WEBVTT NOTE Cycles, Business and Otherwise, in the Austrian World View 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 I want to thank you all. I was doing some research anyway up in Tallahassee with respect to... 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:14.000 We've got a bibliographical stuff to add to the third edition of History of Florida and it will be out in a few weeks at the University of Miami Press. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:23.000 I've added a whole bunch of free market stuff in it, gave a paper I was telling a couple of you about a couple of years ago on Wayne Huizinga. 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.000 It was called The New Entrepreneurship and Implications for the 21st Century. 5 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Mr. Heising, after he read it, it was in the newspaper, after my paper tried to get me fired, the president told him I had tenure, and he's been at it recently while I was in Europe, trying to get a new subsidy for the stadium, and this time there's enough public indignation to turn him down, but I differentiated between, I don't know if you're aware of the fact that with Russia and Israel, they've made a differentiation between entrepreneurship and what they call 6 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:03.800 Entrepreneurship, which is hard to say, and I added an I, so it's politifunership, and 7 00:01:03.800 --> 00:01:08.080 we'll talk about it later today, but it seems to me one of the dangers is that under the 8 00:01:08.080 --> 00:01:13.160 guise of what we would call entrepreneurship, which means seeing an opportunity and risking 9 00:01:13.160 --> 00:01:18.840 your own capital, that there are a number of people, and have been, when they used to 10 00:01:18.840 --> 00:01:24.560 honestly call it mercantilism or something like that, that by entrepreneurship they mean 11 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:54.560 and Risk in Government's Capital, and those are really polit-preneurs, etc. So I'll be giving a paper related to that also for Florida Historic on Friday in Jacksonville, after going over to Savannah tomorrow to see my old teacher who did the original history of Florida, who was 93 yesterday, and still going strong, a really brilliant guy, Charlton Tebow. But it struck me that you might find some interest in the idea of cycles, 12 00:01:54.560 --> 00:02:02.560 After all, Austrian theory, at the very heart of it, is the idea of the business cycle. 13 00:02:02.560 --> 00:02:03.560 We all know that. 14 00:02:03.560 --> 00:02:09.680 I think the best summary of that is in Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression, where 15 00:02:09.680 --> 00:02:16.880 he very succinctly points out the difference between some kind of monetary Milton Friedman 16 00:02:16.880 --> 00:02:22.640 idea of the business cycle, or some Keynesian idea of the business cycle, where it's government's 17 00:02:22.640 --> 00:02:35.640 and the Austrian view that the business cycle is an important part of the whole process of the market, lack of knowledge, etc., etc., 18 00:02:35.640 --> 00:02:39.640 whereas whereby the system wrings itself out. 19 00:02:39.640 --> 00:02:52.640 And since, I think that gives a clue as to why Austrian economic theory is so time or historically oriented, rather than mathematically oriented. 20 00:02:52.640 --> 00:03:00.640 Because after all, the business cycle takes place in time. And if you learn very much about that cycle, you're forced to be a historian, aren't you? 21 00:03:00.640 --> 00:03:12.640 So that raises an interesting question. What kind of a theory of history, if anything, does Austrian economic theory have? 22 00:03:12.640 --> 00:03:21.640 And if you go to Mises' Theory and History, you don't find very much of a theory, because the book is primarily directed against German historicism, 23 00:03:21.640 --> 00:03:32.140 and trying to cut, you know, against that idea, which was a very deterministic, in its worst dimensions, view of history. 24 00:03:32.140 --> 00:03:41.140 If you go to Murray, Murray never spent much time looking at some kind of a theory of history. 25 00:03:41.140 --> 00:03:49.140 The closest I found is in Roman numeral 9, an introduction that's in both volumes of his work on economic thought. 26 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:56.820 And he talks about the great man theory and how that kind of was combined with a progress 27 00:03:56.820 --> 00:04:00.980 theory which he calls Whig Theory. 28 00:04:00.980 --> 00:04:05.140 And one gets the impression, though he never quite says so, that he was something of a 29 00:04:05.140 --> 00:04:15.100 Whig viewist himself until he came across Kuhn's book on the structure of scientific revolutions. 30 00:04:15.100 --> 00:04:23.660 And so Murray argues against that kind of progressive view. 31 00:04:23.660 --> 00:04:25.460 And so that's about the extent of it. 32 00:04:25.460 --> 00:04:33.060 And what I would like to suggest is that, apart from some very deterministic German 33 00:04:33.060 --> 00:04:41.360 kind of cycles in history, that there is a much richer, open-ended tradition of cycles 34 00:04:41.360 --> 00:04:52.360 in History that Austrians might consider looking at, and most especially this book, which I 35 00:04:52.360 --> 00:04:57.840 did the bibliography, a bibliographical essay to, when I was Liberty Fund research scholar 36 00:04:57.840 --> 00:05:01.640 and they were starting Liberty Press, they asked us to recommend a book, and it's the 37 00:05:01.640 --> 00:05:07.720 only book I ever recommended, Carol Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations. How many of 38 00:05:07.720 --> 00:05:08.720 you are familiar with Quigley? 39 00:05:08.720 --> 00:05:38.720 This is Clinton's mentor isn't it? That's right. One person. Well, Lew is to some extent. I notice he has tragedy and hope. That's what I call one of the iron laws of discipleship. It didn't happen to Mises, thank God, but in most cases a disciple picks up, I'll leave it to you whether you think Paul did that, but the disciple picks up on some obscure point 40 00:05:38.720 --> 00:05:43.000 of the Master and that becomes the master's message and that's what's 41 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.440 unfortunately happened to Quigley. This book Tragedy and Hope where he had a 42 00:05:47.440 --> 00:05:52.680 little bit of a mention there of elites and their role was picked up by the 43 00:05:52.680 --> 00:05:59.280 the Burchers and and made the substance of Quigley and when he when for example 44 00:05:59.280 --> 00:06:05.800 as Lew mentioned and you were mentioning in Quigley and Clinton's acceptance 45 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:12.800 speech, July 17th, 1992 in Houston. He had also mentioned Quigley at Georgetown in the 46 00:06:13.240 --> 00:06:20.040 previous October, but he ends up the speech by saying that his idea of the covenant, whatever 47 00:06:20.040 --> 00:06:25.620 that is, came from Quigley. And the next day the New York Times had a little blurb on who 48 00:06:25.620 --> 00:06:32.080 Quigley was, this lecturer at Georgetown, a fabulous lecturer that had once failed half 49 00:06:32.080 --> 00:06:39.480 with his classes of 300, with regularity did, and got into the same bircher stuff without 50 00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:45.120 ever mentioning that this book had been reprinted with an introduction by one of Quigley's friends 51 00:06:45.120 --> 00:06:50.320 and was in permanent print with the Liberty Fund. It's only $7 and I recommend, if you're 52 00:06:50.320 --> 00:06:57.280 at all interested in cycle theory, that you get it. I know. After I had written, and I'll 53 00:06:57.280 --> 00:07:03.360 I'll draw on my own essay, egalitarianism and empire, that's in here right after Murray's 54 00:07:03.360 --> 00:07:09.200 essay. They were both given at this conference in Switzerland in 72. His is, you know, is 55 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:15.200 egalitarianism as a revolt against nature and mine is called egalitarianism and empire. 56 00:07:15.200 --> 00:07:21.120 It was printed in a pamphlet by the IHS in here. An earlier version called the E-factors 57 00:07:21.120 --> 00:07:26.920 in history was in modern age and most recently I understand it's been pirated in Venezuela 58 00:07:26.920 --> 00:07:41.320 When I read the Evolution of Civilizations, this 1961 version, and after I had written 59 00:07:41.320 --> 00:07:53.360 my essay, I wrote Quigley, and he was at that point already ill and dying. He died in 77. 60 00:07:53.360 --> 00:08:01.720 He sent me a critique and it was four pages, single space, no margins. And I got this pomposity 61 00:08:01.720 --> 00:08:06.020 that they talked about. Because he started and he said, I hope you won't mind if I really 62 00:08:06.020 --> 00:08:12.960 criticize you severely for your work, but you must understand that I don't usually bother 63 00:08:12.960 --> 00:08:19.200 with such people. And I see you as a promising young historian, so I had to start to live 64 00:08:19.200 --> 00:08:44.200 Cycle Theory, Social Change and History 65 00:08:44.200 --> 00:08:53.760 Book. I used to also use that in teaching history. The cycle is one of the oldest metaphors 66 00:08:53.760 --> 00:09:00.560 that we have. And if you go back to Chinese history, or you go back to the ancient Greeks, 67 00:09:00.560 --> 00:09:05.260 the idea of the historical cycle, the life cycle, today we call it the product cycle 68 00:09:05.260 --> 00:09:13.560 in business schools where I taught for 12 years at FAU before going back to history. 69 00:09:13.560 --> 00:09:20.060 The cycle's been with us longer than any other idea in history, in trying to explain history. 70 00:09:20.060 --> 00:09:21.980 So it's not just a business cycle. 71 00:09:21.980 --> 00:09:27.880 The business cycle is part of a larger historical cycle. 72 00:09:27.880 --> 00:09:36.040 And I think, unfortunately, when most people think of the historical cycle, they think 73 00:09:36.040 --> 00:09:41.820 of Toynbee, or they think of Spengler, or even the best neo-Spinglerian that I know 74 00:09:41.820 --> 00:09:47.540 of Armory de Riencourt. If you want to look at some interesting neo-Spenglarian, the soul 75 00:09:47.540 --> 00:09:54.540 of China, the soul of India, civilization and the Caesars and the American Empire. And then 76 00:09:54.540 --> 00:09:59.420 they're kind of neo-Spenglarian de Riencourt. Anybody heard of Armory de Riencourt? One. 77 00:09:59.420 --> 00:10:08.500 Lou has. I ought to mention, I guess Lou and I go back 26 years to when he edited the book 78 00:10:08.500 --> 00:10:38.500 The book I did with Nathaniel Weil, and he did a beautiful job with Arlington House, called American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro, I was reminded of that, I see you have an essay coming out, I haven't read it yet, David Gordon's, on this crazy Conor Cruz O'Brien book on Jefferson, I have not read the book, I read some reviews, but I read the original essay in Atlantic Monthly, and the guy is just nuts, I mean, he puts Lincoln, at least in that essay, forward as 79 00:10:38.500 --> 00:10:45.300 is a great kind of hero, you know, of non-racism. And as we pointed out in our book, of course, 80 00:10:45.300 --> 00:10:51.700 Lincoln was a student of Henry Clay and wanted, like Clay, to remove all blacks. At the end 81 00:10:51.700 --> 00:10:57.900 of the Civil War, in 64, 65, he's still trying to move them to Cowle Island in the Caribbean 82 00:10:57.900 --> 00:11:05.020 as some kind of a solution. So I don't know how you pull Lincoln forth as a figure of 83 00:11:05.020 --> 00:11:26.380 The problem with most cycle theory that causes people to turn away from it is because it's 84 00:11:26.380 --> 00:11:28.900 so deterministic. 85 00:11:28.900 --> 00:11:35.300 It predicts there's going to be a decline and there's no way to get out of that, right? 86 00:11:35.300 --> 00:11:41.060 The untagang das abenlandes, the nicest translation you can do is the twilight of the evening 87 00:11:41.060 --> 00:11:46.500 lands and hope that it's a long twilight, right, before we go under. 88 00:11:46.500 --> 00:11:53.220 And Quigley, in effect, says that's all nonsense, it's all nonsense. 89 00:11:53.220 --> 00:12:06.220 And in the Quiglian model, there are seven phases to the process that a civilization can go through, and I'll quickly list those. 90 00:12:06.220 --> 00:12:20.220 One is mixture, gestation is two, expansion is three, age of conflict is four, universal empire is five, decay is six, and invasion is seven. 91 00:12:20.220 --> 00:12:28.220 And, of course, that invasion and that cycle has occurred in a number of civilizations. 92 00:12:28.220 --> 00:12:39.340 There's a chart in Quigley on page, let's see, 82, 83 in this version of the book, that 93 00:12:39.340 --> 00:12:42.540 little chart, which shows some civilizations. 94 00:12:42.540 --> 00:12:49.220 And Huntington has just published this book, it's getting a lot of play, the clash of civilizations 95 00:12:49.220 --> 00:12:57.220 and the best thing in his book is Neo Quigley and he prints this chart but I think on the 96 00:12:57.220 --> 00:13:03.940 whole the book is a bunch of balderdash that one would expect from a trilateralist as he 97 00:13:03.940 --> 00:13:09.220 is at Harvard but the best stuff that's in the book is at least what he puts in from 98 00:13:09.220 --> 00:13:15.380 Quigley in a haphazard kind of way. It's too bad he doesn't have a little more Quigley 99 00:13:15.380 --> 00:13:21.140 in there. But when I was writing Egalitarianism and Empire, when I published it as the E-factors, 100 00:13:21.140 --> 00:13:30.300 I had four. But I'll give you my seven E-factors that correspond very closely to Quigley's. 101 00:13:30.300 --> 00:13:38.140 And I would suggest that civilizations go through the following phases. Equality, expansion, 102 00:13:38.140 --> 00:13:43.140 Envy, egalitarianism, empire, entropy and extinction. 103 00:13:43.140 --> 00:13:52.140 And so, it's very close to the Quigleyan cycle there, if you understand cycle theory. 104 00:13:52.140 --> 00:14:04.140 But what is neat in Quigley, and it relates to Austrian economics, is that he suggests that part of what a civilization, when it develops, 105 00:14:04.140 --> 00:14:19.140 by the way, his definition of a civilization is that a civilization comes into being when you develop enough of a surplus to have urbanism and right thinking 106 00:14:19.140 --> 00:14:27.140 we've had over 4,000 societies on this planet 107 00:14:27.140 --> 00:14:31.140 the women's movement these days argues that there are all these matriarchal societies 108 00:14:31.140 --> 00:14:37.140 I don't know if any of you are familiar with sociologist Stephen Goldberg's book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy 109 00:14:37.140 --> 00:14:41.140 but he points out in those 4,000 there is no indication of that 110 00:14:41.140 --> 00:14:44.140 there is no metrolinearity and some other things 111 00:14:44.140 --> 00:14:50.140 but at 4,000 societies we've had no more than about two dozen civilizations 112 00:14:50.140 --> 00:14:56.140 that is entities that were capable of urbanism plus writing 113 00:14:56.140 --> 00:15:02.380 And the kind of writing you get into is very sociological. As I pointed out in my paper 114 00:15:02.380 --> 00:15:12.380 here two months ago with respect to China, once you adopt an ideographic system, it almost 115 00:15:12.380 --> 00:15:17.960 deterministically means you're going to have rule by a group of old patriarchs because 116 00:15:17.960 --> 00:15:24.020 of how long it takes. You separate the written from the verbal and somebody then has to spend 117 00:15:24.020 --> 00:15:29.700 for years, learning the written. Now, there's a great deal to be said for ideographs, you 118 00:15:29.700 --> 00:15:35.700 know, our word for unhappiness is a very abstract kind of concept. If I mention it now, we get 119 00:15:35.700 --> 00:15:42.100 13 or 14 different images. The Chinese symbol, if you go back to the Shang dynasty, is beautiful. 120 00:15:42.100 --> 00:15:46.340 It's like this with two little figures with dresses. And what that means is unhappiness 121 00:15:46.340 --> 00:15:51.460 is two women under the same roof. We all know that's true. You know, and you get an instant 122 00:15:51.460 --> 00:15:58.000 Image of Unhappiness, try that, two women under the same roof. But the problem with 123 00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:02.600 the idiographic language is it means that you get a whole bureaucracy running the show 124 00:16:02.600 --> 00:16:07.980 and the adoption of the idiographic language by the Chinese is critical, critical. And 125 00:16:07.980 --> 00:16:15.580 the fact that we took the phonetic was an incredible step toward the free market, which 126 00:16:15.580 --> 00:16:24.300 which we can't be duplicated again of the fact that we did that. It's absolutely critical. 127 00:16:24.300 --> 00:16:32.940 But Quigley introduces the idea of an instrument of expansion. And what he means by that is 128 00:16:32.940 --> 00:16:42.660 that in every civilization, you have to create this surplus, and it has to be distributed 129 00:16:42.660 --> 00:16:49.940 other than in an egalitarian and segmented way if you're going to have progress. 130 00:16:49.940 --> 00:16:57.540 And every civilization has had at least one instrument of expansion. 131 00:16:57.540 --> 00:17:02.700 If we take Greco-Roman, for example, what he calls classical civilization, anybody guess 132 00:17:02.700 --> 00:17:12.780 That's what the instrument of expansion was that made classical civilization possible. 133 00:17:12.780 --> 00:17:18.280 In the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia and early China, what was it? 134 00:17:18.280 --> 00:17:19.280 The rivers. 135 00:17:19.280 --> 00:17:20.280 Right. 136 00:17:20.280 --> 00:17:22.100 Toynbee's challenge and response. 137 00:17:22.100 --> 00:17:25.580 But neither Greece nor Rome has these rivers. 138 00:17:25.580 --> 00:17:31.020 So what was the institution that they elevated as an instrument of expansion before it itself 139 00:17:31.020 --> 00:17:39.020 became institutionalized, which is really inexorably woven into the decline of the system, of the cycle. 140 00:17:39.020 --> 00:17:41.020 Is it democratic? 141 00:17:41.020 --> 00:17:51.020 No, slavery. Slavery. Slavery has two phases. In phase one, it is an instrument of expansion. 142 00:17:51.020 --> 00:17:58.220 In phase two, it has become an institution and bureaucratized. 143 00:17:58.220 --> 00:18:05.020 By the way, you understand what a definition of a bureaucracy is. 144 00:18:05.020 --> 00:18:15.220 When something becomes an instrument to solve a problem, it becomes bureaucratized when it thinks no longer of solving the problem, 145 00:18:15.220 --> 00:18:20.220 but its main fundamental objective is simply to sustain its own existence. 146 00:18:20.220 --> 00:18:25.100 And that's a good definition of bureaucracy as you can get it, because that's ultimately 147 00:18:25.100 --> 00:18:27.620 what bureaucrats want to do, isn't it? 148 00:18:27.620 --> 00:18:31.340 They used to be concerned with solving some problem. 149 00:18:31.340 --> 00:18:38.180 My son is in the FAA, he's a computer scientist, and he's got to either get out or blow the 150 00:18:38.180 --> 00:18:39.740 whistle at this point. 151 00:18:39.740 --> 00:18:47.180 I mean, it's become a real problem because of what's going on in the FAA, you see. 152 00:18:47.180 --> 00:18:53.740 So, in the first phase of slavery, you have the quality control. 153 00:18:53.740 --> 00:18:59.060 If you remember Cincinnati's at the bridge, he is obviously out in the field working with 154 00:18:59.060 --> 00:19:01.100 slaves, so you have quality control. 155 00:19:01.100 --> 00:19:04.300 He is not asking a slave to do anything he won't do. 156 00:19:04.300 --> 00:19:09.900 When you get lack of fundia, or whether it's people coming into Charleston to live and 157 00:19:09.900 --> 00:19:15.620 leave an overseer out there, you have what in business we call a quality control problem. 158 00:19:15.620 --> 00:19:21.940 Because there is no incentive for the overseer, who isn't getting a piece of the action, 159 00:19:21.940 --> 00:19:25.460 to really increase productivity, because he catches hell. 160 00:19:25.460 --> 00:19:31.580 So he will keep productivity along here, and the system has begun to be institutionalized 161 00:19:31.580 --> 00:19:39.540 and bureaucratized, and its decline in productivity will follow along the same line. 162 00:19:39.540 --> 00:19:45.820 So the way a civilization has saved itself, in western civilization it seems to me, has 163 00:19:45.820 --> 00:19:49.900 saved itself at least twice. 164 00:19:49.900 --> 00:19:55.500 The first one of these, are any of you familiar with books like Jean Quimpell, The Medieval 165 00:19:55.500 --> 00:20:00.260 Machine, The First Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages? 166 00:20:00.260 --> 00:20:05.980 Well what Quimpell argues, it seems to me, persuasively is, that there was, that this 167 00:20:05.980 --> 00:20:12.820 This idea of the dark ages, and again, here's that progressive view, it's a bunch of crap. 168 00:20:12.820 --> 00:20:19.460 It's clear that by the 13th century, 12th, 13th century, there was already a crisis in 169 00:20:19.460 --> 00:20:20.460 western civilization. 170 00:20:20.460 --> 00:20:24.500 An example of that crisis were the peasant wars. 171 00:20:24.500 --> 00:20:31.100 In one of my essays, it was published by Pacific Institute, it's on firearms and violence, 172 00:20:31.100 --> 00:20:33.480 if you've seen Don Kate's book. 173 00:20:33.480 --> 00:20:38.200 My essay in there is called Weapons, Technology and Legitimacy, The Second Amendment and Global 174 00:20:38.200 --> 00:20:39.200 Perspective. 175 00:20:39.200 --> 00:20:46.520 And I go back to the Greeks, et cetera, to show that democracy springs out of one sphere 176 00:20:46.520 --> 00:20:48.920 equals one vote in the phalanx. 177 00:20:48.920 --> 00:20:51.160 All this philosophical stuff is a bunch of crap. 178 00:20:51.160 --> 00:20:56.880 If you fought with a spear by the next guy, nobody was going to deprive you of the vote. 179 00:20:56.880 --> 00:21:00.600 And of course, the emperors in China always wanted to melt down the peasants' weapons 180 00:21:00.600 --> 00:21:01.600 and make a statue. 181 00:21:01.600 --> 00:21:13.600 It's the way you disarm the peasantry, you see. And going on back, and it's clear that the peasants revolt in England was a bourgeoisie revolt, where the radical priests turned it around, the bourgeois then went with the king, 182 00:21:13.600 --> 00:21:28.600 because Richard II, if you read Shakespeare, had brought in his idiot wage and price controls to try to deal with government manipulation of the shortage of labor brought about by the Black Death, etc. 183 00:21:28.600 --> 00:21:32.240 which was raising wages and the aristocrats didn't like it. 184 00:21:32.240 --> 00:21:38.440 So there was this crisis in the system back then that Jim Pell talks about. 185 00:21:38.440 --> 00:21:44.440 You had pollution, ecological damage, all the forests were gone by that time. 186 00:21:44.440 --> 00:21:48.160 There are more forests now in Europe than there were in the 13th century. 187 00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:53.000 I got in a confrontation with a woman on our campus, one of these Econuts that they bring 188 00:21:53.000 --> 00:21:57.560 down to talk and she was going on, she had a symbol of the Indians there and how they 189 00:21:57.560 --> 00:22:02.200 Preserve the Forest. And she was in total ignorance of Indian slash and burn techniques. 190 00:22:02.200 --> 00:22:06.760 There are more forests in North America now on the East Coast than there were when Columbus 191 00:22:06.760 --> 00:22:11.880 landed. So there's all this idiocy out there that we have to try to deal with in changing 192 00:22:11.880 --> 00:22:19.720 people's perception. But there was this crisis and we got out of it. There was a cycle and 193 00:22:19.720 --> 00:22:25.720 we managed to move out of it and there was another cycle probably by the 15th century. 194 00:22:25.720 --> 00:22:36.720 And these cycles, if you don't have some new instrument of expansion, the cycle, as in China, is about 300 years, once a civilization is set. 195 00:22:36.720 --> 00:22:52.720 If you look at Chinese dynastic cycles, and then you get a new dynasty comes in, there's no real change, but you get a redistribution, and the game starts over, again, after that redistribution, and then some able people start accumulating, etc., etc. 196 00:22:52.720 --> 00:23:01.720 What was the instrument, by the way, that got European Western civilization out of that 15th century crisis? 197 00:23:03.720 --> 00:23:05.720 An obvious one. 198 00:23:07.720 --> 00:23:12.720 The New World, as John Locke said, in the beginning was America. 199 00:23:12.720 --> 00:23:22.720 This huge new instrument to open up expansion again of the system. 200 00:23:22.720 --> 00:23:28.720 In Europe, what was occurring? What occurred in Eastern Europe? 201 00:23:28.720 --> 00:23:39.720 A refutilization. A refutilization in which the peasants got tied into the land. 202 00:23:39.720 --> 00:23:52.720 Let's see, feudalism is a very complex social structure and the Russians had to take all that land, potential land, away from the presence, potential to open it up and develop it. 203 00:23:52.720 --> 00:24:08.720 And the best explanation I can give you of the American Revolution in one sentence is that it was a reaction against an effort to reinstitute British feudalism. 204 00:24:08.720 --> 00:24:14.640 in North America. And the best evidence is that this will shock you if you're 205 00:24:14.640 --> 00:24:23.920 unaware of the data. In the decade 1765 to 75, quit rents, which could now begin 206 00:24:23.920 --> 00:24:29.720 to try to be collected on North American land claims by British aristocrats, 207 00:24:29.720 --> 00:24:36.400 exceeded the amount of money being brought in by British aristocrats on 208 00:24:36.400 --> 00:24:56.400 and Quit Rents on Land and Inland. That's an amazing statistic. So the potential for America as just the world's greatest milch cow for British aristocrats and British feudalism, in their eyes, if they could bring bayonets there, was just unbelievable. 209 00:24:56.400 --> 00:25:09.400 And only one thing stood between them, that they smashed Ireland and did that, reinstituted a degree of feudalism, and what prevented them in North America. 210 00:25:09.400 --> 00:25:17.400 Because the Americans had their own instrument of expansion, the long rifle. 211 00:25:17.400 --> 00:25:21.400 As a British soldier said, they are numerous and armed. 212 00:25:21.400 --> 00:25:27.400 And they were! 213 00:25:27.400 --> 00:25:33.400 And the British did not come out in less than battalion strength after dark. 214 00:25:33.400 --> 00:25:36.400 Nowhere in North America. 215 00:25:36.400 --> 00:25:40.400 I think all this stuff, if you've read some of my essays on the American Revolution, 216 00:25:40.400 --> 00:25:45.400 this stuff about the French alliance and the necessity of it's all a bunch of crap. 217 00:25:45.400 --> 00:25:58.400 The British never held very much of North America at all. They held Boston for a few months and they left. They held New York City for most of the war and that's about all. 218 00:25:58.400 --> 00:26:10.400 And it's sort of like Saigon. We let them hold it. I did an essay for Gary North. It's obscure, although it was reprinted in the militia in 20th century America. 219 00:26:10.400 --> 00:26:15.280 It's a case study of the only place there was actual guerrilla warfare in North America. 220 00:26:15.280 --> 00:26:18.080 Anybody know where that was? 221 00:26:18.080 --> 00:26:23.680 Bergen County, New Jersey, because the only place the British held for any part of the 222 00:26:23.680 --> 00:26:24.680 war. 223 00:26:24.680 --> 00:26:28.580 You can't have guerrilla warfare if the enemy doesn't actually hold the territory, right? 224 00:26:28.580 --> 00:26:35.240 As Tom Paine pointed out, the British only sent armies into the interior twice, right? 225 00:26:35.240 --> 00:26:37.480 What happened to the first one? 226 00:26:37.480 --> 00:26:43.480 They got surrounded and annihilated at Saratoga. As Tom said, let them come into the interior, by God. 227 00:26:43.480 --> 00:26:48.480 Let's see what happens. And the next time they brought an army in, where did it end up? 228 00:26:48.480 --> 00:26:52.480 How far did the British Army get in the South? Anybody know? 229 00:26:52.480 --> 00:26:57.480 They got to a place named Charlotte, North Carolina. 230 00:26:57.480 --> 00:27:02.480 And it's aptly, the basketball team is aptly named. What is it called? 231 00:27:02.480 --> 00:27:21.480 The Hornets, and the British soldiers referred to Charlotte, North Carolina as the Hornets Mist, because they were surrounded by these young American kids on horses, sort of, you know, tanks at the time, cavalry, later on the cavalry became the tank corps, and they just cut the British ribbons. 232 00:27:21.480 --> 00:27:28.480 Cornwallis had a retreat across to Virginia to try to get extricated, which he was unable to do. 233 00:27:28.480 --> 00:27:32.480 And he left equipment all along the way, which the Americans picked up. 234 00:27:32.480 --> 00:27:37.480 And when the British got there, by that time a regular American army had come, 235 00:27:37.480 --> 00:27:41.480 and a deal was made so the British surrendered to the regular army, 236 00:27:41.480 --> 00:27:46.480 rather than the guerrilla militia, the partisan militia, you see. 237 00:27:46.480 --> 00:27:54.440 So, you have this total rewriting of American history we've got to get into, where you see 238 00:27:54.440 --> 00:28:00.920 the pressure points of an effort to re-establish old world feudalism in North America is the 239 00:28:00.920 --> 00:28:05.000 greatest key to understanding the American Revolution, and it's not theory, the quick 240 00:28:05.000 --> 00:28:06.480 rent prices are there. 241 00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:12.440 That's undisputable economic data about what was happening with respect to quick rents 242 00:28:12.440 --> 00:28:17.040 in terms of explaining the American Revolution. 243 00:28:17.040 --> 00:28:25.600 So the question becomes now, if you look systemically in terms of cycle theory, Quigley argues that 244 00:28:25.600 --> 00:28:33.400 since early in the 20th century, you could say World War I, because we got off gold, 245 00:28:33.400 --> 00:28:34.400 didn't we? 246 00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:40.940 We had a double dose of cutting back on the growth of the system. 247 00:28:40.940 --> 00:28:45.780 The Federal Reserve system in the United States and it going off gold in general because of 248 00:28:45.780 --> 00:28:50.620 the inflationary pressures to the governments of World War I, right? 249 00:28:50.620 --> 00:28:54.700 And you can build a very good argument that it's been touch and go in the 20th century 250 00:28:54.700 --> 00:28:58.500 about expansion of the real system. 251 00:28:58.500 --> 00:29:05.340 And the question becomes what happens now at this point? 252 00:29:05.340 --> 00:29:09.900 There's a wonderful passage toward the end here where Quigley is talking about guerilla 253 00:29:09.900 --> 00:29:10.900 warfare. 254 00:29:10.900 --> 00:29:24.900 He wrote this in 61, it was so praiseful. If American policy makers had read that, they might not have gotten involved in Vietnam if they had any brains, you know, but if they had read quickly at that point. 255 00:29:24.900 --> 00:29:40.860 But in egalitarianism and empire, I have three sources of value I talk about in civilizations. It depends on very much whether the value system, you see, if we take a value like equality, 256 00:29:40.860 --> 00:29:47.860 We live in an age where everybody's for that. We won't distinguish between equality and egalitarianism for a second. 257 00:29:47.860 --> 00:29:54.860 But if I were to say to you, why, why are you for equality? 258 00:29:54.860 --> 00:29:57.860 That's not an ultimate value. 259 00:29:57.860 --> 00:30:03.860 And you are going to have to fall back on what I think are only three sources of ultimate value. 260 00:30:03.860 --> 00:30:09.860 You have to say some supernatural entity gave it to you, God or whatever you want to call it. 261 00:30:09.860 --> 00:30:14.860 Nature, Natural Law, or Statist Positive Law. 262 00:30:14.860 --> 00:30:18.860 And if you look at films like A Man for All Seasons, 263 00:30:18.860 --> 00:30:23.860 what's fundamentally at issue there is the balance between 264 00:30:23.860 --> 00:30:29.860 God-given law, and Thomas More, and the state, Henry VIII. 265 00:30:29.860 --> 00:30:32.860 If you look at a movie like Judgment at Nuremberg, 266 00:30:32.860 --> 00:30:36.860 it's between the American judges' concept of natural law 267 00:30:36.860 --> 00:30:42.860 and the German judge's concept of statist positive law. 268 00:30:42.860 --> 00:30:46.860 And at the end of the movie he says, I'm giving you this manuscript. 269 00:30:46.860 --> 00:30:53.860 I don't understand how I went wrong, how I got into this thing with the Nazis 270 00:30:53.860 --> 00:30:56.860 because I used the best sociological jurisprudence. 271 00:30:56.860 --> 00:31:01.860 The stuff we wrote came right out of American sociological jurisprudence from the 1920s. 272 00:31:01.860 --> 00:31:04.860 And what does the American judge say? 273 00:31:04.860 --> 00:31:14.300 You went wrong the day you condemned your first innocent man. Natural law theory, you see. 274 00:31:14.300 --> 00:31:20.180 So you have to have those three sources, and they emerge as civilizations do the cycle. 275 00:31:20.180 --> 00:31:25.540 I was arguing against some of Murray's views on my thing in China a couple months ago, 276 00:31:25.540 --> 00:31:30.420 as I think Murray misunderstands the nature of the battle. He's a little anti-Confucian 277 00:32:00.420 --> 00:32:30.420 the French Revolution would have been impossible without China. But that's too far. It would have happened anyway. But it is true that for an age that was fighting feudalism, as Tom Paine and the boys were, the Chinese idea of losing the mandate of heaven was a wonderful cut at the divine right of monarchy, you see, and was picked up in that fashion as a way to undercut it in the West. So Chinese ideas 278 00:32:30.420 --> 00:32:38.660 did come back and were influential in terms of getting rid of that feudal economy ultimately. 279 00:32:38.660 --> 00:32:45.140 But I would suggest that if you take two billiard balls and you call one the state and one the 280 00:32:45.140 --> 00:32:51.660 government, that there are only four possibilities for political economics. One is the free market 281 00:32:51.660 --> 00:32:58.500 where the two are separated and it's government's rules, ideas to set up some rules to function. 282 00:32:58.500 --> 00:33:05.180 Here is mercantilism where the two are combined and supposedly the idea is that government 283 00:33:05.180 --> 00:33:07.820 is directing this for the good of the people. 284 00:33:07.820 --> 00:33:12.480 You have socialism where the two billiard balls have been totally intermeshed and you see 285 00:33:12.480 --> 00:33:16.780 in the mercantilist model the intermeshed is where government is supposedly directing 286 00:33:16.780 --> 00:33:17.780 things. 287 00:33:17.780 --> 00:33:23.860 And then a fourth which I call corporate syndicalism where the two are intermeshed but the direction 288 00:33:23.860 --> 00:33:30.540 is coming from interest groups using government. 289 00:33:30.540 --> 00:33:36.980 And I think in the 20th century or the 21st century, the great problem, I gave a paper 290 00:33:36.980 --> 00:33:41.940 on this, I was trying to get it reprinted, give Lew a copy a year and a half ago in Costa 291 00:33:41.940 --> 00:33:52.340 Rica on a conference on Latin American economies, and I was trying to show that under the guise 292 00:33:52.340 --> 00:34:02.340 The rise of privatization in Latin America. What you're really having is favoritism to these economic interests in the way things are being allocated. 293 00:34:02.340 --> 00:34:10.340 And that's the thing, those of us who believe in the free market, when you see privatization going on, you have to look at it very, very closely. 294 00:34:10.340 --> 00:34:21.340 Because it's usually some economic group getting access to what's being privatized for themselves, and what they really like to keep is a monopoly on whatever it is that's supposedly being privatized. 295 00:34:51.340 --> 00:34:58.340 In an egalitarian race, let's do an equalitarian. The equalitarian, as I conceive it, is a race where you conceive that not everyone will finish together. But you want to try as best you can to equalize the equipment that everybody has. 296 00:35:21.340 --> 00:35:27.100 Everybody starts at the same time that the track itself is as equal as you can make it. 297 00:35:27.100 --> 00:35:29.420 Everybody certainly runs the same length, etc. 298 00:35:29.420 --> 00:35:33.980 So there will be winners and there will be losers, and the thing you cannot compensate 299 00:35:33.980 --> 00:35:37.140 for is motivation. 300 00:35:37.140 --> 00:35:40.580 I was an athlete in the days of yore before I gained weight. 301 00:35:40.580 --> 00:35:46.160 I had a football scholarship to the University of Miami, but I got an academic instead. 302 00:35:46.160 --> 00:35:55.160 There are about a dozen schools in the South, not Auburn, but Florida State, Duke, Tulane, Vanderbilt, etc. that offered me scholarships. 303 00:35:55.160 --> 00:36:07.160 One of the things that athletics taught me is that there are people in the fourth quarter that suck it up and want to win, and there are people that don't. 304 00:36:07.160 --> 00:36:28.160 One of the reasons I got a football scholarship offer is because one of the Miami coaches was refereed in the Orange Bowl for high school games, and he saw me not kick the butt of one of my own tackles on defense. He was whining and sniveling, you know, and you've got to suck it up. And that's the thing that can't be compensated for. 305 00:36:28.160 --> 00:36:36.160 The egalitarian model is everybody should finish equally, right? So how do you run an egalitarian race? 306 00:36:36.160 --> 00:36:42.800 You yoke everybody together. And that means a very slow race, as the stronger drag the 307 00:36:42.800 --> 00:36:48.040 weaker or the slower. And there's always a group, it doesn't matter what they call themselves, 308 00:36:48.040 --> 00:36:54.440 the referees, the party, you know, the elite, whatever. What do they do? They extricate 309 00:36:54.440 --> 00:36:59.360 themselves from the race and say, don't worry, the rest of you can run, we'll be the referees. 310 00:36:59.360 --> 00:37:04.760 We'll fire the starting gun. We'll take care of yoking everybody up. So egalitarianism 311 00:37:04.760 --> 00:37:07.920 Egalitarianism, of course, as Murray said, it's not only a revolt against nature, it's 312 00:37:07.920 --> 00:37:14.640 a contradiction because somebody has to enforce the egalitarianism, etc. and that gives the 313 00:37:14.640 --> 00:37:17.000 whole ballgame away. 314 00:37:17.000 --> 00:37:24.480 So what I find is that there are a lot of people today who are egalitarians using equality 315 00:37:24.480 --> 00:37:32.080 and a lot of inequality and we have to differentiate between them and people confuse the issue. 316 00:37:32.080 --> 00:37:42.160 Some years ago, California, Nick von Hoffman, a great columnist, was giving a talk. He castigated 317 00:37:42.160 --> 00:37:49.920 the libertarians in the audience that we had evaded the two great issues of the 20th century. 318 00:37:49.920 --> 00:37:55.840 Those are the equality issue and the race issue. When he finished his talk, I raised 319 00:37:55.840 --> 00:38:00.400 my hand and said, Mr. von Hoffman, I personally have not evaded either issue. I've written 320 00:38:00.400 --> 00:38:11.400 The race issue is a subset of the equality issue, just as the women's issue is. 321 00:38:11.400 --> 00:38:14.400 And he looked at me and he could hear the gears grinding and said, 322 00:38:14.400 --> 00:38:18.400 By God, you're right, and I've been giving this talk all over the United States. 323 00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:22.400 So you can't be for women's rights. 324 00:38:22.400 --> 00:38:31.120 Rights. It can't be for Blacks' rights or Hispanic rights, since my mother's family 325 00:38:31.120 --> 00:38:35.680 is from southern Alabama and Dothan, but I'm also half Spanish. You can't be for Hispanic 326 00:38:35.680 --> 00:38:42.280 rights. You have to be for equal rights for everybody. It's a contradiction. If you pull 327 00:38:42.280 --> 00:38:49.320 out a subset, the enemies of real equality will immediately try to co-opt you. You see, 328 00:38:49.320 --> 00:38:55.560 But a friend like Nicholas von Hoffmann didn't even understand the way it's one really big 329 00:38:55.560 --> 00:38:57.360 issue. 330 00:38:57.360 --> 00:39:03.960 And so I think that the new instruments of expansion, the newest instrument of expansion, 331 00:39:03.960 --> 00:39:10.160 it's a very old one, but the one which has the potential to rejuvenate civilization in 332 00:39:10.160 --> 00:39:15.160 and Equiblian Manor is what? 333 00:39:15.160 --> 00:39:18.160 What's the name of your newsletter? 334 00:39:18.160 --> 00:39:21.160 It's the free market, for God's sake! 335 00:39:21.160 --> 00:39:26.160 This is the ultimate instrument of expansion. 336 00:39:26.160 --> 00:39:31.160 We know in the command economies, I quoted this in one of my essays, 337 00:39:31.160 --> 00:39:36.160 I think it was in Reason, called Surviving in the Interstices, 338 00:39:36.160 --> 00:39:52.160 We know from fairly good analyses of the economies of the ancient world, as command the economy as they were, that at least 10% of Rome was essentially in the market. 339 00:39:52.160 --> 00:40:02.600 So, from that, we can deduce that even if you have 10% of a market economy, its ability 340 00:40:02.600 --> 00:40:07.960 to keep a civilization from going down the tubes is amazing. 341 00:40:07.960 --> 00:40:14.040 So if you get 20% or 30% or 40% of the market, the rejuvenating qualities on a civilization 342 00:40:14.040 --> 00:40:21.760 are beyond belief, as we can see from some societies that have turned themselves around. 343 00:40:21.760 --> 00:40:32.000 by Introducing the Market. So I would suggest to Austrian economic theory that it's important 344 00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:38.080 to take your economic insights and put them in a larger philosophy of history and understand 345 00:40:38.080 --> 00:40:45.080 how the market has operated in various civilizations as an instrument of expansion. Because the 346 00:40:45.080 --> 00:40:50.880 cycle we have with us forever, not only in economics but anywhere else. And it's important 347 00:40:50.880 --> 00:40:58.680 that people understand that a cycle does not inherently mean some kind of toinian determinism 348 00:40:58.680 --> 00:41:03.840 of inevitable decline, that through instruments of expansion. 349 00:41:03.840 --> 00:41:08.440 I think I'll just mention one other thing we might talk about. 350 00:41:08.440 --> 00:41:15.440 Quigley says when there's a tension or a crisis in the system, there are three options a society 351 00:41:15.440 --> 00:41:18.200 can choose. 352 00:41:18.200 --> 00:41:23.800 One is reform, of which revolution is the most radical. 353 00:41:23.800 --> 00:41:33.440 A second is very interesting, and you never hear it discussed, circumvention of the system. 354 00:41:33.440 --> 00:41:38.800 In a modest kind of way, that's what Richard Nixon was trying, it seems to be, in the 1970s, 355 00:41:38.800 --> 00:41:41.680 in a very foolish way, in fact. 356 00:41:41.680 --> 00:41:45.320 And then thirdly, reaction. 357 00:41:45.320 --> 00:41:52.560 And when I said that people, this corporate syndicalist idea is returning, what we really 358 00:41:52.560 --> 00:42:01.920 mean there is it's reactionary in the sense that people who are essentially fascist are 359 00:42:01.920 --> 00:42:06.800 for privatization and acting like they're for the market. 360 00:42:06.800 --> 00:42:11.420 And we have to expose those people, those reactionaries that are in some ways trying 361 00:42:11.420 --> 00:42:16.620 to circumvent the market, because that's part of what's happening in the 21st century. 362 00:42:16.620 --> 00:42:23.060 In this paper in Latin America, I went country by country to show those countries where things 363 00:42:23.060 --> 00:42:27.380 do not look very good, like Venezuela, where maybe some things are changing there, and 364 00:42:27.380 --> 00:42:31.460 other countries where in fact there were better chances for the market. 365 00:42:31.460 --> 00:42:37.660 So I hope we'll have some questions and some discussion now about what I've dwelt on in 366 00:42:37.660 --> 00:42:38.660 these ideas. 367 00:42:38.660 --> 00:42:49.340 I have a definitional question. Sure. What is a quit rent? What is a quit rent? In feudal 368 00:42:49.340 --> 00:42:59.620 theory, it's something that you have to pay to the Lord to demonstrate that he is the 369 00:42:59.620 --> 00:43:06.500 Lord. It can be in the case, they got very ceremonial, it can be a feather, you see. 370 00:43:06.500 --> 00:43:11.740 See, when it happened, all these lords got, if you know John Locke's feudal system in 371 00:43:11.740 --> 00:43:18.860 the Carolinas from the late 17th century, there were all these feudal land claims that 372 00:43:18.860 --> 00:43:21.300 were given out, you see. 373 00:43:21.300 --> 00:43:28.100 And America was so primitive, not feudal, in the 16th, 17th century, that you can't 374 00:43:28.100 --> 00:43:31.900 have feudalism out in the woods with a few Indians and some farmers. 375 00:43:31.900 --> 00:43:41.900 But once you begin to get a segmented civilization with hierarchy, then feudalism becomes a possibility, you see. 376 00:43:41.900 --> 00:43:47.900 So these people with all these claims were now saying to American farmers, 377 00:43:47.900 --> 00:43:54.540 Well, you think that your grandfather died killing Indians and you're fighting Indians 378 00:43:54.540 --> 00:44:00.380 and you thought you purchased this land in some fashion, but I'm here to tell you that 379 00:44:00.380 --> 00:44:05.020 we really own it, you see, and you're going to pay a quid rent. 380 00:44:05.020 --> 00:44:11.500 It's not going to be a feather that's going to be in pounds sterling. 381 00:44:11.500 --> 00:44:14.700 What frightened the Americans with the Stamp Act was it's not only that they were going 382 00:44:14.700 --> 00:44:24.700 The British said, you guys are not going to pay in any deluded script. You're going to pay in pounds sterling. 383 00:44:24.700 --> 00:44:30.700 The Americans said, what? It's not just his tax, but the way they're going to collect it, etc. 384 00:44:30.700 --> 00:44:36.700 So America looked like the world's greatest milch cow out there, if you could re-institute feudalism. 385 00:44:36.700 --> 00:44:42.100 Utilism. And I don't think we appreciate, given what happened in Eastern Europe and 386 00:44:42.100 --> 00:44:48.940 Poland, Charles Lee, who was one of the great guerilla theory here, Murray's hero of the 387 00:44:48.940 --> 00:44:55.380 American Revolution, he went on nuts, clashed with Washington, but he was a British army 388 00:44:55.380 --> 00:45:02.740 observer in Poland in the 1760s when the Russians were just overrunning Poland. And he said, 389 00:45:02.740 --> 00:45:08.220 My God, it's so horrible to see these brave Poles fighting, literally, with pitchforks 390 00:45:08.220 --> 00:45:15.300 and being bayoneted down by Russian infantry and shot, and he came, it's what a quit rent. 391 00:45:15.300 --> 00:45:22.580 I am amazed that we no longer teach these terms. At the recent Institute meeting, there 392 00:45:22.580 --> 00:45:27.220 were three of Clyde Wilson's students giving a very good paper about Jefferson and others, 393 00:45:27.220 --> 00:45:32.460 and I mentioned something about Elodeo land claims, and he thought I meant alluvial or 394 00:45:32.460 --> 00:45:44.460 And it turned out they were unaware of it. Joe Stromberg later, I understand, is going around saying we ought to have a session on allotial lands next year. Maybe that's a good idea if people don't understand these terms. 395 00:45:44.460 --> 00:45:59.460 But in Jonathan Hughes' book, The Governmental Habit, he argues, and I agree with him, that the betrayal of the American Revolution occurred when instead of going back to allotial land claims from the Middle Ages 396 00:45:59.460 --> 00:46:04.460 that had been destroyed by the emergence of a centralized state in the early modern period. 397 00:46:04.460 --> 00:46:12.460 But the Americans settled for taking the simple from the king and giving it to the American states. 398 00:46:12.460 --> 00:46:18.460 Now, I'm a builder on the side and I've developed a dozen properties and held various pieces of land. 399 00:46:18.460 --> 00:46:26.460 I never had one that didn't belong to Henry Flagler shortly after, you know, in the ways that he manipulated land in Florida with a railroad giveaway. 400 00:46:26.460 --> 00:46:39.460 I always go back to the Key of Spain in Florida, but fee simple is a joke. Anybody who owns land in fee simple, and if we own it, we all do, you rent it from the state, don't you? 401 00:46:39.460 --> 00:46:52.460 And if you don't pay your taxes, even Wayne Huizinga, who I've attacked, his computer got screwed up, he owns so much land that they didn't pay taxes on a piece of land that was worth about three-quarters of a million. 402 00:46:52.460 --> 00:46:59.460 and somebody bought it at a distress sale for $75,000 and Heisinger protested and they were going to try to settle it. 403 00:46:59.460 --> 00:47:03.460 But that's how quickly you can, quote unquote, lose your land. 404 00:47:03.460 --> 00:47:08.460 And I was telling somebody, we were talking over coffee a little while ago, we got on that question. 405 00:47:08.460 --> 00:47:15.460 I would love to go before the Broward County Commission in Fort Lauderdale sometime, maybe I'll do it, and say, 406 00:47:15.460 --> 00:47:33.460 To say, guys, I want to know what it will cost me to buy out of the system, to buy allotial land, you know, give me a price instead of 3,000 a year tax for my land, I want to go back to medieval allotial land. 407 00:47:33.460 --> 00:47:44.460 And I think we ought to start resurrecting the consciousness of the American people to the virtues of allotial land holding. 408 00:47:44.460 --> 00:47:49.960 It's not a new idea. It was the way people owned land in the Middle Ages. 409 00:47:49.960 --> 00:47:57.960 And you couldn't get the national state started at around 1000 A.D. until you smashed all the Lodeo land funds 410 00:47:57.960 --> 00:48:00.960 and came in with this fee-simple crap. 411 00:48:00.960 --> 00:48:03.960 Lodeo meaning you can never be taken away by that. 412 00:48:03.960 --> 00:48:10.960 Yeah, you own it and you really own the land. You do not, in fee-simple, get it from the state. 413 00:48:10.960 --> 00:48:16.000 And all the American Revolution did, as John Hughes points out, is to substitute American 414 00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:22.800 states, and then later the federal government, with all this huge land, for basically allodial 415 00:48:22.800 --> 00:48:23.800 land claims. 416 00:48:23.800 --> 00:48:26.000 But what's wrong with allodialism? 417 00:48:26.000 --> 00:48:29.800 The only problem is it undercuts the power of the state. 418 00:48:29.800 --> 00:48:33.040 It makes it impossible for the state. 419 00:48:33.040 --> 00:48:37.120 When I mentioned this quote of Quigley's, he talks about new instruments that may come 420 00:48:37.120 --> 00:48:45.040 out of solar energies and all kinds of energies. But when I was an economist with the Joint 421 00:48:45.040 --> 00:48:50.000 Economic Committee, that's a joke, you know, I was a senior economist, someone once asked 422 00:48:50.000 --> 00:48:54.600 me how could you be a senior economist with the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress 423 00:48:54.600 --> 00:48:59.680 as I was, well you saw the movie because I never had a course in economics, no I did 424 00:48:59.680 --> 00:49:04.320 one freshman course, but I said well you all saw the movie Miracle on 34th Street, didn't 425 00:49:04.320 --> 00:49:14.320 I said, yeah, I said, well, the post office declared you a Santa Claus. So if the Congress declared I'm an economist, you know, what the hell, you know. 426 00:49:14.320 --> 00:49:30.320 But what I was doing there, looking at affordable housing, and the technologies that we now have, inappropriate technologies that anybody can bring to bear to free yourself from the state, 427 00:49:30.320 --> 00:49:49.320 Not some kind of primitivism that frees you from the market, but frees you so much from the state, in terms of building your own house quite comfortably, freeing yourself from the banks that are creatures of the Federal Reserve, by building a house very cheaply, etc. etc. 428 00:49:49.320 --> 00:49:55.320 If you had a lotio added to it, you could achieve real freedom and not some kind of primitive stuff. 429 00:49:55.320 --> 00:49:58.320 And that's of course what the state doesn't want. 430 00:49:58.320 --> 00:50:21.320 So we're going to have a global kind of coming together on this, and the statist environmentalist ecologist are afraid of this ultimately because of the potential it has for advocates in the market, appropriate technologies and other things, because they don't really understand this on a global scale in the way market people can and do. So I think it's great potential. 431 00:50:21.320 --> 00:50:33.120 It's been some time since I've read Hughes. When you say that that ends here in the United States, is that the Jeffersonian Ohio Valley policies of some sort? 432 00:50:33.120 --> 00:50:35.880 Oh, no, no. Jefferson was an absolute boob on this. 433 00:50:35.880 --> 00:50:39.400 Give me the time frame. 434 00:50:39.400 --> 00:50:45.480 Well, Jefferson had this crazy progressivist idea. There's a real status to Jefferson. 435 00:50:45.480 --> 00:50:50.280 If you look on his theories of education, and I pointed out in my paper on China, they're 436 00:50:50.280 --> 00:50:56.240 neo-Confucian, as Quigley, Creel suggests, he got them from Confucius. And John Adams 437 00:50:56.240 --> 00:51:02.720 is much more liberal. Adams pointed out Jefferson's ranting on about the natural aristocracy and 438 00:51:02.720 --> 00:51:08.480 taking this rabble and putting it into state schools and the equivalent of IQ tests. And 439 00:51:08.480 --> 00:51:15.640 And Adam says, Tom, stop. You know, there are other kinds of talents other than this 440 00:51:15.640 --> 00:51:24.280 academic IQ stuff. And, you know, the Queen, the King's mistress, after all, Adam's is 441 00:51:24.280 --> 00:51:30.720 quite funny. So the King, the King's mistress has a certain talent, Tom. You know, has nothing 442 00:51:30.720 --> 00:51:37.880 to do with IQ. You know, and so Adam's was much more free market. And with Jefferson 443 00:51:37.880 --> 00:51:45.960 And in the Northwest Ordinance, he took this 160 square acre thing and rolled it out like 444 00:51:45.960 --> 00:51:46.960 a carpet. 445 00:51:46.960 --> 00:51:55.020 And we have some studies of parts of the Ohio Valley, and it took 50, 60, 70, 80 years of 446 00:51:55.020 --> 00:52:01.680 property transfers in the market to get a decent market allocation of property use, 447 00:52:01.680 --> 00:52:06.000 because of this stupid Jeffersonian square stuff. 448 00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:11.840 And it begins to look, by the way, more and more medieval, as you get that way. 449 00:52:11.840 --> 00:52:15.620 Have any of you read Jane Jacobs? 450 00:52:15.620 --> 00:52:16.620 Nobody's heard of her? 451 00:52:16.620 --> 00:52:22.840 Oh my God, she's one of the great free market people in the whole world. 452 00:52:22.840 --> 00:52:30.240 A few years ago, I was using her stuff in my classes, and my dean had not heard of her. 453 00:52:30.240 --> 00:52:34.080 She was a woman, an English major, and no reason she should. 454 00:52:34.080 --> 00:52:39.860 But then the New York Times book review had a piece about her and it showed how clearly 455 00:52:39.860 --> 00:52:44.440 the public administration people hate her. And anybody who has that, you know, must be 456 00:52:44.440 --> 00:52:53.440 good. But her book, The Birth of American Cities, The Economy of Cities, shows how marvelous 457 00:52:53.440 --> 00:52:58.760 market cities are. I mean, one insight alone is worth the price of the book. She points 458 00:52:58.760 --> 00:53:06.340 This should be added to your stuff on Marxism, that Marx deliberately chose the most statist 459 00:53:06.340 --> 00:53:14.160 planned city in England for his critique of capitalism, Manchester. 460 00:53:14.160 --> 00:53:17.960 And she said, if he wants a market city, for Christ's sake, choose Birmingham. 461 00:53:17.960 --> 00:53:23.400 You have 20,000 Jewish merchants there competing and tearing the city apart and rebuilding 462 00:53:23.400 --> 00:53:24.400 it, ongoing. 463 00:53:24.400 --> 00:53:31.160 The last thing Marx wants as an example of capitalism is Birmingham. He wants the most 464 00:53:31.160 --> 00:53:39.120 planned city in England by status planning, Manchester. The woman has such great insights. 465 00:53:39.120 --> 00:53:45.440 She's one of the great heroes of market urbanism in the world. It's clear why public administration 466 00:53:45.440 --> 00:53:51.400 hates her guts. She immigrated to Canada and she got fed up. She has a wonderful book, 467 00:54:21.400 --> 00:54:29.400 We appreciate it. We appreciate you being here. We'll call it officially closed if those of us who want to stay around this time talking. 468 00:54:29.400 --> 00:54:31.400 And we thank you for coming today.