 And now it is my pleasure to, and great honor, to introduce my good friend and one of the genuine stars of the Austro-libertarian movement, Tom Woods. Tom is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He first attended Mises University in 1993 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard where he earned his BA in history. He received his master's degree and his PhD from Columbia University, and all the while, he was in graduate school, he was a Mises Fellow. He is the author of a dozen books, including New York Times bestsellers, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and Meltdown, a great book and one of the first on the financial crisis, which features a foreword by Ron Paul. His book, The Church in the Market, A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, won the $50,000 first prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards. I didn't know you got that much money for that. I didn't say anything to cross my palm. Okay. Tom's articles have appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, and Tom is great in speaking to lay audiences as well as to scholars, and he's a great scholar himself. And his books have been translated into a dozen languages. Tom hosts a Tom Wood Show, a libertarian podcast that releases a new episode every weekday. So he's a very busy man. With Bob Murphy, he co-hosts Contra Krugman, a weekly podcast that refutes Paul Krugman's New York Times column and does it very well. You can visit his website at tomwoods.com. In fact, I order you to do so, and so does Guido. Okay. Okay. Tom Woods. All right. Now it's always hard for me to believe that a full year has passed between the previous Mises University and this one. The week goes by very quickly, and you should be warned that on Saturday, during the barbecue that closes Mises University, you're going to experience a feeling of melancholy, of regret, of passing. This is a clinical phenomenon known as post-Mises U depression. That term was coined by Bob Murphy, and I realized, I have that too. That's exactly what I have at the end of this week. So if you wanna get pictures or things with the faculty, do it during the week, because at the end of the week, we're all drunk and miserable because Mises U is over. Okay. It was interesting to listen to Joe, to Jeff and Joe talking about the history of this movement and some of the people in this room, and people in this room have met and known, and the Hayek reference was particularly interesting because it was mentioned on a website, Target Liberty, not too long ago, that Walter Block apparently beat Hayek in chess. Now, if you are, do you wanna clap for Walter? Do you wanna encourage him, really? Okay. Now, you all know the transitive property? Well, as you know, I have kicked Walter Block all over the chess board. Therefore, I have more or less defeated Hayek. All right, let me get right down into what I wanna talk about. I don't know how long this is gonna go. I never know. Every year, it's always exactly on the nose. I don't know about tonight, we'll see. Tonight, I thought it might be appropriate on this joyous occasion as we open Mises University, which really is my favorite week of the year on land. If you don't know that reference, you are disowned. Where you will get that reference is on board the Contra Cruise at contracruise.com. Correct. No, but I thought, given that this is, I mean, I'm not joking. This is honestly my favorite week of the year. I absolutely love everything about the Mises Institute, this program, all the faculty members. I don't know all you guys yet, so I can't say, but you look good so far. Anyway, I thought because it's such a joyous occasion, I thought tonight I would talk to you about some truly terrible, awful people. And the people I wanna talk to you about are ingrates. I personally consider ingratitude to be one of the worst character traits you can have. You've had a favor received, and not only do you not return the favor, you don't even recognize that a favor has been done to you. Even worse, you insult your benefactor. Now that is a no-no. So I wanna talk about, and by the way, I was gonna spend a little time going through what Thomas Aquinas says about gratitude and ingratitude in the Summa Theologiae, and he has a whole section on, he feels exactly the way I do, by the way, that ingratitude deserves its own section. It's so bad, all right? But I'm not gonna, you all have your own copy of the Summa at home, you can flip through and read that. So instead, I'm gonna jump right in and tell you that there are two categories of terrible people that I wanna discuss with you tonight. And the first one, this is really shooting fish in a barrel, very low-hanging fruit. I'm going to make the proposition here that socialists are terrible people. And yeah, I know it's extremely bold and brave of me to say that to you folks. But I don't mean it in the typical way that people mean socialists are terrible people because they favor theft and violence and ignorance and backwardness and whatever. It's not that, it's that they are profoundly ungrateful people. Now, before I begin this section, let me point out, I know that today we don't have a pure market economy. Believe me, I have all people know this. That's almost all I ever talk about is we have this intervention and that intervention and this crony and that special privilege and whatever. I get that, I get that. But socialists are generally not making these kinds of distinctions. They're not saying, well, we oppose that aspect of the market economy when there are, it's not really the market economy, when there are interventions or when there are people on the take, they're condemning the whole market economy. So I'm not interested in currying favor with them by saying, well, I too agree with 0.03% of what you're saying because I also think that this guy shouldn't get that subsidy. I'm not gonna kiss their rear ends here over a little nitpicking like that. So yes, I know that it's not a pure market economy but for the sake of argument, from the point of view of the socialist, this is like the most ultra-capitalist economy that we've ever had, right? That's what they think. So we're gonna stipulate that for the sake of argument. And when I say they're ungrateful, what I mean is let's try to think about what life was like before the development of the market economy, the modern market economy as we know it. Let's try to, let's just cast our minds back. It's not that far really. We can imagine, we can think about what life was like. Now one of my favorite examples because it's so chilling of what life was like in a pre-industrial, pre-market society goes to Burgundy. We're talking about French peasants here or just people who worked in the vineyards. As recently as the 1840s. Now this is a story that I got when Deirdre McCloskey was on my show. And if you are not listening, it's at tomspodcast.com. I just bought that domain. How has no one named Tom taken that domain? Tom's podcast.com. I also bought LearnAustrianEconomics.com. Who let that one go? Anyway, we'll have another talk about clever domain names that I also bought BernieIsWrong.com. Why are these available? I do own those. You can go visit, I own them. Why did Hillary not buy BernieIsWrong.com? And I flipped through what happened. No mention of the missing of the BernieIsWrong domain name because Woods already bought it. Anyway, after the crop was in in the fall, these poor folks would go to bed and they would sleep huddled together. Now this is absolutely the case. In order to stay warm and they would actually hibernate for months in that state. That's how poor they were. They couldn't afford the heat and they couldn't afford the food they would need to consume if they got up and expended energy. Now that is not an existence that befits a human being. And that was normal. That was normal. Now today, that is so preposterous. We can't even imagine that. And yet, how many generations ago was that? Not very many. Or think about child labor. Child labor has been ubiquitous throughout history. Some of you may have heard me talk about child labor before. I won't dwell on it. But people say that child labor is a fruit of capitalism. Capitalism yielded you child labor because before you had capitalism, the kids were just skipping through meadows all day, whistling a tune, and then capitalism came along and they had to go work in a coal mine and get their limbs blown off. That's not so. I mean, children have worked since the beginning of time. And the reason they've worked is not that they have terrible parents. And this is a profound lack of curiosity when you hear modern Westerners talk about child labor. They know they're against it, right? And they're gonna make sure we know that they're against something everybody hates. Super brave. They're gonna tell us how against it they are, but they never bother to stop and wonder what is the root cause? Even if you don't, these are the same people who say we need to consider the root causes of crime. And they say, just because I'm looking into the root causes of crime doesn't mean I'm excusing crime. Well, likewise doesn't mean that you're embracing child labor to at least try to investigate why it is so ubiquitous. Why does it exist? I mean, aren't you at least curious why it exists? And the answer is because without it, families in poor countries starved to death. That's why. And you hear that and suddenly you think, oh my gosh, I've been such a fool my whole life. That's so obvious. Yeah, as a matter of fact, the International Labor Organization, which is not exactly a laissez-faire outfit, said in a report about 20 years ago, this is from their report. Poverty emerges as the most compelling reason why children work. Poor households need the money and children commonly contribute around 20 to 25% of family income. Since by definition, poor households spend the bulk of their income on food, it is clear that the income provided by working children is critical to their survival. So there are two ways you could approach the child labor question. You could say, well, if a lack of food and a lack of labor productivity, in other words, if maybe their parents' work could produce more, then the children wouldn't also have to work. Maybe we could work on that, get the parents' labor to be more productive, then they could produce enough stuff to have the purchasing power to buy more food, to buy more things, the kids won't have to work. Or you could just say, let's pass a law against this. And unfortunately, there are enough low IQ people in the world that they go for the second one. Let's pass a law against the kids working. We just learned that the kids are working because the family will starve if they don't. So let's ban them from doing it. That's not the best way to go about it. And Oxfam actually did a study of what happened when Bangladesh tried to get rid of child labor. Answer that children starved to death or went into prostitution, which is exactly what all the libertarians tried to say at the time, but none of the do-gooders could manage to fit into their busy schedules five minutes to think about that. Now, why do I bring this up? Well, not that we celebrate child labor. We gotta understand if you wanna get rid of it, you gotta understand why it's there. And what's gotten rid of it has been the market economy because it makes your labor more physically productive. My father, those of you who are on my email list may have read today, today's actually would have been my father's 67th birthday. And he was a forklift operator in a food warehouse for 15 years. And that was not fun work. It's humid and hot. It's just extremely unpleasant. But because he had a forklift, he was able to be, I don't know, a hundred times more productive than he could have been with his bare hands. Imagine the weight of these pallets that he's driving around. There's no way he could do that with his bare hands. And certainly how's he gonna stack them that high without a forklift, can't even be done. That allows him to command greater purchasing power in his wage. And basically meant that I didn't have to work. I could sit around like a bum reading books all day, which is what I did. So that's what got rid of it. It's not, yeah, they passed laws against it after it was 90% gotten rid of already. But if you just pass the law and you don't create the fertile ground whereby people can become more physically productive in their labor and thereby liberate their children from work, all you're doing is guaranteeing starvation. The logic of this is beyond debate. Can't debate this. That's the fact. But I bring this up because today, of course, we have less child labor than ever. Reason to celebrate. So we have the case of children working. We have the case of people being so poor, they had to hibernate. Well then, if I may return to, and here, I'll read a brief passage from a transcript of my discussion with Professor McCloskey. It proceeded like this. Even in a country as rich as France in the middle of the 19th century, people were very poor. I estimate that world income around 1800 was, in modern terms, $3 a day. Imagine trying to live on the cost of a quarter, a quarter, two of milk. Spread over all your consumption, all your housing, your clothing, your education, everything. $3 a day is a terrible, terrible life. Now, the world average adjusting for inflation today is $33 a day. It's about what Brazil is now. $3 a day to $30 a day, even if you include very poor countries like Chad and Bangladesh, is an enormous increase. It's a factor of 10. And in countries like Sweden, the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, the average is over $100 a day. So it's either a factor of 10 for the world per capita, or it's a factor of over 30 for the countries that have really absorbed the ideas of liberalism in the classical sense. Here's the most important point. The average poor person in the world is better off by a factor of 10 than that person was in 1800. And in the countries that have allowed capitalism to flourish, like Sweden, and she says, which is a highly capitalist country for all we've heard of its socialism, again, it's a factor of 30. The equality of real comfort, having a roof over your head, having a serious education, having smallpox vaccination or the elimination of smallpox, having enough food to eat, these comforts which were denied 90% of the people in 1800 are now enjoyed by ordinary folk. Even the poorest in a rich society are vastly better off in material terms than they once were. So this engine has been so much more productive in improving the condition of the poor than any of the schemes of equalization of incomes. Now you would think we would pause to appreciate this. This is astonishing. And yet, not only do we not appreciate it, it's not present company accepted, we love it, but no one else knows about it. I don't mean that they're unhappy, they don't know. It's not reported. In classrooms, nobody learns this. In the newspapers, nobody learns this. And how do I know that nobody learns this? Is this just a dramatic remark that I'm making? Actually, they did a study of it. Not too long ago, the late Hans Rosling's web project, GapMinder, did a survey of people in 14 different countries. They asked 12,000 people spread over 14 countries the following multiple choice question. Do you believe that the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty over the past 20 years has A, doubled, B stayed roughly the same, or C been cut in half? Well, the answer, as you know, is that it's been cut in half. 95% of Americans got that question wrong. They don't even know. I mean, imagine being that ignorant about what must be one of the most momentous achievements in all of world economic history. It's happening all around you. You don't even know it. That's amazing. And that's because somebody, somewhere, with the responsibility to convey this information to us is ungrateful, is demanding more, is impatient, is always critical of capitalism and can't give it credit for anything. In the early 1800s, 45% of all children died before age five. That's now 4%. In 1800, people living in what economists call extreme poverty, you're talking 90%. It's under 10% today. Oh, they'll say, if they do acknowledge this because you forced them to, they'll say, oh, that's because of redistribution. Governments are responsible for that. All right, here's why that's wrong. Where did the increased social spending? Where did the increase in the welfare state take place? That took place in the rich countries where they had already gotten rid of extreme poverty. The poverty reduction took place in the poor countries that can't afford a welfare state. That's the answer. The poverty reduction happened in the places where there wasn't an increase in the welfare state. Extreme poverty was gone from the Western world long before there was a welfare state. Other statistics, since 1960, literacy is up 43.6%, caloric intake up by 688, over 21 years of life expectancy and three inches in height. Now you realize that's just an average, it doesn't apply to every individual. I happened to be scrolling through just the other day, humanprogress.org, and I assembled the following headlines almost at random. Here's some headlines. 75% of sub-Saharan Africa now has access to clean drinking water. French family becomes first to move into fully 3D-printed home. Infant mortality in Asia has fallen by 74% since 1969. App lets you be a blind person's eyes from anywhere in the world. Since 1970, the global rate of child mortality fell from 13 to 3.1%. No, we are not running out of forests. This device can turn desert air into drinkable water. Technology helps those with dementia live independently. Every village in India now has electricity. These are headlines I just took at random. So, my point. We see what, we have the slightest inkling of what life used to be like. It's almost inconceivable for most of us. You think about how little clothing you had. You probably didn't have shoes. Good luck if you need dental work. You could go on and on. Do you think that you were able to join a book club with your friends when nobody had books and people were one bad harvest away from starvation? Do you think they had square dancing conventions? Do you think they had bird-watching societies? Do you think they had any of this? That's what life used to be like. And we know what it's like now. It's not to say there aren't any problems. But we live lives that are straight out of science fiction. And it's an interesting exercise to just go through your life and just take a day where you just notice everything you're doing. And if you were to try to describe it to Thomas Jefferson, he would think you'd lost your mind about all the magical devices that are serving you all day long. And all the food that's available to you, just think about the food that's available to you. You think about some monarch in European history who would have all these different dishes prepared and then decide which one looked good and eat that one. Okay, you can go to a supermarket with far, far more choices than that and pick out anything you want and go eat it. I mean, we could go on and on about the differences. But here's my point. Can you imagine if you lived in Burgundy in, let's say, 1800, and you were one of those people hibernating and somebody then described to you the explosion in material comforts and not just material comforts, but in the spiritual renewal that occurs when people aren't living hand to mouth all the time and can fulfill those aspects of what truly make us human. Could you imagine being told what life is gonna be like someday and thinking to yourself, yeah, but when we get there, if there are people who have more than I do, I'm gonna be really ticked off. I mean, you would have to be deranged. You'd have to be deranged for this world to be described to you and for you to be saying, yeah, but you know what, somebody, that magical vehicle that's gonna drive me around with a magical device that tells me how to get where I'm going, somebody else might have a bigger one. You're a terrible person if that's the way you think. You're a terrible person. There's probably no hope for you. But you guys are young enough that I can, we're gonna try and just stop that from taking root here. We can stop it from starting, but once it starts, it's hard to make an ungrateful person grateful. These are ungrateful people. Yes, I know there's plenty of injustice in the world still and I wanna fight against all that injustice, but the fact is the market economy has made possible miracles no one could have dreamed of and the response from socialists is to get out a bullhorn and go scream at their employers. That's a deranged, sick, ungrateful individual. So we're not like that because we pause to stop and appreciate and be thankful for the things we have. All right, now that's the easy part. The easy part is going after the socialists. Now I'm going after the libertarians. Ooh, all right. I'm sorry, I don't wanna talk about that. Those people don't like me very much. We're talking about the libertarian socialists. They don't like me. By the way, you can look them up. They do not care for me at all, one bit. And as you can imagine, I have lost all kinds of sleep over that terrible tragedy. There are people in the libertarian world who are profoundly ungrateful toward benefactors of this movement, whether the Austrian school or libertarianism. Let me give you a brief example. No, I'm not gonna mention names. I mean, come on now, we got social hour afterward with alcohol, you can get the names out of me then. But just the other day, I was in a Austrian-y group on Facebook and somebody said something disparaging about Lou Rockwell. And you know, I just, that stuff makes me crazy. I'm sorry, that makes me crazy. You attack one of my friends, I just get crazy. You know, you attack me and I think, all right, well, I'll make an email out of that and smash him. But when it's my friends, I can't even control myself. So here's what I came up with for that person. He said, yeah, that Lou Rockwell, he's just garbage. And so I said, you ready? I said, yeah, except for that whole making the works of Mises, Hayek, Kersner, Rothbard, Haslett, Flynn, Garrett, Fetter, Maklip, Bombabrik, and Manger available to the world, and except making the entire print run of major academic and popular libertarian periodicals available to the world, plus the greatest collection of libertarian video courses including entire and exclusive courses with Robert Higgs, Paul Cantor who studied with Mises and Ralph Raco, plus thousands of hours of audio lectures on all manner of economic, historical, and philosophical topics. Plus training two generations of Austrian economists through his top notch Mises U training program. Plus, you guys remember a guy named Will Grigg, anybody in this room? Okay, Will Grigg who died not long ago. Will Grigg was the most hardcore anti-police abuse, police brutality, all that stuff, guy there is, period, bar none, he was the best. And as with so many people who are the best, the official libertarian world pretended he didn't exist. The same way the official libertarian world pretends Scott Horton doesn't exist and he's the best foreign policy guy we have. Well who was the one person who consistently gave Will Grigg a platform was Lou Rockwell. Fashionable libertarians didn't have time for Will Grigg. Lou Rockwell was hardcore anti-war on 9-1201. And not to mention he holds every year by far the best attended and most academically rigorous annual scholarly conference in the Austrian world. Yeah, except for all those things. Did not hear from the guy again. Now I've also, I've given, I gave a whole talk at an earlier Mises You about what I call the anti-Rothbard cult. So I won't revisit that whole thing because you can look that up. But it is kind of like a cult because when you're in a cult, you have to, there's certain things you can and cannot do. So you can't talk about Rothbard, you certainly can't talk about him favorably. Every once in a while you can trot him out as some kind of mysterious villain. We can't actually tell you about how he got to be well known in the first place or why anyone cares about him. But we can trot him out a little bit to be a villain and then we'll put him away and say, but instead we have Milton Friedman. Okay, Milton Friedman was a fine man. Very smart, very accomplished, a good debater, very well spoken. I am not trying to take that away from him. But there's something screwy about the whole, we're gonna take the radical Rothbard and make him persona non grata and we'll bring out people who are pretty good. But I mean, it's like we're having a big conference on how to find and capture the Riddler, but we're not gonna invite Batman. So Rothbard, I'm sure most of you know, the guy, okay, so he writes man economy in state which basically keeps what's left of the Austrian movement together. And many people credit him at the famous South Royalton conference in Vermont in 1974 I guess with having influenced the people in that room with that book which Mises said was just foundational. Everybody needs to listen to what Rothbard is saying. Hayek writes the forward to individualism and the philosophy of the social sciences by Rothbard. Has very complimentary things to say about him. Henry Haslett said the best thing about the Mises Institute was that it gives Murray Rothbard a platform. Henry Haslett, okay? Henry Haslett is worth 500,000 no-name libertarian bloggers put together, okay? I don't care what those people think about Rothbard. Well, I do a little because it shows how profoundly ungrateful, anti-social, and horrible they are. And so they're good illustrations for my point. But these people who wanna be critical of Rothbard because I don't like some of his political alliances. Okay, all the people they wanna substitute for Rothbard were guilty of far worse than anything they could accuse Rothbard of. If you read what Milton Friedman was saying about the Iraq War early on, it is horrifying. It is establishment crap from beginning to end. And I don't care what alliance Murray Rothbard had, he never was cheering on totally avoidable deaths in a bogus war. I can say that for Rothbard, I think that matters. And in particular, given the scope and the size of his accomplishments, where would we be without Murray Rothbard? Where would we be? Would we have the hardcore anti-war, anti-intervention strain in this movement? I think it's doubtful if it hadn't been for Rothbard. Here's a guy, by the way, who had no ideological home in the 1960s because everybody on the right wing is for the Vietnam War. And some of them are talking about using nuclear weapons. And he's saying, what the heck did I wake up in a cuckoo clock? What's going on around here? So he tries to make an alliance with the new left because before the internet, you got, you know, you got it. I mean, today you don't really need alliances. You got a website and people can find you. But in those days, well, you got to get published in their magazine or something. He tried to reach out and he had the honesty, unlike 99% of mankind, to admit later on, you know, I look back and I think that was just a waste of energy. It just didn't do what I wanted it to do. Very rare to hear somebody have the guts to say, you know what, I was wrong about something. I'd like to know when one of his profoundly ungrateful critics has ever said, I was profoundly wrong about something, unless they got caught saying a naughty word they weren't supposed to say, then they'll make sure we all know I should never have said that word. I know, I'm talking about something real that would really be embarrassing to apologize for. Never hear that from these people because the same sort of people who are ungrateful never apologize either because they're terrible people. So Rothbard, instead of selling out, which would have been the easiest thing in the world to do, he just starts publishing his own stuff. He publishes left and right, the periodical with Leonard Ligio. He does everything he possibly can to get the word out at a time when according to Walter Block, Rothbard estimated the number of libertarians in the world was 25 and he's still out there fighting. Would all of us have had the guts and the determination to carry on when there were 25 libertarians in the whole world? He kept on doing it when the easiest thing in the world with a guy of his intellect and his academic credentials would have been to sell out, go teach at Columbia University about the Keynesian multiplier and collect his pension. That would have been the easiest thing in the world and instead he kept fighting to keep libertarianism alive and unsullied and if you're going to sit and nitpick some political alliance he made years later, you are a profoundly ungrateful person and I'm leaving out all his contributions to scholarship. The fact that, yes I know there was Gustav de Molinari but let's face it, Rothbard invented anarcho-capitalism. He gave it philosophical, economic, and historical grounding, the likes of which nobody had done. He, was he right about everything? Probably not, but he was a pioneer and he wrote, I don't know, he probably made 528 million claims in the course of his life so two or three of him might not be right. But this man helped to make us who we are today and what's even worse is he helped to make some of his critics who they are today and that's what makes them profoundly ungrateful people. But we have people in this room we should be grateful for as well. Jeff Herbner has been a friend for many years and I first met him in 1993 when I was sitting not quite where you are because we had Mises University out in the West Coast in those days, eat your heart out but I got to know him and I've gotten to know him all the more since we've been faculty together at Mises University. Did you know that Jeff Herbner got his PhD and was a mainstream economist? It wasn't like he was secretly studying the Austrians while he was getting his PhD. He got his PhD, was a mainstream economist and then he came to the conclusion that wait a minute, this is not right. I think the Austrians are right. Now, does any economist think to himself the way to fame and fortune and success is to abandon the mainstream and become an Austrian mid-career? Who would do that? We should be grateful for Jeff Herbner. He didn't do that for riches and influence. Okay, now Walter Block has said some controversial things about American politics but you know what? But you know what? Those are the least controversial things Walter has said in his career. Yep, it's true. Some people don't agree with Walter's strategic judgment on politics but you know what? This guy has peer-reviewed articles coming out the wazoo. He's got over 500 of them. He's got books on all different topics. He's always reaching out for new topics to explore, new horizons in libertarianism and Austrian economics. He's the guy who you can go and ask what if Martians came to earth and would they have rights and what if they'd spoke a different language or whatever? He'd say, all right, here are my 10 articles I've already written on that. His policy is he will debate anyone, anywhere, anytime. Is he right all the time? No, he's not. But he is a great man, an extraordinarily hard worker who at his age does not still need to be working but he's still doing it for us and for the movement. You don't get money for writing scholarly articles. He's doing it to advance knowledge. If you're going to nitpick Walter, yes, we can be critical of Walter. I mean, he has terrible taste in a lot of things. But if you're going to nitpick him without acknowledging his contributions, you're a terrible person. You're terrible. All right, I'll just do a bunch of them together. Now, by the way, I'm sorry for the faculty. It's not, you're not all being mentioned. I'm okay, so don't worry. You can, you don't have to square them. What is he going to say about me? But look, we got Peter Klein who's got a PhD from Berkeley, scholarly publications of all kinds. Here he is taking his stand with the Austrians. He could be anywhere. He could be doing whatever he wants and he's with us. Tom Di Lorenzo gets pummeled all the time because he attacks crummy, so-called American heroes about whom mythology is all Americans know about. We got Joe Salerno. Now, Joe Salerno's a great example of a guy, I was wearing my Joe Salerno shirt earlier today. I'm going to, I'm just for about an hour. So when you see me wearing it on the last day of Mises You, I don't want you to think, is that the same shirt he said he wore earlier in the week? I only had it on for an hour. So it'll still be like one full day that I have it on. But Dave Howden is a name that was mentioned earlier as one of these younger folks who's I think is one of the best young Austrians we've got by a mile. And I've gotten to know Dave really well. He's a great guy and he's very knowledgeable. And he would tell me that, every time I feel like I really, really know Austrian economics, then I go into Joe's office and I talk to him for a while and I walk out thinking, I don't know anything because Joe knows so darn much. Or how about David Gordon? Now, some of you don't know David Gordon. Think you are in for an absolute treat unless he tells you jokes, in which case the official Mises Institute policy is non-disclosure of any of David's jokes outside these walls. But David pretty much knows, in fact, you know what, I don't even need to tell you about David because I'm gonna quote what Rothbard said about David. Well, first Rothbard said in a memo, he said, today, when he met David Gordon, today I met a universal genius. And then he wrote to David himself. He says, I have been in the scholarly world for a long time and it is my considered opinion that you are a universal genius unequaled in my experience. The only flaw in your makeup is that you don't seem to have the slightest idea of what a genius you are. The fact that your talents have so far gone unrecognized and untapped is a horrible waste and injustice and Ron Hamaway and I are embarking on a personal crusade to do something about it. That guy's in the room with us today. And then, of course, joining us tomorrow, Judge Napolitano works insane hours and he's taking a week out of his schedule. Do you have any idea, by the way, how much he gets for a speech? Could you imagine a week what that would cost? But he's doing it as a gift to the Mises Institute and to all of you. So there are people out there, in other words, who are ungrateful. Now, they try to dress it up in moral righteousness, the socialists and the libertarians alike, but the real source is a deficiency of character. Now, all of you good folks in this room have something specific and immediate to be grateful for, namely this program, this faculty, and the donors who made it possible. So, show that gratitude by attending every session, concentrating on the material and learning everything you can. They know, we know, and you know that the future of the Austrian school is in this very room. Outwork, outstudy, and outhustle everyone else and make us altsters proud. Thank you very much.