 Well, there's been a lot of talk in the news about shutting down the government on October 1st. It sounds like a libertarian dream, but it's really not. It's really just politics as usual with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and the President grandstanding in support of their pet projects. Congress has been acting irresponsibly for years. They haven't passed budgets in several years. They've been operating under a continuing resolution for the last several years and we're up against the national debt ceiling. This government shutdown is targeted at not having a budget, but the debt ceiling limit has already been reached and the Treasury has been using extraordinary bookkeeping measures to keep us from going over the debt ceiling limit, which even with all those measures it's still going to hit the debt ceiling limit at the end of next month. So it's basically Congress acting irresponsibly. Even if the shutdown were to occur, it's not really government shutting down. Whole categories, vast swaths of the federal government will continue to operate as, quote, essential features of government. So the military, law enforcement, the post office, the federal reserve, social security checks, veterans benefits, hospitals, prisons, all those things are going to continue to operate. There are a few non-essential aspects of government that will be stopped. So the National Institute for Health, for example, will be shut down. Make it much more difficult to get a visa or a passport. It would disrupt some aspects of the tourist industry, but it's not government really shutting down. And we've had 17 of these shutdowns over the last 40 years. So again, this is just part of regular politics here in the United States of Congress and the president not being responsible, not being good stewards for the taxpayers' money. And one of the reasons that they have been acting systematically irresponsible is that Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have been buying up a lot of the government debt. So that under the current QE policy of the Fed, the Fed is buying up $85 billion of government debt every month. And guess what? If you could spend money irresponsibly and borrow to support that lifestyle at virtually zero interest rates, what would you expect to happen? So if Ben Bernanke weren't funding the federal debt and if he would allow interest rates to rise, the American people would rise in opposition to these bloated government budgets and budget deficits. And that of course is one of the great beauties of the old gold standard. When we were on the gold standard, the federal budget was balanced virtually every year of American history. And when we were taking off the gold standard in 1971, guess what? We've been running budget deficits almost every year since. And those budget deficits have only gotten larger and larger over time, and now we have a national debt of over $17 trillion. So the gold standard was one of the great checks on irresponsible government spending. And that's the Mises View.