WEBVTT

NOTE Crisis and Liberty: Lecture 4

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

2
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:14.000
This morning I touched on a number of developments in the 19th century,

3
00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:29.000
with an eye more to disclosing some of the ways in which government was never as limited as many people take it to have been

4
00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:59.000
in the 19th Century.

5
00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:08.000
but perhaps not as stark a difference as some people believe and some data suggest.

6
00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:17.000
So we need to be aware of those aspects of our history.

7
00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:26.000
They help us to understand better some of the things that continue to take place right up to the present day in this country.

8
00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:39.000
I want to now move into the 20th century and talk this afternoon about the so-called progressive era.

9
00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:49.000
I've already touched upon this to some extent yesterday when I gave a very quick and dirty sketch

10
00:01:49.000 --> 00:02:15.000
of some contours of ideological history in the United States, but I want to get into a little more detail about the progressive era and not only deal with some ideological developments, but with some of the economic and political events of that time.

11
00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:28.000
This is a critical period of 15, 18 years. It constitutes, as I've called it, a bridge to modern times.

12
00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:41.000
And I've got just a few names thrown up not quite at random here to suggest some of the landmark personalities

13
00:02:41.000 --> 00:03:05.000
that are involved in not only making that transition but to suggest that it took place along two tracks both with regard to the government's role in foreign policy, the role of the United States in the world, and in domestic policy.

14
00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:30.500
So, we can think, crudely speaking, of the 19th century as the old regime, in the sense that U.S. foreign policy adhered for the most part, not perfectly, but for the most part, to the direction given by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,

15
00:03:30.500 --> 00:03:41.500
who advised that the country should stay out of foreign quarrels, specifically those of the European nations,

16
00:03:41.500 --> 00:03:49.500
with whom we had many ties of commerce and friendship and culture and other things.

17
00:03:49.500 --> 00:03:59.500
No one of any importance ever urged isolationism in a literal sense.

18
00:03:59.500 --> 00:04:10.500
No one said we should withdraw from the world and be as Japan was before Commodore Perry forced them to open up their trade.

19
00:04:10.500 --> 00:04:19.500
We had lots of connections and the Jeffersonians were always glad to have those connections of culture and commerce.

20
00:04:19.500 --> 00:04:24.540
and Commerce, but what they didn't want was for the government of the United States to

21
00:04:24.540 --> 00:04:33.760
project this nation into the endless intrigues and bloodshed that had marked the history

22
00:04:33.760 --> 00:04:34.760
of Europe.

23
00:04:34.760 --> 00:04:44.020
They said we've got plenty to do here, we've got a continent to develop, we've got lives

24
00:04:44.020 --> 00:04:49.460
of our own to lead, let's do that, let's let these people stew in their own juices

25
00:04:49.460 --> 00:04:57.780
as it were. If they must cut one another's throats, let them attend to it all by themselves.

26
00:04:57.780 --> 00:05:02.580
And so that was, as I say, for the most part, the sort of foreign policy that the United

27
00:05:02.580 --> 00:05:09.620
States conducted for more than a century. Now, there were always some people who wanted

28
00:05:09.620 --> 00:05:18.860
to get involved in foreign affairs militarily or in some other way that deviated from Jeffersonian

29
00:05:18.860 --> 00:05:33.860
and conservatism, and occasionally something would happen, as Jefferson himself authorized naval expeditions to suppress Barbary pirates.

30
00:05:33.860 --> 00:05:47.860
So one can certainly, if one tries, go back and create a fairly long list of events and deviations from that general policy stance.

31
00:05:47.860 --> 00:05:57.860
But I would still insist that they are anomalies. They are exceptions to the general rule of foreign policy.

32
00:05:57.860 --> 00:06:09.860
But beginning with the Spanish-American War in 1898, we move into a new era of American foreign policy.

33
00:06:09.860 --> 00:06:21.540
Policy. And from that time forward, the United States has been actively, repeatedly, and

34
00:06:21.540 --> 00:06:29.980
significantly involved in the military and political affairs of many other parts of the

35
00:06:29.980 --> 00:06:39.460
world, and eventually to virtually all other parts of the world. No one by the post World

36
00:06:39.460 --> 00:06:53.460
World War II period could really be immune from some American interest or involvement or intervention or influence of some kind that was carried out deliberately by the U.S. government.

37
00:06:53.460 --> 00:07:06.460
So we eventually arrived at global interventionism after World War II,

38
00:07:06.460 --> 00:07:15.460
which put the country in a completely different position than it had been in with regard to foreign policy in the 19th century.

39
00:07:15.460 --> 00:07:21.460
And it only gets worse lately.

40
00:07:21.460 --> 00:07:29.460
Domestically, we never had, as I say, laissez-faire, but we had limited government.

41
00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:41.460
We know it was limited because we know now that in the 20th century it got much bigger, so it might have been bigger in the 19th century.

42
00:07:41.460 --> 00:07:53.460
As I've stressed, there were lots of people seeking government intervention of all kinds in the 19th century, and many of them simply failed to get what they wanted.

43
00:07:53.460 --> 00:08:04.460
They didn't achieve the enactment or implementation of the government policies they wanted to do all sorts of things.

44
00:08:04.460 --> 00:08:11.460
Subsidize various industries, make tariffs even higher than they were already,

45
00:08:11.460 --> 00:08:17.460
provide emergency employment projects for people during industrial slumps.

46
00:08:17.460 --> 00:08:25.460
All sorts of proposals were being made all the time for some kind of additional government action in the 19th century.

47
00:08:25.460 --> 00:08:33.460
But in most cases, no response came forth.

48
00:08:33.460 --> 00:08:37.460
And when we look back and say, well, why was that?

49
00:08:37.460 --> 00:08:44.460
Why was it that the kinds of proposals that seem to go through much more readily in the 20th century

50
00:08:44.460 --> 00:09:07.460
I have concluded that an important part of the answer, probably not the whole of it, but an important part, is that the dominant ideology was one at that time that was much closer to what we would call classical liberalism.

51
00:09:07.460 --> 00:09:19.460
Many more people had a view of the proper role of government in economy and society as a closely limited role.

52
00:09:19.460 --> 00:09:25.460
And people talked that way. It was something you could read in newspaper editorials.

53
00:09:25.460 --> 00:09:30.460
You could even hear members of Congress saying things you'd never hear them say nowadays,

54
00:09:30.460 --> 00:09:41.460
Such as, we can't do such and such because we can't take money that doesn't belong to the Congress and use it to benefit these people.

55
00:09:41.460 --> 00:09:43.460
It's not our money.

56
00:09:43.460 --> 00:09:52.460
Well, actually that kind of talk was revived by a few people in the last 20 years in Congress, but they don't mean it.

57
00:09:52.460 --> 00:09:59.460
The difference was in the 19th century when some guy stood up on the floor of Congress and said that he really meant it.

58
00:09:59.460 --> 00:10:06.460
Look, it's not our money. We can't just do anything we think would be nice with that money.

59
00:10:06.460 --> 00:10:11.460
It's not ours to dispose of that way. We're constrained by the Constitution.

60
00:10:11.460 --> 00:10:15.460
This Congress only has certain limited, enumerated powers.

61
00:10:15.460 --> 00:10:22.460
Well, eventually that kind of belief system dissolved.

62
00:10:22.460 --> 00:10:40.460
and we got the kind of dominant ideology that has been friendly to unchecked exercise of government intervention in countless varieties of forms in domestic policy.

63
00:10:40.460 --> 00:10:49.160
Policy. Now, I put up some presidents here who were, as it were, at critical junctures

64
00:10:49.160 --> 00:10:56.760
of making this transition from the old regime to the modern regime, and Teddy Roosevelt and

65
00:10:56.760 --> 00:11:05.040
Woodrow Wilson I would call the mothers of all pernicious 20th century policy, whether

66
00:11:05.040 --> 00:11:13.200
or domestic or foreign. These were really bad guys, any way you slice it. Talk about

67
00:11:13.200 --> 00:11:23.480
misfortune. Roosevelt was a psychopath for starters. I'm not exaggerating here. The man

68
00:11:23.480 --> 00:11:34.840
was a complete nut. He relished killing people. There's an interesting account of the Spanish

69
00:11:34.840 --> 00:11:43.840
American War, when he is described by someone who came upon him dancing a little jig around a dead Spaniard.

70
00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:54.840
Well, you'd cogitate on that one for a while, when kind of a person dances a little jig around a slain human being.

71
00:11:54.840 --> 00:12:02.840
He loved to kill any kind of living creature, an avid hunter, up to and including human beings.

72
00:12:02.840 --> 00:12:27.840
So, that was one element of his personality, unfortunately, he was a complex figure, he wasn't just a psychopath, he was, in many ways, a keenly intelligent man, which made him even more dangerous.

73
00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:55.840
He wrote a great deal, he wrote many books, he was a successful author, and they're not bad books, they're not terrible books, you go read some of that now, and you'll find he's quite literate, he had a flair for writing, he obviously had a keen intelligence at work, now you may have problems with the kinds of thoughts he was processing with that intelligence,

74
00:12:55.840 --> 00:13:04.840
with some of the values that underlay his views and interpretations, but he certainly was not a dummy.

75
00:13:04.840 --> 00:13:15.840
And he had a virtually unbounded lust for power of the kind that demagogues exhibit.

76
00:13:15.840 --> 00:13:23.840
He loved public adulation. He loved to hear the people cheering for him.

77
00:13:23.840 --> 00:13:33.840
And that's one of the things that makes all politicians so dangerous, that they're that sort of person.

78
00:13:33.840 --> 00:13:44.840
They get their jollies from leading people, because the next thing you know, they're leading them over a cliff.

79
00:13:44.840 --> 00:14:10.840
So there was Roosevelt who inadvertently became president in 1901 when one of Ralph Raco's conspirators up in Buffalo polished off President McKinley and he stuck around for the rest of that term and won more.

80
00:14:10.840 --> 00:14:21.840
And then he left office, leaving his hand-picked successor, Taft, who proved to be a great disappointment rather quickly.

81
00:14:21.840 --> 00:14:29.840
Taft is also a complex figure, I think, a more admirable man, although not wholly admirable himself.

82
00:14:29.840 --> 00:14:39.840
A man of judicial temperament, whether you like his judicial doctrines or not, at least that was his temperament.

83
00:14:39.840 --> 00:14:45.840
He didn't really like being a politician, so you have to say, well, so far so good.

84
00:14:45.840 --> 00:14:54.840
He didn't like campaigning, he didn't particularly get a lot of joy from having public adulation.

85
00:14:54.840 --> 00:15:04.840
He was a thoughtful man, I think, and eventually he was much happier later on being Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

86
00:15:04.840 --> 00:15:09.840
The President of the United States

87
00:15:09.840 --> 00:15:15.840
But he did advance in some ways the program that Teddy Roosevelt had set in motion.

88
00:15:15.840 --> 00:15:28.840
For example, antitrust prosecution was carried out much more actively on an annual rate basis under TAF than it had been under Roosevelt.

89
00:15:28.840 --> 00:15:42.400
So even though Roosevelt is sometimes described as the trust buster, Taft was a more active prosecutor of antitrust cases than Roosevelt.

90
00:15:42.400 --> 00:15:51.960
And that was not good because, as I suggested this morning, antitrust law was a dreadful form of law.

91
00:15:51.960 --> 00:15:59.960
It imposed all kinds of uncertainty hanging over the conduct of business, particularly large business in this country.

92
00:15:59.960 --> 00:16:05.960
And even though the government in those days had limited enforcement resources,

93
00:16:05.960 --> 00:16:10.960
so chances were pretty good if you violated the antitrust laws, you'd get away with it.

94
00:16:10.960 --> 00:16:18.960
Still, you didn't know for sure, and if you were unlucky and were prosecuted and lost a case in court,

95
00:16:18.960 --> 00:16:27.120
Court. It could be extremely costly and potentially even devastating to your enterprise. So it

96
00:16:27.120 --> 00:16:37.080
was not a good thing that Taft was himself a big trust buster. But Taft looks like something

97
00:16:37.080 --> 00:16:57.080
If Teddy Roosevelt was a kind of psychopathic proto-fascist, then Wilson, to my way of thinking, was more akin to Lenin, a zealot, a humorless man, so far as his engagement with Lenin was concerned.

98
00:16:57.080 --> 00:17:07.080
My way of thinking was more akin to Lenin, a zealot, a humorless man so far as his engagement

99
00:17:07.080 --> 00:17:12.520
in public affairs went, utterly convinced of his own rectitude.

100
00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:20.920
What could be more dangerous than a man in power utterly convinced of his own rectitude?

101
00:17:20.920 --> 00:17:25.880
That's what we had to deal with with Wilson.

102
00:17:25.880 --> 00:17:32.960
Now Wilson never would have become president in the 12 election, had been elected then,

103
00:17:32.960 --> 00:17:41.520
become president the following year, but for Teddy's revived ambition. Teddy, having been

104
00:17:41.520 --> 00:17:50.980
out of office and slain enough large mammals in Africa to carry him for a lifetime, just

105
00:17:50.980 --> 00:17:55.920
Just couldn't stand being out of the public eye, especially when he was so disappointed

106
00:17:55.920 --> 00:18:02.920
in the way Taft was carrying on as president. So he, along with some of his politically

107
00:18:02.920 --> 00:18:09.920
influential pals, decided that they needed to put him back in office, but it didn't

108
00:18:09.920 --> 00:18:17.920
seem to be workable to do that via the Republican Party. So they said, well, if that won't work,

109
00:18:17.920 --> 00:18:31.920
We'll take our political football and go home and create the Progressive Party and Teddy Roosevelt will be our candidate and he'll run and be re-elected and we're off and running again.

110
00:18:31.920 --> 00:18:49.920
So that's what they did in 1912, and as a result of that political shenanigan, they split the non-democratic vote in such a way that Woodrow Wilson got a majority of electoral votes and was elected.

111
00:18:49.920 --> 00:18:58.920
I believe his popular vote was 43%, if I recall correctly, in that neighborhood.

112
00:18:58.920 --> 00:19:03.920
I think it was, well, at all events, it was in that neighborhood.

113
00:19:03.920 --> 00:19:08.920
He did not get a majority of the votes, but he won in the electoral college.

114
00:19:08.920 --> 00:19:18.920
So when Woodrow Wilson took office, he seemed, I think, to many people to be

115
00:19:18.920 --> 00:19:36.920
A democrat of the sort they had seen before. He had sometimes made noises about believing in competition and believing in the market economy and believing in low tariffs and free trade and those seem like traditional democratic positions.

116
00:19:36.920 --> 00:19:48.920
If you'd actually looked a little more closely into what he had to say, for example, by reading the collection of speeches published in 1912 called The New Freedom,

117
00:19:48.920 --> 00:19:54.920
you would have found that actually he was not any kind of Grover Cleveland Democrat.

118
00:19:54.920 --> 00:20:04.920
He was already deviating off into much more interventionist directions with regard to domestic policies.

119
00:20:04.920 --> 00:20:15.920
Foreign policies, you know, he didn't have any experience with and nobody seemed to be terribly interested in them in 1912 anyhow.

120
00:20:15.920 --> 00:20:23.920
So the election was really decided on the basis of the candidates' positions on domestic policies.

121
00:20:23.920 --> 00:20:33.920
And it was expected, I think, that Wilson would revert to some extent to democratic positions.

122
00:20:33.920 --> 00:21:01.920
And indeed in a few ways he did, such as lowering tariffs in 1913. But he had more in mind. He was already developing a kind of megalomania and it was going to be expressed in domestic policy by making the government a much more decisive arbiter of economic events than it had been before.

123
00:21:01.920 --> 00:21:17.920
He said in that book I mentioned that under modern conditions we can no longer rely on a government that promotes liberty in the old negative sense of just leaving people alone.

124
00:21:17.920 --> 00:21:29.920
We now have to have a government that actively intervenes on behalf of the individual as against powerful entities such as the trusts.

125
00:21:29.920 --> 00:21:55.920
So this was more like the kind of demagoguery you were getting from Teddy Roosevelt who by that time had become a full-fledged fascist who was campaigning for complete government control of big business and was making terribly menacing noises about almost acting as a dictator.

126
00:21:55.920 --> 00:22:09.920
So, I guess we should be glad in a way that Teddy didn't have another run, though it's hard to conceive of anything that would have turned out worse all in all than events as they turned out under Wilson.

127
00:22:09.920 --> 00:22:23.920
The great disaster of Wilson, of course, was that he ended up plunging the nation into World War I in a way that affected decisively the outcome of the war.

128
00:22:23.920 --> 00:22:39.920
But for American entry, it seems quite likely that the warring powers in Europe would have ultimately, in a state of exhaustion, concluded a peace with one another on very different terms than the Treaty of Versailles,

129
00:22:39.920 --> 00:23:04.920
which loaded the guilt and heavy reparations liability onto Germany, which busted up four large political empires and created a jerry-built arrangement of new nations and mandates and divvied up loot between the French, the Italians and the English.

130
00:23:04.920 --> 00:23:13.920
and created a situation in which a renewal of the fighting in Europe was well guaranteed,

131
00:23:13.920 --> 00:23:16.920
as many people saw quite plainly at the time.

132
00:23:16.920 --> 00:23:21.920
Mises wrote about it, John Maynard Keynes wrote about it.

133
00:23:21.920 --> 00:23:25.920
Many people who had heads on their shoulders could look at that treaty and say,

134
00:23:25.920 --> 00:23:41.920
This is a disaster. This is guaranteed to produce renewed warfare in the future, as it did just 21 years later.

135
00:23:41.920 --> 00:23:49.920
That was Wilson. Wilson created the outcome of World War I as it happened, I'd say almost single-handedly.

136
00:23:49.920 --> 00:23:55.520
Wilson personally had not decided to ask for a declaration of war.

137
00:23:55.520 --> 00:23:59.280
I don't believe the United States would have entered World War I.

138
00:23:59.280 --> 00:24:12.000
So if ever we could blame one man for so much horror, that's the man.

139
00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:18.200
Well, he had descendants, and a lot of them.

140
00:24:18.200 --> 00:24:26.200
And I've just sketched in one of his apostles, as it were, Herbert Hoover.

141
00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:32.040
Hoover himself was something of an author, who wrote a number of books.

142
00:24:32.040 --> 00:24:39.360
The last book he wrote was an adulatory book about Woodrow Wilson,

143
00:24:39.360 --> 00:24:48.000
because he idolized Wilson as many of the people who worked in Wilson's cabinet did.

144
00:24:48.000 --> 00:24:49.920
and he was a Wilsonian.

145
00:24:51.600 --> 00:24:55.800
Later on, of course, the Democrats tried to tar Hoover

146
00:24:55.800 --> 00:24:58.560
as some kind of a callous throwback

147
00:24:58.560 --> 00:25:01.340
to old-fashioned laissez-faire Republicans,

148
00:25:01.340 --> 00:25:03.680
but that was complete hogwash.

149
00:25:03.680 --> 00:25:05.080
He wasn't anything of the sort.

150
00:25:05.080 --> 00:25:06.720
He didn't believe in laissez-faire.

151
00:25:06.720 --> 00:25:09.320
He believed in all kinds of government active involvement

152
00:25:09.320 --> 00:25:12.800
in the economy, business government cooperation

153
00:25:12.800 --> 00:25:14.620
of various sorts.

154
00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:30.000
government assistance to farmers, to industrialists, transportation, banks, so whoever was anything but a proponent of laissez-faire.

155
00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:35.000
In fact, he thought laissez-faire was an outmoded idea and the government had to act differently.

156
00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:43.000
He was very much a Wilsonian in regard to domestic policy.

157
00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:47.000
He was somewhat less of a Wilsonian, I think, in foreign policy.

158
00:25:47.000 --> 00:25:57.000
He's not quite so keen to have the United States try to become the arbiter of the world's affairs.

159
00:25:57.000 --> 00:26:00.000
But again, not a perfect figure.

160
00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:08.000
But when we get to FDR, now we get someone who's a full-fledged Wilsonian, domestically and internationally.

161
00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:25.000
And we get him at the worst possible time, 1933, when we're at the pit of the great contraction and many people in this country are desperate for some kind of assistance that they see no way to get except from the federal government.

162
00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:53.000
So we'll come to that later on and talk about FDR and his leadership of the New Deal and the U.S. during World War II, which was so terribly destructive and prolonged the war, as John Denson will tell us later, by his policy of unconditional surrender, causing millions of unnecessary deaths.

163
00:26:53.000 --> 00:27:10.000
Followed directly by the pygmy Truman who, strange to say, eventually became a popular, almost mythical figure to the American people.

164
00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:18.000
There's just no accounting for the tricks that memory can play because when Truman left office in 1953,

165
00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:24.200
He was one of the most unpopular people who had ever held the office of the presidency,

166
00:27:24.200 --> 00:27:27.280
and for perfectly good reasons.

167
00:27:27.280 --> 00:27:35.560
His administration had been domestically corrupt and in foreign affairs disastrous, and so

168
00:27:35.560 --> 00:27:39.640
he deserved all the contempt anyone could heap on him.

169
00:27:39.640 --> 00:27:46.160
But eventually people looked back somehow and found his kind of bluntness so appealing

170
00:27:46.160 --> 00:27:48.160
The Theory of Money and Credit

171
00:28:16.160 --> 00:28:30.160
of FDR, and then after some kind of quieter times under Eisenhower, we get this succession of figures, which all need to be lumped together.

172
00:28:30.160 --> 00:28:43.160
In fact, Nixon was, in many ways, just like these other guys, extreme proponent or at least tolerator of domestic activism of all kinds.

173
00:28:43.160 --> 00:28:48.700
The regulatory state probably took a bigger leap under Nixon than any other president

174
00:28:48.700 --> 00:28:52.060
in any four-year period.

175
00:28:52.060 --> 00:29:00.040
And so we have these guys in the 60s and early 70s who then put in place the modern welfare

176
00:29:00.040 --> 00:29:08.520
state and up to and including its embeddedness in the medical care system, which is proving

177
00:29:08.520 --> 00:29:11.400
so disastrous by the day.

178
00:29:11.400 --> 00:29:20.280
So this is a kind of overview of figures, there's a lot more in that story of course, but the

179
00:29:20.280 --> 00:29:26.480
key here again for present purposes is that we get here via progressivism.

180
00:29:26.480 --> 00:29:32.120
Now one of the things that I was not happy about, and some readers of my book Crisis

181
00:29:32.120 --> 00:29:38.560
and Leviathan were equally unhappy about I think, was that when I discussed progressivism

182
00:29:38.560 --> 00:29:48.040
And I treated this crucial ideological change as exogenous, you know, I say we must recognize

183
00:29:48.040 --> 00:29:55.240
these things happened, but I didn't give a compelling explanation, even attempt to give

184
00:29:55.240 --> 00:29:57.640
an explanation of why.

185
00:29:57.640 --> 00:30:07.880
Why was it that progressivism occurred, that we moved from the dominant ideology of limited

186
00:30:07.880 --> 00:30:15.240
in Government, which had been in place with some resilience for more than a century to

187
00:30:15.240 --> 00:30:23.320
this very different kind of dominant ideology of government activism, both domestically

188
00:30:23.320 --> 00:30:27.640
and in foreign affairs.

189
00:30:27.640 --> 00:30:33.080
I don't know that I have ever arrived at anything I would characterize as a simple

190
00:30:33.080 --> 00:30:48.080
I have no confidence myself that I can put down in a few lines why that transition took place, because I think it has various sources.

191
00:30:48.080 --> 00:30:57.080
What I have tried to do to get a better mental grip on it myself is to consider the context in which it took place,

192
00:30:57.080 --> 00:31:05.080
Some of the background, some of the main ideas that composed it and try to link all these things together.

193
00:31:05.080 --> 00:31:11.080
How do they connect up? Some of them seem, as I said yesterday, to be at odds with one another.

194
00:31:11.080 --> 00:31:16.080
Progressivism seems in some respects to be internally contradictory.

195
00:31:16.080 --> 00:31:22.080
It's for more politics and for less politics, for example.

196
00:31:22.080 --> 00:31:38.080
But ultimately, it's for more statism in every dimension. It's just a question of the progressive's view of the mechanisms by which that statism would be brought into play.

197
00:31:38.080 --> 00:31:48.080
And this belief that they had in expert management, I think, is one of the keys, because that's really different.

198
00:31:48.080 --> 00:32:00.080
are different. You don't find in the 19th century anybody to speak of who touts the idea that we'll all be better off if we have a government expert running things.

199
00:32:00.080 --> 00:32:09.080
In fact, that would have been, I think, viewed almost universally as a preposterous idea in the 19th century.

200
00:32:09.080 --> 00:32:15.640
I mean, people recognize that politics happened, that you couldn't stop it, that sometimes

201
00:32:15.640 --> 00:32:22.760
it produced bad outcomes, but they didn't say, this is grand. They didn't say, that's

202
00:32:22.760 --> 00:32:31.960
the way to run a railroad, to twist an old expression. They would have said, government

203
00:32:31.960 --> 00:32:37.680
commission setting railroad rates? Well, what an idiotic idea. What do they know about that?

204
00:32:37.680 --> 00:32:41.360
They don't know anything about railroad business.

205
00:32:41.360 --> 00:32:42.360
Running banks?

206
00:32:42.360 --> 00:32:44.960
Well, we've already been there, and that was terrible.

207
00:32:44.960 --> 00:32:49.680
They already demonstrated they can't run banks.

208
00:32:49.680 --> 00:32:51.840
Running agriculture?

209
00:32:51.840 --> 00:32:53.920
Running the manufacturing industry?

210
00:32:53.920 --> 00:32:55.400
Stupid.

211
00:32:55.400 --> 00:32:57.200
These guys don't know how to run anything.

212
00:32:57.200 --> 00:32:58.200
They're just politicians.

213
00:32:58.200 --> 00:33:02.880
All they know how to do is tax and make rules and shake people down.

214
00:33:02.880 --> 00:33:06.320
That's what politicians do, and some people accepted that.

215
00:33:06.320 --> 00:33:11.120
It's like the sun rises in the east, you're going to have politics.

216
00:33:11.120 --> 00:33:16.320
Americans are rarely anarchists, you know, very seldom did they say, we've got to eliminate

217
00:33:16.320 --> 00:33:17.320
politics.

218
00:33:17.320 --> 00:33:22.120
They said, you know, you can't do anything about that except throw the rascals out at

219
00:33:22.120 --> 00:33:31.160
the next election or maybe keep a closer eye on them or something of that sort.

220
00:33:31.160 --> 00:33:36.860
But they certainly didn't often believe that they knew what to do to make the world a better

221
00:33:36.860 --> 00:33:43.280
place and that if you assigned them that task, they would do it.

222
00:33:43.280 --> 00:33:50.280
So in those respects, I think our forebears were a lot more astute than we have been in

223
00:33:50.280 --> 00:33:56.120
the 20th century to fall for the kinds of assumptions we've fallen for.

224
00:33:56.120 --> 00:33:59.080
But we got there for a reason.

225
00:33:59.080 --> 00:34:08.260
The ground was plowed, as it were, prepared in the late 19th century by intellectuals,

226
00:34:08.260 --> 00:34:15.820
opinion leaders, people who in some cases, as I mentioned yesterday, had picked up ideas

227
00:34:15.820 --> 00:34:25.020
in Europe, especially in Germany, where government control and the early welfare state were much

228
00:34:25.020 --> 00:34:31.420
much more in evidence, and they had decided that if these highly educated Germans thought

229
00:34:31.420 --> 00:34:40.860
these were good ideas, then they must be. So we had a lot of these young political scientists

230
00:34:40.860 --> 00:34:45.840
and historians and economists coming back to the United States in the late 19th and

231
00:34:45.840 --> 00:34:53.160
early 20th century with their heads full of status nonsense they acquired in Heidelberg,

232
00:34:53.160 --> 00:34:58.840
and then they had students and their students had students and eventually these things began

233
00:34:58.840 --> 00:35:05.000
to have a serious impact on the thinking of lots of Americans.

234
00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:15.520
Some of the figures that are pretty much forgotten now, people such as Lester Ward, Charles Cooley,

235
00:35:15.520 --> 00:35:22.280
Edward Ross, usually called E.A. Ross, these guys wrote books that were big sellers by

236
00:35:22.280 --> 00:35:32.280
by the Standards of Academia at the Turn of the Century, and they trained people at leading universities.

237
00:35:32.280 --> 00:35:45.280
Richard Ely, probably the kingpin of them all, taught, for example, John Commons, and in Commons taught a legion of students,

238
00:35:45.280 --> 00:35:55.280
including a man named Witte, W-I-T-T-E, who was the principal author of the Social Security Act.

239
00:35:55.280 --> 00:36:05.280
And if you like, you can track any number of threads like that from a veritable handful of these German trained

240
00:36:05.280 --> 00:36:12.280
professors in the United States whose students ended up getting involved in policy making,

241
00:36:12.280 --> 00:36:18.440
Making, especially in Wisconsin where John Commons was the leader of a whole school of

242
00:36:18.440 --> 00:36:25.240
thought about government interventionism. Besides Ely and the ones I mentioned, John

243
00:36:25.240 --> 00:36:36.440
Burgess, Albion Small, Simon Patton at Pennsylvania, these guys were very influential. Simon Patton,

244
00:36:36.440 --> 00:36:43.560
for example was the professor who taught Rexford Tugwell and Tugwell was one of FDR's brain

245
00:36:43.560 --> 00:36:55.920
trust guys in 1932-33 and remained in the government later in the 1930s so it's not

246
00:36:55.920 --> 00:37:02.760
difficult at all to find out where bad ideas are born.

247
00:37:02.760 --> 00:37:06.240
Heidelberg

248
00:37:06.240 --> 00:37:10.720
but they were carried here and disseminated so that's one thread and I

249
00:37:10.720 --> 00:37:14.360
think it's a it's of some importance although

250
00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:17.120
it's sometimes hard to tie down its importance

251
00:37:17.120 --> 00:37:20.440
because you need more than just an idea

252
00:37:20.440 --> 00:37:22.720
a proposal is not enough

253
00:37:22.720 --> 00:37:27.120
this has to be sold, it has to be carried through the political process and so

254
00:37:27.120 --> 00:37:29.120
forth so there's more to it

255
00:37:29.120 --> 00:37:34.120
Then just some pernicious ideas being imported into the United States.

256
00:37:34.120 --> 00:37:41.120
But the point of this is that it was changing the climate of intellectual opinion at leading places.

257
00:37:41.120 --> 00:37:47.120
And even people who weren't in universities, people like, say, Walter Lippmann,

258
00:37:47.120 --> 00:37:52.120
who was very much an intellectual and learned at Harvard these kinds of ideas,

259
00:37:52.120 --> 00:37:57.120
became a socialist in his early life and a proto-socialist for the rest of his long life.

260
00:37:57.120 --> 00:38:05.160
Life, very influential, writing columns way up into the 1960s, conspiring with politicians

261
00:38:05.160 --> 00:38:07.760
and diplomats all along the way.

262
00:38:07.760 --> 00:38:18.320
This guy had tremendous influence and he's simply one more of this group, who are shaping

263
00:38:18.320 --> 00:38:26.720
political action and moving it in the direction of collectivism and away from the old regime.

264
00:38:26.720 --> 00:38:50.720
So Irving Fisher, John Dewey, everybody's heard of John Dewey because he's the guy who did more to destroy education than anybody else by propounding very bad ideas that were wildly popular among people who went to teacher's college for decades.

265
00:38:50.720 --> 00:39:20.720
These guys besides being collectively inclined along the lines of the German trained professors also had another trait that was coming into play here and that is that they came out of the post-millennial pietist religious channels in which the dogma includes the idea that we have an obligation to God

266
00:39:20.720 --> 00:39:29.060
to bring about the heaven on earth that Christ isn't going to come and then produce heaven

267
00:39:29.060 --> 00:39:30.060
on earth.

268
00:39:30.060 --> 00:39:33.820
We're going to produce it and then Christ will come back.

269
00:39:33.820 --> 00:39:41.400
So if that's your religious tenet, you're motivated to get out there and start creating

270
00:39:41.400 --> 00:39:47.940
heaven on earth and these people believe that the power of the state would be mighty useful

271
00:39:47.940 --> 00:39:50.380
in helping to do that.

272
00:39:50.380 --> 00:39:58.380
So Murray Rothbard has written a great deal about the influence of post-millennial pietism.

273
00:39:58.380 --> 00:40:08.420
I commend to you his writings on that topic. He knew more about it than anybody I've run

274
00:40:08.420 --> 00:40:15.420
across. So we've got, as it were, intellectuals on one side, but they're not separate from

275
00:40:15.420 --> 00:40:22.220
and these religiously inspired currents going on at the same time, tied up with movements

276
00:40:22.220 --> 00:40:28.420
that go way back in the 19th century such as prohibition of alcohol, prohibition of

277
00:40:28.420 --> 00:40:38.580
Sunday trading, blue laws, various schemes to force people to be more virtuous than they'll

278
00:40:38.580 --> 00:41:07.580
and eventually these ideas were also carried into practice in the form of the Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a very curious kind of thing to have a constitutional amendment about, but it was done and of course we all know how that worked, we learned so much from it that we've been duplicating it for the last 40 years with another amendment.

279
00:41:07.580 --> 00:41:15.580
with another substance with, I would say, even more disastrous effect, but we're not giving it up.

280
00:41:15.580 --> 00:41:22.580
Once again, there's evidence that people are getting stupider as time passes, not smarter.

281
00:41:22.580 --> 00:41:32.580
What happened to the theory of evolution? It took a wrong turn somewhere.

282
00:41:32.580 --> 00:41:50.580
Well, this is kind of intellectual and popular religious background that feeds into the progressivism proper that we get between 1900 and 1918.

283
00:41:50.580 --> 00:42:06.580
And this is occurring in a socio-economic context that I think is no longer very familiar to people, and even historians, I think, lose track of what it was like in that period.

284
00:42:06.580 --> 00:42:14.580
The economy was growing rapidly, so sometimes people think, well, everything was hunky-dory. We were having rapid economic growth.

285
00:42:14.580 --> 00:42:20.500
but if you go back and look at the actual year-to-year records what you find is

286
00:42:20.500 --> 00:42:27.660
that the growth of the US economy in that period was extremely erratic we'd

287
00:42:27.660 --> 00:42:36.180
have a year when when when GDP real GDP would grow 10% in one year and then we'd

288
00:42:36.180 --> 00:42:42.660
have a year when it didn't grow at all or a year or five percent growth followed

289
00:42:42.660 --> 00:42:54.980
by Actual Fall in GDP. On the average, the economy was growing 3-4% a year in that period,

290
00:42:54.980 --> 00:43:01.360
but the average doesn't mean anything because the variance was so great. And the importance

291
00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:09.260
of that was that this created a lot of uncertainty and apprehension. It made people nervous about

292
00:43:09.260 --> 00:43:16.460
What the future held, correctly so, even if you can expect, for example, demand for your

293
00:43:16.460 --> 00:43:21.940
product to grow and you're in business, well, if it collapses next year, you could be wiped

294
00:43:21.940 --> 00:43:29.420
out. One bad year is plenty in a lot of business situations. So businessmen were nervous, a

295
00:43:29.420 --> 00:43:33.420
lot of ordinary people were nervous. They never knew when their employer might lay them

296
00:43:33.420 --> 00:43:41.740
When they come off, when they might have trouble finding another job nearby, so this was a

297
00:43:41.740 --> 00:43:48.900
time when many people were more apprehensive than you might think from the trends that

298
00:43:48.900 --> 00:43:51.340
characterized it.

299
00:43:51.340 --> 00:43:59.020
Financial panics happened every few years, banks would close, depositors would be running

300
00:43:59.020 --> 00:44:15.580
and so forth, so people were worried about the financial condition of the country, not

301
00:44:15.580 --> 00:44:21.540
least of the warriors were the bankers themselves, because they didn't like the setup they had

302
00:44:21.540 --> 00:44:23.620
at that time.

303
00:44:23.620 --> 00:44:29.580
Many business people had been badly stung by the depression of the 1890s, and it was

304
00:44:29.580 --> 00:44:35.420
foremost in their mind throughout this whole progressive period. A lot of businesses had

305
00:44:35.420 --> 00:44:41.540
gone bankrupt in the mid-90s. Even those that hadn't gone bankrupt had lost money for years

306
00:44:41.540 --> 00:44:48.540
on end in many cases, and so they knew something was wrong. They said something about this

307
00:44:48.540 --> 00:44:57.540
The economic set-up we have here is not giving us good results if we have events like that great depression we just had.

308
00:44:57.540 --> 00:45:03.540
Even now when we look back, it's the second worst depression of American history.

309
00:45:03.540 --> 00:45:12.540
Unemployment rates for industrial employees probably got as high as 30 or 35 percent at times in the 1890s.

310
00:45:12.540 --> 00:45:24.540
So it was a terrible slump and it put a lot of business people and bankers in a frame of mind to look around for reforms of some kind.

311
00:45:24.540 --> 00:45:39.540
And we can in fact draw not a straight line but a fairly direct line from that depression and people's responses to it through a number of meetings of bankers and others interested in financial reform

312
00:45:39.540 --> 00:45:45.540
Ultimately leading up to the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

313
00:45:45.540 --> 00:45:55.540
So financial instability, economic instability, labor relations were horrible at this time.

314
00:45:55.540 --> 00:46:04.540
Not just that there were strikes, there were strikes fairly frequently in some industries.

315
00:46:04.540 --> 00:46:11.020
not a great many workers were organized into unions then not even 10% of the

316
00:46:11.020 --> 00:46:15.620
whole labor force belonged to labor unions but in some industries such as

317
00:46:15.620 --> 00:46:22.860
mining and the railroad industry lots of people did belong to unions and in some

318
00:46:22.860 --> 00:46:27.340
places such as out in the western part of the country there were radical unions

319
00:46:27.340 --> 00:46:30.340
I believe it was more syndicalist than socialist.

320
00:46:57.340 --> 00:47:04.140
and so there were events every once in a while such as the the governor of I guess

321
00:47:04.140 --> 00:47:09.780
it was Idaho who walked out of his house one morning was blown to smithereens by

322
00:47:09.780 --> 00:47:20.040
dynamite that was not an accident and on more than one occasion police or the

323
00:47:20.040 --> 00:47:24.880
militia would be brought out and would gun down some of these people there was

324
00:47:24.880 --> 00:47:54.880
There was a massacre in Centralia, Washington, before World War I, or maybe it was just after actually, around the World War I period and right up the road from where I used to live, north of Seattle and Everett, there was another great massacre involving the Wobblies who showed up on a boat from Seattle and were met by the mill owners and their local sheriffs and thugs, heavily armed, and they had a huge gunfight right there on the wharf.

325
00:47:54.880 --> 00:48:02.200
So, this is what we call labor relations in the progressive era, but that is not quite

326
00:48:02.200 --> 00:48:08.040
the way we model it in neoclassical economics, and it made a lot of people apprehensive.

327
00:48:08.040 --> 00:48:15.320
In 1914, probably the worst episode was out in Ludlow, Colorado, there was a big mining

328
00:48:15.320 --> 00:48:22.160
camp and the miners went on strike, Rockefeller owned this operation and so they got the state

329
00:48:22.160 --> 00:48:29.240
militia in there and they got them incomplete with machine guns and they set up their weaponry

330
00:48:29.240 --> 00:48:35.780
and they set this tent city where the strikers were living on fire and proceeded to burn

331
00:48:35.780 --> 00:48:40.560
a bunch of the people to death including women and children and to shoot down some of the

332
00:48:40.560 --> 00:48:47.880
others and they inspired more than a week of civil war right there between the state

333
00:48:47.880 --> 00:48:55.240
Authorities and the Striking Miners. Well, something else to make people nervous, to

334
00:48:55.240 --> 00:49:00.440
make them think, maybe there's a reform that's needed here, maybe capitalism at

335
00:49:00.440 --> 00:49:05.840
least in this form isn't working. So what I'm doing here is I'm trying to suggest

336
00:49:05.840 --> 00:49:11.160
the kinds of contexts in which progressivism developed and to suggest to

337
00:49:11.160 --> 00:49:16.440
you that this was not a golden age. This was a period in which a lot of

338
00:49:16.440 --> 00:49:23.560
Their uncertainties were hanging over people and putting them in a frame of mind to look

339
00:49:23.560 --> 00:49:28.440
for some more secure arrangement.

340
00:49:28.440 --> 00:49:33.800
If there's one promise that government makes to people it's that they're the ultimate provider

341
00:49:33.800 --> 00:49:36.480
of security.

342
00:49:36.480 --> 00:49:43.020
So here were a lot of Americans feeling insecure and therefore becoming more amenable to some

343
00:49:43.020 --> 00:49:52.260
Some proposal to use government power in a way that would enhance their security. That's

344
00:49:52.260 --> 00:49:59.960
the ultimate good deal people want from government. It never gets it, but it's always a deal they're

345
00:49:59.960 --> 00:50:06.300
willing to consider. Immigration rates were very high at this time. On average, about

346
00:50:06.300 --> 00:50:11.280
a million foreigners entered the country every year. The population of the United States

347
00:50:11.280 --> 00:50:23.280
The price in 1900 was 76 million, so to put that in context, that's more than 1% being added to the population by gross immigration flows every year.

348
00:50:23.280 --> 00:50:33.280
Between 1900 and 1914, when the war started, the shipping wasn't available and the immigration flows almost stopped.

349
00:50:33.280 --> 00:50:37.280
But, up until the war, there was heavy immigration every year.

350
00:50:37.280 --> 00:50:42.280
It fell back a great deal during the depression years,

351
00:50:42.280 --> 00:50:46.280
because word passed very quickly between Europe and the United States,

352
00:50:46.280 --> 00:50:51.280
and so people knew there's no point moving to Pittsburgh in 1908,

353
00:50:51.280 --> 00:50:54.280
because there's no work to be had there.

354
00:50:54.280 --> 00:51:01.280
The thing is, from 1900 to 1909, it was the highest ceiling of immigration in the United States in our history.

355
00:51:01.280 --> 00:51:15.280
Right. Yes. Yeah. Well, what this did, again, was create situations in many of the big cities of the east and the northeast,

356
00:51:15.280 --> 00:51:23.280
where people found life more uncertain. Not just the immigrants, of course, they frequently didn't know what was going on,

357
00:51:53.280 --> 00:52:10.080
Lots of people became essentially middlemen and translators and what have you, so there was a huge number of institutional innovations that came forth to accommodate the assimilation of all these strangers into American society.

358
00:52:10.080 --> 00:52:18.880
And I think in retrospect we'd have to say that they worked quite well, but that didn't mean they worked instantaneously or that they always worked.

359
00:52:18.880 --> 00:52:36.880
And so there were conflicts, ethnic conflicts that took place throughout the industrial areas of America and in these, even in the West, in places with mining and lumbering camps, employments of that sort.

360
00:52:36.880 --> 00:52:46.880
That was another part of the context. And then there was on top of this, as I mentioned earlier this morning, the growth of big business which continued during the progressive era quite rapidly

361
00:52:46.880 --> 00:52:51.840
and had a lot of people scared particularly small business people who

362
00:52:51.840 --> 00:52:56.900
were apprehensive that they'd be able to meet the competition. By that time we we

363
00:52:56.900 --> 00:53:01.620
not only had big manufacturers and big utilities and big railroad companies but

364
00:53:01.620 --> 00:53:07.720
we're even beginning to see such things as big retailers. People like the mail

365
00:53:07.720 --> 00:53:13.920
order sellers of Montgomery Ward and Sears that were starting to provide

366
00:53:13.920 --> 00:53:21.160
had serious competition to a lot of small storekeepers in rural areas because they offered low prices

367
00:53:21.160 --> 00:53:27.020
and they delivered reliably and so they were serious competitors and people didn't want

368
00:53:27.020 --> 00:53:35.840
to go down to the local store and pay 50% more. So this kind of development of big business

369
00:53:35.840 --> 00:54:00.840
This was occurring as well. So in this context, schemes to have the government do something that looked as if it would provide more security or hold in check some of these emerging threats gained a new credibility and more political support among the public and thence among representatives in legislatures and in Congress.

370
00:54:00.840 --> 00:54:15.840
In 1903, now we've got Teddy Roosevelt as president, his desire to dictate to big business took the form of the creation of something called the Bureau of Corporations.

371
00:54:15.840 --> 00:54:26.840
This was the beginning of any kind of general interest at the federal level in overseeing big business.

372
00:54:26.840 --> 00:54:32.840
We already had the ICC, which is the so-called Independent Regulatory Commission,

373
00:54:32.840 --> 00:54:46.840
but the Bureau of Corporations was part of the executive division of the federal government and didn't have great ambitions,

374
00:54:46.840 --> 00:54:55.840
although some people wanted to go so far as even having a federal license for corporations doing interstate business.

375
00:54:55.840 --> 00:55:03.440
That didn't go through, but the Bureau of Corporations was supposedly going to discipline

376
00:55:03.440 --> 00:55:09.440
big business by collecting information about business and disseminating it to the public,

377
00:55:09.440 --> 00:55:20.520
so that the power of public opinion would be mobilized if businesses were behaving badly.

378
00:55:20.520 --> 00:55:29.720
The Bureau of Corporations is the germ from which we then got later on, the Department

379
00:55:29.720 --> 00:55:35.680
of Commerce and Labor, which evolved into the Department of Commerce, which is sort

380
00:55:35.680 --> 00:55:47.480
of the government's busybody subsidy office that we have to put up with now as well.

381
00:55:47.480 --> 00:55:49.680
This is where it began.

382
00:55:49.680 --> 00:55:55.340
The antitrust laws didn't satisfy a lot of people, not just the businessmen who had to

383
00:55:55.340 --> 00:56:02.680
endure the uncertainty, but others as well, and eventually they were amended in 1914.

384
00:56:02.680 --> 00:56:10.880
The Clayton Act was an amendment to the Sherman Act and tried to clarify a little bit exactly

385
00:56:10.880 --> 00:56:20.880
What the reach of the antitrust laws were, what things were criminal and what things were not.

386
00:56:20.880 --> 00:56:26.880
I don't know that it provided a great deal of clarification, but it moved in that direction perhaps.

387
00:56:26.880 --> 00:56:33.880
At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission Act was passed, and that created another commission,

388
00:56:33.880 --> 00:56:38.920
Administration, sort of duplicating what was being done already by the antitrust division

389
00:56:38.920 --> 00:56:45.920
of the Justice Department, which was looking into anti-competitive actions by business.

390
00:56:46.200 --> 00:56:53.200
And so we've been stuck with that outfit for the last 89 years as well, again creating

391
00:56:54.520 --> 00:57:00.040
more uncertainty for businesses. You never know when FTC might come down on you with

392
00:57:00.040 --> 00:57:17.040
In 1906, the two laws were passed having to do with security of food and drug supply,

393
00:57:17.040 --> 00:57:23.760
the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Act, sometimes called the Pure Food and Drug

394
00:57:23.760 --> 00:57:26.760
Act of 1906.

395
00:57:26.760 --> 00:57:36.260
These are interesting in various regards. In some ways, they're quite typical of progressive

396
00:57:36.260 --> 00:57:41.520
lawmaking in the sense that they were preceded by quite a lot of muck-raking journalists

397
00:57:41.520 --> 00:57:50.780
exposing supposedly terrible practices, especially in meatpacking plants where unsanitary conditions

398
00:57:50.780 --> 00:57:58.980
were being tolerated and contaminated products were being marketed and what have you. Much

399
00:57:58.980 --> 00:58:04.660
of this was fiction, literally fiction, such as Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, which

400
00:58:04.660 --> 00:58:09.040
may have had the biggest impact of any of the muckraking, but some of it purported to

401
00:58:09.040 --> 00:58:17.740
be reporting as opposed to fiction, but I think much of it was bad reporting. Later

402
00:58:17.740 --> 00:58:23.420
Later on it became fairly clear that the worst defenders in this regard were not the

403
00:58:23.420 --> 00:58:29.220
big meatpacking companies, indeed they were probably the best performers, but the worst

404
00:58:29.220 --> 00:58:36.140
defenders were the little fly-by-night outfits who were usually able to escape any kind of

405
00:58:36.140 --> 00:58:38.940
supervision whatsoever.

406
00:58:38.940 --> 00:58:46.660
But even they were disciplined by market competition, so I don't want to make too much of their

407
00:58:46.660 --> 00:58:54.500
are Sins. At all events, the legislation was misdirected. Both of these acts were, however,

408
00:58:54.500 --> 00:59:00.460
also typical of progressive legislation in that they are not what they seem. Historians

409
00:59:00.460 --> 00:59:07.100
used to write about them in a very naive way. They'd say the capitalists were committing

410
00:59:07.100 --> 00:59:12.540
sins. The muckrakers discovered it and told the public. The public demanded that the government

411
00:59:12.540 --> 00:59:17.540
Clean Up the Mess, and they did, and they passed these laws into story.

412
00:59:17.540 --> 00:59:24.940
Well, actually, there was a long, long background to the Food and Drug Act, for example, that

413
00:59:24.940 --> 00:59:34.540
involved lobbying and politicking and organizing going back at least to the 1880s.

414
00:59:34.540 --> 00:59:40.540
And particularly central to this background was one Harvey Wiley, who started out in the

415
00:59:40.540 --> 00:59:50.180
1880s in a position called the chemist of the Department of Agriculture and that's interesting,

416
00:59:50.180 --> 00:59:55.660
the chemist, they had only one in those days, that's why they're known as the good old

417
00:59:55.660 --> 01:00:05.140
days. But Harvey Wiley was an ambitious bureaucrat, he was kind of a model for bureaucrats everywhere

418
01:00:05.140 --> 01:00:10.820
at all times. He wanted to expand his power. He wanted to build the size of his bureau

419
01:00:10.820 --> 01:00:16.780
and his budget and the scope of its actions. And so he worked tirelessly, never gave up,

420
01:00:16.780 --> 01:00:21.420
and he realized that if he was ever going to get anywhere, he needed powerful allies

421
01:00:21.420 --> 01:00:28.820
in the political process. So he went out and allied himself over the years, especially

422
01:00:28.820 --> 01:00:36.280
with Sugar Producers who were concerned about competition from the saccharin, which is an

423
01:00:36.280 --> 01:00:44.500
artificial sweetener that had come into use in the late 19th century, and whiskey producers

424
01:00:44.500 --> 01:00:50.400
who were fighting against rectified whiskey as opposed to whiskey aged in barrels the

425
01:00:50.400 --> 01:00:57.860
old-fashioned way, and so Wiley, although he was an ambitious bureaucrat, was also a

426
01:00:57.860 --> 01:01:12.860
Dr. Strangelove believed in purity, the code phrase in Dr. Strangelove, purity of essence.

427
01:01:12.860 --> 01:01:22.860
Wiley had the notion that only certain foods were pure and ought to be consumed by human beings.

428
01:01:22.860 --> 01:01:31.500
They were the natural ones, sugar, say, as opposed to the impure or artificial ones, saccharin.

429
01:01:31.500 --> 01:01:37.740
I don't know quite how he got the idea that old-fashioned whiskey was pure and rectified

430
01:01:37.740 --> 01:01:44.860
whiskey not, but he did. Same with butter and margarine. He tied himself up with the butter

431
01:01:44.860 --> 01:01:50.940
producers who were concerned about competition from the margarine producers. Margarine was impure.

432
01:01:50.940 --> 01:01:56.660
In fact, the federal government actually placed a tax on, an excise tax on margarine in the

433
01:01:56.660 --> 01:02:03.440
late 19th century, of all things, and the state said laws that wouldn't allow producers

434
01:02:03.440 --> 01:02:09.440
to color it yellow. They had that for ages, in fact. In my lifetime, you could still buy

435
01:02:09.440 --> 01:02:13.440
white margarine and get a little package of coloring when you bought it, and you could

436
01:02:13.440 --> 01:02:20.440
take it home and mix up the coloring with this white stuff and make it look like butter.

437
01:02:20.940 --> 01:02:39.940
But that was all because of government regulation and Wiley joined forces with these protection seeking manufacturers and they lobbied Congress year after year after year to get a law enacted that would basically outlaw or somehow penalize these impure foods.

438
01:02:39.940 --> 01:02:53.940
And ultimately that law they got in 1906 with the Food and Drug Act which began fairly innocently almost as a labeling law.

439
01:02:53.940 --> 01:03:03.940
It required producers of drugs and processed foods to reveal their ingredients and to say exactly what was in the package

440
01:03:03.940 --> 01:03:07.940
and not to say something was in there that wasn't in there.

441
01:03:07.940 --> 01:03:34.940
So that didn't seem like too burdensome a law at the time, but again it was a foot in the door and from that beginning the power of the federal food and drug regulators grew and grew and grew from episode to episode as some big public health disaster took place involving particularly drugs that might kill a lot of people.

442
01:03:34.940 --> 01:03:44.940
So eventually we got a kind of draconian regulation of food and drugs in this country. It goes back to the progressive era.

443
01:03:44.940 --> 01:03:53.940
Well, let me say a little about one more kind of progressive attempt to get security.

444
01:03:53.940 --> 01:04:03.940
And this is one that has resonance for those of us who still remember well the events of the 1970s.

445
01:04:03.940 --> 01:04:13.940
In the 1970s, many people became concerned with running out of raw materials with energy insecurity.

446
01:04:13.940 --> 01:04:23.940
Remember how Nixon and Carter and those guys used to try to sell the country on their energy policies as national security issues.

447
01:04:23.940 --> 01:04:44.940
and people still talk like this sometimes. We're reliant on the Persian Gulf for oil, people claim, and therefore we're at risk. It's a national security thing. We have to kill all the Arabs, some such non-sequiturs rarely far behind.

448
01:04:44.940 --> 01:04:53.940
Well, a lot of people in the late 19th century and even more in the progressive era began to fear.

449
01:04:53.940 --> 01:04:58.940
We're always dealing with fear here, I reiterate.

450
01:04:58.940 --> 01:05:03.940
Fear is the best thing to use if you want to do something in politics.

451
01:05:03.940 --> 01:05:12.940
They began to fear and to try to persuade other people to fear that we were going to run out of various natural resources.

452
01:05:12.940 --> 01:05:20.940
And one reason we were going to run out of them is because currently they were being used unwisely.

453
01:05:20.940 --> 01:05:37.940
By whom? Oh, by their owners. By, for example, people who owned forest land and had the audacity to go into that land and cut the trees down and turn them into lumber.

454
01:05:37.940 --> 01:05:48.500
Now, in the process of doing so, they sometimes use the methods that in a very naive or vulgar

455
01:05:48.500 --> 01:05:51.660
sense seem to be wasteful.

456
01:05:51.660 --> 01:05:54.620
They might not cut all the trees, for example.

457
01:05:54.620 --> 01:05:58.580
They might cut only certain sizes.

458
01:05:58.580 --> 01:06:06.260
They might not process the wood very carefully, so they might build up a huge amount of byproduct

459
01:06:06.260 --> 01:06:14.900
I remember when I was a kid going up into Northern California and Oregon and Washington,

460
01:06:14.900 --> 01:06:21.700
all these lumber mills used to have these funny looking teepees where they would burn

461
01:06:21.700 --> 01:06:28.100
sawdust and waste wood from the lumber mills.

462
01:06:28.100 --> 01:06:35.460
I never see that anymore, maybe it's because they've moved all the timber making to Canada.

463
01:06:35.460 --> 01:06:43.460
at all events that was the sort of thing that some of these early conservationists would see and they'd say well look at that good product going to waste.

464
01:06:45.460 --> 01:07:00.460
They were very much attuned to the physical fallacy of waste. When they thought of waste they thought of stuff, of things they could see being not used for any productive purpose.

465
01:07:00.460 --> 01:07:07.960
purpose. Ergo, they thought they were seeing waste. What they didn't understand, and indeed

466
01:07:07.960 --> 01:07:14.480
what conservationists to this very day have never understood, is that waste has everything

467
01:07:14.480 --> 01:07:23.360
to do with value. It's not being appropriated, but value. And that when we talk about something

468
01:07:23.360 --> 01:07:33.360
It has value not being used because it would be more costly to use it than to let it go to, quote, waste.

469
01:07:33.360 --> 01:07:39.360
That's not really waste at all. That's economic behavior.

470
01:07:39.360 --> 01:07:48.360
So if some guy in Wisconsin or Minnesota cut all the trees on his woodlot,

471
01:07:48.360 --> 01:07:55.160
It might look as if somehow they were devastating nature's bounty, but what these guys understood

472
01:07:55.160 --> 01:08:04.880
perfectly well was that from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, there were countless

473
01:08:04.880 --> 01:08:11.880
thousands upon thousands of acres of perfectly good trees waiting to be cut at fairly low

474
01:08:11.880 --> 01:08:18.400
Low cost in many places. It didn't make a lot of sense to use German conservation methods

475
01:08:18.400 --> 01:08:28.040
in Wisconsin. It wasn't worth the cost of the resources required to do it. If you wanted

476
01:08:28.040 --> 01:08:37.360
to replace the wood you just cut down in Wisconsin, go to Colorado and cut some trees there. Now,

477
01:08:37.360 --> 01:08:44.400
You didn't have to explain this to lumbermen. They knew this already. That was their business.

478
01:08:44.400 --> 01:08:52.760
But the conservationists looked at the cutover district of the northern Midwest, upper Michigan,

479
01:08:52.760 --> 01:08:58.160
of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and they said, look, they're wrecking this place. They're just

480
01:08:58.160 --> 01:09:06.840
destroying it. We've got to stop them somehow. Capitalism is just raping the land. They thought

481
01:09:06.840 --> 01:09:14.680
But any number of other resources were going to be overused, misused, used up as well.

482
01:09:14.680 --> 01:09:20.160
Let me read you just a brief section from a book written by one of the leading early

483
01:09:20.160 --> 01:09:30.260
conservationists, Gifford Pinchot, an important progressive figure.

484
01:09:30.260 --> 01:09:38.380
And he wrote in this 1910 book, we have a limited supply of coal and only a limited

485
01:09:38.380 --> 01:09:45.300
supply. Whether it is to last for a hundred or a hundred and fifty or a thousand years,

486
01:09:45.300 --> 01:09:51.320
the coal is limited in amount. Unless through geological changes, which we shall not live

487
01:09:51.320 --> 01:09:57.460
to see, there will never be any more of it than there is now. But coal is in a sense

488
01:09:57.460 --> 01:10:02.460
represents the vital essence of our civilization.

489
01:10:02.460 --> 01:10:07.460
If it can be preserved, if the life of the minds can be extended,

490
01:10:07.460 --> 01:10:13.460
if by preventing waste there can be more coal left in this country

491
01:10:13.460 --> 01:10:21.460
after we of this generation have made every needed use of this source of power,

492
01:10:21.460 --> 01:10:26.460
then we shall have deserved well of our descendants.

493
01:10:26.460 --> 01:10:30.300
and later on in the same book he wrote,

494
01:10:30.300 --> 01:10:36.420
the five indispensable essential conditions or materials of our civilization

495
01:10:36.420 --> 01:10:44.620
are wood, water, coal, iron and agricultural products.

496
01:10:44.620 --> 01:10:53.020
We have timber for less than 30 years at the present rate of cutting, 1910.

497
01:10:53.020 --> 01:11:05.660
The figures indicate, expert speaks, the figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have increased twice as fast as our population.

498
01:11:05.660 --> 01:11:15.660
We have anthracite coal, but for 50 years, and bituminous coal for less than 200.

499
01:11:15.660 --> 01:11:22.420
Our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil and natural gas are being rapidly depleted.

500
01:11:22.420 --> 01:11:26.780
And many of the great fields are already exhausted.

501
01:11:26.780 --> 01:11:33.940
Mineral resources such as these, when once gone, are gone forever.

502
01:11:33.940 --> 01:11:45.420
Well, you can take this passage, unchanged, and insert it 20 years later, 50 years later, or tomorrow,

503
01:11:45.420 --> 01:11:49.820
and you'll find somebody willing to sign at the bottom.

504
01:11:49.820 --> 01:11:55.820
This is what conservationists slash environmentalists have been saying from the beginning.

505
01:11:55.820 --> 01:12:04.820
They've been talking about misuse, waste, all subscribing to physicalist fallacies,

506
01:12:04.820 --> 01:12:14.820
and all proposing that the answer to this dire problem is government control of natural resources.

507
01:12:14.820 --> 01:12:39.820
Now, this control had already begun to be expressed as early as 1891, when the Federal Government first created forest reserves, which is to say, it took some of the areas that were still in the public domain, and it said, we're never going to sell these, or let somebody come in and use them. These are going to be set aside as protected forest reserves.

508
01:12:39.820 --> 01:12:55.820
1891 was the beginning of the forest reserve system. That would be President Harrison's term, although I don't know that he had much personally to do with this.

509
01:12:55.820 --> 01:13:03.820
But this was something that Teddy Roosevelt latched onto and made one of his political claims to fame.

510
01:13:03.820 --> 01:13:18.820
and he was the great conservationist, he was going to save our natural resources from rapacious capitalists and again this fits right into the atmosphere of thinking in the progressive era.

511
01:13:18.820 --> 01:13:42.820
So Roosevelt greatly expanded the number of forest reserves from 41 that existed in 1899 to 159 when he left office, which increased the area from 46 million to 150 million acres in forest reserves.

512
01:13:42.820 --> 01:13:47.900
and later on even more land was added and and you can find people today that want

513
01:13:47.900 --> 01:13:55.660
to set aside still more forest land to be overseen controlled by the federal

514
01:13:55.660 --> 01:14:00.680
government. Countless forest economists have demonstrated that the government's

515
01:14:00.680 --> 01:14:07.060
management of these lands is a disaster, that it gives them negative value. Now

516
01:14:07.060 --> 01:14:11.740
I'm not saying it reduces their value, I'm saying it makes them worthless. The

517
01:14:11.740 --> 01:14:16.740
The costs being incurred are greater than the benefits being yielded and if you add that

518
01:14:16.740 --> 01:14:23.500
up over a stream of future years you get a gigantic negative current present value for

519
01:14:23.500 --> 01:14:28.780
what the government is getting out of this property. It's squandering the property. It's

520
01:14:28.780 --> 01:14:34.700
been squandering it all along. These were senseless reserves in the beginning. The forests

521
01:14:34.700 --> 01:14:41.300
were vast in 1908 in this country. There was no running out of wood. Forestry companies

522
01:14:41.300 --> 01:14:47.000
These know perfectly well how to replant forests when it pays to do so, and some of them eventually

523
01:14:47.000 --> 01:14:53.900
began to do that when it made economic sense, but meanwhile the government insisted on embedding

524
01:14:53.900 --> 01:14:58.980
itself in the whole management of the forest, and not just the forest, but a lot of other

525
01:14:58.980 --> 01:15:01.840
natural resources as well.

526
01:15:01.840 --> 01:15:08.420
But we have these progressives and the progressive conservationists to thank for this kind of

527
01:15:08.420 --> 01:15:17.140
Policy, which has become characteristic of modern environmentalism along the way.

528
01:15:17.140 --> 01:15:19.620
Well, let me stop at this point.

529
01:15:19.620 --> 01:15:25.340
We've got about 15 minutes left in this session, and we have more time now for questions.

530
01:15:25.340 --> 01:15:31.940
Don't confine yourself if you want to ask about some other topic that's come up in the past four sessions.

531
01:15:31.940 --> 01:15:35.140
Ask anything you feel like or make comments.

532
01:15:35.140 --> 01:15:43.140
Yes sir. You quoted Woodrow Wilson from a book, I think you said you had previously mentioned, but I didn't catch the title.

533
01:15:43.140 --> 01:15:53.140
It's called The New Freedom. It was really a collection of speeches that he gave in 1912 when he was angling to become president.

534
01:15:53.140 --> 01:15:56.140
So is it edited by him? Do you know?

535
01:15:56.140 --> 01:16:04.140
I don't know that it even has an editor. I think it's just back-to-back essays, as I remember.

536
01:16:04.140 --> 01:16:12.140
The last lecture you mentioned on the book about the abolition of the luxurious prison, will you give the title of that book?

537
01:16:34.140 --> 01:16:44.140
Sklar is one of the members of the Quasi-Marxist Corporate Capitalism School of History Writing.

538
01:16:44.140 --> 01:16:53.140
It means that these are not exactly full-fledged Marxists.

539
01:16:53.140 --> 01:16:58.140
They don't spout the full panoply of Marxist doctrine.

540
01:16:58.140 --> 01:17:07.140
But they use a species of class analysis that clearly springs directly from Marxism.

541
01:17:07.140 --> 01:17:15.140
And they don't understand much of anything about how markets work.

542
01:17:15.140 --> 01:17:18.140
They have very crude ideas at best.

543
01:17:18.140 --> 01:17:27.140
Sklar himself actually ends up going wrong partly because he did look at some neoclassical economics and learned all the wrong lessons.

544
01:17:27.140 --> 01:17:39.140
So he comes away arguing that what business was trying to do, big business in the progressive era was to find a way to administer prices.

545
01:17:39.140 --> 01:17:45.140
That's an expression that goes back particularly to Burlian means in the early 1930s.

546
01:17:45.140 --> 01:17:54.140
Administered prices meant sort of prices fixed by the businesses themselves or by trusts or combinations of businesses.

547
01:17:54.140 --> 01:18:00.100
Businesses, at all events, not competitive prices, somehow administered, and he's got

548
01:18:00.100 --> 01:18:07.200
the idea that whether businesses set prices, a big business sets the price, or the government

549
01:18:07.200 --> 01:18:13.080
sets the price, it's just different ways of administering the price. So he's basically

550
01:18:13.080 --> 01:18:19.100
an ignoramus when it comes to understanding the working of markets, but in other ways

551
01:18:19.100 --> 01:18:24.860
He's a meticulously careful historian, and as I said, his reading of the jurisprudence

552
01:18:24.860 --> 01:18:29.420
of the Sherman Act is superior to anything I know.

553
01:18:29.420 --> 01:18:34.500
So I'm quite happy to give him his due.

554
01:18:34.500 --> 01:18:41.980
If you happen to be interested in other aspects of his work, it's a huge work, very interesting

555
01:18:41.980 --> 01:18:44.020
about the politics of the progressive era.

556
01:18:44.020 --> 01:18:53.020
He goes through all of the presidents and tracks the major policy making and gives a lot of detail about who did what, who said what, who conspired with whom.

557
01:18:53.020 --> 01:19:00.020
So I actually recommend this book despite what I've said about it.

558
01:19:00.020 --> 01:19:10.020
I wrote an essay actually, a kind of review essay about it in a journal called Critical Review in 1992.

559
01:19:10.020 --> 01:19:25.020
And my essay is called Origins of the Corporate-Liberal State, and I believe it's online at onpower.org if you'd like to look it up.

560
01:19:25.020 --> 01:19:36.020
So basically this squire fellow belongs to a school of thought that uses a semi-socialist framework that doesn't spout any crap about dialectical materialism or anything?

561
01:19:36.020 --> 01:19:44.020
He's got a kind of, not exactly dialectical materialism, but he's got, again, something verges on it.

562
01:19:44.020 --> 01:19:56.020
He's got ideas about how historical change is brought about by sort of changing forces of production

563
01:19:56.020 --> 01:20:08.020
and those giving life to political pressures and therefore bringing into being new property relations.

564
01:20:08.020 --> 01:20:16.020
That's all. I mean, it's as if you're having a dream of Marx, but it's a fuzzy dream.

565
01:20:16.020 --> 01:20:22.020
Then you know it's really Sklar you're dreaming about because it's not really Marx,

566
01:20:22.020 --> 01:20:29.020
The apprehension that you talked about in the early 1900s, like the Wobblers and the Rockefeller, those all seem to be like exogenous and outside of anything fueled directly by the government, whereas today's apprehension of terrorism and anti-democracy is so Marxian in flavor and tone that you can't quite shake the feeling that you're in that other dream.

567
01:20:52.020 --> 01:21:00.020
and the drug war and the big scary cigarette companies and what not are all pretty much fueled by the federal government.

568
01:21:00.020 --> 01:21:02.020
What do you think about that?

569
01:21:22.020 --> 01:21:37.020
The members of the, turned out to be the Reagan administration because I pulled this federal guide book off my shelf and it went back to the 80s when Reagan was president.

570
01:21:37.020 --> 01:21:45.020
It's one of these places where you can look up who is who in the government and what positions they occupy formally.

571
01:21:45.020 --> 01:21:59.020
And in the Reagan administration, there were a dozen or more of these deputy assistants under somethings for something, all of whom were basically spin doctors.

572
01:21:59.020 --> 01:22:07.020
I mean, just hosts of these guys, highly paid on the federal payroll, and they exist in every department.

573
01:22:07.020 --> 01:22:11.020
It's not just in the executive office of the president. They're everywhere.

574
01:22:11.020 --> 01:22:36.020
The government has equipped itself over time to constantly feed disinformation to the public, to promote, well, itself. That's what it's promoting. It's drumming up business, demand, artificial demand for what it purports to supply, some form of service or security to the public.

575
01:22:36.020 --> 01:22:40.020
That didn't exist in Teddy Roosevelt's day.

576
01:22:40.020 --> 01:22:48.020
Politicians made speeches, but they didn't have vast staffs of flax running around telling tall tales like that.

577
01:22:48.020 --> 01:22:57.020
So you had to do your own dirty work more directly if you were a politician in those days.

578
01:22:57.020 --> 01:23:14.540
In fact, they do so much advertising that the media is almost beholden to it, because at

579
01:23:14.540 --> 01:23:22.060
all, on Sundays, they say, we're not going to give you our anti-drug laws, or whatever.

580
01:23:22.060 --> 01:23:24.020
You'll go broke.

581
01:23:24.020 --> 01:23:30.820
I have an exercise I suggest to the reader. Sometimes when you listen to the news, just

582
01:23:30.820 --> 01:23:38.980
keep a tally as you go along of the stories and note how many of them go to sources in

583
01:23:38.980 --> 01:23:46.580
the government. Is it, you know, the president's press spokesman? Is it Joe Blow at the Department

584
01:23:46.580 --> 01:23:53.140
of Defense? Where do these stories come from? And I think you'll find that the majority

585
01:23:53.140 --> 01:23:59.840
of what pretends to be news nowadays is nothing but propaganda being propagated through the

586
01:23:59.840 --> 01:24:11.140
mouthpieces of people who pretend to be journalists. They're just retelling the tale. Because they're

587
01:24:11.140 --> 01:24:15.420
supposed to be independent, we're supposed to believe that's credible once they repeat

588
01:24:15.420 --> 01:24:32.420
But they're carrying away press releases and they're carrying away leaks that are given to them and they are indeed beholden because if they cross their masters, they'll get cut off.

589
01:24:32.420 --> 01:24:39.420
They won't get any more leaks. They won't even be treated civilly. They won't be called upon at a presidential press conference.

590
01:24:39.420 --> 01:25:09.420
Conference. Every once in a while something happens. The mic is on when the president doesn't know it. He makes some crack about a jerk over there. I'm never going to call on him. So it's just a fact of life. That's the way journalism operates in the era of massive government. The news media, not entirely, of course. There are all kinds of fringy news sources in

591
01:25:09.420 --> 01:25:15.300
in existence, and thank goodness for the internet because we can all get at them now, but the

592
01:25:15.300 --> 01:25:24.380
major media are, I believe, pretty much just unofficial arms of the government.

593
01:25:24.380 --> 01:25:28.820
All their stories, or all their main stories seem to either involve one of the government's

594
01:25:28.820 --> 01:25:34.420
already ongoing wars against, you know, social crusade wars against one thing or another,

595
01:25:34.420 --> 01:25:53.420
I'd also like to keep a tally of the fright du jour. If you check CNN's headline news,

596
01:25:53.420 --> 01:25:58.620
for example, just about every half hour you'll see, you know, what is today's announcement

597
01:25:58.620 --> 01:26:15.620
It's some horrible thing that may be killing us in the food or the water, the birds flying over, who knows where it could be, but actually the government is looking into it, this will be dealt with.

598
01:26:15.620 --> 01:26:28.620
It's not just the news, though. It's crossed over into pure entertainment media, too, because the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Drug Policy Offices were

599
01:26:28.620 --> 01:26:39.620
vetting scripts from network entertainment shows and giving money, providing support to TV shows that towed the line on their anti-drug policies.

600
01:26:39.620 --> 01:27:00.620
It's probably worse I think because it's more insidious. This kind of the government disinformation has its origins I think in this country in wartime.

601
01:27:00.620 --> 01:27:07.620
During World War I the government went to great lengths to feed its line to one and all.

602
01:27:07.620 --> 01:27:37.620
The movies, the theater, the school teachers, the preachers, you name it, and then in World War II, they operated a little more subtly, but similarly, and they worked through the movie industry, up to and including, or maybe I should say down to and including, cartoons, in which cartoon figures were talking about the importance of paying their income tax, and obeying prices

603
01:27:37.620 --> 01:27:48.340
business regulations and buying bonds, of course. So the wars have been real schools

604
01:27:48.340 --> 01:27:56.620
for government manipulation and control of media, including entertainment media. Luke?

605
01:27:56.620 --> 01:28:25.620
Thank goodness we've now got a new generation reminding us of the glories of the British Empire and our duty to recreate it.

606
01:28:26.620 --> 01:28:28.620
Thank you very much.