Applying Economics to American History

0:00My topic is a very broad one, so as with Bob, I'm going to sort of pick a number of topics that are relevant to American history that involve economics and just show how it's useful to have a sound economic understanding in order to understand American history. It enlightens you, it allows you to see things you wouldn't otherwise be able to perceive. I want to start I'll start off a little more generically, though, and just say that the impression I got when I was in high school and that maybe some of you are fortunate enough not to have gotten, but believe me, this is the standard view, is that if you have a free market economy and you don't have government intervention, the result is kids are working in mines and getting their arms blown off and everybody has to work like 120 hours a week for two cents an hour.

0:56The economy is dominated by short men with white moustaches carrying sacks of money with dollar signs on them. That is the view I got. I remember going through high school thinking, how could people be so stupid, not as sophisticated as I am? They don't understand that we need wise overlords to administer everything because otherwise we'd be at the mercy of these guys on the top of the monopoly package. What would it take to get people to realize the folly, the error of their ways? And so, of course, the standard view is that, well, thankfully, some unspecified government intervention has rescued us from this and we don't have these problems anymore.

1:47One of the assumptions is that labor unions must have probably solved this problem, because labor unions force employers to pay higher wages and that solves the problem. Well, at its height, labor unionism in the U.S. may have reached one out of three workers at its absolute height. The American workers have typically been the least unionized, at least among the lowest unionized in the developed world. Certainly compared to Europe, Europe's workers were much more heavily unionized, and yet somehow without the unions to protect them from the terrible exploiters, American workers consistently were the best paid and compensated. We see this in the 20s and really throughout American history. Well, that's not supposed to be possible, right? I mean, that's the opposite of what we're told. How could this have happened?

2:39So I want to just start off with a little thought experiment and then go from there to try to explain how it is that we have grown to enjoy and become accustomed to the standard of living we have and show it has absolutely nothing to do with government. The only thing the government can do in terms of the average standard of living is disrupt and diminish it. That's all it can do. It's entirely due to the free market, entirely due to the wicked private sector and the wicked exploiters that we have the standard of living we enjoy. And so the thought experiment runs like this. Let's suppose all the machinery that we use to produce things is just suddenly destroyed. Like there's some mad Unibomber who's got this incredible bomb that can destroy all productive machinery.

3:30The Theory of Money and Credit

4:00I mean you know try producing a trolley car from beginning to end by hand you get all get all the all the raw materials and resources do all that by hand can't be done right so let's imagine though we lose all the machines but we all decide you know what I think I'm just going to keep working 40 hours a week I'm just going to keep working 40 hours a week now let's compare how much What stuff we could produce working 40 hours a week with our bare hands, with no machines, no capital goods to help us, and compare that to what we could produce with these machines in 40 hours a week. Well obviously in 40 hours a week with these machines we can produce basically the abundance we see around us today.

4:46But if we've got 40 hours with these crummy hands of ours per week, how much stuff are we producing? And a tiny, tiny sliver, the tiniest sliver of what we used to produce. So when you get your paycheck in that situation, the non-machine economy situation, you get your paycheck, when you go out to spend it, what are you going to find? Everything is very expensive because everything is very scarce and so is commanding a very high price. You have to work very hard and very long to earn the purchasing power necessary to buy the things you want. Now, would that situation be the fault of the terrible exploiter who's employing you? Would that be his fault, that you can't get very much stuff with your paycheck?

5:32Do we need labor unions to get your pay to go up ten times? What would that help if there ain't no stuff to buy anyway? What if we paid you a hundred trillion, Zimbabwean dollars? Would that help the situation? If there ain't no stuff to buy, it doesn't matter, you can get your wages and keep going up and up and up. The problem is, the stuff isn't there. So this is not the fault of the exploiter, so-called, who's employing you. It's the fault of reality. It's the fault of the fact that the economy is so freaking primitive, it can't produce the physical stuff necessary to give you the standard of living you're accustomed to. Well, that is exactly the economy that people living in the early industrial revolution were living in, a very primitive economy with very primitive machines and still a lot of A lot of goods being produced by hand and people are sort of of the opinion that the reason workers weren't being paid very much in those days was that evil capitalists were keeping

6:29all the wealth to themselves. But the problem was that there wasn't much wealth in the first place, that's the problem. What that economy needed wasn't more government wealth redistribution, it needed more machines so that we can produce more stuff, so that the stuff will exist in greater abundance so that it's not so expensive and therefore my paycheck can stretch farther and farther to be able to purchase more and more stuff. That's what that economy needed. Whereas, if we simply were to persist in this situation where we've got very few machines, very, very primitive production process, and just hope that through agitation or legislation, Let's pass a law saying that everybody gets a TV set and a new hat and whatever.

7:19Well, again, the reason that the workers in that situation don't have TV sets and hats is not that the relatively very few rich people are hoarding all the television sets. It's that there aren't any television sets. It's not that the relatively few rich people are hoarding all the furniture and all the meat. It's that there is relatively little furniture and meat being produced. The moral problem is that stealing is probably a bad thing, but from a practical point of view, there aren't enough of these guys to go around anyway.

8:10So again, the problem is not that somehow greedy people in the midst of the darkness of the night, skulking around the edges of the night, leaped out and grabbed everything one night, they got all the TV sets. No, the problem is that we just simply need more investment in capital goods that can produce more stuff, make the economy more physically productive. That's what happens in a market economy. When you're not looting and stealing and condemning people as exploiters, is what they are instead doing, what they are allowed to do, is take their profits and pour them into investment in machinery that makes the productive process more productive, can produce more stuff and the greater abundance leads to lower prices and higher real wages for everybody.

8:56There is absolutely nothing whatsoever the government can do to assist in that process. All it can do is hamper that process by taxing these people, by taking their wealth away and thereby depriving us of the funds that society needs for the capital goods to allow us to be able to produce more stuff. There's nothing government can do to make this process any better. All it can do is make it worse. Now we can see this process going on in our lives today. That if you look, for example, at the mid-20th century and you compare it to the year 2000, so the end of the 20th century, How many minutes did you have to work to earn the money that would give you the purchasing power necessary to buy a loaf of bread?

9:42Well, it was six minutes in the middle of the 20th century. It was down to a little over half that, three and a half minutes by the turn of the century. Because your labor, thanks to the available machinery, was more productive. In the mid-twentieth century, you'd have to work 21 minutes to earn the money that would have the purchasing power necessary to buy you a dozen oranges. By the end of the twentieth century, instead of 21 minutes, it's like nine. So, less than half the time is necessary. Or if you want 100 kilowatts of electricity, now this is going to be a lot of money, you'd have to work 21 minutes to earn the money that would have the purchasing power necessary to buy you a dozen oranges. 100 kilowatts of electricity, now this is going to be a little tricky now because of this little complication, but we'll just go from, you know, it's our friends, the new wonderful poison bulbs, it's now a bragging point that this bulb says, hey, no poison in it, no poison, you can see it's got no mercury, so let's leave aside the benefits of the 21st century and stick with the 20th, but 100 kilowatts of electricity, you'd have to work for two hours in 1950

10:53to earn the purchasing power to buy that. By the end of the 20th century, it was only 14 minutes. And it goes on and on and on. Like a pair of jeans. Well, at the beginning of the 20th century, you'd have to work nine hours to get that purchasing power, to buy that. By the middle of the century, it was four hours, and then by the end of the century, it was three. How about a three-pound chicken, you're all dying to ask me? Well, the answer to that is, Over two hours, nearly three hours in 1900, 71 minutes in 1950 and 24 minutes by the end of the 20th century to earn the money necessary that will give you the purchasing power to buy you a three pound chicken. Now what I've just described here is also relevant to the issue of child labor. This is another thing they throw against the market economy.

11:41Can't have free market because, you know, kids have to work and if we had a non-market economy the kids could just skip through meadows all day, you know, and that's the difference. But the question becomes why are the children working? So no one asked this question. The assumption is that if you have one of these third world countries where a lot of children work, the assumption is that all the parents in that country just stink. Like, this is like a country of stinko parents, like, we should just go in there and just take all these children away from these savages, you know, who don't know how to raise children. But we really should ask, I mean, try to understand the world around us, like, why are the kids working in the first place? It's because the society they live in is so physically unproductive that if the kids don't work, the family starves.

12:31That's why they work. That's why child labor has existed since the beginning of time. It's not like people said, okay, capitalism's here, kids, off to the mines. Kids have been working forever in every society. It never occurred to anyone that someday you could live in a society in which your labor was so productive, thanks to the capital goods at your disposal, that you could work and earn enough purchasing power so that your kids wouldn't have to. Never occurred to anyone. But look at what we have here. Look at it in our society. Think of how much more work one person can do with a steam shovel than he could do with a regular shovel. And multiply that, extract like that through our whole economy.

13:18But up till the free market came along, after the capitalist economy, everybody just assumed, Everybody assumed, okay, life consists of grinding poverty and then you're dead. Everybody assumed that. So nobody in the year 1100 is going around protesting poverty. No one. You will not find anyone protesting poverty or having a hunger strike or a candlelight vigil about poverty because everybody assumed, everybody assumed, of course you're going to be poor. That's the way life is. You're poor. Live with it. I mean, even the king, even the king has to urinate and then toss it out the window because The King, for heaven's sake! So you understand my point that it's only when the free market comes along and we see that poverty begins to diminish, that people become impatient with poverty and they say, wait a minute, they say for the first time it seems possible that poverty could be done away with then they start complaining about it.

14:13But what's the point complaining about it when you think it is a fixture of life? So in terms of the child labor issue, child labor goes away not because you pass a law saying children aren't going to work, it goes away because the economy, thanks to the free market, becomes capital intensive enough that it can produce enough stuff that mom and dad can work, the kids don't have to. That's what does it. Now you can say, but wait a minute, I know we've had child labor laws. Oh yeah, those things are just super. They work great. There's no evasion of those laws at all. All. Those are really well observed. In fact, in Bangladesh, the British charity Oxfam pointed out that when a bunch of Americans and Europeans were griping and complaining about child labor in Bangladesh, and I don't mean to make light.

14:59I mean, nobody likes child labor. The point is to say that we can just pass a law against it is like saying, we'll pass a law against gravity and then we'll all fly. I mean, I wish the world were that simple, like, yeah, gee, there's something about the world I don't like. I'll just pass a law and it'll just go away. How childish and juvenile is that? But anyway, that's how, unfortunately, a lot of our teachers seem to think. But anyway, so they've got this big campaign against child labor in Bangladesh. So what happens, did child labor go away when Bangladesh got rid of it, the Bangladesh government got rid of it? No, what happened was, as Oxfam reported, the children either went into prostitution instead, which is, you know, as bad as it is to work in a sweatshop, you know, obviously it could be worse.

15:45They either went into prostitution or they starved. That's what happened. Well, nice going, geniuses, way to solve that problem. But that was the approach. Even the International Labor Organization, which doesn't concede anything like this, admits that, okay, the reason the kids are working is that the society is so poor that they're contributing at least a quarter of the family income. And when you're living in a society like that, if you lose a quarter of the family income, you're dead. That's it. You're dead. That's it. So what they need is more capitalism, and that would sound like, no one would take this seriously, right? I mean, you know, on MSNBC or whatever, but that is obviously, when you think about the logic of it, that is obviously what they need. There is no other physically plausible solution.

16:33Now, one topic I talked about, sort of on this sort of theme, last year when we had a group of young people come hear us, involves the so-called robber barons, and I'll just say a brief thing about them. The robber barons are the industrialists of the 19th century who were, I mean, these really are the guys with the white mustaches and the sacks of money, and again, the impression you get in your textbooks is that, you know, these are terrible exploiters who took advantage Okay, now it's true, there were some bad industrialists, in the same way there are bad dentists, bad bookbinders, I mean, sure, no argument there, but we can distinguish between people who were bad businessmen who used the government in order to cripple their competitors. We And we can say, yeah, boo-hiss to them.

17:34But on the other hand, there were entrepreneurs who got to where they were because they produced something people wanted really inexpensively. So kerosene goes down in price 90% thanks to Rockefeller, which means people can afford to stay up late at night instead of having to go to bed because they can't see a thing. Because they can't afford whale oil. Yeah, whale oil. You can imagine how cheap that would be, right? Whale oil, that's what they had to use. You don't have to use whale oil anymore. The price of steel rails, basically under Carnegie's efforts, thanks to his efforts, decreases by 90 percent, and that is going to ripple through the whole economy, because everything either has steel in it, or uses steel in one way or another in the production process, so he can make everything, in effect, less expensive to produce and use and acquire. Government can never do that. It can take some money from you, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it.

18:29by force with a gun and hand it to your neighbor. Big deal, right? I mean, any one of us could do that. But very, very few people have the organizational and technological knowledge and ability to do what these people did. Or another one is Cornelius Vanderbilt. And the difference between Vanderbilt and the others is that Carnegie and Rockefeller and some of these others were known for their philanthropy. I mean, they're just giving away money at the end of their lives. They're just throwing it at anything. You know, you've got a pulse, Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton had been granted by New York a monopoly of steamboat traffic, and Vanderbilt was hired, in effect, to keep the money. Vanderbilt put up the seed money for Vanderbilt University, but then basically he just decided to keep the money. But all the same, if you look at his career, it starts off in the steamboat industry, and that's what I'll basically talk about, but later on he got into railroads and other stuff.

19:24And Vanderbilt was hired, in effect, to run a steamboat in defiance of this monopoly. He's going to transport people between New Jersey and Manhattan, even though technically he's not allowed to. And he managed to evade capture and to charge only one quarter of what these monopolists were charging. Well, eventually the steamboat monopoly was overturned, so Vanderbilt can sort of legitimately get into the business. So, thanks to his efficiency, travelers going from New Brunswick to Manhattan were now paying six cents per trip instead of several dollars. They're paying six cents per trip. They ate for free. Look, just come on board, I'll give you like a hot dog or whatever.

20:15I don't know if they had hot dogs then, or they would probably be even more disgustingly produced than they are now. E. Edward Collins gets a grant from the government of $858,000 a year to provide mail delivery

20:50and Mail Delivery across the Atlantic. Well, Cornelius Vanderbilt is getting a big fat zero from the government, and yet he enters the field. He outperforms Collins in passenger travel and in mail delivery, and he does so with no subsidy at all. Congress eventually did away with this subsidy to Edward Collins, and Collins wound up going bankrupt. Meanwhile, Vanderbilt is also outperforming two steamship lines that are also subsidized and bringing passengers and mail to California, and they're charging $600 per passenger per trip. Vanderbilt, with no subsidy, charges $150 per passenger and delivers the mail for free. Now, at that time, of course, as today, people are envious of those who have more than they do.

21:36And so their complaints, oh, you know, Vanderbilt, what a crumb. And so Edward Atkinson, who was a famous Boston manufacturer at the time, tried to put Vanderbilt's achievement in perspective here. He said to people, he said, okay, Vanderbilt is making 14 cents profit on every barrel of flour shipped by his railroads. Eventually, Vanderbilt, as I said, moved into the railroad business. But Atkinson goes on to say, but at the same time, okay, sure, he's making 14 cents per barrel, but you're saving, thanks to him, $2.75 a barrel. What more does this guy have to do? Does he have to hold your hand to take you to the playground? What more does this guy have to do for you to get off his case?

22:23So in other words, this is worth thinking about. Maybe what we hear about these people in our history books might not be taking all factors into account. And I've also pointed out that my friend Tom DiLorenzo has done some interesting research on this. He looked at all the 19th century industries, In the late 19th century industries where people were saying this industry is monopolized by one firm or a few firms and it's terrible and they're raising prices and lowering their output. And he went and looked at them and said, well, why don't we look and check, right? The numbers are sitting right here. Why don't we just look? And he found that actually the firms that were accused or pardon me, the industries where the accusation of monopoly hovered over their heads where the firms where output was increasing, the fastest in the economy and where prices were going down the fastest in the economy.

23:13So, in other words, almost everything we're told about this is completely 100% a lie. I mean, and all you have to do is just look at the numbers. I'm not making this stuff up. You can just go check it yourselves. A couple other quick things to point out that I find interesting that have a kind of economic angle, and one of them is the story of the Wild West. The Wild West Now, we all know about the Wild West because we see Hollywood movies and we've read books about it, that in the Wild West everybody's got a gun and so therefore everybody's shooting. That seems to be the logic. If you've got a gun, well, naturally you're just going to start firing it. And it seems like the truth, though, in recent years, scholars have uncovered that our understanding of the Wild West is about 180 degrees wrong. And this is one of the 33 questions about American history you're not supposed to ask in my book 33 questions is how wild was the wild west and their historians are

24:05actually saying the wild west actually turns out to have been a great big bore believe it or not that when you actually look at it was actually a big bore Larry Schweikart from the University of Dayton has estimated that fewer than a dozen bank robberies occurred in the entire frontier west from 1859 to 1900 so this means that there are more bank robberies in modern-day Dayton Ohio where Larry Now, Buffalo Bill Cody went around telling people that he had been wounded in battles with the Indians 137 times. Wow, wow, there's a lot of violence going on out there. And then finally under pressure, he said, well, it wasn't really 137.

24:53It was one time, but it was really bad that one time, it was really bad. But it was that this sells dime novels better if you say you were wounded 137 times. So actually the consensus, evolving consensus seems to be that the Wild West was not really quite so wild. In fact there is a book called The Not So Wild Wild West that came out a few years ago from Stanford University Press elaborating on this and displaying some of this important scholarship. Well what's interesting about it is here's a place where you would think this is a disaster waiting to happen. People are rushing out there, by and large, because they want to get gold. It's been announced that there are gold discoveries there. People are rushing out there. Americans are going out there of all races. There are people from Europe going to California. There are people from China going to California to get gold.

25:41No one intends to make his home there. People are going to get their gold and get out. Now, the U.S. hadn't even set up a territorial government in California at that time. So you think, okay, so we've got potential racial animosity. You've got greed, you've got the fact that nobody intends to stay there, so there's going to be any longevity. None of these people know each other, so there's no pre-existing community camaraderie to build on. This is a freaking disaster waiting to happen, and yet, through basically free market institutions, people voluntarily established organizations that defined and defended property rights, that adjudicated disputes, And historians looking back on this can't really believe this. That yet in the absence of an overarching coercive institution, somehow people made this thing work.

26:30And it is quite an interesting story. Well, finally, the last little bit that I'll talk about is another thing we hear a lot about. And that is the American Indians were great environmentalists. And the usual implication of this is that you being non-native Americans are all pretty much terrible environmentalists and you should be ashamed of yourselves compared to these people. Now I'm not saying this to disparage or make light of or make fun of American Indians. That's not in any way my intention. In fact my view is that people who want to hold these people up as models of environmentalism are themselves really treating these people like children. I mean they're not treating them like human beings. They're treating them like cardboard cutouts that they can use as bludgeons to bash the rest of us over the head with it.

27:18They couldn't care less what the Indians actually did. They don't know anything about it, most of them. So, for example, one of the great scholars of environmentalism, Al Gore, was a, that was cheap, totally cheap. But Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, which came out when I was in college, he cited a speech from the 19th century Chief Seattle, who was in the Pacific Northwest. And in this speech, Chief Seattle talks about every single pine needle, every bug being sacred to him and his people. And, you know, Al Gore saying, you know, if only we could get back to this. Well, it turns out this speech is totally phony. It was made up in the 1970s, the 1970s, like a hundred years later by a screenwriter named Ted Perry from Texas.

28:07Now, Perry just sort of, you know, made up the speech, how he imagined it would have been, what this guy might have said. And then he saw that people were using it as if they were Chief Seattle's words. So Perry spent the rest of his career going around telling people, I made that speech up. I'm really sorry to break this to you, but I made that speech up. Well, Gord doesn't know this, so he's repeating it like this is from Indian wisdom. And this one speech bears a tremendous amount of the argumentative burden to prove that the Indians were all environmentalists. This poor guy, Ted Perry, makes up this speech and he goes through his life thinking, well, maybe I've made good, I've tried to overturn this mistake. Well, there's a children's book that hits number five on the New York Times bestseller list called Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, written by some author, based on the phony Chief Seattle speech.

28:59He's going, oh, gosh, I can't. Then one day, Ted Perry is sitting in his own church and his pastor gets up and says, No, as Chief Seattle said, he said, I can't believe this is happening. This can't be happening. So it just keeps going on and on. Well, earlier versions of the speech that we have are dubious for reasons of their own that I don't have time to get into, but I do talk about in the 33 Questions book. But when you look at it more closely, he's not saying, every inch of ground everywhere is sacred to my people such that we can only daintily touch it. He's not saying that. He's saying that specifically this land is sacred to us because our ancestors Well, that's a very different thing from saying that land in general is a holy and sacred thing and no one can touch or do anything with it. So were the American Indians environmentalists? Well, like most people, they were good in some areas and bad in others.

29:47They were not, in fact, cardboard cutouts. They were not, in fact, ideological little creatures to be exploited by leftists today. They were actually real human beings, believe it or not. They were actual people. So, yeah, they did do some bad things. They engaged in slash and burn agriculture. They wiped out entire animal populations, on the assumption that any animals that they killed in a hunt would be reanimated. So they didn't worry about killing animal populations. And they destroyed forests and grasslands. But at the same time, they were good environmental stewards in exactly the opposite way that we've been taught. We've been taught that the American Indians didn't know anything about property. We heard this a million times. and that the white man comes along and says this is mine and the Indian scratches his head.

30:32What could you mean mine? You know, everything is in common. Well, that's not true. First of all, American Indians are extremely diverse and have varying approaches to the idea of property, for one thing. But by and large, one of the reasons that you might see some Indians having a view of property that is relatively communal is that these were Indians who lived in areas of tremendous abundance so like right now air exists in such great abundance we don't have property rights in it we don't argue about it I don't say hey wait a minute you just breathe you were just breathing my air you jerk like we wouldn't say it doesn't make any sense well likewise if you're living in an extremely sparsely populated area you know who can't you know it's true you use that land I'll use this one who even cares but as things grow more and more scarce then you start to see various

31:53I'd better just go kill any animal I can, because any animal I don't kill will be killed by somebody else, and this is my only chance to get it. No one thinks about tomorrow. They just think, I've got to just get when the getting is good. But if my tribe has care of this area in terms of hunting, well, we have an incentive not to kill every single animal now, because then what are we going to do next year? We have an incentive to preserve some for the future. And so we guard our property rights. We make sure that other people, poachers, don't come in and just start killing arbitrarily. And they say, no, because that hurts us, because then we won't have anything for next year. So they used, basically, property rights, in effect, to conserve in areas like this, whether it was salmon or livestock or whatever. And so this is, and just one last thing on this point, and then I'll wrap up, is that

32:42very recently in Wyoming, the Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming have been riding around on all-terrain vehicles just killing animals everywhere and just wiping out animal populations. and so what happened to their spiritual kinship with nature well here's what happened to it there's no incentive for them not to do that there are no property rights in that land or or to those animals so might as well kill them all now because I can't since I can't privatize the land I can't reap the benefits of preserving anything for the future because it doesn't doesn't belong to me I got to just kill them all now so in other words the Indians responded to incentives again they're people they responded to incentives but they show us So it's in fact the very thing we're told the Indians knew nothing about, namely, private property rights.

33:28It's that very institution that they used to protect the environment. So they were environmentalists, but not in the way we're typically told. All right, well, I'm already over the time, so I'll just simply leave you with this. We haven't actually mentioned today that the Mises Institute promotes something called the Austrian School of Economics. promotes something called the Austrian School of Economics. It's a school, it's not a building, it's a school of thought that is the oldest consistently existing school of economic thought, probably the smallest right now but the fastest growing because we have the fewest stooges in the Austrian School, we have the fewest bootlickers, our economists don't want to go to Washington and tell them whatever they want to hear. We tell them the opposite of what they want to hear, which is why no one invites us to Washington.

34:16But the Austrian School, these are the economists who predicted the crash we're going through now, who predicted the Great Depression at a time when they were laughed at, when they were told that this is a time of permanent prosperity. In fact, Irving Fisher said that stocks had reached a permanently high plateau about three seconds before the stock market crash came. So there are people who are interested in what we're saying more and more. It's the Austrian School of Economics in particular that can help to keep you from being clueless, so that you won't be just another one of these drones who repeats what's said on MSNBC, who says, oh, we just need to give more power to our wise overlords. That's what they want you to be. Man, there is nothing they would like more than to see you young people become a bunch of drones who just repeat what they hear at some presidential press conference and say, oh, we must do whatever our wise leader says.

35:08That's what they want. Don't think. That's exactly what they want. But what the Mises Institute challenges you to do is the opposite, is to think, is to listen to people who are out of fashion because those are the ones who typically are right. The boot lickers are very much in fashion and they told us everything was just super in the middle of 2007. And they're telling us things are turning around and they're going to be just great within 10 minutes. You know, at some point you've got to say, I don't care what those people think. I want to follow the people who have said what is true, who have pursued the truth, regardless of what it meant for their careers, because they believe in the truth, and they want to understand the world as it really is, not how politicians want it to be. So I hope you'll join us. Thank you very much.