 Welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist. And this weekend, this is a first for us. We're actually trying the show live. We're finishing up a week of Mises University here at our campus in Auburn, Alabama. We've had about 180 kids, young people in our building. This week has been a great experience. And Lou, I have to say, did you ever imagine that you would someday be sitting here talking about the 30th year of Mises University? Well, I hope so. All right, so yeah, and it's, of course, great. And great to be on the show. Great to have this wonderful audience. And let's go. Well, we had a tremendous talk earlier this week from Dr. Gary North about some of the travails of Ludwig Gunn-Mises, the person for whom this organization is named. But I'd like to talk a little bit about his wife, Margaret, whom you knew for many, many years and had a long relationship. She lived, I believe, to be 99 or 100. Could you talk a little bit about Margaret? Well, when I first determined that I wanted to start the Mises Institute, and I had known Mises and Margaret some years before that, when I had the great experience of having publishing entrepreneur Neil McAfrey of Arlington as publishers in the conservative book club. And at that time, the only publisher and distributor of libertarian and conservative books. And the grandfather of Matt McAfrey, who was a former Mises fellow and teaches at the University of Manchester, called me into his office and he said, how'd you like to be Ludwig Gunn-Mises' editor? I was 23 and, of course, I was one of the great things, one of the great questions I was ever asked. And so this was bringing back into print eminent government bureaucracy and theory and history and also the new publication of his monograph, The Historical Setting of the Austrian School. So I was able to have dinner with Margaret and Ludwig Gunn-Mises. And before I mentioned what a great lady Margaret was, Mises was exactly what you might expect. Murray Rothbard called him a European gentleman out of an older and better era. And he was beautiful manors, very dignified, very charming, very welcoming, just tremendous. Margaret, as Gary pointed out, was a former actress, also a playwright, play translator, very big deal in the Austrian, Austro-Hungarian world of theater of those days. And all her life that I knew her was recognizably as an actress. I mean, she just had a great presence, and that's what I mean by that. And I had some dealings with her in bringing these books back into print more so than with Mises. So some years later, when I was working at the Law and Economic Center at Emory University where I would become concerned that Mises' reputation and the influence of the Austrian school was diminishing since the years of his death. And I thought, it's probably luck that I was working at a place where that sort of place. And I thought, well, I could do this. So Margaret was the first person I talked to. And I took her to her favorite restaurant in New York City, which was the Russian tea room, a fabulous place. And I told her about what I wanted to do. And I asked her blessing. And I asked if she'd be the first chairwoman of the Institute. And that was the word she wanted used. She didn't like the idea of it, which was just coming into vogue at that time, the idea of calling her the chair. She thought that was insulting. And so she gave me, she told me that she would be very glad to do it. And she was a great source of wisdom of very strong opinions. Murray Rothbard called her after Mises' death the one woman Mises industry. And she had been that. I mean, she was really responsible for keeping his books in print, for getting them translated. And she was doing it pretty much all on her own. So I wanted to help her in that. And she was thrilled. And whenever Marty and I oftentimes would see her in New York, she was never anything but beautifully dressed, beautifully quaffed, beautifully made up, jewelry, always very formal. And she just was always gorgeous when she was in her 90s. I mean, she was a very impressive-looking lady. And also a lady of always very strong opinions. She never hesitated to give me her strong opinions. She was very wise. And it's just a tremendous experience to be able to deal with her, to learn more about Mises, to learn about what their life had been like, to learn about such small things as Mises' pension from the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, which would have been a good deal of money before the inflation. She would always get outraged when she got the monthly check in New York. And it was just about less than $3 in American dollars. So Austrian inflation. So the second person I asked was Murray Rothbard. And this is the only time I've ever seen this in my life. Somebody literally clapped his hands in glee. Murray was just so thrilled with the idea of a Mises Institute. And I asked him if he would run our academic Mises Institute at this point. It was just a typewriter on my kitchen table. But I asked him if he would be in charge of academic affairs and if he would be our inspiration and our guide in all matters, ideological and theoretical. And so he was just also a tremendous person to work with, always a, I mean, many blessings in my life. One was the, I'd known Murray before starting the Institute. But every day after starting the Institute until Murray's very untimely death in 1995, every single day I got to deal with him, either in person or on the phone. And he was just so much fun. I mean, he just was so funny, so welcoming, so warm, and didn't hurt that he was a world-historic genius. I mean, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, maybe even more than that. So I was a very, very lucky guy to deal with people like Margit von Mises. That one time I had dinner with Ludwig von Mises. I talked to him on the phone several times. That was not very successful. So I always dealt with Margit. Just I was able to be around giants quite an experience. I think I recall you telling me something like the first time you met Mises, it was intimidating to you, his presence. Well, I saw them at the table. I thought, holy smokes. Because even though I had dealt with them both in bringing these books back into print and publishing the monograph, I had not met them until after that process. And yeah, it was scary. I mean, it was scary. But they couldn't have been nicer. Couldn't have been warmer or more welcoming. And as Rothbard said, you absolutely had the feeling that you're dealing with somebody from the days of the Hopsporgs. I mean, somebody from the days when Vienna was one of the great intellectual and cultural capitals ever to exist in the history of the world, later, of course, pretty much destroyed. But just what a great experience. You had a very long and fruitful, both professional, personal relationship with Murray Rothbard. Certainly, he has his devotees and his fans. He has his attractors as well. What do you think is so misunderstood about Murray and also about his work? Well, I think part of it is that I think of somebody like, say, Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman was a brilliant guy. I think his economics were a problem. But he certainly was brilliant. But boy, was he arrogant. I mean, he was, and he liked nothing better than, say, a student or a fan of his asking him a question that he thought was stupid just to humiliate them. And whether that was, he seemed to get great pleasure out of that. How can you know? But that was not Murray Rothbard. So Murray was very easy to approach, humble. And he didn't parade his knowledge, which, of course, was, I'm not sure any of us know exactly how much he knew. I mean, he was so much over so many different areas. I once tried to tease him. I was in a scholarly used bookstore in New York. And David Gordon was there, too. And so I started asking them about the various books. And of course, I couldn't find any book that either David or Murray hadn't read and knew all about. And could point out, well, you know, on page 28 is this great statement about X. So that was just Murray. And it wasn't just his vast knowledge in history and economics and philosophy, political philosophy and just philosophy period. But he was an expert on sports. He loved basketball. He was a huge fan of Tarkinian and the running rebels at UNLV. And whatever he loved politics and whatever he got into, he became a world expert. I can remember being with him on election eve and he would have one of his classic yellow pads full of notes that no other human being could read. And you could ask him about any congressional or Senate or gubernatorial race in the country and he knew all about it. What's happening in the second district of Idaho? He knew about the candidates, the issues, the real issues, the special interests, the scandals. And he just always would predict what was going to happen and his predictions were less successful than his knowledge. But he understood politics and when it came to the Olympics, he loved especially the Winter Olympics. But he loved the Summer Olympics, too. He knew the entire history of the Olympics. If it was a sport he was interested in, he knew what everybody had gotten a medal in past years. What were their strengths, their weaknesses? Whatever he was interested in, he became a tremendous expert. But he never paraded this. I mean, you always had to sort of pull it out of him. But I should also mention, I talked about Margaret. Murray's wife, Joey, who was a brilliant, brilliant brilliant woman, Margaret once said that she wished that Joe had gone on to get a PhD. She had a master's from Columbia because she should have had a PhD. She should have been a professor and not have devoted her life to Murray. Well, she was always glad she devoted her life to Murray. And of course, Murray famously, in one of his dedications, called her the indispensable framework. And she was. So Murray was, in some ways, the absent-minded professor. And I can remember when she would, say, go sometimes to visit her family in southern Virginia where both Murray and Joey are buried. In their freezer, she would leave Murray's meals with Tuesday lunch and Wednesday dinner, and so forth. Because otherwise, he might not eat or whatever. So she took good care of him. But as important as that was, and she was just like Margaret typed human action and other Mises books, she helped Murray with that sort of thing. Although he was a super typist, Walter Block pointed out the other day, very, very fast typist. And he could really turn out the material. I'll just make a slight addendum to Walter's story about Murray having to be reminded that he had a paper due much sooner than he thought. And it was his New Deal monetary policy paper. So he excused himself, went into the next room, and as Walter said, typed it out. This is a large paper. He typed it out with footnotes and bibliography. So he'd written the whole thing in his head, but hadn't actually typed it out. So that always struck me as an amazing ability to be able to do that. And again, this is just Rothbard. After his death, Joey asked me to come and go through his office in Las Vegas and see what should be shipped back to New York and what could be disposed of. And it was just very, very moving. And also it just gave me a glimpse, which I'd already known about, but just a further glimpse of just how important Joey had been to him as an intellectual partner, as a critic. A lot of times she would say, Murray, you can't say that. He said that a number of times she'd sort of saved him from trouble, and he wouldn't always take her advice. But she was very smart, very knowledgeable, very sweet, and I must say a great judge of people. She, I never, and she was a quick judge. I never knew when she was wrong. I mean, she said, no, you can't really trust that guy. I turned out you couldn't trust that guy. And when she thought somebody was a good person, well, they did turn out to be a good person. So that just wanted for many abilities. And she was herself a huge expert in opera, especially the operas of Wagner. She loved going to the Bayreuth Festival, and she knew everything about Wagner, everything about Wagner's music. And that was just one of her hobbies. But Murray was her main hobby, and of course, her life's work. And I think without Joey Rothbard, we would not have the same Murray, absolutely. So he was very lucky in their marriage. And she tells the wonderful story about being late once to a date with him to go to the movies before they were married. And so she arrives at the theater. It's a huge theater. It's pitch black. And she wonders, gosh, how am I going to find Murray? And then she hears his laugh. So she could go right to the island to the seat because he had such a distinctive laugh. You heard his laugh all the time. He was definitely the joyful libertarian, but he was just a joyful person, and not an unrealistic person, very realistic about the state, his depredations, about the chances of victory for all of us in the future. But he just loved life. He loved the battle. He loved, of course, scholarship. He loved knowledge. Just being able to sit at his feet was quite an experience. Well, let's back up for just a minute and talk a little bit about your career prior to meeting Murray, prior to starting the Institute. A lot of people probably know that you worked for Arlington House for some years, and you may not know that Lou was also at Hillsdale College for a period and started their publication in Primus, which still survives today. But you've told me some stories that you've been in the room with a lot of interesting people over the years. I mean, you've mentioned some names like Nixon and Buckley and Ayn Rand, so I'd love to hear an anecdote. Well, I have to tell something terrible about myself. In the 1960 election, I was 16, and I collected money for Richard Nixon's campaign. But I raised a lot of money. In my town, my Boston suburb in Massachusetts, all the Republicans hated the guts of John F. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy family. So raising money for the anti-Kennedy was actually pretty easy. So I raised $3,000. Did you go door to door? How did you do it? No, I had to be door to door. I was given a list of all the registered Republicans. This town today probably has more communists than it's got Republicans, but very, very left-wing place. In those days, it wasn't true. So it was mostly Republicans. And I went door to door over a period of days. And it was a different era. That was the year or two where Avon ladies were able to be welcomed in people's homes, didn't fear to go in, where housewives would have the fuller brushman come. You can't conceive of something like that happening today. So everybody was very welcoming. And sometimes they gave, and sometimes they didn't. And by the way, they didn't have anything like the FEC regulations. But people were very generous. And they hated Kennedy. I'm sure some of them like Nixon, too. But because of that, I got to meet Nixon. And so I was stationed. He was giving a big speech at the Boston Armory. And then I'm stationed outside with this great lady, Mrs. Darrow, who was sort of my patron in the Republican Party. And so Nixon comes running out, angry. Come on, Pat. Come on, Pat. We're late, we're late. And then she, you know. So then he showed up with shakes hands when he was gone. And Pat came out. And I thought she looked like an angel. This was the way people dressed in those images. She had a hat, pocketbook, gloves. But then she stopped and talked to me for maybe five minutes. Meanwhile, Nixon is saying, come on, come on. So I was always pro-Pat as a result of that, but not, of course, pro-Nixon. Although I was followed Nixon with great interest. Buckley, Bill Buckley, very smart, very charming, very evil, like a serpent, a snake, a very bad guy, ex-CIA agent. They always say with agencies like the CIA and the KGB, no such thing as an ex. And I think that was certainly the case of Buckley. I think he set up National Review, or the CIAs. He set it up for him. All his questions about what the money came from. The lawyer who incorporated National Review was Bill Casey, who had been head of the OSS, and later head of the CIA himself. A lot of CIA people involved in National Review. And also old, right people, John T. Flynn, for example, wrote until he was kicked out. So why was he kicked out? He was kicked out because he wasn't pro-war. He wasn't pro-American empire. He wasn't in favor of nuking the Soviet Union. So the Buckley magazine was very right-wing in those early days. I think deliberately so to try to bring the right-wing along with the empire and the war, the permanent war and the Cold War and so forth. Which had not been the case earlier, as Rothbard, the great scholar of this, among so much else, points out the American right-wing until then had been, for example, anti-Rosevelt. Sort of their key thing in life was hatred of Roosevelt and Truman. And because of that, they opposed the American drive to war, the Roosevelt drive to war. They might have felt World War II was necessary to fight, but they weren't ever happy about it. And they didn't think that should be a model for the permanent American warfare state. So Nashville, if you had a huge effect in bringing this along, I met Buckley a number of times. I didn't really know him well, but he was very charming, smart. But I think of a very bad guy and all the sort of right-wing stuff I think buttresses my view that in this Rothbard's view, of course, this was a trick, because once everybody in the conservative movement of those days, the Republican Party had been brought along to total warfare, permanent warfare, permanent empire. Buckley famously said in 1948 that we had to build a bureaucratic state in America in order to fight permanent war and that everything had to be devoted to fighting on a war footing forever because Soviets would be forever and we had to turn ourselves into a garrison state, surveillance state, all the stuff that has since happened. But Nashville, you dropped away all their right-wing aspects and became just a bunch of, as they are today, just a bunch of social justice warrior types. So I think I knew Barry Goldwater a little bit and I think I put Barry in that same category. I was a huge supporter of Goldwater, donated a lot of money I couldn't afford and worked my heart out for him. And it was only later that I realized that he was always bad on foreign policy, but boy, he was great on domestic policy, very, very libertarian. His book, Conscious of a Conservative, goes written by the great Brent Bozell. This is not the present Brent Bozell, but his dad, who was a man of great principles and great ethics, and later put in an insane asylum with Buckley's help, whether he actually was insane or who knows, Buckley didn't like his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. Buckley just did so many bad things, but he was, again, the National Review was very key to the promotion of the Goldwater movement or Barry Goldwater. Only after this all happened that I find out that Goldwater had been pretty much of a statist before he ran for president, and in fact gave a famous speech at the 56th Republican Convention that Republicans had to forget the old notion of opposing the no deal, opposing the fair deal, that every conservative, every Republican had to accept all of this and just move on, and that it would be an outrage and reactionary and so forth to continue to think maybe there was something wrong with the new deal or the fair deal. After his race for president, his term as US Senator from Arizona, he was just a total neocon, so when he was a neocon, I would say before that, so my supposition has always been that the Goldwater campaign was just another trick, very successful trick, but still that book, Conscious of a Conservative that Bozelle wrote, it's still very much worth reading. I mean, the prose just jumps off the page and private, you know, get rid of Social Security and TVA and all kinds of government industries and he was entirely in favor of the Freedom of Association in a very tough time. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so he did a lot of great things can't look into his heart, but he definitely was a bad guy earlier, a bad guy later, bad on foreign policy, but the view of those of us, very naive view probably, was that Johnson was just as bad. Goldwater might have been worse on foreign policy who can know, but boy, he was a great voice in the 64 campaign for libertarian ideas domestically, very eloquent, so I would say he had a very good effect in some ways, a bad effect in other ways. Who else did you want me to mention? Well, I guess I'm curious after this start in your young life, can you identify a particular period or a particular time when you recall really becoming fully anti-state, anti-war? Well, I got a good start, I think because my dad was a very strong Taft Republican, and in fact, my first political memory is impending a Taft President button on my code, so I think I was always oriented that way, even in a little kid in school, I was troubled for my teachers on these kinds of issues, but I think it took a while to develop, I was more of a conservative initially, but I can still remember, and this is before the 64 Civil Rights Act, I went to a very liberal school and I can remember this one particularly, he's advocating something like the Civil Rights Act, and I was in the seventh grade and I just couldn't, just didn't strike me as the right thing that the government should be able to tell the businessman who he should serve and who he shouldn't serve. I mean, I didn't understand why anybody had a right to get a hot dog at the hot dog stand. If the hot dog stand owner didn't wanna sell him the hot dog, so those days that wasn't called racism, but it was an unpopular view, especially in my school, but I think the reading that my dad encouraged me to do and the kinds of people I started to read, working at Arlington House later, was, and I was very lucky to be sort of in the, let's say the freedom movement, it wasn't necessarily the libertarian movement, but except for my first job, which was a writing job and was just dealing with business things, not ideologically, but I got to work at Arlington House and again at Hillsdale College and set up their ideological programs and so I learned a lot there and I was editor of a libertarian medical magazine of economic issues and medicine and except on licensing questions was entirely libertarian and worked against everything that's happened, is why I'm, you know, the sort of thing that, and warned against everything that's coming and I must say one of the great experiences, we took a group of congressmen, probably the best known still today was Phil Crane, to learn to England to study the National Health Service and we had Enoch Powell speak to us and met a lot of great people, sorry, Keith Joseph later, Sir Keith Joseph who worked for the Thatcher administration, but Enoch Powell, and then I later was able to bring him to Hillsdale for a week, I must say the most eloquent speaker I've ever encountered, I mean the most astounding, of course British politicians tend to be very amazing on their feet, but this guy was like a Shakespearean actor, ideologically motivated, he was for the gold standard, free market and just a pioneer in many different ways and I remember having him, we had him debate at Hillsdale, Truman's head of the Council of Economic Advisers about price and wage controls and the night was just a pouring, pouring Michigan rainstorm and this economist had come in his galoshes in his raincoat and his umbrella and that sort of thing. After this debate, he walked out into the rain just in his suit, the brain is pouring out, he forgot his hat, so we had to bring him back in, he was so gobsmacked by what had happened to Enoch Powell, he just, it was just a, so Enoch Powell and other tremendous man, I think predicted some of the problems of mass immigration very early on too, a very, also a decentralist, a little englander, an advocate of non-interventionist foreign policy on the part of England to be neutral, to be, some people would say isolationist, to be a non-isolationist in trade and cultural matters, isolationist as to not bombing other people and so he was also a great poet in ancient Greek, author of a tremendous scholarly work of about 1,500 pages on the House of Lords in the Middle Ages, I mean just great intellectual and that of course, like Jeff, got to know Ron Paul very well, another great intellectual, public intellectual author, economist even, he's a physician, but he's an economist, he's a historian, constitutional scholar, great man, as we can both testify, there are a lot of people who are not what they seem, that's especially true on Capitol Hill, they're very different in the real life, Shona Cranston always makes the point and I think I agree with her, you can ought to tell how these guys treat their staff, they're loving the human race in public and they're beating people over the head who can't resist in private and that's sort of the typical congressman, but Ron Paul was a gentleman and a sweetheart in private life with employees, with friends, with patients, just exactly what he seems to be in his public life, that's the way he is in private life. Well, I'd like to turn to more topical events, if there's any questions we might elicit from the crowd, I would certainly like to just ask you briefly any thoughts you have on the Democratic Convention which just wrapped up, and Madame Hillary, Lou doesn't like politics, but he does have something to say about it from time to time. I don't like the effects of politics, but I must say I love watching it, I mean I love the scam, I love hating these people and of course it's all, they do terrible things to us, so I think it's fun and important to follow them, I don't vote, I only voted once in my life for Barry Goldwater and that I regret, but I think, so the Democratic, I mean it was a, I don't know, Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist who has quite a wonderful blog, he says he's a supporter of Hillary because he lives in California and literally his life would be in danger if he came out for Trump, so that may very well be true, who knows, but he summed up the Democratic Convention to seem to be entirely anti-male and he thought that they perhaps had made a mistake by just being so openly hating the guts of men and he said, he thought by the end of the convention the men had left the building, he said by the way, the building they built, so I'm very politically incorrect, Mr. Adams, but so certainly it was a display of all the special interest groups, all the grievance industry and so forth and of course in favor of more war, more government, I think those who worry that Hillary is capable of bringing about nuclear war with Russia don't exaggerate, I mean she's her temperament and her, if you just remember her giggling over killing Gaddafi, I mean her witch-cackle, as she said, we came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha, so by the way, there were some great photos you may have seen from the convention of her, with her gigantic mouth open, laughing and she has a spot on her tongue and people are saying that's the result of a biopsy to her tongue, so who knows, but I think she's a very nasty piece of work, I don't think she's in favor of human flourishing and because probably politicians in general, with the reception of Ron Paul, I think Ron Paul is the only one that I know about or have ever encountered, I would say maybe in all of human history, certainly in American history, but even a guy like Jefferson, who was good in many ways before he was in office, great in many ways after he left office, but terrible when he was in office, just, of course this is the history of presidents, not one of them has ever left the government smaller than he founded, even the ones who are a decent, Harding, Cleveland, certainly decent as compared to the other ones, although my favorite, somebody asked me the other day who my favorite president, I said, William Henry Harrison because he died right after being inaugurated, so he didn't actually do any damage as president. Do we have questions from the audience, though? I think we have a question over here. I know Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard have always been pretty optimistic about our future and libertarianism and Austrian economics, but I was wondering what you think about the rise of socialism and New Kansy and economics, whether after a financial crisis, if the current system is just gonna be replaced with the same system? Well, I think socialism never went away. Certainly the name has gotten a lot more prominent, Piketty, and of course Bernie, and but the US system has always been more, for a very long time, and partly socialist, but I think that Murray and Ron have a point, we are right. I mean, we do have the truth on our side. It has to account for something. Obviously the truth can be crushed, has been crushed, but it somehow always bounces back, and I think even for a religious standpoint, we know that in the end, things are going to be okay, and I think even in terms of human society, Rothbard always thought that the truth would eventually triumph, and that human flourishing would count, and that there was no going back. He thought and certainly hoped in terms of the division of labor, because of course if there were, there'd be mass global starvation among other effects of that. So he thought that we were making progress. I think we see it here, that this Mises University week, and I think, I must say, I thought it was a very low point after 9-11, when it seemed like it was government. Every state would like to be totalitarian. Every state would like to be the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. The only thing they don't like about the Soviet Union, it didn't give a very good life to the rulers. So that was a problem. I remember that there was an incident towards the end of the Gorbachev era, where there was a communist, a local communist party leader whose car, which of course only very few people had cars in those days, was in a car accident, and the trunk of his car popped open and it was full of sausages. And the people who were surrounding that were so outraged that this guy had sausages which of course were not exactly available. The regular person, they beat him up. And Yuri Maltsev, who was a Soviet economist, defected, one of the last defectors here, one of our senior scholars, said he thought that when being a member of the power elite meant you got sausages versus not, that was pretty small. So I think the whole regime of evil, all over the world, they don't wanna go back to pure socialism because they don't have a good life. So they really like fascism better, which is economically more viable. So we have that to fight. But I think, I don't know, I think people want change. I think people are dissatisfied with the political arrangements, whether that's true in England or on the continent. You know, all of human history, socialism had been a race between power and market and Rothbard's turned. And sometimes we seem to be winning, sometimes we seem to be losing, but again, we have the truth on our side. And I think, unlike right after 9-11, I think a lot of Americans especially distrust the government. They don't, the polls show this, they don't like the government. Now that doesn't mean that they're able to reject some new scam that Hillary or whatever is going to offer them. But I think, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about young people. I think a lot of young people don't like what they're being taught in college, ideologically. They don't like the atmosphere on campus. They don't like their professors who might as well have a flashing sign on their forehead saying fraud, fraud, or liar, liar. And so they're looking for something else. We can help provide them with that something else. And so I think, you know, I think a fight for human flourishing has always been a struggle, but we really have made progress and many things threatened us in so many different ways. But I think Ron and Murray who are close friends and I think they're right. So I think obviously I'd like to believe they're right too, but I think they're right, but that doesn't, you know, this is not anything easy. It's gonna require all of us work from all of us require scholarship, everything comes from scholarship. You have to have intellectuals. That's something probably wrong with the Trump effort. There are no intellectuals involved. So it's all just sort of seat of the pants. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. So the rule of intellectuals of academics absolutely essential to everything has of course great entrepreneurs, great managers, great professionals, doctors, lawyers, so forth. There aren't many like Shauna who always give you a five, but lawyers are still important. Jeff, even Jeff wouldn't always give you a five. He's an attorney too, of course. So it's, yeah, I'm in Rothbard's terms, short-term pessimist, a long-term optimist. Another question out there? What are your thoughts on the recent pages of the 9-11, Congressional 9-11? 28 pages? Well I think it's, I think they obviously, they should be released in the typical of the government, right? We're gonna finally release these pages. We're gonna make it all public. So you look at it and everything's still redacted or blacked out so you can't see it. But I think clearly, I must say I don't, in some fundamental sense I think there's something wrong with the whole 9-11 report. It's kind of my attitude for the Kennedy assassination. I don't entirely know what happened. I don't believe the Warren Commission. So I don't know what happened in 9-11 but I don't believe the government. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the government story. Is it simply that they're hiding their own incompetence? Is it more than that? I don't know but that was definitely, just because it's benefited the government and they should all celebrate 9-11 as a holy day for them because of course it just meant vastly, a vast expansion. As I mentioned earlier, every government wants to be totalitarian. They can't get away with it because of popular opposition. When that opposition shrinks, which is what happened in 9-11, opposition to government growth, government surveillance, police state, all that pulled back. Everybody was terrified. That's why they loved of course, frightening people all the time. So when that pulled back, government all of a sudden expanded. And as I say, they should all be, they should all, I'm sure they do in their hearts. They do celebrate it. This was a great, and I certainly would think the sacrifice of 3000 people is just a nothing. They're happy to kill people. Something always important to remember about people rise to the top of the government, whether it's in the military or in any other part of the government. They tend to like killing people. They tend to enjoy, see this with Hillary, they tend to enjoy sending young people out to kill or be killed. They get a charge out of it. These are not nice people. They're happy to step on other people. They get a charge out of, putting you under their thumb and doing that. So that's something else actually going for us. Most people aren't like that. Most of us don't actually wanna run our next door neighbor's life, let alone the next town or the next country. We're just trying to run our own lives to care of our own responsibilities. That's quite sufficient. But of course, there are people who wanna run the next door neighbor, the next door town, the next country, the whole world. And they're a very, very nasty bunch. And they pretend to care about other people. We're all just means to their ends. This is the era of, I think, narcissistic personality disorder has always been widespread among politicians and bureaucrats and everybody who seeks power. Maybe it's not any more widespread today than it has been in the past, but boy it sure seems like it. And everybody's a means to their end. We're all just sort of, only they are the real people in the world and everybody else is sadly out of focus and a means to their end. We don't feel that. We think everybody's a means to their own ends. And we're not interested in killing people. We're not interested in running their lives and jailing them, putting them in cages, ruining their lives because they spoke to joint or committed some other made-up government crime. So this also gives me optimism. The opposition, they really are an extremely ahead bunch. And so we're not, let's say, angels, but we really are as a group, as an ideological movement, a much better bunch of people. And I think that's appealing to other people because I think most people are pretty decent. It's just that they find themselves having more to do, just mowing the lawn, going to church, raising their children, working in their job, caring for their home, their family. That's sufficient. It's our job to commit enough of them to go along with us and we don't need everybody. I mean, everything that's accomplished in these sorts of matters, for good or for ill, is by a dedicated minority. Whether it was communists in old Russia or libertarians today, it's always the dedicated minority. So we need more people, we need more dedicated people, we need more educated people. Great Albert J. Nock was once asked about, by somebody he thought of as sort of a babbit figure, well, what are you gonna do to save the world? That wasn't the exact question, but that was the import of it. And Nock said, the only thing I can do for the world is present it with one improved unit, except to first improve yourself. And in our world, that means educating yourself. So it's a great thing. The Mises Institute does exactly as Mises wanted us to do. It's not just a matter of training economists, although that's absolutely essential. But economics is for everyone. It's for, because it's really, as he put it, the pith of human life. And also if you know some economics, the government can't fool you, the media can't fool you. So teaching people about the ideas of liberty, but Austrian economics is a huge blow for everything good in the world. And I think, again, we've got the truth on our side. The enemy is a bunch of monsters. So it's like a zombie movie. We'll see who wins out. I think we can win. Well, on that note, we are out of time. Lou Rockwell, thank you for joining Mises Weekends. Thank you, Jeff. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.