WEBVTT NOTE The Cultural Cloak of the Coercive State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.140 I'm very pleased to be here, it's actually the first time that I am in Houston, speaking 2 00:00:05.140 --> 00:00:10.720 in Houston, it's a wonderful city, it's a wonderful place here, Wargos Restaurant, first 3 00:00:10.720 --> 00:00:17.240 I thought it was Department of the Houston Zoo, but it's actually just a nice place to 4 00:00:17.240 --> 00:00:24.560 be. My topic today is the cultural cloak of the state, which brings me directly to 5 00:00:24.560 --> 00:00:54.560 Walter Block, more or less, took away my subject from me, talking about all these things, and also taking away the justification from me, so I had the urge to spring up and then rip the microphone away from him, say, stop Walter, that's my subject, but then he said, he brought up the example with his wife, and said, well, you have no right to prevent competition. So it's good to know that I can compete with you as far as your wife is 6 00:00:54.560 --> 00:01:06.560 I'm not very concerned, but he brought up another subject too, stealing terms and stealing expressions and so on, 7 00:01:06.560 --> 00:01:20.560 so therefore you get from me, from a German, a hearty howdy, and I'll still start to compliment, supplement a little bit what Walter Block has said. 8 00:01:20.560 --> 00:01:49.560 First, I'll go on defining my terms. After all, I'm a university professor, so you get what you asked for, and so the coercive state and culture, and then I'll talk about the reasons why the state intervenes into the culture and tries to obtain a cultural cloak and how the state goes about it and why he goes about it the way he does it. 9 00:01:49.560 --> 00:01:53.560 And then we'll talk a little bit about the consequences that result from it. 10 00:01:53.560 --> 00:01:59.560 Okay, so first of all we have the word coercive state. 11 00:01:59.560 --> 00:02:03.560 What is a coercive state? It's actually very nice to say this. 12 00:02:03.560 --> 00:02:09.560 I think it's an oxymoron. Not an oxymoron, it's a pleonasin. 13 00:02:09.560 --> 00:02:16.560 Isn't any state coercive? Well, I mean, again, it always depends on how you define terms. 14 00:02:16.560 --> 00:02:33.560 In terms, you can define a state in such a way. It's a government, as it operates based on right reason and so on, then libertarians would be tempted to say, well, okay, then we wouldn't have any government at all, so it's still, I mean, how can this be? 15 00:02:33.560 --> 00:02:39.560 But the crucial element in any case is indeed the distinction between governing services. 16 00:02:39.560 --> 00:02:44.560 And we do have governing services in various private and public institutions. 17 00:02:44.560 --> 00:02:47.560 We have governing services, for example, in condominiums. 18 00:02:47.560 --> 00:02:52.560 We have governing services in sports clubs and so on. 19 00:02:52.560 --> 00:02:58.560 So you need people who are organizing, setting up things, making decisions for a larger body of people. 20 00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:02.560 And as Walter Block has pointed out, and that's of course the libertarian plumb line, 21 00:03:02.560 --> 00:03:06.560 the crucial question is always, is it voluntary or not? 22 00:03:06.560 --> 00:03:14.560 The question is in particular, are you a voluntary member of the association that is being governed by this government or not? 23 00:03:14.560 --> 00:03:18.560 And the problem that we have nowadays is that we cannot opt out, right? 24 00:03:18.560 --> 00:03:23.560 You can no longer subscribe to the government services of the federal government in Washington, D.C. 25 00:03:23.560 --> 00:03:31.560 And I would very much love to opt out of the government services of the French government, but yeah, we're still further away from this. 26 00:03:31.560 --> 00:03:40.560 Okay, so the crucial element here is coerciveness, we are forced to consume these services, and again the question is, is it a true service? 27 00:03:40.560 --> 00:03:51.560 So the crucial element is the coercive element, and coerciveness means, well, taking away our property against our will. 28 00:03:51.560 --> 00:04:09.560 The government can exercise its coerciveness in two or three ways, it can take away resources from us in the way of taxation, sometimes also in a less visible form, in the form of inflation, then the purchasing power of the money unit is diminished, 29 00:04:09.560 --> 00:04:18.560 But it can also order us to do things, and order us to behave, interact with other people in certain ways, and in that respect too then, it infringes on our property rights. 30 00:04:18.560 --> 00:04:35.560 It takes away some liberty at the margin that we have, whether I'm married to a woman or to a man, and orders me, okay, in the name of equality and fairness, you've got to be married at least once a year to a man or something. 31 00:04:35.560 --> 00:04:51.300 And so the coerciveness must always be seen in this context. 32 00:04:51.300 --> 00:04:56.200 Now the second term that we have here is culture and when we think about culture we attempted 33 00:04:56.200 --> 00:05:09.800 to have in mind predominantly the arts, paintings, literature, and so on, and that's certainly 34 00:05:09.800 --> 00:05:15.280 a very important part of culture, but it's not the only part of culture. 35 00:05:15.280 --> 00:05:21.000 We must have a very comprehensive view of the meaning of culture, and especially if 36 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:25.480 we want to understand government intervention in this field. 37 00:05:25.480 --> 00:05:38.480 So culture also belongs, for example, to the sciences. Of course I say this in some self-interest. I'm a cultural producer. I'm not just a mean economist interested in material things, but cultural work. 38 00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:51.480 But more largely also consumption, the kind of products that we consume. Why do we have a restaurant facility set up in this way? It could have been built in many other ways. 39 00:05:51.480 --> 00:06:21.440 The reason why it's set up in these ways, with this nice architecture of wood and glass construction, it's very airy and so on, then we have a kind of a zoo around, this is an expression of culture, it's a reflection of what those who run this restaurant think about life, and what they think about how their customers see themselves in their relation to these things. 40 00:06:21.480 --> 00:06:31.480 So we have consumption and production as part of the culture. Production itself is part of the culture. How do we produce things? Very different ways to go about it. 41 00:06:31.480 --> 00:06:43.480 Of course, from an economic point of view, we might say, okay, it's ultimately a question of profitability. We choose one way of producing things rather than another because it's more profitable than other things. 42 00:06:43.480 --> 00:06:48.600 but yeah and while this is true even in production things are not quite as 43 00:06:48.600 --> 00:06:55.600 straightforward as this as everybody knows who has to hire people if you are 44 00:06:55.600 --> 00:06:59.400 not dealing with completely primitive manual labor something more 45 00:06:59.400 --> 00:07:03.680 sophisticated than other things come into play the personal preferences of 46 00:07:03.680 --> 00:07:09.040 the people you're working with come into play the way they view the world they 47 00:07:09.040 --> 00:07:12.600 view their social relationships and so on you've got to take it out of this 48 00:07:12.600 --> 00:07:17.600 and it will therefore also be reflected in the way you go about things. 49 00:07:17.600 --> 00:07:25.600 So production is too a reflection of values, preferences of the individuals involved in production. 50 00:07:25.600 --> 00:07:27.600 Family. 51 00:07:27.600 --> 00:07:29.600 Walter Block brought this up. 52 00:07:29.600 --> 00:07:34.600 Sorry, it's impossible just to talk about other things than Walter because Walter pretty much covered the ground. 53 00:07:34.600 --> 00:07:38.600 So I'll not talk about language because he wants so much detail there. 54 00:07:38.600 --> 00:07:56.600 Family. What is a family? These days it's a good question. About 20 years ago it was pretty straightforward. You have a man, you have a woman, you have a couple of bimbo bambinis, as the Italians say. 55 00:07:56.600 --> 00:08:08.600 In these days, it could be anything, right? It could be two men and a dog, and two women, three women, next year a man and a monkey, I don't know. 56 00:08:08.600 --> 00:08:17.600 I had to think about this monkey thing, because Walter mentioned the AIDS virus, right? 57 00:08:17.600 --> 00:08:31.600 Social relations in general, a very important field of social relations is of course production. 58 00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:38.600 Business firms and so on, but I mentioned clubs, associations, but also the public sphere. 59 00:08:38.600 --> 00:08:42.600 How people interact in the streets is very different from one country to another. 60 00:08:42.600 --> 00:08:58.600 As all of you know, who have gone to other places, not necessarily Canada, but let's say Japan or China or even Europe, there's a big difference already between Germany and Spain, how people interact on the streets and so on. 61 00:08:58.600 --> 00:09:04.600 It's not only because it's colder in Germany, but there's other things that come into play too. 62 00:09:04.600 --> 00:09:09.600 Population. What's the composition of the population? 63 00:09:09.600 --> 00:09:17.360 population, what's the size of the population, how many different groups, what are their 64 00:09:17.360 --> 00:09:21.360 relationships and so on. It's an expression of the culture, what are the languages that 65 00:09:21.360 --> 00:09:32.080 they speak. We have the setting up of cities, the way cities are built, how they are organized. 66 00:09:32.080 --> 00:09:40.080 Of course, again, you see big differences today between European cities and American cities. 67 00:09:40.080 --> 00:09:47.080 Most Europeans are deceived when they come for the first time to the U.S. because they have these great images of New York and so on. 68 00:09:47.080 --> 00:09:52.080 New York is a distinct cultural product, and San Francisco as well. 69 00:09:52.080 --> 00:09:59.080 This is a common saying right in the US, you have three cities, you have New York, you have San Francisco, and all the rest is Cleveland. 70 00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:08.080 But of course, you could say similar things about Europe, there's also a certain type of European city, the way it is built up and so on. 71 00:10:08.080 --> 00:10:17.080 But again, so the point is, the way we do, we go about these things, the way we build cities, we organize them, is an expression of the culture. 72 00:10:17.080 --> 00:10:27.080 Same thing about regional development, how are streets built, how are settlements created within the country, 73 00:10:27.080 --> 00:10:33.080 how does this articulate with city dwellings and so on, it's all an extra part of the culture. 74 00:10:33.080 --> 00:10:40.080 Then of course in our day environment, what is the relationship between human beings and, well, their natural environment, 75 00:10:40.080 --> 00:10:46.560 not only as factors of production but more generally so again the way we view 76 00:10:46.560 --> 00:10:52.480 these things and we go about this or we make decisions about our natural 77 00:10:52.480 --> 00:10:57.800 environment is a reflection of the culture and finally religion probably 78 00:10:57.800 --> 00:11:02.160 the most fundamental factor of all is also of course a very very important and 79 00:11:02.160 --> 00:11:08.360 fundamental part of culture so we are talking about a huge bag and as we know 80 00:11:08.360 --> 00:11:13.360 We know the state today is present in all these fields. 81 00:11:13.360 --> 00:11:16.360 The state runs the arts, runs the sciences. 82 00:11:16.360 --> 00:11:20.360 Fortunately, in the US, you're very blessed, you still have private universities. 83 00:11:20.360 --> 00:11:24.360 You have private research. 84 00:11:24.360 --> 00:11:27.360 You even have private artists. 85 00:11:27.360 --> 00:11:30.360 I try to go about this, well, okay, there are private artists also in Europe, 86 00:11:30.360 --> 00:11:32.360 but they almost do this with a bad conscience. 87 00:11:32.360 --> 00:11:37.360 I'm always fascinated in the US when I see TV shows and their advertisement, 88 00:11:37.360 --> 00:12:01.360 The government is present in virtually all countries, more so in Europe than the U.S. in the arts and in the sciences. 89 00:12:01.360 --> 00:12:07.840 The government, of course, is present in consumption, tells us which things to produce, some products 90 00:12:07.840 --> 00:12:18.400 are not healthy enough, others might be too healthy, dangerous, morally offensive, and 91 00:12:18.400 --> 00:12:19.680 so on. 92 00:12:19.680 --> 00:12:24.320 The government also is present in production, tells us how to produce things, and your two 93 00:12:24.320 --> 00:12:30.760 aspects have come into play, of course, environmental aspects, but also social relations, you cannot 94 00:12:30.760 --> 00:12:34.440 just produce how you wish, or you've got to produce in the right way. 95 00:12:34.440 --> 00:12:41.920 So in some cases, the most flagrant example is the promotion by government of labor unions. 96 00:12:41.920 --> 00:12:48.360 In the U.S., as you know, we have quotas, a very strong move toward the establishment 97 00:12:48.360 --> 00:12:53.520 of quotas of certain types of workers, males, females, handicapped, non-handicapped, different 98 00:12:53.520 --> 00:12:56.360 ethnicities and so on. 99 00:12:56.360 --> 00:13:00.320 In Europe, this is still less pronounced, but we are moving very strongly into the same 100 00:13:00.320 --> 00:13:08.480 direction. Family, of course. Government has been in place for a long time. More recently 101 00:13:08.480 --> 00:13:13.640 in the U.S. than in Europe, and less strongly in the U.S. traditionally than in Europe, 102 00:13:13.640 --> 00:13:18.240 but ever more strongly so in the past few years. And again, we've talked about gay marriage. 103 00:13:18.240 --> 00:13:23.720 It's the most flagrant example. And of course, well, so, gay marriage is the natural outcome 104 00:13:23.720 --> 00:13:27.880 of having government in the marriage business at all. 105 00:13:27.880 --> 00:13:29.560 It's just a very natural consequence. 106 00:13:29.560 --> 00:13:31.240 As soon as the government has the authority 107 00:13:31.240 --> 00:13:34.280 to define what a marriage is, and it has the authority 108 00:13:34.280 --> 00:13:39.040 to, by virtue of its, well, authority 109 00:13:39.040 --> 00:13:42.440 to get marriage licenses, well, then, of course, 110 00:13:42.440 --> 00:13:44.400 the government can just make up its mind 111 00:13:44.400 --> 00:13:46.400 and make a different decision, say, OK, well, 112 00:13:46.400 --> 00:13:50.920 now the union between a monkey and a pheasant is a marriage. 113 00:13:50.920 --> 00:13:59.920 It's a completely fruitless debate because it's just quibbling about words. 114 00:13:59.920 --> 00:14:11.920 If they say, we are using this word from now on in this encompassing sense, any union that we decide is, that we think should be called this way, we do call marriage, then of course there's nothing to argue about. 115 00:14:11.920 --> 00:14:14.920 That's how they do it and that's fine. 116 00:14:14.920 --> 00:14:22.920 And it's again, it's a natural consequence of having this institution in the marriage business at all. 117 00:14:22.920 --> 00:14:39.920 City regional planning, of course, omnipresent population, government runs very expensive programs, very encompassing programs, designed to create a certain type of population, 118 00:14:39.920 --> 00:14:48.920 right proportion between different ethnicities, therefore very interested in questions of immigration and so on, but also in population growth. 119 00:14:48.920 --> 00:14:58.920 I find this very interesting. I sometimes wonder whether all these people running the population offices and population bureaus of the federal governments in the world, 120 00:14:58.920 --> 00:15:07.920 whether they have all been cattle breeders before. That's the kind of mental equipment that you need to have in order to do good population policy. 121 00:15:07.920 --> 00:15:13.480 and Policy. Ultimately you must look at human beings as cattle. It's just okay, well, we 122 00:15:13.480 --> 00:15:18.960 don't have enough of these and the cows don't give enough, so what can we do with some different 123 00:15:18.960 --> 00:15:30.320 nourishment or food or they need more stabs or more whips or more sugar. In our day, of 124 00:15:30.320 --> 00:15:34.720 course, the principle is the same. We don't, of course, whip them directly, we don't give 125 00:15:34.720 --> 00:15:42.720 We give them sugar, but we do other things. We give maternity leave, paternity leave, and all these things, 126 00:15:42.720 --> 00:15:49.720 which are again based on and result from a very mechanistic view of how human beings make choices, 127 00:15:49.720 --> 00:15:59.720 how they go about offspring and so on. You treat them in the same way as you would treat your cow, your sheep. 128 00:15:59.720 --> 00:16:10.720 The environment, okay, it's not necessary to say anything about this and clearly this is probably the most terrible threat to our liberty today. 129 00:16:10.720 --> 00:16:22.720 The government endeavoured to protect the environment differently from what it would have been if the choice were left to people on the free market. 130 00:16:22.720 --> 00:16:35.720 And finally, the example that I gave, religion, of course, here again, the government is very strongly present and virtually all religions are under very tight government control and have been under tight government control. 131 00:16:35.720 --> 00:16:43.720 The only exception is again, and bless you, the United States. And I hope very much for you that it will stay this way. 132 00:16:43.720 --> 00:16:45.840 this way that again, as you know, 133 00:16:45.840 --> 00:16:47.720 tendencies in the past few years 134 00:16:47.720 --> 00:16:50.480 by the present administration to change this 135 00:16:50.480 --> 00:16:53.720 and to bring the government also in the religion business. 136 00:16:55.080 --> 00:16:57.720 So, why all this? 137 00:16:57.720 --> 00:17:00.900 Why is the government present in all these fields? 138 00:17:02.320 --> 00:17:06.660 The catch word here and what we need to keep in mind 139 00:17:06.660 --> 00:17:10.840 is that the state is a cultural parasite, okay? 140 00:17:10.840 --> 00:17:17.480 State is a cultural parasite. It thrives on a culture that is by and large produced and 141 00:17:17.480 --> 00:17:23.560 has been created independently of its own efforts. So he has a parasitic relationship 142 00:17:23.560 --> 00:17:34.200 with cultural production. And the reason is, ultimately, that the government is under the 143 00:17:34.200 --> 00:17:41.700 The constant need to justify its activities and to hide its naked power. 144 00:17:41.700 --> 00:17:46.640 As we said, in a way it follows from the definition of the coercive state itself. 145 00:17:46.640 --> 00:17:51.960 The state is coercive, its defining element is the violation of property rights, taking 146 00:17:51.960 --> 00:17:58.080 away property from other people without their consent. 147 00:17:58.080 --> 00:18:02.440 And if the government just went about this in a straightforward way and said, okay, well, 148 00:18:02.440 --> 00:18:06.320 Give me all your money, because I said so. 149 00:18:06.320 --> 00:18:10.840 That would not be very charming. 150 00:18:10.840 --> 00:18:20.160 Some people would find this sexy or cool, but there would not be too many of them, especially 151 00:18:20.160 --> 00:18:25.040 of course in this group, but I guess even in the more general population would not be 152 00:18:25.040 --> 00:18:30.360 too many people who would find this sexy or cool. 153 00:18:30.360 --> 00:18:36.680 Because they know it, they have to seek for justification, they have to seek for a cover. 154 00:18:36.680 --> 00:18:42.320 They have to play on the illusion that their activity is something else but naked power. 155 00:18:42.320 --> 00:18:48.200 And therefore we have this very nice phrase of the cultural cloak culture, the presence 156 00:18:48.200 --> 00:18:52.280 of the government in culture is nothing but a cloak. 157 00:18:52.280 --> 00:19:04.280 It's a cover for its true nature to hide the fact that government intervention is in fact naked power. 158 00:19:04.280 --> 00:19:13.280 It is expropriation, subjection of some individuals by other individuals. 159 00:19:13.280 --> 00:19:20.280 And of course, this cultural presence or the parasitic nature of the government is in strict proportion to the ambition 160 00:19:20.280 --> 00:19:35.280 The stronger your ambitions are, the more encompassing your activities, the stronger is the cover that you need, the more diversified and varied is the cover that you need. 161 00:19:35.280 --> 00:19:38.280 So how does the government go about this? 162 00:19:38.280 --> 00:19:54.280 The important point here is that the government must go about it in a roundabout way in order to address the fundamental problem from the point of view of government, which is the problem of authority. 163 00:19:54.280 --> 00:20:05.280 We'll go about this step by step. First of all, we consider a government intervening directly without this roundabout way. 164 00:20:05.280 --> 00:20:17.280 Let's say the government just said, okay, Christianity is out of date, it's not a very suitable way to think about God and so on, 165 00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:30.280 and from now on, everybody has to believe in the goddess, whatever, the goddess water, the goddess microphone, whatever, so it could be anything. 166 00:20:30.280 --> 00:20:46.280 This wouldn't fly, and we all know it wouldn't fly, because, well, if you just come ahead as one individual and as one institution, we'd ever so prestigious and say, well, you've got all to change your mind about this thing about which you thought in a certain way before, 167 00:20:46.280 --> 00:20:58.280 it would not be convincing. The government would not find its support of the population. The support of the population is of course important because, as far as sheer numbers is concerned, government is always a minority, always a very small minority. 168 00:20:58.280 --> 00:21:11.280 in order to get therefore support for their cultural parasitism, they need to engage in political production. 169 00:21:11.280 --> 00:21:18.280 Now some of you again might think that that's a contradiction in terms of that is an oxymoron. 170 00:21:18.280 --> 00:21:21.280 Political production, how can that be? 171 00:21:21.280 --> 00:21:29.280 Well, that is of course true, but the problem disappears if we consider that production does not only concern goods, 172 00:21:29.280 --> 00:21:38.280 also concerns bats. You can't produce a bat. And that's what they're doing. So ultimately what they want to do is to expropriate people. 173 00:21:38.280 --> 00:21:44.280 That's the ultimate goal. And now the way to do it is a production process. 174 00:21:44.280 --> 00:21:52.280 And again, the main problem, the main intermediate objective of the political production process is to gain sufficient support. 175 00:21:52.280 --> 00:21:57.280 So you have one step back. You need to produce support in order to be able to expropriate. 176 00:21:57.280 --> 00:22:02.280 How do you go about creating support? Well, you must work on the media. 177 00:22:02.280 --> 00:22:10.280 You must work on people who publish opinion and make opinion, express opinions and so on, try to influence them. 178 00:22:10.280 --> 00:22:13.400 One step back in the production chain. 179 00:22:13.400 --> 00:22:15.300 And for those of you who know Austrian economics, 180 00:22:15.300 --> 00:22:17.640 of course, you see immediately that we have here 181 00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:18.880 a roundabout production. 182 00:22:21.120 --> 00:22:23.800 So the art for a government is, again, 183 00:22:23.800 --> 00:22:27.360 with each advancement of its own economic power 184 00:22:27.360 --> 00:22:31.800 to begin economic production at an earlier phase, 185 00:22:31.800 --> 00:22:34.440 at an earlier level, in order to influence 186 00:22:34.440 --> 00:22:37.040 the final product. 187 00:22:37.040 --> 00:22:50.040 Now, the same thing applies in the case of intervention in the culture. Government needs to engage in political production here, too. 188 00:22:50.040 --> 00:23:01.040 And here it encounters the problem of authority. Who defines how things, how cultural things are to be seen? 189 00:23:01.040 --> 00:23:06.040 Who defines the state of the art and the sciences? Who defines the state of the arts? 190 00:23:06.040 --> 00:23:11.040 Who defines what is the good religion, what is the bad religion? 191 00:23:11.040 --> 00:23:16.040 Who defines what are the environmental threats that we face and so on? 192 00:23:16.040 --> 00:23:21.040 And so we have here the question of truth and falsehood. 193 00:23:21.040 --> 00:23:28.040 And ultimately, therefore, the ultimate phase in political production 194 00:23:28.040 --> 00:23:39.040 And the question necessarily concerns the sciences and the arts and therefore it is very correct to perceive the sciences and the arts as the most eminent aspects of culture. 195 00:23:39.040 --> 00:23:44.040 And it is so as we see now because of their political roles, very important political role. 196 00:23:44.040 --> 00:23:55.040 It's in the arts that truth is expressed more or less beautifully in films, literature and so on and it's in the sciences that the truth is analyzed. 197 00:23:55.040 --> 00:24:10.040 So the government, if it wants to impose its vision on cultural affairs, has to seize the arts and the sciences where we have the authorities on these questions. 198 00:24:10.040 --> 00:24:15.040 So again, it's important not to confuse the two different meanings of the word authority. 199 00:24:15.040 --> 00:24:21.040 Authority can be somebody who wields political power. That's the way we use the word authority in political language. 200 00:24:21.040 --> 00:24:36.040 But more generally speaking, an authority is a person who has the ability, who is recognized as having the ability to define truth, as a scientist, as an artist and so on. 201 00:24:36.040 --> 00:24:44.040 So government needs to co-opt the authorities, needs to co-opt the elites in the arts and the sciences. 202 00:24:44.040 --> 00:25:06.040 And here we have the reason why government has taken particular care to co-op, to run universities, to run schools, because that's the way to get under control those who define truth and falsehood in these matters. 203 00:25:06.040 --> 00:25:09.040 Then the question is, why do the authorities consent? 204 00:25:09.040 --> 00:25:15.040 It's a different question. Why do intellectuals, why do artists consent to this game? 205 00:25:15.040 --> 00:25:20.040 It's a rather stupid thing. Why do they play with people who just want to wield naked power? 206 00:25:20.040 --> 00:25:24.040 Well, and here again we have a rather unpleasant feature of human nature. 207 00:25:24.040 --> 00:25:27.040 Walter mentioned competition before, right? 208 00:25:27.040 --> 00:25:32.040 Scientists and artists are also in competition with others. 209 00:25:32.040 --> 00:25:38.040 So an alliance with the government can be a very convenient way just to get rid of all these nasty competitors. 210 00:25:38.040 --> 00:25:44.040 A flagrant example was the rise of the power to the Bolsheviks. 211 00:25:44.040 --> 00:25:53.040 It brought this entirely new movement in the arts to the fore. 212 00:25:53.040 --> 00:26:00.040 Writers like Maxim Gorky and painters, sculptors and so on. 213 00:26:00.040 --> 00:26:05.640 and that was taken at the time as a proof that socialism goes in hand with 214 00:26:05.640 --> 00:26:11.040 cultural, with artistic innovation. Ludwig von Mises pointed out in 1922 215 00:26:11.040 --> 00:26:15.320 already so just a couple of years after the Bolshevik coup that what was really 216 00:26:15.320 --> 00:26:21.880 going on was just that one part of the cultural producersivid the alliance with 217 00:26:21.880 --> 00:26:27.040 the government were crowding out all other competitors so because what they 218 00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:36.040 What they were doing was new right now, there was the false impression that socialism and state intervention is inherently innovative. 219 00:26:36.040 --> 00:26:47.040 But as time would go on, these people would just enshrine their vision of things, what beautiful paintings, what beautiful sculpture and so on is, into law. 220 00:26:47.040 --> 00:26:54.040 And would therefore stifle artistic innovation, artistic work, and that's exactly what has happened. 221 00:26:54.040 --> 00:27:03.040 So the only innovation came at the time of the Bolshevik coup. After this, socialist art has been barren. 222 00:27:03.040 --> 00:27:13.040 What are the consequences? Well, the consequences, of course, as we know, are, first of all, destruction, destruction of society. 223 00:27:13.040 --> 00:27:20.040 As economists, we have in mind, first of all, of course, economic waste, destruction of material resources. 224 00:27:20.040 --> 00:27:33.040 That's a very important aspect. But it's not the only aspect. The destruction does not just involve economic waste. It also creates the destruction of social institutions. 225 00:27:33.040 --> 00:27:45.040 Let me just take again the case of the family. It's quite obvious. If we look at the figures, what has happened to family life in the United States and in Europe, 226 00:27:45.040 --> 00:28:15.040 In Europe, that we had very terrible consequences of government intervention in this field as can be measured by divorce rates and by birth rates, birth rates declining especially in Europe, divorce rates being up in all countries, Europe and the United States and that's a direct consequence of government trying to be a social engineer of social relations, 227 00:28:15.040 --> 00:28:44.040 And all of government policies today are designed to create, well, separate individuals to dislocate the family as a form of the division of labor and to give economic incentives for women to join the workforce not to produce, be economically independent of the husband, 228 00:28:44.040 --> 00:28:48.040 not to have any incentives to give birth and so on. 229 00:28:48.040 --> 00:29:00.040 Another, the second very important consequence is the aspect of corruption and here intellectual corruption, artistic corruption. 230 00:29:00.040 --> 00:29:07.040 In the sciences this is very strongly present. 231 00:29:07.040 --> 00:29:14.040 And it's been a phenomenon that has been for a very long time observed. 232 00:29:14.040 --> 00:29:20.040 For example, at the beginning of the 19th century, Richard Waitley, who was one of the great classical economists, said, 233 00:29:20.040 --> 00:29:30.040 well, if physics or chemistry had any political applications, the government would very strongly interfere in this area 234 00:29:30.040 --> 00:29:34.040 and we would have constant disagreements about these things. 235 00:29:34.040 --> 00:29:42.040 200 years before, German philosopher Leibniz wrote that if mathematics had the slightest political application, 236 00:29:42.040 --> 00:29:46.040 there would be debates about whether 1 plus 1 is really 2. 237 00:29:46.040 --> 00:29:54.040 And, well, in economics it has always been the case that the only practical application of economics is in politics. 238 00:29:54.040 --> 00:29:59.040 I'm still waiting for my colleagues who want to try to get rich by economics, 239 00:29:59.040 --> 00:30:06.400 Economics, say good luck. So the application is in politics, and here precisely because 240 00:30:06.400 --> 00:30:10.160 there is an application in politics, the government has a very strong incentive to interfere and 241 00:30:10.160 --> 00:30:19.760 to promote those kinds of economics, those branches of economics that are least harmful, 242 00:30:19.760 --> 00:30:25.360 least obstructive to government activities. That's precisely what has been going on. Government 243 00:30:25.360 --> 00:30:31.380 has been promoting actively lefty schools, Marxist schools of thought. It has promoted 244 00:30:31.380 --> 00:30:39.760 a mathematized approach that economists know as neoclassical economics, which consists 245 00:30:39.760 --> 00:30:48.440 in applying the methods of the natural sciences to economic behavior, which in other words 246 00:30:48.440 --> 00:30:52.800 treats human beings as if they were stones or if they were rabbits and so on, behave 247 00:30:52.800 --> 00:30:58.200 completely mechanically, and they did this because this research is completely barren 248 00:30:58.200 --> 00:31:03.640 and therefore does not pose any threat, does not pose any risk of contradicting government 249 00:31:03.640 --> 00:31:14.640 programs. So all in all, the relationship between state and culture has therefore two 250 00:31:14.640 --> 00:31:19.600 aspects. On the one hand, culture is a cloak and the government needs this cloak to cover 251 00:31:19.600 --> 00:31:25.600 is what it's really about, naked power, expropriation of other people. 252 00:31:25.600 --> 00:31:29.600 But on the other hand, it's not so that the culture remains unaffected in this process. 253 00:31:29.600 --> 00:31:35.600 It's precisely because the government gets into the play that the culture gets perverted and depraved. 254 00:31:35.600 --> 00:31:38.600 And we are in the midst of this process. 255 00:31:38.600 --> 00:31:48.600 The only way to stop this or to oppose this is, well, to focus on those fields where culture is defined 256 00:31:48.600 --> 00:31:52.400 And the most important fields, again, are the sciences and the social sciences in particular. 257 00:31:52.400 --> 00:31:58.200 And therefore I'm very grateful for the existence of the Mises Institute, who promotes independent 258 00:31:58.200 --> 00:32:07.080 research, independent writing on these issues that are designed to keep up levels of criteria 259 00:32:07.080 --> 00:32:11.400 of truth and falsehood that are not directly controlled by these guys. 260 00:32:11.400 --> 00:32:16.400 And I'm very thankful for all of you to support our work, which allows us to carry it on in 261 00:32:16.400 --> 00:32:17.400 the future. 262 00:32:17.400 --> 00:32:17.920 Thank you very much.