there's magic money, you know We can magic magically create it and it has no impact We just get there's no cost to doing so and but you know, we don't believe in magic because we're adults so And it's the same. It's it's the same with in my view Hayek's distinction between what he called the taxes and The cosmos and how anybody can confront it that idea and still support its central plan a taxes was you know It was a structure a top-down Organized thing, you know, we get the word taxonomy from it, right? We we have a tax on in the animal kingdom, you know, it's everything classified, you know We have Cordata and we have you know kingdom fine class order family genus species So the duck bill platypus comes along kind of screws the structure up a little bit But you know it has it has its place and a cosmos is a spontaneously arising an Autodynamic a self-generating system and Hayek likes to talk about language. It's a great example of a cosmos Self-generating nobody nobody handed it down Nobody created it. It didn't come from a committee or the state, but it's not just language. It's it's the evolution of money and Markets of course are great examples of this sort of stuff when Donald Trump builds a high rise He appropriately Uses the the taxes model. I mean, you know, so many so many spans of steel such and such structural strength So many, you know miles of copper wiring for this so much this so much that you know It's all and it's all has to be very very precise and that's the appropriate application of the taxes model but Were he to succeed in the same kind of structure, you know forcing the top-down order on The economy on trade on all the things that he's going to force it on You know with the obvious result would be a calamity and of course we have all the evidence of the world of this I don't understand why it's so often overlooked. You know, you have the the failure of the soviet union you have East germany and west germany you have north korean south korean have ample evidence of this kind of thing when when a president say bush decides to impose An order like a jeffersonian democracy on iraq Calamity is going to resort is good. It is going to be the result because if you understand the Centralization and command nature of the structure you understand that it destroys culture It destroys spontaneous order that people have created in their own lives over time with things that have worked it destroys what we call it then a cosmos so This is how I began to immunize immunize myself against the The central economic planners of the state and the global empire builders and and so on now Rather than their assertion, this is evident to all of you already The rather than the assertion of my teachers that you know the more complex the argument complexity and size and so on Makes you know the cosmos model or the freedom model the market model inappropriate. The truth is just the opposite the more complex The larger the more imperative the market is I mean you can imagine I guess a you know a closed economy and island You know state of one guy that makes bread and one guy that fishes and the chief that tells them what to exchange things at and so on and He rakes off his take and then he tells them what to exchange it for but Maybe they could get fed maybe that would work but everything changes in the real world everything changes You know somebody you know oceans change A fishing patterns change crops fail somebody dies Somebody's born a castaway washes ashore with whatever whatever it is But if you multiply those few actors by by hundreds of millions you begin to be staggered By the complexity of it all and yet it all solves itself organically Without a central command in new york city. It's estimated that there are something like tens of billions Of sku's these are stop keeping stock keeping units For products and certain tens of billions for products and and services and only a madman Would think himself capable of intervening in this process Well, this is something I wrote about in uh In red and blue and and broke all over Um, but I do want to say that when I suggest that being immunized against the plague of statism We can depend upon austrian economics I I do want to suggest that I mean only people With healthy human consciousness Now that means not politicians With the obvious exception of uh of of one But anybody eager to control anybody ambitious to uh to rule others any anybody that is hungry the native criminal class um Don't have what I like to call healthy human consciousness in In uh early world war two richard nixon worked in the office of price administration in washington dc These were the price control guys. He worked in tires These were the rationing guys the price control guys and and uh, he learned What a nightmare this stuff was But the white house tapes show us That when he introduced his leninous sounding new economic plan In august of 1971 and phase one phase two phase three richard nixon's price controls. He knew That it would be destructive to the economy and he imposed it any way why Because it would be good for his reelection chances. He surmised in 1972 Not healthy human consciousness The the very existence of these people though in their hunger for for uh for power Desire to rule to control and so on is as great an argument as any that the state Needs to be disempowered and it needs to be disempowered right away. So What is to be done? When murray rothbart addressed this question more than 50 years ago about the freedom movement about the liberty movement about libert libertarians He said he said well, what we really are going to need is a center of gravity We're going to need a hardcore center. We're going to need a a a center That we can all kind of be around you know to hold this together and and so on and and uh, We have such a center. We have one of demonstrable capability of great achievement The kind that uh rothbart was talking about 52 years ago or so when he wrote what is to be done And I began by saying calling him out. I said, you know that the mesis institute is the is the vital And the intellectual center of the freedom movement in america today I shuttered to think where the freedom movement would be without it so I will tell you from my my lifetime and Trying to bring people in trying to recruit people talking about freedom in the media and my personal life and And so on in the public debate. I have found that the single Most effective way to immunize people against the blandishments and the lies and the Conventional wisdom and the the naked assertions of the state and the status the most effective way To immunize people against the state and its desire for ever more violence and economic destruction Is is austrian economics So There is a great deal to be done, but so much has been done for us. There are so many resources available to us Thanks to the mesis institute and we must all help I believe in every way that we can Thank you very much