WEBVTT

NOTE Libertarianism

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Thank you very much. It's a marvelous introduction. It's super. I don't know if I can live up to it.

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I think this convention is a great convention. I mean, it's really unusual. I'm not just saying it because it's another convention I attended because

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And two unique things about it, one for Libertarian Party conventions.

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One is, today is the first time, today and tonight, I heard a Libertarian Party official at any convention call for more members.

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That's fantastic. That's an unusual situation.

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You might think it's puzzling why it's unusual. That's an interesting question. Why indeed.

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Actually, welcoming and calling for new membership. That's a great spirit in itself.

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There are too many parties, and I'm not going to mention their names in order to protect the guilty.

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There are many state parties which don't want to grow in membership.

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If we have enough members, we have 20 members, why do we need more?

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Well, it's strange attitude.

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And the second great thing about the Michigan Convention here is that the first convention I remember is since the 1970s.

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I've attended every national convention since 1975.

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And there are many state conventions, not every one, but many.

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The first convention since the 70s, which focuses on ideas, ideas of liberty and how you apply it to the real world, the first time, a very unusual situation, so I applaud that, it's just great to talk about ideas. What else did they talk about? I don't know.

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So I hope this sparks a trend of talking about ideas at the Libertarian Party conventions.

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What's the purpose of the Libertarian Party? Should our purpose be to get more votes? Should

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it be to win elections? Should it be to spread ideas? I never understand the dichotomy here,

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I always figure all of the above is my answer. That's the whole point. We grow in membership,

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advance the ideas, get more votes, and eventually get elected and mull back the Leviathan state.

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That, I figure, is the whole point of the exercise here. So I can never understand why

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there should be any kind of split in these aims. It seems to me that the ultimate purpose

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of course of the Libertarian Party, the Libertarian Party is the political action arm of the Libertarian

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Movement, and it's the arm which flies libertarianism to politics and electoral politics, and the

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idea is eventually to roll back the state, and this is our method of doing it.

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It seems to me that the basic strategy we should employ is to, and this again as a question

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always comes up, what sort of strategy, seems to me the basic strategy is to uphold, keep

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the idea of the loss of our ultimate goal, ultimate principle, and try to achieve them

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and try to get toward it as fast as possible. This would seem to be almost banal, but it

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seems to be controversial in the movement. There are two, Marx has worked this out, Marx

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has a very good strategy, strategic theorist. As a matter of fact, before they started collapsing

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about a few years ago, they spent most of their time arguing about strategy, not about

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The Marxists identified two basic erroneous strategies, and I would endorse this, one is what they call opportunism, which I think is often rampant in the movement.

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And what happens there, I've seen this happen in many libertarian organizations because I've been around the movement for about, Jesus Christ, about 43 years that I've been a libertarian. Good God.

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At any rate, what happens is, your goal is to advance the ideas of liberty, that's the objective, okay, and you want to do it as rapidly as possible and as effectively as possible.

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And so you try to get, build an organization which will accomplish that, and what begins to happen, sometimes very quickly and other times after a long period of time,

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The end of time begins to have a subtle, or sometimes sudden, shift of emphasis.

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The means become the end.

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The objective, which had been advancing liberty, now becomes keeping the organization going,

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keeping the payrolls going.

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Then you change the output in order to maximize your input, so to speak.

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So the ends and means are transposed.

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My friend Woody Harper used to say, one of my early mentors in the movement,

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That is when an organization takes on the dimensions of a racket.

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You claim you're advancing freedom, instead of that you're simply building your own salaries.

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So that's one problem that keeps popping up, only internal vigilance, and realizing

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the problem I think can stop it.

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The other problem is certainly the opposite, the opposite problem, which is Marx is called

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sectarianism.

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In other words, only saying, okay, we want, only talking about the ultimate goal and never

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I think the best, most extreme example of that is the old, fairly lovable socialist party called the Socialist Labor Party.

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I don't know if anybody here has heard of it. For good reason, nobody's ever heard of it.

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At any rate, the Socialist Labor Party has been in existence since about 1890 or so.

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They've gotten no place, and their strategic outlook is simply to publish one pamphlet.

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The one pamphlet has different headlines. They keep up to date. Their outreach program is to change the title.

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In other words, they'll say, are you worried about nuclear war, pollution, unemployment, whatever the situation is?

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Then they reprint the same pamphlet, and the answer is socialism.

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Scrap capitalism onto socialism. That's it. It's the pamphlet.

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So it hasn't been very effective. It doesn't really grab. It's not a grabber.

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There are a lot of libertarians that tend to have the same emphasis. Okay, smash the state, that's it. Without any kind of intervening analysis.

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So what I think is the correct strategy, so to speak. I think the correct strategy is to hold the ultimate goal objective, always keep it in mind, and then offer what the Marxists call transition programs.

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So the transition program to a taxless United States is abolishing income tax. It's a good solid transition program. Go for that.

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I've been willing to live with that for a few years before pressing on.

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So the transition program, however, has a couple of criteria, important criteria for the transition program.

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1. It should be consistent with the objective, with the goal. I think it's very important.

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This is what liberals mean when they say the means should not contradict the ends. I think

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it's clumsily worded, but basically it's that you advance a transition program and shouldn't

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undercut the ultimate objective. So you don't, for example, if you want to abolish the income

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tax, you don't say, we should have a huge sales tax. But the first one will usually

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have it and you have both. You wind up with both. Our objective is not to help the state

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The Heartland, of course, the libertarianism, as we all know, was a stunning mayoralty race in 1973.

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Fran Youngstein got 9,000 votes or something, which was great for that time.

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And so, buoyed up by this resurgence, they decided to run for governor next year, Jerry Tuccioli ran for governor.

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They signed on a soft-core program, because they really thought they were going to either win or at least get a lot of votes.

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You have to appeal to the public.

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In 1974, Tuccioli's radical program was to cut taxes, cut state taxes, which was a big deal.

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Both the Republicans and Democrats said the same thing.

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So we were stuck with a situation where Republicans and Democrats were both saying we should cut taxes.

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Taxes were too big.

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The Radical Crazy New Party also says the same thing. What's the point of voting for the Radical Crazy New Party if they don't offer any alternatives?

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So naturally, there's a big flop-a-roo with lots of hysteria coming out of it.

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And she left the party shortly thereafter, a disillusioned broken man.

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And the New York Party has been declining ever since. Every year it gets less fewer votes.

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At any rate, there's no point in selling out in that manner because you don't offer an alternative.

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There's no point in pulling for a 2% income tax cut, things like that.

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There were many great things about the Clark campaign in 1980, but the content was not one of them.

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The content was, Clark offered the big centerpiece of a Clark campaign, which is very well funded,

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and a lot of TV ads, which we haven't had since, the centerpiece of a Clark campaign was a 30% income tax cut.

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Tax Cut. Unfortunately, Reagan was saying the same thing. He was also offering a 30%

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income tax cut. The question is, if a Republican has a good chance to win over the 30% cut,

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and a libertarian with a crazy new party also says we're in favor of a 30% cut, who is the

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average anti-tax person going to vote for? And the answer is obvious. Ain't us. So that's

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the sort of thing. We have to offer a clear cut radical alternative to the existing system

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to give people a reason to vote for, to break their habits of a lifetime and vote for some

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The Libertarian Party has what I consider a great platform that was built up over many

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years.

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I'm one of the architects of it.

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I've been on the platform committee for many years.

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And we built it up specifically to take the principles, which are great principles, and apply them to political issues.

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To make the connection, to just say your favorite freedom is not enough.

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It's great, it's fine, but it's only the first step.

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Okay, you guys are in favor of freedom, how do you apply it?

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Okay, he will apply it.

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Bing, bing, bing.

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Well, this upset a lot of people, including many libertarians, and it's a constant call for either getting rid of the platform, which is almost impossible to do because

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The way the bylaws are structured, once the thing is frozen on the platform, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.

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The other proposal, which unfortunately carries, is to have a program, which is a short platform, which essentially is an end run around it, to appeal to the average person because the platform is considered too radical.

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So what you have, you're beginning to get something like a 2% income tax cut. You're beginning to get to the point where who cares anymore.

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The Democrats and Republicans vote for the Democrats and Republicans.

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I don't know, this guy's a little bit better for them.

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Yet with us, they say, well, you have a hundred positions.

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I disagree violently with one of them. Therefore, I won't vote for you.

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Why do they do that?

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Why do they have to agree with every damn one of the planks until they vote for us?

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I still don't understand this.

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Maybe cycle babble has a place after all. I can't explain this.

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Jean Burns was a sometime candidate for president. I think he was just a great candidate. Unfortunately, things happen and he never continued to be nominated to the nomination.

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He has a great, I think a great concept. By the way, he's one of the greatest speakers I've ever heard, bar in any party.

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Anyway, his concept was a freedom train concept, which I think is terrific. He said this, of course, much better than I do. He's a radio talk show host and he has a great voice.

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He said basically, look, if you don't agree, we have a freedom train. We're going on the way to freedom.

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I invite you to get on the train. If you don't like what we do, you know, after we go 80% of the way or 60% or 90%, you're free to jump off or get off at any time.

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But join us in the meantime. I think it's a great metaphor and I think it's terrific.

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I'm sorry I didn't continue the nomination.

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Anyway, so I think that sort of thing might be a good answer to this.

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Nobody wants you to agree 100% on the thing. It would be great if you did, but we don't require it as a condition for voting for us.

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I think to get to another point here about the case for the free market and the case for liberty and the case against statism, I think it's very important to do two things.

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One, to refute the intellectual content. It was to show that statism doesn't work. That's great. I'm against it. I'm all for it. I do it most of the time.

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Most of the time. But there's something else which I think is also important, mainly to show it's not just intellectual error.

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This is where I agree with the public choice people. It's not just intellectual error. People aren't that dumb.

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A lot of people benefit from this stuff. We have to expose the fact that they are ripping us off.

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And one of the advantages of this is it gets people hung on a collar, as they should do, as they should.

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In other words, if you say, well, the foreign price support program is a beautiful example of this,

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If it doesn't work, it's irrational, etc., etc., it's all true, it hurts the consumer.

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People will say, yeah, okay, and they sort of walk off. They don't really care that much.

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It's like my students, or anybody else's students in the classroom.

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If you say, they're ripping us off, these are a bunch of thieves, they're looting our pocket.

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Then they start, you know, they pay attention, they're interested.

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It rouses them from their usual torpor.

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So the moral argument is actually an extremely important one, and even from utilitarian grounds.

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For example, think the farm price support program. Farm price support program is, quote, irrational, unquote.

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It's the old way of looking at it. The taxpayer pays the farmer. The taxpayer is fleeced.

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The government pays the farmer to produce less or sometimes not to produce at all.

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and then prices go, supply goes down, prices go up, the cheese or whatever, there's a store

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and then some warehouse and many years, in addition to all that, the Department of Agriculture

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is also paying farmers to produce more, increase their productivity, to irrigate, in the old

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days to electrify, to increase fertilizer, so it seems totally crazy, why is the government

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paying people, the farmers, one to produce more and two to produce less?

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That's irrational from the point of view of the consumer, from the point of view of the economic system.

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It's not irrational, however, from the point of view of two groups.

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One, the big farmers get paid to produce more and to produce less. That's great. They love it.

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Two, the Department of Agriculture increases bureaucracy tenfold to run these programs.

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So we have a cozy coalition between the Department of Agriculture and the large farmers.

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They are ripping us off.

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I think this sets this thing in a historical point better than simply a logical critique of a program, in addition to that.

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This brings me to my question of outreach, which of course is always on every libertarian's lips.

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And actually I'm in favor of everybody voting for us, without exception.

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Another question, who do you target? I mean, we don't have unlimited resources. Which issues do you concentrate on? Which groups do you try to get in?

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And I think the basic thing is you try to concentrate on people who are, in some way, are outraged at government, some aspect of government action.

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It's an anti-government coalition, I think we're trying to build.

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In other words, it's not a coalition with Dan Rather, not that I hate Dan Rather, it's not a coalition, the idea is not to convert Dan Rather.

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I think it's a hopeless task, although anybody who wants to do it is free of course to do it.

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Or to convert the establishment, or to convert the Reagan administration or the Bush administration, I think it's a terribly mistaken kind of strategy.

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The idea is to convert people who already hate the government for one reason or another.

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This puts us in a very different kind of focus, a very different kind of footing.

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It also means we're probably going to be less respectable.

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Interest and respectability, this is not the kind of program to push.

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For example, one of the outrageous things happening right now is the sell-out of President Bush on gun control.

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And President Bush, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, allegedly opposed to gun control,

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This is a crunch comment, which means anything at all. Suddenly somebody uses a gun to shoot somebody. Bingo.

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Yeah, yeah, we have to restrict imports of guns and all the rest of it.

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So this is a powerful program for the people out in the boonies.

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I admit it's not a good program for urban America.

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New York City, if you argue against gun control, you're a minority of one, two, or three, or whatever it is.

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So what? This is correct. You have a large number of people out there in the non-urban areas who hate the guts of gun control.

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and we'll get their votes in support.

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When you push to make the philosophical case, you can't be in favor of gun control and also be in favor of any other aspect of private property rights and freedom and all the rest of it.

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So that's just one aspect of policy which might be unpopular, but it's very important to push.

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And when you get the votes in support of financial support, even if a lot of people are very interested in the topic,

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There are other aspects of this. I've already alluded to some of it in today's panel. This afternoon's panel. The whole drug program, here's a beautiful example of tying in the war against drugs, of tying in civil liberties, personal freedom on one hand and private property on the other.

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Personal Freedom on one hand and Private Property Rights and Economic Freedom on the other.

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Because both of them are going down the tubes as a result of the totally insane war against

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drugs which is not going to win, hasn't won, not going to win, it's hopeless.

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And result is of course to get the government in every aspect of our life.

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It's very much like Prohibition in the 1920s, it's outlawing liquor and then shooting everybody

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The way of mobilizing the resources of the whole government at every level to seek out

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liquor, pry it out, kill anybody who has a still and all the rest of it.

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And it means also, of course, that it doesn't outlaw liquor, it simply drives it underground

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and gets it lower quality.

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Of course, there's no quality control in the black market when a thing is prohibited, so

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you get people dying from methyl-acrylamide, methyl-acrylamide, the poison kind of alcohol,

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things like that.

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In addition to not succeeding in the drug front, as a matter of fact the drug

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Addiction Problems has increased in proportion to the amount of resources the government has put into fighting it.

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In addition to all that, of course, they're using it in order to terrorize everybody's financial records, everybody's bank account.

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You can't use cash. You gotta want cash. That means you're a drug dealer. Why else would you use cash?

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Why else would you use the beloved government banks?

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So this is a move towards, a method of moving towards exchange control and trying to outlaw cash and all the rest of it.

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and National Arrest of it.

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And people on the wrong pole would meet media people and so forth.

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And government officials even admit this. They admit it doesn't work.

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They still, of course, have to be publicly committed to the Civil War.

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Eventually, it's got to crack.

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What proportion of the world's national product will have to invest in the drug fight

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until the whole thing is seen as hopeless?

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I mean, 50% after the DMP going into the drug war, whatever it is,

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those things are ridiculous.

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Okay, so we can be on the forefront on the drug question, which we haven't been, if we've done that.

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We could keep accelerating this.

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There's an example, by the way, to get more toward economic questions.

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As an example of what I mean by uniting with the public, part of the public that hates the establishment and hates the government.

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I happened to live in California the glorious summer of 1978 when Proposition 13 was passed and it was a magnificent thing to see because everybody was against it, everybody hated it, it was a terrible thing, it would destroy the state government, there won't be any police anymore if you passed this, big tax cut, property tax cut, there won't be any schools, there won't be any firemen, those roads will decay, and none of it worked. And everybody, the whole big business, big unions, big government, our beloved

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The teachers unions, the whole group weighed in, the press, the media, the TV, everybody attacked. Irresponsible.

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How can these people be so irresponsible in favor of cutting the property tax decision by two-thirds? A terrible thing.

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And as the thing built, as the hysteria mounted, the polls began to record that the population was getting more and more support. It was a beautiful thing.

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And at the end, it's per swept a victory, but no establishment support whatsoever, two or three economists, and that was about it.

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And it was a glorious thing to see, and if it could happen then it could happen somewhere another time too.

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Of course that was the heyday of anti-government sentiment in the United States so far, which was the late 70s, before the Reagan administration came in and co-opted the whole movement.

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But it can happen again, because I think one of the glorious things about what's happening since President Bush got in with the eight years of the Reagan miasma being lifted at long last and the sort of narcosis or whatever of the Reagan smile and the head-shaking and all the rest of this.

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People begin to see reality once more. And what happened? Bush is hardly in office. And suddenly what happened? There's the SNL crisis, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later.

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Secretary of Treasury Brady comes out with a brilliant idea. The way to save the SNL and pay off the depositors is to tax the bank deposits.

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Small tax, only $0.25 for every $100. What is it? Public won't care.

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By the way, here's the problem with the public choice people. They would say, well, the public won't care.

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The small amount of costs are spread over many people, teeny amounts.

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It was magnificent, it was a wonderful thing.

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One of the greatest things that has happened in American politics in my memory, namely a firestorm of hatred.

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It rose up and in three hours the whole proposition was dead.

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In three or four hours it was great because it was advanced to 10 o'clock in the morning one day, whatever it was.

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And by three o'clock, so let's crossfire whatever it is on and say, it's dead, it's finished.

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I mean, Bumpercraft, Republican, the main here, but it's finished.

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We're taking idiotic, stop. It's dead. It's out.

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So I said, what a magnificent sight. It's just beautiful.

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It reminded me, of course, in the early 80s, even on the high day of the honeymoon,

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they try to put a withholding tax member on interest and dividends. That was killed also.

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This is a great reversion of that.

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The second step, which happened shortly thereafter, was the Congressional Pay-Raises Scam, one of the beautiful things in American politics, not organized by a libertarian party, but caught us by surprise, and they have this whole thing rigged so they have a so-called bipartisan commission of beloved people.

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I use the term beloved, by the way, for many of us, by people who are beloved by all right-thinking people.

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New York Times, CBS, Washington Post.

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And one of the most beloved people in 20th century America was Lloyd Cutler,

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who was the chairman of the bipartisan commission.

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And Cutler, in his wisdom as a long-time lobbyist of the public trough, of course,

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came to the conclusion that we need a 50% pay raise for congressmen and for top bureaucrats with judges and everything else.

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and everything else. Desperately need it, otherwise we'll lose these great people!

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We'll lose them! Pay them now!

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It wasn't a grabber.

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And the thing is, there was a revolution against the pay raise,

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it was organized by a radio talk show host, a heroic group,

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The TV is sort of locked up. You watch TV, you watch Donahue and all these other creeps.

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And the radio talk show house, whoever, sort of semi-libertarian or whatever,

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they rose up as one man, practically, and had this whole network across the country,

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sending tea bags to the congressmen protesting as it's rotten.

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How dare they? See, the point is, it's a moral indignation again.

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How dare these SOBs vote themselves a pay increase at our expense?

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Very simple and very effective.

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In the 19th century, anytime Congress would vote itself a pay rate, even a hundred dollars a year, they were thrown out in a nice election, just like that.

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How dare these people do that? Okay, so the same spirit rose up. It's not dead in America.

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And tea bags were sent to all these people, and even the White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier, whatever,

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and there were kind of Congressmen, the National Committee, whatever it meant, and they'd conclave, and all of a sudden they're dead using tea bags and tickets.

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And it worked. It worked. That's the great thing about it. Because the one thing about Congress, we complain a lot about Congress, of course, and one thing about them, they have to come up for re-election pretty often. So they're sensitive to public protests, the pressure. That's the point. It's not the idea of begging these people. Put pressure on them. Look, you so-and-so, if you vote against me for the pay raise, you're out. You're finished. And so it worked. We beat it. And it's just a great thing. It's magnificent. Despite all the establishment, despite all the hokey arguments,

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These are heartening signs that things are breaking loose again in the United States as they were before the Reagan administration.

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Okay, let's get to the SNL bailout. I think that's a very interesting example of a situation

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where only a radical approach works. Only a radical approach is consistent. There's a gradual

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approach which is taken by almost all think tanks. We heard about free market think tanks

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today. Almost all the free market think tanks say, well, of course we have to bail out the

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depositors. It's a government guarantee. You have to bail them out. And then you try to

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and how to reform them. Other forums are pretty picky even to begin with. I don't want to talk about that right at this moment. I want to talk about the bailout.

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Nobody knows how much the bailout is going to be. I mean, the estimate keeps rising at about $20 billion every month or so.

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It started last year about $20 billion, it's now up to about $120 or $200 or whatever. Who knows?

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Because the thing is, the SNLs, a third of them are officially insolvent, and the rest of them are philosophically insolvent.

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When does the reality catch up with philosophy? It can happen any time.

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I think it's about $8 billion a month being withdrawn by shrewd people.

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Let's get out of this stuff. It seems to be collapsing around us. Let's get out and go into other things, money market funds or whatever.

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This is going to accelerate as the collapse accelerates. It could easily happen.

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So, the government guarantee is very interesting because the government, this is part of the running debate and libertarian party for many years over public debt.

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Those of us who are radicals are in favor of puniating the debts. The answer is, gee, it's a contract. Who made the contract?

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Contract is made by a government with people who want to live off tax loot for the next 20 years.

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I don't consider that a valid libertarian contract. It's sort of like a mafia contract. You and you get together, we shoot that guy over there.

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So, interestingly enough, the question of how the SNLs will be bailed out, everybody except maybe Mises Institute and one or two other groups are in favor of the bailout.

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Then the question is, how do you arrange the bailout? Well, you can establish and say, well, half of it will be paid by taxpayers.

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It won't be a tax, though, of course, like the saving, like the other tax and deposit was not a tax. That was supposed to be a fee.

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This is one of the ways. President Bush fulfills his pledge of no new taxes. You don't call it a tax. Tax is a bad word. Nobody likes taxes anymore.

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So you use the word fee. In this case it would be an insurance premium. You raise the insurance premium on the other banks to pay off the unsound banks, which of course pushes up various marginal banks into unsoundness, you understand.

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That's one way. Half the bailout funds are supposed to come from there. The other half will come from borrowing.

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Well, how do you... $50 billion is the estimate. It would be a lot more than that, I can assure you, before the thing is over.

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The other question is, how do you meet the Graham-Rudman limits on deficits?

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We're supposed to be moving down towards zero on the budget deficit question.

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When you do it by very simple advice, you just don't include it on the budget. It's an off-budget item.

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One great way to balance the budget is to not include spending in the budget. I wish I could do that.

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So I won't budget that.

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We create a phony new outfit called the Resolution Finance Corporation, something like that.

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They flood the bonds, and that wouldn't be officially part of the government, so it doesn't really count.

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One interesting thing is the third method, which they don't mention, the way they could really pay off the deposit seems very simple.

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The most important tip, which is really the foundation of Fed power, is to just print money and pay the people with it. Print the currency and give it to them.

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Why don't they do that? Why don't they print two hundred billion dollars, and give it to the depositors, and write the whole thing off.

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They could do it. There's no law against it. They've got the unlimited power to counterfeit.

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Which is the Fed.

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The reason they don't do it is kind of interesting. Because if they do it, it would be super-hooper-duper inflationary.

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Fractional Reserve Banking

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1. It would relieve the taxpayers of $200 billion or more of new taxes or new inflation, or however they're going to hug or bugger this.

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2. Our beloved depositors and savings and loan people will learn a valuable and instructive lesson.

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Namely, never trust the government again.

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It's very similar to the foreign debt question.

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If there's foreign debt piling up in Brazil and Argentina and other places,

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what to do about it? Well, don't write it off.

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Which means the Brazilian taxpayers don't have to be fleeced some more,

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the American taxpayers don't have to be fleeced some more,

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and the banks will finally engage in some honest accounting,

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which means they'll go under.

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So this is a radical one. It's a cleansing kind of thing.

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The thing is that honesty applied to American politics for the first time in a long, long time.

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We had the same opportunity, by the way, to get rid of unsound banking during 1933 and the Great Depression.

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The banks were going under. They were collapsing as we spoke.

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But we had two alternatives then. One is to allow them to go bust and that's it.

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We go back to the hard gold currency, forget about paper money and fractional reserve banking.

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The other route was taken, of course, by Roosevelt, and would have been taken by Hoover, which was, of course, to save the banks, go on to a paper-fiat standard, and all the rest of it, guarantee deposits, and all the rest of it.

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Now, some of my close friends are in favor of eliminating the FDIC government insurance and substituting private insurance, privately financed deposit insurance.

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Well, I'm not against it. I mean, it's like an entrepreneurial point. If you want to set up a private deposit insurance corporation, you're free to do it.

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The Ohio and Maryland private deposit insurance firms a few years ago.

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One bank was a crooked bank and that went under and immediately all the other banks,

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people got scared and the bank run occurred.

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The bank run, by the way, is a beautiful, magnificent institution, so it spreads like that.

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And once it spreads, nothing can be done about it.

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I think that's an instructive lesson because the banking system is the only industry in the United States that I know of which rests only on public confidence.

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You know, they always talk about confidence. We can't tell the public that SNLs are collapsing because it would ruin the confidence of the public.

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You don't see that applied in any place. Nobody talks about the importance of confidence in the computer industry or confidence in the TV industry.

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They've got TVs to sell. They've got computers, which are good. I mean, work.

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Confidence rests on the soundness of the product, not on flim flam and smoke and mirrors, which

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it does in the fractional reserve banking system.

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That's why confidence is all important, because they ain't got the money there, folks.

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They ain't got the money.

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There's a dispute among my friends about whether the public thinks that their money is there

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on the banks.

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I mean, take a poll, I think they all think it's there, and even my students every year

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for a semester of brainwashing still really believe it's there.

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So they think the money is there, they don't think it's going to be loaned out somewhere

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and it ain't there.

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So anyway, that's, I think, again, an instructive lesson which should be learned.

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To me, the idea of insuring the fractional reserve banking system, insuring the SNLs,

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is very much like insuring the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.

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No percentage of people.

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You're free to do it in the free market to do it, but there ain't much percentage in

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it.

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Okay, so by the way, free enterprise, it seems to me, I'm getting kind of irritated at the idea that if you're a small firm, if you own a restaurant or whatever, you're allowed to go under. If you're a big business, if you're a continental Illinois bank, or if you're a Lockheed or Chrysler or the SNL on the street, you can't be allowed to go under. You're bailed out automatically by the government. It seems to me that free enterprise means freedom to choose

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and also therefore means freedom to lose, for the big guys as well as the small ones.

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Okay, I think if I haven't succeeded in alienating everybody yet,

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I might as well give a couple, two more points on the current policies and current issues.

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One is a thing which irritates me a lot.

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I don't see much opposition to it, either in the libertarian movement or free market economists.

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I'm not saying it's not there, I just don't see it.

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It might be there bubbling underground and I haven't seen it yet.

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Anyway, we've had in the last few years a veritable reign of terror on Wall Street.

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Many of us have our least favorite politician. It's very difficult.

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I think about my least favorite politician is very difficult to decide among a rich tapestry of choices.

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If you're focused on this guy, yeah, yeah, he's the least favorite.

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If you're focused on somebody else, yeah, he's the one.

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My particular favorite is Rudolf Giuliani, the heroic Savonarola of Wall Street, the scourge of Wall Street, and Giuliani, as you probably know, is probably going to be the mayor of New York soon, and his big thing is using the power of the state apparatus, including all praise I have for illegal means, and certainly all the libertarian means, to what? To combat the evils on Wall Street. What are the evils on Wall Street?

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Insider trading, which is tied on up in certain means. If you hear, if you talk over a martini and say, gee, I know, gee, Jim, I know that so and so XYZ Corporation is going to merge with ABC Corporation, you're arrested. It's illegal. Somebody's spying on you. Ah, it's inside trading evil. Lock them up.

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And the idea that it's somehow an unfair advantage if you know something more than the other guy and therefore profit from it, that's what free enterprise is.

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It's knowing something more than the other guy and being an entrepreneur and profiting from it, whether it's the stock market or business in general.

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This is a direct assault on free markets, on free enterprise, on private property and all the rest of it.

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It's a victimless crime, just as much as prostitution and drugs, it's a victimless crime.

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also helps the economy by siphoning control and ownership of assets of corporations to

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the most efficient people, those who know more than the other clucks.

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And for this they are persecuted, the two permanent investment bankers are dragged out

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of their offices in manacles and chains by Giuliani's thugs, and what does the public

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say about it?

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I mean usually I'm optimistic about the public, but not in this sort of situation, they don't

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It's too good for them. There's a billion dollar fine and five years in jail and prohibiting

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forever freeing of security again. Too good for them. They should lock them up and throw

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away the key. This seems to be the modal argument, the modal opinion of the man on the street.

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And if you talk about civil liberties or property rights of Wall Street people, it seems, ah,

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they're rich. Who cares about their rights? I think it's extremely important for us to

372
00:40:09.000 --> 00:40:21.000
to me, one of the most interesting aspects of this was the New York Times headline, the New York Times always tries to be very objective in their headlines and their reporting

373
00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:28.000
but this time they weren't very objective, even by New York Times standards, the big headline was something like this, I wish I could remember the exact quote

374
00:40:28.000 --> 00:40:33.000
on the financial page, which is even more neutral than the other parts of it, was something like this

375
00:40:33.000 --> 00:40:39.000
Income so big that even Wall Street can't stomach, that was the headline.

376
00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:47.000
Income referred to Michael Milken, indicted for a billion dollars fine, 550 years in jail, whatever the penalties are,

377
00:40:47.000 --> 00:40:53.000
for the crime of inside trading, plus takeover bids and a little aperture against him a little bit.

378
00:40:53.000 --> 00:40:59.000
And the comments about Milken's $550 million a year income,

379
00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:03.000
Three people in particular at the New York Times quoted as attacking this bitterly.

380
00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:05.000
It's too much, it's monstrous, and so on and so on.

381
00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:08.000
One was, of course, our old buddy, John account of Galbraith.

382
00:41:08.000 --> 00:41:11.000
So you can expect that from Galbraith, alright.

383
00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:15.000
Galbraith was made minions by attacking everybody else's affluence.

384
00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:20.000
This is contribution to social life.

385
00:41:20.000 --> 00:41:24.000
The other was with Donald J. Trump, who was on the nerve, saying,

386
00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:26.000
You couldn't be happy on less money than that.

387
00:41:28.000 --> 00:41:30.000
What gold? What chutzpah?

388
00:41:31.000 --> 00:41:36.000
And third, another old buddy who practically runs the country, David Rockefeller, who says,

389
00:41:37.000 --> 00:41:42.000
if somebody can make that much money, it shows there's a serious imbalance in our financial system.

390
00:41:45.000 --> 00:41:49.000
So what are we looking at here? We're looking at a situation I think basically we're really looking at.

391
00:41:49.000 --> 00:42:05.000
The old corporate elite, which was inefficient, which has been shafting the stockholders for a long time, suddenly finds a system whereby people like Milking can finance, take over bids, and get the corporation out from under inefficient elites and under new and better owners.

392
00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:13.000
And so they'll pay the stockholders more money. That's really what it's all about. People like Rockefeller almost the embodiment of the old-fashioned corporate elite.

393
00:42:13.000 --> 00:42:22.000
So, there's another factor here, too, which Mises pointed out years ago, namely, very rich people tend to be in favor of progressive income tax. You wouldn't think of that.

394
00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:35.000
But very rich people essentially live off inheritance, off inherited wealth. They don't want new upstarts coming up with labor income, which is what Milken's income was, of course. It was percentage commission of income he got for the firm.

395
00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:42.000
So you have a war between the old-fashioned inherited wealth and people coming up on the outside, fast on the outside, doing better things.

396
00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:59.000
Actually, the whole milk and point was made possible by the Williams Act, the Farias-Williams Act in 1967, when the corporate elites were being hit by takeover bids so that people could get stockholders together and offer them higher money in the morning than getting an hour per share.

397
00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:04.000
It was outlawed by the Williams Act, and the Williams Act cracked down on takeover of business

398
00:43:04.000 --> 00:43:10.000
and ordered, as soon as you amass 5% of any corporate stock, you have to go public, you have to announce it,

399
00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:15.000
announce your intention to have an eventual takeover and wait a certain number, a certain time period to do it.

400
00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:20.000
This of course meant opportunities for arbitrage and the rest of it.

401
00:43:20.000 --> 00:43:26.000
And what Milken did was tremendous financial innovators to get around, by takeover, by leverage bias,

402
00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:31.860
around and so-called jump bonds to get around this prohibition. The Williams Act was passed

403
00:43:31.860 --> 00:43:37.840
by the beloved Senator Williams, who was then beloved, not now. The so-called education

404
00:43:37.840 --> 00:43:41.960
senator was always filling a congressional record with the pleas for more government

405
00:43:41.960 --> 00:43:49.360
money and education. We got caught on the Ampscam affair, got tossed under the Hussgau,

406
00:43:49.360 --> 00:44:17.360
The bankers who were floating low yield bonds didn't like the fact that Milton was competing with them very successfully.

407
00:44:17.360 --> 00:44:27.360
So you have these various interests trying to crush that competition and using the government to do it and using phony moral arguments to try to do it, and apparently fairly successfully at this point.

408
00:44:31.360 --> 00:44:45.360
So, my final example here, a current issue which I think almost everybody is wrong on, which I think libertarians should sail into,

409
00:44:45.360 --> 00:44:56.360
Is the Alaska oil spill. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. I couldn't see anything on TV. TV news are getting the point. All you get is medical news. And what's the point of getting something of the Alaskan oil spill?

410
00:44:56.360 --> 00:45:06.360
I mean, I'm now intimately familiar with every study and report that's been done on cancer and heart disease and plenty of other obscure diseases now, just from watching the regular news program.

411
00:45:06.360 --> 00:45:12.360
At any rate, here you have the oil spill. Who's blamed for the oil spill? Exxon.

412
00:45:12.360 --> 00:45:16.360
Excuse me, Exxon is precisely the apple of people we should feel sorry for.

413
00:45:16.360 --> 00:45:21.360
Exxon loses ten million gallons of oil, which is approximately five million dollars,

414
00:45:21.360 --> 00:45:24.360
plus the money they have to pay, and I think correctly so,

415
00:45:24.360 --> 00:45:28.360
the people, the lost apple of the oil spill, the fishermen, and all the rest of it.

416
00:45:28.360 --> 00:45:34.360
So Exxon are the losers, allegedly, from allegedly drunken sea captain.

417
00:45:34.360 --> 00:45:39.360
and yet Exxon is being boycotted, constantly attacked, etc., etc.

418
00:45:39.360 --> 00:45:44.360
And if you look at the arm, what we're suffering from is essentially environmentalist infection here

419
00:45:44.360 --> 00:45:48.360
because if you look at the environmentalist propaganda here, what they're saying is

420
00:45:48.360 --> 00:45:52.360
they're not really talking about the fishermen, they're talking about the otters,

421
00:45:52.360 --> 00:45:57.360
they're talking about the water. In fact, the water is no longer blue,

422
00:45:57.360 --> 00:46:01.360
it's now white or whatever, it's now black or brown because of the oil.

423
00:46:01.360 --> 00:46:10.360
So in other words, the rights of, but it used to be the rights of a stale daughter become a greater than the rights of human beings, or the rights of a caribou, or whatever, now it's the rights of the water.

424
00:46:10.360 --> 00:46:15.360
The right of the natural right of the water remain pristine. It seems to be totally idiotic.

425
00:46:15.360 --> 00:46:22.360
That's the sort of, that's the language in which this is camped. Exxon are not the liberally bumpy oil. They're the ones who are lost from it.

426
00:46:22.360 --> 00:46:50.360
The last big problem was the Amoco-Cadiz tanker off the coast of France in about 1979, I don't think there was any big fuss made about it at all, it was much bigger, about 60 million gallons, nobody complained, there was nothing big on television about it, they paid, I think Amoco paid about $100,000.

427
00:46:50.360 --> 00:46:59.360
They paid, I think Amoco paid about $500 million for unliability. That was it. There was no big thing. Nobody boycotted Amoco and all the rest of it.

428
00:46:59.360 --> 00:47:05.360
I think this is an example of the way in which environmentalism has spread in the last intervening decade.

429
00:47:05.360 --> 00:47:14.360
And I think what we have with the oil pipeline, which they're trying of course to shut down,

430
00:47:14.360 --> 00:47:21.360
The big argument against it was, for many years, which held up the development, the fact that the caribou migratory patterns would be disturbed.

431
00:47:21.360 --> 00:47:29.360
I mean, the caribou's got lots of land up there in Alaska. There's tons of, you know, huge amount of land. There's lots of land to walk around in.

432
00:47:29.360 --> 00:47:33.360
But the idea, the projection was the caribou would be disturbed by the pipeline.

433
00:47:33.360 --> 00:47:36.360
Well, they built the pipeline. It turns out the caribou loved it, because it's nice and warm.

434
00:47:36.360 --> 00:47:41.360
And they literally stubble up to the pipeline with a nice warmth.

435
00:47:41.360 --> 00:48:11.360
So, we have a group of people which have not been explored enough, I think, an environmentalist movement, essentially an anti-human movement, a movement which wants to roll back the Industrial Revolution, wants to go back to the primitive period when man and nature were allegedly in balance, which means of course wiping out about 95% of the human race, and elevating the alleged rights of animals, insects, fish, water, mountains, everything except fish.

436
00:48:11.360 --> 00:48:41.360
and People. Those of us who take this position are called speciesists, I prefer to call humanists, human beings being the prime priority here. I've been writing some anti-environmentalist articles in Liberty Magazine and the last couple of weeks ago the August chairman of the August New Jersey Libertarian Party called up the head of the Center for Libertarian Studies and demanded that he fire me as the

437
00:48:41.360 --> 00:48:45.360
of the Journal of Libertarian Studies for daring to attack environmentalism.

438
00:48:45.360 --> 00:48:52.360
So my friend who's the head of the center said it seems to be a lot easier for him to fire himself a subscriber.

439
00:48:52.360 --> 00:48:56.360
That means forcing him to subscribe to the journal.

440
00:48:56.360 --> 00:49:05.360
So that sort of stuff, I think, has to be tackled because where socialism, as I mentioned this afternoon, has collapsed.

441
00:49:05.360 --> 00:49:07.360
I mean, it's imploded, it's collapsed.

442
00:49:07.360 --> 00:49:13.360
Nobody is a socialist anymore, but we have a rise in various other forms of interventionism,

443
00:49:13.360 --> 00:49:20.360
in particular environmentalism, other egalitarianism, other measures, hatred of the rich and things like that, which still persist.

444
00:49:20.360 --> 00:49:27.360
So there's lots of work for us to do, but I think the climate, the political climate has gotten a lot better.

445
00:49:27.360 --> 00:49:32.360
With the retirement of Reagan to the ranch in Santa Barbara,

446
00:49:32.360 --> 00:49:53.360
What's your opinion of government experimentation on the American public without the American public knowing it?

447
00:49:53.360 --> 00:50:21.360
I was mentioning at the table here during dinner that the American public was injected with a AIDS virus, and we're all carrying the AIDS virus around with us, and it was a government experimentation back then, and how we all got this AIDS virus within us.

448
00:50:21.360 --> 00:50:27.360
How we all got this AIDS virus within our bodies was back in 1962 when the government

449
00:50:27.360 --> 00:50:34.620
was giving all these free polio injections that they had the AIDS virus within this injection

450
00:50:34.620 --> 00:50:39.400
of the polio. So we're all carrying the AIDS virus. The only problem is that they're not

451
00:50:39.400 --> 00:50:45.600
sure how the AIDS virus spread to where it's out of control today.

452
00:50:45.600 --> 00:50:48.800
I never heard of that. I don't know anything about that.

453
00:50:48.800 --> 00:50:55.800
it sounds far out. Yeah, it sounds far out. I can see any evidence of that effect. My favorite

454
00:50:55.800 --> 00:51:01.800
story about the government medicine was the swine flu caper, if anybody remembers that.

455
00:51:01.800 --> 00:51:08.800
I mean, that was documented. During the Ford administration, I believe, Ford was desperately

456
00:51:10.040 --> 00:51:14.320
anxious to get re-elected, but didn't look as if he was going to. He discovered the great

457
00:51:14.320 --> 00:51:21.680
Swine Flu Menace, and it's just that everybody got injected with this virus. There's no authentic

458
00:51:21.680 --> 00:51:28.600
cases of swine flu that had been recorded, and they were desperately trying to find somebody

459
00:51:28.600 --> 00:51:34.040
with swine flu so they could justify the program. They finally found some guy, I think in northern

460
00:51:34.040 --> 00:51:37.560
Michigan or Minnesota or something, it turned out however he was a pig farmer, he actually

461
00:51:37.560 --> 00:51:42.960
got it from swine. That didn't count. So they never really found anybody. In the meantime

462
00:51:42.960 --> 00:51:49.960
I kept injecting people with this stuff, and people were getting paralyzed from it and dying from it at a fairly hefty rate.

463
00:51:49.960 --> 00:51:56.960
And my favorite story, being a New Yorker at the time, being steeped in New York politics and social life,

464
00:51:56.960 --> 00:52:05.960
the head of the top mafia family in New York, the sainted Carlo Gambino, I believe, was pretty old then.

465
00:52:05.960 --> 00:52:12.960
His assistant, his top assistant, assisted him. Godfather, you must go get the swine flu virus injection.

466
00:52:12.960 --> 00:52:16.960
And he finally did. He tottered it off and got it and died the next day.

467
00:52:16.960 --> 00:52:26.960
And his helpful assistant was Carmine Galante, a secret member of the other competing family, then took over as head of the mafia.

468
00:52:26.960 --> 00:52:33.960
That was one great story. And the other, not really a story, was that I was telling this,

469
00:52:33.960 --> 00:52:39.960
I was talking to my class in American Economic History about the current situation at the time.

470
00:52:39.960 --> 00:52:43.960
And at that point Nelson Rockefeller was the Vice President.

471
00:52:43.960 --> 00:52:52.960
And that morning, I think, President Ford showed the greatness and the safety of the virus, the shot, got himself injected.

472
00:52:52.960 --> 00:52:56.960
One of my students popped up and said, well, if Ford dies tomorrow morning,

473
00:52:56.960 --> 00:53:00.960
and Rockefeller becomes President, that would vindicate a conspiracy analysis.

474
00:53:00.960 --> 00:53:14.960
Back some years ago there was a hundred intel programs by government spying on the roots in the country.

475
00:53:14.960 --> 00:53:23.960
Do you have any comments about any current government monitoring of various political groups, saved libertarians?

476
00:53:30.960 --> 00:53:43.960
The LP was spied upon in the early founding a couple of years. It was really kind of crazy, about five people in the party, and one of them must have been a government agent, because Ford had a great detail about it. This guy said it, and that guy said it.

477
00:53:43.960 --> 00:53:53.960
I think in a particularly scary period, one of the first libertarian meetings in the current period was in 1969.

478
00:53:53.960 --> 00:53:59.960
I was putting out a libertarian forum at the time in New York.

479
00:53:59.960 --> 00:54:02.960
My friend Joe Peaton was the publisher.

480
00:54:02.960 --> 00:54:05.960
He said, we seem to be getting a lot of people here, let's have a supper club.

481
00:54:05.960 --> 00:54:09.960
Go to a Chinese restaurant and have supper club.

482
00:54:09.960 --> 00:54:11.960
We thought we'd get about 20 people.

483
00:54:41.960 --> 00:55:11.960
I guess a report, someone so spoke, they said such and such in the comments. I mean, imagine the peculiarity of this thing, this coming little movement. We were, I mean, we're a mighty movement compared to what we were in 1969. You know, twenty people giving papers, and the cops were there. You know, they were spying on us and reporting it, and the taxpayers were paying for this crap. So I don't know what's going on now, but I do know that was going on then. And it was, oh, I can tell a story at length on that. But anyway, that was the Nixon administration. Nixon was going bananas.

484
00:55:11.960 --> 00:55:25.960
How, from a federal preventionist foreign policy standpoint, as an historian who has spawned, would people say Americans would never have won the Revolutionary War if they were not a part of the French?

485
00:55:41.960 --> 00:56:06.960
I was wondering if you'd ever addressed a free market alternative to saving the environment when you were talking last you mentioned the environment possibly as not being the important issue but of course in bottom analysis it still is important to a lot of people so I was just wondering...

486
00:56:11.960 --> 00:56:15.960
I do have some friends who are libertarian environmentalists.

487
00:56:15.960 --> 00:56:21.960
They have all sorts of ingenious plans, if you want to save the turtle or whatever it is.

488
00:56:21.960 --> 00:56:23.960
I don't care about saving these things.

489
00:56:23.960 --> 00:56:28.960
If you care about saving the species sub-28 of the turtle, you buy the damn thing and preserve it.

490
00:56:28.960 --> 00:56:31.960
You have a breeding range and you preserve it.

491
00:56:31.960 --> 00:56:33.960
Some environmentalist groups are doing that.

492
00:56:33.960 --> 00:56:36.960
They buy a plot of land and they save species.

493
00:56:36.960 --> 00:56:38.960
Okay, I'm sitting out against it.

494
00:56:38.960 --> 00:56:43.960
I wouldn't contribute a lot of money to it, but that's different strokes for different folks.

495
00:56:43.960 --> 00:56:47.960
Other things like pollution is an important question, but there you have to prove it.

496
00:56:47.960 --> 00:56:53.960
You have to sort of show the pollution going on, what the effect is, before you can start using the power of the government upon them.

497
00:56:53.960 --> 00:56:58.960
And a lot of the stuff seems to be very vague, you know, somebody's doing something.

498
00:56:58.960 --> 00:57:04.960
I mean, it's like the rainforest in Brazil. I mean, somehow poor Brazilians get in the neck.

499
00:57:04.960 --> 00:57:06.960
Everybody else can develop and chop down a forest.

500
00:57:36.960 --> 00:57:45.960
Well, I've noticed there was a number of organizations that have shown that they can save the environment at a profit.

501
00:57:45.960 --> 00:57:46.960
Yeah.

502
00:57:46.960 --> 00:57:47.960
Like whale watching.

503
00:57:47.960 --> 00:57:48.960
Yeah, yeah, sure.

504
00:57:48.960 --> 00:57:56.960
You know, there's Rainforest in Central America where they're taking people through and charging them to go through.

505
00:57:56.960 --> 00:57:58.960
Great. There's nothing wrong with that at all.

506
00:57:58.960 --> 00:57:59.960
Sure.

507
00:57:59.960 --> 00:58:07.960
The best example of that is my late Anthony Fisher, the founder of about two dozen free market institutes.

508
00:58:07.960 --> 00:58:12.960
And he invested in the turtle breeding grounds somewhere in the Caribbean.

509
00:58:12.960 --> 00:58:17.960
The thing apparently about turtles, and I'm not a natural scientist, I'm working on shaky ground.

510
00:58:17.960 --> 00:58:20.960
I'm not a turtle maven. But anyway, the turtles apparently...

511
00:58:20.960 --> 00:58:25.960
There's a high death rate for turtles. They're spawned on the beach.

512
00:58:55.960 --> 00:59:02.960
The Libertarian Party and the Libertarian Movement seems to, in terms of the

513
00:59:25.960 --> 00:59:31.560
Q. Membership, funding, the vote seems to have been basically a plateau in this decade.

514
00:59:31.560 --> 00:59:36.600
Do you think there will be any significant growth in the next 10 or 20 years, and what

515
00:59:36.600 --> 00:59:38.480
do you think they will take for that to happen?

516
00:59:38.480 --> 00:59:44.560
A. If you look at the Libertarian Party, it was founded in 1971, it grew phenomenally

517
00:59:44.560 --> 00:59:49.080
until 1980, at almost an exponential rate, and then bingo, we're hit.

518
00:59:49.080 --> 00:59:52.200
I don't think it's an accident that it was growing at the same time as anti-government

519
00:59:52.200 --> 01:00:07.200
In general, anti-tax sentiment, anti-inflation sentiment, anti-watergate, the whole watergate thing came in, the presidency, Vietnam, also Vietnam War, it all came in about the same time in the mid-70s.

520
01:00:07.200 --> 01:00:09.200
So you had a tremendous revulsion against government.

521
01:00:09.200 --> 01:00:17.200
Well, what happens in the 1980s, Henry Ronald Reagan, he had the honeyed voice and the head-shaking and all the rest of it.

522
01:00:17.200 --> 01:00:23.200
So Reagan, using libertarian rhetoric and doing exactly the opposite, fooled a large number of people.

523
01:00:23.200 --> 01:00:27.200
And so that's, so yeah, that killed eight years.

524
01:00:27.200 --> 01:00:32.200
And I think we did great by being on a plateau. I'm surprised we didn't collapse altogether.

525
01:00:32.200 --> 01:00:35.200
Now that Reagan, I really place a great emphasis on Reagan.

526
01:00:35.200 --> 01:00:45.200
I don't think it would be a replicable phenomenon. I think I couldn't find anybody who was like that, who was a beloved actor, who knows all the tricks of the trade and all that sort of stuff.

527
01:00:45.200 --> 01:00:55.200
Given that, I don't see that the state would be beloved again. He restored, he realized what happened to the presidency, he realized the magnificence of the fact that Nixon was really impeached.

528
01:00:55.200 --> 01:01:03.200
I mean, before Watergate, the talk of impeachment, which of course was straight constitutional advice, was unthinkable.

529
01:01:03.200 --> 01:01:06.200
You couldn't talk about impeachment, or not if you talked about impeachment.

530
01:01:06.200 --> 01:01:10.200
When Nixon came in, he was impeached. In fact, when he resigned before they could actually kick him out.

531
01:01:10.200 --> 01:01:13.200
But he was impeached. It was a great thing, a great step forward in American history.

532
01:01:13.200 --> 01:01:16.200
Finally an impeachment of the president.

533
01:01:16.200 --> 01:01:21.200
So, with Carter, first when Carter got out, I was afraid the cardigan sweater would sweep people off their feet,

534
01:01:21.200 --> 01:01:30.200
I think that that didn't happen. He sank without a trace. And when Reagan comes in, it reestablishes the love of the people of the president, the sovereignty of the president, and all sorts of stuff.

535
01:01:30.200 --> 01:01:38.200
So I think with Reagan out of the picture, it's not going to happen. I mean, Bush has a high approval rating, but I don't think it means much, because he isn't beloved in the same way.

536
01:01:38.200 --> 01:01:45.200
It's not magic, whatever it is, because I don't understand it, because I'm not caught up by it. But he hasn't got it.

537
01:01:45.200 --> 01:01:50.200
I think we're now going to be back to a normal political scene with people rising up in hatred of the government.

538
01:01:50.200 --> 01:01:53.200
My prognosis is great.

539
01:01:54.200 --> 01:02:07.200
I think there were a few of us who were surprised, to say the least, at your advocacy of Ron Paul for our party candidate in the last election.

540
01:02:07.200 --> 01:02:13.200
I wonder if you have any thoughts about it, if you intend to get involved in the 92 campaign, if you have anybody in mind?

541
01:02:13.200 --> 01:02:33.200
I've always involved every campaign. I haven't got anybody in mind particularly now. I think a candidate should be a credible candidate, should be somebody who the American public can identify with as a political leader, somebody who might be conceivable as a president.

542
01:02:33.200 --> 01:02:37.200
See, that's my problem with nominating people who are obviously not president.

543
01:02:37.200 --> 01:02:44.200
There's no word as president, I'll be like, it's like, I'll be like, the Pope, somebody who's a credible people candidate.

544
01:02:44.200 --> 01:02:49.200
So I think we should put up somebody who the American public would look at as a possible credible candidate.

545
01:02:49.200 --> 01:02:53.200
Like Dick Jacobs, the out-debated, what's the regal, you know, that sort of stuff.

546
01:02:53.200 --> 01:02:55.200
Somebody who can out-debate the establishment.

547
01:02:55.200 --> 01:03:00.200
If a monk will knock the socks off of Bush, it should be clear.

548
01:03:00.200 --> 01:03:04.200
So, I mean, that sort of thing. Two, I think, is you should have somebody who can raise money.

549
01:03:04.200 --> 01:03:08.200
If you need money for a presidential campaign. And Ron didn't have the ability to do that.

550
01:03:08.200 --> 01:03:13.200
So, I think that, and somebody who's pure libertarian, not going to waffle or sell out, which I think is also true.

551
01:03:13.200 --> 01:03:18.200
I think there were mistakes in his campaign, but, I mean, that's, you know, that should be corrected.

552
01:03:18.200 --> 01:03:23.200
But for the future presidential nominee. Yeah?

553
01:03:23.200 --> 01:03:36.200
What do you think the Hans Hoppe philosophical proof on property rights is going to have on the intellectual movement of libertarians?

554
01:03:53.200 --> 01:04:23.200
He's establishing a value-free, without establishing an ethical system, he's establishing a value-free libertarian ethic, hardcore, totally hardcore ethic, and he does it by taking an Aristotelian version of communism, which is prominent in Germany, extrapolating into economics and politics, so I think it's great, I mean I think it will have a lot of influence, I think it already has, so of course most of the people who originally reviewed it didn't understand it, and that's inevitable.

555
01:04:23.200 --> 01:04:30.200
Yeah, back there lady, back there in the wall.

556
01:04:53.200 --> 01:04:57.200
care of my own health, my children's health, and the industry that we have in the environment.

557
01:04:57.200 --> 01:05:03.200
So I would urge you to maybe reconsider your creation of environmentalists and start bringing them into the fold.

558
01:05:23.200 --> 01:05:53.200
basically starts what they start off by saying that before people arrived everything was great, there was a balance of nature, everything was, the environment was a little balanced, the species were balanced, and then man comes along and screws everything up, man is linear instead of being this beautiful circle, and man changes the environment, dominates it, it's a terrible thing, that seems to be the basic philosophical environmentalist position, for a long time now, it's the stuff I've read, so that you know, if you take a moderate position,

559
01:05:53.200 --> 01:06:22.200
How do you explain the continuing popularity of Paul Johnson in certain intellectual circles?

560
01:06:23.200 --> 01:06:29.200
I think there's some merit in modern times, a certain amount of merit. He adopts the Austrian Great Depression.

561
01:06:29.200 --> 01:06:40.200
It's a peculiar merit. But I think, basically, Paul Johnson is part of the international, really Anglo-American neocon movement, neoconservative movement.

562
01:06:40.200 --> 01:06:48.200
I'm not a big fan of the neoconservative movement. I think they're endangered, both to old-fashioned conservatism and to libertarians.

563
01:06:48.200 --> 01:07:05.200
Neocons are statists and they're basically, the position they take, they're very smart, they have a lot of media influence, the Wall Street Journal, Irving Kristol and so forth, and Jack Kemp, and basically their position is they want a more efficient welfare state.

564
01:07:05.200 --> 01:07:09.200
They want a welfare state after pre-McGovern, pre-1967.

565
01:07:09.200 --> 01:07:18.200
In favor of the New Deal, in favor of the Fair Deal, they love Hubert Humphrey and all that stuff, and they only stop with McGovern and post-McGovern.

566
01:07:18.200 --> 01:07:24.200
That's not good enough for me. I'm against the New Deal from the very beginning, even the Progressive Movement, much less the Deal.

567
01:07:24.200 --> 01:07:36.200
They're collectivists, they believe in American position of collective might all over the world, pushing everybody around for the base for world democracy or whatever.

568
01:07:36.200 --> 01:07:41.000
And I think it's a very dangerous movement, and the English seem to be into this quite a bit.

569
01:07:41.000 --> 01:07:46.200
The English right wing is now almost all neocons, except for a few maverick types.

570
01:07:46.200 --> 01:07:51.900
So, and they have a huge amount of influence, much more than their numbers, even more than that.

571
01:07:51.900 --> 01:07:54.500
We have somebody who mentioned that libertarians are more influential than their numbers.

572
01:07:54.500 --> 01:07:59.300
Neocons are even more so, almost the influential, and very few actual people in it.

573
01:07:59.300 --> 01:08:03.400
But they have believers of power, they're very smart, they have mostly their ex-Marxists or ex-Tchotskyites,

574
01:08:03.400 --> 01:08:22.400
One of the biggest news stories of this past week was the conviction of Oliver Noyce.

575
01:08:22.400 --> 01:08:27.400
One of the biggest news stories of this past week was the conviction of Oliver Noyce.

576
01:08:57.400 --> 01:09:01.400
I personally don't think you should absolve them. I'm sick of the order stuff.

577
01:09:01.400 --> 01:09:05.400
When the prosecutor, John Kecker, raised the Hitler point, I think he was making a good point.

578
01:09:05.400 --> 01:09:09.400
He was making the point that that was the icon of defense. He was just carrying out orders. He wasn't doing anything.

579
01:09:09.400 --> 01:09:13.400
He wasn't a rogue elephant, a rogue cowboy, whatever you want to call it.

580
01:09:13.400 --> 01:09:17.400
I think you have to apply the same sort of standards in the United States.

581
01:09:17.400 --> 01:09:21.400
I have to say that I've obeyed orders that are not good enough.

582
01:09:21.400 --> 01:09:25.400
You can resign, despite Rothbard's law. Some people can't resign.

583
01:09:25.400 --> 01:09:31.400
the freedom to get out of government. So that's my position, essentially anti-North and anti-Reagan.

584
01:09:31.400 --> 01:09:38.400
By the way, North patriotic Hocum, he'd stand on his head for the president and all that sort of stuff.

585
01:09:38.400 --> 01:09:42.400
You notice when Bush came to shove and his neck was on the line, he didn't stand on his head for anything.

586
01:09:42.400 --> 01:09:47.400
He was subpoenaing Reagan, right, and trying to expose these so-called secret documents.

587
01:09:47.400 --> 01:09:50.400
So I don't see his nobility there either.

588
01:09:50.400 --> 01:10:18.400
What do you think about libertarians selling the idea of libertarianism, making it more powerful?

589
01:10:18.400 --> 01:10:26.400
What I mean is like, instead of saying abolish the IRS or abolish the income tax, talk about the benefits of the income.

590
01:10:27.400 --> 01:10:31.400
I thought you were going to say privatize the IRS. I got scared for a minute.

591
01:10:32.400 --> 01:10:35.400
Oh, we don't want an efficient IRS. No, we don't.

592
01:10:37.400 --> 01:10:43.400
What I'm saying is a lot of times you hear a wrong call or whatever, right on the TV they want to abolish this.

593
01:10:43.400 --> 01:10:53.400
The question is, instead of doing that, maybe explain the benefits that would come with getting rid of money?

594
01:11:43.400 --> 01:11:47.400
on the viability of privatizing the judicial system?

595
01:12:13.400 --> 01:12:16.400
The political ______ about the radio and TV channels or something.

596
01:12:16.400 --> 01:12:20.400
You get somebody who's an expert on the TV industry and you can judge it.

597
01:12:20.400 --> 01:12:24.400
It's picked by both sides and therefore it would be selling your services on the market.

598
01:12:24.400 --> 01:12:26.400
And I think it's great. It's happening more and more.

599
01:12:26.400 --> 01:12:28.400
It's not just a theoretical point.

600
01:12:28.400 --> 01:12:30.400
Many of these things, by the way, are not just arcane points.

601
01:12:30.400 --> 01:12:32.400
They're happening all the time.

602
01:12:32.400 --> 01:12:36.400
It's just where we don't get too brain-clogged to see it.

603
01:12:36.400 --> 01:12:40.400
By the way, there's a great book coming out by Bruce Benson this summer.

604
01:12:40.400 --> 01:12:42.400
The title, it keeps seeing different titles.

605
01:12:42.400 --> 01:12:43.400
Law and Justice.

606
01:12:43.400 --> 01:12:47.160
And what it is, he's an economist at Florida State, what it is is a whole massive compendium

607
01:12:47.160 --> 01:12:52.560
of how private law, private courts, and private enforcement has been successful in primitive

608
01:12:52.560 --> 01:12:56.400
Indian tribes and pre-modern Europe and all the rest of it, a whole bunch of cases of

609
01:12:56.400 --> 01:12:57.400
that sort.

610
01:12:57.400 --> 01:12:58.400
It's a great book.

611
01:12:58.400 --> 01:13:00.400
So that's a look for it.

612
01:13:00.400 --> 01:13:06.880
Anyway, he has an article in Southern Economic Journal, this current issue on law and merchant,

613
01:13:06.880 --> 01:13:11.600
how to develop a private merchant course and then take it over and scoot up out of the

614
01:13:11.600 --> 01:13:30.600
I ran once said that one does not go above one's house dusting it if one's house is on fire. How do you see America's house smoldering, on fire, if it hasn't already burned to the ground?

615
01:13:41.600 --> 01:13:44.960
The way Albert J. Knox put it, it's the struggle between state power and social power.

616
01:13:44.960 --> 01:13:50.560
By social power, we meant voluntary arrangements, market arrangements, voluntary scientific

617
01:13:50.560 --> 01:13:52.740
development, civilization and all that.

618
01:13:52.740 --> 01:13:56.400
And social and state power forces the state looting it, interfering with it, repressing

619
01:13:56.400 --> 01:13:57.400
it.

620
01:13:57.400 --> 01:13:58.880
It's a contest between the two things.

621
01:13:58.880 --> 01:14:08.080
I think we're fairly in good shape and there's some bad things and some good things.

622
01:14:08.080 --> 01:14:09.080
Back there.

623
01:14:09.080 --> 01:14:15.080
Do you see the current balance of trade deficit and do you think there's anything to be said for protectionism?

624
01:14:39.080 --> 01:14:42.080
Probably you've got to hold the $200 billion worth of dollars somewhere.

625
01:14:42.080 --> 01:14:46.080
And what it is, of course, foreigners hold it. Foreign investors are investing in dollars.

626
01:14:46.080 --> 01:14:51.080
Which means the dollar is much more higher value than it would be without it, which means they're financing cheap imports.

627
01:14:51.080 --> 01:14:54.080
It's great. It's one of the last. It's terrific.

628
01:14:54.080 --> 01:14:58.080
There's nothing wrong with deficits. It's just like worrying about the deficit between Dearborn and Southfield or whatever.

629
01:14:58.080 --> 01:15:05.080
If there was a balance, if there was a customs barrier between Dearborn and Southfield, between Las Vegas and Los Angeles or whatever,

630
01:15:05.080 --> 01:15:14.080
There will be people griping about the deficit. There will be some sort of deficit. One or the other. There will be more dollars crossing the border this way than that way.

631
01:15:14.080 --> 01:15:20.080
And people will gripe about it. My God, we have to have tariffs, we have to have government intervention. It's all nonsense. There's no problem with the deficit.

632
01:15:20.080 --> 01:15:27.080
And the only reason people think there's a problem is because the word deficit is the same as the government budget and the balance of trade.

633
01:15:27.080 --> 01:15:32.080
The fact that the word is the same means nothing. It's two totally different things. There's nothing to worry about.

634
01:15:32.080 --> 01:15:36.580
Unfortunately, statistics, a collection of statistics often creates problems on themselves.

635
01:15:36.580 --> 01:15:39.080
This is a beautiful example of it.

636
01:15:39.080 --> 01:15:42.080
That's it. Yeah.

637
01:15:42.080 --> 01:15:49.080
Everybody seems to be running around tonight asking the solution to their own pet problem.

638
01:15:49.080 --> 01:15:51.080
It's all asked of mine.

639
01:15:51.080 --> 01:16:00.080
And that is, you as an economist, I think, must understand how freedom movement around the country

640
01:16:00.080 --> 01:16:29.080
The English network of roads in the 18th century was all private, and turnpikes, toll roads, you can see that, this is where I'll have a private collection of tolls that the government, and then streets are going to be run in all sorts of ways, all sorts of ways in which the street companies collect income.

641
01:16:29.080 --> 01:16:32.080
So Broadway becomes a private firm?

642
01:16:59.080 --> 01:17:11.080
You know, on the, on the, on your car, you buy a sticker which gives you the right to drive in certain, let's say in the rush hour period, you pay a market clearing price for the sticker, this eliminates congestion and rush hour. Beautiful way of doing it.

643
01:17:11.080 --> 01:17:20.080
In New York City, there's two, first of all, they, of course, they don't have much, either they have zero fees or very low parking fees, they have big congestion.

644
01:17:20.080 --> 01:17:24.080
And then the mayor says, we've got to ban all private cars from New York from Manhattan.

645
01:17:24.080 --> 01:17:28.080
There's a typical government in action, easy to subsidize something, you're prohibiting it.

646
01:17:28.080 --> 01:17:34.080
There's no kind of concept, maybe you let the market do it, you know, have a market of private and competing private and enterprise,

647
01:17:34.080 --> 01:17:38.080
and let them work out the pricing arrangement. It's the only rational way to do it anyway.

648
01:17:38.080 --> 01:17:44.080
It's only because we've been locked in a situation for several centuries of government rows that we can't conceive of how it would work.

649
01:17:44.080 --> 01:17:51.080
It's very much as if, for some kind of customary, historical reasons,

650
01:17:51.080 --> 01:17:55.080
The government is the sole monopoly producer of shoes.

651
01:17:55.080 --> 01:17:58.080
Everything else is free, but the government produces all the shoes.

652
01:17:58.080 --> 01:18:03.080
And if I came up and said, I think we should have a privately competitive shoe or shoe industry,

653
01:18:03.080 --> 01:18:05.080
and you could easily say, hey, that's a terrible thing.

654
01:18:05.080 --> 01:18:07.080
You want people to go one shod, and who would produce shoes?

655
01:18:07.080 --> 01:18:09.080
How many would they be? How many firms would it be?

656
01:18:09.080 --> 01:18:13.080
Who the hell knows? Let the market rip and let the market decide.

657
01:18:13.080 --> 01:18:15.080
That's the way to do it.

658
01:18:15.080 --> 01:18:17.080
Two more questions.

659
01:18:17.080 --> 01:18:19.080
Okay.

660
01:18:19.080 --> 01:18:43.080
I'm sorry, I don't have a question, but I'd like to remind everyone that there's something that they can do to advance their libertarian philosophy, and that's to get ahold of their Republican representatives and let them know how they feel about this gun control legislation, because all of your rights hinge on your ability to prepare firearms.

661
01:18:49.080 --> 01:19:01.080
Talking about politicians, I'm confused about Dana Broderbacher, I thought he was a libertarian once, he just got elected, he's talking about Olly North, he made a real pro-Olly North government the other day.

662
01:19:19.080 --> 01:19:25.080
And then he shifted over as soon as the job in the Reagan speech campaign team opened up.

663
01:19:25.080 --> 01:19:30.080
So that's, I mean, I don't know what, I mean, who the hell would be?

664
01:19:30.080 --> 01:19:34.080
People change their minds, people defect from the Communist Party, people change a lot, and even he changed.

665
01:19:34.080 --> 01:19:37.080
The problem is to call him a libertarian in some sense.

666
01:19:37.080 --> 01:19:41.080
That's where I balk, you know, the guy's now a Reaganite.

667
01:19:41.080 --> 01:19:43.080
So that's the tradition.

668
01:19:43.080 --> 01:19:46.080
And look at his voting record, it's Reaganite.

669
01:19:46.080 --> 01:19:54.080
speech record and the rest of it. So that's it. It happens from time to time. Too bad, but it doesn't happen.

670
01:19:55.080 --> 01:19:57.080
Thank you, Murray.