Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government

0:00The genesis of this book, Organized Crime, was I got a bunch of emails from people who have been reading my articles for years, and they kept saying, you know, we read all your stuff about Lincoln, all these books, and, you know, why don't you write a book, sort of like an economics in one lesson style book, and all this other stuff you've written about. So, you know, they get fascinated with one of your books, like my books on Lincoln, they do a web search and they find that I've been writing about antitrust regulation and banking and all these things for 30 years. And so I said, yeah, it's about time to do something like that. And I had all these web articles, they go back maybe 25 years, some of them, and they've never been in print anywhere, just on the internet, maybe 20 years.

0:48And so I rewrote all of these articles, and I organized the book into several sections. The first one is coercion and regulation, so there's eight short chapters or 55 essays in it. The second one is politics and thieves, it's sort of redundant, but that's what I think Lew Rockwell actually chose that word in politics and thieves, centralization versus liberty. So I have some, what I think, sort of very clear articles that sort of state my case for decentralized government, states' rights, federalism, why you should hate Lincoln, that sort of thing. Then Money in the State, I've done some writing on Money in the State, you know, I was, not to brag, but I was writing about the dangers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mae, government-sponsored Enterprises in my first book in 1983, it was called Underground Government, The Off-Budget Public Sector.

1:48So, I'm one of the few who's been writing about this stuff for decades, and you didn't have to be much of a genius to know that this was going to blow up in our face someday, if you understood what these institutions were like back then. And so, I wrote a few short articles, and I'd been writing about the Community Reinvestment Act for 20-some years, which was a federal law that forced mortgage bankers to make bad loans to unqualified borrowers by the trillions. And these are called subprime loans. So you know, if you have a credit rating of, say, 850, which is almost like as high as you can get, 850, I guess subprime would be 849, 848. So the government gave us that word, subprime, but of course, in reality, these are people with non-existent credit ratings. I don't think they go below 400. And so that's who these people are. And so I put some of these articles, I rewrote and put them in there.

2:49And the workers and unions. I've written several, quite a few articles on workers and unions. I've always had an interest in labor economics. It was one of my fields in graduate school back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. And so I put some articles there about unions and what unions are up to, and then Truth and Lies about Markets, that could be a whole big fat book, bigger than Man Economy and State, Truth and Lies about Markets, and so I had several essays on that in the final section, and for example the Truth about the Robber Barons, Truth about the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Myth of Natural Monopoly, and sometimes Sometimes I question myself, am I being delusional about this? I mean, is it really that many lies about markets and governments? Well, no, not at all. We need to reveal much, much more because of the nature of the economics profession. Peter Klein just sent around an article a couple of days ago that I blogged about, about sort of the latest effort by

3:57by a Fed Economist. He wrote an article called On the Instability of Private Money. And it's a mathematical article. And it's the same old routine. When I was in graduate school in the 70s, I was taught why this is a bogus form of analysis. It's called the Nirvana Fallacy. You whip up some theory of a perfect economic world, perfect competition, or something like that. And then you look at the real world, And you discover, you know, who would ever have thought that the real world is not the identical twin of Nirvana. And so you condemn the real world, and then step two is to recommend perfect government intervention to correct the real world and make it perfect.

4:43And you would never ask any question about any possibility of imperfections in government. You just assume government will correct the market failure. Failure. So this is the latest that I got from Peter, that the inherent instability of private money, and it was the author is a Fed economist, works for the Fed. So I blogged on, I think that the blog I put was, what do these publications have in common? And I made several of them up, the first one was on the inherent instability of Apple computer And so for a Fed economist to write an article on the inherent instability of competing money it's just laughable and of course it's just one big blur of math that nobody can understand and that's the game that is played, but this book I intended to be an antidote to that sort of thing and it really, really aggravates the status in academe when books are published.

5:48when books like this are written, not this one, but things like economics in one lesson, it's still out there in print, what, 60 years in the running, it's online, it's everywhere, and so flashing that in front of one of these market failure theorists is like flashing a cross in front of Dracula, because their students read it, the students suffer through these classes with the math and the graphs and they don't learn anything, and then they read Mises Institute, Literature and they understand economics and their professors hate that. And so the purpose of this book is to be sort of a primer on Austrian economics, Austrian political economy and in the back of my mind I had in terms of the market for this is I've given several speeches to Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty and where there's like a thousand people or more and the average age is very young and I've met hundreds of these young people, I've given speeches to campaign for liberty groups in Florida and elsewhere, and

6:51they're just eager and hungry to learn more about Austrian economics, and so I keep telling them whenever I come across them, not just to sell books or promote myself, but the purpose of this is if you've never run across this stuff, I consider this to be a pretty good primer for students like that, or for anybody. And so that's the purpose of organized crime, and of course that's a Rothbardian theme isn't it, or government as organized crime. And I've been thinking more and more the way things are going, that the time is ripe for a whole book on government as a criminal enterprise, and so it wouldn't be hard to do that. The big challenge would be how to keep it down to a manageable length, if you wrote that.

7:37And so we're just going to make sort of overviews of these books here and I think that's about all I'll say for now and Mark will give us our next speaker.