Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/27/23 Ryan McMaken on How the Fed Is Ripping Us Off

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute joins Scott to discuss the ill effects central banking has on the country. McMaken wrote an article recently pointing out that the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, is technically bankrupt. Scott has McMaken explains how that’s true and why the costs of a bankrupt Fed are felt by us all. Scott and McMaken also address some common points about inflation made by the left and examine what they get right and where they go wrong. The two also look at today’s economy to try and work out where we are in the boom-bust cycle.  Discussed on the show: “Why the Fed Is Bankrupt and Why That Means More Inflation” (Mises.org) What Has Government Done to Our Money? For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. He has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got ryan mcmacken he's an economist and senior editor at the ludwig von meeses institute that's mises dot org center of austrian economic

thought in America over there. Welcome back to this show. Ryan, how are you doing, sir? Scott, I'm great. It's good to be with you. Good. Happy to have you here. Listen, you wrote this article why the Fed is bankrupt and why that means more inflation. And I didn't understand it, but it seems very important. So, I just don't have enough of the background to make heads or tails of this thing, but I hate the Fed and I'm sure it's bad. So why don't you go ahead and explain this thing in English I'll see if I can grok that. Well, it was only a few years ago that I started really thinking about it because I never really thought about how the Fed buys up, all of this stuff.

So that's, I think that's the key first step. So Federal Reserve, it's this big central bank, and they buy since 2008, and that's a pretty new thing. I didn't used to do this very much. They've bought up trillions of dollars of assets. And what that really just means mostly is like, debt or bonds or securities so in the case of the fed since 2008 they've been buying trillions of dollars worth of two things government bonds so treasuries most of it of periods that's

longer than a year so as bonds are some bonds you like they mature quote unquote in like 30 days or 90 days or six months and so then you pay them off and then they're off the books and then you can start a new round of stuff with with some others they it takes a year or more sometimes 10 heck even 30 years before it matures and you pay it all off now that's significant to where we're going with this and then the other thing they bought up trillions of dollars of is mortgage-backed securities and and that's all of these if you saw the movie the big short that's how they explain how they took all these mortgages and they rammed them all together into basically sort of these bond-like things that pay interest like intermittently every few months or years or whatever.

And so what's what the feds now got is they got all this stuff they bought with newly printed money, right? They just created a few trillion dollars and they flooded the economy with it so they get buy up this stuff. And this stuff does pay, it makes payments to the Fed because they're bonds. so the so as as owners you receive payments as as part of being the owner of this this stuff um so they're making like you know one two three percent if i'm following you here you're telling me the fed has made itself into Goldman Sachs in the position they put themselves in in 2007 and eight yeah they invest in a bunch of stuff now in housing and in government bonds um Now, they're more limited than, like, Goldman, right?

They don't have, like, stocks and things like that. But, yeah, they got lots of these bonds based on mortgages and then government bonds. So those have two things going for them. They're fixed rate, which means the interest rate doesn't go up as the overall market interest rates go up. So it's set. It's like your home mortgage if you got one. It's stuck at that particular industry, which is good for the person. paying off the loan, right?

For the person who owns the rights to accept your payments, which is what the Fed is, they don't benefit if the interest rate goes up. So they've got all this stuff. It pays like 3%. They're making this little bit of percentage on it. But now, interest rates are going up, and they've gone up a lot over the last year or so. So why would that be a problem for the Fed? means they won't make much money. They won't make as much money as they could, right? Because they

could buy other stuff. That's like paying five or six or more percent. But that's not the problem the Fed faces. The other thing the Fed started doing after 2008 was they started paying interest on reserves to banks. So banks, they have these excess reserves and they store them at the Fed, and the Fed pays them regularly money out the door to these banks. And the banks, they have these excess reserves. And There were, there's many complex reasons why they did both sides of this. Why did they buy mortgage banks, mortgage securities? Why did they buy government debt? It's really to prop up both industries, to prop up both the government and the mortgage industry.

But we don't need to get to the details of that so much. Just know that they bought all that stuff that's paying a low interest rate to the Fed. So they're making 3%. But now, well, but wait, let me, let me interject just a touchstone here, which is that there were some Austrians who thought that there'd be much worse inflation after all of the new money creation after the last crash in 08. But this was the reason they said that that didn't happen was because the bed. Bernacki was worried.

Ron Paul was on Bernacki's shoulder warning of inflation. Bernanke said, you're right. So I'm going to pay the banks to keep all this new money that I'm giving them at the Fed. So in other words, make the banks hole, but don't loan all that money out to the society in a way that's going to be inflationary. on the shelf, right? That is correct. Yes. So part of the reason why the Fed was paying interest now to the banks was so that they would just hold all that money and not loan it out, which would have caused massive inflation. Okay. So I know what you're talking about there. Go ahead. So you are

correct. And so all that money is just sitting there. And the Fed doesn't want them to pay to start loaning that out. So the Fed is going to keep up, has to keep raising the interest it pays on those reserves so that the banks don't start sending all that money into the larger economy. So as a key component of controlling inflation, they need to keep raising what they're paying banks as the interest rate in the general marketplace goes up. So now here's the mismatch. The Fed owns all this stuff. It pays like 3%, let's just say. And however, they now have to pay money out the door that's like 5 or 6 or more percent to the banks. So you can see now what the problem is, they're only making 3% coming in, but they have to pay out, 5, 6, 7% going out.

And this is the same thing if you, if you're an oldster, you remember the whole savings and loan crisis. So what happened there was something very, very similar, where banks, they had all this mortgage debt that was long term, and just as the Fed now has mostly long term debt, and it was paying fixed amounts coming in. So that was the inbound cash flow for all these banks. But then as interest rates started going up in the 80s, now suddenly all the banks had to pay out much more interest to, say, people who had accounts at the bank and their other obligations. So the banks had that same mismatch back in the 80s.

They were only getting a little trickle of money in from all their old mortgage debt and stuff, but they had to keep paying more and more out as interest rates went up. So what happened to those savings and loans? They went bust. they went bankrupt. They had to be bailed out. And the Fed's in a similar position now. Now, of course, the Fed isn't a private bank. So the Fed, they're going to get, they can bail themselves out by simply printing money as they need it. So they don't need an act of Congress to bail themselves out. But the bummer here for ordinary people and for taxpayers and stuff is that, of course, when the Fed does that, it just means they're going to have to print more money. And what does that

mean. That means more price inflation for regular people. It means lessening purchasing power. It means rising home prices. He stole my line. I was going to say, why don't they just print it? Yeah, exactly right. They will. So it is, they're not. So they're only bankrupt like in in a more general colloquial sense. They're not legally bankrupt because of the way the law's written. And they can just bail themselves out. So it's different from you or me being bankrupt. Yeah. But it just goes to show that they, really don't know how to drive the car and they're the ones in charge. Yeah, I mean, this isn't a real organization. It's not like a market organization. It's not a

private organization. Any meaningful sense. They can do whatever they want. But you just say they're bankrupt to show that basically they have negative cash flow, right? And they've got obligations they can't meet without just counterfeiting a bunch of new money. Yeah. Now, look, I'm sure this is just a side point. And I probably just don't really understand it right. But If the Fed owns all these mortgages and these mortgage-backed securities and all that, does that just make them the biggest landowner in America or the biggest owner of the debt of just American family? Yeah, well, it certainly makes them one of, absolutely. Now, they don't own the land, of course. They don't actually own the houses.

They have they could, I suppose, if these owners of these, all these, now, they're not even the, they're not even the owner of that in that sense because of the way the mortgage-backed securities are structured. but they own the debt, right? They have, they're essentially in the secondary market that they're the people who control this market because they own trillions of dollars of it. And as one of our senior fellows pointed out in a speech in the business too, which I had never even thought about this before. And he mentioned this last year was even now, after the Fed's been selling off a bunch of their mortgage debt, you know, at a very slow rate, it's not like they sold off some half of it or anything.

like that. They're still, they still own like 23% of all mortgages in America in terms of volume. So the volume that the Fed owns a mortgage is equal to 23% of all of the $11 trillion of mortgages that are out there. So that's a huge chunk of the market, really astounding. And then if you look at treasuries, at the government debt, depending on how you calculate it, they owe, they own 10% or more of the domestic market there. So this is huge. Imagine any firm that owns more than 20% of the debt in a particular market. So, of course, they're essentially, they can swing the market, they can control it, they can heavily influence it. There's nothing like, there's not much capitalism going on there. Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds to me like what you're saying

is that the Fed itself made a bunch of malinvestments under low interest rate conditions. And now they're essentially going through what they put everyone else through when the boom and the bust comes. And so now that they are the ones who are deliberately inflicting a recession on the economy, that recession has hit them. And now they're screwed by it. Yeah. I mean, well, they, this goes to show that they don't know where the economy's going.

They've got no master plan. There aren't a bunch of geniuses there. with their PhDs, you got it all figured out. The Fed is functioning on really just hitting the panic button. That's why they bottle up all this stuff in the first place. They hit the panic button. It was 2008, 2009. They're like, oh, no, the market is going to absolutely drop out of these mortgage-backed securities,

and all these investment banks are going to go completely belly up. And not just investment banks, but like regular commercial banks, too. Wells Fargo, organizations like that, they're going to go bankrupt. So we'll give them huge tarp loans. We'll buy up a bunch. of mortgage-backed securities to push up the value, to create artificial demand and push up the value of mortgages. And what does that done? It's saved banks from basically just losing their shirts on their own mortgage portfolios. And it's also pushed up home prices. Yeah, it's the greatest

homeless crisis since the Great Depression. Big part of it. Absolutely. People freeze into death under a bridge. Prices should have come down significantly after 2009. And they did very momentarily. and then started to be inflated again thanks to the Fed, which really started buying up a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, you can thank the Fed for all those rising home prices, which, of course, help most very wealthy organizations that own huge amounts of this debt and homes that tend to be in the most expensive markets, which is also where most of the rich people tend to buy their real estate. So, yeah, they're not helping, in spite of all, their BS about equity and everything, they're not helping those people. they're just pushing prices up and causing asset inflation. Right. Okay, so one thing that's, I don't really understand the difference,

but I know there's M1, M2, and M3 are like the different categories or measures of the money supply. And it's always very interesting to me because I remember very well in the summer of 2008, in August, I guess, especially of 2008. I was reading Gary North at Lou Rock. Rockwell.com. And he was saying, everybody, red alert, get out of the market right now. It's about to crash so bad because look at this chart. And I'm pretty sure it was the M2. And he was saying, you know, us Austrians are always complaining about inflation, inflation, inflation,

but don't miss the forest for the trees here. Look what they're doing. They're deflating right now severely. And that means that everybody who's got their neck stuck out is about to get it cut off. and then one month later, the whole thing imploded. So I'm always trying to figure out, even though I don't have any money, I'm always interested in watching the boom-bust cycle ever since I was a kid because I lived through a great bust, boom and bust here in Texas in the 80s. And so I've always been interested in how this stuff goes. So I'm always trying to peg, like, where we are on the cycle.

Obviously, they're trying to induce a recession here, but you're also telling me that, geez, the recession is hitting the Fed so hard, they're going to have no choice but to inflate again. And maybe before they're done, wringing all the inflation out from the last boom that was caused by the stimulus mostly from the lockdowns, which was sort of the artificial stand-in for the bus that we were due anyway from the previous bubble that the Obama government oversaw after the crash of 08, right? Well, yeah, after all those prices crashed stock prices, mortgage prices crashed in 08, well, the reason it came back so fast was. was just because the Fed pulled out all stops and created trillions of dollars of new money by purchasing all that stuff up that we've been talking about, all the government debt, all the mortgage-backed debt.

So that's why all those prices didn't stay down for years. Because Gary would have been much more right had they not re-inflated the market as the Fed did. Right? Because, yeah, obviously for the short term, it was you should have gotten out. out of the market then. But then, if you didn't get back in, you missed out on a huge rally. Right. Right. And it was a Fed-created rally. Yeah, I'm not sure if he advised that or not. I stopped paying attention after that. He may very well have said, now get in. Well, I'm so young. I just buy and hold still. I still got 30 years still. I got to worry about

like a downward slump in the markets. I don't have to time it right now. But yeah, if you were older and didn't have to retire, then you might well, you would have been even better off just leaving all your stuff in the market because it turned out capitalism no longer applied that the Fed was just going to buy up all this stuff and reinflate the markets. Well, and then they reinflated. Economic analysis would have pointed toward disaster, but that's not what happened. Yeah. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war.

All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Serbia, and. Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book All the War Lies by me for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again.

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From the, although that was, I think, as you've reminded us before on the show, that that was mostly like direct stimulus from the Congress. Not really different than the Fed and the banks creating new money their own way, I don't guess, but that's a whole new kind of, I don't want to say, many big boom bus cycle because of the size of it, but just because of the length of it, right? Like it was this huge crash that they caused, but they immediately, created. I don't know how many trillions. But then now they're already trying to cause another recession to prevent the worst because that price inflation got so out of control. But are they

already backing off on that? Or they're still cranking up interest rates trying to cause a crash? I mean, there could be another massive crash like 08 still coming or not? Oh, sure. That could that could still happen, especially since M2 did just go negative, as did our own, the Means Institute has its own nuanced measure of money supply, which is better than M2, because it takes a more laser-like focus on what's really money, as opposed to. Some of the stuff that's accounted in M2 isn't really money. Okay. But our measure has gone negative for a few months now and has shown that, yeah, when it goes negative, you should expect big-time economic disruption. By go negative, you mean the money supply literally is shrinking and not expanding. It literally went down, right?

Like the growth rate was only 5% as opposed to 10%, right, which often happens. And even that in itself points toward an economic slowdown. But once it goes actually negative, then you're getting really deep into recessionary warning territory. And that's where we are now. So both are Rothbard-Salerno money supply measure that we use as well as the M2 that the Fed uses those points toward recession. So, yeah, there's a real slow down there, and a big part of it is rising interest rates. Now, it's important to remember that the bust becomes necessary as a result of the boom. So it's not like the boom is natural, and then the mean old Fed comes along and tries to create a recession for some reason.

They sow the seeds of the boom or of the bust by creating the boom. So whatever busts we have now, the cause of that started back in 2008, if not before, because all of this money printing, all of this easy money stuff that the Fed's been doing since 2008 is what's. going to necessitate the bust now. So they're just trying to do damage control on the boom they created, which is, which always leads to tears and disaster. But what they're faced with now is, okay, we wish the boom could just continue forever, but inflation is getting out of hand. And we're afraid of inflation. Because historically, inflation, if there's any law of politics, is that inflation leads to political instability, to things like riots, to disturbances, to even coos, right?

So they're afraid of inflation. So they're trying to do something about it. And that's why they want to bust now because they know that would rain in inflation. So that's what they're trying to do. Now, they would have had to do that back in 2019. That's what they were already trying to do. They were trying to scale back their portfolio, trying to get the information. rate to inch up. And you could already see the recession starting in late 2019 and early

2020. Had there been no COVID thing, there would have already been a severe slowdown and probably a recession like a year ago. But COVID, gee, how lucky for the Fed, intervene and made it look like the Fed was making this expansion last even longer when they weren't. They were already headed toward recession. The Fed then created this whole phenomenon on of its own, right? The economy is closed down. Demand is collapsing. People aren't earning a living. Everything's going rock bottom. So it's just this amazing collapse in GDP production and all these other measures. Employment just disappeared overnight. And how much money did they really create then? The Fed and the Congress and whoever. I think we're looking at like, I think it was like

four. So at least four trillion dollars over that period. Because people said, And I think we talked about this a couple of years ago, like during this, by some measure, it was like two-thirds of all the money ever printed or half the money ever created U.S. dollars during that time. Is that really right? Yeah, I can't remember what the exact percentages, but a huge and significant portion of all the money that exists now has been created just since 2008 and a big portion of that just since 2020.

Yeah. You know, I saw some, off the scale. Yeah. I saw some leftists on Twitter talking. amongst themselves and I didn't intervene because they're mostly right I think kind of that the way they were putting it was inflation

is just fine until wages start to go up. And as soon as people who work for a living for like hourly salaries, meaning lower end workers mostly in terms of

amount of money that they're making in the first place, as soon as that starts going up, that's when they get upset. It's not that they're worried about bread riots. They're worried about business owners rioting. And so, um, and then the way they always put it is that upward pressure on wages is causing inflation. You know, those greedy McDonald's workers are the reason that they raise the price of your cheeseburger because they're just never satisfied with their never raised minimum wage that they're making or whatever it is, no matter, um, you know, how much,

the money supply is debased. And so it seems like there's a lot of truth to that. You know, I remember watching Alan Greenspan tell Ron Paul, or maybe it wasn't Ron Paul, just Alan Greenspan testifying to Congress in the 90s that, boy, yeah, if these wage earners continue to demand increases, that could cause inflation. And then we might have to intervene. And that's how they define it. You know, that's their whole approach to it. It seems fundamentally dishonest. self-serving on their part. And it seems like the people who, you know, can afford it the least are the ones who have to get the so-called haircut all the time, you know? Well, they should probably come up with a different way to phrase it rather than talking

about wage inflation all the time because what they really mean is that it's just goods and services inflation, which is driven by bidding up of wages. And this is, we have a good whole seminar on this on how inflation works its way through the economy. And the problem is it doesn't happen evenly. So, and I am familiar with the left's theory on this, how they only start to intervene to bring down inflation when it's wage inflation. But the fact is, is that they're only looking at nominal wages, because if you look at wages overall, the real wages actually go down when you start to have inflation filter out through the economy on that. Now, if you're fortunate to be in one of the industries that sees wage inflation first, then you do have a period of

time where you can buy stuff at old prices with newly rising wages. But most workers don't benefit in that way. They're more at the receiving end of the wage inflation. And so often their wages only start to go up after goods and service inflation has already occurred. Well, by the way, though, I mean, I think to give these guys credit, you know, there's, I think there's like sarcasm built into the, oh, sure, inflation's just fine when it's benefiting banks, when it's benefiting the people in the richest neighborhood who the value of their house is going up, when it's benefiting business owners, whatever. But as soon as the stiffest of working stiffs, when they start to get a price of living

increase, you know, cost of living increase, then they get the blame for the prices going up at all. And that's when the interest rates got to start going up and the bust has to, you know, start getting inflicted. Well, it's not that they're necessarily endorsing inflation. They're just saying it seems like the rich and the powerful like inflation just fine until the people at the bottom end start getting an adjustment at all. And then that's when they bail out. Well, they certainly have no problem with asset price inflation, right? Right. Yeah. Fighting the economy with all that new money, which then made stock prices surge, made

home prices surge. And that's all to the benefit of people who own large amounts of capital. And so obviously, if you're a first-time home buyer, you're absolutely screwed by that policy. And if you want to get into the market and plan for your retirement and stuff like that, even on a modest level, that screws you too. And worse, if you have interest rates. be rock bottom, you can't save in any of the traditional safe ways of spending, which is what a

normal person would have to save through, savings accounts, CDs, that sort of thing. You can't make any money on that. You actually lose money making your 1%. Right. So you have to speculate in the market, right? Right. You have to go into higher risk sort of investments. And that's great if you can afford to enter a hedge fund. And also, if you lose your shirt, you still have enough money to buy food. But normal people, they can't afford those sorts of risks. So, yeah, that's just another way they're worked over by super low interest rates. So, yeah, I mean, obviously the Fed is not there. Nothing the Fed does actually helps regular people.

And they, even the left to this day still kind of banks on this idea that it's the, because when the left has someone who supports central banking, this is the argument they use, that it's mostly poor people who borrow things. And so by keeping interest rates low and by inflating the, the dollar at, say, moderate rates, that the debtors pay back their money at lower values, right? So when inflation's high, the money you pay back is devalued. So you're actually doing better as a debtor. And that screws the creditors, is the theory. And that may have been true at one time, but it's certainly not the case now that it's mostly the lower income people who

are holding most of the debt or who go into debt. The rich are going into massive amounts of debt, and they benefit tremendously from these super low interest rates, especially since they can still invest in things that earn high interest rates. Whereas regular people, sure, they're going to, they're going to take on debt, and that's going to be a significant amount of what they owe. However, they can't make any money on other investments because of that. And if prices keep going up on a house, a lower interest rate doesn't actually help you that much. You need the lower interest rate

just to be able to afford a house at all. It's just barely compensating you, that lower interest rate is barely compensating you for the rising price because the rich are then bidding up all this property. So it's not this nice package where oh, golly gee, inflation helps the

debtors and the debtors are mostly poor people. That's just not the modern reality. And even where it is, like, well, you got some middle class homeowners are somewhat benefiting in a you didn't build that kind of a way. And still, the middle class isn't the poor, and the poor are the ones who are getting

shoved even further to the margin as houses are being made more and more and more unaffordable. And they have no way to catch up with that. So let me ask you this, though, because I didn't want to get into a big argument about it because I decided to stop arguing people on Twitter so much. But I did recommend one time

when a left winger was completely, about inflation. I said, yeah, that's why we need a gold standard. And then the immediate response was the same thing I learned it in community college, Austin Community College, was no, a gold standard is bad because that'll cause a deflationary spiral where no one wants to buy anything at all because they're waiting for every price to continue to get lower and lower and lower. And then the whole thing sees us up and everybody goes out of business and nobody produces. nothing no more, and that's why we have inflationary money in the first place, tell me, because the scientists figured that out a long time ago, Ryan McMack.

And what do you think about that? Well, I'll just say that history just doesn't really support that position, right? If we want to look at the times when the American public and the working class in general made its biggest gains in real wages and real ownership was indeed in the 19th century. Now, many people still believe the old economic history that had been put forward in the late 19th century, early 20th century, was this idea that in the mid-19th century, up until the very end, that people are actually getting poorer. And that's old orthodox Marxism is this idea that over time the working class would get poorer and poorer. But even, but by the late 19th century, even the Marxists, or really who the Marxists were losing adherence because they had the social Democrats led by people like Edward Bernstein, who recognized that, oh, actually, that's not happening, that actually a lot of the working class people are becoming better off. So this whole Marxism thing, it turns out, isn't true. Now, that didn't mean that Bernstein and his friends became laissez-faire capitalist types. It just meant that they recognized that, that they could harness the power of sort of this mixed regulatory system to benefit themselves through a largely capitalist system.

Because even they admitted that in the 19th century, that system was actually leading to gains in the standard of living for the working classes, for factory worker type people. And what was that what was going on in that time period? Well, that was the time period of hard money. That was a time period of the classical gold standards, as it's thought of today. It was a time of when there was real deflation. But what does deflation mean? It means the wages you do get actually purchase more. So if we look at economic history, the time that percentage-wise, some of the largest gains were made was during the gold standard.

You weren't in this deflationary spiral that made people get poorer. The reality was that when deflation happened, people's real wages actually went up. And that's why you saw huge gains in people's ability to eat, in to buy more square footage, in access to lots of basic amenities. And it's why in the period of the late 19th century is when we start to get things like just basic stuff that now we would consider almost a human right, things like recreation on Sunday, going to the seaside for a little bit of fun, maybe a little bit of window. shopping. These were all brand new things that were brought about by the bad old days of hard

money, laissez-faire. But that's the reality. And it wasn't just rich people doing that. It was regular people who had access to that sort of thing for the first time ever. Yeah. All right. So mesas.org is the website. And I always like to send people the PDF of what has government done to our money by Murray Rothbard. Or I think it's Chapter 11 for New Liberty is a pretty good treatment on the boom bus cycle. What's your favorite things to send people

to get them interested in Austrian or when they're first interested in Austrian economics to get them on the same page here? Yeah, it's hard to go wrong with what government has done to our money, especially since it's mercifully short.

It's, I don't know, it's probably like 80 pages double spaced, right? It's not like small text or anything. But even if you're not willing to read that much, you would, I suppose you would just go to mezes.org and just look at anything that's related to business cycles, to inflation, any of that stuff. And it just kind of bounce around on those topics. And I think you'll really start to learn it because just really starting to get a sense. And Rothbard has some good short articles then on how the business cycle works, how boom busts work. Because then once you get a sense of that, you start to really appreciate just how. how badly you're getting worked over by the central bank and how inflation really works to hurt

regular people. And this is just really key. Like the saying that I like to use is, you know, most people think economics is real boring and everything. But I say we learn economics to learn how we're being ripped off, right? Because if you don't know how, at least somewhat how it works, you don't know how the ruling class is working you over, how they're ripping you off. because they know all the tricks. They know how to make themselves seem very, very smart, and that they've got it all planned ahead. And, oh, yeah, we'll just inflate a little bit here.

And that'll help everybody. And we'll just regulate a little bit there. And everyone will be better off. But that's not true. They don't know what they're doing. But they're actually impoverishing you. And it's very helpful to have an idea of how that's being done so that you know just how bad it is and what needs to be done to maybe reverse that problem.

Thank you very much for, time Ryan really appreciate you thank you scott the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org