The Fall of Communism and the Rise of 21st Century Socialism

0:00Yes, I have quite a bizarre background, I think. I worked for the Soviet government in Moscow, for some kind of an overstatement of my activities. I was one of the economic advisors to Gorbachev. I wasn't the advisor, I wouldn't take the blame. And then some kind of window of opportunity opened. I was not prepared to take it, but I immediately, looks like I was still, Soviet trade economist sounds like an oxymoron, but I kind of seized that window and ended up in the United States instead of staying back in beloved Soviet Union. And so in the United States I found myself working for the second largest bureaucracy of this planet, for the Federal Government in Washington, D.C.

0:52And I was working in a Congressional think tank, which like, I think all government think tanks did a lot of tanking, but not much of the other things. So then I decided to do what I like to do, and I'm teaching young Americans the ideas of American Founding Fathers, ideas of liberty, ideas of free markets, free minds. And definitely, I think the lesson that we can learn from the dismal failure of communism is a lesson that we should keep in mind. Remembering this millions, tens of millions of people who were slaughtered just to prove that that non-working system works and it didn't. And because of that, I think that the best would be for economists to look into economics of socialism, economics of socialism. The in-depth analysis of economics of socialism was done by Ludwig von Mises. He was the first Western economist who in 1918 he wrote an essay, Economic Calculation Under Socialist Commonwealth, and in that short essay he predicted what happened 75 years later. And he was the only one, to the point even that in 1936 Oscar Langer, Polish

2:15socialist economist and central planner, he was saying that we should build, we should to direct the monument to Ludwig von Mises, because he pointed to the problem of economic calculation, of economic calculation under communism. And that problem is not solved. That's what Oscar Lange admitted. Well, Oscar Lange was then murdered by Stalin, but he didn't solve this problem at all, because the whole idea, The whole idea, I think, was even perpetuated by Lenin himself. In 1922, he wrote in a letter to Zerzhinsky, he wrote in another that even when the whole world will become communist, we should keep one little country capitalist to see what prices looks like.

3:01That's why I'm Lenin, I'm Lenin and I'm a student now. So, from Mises' theory of socialism, there are two patterns of socialism. There's the Russian pattern. The Russian pattern is that everything is nationalized. That all means of production are in the hands of the state, in the hands of the socialized economy. That everything is run like, say, the U.S. Postal Service System. I would say, everything was run like a financial services system today, or like a health care system would look like very soon. Well, you have this in Canada already. So I think we are kind of like in between, Russian and the other one, is German pattern.

3:55German pattern of socialism is that, and von Mises also, he kind of explained it from a very interesting perspective, because Marx was Jewish, and Hitler, as you know, he didn't like Jews, to say mildly. And because of that, the name of Marx was never mentioned in national socialism, under the national socialism doctrine of Hitler and the likes. And because of that there were some modifications. So today I would say German pattern is very close to the mixed economy we have in the United States already. It is 100% of the economy is saying today is Russia, the Putin's regime. And what does this mean? That means that property rights are declared. Property rights are even embedded in the Constitution of a country.

4:51From another hand, having property title today is the same as having property title for wetlands in Canada, for example. You cannot do anything, you cannot walk on your property without being fined. So that's the second, the German type of socialism would be without socialization of everything, How well was central planning from the center of the whole economy? Because that would be the government who would be telling you how much to produce, for whom, when, how, and whom to fire, whom to hire, everything, especially labor markets. So both types of the socialism ended up in mass murders and complete destruction of the countries which practiced this type of economic system.

5:47However, having said that, Mises made a very good point that Marxism is not an economic system. It is just a simple system of management of commands, top-down commands, and that's it. Union, the most perfect killer state, 61 million people slaughtered for equality. And that's the numbers from Rudy Rummelt, who is a professor of demographics in University of Hawaii, a very famous American demographer. Now he is focusing on this demo site, he called it demo site, the gathering of people.

6:33So these deaths, you can see, are just overwhelming. I think they illustrate very well Stalin's point. He said, the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. So communist China also is the second worst mega-murderer. So communists, according to Rommel, have murdered 110 million people, nearly two-thirds of the nearly 170 million killed by all governments in the 20th century. Well, the other 22 million were murdered by Nazis, by Nazis, which is another form of socialism, so it will be already 132. So that's way more than the people who were murdered on the battlefields are not counted into that. That would be people who were murdered in the peace time in the Soviet Union.

7:24I remember myself very well, the time when Gorbachev started this Perestroika thing. And he ordered all government ministers to appear on television and to take phone calls from the public.

8:09One of the callers, he said, I kind of did some calculations, I think there are 43 million people murdered by your institution, by the KGB. Is that the right number or not? And Mr. Kruchkov said, well, I don't know much, numbers, whatever, give me a week and I will put it down and I'll find out how many people. And that was amazing. I remember I spilled my coffee on myself on the surface. And then, sure enough, a week after that, the whole country was glued to TV screens to find out how many skeletons you have in a cupboard. That just was amazing. And Mr. Khrushchev, he said, well, comrades, the number is about right, but he said it's preposterous to believe that all these people were killed.

9:04Most of them died of natural causes, and sure enough, if you don't feed people, or if you don't clothe them in Siberia, they tend to die of natural causes. I decided to do a little bit of, as soviets would call it, visual propaganda, because after lunch, speech is usually the most kind of unsuccessful. People tend to sleep and dream or whatever, so just to keep you awake. Lenin, I would say today there are a lot of people are saying, well, Marx was right, Lenin was wrong, there is something wrong with Leninism, so if you will read Lenin, you will see he was 100% Marxist, 100% Marxist, the only deviation from Marx was that he was trying to say that the end of the earth or communism would happen in one country, not in the whole world at the same time.

10:11That was the only kind of little deviation from orthodox Marxism. Lenin, like all Marxists, like all socialists, he hated gold, he believed that gold in the future society, they will make toilet commons out of gold. because gold was specially designed by nature to be in contact with the human waste because it is such a bad thing morally and from another hand it is also very good from corrosion point of view. And so he probably could do that and he didn't live long enough but he probably could do Trotsky is kind of a hero for our napalm conservatives in the United States.

11:24in the United States. However Trotsky, if you will look at Trotsky's writings, he was not a humanist. He wrote in his book on revolution that we inherited from Tsar, we inherited very poor human material, that's how he called people, which only can be mended with mass shooting and forced labor. And that's what his program, my program, was to do that. And then comes this person who killed more people than all other people combined. At least one Russian historian, Roy Medved, he did this calculation of who murdered how many. And so from that perspective, you just start to think, basically now he looks like Boehm.

12:18So this is the map of the extermination camps, extermination camps for people. Later, this famous dictum is that politics is a form of pest control. And that's exactly where they were getting rid of pests. And this is the gulag, gulag, Stalin's empire of prison camps. At the height of it, every day they had over 20 million inhabitants. So it was a huge, huge meat grinder for the people of the Soviet Union, for the people from overseas as well, there's a lot of foreigners there as well. So that's the gulag itself.

13:03Twenty million a day? No, no, they were all the time populated by this amount. They were dying of natural causes one by one. At the height of the murders, they were murdering 12,000 today, in the height of murders, in 1937, and at that time, why do I know, because I did some research on this, because Robert LaFollette, who was the governor of Wisconsin, that's where I'm from, you can recognize this accent, yeah, and the governor of Wisconsin, Robert LaFollette, Robert LaFollette, he visited Soviet Union in October of 1937, when they were measuring 12,000 a day.

13:49He went back to Madison, Wisconsin, his lads were, our previous speaker got his indoctrination. And he went back to Madison, Wisconsin, he said, I saw the future and it works. And so that's, that was amazing for us in back in Soviet Union to see how people coming from the West, Definitely not KGB agents, but would give praise to such an evil, Clementine Churchill, in 1947, visited Soviet Union. I don't think she was a KGB person, but Clementine Churchill, you turn back to London, she said, colonists are lying that they don't have a privileged class, they do, and that is children.

14:34Can you imagine, when the true ruling class was dining and whining her and creating this show, kind of kindergartens made of KGB children, and she returned back to London and said, nobody pulled her tongue about that, this is a villainous Lithuania, and so Mary Lou is a frequent traveler to that part of the world. Now it's a free country, so Baltic states are doing very well from that perspective. They put, at first they had this, it was called Park of Fallen Foibles, Park of Fallen Foibles. And I went there in 1995 with my students, and at that time they had a little bridge over Stalin. And those, and that was a political entrepreneurship at its best.

15:21If you pay five liters, that's about one dollar, then you can go and pee on this time. Not at any time. Amazingly enough that my female friends were very upset. So Stalin was succeeded by another mass murderer. Not many people know his biography, that he is all covered with blood and minced meat. and all this kind, this is already, we call that period, the reign of corpses, the reign of corpses in Moscow and the saying was that the working day in Kremlin was stuck with resuscitation and then it's giving away orders and medals and then it's clinical death again and this is my boss, my immediate boss was first Deputy Prime Minister of Soviet Union, who was contended And he should be blamed for it. And he would all the time return from meetings with Gorbachev and would say, what is happening behind this birthmark? Because nobody really knew. What happened actually? Why communism collapsed? Why they couldn't survive another 10,000 years like was predicted by the CIA? Because they removed fear out of the system, which was

16:45was glued only by fear, there's nothing, no other explanation. You have a command economy, if you have a, people are being short for not working and if you start, stop shooting them, that's, everybody would stop working and that's exactly what happened. There was another joke I remember in Moscow at that time, that CIA agent is in Moscow and is walking into a shoe store and writing in his notebook, no shoes, going to grocery store, no groceries, He's going to a pharmacist with no medicines, and there is a KGB guy looking over his shoulder and he said, You know what? He said, ten years ago you would be shot for doing that. He writes there, no bullets. That's exactly it. I remember I was working for the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade at that time, as a chief consultant, and my secretary, her name was Lena, she was a very nice lady, 23 years old, And I saw her picking up paper clips, putting them into her purse, and I said, Leah, why

18:12are you stealing state property in such strange form, paper clips? And she said, Yuri, what else can I take from this? And she used that for her office. Just show me, I'll take that. said nothing else to take can you imagine when I'm working and so she was taking this and I thought and I remember I was looking back to the metro station I was thinking if people like her or Rizia coming to work or to steal stuff there I wasn't doing anything at all, work-wise, and just going there to test a few stuff, the regime is doomed, the regime is doomed, and that's what exactly happened. Let me say to Gorbachev, all the time he like, kind of like a strange parrot, he would repeat on and on and on that he's for socialist choice of people, that we should not do away with capitalism, we should reform social, social with human faith, like that sounds like a real oxymoron, and we had an economist, also a confidant,

19:20Igor Bacheval, Avila Gandigyan, a good friend of mine, he was the biggest, I would call him, the biggest economist in the world, he was, I think, like, 600 pounds, and he, yes, One meeting he said, and Gorbachev was saying, like, we should have a plan, like, at last. His point was that planned economy didn't work because we didn't have a good plan. And all the time we would fail to make a good plan. So if we were at last, we would make a good plan. Then everything would work. And he said, Abel, what is your plan? And Abel didn't realize, this is the big economist, didn't realize what he's talking about. Probably he was daydreaming about food or something.

20:05And he said, my plan would be to build a Swedish model in Soviet Union, Swedish model. And he worked with him like he's crazy. He said, where you will get all the Swedes? But why am I talking about that? Not just only to keep you awake, but mostly to illustrate the intellectual depths of discussions of reforming socialism. Now it was Mr. Yeltsin, I had a misfortune to work with him for half a year, he was a tough guy, he had a chance in 1991, at that time, look how popular he was, because he was, I cannot forgive myself, I wrote an article for Washington Times that we have another Thomas Jefferson in Russia.

21:12However, this Thomas Jefferson, Russian Thomas Jefferson, he instead of capitalizing on this enormous victory, when he was extremely popular to proceed with reforms, he disappeared for three months, presumably writing a book, which turned out he never read. And I was watching, I'm not making it up, I was watching a TV press conference with Mr. Yeltsin, and one lady, she said, Well, you were in Sverdlovsk in 1956 doing this and that. He said, never been there, never did that. and she said that they sent patients six of your book. He said, oh really? Can you imagine?

21:59He was probably consuming his favorite beverages for three months in a row. So now we have another civil society back in Moscow. I wrote an article, my kind of congratulatory article for Mr. Putin, which was the last article published in Russia. And the title of article was translated from Russian, would be Meat, Booting for Meatgrinder. And I think that's exactly what they did, because we know that Mr. Putin is a career KGB officer, he represents, proudly represents that very institution. I have my own person in Kremlin, a sleeping cell, who is a lawyer for Kremlin, and a very nice and joyous Jewish personality.

23:07And I called her and said, what, why, why, why Medvedev? I mean, first, I called her and said, what do you think about elections? That was February, March, where he was elected. She said, huh, I don't like this guy, McCain. I said, no, no, your elections. She said, yes, we do have elections, but he was already elected because we have only one elector and And already that elector already elected Mr. Medvedev, but I said, why the elector elected Mr. Medvedev? Nobody knew him or what not, and she said, come on, you've kind of completely lost your ties with your motherland because he's shorter, and I said, what do you mean by shorter?

23:56She said, that's the only person in government who was shorter than Mr. Putin, and I said, She said nothing wrong to be short, unless you don't like it. And Mr. Putin, and I really, I never saw this, I mean, I trust her because she's a very trustworthy person. Mr. Putin, she said, has very high heels, very high heels, like a very well-known French Emperor. and so he is up and Mr. Medvedev looks like got even higher heels and that's a Russian CDM, a president.

24:44All right, so there you have this roller, yes, you can only, if you're taking pictures of this great leader, You can only do it from below, so they are powering over you. If you take them like that, or like that, then your camera can be destroyed, as well as you, I think. The guy to the left, yes, I think I talked to him on a Sunday today, that life expectancy drops suddenly. 122 journalists, 122 journalists on his watch were murdered. And the only common thing, and they worked for different newspapers and magazines and whatever, all over Russia, The only common thing is that they didn't want him, they want number one, and second common denominator is that none of these murders were ever solved.

25:41So that's that kind of... I knew the guy who was, maybe you remember Mr. Litvinenko, who was murdered in London, in London, yes. And I'm doing seminars for US military and US intelligence community, which is not very intelligent, I think, but thriving community. And one lady from NSA, which is not agency, and she said, come on, she said, why Putin would kill him? Why Putin would kill him? He was debriefed already 10,000 times. He doesn't know anything anymore. So why would Putin, yeah, maybe Putin would work for NSA, he wouldn't kill him.

26:28But because he doesn't, he killed him right away. And I can see him looking at a menu of poisons in Gramian and picking up the most exorbitant and the most expensive one. It's about $100,000 worth, the necessary amount to kill a person. $100,000 worth, it's very extremely expensive, only governments can have it up, it's kind of, again, I'm not for immediate human right to own Polonium 21, but still that's, and I can see why, I mean, because, can you imagine, he wrote a book about Putin, how Putin was blowing up Mother Russia, I think the title of the book is, and that was, that was just 250 pages solicitation for a point, So, Poisons from Kremlin, and because also he lived in Norwich, London, a nice house, driving green, racing green Jaguar, I'm quoting Putin, not anybody else, So turning back to economics. What is the success and what is the failure? It's economic freedom, it's economic freedom. That's what Austrian economics is teaching us.

28:02Public choice is very close to the same understanding of the role of government in the economy. And my good friend, Jim Wartley, he compiles every year, every year. He was with the Institute here in Canada, in Vancouver, and he is making up this map, Which is telling us what countries are free, what countries are mostly free, and what countries are repressed. So you can see that we are, some mistakes are depicted in blue, that means free. Free Canada is depicted mostly free, it's a matter of taste I think.

28:52Then I have countries which are unfree, unfree, that's yellow, and which are repressed, and that would be in red, that would be in red. So that's China is unfree. Yeah, I think it's unfree. And nobody knows about this one, so that they are on the white list. So that's, you can see that when they have criteria, what is that, property rights, taxes, the share of government and GDP, not a very important indicators, important indicators. And what's amazing is, is a very strong correlation between economic freedom and income, and income.

29:41If you look at the three countries, they have the highest income. This is 2002. Now it's even more explicit, this correlation is. So mostly free, we already have almost 50% of the income of the three countries, and mostly I'm free. Why the press are doing so well in comparison with mostly I'm free? Because most of them are oil producing countries. So it's something which is called purest of natural resources or paradox of plenty, paradox of plenty, when the countries which are endowed by natural resources are doing worse than others. And people couldn't however explain why say Canada is doing relatively alright or United States or Australia.

30:26And the answer is flying in the air because of property rights, because it's not Canadian government which owns natural resources in Canada, It's not U.S. government which owns, but it's Russian government which owns natural resources in Russia, Brazilian government, or Venezuelan, or Nigerian. So you can see that countries, because what paradox of plenty is, that countries with a lot of natural resources are doing much less successfully economically. In most cases, the poorest countries in the world, if you look at countries like Angola, Nigeria, or many Middle Eastern countries, or Central Asian countries, or Russia itself, you will see that GDP per capita is very low, much lower than in countries with no natural resources, but with economic freedom.

31:52You can compare these ways, and you can compare who achieved what, and you would see such a disparity. Under colonialism, I would say, it's very difficult to say what was real GDP at that time. Because I didn't have anything else to do while working, so called, for Kremlin. I was recalculating GDP. which was a which I came to some some results which proved to be sensational when I defected to the United States because on the way I beefed by all intelligence services of the world and my point was that that Soviet GDP is between three and four percent of the US GDP that's what my numbers were and and so then and then when I already was lived in Washington DC I was called I got a call from Pentagon, and at that time Dick Cheney was not Vice President, but he was Secretary of Defense, if you remember, and Bush Senior.

32:51And I got a call from his office that if possible that the Secretary would like to meet with me. And I was very surprised, so I arrived at Pentagon, and Mr. Cheney, he said, well, he had kind of a folder, probably my folder or whatever, I said, yes, Mr. Secretary, it is in between three and four. And I'm probably the only person in the world, maybe besides his wife, who likes Dick Cheney, because he said, sweet. His response was, sweet. Well, otherwise I don't like him, actually.

33:54But what I am saying is that nobody knew what the real GDP is, what the real numbers are. And some people were making some intelligent guesses about this. And that was impossible, because the CIA believed that the Soviets knew the true number, but then they multiplied it on some secret quotient, and then we should send a James Bond assignment and find out what this quotient is divided and have great statistics at hand. This statistics was, my first job was with the Department of Labor of Soviet Union, and my boss, I remember, that was first, he was kind of teaching me life, he was secretary of labor, and he would say, well, if you don't have primary statistics, you cannot have a result in statistics, that if you don't have primary reporting, I mean, if you don't care to ask how many, wherever people are working, in this field, or that field, or that enterprise.

34:53Then, definitely, he said the relevance of the sum of the unknown is relevant. But you can get it easy. He said, just stare at the ceiling, and then if you stare long enough, you see numbers. You just take them down, go to your boss, and he'll correct them. That's how statistics is made. And I remember I was, because I'm taking students to Cuba all the time, almost every year. I was taking until recently. Now we have this imbecile government we have in Washington. They decided that people are abused short-term. You know that American citizens cannot go to Cuba.

35:39in Cuba. There is another restraint on our liberty to do things. So, we cannot go to Cuba. However, you can get a license, if you wish, to go there for educational purposes. If you want to study communism, then you can go to Cuba. To get this license, she would give a call and the lady said, I will fax it to you, just spell your name correctly. And so I got this license and I got my students. And many of these students are children of the 1960s guys. and many of them are being sent by their parents to Cuba, just like pilgrims, right, to kiss the land and to bring pictures of Fidel, and what not, and I met with some of them and they said, well, the reason is that Cuba is doing better than anybody else, it's very low infant mortality rate, very low infant mortality rate.

36:45Clinton's economic advisor, Bora Tyson, came up with a book praising Cuban Communism, saying that they achieved the lowest intermetallic rate. That book was published in 1986, and I read it in Moscow as part of my duties to read all the coming from the West. So I was I was surprised by that, and I asked a Cuban I knew, who was representative of Cuba in Comicon, that was Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, Council for Mutual Economic Destruction. And I said to him, Carlos, how do you make up statistics about infant mortality? And he said, we never make up anything.

37:33I said, how do you fix that? I said, what do you mean, make? He said, well, it's a very simple device. They register children who are already at least six months old. Infect mortality is mortality of infants within the first year of the life. And most infants die within the first week of their life, who are doomed to die, right? So the departed are departed outside of statistics, and the others are factored in along with them. And now, however, in Cuba of today, I think that they gave up this as well, because everything has fallen apart to the point, I don't think it reached anybody for anything.

38:22It's such a sad place to be. Now the point is, the point is, of the people in Washington, that you can only go to Cuba for a longer time, because Colin Powell did a report on educational exchanges with Cuba of the U.S. citizens, and that many of them, instead of studying them, meaning socialism or whatever you can study there, that they, instead of that, they're swimming and snorkeling and scuba diving, even to the point that I thought I had an MPI agent with my group, And so, the idea now is that if you want to go to study at UBA, it should be at least semester long, semester long kind of stay.

39:13And I would say I would prefer maybe probably a Waterloo Regional Jail for a semester, the Island of Freedom. It's really, really, really, really sad, really sad what happened over there. So this is like an European perspective, you can see that some post-communist countries. So returning back to that 3 to 4%, I think that incomes of people were about $2,000 per year at the end of communists, about that time. I think that the Soviet economy, size-wise, was at that time a little bit smaller than on the economy of the state of Illinois and a little bit bigger than the state of Georgia.

40:01So kind of like in between. And that brings us the per capita income for about 2000. So it was more or less 2000. There were kind of regional discrepancies of plus minus 30 percent. For example, in Central Asia, people live poorer, say minus 30 percent. And kind of like Belarus, which was a stock performer under communism, they did much better and then in Central Asia or on the average, also about 25-30 percent. But now you can see there is a country like Estonia which is target former, they right now have GDP per capita $22,000, so it's almost like in England. Then you have all these countries, Lithuania, and Russia is number 143, I think it was over here, 131.

41:21He was a good poet. He wrote like seven volumes. That's why people elected him president. They thought he was a good poet, so they can't report him. Instead, he began to murder people. There was no tomorrow. And he came up with a lot of very extravagant kind of things. For example, he built a monument. His mother died. On this occasion, he built a gilded monument for his mother, 32 meters high, standing before the presidential palace, like this, and so every morning he goes there and waves her, and she is kind of standing right there. Then he was 62 recently, and he gave 100 dollars to everybody who is 62. It was very, very interesting, the distribution of income scheme, and I'm afraid they will learn about that in Washington, and...

42:12I would like to quote pioneer of Austrian School of Economics in Russia, Mr. Bogdanov, who I think probably was the only, they all the time say that Stalin and Lenin, they killed 61 million innocent people. Well, Bogdanov was one of them, but he was not innocent, because he said that, you can see. He said, government, whether communist or not, is above all, is a special form of social consumption, authoritarian regulatory organization of mass parasitism and destruction. It's a matter of degree rather than principle. Now, I think he was absolutely right about that, and especially if you will look, not on Belarus, but about Bolsheviks in Washington we have right now, Alan Greenspan was co-author of Ayn Rand. In 1966 they published a book together, Capitalism and the Unknown Ideal.

43:20In that book he had a wonderful chapter on gold standard and economic freedom. In that chapter he was saying that economic freedom is the basis for human freedom and gold standard is the basis for economic freedom. Freedom. And then, sure enough, now he is being treated like dirt, not because what he did as chief inflationist of the United States, not because he was a central planner, but because of what he wrote for Iran at that time, at that time. And that was kind of a funny episode. I even wrote about that on Ludwig von Mises' website. And I got a phone call at two o'clock in the morning from Moscow. There was a guy whom I know. He was former general of the Soviet army.

44:10And he was a general medical corps general. And they would all the time present him and all because he was the only Jewish general. And so he was everywhere, right? And they would remove his medical chevrons, so huge chevrons, the general. And so he quit when Soviet Union collapsed, and now he is a huge pharmaceutical kind of tycoon. And he called me, he forgot about time difference between US and Russia. I think he was just drunk or eating his pharmaceuticals or whatever. So he called me and he said, I see two Jews are being filmed in the United States. One is interrogating another.

44:59And he said, what's the name of them? He said, Greenspan is one. The other one I don't remember. The other one is Wachsman. Wachsman was the chairman of the Congressional Oversight Committee on Government. And Mooksman was attacking Greenspan for his free market background. He was saying that all the power conflicted in the United States economy is the product of the free market ideas implanted into his head. Can you imagine that? And, sure enough, Greenspan, he was just, I have a good friend, his name is Andrew Napolitano, Judge Napolitano, if you know him, yeah, if you don't, buy his book, his great book, The Nation of Sheep, The Nation of Sheep, yeah, he called my compatriots sheepo, sheepo.

45:56And so, in the most beautiful sheepish tradition, Mr. Greenspan said, yes, I was wrong, complete and everything, yeah, it's about time for me, he said, to reconsider my world, my lifelong beliefs, yeah, so he's 82, so it's about time to reconsider. And so his point was that the free market didn't work, and my ideological insanity led to all this crisis, which was kind of shivering, and so forth. And he is there, and Mr. Greenspan, he was the one who would usually come on the Capitol Hill like he's our own consul.

46:44He would, everybody would just stand up immediately. They were praising Volker. Volker was packing these awful cigars on everybody. And this one, however, he looked very academic and everybody just loved him enormously. And another central planner and regulator, Mark Hayne, I put it down just because otherwise people would think I'm making it up. Because Mark Hayne said If he would be president, then he would appoint Greenspan, even if he's dead, to be chairman of some committee on taxes, yes, on tax code. And so he is alive, doesn't matter at all, can you imagine? If he's dead, just prop him up, put some dark glass on him, and like we can read, there he is.

47:32That's another sales pitch. Even Khrushchev, you remember that fat joker we had in Soviet Union, even he never thought of giving post-mortem appointments to Lenin or Stalin, at least that guys were well-preserved in the mausoleums.

48:04And this one, we can skip this. Yeah, well, I mean that Keynes is also, can you imagine that even Keynes understood that? Even Keynes understood that. However, there's the same Keynes which wrote this. Well, the only course open to me is to be by knowing Bolshevik. And as I lie in bed in the morning, I reflect with a good deal of satisfaction that because our rulers are so incompetent as they are mad and wicked, Our particular era of particular kind of civilization is very nearly over. So, that's Mr. Keynes, that's, that was, that was added for, against past positions. And sure enough, that's a disciple of Keynes, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.

48:52Yes. So, Mr. Krugman, Paul Krugman, Paul Krugman, yeah. He looks like a member of the Bolshevik government. Well, maybe he deserves it. I mean, if Elgor got one, or Yasser Arafat, then he should get one. Well, on this cheerful note, I would be happy to discuss whatever questions you have or comments. Thank you very much.