11/16/16 – Mark Thornton – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here for Ryguys T-shirts.
Ryguys, that's W-R-Y-guys dot com.
Great, irreverent, thought-provoking T-shirts upholding a pro-freedom perspective.
Inspired by such classic humorists as Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Oscar Wilde, they invoke the wit and wisdom of the past to satirize modern myths.
These high-quality shirts for men and women look good and feel good, and they make great gifts.
Use the coupon code SCOTT for 15% off.
Ryguys T-shirts at Ryguys dot com.
That's W-R-Y-guys dot com.
Alright y'all, this is the Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at libertarianinstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Mark Thornton.
He is senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
That's Mises dot org.
The home of Austrian school economics in America.
He is the editor, the book review editor, pardon me, of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
And he has published all kinds of things, including The Economics of Prohibition, Terrorist Blockades and Inflation, The Economics of the Civil War, The Quotable Mises, The Bastiat Collection, An Essay on Economic Theory, and The Bastiat Reader.
And it goes on and on like that.
Again, check him out at Mises dot org.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you?
Hey Scott, I'm doing great.
It's great to be back on your program.
Good deal.
Yeah, it's been way too long since we've spoken.
I mean, sorry, kind of, but I just want to talk about the same old thing.
But I know you like writing about the same old thing, too, for the same reason as me.
It's the Austrian school theory that is, in other words, the only correct explanation for the boom-bust so-called business cycle that pulls the rug out from under about 90% of the American people every 10 years or so in this country.
And that nobody even seems to really ask about, much less explain well.
And yet, here you are again, still at the top of your game.
Is another skyscraper curse coming?
We can talk about that.
But first of all, can you just give us the nutshell, if you just, you know, the elevator speech or the met-me-in-a-bar or something, and tell me real quick, what exactly is the Austrian explanation of the boom-bust cycle there, Mark?
Well, it's a very realistic view of what causes the boom-bust cycle, what effects are taking place in the economy, and why it's such a bad thing to begin with.
And basically, the Austrian theory of the business cycle starts with money, starts with credit, and the interest rate, which are, of course, in modern times, manipulated by the Federal Reserve, our central bank.
And, you know, periodically, they artificially lower interest rates and increase the amount of money in credit in the economy.
And that naturally just sets off a boom of investment.
People see those low interest rates.
They look at their profit calculations differently as a result, and they see that now more projects, more complex projects are now profitable, especially long-term projects.
So entrepreneurs out there get fooled by those artificially low interest rates into making all of these investments in advanced technologies.
And, of course, that can't last.
And the profit calculations that the entrepreneurs started with, of course, turn out to be incorrect.
Their revenues, as these projects come online, their revenues are lower than expected, their costs are greater than expected, and people are losing money.
They're going bankrupt, so on and so forth.
So that's basically the thumbnail version of the Austrian business cycle theory.
It starts with the Fed and how they manipulate what entrepreneurs base their calculations on and then artificially induce them to undertake what are going to turn out to be, eventually, bad investments.
Alright, so now in the Bush years, I remember, well, citing you, but getting in an argument with a friend saying, look, inflation is low, you're always crying about inflation this, inflation that, and the inflation rate is pretty low.
And I said, yeah, except in the price of houses, except in the price of fuel, except in the price of stocks on the Dow and all of that, on the New York Stock Exchange.
And once you look at those things, you see these bubbles, That's basically the same thing as saying price inflation, but just in certain sectors.
Is that right or not?
That's absolutely right, and that's a big difference between Austrian economists and everybody else.
Everybody else looks at aggregate statistics, like the consumer price index and gross domestic product.
So they're looking at the overall economy.
Austrians try to look at it realistically, breaking all that down into the prices of investments and capital, the prices of labor or the wage rates, and the prices of consumer goods.
And so this new money and credit that is being injected into the economy during a bubble can have any kind of effect on different prices.
But typically what you see is the price of land go way up, the price of real estate go way up, the prices of houses and everything like that going way up, and of course the stock market and bond markets are also affected.
So instead of inflation in the consumer price index, what we typically see to begin with is inflation in stock markets and in bond markets and in capital goods and land prices.
That's where all the action is, and that's exactly what we would expect from the Austrian theory of the business cycle, is that those artificially low interest rates are increasing the value of capital investments and also inducing people to try to generate more of those capital investments.
All right, now if we take, say, the housing years again, the Bush years, at some point, I guess in 2007 or was it at the end of 2006, Ben Bernanke, did he start reading Mises.org?
And he said, because we didn't have widespread price inflation, which is usually, that would be when they panic, right?
Is when you have the CPI starts going up, up, up, and then they say, oh, we've got to prick the bubble.
We still didn't have that, but for some reason, Ben Bernanke decided to start raising the federal funds rate and basically calling in the loans, more or less, right?
Started to deflate, but why did he start to deflate instead of just going full QE234 right then and there in 2007, Mark?
Well, in 2007, everything in the economy was pretty good.
I mean, the stock market was high, unemployment was low.
The housing bubble had sort of leveled off in 2007, but everything else was going gangbusters.
So it was very curious.
Bernanke was denying there was a housing bubble and made some, you know, made some statements about trying to control inflation, and then eventually they got around to some small increases in the federal funds rate, which is a signal that the Fed is calling an end to the credit party and, you know, stopping or at least reducing the amount of increases in credit that it's enabling in the economy.
But he was, you know, in full denial, certainly at the beginning of 2007.
But if you fast-forwarded a year later, he's in full panic mode.
And, you know, doing almost immediately, you know, they started doing unconventional monetary policy like TARP and an endless series of monetary experiments that have only recently come to a close here in the U.S.
Well, so yeah, now it's been eight years.
Bush Jr. and Alan Greenspan, you know, they had entered into their conspiracy to make the war seem free by really cranking up the money, especially after September 11th, right?
But then it all came crumbling down before he could get out of there.
Looks like, I don't want to speak too soon, we're not quite over yet, but it looks like maybe Barack Obama will get out of power claiming that he inherited the worst economy ever and then it got better and better and better and better the whole time he was in office.
But then, so the question remains, and I know you don't like to time these things too closely, but where in the cycle are we now?
Are we looking at, with Trump and his team, some kind of hard money policy that's going to force a recession here?
Well, that's a very good question.
Trump has called into question what the Federal Reserve has been doing.
He's said that, you know, it's an artificial economy right now and that things are much worse for the average American than the government economists will let on.
And he's right.
I mean, the reason he won is that there's over 30 states where personal income or median family income has gone down for the last 15 years.
And so only on the East Coast and West Coast have incomes grown for the last 15 plus years.
And so Americans are not happy and that's why they turn to Trump to try to get things changed and working for Americans rather than hedge funds and Wall Street and so forth.
So we're in a very precarious time right now.
I wouldn't want to be the next president of the United States because I see things falling apart pretty quickly.
I think you're going to start to see some negative signs by the time Obama gets out of office and before Trump gets into office and especially with all the uncertainty that has emerged with the Trump victory.
So, you know, I think that Janet Yellen, who's the chairman of the Fed, she would like to get out of there because Trump has been criticizing her.
And so I think everybody wants to get out of town.
Greenspan was able to get out in the clear fairly well.
And Bernanke got out and handed the baton of zero interest rate policy to Janet Yellen.
And Janet Yellen is a dove on monetary policy.
She hates to raise rates.
And so I think she would welcome, you know, being fired by Donald Trump at this point.
Yeah.
And probably, you know, move to the West Coast as fast as she can, too.
Now, so I remember seeing a quote or reading, I think I saw him on TV, Donald Trump say, oh, yeah, you know me, I'm a low interest rate guy.
And, you know, I don't know if he really understands the Austrian theory of the bubbles and the busts, but he certainly did understand that, you know, he was being kind of tongue in cheek and cynical about it and saying, of course, I'm a low interest rate guy because I'm a builder.
And, you know, basically this is welfare for him at the expense of other people.
I think he even went on to elaborate that.
Meanwhile, grandma down the street is trying to save and she can't.
It's basically a crime for her to try to save a penny.
So what's she supposed to do?
But, you know, I wonder if if we can expect him to really have some kind of hard money policy.
And then if he does, it'll be forcing the recession that he's been promising the American people he's going to get us all over again.
You know, it'll be because right now we're at the top of the cycle, right?
We're due the bust that he says we're we're at the bottom of and that he's going to build up from.
Well, you know, there's it's it's a very complex issue because we are at the at the top of the bubble.
But, you know, we've been doing this bubble thing for so long that it's eroding the true foundations of the economy.
So there is a great deal of weakness in labor markets and manufacturing.
The real savings is just not there to keep productivity and technology in the right hand.
It's all going into the wrong hands and it's being used to leverage up financial markets.
So we need or we do need a new direction here.
Trump has there's two open seats on the board of governors that are available.
And I fully expect that these appointments will not be academic economists, which have, you know, academic economists have been ruling the world.
Economically speaking, starting with Ben Bernanke, who's an MIT Ph.
D.
Janet Yellen, who's another MIT Ph.
D.
Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank.
He was actually roommates with Alan Greenspan while they were at graduate school at MIT.
So they all have the same mindset and it's they've got one tool, which is money printing.
And they've been using that to the extreme with zero interest rates in the U.S., negative interest rates in Europe, negative interest rates in Japan.
And so, you know, and I also fully expect that Trump will not, of course, not pick academic economists, but he'll pick business people to fill those roles.
He'll be looking for bankers, bankers with experience inside the Fed, maybe, and outside the Fed with outside the Fed experience being mandatory and inside the Fed experience not mandatory.
And so he's definitely going to go in that direction.
He realizes that somehow or another, we have to get back to normal monetary policy.
And it's going to be very painful.
And it's clear to me that he's been, he studied Ronald Reagan's playbook because he's advocating for tax cuts, tax simplification, corporate tax cuts, corporate tax simplification.
He's arguing for infrastructure spending.
He's arguing for military spending, all pretty much in line with Ronald Reagan's playbook.
And, of course, what happened when Ronald Reagan was elected, they raised interest rates to extreme levels, historic levels here in the United States.
And we went into an economic depression in the early 1980s with seeing inflation and unemployment hitting 10%.
And, you know, that's very painful.
Those were very painful times.
I was in college at the time, so I was somewhat insulated from them.
But it was a disaster for those first two years.
But by the time he came around for re-election, everything was great and dandy in the economy.
So Austrian economists typically, and F.A. Hayek did this in the 1960s and 1970s, he recommended that you go for immediate hard policy changes and get the problem out of the way so the economy can recover, so that when your re-election comes around, the economy will be great again.
And, you know, you'll get re-elected and you'll have the right people in line.
The problem was then all they did was inflate another bubble that popped in 87, right?
Right, right.
They did.
And that's what you have to be careful for.
I think we've got enough experience.
I'm working on my book right now, When You Called.
I'm going to be detailing all of this history, this back and forth.
So it comes out into the open.
You can see what people were saying, both Austrians and non-Austrians, about all of these historical events.
Well, I was a kid at the time.
I mean, I remember the commercials for get a new truck with only 23.9% financing and that kind of thing.
I remember economic times being bad.
I hate to say this.
I'm sure you've already read this.
I hope you have so you don't have to reread it.
But otherwise you will, because there's a lot of great tidbits in there, which is Secrets of the Temple by William Grider from the Washington Post.
It's the Washington Post version of Jekyll Island, basically, something like that.
Anyway, so it's a democratic view of the whole thing and how Volcker is the horrible villain for raising rates so high, even though, yes, admittedly, it was all his predecessor's fault for causing such high inflation that he basically, quote unquote, had to do it in order to get that reset that you were talking about.
But he really describes the great pain that people were put through in order to force that recession to finally end that inflation so that they could reset it.
Yeah, and, you know, Austrians were pounding the table throughout the late 60s and throughout the 1970s, you know, saying that to solve this problem, you have to attack inflation.
You get inflation out of the way.
You allow for corrective process in capital markets and labor markets and real estate markets, and the economy will recover on its own.
If you continue on the path of interventionism and inflationism like Japan has done, for example, they've been using the Keynesian playbook since their stock market bubble burst in 1989 and their real estate market burst four years later.
And they've been using inflation, low interest rates, public works spending, a huge national debt of 250 percent of gross domestic product, and they haven't fixed anything.
They've only created bigger...
And that's consistent really this whole time, all the Japanese lost decades.
That's still going on, just this zombie economy just lurching on, but that's it.
It's not terrible over there, you know, but they have enormous problems now.
They have a declining population.
They have an aging population.
They have brand new competitors surrounding them in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and they have this enormous national debt.
And they've been doing all of the wrong things to try to fix it.
You know, the prime minister is going to come out and say shortly that corporations and government should raise wages and salaries in order to stimulate aggregate demand and to stimulate consumption.
But that's absolutely wrong.
I mean, you don't create jobs, more jobs, by raising wage rates.
That just has never worked.
It will never work.
It didn't work for President Hoover in 1930 when he was basically cajoling and forcing corporations to maintain high wage rates, which got us down to 25 percent unemployment in 1932.
And so these are the wrong things to do, and the right things to do are going to be laid out in my book.
And the history of it all and what Austrians have been saying for over 100 years, and all of this is going to come out.
And I think that once it does come out, once the American people understand right from wrong in terms of economic policy and to take a long-run view of things, we could enter an economic time of great economic times.
All right, Charles Scott Horton here, and I got a great deal for you.
Anyone who helps support this show with a $50 donation or more gets a copy of the brand-new Rothbard book, Murray N. Rothbard book of long-lost essays from 1967 and 68.
It's entitled Never a Dull Moment, A Libertarian Looks at the Sixties.
Murray N. Rothbard, really Mr. Libertarian himself, on Vietnam, conscription, civil rights, LBJ and Nixon and all kinds of great stuff from back during those times.
Never a Dull Moment, and it's an exclusive.
It's not available on Amazon yet.
It's an exclusive, so far at least, for listeners of this show, so be the first to get it.
Help support this show at the same time.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
And again, anyone who sends $50 on this way, along with a mailing address, and I will get this book right to you.
Thanks.
Alright, now, so what we're facing here is not any kind of libertarian regime in D.C., but this kind of right populist one.
And, you know, Trump is surrounded.
I'm not exactly sure who's going to be Secretary of Treasury, but he has these few billionaire friends like Carl Icahn and these other guys.
And, as you're saying, it seems like it's going to be mostly businessmen and not professors to come in and be in charge of the Treasury.
And, you know, the thing is about Trump, it's kind of hard to tell, Mark, because he blows so much hot air.
But there's a few things where you take him seriously, right?
Like when he says he doesn't want to back the terrorists in Syria anymore, like that's pretty clear he means that.
And, you know, when he says he wants some kind of tariffs and a new sort of trading regime, you're not sure exactly how far he's going to go to so-called renegotiate these things.
But he seems to really mean some of that.
And another thing that he keeps saying is the infrastructure.
He wants to spend all this money redoing the roads and redoing the airports and all these things.
And, you know, I don't want to characterize it too bad.
I was going to call it a five-year plan, but maybe that's unfair.
But, you know, what do you think of all this?
Is the national government led by the builder himself, the Donald?
Is he going to appropriate all this money in the right way?
And, after all, we do have some pretty run-down airports and some pretty creaky bridges that do need to be replaced by somebody at some point.
So what does an Austrian school economist like you say to Donald Trump's new deal?
Well, you know, I've talked about the tax cuts being good, the simplification being good.
So there are good things about his platform.
If he privatizes transportation, roads, airports, you know, in exchange for promises of new investments and expansions, I could see that as a good thing.
You don't lose a whole lot on infrastructure spending, but if we privatized it in the process, then that would be a good thing.
The trade deals, that's very tricky.
You don't want to be changing, debating trade deals as you're entering into an economic depression.
Hoover tried that, too, with the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
Raised tariffs tremendously and almost shut down international trade and hurt a lot of American businesses that sold goods overseas, leading to even more unemployment.
So I would put extreme caution on the protectionism thing.
There's ways you can do that.
There's ways to reestablish an independent trading policy rather than these global, regional blocks of agreements that tend to benefit American capital, patent holders, and things like that.
It's not free trade.
That's a range trade, and a range trade can be just as dangerous and even more protectionist in some cases than normal trade policy or free trade policy, which I would advocate.
And I would also go easy on the immigrations thing.
Put off immigration for a second, because I want to hear you out on that, but let's talk about trade a little bit more for a second.
Okay, sure.
So Trump says, look, man, we need factories.
We had all these factory towns with all these low-educated people who had middle-class salaries because they were making high-quality stuff, whether it was union jobs or not.
I'm not sure if he's really specifying, but he got all these Reagan Democrats to come and vote for him.
Because he said, look, Ford, he really did say, you move your factory to Mexico, I'm going to put a massive tariff on it.
And I'm going to basically wage economic war against you until you bring your supply creation back here and keep it in Michigan where I want it to be.
And in fact, I read a thing that said that they were actually already moving a plant back from Mexico at the time that he said that.
But anyway, point being, that really is his plan, right?
We need a supply-based economy.
It makes sense if he's saying that these bad deals, for all the advantages they give the U.S. government and some companies, that the deals, whether it's, I don't know, Mark, whether it's the free parts of them or the rigged parts of them that have allowed all these factory jobs to travel to Mexico or to overseas where labor wages are lower.
But he says he's just going to reverse that.
And I wonder whether you think that would be good for the economy in a sense.
Is it possible that we'll gain more than we'll lose, and I am using the collective we here, the American people, if they raise prices on everybody somewhat, but in order to more or less coerce American corporations into bringing their supply back here to the United States so that people can have decent jobs again?
Well, no.
That's how he got elected anyway, was promising that.
And that's going to be very harmful.
We don't want to in any way decrease international trade or put any kind of restrictions on international trade whatsoever.
We want to actually make trade internationally freer, more open, because of the great things that it does.
Now, most people don't understand the benefits of free trade.
Economists on this point are actually united.
Austrians, Chicago, et cetera, even the Keynesians, tend to support free trade.
And if you have a free trade policy and you have a proper tax policy, which we don't have, and you have a proper monetary policy, which we do not have, and you have a deregulated economy, which we do not have, then you don't have to worry about losing jobs overseas.
Around here, around Auburn, Alabama, where the Mises Institute is located, we've got factories opening up all over the place.
So there are places in the U.S. economy that are hurting, particularly states that are union states, but we're all right-to-work states down here in the South.
And so factories have been moving here and closing in Michigan.
And Michigan just became a right-to-work state because they realized that policy matters.
And you can save jobs if you've got the right labor regulations, if you've got the right monetary policy, you've got a deregulated economy, you've got the proper tax policy so that corporations aren't getting ripped off.
Then jobs and factories and manufacturing will take care of itself.
We really haven't lost, in terms of the amount of manufacturing output, we haven't really lost that much.
It's just being redistributed within the United States and in different places around the world, and we want to take advantage of it.
The iPhone is manufactured in China, and that really decreases the cost of the manufacturing process.
And you've got low-wage manufacturing jobs over in China putting those iPhones together.
But all the high-wage jobs are still here in the United States.
They're making the parts, they're designing it, they're doing the engineering, they're doing the apps, they're doing the marketing.
All the good jobs from the iPhone, all the high-paying jobs from the iPhone, they're all still here in the United States, and a few of them are in Taiwan and South Korea.
But basically, the iPhone is only economically feasible if Tim Cook and Apple put that iPhone together in the lowest possible cost manner.
And so it's a tribute to international trade and something we've all gained from as producers, as Apple employees, and as Apple consumers.
We've all had a tremendous benefit that has increased our standard of living enormously.
And it was only possible, only possible, because of international trade.
So I'm reading all these things, though, about people saying, Yeah, but look, I'm not an economic unit, I'm a man, and my family's from here, and my grandparents are from here, and this is our town, and it used to be a great town, and now it sucks because everything changed.
And all they're hearing is your saying, tough, move.
But you know what, I wonder, and I'm biased, I'm an anarchist like you, Mark, but I'm sure that if I were to tee one up for you, that you could make a case that a lot of these factory towns were built up on American government intervention and protectionism in the first place.
And a lot of what happened to those towns is that the protectionism ceased.
Rather than the government really intervened against them, they stopped intervening for them.
Yes, that's absolutely true.
And you know, Scott, sometimes you do have to move.
I had to move.
When I graduated from college, there were absolutely no jobs in western New York State.
So I moved.
I moved to the south.
And that is happening all the time, believe it or not.
And I recently was back in my hometown, which was, you know, when I left my hometown, I thought, who's going to be the last person leaving my hometown?
Who's going to turn out the lights?
Who's going to lock the door and shut the whole thing down?
Well, you know, a long time later, you go back there, and it's an incredibly vibrant economy.
It's an incredibly vibrant society.
And they have much more higher paying jobs.
They have a lot of entrepreneurship.
And they've converted a lot of what we used to do into new things.
And it's been an incredible success.
So, you know, I have incredible feelings for people who are placed in these positions.
I was in the same position myself.
And I've got to tell you that you cannot mechanically put these things back together.
You can't have the government do it.
You can't do it through protectionism.
That's a losing battle.
We've got to do it through better economic policy, better education, and creating an environment where entrepreneurs feel like they have an opportunity to go to work, to put together capital and labor in such a way as to make a profit.
That's the key to our success.
Only entrepreneurs can fix an economy.
And that's an incredibly important point.
Government can only mess things up.
Now, as I said, you can get a better tax policy, a better monetary policy, and better education and so forth.
But the only thing that fixes an economy is when entrepreneurs go to work.
And we all know that entrepreneurs work much better when there's fewer regulations, lower taxes, and less government intervention.
That is the key.
I know I've read headlines along these lines, but you know me, Mark.
As an economist, I'm a great anti-war guy, as Lou said about somebody else one time.
What about the Rust Belt?
Back when it was shiny, that that was just basically a big government program.
That's why it rusted and went to hell, because it was never the free market that had built up that industrial base in that region in that way in the first place.
Was it World War II, or what was it?
Well, after World War II, we were in an enviable position.
The capital around the world was destroyed in Europe.
It was destroyed in Japan and elsewhere.
And it wasn't touched here in the United States.
So we hit the ground running with a return to the gold standard, millions of young men coming back home to work, a large surplus of savings in the economy, and a tremendous demand for our goods, particularly manufacturing goods in the United States.
And so that was a great time.
Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, but the whole economic landscape is continually changing.
And we didn't really change fast enough.
And we relied on protection too long.
We relied on unionism for too long.
And that's why they never evolved the way it's necessary to evolve in order to keep pace with the world economy.
You can't simply do the same old thing in a regional economy decade after decade after decade.
Eventually, things change.
The best place to grow a crop changes over time.
The best place to do manufacturing changes over time.
The Japanese got into our automobile market, and now the South Koreans are getting into the Japanese automobile market.
And so they're having to find new ways of doing things or new products in order to keep pace.
If you want a progressive economy where the standard of living is rising, then all of the parts of the economy have to make some changes over the long haul in order to keep pace with all that.
And the Midwest just didn't keep pace.
And so you see what happens to Detroit.
But I fully feel that places like Detroit and Cleveland are very capable of a resurgence in their economy.
And I think the process is already underway.
But you still have people, you still have towns where certain parts were made for a certain group of automobiles that's no longer necessary.
And so the plant shuts down and people go out of work.
What we need is either people to move or for new entrepreneurs to come in and put the capital and labor back together in a different way to produce more advanced products and get the economy moving again.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because I've already kept you over time here, and I know you're a busy man.
But you started to talk about immigration before I interrupted you there.
You want to give us a short one or put that off till next time?
No, I mean, it's well, basically, you know, he on the campaign, it was throw all the Mexicans out, ban Muslims from coming into the country.
And now he's backed, backed up on that.
And it's only now it's going to be to deport illegal aliens who commit crimes, robbery, burglary, that kind of thing.
And, of course, I fully support that.
And so he's backed off of some of his promises.
Some of his promises simply aren't really feasible in any way.
And so, you know, I expect him to start building a wall someplace just as a campaign statement.
And I expect him to deport illegal Mexican criminals.
I fully expect him to improve the screening of people coming into the country from other places.
Just to clarify there, you meant people who are actual felons, not just illegal immigrants.
Right.
Absolutely.
And I also expect him to get some work done on our immigration policy in the sense that, you know, right now the Obama administration has been big into bringing people in from third world countries.
And they really don't fit in.
They don't really adjust very well or quickly.
Whereas if you bring in people from second world countries and first world countries, then you're bringing in people who can adjust quicker and faster to the American way of life.
And they have the skills that our businesses need and want.
And so I...
Well, Hondurans and Mexicans do too, right?
I mean, somebody's got to pick the lettuce.
It's not going to be me.
Yeah.
And I hope it's not prisoners in corporate prisons picking that lettuce either.
Yeah, there's a good point.
That's an outrage.
And so there's so many policies that need to be improved and adjusted and changed or thrown out.
President Trump has his work cut out for him.
And I hope he proceeds along that way.
And I hope he proceeds along the way that Austrian economists have recommended to him and will continue to do so.
And I think he should take note of the fact that it's my view that he was able to peel away anti-war folks from the Clinton campaign into the Trump camp, because I think Trump is seen as less disruptive in the Middle East, more conciliatory.
Somebody who's going to maybe back out of the Middle East and back out of the conflict with Russia.
And so I think he owes that very thin margin of victory that he had in certain states, I think, is attributable to the fact that he was able to get some anti-war people out of the Clinton camp and into the Trump camp.
Yeah, well said.
And yeah, if he wants to get reelected, he better do a lot more anti-war than pro-war stuff.
You got that right.
There are people, you know, I got to say, I never really believed in him, but I always did believe that Hillary was worse on foreign policy.
No question about that.
And so, you know, I think you're right that a lot of people that probably was the margin in some important states of people who just said anything but her on her horrible foreign policy, you know.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, Donald Trump has got four years of difficult years ahead of him.
But I think you've got a big duty here to stay on him on this war issue and, you know, to congratulate him when he does something correct and to attack him when he's doing the wrong thing and to keep him away from going down any kind of quagmire of international conflict.
That's the worst thing we need right now in the world economy, which is very fragile.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know how the hell to get him to listen to me, but I will continue to do what I always do.
So there's that.
And that includes having you on, too, to do this great economic coverage that, you know, it's not usually the focus of the show, but it is something that's very important to me.
And, of course, you know, as we've talked about in the past and will again, it's a question at the heart of the empire and the entire, you know, Pentagon and CIA global domination project also being, you know, basically a subsidiary of our of our central banking system or basically a government program that is only possible because of our inflationary monetary system that disguises the costs.
And all that kind of thing.
So it's all part and parcel of the same machine, of course.
Amen.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for your great work and your time on the show again, Mark.
You're very welcome, Scott.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Absolutely will.
All right.
So that is the great Mark Thornton.
He is senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Well, it's just the Mises Institute now.
M.I.S.E.S.
The Mises Institute.
And back in 2005, he and Robert Blumen were the very first ones to call the housing bubble that popped in the big crash of 07 and 08 there.
So keep an eye on his work there at Mises.org.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
On average, how much do you think these interviews are worth to you?
Of course, I've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this, and I'm not about to start.
But at patreon.com slash scottwhartonshow, you can name your own prize to help support and make sure there are still new interviews to give away.
So what do you think?
Two bits?
A buck and a half?
They're usually about 80 interviews per month, I guess, so take that into account.
You can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
That's patreon.com slash scottwhartonshow.
And thanks, y'all.
Bye.