 I'm trying to recommend books. There are great many titles available. I've just selected a few of them. And I'd like to begin with one of the classics of the 19th century short pamphlet by the great French economist Frédéric Bastiat, probably the greatest economic journalist of all time and also an original theorist. He was one economist who Carl Marx particularly despised, so at least that's one point in his favor. The work is the law. Many of you will have read this already. It made a big impression on me when I first read it so long ago and it was 1962. What theme in the law is that I think is of fundamental importance is that Bastiat says that the state or the government can't get new powers or rights that individuals don't have. So, for example, since individuals don't have the right to take property to redistribute to poor people, say if I said that there's someone I think is very deserving of getting a lot more money, so I'm going to take some money from a rich person and give it to that person. I wouldn't have the right to do it. I wouldn't have the right to steal the rich person's property. So, Bastiat says similarly the state doesn't have the right to do that. The state can't get any new rights that individuals don't have. And he criticizes on this basis many of the programs of various political parties in France at the time. He was writing, for example, there were programs by the French socialist Louis Blanc to have a system of workshops would be making jobs available to poor people. And he criticizes that for violating this principle the state can't acquire new rights. Another basic theme in that book, which I think is of great importance, and it prefigures an argument that Friedrich Hayat made in his book of 1944, The Road to Serfdom, was that Bastiat says that socialists and other planners view themselves as above society, that they are the ones who are educating people or compelling people to behave in a certain fashion, that the people are unenlightened and need to be controlled by experts, that the elite group of educated or people who really know the truth, and it's their job to teach the rest of us how to behave. This is a theme that's very pop goes back. You find it in Plato's Republic, and we find it even today. I wrote a column recently on Cass Sunstein, who's a very prominent legal academic who has similar views. So Bastiat has a very penetrating criticism of this idea. Now, the second book, I think, is very important. Again, a very short book. I'm starting off with the easier works, and then we'll get into the somewhat longer and perhaps more difficult ones. Later is a pamphlet by Murray Rothbard called What Has Government Done to Our Money? This was originally published by the Freedom School of Robert Lefebvre. I again remember when that one first came out. And what Rothbard argues in that book, its point essential to grasping a proper monetary system, is that money is a commodity. Today, we often think of fiat money. Money is just a creation of the government. A popular view holds that whatever is accepted is money. So money doesn't have any real basis. Just whatever people take to be money is money. But Rothbard, following Ludwig von Mises' famous money regression theorem, says no money must originate as a commodity. And he, on that basis, favors a strict gold standard. And in defending that strict gold standard, he very much opposes fractional reserve banking. Seeing this as the key to the business cycle, it's through expansion of the money supply by bank credit, by bankers, because of the fractional reserve system, that creates an artificial boom leading to depression. So although this is a very short pamphlet, if you read this, I think you'll get a fundamental grasp of monetary theory. And this will enable you to progress further. Extending from monetary theory more widely into other parts of economics, I recommend another popular work relatively short, although longer than the first two. And this is Henry Haslitz's book, 1946, Economics in One Lesson. It's not, please know, it's not one easy lesson. It's just one lesson. It's for many of the people in government in various Keynesian economists. It's not a very easy lesson at all. I should say, just if you'll permit me a digression, one story on Keynesian economics. When Ludwig von Mises was teaching at New York University, for a while, in addition to his famous seminar, he gave another course, which was an introductory course in economics. And he used Haslitz's economics in one lesson as a textbook. So on one occasion, Mises mentioned something, and he said, no economist would ever say this. And a student was unwise enough to put up his hand and said, Professor Mises, so and so, in this textbook says exactly that. And Mises replied, he is not an economist. He is a Keynesian. So to return to economics in one lesson, the lesson that Haslitz has in mind, which is one that's so hard to grasp, is in addition to considering the immediate consequences of a particular policy measure, we also need to consider the long-run consequences and also what would happen if we didn't have this policy. What would have taken the counterfactual proposition, say supposing we have minimum wage loss, what would have happened if we didn't have the minimum wage loss. And Haslitz shows for all sorts of interventionist measures that measures will have disastrous long-run consequences. They won't work at all. For example, to take a topic that's quite relevant today, many people say we need protective tariffs because otherwise people will lose jobs because foreign industries will out-compete them and then the American workers will lose their jobs. So isn't this terrible that workers will be out of work? But what Haslitz points out is that if, as a result of lower prices, people buying more products, this will create jobs for other workers. So it's not the case that tariffs really promote employment of American workers overall if we consider the full effects of the measure. Another fallacy he exposes is one that workers need to have wages high enough so they can buy back the product if the argument by the interventions in favor of this say, well, if workers can't afford to buy the product, then the people selling it just won't make any money. They'll go out of business. But as Haslitz points out, there is no reason to think that the workers in say who are producing automobiles are the ones who are going to be purchasing those very automobiles, whether the wages the worker gets determined by their marginal productivity and whether it doesn't follow that workers who make more expensive products that sell for higher prices would have to get higher wages in order to have enough money to buy the product. If whether the product will be successful, it will be dependent on whether it sells on the market, not just to the workers who are producing it. Now, the three books I've given you so far are quite easy, perhaps Haslitz is a bit more difficult in the first two. So now we can get into the harder stuff. One, I think I want to mention one by Ludwig von Mises, great book of 1922, Socialism. This developed one argument there, the famous calculation argument based on his article of 1920, but developed much more detail, is that a socialist economy is really impossible if you take a socialist economy to mean something like an economy on a large scale, say the scale of a modern nation with changing consumer demands, because the argument was that if you have a certain list of consumer goods to be produced, then if you take the production goods, there are various combinations of these production goods that will produce the consumers goods. So you need some means of determining how efficient, what is the most efficient combination of factors, production to produce these consumer goods. And to do that, you have to have a system of market prices. And Mises said, without market prices, we can't have any economy at all. One thing, in addition to the calculation argument, sometimes people think of socialism as the book socialism. They think only of the calculation argument, but there's a great deal else in the book. For example, Mises gives a very strong defense of the traditional or bourgeois family. Had he lived today, it's safe to say that he wouldn't view with much favor the modern feminist movement or other movements that designed to overthrow the traditional family. And he's very much in favor of that and argues in defense of that. Now, I'd like now to turn to, that's a fairly long book. I'd like now to turn to an even longer book, which is Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. We had this past June in the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. We covered the book, and I reread the book. I read it over the years. Again, this is one I remember that one when it came out. Also in 1962, as you know, I'm quite old, so I was around when some of these books originally came out. So when I reread the book, I was impressed by the enormous intellectual scope of the book that Rothbard shows how he builds up the entire structure of production, showing how income is imputed to the original factors of land and labor and how the structure of capital is built up through the various stages of production. And in the book, there's an enormous number of arguments on particular topics. So every page is filled with interesting arguments. In that respect, in having a large number of arguments that just coming at you one after another, he resembles very much a philosopher, Robert Nozick, whom he didn't get along with so well. But they had a very similar intellectual style, in my opinion, of just having a series of argument. And one point's very important in reading Rothbard. He moved very fast in his process of thought. So he expects readers to be able to really fill in steps of his argument that sometimes you might think that you wonder, well, how did you get to this? So you have to reconstruct it in order to understand what he's saying. And in the book, I come along with it in this edition, published, recent edition, published by the Mises, who includes his power and market. And this gives a very detailed and systematic analysis of all forms of government intervention in the economy. And this I would, I think, if you want to get into economic theory in a detailed level, this is one of the two books I think you have to read. The other one, of course, is the great work of Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, which came out in 1949. And what Mises does here, it's really his, he gives a very detailed account of the basis in the theory of knowledge for economics. He also had an earlier book, a collection that says epistemological problems of economics. And what he tries to do, and carries this off with his enormous knowledge of the philosophical literature, he shows how economics can be developed as a science of human action from thinking about the concept of action drawing out the consequences of that concept. He develops the whole systematic structure of economics on that basis. And the last book I want to mention is the great two-volume work of Murray Rothbard, an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought. And this is much more than a history of economics. It's a comprehensive picture of the European civilization during the period Rothbard was writing about. And I'll have time just for one topic in the book in the second volume, which I think is of particular interest is Murray Rothbard's analysis of Marxism. And here he follows the political philosopher Eric Vogelin, who had been a member of Meese's private seminar. That Marxism is kind of what he calls a Gnostic movement. The Gnostics were a group of early Christian heretics. And there was also a non-Christian Gnostic who thought that the world was a dark place and only some kind of secret knowledge possessed by experts could save us. So Rothbard views Marxism in this perspective and shows how there are various parallels between Gnostic and millenarian movements and modern Marxism. He's here following the books of Vogelin political religions and came out in 1938 and Vogelin's book New Science of Politics in 1952. So he's very much influenced that by Vogelin. One story on this, I think he had became more influenced by Vogelin than he had been at an earlier period. I remember he once asked me on Vogelin said, do you think this leap in being means anything? That was key concept of Eric Vogelin. So he was a bit skeptical about some of Vogelin's more general philosophy, but he applied and developed his ideas in analyzing Marxism. So I think those are a few of the books I think would help you in understanding the crisis we face today. And as you will see, if you read them, none of them have anything to say about the opioid crisis. Yes.