 This weekend we welcome Michael Oliver and if you're interested in Rothbard and Rand or the debate over limited government versus anarcho-capitalism, you'll love this weekend's show. Michael literally witnessed the beginning of the modern anarcho-capitalism movement. He knew Murray Rothbard, the man he credits with coining the term. He even called his master's thesis in grad school the new libertarianism colon anarcho-capitalism. In this thesis, which is now a book available on Amazon, Michael tries to reconcile objectivism with Rothbard on natural rights, on private defense, and on the idea of limited government versus pure anarcho-capitalism. Michael's a long-time technical market analyst and he studied the comics during his years at EF Hutton if you remember that term. He later worked at Wacovia Bank and today he operates MSA, a technical firm whose advice on market timing is quoted in publications like The Wall Street Journal. Michael's a friend of the Mises Institute and a hugely knowledgeable and interesting person when it comes to the history of the modern libertarian movement, objectivism, anarcho-capitalism versus libertarianism, and the impossibility in his view of limited government. Stay tuned for a fascinating interview. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and I'm pleased as promised to be talking today with Michael Oliver, author of The New Libertarianism Anarcho-Capitalism. Michael, how are you today? I'm fine, Jeff. How are you? Well, I'm great. And I got to tell you, we were very excited when you sent us at the Mises Institute some copies of your book this year. And I know it's on Amazon. I know it's at the Mises Institute website via Amazon. And I got to tell you, I loved it. It's only about 175 short pages. It's a great little synopsis of a lot of things that both Rothbard and Ayn Rand posited back in the day. So, let me just start off with this. Tell us about your relationship with Murray Rothbard, how you knew him, and how you came to understand as you relate to me that he is the originator of the term anarcho-capitalism. Well, let's see. In the late 60s, I was primarily an objectivist that was in high school, free college days. And I learned about Mises at that point through Ayn Rand, because Ayn Rand's bookstore online, not online, excuse me, her bookstore via mail, promoted human action. And I'd never heard of Mises until Rand to make more of a little less maybe issue out of it. And obviously she was endorsing Austrian economics, which was new to a lot of objectivists, and therefore she helped create a wave that quite possibly has helped shape up the Mises Institute today in terms of being there because of the popularity she brought to bear on Austrian economics. And then I found out about Rothbard via some of his early writings. And in the early 70s, I was in Columbia, South Carolina at the time, I established a newspaper along with some associates called The New Banner, which was an objectivist slash anarcho-capitalist periodical. And we published about it in two weeks. It went out nationwide. I think we had at our peak maybe 400 or 500 subscribers. And remember, the movement back then was pretty small. There were probably a couple dozen real hardcore activists in such locations as California, where Reason Magazine was coming into being. Lefebvre was out in Colorado. Robert Lefebvre, he had a group of people, and there was also a group in Philadelphia called SIL Society for Individual Liberty. And down in Columbia, we had The New Banner Group. And so there were pockets of anarcho-capitalist thinkers and activists all around the country in different places. And we were probably in the weirdest place, Columbia, South Carolina, but we were. And I sent a letter to Rothbard requesting an interview. And I guess he'd heard about the paper, and he was very open to talking to anybody of any of his students, so to speak. And he invited us up and went up to his apartment, which was a walk-up, as I recall. Remember, this is 42 years ago. It was on the west side. It was on the west side of Manhattan. I think the lower west side, I've forgotten the exact address I got written somewhere. But I walked up, and it was a wooden staircase, and it was lined with books. As you walked up, I'm trying to give you the visual picture here. It's like a real academician. I mean, even the hallway going up to his walk-up apartment was lined with books. And he got into his apartment, and it felt like you were in Sherlock Holmes' house. There were books everywhere, and stuff piled up. And I met his wife, Joey, and he gave it to us. I guess we were there two, three hours, sounds recording him and asking various questions, which were later published in our interview with him, which occupied the whole issue, and which I think is now available at the Mises site. And that's where he came up with the quote, true anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism. And we put that in bold type in the interview, because he thought it was great. That made him the first time he'd ever used that phrase. As far as the source of anarcho-capitalism, I think Mark Thornton thought it might have been me, but it wasn't. And I talked to Mark about it. And it turned out I did find some earlier uses of the term, anarcho-capitalism, by Rothbard earlier on, at least a year or so before New Banner ever came into being. So that term, he no doubt coined the term. As best I could tell, Rothbard did. He didn't use it all the time. He used libertarianism a lot. But the term actually probably came into being about 1970 via Rothbard. But he was quite a guy. He was just like his picture show. He was happy. He was a happy warrior. I think that phrase has been used. Last a lot. There's no, like some people get mad today about the events and trends that have come to us. And Rothbard would be laughing his head off because he knows we're going to win. He has a certainty, he had a certainty that the ideas were solid and ultimately, by Darwinian process, such ideas would emerge and would ultimately trump lesser ideas. And sure enough, what's it been at 40 some odd years later, and you have a phenomenon where Rand's books don't quit selling. They sell more and more every year. And Rothbard is a common name, a known name in academia and elsewhere. And Austrian school is very well known. And this all happened in a matter of 40 years, which seems like a long time. But for back into the boss idea, anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism, this is now known, to emerge so strongly in such a short period of time is really quite amazing. It shows the power of ideas. Fortunately, we've had some events that have helped coalesce, I think, help push forward the ideas because the events are matching the analysis, so to speak. Anyway. Well, you wrote your book first as a graduate thesis, all the way back in 1972. Now, this was pretty radical stuff for the time. And this was prior to a lot of what Murray had written. So either through being an objectivist or through your own sort of background and self-education, how did you become so radicalized? It was just a process of logic, really. You know, Nathaniel Brandon passed away a few days ago. Well, back in the late 60s, he had a record set that is available in various cities in person in Nathaniel Brandon Institute, where he had like a 20-volume record set of the lectures of the Base Principles of Objectivism, where he dealt in nonfiction form with the basic concepts of objectivism, which Rand would scatter throughout our novels. But he brought it all together in a lecture series. I was very influenced by that. And I remember associates of mine and new banter folks sitting around nights listening to record at the record of Brandon. And it just seemed to us that the logic of a conservative political outcome, or a quote, limited government outcome, made no sense whatsoever, given the strain of thought, the concepts that are prior to that in the thought process. That Rand's philosophy made sense all the way up to politics. And then suddenly it was like she got illogical. She got emotional. And I think in part that may have been true, because to remember she came over from Russia, and we no doubt looked like a city on a hill to her. And she was also very much in love with the founding fathers concepts of limited government. And I think she just basically shut it off right there. And it said, OK, there's my politics. And in fact, it makes no sense to a lot of the young libertarians back then who broke from the limited government view to the libertarian view and that the concept of limited government in the first places is almost nonsensical, because what a government is is a monopoly of physical force, a legal monopoly of physical force in a given territory, meaning they trump everybody. They're the papa. Now, to assume that somebody or some entity can have that kind of totalistic power and not apply it necessarily, say, oh, well, we're going to be limited, well, the founding fathers probably more than any other thinkers in history created structures, checks and balances, balance of power, so forth, to restrict the government from becoming Leviathan, at least they thought. But we now see after four, five, six generations in the United States that those restrictions and limitations built into the system really didn't quite do what they expected. I'm sure any of the founding fathers now, if they saw what was going on, would be law and construct what has not been restrained. I mean, Putin almost looks like he's a dictator in everybody's mind, but I seriously doubt he gets involved or is concerned about what everybody does every moment of their life for their own good. All he wants is political power, whereas somebody in the West who's elected and seems to be a more democratic and therefore a better outcome is more concerned about manipulating every moment of your life. So it's a question in my mind whether, quote, a limited government like ours or a theoretically unlimited government like, let's say, Putin or what China used to be is better or worse. There's too many subtleties involved there and certainly the limitations on government did not work. We probably have a more invasive state in terms of the aspects of your life they want to control or do control than Saddam Hussein had. So I think it's been a failure, objectively, the limited government concept. Unfortunately, many conservatives still don't see that. They still think we can limit the president's power. That's the big issue now and so forth and so on, but it's theoretically impossible. If the state commands the high ground and says we have the right to do this, to make law, to generate truth, then it's entirely up to the government itself, whether it restrains itself or not. And looking at it another way, the concept of limited government, all governments in effect are limited to some degree, simply due to logistical issues, technology issues. Even in an outright dictatorship, citizens have moments of privacy where the government doesn't know what they're doing and therefore they have some degree of, quote, freedom. So there is no such thing as a limited government in our view at that time. And therefore Rothbard's politics and economics were a perfect fit to simply sit on top of, if you took a garden picture here, take Einrann's head off the statue but Rothbard's head on top of it. All her ideas led in a perfect trajectory in our view and other people's view at that time toward no government. So it made sense. That's how I arrived at it, it made sense. Well, that's interesting. I'm trying to have this image in my head of Einrann's body with Murray on top. Neither one of them I think cracks my foot five. I love the old way, but you know. But let me, I mean, let's explore this a little further. I mean, you talking your bio about unifying objectives principles with Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism. And it's not just objective as many libertarians as well advocate some sort of limited state. So from a philosophical perspective, not a political perspective, but philosophically, is this too big of a gulf to bridge between people who believe in anarcho-capitalism and people who believe in some sort of state? No, I don't think there's any compromise. You have to tactically, in terms of change in time in history, have to live with the slimy approach, I'm sure. But the concept of the state is inherently illegitimate, no matter how you want to define it limited or otherwise. And objectivism, after all, what it posits is that a view of reality is noble, it's real, it's objective, human consciousness can grasp reality. And the key attribute, and this is where the link between anarcho-capitalism and objectivism is most important, if you want to have a society that's a human society, then you have to know what are you talking about when you say the word human or man? And I ran to find man by his chief attribute as having a volitional consciousness. Well, having a volitional consciousness means it isn't involuntary. You're not like an animal with behavioral drives. You have to actually apply that tool in your life to achieve productivity, happiness, and so forth. But in a status system where somebody else takes the high ground because they know better and they short-circuit your intellectual process, your conceptual process, then what, in effect, they're doing is denying you human humanity because that is the chief attribute of human being, is the ability to think and then act upon his thoughts. And to the extent that more and more of those thoughts and actions are restrained, regulated, denied, abridged, et cetera, by the state, then it becomes less and less of a human society. And I think that any objectivist who sat down, even the orthodox ones, if they sat down for a minute and thought about it soberly, would realize that, yes, in fact, limited government is, is not the solution. Ultimately, it will evolve into a stateless society with a market society, voluntary society. So I think the bridge there is her definition of man's essential attribute as the volitional consciousness and the state as an enemy of that, in effect. And therefore, when you put the two together in anarcho-capitalism makes sense, given her definition of man, which I fully agree with. So I think there's an ideal marriage there. It's not, it's not a difficult bridge to make at all. Well, Michael Rothbard certainly understood the concept of a volitional consciousness. And he believed in a view of natural rights ethics that was not based on faith or a deity. But can his view of natural rights ever be reconciled with Rand's morality? You know, as you know, she eschewed natural rights, at least conceptually. Yeah, she did. She eschewed a lot of things that she may have said she eschewed, but she really didn't. When you read more about me, you know, she got mad at certain people and certain ideas. Libertarians were hippies to her. She used that term, wrote a letter to the New York Times and disclaiming them. And yet over time, we can see that the libertarian movement, as it now exists, is filled with objectivists and people who are motivated by her. I'll give you a couple, I want to deviate off the question too much, but right now, just as examples, there's an interview on YouTube. Go to YouTube, type in Rand Paul on an I in Rand and his name, because his name is Rand, so people thought he was named after I in Rand. And in a two and a half minute video, he discusses why it's not the case, but why he admires her greatly as an intellectual. And then he mentions another name as well in the context of people he admires. And this was, he recorded this in late 2009, so before he actually was elected to the Senate. And he's in his doctor garb and everything. He's just talking calmly, as he always does. And the other person was Murray Rothbard, who actually met and got the drive to the airport one time when Rothbard spoke with a group. And those are the two people in his mind that are totally, there's no disharmony whatsoever in Rand Paul's mind. And that's what I'm trying to make the point of in the book is that this disparity, this antagonism between the old orthodox objectivists, which are probably becoming fewer and fewer in my view, or assistant, people call the unorthodox objectivist, such as myself. And then there's Ted Cruz, who in his speech is filibuster, along with Rand Paul's filibuster on the drone issue. Who is he quoting? He's quoting Iron Rand. And then the guy who came up with the name, Tea Party, Dick Santelli, for years. I suspect he's an anarcho-capitalist, I don't know for sure, but he quotes Rand all the time. In fact, I remember a Christmas or two ago, there were long lines in front of the stores, and he said, well, I wouldn't be there for anything. And then he paused the moment and said, unless it was a first edition signed copy of Atlas Shrug. But here's Tea Party, therefore libertarian. The guy who sparked the whole thing, at least to solve what was beneath the surface when he had his rant, because he had like 100,000 emails that came in his favor right after that. And yet he's motivated by Rand. So he has no conflict in his mind between libertarian politics and Iron Rand. And I think this evolution has been occurring. And I think it's likely that it should. As far as the specifics of natural law concepts versus Rand's concepts of rights, I don't see any problem, any conflict interpreted broadly. I just, I don't see that. I think that if a person has a volitional, is free to exercise their volition and act upon it, that in effect is natural rights. And that's her way of defining it as being a free society. And the natural rights might have used different phraseology, but effectively they're saying the same thing. The human mind must be free to your mind to think and to act. That's the definition of freedom. Well, Michael, last devil's advocate question on objective is not, I promise. In your book, you discussed what is a huge sticking point for many libertarians. I'm sure all objectivists or most objectivists, and that is the concept of private defense agencies that Rothbard promoted. How do you, Michael Alver, make the case for private defense agencies? Well, it's simple. It's just a service that's needed because in any society you'll have people who aggress, who aren't part of the state, let's say, but who the state is gone now. Okay, we still have aggressors, whether individuals or groups, you have to defend against them. It's like you have to defend against heavy rains, you know, and so forth. So it's a service to be provided. Well, how better to provide a service than have a market entity provide the service? We know that if the government provides it and this is some conservatives need to wake up to. That whenever government provides any services, always more or less dysfunctional or certainly less functional than would a private market operation, moving the mail or building the sewers or building the roads. Conservatives can't seem to break free of that. They still think, well, in order to have a defense force, both extra outside the country defense force like an army or internal police, and to have arbitration, you have to have a monopoly government agency provided. And yet, at the same time, that same conservative would argue for orthodox subjectivists that, oh, no, you can't allow the private agencies to handle those things. They're too important. But meanwhile, anything else the government does is naturally screwed up by the nature of what government is, a non-market agency. They need to reconcile that problem. It's easily reconcilable from our side that private defense forces would be just as dysfunctional as would be private manufacturers of food, growers of food. China's learned that in the last 30 years. I remember they had food was too important to them. And it is, it's an essential of human life, right? Therefore the government, in effect, controlled food production. Well, their food production was not very good. And pretty soon they couldn't blame it on weather cycles. And so they backed their way out of that, privatized agriculture, and boom, all of a sudden the food production grew. Well, the same is true with other quote essentials, like arbitration. And there's private arbitration out there already anyway, but it certainly is a functional concept. And as far as police go, as I describe in the book, a little bit more detail or at least speculative detail. A defense agent is not some free and loose guy with a gun. He has restraints upon him too, because he commits an act of aggression in the process of retrieving stolen goods for you from a thief, but overdug it and commits aggression. Then he is vulnerable, liable in a private system, just like anybody would, like if you had a automobile accident, you're liable. Well, the same would be true with private defense agents. I think Rand Paul's making a good point on this now, but the police issue, another issue he seems to have co-opted very well, and it literally was put in his lap from a libertarian perspective, that the police, to some extent, have an immunity, more so than they would probably in a free market economy, where they would be liable just like any other actor in the economy, whereas police are, to some extent, above and beyond that or have looser rules anyway. Michael, when we were talking offline, we mentioned that you're very much an optimist when it comes to your assessment of the modern liberty movement. Let me ask you this. Give us your thoughts on the liberty movement in America and in the West today, and also whether it should be political or whether it should be apolitical. Both, it should be both. It's just cultural. I think, well, Rothbard was specifically an economist, but he was also a political philosopher, but Rand was broadly cultural. I mean, her books are read not just for political content, but for emotion and the moral sense, which is, let's say, non-political. Moral sense of the validity of capitalism or free markets. So it doesn't have to be strategic or tactical, political-type operation. The LP served a function for about 40 years now, and I think they've dwindled off the page to some extent. But they, at least in their political process, had some minor success, but the main thing they did is they brought a new term into the minds of the American public with a new definition attached to it. Used to be libertarianism, to use the word back in the late 60s or 70s, implied the socialist anarchists from Europe usually, like Bakunin or so forth, Kropotkin. That was generally the knee-jerk response. Well, now when you say libertarian, almost anybody, knows what that term means, can at least supply like a half-sentence answer to it. Oh, you believe in free markets. And that is now common. And so the LP, I think, can take credit for that. Then you have outfits like reason, so forth, not just political action, but cultural and so forth. So I think it could be done on all levels, and I think it is being, that's why it is successful. It isn't just a political operation. Now, from that point of view, the political issue, I think the libertarians were at the point now over the last three or four, five years. And I mean the ones in the ELP and the ones outside the LP, the ones in the GOP, the Santellis of the world, the Tea Party folks, are in position to either create a new party or simply take over the cadaver of the GOP, which might be the easier vehicle to use instead of having to build an entire new party with a new infrastructure. I think that's what's happened, is they've made a play on the GOP and I think they're gonna take it over. And I think the old timers are on their way out just because of age. And also I think they're getting a lot of disrespect, which is fine. Well, that's the second grade, that's it. You know who I mean, the McCain's and Lenz's of the world. Well, that's the second grade visual you've given us today, the cadaver of the GOP. I can just imagine that running out. Instead of throwing it away, just use it, rename it maybe. And I think that the press does not understand what's going on here. They think it's just some bunch of conservatives or Tea Party they associate with major conservatives. I don't think they realize the strong libertarian undercurrent and dominance in that party. Where guys like Christie or Jeb Bush who think they got a chance of getting nominated by the party, I would be shocked if they even made an effort as we get closer to 16. I think that party has been taken over by libertarians and libertarians slash conservatives. And I'm not about a hundred percent sure it's Rand Paul's nomination. In part not because he's, let's say, intellectually a better libertarian than his Cruz, for example, but Rand Paul is just so calm, so unnerving, even though libertarians are mad, Rand Paul does not exude any madness whatsoever, he's very quiet. And I think the country probably wants somebody who doesn't have a jutting jaw, who's acting authoritative, instead he's conversational. And he's having conversations with people that most GOPers never even thought about, the Urban League and NAACP, for example. So I think there's a big change in the way there. And I don't think the mainstream press in their analysis even understands what's coming out of the side mirrors of the car. They're looking out the front window and out the back window at the normal orthodox type of trend of events. And I don't think they understand what's going on, which is fine because maybe they need to be surprised. Well, Michael, as you know, I'm sure the Mises Institute considers itself firmly in that A political camp on the educational and cultural side of it. And here's an argument I'm sure you've heard, Adnausium, the argument for, let's say, principle non-voting. In other words, if we consider politics, more or less a gang struggle, the process by which an individual or group comes to control the state apparatus and all of its evil, how can politics, therefore, lead us to a stateless society? In other words, there's no incentive for a good guy to ever be a politician because to become a politician is to become an ineffective gang leader. I have some family members that tell me that, too. They hate me watching political events on the news because they're all the same and they're not. I do disagree. I think that you have to, barring something in the streets, I don't think that's necessary. I think the power of ideas dominates other forces. And I think Rand and Rothbard combined are so powerful on various levels and for so long now, and they're gaining power in the minds of people like Cruz and Rick Santelli and you can name half a dozen folks that are in Congress or out of Congress that are motivated by these, not motivated by normal conservative thinkers. Now, they're running for office and I wouldn't dare ask Rand Paul or Ted Cruz whether they're anarcho-capitalists because they couldn't answer the question, at least not in front of a camera. But I believe in their integrity of ideas, I think they're headed in the right direction and you have only two choices, it's either that or some other way. And I think that the combination of the cultural and the political trends will combine to reduce the state. And I think that once you break a few models that are in people's heads, like Rand Paul has done a great job in the last year or two with the privacy issue. In fact, he was on top of that before, he was with the drone issue, but before the NSA scandal occurred. And so he more or less fell into his lap. He preempted it and he's now Mr. Pregacy. Now, he in effect has broken a model. The model in the young voters head, let's say the young kid whose parents were both Democrat, voted Democrat all their life. They filled the kid's head with all kinds of ideas about what GOP is, the old white man and all this thing. And then what the Democrats are, they care about people. And meanwhile, the young voter who overwhelmingly vote Democrat in the last few years is shocked by the fact that the president is on the side of the NSA and is listening to their emails and reading their emails or storing them anyway. And they don't quite understand that. It breaks a model. And I think a lot of these models can get broken. And so this process can unfold more rapidly than you think. In my professional side of my life, I analyze markets. And most people when they look at trends, look for the normal signs that the trend is ending, some event that makes sense as a negative to stop a positive trend or a positive to stop a negative trend. Most of the time, I find that when trends change in markets, the event comes from the left or right side mirror. It's not something everybody's looking at. They're not aware of it. All of a sudden, it ambushes them. And it's a whole new variable. The model is broken. In other words, all the things that they thought would be dominating factors of the trend turn out to be something else. Suddenly trumped all those other things. And I think libertarians have that advantage today on various issues. And I suspect they'll make some headway on the immigration issue in terms of Hispanic voters, not in order to get the voters, but simply because they've got an answer that would be suitable to Hispanic, to immigrants. And not the normal GOP answer. On the privacy issue, I think clearly, Rand Paul and libertarians within the GOP have co-opted that issue. Now on this police issue, it seemed at first with the Ferguson thing that it was playing into the Democrat hands. But I'm sure they were playing it for that. But as it turns out, now we have this event in New York that preceded the Ferguson event with the guy who strangled for selling a cigarette. I mean, he even got a conservative talk show host rent and rave about this now. From the perspective of libertarian perspective. So even that issue now suddenly has turned tail and gone the other way, favoring a Rand Paul approach, which again is expressed very calmly. I saw him on CNN last night. I think Wolf Blitzer tried to get him irritated, but didn't succeed. And he had very sober response. A non-model response. It's not the response a normal viewer would expect to see from a GOP spokesman. And I think these tangential events, these coming from the side mirror type direction with solid ideas calmly presented with the events playing into your hands. It's quite a cascade. And I don't see it letting up. I also suspect it's just on the youth vote, for example. We know that they voted heavily for Obama in his first election. And therefore, heavily Democrat, but also came out heavily. That waned sharply in the next one, waned even more in the recent one. And with the privacy issue and also the continuing lack of jobs for youth that are comparable to their degree and put it that way. A lot of kids have degrees but work at Walmart. There's a different reality out there. And it's gonna get worse on the economic side, but by the time we get to 2016, in my view. Worse meaning that the one thing they can hold up as a success is the stock market. And I do not think coming into 2016, they'll be able to hold that up anymore as look what we did. So even if that goes away, the dynamics flow even more for a new view to libertarian view that all the status and didn't work. See, your parents told you vote Democrat, but look, you're six years out of school and you still work at Walmart. Well, Michael, I will say this. I'll only add to your original comment that I await the day when Wolf Blitzer or somebody at CNN asked Hillary Clinton, Hillary, in your heart of hearts, are you actually a Marxist? But I don't think that day is worth coming. Like, let me just shift back to your book for just a moment before we let you go. Thanks so much for your time today. But I note that L. Neil Smith, the great libertarian sci-fi writer, provided a very nice introduction to your book. Tell us about how you came to know him. I moved to Colorado about six, seven years ago. And I knew he lived, I was in the Boulder area. He lived north of there. And I contacted a friend of Washington state, the libertarian I knew, who also had been communicating with L. Neil. So I went up to visit L. Neil and he's a great guy. He's like an uncle to my sons and he's got all kinds of good ideas, radical libertarian ideas. He's been around as long as I have. It's not a couple of years longer in terms of his activity. He came from the Lafayette side. He was close to Lafayette back then. So that's where he came. And he was also involved in the LP in the early years. I think he even ran for office once. But he's a great sci-fi writer. He has tons of books. His first one is The Probability Brokes, which I encourage everybody to read. It's quite a good novel, libertarian. It's also about the defense issue, the private defense issue. So it's futuristic and a private eye novel at the same time. He's a colorful guy. I've been shooting with him a bunch of times. At a shooting range outside where he lives. And I've got the target upstairs because I outshot him. I've got the target set. Anyway, El Nile's a great guy. And he has very high respect. Though if you read the introduction, he had some criticisms of Ron Paul. In the early days of Ron Paul and El Nile's view, where Ron Paul was coming more across as a conservative. And then at the end of that, forward that he wrote from my book, he said that in all likelihood, I can't remember his exact words, Ron Paul changed history. It was like a lump in your throat when he finished that introduction. And he knows he does have high respect for what Ron Paul's done as a single crusader. And it's no doubt changed history. And now maybe his son will walk through the door but it will find out. But El Nile's a great guy. And I recommend anybody read his book, Probability Broaches, first novel. Well, I love seeing that intro to your book. Ladies and gentlemen, how can you find Michael Oliver? Find his book, The New Libertarianism, Anarchocapitalism on Amazon. We'd love if you click through that via the Mises website. Also, if you want actual proprietary technical and market analysis, Michael is a brilliant guy. He operates olivermsa.com. Michael, thank you so much for a fascinating and wide ranging interview. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.