 Welcome to our second to the last session of our conference series, How Austrian Economics Impacted My Life. I'm Jacob Hornberger, President of the Future of Freedom Foundation, the sponsor of this conference. For those of you that don't know about FFF, we're a non-profit educational foundation founded in 1989. And for the last 34 years, we've advanced liberty and the libertarian philosophy by presenting a principled and compromising case for the libertarian philosophy. And of course, the centerpiece of economics and libertarianism is Austrian economics. And so we have this series. And we're just really honored to have Joe Salerno here. You all know that I've been promoting Joe during the last week as one of the real stars of the libertarian movement. And when I read you his bio, you're going to see that I wasn't just blowing smoke here or exaggerating. Joe received his PhD in economics from Rutgers University. He is professor emeritus of economics at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University in New York. He is the editor of the quarterly journal of Austrian economics and the academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where he also serves on the board of directors. He has held the inaugural Peterson-Luddy chair in Austrian economics at the Mises Institute and the inaugural John V. Dentzen, the second endowed professorship in the economics department at Auburn. He's a research associate of the foundations of the market economy and the economics department at New York University and is on the board of editors of five academic journals. He has published over 70 articles and essays in referee journals and scholarly books. His latest book is the Austrian School of Economics in the 21st century, Evolution and Impact, co-edited with Annette Godard von der Kruhn. He's the author of Money, Sound and Unsound by the Mises Institute and is currently writing a book with Patrick Newman on the development of Murray Rothbard as a Misesian economist. In the last years, he has published several articles appearing in peer review journals, including Oxford Economic Papers, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and the Journal of Institutional Economics. He has testified before Congress several times and published numerous op-eds online at Mises.org, Forbes.com, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Oasis, Economic Policy Journal, and others. So learn about lectures frequently throughout the United States and internationally, and more than 50 of his lectures are available online. He has been interviewed on broadcast and online radio and TV shows including Bloomberg Radio, Seaspan, Fox News, Fox Business Network, New York Lawline, and RT Television. You can catch his blog at Mises.org blog. Joe, I just can't tell you what an honor and a pleasure it is to have you join us. Thank you for taking the time and take it away. I came to Austrian Economics in the Libertarian Movement in sort of a circuitous way. It started when I was extremely young. I was 12 years old, and we had a cousin of my mother visiting from Italy. And everything was going along fine until my father found out that he was a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party. So a tremendous argument broke out. And of course, I didn't really know what they were arguing about. But I was very interested about what would make my father and this other man so passionate. I was hoping, of course, that my father would throw him out of the house or something would happen. Interesting. My mother interceded and to make a long story short, everything calmed down. But from that moment onward, I was very interested in reading about communism. And so when I was in sixth and seventh grade, I read a lot of books, right-wing books about communism. And then a little bit later on, the Barry Goldwater Campaign began, where Goldwater was running against Lyndon Johnson. And I was very interested in the campaign. I read the book that Goldwater had power. There was a ghost written for Goldwater called Contents of a Conservative, in which there were some libertarian free market positions stated and set out on economics. And a little bit later on in high school, my high school was a private boys Catholic prep school. And it was very interesting because it was really split between some young Catholic, they weren't priests, they were brothers, in order, a teaching order, who were very, very liberal. And they were sort of like JFK and Lyndon Johnson. And there was another group that were active, two or three teachers, they're late teachers, that were Berchers that belong to the John Berth Society. So my high school was very politically charged. We had a lot of debates. And I became a conservative, not realizing that Goldwater was a conservative. I began labeling myself as such. And then by, I think it was my senior year in high school, I was given an assignment by one of the liberal late teachers that we had. And it was to read both John Kenneth Galbraith's book, Affluent Society, and sections of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. So Galbraith's prose was very stilted and he expressed his own values and so on. Smith was very, in his writing, was very straightforward in trying to analyze the market economy and explain the social benefits of the economy. So after I took that course and read Smith, I realized I wanted to be an economist and I never really thought more about it after that. So I went on to college at Boston College, which is a Jesuit college. And there I started to become more of a libertarian. I discovered the libertarian movement in my freshman year and I began reading certain periodicals. But the bombshell really hit when in my sophomore year, there was an article in Naval Places New York Times Magazine. And in that article, which was called The New Right Credo, Libertarianism, they mentioned a number of libertarians, including Murray Rothbard, who they said was the dean of the Austrian School of Economics. Now I was an economics major and I had taken a number of economics courses by that time, including principles of economics and intermediate macro micro, but I had never heard of the Austrian school. So I was very interested about learning more about it. And I also happened to have that semester, a course in the history of economic thought, and the professor there introduced us to the old Austrian school of Carl Menger, Eugen von Bomberwerk, and Wieser. Anyway, he pointed out that it was a unique event in intellectual history. You had three individuals working on a common approach to economic problems. So that wetted my interest even further. And so when I mentioned this to someone in the Young American for Freedom, which was a conservative group that had just started that year, but also included some libertarians or libertarian-leaning people like myself, he said, oh, let me give you this little pamphlet. And it was a little pamphlet by Murray Rothbard, and it was called Economic Depressions, Cause and Cure. And I read it in about 45 minutes. And I realized then and there that the macro courses I had been sitting through, principles of macroeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, fiscal policy and all these other courses were full of baloney. And that the Austrian school in that small pamphlet had explained back in the 1930s and even earlier what the cause of business cycles were, what the cause of inflation and recession was. So I was very impressed by that. And I think at that point, I became an Austrian, not that I had much knowledge. So when I went back for the summer, I scoured libraries to find works by Mises and Hayek and Rothbard. And I found one in a downtown city that had had a lot of riots a few years before, and nobody was going to that library. So I got the books out. And that summer, I was working as a janitor. And I remember sitting in the janitorial closet with all the cleaning supplies, probably poisoning myself from smelling them. And I would complete my work very quickly and be done by two o'clock in the afternoon and sit in the room and read America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard. And of course, to that point, I had never met another Austrian or anyone that even knew about Austrian economics. And so I felt very alone. I was alone, I was in a closet by myself reading a book. But when I came out of that closet, I was an Austrian economist. I did understand Austrian business cycle theory. And then I decided to go to graduate school. I purchased a lot of books for libertarians that was just starting. It was a mail order bookseller. And I got all the Austrian books, I could get my hands on it, began reading them. I went on to Rutgers University for PhD in economics. And I also had become at the same time the vice president of the New Jersey Libertarian Party, which had just started. And we had at our first convention, I was in charge of getting someone to be the keynote speaker. And I found out that Murray Rothbard just lived across the river in New York City. I was in New Jersey. And I just got up the courage to call him up on the phone and ask him to be our speaker for a paltry $75. And he agreed. And he came over and we were just making small talk before his talk. And I mentioned that I was a graduate student in economics at Rutgers University and that I had read his book or a number of his books. And I was shocked by the reaction. I mean, he was so excited and enthusiastic. And he was frantically searching for a pencil to write my number down. And he told me he was going to put me in touch with some people in New Jersey who had a reading group. That included Walter Block, another one of my Libertarian heroes at the time. And he did so. I didn't think much of it. I mean, he gave a great talk and then he left. But a few days later, I did get a call from somebody in the reading group. And they took me to, they picked me up, brought me to the reading group. I met Walter Block, also Walter Grinder, another Libertarian who was sort of prominent back in the 70s and 80s. And evidently, they reported back to me that they were impressed with me. So that summer, I was invited to go to his apartment in Manhattan and where he would host Libertarians and Austrians. And so I was a little bit timid. I was afraid that he would begin asking me things about Austrian economics or Libertarianism that I would, and find out that I really didn't know that much. But anyway, when he greeted me at the door, I went with another student. He acted like I was an old friend. He says, oh, Joe, my boy, come on in. And it was a great, great evening. He did ask a lot of questions on Libertarianism and my views on certain things and also about Austrian economics. And we had a few interesting interchanges. At one point, we were discussing what should be done to looters, people who loot. His position was that, well, you can use force, obviously, to protect your property from a looter. But that if a looter got a hold of your property and was running away with it, you couldn't shoot him down. You could use deadly force in protecting your property, but you couldn't if he ran away. So I kind of sheepishly objected. I said, well, certainly, if you can shoot him in protecting your property, you can shoot him in recovering it. I don't see why you have to call the police in that case. And so he responded, ah, he says, you're someone I can, now that's something I can have a conversation about. So whenever you gave a more radical position than he had, he was very happy. I also remember discussing, this is pretty interesting, views on what would happen after the Libertarian Revolution, what should happen to state-owned property. So I suggested that it be sold off and the money given back to the taxpayers, or that it could be given to, for example, postal workers could be given the postal office and the public schools could be given to the teachers. And he didn't like either of those alternatives because they involved the state having to carry out some duties and also wouldn't get the property back quick enough. So his solution was that it should go to the heroes of Libertarian Revolution, which I thought was pretty funny. But all in all, he was a great guy and I became pretty good friends with him. And later on, when after I became a professor at Rutgers University and then Pace University, we would meet for luncheons in New York City and Manhattan. And he was just so intellectually humble. He liked, and actually before I talk a little bit about that, he also liked real people, what he called real people. People had real jobs in the real world. People who liked American culture like himself. He loved James Bond movies. He loved Matt Helm detective novels. He really esteemed the Godfather movies. I mean, he was really embedded in American culture because he believed that it had really developed out of a quasi laissez faire system. So it was a natural culture. So I was at a few conferences with him which I have some interesting anecdotes. At one conference that I was at, he was notorious for being a night owl and staying out late and wanting to talk to the graduate students and other young professors late into the evening. So one night he wanted to go out and get something to eat at midnight and he loved Denny's restaurants. Anyway, I had a car and a bunch of us piled into the car and we searched for an hour for some place to eat and every place was closed. This was Hartford, Connecticut, not really a hopping city. And so he was complaining in the whole way. He says, don't these people know that the industrial revolution occurred 200 years ago? We have electric lights now. Why can't you serve consumers at night? So he was quite distressed. But I found an open pizza place and driving around and he declared me a hero of the libertarian revolution for finding a place to eat. One other interesting conference that I attended with him was one on kind of a dry topic of economic methodology. And it occurred at West Point. So we were on the West Point campus which was very drab and stodgy. And we were in the West Point Hotel, which is the West Point is the college for army officers. In any case, Murray, after the second day, he was getting antsy. As I said, it was kind of a dry subject and he wanted to get out among the real people. He kept telling a few of us, let's break out tonight and go over the wall and go see some music and dancing and real people. So I asked the concierge at the hotel about about any places that he might know where we could have some fun, some drinks, some music and stuff. And he pointed us to a place that was 15 miles away. And to get there, we had to go along some mountainous roads up to Newburgh, New York. And as we did so, a fog, a very, very thick fog descended. We couldn't see more than, I don't know, 20 or 30 yards ahead. So we were debating. There was about five or six of us in the car, including Murray. We were debating whether we should turn around and go back. And every time that came up, Murray would say, push forward, troops, push forward. So we wound up finding the place and having a great time. And Murray was, there was a period of disco music. There was a lot of disco, but Murray had a very good voice and he was singing along with it. And on the way back in the car, he was serenading us with a few lines that he remembered from a disco song. I can still remember it was on the radio by Donna Sumner. So he was just a regular guy in his personal life and just loved laughter and loved hanging around and absorbing the culture. In fact, when we were at the club, he was saying that he was a sociological observer is how he put it, that he was just taking everything in. Anyway, I was fortunate, as I said, to have lunch with him one or two times a semester. And so when I did have lunch one time, it was during the period that he was writing his great work, two volume work on the history of economic thought, Austrian perspectives on the history of economic thought, and it hadn't been published yet. So we sat down for lunch, we were eating lunch, and he talked for about an hour about all the great new good economists that he found, some of the underrated economists who should be better known, or some of the other economists that were well known, but were just terrible, and all the new insights. So I was fascinated by what he was saying. I didn't say a word, which was uncharacteristic. We usually have a back and forth. And so after an hour, he appeared a little bit sheepish, and he said, well, I'm sorry, I'm monopolizing the conversation. But that just shows his intellectual humility. Because he's one of the greatest, well, he is the greatest Austrian economist living at the time. And for him to think that I would not be engaged in what he was saying, and that I was bored or was crazy. I was getting a private seminar about a work that had not yet been published yet. So I was one of the few that was hearing all this. And it was, again, something I would have actually paid to hear. So those are my experiences with Murray. And I think he's probably the biggest, well, he is the biggest intellectual influence. And he really did help me to develop a research program. So let me just say a few things about the ideas of Austrian economics that I think are extremely important. And then I'll take questions. First of all, one of the most important things about Austrian economics. And I coined the word to describe this back in the early 2000s. And it's now sort of in general use among Austrian economists. Austrian economics is causal realism. Now what that means is that it's really aimed at finding out, investigating, and explaining the causes of real prices, interest rates, wages that are paid on real markets in the economy. It's not interested in explaining how equilibrium prices are formed. If everybody had perfect knowledge, what would prices be? And because people don't have perfect knowledge, prices aren't perfect. Well, prices are more than adequate to allow entrepreneurs to use these prices to economically calculate how or what are the best and most valuable uses of economic resources. Because what economics is all about is, and what the economy, where the economy actually comes from, is from human beings choosing and acting to satisfy their most important wants. So all the skyscrapers, the factories, the airplanes, all the visible manifestation of economic activity that we see can all be traced back and is traced back by Austrian economics to the human soul in some sense, to the conflict of desires for different things that we want. And because we have these conflicting desires for different things, our wants are unlimited, but yet resources in the real world are limited so that we have to choose. We have to rank things as more or less important to ourselves and then choose to spend our money or our energy or our time in trying to obtain those things that are most important to us. And that was the original insight of the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, who was Carl Menger. And so that's economics. Economics is what we call methodologically individualistic. It focuses on the individual and builds up the explanation of the overall economy from individual choices and actions and expectations. And I think that's how I would summarize Austrian economics. Also, one other point, since we're living in an age where everyone's pushing for socialism, unless you have real prices, and that is prices determined on the market by buyers and sellers who own not just consumer goods and are buying and selling consumer goods, but who also own factories and their own labor and natural resources and trade these things and thereby cause prices to emerge for those things. If you do not have that, if you don't have prices for every good in the economy, there's no way to determine the most valuable uses of resources. You need prices of all capital goods, all factories, and so on in order to calculate your costs. And this is why, by the way, you can never have a real socialist economy, because since the state owns all resources, productive resources by definition, it cannot determine what its costs are. So, socialist production will always be chaotic. And that's another important insight that arises, that came from the Austrian school, in particular, this was Ludwig von Mies's argument in an article published in 1919, which is one of the most important articles ever written. Economic calculation in the socialist Commonwealth, and I recommend that to everyone. And lastly, before I stop, I just want to mention that today, there are really two lines of thought within Austrian economics. One stems, they both stem from Karl Manger, but one goes from Manger to Eugen Bombaverk. Manger was Bombaverk's teacher, Bombaverk was von Mies's teacher, and von Mies's, of course, was Murray Rothbard's teacher. So that line of thought goes from Manger to Bombaverk, to Mies's, to Rothbard, to my generation, who are all older generation now, and now there are two more generations of students that have come through Mies's Institute programs. And these two new generations are already professors, many of them are professors. So we have people as young as 2829 now, who have gone through Mies's Institute programs that are professors, and are now starting to send their students to our programs. The other, I should mention the other line of thought, went through Bombaverk's brother-in-law, Friedrich von Wieser, who taught Schumpeter, and another economist named Meyer, they aren't as important. But then Wieser also taught the generation after Mies's, Hayek and Maklub, and though Hayek was also influenced by Mies's, and it's part of both strands of thought. And as it occurs, there's also a student, or a protégé of Hayek's, who is part of Mies's, because he was Mies's graduate assistant. So I think I'll end there, and then I'll be happy to take any questions that you may have. Excellent presentation. Thank you so much, Joe. You know, we've had, you're our fifth presenter, and you're the first one to really give a really nice synopsis of Murray Rothbard. I mean, everybody's mentioned Rothbard, and of course he's a giant in Austrian economics and libertarianism, but to get these personal accounts, this is the first, it's really nice to learn a little bit, because you know, most of us, we just learned about Murray Rothbard from his books, and it's nice to get the personal account. I was, I was, I couldn't help but smile when I heard you describing coming out of the closet as an Austrian, and how you probably had your lungs forever destroyed by those chemicals in that janitor's closet. And then there was another comment I wanted to make about, wait, oh yeah. Now you, you were at Rutgers when all this was taking place, when you were hanging out with Murray, right? I mean, is this, I was at Rutgers as a graduate student for, and interacting with him as a grad, as a graduate student. In fact, I did have him come and speak to the faculty as a graduate student, but then I graduated for, I got my PhD from, and then I went, I went on to teach at another Rutgers campus in New Jersey. And so I didn't see him quite as much. And then I went to Pace University, which is a university in New York City, not too far from where he taught in Brooklyn. And I saw him more frequently than, and I, of course, I saw him at a lot of conferences and at the Mises Institute. Okay, what I'm curious about is at Rutgers where you, in your graduate program, were there Austrians there that you were working under? And did you do your doctorate in Austrian economics? And did Murray have any influence on your doctorate there? And can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, I sure, sure will. So the Rutgers University Economics Department was very, very eclectic. So we had monetarists, we had Keynesians, we had even more, we had post Keynesians who are very, very radical, they're near Marxists. We had supply ciders. And we had Marxists. So it was, I learned a lot at Rutgers University, but I didn't learn any Austrian economics. I did all my learning in Austrian economics from conferences that I was going to and from reading. But fortunately, one of my professors who was a Keynesian, like me, thought I was very interested in what I had to say about Austrian economics. So he disagreed. But he allowed me to do my dissertation on the balance of payments. So I, my dissertation was on the classical school, which, such as Ricardo and so on. And their balance of payments theory was what influenced Mises. So I was able to get Austrian economics into my dissertation, sort of through the classical school. So it basically was on monetary theory and how it affects balance payments. And that, so, and I sent the chapters to Murray, who liked them quite a bit and used some of them, used some of my work in his book on, later on in his book on history of economic thought. So you'll see references to my dissertation in there. Okay, great. And of course, when you say Ricardo, you're referring to the classical economist, David Ricardo. Yes, I am. Okay, let's go to the audience here. There's a number of questions. This is this one's from Bonita. And she says, considering everything that's already happened with the NATO summit, the BRICS country summit, and especially the OPEC meetings, what do you yourself predict for the foreseeable future for US taxpayers and consumers going into 2024 and beyond? Well, I could, I could be like, I could be like, club or lang and say, pain from the Rocky movies. I don't see the Fed stopping its increase in the money supply. This is the root of all problems. And the fact that foreign governments are willing to accumulate dollars, though less and less so, they're becoming less competent in the dollar. But what could happen is if they begin places like China and Brazil and so on, begin unloading the government securities that they own, that will drive that is selling them on the world market, that will drive their prices down, and it will drive up interest rates. And it will also destabilize our financial system. I still don't think that the currency that's being discussed by the BRICS countries will replace the dollar. I think if inflation gets worse, foreign countries are individually going to begin to diminish their holdings of US dollar assets. Okay. This is from an anonymous attendee. Why is the methodological individualism important? Why do conservatives critique this framework? Well, I don't know if conservatives critique it. Oh, they may. But let me just answer the first part. First, methodological individualism is not political individualism. It's just a method of doing economics. That is, in order to explain the whole, in order to explain the overall operation of the economy, it's necessary to explain its causes. And that's why Austrian economics is causal realist economics. And the causes lie in human choices. And only individual human minds can make choices, undertake actions, have expectations about the future and act on other expectations. Now, conservatives may critique it because, and I'm not sure what the person is referring to, but because they may think that, well, there is a sense in which a society or a community exists and can choose. I don't agree with that. A community is made up of like-minded people, certainly, people who adopt the same values, but they all have to make the choice to adopt and act on those values. So the community itself or the United States itself does not act. Okay. Certain members who are leaders of the community or leaders of the United States or rulers, they act and they act on their own values. Now, some of those values may reflect those of the American people. Okay. Harjinder asks, do you think China is more free market than the United States? It may have been tending in that direction a few years ago, but lately, no, it is not. I mean, the U.S. is becoming less and less free market, certainly. But I don't think it's reached a point where China is more free market oriented than the U.S. Yeah. An interesting aspect of that is you'll recall, I don't know what, 10 or 15 years ago when there was all this free market intellectual activity going on in China, Cato was having seminars over there and things. Right. What do you think happened there? That seems to have all just gone away. Yeah. I think there's new leadership with the Communist Party and they decided to crack down. Now, for what reasons, I'm not sure, but you know, certainly rulers of a country like China, a one-party country, they're paranoid, and if they see their control slipping in the least, they can swing the pendulum back away from moving towards the market. Okay. This from Richard. Do you have any advice on how to communicate Austrian critiques of Marxian theory to undergraduates who are not well versed in these topics? Are there any classic, strong examples or recent examples? Well, there's a very good, it's longer than an article. I would say it's a booklet, small booklet by Bombavirk on Marxist economics, but that might be a little bit above their level. Mises has written in Planning for Freedom. It's a book of essays called Planning for Freedom. There are some articles on Marxism in that book. I would suggest that the person go online and go to the Mises Institute. There's so many resources and just type in Marxism, and they'll come up with a lot of shorter articles that are aimed at a popular level. Okay. And just in case there are people that later see this video that don't know anything about Austrian economics, it's misismises.org for the Mises Institute. Okay. This from Scott. Did you attend the YAF Convention in St. Louis, Missouri in August 1969, and what is your take on that event? I did not attend it, but the fallout from it, I did come in contact with when I joined the Young Americans for Freedom when I was in college a few years later. There were both traditionalists and libertarians, and I think it was a milestone in that libertarians who were becoming self-aware realized that they really had nothing in common with the pro-war conservatives, the Buckley-Eye conservatives. So I think that split kind of finalized the development, I guess, with the beginning of the libertarian movement among young people. Yeah. As a personal anecdote, there was a guy there that burned his draft card that set the conservatives off, and that was when the big walkout took place. Well, some years ago, I was at a convention, and I started talking to this guy about that event, and he says, I'm the guy who burned the draft card. Really? I don't remember what his name was. It's pretty funny. All right. Okay. Here's one you'll enjoy. And I'm not sure I agree with this, and I'm not sure. Oh, I guess he says, this is from Harjinder again. Hi, Joe. Mises believes in a small night watchman state. I assume he means Ludwig von Mises, yet Rothbard believes in no state. Do you know any institute that's core principle is no state? May I suggest a Rothbard Institute? Thanks. Well, I mean, the Mises Institute is, although we welcome what are called minarchists, people who believe in a very, very small state, I think most of people associate with the Mises Institute are anarcho-capitalists. We don't take an official position on that, but I think everybody from Lou Rockwell on down to almost all our scholars are anarcho-capitalists. I agree with you. I think Mises is predominantly anarcho-capitalist and has been for a long time. All right. Let me see. Okay. Here's a controversial one. Does the Mises Institute hold an open borders view? I hope so. Thanks. If not, why not? I don't think the Mises Institute takes a position on that, or I know it doesn't. Walter Block, for example, who's a prominent scholar associated with the Mises Institute, totally open borders. Other people, such as Hans Hoppe, believes that open borders are suicidal, and though he's not against immigration, he would have an immigration policy, I guess whereby citizens would sponsor people to come, and they would have pre-arranged jobs and so on. So, we're not totally closed borders. Nobody can come in. We range from controlled immigration to open borders, people like Walter Block. Right. Okay. My son is also listening. What could you say to him? He's 13 years old. He convinced him not to become a socialist. Here's your big challenge, Joe. Well, there'll be shortages of video games and books, and there'll be long lines even for foods that kids like. I mean, that was all true in the Soviet Union. Children's clothing was in very short supply because without prices, the targets were how many yards of clothing was a target that was assigned to each textile factory or clothing factory, and so they made a lot of large-sized clothing. So petite women and children had to wear misfit clothing. That's a great answer. One other question I wanted to ask you is on the socialist calculation situation. I agree with you. That's a critically important point. Can you tell a little bit about the socialist calculation debate that was taking place between what was Mises? Well, there were two. One was in the 1920s between Mises and German economists who really didn't know much economics. But then in the 1930s, it was taking place. Mises was involved, but Hayek was involved even more than Mises, and that was between Mises and Hayek on the one hand and British economists and American economists. Basically, what used to be the position before Mises wrote his famous article very briefly, the position was that there were all these crazy socialist schemes out there by what we'll call the utopian socialists. Everybody would eat a common kitchen, and they had all these plans. Well, that was easily refuted by the classical economists who just asked the question, who's going to take out the garbage? Who's going to do the dirty jobs in these utopias? So Marx, realizing that he could not answer the classical economists, basically said anyone who talks about what a socialist future might look like is unscientific, because socialism is going to come regardless of what any of us think it would look like, because capitalism is breaking down and will break down. So Marx then came up with this notion of scientific socialism, in which you don't talk about socialism, you only talk about the ills and the destruction caused by capitalism. Mises then pointed out that without prices, you can't have socialism. So Mises broke the taboo against discussing what socialism would look like, and what he pointed out was that it would look like chaos. And that's when socialist economists realized he has a point, because if the state owns all the property, there can be no exchange. Okay? There's only one monopolist who owns all the means of production, so he can't have any exchange. And so you had all these stupid answers in the 1920s by German socialists who were trying to say things like, well, we'll just tell the managers to do the exact same things that they were doing the day before we became a social society. But of course, Mises points out that then you would never change. There would be no technological innovation, there'd be no response to new consumer wants and so on. So Mises easily refuted that. But then in the 1930s, we had much more sophisticated responses to Mises and Hayek. And one of which was, well, we now have what's called general equilibrium theory, which is really trying to describe the economy by a system of equations of supply and demand. So if you had enough information, you could feed them into, you could put them in the form of equations and then there were no computers then. But if you had had computers, you could then solve those equations for the right prices and the right quantities. But Mises and, but first Hayek pointed out, well, first of all, it would be almost impossible to get that information together in a timely fashion. And secondly, even if you did and you solved them, it would take years because there were no computers then. Mises took a different view. He said, look, he said, all the equations tell us is what we would have, what we should produce and what the prices should be in a never, never world where everything is perfectly adjusted. But in the real world, there's continuous profits and losses. Entrepreneurs are making mistakes. No one knows the future with certainty. So bottom line is, Mises' response was, mathematics doesn't give you and cannot be applied to a dynamic world where things are constantly changing, errors are being made and corrections need to be made. That's where you need profits to know what to do and losses to know what to avoid. Okay, excellent answer. Can you speak on Rothbard's movie reviews? He seemed to cross all disciplines. Have you ever considered writing on popular topics? Those are two separate questions, I guess. Yeah, so Rothbard loved old-fashioned movies. He loved John Wayne movies. He loved James Bond movies. Those were his two favorites. And he thought the best movie ever made were the two Godfather movies, which he compared to westerns. The gangster movie grew out of American culture. He thought that the mafia, for the most part, provided goods and services that consumers were prohibited from getting by the state, and that they had to use, because they couldn't go to courts if there was any disputes, they had to use ultra, as Rothbard put it, ultra-rigorous methods of enforcing contracts. So he liked, he thought that the Godfather movie, the Corleone family, they were good guys in some sense. Okay, I think that wraps it up. Okay. No way, I got one more. From Rothbard to Hoppe, any comment? I'm not sure what he's referring to. Well, I can just say that Rothbard founded his libertarianism on natural law, whereas Hoppe believes in these ethics of argumentation, which I'm not a philosopher and I'm not equipped to explain exactly what that is. But basically, the fact that people engage, once people engage in arguments with one another, saying that socialism might be better than capitalism or vice versa, they're demonstrating the ownership of their own bodies, and they're conceding the ownership of the other person's body by trying to convince that person of their view. So that's the foundation of Hoppe's philosophy of libertarianism. But you're not to ask David Gordon if you want to go further than that. He's a great philosopher. And he's there at the Mises Institute too. Yes, he is. Yes. Well, Joe, when we put this thing together, we wondered whether there was going to be overlap and duplication, and so far with five great Austrian speakers, there has been virtually no overlap or duplication. I'm glad to hear that. It's just been a fantastic series, and you really brought Murray Rothbard to life for us here. It's really, really nice. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate all the work you've done for Austrian economics and libertarianism. And if people want to get more, I guess, your blog there at Mises.org. Anything else you recommend? No, they can just look on Mises.org. I have hundreds of popular articles on there. So there is a Fed movie that we have. We have a Fed movie that a video that was made in 1996. That's being updated and should be done in a year within the year about the new Fed, so-called new Fed, which is really the old Fed, old wine and new bottles. Joe, I can't thank you enough. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to share personal anecdotes, as well as your insights into Austrian economics. Pleasure is mine. Okay. Good night. Good night.