You know, you never know what sorts of criteria people will use to evaluate different activities or outcomes. That's part of Austrian-style subjectivism, right? But this gentleman in the front was just telling me that he said, of all the lectures he heard yesterday, he liked mine the best because it had the shortest title, just a one-word title. And he said, and look what you've got today. I mean, I don't have enough room on the page to write this title down. So now I'm giving the worst lecture that he's heard today. He reminded me of a time I was reviewing my teaching evaluations. You know, at the end of every semester at my university, like most, we hand out evaluation forms for the students. They get to describe their experiences in the class and rate their professor. And one student said of me, he said, of all the professors I've ever had, he is by far the loudest. And I thought, well, you know, there are worse things that a student could have said. Some of the old-timers may remember the movie Spinal Tap, which was about England's loudest band. So I'm Mises Yu's loudest professor. So this is the last slot of the day in the middle of the week.  So I'm going to try to be loud and hold your attention this afternoon. One of the reasons that I enjoy this particular topic, applications of Austrian economics to business and management, is because there's a little bit of a misconception among some people that Austrian economics is not a very practical subject because Austrian economists emphasize theory and abstract reasoning. And because they tend to be somewhat skeptical of some mainstream empirical research and social science, therefore, it's sometimes assumed, well, Austrians are only interested in abstract theory, and their work doesn't have much to do with day-to-day practical subjects in the economy or whatever. I certainly want to challenge that view. In my opinion, Austrian economics is an extremely practical subject, especially in regards to the business world, commercial activity, entrepreneurship, management, and so forth. And just as an aside, I mean, I've given versions of these talks on these and related subjects to many practitioner groups over the years, to groups of entrepreneurs and business executives, managers, financiers, and so forth, and they usually agree with my assessment. They're typically impressed with how useful Austrian insights can be to their work. And those who did undergraduate studies or even took an MBA where they studied a lot of standard economics often say, well, this is really different from the economics I learned at the university, which was not at all useful to actual business decision-making, what the Austrians are saying really is helpful to me. And so I hope to convince you by the end of this next 45 minutes that Austrian economics is practical and to give you some examples, some applications to talk about some specific areas where Austrian economics is very useful. Why would I claim that Austrian economics is a practical subject? And on what basis could I make such a claim? Well, as we've seen in the last three days, Austrians employ what some of us have called a causal realistic approach to price formation. So in contrast to neoclassical microeconomic models and macroeconomic models, which emphasize simultaneous determination of different magnitudes using equilibrium modeling, Austrians following Menger, emphasize that all economic phenomena, including or especially the prices that emerge in markets, are the result of deliberate, purposeful human action. They're the result of people's beliefs, their expectations, their actions, and the results of those actions. That's the causal aspect. The realistic aspect is that Austrians are interested in explaining actual prices. If you go around the corner to the little convenience store and you pay a buck 25 for one of these, you give up $1.25, you get one of these in return. We're interested in explaining in terms of marginal utility, in terms of the relative scarcities of different stocks of goods that are available for sale in Auburn, Alabama on this very day, why the price is $1.25 and not $1.50 or 75 cents. We are not concerned with constructing abstract models of hypothetical prices that could exist under certain conditions, like the perfectly competitive price, the pure monopoly price, and a standard sort of I.O. model, the long run price. We're not interested in those. We're interested in real prices, real firms, real profits and losses. We don't construct a model of the representative firm and then try to generalize that into some explanation of the market. No, we're interested in cause and effect. We want to offer causal explanations for real economic phenomena. You know, other characteristics of Austrian approaches that practical people, business people, entrepreneurs, financiers, and so on, find very useful include the Austrian's emphasis on firm and resource heterogeneity, right? Real firms are not identical because firms are established by, operated by, coordinated by, changed by real human actors with subjective beliefs and preferences, acting in a world of uncertainty, making errors sometimes, revising their beliefs and actions, et cetera. Resources are not identical. There's no such thing.  I mean, we can generalize. It's not only that we say, well, capital goods are heterogeneous and have multiple specificities and can be employed in alternative uses with varying degrees of productivity and so forth, rather than K. But we do the same thing for labor. We do the same thing for entrepreneurship. We do the same thing for land, for any productive resource, right? Resources have heterogeneous characteristics and the value of economic resources, the place of particular resources in the structure of production is determined subjectively through interpretation by real human actors, entrepreneurs and other market participants. We talked a little bit yesterday about the marginal productivity theory. I'll mention some more about that today. You know, what is a business firm? Well, a firm consists of a bundle of heterogeneous, valuable, productive resources and how those resources are combined, how the resource value is interpreted by entrepreneurs and so forth. That's the focus of the Austrian theory of the firm. Those of you who have taken an undergraduate micro course at a mainstream university have seen the theory of the firm, you know, presented as, you know, the average cost curve and the marginal cost curve and marginal revenue curve and, you know, finding some equilibrium value. Okay, that is not a useful theory of the firm to anybody, as we'll see a little bit later.  They have to form judgments about potential future results as we discussed yesterday. Resources have to be owned, right. Ownership in this context refers to, you know, sort of residual control or the ultimate responsibility for deciding how resources will be used in situations that are not, you know, obvious or not previously specified in some kind of contract. Ownership is almost completely absent from neoclassical economic theories of firms and markets and entrepreneurs, right. But anybody operating the real world knows that ownership brings with it responsibility, certain responsibilities that non-owners do not possess. You know, Austrians seek to integrate their treatment of financial markets into their treatment of the general, you know, sort of the general economic system, right. The finance is not a separate discipline that has nothing to do with the real economy. No, financial markets are where entrepreneurs, financiers, financial market entrepreneurs are exercising judgment about the value of particular investments in entrepreneurs and firms and so forth. And that's critical to the operation of a market system. So, you know, this is just to give you the flavor of some of the things that Austrians are interested in, things that Austrians think are important, things that Austrians talk about that are extremely useful and relevant to practical people. And I'll just mention, walk you through some examples in the time that we have remaining. Let's speak for just a moment about cost, right. So, you know, the standard approach that you get in the mainstream textbooks treats, you know, costs as exogenous to the decision maker. The decision maker, you know, the manager of the firm and standard micro, you know, just sort of wakes up one morning and, oh my gosh, there's the average cost curve and the marginal cost curve and the marginal revenue curve. You know, I got a busy day today. I need to do some calculus, right. I've got equate marginal cost and marginal revenue and it takes me several days. You know, the whole thing is kind of silly. And of course, if you're good at math and you're presented with the curves, you know, it might only take you a few seconds to find the equilibrium, maybe a few minutes if it involves taking some difficult derivatives or whatever. But I mean, of course, this is just sort of laughable if you went to a CEO or a middle manager or, you know, entrepreneur and said, hey, show me your cost curves. I'll optimize for you, right. I mean, it's just not very useful. Of course, the emphasis in mainstream theories is always on explicit costs, costs that you can write down and are given to you in numbers, implicit costs, opportunity costs are sometimes neglected. And the idea is that costs are sort of the drivers of firm behavior. The manager wakes up, is presented with some cost curves, then does something, you know, acts in the abstract by choosing quantity or choosing price or whatever. And, you know, then the day's over, right. So entrepreneurs, decision makers, managers, you know, they're only driving anything. I read to you that quote yesterday from Mises about entrepreneurs being the driving force of the market economy. You know, business decision makers in standard microeconomics are extremely passive. They're not the drivers of anything. They just sort of wake up and solve math problems, OK. Austrians, of course, treat cost in a fundamentally different way. Costs are endogenous to the market system. What do I mean by that? Well, of course, the correct notion of cost in any context is opportunity cost, right. The value of the goods or services that you don't get when you engage in one course of action over another. It turns out there's some excellent work on opportunity cost, not only by Austrian economists, but by, you know, some people that might be considered fellow travelers, although they haven't always been considered this way. James Buchanan, for example, but also Ronald Coase. One of James Buchanan's best books is a book that he published in the late 60s, 1968, I think, called Cost in Choice, which is a very Austrian-style, subjectivist treatment of cost. Ronald Coase, no Austrian and not really a friend to the Austrians. How many of you have been in a Walter Block lecture so far where he blasts Ronald Coase as the Great Satan or whatever? I don't actually agree with Walter on that, but Coase was not friendly to the Austrians in general. But Coase wrote a series of articles in the 1920s on cost accounting, where he explains that no, the right way for accountants to think about cost is in terms of values foregone, i.e., opportunity costs, rather than simply explicit monetary costs. Costs are prices. What do I mean by that? The cost to the entrepreneur to produce a marginal bottle of water, right, where do we get that? Well, how much does the entrepreneur have to pay for the plastic and for the labor and for the actual water itself and the use of the machines and for marketing and transportation and so forth? Right, well, what are those costs? What's the cost of labor? Well, that's the wage or salary you pay to your employees. Well, where is that wage or salary determined? Well, in the labor market, right? There's a market in which supply and demand interact and the price of a particular type of labor used in a particular way on the margin, right, is determined by the intersection of labor, supply, and demand. In other words, the costs from the entrepreneur's perspective are simply the outcomes or the prices that emerge from factor markets. And once you realize this, you say, well, the entrepreneur can hardly be a passive participant who is simply presented with prices because who are the demanders of factors in factor markets, right? Who demands labor in the labor market? Yeah, businesses, firms, entrepreneurs, who demands the use of capital goods, who demands raw materials and so forth. Well, it's firms, entrepreneurs, business people. They are the demand side of the factor market. So what we, from the firm's point of view, we treat as costs, right, are simply the prices that are paid by the firms for goods and services, intermediate goods and services that they use. So the entrepreneur, typically in the typical case, has some control over the prices that are paid. It may be only a small amount of control that the individual entrepreneur can exercise if I'm buying plumbing supplies for my plumbing firm and I'm buying them from Home Depot or Lowe's, right? Home Depot is probably not adjusting the price very much in response to my individual demands. So they might, if I buy in a large enough quantity, if I have a contractor relationship, I might get a discount based on what I pay. And of course, if I'm a large buyer, if I'm IBM, if I'm Walmart buying from a wholesaler, you can be darn sure that Walmart has a huge influence on the price that is paid.  The small firm just has to take the prices as given from these, whatever comes out of wholesale markets where there are big suppliers and so forth. But remember, even the small entrepreneur has a choice among alternative production methods, right? If the price for little pieces of pipe or whatever at Home Depot are too high, I have the choice to source my pipes from some other vendor, to use a different kind of pipe, to use a different technology, or even to get out of plumbing altogether, right? So it's not the case that the prices for my inputs are given to me and are fixed. I can choose, right? I can choose what inputs I want, how much I want to buy, whether I wanna buy them at all, whether I wanna go into an alternative line of business or whatever. So costs are not the determinant of what firms do, right? Costs are themselves prices that emerge in factor markets. Costs emerge as part of the larger market system. I mentioned this, you know, Coase's articles on cost accounting, Buchanan's book and so forth. I just wanna just emphasize, I sort of hinted at this a little bit yesterday. And I think Salerno also discussed it in his lecture on calculation and socialism, right? That if you think about it, I mean, this is sort of an unsexy way to describe Mises' great contribution in the socialist calculation debate. But Mises' work on socialism, Mises' 1920 essay, his 1922 book, I mean, these are really works on cost accounting, okay? Mises' treatment of socialism is really an exercise in cost accounting. Why? I mean, you guys know this, Mises' central argument, right? Is that under socialism, where the state owns all of the factors of production, there are no markets for productive inputs because there's no private property in these inputs. There are no factor markets, therefore no prices emerging from actual real factor markets. Therefore decision makers do not have access to information on costs to determine what is the least costly or the most efficient way to build a railroad or to produce automobiles or to set up a gulag or whatever it is that the central planners wanna do, right? They cannot be economically efficient even if they want to because they lack the information on relative scarcities of goods and services. They lack information on the alternative values of resources that they would use to satisfy their own ends because they don't have market prices for factors, i.e. they don't have actual market costs, okay? Remember Mises says, I mean, of course, there's all sorts of additional problems with central planning. Of course, you have the gulags and the shooting people as they climb over the wall and all that.  Even if the dictator's goal is simply to satisfy his own personal preferences, it's impossible for the dictator to do so efficiently without prices and markets for intermediate goods. In other words, the socialist dictator cannot perform cost accounting in a correct way.  You can use play money essentially, you know, fake prices, arbitrary prices, computer generated prices, simulated prices and so forth for inputs. So you have pretend costs, fake costs, but that's not economically efficient in Mises sense, okay? One of Mises' least read books, but in my opinion, one of his most important books is a little book that he published in the mid 1940s called Bureaucracy. If you haven't read Bureaucracy before, I would urge you to take a look at it. It's short, it's easy to read, you can give a copy of Bureaucracy to your grandmother, whereas if you dropped human action on grandma's lap, you might, you know, get a different response, negative response. You know, in a sense, the book is, I think Mises and his publisher did not do a good job marketing the book. I mean, it's ostensibly about Bureaucracy, which makes it sound like a kind of a political science topic, but it's really about business management and it's about the things we're talking about right now. In fact, Mises has a wonderful summary of his calculation argument in Bureaucracy. In my opinion, it's a much clearer and more straightforward summary of Mises' argument than the version that Mises himself presents in the book on socialism and even in human action. He's these great little passages where he talks about under capitalism, the factors of production in, through their prices, which emerge on private factor markets, are calling out to the entrepreneur their values in this activity relative to some other activity. And he says, you know, under socialism, I'm paraphrasing, under socialism, the factors of production are mute.  And you know, of course, under socialism, it's silence. Anyway, I mean, that works for me, but maybe it doesn't work for you, but. Mises has an important section of this little book where he distinguishes what he calls profit management and bureaucratic management. And so Mises defines bureaucracy in a very specific way, not in the general sense in which people use that word.  Mises has a very precise definition of a bureaucracy. Mises says, a bureaucracy is an organization that produces goods and services that are not themselves bought and sold on markets. Right, so a bureaucracy produces some output that is consumed by somebody, but people are either compelled to consume it, police services, right? Or it's simply given away to people without being in exchange for money. In other words, a bureaucracy is an organization that does not have a profit and loss statement, okay? And therefore, according to Mises, Mises doesn't say these organizations are illegitimate. Remember, Mises was sort of a minimal state, classical liberal. He thought the police force was legitimate, the court system was legitimate per se. Army is legitimate. Of course, he had a lot of criticism of how those things were operated in his time. But Mises says, the thing with the police force, not that he shouldn't have one, according to Mises, but you can't run it like a business. I was getting nervous when we have some successful business person, Trump, obviously, running for president. I mean, I haven't heard Trump say this as much as some other people who've been like Trump in the past. You know what I'm saying? The government should be run like a business. Right, if you put me in charge of the business, put me in charge of the government, I'm gonna make it work because I ran a, I was a CEO of a company and I made that work, okay? I mean, the problem with this, according to Mises, is that these are fundamentally different kinds of organizations. Why? The objective of the CEO is to maximize profit. Okay? By reducing costs and raising prices if possible and becoming more efficient and so forth. What guys like Trump mean when they say that is, I'll make the government more efficient. But the proper response to that is, how would you know? How do you know if the police force is efficient or not? Well, I mean, is it net income? Well, I mean, you know, the local police department here in Auburn, Alabama could say, well, we need to increase our net income. So we're gonna start issuing more tickets, more speeding tickets, more parking tickets, higher fines, we need to increase our revenues so we have more, you know, net income after we pay our costs. Or we need to reduce the salaries or wages that we pay to police officers and so forth. You know, Mises points out that private organizations that do buy and sell their outputs on the market, you know, can be managed in a fairly decentralized way. He talks about large corporations that have subsidiaries and subunits. You know, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company can say to the head of a particular operating unit or subsidiary, say, look, I'm not gonna tell you exactly how to run your business. I'm just gonna look at, you know, the bottom line that's coming out of your subsidiary.  If you're not profitable or you have low net income, I'm gonna fire you or contract your business or whatever. Kind of like what capital markets do for the firm itself. Okay? The police can't be operated that way.  You go out there and figure it out. Just bring home the bacon, right? We'll judge you on how much revenue you bring in for the police. You know, you can see the obvious sort of incentive difficulties with that. According to Mises, you know, the way to manage the police department is with very strongly enforced formal rules and procedures. Basically, you tell the police officer, this is what you do in this situation, this is what you do in that situation, you don't give them a lot of latitude to make their own decisions on the fly. Those of you, if you've ever seen a, any one of a thousand Hollywood police movies, crime dramas or TV dramas, there's always a scene where the hero, the hero cop has had this confrontation with the boss, the lieutenant, the lieutenant's yelling at the Bruce Willis character or whatever. McClain, you never do things by the book. Why do you always do things your own way? He's like, well, what is this book? What's the book he's talking about? You know, at IBM, the supervisor doesn't say to the subordinate, you know, why aren't you doing things by the book? You don't say to the traveling salesman, why aren't you doing things by the book? You say, how much sales revenue do you have? Okay, you figure out how to do it. I want to see, you know, show me the money. For, if under a bureaucracy, for a bureaucracy, according to Mises, you tell them exactly what to do because there is no way to evaluate their performance in monetary terms because they're not offering their stuff for sale where consumers can vote with their dollars to patronize or not to patronize. Okay, so my point is, according to Mises, the economic calculation argument has an implication for how you manage large organizations. Okay, it has implications for the limits to the size of the firm. It has many implications for practical management as well as being a, you know, sort of argument about why socialism doesn't work. There's an interesting article by Thomas Taylor in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics in 2000 on Austrian, I forget the exact title, it's something like current developments in cost accounting from an Austrian perspective, which I would urge you to look at, those of you who are interested in accounting. Now I spoke yesterday about entrepreneurship, right, to remind you, in sort of a long run equilibrium state, we can imagine factors of production being paid, prices equal to their discounted marginal, revenue products, capitalists earn an interest reward, an interest as a reward for foregoing consumption, paying for factors today and realizing revenues tomorrow. Entrepreneurs can earn sort of an implicit wage but there are no profits and losses, right? But in the real world, right, on a day-to-day basis, entrepreneurs do earn profits or losses, right, based on the quality of their judgments about the future, they're based on their ability to anticipate future prices, future market conditions and so forth. So the unique role of the entrepreneur is to arrange the factors of production, right, under conditions of uncertainty in the pursuit of profit and, you know, in the attempt to avoid loss, is not quite the same thing as innovation as emphasized by Schumpeter, not quite the same thing as discovery as emphasized by Kirchner, implies ownership of resources and judgment in the use of those resources. So it follows that there are a lot of things that are commonly misunderstood as profit but are not really profit, okay? So it follows from an Austrian understanding of entrepreneurship and markets that, okay, first of all, profit is not interest. Profit and interest are distinct praxeological categories even though they both are often manifest as cash in the business owner's pocket, okay? So, you know, if you own a company and your accountant gives you your annual tax return or you're looking at your net income statement and he's got, okay, we have, I got $5,000 left over, that's money that goes in my pocket. Ooh, I made a big profit. Yeah, I mean, from the point of view of economic theory that $5,000 may or may not be economic profit, right? Some component of it is an interest return if you, depending on how much you paid Exante for your factors and the length of time between those payments and when you realized receipts and depending on the opportunity cost of investing those funds elsewhere, right? Some of that net income on the accounting, in an accounting sense is implicit interest, right? Some of it is the business owner's implicit wage and then some of it is entrepreneurial profit or loss. Again, these are not numbers that come out of the income statement. This is something that must be imputed or inferred by the decision maker, you know, by using these, by using economic theory, right? But a firm, you could have a positive number, you could be in the black as a firm, but not really earning economic profit, right? You could simply be earning your opportunity wage and no more. You could simply be earning an interest return and no more or some combination of those, but actually be earning an entrepreneurial loss or having a very small entrepreneurial profit. You know, and this is something that, those of you who have studied, if you know that there's some accounting profit and economic profit, you already know what I'm talking about. Profit is not an automatic return to capital. Attention, Thomas Piketty, right? I mean, Tomas Piketty, you know, it's not, people think that, well, profit is what you get when you own stuff. And so if you own productive capital, financial capital, machines, whatever, you just kick back and let the profit roll in. Okay?   You know, if you plant it, it grows. So capital just tends to grow, you know, almost like biological reasons or something and you automatically get some fruit every year. Yeah, you got to water it and you got to put some fertilizer in. But just if you have that little seed or the little, you know, lemon tree, it just automatically generates a flow of lemons. And that's, you know, so you get profit just for owning capital. Well, of course, if you think about how markets operate, you realize, nope, the mere ownership of productive resources does not guarantee any income whatsoever because you can deploy them in activities that do not produce goods and services that consumers want to buy. Okay, I mean, just look at, I don't know. I mean, I don't think Auburn has a lot of abandoned buildings but, you know, go to Detroit or any number of other cities around the world and look at abandoned buildings and say, well, somebody owns that nice building. Why are, where's the profit? Okay, I don't have any profit because that building is not in productive use in the economy.   Yeah, well, of course, I mean, I can add any markup I want over my out of pocket expenses to produce something but it doesn't mean somebody's gonna buy it, right? Some of this maybe is a confusion between sort of, you know, sticker price and market price. Yeah, I mean, I can put whatever sticker price I want on the thing based on whatever markup I want over the cost that were not given to me, remember, but I chose, right? But that doesn't mean anyone will buy it at that price. The market price has determined completely independently from what my costs were and what markup rate I chose, right? It's determined by consumer preference. Okay, a couple more things. Let me say a little bit about business strategy.  Some of you have. It's a popular topic in business schools. There's tons of books, you know, if you go to Barnes & Noble or you stop at the bookshop at the airport on your way back home from Mises U, there's tons of books on strategy and some of them are more academic and some of them are like, you know, Dr. Seuss on strategy or, you know, sort of silly, silly things. But in the academic literature on strategy, there's some pretty interesting stuff that Austrian economics bears upon. For years, the dominant perspective in the academic and the practitioner literature on strategy was the so-called strategic positioning approach associated with Michael Porter, whose book, Competitive Strategy, is the all-time best-selling book on business strategy. And Porter is a neoclassically trained industrial organization economist who took the standard models of perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly and so forth and just sort of flipped them on their heads, right, just as if you take an intermediate micro course, they teach you that perfect competition is good and entry barriers are bad because that gives monopoly power to firms and that's bad and you gotta stamp that out. And Porter said, well, if I'm a firm and I wanna make lots of money, then why don't we just say entry barriers are good? It's like, how do I get entry barriers? How do I get monopoly power? How do I stamp out perfect competition and try to get as much market power as I can for myself, right? I mean, if you understand the Austrian critique of the standard approach to market structure, that if you understand the difference between actual competition in the market from an Austrian perspective and perfectly competitive general equilibrium from a neoclassical perspective, then it's easy to see why this Porter's approach is not particularly useful, right? If you believe, as Austrians do, that profits are the result of entrepreneurs being successful at anticipating future prices and market conditions, then having entry barriers does not necessarily help you very much, okay?  Of course, perfect competition doesn't exist, never has, never will. Perfect competition is not a useful benchmark for thinking about markets. All markets in the real world are imperfectly competitive in that sense. And trying to get some kind of monopoly grant from the state, trying to get a scale advantage or brand name recognition and so forth does not in general lead to any kind of sustained profitability. It might give you some temporary advantage, but it's not the way to earn economic profits over time. Of course, in this positioning approach, the Porter approach, you'll never see the word uncertainty, you'll never see the word entrepreneurship, you'll never hear about heterogeneous capital resources, you'll never hear about actual competition as Austrians understand it. There's another approach that is sometimes called the resource-based or capabilities approach. So say people like Jay Barney, David Teese and others, that I think actually has a lot more promise and is in one sense more compatible with Austrian economics, more congenial to Austrians. Right, it emphasizes that firms that are successful in earning profits tend to be firms that have particularly valuable and maybe unique combinations of resources, productive resources, capital, labor, and so forth. These theories are still a little bit too closely tied to the perfect competition model for my tastes and do not give quite as prominent a role to interpretation and subjectivity as I think they should, but I think these models are worth studying and worth reading. And there's actually a fairly new literature that tries to combine business strategy and entrepreneurship, tries to incorporate concepts from the entrepreneurship field into the study of strategies and I was called strategic entrepreneurship, which I think has some promise too and I've done some work in this area. But one thing I thought I might mention to you guys because I have often been asked this in the past is, well, what about game theory? Right, a lot of the work on strategy uses game theory. How many people have studied game theory before? Yeah, most of you have. We, I mean, we've had some sessions that means as you in the past that were specifically devoted to game theory and there's some good Austrian writing on the pros and cons of game theory. I mean, I'll state my position for the record as being as I am in so many things, a moderate, right? I have a reasonable and moderate balanced position in the sense that I think there are some insights that we can gain from thinking about strategic interaction in the game theoretic sense, but those insights are limited, okay? There's some game theoretic models that I think are completely worthless, but there are some general insights that may actually be beneficial. So for example, or to be more specific, you know, what about the numbers that go in these, you know, go in a game tree or in a normal form game matrix or whatever? Yeah, so let me put it this way. A superficial Austrian critique of, you know, some kind of prisoner's dilemma model would be to say, I can hardly read it. Oh, well, it says here that, you know, if they both cooperate, they each get three utils and if one of them defects, that person gets four utils and there's no such thing as a util, therefore this is worthless. Well, okay, I mean, yeah, I agree that anything that relies on utils is pretty much worthless, right? But of course, you can do a lot of, you can do some game theory without using cardinal utility, right? In fact, you can write down a prisoner's dilemma game with strictly ordinal relationships among the payoffs, right? To get the standard answer, how many people know the prisoner's dilemma game? You know, to get sort of the standard answer, you just need this payoff to be greater than this payoff and this payoff to be greater than this payoff from the point of view of the actor. You don't have to use numbers. You don't need cardinal utility. I used to give that as an exam question in some of my classes. You know, I just said alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Tell me what has to be true about the values of alpha, beta, delta, gamma to get for it to be the case that in the one-shot game, you would always defect and it's not that hard. You just have to write down some inequalities. Same thing with coordination games, you know, battle of the sexes game. You don't necessarily need numbers. Now, there are some versions of these games that only work when you do have cardinal numbers. Certain kinds of repeated games where you have to add up the payoffs over time and, you know, discount them. Certain games of imperfect information where you have to have estimates of the probabilities and then you multiply by the values of the outcomes and so forth. Yeah, I mean, if you're doing that, then yeah, you're really engaged in some kind of exercise that is thoroughly divorced from actual economic behavior. But it doesn't follow from that that the kind of logic of the prisoner's dilemma, for example, or the logic of a chicken game or a battle of the sexes game is incompatible with praxeology. I don't think that's the case. Now, so how useful does that make these models? Well, that's up for debate. I mean, it depends on what you're doing and I think there are some situations where using prisoner's dilemma logic may help us to understand what firms are doing as they interact with each other and so forth.  What are their characteristics? How are their actions interdependent and so forth may clarify your thinking on a specific business problem. Okay, about out of time. I've done a lot of my own research on the theory of the firm so I won't waste your time now by talking about it but simply urge you to waste your time later by reading some of my articles. What I and others have tried to do is challenge the textbook notion of the firm as some sort of production function, right? And think instead about the firm as ownership of assets. And one thing that I've had fun with lately is dealing with some, there's some sort of Austrian inspired critiques of the corporation. There are people, you know, Kevin Carson, Roderick Long and so forth who say that corporations are per se illegitimate because they receive artificial state privilege. I think that argument is actually not correct for reasons we can discuss later. I also think it's not correct that in a free society, in a free market, all firms would be very flat, non-hierarchical, everything would be sort of peer to peer. We wouldn't have big companies with bosses and middle managers and workers. I think that's also incorrect. You know, voluntary hierarchy and authority are perfectly compatible with sort of free society. I have a recent article in Sloan Management Review that sort of misleadingly titled why managers still matter, but it's really about the myth of the flattening hierarchy or the flattening firm challenging theoretically and anecdotally the idea that the age of the old hierarchical corporation is over and that all firms need to be lean and flat and decentralized and so forth. Okay, just to summarize, you know, Austrian economics is useful for management, for business more generally. It's different from other kinds of economics in ways that are practical and useful. It's causal realism. It's emphasis on heterogeneous resources. The role that it gives to the consumer opens up this sort of a whole, there's a whole field of demand side strategy which is very Austrian in its spirit. The role that it gives to the entrepreneur and so forth. So, you know, but I just want to emphasize that, you know, while the theorems that we derive from praxeology are qualitative, those theories can be very useful for doing quantitative analysis, doing economic history as Bob Higgs and, you know, Murray Rothbard and many other people have done, right? Even doing forecasting, which is not a praxeological activity itself but it's sort of a kind of entrepreneurship having a correct knowledge of economic theory that we derive from praxeology makes us, you know, helps us in trying to do provide quantitative estimates of the future. You know, of course, management per se is different from economic science. Management is an art. It's an entrepreneurial activity. It's not a, it's not formal logic the way praxeology is but I think there's a, you know, closely compatible relationship between good economic science and good management practice. So thanks a lot.


Let's read verses 16 and 17 and we'll get into our study. Romans chapter one, verses 16 and 17. Paul writes, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. Now as we've been going through Romans, we stopped last time at verses 14 and 15. Let me remind you what Paul had said. He said, I'm a debtor, both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to unwise. So much as is in me, he said, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also. So he's ready to preach the gospel to the citizens of Rome and that's because Paul desired all people to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. He had mentioned in verse nine that he had served God with his spirit in the gospel of God's son Jesus. So as a missionary, Paul had taken the message and had preached it everywhere. That's because he said that he had been called and separated to the gospel of God. In other words, he was aware of his calling and being aware of his calling and we've seen this, I'm just reminding you of a few things. He was obedient to what the Lord Jesus Christ had commanded us. Remember in Mark chapter 16 verse 15, Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. So being called and separated to the gospel inspired him as well as fueled him to preach. He had what you would call a fire that would burn within his soul. He had said in first Corinthians in chapter nine verse 16, when I preached the gospel, I cannot boast for I am compelled to preach and he went on to say, woe to me if I do not preach the gospel. So the proclamation of the gospel, the preaching of the word of God, the going to wherever God called him to go, the obedience of his soul to that mission was driving him, it was a compelling force. People were lost, people needed God, they needed to be saved. And he knew that the salvation that they needed is only gonna come by receiving the message or the gospel of salvation and you do so by faith. And that message again is found in the gospel. In first Peter 1.23, Peter said it like this, he said, being born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible through the word of God which lives and abides forever. And so because of the message, the message of salvation, Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That word ashamed means to shrink back. You can speak of being confounded. You see, Paul knew that the gospel revealed God to man but he also knew that man considered this message that God would send his son, that his son would give certain words, do certain things but end up crucified and dying across and yet be proclaimed as being alive three days later by the power of the resurrection. Paul knew that people would see that as being simply foolishness. And there are those who will not preach that message because they think it's foolish. But he made a statement in 1 Corinthians chapter one verses 17 and 18, he said, Christ didn't send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of no effect for the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved, it's a power of God. So through knowing how it was viewed, he did not shrink back from proclaiming it. He didn't hesitate to declare what God had given to him when Jeremiah was called by the Lord Jeremiah at first said, no I can't, I'm but a youth, they're not gonna listen to me. And God began to speak to him, told him that he had ordained him to be a prophet in all but he said to him, do not be afraid of their faces. They're gonna have frowns of disapproval, they're gonna reject the things that you have to say but this is a message that has to be proclaimed. Well in the New Testament Paul said, I don't shrink back. Even though it's a message that people think is a foolish message that we would believe that God would send his son, that his son would be born of a virgin, that he would live 33 years dying across and yet be raised from the dead, that's foolishness but he was willing to pay the price to be faithful to deliver that message even if he was harmed for doing so. He knew that was part of his calling. In Acts 9, 15 and 16, he reads, go your way for he speaking of Paul is a chosen vessel to me to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. But he goes on, God says for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake. So there's suffering involved in the proclamation of the gospel, there's a rejection, we know that, there's rejection, your friends and your family, people in general, there's a rejection, sometimes there's a physical persecution, he was aware of that and many of us are also. And today, even today in our day, we can become ashamed because it seems that the world is winning, you watch the news and it seems that it is. We can become intimidated, we can become embarrassed to be associated with Christianity and sometimes it's understandable. I mean, if you turn on the television and you see a screaming TV preacher, you see the weird theatrics that sometimes they participate in, it can be a bit embarrassing. And you can watch a movie and the movie can portray a believer as an ignorant, backward kind of bumpkin. And it causes you to shrink back, it makes you kind of embarrassed to wanna be associated with that kind of thing. So what happens, you become silent. And because this is true, there have been pastors, many pastors who have watered down the message of the gospel. They're afraid of offending sensitive hearers. They're afraid to even offend the sensitive hearers that are sitting in the pews of their own fellowships. And so they become quiet. They don't say what the word of God says. So a call for repentance, a call for conversion, a warning of final judgment is often muted or not said at all. God's holiness and man's sinfulness isn't clearly proclaimed because they're finding passages that will actually speak to people where they're at and not call them to be in a different place. The desire for a large church can tempt a pastor to water down the message. So instead of teaching the full counsel of God, the church becomes a theater, the worship team becomes a band, the stage becomes a place for entertainment. Charles Spurgeon, who was a great preacher of another time, said the devil has seldom done a cleverer thing than hinting to the church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people with a view of winning them. He said the time will come when instead of shepherds feeding sheep, they will have clowns entertaining goats. Jesus pitied sinners, sighed and wept over them, but he never sought to amuse them. And so pastors sometimes, Bible teachers sometimes water it down. They fill their message with stories, victories that they've experienced, outlandish tales of faith. They're always the center of their own message. They're always the hero in their own story. I was on a plane. I was flying from here to Texas. And then it was a storm. And the storm shook that plane. And as it shook that plane, people began to scream. They began to cry. They began to say, oh help. And I stood up and I said to them and they listened and I baptized them in the bathroom. So I've heard such crazy stories because they think the word of God should be changed to entertain the goats. I am thankful that I got saved because someone told me the truth of the gospel. It wasn't something to make me feel good about myself.  And so teaching and encouraging believers, the word of God is what equips them. And if we reject doing that, we're gonna end up with a crowd and not a church. So Paul wasn't ashamed because the gospel is the power of God that results in salvation. It is God revealing how he saves men and it's how God reveals how he gives eternal life because it is not within the power of my own strength to change my nature. God is going to do that through the power of the spirit. Good works alone is simply dressing up as a spiritually dead person. You know, what you are, it's a screen, we'll be seeing this as we go through Romans but we're dead in sins. We're dead in trespasses. We're spiritually dead.  And good works when you're unsaved is like dressing up a corpse. You're still dead.    God needs to empower me by his spirit and that comes through the preaching of the gospel. Again, we can't change our nature by good works. Our nature won't be changed by rituals. Our nature is not gonna be changed by any human means. Change comes to the receiving of the gospel and being born again. Notice in verse 16 how he says the gospel is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. Changed lives are what truly reveals the power of God. It's the transformation. And that's why we remain teaching the scripture. Again, because a message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but unto us who are being saved. It is the power of God. Now he says in verse 16 that he's preaching notice to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So before the gospel went to the whole world it was taken to the Jews. In obedience to this command, the apostles first went to Jews. Look at the book of Acts in chapter one verse eight and it speaks concerning the day of Pentecost that was to come. And Jesus was saying you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. You shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and unto the other most parts of the earth. To the Jew first and also to the Gentile. And so from the beginning when Paul would enter a city he would first go to a synagogue. After he got saved it's recorded his salvation is recorded in chapter nine of Acts. But after he got saved according to Acts nine verse 20 Paul promptly began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues declaring that he is the son of God. In Acts chapter 17 verses one and two it says when Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia they came to Thessalonica right next door to Chino where there was a Jewish synagogue as was his custom Paul went into the synagogue and on three Sabbaths he reasoned with them from the scripture so it became his habit from the time he got saved to the Jew first but also to the Gentile. And so from there the gospel is taken out to the whole world. Why is that important verse 17 in it in the gospel? The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written the just shall live by faith. God's plan to make us righteous is revealed in Jesus and his work. In second Corinthians five 21 Paul said God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. So God's righteousness his plan for us to be righteous is revealed and this righteousness of God he says in verse 17 is revealed from faith to faith. In other words it's by faith that we receive the gospel and it's from that point of faith that we continue to grow in faith. And then he speaks of the fact that the just shall live by faith. That's an Old Testament book Habakkuk that's chapter two verse four. You see faith in the old covenant was leading to the faith that was revealed in Jesus in the new. And with that in mind the gospel is a message that results in salvation. It is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes. Now we've all heard of Martin Luther. I've heard Martin Luther King so often I have to stop at Martin Luther because I wanna say King but it was Martin Luther. And we know that Martin Luther discovered something in the book of Romans. And I'm gonna maybe I should wait to say this but I'll say it right now I was reading recently concerning revivals and we all are praying for God to awaken. Revival begins with the church. Sometimes when people are speaking of revival the thinking of evangelism that reaches the world and that people are gonna be saved and revived but no revival is really a term that speaks about what God does within the church. He revives the church, he wakes us up. See people who don't know the Lord are called they're dead in trespasses and sins. They're spiritually dead. So what God does is in revival is he awakens the church. And so there are things that are going on right now in some places that people are asking is this the second Jesus revolution? Is this the second Jesus movement? There's been something taking place in a seminary called Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. Some of you perhaps have read or heard of it. There's a lot of reporting being taken place right now concerning the fact that these students have been going to Chapel Stain and Chapel Prane and it's been going on for days. And people from different portions of the town are coming in, people who don't go to the college are coming because they wanna see what's taking place and it seems that there's an awakening that's taking place in these students in this Methodist University. And some people are even getting on planes and flying there just step in and to try and soak in what's taking place. And I've been asked, do I think that's a genuine revival? And here's the thing, I don't know, we'll see. We'll see because when Josiah in the Old Testament, when Josiah discovered the book of the law and saw that it hadn't been honored, they returned to the Word. And when they returned to the Word, the nation of Israel, when they returned to the Word, they began to act out the things that were commanded and the things that were forbidden. They began to see that so they tore down all the altars and the places of false worship. So revival is always demonstrated by a return to the Word and a changing, a repentance, a destruction of those things that are bad, that are evil, that take you away from God. So I'm gonna wait and see. But I was talking to John just yesterday about this and we did it on our unfiltered program that we do. And I said, I was part of a genuine revival in the Jesus movement, absolutely. I got saved 52 years ago. It didn't wear off because in a real revival, real change takes place. So sometimes you have to take a wait and see kind of view. Let's see what the Lord does in time. But I believe that God can do revival wherever he desires to. And why not hear? Why not wake us up? Why not get us on fire for him? Why not? I believe he wants to. And that's what happened to Martin Luther. Now, there's a guy by the name of Baron Klaus Kuiper and he wrote the book, Martin Luther, The Formative Years. And this is what he quoted Luther as saying, I greatly longed to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the righteousness of God. Because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and deals righteously and punishing the unrighteous. Night and day I pondered until I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby through grace and sheer mercy he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of scripture took on a new meaning. And whereas before the righteousness of God had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me the gateway to heaven. So the just shall live by faith, not by works of righteousness, not by attempts to be good for God's sake, not in trying to find several things that I should do to demonstrate to him that I'm worthy. It's just understanding that I'm unworthy, that I'm a wretch and that God showed mercy to me. And do you too by the way, don't look at me as if I'm the only wretch. And he saved us by his love, by his grace, by his mercy. And not only did he save us but he lit us on fire to tell other people what God can do in their lives. And those who knew us best, those are family, our friends, our neighbors, who knew us best became open witnesses to the change they saw that took place in us. I was the crazy guy in the neighborhood, I did crazy things and one of my neighbors who lived about four or five houses down was aware of how crazy I was, she was aware. And even felt sorry for my mom for having a son like me. But when I got saved and went into the military, I came out and I started a home Bible study. She was among the very first who ever came to a Bible study that I taught because she knew she could learn from me because she saw the remarkable change that God brings into the life of a repentant sinner. And I'm sure you can say very similar things yourself.  Now they wonder what you are. And then you're able to tell them what I am. I'm just brand new, I'm just brand new in Jesus Christ. It's a grace of God and he has saved us. Moves us from faith to growing faith in him. Well, he goes on in verse 18 and says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Now, taking this in context, in Rome, the average person considered the gospel to be irrelevant. And so what he's doing here is he's beginning to unfold the gospel of God. And he begins first, notice this, by speaking of the wrath of God. Now today, the thought of a God who could be angry is unacceptable. They say, well, he's a God of love. He's loving, he's not judgmental. Well, in verse 18, he says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness. Now, when it speaks of wrath, that word wrath speaks of indignation. It is anger revealed in punishment. It speaks of a settled displeasure. So God's wrath is revealed as being against ungodliness and unrighteousness. It is revealed, it's made known or it's made visible against ungodliness and unrighteousness. Ungodliness is lack of God. It speaks of a lack of reverence for God. And unrighteousness, because there's no relationship with God, unrighteousness will be the result.  In the Old Testament, and I didn't wanna go through very many scriptures, I only took a handful. But in the Old Testament, God revealed his wrath several times. Genesis three, his wrath is revealed in the garden when he evicted Adam and Eve. Genesis chapter six and seven, his wrath is revealed when he destroys the world through a flood. Genesis 11, it's revealed when he scattered the people and confounded the languages. In Genesis 18 and 19, it's revealed when he destroyed Sodom, Gomorrah, and Adma, Belen, Zebuin, which were other little cities in that area. And then again, in Exodus 14, it's revealed when he destroys Pharaoh's armies in the Red Sea. God's wrath is revealed many times in the Old Testament. The New Testament also speaks of and reveals the wrath of God.  Why? Well, God's wrath, he said, remains on him. In Colossians three, five and six, Paul said, put to death, therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry, then he goes on to say, because of these, the wrath of God is coming. I was asked the question unfiltered the other day, well, if God is a God of love, why would he judge someone for being in love and having sex outside of marriage? Well, Paul made it clear. He said, these are the things that are actually gonna bring the wrath of God. Why? Because of this disobedience to his word. It's a rejection of a God has said. When you look in the New Testament, the greatest example of the wrath of God is the seven year tribulation. In Revelation 6, verses 16 and 17, it reads, they said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb for the great day of his wrath has come and who's able to stand. It's God's wrath. God's wrath has divine origin. It's poured out on those who deserve his wrath. Now, what is it that they're doing that makes them deserve his wrath? Well, he says in verse 18, he says, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all in godliness and unrighteousness of man. Notice who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The word suppress simply means to hold back or restrain. They're holding back the truth, they're restraining the truth. They hold back the truth through wicked efforts and a rejection of what is true. In John 3 19 and 20, Jesus said it like this, this is the verdict, light has come into the world but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds are evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. They suppress it. They say, turn the light off, we don't like it shining on us exposing who we are. How does the light shine on them exposing who they are, the preaching of the gospel? When you teach the word, when you share the word, people get upset.  There are those who actively suppress what is true. Very many cults do that. And sometimes even in the nation we live in, it is steeped in Christian tradition. There are those who reject that tradition and wanna suppress the truth. There are those who have wealth and those who have influence and they try to stifle the truth. There are those who resist scripture, who refuse to see value in them and they reject the truth. This is interesting just this last weekend. There was an ad aired in the Super Bowl. I wonder how many of us thought, what was her name? What's her name who did the halftime? Rihanna, Rihanna. That gave me an opportunity to take a nap. So. But there was an ad, all of you are aware of, if you watched it, there was an ad encouraging people to investigate Jesus. Remember that? A lot of controversy. And there were people who say, and I'm not gonna, well, I'll take a moment to do this. I'm gonna have a couple of minutes. There were people who said, that ad cost $20 million. Those ads, that's a lot of money. John, can I borrow? That's a lot of money, $20 million. And who's to say it's not? Well, we could use, it could have been used and then people will tell the church or Christians how they should use their money. They like to tell us that. A lot of controversy. But did you know that Jeff Bezos, you know him, Jeff Bezos has a $500 million super yacht. Let that sink in for a second. $500 million yacht. Have you ever heard anybody say anything about that? Hmm, you should have used that for what? You know, just today, and I happened to like Michael Jordan, I think, and this is my opinion, he's the greatest basketball player who ever lived. That's my opinion. Yours doesn't count. So, he just gave $10 million to a charitable organization. 10 million dollars. And it wasn't to me. And Marie and I were watching the news and they were pointing that out. Michael Jordan. And I said, sounds like a lot and it is. But he's worth $1.7 billion. So when you take that into consideration is 10 million that much? No, but nobody says anything about that. They say how great this is. See, the world is that way. We know that as believers. And so, Paul speaks about this mentality that they make every effort to resist and restrain which is true. They don't want it heard. We saw that just this last weekend. It's amazing to me how people will say that what you watch doesn't affect you. I've heard that argument. Again, this isn't in my notes. I'll say it quickly, but what you watch doesn't affect you. Really, then why did you spend millions of dollars for 30 seconds of airtime if you think that what you're presenting to people doesn't affect them? Why do you do that? The hypocrisy is so obvious and it's very seldom pointed out. Well, Paul is making it clear that all people deserve to be judged. And so what he's doing here, and we'll be seeing this, he begins by making a case against the Gentiles because they're separated from God. That's something that we saw in Ephesians 2, verse 12, when Paul said, remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise without hope and without God in the world. So he begins by making a case that all people deserve to be judged, starts with the Gentiles. From chapter two to chapter three, verse eight, he then reveals that the Jewish nation also is under sin. Then from chapter three, verses nine to verse 20, he then states that both Jew and Gentile, mankind deserve judgment. Now it says in verse 19, he goes, because what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them. And so Paul makes it clear that God has revealed himself in the gospel. And the gospel communicates clearly what God wants us to know. That has been called special revelation. But the fact is some haven't heard the complete revelation of God. Even if they haven't heard, he's making the case, they have what is called an innate knowledge of the reality of a God.  Because we're created with an innate knowledge that there's something greater than us and that is God. And this awareness has been given to us by God. It doesn't originate within us. And that's why he gives to us what is called general revelation.  You have to teach your child to not believe. Because babies know as they're growing, there's something greater than themselves. They know that. So you teach them and that's suppressing the truth and that's something that is worthy of judgment. You see, God has given to us moral compasses. It's called a conscience. He says that what may be known of God is manifest in them. That's been referred to as natural religion. In Ecclesiastes chapter three, verse 11, it reads, he has also set eternity in the hearts of men. There's an awareness of the infinite. And that's what fuels our lives to seek purpose in our life. And it's the awareness of what fuels social rules and morals. It's what fuels and influences and educates our conscience. But the conscience alone can't save you. The conscience is formed over a lifetime. It reflects the values that were taught and were caught.   It can accuse you, but it can also excuse you. You can do something that's wrong but you don't feel bad about it. Some people have blended their conscience and they cease feeling any guilt. In 1 Timothy four two, it speaks of, it says that they are speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. You can do something that doesn't violate your conscience and it's still wrong. Your conscience isn't the spirit and you may still do wrong without any guilt. In Proverbs six, verse 30, people do not despise the thief if he steals or satisfies hunger when he's starving. So he's stealing, but they're not mad at him because they think he should do that. But he says in verse 20, since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they're without excuse. Not only do they have the internal sense but they have an external witness. Nature reveals God's power. There have been atheists, I've heard their testimonies who when they were in the delivery room when their children were being born, they said there's gotta be something greater than me. There's gotta be because the wonder of childbirth arrested them. The Bible says in Psalm 19 verse one, the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork. Psalm 104 and 19, he made the moon to mark the months and the sun sets according to a regular schedule. He was three verse four, every house is built by someone but he built all things as God. He says because verse 21, although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful but became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened, professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. We'll close with a few thoughts about this. We'll be picking up and developing it much further. Notice in verse 21, they knew God but didn't glorify him as God. They have a natural awareness that there is something greater than themselves, it is called God. They have a conscience, internal and nature which is external yet they're rejecting God. And so man reveals his rejection by four things. One, by dishonoring him and proudly rejecting him. Two, by being thankless. They reject giving thanks to the one who provides for them. Three, they become futile in their thoughts concerning him. That's Paul's explanation concerning the creation of false religions. Man's search for meaning outside of God results in confusion and vanity and forth their foolish hearts are darkened. They refuse his light which is spiritual illumination and the result is they live in moral darkness. The heart is the core of our being. It produces thoughts, words and actions. For it to be darkened means that we do whatever we feel like doing regardless. So professing to be wise, they became fools. Instead of giving God glory to his name, they give glory to his creation. There's a commercial where a guy speaks concerning fruit in the natural products of the earth and he says, you can call it mother nature if you like or call it God if you want. That's what Paul is talking about. Mother nature, I don't think so. It's God, God has created all things. Every house is built by some man. You don't drive by an empty lot one day and the next day there's a house there. Every house is built by some man. There are teams of men working in building. If a house is built by a man, why isn't the universe created by God? Why? And that's why he said, you created all things is God. So instead of giving glory to his name, they give honor to his creation. Mother earth worship is alive and well in the United States. So Jeremiah 2, 11 through 13 says, this has a nation changed its gods, which are not gods. But my people have changed their glory for what does not profit. Be astonished, oh heavens at this and be horribly afraid, be very desolate says the Lord. For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters and hewn themselves sisters, broken sisters that can hold no water. When you go to Israel, you discover that it is dry and thirsty land. It relies on the rain and what they'll do in seasons when it's not raining, they have built in the old days, they would build cisterns where they would store water and they would hold hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. So when the drought would come, they were able to drop a bucket in and they were able to drink the water. So they were able to survive. But what happens sometimes is that the cistern would develop a crack, something that couldn't be seen from up there as they look down. And so in a time of drought, they would open up the lid, they would drop down the bucket and it would hit the ground. And they'd climb in and they would see that there was a hairline fracture and all the water had drained out. And God is saying you've committed two evils. You've forsaken me, the one who provides the living water, you hewned for yourself, you dug out for yourself sisters, broken sisters that can hold no water. By chasing after the false, he rejected the true. And so Paul is giving us that I'm gonna develop that much more as we get together. But he says professing to be wise, they became fools. So instead of rejecting man entirely, God reveals himself to us through Jesus. And many of us who at one time didn't honor him, do now because he has revealed himself through him. We'll stop here because it's time for communion.


Let's do this! You'll have seen me driving through that podstarring wall with this incredible digger. That's what we've got to do on Thursday in just two days time. Break the deadlock. Take this country forward. Let's get Brexit done. Vote Conservative on Thursday.