Podcast appearances and mentions of George Stigler

Most people associate Adam Smith with free markets and “the invisible hand”. But does this conventional narrative purposefully ignore Smith's deep suspicions about monopolies and power?  Georgetown assistant professor Glory Liu argues this narrow interpretation is actually a deliberate historical reconstruction. In her book, “Adam Smith's America”, Liu reintroduces the famous philosopher as a theorist of power who worried deeply about organized wealth distorting society. She notes that Smith watched early merchants use their disproportionate resources to capture political influence and actively suppress workers.  Hosts Luigi and Bethany debate whether early merchant wealth accumulation truly mirrors the massive capital concentration seen in today's corporate landscape. They also explore the argument that reintroducing moral foundations to economic theory might provide a better foundation for capitalism itself. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jesús Huerta de Soto traces the Austrian school's intellectual roots from the Spanish scholastics to Rothbard, making the case that anarcho-capitalism is the natural endpoint of the classical liberal tradition.The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed.The Austrian Economics Research Conference is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian school, bringing together leading scholars doing research in this vibrant and influential intellectual tradition.Full Text version of the Lecture (Submitted by Prof. Huerta de Soto):Thank you very much to the Mises Institute and Joe Salerno for his kind introduction as well as for inviting me to deliver this “Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture” to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Murray N. Rothbard's birthday. It is the second time I visit the Mises Institute to deliver this most important lecture: The first one was almost thirty years ago, back in April 1997, when I delivered a lecture on “The Scholastic Roots of the Austrian School”. In this second opportunity I am very happy to have been able to accept Joe's invitation and to come with a very well represented retinue of ten of my colleagues and doctoral students. All of them are teaching as professors or making their research at our more than twenty-year-old Doctoral and Master Programs in Austrian Economics at King Juan Carlos University back in Madrid, and which is the only one officially approved and with full validity inside the whole European Union. You have already had the opportunity to hear from each one of them a detailed description of the so-called “Madrid Austrian Research Hub” and of all the activities we are developing every year, including the 54 Doctoral Theses on Austrian Economics that have been read up to now in our program. And here you have also copies of the English version of our main books published by Routledge, Edward Elgar, and by the Macmillan Austrian Series edited by my Madrid Colleagues, the German professor Philipp Bagus and the Canadian professor Dave Howden. And you will have the unique opportunity to buy these books that, as you know, have a hefty price of almost 100 pounds each one, at the almost “stolen property” and symbolic price of 5 dollars per copy, thanks to the most generous help of the Spanish Jesús Huerta de Soto Foundation that is helping to finance our participation in this important event.And now what I will do in the next forty minutes is to try to summarize not only my main contributions, but also “The Libertarian Vision of the Scientific and Moral Truth” as we see it from our Austrian School Hub in Madrid. And I will do it by focusing on a series of fundamental points.Precisely, the youngest of all sciences, Economics is the one that has provided Humanity with the most important scientific contributionThe first one is that Economics, being the last science to arrive, or as Mises said, "the youngest of all sciences," has nevertheless achieved the milestone of providing Humanity with the most important scientific contribution. For the first time, and thanks to Economic Science, human beings have discovered and understood that voluntary social cooperation, free from all institutional and systematic external coercion, generates a spontaneous order that cannot be designed nor organized by anyone, and that peacefully and without limits drives the prosperity and expansion of Humankind.This transcendental message of Economic Science, on the one hand, resolves the impossible antithesis of attempting to apply, within the realm of interactions carried out by human beings endowed with free will, the manipulative approach of external entities that human beings have no choice but to use, supported by technology and the natural sciences, in order to dominate the subject of the material world. And on the other hand, this is a radically revolutionary message: for the first time, it has been scientifically demonstrated that states, in any of their forms, are neither necessary nor viable; that Society, understood as a process of voluntary human interactions, does not need anyone to govern it, because it regulates and organizes itself spontaneously; and that the attempt to coordinate Society on the basis of social engineering and state coercive commands is impossible, doomed to failure, and gives rise to all kinds of distortions, social conflicts and violence, that continually hinder and block human progress.Economic science is generalized into a complete Theory of Liberty that makes it possible to reinterpret History and promote the expansion of civilizationThe second point is that Economics has been generalized into a whole Theory of Liberty, understood as the most essential attribute and requirement of human nature. Liberty means that all human actions are carried out voluntarily, based on the principle of non-aggression, and free of external coercion or violence imposed and organized from above by the always minority group of human beings who, under whatever title, exercise any kind of political power.Moreover, Economics dismantles and turns upside down the erroneous and biased account of Thomas Hobbes and his followers. Neither was the "state of nature" a terrifying situation, nor did a supposed "social contract" ever exist or was it necessary to create and maintain a State that would impose order and guarantee peace. What happened was precisely the opposite: natural evolution consisted, above all, in the spontaneous discovery of the great advantages provided by voluntary exchanges and peaceful trade. Systematic and generalized violence, war, and terror arose only with the appearance of States, as coercive institutions composed of the most antisocial and violent human beings, who wanted (and still want) to live at the expense of plundering those citizens who earn their living by working and trading peacefully with each other (Oppenheimer, 1926).Thus, Economics, demonstrates that what Étienne de La Boétie named "voluntary servitude", is an anti-human aberration to which human beings have been subjected for centuries. And that it is not necessary to continue with the resigned habit of obeying the State; nor do governments enjoy an aura of prestige (but are literally "stripped" of any attribute of intellectual or moral superiority); nor is the caste—or “praetorian guard”—of intellectuals, “experts”, and acolytes that surround states and rulers to be regarded as untouchable; nor should we allow ourselves to be seduced and deceived by subsidies or perks, whether supposed or real, with which they seek to purchase the will and secure the loyalty of exploited human beings, so that they will consent, voluntarily and permanently, to their exploitation and servitude (De la Boétie, 1975).Economics is the Science developed by the Austrian School of Economics, which should in fact be known as the Spanish School, as it has its origins in the thinking of our scholastics of the Spanish Golden AgeThe third point is that Economic Science has reached its highest level of development thanks to the Austrian School of Economics. As you know, our school is based on the realism of its analytical assumptions, in the dynamic approach based on the entrepreneurial, creative, and coordinating capacity of every human being, and in the study of the spontaneous and self-regulated order of the social process of voluntary human interactions (Huerta de Soto, 2008). The institutional and multidisciplinary approach of the Austrian School is also very relevant. As a result of the spontaneous social process important institutions emerge which, in turn, make it possible and drive it forward: Law and property rights rooted in human nature and discovered and developed spontaneously outside the state; the family, a basic and essential institution, on which the expansion of Humanity is made possible and consolidated; moral principles, which act as a true "automatic pilot" for liberty and which human beings internalize and transmit from generation to generation, thanks to the family and other community or religious institutions; economic institutions, and in particular, money, which also evolves spontaneously outside the State, and which can and should be considered the social institution par excellence, since by overcoming the problems of barter, it enables the exponential multiplication of voluntary exchanges and human interactions, within which the rest of the social, linguistic, moral, legal, economic, and religious institutions are discovered, shaped, and perfected.Our fourth point is that the first theorists of the spontaneous order emerged in the field of law, led by the great jurists of classical Rome. They were the first ones to understand the organic and evolutionary nature of the social process, and so they became, without being aware of it, the first economists. Their tradition was kept alive throughout the Middle Ages thanks to the Catholic Church and, through thinkers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Antoninus of Florence, and Saint Bernardino of Siena, eventually came to influence the Spanish scholastics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gathered around the University of Salamanca. As Rothbard demonstrated (Rothbard, 1976) these thinkers of the Spanish Golden Age should be considered the most immediate precedent of the Austrian School of Economics, which, precisely for this reason, should be called the Spanish School of Economics. And in fact, these Spanish scholastics were already able to articulate the following ten essential principles which constitute the theoretical foundation of the Austrian School:Firstly, the subjective theory of value developed by the Bishop of Segovia, Diego de Covarrubias, who as early as 1555 clearly explained that, although the objective nature of wheat is the same in Spain as in America, its price was higher in America because there human beings subjectively valued it much more highly; from this follows the correct relationship between prices and costs set out by Luis Sarabia de la Calle, in the sense that it is market prices that determine costs and not the other way around, as equilibrium theorists mistakenly believe; the Scholastics also realized that equilibrium models and prices lack realism and theoretical meaning because they presuppose a degree of knowledge “so complex that only God, and in no case human beings, could ever acquire it” (in latin “pretium iustum mathematicum licet soli Deo notum”), as already explained by the Jesuit cardinals Juan de Salas in 1617 and Juan de Lugo in 1643, more than three hundred years earlier than Hayek could conclude that “a science which assumes knowledge that can never be acquired is not a Science”; also the dynamic concept of competition is fundamental, understood as a process of rivalry among sellers based on the dynamic conception of market processes developed by Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla and Luis de Molina in 1589 and 1597, and that has nothing to do with the static model of "perfect competition" of equilibrium theorists; and also the important contributions of the Spanish Scholastics related with capital theory, business cycles, and the effects of fiduciary media generated by banks; so, particular emphasis should be placed on the rediscovery of the principle of time preference by Martín de Azpilcueta, following what Lessines had already stated in 1285; as well as on the fact that bankers commit mortal sin when they operate with fractional reserves, creating bank deposits as a form of virtual money (or chirographis pecuniarium, as Luis de Molina said in latin) that only exists in their accounting books and distorts the structure of relative prices, creating bubbles and deep economic crises that ultimately "bring everything crashing down," as Saravia de la Calle and Tomás de Mercado so vividly explained in the 16th Century; and in short, the Scholastic's idea that it is impossible to organize society through coercive commands due to lack of the information that would be required to give them coordinating content; as well as the discovery that inflation is a hidden and very harmful tax that arises from an act of tyranny, since it is neither known nor accepted by citizens, which would even justify the assassination of the King according to the theory of tyrannicide, a contribution originally made by the Castilian Comuneros eventually defeated by the tyrant King Charles V in 1521, and developed by Father Juan de Mariana almost a century later [in 1610].This entire line of proto-Austrian scholastic thought also spread throughout the Americas, especially in the newly founded universities of San Marcos in Lima and Mexico City in 1551 where brilliant disciples of these Scholastics, who had studied at the University of Salamanca itself, came to occupy prominent academic positions. Thus, for example, we should mention the cases of Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz in Mexico, and above all the great Juan de Matienzo, who became judge and president of the Royal Audiencia of Charcas and Lima from 1560 onwards (Popescu, 1997).Finally, the doctrine of our scholastics did spread even to North America two centuries later through the books of Juan de Mariana, who greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers of the United States.However, the southern part of the continent ultimately proved unable to neutralize the wave of growing statism and centralization that first came with the arrivals of the Habsburgs in Spain, and which was intensified even further after the arrival of the Bourbons with Philip V at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Martínez Marina, 1820). How different and much more prosperous and libertarian might the historical evolution of Spain and Latin America have been, had the statist centralism of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons not prevailed, and had the far more libertarian, local, and decentralized traditional representative institutions of the kingdoms of Castile instead remained predominant—institutions that were dismantled, together with Europe's first libertarian revolution, beginning with the defeat of the Castilian Comuneros at Villalar on April 23, 1521 (Leonard Liggio, 2025).The most important and far-reaching contributions of economic scienceLet us now turn, in greater detail, to the most important contributions of Economics, as developed by the Austrian School.First, human cooperation takes place spontaneously, without the need for anyone to organize it coercively from outside. This is so because human beings are endowed with an entrepreneurial and creative capacity that continually drives them to discover the multiple opportunities for profit that arise in their environment. Each of these opportunities embodies a previous discoordination in human behavior that remains latent until it is discovered and overcome by the corresponding entrepreneurial act. This entrepreneurial act always arises from a creative tension and interpretation of events of the outside world that is essentially subjective and, therefore, cannot be reproduced by any artificial intelligence algorithm; in other words, the same objective events can be interpreted in multiple ways, even contradictory ones, without it being possible to postulate which is correct until the corresponding entrepreneurial process is completed in the form of a subjective profit. In any case, every entrepreneurial act involves, firstly, the creation of information that did not exist before (regarding the profit opportunity that arose from the previous discoordination that had gone unnoticed); secondly, the transmission of that knowledge (directly to the parties involved in the entrepreneurial act and indirectly through a series of institutions and signals such as market prices); and third and finally, the coordination of the previous maladjustments takes place when the parties involved learn motu proprio, that is, voluntarily and for their own benefit, to discipline their behavior according to the needs of others (for example, when they discover that they achieve their ends more effectively by specializing and trading peacefully the mutual results of their efforts). The discovery of the essence of this pure entrepreneurial act, with its elements of creation and transmission of information and the spontaneous coordination of the previous maladjustments continually generated by human coexistence, constitutes the most important contribution that Economic Science has provided to Humanity, and explains why the spontaneous process of voluntary social cooperation that drives the multiplication of human beings and the expansion of civilization does not require any statist system of institutional coercion.Another essential contribution of Economics is the concept of Dynamic Efficiency, understood as the process of unlimited expansion of human creativity and entrepreneurial coordination that arises only within a specific institutional framework of moral and legal norms. This framework is the one grounded on the ethical principle according to which every human being has a natural right to appropriate the results of his entrepreneurial creativity; that is, a property right over what one has created and which did not previously exist, which is the most obvious and important human right. For this reason, (dynamic) Efficiency and Morality and Justice (properly understood) cannot be separated one from the other; or, as we might say, they are two sides of the same coin in the sense that only Justice and Morality induce and generate efficiency; and at the same time, what is dynamically efficient in economic terms cannot be neither unjust nor immoral. All of which, on the other hand, demonstrates the integrated order that exists in the social universe, and highlights the three levels of research (theoretical, ethical, and historical) that complement and reinforce with each other and are essential in our search for truth (Huerta de Soto, 2000).Finally, another key contribution of Economic Science is to have demonstrated the impossibility of socialism, or better, the impossibility of statism, in the sense that it is impossible for the State to achieve and coordinate what it promises for the following four reasons:First, because of the enormous volume of information required for such coordination, which the State cannot acquire because it is dispersed in the minds of the eight billion human beings who participate and interact in the social process every day. Second, given the tacit and inarticulate character of this information (and therefore its inability to be transmitted in an objective manner). Third, because the information that is generated is not "given," nor is it static, but instead changes continuously as a result of human creativity, making it impossible to transmit today information that will only be created tomorrow, and which is precisely the information that the organs of State intervention and the so-called “experts” would need today in order to direct society to achieve their objectives tomorrow. And fourth, and above all, because the coercive nature of State commands blocks the entrepreneurial activity of creating the very information which the State organization itself would need in order to give its commands a coordinating content. In sum, the State is always and everywhere violence and coercion; coercion blocks the entrepreneurial act of creation, discovery, and adjustment of discoordinated human behavior, while at the same time preventing the creation of the information and the emergence of free market prices that make economic calculation and social coordination possible. For this reason, statism is not only unnecessary but is also scientifically impossible.The impact of these essential contributions of Economics on the course of social evolution has so far been very limitedAll of these scientific contributions have so far achieved only a very partial, imperfect, and limited impact on the inertia of a social and political reality that has for centuries been characterized by the coercive power of States and rulers, and by the more or less resigned servitude of the citizens. And despite the very limited nature of this impact to date, which at best has materialized in a series of naïve and "liberal" revolutions aimed, with as much arrogance as lack of success, toward the impossible objective of trying to separate and limit the powers of states and rulers through political constitutions and "liberal democracies" (Rothbard, 2009); Humanity has been propelled as never before in those places and historical moments where it has managed, despite everything, to at least partially free itself from the State and open up some of the new channels of liberty shown by the teachings of Economics. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, which was but the first chapter of the never-completed "Revolution of Liberty" inspired by Economics. And although what has been achieved in terms of prosperity and standard of living by the now eight billion human beings seems relatively significant—and indeed it is—we cannot even conceive of the standard of living and population size that could be achieved if Humanity were able to take full advantage of and fully implement the teachings of Economic Science.We can be few and poor in a context of servitude and submission to the State, or many and wealthy in a context of liberty (Hayek, 1988, p. 133). The globe is practically empty of human beings (the Earth's current population would fit into an area equivalent to that of the state of Alaska, with a population density equal to that of Brussels). And we cannot even imagine the prosperity that could be achieved in a free market daily driven by eighty billion, or even eight hundred billion, human beings. Economics explains and demonstrates that the increasing prosperity of an ever-growing population of human beings never results from deliberate and coercive State plans, nor from the egalitarian income redistribution, nor from increases in public spending, nor from subsidies, debt, or inflation, but only arises from the free market of the capitalist system. This consists of the process of voluntary exchanges among all human beings who, endowed with an innate entrepreneurial and creative capacity, are able to detect and assess, through the system of free prices, the relative urgency and necessity of each good and service, overcoming the relative scarcity of each and satisfying, every day and in the best humanly possible way, the desires and needs of billions of consumers. Entrepreneurs who succeed in this never-ending process of profit-seeking accumulate significant resources, which, in turn, are saved and invested in capital goods and new technologies that make human beings increasingly productive, boosting their wages and standards of living; a virtuous process of continuously expanding prosperity and population growth that, if not coerced or hindered by the State, has no limits.Therefore, it is crucially important for the future of Humanity that it be able to take full and maximum advantage of the lessons and essential message in pursuit of human liberty that Economics provides. But this will only be possible if we are able to unmask and carefully analyze the powerful forces of the pseudoscientific and counterrevolutionary reaction that has been mobilized to prevent the advance of the theory of liberty derived from Economic Science. Despite their diverse origins, they all converge on the same objective: to attempt to justify and preserve State coercion at all costs under the appearance of scientific legitimacy. They are driven by the "fatal conceit" (Hayek, 1988) of many visionaries, thinkers, and supposed "experts" who believe themselves to be clever enough to correct the spontaneous market order, of course, using the violence and coercive power of the State. Together with a privileged caste of rulers, bureaucrats and acolytes, they continually manipulate a Humanity that is sadly accustomed to serving the State. For all of them, it is vital that statism be maintained and that the message of liberty provided by Economics never prevail.Next, we will list the main reactionary pseudoscientific currents that have infiltrated Economic Science like a lethal virus and constitute, in Hayek's terminology, "the counter-revolution of science" (Hayek, 1955).Pseudoscientific reactionary currents opposed to Economic Science. The role played as “useful innocents” by many libertarian economists of the counterrevolutionary mainstreamFirst, positivism and scientism as pseudoscience. By "scientism" we must understand the improper application of the methods of the natural sciences to the field of Economic Science. Thus, while the natural sciences study their object of research as something external, measurable, and quantifiable, Economics studies the implications of the voluntary actions of human beings. And given the essentially creative nature of human beings, the supposed empirical "evidence" has, at best, only a superficial, partial, and always historically contingent value. In Bastiat's words, of "what is seen" —or rather, what is believed to have been seen— but not "what is not seen" (Bastiat, 1995); and at worst, it always entails the assumption, that human beings are an object of research that can be manipulated as the matter of the external world studied by the natural sciences. This inevitably introduces the idea that to improve the world, the State and its rulers must use their coercive power to manipulate and change the things they believe they see in their historically contingent "empirical photos." But these "empirical photos" cannot capture the underlying dynamic essence of spontaneous social processes, let alone what is already happening spontaneously to solve and coordinate every problem. Therefore, it is not surprising that from the very first steps of Economic Science promoted by the Austrian School, its most violent opponents were the "socialists of the chair" gathered around the German Historical School, reinforced in France by the empiricists of the school of Saint-Simon, the insane Comte, and Durkheim, who sought to create a new and alternative pseudoscience of society. And their unhealthy positivist and ultra-empirical influence has persisted to the present day, first through American Institutionalism and later through the massive compilation of empirical data, for example, in the work of Wesley C. Mitchell or Henry Schultz, the latter, as shown by Professor Salerno, having gone on to exert a decisive influence on his assistant Milton Friedman and, through him, even on the Chicago School itself (Salerno, 2023).Secondly, the pseudoscience of neoclassical economics is characterized by its claim that only its own approach constitutes true “science,” that is, the approach based on the principles of equilibrium, maximization, and constancy. Moreover, in addition to the lack of realism of its assumptions, it adds the reductionism of a mathematical language that has developed in response to the needs and demands of the natural sciences, but which is alien to Economic Science because it does not allow for the subjective concept of time or entrepreneurial creativity. Neoclassical economists develop their pseudoscience based not on real human beings of flesh and blood, but on "ideal types" that are like "robotic penguins" who, even in their most sophisticated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models are limited to moving and reacting to events and State coercion as if they were characters of a sort of economic video game ("videogame economics"). Yet neoclassical pseudoscience, despite its apparent and ever-increasing sophistication, is not capable of accounting for the immense complexity of the real world and rebels against the idea of spontaneous market order in two ways that are equally harmful to human liberty: on the one hand, by promoting the coercive "social engineering" of central banks, States, and governments to use "fine tuning" to force reality toward to the mathematical optimum of their models; and, on the other hand, by labeling as "market failures" everything they believe they observe in reality that does not coincide, in their empirical studies, with their ghostly models of “perfect” equilibrium and adjustment (Milei, 2023); failures that, according to them, refute the "benefits" of the spontaneous order of the market and human liberty, and justify their elimination as soon as possible by a coercive State authority. Note also how neoclassical pseudoscience needs, and feeds upon, the empirical work of the previous pseudoscience, positivism, in order to justify its conclusions against human liberty and in favor of State coercion, so that positivists and neoclassicists join hands and end up reinforcing each other in their reactionary agenda.Third, Keynesianism and macroeconomics as pseudoscience. The very “macro” approach already entails, inevitably, an obvious bias in favor of justifying State intervention, aggression, and coercion against the spontaneous order of the market and human liberty. As F. A. Hayek pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1974 (Hayek, 1978), macroeconomists ignore everything they cannot measure, specifically truly relevant economic processes and theories. At the same time, they believe that certain aggregate concepts—which lack genuine economic meaning—possess a “real” existence, that permits to collect empirical information or evidence that can be manipulated and statistically treated. Once again, macroeconomic pseudoscience goes hand in hand with positivist pseudoscience, and the two reinforce with each other in their counterrevolutionary reaction. Furthermore, Keynesianism is particularly harmful: not only does it flatly deny the coordinating capacity of creative entrepreneurship and the spontaneous market order, but it also builds as an alternative explanation a whole model—of course—of equilibrium with permanent unemployment, to justify the coercive intervention of the State in the lives of human beings in the form of all kinds of fiscal and monetary manipulations. Moreover, the macroeconomic and Keynesian pseudoscience feeds upon, and is reinforced by, the pseudoscientific approach of the Neoclassical School, to the point that, the so-called "neoclassical Keynesian synthesis" became, throughout the twentieth century, the main reactionary movement inside Economics. Keynesians and macroeconomists thus become the champions of that intoxication with statism, manipulation, and political power which constitutes the framework, orchestrated by governments and central banks, to which we have, regrettably, become accustomed and in which we are forced to live. This context repeatedly destabilizes the spontaneous market order, generates serious financial and economic crises and social conflicts, and continually hampers the prosperity and advance of civilization.We have left the quasi-religious mysticism of Marxist pseudoscience for last, because Marxism was scientifically dead even before it was born: in fact, it emerged with—and was theoretically demolished by—the subjectivist revolution led by the Austrian School of Economics. From the beginning, the Austrian School's development of time preference and capital theory revealed the contradictions and grave scientific errors of Marxism, while at the same time exposing its pronounced character as an intellectual fraud (Böhm-Bawerk, 1949). This intellectual fraud was historically illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of virtually all other communist countries, after many decades of unspeakable human suffering for a large part of the world's population, all of which was perfectly consistent with the theory on the impossibility of statism developed by the Austrian School beginning with the von Mises of 1920 (Mises, 1936), and which was the final nail that forever sealed the coffin of the corpse of Marxist pseudoscience (Huerta de Soto, 2010).Finally, in this context, we must mention the destructive role played by a number of distinguished economists who, although they defend liberty and the market economy, could be described as a kind of "useful innocents" in Mises' terminology (Mises, 1947). This is so because, even though they officially oppose rampant statism and defend liberty, by accepting—even if only partially—some of the postulates of the reactionary pseudoscientific currents we have described, they ultimately end up, often without intending to and much to their regret, providing additional impetus to the statist reaction within our discipline; for example, when they insist on advising States with proposals aimed at making them more efficient and at helping them do somewhat better things that they should not be doing at all. By way of illustration, we should include in this category of “useful innocents”, for example, thinkers as the Karl Popper of The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 1966, p. 366), who came to admire the “scientific capacity” and even the “humanism” of Karl Marx, and who proposed a statist strategy of “piecemeal social engineering”; or George Stigler, when he claimed that only empirical evidence could determine which economic system, socialism or capitalism, might function (Stigler, 1975, pp. 1-13); and, more generally, the members of the Chicago School, led by Gary Becker and Milton Friedman. Becker when defending that only economics developed within the strict limits of equilibrium, constancy, and maximization, typical of the neoclassical pseudoscience, constitutes true "economic science." And even more serious could be considered the case of Milton Friedman, whose very sincere love of liberty and intense and popular media support for free markets stand in sharp contrast to his pseudoscientific approach based on the aggregate method of economics of Keynesian origin, on positivist empiricism, and on the full acceptance of the unrealism of assumptions. Only in this way it can be explained Friedman's litany of scientific errors which, much to his regret, have invariably ended up reinforcing statist interventionism, to the point that Hayek himself was forced to conclude that after Keynes's The General Theory, the book that has done the greatest harm to Economic Science has been Friedman's Essays in Positive Economics (Hayek, 1994, pp. 145).The failure of democracy and classical liberalism: the triumph of statismAs we see, many classical liberals and advocates of liberal democracy have also acted as "useful innocents." The fatal error of classical liberals lies in the failure to realize that their program is theoretically impossible, because it incorporates within itself the seeds of its own destruction, precisely to the extent that it considers necessary and accepts the existence of a State (even if it is "minimal") understood as the monopolistic agency of institutional coercion. Therefore, the great error of classical liberals is very basic: they believe in a program of political action and economic doctrine that aims to limit the power of the State, while at the same time accepting it and even considering state's existence necessary. However Economic Science has already shown that the State is unnecessary, that statism (even in its minimal form) is theoretically impossible, and that, given human nature, once the State exists, it is impossible to limit its power. On the other hand, liberal democracy is a concept as naïve as it is impossible. Mises already warned us that democracy could only function if all its participants accepted the classical liberal principles, which is impossible because democracy itself encourages and amplifies vote-buying and the partisan use of power. So, the inevitable conclusion is that "liberal democracy" is a contradiction in terms as absurd as speaking (following Anthony de Jasay) of a “square circle,” of “hot snow,” or of a “virgin prostitute” (A. de Jasay, 1990). And even Hayek considered democracy unworkable if it is understood as the exercise of absolute power by majorities (Kratos in classical Greek). It should therefore come as no surprise that democracy once and again tends to be a perverse system based on lying and buying votes with money stolen through taxation.The fact is that the State attracts like a magnet the worst passions and vices of human nature, for instance, when individuals try to obtain rents produced by others using the State's coercive power. Moreover, the combined effect of the privileged groups, the phenomena of governmental myopia and vote-buying, the megalomaniacal character of politicians, and the irresponsibility and blindness of bureaucracies generate a dangerous, unstable and explosive cocktail, continually shaken by social, economic, and political crises which, paradoxically, are always used by the political caste to justify further doses of intervention and statism that, instead of solving problems, further aggravate them. Statism therefore corrupts the entire social body and at the same time blocks the spontaneous and free market solutions of social and economic problems.In fact, the State has become the "idol" that almost everyone turns to and worships. Statolatry is the most serious and dangerous social disease of our time. We are educated to believe that all problems can and must be detected and solved by the State. Our destiny depends on the State, and the politicians who control it are expected to guarantee everything our well-being may require. Human beings remain immature and rebel against their own creative nature, which makes their future always uncertain. They demand a crystal ball that assures them not only knowing what will happen, but also that any problems that arise will be solved for them. This "infantilization" of the masses is encouraged by politicians, as it justifies their own existence and ensures their popularity, position of dominance, and capacity to control. In addition, a whole legion of intellectuals, so-called "experts," and social engineers join in this arrogant intoxication of power. Not even the Church and the most respectable religious denominations have been able to realize that statolatry today constitutes the principal threat to the free, moral, and responsible human being; that the State is a false idol of immense power, worshipped by all, and that does not allow Humanity to be free from its control or have moral or religious loyalties beyond those the state can dominate. Furthermore, it is kept hidden from the public that the state is the true source of social conflicts and evils, and "scapegoats" (such as "capitalism" or private property) are blamed for the problems, and they become the goal of the most serious condemnations, even from moral and religious leaders, almost none of whom have realized the deception or dared to denounce that statolatry is the main threat in the present century to religion, morality, and, therefore, to human civilization.Perhaps the main exception within the Church is included in the brilliant biography of Jesus of Nazareth written by Benedict XVI. That the State and political power constitute the institutional incarnation of the Antichrist should be obvious to anyone with a minimal knowledge of history who reads the former Pope's considerations on the most serious temptation that the Evil One can present to us (and I quote Ratzinger literally): "The tempter is not so crude as to propose to us directly the worship of the devil. He merely proposes that we opt for the rational solution, that we prefer a planned and organized world in which God may have a place as a private spiritual matter, but must not be allowed to interfere in our essential purposes. Soloviev attributes to the Antichrist a book entitled The Open Road to World Peace and Prosperity; it becomes the new Bible, and its core message is the worship of well-being and rational planning," by the state (Ratzinger, 2007). And so, we should not be surprised that, for example, the great author of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. Tolkien, whose Catholic anarchism I fully share, went so far as to say that he would arrest anyone for simply daring to pronounce the word "State." Because the State is, always and everywhere, a reality of violence and systematic coercion against the most intimate essence of the human being, which is his capacity to act freely, creatively, and spontaneously; and so, it is unavoidable to conclude that the State is essentially immoral and that statism constitutes the principal threat to humankind.A theological digression: the dismantling of statism as a logical necessity inseparable from the work of GodAnd almost without realizing it, we can go ahead with a theological digression on how dismantling the State is a logical and moral necessity inseparable from the work of God. I fully understand that referring to God in this conference may come as a shock to many of those present, but I would ask that even those who do not believe in God, at least for dialectical purposes, make an effort of imagination and, for the next few minutes, imagine that God does indeed exist.And what do we mean by God? We must understand God to be a Supreme Being, Creator out of love for all things. And the most important creature that God has created is precisely the human being: in His image and likeness. And if there is a point of connection between God and man, it is precisely in the creative entrepreneurial ability: the capacity to discover, to see, and to create new things, goals and actions. But now I am going to go one step further and attempt to demonstrate that God is not only the Supreme, loving Creator of all things, but that—moreover—God is libertarian.And what does it mean to say that God is libertarian? It means that God, the Lord of all the Universe, has absolute power over it, and yet He chooses not to use force, but always leaves his creatures free. To the point that He gives human beings the freedom to rebel against Him; even though, again and again, God forgives human beings and allows them to rise up and begin anew.God always lets the universe He has created, flow in a spontaneous manner ("laissez faire, laissez passer, le monde va de lui même" could be the motto of our libertarian God). And this despite the fact that human beings tempt God again and again and demand that He manifest His absolute power, that He give us clear and indisputable signs of His existence and supreme power in order for us to believe in Him. But of course, God does not accept our challenge. Why? Because love and liberty are inseparable, and a forced conversion, for example by an evident cataclysm, would be completely contrary to that liberty with which God has created human beings out of love.Moreover, the Kingdom of God is not of this world; Jesus himself says this to a fearful Roman state official, who was also in charge of judging him: "My kingdom is not of this world." Does this mean that there are two types of kingdoms? The kingdoms of this world or States, which would be legitimate at their own level (remember "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"), and the Kingdom of God, of ("render unto God the things that are God's"). That is the standard interpretation that has prevailed until now, but I think is completely wrong. The Kingdom of God—which is the exact opposite of the kingdoms or States of this world—never makes systematic use of violence and coercion: it is a Kingdom that has already come to us and, moreover, has been given to us freely, in an act of immense mercy and love (Deus caritas est). And just as the hateful institution of slavery came to an end, the Kingdom of God will also dismantle the kingdoms of this world, the states of this world, or as St. Paul said, of every principality, power, and glory (Ephesians 1:21-23), because God is libertarian and man is made in the image and likeness of God.Ludwig von Mises, in his book Interventionism, introduced the term "destructionism" to refer to the economic and social effects of statism. If Evil (represented by statist destructionism in Mises' terminology) were to prevail, the human race and civilization would have disappeared long ago. The fact that, despite everything and the immense power of seduction of statism over humankind, the process of social cooperation continues to unfold and even prosper in certain historical periods and geographical areas, is a clear manifestation that God does not abandon the world nor leave libertarians alone in their struggle against the Evil; and that Good, represented by liberty, the principle of non-aggression, the spontaneous order of the market, entrepreneurial creativity and coordination, and above all, moral principles, always with God's help, prevails and is capable of overcoming Evil, represented by the fatal conceit of the statist ideal and the destruction that it produces.And now I will finish with some thoughts on anarcho-capitalism as the only possible system of social cooperation truly compatible with human natureAnd now I will finish with some thoughts on anarcho-capitalism as the only possible system of social cooperation truly compatible with human nature. The most important intellectual and moral event that is taking place nowadays is the full fusion between Christianity and anarcho-capitalism. Because anarcho-capitalism is the only possible system of social cooperation that is truly compatible with human nature. Anarcho-capitalism is the purest representation of the spontaneous market order in which all services, including law, justice, and public order, are provided through a voluntary process of social cooperation. In this system, no area is closed to the drive of human creativity and entrepreneurial coordination; efficiency and justice in the resolution of problems are simultaneously enhanced, while the conflicts, inefficiencies, and discoordinations generated by the State are eradicated at their root.The progressive abolition of States and their gradual replacement by a dynamic network of private agencies different legal systems, and providing all kinds of prevention and defense services, constitutes the most important social transformation that will take place in the twenty first century. Without forgetting that exactly what prevents us from knowing with precision what the future without the state will look like, the creative nature of entrepreneurship, is what gives us the peace of mind of knowing that any problem will tend to be resolved and overcome, once the entrepreneurial effort and creativity of Humanity are devoted to its solution (Kirzner, 1985).Therefore, the revolution against the “Old Régime” carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the old classical liberals, today finds its natural continuation in the anarcho-capitalist revolution of the twenty-first century. The message of anarcho-capitalism is clearly revolutionary. Revolutionary in terms of its goal: the dismantling of the State and its replacement by a competitive market process consisting of a network of private agencies, associations, and organizations. And revolutionary in terms of its means, especially in the scientific, economic-social, and political fields:a) First, Scientific revolution, in the field of Economic Science, which becomes the general theory of spontaneous market order extended to all social areas. And by contrast and opposition, the theory and analysis of the effects of social discoordination generated by statism in any sphere in which it operates, as well as the study of the transition process from the State towards liberty.b) Second, an Economic and social revolution, as we cannot even imagine today the immense human achievements and discoveries that could be made in an entrepreneurial environment totally free from statism. Today, and despite continuous governmental harassment, an unknown civilization is already developing, with a degree of complexity that is beyond the reach and control of the state, and which will achieve unlimited expansion once it manages to completely rid itself of statism. And when human beings become more and more aware of the perverse nature of the State that restricts them, and of the immense possibilities that are frustrated each day when the State blocks the driving force of their entrepreneurial creativity, the social demand to reform and dismantle the State will multiply creating a future that is largely unknown to us but that will elevate human civilization to heights that we cannot even imagine today.c) And finally, a political revolution in which, although day-to-day political struggle is important, it should not be the top priority. It is true that the least interventionist alternatives must always be supported, in clear alliance with the efforts of classical liberals in their long term impossible democratic limitation of the State (including reforms such as those proposed by Hayek in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty). But the anarcho-capitalist does not stop at this task, for he knows that he can and must do much more. He knows that the ultimate goal is the total dismantling of the State, and this goal leads all his imagination and political action in everyday life. And here we cannot fail to mention the unprecedented impact of our disciple and follower of our Master Program in Austrian Economics in Madrid, the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, who has done more than anyone else before to disseminate the principles of the Austrian School and the anarcho-capitalist ideal. Principles that he never ceases to quote and explain and defend once and again in all his public appearances, from the United Nations to the Davos Forum; and in all his meetings with other Heads of State, universities, and parliaments, to whom he even gives copies of the most important Austrian works by Mises, Hayek and even myself, as he did, for example, with the two popes, Francis and Leo XIV, with the French President Macron, the Italian Prime Minister Meloni, and even with Elon Musk. For us, it is a great honor that Milei has, to a large extent, emerged from the Austrian School of Madrid and that he continually keeps drawing inspiration from us. This is, without a doubt, much more important than incremental political steps in the right direction—which should of course be welcomed—and that should never fall into a political pragmatism that could betray the ultimate goal of achieving the end of the State (Huerta de Soto, 2010).And all this with tireless enthusiasm in the search for scientific and moral truth, an attitude that, inspired by the immortal work of Miguel de Cervantes, we could describe as follows: "It matters not whether they be giants or windmills, when the plume of our helm is stirred by the winds of tenacity and faith." And always creating a future that, although it may seem distant today, may at any moment witness giant steps that will surprise even the most optimistic among us. History has entered into an accelerated process of change which, although it will never stop, will open a whole new chapter when humankind finally succeeds in ridding itself definitively of the State, reducing it to no more than a dark historical relic of tragic memory.Thank you very much.REFERENCESBASTIAT, Frédéric: Selected Essays on Political Economy, Foundation for Economic Education, New York 1995.DE LA BOÉTIE, Étienne: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Free Life Editions, Nueva York 1975.BÖHM-BAWERK, Eugen von: Karl Marx and the Close of His System, Augustus M. Kelley, Nueva York 1949."The Exploitation Theory," Capital and Interest, Vol. I: History and Critique of Interest Theories, Libertarian Press, South Holland 1959.HAYEK, Friedrich A. von: The Counter-Revolution of Science, Free Press, New York, 1955.Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (eds. Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar), University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1994.Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1979.The Fatal Conceit: the Errors of Socialism, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988."The Pretence of Knowledge," in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1978.HUERTA DE SOTO, Jesús: Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham y Northampton 2010."A Hayekian Strategy to Implement Free Market Reforms," in Theory of Dynamic Efficiency, Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2010.Proyecto Docente, Chapter I: "Ciencia y Economía," Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid 2000.The Austrian School: Market Order and Creative Entrepreneurship, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham y Northampton 2008.DE JASAY, Anthony: Market Socialism: A Scrutiny, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Occasional Paper no. 84, 1990.KIRZNER, Israel: "The Perils of Regulation: A Market Process Approach" in Discovery and the Capitalist Process, University of Chicago Press, 1985.LIGGIO, Leonard: "The Hispanic tradition of Liberty," published in Procesos de Mercado: Revista Europea de Economía Política, vol. XXII, nº 1, Summer 2025, pp. 403-420.MARTÍNEZ MARINA, Francisco: Teoría de las cortes o grandes juntas nacionales de los reinos de León y Castilla, Collado, 1820.MILEI, Javier: Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap, in The Emergence of a Tradition: Essays in Honor of Jesús Huerta de Soto, Volume II (editors Howden, D., Bagus, P.), Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023.MISES, Ludwig von: Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Jonathan Cape, London 1936.Planned Chaos, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson 1947.OPPENHEIMER, Franz: The State, Vanguard Press, Nueva York 1926.POPESCU, Oreste: Studies in the History of Latin American Economic Thought, Routledge, London 1997.POPPER, Karl: The Open Society and its Enemies, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1966.RATZINGER, Joseph. Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. Doubleday, New York, 2007.ROTHBARD, Murray N.: "New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School," in The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (editor Edwin G. Dolan), Sheed and Ward, Kansas City 1976, pp. 52–74.Anatomy of the State, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn 2009.SALERNO, Joseph. "Milton Friedman's Views on Method and Money Reconsidered in Light of the Housing Bubble", in The Emergence of a Tradition: Essays in Honor of Jesús Huerta de Soto, Volume I, (editors Howden, D., Bagus, P.), Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023.STIGLER, George: The Citizen and the State, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975, pp. 1-13.

It's hard to make money running an airline - but Southwest was profitable every year for nearly five decades. How did it manage it? Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore how a carrier with just four airplanes shuttling across Texas revolutionized flying by offering free whisky, cheap late-night tickets and free-for-all seating allocation. Southwest developed a winning formula that forced its competitors to change how they did business - but then the Southwest model fell apart. Find out why. Key books: Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger Jr; Nuts by Kevin and Jackie Frieberg Other sources: The Theory of Economic Regulation by George Stigler; Fortune Magazine: The Rapid Descent of Southwest Airlines; Southwest Airlines: When Herb Met Rollin.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Standard economic theory informs how we think about business strategy and the economy and presumes that people are selfish, have well-defined preferences, and consistently make welfare-maximizing choices. In other words, we are rational. But what if that is not the case?Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler is out with an updated edition of his bestselling 1991 book, "The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life." In the new edition, he and his co-author Alex Imas (both professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) reflect on the last thirty years of behavioral economics and how it makes sense of tensions between our psychological biases and impulses that make us less than fully rational in practice. Using a wealth of empirical evidence, the authors explore the behavioral anomalies that contradict the expectations of standard economic theory and explain a wide range of real-world examples from banking crises to social media addiction.Earlier this month, Thaler joined Bethany and Luigi for a sold-out Capitalisn't recording in front of a live audience in Chicago to walk through the anomalies of human behavior that have endured from biblical times to the age of Big Tech. Thaler reflects on how views and the adoption of behavioral economics have changed over the last thirty years, both within academia and beyond (wonder why you can't put down your phone? Silicon Valley has read Thaler). He also shares how behavioral economics can influence public policy from canceling “junk fees” and dubious subscriptions to deciding which parts of the Affordable Care Act to keep and which are unlikely to produce their desired outcomes. Over conversation, light banter, and audience Q&A, Thaler shares his views on the state of capitalism and reveals how there is no grand unified theory of human behavior that incorporates all its irrationalities—only departures from the standard model. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this conversation from 2023, Alex and Mike Munger discuss two strains of thought within the liberty movement - one concerned with philosophical purity and cohesion, the other with advancement towards a common ideal of greater freedom for all.  Episode Notes: Mike's article "The Right Kind of Nothing": https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-right-kind-of-nothing/ An introduction to Coasian bargaining: http://www.ejolt.org/2015/09/coasian-bargaining-2/  The Piece commissioned by Leonard Read by Milton Friedman and George Stigler on Rent Control: https://fee.org/resources/roofs-or-ceilings-the-current-housing-problem/  Mike Munger's piece "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" https://www.aier.org/article/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things-directionalists-vs-destinationists/  James Buchanan on Relatively Absolute Absolutes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-021-00883-0 

In President Donald Trump's recent joint address to Congress, he said, "To unshackle our economy, I have directed that for every one new regulation, ten old regulations must be eliminated." Elon Musk, whom Trump has assigned to execute this vision, has argued that it is time to get rid of all regulations, or as Musk said, “regulations, basically, should be default gone.”Joining Bethany and Luigi to discuss this intensified commitment to deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism is Sam Peltzman, perhaps the leading living expert on the economics of regulation. Peltzman is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and director emeritus of the Stigler Center, which sponsors this podcast and is named after his mentor, Nobel-Prize laureate George Stigler. Together, the three of them chart a historical perspective on regulation, from Stigler's ideas of regulatory capture to the unintended consequences of deregulatory efforts over time to today's “chainsaw” approach to gutting federal agencies. To understand the costs and benefits of regulation, they discuss how federal agencies have recently intervened in markets, if the private sector could not have accomplished these interventions more efficiently, and if these interventions did more harm than good. Their case studies include the funding, testing, and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the regulation of cryptocurrencies, the management of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the role of the government in addressing climate change. In the process, they answer the trillion-dollar question: Are Trump's deregulation efforts actually efficient?Episode Notes:Revisit our recent episode with Federico Sturzenegger, the Argentinian Minister for State Transformation and DeregulationRead the op-ed Bethany mentions writing in the wake of the financial crisis: Who Wants a 30-Year Mortgage?At the end of the conversation with Peltzman, Luigi asks him about his recent academic papers tracing marriage and happiness. Read these papers on the Stigler Center's Working Paper archives: The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness (2023) and The Anatomy of Marital Happiness (2025)

I was pleased to be joined by the illustrious Dr. Peter Linneman to get his thoughts on the economy, tariffs and the industrial real estate market!In the interview Dr. Peter Linneman shares his perspective on current events in the industrial real estate market, emphasizing the importance of cutting through the noise to focus on fundamental economic indicators such as job growth, GDP trends, and capital flows. He uses an analogy of trying to predict the Super Bowl winner 10 years from now to illustrate the futility of long-term market forecasts based on short-term events. Linneman discusses the state of various real estate sectors, noting that office spaces have bottomed out and are starting to recover, while industrial warehouses, particularly big-box facilities, have experienced overbuilding but are expected to absorb excess supply due to steady demand growth. He also addresses reshoring and manufacturing, stating it will remain limited due to higher labor costs in the U.S., and emphasizes America's economic strength due to robust capital markets and innovation. Linneman remains optimistic about the resilience and long-term strength of the U.S. economy despite ongoing challenges.About Dr. Linneman: For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular, and highly regarded, Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI. Most recently, he co-authored (with Dr. Michael Roizen and Albert Ratner) the best-selling book "The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow."Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast. Connect with Dr. Linneman:Website: https://www.linnemanassociates.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlinneman/SAM Elimu charity: https://www.samelimucharity.org/--

Do you know Thomas Sowell, one of the most amazing individuals speaking into people's lives the last fifty years? Have you read any of his books or listened to him on videos? If so, you know what I'm talkin' about! If not, you are in for a real treat. Join Kevin as he profiles the amazing Thomas Sowell, a man especially relevant to all of us in the troubled culture and for the troubled times in America! // Download this episode's Application & Action questions and PDF transcript at whitestone.org.

Luisteraars! De laatste keer dat Matthijs Korevaar in De Rudi & Freddie Show zat, kwam hij met relativerende noten over de woningmarktmalaise: in de Gouden Eeuw was het erger. Nu heeft hij zijn neus uit de muffe boeken getrokken en is hij teruggekeerd naar onze eeuw, daar blijkt ook het nodige over te zeggen. We hebben het over de laatste woningmarktplannen van demissionair minister van Volkshuisvesting Hugo de Jonge. De Jonge heeft de afgelopen jaren een schot hagel van beleid afgevuurd op de woningmarkt, en dan met name op de vrije huursector (ongeveer 8 procent van het woningbestand). Er was al opkoopbescherming, hogere overdrachtsbelasting, meer box-3-heffing, nu komt daar nog bij: de Wet betaalbare huur, waarmee de huren in de vrije sector omlaag worden verordonneerd. Is dat een goed idee? Op het oog is het in ieder geval sympathiek: verhuurders de woningmarkt uitjagen, zodat starters weer een woning kunnen kopen. Helaas impliceert het bestaan van een verhuurder ook een huurder. En uit Korevaars onderzoek blijkt: in huurwoningen wonen vaak meer mensen met een lager inkomen, dan in koopwoningen. Zie de woningmarkt als een stoelendans met veel te weinig stoelen: het gevolg van de Wet betaalbare huur is dat er meer stoeltjes gereserveerd zullen worden voor de beter bedeelden, die ook nog eens minder geneigd zijn de stoeltjes te delen met anderen. Lekker dan! Sowieso: schiet het op als we elke keer beleid verzinnen voor degene die geen stoeltje wist te bemachtigen in de stoelendans, waardoor iemand anders weer geen stoeltje krijgt, waarvoor we dan ook weer beleid gaan verzinnen? Heeft iemand misschien nog ideeën om er wat stoeltjes bij te zetten!? En dan is er nog een bonus: wat kunnen we leren van de verkoop van prestigieuze baantjes in prerevolutionair Frankrijk (wilt u de hoogste rechter worden van Parijs: kost je 500 franc!)? Niet veel, maar leuk is het wel. Zoals altijd kun je je opmerkingen en suggesties met ons delen via rudienfreddieshow@decorrespondent.nl. Leesvoer bij deze aflevering: - Het nog ontoegankelijkere gesprek dat Jesse en Matthijs in 2020 voerden: 'Het is nu moeilijk een huurhuis te vinden, maar in de Gouden Eeuw was het nóg moeilijker'. (https://corr.es/3a4503) - De publicatie 'Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem' (1945) van Milton Friedman en George Stigler. (https://corr.es/a64d0c) - Deze recente column van correspondent Tim 'S Jongers: 'Bestaanszekerheid is geen geldkwestie.' (https://corr.es/3526bd) - 'Morele ambitie', het nieuwste boek van Rutger, kun je al reserveren via onze kiosk. (https://corr.es/79a30c)

Luisteraars! De laatste keer dat Matthijs Korevaar in De Rudi & Freddie Show zat, kwam hij met relativerende noten over de woningmarktmalaise: in de Gouden Eeuw was het erger. Nu heeft hij zijn neus uit de muffe boeken getrokken en is hij teruggekeerd naar onze eeuw, daar blijkt ook het nodige over te zeggen. We hebben het over de laatste woningmarktplannen van demissionair minister van Volkshuisvesting Hugo de Jonge. De Jonge heeft de afgelopen jaren een schot hagel van beleid afgevuurd op de woningmarkt, en dan met name op de vrije huursector (ongeveer 8 procent van het woningbestand). Er was al opkoopbescherming, hogere overdrachtsbelasting, meer box-3-heffing, nu komt daar nog bij: de Wet betaalbare huur, waarmee de huren in de vrije sector omlaag worden verordonneerd. Is dat een goed idee? Op het oog is het in ieder geval sympathiek: verhuurders de woningmarkt uitjagen, zodat starters weer een woning kunnen kopen. Helaas impliceert het bestaan van een verhuurder ook een huurder. En uit Korevaars onderzoek blijkt: in huurwoningen wonen vaak meer mensen met een lager inkomen, dan in koopwoningen. Zie de woningmarkt als een stoelendans met veel te weinig stoelen: het gevolg van de Wet betaalbare huur is dat er meer stoeltjes gereserveerd zullen worden voor de beter bedeelden, die ook nog eens minder geneigd zijn de stoeltjes te delen met anderen. Lekker dan! Sowieso: schiet het op als we elke keer beleid verzinnen voor degene die geen stoeltje wist te bemachtigen in de stoelendans, waardoor iemand anders weer geen stoeltje krijgt, waarvoor we dan ook weer beleid gaan verzinnen? Heeft iemand misschien nog ideeën om er wat stoeltjes bij te zetten!? En dan is er nog een bonus: wat kunnen we leren van de verkoop van prestigieuze baantjes in prerevolutionair Frankrijk (wilt u de hoogste rechter worden van Parijs: kost je 500 franc!)? Spoiler: niet veel, maar leuk is het wel. Zoals altijd kun je je opmerkingen en suggesties met ons delen via rudienfreddieshow@decorrespondent.nl. Leesvoer bij deze aflevering: - Het nog ontoegankelijkere gesprek dat Jesse en Matthijs in 2020 voerden: 'Het is nu moeilijk een huurhuis te vinden, maar in de Gouden Eeuw was het nóg moeilijker'. (https://corr.es/3a4503) - De publicatie 'Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem' (1946) van Milton Friedman en George Stigler. (https://corr.es/a64d0c) - Deze recente column van correspondent Tim 'S Jongers: 'Bestaanszekerheid is geen geldkwestie.' (https://corr.es/3526bd) - 'Morele ambitie', het nieuwste boek van Rutger, kun je al reserveren via onze kiosk. (https://corr.es/79a30c)

It's been nearly 16 years since the federal government bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion in response to the financial crisis that precipitated the Great Recession. The idea that the public must guarantee critical financial institutions that are “too big to fail” was controversial then, but does it still remain an issue? Stanford finance professor Anat Admati, whom the New York Times profiled in an article titled "When She Talks, Banks Shudder," argues it's become worse.Admati joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the updated edition of her and Martin Hellwig's book, The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It. Dissecting new financial developments, including the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, the crypto industry, and shadow banking, Admati lays bare how the current financial system is rigged for the benefit of the few. She also prescribes how we can build and regulate a fairer and more accountable financial system and, thus, a more stable and equitable capitalist economy.Show Notes:Read the 2024 preface of The Bankers' New Clothes on ProMarket.Revisit our 2019 conversation with Anat and Chicago Booth Professor Guy Rolnik, exploring the reasons why market and policy may fail in finance and technology and what we must do to address such failures.Read Anat's contributions to our e-books on George Stigler and Milton Friedman.

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Sam Peltzman is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.Sam is was a graduate student to Milton Friedman and a contemporary to George Stigler, the famous economist who coined the term "regulatory capture".Regulatory capture is an important concept. AI and crypto is under fire by regulators.The legendary venture capitalist Bill Gurley gave a talk at the All-In Summit 2023 that went viral. He quoted Stigler's adage that "as a rule regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit."The problem is that it's not true.Stigler asked the right question, but didn't give the correct answer.Sam Peltzman has thought and written extensively about this question for 50+ years since Stigler's famous article. The truth is simpler, but more sinister.In fact, we learn in this episode that it's not industry that seeks to be regulated. Even the pharma industry did not proactively lobby for more regulations - they resisted the landmark Kefeuver-Harris amendments (1963) that shaped the modern FDA.It's regulators who seek to regulate for their benefit.Bill Gurley might be on the right track commenting on Elizabeth Warren's behaviour towards tech: "You attack 'em they have to come to you.” This is a very nuanced episode on what might be the most important but least understood problem for greater progress in technology.Sam Peltzman's legacy helps us to understand what's coming at us.Yet his message is deeply optimistic: technology is still unstoppable. It can only be temporarily slowed down, not eliminated. Get full access to Stranded Technologies at niklasanzinger.substack.com/subscribe

To access a FREE collection of resources, go to www.TheMaverickVault.com   Explore the intricacies of real estate investing and delve into the current state of the economic market in this episode featuring Dr. Peter Linneman. Gain valuable insights into emerging trends, metrics, and strategies to maximize returns while mitigating risks. Unveil the opportunities that await in this ever-evolving landscape by tuning in today!   Key Takeaways From This Episode Important inflation metrics you need to know in the current economic market  The impact of Federal Reserve System policies on property investors and capital markets  A simple analysis of the economic growth of various nations  Ultimate benefits of investing in multifamily and retail properties  Qualities to look for in a real estate investment partner  Advantages of learning from seasoned investors   References/Links Mentioned Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio | Kindle and Hardcover About Dr. Peter Linneman Dr. Peter Linneman, a renowned figure in real estate, has gained global recognition for his combination of rigorous scholarship and practical business insights. With over 45 years of experience, he has received prestigious accolades, including the Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research from PREA, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center, and the Special Achievement Award from Realty Stock Magazine. He has been named one of the "25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and included in The New York Observer's list of the "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate." Dr. Linneman earned his Master and Doctorate in Economics under the guidance of esteemed Nobel Prize winners, such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz, and Jim Heckman. He was the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the renowned Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During his tenure at Wharton, he co-edited The Wharton Real Estate Review and published over 100 scholarly articles. He authored eight editions of the acclaimed book "Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities" and the widely read quarterly report, the Linneman Letter. He co-created the highly regarded Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI. Recently, he co-authored the best-selling book "The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow" with Dr. Michael Roizen and Albert Ratner. Besides his academic accomplishments, Dr. Linneman has enjoyed a successful business career as the Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates.   Connect with Dr. Peter Website: Linneman Asscociates, LLC  Email: dlinneman@linnemanassociates.com    Are you a passive real estate investor seeking financial freedom? Almost daily, new headlines break on the latest financial market upset. Now is the time to get educated on how to strategically invest in commercial real estate for long-term financial freedom. Grab your copy of “How to Passively Invest in a Changing Economic Environment” Go to…www.MavericksInvest.com Want to keep up to date on the commercial real estate market, trends, investing tips and know what Neil is buying right now? Connect with him at Legacy Impact Investors and be sure to register for his newsletter. Connect with Neil Timmins on LinkedIn. If there is a topic you want to know more about or a guest that you would like to see on the show, shoot Neil a message on LinkedIn.   About Neil Timmins Having completed hundreds of Fix & Flips, Wholesales, Wholetails, Novations, and Owner-Financed deals, Neil longed to quit forfeiting time for dollars. After building a portfolio of single-family rentals to produce passive income, he found the strategy to be anything but passive. Neil didn't go looking for his first commercial deal—he stumbled into it. Since then, he has refined the process of analyzing and buying commercial properties that produce stellar cash flow. Neil has been involved in over $300,000,000 in real estate transactions. While his holdings in commercial assets include apartments, offices, mobile home parks, and self-storage units, his passion is industrial property. Neil now has verticals in residential real estate, multiple commercial asset classes, brokerage, publishing, and a successful podcast.   Click here to see video of the podcast. 

Alex and Mike Munger discuss two strains of thought within the liberty movement - one concerned with philosophical purity and cohesion, the other with advancement towards a common ideal of greater freedom for all.  Episode Notes: Mike's article "The Right Kind of Nothing": https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-right-kind-of-nothing/ An introduction to Coasian bargaining: http://www.ejolt.org/2015/09/coasian-bargaining-2/  The Piece commissioned by Leonard Read by Milton Friedman and George Stigler on Rent Control: https://fee.org/resources/roofs-or-ceilings-the-current-housing-problem/  Mike Munger's piece "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" https://www.aier.org/article/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things-directionalists-vs-destinationists/  James Buchanan on Relatively Absolute Absolutes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-021-00883-0 

Casey Mulligan, Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago, joins the podcast to discuss how he got interested in becoming an economist from his days as an undergraduate at Harvard in Martin Feldstein's Ec10 class, being an economics graduate student and professor at the University of Chicago teaching the Chicago Price Theory approach, his experience working in the Trump Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), and the long-term influence of University of Chicago economics figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, Peter Linneman shares how people's life expectancies limit us from embracing our full potential and capabilities. Peter has been in the business and has been giving gifts of greater quality of living standards.    Peter believes that the most unvalued skill in life is intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity will make people take action, but sometimes, it leads them to be blind but smart enough to recover from that. The inspiring words from Peter are that people are just afraid of conditions, not age. Realizing you're capable will be a big help, so listen to this!   Key Points from This Episode:   How to notice cognitive bias? Peter shares how to check people's thinking Why are people constantly distracted by things that seem unimportant but are not that important? How can people be active and reactive to people from tough times? Ten years from now, Peter explains why the success and failure of people have nothing to do with what happens six months from now. How is it empowering oneself to give the most extraordinary talents? Peter shares that a lot of people settle for mediocrity. How important is it that people should be aware of how they behave and interact with the environment? Peter shares how people can do better than mediocre.  Why is it important to focus on what matters? Tweetables: “Don't get distracted by shiny objects ” - Peter Linneman  “And I could promise you, it's not, it's not easy. It's just what you do ” - Peter Linneman “There are times when you can do so much better than mediocre ” - Peter Linneman   Links Mentioned Peter Linneman's Website   About Peter Linneman For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".   After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the  Wharton School of Business at the  University of Pennsylvania. For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center.  During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular, and highly regarded, Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI.    Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.   Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast.   --------------- Are you a real estate investor looking to elevate your income, freedom & lifestyle? If so, optimize your daily performance by downloading our free guide, Raising the Bar - 5 Steps to Elevate Your Habits, at elevatepod.com. In this guide, created by your host Tyler Chesser, you'll learn why you do what you do, how to easily institute cues in your environment to trigger desired behavior, directly applicable steps to create a fulfilling future and much more. Get your free copy at elevatepod.com and kick-start your new habits today. Your future self will thank you! This episode of Elevate is brought to you by CF Capital, a national real estate investment firm. CF Capital's mission is to provide property investment and asset management solutions to help investors like you maximize their returns by investing in high-value multifamily communities. If you are looking for risk-adjusted alternative investments in quality apartment communities, and are seeking tax optimized cash flow with appreciation upside without all the hassle of management, you might benefit from learning more about investing alongside our team. You're invited to reach out and learn how you can invest with us by visiting cfcapllc.com. We're also currently offering a free ebook called The Bottom Line - 10 Ways to Increase Cash Flow in an Apartment Complex. Whether you're a new or an experienced investor, we're confident you'll find massive value in this resource. Get your free copy today at cfcapllc.com.

In this episode of Purpose-Driven Wealth, your host, Mo Bina, and Peter Linneman weigh everything about today's uncertain world economic market. During the early take-off of the real estate industry, Peter saw how things developed. With years of insight into the investing world, here, Peter answers whether or not the FED should raise interest rates, how Russia's war on Ukraine benefits the US, his perspective on today's inflation, and so much more. In this episode, Peter talks about: How real estate was back then… Keeping a balanced view of the inflation Yes—the FED should raise interest rates Higher oil prices help the US Peter Linneman's opinion on crypto and so much more! About Peter Linneman:   For nearly 45 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".   After receiving both his Master's and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz, and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the  Wharton School of Business at the  University of Pennsylvania.   For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review.   He has published over 100 scholarly articles, eight editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report. He is also the co-creator of the popular and highly regarded Real Estate Finance and Investment Certification course, REFAI.   Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, LLC, a leading real estate advisory firm, and its affiliates. For more than 40 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.   Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his SAM Elimu educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for nearly 50 years and remains an exercise enthusiast.   Follow Peter Linneman on:   Website:          https://www.linnemanassociates.com/ Email:              dlinneman@linnemanassociates.com   Connect with Mo Bina on:   Website:          https://www.high-risecapital.com/ Medium:          https://mobina.medium.com/ YouTube:        https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ISsEKBHlkX7lk9b68SKLA/featured Instagram:       https://www.instagram.com/highrisecapital/   For more information on passive investing in commercial real estate, please check out our free eBook — More Doors, More Profits — by clicking here: https://www.high-risecapital.com/resources-index      

Ready for the roaring '20s?! Dr. Peter Linneman on the economic data he's tracking According to leading economist Dr. Peter Linneman, all economic indicators are pointing to a new-age roaring 20s! Watch the latest Walker Webcast to get a sense of the data points Dr. Linneman and his team are tracking and his advice on navigating the upcoming economic boom. Having analyzed the latest data from Q2, Dr. Linneman also reviews his past predictions and provides insights into the trends impacting the commercial real estate space. Host Willy Walker and Dr. Linneman discuss: • Uncertainty in the coming months due to variants of Covid-19 • Dr. Linneman's thoughts on unemployment numbers and what may happen when unemployment stipends end in early September (9-minute mark) • Insights on the changing dynamics of labor, the necessary shifts in business models, and what will happen to those who fled cities in the past year (18-minute mark) • Analysis within the Linneman Report, which discusses the pros and cons of the GDP returning to 2019 levels (22-minute mark) • Mr. Walker and Dr. Linneman also discuss the Gallup poll: Satisfaction with America, why it is higher than it has been in the past decade, and the role the news and social media have played in this • Jump to the 35 minute mark to hear them discuss the health of U.S. households and how we can take advantage of it Want an economist's forecast for office, multi-markets sector and jobs? Keep watching to find out. ABOUT THE SPEAKER For over 40 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate". After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Have you ever heard the term "regulatory capture"? It's a famous economic theory that the regulation and regulators we create to keep certain industries in check can be captured and bent to the desires of those very industries. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the paper that first proposed this theory. It's called "The Theory of Economic Regulation" and it was written by none other than the namesake of the center that produces this podcast, George Stigler. We recently hosted a conference of some of the most prominent economists to reflect on why the ideas of this paper are still revered and relevant today.

Are we getting our money's worth? Dr. Peter Linneman on Stimulus, Inflation, & Identifying our Collective Enemy Willy Walker interviews renowned economist Dr. Peter Linneman on the economy and the CRE industry. Their conversation is packed with insights into government stimulus, unemployment, asset class performance, and so much more. Want to find out an economist's forecast for office, multi-markets sector and jobs? Keep watching to find out. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: For over 40 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate". After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. GET NOTIFIED about upcoming shows: » Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5jhzGBWOTvQku2kLbucGcw/videos » See upcoming guests on the #WalkerWebcast​ here: https://www.walkerdunlop.com/webcasts/ RELATED WEBCASTS: Tune in on Wednesdays for fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy, commercial real estate, and more! #WillyWalker​ hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. Guests include prominent CEOs, academics, high-ranking government officials, and sports heroes. Check out our previous videos: » Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_QkMqEzOkzNmWUe9kpfRJ4213jIh6LNk » Data, analysis, & insight into the economy and commercial real estate market with Dr. Peter Linneman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z-Pt9modLE&list=PL_QkMqEzOkzNmWUe9kpfRJ4213jIh6LNk » Has the Pandemic Forced Companies to Rethink their Communication Strategies?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=matZrSSdcNU&list=PL_QkMqEzOkzNmWUe9kpfRJ4213jIh6LNk Follow us: » LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/walker-&-dunlop/ » Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WalkerDunlop » Twitter: https://twitter.com/WalkerDunlop » Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/walkerdunlop/ Subscribe: » Newsletters: https://explore.walkerdunlop.com/subscribe

Episode: 197 Host: Alpha Mike Intro: Alpha welcomes the Nation to episode #197. How to contact us RaiderCop.Com and RaiderCopNation.com. Parler is back so join us on, Parler @RaiderCop and our other social media outlets attached below MEWE, Winkin, Clouthub, Gab, Parler, Facebook, Instagram, and Rumble. Alpha talks about the death of his Grandmother which was just short of 103. Alpha gives us an Intro on Mr. Thomas Sowell. Word of the Week: But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. James 1:22-24 Main Topic: Thomas Sowell, Why We Should listen Born in Gastonia NC, on June 30, 1930 Born poor, Thomas Father would die before his birth and his mother would die at child birthday Thomas as adopted by a Great Aunt and raised by her and her two adult daughters At the age of 8, Thomas would move to NYC Harlem with his adoptive family Never having a t.v. as a child they would have a telephone and radio (reaching the big time) Family friend names Eddie Map would mentor Thomas Sowell Dropping out of Stuyvesant High School, Thomas would join the USMC with an MOS of photographer during the Korean War With an Honorable Discharge, he would get into Civil Service living in Washington D.C. Attending night classes at Howard University, Thomas scored very high in the college board exams Thomas would also attend Harvard University and receive a BA in Economics in 1958 Thomas would earn a Masters Degree from Columbia University During his 20's, young Thomas would see himself as a Marxist Thomas would learn and understand Marxism was nonsense, while working for the government Early in Thomas Sowell, professional publications  he wrote "Sympathetic Examination Marxist Thought Vs. Marxist-Leninist Practices' Thomas would learn the raising the minimum wage, hurts the poor Thomas would receive a Doctor in Philosophy in Economic University of Chicago Thomas would study under George Stigler, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics Thomas, would have Milton Friedman as his mentor, another 1976 Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences Thomas Sowell would go from Professor to Fellow at the Hoover Institute Thomas would appear on the William Buckley show Firing Line. Thomas, would write articles for up to 300 newspapers for many many years calling it quits on December 27, 2016, but many would be rewarded with YouTube interviews Books, many, many books giving each reader his knowledge and wisdom Thomas Sowell, wanted to become a professional baseball player and wwould suffer a right should injury, so he taught himself to throw left handed. Thomas Sowell, "I survived two months of Paris Island" Up Next: Tony Ducks #198 Reference: Common Sense in a Senseless World Thomas Sowell Late Talking Children Thomas Sowell on Black History MYTHS Promoted by the Left Thomas Sowell's Ultimate MIC DROP Moment Thomas Sowell on YouTube Instagram @milo_raider_cop  Co-host of Raider-Cop Tube coming in 2021 Spotify   Stitcher  PodBean Join the Raider-Cop Nation Pistol Pete the Gunsmith Kilo Sierra’s Firearms Training or Investigation: Sepulveda inc MeWe, WimKin, Rumble.ApplePodcast GooglePodcast Pandora  Parler: @RaiderCop  CloutHub: @RaiderCopWimkin: @Martinino and Raider Cop PodcastMeWe: Raider-Cop Podcast & Alpha MikeGab: @RaiderCopPodcast#JailsLASD #CACorrections #MDCR #NYPD #LAPD #LASD #MDPD #MPD #NYSP #NJSP #LVPD #Security #HCSO #PBSO #BSO #OCSO #PCSO #SFPD #DPD #HPD #SAPD #LCSO #FMPD #CCSO #NYC #NYCDOC #NJDOC #PPD #SLPD #CPD #TestEverything @RaiderCopNation #RaiderCopNation #TrainUp #o9TG #WiseGuySeries #TrainUpSeries #RollCallSeries #ThinkOuttaDaBox #SideBarSeries #TheWord #Buccaneer #RaiderCopPodcast #BeLikeJack #Corrections #RaiderCop #EmpanadaLadiesOfGeorgiaYoutube Free Music: Triumph by Yung Logos, Rodeo Show by The Green Orbs, Minor Blues for Booker E’s Jammy Jams, Happy Birthday Mambo, by E’s Jammy James. The Awakening Patrick jazz Space, The Current Blues, Blue Infusion, Front Porch Blues, Crazy Blues, Midnight Special, Super Blues, Bright Eyed Blues, Bleeker Street Blues, Olde Salooner Blues, Miles Beyond, D.J. Freedem, Causmic, Verified Picasso, Coyote Hearing, Diamond Ortiz, Nico Staf Brooklyn & The Bridge,PatrikiosMusic: I'm Back by Eye of the beholder.

For over 40 years, Dr. Peter Linneman's unique blend of scholarly rigor and practical business insight has won him accolades from around the world, including PREA's prestigious Graaskamp Award for Real Estate Research, Wharton's Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center's Lifetime Achievement Award, Realty Stock Magazine's Special Achievement Award, being named "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Real Estate" by Realtor Magazine and inclusion in The New York Observer's "100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate".​After receiving both his Masters and Doctorate in Economics under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman, Peter had a distinguished academic career at both The University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. For 35 years, he was a leading member of Wharton's faculty, serving as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Public Policy as well as the Founding Chairman of the Real Estate Department and Director of the prestigious Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center. During this time, he was co-editor of The Wharton Real Estate Review. In addition, he published over 100 scholarly articles, four editions of the acclaimed book Real Estate Finance and Investments: Risks and Opportunities, and the widely read Linneman Letter quarterly report.​Peter's long and ongoing business career is highlighted by his roles as Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, a leading real estate advisory firm; CEO of American Land Fund; and CEO of KL Realty. For more than 35 years, he has advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.Although retired from Wharton's faculty, Dr. Linneman continues his commitment to education through his Save A Mind, Give A Choice educational charity for orphans and children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. He has been married for over 40 years and is an exercise enthusiast.

I am always fortunate to bring on interesting minds to this show. Today is no exception. Through a connection I was introduced to Peter Linneman and given the current state of global economies it made all the sense in the world to have Peter on ASAP. Peter Linneman is the principal of Linneman Associates, the CEO and founder of American Land Fund and of KL Realty. He previously served as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, retiring in December 2010. Linneman served as the founding chairman of Wharton’s Real Estate Department, and was the Director of Wharton’s Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center for 13 years. He is also the founding co-editor of the Wharton Real Estate Review. Linneman has also been named one of the 100 Most Powerful People in New York real estate according to The New York Observer and one of the 25 most influential people in commercial real estate by Realtor Magazine. Going back to the early days, both Peter’s Masters and Doctorate degrees in Economics came under the tutelage of Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman.

Today’s podcast, originally recorded in 1978, is a discussion between legendary economist Friedrich Hayek and then economics graduate student Jack High. During the conversation, Hayek talks about his major influences in economics as well as his upbringing in the social sciences. As they dive into Hayek’s philosophical and professional development, they touch on famous names from history such as John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig von Mises, and George Stigler. Originally Recorded:  1978

The late 1980s saw massive changes in the real estate industry. The passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and then the S&L crisis that followed transitioned the industry into a modern, institutional business. During this time, Dr. Peter Linneman had just started reworking the real estate program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.Dr. Linneman was an outsider economist who saw the obvious future in information, transparency, and capital flows. This week's conversation dives into Dr. Linneman's experience, from his perch at Wharton where he learned from and then counseled the then giants in the industry on this transformation as well as trained the future generation of leaders in the business.Dr. Linneman's story begins in Lima, OH, which at the time was a booming industrial city. He supported himself starting at a young age to attend private high school and went on to obtain his masters and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. During his studies, he was trained by prominent economists including Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Ted Schultz and Jim Heckman. As an economist by trade, he started his career in general economics and industrial organization, which at the time was mostly manufacturing. Soon after, he pivoted to commercial real estate.The Dean the University of Pennsylvania approached Dr. Linneman and asked him to evaluate the real estate curriculum in their business program. Following his research, he developed and designed Wharton's renowned real estate program and subsequently served as the founding chairman of the department and the Director of Wharton's Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center for 13 years. Quite literally, Dr. Linneman wrote the textbook for collegiate real estate programs.Beyond his time in academia, Dr. Linneman has had a tenured career as a Founding Principal of Linneman Associates, a leading real estate advisory firm; CEO of American Land Fund; and CEO of KL Realty. He's also advised leading corporations and served on over 20 public and private boards, including serving as Chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties, where he led the successful restructuring and sale of Rockefeller Center in the mid-1990s.While Dr. Linneman is now retired from Wharton's faculty, he and his wife Kathy support a program, Save A Mind, Give A Choice, which commits to educating young children of extreme poverty in rural Kenya. Dr. Linneman contributions to the academic study of the field has been instrumental in training the leaders of the real estate industry today and subsequent educational programs in real estate fields.

Government regulation is a force that influences nearly every aspect of our daily lives. The intentions are usually well-meaning. They are created to fix a problem or a perceived market failure. The problem that we run into time and time again is that the fixes usually create another problem, while only putting a temporary patch over the initial problem. The response is usually another patch with the same result. In the words of Nobel laureate George Stigler, “The trouble is that normally the way (advocates) want to solve the problem is to create either a new agency, or a new …

Adam Smith has been called the “father of capitalism.” The Nobel Prize winning economist George Stigler called Smith the “high priest of self-interest.” But what did Smith really think? As a virtue ethicist Smith believed that people were good (for the most part) and that self-interest, though important and different from selfishness, was not enough to create a vibrant society. This talk will cover religion, morality, and (of course) economics.For a complete list of speakers, topics, and dates of the Free Markets: The Ethical Economic Choice speaker series visit heritage.org/free-markets. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Echoing the narrative style of Director Quentin Tarantino, Professor Lawrence H. White delivers an overview of the economic intellectual debates of the 20th century in his book 'Clash of Economic Ideas.' These debates are framed through the lenses of individuals such as Irving Fisher, Rexford Tugwell, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig Erhard, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, John Maynard Keynes, F. A. Hayek, and others. What results is a non-linear and captivating historical narrative that offers a refreshing perspective from the roaring twenties and the Great Depression to the Great Inflation and fiscal policy issues of today. CC Music: Twisterium

(https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/landsburg.jpg) Steve Landsburg went to Chicago to do his graduate work in mathematics but was intrigued by the economics taught by Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and other luminaries.  We discuss the essence of Chicago price theory, the time when Steve was picketed by campus feminists, how Steve can climb aerial silks like Batman (while Bob looked more like the Penguin), and puzzles from his new book.   Mentioned in the Episode: (http://www.armchairecon.com/outsmart/) Steve Landsburg’s new book. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451651732/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=consultingbyr-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1451651732&linkId=6887c6010f2782e4ccba38520337cb4f) , one of Steve’s earlier classic books. TheBigQuestions.com (http://www.thebigquestions.com/) , Steve’s blog. Landsburg (http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/01/04/you-your-grandchildren-and-the-public-debt/) on Krugman’s take on government debt burdens. Murphy vs. Landsburg (https://mises.org/library/escalating-confusion) on escalators. Steve gets into trouble (http://www.thebigquestions.com/rush.html) when he blogs about Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke. Steve doing aerial silk heroics ( two (http://www.thebigquestions.com/videos/elbowcatch.html) ). “Carbon Taxes and the ‘Tax Interaction Effect,'” (https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2012/Murphycarbon.html) EconLib article by Murphy. The sound engineer for this episode was Chris Williams. Learn more about his work at ChrisWilliamsAudio.com (http://www.ChrisWilliamsAudio.com) .

What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Otto Lehto. Petersen: You're listening to Economics Detective Radio. My guest today is Otto Lehto of King's College London. He is formerly the chair of Finland's Basic Income Network. Otto, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Lehto: Oh it's my pleasure to be here. Petersen: So our topic for today is the basic income guarantee. Otto, you approach this idea from the perspective of political philosophy, so let's start by discussing that. How about we start by talking about two of the major figures in political philosophy: John Rawls and Robert Nozick. What do each of them have to say about the welfare state and where do your views diverge from theirs? Lehto: That is a good point to start indeed, although it is I think a bit lamentable that we have to start from those two figures because they have dominated the discussion so much during the last 50 years. In fact, it's very hard to have a conversation outside the boundaries set by those two figures, but they're both geniuses. They set the stage for the discussion, certainly in philosophy but also in public policy in many respects. So, let's start with John Rawls. John Rawls really was a towering figure in Harvard, really starting from the 60's and throughout the 70's. He wrote this book, A Theory of Justice, which is considered one of the really truly great books in political philosophy that revolutionized the way we think about these subjects. But the short version of his theory, which is very influential even up to this day, is that people in societies should look at the framework of living with each other as a cooperative game where we all try to sort of not only maximize our own position but also to make the whole game fair for everybody. And so he called his theory Justice as Fairness, where people are entitled to a certain respect and autonomy, certain liberties as members of the democratic community where they can pursue their own ends. But they're also entitled to a redistributive scheme if they happen to be among the worst-off people in the society. They are entitled to redistributive transfers. This framework sounds very familiar and indeed it should because it reflects the social democratic reality in which most Western societies operate. And even in later years he said that actually his philosophy, even though it starts from first principles and proceeds from there, is actually meant to be a philosophical justification of the intuitions that people in Western democracies---liberal democracies---have. So, you combine liberal ideas of individual freedom with these notions of the welfare state and so on. So that was the foundation of Rawls' system. So that's Rawls' system but Nozick came along and he found a place for himself in the same institution, that is Harvard, and he wrote a critique---a respectful critique---but a very thorough and deep critique of Rawls' theory. And he ended up justifying a minimal state that libertarians are very fond of. And he effectively said that no, people should just be seen as individuals who have some fundamental rights---he calls them side constrains---that people have a certain respect that they are owed by other people and it is very wrong for people to violate their personal boundaries and this includes the State. The state has actually no right to violate the sort of inviolable right to property rights that individuals have. So every form of taxation, that features very prominently even in Rawls' system, is theft. So, that is of course a very prominent theme in libertarianism. So his book---which by the way is really brilliant philosophically, it's not only just a standard justification of libertarianism but it's actually one of the great books in philosophy because it's so rich and powerful and full of interesting ideas and strange examples and brilliant footnotes and all that---but that lay down the other side. And so the debate in intellectual philosophy and history in the last 50 years or so has been largely dominated by these two figures: Rawls' Theory of Justice on the one hand, a justification of social democracy with a liberal bent, and then on the other hand Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, which is a justification of libertarian taxation-is-theft ideology. So that is the framework in which we find ourselves. Petersen: So there are these two competing extremes. You quote John Tomasi's critique of both of them. Would you like to summarize that for me? Lehto: Yes. John Tomasi wrote a wonderful book in 2012 called Free Market Fairness where he actually tries to combine these two perspectives. And he says that actually there's a whole tradition that we're forgetting here when we focus only on these two---as you put it, they are both at extremes---although at least for Rawls himself, he's often considered a centrist. But in many ways, he represents this kind of---from a perspective that Tomasi points out---the perspective of classical liberalism even though the Rawlsian center-left position, he's actually seen going fundamentally wrong in many ways, even though that is the unquestionable framework in which people today operate. And I should say, when I say that Rawls and Nozick laid a framework, it's not as if there is 50% on one side and 50% on the other side. Perhaps in politics, like the left-wing and right-wing ideologies have maybe about 50% on each side depending on the circumstances. But in philosophy certainly, Rawls has been the one that dominated the discussion and there are actually very few Nozickians around. But Tomasi points out that even with this seemingly very credible and too wonderful system that Rawls lays out, there is very little attention paid to issues like individual freedom especially in the domain of economy. And the lack of respect for people's freedom of choices in economic matters is actually a major shortcoming in Rawls' system. And this is exactly what Tomasi points out and from the perspective of classical liberalism which he raises to the standard of something that we should actually take more seriously than we have today. He points out that actually economic liberty is something we should insert back into the conversation in a serious way without however on the other side falling down the assumption that Nozick makes---and a lot of libertarians make---that the only justification for all economic liberty necessarily leads to a justification for the night watchman state or the minimal state of libertarianism where there is no role for government to provide public services and all that. And so this false dichotomy that Rawls and Nozick have put out has sort of made it difficult for people like myself and Tomasi and Matt Zwolinsky and people who consider themselves followers of the legacy of classical liberalism to lay out the more complicated, but I think more interesting, case for a system where robust economic liberties are combined with certain welfare state elements. Certain elements of taking seriously the power of the state to actually increase the real opportunities of people rather than just being a system of theft as Nozick calls it. Petersen: So that's where something like the basic income guarantee comes in. Can you summarize what that is and how is that different from the welfare states most countries currently have? Lehto: Right. Basic income guarantee, first of all, is defined as a regular payment to all citizens or residents of a political community that is given uniformly to all citizens. All people get the same amount and people get it without bureaucratic discretion. So it is given automatically or almost automatically to all people either in the form of a direct cash transfer to their bank account or in the form of a tax break system as in the form of negative income tax which is actually a form of basic income. So this system is supposed to, and it is a way, to replace the bureaucratic complexity and the nightmarish disrespect for human autonomy and human freedom that lies in the center of the current welfare state system in my opinion and certainly in the opinion of Tomasi and other people who I'm referring to. So the basic income guarantee is superior to the current system and it differs from the current system in the sense that it actually operates under the principle that we shouldn't use the state to guarantee specific favors to specific people, we shouldn't use the state as a one-upmanship mechanism whereby one group of recipients carries for the favor of bureaucracies, tries to---and in a way infiltrate---the mechanisms of the state to redistribute money and resources to themselves or to groups that they favor against the interests and desires of other groups because this leads to a spiral of negative-sum game in the political economy. And I think welfare states today in this sense have become victim to this overzealous one-upmanship of special interest group politics and basic income is a way to overcome this problem. Petersen: So the basic income guarantee, is it really a break from business as usual? It seems like it's a marginal improvement on the system we have now, but I guess you're suggesting that the system we have now encourages a lot of rent seeking, it has a lot of payments to different groups, it's needlessly complex. I could list some other problems with it. There are the so-called welfare cliffs where poor people face implicit marginal tax rates sometimes of a thousand percent, or some absurdly high amount because their benefits are clawed back when they earn a little more income. So there seems like there's a good economic justification for basic income. Is your work focused on the classical liberal philosophical justification for having a hands-off welfare state? Lehto: Yes, in a way. The fundamental debate is truly between these two perspectives of whether it's a pragmatic justification for reform towards a slightly saner and slightly more useful and purposeful and beneficial system, or on the other hand, is it a requirement of justice that we have something like a basic income guarantee. And I think that really the truth is somewhere in between. First of all, I think it certainly is a pragmatic improvement over the current system but I should point out already at this point that when I'm advocating for basic income I'm not advocating for basic income without demanding widespread reforms in other areas of life in the welfare state. I am indeed calling for massive restructuring of many of the mechanisms of the welfare state partially just to accommodate for the fact that we are taking basic income as the policy paradigm that we're trying to implement. Because if we take that as the policy paradigm, then we necessarily must reform the existing bureaucracies, tax system just to accommodate for the fact that we are taking this new system into effect. In addition to this, I think that the whole framework of regulations, the whole framework of massive interventions into the economy, into the private life of citizens have to be addressed as serious violations of the capacity of the welfare state to truly increase the welfare of its people. Because my opinion is that the welfare state has failed because it has failed to address the proper means to achieve its own ends that it claims to have. Use of improper means to achieve its ends is the reason why the welfare state is failing so miserably everywhere in the world today. That it's claiming to be for the welfare of its citizens, but if you look at it in terms of its overall effect in many ways it fails. Petersen: So, when I think of the policies that I'd like to see replaced by a basic income guarantee they're not just strictly welfare transfers. There's a theorem in economics called the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem. It says that when you have an optimally designed progressive income tax scheme, basic income with a progressive income tax would be something like that, then it doesn't make sense to have additional programs designed to redistribute. And some of the programs that I think are basically focused on redistribution are things like protecting taxi drivers from competition from companies like Uber and Lyft, or a lot of the interventions into medicine are designed to make sure that people who get sick don't also become poor. And of course, if you had something like a basic income, every taxi driver could lose his job, he wouldn't fall below that minimum level. And so could at least in principle---if we were going to make sort of an ideal political bargain---a basic income guarantee would come with a lot of free market reforms ideally. Is that basically a big part of the reason why so many libertarians---such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek---have supported versions of a basic income? Lehto: Well yes indeed, it has the feature of being compatible with a total abolition of the rest of the welfare state, or major portions of the welfare state. And in fact people like Charles Murray have recently proposed exactly that, a replacement of the welfare state by the means of a basic income given to all citizens as the second-best option to a complete free-market society. And people like Hayek and Friedman were also of the opinion that the majority of those transfers could be replaced. So the thing with money is that money is a universal means of exchange and the uses of money and the need for money are as varied as people and situations. And when we think of basic income we don't think of it in terms of being for a particular purpose or for particular people or for particular circumstances unlike the current measures. And so it has the virtue---and perhaps the vice depending on your point of view---of being this universal situation, a neutral ground. And so indeed we can come up with hundreds of scenarios where a basic income could be useful for people. Obviously, some of those are covered by the current redistributive schemes within which by the way I would include things like farm subsidies, many forms of corporate welfare and so on. So basic income has the virtue and vice of being neutral as regards purposes and situations. The only thing really is that if you don't have any other sources of income then you will get a basic income without having to beg for it from anybody either in the government or in the world of charity for example. So, yes indeed, people who are forced out of work to circumstances---whatever those circumstances happen to be---are able to survive, the people who are forced out of the labor market entirely for a reason---one reason or another---people who have temporary or permanent conditions that affect their capacity to find work will be covered up to this level, and people who perhaps want to take some time off to take care of their family, people who want to take some time off to study, to plan ahead, to perhaps think about starting a new company, they have some ideas but they don't have the means of funding yet, that allows people to focus on doing what they think is best for them at the moment. So it has almost an infinity of purposes precisely because there is an infinity of human beings and human desires that in a pure realistic society will have to be taken into account. And a welfare state that tries to measure what people truly need, or what circumstances need to be taken care of, fails precisely because it can never count the infinity of the variety of ways in which people end up in need of money in society. Petersen: So before this welfare state that we currently have---the welfare state as it currently exists largely is a creation of the 20th century. But in the 19th century and early 20th century a lot of what you had was mutual aid societies and things like that. And I think a hard core maybe a Rothbardian libertarian who maybe still cares a lot about the poorest among us might say, why have a basic income? If we just had nothing there would still be the civil society and we could create something like a mutual aid society. Are there advantages of---is there reason to do this through the state, I guess is my question. Lehto: As a very wide-going and deep-reaching utilitarian, for me it's all about checking what robustness criteria institutions might have, and what institutional arrangements we could come up with and seeing how they perform in the real world rather than in the realm of ideal theory. And we have some evidence of places where mutual aid societies worked and we have some evidence of places where forms of welfare state that are highly bureaucratic and oppressive and paternalistic have operated and both of those have several features that I think we can wish to want to get rid of. So I think that if we look at societies where mutual aid societies were the sole means for people to survive I think they actually did a relatively good job in many cases but I think they failed to provide the sort of guarantee of security that I think a good society would wish to provide for people. That is, if we rely on the means of mutual aid societies you will get perhaps even a superior alternative to many forms of welfare state in the long run and I'm completely open to the idea that free markets can provide a very robust system of welfare. And actually that to me is one of the reasons why I consider myself a libertarian defender of a welfare state because I think that the libertarian part comes from actually understanding that markets are a good way of producing welfare and the opportunities available for markets and other forms of voluntary transfer, including mutual aid societies, are a way of providing a wide framework of security and services and other forms of protection. But I think that they provide a patchwork which leaves a lot of people outside in a number of circumstances. And I think this fact that they have a lot of holes in the way into the system, they have a lot of uncertainty about guaranteed income and lot of uncertainty about who gets covered, who is seen as being worthy of being helped, who is seen as being worthy of being protected by a benevolent charity and so on, means that we need to have a system of making sure that people don't---perhaps out of no fault of their own---fall through the cracks of the free market system and the same goes for the welfare state. I think they actually are surprisingly similar the welfare state and the free market utopia, they both provide this patchwork framework where some people are protected, some people are not, there's a lot of uncertainty about who gets what, who gets protected, and who doesn't. And so actually in both systems, people fall through the cracks and this is exactly the reason why I think basic income guarantee can be a superior alternative to either of those. But again we have to see what happens when we actually implement basic income, there could be a lot of unintended consequences. So we need to take those into account as well but at least on the side of theory, I think the idea of guaranteeing basic income, I think it's both desirable and practicable because we know how to do it technocratically and theoretically. I mean there's nothing so difficult with guaranteeing basic income via bank transfer to all citizens for example. Petersen: So one virtue of the basic income guarantee is that it seems to be actually politically feasible within our current system and it has got some interest in recent years. We mentioned at the start of the episode that you were part of the effort to bring a basic income to Finland so could you tell me about the political situation there? I've heard that they're looking at bringing in a basic income guarantee. Lehto: Yes, indeed. And here I'm being brutally pragmatic. Finland is not going to turn into any sort of libertarian utopia that I would wish for and certainly there are elements of paternalism there that are not going to go away. We still regulate the sale of alcohol in a very, I think, outrageous fashion for example and there are a lot of elements in the system that probably will keep us on the level of adult children for a long time. But as far as the welfare system is concerned, there is considerable consensus now that something like basic income would be a desirable reform. And this is seen by the majority of the population and by more than 50% of the M.P.'s in the parliament, basically from all parties with of course different proportions in different parties. But yes indeed the center-right government is actually going with the basic income pilot experiment starting next year. It's I think a well-planned pilot. They have a lot of experts because we believe in experts in this country and in Finland the sort of reliance on experts is both good and bad in many ways. It always seems to suggest that there is a group of people who can define the perfect system but in this case I think they've done a pretty good job with planning this two-year pilot. We shall see what happens. It's certainly not ideal and the government is already bungling with some of its promises and how it is going to be organized. But the basic premise for people who may not have an understanding or an idea in their mind of what this actually means, it means that basic income in the Finnish context would be the guarantee of something on the order of 500 to 600 to perhaps 800 Euros per month per person. And this would replace the various forms of unemployment benefits, sick leave benefits, student benefits and various other forms of benefits and Finland obviously has a lot of those already in place. And the complexity of the bureaucracy is such that even the experts who run it are surprisingly candid about their ignorance, about the complexities and mutual dependencies of the various benefit structures so that it's a maze that not even the experts can navigate, let alone regular ordinary people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the system. So a lot of people don't know how to apply for help, a lot of people don't know what benefits they're entitled to, and there's a long delay in getting the results of one's application for particular benefits---months, sometimes even the years. And a lot of people fall through the cracks in that fashion that I mentioned earlier. And so I think we've come to the point almost by necessity, where this system is seen almost universally by all as in need of reform and basic income happens to be the form of this reform that is most universally seen as the one we should pursue even though of course there are still people who are very skeptical of it in many ways. But yes, indeed they're planning this experiment where they're giving something like 500 Euros to a few thousand people across Finland. It's a very small experiment, but there are people who will call for its expansion I'm sure in the years to come. That will be definitely a very interesting experiment to see how that goes. Petersen: It seems like with the current system being so complex, it's almost like a part-time job just to collect benefits. You need to build expertise and you need to fill out the right forms and it takes a lot of your time and in many ways that makes it something that competes with the labor market for your time and your efforts and your human capital development. Seems like a basic income would be a good way to get people back into the labor market simply by virtue of freeing up their time to pursue something else. Do you see the political movement towards basic income making progress in other countries as well? Lehto: So yes experiments are undergoing in a number of countries. In addition to these, Netherlands, Canada and U.S. experiments and the Finnish case of obviously which I'm most familiar with, there is a very interesting experiment going to start in a few years in East Africa organized by the charity Give Directly who are already advocates of this idea of giving cash transfers to people. They have been doing that for a number of years now with quite good results according to many independent researchers. They've been giving cash transfers directly to people and they've shown great results. So they are actually expanding this idea and organizing again a privately funded experiment that they planned around for ten years, I think, or at least a number of years in East Africa. And this should be quite interesting to see how the basic income experiments in rich countries and poor countries compare and perhaps they can help both in different ways, because obviously countries where welfare states exist are quite different from places where they don't. So any help or any form of monetary transfer will help people in African countries proportionally more than they do in rich countries, but I think both situations and both contexts can certainly benefit from direct cash transfers and basic income. Petersen: Give Directly is a charity that I support and I really like what they're doing. I especially like how they take such a quantitative approach. There are so many charities that just start with "wouldn't it be nice if people in this village had this thing?" And then they bring it to them and they don't really stop to say can we measure, were we cost effective in improving their lives? Did we do a good job? Could something else of equivalent cost have made them better off? Give Directly is doing a great thing by bringing a lot of this sort of quantitative approach to charitable giving and I'll have a link at the show notes page to Give Directly if you want to contribute, if any of the listeners want to contribute, I highly recommend it. Lehto: Absolutely. For a little bit, just to say about the reasons why cash transfers are so great. By the way, I should say that there are perhaps a few charities that are even more helpful in certain contexts. For example, direct malaria helping efforts, efforts to eradicate diseases perhaps, have an even higher rate of efficiency but those are pretty much the only ones that are more effective than giving people cash. And the reason why giving people cash is very good is that first of all, they stimulate markets where they don't exist and where markets do exist they operate in a way that maximizes the preferences and satisfaction of the people concerned. They operate as a way of giving people welfare in the most efficient way possible. And the theoretical foundations of these can be found for example in neoclassical economics, of course, where the superiority of cash transfers have been posited for example in the Chicago School since George Stigler and Milton Friedman and others. There's a wonderful paper by Brennan and Walsh on the desirability of cash transfers over in-kind transfers from a game theoretical Pareto perspective. So that's also quite interesting how the theory also matches the empirical research here. And just again to go back to the very foundation of the welfare state. I think that's been the biggest mistake of the welfare states today that they fail to take into account how welfare truly fundamentally is the satisfaction of the desired ends and needs of the people themselves as they themselves see them. It shouldn't be the satisfaction of some criteria of goodness that the state bureaucrats measure and determine. It really should be ultimately up to the people themselves what they value, what they pursue, and what needs they see themselves as having and thus giving money to them is the best way to make sure that they actually get to satisfy those preferences which they have rather than those preferences which some bureaucrats think that they should have. Petersen: If I may ask one final question. Some supporters of the basic income guarantee have suggested that we could do it as a swap. We get rid of our current costly welfare system and bring in the basic income guarantee and often you'll hear the suggestion that this could be revenue neutral. Is that a realistic possibility? Lehto: It is a realistic possibility in cases where quite extensive welfare states already exist. And obviously it depends on the level of basic income and I'm actually in favor of starting low where that is the most politically feasible option. But I'm also quite a quite supportive of the idea of starting high where that is politically feasible. So in countries like the welfare state in Canada and many other places. Starting from the level of where the current welfare state benefits are it is compatible with the goal of making it neutral as far as the effect on state budget is concerned. Although I think that it will be very hard to make it completely neutral in that regard. I think it will by necessity always cost something. But what it will cost is heavily overblown in many estimations because many people simply do not understand how to calculate the costs and they simply add up some figures of everybody gets this amount of money and multiply that by the number of people and voila you get the proposed cost of this program. But that's obviously nonsense that they don't understand what they're talking about. And they really should have a look at the actual models because in all models what happens is you reform the tax system at the same time which means that for most people, middle-class and upper-class people---or middle income and upper-income people, to be more politically correct---the income that they get from basic income actually is a zero sum addition because actually, they ended up paying their basic income back in the form of taxes that I've been raised to match accordingly the need for basic income funding. So, even if there is no criteria that you don't give basic income to people above a certain range of income, nonetheless those people in the upper brackets will end up paying back their basic income due to the taxes that have been raised. But the taxes that are raised do not have to impose unbearable burdens on those people either, because again for most people it is just a nominal transfer of funds and it's withdrawn from their bank accounts at the same time. Petersen: So are there websites, books? What can you recommend to people interested in this topic? What should they read? Lehto: Well I think for those who are philosophically minded, I certainly recommend reading the classics of the libertarian welfare state stuff. Things like Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom where the negative income tax fee is featured. Friedrich Hayek's Constitution of Liberty is a great book and it also features a defense of guaranteed minimum income. And more recently John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness, and I would recommend people to read the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians they have been advocating for basic income but also debating it. And also proposing this similar thing that I'm doing which is trying to combine Rawls' and Nozick's intuitions into something like a new coherent whole. And just follow the news, read up on the models, follow up on what the governments and many of these countries---Finland, Netherlands, Canada---are doing. And go to basic income networks website. Just Google basic income earth network. B.I.E.N it's called---Basic Income Earth Network---and you will find more about basic income. Petersen: My guest today has been Otto Lehto. Otto thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio. Lehto: My pleasure. It's been fun.  

Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He’s previous authored Science-Mart, Machine Dreams, and More Heat than Light. Mirowski brings his broad background as an economist, historian, and philosopher to this meaty subject. He weaves together a stinging critique of the ways many economists reacted to the recent economic crisis with a larger discussion of the nature of economic ideas in politics. He highlights the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society and its links to what he dubs the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Rather than resting on broad generalities, he distinguishes between famed neoliberals to show how, for example, Milton Friedman and George Stigler approach their advocacy in very different ways. Philip Mirowski is a contributor to Public Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He’s previous authored Science-Mart, Machine Dreams, and More Heat than Light. Mirowski brings his broad background as an economist, historian, and philosopher to this meaty subject. He weaves together a stinging critique of the ways many economists reacted to the recent economic crisis with a larger discussion of the nature of economic ideas in politics. He highlights the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society and its links to what he dubs the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Rather than resting on broad generalities, he distinguishes between famed neoliberals to show how, for example, Milton Friedman and George Stigler approach their advocacy in very different ways. Philip Mirowski is a contributor to Public Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He’s previous authored Science-Mart, Machine Dreams, and More Heat than Light. Mirowski brings his broad background as an economist, historian, and philosopher to this meaty subject. He weaves together a stinging critique of the ways many economists reacted to the recent economic crisis with a larger discussion of the nature of economic ideas in politics. He highlights the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society and its links to what he dubs the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Rather than resting on broad generalities, he distinguishes between famed neoliberals to show how, for example, Milton Friedman and George Stigler approach their advocacy in very different ways. Philip Mirowski is a contributor to Public Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Mirowski is author of Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso Books 2013). Mirowski is the Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He’s previous authored Science-Mart, Machine Dreams, and More Heat than Light. Mirowski brings his broad background as an economist, historian, and philosopher to this meaty subject. He weaves together a stinging critique of the ways many economists reacted to the recent economic crisis with a larger discussion of the nature of economic ideas in politics. He highlights the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society and its links to what he dubs the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Rather than resting on broad generalities, he distinguishes between famed neoliberals to show how, for example, Milton Friedman and George Stigler approach their advocacy in very different ways. Philip Mirowski is a contributor to Public Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Simon Johnson of MIT and the author (with James Kwak) of 13 Bankers talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the origins of the financial crisis and how the next one might be prevented. Invoking the work of George Stigler, Johnson argues that the financial sector has captured the regulatory process and the result is that regulation and government intervention have been steered more by the interests of the financial sector than to the benefit of the general public. Johnson argues for capping the size of banks in order to reduce the danger of systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail excuse for bailing out banks. Johnson also discusses the role of the Fed in subsidizing risk-taking and leverage in the financial sector.

Simon Johnson of MIT and the author (with James Kwak) of 13 Bankers talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the origins of the financial crisis and how the next one might be prevented. Invoking the work of George Stigler, Johnson argues that the financial sector has captured the regulatory process and the result is that regulation and government intervention have been steered more by the interests of the financial sector than to the benefit of the general public. Johnson argues for capping the size of banks in order to reduce the danger of systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail excuse for bailing out banks. Johnson also discusses the role of the Fed in subsidizing risk-taking and leverage in the financial sector.

Monty Pelerin's background includes academic degrees from Duke University (AB), the University of Chicago (MBA) and Syracuse University (PhD) all in finance and economics. At Chicago, he was fortunate to have classes from Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Ronald Coase. He knew Merton Miller. All of these gentlemen subsequently became Nobel Laureates in Economics. His early career was in the corporate world where he served as Chief Financial Officer for a few companies. Later in life he went back to school for the doctorate degree and then taught for about 10 years at the college and graduate level. He enjoyed the classroom, but disliked the bureaucracy and dealing with too many peers who were educated beyond their levels of competence. He retired early and have supported myself primarily as an investor. Monty Pelerin is an avid reader, investor and reasonably decent golfer (or used to be). He was exposed to both Keynesian and Monetarist economics in formal training and became an Austrian economist on my own. In his opinion, it is the only "school" of economics that makes any sense. In September of 2009 he started a website: Monty Pelerin's World at www.economicnoise.com. Since its inception, he has put up almost 1,500 posts. The posts deal primarily with economics, politics and investing. The name Monty Pelerin is a pseudonym derived from the Mont Pelerin Society founded by Friedrich Hayek after WWII. Hayek saw a need for a forum for like-minded individuals who believed in Classical Liberalism. At the time, government planning and control dominated economic and political thought. The Mont Pelerin Society was composed of friends of freedom from around the world. Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman were original members. More information on Mont Pelerin can be obtained from my site or the internet. He have no connection with the Society other than a coincidence of philosophy. He uses Friedrich Hayek as an gravatar in honor of his enormous contributions to classical liberalism. A photo of Hayek is attached. Here are the full articles published on American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/) Articles By Monty Pelerin The Coming Political Upheaval Put Uncle Sam on an Allowance Jekyll and Hyde Government Why the Democratic Party Cannot Survive Bernanke's Cowardice Has Sealed Our Fate Red vs. Blue: Bloods vs. Crips Obama: Not Moses, Merely Elmer Gantry A Depression May Be Our Best Hope Keynes as 'Useful Idiot' The Divine Right of Government Desperate Economic Action Ahead? Inflation: The Last Gasp of the Obama Economic Crisis Our Patrick Henry Moment Is Here Repent -- The End Is Near Worse than a Depression The End of Democratic Socialism Political Fatal Conceit The Keynesian Fraud Obama the Entrepreneurship Expert Obama's Ides-of-March Moment is Near The Economic Crisis Is Only a Symptom Health Care Reform Vaporizes Obama Presidency 2010 Will Be Worse Obama's Vote-Buying Dilemma Why Obamanomics Will Not Improve the Economy

Monty Pelerin's background includes academic degrees from Duke University (AB), the University of Chicago (MBA) and Syracuse University (PhD) all in finance and economics. At Chicago, he was fortunate to have classes from Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Ronald Coase. He knew Merton Miller. All of these gentlemen subsequently became Nobel Laureates in Economics. His early career was in the corporate world where he served as Chief Financial Officer for a few companies. Later in life he went back to school for the doctorate degree and then taught for about 10 years at the college and graduate level. He enjoyed the classroom, but disliked the bureaucracy and dealing with too many peers who were educated beyond their levels of competence. He retired early and have supported myself primarily as an investor. Monty Pelerin is an avid reader, investor and reasonably decent golfer (or used to be). He was exposed to both Keynesian and Monetarist economics in formal training and became an Austrian economist on my own. In his opinion, it is the only "school" of economics that makes any sense. In September of 2009 he started a website: Monty Pelerin's World at www.economicnoise.com. Since its inception, he has put up almost 1,500 posts. The posts deal primarily with economics, politics and investing. The name Monty Pelerin is a pseudonym derived from the Mont Pelerin Society founded by Friedrich Hayek after WWII. Hayek saw a need for a forum for like-minded individuals who believed in Classical Liberalism. At the time, government planning and control dominated economic and political thought. The Mont Pelerin Society was composed of friends of freedom from around the world. Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman were original members. More information on Mont Pelerin can be obtained from my site or the internet. He have no connection with the Society other than a coincidence of philosophy. He uses Friedrich Hayek as an gravatar in honor of his enormous contributions to classical liberalism. A photo of Hayek is attached. Here are the full articles published on American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/) Articles By Monty Pelerin The Coming Political Upheaval Put Uncle Sam on an Allowance Jekyll and Hyde Government Why the Democratic Party Cannot Survive Bernanke's Cowardice Has Sealed Our Fate Red vs. Blue: Bloods vs. Crips Obama: Not Moses, Merely Elmer Gantry A Depression May Be Our Best Hope Keynes as 'Useful Idiot' The Divine Right of Government Desperate Economic Action Ahead? Inflation: The Last Gasp of the Obama Economic Crisis Our Patrick Henry Moment Is Here Repent -- The End Is Near Worse than a Depression The End of Democratic Socialism Political Fatal Conceit The Keynesian Fraud Obama the Entrepreneurship Expert Obama's Ides-of-March Moment is Near The Economic Crisis Is Only a Symptom Health Care Reform Vaporizes Obama Presidency 2010 Will Be Worse Obama's Vote-Buying Dilemma Why Obamanomics Will Not Improve the Economy