This article is a transcript of Tom Woods’s opening lecture at the 2025 Mises University at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama
I want to start off by saying a little something about the Ron Paul movement before I get into our present moment. There are many things we could say about the Ron Paul movement and the Ron Paul presidential campaigns, which virtually all of you were too young to have been a part of. But I’m telling you, it was really an extraordinary thing to witness up close and live. One distinguishing feature of that movement was that it was very economics focused.
Dr. Paul had many things to say about a great many topics, foreign policy chief among them. But Dr. Paul had favorite economists. He had favorite books that he had read, that he recommended that other people read, and they did. I distinctly recall being here at the Mises Institute when the website broke down after it was announced that they had X number of copies of Human Action left over at such and such price. Now that is a world I want to live in. The website broke down because so many people wanted to buy a 900-page book. And it was a book that they probably wouldn’t have read if Ron Paul hadn’t urged them to read it.
That’s not to say that everybody in the Ron Paul movement was a bookworm. The point is that these books have ideas that can change the world in ways we would all like to see. But they can’t do that if we don’t read them. So reading and learning, but also being an activist, conveying these ideas in a popular way to other people, all of these things existed side by side in the Ron Paul movement.
Now let’s fast-forward to the MAGA movement. It’s not so much driven by economics, even though there are economic issues at stake (that is to say, tariffs and other matters like that). But we don’t hear about favorite economists, favorite books we ought to read. Some people will say that’s a good thing. “We’ve had enough of you nerds, you poindexters out there. Now we need men of action.” But if the men of action don’t know what action to take because they didn’t read Human Action, it’s a problem. Simply doing things is not enough. That, of course, is the problem we run into all the time, is that governments feel like as long as they’re doing something, that’s good. That’s better than nothing. But a lot of times when they do something, it’s not better than nothing. Nothing would have been better. Doing nothing would have been better than that.
Over the past several years, I’ve started to observe a number of influencers on the political right wing disparaging economics per se: Economics is a sham science, was invented to rationalize greed, or is a discipline that only superficial people care about because “Don’t you understand we have much more important existential issues at stake in America today, involving culture, nationality, an epidemic of youth hopelessness, and so on?” They accuse economists of thinking only about whether a single number, GDP, goes up or down. You see that sometimes on social media: “Line go up,” because that’s what they think economists think, because they don’t read any economists, unfortunately.
We’re all very used to dealing with left-wing critiques of the market economy. I really would like to just go back to that, because that’s just so much more fun. I already know how to answer the left-wing critiques really easily. That’s a muscle I have flexed many times over the years. I know what their arguments are. We’re very familiar with that. But this critique that’s coming from the traditionalist right is a bit different. It sees the free market as an outgrowth of the wicked Enlightenment rationalism that reduces men to mere atoms stripped of social identities and conceives of man as being solely concerned with acquiring material goods. I dealt with the Catholic version of this critique in my book The Church and the Market. (Since Joe’s talking about people’s ages, I’ll just say that the tenth anniversary edition of the book is celebrating its own tenth anniversary this year. It’s very sad, good in a way and sad in a way.)
We might call these people traditionalists. They have a different critique from the kind of critique that, let’s say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have. They will say things like, “What you economists call economic laws, these are just phantoms. We should feel free to disregard these artificial constructs because if we desire some social outcome, no so-called economic law should stand in our way.” Again, they emphasize that there’s more to life than a higher GDP.
For starters, I am very happy to put their minds at ease about our alleged obsession with GDP. As a matter of fact, those of us in this room have perhaps had more to say than anyone about the shortcomings of GDP as a measure even of economic health. If what you want is a summation of the value of all the final goods produced in the economy during the year, then I suppose that number is helpful to you. But if you’re looking for an overall picture of the economy, it’s misleading for at least two major reasons.
First, it includes both government expenditure and private expenditure. Private transactions, because they’re voluntary, presumably benefit both parties or they wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. But since government transactions are financed via coercive transfers of wealth, there’s no way of knowing whether and to what extent people value the goods in question. The money to finance the goods was simply seized from them. I don’t think I’m alone, for example, in thinking that I derive negative benefit from the military expenditures that are financed by coerced wealth transfers from me.
Second, by focusing on final goods only and insisting that including intermediate goods would be double counting, GDP leaves out a major portion of economic activity and contributes to the false impression that consumption drives the economy. We should already know that consumption can’t drive the economy because using things up is easy. Anyone can do that. Just using things up can’t possibly drive the economy. But GDP looks only at things like cars and phones, the products we buy, and it ignores the steps and the materials that it took to make them. When you pass over all of that, you miss a central part of what keeps the economy going. Businesses spend an enormous amount on things like raw materials, manufacturing, supply chains. These expenditures amount to nearly twice as much as what people spend as consumers. All this is obscured by GDP.
The traditionalist critique of economists is that we allegedly subordinate everything to economic efficiency. All we care about is economic efficiency. Then traditionalists triumphantly point out that there is more to life than economic efficiency. Checkmate, economists.
I could point out that Murray Rothbard wrote an essay called “The Myth of Efficiency” (1979), and we can have a long conversation about that. But I think I’d rather say, first of all, that it’s not obvious to me why, whatever your goals are, you wouldn’t rather be efficient than inefficient in achieving them. It reminds me of people who look down their noses at business firms because they operate on the basis of profits. Would you rather that they operate on the basis of losses? I don’t even understand what the criticism is. More to the point, Rothbard expressly ruled out efficiency as a criterion for deciding on policy. He wrote, “Only ethical principles can serve as criteria for our decisions. Efficiency can never serve as the basis for ethics; on the contrary, ethics must be the guide and touchstone for any consideration of efficiency. Ethics is the primary.” In the field of law and public policy, the primary ethical consideration is the concept that dare not speak its name: the concept of justice.
If you’d like to see a school of thought that does prioritize abstract efficiency over justice and property rights, I refer you to the classic case in Chicago School law and economics, famously described by Ronald Coase—namely, the train that emits sparks that set fire to a farmer’s crops. (This was before the introduction of the diesel engine.) Somebody’s going to have to bear the cost of this damage—either the farmer or the railroad. It’s going to be one or the other. On the basis of strict liability, the farmer has the right to the property in question, so he has the right to enjoy its fruits undisturbed. The railroad should compensate him for the loss or install some kind of spark-retarding device. That’s how economists of the Austrian School have generally adjudicated this matter. But the Chicago School decides this case on the basis of pure economic efficiency: The judge should decide the case in such a way that overall wealth is maximized. So, okay, traditionalists, you have a point, but go get those people. We’re not to blame for that. We don’t think that way.
The economists, we are further told, believe everybody strives only to maximize their monetary income. What a bunch of dumb dumbs those economists are. Don’t they know that people are motivated by other things? What I want to say is whenever you make an argument against somebody and it sounds that dumb, you’re probably not stating it correctly. There really isn’t anybody—probably not even C. Montgomery Burns—who thinks that way. I’m sure there are a few other things that delight him more than simply the acquisition of monetary wealth. So, we don’t need to be lectured about these obvious facts of human nature. Of course people have motivations other than maximizing their monetary income. Austrian economics is concerned with action as such, not simply action that is narrowly focused on maximizing monetary income. The income that we say human beings are striving to maximize is psychic income, which consists of all the variables whose symbiotic relation constitutes the person’s sense of their own well-being. As Ludwig von Mises put it, “Economics deals with the real actions of real men. Its theorems refer neither to ideal nor to perfect men, neither to the phantom of a fabulous economic man . . . , nor to the statistical notion of an average man.”
Still another accusation is that economists think of human beings as isolated, interchangeable atoms with no bonds holding them together except those of the cash nexus. But in “Nations by Consent” (1994), Murray Rothbard himself denied that individuals are “bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange.” Rothbard said further, “Everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions.” These are the sorts of things economists are said to leave out.
Let it suffice to say that Ludwig von Mises appreciated concerns about mass migration, allegedly neglected by atomistic libertarians.
As he wrote in Liberalism in 1927, for example, “If Australia is thrown open to immigration, it can be assumed with great probability that its population would in a few years consist of Japanese, Chinese, and Malayans. . . . The entire nation is unanimous, however, in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of those favored lands [he means the US and Australia] fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans today are exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland.” Mises continues, “As long as the state is granted the vast powers which it has today and which public opinion considers to be its right, the thought of having to live in a state whose government is in the hands of members of a foreign nationality is positively terrifying.”
Instead of being obsessed with GDP, we are told, we should concern ourselves with the material well-being of families, with drug and alcohol abuse, with family harmony, with healthy social life, with families staying together, and so on. Obviously, no single discipline can solve all these problems, but economics can improve every single one of them. Long-term unemployment, for example, can cause or intensify every single problem I just listed. It so happens that the economists have a whole toolkit. They have a great deal to say about how to minimize unemployment, including the particularly debilitating long-term variety.
For example, in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Francis McKee Ryan and colleagues surveyed 104 empirical studies and found the unemployed to have lower physical and mental well-being than their employed counterparts. David Relfs and colleagues estimated in Social Science and Medicine that unemployment increases mortality risk by 63 percent. Further research into the collateral effects of unemployment found that job loss doubled the risk of myocardial infarction, heart attack, and stroke among older workers.
A 50 to 100 percent increase in mortality was evident the year after displacement, with a 10 to 15 percent elevated mortality risk persisting for 20 years. Displaced workers were less likely to participate in church groups, community organizations, or informal social gatherings. Long-term unemployment increases risks of alcohol and drug misuse, with unemployed people 1.3 to 2.0 times more likely to develop substance abuse disorders.
Studies have shown significantly higher levels of friction with spouses and children among unemployed men. US data shows that chronic unemployment correlates with a 15 to 20 percent higher incidence of opioid misuse compared to employed peers. In the US, layoffs can increase the chances of divorce by up to 20 percent. A similar study found that in Sweden, the likelihood increased by 13 to 18 percent, while in Australia, spouses were 10 to 15 percent more likely to separate within two years. Naturally, we witnessed a significant spike in all these problems during the displacements brought about by the covid fiasco.
If we want to minimize recessions and depressions, and by extension, the unemployment that comes in their wake and carries with it all these subsidiary problems that I just mentioned, well, it might help to learn some monetary economics, particularly the monetary economics that won F. A. Hayek the Nobel Prize in 1974. You might say, “Oh, but there are Nobel Prize winners in economics who say a lot of loopy things.” That’s true, but they’re saying things that generally the Nobel committee wants to hear. Hayek was not saying something that they wanted to hear. That’s what makes his prize significant. So Hayek demonstrated that system-wide downturns, as opposed to sector-specific declines driven by events in the news, have a monetary cause. If we want to avoid the disruptions to family life, to the things the traditionalists care about, and the various dysfunctions that accompany unemployment, we need to focus our attention on the central bank— in the American case, the Federal Reserve System.
I suspect people in this room are already familiar with what we refer to as the Austrian theory of the business cycle. I’ve written and spoken about it quite a bit, and you’ll be learning about it this week in some detail. It can suffice for the purposes of our opening remarks tonight to say simply that interest rates are real and meaningful and not fake or arbitrary. To think that pushing them down artificially via credit expansion is a way we can generate prosperity without effort is a gross error—the kind of error I would expect to hear from the Left. Lowering interest rates by credit expansion, which in the present situation takes place via the Fed, generates a boom that’s a self-reversal. Malinvestments that grow out of the confusion introduced by the arbitrary interest rates sooner or later have to be liquidated. So if you don’t want to endure episodes of boom and bust, a cyclical up and down that only mimics real prosperity, we need to let the natural array of prices, including the interest rate, dominate so prosperity can continue unimpeded by this series of malinvestments and liquidations.
Some MAGA people have at least a rudimentary understanding of the problems with the Fed. But others think the problem is that Fed Chair Jerome Powell is too stingy about lowering interest rates. Their argument is that price inflation now being more or less under control, the Fed can lower interest rates to stimulate economic activity. Well, as we know, the issue is not whether this person or that person is chairman of the Fed. What we should want is to undo the economic distortions introduced by past Fed activity. The only way to do that is not to bark commands at the chairman of the Fed, as presidents are liable to do, but simply to stop inflating for a while, after which time market interest rates will gravitate to a sustainable level.
I expect people on the political left to look for miracles from economic interventions. The American left’s approach to the economy is that wishing can make things so. We want workers to enjoy this benefit or that benefit. Pass a law. We want higher wages. Pass a law. We want less poverty. Pass a law. There’s no thought given to any possible side effects of these interventions. It’s just assumed that they will achieve their stated goals, and that we need to consider nothing further. Likewise, there’s no thought given to whether physical constraints might be at work here. If simply passing a law or intervening in the economy somehow could generate riches from poverty, wouldn’t Bangladesh have tried that already? Not to mention, there’d be no point to foreign aid if all they had to do was just pass a law bolstering labor unions or establishing a minimum wage. Well, that’s a bad example because there is no point in foreign aid. It’s terrible, and everything it does is a disaster. But you understand where I’m going with this.
When I hear this kind of thinking from the Right, that there’s this magic button that if only Jerome Powell would push, but he’s just stingy and for some reason has some fetish for human suffering and therefore refuses to push this button, this sounds like AOC. This is not the way a right-winger is supposed to talk. This is something a right-winger is supposed to laugh at. It would be great to live in a world where a government-created institution like the Fed has that button. So please don’t make me defend Jerome Powell. I don’t want to. I’m not saying he’s a particularly good guy. I’m saying this is not the point. There is no reason for anybody on the political right to sympathize with the idea that American prosperity, as well as the stability of the US economy, requires the monetary interventions of eggheads with their central plan. That is at odds with the way a conservative is supposed to see the world. What should resonate with him instead is the idea that there is a natural order of things that no intellectual, no matter how overcome with hubris, can overturn.
It is the Left that is consistently at war with the natural order. It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who thinks that wishing for an outcome and backing that wish with state violence is all that’s necessary to attain that outcome. I remind the MAGA people: She’s not bright. Don’t mimic her worldview. It’s wrong. The conservative, rather than fruitlessly trying to bend the natural order to his will, recognizes it and conforms himself to it.
This is what Richard Weaver, who was much farther to the right than any of these people, was driving at when he wrote in his essay “Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground” (1960): “It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will be here after he’s gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things.”
Weaver went on to speak specifically of the insights of Austrian economics: “Praxeology, briefly defined, is the science of how things work because of their essential natures. The conservative and the libertarian agree that it is not only presumption, it is folly to try to interfere with the workings of a praxeology. One makes use of it, yes, in the same way that a follower of Bacon makes use of nature by obeying her. The great difference is that one is recognizing the objective; one is recognizing the laws that regulate man’s affairs. Since the conservative and the libertarian believe that these cannot be wished away through the establishment of a Utopia, they are both conservators of the real world.” In that real world, that magic button for the Fed or anyone else to push to create prosperity without effort does not exist.
Furthermore, some segments of MAGA don’t seem to understand the role of the Fed in rising prices, which are a concern of theirs. Therefore, they don’t recognize that we’re dealing with a matter of monetary policy. They speak as if consumer price inflation is caused by things like high energy prices or excessive government spending, and the Fed is just invisible here. I get why a politician might talk that way. Government spending and energy prices, well, they can control those things. Whereas there’s not that much political traction to abolish the Fed. Most Americans know nothing about it anyway, so why even bring it up?
But it’s harder to understand why intellectuals and influencers who don’t have to worry about these things likewise speak as if the drivers of high consumer prices are government spending and high energy prices, and neglect the Fed altogether. At this point, we’ve had the internet for a long, long time. We’ve had a long time to find out the truth about this. The Mises Institute, for example, is not exactly shy about spreading this knowledge to the public. So there isn’t much excuse, especially for somebody on the right, for not knowing the truth and not understanding this ongoing and persistent inflation of consumer prices. This phenomenon is caused by the Fed. It has nothing to do with these other things.
There’s a superficial plausibility to the claim that high energy prices cause prices to rise generally. The argument is, of course, that everything uses energy. So if energy prices go up, that pushes up the price of everything. The problem with that is, that’s a variant of the cost-push theory of inflation. It seems plausible. The problem is, if you don’t have a Federal Reserve pumping more dough into the economy, the higher energy prices leave people with less money to spend on everything else.
So any higher energy prices would therefore be offset by lower prices elsewhere, and it would just be a wash. How are they able to maintain the high energy prices and yet all the other spending stays the same? How could that be unless there was some institution pumping money into this? That’s where the problem is, right there. Likewise, government spending per se doesn’t cause an increase in consumer prices. It depends on how they finance the government spending. If later on they increase the money supply and try to get around it that way, then you will see that. But it’s not government spending per se, which we saw a lot of people claiming.
If you’re claiming that you want to improve the well-being of the average American, who’s been overlooked—you say that both parties have overlooked this person—you yourself can’t overlook the Fed, because the Fed is the source of tremendous misery for tens of millions of people. And to make matters worse, they don’t even know that it’s the source of their misery. So I assure you that dismissing economics as stupid or boring or nerdy or not as important as the existential issues you think are more important, that’s only going to worsen the situation you’re complaining about.
The consequences of inflation extend much farther than high consumer prices. For instance, inflation discourages saving. Even if the Fed meets its inflation goal of 2% a year, that still means that over 20 years, your savings will lose 30% of their value. How can you save? How can you save for the future? Old-fashioned people, the conservatives in your life, like your grandparents, urging you to save now look foolish and contemptible, thanks to the Fed.
Our friend Guido Hülsmann, who wrote the tremendous biography of Mises, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007), says that we have to consider the implications of this situation for ordinary workers. Most ordinary workers did not get any training in how to invest in the stock market. They used to be able to just accumulate precious-metal coins, which held or increased their value. That was all they needed to do for saving. But as we’ve seen with that figure I just gave you, they can’t do that now. So now what do they have to do? They have to get involved in transactions they know nothing about and put their money at risk in transactions that involve expertise they don’t have.
Even people who happen to have that knowledge and the time to navigate investments still can fall victim to inflation’s broader effects.
People wind up spending more time than they otherwise would researching and selecting assets that they think will outpace inflation, diverting their mental energy toward money matters more than they would otherwise. That’s a cultural effect. Also, people may choose to prioritize high-paying careers over careers they find personally fulfilling because inflation gives them no choice. That is a cultural effect.
Culture isn’t separate from economics— “smart people talk about this, and dumb poindexters talk about that.” That’s a completely uncomprehending bifurcation. People may take jobs far from home, that involve long commutes, just chasing marginal income gains because, again, they’re motivated by inflation pressure. This focus on money over personal satisfaction fosters materialism, weakens family ties, and reduces community loyalty as financial pressures come to dominate decision-making and reshape societal values.
Still another problem facing Americans, particularly those in their 20s and 30s, that the MAGA world is concerned about is rising home prices. They say the system has failed young people. Nobody can afford to buy a house. The implication seems to be, “You dumb economists, see? Free market capitalism doesn’t really work after all. We shouldn’t keep falling for this discredited superstition. We need to take some kind of collective action here.” It’s not always clear what that’s going to be. Dare I suggest that those maligned economists have something to say about this issue as well?
I might note, by the way, that the critics of the market have trouble getting their story about home prices straight. You would think that people who had been complaining for years about the problem of lack of affordable housing would have been overjoyed in 2008, when housing prices fell sharply. “Oh, look, housing prices are coming down.” They were not overjoyed. So, I don’t believe them, some of these critics. The prices came down in 2008, and they acted like Frankenstein’s monster had returned just because housing prices were falling. They went into overdrive to figure out how to make houses more expensive again. They absolutely did that.
If these people are serious about rising home prices and would genuinely like to see a solution to the problem it couldn’t hurt, again, at least to listen to economics. You would discover that we can cut home prices all the way in half just by deregulating housing. Cutting these useless regulations would also, guess what, create a whole lot of very good construction and manufacturing jobs, which they also say they care about.
Home prices, again, this is another area where economics and culture are tied together in social life. Home prices are more than just numbers. They affect when and if young people are going to get married and start families. I’m sure a lot of these traditionalists are concerned about that. So if we can figure out through economic analysis how to get those prices down, that’ll be yet another example of why the much-maligned economists ought to be listened to from time to time, and why it’s foolish to dismiss economics as being a disembodied obsession with the line on a graph.
The person you should read on this is Bryan Caplan. Now, you know he’s not good on everything, but when he’s really good, he’s really good. Bryan Caplan has been on my show several times—we have agreements and disagreements—but he has a book called Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (2024). If you think, “I would never want to read this book because it sounds too dry,” he’s written it as a graphic novel because he realizes that people don’t read. (“So what if I draw you pictures? Maybe you’ll look at this.”) It takes you no time at all. He says that full deregulation of housing would indeed reduce home prices by a whopping 50%, even adjusted for inflation. He also points out that these ideas are, oddly enough, shared across the ideological spectrum. You find a lot of people on the left saying, “Yeah, we agree with this. These regulations are stupid and pointless, and they’re antihuman, and we should get rid of them.” So there’s huge consensus about this intellectually. Only nothing gets done. If we have a way to reduce housing prices by half, and people who have informed opinions on the matter across the ideological spectrum agree on it, yet we’re still not doing it, then we’re just not serious about it.
The main cost is obtaining permission to build, which in turn involves navigating zoning laws, building codes, bureaucratic red tape. Get rid of that, housing supply goes up. You have zoning laws mandating single-family homes. They limit multifamily housing, high-density developments like skyscrapers, even in high-demand areas. Minimum lot size requirements prevent the subdividing of land for more homes. Regulations make it difficult to build tall buildings, even though this is a way that technology can make affordable, spacious housing available in places where people want to live. We might also mention that a significant portion of US land, especially in the West, is owned by the federal and state governments and kept off the market, and that reduces available land for housing development also.
On a much smaller scale, there is the sort of thing that’s easy to overlook: Regulations tend to mandate an excessive number of parking spaces. They’ll mandate two to three per apartment unit, or enough for if every day were Black Friday. But every day isn’t Black Friday, so why are we wasting all this space? That’s wasted money and misallocates land that could be used for housing.
It is wrong, in short, to imply that on the one hand, we have deep-thinking philosophers contemplating matters of profound import, while on the other hand, we have these confused and frivolous souls who for some reason are concerned about a trivial field like economics.
If you neglect economics, which is really just shorthand for understanding how the world works, you will not achieve the goals that you have convinced yourself are far removed from economics. I understand it can seem satisfying to appear to be above the allegedly mundane and materialistic concerns of the economists. Why don’t these foolish calculators understand that our concerns are far more profound than theirs, and that they overlook the existential problems confronting us today?
This reminds me of my book The Church and the Market because in that I talked a lot about what we can do to improve the well-being of working people. I was answering all these accusations: “You economists are materialistic, and all you think about is profits and money. We need to help the working man.” So I would say, “Okay, well, what do you want for the working man?” And their answer was more money. Okay, the very thing they just accused me of being a materialist for thinking about. So that is what they want after all. After all this pomposity about “We think about higher things,” we really just want to give them more money. Okay, well good, because we’re good at that. We know how to get them more money. We’ve got a whole lot of books on that.
The MAGA movement tells us, and I believe that they’re sincere, that they’re concerned about the well-being of the family, young people not starting families in the first place, home prices being out of their reach, generalized hopelessness and despair, and the sense that a prosperous and fulfilling life seems to be out of the reach of so many. I don’t claim that people from any one academic discipline have all the answers or can solve all problems. Economics can’t solve all problems. It doesn’t pretend to. But it’s precisely with the tools of the economists—good economists, I mean, not the establishment lackeys that many of them have become—that the problems identified by traditionalists can at least be mitigated. It’s with the advice of Austrian economists that MAGA can avoid falling into the kinds of errors that seem to create prosperity but only set the stage for recession and thereby intensify the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. So after all the foolish and misplaced abuse they’ve taken, the people who have indispensable and important things to say about the troubles that ail us are in fact the despised, the rejected, the economists. Thank you very much.
