WEBVTT NOTE Rise of the West 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Great, thank you. Thanks very much. Good to see you this morning. 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:12.000 My talk today is on the rise of the West. 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Years ago, when I started teaching, many years ago, 4 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 I used to use, very often in appropriate classes, the Communist Manifesto 5 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.000 in 19th century Europe and Western Civ and so on. 6 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:38.000 And I usually took the devil's advocate position, that is, argued the Marxist case with the students. 7 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:49.000 And back then, it really was a number of years ago, even at my school there were some good students, we had good discussions and so on, and it was a useful kind of exercise. 8 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:55.400 In recent years, not only have I given up any kind of devil's advocate defense of the Communist Manifesto, 9 00:00:55.400 --> 00:00:58.400 but I never used the Manifesto. 10 00:00:58.400 --> 00:01:04.200 And the reason is that today's students find the Communist Manifesto totally persuasive. 11 00:01:04.200 --> 00:01:14.200 They have been conditioned to think of business, the bourgeoisie, as the enemies of mankind. 12 00:01:14.200 --> 00:01:25.200 And, there's no possibility of having them read it and then discuss it and counter this instinctive reaction of theirs 13 00:01:25.200 --> 00:01:37.200 Because they have no idea, unless they come from Jesuit schools, they have no idea, my students anyway, what it means to propose a thesis and to present arguments for it 14 00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:44.200 Instead, it's always a question of their emotional reaction and the pictures in their heads. 15 00:01:44.200 --> 00:01:47.200 This is what appeals to them. 16 00:01:47.200 --> 00:01:56.200 And this is, to a large extent, the true of certainly a very large part of the younger population. 17 00:01:56.200 --> 00:02:04.200 Whenever they read about some rich merchant or rich capitalist, the first thing that comes into their minds is, 18 00:02:04.200 --> 00:02:09.200 Why don't we take his money away from him and divide it among the needy? 19 00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:13.200 As Camille Paglia said in a different context, 20 00:02:13.200 --> 00:02:18.200 if we'd gone by that principle, then we'd still be living in grass huts. 21 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:24.200 But the idea that wealth is something that somehow magically appears, 22 00:02:24.200 --> 00:02:31.200 and the chief function of it is to act as a target for redistribution to the needy, 23 00:02:31.200 --> 00:02:38.800 the homeless, or AIDS victims, whatever, this is ingrained in the younger people. 24 00:02:38.800 --> 00:02:45.100 So that what I'm going to be saying tonight is not going to come, this morning, is not going to come as much of a surprise to you, I don't think, 25 00:02:45.100 --> 00:02:49.500 but certainly would come as a surprise to students in general. 26 00:02:49.500 --> 00:02:55.300 That is how the West arose, how the West grew rich. 27 00:02:55.300 --> 00:03:00.900 I will be discussing the West, and this is not in Europe. 28 00:03:00.900 --> 00:03:05.800 and Europe's offshoots, above all, America, Western civilization. 29 00:03:05.800 --> 00:03:12.200 And in this sense, Europe is not a geographic expression as much as a cultural expression. 30 00:03:12.200 --> 00:03:21.300 It is a Europe that extends roughly to a line from Helsinki to Warsaw to Prague to Budapest. 31 00:03:21.300 --> 00:03:27.500 That is, a Europe that had, at one time at least, been in communion with the Bishop of Rome. 32 00:03:27.500 --> 00:03:38.400 This is European civilization, this is the Europe that has made its special mark on the rest of the world. 33 00:03:38.400 --> 00:03:46.400 So, what I'm going to be dealing with is, of course, essentially and hideously, Eurocentric. 34 00:03:46.400 --> 00:03:56.700 This, as maybe you've gathered from your teachers and your colleagues, is a terrible thing to be Eurocentric. 35 00:03:56.700 --> 00:04:00.380 Because, just as Professor Higgs was saying yesterday, 36 00:04:00.380 --> 00:04:03.260 capitalism is the cause of all evils in the world. 37 00:04:03.260 --> 00:04:07.980 Well, capitalism is simply one aspect in that understanding, 38 00:04:07.980 --> 00:04:10.700 is simply one aspect of European civilization. 39 00:04:10.700 --> 00:04:15.700 It's Europe that is the cause of all the evil and harm 40 00:04:16.820 --> 00:04:18.980 that's going on in the world. 41 00:04:18.980 --> 00:04:23.260 And in that sense, the European man of the millennium, 42 00:04:23.260 --> 00:04:25.260 of course, is Adolf Hitler. 43 00:04:26.700 --> 00:04:33.200 ...standing for all of the atrocities that European men have inflicted on the rest of the world. 44 00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:39.200 However, the fact that, and there's no doubt that there were many atrocities over centuries, 45 00:04:39.200 --> 00:04:45.200 with the slavery and the conquest of peoples around the world, no doubt about that, 46 00:04:45.200 --> 00:04:54.200 but the very fact that European man was able to inflict from these atrocities, besides other things, 47 00:04:54.200 --> 00:04:57.200 The atrocities weren't the whole story, obviously, which I'm going to be talking about. 48 00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:06.200 But the fact that he was able to inflict these terrible things came from the fact that he had the power to do it. 49 00:05:06.200 --> 00:05:09.200 So the question is, where did this power come from? 50 00:05:09.200 --> 00:05:12.200 Why did he have the power and not others? 51 00:05:12.200 --> 00:05:17.200 Because when we look around the world, 52 00:05:17.200 --> 00:05:30.200 We see that the crimes that European man was guilty of come from and reflect the essentially fallen nature of all men, of all men. 53 00:05:30.200 --> 00:05:38.200 Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton said, we'll be talking about him later in the week. 54 00:05:38.200 --> 00:05:45.200 And European man happened to have the power to sail ships around the world, starting 500 years ago, 55 00:05:45.200 --> 00:05:51.200 with firepower that no other people could match and did terrible things from time to time. 56 00:05:51.200 --> 00:06:04.200 But it occurs to me, what would have happened if it had been the Aztecs who reached Spain and conquered the Spaniards rather than vice versa? 57 00:06:04.200 --> 00:06:14.200 Would we have seen some interesting sights in Madrid and Cádiz and so on of the sort that the Aztecs were famous for? 58 00:06:14.200 --> 00:06:22.200 or if, by some real counterfactual, the Comanches or Apaches had conquered Western Europe. 59 00:06:22.200 --> 00:06:32.200 I mean, we're talking about peoples whose whole lifestyle was spent in killing other Indian tribes and torturing prisoners to death and so on. 60 00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:40.200 So my point is that, sure, you can have whole courses, which exist, of course, at every college nowadays. 61 00:06:40.200 --> 00:06:49.200 at my college, and I'm sure that those of you who are familiar with it, hold courses on the history of European crimes and the history of the crimes of Western man. 62 00:06:49.200 --> 00:07:07.200 And no doubt you could in the case of other peoples as well. I mean, I remember that Tamerlane, for instance, was not exactly the kind of Mother Teresa type or Genghis Khan. 63 00:07:07.200 --> 00:07:14.560 So, and Europeans, but you know sometimes it really gets unbelievably ridiculous 64 00:07:14.560 --> 00:07:20.080 and these people have no shame because one of the terrible things that the European man 65 00:07:20.080 --> 00:07:27.440 is famous for, notorious for, is his terrible treatment of women, right, in European civilization 66 00:07:27.440 --> 00:07:34.360 and in Western civilization women have been brutalized, have been oppressed, well to a 67 00:07:34.360 --> 00:07:40.760 To a degree, that's true. Again, power corrupts, and it's men who have had power. 68 00:07:40.760 --> 00:07:45.960 On the other hand, if you want to compare Western civilization with other civilizations, 69 00:07:45.960 --> 00:07:50.760 you know, let these people tell us about Sati, for instance. 70 00:07:50.760 --> 00:07:55.360 You know, the Hindu practice of the British are suppressed. 71 00:07:55.360 --> 00:07:59.960 You're all familiar with this, right? Your professors tell you about this, right? 72 00:07:59.960 --> 00:08:12.960 You know? Well, Sati was really quite reasonable and sensible, but when the man died, his widow was drugged and brow-beaten and pressured into throwing herself on the funeral pyre. 73 00:08:12.960 --> 00:08:19.960 Because what's the point of living now that the louse, I don't mean the louse, now that her husband is dead? You know, what's the point of going on? 74 00:08:19.960 --> 00:08:27.960 So, in other words, the widow had to commit suicide. This was standard among the Hindus, and the British suppressed it. 75 00:08:27.960 --> 00:08:37.960 There was a footbinding among the Chinese, the treatment and the status of women in Islamic countries, everybody knows about that. 76 00:08:37.960 --> 00:08:48.960 And I don't know how many people know, but to this very day, tens of millions of young girls in Africa are subjected to bodily mutilation. 77 00:08:48.960 --> 00:08:55.960 And even the papers like the New York Times talk about this tension in Sierra Leone, for instance, 78 00:08:55.960 --> 00:08:59.840 where they say 90% of the girls are subjected to this. 79 00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:05.720 And the tension exists in the fact that there's six radical feminists there who complain about it. 80 00:09:05.720 --> 00:09:09.920 I mean, it's not that there's any tension. The society has given over to this age-old practice. 81 00:09:09.920 --> 00:09:13.480 That's what started the Kikuyu rebellion in Kenya. 82 00:09:13.480 --> 00:09:18.280 But the British were putting down this practice of bodily mutilation of women. 83 00:09:18.280 --> 00:09:22.680 And it went against Kikuyu culture and customs. 84 00:09:22.680 --> 00:09:32.320 Well, the point is, maybe I didn't have to spend so much time apologizing for concentrating on Europe and the West with this group, 85 00:09:32.320 --> 00:09:39.560 but on the other hand, maybe some of the things that your contemporaries would be telling you have occurred to you, 86 00:09:39.560 --> 00:09:42.020 and it's good, I think, to answer that. 87 00:09:42.020 --> 00:09:46.160 So, I'm going to be talking about Europe and the rise of the West, 88 00:09:46.160 --> 00:09:51.420 and I'm going to be presenting a general interpretation or model or pattern, 89 00:09:51.420 --> 00:10:05.820 or, since people in my position and our staff in general like to use quite in fancy words, a paradigm, okay? 90 00:10:05.820 --> 00:10:10.920 The adjective for which is paradigmatic, okay? 91 00:10:10.920 --> 00:10:15.720 A paradigm of the history of the West. 92 00:10:15.720 --> 00:10:18.820 Now, this is not anything I invented. 93 00:10:18.820 --> 00:10:26.420 All I'm doing is taking this from the people who did develop this over a few decades recently. 94 00:10:26.420 --> 00:10:29.580 And I'm not sure that you're familiar with it. 95 00:10:29.580 --> 00:10:32.380 Going back to the Marxist model, everybody's familiar with that. 96 00:10:32.380 --> 00:10:35.980 I mean, that's common currency. 97 00:10:35.980 --> 00:10:45.660 But this model has become very well established, and it's the work of a number of scholars. 98 00:10:45.660 --> 00:10:59.160 If anybody is interested, you know, on our agenda, I think the list of the staff and speakers is given towards the end, including email addresses. 99 00:10:59.160 --> 00:11:08.660 So if anybody's interested in any bibliography in my talk or in regard to anybody else's talk, just email me, email whoever you might be interested in, 100 00:11:08.660 --> 00:11:13.360 and I will provide you with the bibliography, the detailed bibliography. 101 00:11:13.360 --> 00:11:20.360 But to give you an idea of the people who have contributed, the scholars who have contributed to this model, 102 00:11:20.360 --> 00:11:26.360 which you can call, for short, the miracle of Europe, or the European miracle model, 103 00:11:26.360 --> 00:11:33.360 we have Douglas North, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for doing so, for his economic history theories, 104 00:11:33.360 --> 00:11:40.360 Jean Bechler of the University of Paris, Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford, E.L. Jones of La Trobe, 105 00:11:40.360 --> 00:11:47.000 and it's Jones who wrote of the book called The European Miracle and many 106 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:53.200 other secondary figures, David Landis who is retired now but was from Harvard but 107 00:11:53.200 --> 00:11:58.600 probably the most famous economic historian in the United States, William 108 00:11:58.600 --> 00:12:02.960 McNeil again retired from the University of Chicago, Eric Veda from Bonn 109 00:12:02.960 --> 00:12:08.040 University and many many others. So that what I'm giving you here is a kind of 110 00:12:08.040 --> 00:12:28.040 a summary and consensus view, not that these writers agree on every detail, not that they agree on every important point even, but this is basically their theory, this European miracle theory. 111 00:12:28.040 --> 00:12:31.640 The miracle in question consists of a simple but momentous fact. 112 00:12:31.640 --> 00:12:36.880 It was in Europe and outgrowths of Europe, above all America, that human beings for the 113 00:12:36.880 --> 00:12:43.680 first time achieved per capita economic growth over a sustained period of time. 114 00:12:43.680 --> 00:12:51.680 And in this way, the man and woman, of course, eluded the Malthusian trap of a little bit 115 00:12:51.680 --> 00:12:56.000 of economic growth, but then swallowed up by population increase so that the people 116 00:12:56.000 --> 00:13:11.000 People are just as miserable as they were before the masses of people, and for the first time, hundreds of millions survived and could grow affluent into the sort of life that people lead in Western societies to get today. 117 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:15.000 So the question is, why Europe? 118 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:29.000 And the working out of the theory and the use of economic theory to explain these changes is really what is novel about it in the past few decades. 119 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:35.000 Because the theory itself goes back a long time and you can find earlier writers. 120 00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:41.000 For instance, in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 121 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:47.000 talked about the constraints of the modern tyrant, 122 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:51.000 modern tyrant versus the Roman emperors he was talking about, 123 00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:54.000 and among them the circumstance that, as he put it, 124 00:13:54.000 --> 00:14:00.000 the object of his displeasure escaping, in modern times, in Europe, 125 00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:04.000 the object of his displeasure escaping from the narrow limits of his dominions 126 00:14:04.000 --> 00:14:08.000 would easily obtain in a happier climate a secure refuge, 127 00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:14.000 A new fortune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint, and perhaps the means of revenge. 128 00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:20.000 He said, that's the way it is nowadays, but it couldn't be that way in Rome because he said, 129 00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:24.000 but the empire of the Romans filled the world. 130 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:28.000 So, we already have the suggestion of what's involved. 131 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:46.000 The secret of European economic growth and European flourishing in generally was European decentralization, was the decentralized nature of European civilization. 132 00:14:46.000 --> 00:15:04.000 David Landis, whom I mentioned, and you know, he's not any libertarian, he's probably one of those Democrats that Robert Higgs was talking about, but this is his approach to economic history. 133 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:14.000 He wrote a big book years ago called Prometheus Unbound, and he said in this book, what distinguished Europe? 134 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:25.000 First of all, the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise, and then the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment. 135 00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:36.000 These are all quotes, as he says, the role of private enterprise in the West is perhaps unique more than any other factor it made the modern world. 136 00:15:36.000 --> 00:15:50.000 Okay, so there we have his putting his finger on what's most important, but then still the question, why did private enterprise flourish in the way that it did in Western Europe? 137 00:15:50.000 --> 00:16:01.000 Now, as he, as Landis himself says, a precondition of economic expansion was a definition of property rights and their defense against political authority. 138 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:11.000 And other writers would emphasize other aspects, but he points out the importance of regular taxation, 139 00:16:11.000 --> 00:16:20.000 regular taxation, but agreed to by assemblies representing the tax-bearing classes. 140 00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:24.000 You understand? Well, I don't know if you know, but in medieval Europe, 141 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:31.800 In Europe, there were the equivalents of the Parliament of England everywhere in Europe. 142 00:16:31.800 --> 00:16:36.000 Catalonia had its own Cortes, for instance. 143 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:42.500 Sicily, Naples, the German states, Hungary, the French estates in general, 144 00:16:42.500 --> 00:16:48.000 all of the different components of what afterwards became the Netherlands, Scandinavia and so on. 145 00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:51.000 There were these representative assemblies everywhere, 146 00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:56.080 Then they included the nobles, the clergy, the townspeople, sometimes the peasantry. 147 00:16:56.080 --> 00:16:57.840 Why were these classes included? 148 00:16:57.840 --> 00:17:00.280 They were the ones who had to agree to new taxes. 149 00:17:00.280 --> 00:17:05.600 You see, in other words, it wasn't what we have nowadays where representative assemblies 150 00:17:05.600 --> 00:17:10.080 get together and decide how the wealth of whoever happens to have any wealth is going 151 00:17:10.080 --> 00:17:14.040 to be redistributed among the masses of people. 152 00:17:14.040 --> 00:17:19.520 It was not a democratic assembly, it was a representative assembly of taxpayers. 153 00:17:19.520 --> 00:17:23.440 And it was only in Europe that you found it. 154 00:17:23.440 --> 00:17:27.000 And what does Landis say that's important? 155 00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:34.280 He says because that contrasted with the system of what he calls extortion in the great Asian 156 00:17:34.280 --> 00:17:39.080 empires and the Muslim states of the Middle East, where fines and extortions were not 157 00:17:39.080 --> 00:17:43.900 only a source of quick revenue, but a means of social control, a device for curbing the 158 00:17:43.900 --> 00:17:49.140 pretensions of the nouveau riche and foreigners and blunting their challenge to the established 159 00:17:49.140 --> 00:18:19.140 Power Structure, okay? In other words, regularity of taxation overseen by the people who have to pay the taxes, that contrasts with a system of arbitrary taxation, whenever you see anybody, a mafia type situation, whenever you see anybody who has any kind of wealth, you pounce on him and take as much as you can from him, which was the tradition in these great empires of the East and in Islam for a large part of the time. Now, different writers I 160 00:18:19.140 --> 00:18:49.140 In other words, there were nobles, there were nobles in almost every advanced society, but the European nobles had a status of their own, their position was based on a contract between them and the ruler where they had certain rights and were not simply pawns of the ruler, as against Russia, for instance, where the nobility, the old nobility was exterminated and the new nobility, in my opinion, was exterminated. 161 00:18:49.140 --> 00:18:52.820 in the modern times consisted of state appointees. 162 00:18:52.820 --> 00:18:56.420 There was simple creatures of the central government. 163 00:18:56.420 --> 00:19:01.380 So that this relatively independent feudal caste was important. 164 00:19:01.380 --> 00:19:04.020 As you can see, it's something like the Magna Carta, 165 00:19:04.020 --> 00:19:06.220 where the barons of England are the ones, 166 00:19:06.220 --> 00:19:07.900 I mean, they have the power. 167 00:19:07.900 --> 00:19:09.140 Who else has the power? 168 00:19:09.140 --> 00:19:10.820 And they're the ones who force limitations 169 00:19:10.820 --> 00:19:15.740 on the royal authority. 170 00:19:15.740 --> 00:19:23.500 And these documents like the Magna Carta are also widespread throughout Europe by the end 171 00:19:23.500 --> 00:19:24.500 of the Middle Ages. 172 00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:31.580 The Magna Carta is just the most famous in the Dutch lands, as was the Joyeuse Entrée 173 00:19:31.580 --> 00:19:38.100 of Brabant that was then expanded to all of the Netherlands, whereby whoever ruled the 174 00:19:38.100 --> 00:19:41.900 Dukes of Burgundy, for instance, had to promise certain things. 175 00:19:41.900 --> 00:19:47.580 One thing, for instance, not to introduce any taxes without the okay of the representatives 176 00:19:47.580 --> 00:19:48.780 of the people. 177 00:19:48.780 --> 00:19:55.980 They couldn't simply impose arbitrary taxes. 178 00:19:55.980 --> 00:20:03.460 And another important thing, and Deepak Lal, is a well-known economist at UCLA, has also 179 00:20:03.460 --> 00:20:06.220 written on this subject recently. 180 00:20:06.220 --> 00:20:10.180 And he comes from a kind of Hindu background, so he's very interested in this, the differences 181 00:20:10.180 --> 00:20:15.580 between India, for instance, and the West, and he says, as others have said, but he really 182 00:20:15.580 --> 00:20:20.780 emphasizes it, the most important difference was that the West had an independent international 183 00:20:20.780 --> 00:20:22.700 church. 184 00:20:22.700 --> 00:20:28.660 In other civilizations, the religious leaders are totally under the thumb of the secular 185 00:20:28.660 --> 00:20:32.660 leaders, if maybe sometimes the other way around, but in other words, they work hand 186 00:20:32.660 --> 00:20:37.380 in hand against the people to get as much as possible from the people. 187 00:20:37.380 --> 00:20:44.380 In Western Europe, what you had was an adversarial relationship, as I'll point out what Acton saw so very well. 188 00:20:44.380 --> 00:20:56.380 An adversarial relationship between the international church, international church, so it could call on resources outside of the national boundary, the Catholic Church. 189 00:20:56.380 --> 00:21:11.380 And there, you had a struggle that lasted for a long time, for centuries, between the power of the secular rulers, especially the Holy Roman Emperors, the German Emperors, on the one hand, and the Church on the other. 190 00:21:11.380 --> 00:21:25.380 And in the course of this struggle, in other words, unlike other places, ancient Egypt, ancient Persia, China, where the highest priest was the emperor, or the Brahmins in India, 191 00:21:25.380 --> 00:21:36.380 unlike those civilizations, you had an intense conflict between the clergy and the church on the one hand, and the political leaders on the other. 192 00:21:36.380 --> 00:21:41.580 and in the course of this the freedoms of the of the people could flourish and 193 00:21:41.580 --> 00:21:48.280 among other things for instance the city-states of northern Italy and central 194 00:21:48.280 --> 00:21:55.540 Italy became independent of the German Emperor. This is one of the milestones of 195 00:21:55.540 --> 00:22:00.300 the history of the West which I don't know maybe it's never going to be taught 196 00:22:00.300 --> 00:22:10.300 But our next speaker, Professor Bassani, is a descendant of the people who fought the German emperors. 197 00:22:10.300 --> 00:22:13.300 And it was a question of fighting. 198 00:22:13.300 --> 00:22:20.300 Understand, it's like in Perilondra, someone was reminding me of C.S. Lewis last night, 199 00:22:20.300 --> 00:22:29.300 when Ransom, the hero, suddenly realizes when he gets his sense he's going to have to fight the diabolical forces, 200 00:22:29.300 --> 00:22:34.300 It's going to be a real fight. It's going to be a physical fight. 201 00:22:34.300 --> 00:22:40.300 And this is what happens a number of times in the history of the struggle for liberty. 202 00:22:40.300 --> 00:22:42.300 It's a physical fight. 203 00:22:42.300 --> 00:22:47.300 And it happened at the end of the 12th century that the Battle of Lignano, 204 00:22:47.300 --> 00:22:54.300 the dirty German aggressors, pardon me if I'm getting carried away a bit, 205 00:22:54.300 --> 00:23:07.300 were actually smashed by the city-states of Lombardy, led by Milan, in alliance with Venice, and in alliance with the Pope, Alexander III. 206 00:23:07.300 --> 00:23:21.300 And here, these German troops who left their forests where they were eating acorns and wearing bearskins and wanted to take over the gorgeous northern Italy. 207 00:23:21.300 --> 00:23:26.300 As a matter of fact, on Lake Como, you can see a tower. It was Barbarossa's tower. 208 00:23:26.300 --> 00:23:33.300 And the very idea that he's looking over this gorgeous lake into Lombardy and so on, 209 00:23:33.300 --> 00:23:39.300 with total greed in his heart, but defeated. Defeated in an actual battle. 210 00:23:39.300 --> 00:23:46.300 So that we have now the beginnings of the whole city-state and the chartered city, 211 00:23:46.300 --> 00:23:48.860 Chartered Towns, Culture of Europe. 212 00:23:48.860 --> 00:23:53.900 It was so important in the rise of free institutions. 213 00:23:53.900 --> 00:23:58.660 And because these new city-states, and they were then in northern France, 214 00:23:58.660 --> 00:24:03.100 of course in the lowlands, along the Rhine and in other parts of Germany, 215 00:24:03.100 --> 00:24:07.180 they became the incubators of this middle class, this bourgeoisie, 216 00:24:07.180 --> 00:24:14.980 that was the engine of economic growth and of the idea of citizenly rights. 217 00:24:14.980 --> 00:24:19.380 So Europe, and you don't have counterparts of this in other civilizations, 218 00:24:19.380 --> 00:24:23.480 or to the extent that you do in Islam, they were very quickly smothered. 219 00:24:23.480 --> 00:24:27.680 So Europe was something really quite different. 220 00:24:27.680 --> 00:24:34.680 And as I say, much of what I'm telling you is simply pretty much accepted. 221 00:24:34.680 --> 00:24:38.980 This business about the Catholic Church, for instance, Harold Berman of Harvard, 222 00:24:38.980 --> 00:24:43.180 or Brian Tierney of Cornell, great historians of law, 223 00:24:43.180 --> 00:24:46.100 This is essentially their point of view. 224 00:24:46.100 --> 00:24:47.500 This doesn't mean, by the way, 225 00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:52.700 let me hasten to reassure some of our perhaps Baptist students 226 00:24:52.700 --> 00:24:56.500 that the Catholic Church was a great champion of liberty. 227 00:24:56.500 --> 00:24:59.900 No, no, it was a question of countervailing powers. 228 00:24:59.900 --> 00:25:03.300 And from the clash of these two powerful institutions, 229 00:25:03.300 --> 00:25:05.580 then developed something which, 230 00:25:05.580 --> 00:25:07.220 if it had been left to the German emperor, 231 00:25:07.220 --> 00:25:09.380 if it had been left to the pope, 232 00:25:09.380 --> 00:25:11.180 it would have been a dictatorship. 233 00:25:11.180 --> 00:25:13.900 Well, it would have been something like the Roman Empire. 234 00:25:13.900 --> 00:25:23.700 But the fact that they collided is what provided the opportunity for the growth of liberty. 235 00:25:23.700 --> 00:25:30.860 Now, I say liberty, and we should not think of this in solely some abstract sense. 236 00:25:30.860 --> 00:25:37.220 The main liberty that they were concerned about was the freedom from arbitrary taxation. 237 00:25:37.220 --> 00:25:41.720 Even if you're talking about relatively wealthy merchants after a while, 238 00:25:41.720 --> 00:25:46.220 still, most people were living on the margin. 239 00:25:46.220 --> 00:25:53.020 That's why the Republicans and the tax collectors in the New Testament are such hated creatures. 240 00:25:53.020 --> 00:25:58.620 Because they're taking food out of the mouth of the children, of your children. 241 00:25:58.620 --> 00:26:01.320 Nobody is really rich enough to afford this. 242 00:26:01.320 --> 00:26:07.880 By the way, that's when the government was collecting something like 10 or 15 percent of income. 243 00:26:07.880 --> 00:26:13.680 Not the 50 percent that they could collect in Germany and the Netherlands today. 244 00:26:13.680 --> 00:26:20.840 So when we talk about the freedoms that people fought for, it was primarily their economic freedoms. 245 00:26:20.840 --> 00:26:25.960 And as a guarantee of their economic freedoms, also their political freedoms. 246 00:26:25.960 --> 00:26:30.880 To be able to choose their own rulers and so on, and to participate in these assemblies. 247 00:26:30.880 --> 00:26:37.880 But why? That was a means of keeping down the predatory state. 248 00:26:40.880 --> 00:26:46.880 In medieval society, you know, it has a very bad reputation. 249 00:26:50.880 --> 00:26:57.880 But amongst people who know anything of the literature, this idea that it was the Dark Ages, 250 00:26:57.880 --> 00:27:26.880 As Leonard Petkoff puts in his book on, I think in that book or whatever, it was a time of, when all of Europe was filled with crosses and gallows, which, something wrong with the meter there I think, I mean such a, such a thuddy, dull, stupid, besides being stupid, statement. 251 00:27:26.880 --> 00:27:37.880 Of course, those people, the Randians of all people should understand, we're talking about the rebirth of Aristotelianism. 252 00:27:37.880 --> 00:27:51.880 And we're talking about the church that cultivated and acted as a nursery for the new rationalism and scholasticism, and invented universities. 253 00:27:51.880 --> 00:27:57.880 And, again, C.S. Lewis comes to mind. People talk about the Dark Ages. 254 00:27:57.880 --> 00:28:02.880 Well, have you ever seen the sun come through a stained glass window of a cathedral? 255 00:28:02.880 --> 00:28:07.880 Middle Ages was really quite different from what many people say. 256 00:28:07.880 --> 00:28:15.880 And I wanted to quote to you Norman Cantor, who was a great American medievalist. 257 00:28:15.880 --> 00:28:19.880 And he has his book, The Making of the Middle Ages, came out a few years ago, 258 00:28:19.880 --> 00:28:37.880 In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the universal level of the state. 259 00:28:37.880 --> 00:28:46.880 The family, the arts, learning and science, business enterprise and technological process, these are all below the state level. 260 00:28:46.880 --> 00:28:53.080 These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote 261 00:28:53.080 --> 00:28:54.080 and disengaged. 262 00:28:54.080 --> 00:29:01.080 It is the rule of law that screens out the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption 263 00:29:01.080 --> 00:29:06.060 and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. 264 00:29:06.060 --> 00:29:11.480 It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their 265 00:29:11.480 --> 00:29:19.720 Destinies with Little or No Involvement of the State Most of the Time. 266 00:29:19.720 --> 00:29:23.720 Now he talks about the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption. 267 00:29:23.720 --> 00:29:29.560 I should have made it clear, I'm sorry, I should have thought it when I was outlining 268 00:29:29.560 --> 00:29:37.620 this, the basic mechanics of this theory of the growth of the West and economic development. 269 00:29:37.620 --> 00:29:45.540 The premise there is that the state is a predatory being, that whoever is in control of political 270 00:29:45.540 --> 00:29:50.860 power takes as much as they can, you understand? 271 00:29:50.860 --> 00:29:53.400 There has to be something that stops them. 272 00:29:53.400 --> 00:29:58.380 What stopped them in the case of Europe was Europe's decentralization that was the result 273 00:29:58.380 --> 00:30:04.380 also of this complex institutional system, and the decentralization meant that if your 274 00:30:04.380 --> 00:30:10.380 If your prince started to extort too much money, that's what he would want to do if he could get away with it. 275 00:30:10.380 --> 00:30:18.380 That's what they're doing in Ottoman countries at this time, whatever they can get away with. 276 00:30:18.380 --> 00:30:27.380 But if he tries to extort too much money, or if he puts into onerous regulations, you're part of Christendom, you're part of Christian Europe. 277 00:30:27.380 --> 00:30:43.380 It's not what you prefer, but if necessary, you pick up and you take whatever assets you can, mainly your human capital of entrepreneurship and business savvy, or professional skills of some kind, and you go somewhere else. 278 00:30:43.380 --> 00:30:54.380 If the dukes of Burgundy mistreat you in Holland, then you go across the North Sea, to England, or you go down the Rhine, to Cologne. 279 00:30:54.380 --> 00:31:06.380 It was that decentralization, you see. The fact that Europe was decentralized and was open to the possibility of exit that kept the princes in line. 280 00:31:06.380 --> 00:31:15.380 Sometimes it didn't, like with the Habsburg kings of Spain who tried to get everything they could, but they paid for it. They paid for it with Spain's decline. 281 00:31:15.380 --> 00:31:27.380 Now, one last thing that should be mentioned here, which is not taken into account in these theories so much, but I find quite interesting and quite suggestive. 282 00:31:27.380 --> 00:31:49.380 And that is that in Western civilization, for the most part, again in contrast with other civilizations that we know about, there is a social taboo on the expression of envy that very often you don't find elsewhere. 283 00:31:49.380 --> 00:32:19.380 and elsewhere. Envy. Now, there's a great conservative libertarian free market sociologist named Helmut Schirk who wrote a book called Envy, which you can get from Liberty Press, and maybe you know about Liberty Press books, okay, they're very well done, they're very cheap, and his book is called Envy, 284 00:32:19.380 --> 00:32:31.380 And what Scherck says is this, you study the anthropological literature, the field studies, there's envy all over, everywhere in the world is envy. 285 00:32:31.380 --> 00:32:39.380 It's a basic human feeling. Why should he have something and I don't have something? 286 00:32:39.380 --> 00:32:47.380 There are tribes, for instance, I'll take an extreme example, who whenever it comes time to eat, comes time to eat, 287 00:32:47.380 --> 00:32:53.380 Everybody takes his portion and goes into the bush and eats it by himself. 288 00:32:53.380 --> 00:32:58.380 So that nobody in the tribe should put evil spirits on it, 289 00:32:58.380 --> 00:33:04.380 out of envy of the fact that they have maybe a little more than you have. 290 00:33:04.380 --> 00:33:08.380 I would not like to see this happen in our cafeteria. 291 00:33:08.380 --> 00:33:14.380 I mean, I think that would be really a ridiculous sort of, even as an experiment. 292 00:33:14.380 --> 00:33:26.780 But one form of envy is very well known and that's the evil eye, which you find throughout 293 00:33:26.780 --> 00:33:32.580 the Mediterranean region, which you find in the Americas, which you find in Asia. 294 00:33:32.580 --> 00:33:33.580 What is the evil eye? 295 00:33:33.580 --> 00:33:41.460 The evil eye is possessed by someone who has the power to spoil things for you, okay, as 296 00:33:41.460 --> 00:33:43.740 a malicious person. 297 00:33:43.740 --> 00:33:47.020 Why would anyone want to spoil things? 298 00:33:47.020 --> 00:33:52.060 Out of envy, because you have it and they don't. 299 00:33:52.060 --> 00:33:56.940 Make your kids sick because they don't have any kids at all, or your cow not giving any 300 00:33:56.940 --> 00:34:00.260 milk. 301 00:34:00.260 --> 00:34:06.580 And this occurs sometimes in civilizations that in some respects are close to Europe, 302 00:34:06.580 --> 00:34:08.900 but they're not Europe. 303 00:34:08.900 --> 00:34:13.480 I think the classic example must be Russia. 304 00:34:13.480 --> 00:34:28.480 When I was in Russia some years ago, I asked people, I asked some Russian students, bright young students, whether this anecdote I'd heard would seem to be reflective of Russia. 305 00:34:28.480 --> 00:34:38.480 The anecdote is this. You have an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian, and they're asked, what would your wish be? 306 00:34:38.480 --> 00:34:45.600 And the Englishman says, well, you know, knighthood from the Queen, Buckingham Palace, all that 307 00:34:45.600 --> 00:34:53.960 sort of thing, and the Frenchman says, an apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis and a million 308 00:34:53.960 --> 00:35:04.680 francs a year, and the Russian says, I want my neighbor's cow to die. 309 00:35:04.680 --> 00:35:27.680 Now, that's not the whole story of Russia, but unfortunately, I think that it's too much of the story of Russia because it explains the hatred of the net men during the short period of semi-capitalism in the 1920s when some people got rich again, and it explains how the Bolsheviks were able to rile up the masses. 310 00:35:27.680 --> 00:35:34.480 We don't understand really the horror or really disgustingness of what was going on there. 311 00:35:34.480 --> 00:35:42.320 I mean, imagine someone like Lenin or Trotsky saying, you know, there's the rich man, he has what you have, what you don't have. 312 00:35:42.320 --> 00:35:44.320 Why don't you go and take it? 313 00:35:44.320 --> 00:35:51.880 It's like these Trotskyist teachers in the public schools in Britain who take their students to housing projects 314 00:35:51.880 --> 00:35:55.640 where a nice condo is for the rich are going to be built and explain to the kids 315 00:35:55.640 --> 00:35:59.800 why their parents aren't going to be living in those in those condos their 316 00:35:59.800 --> 00:36:03.280 parents have to live in these small council houses where the rich have these 317 00:36:03.280 --> 00:36:12.160 and and the point is deliberately exciting envy on the part of people and 318 00:36:12.160 --> 00:36:17.880 that's one thing in the West where there's been a relative taboo you know 319 00:36:17.880 --> 00:36:31.880 To openly envy somebody else's good fortune, in the sense that you wish that they didn't have it, is considered almost a sin. 320 00:36:31.880 --> 00:36:35.880 And I would think in some varieties of Christianity, it is a sin. 321 00:36:35.880 --> 00:36:43.880 Well, what I'm saying is that this basic cultural fact about the West also played some kind of role. 322 00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:56.880 Shirk says, it was Christianity in this sense, that unlike the ancient religions, Christianity did not posit a deity who would mock you if you failed. 323 00:36:56.880 --> 00:37:12.880 You see, the deities of ancient Greece and Rome were kind of amoral in that sense, but the Christian God was all on your side, just as long as you stayed within the rules. 324 00:37:12.880 --> 00:37:14.880 I'm happy that you would succeed. 325 00:37:14.880 --> 00:37:19.880 So, what I'm getting at is that this is a real complicated question, obviously. 326 00:37:19.880 --> 00:37:22.880 It deals with the whole fabric of Western history. 327 00:37:22.880 --> 00:37:30.880 But I think, interesting, and I think that what these new institutional historians, as they're called, have come up with, 328 00:37:30.880 --> 00:37:35.880 is the story, is the key to the whole story. 329 00:37:35.880 --> 00:37:57.880 Now, one thing that I find quite interesting is that this new institutional history, or this European miracle theory, works in very well with the work of one of my favorite writers, who thankfully is still alive, and that's Peter Bauer. 330 00:37:57.880 --> 00:38:25.880 Peter Thomas Bauer, Lord Bauer as Margaret Thatcher made him, you know Bauer means peasant in German so it's a little ironic, one of the last along with Thomas Saz and just few left, one of the last of the great community of Budapest Jews, 331 00:38:25.880 --> 00:38:32.880 You know, besides being evil, the Nazis were also very stupid, it seems to me. 332 00:38:32.880 --> 00:38:37.880 I mean, if you want to make a master race, you don't start out by trying to exterminate the Budapest Jews. 333 00:38:37.880 --> 00:38:42.880 But now, maybe you're not familiar with Bauer's name. 334 00:38:42.880 --> 00:38:48.880 Bauer is the chief writer in the whole field of economic development, 335 00:38:48.880 --> 00:38:54.880 now going on for 40 plus years, who has a free market point of view. 336 00:38:54.880 --> 00:38:59.880 And he has been pushing this point of view for 40 odd years 337 00:38:59.880 --> 00:39:06.880 against the whole tide of the development school of economics 338 00:39:06.880 --> 00:39:12.880 which for generations was ruled by people who took the Soviet model to be 339 00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:16.880 just about the best model for underdeveloped countries 340 00:39:16.880 --> 00:39:19.880 Now, Bauer is interesting from a number of points of view 341 00:39:19.880 --> 00:39:21.880 For one thing, he doesn't call himself an Austrian 342 00:39:21.880 --> 00:39:30.880 in the South and Austrian, but his methodology is very similar in many ways to the Austrian methodology. 343 00:39:30.880 --> 00:39:36.880 For one thing, he says, the important factors about development cannot be put into mathematical terms. 344 00:39:36.880 --> 00:39:43.880 They have to do with habits, attitudes, cultural traditions, the sort of things that, 345 00:39:43.880 --> 00:39:49.880 there's no point in trying to aggregate them, put them into numerical form and aggregate them. 346 00:39:49.880 --> 00:39:54.440 He says, what happens is now for all these decades, he's a development economist, 347 00:39:54.440 --> 00:39:58.520 have been dealing with the kind of models that you can do mathematics with. 348 00:39:58.520 --> 00:40:09.880 I mean, talk about, you know, the old joke of some drunk is looking for his car keys under a lamp post, 349 00:40:09.880 --> 00:40:14.360 and the cop says, what are you doing? Looking for my lamp keys, for my car keys. 350 00:40:14.360 --> 00:40:19.840 Where's your car? My car is down there. So why are you looking over here? Because the light is over here. 351 00:40:19.840 --> 00:40:26.840 So these mathematical economists, you know, regardless of what the reality of the field is, 352 00:40:26.840 --> 00:40:30.840 they use the techniques that they're familiar with and that they're comfortable with, 353 00:40:30.840 --> 00:40:33.840 and that they really don't get them very far. 354 00:40:33.840 --> 00:40:42.840 And Bauer, just as his friend Thomas Saz in psychiatry was subjected to real abuse 355 00:40:42.840 --> 00:40:48.840 as a right-wing nut and so on for decades, 356 00:40:48.840 --> 00:40:57.840 Bauer also was subjected by this whole world industry of economic development. 357 00:40:57.840 --> 00:41:07.840 But he says, as Bauer wants to say, the European economic growth came out of the whole European tradition. 358 00:41:07.840 --> 00:41:13.840 It came out of the institutions that the Europeans had developed over centuries, 359 00:41:13.840 --> 00:41:17.840 above all the rule of law and respect for private property. 360 00:41:17.840 --> 00:41:29.040 And now, the interesting thing is that, although Bauer continues to be attacked by people like Walt Whitman Rostow, 361 00:41:29.040 --> 00:41:41.140 I don't know if you know the name at one time, he was one of the Kennedy group, you know, the brightest and the best, 362 00:41:41.140 --> 00:41:45.840 famous in Kennedy days, but famous also as an economic historian. 363 00:41:45.840 --> 00:41:57.840 A few years ago, 10 years ago now, Rostow wrote a huge book on economic development, on the history of theories of economic development. 364 00:41:57.840 --> 00:42:07.840 And it's amazing that in this whole book, none of the names that I gave you at the beginning of this lecture is even mentioned. 365 00:42:07.840 --> 00:42:30.840 He hasn't mentioned any of these people, not Douglas North, the Nobel Prize winner at that time, already famous for his own analysis of economic growth, not E.L. Jones, not Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford, none of these people exist in these 200 pages of notes of Rostow's. 366 00:42:30.840 --> 00:42:46.540 Instead, he attacks Bauer by saying that Bauer does not realize that the state has to play the indispensable role in any economic development. 367 00:42:46.540 --> 00:43:00.740 However, Bauer has attacked this point of view as a spurious consensus, pointing to the actual history of economic growth that I've given you some idea of today. 368 00:43:00.740 --> 00:43:30.740 called it the spurious consensus and thankfully, the fact is that now he's winning and according to some observers has actually won the debate both theoretically and also empirically in the failure of regimes that base themselves on central economic planning and on the models of these economists is obvious the need for the kind of free market arrangements that Bowers always talked about 369 00:43:30.740 --> 00:43:40.060 is also obvious and most obvious most remarkable in this whole field now going 370 00:43:40.060 --> 00:43:44.940 back to what the economic historians I was talking about maintain most important 371 00:43:44.940 --> 00:43:50.900 is that finally people in this field are beginning to understand the real nature 372 00:43:50.900 --> 00:44:16.900 In the heyday of development economics, they actually believed that the rulers of the state could be conceived of, and could be best conceived of, as kind of platonic guardians. 373 00:44:16.900 --> 00:44:23.900 That is, they were interested in the welfare and the good of their own societies. 374 00:44:23.900 --> 00:44:34.900 So all that was necessary was for these mathematical economists to make up their models of central planning, of export controls, 375 00:44:34.900 --> 00:44:45.900 of emphasis on heavy industry, steel industry and Zambia, and so on, and tell the Platonic guardians about it. 376 00:44:45.900 --> 00:44:51.800 and then they would put into operation what they saw to be good for the people. 377 00:44:51.800 --> 00:44:57.200 The view that the state was predatory, that is fundamental to the actual historians 378 00:44:57.200 --> 00:45:02.500 who have examined economic growth in the West, was the furthest thing from their mind. 379 00:45:02.500 --> 00:45:11.800 And here, I have to tell you that we, see, Bauer is always, I mean, he's really tough, 380 00:45:11.800 --> 00:45:41.800 And I think I would have to say that here the disregard for reality in their analysis and their interpretation of what the state was like in third world countries passes over into the truly surreal, because what it means, as difficult it is to understand the reality, as difficult it is to understand the reality, as difficult it is to understand the reality, as difficult it is to understand the reality. 381 00:45:41.800 --> 00:45:48.560 to grasp, is that for decades these practitioners of development economics, and they were the leading 382 00:45:49.720 --> 00:45:54.240 policy economists and government advisors in every Western country. 383 00:45:56.200 --> 00:46:02.200 For decades, they acted as if the Marcosas, the Samosas, the Duvaliers, 384 00:46:02.600 --> 00:46:11.040 the Mobudos, the Bucases, the Indonesian generals, the Nigerian military chiefs, the bosses of the Mexican PRI, 385 00:46:11.800 --> 00:46:24.800 The legions of Brazilian state capitalists, the many millions of low and top-level bureaucrats living off the confiscated assets of native peasants and shopkeepers and befuddled Western taxpayers, 386 00:46:24.800 --> 00:46:37.800 that this whole plundering political class spanning the globe and performing corruption on the greatest scale the world has ever known, that it did not exist. 387 00:46:37.800 --> 00:46:43.800 It did not exist, because the people in charge of the government were platonic guardians. 388 00:46:43.800 --> 00:46:52.800 What I've just outlined is the sort of stuff you could read in any newspaper, and what was going on behind the scenes. 389 00:46:52.800 --> 00:47:00.800 You know, I said the greatest scale the world has ever known, and yeah, obviously, we're talking about, by this time, certainly hundreds of billions of dollars. 390 00:47:00.800 --> 00:47:14.800 And, well, since Harry S. Truman announced 0.4 in his 1948 message to Congress, the beginning of foreign aid, 391 00:47:14.800 --> 00:47:21.800 since then, probably, in today's dollars, a few trillion, a number of trillion of dollars. 392 00:47:21.800 --> 00:47:27.800 And this is, the foreign aid that the German banks gave to Russia was $50 billion. 393 00:47:27.800 --> 00:47:37.800 that has totally disappeared to post-communist Russia, this foreign aid that was supposed to trigger some kind of economic miracle there. 394 00:47:37.800 --> 00:47:44.800 So we're talking about this enormous system of corruption, mind-boggling system of corruption. 395 00:47:44.800 --> 00:47:55.800 And these economists, right, the empirical economists, we Austrians are so a priori in our own little ivory tower world and so on, 396 00:47:55.800 --> 00:48:00.300 The so-called empirical economist simply didn't recognize that it existed. 397 00:48:00.300 --> 00:48:06.800 Well, that's, as far as I'm concerned, one of the good things that's happened, that is the vindication of P.T. Bauer. 398 00:48:06.800 --> 00:48:18.800 I know him. He's a very elderly man now, very frail, but he's lucky to have seen himself vindicated. 399 00:48:18.800 --> 00:48:23.800 It would have been nice if Mises had lived to see his arguments on economic calculation, 400 00:48:23.800 --> 00:48:29.800 by the collapse of the Soviet Union and all his enemies who said it was going to go on forever 401 00:48:29.800 --> 00:48:32.800 and it was a radiant future of all mankind and so on. 402 00:48:32.800 --> 00:48:36.800 I've been discomforted, but that never happened. 403 00:48:36.800 --> 00:48:39.800 Well, there are a number of things I've brought up, 404 00:48:39.800 --> 00:48:44.800 and we have a little time for any questions or comments you might have. 405 00:48:44.800 --> 00:48:49.800 Keep in mind also discussion groups tonight. 406 00:48:49.800 --> 00:48:51.800 Floor is open for comments and questions. 407 00:48:51.800 --> 00:49:04.800 But isn't the politics of envy now on the assumption? 408 00:49:04.800 --> 00:49:07.800 Oh, I'm from Florida. 409 00:49:21.800 --> 00:49:31.400 There's something has happened in it and now it's much more acceptable somehow to call on class envy. 410 00:49:31.400 --> 00:49:40.080 For example, this weekend in Miami, Democrats had their concrete and the entire topic was 411 00:49:40.080 --> 00:49:50.120 how do we get back at these evil Bush brothers and furthermore, they've been denying so many good things before folks. 412 00:49:50.120 --> 00:49:52.120 The politics of M.V. is coming up. 413 00:49:52.120 --> 00:49:56.120 Yeah, and the tax cuts for the rich. 414 00:49:56.120 --> 00:50:03.120 I mean, you don't have to be a tax accountant to know that it's the so-called rich, 415 00:50:03.120 --> 00:50:08.120 the top 10% or something, that pay most of the income taxes. 416 00:50:08.120 --> 00:50:12.120 And something is very funny, and of course the Republicans give in on this, 417 00:50:12.120 --> 00:50:18.520 on this as Professor Higgs pointed out we're not talking about some great superiority on their part 418 00:50:20.520 --> 00:50:27.800 and fewer and fewer people are now now have to pay income taxes lower level income earners are 419 00:50:27.800 --> 00:50:33.640 taken off the tax rolls completely and that's supposed to be a great advantage but then we're 420 00:50:33.640 --> 00:50:42.040 coming rapidly to the kind of reductio ad absurdum of democracy which is that the massive voters 421 00:50:42.120 --> 00:51:12.120 The top 25% pay virtually everything, and it's the mass of a non-taxed people then who decide on the taxes of the others, which is the opposite of what they had in the Middle Ages and which is the opposite of how representative institutions started and the opposite of the reason for being of representative institutions, to keep themselves from being built on the basis of what they had in the Middle Ages. 422 00:51:12.120 --> 00:51:18.600 built and plundered by whoever happens to be in control of the arms of the guns so that 423 00:51:18.600 --> 00:51:24.200 the your point about the increase in the in the politics of envy I think is very well taken yes 424 00:51:24.200 --> 00:51:32.360 there's also in welfare economics you know it's called no envy equilibrium so distribution is said to be just 425 00:51:32.360 --> 00:51:55.360 In other words, envy is taken as a given, as a totally acceptable, and worked into the theory. 426 00:51:55.360 --> 00:52:00.360 And we want to minimize envy. But of course envy can never be gotten rid of, 427 00:52:00.360 --> 00:52:30.360 and Riddle, even if theoretically you could have some kind of egalitarian society, which again is a pipe dream, it's talking about un-empirical, every communist regime in the world had a nomenclatura, that is the class of pigs in animal form and even before they could institute a full communist society, Danny, what was his name, Danny 428 00:52:30.360 --> 00:52:54.860 in Nicaragua, the head of the Contras, Ortega, yeah, sorry, when he came to New York, and there the New York Times reporter showed a little bit of initiative, 429 00:52:54.860 --> 00:53:01.660 Followed him around. He came to New York for the U.N. Followed him around, and I don't know if this was whatever, 15 years ago or something. 430 00:53:01.660 --> 00:53:09.260 He was used to wear these big glasses, and of course he had to stop at Nathan's on Fifth Avenue for new frames for his glasses. 431 00:53:09.260 --> 00:53:15.660 Well, Nathan's on Fifth Avenue, even in those days, charged $600 for frames for your glasses. 432 00:53:15.660 --> 00:53:22.660 So this was a little mistake on his part. I mean, this was the great representative of the oppressed Nicaraguan peasants. 433 00:53:22.660 --> 00:53:31.060 And even before they got into power, acting the way Castro and the other guys who have Rolexes in Havana act. 434 00:53:31.060 --> 00:53:36.260 So the point is, first of all, you're not going to have an egalitarian society. 435 00:53:36.260 --> 00:53:43.060 But even if you could, economic inequality, even by some, is the least of it. 436 00:53:43.060 --> 00:53:50.060 You're always going to have envy on the basis of some kind of advantage one person has over another. 437 00:53:52.660 --> 00:53:56.660 You know, I don't know if... Well, for today, one thing that just comes to mind. 438 00:53:56.660 --> 00:54:04.660 The only time I ever flew first class was when I was bumped up because there were too many people in economy. 439 00:54:04.660 --> 00:54:08.660 So there was a first class seat available. This was transatlantic. 440 00:54:08.660 --> 00:54:16.660 And, of course, everybody knew that you'd get somewhat superior food in first class. 441 00:54:16.660 --> 00:54:20.660 And the other passengers were bitter about the fact that I was... 442 00:54:20.660 --> 00:54:26.060 You know, first of all, anything you make at home is going to be better than anything they serve on an airplane, right? 443 00:54:26.060 --> 00:54:35.060 I mean, the fact that I was going to get marginally superior food, and they were gnashing their teeth over this. 444 00:54:35.060 --> 00:54:41.360 And these were Americans. I mean, I can imagine if they were Russians or Syrians or something. 445 00:54:41.360 --> 00:54:44.360 I checked. We don't have any Syrian students here. Yes? 446 00:54:44.360 --> 00:54:50.360 I sometimes hear that there's a distinction made between maybe the years like 500 to 1,000 447 00:54:50.360 --> 00:54:55.860 being sort of more referred to as the Dark Ages and then 1,000, so you're... 448 00:54:55.860 --> 00:54:58.360 Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, there's no... Yeah, yeah, but... 449 00:54:58.360 --> 00:55:00.360 Commerce and the city stage. Right, right. 450 00:55:00.360 --> 00:55:04.360 You could talk about the Dark Ages in the sense that the civilization declined, 451 00:55:04.360 --> 00:55:07.360 literacy declined, the cities declined, and there was a reason for that. 452 00:55:07.360 --> 00:55:13.360 There were the barbarian invasions, the barbarian invasions and then the Moorish invasions 453 00:55:13.360 --> 00:55:43.360 and then the Hungarians before the Germans finally slapped them around and taught them a little good manners were going all over the, you know, I mean, they were acting in an instinctive Hungarian way, going all over the place, driving everybody crazy, but it happened, it happened that after about the, and the Vikings, same sort of thing, it happened that around the year 1000, for instance, finally the Scandinavian peoples, the Magyars themselves became Christianized, 454 00:55:43.360 --> 00:55:54.400 The Moorish attacks were thwarted and Europe started to settle down again and the cities started coming back. 455 00:55:54.400 --> 00:56:02.400 Cities had never disappeared in Italy. It was already back then known as a country of a thousand towns. 456 00:56:02.400 --> 00:56:09.400 But in other parts of Europe they had and the arable land had declined. 457 00:56:09.400 --> 00:56:16.600 But the reason they were dark ages was because of the political situation, the invasions and so on. 458 00:56:16.600 --> 00:56:21.400 And once those stopped, things started to pick up. 459 00:56:21.400 --> 00:56:28.000 But I think that a lot of people consider the whole period, up until the Renaissance, the dark ages. 460 00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:36.000 That is the Randian view, there was Aristotle, and then the dark ages, and then the Renaissance, and then the railroads. 461 00:56:36.000 --> 00:56:46.000 Okay, other comments? Any comments anybody has? Yes, please. 462 00:57:06.000 --> 00:57:35.500 Well, what you say is very important, and very much to the point, and I would add that it has to, if you want to think in those terms of an indispensable moral foundation, 463 00:57:35.500 --> 00:57:46.000 that then would express itself in the institutions, it can't be just a pro forma, a nominal agreement to Christianity, let's say. 464 00:57:46.000 --> 00:57:53.000 Because in South Africa, as far as I know, most of the population, black as well as the white population, is Christian. 465 00:57:53.000 --> 00:58:02.500 That doesn't prevent the terrible rampages that go on and the breakdown of law and order which is now taking place in South Africa. 466 00:58:02.500 --> 00:58:08.500 So it can't be just nominal Christianity, it has to be somehow ingrained. 467 00:58:08.500 --> 00:58:11.500 How you do that, I don't know. 468 00:58:11.500 --> 00:58:17.500 I would point out though that, I don't know if you were alluding to this famous theory of Max Weber 469 00:58:17.500 --> 00:58:22.500 that capitalism was an outgrowth of Protestant, mainly Calvinist Christianity, 470 00:58:22.500 --> 00:58:29.500 but there's really nothing to it, because as I say, before the Reformation came along, 471 00:58:29.500 --> 00:58:35.180 Long, already you had capitalist institutions and you had the respect for private property 472 00:58:35.180 --> 00:58:37.900 throughout Europe. 473 00:58:37.900 --> 00:58:42.620 Not always adhered to, but at least that was the ideal, and that was what was taught in 474 00:58:42.620 --> 00:58:48.400 the schools, in the law schools, in the universities, the rule of law, and that the prince was not 475 00:58:48.400 --> 00:58:49.640 above the law. 476 00:58:49.640 --> 00:58:52.140 This was before the Reformation. 477 00:58:52.140 --> 00:58:59.000 The Italian city-states, for instance, were of course all Catholic and remained Catholic, 478 00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:03.720 And that's where you got many of the institutions. 479 00:59:03.720 --> 00:59:07.360 Mises said one of the great institutions, one of the great creations of the human mind 480 00:59:07.360 --> 00:59:09.600 is double entry bookkeeping. 481 00:59:09.600 --> 00:59:12.680 And that was Florentine, I think. 482 00:59:12.680 --> 00:59:17.120 Or maritime insurance or bankruptcy laws. 483 00:59:17.120 --> 00:59:24.760 All of these characteristics of a capitalist society developed long before the Reformation. 484 00:59:24.760 --> 00:59:25.760 Yes? 485 00:59:25.760 --> 00:59:32.760 How do you relate the regime of Byzantium to the encouragement in the discussion? 486 00:59:55.760 --> 01:00:08.760 In the West, around the middle of the 5th century, in the Byzantine Empire remained for another thousand years, another thousand years, a huge period of time. 487 01:00:08.760 --> 01:00:23.760 And there you had the continuation of the system of the last years of the Roman Empire, and that was the emperor in charge of the church. 488 01:00:23.760 --> 01:00:28.760 And unfortunately, it was that kind of system that was adopted by the Russians. 489 01:00:28.760 --> 01:00:35.760 When the time came for the conversion of Russia to Christianity, it was from Byzantium. 490 01:00:35.760 --> 01:00:38.760 And that has made a big difference, I think. 491 01:00:38.760 --> 01:00:40.760 It hasn't made all the difference. 492 01:00:40.760 --> 01:00:47.760 And this is not to say that there aren't great spiritual elements in Eastern Christianity. 493 01:00:47.760 --> 01:00:51.760 But as far as the politics goes, it was different from the West. 494 01:00:51.760 --> 01:01:13.760 In terms of the fact that you brought up Russia, it seems to make the case that there was, for a while, a flourishing military state that wanted to bring in their intelligence, and the monumental invasion was a thing that was there. After that, even the Russians were following along with Russia. 495 01:01:21.760 --> 01:01:51.760 in Russia, and some of the city-states were even associated with the Hasiatic League, but this was a brief period, and they had the, Novgorod, for instance, was famous for this, they had the kind of citizenly rights that you had in Cologne and Prague and Northern, well, they weren't totally independent, but, and there was this, that same kind of development, and then the Mongols and the Tartars came, 496 01:01:51.760 --> 01:01:57.120 destroyed all that and destroyed... but the end result of the Mongol 497 01:01:58.560 --> 01:02:05.280 dominion was the rise of Muscovy, of Moscow, for various reasons and that became the the leading 498 01:02:06.400 --> 01:02:09.920 center of Russianism and then when the Russian, when the Moscow 499 01:02:11.120 --> 01:02:17.120 Grand Dukes and then Tsars began expanding, they destroyed what civil liberties existed in the 500 01:02:17.120 --> 01:02:22.120 and the other states as they annex them, and that was a terrible story. 501 01:02:22.120 --> 01:02:27.120 Any other comments or? Yes, please. 502 01:02:38.120 --> 01:02:44.120 Oh sure, yeah. Well that's going to be, that's going to be gone into a little bit, I think, in the next session. 503 01:02:44.120 --> 01:02:58.120 But Aquinas, like the other great scholastic thinkers, laid down the principle, which was very important, which was that the prince is under the law. 504 01:02:58.120 --> 01:03:06.120 It's not the case, as it was in the late Roman Empire, that the will of the prince makes law. 505 01:03:06.120 --> 01:03:13.120 That is, the law is simply an expression of the will of the prince who's the sovereign. 506 01:03:13.120 --> 01:03:24.120 But that there is a law that transcends the will of the ruler, and the ruler who does not obey that law is not a true ruler, but a tyrant. 507 01:03:24.120 --> 01:03:39.120 And then the followers of Aquinas among the late scholastics, some of them, pushed that even further by saying that the ruler who is not a true ruler, not a true prince, but a tyrant, may be killed. 508 01:03:39.120 --> 01:03:55.120 The Glorious Revolution of 1880? In England. When they threw the king out. One of the king above all. 509 01:04:09.120 --> 01:04:14.120 The Anglican Church, and they certainly didn't believe in tyrannicide. They got rid of the king. 510 01:04:14.120 --> 01:04:24.120 Charles I, maybe you have a better case. But the people who put Charles I to death didn't make that into a system. 511 01:04:24.120 --> 01:04:28.120 I mean, into a general principles of the regicides. 512 01:04:28.120 --> 01:04:34.120 Well, but Guy, you and I are never going to agree on anything at any of these conferences. 513 01:04:34.120 --> 01:04:42.120 So why don't we just have a beer late tonight and not bother decent people with this? 514 01:04:43.120 --> 01:04:44.120 I have one more question. 515 01:04:45.120 --> 01:04:46.120 Well, very briefly then. 516 01:04:47.120 --> 01:04:57.120 The South African situation, the strength of the church was one of the reasons that the progression from the apartheid to the new happened successfully. 517 01:04:57.120 --> 01:05:10.120 The Church is a lot different from what it used to be, I would guess. 518 01:05:10.120 --> 01:05:13.120 Well, thank you, and thank you very much.