Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Tikhanda Singh Pawar, former Deputy Mayor of Shimla and is also a candidate from Shimla Urban Constancy for the CPIM in upcoming Himachal Pradesh with Hansa by elections. Welcome to NewsClick, Tikhanda. So first of all let's start with what is the vision of left vis-a-vis these elections. CPIM is fighting 11 seats. So you mean the vision for the state? Yes. Himachal has a very interesting characteristic as far as the development of the state is concerned because we were a predominantly backward state with very low production base as far as industries are concerned. And that's when we got statehood in 1971. So what is the model that should have been adopted? Congress, in fact there was a movement down below which was led by the communists that meant land forms movement. But it was completely taken over, I could say, I can say hijacked by the Congress and then Dr. Weispar Maher. And he played a very pivotal agenda which I can mark was literally left of center, left of center. Where large scale land forms took place. At the same time we had a huge development of social infrastructure. Now can you imagine Pranjali in 1980s we were 100% literified. Every village and if you visit Himachal you will find that the density is very low. Some house would be a kilometer away, just once in the house. Even there those poles were erected and the electricity was taken. At the same time you had education, you had health infrastructure. This all continued till the 80s, 85s, till 90s I would say. When we just swung to what we call the neoliberal power where the FRBMs, the Fiscal Responsibility Emergency Management Act and see the political repercussion. That is very interesting that has happened. The political repercussion is so you developed a very strong social infrastructure with a very strong stimulus and support of the state. And of course which was given by the center, there was hardly any private investment so no private capital came. They didn't even have the capacity to do that. So it was the center that really helped the state. But post-85 you see once the state started withdrawing, once we just swung to another form of developmental model. You will find after 1985 every government lost. So even stalwarts like Veer Badrasingh or P.K. Dumlu, they couldn't repeat their governments back. Those issues still remain private. So what are these issues? The issues are that the people look at the state government as one of the major investors, one of the major areas that are going to help them out. That are going to help them out in emulating their problems. For example unemployment is a huge problem. But let me just say one very small example. When I said that we were 100% electrified in 1980s or 1985, I guess the number of people that were employed in the electricity department. There were just 6 lakh subscribers, maybe 6 to 6.5 lakh subscribers, but we had some 23,000 workforce. So 45,000 workforce. Now we have 23 lakh subscribers but the workforce has gone down to 15,000. It has declined while the demand has increased threefold. That's the new concept. So you have to reduce your fiscal deficit. How do you reduce your fiscal deficit? That's how the FRBM enforce all those MOUs and all that you sign. I'm in focus that the fiscal deficit should not increase more than 3% of your state GDP. So what is the way out? And the Centre said we will not give you a grant if you do not. The way out was do not fill your waking posts. That's why we find, forget about the 1990s baseline. Even today if you find there are more than 1 lakh vacancies lying in different departments. So social infrastructure is the major issue here. That's one. The sick thing is, as I told you because the huge infrastructure ones you create, that also creates a middle class, that also creates consciousness amongst the people. Post 2004, all those who are employed and still we have a large number of people who are employed in government departments, health, education, electricity board, I think the number would be around 3 lakh. So post 2004 all are under the NPS. So all that glossy picture came after 1990s where your money will go to the stock market and then you will have inflated pension stuff and you will have a rise in pension. Now they are realizing someone who is drawing a salary of 80,000 rupees lands up getting a pension of not more than 4000 rupees whereas the person should have got 40,000 rupees. So that's a major issue and it's not that it's come out of the blue but they fought down and the government actually completely mishandled it. The BJP is completely a worse to it and they targeted the people and of course they took it head on, the BJP government. So there's tremendous, tremendous fear or if you just talk to the government employees against the government and on this important issue of. And third I think also what is important because the state as I told you is a very characteristic state. So forget about the communists, I can even tell you some of the congress leaders, even Dr. Parmaran who hijacked the communist movement altogether I can say, when he retired he went back to his home in a bus so he had nothing. So that corruption was not seen here, politics was still kind of clean politics. No, not clean, something that you have to serve and even madam Stokes I mean from Tioke, she had a very clean image. Likewise Gaur Sahib in Congress, I'm talking about congress leaders. Gaur Sahib whenever he used to contest from Kulu, he used to lose a part of his land. Now people gain land once they, so you know people are actually easily, they can easily understand the kind of corruption, the kind of money that is flowing in and it's not just one but it's like even the BJP in Congress. So I think that's also a very major issue. People are looking at people who would be of course on these major issues but also corruption is a way and we've seen how the police recruitment scam was highlighted and of course they had to just get rid of the paper. So taking this as going back to where you had started from that how communists played an important role in the movement and made sure that Himachal had social security and all that. Communists have been there in the movement throughout, they're always on the streets. We've witnessed various movements regarding apple farmers, regarding students but still the presence of the communists in the assembly has been limited to one since last assembly elections and there was no candidate before that. So how do you see CPM as an alternative force right now in Himachal? Okay so let me just put this question three phases. The first thing is actually the earlier communists, they were there in the assembly, I think we had six or seven, that was the undivided communist party. So post-64, the biggest loss I think the communists got because of the split in the communist movement and then the new form of the communist movement that you're talking about is like post-1980s. So this is the this is the manifestation of ISPY, so you know the ISPY is formation took place in 1980s and we've been winning the elections in the universities. So you know there's a whole bunch of people coming from that period, be it Singha or be it Kashmir, Thakur, be it President John John and of course many others, I mean not just to name a few. So they still represent that student knack, they've not been able to really and they mean we have not been able to go back to our base and base. It's only recently that some breakthrough has taken place in the farmers movement and also in some of the workers agitation particularly in the hydropower but this is insufficient if you talk about taking Himachal as a whole. Himachal is very wide, Himachal is very diverse. You just go across the state and you come to know the kind of diversity languages so I think the two view left as an alternative right now would be too premature to utopian as well. Yes they have reasons because of the students movement because of ISPY, we are everywhere. This transformation will take a little more time with the way things are precipitating, the way things are unfolding. It's just that I think we as left we have to go back to the people and try to just build movements which are pan state, we're still restricted to building movements limited to particular regions. So we are more of that regional stuff not a state as of now. So it takes some time. So let's now come to your constituency which you are fighting elections for, Shimla, Arban. What are the key issues that you are pinning your hope on? Because as we know Shimla, Arban has been, it's a centre of Himachal politics right now and we've seen water problems here, we've seen road transport problems here, you've been a dipty mayor yourself of the city. So where are your hopes right now vis-à-vis Shimla? See I'm really enjoying this election for the first time and you won't believe Pranjil because Shimla is completely pedestrianised. And if you just look at my watch, so it measures my footsteps. By the end of the day I've finished walking around 24-25 kilometres and this is not a, I'm trudged up and down, you know, climb stairs up. So I'm really enjoying this because of three major reasons. One is there's nothing against us. So people are really fond of us when we visit them. The second thing is that the five years of the BJP triple engineer, the municipal corporation, the MLA who is also the minister and the central government, they have actually put the city on the head instead of putting the city on the feet. I'll try to explain that. And the third thing is that people are also comparing our work when we were in the municipal corporation leading that institution. And the five years.  Whatever you've done, you brought the smart city, you brought that water project, but they were completely, completely messed up this town. And I think the primary reason is why they did so is because we went to the people. So there is no people's interaction, the interface between people and governance was completely missing in the city in the last five years. So actually people's participation was completely missing or completely absent. Also because of the reason, because BJP has a very strong nexus with the contract. So most of the contracts take, for example, the smart city. I was instrumental into writing the smart city. And of course, the financials we worked out, we were one of our former finance secretaries, Mr. Baldy. Then we had one additional commissioner. So three of us actually, we were very instrumental into writing the smart city. And we all always had this impression that water would be the first thing that has to be addressed. But the people said, no, we went back to the people. They said it's mobility. You see, Simla had never seen traffic jams. Now you're starting traffic jam for two hours. And the smart city was to address this. How are we going to address this? Here apart from horizontal mobility, it's vertical mobility, which is extremely important.  And can you believe the smart city was, money was spent on, I think one crow was spent on planting flower pots in the forest. Have ever seen or heard that? You have a forest, a beautiful dense forest, and you plant flower, you know, flower pots there. So they have ridiculed the entire concept. And people are realizing this. At the same time, whatever was been, we were able to do, for example, on solid waste management, we were able to reach out to 99%, 95% to 99% of the houses. They have kind of dismantled that. So that's, that's me. Another thing which, which they have not been able to handle at all is, you know, this was something, I don't know how, how, how, how is it continuing Punjab? But, you know, the whole question of drugs, it's a very major issue in the town. The parents won't come to you. But I have seen, because I've been visiting the houses where mothers talk about their children. They don't want to come in the forefront, but they say, well, what is the future of their children? For the simple reason, many of the young, bright boys and girls have been addicted to that. And in a recent survey, we found out that the major reason, the primary reason for this is unemployment. So it's quite integrated, you know. So, so yeah, when we're going back to the people, I'm enjoying the campaign, but at the same time, it's very frustrating also. Because, you know, the issues that are coming up are really serious. So since we are running short of time, concluding remarks on your seat and overall the Himachal Pradesh elections, why do you think, as you have said this? I think the GDP is going to lose. It's for sure.  And the second thing is which, which people have to realize, they're also angst about the Congress people. You know, they say, even, I mean, the Chief Minister has been openly proclaiming, in fact, it's an admission of their defeat. They're saying that even if you do not win, we will form the government. What does that mean? So, you know, there's certain people who would, I like they've been able to, they've been able to just win over one of the important Congress functionaries recently, Mr. Harsh Majan, who was like an idologue for some of the Congress. Yeah, few people who are my age or my contemporary, you can say. So, it's a very interesting thing. So, we'll have to keep vigil, the people will have to keep vigil, not to elect those people. And I think the left is definitely going to have a better presence. We should jump from one. We were one, definitely we're going to go, we're going to get that seat. But I mean, I can galvanize the mood of the people. They are definitely, they are wanting more because, you know, the five years has seen, I mean, all those, for example, the old pension scheme, which is very important, very major issue here. So, they've seen how the left has fought. And of course, the, the wavering standard, the Congress in 2003, if we just link some of the videos, you'll find the most ardent advocate was Congress. But now Congress is realizing that, you know, this is a very major issue. And that's why in two states, they've already gone ahead, even the Alma de Pati in Punjab. It's a very major issue. So concluding remarks is BJP has to go, it is going. People have to keep vigil that some of the people who get elected shouldn't just jump over, so elect good people. And I think the left is going to definitely increase its strength. Thanks a lot, Tickinder, for giving us your time and we wish you all the best. That was Tickinder Singh Pawar, former deputy mayor of Shimla and a candidate of the CPIM for Shimla Urban Constituency. Keep watching news click for more such interviews and our coverage of Himachal elections. Thank you.


This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. All right, ladies and gentlemen, it is time once again for Mises Weekends. Very pleased to be joined by a friend of ours, Professor Steve Hankey. A lot of you will know he teaches at Johns Hopkins, Frequent Writer for Forbes Magazine, but for our purposes today, he is involved with actually heads up the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Insuit, which is very interesting, giving what's going on in Turkey and Venezuela. So, Professor, great to see you, thank you. Jeff, great to be with you. Well, I'd like to start off with a little bit of background. I know from speaking to you that you knew Hayek, you knew Milton Friedman, you knew Murray Rothbard, you know Ron Paul. Give us a little background on how you came to be involved in economics and Austrian thought. Well, I was involved really from almost the time I could walk in markets because I grew up, I'm an Iowa farm boy and as an Iowa farm boy, you listen with your grandparents, your grandfathers in particular to two radio reports every day. One is the weather report and you listen to the weather report because that influences the quantity of grain that you're going to produce. And you also listen to the price reports and the stock reports from, especially from Chicago and Omaha because that will determine the prices you're gonna receive for the quantities you produce. So supply and demand, you get onto that pretty quickly. And then in addition to that, I became actually fairly sophisticated with derivatives at about age 10 because I was helping one of my grandfathers hedge eggs.  And what they do is candle them, you put them under a light, see if the egg is any good or not, you grade the egg, clean the egg and then you put them in cold storage. Well, the cold storage, they stay there for a while before you ship them back to New York from Iowa. And in that time interval, they're price risk. And so what we would do, depending on where we thought the markets were going, we would sell eggs forward with an egg contract that was on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at the time. This is 65 years ago. So at 65, I was trading derivatives and learned how to hedge with my grandfather.  So all of that would be, plus I had a million jobs and everything else, all that would be illegal today, child labor laws, you couldn't work and obviously couldn't open account and be speculating in soybeans. At any rate, that's the market thing. So markets were just natural. I understood markets, we would take livestock, especially to Omaha, and you'd watch the auctions and you even knew how the auctions worked and so forth and so on. Then I entered university at the University of Colorado in 1960. And the first course I took in economics, the first formal course was taught by Rage El Malak. And it was on European economic history, but he was a great devotee of Schumpeter. So he would trump at Schumpeter literally every lecture. And so technically that's the first time I came in contact with an Austrian economist was in El Malak's course. Then by the time I entered graduate school, I started graduate studies, one of my professors was Fred Glehi, who you know, I'm, he's a friend of Mises Institute and has written several books on Hayek and Austrian economics. So Fred was teaching theory at the time as well as econometrics and I had Fred and he was one of my dissertation advisors actually. So that was a little, also some Austrian and then the other one at the University of Colorado was Ken Bolding was one of my professors and of course Bolding was very, he wasn't an Austrian but he was very familiar and very friendly to Austrian economics. Then if we jump after I received my PhD in 1969, I was actually doing very applied micro systems analysis, doing things like designing water systems and basically figuring out how big the pipe should be for an optimal system or that sort of thing. It's super micro and I had an appointment in the late 1970s at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. And that's located at a Schloss outside of Vienna and Mrs. Hankey and I actually lived and bought in by Veen for about a year. And just being in the environment was the clincher for me. I mean, that was it. And at about that same time, of course, Hayek received his Nobel and I remember we, I don't exactly know how this was arranged but we had the good fortune to have a private dinner at the Maison Blanche Restaurant in Washington, which was a great restaurant at the time. This was about, I think, 1980. And so Hayek got in a very deep conversation of a psychology and philosophy with Mrs. Hankey and finally he stopped and he said you're French but you seem to have kind of a German accent. He said, do you? And she said, well, I suppose I do because half of the family is from Vienna. So he asked the maiden name and Hayek asked if Mrs. Hankey knew so-and-so. And she said, yes, that's my great aunt. And Hayek said the most beautiful and intelligent woman in Vienna. And one of my great flames and apparently the flame was extinguished when he came to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and when he went back, the aunt was married to actually a judge in Vienna and that was the end of that chapter. But we had a great meal. They finally threw us out at midnight from the Maison Blanche. We took Hayek back to the hotel, accompanied him up to his room to make certain everything was okay. He had a little bottle of schnapps next to his bed. He said he always had a shot of schnapps for medicinal purposes before he went to bed. And he did so and we said goodbye. And so we stayed in very good contact obviously ever since then. And then later than that, the last couple of years of his life, the great Austrian economist Habler lived in Washington and Mrs. Hanke and I would always go down at least once a week in FT with him and make certain he was okay. He was in his 90s. Austrians tend to live as you know, pretty long. So fortunately for us, they usually go into their 90s. Well, it's all that hiking and mountaineer I think, but... Well, a schnapps is okay too. Yeah, and the schnapps.  How did you become involved in studying currencies and in particular studying hyperinflation? And had this become a niche for you? Well, this became a niche because in 1985, this is an Austrian connection. I've been a professor here at Johns Hopkins for almost 50 years. And I'm proud to say I was the fastest one to ever be promoted from PhD to full professor. And under the old regime, the old German regime we had at the time. And that is that the only way you could get tenure at Johns Hopkins was to be a full professor or as they used to say, a full bull. So in any case, 1985, I got a call from Dr. Albert Friedberg who you know at the Mises Institute. He's been involved in helping the Mises Institute. Friedberg said he was a very known commodity and currency trader in Toronto and a very Austrian in his orientation. And he'd read a few things that I'd written in barons at the time. And he said, could you come and have lunch in Toronto? And I said, fine, went up and saw him. And by the end of the lunch, I was a chief economist at Friedberg Commodity Management in Toronto and we were trading commodities which was fine. The first big trade we had by the way that I was involved in, I did kind of a plain vanilla analysis and modeling of the oil market and concluded that OPEC would collapse and oil would go below $10 a barrel. So we put every kind of short position on we possibly could, including shorting the Saudi Rial and the Kuwait Dinar. And as you know, OPEC did collapse in 1986 so oil prices actually did go below $10 a barrel. All of our ships came in and I thought, gee, this is easy. This is great. And our positions actually ex post facto we found out were just huge. We had 70% of all a short interest in the gas oil contract in London. So we were really very big players and that gets into the currency. So then we had other big trades which I don't have to bore everyone with it, trade by trade. But in 1995, I was the president of one of our units, Toronto Trust, Argentina and Buenos Aires and that was the best performing fund in the world in 1995. We were up 79 and a quarter percent what was in effect a currency trade because we had one position. This idea of diversifying portfolios is of course completely silly. You can diversify and you have a lot of holes in your basket as they say, but if you know what you're doing you get one big position and you stay with it. Our position was Argentine bonds denominated pesos, 1995, the tequila crisis, everyone said Argentina would collapse and they had a convertibility system that we thought we understood the currency system and so we put everything in that basket and it turned out to be a good one. So that's the start. Now fast forward to the, so I've been trading currencies for, well really since 1985. And still I'm trading currencies actively, but the hyperinflation thing comes into the picture because it is related to currencies because if a currency collapses inflation sores and there have been 58 hyperinflations in world history and all of those involve currency meltdowns become complete destruction of the currency and then the hyperinflation takes off and you say well, how does all this happen? I mean, you know, and it happens very simply as Friedman taught us of course, that everywhere and every place inflation is the result of increases in the money supply. Well, that is true, but there's more to the story and that is well, why does the money supply grow so fast and the money supply grows because in these hyperinflating situations the government spends money. And for one reason or another their financing sources either don't exist or dry up on them and what are the financing sources? You can have taxes and your tax base can dry up on you. For example, when the former Soviet Union collapsed or what happened in the Soviet system there weren't taxes. There was no tax administration at all. And so all these new countries where the government was spending money but they didn't have any tax system. So in the case of Venezuela, the tax system and so you had a lot of hyperinflations around the time the Soviet Union collapsed because no tax revenues. The bond market, there was no bond market in those countries. They didn't have bonds and domestic bonds anyway and international bond market they were cut off from that. They weren't established. So they had no source of revenue there. So you go to the central bank if you're the fiscal authority and you say we've got some great bonds to sell you and the governor of the bank says, yes, I agree. And he basically turns on the printing press literally and you're off to the races. And as you do that as the inflation starts going up the tax base, if you have one starts disappearing in real terms on you because inflation is going up and you have something called the Tansy effect.  So the Tansy effect works like this. If inflation is going roaring away and going up and up and into triple digits and your tax bill comes in December but it isn't payable until April by the time the government gets your money it's not worth very much. So the tax base shrinks and the bond market shrinking and you just keep going back to the central bank for more and more and more and the thing takes off. In the meantime, of course, people's expectations people are rational and they expect the currency to collapse because it's losing purchasing power. So they get rid of the local currency and in the case of Venezuela, the boulevard is a hot potato and what do you do? You either buy commodities but of course, Venezuela is fundamentally a socialist operation and there are no commodities to buy because everything's under price controls. So you can't buy many, not much sugar to find the shelves are empty.  I noticed and observed very carefully the hyperinflation in Yugoslavia because in 1990, I actually was the chief advisor for the new Markovic government that was gonna throw out socialism and reform the economy, it never happened because Milosevic took over the socialist the old communists took back over and what happened hyperinflation and at the end in January of 1994 the hyperinflation had reached 313 million percent in one month, in one month. I mean, this is just unreal. But if you look at the model, of course the money supply was going up but the real engine of the thing was this huge fiscal deficit in which the central bank was supplying 95% of the finance for government expenditures was coming from the central bank. The taxes base was completely gone there was no bond market and so that was a story there and it's a story with every one of these hyperinflations. If there was a hard budget constraint on government expenditures it becomes softer and softer and finally it just completely disappears and there you are, you're kind of in the soup. So that's the long and the short of it. The real innovation, Jeff, that I came across is using purchasing power parity to be able to translate changes in the exchange rate into changes in the inflation rate. And you can measure it once you get into hyperinflation it's just one to one. It's a perfect, absolutely perfect correlation because the economy in a hyperinflating situation like Venezuela, it is dollarized already. The unit of account is the US dollar. Everything in Venezuela is calculated in the dollar. So you get a little movement in the Bolivar dollar exchange rate that's translated right away into the overall inflation. And so that's the kind of insight that I had. It's an old theory purchasing power parity but the way it's usually used is to look at inflation differentials and try to predict what's gonna happen to the exchange rate. Now I've reversed it. I look at what happens in the exchange rate to see what the inflation rate is. And in hyperinflation, actually you can do it and you can measure things very accurately.  Of course, we all know that but one thing they're doing they're claiming that they can forecast where hyperinflation is going to be at the end of the year. Well, you can't forecast the course and duration of a hyperinflation. It's totally impossible. So they have no forecasting model.  So the reporters are like stenographers. They report whatever the IMF says, they report it and you will find that now about Manzawa all the time. And actually I can tell you today the inflation rate is 65,320%. Wow. I measure it every day and I know exactly what it is. And that, by the way, is a basket of everything. It's just not consumer goods but all consumer goods, all services, all assets, anything that moves is included in my agriculture basket. Well, one thing I'd like to mention about Turkey and we see this all the time I wouldn't really call Turkey an emerging country with 70 or 80 million people but nonetheless, we see this time and time again in that the Turkish government borrows in dollars and euro and it can only produce lira to pay against that borrowing. So there's sort of a whipsaw effect there. They owe money in a currency they can't print. Yes, that's the knob of the problem. And that's fine if your currency was stable. Let's say that's fine for some place like Bulgaria where I put a currency board in in 1997 to stop, by the way, hyperinflation. Now, that's a good example, Jeff, of a hyperinflation eyewitness because I was president Stoyanov's advisor in 1997 and hyperinflation was running at 242% per month, per month, not per year, per month. And so the question is, what do you do? And I said, you make the lev, which was the currency, a clone of the Deutschmark. Now, how do you do that? What's that? How's that trick work? You do a currency board operation. You set up a currency board law and that means you can issue the lav, but the lav have to be back to 100% with Deutschmark reserves and the lav has to trade at an absolutely fixed exchange rate with the Deutschmark. So a lot of Austrians get this completely mixed up. They think, oh, a fixed exchange rate. That's like price controls. That's a disaster, that's a bad thing. No, it isn't at all. The supply curve under that arrangement with the lav is the lav is completely elastic in the old days at a fixed exchange rate with the Deutschmark. Since then, of course, it's with the Euro. So you have a completely elastic horizontal supply curve and the demand curve moves. The demand curve is the demand curve for lav. So the quantity of lav in circulation is dependent on the demand for lav at that fixed price and it's freely convertible, totally free market. And what happened? We put that in in July 1, 1997, hyperinflation was crushed within hours. And of course, when you start out, the interest rate in lav-denominated assets is a lot higher than Deutschmark assets. So the demand for lav does what? It explodes. Everyone wants lav. So they take their marks in an exchange room for lav to arbitrage and go from a low interest rate yielding currency into a high one and eventually what happens? Of course, the interest rates in Germany and Bulgaria on a risk-adjusted basis come down and are about the same. Now, it's back to Jeff's question, which is a critical one. Bulgaria can borrow in euros without any of this kind of risk. They don't, by the way, because they have a very hard budget constraint. They can't go to the central bank and say, turn on the printing press. The only way they could do that is if they took euro reserves in there to exchange for a lav, you see. So there's a totally hard budget constraint. The deficit, the fiscal deficit is very small. They don't borrow very much. The debt's very small and so forth. But if they did, they wouldn't have any problems. They wouldn't run this currency risk that you're alluding to, Jeff, because the lav is a clone of the euro. Well, the lira is not a clone of anything. It's not attached to anything and it's completely disintegrated in 1994. It completely disintegrated in 2000. It is essentially completely, almost completely disintegrated in 2018. And under that situation, if your revenue and funding sources are in lira and your liabilities are all in dollars, the mountain of debt is in the financing obligations are huge on you. And so this crush will come into play and there will be many firms and organizations in Turkey that go to the wall because of the debt and because of the government's mismanage of the currency. So I've recommended all the time that the, and most recently, I've recommended mainly for political reasons, they should have a gold-backed currency board system. So should Iran, so should Russia. They should all introduce, they should keep their local currencies for nationalistic reasons. They wanna do that. So you'd still have a ruble, a lira and a reale, but all those would be backed 100% with gold. They traded a fixed exchange rate with gold. They'd be freely convertible into gold and you'd have a gold block of Turkey, Iran and Russia. I've just written about this. I think it's the only way for them to good is to stabilize their currencies. All those currencies have been half-baked, never attached to anything historically. Oddly enough, in Russia, they actually have had a currency board before and it was introduced in 1918 and who designed it, John Maynard Keynes, actually. And so Keynes was a treasury official at the time. No one knew that Kurt Schuler and I dug this thing up. It isn't even in any of Keynes's works, but we found in the archives, he is the guy who did it. And the white Russians at the time wanted to stable ruble or about 2,000 rubles circulating at that time in the Civil War issued by various entities, all private as well as a government. They weren't worth much. They weren't backed by anything. They weren't redeemable into anything. So Keynes said, we'll set up a ruble currency board in North Russia and the North Russian currency board, ruble will be redeemable into pound sterling and back 100% with pound sterling reserves. The thing worked beautifully. The war ended and they still were redeeming in London those rubles, everyone got paid. The ruble was as good as sterling and what I'm suggesting for Iran, Turkey and Russia, they should make their currencies as good as gold and we should have a gold block again and in short, they should go on the gold standard. Why do you think someone like an Erdogan or a Maduro is it simply hubris and ego that prevents them from doing this? Is it a lack of historical knowledge? Is it something darker? I think it's, well, I think it's a lack of historical knowledge for one thing, there probably is some hubris and I think, I can't speak about Russia exactly right now but I know in Iran and I know Venezuela very well because I was President Caldera's advisor in 1995 and 1996 the incompetence is just beyond belief. So there's a lot of just pure ignorance. They don't actually know about how they would do one of these things and when you look at someplace like Bulgaria, I mean, I can tell you, I fixed the thing in hours. We're talking about hours, we're not talking about even weeks because people are rational and people change their expectations almost instantly. If you come up with a credible system that they can understand and you can understand something like a currency board system. But when we look at Turkey, we see a lot of foreign bank debt just as we did in Greece a few years ago just as we did in Iceland. Should those foreign banks be prepared to take a haircut? Isn't that the proper resolution to their loaning money to what appears to be a profligate government in Turkey? Oh, that's what's going to happen. I mean, whenever you get into these unsustainable debt burden situations, Jeff, and many people don't realize this or maybe they realize it, just don't say it, you're bound to be talking about haircuts. I mean, there are gonna be losses involved. And if there aren't losses involved, you'll be struggling under a mountain of old debt that they keep you buried forever and you'll never recover. That's why, by the way, in Greece, they really haven't taken sufficient haircuts. Point number one, point number two, the property rights system and judicial system is a complete disaster in Greece. And until they learn that the magic of private property rights, they are never gonna recover. Most people don't realize that Greece is a Balkan country. It's in Europe, but it's in the Balkans. And this is Balkan history.  I mean, any Austrian would know this because of course the Balkans were part of the empire for a while or at least part of them. We're talking about Austria and Turkey. The Balkans were part of either the Austrian empire or the Ottoman Empire. So that history is relevant. And if you read Mises, by the way, he has a lot of interesting things to say about the Balkans in terms of cultural history and things like that, as well as economics, of course. Speaking of debt, let's talk about the dollar a little bit. What, I know you really look at dollar euro and I know you really look at dollar gold. What worries you about the dollar? What keeps you up at night? Well, not the same things. I don't think that a lot of my Austrian friends are kind of the apocalypse coming down the road or the chicken little types. But if you look at that, I'm not that type of Austrian. When it comes to the US dollar, when it comes to a lot of these half big emerging market country currencies, yes, it's fairly clear. But the US dollar, I'm not quite there and many Austrians, for example, were fanning this story that we would have hyperinflation in the United States as the Fed exploded its balance sheet after the Great Recession started in 2009. I knew this was just utter nonsense and they didn't understand what they were talking about because what happened after the crisis, without going into a lot of detail, you had the Dodd-Frank and regulation of banks and you have to look for economic activity as driven by the quantity of broad money in the economy that's circulating. Money dominates and broad money is what you wanna measure. So the best measure is I think the DeVizia M4 measure that's put out by the Center for Financial Stability in New York, Professor Barnett is the guru on this and does all the calculations and so forth. So DeVizia M4, you wanna keep looking at that and the big contributors to DeVizia M4, the elephant in the room, it's commercial banks. Private banks create most of the money in the United States. The Fed is peanuts and at the time the crisis started, the Fed was producing about 10% of DeVizia M4. So they weren't producing very much and then you had Dodd-Frank and all the, the Basel three capital requirements being increased and that really put a squeeze on private banks and private credit and the private credit and private money contribution actually started declining. It was going down. So if the Fed hadn't have come in with QE, with quantitative easing, we would have had another great depression in the United States. So the step is the first thing that happened that was very pro cyclical, just what you shouldn't have done, they laid all kinds of bank regulations and capital requirements on private banks and commercial banks. So 90% of our money supply, the contribution to our money supply was under massive pressure with all these bank regulations and so forth. So the Fed in fact did the right thing. They came in with quantitative easing and if they hadn't come in, we would have been absolutely buried in a huge, great depression. Now, many Austrians interpreted it. They looked only at the Fed, only at the Fed. The Fed are the bad guys of course, but the Fed are the bad guys. They are the bad guys, but in this case, they looked at the Fed balance sheet and they said, we are going to have hyperinflation and we didn't have, we had deflationary environment. We're still in a deflationary environment in the United States, prices aren't going up. We've never had hyperinflation. The reason why bank money, by the way, in 1930, the best book Keynes ever wrote was the treatise at least according to Milton Friedman and according to me and many others. And in the treatise, Keynes separated bank money and state money and state money is produced by central banks and bank money is produced by commercial banks. And state money is always tiny and bank money is always huge. Bank money was 90% of the money supply in 2009. And now, bank money accounts for 80%, meaning that the state money is grown as a proportion from 10% to about 20% now due to QE. But at any rate, QE basically saved us. It creates all kinds of distortions and all kinds of other problems are associated with it. But that's more or less the story up to today. Right, but I mean, just on a tangent here, we look at QE, we look at the Fed's balance sheet and it takes almost 100 years to get to 800 billion then it goes from 800 billion to 4 trillion in less than a decade. And I think people look at that and say, what does that all do? It's just sitting there parked as bank reserves and now it's slowly being bled off through tapering. But what does it mean? Where does it go? What is its effect? Let's get to today then. So I had to take many of the doomsters and my Austrian friends to the woodshed, which I just did. But let's not go to today. You said, we started Jeff by allowing me to go off in this tangent, which I appreciate that. Keeping me on a long leash today. You said, well, what worries you about the dollar today? And here's what worries me. And here's the problem you create. It's a cascade of government created problems. The first thing that kicked it off, of course, was we had a great recession. That was actually caused by the Fed, which we don't have to go back and revisit that. That was caused by a mistake at the Fed. Okay, then we have the great recession start. Then bank regulations. That's something caused by the government. That causes a problem. It's very pro cyclical. And any principles of economic student knows you wanna be counter cyclical if you do anything. You don't wanna be pro cyclical. So then the Fed comes in and they try to mitigate the damage that the bank regulations are doing and they put on QE. And then now, today, as you said, they're unwinding this massive balance sheet. And this is a tricky situation. And as a result, we have very tight monetary policy right now. And we know it's tight because the Vizia M4 is only growing at about 4.7% per year, which it isn't super slow, it's modest though. That's nominal growth, nominal growth. So let's say the economy is growing at 4%. If the economy is growing at 4%, you subtract the four from the 4.7 and you've got inflation of less than 1%. You got very low inflation. So that's one signal. That's looking at quantities. That's a Milton Friedman kind of, let's look at our cues, the quantities of money. 4.7% growth. If you look at Bob Mandel and the supply ciders, which I tend to pay a lot of attention to, if you look at prices, and you look first at the most important price in the world is the dollar euro rate. And my comfort zone for that is about 120 to 140. And now it's about 116. It's the dollar is very strong. It's outside the zone, dollar strength. Then you look at another very important international prices, gold. And my comfort zone is about 1200 to $1,400 an ounce. And it's trading now. It's been a little below 1200. It's just popped $20 this morning and it's over $1,200 an ounce right now. So that also suggests tightness. Everything is very tight. And then you throw in your thing with the, well, what's happening in emerging market countries. You've had a lot of these currencies. All the capital is coming out of the emerging market countries now because when the dollar gets very strong, the emerging market currencies tend to get very weak and capital flows come out of those emerging market countries. So we have a very destabilized kind of situation. It looks kind of calm on the surface. And we got a big bull market and the US stock market and et cetera, but there are things going on. We've had the Argentine peso lose 38% of its value this year. Turkish lira lost 38% of its value.  Chile has even lost a lot of value. So all these places where you're losing value, you've got this exposure that you've alluded to and that is a mountain of debt. Debt denominated in dollars, but you have to generate first the Chilean pesos and then exchange those for dollars at a bad exchange rate to pay off the debt that you accumulated in dollars. So I'm a little bit nervous about the markets right now. Are you nervous about interest rates? Historically, Fed funds rate has been more in the five to 10% range. You think we'll ever see that? And again, and what would it mean? Well, it would mean that the emerging market countries are not the place to be. That's one thing. Because when we had QE on and interest rates were essentially zero in the United States, everyone was chasing yield. And you see Roger Garrison's work fits into all of this. What happens when you have QE? Of course, it mitigates having a great depression but it creates all kinds of distortions. And one is the interest rate is almost zero. So everyone wants to chase yield. You're trying to find yield and you're leveraging, you're doing massive leverage and the combination of those things, you get a lot of over-investment. So you look at Garrison's books and you can figure this out, his stuff's, I think the clearest thing on these issues. So you start over-investing. You over-invest in long-term capital kind of projects and you go into risky and markets. You go into emerging markets, you put a risk on. It's risk on, they call it. And now with the dollar getting stronger and the interest rates going up in the US, you get everyone unwinding the carry trade, everyone starting to deleverage and risk off is what you're seeing. And so risk off, you get into less risky assets. So all these distortions, and this is of course a beauty of Austrian economics, the emphasis is on these distortions. I just wish younger Austrians as well as older ones for that matter would pay actually more attention to actual real markets because it's all in the markets and if you're trading the markets, it's just so natural Austrian that you don't even think about it.  You just know it. And if you do go to the treat us, you will find it. Run out of time, gotta ask you a final question that relates to all of this and certainly relates to the dollar. Give us your thoughts about US debt and entitlements in the future. What does that mean? Certainly the dollar's very strong right now looking strong as other currencies wobble. But should we worry about the debt? Should we worry about deficits? Should we worry about Trump? And most of all, should we worry about entitlement promises for the future? Well, I don't stay up too late at night worrying about that. I mean, it's coming. If you're trading, that's another thing. I mean, you do have a time horizon and it's not 30 years. Now, I realize expectations come into play and can make 30 years come back to haunt you today if you're trading in a market and something is happening to you with unfunded liabilities coming up. So overall, not too much worried. Entitlement's totally worried. All these things are bankrupt and will never be paid. So just forget entitlements.  So they'll play all kinds of games, band-aids here, band-aids there and so forth. But the reality is none of it's ever going to be paid. And the only way to solve the biggest entitlement are one of them. Now there are others that have gotten huge. Social security, really, you have to have a private social security system. If you look, for example, it is mandated but the social security system in Chile, of course, is the model. I mean, that is a real private social security system that has done extremely well. Designed by our friend Jose Panera and does beautifully. There's another one that is interesting and that is after Singapore became independent in 1965, Lee Kuan Yew, they put in a, it is a private end quotes system. It's a self-financed system. You're mandated to put so much money in but you own the money that's in there and their returns. And actually that fund and the wealth fund that they have in Singapore, it's one of the biggest sources of revenue for the government. It finances government expenditures. So we have to get away from these pay-as-you-go kind of systems that everyone knows they're phony and they're bound to break the bank. And this is one reason, by the way, that a lot of the left-wing politicians want open borders with massive uncontrolled immigration is to finance these systems as a popular, as the demographics naturally are tilting towards older and older, more aged populations. It puts tremendous strain on these pay-as-you-go systems because they don't have enough young serfs working the system to pay for them. I mean, it is a form of serfdom actually but they want to import serfs and they don't want any control over the borders and they just want warm bodies to generate as much as many contributions to these unfunded liability programs that the government has. So that gets into a whole nother set of discussions that we might have but you did mention the word Trump in that laundry list of things of what are you worried about? And Trump, I'm very worried about Trump because he's got two things that he's doing. He's blasting off sanctions as if they're misguided or unguided missiles every day. Now, this is a potential vulnerability spot for the US dollar because the US dollar, all commodities are priced in dollars internationally, all payment systems are running dollars or dollar denominated. But what happens if people lose confidence in using the dollar and the dollar payment systems because their financial sanctions being imposed on God only knows who tomorrow. So sanctions are equivalent to tariffs. There are interferences with voluntary exchange and Trump is very keen on both sanctions and tariffs and a whole array of protectionist kind of trade policies. This is, we could do another whole show on this, but this is very, very worrying actually. This is an immediate worry. The unfunded liabilities are an intermediate worry. The overall aggregate debt is kind of way off in the future, not worrying me very much. I mean, I don't like it but because it's a form of a lying price. You see, if you don't charge somebody now for what you're giving them or what they're consuming or what they're demanding for you and you're requiring yourself to go into debt to be able to finance whatever you're giving them, you're giving them a lying price. That's why I like balanced budgets. If the government wants to spend, fine, force them to balance a budget and force them to go to the people and say, oh, if you want this, we're gonna increase your taxes to pay for it. And we don't do that now, we just go into debt. So everything supplied by the government is kind of a lying price. We think we're getting something at a fairly low price but the government's not telling, oh, we've had to have a huge accumulation of debt to finance what we're giving you today.   Governments, if they wanna do things, they should charge full price, full cost upfront and let people decide then. And my view is people will decide to put a thumbs down on a lot of government activity if that was the case. Well, amen to that. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wanna know more about Professor Steve Hankey, you can find him on Twitter. He's got 80,000 Twitter followers and a very active Twitter account. He's on a lot of the talking head shows. You can follow him at Steve underscore Hankey, H-A-N-K-E. Professor, thanks so much for your time. Great talking to you. Yeah, great talking to you. Yeah. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.


The third part you need to talk about on your resume is achievement. Specifically, let me define what I mean by achievement. There are three types of achievement you need to talk about on your resume. The first is stakeholder improvement and second customer satisfaction. And third is the organizational improvement. What I mean is that stakeholder improvement, how much more money did you make for your stakeholders? How much money have you saved for the company? What kind of things you have done lead to those achievements? And the second about the customer satisfaction is about how many more customers, millions of customers have used your product. And their feedback or their review is five out of five, things like this. And third is about organizational improvement means you may help help your company or your client to improve the efficiency of operations or selling product. Those are all great achievements you need to put into your resume.


Okay, we have testimony, oh it's posted. There's an individual who had requested to testify. We offered that he come to the public hearing or stand written testimony. So now the wires got crossed. So he's on the phone today because he... So, yeah. It is Norman Smith who I have to ask him when he comes up on our database. He speaks for the Vermont Ethical Health Care Alliance. He's the general speaker of the committee. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith, can you hear me? Yeah, he's breaking up. Okay, well that's all right. I can break up. You're not breaking up at all. But I do, as I said to the committee, we seem to have had a mixed communication or mixed signals because I understand that you had gotten an invitation to submit something in writing prior to this or to come to the public hearing. I didn't know that so I sent you the email today and I'm glad that you can testify right now and around the room, 10 of the 11 members of the committee are here right now. And then as I understand you've testified downstairs in Senate. Yes, I did. In Senate Health and Welfare so you know that there are interested parties as well listening. So Mr. Smith, if you could start your testimony. We'll let you go through it and as you do that if you could identify yourself. On our database you are speaking for the Vermont ethical health care alliance. Yeah, sort of, and also personally. Okay. Okay, so Madam Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for allowing me to testify regarding the proposal by declaration of rights and personal resources. My name is Norman Smith. I was born and raised in St. John'sbury graduating from St. John'sbury Academy in 1973. I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduating in 1977 with a bad school degree in urban studies and climate. I then studied law at the college university who was law graduating in 1980. I flirted in 1981 for Albert W. Barney Jr. the then Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. I now serve on the Vermont Supreme Court's probate court oversight committee and the probate court rules committee. I am a full practitioner and as a junction where much of my practice focuses on probate wills, trust, hours of attorney, and advanced directives. I helped serve many elderly that disabled clients over the years. I have managed to finance with several elderly clients that no one could help. I have served as a court-pointed guardian for several years. Proposal five stated purpose is to protect personal reproductive autonomy. The proposed amendment, however, does not define personal reproductive testimony. What personal reproductive autonomy means therefore will not be determined by the people of Vermont through their legislature rather it will be defined by the Vermont Supreme Court. Reproductive rights may well change over time. Reproductive rights are not limited to abortion. They could include the following. Human cloning for reproductive purposes, gestational, just, seriguously trafficking achieved by in vitro fertilization and then followed by human embryo transfer and after the birth the handing over of born human child in exchange for payment. Trafficking in humans, it could also result in trafficking in human embryo creation, the creation of the human embryo by in vitro fertilization and the substance failure trade of such human embryos for implantation in another woman's womb for the purposes of reproduction. It could result, it could include designer babies, the creation of designer embryos using gene editing techniques and the implantation and birthing of such genetically modified human beings. Additionally, the word autonomy is not defined in the proposal. This could raise several issues included would the autonomy include the right, would the autonomy right under such criminal prohibitions related to age of consent or sexual assault if a minor girl starts to become pregnant with the assistance of a man over the age of 18? Would a minor girl's rights to personal reproductive autonomy be infringed if such a man were prosecuted for sexual contact with a minor? Proposal five may also require a state's funding of any of the above treatments. The over-broad language of proposal five might be used to argue that economically disadvantaged people have a constitutional right to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, gestational courtesy, brain care embryos or any other reproductive technology and that the state most of the duties subsidize or fund these practices. The state is already required to pay for abortions for those who qualify as a result of a Vermont court decision based upon Vermont's constitution. This is doubly troubling because we cannot predict what future reproductive technologies may be developed. This amendment would lead it to the Vermont different court, not the legislature to make that policy decision about these issues. The proposal requires a compelling state interest in order to allow regulation. I have not been able to find a clear test for what constitutes a compelling state interest. It would appear in the case that I have reviewed that it is simply the court which determines whether regulation has a compelling state interest. So the proposal again leads it up to the Vermont Supreme Court to determine whether a regulation has a compelling state interest. By requiring the state standard, the legislature is giving up its ability to regulate reproductive technologies that may be created in the future. The case does not appear to provide a clear test for what a least restrictive means might be and in cases I have reviewed the court simply makes a determination based upon his judgment of the fact in the case. Again, this proposal leads it to the Vermont Supreme Court to determine whether regulation accomplishes its goals through a least restrictive means. In closing, proposal five is still open ended in day that many unintended consequences will result rather than a legislature that Vermont Supreme Court will make many policy decisions with respect to reproductive rights. I urge the committee and the House to reject this adoption. And I'm happy to take any questions that the committee members have. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Committee, questions. Mr. Smith, thank you very much. Thank you for your testimony. It is now on our website for us to review again and for others to review who are looking for it. Thank you for your time. Thank you for allowing me to test. Absolutely. Have a good day, everyone. You too. Have a nice day. The other testimony that I would like to read and Julie is now posted. I received a communication from UVM and C about their statement which they have shared with their staff on Wednesday or Thursday. I believe that UVM and C will have to be refreshed. At the University of Vermont Health Network, decisions about reproductive health, including abortion, are the concern of the patient and their provider. As is the case with all medical care. We support state laws, including a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights. This includes the right to contraception and to save legal abortion. We also support the right of individual health care providers to elect to not participate in abortion procedures. I thought it was important for this committee to see this statement if you recall during our discussion of age 57, we had individual physicians speaking, individual health care providers speaking on behalf of themselves or the professional organization. I thought that was important for people to have that as well. During I guess I'm just liking it being kind of safe. Certainly. In terms of some of the comments that were just made by Mr. Smith in terms of what would be definitely allowed under proposition 5, I wanted to to get your some of your feedback on that. Sure. We've already talked a bunch and people have had different views on whether things are clear in terms of language. Sure. So I'm just saying this but I'd be glad to comment on certainly I have not seen it before but I'm glad to provide some comments on at least some of it. So for the record, from legislative council I think the committee has talked about the word autonomy. That's a word that can be found in the dictionary. It means the right to self-govern to make decisions about one's self. The question of would this autonomy somehow prohibit criminal prosecution for a person who commits statutory rape, I would say the answer to that is the state has a compelling interest in prohibiting sex with a minor and proposition 5, the wording of article 22 is not going to somehow override our statutory rape clause and I would just emphasize for the committee that that's a good example of what compelling state interest is the state interest in prohibiting sex with a minor. We can have Madam Chair, we can have five lawyers sit in that chair and say five different things. That's why I wanted to get a judge here I'm just going to make that point again because that's who's going to make the decision with this passage. And no disrespect anyway. So comment what the judge is going to say is that a judge can't comment without the specific facts specific to the situation that there's not a cookie cutter for the criteria and so we could give them a hypothetical and they wouldn't be able to answer that Well, they'd be able to give you a decision based on the language I mean that's, this is my opinion. And I'm just sharing my opinion. Yeah. Other questions for Bryn so we can get her, I mean otherwise we can have a discussion and I would entertain we have other questions for Bryn. Bryn, thank you. Thank you. Can you put, I'm sorry ask what we are I will now share that we don't move Proposition 5 out of the committee. Second.  Yes. Discussion. The reason that I move in the way I did is because I've said from the beginning when this first hand to us that the way it's written there are, it was interesting when I read this here too there are too many unintended consequences that in my mind come out of this and I've mentioned a couple of them and there's some more here and that's why I'm doing this I think it's going to do more harm and we have a bill that we pass in this committee and on the floor that is being worked on that is My major concern with this proposition going forward is the implication it would have on potential life not just potential life but the life of a viable human being at 20, 26 weeks in the future and I have a feeling there should be more and more emphasis placed on the fact that this is a living human being and should have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and this proposition would further complicate laws going forward to protect the life of a viable human being and for that reason I with the topper I'm opposing this proposition going forward I will be opposing your motion because I support moving proposition 5 forward and I support it because personally I support this and I believe that similar to the statement that I just read from the health network which I just got an e-mail it took so long because it's seven different boards so it wasn't just three people but that reproduced the decisions about reproduction that is made to an individual and their physician and then I supported the law that we had before my other reason for supporting this is the ultimate outcome of this process is this brings it to the people of Vermont so if I am wrong if I am in the minority of the people of Vermont they will speak and I think that I believe that on something as important as this that the people of Vermont deserve the ability to to say whether or not they believe that personal reproductive autonomy is a fundamental value to be in there I'll just quickly say that I agree with Madam Chair on both of those points I also just agree that the individual and their physician should have the right to make decisions about their health care in general should be between the person and their physician and that whether or not they're a female I think that's important and I also really do really supportive of bringing this to the people there are a lot of things we decide here that there's this little piece of me that wishes that we could bring more to the people to tell us how they feel about a position that is difficult where we really argue and talk for a long time on the floor and we all know that isn't very many things but every once in a while there is one that goes on and you do want to hear from the people that's what a lot of us do surveys and things like that so I'm really interested in this and I feel good I agree with you and you I do believe it should go to the people I agree with Carl on the issue and Topper on the issue that I find it distressing that the issue there's no willingness to differentiate between viable and unwed and so that's why I personally wouldn't choose to have abortion because of my religious beliefs and I absolutely support this as a right for women and I don't feel I have the right to determine for everyone else what the lay of the land is I am petrified with what is happening in this country around the rights of women and their ability even since we passed age 57 what has happened since then in terms of eroding the rights and I absolutely feel like this is an essential thing that we have to bring to the people for them to speak I will absolutely be supporting this I feel similarly to what you just said Miradeth and there's probably in the time that I've been here I haven't received much more email than about this particular subject though last year probably it's an exception and I feel like people are the opportunity to be heard and as you were saying Jessica it is rare that we have the opportunity for people to be heard since we're not a public referendum state and so I feel like the final word would be with the people in the state so I would be supporting or not supporting the motion I have another statement and reading the university the one health network I noticed that they leave out the part that I brought up before about if they refuse to have an abortion they are going against what this constitutional amendment says they are can you clarify it can clarify it's right up there it says it's centered to the liberty and dignity to determine one's own life of course and shall not be denied or infringed upon if the universe if the doctors or that group of people that make the decisions about late term abortions after 24 weeks if they decide that the abortion is not going to take place they are infringing upon the woman's right to have that abortion and I'm surprised they didn't deal with that the except UBM I agree with principle but UBM is not the state so this would be doesn't matter to me what they are they are performing the abortion there could be planned parenthood as an example if they refuse a woman they are going against the woman's right what's trying to be done here is to have personal reproductive autonomy going against that Tapper I think you are I'm not trying to persuade you to change your mind I believe that you are misinterpreting and I would ask misinterpreting this statement and I would ask either maybe you could help so as the committee heard yesterday I think this might be just sort of a fundamental misunderstanding about what the constitution does and the constitution as you heard yesterday from the attorney general's office acts as a check on state power so adding article 22 to Vermont's constitution would provide a specific check on state power from interfering with the right to reproductive autonomy so it wouldn't have an effect on a private institution a medical facility of individual it's about what the state how the state can interfere with the fundamental right to reproductive autonomy I guess I got to make another statement just so everyone knows how I feel when the attorney general when the two people came in here yesterday I was disturbed personally that they talked about supporting this because that's not what they're supposed to do they're supposed to come in here and talk to us about the law so I might as well get that off my chest too I still say we should have had a judge count we could have set it up so that they weren't going to be a judge that would be making any decisions could have been a retired judge just to get an idea of interpretation that's my big hang up there's too many unintended consequences here for me and I voted by the way for the bill that still isn't out of that Senate the motion is to not support not to move article 22 out of committee so a yes vote means this article goes no further and stays in committee a no vote will move this article to the floor or the legis or the house to decide whether it takes the next step so begin to call the vote representative fond so a yes vote means a yes vote is in support of the motion that you made I made yes to keep it here representative Haas representative Brunstead no representative Rosenquist yes representative Redmond no representative Paella no representative Gregoire yes representative Noys no representative Wood no sales of a eight to eight I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I'm sure but we approve the second motion I'm move to approve proposal five the Quirk show begin to call the roll representative fond no representative Haas representative Brumstead represent Rosenquist. No. Represent Redmond. Yes. Represent Nicole. Yes. Represent Paella. Yes. Represent Brighard. No. Represent Noyes. Yes. Represent Wood. Yes. Represent Pugh. Yes. Motion to move, perhaps if we find that committee has us on eight to three. Thank you committee for reminding us all of the constitutional process or steps that we have to take. It will be on notice on Tuesday and it will be on notice. It has to be on notice for four legislative days. So it will be on notice all next week and it will not come up for action until the following Tuesday. So does that mean that there will be full debate on Tuesday, like on the bill that we did as well? Yeah, just on the constitution. I just said that. Does that mean that following Tuesday when it comes off of notice, do we have a full out debate? We will have, yes. So if there is a full debate on the Tuesday after whatever day that is. So next week it's the whole week it's on notice? Correct. The whole week. Four days. And then the next Tuesday. And the next Tuesday I will be reporting it on the floor of the house and there will be no debate. And there will be. I think maybe there won't be, but there may be debate. But there can't be any amendments. So it may be, I mean I don't know, it may be more statements that people are making as opposed to, since an amendment, I don't know whether the speaker will say non-Germain or whether the speaker will say sorry can't do it. There's probably some fancy words to say about that. And I believe it is a one-day vote. It's a one-day, it's not a. It's not a, it's a one-day up and down. And it is a majority vote. A majority of members. A majority of members. So there needs to be 76. Positive vote. Correct. Madam Chair. Yeah. I can't remember. Does the purpose, when it goes out to the public, does the purpose go with it? No. Just think. When it goes out, the only thing that will go out will be below that. True. And then I would just want you to. So after just the Tuesday after that. Yeah. 76 votes. Next year, nothing year after. Correct. Correct. Do we have to debate or have a committee next year? No. In the following legislation. Oh, that's right. Okay. The final legislation, the Senate will, the process. Read the book. The Senate doesn't, this is not, again it is not a change the language. It is, here's the language. Yes or no in the Senate. Here's the language. I mean, and if the Senate says yes, comes to the house, here's the language. Public hearing. Public hearing. Get into the public hearing. Another one. And then if the House were to vote, yes. The next legislative, the next legislative session, it goes to the votes. The only difference in the Senate, if I understand it, is instead of two-thirds votes today would be the majority. In the second year. Yes.