Ticka, Ticka, You Need Good Timin'

0:00Our next speaker is a guy who's always looking for an argument. He has a PhD from Columbia University. He's author and co-author of a number of books, a number of articles, but we have a couple of books out front I urge you to buy. One is Defending the Undefendable, it's a wonderful little book to learn economics with. He also has a very, very hot new book called The Privatization of Roads and Highways, which if you got stuck in traffic here, you can see how the free market might have handled that.

0:51But he's a professor at Loyola of New Orleans, but lives part of the year right up the road in Vancouver, and it's our pleasure to have him here. He'll be speaking on Ticca Ticca, You Need Good Timing, Dr. Walter Block. It's a little cold in here, isn't it? Well, you're in luck. Hot air is coming. Before I start in my own talk, I just wanted to add on an addendum to Peter's excellent talk. One of the reasons that the Fed is very popular among the economics profession is because Half of the economists either work for the Fed or hope to work for the Fed or try to get published in the journals that they do.

1:48It's amazing that we have to have Fed independence in the view of these people. And the reason it's only half because only half is macro. I think every macroeconomist works for the Fed in some way or other. Another point about the Keynesian that really impresses itself upon, to me, is stagflation. You see, according to the Keynesians, the economy is sort of like a car. When it's going too slow, you have to hit the gas, and the monetarists and the pure Keynesians argue whether the gas should be fiscal or monetary policy. And when it's going too slow, when it's going too fast, you have to pull back expenditure, whether monetary or fiscal, and when it's going too slowly, if you have depression, then you have to hit the gas. Well, the problem The question is, what about when it's doing both? What about when you have stagflation?

2:39And the answer is, as Ayn Rand would say, blank out. You just don't have any answer to that one. Murray Rothbard tells the story that Arthur Burns was once talking about this before stagflation started, and he said, well, if that ever occurs, we'll all have to resign. Well, it's about time for these guys to resign. Okay, let me start my own talk, and my message is, economics is beautiful. Okay, you might I think I'm a weirdo, economics is beautiful, give me a break, but that's what I get out of economics, it's sort of an aesthetic jolt, it's sort of like Bach, Mozart and Handel, my three favorite composers all rolled into one. The story I'd like to give you is the ancient one from several centuries past, Bastiat, how does Paris get fed? He looks up from the Eiffel Tower down on Paris and everyone's People are scurrying around. We could look at the Space Needle here in Seattle and people are scurrying around and there's no central direction and yet everyone gets fed. How can this be? It's a miracle in my view. It ranks up there in beauty with the sunset, the rainbow, the smile of a baby. It's just a gorgeous thing. That is the free market part of it. I have a confession. I have various motivations for being an economist and in the order of

3:59Less Importance and Toward the Greater Importance, the first one is I like to see light bulbs lighting over my students' faces when they get it. It's just a big jolt for me. Another one is tweak noses. I like to take noses and tweak them, especially big fat noses. Another one is I'm against poverty and I'm pro-prosperity. I like to see us be rich and Cure Poverty, and economics is the key for that. And then an even more important one is liberty. Economics is a key element in understanding what liberty is and how to promote liberty. Another one, a personal one, is I want to pass on the baton that Murray Rothbard passed on to me, pass it on to younger people. But the most important one, this is my true confession, it's just the sheer beauty of it.

4:48The idea of how we can have social cooperation without any central direction. and it just, it turns my crank. Now, on the other hand, there are people that say economics is boring and there's some reason for that and I sometimes joke around and I say, well, you know, I'm one of the few doctors who still makes house calls and if you have sleep apnea or you can't sleep too well, I'll come over to your house and I'll give you an economics lecture and you'll be out like a light. And Keynesian economics is like that, but not Reagan, Ronald Reagan, talked about the magic of the marketplace and he was a great rhetorician. He was really good at that, but you know, when push came to shove, when he was governor of California, the budget went up and so did regulation and when he was president.

5:40But at least he was good on rhetoric, if nothing else. And how does this work? Well, the magic of the marketplace is based on free prices, property rights, free enterprise, laissez-faire Capitalism, trust, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is profit and loss. The reason Seattle gets fed or Paris gets fed is because those people who are not successful in feeding it, who don't provide services or goods that the people want, they go broke. And they leave room for other people to come in and take their places. And that's why things are pretty good. That's why in the Soviet Union they're pretty bad, is very bad because you don't have this automatic feedback mechanism that rewards success and penalizes failure and as long as that sort of a thing is allowed to occur, people get fed and we have prosperity and we don't have starvation.

6:28There was this movie, what was it? Moscow on the Hudson where they sort of showed what the Soviet economy was like and if you see a long line you get on it. You don't ask what it is and you know it might be toilet paper. Well, you can always use toilet paper, but the situation here is you're up to your armpits in toilet paper, but you've got no oranges or vice versa. In other words, in the market, if we had so much toilet paper, the prices of toilet paper would go down, the profits in it would go down, and if we have too few oranges, it would go up, and we'd have some sort of equilibration. That's the sort of thing that we rely on. It's sort of like we're But the reason that we have a civilized, non-barbaric, non-starvation economy is because of this market, this beautiful marketplace.

7:13Leonard Reed once talked about eye, the pencil, you know, the pencil is made of wood and rubber and metal and graphite and this and that and the other. And he said, no one person knows how to put together a pencil. The pencil is put together by people who, if they met each other, they'd hate each other, by people who, if they met each other, they'd hate each other, they'd start fighting with each other, and yet the market can coordinate this cooperation in a very humble example of the pencil. One dramatic way of putting this is to look at a place where it doesn't work. And I was living in New Orleans when Katrina came. It really wasn't Katrina's fault, it was the government's fault. The government's fault in several ways. One, the Army Corps of Engineers allowed the thing to fall apart and to FEMA prohibited private people from helping, but even more important, the very Katrina itself was government's fault. You know, they say

8:09you can't blame government on bad weather, you can blame government on bad weather. They took half the GDP for decades. If they hadn't, we probably have had enough research to stop Katrina's and earthquakes and everything else, so it's all the government's fault. They don't Don't call me Walter Moderate Block for nothing. Okay so I've just explained, I think, why things run pretty well. Why if there are errors, people go bankrupt and they leave, if there are too many frisbees and we don't want frisbees anymore, or hula hoops, or this is out of style, or if you make a woman's dress with the hemline too high or too low, you go broke. Why then do we have a cluster of errors?

8:54And what is a cluster of errors? A cluster of errors is all of a sudden all the businessmen make mistakes. How can this be? How can it be that businessmen who are selected and deselected for success or failure respectively, how can it be that they all sort of go berserk all at one time and we have a recession or a depression? Is this part of the market? Well, the Keynesian would say, yes, we didn't have enough animal spirits and we've got to go see a psychiatrist to get more animated or something like that, but for the Austrians, it's not true at all. And what I'm now going to do is talk about not intra-temporal cooperation, which I've been talking about with Frisbees and Feeding Us, but rather inter-temporal cooperation, namely cooperation through time. And that's why I came up with that title, Ticka Ticka Ticka, You Need Good Timing. Don't ask me to sing it, because if I have to sing, we'll be in trouble. But there was this rock and roll song from the 70s, wasn't there? Ticka

9:52Okay, so what's going on here? What's going on here is, now please pick out these little thingies that you've been given. There'll be a quiz on this, so if you don't pay attention you're going to fail the quiz. And I was kidding about a quiz, but I really do want to take a survey because I do go around the country with Lou and Doug and the Mises gang and all All of us, I think I speak for my fellow speakers here, are trying to come up with the best way to get this across to a lay audience, and this may or may not be a good way, so after I go through it, if you would indulge me with a show of hands as to, was this a waste of time and really boring, or was this, did it help you understand Austrian business cycle theory, I would appreciate it, so I'd know whether to voice this on the next group.

10:47Okay, we have two tables, and first turn to the one in color yellow, flip it over. And here's, you know, when I come to your house and I start with the boring lectures, I'll start 1.02, 1.04, 1.06, and that's my way of putting you to sleep. But this interest rate table is the one with which you're most familiar. When you were six years old and your parents told you, well, if you save your money, you'll get more money and your eyes lit up with greedy glee and you started, wow, this is great. That's the interest table you had. Notice that if you put a dollar in the bank for one year at 2% at the end of the year, you'll have a dollar too. And the implicit assumption behind all these interest rate calculations is that it's for sure you can trust me, you'll get the money, just stipulate that, and also that there'll Theoretically, in other words, what we're doing is using Ceteris Paribus, we're assuming

11:47away these complications to focus intensively on the interest rate, the way the Austrians see the business cycle. Notice that the numbers go higher to the right, namely at the one-year level, the higher the interest rate, the more money you get, and they go, as you go down the column, the more In years, say at 6%, the more money you'll get, like you'll get more money if you leave the money in at 6%, you'll get 18 bucks in 50 years, whereas if you only leave it for two years, you'll get just $1.12. Okay, everyone with me on that? Any questions on that? That's a very simple straightforward interest rate table. Now before we turn it over, I have here in my hot hands a dollar bill, and I promise, you can trust me because I'm a trustworthy person, I used to be a Boy Scout, that I'll I'll give you this dollar here in one year from now and there'll be no inflation and you'll get this money for sure and now I'm offering opening bids. Who will bid for this

12:46dollar in a year from now and what bid will you offer? Anyone? 50 cents. Wrong answer. I pull this on my students so you'll have to forgive me. You have to know what the interest rate is before you can make a rational bid because suppose the interest rate was so high, It was 10,000%. If you put 50 cents in the bank at 10,000% interest, you get way more than a dollar. You get it? So you have to know what the interest rate is before you can make a rational bid. Okay, now turn the interest rate table over to the other side. And what we have here is the present discounted value of a future dollar. Namely this dollar in a year from now at 5%, The proper bid for that or the bid at which you'll make no profit or the equilibrium bid, so here 50 cents would be a good bid if the interest rate was 5%, the proper bid would be 95.2, 95 and two-tenths of a cent. Why? Because if you put 95 cents rounding at 5%

13:51in the bank, you'll get a dollar. Namely, these two tables are reciprocals of each other. If you flip them over, they're reciprocals. You multiply the same box, and you'll get of One. Or another example is if the interest rate is 15% and I promise to give you this dollar in two years, then the equilibrium bid would be 75.6 cents. Why? Because if you put 75.6 cents in the bank and leave it there for two years, at 15% you get a dollar. So you wouldn't pay any more than that and you couldn't pay any less than that if we had a wide market where a lot of bidders, sophisticated bidders were. So notice that the numbers as you move to the right on the one year, the higher the interest rate, the more heavily you discount future income, namely at 20%, it's only worth right now 83 cents, right? You're heavily discounting it at 20%. Whereas at 1%, you're not discounting it too heavily, it's worth a full 99 cents. And also as you go down the

14:52In the columns, the numbers get smaller. For example, at 3%, a dollar receivable in a year from now is worth 97 cents right now. The present discounted value of a dollar receivable in a year from now is 97 cents. Whereas, the present discounted value of the same dollar for sure, with no inflation, receivable in 50 years, is only worth 23 cents. 22.8 cents, everyone following that? Yes? Okay, now, drum roll, tick-a-tick-a good timing. What happens when the government lowers the interest rate, say, from 8% to 6%? Well, a dollar receivable in one year gets a little bit more valuable. You go from 92 cents to 94 cents, a change of roughly 2%? Not much.

15:41It doesn't change much. It doesn't change the value of a dollar receivable in a year from now, very, very much, at all. Whereas, say a dollar receivable in 12 years goes up from 90.39 cents, 39.7 to 49 cents, a change of 20%. That's a hefty change. A dollar receivable in 12 years is worth the increase when you lower the interest rate, you get a big jolt. So entrepreneurs are led as if by an invisible hand out of investments that only take a year Herein into investments that take 12 years. Now let's look at 50 years. A dollar receivable in 50 years at 8% is worth 2 cents, whereas at 6% it's worth 5 cents, which is an increase of 250%. So there's a gigantic, stupendous push toward heavier investment like houses, cars, things that take a long time to do. Don't think of a car just on the assembly The assembly line, it only takes, I don't know, five hours to get through the assembly line, but it's got metal that has to be mined and the house takes just a year to build, but the stuff that's in it takes many years of mining and heavy industry.

16:49So what the bloody government has done by artificially lowering the interest rate is fooled entrepreneurs into producing for the long run when the inter-temporal cooperation is ruined. You see, what they're doing, people are saving as if, they're saving as if, they're only saving nine bricks worth, and the interest rate is telling entrepreneurs that there are ten bricks out there. So they're building heavier, they're building longer, they're building bigger, they're building more housing or cars than they should be building, and the government is bailing them out. But the cause of the business cycle from the Austrian theory is they lower the interest rate which leads entrepreneurs as if by an invisible General Hann Adam Smith said to promote the general good, but they perverted because the interest rate signals are all wrong. The interest rate is very important. I had a full head of hair before I discovered what they were doing. Look at me now, it's all because of the interest rate. And Bob Murphy, who you'll see later, is in roughly my same position.

17:53Okay, now let me take the survey. I've spent five minutes out of my 30 minutes and I don't I don't know whether it's good or not, and I bored you with interest rates. If you would just raise your hand and say, I'll give you three choices. This was very helpful, this was moderately helpful, it was a waste of your time, because you don't understand how I'm talking about it, and I might as well talk about other stuff. How many say this was a good use of the five minutes? How many say it was moderately good, it was some help? And how many say it was a total, utter, silly waste? Shut up! Bob Murphy did his dissertation on interest rates, so he's bored with that, so he's the only one. Okay, well thanks, I appreciate that, so I'll have no compunction about, you know, spending time doing this.

18:42I mean, I do this with my students, but I have them for a whole semester, and I can really drum it in, but I'm glad to see that this is sort of the way that got to me. When I saw this, the light bulb lit over my head in a way that other ways of explaining Austrian business cycle didn't, namely that the government is making people, encouraging them, making it more profitable for them to do stuff that is incompatible with our decisions as savers. They're telling businessmen that there's more resources out there and they should invest in longer terms than is justified by people's actual decisions. So what is the government doing? It's propping up these things that never should have been in the first place, that were mistakes. Tom Woods, the author of Meltdown that Peter mentioned, says it's sort of as if there's a circus coming to town and you have a restaurant and you double the size of the restaurant even though the restaurant is only going to be there for

19:38a week. And you do very well during that week and now your restaurant is double the size and now the circus goes away and all the circus performance and all the people in the audience go away from this little town and now you're left with double capacity and you're about to go broke and what the government is doing is giving you money to keep double capacity. No, you shouldn't have made double capacity. What you should have done with that money is something else that was more in sync with consumer desire. They say sometimes, well, it's too big to fail, you know, Chrysler is too big or talking about vampires or ghouls, you know, the big three, especially Chrysler is really a ghoul that, you know, sort of walks like this and tries to get the pretty girl in the movie.

20:26Too big to fail is silly. I mean, at one time in the beginning of our country, agriculture was some 97% of the labor force and now it's 2%. Well, 93% of it failed in the sense that it was diverted into things that we now need more. Look, if all the people had to be farmers, we couldn't have a lot of other things that we now have because, happily, not everyone has to be a farmer. The horse and buggy industry, it was a horror. I mean, all those blacksmiths and all those horsebreakers and horse trainers and leather and the saddles and whips. They all went broke and the evil Henry Ford and other people started these horseless carriages. Well, the economy improved. You don't have to keep these things going. Another, I think I got this from Tom Woods, it's sort of like taking water out of the shallow end, no, taking water out of the deep end of the pool and trying to put water into

21:19the shallow end of the pool in order to increase the level of the shallow end of the pool. I mean, if you take money away from Peter and give it to Paul, well, yes, Paul now can spend, but Peter can't, so where did you get anything from? Well, the Keynesians say, well, when the government does it, it has this multiplier, but what they do is they ignore savings, only consumption, which leads you to think that the way the economy prospers is if people eat like pigs, not if they produce anything, which is a little silly. Okay, what I want to do with the rest of my time is criticize a few people who haven't yet seen the light, but who maybe one day will. And high up on my list is Peter's friend Paul Krugman, who just came out with something in the New York Times. You know, it's interesting that one of the pictures, here's the New York Times thing, and one of the pictures, there

22:19are pictures in this, and here's this mad, he does one good thing and he does one bad thing, the good thing is he attacks mathematical economics, and here you have, I don't know if you can see it, but you have some sort of weird mad scientist who's got all sorts of numbers on the blackboard and he's saying math is no good, well yes, and Austrians would agree with that, but the Keynesians are very heavily mathematical, so I don't really understand Another criticism I have, here's a bunch of economists, there's no black and no women. How politically correct is that? I mean, we can't allow that. They don't call me Mr. Walter Moderate Block, they also call me Walter Politically Correct Block too, for other reasons. Now here's a picture of Hayek. I mean, it looks to me like Hayek, and it says descending economists were marginalized. Well, Hayek is a descending economist who was marginalized, but they never I want to mention the word Hayek just to have his picture, which is a little strange. What

23:14else do I have here? Note that I'm only criticizing the cartoons because I think the piece is worthless and the cartoons are the only thing worth mentioning. Here, however, is my second person that I want to criticize. This guy, Jeffrey Miron, who writes for the Cato Institute. This is sort of an anomaly or a puzzle because you'd think the Cato Institute would be free enterprise and on the side of the good guys and, you know, Austrian economics, but unhappily it's not really true. So what does Jeffrey Miron say in his In Defense of Doing Nothing, a Cato letter from spring 2009? Well, he does two good things. First he says that house ownership, CRA, Fannie and Freddie, and people like that hurt us and he's absolutely right there. But this really isn't the Austrian key. It doesn't address the cluster of error. It's sort of like the Smoot-Hawley tariff. It screwed up things worse. It exacerbated things during the Great Depression. Also, he's against artificially

24:23Raising Wages, which will always create unemployment, but again, doesn't really get to the crux of it, but still, okay, give them a B+. The second one, and a problem with this also is that the big housing mortgage debacles are in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Florida, and this isn't really what HUD and Fannie and Freddie and the Boston Fed were doing in China, as Peter said, put people into houses that they don't belong into because they're very poor and they have no collateral and they have no job and they have no nothing, but you give them a house anyway with no down payment. These people were not like that, so that couldn't be the entire explanation of the housing debacle. The second thing that he does well is bailouts, yes, we're against bailouts and that's all well and good, but that pretty much exhausts the thing. What I did is I got it up on the web and I used He uses the word search for interest because remember interest rates or interest is the

25:21key element to understanding the business cycle from the Austrian perspective. He mentions interest seven times, twice he decries artificially lowering interest rates but he never says why which is more than passing curious. One time he talks about mortgage interest deductibility which I'll get to in a second and then the other four times that he uses the word interest he talks about it in terms of Interest Groups, namely, all the bailouts went to interest groups, which is well and good and correct, but it doesn't really get to the essence of the Austrian business cycle theory, the cluster of error. Okay, so those are the two good things. Now let's get into some of the bad things. First, he talks about the failures of rating agencies. What are rating agencies? Rating agencies like Fitch, Standard & Poor, Moody's, are supposed to be the do line, the distant early Warning Line, you know, due line for the Soviet missiles incoming. Well, these places, Fitch, Moody's and the Standard & Poor, are supposed, they're bond rating agencies or

26:24rating agencies for commercial paper. They're the ones that are supposed to tell us, hey, you know, something's a little swanky over here and there's a little fraud there. Instead they're giving all these toxic assets, AAA, quadruple A ratings, the highest ratings. Now the problem with Miron here and the problem with his Cato's letter is that nowhere is it mentioned that these are wholly owned subsidiaries of the government. Look, if you try to start a rating agency, you just can't do it. You'll be in violation of the law because there are restrictions on entry. These three rating agencies are part and parcel of the government apparatus. They're not part of the free enterprise system and Miron doesn't seem to realize that. The second one, and I really fell off my chair, and if I didn't use the bald joke on that, I would use it on this, when he talks about greed. Greed is the cause of our present problems.

27:17I have here a thing about the Harvard MBA. It says Harvard MBA students pledge to be ethical and they eschew greed and it says that they will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their own narrow ambitions at the expense of others. What is this expense of others nonsense? The free enterprise system is a mutual beneficial system. If I trade you this pen for my tie, you want my tie, I want your pen, it must be that I value your pen more than the tie, and it must mean that you value the tie more than the pen. Whenever we have voluntary trade, there's mutual benefit. There's none of this expense of others. Whenever you buy something, look, you bought a newspaper for a buck, you valued the newspaper more than the buck, they valued the buck more than the newspaper, nobody gained at the expense of anyone else in the free enterprise system, rather the free enterprise system is this beautiful way of cooperating with each other.

28:12So Miron, I guess I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist because these are Harvard MBAs and Miron is a Harvard professor, I wonder if there's any connection that they're somehow coming out against greed. I mean Adam Smith said it's not from the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker paraphrase is here that you get your goods. It's out of a keen appreciation of their self-interest. It's not from benevolence. It's out of greed. Greed is good, said, what's his name from that movie, Wall Street, Gordon Gekko. Gordon is our man. I mean, greed is good. Greed leads us to promote the common good. And what is this attack on greed from the Cato Institute? They called the 1980s the Decade of Greed. I mean, come on. I lived through the 1980s.

29:02Many of us did. Were people more greedy then? No. Greed works at a white hot fever pitch all the time. You don't become more greedy. I mean, you can't explain inflation based on greed. I mean, how do you measure greed? People are always 100% greedy. It's true they could be greedy on behalf of their wife and their kids and charity and cancer research Research, or the Mises Institute or other worthwhile places, but they're interested in promoting their own personal self-interest and sometimes it's defined widely that way. The third one is market failure. Here's a quote from him and he says, there was no plausible market failure in the production of housing or in people's decisions about whether to buy homes or not. The implication here is that if there were a market failure then there There would be justification for government. This is a code word among economists, market failure. Market failure is the key. And what Miron is saying, well, there's no market failure

29:59here, so there's no government activity that's justified. But the implication is, if there were market failure, well, then the government would be justified in intervening in the economy. Well, I say to you here and now, there ain't no such thing as market failure. There's only and not any government failure. Okay, what's his next mistake? Ah, here we have deductibility of mortgage interest rate. I said I'd get back to this. Here's a quote. A partial list of policies designed to increase home ownership includes the Federal Housing Administration, the Federal Home Loan Banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, the deductibility of mortgage interest rate, the homestead exclusion, the personal bankruptcy code, Tax Favor Treatment of Capital Gains on Housing, Hope for Homeowners Act, and it goes on with four or five others.

30:47Now most of these, I agree with them, but what is this mortgage deductibility, mortgage interest deductibility? Why is he attacking that? I mean, that's good. Whenever the government taxes you less, that's good. It's not bad. I mean, doesn't this guy favor free enterprise? This reminds me of the drug legalization debate. Now, drug legalization is good because it reduces crime, right now there are young black men shooting each other, a couple of years ago, young Italian men shooting each other, not over drugs but over booze, so there'd be less crime, we'd be safer, we wouldn't have bathtub gin or poisonous marijuana, the jails would empty out, 3 quarters of the jails in some cities are filled, or the jails are filled 3 quarters with drug crimes which are no crimes at all, and then there are these libertarians who say, and another reason The reason for legalizing drugs is now the government would have more tax revenue.

31:44No! Yes, we favor drug legalization, but in spite of the fact that the government would have more money, the government's got too much money already. I'll just summarize the other mistakes he makes. He's pro-FDIC. Pro-FDIC? I mean, that's horrible. He is. Just read it here. He doesn't realize that fractional reserve banking is responsible for the banking crisis. He thinks that education is a market failure, that we should have public education, whereas free enterprises favor privatization of education. Heck, we favor privatization of just about everything. You know where they vote for rent control mainly? Santa Monica, Berkeley, New York City, Cambridge, Ann Arbor. Well, what's true in those places? They're all millions What they do in school is Queer Studies, Feminist Studies, Black Studies, Marxism, Deconstruction.

32:41If we do anything with education, we ought to tax it. Not that I favor that, but I say if we do anything we should tax it, not subsidize it, with the exception of Grove City and Loyal and a few other very, very few places that are free enterprise. So I have to give him maybe a B plus for the two good points and then an F for the rest and maybe he comes out with a C-, not a very good mark. Thanks for your attention.