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Feb. 14, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:51
2092 In the Long Run, We Are All Dead! Keynesianism Debunked

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the endless failures of state stimulus spending and Keynesianism with Redmond Weissenburger, President of Mises Canada

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Hi everybody, it's Bob and Doug McKenzie again from the Great White North.
I'm here with Redmond Weisberger, which still sounds like a sandwich I would order from an SS shop, who is the president of Mises Canada, Mises.ca, and you can check it out.
They're really starting to get some great content on there, some great articles, so I hope you will go and check that out.
Welcome back, Red. The young man will go higher than I am.
So you set up a couple of topics which I thought were very interesting.
The first, which I think is worth digging into, Is Keynesianism.
Oh, there's a gripping topic with which to snag the audience right up front.
But I think it's something really, really worth understanding.
I know a little bit about the history, but if you wanted to dive in, let's, you know, I sent the smell of economic gay blood in the water, and Daddy's getting hungry, so maybe we can rip this one a new one, because I think it's a particularly vile doctrine.
I wonder if you can talk a bit about the history and the illusions that people have about it.
Oh, okay. Well, Keynesianism, well, the way I see Keynesianism, I mean, obviously, it's named after John Maynard Keynes, right?
And what's interesting about Keynes is that, in fact, early on, he was a proponent of free trade and early on also fairly free markets.
But Murray Rothbard quoted him as saying that he actually called himself an immoralist, right?
So he specifically said he doesn't have any morals, and he was known for changing his mind on a regular basis, right?
So, leading up to...
And his famous book, the one that sort of changed the world and made everybody Keynesians now, was The General Theory.
Now, when he released this book...
The governments of the day had already been involved in a fair amount of intervention in the market.
And of course Keynes' general theory was the idea that governments could go and essentially basically spend money, intervene in the economy to achieve some sort of desired result.
And generally it was related to unemployment.
So the idea is that governments would engage in deficit spending and this would enable the The unemployment levels to lower.
So the government would spend money, create demand, and employment revenues would go up.
Right, and it's a complete mirror image of the Austrian school because he places the business cycle, right, the booms and the bust, he places that directly in the free market, that the free market is just prone to the madness of crowds, irrational exuberance, and this up and down.
And what you want is a government that's going to smooth things out, make things nice and even.
So when demand collapses because of the mad schizoid nature of the free market, you're going to prop up demand by pumping money into the economy.
And the theory then, of course, is that when demand rises again as a result of that, governments need to cut back to lower their spending, even to levels lower than before they started borrowing because they've got to pay off all that debt.
And, of course, half the equation only ever gets implemented.
The government spends like crazy, which is what they love to do because it gets them into power and keeps them into power, but they don't ever do the flip side of it, which is to save when the demand increases.
Yeah, well, it was Keynes who coined the term animal spirits.
And so he thought it was all this irrational...
I mean, the thing is, he was trying...
Oh, sorry, I thought it was about making wine out of badgers, but not...
I may have missed that part.
Yeah, well, see, the problem is that...
So when Keynes wrote his book, The General Theory, the thing is that governments had already been involved in massive amounts of deficit spending, and, of course, this was what created the Great Depression, massive amounts of intervention, right?
And so it's my opinion that he essentially just wrote this book because that was what was going on already.
And he wanted to be in there with the powers that be.
He basically wrote a book that justified Well, people in power are always very friendly to intellectuals who say that their use of power is really great.
You know, there's nothing better than giving, you know, government spending is the way to work your way out of all problems.
Governments love that, and they will lavish praise and money and status on all of the people who praise the sword of the state and say that it can be used for good.
Well, I mean, and a key example of that is that within the introduction of the German version, the German edition of Keynes' book, The General Theory, which of course was released while the Nazis were in power, he writes right in the introduction that his system would be far more easily implemented within a state like Nazi Germany, a Nazi socialist state with a top-down control of the economy.
That is, of course, what Nazism was.
It was National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP. And, you know, some people who call themselves socialists like to conflate Nazism with capitalism, but of course it was socialism.
Well, and it's also just done a sort of minor detour.
It's easy to forget, and in fact it's not often remembered, the degree to which intellectuals and the ruling classes in the West loved fascism, loved communism, and even had a strong admiration For Nazism.
They had a fetish for it.
You know, they really saw it as something that was amazing and wonderful and exuberant and vital and so on.
And reading back, I mean, what happened with the intellectual pilgrimage to the Soviet Union was just unbelievably reprehensible.
Yeah. But even you can read very, very pro-Hitlerian statements and certainly you can get lots and lots of pro-Mussolini statements from the leading intellectuals and people in significant positions of power in state departments and foreign departments who are responsible for foreign policy.
They really did like these guys.
They had a lot of charisma. Of course, you know, tyrants have a lot of charisma in general, but they love these guys and You know, the fact that all the intellectuals were saying more state power is good does not exactly help you fight the good fight against rising totalitarianism.
Well, the thing is that, well, yeah, basically there was a puff piece on Mussolini just about every week in Time magazine.
And, of course, the thing that Hitler had done that sort of stunned, I guess, some of these economists was that, you know, he had sort of put together a successful plan, you know, a successful planned economy, right?
That That their unemployment levels were lower.
Of course, it was all based on preparations for war.
So, you know, the problem is, of course, it's the old fallacy that war solves economic problems by putting people to work.
Of course, they're drafting everybody.
Well, and of course, refusing to pay reparations.
Stopping the payment of reparations under the Versailles Treaty helped a little bit keep some of the capital and gold within Germany as well.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's...
I mean, you could do a whole talk on Versailles and the end of World War I, but anyways, let's go back to Keynesianism.
So Keynes writes this book.
Interestingly enough, all the Keynesians, and of course, he sort of, up until this point, the Austrian School of Economics was very mainstream.
Hayek, F.A. Hayek, was actually friends with Keynes, and they would have debates, and he would write, Hayek wrote You know, point-for-point rebuttals of Keynes' work.
And then when general theory came out, Hayek did not respond to general theory in a really hardcore way.
And some might say that this was Hayek's sort of fatal mistake.
If Hayek could actually respond, if people were actually looking to Hayek to do this, he didn't do it, and Keynesianism took off, it became sort of the fad within academia.
And of course, as we stated before, governments loved it, so They were happy to pour money into economics departments.
If you look at what happened during the war, of course, you had a total planned economy across the entire world.
In the U.S., what was funny is that right after the war, the government of the time, not the president, but the Congress, actually radically cut the budget, cut the number of people who were in the military, and Keynesians Actually thought that there was going to be a massive depression right after the war, but there wasn't, and what you saw was a growth in the economy.
Sorry, that's very true.
And just to put some numbers behind that, the government budget in the U.S. was cut by two-thirds.
Which, of course, should cause a massive depression, according to Keynesian theory, just as the spending in the 30s should have solved the problem of the Great Depression.
But when you're in an ideologically power-sucking paradigm, facts don't matter.
The only thing that matters is what you can convince the people to turn over their pockets to do.
You know, whatever nonsense. Intellectuals are like the little urchin who runs into you in a crowded square to distract you while the guy picks your pocket.
And the facts don't matter.
As long as people will give up their money, you can give them any kind of bullshit that you want.
Yeah, well, that was the thing is that the—and, of course, what was completely ignored in the mainstream analysis was the fact that leading up to the Great Depression, of course, you had massive intervention by governments into the economy, the Federal Reserve.
And, of course, there were issues with Britain after World War I attempting to go back on a gold standard, but at the same exchange rate as they had before World War I. Of course, they printed—they'd gone off the gold standard, I think one thing that people forget about the economy of the 20s is that it was in Western Europe and it was a massive smoking crater of 10 million bodies and billions and billions of dollars of worth of property damage.
Left over by the ultimate government program.
War is a government program.
And when you are trying to recover from the worst and most destructive war to date, only eclipsed by the Second World War, of course, you can't look at that as a free market any more than you could look at someone's general health when they're trying to pull an arrow out of their chest.
Well, though, again, as well, you need to look at, but also there was a difference between what was going on in the United States, because, of course, the United States after World War I and after World War II, you know, came out of it unscathed.
They had their industrial base intact.
They came in at the end of World War I, so they didn't sacrifice half their working-age people to this war.
Going back to Keynesianism, of course, at the end of World War II, Keynes was involved in the Bretton Woods Agreement.
He actually, at that point, already wanted to create a global fiat currency, but they weren't able to do it at that point.
Oh, and actually, one more point back to Keynes' general theory.
Gary North points this out.
The founder of the social credit movement, his name escapes me at the moment, wrote a book basically in the 19th century, and he created this idea that you could create.
Gary North called his book Salvation Through Inflation, right?
And so it was mixed up with Christian theology, The idea was you would provide free or very, very cheap credit to people to increase the economic situation, to improve it.
And at the very last chapter of Keynes' book, The General Theory, he actually goes through what he perceives as his sort of utopia, right?
And he sees the socialization of credit.
He sees basically credit being made free.
He wants to have zero interest rates.
This is sort of the Keynesian world he envisions.
Now, so going back to after, so, you know, the 60s, the 50s, you know, continue.
The 60s, we had a large, we had interventions in the economy during the 60s, especially in the U.S. You had people declaring a new era, right?
And, of course, this was because of government printing money, stimulating the economy.
There was the nifty 50 stocks.
But at the same time, you had the prosecution of the Vietnam War, right?
And then you also had Johnson throwing in his Great Society, which was in some ways the completion of the New Deal, right?
This is when Johnson threw in...
I mean, Social Security had been put in during the New Deal, but then within Johnson, you've got Medicare, Medicaid, the welfare state as we know it today was put in then.
And of course, all of this is created by the fact that the government basically had unlimited ability to print good money.
Now, during the Bretton Woods situation, U.S. government, this is when the U.S. dollar became the world reserve currency that it is today, right?
The Americans held the gold.
The U.S. dollar was held by central banks instead of gold.
Of course, as we hit 1971, the U.S. government...
Now, this is sort of leading up into Keynesianism, because Keynesianism was still being used at this point, right?
But the U.S. government had been printing so much money and spending so much money that governments around the world were starting to claim.
And specifically France, influenced by...
Charles de Gaulle was influenced by an economist who's actually an Austrian, a man named Jacques Rouet, And he advised De Gaulle to send their American dollars back and to get gold.
Because at this point, individual citizens were not allowed to own gold in the United States.
They could only hold U.S. dollars.
But foreign central banks could hold gold, or U.S. dollars, and they could exchange it for gold at $33 an ounce.
They basically tried various things to keep that ratio going.
But of course, Nixon never wanted to cut any money, never wanted to cut any of the budget.
Johnson never wanted to cut any of the budget.
So at that point in 1971, Richard Nixon cut the window to gold.
And what's interesting is that he cut the last connection that the US dollar held to gold.
And that's when the entire world went on a global fiat currency system.
Well, and this, of course, was the beginning of the energy crisis because without a dollar backed by gold, the Middle East countries and the other countries who were exporting oil to the U.S. had to raise their prices to take into account the inflationary aspects of the U.S. fiat currency system.
Yeah, well, the energy crisis also was, Murray Rothbard does an excellent talk on this.
The energy crisis also was in a very large way self-inflicted.
The American government put on oil controls.
They put on rationing.
They were setting prices across the nation.
There were massive interventions in the oil economy just in the United States on top of whatever was happening with the oil market abroad.
Now, of course, during the 70s, the Americans made a deal with the Saudis, and they said they were going to back the Saudi royal family if the Saudis would only sell their oil for US dollars.
Now, the term petrodollars came out of that sort of agreement.
And so this is another one of the reasons why we still use the dollar today.
Because it became the only...
Well, I'm sorry, just to point out that the U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year supplying arms to the Saudi family.
And so what this is, of course, is that the prices at the pump may stay a little bit lower for a time, but you're just adding to the debt that future generates.
It's a hidden tax, right? Because you borrow or print money to pay for these weapons, which you then give to this sadistic and brutal regime over there.
And so the prices stay a little bit low, but there's a big hidden tax, a storm cloud gathering in the future.
Well, yeah, and I mean, certainly you could say that, you know, the first Gulf War of 1991 was done at the behest of the Saudis.
And then right now, you know, with everything that's going on with Iran, oftentimes people will say, oh, well, it's the Israelis who want the Iran bomb.
Well, sure, sure, the Israelis want a Iran bomb, but the Saudis also want a Iran bomb.
They actually have basically come out and said it.
It's a It's within cables that have been released.
The Saudis are no friend of Iran, because there's a large Shiite population of Muslims within the oil-rich regions of Saudi Arabia.
And, of course, the ruling class of Saudi Arabia is Sunni Muslim, right?
But, I mean, that's another talk.
But going back to Keynesianism.
So Keynesianism was being practiced up until 1971.
But then within the 1970s, you had stagflation.
And this was supposed to be impossible within the Keynesian framework.
And it is important to note that John Maynard Keynes essentially created the field of macroeconomics as we know it today.
He created the idea of using complicated mathematical functions to attempt to describe the macroeconomy.
And essentially what he did was you had microeconomics, and of course the Austrian School of Economics is built from the ground up, right?
So it's all based on the individual and it goes up from there.
And in terms of microeconomics, most economists will agree with sort of the microeconomic features.
But what Keynes did is he grafted on macroeconomics onto the top.
Essentially, from the Keynesian view, you pull levers at the top, you do things like you adjust money supply, interest rates, and this is supposed to change macro factors, but it's completely divorced from what's going on at the micro level, right?
So they'll point to GDP going up, they'll point to government spending, increasing GDP, creating jobs, but there's nothing about what kind of jobs these are.
And frankly, I mean, who would really care about, I mean, I don't think people would really care that much about macroeconomics if it wasn't for socialism and fascism.
If it wasn't for the fantasy that central planners could run our lives better than we can ourselves, who would care about macroeconomics?
People would just be focusing on their business plans, their personal finances, and you would have vague, general suppositions about the economy, but the science or the discipline of macroeconomics seems to me to go lockstep with socialism.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Keynes was a socialist.
So let's just talk about why the stagflation is impossible under Keynesianism, and let's talk about why that didn't put any nails in the coffin.
Well, it actually did, for a time, it did put nails in the coffin.
Well, the whole point with it was, within the Keynesianism and stagflation, is that the government would increase spending and Prices might go up, but you would also have an increase in employment, right? Unemployment would go down, right?
But then, also, what you would do is you, of course, do the reverse, right?
If the economy got too overheated, you would withdraw spending from the economy.
And prices would go down, but you might have slightly higher unemployment.
Now, what happened during the 1970s in stagflation is you had money being spent Unemployment rising and prices rising all at the same time.
And Keynesians, they didn't think this could happen.
So essentially, the 1970s destroyed Keynesianism for a time, right?
So what, you know, you could say it was dead from the neck up.
And there was, of course, after Hayek won the Nobel Prize, was it 74, I think?
There was a resurgence of interest in the Austrian school because the Austrian school could explain some very salient points about the boom-bust cycle.
So, for instance, why does it start in capital goods and then only move to consumer goods and so on?
So there was a resurgence in Austrian economics, but that really didn't seem to last very long.
Well, okay. The resurgence started in Austrianism, but what really took over after the Keynesianism The Keynesians was the monetarists, right?
And this was Milton Friedman.
And the monetarists, those are the guys who sort of came next in terms of managing the macroeconomy.
Now, of course, Friedman's very good on libertarianism and freedom.
You know, he had his book Free to Choose.
He was one of the main guys who was fighting against the draft.
And he actually thought that that was one of his great things, was that he contributed to getting rid of the draft.
But the problem with the monetarists is, of course, they're positivists, right?
So they still believe that a central bank should exist.
They believed that the way to solve the problem of pure fiat currencies and the way that they relate to each other Was to have no pegged exchange rates, freely floating exchange rates and whatnot.
And, of course, the problem that he saw in the Great Depression, that Milton Friedman saw, was that the Federal Reserve did not print enough money.
He thought that there was too much of deflation of the money supply during the late 1920s.
And he thought the Feds should have actually printed more.
Now, of course, you can see the problems with that.
And the monetarists did last for a while.
And I'm sorry, I just wanted to point out the elemental contradiction in monetarist theory is they say, let's have a government-enforced monopoly within a geographical region, but then free trade between, free trade and competition between geographical regions.
Which is, why is there a magic line where reality changes around a particular geographical region?
We want a state-granted monopoly of currency within America and Canada.
There's its own state-granted monopoly.
But between the two currencies, we want free-floating exchanges and competition and so on.
Well, if there's going to be competition and free trade, why is there a difference between a country and within a country?
That's something that's never made any sense to me because I think it doesn't make any sense.
Well, the way that Joe Salerno talks about it, he said that we entered a period of dirty floating, right?
So theoretically, you know, everybody was just supposed to...
You know, they would keep their monetary base stable and what not, and trade would happen.
But what would happen is to increase exports, countries would devalue their currency, right?
They would print massive amounts of currency.
And of course, we also have the problem during the years since 1971 is that the US dollar has remained the world reserve currency.
They've also now become the largest importer.
And every time that the U.S. government inflates, the money goes overseas, gets held, eventually ends up in central banks of foreign countries.
And if it doesn't come back to the United States, what they do is they use that as an asset on the balance sheet to increase the amount of their own currency.
So U.S. inflation of the money supply leads to Eventually leads to global inflation of the money supply.
So all the other nations, in part, what they do is so that their exchange rate doesn't change.
They want to keep the balance of trade.
So when the US government increases its money supply, the Canadian government will then also increase its money supply so that our currency does not appreciate against the US dollar so that we can maintain our balance of trade.
It also means, of course, it tends to be a self-reinforcing cycle because as banks and other institutions are holding U.S. dollars, they're all heavily invested, literally, in maintaining the value of the U.S. dollar when a more skeptical approach might cause it to collapse, certainly given the numbers, I think, of 100% of GDP. Well, yeah, I mean, that's why right now Canada has almost no gold.
We have, you know, three tons of gold.
We used to. We used to.
Yeah, we had 100 tons of gold or so.
We had, or maybe even 1,000.
I've got to look the number up, but...
Yeah, we used to have a ton of gold, and we actually only sold our gold off quite recently.
Within the last few years, we sold it all off.
I don't particularly know why, but basically what's backing the Canadian dollar is US dollars, and a lot of countries are doing the same thing.
Although, you know, Canada to its credit is hearing the giant sucking sound of the south and is sending Stephen Hopper over to China to lick the boots of the new rulers so that he can get some trade going east-west rather than north-south.
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, the U.S. has been the largest trading partner of Canada for a very long time.
But in the Financial Post a couple, about a week or two ago, I saw a stat that showed that we are actually, you know, for the last 10 years we've been shifting our trade away from the United States.
Which I think is a very smart thing to do.
And I think countries around the world right now are actually, I mean, you know, in the end I think People know what's going on, right?
They can see what's happening. Sorry, let's just talk about a few of the examples of ways in which keynesianism doesn't work.
So, of course, one of the greatest experiments in stimulus spending was Japan over the past 20 years when their real estate crashed in 1990.
They then spent trillions of yen.
I don't even know what the number is of yen because yen is such a paper currency anyway.
And now they have a debt to GDP that's over 220%.
Their economy remains mired in the doldrums.
Like all... Late-stage fiat currency collapse environments.
Their birth rates are collapsing.
I mean, it's just a complete mess.
And this, of course, should not have occurred, according to Keynesian theory.
And you can think of many, many other countries where spending has led to permanent recession slash depression.
I think, personally, we're facing the same issue because we've got massive stimulus spending in the U.S., slightly smaller amount in Canada per capita, except, I guess, Ontario is fairly big.
But this is not pulling things out of the recession.
It's the guy, Stinson, I think it was, in America, who said, you know, after 10 years of stimulus spending, we've spent money on everything we can think of.
We still have massive unemployment, we still have really low trade, but we also have a massive debt to boot.
Those are the long-term consequences that Keynes derided by his famous remark, well, in the long run.
People say, well, what happens in the long run with all this stimulus spending when...
You come out, and there's this massive debt, and then governments have to contract their spending to pay off the debt.
Don't you just end up in an even worse cycle?
He says, in the long run, we're all dead.
Which is a brilliant, but ultimately incredibly nihilistic response to a legitimate criticism.
But there's lots of examples of how Keynesianism achieves the opposite of its stated goals, which is why you know it's a government program.
Yeah, well, I mean, the very first Keynesian experiment that didn't work was the Great Depression, right?
You had an interventionist government under Herbert Hoover.
And honestly, it was funny because FDR ran as somebody who was going to balance the budget.
He didn't balance the budget.
And within their writings, the people within the FDR administration said, everything that we're doing, we took from Hoover.
He started it and we just continued it.
Right? And then what you had was a classic Keynesianism, you know, putting price controls, controlling the market, massive spending on infrastructure projects and all that sort of thing.
Not once did the unemployment rate fall below 10%, you know, within the United States at that time.
And of course, you know, and then, you know, you can look at the last 40 years since going up gold.
You know, as essentially an extended experiment in Keynesianism, right?
Essentially, we've been living now in this world of pure global fiat currency, and as you can see from what the Fed is doing, we're now approaching that point that Keynes wanted, right?
We're approaching a point of zero interest rates forever, right?
You know, since 2008, and essentially 2008 is when Keynesianism sort of got Reinvigorated, or the zombie came back to life.
Because they didn't necessarily believe in Keynesianism leading up to that point.
But after the crash, none of the mainstream economists knew what to do.
The monetarists didn't know what to do.
Nobody knew what to do.
Well, I think they knew what to do.
I would argue that they knew what to do.
But Keynesianism, you know, this is standard public choice theory, Keynesianism is by far the path of least resistance.
Printing money, handing it out, getting votes, as opposed to confronting public sector unions.
Yeah.
Everybody who's profiting from those regulations and restrictions, lowering taxes, cutting spending, all of that is going to get people kicked out of office because the general population is worse than economically illiterate.
There are people who think they know what they're talking about, but quite the opposite is true.
It's one thing to say, "I don't know anything about nutrition." It's quite another thing to say, "Shun your broccoli and eat your chocolate cake.
That's the path to health." People are not only, they're economically anti-literate, which means that confrontations with heavily invested public and private interests will get you kicked out of office, you know, faster than, I don't know, inserts Clinton cigar joke somewhere here.
And so I think that's the issue, is that they grab onto this stuff because printing money and bribing people is exactly what...
Governments want to do. Everybody knew you had to cut taxes, you had to open trade, you had to get rid of regulations, because that's what saved the economy after the Second World War, was detonating all these regulations and government programs.
But we do not have the politicians with the spine for that, and we do not have a population that's even close to accepting that.
Sorry, end of rant. No, no, no.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right?
In our constantly inflating economy, or, you know, constant price rises, I mean, the thing is, for people who are young, You know, at the beginning of their career, well, I mean, right now we actually have a very large proportion of young people unemployed right now, but at the same time, if you're within the system, while it's inflating, you can switch jobs, you can ride the rave of inflation, right?
It's when you start detaching yourself from that constantly inflating system.
Because there's a sort of money spigot that's flying around.
And if you catch yourself and you go, bang, I'm going to get into real estate.
You get out of real estate, okay, what's the next thing that's going to be inflated by the government?
What bubble can be popped up next?
You can get in that bubble.
The thing is, look at somebody who...
And it's funny, too, because Keynes actually said, before he wrote the General Theory, he said the surest way, he said inflation...
Basically, it's the surest way to rob people, destroy their wealth.
Not one person in a hundred will know what the effects or what the causes are.
It's hilarious. And then inflation and other forms of financial jiggery create such an unstable system that there's great profit to be made in the general ignorance of the economic system, which is why you get this massive swelling of the financially parasitical classes.
Why do you have so many people working in Wall Street?
Because the government is shifting the tides with its big giant finger and so everybody's catching the fish that's burnt up and nobody knows where the hell the next thing is coming from.
At least very few people do, but those who do can make a fortune.
Yeah, well, and that's actually what you've seen is the, as a percentage of the population, I mean, actually, I haven't looked at the numbers since 2008.
But as a percentage of the population employed in the United States, basically, you've had this great sucking sound of people running You know, rushing sound of people running into the financial sector because that's where the money is, right?
And away from economically productive things, you know, which actually provide value rather than stealing people.
And it's something that's always struck me.
It's just astounding. People say that the government should, you know, we've got to ban drugs, you see, because drugs, they may have short term, I mean, certainly do have short term positive consequences, but boy, in the long run, it's really bad.
But debt is democracy and debt is a drug.
The statism as we currently understand it is the ultimate drug.
At least when you take heroin you're only messing with your own system and affecting the lives of those directly around you.
When you mess with the currency with the drug of inflation and fiat currency you're messing up Everybody's lives around the world.
You're maintaining poverty in the third world.
You're collapsing people's potential for self-actualization in the economic sphere in the here and now.
The idea that government fights drugs when government is addicted to the most dangerous drug, which is currency inflation, has always seemed to me a particularly rancid joke.
Yeah, well, it's impossible to plan for the future, right?
When the government can just devalue the currency by half overnight, essentially, right?
And if you want to look at a way that this actually does, you know, because they're saying that they're complaining that, say, capitalism impoverishes the middle class.
Well, but number one, we don't have capitalism.
Number two, it's government control of the money supply and the interest rate that impoverishes the middle class, right?
So you've got a situation now, let's say I buy a house at, you know, 2.75% interest, $500,000 house, I put 20% down.
Let's say I even put 20%.
A $400,000 mortgage.
Let's say 10% of my income is going in to pay for my housing costs.
Let's say 20% of my income is going to pay for my housing costs.
Five years down the line, government jacks interest rates.
They're now at 8%.
Because the government has spent so much and screwed it up so much, you look at the 1980s, Volcker jacked the rate up to 18%.
If you're in a situation, let's say I've got that $400,000 mortgage that I got at 2.75%, five years down the line, the interest rate is 8%.
Now, that 20% of my income that was going to pay for my housing, and also look at the fact that, let's say that the house was being taxed at $200,000, and now the house is being taxed at a $500,000 price.
Right? I mean, number one, your Property tax rates are going to go up.
So let's say your interest rate gets reset at 8%.
All of a sudden, 40% of your income could be going directly into your housing.
Well, and because of the increase in interest rates, the value of your house has to decline relative to those payments.
Yeah. So number one, you're going to be underwater.
Number two, more of your money is going to be going to the banks.
And you wonder, of course, those banks will be showing record profits.
But it's at the expense of the middle class.
Well, and the people who talk about the free market harming the middle class, you know, there's this bizarre belief that people have, Redmond, about how, like, the economy only started in 1800.
You know, you can't compare the economy.
How big was the middle class in the Middle Ages, for heaven's sakes?
There was no capitalism.
There was no middle class. You had, you know, tiny parasitical priests and the landlord aristocrats, and then you had a massive surf population, almost nobody in between.
And the middle class grew out of the Industrial Revolution, and that's where capitalism started.
Well, yeah, I mean, it was the application of what they call the Manchester system within the UK. It was also termed laissez-faire, right?
And yeah, and that's when you had the middle class start to grow.
But what's happening now, what happens under socialism particularly, is again, you have this system where you have a few elite at the peak, right?
You'll have the few rulers.
And within our system with the United States, you have it Sure, they get elected every once in a while, right?
Every four years, the people at the top change.
But then you start to have the bureaucratic class, which appears under it.
And of course, the bureaucratic class never changes, right?
No matter which politicians are in power, the bureaucratic class is this sort of set, fixed...
And what I find hilarious about civil servant pensions Well, but see, what that does is it creates an entire voting bloc that doesn't care about inflation.
And so that allows the government to inflate without people on these pensions getting upset.
And of course it comes, and let's sort of finish up with this.
Because it comes at the expense of the private sector pensions.
So that's implicit. Whenever you drive up inflation, you're transferring wealth from private sector pensions to public sector pensions because you have to get the money to pay for the increases somewhere.
And so there's a net loss of the private net gain to the public.
But it's becoming even more explicit now when you have politicians actually implementing direct taxes on private sector pensions in order to fund, I mean, general spending, but I think it's with an eye to the deficiencies in the public sector pensions.
And we talked a little bit about, emailed a bit about that.
You talk about that. Yeah, well, what actually happened in Hungary, just at the end of 2010, beginning of 2011, the Hungarian government nationalized private pensions, right?
And this is the danger of holding your money.
Of course, governments around the world have been incentivizing people to shelter their retirement savings within a government program, right?
Because supposedly it's tax-free.
In Canada, we have RRSPs.
In the U.S., you have 401Ks.
Ireland has also nationalized private pensions.
France, which of course is supposed to be this great first world country, is also looking at nationalizing private pensions.
It hasn't happened in Canada.
It hasn't happened in the U.S. yet.
But this is the problem.
If you pull your money out of those RRSPs, out of those retirement savings programs, they're massively taxed.
It's just tacked on to whatever you're So let's say you make $80,000 a year, and you pull $100,000 out of your income, out of your RRSPs, because you want to get them away from the government, so they aren't nationalized, and they aren't taxed.
Basically, you're making $180,000 that year, and they just strip away almost half of them right there.
And of course, the other thing about RRSPs, and with these government-registered savings programs, It encourages people to pour their money into the investment sector.
Oh, it's a massive bribe to the investment sector.
There are so many people who are in the stock market who shouldn't be.
The stock market, of course, originally designed for people who knew a lot about a particular industry to invest money in a company that they knew about.
It only works when people are directly knowledgeable.
It doesn't work when you get masses of herded, enforced speculators going in there who have to put their money there for fear that the government's going to strip it from them by force otherwise.
Yeah, well, that's it, right?
That's the whole reason you're supposed to put it into RSTs so you don't get taxed.
It comes off your taxable income.
But again, like you said, once it's in there, and the reason why people are also herded into the investment market is that because of government inflation, There's a real negative interest rate, right?
You have to invest just even if you want to maintain value, you have to throw your money into the stock market.
Otherwise, it's going to bleed away with your half a percentage point savings payment, right?
Yeah, well, and that's exactly it, right?
If you're making 4% interest, but the government is inflating money supply and creating a real interest rate of 10%, You're losing 5% on that cash balance every year.
And so what happened was people put it into investments, but it's a joke.
Nobody... Sorry, I think you meant 6% if you've got an interest rate.
You're getting paid 4% and the government's inflating 10% to 6%.
No, no, no. What I meant is that the cost of living.
What I meant is that if the government is inflating, yeah, if the government is inflating enough that it's causing a 10% Real interest, a real rise in the cost of living, but your cash balances are only earning you 4% interest, losing money every year.
Yeah, and that drives people into this defensive position.
It puts a lot of ignorant money under the management of others.
It creates an entire class of financial manipulators who are dependent upon the continuing inflation.
And so, yeah, I mean, you know, once resources pass through this sort of bloody curtain of force, I mean, they just wreak mayhem.
But there's this weird drug of debt that keeps all of this stuff at bay, which, of course, only makes things worse in the long run.
Sorry, you were going to say something just to...
And that was the thing, right?
If you look at the 19th century, when we had a stable supply of gold as the monetary system, you actually had declining prices and increasing purchasing power of the currencies that were based on gold, right? So the US dollar gained purchasing power over 100 years.
British pound gained purchasing power over 100 years.
And of course now, since the creation of the Federal Reserve, And this was the way that people saved money.
They held their own wealth in things like gold and silver.
And it's funny, of course, that in 1933 is what FDR made illegal.
He actually put forward a resolution.
It was an executive order that seized all of the privately held gold in America.
Because that's exactly what he wanted to do.
He wanted to strip away the ability of people to save money and that they would then be forced to rely on the government.
So he could inflate as much money and buy as much as he wanted.
And what's hilarious, too, is that just last weekend, and we've got a piece coming out on it that's there tomorrow, 60 Minutes had a reporter going over to India.
And, you know, they were wondering at the average Indian's sort of, they called it an obsession with gold, right there.
The Indians love to hold gold.
India is one of the largest buyers of privately held gold.
And of course, they actually know what gold is.
It's a store of value.
It holds its value while your government is sort of depressing or destroying the value of its currency, because that's what's happening in India right now.
Yeah, of course. I mean, if government currencies are pegged to each other and everyone's inflating, it hides the inflation.
But when you see the price of gold going up relative to currencies, it really is unmasking the inflation.
It's one of the reasons governments don't like gold.
And you hear so much gold bugs into derogatory mentions of gold.
Like everyone who's got gold is, you know, hoarding ammo and goats in the basement.
But what it does is it statistically unmasks the lowering value of fiat currency.
Yeah, well, it's one of the more obvious ones.
I mean, don't get me wrong, gold is a highly manipulated market at the same time.
But what you actually see is the price level of everything going up.
You see the price level of food going up.
I mean, you see it also in commodities, you know, copper, platinum.
You see it, not so much platinum right now, but you see it in a lot of different commodities.
The general price level is rising, which really just means the value of your dollar, of the currency of your choice is going down.
And what gold is, what silver is, it's a hedge against that currency devaluation.
So really, Indians aren't obsessed with gold.
It's we in the West who are obsessed with paper, right?
Well, I wouldn't say that we're obsessed with it.
I think that We are forced to use it, and alternatives are illegal.
Alternative currencies are illegal, and we saw what happened to the Liberty Dollar in the U.S. If you try and compete with the central source of a democratic government's power, which is the fiat currency, I mean, they will lock you up and throw away the key.
So, I'm just obsessed, you know, we're just forced to use it.
We're backed into a corner, and like most people who are forced, we pretend that we've decided to.
And, you know, that's our way of retaining a shred of illusory dignity in the face of being cornered with guns.
Yeah, well, I mean, of course, the internet.
The internet is actually, you know, internet, to me, it's amazing.
The internet and smartphones are now, well, number one, it's enabling people to, you know, if you can imagine the people who are learning about the stuff around the world, it's never talked about the right thing.
You've got a situation now, something, you've got Bitcoin coming up, you've got PayPal.
I mean, PayPal could basically be seen as an alternative currency.
You've got Peter Schiff created as Euro-Pacific Bank, where you can put money into this bank, purchase gold, you can exchange that money for gold, and then at a later date, you push it back into cash.
There are all these different systems that are coming up for people to be able to dodge around and retain their value.
Of course, the problem is it's the agile people, the people who are aware of these things, who are looking for the knowledge.
And that sort of general societal knowledge that would have been known in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, people knew, well, you know, just hold a little bit of gold.
It retains your value.
You'll be able to, you know, purchase.
You'll be able to, you know, hold something for your old age.
Most people just have no idea of that.
And so they do get wrapped up in this sort of The system of the government coming to their rescue.
But of course that's exactly what the government wanted to create.
Well and with the goal of course of the The great deal in the new society, but the goal of this social engineering was to create less disparity in wealth, to eliminate the poor and hack down the rich little, create a permanent middle class or a larger middle class.
And of course, like all government programs, the exact opposite has occurred, that the middle class is getting hollowed out.
You have a more permanent underclass of poor.
You have a more extravagant and frankly revolting class of rich people.
Not that all rich people are revolting, but those who are You know, the maggots infesting the scar of our currency.
It's exactly what you would predict.
I mean, if the government wants to even things out, it's going to make things more extreme in the currency, in the business cycles, in the wealth disparities.
And yet, facts still don't matter.
People still aren't circling back and saying what went wrong yet.
Well, I mean, the thing is, I don't necessarily blame.
I mean, I don't necessarily.
I mean, if you look at a rich person, I mean, you can talk about quote-unquote rich people, but, you know, a guy like Peter Thiel, A guy like Steve Jobs, a guy like...
I know everybody's going to hate me for saying this, but Bill Gates, you know, the founder of Microsoft.
Oh, I mean, okay, they've got some IP, they've got some...
But, you know, those guys are actually producing stuff.
I'm just talking about the real money men who don't make anything, who don't produce anything, who aren't consumer-focused, but are just, you know, like sticking their giant squid-sucking money things into every orifice exposed by government corruption.
Those guys, I think, are...
You can't blame them in a way because, you know, if a Brink's truck explodes and scatters $100 bills over a poor neighborhood, you can't call everyone a thief who grabs a few and sticks them under his pillow.
The state and the violence is the issue, but still, it's kind of gross the way these guys make their living.
Oh, well, I mean, I can't stand, I mean, especially a guy like Warren Buffet, right?
I mean, he's sitting there because of the investing rules and the way that he hides his income.
I mean, he only pays himself $100,000 a year, right?
Somebody at Forbes magazine figured out that Warren Buffett probably pays his secretary between $200,000 and $500,000 a year, right?
So he pays his secretary way more than he pays himself.
All of his money is investments, and it's basically because of the way he structures it, he doesn't get taxed on it personally.
So although he's a billionaire, it appears that he's being taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is being taxed.
Yeah, and I think, what was it, they just found that Mitt Romney is paying about 15% in taxes on, you know, multi-hundred million dollar a year incomes.
Yeah, but again, it's, but of course with Romney, it's actually held within a blind trust.
He actually doesn't make the investment decisions based on this thing.
I mean, well, I'm not going to go there.
Still an asset in his name, but yeah, what'd you say?
But at the same, I mean, you know, at the same time, I believe that money put into investments is a legitimate thing.
And if you want to hold an investment, that's great.
But, but, But also, you've now had several generations of people who've grown up, basically anybody born after 1971, or who was, let's say, 10 years old in 1971, had no understanding of economics.
They grow up, they get a job in finance.
Nobody's sitting there telling them, buy gold.
If you were born in 1980, and you got a job in finance in 2003, You know, you're completely ignorant of all these issues.
And just, you're looking for a job.
Hey, I can get a job working in the mortgage section.
Looks great. I get a great salary.
I wouldn't necessarily look at that person and say, you're guilty.
No, I agree.
I agree. No, I absolutely agree.
Except, of course, these guys do sink their money squid dollar into the politicians and make sure things go their way.
And in a sense, again, it's hard to really come down.
It's almost like blaming a doctor in the 14th century for not using penicillin.
The knowledge has been lost.
We're in that state, like in 1984, when Winston Smith goes into that bar and tries to get the old guy to talk about life before I know what you mean.
I don't have a particularly strong You know, moral condemnation of people, because, except where they avoid knowledge, if they avoid knowledge, the knowledge of libertarianism, Austrian school, the moral arguments, the revelation that statism is forced, that taxation is violence, this is now, I think, common coin enough that you have to work a little bit to avoid it, and I think that's where the culpability comes in.
Oh, yeah, no, no, for sure.
I mean, you know, Ron Paul, and that's what's changing, right?
And I see, I think it's the And, you know, some of these things take generational changes, right?
But now, you know, I've, you know, I think there was some guy, this student, who was actually part of, you know, the Campus Conservative Party of Ontario.
He went to some conference on the weekend, and he bought 50 books from me to take and just give away.
And this is to the, you know, progressive conservative Organization of Ontario, which is, you know, not...
I mean, they're basically socialists, right?
I mean, they're basically... Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, that battle was lost decades ago.
But this is the thing. Oh, yeah.
I mean, they were the ones who put in O'Hill.
You know, they're basically Red Tories, or whatever you want to call it.
But this is the thing, is that, you know, and with the Ron Paul movement, you know, most of the people...
It was funny. Peter Schiff...
It was Peter Schiff. Apparently...
Oh, no, this is Rachel Maddow, who I dislike intensely.
I was interviewing one of the people, one of the head guys at the Ron Paul campaign, and it's hilarious.
Referencing back to the talk you gave about baby boomers, you know, sort of the guilt of the baby boomers and whatnot, who have essentially lived off this highly inflationary system their entire lives.
They've been the beneficiaries of it from almost day one.
Apparently, the word had come down in a voice memo, they didn't write this down, from a Republican establishment Not vote for anybody under 30 as a as a delegate to go to the Republican convention because they're gonna vote for Ron Paul We're good to vote for Ron Paul.
So, you know, when the boomers were under 30, there was the old hoot and the old goose.
Don't trust anyone over 30, and now it's flipped.
I think one of the reasons that the media doesn't like Ron Paul, I mean, it's not even that they understand his issues and oppose them.
It's just that it takes a little bit of work to understand.
Actually, it takes quite a lot of work to understand Ron Paul's arguments.
And I just don't think they want to lift their lazy entitled asses off the couch, go to a book and actually read up on the gold standard and learn a little bit about economics outside of the mainstream.
They just want to push their, you know, idiot quacking duck talking points around and talk about who has a mistress and who had open marriage conversations perhaps 10 or 20 years ago.
They don't actually want to crack a book and learn something because, you know, that hurts.
Well, but, you know, I mean, most people, you know, most people on television especially are picked for their looks.
They're not picked because they wrote a great master's thesis on the nature of trade or anything like that.
Even the people in economics, essentially, they're just reading the business section.
They're reading teleprompters.
I think the term that was coined was infotainment.
If it could be entertaining for the broad general public and get that lowest common denominator, we've got a million viewers, let's sell some ads.
It's not about education.
It's about entertainment. And I think that's, I mean, that's one good thing about a great thing about a guy like Peter Schiff is that he is entertaining.
So he, you know, during the whole housing boom, he was getting in on these things and he would lambaste these people and say, look, this is a bubble.
He's going to be bursting. He was funny and entertaining.
And so That's sort of why he got it.
So what you're saying is next time we talk, we're going to have clown noses.
That's, I think, where we should be going.
I think that's where we're getting. I got a rainbow wig, which I can pop on, all that kind of good stuff.
In fact, I'm going to replace myself with just a picture of Brad Pitt.
And then I'll just talk.
We'll sort of animate his lips moving.
Right. I'll get a great job after that.
Like that show Space Rangers.
It was a cartoon show with real-life lips that drifted all over people's faces all the time.
Well, on that note, actually, I've been talking to a bunch of people within the broader libertarian anarcho-capitalist community about putting together some type of either online network or something.
Oh yeah, we need that for sure.
I mean, now that Judge, the laser of corporate indifference has hit Judge Napolitano on the forehead, and what a small forehead it is, so that's quite an aiming job.
That's just heavy. But yeah, we definitely need that, because I don't think we can turn things around before they change, but at least we can hammer the points and be accepted as right after some transition occurs, and I think that would be a good trail to leave for people to follow.
Well, that's the thing.
Peter Schiff says that he doesn't get on TV as much as he used to, right?
Because that was the whole thing. He was right.
For eight years, he was banging a drum, saying, this is coming, this is why it's coming, Keynesian doesn't work.
This is a bubble. And now, of course, they all know he was right.
And now they don't want to have him on TV anymore.
No, and it's because he's got credibility and he's talking about the next thing, which is, you know, currency crisis.
And they really don't want somebody with that level of competence and credibility talking about something that's far more dangerous to people than a mere, and I say that very lightly or very advisedly, a mere housing crash.
A currency crash is infinitely more dangerous than a housing crash.
And so I think they don't want that kind of information going out there because, you know, it's like as they all edge towards the lifeboats, they don't want all the other people on the Titanic looking that way either.
Yeah, well, there's a few indicators of that.
There's something called the Baltic Dry Index, which I guess is this broad index that tracks just bulk shipping around the world and apparently that's fallen now precipitously and that hasn't fallen in something like 40 years or something like that, right?
And then as well, apparently, the World Bank put out some reports saying that people should be, you know, basically saying there's a major recession coming, a major pullback.
Some Council of Economic Stats has sort of come out with a bearish sort of outlook.
And it's rare that these organizations will do that.
Now, you know, you can understand why, you know, governments and the news media, I mean, This is the thing.
Ron Paul, he's an outsider.
He can come out and say, look, we're heading for a crash.
But if the government suddenly just says, okay, guys, yeah, bang, we're heading for a crash.
We can't handle it. Prepare yourselves for the worst.
You know, all their credibility would be gone.
You would have people, I think you would have states' rights movements.
You would have people just saying, why am I paying my taxes anymore?
Well, at a more basic level, I think you would see people hoarding food and, you know, all the stuff that happened with duct tape after 9-11, that you would see significant interruptions in the food chain.
And that, as we saw in the Middle East, that leads directly to revolt.
And, you know, they're just, you know...
I think to be in the government now is just about one more day, one more day, come on, one more day.
That's, you know, just whipping that horse to go three more feet despite the fact that it's on one leg and pulling itself forward by its teeth.
But I think it's just one more day for these guys and they, you know, they all have investments.
They're all trying to get their money into something more secure and they don't want to crash.
You know, it's just one more day.
I think that's like every addict.
It's just I don't think about the long term.
I don't, you know, I lie about everything.
It's just one more day. I got to get my fix.
Well, yeah, I mean, you can see also the rise of the police state within the United States particularly over the last eight years.
And you can almost say, I mean, if these guys, if some of these guys, and actually there was, because I'm working now with a guy named Jeff Berwick who does the Dollar Vigilante.
Sort of, it's an investment newsletter.
And I saw, he pointed me to this video of this conference a little while ago, and Apparently, this guy had been speaking.
Now, it was unattributed, right?
Apparently, this guy had been speaking to somebody in the Obama White House.
He said, now, look, what are you going to do?
How are you going to address US manufacturing when our wages are so high relative to the rest of the world?
And to some extent, that's what Europe and the United States or the entire G8 has done.
We've priced ourselves out of the global manufacturing market With all these wage and price controls, highly unionized, and of course not just unionized, but government-enforced unionization.
And apparently the guy in the Obama White House said, we're going to destroy the dollar.
And this is the thing, if the United States destroys the dollar, they become the new China.
They become this country with this massive population, All of a sudden, they're competitive again in terms of manufacturing and all these sorts of things.
And it's just something that people...
I mean, whatever is coming down the line, we're going to get through it.
Of course. And we'll get through it, I think, more easily than any other time in history because we do have such accumulated wealth.
It's not like all the... Buildings and houses, they don't all vanish the moment the currency has a problem.
And it's not, you know, again, I don't think it's going to be a disaster, but I think that we really need to work hard for people to understand that it's force that hasn't worked, not voluntarism.
It's government that hasn't worked because it never does, not the free market.
I think that's the real challenge.
Well, that's the old thing, right?
I mean, it's like the old Soviet Union, right?
I mean, everybody, you know, there were plenty of people in the West who up until 1989 would look at the Soviet Union, And say, you know, the Soviet Union is proof positive that central planning can really provide, you know, and help to plan an economy, right?
Two years later, the entire Soviet Union crashes.
Of course, you know, the problem, the Soviet Union was in a far worse position than we are, because they had spent 70 years destroying their capital, right?
And their population, not to mention...
And their population, yeah, or murdering their population.
70 million people, I think, died in the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Bloc countries were murdered by the state.
Which, again, sorry, just to mention Steven Pinker's new book, The End of Violence, or the Minimization of Violence, or Violence is Better Now Than It Ever Was in the Past.
He just, he excludes 250 million people killed by their own governments.
He excludes non-combatants, which was, of course, the central focus of war after the First World War.
So, yeah, if you exclude a whole bunch of people getting killed, I guess violence looks better.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that. Yeah, well, there's a good website called, it's called Democide.
I don't know if you've been to it. Oh, yeah, no, I've been to that, yeah.
Yeah, the University of Hawaii, Kentucky.
And meanwhile, I mean, and really, you could say that, you know, in a real sense, America has really been destroying its real capital since about, you know, in a real way since 1971, when it went off the gold standard, because that helped to create something known as the Rust Belt,
right? Because if somebody, let's say somebody invests in some machines, and it costs them $500,000 for that machine, And they base the pricing of their products on that machine, right?
So they'll say, okay, I need to replace this in five years or ten years.
I need to charge X amount for my products.
Now, five years or ten years goes on.
Sure, they've made some more, they've made some paper profits, right?
But when it comes time to replace that machine, that machine might cost a million dollars, right?
And so they end up just using their capital, right?
And then also, because of the influence of environmentalism, If you look at the oil and gas industry in the United States, and energy altogether, they haven't built a new coal-fired power plant in 40 years.
They haven't built a nuclear power plant in 40 years.
Actually, I think one just got approved, or two just got approved recently.
And of course, the other thing that's, I mean, yeah, you should say the government protected unions and so on.
There have been, I've read the statistic and I still, I haven't verified it except in two sites.
But according to some statistics, upwards of 200 plants a day have been closing in the U.S. over the past year or two, manufacturing plants.
I mean, that stuff's just been completely decimated.
And of course, that was the road to the middle class for the less educated population.
Yeah. You know, it's particularly hit minorities very hard, and again, you don't see a lot of people who are against racism dealing with that kind of stuff, because that's just too obvious.
No, I mean, as Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell pointed out, minimum wage and unionization was very...
Brutal on the blacks. Yeah, it was just brutal on the blacks.
In 1941, in the 1940s, 1930s and 40s, Minority unemployment was lower than white unemployment in the United States.
Since the Great Society, since the welfare state, that disparity has been growing, especially in the young.
I mean, number one, I mean, young white unemployment is actually quite high now, too, but young black unemployment is even higher.
Yeah, I think the young white can be calculated at 20 to 25 percent, but the black and Hispanic can be 35 to 40 percent among the young.
It's unbelievable. And of course, you know, the people who came to clear about it, who...
We've had a long chat.
I don't want to exhaust the audience's attention span too, too much, but I really do appreciate it.
Let's just make sure the people get to talk a little bit about the Mises Canada website, what's going on, what's coming up, the address.
Oh, and just to follow up.
All these problems that we're seeing today is all Keynesianism.
It's the effects of Keynesianism, except it's the effects of the idea that the government can and should just spend as much money as it possibly can to do whatever it wants to, you know, help the economy.
But anyways, you can find us out at Mises Canada.
So that's www.mises.ca.
And then we're also, in the next month or two, we're going to be coming out with a whole new look for the website.
We're looking at putting together a Mises Canada University for August 2012.
So students, please start sending me emails at contact at mises.ca.
We're going to have Bob Murphy up.
We're going to have Peter Klein up and probably Danny Leroy.
We're going to be doing a three days intensive on the Austrian School of Economics and how to apply it.
Yeah, so check it out, mises.ca.
Fantastic. Well, thanks, Redmond, so much.
I appreciate your efforts in attempting to bring a little bit of the Austrian Alps to the Canadian Rockies.
It's not exactly the easiest fit at times, but it's absolutely essential.
Have a great week, and we'll do this again soon.
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