WEBVTT

NOTE Classical Liberalism and the Welfare-Warfare State

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Good afternoon and welcome to our last lecture.

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This, if you recall, is the Europe that existed in 1914.

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And then, in January of 1919, the war having been over,

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Germany having surrendered conditionally, unlike in World War II,

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the conditions pertaining to President Wilson's 14 points

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and his other speeches emphasizing self-determination of all peoples and other general provisions

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implying equal justice for victors and for the vanquished. That was the spirit that Wilson publicly

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proclaimed and it was on that basis that the Germans surrendered. And then in January of 1919,

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Between the leaders of the Entente get together in Paris.

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In 1814 and 1815, the last time there had been a general European conference to settle

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questions at the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the victorious powers,

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the coalition that had defeated Napoleon were there, but equally the French were represented

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by Talleyrand, who took part in the negotiations together with everyone else.

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The spirit in Vienna in 1814, 1815, was the rational one, which is that they're going to have to live with France on the same continent.

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They can't simply exclude France and create a dictated peace, so that the French had to be let in the negotiations.

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Negotiations, and Talleyrand, as clever as he was, was able to manipulate things to the

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interests of his own country.

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In 1919, in Paris, it was quite different.

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There were German representatives, but they were put up in a hotel and under guard and

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not permitted to take any part in the negotiations and the creation of the peace treaties.

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When the peace treaty with Germany was finally settled upon, the Germans were brought out

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to the Palace of Versailles under guard and told to sign the treaty, and that was it.

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They refused at first, but were threatened with an invasion of Germany.

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The Germans had totally disarmed by that time, had no artillery, had no guns, had no planes,

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The army was demobilized, whereas the allies still had their armies, so that the threat

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of invasion of Germany was a very real one and enough to force the German representatives

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to give in, regardless of their own personal feeling.

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In Germany, everybody, from the communists to the extreme nationalists, there weren't

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exactly any Nazis by that time, but people on the extreme nationalist side, everybody,

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The Catholics, the Socialists, the Liberals, everybody was against the Treaty of Versailles.

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Nonetheless, it was implemented.

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The history of the peace conference is of great interest, and it shows that time and

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time again Wilson, who was surprised, who was astonished, that somehow his wartime allies

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I seem to be interested in acquisition of colonies and advantages over the defeated powers rather than to welcome the new German democracy as a sister democracy and so on, he was very hurt in the middle of the conference, he got a stroke, had to go back to America and then recovered a bit and came back, but time and time again when he tried to set himself up against some position of the French or the British,

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He threatened not to go along with his baby, his dream, his vision of the League of Nations

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and that was enough to have him cave in.

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So that the peace treaty was signed with the defeated powers, one treaty in each of the great palaces in the vicinity of Paris

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and the most important one at the most important palace, the treaty with Germany at the Palace of Versailles.

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The Treaty with Germany included an Article 231, unprecedented in the history of peace treaties, whereby the Germans acknowledged, on behalf of themselves and their allies, the sole responsibility for having started the war.

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It hadn't been considered really a very gentlemanly thing to do, once you have defeated and knocked down an opponent, then to force him to grovel further and admit that he was the one that started everything.

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Now this, let's see if I still know how to use this, yep, there we go, this is the Europe we started with and this is now the new Europe.

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The most obvious thing is the creation of a series of successor states down here, successors

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in part to the old Tsarist Empire, in part to Germany in the sense that the German section

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Winston Churchill lamented the end of Austria-Hungary. He said it could have been reformed and it

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provided a home for all of the small peoples of Central Europe to live together and to

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to lend each other moral support and, if necessary, military support, belonging to the same empire.

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Instead, what you had were small peoples, the Czechs, the Slovaks, Austrians and Hungarians divided,

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and the big Poland, but still between Germany and Russia, and these small peoples in the interwar years

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and after the second world war fell victim, for the most part, to Germany at first and then to Russia.

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By themselves, in other words, when Germany and Russia were interested in absorbing them, they simply couldn't hold out.

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You can read in my essay, again, some things which particularly disturbed the Germans

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and it has to do with really many of the different parts of the Treaty of Versailles, but in regards to self-determination.

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Here, the Polish corridor did include many Germans, as did Upper Silesia over here.

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Just to do justice to the treaty, it would have been very difficult to cleanly divide off Germans from Poles there.

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Donsik, Donsik, Donsik, Donsik

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of Self-Determination for the Germans were in the Sudetenland, this area here around

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Czechoslovakia, where there were about three and a half million Germans. Out of the total

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population of this new country, Czechoslovakia, of around 12 million, there were more Germans

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than Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. The Germans in the Sudetenland did not wish to be part

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The Germans did not want to be part of Czechoslovakia, but they were denied self-determination.

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Austria was prohibited from joining with Germany, although the Austrians said, look, what are

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we now?

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We're some alpine provinces and it's a big city of Vienna, all Germans, all the non-German

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The German territories are taken away, we want to be part of the Reich, but the treaties with Austria and the Treaty of Versailles with Germany prohibited that.

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So here blatant violations of the principle of self-determination, here in the South Tyrol also, about a quarter of a million Germans put under Italian control.

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So, it seemed to virtually all Germans an act of hypocrisy.

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The Germans were divided between those who said, well, we have to live with it, we lost,

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and those who said, well, we're not going to live with it for very long, we're going to change it as soon as we can.

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So, this was, and the German colonies were divided up, very importantly, in the most important colonies,

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were the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire.

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I hear Turkey as a Turkish land comes into existence, and this map doesn't show the Arab lands of the former Ottoman Empire,

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but those are either directly or indirectly under British and French control.

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The French take over Syria, and there's a Christian minority in Syria at the time.

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In order to create a Christian state in the Middle East,

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They carve out of Syria something that had not existed before called Lebanon with a Marienite Christian majority in order to have this kind of wedge in the Muslim Arab world.

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So that Lebanon and the problems that Lebanon has experienced since then are traceable to this division.

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The British oil has already been discovered at Mosul.

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The British create something called Iraq and in order that Iraq should be less potent than it might have been otherwise, they arbitrarily create something called Kuwait out of formerly a territory that had been part of the same area as Iraq administered by the Turks and this Iraq that they create is a non-country with non-Arabs in the north, Kurds

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and the strongly divided Arab Muslims in the center and the south, Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

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Nonetheless, it's made into a country, a king is put in charge and has a very tortured history

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because how else do you keep together a non-country like this except through dictators, one way or the other,

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and sometimes dictators who act extremely brutally.

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The House of Saud is given its reward for supporting the British against the Turks in the creation of something called Saudi Arabia.

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Most ominously, the Ottoman territory of Palestine is taken over as a mandate colony by Britain.

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In the course of the war the British, in order to gain all the support they could, promised

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on the one hand that the Arab states would be free and independent, that they could raise

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up the desert Arabs against the Turks, and on the other hand promised Zionists that Palestine

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would become a homeland for Jews.

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not exclusively for Jews, because the Balfour Declaration, where this was expressed, said

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that the rights of the present inhabitants of Palestine should be respected. Nonetheless,

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Balfour was a high member of the British Foreign Office. Nonetheless, the first international

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The Balfour Declaration, while the war is going on, of the claims of the Zionists, and the creation then, or the beginning of the creation of a Zionist state in Israel, a state in Palestine.

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The state is not going to be declared until 1948, but nonetheless this gave an opening for increased Jewish immigration into this Arab country.

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A League of Nations was set up, although the United States never joined, as I mentioned before, the story that you all heard is that there was a terrible tragedy that the United States did not join the League of Nations.

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But I don't have a map of the world right here to show you the division also of the German colonies, the few German colonies, but here you can see what happened in Europe.

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How did the world look in 1919, as far as the great powers were concerned?

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Well, Russia had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, so it was at least temporarily outside of the family of nations anyway.

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And the Bolsheviks, of course, were involved in their own civil war and their own civil disturbances, so they were hardly a factor.

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Austria-Hungary didn't exist anymore.

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Germany was down and the French and others hoped it was out permanently.

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So the League of Nations then, which established the principle that aggression meant crossing borders,

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was an instrument to eternalize Anglo-French world hegemony.

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The borders were fine. The borders of the world were fine as far as the British and the French were concerned.

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This is the way it should be and this is the way it should stay.

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And the League of Nations now was this peacekeeping organization dedicated to preserving the borders

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of 1919.

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If they had gotten the United States into this, then the Americans would have been obliged

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to lend when necessary military support to the preservation of this Anglo-French world

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hegemony.

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That's the fact of the matter, as many realists in the United States and elsewhere saw it.

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Now, this is only one example of, well so much for our maps, ha, this is only one example

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of, and I've taken World War I because it's a very well known example, a lot is known

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about the war, it's very interesting on other grounds, it's very significant because of

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of its Consequences, but this is one example of the burning need for revisionism, what's

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called revisionism. I don't know how much anybody would be willing to bet me, but I'd

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be willing to bet a lot, even more than the $250 I'm getting for these ten lectures from

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the Mises Institute. I'd be willing to bet a lot that the President of the United States

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had never heard the word revisionism before he recently gave a speech saying that people who deny the administration's position on why we got into war in Iraq and so on are guilty of revisionism.

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I think that sounds more like Pearl or Wolfowitz or maybe even Cheney.

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But revisionism, as it pertains to historical interpretation, is an absolute necessity.

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What's the alternative to revisionism?

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The alternative to revisionism is to simply believe the victorious state's story about how the war began, how it was conducted and what the consequences of the war were.

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To believe the propaganda that a state involved in war necessarily always puts out, always tries to spread,

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Revisionism, to one degree or another, is absolutely called for, absolutely necessary, in regard to every war.

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If we take the last good war, the war everybody likes, World War II, there's been necessary revisionism in regard to that.

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I mean, of course, there's revisionism in regard to that.

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The war everybody likes, World War II, there's been necessary revisionism in regard to that.

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I mean, of course, there's revisionism of the school I agree with and Joe and others here,

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but there's been revisionism even among mainstream historians.

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Nobody now believes the story that was told during the war and right after the war,

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that Franklin Roosevelt worked tirelessly for peace right until he was totally stunned and surprised

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by the Japanese attack on American forces in Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and elsewhere.

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That was the American government story. Nobody believes that. As a matter of fact, the people who

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like Roosevelt say, no, you know, he did plan to get us into war with Germany and turned out with

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with Japan also, he had to do it very slowly because of the isolationist American public but he did plan to do it and he was right to do it because Nazi Germany was such a threat especially as perceived to be allied with Japan that we had to get into that war so that there's been revisionism even in the mainstream story in regard to World War II and in regard to many other wars.

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I don't understand how anybody thinks that they can maintain the story of the Vietnam War

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now that people like McNamara say that, well, you know, now we really had no idea why we went into Vietnam.

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And it turned out really to be kind of a mistake. Sorry.

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The man who was the secretary of defense and the chief impetus in favor of that war in the Johnson administration.

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so that revisionism, as I say, is necessary.

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The state engages in propaganda constantly, especially in regard to war,

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and the reason for this is clear.

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As the French philosopher La Boétie,

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I think Chantal is familiar with this writer,

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A friend of, who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel? Talk about forgetting. Rabelais. No, he was a friend of Montaigne, a close friend of Montaigne, and Montaigne actually wrote an essay on friendship in connection with La Boisi, who died fairly young, but La Boisi wrote a tract that has actually been translated, I think,

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about how the state depends totally on opinion.

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The ruler is just one person or a small number of people.

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Even his supporters are a limited number of people.

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The ones who are ruled are the vast majority.

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How are they going to be ruled by a relatively small number except through opinion, through

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through instilling in them, planting in their minds, the legitimacy of the state and the

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arguments for state control.

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So this is done through glorifying the state's wars, isn't it funny how with the possible

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exception of Vietnam, all of America's wars have been justified, have been right, have

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been good, I mean, what are the odds of something like that?

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The enemy has always been unbelievably horrible. Orwell's 1984 is indispensable for this. The way hate against the enemy is whipped up, the five-minute hate, showing that it's easier when Oceania is fighting East Asia because they're Asians, and they can be made into grotesque enemies.

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Eurasia with the Slavic people and their inveterate bloodlust and traditional cannibalism

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It was started with the Belgian atrocities stories of 1914.

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Really, maybe the first great propaganda success in modern times.

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At my apartment in Buffalo, I have a poster selling liberty bonds,

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and it shows a burning village in the background,

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and it shows a big hulking German soldier with his Pickelhaube helmet.

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The British government is dragging along a 10-11 year old girl into the bushes, and it says remember Belgium, buy liberty bonds.

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This was part of the deliberate campaign of the British government, brilliantly successful, so that Hitler talks about it in Mein Kampf, and Goebbels says that he learned a tremendous amount about propaganda from the British.

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So the government keeps telling everybody how horrible, how demon-like the enemy is, how totally virtuous we are, good and evil, the way we're being told about it all the time now, and the government has certain heroes who are set up as exemplary models of humanity, monuments are set up to them.

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In Washington, they're going to run out of room after a while.

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I mean, even the D.C. is a pretty limited area now with, what is it, seven and a half acres

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in the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial.

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What happens when the Harry Truman Memorial comes, the George Bush Memorial, all of these

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other memorials.

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And school children are brought to see these things, and the state's myth is carried on

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from one generation to another.

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Now I want to talk about something about the situation in regard to liberty in the present

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day.

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Hayek, I think, was quite right when he said in the last years of his life, well, socialism

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is essentially dead.

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The traditional standard socialist program, nationalization of industry and central economic

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Planning, the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and what's happening in

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China and so on, that no serious person defends the idea of central economic planning and

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nationalization of industry as the road to prosperity. The ones who do practice it, I

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suppose in Cuba, North Korea and so on, well they hangers on of the regimes that have been

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has been there for decades. So it is the case that traditional socialism has gone into oblivion.

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Hayek said, however, that socialism is being replaced by the welfare state.

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And this certainly is the case.

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Discussing the welfare state brings us back to the discussion of the origins of liberalism because liberalism arising in the 18th century faced, as we know, absolutism, mercantilism, but also, which is not as well known, what it faced on, especially on the continent of Europe, was the welfare state in the version of that time

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The Polizeistaat, Police in the sense of regulation by the government.

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There's literature on this that I could be citing to you.

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As always, I'll be willing to send you citations if you care to have them.

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There's great literature on the subject.

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There's a book by a man named Dorwart, D-O-R-W-A-R-T, from Harvard University Press, on the history of the welfare state.

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And he distinguishes three stages.

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The first was the welfare state that came into existence with the so-called enlightened despotism of the early modern period.

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and that existed in France, that existed in the German states, above all Prussia,

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it existed in the Austrian states.

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And there were treatises written for the government bureaucrats who were going to be regulating agriculture industry,

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setting up hospitals, setting up educational institutions, insane asylums,

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all the sort of things that were going to be operating the poor laws,

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all the sort of things that were supposed to be helping people,

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Treatises written for them, because they studied in universities, that explain that the aim of the enlightened prince is the happiness and welfare of his people.

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And it's the government's job to look after this and to do everything it can to extend and expand their happiness and their welfare.

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That's why, if you look at the greatest book written in Germany on liberalism before the rise of the Austrian School,

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and that is The Limits of State Action by the great German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt.

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and translated into English, Limits of State Action, again, a book available from the Liberty Fund and he has as a quotation of the beginning of his book something from one of the French physiocrats who lashed out against the rage to govern, which is the most disastrous disease of modern governments.

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This is what, actually it was the elder Mirabeau who said that, and this is what Humboldt was saying also.

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And what was his rage to govern? The welfare state that was coming into existence.

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One reason, by the way, why the philosopher Immanuel Kant says that happiness cannot be the aim of ethics and by implication of government action.

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He was an opponent of the Prussian welfare state, so that, as Kant put it, justice, not happiness, has to be the aim of policy.

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Now, Dorwert, the scholar I mentioned, then talks about the second stage of the welfare state,

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which was the period of classical liberalism and the retreat of the state and the introduction of laissez-faire.

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And that lasted for a few decades in Europe.

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And then finally, the third stage begins, as I'll talk about in a moment, in the 1880s in Germany.

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And it is the stage of the indefinitely expanding welfare state that we are privileged to experience today.

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Some people might be surprised that the welfare state came into existence in Prussia,

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Well, Germany, Prussian-controlled Germany, under the aegis of Bismarck, whom I talked about last time.

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Bismarck was no friend of freedom. He was, in a paternalistic way, a friend of common people,

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and looking out for their welfare. But there were other reasons behind his introduction of

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and the welfare legislation into Germany in the 1880s.

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Odd as it may seem, we can pinpoint where the modern welfare state started, and it was there.

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He introduced old age pensions, disability, insurance, health insurance, and other welfare measures.

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The reason was, as his conservative advisors agreed with him, that people were becoming too independent.

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They were, well, they were becoming, look, he lives in a monarchy, this is his whole life, service to the Hohenzollern kings and now emperors of Germany.

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They were becoming too independent.

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The liberals, whom he considered his worst enemy, enemies worse than the socialists, were depending on gradual improvement in conditions, people becoming even more independent.

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As they become more independent, they take care of other things, like their health insurance provisions for old age and so on.

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And what's going to happen to their gut loyalty to the government?

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Well, he said he had noticed under Napoleon III in France, who started some of these welfare measures,

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and Napoleon set up pensions for certain categories of people,

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he had noticed that people who look forward to a government pension

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tend to be much more amenable than people who are acting on their own,

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looking to their own support in various ways to the private sector.

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And it was this political need, as one of his advisors said, to bind the people to the throne with chains of gratitude that led to the introduction of these measures.

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Bismarck was also clever enough to add to these welfare measures a kind of gimmick that is successful to this day and that is, in some cases, not all.

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In regard to old age pensions, for instance, talk about the employees and the employers' contribution divided up as if you're a worker and you're giving something into this fund, but they're also getting your boss to give something into the fund.

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Now, nothing is more certain than your boss doesn't care how he divides up your salary.

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You know, if you tell him, give seven and a half percent to Catholic charities, send 45 percent to the Mises Institute or whatever way you want to divide it up, he's willing to do it because he is going to be paying you a certain amount what he thinks you're worth, so that if there were no employer's contribution, this is what a worker would be worth and this is what a worker would be getting. But this optical illusion of an employer's contribution

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This contribution certainly helped Bismarck's plans along.

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Bismarck was opposed in these measures by the German liberals.

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I have a book on the German liberalism in general that Guido Hilsemann translated into German for me.

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But, there's also an article in the JLS, that you can look up under, to my mind, the greatest of these men, one of my real heroes, Eugen Richter, and the other authentic German liberals, Manchester liberals, opposed the welfare state, which is a major reason why German historians have total contempt for these 19th century liberals, that is, that they ignore them, they misinterpret them, they distort what they said,

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because, my heavens, these were actual Germans who were against welfare,

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who were against the welfare state,

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welfare state being enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany,

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which is a social state, as they say,

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given to human dignity, also in these material terms of supporting welfare.

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So these German liberals are not treated very well by historians, either here or abroad,

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but they came up with very good arguments against the welfare state and in

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particular pointed out you know what's going to be the end of this people get

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the impression that the government has endless largesse to distribute what's

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going to stop them from just the government from creating more and more

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programs taking more and more of the people's income through taxes and then

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distributed it through alleged welfare measures.

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The German liberals, by the way, understood perfectly the mechanism that the School of Public Choice talks about.

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That is how benefits are concentrated and costs are dispersed among the whole population

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and how this works in with modern electoral politics.

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And my own view, since I want to talk about the prospects for freedom, is that this welfare state that exists now in western countries is simply going to expand.

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There might be some setbacks from time to time.

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But as for instance in America, the Clinton health program to immediately socialize 14% of the American economy did not get through.

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On the other hand, what are we witnessing now? Prescription drugs for older people and anything that is for America's kids.

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I don't know when this concept came in of America's kids.

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I don't think it existed in our time, in earlier, in the earlier years.

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America's, what do you mean America's kids?

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You know, there's Mrs. Marino's kids, and there's Mrs. Fleischman's kids,

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and there's kids of different families, and the kids are in that family.

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They don't belong to some huge, unbelievable, over a quarter of a billion,

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practically 300 million strong collective called America.

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But that argument of doing something for America's kids is unanswerable.

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We should always keep in mind that half of the population by definition has an IQ of

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less than 100.

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So we see in New York State, because the states are going into various speeds here, in New

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York State there's one aspect of socialized medicine after another that's put in.

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Now, for instance, there is state-funded insurance for all people who can't afford it otherwise,

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who have children in their family, and that's coming in in a few years, and the Republican

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governor boasts about that.

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So it's a matter of time until something very like the original Clinton program comes

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into existence.

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There might not be the coercion that was originally proposed, or else maybe if there's a Democratic

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president, there will be such coercion.

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But the welfare state does experience defeats from time to time, but then it picks itself

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up and goes ahead to greater and greater victories.

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So this is what we have to worry about, I think, in the modern world.

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But this welfare state has another aspect to it that Paul Gottfried talks about, and

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I mentioned Gottfried's two books, After Liberalism and his more recent book on multiculturalism.

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The welfare state is a managerial state, a therapeutic state, a state that is concerned

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to radically redo the values and traditions of society.

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And what's more obvious than that, I don't know.

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Wasn't there once on the Alabama license plates some phrase to the effect that Alabama was

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the heart of Dixie?

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I think there was.

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I think maybe the last time I was here there was, or at least that was on some license plates.

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Now it's virtually disappeared, I mean literally disappeared. It's down in a small print if you have an Auburn license plate.

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I know what it is, but I'm trying to figure out what the hell it means.

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Stars fell on Alabama. I guess that's a good thing.

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This is a very small example, obviously, but why are they doing something like this?

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Of course, Alabama is the heart of Dixie. What else would it be?

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We're not talking racism here. We're talking about the very mention of the name Dixie is now taboo

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because of the state diktat, and years to come it's going to get worse and worse.

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The State has an agenda to root out certain traditions and values in society, for instance, identification with the South, the part of southerners, and to substitute others.

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This is the managerial, bureaucratic, therapeutic state that Paul Godfrey talks about and that state lends itself legitimacy through the welfare state by buying off more and more constituencies.

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Well, I mean, you might say it started with the agricultural program that favored the South under Roosevelt, the southern cotton growers and hog growers and corn growers and so on, in this way, directing them in the direction of Washington, whereas they had been very suspicious of Washington before.

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But now, every group in America that's worth pandering to gets benefits and feels that it has a stake in the modern welfare and warfare state.

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What could possibly represent an end to this? How could this end?

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And I don't see that the welfare state is going to come to an end by itself. What I see is that as it becomes more and more intractable, as we approach the crisis of the welfare state, they will, the politicians, the people in control of the system, will bring in what has already been suggested by politicians in Europe, including in Germany, for instance, and that is what we need are young taxpayers to support

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the pensions and medical care and so on for the retired, older, non-tax payers now, retired people.

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Where are these young tax payers to come from? Since the Europeans don't seem to be,

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I don't know if they've forgotten how to do it, but don't seem to be very interested in having kids.

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And in America, the white population does not replace itself.

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So where are these new taxpayers to come from?

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And that is, then, the third world, opening up the borders to immigration so we can get these new workers and we can tax them.

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And, of course, they're going to get old after a while, and they're probably going to have fewer kids.

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But that's going to be way in the distance, and the politicians who are worried about it now will be long since gone,

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and they don't have to worry about what's going to happen down the road, typical of politics,

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typical of the whole, implied necessarily in the logic of democratic politics.

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They don't have to worry what happens down the road, but what will have happened in the meantime

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is that they will have destroyed the identity, first of all, of the European nations.

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There's no such thing as, as far as I can see, of a France that's one-third Muslim.

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In Italy, that's one-third Muslim. I mean, there's an Italian state, but there's no such thing as an Italian identity, that there's one-third Muslim or more for that matter.

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So they'll destroy the identity of the European peoples, eventually also the American people, although we have some leeway in our country.

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And I don't think anybody could have predicted that. That's one thing the German liberals certainly never thought of, that it would come to that, that in order to salvage this never-ending system of welfare, one welfare program after another, more and more debt, more and more taxes, they would have to simply destroy the historical identity of the countries.

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Now, well, is this pessimistic? Well, it's kind of pessimistic, you might say, but I'm not just pessimistic.

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By my contract with the Mises Institute, I cannot be just pessimistic, so there has to be hope.

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By the way, before I forget, if you want to know what I really think is going to happen, there's a novel by Ira Levin.

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this perfect day

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Brazil, Kiss Before Dying, Death Trap, Stepford Wives, and he wrote this, if you check out

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one of the histories of the Objectivist Institute, while he was attending Objectivist lectures

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in New York. This is his really quite libertarian work, and it's a futuristic work. So, a glimpse

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into the Future, and when it was in paperback and easily available, I gave out a lot of

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copies. I've never come across any libertarian who didn't at least try to read it in one

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city. You know, maybe at three in the morning it got too late and they had to finish it

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the next morning. But I look at the book, it's on the library shelf, This Perfect Day, it's

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It's on the library shelves and it gives you an idea of what I think eventually might happen.

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Futuristic, kind of 1984, but with a different ending.

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Now we've talked about classical liberalism in different respects this week.

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One thing certainly was clear, I imagine, and that was that the liberals aimed to limit

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government government was to be limited to certain functions things that the

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government had done historically it was to leave alone and in many countries the

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liberals thought that a means for doing this would be constitutionalism

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constitution is by definition something that limits the government that is it

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says what the government can do and by implication what the government can't do

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In France, the great liberal I mentioned, maybe I wasn't able to get into as much detail on his views as I had hoped.

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Benjamin Constant spent a good deal of his life coming up with constitutional arrangements for France after the great revolution.

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And, as we know, liberal revolutions aimed very often, principally, at setting up a constitution

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on the European continent, for instance, in the early 19th century, in Spain, during the

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liberal agitation there, or in the different German states, up until Germany was unified,

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setting up a constitution.

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And the United States Constitution is probably the most famous example of these liberal constitutions.

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The aim was to limit the government.

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And the drafters tried as much as possible to do that.

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And just to nail it down, they added some amendments to the Constitution, the first

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the ten of which become the Bill of Rights by the way unlike oh I think it's about 25 or 30 percent of American students I am sure that you are aware of the fact that the Bill of Rights does not include the phraseology to each according to his needs and from each according to his abilities we all know about the famous article one Congress shall make no law respecting a series of rights

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And then, I don't know how many people have ever put this together with that, that is, the facts together,

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the Second Amendment, right after that, right after the enumeration of these basic rights and religion, speech, assembly and so on,

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the Second Amendment comes, as Blackstone said in Commentary on the Laws of England,

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One of the major ways of defending our basic liberties.

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The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

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That comes right after the Second Amendment.

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But let's go on to the end of the Bill of Rights.

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And you'd suppose, I mean, what more could you possibly put into writing

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that would guarantee a limited government

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and would guarantee the freedom of the people than this, Article 9.

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The enumeration and the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

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What does that mean?

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Well, these are not the only rights people have.

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In fact, it's the other way around.

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The government has just a few powers and the people are swimming an ocean of rights.

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They have the right to have families, they have the right to travel, they have the right to educate their kids, they have one right after the other.

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And then Article 10, the last of the Bill of Rights.

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The power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by it to the states,

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or reserved to the states respectively or to the people.

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That nails it down, right?

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The Federal Government can only do precisely what it's given authority to do in the body of the Constitution.

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So, it was a heroic attempt to limit government, but very quickly, the Hamiltonian and then

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the Whig tradition arose in America to expand the powers of the national government. And

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very quickly also, the national government's own Supreme Court set itself up as the ultimate

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Arbiter of the Constitution, an Interpreter of the Constitution, very dangerous.

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What could be a protection against this?

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What could be a protection against the national government doing all kinds of things in the

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economy, protective tariffs, so-called internal improvements, pork for, meaning pork for their

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Contractor Friends and the Railroads and so on, printing money that forces on the people.

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What could prevent the Federal Government from doing that?

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Well, the states, it's the states, it's a federal system.

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And in critical times, some states even threatened secession when they thought that the Federal

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Government was going beyond its legitimate powers.

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famously in the 1830s by South Carolina, over the tariff, not over slavery, over the tariff.

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But then it came to power in the United States a party that was perceived by a large part of the population

385
00:51:08.180 --> 00:51:14.180
as aiming to implement once and for all the Hamiltonian and Whig program.

386
00:51:14.180 --> 00:51:21.180
That said, in this program they were going to be putting into effect a protective tariff

387
00:51:21.180 --> 00:51:32.180
The consequence of which would be to fatally harm the interests of the South, and then secession came.

388
00:51:32.180 --> 00:51:49.180
Now, there have been a number of interesting pieces written on the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

389
00:51:49.180 --> 00:51:59.420
One, which is, I'm not sure on the Mises website, but I'll give you the citation from the Southern

390
00:51:59.420 --> 00:52:06.620
Economic Journal of 1992 by a friend of the Institute, Randall Holcomb, who points out

391
00:52:06.620 --> 00:52:14.940
that the framers of the Southern Constitution very well understood principles of public

392
00:52:14.940 --> 00:52:28.620
choice, so that their legislature was prohibited from erecting protective tariffs and giving

393
00:52:28.620 --> 00:52:33.260
special favors, bounties and so on to industry.

394
00:52:33.260 --> 00:52:39.500
Marshall de Rosa, who has spoken at the Mises Institute, has discussed the Confederate Constitution

395
00:52:39.500 --> 00:52:45.900
and a little book, and come to similar conclusions, that is, that the Confederate Constitution,

396
00:52:45.900 --> 00:52:54.060
because of the experience of the American people up until that time, was dedicated to

397
00:52:54.060 --> 00:53:01.500
preventing the Confederate government from acting the way the Federal Government had

398
00:53:01.500 --> 00:53:03.580
acted.

399
00:53:03.580 --> 00:53:11.940
This was the last great attempt to thwart the will of Washington, and it came down to

400
00:53:11.940 --> 00:53:19.340
a struggle of arms, as it had in England in the 17th century, as it had with the Italian

401
00:53:19.340 --> 00:53:27.900
city-states against the German emperor in the 12th century, as it had with people fighting

402
00:53:27.900 --> 00:53:32.500
for their freedom at different times in history.

403
00:53:32.500 --> 00:53:39.260
And before you bring in the question of slavery, I think maybe you might consider what a great

404
00:53:39.260 --> 00:53:48.260
lover of the slaves like General Sherman had in mind, going from Atlanta to the sea,

405
00:53:48.260 --> 00:53:53.660
burning deliberately, consciously burning every possible means of subsistence in his

406
00:53:53.660 --> 00:53:56.540
way.

407
00:53:56.540 --> 00:54:00.580
What were the tens and tens of thousands of slaves on the plantation supposed to be living

408
00:54:00.580 --> 00:54:08.020
When the Union soldiers killed all the chicken and livestock and burned all the corn fields

409
00:54:08.020 --> 00:54:12.180
and destroyed all the other means of subsistence.

410
00:54:12.180 --> 00:54:16.900
No concern for the slaves there it seems.

411
00:54:16.900 --> 00:54:23.620
So that the South was defeated and as Lord Acton wrote to Robert E. Lee, that was the

412
00:54:23.620 --> 00:54:53.620
In the end, as far as he could see, of the limit to the sovereignty of the one power center in Washington Acton supported the southern cause not because he was a friend of slavery but because he thought this was the one possible bulwark against federal tyranny the right of secession of the states and now there seems to be no limit

413
00:54:53.620 --> 00:54:59.620
No institutional limit, no theoretical limit to what the national government can do.

414
00:54:59.620 --> 00:55:03.620
You say, well, we still have the Bill of Rights.

415
00:55:03.620 --> 00:55:08.620
Well, yeah, we have the Bill of Rights, but the Bill of Rights has to be interpreted.

416
00:55:08.620 --> 00:55:13.620
It's interpreted by the Federal Supreme Court, right?

417
00:55:13.620 --> 00:55:17.620
We know already that commercial, take the First Amendment,

418
00:55:17.620 --> 00:55:22.620
we know that commercial speech is not privileged speech, right?

419
00:55:22.620 --> 00:55:28.460
as pornographic speech of course is not privileged speech, that it's not speech per se that's

420
00:55:28.460 --> 00:55:35.340
privileged that Congress may not infringe on. So what happens when the five or six majority

421
00:55:36.620 --> 00:55:42.700
liberals on the liberal so-called on the Supreme Court, maybe graduates of the law schools which

422
00:55:42.700 --> 00:55:49.100
are preaching this very point today, decide that hate speech is not privileged speech,

423
00:55:49.100 --> 00:55:53.140
Hate Speech, that it doesn't come under the protection of the First Amendment.

424
00:55:53.140 --> 00:55:59.140
And hate speech can include everything that you might think of including.

425
00:55:59.140 --> 00:56:04.780
Hate speech would include, might very well include, it could be argued in court.

426
00:56:04.780 --> 00:56:09.900
Hate speech includes, well, we have to stop with, do away with welfare in New York City.

427
00:56:09.900 --> 00:56:16.140
Well, that's hate speech because the implication is clearly that we should do away with welfare

428
00:56:16.140 --> 00:56:22.140
and therefore minority populations, which are the great bulk of the people who get welfare in New York City.

429
00:56:22.140 --> 00:56:30.140
This seems strange to you. I would suggest that political correctness a couple of decades ago

430
00:56:30.140 --> 00:56:36.140
and the extent to which it's gone in America and Europe would have seemed very strange.

431
00:56:36.140 --> 00:56:43.140
My point being that the Bill of Rights, per se, is not going to be any protection of all liberties.

432
00:56:43.140 --> 00:56:53.860
Ever since I translated Mises liberalism many years ago, and even before that, I've been

433
00:56:53.860 --> 00:57:00.380
interested in the history of classical liberalism, and most of my research has concerned that.

434
00:57:00.380 --> 00:57:06.700
And I am coming to a conclusion, which I held theoretically but feel more strongly about

435
00:57:06.700 --> 00:57:12.820
and hold, you might say, practically now, that there is no answer within classical liberalism.

436
00:57:12.820 --> 00:57:21.500
The liberals had no answer because they strove to preserve the state and I say I held this

437
00:57:21.500 --> 00:57:27.840
view theoretically because I agreed with Murray Rothbard, my old friend, that ultimately the

438
00:57:27.840 --> 00:57:34.600
kind of system we want is a system of where individuals are empowered to select their

439
00:57:34.600 --> 00:57:41.040
own means of defense, their own let's say defense agencies, their own courts, just as

440
00:57:41.040 --> 00:57:45.040
as they select any other service of theirs.

441
00:57:45.040 --> 00:57:46.040
So I held that for a long time.

442
00:57:46.040 --> 00:57:56.040
But now what I'm telling you is that it's very clear that there is no way of salvaging limited government.

443
00:57:56.040 --> 00:57:59.040
It's simply going to be getting worse and worse.

444
00:57:59.040 --> 00:58:06.040
So our more direct and immediate aim has to be to destroy the centralized state,

445
00:58:06.040 --> 00:58:11.040
to do away with the centralized state in stages.

446
00:58:11.040 --> 00:58:14.040
I'm not talking violent in the revolution.

447
00:58:14.040 --> 00:58:17.040
As a matter of fact, I hope that the leaders of the United States,

448
00:58:17.040 --> 00:58:24.040
President Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the other leaders of the United States,

449
00:58:24.040 --> 00:58:35.040
I hope they live forever, and I wish them well.

450
00:58:35.040 --> 00:58:42.040
Joking aside, obviously I'm not talking about violence. There's no point to start violence and see what happens.

451
00:58:42.040 --> 00:58:47.040
We're going to be like the Branch Davidians all over again.

452
00:58:47.040 --> 00:58:52.040
So it has to be, of course, education and political action.

453
00:58:52.040 --> 00:58:55.040
But the aim has to be to break down the central state.

454
00:58:55.040 --> 00:59:00.040
And when I say by any means necessary, I mean, for instance, by secession.

455
00:59:00.040 --> 00:59:06.040
The Mises Institute has a whole book of very interesting scholarly essays on the question of secession.

456
00:59:06.040 --> 00:59:12.040
Secession of provinces, as for instance Lombardy in Italy.

457
00:59:12.040 --> 00:59:16.040
Let's hope the Basques and the Catalans get their independence.

458
00:59:16.040 --> 00:59:23.040
In Spain, Corsica, from France, the breakup of Belgium, the sooner it happens, the better.

459
00:59:23.040 --> 00:59:29.040
I don't know where the EU bureaucrats are going to escape to, but wherever they go,

460
00:59:29.040 --> 00:59:38.040
The breakup of states down into provinces into cities.

461
00:59:38.040 --> 00:59:48.040
Now, if Lombardy is going to succeed from Italy, I don't understand why Verona has to be enslaved under the tyranny of Milan.

462
00:59:48.040 --> 01:00:02.040
So, we want that. And then, finally, down to the succession of any individual who wants to see to his own defense, the defense of himself and his family.

463
01:00:02.040 --> 01:00:10.040
And it doesn't, you know, I don't have to think in terms of some family in Idaho or something, or accept all the best of them.

464
01:00:10.040 --> 01:00:21.040
What I want to do, as far as I can see, is live their own lives by themselves, as the Weaver family did at Ruby Ridge until the federal government got interested.

465
01:00:21.040 --> 01:00:27.040
But I don't mean necessarily that. I mean, for instance, proprietary communities.

466
01:00:27.040 --> 01:00:37.040
A company can get together, buy land in a certain area, and provide also for the security, the police of that area.

467
01:00:37.040 --> 01:00:48.040
And you rent or you buy some property from this company and they take care of your security interest as they take care of the water interest, the electricity interest, whatever else might be involved.

468
01:00:48.040 --> 01:01:02.040
And there you have an independent community. Those communities, by the way, can be on the basis of religious affiliation, on the basis of other values of some kind.

469
01:01:02.040 --> 01:01:14.040
So that what we have, people talk about diversity. They don't mean diversity. What they mean is every place in the country having exactly the same composition.

470
01:01:14.040 --> 01:01:31.040
Diversity would be if you have an area like Alabama, and you have communities of blacks, and then you have communities of people who prefer to remain among themselves, whites, or scotch Irish, or Italians, or homosexuals,

471
01:01:31.040 --> 01:02:01.040
Homosexuals or heterosexual families that want to keep homosexuals out, that would be a collection of diverse communities, and it seems to me that this all has to be worked out, we're not going to do it tomorrow, but it seems to me it would be very possible for these communities to see to their own self-defense as well, as a matter of fact in a community where people tend to be of one

472
01:02:01.040 --> 01:02:14.040
Kind, among their own kind, it would be easier to see to the prevention of ordinary crime, I think, than in some Babylon, like New York, or Washington, for that matter.

473
01:02:14.040 --> 01:02:24.040
In any case, this, I think, is the only hope, unless you can suggest something else.

474
01:02:24.040 --> 01:02:30.040
I don't think classical liberalism is possible anymore.

475
01:02:30.040 --> 01:02:37.160
and I guess I assumed this would go without saying what you have to read in connection with this

476
01:02:37.160 --> 01:02:44.680
and really one of the finest books written in recent years and it has become quite a bestseller

477
01:02:44.680 --> 01:02:50.120
translated now into a number of European languages and that is the book by Professor Hoppe

478
01:02:50.120 --> 01:03:02.200
Hoppe, called Democracy, The God That Failed. The God That Failed refers to a famous book

479
01:03:02.200 --> 01:03:09.120
of the 1950s, a collection of essays by ex-communists called The God That Failed, and it was about

480
01:03:09.120 --> 01:03:16.760
communism. So, Hans Hoppe outlines and backs up much of what I've said in the last few

481
01:03:16.760 --> 01:03:28.760
with a panoply of arguments. Finally, just to remind you of what we've done this week.

482
01:03:28.760 --> 01:03:40.760
Basically, we've gone into a study of history. History is a struggle of liberty and how liberty came out of Europe,

483
01:03:40.760 --> 01:03:48.240
in Europe, how liberty developed in Europe, the history of classical liberalism, I was

484
01:03:48.240 --> 01:03:57.440
faced with various enemies, but the basis of everything we've done, I think, is a feeling

485
01:03:57.440 --> 01:04:04.880
that I have and that the Mises Institute has, that history is a very important part of understanding

486
01:04:04.880 --> 01:04:12.640
The Case for Liberty and the Possibilities of Liberty.

487
01:04:12.640 --> 01:04:20.760
It's not an accident that George Orwell in 1984 talks about history and the rewriting

488
01:04:20.760 --> 01:04:27.220
of history, the constant rewriting of history by the men in power and the tyrants.

489
01:04:27.220 --> 01:04:33.080
And there's a mantra or a saying that goes through the book.

490
01:04:33.080 --> 01:04:40.080
He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the

491
01:04:40.080 --> 01:04:42.520
past.

492
01:04:42.520 --> 01:04:46.960
He who controls the past controls the future because people make up their minds about what

493
01:04:46.960 --> 01:04:52.240
they want and what they will support and what they will fight for very often on the basis

494
01:04:52.240 --> 01:04:56.000
of their understanding of history, as we talked about when we talked about the Industrial

495
01:04:56.000 --> 01:04:57.640
Revolution.

496
01:04:57.640 --> 01:05:03.600
He who controls the present controls the past, because the past doesn't exist by itself.

497
01:05:03.600 --> 01:05:09.600
Oh, you know, there are written records, but in Orwell's world, those records can simply

498
01:05:09.600 --> 01:05:14.800
be destroyed or obliterated, fabricated.

499
01:05:14.800 --> 01:05:18.920
There are gravestones, there are coins, I mean, there are residues.

500
01:05:18.920 --> 01:05:26.200
But basically, those who control the interpretation of the past control the past.

501
01:05:26.200 --> 01:05:31.680
The people of the present time, who, because of their positions of power, control the understanding

502
01:05:31.680 --> 01:05:36.860
that people have of the past, can control it, and in that way control the future.

503
01:05:36.860 --> 01:05:42.040
And we don't want to be in that kind of position.

504
01:05:42.040 --> 01:05:48.360
As an Italian, an Italian-American, I go back often to Machiavelli, who was not a nice man,

505
01:05:48.360 --> 01:05:52.440
but he was a very smart man and a very sharp man.

506
01:05:52.440 --> 01:06:00.800
and in The Prince he talks about how men who want power can gain power and what the nature

507
01:06:00.800 --> 01:06:06.080
of power is and what the nature of politics is and he says, look, I'm writing for a few

508
01:06:06.080 --> 01:06:10.020
people. This is in just what he says, I'm writing for a few people. I'm not writing

509
01:06:10.020 --> 01:06:15.620
for the mass of people. The mass of people prefer appearance to reality. They prefer

510
01:06:15.620 --> 01:06:22.620
for their fantasy to what actually exists. If they knew what politics really was, they

511
01:06:23.220 --> 01:06:30.220
wouldn't have a good night's sleep for the rest of their lives. It really is scary. And

512
01:06:30.700 --> 01:06:36.960
there are only some men of strength, some men of power, some men of force who can deal

513
01:06:36.960 --> 01:06:43.960
with this. The average person born to be sheep, and as another Italian Pareto said, the average

514
01:06:45.620 --> 01:06:49.620
He who plays the sheep will find the butcher.

515
01:06:49.620 --> 01:07:01.620
So that for, I think that here we see some of the value beyond the simple interest, which is good enough, in historical studies. Thank you.

516
01:07:01.620 --> 01:07:18.060
Now, this time we have a good deal of time, plenty of time really, for questions, anything

517
01:07:18.060 --> 01:07:25.620
that came up this week, anything that came up today, and ideas you might have about the

518
01:07:25.620 --> 01:07:32.620
Status of Freedom in the world today, in our society today, and the prospects.

519
01:07:38.060 --> 01:07:43.060
He wrote Limits of State Action in the mid-1790s, but he lived until about 1832.

520
01:07:43.060 --> 01:07:44.060
Chantel?

521
01:07:44.060 --> 01:07:51.060
Is that true? In English? Really? Huh?

522
01:07:55.620 --> 01:08:13.620
It's on the Mises site. It's on the Mises site at Rothbard's introduction.

523
01:08:13.620 --> 01:08:41.220
Oh, I see. Another plot. Okay, yeah, I guess I meant the Mises. But whatever, JLS is what?

524
01:08:41.220 --> 01:08:49.220
is under, it was in the JLS, wasn't it? That's right, yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah,

525
01:08:49.220 --> 01:08:57.080
yeah, okay, you're right, you're right. Right, it was under the old review of Austrian economics,

526
01:08:57.080 --> 01:09:08.580
so that's on the Mises website. Yeah, okay, Joe, please. I mean, Joe, you're embarrassing

527
01:09:08.580 --> 01:09:37.580
I think that all socialist leaders are evil, and I agree with you that it was evil, however,

528
01:09:37.580 --> 01:09:42.780
I don't think he is extremely evil because I think he is this and other socialists dictated

529
01:09:42.780 --> 01:09:52.780
and I think Churchill knows all of this is bad and I think Stalin was much worse

530
01:10:07.580 --> 01:10:12.580
take it for granted that you agree with me that Hitler certainly was evil

531
01:10:12.580 --> 01:10:14.980
yeah well alright

532
01:10:14.980 --> 01:10:19.060
well at least uh...

533
01:10:19.060 --> 01:10:22.740
we have a breakthrough here

534
01:10:22.740 --> 01:10:23.780
uh...

535
01:10:23.780 --> 01:10:27.420
any other questions comments feel free to say anything that you want to say

536
01:10:27.420 --> 01:10:29.740
one thing you mentioned about

537
01:10:29.740 --> 01:10:31.620
Bismarck's

538
01:10:31.620 --> 01:10:33.860
social programs

539
01:10:33.860 --> 01:10:38.300
which started around 1875, 1880.

540
01:10:38.300 --> 01:10:42.340
The same thing happened in England about 30 years later

541
01:10:42.340 --> 01:10:45.620
to abolish the mutual assistance.

542
01:10:45.620 --> 01:10:48.780
And there were living funders sometimes through religions,

543
01:10:48.780 --> 01:10:53.540
sometimes from just societies of friends.

544
01:10:53.540 --> 01:10:56.740
Sure, friendly societies they were often called.

545
01:10:56.740 --> 01:10:59.540
And that was one of the first things to eliminate.

546
01:10:59.540 --> 01:11:02.780
Well, they eliminated them mainly

547
01:11:02.780 --> 01:11:08.020
by giving free government programs instead.

548
01:11:08.020 --> 01:11:12.580
The British welfare state came into existence a few years

549
01:11:12.580 --> 01:11:15.120
before the First World War.

550
01:11:15.120 --> 01:11:19.860
And it's as clear as anything how it came into existence.

551
01:11:19.860 --> 01:11:21.380
And that is that Lloyd George, who

552
01:11:21.380 --> 01:11:23.720
is the chancellor of the Exchequer,

553
01:11:23.720 --> 01:11:26.100
and his assistant, Winston Churchill,

554
01:11:26.100 --> 01:11:36.100
went to Germany and saw, this was around 1908 or so, saw Bismarck, of course, Lord Ded,

555
01:11:36.100 --> 01:11:42.340
saw the Bismarckian system in operation and Churchill says, which you can find in my Churchill

556
01:11:42.340 --> 01:11:48.180
article in that book, Churchill said, this is a great system, we have to have a big,

557
01:11:48.180 --> 01:11:58.980
We have to add a big slice of Bismarckianism to our English scene.

558
01:11:58.980 --> 01:12:04.260
What Churchill and Lloyd George saw were the electoral advantages of supporting welfare

559
01:12:04.260 --> 01:12:05.260
legislation.

560
01:12:05.260 --> 01:12:12.700
So, it was under Lloyd George and the Asquith administration before the First World War that

561
01:12:12.700 --> 01:12:17.100
the first welfare measures were put into effect in England.

562
01:12:17.100 --> 01:12:22.580
So that the connection between Germany and England is as clear as anything.

563
01:12:22.580 --> 01:12:30.580
And what Dr. Prince is getting at is this, Tocqueville and visiting America and also

564
01:12:30.580 --> 01:12:36.700
visiting England, which he loved, his wife was English, said the English speaking people,

565
01:12:36.700 --> 01:12:45.080
the Anglo-Saxons, he meant also the Celtic people and their descendants, have a genius

566
01:12:45.080 --> 01:12:47.840
for Free Association.

567
01:12:47.840 --> 01:12:49.520
America is the best example of this.

568
01:12:49.520 --> 01:12:54.040
You go to America and in any community, the people get together and do everything that's

569
01:12:54.040 --> 01:12:55.360
necessary.

570
01:12:55.360 --> 01:13:01.320
You need a public library, you need a fire department, you need a bridge, you need an

571
01:13:01.320 --> 01:13:04.640
extension on the road, the people do it themselves.

572
01:13:04.640 --> 01:13:11.600
In France, people get together and apply to Paris, to the appropriate bureau to fund and

573
01:13:11.600 --> 01:13:21.100
The English people and their descendants have a genius for free association.

574
01:13:21.100 --> 01:13:27.940
Now, by the end of the 19th century, in England, as you say, they had come into existence a

575
01:13:27.940 --> 01:13:34.880
huge number of what we generally call friendly societies.

576
01:13:34.880 --> 01:13:41.480
Working people, not so affluent people, have been concerned about various needs that they

577
01:13:41.480 --> 01:13:46.600
and their family have had. They've always been concerned. Back in Roman times, groups

578
01:13:46.600 --> 01:13:52.920
of workmen would get together and the major thing was to arrange for a funeral, for a grave

579
01:13:52.920 --> 01:14:00.480
site when they died. Working people are human beings, poor people are human beings, worry

580
01:14:00.480 --> 01:14:04.800
about something like that and gives small contributions each time.

581
01:14:04.800 --> 01:14:09.720
So by voluntary associations, voluntary contributions arranging for these things.

582
01:14:09.720 --> 01:14:15.820
Now, by the time this came into existence, these problems came to the fore with a great

583
01:14:15.820 --> 01:14:20.660
working class, let's say in England at the end of the 19th century, you had a vast number

584
01:14:20.660 --> 01:14:26.460
of associations for all kinds of things, for sickness, even for unemployment, which would

585
01:14:26.460 --> 01:14:40.060
In America, you had similar associations, and David

586
01:14:40.060 --> 01:14:47.000
Beto of the University of Alabama has examined these.

587
01:14:47.000 --> 01:14:54.500
They were very often ethnically divided, and a reason for that is you would have a problem,

588
01:14:54.500 --> 01:14:59.100
a moral hazard problem, that is, people kind of exploiting or taking advantage of the system.

589
01:14:59.100 --> 01:15:03.620
But let's say somebody said that, well, he was ill, too ill to go to work, and could he

590
01:15:03.620 --> 01:15:04.620
get some compensation?

591
01:15:04.620 --> 01:15:11.660
Well, it makes a difference if his friends, if his paisans come to him and visit him and

592
01:15:11.660 --> 01:15:15.500
know something about the traditions, the way of life of the family, because it's their

593
01:15:15.500 --> 01:15:19.700
way of life, come to a conclusion, you know, is he faking or malingering or is he really

594
01:15:19.700 --> 01:15:20.700
ill?

595
01:15:20.700 --> 01:15:24.700
were tended to be divided often on ethnic grounds.

596
01:15:24.700 --> 01:15:32.700
The largest such group of insured people in Chicago, for instance, at a certain time, were blacks.

597
01:15:32.700 --> 01:15:36.700
We're talking about 1890 and so on.

598
01:15:36.700 --> 01:15:45.700
Black families that saw to their own family needs of insurance for health, for old age, and so on.

599
01:15:45.700 --> 01:16:13.700
If Tocqueville referred specifically to English-speaking peoples, and I don't believe it could have been referring to the Celts, because at that time, the Celtic-speaking people still spoke varieties of Gaelic.

600
01:16:15.700 --> 01:16:24.100
But Ben, really, that's a very trivial point. I said the Anglo-Saxons in America, and then

601
01:16:24.100 --> 01:16:31.260
I said the Celtic people also. Not because they were speaking any Celtic language in America,

602
01:16:31.260 --> 01:16:37.340
but because in Appalachia and other places, they were the descendants of these Scottish,

603
01:16:37.340 --> 01:16:45.140
Irish and the Scots. Do you want, perhaps, to raise something of greater significance

604
01:16:45.140 --> 01:16:55.140
What? Come on, Ben, you can think of something better than that.

605
01:16:55.140 --> 01:17:07.140
I have sort of a broad question. There's been somewhat of a vague region amongst fellows this summer about being pragmatic or practical in pursuit of liberty.

606
01:17:07.140 --> 01:17:09.140
And what does that mean exactly?

607
01:17:09.140 --> 01:17:23.140
We don't live in a perfectly un-hampered market, so the basic idea is that we can't really promote these principles of liberty because they don't really apply, so we have to take basic steps toward it.

608
01:17:39.140 --> 01:17:49.140
Because you have to have standards that you're moving towards, and if you don't recognize

609
01:17:49.140 --> 01:17:59.140
the truth of what works, then there's no reason to even move towards it.

610
01:17:59.140 --> 01:18:07.140
If you don't recognize the truth of what works, then there's no reason to even move towards it.

611
01:18:19.140 --> 01:18:23.140
We have the goal in mind, it's what's the best thing?

612
01:18:29.140 --> 01:18:40.140
Well, we have like the end in mind, we've been kind of debating what is the correct way to kind of, you know, spread the word and move towards that.

613
01:18:46.140 --> 01:18:48.140
That's what we're debating.

614
01:18:48.140 --> 01:19:09.140
You know, maybe I misunderstood what was going on, but I would say that sometimes libertarian principles can be conflicted in the real world, and what would be an example of that?

615
01:19:09.140 --> 01:19:15.860
Since we do have a government and a welfare state that are not built on libertarian principles,

616
01:19:15.860 --> 01:19:20.980
you will many times have the people's rights on conflict.

617
01:19:20.980 --> 01:19:27.060
It's very hard to interpret how to apply libertarian principles in a conflicting world.

618
01:19:27.060 --> 01:19:30.820
Would you disagree with that?

619
01:19:30.820 --> 01:19:34.580
Well, I'm not sure exactly. How about an example?

620
01:19:34.580 --> 01:19:43.980
Well, an example could be, I don't know if that was what Jeff was referring to, but I had a discussion with Jeff when we were eating lunch.

621
01:19:43.980 --> 01:19:44.980
Don't be ridiculous.

622
01:19:44.980 --> 01:19:49.980
I'll take your word for it over here.

623
01:19:49.980 --> 01:20:17.980
Say you have a situation you consider, or many people, if not most people consider, of being a great threat, and you have the threat coming from a group of people that is identifiable, however, some of this group of people are, of course, innocents, and have no bad intentions.

624
01:20:17.980 --> 01:20:23.980
I suppose not to do anything. Just wait for the next, maybe a half to heaven.

625
01:20:47.980 --> 01:21:02.980
Paying with cash and having no luggage, in that case we could have, if we did not have government regulations about racial discrimination,

626
01:21:02.980 --> 01:21:12.980
I think we could have left it to American Airlines to ask this group of five young Arabs to step aside and explain themselves a little bit.

627
01:21:12.980 --> 01:21:16.980
Well, that would be my point, you know, you can apply for the criteria.

628
01:21:16.980 --> 01:21:19.980
No, but private property would have taken care of that.

629
01:21:19.980 --> 01:21:23.980
Well, but we do not have private defense agencies as it is now, right?

630
01:21:23.980 --> 01:21:27.980
We have the threat now, but we do not have all these private institutions to help us.

631
01:21:27.980 --> 01:21:33.980
Well, okay, then I guess I didn't understand what your example would be.

632
01:21:33.980 --> 01:21:39.980
If you talk about terrorists about to commit some terrorist act,

633
01:21:39.980 --> 01:22:01.980
The terrorist act, even short of throwing a bomb or taking out a bomb, in a case like that, where there was some strong possibility, or even some possibility, that a terrorist act was being planned, there the private airline company, if it had been given its own way, could have taken care of it.

634
01:22:01.980 --> 01:22:11.980
They have not fallen out. They are their own poverty scheming and collecting dynamite or whatever.

635
01:22:11.980 --> 01:22:18.980
You say, well, they have not harmed anyone. So maybe they will not.

636
01:22:18.980 --> 01:22:28.980
No, look, there are a lot of different questions that are dealt with by law, that is a lot of different legal questions.

637
01:22:28.980 --> 01:22:36.980
Where does probable cause come in and permit us to take certain measures?

638
01:22:36.980 --> 01:22:45.980
Now, where does probable cause of the commission of a felony come in that would permit us then to take various measures?

639
01:22:45.980 --> 01:22:53.980
A lawyer, a libertarian lawyer, a lawyer who believes in private defense agencies, for instance,

640
01:22:53.980 --> 01:23:13.980
Randy Barnett, Professor of Law at Boston University, would be a better person to deal with that because, and I've heard him deal with questions like that, because he knows how law is adjudicated and how questions of probable cause occur in the state system, how it's likely to occur also in a private system.

641
01:23:13.980 --> 01:23:30.980
Private defense agencies would also operate on the basis of defending their customers and not against simple immediate threats where there's a gun to their head, but in cases where it is likely that there will be a threat to them.

642
01:23:30.980 --> 01:23:34.980
I mean, the private defense agencies would also be interested in that.

643
01:23:34.980 --> 01:23:39.460
And the issue comes up now for...

644
01:23:39.460 --> 01:23:42.740
There are no private defense agencies that can do anything like that.

645
01:23:42.740 --> 01:23:45.860
The issue comes up now for government agencies.

646
01:23:45.860 --> 01:23:47.700
I mean, there it's a problem.

647
01:23:47.700 --> 01:23:50.660
When they're entitled to do something and when they're not.

648
01:23:50.660 --> 01:23:58.660
Would you agree that you can put up criteria that if you behave in certain suspicious ways,

649
01:23:58.660 --> 01:24:04.500
that you, you know, could act before they have done anything, any harm?

650
01:24:04.500 --> 01:24:10.100
Now, you know, it's a question of, there's not any particular criterion that can decide that.

651
01:24:10.100 --> 01:24:14.660
It is very much a question of circumstance, that's why they talk about probable cause,

652
01:24:14.660 --> 01:24:18.980
that's why they talk about presenting the evidence for probable cause to a judge,

653
01:24:19.540 --> 01:24:23.220
who then will give a warrant for a search or whatever. Yes, you.

654
01:24:24.660 --> 01:24:32.980
I just want to point out that in these situations where we, you know, debate the idea of, well,

655
01:24:32.980 --> 01:24:40.980
What's the libertarian law going to be like? How's the private sector going to work? How do they apply that to the existing situation of the state?

656
01:24:40.980 --> 01:24:51.980
Lost in the bigger perspective is this point that the state and those who want to use state power to politicize a police society,

657
01:24:51.980 --> 01:24:58.980
they themselves don't even go do these practical things when they have the power to do them. That's not the people they target.

658
01:24:58.980 --> 01:25:07.980
When I was in the Air Force, and we got ready to go to war with Albania, I was in Spokane, Washington, where there was a large Russian and Serb community there.

659
01:25:07.980 --> 01:25:10.980
I mean, Serbia. Albania's in wag the door.

660
01:25:10.980 --> 01:25:18.980
Right, right. But I mean, when we went to war, it was in Kosovo, I apologize, supporting the Albanians again. There was a large Serb community there.

661
01:25:18.980 --> 01:25:26.980
The people on base, all they were talking about was, you think these Serbs could be trusted to support the war? Or do you think they might cause problems?

662
01:25:26.980 --> 01:25:38.980
Maybe a servant will drive out to the base and explode with a car bomb or something. That's what they fret about. They don't fret about the private property of American citizens. They fret about the power of the state.

663
01:25:38.980 --> 01:25:49.980
And the long-term issue here is delegitimizing the state, destroying and delegitimizing the central government. One way or another. You have to have history to do that. You have to reach out to people to do that.

664
01:25:49.980 --> 01:25:54.680
I agree with you basically, but I think what Peir is bringing up, what do you do in the meantime?

665
01:25:54.680 --> 01:26:01.680
Let's say you're deconstructing the state, but practical issues come up all the time, and how's that to be decided?

666
01:26:01.680 --> 01:26:03.680
I certainly don't believe any of this is easy.

667
01:26:03.680 --> 01:26:13.480
If I can add one thing, you're representing what I'm saying, but I think that the state is a huge enemy, I agree with that.

668
01:26:13.480 --> 01:26:16.480
No doubt about it, but there are also other enemies.

669
01:26:16.480 --> 01:26:28.480
And we have to take things in proportion and you can have an imminent big threat, you know, where your government might be your best instrument, as it is now, and then you can try to move forward.

670
01:26:28.480 --> 01:26:33.480
They won't help you there. They don't. There's no record of them doing so.

671
01:26:33.480 --> 01:26:39.480
It's possible, but of course everything depends on circumstances. Wait a minute, what do we have back here?

672
01:26:39.480 --> 01:26:45.480
Wait a minute, what is this, an anarchical element?

673
01:26:45.480 --> 01:26:47.480
Do you want to say something?

674
01:26:47.480 --> 01:26:49.480
Do you want to say something?

675
01:26:49.480 --> 01:26:51.480
Say something!

676
01:26:51.480 --> 01:26:53.480
Say something or else I'll beat you

677
01:26:53.480 --> 01:26:55.480
within an inch of your life.

678
01:26:57.480 --> 01:27:01.480
You see, there's some people who just don't understand free discussion.

679
01:27:01.480 --> 01:27:03.480
Go ahead, please.

680
01:27:03.480 --> 01:27:05.480
Oh, okay.

681
01:27:05.480 --> 01:27:07.480
But what about on this issue or something else?

682
01:27:07.480 --> 01:27:09.480
Okay, go ahead.

683
01:27:09.480 --> 01:27:11.480
What's your question?

684
01:27:15.480 --> 01:27:19.480
and the whole intellectual struggle for a living.

685
01:27:23.480 --> 01:27:34.480
Well, I mean, who is going to be the ultimate, so to say, fighter or promoter of the process of living?

686
01:27:34.480 --> 01:27:37.480
Ordinary people or...?

687
01:27:45.480 --> 01:27:49.080
to tell you who's going to be the ultimate fighters.

688
01:27:49.080 --> 01:27:51.880
Intellectuals have a disproportionate influence

689
01:27:51.880 --> 01:27:53.760
because they create ideologies,

690
01:27:53.760 --> 01:27:58.600
and human beings find ideologies very often attractive.

691
01:27:59.800 --> 01:28:04.800
But one thing, so I don't know how to,

692
01:28:05.520 --> 01:28:09.200
I really don't know how to answer that in particular.

693
01:28:09.200 --> 01:28:11.720
Some last question or two?

694
01:28:11.720 --> 01:28:20.720
My question is in response to what Ludwig said before about this whole concept of probable cause and preemptive caution.

695
01:28:20.720 --> 01:28:30.720
Dr. Michael Saliba presented a paper at the Austrian Scholars Conference which talked about how the idea of targets for terrorists are always changing.

696
01:28:30.720 --> 01:28:34.720
You're five muslims, by an example.

697
01:28:34.720 --> 01:28:44.720
In fact, the matter is that you stated that as we all know it as well, everyone knows this, so therefore that's going to be the last thing that anyone will do.

698
01:28:44.720 --> 01:28:50.720
So that's not the topic you need to be looking for anymore. The topic you need to be looking for will be something completely different.

699
01:29:00.720 --> 01:29:03.720
The possibility of hijacking was in the minds of many people.

700
01:29:03.720 --> 01:29:11.720
I think that if American Airlines had been given its choice, it would have questioned these men.

701
01:29:11.720 --> 01:29:18.720
But on the other hand, they would have been afraid they'd be sued for racial discrimination.

702
01:29:18.720 --> 01:29:21.720
But you're right, the terrorist targets do change.

703
01:29:21.720 --> 01:29:26.720
I don't think it's going to be another case of using a plane as a bomb.

704
01:29:26.720 --> 01:29:29.720
Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be terrible.

705
01:29:29.720 --> 01:29:46.720
My original question would be directed there. I was just talking more in general. What I sort of interpreted from what you said is that we should be uncompromising, especially those of us who want to go into academia.

706
01:29:46.720 --> 01:30:14.720
I know people that have gone to Mises University, that have gone on to Ph.D. programs in economics, and I talk to them and they say, well, you know, it's impossible, it's not that bad, you need a job, so I'll remember that I'm in Austria, somewhere down the road when Mises is meeting, and I think that's the biggest problem with our entire movement, our efforts, so what I've been interpreting from what you've said this week is, don't compromise, don't be ashamed of promoting liberty.

707
01:30:14.720 --> 01:30:22.720
No, no, no, I'm not telling you to act in any particular way in your professional or social life, not at all.

708
01:30:22.720 --> 01:30:29.720
As a matter of fact, I think that for a graduate student, there's no particular reason to bring up your political views,

709
01:30:29.720 --> 01:30:38.720
your scientific economic views of something different. I mean, I don't see how you can stay away from, get away from that.

710
01:30:38.720 --> 01:30:41.720
If you're going to be, let's say, you're an economist, right, if you're going to be an economist.

711
01:30:41.720 --> 01:31:01.720
A friend of mine, Mario Rizzo, for instance, got a PhD with great ease at the University of Chicago in the days of Stigler and Friedman, and learned Chicago economics, but he was an Austrian from the word go, because he was a good friend of Murray Rothbard before he went to Chicago.

712
01:31:01.720 --> 01:31:16.720
And so it's possible to get ahead, having Austrian views, but I'm not telling you, and I don't think it's a good idea to broadcast your views to everybody.

713
01:31:16.720 --> 01:31:21.720
As a matter of fact, probably there are a lot of people who shouldn't know about your views.

714
01:31:21.720 --> 01:31:29.720
Sometimes you get, they're libertarian students, okay, you know, God bless them, salt of the earth.

715
01:31:29.720 --> 01:31:36.280
of the Earth. But then, what they do is they go to college and they write on libertarian

716
01:31:36.280 --> 01:31:43.040
issues for every course. Like for their French course, they would write about Bastiat, and

717
01:31:43.040 --> 01:31:48.680
you know, in world history they would write revisionist stuff and literature on maybe

718
01:31:48.680 --> 01:31:57.960
Ayn Rand, let's say, and that's not any way to get a liberal education, and why spend

719
01:31:57.960 --> 01:32:08.060
The purpose of being in college or then in grad school is not to change the world from

720
01:32:08.060 --> 01:32:09.480
the position you're in.

721
01:32:09.480 --> 01:32:16.280
The purpose is to get an education and to get professional credentials.

722
01:32:16.280 --> 01:32:22.960
Now I don't think you're going to want to dissemble or lie if it comes to that, if it

723
01:32:22.960 --> 01:32:27.360
comes point blank, but I certainly am not saying that you should go out and broadcast

724
01:32:27.360 --> 01:32:36.360
What do you mean? Somebody says, what do you think of the minimum wage? And what are you going to tell them?

725
01:32:36.360 --> 01:32:40.360
Well, the minimum wage should be lowered. Right? Is that what you think?

726
01:32:40.360 --> 01:32:45.360
Or do you think the minimum wage should be abolished?

727
01:32:45.360 --> 01:32:53.360
Am I talking in Hungarian suddenly? Nobody seems to be understanding me.

728
01:32:53.360 --> 01:32:59.360
You're not going to say the minimum wage should be lowered to whatever, you know, $4.50 an hour.

729
01:32:59.360 --> 01:33:05.360
I presume, like most economists, not even going to have to be Austrian about it,

730
01:33:05.360 --> 01:33:08.360
but you'd say that you abolished the minimum wage.

731
01:33:08.360 --> 01:33:12.360
So I'm not sure in what case you would be compromising.

732
01:33:12.360 --> 01:33:15.360
What about the Fed?

733
01:33:15.360 --> 01:33:20.360
I think Friedman is in favor of abolishing the Fed now, isn't he?

734
01:33:20.360 --> 01:33:33.420
He's very skeptical of the Fed and the Fed's power to do anything because of the lag between

735
01:33:33.420 --> 01:33:39.220
getting any reliable statistics and then the Fed acting in a certain way and then producing

736
01:33:39.220 --> 01:33:40.720
the desirable effect.

737
01:33:40.720 --> 01:33:50.040
In any case, leaving aside particular examples, is there anybody who wants to bring up some

738
01:33:50.040 --> 01:33:52.040
One other point, one last point, yes.

739
01:34:20.040 --> 01:34:36.040
Is that true that he did? Is it true that Douglas North did? I'm surprised to hear that.

740
01:34:50.040 --> 01:35:02.220
Roy was a good friend of mine and I don't know if anybody's ever heard of him but he was a big

741
01:35:02.220 --> 01:35:06.880
influence in the libertarian movement and also in the libertarian party work for Cato and then

742
01:35:06.880 --> 01:35:17.400
was a charger of books at laissez-faire books and quite an original individual. Now in previous

743
01:35:17.400 --> 01:35:31.400
These articles of his, he loved writing articles, he wrote an attack or criticism, because he was a friend of Nozick, but a criticism of Nozick defending the anarcho-capitalism against Nozick, and I think also against Ein.

744
01:35:31.400 --> 01:35:41.400
But as you say, towards the end of his life, he began telling people that he discovered the secret argument in favor of the state.

745
01:35:41.400 --> 01:35:47.400
Somebody ever found out what that argument was. He didn't even give a hint of what that argument might be.

746
01:35:47.400 --> 01:35:53.400
And then he died, because he was really very ill.

747
01:35:53.400 --> 01:36:03.400
Aside from that, which, I don't know, maybe was a joke even, or some kind of role that Roy was playing,

748
01:36:03.400 --> 01:36:07.400
I don't think that he became less radical.

749
01:36:07.400 --> 01:36:16.400
If you're here next week, you'll see an example of somebody who's become more radical, and that's Robert Higgs.

750
01:36:16.400 --> 01:36:19.900
Murray, of course, remained radical from the beginning.

751
01:36:19.900 --> 01:36:27.200
Really from the beginning, when he was a grad student at Columbia until the end.

752
01:36:27.200 --> 01:36:44.200
When in the 1948 election he supported Strom Thurmond for president against the secessionist type, the guy who got into, who did he get into, he got Trent Lott into trouble recently.

753
01:36:44.200 --> 01:36:50.200
So Murray was radical on one side or another until the very end.

754
01:36:50.200 --> 01:36:54.200
Anybody want to speak to this gentleman's question?

755
01:36:54.200 --> 01:37:00.200
How many people are getting, feel they're getting more radical as time goes on?

756
01:37:00.200 --> 01:37:04.200
Okay, how many people are feeling less radical?

757
01:37:04.200 --> 01:37:08.200
Can't you?

758
01:37:08.200 --> 01:37:12.200
Okay, thank you. I think Chantal has a request to make.

759
01:37:12.200 --> 01:37:16.200
I just wanted to take a video of you relaxing.

760
01:37:16.200 --> 01:37:24.200
So, since you probably cannot be identified from the back of your head anyway, where do you want people to sit?

761
01:37:31.200 --> 01:37:36.200
Wait a minute. What's going on here? Hold on a second. What's going on here?

762
01:37:42.200 --> 01:37:44.200
Then we don't have Mason.

763
01:37:46.200 --> 01:37:52.200
Everybody's going to come here, we're going to have a group picture. I'll send you a copy.

764
01:37:52.200 --> 01:37:56.200
Would you like that? No, I don't take photographs very well.

765
01:37:56.200 --> 01:38:00.200
That's not what I wanted to do.

766
01:38:00.200 --> 01:38:06.200
Why did you allow this kid to take over?

767
01:38:06.200 --> 01:38:08.200
I want to stand like a pair of guys.

768
01:38:08.200 --> 01:38:12.200
Okay Mason, come on to the front here.

769
01:38:12.200 --> 01:38:24.340
It gets taller every day. Have you noticed? You're at least two inches taller than you

770
01:38:24.340 --> 01:38:33.800
were at the beginning of the week. Jeremy, what's wrong? He's Canadian. He doesn't

771
01:38:33.800 --> 01:38:42.120
think he can get back into the country. We've got to get closer though, don't we?

772
01:38:42.120 --> 01:38:46.120
We've got to get closer, right?

773
01:38:46.120 --> 01:38:50.120
Ben, you're hidden.

774
01:38:50.120 --> 01:38:54.120
Okay, very good.

775
01:38:54.120 --> 01:38:58.120
Well,

776
01:38:58.120 --> 01:39:02.120
okay.

777
01:39:02.120 --> 01:39:06.120
Okay, take one.

778
01:39:06.120 --> 01:39:10.120
Right, right, right, right.

779
01:39:10.120 --> 01:39:20.120
Right? Say cheese, now smile. Everybody say, right go. Very good. Thank you so much. You're welcome.