Chicago Economics v. Austrian Economics

0:00Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to once again attend a libertarian conference and have so many people come out for it. I'm also kind of a tough spot here, personally, because I make sure you get into the previous debate. The basic problem, I think, the fundamental basic problem with Chicago, well, first of all, you have to, the average person, the average intellectual or

1:21They push each other into positions and get each other jobs and that sort of thing. So there are small types of intras Chicago Solidarity. The basic problem, I think from the point of view of truth, freedom, liberty and justice about a Chicago school, Well, there are a couple of basic problems. One basic problem is their attitude towards the state. They regard the state as an equivalent arm of social action. In other words, you've got the market out here, you've got voluntary clubs out there, you've got the state over here, and all of that, in fact, there's no moral distinction, no logical distinction between the two or three of them.

2:14So that the Chicago-wide is never against government action because they're moral or criminal or whatever. Consider it another social tool of government. Well, we look at each situation ad hoc. Should the government build a steel plant? Well, we look at the situation, we examine the statistical correlations, et cetera. And we usually wind up with conclusions they shouldn't, but it's less efficient than the market's doing. But you'll never know from one ad hoc problem to the next what the Chicagoite is going to come up with because each area, each field is a separate distinct field for investigation. The Chicagoite has therefore no general theory attacking the state or pursuing the state is even somehow different anyway from a private action.

3:11The color of this is the fact that Chicagoites have no theory of justice in property rights. Now, they talk a lot about private property, at least the last few years, but their view of private property is purely instrumental. In other words, government decides who should get this property. Social Efficiency

4:07The question is, who should pay who? Who owns the property? Should the railroads have to compensate the farmers for the damage? Or should the farmers have to pay, beg the railroads to stop by paying them more?

5:01The Chicago School, starting off with the idea of completely value free economics, economics supposedly shorn of any kind of moral or ethical position. Why not, however, taking all sorts of more political positions, making all sorts of political statements, presumably also value-free, in other words, have a leap from a supposedly value-free science to a supposedly value-free politics, which I don't think can exist, and it's not a value-free species, one of us say the state is some sort of a neutral tool, and sure, the concept is so-called social efficiency in some way, it's more The Theory of Money and Credit

6:18The Austrian has been very weak on tax theory also, and as a matter of fact, this is true for women and government types in general. If a women and government person favors taxes, which most of them did, I'm not saying objectivist in this discussion, but most women and government people favor taxes. How do you raise the taxes, and which taxes, and so forth, and so on? And a lot of justifications for that, and it gets pretty dicey. Well, usually the Austrian position on taxes is that they like to have a lower tax structure as possible, which I go along with. And two, it should not be progressive. The income taxes should not be progressive, for example.

7:03And three, they should somehow be neutral with respect to the market, which is really impossible. This is just about as far as Austrians will go in a tax theory, but at least most Austrians aren't really enamored of taxes. They don't consider taxes somehow a lovable instrument. What Chicago whites really do, once they get around to the doctrine of taxes, is really more efficient in this particular area. So if you turn those Chicago writings on taxation, there's a big yammer for taxes in many ways. For example, I remember a few years ago there was a meeting of the Montelorado Society, which is a meeting of a group of international free markets, semi-free markets, and one-tenth free market economists, and social philosophers, and journalists, and businessmen.

7:58They gather every year at a pleasant summer resort, and one year, three Chicagoans zeroed in on Belgian delivers and eating with hell, and three of them had independently arrived with this magnificent theory of a new kind of tax. I don't know if they've ever published this, but at any rate, they'd arrived at this, and they were all great minds, you know, working independently on a problem, or arrive at the same solution. I think all I have to do is to follow the Chicago White mentality and Chicago White attitude towards property in general. I want something like this. Here's what we do. We get everybody to assess their own property. In other words, I have a set of books that you have a house or a factory or whatever it is.

8:45Each guy puts down his own assessment. Well, that's pretty good, you know, because if each guy's allowed to put his own assessment down, and then he's going to have to stop all investigations, the usual presentation put out, you know, an evaluation of something like half a penny, and then you pay your rate on it. Ah, but there's a clicker here, which shows Chicago people work that. If you, you are forced by the government to sell this particular property to anybody who comes along at that rate. So, I think they really lined this up. They really thought this was somehow the answer to the tax question. It's more efficient. You don't have to have a big arm of assessors investigating what your property really is. Why don't you let the guy assess it himself, and then whoever is smoothing down the block comes along and says, You can say you're half a word, half a cent, here's a half a penny, and you're forced to sell it to him.

9:42At this meeting, Friedrich Hayek, a distinguished free-market Austrian economist, was very concerned about this, particularly because he has a distinguished book collection. Well, my God, this means that if I evaluate a set of books, my books, you know, the Boeing Priceless today, it means that I would be forced to sell it to anybody, and this means of course, if I evaluate a book very highly, I have to put an enormous assessment on it. Say, in other words, at 30,000 people have to get you, you know, they want to destroy your book. You have to put in a section of $10 billion in your book collection. You have to pay $100,000 a year, whatever the property tax will be.

10:28You might not have. So, of course, the Chicago Antia, what about my book? Hayek said, of course, the Chicago Antia was tough on your book. I think this really sums up the Chicago position on taxes. It's a position of brutal indifference to genuine property rights and a desire to clean up the state, in other words, make the state as efficient as possible. The thing is, the Chicago people look, for example, the notorious Friedman-negative income tax, which I don't know if I went into it right, but in any case, Friedman looks around at the welfare system, it's a big mess, right, no question about that, I don't think anybody would argue about this, every city, every state, every region has its own crazy system, etc., and it's inefficient, and there are also the bureaucrats who The Theory of Money and Credit

11:59If your income happens to be $500 a year, you submit your form to the IRS, and you get back $1,500. Of course, people make certain adjustments to try to weaken some of the disincentive effect, which is pretty obvious in this thing. But basically, this is what happens. In other words, everybody gets that automatic claim on production. Instead of having to shuffle through a large welfare bureaucracy, and go up in the shuffle and get stepped on by arrogant welfare workers and that sort of thing, To simply submit your form and get the money, this might be more efficient in the sense of lower cost, greater uniformity, but it also means an automatic claim of production instead of a sort of shuffling, inefficient claim, which I think would have much more disastrous effect.

12:45An enormous shift from production to the welfare, to the negative income tax goal. This is typical of the attitude. For example, Milton Friedman is very proud of the fact that he was one of the people most instrumental in pushing through the withholding tax system in this country. He was working for the US Treasury Department during the war and came up with this brilliant idea, withholding tax. You see, the problem is, if you didn't handle the withholding tax, the whole income tax structure would collapse. I mean before the war it went fairly well because taxes were pretty low, but if you try to extract 20%, 30%, 70% income tax in person, and you let them, you know, you say well let's do it on April 15th, period, and you're not going to diligently save up over the year, and then hand it over to the government.

13:38The Enforcement, a tremendous tag of enforcement things that break down. So Friedman and his colleagues come up with a brilliant idea of extracting the payments every day from his paychecks using the employer's unpaid agency in this regard. So this makes the income tax system much more efficient. It allows the growth of an enormous Manhattan State, enormous income tax burden and criminality, etc. And it's none other than the level of efficiency, and in fact it is more efficient, but it comes to the state operation, in my view, the less efficiency, the better.

14:20You know, if I was talking about the operations of a criminal gang, you know, it wasn't going to be efficient, you know, it wasn't going to be, you know, the backstages and, you know, how to get it going. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but it's a great story anyway, about Charles Kettering, an distinguished free market industrialist. And he was trying to cheer up a friend of his who was in the hospital. The friend of his was complaining about the local government and how terrible it was and so on. As Tony said, Terry said, cheer up Jim, thank God that we don't get as much government as we pay for. So I think it sums up the question of efficiency.

15:05If you're going to have to have the tax burden, at least let the money leak out all the way if you don't have an efficient governor coming to oppress you. And this is essentially what the Chicago White position does. The Chicagoite is an economic technician, society in quotes sets the ends for which he is working, and that means a state as a so-called representative of society sets the ends. And the Chicagoite is a technical advisor, you know, how do you, something like he's an incorporation type of thing, trying to decide where is the most efficient place to place the A-bomb or whatever. Where is the most efficient pinpoint? How do you fix the state after it's more efficient in terms of taxing and governing and subsidizing and whatever?

15:54And I think that's essentially why the Chicago opposition amassed it. As far as the math, back to the attitude of efficiency, we have another problem with the Chicago position, which is the original founding father of the Chicago school, Henry C. Simons, I think he's very instructive. Simons, everybody, go and read Simons' famous book, A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire, which came out in 1934. And because you see everybody before him, before the laissez-faire was essentially negative, where you tell the government, leave us alone, and the government is not supposed to do much. And finally it says, no, no, from my view, the government is out there doing a hell of a lot. It's a positive program.

16:42The positive program is essentially three things, I think. One is a very, very drastic egalitarian progressive income tax system. When you smash the rich, you take cash, almost, you know, supposedly you got a carrier, and you smash the rich and give all the money, you tax everybody above a certain amount, and you pay the money to everybody below a certain amount. Now we see in this, and one of the problems here is that, of course, the diamonds in the Chicago school believe that you can do this without affecting incentives at all.

17:47This is one of the problems that Chicagoism has taken us over from Orthodox economics. They have this very drastic progressive income tax set up. The president of Chicago School has happily weakened this. They've given up, they've grown well, they've retreated a great deal from the finance position. There's still this trailing cloud of glory that we get sometimes when we see science. The negative income tax is freedom of the example of it. We tax everybody above a certain amount, pay out money to those below it. Freedom would not advocate progressive income tax, but this is especially where romance is.

18:32At least progressive in the sense that the guy below, of course, 2000 or whatever, is not paying anything. Also, there's various other things that Chicagoites come up with from time to time. For example, the Chicago position now favors local government subsidies to factories. You know, we induce factories to come into the state of the South. Some of them are rural areas or whatever. A lot of factories come in there, so it's legitimate for local government subsidies. Then there's another position they came up with. I think that's a Buchanan, who might have shifted over from Chicago to Austrianism. This was in the Chicago Incarnation. Beccano was worried about the external, just autonomies again.

19:17And that took a whole neighborhood of effect. Of clowning and noise and all that. Saying Los Angeles. I think you can see the audience. He was a visiting professor at UCLA. He was kind of worried about urban growth and, you know, noise and congestion. Before that he was in Charlottesville, Virginia. He didn't have much of a response. And he said, well, let's see, there are three ways to handle it. One is you can enforce property rights. For example, you can enforce the property right against noise invasion of your property, or against air pollution against your lungs. And he clearly dismissed that. I want to ask this utopian. He dismissed that very quickly. That's out. The second thing he did do, which he really pounced for, was the ideal solution, was to set up a migration barrier in California, not submitting any outlander to come to move to California from the middle west, or set up immigration barriers in New York.

20:09Then he sighed, and said, well, we'll miss that unconstitutional problem we're dealing with, and then the Constitution will submit immigration barriers within the country. So for the third approximation pokes for the idea of taxing these people in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and using that money to subsidize Appalachia, other rural areas, in order to keep them there, they wouldn't create headaches by migrating to the city. That's a typical Chicagoite solution. Whatever it is, whatever we may say about it, has nothing to do with the free market. It's pretty clear. There are other examples of this point of view toward taxes and ad hoc solutions.

21:00The Friedman position, for example, about air pollution, water pollution. I'm not against the technicalities of that whole pollution question here, but the point is that their solution to it is a typical ad hoc utilitarian thing. Well, we balance, we decide, we, we mean the government for it. We decide how much pollution we want as opposed to how much industrial progress we want. How much we balance the factories as against the, you know, the lung cancer or whatever. We get some kind of a measure of social cost versus social benefit. And then we tax free the industries up to the pollution, up to this level. We make sure that they only pollute a certain amount, not more than the social benefit outweighing the social cost, outweighing the social benefit.

21:46But the ultimate position is that there's no such thing as social cost and social benefit. There are only individual costs and benefits, which you can't measure one against the other. But at any rate, this is, again, a simple situation. The whole situation is that the government sits down with wisdom and decides its values, which is supposed to represent the public as a whole in some way, in a much fewer manner, and then this is imposed upon everybody in society through tax subsidy adjustments. There's also, oh, I thought I'd mention five of them as three great positive functions for government. One of them was to smash everybody making over $5,000, $10,000, whatever the thing is, per year. Another one was extreme out, unlimited fanatical fuckbusting, so that every corporation above the size of a small blacksmith shop The Theory is still there. The theoretical framework of Chicago Economics still says that pure competition, quote, is not enough.

23:09is better than impure, imperfect competition. And imperfect competition means real world competition. There's no other than imperfect and close. Imperfect is a loaded term, that's part of the whole problem. At any rate, they still have a theory that pure competition is better than impure. And even though they say in practice, government is the main source of monopoly, even if we have to zero in on appealing government privileges and so on and so on, but still the theory is back there as a canker, no bigger than a man's hand, which wasn't one that popped out. For example, it wasn't too many years ago when Professor George Friedler, number two man on the Chicago hierarchy to the state, advocated before a committee of Congress the breaking up of U.S. steel, which was monopolistic and busted into constituent parts.

23:55So every once in a while an old stuff-busting element will pop up in Chicagoism. This is not only a Chicago argument, which is one of the reasons I have against Chicago is that they are not too different from regular economics, this is one of the reasons why they are so popular in the economic profession. In other words, accept that anything that you do affects the guy next to you, affects somebody else in society. Of course, from my point of view, this is an open step to me to any type of intervention, because anything you do affects somebody, somewhere.

24:43I mean, if I read Human Action, I acquire more wisdom and I benefit other people who come in contact with me. Therefore, in order to internalize the costs and all that sort of thing, they should be taxed for paying me or eating that. In other words, you're not internalizing the costs, and therefore somebody's got to do it for you. In other words, the government's got to step in and correct the so-called B-Site in the market. If I'm enjoying, well it could be anything, if I'm enjoying the, for example, I used to use it in class, which used to be pretty effective before women's web came around with miniskirts. But if you watch, especially in older male schools, it's even more effective.

25:32The point being that if you watch and enjoy the fight of girls walking out of street in miniskirts, you're getting a slightly benefit from this. And according to Chicago opposition, you should be taxed to subsidize or wear miniskirts, because they're not capturing the court. I'm getting a free benefit out of this case, a free writer out of this situation. And this permeates, again, I think that Stigman himself will limit this argument to two things, basically. One is urban parks. For some reason he's very worried about places like Central Park. Because if Central Park was private, my god, somebody on Columbus Avenue might look at Central Park and be able to enjoy a leaf of tall trees.

26:18And you're not capturing that benefit, you're not making a take for it. I'm not really concerned with making people pay for stuff. I mean, that's not my stick. I don't see why this is particularly better. I can see a lot of reasons why it's worse than a free system. Certainly, if I don't have a membership in Central Park, I'm not an annual member, let's say, in a private park, I might be able to watch the trees, and nobody's going to, you know, unless the treatment is stopped, they'll get after me and fuel me for doing it. But I wouldn't be able to be in the park. I'd still be a class citizen. I'd still be able to enjoy the park itself. I could only watch the outside. But things like that really bother Chicago whites. It makes them pay. If it so happens, the free market doesn't make them pay.

27:05But who limits this to two things, basically. One is urban parks, because you recognize that Yellowstone will keep people out. Education Education is a very big deviation. It favors government subsidy and payment for education for little kids, not necessarily in public schools, but in schools with tax systems. One kid is educated, I'm being better for him, he's a better kid. He's more productive. Let him pay for it, or his parents, or if I fall for the freedom of view, if I fall for the idea of neighborhood effect, I can voluntarily subsidize this kid.

27:58I mean, in a free society, he's free to do this, but this is not enough for the neighborhood effect position. He's forced to quote the societies of education. So, uh, but he would limit it. Friedman would especially limit this to urban plots and education. But, as I've said, you can apply it to anything. You can apply it anywhere, all the way down the line. To subsidize a mini-skirt, to subsidize anything. Uh, reading newspapers, like, oh, I read the Times, like, I'd better start learning something. So everybody should be taxed to pay me to read it. It's still below and so on. and so on. And interestingly enough, if you challenge the catallactics with this argument, you will say, yeah, logically you're correct, but, you know, who's going to apply this to this case, which is, I think, an interesting commentary on the consistency of the general intellectual standards around a culture.

28:51The neighborhood effect is a hole in the sense of a market big enough for a max truck to ride into, and those people on the left were smart enough to realize this and take full advantage of the neighborhood effect and their gap. Another problem is, I mentioned the neighborhood effect, excuse me, I mentioned negative income tax, but I think it would be total disaster. I hope that the president, in Congress right now, the Left-Right Coalition, a very peculiar store against the Family Assistance Plan, essentially the Friedman Plan, leftists would want to go further, right-wingers would want to go that far, and this plan was able to block, I mean, this college was able to block this thing last year.

29:43I don't know if it'll have the same respect this year. Anyway, I foresee it's fantastic, just in set of respects, in a normal proportion. To put it briefly, wherever you set the floor, let's say you set the floor at $2,000, that means that the guy making $2,100 a year has gotten rather disgruntled, rather edgy, by the whole set-up.

30:35and the drop out, and receive the 2000, and as he drops out, this will be true for people making 2100, 2200, 2800, 3000, etc., etc., as these guys drop out, this course will add more people on the bill, the course will go up, the tax course on the people still working will keep going up, and this will induce more people to leave the working and go on the bill. You have a taxing vicious circle. The court estimates the statement that other people have given about how much this thing would amount to for a year seem pretty reasonable now, $10 billion or whatever it is. The budget goes up about $20 billion every year anyway, you could say, well, why not devote $10 billion to this? But all these court estimates assume that everybody will keep working in the same intensity and degree as they do now, which of course is a clinker in the whole argument.

31:26It's the question begging the clinker. The point is that when I keep working, unless there's a complete boat, they will join me on the automatic goal, there will be no stigma attached to it, it's one of those things with the stigmatizer. And certainly, you've got to remove the stigma from being on a boat there, okay, the stigma's removed, everybody gets on it. Which of course is the real point, which is really forgotten now, because the Chicago people consider themselves as heir to 19th century liberalism. They're not really, because 19th century liberalism is much better than that. And the reason why 19th century liberalism was favored with stigma, and coming to work houses and, you know, the ceilings falling down every once in a while, things of that sort, The President wanted to have a strong, negative incentive for people not to go on the convalescence.

32:19And so this was the real point. This has been forgotten in the present so-called pre-modernist people. And as this happens, the things snowball, accelerate, and you increase the taxes and so forth. And so finally I think you wind up with conditions that everybody is going to be on.

33:08In addition to everything else, I foresee complete disaster as the negative income tax guarantee goes through. So that's one big area, clunker area. The free market solution of the libertarian solution of the welfare question, of course, is that, well, in several steps. One is that free market capitalism is the same, it eliminates poverty, which has brought us up from the caves to the present system, which has created the Industrial Revolution and so forth. And, secondly, whatever quality does exist can be aided by voluntary effort, either self-help, short-term programs, community health programs, or whatever.

34:05All of which, since voluntary agencies, for example, do not have the unlimited funds that the state has, all of which will necessarily be based on the idea of helping people to help themselves, to get them on their feet. which again was a 19th century view of a private charity, voluntary charity and of course also the values of the public, the values of the groups on welfare come in here. The Charming Harbor, I don't know how many people saw it, the New York Times I think about a year ago, about the Albanian population in New York City. I didn't know there were any Albanians in New York City, but there are. They've just set up their first Albanian church anywhere in the world. That's how these churches are outlawed in Albania.

34:51And the Albanians are very, very poor. There are not wealthy Albanians in New York. There's probably no wealthy Albanians anywhere. Anyway, certainly not in New York. Albanians are very poor, and the Albanian spokesman was saying, I know of Albanians on welfare, period. Outcoming is a very poor group. Albanians regard being on welfare as begging, begging on the street, and they refuse to bet, period. And they manage it so they don't get on welfare. So cultural values, social attitudes, that's also a terrible equation. Anyway, going on to the third big sign on Chicago deviations from the free market. There is a whole money government spending area.

35:39Essentially, one of the things that we said recently in an article about the Chicago School, the reason why they didn't become Keynesians is that they were Keynesians before Keynes ever arose. So they didn't fall into the sway of the Keynesian Revolution. During the early 1930s, they were considered leftist, radical, socialistic by the Chicago School, by the rest of the profession. and so they advocated enormous public work during these sessions, inflationary credit, going off of gold standards, and so on, and these people, these online economists, practical economists, were correct, they were socialistic in a sense, but what happened of course, the rest of the economic profession has moved much more socialistic since then, so they look like stream-moderateeers at this point, but their position is basically the same, and that is that the government, The government has to have an absolute control of the monetary system, an absolute dictation of the money.

36:39The way you get absolute dictation of the money is to abolish gold altogether or silver or any other commodity and make money the legal ticket put out by the government, by the treasury. The treasury puts out a ticket of the Federal Reserve Board, puts out a ticket saying $1 or $10, you make that money and nothing else. So this means that this money is another of the market economies. This is the single most important commodity or element in the economy. Since money participates in every exchange that you ever make in the system, this means that if you allow government to total control of money, you allow government to really total control of the whole system. You've given up a way to even start it. And this is what the Chicago advocate is doing. Chicago's position on money is to cut all even present tenuous. Right now they have very tenuous and ridiculous but similar in length with international gold.

37:33They would cut it completely and have freely fluctuating exchange rates between the dollar and other currencies. Which puts the absolute control of the money completely in the hands of the state without even a balance of payments check. payment checks, and now at least once in a while they have a balance of payment crisis. This puts a limit upon government inflation of money. But if you thought it was a little female limit, the only limit would be Milton Friedman telling them please don't inflate more than 3% per year. In other words, Friedman telling, admonishing Hector and Hirany in the Federal Reserve system, now you're inflating too much, now you're inflating too little, you should only inflate 3% more, but they keep changing The way, again, which is consistent with the Chicago position, of being sort of technical advisers of the state, is that the federal government is not going to be able to do this.

38:30The federal government is not going to be able to do this.

38:38And I think this is a ridiculous way to proceed, but it's a way, again, which is consistent with the Chicago position of being sort of technical advisors to the state. You have all power over the state, and you advise them technically. No, you shouldn't do that because it's inefficient. It's the best of this thing out here. Please don't do that. It feels like the advisors of the Court of Collegial Law. Don't burn the city because it's, you know, reducing the essential products or whatever the advice is. I did it. It's not going to be made effective by my predictions. If a female is interested in social predictions so she can see the truth, my prediction is not going to work. And it hasn't. The reason why people want the 2% to 3% for year inflation, I guess it'd be a lot of technical and I don't want to get into that, but basically the old Chicago assignment position of stabilizing the price level, the price level should remain constant.

39:31This became some mystical idea, literally, in the Chicago school, School, or somehow a constant price level of these things that means the money is performing its measuring function, and so on, so if I were to say on this, on a truly free market, unhappily by government inflation and government banking and government money, prices generally tend to fall considerably as the supply of business services and productivity increases. Prices fall, just like the price of TV sets has fallen from $2,000 per coming set to 20 This is generally what happens to prices in the free market. For some reason, Chicago people hate this idea. They want the government to step in to keep the sports supply levels remain constant in the whole time. And this leads them to this idea of 3% inflation in money supplies, the balance increases business services, etc.

40:22There's also a difference in business cycle theory, but I don't, again, just a little technical go into that. Again, I just want to say that there's a bit of confusion among some people, because both Friedman and the Austrians agree that the Federal Reserve was responsible for the 1929 depression. So consider that they really agree basically on the whole problem. They don't, completely the opposite. The Austrian view is that the 1939 recession was brought about by the Federal Reserve for expansion of the microply during the 1920s and later, which brought about a situation which caused a depression. In other words, monitoring inflation by the Federal Reserve system bringing about an inevitable recession.

41:11The Sigma position is that the Federal Reserve didn't insulate enough, that they turned back to the popular rule of normative inflation to offset foreign prices, etc. So the Sigma position and the Austrian position is exactly the opposite. Both are zero in on the Federal Reserve system, that's true. But each one has a completely different view. The Chicago position is that they shouldn't have insulated more, the Austrian position is that they shouldn't have insulated at all. I think that more or less sums up at least the political and political economy of the section, and also the methodological and philosophical critiques that they make of Chicago's school.

41:59I think they're in a sense worse philosophically than they are even in politics. That's a whole other realm. The two things, of course, again, lack over, as I was trying to say about the theory of property and justice and so forth. Summing up, I think what the problem is, the free market, in quotes, which would exist under the Chicago system, would be only under the support of the central government advisers, technical advisers. If they fought for one minute, at any point, if the free market was, quote, not efficient, unquote, in relation to some other scheme, they would abandon it, abolish it. On the Chicago scheme, therefore, we have no dispensing of legal questions whatsoever. Thank you.