Commentary

0:00Well, the majority of my comments are for Walter Block's paper, probably because his was the most provocative and gives me the most to maybe react to or against. I'm not necessarily a fan of microfinance. I think Jeffrey Tucker has done great work on Eunice and Grameen Brank, and Walter builds on that to his great credit in his paper. But there are some things about which I still have questions after reading the paper. Walter, he said this a little bit in his presentation and a lot in his paper, that it's a problem that Grameen gives money to women, especially. This is somehow untoward or sexist. Apparently, Walter objects to this in some way. But my gut reaction to that is, well, what's wrong with that?

0:45I mean, hasn't charity traditionally, historically been targeted to women for whatever reason, for perfectly legitimate reasons, we give money to widows and orphans with respect to the idea that there's maybe a socialist feminist agenda at work here, that may be true, I haven't read Eunice's writings in any detail, but I did come across an article by Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine, and I certainly don't consider him to be a more credible source than Walter, but nonetheless he did listen to a speech by Eunice and did make this comment, he writes characterizing Grameen's reading, This strikes me, of course, as entirely plausible. I don't know much about Bangladesh, but I can imagine that perhaps the poor men in Bangladesh have very high time preferences and go out and do irresponsible things, and the women are the ones who stay home and who might be more reliable.

1:53It's not at all hard to imagine that young men in the inner city of the United States have very high time preferences. They're out getting put in prison and doing bad things and being wasteful. And who's left but the women to be responsible to lend the money to? Now, it's interesting that Walter objects not only to Grameen Bank, Now it's interesting that Walter objects not only to Grameen Bank, but also to hypothetical pure private microfinance, and I have a little trouble understanding that. One objection Walter has in his paper is that supposedly this crowds out legitimate lending to creditworthy people. But it seems to me that this money isn't money that would otherwise be lent to creditworthy people.

2:38It's money that would otherwise simply be given away as charity. And what's wrong with giving people a loan instead of giving people a handout? It seems if you give them a small loan with the expectation that they'll pay it back with some guidance, that they're going to invest this in some way, and not everyone's cut out to be an entrepreneur, but certainly people are cut out to be self-employed, or do small-scale things, running a food cart or whatever it is that you might do in some third world country, so I don't find this as outrageous or inappropriate. Walter did mention that we libertarians should urge sweatshops, not microfinance, and there may be some problems with sweatshops as far as how these things are set up, whether they're always fully compatible with property rights and the way that these companies come in and get to set things up.

3:27And I wonder why Walter didn't mention instead, of course, the approach of someone such as Hernando de Soto who says, no, let's libertarians go in and promote property rights. That seems to me to be the number one alternative to microfinance. So again, overall, I certainly agree with respect to Eunice. There's no question that he's tied in with some unsavory socialist characters and agenda, but I wonder if we can so easily condemn all of microfinance. With Mr. Payne's paper, I liked it. It was well-researched, well-documented, and I certainly recommend the written paper to I mean, everybody here wrote a great paper. But what struck me about his is something that other academic writers, not necessarily on this panel, but in general, could learn from, and that is, it reads very smoothly, it reads like a magazine article, it's something you can sit down and read, and the footnotes are all there, it's all well documented, but it tells a good story at the same time.

4:22I had some sort of critiques of the paper, but he kind of corrected them in a presentation. The paper just kind of lists all the poor planning and so forth that was done by this Wilbur Smith and Associates, and as I was reading this it occurred to me, well, if some bureaucrat looks at this. If some ordinary person looks at this, they're going to think, gee, remind me not to hire Wilbur Smith and Associates when I want to do my central planning. But of course, the problem isn't Wilbur Smith and Associates, it's the very idea of central planning. And you hit that as soon as you start in this presentation, I think in the final written product it would be helpful to have that come out even more and bring out even more the points that you brought out in your presentation about how these programs, they're so destructive and tearing up all this existing stuff then building new roads and you didn't say this

5:09in the paper but you did say it in your presentation then of course we have the environmentalists and whoever coming on again to say no let's build the tracks all over again and as long as you have central planning you'll have all sorts of arbitrary decisions and crazy back and forth and so if this paper could really hammer home in the end the idea that look it's not St. Louis it's not the interstates it's any time government tries to decide this stuff because government can't decide this stuff I think would make a really powerful Well, of course libertarians have known for a long time that many intellectuals are bought

5:43and paid for by the state. The reason why there aren't more libertarians and Austrians at top universities probably isn't because we don't do great work. I would say the evidence here suggests that we do great work. The problem is that the intellectuals of the major universities are unpaid for by the state and of course this paper illustrates that point, it uses kind of a powerful new analogy or evolutionary approach to show how the state infects the intellectual world and how the state continues to enjoy legitimacy even though it it seems obvious to us that it should have no legitimacy. The question that the paper raises for me is of course what is the next step, how do we take advantage of our knowledge of the way the state infects the intellectual climate in order to advance our own ideas.

6:32I don't have much to add regarding Mr. Luzardo's presentation. Obviously, he's on solid ground relying on Mises, Hayek and Rothbard. I'm struck by, he mentions Henry George, of course, and you know, I get tired of hearing about Henry George sometimes because I feel like it was refuted so well so long ago by Murray Rothbard, but of course there are always people trying to bring George back and push So that's all I have.