Welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist. And this weekend, this is a first for us. We're actually trying the show live. We're finishing up a week of Mises University here at our campus in Auburn, Alabama. We've had about 180 kids, young people in our building. This week has been a great experience. And Lou, I have to say, did you ever imagine that you would someday be sitting here talking about the 30th year of Mises University? Well, I hope so. All right, so yeah, and it's, of course, great. And great to be on the show. Great to have this wonderful audience. And let's go. Well, we had a tremendous talk earlier this week from Dr. Gary North about some of the travails of Ludwig Gunn-Mises, the person for whom this organization is named. But I'd like to talk a little bit about his wife, Margaret, whom you knew for many, many years and had a long relationship. She lived, I believe, to be 99 or 100. Could you talk a little bit about Margaret? Well, when I first determined that I wanted to start the Mises Institute, and I had known Mises and Margaret some years before that, when I had the great experience of having publishing entrepreneur Neil McAfrey of Arlington as publishers in the conservative book club. And at that time, the only publisher and distributor of libertarian and conservative books. And the grandfather of Matt McAfrey, who was a former Mises fellow and teaches at the University of Manchester, called me into his office and he said, how'd you like to be Ludwig Gunn-Mises' editor? I was 23 and, of course, I was one of the great things, one of the great questions I was ever asked. And so this was bringing back into print eminent government bureaucracy and theory and history and also the new publication of his monograph, The Historical Setting of the Austrian School. So I was able to have dinner with Margaret and Ludwig Gunn-Mises. And before I mentioned what a great lady Margaret was, Mises was exactly what you might expect. Murray Rothbard called him a European gentleman out of an older and better era. And he was beautiful manors, very dignified, very charming, very welcoming, just tremendous. Margaret, as Gary pointed out, was a former actress, also a playwright, play translator, very big deal in the Austrian, Austro-Hungarian world of theater of those days. And all her life that I knew her was recognizably as an actress. I mean, she just had a great presence, and that's what I mean by that. And I had some dealings with her in bringing these books back into print more so than with Mises. So some years later, when I was working at the Law and Economic Center at Emory University where I would become concerned that Mises' reputation and the influence of the Austrian school was diminishing since the years of his death. And I thought, it's probably luck that I was working at a place where that sort of place. And I thought, well, I could do this. So Margaret was the first person I talked to. And I took her to her favorite restaurant in New York City, which was the Russian tea room, a fabulous place. And I told her about what I wanted to do. And I asked her blessing. And I asked if she'd be the first chairwoman of the Institute. And that was the word she wanted used. She didn't like the idea of it, which was just coming into vogue at that time, the idea of calling her the chair. She thought that was insulting. And so she gave me, she told me that she would be very glad to do it. And she was a great source of wisdom of very strong opinions. Murray Rothbard called her after Mises' death the one woman Mises industry. And she had been that. I mean, she was really responsible for keeping his books in print, for getting them translated. And she was doing it pretty much all on her own. So I wanted to help her in that. And she was thrilled. And whenever Marty and I oftentimes would see her in New York, she was never anything but beautifully dressed, beautifully quaffed, beautifully made up, jewelry, always very formal. And she just was always gorgeous when she was in her 90s. I mean, she was a very impressive-looking lady. And also a lady of always very strong opinions. She never hesitated to give me her strong opinions. She was very wise. And it's just a tremendous experience to be able to deal with her, to learn more about Mises, to learn about what their life had been like, to learn about such small things as Mises' pension from the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, which would have been a good deal of money before the inflation. She would always get outraged when she got the monthly check in New York. And it was just about less than $3 in American dollars. So Austrian inflation. So the second person I asked was Murray Rothbard.  Somebody literally clapped his hands in glee. Murray was just so thrilled with the idea of a Mises Institute. And I asked him if he would run our academic Mises Institute at this point. It was just a typewriter on my kitchen table. But I asked him if he would be in charge of academic affairs and if he would be our inspiration and our guide in all matters, ideological and theoretical. And so he was just also a tremendous person to work with, always a, I mean, many blessings in my life. One was the, I'd known Murray before starting the Institute. But every day after starting the Institute until Murray's very untimely death in 1995, every single day I got to deal with him, either in person or on the phone.  I mean, he just was so funny, so welcoming, so warm, and didn't hurt that he was a world-historic genius. I mean, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, maybe even more than that. So I was a very, very lucky guy to deal with people like Margit von Mises. That one time I had dinner with Ludwig von Mises. I talked to him on the phone several times. That was not very successful. So I always dealt with Margit. Just I was able to be around giants quite an experience.  Well, I saw them at the table. I thought, holy smokes. Because even though I had dealt with them both in bringing these books back into print and publishing the monograph, I had not met them until after that process. And yeah, it was scary. I mean, it was scary. But they couldn't have been nicer. Couldn't have been warmer or more welcoming. And as Rothbard said, you absolutely had the feeling that you're dealing with somebody from the days of the Hopsporgs. I mean, somebody from the days when Vienna was one of the great intellectual and cultural capitals ever to exist in the history of the world, later, of course, pretty much destroyed. But just what a great experience. You had a very long and fruitful, both professional, personal relationship with Murray Rothbard. Certainly, he has his devotees and his fans. He has his attractors as well. What do you think is so misunderstood about Murray and also about his work? Well, I think part of it is that I think of somebody like, say, Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman was a brilliant guy. I think his economics were a problem. But he certainly was brilliant.   And whether that was, he seemed to get great pleasure out of that. How can you know? But that was not Murray Rothbard. So Murray was very easy to approach, humble. And he didn't parade his knowledge, which, of course, was, I'm not sure any of us know exactly how much he knew. I mean, he was so much over so many different areas. I once tried to tease him. I was in a scholarly used bookstore in New York. And David Gordon was there, too. And so I started asking them about the various books. And of course, I couldn't find any book that either David or Murray hadn't read and knew all about. And could point out, well, you know, on page 28 is this great statement about X. So that was just Murray. And it wasn't just his vast knowledge in history and economics and philosophy, political philosophy and just philosophy period. But he was an expert on sports. He loved basketball. He was a huge fan of Tarkinian and the running rebels at UNLV.  I can remember being with him on election eve and he would have one of his classic yellow pads full of notes that no other human being could read. And you could ask him about any congressional or Senate or gubernatorial race in the country and he knew all about it. What's happening in the second district of Idaho? He knew about the candidates, the issues, the real issues, the special interests, the scandals. And he just always would predict what was going to happen and his predictions were less successful than his knowledge.  But he loved the Summer Olympics, too. He knew the entire history of the Olympics. If it was a sport he was interested in, he knew what everybody had gotten a medal in past years. What were their strengths, their weaknesses? Whatever he was interested in, he became a tremendous expert. But he never paraded this.  But I should also mention, I talked about Margaret. Murray's wife, Joey, who was a brilliant, brilliant brilliant woman, Margaret once said that she wished that Joe had gone on to get a PhD. She had a master's from Columbia because she should have had a PhD. She should have been a professor and not have devoted her life to Murray. Well, she was always glad she devoted her life to Murray. And of course, Murray famously, in one of his dedications, called her the indispensable framework. And she was. So Murray was, in some ways, the absent-minded professor. And I can remember when she would, say, go sometimes to visit her family in southern Virginia where both Murray and Joey are buried. In their freezer, she would leave Murray's meals with Tuesday lunch and Wednesday dinner, and so forth. Because otherwise, he might not eat or whatever. So she took good care of him. But as important as that was, and she was just like Margaret typed human action and other Mises books, she helped Murray with that sort of thing. Although he was a super typist, Walter Block pointed out the other day, very, very fast typist. And he could really turn out the material. I'll just make a slight addendum to Walter's story about Murray having to be reminded that he had a paper due much sooner than he thought. And it was his New Deal monetary policy paper. So he excused himself, went into the next room, and as Walter said, typed it out. This is a large paper. He typed it out with footnotes and bibliography. So he'd written the whole thing in his head, but hadn't actually typed it out. So that always struck me as an amazing ability to be able to do that. And again, this is just Rothbard. After his death, Joey asked me to come and go through his office in Las Vegas and see what should be shipped back to New York and what could be disposed of. And it was just very, very moving. And also it just gave me a glimpse, which I'd already known about, but just a further glimpse of just how important Joey had been to him as an intellectual partner, as a critic. A lot of times she would say, Murray, you can't say that. He said that a number of times she'd sort of saved him from trouble, and he wouldn't always take her advice. But she was very smart, very knowledgeable, very sweet, and I must say a great judge of people. She, I never, and she was a quick judge. I never knew when she was wrong. I mean, she said, no, you can't really trust that guy. I turned out you couldn't trust that guy. And when she thought somebody was a good person, well, they did turn out to be a good person. So that just wanted for many abilities. And she was herself a huge expert in opera, especially the operas of Wagner. She loved going to the Bayreuth Festival, and she knew everything about Wagner, everything about Wagner's music. And that was just one of her hobbies. But Murray was her main hobby, and of course, her life's work. And I think without Joey Rothbard, we would not have the same Murray, absolutely. So he was very lucky in their marriage. And she tells the wonderful story about being late once to a date with him to go to the movies before they were married. And so she arrives at the theater. It's a huge theater. It's pitch black. And she wonders, gosh, how am I going to find Murray? And then she hears his laugh. So she could go right to the island to the seat because he had such a distinctive laugh.  He was definitely the joyful libertarian, but he was just a joyful person, and not an unrealistic person, very realistic about the state, his depredations, about the chances of victory for all of us in the future. But he just loved life. He loved the battle. He loved, of course, scholarship. He loved knowledge. Just being able to sit at his feet was quite an experience. Well, let's back up for just a minute and talk a little bit about your career prior to meeting Murray, prior to starting the Institute. A lot of people probably know that you worked for Arlington House for some years, and you may not know that Lou was also at Hillsdale College for a period and started their publication in Primus, which still survives today. But you've told me some stories that you've been in the room with a lot of interesting people over the years. I mean, you've mentioned some names like Nixon and Buckley and Ayn Rand, so I'd love to hear an anecdote. Well, I have to tell something terrible about myself. In the 1960 election, I was 16, and I collected money for Richard Nixon's campaign. But I raised a lot of money. In my town, my Boston suburb in Massachusetts, all the Republicans hated the guts of John F. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy family. So raising money for the anti-Kennedy was actually pretty easy. So I raised $3,000. Did you go door to door? How did you do it? No, I had to be door to door. I was given a list of all the registered Republicans. This town today probably has more communists than it's got Republicans, but very, very left-wing place. In those days, it wasn't true. So it was mostly Republicans. And I went door to door over a period of days. And it was a different era. That was the year or two where Avon ladies were able to be welcomed in people's homes, didn't fear to go in, where housewives would have the fuller brushman come. You can't conceive of something like that happening today. So everybody was very welcoming. And sometimes they gave, and sometimes they didn't. And by the way, they didn't have anything like the FEC regulations. But people were very generous. And they hated Kennedy. I'm sure some of them like Nixon, too. But because of that, I got to meet Nixon. And so I was stationed. He was giving a big speech at the Boston Armory. And then I'm stationed outside with this great lady, Mrs. Darrow, who was sort of my patron in the Republican Party. And so Nixon comes running out, angry. Come on, Pat. Come on, Pat. We're late, we're late. And then she, you know. So then he showed up with shakes hands when he was gone. And Pat came out. And I thought she looked like an angel. This was the way people dressed in those images. She had a hat, pocketbook, gloves. But then she stopped and talked to me for maybe five minutes. Meanwhile, Nixon is saying, come on, come on. So I was always pro-Pat as a result of that, but not, of course, pro-Nixon. Although I was followed Nixon with great interest. Buckley, Bill Buckley, very smart, very charming, very evil, like a serpent, a snake, a very bad guy, ex-CIA agent. They always say with agencies like the CIA and the KGB, no such thing as an ex. And I think that was certainly the case of Buckley. I think he set up National Review, or the CIAs. He set it up for him. All his questions about what the money came from. The lawyer who incorporated National Review was Bill Casey, who had been head of the OSS, and later head of the CIA himself. A lot of CIA people involved in National Review. And also old, right people, John T. Flynn, for example, wrote until he was kicked out. So why was he kicked out? He was kicked out because he wasn't pro-war. He wasn't pro-American empire. He wasn't in favor of nuking the Soviet Union. So the Buckley magazine was very right-wing in those early days. I think deliberately so to try to bring the right-wing along with the empire and the war, the permanent war and the Cold War and so forth. Which had not been the case earlier, as Rothbard, the great scholar of this, among so much else, points out the American right-wing until then had been, for example, anti-Rosevelt. Sort of their key thing in life was hatred of Roosevelt and Truman. And because of that, they opposed the American drive to war, the Roosevelt drive to war. They might have felt World War II was necessary to fight, but they weren't ever happy about it. And they didn't think that should be a model for the permanent American warfare state. So Nashville, if you had a huge effect in bringing this along, I met Buckley a number of times. I didn't really know him well, but he was very charming, smart. But I think of a very bad guy and all the sort of right-wing stuff I think buttresses my view that in this Rothbard's view, of course, this was a trick, because once everybody in the conservative movement of those days, the Republican Party had been brought along to total warfare, permanent warfare, permanent empire. Buckley famously said in 1948 that we had to build a bureaucratic state in America in order to fight permanent war and that everything had to be devoted to fighting on a war footing forever because Soviets would be forever and we had to turn ourselves into a garrison state, surveillance state, all the stuff that has since happened.  So I think I knew Barry Goldwater a little bit and I think I put Barry in that same category. I was a huge supporter of Goldwater, donated a lot of money I couldn't afford and worked my heart out for him. And it was only later that I realized that he was always bad on foreign policy, but boy, he was great on domestic policy, very, very libertarian. His book, Conscious of a Conservative, goes written by the great Brent Bozell. This is not the present Brent Bozell, but his dad, who was a man of great principles and great ethics, and later put in an insane asylum with Buckley's help, whether he actually was insane or who knows, Buckley didn't like his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. Buckley just did so many bad things, but he was, again, the National Review was very key to the promotion of the Goldwater movement or Barry Goldwater. Only after this all happened that I find out that Goldwater had been pretty much of a statist before he ran for president, and in fact gave a famous speech at the 56th Republican Convention that Republicans had to forget the old notion of opposing the no deal, opposing the fair deal, that every conservative, every Republican had to accept all of this and just move on, and that it would be an outrage and reactionary and so forth to continue to think maybe there was something wrong with the new deal or the fair deal. After his race for president, his term as US Senator from Arizona, he was just a total neocon, so when he was a neocon, I would say before that, so my supposition has always been that the Goldwater campaign was just another trick, very successful trick, but still that book, Conscious of a Conservative that Bozelle wrote, it's still very much worth reading. I mean, the prose just jumps off the page and private, you know, get rid of Social Security and TVA and all kinds of government industries and he was entirely in favor of the Freedom of Association in a very tough time. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so he did a lot of great things can't look into his heart, but he definitely was a bad guy earlier, a bad guy later, bad on foreign policy, but the view of those of us, very naive view probably, was that Johnson was just as bad. Goldwater might have been worse on foreign policy who can know, but boy, he was a great voice in the 64 campaign for libertarian ideas domestically, very eloquent, so I would say he had a very good effect in some ways, a bad effect in other ways. Who else did you want me to mention? Well, I guess I'm curious after this start in your young life, can you identify a particular period or a particular time when you recall really becoming fully anti-state, anti-war? Well, I got a good start, I think because my dad was a very strong Taft Republican, and in fact, my first political memory is impending a Taft President button on my code, so I think I was always oriented that way, even in a little kid in school, I was troubled for my teachers on these kinds of issues, but I think it took a while to develop, I was more of a conservative initially, but I can still remember, and this is before the 64 Civil Rights Act, I went to a very liberal school and I can remember this one particularly, he's advocating something like the Civil Rights Act, and I was in the seventh grade and I just couldn't, just didn't strike me as the right thing that the government should be able to tell the businessman who he should serve and who he shouldn't serve.  If the hot dog stand owner didn't wanna sell him the hot dog, so those days that wasn't called racism, but it was an unpopular view, especially in my school, but I think the reading that my dad encouraged me to do and the kinds of people I started to read, working at Arlington House later, was, and I was very lucky to be sort of in the, let's say the freedom movement, it wasn't necessarily the libertarian movement, but except for my first job, which was a writing job and was just dealing with business things, not ideologically, but I got to work at Arlington House and again at Hillsdale College and set up their ideological programs and so I learned a lot there and I was editor of a libertarian medical magazine of economic issues and medicine and except on licensing questions was entirely libertarian and worked against everything that's happened, is why I'm, you know, the sort of thing that, and warned against everything that's coming and I must say one of the great experiences, we took a group of congressmen, probably the best known still today was Phil Crane, to learn to England to study the National Health Service and we had Enoch Powell speak to us and met a lot of great people, sorry, Keith Joseph later, Sir Keith Joseph who worked for the Thatcher administration, but Enoch Powell, and then I later was able to bring him to Hillsdale for a week, I must say the most eloquent speaker I've ever encountered, I mean the most astounding, of course British politicians tend to be very amazing on their feet, but this guy was like a Shakespearean actor, ideologically motivated, he was for the gold standard, free market and just a pioneer in many different ways and I remember having him, we had him debate at Hillsdale, Truman's head of the Council of Economic Advisers about price and wage controls and the night was just a pouring, pouring Michigan rainstorm and this economist had come in his galoshes in his raincoat and his umbrella and that sort of thing. After this debate, he walked out into the rain just in his suit, the brain is pouring out, he forgot his hat, so we had to bring him back in, he was so gobsmacked by what had happened to Enoch Powell, he just, it was just a, so Enoch Powell and other tremendous man, I think predicted some of the problems of mass immigration very early on too, a very, also a decentralist, a little englander, an advocate of non-interventionist foreign policy on the part of England to be neutral, to be, some people would say isolationist, to be a non-isolationist in trade and cultural matters, isolationist as to not bombing other people and so he was also a great poet in ancient Greek, author of a tremendous scholarly work of about 1,500 pages on the House of Lords in the Middle Ages, I mean just great intellectual and that of course, like Jeff, got to know Ron Paul very well, another great intellectual, public intellectual author, economist even, he's a physician, but he's an economist, he's a historian, constitutional scholar, great man, as we can both testify, there are a lot of people who are not what they seem, that's especially true on Capitol Hill, they're very different in the real life, Shona Cranston always makes the point and I think I agree with her, you can ought to tell how these guys treat their staff, they're loving the human race in public and they're beating people over the head who can't resist in private and that's sort of the typical congressman, but Ron Paul was a gentleman and a sweetheart in private life with employees, with friends, with patients, just exactly what he seems to be in his public life, that's the way he is in private life. Well, I'd like to turn to more topical events, if there's any questions we might elicit from the crowd, I would certainly like to just ask you briefly any thoughts you have on the Democratic Convention which just wrapped up, and Madame Hillary, Lou doesn't like politics, but he does have something to say about it from time to time. I don't like the effects of politics, but I must say I love watching it, I mean I love the scam, I love hating these people and of course it's all, they do terrible things to us, so I think it's fun and important to follow them, I don't vote, I only voted once in my life for Barry Goldwater and that I regret, but I think, so the Democratic, I mean it was a, I don't know, Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist who has quite a wonderful blog, he says he's a supporter of Hillary because he lives in California and literally his life would be in danger if he came out for Trump, so that may very well be true, who knows, but he summed up the Democratic Convention to seem to be entirely anti-male and he thought that they perhaps had made a mistake by just being so openly hating the guts of men and he said, he thought by the end of the convention the men had left the building, he said by the way, the building they built, so I'm very politically incorrect, Mr. Adams, but so certainly it was a display of all the special interest groups, all the grievance industry and so forth and of course in favor of more war, more government, I think those who worry that Hillary is capable of bringing about nuclear war with Russia don't exaggerate, I mean she's her temperament and her, if you just remember her giggling over killing Gaddafi, I mean her witch-cackle, as she said, we came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha, so by the way, there were some great photos you may have seen from the convention of her, with her gigantic mouth open, laughing and she has a spot on her tongue and people are saying that's the result of a biopsy to her tongue, so who knows, but I think she's a very nasty piece of work, I don't think she's in favor of human flourishing and because probably politicians in general, with the reception of Ron Paul, I think Ron Paul is the only one that I know about or have ever encountered, I would say maybe in all of human history, certainly in American history, but even a guy like Jefferson, who was good in many ways before he was in office, great in many ways after he left office, but terrible when he was in office, just, of course this is the history of presidents, not one of them has ever left the government smaller than he founded, even the ones who are a decent, Harding, Cleveland, certainly decent as compared to the other ones, although my favorite, somebody asked me the other day who my favorite president, I said, William Henry Harrison because he died right after being inaugurated, so he didn't actually do any damage as president. Do we have questions from the audience, though? I think we have a question over here. I know Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard have always been pretty optimistic about our future and libertarianism and Austrian economics, but I was wondering what you think about the rise of socialism and New Kansy and economics, whether after a financial crisis, if the current system is just gonna be replaced with the same system? Well, I think socialism never went away. Certainly the name has gotten a lot more prominent, Piketty, and of course Bernie, and but the US system has always been more, for a very long time, and partly socialist, but I think that Murray and Ron have a point, we are right.  It has to account for something. Obviously the truth can be crushed, has been crushed, but it somehow always bounces back, and I think even for a religious standpoint, we know that in the end, things are going to be okay, and I think even in terms of human society, Rothbard always thought that the truth would eventually triumph, and that human flourishing would count, and that there was no going back. He thought and certainly hoped in terms of the division of labor, because of course if there were, there'd be mass global starvation among other effects of that. So he thought that we were making progress. I think we see it here, that this Mises University week, and I think, I must say, I thought it was a very low point after 9-11, when it seemed like it was government. Every state would like to be totalitarian. Every state would like to be the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.  So that was a problem. I remember that there was an incident towards the end of the Gorbachev era, where there was a communist, a local communist party leader whose car, which of course only very few people had cars in those days, was in a car accident, and the trunk of his car popped open and it was full of sausages. And the people who were surrounding that were so outraged that this guy had sausages which of course were not exactly available.  And Yuri Maltsev, who was a Soviet economist, defected, one of the last defectors here, one of our senior scholars, said he thought that when being a member of the power elite meant you got sausages versus not, that was pretty small. So I think the whole regime of evil, all over the world, they don't wanna go back to pure socialism because they don't have a good life. So they really like fascism better, which is economically more viable. So we have that to fight. But I think, I don't know, I think people want change. I think people are dissatisfied with the political arrangements, whether that's true in England or on the continent. You know, all of human history, socialism had been a race between power and market and Rothbard's turned. And sometimes we seem to be winning, sometimes we seem to be losing, but again, we have the truth on our side. And I think, unlike right after 9-11, I think a lot of Americans especially distrust the government. They don't, the polls show this, they don't like the government. Now that doesn't mean that they're able to reject some new scam that Hillary or whatever is going to offer them. But I think, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about young people. I think a lot of young people don't like what they're being taught in college, ideologically. They don't like the atmosphere on campus.  And so they're looking for something else. We can help provide them with that something else. And so I think, you know, I think a fight for human flourishing has always been a struggle, but we really have made progress and many things threatened us in so many different ways. But I think Ron and Murray who are close friends and I think they're right. So I think obviously I'd like to believe they're right too, but I think they're right, but that doesn't, you know, this is not anything easy. It's gonna require all of us work from all of us require scholarship, everything comes from scholarship. You have to have intellectuals. That's something probably wrong with the Trump effort. There are no intellectuals involved. So it's all just sort of seat of the pants. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. So the rule of intellectuals of academics absolutely essential to everything has of course great entrepreneurs, great managers, great professionals, doctors, lawyers, so forth. There aren't many like Shauna who always give you a five, but lawyers are still important. Jeff, even Jeff wouldn't always give you a five. He's an attorney too, of course. So it's, yeah, I'm in Rothbard's terms, short-term pessimist, a long-term optimist. Another question out there? What are your thoughts on the recent pages of the 9-11, Congressional 9-11? 28 pages? Well I think it's, I think they obviously, they should be released in the typical of the government, right? We're gonna finally release these pages. We're gonna make it all public. So you look at it and everything's still redacted or blacked out so you can't see it. But I think clearly, I must say I don't, in some fundamental sense I think there's something wrong with the whole 9-11 report. It's kind of my attitude for the Kennedy assassination. I don't entirely know what happened. I don't believe the Warren Commission. So I don't know what happened in 9-11 but I don't believe the government. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the government story. Is it simply that they're hiding their own incompetence? Is it more than that? I don't know but that was definitely, just because it's benefited the government and they should all celebrate 9-11 as a holy day for them because of course it just meant vastly, a vast expansion. As I mentioned earlier, every government wants to be totalitarian. They can't get away with it because of popular opposition. When that opposition shrinks, which is what happened in 9-11, opposition to government growth, government surveillance, police state, all that pulled back. Everybody was terrified. That's why they loved of course, frightening people all the time. So when that pulled back, government all of a sudden expanded. And as I say, they should all be, they should all, I'm sure they do in their hearts. They do celebrate it. This was a great, and I certainly would think the sacrifice of 3000 people is just a nothing. They're happy to kill people. Something always important to remember about people rise to the top of the government, whether it's in the military or in any other part of the government. They tend to like killing people. They tend to enjoy, see this with Hillary, they tend to enjoy sending young people out to kill or be killed. They get a charge out of it. These are not nice people. They're happy to step on other people. They get a charge out of, putting you under their thumb and doing that. So that's something else actually going for us. Most people aren't like that. Most of us don't actually wanna run our next door neighbor's life, let alone the next town or the next country. We're just trying to run our own lives to care of our own responsibilities. That's quite sufficient. But of course, there are people who wanna run the next door neighbor, the next door town, the next country, the whole world. And they're a very, very nasty bunch. And they pretend to care about other people. We're all just means to their ends. This is the era of, I think, narcissistic personality disorder has always been widespread among politicians and bureaucrats and everybody who seeks power. Maybe it's not any more widespread today than it has been in the past, but boy it sure seems like it. And everybody's a means to their end. We're all just sort of, only they are the real people in the world and everybody else is sadly out of focus and a means to their end. We don't feel that. We think everybody's a means to their own ends. And we're not interested in killing people. We're not interested in running their lives and jailing them, putting them in cages, ruining their lives because they spoke to joint or committed some other made-up government crime. So this also gives me optimism. The opposition, they really are an extremely ahead bunch. And so we're not, let's say, angels, but we really are as a group, as an ideological movement, a much better bunch of people. And I think that's appealing to other people because I think most people are pretty decent. It's just that they find themselves having more to do, just mowing the lawn, going to church, raising their children, working in their job, caring for their home, their family. That's sufficient. It's our job to commit enough of them to go along with us and we don't need everybody. I mean, everything that's accomplished in these sorts of matters, for good or for ill, is by a dedicated minority. Whether it was communists in old Russia or libertarians today, it's always the dedicated minority. So we need more people, we need more dedicated people, we need more educated people. Great Albert J. Nock was once asked about, by somebody he thought of as sort of a babbit figure, well, what are you gonna do to save the world? That wasn't the exact question, but that was the import of it. And Nock said, the only thing I can do for the world is present it with one improved unit, except to first improve yourself. And in our world, that means educating yourself. So it's a great thing. The Mises Institute does exactly as Mises wanted us to do. It's not just a matter of training economists, although that's absolutely essential. But economics is for everyone. It's for, because it's really, as he put it, the pith of human life.  So teaching people about the ideas of liberty, but Austrian economics is a huge blow for everything good in the world. And I think, again, we've got the truth on our side.  So it's like a zombie movie. We'll see who wins out. I think we can win. Well, on that note, we are out of time. Lou Rockwell, thank you for joining Mises Weekends. Thank you, Jeff. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Ahmed Sameer Santavi is the latest victim of the Egyptian government's intimidation of academics and students studying abroad. Sameer, an Egyptian student at the Central European University in Vienna, was remanded for a period of 15 days on February 6th. Sameer was detained by the Cairo police on February 1st and his whereabouts were unknown till Saturday leading to a global outcry. Media houses quoted Sameer's lawyers Nabi Al-Ginadi as saying that the student had been hit in the face repeatedly during a period of detention. According to reports, Ahmed Sameer, a second-year student of the M.A. Sociology-Social Anthropology Program, was interrogated at Sharm el-Sheik International Airport upon his arrival on December 15th. On January 23rd at 2 a.m. in the morning, armed security personnel searched Ahmed's house in Cairo. On February 1st, Ahmed voluntarily presented himself at the 5th District Police Station as demanded by the authorities where he was detained by the National Security Police. Following his detention, students and teachers of C.E.U. had condemned the action by the Egyptian authorities and demanded his immediate release. Michael Ignatiev, Rector and President of the University, issued a statement on February 4th saying that there were no charges brought against Sameer. He also called for Sameer's immediate release and safe return to his family and studies. A hashtag campaign, whereas Ahmed Sameer, which was initiated by the students, also gained traction on social media platforms. The leftist bread and freedom party also raised similar demands calling on authorities to release Sameer and stop the policy of summoning and illegal detention and prosecution of researchers, writers and all citizens. Sameer's detention and demand is not an isolated incident. In February 2020, Patrick Zaki, a student of the University of Bologna in Italy and a researcher with an Egyptian initiative for personal rights, was arrested at Cairo International Airport. He remains in detention on charges such as disseminating false news and attempting to incite protests. In May 2018, Balit Salim, a PhD researcher at the University of Washington, was similarly arrested. Salim was working on the country's judicial system. In January 2016, 28-year-old Giulio Reggiani, a PhD student at Cambridge University from Italy, who was researching trade unions, was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Cairo.


starting with the Discos final for on the 17 girls. Lea Retardato-Samo, 35.73 meters to take the bronze. Terrell McCoy of Bahamas securing silver with 36.09 and Jamilia Young of Jamaica completing the on the 17 shot put Discos double with a throw of 36.80. She came into this one as the favourite. Then the shot put final for on the 20 boys. Deandre Bristol of Grenada, 16.69 meters to take the bronze medal. Silva going to Jalen Calder. Also of Grenada, 17.74 bigger for it there for him. And Sheik Wan Dun completing the shot put Discos double as well the Jamaican with a winning mark of 18.89 meters. Great stuff there in the throws on both the girls and boys side.


Hey coach, welcome back to the channel. If you haven't yet, make sure you subscribe to stay up to date with all the latest content that we put out. Now today I wanna talk about building and scaling your football academy business to the next level. Okay, so if you're a coach in football soccer and you have a business, you wanna get it to the next level, then this video will really help you to do that. All right, I'm gonna show you three things that you can do today in order to build your business further to grow and scale and get it to the next level. Right, number one is create a referral program within your business. So by referral program, I mean that any current clients that you have who are currently part of your training program, I want you to reach out to them at the end of this month and offer them a discount for their upcoming subscription if they refer a new client into your business. Okay, so what you wanna do is you wanna have a system in place where you are connecting with your current clients and getting on a five minute call with them to talk about this referral program. Okay, so you wanna schedule a call with each one of your current clients, get on the phone, the call doesn't have to be long, it can be three to five minutes, but just explain to them that you're setting up a referral program and this is what is included. Okay, there's a lot of different things that you can offer as part of your referral program. You can offer a 50% discount of next month's subscription. You can offer them a month free training. You can offer them a free clinic or private training session. Okay, there's a hundred ways that you can offer more value to clients in return of them referring a like-minded client into your business. Okay, so the first way to build and scale your business add a referral program, reach out to all your current clients at the end of this month and get them onto this program where they're referring clients to your business from people they know, okay? If you do this and you do this properly, you could add anywhere between five, 10 or 15 new clients by the end of this month, okay? That's the first way. Now the second way is build partnerships with local clubs, okay? So if you are a private business, okay, and you specialize in one-on-one training, you do group training, one way to grow and scale is build partnerships with local clubs, okay? So what you wanna do is you wanna speak to the decision maker, which is normally the club director, the club president, or someone that is in charge of the club and talk to them about the value of your program. Talk to them about how this industry in terms of private training, personal training is going to continue to get bigger and bigger. There's going to be more parents who are looking and searching for individual development and explain to them how your program can help their players if you guys build a partnership within the club, okay? I know a lot of coaches who are currently working in partnership with local clubs. Some of these coaches go into the clubs maybe once or twice every month and they run clinics for the club. Some of them do individual training with specific players of different age groups. Some of them do goalkeeping training. They go into the club and put together goalkeeping training sessions. Okay, so there's a lot of things that you can do in order to grow and scale your business by building a partnership with a local club or organization, okay? If you need more help on that, get in contact with me. There's two ways you can do that. Visit the kindly link in the description of this video. You can book a free 15 to 20 minute call with me. We can jump on Zoom. I can talk to you a little bit more about this or you can send me questions to makemoneycoachingsportsatgmail.com, right? So that's the second way. The third way is your social media presence. Is to build and scale a brand or a business you have to be active on social media. Now, something we teach our coaches to do is to use social media as a tool to grow the business. So what you want to become now is you want to become a producer, not so much a consumer. When you are a producer means you're producing content in order to help your business attract more parents to your program. So you want to create content which is appealing to parents. You want to create content that's engaging. You want to create content also that touches on certain pain points that parents are having with their child, okay? And also you want to use social media in order to connect with parents, okay? So that might be through direct messaging parents, telling them about your program, trying to build some type of connection, relationship where you can then close them into an evaluation session in your business. Also, any parents who engage in your content such as likes, comments, right? We want to build a connection with them as well and we want to try and lead that connection onto a sales call where we can get that parent on a call, see if they're a good fit for our program and then close them into an evaluation session, okay? So the three ways to grow your business today, okay? To build and scale to the next level is number one, make sure that you're setting up a referral program once a month where you're reaching out to your current clients and you're asking your parents for referrals. Number two, build local connections with other organizations in your program, sorry, in your local area or any clubs, okay? So building partnerships in your local area with clubs or other organizations will help to build and scale your business to the next level because if it's set up correctly, okay? That club organization can be bringing you leads, bringing you clients regularly month after month. And the third one is stay active on social media and use social media to produce, not consume. They can use social media to create engaging content, to connect with parents, reach out to parents and to try and close parents onto a sales call which then leads into an evaluation session. You'll be able to add five or 10 new clients per month which will help to build and scale your business to the next level, okay? So again, if you need more help with this, visit the description of this video. You can either book a call with me via Zoom, it's a free 15 to 20 minute call or you can send me a question to makemoneycoachingsportsatgmail.com, okay? Thank you for watching and make sure you don't forget to subscribe to our channel.


Today I'm going to tell you about cultural Marxism. Our enemy is cultural Marxism. Political correctness is cultural Marxism. We won the Cold War with political and economic communism. We've lost the cultural war with cultural Marxism. You're referring to the cultural Marxists and I really do think that they are so much that the heart of what has led to the crumbling of the West right now, the decline of the West. The thing is, it doesn't exist. At least not outside the fever dreams of far-right extremists and right-wing pandits and politicians. In short, here's the conspiracy theory. After the 1920s a group of Marxist academics set out to destroy Western modernity from within. But unlike classical Marxism which locates the working class as the agent of change and economics as the spirit of struggle, cultural Marxists sought to change social values and norms, gnawing away at the foundations of the West's very self-confidence. Are we the baddies?  Namely to bring about the demise of European civilization. Why are we constantly browbeaten into being ashamed of the West? We shouldn't be ashamed to defend Western civilization.  Take question time's favourite Nigel Farage. He claimed that the BBC was responsible for a cultural Marxist revolution or Conservative Party MP Suehle Brevenman, the Attorney General. Last year she claimed the Conservative Party was engaged in a battle against a cultural Marxism. And then there's Anders Brevik who killed 77 people, primarily members of the Youth Wing of Norway's Labour Party in 2011. In a 15-page manifesto he mentions cultural Marxism 107 times using it interchangeably with terms like multiculturalism and political correctness. Then there's Brenton Tarran who killed 51 people across two mosques in the Christchurch massacre of 2019. He wrote The Western Society had long since fallen to the Long March through the institutions committed by the Marxists. Then there was the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter who murdered 11 people and blamed Jews for, among other things, communism. And yes, cultural Marxism. And in Britain, well, check out this video from the BMP's Youth Wing in 2014. The heartless scientist whose interests are foreign interests. The cultural Marxists who infest our teaching establishment. We will not give in and we will not back down. We will protect our own identities and secure our own futures. We are BMP youth. This guy is Jack Renshaw who, alongside targeting militant homosexuals, blames cultural Marxism for Britain's problems. He's currently serving a lifetime prison sentence for plotting to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper. Despite this term being used so frequently by far-right terrorists, it has slipped unnoticed it seems into the right-wing mainstream, whether it's Fraser Nelson and the Spectator, Conservative members of Parliament, Nigel Farage or best-selling author Douglas Murray. A lot of people on the right are very happy to say they believe in something called cultural Marxism. But the comfort of recent decades has become the comfort of espousing and following a basically culturally Marxist view of the world. So how did this happen? How, over the last decade, has cultural Marxism become a relatively mainstream talking point for both politicians and pundits on the right? While it's easy to see a resemblance between contemporary claims around cultural Marxism and what the Nazis once referred to as culture bolshevismus, cultural bolshevism, it goes beyond just that. One important parallel between the two, however, is their flexibility and thus their political efficacy. When the Nazis used the term, it was applied mainly to the arts. But like cultural Marxism today, it was also deployed for a range of things they simply found disagreeable. One journalist, Carl Osiecki, wrote, cultural bolshevism is when a painter sweeps a colour into a sunset not seen in lower Pomerania, when one favours birth control, when one builds a house with a flat roof, when a caesarean birth is shown on the screen. In short, it was anything reactionaries wanted it to be.  However, it wasn't until decades after the fall of the Third Reich that cultural Marxism as a recognisable conspiracy theory began to emerge. Arguably its godfather in this respect was Lyndon LaRouche, a conspiracy theorist often accused of racism hailing from a very, very strange part of the left. In 1974, LaRouche mentioned the Frankfurt School for the first time, as part of a broader smear campaign against left-wing opponents. According to a special report in his Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche claimed Angela Davis was a CIA agent whose purpose was to infiltrate the American Communist Party and split the organisation. He further alleged Davis was prepared for such a role while studying under Frankfurt School intellectuals and, according to him, CIA agents Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Rodano. LaRouche claimed that when Davis was their student, Marcuse Rodano subjected her to a CIA zombie brainwash program, in essence, transforming Davis into a Manchurian radical, which is to say somebody who could infiltrate the very highest levels of the American left. The theme of the Frankfurt School as a secret brainwashing operation continued in a 1977 Counterintelligence Report, where LaRouche claimed those movements, which emerged in the aftermath of the late 1960s around gender race and sexual rights, had degenerated into violent fascism, even alleging British intelligence actually established the Frankfurt School themselves in the 1920s to assemble leading British agent intellectuals. But how did the idea of cultural Marxism go mainstream? After all, while culture Bolshevismus and LaRouche's conspiracy theories had been around for a while, the likes of Farage and Breivik didn't hear about them after reading interwar histories of Germany or the esoteric disjector of LaRouche. No, the transmission mechanism was 1990s paleo-conservativism in the United States, with conservative thinkers like William Lind, Papua Canaan and Paul Verich pushing the term into the mainstream. While a small sea conservative was meant to want to keep things the same and only believes in incremental change, a paleo-conservativist fundamentally a reactionary, somebody who wants to go back to a mythical Halcyon time before things went wrong. The mythology to many of these people, which gives forms to their otherwise incoherent rejection of the modern world, is cultural Marxism. Care about climate change? Cultural Marxism Think equal pay is important? Cultural Marxism Are you a vegetarian happy to be called they or them or pro-choice and abortion? Cultural Marxism 101 It was also during the early 1990s it became increasingly common to hear the term political correctness, another nebulous bugbearer of the right, whose use lay precisely in meaning both everything and nothing. It's content essentially a matter of opinion for those mainstreaming cultural Marxists and the terms were broadly interchangeable, with William Lind defining it as a brand of Western Marxism, commonly known as multiculturalism or less formally political correctness, though how either of those as Marxist remains unclear. He claimed the presence of LGBT people on television proved cultural Marxists control the media and that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals a vanguard for the cultural revolution. But I thought he was the CIA or was it MI6? Anyway, by now the idea of political correctness was far from marginal and increasingly amplified by the likes of the Sun newspaper in Britain and Fox News in the US, both owned by this guy. Indeed it was even highlighted in a 1991 speech by President Bush. We find free speech under assault throughout the United States. By the end of 1992 feature stories on this crisis had appeared across the US print media from Newsweek to the New York Review of Books. That's right, we've been having the exact same moral panic around freedom of speech for at least 30 years. Why? Because if the conversation moves to class, living standards and economic justice, these people don't have a leg to stand on. For Pat Buchanan, godfather of the 1990s cultural wars in the US, the importance of this struggle was not to be understated but the culture war, a religious war and in many ways no less important than the Cold War. It is an anti-Christian, anti-god, anti-traditionalist revolution. The sexual resolution has a lot to do with it and so we are two countries now. In his 2002 book The Death of the West Buchanan described cultural marks as a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatise social heresy just as the inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance. Now where have I heard that before? The goal of the education system is to indoctrinate children from kindergarten into radical, post-modern, leftist, communitarian, equity-oriented ethos. It's Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News and close friend of former Trump guru Steve Bannon, similarly viewed to fight against cultural Marxism as essentially a continuation of the Cold War. This country will be destroyed by people like you who think you are doing good while you divide, you divide into separate different categories when we hit against each other. These people are incredibly dangerous. In 2014 William Lind under the pseudonym Thomas Hobbes published Victoria, a novel of fourth generation war in which a group of Christian marines lead a bloody insurrection against cultural Marxism as the federal government collapses. At the book's climax, knights wearing crusader crosses and singing Christian hymns murder politically correct staff at Dartmouth College, the main characters and Mr. Lind's alma mater.  The very point of using the term cultural Marxism is to collapse any boundary between a significant part of the population who don't view themselves as extremists and the far-right people like William Lind. Most importantly, it tells that some of the most dangerous fanatics of the 21st century speak with polished accents, went to excellent universities and, most troubling of all, are actively promoted by the media. One thing is for sure, any politician or pundit who utters the words cultural Marxism has got nothing to say when it comes to the biggest issues of our day, which people actually care about and affect their everyday lives from healthcare to climate change, economic inequality and the housing crisis. Some conspiracy theories are relatively harmless. Cultural Marxism isn't. That's partly because it relies on bigotry and xenophobia and partly because it's designed to distract us from the big existential challenges of the 21st century and there are plenty of those.


Okay, okay this is the start of our 360 video in Madrid, yeah some people were talking about oh you should do a narration to the video after the Paris one so when we hit the Spanish capital we thought we would do a little five-minute 360 sequence with a nice narration. Oh look at this, wow I don't really know where I'm going, I'm just driving, yeah I bet there's millions yeah and it's amazing architecture here in Madrid, it's full of palaces and museums and like plazas like look at this plaza so I'm just gonna go wherever I I feel let's go off to the right like all the other cars let's just see where it takes us oh look at this unless we start to get to a point where vehicles are not allowed we can just continue through okay I wish I could understand the signs I think it says unless you're a guest at the hotel you have to go to the left so we'll go to the left whoa look at that scooter okay yeah we have to be all eyes and ears here in the center okay I can't go that way so I guess I'll just go straight and then I think to the right as I have to go to the right and it is a hot day here in Spain the bike is registering 32 degrees C so it's quite the weather to be coming into the city I tell ya I'm sweating okay let's get a little bit of speed and get some wind get some wind on us yeah here we go look at all this beautiful a little bit of shade oh my god there's like a whole labyrinth of streets yeah and we're just sort of like going left going I have no idea I think it's a service city so I think that's a bar and everyone's just queuing for a beer let's get up and join them


This is stock number 7T448A. We are at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. This is a 2012 RAM 1500 regular cab, RAM box, short box, ST, two-wheel drive. From this HD video, you'll be able to tell that this truck is extremely clean all the way around. No dents or dings on the front bumper. Front valance is in really nice condition. The hood is in excellent condition. No dents or dings. Flame red is the color. This truck has the 4.7 liter V8 motor. Has the steel rims with the chrome covers, and this truck has brand-new a Hutsu ST526570R17 tires all the way around. Put these tires on in our shop, and they are brand-new. Didn't see any dents or dings on that front fender. We take all of our videos in 1080p, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smart device, turn them on now. Because it's like you're right here looking at the truck with me. Passenger side rim, excellent condition. That tire is brand-new as well. And as we go down this side of the truck, you can see just how clean the body is, how reflected the paint is. The only thing I saw on this truck, one small tiny little ding on that front fender there. Other than that, this truck is extremely clean all the way around. It does have the ram box, which is a pretty cool system. So basically, you got lots of storage area. This is a lockable bin. It also has drain plugs in the bottom, so if you wanted to put ice in here, you definitely could. And then there's lights on the sides, and this thing will lock with the key. Down this side of the truck, very, very clean. No dents or dings on this box. Back tires are brand-new as well. And this back rim is in excellent shape. All the lower, all the wheel wells look like they're in really nice condition. Framing the underbody on this truck is really clean. And all the lower rockers and everything look really good as well. We want to make sure that you get the most accurate representation of the vehicle as possible so that when you get here there's absolutely no surprises, and you'll be ready to take your truck home with you. All you got to do is drive it and love it, and it's that easy. Access soft rolling tonneau cover. Very nice tonneau on here. It has a spray-in bed liner. I would venture to say that this was a factory spray-in. Very nicely done. Locking tailgate as well. The tailgate itself is in excellent condition. And as you go down this side of the truck, you can see that it's just as clean as the passenger side. I didn't see any dents or dings on this side of the truck. Very, very clean. Inside the ST package gives you the grey cloth interior. There are no rips or tears on these seats. Good to note that this one does have side-current airbags. Seat is in really nice condition. No rips, tears or stains. Has factory floor mats throughout. Carpeting is very clean underneath. Has auto headlamps. And this truck has 37,882 miles. You have cruise controls on this side. You have the different, can view, trip A, trip B, outside temperature display. And then of course the odometer again. Has a CD player, AM, FM, and Serious Satellite radio capabilities on this truck. You also have your climate control right there. Stability control. You can turn that off. And then it does have a tow-haul mode. Passenger seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that. And we got factory floor mat on that side as well. Take a quick look under the hood. We also wanted to show you back here.  Tools, whatever. Has latch child safety system on that side for car seats. And just a really nice truck inside and out. Under the hood we have the 4.7 liter V8 motor. This truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. This truck has four brand new tires on it. Has been gone through mechanically 100% and is 100% ready to go. And to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wranglers, you name it we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on the lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have. All at www.summitauto.com. Thanks for checking out my video. If you like this truck, want to make it yours, give us a call<PHONE_NUMBER>. Ask for one of our sales associates to make this truck yours today. Once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thanks again and if you want to check out more videos like this, go to our YouTube channel which is youtube.com slash summit auto. Like, subscribe and share. In fact in a second you'll see a subscribe button to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more like duty truck videos like this one on your right. And if you haven't been to our website a link on the bottom to this truck on our website. Click those check us out and we look forward to helping you with the Super Clean 2012 Ram 1500 regular cab short box. Thanks again.


Rhefn gennych chi i gwaith i gweithio gwyntiau 27 ym 2018 i gwaith unrhyw ddodol iawn. Mae gennym ni'n ffwrdd i'r gwaith cyffredinol, a hynny'n amser fel gyfan, i chi'n pr()i yn gwych â gweithio. Mae gwaith i gwaith 5, 6 a 7 a'i gwaith, fel hynny o'r gwaith unrhyw ddodol iawn, oedden o'r pilfu yn cyffredinol i ei gael ac oedd chi'n dweud hynny fel Lord y similarly ar y Secondary Legisl Does the committee agree to take these items in private? Okay So we move on to Agender item two and we have got before us Graeme Da, the new Minister for Parliamentary Business and Veterans To welcome He's going to provide us with an update on the Government's Secondary Legislation program He's accompanied by Steve McGregor from the Absandto and Legislation looking Colin Brown from the Scottish Government Legal Directorate and Luke McBratney from the Constitution and UK Relations Division. Minister, I believe that you have got an opening statement. A brief one, thank you convener. Obviously, this is my first time before the committee and I very much welcome the opportunity to engage with yourselves and I look forward to working with you over the coming months. This committee has a pivotal role in scrutinising the delegate powers that ministers and others are given through new acts and, indeed, using the use of existing powers. That, I suspect, can be a technical and laborious role at times, but it is an absolutely essential one and I commend the committee for the regular it brings to the task. I say that both as a minister and someone who, until quite recently, was a convener of a committee whose work was greatly aided by yours. The standard of legislation brought forward by the Government is generally high, but I fully accept that there can be exceptions to that. I offer today an assurance that I will always seek improvements in performance in this area and reflect the issues that are highlighted by this committee and others. In terms of the challenges coming down the track, we Brexit looms large. Whilst the full legislative implications of that remain unclear, we can be certain that Brexit will require better planning, quality assurance and explanation of the Government's SSI programme. That is a challenge that Mr Russell and I are jointly tackling with officials. I will give it there, convener, because I am sure that you have a number of questions for me. We do, and a lot of them relate to Brexit, as you might imagine. Thank you very much for that, which is very useful. We will go into the questions and start with Stuart McMillan. Thank you, convener. Good morning, minister, and welcome to your new role. Certainly, minister, can you provide the committee with an update on any discussions that you are having with the UK Government on areas where the UK-wide approach to secondary legislation might actually be more appropriate? Those discussions are on-going across the Scottish Government. There is a protocol in place for a notification to be sent to the Scottish Parliament if the Scottish Government is considering consenting to the UK Government-making provision in a statutory instrument. The first notifications were sent at the end of last week. Those discussions are taking place between individual ministerial portfolios in the relevant departments, and we in the centre of the Government are co-ordinating that work. Luke might talk a little bit about some of the criteria that underpin those discussions, but where there is an opportunity to work with the UK Government to make corrections ahead of Brexit? We are looking at that as a survival option. The Scottish Government recognises that we are dealing with a programme of legislation arising from EU withdrawal, both the notifications being issued in relation to UK SIs and SSIs in the Scottish Government, which will be of an unprecedented level of scale, pace and complexity. We also want to protect as much parliamentary and governmental time as possible for non-Brexit related legislation. We have, therefore, as Stephen indicates, agreed an approach with the UK Government where we will be able to consent to legislation being made in devolved areas by them. The minister wrote to the convener of this committee and to the convener of the Constitution Committee last week to set out the rationale for the Government taking this approach. Thank you for that, minister McGregor. You just mentioned consent notifications from last week. You also mentioned the issue of having dialogue to potentially change if there was a particular issue. How is that dialogue going? Have you found any particular problems so far? It is still early days, but it gives a flavour of it. We have regular discussion with colleagues in Cabinet Office and DEXU about the process. There is a very high level of awareness within the UK Government about the need for the Scottish Parliament to be able to scrutinise those notifications, and they are building that into their timescales as best they can. We are continually trying to get more information about what the Scottish UK Government is working on. We are trying to get as much draft information as we can in order to provide the Parliament with as much information at an earliest point as we possibly can. I think that that is reflected in the fact—or success of that so far is reflected in the fact that we have been able to send some notifications at the end of last week, which is—in the Evelyn Scottish Parliament—to see what is coming through the pipeline effect of the whole month ahead of these instruments getting laid in the UK Parliament. The process that we have put in place has given us a very early indication of what the UK Government is planning to do. We would like to know more. We would like to know more earlier, and we would just have to continue that dialogue with the UK Government to get as much information as we can. Essentially, between September and November, will be the period in which the bulk of the notifications come through. We anticipate right now—this is a moving feast—about 110 Brexit SSIs. Those will be contained within about 30 to 50 notifications. The notifications will go out September and November. As Stephen said, some of those have gone out already. November to December will be when the material starts to meld, running through to March. We are aware, obviously, of the last laying dates. We will be doing everything that we can to meet those, but we certainly cannot guarantee that there will not be some last-minute ones. That is essentially where we are at the moment. Obviously, the Cabinet Secretary touched upon the notifications last week in his statement in the chamber. Your answer has been quite helpful, but it might be useful if you could certainly come back to the committee, or even write to the committee on a regular basis, just in terms of how that is progressing, because, as you said yourself, there is a moving feast. That is a very good point, and I am happy to commit to that, because it is essential that we work closely with the committee and the others at the Parliament to work our way through the process. I would also welcome members' views on the nature of the notifications, the details that are contained within them. I am happy to take any suggestions away to look at that, because we are in the business of trying to provide you with as much advanced notice and information as we possibly can to smooth away the way for your work to take place. On that point, the issue of the heavy legislative lifting has been discussed in the past. As the consent notifications will be considered by the subject committees, can you, Minister, to provide the relevant committees with the summary of how many consent notifications they might be expected to scrutinise to help them to plan for their workload to overcoach in the next few months? The answer is yes, but not quite yet. We are working our way through the nature of the 110s and where they would sit. That process has not been completed as yet, but as soon as we have that information, it will be shared with the committees and the committee. Alison Johnstone I feel that you were answering quite a lot of my questions there, to be honest. Back to the SSIs, when does the Scottish Government intend to begin to lay them? Have you any more specific dates or do they all require to be considered by Brexit day of the 29th of March? I will cover the first part and the second part. I feel that the timing says that the first tranche will be SI notifications, so things that the UK Government might be best placed to make the fix. That is because, as I explained earlier on, we are effectively getting notifications a month in advance and then putting them into their Parliament. In September, October and November, the bulk of the work will be SI notifications, and then transitioning into November, December and January, where we think that we will get the bulk of SSIs. As the minister says, we are keenly aware of last-lane dates and want to do everything that we can to get as much work done as early as we possibly can. I appreciate that. You asked about prioritisation. There will have to be a process of prioritisation applied to these instruments. The way to think about this is not to focus on whether this is no deal prioritisation or not, but this is about March 2019 prioritisation. There will be a group of the fixes that are absolutely essential to make, where, for example, a system of laws, a scheme or a field of regulation would be broken entirely if no preparations or changes to the law were made in anticipation of EU withdrawal. It is obviously proper that the Government focuses on those areas first, given the scale and pace of the legislating that I mentioned. For example, where you were talking about an important regulatory function ceasing to be able to be exercisable, the Government will be making whether, by notification to this Parliament that a UK-wide approach is being taken or whether by its own SSI, the Government will be taking the steps required to address those deficiencies in legislation by March 2019. There will be other areas where Brexit has rendered a function, has made it so that a function works in a different way, works in a suboptimal way, but continues effectively to operate. An example might be, and I should caution the committee that this is only an example, that certain judicial posts currently cannot be held by somebody if they are a judge of the European Court of Justice. Obviously, that does not make sense if the UK is no longer a member of the EU, but it is not exactly a fatal blow to the scheme of judicial appointment. That might be a deprioritised fix, and it may well have to be addressed ultimately after whatever the important date is, whether that is March 2019 or later. Just going back to the consent notifications, I do not suppose that you have a rough guess of how many would be applying to each various committee in this Parliament? That follows on from Mr McMillan's point. Right now, we do not let something work through, and as soon as we have that information, we will look to share that, because I recognise that committees have to plan their work programmes. To risk a repeat myself, we absolutely will share that ASAP. Mr McBratton, you mentioned quite obviously that there are some pieces of legislation that you are going to have to do. Do you know the numbers there? No, we do not have those sort of numbers at the moment. The Government intends to address all of the consequences of EU withdrawal. That is not about cutting off the matters that will be addressed and those that will not be addressed, but it is about establishing the order of priority in which they are addressed. To come back to the committee and follow on from the earlier question with updates, if that is what you would like, and have that continuing dialogue. Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you. Mr Finlay. How is this impacting on the normal work of government? It would be unrealistic to suggest that it is not impacting. It would be unrealistic to suggest that it will not impact on the work of the committees, but we are applying as much resources as we can to dealing with this and being pragmatic in common sense in our approach. We are working with the UK Government where that is appropriate to make the progress that we need to. We are bringing forward SSIs as we need to do those. I assure Mr Finlay that we are coming at this with the best of intentions and the best efforts to minimise the impact on the work of the Parliament. We see the same level of non-Brexit related instruments coming through. We are working through that information, so what we want to give the committee is not just the picture of what Brexit SI notifications and SSIs are coming, but all SSIs are coming through the system. Historically, it has been about 200 to 300 domestic SSIs, so I can call them that. We have very preliminary information that suggests that, if we continue as we plan to do, it is about the same volume again, but we have not had the chance to work out how those figures fit across individual committees or to go through a process of prioritisation in the same way that we are doing with Brexit work, so that is a discussion that we need to have with the minister. Once we are able to show those projections to the committee, we intend to do so. Shouldn't you see any big dip in that workload that we have seen previously? There are fluctuations across the SSI programme every year. Sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less, and that is just a product of the type of work that we are bringing forward, but at the moment it is looking similar to the previous years. In terms of the Government, it was provided with cash in order to prepare for Brexit. Where has that money gone? To pick up that point, the chancellor set aside £1.5 billion for additional funding in each of the years 2018-19, 2019-20. For that, the Scottish Government received £37.3 million of consequentials for 2018-19. That has made up a £35.8 million resource, £1.6 million capital. The Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Economy and Fair Work has made initial allocations of £26.6 million resource and £0.5 million capital funding, which are supporting the preparation work that they are doing, and there will be further announcements linked to the budget. That is a global figure, but what are we doing with the cash? Can we give examples of that? To be honest, that is not an area for us to get into more sort of delivery of the legislative programme, so I think that is something that we would have to come back on if that is okay. We will write back to the committee with as much information as we can. Is your question kind of related to staffing? Yeah, I mean the resources that we are spending £10 million on stamps, are we spending them on lawyers, are we spending them on policy experts or where is the money? Once the final details are announced in the budget, we can write with that, provide that detail. In the meantime, I will proceed to come back with any information that I can, and that is helpful. Thank you, convener, and good morning. May I also take this opportunity to welcome the minister to his new position? Clearly, there has been much discussion about instruments arising from the EU withdrawal act. I wonder if the minister or his officials could update the committee on any other Brexit-related legislative activity that will be forthcoming, such as from the trade bill. The main other area of activity is UK primary legislation, and obviously the trade bill is currently before the Parliament in legislative consent memorandum has been looked at. The next one is the agriculture bill, which the UK Government has just introduced. We expect that there will be more UK primary legislation relating to Brexit in the future, potentially by the turn of the year, but we do not know exactly what that might be and exactly when it might come. One example would be the fisheries bill, which I think the UK Government has said that it is working on, but we do not have timings on that. Is there any expectations with regard to delegated powers that hinge upon devolved competencies in that legislation? The committee will be from its consideration of the EU withdrawal bill. I am sure that you are familiar with the Scottish Government's position on delegated powers as it relates to preparations for EU withdrawal. The Government's position will be the same, and it has been expressed to the UK Government that, when similar issues arise in Brexit-related legislation, the expectation is that devolved competence will be respected when it comes to the allocation of delegated powers. Clearly, from what we have learned from the EU withdrawal act, it is that the UK Government is unwilling to respect devolved competencies when it does not regard that as being in the UK's interest. When this legislation is inevitably passed out at Westminster, in terms of the workload for this Parliament on devolved areas of potential arising, such as ASIs and SSIs, is there any understanding of how that can impact on the workload of the Parliament and the Government? I would again simply point to the experience that this committee and other committees have had with the EU withdrawal bill and act as an example of the way that the Government is seeking to protect the devolution settlement and in particular respect the role of this Parliament while faced with the undoubted, large practical challenge of making the necessary preparations for EU withdrawal. I will ask you about a slightly different thing that you will be relieved to hear. You will know Minister as a former convener that there has been a frustration among conveners and others about the accessibility of some of the documents that we get relating to SSIs. Now, you are predecessor committed to looking at this. I do not know how far he has got. You will also appreciate that we are in the same boat here as former journalists the need to present things in plain English. We often do not get that. Is that something that you are committed to pursuing? Yes, we have had several conversations with officials as I was appointed. My predecessor committed to doing that and had done substantial groundwork in that area. I have very much reinforced that. As a former convener, I share your and other conveners concerns about the nature of some of the explanatory notes that are overly explanatory at times and the lack of plain English. There is substantial work going on to try and ensure that we make this as easy as possible for committees. For example, what we are looking at is, in addition to what is contained within the instrument, perhaps a covering letter that explains in two or three paragraphs specifically what the instrument does. That is not to insult the intelligence of committee members. It is simply to be helpful, because we have all at times read explanatory notes and had to go back and re-read them. It is a legitimate complaint that the committees have had. It is something that we are very much looking forward to fixing. I am not going to sit here today and say that we will get this absolutely right in one go. As Mr Fitzpatrick had indicated previously, I am not quite happy because I think that we would resolve that issue. I am certainly willing to hear from committees of any examples of poor practice, poor presentation, so that allows us to focus in on that and look to improve the nature of the instrument and the way that it is presented. I am very much hearing what you are saying on that issue. Okay. Given that everything comes through this committee, I am sure that we can provide examples, but it is just to be helpful that we need to work together on that. In the spirit of constructive engagement, I completely wait your commitment to working with you on that. If you have something to draw up my attention, do so. That is very useful. I have one final question. It is back to Brexit, I am afraid. Given the number of additional Brexit-related instruments are you concerned that officials might force officials to speed up drafting to get things through and that mistakes could occur? I certainly hope not. There is a lot of work going into ensuring that we do not see a dropping of standards through the workload. Human nature being what it is, people will make mistakes. It happens, we all do that, but we are acutely aware of the stresses on the system to produce good quality drafting. I cannot sit here today and say that there is not going to be any problems and I would not do that, but we are committed to getting that right. We put in as much resource and effort into doing that. Given evidence to the committee before about improvements in the quality assurance mechanisms being applied inside government to the process of drafting, I can reassure the committee that there is no intention to compromise on any of them simply because of the Brexit workload. The same quality assurance processes that the committee has taken evidence about before will apply to every single Brexit instrument that comes before the committee. However, as the minister says, we are dealing with an unprecedented workload and that will inevitably have some consequences on the instruments that the committee sees. It might be clear with the approach just to get it right first time, so we are not tying up your time and I was having to revisit instruments. Okay, thank you. Members have any other questions? No. It has been a short session, but a useful one, getting to know your session, if you can call it that. I thank you for your time and I will suspend the meeting briefly so that you can leave. Okay, we will move on to agenda item 3, instrument subject to affirmative procedure. No points have been raised on the draft renewables obligations Scotland amendment order 2018 and the draft early years assistant best start grant Scotland regulations 2018. Is the committee content with these instruments? Yes. Okay, agenda item 4 consideration of an instrument subject to negative procedure. No points have been raised on SSI 2018-267. Is the committee content with this? Yes, it is. Okay, and I will move the meeting into private session.