Why You Should Support the Mises Institute

0:00I just have a couple of minutes to talk to you about something that's really important and I want to tell you why the Mises Institute is so important and why it deserves your support. You know, one of the questions that people always ask is, well, how come we don't hear more about free market economics and the von Mises Institute in schools? And you think about it, how do we get our information? Well, the principal way we get our information, one source is the major media. However, it is not true that the major media definitely always tells you what's what, and in fact in my lifetime there's been a 50 year period where you couldn't get anything into the major media having to do with smoking, even though arguably smoking was killing half a million people a year. But what about the colleges? How come we don't hear more about free market economics in the important schools? And the stuff that you hear mostly is that, well, there's a bias.

0:54Well, actually, in my view, there's a much more compelling and a much more sinister explanation. I'd like to tell you what it is. And the guy who really put his finger on this, his name is John Kenneth Galbraith, a Keynesian, not one of us. Now firstly, about John Kenneth Galbraith, he was in charge in wage and price controls during World War II. He was very highly regarded. Kennedy loved this guy. He made them the ambassador to India. to India, and after Kennedy was murdered, they wanted to run Galbraith for president. Well, fortunately for us, and I think for him as well, he was born in Canada and he wasn't eligible for this. And so he was, for something like half a century, the Paul M. Warburg Professor Emeritus of Economics at Harvard. He wrote 40 some odd books. He was the president of the American Economic Association, again, arguably the dean of the economic profession.

1:49In one of these books, it's called Money, he has this very interesting line, which I think is important. He says, the study of money above all other fields in economics is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. To disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. Now we have a word in the English language for disguising and evading the truth, it's called lying. And so here you have this very important guy telling you that in monetary economics, these economists lie. Well, why do they lie? I mean, they have tenure. They could say whatever they want. And the answer is they've pretty much all been bought off with honorariums, with endowed chairs, with research grants, you name it. And the first time I came upon this, I called the blue about it, and I had a piece of evidence, which I'll tell you now.

2:38And Lew said right away, he says, well, they're all on the take. Now, one of the problems that people in academia have in getting ahead is that they all have to write papers which have to be published. Well, there's a recent piece in the Huffington Post, somebody did a real big analysis on it, and it turns out that almost all of the important journals are edited by present or former employees of the Federal Reserve. And they don't let this stuff get into the journals, so people in academia who want to get ahead, they can't get published. Another thing which came to light, when I first started my organization, I was introduced to a guy by the name of Bobby Auerbach, who was then the Chief Economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress. Prior to that, he had been the Chief Legislative Aide for Henry Gonzales, when Henry Gonzales was head of the House Banking Committee.

3:26And Henry Gonzales every year used to introduce legislation to bring the Federal Reserve under the umbrella of the Congress when it goes for money, just like everybody else. and every year this legislation used to get knocked down and then one year he submitted very good legislation he got hundreds of letters from all over the country and it says to Auerbach and it's Auerbach telling me this story who's writing all these letters and it turns out that just about all of these letters were written by economists who were at one time and at that time to employees directly or indirectly of the Fed visiting scholars and whatnot Auerbach Hayek showed these, he collected all these contracts that the Fed had signed with these economists to a reporter, his name is Stephen Davies, who put us an article in the American Banker, which I have the article, I can email it to anyone who wants to see it, and basically what these economists promised, among other things, in return for their fees, was not to say anything bad about the Fed. And Gonzales said, all they're doing is buying off credits, so basically the whole thing is fixed.

4:33I did my own Freedom of Information request to double check this. I got a list of all the economists like this. And you know who's not on that list? People like Murray Rothbard. The people from the Austrian School, they don't get paid, they don't become the visiting scholars to the Federal Reserve. So the reason why, I mean one of the reasons why you should support the Mises Institute, this is the fountain of truth. And if you want the real stuff to get into academia, if you wanted to get into society, if you want to somehow prevent a and the debacle which is surely coming, or at least mitigate the damage, please, right now, take out these contribution forms, everybody has one, and please make a fully tax-deductible contribution to the von Mises Institute. And thank you very much, and God bless you all, and good night.

5:27Let's quickly say thank you to our donors who made this possible, like everything else Thanks to our wonderful speakers, thanks to our staff, and thanks to all of you for coming.