Rate to see you all again today. [applause] this is not being recorded live. This andve right into stay as close to schedule as possible. I want to talk about the economic crisis, and i am happy to say that thanks to my friends, some of you here, my entering its fifth week as a New York Times bestseller, and you guys help make that happen. Thank you. [applause] it is the ideas that matter. Forced towe are being in doer this conventional wisdom that tells us that the free market has failed and we are stupid for believing in the free need thed instead we geniuses and washington to see us through. It is so false that i wonder if everybody who utters it believes it. Im sure some of them dont understand the situation well enough. That is what they think. Something moreis sinister in some cases. This is so far from the truth that i think when rahm emanuel said you cant let a good crisis go to waste, he revealed that dontople who rule us care what the causes of this thing is. Moreolution is they get power, always, always, always very [applause] [applause] while everyone is suffering, they get their offices renovated. That is stimulus. There are people who believe this. Voodoo . Do do they do a rain dance . I dont know why you would believe absurdities like this. It is not just our currency that has been debased. It is also the nobel prize. Lets get cracking. More time, which i dont, i would say lets go through the list of government factors that led us to this crisis we are in today. I dont have time for them all. There are a lot. Normally i would talk about , andie mae and fanny mack these supposedly private organizations that only an idiot thought were private organizations and everybody knew would be bailed out with taxpayer money. Organizations got regulatory breaks not available to other market actors, so they were able to distort the market in ways the free market would not have permitted. I talk about the Community Reinvestment act that got real only in theeeth 1990s that required banks to make Mortgage Loans against their better judgment to avoid facing crushing discrimination suits. In america, as you perhaps know, discrimination suits if you are accused of discrimination, you are guilty until proven innocent. Brainve to open up your and look around for the proof. I dont know how you are expected to do that. Instead of trying to do the impossible, bank said we wont make loans that dont make any sense. I will not talk about those factors. Onhink a lot of people conservative talk radio have talked about them and made some excellent points. I think conservative talk radio and people who believe in the free market are getting killed in this debate because they are the most important precipitating factor in this crisis, and that is the Federal Reserve system. [applause] people talk about the Federal Reserve system, the average persons eyes glaze over and think i could never understand this. I better leave this to the experts. That was the problem. We left this to the experts. No, we need people who know what they are talking about to have a say in this debate. How did we get in this situation, and why is this not a fault of the free market . An example of government planning gone dramatically wrong . Made an unfair reference to paul krugman a little while ago, so lets talk about somebody whod deserves the nobel prize. Hayeks significant about innot that he could write several different disciplines and have something of value to say, but the theory for which she won the nobel prize is the most relevant piece of economic knowledge for americans to have right now. As the austrian thierry of the business cycle. When i gave a speech in nesota in september normally you write your remarks and figure this one people might clap, this one may be they will laugh. I got to the point where i more peoplere and are interested in austrian business cycle. 10 thousand people burst into applause. I thought people who believe in freedom are the smartest people on earth. [applause] lets talk about this. His sounds technical i could never understand this. You can understand it. You have to understand it. Right now every kwak on earth is remedies for kwak a crisis he did not see coming. Know the real truth and be able to defendant. Higher experience works as follows. Said lets suppose you had a central bank like the Federal Reserve system, by the way, hayek is against this unfree market grounds. Its not the great stabilizer in , the Federal Reserve is the great d stabilizer of the economy. Follows, was as Interest Rates can come down in two ways. They come down if you and i save more. That pushes the Interest Rate down because the banks have more to lend, so the price of lending becomes lower. That Interest Rates can come down is if Central Banks force them down through open market operations. Technicalet into the details about that. The central bank through operationspen market can push the Interest Rate in various directions, so the Interest Rate can come down naturally through the free can come downey unnaturally through Central Planning when you have your soviet commissar in charge of money and rates pushing them down artificially. Greenspan, by the way, who told us there is a flaw in the free market and i did not notice it before. Yeah, why dont you look in the mirror and see the flaw . Was that these two different ways Interest Rates can come down have different economic consequences. If they come down naturally because you and i are saving more, this has two important coordinating a fax. Coordinating effects. If i save now, i will consume more in the future. Saving for the future. The more i save, the more oriented to the future i become. That is good. When Interest Rates come down, that is the time when businessmen say now is the time for us to do longterm investment because Interest Rates are low and borrowing is cheap. The longerterm your investment is, the more Interest Rate sensitive it is, and anybody with a 30 year mortgage knows what im talking about. The first year you pay your 30 2200mortgage, you realize dollars is interest to because the term of the loan is so long. Mortgages are Interest Rate sensitive. The Interest Rate comes down a little, your rate can come down a lot. Businessmen engage in longterm investment projects oriented to the future when investment rates aspects theo those furthest from finished consumer goods, they get the biggest stimulus from this. Is good because people will consume in the future and producers are getting ready to produce the goods in the future. Useful coordinating device is if the Interest Rate comes down because we are saving more, that means i produce a lot of stuff but have not gone into the economy to pull out all the stuff my cash entitles me to. Resourceslease these and save, we are providing the material wherewithal to see these new investment projects that businesses are undertaking through to completion. The Interest Rate on the free market coordinates appeared what happens if the free market is not in the picture and the Interest Rate is artificially pushed lower. This is not the free market. The free market will still be blamed. Says ir soviet commissar think Interest Rate should be 1 and engages in policies to bring that about, that is not the free market. If the Interest Rate is brought down artificially, consumers have not indicated they want to spend more in the future. They want to consume more now, at the very time that investors are being enticed to invest for the future. At a time when people want more existing product, investors are misled into thinking they should engage in longterm product development. That is why we are supposed to have a free market. We dont need a central planner. If the Interest Rates are artificially lower, they have not released additional resources. If in bernanke does something to push Interest Rates down, that does not mean there is more lumber, more steel. Ben bernanke does not have anything that he can give us. Although he owes it to us, what ever he has. [applause] will therefore investors start their new investment project with an unchanged resource pool, grabbing from a that is smaller than they thought it was. The prices will go up. Discoordination introduced by interfering with the free market. In some ways we can describe the Federal Reserve as a private institution, at the same time we have to understand the fed was created by an act of congress. Many of its personnel are appointed by the government, and it has the governmentgranted monopoly privilege to create legal tender money out of thin air. If it did not have that privilege, it would be nothing, so this is a government supported institution. Without that privilege, it would be nothing, so this is an example of the government intervening in the economy. It has disastrous results. Is thesey what happens projects cant all be completed. The resources havent been saved to complete them, so the thing has to become a bust, so any attempt to explain why are our economy goes to a boombust cycle, why is that . Karl marx says that is the way the free market is. Ok, there is karl marx is wonderful view. That is also the mainstream view. That is the way capitalism is. There is no particular reason we should see this. Some businesses are going to fail. That is inevitable. Are not infallible forecasters of the future, but why should they all simultaneously seem to suffer a downturn all in the same direction, especially when the market weeds out people who are bad at entrepreneurship. If you are bad at anticipating consumer demand, you go out of business. Capital havet your proven they are good anticipating this demand, so given the market tends to weed people who are bad and report people who have a good track these peoplere all making errors in the same direction . Animals. Just and suddenly make bad decisions . I guess if we just develop the right drug and give these businessmen the right drug, i dont know why we are not researching that. Maybe there are real factors and not just psychological ones . We have identified the source of the error. Why are there these major errors . The Interest Rate is not ring allowed to tell the truth. Structurest rate, the of Interest Rates come the most important figures in the whole paysmy, every entrepreneur attention to them, and if they are distorted, theyd lead to errors by businessmen, investors, consumers. It is not a free market when the Interest Rate is interfered with because the collapse we have seen is directly attributable to this interference with Interest Rates and creating all this new money [applause] the fed has the power to ate money out of 10 air out of thin air and by assets and get it into the Banking System to bring Interest Rates down, but all the money created out of air discombobulated economy and the result is a crash. Some people will say we created all this new money, got it into the Banking System. That lowered Interest Rates and caused confusion. Money. Ution is more lets create more money out of thin air to create solutions created by the problems of the first money. The problem with that is as follows. Givenconsider the analogy by a great 20 century economist who basically knows more about economics than our whole economics establishment today put together. Lets have an analogy in which we compared the economy to a master elder. The Master Builder is trying to build a house, but believes he has 20 more bricks at his disposal than he actually has. He will Start Building that house, a different house with different dimensions than he would have built if he could have seen the economys Resource Base clearly, but he has been misled and lets assume he cant i add additional bricks. Better, for him to discover this error sooner or later . Out, ther he finds it sooner he can abandon this project. This is a bubble project. It is a wealth consuming project that will go to waste and improper sham. He will waste bricks, labor time, resources. It is better to stop as soon as possible. If he waits until the end, he will demolish a whole house he cant complete. It is as if you are saying instead of letting him know the real Resource Base of the economy, lets get him drunk. Up so he doesim not notice how many bricks he has it when reality kicks in, it will be rough, but that in effect is what is going on, and all of our geniuses on tv and in the newspapers and everywhere else are all saying that is what we need, more of the same. With the obama administration, it is more of the same, except worse. [applause] arehis is the policy we being given. Lets remember now. We have just seen an example of what happens when you try to paper over a recession and printed new money to get us out help, acause that will strategy that should not satisfy a bright fourthgrader. Was that inened bust,we had the dot com another artificial boom. We had that downturn, but greenspan decided that after a while he wanted to get things rolling again, so instead of letting the economy autumn out and let all the mistaken investment be cleared out so that real Wealth Generators could begin our real as opposed to a phony recovery, instead lets just keep pushing Interest Rates lower, like this is some shortcut to prosperity. A federalwe build reserve system in bangladesh and all their poverty will be done . Look at what happened in the 20002001 recession, the only one on record in which Housing Starts did not decline, so what happened is that by not letting the economy clear out, let the recession take its course, and the recession is the economy trying to readjust after all the misdirected resources caused by the fed in the first place, so it is the boom that is the problem, not so much the recession which is trying to clear this out so we can have a genuine recovery. When the bust comes, it is much worse because now all this time people have been making consumption and Investment Decisions that are unsustainable that they would not have made if they could see the economy clearly. Meanwhile, this is blamed on the free market. I really want to know how it is possible for radio talkshow host like thom hartmann, who has of hayek, butord wrote a column on huffington post. Are you a blockhead . I say that not to be mean or get emails from people comes sorry. The wellbeing of the country is at stake and we have a guy who cant be bothered to read three pages on people he condemns, people who would have prevented the crisis if we only had listen to them. Instead we are listening to tom hartman. That is an economic theory for children. We need an economic theory for grownups. [applause] that says that wealth and economic wellbeing are not created by spending per se, but by saving, producing, and entrepreneurial skill. Fed,entally, without the there would have been no housing bubble. People had become irrationally attached to the buying of houses, what would have happened, it was a mania, people went crazy. , who is notchwartz an austrian, even she says that if there is in a fed creating all the credit, where what all the money come from. Would go up houses and Interest Rates would shoot way up. That would put an end to speculation in real estate. Youead what happens when are the soviet commissar in charge of money and Interest Rates, you can just create money out of new air and the banks have a time to lynn, so you keep the solution going, but it is an illusion all the same. Just like the homebuilder in the wonderful analogy to show how producers and investors get misled into engaging in projects that the economys Resource Base cant complete. It is also a good analogy for consumers. Consumers thought they were richer than they were because their home prices were appreciating. Why not borrow against it and by that fancy car . Why not buy a five dollar cup of coffee at starbucks. The sky is the limit. That homebuilder analogy is useful for consumers. They were on an unsustainable consumption binge. They would not buy all these things if they knew their house was worth only half of what they is beingso everybody misled. An economist with the fed said that for the fed to be standing there after what it has done to us and say we dont know what it couldnt have anything to do it us or the fact that we are making all this money of available cheaply and at no cost for you to leverage up, we wont mention that. We will just say we are the saviors here. They caused all of this miscalculation. [applause] make matters to worse, we had during Alan Greenspans tenure, the phenomenon known as the greenspan put, which investors understood to mean that Alan Greenspan has put unofficially in place a floor beneath which asset prices will not fall and Monetary Authority will intervene in bail you out. Thats why some people called him mr. Bailout. Antony mueller said since Alan Greenspan took office, Financial Markets in the u. S. Have operated under a quasiofficial charter that says the central bank will protect major actors from the risk of bankruptcy. You succeed, when you are in high profit, and if you fail, authorities will save you anyway. In the wake of the dot calm boom, there was increasing concern that greenspan and his put, which is an unofficial injecting into the economy a destructive tendency towards excessively risky investment supported by hopes the fed will help if things go bad. The argument will be rates, what about before the fed . Didnt we have crazy ups and downs in the economy before the fed . Ok, we did have the great depression. Far worse than anything that occurred in the 19th century, but there is a twofold response to this i have a section in meltdown that deals with the ups and downs before the fed. One is arguing where the apparent extremities of the economic swings of the 1990s as opposed to the stability of the postworld war two. Period is an artifact. I will grant you it is not a Federal Reserve system. You got me there. Everything else is there. , firste National Banks national bank, Second National again, you have a boom created by excessive money creation that could not have occurred and a free market. You have a government intervening to bail out the banks. The banks know the government will bail them out like this, so you think this might make them become a little riskier . Incidentally, it is true that the Community Reinvestment act and these other things did require and encouraged the banks to lower their standards of credit worthiness, but we should remember the fed and central banking through American History before there was a fed, when they increase the money supply, we always see lending standards go out the window, particularly pronounced in recent years. We see this in the early 20th century, the 19th century. They are throwing money at anybody because there is so much of it. The key point to remember is that lets say i am a coach of a Basketball Team and they change the rules and you are allowed to more people on your team, in order to get to more people on my team, i have to look at people who would not have made the cut in the past. The same thing goes with all the new money on hand. They want to lend it out. Outhey are going to lend it come it is inevitable they will lend it out to people they would have rejected in the past, so the institutional structure we are operating under leads to this. All these panics of the 19 century have the same pattern, excessive money creation leads to a phony room that leads to a bus. To a bust. It is the same phenomenon. You would have to be asleep not to see it. You would aote for new york editorial writer has to to say about it in the 1830s. Listen to him describing the phenomenon he just observed in the 1830s that culminated in the panic of 1837. Thank goodness our economy is now panicproof come up because the government decided we will not use the word panic anymore to describe these things. That is what they have done with the toxic assets. There are no toxic assets. There are legacy assets. Really now . They must laugh at how dumb they think we are. [applause] listen now. Here is a guy writing in 1837. He could be writing in 2009. He is writing about the same phenomenon that has nothing to do with the free market. For is a guy who calls separation of bank and state prevent this from happening again. What ever must be, the consequences of such a sudden and prodigious inflation of the currency, business to related to the most unhealthy activity, a vast amount of overproduction come a vast amount of speculation and property of every kind and name and fictitious value, and finally a fast and terrific crash when the treacherous and unsustainable basis crumbles beneath this to tend his fabric of credit and the structure falls to the ground, burying in its ruins thousands who exulted in the security of their elevation. Deemingdays go to bed themselves rich and wake in the morning to find them stripped of the little they really had. They count diluted creatures on thecontinued liberality of banks whose treaties seduce them into the slippery path of speculation. They have now to learn that the banks cannot help them if they would and would not if they could. They were free enough to lend their aid when assistance was not needed, but now when it is indispensable to carry out the project which would not have been undertaken but for the temptation they held forth, no further resources can be supplied. Krugman, you listening . 1837, this guy is just a journalist. Later that year he said any person who has soberly observe the course of events for the past couple of years must have seen the state of things which now exists. Im sure he had to endure people even then who said no one could have seen this one coming. Leaders tellr wise us. He said you will see that the banks have been striving with all their might, each emulating the other, to force their money into circulation. They have used every art of jewelry and lou are meant to entice men and they excited speculation which they stimulate until an increase to a delirious fever and men in the epidemic frenzy of the hour wildly rush upon all sorts of desperate ventures. They dug canals were no commerce asked for the means of transportation. They open roads were no travelers decide to penetrate. They built cities where there were none to inhabit. I just read a bout this a gigantic center they were building in las vegas. They are abandoning the whole thing to talk about cities where there were none to inhabit. The same phenomenon. Dont tell me that before we had all these problems, but now the fed has gotten rid of them. This is exactly the problem we had then and now and for the same reasons. Suggest to you is this is not just a matter of more regulation. Irresponsiblest intellectual laziness imaginable to look at this and say we need more regulation. [applause] if the institutional structure encourages excessive risk and takes credit cheap and encourages risks, you can have all the regulations you want, yes, wetually come wont repeat this exact scenario, congratulations. For example, we will never have another shoe bomber. Way ahead of last weeks terrorist, and if we have a time warp here, we can stop this one, but the point is thereegulatory tinkering, is more of an argument here, it is the institutions giving rise to this. It is the money itself, so what we see here is we have a money that can be manipulated, created there areair, and always criticisms come if money were attached to gold or this and that, we could never have that. That is not true either. I dont have time for that at the moment, but the point is we get all these criticisms. A person who wrote economic editorials for the new york said i dont care what your technical criticism of gold or the precious metal standard are, it is a money that government cannot just bankulate and a central cannot destroy peoples savings by manipulating it, and what ever your technical criticisms are, they are utterly trivial when set next to the merit of a sound money. Right now we have an unsound money, so we have seen artificially manipulated paper money with nothing to back it to give us the phony prosperity, what comes with that is a boombust cycle. The result ofates savings are the foundation for real growth. Low Interest Rates the results of manipulation yield us only boom and bust. Then to add insult to injury, when the bust comes, all the Major Players caught out in it who should not have acted the way they acted turned to the paper money producer and ask for a bailout and usually get what they ask for. I ask you is this the best conceivable system that every nontrivial alternative has to be dismissed out of hand . Slowwe are watching is a motion wreck as we observe washington and the fed tried to put everything back together, and in the interest of time i will refer people to my website for an article called tooth fairy economics explaining why there is no way to improve it. A free thank you. I will conclude with this so we can keep our program on schedule. Us as being held up to people we should listen to . Ben bernanke, isnt it funny that ben bernanke felt he had to go on 60 minutes to defend the fed and explain why everything he is doing it so urgently necessary . They are under more pressure than they have felt, and that is not supposed to happen. They are doing what is best for us. How dare we question them . We are starting to question them. The journalist interviewing ben bernanke is not questioning him. The reporters job is to throw him softballs over the plate. Of the Mainstream Media to make the overlords look good, smart, indispensable am a bit never ask a really challenging question, like what is the toughest thing about being a central banker . Yeah. Come on. What kind of free press is this . They are too ignorant to know what question to ask. Why be overawed by a guy who told us a couple of years ago that his regulators had investigated the Mortgage Market and found it was healthier than ever. Why should we listen to a guy who said the housing bust will be over by december 2008 . [applause] we have listened to hank paulson who told us in 2007 that the World Economy is in the best shape ever . These of the people we are supposed to care about . Seriously, you would want to do the exact opposite of what these people recommend, so let me say this [laughter] instead of listening to every been on earth who has wrong for years and giving us the wrong advise, who contributed to the blowing up of the largest asset bubble in the history of mankind, instead of listening to them, lets listen to people who saw it coming. These arent still sayers or people who had crystal balls, they had sound austrian economics to jim grant, jim rogers, peter schiff am a ron paul. It is not a coincidence they saw this coming. To them . We listen their phones are not ringing off the hook from the obama administration. The administration seems to be of the opinion that the bigger blockhead you were, the more surprised you were by the crisis, the lesson since you have, but the more we want to hear from you am a but if you saw this coming, forget about it. So ladies and gentlemen, lets listen to the people who not only predicted this but have a theory to account for how it happened and a serious proposal for how to get out of it come up because, ladies and gentlemen, that would be change we could believe in. Thank you. [applause] i know it looks like i have come up for an encore. Now i would take about the war of 1812. I guess we have a few minutes. Ok. I went so fast because i thought this is all the time i have. Good, ok, yeah. Is the microphone not working . I can ask a really easy question . Have a question. I have a thing i would like you to explain the little bit to what the effect of the currency act of 1933 had on the people . You mean the confiscation of the golden beyond . Yes. Been interested in this subject because the questioner is asking something a lot of americans dont know, that in 1933, the federal government confiscated peoples gold. You had to hand your gold over. The understanding was we will get it back eventually. This is just for the duration of the emergency. That is one thing where people say, do you think they will confiscate gold again. I think people this time will not do it. They realize. At the time, i think a lot of people just believe the government knows what it is doing. I know this sounds quaint, but this is a country that had just lived through simple president s like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge am a very unassuming guys just doing their best. I think they did believe the government was doing its best and this was a necessary interim measure so we will hand it over. Today it would be like they came by asking for your guns. You give them the one gun you have then meaning to get rid of anyway. Seemive that when and you like you complied, and you have your stash. The same thing would go for gold. [applause] details about this, i wrote an article on this. There is a chapter on gold. We call it the great gold robbery of 1933. There is an article online i drew from that. The effect it had on the people, i think the effect has only been in the longterm. In the shortterm, most people did not give monetary issues a second thought. Could redo and the paper for gold, and they have been using paper for a long time, there is very little gold coins circulating, so it did not seem to people like a huge departure being made. ,ext year, they canceled eliminated all gold clauses in contracts public and private. You cant contract and gold. People always have the right to pay you in greenback. It is in the long run that it has had its effect. Knowing what the government has done, we look act on it and say that was a watershed moment. People who were astute at the time realize that was a watershed moment. I dont think they realized how sinister washington, d. C. Was at that time. Yes, sir. I have a twopart question. Government were to stop intervening with all these bailouts and the pump priming of the Federal Reserve, number one, how bad given the Current Situation with how far we have gone down this road would it be if the economy was allowed to correct itself. And two, is there any historical precedent where that has happened that way . A that is question. What i did not have time for in the talk is the subject of, what would some who believes in the austrian theory have done . What is going on in the recession or depression is that riod, thereboom pe has been bubble activity. Activity which at that price level could only be sustained by artificial means, only by printing more and more money. It was actually diverting wealth from channels where the wealth would normally have gone to something where it does not want to go, but the Interest Rates are so cheap. On the back of that bubble are tinier bubbles. I use starbucks as a whipping boy. I am not on the antistarbucks bandwagon. I wrote it in a starbucks a lot of the time. I dont treat coffee, so i bought ice tea over and over. They never bothered me. I think they are good people, but at the same time, they are closing a lot of stores because it may well be that five dollar cups of coffee are a bubble activity that people will engage in only when they think they are richer than they are. Has hery friend example, cold stone creamery, home of the seven dollar ice cream cone. Maybe during a bubble, but now year thinking about making your own. Those sorts of things, the wealth that went into them was artificial. It should not have gone into them. Is trying to sort out, ok, we have had crazy movements of capital here, and some are sound and sustainable am a but some are bubble activities. We are trying to sort out which can stand on their own and which are wealth consuming bubble activities that need to be discontinued so their resources can be freed up for more productive use. Every time you prop up a firm going out of business, you are interrupting the process. Sometimes it is not quite so simple as that. Everybody going out of business was not a bubble activity. Process, butcrude to make credit artificially available can simply prolong the initial problem by steering capital into a place where it would not normally want to go. You have to let wages and prices adjust to the new reality, so wages need to come down. They may need to go up in other places. That is how we reallocate labor. That has to be done without any interference. How deep with things get . I think it would be arbitrary to try to speculate on that, but it would be short lived if history is any guide. 192020 one, here is a depression no one had heard of, but in terms of production and unemployment, it was worse than the first year of the great depression. What did they do . I have come across interesting speeches i Warren Harding. He was not the smartest guy in the world, but he was not the dumbest either. He was probably smarter than most of the recent president s. They made fun of him because he could not speak very well. When he died, they said the guy who could utter a simple grammatical sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead. What he did manage to get out of his mouth was surprisingly sound. He said we have had this credit bubble and now it is coming undone and any wild experiment will only make things worse. All we can do is rely on our system of free enterprise. That is what they did. They didnt increase the budget. They cut it. [applause] book says you cant do that. About aggregate this or aggregate that, the problem is specific streams of spending should not be going here, here, and here. A third,the budget by probably more, huge, dramatic cuts. Order of axes on the third or more, by the end of the decade, by two thirds at the top rate. The economy was already turning around by 1921 and beginning to set production records again, so if you let the market sort this out, he can work. Dead wood out. It will clear it out. We it is not us. It has nothing to do with you and me. It is them. If they keep doing this model where they bail everybody out, my view is what you want up with are not firms too big to fail, they are too big to be kept alive. [applause] so clear them out, dont follow the example of japan. Do have time for one more . Is that it . Ok. We will talk informal. Ok, thank you all very much. [applause] history bookshelf, here from the countrys bestknown American History writers of the past decade every saturday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern, and you can watch any of our programs anytime when you visit our website, cspan. Org history. Americanatching history tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Afterwords,ght on the life and political career of Newt Gingrich with his book, citizen newt. He is interviewed by former virginia congressman jim davis. This is an era before Cable Television. Msnbc,as before cnn, Little Pockets of cable here and there, but mostly reruns of i love lucy and things like that. There is no talk radio to speak of. There is the big media. And cspan. He quickly realizes the potency of giving special orders every afternoon, a fiveminute speech, because it was then being carried over cable into 100,000 homes around the country, and him aboutsed to rip it. Newt gingrich used to say, w ould you give a speech to 100,000 people . That is what you have on cspan every afternoon. He quickly became a colt political leader getting 700 letters a week from people , a junior country member from georgia who is a member of a minority party. Onouncer watch afterwords cspan twos book tv. Tonight on the civil war, the unions decision to assign colored troops to guard prisoners. Here is a preview. The returned to the southerners, he said, isnt it talkous, most too good to or think about prison filled with rebel shoulders and dark ies on guard over them. Areent on to conclude they without surprise, without a government, and without a cause. Unions decision to use black regards over confederates is important for many reasons. It helped to shape their cause in the decades that followed the civil war. Aning the war, it served as impetus for these soldiers to fight harder. Prisonered the Exchange Breakdown and the potential for positive postwar relations. For us today, including the story of black sentinels in helps us toalso better understand the means and methods of retaliatory methods used in the war and the degrees of compliance with the labor code, especially this idea of humiliation. Watch the entire program on on colored troops as prisoner guards on cspan3s American History tv. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. 1970 nine, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Up next on American History tv, Texas Christian University history professor jean smith talks about Thomas Jeffersons challenges with the Louisiana Purchase treaty. He discusses jeffersons concerns over whether it was unconstitutional come at the resistance from the federalist party, and the territories inhabitants demands. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the seminar room under the dome on the fourth floor. I am doing this for television, so excuse my formality. I am a professor of history here at the university of missouri and the director of the institute on constitutional democracy. Tonight, we celebrate Constitution Day 2017. Constitution day was on sunday this past year, so we decided to