 don't like to brag but I shook Mises's hand and I never washed the hands since so if you the hands a little dirty but if you shake my hand you channel Mises my topic today is praxeology and Andrew Napolitano the judge talked about legal positivism there is also such a thing called logical positivism and as libertarians we oppose legal positivism but as Austrians we oppose logical positivism what is logical positivism logical positivism is the view that economics and all social sciences but I'm mainly concerned with economics is an empirical science just like chemistry physics astronomy any other physical science and in those sciences there are no laws even the law of gravity is not a law it's really just a hypothesis and what a hypothesis is is you are generalized from experience and then you make a hypothesis and then you test it and if the test comes out okay you don't say that it's a law you just say well the hypothesis has not yet been refuted so we provisionally accept it we provisionally accept gravity we provisionally accept H2O is water things like that there are no laws because a law is something that if you disagree with it's like a logical contradiction and there are no laws like the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics if you take a triangle and you take the right triangle you take the square of the signs and add them up and it doesn't equal the square of the hypotenuse what do we say do we say well you know it's the Pythagorean theorem isn't really a law no we say you don't have an accurate triangle go out and do it again till you get it right because the Pythagorean theorem is a law 2 plus 2 is a law you can't contradict that now in in the way I see it we have Austrian economics here and we have neoclassical economics here we have a Venn diagram and there is an overlap and I don't mean maybe I should put it this way so that I don't know I'm not really trying to talk about how much of an overlap there is just that there is an overlap and let's suppose we have a B and C and a would be laws where the neoclassicists do not allow for and B would be the overlap where the neoclassicists and the Austrians sort of agree you take a right-wing neoclassicist Chicago school and they will agree on B such as minimum wage creates unemployment for unskilled workers rent control ruins housing things like that free trade is beneficial but the difference between the A and B is that for us Austrians the A part are laws whereas for these people they're only hypotheses so when Cardin Kruger come out with something on the minimum wage law saying that well it really doesn't create unemployment for unskilled workers what they mean it is as hypothesis and you have to test it whereas for the Austrians what we say is if you have a minimum wage law of $10 an hour then assuming profit and maximizing behavior unemployment for unskilled workers will be higher than it otherwise would have been well if it's higher than otherwise would have been how do we know what it would otherwise have been we don't so you can't test this whereas for those people hypotheses live or die based on on the latest empirical test let me give you a bunch of examples I get a lot of this from my colleague friend buddy Hans Hoppe who is a real rabbit on this point and all of us follow him and Mises and Rothbard on these things suppose I trade you this tie for your pen we're gonna have a swap here's your pen here's my tie if you agree to it I can deduce logically necessarily apodetically that there's something about this tie that you like more than your pen and if I also do it agree to the trade there's something about the pen of your pen that I like more than this time so when we do it when we make the trade we necessarily in the ex ante sense gain and we evaluate the two objects in in opposite ways now how do you test that you can't test that if you understand the English language you understand that this is untestable this is apodictic this is necessarily true to deny this is to commit some sort of logical contradiction now it might be see I don't know why you like this time maybe you think that if you make the trade I'll give you an A in the course but there's no course here and I can't give you an A or any other mark so you're mistaken so I'm not saying why you like the tie or why I like the pen maybe I think that if I make this trade you'll be my best friend forever or something like that who knows we don't know the psychology of it all we know is that there's something about this that you prefer you rank them this way and there's something about the thing that I rank them this way and that there's mutual gain and a benefit in the ex ante sense okay so that's one example another example is that there's a tendency for profits to fall to zero and the evenly rotating economy but profits are never zero because whenever in the evenly rotating economy another one is that there's a tendency for profits to be the same in all industries such that if in industry a there's 50% profit in industry b there's 10% profit in industry c there's minus 20% profit there will be a tendency for resources to leave the low profit thus raising the profit and enter the high profit thus pushing down the profit level in the high profit industry such that there's a tendency for them to be equal but tendencies can't be falsified because at any given time there'll be differences in profits but that doesn't falsify the idea of a tendency another one is rent control leads to misallocation of resources let me tell you a little story about this I was doing my PhD dissertation with Gary Becker a Nobel Prize winner and not only a Nobel Prize winner but perhaps one of the most famous ones because he applied economics to a whole bunch of areas in sociology which previously at least in the mainstream had been the provenance of of sociologists and now he was applying it to the economics of crime and marriage and choice of whether to have a baby or not and all sorts of things like that so anyway I'm doing my dissertation and it's got some sort of econometric equation of the sort amount of rent it's y equals a plus b 1 x 1 plus b 2 x 2 plus some sort of error term and here is amount of rent control and here is housing quality or shortages or what have you and my thesis was that the more rent control you have the less quality of housing you'll have so I expected a negative coefficient there and most of my econometric results were correct I got a negative sign for the x 1 independent variable and most of the time it was statistically significant and I was doing well every once in a rear while though I would get the wrong sign which indicates the more rent control the better the housing quality holding constant other things like this that would also impact housing quality say such as wealth or weather or whatever and every once in a while horribly the the wrong sign was statistically significant so if Gary Becker was really a neoclassical economist that he thinks he is if he was really the logical positivist the person who believes in testing economic hypotheses he would say oh I've got this young genius I was young in those days I don't know what happened I used to be the on-front terry but now I'm an old duffer it goes fast when you're having fun in any case in any case he didn't say that he said he was too polite to say this but this is what he really meant what he really meant was block you more on go out again get it do it again till you get it right so what was testing what was my stupid econometric equation system testing what we know about rent control that you know that if you have a what do you call it a price ceiling there's a supply there's the man quantity price you're gonna have shortages and you can have all sorts of messes with the housing problem what was my econometric equation testing this no the Austrian view would be that it's illustrating this now here I have a slight disagreement with my colleague and friend Jeff Herbner who thinks that all this stuff is just a snare and a delusion and it's improper to even use econometrics I'm a moderate he's such an extremist I don't know he he looks mild-mannered but he's real extremist and I'm the moderate here that's why they call me Walter moderate block and he says it's of no use whatsoever and I say and I think I speak for most of my colleagues that there's nothing wrong with this per se it's rather all in the interpretation of it the interpretation is we're not testing economic law we're illustrating economic law and sometimes the illustrations come out right and sometimes they come out wrong and when they come out wrong there's nothing wrong with the economic law there's something wrong with the econometric equation very similar with the Cardin Krueger kind of thing when Cardin Krueger came out and said that minimum wage law really helps unskilled workers Gary Becker and the Chicago types not not the the left-wing neoclassicals like Stiglitz who favor the minimum wage although there's an interesting story there Stiglitz was once interviewed and the interviewer was a bright journalist and said look Professor Stiglitz in your textbook you give the ordinary stuff about minimum wage law that you know it creates unemployment for unskilled workers and yet you sign this petition saying we should raise the minimum wage law to help unskilled workers how do you reconcile that and Stiglitz went on for about five minutes yacking and I couldn't understand a word he was saying was the most amazing thing he really was caught with his pants down around his ankles intellectually speaking and he really didn't have a leg to stand on but he's got a good BS ability and he just BSed his way out of that but horrendous Gary Becker and the other Chicago types Milton Friedman who also take the logical positivist view when Cardin Krueger came out with their stuff they didn't say well you know maybe economic law doesn't work in New Jersey as Joe Salerno he's from New Jersey and all sorts of weird things go on in New Jersey some maybe economic law didn't work there or it works differently or something no they didn't say that so what I'm trying to say is that if you scratch a good neoclassical economists they're really Austrians but you have to scratch hard because they don't they don't understand this somehow I got into a little debate with Gary Becker again and he called Austrian economics a cult and a religion and I took Umbridge at this and we had a back and forth on this it's if you're interested I can email it to you or just Google Gary Becker Walter Block Austrian cult something like that and you'll get this debate we had and I was trying to you know convince him and I didn't do too well because he he recently passed away and he he's not going to heaven or at least economic heaven because he wasn't an Austrian and only Austrians will get to economic heaven I have to tell you story about Jim Buchanan now my colleague and friend and many times co-author Tom Delearns spoke about Buchanan I have a little different view of Buchanan I'm a professor at Loyola University and we invite scholars to come and present to our students Eric were you here when Buchanan we you at Loyola when Buchanan came no okay this is before Eric's time he's one of my students now and I disagree with Buchanan on a lot of things I don't like this rent seeking business I mean what they what they mean by rent seeking is theft and yet they don't distinguish between theft and and ordinary behavior you know that joke do you know the difference between the bathroom and the living room and if you say no the answer is don't come to my house well if you don't know the difference between theft and a voluntary interaction I say don't come into political economy and these people the public choices they don't know the difference between theft and taxes on the one hand and voluntary interaction on the other later in one of my lectures I'll accuse Kos of this Ronald Kos and other famous neo-classical economists but the point is that they call rent seeking something that is really pernicious and evil and why do they pick on the word rent I mean rent is innocuous is the economic rent is renting a car or an apartment why call it rent seeking so it sort of ticks me off in any case I had some disagreements with Buchanan and I invited him the loyal to speak and I promised myself I wouldn't ambush him because I'm the host you know you're not supposed to invite someone unless it's a formal debate then you can kick butt but if it's just an invitation you know you sort of be nice and I was nice and he was a mouthing off about all sorts of irrationalities from my point of view although as Roger as Tom DeLorenso said he was good on cost and choice he was sort of Austrian but he's a little strange so anyway you know it's hot outside and if I were to say it's hot outside it would be sort of innocuous and undebatable and the way that's what he said about Austrian is that Austrians are cult and it is going to go on to something else as if you know it's warm outside so I went into a five or ten minute diatribe you know just sort of jumping down his throat and I was ready to you know get it on intellectually of course he was bigger than me so I don't want to fight him but and then he didn't say anything but it was very very frustrating the point is the neoclassical people see Austrians as a cult or a religion and they don't mean this as positive because of praxeology because we believe that there are certain laws and economics of the sort that I've mentioned to you that are not testable and then they say of us not testable well then it's not science Milton Friedman said that if two neoclassicists disagree with one another well they'll just go back and run the regression again or do some more empirical work whereas if two Austrian economists disagree they can only fight can you imagine Mises and Rothbard fighting you know duking it out over some economic theorem I mean the whole thing is silly it's as if when two symbolic logicians disagree they have to fight when two geometricians disagree over the Pythagorean theorem or something like that they have to fight now that's silly it's a matter of logic and you just go back to the premises and see where one or the other or both made some sort of mistake so these I regard as slurs against Austrian economics okay I want to now talk about a whole bunch of other things where Austrians disagree with neoclassicists sort of a rundown of various other things beside praxeology but I regard praxeology is the most important unique part of Austrianism the rest of the stuff about coordination and market process and this and that and the other I think are important but are not crucial I once gave a speech on Austrian economics a week or a month after an economist from George Mason did and people said you know it's as if two different Austrian Austrianism and they really are there's the the way I would see it there's the Manger-Bomberwerk Mises Rothbard group and then there's the Manger-Bomberwerk Hayek Kursner group which is subtly different the people of George Mason for example are on the Hayek side and Hayek was not a praxeologist Hayek said he does not follow Mises on this praxeology stuff Hayek was quoted as saying well I think Hayek was a splendid Austrian economist he was very very good on on business cycles and although I have some problems with the Hayekian triangle and I I often mention Roger Garrison who's sitting there as Hayek's chief lieutenant or and Roger made a very good point about inverting the triangle and putting time on the horizontal axis which makes it more amenable for the neoclasses to understand whereas the the way the Hayek triangle he had time on the on the vertical axis but here we have another disagreement the Keynesians and on the Keynesians I include the right-wing Friedmanite Monterus Keynesians and also the left-wing Keynesian Keynesians as Keynesians because what they both all versions of Keynesianism believe is that we have a market failure and the market failure is that the economy is sort of like a car and it's riding along the road and it's always going to veer off either into inflation or to unemployment and the role of the government the role of the Fed the role of the central bank is to keep the car on the straight and narrow and when it veers off into inflation we have to cut back and when it veers off into inflation rather when it veers off into unemployment we have to boost the step on the gas when it veers off into inflation we have to step on the monetary or the fiscal break that's the the main difference between the two is one of the Monterus one of the fiscalists but they have the same view that the economy is unstable the free market is unstable and and the government has to keep the car on the on the straight and narrow Arthur Burns was once asked at a conference that Murray Rothbard was at well suppose we have both suppose we have unemployment and inflation then what do we do and Arthur Burns said well ha ha ha that'll never happen we'll resign well it happened it's called stagflation and they never they never did resign whereas the Austrian has a very different view the Austrian view is that there are market forces that will prevent if we have a pure free enterprise economy without any government or central banks or any anything else that there'll be neither unemployment nor inflation and the reason that we have one or the other or both is because of central banking and fractional reserve banking although fractional reserve banking is a little debatable among Austrians but the Rothbardian view is that fractional reserve banking does create the lead to the business cycle so that's a second disagreement where Austrians and neoclassicals diverge so that would be part of the the C versus a business where the Austrians have a view on praxeology and on business cycles and the other guys have the opposite view or a very very different view okay another one is a spontaneous order Austrians are very strong on spontaneous order where something occurs which is not the result of any human intention but it just sort of happens like topsy for example language language is a spontaneous order nobody you know the caveman one caveman said hug and the other said a bug a booger or something and and this became a language even though the intent of each speaker was not to create a language but rather to just you know help in cooperating killing the buffalo or whatever they were doing money is also a spontaneous order people engaged in barter and then it became difficult because of the double coincidence of wants you know if I have a chicken and I want to pickle the idea of finding the odds of me finding someone who's got a pickle and wants a chicken are very low so what I'll do is I'll take my chicken and I'll trade it for something and I think most people want like salt or sugar or fish hooks or whatever and I'll make two trades where I could have made one but the one would be very difficult because of the double coincidence of wants so I make two trades and now the question is well what will be the trade into mediation will it be sugar or salt or would be fish hooks will be clam shells and whenever people were free to choose their trade into mediation it usually evolved toward gold and maybe sometimes silver Friedman had a series of TV series free to choose which was good in many ways but when people were free to choose they chose gold and yet he is adamantly opposed to gold and so it's sort of a little inconsistent there on his part okay another one is entrepreneurship Austrians focus on entrepreneurship for Austrians entrepreneurship is very very important if you look at an intro or an intermediate economics textbook some of the and you look in the back in the index some of them will have entrepreneurship and it'll be like one page or two pages and some of them won't even have it rather they'll focus on land labor and capital whereas for the Austrian the entrepreneur is very very important Israel Kersen wrote a book competition in entrepreneurship a very important book there are disputes among Austrians about this Murray Rothbard special emphasize the capitalist entrepreneur or is a Kersener emphasize the pure entrepreneur and the problem with the pure entrepreneur somebody who has no capital no skin in the game is he can't make losses and for the entrepreneur it's profit and loss not just profit or is the Kersener version of this it's hard to see how you can make a loss if you don't have any money invested in the enterprise another one is ordinal and cardinal the Austrians believe in ordinal utility ordering things ranking things that that would be legitimate so we have I rank my wristwatch first my tie second and then this pen third that's okay no problem with that but the mainstream look at utility not so much although they do agree with ordinal but they add cardinal and cardinal is counting and now you have utils so for example if you have a curve like this and and you put utility here and say money over there and you have diminishing margin utility of money the idea is that if you're very rich the last dollar doesn't mean that much to you if you're very poor the the first dollar or the introductory dollar is much more important but whenever you put utility on an axis what you have is your measuring and it's not first second and third and fifth and 19th it's 10 20 30 utils but there are no utils yes we we have measurements of height and weight and speed and velocity and all sorts of things that are legitimate temperature Celsius Fahrenheit whatever when we're not against the measurement but there's no units of happiness there are no haps there are no utils you can't say I can say that I like their watch more than the time more than the pen but I can't say the watch has 10 20 utils this has 10 utils and this has five utils and therefore I like this twice as much as this and this twice as much as that and this four times as much as that that's just nonsense on a on a stick or whatever a nonsense not a pogo stick what nonsense where is nonsense supposed to be on stilts that's it thanks I need all I'm getting seen all I I need all the help I can get nonsense on stilts I thought a pogo stick was pretty good and then you get all sorts of implications for example if you take money away from the rich guy and now he's a little less rich and you give money to the poor guy and now the poor guy is a little wealthier that somehow we have if you take the two of them as the total of society now society is richer because this guy loses only this many utils and this guy gains all those utils and the difference between them is a net gain and this is an intellectual justification of welfare and not well not corporate capitalist welfare or or crony capitalism or corporate welfare but you know ordinary plain old ordinary welfare one of the problems with this is that as what's his name Charles Murray says in his book losing ground the problem with this is that it tends to break up the family especially the black family the example I sometimes use to illustrate this is that if you throw a frog in boiling water it'll jump out its metabolism is such that it recognizes and jumps out if you put a frog in cold water and heated up slowly it stays there and gets boiled well slavery for the black family was like boiling water yes it ruined the black family during slavery but after slavery the black family coalesced got back together in the 1860s 1870s and 80s there were ads in the paper you know Emily Lou where are you this is Joe I was put in this plantation let's get together the 1900 and 1910 census the black and white family were about as intact as each other and then came what's called LBJ with his great society in 1965 there was always welfare before that but he really ramped it up and that broke up the black family because Charles Murray made the point that young girls would marry the state because the state could make them a better financial offer than not their husband the father of their child and it's not a black-white thing Sweden has welfare state and their family is breaking up and they're mostly white and even now days with whites the family formation is very less what is it I think three quarters of black kids are now brought up in non intact families which creates all sorts of havoc okay so that's one problem with this welfare another problem with this welfare business is who says that they're on the same curve maybe maybe they're on on this is the rich curve and this is the poor curve and maybe what you're doing when you take money away from the rich guys you you're reducing welfare by that and you're only giving the poor guy this so if I drew it a little better I think you can see that you're now taking more utils away from the rich guy than the poor guy right that is it clear from my diagram slightly more and in other words even if you adopt their nonsensical view of utils it still doesn't follow that we should take money from the rich and give it to the poor which is really normative economics not positive economics which is a different realm of discourse okay where else do we Austrians diverge from them bar neoclassics another one is math you look at the journals nowadays and it's all math and all statistics American economic review very heavily mathematical what's the Austrian view on math the problem that and here I'm I'm sort of a herban herbanerian herbiner erian yeah that would make it right I think that math is a snare and a delusion for economics why because to do math you have to have smooth curves and Murray Rothbard has one of the most beautiful things what you see here is an average cost curve notice that it's smooth curve and there's quantity there's price and now you have a demand curve and you can see that you're at point a not at point b but point b is the most efficient and this is sort of the how shall I say it the the bedrock of antitrust economics that if you have a downward sloping demand curve you don't have perfect competition you're not going to have efficiency and we have to have perfect competition so that we can be at point b which is the low point on the average cost curve so what Murray does is there any more paper here running out of paper I got one more sheet so I'll use no I can't use the other sign so what Murray does beautifully in many economy and state the most gorgeous diagram ever what Murray does is he goes like this and that's the average cost curve namely it's sort of a reductio ad absurdum and it says look the whole the whole idea here follows from smooth curves that if you didn't have a smooth curve you could be at the low point and now he draws a non smooth curve it's true you can't have a tendency but they can touch I mean isn't that beautiful it just shows that the whole it's sort of like the mathematical dog is waving the economic tail and we're economists we should be the dog and then wave the mathematical tail namely we're economists we're not mathematicians at least in this regard although Murray was a gifted mathematician but that's a whole other kind of an issue so we have nothing against math God forbid having anything against mathematics but what we have is the against or oppose is the I guess Donald Trump wouldn't like the immigration of math into economics you know kick those mathematicians out they're all the rapists and whatever else Donald Trump is accusing the Mexicans of we can accuse the mathematicians of well not really not really rape but but mischievous mischievous behavior of you know perverting antitrust economics by making this sort of a curve okay what else do we have oh another one is market failure these mainstream people they love market failure the main market failures are one of the main market failures I guess well unemployment the business cycle is a market failure monopoly is a market failure public goods are a market failure externalities are market failure I once didn't have much to write I now have so many projects I don't know what to do but one summer I didn't know what I was gonna write that summer the life of a professor is pretty good you get the whole summer off not to mention Christmas and Easter and all that I was once in a debate here with Gary North he was saying nobody should become a professor and I take a very different view of that I encourage people to if you're interested not everybody should become a college professor I mean then who would be the plumber and you know the carpenter and the farmer but if you're interested I encourage you to do that so anyway I got a whole bunch of American economic reviews and most of it was just statistics and mathematics and the rest of it was all new market failures so the mainstream just loves market failure but the I have to give credit where credit is due to the to the Chicago types is there any more paper oh thanks we should really have more paper here but I guess we're electronic nowadays who knows in any case here is here is the mainstream antitrust thing marginal cost demand curve marginal revenue curve here is point C for competition and here is where the marginal cost and the marginal revenue equals so that how many people are familiar with this curve that this diagram okay so you know what I'm talking about well here is profit and here is the evil dead weight loss dead weight loss well this dead weight loss is a is a comparison interpersonal comparison utility you see it's one thing to say that this is 20 eudels this is 10 and this is 5 it's quite another thing to say that this is 20 eudels for me and it's 30 eudels for this gentleman now we're getting into interpersonal comparison utility ICU in not ICU like with a baby you know I have grandchildren now they're six months old so I'm going you know not that kind of ICU but interpersonal comparisons of utility what they're really saying is that the area under the demand curve is how much people value the product and the area under the marginal cost curve is what it costs society and since the perfect competition has got QC and the monopolist has got QM the monopolist is engaged in what is it withholding failure to trade restraint of trade right and this is just the interpersonal comparison utility for example let's take Djokovic the tennis player according to this and I'm now going to try a reductive out absurdum of this Djokovic should really be playing in 30 tournaments a year but he's only playing in 20 tournaments a year so he values we value the extra 10 tournaments the area under demand curve but only costs him the area under the sorry we value the extra 10 tournaments that he's not playing in based on the area under the demand curve it only costs him the area under the cost curve so he's cheating us out of deadweight loss I mean this is grotesque but to give credit to the freedmenites what they say is well we shouldn't always have antitrust because antitrust costs something and if the deadweight loss is bigger than the antitrust cost well then we should pursue an antitrust case and if it's the opposite way then we shouldn't pursue it you can see that this is a full employment bill for economists now we're going to try to measure these immeasurables another reductive out absurdum is if you really believe in this crap you have to oppose monogamous marriage okay so I go over to a married woman I say hey chick I notice my wonderful uh approaches to women hey chick let's go to bed and she says no I can't I'm married and I'm monogamous I say ah restrain of trade she's monopolistically withholding her services the bitch I mean you know she should she should go to bed with me and if not I'm going to pursue an antitrust case against her I mean this is ludicrous of course although the New York Times that if they just heard that much they would say block favors um suing women who will go to bed with them which is a whole other idea I'm not saying that seriously I I was just kidding I'm making a reductive out absurdum and the reductive out of absurdum is you know this restraint of trade nonsense okay what else do we have market process yes we the mainstream loves equilibrium equilibrium is great equilibrium is wonderful well you know Austrians also have the ERE but it's sort of a a heuristic device to think clearly you know we assume we're at equilibrium and then we let one thing change and then in our minds we try to figure out what the effects of that are so there's nothing wrong with equilibrium but what the mainstream does is they make a fetish a cult they're a bunch of cultists they make a cult or a religion out of equilibrium what's true what's not true at equilibrium oh and then we we notice that the real world isn't always at equilibrium well then that's market failure I mean that that's just preposterous and crazy uh another one is indifference that they love indifference curves um here's an indifference curve map so here we have an indifference curve set and here's apples and here's bananas and here's a hundred utils of stuff and here's 200 utils and 300 utils and you get some sort of budget line that goes like that and you get an equilibrium point how many are familiar with this from okay well the problem with this and there's nothing wrong with this if you have it as an isoquant uh an isoquant would be here is an input that says skilled labor here's unskilled labor and here is um I don't know 100 choose 300 choose 300 choose the only problem is the smooth curves but there's nothing wrong per se with with this but austrians have a grave difficulty with indifference why indifference is a perfectly good word look I was given this pad by Anton and there's a whole bunch of sheets here and I just picked the top sheet but I could have picked the middle sheet and and if they weren't attached they really wouldn't matter to me I'd be indifferent as to which sheet of paper I used uh we're gonna have lunch soon and uh you're gonna go get a bottle of water or a can of coke or something and there's a whole bunch in the refrigerator right and you just sort of can close your eyes and pick one you're indifferent right so the word indifference has got a perfectly good English and perfectly good English words we know when the word is used properly and we know when to use the word is is not used properly there's a girl here with a capitalism in in coca-cola language you have a coca-cola there are 20 bottles of coca-cola you pick one so it's indifferent so we're not I'm not supposed to call for questions because I've only got 45 minutes and we're gonna have questions later and I think I have an office hour today so if you have questions come in and then we're gonna have panel discussions with questions I don't know they used to make it an hour and I you know I had a hard time keeping this within an hour so if I have questions it'll slow me down okay what was I talking about oh indifference indifference right I'm getting senile you have to work with me pretty soon I'm going to start drooling and then the people in the front row are going to be in trouble the drool goes okay so anyway uh indifference look in physics work means um uh force over distance or rather weight over distance so if I hold out to 10 pound barbells like this and if you ever try to for the first 15 seconds it's easy but then your hands start dropping and you're if you keep holding I'm even Mike Tyson or you know some strong guy well make it a 25 pound barbell it's really hard and yet there's no work in the physics sense right because as long as there's no movement there's no work and yet you're dripping so what I'm trying to say is that there's an ordinary language where this is work and we have indifference and then there's a narrow technical language like in physics that where this is not work and also in in Austrian economics indifference is is ruled out of court why because it's incompatible with human action human action is a book written by the guy with whom I shook my hand and remember at the beginning of the right okay indifference me human action is incompatible with indifference because when I bought this wrist watch I paid 50 bucks for it let's say I valued it more than 50 bucks otherwise I wouldn't have bought it and the guy who had them he had plenty of watches he valued the 50 bucks more than the watch namely you can't establish indifference through human action nothing that you do can establish indifference right now you're sitting here from which I deduce that you value this class fools you more than what you could have been doing and I don't know what you could have been doing another class biking swimming eating whatever but you can never establish indifference so Austrians have a thing against indifference let me oh cost one last thing the cost curves at the beginning chapter of every textbook intermediate intro the first chapter they talk about cost being the opportunity cost or alternative cost what the true cost of this is the foregone opportunity the next best thing you could have been doing you're not doing that's your cost and then all of a sudden we have these things cost curves now where the hell you get cost curves these cost curves are objective namely in the fifth chapter or the tenth chapter or whatever they introduce cost curves we forget all about opportunity costs and on the basis of this we start suing people for antitrust thanks for your attention my time is up