>> from fume fast 2009, libertarian conference, free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse," this is 50 minutes. >> thank you, ladies and gentlemen beach -- there are eight things going on while i am speaking saw am glad to see there is anyone here particularly since the other ones are involving how to hold on to your wealth. you must know all about that. i have the high rollers in the room. i would like to make a little shout out to my wife who is not here but who is a wonderful woman. we are expecting in addition to our family in the near future.

we thankfully have a wonderful relationship where the only thing we fight about is which of us is the better person and we are each making the case for the other. thanks to that i am able to save for her i am going by myself to a conference in las vegas and 9 won't be around for three days and that is sort of okay. that works. i am thankful to c-span for creating this official historical record that such an event did in fact occur. i would like to talk about the subject of my book meltdown. it was on the new york times best-seller list, thank you barry much. the new york times has refused to review it. but they will still impose paul krugman on us every week.

but no dissent is allowed in the new york times. i think we all know about the financial picture the new york times is facing so i think it doesn't want to promote a book that argues against bailouts given what the media is going to be demanding in the near future. let's not talk about that depressing subject. i hope i am not going to depress you today because i will leave you with a suggestion that there is a way out of this. whether they are going to follow what is another question. it is comforting to know that if we wanted to get out of this economic mess we could do it. it can be done. i am not going to talk about some of the things you would likely encounter if you turned on right-wing radio where you hear a lot of denunciations of the community reinvestment act that introduced affirmative action in lending or fannie mae and freddie mac whose irresponsible decisions were a fairly significant factor in all

this but all the same there is the elephant in the living room. the factor that more than any other contributed to the crisis but never gets mentioned, is never mentioned in a negative light, certainly in political circles where to the contrary we are encouraged to not even think about it and that is the federal reserve system. most americans here that and don't even know what it is. i am never going to know. this is too complicated. i had better just what the experts take care of this. the experts are a bunch of quacks so it is important for us to learn this material. to know what is going on so that we can have an informed opinion so that we won't inadvertant we enlist in the army of drones who say the solution of the crisis is to give more power to our wives overlords. the federal reserve system is in

charge of the country's money supply as i am sure i don't need to tell people in this room. it has the ability to increase or decrease it. we all know the direction it normally goes. it is supposed to act as a lender of last resort for the financial sector. there's one thing it knows how to do. they got that pretty well under control. we are told that the fed is a great stabilizing agent in the economy. we should not be questioning it because it brings scientific management to bear on our money supply. who could question that? this is for our own good. even the left which prides itself on its slogan question authority falls completely silent when it comes to the fed. that is taking question authority too far. i intend to do that. we are inclined not just to accept whatever we are fed by

the establishment especially when the establishment has been obviously so wrong. we are inclined to ask fundamental questions that are normally passed over. normally what happens when there's an economic crisis of this kind is we get people on one side saying we need to blow borrowed money on non such project and that will make people rich and the other side says let's print up a lot of money. the first two are complete the juvenile and will make the situation worse. this has nothing to do with austria on lot of early figures in the school came from austria. this is important because the austrian school is a school of

economic thought, smallest in the world. it is also the oldest continuously existing school of thought in the world and is the fastest growing because disproportionately economists predicted will we are seeing at a time when the rest of the profession was completely blindsided. maybe 1/10% of professional economists saw this crisis coming. he was not including the austrian economists. his job is to pretend are no austrian economists. we need to highlight these people because they did see what is coming and that is what people are interested in them. the mainstream, so-called, has in my opinion completely disgraced itself during this crisis. not only did it fail to see it coming and not only did they tell us this is the most robust economy anyone has ever seen. they said that in 2007.

the solutions they proposed are utterly juvenile and extremely crude and this is all they have to show for themselves. the mainstream of the economics profession has in affect move from what was once a small corner of the profession, a group of people who fought the best thing for economics to do was to take physics. lot of times in economics we have former or would-be physicists who for what ever reason couldn't get through a physics programs so the next best thing is to become an economist and try to a plea metho of the physical sciences. you will find it is completely unreadable. it is all math.

it is all darden and you would not be alone if you are not subscribing to the american economic review. they did a study to ask how many people read the average article in the american economic review and the answer 2-1/2 people. i assume they're not including the editor and the author because then we would be left with half a guy. the fact that the mainstream is not favorable does not count as a dean marriage. what i want to talk about today is the precipitating factor. it is not the regulation. it is not the free-market is evil. it is not the nonsense you get from nbc or the white house or whatever. all of that is false.

everybody who says the free market has failed. the drones who run the economy need more power. that is dead wrong. what was the precipitating factor? i want to explain why fiscal stimulus is a juvenile idea that intensifies the problem and monetary stimulus and propose what actually could be done to accelerate the recovery. i want to make reference to an episode in american history, and depression that was over in a year and a half because the government did the exact opposite of what it was doing right now. so first to the fed. the fed has nothing to do with the free-market. the free market is the idea of social cooperation bounded by private property rights that we all engage in voluntary transactions with each other and we can not trespass upon other

people's rights to life and property. for all the definitions you have been getting of the free-market, there is no room in that set up for a monopoly paper money producer. that violates the tenets of the free market which opposes -- the free-market would never produce a paper money system where the money is paper and renewable. the system was never created voluntarily through the free market. never. no such thing. it has always made me laugh your governments and the use of police to suppress alternatives. it has never spontaneously emerged. the fed is going to be the target of my remarks. i am of the opinion the free-market more or less works. the free market works but when it comes to money and interest rates we need a soviet czar

engaging in a central plan. seems like an inconsistency. we don't need to concede this. yet the chairman of the federal reserve system from the late 80s, alan greenspan, was treated like a god among men in our financial press and popular culture and television. he was called the maestro. the new york times in its typical totalitarian fashion referred to alan greenspan as the in fallible maestro of our financial system. bob woodward, the anti-establishment reporter, said that in the wizard of oz, we are off to a creepy start, in the wizard of oz, when the man behind the curtain is revealed we are disappointed but in alan

greenspan we find comfort. just creepy. totally creepy. this is beneath the dignity of a free people. or my favorite example is from the new republican magazine which i hope you don't waste your time reading. it had a journalist who have a problem in the 1990s. he is to just make up his tour is. other journalists would be wondering why didn't i get that story? because it came out of this guy's brain. one of the stories this guy wrote was about alan greenspan. he told this story that a group of wall street executives build a little shrine to alan greenspan with his image and flowers and candles and they would meditate in front of him. what is more amazing that somebody would invent a story like that is nobody noticed that with a phony story. people thought that seems like a reasonable thing somebody might

do. something is wrong here. this doesn't make sense in a free society. i want to puncture this bizarre aura around this man and the federal reserve he headed in general. let's talk about a nobel prize winner in economics who actually deserved the prize unlike certain people whose names we won't mentioned until later today. f. a. hayek won the prize for showing that central banks like the fed created by government and nothing without the government granted monopoly privileges destabilize the economy. forget this mythology about what wonderful stabilizing agents they are and since we had the fed, we compare the number of crises we had, has doubled since that time. don't give me that it is a wonderful stabilizer.

that is propaganda. f. a. hayek when the nobel prize because he says the opposite of what the nobel committee wants to hear. they don't want to hear that the central banking thing is a big racket that deep stabilizes rather than stabilizes the economy. he is saying the opposite of what they would like to hear. anybody can understand f. a. hayek's argument with the exception of certain recent nobel prize winners but anyone in this room watching a television can understand this. if you want to understand what happens to the economy and why it is completely laughably bogus to blame this on the free-market, i suggest just two minutes, you will find this makes a lot of sense. i am happy to i spoke at the university of colorado in boulder a few months ago and didn't realize until i got there what boulder's reputation was. they are on the political left.

they invited me to speak so i am going. the room was full on friday night. i don't care what your political outlook is. if you come to an economic lecture your getting a pass from me. a lot of them were obama supporters and i thought i am not getting out of here alive but as it turns out, they thought you made -- i got an e-mail later. he made a good presentation, you made us think, we don't see the argument against what you are saying. i did a show with a left wing host in advance of an appearance in west virginia. i had ten minutes to explain f. a. hayek's theories. in ten minutes he said i was expecting to hate you. instead he make a good case and finally the guy who reads free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse" who has the greatest reading voice you can imagine. he is like a guy from the

movies. just died. he is an obama supporter too free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse" he thought here we go with another bit of right wing propaganda and he wrote to me and said you make a strong case. it is nice once in a while that even though we disagree with people we can be civil and listen to what we are saying. isn't this a wonderful break from what usually takes place? here is f. a. hayek's argument very simply. he wants to know why it is the economy moves like this. we are doing great and up and down, why is it happening? an interesting question. why is this happening? why is there what the economists call a cluster of errors where all of a sudden people who had been great forecasters of consumer demand turn out to be terrible at it at the same time in the same direction? why would this happen? the market weed out people who stink at anticipating consumer demand. they make losses or go out of

business and people who are good at it expand and get more control over capital. at any one time the market is promoting people who are the best at doing this. why are these people selected by the market for their forecasting ability so bad at the same time? good question. rarely do you get an answer to this question other than a psychological one that there were animal spirits that make the want to invest a lot and it turned around and they don't want to invest so much, whatever. was a totally anti intellectual, and satisfying explanation. f. a. hayek says real factors account for why this occurs. f. a. hayek focuses on interest rates. this is too complicated? interest rates are so important. you are going to dream tonight about a giant interest rates symbol chasing you around. what f. a. hayek is saying is interest rates are not just arbitrary numbers. you can't just change them.

we would all like to have low interest rates in the same way that we would all like to have milk for $0.05 a a gallon. we only have that occurs spontaneously. government makes milk, that doesn't mean we will get milk. we can't just simply say anything that seems good for me as a consumer must be good. let's have the government just force it. you might as well have the government abolish the law gravity. interest rates means something. they are where they are for a reason. if you interfere with them. interfering in the free market. you are going to lead to this court nation. what role does it play? it coordinate production of taught -- across time. when people are willing to postpone their purchases into the future, it makes sense for

businesses to bear fruit in the distant future. if people want to consume right now, this is not a time to deploy resources on product development. the interest rate coordinate's demand for goods in the future. this is just the other side of the same:. the interest rate makes sure there are enough resources in the economy to complete all of the long term projects businesses engage in. when we save more, and we restrict our consumption temporarily, we put our money in the banks and this pushes interest rates lower. to take a shortcut here, the price of lending goes down. that indicates we are postponing

our desire to consume into the future. because we are postponing our desire to consume we are releasing resources into the economy for use by these longer-term projects. if we are not producing consumer goods some of the factors of production are now made available for longer term projects like research and development or manufacturing or expanding mining capacity. the reason low interest rates encourage long-term investment should be obvious. more interest matters, if i make a ten year project at 15% interest it is not worth my while but of the interest rate is 8% it might be profitable for me to do it. the longer term the investment is the more it is artificially stimulated if interest rates are interfered with. if interest rates come down naturally because there's more saving available it makes sense for long-term investment to get

started. people are willing to wait. the time it takes for these projects to much or, the interest rate places commercial coordinating function. it is not the case that you can create a utopia by forcing interest rates down artificially. then it will be sunshine and kittens everywhere. the interest rate is a genuine constrained that limits our ambitions to make clear to us we cannot do everything simultaneously. we cannot begin every production project at the same time. f. a. hayek's point is suppose interest rates come down naturally. we have coordination. we have long-term investments starting at a time when people have deferred consumption and released resources for use in longer-term projects, higher order stages of production. let's say you have a central bank like the fed that has various means to push interest

rates lower artificially. what is the difference here? we have the same effect which is more term -- long term projects are overtaken. in this case people haven't stopped consuming or restricted their consumption. they're consuming as much as before. they are consuming even work thanks to the low interest rates discouraging them from saving. if people are not releasing resources, these long-term projects will not be profitable. there are not enough resources to complete them. the resources that are supposed to be released into the production of these distant things haven't been released so there isn't enough to go around. the price of these factors will go up. that will seriously compromise the profitability of these new projects. that is what f. a. hayek is saying. people of building things but what good is a boom if they are

building things they can never finished? they don't correspond to what consumers want. if you interfere with the structure of interest rates as the market sets of them at the result is a massive error on the part of investors and consumers. ludwig von mises was the austrian economist of the 20th-century. he had to flee nazi controlled europe where he was teaching in switzerland. he had to flee even julie not only because he was jewish but what he was teaching was not exactly in conformity with the nazi economic program. ludwig von mises talked about the division of labor and how the markets are the best example of human cooperation across borders and what wondrous thing is to take resources from all over the place and we can create

well. what a wonderful thing this is. not exactly what the nazi party wants to here. they destroyed his papers and library. he fled to the united states where he arrived in 1940 almost empty-handed. not speaking a word of english and no paid university position at a time when every competent -- every marxist could find unemployment. there's ludwig von mises, one of the best economic geniuses of all time and yet he went on to be as productive than ever. is great treatise human action in 1949 is a fantastic best seller even though it is 900 pages. ludwig von mises was an extraordinary genius whose work is still being studied and remembered at a time when all those nobodys who were getting welcome over him have long since been forgotten. ludwig von mises after him the

institute is named gives a great analogy for what is happening in the economy when you are playing havoc with interest rates. let's imagine the economy is being a master builder. building a house and he is going to supply bricks that he thinks is larger than it actually is. let's say these are all the bricks in the whole economy. it is better for him to discover this error earlier rather than later because he has only squandered so many of them and only wasted so much of his time. if he discovers his error as he is putting on the last brick this is a disaster. he has wasted more labor time. this may need to be demolished. if he discovered the error sooner he can cross things off and change things around and make the best of the situation. notice what would not help his master builder. if we got him drunk and said

keep on building, it will look like an economic boom. he is working and building. is the house anymore and financial than it was before? he still can't finish it but now he will be misled into continuing even longer. that is what happens to the economy when people say the cure for low interest rate problems is even lower interest rates. you are saying you started off on investment projects that can't possibly be completed. physical resources don't exist to finish them. starts a more. that is what you are saying when you say you need more credit pumped into the economy. we don't. we need the opposite of that. what ludwig von mises's example shows and this is easy to take out of context and hostile people can interpret the wrong way but i'm speaking to people

of goodwill. the recession period, as painful as it can be, is when we are restored to health. look at the master builder example. the recession period is when the error comes to like. i engaged in an unsustainable project. i need to scale back my expectations and move into something else. that is a good thing. the bad part was the bloom when he was allocating resources wrongly, squandering them on projects the economy does not have the resources to finish. that impoverishes costs because these cannot be recovered. the recession is when we say wait a minute, we have done stupid things we shouldn't have done and now we need to let the market system sort out what is probable, what needs to be abandoned and we clean this out and start again on a firm foundation. that is what the recession accomplishes and it can be short

and swift if the government doesn't interfere. we just lived through the classic example of what happens when you have an economic downturn and the authorities try to inflate their way out of it. create more money and push interest rates down. remember the 1990s where they had no customers and they barely knew what they were making and people think they would get rich in these companies. it went bust around 2,000. in 2001 alan greenspan decided i'm sick of this economic downturn. it is time to laugh again. we need to pump money into this economy and get interest rates down. that will stimulate things again. we had 11 rate cuts in 2001.

this is when he started being called the maestro. this man, this money overlord before whom we are not worthy to stand the dismissal has somehow held off an economic collapse. what an extraordinary man this is. here's what the extraordinary man actually did. in 2001 we had the first recession on record we have ever had in which housing starts didn't decline. that is because alan greenspan wouldn't let the economy clear everything out, the bad investments, people drew the conclusion we have a recession and that housing is still robust so that means housing never goes down, is the best investment you can make an these myths get started because instead of saying to people we need to abandon what we have been doing he says full steam ahead, keep doing what you have been doing. the crash we have now is all the worse because in the interim we

have been persisting in these incorrect flows of spending and production. it is all the worse because instead of being corrected we were affirmed. recently we had all tears and to be on television saying to us this crisis goes to show that there is a flaw in the free market that he had never noticed before. it means a lot when a guy like this who people falsely believed was a free market guy. if even greenspan--who are you to dispute what greenspan says? i would simply say -- he is making $150,000 a speech. pretty good racket.

we have found the flaw and it is you. how could you have a housing bubble? a lot of people have said -- prices that are not sustainable, this is a scent of subjective las vegas. there's no getting around it. some people say this is a psychological phenomenon. people become attached to a particular kind of investment or asset. i don't mean to discount psychological explanations. once the bubble gets going it feeds on itself. the order is sometimes mixed up because if it had just been psychology the market would have put a damper on that because where would you have gotten the credit to keep investing in housing? if there is unusual activity

prices go up and if you had a free market in making interest rates would go up to say we are run out of things to bend. maybe you should rethink this. when you have a soviet commissar running interest rates, he can create all this new money and put it in and keep interest rates low and keep this artificial thing going. this was always ludwig von mises's argument and even anna schwartz said any time there is an asset bubble there's always some kind of artificial credit inflating it. that is what does it. there is no way you would be able to afford the increasing price unless there was some consistent spigot of credit being pumped into the economy. it is not fair to blame hdtv for the housing bubble. is a crazy simultaneous thing.

it may have played some minor role but without the fed pressing the accelerator we wouldn't have this problem. the issue of lowering lending standards is not altogether separable from the issue of the fed. it is not just the community reinvestment act. if the fed pumps money into the economy, into the banking system, the banks want to stay loaned up to the legal extent possible. if they get more money to lend out and it is burning a hole in their pockets, who is going to be the recipient of this money? if not, people they would have rejected otherwise. the example a free-market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse" is if i have a basketball team and i pick my players and i am told you get to pick two more. where will i pick the two more players from? the pool of people i had just rejected. naturally the standards are going to go down. all through this, we had

something that investors knew as the greenspan put which everyone understood to mean that greenspan is going to not let things unravel. things turn bad for major market actors he will bail you out. this happened time and time again. it is not some theory i came up with. you can find out all about this. where is the free market in this? in what way could this be the free-market? when you have a central bank, since 1971, what happens is it institutionalizes moral hazard. that is the phenomenon in which people become riskier when they believe any losses they make will be spread among the public instead of borne by them individually. they keep the profits but spread the losses. the fed institutionalizes this problem because why should

financial firms worry so much about their capital? why should they worry about the types of investment they are making when they can get injections of fresh liquidity? naturally there is going to be more risktaking then there would otherwise be. i don't see how this can be disputed. this is the nature of the system. if people say we need more regulation you have got to be kidding me that that is the explanation. you have got to be kidding me. the banking industry is the most heavily regulated in the whole country. the regulators thought the securitization model was working just fine. now we are being told we need a system regulator and that will be the fed. the fed creates the risk in the first place. now they are going -- this is like we are living in an orwell novel combined with a kafka novel. it is unbelievable. you wake up as a giant bug and they throw you in jail.

it is a bizarre situation we are facing. i will point out by the way that one objection to what i am saying is in the nineteenth century we had a lot of booms and busts, you can't blame that on alan greenspan. that is true. i can't blame that on a person who had not been born or and institution that didn't exist. i talk stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse". if you look cases in the nineteenth century they are all caused by the same thing. we either have a national banking going monopoly privileges or banking system that is consistently bailed out when it gets into trouble. if you look at the 1870s, supposedly the time of the long depression, worst depression ever, economic historians don't believe there was a long depression in the 1870s.

the consensus now is there was a recession in 1873 but the 1870s and 1880s were among the most robust decades and american history according to every criterion you can imagine. economic historians were misled into thinking this must have been a depression because prices declined by 3.8% per year and declining prices is like death, lobbies are going to rome the earth when you have declining prices. i won't get into a deflationary here. that is how people become rich. in the old days before the fed you used to be able to save by accumulating precious metal:. back when precious metal circulated as money they held their value or gained slightly in value when they circulated as money. how did people save for the future? they save quoins. they didn't have to go into the stock market and become

speculators. we all have to become speculators to go into the stock market or invest in heaven knows what or go into debt to buy house because it will keep up with inflation. you can get wiped out and ruined by this but we are told this is all for the common man. you have got to be kidding me! this is unbelievable! every time i hear the left talk about questioning authority, the most regressive institution imaginable that rewards the financial elite in society and discombobulates the financial planning of every normal person in the country, you say that is not worth questioning, you are a crank and not to question it at this point. [applause]

so there's something wrong with the money. money can be created that will in any quantity, no resources expended. this money is pumped into the banking system and pushes the rates of interest down and creates this boom and bust cycle. when the bust comes, the major players who get caught out go crying to the central bank, the paper money producer because they know there is no physical constraint on how much money the paper money producer can create so they go to the paper money producer and say bail me out and get what they want. it seems to me this is not obviously the best conceivable system. we are being told what needs to be done is we need fiscal stimulus. this one is rich. we need fiscal -- we are going

to spend $800 billion and blow it on money losing project. how do i know their money-losing projects? if they weren't the private sector would be engaged in them. when has barney frank ever directed money to something that made any sense whatsoever? you know it is a money losing project. i don't excuse republicans who will say the problem with the stimulus was we didn't blow the $800 billion on the right things. this is again not the sharpest response he might make. the fact is the government has no profit and loss mechanisms so has no way of knowing if it is doing well or destructively bad your wasting resources, it has no way of knowing. kind of uncivilized. it has no way of knowing what it is doing. this will make us rich.

now paul krugman says we need more stimulus. the problem is never that the first crazy idea was a crazy idea. we have not done enough of a crazy idea. it is never lets reverse course and do something else. we do exactly what japan did all through the 90s and they continue to do and they just contracted their economy on an annualized rate. what you might hear for haiti or something but that is japan after following the advice of these geniuses who claim they didn't follow our advice. they did everything -- this is what they have to show for it. basically zero. in terms of fiscal stimulus, it diverts resources. where are the resources coming from? it takes them from the private

sector. the sophisticates will come back with these resources are idle. they are not doing anything anyway so it is okay if we put them back in production. that would be the case perhaps if you could devise stimulus packages that would only make use of precisely the resources that are currently idle but they are not doing that. they're coming up with arbitrary projects which are going to involve diverting steel or labor from places where they are currently employed. this vital resource argument doesn't work on those grounds. secondly, the argument that we need to spend money to get all the resources back into productive activity, they never asked why the resources are idle in the first place. why do we have idle capacity in the first place? what is going on here?

this is a remnant of the artificial bloom. we had production in areas that can't be sustained. we don't want to stimulate these back into use. we need to see what the market decides where they should be deployed right now. it is like a restaurant owner in vancouver who when the olympics come he thinks great, apparently everybody loves my food. he doesn't realize the reason people are coming to his town are the olympics are in town and a lot of spectators and athletes. they have the olympic rings on their t-shirts. this guy is not noticing this so he thinks suddenly loved my food. i knew this was bound to happen so he built a second location and the olympics go away at his second location, they are getting no tips, there is nobody in their. should we want to stimulate his idle resources back into activity?

obviously that would divert resources from healthy areas of the economy where the market needs to redeploy them. it would be a total waste to do this. stimulus packages are like drinking red bull instead of sleeping. what it is actually doing, there is no perpetual motion machine. whatever part of your body is not totally exhausted the red bull will totally exhausted. it is not like no crash coming, that crashed is coming. likewise -- it seeks out like the parasite that it is a profitable sliver of the economy and sucks resources out of it and exhausts the economy still further. monetary stimulus, let's print more money and blow it.

that puts it off for a few more years and make it more intense when it actually gets here. we need the opposite. in american history we have an episode in which that is exactly what was done. that is 1920-1921. you have heard me talk about this over and over again. i have a youtube on this topic called why you have never heard of the great depression of 1920. it has there refreeze thousand used. it amazes me that people are so desperate to figure out what is going on that they will sit in front of their computer and watch tv for 45 minutes about the great depression of 1920. what happened in 1920? we had a depression in which we had double digit unemployment, skyrocketing from 4% to 12% and production dropped dramatically. what was done? between 1920, and 1922 the

federal government budget was cut in half. instead of the fiscal stimulus we had the opposite of that. today we are being told the worst thing you can do is cut government spending during a depression because that will cut into aggregate demand. you can't ever do that. is important for the congressmen to get their offices renovated. this is for the good of the country. it is nothing to do with what we want. i have eight minutes? how much have i got? according to my watch we started at 11:35 -- okay. alright. i will try to finish in a couple minutes. they did the opposite of this. the fed stayed out and in 1921 the crisis was basically over. they did the opposite. you never hear about this episode ever. i talk about this in that youtube. i look at how historians dealt with that. the opposite of stimulus, it

works fantastically. there were one or two episodes about this. there was not a wicked the entry on this until this year and it has entries on the drummer for journey in the 1980s and what his second wife did for a living and nothing about this whatsoever. given that apparently i am lebron time then i realized -- people were told to listen to the experts, had no idea what they were talking about. in 2001, paul krugman said we need lower interest rates to spur housing. that should be much finish it for paul krugman. working for the new york times means never having to say you are sorry. you would never be working for the new york times if you were not always wrong. we have not been listening to people who know what they are talking about or the economists that the austrian school. we have been neglecting them

because they refuse to lick the establishment's boots but that is a virtue. it is time we started listening to them. i urge why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse". visit me at tomwoods.com. we have been listening to the quacks long enough. let's make some progress for a change and listen to people who have a clue what they're talking about. >> this event was part of freedomfast held annually in lost vegas. for more information, visit freedomfast.com. >> 17 years old, and thoroughbred arab cross. wonderful horse. my mother read horses. i always liked horses. i tend to get up at 6:30 every

day. my co editor, jeffrey sinclair, puts this side up on new material at 7:30. we crack in at 6:30 and discuss what stories might go up on the site. probably accumulate them over the previous day. we talk about what people are interested in and what big events are in the world. jeffrey gets the site up between 6:30 and 8:00. i do columns and "counterpunch" material. the one i have been doing since 1984. i do that every second tuesday. his syndicated column. then working on a couple books for "counterpunch" press. those are the birds.

the dog and cat and birds ride in with me. we keep quiet about that. do you want to write a column for me? sit down. sait down. good morning. some writers like no noise. i can ls because they don't criticize. as soon as you start talking for radio they drown you out. that takes me through the morning bidding for the "counterpunch" books, two or three book projects. in the middle of this, i have horses, i am running around building things. life lurches forward through the day.

this is a building where we put up three or four years ago. it is a very old technique. like many riders i like thinking about things other than writing. i like to build. this is a square building going into a dome done by my friend and neighbor greg smith. i don't like to write in the evening unless i do something for england. england is eight hours from here. if you're going to do something about a:00 in the morning you can do it late at night. that is the shape of my day. someone who does the editing on the books -- business operations

are run in petroleum by becky grant and david weaver. we started thinking we were publishing stuff in the newsletter and we wanted to keep it in more permanent form. the web stuff doesn't go away. it is on the backside of mars somewhere in the vast black hole of internet communications, in some government archive. we felt we wanted to put them in hard covers. we began with the politics of anti-semitism. the idea that if you are critical of israel you are an anti-semite which is nonsense. that was a very successful book. we do books in association with the press who are a bunch of

organized anarchist's in oakland. we also sell the books on our web site. people right in and we send them to the office. it was natural for us to do it. we put in books that we like. it is not that expensive if you can sell them and you have a web site in which you can advertise them all the time. we have done five or six books. it was done by myself and jeffrey sinclair, co editor of this one. and we have danny cassidy's book. that will be a very important book because it shows much of american stuff comes from marriage like poker and jazz. it is a hidden part of american

language. three words from irish in american today is complete nonsense. millions of irish people came to america speaking irish. the words didn't go away, they just transmuted into american. danny is the first person who has gone through it and there were communist words in the american language straight irish. we have not been shy to criticize the bush administration. we don't think the democratic party is the answer to everything. a dime's worth of difference basically saying -- in many ways

between the two parties. lot of democrats got pretty mad. we occupy a different site. we figure pretty large. when people say we must like the democratic party, we are staying out. you know lot about life and the world. that is what we are about. listening to the sound of my father at 5:00 in the morning, a ten word typewriter tracking away. that was a different era. i grew up with hot metal type in newspapers. my dad who was a great writer, i applaud -- one telephone line from southern ireland in the middle 50s.

he finished writing his article and jumped on his bike to ride three miles to tell. only time he got mad at me in my childhood was when i got fed up with him riding into town instead of writing a book in the evening. he was furious. any other father would be you. my father rode on that for many years until almost the day he died. not quite 1980. i must have typed five million words on those machines as many riders of my generation did. the only person who still does is ralph nader. i told him i had underwood 10. he wanted to cannibalize it for his. i wouldn't do it. that was my work habits.

editing and all that. i wrote columns in new york until 1984. i have to get on the subway in manhattan -- all the way to the south end of manhattan. i rode to key west in the early 80s. then fedex. it got easier to be a columnist outside new york. i really only went on line in probably 1998. i was late to the game. my co editor said you have to do it. what are our work habits now?

i put the typewriter away for and electric ibm. i will have you out in a little bit. i haven't gotten the poor old thing. rather treacherous and here i am with a mack, laptop. i am a hunt and peck guy. two or three fingers. just hammering away at the keys. i used to wear the imagery -- the characters off of the keys because i hit them hard. >> in her book sexism in america barbara berg present that argument that women in america have a come nearly as far since the 1950s and 60s as is generally believed.

this event is 50 minutes. >> thank you very much. thank you for hosting this event. thank you for coming. he pulled me by my hair and dragged me up 36 metal steps, each one i could feel as my cheek went against them making a mark on my face. i had to spent weeks in hospital and i will never look the same again. this story was not the worst i heard. far from the worst while i was researching this book. but when i told a colleague about it he said sexism? are you kidding? there is no more sexism in america. that is so passe. that is pretty much the kind of attitude i ran into when i first began