 Okay, this is panel number two for the afternoon. And the routine is open mic, open mic Friday. Anybody has a question for any of us up here? Feel free now or forever. Shut up. Yes, sir. He had his hands up right here. And by the way, this thing in his hand, you just throw that around. So the next person catches it. Talking box. Talking box. You guys are working? Okay. My question is actually for Dr. Di Lorenzo, but I'd like any of the panel, particularly Newman, Dr. Newman to weigh in on its historical question. Jefferson Davis, great president of the Confederacy or greatest president of the Confederacy? No, I'm just kidding. My questions, I ask that to my students sometimes. My questions actually, I know I think where you lean on this, Dr. Di Lorenzo, but in your opinion, is Lincoln the worst president or Woodrow Wilson? Because you have, you know, both reasons for both of them. And I go back and forth myself. So I, and I'd be interested in Dr. Newman. Or if there's somebody worse, you can have that as well. Well, of course that's, that's sort of a softball question for me. That's, uh, Lincoln's Roswell for the death of far more people. The latest estimate of the Civil War deaths are as much as 850,000. For a hundred years, the number was 620,000, but it seems to be accepted by even the mainstream now that it's between 750 and 850. And this is a time when the population of the U.S. was one-tenth of what it is today. So it'd be as much as 8.5 million Americans dying in four years in a war, mostly here in the South. Well, you know, excuse me, Gettysburg was the only battle really in the North, as far as that goes. And so, so yeah, I would put him in there for a lot of reasons. I could stand up here for a couple hours and tell you the reasons why. Maybe Patrick has something to say. So as I explain in my forthcoming books, Wilson unmasked in The Real Wilson. I would just, I would say Wilson, because I mean, you have World War I and, you know, at least, at least Lincoln didn't pass the central bank. We had a quasi-central banking system. So, but Wilson, we got the Federal Reserve, but they're equally bad. I would, I at least side with Ivan Eland. He has a book, Recarving Rushmore, where he ranks the presidents. I agree with all the rankings, but I do agree with the one who's at the top or I guess the bottom of the list in terms of the worst, and that Wilson. But that's just me, I guess. I would say that. He's more politically correct than I am. Thank you. Yes, sir, over here. You don't get to ask if you drop that thing, by the way. Freddie Bear. Freddie Bear? All right. My question is for pretty much everybody on the panel. We just had a talk today with Ryan McMakin about decentralization as a path to anarcho-capitalism, and though Bishop, he's going to give his lecture tomorrow on economic populism. And these are kind of strategies for how do we get to the end goal, because something as libertarians we're really good at is talking about the causes of problems, the solutions to problems, what we don't do enough is talk about how we get there. So I wanted to ask everyone in the panel about what they personally think is the best strategy to getting to the end goal. Any strategy that works, and every strategy that works should be used, I would point to the marijuana legalization movement as something that's very interesting and potentially very powerful in that in the states, you have voters directly, you have legislatures acting independently, you have courts acting independently all to strike down the power of the federal government and even international law of the UN. So that's something that was done, you know, in the state of Colorado, independently against the law, against the wishes of the governor and the state legislature, and they made it happen, they opened the door for all these other states to go in that same direction and the same model can be used in any number of different areas for states to withhold their authority and agreement with various parts of the federal government seriously undermines the type of authority that the UN and the federal government would like to have and the less of that kind of power that they do have, the better. You might, as a footnote of that, check out the website of the Abbeyville Institute, abbeyvilleinstitute.org, Don Livingston, the founder of it. He says that, you know, Americans are too, especially, are too conditioned to thinking horizontally about politics left and right, you know, if only we can get our person in, if only we could get Ron Paul as president. Well, even if we got Ron Paul as president, they would do the same thing to him in spades that they did to Trump, you know, sabotage every move he tried to make. And so, and he says, we need to think more vertically, that is, like Ryan McMacon said, decentralized power and nullification is essentially what Mark is referring to, I think, nullifying federal marijuana laws and like to see that, a massive proliferation of that occurring along with secession. Thomas Jefferson thought there would be at least three confederacies, even during his time in the 1820s, he said that, and he said, they will all be our children, meaning all be Americans and we would wish them well. And then you fast forward to Lincoln and he says, pay up or die to any state that wanted to secede. So he was the anti-Jefferson. Yeah, these two guys, you can arm wrestle to see which one of you goes first. Uh-oh, he gets to ask the question. He gets to ask the question. Are you sure? I mean, that was bad. That was a bad couple. That was not exactly a Tom Brady pass, so you can go ahead. I'm not an athletic person, say the least. However, going off of Payton, I was curious about your guys' thoughts on nonviolent tactics. An author specifically I have in mind is Gene Sharp. If any of you are familiar, so, yeah, stuff like protests, sit-ins, pickets, stuff like that. I mean, that's what a lot of the American revolutionaries did. I think those tactics are good. There's always a fine line between what comes to an invasion of public property or looting, et cetera, which I wouldn't support, but nonviolent civil disobedience is certainly libertarian. It's something to be pursued. Obviously, you want to use it at the right time with the right problem at hand. One of the issues that's always going to happen is the media is always going to call a protest they don't like, like a riot. And the riots they do like is protests kind of. You do get that, but it's certainly a tactic to try. As long as it's, again, done respectfully and civilly and it's at a time when it can make a difference. I think that's a pretty ineffective strategy, actually, to be honest. Making signs will not change a whole lot. Voting will definitely not change anything. I think the effective strategy is to engage in counter-economics, start businesses, step outside of the institutional framework, do new things in new ways and build new free market institutions within the shell of the old. And replace, first stop feeding the beast and then replace the beast tentacles one by one by starting businesses. You might want to read a book by the late Harry Brown. It's called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. He was a Libertarian Party candidate for president several times. Yes, sir. Film a pass. Good. You had your, okay. Sorry about that. I forgot you didn't ask for a question. My question is for Professor Trout. So basically after the lecture about this government land-owned everything, how I was thinking is there like any literature or any policy that we could think of to privatize all that land? Is there anything on it? If you're talking about privatizing public lands that is I think you could see some movements in that direction with some subcontracting but that's only a slight movement. I think you'd have to see, you'd have to communicate to people the abject failure that federal land management and state land management has been. The government is not really using these lands to their best purpose and it's going to take a widespread acknowledgement of that fact before anything actually happens as far as government selling off land or giving it away. I would be perfectly happy if the government decided to give a Yellowstone to the CR Club or the Audubon Society or something. It doesn't have to go to the highest bidder necessarily as long as it winds up in private hands. I think that would be fine as an intermediate solution. Check out the website of political economy research center at WC.org PERC in Montana. They've been working on this for 40 years and they do have a huge literature on this. They have a whole program on what they call enviropreneurship and it's a lot of ranchers and farmers in the western states who are in business who are finding ways to privatize land and to solve problems with the land through free markets and property solutions rather than government regulation and dictates. If you're interested in the literature that's where you need to go. I would add too on that. There's groups like Nature Conservancy and the American Prairie Reserve that are taking land and basically holding it in trust in its natural state and when people can see that kind of contrast where there's a private organization that's fulfilling that same function where there's people to see that we don't need government to engage in conservation. Right. Thank you so much. This is for Dr. Balloon. You're obviously an entrepreneur you teach entrepreneurship along the state. Those are not the same things. I was so I was you obviously see entrepreneurship as a tool to bring younger students into the Austrian school. We have a lot of young entrepreneurs so do you think this tool can be used efficiently in the future to bring in young Austrians and if not what can we do? I think there are more than one strategy that could work for this but as I said in my first talk I successful and experienced entrepreneurs are Austrians. They don't know it. If we can reach them if we can talk to them and give them the terminology that there is already a theory explaining what they know even though they don't have words for it we can gain a lot and I don't mean just in donations to the Mises Institute I mean in terms of influence everywhere and helping them also to succeed because yes they know a lot they've learned a lot they have a lot of experience so they have this tacit knowledge of how the market process works but we can help them and so I think that is definitely a way forward but it's not the only way forward. So my question is about secession from an Austrian perspective this for anyone how would you view CHAS as kind of like an expression of secession and in addition to that why did CHAS fail and why are these like pockets of kind of BLM oriented secession efforts per se So what are you, Chad? What are you talking about? You mean when these lunatics took over part of the town? Right, right, yeah, CHAS That was a violent insurrection and imposition of private property was what that was I mean they crapped all over people's homes and businesses and that was just law-breaking I don't consider that any kind of act of secession of any kind I mean in the American tradition when the southern states seceded you have to understand since you used the word secession first of all when the Constitution was ratified Rhode Island New York and Virginia all reserved the right explicitly to secede if the federal government interfered with what they called their happiness and they all insisted that we have that right and that right is not dependent on any other state or any other group of states voting that it's okay for us to secede we reserve the right and when they were accepted into the union all the other states assumed that right the same right and so when they seceded when the southern states began to secede they did the same thing that they did when they held the ratification conventions they held a ratification conventions and popular votes to go about it they didn't take over a part of the city and ruin people's businesses and burn down their homes and shoot people and beat them up if they tried to protect their own property like these lunatics a little chat I don't know what they call that they're their city and so I think that's not really not an appropriate comparison at all with the American tradition of secession of the man in the way in the back there forward Dr. Terrell specifically about I've been spending some time reading about Thomas Sow and concerned a question about how the administrative structure of the university has grown over the last you know decade and I wanted to get your thoughts on it and does this stem from the fact that a lot of students are mismatched with the universities they go they go to largely because of either affirmative action policies or you know no child left behind type of policies because you know Dr. Sow would say you know when he was at it was a Cornell some students who because you're expected to be reading at the level of the 95 percentile at Cornell and some of the students who probably reading at 75 percentile which is great I admitted to Cornell and many times you see the students failing at a class because the professor expects them to be reading at this level and teaches them at that level so that because a lot of them dropped out of school and that's not good for the university they create this administrative structure around university to create like remedial classes to support for the students and that might have unintended consequences and I wanted to get your thoughts on that in general one of the things that I didn't mention earlier today is that colleges and universities are dealing with some of the problems that are coming out of failures in K through 12 and so there's more of a a need for college classes to make up for the lost ground that students have when they come out of high school they don't have the verbal and quantitative skills that we would expect them to have that they might have had in the past and so colleges and universities are starting with in some cases students that aren't prepared for college work and the incentive that colleges have financially largely because of government subsidies is to kind of coax these students along and maybe fudge the requirements a bit to allow the college to continue to collect taxpayer dollars and colleges sometimes will either turn a blind eye to problems like plagiarism or they will kind of impose slap on the wrist kinds of penalties for these kinds of things and it's hurting the students who do come in prepared you couple that with great inflation and some other ways that colleges and universities have tried to adapt to that ill-prepared student and you end up with the kind of degradation of the value of the degree so I am not sure how to solve that but a part of that I have to start with K-12 and it's a problem that's I think pervasive across public and private institutions they're still facing some of the same problems 20 or 25 years ago a woman named Rita Kramer wrote a book called Ed School Follies she went all over and studied schools of education to learn what teachers are taught people who are getting degrees in education Harvard and Stanford and then she went to small schools, colleges and wrote this whole book and she concluded that the average teacher like if you have credentials in English you would never have read actual Shakespearean plays you would have read Cliff Notes summaries of Shakespeare's plays and so she concluded that the average teacher there are exceptions of course it's grossly uneducated as far as that there are many exceptions of course all of us can name good teachers that we had if we went to public schools as I did but that's a part of it too that Tim is referring to that was about 20 or 25 years ago and my impression is worse now than it was schools of education my first year in graduate school I worked for assistant for Gordon Tullock and Richard Mackenzie they were writing a textbook and they made a bet with me one day at lunch they said in Mackenzie's class of 300 freshmen and they listed on the roster all the majors of everybody he said I bet every single education major will flunk the test I took the bet and I lost and that was 40 years ago and so it's probably worse today so let me add something too because both Tim and Tom have talked about the lack of knowledge when students come to the universities and that's part of the problem because we should expect people to have a certain level of knowledge and all these different things one thing that I've struggled with teaching entrepreneurship is that students know the wrong things they have been miseducated they've been taught through K through 12 some weird stuff that I don't know where it comes from so it seems like the teachers too are either uneducated miseducated or just ideologically driven I had a sophomore economic student that when I try to teach him how voluntary trade is mutually advantageous between buyer and seller and he said well I've been taught that businesses basically take advantage of people's wants you know people have wants they take advantage of them and he went through 12 years of private Catholic school and that's what they taught him about economics and so I had to do what Perry is saying and reprogram him and his classmates from this foolishness that their heads are filled with and they're paying 60,000 a year to their parents are paying for this other question after Lincoln's death of course the Andrew Johnson became president and the radical Republicans were not fans of him I was wondering what your opinion was of Andrew Johnson well since the radical Republicans tried to kick him out tried to kick him out he must have been a pretty good guy as far as that's concerned and what can I say he was a Republican and he was the vice president so he was a part of the Lincoln regime and so he's probably as a result of being part of the Lincoln regime in my opinion his next door neighbor today is probably either Hitler or Stalin or one of the guys down there as far as in my opinion we talked a lot about how universities are kind of teaching economics in more Keynesian in more mainstream ways I was wondering if you guys could talk about the argument of why students should get an economics degree if they're at a college where they're very reluctant to teach free market ideas in order to defeat the enemy you have to know him no I mean yeah I think well one it depends on what you want to do for a career so getting an economics degree is just in general like a signal it signals a certain level of intelligence a certain level of conformity persistence etc so going to a mainstream program in doing that especially you have to do a good amount of math that could be good for finance for finance degrees for private sector it's a good analytical just helps you think logically with basic graphs and math it could be tougher than a lot of business degrees in other sorts of social science degrees where there's a lot of fluff so and it does train you to I got my undergrad at a place that was not friendly to Austrian economics but you know here I am right so I would still encourage you I encourage you to get an economics degree whether it's Austrian based or not again it's partially if you want to get a PhD it's good in academia if you want to just work in the private sector again it depends on the job but there are benefits to learning the other side because you think critically so yeah I would just say I would say that one of the things you have to remember all the other degrees in the social sciences the humane sciences they've all got huge problems as well and you can't just say well how about history because there's a lot of problems a lot of extremely left wing history professors so you're going to get pretty much nothing but misinformation whereas you'll get bits and pieces of good information even from mainstream economic programs and you'll learn about what's so wrong with the economics discipline and economic education in the process directly I'll tell you a short anecdote I used to hand out a magazine article to my principles of economics students that was an interview with Bill Belichick the New England Patriots Coach an economics major in school and he said every decision I make as a coach is based on what I learned about marginalism and economics so you don't have to get a degree to understand that but I used to use that when I taught opportunity cost and trade-offs in the principles class and so you might want to look for that online it's probably ten years old now at the time Bill Belichick likes deflation too right he's a deflationist deflationist how about this guy back here and I'll kill him and then behind you we all know based off of theory that a freer society whether it's anarcho-capitalist or minarchist would be much better than anything we currently have this being said though we're so far away from a society that any of us in this room would consider ideal so what I want to ask is do you guys think that humanity is just condemned for the rest of history to be constantly fighting the state well that's the battle between liberty and power that's what's been going on throughout history there's always people who want to get special privileges so the only way we can defeat that is through greater education but humans aren't perfect so yeah we'll probably be in that battle now there'll be different degrees of victory sometimes liberty will be winning sometimes power will be winning but we're always going to be we're always going to be fighting error we're always going to be fighting economic fallacies so we'll always be fighting the long arm of the government unfortunately I communicated with Ron Paul a while back and he asked me what I was doing I'll tell him about a book I was writing and I told him it seems futile though doesn't it and his response was to say he said well at least it makes life interesting and then our old friend Gary North once said what he thinks a lot of what he does in writing articles things is basically peeing on the front steps of city hall and running away he said you can't defeat city hall but you can at least harass them and it's kind of fun to do that okay so we have an answer question outside I think we got the world done I guess it's 4.15 yeah