 Does anyone have a question? This is the part where you ask questions and we make up answers Yes, sir Let's see. I'm going to try to boil that question down I think you're equating the price of gold with the price of crops and more or less or the increase in the money supply created by the Federal Reserve and 0% interest rates has led to the price of commodities going up including gold and So some people think it's different because this will go on And I don't understand how the gold plays in there if you can help me with that Okay, so yeah, it's two different questions I think that I tried to make a couple of points in in the talk that That we're probably rather subtle that These low interest rates have Provided the perverse incentive to stay in farmland as opposed to selling farmland Because you can't get any higher interest rate or any higher return on that So And and the crop yield You know driven by China and India and wherever it may be. We don't know whether that's Real imagined or or what have you I mean there's speculation in those markets Just like any other market so and generally bankers will Leverage up this land and that's where the real problems will become because if that average five percent farmland loan Become seven percent and it doesn't take too much imagination To imagine a five percent farm loan going to seven percent or even ten percent for that matter That will cut the legs completely out of this market really no matter what happens to crop prices. They could stay the same If crop prices were to come down at the same time we had a rise in interest rates Or a fall in the dollar which would precipitate a rise in interest rates The same thing could happen So that's what I the way I'd answer that part of the question gold is I Don't know somebody else want to take a swing at the gold Is gold different this time is it? Is Anybody arguing that gold's a speculative bubble and but it's different this time Well, no, I mean the way I would handle it as you're right would I'm not telling people I think gold is gonna for sure I bet my life gold is gonna be higher next month than it is right now it might not I mean gold could fall 20% what I'm With the people I say you should hold gold is it's more of like a hedge just in case Bernanke doesn't Undo the stuff that he's done, which I don't trust that he will okay, so it's In other words, it's not like all the damage has been done and now we just hope he doesn't do something more I mean he's pumped all that money in the financial sector That's just sitting there waiting and until they suck those trillion dollars in reserves out. I would still tell people You want to have some gold? You know again not as you're speculating. It's gonna go up next month But just it's there so you don't get completely wiped out would be the way I would say I forgot one quick thing I'm just making an announcement for the high school people in there if you want to go to school in the area I forgot to mention if Tyler Watts could just raise your hand. He is an Austrian at Ball State He's wanted me to mention if you want to see him and Jim McClure as well That they want to just you to know that they're in the area and they have a strong Austrian program there Do you guys have an opinion on? Gold prices or speculative land mad Well, yeah, they could the government uses taxes borrowing and money printing To finance everything and so yeah in theory, but of course with printing money by the Fed makes makes it easier for one thing and it creates what economists call a fiscal illusion and that you know, man I just published an article a few months ago on inflationary finance of war and imagine if President Bush trying to persuade us to go to war in Iraq Said okay, it's gonna cost a lot of money. It's and I figure it's $20,000 per family I think there'd be a lot more opposition to that war than there was if you did that So it makes it more difficult But but and therefore there would be less of it if we just resorted to tax finance and not inflationary finance, but You know that requires abolishing the Fed hold your applause, please. We want to continue with this Okay Yes, sir the question again the government holds a lot of land Yeah, pretty much the the the entire western half of the United States is pretty much owned by the federal government where I Came from spent 22 years in Nevada 86% of the land in Nevada is owned by the federal government by the BLM and And There were reasons for that actually that tie into a lot of work that Professor De Lorenzo is done in terms of Lincoln actually, right? Well, yeah, well the home if you want to talk about history the original homestead act in the 1860s There's a historian named Ludwell Johnson who I once published an article showing that The majority of it went to corporations, you know, there were a lot of people got 160 acres to farm But he he he made the case that over half of it went to mining forestry and railroad corporations and And I think more up to date a lot of that land Historically has been leased to ranchers at below market prices So it's a form of pork barrel politics of a congressman making giving a sweetheart deal to campaign contributors who are ranchers or our friends in Montana at the Political Economy Research Center For years have been writing articles and books about how in the timber industry, you know All the timber lands that are owned by the government are leased on the cheap to timber companies who then clear-cut The timber and create all kind of environmental devastation Compared to on their own privately owned lands. They don't do that. They're much more careful They they regrow it with super trees and that that sort of thing And so so that's where the transitional gains trap would come from because there are the special interests who benefit From the government being able to control the land and I would argue that the Bureau of Land Management is the most powerful Special interest there are a lot of bureaucrats and a lot of careers Wrapped up in in being the bureaucrats that run the whole show and that's where a lot of the opposition would come from to privatizing it but Our friends in Montana. They used to say that 50% of the land the west of the Mississippi is owned by the federal government That's a statistic they used to use in Nevada. What is it 86% of the whole state of Nevada and I know in Nevada in Doug's case It's it's really like the government is operates like the mafia because when the developers during the boom outside of Vegas When the developers wanted to build land The first thing they had to do like all developers everywhere in any city is bribe the politicians to let them buy the land that the government owned And like anywhere else even if the government doesn't own the land you still have to get permits And so that's that's how a lot of county commissioners and these people financed their political careers through sort of Tony Soprano like Activities if you want to do businesses in town you got to give me my share is essentially what they're saying And it's perfectly legal unlike the mafia And so but it's essentially the same thing Every once in a while there will be some kind of proposal to to privatize a small piece of The government owned and managed area in the National Forest for example Those are proposals come along every once while and whenever they do come along. There's a huge outcry from the environmental lobbies Which are just completely invested in the idea that any movement of ownership from government to the private sector is Wrong a movement in the wrong direction. They would actually like to move more land Under the control of the government, but this is also another case where The the subsidies and the government management benefit Interest that you might not expect if you'd never really looked into How how these programs operate in the in the National Forest for example where the land is Least to timber companies to cut the wood We know there have been some studies by my old friend Barney Dowdle at the University of Washington that showed that that the the the costs of managing the the National Forest Exceed the value of everything produced in the National Forest. So it's like a net Lost just from the fact that the government is operating and managing these areas to begin with But if you look at what National Forest are for you discover that they're they Don't really exist to to cater to forestry companies as much as they exist to cater to road builders There there are more miles of road in the National Forest system in the United States than in all the rest of the country combined You know all the interstate system the state roads and local roads add them up That's not as many miles. Of course, this is a different kind of road, but it just gives you an idea of how many Hundreds of thousands of miles of roadway Have been built and continue to be built in the National Forest and and of course that's all made with contracts with road building companies and They make buku bucks from doing this work and they they have sweetheart arrangements with the people who manage particular Areas of National Forest and what have you but this is also something that the the environmentalists have fallen down on because some of the biggest complaints about the Despoilation of the National Forest occurred because that all of this road building creates tremendous amount of erosion and it wrecks the streams and rivers in these areas kills fish and and other river in life and So it's just terrible for the environment. It never should be happening in the first place because You know if people had to really pay market prices for for their access to cutting this timber The whole system would operate differently Well, I came from the game the Soviet Union was called the environmental Auschwitz in a sense that they destroyed their Their nature more than anybody else However, I had a strange very strange experience where the state of Nevada was Invited by a very radical group there to talk about the Bureau of land management and And how they and the mining claims are being served and whatnot and so my point was that government does not have any Any role in ownership of land and then the definitely should be privatized However, amazingly enough my my hosts who were pretty radical at that time Bruce Babbit maybe remember he was a home secretary and He was raising grazing fears per cow like almost 40% up and And so they they were pretty radical they were they would invite me to a pub and they were just throwing darts into his eyes put his picture there and in and I'll Bruce Babbit and Janet Reno and whatnot and However when I said that they should be they said no no, this is ridiculous. No this we don't need this We don't want to send this land at all. They wanted just to reduce the grazing fears Use grazing fears keep them low so they can rape the land which belongs not to them And that's exactly what what what was also it agriculture was about just you rape you you don't think about tomorrow Yes, you just do that right now so the so the question is does the executive branch have the power if If the right libertarians were elected if they could just shut the tap off at the Department of Agriculture just just Stop it you you guys all go sit and do nothing You know download download porn all day what they do at the SEC or whatever So I yeah, I'm certainly not qualified for the question any Yeah, the first thing people would say is that well the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse and so they could force the president to do it But nobody in Washington pays attention to the Constitution anymore whenever Democrats talk about the Constitution It's only to try to block something the Republicans want to do and whenever the Republicans talk about the Constitution It's only to block something the Democrats want to do but but neither party believes in in the limited constitutional government about five years ago Ron Paul invited me to go to his office in DC and give a Presentation based on my book the real Lincoln to him in his Liberty caucus about a dozen members of Congress and During that the evening one of the things they all agreed on is about a dozen members of Congress is that no one in Washington Will take you seriously if you try to make a constitutional argument Against any kind of government program. They all nodded in agreement with that and so in my answer to your question is Yeah, why shouldn't the president do this and then it should give the Congress a big middle finger If they start talking about the Constitution and the same with the Supreme Court, you know I think we should this idea that the Supreme Court is a black robe deities who announced to us What our freedoms are to be did not always exist. It's a post civil war phenomenon before the Civil War there were Andrew Jackson for example when that when the Supreme Court said the Bank of the United States which was a precursor of the Fed was constitutional He responded by in essence saying Thanks for your opinion, but my opinion is different and so and so we didn't always bow down to these black robe deities of the court and and I think We'll never have freedom again in America really until we start giving every member of the Supreme Court the big middle finger or Two and say so what you know, that's your opinion. Keep it to yourself You know, we have a we in Andrew Jackson reminded the court at the time that there are Three branches of government not one and so so this was an invention that the Supreme Court has the sole Arbitra whole sole power to decide on constitutionality so I could see a Ron Paul type president Just doing it and doing and confronting Congress because they don't believe in the Constitution. So what why should we use it? there was An attempt several attempts during the Reagan administration to impound authorized funds and It gave rise to court challenges which went to the Supreme Court and the Drift of the rulings was that the the executive may not Unilaterally impound these funds Now as Tom says if the executive branch We're willing to say the hell with the Supreme Court. It wouldn't matter because the Supreme Court is just Nine persons with with no private army of its own on the other hand if the executive were to act that way in current political circumstances it would run a tremendous political risk and I'm willing to say it although no one knows the future that it would end up Being totally repudiated Because even though the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its rulings it it still has a considerable power of public opinion behind its rulings and the People dispute the rulings of course greatly for all kinds of reasons But that's different from disputing the authority of the of the court to exist and make Constitutional rulings and I think if if the executive branch took that position it would find itself Very much on the losing end of the political fallout So I think maybe it was easier to do in the Jackson's day than it would be today Ultimately the only way to To achieve this is to do what happened in a former Soviet Union and have all the states secede and create one That's a society of liberty rather than the society of tyranny, which we live under today Yeah, well I'll move to Indiana. I take it the Monsanto issue with the using intellectual property laws to Keep their seeds from being used by anybody else, right is that Yeah Yeah, I mean in my view of that would be that that's a not a A legitimate right a legitimate right that they have and and they're keeping food out of people's mouths and They're using the power of government the power of their lobbying efforts to keep small farmers out of the market and So yeah, I'm I personally wouldn't be a Monsanto fan or at least the way they do business Anybody else This is by no means Something I do a lot research on or anything, but I have talked with a few people That were you know in air culture that didn't seem to be demonstrably insane and You know the guy didn't you know then talk about how the aliens mistreated him or anything And and he was saying it's not just the issue of you know sort of aggressive practices But he was saying stuff and again, I didn't verify this But this is what he was telling me that like if if the breeze blows The seed onto your land and then Monsanto can come in and prove that you have some of their strain Then you have to pay them money Even if like you didn't buy the product and put it just the wind took it on and he was saying like sir There are some small independent farmers that just hate everything they stand for and yet the stuff They can't keep it off their land and then now they're stuck having to pay them and then it you know They can't even remain independent if they wanted to so if that's true, certainly that sounds crazy to me Sir the effects on Agriculture during Chairman Mao's what? Great leap forward. I'm sure that's what they figured it was. Yeah Well, I can't speak with any genuine authority about that but from what I have read about it the effects of the great leap forward in agriculture were were very bad in terms of Hurting the productivity of agriculture at the time one of the things that The government did during the great leap so-called was was to to to absolutely Absolutely clean out the cities and force people at least for a period of time to go out and work on farms Can you imagine anything worse for farming than having a whole bunch of Totally inexperienced city slickers sent out to help you farm as a disaster we used to hate it when people came out to hunt pheasants and ducks on our farm, but This had this had to be very harmful and it was done Really for ideological reasons. It was to basically break everybody's will and spirit by showing them That they could be put out in the country doing very hard unpleasant work And in fact that they had to do it like it or not and whether they enjoyed the pay or the conditions or whatever So the the idea was you know we're going to create this new man and the first thing would just destroy the old man's type of thinking By by breaking him just the way when you go in the military the first order of business is to break you So you'll do automatically anything you're told to do Well, I was one of this Slick urban dwellers and in the Soviet Union they would send Most people that I was a student every September and October I would spend in Pretending that I'm picking up potatoes. Yes. That was a massive. Well at that time I was pretty young or whatever So I had just had a great time Others older people they were just drinking themselves into oblivion there. Nobody was picking up potatoes only to only to put them in the fire and then eat them with the pickles or whatever but but in China I had a friend who was Soviet advisor can imagine Soviet advisor to a Chinese department of labor and and And he was part of that and his stories were just amazing that for example, they decided to kill all yard birds Sparrows they're considered sparrows We are attacked by sparrows because they eat a lot of grain and a lot of rice And so the whole country was murdering sparrows sparrows And he was a Soviet device also recruited because he needs to show his Understanding of that and they would come with pots and pans and beat them to the point that poor sparrows And sparrows cannot fly more than five minutes They have a heart attack and they drop and then people would fight each other to pick up sparrows because they need to show them And then if you have enough dead sparrows, then they exchange it for a medal Yes, so can you imagine and then and then I worked for the Soviet department of labor and my minister Usually I would go to him because I worked with a minister of labor and and he would call and would say Don't draft him because I need him. Yeah, so just draft somebody else instead and and I and I was kind of because he would he would all time would do that and I and I ask him a This is a what's this for I mean what's this for this? Doesn't help agriculture. I was kind of naive and whatever he said. Yeah, but it keeps people a little bit more humble Yes, it's like they TSA today Yeah, they can can take your picture of naked or whatever or do the tricks you like to And the same thing that you have a family responsible You have a lot of things to do and they would say no, this is not important Just go and they will drive you. You're on a school bus 10 hours from Moscow dump you in the middle of a swamp and that's it for two months And that was it and and in in China that was I think the last coffin They they've beaten into into entrepreneurship and creativity of Chinese people at that time after that everybody was submissive they The human toll of of that experiment with agriculture in China was 16 million people died Because starvation during the Great Leap Forward that's that's a wonderful also those of you who are interested in murders and crimes of socialism you can look at the University of Hawaii Dota do you and then slush Rammel Rammel? That's professor a little from of University of Hawaii He wrote a lot of books about demo side about about government murdering their own people I think the best one is called death by government that by gun his point was that this is the worst disease that you Can have is government and government is murderous diseases worse on AIDS or anything else I'm not great fan of of them of the of their prime minister mr. Putin nor his spokesman President Medvedev They are all kind of KGB stooges, but even under I would say kind of How fascist thing they have it's still greatly forward because what they did now Russia became Russia became a net exporter of grain again Moreover they're exporting almost as much as grain as United States does in the year 2019 They have this I don't know if it's a rather statistical delusion or not They think they will become the first in the world in the exporting of great most of this Arab unrest in the Arab countries was not because people were looking for freedom or read too much of Mrs. And Hayek and began to throw out the The social parasites away no because food prices increased by 70 80 percent in all these countries Mostly because of the huge draft in the southern Russia Southern Russia is producing a lot of cheap low quality, but food grain Which is mostly was exported to countries in developing world into these countries And so today today it's much better what they do they they kind of privatize it Those who would like to assume the proper The problem is that it's I think it's a huge human human disaster for example I I Go to Baltic states all the time in Estonia. I met a gentleman from from Finland He was buying land there buying land for almost nothing for what reason his point is that that they privatized all land properly Everything is private but already peasants they hate this land because for them It's kind of part of the privatized privatized concentration camp there were slaves in So they don't value this land they sell it cheap They want to want to go to the cities and and forget about all these atrocities that they experience So it's it's really really pretty sad, but now it's again. It's much better that than than it was Yes, yes, yes, they in the beginning they stalled with privatization of land. It was nationalized Never but but since 1995 96 they began to privatize it's still about half of it is is publicly owned even today All right. Yeah, I'd love to hear more about this, but I'm afraid we have to shut it down I am very pleased that you all came Thank you for my speakers Yuri Malta Bob Higgs Robert Murphy and of course Tom De Lorenzo here behind me thanks to the crew of Chad Parrish and will and and James and Christie of course But it was a pleasure to be here in Indianapolis. We hope we can come back next year. Thank you to Weaver popcorn for making this all possible If you have a chance to buy a book on your way out, please do otherwise enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you