Watch this excellent video titled “Fraud: Why the Great Recession“.
It is an hour and six minutes long, but it is worth every minute.
It is important to watch it to the very end, even after the credits start to run, for Huerta de Soto’s prediction. Patrick Barron
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTpKGiVwKHY]
By Joakim Fagerstrom and Joakim Kampe, www.mises.se
Introductory Comments
by RadioFreeMarket.com Founder, Michael J. McKay
Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe
To the human mind held in captivity Freedom is an idea which, if it comes at all , can come slowly at first and then – maybe – more quickly.
For some thinking about life outside of jail is too much. They learn to love their captivity.
As the notion of Freedom dawns it is common for people to see it first in only one area, like rebelling against a requirement to wear a motorcycle helmet or being prohibited from experiencing the rich sweet taste of raw milk from their youth, or maybe noticing how abusive some petty clerk bureaucrat at the Department of Motor Vehicles can be.
But then – maybe – it picks up steam and for those fortunate few they start to study what Freedom – True Freedom – would look like.
There can be several stages to this process.
But the biggest and most challenging transition stage is when people seriously consider whether government itself is necessary.
This is when it gets really interesting.
For many people, even most people living today, they cannot even imagine the idea of “no government” and still having a society of Peace, Prosperity and Freedom.
Yet some who study Freedom not only come to the idea of Peace, Prosperity and Freedom without government, they actually write volumes on how that is possible – and practical.
I know, for many of you reading this, it may sound simply crazy.
But crazy it is not.
Only a couple hundred years ago very few people could imagine separating The Church from The State.
And now, today, a large number of people around the world live in such a reality.
Indeed they cannot imagine a world where to be excommunicated actually meant, as did then, certain death. Life itself was dependent on keeping your head down and just going along.
There are some, extremely few, who have articulately presented how a stateless yet orderly society could and would work.
And here is why one and all should read the works of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe and especially his newest book “The Great Fiction”.
The story that follows this introduction is told by my two very good friends Joakim Fagerstrom and Joakim Kampe from the Mises Institute in Sweden.
Please read it closely. You will see that they respect those students of Freedom who have only come “so far”, but are not ready to even think about a world without The State.
The story will show that the organizers (who paid for the event) wanted to exclude Dr. Hoppes books because they thought these books to be “too radical”.
This was their right to do.
My friends respected the rights of these organizers, as they should.
This is an interesting story. At its heart it shows that, along the path to Freedom, some people stop at the idea that government still must be a key player in the equation of human society. Ironically, these early-in-development “freedom lovers” impede the broader understanding of how True Freedom could practically work.
But others learn, and now you dear reader can be one of them, that to expand Peace, Prosperity and Freedom we do not need government at all.
We do, emphatically, need Rules and Laws.
This next layer of understanding shows us the practical way where we do not need government to create, arbitrate or enforce our Rules and Laws.
After reading the story of my friends from Sweden, please do yourself a favor and purchase Dr. Hoppe’s book (here).
Your life – our life – will be changed for the better. MM
A few months ago we were invited to speak at the European Students For Liberty regional conference in Stockholm. Our institute has previously written articles for ESFL and we have also delivered a webinar for them, on May 1st on the topic The Myth of the Socialist Paradise Sweden. It was a great event with about 200 attendees and it was, to our knowledge, greatly appreciated. Thus, we were truly looking forward to speaking at a one of their conferences that was going to be held in our hometown.
The topic of the speech was “How to achieve freedom”. In the speech we were going to bring up Mises and use him as a role model in the struggle for freedom, and how you had to be uncompromising in your struggle and never water down your message in order to better suit the masses. What mattered was devotion to truth and to your principles. After all, Mises in his memoirs concludes that if there was one thing that he regretted it was that he compromised too much (Memoirs, p. 60).
As a part of our attendance at the event we were planning on selling books from many of the great authors and legends like Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Henry Hazlitt, Stephan Kinsella, Linda and Morris Tannehill and many more. Since these books are hard to get and a bit more expensive in Sweden we always try to sell them at good prices. We were granted the permission to have a table to sell the books from during the day. At this point everything was ok.
However, a few days before the event we announced at the ESFL event page that we were going to sell these books during the day and about ten minutes later we got a message from the organizers asking us to immediately remove the “Hoppe comment”. After some clarification it was understood that what they wanted us to do was to remove the announcements about the books. The reason was that we were not allowed to sell Professor Hoppe’s books at the event. This was quite surprising, since according to their website, ESFL prides itself on embracing “the diversity of justifications for liberty and encourages debate and discourse on the differing philosophies that underlie liberty”, and in being a big-tent movement. The explanation was that a person responsible for the event didn’t like Professor Hoppe, and that Hoppe’s ideas were deemed to be too controversial. In other words, an organization that claims that they are all for liberty doesn’t want to sell books written by one of the leading libertarian thinkers of our time because his ideas are deemed controversial.
For many people Professor Hoppe’s books have been and will always be too dangerous to allow. Once you read them you understand the great fiction of the state, and it becomes obvious to what extent you truly believe in property, freedom and society. Of course we fully understand that European Students For Liberty have every right to exclude whatever and whoever they want from their events. It is their property and their event and they can choose to exclude and discriminate in any way they see fit. Ironically, this is a point that Hoppe has made and been widely criticized for, and it is likely one of the main reasons why his ideas are deemed as being too controversial and uncomfortable, and why ESFL wants nothing to do with him.
It is however somewhat hypocritical to say that they want to include everyone in the freedom movement, from minarchists to anarchists, and that they are open to all ideas regarding freedom, but at the same time they are afraid of Hoppe’s ideas. Thus they have shown through their demonstrated preference that they don’t live up to the very ideal and vision they themselves have set up for the organisation.
To water down the message of liberty and shy away from controversies, with no regard to the truth, in order to gain a wider audience is not a behaviour that we think is conducive to the overall goal and can never be a good long-term strategy. It is coincidentally also one which both Mises and Hoppe would advise us against pursuing.
Obviously, since we hold Professor Hoppe in such a high esteem (he is even featured on our crest) and because he is an important reason as to why we started the Swedish Mises Institute we chose to not participate. Following the lead of Mises, and coincidentally even more so of Hoppe, we do not compromise and we are not willing to water down our message in order to better appease the masses. Instead we choose to stand fast in our uncompromising intellectual radicalism. Of course without our participation the event was more homogenous, with statists and bankers.
Also, an interesting detail that seems to have gone by completely unnoticed, is that ESFL at the event handed out a book with the name “Marknader och demokrati” (“Markets and democracy” in English only available in Swedish) for free, by Björn Wahlroos. What they weren’t aware of is that in the book he references Professor Hoppe’s book Democracy The God That Failed, and even quotes Hoppe regarding the connection between democracy and a higher time preference.
In the end, it was a simple cost-benefit analysis on our part. Yes, it is true, we could have gained some followers in the short-run if we compromised and watered down our message, but we would have done so at the expense of denying who we are and what we stand for.
To conclude, and to paraphrase Shakespeare, there appears to be something rotten in the ESFL. While we are sure this article mostly will fall on deaf ears, we at least hope that someone within the ESFL realizes that something is not right and acts to change this. ESFL could be a strong and true force for libertarianism in the world, and it is likely an organization that will be with us for some time. However, to exclude ideas and authors because they are deemed to be too controversial or uncomfortable will in the end be the undoing of the organization and the overall goal. Only an adherence to non-compromising intellectual radicalism will help us achieve our goal. An adherence to pragmatism and gradualism will not. Because, it is just like the libertarian abolitionist of slavery William Lloyd Garrison put it: “Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.”
Joakim Fagerstrom [send him mail] is the President of www.mises.se. Joakim Kampe [send him mail] is the Editor of www.mises.se.
by Benjamin Marks, Capitalism.HK and Economics.org.au editor
O fortunate age! O happy times! in which shall be made public my incomparable atchievements, worthy to be ingraved in brass, on marble sculptured, and in painting shewn, as great examples to futurity! and O! thou sage inchanter, whosoever thou may’st be, doom’d to record the wondrous story! forget not, I beseech thee, the trusty Property and Freedom Society, the firm companion of my various fate!
~ Don Quixote de la Mancha1
Complying with Rothbard’s strict unanimity criterion, Turkey is the only modern day libertarian country. It is difficult for those who don’t speak a word of Turkish to comprehend the marvel, but I was able to get a good taste after interviewing scores of English-speakers in Turkey, all of whom were anarchocapitalist. This must be due to the diplomatic manoeuvrings and popular scheming of Turkey’s Property and Freedom Society (PFS), especially its annual meetings, with The Honourable Hans-Hermann Hoppe as host alongside his wife Gülçin as “the indispensable framework”. I was very fortunate that the 7th annual PFS meeting coincided with my recent visit to the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum.
Bodrum has so rich a history that it is even where “the father of history” Herodotus resided, and so, although I do not claim to be a professional historian, its history of historical awareness plausibly explains how it became the most libertarian country in the world today. The conference venue was the Hotel Karia Princess, which sounds like a cruise ship, and in the beginning of its history the evidence would indicate that it was a cruise ship that decided to stay put at the best location rather than travel to pick up passengers, or, more likely, to return them. The rooms were large enough for a modest harem. The food! The food was fit for a: libertarian. And the drinks! At 16 months since the last Property and Freedom Society meeting, it was a long time between drinks. And for Duncan of the U.K., Doolittle of the U.S. and De Roeck of Belgium, it looked like it was also a long time between meals. Evidently drinking like a fish has a different meaning to eating like a fish. It is very libertarian to think of progress as weight loss.
What I found most representative of PFS was a conversation I had involving the youthful Kinsella jnr. He is understandably so familiar with censoring his opinions that his father had to remind him that it is okay to speak his mind at PFS, which Hoppe proclaims a “political correctness free zone”. I think everyone struggled a little with this; jetlag was a non-issue compared with turning down our self-censorship settings. Many of us had forgotten where our self-censorship setting was, as we find it easier to just change the channel. I wonder if the popularity of sport can be explained as simply people finding somewhere where they are allowed to speak their mind and genuinely speak out in plain language against the opposition.
What I found fiercest was the very gentlemanly Karl-Peter Schwarz chastising Václav Klaus and Tyler Cowen for their opposition to returning land confiscated by governments to its rightful owners.
What I found funniest was Hoppe reading out the many functions of government that Hayek supported. Next time Hoppe delivers that speech there needs to be an intermission. But even without an intermission, or any time constraints of any sort since Hoppe wrote the schedule, even then! there was still only time for the speech to be just basically a list of where Hayek supported government.
What I found most exciting was Professor Salerno continuing to emphasise the importance of public opinion, especially to fractional reserve banking.
What I found most encouraging was the fact that the radical Peter Wong of Hong Kong’s Lion Rock Institute has not in any way been silenced by China.
What I found most interesting was the new or underexploited genres of libertarian activism that many of the attendees are exploring. I think their aim is somewhat similar to my aim for Economics.org.au, which is: to fail differently to everyone else. Michael McKay of Radio Free Market fame has an idea that is not yet for public release, but here are short summaries of some of the other ideas which are public:
This can advance libertarianism as never before. Every single person that sees this image will want to know who the heck is this guy with a bow tie and shorts and what he thinks. Then they will discover freedom.2
A great informal “behind-the-scenes” record of the conference is this video series by the steady hand of Joakim Fagerström of Mises Institute Sweden featuring candid comments, inside gossip and ambient lighting. Here is a randomly selected sample of his brilliant video interview series:
[vimeo 51844798 w=400 h=300]
Fagerström thinks libertarian ideas will be more likely to catch on in Sweden if they are translated into Swedish. He also thinks that economics is a science that does not admit of exceptions, which sets him far apart from his countryman Johan Norberg, who gets more utopian the older he gets, and currently unrealistically supports majority rule and even government monopolising many important industries.
The programme for PFS was so impressive that the speaker whose work I was least familiar with was: my own. I think it showed.
I learnt a lot about how government functions in the northern hemisphere by speaking to people from the U.K., Hong Kong, Singapore, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Austria and the U.S. It is very different to southern hemisphere governments. North of the equator, government spending goes down the drain counterclockwise.
What was mournfully missing from the meeting was the presence of the most radical free-market advocate in the world: Ron Manners, whose Mannkal Economic Education Foundation will next month be celebrating 15 years. I thought he attended every meeting on the planet involving very diverse shades of free-market advocacy, being an active member of the Mont Pelerin Society, on the Board of Overseers of the Atlas Network and a great supporter of the Australian Mises Seminar. If you doubt my comment that he is the most radical free-market advocate in the world, then check this out:
With over 40 years’ experience in business, let me tell you that a business must choose between complying with every tax and regulation or surviving. It is a simple decision, but you can’t do both. There is a war on between taxing authorities and the business community and the fact that your livelihood as tax agents (where applicable) is dependent on a licence issued by the enemy makes me doubt the effectiveness of advice offered under such duress.
Let me suggest that the Australian Accounting Profession’s total preoccupation with compliance, rather than resistance, has contributed greatly to those who earn their living by political activity. There is an old saying: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” — well, we must now “stop feeding the hand that bites us”.3
Furthermore, in Manners’ brilliant book, Heroic Misadventures, he says he never travels business class because he does not want to risk sitting next to politicians.4 Well, there’s a real and present danger of sitting next to politicians at MPS, but not at PFS!
(To prevent misunderstandings: I’m not asking Mr Manners to sponsor or subsidise me; I just think he would enjoy going, and maybe he could send some of his Mannkal scholars and students who are often generously sponsored for other international educational activities.)
Neville Kennard was missing in action too. The morning after I came back from the 2011 Property and Freedom Society meeting, I drove down to his country property to tell him what he missed, as he had to cancel his trip at the last minute for surgery. I was invited for breakfast, but stayed for lunch and dinner, because he was so interested. And now that he has an even better excuse not to have gone to the 2012 meeting, I guess I’ll have to debrief him at even greater length.
The Property and Freedom Society is, in some ways, like the castle where “the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha, redresser of wrongs and scourge of injustice”5 regained his health. After the conference, once we were all refilled, refreshed, re-armed and re-armoured, we then “longed fervently to depart in quest of adventures, thinking every minute [we] spent in that place, was an injury to the world in general, and to those miserable objects who [require our] favour and protection.”6 We could not continue to keep our insights to ourselves, with so many substances to legalise, ailing economies to cure, corrupt “businessmen” to expose and ignorant minds to save. We were at risk of being held complicit in criminal acts for withholding information about the terrible injustices in the world. We were harbouring knowledge that could lock up fugitives, compensate poor innocent victims and prevent future crimes. So we left Bodrum even quicker than we arrived. We arrived to listen and learn, then left to talk and teach. Enough! Such guilt. Duty calls. History must be made. Revolutions must be triggered. Governments must fall. Universities must close. Newspapers must topple. So much to do!
In this interview Max Keiser’s guest, Dr. Michael Hudson, discusses Shiela Bair’s new book, which claims that our monetary system is under the control of a Wall Street “mafia”. She ought to know, because Sheila Bair was head of the FDIC!Re: A Lesson From 1987,Unlearned by Wall St.
Dear Sirs:
Mr. Norris’ discussion of the role played by the then novice use of high speed computer trading in the 1987 stock market crash is merely a side show to the real unlearned lesson. The real unlearned lesson of the 1987 crash was the role played by the Greenspan Fed, which pumped massive amounts of liquidity into the market, short circuiting the cleansing process, and reigniting the inflationary bubble. This became the template of central bank policy everywhere–whenever the stock market gets jittery, lower the interest rate by any means possible to prevent stock prices from falling. The result has been ever shorter and more extreme boom/bust cycles, with higher and higher injections of fiat money producing less and less result. The U.S. and most of the world has built an unsustainable capital structure that is completely out of tune with the wishes of those who provide the financing–the savers. It is this mismatch of savings with investment that eventually will cause a collapse that no amount of fiat monetary injections can stop. Patrick Barron
Re: A Golden Solution for Europe’s Sovereign-Debt Crisis
The author, Stephen Fidler, is off the mark, but the significance of his article is that he advises using gold as a solution. The over-indebted countries do not need to find ways to continue to borrow. They need to stop borrowing…period. A nation that put its gold as collateral in a well-respected third party depository might be able to borrow more and at lower cost…but that tactic would only get that country further into debt…and it could mean losing its gold reserves entirely. This solves nothing long term. The over-indebted countries need to slash their budgets, slash their onerous regulations on business and labor, and somehow institute sound money, even if it means leaving the eurozone and instituting their own gold-backed currency. Now THAT would be a good use for all that gold. Patrick Barron
As impressive as are the visual graphics below of the U.S. government’s deficit, they do not convey the individual American’s responsibility for this debt.
For example, how much of the federal government’s ANNUAL deficit is each American citizen required to repay–with interest, of course–in the future? Here’s the shocking answer–$5,000! That is $1.5 trillion annual budget deficit divided by 300 million U.S. citizens. Of course, we know that half of the American citizenry pay NO TAXES, so the number is at least double for those actually paying. And this is added to the individual’s future tax burden EVERY YEAR!
Here’s another way to look at it. The total UNFUNDED LIABILITIES of the U.S. government is $114.5 trillion. That’s $381,666 debt burden PER U.S. CITIZEN! And that burden on the individual citizen is increasing by $5,000 EACH YEAR!
Now, does anyone really think that these liabilities can be paid off in dollars of current purchasing power? Of course not. Patrick Barron
It does help one understand the severity of our national debt problem.
One Hundred Dollars
$100 – Most counterfeited money denomination in the world. Keeps the world moving.
Ten Thousand dollars
$10,000 – Enough for a great vacation or to buy a used car. Approximately one year of work for the average human on earth.
One Million Dollars
$1,000,000 – Not as big a pile as you thought, huh? Still this is 92 years of work for the average human on earth.
One Hundred Million Dollars
$100,000,000 – Plenty to go around for everyone. Fits nicely on an ISO/ Military standard sized pallet.
One Billion Dollars
$1,000,000,000 – You will need some help when robbing the bank. Now we are getting serious!
One Trillion Dollars
$1,000,000,000,000
When the U.S. Government speaks about 1.7 trillion deficit – this is the volumes of cash the U.S. Government borrowed in 2010 to run itself.
Keep in mind it is double stacked pallets of $100 million dollars each, full of $100 dollar bills. You are going to need a lot of trucks to freight this around.
If you spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, you would have not spent $1 trillion by now… but ~$700 billion – some amount the banks got during bailout.
One Trillion Dollars
Comparison of $1,000,000,000,000 dollars to a standard-sized American Football field and European Football field.
Say hello to the Boeing 747-400 transcontinental airliner that’s hiding on the right. This was until recently the biggest passenger plane in the world.
15 Trillion Dollars
$15,000,000,000,000 – US National Debt (credit bill) has just topped the 15 trillion 2 months before Christmas 2011.
Statue of Liberty seems rather worried as United States national debt passes 20% of the entire world’s combined GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 2011 the National Debt will exceed 100% of GDP, and venture into the 100% + debt-to-GDP ratio that the European PIIGS have (bankrupting nations).
$114.5 Trillion Dollars
$114,500,000,000,000 – US unfunded liabilities
To the right you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs the WTC & Empire State Building – both at one point world’s tallest buildings. If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty.
The 114.5 Trillion dollar super-skyscraper is the amount of money the U.S. Government knows it does not have to fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions. It is the money USA knows it will not have to pay all it bills.
If you live in USA this is also your personal credit card bill; you are responsible along with everyone else to pay this back. The citizens of USA created the U.S. Government to serve them, this is what the U.S. Government has done while serving The People.
The unfunded liability is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in US Population.
Here are two good article about the real work yet to be done by the EU. These articles reflect the original purpose of the EU as a voluntary organization of sovereign states that would cooperate to reduce trade barriers in Europe. Trade barriers can take many forms as explained by Charlesmayne in the Economist and by David Willetts in the Telegraph. Charlemayne makes the excellent point that the euro project threatens to undo all the good that has been accomplished over several decades to allow the freer movement of goods, services, capital, and people among the members of the EU. That is a point that must be emphasized again and again. There is a huge difference, too, between uniform standards that will reduce trade barriers and costs, such as common railway signals described by Charlesmayne, and regulations that add nothing to freer trade and serve as government protection for inefficient industries, such as those described by Mr. Willett in the scientific area. Patrick Barron
In this interview Mr. Egon von Geyerz says something that is very insightful; i.e., that the demand for gold will increase DESPITE interventions to drive down its exchange value vis a vis fiat currencies. In fact, the more governments try to intervene to drive down the price of gold vis a vis any fiat currency, the more fiat money they produce to do so…resulting in even more pressure to INCREASE gold’s exchange value. There are many perceptive and knowledgeable people throughout the world who do not swallow the Keynesian Kool Aid that fiat currencies are superior to commodity currencies. We know that the opposite is true, for the reasons given by Mr. von Geyerz; i.e., that fiat money is POLITICAL money and will be plundered to extinction. There is no power on earth than can stand up to the political pressures to plunder fiat money–the public will demand it! Patrick Barron
By Michael J. McKay
“Why are you smiling?”
My friend asked me this as our van accelerated away on our departure from Bodrum, Turkey.
I was unable to answer him, frankly, because I had stopped noticing. I guess I had been smiling permanently since my arrival at the Property and Freedom Society conference six days earlier.
Last year, my dear friend and blogger-colleague, Andy Duncan, wrote an excellent article entitled “A Few Days Outside the Asylum”. This beautifully summarized how wonderful and special the annual PFS Conference becomes to its attendees. Andy is a far better writer than I am and everyone would be served to read (or re-read) his wonderful article, which you can find here.
Why would anyone want to travel to Turkey and endure such cost and trouble, just to hear a few days of lectures that will be posted for free viewing on the Internet, anyway?
Ah, but that is only one of the pearls of distributed wisdom that one receives in Bodrum.
In my sphere of interest, it is truly awesome to be able in the same day to hear lectures by up to four of the foremost geo-political or monetary scholars of our time. And for those of you who have yet to do so, I highly recommend you follow these links to great books by Professor Guido Hulsmann, Professor Joe Salerno and important articles by Thorsten Polleit, plus an expert on banking, Doug French. Read the works by these four gentlemen and listen to their interviews at RadioFreeMarket.com (here, here, here and here). I believe you will be truly enlightened.
But in Bodrum, it gets even better.
At the PFS conference, you can walk up to these luminaries and ask them a question either during a session, over a coffee, through a meal, or maybe even while on a bus ride.
It is kind of like being able to walk through an art museum and then have drinks with the best artists on display.
But it’s more than the presenters who are the treasures. You might be able to chat with Ms. Floy Lilley, the Executive Producer for Lew Rockwell’s podcasts and a scholar in her own right.
Or you might find yourself chatting with Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor of Laissez Faire Books, and getting insights you never even imagined.
Or, you might find yourself watching dancers and musicians with the really big dog at the conference, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the works of whom EVERYONE should read as a gift to those they most deeply care for.
Dr. Hoppe and his lovely and gifted wife Gulcin, host this event and go to enormous lengths to make it the most extraordinary experience, where very serious people get together, to learn, share and just have fun. They make PFS attendance a membership that everyone should be clamoring to obtain.
Yet very few do, or even can.
You see, PFS is an unabashed celebration of exclusivity. You must be invited to attend and you quickly notice that you are surrounded by self-empowered people. All around you are those who celebrate – and deeply value – a practical world of peaceful cooperation and mutual benefaction.
This crowd of a mere 100 souls or so, is unashamed to want less or even zero government, to want an environment where personal responsibility – in all of its forms – is both valued and displayed.
Dr. Anthony Daniel’s hilarious, yet sobering, lecture on “Choices without Consequences” bitingly hit home. It outlined the severe social cost of the widespread syndrome of Free Lunches demanded by those legions of leeches and parasites who would succor on the blood of the people who produce and increase value in the world.
Ahh, but in the air of Bodrum, even that sobering reminder is sloughed off as easily as remembering last year’s bad snow storm, while sitting by a pool under a palm tree.
There were those who – since the previous year we had been together – demonstrated their personal responsibility in very big and obvious ways, having changed professions, started companies, and even renounced citizenships. Others had got a new grip on their personal lives, dropped bad diets, lost weight, and looked good.
This may sound trivial, but it’s also evident in what you fail to see and hear at PFS; you never see people sitting around and complaining about their life.
Instead, you look around and see what a world of self-empowered people would look like.
It’s beyond philosophical, it’s practical. Real life has real consequences. Choices matter.
This personal responsibility exhibited by so many in Bodrum extends outwards from their personal lives. Many – maybe even most – of the PFS attendees have decided to spend their time and treasure in the promotion of Peace, Prosperity and Freedom in various ways.
There are now small think-tanks and action-tanks in Sweden, Estonia, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia, all of them focused on Austrian Economics. There is even a 12-person Mises.org-friendly think-tank in Lithuania that is very active and making big progress in that country.
From Vienna, Zurich, Munich and London there are individuals and small groups who blog, teach Austrian Economics, promote sound money policies and – in a dozen different ways – stand up for freedom, sanity, and common sense.
The real value of PFS is how these souls demonstrate by example what a more peaceful, prosperous, and more personally empowered community would actually look like.
It’s little wonder why people go to great lengths to petition for PFS membership.
And it’s little wonder at all why I was on that van ride, as I still am today, grinning from ear to fortunate ear.
Michael J. McKay is the founder of www.RadioFreeMarket.com and the author of Secrets About Money That Put You At Risk. You can reach him by email here.
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... needs to be read by as many Members of Congress as possible.
