 This talk, the title of this talk, is Myths of Market Failure. And I'm going to give you a little history of economic thought background on this, since I've published articles and things on this whole thing over the years. And one of my articles I've published co-authored with Jack High, back a long time ago when we were both at George Mason, was about antitrust and competition. And one of the things that we, points we made in there is that until you get to the 1930s really, people, economic writers who wrote on a subject of competition and monopoly law was relatively new. The first federal antitrust law in the U.S. was 1890. And I think it was the first anti monopoly law in the world, actually. And then other countries followed suit. Most economic writers thought of competition like the Austrians did and do today as a dynamic rivalrous process of entrepreneurship and discovery. That's basically, and it's an ongoing and dynamic process, a never-ending process. We didn't think of competition in those days as perfect competition with all those assumptions of many firms, perfect information, homogeneous products and all that. That came around the 1930s. And so, you know, as long as economists understood this, that this is the nature of markets, there wasn't a big literature on market failure. But that all changed with the advent of the so-called competitive model, where the economics profession began trying to imitate the physical sciences, physics in particular, to construct mathematical models of competition. So all of a sudden in the 1930s and thereafter, the markets hadn't changed, but the theory of markets changed. The benchmark of efficiency became the perfect competition model. And so all of a sudden there were all these books and things written about how markets fail. And part of it was motivated by the existence of the Great Depression and the impulse to blame capitalism for the Great Depression, and not the Fed in anything but government, and not the massive 15 years of government intervention in the United States that caused this. It was capitalism. And so there were all of a sudden all these books. And so it became a real industry within the economics profession in the 30s, 40s, 50s, especially in market failure. And so in one of the, and what it created is what the economist Harold Dempsey has called the nirvana fallacy. It led to this fallacy called the nirvana fallacy. And this language came from an article that Harold Dempsey, he's a UCLA economist. He passed away last year. He was a great economist. He was a fellow traveler of the Austrians. He never called himself an Austrian. But when I was in graduate school 115 years ago, shortly after they slayed the last dinosaur out on Montana somewhere, I remember reading about it in the school newspaper. But I read, I was a big fan of Dempsey's research, mostly because it was very Austrian like and it's very applied. And it was published in places like the American Economic Review. And so, but anyway, this one article of his, I think it was 1969 Journal of Law and Economics. And it was a debate with Kenneth Arrow, who was a Nobel Prize, one of the early Nobel Prize winning economists, Kenneth Arrow. And they were debating over market failure. And Dempsey used this phrase, I don't know if he was the first one to coin it, but he used the phrase nirvana fallacy to say that, well, this is the method of analysis that Kenneth Arrow was using. And at the time he was using Arrow as an example, a very prominent example of the type of analysis that went into market failure analysis. Okay, now what is nirvana fallacy? Well, it's basically establishing some sort of benchmark for efficiency, perfect competition. And you think of the old assumptions, the original assumptions of this model of the time, many firms, whatever that is, many, perfect or homogeneous products. Everybody produces the same thing, homogeneous prices. Everyone charges the same price, perfect information. You know, consumers know everything there is to know about the market and producers know how to minimize costs and maximize profits and so forth. So that's perfection. And so, and the method of analysis was to assume that that's perfection and then compare that to the real world. And then the real world inevitably fails everywhere. And in this article that I mentioned with Jack High, that was published in Economic Inquiry way back in 1988, when I was just five years old, just kidding, she thinks I'm serious. But we mentioned, I lost my train of thought since I made a joke. So anyway, in this article, the nirvana fallacy, what I wanted to make here, the debate with Demsets, he was making the point that this is really a bad method of analysis. You know, dishonest. He didn't say dishonest, I think it's dishonest, to point this in never, never achievable ideal and compare the real world to it and say the real world fails. And then the point I was going to make is that we cite in this article some literature, some books that were celebrating, celebratory and economic journal articles that said things like, at long last we have discovered that there's market failures everywhere and we can now construct a positive government program to save the world from market failure. It was really ridiculous. I thought they were celebrating. You would think if they discovered that the wheels were running off of the economy, they wouldn't be so happy about it, but these statist economists at the time were. And so it was a big deal. And that led to the publication of books by Edward Chamberlain and Joan Robinson on monopolistic competition, which is sort of like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence. If you don't like country music, it would be country music, you know, whatever it is as far as that goes. And so, and even an old Chicago school, law and economics scholar, the late Robert Bork, who was also a federal judge, he wrote a big book on any trust economics. And one of my favorite lines in the book is when he said, if the government actually tried to force perfect competition on us, it would have the same effect on the economy roughly as several strategically placed nuclear explosions on the economy. We really took this seriously. But that became the method of analysis. And here's like one simple example of the method of analysis. There was a literature on innovation, product innovation. And this was sort of a takeoff of monopolistic competition. I'm not going to get into monopolistic competition. But in the 70s and 80s, there was a whole literature in the economics journals. It was always considered sort of a footnote to the theory of monopolistic competition. It was highly critical of technological innovation claiming it created monopolies. And the simple, you know, Econ 101 analysis. This is the textbook monopoly diagram. And from the, you know, principles, micro textbook, monopoly model. You know, monopolists will equate marginal revenue and marginal cost and decide that this is the profit maximizing level of output here in charge of monopoly price. But if this were competition, this would be the marginal cost curve here would be the supply curve. And here would be the supply and demand. That would be the equilibrium quantity here, QC. And so there was this literature that basically said innovation needs to be regulated by the state because it creates monopoly. It should be, you know, part of the anti-monopoly regulation. And most importantly, what does monopoly do? It restricts output and causes a dead weight loss. There's a dead weight loss and the loss in consumer surplus. Okay. And Demsets came out and made what seemed to me to be a pretty obvious point is that, hold on now, what you're saying is that if maybe a hundred people had the idea at the same time, okay, for this innovation, then you would have Q sub C. That would be the output. But that didn't happen. Somebody did it first. Therefore you have QM. Yes. So what you're doing is you're comparing this utopian ideal where a hundred people, the same light bulb went off in their heads simultaneously and therefore they all invented this product and put it all in the market at the exact same moments. Perfect competition. And you compare that to the real world where only one guy did it and the real world fails. And Demsets says that's an inappropriate comparison. What you should be comparing to if you're concerned about output production is today. Okay. Let's say the invention comes on the market tomorrow. The appropriate comparison would be today when you have zero output of this product compared to tomorrow when it's invented and you have this much QM. Okay. There's an expansion of output. There's not a restriction of output. The invention and innovation expands production in the marketplace. It doesn't restrict reduction in the marketplace. And of course it's always going to be that way. If you make this assumption of perfectly competitive equilibrium that everybody had the same invention. And so that's an example of the nirvana fallacy that leads to invariably, it always leads to recommendations for more regulation, more control, more government outright production of resources. And this is kind of related to another type, a more modern version of so-called market failure for which Joseph Stiglitz among other people and somebody else won a Nobel Prize in economics. And this is called asymmetric information. Some of you have taken microeconomics may have heard of this supposedly form of market failure, the fact that we all have different information. But one of the original articles on this, on asymmetric information, was on what's called the lemon's problem. It was an article that claimed that used car dealers have more information about the cars than the buyers do. Therefore they're likely to sell you a lemon. A lemon is being a word for a car that has some sort of problem. And the engine's about to blow or something like that. And then the prediction that came out of this article was that the used car market, people would catch on that they're selling you lemons and so the used car market would disappear. The author of this was Bruce Akerlof, who was the husband of Janet Yellen, the former Fed chairman. And so that was the lemon's problem as published in the American Economic Review. But what he didn't mention at the time, this was published in the early 70s, at the time the warranty market had solved the lemon's problem. The used car dealers had warranties that said, you know, if you exist today, if you go to CarMax, which is a big used car sales place in the United States, and you buy a car, the last time I did, I bought and sold several cars to CarMax, and they used to give you seven days to bring the car back. No questions asked if you don't like it and they give you all your money back. And so that solves the lemon problem. You're not going to buy a lemon. You have plenty of time to take it to a mechanic and make sure you weren't sold a defective car. It existed when Akerlof wrote the article. And so I published a little article about this years later, and I want to short quote from Von Mises on this, on this point of saying that this is a market failure. And keep in mind, the market failure has to do with this point that everybody has the same information that is said to be a desirable thing. You know, talk about nirvana. And if I can find, here's what Mises said. Mises said this, the adjustment of prices to every change in the data would be achieved at one stroke. So that's what he's talking about, that the market everybody knows at the same time in one stroke there's a change in the marketplace and that everybody knows about at the same time. It is impossible to imagine such uniformity in the correct cognition and appraisal of changes in data except by the intercession of super human agencies. We would have to assume that every man is approached by an angel informing him of the change in the data. You know, an angel. Moreover, even if market participants did possess the same data and information, they are bound to appraise it differently. So even if the angel did come and give us all the same information about this new product, let's say, we would all appraise that information differently because we're all different. And so in other words, it's a human impossibility to think that people would all have the same information. And of course, asymmetric information is why markets work. It's another word for it would be the division of labor. Who knows more about how to manufacture an automobile? You or the automobile manufacturers? Who knows more about how to build a house? Homebuilders or you? Everything in your life, when you think about it, the reason we have human civilization is the international division of labor. But somehow people like Joseph Stiglitz have sort of confused this and called it asymmetric information leading to market failure. But it's really, you know, in the old days, maybe 50 years ago when we're in a machine age, the language we did use was division of labor. But there's also division of information. Now that we have a more information age economy, you know, we can talk about this and more in terms of the division of information. You know, in not just a division of knowledge or additionally a division of labor rather. And I also quote Hayek in the same article because Hayek way back in the 40s also was writing about this about maybe the undesirability or the unreality of all this. So that's one type of market failure problem, the nirvana fallacy. And it's pretty pervasive in a bunch of the literature. And just think of that perfect competition model and you know all those unrealistic assumptions and I assume Peter Klein probably mentioned that. And there's there's also a good literature now. Another point before I proceed though is the way the economics profession handled this. I gave you a little bit of a history lesson earlier talking about them sets and all these people is that when the public choice school came along in the 1960s, basically the economics of political decision making. Everyone here I assume knows what public choice economics is. Maybe you've run across in a textbook. What they did basically was to basically accept the market failure literature and say, okay, we accept all this market failure literature. But let's apply the same criterion of Pareto optimality to government because government allocates a lot of resources to. And so they claim to have constructed a theory of government failure to work alongside the theory of market failure. And Harold Demp said, so I mentioned earlier, he calls this comparative institutional analysis. So a lot of the research that you would find in the ship by the Chicago school economists published in the Journal of Law and Economics Journal of Political Economy. And of course, by this type of methodology of assuming without even challenging the market failure analysis, take a look at, well, what's the alternative? How is government likely to do better or worse? And of course, the big theme of the public choice literature is that even if there is, quote, failure of markets, governments will fail orders of magnitude worse typically. If you compare the two institutions, the method of analysis would be to make a decision on which is less perfect, not comparing perfection to reality, but imperfection to imperfection. That's sort of the method of analysis. Now there's another strain of research that has always challenged the market failure. Of course, the Austrians never accepted the perfect competition model as a model of competition. They've always been around, always had that view. They never changed their view of competition as a dynamic rivalrous process of entrepreneurship. But there are a lot of other economists, Chicago school and elsewhere, and Austrian economists who have done a lot of applied research, looking into all the various theories of market failure. And so I'm going to talk about some of them and maybe peak your interest into looking up some of this literature. And one old article was by Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize winning economist from Chicago. He's not an Austrian, but his famous article about the lighthouse was, it's still being debated actually in economics literature, but I always thought this was a great type of research. That I really appreciated because Coase did what the market failure economists typically did not do. The market failure literature became very highly mathematized, very highly quantitative. You know, typically an article would be published in some highfalutin economics journal with 116 equations to prove that markets once again fail. And there would be not a bit of reality in it. No, no case studies, not even those statistics, all theory. And so for many, many years, the lighthouse was used as an example of a freerider problem. Market failure due to a freerider problem, the theory being, you know, once a light is shined over a harbor, it provides, it creates a public good. And so the next ship to come by has no incentive at all to pay for the public good. Therefore, you, you will have an inadequate provision of lighthouses in the world. And in textbook after textbook that was used. And so in Coase's article, it's called the lighthouse in economics, you know, published a long time ago in the journal on economics. I'll take one short quote by Paul Samuelson. And Paul Samuelson's famous textbook says, take our earlier case of a lighthouse to war against rocks. Its beam helps everyone in sight. A businessman could not build it for a profit since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. And that was Paul Samuelson's textbook, which was the biggest selling textbook in economics in the world from 1948 until the 1980s. And all during that time, all the top competitors for that textbook were basically clones of Samuelson's textbook. So this is what generations of economics students were taught as a quintessential example of market failure due to the free rider problem. And so, but Coase did be unheard of. Unheard of at Harvard and MIT anyway. He got up off his swivel chair and his faculty office and went to the library. Can you imagine a professor at a distinguished institution like that walking across campus to the library and reading a book? Oh my God. What is this world coming to? They're supposed to sit in their behinds until they die playing with mathematical models if you're an MIT economics professor. Well, anyway, basically what Coase found, he did a case study of the British lighthouse system in history and found that private enterprise had built private lighthouses in antiquity. And because it was in their own self interest to do it, they were entrepreneurs. And they knew it would be very dangerous to ship cargo from America all the way across the Atlantic to England and then have a storm pop up at the last day of the voyage and have their ship crash on the rocks. And if they weren't sufficiently insured, they're, you know, they're up the creek without a paddle, so to speak, maybe literally up the creek without a paddle if that were to happen. And so that's in a nutshell, that's what Coase found. So I just want to bring some of this literature to your attention. And at the end of his article, he says this, and you know, after quoting Paul, the great Paul Samuelson and another Nobel Prize winning economist saying this, Coase says, The question remains, how is it that these great men have in their economic writings been led to make statements about lighthouses, which are misleading as to the facts, whose meaning, if thought about in a concrete fashion is quite unclear, and which to the extent that they imply a policy conclusion are very likely wrong. Okay. And well, he basically says what I just said, they're lazy. They didn't look around. They didn't, they didn't do the research. Okay. And that's why I'm mentioning this particular type of research. Now I'm going to give a couple more examples and what runs through these examples that I'm going to mention of this is that these stories of market failure tend to ignore three main things that they all seem to ignore is one, the dynamic nature of markets. They tend to take a snapshot at a point in time of a market. And they are unhappy with the outcome, because it's not perfection. They also tend to ignore, not always tend to ignore entrepreneurial discovery, because after all, if there is a problem like not enough light in the harbor. Well, surely it's it's in it in somebody's self interest to solve that problem because there's going to be money in it and solving that problem, especially if there's there's money in it. Why wouldn't they solve they don't they don't need some professor from MIT to tell them that how to make a buck. They're going to they're going to work at it and the human mind, you know, often will succeed in doing that. That's what entrepreneurship does. And also they tend to ignore history and reality, because there's overly theoretical model of the literature. No, there's there's plenty. There's case studies and think the literature, but the literature that coast was talking about and Samuelson. Like I said, they tend to think that theory is enough, but theory is not always enough. At least at least the Chicago school and its its positivism, at least it proposed testing these theories and the testing is sometimes very dubious. But but at least they they they made some attempt to enter the world of reality to test the theory and see if it could explain things in the world. But a lot of the market failure literature is just pure theory and doesn't make an attempt to that. Another example, for years, road building, you know, Walter Block, who's not with us, we call him our roads scholar, because he's for for the past 50 years. He's been making the case for the privatization of roads everywhere. He has all sorts of wild schemes underground super highways and everything. It seems to be zero opportunity cost economics, though, that's because these highways he talks about. It seems to me would cost trillions of dollars to build that. But anyway, but for a long time, there was a free rider problem story, you know, public good story about roads. Said that, you know, you need you need a government funding of roads and highways because it's a free rider problem. You know, once the road is built and if if it's difficult or impractical to have a toll everywhere and charge people, there will be free riders and you'll never be able to raise enough money. And so I would refer you to there's one other article I'm going to mention on this that I thought was kind of a need article because of the method of analysis that was done, you know, which is good sort of Austrian school analysis. Even if the authors don't call themselves Austrians, although I know one of them does. Let's see. It's called the or this author does used to anyway, the voluntary provision of public goods question mark the turnpike companies of earlier early America. It's an economic inquiry. Some years ago by Daniel Klein and Danny Klein was an undergraduate student of mine at George Mason 116 years ago back right before they killed that last dinosaur. And at the time he called himself an Austrian. I don't know if I haven't seen him in years and years. I don't know what you guys know Dan Klein is. No, I haven't seen him forever. I was the last time I saw him. He was a kid. He's like you, but it's been a very long time. But I really like this article because, you know, he did what coast did it. Well, they're, well, let's see here. Well, early America, they have a problem with roads. So the business people who have invested their everything they've got in a in a business that they're not interested at all in building a road. There's no money in it. There's no money in somebody building a road connecting two towns so that all the merchants in the two towns can prosper and so forth. And so I'll read you one quote from this. What he found. This is early America the early 1800s between 1794 and 1840 238 private New England Turnpike companies built and operated about 3750 miles of road. New York led all of the states in turnpike mileage with over 4000 miles as of the year 1821. Pennsylvania was second reaching a peak of about 2,400 miles in 1832. New Jersey companies operated 550 miles by 1821. Maryland operated 300 miles on turnpikes also represented a great improvement in road quality. So basically what he discovered was that while people were saying in the economic historians that government was absolutely necessary to build roads. Private entrepreneurs had built already built thousands of miles of roads and in early America and they were mostly toll roads. And it's very interesting that how the entrepreneurs got this to work. They use social ostracism if you were in a small town and they bought stock the people of the town bought stock. Even though he says that the ready return on that turnpike company stock might have been three or 4% and you could have earned eight or 9% somewhere else. But they did it anyway because they realized it was more than the three or 4% that was going to be their profit because their business would now survive their business or thrive because it was connected to a bigger market. You know the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market as Adam Smith said in the wealth of nations so when you expand the market you expand the division of labor and you prosper more. They recognized that and so they were able to raise enough money through the stock market to have these profit making turnpike companies. Another famous article in this literature is The Fable of the Bees by Stephen Chung. How many of you have ever heard of this? A couple of you. Just a couple. The Fable of the Bees subtitle is An Economic Investigation. Another old journal about economics article. Well this is also the same type of research that I kind of like a lot because it's a combination of good applied price theory, good applied economics and people who are willing to work hard and research and use their economic vision to research the reality of these markets and their industry studies or market studies. The problem here was supposedly the situation where you have the proximity of an apple orchard and beehives. The bees pollinate the apple orchard and therefore the apple owner makes more money because the apples are more prolific and so that's a positive externality imposed on the apple orchard owner. At the same time the apple orchard nourishes the bees so the beekeeper gets more honey from the bees. So there's sort of a reciprocal positive externality with a proximity of beekeepers and apple orchards. And again Stephen Chung quoted he was teaching at the University of Washington at the time. This is long before the Antifa riots in Washington state. And he quotes all these big shot Nobel Prize winners Francis Bator. When I was in graduate school I was tortured by having forced to read his big book on market failure by Francis M. Bator. But here's what he said about this whole situation. It's easy to show that if apple blossoms have a positive effect on honey production any Pareto efficient solution will associate with apple blossoms a positive Lagrangian shadow price. If you haven't taken mathematical economics you don't know what that is. If them but don't worry about it. If then apple producers are unable to to protect their equity and apple nectar and markets do not impute to apple blossoms their correct shadow value. More math econ lingo profit maximizing decisions will fail correctly to allocate resources at the margin. There will be a failure by enforcement. This is what I would call an ownership externality. So he invented a new type of market failure ownership externality. And this was typical so you if you if you when you get to the chapter of the micro economics textbook on externalities. It was typical that this would be used as a one example of a market failure due to an externality problem. And so once again Stephen Chung did the unheard of it got up off his butt. And here he is in Washington state if you went to the local Kroger department store in Auburn today and bought some apples you probably find some apples over there from Washington state it's a big apple growing place. So he was sitting there in the middle of the apple growing mecca of the American West. And so he started investigating the apple industry. And lo and behold, he found out that the entrepreneurs in both the beekeeping industry and the apple industry are not as dumb as the these Nobel Prize winners in economics thought they were. Okay. And what he found basically is that for generations they had very specific contracts already worked out where when the apple blossoms are about to bloom in bloom. We will we will pay you to move your your your your your beehives next to my apple orchard and and we'll all benefit from it. They had very specific things that said such as we'll give you two weeks warning before we're going to put any pesticides on the blossoms on the apple trees. So you get the bees out of there and it doesn't harm the bees. And this is that existed for decades and decades. And so like I said, there's this seems to be this pension on the part of the market failure theorists to think that entrepreneurs are just either dumb or non existent in that, you know, there's big money to be made here and they're just going to walk away. They're not they need they need government to force them to make money for them. And we do have government subsidies to beekeepers to this day. And I'm not sure if it came from this these theorizing, but but we do have these policies in the US like this. Okay. Another of my favorite articles that is very Austrones by people who don't don't necessarily call themselves Austrians as Stephen Chung did he was a Chicago school guy. But but but this is the type of economic history, I think that Austrian economists have done and should do also is who recognizes this configuration. And what is that? That's the keyboard. That's the configuration of the keyboard. This this too there was an economist named Paul David who he was at the University of Tennessee at the time I looked them up recently had some kind of joint appointment with Stanford and Oxford. This sounds pretty prestigious to me. And anyway, he wrote an article, one of the first claiming that this was a tie a new type of market failure called path dependence that somehow the the market consumers adopted this configuration of the keyboard. Even before computers were invented, this was typewriters. And I learned to type on a typewriter in my day. And so they had just gotten rid of the stone tablets. I remember seeing them all out there in the playground. They threw them all away finally and in but typewriters. I remember taking a whole class in ninth grade and typing on an IBM Selectric typewriter. It's probably the most valuable class I ever took in public school is typing because I became a world class speed typer by doing that. We competed. We used to have competitions even out of school who can type the fastest without making mistakes for money. We put money down and that that's what Italians do. So anyway, so Paul David said, well, this is a market failure because there's a superior type of keyboard. And it's obviously superior. We have research that shows us superior. And it had a different name. And the name doesn't have to do with keys. It's the man's name. And this man's name was Dvorak. So there existed, you know, in the early days of typewriting, different types of keyboards. He didn't have all the same like we do now. And I gave this, I talked about this in a talk in Czech Republic a few years ago. I was invited to talk at the Prague University of Economics. And when I mentioned Dvorak, the students all kind of giggled because it's a Czech name. I don't know why that was funny that I thought it was funny that an American would know a Czech name, I guess, August Dvorak. He was an American, but he's of Czech heritage. But anyway, these two economists that have done a lot of good work, good research. Let's see. I'm going to get this. Stan Liebowitz and Steve Margolis and Stan Liebowitz is their names. And they wrote, they have a book on Microsoft. It's called Winners, Losers and Microsoft, which is a fabulous book, the kind of book that Austrian economists should research and write. Even though, once again, I don't think they would call themselves that. But they were students of Harold Dempzitz at UCLA. So I think there's sort of this hidden connection. I think Dempzitz would have, maybe if you tortured him with electric shock or something, he would have said, okay, okay, I'm an Austrian. Because a lot of his research was like that. But anyway, they researched this and to see, well, is it true? Is it true that these stupid consumers have adopted this inferior technology? And they looked into it. And one thing that raised a big red flag is they looked into where these studies came from that Paul David cited. And here's what they found. And they quote, this is a quote from them. They say, let's see. Here it is. They said, well, there might be a conflict of interest here. They're talking about some author, it doesn't matter what his name is, is this author identifies Dvorak as Lieutenant Commander August Dvorak, the US Navy's top expert in the analysis of time and motion studies during World War II. Then there's a man named Earl Strong, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and one time chairman of the Office of Machine Section of the American Standards Association reports that the 1944 Navy experiment and some Treasury Department experiments performed in 1946 were conducted by Dr. Dvorak. So the studies claiming that the Dvorak computer keyboard is superior to the QWERTY keyboard were conducted by Dvorak with his typists. And so that doesn't mean it's not true, but that means kind of conflict of interest there. And it so happens that Dvorak owned the patents on the keyboard and had received at least $130,000 from the Carnegie Commission for the studies of the keyboard. So that's kind of like, you know, General Motors conducting, comparing General Motors cars with Toyotas and declaring that we've done a scientific study and we've come to the conclusion that General Motors cars are superior to Toyotas. And you know, take that with a little grain of salt, wouldn't you? And so did Sleba Woods and Margolis. And so they did other studies when they had those studies and they found they concluded that the QWERTY keyboard might be very, very marginally better in terms of quickness of typing, not huge, but that's what the market shows. And so they didn't see a path dependence problem there. And I would argue there that the real problem of locked-in inferior technology is with government. That's where you lock-in technology because once the government chooses the technology, you automatically have all the special interests that coalesce around it. The manufacturers, the suppliers to the manufacturers, the members of Congress who represent the district where the manufacturer is located. And you provide a political cabal that will defend and protect that technology no matter what. That's why we have so many airplanes in the United States Air Force that the Air Force knows are ineffective, but they keep them anyway. That's why I've been working on a paper on that. I was supposed to give it at the Austrian Economic Research Conference, which was canceled. But I had a whole bunch of literature that I dug up on this, on obsolete government technology. And probably the worst example or the most spectacular example is that until just about a year or two ago, the American nuclear arsenal used 7-inch floppy disks. I don't know how many of you know even know what a floppy disk is, but this is 1970s-era computer technology. And the first computer I ever bought was an IBM PC in the early 80s. And say if I was going to co-author an article with you and you lived a thousand miles away, I would put this floppy piece of plastic in the side of the machine. And I could copy my article that I just wrote on it. And then I would send you in the mail the floppy. And then you could do your part. You could add your part to the article that we're co-authoring. And then in the 80s they adopted hard disks like three and a half inch hard disks, but these are seven and a half, seven inch floppy disks. They were they were using for the nuclear arsenal until just just like two years ago. They finally I've read an article they they changed that. And so, you know, talk about locked in inferior technology and you look at the public schools, the stupid school buses, they look the same as they did 60 years ago. The mailman, the U.S. Postal Service trucks, they haven't changed since I was two years old. They have the exact same technology. And so that's where the real problem is. Okay. And so about out of time, it looks like I always tell people from the from the last speaker before lunch that I got a standing ovation because everyone stands up and goes to lunch after the room. And we have one minute if there's a question or two about something like I got one minute left, I guess. So with the solution to the public problem, it's essentially saying that there still are free riders, right? Free riders don't prevent entrepreneurs from starting? Well, entrepreneurs sometimes are very good at solving free rider problems. You know, what are what is private charity about? You know, we have thousands and thousands of private charity that produce things that a lot of economists would consider to be public goods. You know, when just in the 4th of July, I'll give you one example. The 4th of July in my town, it was very strange. You know, usually the city government pays for a 15 minute fireworks display. I live in a beach town right on the Atlantic Ocean. And there's a big 15 minutes fireworks display. And then that's it. But this 4th of July, I was walking around town at 9.30 at night. And it seemed like everybody's yard had a private fireworks display. And there are examples and textbooks of a public good being fireworks. You know, once they're provided, how can you exclude anybody from looking at the fireworks? Public good, free rider, therefore we have under provision of fireworks. There was no under provision in Delray Beach, Florida of fireworks. And I even put on the Lou Rockwell blog, a helicopter, a news helicopter in Los Angeles was flying over LA. And there were just millions of fireworks going off, even though the city of Los Angeles didn't do it. They canceled because of the plague. You know, and so it was canceled. So yeah, entrepreneurs, maybe they won't solve every single free rider problem in the history of the world. But it's my point is it's been greatly exaggerated as a problem by ignoring those three things. Dynamic nature of markets, entrepreneurship and reality and history. You know, not not looking at, you know, has someone solved this problem before. That's saying if you rely too much on theory, that's that's the sort of hole that you dig yourself into. And that's, I guess we're out of time. So thank you very much.