 My name is Ryan Griggs and in the summer of 2013 I was an intern at the Mises Institute. How many have been to the Auburn campus? Alright so if you've been there you've seen on the first floor Wolf Library where everyone of Murray Rothbard's own private book collection where 5,000 books are stored. I had the distinct laborious privilege of putting them all there from where they were in their storage boxes. I've also been a student of Mises University and an attendee at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. This is and I'm now a recurring attendee at these Mises circles. You know Austrian economics is theoretical and philosophical but the results of your time, your attention, your financial resources are not. I am one of many products of the educational programs at the Mises Institute. I'm fully aware that that would not be possible without the support of people like yourselves. It would not be the man I am nor do the work I do without you. So thank you. With that said, if you'll please join me in welcoming to the stage the president of the Mises Institute, Mr. Jeff Deist. Well thanks very much for that Ryan. He's definitely been one of our great ambassadors out there and if I can follow up a little bit and toot my own horn or toot the Mises Institute's horn. For people who haven't been there and visited us, we really encourage you to do so because a lot of people think of us as a think tank, an expression I don't like, or a website. We're certainly a website. We're one of the most traffic econ websites in the world and we have unbelievable amounts of books available online for free. But we're really a lot more than that and I'm sure many people in this room would agree that higher education and also K through 8 education are in big big trouble. So we strive to be an alternative school of sorts, a free school for people to come to and attend and people who come to Auburn are actually quite surprised that we actually have a physical campus across the street from Auburn University. We have some very lovely gardens and very lovely buildings. We own an apartment building where students stay so we have PhD candidates from around the world spend their summers with us doing research. Undergraduate students come for a week in the summer to Mises University. It's actually a pretty exciting time and they do all this for free. We're actually one of the largest private libraries in the entire United States. We have over 50,000 physical volumes on our campus so people are oftentimes surprised and we would invite any of you to visit us anytime and learn a little bit more about what we do. I think you're really going to enjoy the variety of our four great speakers today. They bring a variety of perspectives with them. Libertarian, left progressive, populist, anti-war, anti-fed, anti-communist, anti-Soviet, but all of them are pro us in the sense that Lew Rockwell uses that term. That they are people who are interested in human flourishing and as a result are very concerned about what both the state and its central bank are doing to us I would say rather than for us. I think one theme you'll find throughout all four speakers is emerging and it's a populist theme. It's actually quite a non-ideological theme and that's what's exciting to me is that we have an opportunity I think before us to build on some single issue coalitions that transcend the R versus D dichotomy, the liberal versus conservative box that we've all been put into over the last many, many decades and the two themes that really emerge is that outside of what they call the Acela corridor, that's the train that travels between Washington D.C. and New York City, outside of the Acela corridor meaning Washington and Wall Street there is literally no constituency in America for what the Federal Reserve is doing on a day-to-day basis and what commercial banking looks like as a result and outside of the Washington D.C. Beltway and we'll get to this those of you are familiar with the area some of these very Tony towns like Great Falls, Virginia and Potomac, Maryland outside of the D.C. Beltway there is literally no constituency in America for these endless Middle East wars in which we find ourselves engaged spending literally trillions of dollars and unknown amounts of of injury and hardship not only for American soldiers but also for the people in those various countries so when you think about that it's pretty incredible democracy isn't yielding some sort of compromise down the middle where we none of us get everything we want but we get some of what we want it's not working it's creating an entrenched political class and an entrenched economic class but it's not giving us any kind of results in terms of what the population actually supports I I'm very curious to see what if Trump runs in 2020 and if he continues to at least rhetorically engage in the the act of questioning our involvement in the Middle East he certainly backpedaled on that and I think he did something very very very bad by bringing Michael Walton into the administration but but that remains to be seen so what what emerges today as a theme is cronyism it's it's interesting that there's a sense an inescapable sense in the West not just the United States that something is very very wrong and we wonder why that might be it's not materialist the sense that if you read Deidre McCloskey or if you read Stephen Pinker you'll know that in a purely material sense almost everyone's life in the West is getting better and not even in the West in the developing world the number of people who live in severe poverty around the world continues to go down and those of us who are fortunate enough to be born in the United States in in terms of our material comfort our tech our modern medicine in many ways many material ways life is getting better and really when we're talking about Western nations but for the very poorest people homeless people I would I would venture virtually everyone in this room wakes up every day and has some sort of habitation over their head has hot and cold running water has electricity has an ample amount of food in the fridge or the ability to go to go buy food at a restaurant so in that sense in the strictly material sense we've probably never been better so what is it why are people in the West so unhappy and what is this foreboding sense we have is it economic in the sense that we're living on borrowed time is it political is it social is it cultural it's probably all of these things but I would say it's represented by our topic today which is this unholy nexus this connection between state power and economic power and it's something that's really rising in the United States and we see it in so many contexts we see it in the equities markets a company like amazon this is not a startup ladies and gentlemen it's been a public company for more than 20 years it still produces virtually no profit and it doesn't pay any dividends but somehow magically the stock price goes up year after year after year and from where I said a company that never produces dividends that just counts on capital gains accumulation is a bit of a pyramid scheme we see certainly see it on wall street where the bonus system and the incentives since the 2008 crash have returned with some degree of fervor we see it in the equity markets we see it in the real estate markets in places like san francisco new york city where young people struggle to find any place to live even with roommates we see this in silicon valley as well and why why should that be the case we see it in the political world and I don't mean to single out the obamas you may have noticed that they recently signed a 50 million dollar deal with netflix which is going to keep them in in in very good shape financially for the rest of their lives and uh you know contrast this with harry truman when harry truman left office he actually went home he went to independence Missouri and he was so broke he was forced to live with his wife and his mother-in-law which seems like a bad end for a former president his only income was 113 dollar a month army pension and actually uh not long after that almost out of embarrassment for him uh congress passed a stipend for ex-presidents there didn't exist until then but again i don't mean to single out the obamas the regans received quite a sweetheart deal some friends of theirs purchased them a very nice home in bel-air uh for them to retire to when richard nixon retired uh he retired to the white house west in san clemeni and there was a very strange land deal that made that possible and i noticed the other day that that the white house west is back up for sale on the market in san clemeni it could be yours for i think 87 million dollars so check it out so the question becomes what do we do about it uh what should we do realistically uh to fight what we see as this rising cronyism and it does manifest itself in some ways in inequality in the sense uh that folks on the left are correct there is some unearned wealth in the united states today and that's an open question uh when the young brilliant tech kid comes up with a company idea and some venture capitalist swoop in and buy it from him and he gets 30 million dollars and he's 22 year old kid and he's got a lamborghini it's awfully hard given what the fed has done for the last 20 or 30 years to really know how much value that kid created and whether it really was worth 30 million dollars so things get murky when so much of our economy seems to be rigged either by fiscal policy in washington or by monetary policy uh at the echoes building in dc