 We are in for a treat. We have Dr. Guido Holsman is going to speak tonight and his talk, The Cultural Impact of the Dollar, is sponsored by Greg and Joy Moran. Thank you to our sponsors. And to all of the sponsors for the whole weekend and all of the talks. It's really just been a fabulous event. So we really appreciate all of those who have sponsored these talks. We're thrilled to have Guido here back with us. He hasn't been here to the Miesen Institute since 2019. If you remember there was something horrible and awful and stupid that kept him away for several years. But now we're glad to finally get to have him have him back with us. You may not know this, but Professor Holsman is a very well-rounded guy. He has degrees in philosophy and mechanical engineering and economics. So also if you haven't read, if you haven't read The Last Side of Liberalism, the biographer he wrote of Mises Highly recommended it. He wrote that while he was here in Auburn, was it five years? Four years in the making. And it's a great, it's a fabulous book. Of course, he's a senior fellow of the Miesen Institute. He's a professor at University of Angers where he directs the master's in law and finance and co-directs the double bachelor program in law and economics. So he's the author. He's got a new book coming out, Abundance, Generosity and the State. Also he wrote The Ethics of Money Production. Of course, Mises The Last Night of Liberalism. So we're looking forward to hear him come speak to us tonight. So. Dear Lou, dear Joy, dear Greg, dear colleagues, including David Gordon. Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear Natalie. It's true, I've been working for many years at the Mises Institute on the Mises Biography. And it was all in all 10 years in the making, right? It was 10 years. I mentioned this only because I said it was kind enough to downplay this a bit. It was only five years and so on. But I remember the many painful meetings that it was Lou and Lou and I would have, Guido, we need to have lunch as we sit together and stand. We talk about all kinds of things and research and so on. Then we look a bit when it's the book coming. It is terrible. It is really, and I'm slow. I admit this. So I'm slow. And so the most recent book was also five years. It just takes me a time. And everybody has got to work with his own weaknesses. So it just takes time. And then eventually it's there or not. So far, it was always there at the end. A few days ago, on October 10th, we've been commemorating the 50th anniversary of the passing of Ludwig von Mises. The name pattern of this Institute always went its own way against the socialist and positivistic fashions and fats of his day. He drank the cup of life to the fullest and never complained. He once wrote that we are all the lucky hairs of our fathers and forefathers. We at the Mises Institute and all people of goodwill all over the world are and remain the lucky hairs to this intellectual kind. Praise to his glorious memory. May God have mercy on him and may he rest in peace. His example has guided the Mises Institute throughout all the years since its foundation. It has guided Lou Rockwell. It has guided Jeff Tucker. It has guided Doug French. It has guided Jeff Deist. Whatever their strengths and weaknesses may have been over the years, they have always been faithful to the mission. Thanks be to that. Now the Mises Institute is taking a new departure and a new leadership. And I think we all hope and we all pray that the board will make the right decision picking the right person to guide us through these difficult times. My topic this evening is the cultural impact of the dollar. That's not really an academic discipline. It's an intellectual oddity that has been my fad for the past 15 years or so. I've been publishing on this a bit because it occurred to me initially just speaking about monetary policy and monetary interventionism that we cannot just limit the discussion to the economic consequences that follow from it but the manifold cultural repercussions of these interventions. The typical justification of monetary interventionism, so the creation of the toleration of fractional reserve banking, the creation of central banking, the imposition of fiat money on the economy, goes in terms exclusively of its economic benefits or sensibly its positive impact on employment and of economic growth. Now even as far as these benefits are concerned we have to say that there's an extreme discretion and even on the part of the advocates about the studies and the evidence that support this claim. Is it really true that central banks and monetary interventionism facilitate employment? Is it true that they promote economic growth? Standard empirical work that is conducted by well standard economists shows that monetary policy has an impact. I'm not kidding you, has an impact on the economy. Well who'd have guessed so? So there are some guys who run a printing press. They can create as much of this as they want and they do have an impact on the economy. Well yes that's probably true and the impact tends to be positive typically in the short run. So short run meaning anything between 8 and 16 quarter years after the increase of the money stock. But then so the question is of course what happens in the longer run? That longer run so for many economists the long run is 16 quarter years or four years. That's the long run. Now we're talking about very different things. I understand the long run for me is something like 10 years, 20 years, 30 years but then I'm an economic dinosaur probably. Now as far as this really long run is concerned we have in the textbooks in macroeconomics we have what I like to call the great macroeconomic puzzle. Because all the textbook writers whether it's Blanchard, Mankiew, they all agree that monetary policy has a positive impact on the short run and no impact on the long run. That's the fact. Okay now that's a puzzle. I mean not for an Austrian economist but for a mainstream economist that is a puzzle. It's a big puzzle because you should think that if something has a positive impact on the short run then why don't we add one damn short run after the other? It works for eight quarter years or for 16 but why don't we do it for another 16? So why shouldn't it turn out to be after 32 quarter years or 64 quarter years to be positive but it doesn't. So that's on the side of the benefits. So the benefits are essentially short run and there are no demonstrable benefits in the long run. On the other hand the costs of these policies are never considered, virtually never considered. The monetary and financial costs of monetary interventionism are supposed to be negligible. Nobody is really examining this except for Carl Friedrich Israel, he's a young professor who has been a Mises fellow many years and he's now teaching also in Angers but not at my university, he's teaching at the Catholic University, he's also teaching at the German University and he has examined in his work his research the monetary costs of central banking. So central banks usually escape from the scrutiny, usually the supposition is in their favor. As we imagine oh yeah there's a printing press, yeah there's a little machine and it costs whatever, $10,000, it's a one-time expenditure. Then you buy all the paper and you buy all the ink and there's one guy at the printing press and then you have whatever the press secretary and the president who tells the guy at the printing press how much he should turn right. So it should be very inexpensive. That in a case was the argument brought up by the classical economists by Adam Smith and David Ricardo and they said wow I mean we can save a lot of money, a lot of resource costs if we just substitute paper money at the place of gold and silver which are expensive, which are costly and so on. Well that argument was debatable at the time where we didn't have any experience of central banks. So at the beginning of the 19th century it's completely unacceptable in our day in which we have empirical evidence of the functioning of a fiat money system to give you just one idea. Just the number of people employed by the Federal Reserve system is in excess of 20,000 people. The Federal Reserve system has one central banking system. The German Bundesbank employs in the excess of 12,000 people. The French, Bonk de France, more than 12,000 people. And you go on, the central bank of Italy, central bank of Spain, everybody has these thousands of people. Now I can tell you one thing, they're not working at the cost of a gold miners, tariff okay. And so what Professor Israel has pointed out that is that actually the actual resource costs of our current system just in money terms are way in excess of what we had in previous times for gold and silver mining. And the great irony is that of course we haven't got rid of gold and silver mining, it's still there. So we have added an additional layer of costs on top of gold and silver mining, which we still have and which still serves people who are not completely confident in the competence of our central banks. And so therefore own gold and silver to protect themselves against the adversity of times. Now these are just the monetary financial costs. Any other cost items are supposed to be inexistent or irrelevant. On my talk today I'm dealing with some of these other cost items which are of a cultural sort. I will first highlight, so among these cost items are the role, the exaggerated role in place of the state and the wedge that monetary interventionism drives between the inhabitants of any country. It destroys a free society, creates a caste of underlings and a caste of supreme rulers. Then I'll talk about one of the most visible repercussions of permanent monetary interventionism, which is constant price inflation. And constant price inflation brings about redistribution effects between the haves and the have-nots. It leads the reorganization of the market economy and it entails a culture of debt, which has many negative repercussions on the economy, as I will spell out in some more detail. So let's start with one immediate effect of monetary intervention that should be familiar to all people in this room, which are the so-called cantillon effects. Cantillon effects are the redistribution effects of increases of the money stock, which these increases have an unequal impact on individual prices. Some prices rise earlier than others and some prices rise stronger than other prices. And the consequence is that there are always winners and losers. The winners are those, the selling prices of which, of whom, increase stronger or earlier than their buying prices and for the losers is the other way around. Now, this brings us immediately to the impact on the political organization of a country and the role of a state. Of course, cantillon effects are the prime motivations for government intervention in the monetary system in the first place. That's exactly the reason for governments to get into the production of money. Governments, by controlling the production of money, can position themselves as institutionalized winners themselves and their allies. And as a consequence, we have, thanks to government intervention, not just winners and losers, which you would have if the money supply would be artificially extended just occasionally, for example, by fraudsters, right? So, false money and so on. But governments position themselves as permanent winners and all other citizens become permanent losers. So, we not just have winners and losers, we suddenly have an impact on the structure of society. Now, suddenly, it's a permanent upper class and a permanent lower class. And we are seeing this today. Monetary interventionism is therefore irreconcilable, silable with the idea of a free society. This point is not stressed enough today, even by critics of the Federal Reserve. But two of the greatest monetary thinkers of all times, Nicolas Oresme in the 14th century and Ludwig von Mises in the 20th century, they have underlined, underscored exactly this problem. And Mises has said that a free society, and he was not an anarchist, and so a free society, so we have a government, and the government is under the control of the population by virtue of the control of the budget of the government. So, it's the representatives of the population that decide how much money the government can spend. If the government can decide unilaterally how much it spends, then there are no limits to the extension of government activity and to the reduction of purchasing power of the population. You cannot confine the government by specifying a specific, only a mission. For example, you might say, well, the government should just be a night watchman state. But of course, even if the mission is only to protect the population, so you forget about the welfare state, you forget about the protection of the environment, the fight against global warming, I don't know, just protect the population. Well, you can protect the population with one policeman for 1,000 persons, one policeman for 100, one policeman for 10, one personal bodyguard for everybody. It's a very different budget, and the policemen themselves, they can be armed just with a knife or with a gun, with a machine gun, with a tank, and so on. So, the simple specification of the mission is not sufficient to limit the amount of resources that are absorbed by the authorities. So, it is necessary to specify how much they can use. And the control of the printing press allows the government exactly to sidestep that limitation. If they have control of the printing press, they don't care what people are babbling in the parliament or in Congress. And then they're haggling over each million or two days or each billion, they don't care. The Federal Reserve can create any hundred billion that they need with a snap of their fingers. So, the whole democratic process becomes pointless, becomes ridiculous, because the truer decisions are made elsewhere. Now, that's a recipe for tyranny. The taste of tyranny, well, we fed it a few times in these past 20 years, and we're not at the end of it. Now, let's get to one of the most visible signs of monetary interventionism, which is permanent price inflation. Permanent price inflation, as I tell my students every semester, is not something that falls out of the skies and that is the law of nature, but it's something that historically has existed in peace times, only since World War II. Before World War II, we always had a tendency for the price level either to remain stable or for the price level to drop. I can show you the statistics for the United States. If you look for the United States data for the 19th century, previously, we don't have any reliable data. For the 19th century, it shows very clearly that the price level had the tendency to drop more or less vigorously. And this tendency was interrupted only by the regular wars that were carried on American soil, the War of 1812 and 1814, the Civil War, and then World War I. But each time, after the hostilities ended, the government reverted back to the peacetime monetary order, and that order is no artificial extension of the money supply or not much of it in any case, and as a consequence, the price level starts to drop again under the impact of economic growth. Since World War II, we are pursuing, for the first time in economic history, wartime monetary policies during peace times. And the consequence is that we have a permanently rising price level. That, ladies and gentlemen, has never existed before. Now, I have never experienced anything else. Some people in this room might be old enough to have witnessed something else in their youth days. Okay. And certainly, our students, they have never seen anything else. We've grown into this. So it seems to be something that is just part of the landscape, just part of nature. It cannot be different. But the study of history tells us, well, that's not. We are living in very exceptional times. We are living in an age of inflation, in an age of price inflation. And the economists and historians of the 1950s and 1960s were very aware of this fact there. So they've cried out and said, well, suddenly we're in this age of inflation. Today, we no longer care. Now, permanent price inflation comes with a heavy cost, heavy social cost, most notably in the form of the redistribution of wealth in favor of the haves and to the detriment of the have-nots. In an environment of permanent price inflation, perishable goods are traded at a discount and durable goods, which help us to protect our wealth against the loss of purchasing power of the money units, trade as at a premium. Now, what are the most durable goods? Real estate and financial titles. What are the most perishable goods? What's the most perishable good? Human labor. Human labor cannot be stored any second. You can store eggs, you can store other perishable items for a few days or a few hours, but labor cannot be stored even one second. Okay. So as a consequence, the labor trades in an inflationary environment at a discount as compared to durable goods such as real estate and financial titles. And this manifests itself in the increasing difficulties of the rising generation to accumulate wealth. It just takes many more years of work and increasing savings rate to catch up with the level of wealth that has been accumulated by previous generations in a shorter time and with lower savings rates. Now, the data are very clear in that respect. So we have a lot of whining sometimes with the younger generation and of course we need to slap them on their cheeks from time to time, but it's not without reason. They definitely have a harder time today than they had before. It is harder for younger people, harder for younger families just to catch up. One of my associates, Jeffrey Degner, who is sitting over there, he will defend his doctoral dissertation next month on the family in the inflation economy and which he studies the impact of permanent price inflation on families and especially young families. Now, the consequence is, of course, that some sort of growing despair, growing revulsion of younger people against the economic order that exposes them to such injustice. And that right now drives them into the hands of communists and various other people who tell them that their life situation is delivered. That's a consequence of capitalism rather than of monetary interventionism. So it's a false flag operation. We see something very similar as far as the world of business is concerned. So here too, permanent price inflation entails a redistribution between the haves and the have-nots, established companies who have already assets of various sorts, durable goods, can offer collateral on credits and therefore are better positioned in the competition for additional credits than startup firms and so on. Now, the consequence is that the optimal firm size in an interventionist economy is larger than in a non-interventionist economy. So we get artificial size, which works out to the detriment of family business and so on. Another consequence is that permanent price inflation creates an irresistible incentive for debt finance. Everybody in the room knows this out of his own experience. You are all owners of some real estate, your own family home and so on. And I bet there's not one of you here in this room who has financed the acquisition of his family home out of equity capital. All of you, like myself, have funded the acquisition of the home with the credit, with the loan. Now, why is this so? Simply because in an inflationary environment, our revenues are likely to increase. And if we take out a loan at a fixed interest rate, the weight of the debt service in our annual budget diminishes as time goes on. So it's the rational decision making in an inflationary environment. And that's very different as compared to our ancestors living in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century who could not expect that their revenue, their monetary revenue would increase year by year and who therefore had an incentive to accumulate savings and eventually when they had enough savings to purchase their house out of equity capital. Now, what are the consequences of increasing debt finance? That brings us to the culture of debt. And here I have one, two, three, four main points. Either the list could be extended very easily, but my time not. First of all, modern man, man living in a price inflationary economy, in a debt economy, tends to be short-sighted and reductionist in his vision. He tends to be short-sighted because he needs to bring money on the table every single month. Month, he needs to service his debt. So he cannot just lay back as our ancestors would have done in the 19th century. They'd know that if there's no money forthcoming in any month or maybe there's a bad year and so on, well, we get over this. We have some savings and so on, we get over the time. Today, we need to make sure that every first of the month we have what it takes to service our contractual obligations. And it also makes us therefore reductionist because all other considerations are relegated, really quality of our business to other objectives that we pursue in life. So this becomes the number one objective. Second, modern man, the man living in a debt economy tends to be servile in order to benefit from this process, in order to be one of those who are first among the users of the new units of money. The only way for him to do this is to take out new loans. In order to qualify for loans, he needs collateral, he needs revenue, he needs to demonstrate that he's a servile and good contractual partner who will do whatever it's necessary and never disturbs anything. So we get here the whole history of credit scores which easily tend to be transformed and we've seen this in the case of China and even some western economies into social credit scores. So you frequent the wrong people, you support the wrong political party, you eat meat rather than fish or meat rather than vegetables, you don't do enough for the environment, you smoke cigars, I know more smoking at all, your social credit score diminishes and as a consequence you're relegated to lower places in the competition for additional credits. Third, in a debt economy, values tend to be turned upside down. The long run becomes less important as compared to the short run. Now, of course, the important word is less. It's not the case that the long run no longer counts but it becomes relatively less important than the short run. Even in a normal economy that is based on private property rights, there's no monetary interventionism, there's always a balance between the short run and the long run. Nobody lives just for the long run and so on. You always have short run goals that need to be balanced, equilibrated relative to short run goals. But in a debt economy, the short run primes because you need the short run, service the debt in order to survive the long run. Independence becomes less important as compared to the dependence that comes with relying on additional credits. And that leads to the sort of servility that I mentioned before, a highly indebted citizen is a compliant servile citizen. Just think of the experience that we had during the COVID years. Why did COVID doctors so readily given to pressure coming from the government? Because the answer is very briefly that they could not have survived three months without the money coming from the system because they were all indebted to the Hilt. And so they needed the money to be forthcoming, so they gave in. Debt makes compliance. Same thing for bank customers, same thing for the Canadian truck drivers, same thing for internet providers and so on. It's really the debt economy that turns us into, well, slaves of the state. Another aspect of this is that equity capital, of course, and I've mentioned this, diminishes in importance relative to debt finance. Another aspect of this is that ownership takes a secondary rank as compared to usership. Probably you have noticed over the past 15 years or so, we've been talking a lot about users of various services and so on, and nobody's talking anymore about owners. And the reason is that in a debt-based economy, well, you take out a loan and all that you're interested in is that you can sell at a higher price than at the price at which you've bought. Doesn't matter whether you keep the property in good shape. You don't necessarily need to be responsible. You just need to find another idea to pay a higher price than you did previously. All right, so ownership is relegated to a secondary place increasingly. And the consequence is, of course, that the cultivation of existing assets of land, of capital, of social relations takes an increasingly secondary place relative to the exploitation of assets of various sorts. Another aspect is that comes with the debt economy is the revised relationship between responsibility and licentiousness, which is related to this equity capital and ownership issue. So the respect for others diminishes, whereas brazen selfishness is encouraged. The attitude that was once characteristic of the American entrepreneur and of Western citizens in general, namely the attitude to do what is the right thing to do in any situation, takes a second place relative to the attitude that boils down to, well, I'll do whatever I can get away with. Genuineness takes a second place relative to impersonation. Relative to impersonation, a genuineness of virtue, of friendship, of leadership. Today we have in all Western nations, we have political leaders that are no genuine leaders, but they're impersonate leaders. Probably the first famous case with Ronald Reagan, at the time nobody paid much attention to this, and to the fact that he had this prehistory as an actor. Well, today we have Mr. Zelensky in Ukraine, it's another glaring case, so we have increasingly people who are impersonating something that they are not. And that's also a consequence of the debt economy, because you get away with this. We no longer have journalists, we have less and less journalists, and we have more and more influencers, again who are irresponsible because they do not care about their reputation, because what primes is the short run, the short run impact, rather than the long run development of their career. To sum up, inflation culture man tends to become increasingly cunning, materialist, short-sighted, reductionist, shallow and servile. He's bound to be morally low in every sense of the world. And the last item that I should mention here is, and I've mentioned this in my talk this afternoon, I was talking about my forthcoming book, is the death of generosity. The interventional state, and monetary interventionists in particular, attacks generosity at its root. It reduces the opportunity cost of for-profit activities, of selfish activities. And again, I'm not morally condemning selfish activities, right? So they are absolutely central for the economy. I fully agree with Adam Smith that we've seen not much non-selfish action that genuinely improves the situation of men. That's a different issue. But the point is that the opportunity cost of dedicating our time and our resources to the service of others is systematically increased by monetary interventionism. Monetary interventionism makes it possible to leverage investments and that makes it possible for, especially for rich people, creates irresistible, very strong incentives to stay invested, have every cent of their wealth in the market, in the service of earning additional revenue, rather than donating money to worthy causes to deserving or needy persons. And we see this tendency in the declining membership in associations. We see this in the increasing superficiality of friendship and the manifestation of dedication to sciences and arts in all walks of life. This, ladies and gentlemen, are the cultural costs of monetary interventionism. So to sum up, the benefits of monetary interventionism, in particular of dollar interventionism, are questionable or, as put it politely, are yet to be demonstrated. We're waiting for this. In any case, they are likely to be tiny. The costs of financial and cultural are massive and patent. I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I think we have time for a few questions. Do we have time? Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay, go ahead. Thank you very much. It seems that there would be possibly one additional detriment to modern man in the debt culture, and that would be the spiritual detriment that comes. And you described it, the moral side and the ethical side, but it also seems that it compels people towards a materialistic approach to life and thereby distracts from the spiritual realities that might be greater. Could you comment on that? Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right. I mentioned among the durable goods financial titles in real estate, but that, of course, is relatively non-durable as compared to eternal life. So clearly then in a debt economy, these considerations also are discounted relative to the immediate concerns of daily life, and we see this also. In order to lead a spiritual life, you need to have a spare time. We need to have the attitude of Abraham who received God, and he was just available. God, three persons show up, God shows up at his house, and Abraham did not say, oh, wait, wait, wait, I need to take care of my car and then I need to run the children to the school and do various other things, right? May the paychecks and so on said, yeah, I'm here and I'm available. You're not available in a debt economy in which you tend to rush. There's permanent haste because you have the time of your activity. It's discounted relative to all these durable goods, so the only way for you to benefit from your youth and from your strength is to transform your activity as soon as possible into something durable. Whereas in a free market economy, the tendency would be exactly the inverse. In a free market economy, as in the U.S. in the 19th century, the price level would tend to diminish in the course of time, so the purchasing power of money would increase. The value of your labor would increase relative to all durable goods, so you have time and you have resources to consecrate, to dedicate to other people, to wealthy cause and so on. Yeah, we do have that problem. There was a question over there. Hi, so a lot of people have noticed that a lot of people are having less kids nowadays, and a lot of people will argue, of course, that's maybe because they don't need to for whatever reasons, you know, we're more productive by ourselves, but do you think that rogue monetary policy, if you can even call it policy, do you think that might have an impact on whether people are or are not having more kids and, you know, repopulating the earth, right? Yeah, I mean, of course, there are several factors that come here to play, but monetary policy, especially insofar as it funds the welfare state, plays a major role. The whole point of the welfare state is to replace the traditional role of the family in providing goods, right, gratuitous goods to the family members and so on. So why should you incur the costs of family life? Arrange yourself with a difficult wife. My wife is not difficult. With any human being, right? I mean, there's the old joke, right? Well, there are two, there's treason. So it's, and so I say this to all my students who always wax enthusiastic about communal life, oh yeah, we'll have, we transform all of France into one huge kibbutz or something like this. And so, well, look at divorce rates, okay? Apparently, it's difficult to get along just with two, right? And you want to apply this on a national scale? Well, good luck with that, right? And in a free economy, of course, all these difficulties that you have getting along with a different human being, whereas, well, not from the outset, but you're growing to become one in the course of time if everything goes right, right? So it comes eventually, but not at the beginning. And so how do you survive this? Well, because there are huge benefits in a free economy. You depend on one another as a division of labor. Now, if there's the guy running the welfare state and the welfare state checks and so on, if there's a slight difficulty, here's the officer will take your divorce, who will file a divorce, and here's the other guy who will pay you money and so on. Yeah, of course, you ruin the family. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Halsman. This is a very, very important topic. Just to show an example of what the young man just said, we have many, many students in the United States that have student debts. And that's affecting the marriage rate. The other thing that we've seen in the United States is in the 30s and 40s, this country had a wide variety of mutual aid societies, which were individuals who contributed capital to help others in their community. That entire system has been completely destroyed by government intervention and debt. So I thank you for this very, very important topic. Thank you, sir, very much. Yeah, on your first comment, I again refer to Mr. Jeffrey Degner, who has written a wonderful dissertation and discusses exactly this problem, the impact of the debt service on the formation of new families. And so he provides also evidence of statistical and econometric sort. As far as the second issue is concerned, yeah, that's actually very important. Maybe I should seize the opportunity to point out something that is of very interesting historical fact. The British in the 19th century up until the 1830s, they had a well public welfare system that relied on the Elizabethan poor laws, right from 1601. According to the poor laws, each municipality was responsible for the poor people living in his abut and it involved various mandatory services such as cash payments and so on. Now, of course, the consequence were all kinds of abuses that we can imagine, right, so people signed up in multiple municipalities in order to have more cash payments. There was no incentive to get a new job and various young women benefited from cash payments to mothers, unmarried mothers and so on and let life just based on welfare and so on, as we have it today. Now, the British then decided based on a report by one parliamentarian published in the 1830s to completely abolish this system. And the best description of this process is in a book by a British journalist with the name of James Bartholomew. Bartholomew was published in 2014 in the book of the title, the welfare state we're in. So not the welfare state of the morals and so on of the fairy tales told by welfare state employees but the real welfare state, right. And so he relates the prehistory of the modern British welfare states. Well, actually the prehistory was firstly Elizabethan welfare for more than two centuries and then suddenly the complete abolition. What happened after the complete abolition? Well, a lot of misery on the one hand because of course you have people who cannot lead a life unless they are supported by somebody. And so a lot of immediate misery. On the other hand, a lot of spontaneous readiness on the side of citizens to help out. So within relative short time, within 10 years, 15 years, thousands of private welfare agencies sprang up. And in particular, a system that is not much known in the US, which the British call the friendly societies. So the friendly societies are associations of co-workers or neighbors and so on, the purpose of which is to help out people in need. And these associations have worked, well today we would say miracles, well they've worked like free market organizations, they were very efficient. Because somebody who is obviously an abuser, well he doesn't get funded. People who are obviously in bad strays without any fault and so on, well they get supported. And so the consequences within a generation or so, you get all the bumps of the streets and everybody seeks for employment, the mentality of the population changes and various other things. So the Brits, they had tens of thousands of friendly societies until the beginning of the 20th century. And then under the impact of the developing modern welfare state, it gets steamrolled, of course, SS in the case of the US, with these consequences. So whenever we get confronted with this sort of objection, we should say, well there's historical precedent, it's not just theory or it's something that we know from experience. And whenever free citizens are challenged and to help their neighbors and other poor people and so on, they will do it. They would not just throw money at people, which is what the welfare state does. Hey, Dr. Walson, kind of building on that topic and the issues that young people have with student loan debt and like, I know we've talked a lot about the dollar side of things, this culture of debt, Murray Rothbard wrote about repudiate the national debt. I'm curious your thoughts about the rule of debt jubilee and a variety of standpoints on more trying to figure out ways to empower younger generations to try to better navigate this world they've inherited. Well, as far as the younger generation is concerned, I mean, we see two things, right? I mean, the only ones still living the life of their parents or my generation are those who are in the lucky position who have sufficiently higher revenues. Among the others, well, some who are very virtuous, they continue to struggle on even though it's somewhat hopeless and many others get disbared, frustrated, joined the revolutionary ranks and so on. That's the current situation in which we are. And it's a time bomb. If we go on like this for another 10, 20, 30 years, well, we get a generation of lininists. And that attitude is not irrational on the bottom. I mean, they might not understand anything about economics and might not understand where the problem comes from, but they see that they will never be able to build up a life, an economical life, a material life as their ancestors had done. And so they will tend to overthrow the system that crashes them. So do we want this, right? Now, how do we get out of this whole situation? That's the how many trillion dollar question, right? So it's 120 trillion or 150 trillion dollar question because that's the side of the American debt market. Well, we cannot get around. I mean, here I agree, of course, fully with what David Stockman said yesterday, we need to abolish the system. The problem is that the system has lasted now 80 years, almost. And it has created two generations of people who have never known anything else who are dependent on the system, also incapable intellectually of imagining anything else. So if you just push the button and you destroy it, take out the Federal Reserve and say something, well, they will be confronted with a new reality with which they cannot immediately cope. That is unfamiliar to them, which drives them mad. And the first thing they will try to do is to get back the old system. And we need to have, again, price inflation and so on. That's the problem which we are. And that is why it's so important that institutions such as the Mises Institute exist. Well, first of all, it illuminated the population about the issues that here at stake. It's not because we might get price deflation that this would be detrimental to the average working class person or average wage earner in the US would not. Of course, the money wages would not evaluate as they have evolved so far. But in real terms, of course, revenues would be likely to increase. Now, that's an uphill battle because the argument is theoretical, right? It's not empirical. It's the difficult sell. That's our task. And if we don't succeed, I mean, we are in dire straits. The lady had a question. Sounds like your position is that policy is sort of driving the culture. I'm just curious, to what extent do you think policy is driving the culture? Culture is driving the policy and does it even matter? Yeah, I fully agree. So the culture is also driving the policy at some point. So we are in the chicken and egg problem. But again, we need to convince a sufficient number of our fellow citizens here in the US and in Europe that what are the causes, right, of our present problems? And that's the only way to change the attitudes and therefore the culture. If we just change policy without the culture, the policy change cannot be permanent. People will long to bring it back. And, right, so I mean, this button push idea is irrelevant unless you really convince the people what needs to be done.