 Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and as we look back on our first year of the show, we decided to check the numbers and run the program with the highest ratings as we close out 2014. So based on analytics from YouTube, iTunes, and Stitcher, the number one show of last year is none other than Patrick Barron in this two-part interview on the end of US Dollar Supremacy. Patrick and I recorded this back in October and I'm sure you'll enjoy it, especially if you're concerned about what happens to the US Dollar and do all of our personal finances when said dollar loses its position as the world's reserve currency. So stay tuned for a great interview and we'd love to know what guests you'd like to hear and what questions you'd like asked on Mises Weekends in 2015. Let us know via Twitter at MisesMedia or by emailing weekends at Mises.org. The former French president, Giscard Destang, I'm hoping I'm saying that closely to correct pronunciation, said this in the 1960s. He termed the US Dollar status as the world's reserve currency as our exorbitant privilege. And from my reading of it, he didn't say this happily, he said it somewhat bitterly. So I'd like to get your thoughts in an overall sense of what the US Dollar status as the world's reserve currency really means. Well, actually that quote from Destang, I thought that I think probably Jacques Ruff, who was the, not sure I'm pronouncing that right properly either, but he was the great French economist who was of the Austrian school. And he is, I think he's the one who termed the Bretton Woods Agreement as conferring upon the dollar and American exorbitant privilege. Henry Hazlett, who is a well-known American Austrian economist who at the time attended the Bretton Woods Agreement or Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944 as a reporter for the New York Times was very critical of the agreement because he said it conferred upon one nation too much of a, too much power and it was too great a responsibility. And I think what he meant by that was it conferred too great a chance, an opportunity to cheat. And this is exactly what America did. So what the Bretton Woods did during World War II, because the US had been the arsenal of democracy before we actually got into the war two years after Britain did. We had been producing arms for all the allies. And we had a huge balance of payments credit that was being paid in gold. And over the course of the war the United States accumulated a huge reserve of gold. So we had, I don't know what the percentage was, but the lion's share of the world's reserve of gold in all the central banks. So at the Bretton Woods Conference there was a desire to return to a, to found money of some kind. So what they came up with was that there would be inter-bank settlement among central banks and the settlement mechanism would be in gold or dollars. And that the dollar would be pegged at $35 an ounce. So it's the Bank of England or the Bank of, well, it's just in the Bank of France. Since we're talking about the French, the Bank of France accumulated a lot of dollars because we were buying French goods, then the Bank of France periodically would present these dollars to the Federal Reserve Bank and would demand gold at $35 an ounce. Well, the central banks of the world didn't really, this is called the Gold Exchange Standard by the way. A private individual couldn't present, couldn't present the dollars to the Fed, but other central banks could. So it conferred upon the U.S. the ability to, if the dollars weren't presented for payment to cheat and actually start printing money, which we did. But periodically the banks would present some dollars. Over the years, the years went by especially into the 60s. It was Charles De Gaulle, who along with the advice of Jacques Ruff. And Charles De Gaulle was a hard money man. He was a gold standard man. They recognized what the U.S. was doing, and they said, you know, there's some cheating going on here. The U.S. is printing dollars and buying foreign goods. So in effect, we're getting pieces of paper that are not really worth $35 for $1.35 an ounce of gold, and yet we're giving the Americans good, French goods for that. So he told the Bank of France to redeem 80% of their dollar holdings, which they had counted as the same as gold at $35 an ounce. Well, this over time started what in effect became a run on the fit. And that is what drove us off the gold standard in 1971. I did some calculations just recently to see, well, what would we have had to devalue the dollar to gold? What would have been the rate if we had, if Nixon was to just taking us off the gold standard, had decided to just say, well, you're going to have to present more dollars to get your ounce of gold so that we don't run out of gold. And I calculated at that time it would have been over $400 an ounce, which shows how much money the U.S. actually printed in the, you know, since World War II. And of course, what really caused the big explosion in dollar printing was Lyndon Johnson's guns and butter policy of the 1960s, where he simultaneously fought the Vietnam War and introduced all his welfare programs that he called the Great Society. So the U.S. that was called a reserve currency. It was a sort of a technical term until we went off the gold standard. And so this technical term of reserve currency meant that central bank would hold dollars as reserves the same as gold at a certain exchange ratio. So it was a technical term. Now, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, it didn't mean that people would, central banks had no longer hold dollars. It just meant that they're technically the term calling it a reserve currency is just sort of an anachronistic name. And now central banks hold dollars just for the convenience of it. And sometimes they hold dollars, often they're holding dollars for the wrong reasons because they have bad monetary policy themselves, which we can get into. So Jeff, that's kind of a long winded explanation of what it means to be a reserve currency. Well, Patrick, today Hans Hoppe, among others, uses the term monetary imperialism to describe U.S. monetary policy. And what he means by that paraphrasing is that the dominating state uses its position to enforce a policy of internationally coordinated inflation in effect. So can you discuss this phenomenon a little bit for us? Well, what's happening today is all the central banks of the world are following the wrong monetary policy, which allows the United States to become a monetary imperialist, which means that we are papering the world with our dollars and we're buying foreign goods and we're giving people paper dollars that are worth less and less all the time. But we have to realize that this is an imperialism that only takes place because the other countries have bad monetary policies themselves. They allow it to happen. So here's an example. China runs a huge foreign exchange credit with the United States. And the reason they do that is because they're running a mercantilist economy, meaning that they believe that accumulating foreign reserves are good for their economy. Plus they want to, they think that they can export their way to prosperity. So they are giving more yuan for the dollar than would be the case in a non-interventionist market. If they did not inflate the yuan, then the U.S. importers who are trying to import Chinese goods would not get as many yuan for the dollar as they are now. And therefore, China wouldn't sell as much to us, of course, because their prices would be technically higher in dollar terms. If you're getting 10 yuan to the dollar, you only get 8 or 7 or 6 or 5, then it technically means that Chinese goods are more expensive. But the Chinese don't want that to happen. They want to keep their export industries going. So they are, in effect, they're printing more yuan and they're importing inflation. But they import inflation, you might say voluntarily. But so they're allowing the United States to be a monetary imperialist and export, export our inflation to them because they are rigging their own internal foreign exchange markets. If they didn't do that, then the United States would be quickly called to account. And we would see that our economy would go into recession because our foreign goods in the United States would become more expensive. Now, we can become a monetary, we can stay a monetary imperialist. The important point of this is only as long as the other countries allow that to happen. And right now we are seeing a lot of pushback in the world from Russia, China, the Arab countries, India, who are saying that, you know, we don't want to trade in dollars anymore. We don't want to settle our accounts in dollars because the dollar is becoming worth less and less, the US is expanding it. So they're searching for some way to do this, something that is more honest. So they've talked about actually using gold as an exchange. And I think that this is going to continue because the US is just, we show no inclination to stop our monetary imperialism because there doesn't seem to be any reason to do it right now because everybody's accepting the dollar, but it's not going to last. What happens with all these imperialism of any kind, whether it's monetary or military imperialism, it tends to expand and expand until it actually collapses. And at some point, you know, the rest of the world will realize that, in effect, the emperor has no clothes and they're going to say, well, that's it. We're not, maybe it'll be Japan or maybe it'll be China and Russia and India that will get together. Maybe Brazil will jump in there too and say, you know, we're just, we're not going to do this anymore. We're not going to use dollars to settle our foreign accounts. We're going to use some other currency. And if I could continue this thought, my hope is that one of the Western countries would be the one that would break this chain. And I was hoping, I am still hoping that it would be Germany rather than Russia or China or one of the Arab countries because I just think that Germany is a solidly Western law-abiding as a respect for property rights and it would reinstate the Deutsche Mark and over time, the Germans would not inflate the Deutsche Mark as the rest of the world are inflating their currency and that the world would start demanding more Deutsche Marks and that would put pressure on America to stop inflating the dollar. So this is what I'm hoping would happen and that this is how America's imperialism and monetary imperialism would end. Let's face it will end because it's bad for the rest of the world. The rest of the world realizes that getting off of the dollar is not going to be painless so they haven't been willing yet to endure the pain but the longer they put up with America's monetary imperialism, the harder it's going to be when they finally do throw in the towel and say, well, we've just got to do something else. So it will end and I just hope it ends sooner rather than later. Well, that's interesting. You talk about pushback by countries and there's a lot of angles to this. For instance, Asian central banks hold lots and lots of dollars so they have a vested interest also as exporters in propping the dollar up but they understand in a long-term geopolitical sense that having the US dollar dominate is not in their interest. We've heard recently about this talk among the BRIC nations potentially forming their own central banks. Patrick, would this be as simple as just opening more oil exchanges that aren't priced in dollars? I mean, could that be the beginning of the fall of the House of Cards? Well, I think it's already beginning and I'm not saying it's going to be simple but I don't believe that we're going to see that there's any kind of great sort of Bretton Woods type conference among the Russians and the Chinese and maybe the Indians and the Arabs. It's more likely that international corporations will start wanting to trade in something other than the dollar and this is already happening. I have it on good authority from some friends who work for a major, major American escort company on these coasts that their goods are being settled, their trades are being settled in yuan in Asia and that's because their partners want yuan and they don't want dollars. So I think already this has begun. So it may be something that's already beginning but it's just not on a radar screen and there's not a lot of statistics out there to point this out, to show us what is happening. But I think it's very likely that in many ways the United States has overstepped its bounds. I mean my god, our wars all over the world are being financed by printing dollars and so the dollar is losing its value so all the countries of the world such as China and Japan who each hold a trillion dollars of our actually they're holding trillion, a trillion dollars of treasury bills that they would exchange for dollars they're becoming increasingly nervous that their holdings of American financial instruments and dollar terms are depreciating as they sit there. So they don't like this, they don't really quite know what to do about it yet or like I said before they know that getting off of the dollar, ridding themselves of the dollar will not be pain free and they're just at this point not willing to accept the consequences of it. But it will be done because it was Herb Stein, Nixon's financial advisor told him, you know, if something can't continue, it will not continue. And he was right, you know, if American financial imperialism cannot continue then it will not continue. It's just when will it happen? Well, Austrian economists, we know that we don't like to answer any question that says when. Now, we both know that the rest of the world has to understand that the United States is never going to get its fiscal house in order. So does this mean in your view that the rest of the world understands that it's basically US military might serving as the implicit backstop for the US dollar? Well, and I think our military might is being called into question because our military might is dependent upon the strength of our economy and our economy is being weakened. I'm not very happy with, you know, with our military might. I think that our military might is being used up in all these wars. Again, I've got a pretty good authority because I'm an old Air Force guy myself that our Air Force is not as strong as people would like would have us or we would like to have others believe it is. We were using up our Air Force men. We're using up our airplanes. We're not replacing them. They're in effect. They're just being worn out. They're being spread in all over the world. To me, it reminds me of what I read about the British Empire. At the beginning of the end of the British Empire, they supposedly controlled 40% of the Earth's surface with very small military forces. And when someone kind of, you know, pricked that balloon, it all collapsed. It was shown that they just, they couldn't defend it. And I just wonder if we're not doing the same thing. In fact, I think we probably are. Well, I'd like to talk to you about how this process might occur. In other words, slowly or rapidly as a result of certain shocks. You know, Pat Buchanan wrote something to the effect that a collapse of a major fiat currency like the dollar or the euro will result in one of two things. Either one, a rapid return and all out return to local sovereign currencies of yesteryear. Or perhaps the imposition of some sort of monster global currency imposed by the IMF or the UN. So I'd like your thoughts on that. Well, if we, if there's some kind of a shock and it could be something that we don't really think is all that important at the time. But it turns out to be just whatever breaks the confidence in the monetary order. Then it could result in an attempt at sort of financial fascism and that the IMF would order us around in the Fed and the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, etc. would go along with this. But it would, that would not really be an answer. It might, you know, it might push us down the road even further. But it would not really solve any fundamental problems. It would just mean that we push the whole inflation problem from a handful of central banks that are inflating their own currencies to one international central bank that engages in complete worldwide monetary inflation. That's not an answer. That is just continuing the same rot. I don't think that will solve anything. But it could happen that that would be the next step instead of a step of returning to a more liberal and with a small L order of sound money, sound national currencies that are exchanged for the gold and or silver. That to me is the answer. That is the solution, which of course people in government don't like that solution because that means that they can't spend, their governments can't spend whatever they want. They, that means their governments have to be responsible to the people because they have to either tax the people or go to the people honestly and ask for honest loans. Well, they don't want to ask for honest loans and they, you know, because they would rather just print the currencies. So I don't really know if we can predict which of these, which of these things would happen. I, you know, I'm kind of pessimistic in that whenever there's some kind of anymore, whenever there's any kind of problem in society, no matter what it is, everybody looks to the government to cure it for them rather than to look to themselves or to say, well, what, you know, what is the, what is the market solution? What do people really want to do? So I think if there are a problem with, you know, the international financial system, we would probably see, you know, some giant meeting of the G20 that would get together some place and come up with some huge supposedly solution that might be worse than what we had, but it might live along for a few more years like that. I hope not. I would hope that we by that time, you know, that people would have listened to people like Ron Paul, who was telling us all along that, you know, we're going down the wrong path and we've got to return to sound money because it's only sound money that can allow us to have a sound economy. And that's what we all want is, you know, peace and prosperity and we can't have peace and prosperity if we don't have sound money. I think that's what we're seeing right now. Well, you mentioned that a shock could occur that we don't really recognize as necessarily a hugely important event at the time. I'd like to get your thoughts on this idea of the collapse or potential collapse of the dollar in this sense. We have historical examples for instance, Germany, Argentina, where national currencies contained in a geographic area, let's say, have collapsed. But we've never had an instance in history where a worldwide reserve currency collapsed. What do you think it might look like, at least in the short term? Well, I think what might happen is that it would result in a huge inflation in the United States because a likely scenario would be that China decides it just is not going to hold dollars anymore and again, I want to make sure I understand it's not really actually holding dollars or holding Treasury bills. We're not going to hold Treasury bills anymore that we buy with our excess dollars that we get from our export economy. We're going to start phasing out of those and we're going to, so they say we're no longer, we're no longer going to take these dollars and buy Treasury bills. We're going to take these dollars that we're getting and we're going to buy American goods. People may say, well, that's great, buy American goods. Well, we're not really, at any given point in time, America is only producing so much. So if this flood of dollars, so if the Chinese say, well, we're not going to roll over our Treasury bills, we want dollars that we can spend, then the United States government would have two options at that point. They could say, well, we can print money, just print dollars for the Treasury bills and give it to the Chinese and then the Chinese will spend those dollars in the United States and cause a great inflation in the U.S. because it would be a great increase in our money supply or we can allow interest rates to rise so that Americans will start buying more Treasury bills voluntarily. Interest rates will rise, which will throw the United States into a recession. I think what they were probably just print money because that's what they've done all along. So I think a very likely scenario as likely as any is that central banks of the world decide to get the heck out of dollars. Just like the central banks in the world over a period of about four or five years from the late 60s into the early 70s decided that they wanted to trade in their dollars for gold, had to fed and that drove America off the gold standard. The same kind of thing could happen with central banks deciding they did not want to hold American Treasury bills, which represent dollars as a reserve currency anymore because they just don't trust it. That could cause a gathering, kind of a gathering storm, so to speak, of like-minded central banks. All of a sudden there is a run to get rid of your dollars and buy something of real value. Farmland in America, American stocks and bonds, goods and services, and just cause in effect a great inflation in the United States. I think this is a likely scenario and I wish it wouldn't happen that way, but unless we suddenly get monetary religion and get our budget in order, stop fighting all these wars and stop borrowing so much money and loosen up the American economy, get all of our alphabet agencies of the government that are stifling American industry unless we start abolishing those or rein them in, I think it's very likely to happen that way. You talk about the tremendous dollar holdings of the Chinese, for example, it seems that many people who bemoan US trade deficits, they don't understand that we have needed this huge outflow of dollars decade after decade, that's what a reserve currency requires, right, is an outflow of US dollars so that the rest of the world has dollars to use to buy oil, to settle international payments, whatever it might be. Well, I'm not sure that they actually need those dollars, they have used the dollars as a proxy for gold, but they can use other currencies. It's just whichever, so far, you know, when we look around the world, I will, what currency do you trust? You have to admit that, well, these currencies are not all that trustworthy, I guess the US dollars is trustworthy as any. I mean, I would trust the US dollar over the Chinese yuan, for example. I don't know what the Chinese are going to do with the yuan, I'm not even sure I trust their statistics over there. I'm not sure I would trust, you know, any kind of currency that the Russians would come up with. They would have a hard time, these countries would have a hard time gaining the confidence of the market. So this is one thing that keeps the dollar financial monetary imperialism going, is that there's no one else who has really stepped forward that is more trustworthy. But I get back to the group, country that I think is very trustworthy is Germany. The German bankers, if you recall, German bankers keep saying, they're central bankers, they are not in favor of inflating the euro. They want a sound, hard money. They want honesty in banking. And frankly, I would trust the Bundesbach more than I would trust the Fed. And I would love this, right now there's kind of a, there's sort of an unofficial war going on in Europe between the Bundesbach and the European Central Bank over whether the European Central Bank is going to be allowed to continue to inflate the euro at a higher and higher rate. And the Bundesbach is getting very nervous about this and doesn't want that to happen. My prediction is that the Bundesbach will win that war. I don't think they're going to allow the European Central Bank to inflate the euro. And because if the, but it looks like European Central Bank may just go ahead and do it anyway. And at that point, Germany, if they're smart, would leave the euro, which would be a good thing for them. It would be a good thing for Europe. And it would be a good thing for the United States to be a good thing for the world because it would start this cycle, this virtuous cycle of other central banks being forced to strengthen their currency because a major world nation, a major trading nation in the world has its own currency and is not going to depreciate its currency as much as the rest of the world. And so gradually, people would want to use Deutsche March to settle their trades instead of dollars, instead of yuan, instead of euros. So I think that is a likely scenario that could happen. And that's what I keep hoping will happen. And I'm seeing some encouraging signs out of Europe now that the Germans just are not backing down over this issue. Patrick, I'd like to get your thoughts on how elites view this issue and how the IMF might play a role. So the IMF issues special drawing rights, SDRs, which really just represent an exchange claim for currency among IMF member countries. But just as the dollar once represented a claim to money, and it wasn't considered money itself, could SDRs morph into an actual global currencies, at least if the elites had their way? Well, I don't think so. It could be something that is attempted in the Pat Buchanan thing where he said, you know, there might be a, there, the IMF might try to impose a world currency that would be a special drawing right and a re-denominant, you know, re-daming it and redefinition. I, as I said before, this is not a real answer. I don't think it would, I don't think it would be accepted by the world. The IMF is an anachronism. People probably don't realize the start of the IMF, but the IMF was also formed at the Bretton Woods Agreement or it was, it was voted to decide that the IMF would be formed at the Bretton Woods Agreement. And the purpose of the IMF was to make sure that the United States did not inflate its currency. Right. So the IMF failed from day one. The US just inflated its currency anyway. So the IMF has been searching for some kind of role ever since. And, and so again, you know, we should just shut down the IMF. It's just meddling in world affairs, giving bad advice to developing countries that they should not listen to. All right. I just, I don't put a lot of credence in that special drawing rights are going to become the next world currency. Well, that's encouraging. But, you know, it's interesting to note that the left uses the term monetary imperialism as well. Often when we're talking about the IMF, the left means in the context that, that richer countries, economically richer countries are pushing huge levels of indebtedness on third world countries in effect. Well, again, the third world countries are following the wrong economic model themselves. No country can really force a bad economic policy on another country, I guess, as well. It's just that these other countries' elites find that it's good for them to inflate their currencies or to go along with the monetary imperialist. They don't have to do that. And they shouldn't do that. But there, so there is a Philip Bogus who wrote the tragedy of the Euro about, he wrote about four years ago and he updated the book a couple years ago. Philip Bogus made the point that there is more in common among the elites internationally than there are, than these elite have with their own people. For example, French bankers have more in common with the Italian bankers than French bankers have in common with their own French people. In other words, there is an international elite that are all living well, hold a lot of power, hold similar fallacious economic goods. They all, or economic ideas, they all went to the same colleges and universities and were instilled with the wrong ideas. So they are a very tight elite all over the world and they don't really have a lot in common with their own people and they're supposed to be representing their own people. And I think that this is a problem. So I'm not surprised at all that the elite of the world, they all would probably think that having a one-world currency is a great thing. But I don't think it would be good for their people and I think they're completely out of touch with their own people when they recommend these things. Well, Patrick, we've got the upcoming Swiss gold referendum. We know that Asian central banks, even Asian households, are buying huge amounts of gold. Do you think the elite will ever be forced to accept a role for gold in the international monetary system? Well, I think they could be forced by political forces, yeah. And this could be that there are probably a lot of, maybe some of our listeners who really aren't aware that there is a referendum in Switzerland. It's going to take place at the end of November, I think November 30th, where the Swiss will vote on whether their central bank, the Swiss central national bank, should repatriate all of its gold that is being supposedly held in central banks around the world. Not supposedly because no one will allow an audit of whether the gold is really there. But let's just assume that it is there. I think that this is the kind, this referendum is the kind of thing where the people are going to have their say. And I cannot imagine a Swiss government that would ignore this referendum if the Swiss people voted in favor of this referendum. I can't imagine that a Swiss government would last very long that said, well, we're just going to ignore that referendum. I think that they would probably do it. They'd have to do it. And this, maybe this is the international incident that triggers the whole thing, that triggers the whole sort of collapse of the monetary imperialism of the dollar and the inflation of the euro and the yuan and all the other currencies. And this might be something that would force the central banks to start looking to their gold reserves. And because it looks to me, it's referendums like these that tell me that there is a great well of knowledge embodied in the people that know that something is not right. And they know that gold is gold and they know that paper is paper and they would rather have their gold. The Indians certainly understand that. The Chinese understand that. And I think Americans and Europeans understand that, despite all the propaganda from the elite and in America and in Europe that, you know, gold is the, you know, what is it, the relic or something that should be a barbarous relic. Barbarous relic became sensitive. Well, it's no such thing. And it is not a barbarous relic. Gold is gold and paper is paper. And I think that perhaps this upcoming Swiss referendum could be the trigger. So I hope the readers pay attention to that and we'll see what develops. Well, one thing we know about gold, apart from its exchange value at any point in time or history, is that for many centuries, it has always been accepted as a form of payment across cultures, across countries, and across time. Right. Yeah, from time immemorial, gold has been used as money. It's accepted anywhere. We are not used to dealing in gold, physical gold, but we did up until the, you know, mid 20 or early 20th century anyway. And people knew gold when they saw it. They knew what it felt like. They knew what its weight was. They knew what it sounded like. You know, we see, you know, we'll see maybe in some old cowboy movie in America that, you know, somebody throws over a $10 gold piece to somebody and he takes it and he bites it. You know, well, that's what used to happen is, you know, it has a certain feel to it or they would stomp it on it when they would encounter it. It had a certain sound to it to know that it was really gold and not something, not some base metal. And gold has, you know, has other uses, you know, not only decorative uses, but it has the industrial uses. So there are, you know, gold. There's only a certain amount of gold. It's in the world at its extent right now. It's gold is mined every year, but in a very small amount because it's not a, people think that there's a big vein of gold like there's a vein of coal in the Appalachians or something, but that's not really what it is. Gold is small little particles that are in tons of earth and it takes a lot of processing to get the little bit of gold out and it's actually a cost to doing that. So when the, you know, when the cost rises too much then gold production slows down. So it's not something that can be manufactured easily. And this is why, you know, gold over the millennium has been accepted as a unit of exchange because it retains its luster. The only way to destroy gold apparently is to burn it. And all the gold that's ever been mined in the world that has not been burned or lost at sea at the bottom of the sea and some Spanish galleon is still in use. And even when they find a Spanish galleon that's been lost for several hundred years and they find the gold at the bottom of the sea they pull the gold up and it is just as good as it was then. It doesn't tarnish even if it's been in sea water for several hundred years. So I mean this is, this is the perfect unit of exchange that all societies have recognized from time and memorial. And, you know, why we, this is what we really need to return to is probably as a gold standard. Well, say we need to return to that. Nothing we wouldn't, I do not recommend that governments impose the gold standards, but that if there were a free market and money production that the people would recognize gold at least as one of the major currencies, gold and silver would undoubtedly be used as two of the units of exchange that would be accepted voluntarily by all the people of the world. Patrick, I would like to leave you with just one last question today. We've been speaking a lot about Germans today and German economists. I'd like to bring up another one, Guido Hulsmann. He's written quite a bit about the cultural consequences of a fiat U.S. dollar, for example, changing time preferences, discouraging thrift, even somewhat interfering with the family structure. As we finish up this discussion, let me just ask you, is the U.S. dollar also a cultural weapon of sorts that, in effect, Americanizes the world? Well, yeah, and I agree completely with Professor Hulsmann in this and that it's used to corrupt people. It's used to corrupt Americans. It's used to, and Americans use the dollar to corrupt the rest of the world. The dollar is used to corrupt Americans by our welfare system. It's just terrible what we've done in America by trapping several generations of people in a welfare system that is possible only because of the printing of the dollar in massive amounts. So it does. It has ruined its ruined families in America, and I'm sure that, as the dollar is used overseas as a reserve currency head, it has the same pernicious effect all over the world. But I think we have to look at where America's sort of cultural decline began. And it began with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the 60s that were made possible only because we went off the gold standard in 1971 and could be continued and expanded. And that is where America's cultural decline started. And we're seeing the results of that today. So yes, I think that the printing of any fiat currency in massive amounts allows the government to spend money to buy votes that has a terrible effect upon the cultural structure of the nation. And we're seeing that in America. That's a very good point that Professor Holman makes. So there you have it, the number one Mises weekend show of 2014. Thank you so much for listening all year, and thanks for being part of the Mises Institute in 2014. And again, if you have guests you'd like to hear on Mises weekends in 2015, let us know via Twitter or by emailing weekends at Mises.org. Have a great weekend and happy 2015 to all of you.