 Okay, it's my pleasure to introduce the Ludwig von Mies' Memorial Lecture sponsored by Yusuf al-Muwaed. Murray Sabrin, who has been a very good friend of mine for, I won't say how long, but it's been decades, many decades, had the BA in History, Geography and Social Studies Education from Hunter College, an MA in Social Studies Education from Lehman College, and a PhD in Economic Geography from Rutgers University. Murray is one of only two individuals who have had the honor of having Murray Rothbart serve as a member of his dissertation committee. Dr. Sabrin joined the faculty of the Anus School, Anus Field School of Business of Ramapo College of New Jersey in 1995 and retired on July 1st, 2020 as Professor of Finance. The Board of Trustees awarded Dr. Sabrin Emeritus status for his scholarship and professional contributions during his 35-year career. In 2021, Dr. Sabrin published two books, Universal Medical Care from Conception to End of Life, The Case for a Single-Payer System, and secondly, Navigating the Boom Bus Cycle, an Entrepreneur's Survival Guide. He is also author of Tax-Free 2000, The Rebirth of American Liberty, a blueprint on how to create a tax-free America in the 21st century. Well, we're waiting Murray. And why the second book published in the same year, and why the Federal Reserve sucks, it causes inflation, recessions, bubbles, and enriches the 1%. In November 2022, Dr. Sabrin published Finance of Health Care, Wellness and Innovative Approaches to Employee Medical Insurance. It's Autobiography from Immigrant to Public Intellectual. An American story was also released in November 2022. Dr. Sabrin will address us today on the Forgotten Austrian, Peter F. Drucker in the Welfare State. Please welcome Dr. Sabrin. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate that introduction. I just want slight correction. I started teaching in 1985 to 2020 makes that 35 years. Anyway, thanks to the sponsor of today's lecture, Yusef Alamed. And Joe, if you don't know, was my roommate in South Royalton. So we go back a long way, and I won't tell you the details of that encounter. Anyway, I also want to thank a big thank you to Lou Rockwell because he had the vision to found the Mises Institute in 1982, and the Institute has enriched countless students over the past 40 some odd years, and I was fortunate to be one of them not only as a student of Austrian economics, but using the ideas of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Rockwell, Salerno, and the list goes on and on in teaching of the financial history of the United States, which is, of course, I can tell you, students loved it because they got to understand how the financial system evolved, why we have boom bus cycles, and where we are headed. I have, and of course, Tom Di Lorenzo, who whose work on Hamilton and Lincoln was, I integrated that in the course as well, and students really had their eyes opened about Hamilton and Lincoln, and what they did to the country, and set us on a road of statism. I have, I had three observations before I began. Now I have a fourth one. It seems that the Institute has more restrooms than I-75 has rest areas. I can tell you that from driving on I-75 several times, and you really have to have a strong bladder to stay on I-75. Also, I would have brought my teleprompter here, but several years ago, Joe Biden barred it, and the staff has refused to return it, so also, as we were driving from Florida to the Institute, a lot of billboards, and you get to learn a lot about the local culture by the billboards that are there, and there was one that really struck me, it said rockets and mortars, and I'm saying to myself, one customer of that company must be Walter Block at his private army. General Walter Block has a nice ring to it. I think that the other thing that I find interesting living now in Florida after so many years in the Northeast is the difference in hospitality between the Northeast and the South, and to give you an example, when you drive into New Jersey, on the turnpike, it says welcome to New Jersey, and it also says, you haven't seen it, it's in small print, the Bill of Rights is above the pay grade of Governor Murphy. That's what it says. You have to really look hard for it, but when you drive into Georgia and you're driving to Alabama, it says welcome to Georgia, welcome to Alabama, have you enough ammunition? So it's good to be in a place where they respect your Second Amendment rights. It wasn't always that way, by the way, if you know the history of gun control in the United States. Anyway, it is fitting that I deliver the Mises Memorial Lecture, the 75th anniversary of human action. I too am celebrating a 75th anniversary this year. I arrived in America on August 6, 1949 with my parents and all the brother from West Germany, where I was born nine months after the publication of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Haslett. I'm trying to still figure that out, but I'll get into that in a moment. Although I did not formally study Austrian economics as an undergraduate or graduate student, I have been channeling Austrian economics since I was a youngster. Let me provide several examples. For the students here, when Color TV was introduced in the market in the mid-1950s, it was about a thousand dollars for Color TV. That's about ten, twelve thousand dollars in today's purchasing power. I was in elementary school and I said a thousand dollars. I think my father was making three dollars an hour at the time. And I said, why would anyone buy that unless of course, you're really wealthy? Because I instinctively, I said as production increases of a new product prices will come down. In other words, good deflation. So I was channeling Austrian economics at age 10 or whatever it was back in the mid-50s. Fast forward to a few years later when I started teaching in New York City schools in 1968 as a social studies teacher. And I remember distinctly teaching a six, a bunch of sixth graders in the inner city of the Bronx. How goods go from raw materials to final consumption, never having read anything about Austrian economics. I forgot the context of the lesson I was teaching, but I just went through it on the board. You go from raw materials to fabrication to wholesale to retail. So instinctively or just common sense wise, how do goods come to the market? They have to be produced somewhere. And I realized I must have been channeling iPencil by Leonard Reed at the time and Hayek's prices and production. A few years later, this is really interesting, the summer of 1972. The summer before I entered Rutgers full-time. My wife and I were vacationing in Spain when we went to a street market in Barcelona, not far from an upscale retailer, Alcorte in Glace. I saw a tan leather jacket at one of the vendor stalls and asked a woman the price of the leather jacket and she told me it's much more expensive at Alcorte in Glace. I told her I'm not in the department store where it's air conditioned, the sun is not beating on us. There's no cobblestones streets to walk on. And so she said she's not in an agreement. Sure, you're not in a very fancy retailer. So that was my first concept of subjective value. That although it's the same exact good, the location of it makes a difference in how the consumer perceives that good, okay? Yesterday, Michael Oliver, I just added this in after Michael Oliver spoke about sending a letter to Murray Rothbard. After I read Man Economy and State in February of 1974, I too sent him a letter because I was studying in the Geography Department at Rutgers and I owe Murray a great debt of gratitude because there on page 711 of Man Economy and State, the edition that I have, my dissertation topic jumped out at me where he wrote, new money enters the economy and diffuses through the country. Well, we know the fusion theory is applicable in so many different disciplines, most recently Epidemology. And so I wrote him a letter saying, because Rutgers allowed you to have one outside member of the university to be on your dissertation committee. So I wrote him a letter. It must have been in March of 1974 and I'm waiting for a reply. No reply is coming. Michael got one in, what, three days or four days? I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting and no reply. And I said, the guy must be so busy. Why does he want to deal with our Rutgers graduate student from in Geography, no less? So then I was at Rutgers one day and I said, I can't take it anymore. I got to go see him in Polytech. So I drove from New Brunswick to Polytech in downtown Brooklyn and I'm waiting outside his office and I expected, having read his op-ed in 1971 about Nixon betraying the country with wage price controls, I expected someone at least six foot tall and in comes a short, fairly rotund gentleman into his office and I said, Professor Rothbard, he said yes. So he took me to his class of microeconomics and it was just a superb lecture on microeconomics. And I said, I read your man economy state and I'm going to do a thesis on the geography of inflation. He was excited like you couldn't believe, like we were friends for 40 years and so next thing I know I got an invitation to the South Royal Tin situation. Well, what does a PhD in economic geography, what skill set does a PhD in economic geography have that no Austrian economist has? I'll let you mull that. I can locate Vienna and all burn on a world map blindfolded. That's what I can do. It's no mean feat, I'll tell you that. In addition, I just googled the distance between Vienna and outside of Munich where I was born, 250 miles. So I think I was destined to study Austrian economics. I lived near Vienna. I understood that deflation is natural and subjective value was a concept that I understood. So studying geography and social studies education as an undergraduate, the impetus for that was I received a wonderful bar mitzvah gift, an atlas of the world, a leather bound atlas of the world and I just devoured it, studying every region possible and then when I went to, then when I took the geography courses and I studied every region of the world except Asia and India, the courses at the undergraduate, graduate level based upon region. There was North America, South America, Europe, Africa and the most difficult course was the geography of the Soviet Union. Trying to memorize Russian regions was a real challenge and the thing that stood out in that course was there's always one course I think that gives you a factoid that carries you forever. In the textbook said the Soviet Union at that time in the mid 60s had 20,000 years of coal reserves. Think about that, 20,000 years of coal reserves and it has everything else, every mineral under the sun. Yet the Soviet Union was a basket case. So although geography was fascinating, it didn't give me the answer of why the topography, but the human geography looked the way it did and so that's what interested me. The next year I took a course in political geography. That was even more fascinating because it helps explain a lot of geopolitics in the world and in that course we learned about the Heartland theory. Anybody familiar with the Heartland theory? It was posited by a British geographer, Hallford MacKinder in 1904 and his theory was that who controls the Heartland? The World Island is China and Russia, then you have the Heartland and then you have the Outer Rim. If you take a world map and draw a line between the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Ukraine, what do you get? The perimeter of the Heartland. The Heartland theory basically explains U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II containing the Russian bear and China. That's what the Heartland theory posits and of course the U.S. policy has been intervening in those places in the world. Several years ago, as Joe mentioned, I was on sabbatical to investigate the Federal Reserve and the business cycle, which turned it to my 2019 book, Why the Federal Reserve Sucks, It Causes Inflation, Recession, Bubbles, and Enriches the 1%. Last month, a financial site published a study about how much net worth it takes to be in the 1%. To my surprise, I learned my wife and I are one percenters. My next book will be Why the Federal Reserve Is the Greatest Things in Slice Bread, A Love Letter to Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell. My topic today is the Forgotten Austrian Peter Drucker and the Welfare State, and I should add the nonprofit sector. I became interested in Drucker's writings when I read his December 1991 Wall Street Journal column, It Profits Us to Strengthen Nonprofits. I shall discuss his contributions to the literature of nonprofits in the welfare state shortly. If you're unfamiliar with Peter Drucker and his writings, a brief introduction, I'll give you a sense of his enormous accomplishments during his lifetime. Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in California in 2005 at the age of 95. CNBC produced an hour documentary about his lifelong contributions to the practice of management, where his former students and clients showed their deep affection, reverence, and appreciation for his insights and advice. Drucker was the author of at least three dozen books on a wide range of topics from political history, to management, to entrepreneurship, to nonprofits, to Japanese art, and other subjects. In other words, Drucker has written more books than both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have read. This is not, as Joe Biden will say, there's no joke. Joe Biden has spent most of his time reading classified documents and Trump has been spending his time reading indictments and lawsuits. Recently, I met a gentleman who went to law school with Biden and the feedback was, Joe was nowhere to be found in the law library at Syracuse University. Drucker's parents, Adolf, an economist, an attorney, and his mother, Carolyn, who studied medicine, a rarity for a woman in Austria at the time, held weekly dinner parties where many Vietnamese intellectuals stopped by. I could not find any reference to Mises or Hayek having been guest at one of the weekly dinners. That doesn't mean they weren't there. I just couldn't find any yet, which is surprising because Mises and Hayek were doing research at the The Business Cycle Institute. Mises founded in 1926 and was an economist at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In his memoir, Mises described himself as the country's economist. In addition, Mises' monumental 1922 book socialism should have accorded him an invitation to be one of Drucker's dinners. A frequent guest, however, was Joseph Schumpeter, who had a major impact on Drucker's thinking about the world. Drucker, according to his biographer, Jack Beattie, received the first-class education at home, listening to the diverse intellectual discourse on the post-World War I period. Beattie's biography is a wonderful tribute to Drucker, and I urge you to take time to read about a fellow Austrian's early years and Drucker's commitment after the rise of Nazism to battle totalitarianism throughout his lifetime. Now, here's the real interesting thing. Mises was born in 1881, Drucker 1909, and yet that very similar early years. Let me give you an example. Drucker left Vienna in the 1920s, which he admitted he hated because of the collapse of civilization, the inflation. He just hated it, so he went to Hamburg, Germany, when he was 17 years old, where he worked as a clerk trainee for an export firm. He enrolled at Hamburg University in the law faculty to appease his father, who was an attorney, because Drucker worked during the day and could not attend classes because none were held in the evening. For the year and a half he was enrolled there. At Hamburg, he did not attend a single class. He spent his time in the Hamburg City Library reading in German, English, and French. Drucker's skill as a writer was evident when he was in the fourth grade. He knew he wanted to be a writer because he was good at it, and he began his writing career in the late 1920s, and this is priceless. In September 1929, and we know what happened a month later, he wrote that the stock market could only go up. A few weeks later, the stock market crashed, and that was the last financial prediction he ever made. As physicist Neil Bohr stated, prediction is hard, especially about the future. He soon moved to Frankfurt and enrolled in law school courses at the university. He became a financial writer on Frankfurt's largest newspaper, where he was soon promoted to senior editor at age 20. Think of this, senior editor at age 20. Why wasn't there anybody older to take the position? World War I decimated the generation before Drucker. That's why Austrians, libertarians hate and despise war. It is incredibly devastating, not only from the economic point of view, but from the personal human point of view. Drucker was not a German citizen and was ineligible to take exam for the law doctorate. He crammed to take an exam and earned a doctorate in public law and international relations. In 1933, Drucker emigrated to England after he took power in January 1933 because he explains in his documentary and his writings he had read Mein Kampf. The Nazi regime would be inhospitable to writers like Drucker who had already penned critiques of totalitarianism. After finding a job as a security analyst for an insurance company, he eventually married a woman from Austria whom he reconnected with in London. Drucker attended Keynes' seminar at Cambridge and, quote, discovered he was not an economist. Drucker said, suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities while I was interested in the behavior of people. Sounds like an advocate of human action. As his biographer points out, quote, his interest in people would lead him to the study of management for which Drucker is all about people. It would lead to his career as a management consultant. Beatty points out, as for Keynesian economics, notably it's advice for governments to spend their way of depressions, Drucker observed, in other words, government spending during a depression was like a doctor telling the you that you have an inoperable liver cancer, but it will be cured if you go to bed with a beautiful 17-year-old. There were some interesting things that I can go into, but I won't. After spending four years in England, Drucker and his wife left for America in 1937, which he found vibrant and forward-looking even during the Great Depression. He compared Europe in the 20s and 30s as looking backward, trying to reestablish the old culture, the old republic, and he said it wasn't going to happen, and in America he found people were forward-looking. In 1939, his first book was published, The End of Economic Man, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Remember, he's not even 30 years old yet. The purpose of the book, he writes this forward, is to strengthen the world to maintain freedom against the threat of its abandonment in favor of totalitarianism. Sounds like it could be written today. Writing, okay, I would love to have David Gordon, David, do you have an assignment for today? Do a book review of Drucker's analysis of the origin of totalitarianism. Drucker asserts in an introduction that this is the first book to explain the origin of totalitarianism. I don't know if that's correct. We'd have our resident guru, David Gordon, come up with that. The interesting thing about his book is that there are no footnotes and does not list any of Misi's works in the appendix, which is really surprising because it was written throughout the 30s. So he had to know about socialism, he had to know about the free and prosperous Commonwealth, and other Misi's writings. So to ignore Misi's, and I think I know the reason why, which I have a quote from Drucker about that. So let's sum up the parallel lives of Drucker and Misi's. Both published their first book about the same age. Misi's was 31, when the theory of money and credit was published in 1912, and Drucker was almost 30 years when the end of Economic Man was published in 1939. Drucker left Germany in 1933, and Misi's left Austria a year later to teach in Switzerland. Drucker arrived in America in 1937, and Misi's wrote why he left Switzerland. I left the institute quote, I left the institute because I could no longer face living in a country that considered my presence of political liability and a danger to its security. Misi's arrived in America on August 2, 1940, exactly nine years before I did. He began teaching at NYU in 1945. Drucker joined the NYU faculty five years later when the university created a graduate school of business management, where he taught until 1971, and Misi's, as we know, retired in 1969. Yet I have found few references to his fellow Austrian literary von Misi's in his most important works. In fact, the only direct contact I could find between Drucker and Misi's is on page 50 of Misi's Drucker's memoir, and this is fascinating. There's a PhD dissertation topic right in here, or a master's thesis in here, on page 50 of his memoir. It's called Adventures of a Bystander, and I want to read this to you. Drucker talks about this woman, Annette. He doesn't give her last name. He describes her as a tall, beautiful, elegantly dressed woman, young woman, and this is what he says. She was the first woman in Austria to go into economics. That was a time around 1906, and this is interesting. When the Austrian School of Economics dominated worldwide, I leave that to Joe Salerno to figure out if that was true, but this is Drucker's view. The great men of the school, Visa, Bonbarwerk, and Philopodvich were still alive and teaching, and the students were brilliant. Ludwig von Misi's was Annette's classmate, but Annette, by common consent, was the superstar, equally gifted in theory and in mathematical analysis. Even Misi's, who was no feminist and did not suffer from undue monesty, admitted her superiority. This is the really interesting part. Years later, in the 1950s, when Misi's was old and very famous, he and I were colleagues at New York University. We did not see much of each other, which is really fascinating when you think about it. Misi's considered me a renegade from the true economics faith, left Perenn, for good reason, right Perenn. But one day, going down in the elevator together, he turned to me and said, quote, you knew Annette, didn't you? If she had been a man and encouraged to go on, she would have been the greatest economist since Ricardo. There's a PhD dissertation somewhere there. Who is this woman Annette? Who herself had a very interesting, let's say sexual orientation, okay? And she, according to Drucker, was really one of the superstars in Vienna in economics. I will keep on searching. I've contacted Drucker archives to see if there's any other communication between Misi's and Drucker and doesn't seem to be any. So let me see where I'm going. However, I did find one quote from Drucker about Misi's, which I think explains a lot and why he probably ignored a lot of his work. Quote, Misi's was the most depressing person I ever saw. That is an incredible statement to somebody who was an intellectual giant. In the same article Rothbard observed Misi's what quote, a joy and inspiration. Mrs. Misi's is quoted in the same article, quote, he wasn't gentle. He had a will of iron, his mind a steel blade, and he could be unbelievably stubborn. Was Drucker's assessment of Misi's accurate? Mrs. Misi's writing in the forward to Misi's, to look at Misi's memoir quote, never before had he written such candid harsh devastating remarks and observations about economic conditions. Universities, the professors and well-known public personalities in Austria and Germany, never before had he expressed such undisguised despair about the coming decline of Western civilization. That speaks volumes about Misi's outlook of what he saw going on in Europe at the time, and Drucker, I think, being the optimist of the period, just felt that Misi's was just too depressing, too pessimistic about the future. And in the memoir, Mrs. Misi's asserted that years later, as his personal situation improved, Misi's sort of tempered his negative outlook. Now to the main topic of my lecture, Peter Drucker and the Welfare State. According to Joseph Masiorello, a longtime friend and colleague of Peter Drucker, who served as the Horton Professor of Management at the Peter F Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont University, quote, from his very first book in 1939 through his latest book in 2004, Drucker pursued the enormous topic, how do we create a society that functions? His answer, we must create institutions, organizations that perform, which in turn leads to the question, how does one create organizations that perform? And then, how does one develop managers who create organizations that perform? In other words, Drucker was an institutionalist. He saw the institution as the vehicle to create a better society. According to Drucker, quote, the old community's family, village, parish, and so on, have all but disappeared in the Knowledge Society. Drucker was the first one to ascertain in the 1960s a census that the Knowledge Society was going to expand dramatically as opposed to the old Industrial Society in America. The place has been taken, has likely been taken up by the new unit of social organization, the organization where community membership has been seen as fate, organization membership is voluntary. That's why one of his first books was about General Motors, and how General Motors was a community where workers were able to obtain status and have meaning and goals for their work. Drucker points out, in the Knowledge Society, he recognized would be the future of the global economy required. New institutions for people to realize their potential. Drucker asked an obvious question about the Knowledge Society of who takes care of social tasks. He points out that two answers have emerged in the century regarding, and he says they're both wrong. According to Drucker, quote, the majority answer goes back to 100 years in the 1880s when Bismarck's Germany took the first faltering steps toward the welfare state. The answer, the problem of the social sector can and should must be solved by government. It is still probably the answer for most people except especially in developed countries of the West, even though most people probably no longer fully believe it. This could be written today. What is the thrust in Washington if there's a problem? We've got to have a government program, a government program at the federal level, the state level, the local level. Drucker continues, modern government especially since World War II has become a huge welfare bureaucracy everywhere. I think Austrians would agree with that wholeheartedly, and the bulk of the budget in every developed country today is devoted to entitlements that is payment for all kinds of social services. To give you some idea of the size of the welfare state in America, very few people have done this, but there was a chart published the other day of the federal government's income statement for February. Total receipts $271 billion. That's a lot of money collected by the federal government. However, the outlays were more than double that, $567 billion. The federal government is collecting half of what it's spending. That's for February. We know revenue increases in April, June, and September when estimated payments and tax returns are filed. Now let's look what money is spent on. This is an area that Austrians I think have done a great job and some other free market economists. What are the expenditures of the federal government? And I would contend, if you look at the categories, it's virtually all welfare spending. Virtually all welfare spending. Social security, $121 billion. Most people though consider social security welfare, but in fact it is. The money you put in is already spent. It's not your 401k, it's not your IRA. The government just gives you a promise to pay you. Income security, $90 billion. Health, $76 billion. Medicare, $73 billion. Remember, these are monthly numbers, not annual numbers. These are monthly numbers. Net interest, $67 billion. National defense, $65 billion. Veterans benefits, education, transportation, and others. In other words, the government takes money from the taxpayers. It goes through the welfare bureaucracies and the other agencies of the federal government and comes back to the taxpayer at a deep discount. So is this a way to run a government? What Drucker says is that the government should not be providing these services, they should be basically paying for them as a pay master. In other words, he considers the G.I. Bill the quintessential excellent government program where the government is not providing the institutions of education, but allowing the beneficiaries to use their tax dollars to pay for education. So for Drucker, that is his paradigm. Now here's some Drucker quotes, which are really wonderful and problematic that he's written and spoken about over the years. And I find that fascinating. And the first one every Austrian would agree with, every libertarian would agree with, and good fiscal conservatives. The wisdom of government can only exist in textbooks. If you take that statement and apply it, you don't want the government doing anything except what's authorized in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. And then he wrote, none of the U.S. government programs the last 40 years in which they try to tackle a social program through government action has produced significant results. But independent nonprofit agencies have had impressive results. I'm going to skip some of these quotes, even though that this somewhat, here's the quote that I think is really interesting. The nanny state, a lovely English term, is a total failure. We can all agree with that. Government everywhere, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the former Soviet Union have proved unable to run community and society. But the counter theory, this is really interesting, that preaches a return to pre-World War I government has also not proved out. That theory was first formulated in 1944 in Friedrich Hayek, the road to serfdom, and that culminated in neoconservativism. I don't know why he doesn't call it classical liberal, because that's what it should be called, not neoconservativism. He continues, despite its ascendancy in the 1980s, despite Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the nanny state has not shrunk. That's for sure. Just look at the budget over the last 40-some-odd years. On the contrary, it has grown ever faster. And the new Republican majority, so he's writing this in either late 94 or early 95, is soon going to find out neither maintaining or curtailing the nanny state is acceptable to the public. He is right. When conservatives say, we have to have a safety net, a government social safety, they've lost the argument. All they're debating now is how large it should grow, how fast it should grow. When I saw this quote, I said, Drucker should be in the Austrian camp 100%. When Drucker was invited to speak to the employees of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1969, by the way, the department was accrated by President Eisenhower in the 1950s. In 1969, the first year of President Nixon's first term, the president introduced him with these words. Quote, Peter Drucker says that modern government can only do two things well, wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr. Drucker wrong. Talk about irony of ironies, right? Two years later, we get wage and price controls, the abandonment of the classical gold standard, and of course, the continued war in Vietnam. So even President Nixon did not fulfill his promise to the American people. Yet in 1995, Drucker wrote a piece about reinventing government with the rage with Al Gore's Vice President. They're going to reinvent government, downsize it. If you remember 1996 State of the Union dress, Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over. That was a joke. It has grown enormously since then. And what, the way Drucker looks at government, and it's throughout his writings, it doesn't look as government as the provider of services, but as the conductor, as he calls it. He wants the government to conduct society. Where he came up with that idea is really remarkable. He wrote, and we need government as a central institution that expresses the commonwealth and the common vision and enables each organization to make its own best contribution to society and citizens, while expressing common beliefs and common values. If you take blood pressure medicine, take it now. We need strong effective governments in the international sphere so they can make sacrifices of sovereignty needed to give us working super national institutions for world society and world economy. That sounds like it comes out of what? The World Economic Forum, doesn't it? So when I read this, immediately it came to me. Who's common vision? Who's common values? Is it Bernie Sanders' common values? Is it Joe Biden's values? Is it Donald Trump's values? Who's a protectionist and an easy money guy? Is it Ron Paul's values? Okay. Whose values is he talking about? He continues. He's sort of a dig to libertarians. We do not face a withering way of the state. On the contrary, we need a vigorous, strong and very active government. I read that, and he keeps on disappointing me, Drucker, after I read his 1991 Wall Street Journal article. So he calls his proposal reprivatization, where we shrink the welfare bureaucracies, but we maintain the concept of government as the, not the doer, but the orchestra leader. Now, what is he right about? It is a 1991 essay, which got me started on the journey of understanding Drucker and his approach to a whole bunch of subjects. Here's how he starts his article. Government has proved incompetent at solving social problems, okay? We know that. We know that. Virtually every success we have scored has been achieved by non-profits, and he lists some of the non-profits that have done incredible work at a fraction of the cost of what government agencies would do it. The non-profit sector spent far less for results than government spends for failures. That's just an objective analysis. He concludes with these observations, bureaucracies' hostility to the non-profits is not too different from the bureaucratic hostilities to markets and private enterprise in the form of communist countries. Let's applaud that. That's a great statement. The success of the non-profits undermines the bureaucracies' power and denies its ideology. Worse, the bureaucracy cannot admit that the non-profits exceed where governments fail. What is needed, therefore, is a public policy that establishes the non-profits as the country's first line of attack on social problems. In other words, he calls for non-profitization, a total reevaluation and a restructuring of the social sector. He recognizes that we have the private sector that produces the goods and services that people want. We have the government to do some modest activities. What was Drucker's solution to getting government agencies or government bureaucracies out of the equation? He says, we could boost the finances of the non-profits by providing a $1.10 tax deduction for every dollar contributed to a non-profit. In my tax-free 2000 book, I went a step further and said, we really want to get the non-profits as the sector to deliver the goods, the services that people want. We should do a dollar tax credit. In other words, instead of your dollar going to Washington, it goes to your favorite non-profit, the Mises Institute. This would mean that every non-profit would have to raise its money from individuals. What do I recommend as far as this? It's not going to be with Biden or Trump. They would announce that within one year, no non-profit will get one penny of tax dollars. All of the money would have to be raised through voluntary contributions from individuals, corporations, foundations. The money is there. We know there's $140 trillion of net worth in the United States, something like that. I went to the website of the National Public Philanthropy Trust. It has data on how much money is available. I would make the point that if the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation want to do something great for the American people, in other words, low-income people who don't have access to medical care and save the U.S. taxpayers about a trillion dollars a year to wipe out Medicaid, you can do what I did when I was invited 20 years ago to be a founding trustee. You see, they're already applauding in Auburn. And you create a non-profit. So I was invited by the founder to do that. Okay. So to give you some idea of the reaction is several years ago, 15, 20 years ago, I attended a health care conference in New Jersey. And one of the speakers was chairman of the New Jersey Senate Health Committee, where one of the speakers was a founder of a non-profit health center in New Jersey. And after he spoke, I went over to him and I said, we could save New Jersey taxpayers a bundle of money if we create non-profit health centers through tax credits for New Jersey. But New Jersey has a very strange income tax. It's not called the income tax, it's called the property tax relief fund. So all those dollars are earmarked for education dollars to go to local communities. So I said, he said he would investigate this concept of non-profits providing health care to low-income folks who don't have Medicaid. So what was the conclusion? Expecting politicians to do the right thing is like expecting a Nymphomaniac to behave herself on a submarine. It's true. It's true. They can't help themselves. They just can't help themselves. I've debated them as running for office in New Jersey. Both Republicans and Democrats, all they want to do is maintain the status quo. Drucker's view of government is a paradox. And the one hand, he says, there's only two things well with money and wage war, print money and wage war. But he wants the government to be the conductor of society. In his 1995 essay, he wrote, the mega-state that the century built is bankrupt. I think everyone would agree with that. Morally as well as financially. It has not delivered. But here's the real paradox, but its successor cannot be small government. How he reaches that conclusion from his premise is really an inconsistency. There are far too many tasks domestically and internationally. We need effective government and that is what voters of the world are clamoring for. In the final analysis, Drucker's legacy as the world's preeminent management theorist and practitioner is secure. However, if he had braced proxyology and Misi's insights about how to best organize society, in other words, through voluntary action, his legacy as a champion of liberty, which he claimed to have set out to be in his first book, The End of Economic Man, would undoubtedly have earned him a place in the pantheon of classical liberal intellectuals. Thank you.