 Mark Thornton has a special offer for fans of minor issues, a free copy of Murray Rothbard's famous work, Anatomy of the State. This is a limited time offer, so act fast. Get yours today at Mises.org slash issues free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the minor issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. In this week's episode, we're going to take a deep dive into two huge issues that the mainstream media ignores. It relates to a previous episode on the Oregon problem and drug decriminalization in Oregon. Libertarians need to see this episode and the issues involved. The two fundamental issues that are in play here are one, property rights and our well-being in society and really our survival in society. And two, the pernicious impact on our daily lives of socialist ideology and mentality that has so infected the nation and the world, particularly younger people, maybe less than 40, but it's really everywhere. We also need to know that real full market reform is essential and so much better than incremental reform, as in the case with drug decriminalization. So we're going to be taking a long form deep dive using the podcast I did recently with Rob Taylor. Rob Taylor publishes the Rob Taylor report from Coose County, Oregon on the Pacific Coast, one hour drive from remote Oregon, but very much impacted by the policies of the state of Oregon. That we're going to be discussing measure 110 and we're going to be discussing property rights because I think that's part of the discussion that's missing. I think one of the greater elements that has happened in Coose County is the fact that we keep talking about either full-on prohibition, we're either talking about full-on prohibition where we're going to lock people up. I mean Donald Frump and his remarks on the speech the other night said he wants to execute all drug dealers and I think that's an extreme I'm not willing to take, I think it's a bad idea. But then you've got the do-know-harm crowd who want to have safe injection rooms, they want to provide drugs to these people, they want to give out crack pipes and I think this is a bad idea if it's done with my tax dollars. And so when I was set this article by a friend and it was written by Mark Thornton he's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the name of the article or the title of the article is called the Oregon Problem. It's not drugs, it's the socialistic political culture and anyone of you who lives here in Oregon you know that's what we're dealing with in Oregon. It's a socialistic culture that we have that's really pressing down upon us. I think Oregon is is sometimes the trial state for full-on American Marxism that's coming down the road. So joining me right now from the Mises Institute is Dr. Mark Thornton. Mark how are you doing? Hey I'm doing great. I'm here live at the Mises Institute. It's great to be on your program. I think this is a very important issue. You know my podcast is called Minor Issues but in reality we're dealing with a lot of issues that the mainstream media thinks are minor or irrelevant or don't make any sense but really hit at the heart of the matter and I think that the opinions and the issues and the statistics that I've seen relating to Oregon and this issue means it's a really big issue with the people out there and you know similar problems in other states and the problems seem to be spreading. I mean these are these are issues that simply didn't exist except in a couple of very isolated ghetto areas in the United States when I was growing up and now it's a common scene in some of America's great states, great cities around the country, places that were not long ago considered utopias. Yeah you know I think Oregon was was in that category that just a few decades ago people considered it kind of a utopian type of society and now look what's come of it so great to be here with you. And it's great to have you. I woke up at three o'clock last night and I started thinking of all the things I was going to ask you and what I wanted to talk about and then darn it I couldn't get back to sleep because you won't believe how much this issue is affecting everyday citizens here. In fact we are now looking at the development of and I don't want to call it vigilantism but the fact that the lawlessness that's going on because no one is taking care of the property crimes and the vandalism that's happening throughout our county here in Coose County and let me tell you how far off we are on the southern Oregon coast just to get to my little city abandoned you have to go an hour past the town called remote okay so we're we're way out here in the middle of nowhere and yet we have crime in our county that's just unbelievable and it's due to measure 110 which I did not support ironically because I am for drug at the end of the drug prohibition I've been fighting the drug war for a long time and not because I support anyone doing drugs I'm completely and would tell anyone that's a bad idea who's thinking of doing drugs but I saw a long time ago I was an advisor for the Gary Johnson administration in New Mexico and you know during his second term I was one of the people working with him to bring him out to start talking about these issues because we were seeing it in New Mexico where the extreme prohibitionists were pushing one way but the fact was it just wasn't working I was in a neighborhood where crack dealers ruled the neighborhood and it wasn't any better than what we have now but now we've gone to the exact opposite because of measure 110 they have decriminalized drugs which is far different than legalizing drugs and that's why we didn't support it and in your article I thought you did an excellent job of bringing out the fact that if you're going to have the end of drug prohibition you have to have the protection of people and property that is an utmost fact with any society and so I love that in your article yeah I mean you have to have a substitute and there has to be rules you know private property is a system of rules where my property is my property I get to do with it what I want your property is your property you get to do it with what you want and there's well established rules of what we can do and how we can do it you know who we allow to use our property how we use our property I mean that's a set of legal doctrines that date back for hundreds and hundreds of years and government you know slips in between that system it carves out a little realm of property for itself and you know we can do whatever it wants as long as the voters will go along with it and that's where the problem comes in because individuals who own property and who have an interest in being good caretakers of the property and and getting the most out of that property aren't there and so the public servants who are supposed to be serving the the voters and the citizens they have to act as a substitute I think it's important to point out um and it's very much related to this point is that with drug legalization the true drug legalization you spoke of and how different that is it is then uh decriminalization is that when drug legalization the types of drugs that would be produced distributed and consumed who would be making them who would be distributed in them who would be selling them who could they be sold to i.e not minors would be radically different okay so pharmaceutical companies drug companies would be making these products they would be under you know legal constraints of being sued for wrongful death for you know misadvertising their products product quality they would be under competitive threat from other producers they could go out of business or they could make a lot of money either way but it's entirely different than in a black market where nobody knows what anybody else is doing um we're the only incentive on the part of drug producers and distributors is to come up with the craziest most potent often the most lethal drugs possible so you know we've gone from a country where people drank beer and smoked pot and there were a large number of heroin addicts in cities like san francisco and new york city um to to a country that's overrun with you know crystal meth fentanyl um you know right now the black tar heroin from from mexico is actually relatively one of the safer drugs um it's produced in a primitive commercial like fashion um you know and of course under drug prohibition the potency of pot went from like a half a percent up to way more than 10 percent so you got just an extreme reaction as a result of drug prohibition and the drugs just got worse and worse and worse more addictive more dangerous more deadly and of course now we're seeing uh people gathering from fentanyl all all over the place um and and of course we had um several decades of people dying in large numbers from prescription opiate drugs and fake prescription opiate drugs um so the problem under government stewardship has gotten way out of control it's gotten much much worse um and we've made precious little progress now when i heard that orga had decriminalized all of drugs i thought well you know i was hopeful you know that somebody had uh said hey this is working for cannabis maybe it will work uh for some of these other drugs and it has you know similar experiments in portugal in spain a few other countries that have decriminalized other drugs have been much more successful um one of the things that you just mentioned is that under a legalization scenario because the what we've done in orga and i want to differentiate to people the that decriminalization means that for certain large amounts of drugs for dealing drugs you're still going to go to jail and for people who are using low level amounts of drugs who are caught with those personal use drugs they're going they're supposed to get a hundred dollar fine and um they they get a number you can call the number and get help if you want help the help really isn't there they're they haven't spent a lot of the money for to provide help in many areas especially in rural areas and um that to me was the bigger problem is that under legalization as you were saying the government would regulate the supply and until we get a candle on the supply until we get more uh commercialized regulated products that uh decriminalization would never work just for the scenario you set up and people are always going to say that well you know yes drugs will be safer but people are going to die of drugs people die of smoking cigarettes people die of alcohol right now those are drugs those are legal in fact i'm sitting here drinking sweet tea and that's a refined white powder that i consume every day and there are people out there hundreds of thousands across the globe who die of diabetes and other diseases because of sugar it's uh you know and so i'm i believe that it's still better to have these products legalized and people choosing to use them knowing the risk die instead of what we have here in coose county where and this happens all over the united states is that the gains the criminals control the production they control the the uh the supply of where it's delivered who's going to sell it how it's going to be sold and they control that through violence and i think that one person one mother one father one child who dies who's not using drug who's not involved with drug use is 10 100 times worse than people who are going to die who are going to use legal cocaine who are going to use legal heroin under our scenario because i would call it our scenario because i think you and i both uh in the same book of wanting to legalize it we just don't want to see what's happening right now where people and the government does it here they they excuse the criminal activity by saying well they're on drugs so there's nothing we can do about it you agree with that oh yeah i mean the potential for what economists call negative externalities where my behavior could be internalized and i face all the cost of my behavior but if my behavior negatively affects my neighbors uh passersby and so forth um you know that's that's the big problem and property rights does a great job of preventing people from imposing costs on innocent third parties and and so what you know the rule of law is supposed to prevent people from imposing their externalities on other people and but with the government in charge of so much public resources so much public land the streets the sidewalks government property of all sorts the schools um it becomes a really big problem if government itself doesn't find some way of minimizing my ability to have a negative effect on my neighbors or have a negative effect on just the population in general and i see that's really what's happening in oregon and it really is a matter of policy but it turns out i think that a lot of the public services that most cities and counties and states have uh in oregon certainly has you know programs to protect children and programs to help the homeless um you know programs for the mentally ill but they're um i i've i've learned um more recently since i wrote that article that most of the public institutions in oregon um have become woke along with the population and they're simply not either able or willing to or instructed to do what a lot of other public bureaucracies do in other states under similar circumstances and i understand that the police but out there are very frustrated with this new rule and that the hundred dollar fine nobody collects it um nobody calls the number um and that when people reach out for public assistance for rehabilitation services or child protection services um that nobody's answering the phone or if they do answer they're doing nothing about it and i'm afraid that as i described in the article and i've learned that the problem is actually much worse than i first suspected is the ideological problem in oregon is much worse um i think of oregon as um as more of a rural state um you know cutting trees we cut trees here in alabama too it's a big industry farming you know those kind of things um but apparently the ideological basis in the state has changed for whatever reason um you know and the the policy in the ideology now apparently permeates a majority of the voting class which tends to be concentrated in urban areas uh as well as the political class of politicians and bureaucrats um and that really you know has a big influence on um the rules that are enforced how they're enforced whether or not they're going to be enforced and um when you get to a situation where you have widespread homelessness and you have widespread open public drug use and abuse especially involving children you know that that indicates to me that it's you know the problem of drug addiction has gone way way beyond that um and it's and it's having a very detrimental effect in the state and i think it's probably having a detrimental effect on business and employment outside employers who get to choose from 50 states um are going to think twice about locating new facilities in the state of oregon uh you know and of course similar things are true in central america where this drug trade comes up um it's it's hurt jobs it hurts jobs everywhere it goes you know there's a few jobs in the black market and there's enforcers mafia type people jobs but they're not breadwinner family-oriented jobs and i gotta think that that's going to um have a further negative effect for the people of oregon when when employers are looking around they're not already in oregon they're looking for a new home whether that's for production raw material extraction distribution assembly facilities um you know you could well imagine given the diversity of climate and and and natural resources in the state that a lot of people would be attracted to that for its natural conditions and i consider this ideological problem and this policy problem not a natural condition at all but a purely man man-made problem of the human mind that's turned away from the traditional institutions uh that have benefited humanity over the last several hundred years and you couldn't be more correct and as someone who and they'll call me a conspiracy theorist i believe that the oregon government which is run by extreme leftists from the democrat party that they are using this drug decriminalization to destroy the rights of the property owner and here's the storyline that goes out now doctor 14 is that um they will tell you people they they're they're um they are losing their houses then they get drug addicted and then we have to deal with that problem by helping these homeless and they're calling them the homeless and i and i hear this in my own county by people who get up and try to put that narrative forward and i always get up and i'm correct and i say no the story isn't that they lost their house then they got it became a drug addict i said they became a drug addict they lost their job then they lost their house and now they're living on the street and you people want the rest of us to house these people by raising our taxes and taking up more and more land that's in the private market putting it into the hands of government to build these shelters for these people and i believe that it's a way to slowly erode our property rights and that's what i see happening now and it's happening um from the the top down i mean it's happening at the governor's office who has who has declared several emergencies on what she calls houselessness homelessness and i have to say that uh the problem isn't homelessness the problem is lawlessness once again and and i go back to the fact that if you gave me one of these these meth heads on the street today a house it wouldn't take but maybe three weeks before they have destroyed the house it would become just like the shopping carts and the tarps that they live in in the streets or on the sidewalks or on the front of the business and you can't take someone who's in a chaotic state and give them a brand new house at the expense of the taxpayer and the property owner because all you're doing is cutting into the taxpayer and the property owner so that it actually creates more homeless because many people are barely able to survive right now so that's why i think decriminalization is the way they went to not really because they love the attic and they care for the attic but i think they just hate property and and anyone who knows marks the carl marks was asked once what is communism and he said the the abolition of private property and that's what we're looking at today in Oregon yes and i i just directed a master's thesis that looked at the housing situation in the western states washington or gone in california in particular california but it applies to all three states and in all three states the government wants to restrict the ability of property owners to build housing yes and so in these three states i know portland seattle all the major metropolitan areas of california housing is very very expensive and basically the political class of the state had made the use of private property or public property it's taking that off of the board with respect to creating housing so what you're saying about the political class wanting to make the problem worse i mean they could just be stupid that they could be but i think it's more of their marx's orientation uh they're they're interested in controlling everything and micromanaging everything as if they were running some bureaucracy or some business and so they've artificially driven up the price of housing in san francisco in the bay area los angeles uh santa barbra portland seattle all of these places they've they've greatly restricted uh where you can build a house right so housing is very very expensive so if you get into any kind of trouble you know like this inflation that the fed has given us the last couple of years i've seen stories all over the country but particularly on the west coast where people are exasperated they're working a full-time job and the fed has basically caused prices to rise so much that they can't afford their apartment they can't afford to make their mortgage payment they can't afford to move there's no place for them to go so that would reinforce your point about the politicians seemingly and actively working to make the problem worse yes yes absolutely and you know unlike your state and everything that is east of the mississippi all the states that are west of the mississippi nevada new mexico california washington um oregon itself 54 percent of it is owned by the federal government 54 percent of it and most of it is forest land it's vacant land and that right there in itself is part of the problem because we're not being able to utilize that land for development and then you add on the high cost of development fees that could be lowered without raising taxes you look at the regulations such as the smarts the smart cities the smart grid regulations that organ has put on development you get you can get rid of that without raising taxes things like land use laws or again is the only state in the entire nation that has centralized planning and zoning through the organ development council our council on development and conservation and it's it's it's complete socialized planning and zoning i would get rid of that entire council i would let it go to the county's urban growth boundaries that they have created is just in that's just an imaginary line to destroy the development of things and you know you you take all those into a contributing factor but yet they're not looking at that up in Salem with the governor or the legislature that's controlled by the democrats they're not looking at changing those right now they're talking about well different taxes to tax us the the the producers instead of doing stuff that would actually encourage development and they want to develop they say they want to develop 36 000 houses a year they're never going to be able to meet this but that's their goal and the only way that they're going to do it without changing the things that i suggested is by making it from those of us who produce and it's a scary proposition because it's just going to destroy rural Oregon and and i believe that that is exactly their intent to get us all into the major cities so that they can use this for their playgrounds i don't know what do you think of on that situation well i mean all the evidence indicates that that is the case and um it it's a general problem i mean government is driving up the cost of everything whether it's the federal reserve creating money out of thin air or state county and local bureaucrats imposing all sorts of restrictive um covenants and regulations and requirements and paper filing um in this master's thesis um i i noted that uh the student found that the cost the government paper red tape cost of producing a condominium in uh in southern california was greater than what it would cost you to buy yeah a completed condominium here in in the state of alabama and sure you know but we're not talking about the land the cost of the land so this is just construction and then you know the construction materials can't be that much uh different so it gives you some idea about what um the the paper red tape cost that states and local governments can impose and then the restrictive government covenants that the environmental mindset wants to impose so we don't cut down trees and we have this and we have that and all this open land yada yada yada but if you do that that means there's no land to build houses and schools and businesses and retail and so forth and i know portland you know is highly geographically constrained yes um you know so and then you throw the environmental concerns on top of that and it's a it's a recipe for economic disaster and i know that this has been going on for quite some time i've heard the story from friends and relatives that go back 25 years or more so this is not new they're just continuing on um their drive towards uh control and and i think you're right they they do want to control people they want to um they don't like people out in rural areas they don't like people go to church right um organ is um is a state where people are not religiously uh affiliated the only states that have lower religious affiliations are in the communist states of new england um and that works against uh freedom and property rights and independence uh because people tend to have a more socialistic mindset they tend to be more indoctrinated in the public schools uh and so the situation can become ideologically which is what they want ideologically it weakens you uh and makes you much more willing to go along and the ultimate weaklings uh in society and the most unfortunate are these drug addicts and alcoholics who have no will really left of their own and they become a pawn in this whole process they actually it sounds to me they almost become like a weapon that the politicians are using to plan the productive class in society the people who go to work the people who own businesses uh the people who have to make payroll uh the people who have to satisfy the customer somehow or another uh this is all coming down and of course as you suggest they they're only solution they're only go to solution is we're going to tax you more we're going to hire more people to work for government and we're going to screw up even more people's lives in the process right um so if if if you don't turn that all around um you know the vitality of the state will just float down river and out to the sea one of the things that people often confuse libertarianism with is anarchy they they assume that if you're a libertarian you're you're an iran iron ran objectivist that you're conservative that somehow that many ways that uh you know they we talk about laissez-faire markets they they immediately equate that with anarchy but the thing is is that we still the the the reason we have government is to protect the person and the property building streets and bridges and all the other things they do that's ancillary to the main goal of protecting the person and the property from enemies foreign and domestic and one of the things that people will tell me well rob you're a libertarian you must you must think that uh that you know these druggies that are out on the street that have no home due to the fault of their own with or without these regulations that you don't you don't want to tell these people they can't sleep on the sidewalk you don't want to tell these people that they can't sleep in the park you don't you don't actually want to get them out of the the residential areas where they're building their their campsites and and i tell them yeah actually i do and i believe that when government the collective and and i believe in the smallest collective that we can have and still survive as a society that in a collective when we build sidewalks still for walking when we build roads they're for roads when we build residential areas we have to protect those residential areas and in fact i would argue that what they're they're talking about is the commons and that's the tragedy of the commons is that if nobody takes responsibility for it because we all own it then this is what we're going to get the real anarchy that we're seeing in many cities and streets um we do agree with that oh yeah it's the chaos the chaos the chaos um you know there's lots of different types of libertarians there's lots of different republicans and there's obviously a lot of different types of democrats um but in general all libertarians believe in the free society and it's just a matter of how much uh government you have how little government you have and what it does and libertarians agree that there has to be protection for property rights against crime uh violence and invasion um you know so there's some generally accepted uh things about libertarianism and you know for the most part um i live my life without really any government intervention to speak of i mean um when i go to the grocery store there's you know the government isn't overlooking that sort of transaction so we we go about our lives generally in a free society that's what made america great to begin with is that freedom brings along with it uh the opportunities for individuals to succeed in life to do better to do the things that they really wanted to do um and it's the state and massive government interventions which basically limit people they tell them you can't do this job and no you've got to be in school until you're 18 and you know you're demanded to do a lot of things you're prevented from doing a lot of things uh you have to get a license to do things you have to pay taxes on your income your investments you have to pay taxes when you buy stuff i mean you know so we become a very heavy-handed uh government in this country we're much less free but our freedom and nobody denies us our freedom is what allowed americans become so prosperous and to become the reason why so many people around the world uh want to come to the united states i just talked to a young lady uh yesterday from china and she was telling me about her life growing up in china i mean how she always wanted to come to the united states where she would have opportunities not that she was going to be given anything but that she could do more or less what she wanted to do and given an opportunity to succeed or fail and so that's really the key to our success in these numbskills in government and the socialist ideologues in the media in particular the mainstream media have been able to control our education and our ideology and they've basically turned that story upside down so that the entrepreneur is all of a sudden always the bad guy who's destroying the planet but in reality the entrepreneurs providing people jobs providing people with goods and services at a competitive price that's how the system works and so if you're living a good life it's really you're living between the seams of government you're you're serving your fellow man and you're being compensated for that and very often you know us lucky ones that are in that position we don't really get involved with government in much any way i mean what protects my house and my car and my health are insurance companies not the government and so it's really an ideological problem that we've gotten into and i don't have an explanation as to why the west coast states are particularly problematic or why the new england states are even worse in many respects you know when you think of vermont and you think of main and you think of massachusetts um those are very big government states of course they're also still like many of the western states they're still fairly wealthy a lot of wealth was built up in a similar fashion that happened in sweden sweden was a very free market country total free trade total laissez faire they became one of the wealthiest countries in the world and then the socialists got involved and started to break it all down and um so you know when it comes to economics we cannot do away with some of the basics like education like ideology you know we've got to know what makes the country great and what makes it prosperous and what undermines it and i think you know you're pointing out the tragedy of the commons the tragedies that happen with communal ownership and control of resources is really fundamental rob i think that's really really fundamental the fundamentals that the young people aren't learning today and that's it yeah and and you know when stalin went in to take over russia and he pitted the the proletariat against the bourgeoisie there was a state of chaos that he could take advantage of and that's why the socialists have to create that chaos so that they can create a new class of bourgeoisie and a new class of the proletariat we were you were talking about how the the homeless are almost and i and once again i don't put everyone in the same category in homeless i'm talking about the drug addicted criminal are now being exploited as someone who they can use against people who are legitimate property owners once again creating that proletariat creating that bourgeoisie you are someone as a senior fellow for the ludwig von misa's institute ludwig von misa's i believe it was austrian right or was he austrian austrian yes i'm sorry i meant that austrian and he saw what was happening with the vine mar republic where you have the international socialist fighting the national socialist the fascist against the communist and in an economy that we're facing today they tried to pit one here in america that the communists are on the left the fascists are on the right and yet ludwig von misa's successfully argued in many of his essays that it wasn't that the communists and the fascists were different they were either international socialists or national socialists on the far left with big government collectivism or you're on the right who which would be anarchy if you went to the extreme right but somewhere farther to the right past the socialism and fascism just before anarchy you have the libertarian who believes in the free laissez-faire market and that is really the the paradigm that we should be looking at but yet the news and everyone else keeps talking about the right and left as in the left is communist and the right is fascist and i think that paradigm is what needs to be broken when we're talking to each other which you know you see what i'm saying oh yeah and in misa's ludwig von misa's argued strongly against both of them you know he lived in vienna austria he was you know considered the last apostle of free market economics and when the nazis invaded austria and vienna they went to his office into his apartment to get him because he had so he had proven that socialism doesn't work and they wanted to figure out exactly how they could fix their system because it was very chaotic misa's fortunately had already left he went to switzerland then to portugal and finally to the united states and then after the downfall of communism in the late 1980s we found all of his papers from his office and from his apartment in a kgb warehouse in mosca so the nazi ss troopers had gone in taken all of his stuff brought it back to an agistapo warehouse headquarters to study it and then when the red army invaded from russia from the soviet union they grabbed all of misa's papers thinking that he had hidden this secret on how to solve socialism and they brought it back to mosca so they were both you know staunch enemies of misa's they wanted to kill him and they thought that you know he he had proven that socialism was impossible and chaotic and they thought he was just making it up and that he really knew how to make socialism work right and you know the fact that they were both after them and they both stole his papers indicates that they were really too birds of a feather they hated each other because one was international one was nationalist and you know lenin who took over russia during the russian revolution it's his birthday this week and um he would have never ever come to power had it not been for for the u.s in canada in france in great britain and even earlier germany itself propping him up um in russia so the fact that we got communism and leninism in tens of billions of russians had to die as a result we actually helped create lenin we actually had troops in russia during world war one defending the bolsheviks from the germans because the germans hated hated lenin and they wanted to sack him and we actually stationed troops to try to protect him so there's a lot of just crazy things in history that were never told about were always misled in public schools and by the media and but the truth that you cannot obviously anybody can realize that you know a free society is what allows us to be happy and prosperous it allows us it gives us opportunities it opens up things to strive for and in striving to do better for ourselves we're actually serving our friends and neighbors and um and sometimes people around the world um and and that's really what makes for a good society when everybody has the opportunity to serve each other we all end up being better off and we all end up being happier as a result and communism and socialism uh don't do that they do the exact opposite they cause conflict that's what's happening in oregon they're causing conflict on the city streets um in the cities and metropolitan areas of oregon and it's a policy that's really when you look at it rationally it's designed to fail it has to be because with the natural resources that we have in oregon just by accident we should be a huge supplier of those natural resources all over the uh this country all over the world and we're not using those natural resources because we've been hindered by the federal or state government that's in charge it's funny you were talking about how america so many times was helped out the russians when you know we up to the point where you know we started fighting a cold war with them hoover under the hoover administration in 22 he he sent huge amounts of food because of the starvation that was going on in russia right after the revolution which then kind of led into the holodomor that happened well before the holocaust and it's kind of ironic that uh you know we held out russia and then looked what russia did to ukraine you know a couple of years later and it's we could have prevented that as americans if we you know maybe let some of the commie stars i know it sounds cruel but it just would have been better if we wouldn't have had the policy of trying to always help them out one question i have for you and i i'm a huge uh i'm trying to read as much as i can and i'll tell you someone i've never heard about and you turned me on to him an essay on economic theory by richard camp tillett and i may be pronouncing that wrong but i noticed you or the editor of that book uh that um he had written and i'm not familiar with it but i i definitely want to hear some about that uh how did you uh you know how did you end up editing his book because this i just read chapter two and now i want to read the rest of the book on it because it it does lay out it seems like the same kinds of theories that um uh adin smith was talking about in the wealth of nations and you know of course all the modern 20th century economists melton freedman hyac and such were also uh extrapolating how did you get involved with it well my teachers i was just lucky to have some great teachers um including murray rothbard and um teachers here at alburn university who knew of richard camp you know because he wasn't a widely known uh or discussed figure uh he may be the most important person who's ever lived that nobody really has ever heard of he was irish uh he was a banker he became one of the world's wealthiest persons in the 1720s he wrote this manuscript in 1730 and he really explained economic theory very basic stuff across the entire board of economic analysis you know prices money inflation employment standard of living growth location geography entrepreneurship he's the father of entrepreneurship theory um and but he was you know he was read by adam smith he was read by david human two of the very first uh classical economist very influential but very mysterious at the same time he was murdered right after he wrote the manuscript and it wasn't ever published until 25 years after his death it was published suspiciously anonymously by a publisher that had been out of business for decades um and he he was always a man of mystery but he's really the first person who was able to construct economic theory you know such as supply and demand but really everything else and he debunked all of the existing notions about money being well and just all sorts of nonsensical notions that pervaded economic policy um like you could be you could the nation could become rich through protectionism um as much as i just like modern mainstream economists even they disagree with that so we've learned a lot from this guy and yet nobody really knows much about him and uh his economic theory is not widely known as coming from him but it at the same time it's it's widely adopted uh so if you took up principles of microeconomics you would see a lot of his influence in there as well as in economic policy where he was an advocate for free trade for free professions and you know just that the free market worked um on its own he used the word regulated in the essay a hundred times but he used it to show that markets were well regulated by themselves not that they required government intervention so he's really a diamond in the rough he might be one of the most important thinkers of all time and he influenced a lot of the great french liberals uh and english liberals and by liberals the european liberal is the libertarian not the democratic socialist um and but the ideas his name never really stuck with the ideas and so that's one of my big um crusades is to show that um he's really responsible and a lot more important than anybody ever thought and uh and i'm finding brand new things um in this book uh even since you know the this translation was published 13 years ago and i'm still finding brand new surprising shocking things in this book um that have not yet come to light so uh this is a very dynamic thing that we're doing here at the mises institute we're not just shilling a bunch of old ideas for wealthy businessmen we're supported by um you know individuals families family foundations we don't get money from the government we don't get money from large government bureaucracies we don't get money from you know the big charitable foundations we're supported by individuals and entrepreneurs really so it's a natural home for the father of entrepreneurship theory to have his work uh retranslated and provided we actually provide a free pdf of that book and even an audio version of that book for free on our website so we want to get the word out and we're we work very intensely with college students with graduate students who are studying to become economists and social scientists um and we work with the general public we have conferences all around the country we have scholars affiliated with us in many many different different countries around the world uh there are 20 other fledgling mises institutes not a part of us right but people who have seen the merit of living on mises at work and want to try to do the same thing that we're doing for their country and so a lot of our work gets translated into other languages my book on prohibition was just translated into portuguese um spanish italian and so there's a big drive particularly on the part of young people college students and business people or or want to be business people uh define the science behind what makes the system work the system of free market capitalism maybe maybe we should start going around like they did in the 30s and having the christian revival we will have the mises revivals maybe i don't know but i'm hoping that there's a generation coming up that has seen what the last the woke ism uh the the woke generation that we've been dealing with the last um well probably longer than four or five years probably over the last decade or so that really has gotten strong over the last couple of years i would like to see a rebellion young kids rebelling and having this type of uh revival for for you know this type of free laissez-faire free market uh ideas and you know you could the history for it is there and i imagine the publisher who published this book i imagine they the reason they they did it is because it was almost heresy you know what i mean i imagine it was almost a danger to be promoting those ideas because it was undermining monarchies and and such so i i'm just yeah i'm the people who published cantillon's book were the free market leaders uh within the french revolution movement you know there were socialists and so forth but the free market click within the french revolution is exactly the people who published cantillon's book so you're absolutely your guess is right on the mark and i can tell you that more people are interested in austrian economics now um than ever before it's like a million to one from when i was in college so and it's all largely young people uh people who are are in business or want to go into business and uh so it's the future leaders of society are really clicked into this not the political leaders right but the social leaders of community that um realize that there's there's an important message here i'm very optimistic i know it can be very frustrating for you uh to read the headlines and to read the misinformation out there but um from my perspective i get to see the students and uh you know what they're having to put up with at most universities in the world and uh they see a light go off when they see the science of liberty being explained to them they might not be able to memorize it but they can see it they can recognize it but yeah private property does seem to work doesn't it you know it sure does the entrepreneur is really not that bad but after all well i don't think that you will own nothing and be happy crap that's coming out of the world economic forum is going to sell to young people i i you know they you see a lot of them on iphone's but that itself is property their body itself is their property and i i agree with you i i think it's i think we're going to see a whole new revival of this theory going in um mark i want to thank you so much for coming on um we i hope we can get you back here again at some point in time if people want to see mark uh thorton's thorton's work go to mesis.org and anything quick you want to say before i get you out of here yeah i mean i would encourage that too there's you know no registration no fees our books are dirt cheap you can get free pdf we got daily articles coming out all the time about everything under the sun that's written for regular people and um it's it's just a great resource um and uh and i think we're winning the battle we're but we're very very small and i encourage everybody to take a look and join in because it's very exciting it's very promising and it's absolutely essential to save the way ours on the way of life that um we uh that we want um and that we deserve and uh i think you'll you'll see what we can what we can do and why other people are so excited about it so and i'm also on twitter dr mark thorton and um you know so again uh join us we've got lots of scholars that are on twitter and we have lots of scholars who are publishing every day a lot of young people publishing every day on mesis.org it's m i s e s dot o r g so thank you very much rob i look forward to coming back