 First, a little shameless self-promotion. This morning, I just docu-signed a contract with the Regnery Publishing to write a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics. They have a whole series. Tom Woods wrote the first one. It was the New York Times bestseller. So I'm thinking of just getting Tom to write this for me and put my name on it to sell books. I told him I could get it done by the end of the year so it would probably be published next summer. That's sort of a lag there because some of you have asked me, some of the students have asked me, are you doing a new book? So that's, so you don't have to ask me anymore. I didn't make that announcement. My topic today is Miss Estian Destructionism. And if you picked up a copy of Socialism, Misi's book, famous book Socialism, published in the early 1920s, it's broken into five sections. In section five, it's called Destructionism. Not Deconstructionism, that's a philosophical term, but Destructionism. And so my talk today is to familiarize you with what Misi's had to say about this and relate it to today's world. And not only today's world, but some of history. And I'm gonna read a couple of quotes from Misi's himself. What he's talking about here, Destructionism. He says, Socialism is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build anything, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created. Each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists. And so he writes about how even in his time, the whole history of socialists, socialism was to try to destroy the existing society that had evolved over maybe sometimes centuries, as far as that goes. And one of his comebacks to the so-called market socialists, by the way, was they ignore the fact that for it to have an operating capitalist economy, you have all these institutions, the insurance industry and the stockbroker industry and all these people gather a lifetime of information and knowledge in there to be able to perform all these tasks. And you can't just abolish all of that and then pretend to play capitalism without all of these individuals with all this built up knowledge. And so that's one of the fatal flaws of so-called Destructionism. And he's talking, he talks primarily about capital destruction and just the eating up of the capital that had been accumulated and the results of capital accumulation and production. And you can think of many examples. Of course, the Soviets lived off the capital accumulation by previous generations. That's how they kept the system going for some 70 years. Just eating up, not only eating up the capital that previous Russians had accumulated conquering other countries and eating up their capital too. The British, when they ejected Winston Churchill and adopted what they called Fabian socialism after World War II, they did the same thing. They ate up their capital and they destroyed a good part of the British economy until you get to the 1970s and the whole world was talking about what was called the British disease which was not a disease like COVID or anything like that. But it was just the recognition that by nationalizing all those industries, they all operated with the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the postal service. The steel industry, the car industry, the electricity, everything was just a mess. And it was the British disease. That's how Margaret Thatcher got elected. Sweden was a great capitalist country in the late 19th, early 20th century. Still is a capitalist country. It has private enterprise. It just has a giant welfare state just like America. I've been surprised to learn over the years, by the way, some of the students who come here and even some faculty who have come here from Europe were unaware that we had a big welfare state in America just like Sweden. And of course, Sweden, they adopted, you know, been big in the direction of socialism in the 1950s. And the result, in one of my books, I quote the, I guess it's the Swedish version of the American Economic Association. They said that there was not any net new job creation for these succeeding 55 years. And no net job creation on net as a result. And they had very high, you know, several hundred percent of interest rates in the 1980s. And it was a mess and they've tried to retract ever since. And of course, Venezuela was one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America for many years. They're said to have more oil than Saudi Arabia. And it just took them about 10 years to totally destroy their economy with socialism under Hugo Chavez and his successor. And you can go on and on, you know, chapter and verse after chapter and verse with this. And so Mises goes on to say this, another quote, progressive capital formation is the only means by which the position of the great masses can be permanently improved. And socialism and destructionism proposed to use up capital so as to achieve present wealth at the expense of the future. The policy of destructionism is the policy of the spin thrift who dissipates his inheritance regardless of the future. And we see that a lot today, don't we? Every when you look at, read today's news about the current administration in the US redefining infrastructure to mean not bridges and roads but people, infrastructure. So if they're redefining the welfare state as infrastructure, spending, reliable, hoping that no one will notice that a person in the bridge are not quite the same thing. And that's them. And another interesting thing that Mises said here, he said that for Karl Marx and his followers, he said this, all politics was only the continuation of war by another means. The socialist parties who have taken the Marxist parties for their model have elaborated the technique of agitation, caging for votes and for souls, the stirring up of electoral excitement, street demonstrations and terrorism. Sounds kind of like Antifa, doesn't it? And Black Lives Matter. I call it only Black Lives Matter because when they first became prominent, there were some people on television and radio who were asked, well, what do you think about this? And they would say that the natural thing that any normal human being would say was that, well, of course, all lives matter, fired, you know, lose your job, you're canceled by saying that. So I call them only Black Lives Matter. O-L-O-B-L-M, not B-L-M. And so it sounds very similar to what's going on now, isn't it? Mises, believe it or not, Mises also talked about the fake news of his day. I think it was Trump who coined the phrase fake news or made it popularized anyway. But Mises called them the literati. That's sort of, you know, that was his generation's word for this. He said the literati are essentially recruiting agents for socialism since socialism must destroy society and they are paving the way for destructionism. So even in his day, in the turn of the 20th century, the journalists and novelists, most novelists, were agents of socialist destructionism. And I wrote a paper years ago about this. There were two economists at University of Rochester, Jensen and Meckling. They were really good free market economists. They thought finance, but they also wrote a lot of good things about capitalism, free enterprise, and produced some good students there. And they had this intriguing paper. I always thought it was very telling about why it is that so many journalists, so-called in the media, are statists. And it's a pretty simple explanation why this is sort of inevitable. In that if you're a journalist who writes for a living, columnist, journalist, the bigger government gets and the more prominent government is in society, then your sources of information to do your job mostly come from the government. If you're a journalist who covers, say, environmental issues, you get your information from the EPA. If you cover labor issues, you get the US Department of Labor. And so if you're too critical of the EPA or the US Department of Labor, you're cut off. You're not gonna have a job anymore. And so it's not that they're necessarily ideologues, although many are socialist ideologues, but it's a matter of just economic incentives that if you want a career in a regime of private property and free enterprise and where government is minimal, that wouldn't be quite as true. That might not be true at all. But in today's world where government is so big and pervasive, it has destroyed freedom of speech. The late Milton Friedman wrote an article on this topic also, by the way, I think it was called Free Speech and Free Markets. And his argument was that whenever government becomes so big and pervasive in terms of its regulatory state, then corporations no longer have free speech because they're so fearful of regulatory retribution and they have to bribe their way in to businesses and they can be threatened with taxes that can ruin their business and so forth. And so they too are stifled and censored implicitly. And that's probably why so many corporations, by the way, to get their views out, they fund think tanks like the Cato Institute and places like that. They try to get them to promote their views without seemingly getting their hands dirty in the politics and hasn't really worked out for them that well, although. And so that's another interesting thing. Mises also talked about the attack on Western culture. I mean, you see them toppling statues of George Washington and things like sort of high tech book burning that we see today. Mises was there a hundred years ago talking about this almost a hundred years ago. The attack on Western culture, he said, people which have hailed with great enthusiasm, writings which call for the destruction of all cultural values are themselves on the verge of a great social catastrophe. So he's saying they're calling for the abolition of religion, for example. They're waiting for a social catastrophe if we do that. And he said this, social art preaches it, schools teach it and the churches disseminate it. And that was in the early 1920s. Mises is saying that. It sounds very familiar to Americans especially when you see that. Now the methods of destructionism that Mises talked about seem quaint by today's standards. And then if you read this section in his book, Socialism, you know, he's talking about labor legislation, minimum wage laws, maximum hour laws, compulsory social insurance, social security. That, you know, these have all been studied to death. Social security, you know, if the government says, well, we will take care of grandma, then the incentive that creates is a lot of people will think, well, then I don't need to take care of grandma. The government's gonna take care of her. And so, and or yourself, you save less if you think, well, the government's gonna send me to check someday when I retire. Unemployment insurance. I blogged something on Lou Rockwell's website a couple of weeks ago because a former colleague of mine at Loyola University, all the other economists, not me, but all the other economists congratulated him one day because he had a journal article published in which he, it was an econometric article in which he argued that increases in the uninsurance payments and the length of uninsurance have no effect on the unemployment rate. So you can pay people just any amount and they won't stay home instead of going to work. You know, no matter how much you pay them. And I wrote sort of a snippy, nasty email to all of them and they kind of liked that. They were offended, poor babies about that. But here's Misi saying, unemployment insurance, you know. And of course today, everybody knows it that this is BS. You go everywhere, like the seafood restaurant. I live five minutes from the ocean and there's a seafood restaurant, it's high season for tourists and they shut down on Sunday and Monday because they can't get enough kitchen help to keep the restaurant going. And because why? You asked the manager, the odd-wise reason, obvious. Well, they're still getting these government checks, unemployment insurance checks, and it doesn't make it, they do the benefit cost analysis. It's worth, it's, they make more money just sitting at home, taking the check than they can working in the kitchen somewhere. And so, and that's pervasive now. So I don't, so that's, Misi's was talking about that nationalization of industry, taxation, inflation. And these are, you know, the tools of destructionism. The communist manifesto is sort of the, really the manual for destructionism. If you look at the famous 10 points of the communist manifesto, abolition of private property and land. Well, the US government still owns more than 50% of all the land west of the Mississippi. If you've ever been to Las Vegas and you do what I do and you go to the top one of those hotels where you can at night and you can see all the lights, it's kind of weird looking because all these, you know, lights everywhere and then all of a sudden it's like, it's like God wrote a line in the sand, literally a line in the sand, nothing, you know, nothing. And you gotta wonder, well, you know, housing prices are so high in Las Vegas, why doesn't somebody build a few houses out there? You know, it's right next to it. Well, it's because that's all government land and the government won't let them build houses on that land. So it's in the government, I think it's like something like 80% of Nevada is owned by the government. So we've got that, a heavy progressive income tax. We've got that abolition of all rights of inheritance. We have an inheritance tax. It's been cut in recent years in America, but there's always talk about bringing it back. Confiscation of the property of anyone who criticized the government. Well, we don't do that, but we censor pretty well nowadays, don't we? In the United States. So far, they're not confiscating your property. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state. Well, that was done in 1913. That wasn't it. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state. That's one of the things Murray Rothbard wrote about in several of his books, including For a New Liberty, that the state always tries to monopolize transportation and communications. And you see that today, when I read the news recently about Cuba, about Cuba, they shut down the internet so that the Cubans who are protest, finally, a mass protest against the Castro's and communism in Cuba. The first thing they did was shut down the internet in Cuba. And so all these Cubans in Miami now are all crusading to get somehow, to get our government in the U.S. to do something to bring the internet back. And so there you have it. That's why government wants to monopolize communications so they can control communications. And of course, they're doing a good job of it in the U.S. as well. Peter Klein's gonna talk about the economics of big tech. I don't know if he's gonna talk about the fascist nature of it all. So fascism by the way, economic fascism by the way is the marriage of business and government. That's what it was. And what else would you call, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and their antics in censoring anyone who disagrees with the official state policy. That's what it is. The operation of factories and farms under a common plan. Well, that sounds like the U.S. Department of Agriculture of the state forced labor. Well, that's the income tax, isn't it? Last year, my former employer, Loyola University, offered a buyout to senior faculty like me and I took it and they said, we'll give you two years salary if you get lost. And since the place that turned into a, I don't wanna use bad language, but you can imagine what I would call it anyway. And I'm of age to do that, I took it. And so my income was a two years salary plus a half a year because I worked for half a year. I took it July 1st. And so I had a larger than normal income and as a result, it put me up into a high tax bracket. And even though my tax accountant works for some big corporate accounting and law firm and they do a really good job, I think they actually intimidate the IRS with this big thing of paper. I'm a college professor and they still give me a tax return, like a big tax return. So they've never audited me. But still they still took maybe over 40% of my income. And so that means that basically I worked as a slave for nothing until May just to pay taxes. And then from mid-May on, I could maybe work for myself and keep the money for myself. And so the income taxation is a form of forced labor. I was being for, if I refuse to pay the income tax, if I wrote the IRS a letter, for example, and said, dear IRS, I understand that you think that the national parks are owned by the people. Well, I've decided to give back my portion of Yosemite. We will keep it in lieu of paying taxes this year. Keep my section of Yosemite and Yellowstone for that matter. That's a tip. You can have a tip, keep my portion of Yellowstone. I'll be in the Crowbar Motel, won't I? They'll send me to jail for doing it like that. Abolition of the distinction between town and country. Well, that's the current administration in Washington is talking about trying to destroy the suburbs because there are too many Republican voters coming out of the suburbs. Free education for all children in government schools, communist manifesto. So that was the roadmap for destroying existing society by the communist manifesto. Now, what about today? If you fast forward more to today, there's been a sea change in the Marxist plot because what happened was the old class struggle theory between the capitalist class and the working class didn't really pan out. Europeans didn't really accept that. The factory workers, all they ever wanted was better pay and working conditions. They never wanted to take over the factories and run the factories. They just wanted to pay raise basically in a cleaner workplace. And so they didn't go for Marxism. It was forced on a big part of Europe, at gunpoint for many years, but there was no working class revolution for this stuff. And so the Marxists had to change strategy. And now today they're called cultural Marxists, led by such people as Antonio Gramski, the Italian. And I mentioned in one of my talks that one good thing that Benito Mussolini did was put Gramski in prison. That's the one thing we should praise, praise Mussolini if we're doing it. And also, Georgie Lukacs, L-U-C-A-C-S. I think David Gordon told me it's called Lukacs, as I pronounced it. And others, and others. These were the cultural Marxist early 20th century. And they blame the failure, the failure to adopt Marxian socialism in Europe on two things, Western civilization and Christianity. If people believe that God is their sovereign, then Joe Biden cannot be your sovereign. It's God, God, Joe Biden, God, Joe Biden. Who are you gonna believe in? The same is true with the family. Your parents might interfere with the government's plans for you. They might even send you to Misi's University or some other subversive insurrectionist institution like that, and we can't have that. And so we gotta abolish the family as well. And Western civilization, socialists, whether they call themselves fascists, socialists, whatever, they've always been fierce enemies of Western civilization, especially liberalism. If you read Misi's book, Liberalism. In some of my publications, I've actually read Mussolini's autobiography. It has a title, like if I was a third grade teacher and I gave the assignment to the kids, write your autobiography, I would probably get titles from some of the kids that would just write a title for it, like my autobiography. That's Mussolini's title of his biography, my autobiography. Not very catchy. No commercial publisher today would probably think that's to be a seller. Grab that off the shelf. But he's very explicit. I mean, he was very explicit in condemning all the things that Misi's writes about on liberalism. They know who the enemy was, the ideas of liberalism. It's not just Western civilization in general. It's the ideas that have come out of Western civilization and the Enlightenment and the US constitutionalism and so forth. That's what must be destroyed. There are too many Europeans, these guys said, who still believed in English liberalism. And so that had to be attacked first. That had to be destroyed first, these ideas. Mussolini said it, Hitler said it, the Russian communists said it at the same time. So they knew who the enemy was. The enemy was these ideas. And so they had a little success. Lukacs himself was Hungarian and the communist took over the Hungarian government in 1918 and Lukacs became the commissar of culture. That's kind of a nice title. Wouldn't you like to be the commissar of cultures? I was on the radio for about 20 years in Baltimore with my old friend, the late Ron Smith. He was a radio talk show host. And he would have me on every few weeks to just talk about something. And he gave me the title of Minister of Economic Truth. So that was my title for about 20 years in Baltimore. That people knew me as the minister of a very Soviet Union-ish title, Minister of Economic Truth. But he came to the commissar of culture. And one of the first things he did was to introduce sex education in elementary schools in Hungary. And that was enough for the Hungarians to kick the communists out. So they were gone. That blew up in their face. And Hungarians are still at it today, aren't they? They're still fighting this. So they established a think tank. And they called it the Institute for Marxism. And that didn't pan out either too well either. Because by this time, Marxism was associated with Stalin and the purges and mass murder of millions of people. And so these guys apparently thought, what are we thinking, the Institute of Marxism? So they changed the name and they called it the Frankfurt School. And so you know, who the hell knows what the Frankfurt? It sounds like, you know, where they teach people how to make hot dogs? What is it? The Frankfurt School. But it was originally the Institute for Marxism. And so these people all fled Nazi Germany and other parts of Europe and ended up in the United States. And many of them, for some reason, they settled in Santa Barbara, California in the 1950s, which must have been one of the most beautiful spots in America in the 1950s before all the pollution and the congestion, traffic congestion and all that sort of thing. And they just hated everything. They hated light. Book after book about how horrible life is in America. And these are people who left Nazi Germany and they're writing books about a horrible Santa Barbara in the 1950s, as far as that goes, the Frankfurt School. And so they settled on their new theory, new class struggle theory. They decided factory workers weren't enough. You can't take over the government and impose communism just with factory workers. You need more. So they famously came up with a new theory of class struggle of the oppressor class versus the oppressed class. And the oppressor class is white heterosexual males and the oppressed is everybody else. That way you have not just the factory workers, you have just about everybody except white heterosexual males. And even then, if you're a white heterosexual male and you're a socialist, you're okay. You're okay. But I should say non-socialist white heterosexual males are the oppressor class, okay? They denounced, you know, book after book, they denounced traditional morality. They called it fascist. So if you're a religious person, you believe, you try your best to live by the 10 commandments, you're like Hitler to these people. If you're interested in this, you should familiarize yourself with Herbert Marcuse. He's one of the cultural Marxists. And his famous, some of the things he's famous for, he wrote a book called Eros and Civilization where he championed, and this was very popular with college students in the 60s, as you could imagine, polymorphous perversity, he called it. And he advised college students, don't work, have sex. And I went to school with some guys that sort of took that to heart and ended up. In my generation, you see why Marcuse was a very popular guy among college students in the 1970s who now all run all the universities, these people. But his more damaging, that was just silly, ridiculous, but his more damaging is his theory of liberating tolerance. And this is a thing that animates what we see today going on on the college campuses when a conservative or libertarian shows up at Berkeley and they set the building on fire and things like that. I've known Charles Murray, the political scientist for 30 some years, and his daughter graduated from Middlebury College. And so the political science department there invited him to come up and give a talk on his new book since apparently he knew some of them since he'd been visiting his daughter over the years and he knew the political science faculty there. And he's an MIT political scientist himself, that's his background. And so he goes to give a talk on his new book about the American work ethic, sort of a labor economics thing. He shows up and the usual mob shows up screaming and yelling, calling them a fascist and a racist and all this stuff, drowning him out. And the woman, the female political science professor who invited him, one of them, one of these thugs grabbed her hair and jerked it so hard that she injured her neck, they had to call an ambulance and bring her to a hospital. And then they left in a car and they chased them through town in cars. They literally fled in cars, out of the tiny little Middlebury, Connecticut, no, Vermont rather. And so that's the sort of thing you see now. I first got wind of this, yeah, I might be 15 years ago, I had a student who was very interested in hate speech and this is when I first got wind of the fact that college students have already been very, very educated pretty well in Markuz's theory of liberating tolerance. And his theory is basically that only the oppressed classes deserve freedom of speech because the oppressor class uses speech to keep the oppressed down. And so, you know, events like this, you know, we have all these white guys like me, the oppressor class in whatever we're telling you is probably, we're giving you tools that you can use to oppress your fellow, instead of the oppressed class in whatever state or whatever country you come from, that's what we're doing here. According to people like Markuzza. And so, college students in America and elsewhere have been taught for many years now that you're taking the moral high road when you do things like this. If a Tom Woods or me or Charles Murray shows up at a university and you organize a mob to harass them and injure them and invite antifa to come in and do their thing, you're taking the moral high road. You know, you're not being a scumbag enemy of freedom of speech. And the academic administrators, of course, usually orchestrate a lot of this. It was my experience at my university where the top administrators were cultural Marxists. And when I first, it was a Jesuit school when I first got there, the old priest, Father Selinger was a great guy. I published an article in the Wall Street Journal and he took me out to lunch to thank me for doing that. And he would say things like, you know, our parents will read this and they'll send the next sibling along to the school. So he was very business oriented. And then the newer generation takes over and they turn out to be a Herbert Markuzza worshiping cultural Marxist nutjobs. And that seems to be the characterization of a lot of the university administrators these days, an awful lot of university administrators. And so when you see these things, these literally setting fires to buildings at Berkeley, they think they're taking the moral high route and because they want to destroy these ideas. This is Mesessian destructionism in action. One of my first observances of all this and how things were changing was way back in the mid 1980s when I don't know if any of the students have ever heard of this, there was a protest at Stanford University led by that great political philosopher, Jesse Jackson. And they were chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. And so they wanted a quick teaching about Western civilization. You know, when you teach Western civilization, you don't have to say that Christopher Columbus was a great guy. I mean, you could teach pimples and all. You know, that's the way to do it anyway. I mean, you don't teach everything about Western civilization was wonderful. You teach everything. And, but they wanted to abolish the teaching of all together, get rid of it. And they did, they did it at Stanford. And I didn't pay much attention at the time. I said, now it's another attempted shakedown by Jesse Jackson. That's how he made a living is he would threaten to organize a mob to call, say, Coca-Cola a racist company unless they gave him Jesse Jackson, millions of dollars to his organization, which paid his salary, of course. And so basically extortion. I thought, well, they're, he's picking on the universities now. He's gonna, he's gonna force Stanford to give him money to do this. So I didn't pay much attention to it, but that's what was going on. It was deeper than that. And then around the same time, there's another famous incident that us old fogies like myself remember as being sort of a hallmark or the start of these things. There was a family from Texas who were all Yale alumni. And they offered to give a $20 million to Yale. They write a check for 20 million, give it to Yale to hire a few more professors to teach courses in Western civilization. They thought they apparently noticed that Yale had been phasing out the professors who taught courses about Western civilization. And so they say, here's 20 million to put in some endowed professorships to teach this. And there was sort of a mini riot on that part of the faculty. And they complained so much that the university administration gave the money back. You know, they had already had the 20 million in the bank and they gave the money back to the Bass family from Texas. And so, and so these things all happened by the same as, so this has been simmering for a long time. So when you see today, you see all these over the last summer when you had all the riots in the United States. And it was very noticeable. You see all these college kids participating in the riots. And then you see these opinion polls saying that today's college students or people in their 20s, a majority of them prefer socialism over capitalism. Well, this has been going on for 30 some years and it's infiltrated down to the elementary school level by now. I have an article on Lou Rockwell's website today sort of partly based on my own history of this and some observations about how, you know, people ask me sometimes since I taught for 41 years at universities, what are some of the differences? And I noticed when I first started that the campus Marxists would always sort of latch on to a small number of incoming freshmen. They'd get maybe 5% something like that and try to get them to become like them, become, you know, spend more of your time rabble rousing and being a political activist on campus instead of going to the library and educating yourself. And they would always, so there'd always be this sort of the rag tag group. They would pray on the dumbest students that they could find mostly education majors. Sorry about that, education major. But today I observed that the majority of students coming in are already thoroughly brainwashed like this. So the professors don't need to do, they've had their work done for them in K through 12 already. And that's one big difference. And so this is part of the genesis of it. And it's all about destructionism, isn't it? The whole purpose of this is to destroy these same institutions that the cultural Marxists have been trying to destroy for 50 and 60 years and they're succeeding. They're succeeding. Who was it? Mrs. Deist just the other day asked me or commented at lunch or when we were sitting there, seems like in the past year and a half, this has exploded all of this thing. Well, this has been simmering for 50 or 60 years and it is filtered down through education. That's why you have so many of the young people behind it. And that's why it is more important than ever today for people like you to be here and learn these things, learn about Austrian economics and Austrian political economy if we're ever going to have any hope of countering this. It has to be countered with ideas. We can't counter it with violence, even if we wanted to, now I wouldn't recommend that. You can't pulling a gun on the government is the dumbest thing you could ever do, for example. So don't think I'm advocating anything like that. But our ideas, we have to counter this every step along the way. And it's happened before. If I can think of some individuals who made a big difference just by themselves, you don't have to convince the majority of the 330 million Americans of this. In one example, I gave somebody the other day, one of the students was, and it's popped into my head, it seems so bleak, what can I do? Well, at the end of World War II when Germany was a burned out mess, Ludwig Erhardt, who was a student of the Austrian school, was appointed by the authorities as finance minister of Germany. And he went on the radio one day, on a Sunday, and the American occupation authorities, by the way, they liked the Nazi economic system. They kept it in place because it was pretty much identical to the New Deal. The same thing, New Deal, Nazi Germany, fascism. There's a whole chapter in my book, How Capitalism Saved America, about this, about how it was essentially the same thing. And so the American occupation authorities kept it, yeah, we like this, let's keep these economic policies. Well, Erhardt had studied some of the Austrians. And so he went on the radio without permission and just announced no more price controls. He freed up price controls all at once, all in one day. And it works. That's what created the German economic miracle. One man did this. And there's kind of a funny story that the American general in charge stormed into Erhardt's office and said, my advisors tell me that this is a crazy thing to do. And Erhardt supposedly said to him, well, my advisors tell me the same thing as advisors. But he did it anyway, but he did it anyway. And so one person can make a pretty big difference. And of course you have to be the finance minister first, but who knows where some of you will be. And I think I'm going to stop there and we have time for a Q and A if anybody has questions or high praise or anything like that, five minutes. Anybody have a question about anything? So yeah, you mentioned socialism is kind of simmering in America, especially in Western civilization for the past 50 years. Would you blame this kind of explosion of socialism and Marxism on internet politics? Socialists have places to find refuge online and they communicate with each other just as other people ideologies, such as Nazis and supremacists. Yeah, they've made good use of that. But when the internet first, in the early 1980s, when I bought my first computer and there was no internet, maybe there was, but the computers you buy, they didn't have internet. You had to buy a browser eventually. And when it first came about, there was a friend of mine, Dick McKenzie, Richard McKenzie, another economics professor. He bet, I think it was Tom Haslett, I forget who it was, he bet somebody that the overall effect of this internet, the new thing, they had to bet one side said, it's going to be good for freedom. And the other one said, no, the state will take control of it and will control speech and it will be bad for freedom. And it seemed to be pretty good for freedom for quite a long time, but that's a good point you're making, though, when Peter Klein might address this too, he's given a talk on economics of big tech, and that it's become fascistic and that the owners, people who run the big companies, Google and so forth, are themselves socialists and totalitarians and they're in bed now, so to speak, with the government. And so they're using basically sort of de facto power of government to censor even the president of the United States who they don't like, as far as that goes, and they allow tyrants from all over the world to speak up on Facebook and elsewhere, but not the politicians, they dropped Tom Woods, for example, some of these platforms, but some dictator, some African dictator or somebody, he's okay, he's okay, he's gonna leave him on. And so that's my response. Yes, sir, somebody back there? So you were talking about how that socialists have been deconstructing the values, not disgusted, the populace disgusted towards them, how would you say is the best way to incubate ourselves, our family members, and then eventually for many of us, our children from this kind of corruption? Yeah, you probably have heard that the founder of Black Lives Matter famously said, what one of our objective is to destroy the nuclear family, mother, father, children, you gotta get rid of that, because we wanna get the government to raise children. That's why the socialist ideologue, Hillary Clinton wrote a whole book called, it takes a village to raise a child. And the village, of course, is the Biden administration, so that's the goal, that's the ultimate goal. And she was involved for many years in the 70s. She was involved, she was the chairman of the Legal Services Corporation in the Carter administration. And one of the things they were agitating then was some sort of mandatory childcare, so I mean newborns being put in some sort of government program, and they've always been agitating that, if you send your kid to public school at age five or age six, that's not early enough. We gotta get them at age one, so that the parents are totally out of the loop in educating the kids. That's their pipe dream anyway. And what to do about that is to be vigilant if you're a parent, pay attention to this, take them out of the government schools for God's sake, first and foremost, and teach them yourselves. I was on a platform in January with a man who has 11 children, and he's a very serious Christian. And his advice was, you know, have lots of kids and raise them the right way. That's the way to do it. And so maybe one more way, I'm gonna have a few seconds left to this young man here. Do you think that like the decline towards socialism is an actual byproduct of like a modern democracy, or do you think that there's like a real chance of like preventing the decline to socialism even like in a democracy? That's the theme of Hans Hoppe's book, Democracy of the God that Failed, that democracy inevitably evolves into socialism, which it has, which it has. I think, you know, for years there was a debate between the minimal government types, people who, you know, libertarians who advocated limited constitutional government versus the sort of the anarcho-capitalists. And probably the biggest myth that I can think of is the myth that you can control government with a written constitution. You know, they can, you know. And so, it takes a lot more than that. John C. Calhoun wrote a great book that does disquisition on government while a written constitution is not enough. Not that we shouldn't have one, but it has, but who's gonna enforce this? If you allow the state to enforce this constitution, well, they're eventually gonna decide that just about everything is constitutional no matter what. And that's what has happened. And if you read the Judge Napolitano's book on the Constitution and Exile, what is it? It was like no federal law, what was it from 1936 to 1995 was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And that's Hamilton's vision of the Constitution, by the way. Alexander Hamilton, after he denounced the Constitution as a frail and worthless fabric, once it was ratified, he spent the rest of his life trying to undermine the Constitution by inventing such things as the implied powers of the Constitution. He was the first one to come up with the argument for how to pervert the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and so forth. And so, but that was his vision of being a rubber stamp on just about anything the government would ever wanna do, whereas his nemesis, Jefferson thought the Constitution, the government needed to be bound by the chains of the Constitution, he said. And Calhoun thought that his solution was that people of a state or a group of states ought to be able to say, we're not gonna obey this law because we think it's unconstitutional. And so nullification, basically, is what he was saying. So it takes more than just the written Constitution. You can't, making speeches about the sanctity of the Constitution hasn't worked. We've been at that for almost 250 years and I think that's enough proof for me, but that's not a good idea. Time is up.