 One brief announcement. I know you've got a lot of great books. I noticed the boxes of books out there. And they'll probably all be confiscated by the TSA at the airport. But as I was telling some of the students earlier, years ago, around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cato Institute had a book of essays by libertarian scholars translated into Polish. And they smuggled them into Poland. And their hope was that the border guards would read them. And so when you go through the airport and the TSA takes all your books, it's a good thing. They are the border guards, after all. And you've got all these free books. But if you want 60 additional air miles on Southwest Airlines, you can buy my latest book. It's the Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics. The shipment just came in a couple of days ago. The release date is August 16. So this is sort of an underground distribution of my latest book there. My topic today has to do with the way Joe put it was progressivism and destructionism. And destructionism, how many of you have ever read something by Mises on destructionism? A couple of you. The last several chapters of his famous 1922 book, Socialism, are on what he calls destructionism. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to explain what he had to say about that, because I think it is prescient. It was prescient, as is so much of what Ludwig von Mises wrote in his writings. And I want to talk about what has happened since then, at least some aspects of what has happened since then, in terms of destructionism. Because that's what's going on right now in spades. Destructionist, socialist destructionism. And so if you read through these chapters at the end of the book, Socialism, today it seems quaint and almost trivial of what Mises was dealing with in his day. And he thought it was a big deal. But it's many orders of magnitude, a bigger deal. But a few choice quotes, hopefully these won't put you to sleep. He said, socialism is the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing. It only consumes what the social order based on private ownership and the means of production has created. Each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists. And when I reread that, I wrote a note in the margin of my notes here that said Venezuela. And it's sort of the latest example of this is when the socialists took over Venezuela. It seemed OK for a while, didn't it? If you remember reading anything about it, because they were eating up the capital, that Venezuela was one of the wealthiest countries in that part of the world for many years. They said to have more oil than Saudi Arabia, and they ruined it. It took a few years because they had what had been built up by earlier generations to live off of. But it didn't take long. It took a couple of years, and pretty soon you're reading stories about people who used to have good, well-paying upper middle class jobs rooting through garbage to look for food and killing animals and zoos for meat and things of that sort. And so that's what that reminded me of. Another thing that Macy said was, quote, Marx's disciples have faithfully imitated the master's example, reviling their opponents, but never attempting to refute them by argument. And that has always been a classic method of argumentation by most Marxists in my experience. Maybe there are probably some academic Marxists who don't behave like this. But Macy's was saying this in 1922, and you certainly see it today if you agree with them, if you disagree with them, the cultural Marxists, about anything, you're a racist, a white supremacist, a Nazi. I just heard that hideously ugly woman on TV. What's her name? Whoopie, calling a turning point USA, the student group that's having a big convention this week, Nazis. She must have read von Macy's. I'm supposed to call them Nazis. And I don't know if you've all experienced that, but you probably have observed that. Then he talked about the literary tradition known as romanticism, not romance, romanticism. So romanticism is man's revolt against reason. The romantic has a grudge against reality because it is not like the dream world he has created. And in this dream world, he hates work. He hates economy, which I take to mean economics, and reason. And again, if you look at it, it reminded me of what he wrote later in his book, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, which I recommend everybody. It's online for free. They have it here at the Institute. And this is probably one of the ideas that went into it. And my notes in the margin for this or that, read that. And then in today's world, you can be a man today and a woman tomorrow. All you could do is declare yourself to be a woman. And that, in itself, reminded me of the famous passage in the Communist Manifesto, like a paraphrase where Karl Marx and Engels said, once they eliminate the division of labor, you could be a farmer in the morning, a literary critic in the evening, a scientist in the afternoon. That's socialist man. And that seems to be what this detachment from worldly reality that the left has today. The world is going to end in 12 years, unless we adopt socialism, central planning, and do away with cars. We're told that there is a Hitler or a Ku Klux Klan guy hiding behind every tree in America, white supremacy, all these fantasies that the left has come up with. And Mises called that the plague of romanticism in his day. Another thing he said was, all social literature as a thesis to demonstrate, it is ever the same thesis. Capitalism is an evil. Socialism is salvation. And I'm going to talk about that more tomorrow, one of my talks. Literary socialism is an open avowal of destructionism. He said literary socialism. And so that was certainly, it was true in his day. And you can imagine, that was 1922 when he wrote that. And it has all been proven true over and over again since then. Tom Woods used to say that no good capitalist deed ever goes unpunished. Walmart has created and starts selling groceries 35%, 40% cheaper than the unionized grocery stores. They're attacked and vilified for 20 years for that. And so on and on. And that was Tom's way of expressing this same point. One more, the beginning and end of the socialist policy is destruction. Social art preaches it. Schools teach it. The churches disseminate it. So Mises is pretty gloomy in 1922, as you can see. Now, the examples he gave in these chapters were labor legislation of his day. This was 1922. In the US, we didn't get the minimum wage law until the 30s. And we didn't get really a lot of the laws that empowered labor unions vis-a-vis non-union labor until the 30s also. But he's probably talking about Germany. Germany had a head start in the welfare state. It was Otto von Bismarck who started the German welfare state in the late 19th century. Social insurance, well, he saw talking about early versions of welfare. Union legislation, well, we later had that in the United States that had empowered unions in the late 1930s, especially. Unemployment insurance, and he writes about the moral hazard effect of unemployment insurance. If the government pays you to not work, guess what? People are going to not work so much. And of course, we've all learned that, haven't we, since the COVID business started. You still see signs everywhere, help wanted everywhere, because of that. Nationalization, taxation, and inflation. So those were Misi's main things that he wrote about, pretty briefly, as the essential tools of destruction. And so to try to update that a little bit, one of the things I looked at is, if you go and get the government's own statistics from the United States government anyway, and total government spending as a percentage of national income. How much of our income goes to government spending? And at the end of the decade, in which Misi's published his book, 1929, it was about, you would come up with 7%. And these are the government statistics. And talk to Sean Rittenauer, by the way. Sean, as a young man, I think it's still a college student at an internship at the U.S. Department of Labor. And he used to give a great talk here about the absurdity and ridiculous nature of data gathering at the U.S. Department of Labor. So if you're interested in that, I was one of my favorite Sean Rittenauer talks that I can remember. But 7%. And if you look up the exact same statistic today, government spending as a percentage of national income, you get 45%. And so, and that would tell you that the economy is at least about 50% socialist just on that major alone. Not even considering the effects of government regulation and control of every business in America, as far as that goes. And I recommend a publication. How many of you are familiar with this publication called 10,000 Commandments by the Competitive Enterprise Institute? Nobody? That's good. So that's good because I'm now informing you. If you look up, it's called 10,000 Commandments published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute every year. And it's a big policy nerd publication, but it gives you an idea of how pervasive government regulation is. Now none of this existed when Mises wrote Socialism in 1922. Even the federal government regulatory agencies of the time in the United States consisted of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration was brand new, and they weren't doing much. And so this was the dawn of the regulatory age when he wrote this. But if you look up, here's some, I'll mention a few things that are mentioned in this publication, 10,000 Commandments. There's a publication called the Federal Register that lists all the government regular federal regulations of business, of your home, of life in general, not just business. There are about 44,000 pages of small print of the federal government alone regulating your life. In a recent year, Congress passed 97 new laws in one year, but 3,281 new regulatory rules. So they passed 34 of regulatory rules for every law that they passed. And when I lived in Maryland at the end of every legislative session, I would read that they would just brag to the treetops that they had passed between 250 and 300 new laws that year, just the Maryland legislature. And so, and I'm sure Maryland is not unique in that regard in passing several hundred new laws of all kinds. Now, some of them are not too onerous. They're like Hot Dog Day in Maryland or something like that. Let's celebrate hot dogs. But then they had a law some years ago that instituted a rain tax. And they said that when you know these big commercial buildings, when it rains, the rain falls off the asphalt roof and it goes into the sewer system and ends up in the Chesapeake Bay. So that's a negative externality. So we should tax this negative externality. We're gonna tax the rain. And so they started measuring the area of the roofs of buildings and then sending tax bills out based on how big the roof was on your building. And if they had carried that out long enough, I imagine that the construction industry would start building sort of slim tall buildings. You know, that's what I'm gonna do. But that's the one instance I can remember living in that part and that up there for 25 years that the Chamber of Commerce actually did something that was useful and they actually rallied the troops and got rid of the rain tax because it was so ridiculous. Because you had some guy who owned a pizza joint getting a bill for $30,000 all of a sudden, the rain tax bill. And so that's what put the fire under the butt of the small business community in Maryland and that sort of thing. And so don't forget the state of local governments regulate a lot too. Larry Kudlow who's on the Fox Business Channel, he's been talking recently, he's, I only watch him and Tucker Carlson as I want to see what Fox is up to. Can't really stomach the rest of them. But he's coined the phrase regulatory socialism to describe all of this, regulatory socialism. And there's a lot of truth to that. I would call it fascism. Our friend Bob Higgs many years ago said, our system, our economic system in the US, he called it participatory fascism. Now fascism from an economic perspective was private enterprise was permitted, but it was very heavily regulated, controlled by the state. So there was sort of de facto socialism and it was heavily bailed out by the state in Italy and Germany. You know, bail out kind of like the 2008, 2009 bailouts. That was, I remember blogging that at the time with a big long quote from a book on fascism of how they did this in Italy, bailing out because these were, they considered them to be their industries if the state did. And although the proprietors were allowed to earn some profits, they allowed a little bit of profit and incentive to exist in there because they had to produce all those guns and airplanes and tanks and so, somehow. And so I would just call it old fashioned socialism, but Kudlow calls it regulatory, regulatory or fascism rather. He calls it regulatory socialism. Now, one of the lessons from Von Mises about this, about regulation is one of the effects of that is every minute every business person has to spend complying with government regulation is a minute or an hour that he or she is not spending, producing better products, figuring out how to cut their costs, prices, marketing the products and so forth. So that's the opportunity cost of this. And every time I, when I used to lecture this, I used to give examples of a friend of mine in Baltimore who ran several, who owned several print shops, Curry printing is the franchise. And she told me that she would spend at least 50% of every workday just complying with government regulations because the printing business with all the printing and the chemicals and everything is very heavily regulated by the EPA and the state EPA and everything else. And she would have much rather been out rounding up more business and dealing with customers than dealing with government bureaucrats who would come in there and threaten her with fines and just awful, but that was her miserable existence. She's told me for, because of all the regulation. And so then it's like I said, this didn't, this barely existed when Misi's wrote this. Another thing that has happened is we've had what I call the watermelon revolution, which I'm gonna talk about in more detail tomorrow. A watermelon is of course green on the outside, but red on the inside. And so the environmentalist revolution. And I don't wanna steal my own thunder, but one thing I'll point you to is there's an article sort of famous in our circles by Robert Heilbrunner. Anybody here who has heard of Robert Heilbrunner? Raise your hand if you have. Well that's great. That's great that only Lou and me have heard. That's great that you have it. But he wrote this book called The Worldly Philosophers. And if you were a college student from the late 60s to through the 80s, and you took principles of economics, chances are you were forced to read the worldly philosophers. It was mostly the biggest statists in the economics profession. He didn't even have an entry from Milton Friedman, for goodness sake. And let alone Ludwig von Mises. And so that's what we were supposed to learn about the history of economic thought from Robert Heilbrunner. He was a lifelong socialist, but after the collapse of socialism around the world, he wrote this essay in the New Yorker magazine, September 10th, 1990, called After Communism. And he was a mea culpa. He said Mises was right all along. He got it wrong. He got the reasons why Mises was right. But he said Mises was right. He said the great debate between capitalism and socialism is over. This socialism collapsed everywhere. And look how wealthy and affluent the capitalist countries are. But then at the end, he says, but don't despair. He's preaching to his fellow socialist. He says we can make a comeback. Those aren't his words. Those are my words. But in the comeback can be in the form of environmentalism. He said this, socialism must emerge if humanity is to deal with the ecological crisis. Socialism must emerge. And he wrote this in 1990 at a time when the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had just imploded. And journalists and others, for the first time in decades, were able to go and take a look around the socialist world. And what they found was in an environmental, I'll call it a hill hole. I won't call it what it really was. But the environmental problems were many orders of magnitude worse than anything ever seen in this country. There's a book about it called Ecoside in the USSR. It's one book. A political scientist named Marshall Goldman wrote a book in the 70s. And he somehow got information probably from the CIA about how else would you get information about behind the iron curtain in the 1970s. And he wrote this book about environmental issues. But he turned out to be right on the money in terms of the environmental degradation under socialism because nobody owned anything. The state claimed ownership of everything. And so there's little incentive to take care of the environment if there's no property ownership, no liability law that was enforced. And so the governments of these countries just polluted at will because they wanted to compete with America. And in industry, they went to prove socialism was the way to go. And that didn't exist in Misi's time either. And that's all I'm going to say about that, that has to be added. Now, the Hayek redefined socialism in I think the 1976 edition of the Road to Serfdom, where he said socialism, the government ownership of the means of production, that's socialism. But it's also, he redefined it to include the institutions of the welfare state and income taxation and the redistributive nature of income taxation. And of course, I would add also Kudlow's regulatory socialism, if you want to know what socialism is. That's fascism, after all, was a form of socialism. The word Nazi was a national German socialist workers party. OK. And so those things also need to be added to the template that Misi's put together in his book, Socialism. And then, and I'm going to talk more about this and other thing, I'm going to talk more about tomorrow, cultural Marxism, with this relentless attacks on Christianity, the family, Western civilization in general. That didn't exist in 1922 either. That came about mostly in the 1940s by some disgruntled Marxists, European Marxists, who were disgruntled that the working class did not embrace communism. And so they blamed Christianity. They said the working class was too attached to Christianity. And if you think God is your savior, then well, Joe Biden cannot be your savior. Or whoever, Mussolini, Hitler, whoever, Stalin, it can't be your savior. So we've got to do something about that. We've got to get rid of Christianity. The family, if you're attached to your family, well, that's a problem, because your parents could teach you morals. And we can't have, as Joe Biden said a couple of weeks ago, when he said, when your kids are into public schools, they belong to us. They don't belong to you. And that could have been one of the early 20th century communists saying the exact same thing. And that's where the so-called cultural Marxists of the so-called Frankfurt School. And by the way, originally they had this institute in Germany. They originally called it the Institute for Marxism. But then someone must have said, now wait a minute, Stalin has killed tens of millions of people. Are you sure you want to be a socialist? So they called it the Institute for Social Research. Who could be against? Who could criticize social research? And that's the science. They're all about the science, social science. And then a Western civilization, the rule of law, constitutionalism, and so forth. Well, that stood in the way of Marxism. So these are things that they decided all had to be destroyed. And like I said, I'm going to talk in more detail about that tomorrow, of how they've done about that. And that's what we're seeing today. And Mises will not, of course, be surprised at what happened to American universities, which even in his time in human action, he called tax funded universities nurseries for socialism. Nurseries for socialism. And I quote him a bit in the final chapter of my new book. Remember, 60 air miles on Southwest Airlines. If you buy this book before you leave, you can qualify for the competition anyway. And in human action, here's some of the things that Mises said about the university system. That tax-supported universities are under the sway, always under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance the ideas of which they improve themselves. That was true in his day. We see it today. We see it today. And again, orders of magnitude more. I'll give you one anecdote about this. This was around 1990. And I was at the University of Tennessee. And there was a young libertarian historian who had just earned his PhD in history from a prestigious university. And he had great credentials. He sent me his resume because he saw that there was a job opening in the history department at my university. I wasn't in the history department. I was in economics, but I was in my history. And he sent this to me. And he's asking me if I had any suggestions to help him get a job there. And he sent me a second resume. And he says, this is my political resume. And he had been associated with young Americans for freedom or some conservative groups. And he said, for God's sake, don't let them see my other resume. Only show them my academic resume. And then this particular person took him, I believe, seven years to get a decent job. He bounced around. He had a few gigs at a community college. And he worked for one of the libertarian foundations for a while. And he had Ivy League credentials. And so, and Misi saw all this. He said, all the non-socialist governments, Misi's were non-socialists, were firmly committed to government interventionism and appointed only interventionists as professors. The first duty of the university was therefore to sell the official social philosophy to the rising generation. And as such, they had no use for economists. But then he also says, he sort of gives some students a pat on the back. He says, the majority of the students espoused without any inhibitions the interventionist panacea is recommended by the professors. But there was always a remnant. He talks about there's always a remnant. And as you are the remnant, the people like you are the remnant that we rely on to quit spouting these things, I retired from my university job a couple years ago, which was a good thing for me. It became so intolerable, the political correctness and the absurdities. And it was just the fantasy world that I quoted Misi's saying that left his like to live in. That was my work world, this fantasy world that I went to every day. And I always marveled over the past 10 or 15 years where I had so many students who just could not understand supply and demand, opportunity costs, marginal. They just couldn't get it. It didn't compute. But boy, they could stand up and give you a two hour lecture about recycling, like that, or whatever, the latest left-wing fact. Because they had been drilled into their heads since preschool. And these are 19, 20-year-old, 21-year-old students. And so you drill something into somebody's head repeated enough times over 15 years, and some of it will catch on. But I always had a remnant, too. I always had a remnant, too. Like the one student that I sent here, it came to Misi's University. He was a senior economics major taking my American Economic History class. And he told me he had taken all the classes in monetary theory, money in banking, principles of macro, intermediate macro, even had mathematical macro. And he told me I had no idea. There were criticisms of the Fed. This is the first time I've ever heard of criticism. True story, absolutely true story. And he came here and attended Misi's University and got an overload of what he missed out on during his college education. Another student from Misi years ago, Misi University, went to my alma mater, Virginia Tech. And she invited me to come to Virginia Tech and give a talk to her student group. And she said she was about to graduate with a degree in economics. And all she had learned was game theory. And she said, I thought, before I graduated, my fellow students and I should learn something about economics. So I came to Misi's University. And so Misi was talking about this in 1922. How many of you are familiar with the capture theory of regulation? That ring the bell. Well, that's good again, because most of you aren't. The capture theory of regulation is sort of associated with the Chicago School of Economics. And basically, there was a big body of research that looked at the origins of regulation. A classic example was the Interstate Commerce Commission in the United States was created to regulate the railroads in 1887. And the first head of the Interstate Commerce Commission was a railroad industry president. Now, the theory that you're taught in school is that the market had failed. And therefore, the government created this regulatory agency to act in the public interest to protect consumers from monopoly or something like that. But the first person the government put in charge of running this was a railroad company president. And so they regulated it for the railroads. And the first thing they did, there was controversy over people like John D. Rockefeller were given quantity discounts. Because if you're shipping a half a million barrels of oil a year, we're going to give you a good price compared to the guy who's shipping 1,000 barrels a year from his tiny little oil well somewhere. And so the smaller companies didn't like that. It was unfair that the Rockefellers of the world were getting a discount. So the first thing the ICC did was to outlaw discounts so that nobody gets a discount. And it went on from there. And they ended up regulating trucking afterwards. And so the phrase regulation for the regulated became popular among the Chicago School. Same thing happened with the airlines. There were more commercial airlines in the United States in 1922 than there were in 1972. And because the Civil Aeronautics Board was regulated for the benefit of the airline industries, and they basically ran it as a cartel. So that's the capture theory of regulation. Now, I call it the immaculate conception theory of regulation because the story that they still tell the Chicago School is that it was all nice at the beginning. It was all angelic that they had good intentions. They wanted to serve the public interest. But then they were captured. They were surrounded and captured. But the reality of it is, in most of these instances, it was the industries itself that lobbied for and got these agencies to be created. It wasn't enlightened public spirited politicians that created these things. It was politicians who had been bribed by corporations to start these things. And Butler Schaefer wrote a good book about this. And so did Gabriel Colco. If you're interested in this sort of thing, there are these two outliers on regulation. Butler Schaefer was the late Butler Schaefer. He was an old friend of ours. He lectured here many times. Friend of the Lemisi Institute. But if you want to look up books on that. Now, the reason I bring this up is this course all happened mostly after Misi's Day. Not all. The ICC existed in the US during his day. But I bring this up because in today's world, we have entire governments being captured by political forces that want to impose socialism. The World Economic Forum brags that its people now run the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, and other governments. I think Lou Rockwell calls the President of France a macaroon. Is he calling him President Macaroon? His name is Macron, I like Macaroon better. And the tyrant in Canada. And they all come from this training program of the World Economic Forum in Davos with their famous meetings at Davos, Switzerland. And so these people, in my view, have captured entire governments. They haven't just captured individual government agencies. They've captured entire governments, Canada, France, and Australia, and others. And even I was shocked at how totalitarian Australia all of a sudden became during the COVID business. And they had to have had this game plan all ready to go when this happened because it was so fast. And being one of the worst countries in the world. So that's another thing that I would add here. Now, the next point I would make about destructionism is if you consider this in a bit of a historical perspective, when World War I occurred, the international division of labor was severely shrunken. World War, you know, international commerce stopped when World War I occurred, okay? And then we had the smooth Holly tariff in 1929, 1930 that instigated international trade war that shrunk world trade by two thirds in three years. Just that. And then we had the Great Depression, which again, pretty much closed down world trade. Then World War II comes, and World War II. Then the Cold War, all the Cold War years and a huge part of the planet was disengaged from the international division of labor, from capitalism. And so for 80 years, we had this big impairment of capitalism because of all the war, socialism, government interventionism, tariff wars and so forth that's shut down, locked down, a big part of the global, all of China, all of the Russian empire and so forth. And it finally opened up a bit with the worldwide collapse of socialism, okay? And the point I wanna make here is that the forces of evil today have figured out how to do this without all those wars and socialism and nationalized industries and international tariff wars. All they do is let a little virus out of a jar and declare that they're gonna lock down the world economy, and it all worked, didn't it? They literally locked down the world economy for a pretty long period of time and they achieved a destruction of the international division of labor for a time anyway without going through all the rhythm roll of wars and all the other stuff that occurred during the 20th century. And we even have the researchers at the University of East Anglia, which is one of the hot beds of global warming hysteria always has been for decades anyway, saying, well, we should do this every other year, just as a matter of course, just lock down the entire world economy, just tell everybody stop, you know? And just for general purposes. And that's what they're working on today in the United States with the attacks on energy. So they did it without a world war. Another thing that happened that the progressives have blessed us with, there's something that came about in the 60s in the political science literature that was known as the Cloward-Piven strategy. I call it the Cloward-Piven Obama strategy. And Cloward and Piven were two political science professors. They were leftists. And basically their strategy, their plan was at a plot, was a mass expansion of welfare accompanied with vote fraud in order to achieve this, the mass expansion of welfare, open borders to put even more people on welfare. And their writings said, if we did this mass expansion of welfare, and massive enrollment of voting of legal and illegal aliens, it doesn't matter, open borders, then we'll basically bankrupt the government. And so many people will become destitute. They will have to have a guaranteed annual income. The government will have to just print up enough money to put most of the population in their view. The ideal would be all of the population on guaranteed government income, which was basically totalitarian communism, isn't it? In the Soviet Union, everybody worked for the government and they paid you whatever they thought would keep you alive. When I used to teach a lecture on the theory of subsistence wages, Marxist theory of subsistence wages, and I would have my students read what Mises had to say about that. And of course, the only real examples of that in history in the last couple hundred years were socialism in the Soviet Union elsewhere, that's where they gave people subsistence wages to live on, not capitalism. So once again, Marx had it all backwards as far as that. So that strategy came about in the 1960s, and they've been pretty successful with it. It began with the Motor Voter Act of 1993, where it made it much easier to register to vote. And the welfare state has had that effect. It has sort of degraded generations of lower income people of all races and forced them into pretty bad conditions. I've written years ago, I wrote about this group called Acorn. How many of you have ever heard of Acorn? More than have heard of some of the other academic literature, I mentioned it like, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, that's the acronym is Acorn. I read that they've gone out of business, but they were in business when Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, he went right to Acorn. That was when, could you imagine somebody saying, I'm gonna go through the ordeal of getting a law degree from Harvard so I can work at Acorn. And then voter registration, okay, which was, the Acorn style of voter registration is what you saw in the 2020 presidential election. That's what Obama was famous for. I don't know if the students here remember when Obama first ran for president, his claim to fame of what he was, what a professionally was community organizer, working for Acorn, he was their lawyer. Another thing Acorn was known for was a bit of an extortion racket and that they would go to banks and accuse them of not making enough loans to minorities, whether there's any truth to it or not. And they said, we'll shut up as long as you give us Acorn, millions of dollars. And then we'll also make some bad loans to unqualified minority borrowers at the same time, but then us Acorn, we'll get 10 million, 20 million. There was one knockoff organization in Boston that got a billion dollars from banks. And believe it or not, the head of it was a guy named Marks, M-A-R-K-S, not all the next, his name was Marks. And his organization was sort of an Acorn clone and it was in the Wall Street Journal. He got over a billion dollars in this way for this organization. And so that, and they went a long way toward creating this subprime crisis of 2008 because that was part of the political impetus for all these loans. My next door neighbor at the time was a mortgage broker and I played golf with him and he was just bragging through the tree tops but all the money he was making on no-dock loans. And so I, of course, the naive me said, what's a no-dock loan? And there was, of course, to certain customers, you don't need a W-2 form, you don't need a tax return or any documents at all. He said the government just said for these people, just show that they've signed up for credit counseling and that's good enough. And he gave him a $300,000 home loan, no-dock loans. And so it was just turn the crank and take those fees and collect those fees for the mortgage loans. And so one final thing I'll mention, and this is not Macy's, this Hayek wrote in his book, The Constitution of Liberty, that there's a whole chapter arguing why socialists have always attacked the whole idea of individual responsibility and there's a whole chapter in the Constitution of Liberty on this and why this is because if you're responsible for yourself, then well, then the state is not responsible for you. You know, if you're responsible for yourself, then you're responsible for defending yourself too and you should own a gun to defend yourself in today's world, can't have that. So we have this relentless attack on individual responsibility and it existed in Macy's time in 1922 when he wrote socialism, but again, we've seen this really blossom attacks on individual responsibility since then. Okay, the final thing I wanna mention here about destructionism is also from Hayek and the road to serfdom. You know, after 2008 happened, our friends Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev went on the Glenn Beck television show. He had a show on Fox at the time and Glenn Beck wanted to talk to them about the road to serfdom and the road to serfdom went to number one on Amazon sales the next day. And so on that same day, I contacted the Macy's Institute and we were teaching online classes under the Macy's Academy at the time and I proposed a course on the road to serfdom. And so I taught a five week course several times I did it on the road to serfdom, the students all over the world and the students were all over the world and they've read the road to serfdom and had a five week class on it. It wasn't like the graduate program, there was no credit, it was just for free. But I even had active duty military guys in Iraq taking the class on that, it was so popular. And so, but anyway, here's some of the things that some of the latter chapters and this should ring true to you. This should be very familiar to today's world. This is the 1943 that Hayek was writing this. There's a chapter called the end of truth, the end of truth. So this is the last thing I'm gonna talk about is what's being destroyed and by the socialists these days. Official myths are necessary to justify government actions. Read my Lincoln books, for example. Or my Hamilton book for that matter, official myths. In fact, Hayek uses the word official myths and James Bennett and I co-authored a book in 1992 entitled official lies how Washington misleads us. And so, I can't say that Hayek plagiarized us because he wrote this in 1943 and our book was 1992. But maybe, I didn't plagiarize him either on that language, but I just ran across that when I re-read this. He says, quote, pseudo scientific theory becomes the official creed, okay. I was just reading this morning. Anthony Fauci said, I never argued for lockdowns. And then there's an article on Breitbart today that gives videos of Fauci advocating lockdowns, you know. But he came out yesterday and said, oh, me? I don't know, I never advocate a lockdowns. Okay, pseudo scientific theory. Hayek said, quote, the minority who will retain a proclivity to criticize must be silenced, okay. Well, what else is Twitter and Instagram for after all on Facebook? Every act of the government must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism. He's talking about totalitarianism. Now, you know, think about how true that is of American society today and the whole West, Australia, France, Canada, and so forth. Every act of government must become sacrosanct. A friend of mine who's a physician in Montana gave a fabulous talk about the COVID scam very early on. I think it was April 2020. A public talk was on the web and her hospital didn't kick her out, but they withdrew her privileges at the hospital where she would send her patients to. So to this day, she has to send her patients to a different doctor, and that doctor can get them admitted to the hospital. But her patients can't get admitted to the hospital. And this is in Flathead Valley, Montana. And every year, the Flathead Valley, Montana has one of these, a newspaper, the best of, you know, best auto repair joint, best restaurant, best doctor. She's the best doctor every last three years in a row, best family doctor, but she's kicked out of the hospital, basically, because of this great talk about how they were fudging the statistics on COVID cases in April of 2020, OK? Public criticism or expressions of doubt must be suppressed, the same thing. You know, keep in mind, Hayek here is writing in 1943. He's sitting there at Cambridge University taking turns with John Maydard Keynes on the roof of the buildings, watching for the Luftwaffe to come by and drop bombs on Cambridge. Literally, I personally heard Hayek say this. And at Cambridge University in 1984, it might be a big story, but I heard him say it. But he told a group of 700 at the Mount Pellerin Society meeting in 1984 that's where he wrote most of the, he claims that's where he wrote most of the, the road to surf on the roof, watching for the Nazi bombers. But it may be a story, because he also told a story at that same meeting. He said, I understand there's a man in the audience who really should be the co-author of the road to surf them. And I haven't seen him in 40 years. But I understand he's here tonight. Where is he? And this old man with white hair stands up in a very emotional moment. These are all Hayek worshipers, the Mount Pellerin Society. He founded the Mount Pellerin Society with the help of Mises and others. And, you know, 700 people get up, a big cheer. And the next day, my friend Jim Bennett and I are going to a pub for lunch. And here's the old man sitting there, the white-haired old man, the rightful co-author of the road to surf them. And I had to say, wow, that was some story. You should be the co-author of the road to surf them. And this guy says, I don't know what Hayek is talking about. I go out to the theater with him in London all the time. And he says, this is a big story. He made the whole thing up. And so Hayek. And so when he came to George Mason when I was on the faculty there and gave a talk, he gave a caveat at the beginning. He says, yeah, I'm not what I used to be. He said, I think I went sea now for a while, but I quit smoking and it brought my brainwave back. He was a jokester, like that. Anyway, so I'm reading from the road to surf them here. And then one final thing he says, in the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs, such as history, law, or economics, be disinterested, search for truth cannot be allowed. Well, this certainly sounds like a lot of what's going on in universities today, to be sure. And I could tell you, I could stand up here for the next three days telling stories about this. Finally, truth itself is no longer something to be found, but becomes something to be laid down by authority, the end of truth in a totalitarian system. And all I could think of when I reread that was Fauci saying, I am the science. Science is not the science. I am the science. And these people, they actually say these things, at least in the Hayek's day, I don't think they came out and said these things, but they're so arrogant now because they know, or they think anyway, that we will just sit back and take it. And they are the science. And now they're even admitting that they lied to us. This Berks woman, the creepy woman with the scarfs that was on TV all the time during the COVID thing, she wrote a whole book bragging that she lied about this. And I've been thinking of writing an article about why she would lie, admit this. And I'm not sure I know why she would admit this, but she did, and so, Hayek had this all nailed in 1943 and it fits in with what his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, was saying in socialism a couple of decades earlier. And one thing I left out in my talk when I was talking about regulation is in addition to all those regulations, 45,000 pages, in the U.S., we have all these czars. You know, czar, there's a czar for everything. A czar, like there's an AIDS czar. This is a presidential appointee that doesn't have to go through the senatorial process of being voted on by the Senate. And there's a list online of all the czars. And some of these, I look at these like, how can I get a job like this? It probably pays a big salary. And I wrote down some of my favorites. There's an AFPAC czar, Afghanistan and Pakistan, AFPAC czar. There's an Asian carp czar. That's the job I would want, the Asian carp czar. This is the biggest knee slapper, a financial stability czar. Can you imagine the government, the bird flu czar. Maybe I want that one, I'm not the Asian carp. Climate change czar, a censorship czar. I guess this job is to make sure there's a lot more and more censorship every year, okay? A sexual assault czar. Any Bola czar, how about that? Global AIDS czar and a homelessness czar. He's doing a good job, isn't he? The homelessness czar. If I was president, I would give the homelessness czar a shovel and send him to San Francisco. That's what I would do. And that's my story for now. I guess we'll have time for questions if you have any. What's that? You don't have time? Well, who were you to say we don't have time? Who was this guy? No, we don't have time.