 So I got a fun talk today. One of the things that I think we're so fortunate to have is that we're building off of a great academic tradition. And we're also building up the work of particularly great men. Louis von Mises and Murray Rothbard both were not simply satisfied kind of deal with the purely abstract and theoretical. I mean, both were men of action in terms of trying to engage meaningfully within politics in ways to actually bring about a world that more closely aligns with their ideological understanding of what a free and prosperous society looks like. And so one of the more controversial aspects of Rothbard's political strategy in particular was his embrace and his understanding of the powers of populism as a potential force for good with libertarian circles. I'm going to flesh out some of the history of populism within the Western, particularly American tradition, identify some of the aspects of the current political environment, look at some of the criticisms of populism from other libertarians out there, and then kind of outline what I think offer some particularly interesting opportunities for us as Misesi and Rothbardians and engaging with this current political landscape. So of course, I go without saying that populism has been one of the big catch phases of kind of political discourse for the last several years, Brexit, you see with other foreign movements, things like that. The question is, what is populism in the first place? Because not only do we have it from Donald Trump, but it's described with Bernie Sanders, kind of left wing populism. Left wing populism is typically treated by the media, a little more respectively than right wing populism, which might give you some insight on where the true elites stand. We see it also in a post-Trump age, the idea that populism is here to stay within the GOP. And this is not unique to the US, of course. Populists, if you talk to a lot of Latin American libertarians, for example, they are repelled by the idea of populism because of the experiences of Chávez in Venezuela. But we also saw it with the success of Bolsonaro in Brazil, who actually was able to use his position to put in scholars with Mises Brazil in some positions of power that can't be dismissed out of hand. We also see a non-ideological populist. This also presents the rising specter of concerns about liberal democracy in Europe. This kind of starts with the Brexit, these nativist rejection of EU policies. We've also seen non-ideological movements entirely. I mean, this is Armenia. They had an anti-corruption populist movement in 2018, led to the formation of a non-ideological party as the governing party there. So again, there's nothing ideologically connected to populism. So again, is populism a useful term? Here, we have the Atlantic asking if populism is useless because it's only a negative slur. I think that might portray some of the biases within the Atlantic as an institution. But there are some kind of common factors when we talk about populism. They are, again, it's a non-ideological method. It presents societies, political conflicts, and us versus them sort of dynamic, the people versus the out-of-touch elite. This elite aspect is also important because typically, the populist critique is not only is there an elite isolated from us, but they are growing increasingly distant from cultural norms of the people. It is usually connected with the rejection of political norms, which is one of the reasons for concern. Oh, you're breaking down constitutional order, illegal institutions that are dependent upon for stability. So there's fear that populism leads to disturbances in normal order. And also, they typically involve a personality cult. You know, there's a man of action that is kind of the catalyst that the masses rally behind. Joseph Larno himself, kind of following that Rothbardian tradition, has looked at kind of populism as a non-ideological vessel. And again, I think this has reflected a lot within a lot of kind of the libertarian political scholarship, you know, the entire battle of winning hearts and minds. You know, there's interesting literature on the differences between the kind of, what's called the Hayekian strategy versus the Rothbardian strategy. So there's a long line of work on this, kind of building on Mises' idea that governments are always grounded upon the popularity, kind of a perceived legitimacy of the population, right? And so again, if you understand that, then populism is simply kind of a weaponization of the people recognizing how far the state has gone from their interest. So again, looking at the origins of it here, we have Gaius Grocus, who was one of the two Grocus brothers, before the Caesarean era, this major issue where, because of increasingly expansionary Roman wars, since the military is only staffed by Roman citizens that had land, the more soldiers were away, their families back home and having to sell their land holdings, which led to this consolidation of wealth, and so land reform was one of the major issues, you know, kind of motivating the popularies. The opposite, the elite were the optimates who were, you know, aligned strongly with the Senate of Rome, Cicero, was a part of the optimates, Julius Caesar was a populist. Again, this is true, even though there was ideological differences between these two camps, they were not kind of traditional modern political parties. Again, it was questioning on what the structure, you know, should be the leading actor in political Roman politics. You know, earlier today, Ryan and Macon brought the levelers, which was also kind of a British populist rejection of, in this case, it was the absolutism of parliament after, you know, during the first British Civil War. But again, what had happened was an increase of literacy amongst the common people, and from there, they were guided by ideologies of religious tolerance and an embrace of markets and kind of the origins of liberalism. You know, within the US after the revolution, one of the big populist uprisings was Shays Rebellion. This itself came from, you know, former Revolutionary War veterans recognizing that the state governments were using their collective power to increase their taxes on the citizens, to reward financial speculators with hard money rather than the devalued dollars they were collecting, right? So this led to a Shays Rebellion. That itself also had a backlash, right? That helped, you know, convince otherwise sympathetic individuals of the need for that constitutional counterrevolution that Patrick Newman brought up earlier this week, right? So again, there are consequences at times for particularly unsuccessful populist uprisings. Of course, and you know, the populist party, to the extent that it existed with how controlled and filtered democracy was in the early American Republic is best embodied by the Jeffersonians. You know, these anti-federalists, these Republicans, you know, the political organization was a direct reflection of critiques on the Hamiltonian merchant class, right? And so from this, you know, they wore a reaction to federalist growth in the government far beyond these stated constitutional aims. They opposed the first Bank of the United States, which they saw as a, you know, one of the great distributors of state privilege of specific groups. And the response to this was cutting spending, cutting taxes, abolishing the bank. One of the things I want to kind of highlight is that even though we often think about kind of the great men of history and there's some validness in that, some of those historical perspectives, these populist movements were not simply one man, you know, fighting the man, right? Like here we have John Taylor of Caroline, another figure of Patrick Newman's talk. I think I'm the first, me since you're a presenter, to be able to quote from Patrick Newman's new book. It is a great one on this issue. But here, you know, you have also literature from other scholars that have highlighted that John Taylor's kind of motivating ethos for his economic policy was directly in rejection of the state privilege of the bank, which they saw as a corrupt of influence and further expanding, you know, the wealth and power of a selected few at the expense of the common man, the young and farmer, as well as the idea of the American Revolution itself. Of course, kind of the, you know, it's interesting. Patrick Newman mentioned this, you know, that the post Jeffersonian era is really our first unit party, right? The era of good feelings. We're told that we should celebrate this. This is us transcending this petty partisanship that plagues American populist politics, right? Of course, as Dr. Newman's lecture highlighted, there was a lot of corruption during this period. We saw the moderation of the Jeffersonian line, on which led to, within this party, the formation of coalitions that were explicitly described themselves as radical Republicans, Martin Van Buren being one of them. But of course, the leader of this was that man of action, Andrew Jackson. I particularly, I use this photo in particular because it's one of my favorites. Not only is he looking quite fetching here, but the title of this portrait is Andrew Jackson, Defender of Beauty and Beauty. It was painting the celebration of his great victory at the Battle of New Orleans. I mean again, a lot of the platform here is very similar. Right here, we have an out-of-touch growing elite benefited by the state privilege of the national bank and a built up of, again, a lot of very interesting economic thinkers, such as William Gallagher, who recognized again, this central institution as the center hub of corruption in American politics, and again, the betrayal of the values that America was founded upon. Gallagher is another one of those figures that I really like in Patrick's book because when you think about American economists prior to the 20th century, sometimes we'll think about Alexander Hamilton, because all of the great economic theorists, the ones actually trying to understand how markets act, they were newspaper men, they were politicians, they were not in universities because that system hadn't been built yet properly in the European mold within America. And so these sort of figures that offer a lot of very interesting literature kind of go overlooked. Gallagher in particular, he wrote a book about the Piper money in the United States that was widely dispersed in Europe. So again, this is a very interesting sort of proto-Austrian traditional out of regards that offer some interesting intellectual rabbit holes to go down if you're interested in this topic. Of course, one of the great victories of American history is Jackson's defeat of the bank, I particularly love that you've got this demon guy over here, which I think is a proper embodiment of the second bank of the United States. One of the great organizers behind Jackson, of course, was Martin Van Buren, one of Murray Rothbard's favorite presidents, who was a brilliant man. He was the son of a tavern keeper, end up building one of the most powerful political parties of his age. He had one great weakness, though, trains that looked like William Henry Harrison. It's funny, in this case, and Rothbard brings up this point that the populism of Jackson was kind of trumped by the populism of William Henry Harrison, which was very superficial. He himself was a member of kind of an elite class, but they kept him out of the campaign. They pushed this propaganda with the newspapers about how he's just a simple old country bumpkin that likes to sip on his hard cider, the great victor of tippy canoe, and bringing with him Tyler, too. Of course, unfortunately, shortly thereafter, American politics becomes defined by the American Civil War, and then you have the rise of the Lincoln administration, and with it, again, not quite a central bank, but you have the greenbacks and financial regulations that end up again creating some of the big issues here. Even more telling, though, is that if you think about this period of history, it's something we don't think about a lot. Here you had, after the Civil War, an America with states literally occupied by federal troops, a post-Civil War South, and within that you also had the growing railroad industry, which is one of the most political-lized industries in American history because of its dependence upon land grants. This Republican Party was perhaps the most corrupt, destructive party in American history, not simply because of a revisionist views of the Civil War itself as a conflict, because in theory, in theory, you could roll back some of these extravagances of war if you really value the union. There's a narrative for that out there. The problem is that they weren't quite content with, there was no interest in rolling back. You started the rise of American empire. One of the great conflicts within this, a post-Civil War America, you had the rise of another very interesting, overlooked, free market, populist tradition, which called the bourbon Democrats. These are consistent of Southerners that rejected post-Civil War policy, but also led by a man named Sylt Sam Tilden, who was the governor of New York. He was a great victor over Boss Tweed, which is kind of one of the most nefariously corrupt figures of New York history, which is probably the state and the union with the most extravagant history of corruption, right? But this entire tradition, again, went back to this Jacksonian era of railing against the central bank, promoting how to sound money as the surest way of tackling a lot of this corruption that was very apparent in the system. The problem is, is that at this point, the structures have become so powerful that literally the election of 1876, the night of the election, everyone understood that Sam Tilden had defeated governor of Ohio, Rutherford Hayes, but that's not quite how it worked out. The election was stolen. It was stolen in part because of New York Times op-ed. At that time, it was a very partisan Republican paper. It kind of helped sow a confusion about the results on election night that helped Ulysses S. Grant to mobilize federal troops, occupy ballot boxes. Tilden's camp was said, hey, look, if you give us money, we'll give you the votes that you need. He was one electoral vote short. He refused to do it because it was his view that, hey, look, I'm running to clean up this corruptive state fueled by these financial interests. And see, that's what they want me to do. They want me to compromise before, and to get what I've already won. He rejected it. Well, he rejected it as his own peril. We did have the rise of Hayes. The interesting thing about this bargain, one of the aspects of it was that you remove federal troops from the South, but you also got in return, the Democratic Party was allowed to appoint the postmaster general, which is where all the spoils was at. So again, it turns out the Democratic Party didn't really care about corruption. They simply wanted it to be their own corruption. Because of this, the Republican Party controlled American politics for 24 years. If they think about how much power that came with that move right there. Of course, shortly thereafter, you have a breakup of what is a third political system, the way it's looked in through political science literature. One of the most interesting articles on this period is actually in the Progressive Era book, looking at this very unique tradition. Again, another Patrick Newman point he made in his lecture yesterday was about the pietus and the liturgicals. Murray Rothbard goes a lot in depth on that with his Progressive Era book. And of course, when we think about populism, off of his William Jennings Bryant, that is kind of seen as one of the great examples. He had the populous party. The idea of minting silver was seen as a way of bailing out deaded farmers. But what's interesting here is that the Bryant, William Jennings Bryant, taking over the Democratic Party changed fundamentally the ideological structure. This is what kind of led to kind of the modern Uniparty that has kind of controlled American politics maybe until the Trump era of two interventionist regulated free market parties. And Rothbard, within a variety of works dealing with this period of history, he talks about how this was destructive of the laissez-faire tradition within mainstream American politics. I think one of the most interesting aspects about this and something that Rothbard brings up is that even though Jennings has called a populist, what we actually saw, for one, he never won an election. So apparently he really did not have the support of the people. But after this change in political systems, we saw a massive decline in electoral participation. And that's one of the kind of interesting aspects about this Rothbardian populist view is that in some ways it's a mirror opposite of something like the neo-reactionary, anti-democracy sort of literature out there in the conservative movement today. It is from this perspective that it was the decreased interest of the masses in politics that actually helped allow for the larger consolidation of state power. And again, we're gonna look at some other trends in the present day, but I think this is something that's very interesting here. Of course, the other great populists of American history is kind of the polar opposite of Andrew Jackson. You have Teddy Roosevelt. Both of them have, I think, very important features aesthetically that explains why they continue to be celebrated figures today. The biggest thing is that they're macho, right? If populism relies upon the man of action, the strong man, Teddy Roosevelt certainly had that in spades. But what's interesting is that even though he's sold as his great trust buster, if you look at the actual history of the Roosevelt administration, which is covered, there's two great short reads on this from Rothbard, the origins of the Federal Reserve and something about Federal Reserve Wall Street and foreign policy, he really goes down into the connections of how Teddy Roosevelt was a longtime ally of J.P. Morgan, one of the great trusts out there. And again, you see this throughout Murray Rothbard's work of this era is that he identifies all of the large corporate powers that be the Morgan family versus the Rockefeller family. Again, this plays a very prominent role in kind of the creation of the Federal Reserve. And so again, if you're interested in this period of history, there's a lot of very interesting literature, kind of naming names and this power elite sort of analysis. Of course, when we think about populism now, again, as I mentioned, what's interesting is that 20th century politics was defined kind of the uniparty, a decline in average people being engaged in the system and that changed to a large degree with Donald Trump. And one of that is because of him doing right there, not only was he a billionaire celebrity reality TV star, but he was perhaps the most interesting account on Twitter. But of course, within the kind of Trump wave, you've seen rises of other figures advocating for right wing populism such as Steve Bannon and also Tucker Carlson, right? And of course, you know, what's interesting is if you look at the change in demographics of the Republican electorate, what we saw was a massive decline of support from Republicans amongst like college educator, right, right voters, the country club crowd that had long been kind of recognized as synonymous with the GOP. And in its return, we had kind of this working class blue collar coalition. And we saw as reflected, I mean, it was one of the last rallies that Donald Trump did in 2020, it's this mass of attendance rising from the masses. And again, we saw this play out as the title of this graph shows the 2020 voter turnout is estimated to be the highest in 120 years. So this goes back, we're now reverting back to a previous political system in terms of electoral engagement with the population. And I think this is interesting, particularly considering that, regardless of your thoughts about who actually won the presidential race, it is unquestionable that down the line, the GOP did remarkably well in congressional races, state house races, you know, Senate was a little bit of an interesting thing. In theory, the increase of the voting population was always seen as a way of Democrats gaining even greater power, but obviously that did not happen in spite of, again, 120 year highest voter turnout. So of course, all this that we've seen Donald Trump by I'm sure I don't have to tell you guys here has created a lot of negative press by certain institutions, right? You know, this alongside populist movements within Europe, within South America, right? Bolsonaro was described as the Trump of the Tropics. You know, you have all of the expected institutions of the regime, such as the Brookingsley Institute, identifying that populism is the threat of liberal democracy, which given the actions of this past year I find quite interesting. Again, this is not simply Brookingsley, this is a human rights council, right? You see it also from the Adam Smith Institute, which because of Brexit, I think rebranded itself from libertarianism to what they call neoliberalism. And also we saw from Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute, who's perhaps one of the most vocal opponents of the greatest warners of the threat of populism in American politics. And within this article, he makes the similar point that the Brookings Institute made, right? That this brand of populism that we're seeing emerge, that it threatens individual liberty, free markets, the rule of law, constitutionalism, the free press and liberal democracy. Now, who here actually thinks we have any of these things? Right, they take at face value the propaganda of the state. There is nothing liberal about a society that de-platforms political dissidents and that beats political prisoners because of a rally in the events of January 6th, right? And there's nothing democratic about a society where we see corporate, labor, national security agencies, all conspiring for a specific political outcome and changing election law unconstitutionally right before. You don't change the rules of a game and then expect people to take the game seriously, right? The biggest threat to all these institutions is not populism, but it's the actions of the technocrats that are doing everything they can to stop, that are worried about this populist uprising that we've just seen in electoral behavior. And what's also interesting on this is, again, it's populism is a big threat, but yet, if you look at Cato's content about Ron DeSantis and his actions this past year, you've got five articles. Most of them are criticizing him for, because the real danger is government getting in the way of vaccine passports. They're criticizing him for big tech issues. There's no, oh man, think about how much liberty we save because a state like Florida of that size and that population stood against the tyranny of the technocrats this past year. Telling, I think. Lou Rockwell has a term for the sort of libertarian like Tom Palmer, he comes from the regime libertarian. The regime libertarian believes in the market economy more or less, but talks about the Federal Reserve or Austrian business cycle theory, gets some fidgety. His institute would rather invite Janet Yellen for an exclusive cocktail event rather than the Ron Paul for a lecture. It's too tough to be a libertarian when it comes to anti-discrimination law, given how much flak he's liable to get, and he'll side with liberals on that, even though it's completely incompatible with libertarian principles. He sips in happy concord with supporters of the most egregious, unjust wars, but his blood boils in moral outrage at someone who told an off-color joke 25 years ago. I think we can add to this, that the regime libertarian rather be published in Bloomberg and the New York Times in defense of lockdowns, rather than be skeptical of the narrative here. To be fair though, to Mr. Palmer though, his concerns are not simply about this protection of lower democracy. The real threat is often perceived as a war on pluralism. The idea here that it is the populism allows for a certain portion of the group to wield this political power against minority groups. Again, typically this can be seen in view of minorities, financiers, et cetera, right? The 1%. Well, one of the things I think it's interesting is that if we're trying to identify what might be that minority group of elites, they're imposing their will on the people that should be rejected against. There's a very interesting study. It kind of transcends typical left, right, binary views, hidden tribes. One of the things I really like about this it highlights how much political correctness and cultural issues are motivating non-white voters, which I think goes against the narrative that we're often told. And here you see 8% is labeled as progressive activists. And it's these progressive activists that have outsized power in the institutions of the current regime. What you see is that the majority are not proud of American history. What you see is that these are very striking views held by this population, and their views that are not typically held by other groups, even other traditional democratic voters within this research. Compared to average Americans, they're twice as likely to list politics as a hobby. They're the sort of people that never give up Twitter. They're more likely to be white. They're more likely to be college graduates or in postgraduate programs, right? So this is, I think, the demographic that if you're identifying what really is an ideological demographic that has outsized power in the current system, I think that there's a very interesting analysis highlighting specific institutional power. And of course, one of the things about the Trump age is there was a lot of stories about the parallels between kind of Trump brand and Pat Buchanan's wing in the early 1990s. And I think there's some reasons for this politically. The 90s were defined by kind of post-World War, or post-Cold War populism, or post-Cold War foreign policy. That kind of helped split up like the typical Republican coalition of anti-communist hawks, free marketeers, and cultural conservatives. Because if there is no Cold War menace, then again, that's one big part of that three-legged stool that might not be needed anymore. And so from that, you saw Pat Buchanan, I mean, he's considered a paleo-conservative, an anti-empire conservative with some questionable economics views. But what he had was the establishment of institutions designed for dialogue with the paleo-conservatives and what became known as paleoliberitarians. Paleoliberitarians were the fountainhead of that school of political tradition. It was Murray Rothbard and Lou Rockwell here. It was a creation of a number of institutions for this regard. You had the Rothbard-Rochwell report. There was a creation of the John Randolph Society named from Patrick Newman's favorite Virginia politician that had members of both paleo-cons and paleoliberitarians. Pat Buchanan himself was a member. And so what's interesting, I think, is that if we're trying to identify how we as libertarians might be able to take advantage of this current political environment, we should look at the past. So here, one of my favorite articles, again, if you're interested in this topic, the first one you start off with is an article called Strategy for the Right. In addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, Murray Rothbard said, the proper course for the right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy in short of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them and ripping them off. And there's an article recently by Ryan McMacon that kind of kind of expanding this point a little bit. The idea being that economics is a key tool in the culture war. There's a lot of economists that kind of want to transcend. And you see this also very, you saw this with Dr. Block last night, right? His description of libertarianism was neither left nor right. There are some libertarian scholars or some economists that don't like getting into those left-right cultural dynamics. But Murray Rothbard, and you see this reflected also in Workfully Rockwell, they recognized that one of the best ways to get our ideas out there in the general population is by appealing to cultural preferences and highlighting how the free market does not destabilize the family, does not destabilize churches, does not destabilize these institutions that can serve as value, but instead compliment them. It's important to realize, Rothbard went on, that the establishment doesn't want excitement in politics. It wants the masses to continue to be a little bit asleep. It wants kinder, gentler. It doesn't want to pat Buchanan. Not only for his excitement and a hard edge of his content, but also for a similar tone and style. I wonder if there's a modern American politician that this sort of description might apply to. Again, I think it's precise of the tone and the excitement of Donald Trump that ended up elevating. Again, some of these electoral trends that we've seen in the past couple of years. So again, paleo-libertarianism as a libertarian coalition guided by the ideas of Mises and Rothbard, they identified some specific points that the Leviathan state is the institution of evil throughout history, that it is the free market that defends moral and practical institutions. That private property is an economic necessity as well as a moral one. That part in particular I think is important because often capitalism is defended kind of on purely materialistic grounds. You see this critique often come up like the populace right now. Is that, oh well, libertarians will sell out their grandma for a couple of extra points on GDP. No, we're not simply interested in the creation of stuff and the state of stuff. This stuff is very important. It's very easy to take for granted modern living conditions but it's because precisely that free markets are morally strong institutions beyond simply material gains. I think relevant with some of the growing inward turn from the kind of, we see the tools of the war on terror now being the war on domestic terror kind of goes through the threats of the garrison state kind of used the FBI within trying to prosecute Republicans and red states around the country. Again, also explicitly anti-welfare state as a way that victimizes not only the producers in the small business of the country but also is detrimental to the clients other the receivers of welfare. Again, a lot of this stuff is kind of libertarian stuff but they combine with the cultural norms a defensive Western civilization, the defensive Christian values, defensive family, church, state, et cetera. And again, I think it's precisely the cultural outreach here that offers this as an opportunity to build coalitions. One person was very effective at this as obviously Congressman Dr. Ron Paul. In 96, Congressman Paul had been out of Washington for quite a while, he ran for LP in 88. He got reelected in Texas in 1996 in spite of harsh opposition by the GOP establishment. Newt Gingrich was flying down there trying to target this election in particular to stop Dr. Paul and they couldn't succeed. Everyone knew that Ron Paul was a hardcore libertarian. He wasn't simply a country doctor that had delivered 4,000 babies at this point as he was able to kind of get away with in the 70s. People knew exactly what he was and because he was able to build with the work of Murray and Lou, a much larger network. And he saw us, I think, also play out during his presidential cycles. It was homeschooling moms in Iowa that was rabid for Ron Paul as anarchists from here in Auburn, right? And again, it's broadening the power of these ideas. Of course, there's no greater institution right now that I think drives a lot of the critiques that again, this kind of modern populist movement has on capitalism as they understand it in the Fed. This is one of my favorite sites out there for kind of good propaganda purposes is WTF happened in 1971, they've got a great series of charts kind of identifying, going off the gold standard as a big breaking point, kind of leading to the rise of the kind of financialization economy that we have right now. We can talk about income inequality, the breakdowns between output and wages. We can talk about differences in real GDP, trade policies, et cetera, like that. We can talk about consolidation of wealth. And what's interesting right now is that for all the critiques out there, you see this with Steve Bannon, you see this with Tucker Carlson, they were all against the venture capitalists, they were all against the chambers of commerce. The one institution that they don't talk about is the Fed. Steve Bannon just was recently on a 10 pull, another kind of Occupy Wall Street sort of populist. And he kind of ignored this issue. And I think this is one of those opportunities where all of their critiques in society, the critiques about the weathering away of like the one income household, right? There is a narrative there that we can tell as people, as Rothbardians, in our understanding of the way that central banks and credit expansion play a role in the consolidation of power. Of course, we've had some very interesting sort of outpricings within the current financial system, not simply in talking heads on TV, but we see this kind of, the use of Wall Street bets as a trading platform, kind of targeting these large financial institutions. And one of the criticisms is the consolidation of corporate power. I think this is relevant not only to the discussion of big tech, which I'm going to touch on here shortly, but kind of just generally, right? And one of the things that we should be able to understand as Austrians, there's a very interesting paper on this particular topic in 2014, the QJAE, about historical trends of what is called merger waves and corporate consolidation within business cycles. And again, this makes sense, right? You make it cheaper for large corporations to buy up debt or to take on debt. They then use that to acquire competitors, right? Facebook has spent the last decade acquiring Instagram and WeChat and, you know, what's that? We have this whole variety of a network, right? Which can lead to further consolidation, which then combined with the attention of Washington ends up leading to this very destructive environment, you know, where the company, corporations that are the most, that benefit the most from state privilege right now. You know, even if they wanted to be good actors here, the danger is that, you know, rejecting, censoring Trump supporters, you know, increases likelihood of penalizing regulations from Washington DC. And I think this gets to a very interesting, different dynamic in kind of the Republican parties we see here right now, you know, in this populist era. We have someone like Josh Hawley, who was a senator, and perhaps because of his current position, there is a push for conservatives in power to utilize the weapons of the federal government to deal with, you know, section 230, to try to use the federal government as a means of breaking up these institutions that they have identified as threats to, you know, conservative values here in the US. And this is kind of the old Teddy Roosevelt approach to populism, right? It's trust busting to a certain extent. It's hostile to some corporate interests, but there's always, it's defending, it's attacking your enemies, but defending your allies. And of course, you know, it's interesting when you look at the backgrounds and CVs of some of these people in high positions and big tech companies, how often they have been alumni of the Kamala Harris Senate Office of Joe Biden's administration, of Barack Obama's administration, right? The alternative to this, though, is kind of the Ron DeSantis approach. You know, the identifying something like the big tech as an issue, and then identifying that there is perhaps a role for state governments independent from that federal framework to take seriously some of these concerns that conservatives have. One of the things that really frustrates me about this particular issue, and I don't have the answer, there's not a clear answer on how you break up this consolidated wealth. But you have some really bad arguments out there against the DeSantis bill in particular. And I think it stems, this misunderstanding of the difference between the state approach versus the federal approach can be devastating to our cause. So in this article whose author is not particularly important, but within it, the comparison being made to justify what is a standard libertarian view, right? That property is he draws a comparison of Facebook to a wall. And now imagine you have this wall that you have built and people now can draw on your wall. Banksy comes and draws on your wall. But somebody draws something on the wall you don't like, and then you paint it up. And then, oh, this big, bad authoritarian Ron DeSantis is telling you that you can't have that on the wall. Like, oh, this is an infringement property. Of course, comparing a wall to big tech misses the point. These are not similar goods, particularly with like the American tradition of political discourse. You know, it's interesting, you've had others kind of say, oh, this is the biggest infringement upon First Amendment rights we've ever seen. The Florida bill in particular kind of focused purely on registered political candidates. And you see this with the way that newspapers, cable companies, cable stations, radio stations, there's always been equal time laws when it comes to political discourse of registered political candidates because there's an understanding that in a democracy where elections do matter, that if you allow for one side to control the discourse, there's going to be political consequences that do not lend themselves to that liberal democracy that we're supposed to be intent on conserving. Right? There's plenty of issues with the Ron DeSantis approach. Like the guy that wrote the legislation clearly doesn't understand how algorithms work. Like, you know, I'm not defending this as this is the ideal libertarian perspective. But ultimately, I think as libertarians engaging in this populist world and dealing with the fact that we're living in an economy with the Federal Reserve giving, among other aspects of federal policy, large powerful corporations hostile to American interests, state privilege, the very aspect that motivated that 19th century populism, right? We need to engage with it seriously. As Frasery Vasyaut said, the worst thing that can happen to a good cause, such as the cause we are here for, is not to be skilfully attacked but to be ineptly defended. And again, a lot of commentary on this issue and ineptly defended. And this is an issue that matters. I mean, imagine right now what the American Empire is. I mean, it's perhaps the most perverse form of empire we've ever seen. Because at least in history's past, empires are expanding territory. You get the tyranny at home. You get expansionism abroad. But there's a certain national pride, you know, that came to being a Roman citizen. Here in the U.S., you know, we have an empire that gives disrupts abroad that terrorizes us here at home and yet wants to deprive us of even having pride in the American tradition. And it's precisely because that American tradition is baked in the ideas and the ideology and the populist of classical liberalism that they so hate. One of the other interesting things about this environment is that we're now living in an inflationary, you know, we've seen last few months inflationary environments and historically inflation is a very major driver, very influential in politics. You know, we saw protests kind of on this regard. You know, you used to have a back protesting interest rate hikes for Paul Volcker. You know, people sending like wood ins and like, oh well no one's buying houses because of your interest rate policy. So, you know, have at it. You know, this is particularly right now in an environment where, you know, luckily a lot of the political discourse out there in an inflationary environment where money really does matter, where spending is an issue, 95% of all political pundits have nothing to say, right? They've been acting in this economically nihilistic environment for the last old decades. And so this gives us opportunities to identify again who the enemy is, what should society look like and preach sound economic policy to identify how our methods achieve the means that these populists want. And I'm gonna finish up with a, two quotes, one from Lloyd von Mises here. Because one of the things that is important here, you see this throughout kind of Mises's views on ideas in society, right? Going back to that idea of the popular government. You know, he viewed economics as something that should not simply be confined to academics talking about theoretical papers. You know, it should not be isolated to ivory towers. You know, what we need is engagement from the population to understand these basic economics. If you understand basic economics, you're more economically literate than the experts at the Fed. You know, that's one of the purposes of Mises University is to help provide a very deep background in this to a variety of different disciplines. I mean, it's also up to us, and you see this throughout the Austrian tradition of engaging with normal people. You know, Henry Hazard himself, right, was a journalist. Carl Menger himself was also a journalist, right? Like, we have all these great historical figures that we should recognize, you know, to take from their example. If, you know, great movements are typically led by men of action. One of the greatest benefits that we have as Austrians is that we have great men that we can emulate. You know, we have Ludwit von Mises. You haven't got to download the biography of Ludwit von Mises as a free audio book. It's one of the best things out there. But also Murray Rothba, right, these are brilliant men who took great personal, who gave up otherwise potentially very lucrative and powerful careers in defense of the ideas necessary for building civil society. And it's precisely because the weaknesses of this current political environment come from an understanding of economics developed by kind of the current public school apparatus that doesn't want you to think like an economist. This makes our role here as people that engage in the political environment all the more important. I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite Rothbard quotes because I was told to end on a cheering note. And this, I think, then speaks the fire with which Rothbard did so much of his intellectual work. You know, America as it exists today is two nations. One is their nation, the nation of the corrupt enemy, of their Washington, D.C., of their brainwashing public school system, their bureaucracies, their media. And the others are much larger nation. The majority, the far nobler nation, that represents the older and truer America. We are the nation that is going to win, that is going to take America back no matter how long it takes. It would indeed be a grave sin to abandon that nation and that America short of victory. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mises Institute is here to make sure that we can do everything we can in pursuit of that victory. Thank you very much.