Get Rich Education 521: Terrible Predictions, "End the Fed" and Capitalism with Mises Institute President Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo
President of the Mises Institute and author of “How Capitalism Saved America”, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo joins us to uncover the current state of capitalism and if it still exists in America.
Earlier in the episode, Keith discusses the inaccuracy of economic predictions, citing examples like the 2023 recession that never happened, the negative impact of misinformed predictions on investment decisions and business growth.
Persistent housing price crash predictions have been consistently wrong despite global pandemics and higher mortgage rates.
Dr. DiLorenzo advocates for #EndTheFed to reduce inflation and restore free market principles.
Learn how voluntary exchange between buyer and seller through market prices communicates information and influences production.
Resources:
Learn more about Austrian economics and Ludwig von Mises through visiting mises.org
Show Notes:
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Complete episode transcript:
Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai
Keith Weinhold 00:00
Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, reviewing some terrible economic predictions and why it matters to you. Then the President of the Mises Institute joins us. Does capitalism still exist in the US and what would happen if we ended the Fed, today on get rich education.
00:24
Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, who delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show. Guess who? Top Selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit getricheducation.com
Corey Coates 01:09
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 01:25
welcome to GRE from Syracuse, Sicily to Syracuse, New York, and across 188 nations worldwide, you're listening to one of the longest running and most listened to shows on real estate investing. This is Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, now a lot of media companies and pundits and influencers like to make predictions. Listeners like learning about predictions and by engaging just a little of that each of the past few years on one of the last episodes of the year. Here, I forecast the national home price appreciation rate for the following year, many media outlets, pundits and influencers have made terrible, just absolutely terrible, predictions about interest rates and other financial forecasts. Last year, a majority of Pro prognosticators firmly forecast six or eight Fed rate cuts this year, for example, well, we're going to have far fewer, and that's because high inflation kept hanging around. Then there's the 2023 recession that never happened, yet both Bloomberg and the economist actually published some rather ignominious headlines, as it turned out, they published these in the fall of 2022 Bloomberg, big headline was forecast for us, recession within year hits 100% in blow to Biden, well, That was false. That didn't come true. I mean, 100% that doesn't leave you any room for an out. And then also published in the fall of 2022 The Economist ran this headline why a global recession is inevitable in 2023 All right, well, they both believed in a recession, and they believed in it so deeply that it got fossilized. Well, an economic archeologist like me dug it up.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 03:31
We are going to die
Keith Weinhold 03:35
well, but I didn't risk my life like Indiana Jones did there. This archeology, it only involves some Google searches. Well, here's the thing. What's remarkable about America staving off a mammoth recession and leaving all the other g7 nations in the economic dust is the fact that merely predicting a recession often makes it come true. Just predicting one often turns a recession into a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, recession forecast headlines alone, they can spook employers from making new hires and slow down manufacturing, and it can also disillusion real estate investors from expanding their portfolios. Well, the US economy grew anyway, besides the farcical prognostications about myriad interest rate cuts in a quote, unquote definite 2023 recession that never happened. You know, there's also a third forecast that so many got wrong. And you probably know what I'm gonna say. I've brought it up before, because this hits our world, those erstwhile and well still ever present housing price crash predictions. I mean this facet of the gloom boom really ramped up from 2020 One until today, even a global pandemic, new wars and a triplicate mortgage rates couldn't stop the housing price surge and the rent surge. A lot of doomsdayers just couldn't see, or they didn't even want to see that a housing shortage would keep prices afloat. They didn't want to see it because they get more clicks when they talk about the gloom government stimulus programs also buoyed prices, and deep homeowner equity cushions will still keep prices afloat. Ever since 2021 here on the show, I've used that rationale and more to explain that home prices would keep appreciating, but that the rate of appreciation would slow down, and it has slowed down since 2021 see YouTubers tick tockers. They notoriously use woe begone housing crash headlines, because that gets more clicks and then some of the rationale behind this. The reasoning is just dreadful, like, what goes up must come down, all right? Well, this is like, why does it matter? Who cares about wrong predictions anyway? What's the point? Well, people become misinformed. People waste their time on these things and see no one loses money on dismal economic predictions. But the damage is done, because when investors don't act well, then they didn't get the gain that they should have had. Businesses didn't get the gain that they should have had when they could have made new investment and hired new employees sooner. And of course, a recession is going to happen sometime. They occur, on average, every five to six years. It is just a normal part of the business cycle will collectively these three faulty economic predictions, rate cuts, a recession and a housing price crash. I think if you bundle them all up combined, it could be as bad as one doomsday prediction about worldwide starvation or the Mayan apocalypse. Remember that the wide to K bug, the acid rain, even that the internet is just a fad that ran a buck 30 years ago. World War Three is eminent, robots overtaking humans, or how about running out of crude oil. I mean, we're definitely all supposed to have jet packs in flying cars by now, right? But yet, did anyone have the clairvoyance to predict the stock market crash of 1929 or September 11 terrorist attacks, or Trump's surprise, 2016 presidency or Bitcoin hitting 70k A while back, or the coronavirus. So really, overall, the bottom line here with predictions is that no one knows the future. Control what you can maintain equanimity, add good properties, gradually raise rent, reduce expenses, create leverage and expect inflation truly the best way to predict the future is to create it in just that way. Well is the USA capitalistic nation today. That's what we'll discuss later with this week's guest. When Chuck Todd hosted the show Meet the Press, he interviewed AOC about this. Yes, I'm talking about us. House Rep from New York, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, what she say? You
08:34
have said you are democratic socialist. Can you be a Democratic socialist and a capitalist? Well, I think it depends on your interpretation. So there are some Democratic socialists that would say, Absolutely not. There are other people that are democratic socialists that would say, I think it's possible. What are you? I think it's possible. I think you say to yourself, I'm a capitalist, but I don't say that. You know, if anything, I would say, I'm I believe in a democratic economy, but.
Keith Weinhold 09:03
okay, well, I'm not sure if that clears it up at all. And I've listened to more of that clip, and it just makes things more confusing. But I think that most people have trouble drawing a line between capitalism and neighboring economic systems. Where exactly do you draw that line? I don't know exactly where to draw it. When I think of capitalism, I think of things though, like removal of interventionist central planning and allowing the free market to run with few guardrails. And then there's an issue like labor unionization. I don't really know about something like that. This is a real estate show. I'm still forming an opinion on a topic like that. In you know, some of this gets political, and that's beyond the scope of get rich education. The Fed was created in 1913 that central planning, its central banking from 1987 to. 2006 Alan Greenspan reigned as Fed chair. Those were his years, and he became even more interventionist. And then his successor, Ben Bernanke, maybe even more so with quantitative easing and such. Let's talk about, should they end the Fed and capitalism with this week's expert guest. You very well may have heard of the late, famed Austrian American economist Ludwig von Mises today, the Mises Institute carries on his legacy, and this week's guest is none other than the President of the Mises Institute. He's also the number one best selling author of how capitalism saved America and his newer book with a title that I love, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics. Hey, it's great to have you here. It is. Dr Thomas DiLorenzo.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 11:00
pleased to be with you. Thanks for having me.Th
Keith Weinhold 11:02
Well, Dr DiLorenzo, for those that don't know, just tell us a bit in an overview about Austrian economics and what Ludwig von Mises stood for.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 11:02
Well, Ludwig von Mises was the preeminent critic of socialism and fascism in Europe, and in his day, he fled the Nazis literally hours before the Gestapo broke into his apartment in Geneva, because he was the preeminent critic of fascism and socialism, and he was also Jewish, and so he had to get out of town. And he miraculously ended up after wandering through Europe with his wife in New York City, and he taught at New York University for many years, until he died in 1973 and but the Austrian School of Economics is a school of thought. It has nothing to do with, necessarily, with the Government of Austria, the country of Austria, just this the founder of a man named Carl Menger happened to be from Austria, but probably the most famous or well known among Americans would be Friedrich Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970s he was a student of Ludwig von Mises and critics of interventionism, critics of socialism. We teach about free markets, of how markets actually work and how governments don't work. And that's in a nutshell, that's what it's about. And you could check out our website, mises.org, M, I, S, E, S.org, you can get a great economic education. We have a lot of free books to download. Some of them are downloaded 30 or 40,000 times a month. Still, it's even Mises old books like human action, first published in the 1960s and so you can get a great education just by reading our website.
Keith Weinhold 12:42
Well, congratulations, that's proof that you're doing an excellent job of carrying on the Mises legacy into the present day, a lot of which is championing capitalism. Do we have capitalism in the United States today?
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 12:59
I was an economics professor from 40 years before I got this job as President of the Mises Institute. And I used to say we had islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism at the beginning of my career. But now I'd say it's the opposite, that we have islands of capitalism in a sea of socialism. And socialism, this data is not defined anymore as government ownership. That was, you know, about 100 years ago, the socialism. It's basically government control of industry and in addition to government ownership. So the instruments of the welfare state, the income tax and the regulatory state, is our version of socialism, or central planning, if you will. And it's the Federal Reserve the Fed, which is a government agency that orchestrates the whole thing, really, it's a big, massive central planning industry that controls, regulates basically every aspect of any kind of financial transaction imaginable. They list in their publications over 100 different functions of the Federal Reserve. It's not just monetary policy. It's a big regulatory behemoth, and so that's that's what the Fed is. That's what I think we have today. A friend of mine, Robert Higgs, a well known economic historian, says our system is what he calls participatory fascism. And fascism was a system where private enterprise was permitted, but it was so heavily regulated and regimented by the government that industry had to do what government wanted to do, not what its customers wanted it to do, so much, and a large part of our economic system is just like that, and we get to vote still, so that's where the participatory and comes in, and the pin of Robert Hinz.
Keith Weinhold 14:41
yeah, maybe at best, I can think of today's system as capitalism with guardrails on but the guardrails keep getting taller. And I think of guardrails as being, for example, regulatory agencies like the Fed in FINRA. In the FDA.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 15:01
It is the beginning of my career. You know, I studied economics and a PhD in economics, and there was a big literature on what's called regulatory capture. And it was sort of a big secret among US economic academics. There was all this research going on and how the big regulatory agencies created by the federal government in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, were captured by the industries that they were supposed to be regulating. Right? The theory was they would regulate these industries in the public's best interests. But what has happened from the very beginning is they were captured by the industries, and they benefit the industry at the expense of the public. But today, that's caught on thanks to people like Robert Kennedy Jr, frankly, has been a very popular author. He sold a gazillion copies of his book on Anthony Fauci, and in it, he explains in tremendous detail how the Food and Drug Administration was long ago captured by the pharmaceutical companies. And he's not the only one. I think that that is being more and more recognized by people outside of academic economics, like me, and that's a good thing, and that's sort of the worst example of crony capitalism. It's not real capitalism, but crony capitalism making money through government connections, rather than producing better products, cheaper products and so forth.
Keith Weinhold 16:21
I watched RFK Jr speak in person recently, and I was actually disappointed when he effectively dropped out of the upcoming presidential race. And I do want to talk more with you about the Fed shortly, but with all these regulatory agencies and how I liken them to guard rails. You know, I sort of think of it as a watchdog system that's failing. You mentioned the FDA. I know RFK Jr brought them up an awful lot, the Food and Drug Administration that are supposed to help regulate what we put inside our own bodies in our diet. But these systems are failing. We have regulatory agencies in industry, industry in regulatory agencies. I mean, look at the obesity rate. Look at all the ultra processed food that's allowed. Look at all the seed oils that are allowed in food that people actually think are healthy for them. So this system of capitalism with guardrails is failing almost everywhere you look.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 16:22
I wouldn't call it capitalism. I wouldn't use the word capitalism at all, other than crony capitalism, people can relate to that. You know, a lot of these regulatory agencies were lobbied for in the first place by industry. That while the very first one was the Interstate Commerce Commission, it was in the 1880s it was meant to regulate the railroad companies. The first president was the president of a Railroad Corporation, the head of the Interstate Commerce Commission. So talk about the fox guarding the hen house. That was from the very beginning. And so in a sense, this word capture theory of regulation, which Kennedy has used, they weren't really captured. They always were created by the government. The same is true of all the so called Public Utilities. It was the corporations, the electric power companies, the water supply companies, that lobbied for governments to give them a monopoly, a legal monopoly, in electricity, water supply and all these things that were called natural monopolies, but there was nothing natural about them. There was vigorous competition in the early 20th century in telephone, electricity, water supply, and that was all set aside by government regulation, creating monopolies. For example, in electric power, there's an economist named Walter primo who wrote a book some years ago showing that always have been several dozen cities in America that never went this way, that always allowed direct competition between electric power companies. And what do you know, better service and lower prices. As a result, they did dozens of statistical studies to demonstrate this in his book.
Keith Weinhold 18:58
Okay, well, that's a great case study. Why don't we talk about what things would look like if we took down one of these agencies? We're a real estate investing in finance show. Sometimes it's a popular meme or hashtag to say, end the Fed. What would it look like if we ended the Fed?
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 19:18
Well, the Fed was created in 1913 in the same era, with all these other regulatory captured agencies were created, right? And it was created basically to cartelize and create a cartel for the banking industry to make it almost impossible to go bankrupt. They've been bailing out foolish bankers for 111 years. And of course, the biggest example was that as the crash of 08 after they they handed Goldman Sachs and other big investment banks billions of dollars. That was a direct assault on capitalism itself, because capitalism, as you know, is a profit and loss system. It's not a I keep the profits. You pay for my losses system. You're the taxpayer. But that's what happened with that. So the Fed would. Fall into that the Fed is actually the fourth central bank in America. We had three other ones. First one was called Bank of North America. Its currency was so unreliable, nobody trusted it went out of business in a year and a half. And then we created something called the Bank of the United States in 1791 same thing. It created boom and bust cycles, high unemployment, price inflation, corrupted politics. It was defunded after 20 years, and then it was brought back to fund the debt from the war of 1812 and so we had a Second Bank of the United States. It did the same thing, boom and bust cycles, price inflation, corrupted politics. Benefited special interest, but not the general interest, and President Andrew Jackson defunded it, and so we went without a central bank from roughly 1840 until 1913 so we've had experience of that. And what we had been was competing currencies, and that would be sort of a stepping stone. If we got rid of the fed, we wouldn't have to abolish the Fed altogether. We could amend the charter to the Fed to say you're no longer permitted to buy bonds. Can't buy government bonds anymore. That's how they inflate the money supply, right? By buying bonds. That's totally unnecessary. And we could just just that would be a great step forward, and we would sort of whittle away our $80 trillion debt, if you count again upon count the unfunded liabilities of the federal government,
Keith Weinhold 21:26
if we did end the Fed, what would the price of money? Which are interest rates really look like? Would a new market rate be sent by individuals and companies on the free market like Bank of America, with a customer or borrower settling on an interest rate that they both agree to.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 21:44
You know, the Fed uses sort of Soviet style economics, price control. The economists and are all getting all over Kamala Harris for recommendations for price controls on rent and other things. Well, the Fed price control. They control the price of money. That's what they do. And so there's a big, kind of a comical thing that here you have all these economists, if they were to teach economics in the week one, they would teach about the bad effects of price controls, and then they get a job at the Fed, and they spend their whole career enforcing price controls on money, and the interest rate would be determined by supply and demand for credit and inflationary expectations. That's what the market does. And you wouldn't have these bureaucrats at the Fed tinkering around with interest rates, creating tremendous arbitrage opportunities for Wall Street investors. With all the movements and interest rates, you'd have much more stable interest rates, and and you wouldn't have this ridiculous system where the Fed says we need to always have forever at least 2% inflation. And of course, they never meet that, and they lie about it. I don't believe for one minute that the price inflation right now is 3% or under 3% that's ridiculous, right? And so things should be getting cheaper. Everything should be getting cheaper because of all the technology we have. My first PC I bought in the early 80s for $4,000 and it was a piece of prehistoric junk compared to my cell phone today, that almost for free. Almost everything should be like that agriculture, but the reason it isn't is the Fed keeps pumping so much money in circulation, that it pumps up the demand for goods and services, and that's what creates price inflation. And by its own admission, that's what it does, even though it's charter, it's original charter said they're supposed to fight inflation. All of a sudden, about 10 years ago or so, they announced, south of blue, we always have to have at least 2% inflation. Congress had nothing to do with that. President had nothing to do with that, and the people of America had nothing to do with that. It was dictators like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke that just make these announcements. And where does that come from when we live under the dictatorship of the Fed? And of course, the people who are hurt the most by the Fed are elderly people are living on relatively fixed incomes and are forced to become Wall Street speculators they want to make any more money other than their fixed income, where, you know, during the days of Greenspan, when they're pursuing zero interest rates, maybe the mortgage industry like that, but the people on retirement income were starving as a result of that. So it's been sort of an economic war on the retired population.
Keith Weinhold 24:24
Things should get faster and cheaper to produce, like you said. However, there's definitely one thing that's not getting faster to produce, that's housing build times. Housing build times have actually gone up, which is sort of another discussion unto itself. But we talk about the Fed and then setting prices. People wouldn't stand for setting the price or having price controls on oil or lumber or bananas, but yet we set the price of money itself. People have just become accustomed to that. Yet it's that money itself that we use to buy oil and lumber and bananas the fed with that dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment. If we did abolish the Fed, what would happen to the rate of inflation?
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 25:12
Well, we would have less inflation. It's supposed to what we replace it with. There's some system would be a replacement, but we wouldn't have the boom and bust cycles that we have now. There's been research in the past 100 years or so of the Fed, and what the academic researchers have concluded is that the Fed has made the economy in general more unstable than it was before we had the Fed and price inflation. That's a joke. The dollar is worth maybe three cents of what it was in the year 1913 right when the Fed was created. So it has failed on all accounts. And so if we got rid of it, we would reverse that. The idea would be to start out with a competing money system. And I'll tell you a quick story is, you know the word Dixie from the south, you know land of Dixie that was named after a currency by a New Orleans bank called the Dix D, I x 10 in French, and it was 100% gold reserve. It was backed by something real and valuable, and it was so popular as even used in Minnesota. But that's why the whole south, the states in the South, were using this currency, because it was so reliable. But during the Civil War, the national currency acts imposed taxes on the competing currencies and taxed them out of business and established the greenback dollar, as it was called, as the Monopoly money of the country. We didn't get a central bank during the Civil War, but we got that. And so that's the kind of system that we would have. Friedrich Hayek wrote a whole book about this, about competing currencies, called the denationalization of money. He poses that as a good stepping stone to a freer market in money. And like you said, Money is the most important thing. Is most more important than bananas or shoes or any of these other things that we might have price controls on.
Keith Weinhold 27:01
All right, so we're talking about the case for ending the Fed. What is the counter argument? I mean, other than the government wanting control, is there a valid, or any academic counter argument for keeping the Fed in place?
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 27:16
The Fed has an army. I call it the Fed's Praetorian Guard of academics. There was a research article published by an economist named Larry White at George Mason University several years ago, and he found that 75% of all the articles in the academic journals regarding money, monetary policy and so forth, are by people who are basically paid by the Fed, one way or the other. Either they're fed economists, or they've been invited to a conference by the Fed, or they're an intern some relationship with the Fed. The late Milton Friedman once said, If you want a career as a monetary economist, it's not a good idea to criticize the biggest employer in your field. So there's a lot of nonsense about that. And so yes, you'll have all sorts of rationales, but it basically comes down to this, that we think we can do central planning better than the Russians did under communism, because the Fed is basically an economic central planning agency, and there's no reason to believe Americans are better at it than the Russians or anybody else. And it basically comes down to that, you know, studying the past 111 years that's showing Well, yeah, they've been trying that for 111 years. They've made the economy more unstable, and they have failed miserably to control inflation. And why should we give them another chance? Why should we continue along this road? We shouldn't So, yeah, there'll be all kind of excuses the late Murray Rothbard, who was one of the founders of the Mises, who once answered this question by saying, It's as though people said, Well, say the government always made shoes. 100 years ago they took over the shoe industry. People would be saying, who will make shoes if the government doesn't make shoes? The government has always made shoes, right? But the government has not always monopolized the money supply. It's only like I said, we abolished three Feds in our history. In American history, they weren't called the Fed, but they were central banks. And the Fed is called a central bank, and we've done that three times. We've abolished more central banks than we have kept in American history.
Keith Weinhold 29:17
We're talking with Dr Thomas D Lorenzo. He is the president of the Mises Institute. About, is there really any capitalism left more when we come back, this is Get Rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine, at Ridge lending group and MLS 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation, because they specialize in income properties, they help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Caeli Ridge personally. Start now while it's on your mind at RidgeLendingGroup.com, that's Ridgelendinggroup.com. Your bank is getting rich off of you. The national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. If your money isn't making 4% you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation. Let the liquidity fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk, your cash generates up to an 8% return with compound interest year in and year out. Instead of earning less than 1% sitting in your bank account, the minimum investment is just 25k you keep getting paid until you decide you want your money back. Their decade plus track record proves they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know, because I'm an investor too. Earn 8% hundreds of others are text family to 66866, learn more about freedom. Family investments, liquidity fund on your journey to financial freedom through passive income. Text, family to 66866.
Kristen Tate 31:11
This is author Kristen Tate. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold, and Don't quit Your Daydream.
Keith Weinhold 31:27
welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with Dr Thomas DiLorenzo. He is the president of the Mises Institute. You can learn more about them @mises.org and Dr DiLorenzo. Frederick Hayek, an economist that you mentioned very well known and a student of Ludwig von Mises, he believed that prices are a communication mechanism between a buyer and a seller. Say, for example, there's a new style of single family rental home that everyone wants to rent. So therefore the rent price goes up when other builders see that the rent price goes up, that brings in more builder competition, and with more competition, that brings rent prices down, and then the world is filled with abundant housing, rather than a scarcity of housing. So that's how I think of a free market system within capitalism as working, as defined through Hayek.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 32:22
You know, the consumer is king. Von Mises once wrote about the same point where he said that people mistakenly believe that it's the bankers and the CEOs and the businesses that control what gets produced and so forth, but it's really the consumer. You build a housing development then people don't want those houses. You'll find out real fast who's in charge. It's not the mortgage brokers. It's not the bankers. It's not you, it's the consumer. That's the free market system, and if you do without it, and not using the free market system, whether it's for money or anything else, is kind of like trying to find your way around a strange city with no street signs, and the prices are the street signs that tell us what to do, exactly like you said, if there's strong demand for a certain type of housing, that'll drive the price up, and that'll tell the home builders, we can make money building more of these. And they will do that. Nobody tells them. The Chairman of the Fed doesn't have to tell them that the President doesn't have to tell them that Congress doesn't have to issue a declaration telling them to do that. That was the Soviet Union where they tried that. And that's the great thing about the market, is that the consumer can tell the richest man in the world like Elon Musk, go play in the traffic. Elon Musk, if they don't like his cars or whatever he's producing, even though he's the richest man in the world. And he understands that he's a pretty successful businessman, I would say, and so so he understands that the consumer is his boss.
Keith Weinhold 33:53
Well, what else do we need to know? You have published a lot of celebrated books, from how capitalism saved America to the politically incorrect guide to economics. What else might a real estate investor or an economic enthusiast need to know today? Oh,
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 34:10
well, I think everybody needs to be their own economist. You can listen to the talking heads on TV and on podcasts and all that, but educate yourself and become your own economist. Because a lot of the people on TV, as you might see on the news, they have an ax to grind, or they have a sort of a hidden financial interest beyond what they're saying, Be your own economist. And that's why I'm selling my website, which is everything on it, it's for free, mises.org, and there are quite a few others too. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to get a degree. You can get a good economic education, for example, on money. We're in the middle of giving away 100,000 copies of a book called What has government done to our money. I'm Murray rothbar. You go to our website, scroll down to the bottom, and you can fill out a form online, and we'll send you free books and. You can educate yourself that way. And so just in general, I think that's what people need to do. I taught MBA students for many years who are people in their 30s or maybe even early 40s, who didn't have economics degrees, but they were really into it, and for the first time in their careers, they decided maybe I should understand how the economic world that I live in and work in every day operates rather than going through your life and your career without you. Might know all about real estate sales, but it's also useful to know about the economy in general and how things work.
Keith Weinhold 35:35
And when one becomes their own economic student and they take that on, I think it's important for them, like you touched on to not just consume the economic news that's on CNBC or other major media, because that doesn't really tell you how to create wealth. It might inform you, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to take action. For example, on this show an educational channel, you might learn about a story about rising inflation like we had starting three or four years ago. And here we talk about how, okay, if inflation is going to be a long term economic force, you may or may not like what the Fed is doing, but rather than save money, borrow money, outsource that debt service to the tenant on a cash flowing asset like a single family home or an apartment building. And that inflation that you're learning about on CNBC will actually benefit you and debase your debt with prudent leverage on a property, for example, so not just consuming the news, but learning and educating yourself and acting.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 36:34
Oh, sure, well It just so happens that last night, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a real estate professional. They're all talking about, Oh, are we going to have a slight drop in interest rates? And I reminded them that there will be a part of the market if they see it, if we do have a slight drop in interest rates, we'll look at that and say, well, maybe this is a new trend. And so I'll sit back and I'll wait. I'm not going to buy now, because I think the interest rates are going to go down even further in the next six months there were, there would be some segment of the market that thinks that way. And so that's just one little thing. Another thing I would mention is that one of the basic tenets of free market economics is that voluntary trade is mutually beneficial. People buy and sell from each other, because both sides benefit. And that's very important for any business person to keep in mind as you structure business deals, because you know about business deal that is successful is basically, I will give you what you want, and you give me what I want, and we're both happy. And that's that's one of the main tenets of how the market works. Voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial. So think about how to make it mutually beneficial, and you'll succeed in making a deal.
Keith Weinhold 37:45
Well, it's been an excellent discussion on Is there any capitalism left, and how would it look like if we turned the course and created more capitalism here in the United States? It's been great having you on the show.
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo 37:58
Thank you.
Keith Weinhold 38:05
Yeah , again, Learn more @mises.org or look up books by Dr Thomas DiLorenzo. His viewpoint is that there are now merely islands of capitalism in a sea of socialism where those conditions were inverted last century. We've got to end the complex between the government and corporations that these watchdogs are basically powerless when the fox is guarding the henhouse. Dr dilorezzo says we could change the Fed charter so that they couldn't buy bonds, which should reduce inflation. So he does offer a way forward there, a solution. In capitalism, he consumer is king. This is a good thing. You yourself are empowered because you get to vote with your dollars. So therefore what you buy more of society will see and make more of but a prosperous, progressive economy that should be able to produce goods and services that are constantly cheaper because they get more and more efficient to make with innovation, but centrally planned inflation makes them more expensive, at least in dollar denominated terms. So progress should make things cheaper? Well, then everything should take fewer dollars to buy, homes, oil, bananas, grapes, but it doesn't, and it won't anytime soon, like I mentioned in the interview, there single family build times are taking even longer. That's not more efficient, and they're sure not getting cheaper. In fact, the National Association of Home Builders tells us that from permit to completion in 2015 it took 7.2 months to build a single family home. By 2019 it was up to 8.1 months and then. Last year, the time required to build a single family home from permit to completion was 10.1 months. That's not the side of an efficient economy. So basically, therefore, in the last eight, nine years, the time to build a home has gone from 7.2 months up to 10.1 months. That is a drastic increase in a short period of time. Just amazing. And we now have data after covid as well, broken down by region. The longest build time, by the way, is in New England, where it is 13.9 months to build a home from permit to completion. Gosh, such inefficiency. But despite all that stuff that you might find discouraging like that, I want to go out on a good news note here some encouraging sentiment for you, if you champion free markets, then invest in us rental property down the road, there is no centrally controlled ceiling on what you can sell your property for. Most places don't have rent control. In fact, there's been no federal rent control on private property since World War Two. And somewhat ironically, you benefit. You actually benefit from government backed loans at these low fixed rates, and now they're moderate fixed rates. You often get these through Fannie Freddie or the FHA. See you benefit from that particular government backing as a savvy borrower for rental property. And on top of this, you use the GRE inflation triple crown to flip over that not so capitalistic inflationary force. You flip it upside down and use it to your benefit, profiting fantastically from inflation. So you know how to take the situation you're given and use it to your advantage rather than your detriment. Big thanks to Dr Thomas DiLorenzo today, longtime econ professor and current Mises Institute president, more ways to build Real Estate Wealth coming up here for you on the show in future weeks, as always, with the dash of economics and wealth mindset. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, Don't Quit Your Daydream.
42:28
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Keith Weinhold 42:56
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