09/30/09 – Thomas E. Woods – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio on chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio introducing our first guest on the show today.
It's Thomas E. Woods.
You can find his website at tomwoods.com or thomasewoods.com, whichever way you prefer there.
He is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, has a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a master's and PhD from Columbia.
He's the author of nine books, including two New York times bestsellers, meltdown, a free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked and government bailouts will make things worse and the politically incorrect guide to American history.
So other books include who killed the constitution, the fate of American liberty from world war one to George W. Bush with Kevin Goodsman, sacred then and sacred now, the return of the old Latin mass, 33 questions about American history.
You're not supposed to ask how the Catholic church built Western civilization and the church in the market, a Catholic defense of the free economy.
And it goes on and on and on like this.
Of course, we who dared say no to war, the betrayal of the American right.
Oh, he did the introduction there.
All right.
Anyway, Tom Woods, welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you doing?
All right, Scott.
I'm really happy to have you here.
Thanks.
All right.
So here's the thing.
I'm a libertarian just like you.
I'd like to abolish the state the day before yesterday if it was up to me.
But I'm going to pretend and try my best to attack your very libertarian position from the left if I can in this interview, sir.
All right.
You go right ahead.
Do your worst.
All right.
Here's the thing.
We got a 20 percent unemployment rate in this country.
We have huge percentages of the population of this land who live paycheck to paycheck to paycheck.
People don't have any savings held.
The Federal Reserve might as well have made it a felony to save money over the past 10 years.
They forced everybody into these bubble markets because you can't you couldn't even make a cent on a savings account down at the local bank.
And now these people are hurting, man, 20 percent unemployment rate.
This is the kind of thing that leads to revolutions, to, you know, bloodshed and and, you know, people people's political factions becoming, you know, much more radicalized.
And, you know, these are bad times.
And I wonder I know that you're going to tell me, well, it's all government's fault in the first place.
And I think I agree with that.
I'm not sure that that's even in dispute anymore.
It really shouldn't be.
But well, for example, Tom, socialized health care seems to me like the the elite who use the state to rule this country, to wage their wars, to inflate their bubbles.
They're kind of feeling guilty and saying, listen, you know, instead of let them eat cake, let's at least give them, you know, where they can go to the doctor while we're screwing them all out of their job, while we're putting them in the middle of a Great Depression.
At least if they're dying, they ought to be able to go to a doctor on the government's tab instead of having, you know, their kids form a militia after they die without health care.
Do you feel what I'm saying here?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
So, all right, let's try and untangle some of this.
First of all, just so your listeners know, when you're citing 20 percent unemployment, you're not using the government's official statistics, which is a good first step.
That number comes from adding in all the real forms of unemployment the government statistic ignores.
And even the head of the Atlanta Fed, a couple weeks ago, said the real unemployment rate is about 16 percent, so close to your estimate, John Williams' backdrop.
So, yeah, so in fact, as usual, the problem is worse than the government lets on.
So, the question then becomes, you know, here we have a system in which you have an awful lot of average, ordinary Americans who have just been doing the best they can in the midst of a crazy system.
As you say, Scott, a system that rewarded people who went out and blew all their money instead of saving it.
And now what, you know, what do we do about these people, right?
I mean, now we've got a whole lot of them out of work, and people who can't make mortgage payments.
I mean, what exactly do you do?
And I think this is a – it's good that we're having this conversation, because right now we are actually, I think, sort of seeing the kind of phenomenon that people think we're always seeing, which is whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
By and large, I think in a market society, everybody does get richer.
I mean, if you really want to trade away your position in 2009 America for 1857, you know, you should have your head examined.
Obviously, everybody's richer since then.
But what I think has happened, especially since these bailouts, is that the extremely wealthy have, in fact, been well taken care of.
And so, for example, the too-big-to-fail firms, the banks that are too big to fail, the financial institutions too big to fail, are now even bigger than before.
And our Treasury Secretary has consoled us by saying, well, look, everybody, we're just going to have to accept the fact that our financial sector is going to be a lot more heavily concentrated in fewer hands.
Yeah, I'm sure the people in whose hands it's concentrated are shedding an awful lot of tears over that, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, and I tend to think, to paraphrase you from the testimony last week about the audit, the Fed thing, I tend to think anybody who's not on the take, any American, out of 300 million of us, I think everybody can basically assent to the proposition that if a bank is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.
Yeah, exactly right.
And then beyond that, there's an awful lot of argument about whether, you know, the extent to which too-big-to-fail is really real.
I mean, would it have been better to let some of the, like, for example, 1984, interestingly enough, it happened to be the year 1984, that we started to get this too-big-to-fail doctrine.
I'm not going to dwell on this too long, but it was because there was a Chicago bank, Continental, that was going under, and instead of unwinding and using the FDIC, they had a massive bailout.
And it was said at the time, now listen, this is not a policy change, this is just this one bank, and this is what Paul Volcker said, it's just this one bank, we're not going to do it this way for other banks.
But other officials said, no, no, this is a policy change, the top 11 banks we've decided are too-big-to-fail, and so we're going to keep them in good shape.
So the joke at the time became, well, who would want to put his money in the 12th biggest bank then?
You know, so what in fact winds up happening is that the smaller actors, as usual in this corporatist system, wind up getting the squeeze, because everybody now knows, well, I'll put my money in these banks, because nothing could ever happen to them, or I'll be a bondholder in these banks, nothing could ever possibly happen to them, and that's why they're able to attract money on easier terms than the smaller actors are.
We'll extrapolate from that to the whole economy, to the way in which top firms manage to manipulate government and the regulatory structure in their favor, and that's the system we have now that we're being told is the free market and the cause of our problems.
This is a system in which the wealthy, genuinely, this is a real case of the wealthy actually exploiting the rest of society, using their cozy relationship with the political sector to do it, and everybody should be upset about this.
Right, but so now, again, here we are with 20% unemployment.
It's going to be like this.
In fact, you know, I know you oftentimes defer to Bob Murphy, I interview him on this show quite often, and he says, you know, the way they're doing the inflation, the risk of the dollar actually completely breaking, that kind of thing, even aside, this is going to be a depression that is going to last for 10 years or something.
So I just wonder, you know, here what we have, I guess here's a way to phrase it, maybe.
Communists see class war between the rich and the poor, simple as that, or the rich and everybody else, even.
You know, maybe see the middle class as like the cushion to keep the poor from rising up and getting what's theirs, that kind of thing, right?
Then you have the Rothbardian definition of class warfare, which says anybody who's hiring the state to beat their neighbor over the head and take their stuff is, you know, waging class war.
That's really the definition, who's using force and who's not.
But like, to get real here, I mean, and I understand Social Security and Medicare and what have you are large parts of the budget, but no regular individual American is ever getting very much of that.
What we have in America is a class war, even by Rothbardian standards, where the kinds of people who, you know, have, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares of Citigroup or whatever.
These people use the state to mug us, to, you know, it's almost this, this situation now almost reminds me of Russia when they just liquidated all of the former Soviet industries and whatever, and just took all the money and ran, left a shell of a husk of a society left behind.
You know, I mean, the fall of communism didn't have to be that hard.
It looks to me like that's what they're doing to us.
They're just taking everything and they're going to leave us with nothing.
And I guess, you know, it's pretty easy to understand why anyone to the left of anything, anyone who considers themselves on the left at all would say, hey, listen, if they're going to do nothing but take all our money and use it to kill little brown people in other people's countries and use it to bail out banks for the trillions of dollars, well, by God, they ought to give us an education and make sure we don't starve to death and make sure that we can go to the doctor's office and whatever.
That's the least they can do as long as they're getting away with all the rest of this stuff.
Tom, how do you address that?
I address that by saying, you know what, I don't really want to have any moral dealings with these people at all.
I mean, given the fact that they're liars, thieves and killers, I don't want them to throw me some crumbs, you know, leave me with some dignity.
Just I don't want to be contributing to your war machine.
I don't want to contribute to your bailout machine, your bankster machine.
I don't want to be involved in that.
And if you will just exempt me from that and give me my wealth back that you've stolen through taxes and inflation, I'm pretty sure my neighbors and I can come up with some kind of solution to solve our problems.
I'm confident of that.
I don't need to be a bootlicker of people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, all these types of people who should creep out any normal person.
I don't want to be licking their boots asking them for favors.
I'm quite certain that Americans with their well-known ingenuity can solve their problems.
And I don't believe that the health problem is a problem of, you know, we're not blown enough money.
To the contrary, it's that nobody cares about the cost of anything because of the third party payment system.
So of course, of course prices are going to go up.
But if you look at areas, as Rand Paul points out, if you look at areas of health where you don't see this, the government is least involved, like LASIK surgery and so on, prices are coming way down.
But the bottom line is, number one, I don't want to have any connection with them whatsoever.
It's sort of like William Lloyd Garrison's view of slavery.
His view was, yes, I want to abolish slavery.
But first of all, I want the North to secede from the Union because I don't want to have any moral taint associated with me connected with slavery.
And that was his first thing, was that I don't want to be connected with them.
But then beyond that, I mean, look at the system we've got now, where we just elected a guy who ran on change and made us all these promises, and at least even you and I, Scott, who are very cynical, and we know that they're feeding us lies and the two parties are indistinguishable, we know that.
But yet, even still, I bet you and I, deep down, sort of thought, well, at least Obama's not a complete, hick, moron, embarrassment, idiot.
And secondly, maybe he doesn't have as unsteady of a trigger finger, and maybe it might be marginally better.
Now he's beating the drums for war as if Wolfowitz were still there, as if George W. Bush and Cheney were still there.
And so this should make clear to people, this whole regime is corrupt and disgusting all the way through.
And to think, well, oh gosh, if I could just petition for a few crumbs, no, no, free yourself from it.
Don't be part of it, don't be complicit with it, don't go along with what they're saying.
Secede from it morally, secede from it spiritually.
That's how you can be a self-respecting person.
All right, now, I'm sure you're just as discouraged by this as I am, when you see people like Dick Armey, who's one of the most terrible nationalists and statists and warmongers in our society, a welfarer for billionaire mongers in our society.
And all of his acolytes, people, you know, the Fox News crowd, etc., trying to hijack the anti-government movement.
And basically, I mean, we can see right through them, Tom, just as well as a socialist can see right through them, that they are simply trying to provide cover for certain corporations, favored corporations, where they see government regulation of this certain brand or another as hampering them.
And in that sense, even though you don't mean it, I know you don't mean it, I know where your principles are.
But in a sense, aren't you really just kind of contributing to, you know, right-wing, not libertarian, but right-wing anti-government propaganda that is not really anti-government, but is simply pro-corporate?
Well, I'm certainly not.
I mean, Dick Armey doesn't invite me to speak.
I think what he and his friends are trying to do is channel, do what the establishment always tries to do, is channel public anger into safe directions, you know, where all you do is go out and have a public demonstration, and you give a few speeches, and then everybody goes home.
That's what they'd like to see happen.
And then make sure it doesn't go off in unapproved directions.
Make sure it stays safely pro-war, you know, we can't have any of these Ron Paul radicals leading this movement.
We've got to make sure the Dick Armeys of the world are leading it.
So they're doing this for their aims.
Now, at the same time, I've gotten invited by local Tea Party groups to come speak, and so I come speak on the grounds that anybody who invites me, I'll come speak to.
I mean, I want to talk to these people.
And they don't really know.
A lot of them are very well-informed.
Others of them aren't, but they just know.
I don't believe Obama, and I think, okay, that's a good start.
I mean, at least they're not drones, and at least they have some critical faculties.
And then I explain to them, I give them a different overview of what caused the problem, and I point to the Federal Reserve System, which no establishment group is targeting.
The Federal Reserve System is in no way progressive, and it's in no way conservative in the good sense.
It's conservative in the worst possible sense.
It clearly and obviously and consistently benefits the most powerful influential members of society.
That is not a crazy conspiracy theory, because it's right out in the open.
This is what it exists for.
It's what it has always done.
And don't make me laugh by telling me that it exists to provide stability to our financial system.
I mean, not to be kidding me, after the performance of Alan Greenspan, this institution discombobulates our economy, winds up getting people making the wrong decisions with asset purchases.
They wind up thrown out of work when the bust comes after the Fed-induced boom.
This thing is the enemy of the country.
And so when you are lodged against that, no, I don't think I'm inadvertently or deliberately participating in the Dick Army hijacking of this sort of sentiment.
I'm trying to direct it in the right avenue, and I'm particularly also interested in directing it down an anti-war avenue, to take these people's anti-government sentiment and say to them, look, you know, yes, sure, the government loots you for school lunch programs or whatever, but you know what?
Combine all the school lunch programs, you know, school breakfasts, you know, and all that stuff, and put it all together.
And it's not like how much they spend in a tenth of a second in the various wars around the world.
And what I want to show is that, you know, they lie about that just as much as they lie about everything else.
You know, like, you're worried about the president's birth certificate, for heaven's sake.
How about all the lies you were told about this and this and this and this?
And look at the money that's blown by the military-industrial complex.
I mean, what is free market about that?
And then just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
That's how I'd like to try to direct it.
Yeah.
Well, and that's a really good point, I think, for these right-wingers to try to make to this Tea Party movement is that, you know, along the lines of the birth certificate that, you know what, Barack Obama doesn't look exactly like you.
He's got a kind of funny-sounding name and whatever.
But this whole kind of, he's a Muslim, he's a radical, he's a commie, he's a foreigner, all this stuff is basically a psychological move to try to externalize what's wrong with America.
There's this, you know, Kenyan secret service or Indonesian intelligence plot to put their traitor in charge of our government.
He's a usurper, a pretender to the throne and all these things.
And that's another attempt to try to take this anti-government movement and, again, get it off on the wrong track, on irrelevant issues, sidetrack it, get it focused on nothing.
Well, you can see why right-wingers would like to glom onto that, because that's a much easier explanation than it's their fault for cheering at the top of their lungs for fascism for eight years and announcing people like you and me as traitors to America for knowing better than them.
Yeah, no, exactly.
But beyond that, I mean, it is, of course, they also don't want to say that there's something wrong with the whole damn regime.
They don't want to say that.
They want to say it's one guy or it's those terrible Democrats or whatever, you know.
And then, you know, meanwhile, they want to vote for John McCain, who, at least for some of the more well-meaning but basically duped grassroots people, he would have stabbed them in the back at every single opportunity.
And then in 2012, they would have been scratching their heads saying, gee, John McCain didn't turn out to be very conservative.
I mean, I've still been there and done that with this whole charade whereby no matter which one of them gets elected, we get the same wars, we get the same BS every single time, we get the same bipartisan bailout packages.
I mean, come on.
It really is true what Sam Francis said, that you have the stupid party and the evil party, and when they work together, they give you something that's stupid and evil, and that's bipartisanship.
Except now, I don't know which party is the stupid party, which one's the evil party.
I mean, I think they're both the evil part.
I refuse to give them the cop-out of saying that they're stupid, though, because nobody could be quite this stupid.
I mean, if you were just stupid, you would occasionally just fall ass-backwards into doing the right thing, once in a while, right, if you were just stupid.
You'd like to think so, these people.
Well, you know, this is something I put to Ron Paul on the show last week, was, is this stupidity or the plan?
I mean, these people really believe their own nonsense?
And he's like, yeah, I'm afraid so, you know, basically was his answer.
All right, well, you know, I've read quotes from ancient Greece and from Mark Twain and every generation in between wondering whether it's stupidity or the plan.
It never goes away, and it's always a little bit of both, of course.
All right, but so let me ask you this.
I think Jon Stewart actually said this real well, or not real well, but he brought up an interesting point in his discussion with Ron Paul there, where he said, now listen, there's not, you know, people can violate each other's rights other than just the government.
I mean, that's not the only infringement of liberty.
And Ron said, yeah, of course, you know, people ought to be prosecuted for fraud and, you know, that kind of deal.
But what I want to bring up with you is the going postal workplace shootings.
And this is something I really don't know that much about, but I've been reading a little bit of Mark Ames over at the Exiled Online, and this is kind of his specialty.
And basically his story goes, ever since the Reagan years, when I suppose what he's getting at is unions were disempowered and the shareholders and CEOs were completely empowered at the expense of anyone else who took part in any, you know, major company in the society, that that basically left the employees completely helpless to the tyranny of their bosses.
And that as a result, we are now used to the idea that sometimes people come to work and massacre their fellow employees, their bosses, and then blow their own heads off.
And this is something that started in the 1980s.
This is not the natural scheme of things in life on earth.
This is not, you know, how American society just is by default, that we all are supposed to go to work every day, fearing that, you know, somebody who got fired or somebody who got humiliated or tyrannized by the boss or cheated out of his pension or whatever is going to come kill all of us.
And what Mark Ames is saying is that because of the way that the law has been changed in favor of the most powerful, the owners of the societies, the owners of the companies, that is the explanation for seeing these desperate people going on these shooting rampages.
And it happens a lot.
And you know, I just wonder, because I know that, you know, to probably unfairly, briefly sum it up, property rights are absolute.
You make a company, you own a company, the job belongs to you, you can hire and fire whoever you want, and if they don't like it, tough, and et cetera, et cetera, like that.
But I'm not even necessarily getting at the question, Tom, of whether there's got to be a law, but I'm asking you, what does there got to be so that people who are loyal employees of these companies aren't just treated like animals to the point where they come back armed to the teeth and ready to wage war?
Well, Scott, we've also got this problem in the school systems, too, where people are just showing up, engaging in rampages.
So I mean, I can't pretend to account for what the underlying explanation of this is and why it's not like in other countries, like what do you think, that employers in Japan are just super and, you know, no one ever has any problems with them, and yet we have basically no example for this.
So there's got to be some culture-specific explanation of this.
Well, let me give you one short anecdote.
There was one, apparently, a couple weeks ago or a week ago or so in Fresno, and it was a guy who worked at a tractor dealership on the side of the road or something, and he came to work, he killed one of his fellow employees, he shot up all the machinery, and then killed himself.
And all the quotes from all his friends, and they're talking about a murderer here, their friend who turned into a murderer, and they're still saying, listen, this guy was the salt of the earth.
One guy says, I would have bet my life savings he would never do anything like this.
And they got four or five different quotes about how there's at least this one manager at this, you know, roadside tractor dealership who is just the biggest tyrant in the world, and he'd been complained about over and over and over again to the owners, and the owners never did anything about it, and this one supervisor apparently treated everyone so unfairly, and they had no recourse about it.
They could do nothing about it, and finally this one guy snapped and came to work armed.
That's like, that's one example, right?
It's, the point is, the powerlessness of the employee in the face of his employer that's doing him wrong, Tom.
Okay, well, I mean, I think part of the answer is, we have to understand that as long as we're on this earth, you know, we're going to have problems like this.
There is no system that's going to do away with that SOB at work and whatever.
There is no way out of this to some degree.
At the same time, what you can do is, the best you can do is encourage a system in which no special favors are given out, no barriers to competition are erected, so that there are the greatest possible number of alternative sources of employment that you can have recourse to so that you can vote with your feet against what this person is doing, so that this firm has to pay a penalty.
It has to actually pay more to attract people the same way, if you see that show Dirty Jobs, they have to pay more.
I mean, they can't just pay you minimum wage to go, you know, sit in a swamp all day.
I mean, they have to pay a premium.
Well, likewise, normally you would have to pay a premium to get people to endure this, but other than that, as I say, other than punishing fraud and punishing breach of contract and defrauding the laborer of his wages is one of the sins that cries to heaven for vengeance for Catholics.
So again, these are all things that the law is perfectly within its rights to take care of, but beyond that, it's not like if you live in a more controlled society with a more top-down economic system, these problems go away.
It's that now the commissars are the source of your problem, so you can't just wish them away or bureaucratize them away, because then the bureaucracy, which is even less responsive, becomes the source of your problems.
The best you can hope to do, realistically, in a non-utopian way, is minimize it by having a system that is as competitive and non-crony as possible.
Well, and I guess, see, this is the thing, too, is here we are only at the dawn of a brand new era of economic devastation.
I mean, I remember in the 1980s, there were places in Austin, Texas, where they had built entire neighborhoods, had laid huge slab foundations for entire malls and strip malls, and literally they had entire neighborhoods built, the cul-de-sacs, the fire hydrants, the sidewalks, everything, and all this sat dormant for 15 years or something.
We're talking about real hard times for a lot of people, and this kind of thing is only going to get more and more complex.
In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in another thing here.
I do a lot of reading on the internet to do links, not nearly as much as Jason and Eric, but I do some links for antiwar.com to make sure that page has everything we need to know on it, and I see the AP covers at least a couple of times a week, Tom, at least a couple of times a week.
Some guy kills his kids, his wife himself, and sometimes they say, oh man, she was cheating on him with this guy, and it was a personal thing, just went over, but there's a lot of these where it's clearly economic problems, where a breadwinner is hopeless, hopeless.
He cannot see how he's ever going to be able to fix this, and here we're only at the beginning.
Right, right.
No, I understand, and I think what compounds this is the euphoria of the boom period, in which it seems like, you know what, hey, not only am I doing well, I'm doing far better than I thought, and hey, I bet you I should go into the stock market next, and people start doing things that they really shouldn't do.
Like most people don't have any, I don't have any business being in the stock market, but yet it seems like you just can't lose during these Fed-induced booms, and then suddenly when you do lose, and you lose hard, well that's, I think, even more disorienting than just suddenly losing your job or dealing with some jerk at the office.
It's, to go from one extreme to the other, I think is extremely disorienting for people.
So I think it's not enough for us to say, hey, we've got a lot of unemployment, we have a lot of anger and unrest out there, what do we do about it?
Yeah, maybe it's the government's fault, but what do we do right now?
I don't think that's enough.
I think we have to go back and look at how did we get here, because only that way can we make sure that we're not perpetuating the problem, infringing it, and that requires us to go back, and I'm not going to do this now and bog us down, but I mean, looking at genuinely what the causes were, the idea of too big to fail, and implicit bailout guarantees, and a Federal Reserve system that is ready to pump money into the coffers of anybody who needs it to keep afloat, and then later on not even tell us who got what, I mean, come on now, you can't pretend this is a free market.
I mean, the game is rigged to benefit the people at the top, and it consistently hurts the people at the bottom, and it gets the economy on these unsustainable, artificial booms that lead to busts.
You know, I think when we look at an institution like the Fed, it's important to remember that when it was being drafted, the Federal Reserve Act, the people who drafted it were all from the banking industry, and they even said if the public knew who drafted this legislation, they would never, ever approve it.
Now, are you going to tell me, especially somebody on the left who believes in questioning authority and not giving the private sector the benefit of the doubt?
And following the money.
And following the money, are you going to tell me that this is the one case in all of human history when a single industry sought to regulate itself for the sake of the overall common good?
Or is it at least conceivable that they did this to benefit themselves?
And by benefiting themselves, benefits don't just come from heaven.
Benefits come from hurting other people, indirectly.
Where else would it come from?
So they're going to benefit themselves at the expense of others, and that has happened time and again.
It keeps happening.
And now we've got this grassroots movement, left and right, to audit the Federal Reserve to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, you cannot continue to do this.
I mean, we are now on to you.
You cannot continue to do this.
I mean, you've given us – and now the Fed, by the way, has the nerve to tell us that it has to continue to be secret and who gets what, because otherwise it won't be able to do as super of a job as it's been doing.
Oh yeah, that's a real super job there.
The biggest asset bubble that mankind has ever seen, while telling us, meanwhile, that the fundamentals of the housing market were all sound and people should continue taking out adjustable rate mortgages – in other words, doing exactly the wrong thing by the American people consistently, and yet we're being told that if we pry into their affairs and look at what they're doing, they won't be able to do such a good job anymore.
I mean, what self-respecting human being is going to buy a line like this?
So it's time for us to ask more fundamental questions, not questions like, should the top income tax rate go up by 1.3 percent or something like that.
We need to ask – this isn't 1982 anymore.
Let's ask some fundamental questions like, maybe the whole system is screwed up and rigged and it tends to promote unsustainable, crazy financial asset bubbles.
Maybe the system is screwed up.
Maybe it doesn't just need a little regulating here and there.
Maybe the whole thing is screwed up, starting with the Fed and going on down.
That's the sort of question we need to be asking, because this is where the average person is getting it right in the teeth consistently.
That's Tom Woods.
The website is TomWoods.com.
He's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and I mean this seriously, you guys.
For those of you who've listened to the show more than once and you decide you like me, here's my opinion that I want you to know is my opinion.
Meltdown is great.
Meltdown is exactly what you need to understand our current financial crisis.
It's called Meltdown, a free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse.
It's got a big melting quarter on the front of it.
It's on the stands at all of your bookstores and Amazon.com right now, and I want to thank you again for coming on the show, Tom.