 So, this talk is on what I call the Curse of Economic Nationalism, and I'm going to explain this partly in economic theory, partly in some mostly American economic history also. And I'm certainly no Murray Rothbard, but one of the Murray's lectures that I enjoyed the most, when he could stand up and just, you know, give him a topic, and this is what attracted me to Austrian economics in the first place, and it was a big combination of economic theory, political philosophy, European history, American history, and that's what he looked at as being an economist, you know, being an economic scholar, and I've tried to do, you know, maybe 1% of that in my career of being interdisciplinary like that. And so that's why my talks are a little different than just, you know, pure economic theory. But so what I'm going to start is one of the one of the first speeches that Donald Trump gave on economics in 2017, in March of 2017, he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and because he wanted to quote Henry Clay, Congressman Henry Clay, and he made a speech on what Henry Clay's called the American system. And this was Trump's big economic nationalism speech, and whoever wrote it for him was a big fan of Henry Clay, and also Lincoln was sort of a political descendant of Henry Clay. And so it's relevant today, even though I'm talking about history, but, you know, this is relevant today, the President of the United States announced in 2017 that his economic program is going to be based on something called economic nationalism. And there can be different interpretations of this, but there's a unique American definition of economic nationalism, and I'm going to quote, and it started at the time of the American founding, and I'm going to quote Murray Rothbard from his book on history of money and banking as saying what was going on here. And so what was going on, and I'm going way back now, I'm going to start with Alexander Hamilton in the 1780s, and so after the American Revolution, Hamilton, who was George Washington's assistant in the revolution, you know, very precocious, but I think the scientific word would be butt-kisser for Hamilton, but how Hamilton got to be as 22 years old George Washington's assistant in the Revolutionary War, but anyway, he decided well I'm no longer going to work for George Washington, so I'd like to work for the richest man in America, Sir Robert Morris. So he writes Morris a letter, you know, basically applying for the job of Treasury Secretary, and at the same time he wrote a letter to a future Senator Timothy Pickering who would be George Washington's Secretary of State and Secretary of War, and Pickering was known to know something about finance. He was a finance guy and a Senator from Massachusetts eventually, and so Pickering sent him some pamphlets, some sort of British mercantilist pamphlets about protectionism and a few other things, and that was the extent of Alexander Hamilton's economic education, these mercantilist pamphlets, but if there were enough for him to be able to compose a letter to Robert Morris saying, you know, I agree with you that we need protectionist tariffs, we need a bank modeled after the Bank of England, and we need subsidies for road building corporations and things so that you, Mr. Morris, the richest man in America, or Robert Morris, can get your goods to market, okay, and so like I said, he was a very good butt-kisser, and it worked. So Robert Morris contacts George Washington and recommends Hamilton to be Treasury Secretary, and according to Ron Cherno, the big Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Hamilton, George Washington turned to Hamilton and said, I didn't know you knew anything about finance, we never talked about it, but if Mr. Morris wants you to be the Treasury Secretary, you've got the job, so that's how I got the job, okay, I think that's the facial mask police coming into town, coming to Auburn, and here's what Murray said about it, Murray Rothbard, and he said, what they're up to, so you have this cabal of Morris in the New York, Philadelphia, Boston, big business of the day, you know, whatever big business was, cartel of the day, and they were using Hamilton as their emissary, as he was their man in the government, and Murray said this, what they wanted was, quote, to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that of Great Britain, against which the colonists had rebelled. The object was to have a strong central government, particularly a strong president or king as chief executive, built up by high taxes and heavy public debt. The strong government was to impose high tariffs to subsidize domestic manufacturers, develop a big Navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports, open up at gunpoint, I assume that means, well, well, so you need a Navy, you know, you're not going to persuade people to buy your wheat, you're going to aim a cannon at them to buy your wheat for American exports, and launch a massive system of internal public works, which means government subsidized road and canal building at the time. And short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain, end quote, that's Murray Rothbard. Another part of the plan, Rothbard said, was, quote, to organize and head a central bank to provide cheap credit and expanded money for himself, Morris, and his allies with the help of his youthful disciple, Alexander Hamilton. It's a Murray called Hamilton Morris's youthful disciple. And so that was the birth of what's called economic nationalism. Which has really, has always been a synonym for mercantilism, British mercantilism, which is basically a collection of policies that benefits political policies, that benefits producers at the expense of consumers and everybody else. That's sort of a short one line definition that Murray Rothbard gave in one of his publications, actually. And so, so what was the result of this? I'm going to talk about some of the results of this, of what happened, the development of economic nationalism and, and the opponents of it, and why I call it a curse. You know, in fact, I called my book on Hamilton, Hamilton's Curse, because there was a book that was sort of annoying to me by John Steel Gordon called Hamilton's Blessing. It was about public debt being a blessing. So I thought that I, I just didn't like that. So I wrote a whole book, trashing the whole idea of Hamilton's blessing, as far as that goes. So I'm going to start with the public debt. Here's, here's some stark contrast in thinking about public debt and borrowing. And this, and this, by the way, the view of Hamilton and people and his supporters on the public debt was pure mercantilism. It was, it was, you know, certainly early Keynesianism, really, sort of the glorification of government borrowing. And here's a quote from Hamilton, a national debt, if it's not excessive, will be to us a public blessing. That's where Hamilton, you know, Hamilton's blessing comes from a national debt. Of course, Hamilton himself spent the rest of his life trying to explode the public debt as much as possible, even though he said for public consumption, if it's not too excessive, but he did everything he could when he was Treasury Secretary to make sure that public debt was excessive as possible. And I'll read a quote about that later. Compare that to Jefferson. I had a Jefferson quote on the same topic. The Jefferson's position on public debt was that it's legitimate for the government to borrow money, but it should never be more than a 20 year bond because that was a generation, you know, generation in those days, 20 years. So he said it was immoral for one generation to impose a debt burden on the future generation. And that view prevailed in America. It was a very powerful view, basically, until World War One, you know, with ups and downs, they were, you know, ups and downs in debt. But Andrew Jackson, for example, paid off the public debt. You know, there was zero national debt when he was president. And here's what Jefferson said, I consider the fortunes of our Republic as depending in an eminent degree on the on the extinguishment of the public debt. So you couldn't couldn't be more different than Hamilton. Hamilton sees it's a blessing to have more public debt. And here's Jefferson saying, no, the blessing is if we get rid of the public debt. And so and that and that sort of set the templates of the debate for for generations in America anyway. And of course, a lot of other countries follow suit to what goes on in America in history, not always, but a lot of times. OK, and so Hamilton's first caper, the reason why he thought the public debt was a blessing was that he thought the Constitution was far too restrictive of government. And he wanted government to be more or less unlimited as long as it was run by wise people like himself. And so he was constantly complaining to George Washington that the government was too small. And so he was a quite Machiavellian. His plan was to to associate the wealthiest people in the country who would own the public debt, that's who would buy the government bonds. And therefore they would become a powerful lobbying force for higher taxes of the government, because they would want to make sure there was always enough revenue in the Treasury to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds, on their government bonds. So he's very Machiavellian about it. And that's the reason he gave. He came right out and said that's that's that's the reason. It's not like this was some sort of secret conspiracy between him and Morris. That's he was right. He came out and said it. I guess politicians were not weren't always as clever liars as they are today. They sometimes just let it slip like that with what she did. And so so one of the capers that they pulled to achieve this was the war debt, the Revolutionary War Debt issued by the states. A lot of the veteran, a lot of the old veterans were given bonds and instead of money as payment for being in the army. And so they were holding on to these bonds that at the time were trading between two and 10 percent of par value. And they had. And so the government in Washington, the government had passed the law saying that these they were going to buy up these bonds at 100 percent of par value, but only the insiders in the government knew this. But the farmers and the Rednecks in North Carolina and the and the and the veterans, they didn't know this. And this was for all the young people in the audience. This was before the Internet. So you couldn't couldn't easily find this out. And so there was a huge arbitrage opportunity here, wasn't it? You could buy up these bonds. There's they're on the market selling at two percent of par value. And you knowing that you could turn around in a couple of months and get 100 percent par value for the same bond. And so there was this mass exodus all up and down the eastern seaboard of ships, wagon trains, coaches, stagecoaches, horseback of emissaries of the politically connected to buy up as many of these bonds as possible from the hapless and unknowing revolutionary war veterans and others who held these bonds, who are glad to say, you know, it's trading at two percent. I'll give you 10 percent. You know, who wouldn't take that deal? You know, you know, not knowing that it was going to be worth 100 percent in value in a couple of months. And so that that was one thing that happened. And this convinced Hamilton or now Jefferson that what these people wanted was what he called consolidation, bottomed on corruption. That is a consolidation. Their real goal was a consolidated, monopolistic, highly centralized government that could impose their economic agenda on the whole country. Protectionism, corporate welfare for a road building and a canal building and a national bank, because they knew there was there's huge opposition to this. This is the British system. They just fought a revolution against this. This is not going to fly. You need coercive power to impose this. And that was always the ultimate objective. And so Jefferson very cleverly understood that what was going on, he smoked them out by understanding that, well, there were many members of Congress who became extremely wealthy. We're talking millions of dollars at the time. You know, the equivalent of millions of dollars in the 17 17 80s. And so including Hamilton himself and made a bundle on this. And so Jefferson noted in one of his publications that this will tie these members of Congress to the Federalist Party forever. You know, whatever they want, I'll do because they're making me rich. And so if they want me to vote for protectionist tariffs, the National Bank, all this, I'm your man. And so that's what was what was going on there. And of course, you know, this established, you know, sort of the virtues of a public debt is what Hamilton was promoting. And the fiscal illusion that goes along with it, you know, the as a sort of a public choice term is that whenever government borrows money instead of taxing you to pay for what the things that it's doing, it disguises the true cost of government somewhat because it's able to most people don't see it. You know, until later, you know, OK. And so that's one of the things that's going on. And another thing that happens is that when the government imposes a debt like that is that it tends to raise the rate of high rate of time preference. There's a Hans Hoppe has written about this in quite a few places that if people expect there's going to be higher taxes in the future to pay off their part of the debt, the public debt, the national debt, then it makes short term investment, short term consumption look more attractive. If I'm going to be an investor and invest in something, I'd rather invest when the government's going to take fewer taxes out of my the profits of my investment now rather than in the future. And so it tends to increase the rate of time preference, which is a bad thing for the future of economic growth. And so I look at this this this debate over early debate over that aspect of economic nationalism, the public debt, as it's mercantilism and it's sort of pre-Cainseanism, too, isn't it? It's it's not the same argument that Cain's made by any stretch of the imagination about government borrowing. But it was an argument about the virtues of the blessings of national debt. OK. And of course, the other part of economic nationalism, and maybe this is why Trump likes the phrase economic nationalism, he just got the Fed to expand the money supply. But what was it? Three three trillion dollars for for the latest boondoggle in Washington was the bank, the Bank of the United States, the first central bank, national bank in the United States was called Bank of North America. And it was inflated its currency so much that that within a year people had no confidence at all in the currency and it was privatized. And that was that was the work of Morris himself. Morris got his Bank of the United States to provide cheap credit for him and his business partners and associates. And that was a big bust. But they never gave up, never gave up. They gave Hamilton the assignment of resurrecting a national bank. And so so he lobbied George Washington for that. And in Washington, again, asked Jefferson and Hamilton and a few others to write their opinions on a constitutionality of a national bank. And it was clearly unconstitutional because the American Constitutional Convention debated the issue and rejected it. And so, you know, what more evidence do you need? And it's not in delegated powers in the Constitution of a bank. And so, you know, you think case closed, but that's when in the Hamilton invented the idea of implied powers of the Constitution. He basically said, well, if you read between the lines and there's there's there's room for a bank run by politicians. You know, who wouldn't want a bank run by politicians? You know, and put all the money in the hands of a bunch of politicians. That's who would think that's a bad idea. And to make it a short story, what eventually happened is they had this debate and George Washington at the time they were at the time they were about to move the national capital to Virginia and create Washington, D.C. And George Washington was a big land speculator and he owned all this land in Virginia. And he told the federalists in New England who were the Hamilton's party, the federalists, if you extend the border of Washington, D.C. to my property in Mount Vernon, I'll vote for the bank. And so that was the political deal that was done. And so George Washington not vote, but sign off on the bank. So he signed the legislation. He didn't veto it. He signed the legislation. The federalists had the vote. And we got the Bank of the United States first national bank. And here's what Rothbard said about the effect of this. The Bank of the United States promptly fulfilled its inflationary potential by issuing millions of dollars in paper, money and demand deposits, pyramiding on top of two million dollars in specie. The bank invested heavily in loans to the United States government. In addition to two million invested in the assumption of preexisting long-term debt assumed by the new federal government, the bank engaged in massive temporary lending to the government, which reached 6.2 million by 1796. The result of the outpouring of credit and paper money by the new bank of the United States was an increase in prices of 72 percent from 1791 to 1796. So 72 percent price inflation in five years, in addition to the boom and bust cycles that it always creates. And it was given a 20-year charter and it created so much inflation and boom and bust and corruption by, for example, financing one side of the political debate in America that Congress did not recharter the Bank of the United States after the first 20 years. But then the War of 1812 came and they decided they needed to monetize the war debt of the War of 1812. And so they created the second Bank of the United States that came into being in 1817. Now, who here? You've been at Mises University for a couple of days. Who here recognizes the significance of the year 1819 in Austrian economics? You're too old. I'm not going to ask. You've been around for like years. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I just want to know one of the younger students to go ahead and tell them what's the panic of 1819. Murray Rothbard's doctoral dissertation, the panic of 1819. And so my hunch is it's not just a coincidence that the Bank of the United States was resurrected in 1817. And then 1819 was the panic of 1892 years later. So the Bank of the United States did what the Bank of the United States does. And it created the panic of 1819. And as Murray wrote, they were for the first time in American history, there was there was massive unemployment in some of the cities. I think he gathered what statistics he could get. I think in Philadelphia, the number of jobs went from something like ninety five hundred jobs in small manufacturing, which is basically shops where people were manufacturing shoes or things like if there was no electricity, so there wasn't mass production from ninety five hundred to something like twenty five hundred. So, you know, the big huge percentage drop off in employment in American cities from from the panic. And back and by the way, that's back in those days, depressions, what we today call a depression was called a panic. It was Herbert Hoover who came up with the idea that panic is a bad word. People might panic. Let's call it something nicer like a depression. They look like a lot of panic. So, you know, he was he was a clever engineer, Herbert Hoover. So so that created. And then, you know, you know, Murray Rothbard also has high praise for the Jacksonians, not necessarily Jackson himself, but the Jacksonians. He considers them to be a legitimate libertarian party, the Jacksonians of the early 19th century in America. And every time I say this or write this somewhere in an article or say anything positive about Andrew Jackson, like when he defunded the Second Bank of the United States, I get inundated with emails accusing me of defending everything he ever did in his entire life. You know, I don't know where this kind of logic comes from. But but but anyway, so that's what that's the way it is. But so and so Murray praised not necessarily Jackson, but Jacksonians, their party apparatus was very libertarian. And of course, it starts with Jackson's vetoing of the Bank of the United States. And so we had another 20 years of this boom and bust and political corruption. He literally paid the retainers to Daniel Webster, the bank did and other people to to support the bank in the Senate. OK, so just think about that. That's, you know, a pretty bold move there. And so but Andrew Jackson was kind of schizophrenic because as far as economic nationalism goes, it was Andrew Jackson who tried to enforce a big tariff increase from 12 or 13 percent to 48 percent in 1828. But at the same time, he vetoed the Bank of the United States. So he he supported the protectionist tariff. But then he he killed the Bank of the United States. But he was a supporter of the protectionism for a while also. But here's here's what he said. When he vetoed the the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, I'll read just a part of this, his statement. Andrew Jackson said, it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents of education or wealth cannot be produced by human institutions, but every man is equally entitled to protection by law, rule of law. But when the laws undertake to add these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions to grant titles, gratuities and exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society who have neither the time or the means of securing like flavor like favors to themselves, favors from government. Remember, he's saying, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. If government would confine itself to equal protection, it would be an unqualified blessing in the act before me. That is to recharter the Bank of the United States. There seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles. So he's pretty much condemned it as thoroughly corrupt and vetoed the rechartering in the Bank of the United States. Eventually went out of business over the next several years. As a result of that. And so that was one of the high points in American history. Andrew Jackson vetoing the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. OK, another thing that another part of. Economic nationalism, protectionism, Hamilton again, it's amazing how many bad ideas came from Hamilton. And just I mentioned yesterday at our Q&A session that last week, the New York Post reporter called me on the phone because they had, you know, she had seen my book on Hamilton. This is this book here. And they're doing a story on Alexander Hamilton since, I guess, this this musical, this Broadway musical is now going to be on television. So it makes it an issue, I guess. And she was writing an article on would Hamilton be a Democrat or Republican? She wanted to know that in that's a good question. I thought on the one hand, he's sort of like a Pat Buchanan Republican on economics, which is, you know, total nonsense, you know, economic doofus on economics. And so I told her that he would probably be more like a Ted Kennedy Democrat, but not a crazy socialist Bernie Sander Democrat. And they quoted that in New York Post. They had that in the they provided a link to my book, too. So I probably sold one or two books to that. But but he came Hamilton. It was Hamilton who invented the the infant industries argument for protectionism that new industries need protection with tariffs and subsidies or else they can't compete with the older British industries of the day in and so forth. And and he had a lot of really other really in that, of course, you know, all industries are infants at some points. You know, how did the British industries become so big and dominant? They were infants at some point. They didn't always have always all have protectionism and subsidies to to to grow up. And you just ignore that. And he made some other arguments. He said this, quote, transportation is an evil which ought to be minimized. That is, is we should not allow we should minimize transportation of goods from Europe to America, for example. Or for that matter, from Pennsylvania to Maryland or from Alabama to Tennessee, you know, minimized transportation. And Abe Lincoln, when decades later, would repeat the same thing about the evils of transportation cost. OK, sounds very much like Douglas North, doesn't it? Transactions costs, you know, economics, the evils of transactions cost. And he also they also made the argument that with high protectionist tariffs would cause lower prices somehow. That if you just protect them from foreign competition, they would compete among themselves and that would drive prices down. So all these businesses that are supposedly lobbying for protectionism do so because they think they will be able to charge lower prices if they get protectionist tariffs. That's basically Hamilton's argument. And Abe Lincoln repeated the same thing. He also came out in favor of the idea that anything only things that cannot be grown or manufactured in the United States should be allowed to be imported to the United States. So if we can't grow coffee in North America, then we can import coffee. But if we can make shoes, there should be no shoe imports at all, zero imports at all. And once again, his political heir, Abe Lincoln, made the exact same argument for protectionist tariffs also. And so, believe it or not, this this was sort of the original template, you know, sort of theoretical template for protectionism of Hamiltonian mercantilism. And it was repeated over and over and over and over again. And so as far as the curses, so so by the time you get to Jackson's day, as an interesting story that I'll tell related to, you know, Jackson vetoes the Bank of the United States so that the Hamiltonians, the mercantilists are failing and they're not getting this. And so finally, you know, Hamilton is long gone. And it was Henry Clay who picked up the mantle of mercantilism, which is why Trump went to Louisville, Kentucky to give his first economic speech and quoted Henry Clay, he praised Henry Clay literally to the treetops in Louisville, Kentucky. And so Clay was the man. And he's credited with inventing what was called the American system, although it was really Hamilton who used that phrase. And of course, it's really the British system, you know, come to America is what it was. But they finally got their man, they finally elected my and Lou's favorite president, William Henry Harrison, right, Lou? Who died one month after taking office, that's William Henry Harrison. He died. And but he was a wig and Henry Clay and the wig party, they were their man was in a White House. They controlled Congress. They're finally going to get protectionist tariffs, internal improvement subsidies, and then bring back the National Bank. The vice president was John Tyler, who was a states rights Jeffersonian. He vetoed everything. He vetoed everything. So they kicked John Tyler out of the wig party. They burned him in effigy in front of the White House. And in Henry Clay through the mother of all hissy fits over the whole thing. And it probably caused him to die 10 years earlier than he normally would have passed away from all this, because it was quite the calamity for them. But John Tyler saved the day. And that, by the way, has a lot to do with why there's a book called Recarving Rushmore that ranks American presidents by Ivan Eland, E-L-A-N-D. And unlike all the history professors who write books that rank presidents, their criteria are usually whoever taxes, spends, and borrows the most, and gets the most people killed in wars. That's who's at the top. That's why Wilson, FDR, Lincoln are always at the top. But Ivan Eland's criterion is whoever does the best job at protecting constitutional liberty. And his number one president is John Tyler. He ranks John Tyler number one. That's why you've never heard of John Tyler. He calls him the most libertarian of all presidents, Ivan Eland. He works for the Independent Institute in California, in Oakland, California, or at least he used to. I don't know if he's still there or not, but at the time the book was written, he was associated with David Thoreau's Independent Institute out there. And so anyway, that's what happened. So at the same time, you had, here's Jackson vetoing the Bank of the United States. Hold your applause, please. And then the Wigs thought they'd make it a comeback. They elected their man and John Tyler comes in. And so Andrew Jackson and John Tyler were huge heroes for those acts. And at that time of history, was he sort of about 10 years apart that this happened. And so, but they never give up, you know, the sources of political greed and rent-seeking and plunder never give up. And so they moved to the states. The states, state governments all over the United States, beginning in the 1830s, started using state tax dollars for road and canal building, and some very minor railroad subsidies, but nothing, really nothing hardly, but road and canal building. And Abe Lincoln was, he was the leader of the Wigs in the Illinois legislature. And they got them to allocate $11 million at the time was huge for road building, canal building, and nothing was finished in Illinois, not one road was completed. So all the roads were roads to nowhere, and they were never completed. And all the canals were canals to nowhere, never completed. And this happened in state after state after state. And it created such a calamity that all these, the taxpayers were saddled with all this debt that they had to pay off, that by the time you get to 1860, you know, the eve of the American Civil War, every state in the United States had amended its constitution to make it illegal to use tax dollars for a corporation to do anything. Only Massachusetts had not done so. By the time you get to 1860, Massachusetts was the only state to have not amended its constitution, not just pass a law, but amend its constitution, say that no state tax dollars can go to a corporation for road building or anything else. And that was, and so, so that, so they failed again. They failed again. But another success they had temporarily was the tariff of abominations. There's no economic nationalism plank. In 1828, they managed the Whigs, managed to raise the average tariff rate to 48%. And South Carolina was the biggest, the biggest opponents. And the South Carolinians had passed a nullification law that said, we're not going to collect this. And this law actually allocated $160,000, the equivalent of $160,000 in 1832, you know, early 1830s for the governor of South Carolina to purchase firearms with which to fend off federal tax collectors. So there's almost a war, a war of secession in 1828 to 1832 that occurred that they were serious. Part of this law also said that if any federal tax collectors showed up in South Carolina, that he would have all of his personal possessions and properties confiscated and it would be imprisoned. And so that that was a bit of a deterrent, I would think, to taking the job of a tax collector in South Carolina. And so there was serious, in Jackson, as I said, he was sort of schizophrenic on this. He threatened to send warships. He didn't, Lincoln did 30 years later, but he didn't. And so they negotiated, they ended up negotiating a lower tariff after that, the lower the tariff after that period of time. So that by the time you get to 1860, the eve of the American Civil War, the average tariff rate in America was 15%, which is said to be the high watermark of free trade in America in that century, in the 19th century in America, as far as that goes. And so they failed again. They tried that version of it. Okay, but then Lincoln comes along, gets elected president and all of this, all of this is voted into policy. He raised tariffs 10 times, civil war is over, the average tariff rate is in a 50% range, not 15%. And it stayed there until 1913, when the income tax came in. They had, they began the massive subsidies of the railroad corporations. Finally, even though the states had had these, these awful experiences, including Illinois with subsidies. And they subsidized the railroads. And, and of course that led to the greatest political scandal in American history, up to that point, the credit mobility scandal related to corruption of the government subsidized railroads. And, and so this is a, I'll show you how it was spelled. I'm not a French speaker, but I've heard people say this word. What was the name of a company? But what they did, what these characters did, these politicians, is they were in charge of running the government subsidized transcontinental railroad project, building transcontinental railroads, and they would set up companies that would say sell iron rails. And iron rails say, so you could buy an iron rail for a dollar on the free market. They would use government money to pay themselves $100 for the same iron rail. And they would bribe members of Congress to go along with it by giving them shares of stock with the insider information that all of a sudden this company is going to be worth a fortune once we start paying ourselves $100 for an iron rail when you normally buy for $100. And this went on for years until finally there was some big argument between some of the conspirators. And one of them got so ticked off that he told the journalists, he spilled the beans to a journalist, so it all blew up and the American Secretary of State was involved in it. As the Jeffersonians always predicted, and also they built probably the worst built railroads in the world, the government subsidized railroads. Here's, I drawn a map of what I think would be an example of the roots of the government subsidized railroads. There's a map of America and the roots are kind of like that. And the reason they were kind of like that was that every member of Congress in that part of the country insisted, if you're going to get my vote, you need to run a line to my district, even if there's two people a year that ride the train. If you want my vote, there's going to be a line to mine. So that's what they did. And there was one man who did not do this. James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railroad. And with no subsidies, not even land grants. Of course, there were huge government land grants to the subsidized ones. And that's my map of James J. Hill's route. You could look these up on the web. You could look up the Great Northern Railroad route and you can see it looks kind of like this. And then you could Google Union Pacific Railroad route. And it really does look something like that. So it looks something like that. And so they built, and these are all the kind of things that the Jeffersonians had been predicting. This is inevitable what happened if you go this way. So that was another curse of, as I call it, curse of economic nationalism in American history. And speaking of, I was on vacation in Montana a couple years ago. And we went to Northern Montana. I was in Yellowstone for a while. And we went five hours drive north of that. And we went into small town. And I sat down. There was a restaurant that has sort of a second floor balcony. You can sit out there and have lunch. I went out there. And there's train tracks there. And part of the train was a Great Northern Railroad train. And so this was just a couple years ago. But this was the 1870s. It's still there. It's still operating the Great Northern. It's James J. Hill's thing. I think the rumor has it that he was one of the main figures in the novel Atlas Shrugged that was modeled after James J. Hill. Anyway, you know, fast forward, more economic nationalism, the New Deal. The New Deal was really started by Herbert Hoover. He didn't call it the New Deal. But in my book on capitalism, How Capitalism Saved America, I quote Rexford Tugwell, who was FDR's main economic policy advisor for 12 years, is for the whole duration of the Roosevelt administration, as saying they really just took what Hoover was doing and expanded on it. They took the basics of the same ideas. They just went much further than the kind of things Hoover was doing. And of course, he signed off on the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which increased the average tariff rate up to almost just under 60%. It was like 59.6% was the average tariff rate. And keeping in mind that it had gone from 15% back in the day to that. And that spawned an international tariff war that reduced the value of world trade by two thirds in three years, the Smoot-Hawley tariff. So that was another curse that happened that came. Let's talk about Hamilton's curse, another mercantilist curse. And then the first New Deal was Hamiltonian corporate welfare. It was the National Recovery Act imposed price floors on just about everything, all manufactured goods and all farm goods, all agricultural goods, price floors. And so they hired thousands of price-controlled police to fine or even jail people for cutting prices, because they thought the Great Depression was caused by low prices. That was rose about the theory of the cause of the Great Depression. So if we only get the government to force up prices, we'll end the Great Depression. It was their thinking and I need not say more about that. And then of course, that led to decades of crony capitalism at the same era, the early 20th century. We had all the so-called natural monopolies created by government fiat, government franchise monopolies. And once they gave the electric power industry and the telephone industry natural monopoly, I always hated that word natural. There's nothing natural about it. It's government-created monopoly. Natural was the free market, was the opposite in the free market. It's kind of like jumbo shrimp, isn't it? It's military intelligence. It's contradiction in terms. But once they gave these companies, these industries, monopoly status, everybody, the real estate industry, the dairy industry, everybody, well, I'm a natural monopoly too. And we want to eliminate competition. But that was economic nationalism. There are books written. There's a guy named Lind, whose author has written a big book of essays on economic nationalism. But he's praising economic nationalism. He's a sort of a Pat Buchanan type on this. And he praises the FDR as the way to go. And of course, we know now that the so-called New Deal policies cause the Great Depression to be much longer and much deeper than it otherwise would have been, even the mainstream economics. Of course, the Austrians knew this all along. But one of my old articles in the free market probably about 10 years ago now was I was surprised to see in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the big economics journals, that a couple of big shots, including the editor of the American Economic Review, had published an article on the JPE saying that the New Deal actually made the Great Depression longer lasting and more severe. The same thing the Austrians had been saying for decades and decades. And Richard Vetter and Lowell Galloway said the same thing maybe 10 or 15 years before these guys did in their book out of work. But they just ignored all that. And so anyway, so maybe I'll stop there. That's my sort of talk about economic nationalism and why I think it's a curse. I hope you learn something about where it comes from, the ideas that guided it. And they're still alive today with the President of the United States calls himself an economic nationalist. He doesn't know what it means really, but he still calls himself economic nationalist. Someone told him Henry Clay was a neat guy, I guess. But so he does. And so I don't know, do we have a few minutes for questions? If anybody has questions, comments, high praise or anything like that. It's not required. Other than the national ideas that were enacted right off the bat. Protectionist ideas, I mean tariffs. Well, no, he succeeded with the National Bank. That was his big success in terms of economic policy. But everything else, you know, James Madison, when he became president, Jefferson was president from 1800 to 1808 was the last year. And Hamilton was dead. He died in 1804. He was in a famous duel with Aaron Burr. And Gary North once told me that he once started an Aaron Burr Society. And their logo was not soon enough. So he was dead. But Madison becomes president after Jefferson. And the very last thing he did was to veto an internal improvements bill. There was a bill that was supposedly a bill to give pensions to soldiers from the War of 1812 or something like that. And there was a rider in it that would have provided a small amount of money even at the time for road building. And Madison said, this is not, you'll have to amend the Constitution before you did that. And so in president after president vetoed until the Civil War, Andrew Jackson vetoed internal improvement subsidies. And so John Quincy Adams said the greatest defeat of his presidency was he didn't get these passed. And he blamed John C. Calhoun. He called him the evil genius of the South because he was against this sort of thing. Because there was a tension, you know, southerners and they didn't want to pay taxes to have a railroad built in the north. And vice versa. Northerners didn't want to pay taxes if the root was to be in the south. So there was a big controversy over that. But they didn't get any of that stuff. 1824, they got a tariff increase. And that encouraged them to go further and pass the tariff of abominations four years later. But that was long after Hamilton's day. It was over. But the bank, you know, the bank was his big thing. They didn't get any internal improvements. Jefferson's Treasury Secretary was in favor of internal improvement subsidies. But Jefferson told him we would have to amend the Constitution first. So the strict constructionists were serious strict constructionists in those days about the Constitution. And he didn't say we shouldn't have internal improvements. He said you have to amend the Constitution first if you want them. But then Hamilton died. But his heirs, John Marshall was his chief justice, was his real powerful political descendant. And he promoted Hamilton's view. He's the one, Hamilton also invented the idea that the states, I don't know if he invented it, but he popularized the idea that the states were never sovereign. They never really delegated powers to the government. It was the other way around, the federal government sovereign. And John Marshall did a great deal as chief justice for 36 years to repeat that over and over again to sort of lay the groundwork for when Abe Lincoln came along to repeat the same lie that the states didn't ratify the Constitution. The late Joe Soburn said that made as much sense that, you know, that the union created the states makes as much sense as saying a marital union can be older than either spouse. You know, how can that be? You know, so anyway, so that's the answer to your question, long-winded answer to your question. Any other questions or comments? Thank you for not snoring while I was talking. That was the first time in several days. So, and that'll be it for today. You're free to go.