WEBVTT NOTE The Regulatory Imperium 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 My topic is the domestic imperium. It's a big topic. I'm going to talk about regulation. 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:12.000 I thought I'd start with a couple of quotations from Hayek and then I'm going to end with a couple of quotations from von Mises. 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.000 I thought that would go over and frown like this. 4 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:23.000 In the Road to Serfdom, Hayek says in the 1976 revised edition, they reprinted it in 1976, 5 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.760 and he says that when he wrote the original version of The Road to Serfdom in 1944, 6 00:00:28.760 --> 00:00:33.080 socialism meant the nationalization of industry and central planning. 7 00:00:33.080 --> 00:00:36.760 But by the mid-1970s, socialism meant something different in the world. 8 00:00:36.760 --> 00:00:39.880 It meant essentially the institutions of the welfare state. 9 00:00:39.880 --> 00:00:44.520 It meant the transfer of income through the tax system, and it meant welfare. 10 00:00:44.520 --> 00:00:50.200 And I would add also it meant the regulatory state. He discussed that as well. 11 00:00:50.200 --> 00:01:02.200 And so what I'm going to talk about, I guess, we usually use the phrase a lot around here, the welfare-warfare state, but of course we live in the welfare-warfare-slash-regulatory state as well. 12 00:01:02.200 --> 00:01:12.200 And I agree with Lou that we're making great progress. There's light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. Most of you were here for Lou's talk last night. 13 00:02:12.200 --> 00:02:20.200 The Federal Government, as I am, I didn't believe it. Sure enough, he showed me the regulation that actually regulates the shape of toilets. 14 00:02:20.200 --> 00:02:27.200 I was thinking of a good name for the person who thought that one up. 15 00:02:27.200 --> 00:02:33.200 To look at an idea of the regulatory state, I thought I'd reproduce this graph here. 16 00:02:33.200 --> 00:02:39.200 Federal regulatory spending on staffing is on the bottom, the number of regulatory bureaucrats, 17 00:02:39.200 --> 00:03:09.200 And on top is a spending, a federal regulatory activity, and as you can see, despite all the talk about a conservative revolution and a republican revolution and all that, both the staffing and spending on government regulation at the federal level have not abated at all, have not been reduced at all, and they just continue to grow, and so we continue spending about $15 billion a year on the federal bureaucrats 18 00:03:09.200 --> 00:03:19.200 in Washington, and several hundred thousand of those are sort of our permanent pests to try to regulate every aspect of our life. 19 00:03:19.200 --> 00:03:31.200 And in addition to that, I looked up an interesting statistic. There are 500,000 elected and 13 million appointed local government, quote, officials 20 00:03:31.200 --> 00:03:37.200 to regulate everything from what color you can paint your fence to how much fertilizer you can put in your garden. 21 00:03:37.200 --> 00:03:43.760 and that comes out to one local government bureaucrat for every 20 citizens so we 22 00:03:43.760 --> 00:03:49.640 are not lacking in government regulators and people who want to patrol our lives 23 00:03:49.640 --> 00:03:56.520 and what I thought I would talk about in terms of the regulatory period is the MO 24 00:03:56.520 --> 00:04:03.480 or the bonus operandi of the regulatory state in the context of really I guess a 25 00:04:03.480 --> 00:04:22.480 A couple of books I've written. I've written a recent book called Cancer Scan. It's about the anti-smoking crusade, which I would argue is not really about smoking and health, but it's really about getting a hold of large amounts of money to fund an expansion of the welfare, warfare, regulatory state. 26 00:04:22.480 --> 00:04:26.880 and I'll explain to you why I believe that and so I'm going to talk about for a while now 27 00:04:26.880 --> 00:04:34.480 what the elements are of this regulatory state and what it means for those of us who want to eradicate it 28 00:04:34.480 --> 00:04:40.480 but first of all I think it's very important to understand something else Hayek said in The Road to Servenom 29 00:04:40.480 --> 00:04:47.480 another quotation from Hayek and he said the principle that the end justifies the means 30 00:04:47.480 --> 00:04:51.480 is an individualist ethics regarded as a denial of all morals. 31 00:04:51.480 --> 00:04:56.480 In collectivist ethics, however, it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. 32 00:04:56.480 --> 00:05:02.480 There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do 33 00:05:02.480 --> 00:05:07.480 if it serves, quote, the good of the whole, because the, quote, good of the whole is to him 34 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:10.480 the only criterion of what ought to be done. 35 00:05:10.480 --> 00:05:16.480 And we see this all the time of all the environmental lunatics, for example, 36 00:05:46.480 --> 00:05:59.480 which is called the nanny state, which is really the massive regulation of lifestyles in the name of promoting public health, saving the planet, picture grandiose cause, but I guess one example of this, 37 00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:10.480 reason example of this is now that so many of us drive sport facility vehicles that these are becoming a menace to society and the EPA is about to crack down on them and trucks as well. 38 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:20.780 But after having studied these characters, the anti-smoking crusaders, I've decided that, you know, what are their motives? 39 00:06:20.780 --> 00:06:24.780 Motive number one, I think, is political plunder for fun and profit. 40 00:06:24.780 --> 00:06:29.780 Motive number two is central planning of politically correct lifestyles. 41 00:06:29.780 --> 00:06:36.280 And motive number three is to find a way to get money to finance careers as anti-capitalist crusaders, 42 00:06:36.280 --> 00:06:40.080 which most of the anti-smoking crusaders happen to be. 43 00:06:40.080 --> 00:06:54.780 Now, I'm not that big on smoking. I smoke a cigar every once in a while, but I'm not saying we should all go out to smoke, but if you consider who the top anti-smoking regulatory zealots are, really, 44 00:06:54.780 --> 00:07:06.080 you have Michael Perchuk, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who's a cigar smoker, and Perchuk runs something called the Advocacy Institute in Washington, who trains lobbyists 45 00:07:06.080 --> 00:07:11.080 to promote a bigger welfare state, more taxes, more regulation. 46 00:07:11.080 --> 00:07:18.080 And my book was reviewed in the New York Times about a month or two ago by 11 left-wing crank. 47 00:07:18.080 --> 00:07:23.080 And I'm not going to get anybody, and Lou called me out to congratulate me that it was trashed so severely, 48 00:07:23.080 --> 00:07:28.080 because if the New York Times trash is what we're doing, you know we're on the right track. 49 00:07:28.080 --> 00:07:35.080 But Michael Purchock himself just could not help himself, could not help himself to write a letter to the editor to pile on to this. 50 00:07:35.080 --> 00:07:47.080 and he thought a real zinger that would really destroy all my credibility was, and they printed this, and he called me a libertarian tobacco propagandist. 51 00:07:47.080 --> 00:07:56.080 And to the left there is nothing more evil, nothing in the world, than someone who believes in liberty and enjoys a good cigar every once in a while. 52 00:07:56.080 --> 00:08:10.080 That is the ultimate evil. So he thought, all I need to do is destroy these tax creditabilities, call them a libertarian tobacco propaganda, it's because all my friends in Washington will just immediately see that and that will be a signal that they should not take this guy seriously. 53 00:08:10.080 --> 00:08:21.080 And that's Perchuk, another of the top gurus is a guy named Stanton Glantz, who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco. 54 00:08:21.080 --> 00:08:29.080 And he's a leading public health crusader, and he's such a darling of the left that they did a profile of him as People Magazine last summer. 55 00:08:29.080 --> 00:08:36.080 And he's a big fat guy. And I thought, you know, he's a public health advocate telling everybody don't smoke, you'd think he'd look healthy. 56 00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:40.080 I was expecting him to look healthy, but he looked terrible. 57 00:08:40.080 --> 00:08:44.080 His belly went over his belt. 58 00:08:44.080 --> 00:08:48.080 Why should I listen to this guy about healthy lifestyle? 59 00:08:48.080 --> 00:08:52.080 And the third tough proponent for the past 20 years of the old anti-smoking movement, 60 00:08:52.080 --> 00:08:56.080 someone who has introduced bills in Congress for 20 years running down 61 00:08:56.080 --> 00:09:00.080 to implement the political agenda of these characters is Ted Kennedy. 62 00:09:00.080 --> 00:09:06.080 The third person, the third tough man in the lifestyle police is Ted Kennedy. 63 00:09:06.080 --> 00:09:15.080 These are some of the reasons why I was originally suspicious of this whole anti-smoking thing, 64 00:09:15.080 --> 00:09:19.080 thinking public health is not really what these people are after. 65 00:09:19.080 --> 00:09:23.080 You've got a cigar smoker, someone who looks like he's ready to die of a heart attack any moment, 66 00:09:23.080 --> 00:09:29.080 and Ted Kennedy telling us how to live our lives in a more healthy manner. 67 00:09:29.080 --> 00:09:35.080 I wouldn't be too hard on Kento. He was the first Democrat to come out of the Ben Clinton 68 00:09:35.080 --> 00:09:41.080 because of the later sex scandal. He offered to drive Monica Lewinsky home. 69 00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:45.080 So it shouldn't be too hard on him. 70 00:09:45.080 --> 00:09:53.080 Well, I think that just in having studied how this crusade has commenced over the past number of years, 71 00:09:53.080 --> 00:09:59.680 which I think is going to spurt net for the regulation of beer, wine, liquor, fast food and a lot of other things. 72 00:09:59.680 --> 00:10:07.780 They've already got a technique down that has succeeded and they're about to extort tens of billions of dollars, 73 00:10:07.780 --> 00:10:10.180 maybe hundreds of billions of dollars from the tobacco company. 74 00:10:10.180 --> 00:10:16.880 I think they're going to try the same technique for other types of things that we consume in the name of public health. 75 00:10:16.880 --> 00:10:20.980 We eat too much of this, we drink too much of that. 76 00:10:20.980 --> 00:10:31.980 There's already a lawsuit in Washington State where a man is suing the dairy industry because of the argument that he has hardening of the arteries caused by drinking milk all his life. 77 00:10:31.980 --> 00:10:39.980 A Yale professor has proposed excise taxes on higher fat foods. The more fat content, the higher the excise taxes. 78 00:10:39.980 --> 00:10:50.980 and U.S. News even reported that they expect, talked about an epidemic, a public health epidemic I'm expecting to be a beer and wine industry net. 79 00:10:50.980 --> 00:10:57.980 Well, the first result of this, the ends justify the means, as Hayek said, or collected this. 80 00:10:57.980 --> 00:11:01.980 The highest end is the greatest good for the greatest number. 81 00:11:01.980 --> 00:11:05.980 And so whatever the methods are, doesn't really matter that much. 82 00:11:05.980 --> 00:11:16.980 And the first result of this kind of belief with regard to the regulatory crusaders in the smoking movement, especially anti-smoking, is rampant lying. 83 00:11:16.980 --> 00:11:24.980 Just look at the keystone arguments that have been made. The one keystone argument is smokers are a financial burden on society. 84 00:11:24.980 --> 00:11:32.980 Well, common sense will lead you to question this by thinking, well, smokers pay heavy excise taxes all their lives. 85 00:11:32.980 --> 00:11:44.980 And it is true that a 30-year-old man who quits smoking is likely to live seven or eight years longer, which means if he doesn't quit smoking, he's going to die seven or eight years sooner. 86 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:59.980 So the end result of the smoking habit is smokers are net subsidizers of the rest of us, because in terms of, or a lot of us, necessarily about the budget, the government budget, they pay heavier taxes than the rest of us do their whole lives 87 00:12:29.980 --> 00:12:34.620 to our argument that they impose externalities on the rest of us by raising our taxes. 88 00:12:34.620 --> 00:12:38.740 They get sick with heart disease and cancer and they make us pay for it. 89 00:12:38.740 --> 00:12:42.340 Well, clearly, the evidence is that the opposite is true. 90 00:12:42.340 --> 00:12:47.700 The smoker actually subsidized the rest of us, but that doesn't matter because the ends justify the means. 91 00:12:47.700 --> 00:12:52.340 It was a trick, a gimmick used to get this passed and it worked. 92 00:12:52.340 --> 00:12:57.900 You get many laws passed taxing, raising higher taxes on cigarettes and so forth. 93 00:12:57.900 --> 00:13:17.900 The second big lie in this case was the second-hand smoke scam and the EPA took a look at 30 existing studies on the possible correlation between so-called second-hand smoke and cancer, the incidence of cancer and 24 of 30 studies found no correlation at all. 94 00:13:17.900 --> 00:13:26.900 Only two found a statistically significant correlation and this of course says nothing about causation. It's just correlation. 95 00:13:26.900 --> 00:13:47.900 And so what they did is they ignored the 24 studies and focused on the 6 that either said that there is a correlation or some of the studies found a negative correlation with more exposure to second-hand smoke to lower the incidence of cancer, which says something about the usefulness of these kind of econometric techniques, I guess. 96 00:13:47.900 --> 00:14:02.400 And, but anyway, so they did this and they manipulated the data that was involved in those six studies so that they could come out and say that they have found a link between exposure to secondhand smoke and cancer. 97 00:14:02.400 --> 00:14:05.900 And as the old saying goes, if you torture the data long enough, it'll confess. 98 00:14:05.900 --> 00:14:08.900 That's what happened there. 99 00:14:08.900 --> 00:14:13.900 Bob Livio, a retired businessman who works at the Cato Institute now, 100 00:14:13.900 --> 00:14:22.900 He donates more money to the Cato Institute than what they pay him in salary, and so he's a real crusader, he's an ideological crusader. 101 00:14:22.900 --> 00:14:30.900 But anyway, I saw him on C-SPAN a few weeks ago, and he pointed out that someone got a hold of the same data that the EPA used on second-hand smoke, 102 00:14:30.900 --> 00:14:35.900 and added one more variable, whether you're left-handed or right-handed. 103 00:14:35.900 --> 00:14:42.900 And they found a statistically significant positive correlation between being left-handed and getting cancer. 104 00:14:42.900 --> 00:14:50.900 All over things equal. Just to show that if you put up variables in these equations, you can find a correlation with all damn near anything. 105 00:14:50.900 --> 00:14:57.900 And that's apparently what happened. But again, the ends justify the means, so it doesn't matter that you've corrupted science. 106 00:14:57.900 --> 00:15:07.900 Speaking of things that news media ignored, we mentioned that this morning, there was an article in the New York Times about six months ago 107 00:15:07.900 --> 00:15:17.900 that the journalists make very little of it because most journalists know nothing about statistics or economics or most anything, I suppose, most journalists. 108 00:15:17.900 --> 00:15:30.900 The article said the EPA, since it has had such a tough time establishing statistically significant correlations between ostensible causes of cancer like cellular phones and cancer, 109 00:15:30.900 --> 00:15:36.900 that they're going to do away with the use of statistical significance as their standard. 110 00:15:36.900 --> 00:15:41.900 I zeroxed it, I gave it to all my colleagues, and I said, can you believe this? 111 00:15:41.900 --> 00:15:51.900 And the news media just kind of ignored it. To me, I thought it was a huge deal that the EPA was finally admitting we're a bunch of pond men, and here's the proof. 112 00:15:51.900 --> 00:16:00.900 We can't find statistically significant links between all this bogus cancer scares, so we're going to change the science. 113 00:16:00.900 --> 00:16:08.900 And so, uh, line number three with regard to the anti-smoking crowd is, this is one study done by Stanton Glantz. 114 00:16:08.900 --> 00:16:13.900 And those of you who have read about the scientific method, what is the scientific method? 115 00:16:13.900 --> 00:16:22.900 Well, in theory, uh, some theory is used to arrive at a hypothesis, and it is supposed to be a testable hypothesis, 116 00:16:22.900 --> 00:16:27.900 and in theory the results should be able to be reproduced by other researchers. 117 00:16:27.900 --> 00:16:34.620 So typically what we're told is that if someone does one study saying that X causes Y, then 118 00:16:34.620 --> 00:16:40.180 if other people can replicate that study over time, then that may come to be accepted by 119 00:16:40.180 --> 00:16:45.980 the profession, whatever the profession is, as part of the learning of that profession. 120 00:16:45.980 --> 00:16:50.740 Well the way in which the smoking regulators, the anti-smoking regulators have corrupted 121 00:16:50.740 --> 00:16:57.740 science another way is that government funded studies of this sort include hundreds of thousands 122 00:17:57.900 --> 00:18:05.900 When Jeff Tucker and I were sitting in the bar last night, he asked if he could smoke, and they said, no, you have to go outside into the lobby to smoke. 123 00:18:05.900 --> 00:18:11.900 Usually, if you're in a hotel and you say, can I smoke? They say, no, you have to go in the bar. 124 00:18:11.900 --> 00:18:15.900 But now in California, they say, no, you have to go in the lobby to smoke. 125 00:18:15.900 --> 00:18:23.900 But this has been a catastrophe. The real world experience has proven that this one study was a bunch of baloney, as common sense would indicate. 126 00:18:23.900 --> 00:18:30.900 There is such a riot here in California. A newspaper article on this that I cut out a couple of weeks ago says, 127 00:18:30.900 --> 00:18:34.900 one month after the nation's toughest law against indoor smoking took effect in California, 128 00:18:34.900 --> 00:18:39.900 a wave of civil disobedience is swooping through the state's bars, taverns and clubs. 129 00:18:39.900 --> 00:18:48.900 And people just aren't enforcing it. And it talks about this one guy who, in front of his patrons, was smoking. 130 00:18:48.900 --> 00:18:52.900 He feels obligated, because it's the law, to go up to them and say, 131 00:18:52.900 --> 00:18:57.900 you do know smoking is illegal, and if they persist, he just gives them an ashtray. 132 00:18:57.900 --> 00:19:00.900 And that's clearly not working. 133 00:19:00.900 --> 00:19:04.900 And so common sense and experience tells us this was bogus. 134 00:19:04.900 --> 00:19:09.900 But this is one of the ways in which science has been perverted or politicized or corrupted 135 00:19:09.900 --> 00:19:15.900 in the pursuit of political correctness through regulation. 136 00:19:15.900 --> 00:19:22.200 Line number four is that the state must educate kids, tell them about the smoke, and it works. 137 00:19:22.200 --> 00:19:26.600 It works to have the state educate kids and tell them about the smoke. 138 00:19:26.600 --> 00:19:34.200 There have been study after study of California, which has led the country, public school anti-smoking campaigns, 139 00:19:34.200 --> 00:19:39.700 that have found that the teenage smoking rate is at an all-time high in California, 140 00:19:39.700 --> 00:19:45.000 and it went up after they started spending millions of dollars having adults go into schools and preach to kids, 141 00:19:45.000 --> 00:19:47.000 Don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke. 142 00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:50.000 Of course, that's the surest way to get kids to smoke, right? 143 00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:52.000 It's the forbidden fruit syndrome. 144 00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:57.000 And yet, there's a lot of money to be made by the people who manage these programs. 145 00:19:57.000 --> 00:20:00.000 The people who cannot get a job doing anything else in the marketplace 146 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:04.000 can get a career as an anti-smoking crusader 147 00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:09.000 by going into the schools and putting on these phony programs. 148 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:12.000 In California, for example, here's what they get paid to do. 149 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:18.760 Holding outrageous stunt contests. The idea is to try to shock a loved one into quitting smoking. 150 00:20:18.760 --> 00:20:24.760 The winner of one contest was a young girl who ate an entire can of Mighty Dog dog food. 151 00:20:24.760 --> 00:20:30.760 There are trips to Yosemite. They give away backpacks. They give away lottery tickets. 152 00:20:30.760 --> 00:20:36.760 And they have pool parties, carnivals, and so forth. So it's just one big party. 153 00:20:36.760 --> 00:20:45.760 And the idea is to treat the kids real nice, buy them stuff, take them on trips, and then seduce them into not smoking that way. 154 00:20:45.760 --> 00:20:52.760 And no one ever checks whether this works. They tell the kids, if you promise not to smoke, we'll take you to Yosemite. 155 00:20:52.760 --> 00:20:56.760 That'll work. Yeah, that'll work. 156 00:20:56.760 --> 00:21:05.760 And of course the kids are smarter than the regulatory zealots are, so they just take them for all our worth and go to Yosemite and have a good time. 157 00:21:05.760 --> 00:21:12.440 and it hasn't worked but but but there's a lot of might be made so the first 158 00:21:12.440 --> 00:21:16.600 result of this crusade has been rampant lying in the name of the higher club 159 00:21:16.600 --> 00:21:23.360 but the second with another result is tax funding of politics and I've written 160 00:21:23.360 --> 00:21:26.760 several books on this on tax on politics beginning several years ago 161 00:21:26.760 --> 00:21:33.080 whereby in California for example they passed a law in 1988 to raise tobacco 162 00:21:33.080 --> 00:21:39.920 Taxes, but much of the revenue is earmarked to go to so-called non-profit organizations 163 00:21:39.920 --> 00:21:45.120 that then use the money to lobby for even higher excise taxes and advertising bans and 164 00:21:45.120 --> 00:21:47.560 other restrictions and regulations. 165 00:21:47.560 --> 00:21:53.800 So the people who lobby for the higher taxes get the tax money coming back to them, which 166 00:21:53.800 --> 00:21:59.360 they use to lobby some more, and there are laws against it, but the government just seems 167 00:21:59.360 --> 00:22:08.920 And that's even more insidious than just providing pork-barrel jobs. 168 00:22:08.920 --> 00:22:12.960 In Massachusetts, for example, where they raised the tax in the name of public health 169 00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:17.120 on cigarettes, they provided a phone bank where you could call in and people will tell 170 00:22:17.120 --> 00:22:18.120 you, you know, you really shouldn't smoke. 171 00:22:18.120 --> 00:22:23.520 And they'll tell you that it's a quick-smoking phone bank, and they have five employees 172 00:22:23.520 --> 00:22:32.520 Answering the Phones, and eight supervisors, and the eight supervisors make about $55,000 a year. 173 00:22:32.520 --> 00:22:37.520 And so what they're doing here really is just using tax dollars to pay the salaries of the American Cancer Society, 174 00:22:37.520 --> 00:22:44.520 the Massachusetts Division, and under the guise of this phony phone bank, and that really is all they do. 175 00:22:44.520 --> 00:22:48.520 People can call in and they can try to persuade them. 176 00:22:48.520 --> 00:23:00.520 The Centers for Disease Control, another egregious example of tax-funded politics in pursuit of regulatory purity, I suppose, 177 00:23:00.520 --> 00:23:08.520 is the Centers for Disease Control has spent millions of dollars training lobbyists to lobby for gun control laws, 178 00:23:08.520 --> 00:23:17.520 training them all the ins and outs of how to get gun control laws enacted because the Centers for Disease Control has defined gun ownership as a disease 179 00:23:17.520 --> 00:23:22.840 and their statutory obligation is to eradicate disease right so that so in 180 00:23:22.840 --> 00:23:26.880 other words and I'm not making this up I have all the documentation in my office 181 00:23:26.880 --> 00:23:33.120 I have a grant document from the Centers of Disease Control to various groups 182 00:23:33.120 --> 00:23:36.920 someone who works with the Florida Department of Health sent it to me because 183 00:23:36.920 --> 00:23:41.880 they think it grants to public health department state level to lobby to train 184 00:23:41.880 --> 00:23:46.080 lobbyists for things like that and so that's that's an example I mean by 185 00:23:46.080 --> 00:23:50.480 Tax Fund and Politics. This is something that Thomas Jefferson called sinful and tyrannical 186 00:23:50.480 --> 00:23:56.480 way back in 1786, compelling people to pay for political causes with which they disagree. 187 00:23:57.120 --> 00:24:06.160 The fourth result of the growth of the regulatory state that I see in my studies of the anti-smoking 188 00:24:06.160 --> 00:24:11.200 campaign, which I think is the future of the regulatory campaigns, is the politicization 189 00:24:11.200 --> 00:24:17.200 A lot of non-profit organizations that used to be involved in providing assistance to individuals, 190 00:24:17.200 --> 00:24:21.200 charitable institutions, have essentially become arms of the state. 191 00:24:21.200 --> 00:24:25.200 One example I'll give you here is the American Lung Association. 192 00:24:25.200 --> 00:24:32.200 You may have heard recently that the EPA has proposed new clean air regulations 193 00:24:32.200 --> 00:24:37.200 to eradicate invisible sub-particles that are so small they're hardly measurable. 194 00:24:37.200 --> 00:24:43.200 And this was done on the basis of a study done by some researchers who refused to make the data public. 195 00:24:43.200 --> 00:24:46.200 Some of you may be up on this. 196 00:24:46.200 --> 00:24:54.200 But anyway, it's going to be a new, more stringent regulatory regime in terms of clean air regulation. 197 00:24:54.200 --> 00:25:01.200 Now, the way in which this came about, the EPA Administrator, Carol Bronner, has said we had to do this. 198 00:25:01.200 --> 00:25:05.200 We were sued and a judge told us we lost the lawsuit. 199 00:25:05.200 --> 00:25:08.200 We have to do this. It's not our fault. We didn't want to do this. 200 00:25:08.200 --> 00:25:10.200 Well, yeah, that's true. They were sued. 201 00:25:10.200 --> 00:25:13.200 They were sued by the American Lund Association, 202 00:25:13.200 --> 00:25:16.200 a grantee of the Environmental Protection Agency. 203 00:25:16.200 --> 00:25:18.200 The EPA has given... 204 00:25:18.200 --> 00:25:24.200 In our book, we've just documented it through Freedom of Information Act data that we've acquired, 205 00:25:24.200 --> 00:25:27.200 that the EPA has given millions of dollars of grants to the EPA. 206 00:25:27.200 --> 00:25:30.200 So the EPA, or to the ALA rather, 207 00:25:30.200 --> 00:25:34.200 so the American Lund Association can sue the people who gave them the money 208 00:25:34.200 --> 00:25:37.200 for more stringent cleaning regulation. 209 00:25:37.200 --> 00:25:41.000 So the American Lung Association to a large extent, 210 00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:43.000 not totally, at the local level, 211 00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:45.280 they still do a lot of things educating kids 212 00:25:45.280 --> 00:25:47.080 about lung health and so forth, 213 00:25:47.080 --> 00:25:48.800 but the national organization 214 00:25:48.800 --> 00:25:51.280 has become essentially the Sierra Club. 215 00:25:53.880 --> 00:25:56.560 And the fifth result of this kind of crusade 216 00:25:56.560 --> 00:25:59.320 that I've seen, you know, studied 217 00:25:59.320 --> 00:26:02.720 is the main goal here, as I said, 218 00:26:02.720 --> 00:26:21.720 is not so much public health, improvement public health, but money, money, money, money, to get money to finance careers as anti-capitalist activists and money for causes that really have nothing to do with the ostensible reason for the higher taxes. 219 00:26:21.720 --> 00:26:40.720 For example, tobacco taxes have been raised state by state. The pending tobacco settlement that Congress is talking about at the moment, Clinton has proposed sending billions of dollars to the states for a daycare initiative. 220 00:26:40.720 --> 00:26:49.720 And I have a copy here, a friend of mine sent me, of something called the California Children and Families First Initiative. 221 00:26:49.720 --> 00:26:55.720 And this, I think, is the outline for what the Clintons have in mind when they say daycare and talk about daycare. 222 00:26:55.720 --> 00:26:59.720 It's being honchoed here in California by Rob Reiner, the comedian. 223 00:26:59.720 --> 00:27:04.720 The guy who used to play the role of Meathead on All in the Family, Rob Reiner. 224 00:27:04.720 --> 00:27:09.720 He's become the Clinton administration's unofficial spokesman on daycare policy, Meathead. 225 00:27:09.720 --> 00:27:23.720 But anyway, what the proposal is to increase tobacco taxes and to get federal money to finance government-run daycare from birth to age five. 226 00:27:23.720 --> 00:27:28.720 Then when the kids are age five, they go into the government-run schools for the rest of their lives. 227 00:27:28.720 --> 00:27:35.720 And so what this proposes is a set of regulations that would oppose a uniform system of daycare providers 228 00:27:35.720 --> 00:27:41.080 Providers, that they all have to comply with one system concocted by this California Children 229 00:27:41.080 --> 00:27:47.200 of Families First Commission. And they even say that one of their goals is to eliminate 230 00:27:47.200 --> 00:27:51.520 duplicative systems, which is another way of saying eliminate competition and freedom 231 00:27:51.520 --> 00:27:59.060 of choice. And so one of the other conclusions that I've come to in my research on all this 232 00:27:59.060 --> 00:28:04.320 is that the assault on tobacco is not just an assault on the tobacco industry. It's an 233 00:28:04.320 --> 00:28:11.320 and an attempt to get a hold of the large amounts of money to expand the regulatory reach of governments in areas that have nothing to do with smoking. 234 00:28:11.320 --> 00:28:17.320 And that's why I think what's coming next are assaults on quite a few other industries. 235 00:28:17.320 --> 00:28:27.320 And I'll just give you a synopsis of what I mean here before I bring on the Mises quotes. 236 00:28:27.320 --> 00:28:48.120 In these other industries, on the other industries, I'll just mention that there have been groups 237 00:28:48.120 --> 00:28:53.880 like the Center for Science and Public Interest, those which campaign against Chinese, Italian 238 00:28:53.880 --> 00:29:01.080 and Mexican Food, and their research technique is questionable, to say the least. 239 00:29:01.080 --> 00:29:05.380 They get to a restaurant, put five different dishes into a blender and send it to a lab, 240 00:29:05.380 --> 00:29:08.380 and the lab comes back and says, boy, there's a lot of fat in that food. 241 00:29:08.380 --> 00:29:11.780 And they get huge headlines condemning that. 242 00:29:11.780 --> 00:29:21.080 And this sort of thing, I think, is the reason why we're going to be seeing assaults on fast food, beer, liquor, wine next. 243 00:29:21.080 --> 00:29:41.800 I'll conclude by quoting von Mises, as far as the significance of this crusade for politically 244 00:29:41.800 --> 00:29:46.840 correct consumption, for politically correct lifestyles, one of the things that von Mises 245 00:29:46.840 --> 00:29:53.400 If it is true that the government derives its authority from God and is entrusted by providence 246 00:29:53.400 --> 00:29:57.960 to act as the guardian of the ignorant and stupid populace, then it is certainly its 247 00:29:57.960 --> 00:30:01.640 task to regimen every aspect of the subject's conduct. 248 00:30:01.640 --> 00:30:07.280 That God sent ruler knows better what is good for his wards than they do themselves. 249 00:30:07.280 --> 00:30:11.920 It is his duty to guard them against the harm they would inflict upon themselves if left 250 00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:12.920 alone. 251 00:30:12.920 --> 00:30:24.360 Once the principal has admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual 252 00:30:24.360 --> 00:30:29.920 against his own foolishness, no serious objection can be advanced against any further encroachments. 253 00:30:29.920 --> 00:30:34.160 A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine, and 254 00:30:34.160 --> 00:30:38.120 why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of an individual's body 255 00:30:38.120 --> 00:30:39.120 only? 256 00:30:39.120 --> 00:30:45.120 Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evil? 257 00:30:45.120 --> 00:30:52.120 Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? 258 00:30:52.120 --> 00:31:02.120 The mischief done by bad ideologies surely is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs. 259 00:31:02.120 --> 00:31:07.120 No fraternal government ever shrank from regimating its subjects' minds, beliefs and opinions. 260 00:31:07.120 --> 00:31:13.120 If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. 261 00:31:13.120 --> 00:31:19.120 The naive advocates of government interference with consumption unwittingly support this case of censorship, 262 00:31:19.120 --> 00:31:24.120 inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters. 263 00:31:24.120 --> 00:31:33.120 That's quite a mouthful, but I think that's exactly what's going on, and that's why I've been writing a lot against the anti-tobacco crusaders 264 00:31:33.120 --> 00:31:39.120 and taking a lot of heat from them because I think at heart they're proceeding against human freedom.