Good afternoon and welcome to our last lecture.
This, if you recall, is the Europe that existed in 1914.
And then, in January of 1919, the war having been over,
Germany having surrendered conditionally, unlike in World War II,
the conditions pertaining to President Wilson's 14 points
and his other speeches emphasizing self-determination of all peoples and other general provisions
implying equal justice for victors and for the vanquished. That was the spirit that Wilson publicly
proclaimed and it was on that basis that the Germans surrendered. And then in January of 1919,
Between the leaders of the Entente get together in Paris.
In 1814 and 1815, the last time there had been a general European conference to settle
questions at the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the victorious powers,
the coalition that had defeated Napoleon were there, but equally the French were represented
by Talleyrand, who took part in the negotiations together with everyone else.
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.
They can't simply exclude France and create a dictated peace, so that the French had to be let in the negotiations.
Negotiations, and Talleyrand, as clever as he was, was able to manipulate things to the
interests of his own country.
In 1919, in Paris, it was quite different.
There were German representatives, but they were put up in a hotel and under guard and
not permitted to take any part in the negotiations and the creation of the peace treaties.
When the peace treaty with Germany was finally settled upon, the Germans were brought out
to the Palace of Versailles under guard and told to sign the treaty, and that was it.
They refused at first, but were threatened with an invasion of Germany.
The Germans had totally disarmed by that time, had no artillery, had no guns, had no planes,
The army was demobilized, whereas the allies still had their armies, so that the threat
of invasion of Germany was a very real one and enough to force the German representatives
to give in, regardless of their own personal feeling.
In Germany, everybody, from the communists to the extreme nationalists, there weren't
exactly any Nazis by that time, but people on the extreme nationalist side, everybody,
The Catholics, the Socialists, the Liberals, everybody was against the Treaty of Versailles.
Nonetheless, it was implemented.
The history of the peace conference is of great interest, and it shows that time and
time again Wilson, who was surprised, who was astonished, that somehow his wartime allies
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,
He threatened not to go along with his baby, his dream, his vision of the League of Nations
and that was enough to have him cave in.
So that the peace treaty was signed with the defeated powers, one treaty in each of the great palaces in the vicinity of Paris
and the most important one at the most important palace, the treaty with Germany at the Palace of Versailles.
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.
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.
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.
The most obvious thing is the creation of a series of successor states down here, successors
in part to the old Tsarist Empire, in part to Germany in the sense that the German section
Winston Churchill lamented the end of Austria-Hungary. He said it could have been reformed and it
provided a home for all of the small peoples of Central Europe to live together and to
to lend each other moral support and, if necessary, military support, belonging to the same empire.
Instead, what you had were small peoples, the Czechs, the Slovaks, Austrians and Hungarians divided,
and the big Poland, but still between Germany and Russia, and these small peoples in the interwar years
and after the second world war fell victim, for the most part, to Germany at first and then to Russia.
By themselves, in other words, when Germany and Russia were interested in absorbing them, they simply couldn't hold out.
You can read in my essay, again, some things which particularly disturbed the Germans
and it has to do with really many of the different parts of the Treaty of Versailles, but in regards to self-determination.
Here, the Polish corridor did include many Germans, as did Upper Silesia over here.
Just to do justice to the treaty, it would have been very difficult to cleanly divide off Germans from Poles there.
Donsik, Donsik, Donsik, Donsik
of Self-Determination for the Germans were in the Sudetenland, this area here around
Czechoslovakia, where there were about three and a half million Germans. Out of the total
population of this new country, Czechoslovakia, of around 12 million, there were more Germans
than Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. The Germans in the Sudetenland did not wish to be part
The Germans did not want to be part of Czechoslovakia, but they were denied self-determination.
Austria was prohibited from joining with Germany, although the Austrians said, look, what are
we now?
We're some alpine provinces and it's a big city of Vienna, all Germans, all the non-German
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.
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.
So, it seemed to virtually all Germans an act of hypocrisy.
The Germans were divided between those who said, well, we have to live with it, we lost,
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.
So, this was, and the German colonies were divided up, very importantly, in the most important colonies,
were the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire.
I hear Turkey as a Turkish land comes into existence, and this map doesn't show the Arab lands of the former Ottoman Empire,
but those are either directly or indirectly under British and French control.
The French take over Syria, and there's a Christian minority in Syria at the time.
In order to create a Christian state in the Middle East,
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.
So that Lebanon and the problems that Lebanon has experienced since then are traceable to this division.
The British oil has already been discovered at Mosul.
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
and the strongly divided Arab Muslims in the center and the south, Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Nonetheless, it's made into a country, a king is put in charge and has a very tortured history
because how else do you keep together a non-country like this except through dictators, one way or the other,
and sometimes dictators who act extremely brutally.
The House of Saud is given its reward for supporting the British against the Turks in the creation of something called Saudi Arabia.
Most ominously, the Ottoman territory of Palestine is taken over as a mandate colony by Britain.
In the course of the war the British, in order to gain all the support they could, promised
on the one hand that the Arab states would be free and independent, that they could raise
up the desert Arabs against the Turks, and on the other hand promised Zionists that Palestine
would become a homeland for Jews.
not exclusively for Jews, because the Balfour Declaration, where this was expressed, said
that the rights of the present inhabitants of Palestine should be respected. Nonetheless,
Balfour was a high member of the British Foreign Office. Nonetheless, the first international
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.
The state is not going to be declared until 1948, but nonetheless this gave an opening for increased Jewish immigration into this Arab country.
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.
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.
How did the world look in 1919, as far as the great powers were concerned?
Well, Russia had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, so it was at least temporarily outside of the family of nations anyway.
And the Bolsheviks, of course, were involved in their own civil war and their own civil disturbances, so they were hardly a factor.
Austria-Hungary didn't exist anymore.
Germany was down and the French and others hoped it was out permanently.
So the League of Nations then, which established the principle that aggression meant crossing borders,
was an instrument to eternalize Anglo-French world hegemony.
The borders were fine. The borders of the world were fine as far as the British and the French were concerned.
This is the way it should be and this is the way it should stay.
And the League of Nations now was this peacekeeping organization dedicated to preserving the borders
of 1919.
If they had gotten the United States into this, then the Americans would have been obliged
to lend when necessary military support to the preservation of this Anglo-French world
hegemony.
That's the fact of the matter, as many realists in the United States and elsewhere saw it.
Now, this is only one example of, well so much for our maps, ha, this is only one example
of, and I've taken World War I because it's a very well known example, a lot is known
about the war, it's very interesting on other grounds, it's very significant because of
of its Consequences, but this is one example of the burning need for revisionism, what's
called revisionism. I don't know how much anybody would be willing to bet me, but I'd
be willing to bet a lot, even more than the $250 I'm getting for these ten lectures from
the Mises Institute. I'd be willing to bet a lot that the President of the United States
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.
I think that sounds more like Pearl or Wolfowitz or maybe even Cheney.
But revisionism, as it pertains to historical interpretation, is an absolute necessity.
What's the alternative to revisionism?
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.
To believe the propaganda that a state involved in war necessarily always puts out, always tries to spread,
Revisionism, to one degree or another, is absolutely called for, absolutely necessary, in regard to every war.
If we take the last good war, the war everybody likes, World War II, there's been necessary revisionism in regard to that.
I mean, of course, there's revisionism in regard to that.
The war everybody likes, World War II, there's been necessary revisionism in regard to that.
I mean, of course, there's revisionism of the school I agree with and Joe and others here,
but there's been revisionism even among mainstream historians.
Nobody now believes the story that was told during the war and right after the war,
that Franklin Roosevelt worked tirelessly for peace right until he was totally stunned and surprised
by the Japanese attack on American forces in Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and elsewhere.
That was the American government story. Nobody believes that. As a matter of fact, the people who
like Roosevelt say, no, you know, he did plan to get us into war with Germany and turned out with
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.
I don't understand how anybody thinks that they can maintain the story of the Vietnam War
now that people like McNamara say that, well, you know, now we really had no idea why we went into Vietnam.
And it turned out really to be kind of a mistake. Sorry.
The man who was the secretary of defense and the chief impetus in favor of that war in the Johnson administration.
so that revisionism, as I say, is necessary.
The state engages in propaganda constantly, especially in regard to war,
and the reason for this is clear.
As the French philosopher La Boétie,
I think Chantal is familiar with this writer,
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,
about how the state depends totally on opinion.
The ruler is just one person or a small number of people.
Even his supporters are a limited number of people.
The ones who are ruled are the vast majority.
How are they going to be ruled by a relatively small number except through opinion, through
through instilling in them, planting in their minds, the legitimacy of the state and the
arguments for state control.
So this is done through glorifying the state's wars, isn't it funny how with the possible
exception of Vietnam, all of America's wars have been justified, have been right, have
been good, I mean, what are the odds of something like that?
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.
Eurasia with the Slavic people and their inveterate bloodlust and traditional cannibalism
It was started with the Belgian atrocities stories of 1914.
Really, maybe the first great propaganda success in modern times.
At my apartment in Buffalo, I have a poster selling liberty bonds,
and it shows a burning village in the background,
and it shows a big hulking German soldier with his Pickelhaube helmet.
The British government is dragging along a 10-11 year old girl into the bushes, and it says remember Belgium, buy liberty bonds.
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.
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.
In Washington, they're going to run out of room after a while.
I mean, even the D.C. is a pretty limited area now with, what is it, seven and a half acres
in the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial.
What happens when the Harry Truman Memorial comes, the George Bush Memorial, all of these
other memorials.
And school children are brought to see these things, and the state's myth is carried on
from one generation to another.
Now I want to talk about something about the situation in regard to liberty in the present
day.
Hayek, I think, was quite right when he said in the last years of his life, well, socialism
is essentially dead.
The traditional standard socialist program, nationalization of industry and central economic
Planning, the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and what's happening in
China and so on, that no serious person defends the idea of central economic planning and
nationalization of industry as the road to prosperity. The ones who do practice it, I
suppose in Cuba, North Korea and so on, well they hangers on of the regimes that have been
has been there for decades. So it is the case that traditional socialism has gone into oblivion.
Hayek said, however, that socialism is being replaced by the welfare state.
And this certainly is the case.
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
The Polizeistaat, Police in the sense of regulation by the government.
There's literature on this that I could be citing to you.
As always, I'll be willing to send you citations if you care to have them.
There's great literature on the subject.
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.
And he distinguishes three stages.
The first was the welfare state that came into existence with the so-called enlightened despotism of the early modern period.
and that existed in France, that existed in the German states, above all Prussia,
it existed in the Austrian states.
And there were treatises written for the government bureaucrats who were going to be regulating agriculture industry,
setting up hospitals, setting up educational institutions, insane asylums,
all the sort of things that were going to be operating the poor laws,
all the sort of things that were supposed to be helping people,
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.
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.
That's why, if you look at the greatest book written in Germany on liberalism before the rise of the Austrian School,
and that is The Limits of State Action by the great German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt.
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.
This is what, actually it was the elder Mirabeau who said that, and this is what Humboldt was saying also.
And what was his rage to govern? The welfare state that was coming into existence.
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.
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.
Now, Dorwert, the scholar I mentioned, then talks about the second stage of the welfare state,
which was the period of classical liberalism and the retreat of the state and the introduction of laissez-faire.
And that lasted for a few decades in Europe.
And then finally, the third stage begins, as I'll talk about in a moment, in the 1880s in Germany.
And it is the stage of the indefinitely expanding welfare state that we are privileged to experience today.
Some people might be surprised that the welfare state came into existence in Prussia,
Well, Germany, Prussian-controlled Germany, under the aegis of Bismarck, whom I talked about last time.
Bismarck was no friend of freedom. He was, in a paternalistic way, a friend of common people,
and looking out for their welfare. But there were other reasons behind his introduction of
and the welfare legislation into Germany in the 1880s.
Odd as it may seem, we can pinpoint where the modern welfare state started, and it was there.
He introduced old age pensions, disability, insurance, health insurance, and other welfare measures.
The reason was, as his conservative advisors agreed with him, that people were becoming too independent.
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.
They were becoming too independent.
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.
As they become more independent, they take care of other things, like their health insurance provisions for old age and so on.
And what's going to happen to their gut loyalty to the government?
Well, he said he had noticed under Napoleon III in France, who started some of these welfare measures,
and Napoleon set up pensions for certain categories of people,
he had noticed that people who look forward to a government pension
tend to be much more amenable than people who are acting on their own,
looking to their own support in various ways to the private sector.
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.
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.
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.
Now, nothing is more certain than your boss doesn't care how he divides up your salary.
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
This contribution certainly helped Bismarck's plans along.
Bismarck was opposed in these measures by the German liberals.
I have a book on the German liberalism in general that Guido Hilsemann translated into German for me.
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,
because, my heavens, these were actual Germans who were against welfare,
who were against the welfare state,
welfare state being enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany,
which is a social state, as they say,
given to human dignity, also in these material terms of supporting welfare.
So these German liberals are not treated very well by historians, either here or abroad,
but they came up with very good arguments against the welfare state and in
particular pointed out you know what's going to be the end of this people get
the impression that the government has endless largesse to distribute what's
going to stop them from just the government from creating more and more
programs taking more and more of the people's income through taxes and then
distributed it through alleged welfare measures.
The German liberals, by the way, understood perfectly the mechanism that the School of Public Choice talks about.
That is how benefits are concentrated and costs are dispersed among the whole population
and how this works in with modern electoral politics.
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.
There might be some setbacks from time to time.
But as for instance in America, the Clinton health program to immediately socialize 14% of the American economy did not get through.
On the other hand, what are we witnessing now? Prescription drugs for older people and anything that is for America's kids.
I don't know when this concept came in of America's kids.
I don't think it existed in our time, in earlier, in the earlier years.
America's, what do you mean America's kids?
You know, there's Mrs. Marino's kids, and there's Mrs. Fleischman's kids,
and there's kids of different families, and the kids are in that family.
They don't belong to some huge, unbelievable, over a quarter of a billion,
practically 300 million strong collective called America.
But that argument of doing something for America's kids is unanswerable.
We should always keep in mind that half of the population by definition has an IQ of
less than 100.
So we see in New York State, because the states are going into various speeds here, in New
York State there's one aspect of socialized medicine after another that's put in.
Now, for instance, there is state-funded insurance for all people who can't afford it otherwise,
who have children in their family, and that's coming in in a few years, and the Republican
governor boasts about that.
So it's a matter of time until something very like the original Clinton program comes
into existence.
There might not be the coercion that was originally proposed, or else maybe if there's a Democratic
president, there will be such coercion.
But the welfare state does experience defeats from time to time, but then it picks itself
up and goes ahead to greater and greater victories.
So this is what we have to worry about, I think, in the modern world.
But this welfare state has another aspect to it that Paul Gottfried talks about, and
I mentioned Gottfried's two books, After Liberalism and his more recent book on multiculturalism.
The welfare state is a managerial state, a therapeutic state, a state that is concerned
to radically redo the values and traditions of society.
And what's more obvious than that, I don't know.
Wasn't there once on the Alabama license plates some phrase to the effect that Alabama was
the heart of Dixie?
I think there was.
I think maybe the last time I was here there was, or at least that was on some license plates.
Now it's virtually disappeared, I mean literally disappeared. It's down in a small print if you have an Auburn license plate.
I know what it is, but I'm trying to figure out what the hell it means.
Stars fell on Alabama. I guess that's a good thing.
This is a very small example, obviously, but why are they doing something like this?
Of course, Alabama is the heart of Dixie. What else would it be?
We're not talking racism here. We're talking about the very mention of the name Dixie is now taboo
because of the state diktat, and years to come it's going to get worse and worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What could possibly represent an end to this? How could this end?
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
the pensions and medical care and so on for the retired, older, non-tax payers now, retired people.
Where are these young tax payers to come from? Since the Europeans don't seem to be,
I don't know if they've forgotten how to do it, but don't seem to be very interested in having kids.
And in America, the white population does not replace itself.
So where are these new taxpayers to come from?
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.
And, of course, they're going to get old after a while, and they're probably going to have fewer kids.
But that's going to be way in the distance, and the politicians who are worried about it now will be long since gone,
and they don't have to worry about what's going to happen down the road, typical of politics,
typical of the whole, implied necessarily in the logic of democratic politics.
They don't have to worry what happens down the road, but what will have happened in the meantime
is that they will have destroyed the identity, first of all, of the European nations.
There's no such thing as, as far as I can see, of a France that's one-third Muslim.
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.
So they'll destroy the identity of the European peoples, eventually also the American people, although we have some leeway in our country.
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.
Now, well, is this pessimistic? Well, it's kind of pessimistic, you might say, but I'm not just pessimistic.
By my contract with the Mises Institute, I cannot be just pessimistic, so there has to be hope.
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.
this perfect day
Brazil, Kiss Before Dying, Death Trap, Stepford Wives, and he wrote this, if you check out
one of the histories of the Objectivist Institute, while he was attending Objectivist lectures
in New York. This is his really quite libertarian work, and it's a futuristic work. So, a glimpse
into the Future, and when it was in paperback and easily available, I gave out a lot of
copies. I've never come across any libertarian who didn't at least try to read it in one
city. You know, maybe at three in the morning it got too late and they had to finish it
the next morning. But I look at the book, it's on the library shelf, This Perfect Day, it's
It's on the library shelves and it gives you an idea of what I think eventually might happen.
Futuristic, kind of 1984, but with a different ending.
Now we've talked about classical liberalism in different respects this week.
One thing certainly was clear, I imagine, and that was that the liberals aimed to limit
government government was to be limited to certain functions things that the
government had done historically it was to leave alone and in many countries the
liberals thought that a means for doing this would be constitutionalism
constitution is by definition something that limits the government that is it
says what the government can do and by implication what the government can't do
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.
Benjamin Constant spent a good deal of his life coming up with constitutional arrangements for France after the great revolution.
And, as we know, liberal revolutions aimed very often, principally, at setting up a constitution
on the European continent, for instance, in the early 19th century, in Spain, during the
liberal agitation there, or in the different German states, up until Germany was unified,
setting up a constitution.
And the United States Constitution is probably the most famous example of these liberal constitutions.
The aim was to limit the government.
And the drafters tried as much as possible to do that.
And just to nail it down, they added some amendments to the Constitution, the first
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
And then, I don't know how many people have ever put this together with that, that is, the facts together,
the Second Amendment, right after that, right after the enumeration of these basic rights and religion, speech, assembly and so on,
the Second Amendment comes, as Blackstone said in Commentary on the Laws of England,
One of the major ways of defending our basic liberties.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
That comes right after the Second Amendment.
But let's go on to the end of the Bill of Rights.
And you'd suppose, I mean, what more could you possibly put into writing
that would guarantee a limited government
and would guarantee the freedom of the people than this, Article 9.
The enumeration and the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
What does that mean?
Well, these are not the only rights people have.
In fact, it's the other way around.
The government has just a few powers and the people are swimming an ocean of rights.
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.
And then Article 10, the last of the Bill of Rights.
The power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by it to the states,
or reserved to the states respectively or to the people.
That nails it down, right?
The Federal Government can only do precisely what it's given authority to do in the body of the Constitution.
So, it was a heroic attempt to limit government, but very quickly, the Hamiltonian and then
the Whig tradition arose in America to expand the powers of the national government. And
very quickly also, the national government's own Supreme Court set itself up as the ultimate
Arbiter of the Constitution, an Interpreter of the Constitution, very dangerous.
What could be a protection against this?
What could be a protection against the national government doing all kinds of things in the
economy, protective tariffs, so-called internal improvements, pork for, meaning pork for their
Contractor Friends and the Railroads and so on, printing money that forces on the people.
What could prevent the Federal Government from doing that?
Well, the states, it's the states, it's a federal system.
And in critical times, some states even threatened secession when they thought that the Federal
Government was going beyond its legitimate powers.
famously in the 1830s by South Carolina, over the tariff, not over slavery, over the tariff.
But then it came to power in the United States a party that was perceived by a large part of the population
as aiming to implement once and for all the Hamiltonian and Whig program.
That said, in this program they were going to be putting into effect a protective tariff
The consequence of which would be to fatally harm the interests of the South, and then secession came.
Now, there have been a number of interesting pieces written on the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.
One, which is, I'm not sure on the Mises website, but I'll give you the citation from the Southern
Economic Journal of 1992 by a friend of the Institute, Randall Holcomb, who points out
that the framers of the Southern Constitution very well understood principles of public
choice, so that their legislature was prohibited from erecting protective tariffs and giving
special favors, bounties and so on to industry.
Marshall de Rosa, who has spoken at the Mises Institute, has discussed the Confederate Constitution
and a little book, and come to similar conclusions, that is, that the Confederate Constitution,
because of the experience of the American people up until that time, was dedicated to
preventing the Confederate government from acting the way the Federal Government had
acted.
This was the last great attempt to thwart the will of Washington, and it came down to
a struggle of arms, as it had in England in the 17th century, as it had with the Italian
city-states against the German emperor in the 12th century, as it had with people fighting
for their freedom at different times in history.
And before you bring in the question of slavery, I think maybe you might consider what a great
lover of the slaves like General Sherman had in mind, going from Atlanta to the sea,
burning deliberately, consciously burning every possible means of subsistence in his
way.
What were the tens and tens of thousands of slaves on the plantation supposed to be living
When the Union soldiers killed all the chicken and livestock and burned all the corn fields
and destroyed all the other means of subsistence.
No concern for the slaves there it seems.
So that the South was defeated and as Lord Acton wrote to Robert E. Lee, that was the
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
No institutional limit, no theoretical limit to what the national government can do.
You say, well, we still have the Bill of Rights.
Well, yeah, we have the Bill of Rights, but the Bill of Rights has to be interpreted.
It's interpreted by the Federal Supreme Court, right?
We know already that commercial, take the First Amendment,
we know that commercial speech is not privileged speech, right?
as pornographic speech of course is not privileged speech, that it's not speech per se that's
privileged that Congress may not infringe on. So what happens when the five or six majority
liberals on the liberal so-called on the Supreme Court, maybe graduates of the law schools which
are preaching this very point today, decide that hate speech is not privileged speech,
Hate Speech, that it doesn't come under the protection of the First Amendment.
And hate speech can include everything that you might think of including.
Hate speech would include, might very well include, it could be argued in court.
Hate speech includes, well, we have to stop with, do away with welfare in New York City.
Well, that's hate speech because the implication is clearly that we should do away with welfare
and therefore minority populations, which are the great bulk of the people who get welfare in New York City.
This seems strange to you. I would suggest that political correctness a couple of decades ago
and the extent to which it's gone in America and Europe would have seemed very strange.
My point being that the Bill of Rights, per se, is not going to be any protection of all liberties.
Ever since I translated Mises liberalism many years ago, and even before that, I've been
interested in the history of classical liberalism, and most of my research has concerned that.
And I am coming to a conclusion, which I held theoretically but feel more strongly about
and hold, you might say, practically now, that there is no answer within classical liberalism.
The liberals had no answer because they strove to preserve the state and I say I held this
view theoretically because I agreed with Murray Rothbard, my old friend, that ultimately the
kind of system we want is a system of where individuals are empowered to select their
own means of defense, their own let's say defense agencies, their own courts, just as
as they select any other service of theirs.
So I held that for a long time.
But now what I'm telling you is that it's very clear that there is no way of salvaging limited government.
It's simply going to be getting worse and worse.
So our more direct and immediate aim has to be to destroy the centralized state,
to do away with the centralized state in stages.
I'm not talking violent in the revolution.
As a matter of fact, I hope that the leaders of the United States,
President Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the other leaders of the United States,
I hope they live forever, and I wish them well.
Joking aside, obviously I'm not talking about violence. There's no point to start violence and see what happens.
We're going to be like the Branch Davidians all over again.
So it has to be, of course, education and political action.
But the aim has to be to break down the central state.
And when I say by any means necessary, I mean, for instance, by secession.
The Mises Institute has a whole book of very interesting scholarly essays on the question of secession.
Secession of provinces, as for instance Lombardy in Italy.
Let's hope the Basques and the Catalans get their independence.
In Spain, Corsica, from France, the breakup of Belgium, the sooner it happens, the better.
I don't know where the EU bureaucrats are going to escape to, but wherever they go,
The breakup of states down into provinces into cities.
Now, if Lombardy is going to succeed from Italy, I don't understand why Verona has to be enslaved under the tyranny of Milan.
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.
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.
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.
But I don't mean necessarily that. I mean, for instance, proprietary communities.
A company can get together, buy land in a certain area, and provide also for the security, the police of that area.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
In any case, this, I think, is the only hope, unless you can suggest something else.
I don't think classical liberalism is possible anymore.
and I guess I assumed this would go without saying what you have to read in connection with this
and really one of the finest books written in recent years and it has become quite a bestseller
translated now into a number of European languages and that is the book by Professor Hoppe
Hoppe, called Democracy, The God That Failed. The God That Failed refers to a famous book
of the 1950s, a collection of essays by ex-communists called The God That Failed, and it was about
communism. So, Hans Hoppe outlines and backs up much of what I've said in the last few
with a panoply of arguments. Finally, just to remind you of what we've done this week.
Basically, we've gone into a study of history. History is a struggle of liberty and how liberty came out of Europe,
in Europe, how liberty developed in Europe, the history of classical liberalism, I was
faced with various enemies, but the basis of everything we've done, I think, is a feeling
that I have and that the Mises Institute has, that history is a very important part of understanding
The Case for Liberty and the Possibilities of Liberty.
It's not an accident that George Orwell in 1984 talks about history and the rewriting
of history, the constant rewriting of history by the men in power and the tyrants.
And there's a mantra or a saying that goes through the book.
He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the
past.
He who controls the past controls the future because people make up their minds about what
they want and what they will support and what they will fight for very often on the basis
of their understanding of history, as we talked about when we talked about the Industrial
Revolution.
He who controls the present controls the past, because the past doesn't exist by itself.
Oh, you know, there are written records, but in Orwell's world, those records can simply
be destroyed or obliterated, fabricated.
There are gravestones, there are coins, I mean, there are residues.
But basically, those who control the interpretation of the past control the past.
The people of the present time, who, because of their positions of power, control the understanding
that people have of the past, can control it, and in that way control the future.
And we don't want to be in that kind of position.
As an Italian, an Italian-American, I go back often to Machiavelli, who was not a nice man,
but he was a very smart man and a very sharp man.
and in The Prince he talks about how men who want power can gain power and what the nature
of power is and what the nature of politics is and he says, look, I'm writing for a few
people. This is in just what he says, I'm writing for a few people. I'm not writing
for the mass of people. The mass of people prefer appearance to reality. They prefer
for their fantasy to what actually exists. If they knew what politics really was, they
wouldn't have a good night's sleep for the rest of their lives. It really is scary. And
there are only some men of strength, some men of power, some men of force who can deal
with this. The average person born to be sheep, and as another Italian Pareto said, the average
He who plays the sheep will find the butcher.
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.
Now, this time we have a good deal of time, plenty of time really, for questions, anything
that came up this week, anything that came up today, and ideas you might have about the
Status of Freedom in the world today, in our society today, and the prospects.
He wrote Limits of State Action in the mid-1790s, but he lived until about 1832.
Chantel?
Is that true? In English? Really? Huh?
It's on the Mises site. It's on the Mises site at Rothbard's introduction.
Oh, I see. Another plot. Okay, yeah, I guess I meant the Mises. But whatever, JLS is what?
is under, it was in the JLS, wasn't it? That's right, yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah,
yeah, okay, you're right, you're right. Right, it was under the old review of Austrian economics,
so that's on the Mises website. Yeah, okay, Joe, please. I mean, Joe, you're embarrassing
I think that all socialist leaders are evil, and I agree with you that it was evil, however,
I don't think he is extremely evil because I think he is this and other socialists dictated
and I think Churchill knows all of this is bad and I think Stalin was much worse
take it for granted that you agree with me that Hitler certainly was evil
yeah well alright
well at least uh...
we have a breakthrough here
uh...
any other questions comments feel free to say anything that you want to say
one thing you mentioned about
Bismarck's
social programs
which started around 1875, 1880.
The same thing happened in England about 30 years later
to abolish the mutual assistance.
And there were living funders sometimes through religions,
sometimes from just societies of friends.
Sure, friendly societies they were often called.
And that was one of the first things to eliminate.
Well, they eliminated them mainly
by giving free government programs instead.
The British welfare state came into existence a few years
before the First World War.
And it's as clear as anything how it came into existence.
And that is that Lloyd George, who
is the chancellor of the Exchequer,
and his assistant, Winston Churchill,
went to Germany and saw, this was around 1908 or so, saw Bismarck, of course, Lord Ded,
saw the Bismarckian system in operation and Churchill says, which you can find in my Churchill
article in that book, Churchill said, this is a great system, we have to have a big,
We have to add a big slice of Bismarckianism to our English scene.
What Churchill and Lloyd George saw were the electoral advantages of supporting welfare
legislation.
So, it was under Lloyd George and the Asquith administration before the First World War that
the first welfare measures were put into effect in England.
So that the connection between Germany and England is as clear as anything.
And what Dr. Prince is getting at is this, Tocqueville and visiting America and also
visiting England, which he loved, his wife was English, said the English speaking people,
the Anglo-Saxons, he meant also the Celtic people and their descendants, have a genius
for Free Association.
America is the best example of this.
You go to America and in any community, the people get together and do everything that's
necessary.
You need a public library, you need a fire department, you need a bridge, you need an
extension on the road, the people do it themselves.
In France, people get together and apply to Paris, to the appropriate bureau to fund and
The English people and their descendants have a genius for free association.
Now, by the end of the 19th century, in England, as you say, they had come into existence a
huge number of what we generally call friendly societies.
Working people, not so affluent people, have been concerned about various needs that they
and their family have had. They've always been concerned. Back in Roman times, groups
of workmen would get together and the major thing was to arrange for a funeral, for a grave
site when they died. Working people are human beings, poor people are human beings, worry
about something like that and gives small contributions each time.
So by voluntary associations, voluntary contributions arranging for these things.
Now, by the time this came into existence, these problems came to the fore with a great
working class, let's say in England at the end of the 19th century, you had a vast number
of associations for all kinds of things, for sickness, even for unemployment, which would
In America, you had similar associations, and David
Beto of the University of Alabama has examined these.
They were very often ethnically divided, and a reason for that is you would have a problem,
a moral hazard problem, that is, people kind of exploiting or taking advantage of the system.
But let's say somebody said that, well, he was ill, too ill to go to work, and could he
get some compensation?
Well, it makes a difference if his friends, if his paisans come to him and visit him and
know something about the traditions, the way of life of the family, because it's their
way of life, come to a conclusion, you know, is he faking or malingering or is he really
ill?
were tended to be divided often on ethnic grounds.
The largest such group of insured people in Chicago, for instance, at a certain time, were blacks.
We're talking about 1890 and so on.
Black families that saw to their own family needs of insurance for health, for old age, and so on.
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.
But Ben, really, that's a very trivial point. I said the Anglo-Saxons in America, and then
I said the Celtic people also. Not because they were speaking any Celtic language in America,
but because in Appalachia and other places, they were the descendants of these Scottish,
Irish and the Scots. Do you want, perhaps, to raise something of greater significance
What? Come on, Ben, you can think of something better than that.
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.
And what does that mean exactly?
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.
Because you have to have standards that you're moving towards, and if you don't recognize
the truth of what works, then there's no reason to even move towards it.
If you don't recognize the truth of what works, then there's no reason to even move towards it.
We have the goal in mind, it's what's the best thing?
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.
That's what we're debating.
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?
Since we do have a government and a welfare state that are not built on libertarian principles,
you will many times have the people's rights on conflict.
It's very hard to interpret how to apply libertarian principles in a conflicting world.
Would you disagree with that?
Well, I'm not sure exactly. How about an example?
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.
Don't be ridiculous.
I'll take your word for it over here.
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.
I suppose not to do anything. Just wait for the next, maybe a half to heaven.
Paying with cash and having no luggage, in that case we could have, if we did not have government regulations about racial discrimination,
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.
Well, that would be my point, you know, you can apply for the criteria.
No, but private property would have taken care of that.
Well, but we do not have private defense agencies as it is now, right?
We have the threat now, but we do not have all these private institutions to help us.
Well, okay, then I guess I didn't understand what your example would be.
If you talk about terrorists about to commit some terrorist act,
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.
They have not fallen out. They are their own poverty scheming and collecting dynamite or whatever.
You say, well, they have not harmed anyone. So maybe they will not.
No, look, there are a lot of different questions that are dealt with by law, that is a lot of different legal questions.
Where does probable cause come in and permit us to take certain measures?
Now, where does probable cause of the commission of a felony come in that would permit us then to take various measures?
A lawyer, a libertarian lawyer, a lawyer who believes in private defense agencies, for instance,
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.
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.
I mean, the private defense agencies would also be interested in that.
And the issue comes up now for...
There are no private defense agencies that can do anything like that.
The issue comes up now for government agencies.
I mean, there it's a problem.
When they're entitled to do something and when they're not.
Would you agree that you can put up criteria that if you behave in certain suspicious ways,
that you, you know, could act before they have done anything, any harm?
Now, you know, it's a question of, there's not any particular criterion that can decide that.
It is very much a question of circumstance, that's why they talk about probable cause,
that's why they talk about presenting the evidence for probable cause to a judge,
who then will give a warrant for a search or whatever. Yes, you.
I just want to point out that in these situations where we, you know, debate the idea of, well,
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?
Lost in the bigger perspective is this point that the state and those who want to use state power to politicize a police society,
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.
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.
I mean, Serbia. Albania's in wag the door.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I agree with you basically, but I think what Peir is bringing up, what do you do in the meantime?
Let's say you're deconstructing the state, but practical issues come up all the time, and how's that to be decided?
I certainly don't believe any of this is easy.
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.
No doubt about it, but there are also other enemies.
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.
They won't help you there. They don't. There's no record of them doing so.
It's possible, but of course everything depends on circumstances. Wait a minute, what do we have back here?
Wait a minute, what is this, an anarchical element?
Do you want to say something?
Say something!
Say something or else I'll beat you
within an inch of your life.
You see, there's some people who just don't understand free discussion.
Go ahead, please.
Oh, okay.
But what about on this issue or something else?
Okay, go ahead.
What's your question?
and the whole intellectual struggle for a living.
Well, I mean, who is going to be the ultimate, so to say, fighter or promoter of the process of living?
Ordinary people or...?
to tell you who's going to be the ultimate fighters.
Intellectuals have a disproportionate influence
because they create ideologies,
and human beings find ideologies very often attractive.
But one thing, so I don't know how to,
I really don't know how to answer that in particular.
Some last question or two?
My question is in response to what Ludwig said before about this whole concept of probable cause and preemptive caution.
Dr. Michael Saliba presented a paper at the Austrian Scholars Conference which talked about how the idea of targets for terrorists are always changing.
You're five muslims, by an example.
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.
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.
The possibility of hijacking was in the minds of many people.
I think that if American Airlines had been given its choice, it would have questioned these men.
But on the other hand, they would have been afraid they'd be sued for racial discrimination.
But you're right, the terrorist targets do change.
I don't think it's going to be another case of using a plane as a bomb.
Whatever it's going to be, it's going to be terrible.
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.
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.
No, no, no, I'm not telling you to act in any particular way in your professional or social life, not at all.
As a matter of fact, I think that for a graduate student, there's no particular reason to bring up your political views,
your scientific economic views of something different. I mean, I don't see how you can stay away from, get away from that.
If you're going to be, let's say, you're an economist, right, if you're going to be an economist.
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.
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.
As a matter of fact, probably there are a lot of people who shouldn't know about your views.
Sometimes you get, they're libertarian students, okay, you know, God bless them, salt of the earth.
of the Earth. But then, what they do is they go to college and they write on libertarian
issues for every course. Like for their French course, they would write about Bastiat, and
you know, in world history they would write revisionist stuff and literature on maybe
Ayn Rand, let's say, and that's not any way to get a liberal education, and why spend
The purpose of being in college or then in grad school is not to change the world from
the position you're in.
The purpose is to get an education and to get professional credentials.
Now I don't think you're going to want to dissemble or lie if it comes to that, if it
comes point blank, but I certainly am not saying that you should go out and broadcast
What do you mean? Somebody says, what do you think of the minimum wage? And what are you going to tell them?
Well, the minimum wage should be lowered. Right? Is that what you think?
Or do you think the minimum wage should be abolished?
Am I talking in Hungarian suddenly? Nobody seems to be understanding me.
You're not going to say the minimum wage should be lowered to whatever, you know, $4.50 an hour.
I presume, like most economists, not even going to have to be Austrian about it,
but you'd say that you abolished the minimum wage.
So I'm not sure in what case you would be compromising.
What about the Fed?
I think Friedman is in favor of abolishing the Fed now, isn't he?
He's very skeptical of the Fed and the Fed's power to do anything because of the lag between
getting any reliable statistics and then the Fed acting in a certain way and then producing
the desirable effect.
In any case, leaving aside particular examples, is there anybody who wants to bring up some
One other point, one last point, yes.
Is that true that he did? Is it true that Douglas North did? I'm surprised to hear that.
Roy was a good friend of mine and I don't know if anybody's ever heard of him but he was a big
influence in the libertarian movement and also in the libertarian party work for Cato and then
was a charger of books at laissez-faire books and quite an original individual. Now in previous
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.
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.
Somebody ever found out what that argument was. He didn't even give a hint of what that argument might be.
And then he died, because he was really very ill.
Aside from that, which, I don't know, maybe was a joke even, or some kind of role that Roy was playing,
I don't think that he became less radical.
If you're here next week, you'll see an example of somebody who's become more radical, and that's Robert Higgs.
Murray, of course, remained radical from the beginning.
Really from the beginning, when he was a grad student at Columbia until the end.
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.
So Murray was radical on one side or another until the very end.
Anybody want to speak to this gentleman's question?
How many people are getting, feel they're getting more radical as time goes on?
Okay, how many people are feeling less radical?
Can't you?
Okay, thank you. I think Chantal has a request to make.
I just wanted to take a video of you relaxing.
So, since you probably cannot be identified from the back of your head anyway, where do you want people to sit?
Wait a minute. What's going on here? Hold on a second. What's going on here?
Then we don't have Mason.
Everybody's going to come here, we're going to have a group picture. I'll send you a copy.
Would you like that? No, I don't take photographs very well.
That's not what I wanted to do.
Why did you allow this kid to take over?
I want to stand like a pair of guys.
Okay Mason, come on to the front here.
It gets taller every day. Have you noticed? You're at least two inches taller than you
were at the beginning of the week. Jeremy, what's wrong? He's Canadian. He doesn't
think he can get back into the country. We've got to get closer though, don't we?
We've got to get closer, right?
Ben, you're hidden.
Okay, very good.
Well,
okay.
Okay, take one.
Right, right, right, right.
Right? Say cheese, now smile. Everybody say, right go. Very good. Thank you so much. You're welcome.