 Since the last, the first Mises University was last summer about this time, and since the, since that, since that event, we've had, we've gone through cataclysmic changes in the world, and the, what we've seen, I think, in this last part of last year, and continuing this year, is the most exciting event in the 20th century, certainly in my lifetime, I think in the 20th century, namely the total revolutionary collapse of socialism dash communism. And it was just, it was just fantastic, and that's part of the, part of the case for optimism about the future, excuse me, is the, is the fact that something happened, which nobody, nobody had predicted what happened in any sort, at least at that time, in that sort of way, is that we had a totalitarian monolith, one, one friend of mine claimed about two, three years ago that communism has succeeded in brainwashing all the people, all their subjects, so they created a new socialist man, the man that they were trying to achieve, and therefore everything was hopeless. And typical of this person is he's not exactly a very good prophet, and shortly after the, his article was written, you know, came the beginnings of the whole collapse of communism. And one of the great things about it, in addition to the fact that it shows that the spirit of freedom cannot be wiped out in mankind, is that it shows the power of ideas, you know, that it's very difficult, we tend to get pessimistic sometimes, some people do, some laggards, some of the faint of heart, because here we're pouring forth ideas, and Mises, for example, I'll get to that in a minute, that, well, there's life that's fighting for freedom, and opposed to tyranny and socialism, and you think, well, how can ideas affect history? And we're locked in, you know, that's what we all know about the public choice trap. The public choicers who tend to be free market people are trapped in this extremely gloomy pessimistic world outlook, namely that special privileges, of course, as we all know, special privileges out to shaft us 24 hours a day, they're constantly working for lobbying and special privileges and monopoly and contracts and all of that. And the rest of us, the consumers, the average person, is not interested in any one particular focus, like the sugar market or the grain market or whatever, 24 hours a day, and therefore, the consumers quote rationally ignorant, ignorant unquote, and uncaring about these particular fields and areas, and therefore, it's inevitable that special privileges always went out, and tyranny and statism went out, and that's it. There's no hope. And every person, since every person is only interested in their narrow, short-run economic interests, there's no way of getting out of this trap. George Stegler, for example, the distinguished dean of Chicago School and being a mix of one of the two deans at least, the view was that ideas have no influence on history whatsoever. I mean, since if everybody's writing in sort of a vacuum or writing for each other, other professors, and there's no point to any of this as far as affecting history goes. And coming from a story of economic thought, it's kind of a depressing picture. So why are you doing all this? None of this has any impact. So what we find out here are dramatic examples of the exact opposite. In other words, here was a communist, he was the communist system, totally locked in, let's say a legend monolith, special privileges of nomenclatura, totally dominant. Everybody had to have to work for the state, everybody's lives were organized by the state and commanded by the state. And therefore, it seemed to be no hope. And obviously something, and here's a situation of people like Ludwig von Mises, for example, Etienne Labeau of Tee, David Hume of Ludwig von Mises always kept insisting that in the long run, ideas are the things that account. It's not short-run economic interests. It's the ideas held by the public that determine historical events. No government has, however much force they command, however much instruments of terror they use on the population, no government can last any length of time unless the public supports it. The majority of the public endorses it one way or the other for whatever reason. And this seemed to be outmoded in the days of totalitarianism, the days when the government has always read instruments of torture and high technology at their command. How can the average person resist this? And you know, we've all read Orwell's 1984, of course, it's a very gloomy picture. Everything is shot. Everything is finished. The totalitarian elite will win out. And then at the beginning of all this process, Ludwig von Mises in 1920 wrote his famous article on economic calculation of socialist Commonwealth, beginning of this whole monstrous collectivist process of 20th century, and he said, it's not going to work. In other words, in addition to the moral ideas, the moral failures of socialism and the, and all the other and the political, philosophical failures and sociological failures, it's ain't going to work. Socialism is impossible, if you put it, and cannot plan a modern industrial system. It's going to fall apart, can't calculate. And this was allegedly rebutted. The socialists, by the way, in those days took this very seriously. This is the first time that they come to their attention. There's a problem, other than the incentive problem. You know about the incentive problem. Everybody acknowledged that from the very beginning of socialism, even before socialists. And the great socialist experiment of the Soviet Union was established. The center problem is, if everybody's equal, if everybody takes according to his needs and gives according to his ability, who's going to take out the garbage? Who's going to do the dirty work? What's going to happen? And the answer, basically, if you think of the socialist was, we will create, socialism will create a new socialist man, which will be cheerful and robotic, and dedicating his whole life for the service of the state apparatus. And essentially means that, look, even setting that aside, whether or not you can do that, even having a bunch of robots would shifly rushing to obey the commands of the state. What will the state be able to tell them? What will the state tell them to do? How will they be able to plan and calculate, and where some production should be established, and what processes should be used, and what combinations and so forth? They said they can't do it, because there's no free market on the means of production. There's no genuine market which establishes a genuine price system, and therefore they won't know their course, they won't know if they're doing well, or badly, and hopefully they'll fall apart. Socialists taking this very seriously, tried to refute it. We had about 20 years, or 15 years of debate back and forth, especially in Europe where Mises, of course, was published. The conclusion which was acceptable by every right-thinking economist by late 30s was, that's okay, we can have a market socialism, we can total managers to play, play market, and so forth and so on. This was generally accepted by the establishment, and everybody sat back, well that problem was disposed of, they don't have to worry anymore, socialism is okay, we just have this artificial market, so-called market, and Mises kept refuting that in human action, and but the economic establishment, so to speak, determines the whole problem was over, don't worry about it, socialism can do it. Well here we are, and at the end, one of his last articles in his life, Oscar Longa, a monstrous little article called The Computer on the Market, really refuted his whole approach, he had set on his economic theory of socialism, we don't have to worry, socialism doesn't have to worry about calculation, we just have a phony market, we have trial and error, and we can do it very easily, and then in 1963, just before he died, he said, we don't have to worry, now if I was writing my answer to Mises and Hayek today, I'd simply say, look we have a computer, a great new institution, great new mechanism, which will plan everything in two seconds, in fact it's better than the market, I don't have to worry about it, and then he passed on. At any rate, we now find in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, a fantastic demonstration of vindication of Mises' whole approach, the whole thing collapsed, it turns out socialism is indeed impossible, and popping up from this rubble, we found a whole enormous, I mean unbelievable, unbelievable to all of us, enormous outcropping and outpouring of Mises, Hayekians, all over Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, and one of the physical embodiments of that, of course, was here this week, wonderful Yuri Maltsev, I'm sure you've all met, and here he is, he's now honored on the Soviet Union as a prophet, and they want him back, come back and help us plan and so forth, of course, Yuri's too shrewd for that. To me, one of the most moving, and this is by the way an example of how the Mises' Institute works, one of the most moving examples of both of Mises' Institute and this unbelievable desocialization occurred this spring, April or May, when Mises' Institute put on a desocialization conference in Washington, and it was like a people's international, we had a discussion of a planet, socialist planning in Eastern Europe, Yuri talked about the Soviet Union, and Hans Hoppe talked about Germany, and we had a great guy, he was a Polish-American, emigrated from Poland in the early 80s, talking about the Polish planning, and we also had a top economist from Lithuania, it was a very moving, one of the most moving experiences I've ever had, because everybody thought the Russian tax would be moving in about any day, and we had a Lithuanian economic delegation, not worried, not seemingly not worried about the tanks at all, what they want to do, how do you privatize, how do you get to a total privatization, total free market, how do you do it? Interesting question, it's a question of course, that orthodox economists have never thought about, because they never thought what happened, never, and only these millions of dollars that have been poured into anti-communist think tanks over the last 40 years, for 45 years or so, figuring out about missile weights and throw weights and who should bomb, who's missile first and where and so forth, the whole thing seems to be, right now you're looking back at it, seems to be like a 16th, looking back at the 16th century, the whole world has changed in one year, and the whole through way thing looks like a fantastic waste of resources poured into this stuff, and in the midst of all this anti-communist research, nobody, as far as I know, none of these think tanks, none of these anti-communist foundations or whatever, nobody ever sat down and thought, well what would happen if the Russians suddenly had red human action or red Milton Friedman or something, and came to the western economists and said, okay, here's the key, do something about it, we surrender, right? Communism is finished, what do we do next? And none of these guys ever thought about it, because for one thing they thought, they never absorbed the lesson of living on measles, they never absorbed the fact that socialism can't work, and eventually it is going to collapse, and eventually they are going to surrender one way or the other, they are going to ask, what are we going to do, and they had no answer for it, if they are 45 years of anti-communist scholarship. And well what happened to the Lithuanian economists, a whole delegation I think headed by Vice Premier, they were going around the United States, the East Coast, trying to find out, what do we do? And other think tanks, and I might add, what they did was they showed them the great offices, Wookie Talkies and the Plush Carpets, they were of course very impressed with the Lithuanians, but they weren't interested in knowledge, they knew that the West was a great technological shape, how did we apply that here? And only the Measles Institute, a great ideological entrepreneurship of Jeff Tucker, immediately whipped together a prompted one-day conference of a whole bunch of economists lecturing to these Lithuanians on different economic topics, and they loved it, this is knowledge, this is what we came for, we didn't come to admire Plush offices, we knew all about that. And when I was at this Measles Institute conference a little bit, a few weeks later, the first delegation, I'd say it was one of the most moving experiences of my life, because all these people talked about the different aspects of Eastern Europe, and the Lithuanian gentleman who thought he couldn't speak English well enough, obviously he did, but he was hesitant about speaking English to the group, he spoke in Russian, and he already stood next to him translating into English, marvelous, because he was the Lithuanian Russian people's free market solidarity, while Soviet tanks were threatening to march in. And one thing the Lithuanian economist said, he said, well, this was wonderful to hear today, because Professor Semmelson at MIT told us we should have a central bank, the first thing we should do is establish a central bank of Lithuanian, and we did that, now we find out today we should repeal the central bank, we're going to do it, not going to have any central bank. So he's an exact, you know, a beautiful example of influence of ideas on history. And he said that, well, that's he said, one thing I should say is that the remark before, that the whole, the whole implosion, the whole revolutionary implosion in Eastern Europe shows the powerful influence of ideas, because they simply said, not to you, we're not going to obey orders anymore. It was like nonviolent, mass civil disobedience, fantastic scale. And so here we have, as I say, nobody could predict the exact form of this, but here it was like a domino effect, one country topples, communism topples, and the rest of them topple. The, and the form it took was once it's, well, for example in Romania it was a dramatic example, because the troops were shooting and the Ceausescu troops were shooting into the square. And these people, they didn't flee, they just stood there and they said, that's, you know, the heck of it, we'd rather die than live under communism anymore. And that was it. At that point, the soldiers turned their guns on the officers and the whole thing. And we had a point where Ceausescu issued orders and nobody listened to them. This is the great libertarians dream, you know, that the guys on the top of ordering and butchering millions of people, all of a sudden they issue orders and nobody, everybody says, that's to you. That's the, we listen to them no more. So we have this impossible thing not to be optimistic when we see this. We're, we're, we're, we have a lot of things to gripe about here. We have a lot of monstrous trends at work and in the United States. When we see what's, what happened with the under totalitarianism, people just said, how will that, we quit. And looking for free market solutions and, and, and the Misesians, Hayekians popping up, it's a magnificent experience. And simply we should never forget, if we ever, ever tend to be pessimistic about trends in the United States, we should realize what they, what happened in Eastern Europe. In 1989, 1990. So in, in looking at this and in looking at the, the victory of freedom in Eastern Europe, I'm not saying all, obviously not all problems are solved. This is unbelievable and fantastic thing we should always remember. Ideas can always con, ideas in the long run can trump interests, can trump economic interests. The, looking back at this, at Mises being the, the originator of this, of the, of the knowledge that socialism is impossible and can't work. I think we should look back on Mises's life and, and, and what happened in the events in the, in the Austrian economics to see, to engage the future, we have to look at what's, what's been happening in the recent immediate past. As I said, after my collectivism was being established, and socialism was being established in the, in the world, in Europe, Mises wrote this article. In addition to that, he was discriminated against, he was, couldn't get a university post, an Austrian paid university post. He got an unpaid post, prestigious but unpaid, which meant, of course, he had to find work elsewhere. Largely because he was opposed to socialism and collectivism, and there were only two kinds of economists or social scientists who received paid university posts in Austria at the time. Either Marxists or Fascists or corporates, that's it. They were the only respectable. Those, those, that was the wave of the future. And the laissez-faire was, was reactionary in the end of the fall and part of the 19th century which was being displaced by the great progressive new century, the 20th century. So in addition to that, the second thing which disqualified Mises from a paid university post was he was uncompromising. He was a great guy. I mean he was, he's sometimes been accused of being personally abrasive. I never saw those of us who studied under him in, in the United States. He was unbelievably sweet. He was, he was constantly urging people, finding research projects for people to do which he usually didn't do, of course, but always coming up with, with ideas and always being unfailingly courteous and, and, and unfailingly and non-bitter about what happened to him. And so here he was and it, but he refused to compromise one iota. In other words, he didn't, he didn't bend with the wind with intellectual winds which all too often happens in the world as we all know. He didn't say, well, let's, let's try to work within the system and say, state isn't as OK, but you should have a little bit of tinkering here and there, like a little currency reform or a little wage reform or something like that. He was absolutely uncompromising and, and kept developing his ideas and his, and his great works. And in the meantime, not having a paid university post, he had a full-time post as a economist, chief economist of the Chamber of Commerce which in Austria was a, quasi, a government agency which were businessmen elected representatives of this Chamber and they would have a staff and they would advise the government. As a result, Mises became the major economic advisor although his advice wasn't listened to very much. He was tremendously respected. So he almost single-handed, he and a couple of friends of his were essentially single-handedly stopped the Austrian inflation which is rampant as well as the German after World War I. Stopped it from a runaway inflation. He stopped it about 1200% or whatever instead of, instead of, you know, becoming one, as in Germany, one quadrillion marks to the dollar but it was only 1200 Austrian shillings whatever, fennigs whatever the currency unit was to the dollar. Later in his memoirs which was written in the midst of his flight from Europe in 1940, he said, now he's looking back on it. He wishes that he hadn't fought it because it was better because it was hopeless in the long run anyway because they just lengthened on the time of the inflation just slowed it down and the result was the part of, you know, the banking crash and collapse in 1931. But as a matter of fact, one of the very sweetest things one of the most charming and moving passages in his book, he said he's always been accused of being too uncompromising. If he only had waffled, he might have been more influential. And looking back on it, he said, no, no, I wasn't hard, I wasn't hardcore enough. I wasn't uncompromising enough looking back on it. I should have been tougher. He comes to the United States as a refugee. Again, guess, no paid academic post in the United States. His fight is tremendous creativity and not an unbelievable, unbelievable area of addition. At a time when every Marxist, semi-Marxist, social Democrat, Menshevik, Trotskyite, whatever, with Horner Knight refugee, got top academic posts, was fed and welcomed at top universities. Fortunately, that time we had but he got a small foundation grant in New York, penniless, small foundation grant to work on two great books which came out a couple of years. Meases, by the way, the sort of person I've got a grant and in two years it was a book. And something many of us try to emulate. And two great books, Bureaucracy, I'm still a magnificent book explaining the difference between working as a profit operation, private profit and loss operation and government operation, which has to be bureaucratic, as he said, and nonprofit organization. I'll get back to that in a minute because there's a whole uncharted area which Austrian economists haven't dealt with and nobody else has dealt with, really, is of the economics of nonprofit organizations. How do they work is it possible for them to be efficient and Meases pioneered in that? And also his book on Nippon and government, which at the time was extremely important and influential because he was the first one to show those days the ruling doctrine here promulgated by Marxist refugee from Europe, Germany, was that Nazism was the simply the last final stage of evil capitalism. And it was a capitalist turn to the Nazis to crush the rising proletariat. And that's the basic explanation of Nazism. And what Meases pointed out was, this is ridiculous, what Nazism really is, is national socialism. It's a form of socialism and collectivism in the German nation. After that, he was really adrift. And what happened was there was a small group of, there's a foundation, small group of conservative and libertarian businessmen who banded together and actually the William Volcker Fund, which is the head of this, the William Volcker Fund is an unsung, forgotten institution which really was like the candle in the catacombs or whatever. It preserved, maintained and fostered over the 1950s and early 60s, late 40s and early 60s, libertarian and conservative scholars. That was a period you have to realize there ain't no such thing as free market economists or social scientists or anything. Everybody was either in the ruling fashion or you either communists or communists following travel or you're a social democrat. That's it. That was the only, that was the range of debate. Are you a social democrat or are you a commie? Being a free market person was being some sort of 19th century reactionary fascist neanderthal. So, Harold Luna, the head of the Volcker Fund, was searching around for his first task he felt was the fine of Tate University Post in the United States for Mises and Hayek. Hayek was in England. I had a post in England. Mises had no position at all. The result of which, of this detailed search was he couldn't find a paid university post for either of them, interestingly enough. And in other words, this replicates Mises experience in Austria in us. And Mises, the best he could do for Hayek was University of Chicago Economics Department, rejected Hayek as being reactionary neanderthal and whatever. But they found an unpaid post form in the Committee of Social Thought in Chicago which is a highly prestigious graduate department. But the problem of that is if you graduate with a PhD in social thought, where do you teach? I mean, there are no departments of social thought in any place. So it's very difficult to get a teaching position and do anything with it. Usually they end up at history departments. But it's kind of difficult. You're not a certified a star in, which we all know is very difficult in any field to break through the crust. So but Hayek has an unpaid post. In other words, the Volcker Fund paid for a salary. Hayek's salary in Mises, the Volcker Fund paid for a salary visiting professor at NYU in the Graduate School Business Administration. But the major influence the Mises had was a private seminar which he gave in his every week in the Department of Commerce offices, Chamber of Commerce offices and was a magnet for all the top students in Europe, all the top young social scientists and economists and philosophers in Europe and even the United States in England came to this because this was a great center of research from the early 1920s until 1934. And he tried to replicate this with us in the United States. And unfortunately, I felt very sorry about it because the caliber of the students they were not exactly up to almost Vienna par so it's a foot of very kindly. He was totally uncomplaining that news was pressed on and it was very best to stimulate, as I said, research in students. And this was a period from 19, when he was here from the mid-40s until he died in 1973. It was sort of like, as I said, candle in the darkness. So very few Austrians and very few free market people. Even when the free market became more respectable, there were almost no Austrians. And he, as I say, pressed on extraordinarily productive and extraordinarily cheerful in this whole process. When he died in 1973, just coincidentally, the next year, that was the year of 73, 74 of a great collapse of Keynesianism because that was the first year when the process of so-called stagflation or inflationary recession became evident. It happened before a little bit but it wasn't evident. All of a sudden, 73, 74 is an inflation, 13, 14 percent inflation, so-called double-digit inflation. And at the same time it was a big recession with unemployment and bankruptcies and all the rest of it. What are you supposed to do about this? Keynesian doctrine, of course, is very simple. I mean, the equations are complicated but the practical conclusion is very simple. The government is the great macro-steering wheel or whatever. The economic system is wonderful in the micro-sense, but in the macro-sense it's totally without an anchor, without a rudder. It needs a great helmsman, namely, of course, the government. Provider the government is steered by Keynesian economists. That's, of course, a key. And looking at the controls and the indicators and statistics, if the Keynesian economists finds that it's a recession and prices are falling and all that, you're pumping spending. Usually, of course, meaning government, increasing government budgets. If you find there's a boom and there's prices going up and so forth and inflation, then you take out spending. Namely, almost always, of course, by increasing taxes. Never by cutting the government budget, by the way. This is part of the Orwellian memory whole of original Keynesianism. So you increase taxes by sopping up, quote, excess purchasing power. In other words, we have the excess purchasing power after the government has already inflated the money supply and we've all gotten it. Then we become excessive and they have to sop it up, sop it away again. So sort of a one-two punch to the economy, to the people. So here we have a situation, however, where they had two things happening at once. Inflation, prices are going up and yet there's also a recession. What are you supposed to do? You pump in spending and you take it out. You can't do both at the same time. It's by only equations and computer or whatever. You can't pump in spending and take it out at the same time. I said they were finished. I mean, especially Keynesian has been dead from the neck up since 1974. It doesn't mean they quit. Nobody ever quits. It's one of Rothbard's laws of sociological laws. I have a whole bunch of them which I've evolved over the years. And one of them is nobody quits. It's not an apodictic law like praxeology. And once in a while, somebody does quit. But it's a tremendously good empirical generalization of high predictive value. So it's coherent and it has great predictive value. And anyway, so they hang in there. They try and do their best they can. They pump in a little bit of spending, take out a little bit of spending. Hope if something works. In this situation, in this real collapse of Keynesian, I mean, Keynesian theory had a lot of weaknesses before. Ever since Modigliani's first equations, it became evident that it assumes the wage rates are fixed downward, which nobody really realized before. But a practical political collapse is much more important than unfortunately in real life than theoretical collapse. So with this political collapse, Keynesian, as I say, was really bankrupt. And this begins to dissolve a ruling hegemonic paradigm and people looking around for other answers. Next year, Hayek has an Ogo Prize. And one of the interesting, in tandem, of course, with the left-wing socialist Gunnar Meerdahl. It's not to make it too terrible and reactionary. And the interesting thing, this is a big shockeroo to the economics profession. One thing I want to stress here, I don't know if this illusion any young students here, but economists are almost all obsessed with the Nobel Prize. I mean, there's betting pools in the early fall. Who's going to get it this year? And there's all sorts of stuff going on. Everybody's very interested in the Nobel Prize and who's getting it. Before Hayek, as I remember, all the recipients, almost without exception, were mathematical Keynesians, Keynesian econometric types. And all of a sudden, Hayek gets it. Who the hell is Hayek? Nobody had ever heard of him. You see, one of the things about the economics profession, they're not exactly steep in their own history. I mean, if something was written 10 years ago, nobody knows about it, because it becomes, it's part of the model of physics. If economics is a hard science, like physics, which all these people hope and think it is, then physicists don't read 1930s physics unless they're antiquarians, which is what Einstein did or something. Basically, you leave the latest journal article, the latest textbooks, and that's it. I'm going to talk about what some bozo thought 20 years ago. And so, trying to make this, the paradigm in economics, results in tremendous loss of knowledge in the part of most economists. So who's Hayek? How can this guy get an Nobel Prize? Who is he? And then it becomes a resurgence because people look back, they want to find out what did he say and earn him the Nobel Prize and find out, well, this is interesting. I never heard of this. So with this research, unfortunately, some of us conspiracy theorists, this is, of course, prove hypothesis and cherish my many. I don't necessarily hold it, but some of my friends do, is that the point is that Hayek got his Nobel Prize not for this later stuff, not for evolution and rule of law, that sort of thing. He got it for his Misesian business cycle theory, which he had expounded and elaborated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. That's what he got it for explicitly. So the conspiracy hypothesis is that they waited for Mises to die before they gave Hayek the Nobel Prize because Mises died in 1973, Hayek gets it in 74, and they would never give a Nobel Prize a monster like Mises, so they waited until Mises to die for giving it to Hayek. It was much more of a compromiser. If you read his Constitutional Liberty, for example, there's pro-planning stuff, pro-status stuff all over it. So at that point, this sort of sparked a regeneration of revival of Austrian economics. It might not be a total causal connection, but certainly is an impressive coincidence that the first Austrian seminar since old Austria occurred, a week-long conference occurred in Royals in Vermont in 1974. Well, all the younger, whatever Austrians there were, were gathered together. It was a wonderful thing, because we all met each other for the first time, mostly. Like you're an Austrian, and that's fantastic, Mises, like I was saying, the catacombs. And Austrian is flourished as, of course, it was a shame that Mises didn't live to see this, and after fighting it all was life for these ideas. And then we had annual conferences for several years after that. It was a big flourishing movement, and Austrianism was becoming known and widely interested in England and the United States. And then something happens, light suddenly goes out. See, the history of thought and history in general is not an onboard operative light, it's a series of glitches. It's sort of like a, I wouldn't say a business cycle, but ups and downs, a zigzag effect. So suddenly there was a big zag after this impressive zig of the late 70s. Something happened, and the Austrian, younger Austrians at the time started saying, well, trouble with Mises is he's too dogmatic, too uncompromising, too extreme. How do you get respectable in the mainstream of economics if you keep pushing these ideas that nobody really likes? We should try to become respectable, we should drop all this stuff about praxeology and laissez-faire and talk about market, market process, whatever. And the dread name Mises begins to slip out of sight. And this is, of course, really replicating in death what Mises had suffered in his life, except this time it was essentially a stab in the back by people who had called themselves Misesians who understood the situation, and then basically sold out, if you could look at it very bluntly, sold out for potential respectability funds, mainstream publications, 10-year and all the rest of it. Well, in this rather red-dyer situation, and it's not an accident, by the way, that the funding sources, almost a single funding source for this whole revived Austrian movement in the late 70s, which was flourishing very nicely, was one person, one billionaire, and the billionaire had a paradigm shift in his head and all the other acolytes, so to speak, or fundees for the billionaire, suddenly, coincidentally, shifted with it into this idea of, and we began to hear, as I say, not only Mises was too extreme and too dogmatic, talk about him, began to talk about synthesis with Marxists. This has been the latest developments in 1980 or so. It's important for Austrians to really have to understand the great contributions of Marx and Lenin and so forth, and we should have a continuing dialogue, as I'm sure Yuri would appreciate this, and fight for the Soviet Union to come to the United States and for Austrians to find out, hey, we should have a synthesis with Marxists, right, let's join in, or a synthesis with nihilism, and there's no truth, how do we know anything is true, almost sort of fashionable, philosophic guff, Marxo-Freudian nihilist guff from the continent, and this became, it was probably the ruling paradigm because the billionaire funder was in favor of it, basically, I don't want to have a simplistic, monocausal analysis here, but that's the way it looks to me. In this situation, this is a rather pretty grim and depressing situation where Austrianism has really collapsed, but Austrianism, as I said in the first, last week, is really Misesianism, in this situation, one person decided to do something about it, this person is Lou Rockwell, this person is responsible for everything we have today. Well, Lou had been, all these other people, the Austro-Marxists, so if you want to call them, were moving to Washington, and I like Washington, I thought this is where the power is, this is where you can get goodies and respectability. Lou had spent a lot of time in Washington, hated it and wanted to get out, both spiritually and physically, okay, and he decided that he wanted to found Mises Institute, which was the dream of his life and he decided this is the time to do it, and he wanted to revive the Misesian paradigm, the name of Mises and all the rest of it, and he went to the fore-said billionaire, and he thought it was a Misesi, and he said, well, I want to find a Mises Institute, and he was ordered not to do it. Kind of interesting point here, how could he be ordered, since he was an employee of this person? He was ordered not to do it, you can't do it. Of course, Lou, if you know Lou at all, doesn't accept these kind of orders very neatly, so Lou went ahead with no donations, no endowment, no pledges, no big daddy, billionaire, and nothing, just an idea and tremendous energy and organizational genius, entrepreneurial genius of the highest order. And as a result, we have all of us today, we have a fantastic Mises Institute, and we have just to run down some of the things that Misesi is doing, which I think is important, it publishes a quarterly, oh, by the way, in addition to the, it publishes a quarterly annual journal, the review of Austrian economics, which is now going semi-annual, by the way, I'm happy to report, it's, and by the way, the Austrian journal was boycotted by these aforesaid ex-Austrians, organized the boycott, which happily was not successful, and it has, it publishes a quarterly Austrian economics newsletter, which is sort of like a quarterly discussion magazine in Austrian economics, it publishes a monthly free market, which is a marvelous, for application of Austrianism in general, and extremely successful, and it publishes books, which are getting even more, we're gonna be even more books in the future, talking about the future of Austrian economics. Cluer publishers, which have taken over the review of Austrian economics, is extremely excited about the future of Austrian economics, about Misesi Institute, and the future of Austrian economics, not because they're ideological buddies, I don't know what they are or not, but they see it as a great marketing, great prospect for the future, and publishes a very astute in this, and they're particularly quite astute. I mean, if they found, for example, Hans Hoppe's Theory of Capitalism Socialism, which they published, they were amazed, let's say, under Misesi Institute auspices, they're amazed that he was a best seller, an academic best seller, being translated in many languages, so this deeply moves the Cluer people. So, and we have, we're gonna have three books a year, I think Cluer wants to publish, or Misesi Institute books, we have all sorts of books we publish in our own pamphlets, monographs, and conferences we've been putting together for a long time, and building up to the present one. Also, special conferences, like the Desocialization Conference I mentioned last year, conferences on Keynes, on Marx, on the Federal Reserve System, and only these conferences are going into books, in other words, we believe in the contrast of many other institutions, there's another institution which I won't mention, which is believes that every conference is an end in itself. You've got a conference, and everybody should go home, and nothing should be published out of it. Sort of, and we believe quite the opposite, every conference should build on previous conferences. You have a conference, everybody loves it, they go home, and they publish books out of it, and it keeps the whole movement going, and the idea is going. And, in addition to that, we have these annual conferences, the summer conferences, and the interesting thing about that is that there's a certain orthodox mold, you know, things tend to fall in traditional customary molds. The customary molds from about, which started I think in 1977, you have a summer conference for one week, okay? You get four professors, or something like that, around four, and each professor teaches to the whole plenary group, and each one teaches three times, or four times, or whatever. Well, this theater worked pretty well, so everybody sort of fell into this mold. And, what Lou realized a couple of years ago, Lou Rockwell realized a couple of years ago, this is limited, okay? In other words, you've got, you only have four professors, you only have a certain amount of students, everybody gets the same thing. Why not have a university concept? Why not have it so you can have a lot more professors? And we had a lot more, the thing is more professors are coming into the movement, so you have a lot more people growing up into it. First of all, starting as students, and then ending up as professors, like Mark Thornton. So, why should we have these people also give, and be here, and also give their own particular expertise? In other words, have courses, like a real university, okay? And then we always had a problem in the old days in Austrian courses in the summer, somebody would teach Austrian economics, and the level was always bad. In other words, there'd be all sorts of people there from high school students, the business man, the graduate students, the young professors, and everybody was always griping about the level, because some people thought it was too tough, other people thought it was too easy, how do you get the level, it was okay when they were teaching political philosophy or history, because everybody was more or less the same level. What do you do about economics? And so, Lou got the idea, you separate it, you have elementary courses, you have intermediate courses and advanced courses, you tailor each course to the needs of a particular student, and we wound up with a Mises University concept, which is a blockbuster, it's an unbelievable example of creative ideological entrepreneurship and innovation in this field, a field which is not really recognized as a field, which should be. So we had, and last year was a fantastic success, everybody loved it, and this year even more so, each year is better than preceding one. In this case, the wig theory of history seems to work. And the only thing I don't like about it, in the sense that it's like a real university, you don't see that you want to talk to people, you want to talk to my friends or whatever, oh, sorry, I have to go off to the next class. But that's inevitable as university takes over, so to speak. We have more faculty, more students and different segregation, so to speak, by quality and depth of courses. As a result, people can come back year after year because they can take more advanced courses or different specialties and whatever. The, in addition to that, we have a, by the way, I should say that there's an unexplored field, I think I mentioned the media bureaucracy, unexplored field of economics and non-profit organizations, almost not been worked on. People are interested in what can they work on in terms of economics, here's an area. How do you calculate, it's easy to see how you calculate a profit-making institution, profit and loss, how do you calculate efficiency, how do you make sure that you don't have a bloated organization, it's very difficult. And unfortunately, many ideological organizations, whether libertarian or other, tend to become bureaucratic, they tend to be overweighted with dead wood, overstaffed, underproduced, underproductive. The quality has to go down, the emphasis has to be on show rather than content. And what Lou has done as part of his entrepreneurial magnificence, I think, what he's done is, is to have an organization here, which has the highest marginal productivity of any organization in the country, or more none, a non-profit organization in the country. In other words, fantastic output, every person here has a very tight ship. I mean, the staff is about, I don't know, one third of any comparable organization. Each person is dedicated, extremely competent, and works very hard, and as you probably all know this week. And the result of this is the growth of the Mises Institute, both in content, and quality, and in quantity, and in influence. Essentially, we've beaten the Austro-Niolus and the Austro-Marxists, they're out of the picture, they've had it, and doing it against tremendous odds, in a sense, against the odds of a billionaire opposition. In a sense, it's very much like Mises conquering in the long run over the odds that he faced. And one interesting thing about it, and also about Mises' strategy and general strategy and outlook, we've wanted to form a graduate school in economics, I forget now, it was the 1950s or 60s, somewhere around this dark ages, and Mises was gonna be the president of this graduate school, he was gonna be called American School of Economics, and any system, us younger people were on the board of trustees, because they wanted younger, young blood. I mean, you know it was a long time ago when I was young blood, right? So, and Mises kept saying, well don't forget, as you're doing this high theory and scholarship, don't forget to have continuing lecturers, the businessmen, and the general public. At the time, I didn't really understand that, but why does he keep making this point? But I understand it very well now, especially since Joe Salerno was pioneered and looking back over the Mises' Hayek differences between Mises and Hayek on the economics of socialism, and also on the economics, on the rational versus the irrational of the view of exchange and specialization. The point that Mises was really making was that since he believed that people do change history, that ideas do change history, that people are conscious actors, and their decisions really determine events. It's very important for everyone, not just scholars, not just philosophers and economists, it's important for everyone, all the general public, businessmen and the public understand the importance of the free market, to understand the crippling of the free market as death, I mean, literal sense. It leads directly to the terrible situation in Eastern Europe from which they finally got rid of, getting rid of, so that it's very important, not just to get the high-flown journal articles, it's also equally important to spread the basic truths of free market and laissez-faire, and the evils of collectivism and interventionism, to spread that to the general public and the business. And that was the point. It wasn't just sort of a peculiar whim on the part of Mises, it was rooted in his general strategic theories, the theory of life and the importance of reason and ideas on historical events. The interesting thing about Mises is the more I read them and go back and read the stuff, the greater it looks, I mean, it's fascinating. More insights come in as I reread a human action or socialism or those great works. So looking to the future and looking to what are the prospects for Austrian economics, I think it's inherent in the current situation. Obviously it's not determined by, but certainly we get great leads to what we can expect in the future. Namely, I mean, just look at the fact that in Eastern Europe, the economists of Soviet, Russian, Eastern Europe, Mises and Hayek are revered figures. Nobody reveres Keynes and Galbraith out there. Had it with socialism and statism. They're just trying to figure out how to get to what we've been advocating in all this time. If that's true in a system where human nature is supposedly transformed, obviously it wasn't, it should be also true, of course, in the West and in the United States. We haven't gotten to the socialist stage yet. With the growth of the power of ideas, I really think in the long run, truth wins out. Of course, this could be a very long, too long a run for us to worry about, but I think it's winning out right now in the short run. That's a medium run. I'm gonna put it that way. And we have, with the growth of the influence of Austrianism and Mises Institute, and the prospects look terrific. I mean, with continuing growth, as I said, in quantity and quality. And I think one of the lessons of looking back on the Mises himself and the Mises Institute itself is not the cave in. Not to think that you're gonna, don't sell your soul for a mess of pot-edge, so to speak. That's what you're gonna get, a mess of pot-edge. If that, what happens is that in a long run, which is not very long, these compromises and cave-ins simply don't work. Don't work pragmatically. In addition to the moral aspect of it, they just simply don't work. They're finally repudiated, and whereas if you follow what you believe, not only is it a very joyful thing to do it, you also win out, which I think we're gonna win. Ben Sirin most. Thank you. Thank you.