It's great to be back here. I was at a Texas LP convention. It was in Austin. That's all I remember. The years fade away, but I remember it was very pleasant.
And it's great to be here again. I guess I'm slated for a current affairs topic and a lot of fantastic things happening in the world.
Well, you wouldn't know it from the national party. I'll get back to that a little later.
Later. What's happening in the world is that literally we're really living through what the historians call a revolutionary moment in history. It's like something like living through the French Revolution and fortunately we're living in a fairly safe spot where we can kind of watch it on TV, which is my favorite way of watching revolution. But what we're seeing is that literally the collapse
of the big movement of the 20th century, namely socialism, we're seeing the death of socialists, death throes.
And socialism was the big movement of the 20th century, the big ideological and political movement.
And what we're seeing at the end of the 20th century, this is one of the great exciting times in which to live,
because we're seeing the collapse of socialism, the revolutionary implosion of socialism.
What happened was that over the last several centuries, starting in the 17th and going up to the 18th and 19th century,
we had an upward march, not of course every day, but basically an upward march of freedom,
and the death of the old order, which was statism and serfdom and slavery and theocracy.
And rising up from this muck was the idea of individual freedom and the institutions of individual freedom.
Personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, free markets.
And with that came international peace, replacing constant dynastic wars and territorial conquests.
And the rise for the first time in the history of mass consumption, in other words, standards of living,
standards of living, not only increasing standards of living, but standards of living were actually
rising from subsistence level, where the general public could buy stuff. This is unusual, unique
in world history. In the old days, you didn't buy stuff. You didn't go to the store and
buy stuff, which you did with the housewife. You bought cloth, if you had the money, and
the housewife would sew the clothing and stuff. And that was the idea of mass production for
a consumer market as an industrial revolution concept, as a product of the free markets
of the 19th, 18th and 19th centuries. So, what you had is, I mean, just saying the growth
of the standard of living doesn't really encompass it. It's the beginning of a real living standard.
And with this, you have a tremendous progress in all areas of civilization and economics
and personal liberty and technology, which goes along with it. And so the 19th century
was the breaking through of this several century old movement of what we call classical liberalism.
and of course those they didn't call a classical, we call it classical because it sort of died out and we're trying to essentially restore it and this liberal movement was rising and everything was going great and the liberals at the time were very optimistic as well as they should be and then something happened, a glitch happened, something happened on the way to Nirvana and the something that happened was the growth of the development of socialism which was a brand new idea in human history
And the socialist idea, which really sprouts in the 1830s and 1840s in Europe, was that we can still have this, because the previous opposition to classical liberalism, the opposition to freedom, was the opposition in defense of the old order, specifically anti-industrial, anti-mass consumption movement, the idea of keeping the lords and the dukes and the earls in their places, in the state churches, keeping their power in position.
Socialism is basically, frankly, an anti-general freedom movement, an anti-industrial movement.
Well, the socialists came along and said, look, we can do both things.
We can have the same thing, we can have higher standards of living.
As a matter of fact, we'll have better than capitalism does it.
We can have an advancing standard of living.
We can have freedom and we can have everybody be happy and so forth and so on.
We can do it through state control.
We can have better ways through statism.
and we can have more state control than before, we'll have the people state, instead of having
a class state of a few people running it, a few dukes and kings and stuff, we can have
the whole people collectively running the people.
So this concept of collectivism is a brand new thing and it sounded great and was generally
supported by many folk who was either yearning for the old order or trying to blend the two
liberalism and anti-liberalism to one higher, allegedly higher synthesis.
So by the end of the 19th century, if you go read some of the classical liberals, it's a sad thing, because the classical liberals of the late 19th century, around 1900, saw the whole thing as cracking.
Socialism was on the march, and the general public was backing it. The general public previously had backed libertarianism or classical liberalism.
We were a mass movement in the 19th century. In England and much of the continent and the United States, we had the votes. We had libertarian parties, so to speak, not the name or the actual content.
But by the late 1890s or 1900s, the days of night were closing in, the shades were closing in, and Herbert Spencer and other classical liberals writing at the time were very pessimistic.
The whole thing is shot, civilization has had it, and as such they were right. They saw the big forecast, foresaw the terror of the 20th century, the gulag, etc. of the 20th century.
Anyway, by 1900 or so, the general opinion, so-called intelligent opinion, was socialism
is morally correct. That's right, it's morally correct that social justice will be imposed
etc. etc. through collectivism. And the only problem was, will it work? People weren't
sure it would work, because it's so radical and new. But the thing is, socialists are
captured to conquer the high moral ground. Everybody agreed that they're morally correct,
If you're in a situation where everybody says, in general opinion, intellectuals, etc., say, that the socialists are right, or they're morally correct, it's just we're not sure it will work, the next step, the inevitable next step, is, okay, let them try it. Let's see if it will work or not.
And that's what happened in the 20th century. It sums up the 20th century, starting, of course, with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Well, let it work. I grew up in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the general view was, well, of course, there are certain excesses in Russia.
A few people got their head chopped off. But that's a noble experiment. Let's see if a social experiment works.
We'll have to wait and see. Let's see if the famous phrase in those days was, in order to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.
and of course the people who wear the eggs didn't like it too much
but who cares if you have a wonderful collective omelette which we can all eat
well anyway we now have a record
I mean after the 20th century and essentially a process of socialism working itself out
and by the way I see no difference really between socialism and communism
I feel the same thing
By the way, this was the view of the original socialists of the 1830s and 40s.
To them, socialism and communism are interchangeable terms.
And it's only later in the 20th century when the fruits of socialism began to be pretty bitter.
People didn't like the fact, hey, we've got slave labor here and mass murder.
And then socialists in the United States would say, well, that's not our socialism.
We didn't plan on that.
We want democratic socialism with freedom and free speech in the world.
and the collective ownership of means of production.
So the idea of so-called democratic socialism was a cop-out
where socialists refused to accept the consequences of their own policy and action.
And in World War II, when F.A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, this was a big thing.
If you read it now, it seems kind of plonky, it seems to be sort of everybody agrees on this,
And so they didn't agree on it at the time, when he wrote The Road to Serps in 1943-44,
this is a revolutionary statement, because what he said was, there ain't no such thing
as democratic socialism. If you have government ownership and planning of means of production,
if you have government planning of the economy, it means everybody's life is being planned.
You can't have free speech, you can't have democracy, you can't have freedom of the press,
freedom of assembly or expression, if you have government ownership and control of the
means of production. It's essentially what he said in those days was bitterly opposed
by Most Right-Thinking, Upstanding Right-Thinking People.
And it now turns out, I'm not going to show evidence that this is going on, this is now
agreed upon by almost everybody, almost everybody, certainly in the communist countries, agree
on it, that economic freedom and free markets go hand-in-hand with personal freedom and
freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
Well, what happens is that the record of socialism piling up after World War II becomes pretty
obvious of slave labor camps, gulags, concentration camps, mass murder, genocide, etc., etc.,
begin to have a kind of a weakening of the position here, the legitimacy, the high moral
Social ground against the crumled, and public opinion and intellectualism began to realize
that something morally bad about socialists doesn't seem to really give a high moral ground
here.
And also it happened, I think it's also important to realize here, that what happens over history,
We think of it, in the time we think of it, day-to-day things are not happening, no changes
are taking place.
You look at the, it still seems jerks in power, Democrats, Republicans, it looks as if nothing's
really happening, there's no change, it's sort of a frozen system.
Look, it's become, it continues, quote, frozen unquote, for a long time, as small tensions
develop, disagreements, conflicts, and suddenly, this is what's happening now in the communist
countries, suddenly bingo, like that, suddenly eruption, like the French Revolution.
What's happening in France for about 80 years, more and more statism, people grumbling, et cetera, et cetera, and suddenly there's some trigger and the eruption of all the pent-up tensions and conflicts that have been piling up.
So what happened in the communist countries, the original revolutionary generation began to die out.
If you're committing your whole life to a cause, you're up on the guerrilla warfare
on the hills, or whatever you are, and you seize power in a country, as in Russia and
Cuba or whatever, or China, the original revolutionary generation is committed to it.
They murder all the people who are not committed to it, for one thing, only the dissidents
and the guys who are beginning to question and get sentenced to labor camp or get killed.
And so these guys continue to be committed to the cause until they die out.
And I'm not in favor of death, you understand, but there's a certain, sociologically, the
older generation, the people with the revolutionary leadership die out, the younger people coming
up are not that committed.
They are sort of born into the system.
It's a big difference between fighting on the hills and marching down and taking over
and seizing power.
It's a very heady thing to seize power.
I could put up with a lot of heartache and starvation, especially if you're in the ruling
elite. You don't get the starvation anyway. You're in pretty good shape. So being in the
ruling elite and having founded the new revolutionary society, you're going to be committed to it
for life in general. But the new people coming up, as the next generation succeeds generation,
they're not committed to it. They're just born in it. And the fascinating thing is that
One of the lessons of the current situation is that totalitarianism doesn't work, just
doesn't work.
Because these people were brought up in Russia and China and the separate separate, brought
up from the year zero to accept, to listen to all this crap from the beaming from the
government run educational system, down to the local block level.
You owe your life to the society, you're the slave of the state, et cetera, et cetera.
And it doesn't take, the great thing is it doesn't take, and freedom is obviously a natural
In 1984, the Orwell Doom and Gloom Messengers was a great book, but it's not true, but it doesn't work.
You can't suppress the spirit of freedom, that's what we're finding out.
I remember when the Chinese Communists first took over in the 1950s or so,
I think the Yugoslavs had a very interesting movie about China, Communist China.
I saw the movie, it was very interesting because the interviewer was talking to an allegedly average Chinese communist family and they said, they asked the mother and father, what would you like your kid to be when he grows up?
And they said, all we want for the kid is to be the obedient subject of the government, the state, the people's state. It was a pretty chilling thing to watch and I said to myself,
I said to myself, jeez, is it really true that I've really brainwashed this whole nation, you know, is it really true that mankind has been transformed,
the so-called new socialist man has been created, which is just some willing robots to the state apparatus.
And I asked a friend of mine at the time, he had just been released, he had been in the State Department in China, he was interned during the Korean War,
And so he was a China expert, and I asked him, is this really true? Is it true that the Chinese have been totally brainwashed or are going to have a new socialist man, a new communist man emerging?
And he said, no, don't worry about it, because China is an old tradition. When a central government official comes to town, you tell him what he wants to hear.
And when he leaves town, you go about your business again. And so it turned out...
And it's a marvelous thing, it's a wonderful thing, the way people can adapt and yet keep much of their personal integrity.
And so, of course, it turns out to be true.
So the new generation coming up,
they hear about Marxism, Leninism,
well, they don't believe this crap anymore.
And about 10 years ago or so, Earl Ravenel,
he's a libertarian foreign policy expert,
went to Russia for the first time in many years,
visited Moscow.
This is way before any kind of glasnost or perestroika.
And he came back and I spoke to him.
He said, you know, it's a fantastic thing.
Nobody in Russia believes in Marxism anymore, nobody.
... big shots, little shots, whatever. Nobody believes there's junk anymore.
But what began to happen is, as the generations continued, had a bunch of people in power who were sort of operating by inertia.
They wanted to keep their power, obviously, but there was no more legitimacy on the part of... they had no more legitimacy.
No more Marxism, Leninism, purely lip service.
And once you lose your legitimacy, you lose your moral legitimacy, so to speak, the rest... the collapse of the system becomes inevitable,
becomes inevitable, especially if the system doesn't work, because of my next point.
I mean, it was the moral legitimacy of socialism that's finished, and certainly finished in
the communist countries. It's not finished, unfortunately, in the West.
The only Marxist left are in American universities, Western European universities.
It began to be a joke. It's not much of a joke, it's sort of a political joke, but it's a pretty good nevertheless.
And among economists, by the 1950s and 60s, when most economists in the west were still
Keynesians and semi-socialists, and the joke was at international economic conferences,
the economists from the communist countries were talking about the virtues of the free
market and the economists from the west were talking about the virtues of government planning.
Well so this keeps going on, it's kept escalating, and what you have is, in the communist countries,
In countries where it's obvious, first they lose the moral legitimacy and the revolutionary enthusiasm and then they see the goddamn thing doesn't work, just doesn't work, you don't get mass prosperity, you have mass starvation, and a grinding, crummy system that keeps on, and if you get any consumer goods at all, it's all gray and miserable, crummy, and they don't want to live in a crummy world, and they see the interchange with the West, they see that other people are in pretty good shape, and why can't we have the same sort of thing?
They're committed to a modern industrial economy. They realize they can't get it with undersocialism, they just can't get it.
It's become painfully obvious as time is going on.
And so what's happened is that there's a collapse of legitimacy and followed now by a collapse of obviously the economy and a reaching out to try to get rid of this.
All the stuff the guy says is now rendered untrue by events.
What happens in a revolutionary period is fantastically radical change.
Deng Xiaoping used to be a liberal reformer.
He started as a movement over the free market in China about ten years ago.
He's now a reactionary pig repressing the people.
He has the same views as he had before, just the events have outpaced him.
It's very much like the French Revolution.
And just hasn't caught up with the idea, you want to have a free market and modern industry, you have to have free expression and free speech, free press.
He hasn't realized that yet. Of course, he's cracking that. He's also an old guardsman. He was one of the Long March people.
One thing about China, by the way, is that, as everybody knows, I think we should emphasize this, the leaderships are only upper 80s, early 90s.
The youngsters, the young liberals in about 75, if this were the only thing that attracts me about communist China, if I weren't communist China, I'd be a brilliant teenage youth leader.
So these guys are going to disappear pretty soon and the people are not committed to the revolutionary generation.
They didn't march from Yanan or whatever in 1937.
I'm going to be very different. I think forces of freedom are going to win out.
So, one fascinating oracle in Los Angeles Times a few months ago was this.
A guy in Moscow, born in Russia, has been an American citizen for many years,
has set up for the first time in Russia a copy center.
We all know about copy centers. They're all over the place. This is a revolutionary thing.
How can you have a copy center in a country which tries to be totalitarian, which tries to keep people from learning anything?
You can't do it. Once you allow copy machines, that's the end of totalitarianism.
But they don't want to prohibit copy machines. They want a modern world. They want high tech.
How can you have high tech without copy machines without personal computers?
How can you have a personal computer without a totalitarianism in a hermetically sealed country? You can't do it.
So the force of modern technology, the force of industrial revolution, requires a free market.
And it's becoming obvious in the leadership, much less the public in the communist countries.
And he said, this is the beginning, he hopes to have a whole chain of copy centers.
And it's just the tip of the iceberg.
The only countries now, there are two countries I think, I mean I could be corrected on this,
there are two countries in the world which still prohibit typewriters among the public.
In order to have a typewriter you have to have a government license, you have to be carefully investigated and all that.
One is Albania. What can I say about Albania? It's the place that nobody wants to go, even Albanians. No tourists go to Albania for an excellent reason.
And in Iraq, where the heroic free world leader Saddam Hussein, a monster who, you know, every peasant's hut has a picture of Hussein on his wall, otherwise he's shot.
Outside of that, all countries permit typewriters and they're going to permit copy centers,
they're going to permit personal computers and all the rest of it, otherwise they ain't nowhere.
So what we have, what we see then is the whole, let's say, breaking up of the whole communist totalitarian center.
All the books we've read, we've grown up on, the whole picture of communism is a Russian monolith,
a very efficient monolith, by the way, satanic.
satanic, the usual white-winged picture, the Cold War picture of Russia, or communism,
satanic, brilliantly efficient, monolithic movement, organized by the Kremlin, which
is going to take over unless we nuke them and muke them right away. And this whole thing
is now obsolete. If it were true at all, which I don't think it was, it's certainly now obsolete.
You can't keep saying that anymore. The whole thing is now like reading about some 17th
century cult, because the whole thing is now cracking up. They're even attacking Lenin
Now in Russia, they've been attacking Marx, some of the radicals. This whole thing starts
with Marx, we have to investigate this whole business. They're publishing Solzhenitsyn,
they're doing almost anything he can say. I mean, Yeltsin is going... I mean, to think
that on nationwide Soviet television, a guy gets up in the Soviet Congress and bitterly
attacks the KGB, this Olympic wrestler, and attacks him bitterly, man, anything we could
have said, he'd do the same thing. And the head of the KGB gets up and says, when you're
right, but that wasn't my regime, I just came in there, I'm going to reform it now.
He's speaking like an American politician for Christ's sake.
There's a great collection, by the way, in Russia and in Poland now, of course, in one sense they're more democratic than we are because they have these guys running unopposed for elections.
This happened in Russia a few months ago and happened in Poland just the other day. They're running unopposed and you cross their name out and they don't get elected.
They don't get a majority of votes voting. They get defeated.
In other words, none of the above now operates only in Russia and Poland, not in the United States.
In Nevada, my state of Nevada, there is none of the above, but it's only symbolic, doesn't mean a damn thing.
In other words, if none of the above gets a majority, a guy still gets in.
In Russia and Poland, it's now effective.
And they did it, they really just brought their names out.
So, it was a marvelous cartoon after the Russian election where these top communists, unopposed communists in Moscow and Leningrad were defeated.
And there's a great cartoon that's sitting around on a panel facing the audience, three
Russian, feeder Russian communist politicians.
They said, one guy says, what are we going to do now?
The other guy says, don't worry, we'll become lobbyists and consultants.
So adopting the American, good old American practice.
So I'd say these are fantastic things.
My own personal experience goes along with this.
I wasn't, I was not in any of these countries at the recent glass nose period, but I was
Twice in Hungary and twice in Poland, it's kind of interesting.
The first time I was in Hungary, quite a few years ago,
and you go in communist countries, the tour guide,
you go on a bus tour of Budapest or Warsaw or whatever,
and the bus guys were all trained operatives,
communist party apparatchiks.
And they're not sort of dumb-dumb like how the United States
doesn't fully know the name of the square.
They're highly trained, intelligent apparatchiks.
So this bus tour guide was giving us this,
You go to the main square in Budapest, where Attila the Hun, the statue of the great hero of Hungary, like Attila the Hun, I kid you not.
I'd have Attila the Hun revisionist of me here. Anyway, you go to the square, you see these guys hanging around up to no visible good in the square,
and the bus guy says, don't talk to these evil men, because they'd send you counterfeit currency.
What they're really doing, of course, is selling you black market forints, Hungarian currency, at a much better rate, you can get a government rate.
The interesting thing is that they were there. The government had not stamped them out. There was an open, visible black market.
And the tour guide was just saying, don't, these are bad men, they'll send you counterfeits.
The next time I wasn't hungry, that was last year, four or five years after that, the tour guide was,
from the beginning we sat down on the bus until the end, the guy was attacking the government the entire time.
The cooks and tyrants, the communists, it was no good. I mean the whole time, it was a constant scream.
And Hungary, the whole thing, the whole thing, nobody, they're sitting around discussing
about the multi-party system coming up. Most of the parties refuse to even put socialism
on their platform. No, no, we're against socialism. They're negotiating with the government. The
government said, can we put in freedom within socialism? No, toss it out. No socialism.
And Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian Communists are now in favor of private property
rights, free markets, made a whole bit, extremely limited government. The whole thing is totally
Collapsing, great. In Poland, I was in Poland twice, the first time, this was a conference
organized by English conservatives, semi-libertarian conservatives, I guess you'd call them. In
Poland, this was three, four years ago, and it was a conference that was intellectually
very free. The tour guide was obvious coming as party spy, everybody knew it. And at the
In the conference, the tour guide usually would sit in on scholarly papers. He was sitting in every conference paying particular attention to the world of the Pope. He didn't care about us. We were just capitalist, pagan, he didn't care about Americans or British.
The Poles were all out. They all denounced the government from the beginning of the conference to the end. The Polish intellectuals, the spread spectrum was from dissident Marxists to Catholic, traditionalist, to libertarians.
And they were just announcing the government in Poland on a post, and they read my stuff, they read me, they read everybody in Poland, just great.
And so the next year after that, second year, same thing, except I saw that dissident Marxists are gone.
They're left with the traditionalist and the libertarian. So I asked one of the guys, where are the Marxists? I said, we don't need them this year.
The previous year they used it as a cover so the government could allow the conference.
By the next year, which was like two years ago, they didn't need the cover anymore.
And the tour got a lot of Soviet agents, and the whole thing, there were no agents anymore, the whole thing was obviously much freer than it was before.
So as a matter of fact, the end of the, talking about the first year of Poland, there was a Soviet agent there, I mean a government agent there,
At the end of the final banquet, the director of the conference, he said, I hear why I raise a toast, I hope nobody even understands the meaning of this or something, I toast this to a free, sovereign, and Catholic Poland.
Everybody toasted it, including the Soviet, the government agents, communist agents.
So at any rate, the whole thing is just magnificent to see it.
And a tremendous ferment, one of the things that I found very moving was, I forget whether this is Poland or Hungary,
One of these countries on television was a demonstration against the government a few months ago.
And one of the people in the crowd was being interviewed by, I guess, an American station or whatever.
And the guy said, please, people in the West, help us, help us to give us a role model of something.
How about the de-state eyes? How do we de-socialize? How do we get out of this stuff?
Everybody wants to get rid of the government, except for government control and the rest of it.
The interesting thing, the thing which sort of ticks me off is, we've had 40 years now of think tanks, right-wing foundations, scholarly research grants, and all the rest of it.
Must be millions of dollars poured into this stuff, and nobody, not one of them has said, how does the communist government de-state-ize?
Supposing you say, okay, we've read Mises, we've read Friedman or whatever it is, and we come to conclusion the whole thing doesn't work, how do we de-state-ize?
blank out, nothing. There's so much resources going into how many nuclear fuel weights we
should have. How do we get rid of that goddamn thing? And not one piece of research we can
go on into that. Milton Friedman had an interesting article in Newsweek about ten years ago. One
of the ways that these state ices give everybody a share in the TVA. You wake up in the morning
and here's a share of TVA, which you can now negotiate. Well, it's one way to do it, but
I think there's very few people who have thought about this. How do you do it? How do you take
The whole rotten government-owned control system and de-statization.
And one of the reasons for this, and one of the reasons why, personally, for the big break
between libertarians and conservatives many years ago, is the conservative view is this
could never happen.
It could never have de-statization.
The conservative doctrine is, and this is, I think, the fundamental error of conservatism
and this whole thing, is that once a country becomes communist, that's it.
It's like a black hole.
It disappears from history and becomes part of a satanic monolith.
Well, now it turns out they're wrong. It's not a black hole. People have erupted. The whole thing is imploding, exploding, whatever.
And so, and conservatives have not yet adjusted to this new situation. Some of them have. It's very interesting how you can see conservatives on television.
Some of them are saying, hey, there's no more Cold War. There's no more, yeah, what is this? The whole thing is falling apart.
And that's another, I think, interesting aspect of all of this, is that an implication for American politics is that if there's no more communism falling apart,
there's no so-called communist threat, what's the point of a Cold War? Why do you have these 2,800 missiles, whatever the hell it is?
Why do we have to spend umpteen trillion dollars on missile programs and military industrial complex?
Why, indeed.
And so this creates a whole new political situation in the United States, which is bound to continue and get more intense.
It's a whole change of realignment, ideological realignment and everything else coming from the fact that communism is disappearing and cracking up and the Cold War threat is therefore over.
And it will take quite a while, because there's a vested interest in it, for people to realize it.
And oddly enough, Zbigi Brzezinski is one of the few people, I mean, I have very little use for Zbigi, but one of the few people who's really sort of seen this, he's just written a book called, I think, called The Death of Communists.
But a few people realize this whole thing is over. This whole thing is a fundamental change in current history.
And it's kind of amusing, New York Times does not often go in for humor. Those of you familiar with a good gray New York Times.
And except for Russell Baker's column, there's almost nothing ever funny in this very stately publication.
And they actually had a funny article, I mean, I think consciously funny, I think.
The New York Times about a year ago, and this reporter was investigating or dealing with what's known as the foreign policy community, a lovely term.
One of the guys who live off government grants, consulting fees and all that, to study through weights of foreign geopolitics and foreign policy and all that.
and all that. And they were worried about maybe the Cold War is over. What's going to happen to the foreign policy community?
There ain't no more war.
So they've had many conferences on this, as you can imagine, at the swanky hotels all over the world.
They're trying to figure out, are the good times over for the foreign policy community?
And they've concluded, nah, don't worry about it. There's always something. There's always the Ayatollah, of course it's now dead.
There's always some threat somewhere which we can manufacture or help along or whatever, highlight, put it that way, and keep this whole damn thing going, keep the whole military industrial scam going.
So apparently they relax, at least to some extent. But it's phenomenal, and I think even the Ayatollah forces now have died.
I have to find somebody, always Colonel Gaddafi, to dig out, and of course Colonel Noriega for whom I have sort of sneaking in admiration, because he seems to be holding fast despite all the entire weight of the United States hysteria. He's still there.
At any rate, it would be very difficult to continue this for one period of time, trying to get terrible satanic threats out of somebody like Noriega.
This somehow doesn't really work. It doesn't run up a flag on that.
And even in China, before this terrible situation, even in China, a fascinating thing happened.
This was shortly before the crisis broke out. There was two interesting things that happened in one week.
The Mises Institute, which I'm located and I'm the vice president of, which is a straight laissez-faire outfit, got a message from the Chinese embassy in Washington that they wanted all the works of Ludwig von Mises, they wanted to figure out how to de-socialize.
Who else is reading the works of Ludwig von Mises? Certainly not the U.S. government.
So they want to read Ludwig von Mises. They want to read my stuff. They want to read stuff. How did he socialize?
They want to read about socialists. In the meantime, that same week is a little AP dispatch from China.
The Chinese government is worried because over the last two or three years, 1,800 tax collectors have been beaten up and killed in China.
The masses are rising up. The first thing to do is get the damn tax collected.
And even with the terrible situation in China, you have these poor guys on television.
Of course, the whole thing is a fantastic situation.
And they keep saying to the reporters, don't worry, the People's Army can't shoot the people.
It seemed to them like an elementary situation. How can the People's Army shoot the people?
Of course, it turned out the People's Army didn't shoot the people.
And what the lesson of all this is, of course, is there ain't no such thing as a people's army or a people's government, right?
The people and the government are different. And I think they've learned, unfortunately, learned the lesson from the massacres.
I mean, the thing is that all the myths of socialism and collectism, economic myths, ideological myths, all the rest of this are falling apart
and becoming evidently crazy and ridiculous. Evidently. The emperor's clothes are being stripped off the emperor.
So, and what's happening, as I say, is the Marxists have always said, Marxists are great analysts of revolution. They're interested in revolution. How do they work? How do they not work? How do they win and all that?
And Marxists have said for a long time that no ruling class will ever voluntarily give up their power, which is very true, except if the ruling class loses its will to power.
will of power. Something happens to the ruling elite. They begin to crack. And what happened
in Russia in 1917, there weren't that many Bolsheviks around. How did they take over?
It's a huge country. It had a big state apparatus, a big secret police and all the rest of it,
which essentially the communists just took over and expanded. How did they lose? And were
they lost because, for one thing, the ruling elite lost its will of power. They didn't
know what the hell to do. They had a big war on their hands, which they were losing. They're
They're losing the war. There were soldiers who were leaving the front, shooting their officers and walking home, all over Russia, World War I.
And the Russian government and all the Russian political parties, except the Bolsheviks, were committed to continuing the war forever.
Totally insane commitment. We have to fight German imperialism. That's it.
And so with this situation, with this commitment to continue, they didn't know what the heck to do.
They were losing the war. They didn't know how the legitimacy was being questioned. They essentially quit.
Essentially, big sections of the ruling elite hived off.
And the same thing is happening in the communist system right now,
because the communist leadership doesn't know what to do, they say this whole thing is hopeless and we quit.
The interesting thing is, there's some very interesting articles which I recommend on this whole thing.
Timothy Garten Ash, who's an English pre-market person, writes for the Spectator in England,
also writes for the New York Review of Books on Hungary and Poland.
Those are his two areas of expertise.
The very interesting article about two weeks ago, I think the last issue, and he just came back from Hungary and Poland, even he was excited, you know, because he was on top of the situation, he was amazed at what's happening.
And one of the things is the ruling elite in Hungary, for example, realized the whole thing is shot. Stateism doesn't work. They want to get out of this, they want to surrender.
They want to get out of it, however, without getting their throats cut, and also maintaining some economic privileges.
They want to become capitalists, they want to smooth the transition between socialism and capitalism, and keep some of their perks.
That's essentially what they want to do, the nomenklatura, okay?
They're trying to find out what these negotiations are going on, Poland and Hungary, essentially.
Negotiations on how to do that, how to let these guys off a hook, get them out of power, they'll find a way to do it.
I mean, there's no precedent for this.
I think a Hungarian official said, look, there's plenty of...
And if you read the political science textbooks, there are plenty of lessons on how difficult it is to achieve power, to gain power.
But there is no textbook discussion on how to give up power. How do you give it up?
How do you smoothly give it up? What do you do? What are the processes of doing it?
Or one of the Russian and Polish jokes now, political jokes circulating in Russia and Poland, is what's the longest route to capitalism?
The answer is the longest route from capitalism to socialism and back to capitalism again.
That's the longest route, which is the route they're pursuing at the present time.
So we have, in other words, a fantastically exciting situation right now.
We're facing a 21st century which bids promise to be the century of freedom,
in contrast to the 20th century, the century of socialism.
And that means for the domestic front, to get down to the domestic politics,
it means that we have a tremendous opportunity for libertarians.
And we face a situation, just so happens, a coincidental of history, we face an American
political scene where the beloved leader, the president, is no longer a charismatic,
narcotizing figure in American politics.
We had eight years of Reagan, miserable years from our concern, and eight years of total
blight, where everybody loved Reagan, everybody except for myself, crazy about Reagan, crazy
of Our Reagan, anything he did was great. He floated above the political scene, showering
blessings on everybody, and they all loved it. It's a miracle the Libertarian Party survived
through the age of Reagan. It's a miracle, because everything else... We shouldn't gripe
about the fact we haven't got that many votes anymore. How would we survive? That's great.
So now we have George Bush. Nobody loves George Bush. It's a possible exception to his family.
And he's not a charismatic figure, he's not narcotizing anybody, and the whole thing is now erupting.
I mean, I think Bush was in power for one week when he had a magnificent talk show host, anti-government raise revolution.
It was magnificent, it was just great. These bastards want to give themselves a raise.
Congress, top government officials, judges, they deserve a raise, my goodness, they haven't had a raise in eight years.
Horrible thing, you know, they're only getting $800, $100,000 a year now, should be getting double that or whatever.
So, it was smoothly going through. They didn't have a vote on. They had a phony bipartisan commission set up.
One thing, by the way, one of my least favorite things in politics are bipartisan commissions.
Watch out for them. But both parties are going to pick your pocket and hand them.
So, the bipartisan commission, oh yes, we need them. How can you attract good people in government if you don't give them a big raise?
Who wants good people in government? Good people should be in the private sector.
The private sector, helping themselves out in the private sector, being productive.
We want schmoes in government.
We want people who can't find the doorknob.
Why waste productive people, as well as looting the taxpayer?
And it's all going to go through very smoothly.
Everybody loved it. Reagan was for it. Bush was for everybody.
The whole establishment, all the pundits, liberal, conservative, all the rest of it
And suddenly the masses erupt, the talk show host movement erupts
You bastard, you voted yourself a pay raise, how dare you vote yourself a pay raise at our expense
It was a simple dramatic, in the early 19th century by the way, I forget the year, it was something, 1830s or something like that
Congress voted itself a pay raise, I mean it's small, teeny pay raise, my god, how they see it now
And they all kicked out of the next election, it's an uprising, a bipartisan uprising of the public
and the Uprising of the Public. How dare you guys vote yourself a pay raise at our expense? How dare you?
And bingo, they're all out. And this happens. It's a great thing. It touches the...
The interesting thing is the Public Choice School of Economics, a distinguished free market school,
totally can't understand this at all. The Public Choice School, the special interests will always win.
They've got to win because who cares about one lousy pay rate? It's only a drop of the bucket.
If Congress gives itself a 50% pay rate, it's nothing compared to the, you know, $2 trillion, whoever it is in the budget.
But people ignore the public choice economist. No, no, how dare you guys vote yourself a pay rate!
And people erupt. It was just great. So that was that.
There was also another eruption that took place about the same week, I think.
Another eruption of mass libertarian sentiment against the proposed tax, if you remember.
The proposal didn't call it a tax, of course, because it violated Bush's No Tax Increase Pledge.
It was a fee increase for having a bank deposit. If you have a bank deposit, you pay 25 cents
and a hundred dollars fee, quote unquote, to the government. That didn't fly either.
In fact, that was shot down in four hours. It was just magnificent. I mean, I remember
it was proposed at 10 in the morning by Secretary of Treasury Brady as a trial balloon floated.
How about a fee? By 2 o'clock, I think it was, the crossfire or whatever was on, they
The same thing happened, by the way, even in the Reagan administration, with the proposed
tax on interest and dividend. That was killed by the same sort of public eruption. So, now
we have basic libertarian sentiment that much of the public is now free to move again, free
They're free to act and do stuff because they're removed from the Reagan blight, and they're free to express themselves, and also you've got some hot topics here.
You've got, for example, a hundred, it's called a hundred billion dollar bail, every month there's a twenty billion dollar increase in the estimated cost of bailing out these rotten SNL banks,
which of course you have in Texas, you're in the forefront here in Texas, the cutting edge of bankrupt crooked SNLs.
So, bail them all out. Who knows how many billion? Nobody's against it except libertarians, from all I can see.
So, there are lots of issues to talk about, and the fact that socialism doesn't work, it's now shot.
And in the midst of all these tremendous opportunities, domestic and foreign, and anti-coal war, all the rest of it,
tremendous opportunities for freedom for the libertarian party, what is the National Libertarian Party doing about it?
What words are coming, what inspirational words are coming from our beloved leadership in Washington, national libertarian party leadership?
What? I mean, were there any LP signs demonstrating with the Chinese students in New York or Washington?
I mean, they answer their own question, of course not. Zip, zilch, muffin, peanuts.
Now, in the old days, when I was on the National Committee, we didn't do a hell of a lot, but at least we passed resolutions.
It doesn't sound like much, but at least something, some attention was paid to what's going on in the world.
NACOM met in D.C. Was there any statement of support? The Chinese thing was just erupting there.
Was there any statement of support for the Chinese students? Was there shouting for freedom and democracy?
No, there was no statement at all. All they did was knife Matt Monroe and other competent people in the back or the front.
Front and back.
So NACOM and the National Libertarian Party leadership at a time, tremendous opportunity, real world opportunities for freedom,
Real fantastic things are happening. What are they doing? They're playing their own petty rockets and vilifying competent people trying to get something done and have the party grow.
So that's the situation. It's a situation of tremendous opportunity, once again, tremendous real-world opportunities for freedom and for libertarianism and almost nothing being done on the concrete level by the party, by the party leadership.
and I think a lot of good state parties. I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is the national leadership and maybe it's something to be done and followed up about it.
I'm always hopeful about this. I hope that if we can kick out the Russian leadership and the Polish leadership, Jaruzelski can suddenly become a liberal from being a monster repressor and even hope for the LP.
Even hope for an act on. Okay, thank you very much.
Okay, I don't know how long we've got here. Questions, comments? Yeah?
One thing that really surprised me in the news lately is the questioning of NATO.
They gave us front-page headlines. And it's West Germany's question, and it's the United States that's going, why, what is it?
Well, it's another interesting thing, by the way, is Vestia, one of the top Russian newspapers,
just on a long article praising Ludwig Erhard and the beer shop blender in West Germany,
West Germany, the West German Miracle, economic miracle, the free market, hard money miracle,
that's basically what it was, and praising the same view, we should learn from that,
et cetera. So, yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
And then, it's another thing, by the way, another thing I wanted to point out about
Bush versus the communist situation. Reagan said to Mr. Gorbachev, tear down the wall
in Berlin, a great statement. However, they've already torn down the barbed wire wall between
Austrian-Hungary Authority, Dan, a very few people have commented on it. President Bush
said, yes, they should tear down all the walls between Moscow and Bonn, right? That's great,
but what are we doing in Mexico? Where are the walls being torn down there, right? They're
putting up barbed wire, shooting people, et cetera, right? So tear down the wall with
President Bush.
There's another thing, by the way, I should have mentioned this too, on the domestic front,
we have now, is that we found, you know, William James said we should have a moral equivalent
We have a drug furor in Washington, which everybody loves, Bill Bennett, a love by the conservatives.
So we'll see how Bennett will... Bennett has now come out in favor of, by the way, a Larry King program.
They asked him, he wants to enforce the war against drugs, step up enforcement.
They asked him, some guy calls in and says, I don't know if he was serious or sardonic.
He said, what do you think of public beheading a drug dealer? It's a great idea. Yeah, he's all for it.
Murray, how are these world events and the disillusionment with socialism, how does that
impact on the last bastion of stateist thinking, the academic community?
Well, it's interesting. They're kind of confused. Robert Heilbronner, the distinguished, quasi-Marxist economist, wrote an article about six months ago saying the war between capitalism and socialism is over and capitalism is won, period.
I mean, the intelligence Marxists have given up. However, of course, that doesn't mean the status threat is over, quite the contrary. They're now shifting to another line of defense, namely interventionism.
You have to keep capitalism, keep markets, markets are good, at least in their place,
and have some kind of regulated egalitarianized whatever. In other words, the coming struggle
will be, I'm not implying that we won and have to relax, the coming struggle will be
over-interventionism, some kind of statism, quasi-fascism, whatever. In other words, but
the actual, the full socialism has had it, but the, except I'd say from some professors
Alexander Kober, by the way, a great writer
I wish he were a libertarian, a great writer
but unfortunately he's attacking Gorbachev for selling out the international communist movement
he's right on the side, he's sold it out
I believe for us
What about the possibility of the worry of
since the Soviet block is being destabilized
The Russian military is not resisting this at all, they're not championing any kind of ol' guard reaction, and the suspicion is, and we were talking about this, and our suspicion was that the Russian military knows better than anybody else, the whole damn Russian machine doesn't work either.
Just because we know that socialism can't produce stuff, can't produce consumer goods, they also can't produce war stuff either.
How can they be super-clutzy in one area and super-efficient in another? This doesn't make much sense.
There's a great book called Threat by Andrew Coburn, who came out about five, six years ago,
and he investigated Russian military stuff, and he said, the thing is, it doesn't work. The whole thing is falling apart.
The missiles don't fire, and you can see the Afghanistan situation, facing Russia, it was a hard thing, they had their own getting on in Afghanistan, they lost, and they had to get the hell out, and it's a big lesson for the Russian military, they understand what's going on more than the other people do, so I don't think that's a problem with the North, because they want to get the hell out, when up and down, yeah.
Do you see any line where the funny money ends in the sense that there is a total collapse of not having a hard dollar or a gold standard?
It just seems like we keep on having trillions and trillions of dollars in debt and all the other things that are going on.
And I keep on thinking every day that surely it's got to come to an end.
No, it's not that fast. It has come to an end in Argentina where it's about a thousand percent increase a month or something, inflation rate.
In many third world countries it has come to an end. I mean, the currency is collapsing.
In Russia and Hungary and Poland, they're trying to find ways of making the ruble a separate convertible.
As a matter of fact, they're getting more and more hard money.
As a matter of fact, in communist countries, one of the big things, one of the hallmarks of a communist country is a highly overinflated currency.
In other words, the ruble is supposed to be worth 25 cents, it's really worth a nickel or something.
They keep the exchange rate very high as a result of the big black market and currency.
As a result, if you go to a communist country, you're being pestered constantly.
They see you wear western clothes on.
You want dollars. They give you three times or four times the amount of black market rate.
They don't want dollars anymore in Hungary because they now have essentially a devalued foreign to the black market level, almost black market level.
In other words, they're moving toward a free market currency and eventually convertible currency.
They're talking about convertible currency, which means they're getting harder and harder, less and less inflationary.
How do you say a country is either socialist or not?
At what rate would you say a country is no longer socialist?
Socialist.
He said, well, the key is if they have a stock market, if you have a stock market, you can't
say they're social, because there'd be private ownership of capital goods, and of course,
they're getting a stock market.
We already have a small stock market in Poland, I think, Hungary, and they're getting bigger,
and they're looking to have a more and more extensive one.
And one thing is they want foreign capital, they want the rest of the capital, for that
matter, they want this channel for savings.
They're beginning to realize in communist countries, if you want to do it, you have
to have a stock market, and you have to have also convertible currency.
______ investment, have a lot of foreign ______ worthless. They want dollars. They want currency
convertible into dollars freely. So they're moving rapidly toward that. They're only having
harder money in a world market. So all this stuff is great. As you say, the dollar, however,
is getting worse. But it takes a long time. The dollar has a lot... I mean, I don't quote
Milton Friedman very often, but one of the things he said is that capitalism has a lot
of ruin in it. That's true. I mean, if you have such a great productive economy, it will
I'm just wondering what is going to happen in Argentina. They've had an intense movement from the Spanish Empire, they've had fascism, they've had civil war, they've had a disastrous war, and now they have their economy collapsed. That's next group.
I mean, what's happening is there's no, they don't use the dollar, or what's it, the austral, they don't use it anymore, I mean, basically, they try to use dollars, or current, you know, actual physical dollars or also counting in dollars.
A lot of the reason why we didn't have as much inflation as we should have, as quote, should have had, unquote, during the mid-80s was a lot of the dollars actually went to third world countries to use as currency.
So, let's siphon off some of the excess dollars, so to speak, but that's one way to do it and they obviously don't hang around using austral.
It's got to the point in Argentina now where there's always a line for consumer goods.
At the end of the line, the guy at the end of the line pays a lot more in the higher price than the guy at the beginning of the line.
It's literally like reading about the German inflation in the 20s. It's horrible.
So I don't know how this thing is going to be resolved there.
The thing is, unfortunately, what happens is each group wants to get their own advantage in this thing.
One thing that's happening in Russia, for example, is the economists in Russia realize they have to have a free market, eliminate price control.
However, of course, there's a big excess of money over goods because the keeping of prices, the consumer goes way below the free market level.
And they realize they should eliminate price control.
They say, gee, if we do that, there'll be a big increase in prices, the public won't like it.
Well, that's it.
So they're stuck now with a system with no shortages in corruption, and the reason there's a lot of corruption in China, for example, is that they have price controls way below the free market level, and in order to get the goods, you have to pay off some government official.
That all will come to an end with a free price system. So the combination of the public not liking its immediate increase in prices, plus the corruptionists not liking their bootle cut off, the limit is restricting it.
But it's inevitable it's going to happen.
See, what's happening in communist countries is,
Mises talks about the interventionist mindset.
In other words, the interventionist mindset,
which we're all too familiar with here is,
if there's some problem, some problem will happen,
some social problem, the immediate answer is,
okay, the government should pass a law curing a problem.
The next step is the problem is not cured.
Other problems pop up as a result of the government intervention.
And so the next cry is, okay, we should have more intervention.
The government should solve the problem with X, Y, and Z.
The move towards socialism by the inner logic of kind of pure problems, which the controls themselves set up.
Well, in communist countries, and my side is now the other way around, they say,
gee, there's still a lot of problems, there's inflation, there's a lot of subsidy, how do we get, what do we get rid of?
What government measures do we get rid of? How can we make freedom work so the whole thing will solve these problems?
There's a progressive spiral toward freedom instead of a spiral toward government intervention, toward socialism.
Because they've had it with socialism, they already had socialism, and they hate it. They know that doesn't work and how it's rotten.
So moving, groping toward freedom, that's a great mindset to be in, it's super.
It started off in Yugoslavia back in the 60s, in the 50s actually.
Started the move from communism to freedom, unfortunately it got caught up with co-ops, with workers' co-ops, and they got stuck with that.
And then Tito came in and crushed the co-op.
He had the whole ethnic-national problem, which I haven't had a chance to go into, which creates opportunities and problems for them.
The whole Imperium is the fall apart.
The whole multinational Imperium, that constitutes Yugoslavia and Russia.
But anyway that's yeah, these are all, these are all complicating factors.
But the things they now have the mindset,
how do we, why do we have to get rid of them to have it to have the system work?
Yeah.
What do you think about that so-called conspiracy theory,
like you have some bankers too that far?
Conspiracy theory?
Well, I mean, they're all, sure there are conspiracies.
I mean, the thing is the term conspiracy is a loaded term,
The term, because when other guys, if three or four guys sit in a room and do something, plan something which I don't like, I can call it conspiracy.
On the other hand, if three or four people sit in a room and plan something I do like, I'll call it great solidarity for noble action.
So the guys I don't like are always conspirators.
So the term is not a useful term, let's put it that way, but I think obviously there are linkups.
I mean, to put it very simply, if you see that the Congress, let's say, passes a steel import quota,
There are several options. Let's say you don't know anything about why they passed it. You haven't been following the steel question for a while.
You could say, well, they passed the steel import quota because Congress suddenly realized in their wisdom that something has to be done for steel.
Or that they say, gee, there's not enough steel being made. There's domestic steel. We have to do something for the domestic steel producers.
Or you could say, well, I guess the goddamn steel industry is lobbied for it.
If you said the latter, you'd be right. You check on it. You find out, yes, indeed, they have lobbied for it.
If you want to call that conspiracy, you can do it, but I prefer to call it realistic analysis of what's happening.
You can look for who benefits, and you check out, well, did they really push for it?
If they did, they did. You can say, by the way, it's important for libertarians to realize that the two problems you would state is, and one is intellectual error,
which obviously is filled with intellectual error, and we know all that, and we're familiar with it.
We can say, for example, that price control causes shortages, maximum price control.
The other hand, there's also venality here. Price control causes shortages because it means that the guys in with the government can then ration the scarce goods. They can then boodle out of it.
And we can point that out, too. These guys are ripping us off. In other words, there's two things going on with stateism.
There's intellectual error, and it's ripping us off. These SOBs are ripping us off. They're living off tax money, living off subsidies and privileges.
We should point that out because it also gets the people hung under the collar. They realize the source of their problem, which is not just intellectual error.
How do you view the coming integration of the European economies in 1992?
and the free movement of capital and labor and goods within Europe.
The problem is, however, they're also building up a giant bureaucracy in Brussels.
They're also deferring, it means more statism within the countries, for example, countries
in Europe which have low tax levels are being urged by the Brussels establishment to increase
their taxes so as to equalize them with other countries.
So you have a tax-increasing stuff, plus you have a very dangerous situation, namely the
European Monetary Unit with a European Central Bank looming up
A European Central Bank is much worse than having
no European, just having either seven or eight Central Banks. It's much worse to have one giant Central Bank
which is an inflationary cartel
of the whole European structure plus the fact
that the Keynesians are still in power. The Keynesians
the Keynesian Dream and Secretaries Baker
Secretaries Baker and Brady, Baker is a Keynesian government, and so what they want, the Keynesian dream, is to have a great objective from Keynes down, to have one world central bank and one world monetary unit, which can be issued by a central bank, one world paper money, and then you have a world reserve bank issuing world paper, and then everybody can inflate together, you won't have any problems with losing gold, losing money.
Manage, of course, brilliantly by the world economists, and then of course you have a one-world runaway inflation, which would be really horrendous, much worse than the Argentinian runaway inflation.
So that's the Keynesian green, with that one managed world currency and one managed world central bank. I don't think they'll get it because there's a lot of national sovereignty jealousies here, but I mean, that's always the threat.
So the threat of a united Europe is to have a European Central Bank.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Thatcher is against it, probably because she has monetarist economic advisors.
And one good thing about monetarists is that they're opposed to a Keynesian World Central Bank.
So, anyway, that's the... So it's sort of a mixed bag, you know, if it's good in some sense and bad in others. Yeah.
I'm going to ask you a direct question. Of all the presidents we've had in the United States in history, which one do you think is the best?
The best? The least bad?
My favorite is Martin Van Buren. He was great. Martin Van Buren was a Jacksonian, minus the military adventurism of Jackson.
Jackson was a general, so he tended to go out there and crush the Indians, crush the British, that sort of stuff.
was pro-peace, laissez-faire was a favor of hard money, total separation of government
from money, from banking, from almost everything, and very smart, and also was one of the few
people in politics who was able to maneuver and yet do it on a basis of principle. It's
very difficult for a person to do it, as we know in the LP even, when you don't have much
power. How do you maintain your principles and not sell out and all that, and yet be
be able to maneuver and screw your opposition and things like that, he was able to do it, it was great, a marvelous role model it seems to me, the real world politics, I mean see the thing is, most libertarian historians when they go back, they look at Lysander Spooner and people like that, of course they're great, I love Lysander Spooner, on the other hand, you should also look at politicians, whether they're any really good politicians who were able to maneuver within the system and make it better, my bureau was an outstanding example, Jefferson was great except when he was in power, in power of course he totally sold out, before he got in power and after he was
and Power is great. But Van Buren was pretty good even in power. He concluded peace with
Britain at a time when there was a big sentimental war with Britain. And generally, it was terrific.
He was weak on the Indian question, to admit. Almost everybody was weak on the Indian question,
on the libertarian Indian question. But anyway, that was the... So I think Van Buren was by
far the best, my favorite. And there's not too much after that. Rover Cleveland's first
This term wasn't too bad. So, Cleveland, you see, was the favorite of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
That was his big deviation. So, it's a tough situation, I would think.
I mean, in the 20th century, my favorite, of course, was Warren Harding, kind of a lovable character, even though he's a protectionist.
He didn't do a hell of a lot, playing poker and all that sort of thing.
That's descending from Van Buren's loftier eminence.
Yeah, back there?
Yeah, this morning one of the speakers stole a picture and endorsed LBJ for president in 1964.
No, I hadn't endorsed him, I know.
It's true, and it's not a lie.
What's that?
I just wanted to know if that was true or not, and it's not a lie.
No, I hadn't endorsed him, my goodness.
It's a question of who do you cheer for?
I mean, I'm a big political buff.
And so I want to know when election night comes, who am I in favor of, who am I against?
In that sense, I was in favor of Johnson over Goldwater.
I think just purely on the war question.
It's true, but then we have Vietnam.
The other hand, see, the problem was, I knew a lot of the Gold War advisors,
and I thought they were totally crazy, and they wanted to nuke Russia.
I mean, I figured, yeah, Johnson was better than that.
So, yeah, it's a question of, I mean, lesser of the two evils hardly sums it up.
But anyway, no, I was, that was, I think foreign policy was one of the key questions,
because there's not much difference in any other key issue. Yeah?
I believe you're a letter to innovator, like September of 1964, to Carol Leach, an innovator. You said that you were going to vote for Johnson, and that you thought all libertarians should vote for Johnson. That's not an endorsement.
Well, I mean, it wasn't a positive endorsement. It was a contrast.
And you did explain it was an entirely important policy matter.
Well, you did a little attack at Goldwater.
Yeah, it was a contrast to the Gold War.
It was a contrast to the Gold War.
Funny, my big political act in that year, in 64, I realized that many libertarians here were started as libertarians in the Gold War camp, in favor of the Gold War.
We have to realize that the older generation, I left the Republican Party when Taft was robbed of the nomination in 52.
At any rate, I spoke before a group of libertarian Georgists. These were old Chotorovians. These were guys who were followers of Chotorov. I think at that time they were either dead or incapacitated.
And these were guys who were Chotorovian anarchists. They had never voted on principle. They were sort of like Lefavians in that sense. They had never voted for any election. They voted all evil.
I was taking their anti-gold war position. I wouldn't say pro-Johnson. I was taking their anti-gold war position.
And they started shaking their canes at me and saying that, by cracking it, I haven't voted in 50 years.
I'm going to go out and vote for Barry Goldwater after hearing this. It was not very effective.
Stumped speech. So, no, it's true. I thought he was the balmy on the war question.
What would you like to see happen with the National Committee now, the libertarian party?
and to a real transformation. First of all, get rid of the goddamn National Committee.
How many people are in the National Committee? 33 or something. As Mike pointed out today,
I think there's one National Committee member for every 200 members? 30 members?
Something like that. It's totally insane. They have more committees, as many board members
as General Motors, probably more committees on board. It's ridiculous. They have four employees
The National Office, The National Party
starts at the start of the whole thing. It's a tough situation, it's true of many organizations,
a non-profit organization, things like that, they tend to descend into the end becomes not the output,
which is liberty or whatever it is, but the end becomes keeping your own salaries going, your own
perks going. So you try to get out of that, one thing that needs some kind of reformation every
once in a while, cleansing every orgy and stable, the way they need it now, it's really, I mean,
Does Japan have the freest market in the world? Why do they make the best quality of goods?
Free Market, and many of the stuff we've heard about Japan is a myth, like the idea that
well, they won't have social security from cradle to grave and that sort of stuff. That's
really true of the Mitsui Mitsubishi Group, which is really the old firm. They're not
the firms that are the firms we all know about and love, Sony and all that, or Honda and
stuff. But these are young progressive firms that don't have this kind of welfare mentality.
These are much more free market oriented, innovator oriented. So, no, I think it's great.
They also work hard and it's fantastic. They don't have the idea to screw the bosses at every opportunity. They're much more cooperative.
They realize that if the company does better, they'll do better. And they're also very smart. It's great. I only buy Japanese electronics stuff, consumer electronics.
And then I said, gee, this is an American firm, and salesmen will say, no, no, it's made by Japan. It's just the label of them. Clean as whoever is on it. Don't worry about it.
So anyway, so yeah, I think it's great, but it's, yeah, and also they haven't got the military machine on their neck. They don't have to spend a huge, a huge, you see, the military problem, not just the percentage of national product that goes to the military, it's also the scientists and the brain power that goes into the military stuff, which they don't have to worry about.
They can have scientific brain power to electronics and consumer goods and also more and better and prettier missiles.
So that's a big thing. It liberates the whole Japanese society, by the way.
Of course, that was imposed, ironically, by the United States.
Of course, we're very mad now we impose the Constitution and preventing any kind of army.
Yeah, we're trying to get out of it.
We try to get there. Yeah, we impose it, sure.
Murray, assuming that George Bush dominates the Republican politics for the next few years,
but do you have any speculations on who the Democrats might turn to to take them out of
the wilderness?
I don't know. Democrats seem to have a unique capacity for hara-kiri on a presidential level.
They may actually pick somebody as a total loser. I don't know. It's also peculiar why they keep doing that.
You'd think they're a brainy group. So I don't know who they'll turn to. I have no real insight on that.
What do you think of Alan Greenspan now? How did he go from being at least studied under Mises and, well, didn't he take some seminar abandoning the Federal Reserve?
and he had no interest in Austrian economics at all, and no interest in economic theory, he was basically a forecaster.
He was a lousy forecaster, interestingly enough, when he got his Fed post a couple of years ago, he had to give up his forecasting business
because the forecasting firm Townsend Greenspan admitted that they were lousy forecasters and so without Greenspan there was no point in having it.
In other words, Greenspan's soul is not his forecasting but his access to power.
the power. Like Kissinger, why does Kissinger's associates make 10 million a year or whatever
it is? Because he knows all these big shots, he can get them in with a big shot and sort
of stuff. That's high fault in lobbying. And so how did he rise to fame and fortune? I
don't quite know. I've met Greenspan, he's the least charismatic person I've ever seen
practically. I mean, he's got the persuasiveness of a dead mackerel. So I don't know how he
It's difficult to figure out. He got in with, I guess, the Ford administration, and the interesting thing is when he gets in, when he got in with the Council of Economic Advisors and recently as a Fed, the New York Times would write about him and say,
well, he had this peculiar philosophical views, like gold standard and Iran, etc., but don't worry about it, folks. He's really a pragmatist. That's the tip-off.
These views are sort of in the closet. They know that he doesn't care about them. In fact, that seems like everybody else, which of course is true.
But he also has the unique, he has the advantage of the establishment of having a conservative or a brandy or whatever aura.
So he can get away with stuff, a conservative will back him.
So he can do the same stuff that everybody else is doing that has sort of an aura, some kind of right-wing connection.
I think that's probably the usefulness.
But basically he's like Volker or the other people. He's a Volker without a cigar. That's the way he is.
And so he's probably better than a lot of these other guys. The interesting thing is now the Keynesians,
conservative Keynesians like Volker and Greenspan are better than the Reaganites.
Supply side is they want more inflation. They want a lot more inflation and a lot lower interest rates.
They're holding a line such as it is.
It's too bad because Greenspan saved the so-called social security system for a century
by increasing taxes of course. So he has a lot to answer for. In contrast, he's better, less bad than the Reaganites. That's all you can say for him.
But the interesting thing is he follows the Randian strategic view. The Randian strategic view is that most people think of Randians as being libertarians or a slight quirk.
They're not really libertarians politically at all, because what they want is everybody, before you can do anything politically, before you can cut taxes or eliminate price control or anything,
Do you favor a constitutional amendment or a balanced budget?
The thing is, Graham Rudman, also a racket, the way that structure is, the Congress has to balance, not the actual budget, but the prospective budget, the budget as forecast by Congress, okay?
So in other words, anybody can forecast anything. I can sit down and forecast, yeah, next year we'll have a GMP of 200 billion or something, and who cares, what difference does it make?
So you can balance, anybody can balance the prospect of a future budget. It's only the past budget that's the problem, last year or this year's budget, current budget.
So, that would be a real balanced budget amendment. The rest of it is phony.
Yeah, Phil.
I agree with the Brazilian method or the Bolivian method of balancing your budget.
They passed a law that said the treasurer had to sign all checks or expenditures of the Bolivian government.
And he couldn't, on any given day, sign more checks than they took in that day.
Now, this has the effect of doing something that people can maintain is impossible in the Latin American scenario,
namely, knocking out inflation instantly.
Oh, because they hadn't run out of inflation in a year or two ago.
In the past nine or ten months, the inflation rate has gone from something in the thousands of percent down to about eight or nine percent.
Oh, great.
And I wonder, it strikes me as, you know, maybe that's the solution, a different kind of balance.
That's interesting, that might be good. Also you have to have no invasion clause, another stuff that Congress can override with a two-thirds vote.
And in case of war or national emergency, you've got to cut a lot of stuff out and require a concurrent or immediate balanced budget. That might work, yeah.
Yeah, that's another thing. The SNL bailout is not because it's an off-budget item, at least that's what Bush wants. It's an off-budget, everything on budget. It's tough to enforce all this stuff. The post office is going to be on budget, the security, the whole business. It's tough to really ride hard on these people, and they've got all the personnel, they've got all the agencies and the rest of it. Yeah?
Instead of a balanced budget with a gold standard, wouldn't that be a disrespect?
nd the other by creating money, printing money. So we have to take both arms away from them, or reduce it as much as possible, reduce the tax stuff, reduce the deficit, the borrowing arm, which rests on the other two, and reduce the money printing potential. So the gold standard would be a great way of doing that.
Don't allow them to have a paper unit. It's a little piece of rag paper they used to call it.
A crummy paper, badly designed, dirty paper, and called money.
It should be some commodity like gold, which would be a market commodity.
Now all this is important. Yeah, that's a key thing.
Yeah?
Would you care to comment on the fact that the Soviet Union seems to be more inclined to allow
Recently, free speech, whereas China was more inclined to allow free market activity, and in China it was mostly free speech.
How do you have free exchanges of students and all that? How do you get international exchange? How do you do it if you close down and repress everything?
So they're going to find out and won't be able to keep up with the market modernization and all that without the free speech.
They're going to find out pretty soon. They're finding out right now. It really doesn't work.
really doesn't work. As I say, in China, the thing is, in Russia, they've had 30 more years of communism than in China.
In Russia, they had communism since 1917. In China, they've had it since 46 or so. So, 47.
So, as a result, you have the founding generation still there. I mean, Deng Xiaoping, as I said, is about 88 or something.
All these guys in the upper 80s, they were all on a long march, which established communism in the first place.
In Russia, that's all gone. Gorbachev grew up within the system. He's not committed to the great struggles of 1917.
So that's the difference, that they're gerontocratic, that they're much older in China, that they're extremely long-lived.
I've always thought that the best way to assure yourself of a long life is to be a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.
Do you see any nations around the world going through a significantly more free market in the coming years, just further along the road, say, than the Russians and the Chinese?
is going on quite a bit in this sense.
And I think a lot of countries in Western Europe
and it's a lot of third world countries,
New Zealand has had a tremendous,
like before that third world had tremendous
overthrowing of their status system
by labor party government, interestingly enough,
to the tune of hysteria and historical opposition
and part of conservatives in New Zealand,
overthrowing price control and the rest of them,
big cut in taxes.
So there's a lot of movement all over the place
and there's obviously big opposition, but I think it's going to win out.
I think it's going to be a 21st century freedom. Thank you very much.