The David Knight Show - Stagflation Storm Brewing: Will Trump’s Tariffs Trigger the Shaky House of Cards Government Has Built?

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Dr. Jonathan Newman, Mises Institute Mises.org, on the fear of stagflation—a toxic mix of soaring prices and a crumbling economy From government overspending to the Fed’s reckless money-printing, Newman rips the veil off the real culprits behind our shaky economy.     And, how do we train the young on economics and critical thinking?  We look at Dr. Newman’s books for children, “The Broken Window”, “Ludwig the Builder”, “What has the Government Done to Our Money?”, the last available for free at Mises.org/MyMoneyIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTFor 10% off supplements and books, go to RNCstore.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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Innovate, the IT solutions people. Good morning. This now is Dr. Jonathan Newman. He is a Henry Hezlett Research Fellow at the Mises Institute. He's earned his PhD at Auburn University while he was a research fellow at the Mises Institute. He's earned his PhD at Auburn University while he was a research fellow at the Mises Institute. He's got a couple of children's books on economics, a way to make the dismal science less dismal, make it accessible to children.

The Broken Window and Ludwig the Builder. So we're going to talk to him about that, but I want to begin by talking about tariffs, stagflation, and things like that. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Newman. Hey, thanks for having me on. It's good to have you. Let's talk a little bit about the tariffs. And a lot of people are talking about stagflation.

And are we seeing signs of stagflation starting to raise its head in the US economy? Is it stagflation? Is it recession? Tell us a little bit about stagflation and what you think about how the economy is reacting to the Trump tariffs. Sure, so stagflation is certainly possible. It's a rare sort of thing. Usually what happens is the Federal Reserve will print money and this will stimulate business activity, will get the employment numbers up, makes it easier for the government to borrow and spend

and usually that's their reaction to a recession or an impending recession. So usually what happens is they they print the money and that causes prices to rise and for business activity to increase at least in the short run. Of course anybody who's familiar with Austrian business cycle will know that this will eventually turn into a bust. Eventually, all of the new projects that are started while interest rates are artificially low, they can't be completed

because the real savings aren't there. And so we get a recession. But usually what happens is we have price inflation and output and employment moving together. Or during a recession, we'll have some price deflation at the same time we have declining business activity or a recession. And that's why a stagflation is so rare.

We did have pretty much a whole decade of stagflation during the 1970s, and it's certainly possible that it could happen this year or in the next couple years. And what happens in a stagflation... I remember it well. I'm about to remember that, yeah. What happens in the stagflation is when we have price inflation at the same time we have declining output.

So we have a real recession, but we also have increasing prices. One thing that I want everybody to understand is that while tariffs and the sort of the uncertainty surrounding them could cause that sort of event to occur at a particular time, that's not the real underlying cause of it. It's more of like a triggering sort of event that could cause entrepreneurs to re-evaluate their plans and start to liquidate, start to decrease output. But the real cause of a stagflation

is simply bad monetary policy, bad fiscal policy. The real cause of a stagflation is government overspending, government overregulation, the things that the government does to decrease output. And at the same time, they're printing money. At the same time, they're contributing to the price inflation. And so that's if and when we do see stagflation, we should attribute it to bad monetary and

fiscal policy and not, you know, back in the 70s, the scapegoat was the oil crisis. And I'm sure, especially people on the left today would come up with some other scapegoat, like Trump's tariffs as the real underlying cause of the stagflation. Like I said, it could be sort of a triggering factor, but it's the real underlying cause is just bad monetary policy. Oh, yeah, yeah. If we're in a bad, and that's why, you know, I look at this and I say we, we has met the enemy and he is us or the US, I should say, the US government, right, has created a

lot of trigger, you trigger, a shaky economy that's just waiting for the right trigger. I was talking earlier in the program, Charles Hugh Smith said that this is kind of like an earthquake. You know, whether the earthquake was a terrorist or whether it was a long sustained policy of a lot of other people,

people don't realize the infrastructure damage and the things that you can't see, just like with an earthquake, and it's going to take a while for things to surface. As they start to surface, people look for a trigger, like the oil issue or the tariffs issue. But I think it really comes back to the debt, to the interest rates. And I think a big part of this that is as important as the tariffs are, I think a big part of this that is, I think we, as important as the tariffs are, I think a big part of this is just the uncertainty that has been there, because we've seen vacillation

for two months about this. And we've got a lot of people, whether they're shippers or whether they are automobile companies in Germany or other places, just said, we're just gonna stop right now. We're gonna take a 30-day to a 45-day hiatus, and we're not gonna do anything at all and wait and see what happens. That in and of itself can create kind of a stagflation, a stagnant economy even though we've got

inflation and they don't want to address the root causes of inflation, do they? Oh, you're exactly right. There's really no incentive on the part of politicians and bureaucrats to address the real underlying causes. Of course, the incentives of a politician is to increase government spending and decrease taxes. Of course, I'm all in favor of decreasing taxes, but if you're increasing spending at the same time, it just means that the taxes are going to show up in other ways.

It's going to show up in the form of higher prices. It's going to show up in the form of wasted resources going to government programs, government projects. But that's really the allure of government money printing is that they're able to have the government shower us with all of these goods and services that the government provides. And at the same time, the tax bill doesn't fully reflect that. Since taxes are so unpopular, it's very easy for the government to resort to the printing press to finance its activities.

But I mean, we pay for it either way. We pay for it in the form of higher prices. We pay for it in the form of financial crises and business cycles instead. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think is going to happen with this? I think that a large part of this is just to distract people's attention from the massive debt from these other things that have been done in terms of massive stimulus and quantitative

easing and printing of money and all the rest of this stuff. It's kind of a backdoor tax increase. It's kind of interesting to see conservatives now cheering taxes as if it's some kind of an engine of creation. You know, tariffs are just another tax. I don't think they're as bad as the income tax if we're going to have a tax, and I've said that for a long time, but always when people talk about changing the tax system, they were very wary about keeping the income tax and adding an additional tax, which appears

to me to be what's going to happen if he says he's going to keep the tax cuts permanent. That means he's going to keep the tax permanent as well. What do you think about this? I mean, the tariffs are just another tax, and yet you have so many people who see this as an engine of creation now. Yeah, you're exactly right. Tariffs are a tax. Economics itself got, well, it was born as a rejection of old classical mercantilism and protectionist ideas. So you go back to writers like Adam Smith and Richard Cantillon, they were writing in the 1700s, explaining that the government is not going to be able to achieve the ends that it's seeking by implementing tariffs.

So it's actually, it's no benefit to the domestic economy to impose these tariffs. It makes things more costly, makes things more expensive, and it disrupts the global division of labor that we've developed over the centuries. And so there's really, a lot of times people will point to trade deficits, which is really a terrible term because it has the word deficit in it. And so people sort of equate it with a budget deficit. And of course, it's terrible for the government to be in a budget deficit. And I agree with that.

It's bad for households to be in a deficit as well because it means that they're overspending. But it doesn't apply to a trade deficit. It's a bad term, in my opinion. What a trade deficit shows is that there's money flowing in one direction and goods flowing in the other direction. And so if you just think about it from your own personal perspective, think about your own household and the relationship that you have with your local grocery store. There's money going in one direction and goods going in the other direction. Every household has a giant trade deficit with their local grocery store and there's

nothing unsustainable about that. There's nothing bad or unfair about that. It's simply the grocery stores providing goods that households want and households are paying for those goods with their money. And so there's this trade deficit that happens all the time with every single household and all the shopping that they do. And then of course there's trade surpluses that we have individually with our employers. So if you think about there's money going from your employer to the household and that's a trade deficit from the employer's perspective but a trade surplus from the worker's perspective. And so if we just think about it from that individual perspective, people might think,

oh, it might work at that level, but it doesn't work at the international level. But it absolutely does. Just think about how land around the world is especially suited to... Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security,

Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Produce different things. So here in the United States, we're good at producing corn. We've got workers that are very good at designing software and designing airplanes, producing airplanes. Very good at providing healthcare and education. People come from all over the world to get educated here in the United States, or get healthcare here in the United States. And yet other countries are good at producing other things.

And so like we might get semiconductors from somewhere else. We get tequila from Mexico, for example. Right, so each country has its own sort of specializations and this is gonna result in trade surpluses and trade deficits that are just dependent on different productivities and consumer preferences in the different countries. There's no reason to disrupt this. There's no reason to fear this.

There's no reason to think that it's unsustainable or unfair. It's something that's been a huge benefit around the world. There's mutual benefit to be had for everyone who's involved in this global division of labor. I agree. And when we look at this, the thing I think is interesting is that Trump is not really addressing even the tariffs. In the past, we've had, when government was small,

tariffs could fund a small government that fit inside the Constitution. Later on, they used tariffs to protect certain industries. And we see in all the other countries, there's a wide range of tariffs on things. In they could go from like five to twenty percent on most of the things well the aggregate level was like twenty to twenty five percent or whatever they had a few things that they were particularly restrictive on they would have fifty to seventy percent tariffs and they they would go through

though the Trump administration cherry-picked something like Japan that has a 700 percent tariff on rice. But these were about particular things that they were trying to protect from whatever reason, trying to get a monopoly on it or they want to make sure that they produce their own food inside their own country or something like that. Yet these tariffs are being done on a country-by-country basis. And so when Trump talked about this yesterday He's talking about Japanese cars and you're not buying enough American cars

It's like well are the American cars being tailored for something that the Japanese people want? You know, this isn't he's doing this on a country-by-countries basis He's not doing it on a product-by-product basis and even on a product-by-product basis What's being ignored here is the decision of the consumer, isn't it? Yeah, you're exactly right. And you brought up an excellent point about how countries like to protect certain industries. One very common argument for tariffs that I hear is the national security argument,

that if we're going to be – if it's likely that we're going to go to war and that another country will be our enemy in this war, we don't want to be dependent on them to produce weapons or to produce food or pharmaceuticals or other things that we need, essential things, especially in a wartime where we have these, you know, giant international conflicts. And I understand where that argument is coming from. And it makes sense just at face a value that you're right. We don't want to be dependent on an enemy to provide the things that we would need to fight a war.

But I think that even in this case, there are other things that we can do to make sure that we're producing the things that we want here domestically, even if you grant the argument that there's going to be this war with the other country. And specifically the tools that I would recommend, I'm not a fan of subsidies, but I think that a subsidy would work better in that regard as opposed to a tariff.

And the reason why is the subsidy is transparent. The cost is transparent to taxpayers. So they see exactly how much is it costing us to be prepared for war? How much does it cost us to have this national security capability, right? As opposed to a tariff where there are all these unintended consequences that distorts things throughout the economy, whereas a subsidy, it can be targeted.

We can say, we want this particular industry to not have to compete with foreign producers because we want to be able to produce this thing in the case that there's some sort of conflict. So a subsidy, I think, is a much better answer, a much better tool to solve that sort of problem as opposed to relying on something as destructive as an overall trade barrier like a tariff. I agree. I think our competitive advantage would be freedom and liberty and low taxes. Absolutely. You know?

And that's the thing that bothers me so much when I look at how the conservatives and the right-wing media, the people who are supporting Trump, they basically want to prop him up regardless of what he does. They don't want to call him out if he's wrong about something. And he's very wrong about the fact that our country became prosperous because of tariffs. When we look at America in the 1800s, the size of government was minuscule. The intrusion into our lives was minuscule. You could start a business.

You could start a manufacturing concern without being regulated to death. Today with all the regulations, it's pretty much impossible to start a manufacturing business or to grow it. That's the real issue. The thing that is really harming us is the heavy hand of government. And that is, but they, again, they redirect you to a different thing. They don't want to talk about the trade deficit and the $37 trillion. I mean the government's budget deficit, the $37 trillion. They want you to think about a trade deficit, which is just under a trillion dollars, okay? So they don't talk about the thing

that's 40 times bigger, but they want to misdirect you and they want to misdirect you from our government to some foreign government or from our government to corporations and it's always a misdirection thing that is happening. But I think again when we look at it, it's the clarity that is missing for the trade policy that is one of the most damaging things about this. We could argue about the rates. By the way, did you see the calculation,

how they came up with those numbers on that chart? It was parodied on Saturday Night Live and Margaret Brennan didn't really know what to say to Lutnick about it. But she repeated some of the talking points, but I don't think she actually saw it. Did you actually see what people worked out as a reverse engineer, the formula that came up with for the so-called tariff rates? Did you see that?

Yes, it was, uh, basically it worked out to be a simple fraction of, uh, the trade deficit between the U S and the particular country divided by the imports. Yeah. And so I guess their thinking is that they want to apply the right tariff to diminish or get rid of that trade deficit. But as I mentioned before, there's nothing to worry about trade deficits. Trade deficits do not mean that America is losing.

It does not mean that there's something unsustainable or necessarily unfair that's going on. And so, I mean, just the whole idea, it's preposterous, it's been refuted thousands and thousands of times throughout the history of economic thought. I mean, so it's really up to economists. I mean, economists have been wrong about so many things. I'll be the first, I am an economist, I'll be the first to claim that economists have been wrong about so many things. I am an economist.

I'll be the first to claim that economists have failed, especially over the past few decades. But it's really, it's up to the economics profession to stand up and say, there are some good things here. Trump is really a mixed bag. There's some good things, decreasing the size and scope of government through Doge, decreasing government spending, decreasing regulation. There's some good things there, but also like you said, we've got to,

you know, call out the bad things when we see them. And I definitely consider the tariffs and really any sort of trade barriers a bad thing that we should stand up and call out. I agree. Yeah, I'm something of a cynic and a skeptic, so I'll believe the cuts when I see them actually take place, when they aren't overturned by court system or whatever else. But let's talk a little bit about training the future generations because, you know, as you point out, you've had a lot of different schools of economics and so only one could be right and maybe none of them are right. We look at all this stuff, it doesn't necessarily mean that because we've got a lot of them that any of them are right, but I like what you guys do at the Mises Institute, I like Austrian economics. How do we train young

economists so they don't fall into some kind of fuzzy thinking like modern monetary theory or something? Well, whenever I go to a bookstore or sometimes even sort of big retailers that have a book section, I see the children's books that they have there. And I notice that there's all this indoctrination there, especially a ton of woke-ism, getting children to believe these terrible ideas. And I remember a few years ago thinking,

we should have our own version of that. And there are some versions of that. Like I'll definitely say that the Tuttle Twins book series does a great job of teaching principles of liberty and economics. But I wanted to, you know, do something else. I wanted to, you know, show that I could also write some of these stories, especially since I have some young children myself. And so my main idea for training young economists, getting children to see the principles of liberty,

see the principles of sound economics. And so I started writing these stories, these children's stories that are easily graspable, something that they're fun to read as well, fun stories to follow along with. And so I started off with the broken window that tells Frederick Bastiat's broken window parable. It was popularized by Henry Hazlitt. I mean, it basically just, it says that involuntary destruction is not good.

A lot of people will say that, you know, something breaks and we have to replace it. This is stimulative for the economy. In fact, you'll even see this today, like a hurricane will come through the southeast United States, and you'll see some journalists somewhere say, you know, it's not all bad news. This is going to be great for the economy because people are going to have to spend a bunch of money to repair and replace and rebuild. But of course, what they're forgetting, including the Keynesian economists who fall for this

fallacy, what they're forgetting is the opportunity cost. They're forgetting the fact that we had valuable resources and repairing them, replacing them, rebuilding also costs us valuable resources that could have gone to other uses. So really, it's not a stimulus to employment. It's not a stimulus to employment, it's not a stimulus to economic growth. When we have these destructive events, there's an opportunity cost and it's bad. And so that's the basis. That's especially true today. We got these people from Silicon Valley whose motto is

to move fast and break things. They want to break all the windows so that they can build it back better. You know? And so that isn't a very, very important lesson for kids to understand that, you know, breaking stuff is not necessarily a good thing. We don't want to do that. And, uh, we have, uh, the people who seem to be in control at this point, uh, w w on both sides, uh, seem like they want to break everything that we've got. So that's a great lesson.

So how do you flesh that out for the kids and give them an example of how that is not what we want? We don't want broken windows. So I use the broken window parable as it was told by Bastiat and Hazlitt. The story goes this way. There's a young hoodlum throws a brick through a baker's window and a crowd gathers to reflect on this event and think about it and they come to the conclusion that the broken window is actually good it has good positive effects it stimulates spending and

employment because now the Baker is going to have to get the pane of glass repaired and so this is good for the glass business. The people who work in the glass business, now they have extra incomes that they can use to go buy things out and about in the economy. And so that's the conclusion that the crowd comes to. And that is the fallacy. That is the broken window fallacy

is coming to that conclusion. But then the economist arrives on the scene and informs everybody, shows people that it's actually not an increase in spending and employment. It's actually just a redirection of the way resources are used because now the baker is not able to buy the new pair of shoes or to get the new suit that he would like. And so instead of having a full unbroken piece of glass and a new pair of shoes, the baker

just has to settle for the repaired piece of glass. So the economy, this community is actually worse off. It doesn't have as many real valuable resources than it did before. And so the story just, it's a rhyme. So it's very easy to read know to read through and you know Kids have a fun time. There's great illustrations of You know that the kid throwing the brick through the window There's also an illustration of like the broken glass over the you know, the bread and the pies at the baker

And there's even some cool illustrations that show the two different courses of events, one in which the window is broken and the counterfactual course of events in which the window is not broken, and then the baker is able to purchase the new pair of shoes. So I did this to really highlight to children that destruction is not good and it's a waste of resources. But then later on at the end of the book, I have a more detailed explanation for it, like parents and teachers. So if somebody wants to use this in a homeschool curriculum, that's what that section is for, to really explain and help the

child to see why it is that when the government decides to spend money on something, the same thought process applies. It's not stimulative for the government to employ a bunch of people. So especially after the financial crisis, the government had all of these infrastructure projects and the goal was to spend and to stimulate the economy to get us out of the recession. But of course, if you understand the broken window fallacy, then you see actually all of the resources

that were used in those infrastructure projects come at a cost. It means that all of the resources that were used to make new bridges, repair roads, and all of those sorts of things, it comes at a cost that's not stimulative for the economy. It's just a misdirection or redirection of resources. And of course, we saw that during the COVID lockdown.

I don't say anything. The government checks were called stimulus checks. That was great, you know, and it wasn't great that we locked everybody down. We busted a bunch of businesses. But on the left, you see that with the green agenda. You know, they're constantly going, you can't buy this, you can't buy that. You look at what's happening in the UK, they're telling the people over there, you can't have a furnace anymore, you're going to have to have a heat pump.

And we've been going to not just ban your gas furnaces, which are going to put out warm air in that cold climate and damp climate, but we are even going to rip up the gas lines that are under the ground so that you can't build this back. But that's great. You look at how it's going to stimulate the economy and that's the way that the Democrats have sold all of this green stuff. It's all a stimulus to the economy. We're going to create so many jobs with our electric school buses and our solar panels

and all the rest of this stuff. We've had the broken window fallacy has been sold to us in a variety of manifestations and twists and turns, hasn't it? Yes, yes. So these fallacies are alive and well, and I want to do my part to teach children about this so that they're somewhat inoculated, so that when they grow up and become voters and they're reading the news and they're hearing politicians, you know, spew all the nonsense that they do that they have the critical thinking there so that they can they can understand, hey, this is not a stimulus to the economy. This is not this is not good for us. This is just the government grabbing more. This is the government deciding how resources are going to be used as opposed to private citizens, entrepreneurs, and consumers. Right? So that's really the goal, is that there are these good critical thinking skills

that we're teaching our children now so that later on, hopefully we're not in the same sort of mess that we are now. That's the key thing. I'll give you a quick review. Critical thinking is the key thing. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Once they understand the principle, they can apply that in critical thinking when somebody comes with whatever the agenda is, the green agenda or whatever else. I'm sorry, what were you going to say?

Oh no, it's fine. I was just going to give a quick preview of upcoming children's book. So you mentioned Ludwig the Builder. That one is another story for children to help them understand business cycles. But one that's going to printers now, should be out very soon, it's called The Magic Coin. And this is a children's book version, a retelling of Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money? And so What Has Government Done to Our Money?

It's a short little book, very accessible, easy to read. By the way, the Mises Institute is running a promotion right now. We're trying to give away 100,000 copies of this. So your viewers can go to mises.org slash my money. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G slash my money to get a free copy of that book. But in the children's book, what I do is I go through all of the steps that Rothbard goes through in that book where he explains the origins of money,

the origins of banking, how government took control of money in banking, and then there's a little there's a fun little episode in there about hyperinflation. And so the the story follows a girl who discovers this magic coin that takes her through all of these different episodes in the history of money. And the goal there is to show children and really anyone who wants to pick up this book that money has been co-opted by the state.

Money and banking has been monopolized by the state to our detriment. It was originally a market institution that facilitated trade, made for the global division of labor, made it possible, which we were talking about when we were talking about tariffs earlier, and greatly expanded economic growth and standards of living across the world. But then governments realized that they could take control of money and banking to their own benefit and implement the inflation tax. If the government wants to spend more than it collects in taxes, it can make up for part of the difference with money printing. And so I explained that

in one of the episodes in that story. And the goal is to show children that money is... all of the problems that we see in money and banking and finance. It's not a problem that originated on the market. It's because the government has taken control of it. Once again, the government is the enemy in this story. And with that in mind, what do you think of the alleged Bitcoin reserve, which it turns out that Trump started talking about other coins besides Bitcoin. What do you think about that and the crypto stuff and the stable coin?

We've got a couple of bills that are going through the Genius Act and others that are like that. What are your concerns when we talk about government manipulating the money supply? What are your concerns about these types of things? Or do you have any? I'm not a fan of the Bitcoin reserve idea. I think it's best for government to just be hands off. Just let the market work. Let the market decide what it wants money to be.

There's nothing that the government needs to do to try to monopolize that or influence that, intervene in that area. I can't say that Bitcoin is the money of the future, but I can say that what we ought to do, the future that we should shoot for is one in which the market decides what money is and not the government. What we had in ages ago, really not that long ago, just before the 20th century is we had markets deciding what money was and they settled on precious metals. They settled on gold and silver.

And then of course, you can go back to ancient history and you can see how like the, uh, the Roman empire debased their own silver coins and that caused all sorts of problems. They tried to fix it with price controls. And of course that made it worse. And eventually you had the downfall of the Roman empire. And I think we're seeing the same sorts of things happening, uh, today where governments have taken over money. They've debased it, they've printed too much, there have been

a few hyperinflation scenarios throughout the 20th century, and even some in modern times if you look at Venezuela. And so what this shows is that the government is not a good steward of money. That money is too important for us to give to the government to take control of. And what the sort of system that we should shoot for is one in which the market decides what money is. Whether that's going back to gold and silver or doing something new like with cryptocurrency, I can't decide because I'm not in charge of the market. But I do know that the answer is let the market decide. When you look at what is happening now, do you get a sense that our government is getting ready

to reset the financial system like another Bretton Woods and this time move us over into stablecoin that is, I guess we could kind of characterize it as a tokenization of treasury notes. If they're going to have difficulty selling treasury notes to people, maybe they could sell all the treasury notes to a stablecoin or something like that. I mean, to me, it seems like a tokenization of the Fed bills and bonds and things like that. What is your take on it about the stablecoins, the way it's being promoted, not that it's going to be based on gold, but it's going to be based on fiat currency and government

bonds. What do you think about that? I think it's inevitable. I think you're absolutely right to see that in the future. I think that the government has a very big incentive to maintain the current system of fiat money in central banking, which means that if there is some sort of threat from private cryptocurrencies, the government may try to impose or will try to impose something like a central bank digital currency, like what you're talking about. And of course, the reason why they would do that is so that they maintain that monopoly control over money and banking. And really that would totally, that would be the coup de grace,

that would be the last nail in the coffin of sound money. Because even now in our current banking system, there's just this like tiny sliver of a constraint that the public has on the banking system by being able to withdraw cash from the system. But if we get rid of cash and we go to a completely central bank managed monetary system with a central bank digital currency, even that constraint is gone. And so what we'll have is we'll have even more inflation.

All privacy will be gone because of course with the central bank digital currency, government will be able to see everything that you're buying. We got a taste of this during the COVID years. You remember there was the trucker protest in Canada, where they cut off their access to their own bank accounts. And also with the January 6 protesters, they did the same sort of thing. It was Bank of America working with the federal government to help identify who was at, who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, right?

And so- Yeah, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's already been done. It's not even put into practice. Yeah, exactly. Surveillance and control and restriction and taking it away. It seems to me like this stablecoin stuff has got all the worst attributes of CBDC, but it's got some incentives for it to be some people to make a lot of

money for it. It's kind of like I call it a public-private partnership for digital currency. Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. And we should fight it tooth and nail. Like I said, it would be the death knell for sound money. I mean, we don't have sound money now, but that's really the endpoint in terms of government control over money and banking is a central bank digital currency. I would much rather see a future in which we go back to sound money, where we go back to money that's chosen by the market. I agree. And that's why it's

important. The Mises Institute is important because it is nonpartisan. And that's the key thing because it's going to be people who like and who trust a political party or a politician are going to step aside and let them do this to us and make excuses for that when it happens if we are going to be partisan about it. So again, you're non-political there, you're non-partisan, non-PC. Tell us anything else about, of course, Austrian economics there at Auburn University, the Mises Institute. Tell us a little about, of course, Austrian economics there at Auburn University, the Mises Institute. Tell us a little bit more about that, your fellow there at the Mises Institute.

Absolutely. So the mission of the Mises Institute is to educate people about Austrian economics, principles of liberty like freedom and peace. So we're really countercultural in that sense. And you mentioned that we're non-partisan and that really gives us the ability to call out people on the left and the right when they're going down the wrong road,

when they're going down the road towards greater state control, greater size and scope of government. So that allows us to be principled, allows us to be uncompromising. But the way that we teach Austrian economics is we have student programs. Really our flagship student program is called Mises University. It's a week-long crash course in Austrian economics during the summer where specifically undergraduate students is the target audience here to come and learn Austrian economics from

start to finish from wonderful faculty from around the world really. We also have everything that the Mises Institute publishes is available for free online. So you can get the PDF and of course, sometimes we'll give away even our printed material for free like I did with the, like I shared about the what has government done to our money promotion that we're doing.

We have academic journals as well and we have academic conferences. In fact, just recently we had the Austrian Economics Research Conference and the Libertarian Scholars Conference where scholars came from around the world to present their research on Austrian economics and liberty and rights and justice and all of the good things that we need to be researching and talking about and explaining to the public. So if anybody's interested, you should come check out our website, mises.org, M-I-S-E-S.org.

You'll see commentary on current events. We have new articles coming out every single day, multiple articles coming out every single day, where our authors, our scholars are commenting on what they see, and giving the Austrian economic principles behind it, and telling the truth wherever we go. Yes. And a lot of articles about history as well. And of course, when we look at history, that what has government done to our money, that's very important for people to understand that, because the government's got designs on our money right now, as we've just been talking about. And we're going to be as – I'm afraid that in a couple of years they're

going to be asking – everybody's going to be asking that question, what has government done to our money? But it's got a long history behind it, and if you understand that history, you might be able to head off some of the worst aspects of this in the future. Tell people again how they can get that book, because it is very much something that everybody needs to know, not just the kids, but especially the kids. What has the government done to our money? How can they get that at Mises.org? Yeah, the website is Mises.org, M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G slash my money, M-Y-M-O-N-E-Y. And

if you go to that link, then you'll be able to get your own free copy of what has government done to our money. Like I said before, it's very accessible. It's an easy read. You know, you see some of the books that are written by Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Some of them are quite dense. They're thick and they're dense and difficult to go through. But this one is very accessible, easy to read, and it's a short book, and it makes the very strong claim, but you know, one that is backed up with evidence and the history as well, that government has taken over money and banking, and it has not been good for all of us. That's right.

Oh yeah, that absolutely is an important message. Thank you so much, Dr. Jonathan Neuwen. Thank you very much there at the Mises Institute, and Travis has shared that. We'll put that in the description for the video and the podcast as well. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Jonathan Neuwen Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been a pleasure. Dr. Jonathan Neuwen Thank you.