 Originally, they had planned to have a sort of a roundtable seminar of old-timers who had known Mises and interacted with Mises personally. And the problem was the age factor. Now that is a lot of them had just gotten to the age where they didn't do much travel. That's certainly not true of Israel Kirzner, who gives his greatest speech today as he did 50 years ago, and as he says, it's the same speech, which I often appreciate. And George Reesman, who got his PhD under Mises, is still doing brief reports and many books on Amazon. So he's still at it. And Bob Anderson, who studied with Mises, is retired now and out in Wyoming. And it just wasn't possible to get all of them to come down. And I live about 40 minutes east of Atlanta. So I was able to get down here and, of course, lose policy as price competition. He really believes in it, so it was easier for me to get over here and give the presentation. But this awful thought occurred to me at this point. It really did early this morning that in terms of the people around who still go out, still active, and who knew Mises, I am now known as the kid, which means that the personal contact between those who knew him and who can still give recollections about him, that pool of talent is unfortunately rapidly decreasing. To talk about Mises in a way that I hope will relate to you personally and what you're doing at this conference and then will do with the information that you get from this conference, there has to be, I think, a personal touch. And I think that is a good reason for me to be here. But I want to talk about Mises in terms of his personal contacts, his personal influence, which is not normally the way that you hear presentations on Mises, which is okay because he was a great mind and you want to find out about Mises from the point of view of what did he write and what was the impact of what he wrote. But you should also know something about him personally. Now, the book I recommend that will help you the most is in print from the Center for Future Education. It's My Years with Ludwig von Mises by his wife, Margit. And it's a beautifully written book. She was a remarkably talented woman. She was a famous actress in the German-speaking world in the 20s and 30s. And she had a gift for writing and she appreciated Mises. And she doesn't go deeply into the details of what he wrote, but you get this sense of the man that he was. And the picture that you get that he paints is that he would not bend. He was unmovable once he believed he was in the right. And this, of course, could be dismissed as arrogance, but it certainly was an unwillingness to compromise. And this unwillingness to compromise led to a series of dead ends or seeming dead ends in his life. And yet, in my opinion, without exception, each of these major dead ends that he faced in his life opened up opportunities which in fact expanded his influence. And I say that because if you become committed to this or any other fringe position in life, or in my case I hold three or four, you will hit what seem to be brick walls. And this can be discouraging. Now I'm going to mention from another book that I also recommend, Mises' book Notes and Recollections, which he wrote in 1940. It also is very much worth reading. I'm going to talk about what I believe is the most important dead end and self-predicting prophecy in modern history. Now it may be wrong, but the source of it is Mises. And this is one of those facts of history, if he's right in this, that changed the world on a scale that was almost inconceivable. He says in his notes that he first really became an economist in 1903, sometime around Christmas, when he read Menger's Principles of Economics. He said that was the turning point in his life. And he said he didn't know Menger at that point. Later met him, but he testified to the great importance of Menger in his life. Then he mentioned this. He said Menger, he knew much older, when he was much older, in his 70s. He said he didn't have good hearing, but his mind was sharp, there was no problem with his intellect, well into his 70s. And he said it was a shame that Menger ceased promoting economics, doing major work in economics during this period. And he said he believed it was because Menger's perceived very early. Certainly by the 1880s, that European civilization was headed for a crisis. And he said it depressed him. In the notes and recollections, he said this. The knowledge that his fight was without expectation of success, however, sapped his strength. He had transmitted this pessimism to his young student and friend Archduke Rudolph, successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke committed suicide because he disbared about the future of his empire and the fate of European civilization, not because of a woman. This was of course the famous Meierling suicide in 1889. Now because of that suicide, the airship of the throne shifted to the brother of the emperor, and his son was Archduke Francis, or Ferdinand. And in 1914, the assassination of the Archduke launched World War I, which was the culmination of exactly the forecast that Menger had made those years before. Now that's a self-fulfilling prophecy on a scale that is really inconceivable, and you won't find this one in the textbooks. Mises may have been wrong, but at the same time he had better knowledge than most. He determined very early in his life that he would never bend and that he would never stop. He did not want to wind up like Menger. He did not want to misuse the personal gifts which he personally knew that he had and to defect out of what he regarded as the cause of liberty. And he did not defect, which is what I want to get across in the presentation this morning. He was rigorous in his defense. He was implacable. And you get that very clearly in his wife's biography of him. And his peers also knew it. And in fact several of them before they were married warned her that she was going to be dealing with a man who took this attitude and she married him. And she said that was exactly the way he operated. He wrote the theory of money and credit. He got it out in 1912. And he was racing against the clock as he says in his notes and recollections. He believed that the war was imminent. Now this is in 1912. He was convinced that he had to get that book out. And he also understood another fundamental point and this I warn you against. You might as well get the picture now. You can't change just one thing. He began to analyze the monetary theory, which of course was related to capital theory of Menger, and the other major figures of his generation who had written on monetary theory. And he said you have to integrate your monetary theory with your overall theory of the market. And no one else had done that. That was a fact. It was usually regarded as a separate sphere of economic analysis according to its own laws and statistical data. And that these connections were not intimately related to the overall sweep of economic theory. And Mises knew in 1912 that with his book he was basically tossing a hand grenade into the economics profession. And he says that he said I couldn't go into all of it because I didn't believe I had time to go into all of it. But what he did was this. He understood fully Menger's concept of subjective value and the imputation of value by the acting individual as the source of market value. Now that has to be transmitted by means of a competitive process market bids for goods and services and especially higher order capital goods. But that it starts with subjectivism. And he saw that while Menger unquestionably was the great promoter of subjectivism at the same time. Menger had not pushed it as far as it should have been pushed. And he said Bumperberg also refused to make the same application of subjectivism to the field of monetary theory and then to overall economic analysis. So he wrote the theory of money and credit. He really knew the literature which was amazing at his age. He knew the literature. And the interesting thing if you pick that book up and you go to the index, look up Irving Fisher. And you will find throughout that first major volume critique after critique after critique of Irving Fisher's concept of neutral money. And of statistical aggregates that could be used to create a stable price system, stable monetary system. So from the beginning, Mises recognized the great competitor from the very beginning. Now then the war came and he was drafted and he fought in the war. So he was cut off from his academic work. And when he came back from the war, he recognized that he had to continue the work. He was not in a university position but he was with the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. And so he was able to work on his economic theory producing articles and other materials. He kept at it. He stuck to his knitting. And then he realized that the great battle was going to be between statism and the market. And he realized at that point that there had never been a comprehensive theoretical critique of socialism. And so he began work on an article. This would have been 1919. And he was beginning to attract younger men around him. A kind of Mises circle and there were a number of them in Austria at this point. A number of fields. Hans Kelsen, who was his friend, had a circle of brilliant young legal theorists around him. There were other circles like this in physics, in psychology. These young bright men gathering around established men of real academic gifts. And Mises was one of them. So he began assembling this group about 1919. And he began working on his article, which we know is economic calculation in the socialist Commonwealth. He had become a close friend of the greatest of all German social theorists, Max Weber. This was probably about 1917. I didn't know this at the time. In my graduate work, I did not know this. It only comes out clearly in his notes and recollections, which was published later. Written in 1940, but published in the late 70s. So he sent the article to Weber. And Weber was in charge of an academic journal. He sent that to the editor. And the editor decided to publish Mises' famous essay in 1920. Now here was a dead end. And I want to read a little bit about the dead end. This one you just will not hear about. This is a dead end I found, which was virtually unknown. I found this sometime in graduate school. I don't know when I read this. This theory of social and economic organization. And I have increasingly become convinced that Weber was one of the great minds of certainly the 20th century in the field of social theory. The guy was remarkable and he was understood as remarkable. He was internationally recognized. And here was a case where somebody who was internationally recognized and heralded as a master actually was. And so that's kind of rare in academics. So I was reading along, merely plowing through Weber, which is comparable to plowing through the first two chapters of human action. And I came across one sentence. The formation of monetary theory, which has been most acceptable to the author, is that of Von Mises. Now one paragraph up, I had marked this, and I put in the side Mises. Every new set of monetary regulations on the part of a corporate group must necessarily take account of the fact that certain means of payment have previously been used for the liquidation of debts. And then he goes on. I'm saying, this sounds like Mises to me. The next paragraph, I get this statement. Here is the case of the most prominent German speaking social theorist who in the midst of this major passage of his major book, in the discussion of rationality and the rivalry between socialist rationality and market process says that Mises has offered the best monetary exposition. Then, as I'm continuing down through this book, here is a footnote. While the above was in press, the essay of Ludwig von Mises dealing with these problems appeared. This is the economic calculation essay. Unfortunately, it was impossible to comment on it. And he cites the journal. So here you have a case of the most important German language social theorist saying Mises has offered the best monetary theory book that we have, and that he has offered a fundamental analysis of the socialist question, the question of the ethics of socialism and the possibility of socialism. But I don't have time to comment on it. And within months, he was dead at age 56. And of course, he never wrote about it again. And the book was never finished in the final formation. While there were extracts published in English, this one comes from 1947. The full three volumes did not appear until 1968 and buried. And by the way, if you're buried in Weber, you're really buried. There are not a lot of people who are going to struggle through it. Here, buried in this monumental book, his magnum opus that was unfortunately not finished, are these two testimonials to the importance of Ludwig von Mises. And you would say, well, that would certainly escalate his career. But then Weber died, did nothing with this material, could not. And Mises continued, and he wrote socialism, which appeared in 1922. Now, as a result of that, young men from around Europe began to come. And Wilhelm Roepke was one, obviously an important one, very important one. Hayek was one of them. He converted a generation of very brilliant young economists to the market position on a personal face-to-face basis. He did not teach in a university. These students did not come to get a degree. They came because they recognized that this man, beyond anyone else in Europe at the time, had something important to say about economics. And remember, we're talking 1921. At that point, the massive hyperinflations of Germany and Austria began. Mises, in the theory of money and credit, gave the defense of the classical gold coin standard. And within two years, it was smashed by World War I. The war broke out. Commercial banks suspended payment in gold, violating all contracts. The central banks then confiscated the gold from the commercial banks as a means of fighting the war. The war was fought throughout Europe on the basis of fiat money. And that was the destruction of a century of liberty from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which at that point was basically on the silver standard as Western civilization had been for 200 years. At least that was the end in 1914, never to be restored. And Mises was like a man frantically writing the theory of money and credit to get the book out fast enough before the cataclysm came and the cataclysm came within two years. And that was the end of the world he wrote about and defended in that book. And now it became a matter of curious historical defense, not the basis of a defense of the liberal order, because the liberal order did not survive World War I. Now he writes on socialism, providing the first comprehensive defense of the market and critique of socialism and its categories. So what's happening at this point? Lenin has taken Russia. The new economic policy is launched almost as Mises is writing his critique, saying it's never going to work and it never did. So now you have not only did the old world order of the classical gold coin standard get destroyed during World War I, now the new wave of armed socialism began before the war was over. And Lenin and his faction, the Bolshevik faction, were in charge of this massive nation state, highly bureaucratized that was almost overnight converted into socialism because the entire top-down hierarchy of the Tsarist system was instantly captured by Lenin and put to unproductive use. So here is Mises. He has cataloged the defense of the old traditional order of liberty, which was based on the gold standard, and that's gone. Now he's saying that socialism won't work and the whole socialist world is saying, we have our foot in the door now in the Soviet Union and the revolutions were beginning at that point in Western Europe. So here's a man who clearly is involved now in not just in basically a two-front suicidal campaign, one in favor of the gold standard and the classical liberal order and the other opposed to what is now seen as the wave of the future. And it had guns and it had armies and it had power and would retain that power. Now he gets a group of young men around him and at the time that he gets the group of young men around him, another activist is getting a group of young men around him, Adolf Hitler, in exactly this period. In what I would say is the second major conspiracy movement of that era. And maybe you would say even there was a third. And that was the Milner group in Great Britain that became the heir of Cecil Rhodes' trust money, which was based on South African gold, which the British had stolen in the Second Boer War, and on Rhodesian diamonds. And this huge amount of money was funneled from Rhodesia and South Africa based on diamonds and gold, funneled into the Rhodes Trust, which became around 1910, what we now in retrospect call Milner's kindergarten, the round table groups. Now they're forgotten today. But the round table groups was, by my standards, not conspiratorial in the sense of people taking secret oaths and that sort of thing, but conspiratorial in terms of anonymity of being in positions of power behind the political thrones to direct from the top down a new social order. And in 1911 Britain got the income tax. And we got it in 1913 plus the central bank. And in 1921 after the war, the Milner kindergarten, in other words, the round table group established an American branch that we know, know as the Council on Foreign Relations. So you have in this period where Mises is starting his career, you've got this massively funded group of young hotshots coming out of Cambridge and Oxford with enormous amounts of money and personal contacts based on that money. And obviously the Rhodes Scholarships. You have Lenin taking over Russia and creating this massive true conspiracy, no question about that one, that is regarded increasingly as the wave of the future, and now you have Hitler starting what is the third one based on power, based on the capture of power, his based on race, not class, but imitating very self-consciously what Lenin is doing. And here's Mises in Austria with a handful of young men and some women who came to study with him and he began to change their thinking, tiny little group that certainly was of no interest to anyone in the Milner kindergarten, no interest to anybody in the Nazi party and no interest obviously in the Leninist society it was being formed in the Soviet Union. Just this little man with not much more than footnotes. There's a marvelous passage in Margit's book about the kind of commitment to scholarship that her husband had and she said that there were times when he would get up, he was an early riser, which I can certainly at this point appreciate, she said she was one too, and he would get up, he would go into the bathroom and he would begin shaving. This is her statement, this gives you a really, really clear piece of information that will let you understand the nature of Mises' commitment to scholarship. He hated any disturbance while he worked and I would say he started working in the bathroom. More than once he was so deeply in thought that he forgot to turn the faucet off and only when his feet were deep in water did he realize what was happening around him. Then I had to rush in and help him and assure him again and again that it really did not matter for he was unhappy that he caused extra work for me. Now this is a man committed to footnotes. This is a man committed to the life of the mind as he's shaving away and his feet are being covered with water. So you have what I would regard as the three central conspiracies of the 20th century. The round table group, Lenin's Bolshevik movement, and the Nazi movement beginning in the early 1920s, mobilizing the world. And at the same time, obviously on this side of the Atlantic, you have the progressive movement that is beginning to become dominant in American politics. Certainly it's visible by the election of 1912. And here is this lone man with a group of young men around him. Now in 1934 he moved to Geneva. He got an offer to teach there. He was at this point retired from the chamber. And he could see that it's getting riskier and riskier to stay in Austria because of the Nazi movement. And so he left. And he was able to teach alongside of Ropi at the Graduate University in Geneva. And he was there at the time of the Anschluss when the Nazis came into Austria and took the country. That was when he lost his library. The Nazis stole his library, massive library. Curious thing, they did not burn it. They kept it. Then with the invasion of the Soviets, the Soviets got it in 45. And they did not burn it. And it finally became public once again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that that library was still maintained, which is truly a remarkable fact. He was in Geneva, obviously when the war broke out. He was happy. He was well paid. He was finally able to teach bright students. He was accepted by his colleagues. It was a tremendous thing. And meanwhile, all around him, Europe was collapsing. Europe was involved in a world war. And then on May 10th, 1940, three crucial events took place. First one was, Church Hill became prime minister. Second one was, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. And the third one was, Mrs. Mises says, we got to get out. We have got to get out. And he would not have gotten out. He didn't like to move. He didn't like change. Again, a faithful scholar committed to footnotes above all and staying put if possible. But she said, we got to get out. And she basically pushed him to get out. And how are they going to get out? They had to get to Spain. And from Spain, they had to get to Lisbon. I mean, we've all seen the movie to get that plane to Lisbon to get back to America. Except nobody was playing any piano at that point for him. He had to get out. She said, you've got to get out. And they weren't going to go to Casablanca. But they had to get to Spain. And remember at this point, the Nazis were rolling into France. And in the book, there is the story of the harrowing bus ride that they had to take to get through France to the border at Spain and get across that border. And the bus driver was going through back roads trying to avoid the invading Nazi troops. His nip and tuck. And for a Jew, the stakes were high for obvious reasons, especially that Jew whose library had already been confiscated. Well, they made it. And they got to this country. And he was worried. He was 60 years old, almost 59. He'd heard that America liked everything youthful. And he realized he was not particularly youthful anymore. And he was worried what kind of career he had. He had really nothing going for him. So he started over. In 1940, he starts over in New York. He gets help from Henry Haslett. He gets help from a man named Lawrence Furtig. And he begins to rebuild his life. And you think, here's a man at age 60 coming to a complete foreign country, fleeing twice now from Europe with no real job opportunities and no reputation in the United States. This seems to be a disaster. He read English, but he didn't speak it well. And now he had to learn English. And by 1944, he had written omnipotent government and bureaucracy. And in 1949, he wrote human action. And if he had not done so, not one of us would be in this room. He hit the brick wall. And it was a nip and tuck race against death. And he got through it because his wife was there saying, we got to leave. We're moving. And here, with a tiny foothold of even fewer young men surrounding him with even less reputation than he had in 1920, he begins to rebuild. And Margaret said that this was the greatest period of productivity in his life. And it was. Because from human action came that first group of young men led by Rothbard playing, I think, almost a kind of Old Testament replay of entering the Promised Land or at least escaping from the den of Egypt. When these young men surrounded a kind of Moses, a Moses-like figure who they trusted, who they believed was offering a complete comprehensive worldview that had not been put together, and what was it based on? You can't change just one thing. You got to rethink the comprehensive corpus of economic thought in terms of marginal utility and subjective value. And you've got to understand the nature of economic value and how it is best manifested in a competitive market order where people have the right to make bids one against the other. And he restructured it all. Somebody asked Murray when he was young, what's the book about? And Murray said, it's the rethinking of everything. And so now there was another group of young men. Now, some of them were actually taking courses from them at NYU. And he did have four PhDs. Hans Sennholz and George Reisman and Israel Kursner. And Joe, who was the fourth? Who was at Fordham? No, face he was later, Moses had retired. He was one who went into administration and kind of Spadaro. Spadaro, good guy, but he did not write much. He went into administration and made a pretty good living. He did all right. But it was the young men who came from the community in New York City who surrounded him, not taking the course for credit and not taking it once, coming back and back and back to take it again and again. Bettina Graves, who's still alive and her husband Percy, who did yeoman work to get the story of Moses out attended that seminar for 17 consecutive years. And so he was once again in an isolated area with this bright group of young men around him and women beginning to affect the thinking of the next generation, a completely new generation. And then in 53, another group of them came, high school kids. Ralph Raco was one of them. And they, can we come in? And he says, all right, you can come in, but keep quiet. Perfectly reasonable request from a bunch of high school kids coming in to hear what you had to say. And they did, for the most part, keep quiet. And some are still alive. So again, making this move in the 1950s. And through the Freeman, which had begun publishing in 1956, Mises began to get an audience among normal American readers, not professional academics. And so did the young people around him. The Freeman became an outlet for young men who wanted to get their ideas in front of a wider audience. And, and wonder of wonders, they actually paid. They actually paid. By the time I started, I think that we were, I don't know, five or six cents a word. People said, why did you write such long articles? Not too hard to figure out the answer to that one. Now that's what I would call the New York Circle. But contrary to New Yorkers, there is a land beyond the East River and beyond the confines of New York City. And what happened to that realm? Well, you had the University of Chicago. And that was the realm, as we know of the Chicago School, and the realm of Milton Friedman. And Milton Friedman was committed to the monetary policy of Irving Fisher. In her book, she says that at one point, Mises came to her and said, I have had a tremendous offer financially from Credit Onstalt Bank. And he said, I'm not going to take it. She said, why aren't you going to take it? And he said, because I think it's going to go under in the crash. And he wouldn't take the money. He made this wonderful statement. He said, I write a lot about money, but I don't want him to make any. So he didn't take it. Now this was in the late 20s. At exactly that time, Irving Fisher was the most prominent economist in the United States, the cutting edge of new monetary theory. And in September of 1929, he went public with this statement, the stock exchange has reached a permanently high plateau. And three days before the crash, he said this recent setback is entirely temporary. Yale Economist, there are a lot of people I don't like in American history, but Irving Fisher is real high on the list. He's not up there with John Brown, but he certainly makes it into the top 10. This was a man who in 1941, according to his son's biography of him, made the statement to the Socialist Club at Yale. He said, this world is going to be fought out between the anarchists and the socialists. And if it comes to that and when it comes to that, I side with the socialists. And this was the man who was the first president of the American Eugenics Society, whose goal was to create a master race. And in the mid-1950s, at almost the time that Murray got his PhD, Milton Friedman is promoting the monetary policies and economics of Irving Fisher. Now, Fisher lost all of his personal fortune. He lost the fortune of his sister-in-law, and at the end, Yale basically gave him free housing because he had lost it all. His reputation had completely collapsed, completely collapsed because of what he had said and done with respect to the Depression. He died in 1947. Within a decade, there is Friedman resurrecting the legacy of Irving Fisher and bringing Fisher back into respectability within the camp of what we would call economists who are accepted by the academic profession. I call it one of the great resurrection events of modern times. I mean, you have the old picture in the New Testament of Jesus calling forth Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus come forth. In this case, Irving come forth. And if you remember the passage, the sister Mary says, but Lord, he stinketh. And I can imagine Murray saying, well, no worse than he was in 34. And he came forth and has conquered. Now I want to get it down to a place, a time, an event. 1963, Princeton, the city of Princeton. In 1963, Princeton University Press published the Friedman Schwartz book on the history of money in the United States. And really if anyone were honest, it would have been called the Schwartz book with comments by Milton Friedman, because she did the work. And that became one of the most popular books in academia of the time. Gigantic book, and the only thing you ever see quoted from it is the statement in the book that it was the Federal Reserve system that extended the Great Depression because it didn't create enough digital money, enough fiduciary money at the time to keep the collapse of prices from taking place. That you hear, and that was the basis of the famous speech by Bernanke about the helicopter money at Friedman's 90th birthday. And in the very same town, in the very same year, Van Nostrand published America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard. And that book said, the problem with the Great Depression was not what the Fed did 1930 to 33, it was what the Fed did from 1925 to 29. That's where the Great Depression began. Now that laid it out, friends. That's the battleground between the son of Irving Fisher and the spiritual son of Ludwig von Mises. And the academic world, with one exception, has not given Mises a moment's consideration. And the one exception came in 1983 in one of the great books of our time, Modern Times by Paul Johnson. And when Paul Johnson discusses the coming of the Great Depression, he goes right to Murray's book and he adopts the whole analysis and says, that's why we got the depression. But he has not been followed by the academic community. So it was a war. And Mises seemed to be on the losing side once again. And so did his spiritual heir. In the summer of 62, Mises came out to the west coast. Now this was the same year that Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom was published. And that was getting considerable attention by the tiny handful of people who called themselves free market economists, especially if they were undergraduates. And I was an undergraduate. I'd read it, I'd read actually the first chapter of it the year before in a little University of Chicago student magazine called New Individualist Review. And I was willing to listen to it. I wasn't buying his position in the public schools and vouchers, but I was willing to listen. And so a man named Andrew Joseph Galambos brought Mises to the west coast for a series of speeches, a one week seminar with Mises. We had to pay something and I paid whatever it was to go. It was the summer of 1962. And so we got to hear him and at the time I was impressed. He was sharp. I don't know how good he was when he was young. He was sure good at that meeting. There were maybe 30 of us and I don't think most of them were students. I was a student and I was impressed. I remember asking him a question. He said, well what's the orthodox position on whatever it was? Oh man, Mises, no. Orthodox, what do you mean orthodox? I'm not orthodox. The Keynesians are orthodox. Don't call me orthodox. Well I felt kind of bad because I was about to write my bachelor's dissertation on the history of the orthodox Presbyterian church. So orthodox seemed like pretty good word to me. Well it wasn't a good word for Mises. He was unhappy with it. Now at that point human action was out of print. You couldn't get human action. Yale University Press was about to put out their ghastly version of it, terribly typeset. Slap in his face, deliberate, which came out the next year in 63. So he was virtually unknown in the West Coast. No one knew who he was. Again, tiny number of people and he did not quit. He would not quit. In 1971 I joined the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education and there on his 90th birthday they gave him a festschrift. And he was happy. Two volumes set in his honor. And he really was happy. I remember he was holding on to those two volumes. Somebody said, I remember seeing it. Could I see that Dr. Mises? He held on tighter. He was not about to let loose of that festschrift. He finally got the honor. Afterwards coming back, we drove him home and I remember somebody we were in a car and we were driving home. I asked him about the fact, how was it that Weber knew about your book, your essay on socials economic calculation? He said, well, I knew him and I sent it to him and he liked it. I had no idea. He was just amazing to me. And we had one other brief conversation. He said, I believe that economics is value free. And you can't find any kind of neutral statement that everybody believes in, that just does not exist. I said, I don't think that's true. He said, oh yeah? Not he didn't actually say that. Yes. What statement would you make? And it pops into my head. I said, well, it's better to be rich and healthy than it is to be poor and sick. And he said, I think you're right. So that was my great epistemological challenge to Ludwig von Miesen. And so now in closing this as the youngest of the defenders of Mises who actually knew him as a kid, I will say only this. There is one thing that you can say about me that can only be said of me that extends the Misesian tradition. I am the only one who dresses like Mises. And so I want you to look at this magnificent suit in this magnificent, this painting of Mises. And I'll close it with this. Leonard Reed took me down to buy my first handcrafted suit from his tailor out of Hong Kong. And I decided, what could I get for a suit that would never go out of style? And I said, get a suit that went out of style back in 48. And I did and I have never changed. Thank you very much.