Correct me if I’m wrong, but here are some terms you won’t hear in Peter Schiff’s speech for the Austrian Scholar’s Conference (available as today’s episode of the Lew Rockwell Show):
- gold standard
- commodity money
- Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
- Austrian School(!)
- secondary deflation
- M1
- IPO
- capital depletion
- praxeology
Terms Peter Schiff does use:
- sound money
- economic meltdown
- collapse
- bubble
- dividends
- damage
- [Federal Reserve was] too easy, too loose
- land, labor, and capital
- destroy value
- destroy wealth
- assets
- revenues
- go public
- burst the bubble
- spending spree
- socialism
- sound foundation
- buying more stuff
A physicist I worked with once told me that he didn’t care how obscure your work is (theoretical particle physics or whatever)–if you can’t explain it to a layman, then you don’t know what you’re doing.
For the right audience, all those words in the first list absolutely have their place–but it should be noted that if you are speaking to laymen, then terms from the second list are perfectly clear (if perhaps imprecise), while each term you use from the first list is likely to go over their heads.
5:10 pm on March 16, 2009
