It's an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to be addressing this seminar,
despots, left and right, the tyranny of our times.
My own talk is consenting capitalist acts, the tyranny of the left.
I guess we have a little competition going on here.
Lew will be talking about the tyranny of the right,
and other people will be talking about other tyrannies.
I get the left.
Sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, but what the heck?
Tom Woods recently wrote,
Congressman Ron Paul, Republican candidate for president, refuses to play by the rules.
He's a bigger supporter of the free market than anyone else in Congress, but he's also the most consistent opponent of war.
Isn't that crazy that somehow these two things are inconsistent?
That if you're for the free market, you have to favor warmongering imperialism.
I think this comes from the left-right spectrum, you know, on the left you have people who are socialists and against imperialism, and on the right you have people who favor the market and who favor attacking foreign countries who have not first attacked us.
This left-right spectrum is a great problem because who are you going to put on the left?
Well, Mother Teresa is on the left and Stalin is on the left and yet the two of them hardly
have anything in common.
On the other hand, who's on the right?
Well, Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul are on the right and so is Hitler.
You get very strange juxtapositions there.
Surely Hitler and Stalin, left and right, belong in the same place.
One is a National Socialist, the other is an International Socialist, and they've each
killed millions of people for their beliefs.
So the spectrum I like a lot better is a cross, where you have good and bad, the top good
and the bad bottom, and then you can put Stalin on the left if you want, but the key element
is that he's bad, and Hitler on the right, but the key element is that he's bad, and
You can put Rothbard and Mother Teresa and Ron Paul on the good side.
Whether they're right or left is almost unimportant.
The key is whether they're good or bad.
And as a libertarian, my criteria for goodness or badness is, are you advocating things that
are compatible with free enterprise and liberty?
Namely keeping your myths in your pockets and not using them to put around the throats
of other people?
whether in free enterprise criminality like shooting somebody or in, I don't know what,
governmental bad things where they tax you and regulate you to a great degree.
One of the criticisms that I have as the left in terms of tyranny is that they too are warmongers.
They too engage in foreign adventurism.
For example, the Vietnam War was really a JFK and a Johnson war. Nixon got into it later,
but it was a left war. Then there was Clinton in Bosnia. Now the Democrats, they're sort
of semi-against the war in Iraq, but instead of wanting to bring the troops home, they
want to send them over to Afghanistan or other countries. So it doesn't seem that the left
is really great on war, although maybe a little bit better than the right.
The way I'd like to approach leftist tyranny is through a whole bunch of hypocrisies.
Why hypocrisies?
Because they're imposing stuff on us, whether laws or culture or what have you, that even
they themselves cannot abide by because they're so onerous.
Now it's true that there are hypocrisies on the right.
You have a drug-snorting Rush Limbaugh, you have fornicating ministers, you have child
molesting priests. But usually these people apologize. Don Imus now is apologizing to
whoever will listen to him. Not so the lefties. The lefties don't apologize. They're proud
of what they do, even though it's totally hypocritical. Let me give you a few examples.
In the lexicon we have the term limousine liberal. These liberals ride around in limousines.
We have BMW Bolsheviks, we have Champagne Socialists, Engels row to hounds as befitting a gentleman,
the Soviet Commissar had country estates plus limousines.
So on the one hand they advocate a certain policy, on the other hand they really can't
keep up with it.
Michael Moore is against the stock market because it's morally wrong and yet he has
shares in Halliburton, Boeing, Merck, Swizer, Sonico, Tenant Healthcare, Ford, General Electric,
McDonald's and many HMOs. So here you have a man who talks anti-investment and invests.
In his book, Michael Moore goes on and on about how racist the society is and yet he
lives in a town, a small town in Michigan, 2500 people, in which there's not a single
So why did he move to Harlem? Well, he's a hypocrite. There's also questions about his record in terms of hiring minority members.
In his films, there's been a calculation out of 134 employees, two of them were blacks, so this is not a good record for an anti-racist.
Ralph Nader, while calling for the elimination of Microsoft or at least the severe punishment
of Microsoft, owned shares in Microsoft's rivals. He owned shares in Goodyear while
fighting Firestone. He purchased shares in an airbag manufacturer allied chemical before
and while promoting airbags. He owned Stockin Ford while campaigning against GM. He fired
Noam Chomsky is a bitter opponent of property rights, and yet he sets up a trust. He is
a socialist who practices capitalism and an anti-militarist who has made millions of dollars
from Pentagon Contracts. Bono, our buddy Bono, favorite musician of ours, I'm sure, reduced
his taxes to Ireland while talking about everyone paying a fair share. A student of mine, Bedrin
Vuk, who writes regularly for the LewRockwell.com, has found out that the monkey that caused
AIDS was on the endangered species list. You get that? I don't know if you get the
The reason I got into environmentalism, which is one of my fields, is my daughter, aged
about six or seven or eight or so, came home one day and said, daddy, daddy, you're being
environmentally incorrect.
And I was like this.
I was about ready to give her the white four and my wife said, shut up, shut up, because
if you convince her of free market environmentalism, all of her student colleagues and teachers
So I was very frustrated. I couldn't take it out on my poor little girl, so instead I had to take it out on you people in terms of writing about it.
Which leads me to Al Gore's use of energy.
One of the things I loved about the global warming, they were having a global warming conference in New York City and they had to cancel it due to the frost.
Don't you just love that?
He owns a toxin-spewing mine. Barbara Streisand has an annual water bill of $22,000 a year to keep her grass green.
Nancy Pelosi, another favorite of ours, won the Cesar Chavez Award. He's another favorite of mine.
I mean, Cesar Chavez is almost pure evil. I mean, on the one hand, he's supposed to be for the downtrodden,
and yet he did everything he could to make sure that the Mexican workers couldn't come to California to get much higher salaries because he was trying to unionize the Mexican-American workers to keep them out and yet he is an icon on the left.
In any case, Nancy Pelosi won this award and yet she uses non-union workers in her Napa Valley vineyards.
She's received a lot of money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and yet, you'll never guess, she has a restaurant chain called Piatti which has 900 employees and guess what, it's a non-union shop.
No, I'm not against non-union shops, believe me, I'm against unions so I'm certainly in favor of that.
But here's Nancy Pelosi who's talking a certain talk and not walking that walk.
Ted Kennedy has dozens of trusts to protect his family fortune. He's against gun usage, and yet he has bodyguards with guns.
Similarly, Rosie O'Donnell has a bodyguard with a gun.
One of my favorite bumper stickers was Chappic. How many people died at Chappiquiddick?
One. How many died at Three Mile Island?
Zero. This was during the time of Three Mile Island.
Another bumper sticker that I really like is, I remember once there was a parade against the war in Vietnam, this was a couple of years ago, and all the lefties had signs, you know, U.S. out of Vietnam.
There was a small libertarian contingent, and guess what their sign was? U.S. out of the Bronx.
The Clintons are always lecturing people about their need to pay more taxes while finding lucrative tax shelters and taking outrageous tax deductions.
Another favorite leftist of all of ours, I'm sure, is Peter Singer. Peter Singer's mother has...
You know what Peter Singer stands for, that animals have more...
not only that animals have rights, but they have more rights than we do and you know we're speciesists, sort of like racists and sexist speciesists, in any case his mother has Alzheimer's, so if he were consistent with his philosophy he would have, I don't know what, poisoned her or shot her or something, got rid of her because she's you know a burden on society, instead he hired health care workers to look after her, which I think we can all applaud, namely we can applaud his actions of taking care of his mother,
even though we can't applaud his philosophy, which is the direct contradiction of that.
Speaking of getting rid of people, I was once in a debate on environmentalism and there were a bunch of...
My opponent said that we had an overpopulation problem.
So I went first and then toward the end of my speech I said, well, here's my opponent.
He's going to come up to the podium soon. He's going to tell you we have too many people.
Well, he has it within his power to reduce the size of the population by one.
And yet, here he is standing there, which shows that he hasn't taken advantage of this.
This was a hostile audience, so I was roundly booed and condemned, but here it's a much
friendlier audience, so you can get the principle.
Gloria Steinem got married.
Now, this alone, so who cares if some woman got married?
The point is that she, for years as a super-duper feminist, an elite feminist, has been preaching
against marriage and she gets married.
Now we have to talk about Don Imus, he used the word ho.
By the way, Lew Rockwell tells me that Santa Claus will now be banned from Christmas because
The point is that poor Don just used words that the rappers use in BET, black entertainment,
television or something. They're just full of this stuff, which is sort of a tyranny of
the left because you really can't use certain words, or rather only certain people can use
words and other people can't. For example, I can't use the n-word. I can only say n-word
because if I spelled it out and said it, who knows? There's tape recordings here and you
You know, maybe I get fired or sued or something or I have to apologize, but that's sort of
an indication of how far down the road to serfdom, to follow Hayek or the road to tyranny
to follow what we're talking about today.
We've come, thanks to the left, there are certain words that you just can't use.
Another inconsistency is the abortion and the baby seals question, and some wag once
Just think of the fetus as a baby seal. And then, you know, we'll take a different point.
Another tyranny of the left is there are certain words other than the n-word or the h-o-word,
ho, which are problematic, which have been taken away from us.
For example, I often write mankind or he, and I find that when the article is published,
When it's published, it's got person kind or he or she or something like that.
Even authors such as myself that don't want to be politically correct are politically
corrected by editors who won't allow certain words to be used.
You have to keep inclusive language.
Here's a great sentence that I read from one of my readings, quote, he or she must ask
himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself
to write like this. That's what language would sound like if people were to follow this stuff.
Then there are all sorts of words that have been stolen from us, liberal. I mean, liberal, classical liberal used to mean someone who was for free enterprise and personal liberties and against the foreign military aggression, and now it almost means the opposite.
Even the word socialism has been taken from us, I understand, from experts in this field.
Social justice.
What is social justice? Well, social justice seems to be egalitarianism, so they're capturing two very good words.
My response to that is, well, there are two kinds of social justice.
One is socialism or communism or egalitarianism, and the other is justice applied to social issues,
so you can take whatever position you want on that matter.
My own school, Loyola University, New Orleans, calls itself Social Justice University.
They even have a sweatshirt that says Social Justice University.
Does that mean we should all teach egalitarianism and socialism?
Well, if so, then the school is in even greater trouble than it has been because of Katrina.
Environmentalism is another word that they've captured.
Some of my colleagues say, well, let them have it. They're environmentalists. We're against environmentalism.
But I like to try to capture these words back and say, well, they're coercive environmentalists. We're free market environmentalists.
Just the way of trying to say you're an environmentalist.
I remember one time some buddy of mine at a conference introduced me to a sister, and he said that she was a socialist, and she said that she was.
And my response to her is, well, are you a voluntary socialist or a coercive socialist?
And she never quite thought about it in that way. So at least I had a way of trying to engage her.
Whereas if I would have said I'm against socialism, I think I would have lost her.
What do I mean by voluntary socialism? You know, the kibbutz, the monastery, the nunnery.
Even the average American family believes in one socialist tenet, namely, from each according to his ability into each according to his need.
Certainly the six-year-old girl doesn't eat in accordance with her ability to produce, but rather in accordance with her need.
So there's nothing wrong with this, provided it's done voluntarily.
It's only bad if it's done coercively, which a lot of things are bad if they're done coercively.
Gay used to be a perfectly good word. I'm a gay young blade.
Now, if I said that, you know, my wife might wonder what's happening.
Positive rights is another case, you know.
Yes, we have a right not to be murdered, raped and stolen from, but we also have a right
to food, clothing and shelter.
But that's not a right.
That's a privilege or a wealth or a demand for property redistribution.
That's not a right.
It's a very different kind of a right.
Because my right not to be murdered implies that you just don't murder me.
Negative rights.
Whereas my right to food means that you've got to give me food or whatever it is that
that I have a positive right toward.
Diversity.
This is something very popular in college campuses.
We have to have diversity.
We have to have blacks and whites and people with different skin colors and genders and
sexual preferences.
The only kind of diversity that you don't really need in a university is intellectual
diversity because as long as we have a black, lesbian, disabled socialist and a white socialist,
that's fine.
I don't need anything else because we don't need intellectual diversity.
Then this is red states and blue states.
I always used to think red was commie and blue wasn't and now it's sort of reversed.
So anytime anyone says that I have to sort of take five seconds out to realize what they're
talking about.
Another perversion of language.
Get something for nothing.
Somehow that's bad but entrepreneurship is an attempt to get something for nothing.
What's wrong with getting something for nothing?
It's wrong if you do it at the point of a gun or the point of a tax collector who has
a gun, but it's not bad if it's done in voluntary trade.
Every time two people trade something, they each get something for nothing, namely they
make a profit because what they get is valued more by them than what they give up, otherwise
they wouldn't make the trade.
Another one is filthy rich, which seems to be a redundancy.
If you're rich, you're filthy.
The only way to get rich is through filth.
Privileged. I love that word. He's privileged. It's a synonym for rich. But the only people
that are really privileged are people that get privileges from the government. Whereas
if you earn it honestly on the market, you're not privileged, you're just rich. And I resent
the making of these two words, synonyms, privileged and rich. Unearned income. Only
labor is an earned income. And if you invest, you're not earning something, you're not producing
Well, this is part of the leftist culture with regard to language.
Why do we have profiteers and not wageeers?
We don't have wageeers. I guess nobody is greedy when they want to get a raise.
But if you make too many profits, then there's developing countries.
A lot of these countries aren't developing. They're retrogressing.
Why can't we call them something accurate as opposed to, you know, wishful thinking?
tax subsidies, the government is subsidizing you by not taxing you, this implies that they really own everything, and by allowing you to keep some of your own stuff, they're giving you your own stuff, which means that they really own it, which is crazy.
Egalitarianism is another area over which the left exercises tyranny and they're always
talking about we have to take money from rich and give it to the poor because then they
draw you some sort of downward sloping marginal utility curve for those of you into economics
which just means that a dollar, the last dollar that Bill Gates has he values much less than
the last dollar some poor guy has so if you take a thousand bucks from Bill Gates you
You heard him very little bit. If you give a thousand bucks to a starving guy, you help
them to a great amount and therefore we should have redistribution of income.
Well there are a lot of fallacies with this idea. Certainly interpersonal comparisons
of utility. I mean this poor guy might be a bum and just spend it on more booze and be
better off without it. You can't say for sure. But the attempt that I try with my friends
on the left is a reductio ad absurdum. I say, okay, sure, sure, we want to redistribute
from rich to poor, but why money? Money is not that important. Why not IQ points? If
we had a machine and we took 15 IQ points from you smart lefty and gave it to some poor
person in IQ, would you favor that? And that makes him hem and haw.
And then there's, of course, follicle injustice. You know, some of us have more than our fair
Dear share of hair follicles, gentlemen right here, this one here who needs, you know, we
should transfer. That doesn't get them too much, but the IQ is better. Another one is
a two-eyed person and a blind person. You take the eye out of one person and all you
cost them is depth perception. Whereas the other guy, it's the difference between being
totally blind and being able to see with one eye. And you ask them, well, would you give
up your, how come you have two eyes, by the way? Why don't you give one of them away?
How about your kids?
Are you going to take an eye from your kid and give it to someone who's blind?
And that sort of catches them, because that shows the logic of their argument.
Another phrase that bugs me that comes from the left is that Bill Gates is now giving
something back, because he's setting up charitable organizations.
Well, that's true, but the implication is that when he was making his millions or billions
or zillions, that he wasn't giving something back.
He was giving something back then too. He was helping make the whole country have computers.
And every time he did, he uplifted people. He sold someone a computer for 500 bucks.
That means that the person valued it more than 500 bucks. Otherwise, why is he spending
500 bucks? So every penny that you make as an honest businessperson is giving something
back to society. You don't have to do your charity. That's nice. I'm not against private
Charity. I'm in favor of private charity and some of it should be directed to the organizers
of this conference, the Mises Institute. Hint, hint. But the point is I'm not against charity.
I'm just against saying that only charity is giving something back. Business, commerce
is giving something back to the community. Here are ways to be a good lefty. You have
to be against capital punishment but support abortion on demand. You have to believe that
You have to believe that business creates oppression and governments create prosperity. You have
to believe that there was no art before federal funding. You have to believe that global temperatures
are less affected by cyclical changes in the Earth's climate and more affected by soccer
moms driving SUVs. By the way, the temperature of other planets is now rising. Neptune, Uranus,
Mars. I guess they've got a lot of SUVs out there. You have to believe that AIDS virus
is spread by the lack of federal funding. You have to believe that the same teacher
who can't teach fourth graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach these kids about
sex. These are all indications, I mean, these things are so deeply embedded in our culture
that some of us, when we're not thinking, we say, yeah, yeah, that's right, but it's
not right. This is lefty hooliganism or intellectual hooliganism.
A lot of times when I watch a TV show like West Wing, which is a total left-ish sort
of a thing, if I'm going to enjoy it at all, I have to spend my judgment.
I have to say, you know, sort of think along the lines of those Democrat politicians.
And I think that that's what we have to do sometimes with language.
If we want to be part of the culture, we have to allow ourselves to take part in it, which
which is insidious because it undermines our own more correct views.
You have to believe that the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution
while the ACLU is good because it supports other parts of the Constitution.
You have to believe that taxes are too low but ATM fees are too high.
I love that one.
Another way to indicate tyranny of the left is from light bulb jokes, so please indulge
How many socialists does it take to change a light bulb?
One to petition the Ministry of Light for a bulb, 50 to establish the state production
quota, 200 militia to force the factory unions to allow production of the bulb, and one to
surreptitiously dial an 800 number and order an American light bulb.
How many Bill Clintons does it take to change a light bulb?
He doesn't.
How many lefties does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None. They just thought of coping with darkness support group.
How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? That's not funny.
Let me read a quote or two from my buddy Hillary. Don't even have to say what her last name is. Here she is.
The unfettered free market has been the most radically destructive force in American life in the last generation.
What free enterprise in the last generation? It's been mixed economy.
We just can't trust the American people to take these types of decisions regarding health care.
Government has to make these choices for people.
Well, that's Hillary. If we get Hillary, government will choose for you.
You don't have to worry about things. Government will take care of everything.
We can't afford to have that money go to the private sector.
The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it.
Isn't that tyrannical that they know how to spend it better than us?
It's very paternalistic.
They know how better to spend the money for us than we do.
Well, if they know so much, why are they entrusting us with the vote in the first place?
I mean, how are we smart enough to vote if we're not smart enough to spend our own money?
It's a little bit of an incompatibility.
Let me, what time do I go until?
So I've got ten minutes. Let me just very briefly mention
two other things that are sort of pet peeves of mine with regard to the left.
One is unions and the other is minimum wages.
Now, it's theoretically possible to have a
legitimate union. If the union limited itself
of two en masse quits, or the threat thereof.
And my view is that if you have a right to do something, you have a right to threaten it.
If you have a right to threaten it, you have a right to do it. The two go together.
So if a union member went to the boss and said,
OK, boss, look, you're unfair, the working conditions are lousy,
the salary is no good, give us a raise, or we all walk off the job,
would that be legitimate? Yes.
If one person has a right to quit, and if he doesn't, he's a slave,
then everyone has a right to quit because you don't lose your rights
And if that's all unions did, and it's not, then the libertarian would not have very much to say against unionism, except maybe it's economically inefficient.
But unions do one other thing. And I'm not talking about destruction of the factory, which is unusual because they don't really want to destroy the factory, otherwise they have no place to go back to work.
work. But what they do is they beat up scabs. Sometimes physically that's the blue collaway,
sometimes the way they beat up scabs is the white collaway getting a Wagner Act or a Taft-Hartley
Act passed which compels the employer to deal with the union whether he wants to or not.
Look suppose we applied this same logic to divorce. That means I divorce my wife and
And I get my buddies to surround her house and if she tries to date anyone else, we beat
them up.
Now, it's one thing to divorce your wife, okay, it's a tragedy, a personal tragedy,
but you're certainly not allowed to preclude competition as unions are allowed to do.
One of the worst things that unions do is they're sort of like a tapeworm.
They sort of gobble up the extra profits.
The logic of the market is that if somehow wristwatches, there's more profit in wristwatches
and profits go up in wristwatches, capital is supposed to float into the wristwatch area.
And if all that happens is that the wristwatch employees get more money, well then the system
doesn't really work.
Unions are like a tapeworm.
Just look at the Rust Belt.
Vast areas of productive capacity just gone to naught because of grasping unions.
One of the worst things that unions do though is they promulgate the minimum wage. Now some
people think the minimum wage is like a floor under wages and the higher it is the higher
wages go. Nonsense. If you want to use an analogy, the best analogy is the minimum wage is a
barrier over which you have to jump to get a job and the higher it is, the harder it
is to get a job. If the minimum wage was 25 an hour, there'd be vast unemployment. If
If it was $100 an hour, they'd be stupendous unemployment.
If the minimum wage law is such a great idea, why do even the lefties agree with the idea
of having exceptions?
For example, a teenage minimum wage during the summer to hire teenagers?
I mean, if it really raises wages, why are they having an exception?
We don't have any exceptions to laws of murder and rape and theft.
If it's as they say, then they should not have exceptions.
Another exception they have is for mentally handicapped people.
It was learned that even mentally handicapped people need a job and they can somehow sense
the difference between a make-work job and a job where people are relying on them.
And when they passed the first minimum wage, all of a sudden, nobody hired any mentally
handicapped people.
So they had an exception.
Well, again, if you're going to have an exception, that indicates that you don't really think
it's raising wages, rather you realize that it's a barrier over which you have to jump
to get a job.
Why do unions want to do this? Because highly skilled workers are in competition with low skilled workers.
When the union wants a raise wage from 25 to 30, the first thought of the employer is,
well, one of my factors of production is suddenly a little bit more expensive.
I'll substitute to another one. And what's a substitute for high skilled workers?
Well, many more unskilled workers.
Similarly, if you're producing rowboats and the cost of wood goes up, you switch to plastic or vice versa.
and the Natural Tendency of the Market.
Well, this leads me to conclude that the left has got a lot of tyrannical stuff going on.
Well, thanks for your kind attention. It was a pleasure.