Keynes and His Influence | Gary North

it's my great pleasure to introduce dr. Gary north he actually there's a certain distinction that that there is in my life with professor north something something an incident that I think is part of the history of modern Austrian economics it's not very important but turns out Gary North was was the first Austrian economist I ever met in person and heard speak in person so I thought you know pretty cool guy I think I want to do this it was it was in Camden New Jersey which before Philadelphia was known for being the murder capital of the world or of the of the u.s. excuse me okay dr. North received his PhD in history from the University of California Riverside he served on the senior staff at the foundation for economic education and then at the Cal Sudan foundation he has been the editor of the remnant review since 1974 and of Gary NORTHCOM since 2006 in 1976 he was a research assistant for Ron Paul dr. North's publications have appeared in The Wall Street Journal journal of political economy the Freeman National Review Lew Rockwell comm Journal of libertarian studies reason and dozens of other periodicals and websites he will speak to us today on keynes and his influence ladies and gentlemen please join me in extending a warm welcome to dr. north in discussing Keynes and his impact I'm going to take you through basically four points the main thing I'm going to be talking about is the way in which the influence of Keynes spread in the United States the english-speaking world which is I think not what you generally find in the standard histories of economic thought then I want to talk about changes influenced today very specifically today within the last 24 months for there has been I think a significant change third part of my presentation is going to be on the positioning of the Austrian school in relation to Keynes and why I think the situation that we're facing at the present time offers greater opportunity than anything we've had in the past seven decades and then finally I want to talk about a potential I would say research and publication agenda which I'm going to invite some of you to participate in because I think the division of laborers is the effective way to accomplish certain goals that I think need to be met I begin then with Keynes's influence Keynes was an extremely good writer when he wanted to be and in 1919 when his book on the economic consequences of the peace first appeared it created almost an immediate sensation the basic argument of the book was that the verse sigh treaty imposed unreasonable reparation demands on Germany and that those demands were going to the economy would not lead to anything like peace and prosperity for Germany in many ways this I would say would be a free-market argument he was not trusting of the wisdom of the gathered Victor's at Versailles in working out any kind of an economic arrangement in some centrally planned way which is going to guarantee the repayment of the war debts now the book was well timed because this was the beginning of second thoughts about the wisdom of the war and in fact I think you could almost argue that it was the most important initial document to receive wide attention with respect to the lack of wisdom associated with the war and it made his reputation rapidly he continued to write usually smaller pieces very often on Monetary Affairs and the difficulty in assessing his influence is the time and again he changed his policy prescription depending on the external circumstances you could find him when he was favorable towards free trade you could find him when he was favorable towards tariffs he made a famous statement in the economic consequences of the peace regarding a statement he attributed to Lenin with respect to the breakdown of capitalism and he said that Lenin had taught that inflation is an extremely effective way to undermine the capitalist system and he repeated that time and again in subsequent writings the difficulty is that we've never been able to find any primary source doc that indicated that Lenin said it but on the other hand it was certainly a cogent observation that he really should have made the oddity however is that this made change his reputation early as a man who was highly suspicious of price inflation and then within really months of the publication of the economic consequences of the peace both Germany and Austria began their nearly suicidal policies of expanding the money supply in order to create a boom in the economy and that led of course to the most famous of the modern inflation's in Germany between 1921 and 1923 so again what took place as not the consequences of Keynes book but which took place consistent with what he had said elevated his reputation and so he was no question about it influential in the sense of a man that the intellectual class would look to when he would publish something he certainly had his ideas discussed I don't think however you could say that he was a major influence at the time in terms of getting anybody in the British Treasury or anywhere else to adopt specific policies based on the cogent see of his reasoning so it was a peculiar form of influence he would he would make cogent statements many times consistent with what free market economists would have said he got attention in literary magazines and in circles that are certainly outside the purview of most people with economics degrees and of course one of the reasons was is that he never earned an economics degree his field was mathematics his father put up the money to get him to chair at Cambridge which he taught as the leading economists as it turned out of the 20th century when and in fact he never received a degree in economics and certainly not an advanced degree and in that respect I kind of say well that's not a bad deal either I'm always always glad to see somebody beat the system and he certainly did beat the system the the influence that we think in our day that Keynes had has come down as a result of what Lenin would have called a transmission belt but it was not the standard transmission belt in terms of an individual rights for an economic journal that idea becomes widespread the idea seeps down to the Treasury or to some other government agency and that they're there after the particular idea is implemented in fact the strange phenomenon about Keynes is that almost none of that ever happened in the early 1930s the two most prominent economists certainly in the english-speaking world and in Great Britain were Keynes and FA Hayek Hayek having come over in the late 20s to the London School of Economics and was gaining a reputation very deserved reputation at the time by translating into terms and charts acceptable to academia the ideas of Ludwig von Mises with respect to monetary policy and also with respect to the the trade cycle and he gained his reputation basically to be quite honest as a secondhand dealer in Mises ideas but that was okay because Mises wrote in German and he was not widely read in english-speaking world and so it was perfectly legitimate for one of his disciples to begin to translate not the words but the concepts that Mises had taught him and had converted him from socialism on the basis of the power of the ideas that he should sit down and begin to gain an audience for Mises his ideas I think was a certainly legitimate and valuable service to the english-speaking world and it became very obvious very early that Keynes was being challenged in a systematic way by Hayek's arguments and a debate began specifically in the economic journal and the economic journal Keynes had edited that was now being edited by Roy Herod and in that journal a series of exchanges took place over Keynes's treatise on money which first volume appeared in 1930 and Hayek spent hours really more than hours he spent an enormous amount of time going through Keynes's book published a critique of it Keynes responded aiex ponded and and finally in discussing the matter with Keynes because he knew Keynes they were on good speaking terms Keynes made this remarkable statement according to Hayek he said oh well I really don't believe it anyway I'm onto something now completely different so I'm not really interested in continuing the debate that at least is how Hayek summarized what Keynes had told them this would have been probably 1934-35 that period so the debate ended when the general theory was published in 36 Hayek made what had to be one of the great strategic intellectual miscalculations of the 20th century he decided he would not respond to the book because he said I will spend an enormous and of time responding to this book and then Keynes will shrug it off and beyond to something else and so he did not respond and the problem was that the world of anything resembling classical political economy expected him to respond because of his reputation and when he didn't respond there were questions then raised as to whether he was capable of responding or whether Keynes had made this monumental advance in economic thought in which defenders of the old political economy could not effectively respond at all Hayek expressed regret on repeated occasions through the rest of his life that he had not taken up the challenge as he personally should have done the book is unreadable that was it's great strength because then nobody got in trouble for never having read it the ideas certainly motivated a younger group of scholars in Great Britain especially at Cambridge they believed that Keynes had done what Keynes said he had done which Keynes had not done which was to overcome says-- law that is the clearing of markets by means of price adjustments Keynes basically said yes the answers that I provided here have refuted say but he had a caricature of say did not really analyze say and the academic world being deep in its heart almost congenitally lazy figured I guess Keynes refuted say because now we don't have to go read say which they hadn't done in a hundred years anyway and that really did happen and so you have from time to time free market economists going back to reread say and what you find is that when that perfectly cogent economist gets done with his book his book is almost as incomprehensible as the general theory say has not really been given a fair shake in our time and if I were to say of any 19th century economist who really should be studying in depth and taught in depth say would be my choice if I had a choice at least for the first half of the 19th century so Keynes created his own reputation as having destroyed the argument that market pricing clears the market now when the book appeared the world had been in a crisis for six years a crisis of massive unemployment of both resources and individuals now there were answers provided and the answers are the standard ones that any economists should go to price floors higher taxes government intervention into markets political political intervention for the sake of votes which led to the disruption of market exchange all the standard answers that we would go to to say why is this long-term unemployment continuing but by 1936 free market economists even those within the camp of the faithful even those who had been followers of Mises were beginning to lose faith we have an example I have the most egregious example I guess of all of them would be Lionel Robbins book in 1934 on the Great Depression which is a fine analysis of the Great Depression he later repudiated the book and he once told Marx cows and he wished he had never read it written it you had others who had been obvious messages in the 1920s a gottfried haberler would be one for its mock love would be another who steadily by the 1940s were beginning to drift away from anything openly attributable to any idea or work that Mises rope I believe the Great Depression basically shell-shocked some of the best minds of its era no that was not true of Hayek but then Hayek was in that stupid position of saying I'm not going to respond Keynes in effect got a free ride and he got a free ride for a very short period of time and then it was no longer an issue and the free ride was from 1936 to in Britain's case 1939 and then World War two began and the printing presses began and government rationing began and everybody accepted it as a war effort and they solve the unemployment problem by drafting men into the Armed Forces and sending them into Europe and then in our case Asia in the 40s taking them out of the labor force so certainly that reduce the problem of unemployed resources we made bombs and we bombed whatever we could find and then on the other side they rebuilt whatever we had recently bombed and so the world did not have a problem any longer with unemployed resources they just had a problem with approximately sixty million dead people most of whom were civilians that was the problem so Keynes went to the Treasury after the war began and was part of Treasury finance part of the whole system of rationing and fine dancing of the war effort and across the world we had the war effort and war financing overcome the problems of the 1930s by means of vastly worse problems Mises would have understood that and did understand that the middle-of-the-road policy as he said leads to socialism however in that case it was wartime socialism and much more destructive than any other kind so Keynes during the period from 36 until his death in 46 received almost a free ride academically speaking so his followers went to work as good followers did extending the insights of the master and then the wartime economy eliminated the problem the curious phenomenon that is never discussed in the textbooks is the chronology of that period that is the book appeared in 1936 now consider the United States the United States had been suffering from deflation because of the collapse of the fractional reserve banking system and so from 1930 to 1919 thirty-three nine thousand banks went under and when they went under they took the deposits and when the deposits went under the money supply shrink and then you couple that with the various forms of price floors that were established initially and the Hoover administration and then carried forward into the Roosevelt administration so naturally you got massive unemployment in 1934 the FDIC went into effect that was the end of the bank runs that was the end of the deflation from that point on the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve System were able to be transformed into actual m1 and the supply went up in the price level also began to move then in 36 after the change had already been going on for at least two years in the United States then comes the general theory calling for the expansion of money and the running of massive federal deficits as a means of curing the economy's problems well the main problem which had been deflation which had been the result of the fractional reserve banking system that problem was no longer a problem certainly in the United States so again Keynes got a free ride it looked as though what he had recommended was working when in fact by the time he got into print recommending it the policies had already been implemented and they were political facts throughout the West and the politicians wanted to see that they had been validated by an economist and that is exactly what Keynes did he didn't change the policy he didn't establish the policy he simply wrote the footnote to justify the policy and his reputation soared Hayek gave an interview which is on YouTube which I posted on my site this week in which he talked about Keynes's influence and he made a cogent observation which is very very rarely referred to he said Keynes in 46 at the time of his death did not have overwhelming support within the community of economists he said that overwhelming support came later well came very fast by 1950 there was a survey made or at least published by the American Economic Review on the opinions the general opinions of members and something in the range of 80 percent of them had by then adopted the Keynesian position they didn't do it by reading Keynes they did it by reading Samuelson's textbook published in 1948 that was the source of the enormous extension of the influence of John Maynard Keynes Samuelson put it into something at least remotely resembling English in arguments that if you struggled you might occasionally begin to follow and it was assigned as a textbook to almost every student in the country no economic textbook has ever matched it I would go so far as to say that at the collegiate level no other textbook has ever matched it in terms of the number of sales and the royalties generated and by the time that the book began to get competitors the competitors had basically all adopted some version of Samuelson's approach to the discipline of teaching first-year students they did not read Keynes and he did not use the chain Xion formulas he used his own formulas and he was certainly famous for his book is a monumental study which I guess was an extension of his doctoral dissertation on the foundations of economics now nobody read that either in fact there was an old statement when I was in grad school it said nobody meaning professors nobody ever got fired for assigning Keynes's textbook and nobody ever got fired for not having read foundations of economic analysis if I guess you'd have to say Sam isn't got the best of both worlds he established his reputation with a book nobody read and he established multimillion-dollar stream of income with a book that everybody had to read so I contend that it was the writers of the textbooks especially Samuelson is the model that led to the enormous influence of Keynes but remember by the time those policies were being recommended in the name of the general theory in fact the conditions that had led to the crisis had been gone for at least 15 years that is collapsing banks collapsing money supply and the inability of markets to clear that world in the post-war world of inflation that world in the post-war world of the FDIC no longer existed and what happened was the general theory which was not general which was applied to a unique historical circumstances which no longer really existed by the time the book came into print that was transmuted and translated into textbook applications that said you've got to run massive deficits and if need be you've got to fund them by the expansion of money when the conditions which generated the initial demand for the book and the popularity of the book were long gone so the solution that the politicians had applied before Keynes wrote the book for which Keynes got the credit now those solutions were translated into a world in which the problems no longer existed now it became clear by the mid-1960s that Keynes had had this enormous triumph there was the famous cover of Time magazine in which they featured Keynes they had that famous quote of Friedman that were all Keynesian now he backed off later said he meant methodologically but then that's kind of the problem isn't a decade later under the enormous impact of first the Nixon recession then the Nixon Arthur burns inflation the abolition of what remained of the gold standard followed by whip inflation now under Ford followed by an even worse recession the Nixon had by that time the old Phillips curve was being called into question that you could have expansion of money rise of prices and rising unemployment all at the same time and that event called into question at least in some people's minds with legitimacy of the Keynesian paradigm and Keynes began to get a challenge and the main challenge he got was from Friedman and the Chicago School economist but at least there was a challenge and then other schools of thought came along that were not tied openly to changes worldview on the the absolute necessity of running the government deficits in times of crisis and then you actually had lo and behold you had a Federal Reserve Chairman under Volcker who said if we don't stop expanding the money supply we're going to destroy the capital market he's never going to stop and he did stop and he got the recession that any good Austrian economist would have predicted and he pretty much stuck to his guns and the inflation of the money supply certainly slowed and you did get marginal tax cuts in the income taxes under Reagan's reforms so at least you had plausible alternatives to the Keynesian orthodoxy that had certainly prevailed from 48 to say 71 72 maybe 73 there was at least debate now we are into another adventure like the 1930s and we went through that adventure in 2008 and in a period from the beginning of September to the end of October the American economic system was hijacked I don't know what else to call it it was hijacked secretary of the Treasury comes before the public and unilaterally announces the nationalization of what constitutes ninety percent of the mortgage market and there is not a whimper there is not a hand go up in Congress other than one hand go up in Congress Ron Paul's hand that said there was anything wrong with this and then the next month you have the bailouts of the largest banks you have the beginning of massive expansion of the monetary base approaching a trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve you have swaps at face value of Treasury debt in exchange for unmarketable pieces of paper that the banks were holding which if you want an image for it it was like it was like trading the the family heirloom sterling silver for crushed beer kids is what a mountain at face value in terms of pounds and nobody said a word save one so you have a situation in which the entire academic community of economists said we don't like it but it is necessary with the only exceptions being the Austrians who said don't expand the money supply don't intervene into the mortgage markets don't swap federal debt don't bail out the banks stop stop stop now that's a standard your phonce of Austrian economists what made it different in 2008 is that in 2006 a lot of them said the things going to break is going to break soon it's going to crash and the conventional economists riding high on the bubbles that Greenspan had created said there is no such crash coming it is not going to happen and the archetype of it the standing testimony which I hope will be here on YouTube up to the final judgement was the confrontation between Peter Schiff and Arthur Laffer which many of you have seen in which Schiff says it's going down and laugher basically said I don't know what kind of economic system an is basing his theories on but it is not going down and shift spoke representatively for the Austrian perspective and he was right and he was not the only man to do it but certainly he did it he did it on television and in a very short period of time it was on YouTube where it remains because you need a representative crisis once in a while and you need a representative confrontation once in a while and if it happens to be videoed on YouTube it becomes a permanent testimony so the Austrians got credit in retrospect for having predicted it and therefore when they said don't intervene to bail it out they established themselves as people who had the bona fides of having predicted the crisis and the Chicago School and the rational expectations school and the behavioral economists and all the other subdivisions of the profession sat on the sidelines and basically said either nothing or they said well we don't like it but I guess it's necessary now that is my I guess you would say my my second point and that is the Austrian school between two thousand six and late-2008 established territory marked out territory that said we can explain causation we predicted it and now we're going to tell you why the next round isn't going to work and this is an historic opportunity and this is what I hope is not going to be followed by what might be called a Hayek moment of 1935 this is an extraordinary opportunity the 2008 recession was like the what was known in Vietnam as the bouncing betty which was a landmine which would pop out of the ground and scatter shrapnel in all directions and that's what it did to every school of thought out there except the Austrians and we didn't get taken down by that of it because we had buried ourselves in effect behind a barrier and the barrier was we predicted it was going to happen and it's happening in exactly the way that we said it was going to happen and by the way we're going to show you once again why it happened and Lew Rockwell has a rule he says you really don't get very far by telling somebody I told you so but you can get a long way with the general public by saying we told them there is a difference and that is our opportunity in my view Keynesianism now is taking all of the credit for illegitimate reasons I did not know literally until yesterday that there is a concept so wide in the public today called the Keynesian resurgence that wiki has a long extended paper run with all the footnotes on Keynesian resurgence on Wikipedia they are taking the credit for having saves the economy just like they did in the 1930 to 1940 err just like they did after 36 they're taking credit for what wasn't Keynesianism look you can't find any Keynesian economists including Keynes who would have said that you should nationalize the mortgage market unilaterally and bail it out by 1.25 trillion dollars of federal reserve credit as a means of keeping the American economy going there would not have been any Keynesian so mad as to have gone into print with something like that in 2006 or 2007 there's nothing Keynesian about that policy it's ad hoc eree to the core it's just Bernanke sitting up there saying what are we gonna do what are we gonna do I know we'll write checks and that's what he did there's no systematic policy or theory of causation behind that other than wait a minute Goldman Sachs is going down Citibank may go down that's the only cause-and-effect we got to keep the doors open there's no rationality behind it there's no there's no paradigm behind it it's just the central banker creating digits and buying anything he could get his hands on now yes there was a day out of what 787 billion of we don't know how much but some number in that range after the bailout after the checks were written after the mortgage markets were nationalized yeah yeah then sure they get the Keynesian bailout which in terms of the percentage that you're talking about compared to this vast expansion of fiat money by the Fed is nickel-and-dime stuff it's not in the same league at all and they say well see the economy has been solved the recovery is here oh yeah you've got this problem about ten percent unemployment but the recovery is here right banks are lending less money today than they did last year and they lent less money in 2009 than they did in 2008 the greatest contraction of bank loans since the Great Depression the continuing collapse of the housing price market and we're told this is a recovery and furthermore it was the stimulus policy that gave us the benefit ad hoc eree retroactive assessment and we know where it's going too well there there are two scenarios of where this can lead to basic scenarios and I'm a great fan of country music and there is a country music figure who appeared almost out of nowhere about a year and a half ago who laid down the basic framework of what we've got in front of us he goes by the name of Merle hazard and his partner is Bretton wood and they recorded this song and it's on YouTube and the song is called will it be Zimbabwe or Japan now I'm not saying that Bretton and Merle are the most talented musicians certainly in musically they're not the best of Nashville but certainly methodologically they are this massive expansion of the monetary base once the banks begin to lend begin is going to lead to massive expansion of m1 a reversal of the money multiplier where it will actually be multiplying money and we're going to get massive price inflation and the only way out of that is Japan the banks never start lending and the government becomes the primary buyer of all assets practically in the economy this massive expansion of federal presence in the capital markets because the banks have given up so we know where it's going to lead and I think course it will lead ultimately to monetary expansion and bankruptcy because of the massive size of the deficits all over the world and we have the advantages if we have a system of analysis that tells people why it is going to happen and we have held to this analysis since certainly 1912 which is a long time to hold a particular position and time and again it has happened as Mises said it would happen now this leads me to the part of my presentation which in the other part of my life I would call the close which is the sales pitch and that sales pitch is basically let us not have another Hayekian moment what we need I believe now for the first time is a full-scale attack on the general theory from every possible angle in every venue we have access to this has not been done we have bits and pieces we have a book here and a book there but what we have not had within the Austrian camp is a systematic analysis of all aspects of the general theory and that is needed at the present time in order finally to in effect finally to get a stake through the heart of this vampire we have got to undermine the confidence that younger economists have in the basic Keynesian paradigm which is spend and spend tax and tax inflate and inflate because that's all they got that is the Keynesian paradigm we have to go back to the basics and say we've got to do what Hayek didn't do but now we have tremendous advantages we have print on demand we have blog sites we have YouTube we have conventional books we have tremendous opportunities now once and for all to go back to the general theory from an Austrian perspective to say what's wrong with it now I've created a site for those of you who want to go through this called Keynes project.com and if you'll go to that site you'll get an outline of at least 13 separate areas that I think Cheng's is vulnerable to the core and that any one of you with any kind of training masters level training could sit down and begin working on vision of labour opportunity and when you get materials out get a blog side up and do some videos of whatever you've come across and put them on YouTube and create a YouTube channel if necessary and if it's really any good send it to Tucker and see if he'll publish it in one venue or another and if Tucker rejects it then send it to Rockwell because maybe he can use this is the way we literally use the division of intellectual labor and the tremendous advantage which we've been given in terms of the ever lower cost of Technology which means the ever lower cost of communicating ideas this is perfect for folks like us our ship has basically come in what I'm saying is don't be at the bus station this is a tremendous opportunity Rockwell has created with with the Tucker's assistance this digital nightmare for the keynesian in which we have something like even ground and as the New York Times and the other outlets become less and less profitable I think the decentralization of ideas is going to lead to a time in which essentially it's it's the ants versus the elephant and one bite at a time you take the elephant down now I've said that I didn't think that the Keynesian ideas in the form of changes original ideas were the major source of the influence I've said that I think it was the textbooks and so then why bother with cage that's only stage one going after Cain's eliminating that as a challenge is the first step in this what I call if not spontaneous order in a Hayekian sense at least a spontaneous nudge or two to get people in terms of division of labor to begin concentrating on one another aspect of the general theory and take the thing down once and for all just take it down then once that is done then we move to the next stage of teaching which can be in part conventional forms of textbooks although I don't think it's probably the best way to do it where we go to videos where we go to short presentations again the ants versus the elephant the other side has controlled this distribution of ideas and the old AJ labelling comment that freedom of the press is a great thing if you own one was true but now because of the web and because of programs like WordPress anybody can have a printing press and because of Google it is possible that the ideas will be found and then that amazing thing begins to take over the night labelled years ago the word of mouse that the ideas begin to spread people are forwarding videos forwarding whatever it is they've found that they think is fascinating to their friends and now this phenomenon really this phenomenon with Facebook which is beyond me but I understand what's going on Facebook is just extraordinary the number of people who can be mobilized and this is what shook Washington the core shook them to the core when Ron Paul raised over twenty million dollars it couldn't be true it could not be true I remember watching it's on that's on YouTube I remember watching the interview on face the nation with Schieffer who really sat there with his jaw down listening to Ron described how the money just kind of rolled in it stunned them now this is what they're up against and the elephant can stomp and the elephant can dance but there are a lot of ants and so what I am recommending is that we take advantage of this particular opportunity in history that Keynes got a free ride and almost from a point of view of Austrian economics he almost still gets a free ride now he would not have had a free ride if Murray Rothbard had not died in 95 and had been able to finish the third volume of his history of economic thought the free ride clearly would have ended but he did die so you have to move in 15 years later and begin filling that gap and I've talked about the various media that you can use right down to the what we all love the rap video the the Keynes Hayek rap video tremendous presentation creative but that only is sort of a tantalizing hint at what can be done and I'm hoping that those of you who are here will say I think I'm going to devote some years to doing this now it may be for some of you who are non tenured it may be a career derail operation but Mises had his career derailed on sever looking in Rothbard never had a career through the first what thirty years of his career he didn't have a career because of his position but he didn't care and he needed Mises and it's that attitude that does make the difference that is I don't care and and Murray would have loved the technology I realized that he sat there with his electric typewriter and he he resisted until his dying day via the idea of even correction tape on a pipe but he would have loved the web because of the enormous power to get ideas out cheap and fast and ideas can compete now and we need to have a full-scale frontal assault on the general theory and then once that's done take it out to the all the other areas of communication we have positioned ourselves in terms of a piece of economic analysis published in 1912 that has proven accurate time and time again and proven unsalable time and time again that's the problem but now we're into a situation in which you can deliver free of charge except for time ideas the challenge the whole system and I I remember I Matt Drudge several years ago almost ten years ago was invited I think to speak National Association of whoever invited them I think it was somebody it was a group connected with reporters and he said he have do you have any ideas so I dropped him an email and he actually got it he read it and responded I said look what situation is the the web has destroyed the function of the gatekeepers and it has and you realize it's the first time the history of man once is true as far as I can tell first time in man's history this is true the gatekeepers are due oh yeah yeah sure they're at the gate but the walls are down the walls are down they can't stop the flow of information the only area where they're really still in power is the collegiate degree granting system and that is because they have government control over what is defined as a university degree so they they still maintain that monopoly as a kind of fiefdom but it's the last it is the last the rest of it and the immortal words of mr. t is going down the gates are down and we are coming in with a systematic approach to these questions with a lot of documentation although we can always use to say chains was wrong in 36 and he is wrong now and his disciples are wrong and they are in control and they're either going to destroy the dollar or if in its wisdom finally the Federal Reserve pulls a Volker we're going to get another massive recession maybe leading to a depression but at least we've got the analysis we have got the background we have got the in 1912 we've got 98 years of an answer to these people and I think now we should take advantage if we can as we can of undermining the system the old line about if you see something wobble push it I think is where the Keynesian czar now they seem to be in place they seem to be unmovable but they are no more unmovable than the status of the capital markets and the next time we have another massive breakdown they're going to do the same old thing and it isn't going to work and we have positioned ourselves to tell people why it and to give them a systematic comprehensive outlook and analysis of economics as an alternative the older line is you can't beat something with nothing and we are not going in trying to be something with nothing the only problem we've had is they have been able through the gatekeeping system to lock us out for a long time I think that's breaking them and a big part of it is what the Mises Institute has done and Lew Rockwell comm has done taken advantage of the digits and I think I think they're going to be hard-pressed to catch up I really do I think this is an outstanding opportunity that we have in front of us and I would say get back to your word processors find a topic buy a copy of the general theory and begin picking some area of that book if it's only for a monograph if it's only for a blog it doesn't matter begin to take on that that book which has been like an albatross around our necks for over 70 years I think it can be done I think this is the group to do it and I would encourage all of you not to take the approach that Hayek took all those years ago to say it's just not worth my time it was worth his time and it is worth our time and I encourage you to get at it

Channel: misesmedia

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Keywords: Gary, North, Keynes, Austrian, Scholars, Conference, Economics, Ludwig, von, Mises, Institute

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Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2010