Everything's Political Season 4 Episode 14 - Thomas DiLorenzo - President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hey everybody, and welcome to Everything'sPolitical. I'm your host Tayas Shoemaker.
You can find us online at Everything'sPolitical dot substack dot com. Shout out
too, Magicman, Joe Strecker,the Billy Joel of podcast producers, Where
you made right, I'm made acrazy, but it's just make dog.

(00:31):
I know I'm right. I'm notcrazy. There might be some lunatics out
there. Articulate talented Billy Joelin.On this day in nineteen eighty, his
album Glass Houses topped the US chartsand it featured I Believe that song was
on it, and it also featuredthe song It's Still rock and Roll to

(00:54):
Me, which you know. Ilove that song. I love the words
to that song. I could singit about what's going on today. I
guess we all could. Everybody's talkingabout the new sounds, the new people,
all that's happening. It's funny,but it's still all political to me.

(01:23):
Save Okay, We've got lots tocatch up on. Good lord it
it just keeps compounding. But we'renot going to catch up today because when

(01:48):
an opportunity for a guest that wehave today comes up, I've got to
grab it and I'm very excited aboutit. He is one of our favorite
contrarians. He is Thomas de Lorenzo. He's the president of Mesu's Institute,
and folks, if you don't knowabout Mesa's Institute, I beg you to

(02:09):
learn about them, and I begyou to share the resources at MESUS with
your children. It is invaluable information. It's a nonprofit and it exists to
promote the teaching and the research inthe Austrian school of economics that would be

(02:29):
versus Keynesian economics. They promote individualfreedom, honest history, an international peace,
in the tradition of Ludwig von Messisand Murray Rothbard. He's an author
of several books, many of whichwe've read. Hamilton's Curse, The Real
Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked. I cantell Lincoln was a bugaboo with him and

(02:54):
the Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics.And he's here to talk to us today
or with us today about the FederalReserve. So let's dive right in.
Tom de Lorenzo, thank you somuch for being here. It's an honor
and a pleasure to have you.I'm very pleased to be here. Thank
you. Absolutely Okay, before wedive into the FED, I'd like to

(03:17):
ask you, So you were ayou're a former professor of economics. It
was wow? Okay, Now wasthat all at Loyola? No, it
was the George Mason University, Universityof Tennessee for a while, and Loyal
University. I haven't spent one yearat State University of New York, but

(03:38):
it was a little too cold forme in Buffalo. Go aheaded south.
That's the best direction in my opinion. So in that realm or field at
university, I have to ask you, is it as cutthroat as it as
militant or do people still have gooddiscussions about the difference of opinions. Well,

(04:00):
there's a lot of diversity. Imean a lot of different types of
places. But typically the business schoolsand are better places where you have that's
where you have the discussions. It'sthe humanities and the social sciences where the
crazy Marxists have totally taken over andthey don't believe in free speech. They

(04:20):
believe in this theory that was popularin the sixties that only the oppressed classes
deserve free speech. And of coursethat means that anybody like myself or Tom
Woods or they would up here ata university. They consider us to be
the oppressor class. That's a that'scalled cultural Marxism. And so when you

(04:43):
see these kids setting fires and screamingand yelling at conservative speakers who are invited
to campus, they think they're takingthe moral high road because that's what they've
been taught by their professors. Andthey don't even know they're ignorant because I'm
I'm not oppressing anybody with my ideas, and they're not my ideas, you
know. I teach them about theworks of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek

(05:08):
and Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard,and they're not oppressors. But that's what
the academic left has been teaching fordecades, since the nineteen sixties. And
so, yeah, there are safehavens, mostly in business schools, although
they're being tainted also, and mostlymaybe engineering school a few places like that,

(05:30):
but the humanities and the social sciences, there are very few places that
are saying. I've found that thereare a number of sort of small Christian
colleges that were like the only placesleft for free speech on campus anymore.
They don't have when I lived inFlorida, Palm Beach. Atlantic University was

(05:54):
one of those. They had afree enterprise day and the students were all
really, really nice Christian students whowent to Christians School and then went to
that college. And there are placeslike that around, but the big universities
is not where to look for that, no, for sure. But and
that makes sense because if you don'tknow why you believe what you believe,

(06:15):
then you can't defend it. Yeah, and so this is why when you
engage in a conversation with someone withwhom you disagree, it's hard to get
past one talking point because they justfall apart. It crumbles. And so
you have to be able to entertain. I think it was Aristotle. The
mark of an educated man is tobe able to entertain an idea without accepting

(06:36):
it. Yeah. There's one ofthe cancers on academ is called critical theory,
which is another Marxist thing. Andat my former university, there was
a lawyer who was teaching in thebusiness school who brought along a new course
maybe twenty years ago, all oncritical thinking. And I got to know

(06:59):
this some of her students, andthey weren't critical thinkers at all. In
any way. They were just taughta lot of platitudes and slogans, and
they thought that was critical thinking.But what they were really doing is just
criticizing anybody who disagreed with sort ofthe left wing agenda, but with name
calling. And that's and they weretaught that that's critical thinking because the course

(07:24):
was called critical thinking. But theywere incapable of logic and marshaling facts.
And it's hard work to martial facts. You have to dig them up and
you have to interpret them, andit's much easier to sort of be a
virtue signaler and call people names andwho disagree with you. And you know,

(07:45):
they would organize protests if somebody wouldcome on campus that they suspected was
had an alternative viewpoint, they wouldthey would be protests and they'd make all
kinds of noise and things like that. And they thought they were taught that
they were taking the moral high bycensorship. Yes, because we're taught that
disagreement equals hate and you know,if you disagree with me, then you're

(08:07):
not on the right path. Yeah, when when the hate speech language first
emerged, I remember telling some ofmy students, this is going to be
used for censorship. They're going tobroaden the definition of hate speech. You
know, we don't need a newlaw or anything like that to tell people
that, you know, racial empathetsand all that is inappropriate. You know,
that's not that's not what it wasall going to be about. And

(08:28):
they kind of snickered, and hethought, Oh, this is crazy,
that will never happen. But that'sexactly what has happened that you know,
the ideas of freedom are now orhate speech? Is it just experience that
allows some people to look at asituation like that and see the slippery slope.
I mean there are I feel likewe're at the end of every slippery

(08:48):
slope of the last thirty years,and people I know, people who,
to their credit are coming out andsaying, Hey, had I known that
this was where this was going toend up, I'd never been part of
it. So a lot of it, I think is experience. The other
part, I think is critical thing, real critical thinking are being exposed to

(09:11):
ideas and knowing that it's okay toentertain them, you don't have to accept
them. But so is that.And we're grateful to MESUS for all of
their resources. Mesas Dot org.We spoke about them in the intro.
Wow, I know right now thatyou can get Murray Rothbard's what Government has
done to Our Money? Yes,we're in the middle of giving away one

(09:31):
hundred thousand copies of what is Governmentdone to Our Money? At Murray Rothbard.
Just go to the bottom of ourwebsite and you can sign up and
we'll send you however many books youwant. Wow, Mesas dot Org.
I mean, that's what a fantasticresource. Thank you. Now, did
you connect immediately with mesus? Theywere what nineteen eighty two? Yeah,
I've been like, yeah, eightythree, I think it was. I've

(09:52):
been involved with the Mesas Insuite allmost from the very beginning when I was
an assistant professor of economic at GeorgeMason University, and I got a postcard
announcing the creation of the Mesas Institute, and I sent them a small donation.
I think I wrote him a checkfor fifty bucks. And then I
got a letter back from a thankyou letter back from Murray Rothbird and tie

(10:18):
a necktie men's necktie with a pickwith von Mesas on it. And I
wrote them back and said that I'llwear it and it'll have the same effect
in academ as flashing a Christian crossin front of Dracula. So I started
participating in the early days at theconferences, So I was involved. I
taught at mass University every year formore than thirty years, so I've been

(10:41):
involved for a long time. Andthen now I'm the president of the Mesas
Institute. We're glad you're there.So I'm sure on the agenda for ever
at MESAS. And when I saythat, I mean to help educate the
public with your resources and articles.Is the FED? Can we start with

(11:01):
just definitions? Of course, theFED has a history. We can trace
it back to Alexander Hamilton in myopinion, can you just help us understand
first what in who the FED is? Well, the FED was created in
nineteen thirteen, but like you said, it's called a central bank, and
we had two other versions of thatin the early years. One was created

(11:24):
by Alexander Hamilton. It was calledBank of the United States and after twenty
years of that, Congress defunded itbecause it created price inflation, boom and
bus cycles in the economy, highunemployment, and political corruption. It was
using the money from the bank tosubsidize certain politicians but not others, depending

(11:45):
on the party in power. Andthen it was resurrected to help pay for
the War of eighteen twelve, andit did the same thing again for the
next twenty years, and so PresidentAndrew Jackson defunded it eventually, and that
was in the early eighteen four Sowe went from the eighteen forties to nineteen
thirteen without a so called central bank. And then because it does benefit some

(12:09):
people, it provides cheap credit foryou know, and nowadays it's the real
estate business and the bankers like it. It bails out banks when they get
in trouble. And so when itwas created in ninety thirteen, the head
of it is appointed by the Presidentand then there's a Board of Governors and
there are more than one hundred peoplethat work at the Board of Governors as

(12:30):
it's called. It's never been auditedand operates in secret, and it's in
charge of all the money in thecountry. There's a good idea, let's
put politicians, in their appointees incharge of all the money in the country.
They bamboozle the public into thinking governmentis cheaper than it really is,
because after all, if you paythrough taxes you see the tax bill.

(12:52):
If the government were to say we'regoing to send another one hundred billion dollars
to Ukraine, but we're going topay for it with taxes time and so
each working family is going to besent a bill for ten thousand dollars,
you'd see a far fewer Ukraine flagbumper stickers treats of America, I think

(13:13):
if that was true. But theFED just can create money of nowhere.
Literally, it's legalized counterfeiting. Wedon't see it directly, but what we
do see is the price inflation,because that's what creates inflation. You know,
we should be experiencing deflation, weshould be experiening with all the technological
advances we've had in the past decades. But instead that the FED keeps pumping

(13:37):
so much money in circulation, andthat's what drives demand in the economy and
it keeps the prices up. Andthe FED even has an official policy of
always trying to keep inflation at leastat least two percent every year, and
it's always more than that. Andthey do it in a number of ways.
They one way is they buy bondsand that which means so they create
money electronically out of nowhere nothing andbuy government bonds and that puts money into

(14:03):
the banking system. That's one thingthey do. And then and the FED
touts itself as some sort of Wizardof Oz institution where the Grand Wizard meets
in secret. In every couple ofweeks, every investor on the planet is
anxiously waiting for the next two orthree words to come out of the mouth
of the chairman. And the chairmanof the FED is I think of it

(14:26):
as sort of like the Wizard ofOz character. His head is up in
the sky and his clouds swirling around, and he says a few things,
and everybody's supposed to be in aweof and it's it's really a sick institution
when you think about it. Ifwe call ourselves a democracy, which which
I don't like to do, butbut that's that's what the FED is.
And every country in the world nowhas some version of a central bank.

(14:50):
My answer is always decentralization of everything, but clearly our government doesn't doesn't see
it that way. What's frustrating isthat I think people are so distracted sometimes
and it's hard and it's a lotof information, but would it be fair
to say that the FED, andI think Bastiat covers this in his book.
He goes over market capitalism and politicalcapitalism, right, and the FED

(15:16):
enables the ladder, right, soit picks winners and losers. To your
point, the banking, the realestate industry, et cetera, and of
course the inflation. People can seethat at their at their kitchen table,
right, But usually the government willthe politicians will blame it on If gas
prices go up, they blame iton Exxon. You know, if housing

(15:37):
prices go up, they blame iton greedy developers. And it's i logical
because if Exon was that powerful,they would always be raising prices. Gas
prices would never go down. Butthey don't. They've got competition from all
over the world. But it's themoney, well, it's the FED and
it's money spigott that causes inflation riceinflation. I don't typically give the judgment

(16:00):
of charity to a government entity,but why else would you create that entity
and use it to artificially manipulate themarkets, which it hurts everybody else.
Basically, who aren't the winners,who aren't the chosen winners? Why?
Well, it was the FED wascreated in the early twentieth century, and
that was a period of the latenineteenth early twentieth century. There were a

(16:21):
number of regulatory agencies that were created, like the Interstate Commerce Commission there was
eighteen eighty seven, I think itwas, and they were all captured by
the corporations that they were supposed tobe regulating in the public interest. Even
Robert Kennedy Junior wrote about the capturetheory of regulation in his book on Falci

(16:42):
and I was surprised. I readthat book and I wrote a big review
of it for lou Rockwell dot com, and I I said, oh,
this is great. RFK Junior hasread the economics literature on the so called
capture theory. But for example,the Interstate Commerce Commission was originally created did
the first president of it was thepresident of a railroad company, and so

(17:04):
they basically eliminated competition in the railroadbusiness as best they could. And then
when trucks came along, they didthe same thing. They regulated trucking and
they made it illegal to compete intrucking. If you were a trucker that
drove a truck from say Pittsburgh toChicago full of furniture. It was illegal

(17:25):
to come back from Chicago with anotherload of something in there, and so
it was their way of restricting thesupply and demand. If you restrict supply,
prices go up. So the priceof trucking was permanently propped up for
that. And they did the samething with airlines, the Civil ear Eautics
Board that made it illegal for airlinesto compete, and they had all kinds

(17:47):
of weird rationales like, oh,if you don't do this, they won't
have enough money and they'll all gobankrupt, and we won't have an airline
industry, we won't have a truckingindustry. So they had their propagandas out
there making excuse and the FED wasjust like this. At the same period
of history, the banking industry wanteda government run cartel, just like the
truckers and the railroads had at atime. And the natural monopoly the public

(18:14):
utilities, it was the same thing. When they started doing There was vigorous
competition for electricity, telephones and allthat, and the governments created monopolies by
law. They passed laws creating allthese monopolies there. And the ironic thing
is that the government had just recentlypassed an anti monopoly law, the Sherman
Anti Trust Act in eighteen ninety.And so I think of it as to

(18:38):
cover themselves to say that when ifanybody started complaining about monopoly prices here and
there in the economy, they couldsay, well, we have an anti
monopoly regulatory agency, we'll look intothat. Well, at the same time,
they're creating monopoly themselves with these massiveinstitutions. And so this was the
whole purpose was always that. Andyou know, it goes way back to

(19:00):
Thomas Jefferson when he observed Hamilton wasa champion of this because Hamilton was sort
of the political handmaiden of the bigbankers of New England and New York and
Philadelphia and the big business interests ofhis day. And he was the champion
of the bank for that reason.And Jefferson said, the reason was he

(19:22):
wanted a permanent engine of corruption.And the reason Jefferson said that is that
just previously to the creation of thisbank the Treasury. As Treasury Secretary,
Hamilton was very good at using governmentmoney, tax money to buy votes for
his agenda, his party's agenda isa big pork barrel politician in charge of

(19:45):
the Treasury. But he realized thatthe politicians that they bought off they would
eventually retire or die. And soJefferson said, well, Hamilton, he
thinks he needs a permanent engine ofcorruption because this scheme of paying off this
or that politician doesn't always last forever. So he needs an institution to get

(20:07):
this so that he can have permanentmonopoly political power. And that was Jefferson's
take on the first Central Bank.And I think that's what that was,
and I think that's what the FEDis today. And of course the main
beneficiaries are government itself, both parties. You know, if the neocons run

(20:29):
the Republican Party, they want morewars financed by the FED. If they
control the Democrat Party, they wantmore wars financed by the FED. And
the same is true with the welfarestate. It makes government seem less pricey
than if you were to financings withtaxes. Even Adam Smith, famous Adam

(20:52):
Smith, he Right The Wealth ofNations in seventeen seventy six, said that
if taxes were used to pay forwars, be fewer wars, and they
would be shorter wars, and therewould be more defensive wars as opposed to
imperialistic wars, and that was morethan two hundred years ago. I would
contend that we had a much moresuperior i should say intellectual horsepower back then.

(21:18):
Yes, So basically we're picking winnersand losers. The bankers won in
on it. That's got to affectWall Street. What is that component?
You know, I've talked to financialadvisors who basically say they're most successful by
exploiting the manipulation of the Fed.Yeah. Yeah, there are periods in

(21:38):
American history where interest rates were stablefor decades. But the whole idea of
the Fed manipulating industrates what creates arbitrageopportunities for the guys and gals on Wall
Street. If anyway, if interestrates are moving constantly, which they are
now now have been for the lastseveral decades, like I said previously,

(22:00):
that that you could go for decadeswith very tiny movements and interest rates,
so there was no money to bemade there. But that's that's how the
you know, the people on WallStreet follow this so closely. They're is
sitting on pins and needles. AndI have friends who are in the real
estate business and they know I'm aneconomist, and all they want to talk

(22:21):
about. They want to always wantto ask me, what do I think
the FED is going to do?And as though I'm a fortune teller and
I know what the FED is goingto do, because they do. You
know, their business too, dependson interest rates a lot. And that's
a big lobbyist, by the way, the whole real estate business for lower
interest rates by the FED to lovethe markets with more and more money quantitative

(22:45):
easingly. They started calling it aboutten years ago to keep interest rates near
zero, and that that harms createsgreat harm on retired people, among others,
because if you're retired and you livelot relatively fixed income social Security and
an annuity, let's say, andyou want to make a little more money,

(23:06):
you're forced to speculate on the stockmarket with low interest rates. And
they just a couple of years ago, I would get ads in the new
in the in the mail of froma bank saying we're offering one in a
quarter percent interest on savings accounts beforetaxes. Now, how could you pass
that up? So you're you're losingmoney with a little inflation, and not

(23:30):
to mention taxes, and so yeah, and so they forced the retired people
into speculating, and they can,and a lot of them have lost a
lot of money speculating because they it'shard to compete with the sharks on Wall
Street as a speculator. So letme ask you this, why do we

(23:51):
not have oversight on this entity thatbasically controls the economy. It was a
very clever thing they did when theycreated they They keep claiming over and over
and over again that it's an independentagency, meaning independent of Congress. And
if it's independent of Congress, it'sindependent of the people. I mean,
isn't that the whole idea behind Congressof representative government, that they are our

(24:15):
representatives. You know, we aretheoretically in control of the government and we
send our representatives to represent us.But Defense says, no, we are
independent of that. You know,you can, you can, you can
audit the Department of Energy and theDepartment of Defense and all this, but
not us. You know, themoney, after all, the money is
not very important. You know,the money of the whole country is not

(24:37):
important. You know, go andgoha and audit the other ones. And
they keep calling it independent, butit's not independent. The head of it,
the chairman is appointed by the president, and if you want to be
reappointed, you need to do whatthe president wants you to do. And
so, and they don't come outin public and say that, but they
understand what the president wants to do. For example, I've just been re

(25:00):
recently in the Wall Street Journal andelsewhere where. All the speculation is now
that the head of the Federal Reserve, Powell, is supposedly going to cut
interest rates somehow three times in September. Well, gee, the election is
on November fifth. Isn't that convenientfor the Democrats? And so if he
wants to be reappointed, that's thegame he plays. There's even a name

(25:22):
for it. Economists call it thepolitical business cycle. Before every big election,
there's always a pump up and governmentspending, government borrowing, money printing,
interest rate cutting to make the incumbentslook better and to make everybody happy.
And then after the election we're goingto see we'll see more inflation and
maybe even a recession or a depression. But that's after the election. The

(25:48):
election will be over and everybody besafely back in their jobs in Washington,
d C. And that seems tobe what's going on. What will be
going on the next couple of months. Unbelievable. So yes, one of
the financial advisors I just spoke withrecently told me interest rates are coming down
in September, but then they'll haveto come back up Q one or Q
two. Yeah, after whoever iselected is safely in office. Correct.

(26:11):
Yeah. And so what I mean, I look at at the at the
history of the FED, and allI see is instability because it's not a
genuine There aren't any genuine market moves. And I don't I still don't understand
why we don't just let the marketbe the market, other than again picking

(26:32):
winners and losers. Well, it'spolitics, you know. Government is all
about using the powers of government tobenefit the well organized politically special interest groups
and then spreading the cost among thepopulation, so that for a lot of
things government does, you and Imight it might cost us one hundred dollars
a year and we don't even knowit. In higher taxes, we don't

(26:56):
even know it. But it goesto this or that. But you multiply
that by one hundred and fifty milliontaxpayers. That's you're talking big money.
And so it goes to this specialinterest group and that special interest group.
And that's what the FED does.It's a political institution, and that's why
at the Mesage Institute we're calling we'retrying to restart the discussion of ending the
FED. We had a full pageadd in the Wall Street Journal a couple

(27:18):
of weeks ago entitled who needs theFED? Making that case when we have
a documentary coming out in October.Playing with Fire is the title of it.
You can go on mesas dot organd watch the trailer. We have
a trailer made up by our productioncompany, our television production company, and
so it's going to be available forfree online to anybody wants to watch it

(27:41):
beginning around October twelfth or thirteenth.I think it'll be the premiere at our
supporters summit. We're having a Hiltonat Island, South Carolina, and that'll
be the premier where e'ven gonna havea red carpet and we're going to have
a fake journalist interviewing the people whowere in the the think some guy who
works at the meet and gonna weara tuxedo and interview people as they walk

(28:04):
into the hotel for this. Sothat's that'll be fun. Yeah, that's
a great idea. Now, soI was involved in the fair tax movement,
and you know, fair tax,flat tax, however you want to,
you know, whichever reform you wantis fine with me, but we
need to start the conversation. Andwhenever I would start the conversation about a

(28:27):
national sales tax, it was calamity. People were like, we could never
do that, we could never todo that. But to your earlier point,
I said, if you had towrite your income tax, or if
you had to write your taxes everyweek, we might not have an I
R S tier earlier very visible,Yeah, correct, and transparent, and

(28:49):
even once a month or once amonth. Yes. And so I feel
that the same thing would happen ifyou said, and the FED people,
especially all the people who have avested interest in the FED, are going
to say, oh no, no, no, no no. But of
course you tell us, what wouldhappen if we ended the FED? Well,

(29:10):
we have Well, if we didend the FED, we would have
deflation if we adopted a system,a monetary system, again based on gold
and silver being in the banking system. But in the nineteen thirties, Franklin
Roosevelt essentially confiscated all the privately ownedgold in the country. He paid people

(29:30):
an arbitrary price set by the government. We'll give you this. It's kind
of like eminent domain. The eminentdomain gold, all the gold, and
then it was illegal to own goldfor about forty years. And that gold
is supposedly all in Fort Knox somewhere. If we ended the FED, all
that gold could be put back inthe banking system, and and so that
your money would be worth something ifyou wanted to redeem it, other than

(29:52):
the promises of politicians. And wehave ended two feds all ready in this
country. The First Bank of theUnited States and the Second Bank of United
States were abolished. And I mentionedearlier these regulatory agencies that were created around
the same time as the FED.The Civil Aeronautics Board and the Civil Arts

(30:15):
Board was abolished. The Carter administrationgot rid of it because it was such
an egregious ripoff of the common personof the average American and made airfare price
cutting illegal that even Ted Kennedy andRalph Nader were for it. So you
had the left wingers in Congress whowould never ever be in favor of the

(30:36):
deregulation of anything said this stinks tohigh Heaven, and we did the same
thing the Interstate Commerce Commission. Carterand Reagan did that it was creating a
monopoly for the trucking industry, andso everything that you buy is transported somewhere,
and so that dropped up the priceof just about everything that you buy,
every item of grocery in the grocerystore, the higher trucking costs.

(31:00):
And that was eliminated too. Sowe do have a record. It's not
widespread, but there's a record ofeliminating these banks. There were menace now
the state of Ohio, for example, the Bank of America opened two branches
in the state of Ohio, andwe're talking the eighteen twenties, and the
people of Ohio did not want Theyknew what this was about, and so

(31:22):
they imposed attacks of fifty thousand dollarsa year on each branch. This is
the eighteen twenties. Fifty thousand wouldbe many millions of dollars this year.
The bank refused to pay, andso the state of Ohio sent armed marshals
into the bank with a big trunk, and they went into the vault and
took one hundred thousand dollars out ofthe vault. And walked out, and

(31:45):
so and so and so that wasAnd it was shortly after that that President
Andrew Jackson vetoed the rechartering bill forthe Second Bank of the United States.
But he had helped from the peoplein places like Ohio and other states who
did things like this, and sothat can has happened, and I think
it can happen again, but ittakes people need to wake up. You

(32:08):
know. Even when Ron Paul wasinterviewed by Tucker Carlson a couple of months
ago, they recalled the scene whereRon went to the University of Michigan when
he was running for office, andhe personally told me that he was expecting
these left wing students wouldn't be toothrilled about what he was have to say.
And he shows up and they beganspontaneously chanting and the fed because they

(32:31):
had heard some of his other speeches. So they're all supportive at cheering and
all that, and so they wereand they didn't learn a heck of a
lot. But then Tucker Carlson himselfsaid, you know, when I saw
that, I'm thinking I get paidhere by Fox News or whoever he was
working for at the time. Toknow something about this, and he said,
I knew nothing at all about theFED. And this is Tucker Carlson,

(32:53):
and he's a pretty smart guy.He's educated, he's a big TV
job and he even he knew nothingabout the FED. Doesn't take you don't
need to go to school. Wecould read our website, start reading the
articles on mesas dot org like afree education. Some of our books,
by the way, like Man,Economy and State by Murray Rothbarn some months
they get downloaded fifty thousand times.We get We get these statistics every week.

(33:17):
We have a weekly meeting to seeit. Who's how much read?
How much of our products that areout there online are being looked at?
And yeah, and that's the onlyones. That's fantastic. I mean,
I know. I counsel people parentswho are considering the homeschool lifestyle, and

(33:38):
whether they pull the trigger or not, we still try to stay in touch.
And one of my pieces or suggestionsto them is, hey, there
are other resources. If you can'tpull the trigger, there are other resources
out there. We point them to. Misis depending on the age of their
their children, and that you canhave the conversations with your teen or whomever,

(34:05):
and so that they're exposed to thesedifferent ideas. But I have to
chuckle because we're having this discussion fromI'm in Cincinnati, Ohio, and boy,
I sure wish the state was likethat now. Yeah, yeah,
those are the good old days.By the way, time we have a
new beginner's series of video series forchildren, and my colleague Jonathan Newman has

(34:27):
produced several of them. He's planninga lot more, and he has three
small children of himself, so he'shighly motivated. He's a brilliant guy.
And we're gonna have a whole seriesof lectures for kids too. It's called
Economics for Beginners, and so maybefor you know, thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen years old, to teach someeconomic literacy. He's doing that, and

(34:51):
you could look on the website Economicsfor Beginners. We already have several several
videos on there for two that's fantastic. What an ex resource. There's also
and his name is Escaping Me NowLessons for the Young Economist. It's Jonathan
Newman. Is that Jonathan? Yeah? And no he used to have Murphy

(35:13):
Yes, a book about Yeah,that's right. Well, this is what
Jonathan's doing is videos of that perfect, Yeah, excellent, okay, And
just briefly before we close, andagain I'm trying to pull this big amiba
the FED, you know, toour kitchen table. Can we help people

(35:35):
understand what the FED is done tothe dollar? You talked about we could
get back on the gold standard.You look at your dollar now and it
are the dollars backed by anything?And what does that mean? No,
they're not. They're backed by thepromises of politicians. And that's it.
Nothing more than what you could buyfor one hundred dollars in nineteen thirteen,
the year of the feedow's created todaywould cost you about three thousand dollars.

(35:59):
That's that's how my the FED hasdevalued the purchasing power of the dollar over
the years. I used to havea chart on my office wallet Loyal University
or my office door that showed theconsumer price indecks from seventeen eighty nine,
the year the Constitution was ratified,until nineteen thirteen. There are ups and

(36:19):
downs, but it was ended upat the same. So over that whole
period of history, there was noon net, no inflation. That there
were some in some periods, buton that and so and then the same
chart beginning of nineteen thirteen, skyrocketsto the sky from nineteen thirteen to the
present day because the value of thedollar is only is less than five percent

(36:42):
of what it was when the FEDwas created. So the FED has failed
miserably in controlling inflation. And there'sa whole a lot of academic literature now
that says that the economy has beenmore unstable after the FED than it was
before the FED. The way,my latest book is called The Politically Incorrect
Guide Economics, and I have achapter on the FED called the Government's Boom

(37:07):
and Bus Machine. So if youwant, that's another resource. And it's
written in plain English, and thereare there are hundreds of books that are
recommended all throughout that book to readand so so it's in Any educated junior
high school student I think could geta lot out of it. And from

(37:28):
there and more, you know,more advanced. Also fantastic, Thank you
for that. Finally, the movementis this just creating the political will?
I don't see a lot of politicalwill for anything except the status quo in
DC. What can we do?What agency do we have other than educating
ourselves? For sure? Well,the big hope is decentralization. You mentioned

(37:50):
there are some states that have alreadysaid they're going to start accepting gold and
silver as currency, which is agood move. And the whole crypto movement
is sort of simpatico with having competitionfor money. And so I think what
will happen in our country, maybeafter I'm long gone, is it will
be broken up in several different countriesand hopefully one or two or three of

(38:15):
them will will adopt sound money basedon gold and silver. And that's what
happened when the Soviet Union broke up. Some of the former republics were better
than others in terms of freedom.Estonia at the very beginning was had a
relatively high degree of freedom compared tothe rest of them, you know,
as they escaped from communism. Andwe're going to have to have an escape

(38:38):
from communism here someday in the nottoo dis in future, and I think
that's what will probably happen. Butpeople don't want to talk about that because
the whole idea of secession or disunionhas been so demonized by the Abe Lincoln
myth that most Americas think, don'teven think of it. Yes, well,

(38:58):
we'll have to have you back onto about that myth too, because
we pushed that narrative here. Infact, what we what we suggest people
do is personally secede to the degreethat you can from absolutely everything, until
that all that's left is the paperwork. Yeah, the valide Harry Brown,
who was a famous libertarian He ranfor president one year, wrote a book

(39:20):
called How I Found Freedom in anUnfree World and about that And by the
way, we're having a Mesa's Circlein Albuquerque, New Mexico in November on
that topic, how to how tolive as a free person. You know,
despite all of this, right,if you go on messas dot org
and look under events, you cansee what that is about. Fantastic.

(39:43):
Well, I can't think of abetter spot to wrap that up. I
want to thank you again for beingon and we will encourage our listeners to
go to mesas dot org a wealthof information. There is there anything else
you'd like to add? Well,if they're interested in any of my books,
they can go on Amazon. Ihave an Amazon page. Oh great,
they can check them all out there. Outstanding and I consider all the

(40:05):
negative comments to be a badge ofhonor. By the way, Well,
you won't get a lot here.We appreciate the viewpoints and we know whether
we end up agreeing on anything ornot as irrelevant, you know when we're
approaching a subject, so we appreciateit, and we appreciate you being on.
Hope you'll come back and hope youhave a great day. Same to
you. Thank you, take care, Okay, Tom de Lorenzo, everyone,

(40:29):
thank you so much for listening.Appreciate it. Please visit mysis dot
org for a wealth of knowledge andresources, and also, as he mentioned,
his Amazon page where he has Ibelieve eighteen books and I can't recommend
most of them highly enough. SoI want to thank you again for listening.
Thanks as always to magic Man JoeStrecker until next time, who will

(40:52):
stand at either hand and keep thebridge with me. Have a great day.