 Well, my topic today is about political entrepreneurship and wealth destruction. And one of the things a lot of you have probably heard already in one of the classes, or maybe one or more of the classes, is the old sort of the old libertarian idea that there are two ways to make money. And one way to make money is to produce goods and services for other people in the free market. And the other way to make money is to use the powers of the state in order to transfer money from somebody else or some other person or group and give them nothing in return. So for example, if I'm in the mousetrap business and I make a better mousetrap or a cheaper mousetrap and I make more money that way, well, that's type number one. On the other hand, if I go to the legislature and get them to pass a law banning the importation of all foreign mousetraps, and I can sell my mousetraps for double of what I was selling them for, then I can make more money that way too, but all the consumer gets in return is they have to pay more. They get the same stupid mousetrap, but they age that there's more money that leaves their pockets. So that's another way of making money. And so in the modern language of economics, that means there's a distinction between profit seeking and rent seeking. And I never liked this word rent, even though it was rent seeking, even though it was invented by my old graduate school professor, Gordon Tullock. And I prefer plunder seeking instead of rent seeking. But in the economic rent is a technical definition of it is a payment of a resource in excess of what it would take to put that resource on the market. So if I could make a dollar or mousetrap in my mousetrap business, that would be just a free market price. But if I did get the legislature to block competition in the mousetrap business, and I can sell them for $2, that extra dollar would be what economists call a rent. You know, I prefer something like the profits of plunder or something like that. But that's what the language is, use rent seeking versus profit seeking. So an entrepreneur, a private entrepreneur is somebody who engages in profit seeking, not rent seeking. It makes us money by being alert to what the consumers want and gives them what they want and makes money that way. And that's how value is created in the economy. That's what creates value for everybody because all exchange is mutually advantageous. When you engage in buying and selling, both parties benefit, otherwise they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't trade. And that's what creates value in the economy. Whereas political entrepreneurship is totally different. Political entrepreneurship has to do with influencing the government for one thing. In the way I just mentioned, another aspect of it is with private entrepreneurship, you don't see how I'm going to put this. I don't want to confuse you about this. With private entrepreneurship, the consumer is really in charge. On my opening speech on Sunday night, I read this big long quote from Von Mises saying that some people get confused because they think corporate executives and bankers and people of that sort really run the economy. But it's really the consumer because no matter how powerful Bill Gates might be, for example, the richest man in the world, he has no power at all to force me to buy anything. I could tell Bill Gates, go play in the traffic, Bill Gates. I'm using an Apple computer, even though he's the richest man in the world. I can't say that to Barack Obama. I can't say I'm not paying taxes to Barack Obama. Go play in the traffic. He'll send men with guns after me to put me in a government cage for seven years. Bill Gates has no power to do anything like that. He has to persuade consumers to buy his products. And he's apparently done a pretty good job of it because he's become the richest man in the world. But with political entrepreneurs, they spend their time trying to isolate themselves from the pressures of anybody, consumers, investors, voters, to be pretty much on their own, to plunder at will, to do what they want. That's what a political entrepreneur does. And I thought to demonstrate this, I thought I'd tell a short story about a real private entrepreneur, a profit-seeking entrepreneur versus a political entrepreneur that I've written about in some of my writings. And the example would be, in the first case, James J. Hill. Some of you may be familiar, I don't know if some of you may be familiar with James J. Hill, who he is. He was the founder in the 19th century of the Great Northern Railroad. It was the only privately funded transcontinental railroad. It went from Minnesota to California. And it disproved the idea that government money was necessary to build a transcontinental railroad. For many, many years, there was all this talk about the free rider problem that private investors would never put up enough money to build such a big thing, a transcontinental railroad. And the government did build two transcontinental railroads around the same time. The 1870s, 1880s, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. But James J. Hill built, with private funding, private investors, the Great Northern Railroad was the name of his railroad. And I'm going to read to you a couple of quotes from a historian friend of mine named Burton Folsom. And I highly recommend Burton Folsom's book on the history of American entrepreneurs. It was originally called The Myth of the Robber Barons. And let's see, page 115. Here's an example of a real profit-seeking entrepreneur, James J. Hill. If you like biographies, his autobiography is called High Ways of Progress. Very interesting book. He talks about this man who he had one eye. His father died at age when he was 10 years old. And he had to support his mother and his six siblings. And he was a combination of extremely hard worker and high intelligence. And he also saved every penny that he could. And he ended up becoming a very wealthy man, the operator of the most successful transcontinental railroad in America at the time, the Great Northern. And here's how this historian Burton Folsom describes the way he operated as a business person. He said, Hill's quest for short routes, low grades, and few curvatures was an obsession. In 1889, Hill conquered the Rocky Mountains by finding the legendary Mariah's Pass. Lewis and Clark had described a low pass through the Rockies back in 1805. But later, no one seemed to know whether it really existed or if it did where it was. Hill wanted the best gradient, so much of what he hired so much that he hired a man to spend months searching Western Montana for his legendary pass. He did, in fact, find it and the aesthetic hills shortened his route by almost 100 miles. So this is the kind of person that left no stone unturned in terms of trying to find out how to improve the quality of his railroad line and to make it cheaper. And then if you can compare that to the government subsidized railroad line. So Hill was a businessman and every time he cut a dollar off his cost, there was a dollar in his pocket and his business partner's pockets as a profit. So he was highly motivated to minimize the cost and the price to his customers of this transcontinental railroad. By contrast, we had the government subsidized railroad. This is political entrepreneurship and the subsidies were per mile subsidies. So and they're mostly land grant subsidies and cheap loans, you know, far below the market rate of interest loans by the government to these quote corporations that were created by the government. And the man in charge of it was named Grenville Dodge. He was an old friend of Abraham Lincoln's actually Lincoln made him a general during the Civil War and he spent the Civil War killing Indians and mostly to get the Indians out of the way where they intended to build railroad tracks after the war. That was pretty much Grenville Dodge's wartime service as they call it. And so here's how Burton Folsom describes Dodge and his methods of business as opposed to James J. Hill said since Dodge was in a hurry, he laid track on the ice and snow. Can you imagine that building railroad tracks on top of frozen ice, we're talking about the Rocky Mountains after all, a few Rocky Mountains naturally, the line had to be rebuilt in the spring when the ice melted. But that was more that meant more money to Grenville Dodge because the more railroad track they laid, the more money they made to the government. It was the government, it was taxpayers dollars. So what was worse, unanticipated spring flooding along the lower fork of the Platte River washed out rails, bridges, and telephone poles doing at least $50,000 damage in the first year. No wonder some observers estimated the actual building cost at almost three times what it should have been. And so you see the big difference between just the business operation of an entrepreneur versus a political entrepreneur. And from what I read, I read these stories about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. James J. Hill's line from Minnesota to California looks something like, this is my map of the United States that I draw, whereas the line of the Union Pacific looked very different. It looked more like this. And so, but I have more. I have pictures of the actual railroad lines that I got from the internet this morning. The one on top is the Great Northern from Minnesota to California. That's the rail line. And the one on the bottom is the Union Pacific. And you might notice that that version of the Union Pacific looks a lot like my artwork. Over here, there's my artwork. And there's the actual Union Pacific rail line. And so, you know, why the difference? Well, you would think you want to transport the produce, all the farm goods, the agricultural goods from the Midwest to the West Coast and ship them to China or wherever. You would think a business person would try to find the most direct route. And here where my finger is, that's the famous Mariah's Pass that Lewis and Clark discovered in 1805. And no one knew where it was until the 1870s when James J. Hill went out there and hired an engineer to find it. And they found it knocked off 100 miles off of his route. But then you see this crazy, you know, lines built by the government right there. Well, the reason for that is that with these political entrepreneurs, in order to get votes in Congress for the subsidies, you had to promise every member of Congress that will run a railroad line down to your dinky little town. So your dinky little town with 50 people, if, you know, your hometown, if you want to vote in Congress for the continuing subsidies, there's going to be a railroad line down there. Okay. And so why wouldn't they build it if it was just if somebody else's money? James J. Hill was building with his money. It was his debt. And he could personally go bankrupt if the railroad went bankrupt. But when the politicians are spending the money, it's not their money. And so every little burg in the whole western part of the United States that has one of these railroad lines that was grossly unprofitable was built if they wanted to vote. Okay. So that's one example of the difference between real entrepreneurship and political entrepreneurship in terms of efficiency of building things and the cost effectiveness. So at one point, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, they were bankrupted. And James J. Hill was the only, was sort of a monopoly because he was successful and they weren't. And even though they had all these, these subsidies, okay? So now what I want to do next is tell you some of the techniques that I've run across in my reading and research that political entrepreneurs do to isolate themselves from consumer pressure. But also keep in mind the economic lesson here in distinguishing between profit-seeking and plunder-seeking is that profit-seeking involves creating services, serving customers, okay? Rent-seeking or plunder-seeking involves transferring money from one pocket to the other, robbing Peter to pay Paul under the auspices of government. The government is the one doing the robbing of Peter, giving some of the money to Paul and keeping some for itself, okay? And that is economically destructive. It destroys wealth because the opportunity cost of getting involved in politics is all the productivity for gone. If a corporation is spending time in Washington lobbying for some regulation or law that will screw its competition, by definition, it is not back home working on producing better products or better services. That's what got Bill Gates in trouble with the government. Bill Gates thought he could run Microsoft from Redmond, Washington without even having a Washington lobbying office. He did not even have a Washington, Microsoft did not even have a Washington DC lobbying office and the Washington establishment was so outraged by that that they investigated him for 10 years and then dragged him into court in pseudom and that lasted another four or five years and then pretty much nothing came of it. But they diverted his management team for 15 years, basically, to some extent, away from running Microsoft toward dealing with government. And of course, he now has a lobbying office and sends many millions of dollars to Washington. It's not much more different than the mafia, is it? If you want to do business in this country, you've got to give us our take. You've got to finance our careers, okay? And so the opportunity cost of all that political activity is productive activity for gone. If a young student like yourself decides to go to law school because you hear that lobbyists are mostly lawyers and they make a lot of money, well, good luck to you. But as an economist, I think of that as, well, that same student could have gone to engineering school and become an engineer and help figure out how to produce goods and services cheaper or a better quality or become an entrepreneur himself or herself and a creator of wealth rather than a destroyer of wealth. So the more and more people who become involved in the whole political process, the less wealthy we all are. The late economist, Mansar Olson, wrote several books about this. Oops, here's my blue pen. I'll write this name down for you. Mansar Olson, he passed away a few years ago. He wrote several books about this. He used to give an example of the effects of plunder seeking or rent seeking, an example he would give. Whereas imagine this, you know what a sumo wrestler is? A sumo wrestler, these big fat Japanese guys in diapers and they get, they draw a circle and they like slam into each other and they wrestle and whoever gets thrown out of the circle loses, I guess. And so anyway, Mansar Olson used to explain the effects of political entrepreneurship by saying, imagine two sumo wrestlers wrestling over the contents. The award to the winner is the contents of a small China shop. So it's one of these shops with lots of shelves with fine China and goblets and glasses. And these two big guys are just knocking everything over, smashing everything. And they're all done and the winner walks off with one goblet. And the China shop represents the economy. And so the example he's trying to make is that if we go too far with the politicization of society, this is what happens. We destroy a lot more than what the winners get. The winners of the whole plunder-seeking game, they become wealthy, they do well, but the rest of us are left with broken glass. And that was Mansar Olson. OK, another trick that is used by the political entrepreneurs is a trick that has created a monopoly in politics in the United States. And this is true of other countries, too. I think it's true of all democracies now. That once you're elected to the United States Congress, it's almost impossible to lose your seat no matter what happens. And so the classical theory of democracy that everybody has taught in school is some version of looking at government as perfectly competitive. The voters vote in, the politicians, and the politicians faithfully carry out their demands or what they want you to do. Not true. The politicians have isolated themselves from us. They've gerrymandered themselves in. And so this word gerrymandering is actually a combination of two words. There is a politician in the 19th century named Elbridge Gerry, J-E-R-Y, and salamander. A salamander is a lizard. Here's a picture. This is my version of the salamander. So it's kind of a squiggly animal in Elbridge Gerry, Eldridge Gerry, OK? And of course, what gerrymandering is, is each state has congressional districts. And let's pick one of the easy states like Nebraska, or it could be Kansas, or it could be North Dakota, or South Dakota. I guess they got tired of drawing maps when they got out west, and they just make them all look like rectangles. So let's say there were four congressional districts. And this is Kansas. You could draw the four congressional districts like that. And there are members of Congress, or how many members of Congress each state has is determined by the population. So let's say there's enough population. They have four congressional districts. So you have four members of Congress from Kansas. Or you could draw Kansas like this. Here's the state of Kansas again. You could have one district like this. Here's district one. Here's district two. Here's three. And the rest is four. OK, you could do that. Now, why would you do something like that? Well, why you would do something like that is that the way this works is that every 10 years, there's a census, and whoever happens to control the governor's office gets to rewrite the districts based on the census. They create the districts. And so let's say that the Republicans are in the governor's mansion at the time. And in district one right here is 80% Republican. That means whoever runs for Congress in that district as a Republican will always be reelected. It's 80% Republicans. And the same with district number three is, say, 75% Republican. So no matter what, whoever runs, they're going to get elected and reelected and reelected and reelected. And then when the Democrats get in, they do the same thing. If they happen to be in a census year, they'll redraw the districts so that they look to their favor. And so as a result of this, this is the main reason. There are other reasons for this. But as a result, this is information on reelection rates over the years in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The top is the US House of Representatives from 1964 to 2014. And as you can see, the reelection rate is up there about 95%. So that's what I meant when I said, no matter what you do, you're going to get reelected in the US Congress. And I can remember many years ago, I forget exactly when this was, when the congressman, Barney Frank from Massachusetts, was in the Congress. I think he's retired now, but he was in a front page of the Washington Post for a whole week that his partner was running a male prostitution ring out of the basement of his townhouse. They kept saying it was the basement, but I always wondered how they could have dozens of prostitutes coming in and out and Barney knew nothing about it. But it was a whole week, every the headline, front page of the Washington Post. And then of course, Barney was reelected maybe 10 or 12 times after that. So you can even run a whorehouse out of your house in Congress and be elected 10 times as long as you're good at bringing the money back, taxpayers' dollars back to Massachusetts. I grew up in Pennsylvania and I'll never forget a congressman there named a congressman Flood. And I don't know if you people are, probably on how many people have ever seen the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons? Some of the old timers in the room, but or the insomniacs who watch late night TV and watch old cartoons or on the web or something. But anyway, this is the cartoon and there was a bad guy in the cartoon. His name was Snidely Whiplash. And Snidely wore a black cape and a big black hat and he had a big handlebar mustache. And there'd be scenes in the cartoons like a poor widow would be saying, oh, please don't foreclose on the mortgage. It's 20 below zero outside. And Snidely Whiplash would say, so wear a sweater. You know, he was really a bad guy, a bad guy like that. Anyway, congressman Flood looked just like Snidely Whiplash. He wore a black cape. He was in Congress, he wore a black cape, big black hat and a waxed handlebar mustache. And that's why I never forget this guy. And he was convicted of a felony and Pennsylvania State Law at the time said, he had appealed it, said that he could still run for reelection if it was under appeal. So he did and he got reelected. And even though he was found guilty of a felony and I remember reading newspaper articles saying, asking people, did you vote for congressman Flood? Sure, why did you vote for him? He's a crook. And the typical answer was, well, they're all crooks in Washington but our crook is really good at getting money for us for a new post office building and new school, something. So as long as you bring the money back, you can do that. So that's basically what we see here with the US House of Representatives 95% average reelection rate for the 50 years. And it's not much different in the Senate. It's a little different, but it's also pretty high in the Senate. So they've gerrymandered themselves in. And the final thing I have here, I have an article from the National Journal of some of the worst gerrymandered districts in America. So these are actual congressional districts geographically displayed on their sale. They're drawn not too differently. Where's my other map at? See, look at, they're drawn not too differently from, you know, that's my map that I drew a little bit ago and there's these ones. It's not that much of an exaggeration to see how they're drawn, but that's why they're drawn like that. So I don't know, maybe some of you live in some of these places here. But so these are, this was an article in the 10 most contorted congressional districts. Okay, so that's another trick. That political entrepreneurs use to isolate themselves from consumers. You see a private entrepreneur does exactly the opposite. They're always doing everything they can to please the consumer, because that's how you make your money. You know, whereas in politics, you make your money by giving the consumer, the voter, the investor, one big middle finger. That's how you succeed in politics. Another gimmick that is used to get around voter pressure in politics is log rolling, log rolling. If it rains enough, I think Dr. Block and Bob Murphy will have a log rolling contest out back when they're finished with the mud wrestling. Also, here's an example of log rolling. Let's say you have a community with three, three distinct voter groups on the issues of school spending and hospital spending, okay? So you have group A that wants more schools, no more hospitals. Group B wants more hospitals, no more schools. Group C wants no more of anything. So I'll call that status quo. They don't want more schools, they don't want more hospitals. So you might have the older people in the community are willing to raise taxes, spend more on hospitals, new wing in the local county hospital, but their kids are grown up, they're out of school, so they don't want to spend their tax dollars on schools. Younger parents, they'll spend more taxes on schools, they still have kids in school. They're not too worried about healthcare yet, they're young. So that would be this group here, group A. Okay, so we're gonna take a referendum and we're gonna use majority rule. We're gonna use majority rule to vote on raising taxes a little bit, property taxes to pay for an extra wing at the hospital. And so with majority rule, you need two out of three, you need a majority out there. Let's say, you know, they have some communities that do have qualified majority. Let's say it's 66%, you know, it's qualified majority. You need two out of three. If these were the true preferences of the people in this community, could you get a majority in a referendum to spend more money on hospitals? Who wants to take a guess? If you get a free ticket to karaoke tonight, if you guess right, tickets are already free, aren't they? If, could you get a majority vote in this community for a referendum that's, that would increase taxes to pay for more hospitals? No, you only get one, you don't only get one third. This group represents one third, and they want more hospitals, but the other two don't, so you wouldn't get that. How about more spending on schools? The same thing, you only get one third, but you need two thirds for that to go through. So the true preferences of the community, according to the majority rule, is nothing, no more spending on anything. The status quo would be maintained. But of course, what log rolling is, is the people in group B could go to group A if it's possible and say, listen, we don't give a crap about schools, but we want a bigger hospital. So here's what we'll do. We will all vote for more school spending if when the vote comes up in a couple of months for more hospital spending, you vote for more hospital spend. Okay, it's vote trading or log rolling. And that's what happens every single day, all day long in Congress, in state legislatures, that's what they do, vote trading. That's why you see the congressman from Brooklyn voting yes on the farm bill, even though there's no farmers in Brooklyn. That's why you see the congressman from Kansas voting yes on the latest urban redevelopment bill, even though there's no city anywhere near his district in Kansas, they've been trading votes. And so what that means is that because of log rolling, even though the actual preferences of the people is no more spending on anything, the result is more spending on everything. You spend more money on schools and hospitals, even though the true preferences of the people in this supposed democracy is no more spending on anything. And so that's another gimmick or trick that is used. Another of the tactics of the political entrepreneur is illustrated in a book that I mentioned in my speech on Sunday. The book called Money for Nothing by Fred McChesney. And in Fred McChesney, this book was published by Harvard University Press. So it's a very scholarly book, but it has a kind of a simple message. And what the message is, there's a big segment of all the legislation that comes out of Washington and regulations that are proposed and implemented by Washington that is very harmful to the bottom line of businesses, higher taxes on your business, regulations that would be very costly to enforce or to comply with, things would be very harmful to a business. For example, the Clinton administration proposed putting price controls on pharmaceuticals. And of course, the pharmaceutical companies wouldn't didn't like that because they couldn't legally sell their drugs for as high as they're currently selling them for. And that'd be one example. And so they were quite alarmed at that. And so, but anyway, what the Money for Nothing book is about is this type of regulation that is very onerous and costly on businesses that McChesney observed that here's the way it works, is that these things are proposed and it's very alarming to businesses. So businesses then organize a lobbying effort to stop it, to get this bill stopped or to get this regulation reversed, something like that. And that requires them writing checks for many millions of dollars to the Republicans and Democrats in Washington, DC who control all this game. And then once that happens, once all that money comes in to pay for the careers of the Democrats and Republicans in Washington, the politicians say, well, this is a dumb idea. Whose idea was this? Let's get rid of this foolish law putting price controls on pharmaceuticals or whatever it is. So it's basically an extortion racket and these staffers on Capitol Hill actually have their own, they call these bills, the legislation, legislative bills, they call them milker bills. They're milking campaign contributions from business people. That's a euphemism for bribery, in other words. Or extortion will actually be a better word, extortion. You wanna do business in this town, you gotta give us our take is what they're saying. No different from the mafia, is it? And so they use them milker bills. And there's a big long example of this in McChesney's book and it's hilarious because the member of Congress who orchestrated this whole thing, his last name was Leech, Congressman Leech, and I just couldn't get over that reading this whole long passage about this episode. And he does mention that the Pharmaceuticals was an actual example in his book of they proposed price controls on pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical industry sent $3 million to Washington, D.C. Then the Clintons said, ah, forget about it. We're not gonna do this, but they pocketed the 3 million. Okay, money for nothing. Okay, another tactic I'll tell you about is a book that I wrote a long time ago, co-authored. It's called Underground Government. And what this book was about, I co-authored it with James Bennett. What this book was about was we did a study of, in the late 1970s, the United States, there was a tax revolt and a lot of states, it was at the state level, California was the most famous, they limited property taxes, that some of the states limited how much borrowing could happen. Even some counties in the United States had laws passed that said such things as the taxes, the property tax can never go up faster than personal income goes up. So if personal income goes up 2%, that's the limit on how much your taxes could ever go, your property taxes. Some states did the same kind of thing. So there was a genuine tax revolt in this country and it eventually led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That was a part of this anti-government mentality that did exist in a backlash against the overreaching government of the 70s. So my co-author, James Bennett and I, were thinking, well, how is government gonna react to this? The classical theory of democracy says, that's the cannon fire, the Walter Block must have won the wrestling match. He always, he does that every year whenever he wins the wrestling match. If he wins the chess match tonight, you'll hear the same thing. He does the same thing. He kind of goes overboard with this competition stuff, okay? But that's what I was saying about, is government gonna do what the textbooks tell all the kids they're gonna do, that the people have demanded limitations on government spending and borrowing and taxing? Therefore, that's what you all get. We did a historical study mostly and found that for even at that time in the 1980s, what we're talking about, we had about a hundred year history in the United States of how governments did respond to tax revolts by telling the people, okay, the people have spoken, we will pass this law limiting government. But then they would set up whole new institutions that would enable them to spend money off budget or off the books. And the most notorious example was something in Washington state that was known as whoops. They called it whoops. WP, there was two P's in there actually, two P's. This stood for Washington Public Power Supply System. The people out there voted over and over and over again. They tried to get a referendum to build nuclear power plants. And the people did not wanna spend their tax dollars on nuclear power plants in Washington and Oregon. And so they set up what's called an off budget enterprise and they funded this through what are called revenue bonds. And these revenue bonds are a type of government bond where the government just decided to say, well, these don't require a voter approval. You know, with the other type of bond is called a general obligation bond. That means if the government borrows money and you buy this bond, the government will tell you the taxpayers in the state of Alabama or whoever is issuing the bond are responsible for making sure you get the principal and interest paid on your bond that you bought for us. So you're guaranteed to get your money back eventually from the government, that you lent the government by buying them a bond. But with a revenue bond, there is no such guarantee. And so why would you do that? Well, you get a higher rate of interest, but where's the money gonna come from? Well, in this case, we're gonna build nuclear power plants that we're gonna sell electricity. And we're gonna sell electricity and that's where the revenue will come from these things. But in the meantime, so you have a government, you know, government is notoriously inefficient at building anything to begin with, but you isolate them a further step away from any scrutiny by the voters and they become really, really inefficient. And so the end result of all this was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of municipal finance in American history. They defaulted on two and a half billion dollars in government debt out there in Washington State over this. And so in our book, we have chapter after chapter of this in New York State, people would turn down referendum to build state university, new state universities or housing developments three, four or five times. They would say, okay, people have spoken, we're not gonna do this. And then they turn around and they set up an off-budget enterprise and fund it with revenue bonds. Now where I live in Florida, they're doing this now with the, they wanna build passenger train from Miami to Orlando and they wanna fund it with revenue bonds that are not voter approved. And so the same type of thing is bound to happen. They have all this money and they'll create a new whoops in Florida if they go through with that. And so that's another tactic that is used to isolate themselves, politicians from anybody who can pressure them. Another book that Bennett and I wrote that along the same lines is called Destroying Democracy. It's about the manufacturing of the will of the people. And I got the idea for the title from the Federalist Papers, number 10, Federalist Number 10 by James Madison where he wrote that the whole purpose of the constitution he said was to control the violence of faction by which he meant special interest politics, the violence of faction. And that's the whole purpose of the constitution he said. But what this book is about is Jim Bennett and I gathered reams of statistics back then on government grants to hundreds of different special interest groups. There was a non-profit organization in the DC suburbs that had done this. It was called the Conservative Caucus and they had big filing cabinets of Freedom of Information Act requests and data on where the tax dollars are going when they give money to the Sierra Club or to the AFL-CIO or name your special interest group, the Chamber of Commerce, whoever. And so we wrote this big fat book about this and the way the system works is the government gives tax dollars away to lobbying groups, political pressure groups. They use the money to lobby for bigger government and hire taxes, it works, they get the additional money and they give some of it back to the same lobbying groups who lobby more for more government, bigger governments. So these are all groups that use tax dollars to manufacture the supposed will of the people that government supposedly obeys in a democracy. And so that's why we call that destroying democracy because the government is literally financing the violence of faction that Madison warned against. The Constitution is supposed to limit the violence of faction but in reality, the government actually feeds it and gives it money. So in the third book I wrote with Bennett on this same topic is called Official Lies, How Washington Miss Leads Us. And again, that's the theme of that is manufacturing the will of the people and not obeying the will of the people but manufacturing the will of the people. And I don't have time to get into a lot of it. The final thing I'll mention is fiscal illusion. This is a term from Public Choice Economics and in the main vehicle of fiscal illusion is the Fed. It's also government borrowing, but the Fed because it reduces the perceived cost of government when the federal government can finance its programs by money printing, it doesn't have to tax people. Misi's wrote in Human Action, he wrote about how think of what it would be if the government had to fund its wars through taxes. Now, even the current wars that the US government is involved in, what if it had to go to each tax-paying family and say, here's your bill for this year for Iraq, $10,000. You think there would be, you think when these people in camouflage walk through the airports, there'd be quite as much cheering and clapping over this if you had just gotten a bill for $10,000 or $20,000 to pay your share of the war in wherever, Syria, they've been agitating for war in Syria, not likely. So the wars would be much shorter and fewer of them, certainly if we paid for war with taxes rather than money printing and the cost becomes invisible or borrowing for that matter. The cost is thought to be put off on the future generations by most people when it's a few borrowing, so it doesn't cost anything. And that's called fiscal illusion. If you think of it in terms of the law of demand, you're moving down along the demand curve. The perceived price of government is lower because you don't see it. The real price is there. We use the same resources that in reality, but the perception of what you're paying is much lower if the government can delay the cost through borrowing or hide it through your money printing. The cost comes in terms of malinvestment and boom and bust cycles and price inflation eventually. Okay, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it that these are just some of the tactics government uses to destroy wealth in the economy. And it's the inherent nature of political entrepreneurship to be wealth destroying. So these are some of the reasons why when you hear Austrians say the growth of government is the opposite of Keynesianism. I think Keynesianism is the growth of government boosts the economy. Well, these are some specific examples, I think, of how, no, political entrepreneurship is wealth destroying and almost everything government does is an effort that has the effect of destroying wealth creation or at least impeding the progress of wealth creation at one way or another. And so that's about it for now. I guess that's all I have time for. There's some people outside the door tapping their toes. I guess we're out of time. Okay. Thank you.