 You know earlier this afternoon Raheem mentioned Beauty in his talk about Vienna. He also mentioned the darkness and so both those themes I've been weighing on my mind quite a bit lately, and I think there might be a lesson there about how we as People who believe in ideas and Liberty win or at least advance So that's what I'd like to speak to you about this evening. It was a real pleasure as I mentioned to walk through The hotel and see some of the Frank Lloyd Wright finishes and touches on the hotel I happen to be a fan of his design influence. So the stone work the dark wood in fact I like your style generally, but it really appeals not only to my aesthetic paste, but it also evokes something But that I would say is both intellectual and emotional And I think there's a lesson there for us about how we win going forward or at least as I mentioned how we advance So I would suggest this evening that we have not thought about or talked enough about beauty in Our Austrian circles because truth and beauty are of course inescapably linked And Austrian economics is this beautiful logical system. It's deductive. It's a way of looking at the world Just like Frank Lloyd Wright had his own way of looking at the world So in his article on the sociology of the Austrian school I mentioned that last evening. Here's Joe Salerno's definition He says the essence of Austrian economics may be defined then as The structure of economic theorems that has arrived at through the process of praxeological deduction that is through logical deduction From the reality-based action axiom So when you take that together In in in total It is in other words. It's an edifice It's a body of knowledge. It's every bit as rooted in tangible reality as architecture is But architects tend to think about beauty a lot more than economists do So both Mises and his protege Marie Rothbard, they wrote quite a lot about method Which is to say how we search for or how we discover truth in economic science So they talked a lot about truth, but actually if you take a look Through the indices of their main works Human action man economy and state some of the others both had actually precious little to say about the connection between beauty and truth or about aesthetic sensibilities generally if You look through those index index indices excuse me You won't see many references to art or architecture or beauty more generally Now we do know a little bit about Mises from theory and history and also from the anti-capitalistic Mentality where we know he was a subjectivist when it comes to aesthetics as well He has this great quote where he says only stilded Petants can concede the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not And of course we all understand that beauty Has a subjective element to it Doesn't mean we should give it up So maybe Mises and Rothbard didn't contemplate beauty too much because it was all around them in their lives Whether we're talking about pre-war Vienna or whether we're talking about mid-century Manhattan They were surrounded by architecture and music and literature and theater that was the world they lived in like goldfish swimming in the bowl Beauty was around them, but we know that Austrian economics is fundamentally truth In fact truth is its most important and fundamental responsibility As a science, but we can't afford to ignore its corollary as we have been without beauty When economics is divorced from any higher human aspirations, it devolves from this beautiful theoretical edifice which Salerno described into some sort of Bastard cousin a business discipline of accounting and finance or even worse It becomes nothing more than some sort of intellectual veneer for so-called public policy Which is really nothing more than a sanitized euphemism for politics That's all public policy is it's just a word for politics So is economics bloodless does that have a soul? Can it serve beauty along with truth? It's a good question. I think For all of us because there's an opening here progressives abandoned beauty a long time ago Progressives in fact they advance and promote ugliness as a matter of principle That's what it is to be a progressive They they attack the very idea of truth Now some conservatives Like to touch on the idea of beauty a little bit more the Roger Scruton's the Douglas Murray's the Tread Catholics and They consider beauty at least worthy of consideration While we're talking about capital gains tax cuts or whatever George wills talking about Well, if you look at the heritage's and the Claremont's and the national reviews They're too busy defining themselves as just not progressive to talk about something like beauty But frankly even the best conservatives are Paleo friends like Paul Gottfried at Chronicles are exempt from this conversation by the way But even the best conservatives they tend to be mired Just absolutely bogged down in faulty economics a faulty worldview and worse of all these delusions of statecraft That they're gonna somehow capture the federal government and turn it to conservative purposes So they really don't have truth Even when they do think about beauty. So I'm sure many of you are familiar with Steve Saylor writes for toky mag and he's a great sociologist in his own right he recently published a collection of photographs of US City Hall buildings that were constructed before and after 1945 Which he identifies as a dividing year in architecture And he says that before then before 1945 Westerners tried in many different styles to make buildings look beautiful But after 1945 they felt like they no longer deserve beautiful buildings And of course when we look at older City Halls, especially those from the 1800s for example in places like Philadelphia We see that they invoked European classical and neoclassical architecture But if you fast forward and look at City Halls built in the 1960s and 70s Whoo, they tend to be these just brutalists monstrosities of concrete and glass Gray brick and we have to assume that they're deliberately made ugly on purpose And in other words, they're designed by the architect to dehumanize The viewer of the building and God forbid you're an occupant of the building So why in the world are economists not noticing this I Mean architects Australians understand fiat money of course we talked quite a bit about that, but what about fiat architecture fiat food? Fiat art Fiat fashion fiat pop culture fiat everything Economics isn't somehow separate and apart and distinct from the cultural ramifications of Our disastrous economic policies So maybe we should be talking about that a little bit more because I'm telling you folks This hunger for beauty that we have in the West today. It's real It's real. We're starved for it Now I'm sure a lot of you watched the events surrounding Queen Elizabeth's death and funeral a week or so ago and There were certainly plenty of pomp and circumstances lots of marching One thing the old Empire still does well they put on a show But out when I was watching the marching especially the sas card I was saying they could use a little bit of that precision over at the NHS Where you're waiting 18 months to get your cancer treatment or whatever it might be but Aside from that what pulled us all into the Queen's death and funeral. I mean we're neutral in this we're Americans What pulled us into it was the spectacle And here we see in 2022 a spectacle of reverence reverence even veneration for tradition for country for a figurehead For a beloved Matriarch for a hereditary monarch So as we're watching on TV, we see these beautiful buildings throughout London. We see robed clergy conducting religious ceremonies In these majestic cathedrals, we don't see that sort of thing on TV too much in the West although I must say as an aside they during her funeral They made sure to bring in plenty of these sort of vaguely non-denominational woke clergy From all over London, but apart from that and a dreadful cameo by Liz Truss God But we saw all this military dress we saw soldiers we saw Masculinity we saw appeals to continuity everything progressives hate Was encapsulated in those hours and hours of BBC coverage and yet We all know that it was somehow hollow it all felt more like an end didn't it than a beginning? Felt like an end to an old world nobody's excited about the prospects of King Charles III Who is of course himself just a crazy woke inventor environmentalists? Who actually literally praised the great reset at a talk he gave at the World Economic Forum of which he's a member? And his sons appear to be cut from the same cloth And because of 24-hour tabloid media because of social media we tend to know all about their personal foibles And we see them in a very different light than we see the departed Elizabeth we we tend we understand that these are unserious people Following her up in the British monarchy, so it all felt like beauty without truth or substance It felt like some sort of empty pageant or a museum and of course it was made worse by the clownish Biden stumbling around and Having his giant armored motorcade that only the US leader was allowed to bring But even despite all that Even despite the attempts by the BBC commentators to bring in All kinds of left-wing issues into the proceedings there was something there and And it certainly got us all caught up over here So imagine how the the Britsville there was a hunger for some kind of seriousness and substance and meaning The British monarch just isn't the answer But here's the good news and it relates to beauty in a sense The good news is that there's at no point in modern Western history have elites ever been less impressive and More vulnerable than they are today. These are deeply unserious people deeply unserious and you know who I mean You know the blares and the borises The Klaus Schwab's the Zuckerberg's and the Bezos's the Pelosi's the squads the Bidens the bushes the Clintons all the sociology professors and The pop stars and these ludicrous influencers and the Twitter pundits All deeply unserious people Our elites don't care About truth and beauty as a matter of fact they they work actively against both of them But we can replace them. We don't need them every society has elites The question is always whether they're natural or imposed whether they earn their wealth and position in society or captured it Through the political process, but we have to expect this ruled by elites at least to an extent is indeed inevitable Every society across time across place manifests this and democracy doesn't change a thing It just transfers status away from merit and towards politics. We still have elites in a so-called democracy So I would suggest tonight When we're thinking about economics and our our mission our job is that political and economic liberty is really about the freedom and Prosperity average people enjoy in any society That should be our focus So if you look at the poorest and most corrupt countries on earth They have these terrible elites who fat in their own Swiss bank accounts while parasitically draining the citizens of even their most meager resources But in the wealthiest and least corrupt countries elites act far more benevolently and I would suggest we take a look at Prince Hans Adam the second in Liechtenstein As a benevolent elite So most countries in the West Today lie somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. So how do we identify good elites? Wise leaders who will act and guide the world in benevolent ways and move us towards truth and beauty leaders who care about civilization and property and prosperity and peace and justice and fairness and conservation and charity Well, I think we have to start Right here in this room. We start in small concentric circles We start by turning our backs on politics and media and academia and popular culture looking to the real world around us Just look around in this room In our family and our work in our social circles in our local communities are the men and women who can replace our very unnatural elites men and women who understand inequality and human differences as the inseparable starting point of Of any decent human society. Here's what Misa said He said collaboration of the more talented more able and More industrious with the less talented less able and less industrious results and benefits for both We can try to pretend this isn't real But that's what we're doing right now So progressives of all political strikes left and right They oppose the idea of natural elites not because of their claim to egalitarianism or democratic principles or dislike of hierarchies No, they oppose the idea because it contemplates a hierarchy not established by them a Hierarchy where they're not at the top and the other thing that That a natural elite means is that intelligence ability attractiveness Charisma wisdom discretion quiet confidence all these things were just so Very unequally distributed in nature These become the characteristics of those holding greater influence in society. We can't escape this We actually have a responsibility to be the adults in the room if we can use that shop worn phrase We need to desanctify this current crop of elites and replace them with much better and nobler people And it's really up to us None of this is easy. They're not going to do it for us People don't tend to give up power and influence Without a little bit of a fight So it's not easy and it comes with a heavy price a personal price actually to be paid by all of us Most of us in this room by our very natures. We want to focus on our families our personal lives our businesses our professional lives We're not wired to be agitators and troublemakers. We don't necessarily see ourselves as leaders We certainly don't see ourselves as radicals or revolutionaries and we don't want to lead political lives A big part of what the Mises Institute is all about is promoting the idea of organizing society around something other than politics So I get it I Get it, but Gentleman named Richard Hanani. I hope I'm pronouncing his name right He did some research and published an article titled. Why is everything liberal? By which he meant how did progressives come to control all of our institutions and end up as the elites and In his view it all comes down to cardinal preferences not a ordinal cardinal the left just cares more the left just wants it more They're far more willing to engage politically They're more willing to agitate to donate to choose college majors and jobs and academia or media or NGOs or HR departments for influence instead of money and Meanwhile the conservative hard-working people Are focused on their business and they're sending their kids off to spend eight hours a day With these woke monsters So in this sense our natural modesty Our live and let live attitude our inclination to tend to our own and mind our own business It doesn't do us any favors So in 2003 Lou Rockwell gave a talk at the Mises Institute, and I bet some of you were there It was titled the path to victory so in this talk. He argues against quietism against retreat Against this to hell with it all Accelerationalism Against attempting to capture lost institutions like academia and Congress and mainstream media So he argued instead For a robust adherence to truth to education to using every available platform And of course available platforms were very different in 2003 Versus 2020 to three almost But also to recognize that influence can be indirect and far off in the future success He said can take many forms and changes can happen very suddenly and that's true If we look at even American political history Barry Goldwater was trounced, but a lot of people think that he led to Ronald Reagan a Lot of people think Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot led to Ron Paul So you just never know where the seeds you're planning are going to sprout and when But if success can take many forms we have to understand that our personal happiness Our self actualization that's not the focus here anymore folks It's too late Mises tells us that action is it isn't it's not ease or contentment as a matter of fact action happens because of what? Mises calls felt uneasiness. It's our uneasiness with our lives and with the world that makes us act He's got this great quote that I can't resist from human action sometimes Mises surprises you And I'm going to apologize to any Buddhists in the room Quoting Mises some philosophies advise men to seek as the ultimate end of contact the complete renunciation of any action They look upon life as an absolute evil full of pain suffering and anguish and Apodictically deny that any purposeful human action effort can render it render it tolerable happiness can only be attained by complete extinction of Consciousness volition and life the only way toward bliss and salvation is to become perfectly passive in different and inert like plants Such as the essence of the teachings of various Indian philosophies, especially a Buddhism end of Schopenhauer I thought that was funny Poor Schopenhauer He says the subject matter of praxeology is human action. It deals with acting man not with man transformed into a plant and reduced to a merely vegetative existence And ladies and gentlemen that was about half the country during COVID and I don't think that was by accident And I think a lot of people liked it and these companies are having a hard time getting people to come back in the office So I'm not sure we can save those people But I do know that we can save ourselves and that we can form our own institutions our own elites That are focused on truth and beauty and I know that we have to so before we take a quick break To give out some awards I Want to wrap up with An admonition from Mises is life There is this hubris Amongst us in the modern world there's this conceit of Imagining that we live in the most dangerous or troubled times these times of intense and unprecedented rapid change Compared to our grandparents or someone who led these slower becolic lives Relatively speaking folks. I'm not so sure we do if we consider just a lifetime of Ludwig von Mises born in the 1880s Who died almost 49 years ago exactly? I believe on October 10th almost 50 years ago in October 1973 And in this roundabout remarkable way He's the reason we're all in this room tonight The man born in the 1880s But in his time he came from a village In what is now Ukraine? He lived and worked in pre-war Vienna Which has to be one of the most beautiful places and times in the whole history of the West I said he was surrounded by beauty He literally was But he also saw tremendous ugliness He saw Vienna his cherished Vienna fall to the barbarism of Weimar and hyperinflation He saw two incredibly destructive world wars ravaged Europe He saw the fall and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. He saw Leninism and Stalinism Nazism and Italian fascism. He saw Wilsonianism and FTR's new deal He saw the development of nuclear weapons. He personally had to flee war twice And then in his chosen profession he saw socialism and Keynesianism take it over And capture economics and call itself scientific Think what that must have meant to him And we're going to talk about change folks Here's what he saw along the way. He saw the world go from outdoor plumbing And kerosene lamps To widespread electricity. He saw telegrams And radio and television and facsimile machines. He saw the world go from horse and buggies to automobiles From the earliest propeller planes to jets to space travel and satellites by the time he died in the 70s He saw communications go from telegrams to radio to television to the earliest internet in the 1960s He lived through enough changes for 10 lifetimes So when you think about it that way, I'm not so sure we can claim to live in more perilous times than Mises did So we should have some of his fortitude What he called ilan vitale the french term for vital force your life force So we win by serving truth, of course, and we've always done that But also beauty Which we have neglected we win by putting economics back squarely at the vital center of understanding of all human social cooperation Not this bloodless statistical exercise. We win with a focus on the long term And not the short run And that means beyond our lifetimes We win by building better elites and better institutions and replacing the sociopathic clowns Who plague us And we win by going out unapologetically and forcefully into the world With our ideas unapologetically and forcefully those sas soldiers who were On display during the queen's feudal. They have a motto who dares wins The future folks belongs to confident people. Let that be us. Thank you very much