 And now I want to introduce our speaker for this evening. My good friend Tom Di Lorenzo, Professor of Economics at Loyola University in Maryland, and senior fellow at the Mises Institute. And Professor Di Lorenzo will be talking to us about how he came or how I came to Austrian economics. Thank you. Thank you all for coming, and thanks to Joe for inviting me to give a talk of this sort, how I came to Austrian economics. And it's not going to be just a trip down memory lane or something like that. I don't want to put everyone to sleep after they travel all day, although there will be some of that. But I thought what most of the students that would be interested in is hearing me say how Austrian economics has shaped my research career and has shaped a lot of the questions I ask and a lot of the methods I use in trying to go about my research and writing and teaching. You can't separate the two of them. So I'm going to tell a bit of a story, and then I'm going to make some comments about how the Austrian school has really dominated my research career and then my teaching career. And I'm not going to say it. I'm probably, I think, a year younger than Joe Salerno. So I'm not quite over the hill yet. I think I got one more year for that. But when I started school, there was no internet. When I started college, there was no internet, of course. And just by happenstance, my first semester in college, my professor was an aficionado of Milton Friedman in the Chicago School. And in the little classroom at Westminster College in Pennsylvania, there was a whole bookshelf full of all the old back issues of the Freeman published by the Foundation for Economic Education. And so this professor of mine used a book by Friedman called An Economist's Protest. And it was a series of Friedman's Newsweek articles. Back in those days, this was 1972, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson took turns writing a Newsweek magazine on some economic issue. One week was Friedman railing against the postal monopoly. And the next week would be Samuelson being in favor of any government program you could name. Whatever bragging about how the Soviet economy is going to overtake the US economy any day now, that sort of thing. And this book was used as a supplement to the textbook. But I really liked Friedman, I think, because he was articulate. He could write. He could communicate. And he used really basic economics, basic applied microeconomics. And he was very much, later on, I would decide, well, he's very much in the tradition of Austrian economics, the literary tradition of Austrian economics. And it's mostly the Austrians today who are carrying forward this literary tradition in Austrian economics. And so I ended up as a freshman in college going through, flipping through all these back issues of this thing called the free man in the classroom, all the back issues. And so I went back online. They're all online now. And I went back to look at, what was I reading as a freshman in college? I remember sitting there after class and flipping through all these things and reading articles by Ludwig von Mises, Gary North, Leonard Reed, Percy Greaves, Israel Kirsner, Henry Haslett, Bill and Mary Peterson, Milton Friedman, and Hans Sennholz. And interestingly, I looked back at this about a week ago. The one article in 1972 by Friedman was a review of a book, a small book, by Mary Peterson that was an illustration of the Missessian theory of interventionism. So the one article of Friedman that I might have read was an Austrian article. It was a review of an Austrian book by Mary Peterson, the wife of the late Bill Peterson. And Joe Salerno, he's the Bill Peterson chair at the Mises Institute. Not everyone here knows who Bill Peterson was, but he attended Mises seminar in New York City and was a fellow traveler of ours for many, many years, passed away a few years ago. So that was really my initial introduction to Austrianism, but my real introduction was when I went to graduate school, there were two professors of mine who got me interested in public choice economics. So I went to graduate school at Virginia Tech. Back in those days, it wasn't very prominent in football, so they called it VPI, Virginia Polytechnic Institute. So it still sounded like an engineering school, but once they got a good football team, it became Tech. And it's a change in name about Virginia Tech. But I went there because that's where James Buchanan and Gordon Tullich were. And I got interested in public choice economics. So there were two of my graduate school professors were Buchanan and Tullich. And my first semester of graduate school, the textbook was human action. There were two textbooks, human action. And the second textbook was Milton Friedman's Price Theory. And I remember that one of the final exam questions was to compare the methodological approaches to the study of economics in these two books. That was a first year graduate student question, if you can imagine that, a pretty intimidating kind of question. But so you're in graduate school in those days. They actually flunked people out. And so you had to read human action and you had to read Price Theory by Friedman, along with math econ and all the other stuff. And I can recall back then talking to people who I knew who were graduate students at other universities at the time who were saying things to me like they'd been through two years of graduate school and had yet to read an article on economics. It was all math. Two years, I had a friend who went to Purdue in graduate school that I went to college with. And two years, he said he never heard the word monies or prices. He didn't think he heard the words money or prices in two years of graduate school. It was all math. And Virginia Tech was not at all like that. But we had our share. There were just, the mathematical economists were just starting to get their toe hold in. And I can recall, I'll tell you one sort of a silly story about how petty and childish academics can be that there was a clique of mathematical game theorists who were outraged at the fact that human action was being used in the micro class. And so that year, they kidnapped the comprehensive exams. You know, at the end of your coursework in graduate school, at least in those days, we had to take, and we had to take, we couldn't take them one at a time. We had to take them all in two days, micro, macro, two fields, math, econ, you had to take all the comprehensives in two days. And so this clique, this was before there was anything online. And so they would literally hand pass these set of exams from professor to professor. And one of these guys kidnapped them and said, we're not gonna give you these exams until you hire more mathematical economists and all that. And so there was a big battle between Buchanan and the public choice people and the game theorists. And the game, so-called game theorists I know today are still like this, the ones I meet today. And they're still like this. They're just outraged that there's a difference of opinion about methodology somewhere because they of course know everything. And so that's, you know, of course you might learn this week that they really know almost nothing about economics as far as that goes. So anyway, so I'm using human action that I thought, well this stuff is great. I remember I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't wait until Richard Wagner's class. The professor was Richard E. Wagner and he was a student of Buchanan. I couldn't wait to get there. And all my other classmates hated it because he was not a very good lecturer. He was kind of dull and boring and he mumbled a lot. But I wrote down every word and after the class I would go and rewrite my notes so that I wouldn't miss what was on there. And he had a big long reading list and it was impossible to read all this big long, along with human action. But really, but just reading, but being forcing myself to do that. And at the same time I was reading the general theory in macro. And so that was a really torturous semester. And one of the lessons that taught me of reading the general theory was that Keynes could have said perfectly clearly what he wanted to say if he wanted to. Because on our reading list in that class was a article published I think in 1936 in the economic journal by Keynes outlining his system and it was clear as a bell. But the general theory, I don't think anyone has ever understood what the heck is said in the general theory. So that taught me a good lesson that if you wanna become a prominent economist you have to be a convoluted writer that almost no one understands so that people think he must be so much smarter than me because no matter what I do I can't understand what he's saying. And on human action, I read things like I'm gonna just read one paragraph but here I am suffering through mathematical economics and econometrics and all this stuff and then I have time to read human action and here's this short section about Misi describing the important role of the consumer in the economy about how most people think that it's really the big bankers and the financiers and the big capitalists who run the economy. Okay, but Misi says this on page 270 the direction of all economic affairs is in the market society, a task of entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production, true. They are at the helm and they steer the ship but a superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. Well I read that and I thought, well I don't wanna be superficial, I'm in graduate school, never been superficial. And then he goes on to say, but they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer. Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him. And then one of my favorite passages in all of human action about consumers, he says, for them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction. They do not care a wit for past merit and vested interests. If something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their own, their old purveyors. In their capacity as buyers and consumers, they are hard-hearted and callous without consideration for other people. And so this was fun, not only fun, but this was really explaining how the world works. And one of the conclusions I came to early on as a graduate student was that these Austrians are motivated, they have this intense desire to figure out and understand how the world works. Whereas all the mathematical economists, they wanted to know how their models worked and the hell with the world, the models. And I can vividly remember, I better say something like this before my memory goes because I can't stand up here anymore and say I remember. But I can remember being in one of these torturous economics department seminars where you sit on a rock hard seat and some guy gets up there and gets lost in a bunch of math and then confuses himself. And then on the faculty at VPI was David Friedman, Milton Friedman's son and he's a brilliant physicist. And he would always know, every time one of these guys would get up there, one of these half-baked economists would get lost in the math, David Friedman would get up there and tell him where all his mistakes were and that was sort of the end of the seminar. But I'll never forget when there was a mathematical economist named Ng, N-G was his name. And he was putting on a mathematical model of the hamburger market. And my professor, Gordon Tulloch said, but Professor Ng, this is nothing at all like the actual hamburger market. And Professor Ng said, well I'm not interested in the hamburger market, I'm interested in my model. And that's how the economics profession still is to this day. And so I thought, well, I'd rather park cars for a living than do that. Why am I, I mean graduate school, going through all this torture, reading the general theory and all this. Why would I want to be like Professor Ng? And so the Austrian school became all the more appealing. And also I remember reading Paul Samuels, there's an article I read around this time by Paul Samuels when I was in graduate school. And he said, what motivates us economists is the applause of our peers. So it wasn't to understand how the world works, it was pretty much egomania, the applause of our peers. And Paul Samuels, he's the champion of mathematical economics. And I'm not saying all math is useless in economics, but we've gone way overboard with it. But what I assumed he meant by that was showing off your math skills in such a way as proving counterintuitive sounding proofs, mathematical proofs to impress your peers, even if it had nothing to do with the real hamburger market or the real car market or anything like that. And so I decided I didn't want anything to do with that version of it. And so that's how I got interested in this. But Wagner wasn't the only influence on me. Buchanan was also, James Buchanan. And James Buchanan wrote or edited three very important books in the Austrian school. One is Cost and Choice. And the other one is called What Should Economists Do? And then the third one is that he's edited LSE essays on cost. And I would recommend all these books to those of you who are just making your way in Austrian economics. And when he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986, I was asked to write an article for the review of Austrian economics on Buchanan and his association with the Austrian school because that was pretty much what I had done with my own career since then. I was sort of straddling public choice, which Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for in the Austrian school. And I knew that a lot of his important work in public finance was very much influenced by his ideas and cost and choice that he developed from the Austrian tradition. So I wrote this article, it's in the old review of Austrian economics. It's called The Subjectivist Roots of James Buchanan's Economics. You can look it up. I'm not gonna say anything more about that, a particular article now. But I made the case that my old professor, some of his best work and his most famous work in public finance, public choice, was based on some of his work in subjective cost theory, firmly rooted in the Austrian tradition. And I also said in this article that some of his worst and most embarrassing work was when he deviated from that position. In particular, I cited an article in the Journal of Law and Economics where he came out in favor of a confiscatory inheritance tax. And he used the economics of rent seeking to come at this conclusion. And basically in a nutshell, his argument was that, well if the government taxed away inheritance, then you wouldn't have children fighting with each other for years and years and years over being daddy's favorite to get the bulk of the inheritance. And look at all that waste, social waste involved in children being nice to their parents year after year after year, hoping to be the one that gets the biggest inheritance. He called that social waste. And of course, that's cost and benefits are subjective. So who is James Buchanan to say that that is social waste if I wanna be nice to my mother and father and their old age? And so anyway, I made the point that some of his worst work also was when he deviated the most from the Austrian tradition. And as far as my other old professor, Gordon Tullock, these were both colleagues of mine for several years when I taught at George Mason in the 80s. Gordon always told people that reading human action is what made him an economist because he had a law degree. He went to the University of Chicago Law School and then became a diplomat. And we used to tell him, well, that's no wonder China became communist. He was a diplomat in the Far East over there. But that's what Gordon said. And he said, he only took one economics class in his entire life with Henry Simons. And he used to also say anyone who needs more than that to understand economics is a moron, Gordon Tullock. And some of the old timers in the room who knew Gordon Tullock knew he was like that. He enjoyed nothing more than it was always a good-natured insult. And I can remember being at dinner with him at one of the Southern Economic Association meetings when I was young early in my career. And I'm sitting there with my old colleague, James Bennett and Gordon Tullock. And there's a big conference, hundreds and hundreds of economists. And the whole time we were there, one after another, people came up and insulted Gordon. Some kind of insult to Gordon, because that's the kind of person he was. But he was serious. And he made a lot of snide remarks about the Austrian school. But he was dead serious when he said, this is how I became an economist reading this book, Human Action. And he was right about that. But he wasn't as influential of me. Now the public choice, when I first got out of graduate school and started my career, I published a whole bunch of articles. I played the game. I published a bunch of econometric articles in public choice and Southern Economic Journal, places like that. And I even published one article that I wrote as a graduate student in the area of industrial organization. And I did what I thought I had to do. I thought it was a good idea, a really good idea. I sent it to a bunch of journals first. And they all got rejected by three or four journals. And then I decided, well, I'm going to play the game. I'm going to muck it up with a bunch of math and graphs and make it almost impossible to understand what I'm saying. And I sent it to it. And I said, well, since I'm doing that, I'll send it to an even bigger journal. I'll send it to the Southern Economic Journal, which is more prestigious than the other ones I had sent it to already. And it came back and the editor did not even ask me to change a comma. It was accepted as is. But it was basically the same idea. And so I published all these articles in public choice. And the basic methodology of public choice is the way they looked at it and looked at it, certainly Buchanan and Tullock did, is at the time, the theory of market failure had run rampant in economics profession during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And we'll be talking about this a lot this week in class. And we'll be talking about one of my talks on Tuesday. I'll mention the nirvana fallacy of creating some sort of utopian ideal, perfect competition, for example. And then looking at the real world, and I call it aha enomics, and saying, aha, the real world does not meet my utopian fantasy. Therefore, the real world fails. And that's basically how the economics profession looked at markets in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And many to this day, Joseph Stiglitz, for example, by setting up this unattainable ideal, and then claiming that real world markets, which of course could never be like that unattainable ideal. Even Robert Bork, the famous jurist, who taught antitrust law at Yale for many years, he wrote a famous, at least among us, antitrust researchers. He wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox, and one of the lines in it is, if we actually enforced this idea of perfect competition, the economist model of it on the U.S. economy, it would have basically the same effect on the economy as several strategically placed nuclear explosions, if you actually try to do that. And so what the public choice economists did was to really revive the old political economy that had been around for centuries of understanding how government works and how politics works. And they came up with what they call a theory of government failure, but they basically accepted the market failure motif and really ignored it or downplayed it. It said, okay, we accept all this. Markets aren't perfect, of course. There's market failure, but there's also government failure. And so we have all these explanations. Politicians are all short-sighted. They all want to spend money now and borrow money to pay for it because spending money wins you votes, but raising taxes loses you votes. So let's borrow the money. Let's put the burden on future generations. And so that leads to this in debt crisis that we have year after year after year because of the incentives there. So the basic model was that politicians are just like you and me. They put their pants on one leg at a time, but they have different incentives. And I was a part of this for quite a long time. I published a lot, like I said, on all these articles in public choice. And there is still a lot of important lessons there. I'm not totally dismissing, by any means, the public choice economics. But they always seemed a little bit naive for me, even though they were the most severe critics of government at the time. This was the late 1970s when I was in graduate school. It always seemed a little naive to me, along with Milton Friedman's famous monetary rule. I always thought, well, who's going to enforce this rule? If ideally, the Fed would let the money grow at 4%, well, which angel from heaven is going to enforce this rule anyway? How is that going to ever happen? And of course, it never could happen, even if it was desirable. And I thought the public choice economists were kind of like that, kind of like that. A little bit utopian themselves and saying, well, these politicians are just nice guys and gals like you and me, they leave their job in a private sector, get elected to political office, and they face different incentives. Absolutely true, they face different incentives. But then I discovered Murray Rothbard and started reading some of Rothbard's writings. And it was Dick Wagner, who first recommended to his classes that they read Murray Rothbard. And way back, this was 1976. And so here's one paragraph from the state by Rothbard that really opened my eyes. The state in the words of Oppenheimer, he's talking about France Oppenheimer, and I recommend Oppenheimer's book, The State, to everybody here, is the systemization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime at best is sporadic and uncertain. That's real crime, burglars, that sort of thing. The parasitism is ephemeral. And the coercive parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims of crime. But the state provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property. It renders certain, secure, and relatively peaceful the lifeline of the parasitic class in society. And so the parasitic class is all the politicians and the bureaucrats and the welfare parasites. And in the nature of the state, he goes on to say, the state's ideological minions, Washington Post, New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox News, sorry, apologies to Judge Napolitano, but he's an outlier in there, say they must explain that while theft by one or more persons or groups is bad and criminal, when the state engages in such acts, it's not theft, but the legitimate and even sanctified act called taxation. The ideologists must explain that murder by one or more persons or groups is bad and must be punished, but that when the state kills, it is not murder, but an exalted act known as, quote, war, or, quote, repression of internal subversion. That's OK. You can repress internal subversion. They must explain that while kidnapping and slavery is bad and must be outlawed when done by private individuals or groups, when the state commits such acts, it is not kidnapping or slavery, but conscription, an act necessary to the public wheel and even to the requirements of morality itself. And so this is a very different view of the state from the one I got from the public choice economists from Buchanan and talking in the rest. It's not just good-natured guys and gals. Mr. Smith goes to Washington who get caught up in this bad incentive system. These are predators. And so I think one of my articles I wrote in a nutshell, I wrote that the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. That's essentially, you can all go home now. Let's learn what you need to learn about government. So I sort of changed my mindset a good bit from that. I still, public choice is still valuable to me as a way of thinking about economic problems and issues. But I became much more radical. And so did my old friend James Bennett, who I co-authored nine books with when I was at George Mason. And he was a supporter. He loved Rothbard. He didn't know Rothbard very well. I think he might have met him once or twice. But Jim was sort of a silent supporter. Jim, before I even went to George Mason in 1981, Jim Bennett had published articles in the journal Economic Inquiry on the Economics of Bureaucracy by von Mises. And so he was sort of a silent fellow traveling. I don't think he's ever been here maybe once. I think once Jim Bennett showed up at the Mises Institute some years ago. But he was onto this. And so we co-authored several books that were sort of considered to be Austrian political economy. And the first one was called Underground Government, the Off-Budget Public Sector. It's about how governments, in response to tax revolts, would simply spend money off the books and off budget as a way of continuing all the predation. They would say, yes, the voters have spoken. We will do what you have said. We're going to limit taxes and spending. And then they turn around and set up a whole new group of institutions to spend in ways that the taxpayers cannot discover or find out about. Then we wrote another book after that one called Destroying Democracy. Hold your applause, please. The subtitle is How Government Funds Partisan Politics. It's about how the government manufactures the will of the people by spending many billions of dollars giving money to special interest groups, which those groups then used to proselytize and propagandize for bigger government. We get bigger government and higher taxes. The government takes in more money. It gives some back to the same special interest groups who manufacture this will of the people that legitimizes the state and the perpetual growth of the state. And so as we wrote that book, based on a mountain of data that we had gotten a hold of on government grants to all these groups. And the third book that we wrote together and along these lines is called Official Lies, How Government Misleads Us. And it's, again, on this theme of the manufacturing the will of the people through government propaganda and government lies and so forth. And I'm not going to say anything more about those books, but my point is that reading this radical libertarian philosophy of Rothbard and others is what shaped our thinking and our research. And we made no recommendations about how to improve government. That's what a public choice scholar would have done. We just wrote these books to explain how truly rotten government intervention really is. And to me, reforming government is like reforming kudzu. If you came down the highway from the airport in Atlanta, you passed mountains and mountains of kudzu. This plant that I supposedly was imported here from Japan. And it has very deep roots during the dust bowl. And so that they had very deep roots. So it would help against erosion and all that. And you cannot kill the stuff. You just cannot kill. You can't reform it. You can't trim it. You can't send it to wake watchers or anything like that. You have to kill it. And government is like that in the government reform. So that was, I consider that Austrian political economy. And then I started, I wrote a bunch of articles after that critiquing some of the public choice literature. When I was in graduate school, it was the heyday of the old public choice center in Blacksburg, Virginia, of the research on rent seeking, of the use of time, effort, and money to procure favors from government, monopoly franchises, protectionism, and so forth. That's when all that research was being done on rent seeking. Gordon Tullock was the co-inventor of that phrase, along with a woman named Ann Kruger. And so the public choice scholars were doing some rent seeking of their own, however. They began to appear some articles saying, it started out OK. All this literature was saying things like lobbying for a 50% protectionist tariff. The opportunity cost of that is that the corporations who do that could have been spending all that time, effort, and money producing better quality products or cheaper products instead. And so the whole economy becomes impoverished by rent seeking. And so far, so good. And that's nothing new about that either. We've known this for hundreds of years. They just reinvented it in the language of modern economics. But then they started going, what I thought was astray, in saying that almost any business activity is also rent seeking. Advertising, price cutting, product differentiation, mergers. And so some of the public choice economists began saying, well, if we include all these things, then rent seeking, the cost of monopoly, might be 15% or 20% of GDP. We've got to do something about this. And so I published a series of articles in International Review of Law and Economics, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, in places like this, criticizing this whole approach from an Austrian perspective. From an Austrian perspective, if you look at advertising, price cutting, product differentiation, these are all important parts of the market process. These are not social waste, as the economics profession calls them. And so that's another way in which I came to the Austrian school through my research in industrial organization in antitrust. And I know a couple of you I've only been here about an hour, and I already talked to two students who came up to me and asked me about some of my old publications on the origins of antitrust. And this is another way in which the Austrian school influenced me along with the public choice school. And how this came about was I had been teaching courses in industrial organization at George Mason. And I read all these books that said, well, there was a golden age of antitrust regulation in America when there was rampant monopolization in the late 19th century, rampant cartilization. And I kept looking and looking and looking. And I never saw one statistic in any of these books showing what any one industry was doing in terms of prices or production with all this rampant cartilization. And I thought, well, if it's so darn rampant, why isn't there one statistic in any of the I.O. books? And so I got my research assistant at the time back in George Mason to go to the library and pick up every book the library had on antitrust. And his instructions were, show me the data, show me the money, show me where there's evidence that there was rampant cartilization. I read Richard Posner's words, there are all these words about rampant cartilization, but the standard economic story is that they were, they were restricting output and raising prices. And so, and lo and behold, not one book, I had a big stack of books in my office like this high, not one of them had a shred of evidence. No one had ever looked into this. It was just taken for granted. And so, but it was, it was my understanding of Austrian economics though, and the Austrian view of the market that led me to ask this question that, isn't there something stinks here? I smell a rat here because this was a period of price deflation after all, 35 years of price deflation, which doesn't necessarily prove there wasn't cartilization, but it should at least cause you to pause about hearing about rampant cartilization. And also it was what economic historians call the second industrial revolution. So there was a, you know, a lot of huge increases in production in a lot of these industries. And how is that square with monopoly being created? And so we gathered what data we could and I think did a pretty decent job in disproving that whole story. But maybe it's because no one had really taken Austrian economics and the view of the Austrian view of the market seriously as an industrial organization researcher to ask this question. But that's what it led me to ask in that question. And the next question I asked was, well, what were the economists of the day saying? And so I published, ended up publishing an article with Jack High in the journal called Economic Inquiry was way back in July of 1988, where we surveyed the whole economics profession in the late 1880s and found that it was almost unanimously opposed to the whole idea of antitrust regulation. And why was that? Well, we read their explanations. There was just one or two. I think it was one that was actually clearly in favor. And so, and this included John Bates-Clark and other, you know, people like that found, his name is up here somewhere, one of the founders of the American Economic Association. And the reasons they all gave is that they looked at markets like the Austrians look at markets as dynamic, rivalrous process of entrepreneurial discovery. That's how they all looked at it. So they didn't think mergers was anything to be too concerned about, especially when they could cite lower prices year after year after year after year. And so we published this article called Antitrust and Competition in Historical Perspective. And again, Jack High was an Austrian economist back then. I haven't seen Jack in many years, but he was firmly a member of the Austrian school back then. And that's what led us to ask this kind of question. And so when the model changed, when the economic model changed, when the mainstream perfect competition model came to rule the day in the 1920s and 30s and thereafter, economists changed their minds and accepted antitrust regulation. The late George Stigler wrote an article about this in the Journal of Political Economy. And he thought the main reason why economists, by the time you get to the 1930s, like antitrust regulation, is that they learned they could make considerably more than the minimum wage as antitrust consultants. And that's true. I wouldn't argue that's not true, but we think it was their vision of the market that changed, that the way they look at markets had changed also as far as that goes. Now, the third thing I'm going to mention, well, I have the podium here, is how Mises in particular has influenced my study of history, revisionist history, which is, and Bob Higgs is the king of the economic historians from our perspective, so if you have any questions, ask Bob about this, about this. But in Human Action, page 53, Mises is talking about how historians are sort of, for the most part, rudderless, because they're sort of theoretically and philosophically rudderless. They're sort of collectors of facts. But you need to have some sort of context with which to interpret those facts. And he makes the case for economics, as not the only context, but a very important context for interpreting these historical facts. And of course, most historians are historians. They didn't even study economics, but they all write about economics all the time. And so, without the benefit of having studied economics, you know, not every last one of them, but it sure seems like most of them to me. And here's one thing Mises said, a mercantilist or neo-mercantilist must necessarily be at variance with an economist. Subjectivist economics produces historical works very different from those based on mercantilist doctrines. Oh, very true. And as exhibit A, I would blow my own horn and point to my book Hamilton's Curse. Even when I was in graduate school, I took three courses in history of economic thought from E.G. West. And if you wanna learn some good history of economic thought, read the late E.G. West. And I remember reading a little bit about American economic history at the same time. And everybody knew Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury Secretary was a mercantilist. And he went to corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, a bank run by politicians, you know, that's a great idea, isn't it? A bank run by politicians and mercantilism. And so, but a lot of the books written by historians on Hamilton will say things like he saved, he saved the American economy. I think David Brooks in The Wall Street Journal said he created the American economy, single-handedly created the American economy. You know, or he created the financial system. Well, you know, Wall Street was around long before Alex Hamilton moved from the slave plantation where he worked in St. Croix for British slave owners to Columbia University. There were markets in America long before that. But if you understand simple economics, you know, Econ 101, you would smell a big fat rat by hearing Patrick Buchanan or David Brooks or Ben Bernanke, you know, praising Alexander Hamilton to the treetop. Bernanke, by the way, is very upset that they might take Hamilton off the $10 bill. And I don't know who they're gonna put on there. They wanna put a female on there, which is fine with me. I heard Bella Abzug might be, I wanna say some of the New Yorkers in the audience. Remember who Bella would be fitting, the uglier the better as far as on the currency. You know, we didn't put politicians mugshots on the coinage until the Lincoln penny. George Washington himself, the Continental Congress people said, well, we wanna put George Washington on the currency. And he said, no, that's what the despots of Europe did to solidify their power. They put their pictures on the currency. And so he turned them down, but we didn't get a politician's mugshot on coinage until the Lincoln penny. Okay, and so Mises goes on to say this too, in this same page, history can never be studied without presuppositions. And that dissension with regard to the presuppositions, i.e. the whole content of non-historical branches of knowledge must determine the establishment of historical facts. So he's saying you have to have some branch of knowledge, economics, philosophy, maybe both, to interpret historical facts or else you're just sort of a collector of facts and you can make up anything, which was they often do. And a good example of this in my own writing is when I started writing things about the American Civil War, so-called, you know, I read all these books. I was a Civil War buff for a while. I just read all these history books about all the battles and the personalities and all that. I even took courses at the Smithsonian and so I got to meet all the famous big shots, James McPherson and all the rest in the Civil War historians. And I read their books and there's a man named Gabor Borot who's ran the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. He wrote a book called Abraham Lincoln and the American Dream. And this is the establishment view of Abraham Lincoln and economics, Borot's book. It's considered by the Lincoln scholars to be. This is the book on Lincoln's economics written by a non-economist, written by somebody who'd never studied economics, Gabor Borot. And basically what he's known for in saying this book is that Lincoln was a guy who he had the heart of a lion and he advocated protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare and central banking because he wanted all Americans to become wealthy, have a chance to become wealthy, like he had become wealthy. And so assumption one, he's a big heart, the nicest guy in the world. Assumption two, therefore his economic policies must be great, must be great. We love him because we love him. And that's it. That's pretty much what Gabor Borot said in his book, Abraham Lincoln and the American Dream. And so you don't have to go more than maybe two or three days of principle of economics to understand that this is BS, this is BS because anybody, everybody knows protectionism is plunder. You know, Friedrich Bastiat called it legal plunder. That's what this was about. This is not about the desire for all men to be created equal with their wealth or anything like that. But that's the official opinion. And so if you study Austrian economics and combine it with Austrian political economy, you won't go down these dead ends. You won't take seriously people like that. And I even quoted Gabor Borot in another instance. He has to confront the fact that Abe Lincoln during his whole life, adult life, advocated what was called colonization or the deportation of black people out of America. And so then there's a book that was published a couple years ago called Colonization After Emancipation that really proves that to his dying day, Lincoln was hard at work figuring out how to deport the freed slaves somewhere. He was working with foreign governments and buying land. He had William Seward counting how many ships it would take to do all this. And so Gabor Borot had to confront this in his research because it's true. Lincoln didn't say these things. Even when he was a state legislator, he was a manager of the Illinois Colonization Society. And I quote Gabor Borot in one of his books as saying, quoting Lincoln as saying these things and then saying, this is how honest people lie. That's a direct quote from one of his books. He's an honest liar. So anyway, so if you read Rothbard, just one article by Rothbard on the nature of the state, then your bullshit detector will be finally tuned. In your educational career, when you read, oh, this guy is a distinguished endowed chairholder at Gettysburg College and he runs this institute and he gives away a $50,000 a year book award for the Lincoln Book of the Year. He must be really smart, not necessarily, not necessarily. And so you get a pretty good BS detector, like I said, if you read this. And so these are just some examples I wanted to give you of how I came to Austrian economics and how it has influenced a lot of my research and still does to this day. And that of course we all stand on the shoulders of Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and the other great Austrians that you're gonna learn a lot about this week. And I've been doing this for about 25 years now, I think, at the Mises University. And we've had many, many, many students come up to us and say, I'm gonna graduate next semester and I learned more about economics this week than I did in four years at Columbia or Harvard or some place like that. And you have the potential to be that person. If you goof off and you stay up too late, no. But you have the potential. And so I think that's all I wanted to say for tonight. That's my story and I'm sticking to it and no one can argue with me about this because it's sort of my personal story. And so it's all absolutely true. So thank you very much and have a great week.