 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Dice. Jeff is on the road this week visiting the Ron Paul Institute, where he had the chance to join Dr. Paul and Daniel McAdams on the Liberty Report. Stay tuned for the complete show where they discuss the future of the Liberty movement and ask the question, Are Young Americans Abandoning Liberty? We are delighted to have Jeff Dice with us today. Jeff, welcome to our program. Thanks very much, Ron. Great to see you. Now, I can't just say you were such and such in the Congressional office. You had several jobs and you worked your way up from the very bottom to the Chief of Staff. And when you came in, you did press work. And like I said, you don't want people with experience on the Hill. I don't know. You weren't a press secretary for anybody before that, were you? No, I think that was one of the things that really characterized you was that your staff was ideologically aligned with you and interested in the mission and interested in the bigger picture and rather than a lot of members of Congress get party hacks for lack of benefit. They get people assigned to them and their staffs who really almost monitor them as much as help them. But even though you were doing press work, you did a fantastic job, that I also had you do any work on taxes because I knew you weren't going to tell me that I should vote for higher taxes. But you evaluated tax programs and sometimes the tax bills were thick and complicated. And of course, what I wanted was the bottom line, you know, because they were raising taxes here and lowering them over here. And if there was a net tax decrease, generally that's what I wanted. But the goal was to have revenue neutral bills, which was a bunch of garbage because that was just who's going to be the victim in the coming new bill. But I know that took a lot of energy and patience to go through all those bills. But things worked out quite well and we were delighted when you became president of the Mises Institute and we have worked very well together. But today we'd like to talk a little bit about the freedom movement, especially in the libertarian movement, even though the words are used interchangeably. And I've been asked the question so often and it's almost like an accusation. Yes, Ron, you did good and you had a lot of young people coming together and there was a lot of enthusiasm and they've quoted me often saying, you know, for a true revolution, a freedom revolution, you have to have young people and you have to have music. And we did, you know, during our campaigns. But young people are very important and I know well because of being close to the Mises Institute and Lou Rockwell, young people are pretty important and you have continued with this outreach to young people and you have the schools in the summertime. So I would think you'd have a good perception on exactly where we stand with the young people because some people would say it's a lost generation, the millennials are gone, they're all with Bernie Sanders and yet I tend to lean in the opposite direction but I recognize some of the shortcomings that are going on today. How would you explain it to people who want to know how we're doing with the millennials? Well, we're certainly doing better on a net basis. In other words, there's more kids who understand Liberty today than 30 years ago because there's more platforms. It's easier for them to hear about Mises or Rothbard or Hayek or Ayn Rand because there's so many social media platforms, there's so many blogs, there's so many websites. They don't have to go into a physical bookstore like you had to in 1988. The question is whether the Liberty movement is growing on pace with the general population on a per capita basis. And that's a very tough question but I think we have a skewed perception of young people because I think social media allows us to hear the loudest people the most and so we hear a lot of news about how young people are trending towards socialism and how they feel hopeless with their job prospects, maybe with their marriage prospects. Their undergraduate education didn't serve them well, perhaps they have a lot of debt and that they think socialism might be attractive. I'm not so sure that's true because I think that young people are actually smarter and in many ways better informed than we were because there's so much access to information. So with us it's a matter of getting them to the right stuff. Daniel, do you have a question for our guest? Well, it's another part of that. A lot of people did flock to Bernie. I think a lot of Ron Paul supporters did flock to Bernie. There may have been right-man there. There may have been marginal supporters from the beginning but the other phenomenon that's been a little bit vexing to us is the Trump phenomenon. And I think we've lost quite a few, at least hopefully temporarily, to the Trump movement. Have you seen some of this? How has it affected us? I think that's true and I don't think libertarians or liberty-minded people should kid ourselves. Trump absolutely came in and sucked up a lot of oxygen in the air. The 2008-2012 campaign was also the Rand Paul campaign. It created some libertarian energy and Trump stopped a lot of things in his own inimitable way. But I think that at the end of the day the underlying ideas are there. You can't fool the laws of economics any more than you can fool the laws of gravity or the laws of mother nature. So unfortunately a lot of the really serious structural problems we have with state power, with war and peace, with Iraq and Afghanistan, with the dollar, with entitlements, those things aren't going away. They aren't changing. They're getting worse, if anything, under Trump. And so we have to stay here and do the hard work of informing people. And it may not be the sexiest task for young people today. There may be some attraction to Trumpism or to Bernieism. But we know what's right and we know what works and we know what's truthful. And ultimately I think that there's a lot more quiet young people out there who agree with us than maybe we imagine. Jeff, how about telling the audience a little bit about what your programs are like in the summertime? I know you bring young people in and you have, I think a lot of people volunteer to be some of the teachers there. And that's an ongoing activity that you have continued and I think Lou's started those programs. Well we run a summer program called Mises University that young people come to free to them and we bring really the best Austrian economists in the country and even from outside the country come and teach that. So it's really an amazing experience for the kids but Daniel mentioned Bernie and Trump. I really think that economics is the key and the foundation for what makes a good liberty advocate. Somebody who can see through the BS and cut through the arguments and make their own arguments. And I think when we see young people maybe going off the reservation towards some other ideological perspective it's oftentimes because they don't understand the economics first and foremost. So I think learning proper economics is key and I think that a young person can come to the Mises to learn more in a week than they'll learn in four years of economics and undergraduate. And that's also key to a lot that we do. I mean we do a lot of foreign policy here but central banking and war is a critical thing but I was going to ask you Jeff the one thing that's remarkable about the Mises Institute is you have a vast library if it occupied physical space you'd need a huge, huge building, a vast library of free goods available for the taking beyond the imagination of someone even 20, 30 years ago but are you finding that ironically it's difficult to get people to accept these free things everything is out there and it's difficult to get them to read these things that are not easy. Let's be honest it's not easy to read. It's astonishing. We have the whole world's knowledge at our fingertips now in these little things and yet in many ways we know less history, less mathematics less economics than we ever have so it's a conundrum not everybody, young world wants to read a 900 page book and that's okay there's a variety of platforms just sound bites on social media all the way up to really dense reading for people who want to perhaps become an academic in life. We have to tailor our offerings to the market just like any other organization but at some point there does need to be an intellectual revolution. We can't just change things politically, politics follows and at some point real thought and real intellectual effort. There's some work involved that's true. So we're not trying to reach superficially young people and we're okay with that. We're trying to reach young people who are maybe a little better equipped mentally, emotionally to accept some responsibility for some work. Most people are aware of the fact that I was motivated a lot by Austrian economics especially on monetary policy in the 1970s and decided to speak out. When I first went to Congress in 1976 the issue of the Federal Reserve was not well nobody was very much interested in it but over the years of course it changed and you were at the office when we talked a lot about it and a lot about auditing the Fed people would give me a lot of credit I may be deserve a little credit but where it came from was an institute like the Mises Institute because Murray Rothbard was talking about monetary policy because I read his stuff. I was influenced by him and I knew the Austrian economists and I knew Leonard Reid and Hans Sennholz and heard Mises lecture and all these giants that talked about it so I believe it was the intellectual movement that set the stage the fact that when I brought it up there was a fertile field out there and I think it needs both I think you need that I think if I had brought that up and the groundwork hadn't been laid by some group like the Mises Institute and others I think getting the attention that I got would have been much less. It's interesting how a couple different events really helped bring our view of monetary policy to the fore and one was of course you being in congress and carrying and having a platform but then around 2001 we had the Enron de Bacol and Arthur Anderson going down in flames and all of a sudden your committee the banking committee became the financial services committee and all of a sudden it was a lot more exciting and there was a lot more regulation and Sarbanes-Oxley occurred so that committee became a lot more important and then you fast forward unfortunately to 2008 when we had the layman brothers collapse and the housing collapse and the stock market collapse all within about a year those two crises really brought the idea of monetary policy more to the fore so all of a sudden people were questioning Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernacchi and you were at the right place at the right time you know what I'd like to do is mention to the audience that going to your website is a great place to get information and you talked about on the internet you get it there too but there's still people like myself we like to get books and it was the Fee Foundation that helped me in the early years but now people can go to the Mises Institute and get practically any book they want dealing with this subject but I do want to go into another subject slightly different than just the educational aspect because there were some big news today coming out in the realm of foreign policy and I know you keep up with that and that has to do with the so-called firing of Tex Tillerson and the significance of that as well as the appointment of Pompeo the CIA director to Secretary of State to me this is big news and I wanted to see if I get some comments from you on how you see this well it's interesting that he lasted a little over a year which might be a record in this administration and what I do know about Pompeo I know somewhat from reading about him when Rand Paul your son was I believe the only Republican no vote on nominating him to CIA chief now we have his number two is going to become head of CIA and he is apparently going to become head of state department I guess what bothers me the most is that we let the media condescend to following these stories these soap operas and we accept this idea that personnel is policy when really we ought to be concerned about executive power we ought to care about state power we ought to care about the unitary executive theory that John U and George W. Bush forwarded we ought to care about what people like Lou Fisher write about the former Library of Congress brilliant scholar the usurpation of congressional power throughout the 20th century so now we find ourselves in the spot where the average guy or gal in America has to wake up in the morning and care about this woman who is number two at CIA possibly having all this nefarious power over it's authority you know executive authority is the issue not the chess pieces and the players yeah that is a very good point and it's easy to get bogged down looking at the trees looking at the personnel looking at their backgrounds and predicting what might happen when the problem is much greater we've talked on the show so many times about how congress is absolutely supine when it comes to exercising constitutional power that said it is I do have to say that it is I find it very strange at this point in history at this point in the administration when the administration is on the cusp of undertaking probably it's most challenging diplomatic whole diplomatic endeavor that has taken place with the exception of the Iran deal in decades I think going back to the end of the cold war you're going to try to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea and you jettison somewhat hapless but nevertheless I wouldn't say a neoconservative secretary of state to someone who was so demonstrably more hawkish on everything across the board a person who wants to prosecute wiki leaks who thinks they should be in jail it's it's astonishing to me as you embark upon this difficult journey that you would switch over to this you know I just throw my hands up I don't know it's interesting how Trump is very much an empty vessel and on the one hand that's good because he doesn't have I think the worst instincts that Hillary Clinton might have had with respect to let's say North Korea the flip side is that he's malleable and people can come along and whisper in his ear and probably talk him into doing some things that he otherwise might not be inclined to do and the worst thing about it all is that the American public and the American media play a role we're complicit in this in the sense that when he dropped that moab for instance in Afghanistan the press cheered him and they said he's finally doing something presidential imagine that dropping a bomb is a presidential act but meeting with the North Korean regime is somehow a big mistake because no one's done it since the Korean War and no other president's done it so we create perverse incentives on our end and we're complicit in that and you put it out Rachel Maddow the great progressive is the one who's screaming out dairy go meet these people no one's done it before you know before we close I just want to mention the risk I see ahead with this appointment first off this has been planned we've had hints and he has spoken out very favorably for Michael Pompeo and now he's moving up the ladder but the person close to this little group is Tom Cotton I think Cotton's going to continue to be moved up in the ladder I wouldn't be surprised before this administration is over in the first four years that he will be in the administration and these guys will hoax like no no other group against Iran and North Korea so it's interesting to see what will happen especially the Iranian thing I think that is rather risky Pompeo is on the side of saying you know we need to get that snowed and come back here and face trial and then get elected and then get the death penalty I mean he's already made up his mind this to me I see this is pretty blatantly dangerous it might be overstating the viewpoint that you have but if you care to make a comment go ahead Cotton is bad news but what Americans don't understand in my view is Iran is not Iraq 10 years ago Iran has an actual Navy Iran has an actual military and all I would say is you know Rick Steves does the European travel show he has a show available free on YouTube on Iran and if you take the hour or so to watch that show you'll see Iranians in a totally different light it humanizes them and you'll see this is a big beautiful country modern in many ways and the idea that this is our deadly enemy is the only way you could say it's not bizarre is if your populace is just totally dumb down to the point where they think of Iranians as some sort of caricature but it's just not that way Well Jeff we need to close now because of time we could go on and it would be a lot of fun and I'm sure the audience knows how to find you on your website the Mises Institute for getting information and looking into the educational opportunity but I want to thank you very much for being with us today in person we don't get to do this too often in person we usually talk to people remotely but thank you very much for being with us today thanks a million for having me and I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in today to this special program and please come back soon 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