WEBVTT NOTE The Myth of US Government Benevolence 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 I'm going to preface this by saying that it's always good to speak after Walter Block, 2 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:08.000 because then it makes anyone look moderate. 3 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:10.000 It's always good. 4 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000 When I first looked at this topic, I thought, well, I'm not sure how much is in here. 5 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Then I looked at it further and I decided there was far too much in it. 6 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 You couldn't really deal with all the myths of U.S. government benevolence, so I'll do an overview. 7 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 One of the nice things about being a historian is that there's a sort of license 8 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:39.000 to look into anything that might shed light on a historical problem, to prove a fact, refute a proposed fact, sustain an interpretation, or to build a causal chain. 9 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:47.000 An example is the famous book by Garrett Mattingly on the Spanish Armada, which came out I think in the late 1950s. 10 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:52.000 Mattingly had to look at metallurgy and ballistics. 11 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:57.000 He wanted to find out if the canon were available in 1588 were any good, 12 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.000 if the Spaniards or the English had, and he found out they weren't that good. 13 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:06.000 Well, this, of course, has an effect on naval tactics, whether they worked very well or what tactics could be used, 14 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:15.000 and, of course, he builds this into his discussion of the Spanish Armada. 15 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:25.000 So historians are always bringing in theory information from other fields, the natural sciences or the social sciences such as they are. 16 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:31.000 So let's say a historian finds out there's an economic boom followed by an economic collapse. 17 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:35.000 He'll want to bring in from the outside economic theory. 18 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:41.000 Now if you're lucky, he'll bring in the right economic theory and try to explain what Rothbard calls the cluster of errors. 19 00:01:41.000 --> 00:02:01.000 Another area historians get into, of course, in the course of trying to bring some order to what has happened in the past, is the area of Elfin-Shang and worldviews, ideologies, generally speaking, history, and so on. 20 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:09.000 to what has happened in the past is the area of Elf and Schengen worldviews, ideologies, 21 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:13.000 generally speaking, history of ideas, and of course, myth. 22 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:17.000 Now, there used to be a popular perception that myth is an untrue story. 23 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:19.000 Myth is sort of a lie. 24 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:24.000 Well, this isn't exactly right. I mean, the ancient Greeks didn't believe that there was actually a guy named Perseus 25 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:26.000 who went around cutting heads off gorgons. 26 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:28.000 But there was some point to the story. 27 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:30.520 It was supposed to illustrate some moral truth. 28 00:02:30.520 --> 00:02:34.180 So myth is not necessarily an evil, 29 00:02:35.120 --> 00:02:37.340 at least maybe in the private sector. 30 00:02:39.880 --> 00:02:41.460 In any event, you have to be aware of worldviews, 31 00:02:41.460 --> 00:02:45.840 underlying ideas in civilizations and particular societies. 32 00:02:45.840 --> 00:02:48.440 And it may explain sometimes why people did what they did. 33 00:02:48.440 --> 00:02:51.680 They make assumptions that we think are wrong 34 00:02:51.680 --> 00:02:54.800 or doubtful or we don't share. 35 00:02:54.800 --> 00:02:59.000 Oswald Spengler, who's a very interesting historian, 36 00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:03.440 had some really, I think, some interesting insights, at least, 37 00:03:03.440 --> 00:03:06.360 which are at least worth thinking about. 38 00:03:06.360 --> 00:03:08.280 He argued, for instance, that the Egyptian worldview 39 00:03:08.280 --> 00:03:11.840 was such that they didn't need perspective drawing. 40 00:03:11.840 --> 00:03:14.480 He thinks they could have technically drawn lines 41 00:03:14.480 --> 00:03:16.560 converging and created the idea of perspective, 42 00:03:16.560 --> 00:03:19.000 but they didn't need, they didn't wanna do that. 43 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:22.120 And similarly, he argues that the ancient Greeks 44 00:03:22.120 --> 00:03:31.120 not having, in his view, a real notion of nothingness, didn't invent zero, which kind of handicapped how far they would get in math. 45 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:41.120 Whereas the Hindus, who did have a notion of nothingness, or the void, could invent zero, which then the Arabs helpfully brought to Europe. 46 00:03:41.120 --> 00:03:44.120 And we could do a lot more math with this idea of zero. 47 00:03:44.120 --> 00:03:53.120 This may be true or untrue, but it's an interesting hypothesis suggesting how worldview might affect what people do. 48 00:03:53.120 --> 00:04:00.120 Now there's been a controversy involving William Elfin Williams, a revisionist historian, 49 00:04:00.120 --> 00:04:07.120 who argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published 1959, reprinted in 1962, 50 00:04:07.120 --> 00:04:25.120 that by the time the Cold War was available to have, most American policy makers had turned the idea of an open door for American investments abroad and export markets into an ideology. 51 00:04:25.120 --> 00:04:30.120 It had become such a working assumption they hardly, they don't go around mentioning it every day at lunch. 52 00:04:30.120 --> 00:04:44.120 Now they do have to bring a guy in who doesn't think in these terms, so there are documents in which someone like Stemson goes to Truman and explains to Truman the importance of the open door. 53 00:04:44.120 --> 00:04:53.120 Okay, so other historians instead of Williams is just making this up, they don't mention the open door because that's not really anything they're that concerned about. 54 00:04:53.120 --> 00:04:57.120 They're really defending peace and freedom and there's a lot of other things on their minds. 55 00:04:57.120 --> 00:05:12.120 Well, sure, there's some other things on their minds, but nonetheless, why would someone like James Bacevich write a book just a year and a half ago, which centers on the ideological theme of openness? 56 00:05:12.120 --> 00:05:26.120 By the time Bacevich surveys the administrations of Bush the first and Bill Clinton, not only does American policy demand an open door for exports and investment, it demands everybody be open generally. 57 00:05:26.120 --> 00:05:45.120 They must be transparent, you know, they must take a fooky on the turn and adopt transparency and trust, the cowboy way, whatever it is, straightforward speaking, they've got to all adopt us or we can't trust them and then world history can't go on the scheduled path. 58 00:05:45.120 --> 00:05:58.120 So it seems to me that Williams had a point that even a simple or a large policy construct like the open door can take on mythic and ideological dimensions. 59 00:05:58.120 --> 00:06:02.120 And this brings us to myth then as a tool of power. 60 00:06:02.120 --> 00:06:06.120 And this brings us to the sociology of the intellectuals. 61 00:06:06.120 --> 00:06:14.120 This is an interest of Murray Rothbard's, particularly begins to write about this in the mid-60s. 62 00:06:14.120 --> 00:06:44.120 The Anatomy of the State, 1965, and then the neglected essay, The Great Society, a libertarian critique, in 1967, he discusses the role of the intellectuals, and he had been corresponding with a fellow named Dehushar, George Dehushar, about this, and Dehushar famously did a very large collection of essays, I think it's just called The Intellectuals, but we have a copy here, and wanted to understand the role. So Rothbard's interested in what the intellectuals 63 00:06:44.120 --> 00:06:50.120 and what the intellectuals do for the state, and he reasons like this, that, almost quoting him, 64 00:06:50.120 --> 00:06:54.120 that on the free market the income of the intellectuals is somewhat precarious, 65 00:06:54.120 --> 00:06:57.120 and they don't necessarily all want to go around with a tin cup, 66 00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:01.120 teaching philosophy on the street corner like some ancient Greek. 67 00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:07.120 So they tend to find out they can ally themselves with power and with the state 68 00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:10.120 and have a steady income, a predictable income, a large income, 69 00:07:10.120 --> 00:07:12.120 provided they do what the state wants them to do, 70 00:07:12.120 --> 00:07:18.320 to rationalize and justify what the state has been doing or will do next week, and so on, 71 00:07:18.320 --> 00:07:26.120 create mythic structures and narratives that support everything that the state has been doing. 72 00:07:26.120 --> 00:07:29.620 And you see this also with any new nationalist movement, anytime there's a nationalist movement 73 00:07:29.620 --> 00:07:35.620 developing, somebody has to invent a new history, maybe the Czechs in the mid-19th century, 74 00:07:35.620 --> 00:07:38.920 and you prove that the Czechs have always been wonderful and always been picked on, 75 00:07:38.920 --> 00:07:40.400 and no one else was very nice 76 00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:43.160 and any nationalist movement will do this. 77 00:07:44.900 --> 00:07:48.380 And of course in the United States in the 20th century, 78 00:07:48.380 --> 00:07:51.120 there's a little red thread that runs through 79 00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:55.360 a lot of the creation of myth. 80 00:07:55.360 --> 00:07:57.520 And this is called the Rockefeller Foundation. 81 00:07:58.600 --> 00:08:00.520 And really I didn't think much about this 82 00:08:00.520 --> 00:08:02.880 so I started looking into the background 83 00:08:02.880 --> 00:08:05.240 of the various social sciences. 84 00:08:05.240 --> 00:08:35.240 And everywhere you look, there's Carnegie, Rockefeller, a couple other foundations, consciously attempting from the 1920s forward to direct the course of social science, the structure of departments, the nature of the research, the topics, to direct those to various ends, which they, in some sense as allies of the state, will find useful. And they're particularly interested in empirical research, because empirical research 85 00:08:35.240 --> 00:08:48.240 You get numbers and you say, look, we've spotted a social problem, these numbers, something's wrong and there's a social problem and the state must step in and intervene in some way that accidentally helps our friends or expands the power of the state. 86 00:08:48.240 --> 00:08:56.240 The Rothbard had a famous exchange with, I think, George Stigler, a famous critique, I think, 1961, 87 00:08:56.240 --> 00:09:02.240 the Southern Economic Journal, which Rothbard denounced across the board the whole notion of statistics 88 00:09:02.240 --> 00:09:07.240 and statistics collecting for these purposes. 89 00:09:07.240 --> 00:09:13.240 Okay, now, this also leads me to the observation that this means that the state, 90 00:09:13.240 --> 00:09:25.240 The state, operationally, is somewhat larger than the state apparatus. It's larger than the bureaucrats and personnel actually paid formally by the state. 91 00:09:25.240 --> 00:09:35.240 It begins to include everyone that's subsidized, everyone that's allied to the state, everybody that's got a handout waiting for the state to adopt their corporatist project and so forth. 92 00:09:35.240 --> 00:09:39.960 begin to approach something like the notion that Louis Althusser 93 00:09:39.960 --> 00:09:42.520 head of the ideological state apparatus. 94 00:09:42.520 --> 00:09:45.320 And a couple of my colleagues think this is an intriguing concept 95 00:09:45.320 --> 00:09:49.800 that we can hijack and use even though we're not going to become structural Marxists, 96 00:09:49.800 --> 00:09:52.440 but the notion is intriguing. 97 00:09:52.440 --> 00:09:53.560 So what are some of the myths? 98 00:09:53.560 --> 00:09:56.920 Well, we'll come back to benevolence. 99 00:09:56.920 --> 00:09:58.680 It's part of the title. 100 00:09:58.680 --> 00:09:59.560 Well, there is benevolence. 101 00:09:59.560 --> 00:10:01.240 There's a lot of private charity in this country, 102 00:10:01.240 --> 00:10:31.240 But what's interesting is that there's a number of places on the web where you can look at indexes of private charity and I have to say the correlation interesting again we know that correlation is not necessary causation otherwise would have more respect for sociology than we do but nonetheless it's interesting that by some indexes the highest rate of private charity is in Mississippi and you go through a whole set of southern states and western states so Utah, Alabama they're all in the first 103 00:10:31.240 --> 00:10:36.240 Where is the lowest rate of private charity? 104 00:10:36.240 --> 00:10:40.240 It seems to be in the upper Midwest and Massachusetts. 105 00:10:40.240 --> 00:10:47.240 Places like that where they seem to take the attitude that is the function of the state to solve these problems and do charitable giving. 106 00:10:47.240 --> 00:10:50.240 And so it's a different worldview apparently. 107 00:10:50.240 --> 00:10:51.240 I just find that interesting. 108 00:10:51.240 --> 00:10:53.240 Again, maybe this doesn't necessarily prove anything. 109 00:10:53.240 --> 00:10:56.240 It raises a question. 110 00:10:56.240 --> 00:11:04.480 So we can say, well, yeah, the American people have a lot of merits and good qualities, and generosity is one of them. 111 00:11:04.480 --> 00:11:13.000 But lately, when this sort of thing is said of the American people, it's usually said by spokesmen for various state policies, 112 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:22.440 kind of patting us on the back on the way to a different conclusion, which is that the benevolence in the end can be attributed to the government. 113 00:11:22.440 --> 00:11:23.840 and I think that is a problem. 114 00:11:26.760 --> 00:11:31.760 Now, in drawing up a list of these sort of justifying myths, 115 00:11:33.280 --> 00:11:34.600 I found there were quite a few, 116 00:11:34.600 --> 00:11:36.160 some are subsidiary to the other, 117 00:11:36.160 --> 00:11:38.080 some are small myths, some are huge ones, 118 00:11:38.080 --> 00:11:40.880 so I'll try to just cover some of the ground 119 00:11:41.740 --> 00:11:44.960 in a sort of survey-like fashion. 120 00:11:45.980 --> 00:11:48.200 Well, an original myth is the kind of millennial 121 00:11:48.200 --> 00:11:50.920 republicanism that comes out of New England 122 00:11:50.920 --> 00:11:59.680 during the American Revolution, so that there's a kind of synthesis of millennial Protestant 123 00:11:59.680 --> 00:12:05.760 themes as understood in New England with Republican politics. 124 00:12:05.760 --> 00:12:10.880 This could just, in practice, amount to saying, well, we should just have a freer society 125 00:12:10.880 --> 00:12:14.560 and develop the economy and be a good example. 126 00:12:14.560 --> 00:12:18.560 It doesn't necessarily mean at that point that it has to be imposed on anybody by force 127 00:12:18.560 --> 00:12:21.960 for those who hasn't understood these achievements. 128 00:12:21.960 --> 00:12:26.040 But it's sort of lying there as this millennialist theme 129 00:12:26.040 --> 00:12:29.960 that later on sort of metastasizes 130 00:12:31.320 --> 00:12:35.480 into a kind of U.S. mission of world salvation. 131 00:12:36.840 --> 00:12:39.880 And this seems to be a problem in eschatology. 132 00:12:39.880 --> 00:12:43.160 And Murray Rothbard again got interested in this, 133 00:12:43.160 --> 00:12:45.280 I think by the mid-1970s, 134 00:12:45.280 --> 00:12:50.280 and certainly produced an interesting essay on Karl Marx as an eschatologist. 135 00:12:50.280 --> 00:12:56.280 And it seems to be the key point to a lot of difficult books by Eric Figglin. 136 00:12:56.280 --> 00:13:05.280 The key point seems to be that it might be a mistake to take eschatological doctrines about final things and end things 137 00:13:05.280 --> 00:13:09.280 and bring those into secular politics. This could be an error. 138 00:13:09.280 --> 00:13:13.280 It might be misleading to do this. 139 00:13:13.280 --> 00:13:21.280 But this is an underlying theme that runs through a number of critical periods of American history and has come back to plague us now. 140 00:13:21.280 --> 00:13:24.280 Now there's the myth of the Founding Fathers. 141 00:13:24.280 --> 00:13:32.280 Well, why don't we just say there's 70 or so guys meeting in Philadelphia and draw up a document which worked if it worked for a few decades. 142 00:13:32.280 --> 00:13:37.280 In my view, it didn't work in any reasonable sense past 1860. 143 00:13:37.280 --> 00:13:48.280 Some would say it didn't work as soon as the first Congress met and began passing laws that were quite different than what had been sold in the ratifying conventions. 144 00:13:48.280 --> 00:13:53.280 But it wasn't so bad. I mean, I'm not here to pick on the Constitution. 145 00:13:53.280 --> 00:14:04.280 But nonetheless, the myth of the founding fathers as these sort of superhuman geniuses of the first order seems to have been created by the founders themselves. 146 00:14:04.280 --> 00:14:09.480 They were not above self-promotion, and there's an interesting essay by a historian named Jesse Lienisch, 147 00:14:09.480 --> 00:14:14.480 who's rather fonder of the anti-Federalists, that makes this point I think rather effectively. 148 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:22.280 Well, the next step in this business was that the Constitution itself became the center of a kind of cult, 149 00:14:22.280 --> 00:14:33.080 with the Supreme Court as a berobed priesthood, going and reading the entrails and the chicken flight patterns, 150 00:14:33.080 --> 00:14:35.480 and the Supreme Court finding out what it really means 151 00:14:35.480 --> 00:14:37.160 because apparently it's not obvious on the face of it, 152 00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:38.440 it's all very difficult. 153 00:14:39.520 --> 00:14:41.200 Even when it says Congress will make no law, 154 00:14:41.200 --> 00:14:42.600 this is very complicated 155 00:14:42.600 --> 00:14:44.720 and you have to find out what it actually means, 156 00:14:44.720 --> 00:14:48.040 which, you know, that kind of thing. 157 00:14:49.080 --> 00:14:51.440 And writers as different as William F. Williams 158 00:14:51.440 --> 00:14:53.200 and Hannah Arendt have pointed out 159 00:14:53.200 --> 00:14:55.920 that the Constitution has kind of functioned 160 00:14:55.920 --> 00:14:57.640 as a kind of big secular myth, 161 00:14:58.600 --> 00:15:01.080 sort of a substitute for an established church. 162 00:15:01.080 --> 00:15:18.080 But unfortunately, it's not a preservative myth. Having this myth of the Constitution doesn't sort of keep the Constitution frozen in amber with only one set of interpretations because it's been transmogrified into a living Constitution. 163 00:15:18.080 --> 00:15:26.080 So the myth isn't even very useful in preserving the thing. It just becomes a big fallback explanation or excuse. 164 00:15:26.080 --> 00:15:33.080 It's sort of like some of the writers in the 1940s didn't want to deal with the concept of sovereignty, so they said, well, maybe the Constitution is sovereign. 165 00:15:33.080 --> 00:15:40.080 Well, I don't find that very helpful, just another odd claim. 166 00:15:40.080 --> 00:15:45.080 And Murray Rothbard spotted this in his essay on the anatomy of the state. 167 00:15:45.080 --> 00:15:51.080 He cited the book by Charles Black, and Charles Black was, of course, a modern liberal who thought everything was going on was fine and was good. 168 00:15:51.080 --> 00:16:07.080 Charles Black in his book on the Supreme Court gave away the game when he said the role of the Supreme Court is simply to take whatever the President and Congress have been doing lately and then sanction it and find it in the Constitution. 169 00:16:07.080 --> 00:16:11.080 So the role is simply to justify it. 170 00:16:11.080 --> 00:16:19.080 Now this leads me on to another myth, of course it's part of the Constitutional myth, it's the rule of law. 171 00:16:19.080 --> 00:16:27.080 From a hearing a lot lately about the rule of law, this has become a kind of neoconservative trope, figure of speech. 172 00:16:27.080 --> 00:16:30.080 We have the rule of law. 173 00:16:30.080 --> 00:16:36.080 This qualifies us to go around the world imposing it on those who are unlucky enough to not have it yet. 174 00:16:36.080 --> 00:16:44.080 Now if you look at the book by Paul Craig Roberts, I think it's Robert Stratton, we don't seem to have the rule of law. 175 00:16:44.080 --> 00:16:50.080 It's been eroded massively for decades, all through this century. 176 00:16:50.080 --> 00:16:57.080 The erosion is actually more rapid, but less advertised under republican administrations, which is interesting. 177 00:16:57.080 --> 00:17:00.080 So that book seems to belie this notion. 178 00:17:00.080 --> 00:17:03.080 What we've got is the Benthamite notion of instrumental law. 179 00:17:03.080 --> 00:17:07.080 The law should be streamlined so that people in power can accomplish whatever they have to accomplish. 180 00:17:07.080 --> 00:17:09.080 This is basically what we have. 181 00:17:09.080 --> 00:17:14.080 So the rule of law is another huge myth that needs a little reconsideration. 182 00:17:14.080 --> 00:17:17.080 Now this leads me on to the civic religion. 183 00:17:17.080 --> 00:17:22.080 Now we didn't, now again we had something like this coming out of New England 184 00:17:22.080 --> 00:17:28.080 and some other of the enthusiasts in the American Revolution, but it didn't get very far. 185 00:17:28.080 --> 00:17:31.080 I mean the nearest guy we had to Rousseau was probably Benjamin Rush. 186 00:17:31.080 --> 00:17:41.080 and you just couldn't put across the idea of a kind of totalitarian republican educational system at that time. 187 00:17:41.080 --> 00:17:54.080 This really had to wait for Lincoln and the consolidation of federal power and the closing off of certain options that people had thought were open. 188 00:17:54.080 --> 00:18:04.080 And then we begin to have a larger array of national holidays, and during the Cold War the holidays kind of peaked as part of the Cold War enthusiasm. 189 00:18:04.080 --> 00:18:09.080 The holidays were actually celebrated, but now I don't know how many people take these holidays very seriously. 190 00:18:09.080 --> 00:18:19.080 What's the 4th of July? Well, it's the government's birthday, it's a day off of work, it's firecrackers and hot dogs and barbecue, I don't know, sports. 191 00:18:19.080 --> 00:18:23.260 This doesn't seem to have the meaning that it had as part of the civic ritual and civic 192 00:18:23.260 --> 00:18:29.720 religion. When I say civic religion, of course, I'm referring to a notion in republican theory 193 00:18:29.720 --> 00:18:34.640 as expressed by Rousseau and some of the French revolutionists and occasionally some Americans 194 00:18:34.640 --> 00:18:40.740 that we have to consciously go around inculcating these values that involve political participation 195 00:18:40.740 --> 00:18:45.440 as the highest good and defining freedom as participation. 196 00:18:45.440 --> 00:18:51.800 This is already covered by Benjamin Constant in the 19th century pointing out that the 197 00:18:51.800 --> 00:18:59.600 liberty of the ancients was impossible in the modern world and I find a very good discussion 198 00:18:59.600 --> 00:19:08.320 of this in Ralph Reco's dissertation and some articles he wrote dealing with Constant's 199 00:19:08.320 --> 00:19:13.120 Evaluation of These Claims by the Republic Enthusiast 200 00:19:13.120 --> 00:19:14.560 During the French Revolution. 201 00:19:16.040 --> 00:19:18.080 In the event of participation made us free, 202 00:19:18.080 --> 00:19:19.280 why aren't people voting? 203 00:19:20.640 --> 00:19:22.200 I mean, there's an interesting prediction 204 00:19:22.200 --> 00:19:27.200 by Richard T. Ely, the famous progressive economist. 205 00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:32.080 He said that government was weak and contemptible, 206 00:19:32.080 --> 00:19:34.220 but when government was strong and active, 207 00:19:34.220 --> 00:19:36.600 better people would join the government service. 208 00:19:36.600 --> 00:19:39.600 We get better quality bureaucrats. 209 00:19:39.600 --> 00:19:42.400 And then people would be enthused and they'd go out and vote. 210 00:19:42.400 --> 00:19:45.360 Well, I think using empirical methods that he favored, 211 00:19:45.360 --> 00:19:47.860 we probably questioned whether this has worked that way, 212 00:19:47.860 --> 00:19:50.200 whether people are more enthused about participating, 213 00:19:50.200 --> 00:19:54.320 whether participation seems to them to be the key 214 00:19:54.320 --> 00:19:56.640 to their sense of freedom. 215 00:19:56.640 --> 00:19:58.640 Okay, now that got me, 216 00:19:58.640 --> 00:20:01.060 I have to come back to one of the myth, of course, 217 00:20:01.060 --> 00:20:04.040 of Lincoln and saving the Union and then dying martyred 218 00:20:04.040 --> 00:20:08.080 and it's all got a lot of religious overlay and this is huge. 219 00:20:08.080 --> 00:20:11.160 So I'll just mention that it's so huge that it takes, 220 00:20:11.160 --> 00:20:13.160 you have to have, when you do a book about it, as Tom did, 221 00:20:13.160 --> 00:20:14.440 you have to call it the real Lincoln 222 00:20:14.440 --> 00:20:16.720 because it's very hard to find him. 223 00:20:16.720 --> 00:20:17.760 You know, where is the real Lincoln? 224 00:20:17.760 --> 00:20:20.400 Well, he's not the guy who's become the center 225 00:20:20.400 --> 00:20:22.120 of the American civic cult. 226 00:20:22.120 --> 00:20:23.720 He's a little different than that. 227 00:20:24.680 --> 00:20:27.520 Okay, now World War I, you don't get a lot of myth out of that. 228 00:20:27.520 --> 00:20:28.680 Too many people were disillusioned, 229 00:20:28.680 --> 00:20:30.720 thought that hadn't worked out very well. 230 00:20:30.720 --> 00:21:00.720 The only work of usable myth that may have come out of World War I, at least in some circles, is the idea that, well, it's horrible, shame that the Senate didn't ratify the Treaty of Versailles and this led on to all sorts of horrible consequences and we didn't join the League of Nations and so this is sort of a negative myth of what happens when you don't do the right thing and the government isn't able to do as many benevolent things. That leads me onto two more counter myths about the 231 00:21:00.720 --> 00:21:06.720 in the 1920s and 30s, and by a counter myth, I mean a myth that again illustrates the absence 232 00:21:06.720 --> 00:21:10.640 of U.S. government benevolence and the terrible things that happen if the government isn't 233 00:21:10.640 --> 00:21:15.920 doing these interventions at home or abroad. 234 00:21:15.920 --> 00:21:21.800 So the first of these negative myths is the myth of laissez-faire, that the Republicans 235 00:21:21.800 --> 00:21:27.320 and Herbert Hoover were presiding over a free market economy and these don't work and that 236 00:21:27.320 --> 00:21:31.320 led to the depression and the New Deal saved us from all that. 237 00:21:31.320 --> 00:21:34.880 And in those same years, these same blind Republicans 238 00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:38.400 were pursuing isolationism. 239 00:21:38.400 --> 00:21:42.200 And that led to all sorts of horrible consequences, too. 240 00:21:42.200 --> 00:21:44.240 It's hard to explain on one of the interventions 241 00:21:44.240 --> 00:21:48.240 in Latin America in this period why we had gunboats up 242 00:21:48.240 --> 00:21:51.000 the rivers in China if we were literally 243 00:21:51.000 --> 00:21:52.800 pursuing this sort of policy at the time. 244 00:21:52.800 --> 00:21:55.280 But nonetheless, it's one of the myths 245 00:21:55.280 --> 00:21:56.840 about the consequences they're supposed 246 00:21:56.840 --> 00:22:01.480 to follow from the absence of benevolent intervention. 247 00:22:01.480 --> 00:22:03.400 And again, Murray Rothbard was a great pioneer 248 00:22:03.400 --> 00:22:06.380 in Hoover revisionism, showing how little Hoover 249 00:22:06.380 --> 00:22:08.120 was a laissez-faireist and that Hoover's 250 00:22:08.120 --> 00:22:10.840 a moderate corporatist, but then he was outflanked 251 00:22:10.840 --> 00:22:13.520 by the New Dealers who were more serious 252 00:22:13.520 --> 00:22:15.160 about their corporatism. 253 00:22:15.160 --> 00:22:17.900 Leads on to another foundational myth 254 00:22:17.900 --> 00:22:19.680 that the New Deal cured the Depression 255 00:22:19.680 --> 00:22:21.480 or the New Deal saved capitalism. 256 00:22:21.480 --> 00:22:23.040 You know, you've all heard this. 257 00:22:23.040 --> 00:22:36.040 And a fallback position, of course, is that if that doesn't sell, people will say, well, at least World War II cured the Depression, and this came up yesterday, I won't go into that. 258 00:22:36.040 --> 00:22:45.040 There is a very good paper by Robert Higgs, I'm sure there's others on that. 259 00:22:45.040 --> 00:22:49.040 Okay, then World War II, now we have the myth of the greatest generation. 260 00:22:49.040 --> 00:22:50.040 and the Greatest Generation. 261 00:22:50.040 --> 00:22:52.440 Well, I happen to like people from that generation. 262 00:22:52.440 --> 00:22:54.640 My parents were in that generation. 263 00:22:54.640 --> 00:22:57.920 But to arbitrarily single them out and call them the Greatest Generation is just an attempt 264 00:22:57.920 --> 00:23:03.360 to hijack these people, these actually existing people in the service of state mythology. 265 00:23:03.360 --> 00:23:08.600 It has very little to do with them as they actually were, okay. 266 00:23:08.600 --> 00:23:13.400 Now we come into the Cold War, about which there is also, I suppose, some mythology that's 267 00:23:13.400 --> 00:23:16.400 grown up. 268 00:23:16.400 --> 00:23:26.100 The Marshall Plan, again, on the surface, this is supposed to be this open-handed U.S. government benevolence and generosity. 269 00:23:26.100 --> 00:23:36.000 Then you find out about the role of the cotton exporters and how the grants of money to these European countries were tied to their buying American exports. 270 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:44.600 And the whole thing begins to look, at least in part, like an export subsidy because, again, the policymakers were under the impression 271 00:23:44.600 --> 00:23:53.960 that without a certain quantity of export markets, the market was unsustainable at home. 272 00:23:53.960 --> 00:23:58.320 And in fact, they're looking at this open door as the solution to this again. 273 00:23:58.320 --> 00:23:59.800 I mean, there's nothing wrong with foreign trade. 274 00:23:59.800 --> 00:24:01.080 Markets are nice. 275 00:24:01.080 --> 00:24:04.600 But the idea that you have to go to some extra effort to find them, 276 00:24:04.600 --> 00:24:11.280 and it's the job of the government to go out and find your markets for you seems to me a bit odd. 277 00:24:11.280 --> 00:24:12.820 I had a professor of economic history 278 00:24:12.820 --> 00:24:16.800 at the University of Florida about 1973. 279 00:24:16.800 --> 00:24:19.200 He was from the north of England 280 00:24:19.200 --> 00:24:23.840 and he had kind of a practical outlook. 281 00:24:24.840 --> 00:24:27.920 And he would tell us, and this is back when this idea 282 00:24:27.920 --> 00:24:30.600 probably was a little bit new, hadn't gotten out. 283 00:24:30.600 --> 00:24:32.600 And he said that foreign aid generally, 284 00:24:32.600 --> 00:24:34.800 again, it tends to be just an export subsidy, 285 00:24:35.800 --> 00:24:39.760 but foreign aid generally does far less good, 286 00:24:39.760 --> 00:24:42.920 And it always does far less good than tourism. 287 00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:46.280 And everybody denounces tourists now, 288 00:24:46.280 --> 00:24:48.320 but the tourists at least are giving money to real people. 289 00:24:48.320 --> 00:24:49.520 It actually goes into the economy. 290 00:24:49.520 --> 00:24:53.040 It's not being siphoned off from one class of bureaucrats 291 00:24:53.040 --> 00:24:53.880 to another. 292 00:24:55.880 --> 00:25:00.880 Somebody wants to find foreign aid as taxing poor people 293 00:25:01.120 --> 00:25:03.400 in the United States to give money to rich politicians 294 00:25:03.400 --> 00:25:04.680 in third world countries. 295 00:25:04.680 --> 00:25:10.680 So again, the benevolence is somewhat in dispute. 296 00:25:10.680 --> 00:25:17.680 Now, I think Dr. Block alluded to this in terms of his strategy for arguing with people on the left and the right. 297 00:25:17.680 --> 00:25:24.680 And this has to do with the way people compartmentalize, 298 00:25:24.680 --> 00:25:29.680 so that they mythically believe that the welfare state and the warfare state aren't connected. 299 00:25:29.680 --> 00:25:31.680 It's not the same state. 300 00:25:31.680 --> 00:25:52.680 And Alvin W. Goldner, the left-wing sociologist, made this point in 1971, talking about the welfare and warfare state, and that it was odd that people thought these were separate categories, and so all of his friends who were sociologists didn't necessarily like the foreign policy, but they loved the welfare state at home, didn't see it as a unity. 301 00:25:52.680 --> 00:25:54.680 I don't know if he borrowed the phrase from Rothbard, 302 00:25:54.680 --> 00:25:58.680 because Rothbard has already used this language in 1967. 303 00:25:58.680 --> 00:26:00.680 I'm not sure the ultimate source of this terminology. 304 00:26:00.680 --> 00:26:04.680 Chodorov says something like this much earlier. 305 00:26:04.680 --> 00:26:09.680 So now we come back to the beginning, 306 00:26:09.680 --> 00:26:12.680 sort of a myth of the eternal return. 307 00:26:12.680 --> 00:26:16.680 We come back to our first myth, which is the kind of world mission 308 00:26:16.680 --> 00:26:20.680 that the Puritans already have in mind during the American Revolution. 309 00:26:20.680 --> 00:26:31.680 And now we hear this in various flavors from all the defenders of the present policy, who we can roughly call neocons. 310 00:26:31.680 --> 00:26:43.680 There's a kind of pagan, republican, classical variety favored by people like Mr. Ledin, Mr. Kaplan, and a number of other people 311 00:26:43.680 --> 00:27:11.680 The ideal role model for the United States is the Athenian Empire, somehow, because after all the Spartans were sort of narrow and bad people, didn't believe in transparency, trust, or the Roman Empire, and of course very important for many of the writers is the British Empire, this is really the ultimate role model. 312 00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:15.680 And I did a column on this. I don't think I've got time to go into that one. 313 00:27:15.680 --> 00:27:21.680 I did a column in July on Anywhere.com about the myth of the benevolent hegemon. 314 00:27:21.680 --> 00:27:25.680 And I thought, well, this is sort of boring. People may not really like this topic. 315 00:27:25.680 --> 00:27:32.680 And it was summarizing a paper by Isabel Grunberg who talks about how the whole idea of benevolent hegemon is a mythic structure. 316 00:27:32.680 --> 00:27:40.680 It talks about the water metaphors and the kind of religious metaphors that intrude in the international relations writers who believe in this theory. 317 00:27:40.680 --> 00:27:49.680 And lo and behold, a couple days ago, Cubby Owens, or what is it, McCubbin Thomas Owens, some of us call him Cubby, 318 00:27:49.680 --> 00:27:55.680 did an article in National Review Online in which he says, well, we are the benevolent hegemon. 319 00:27:55.680 --> 00:28:00.680 And then he proceeds to talk about how he was just speaking with Thucydides the other day, 320 00:28:00.680 --> 00:28:06.680 and the ancients told him, because the Straussians were always channeling the ancients. 321 00:28:06.680 --> 00:28:10.680 And you have to have a benevolent hegemon, otherwise the sun will disappear. 322 00:28:10.680 --> 00:28:14.680 He didn't say that, but you know, the world will just go to hell. 323 00:28:14.680 --> 00:28:17.680 And it took on mythic proportions. 324 00:28:17.680 --> 00:28:20.680 And he does induce the Athenian Empire and some other things. 325 00:28:20.680 --> 00:28:23.680 So we're back in mythic terrain. 326 00:28:23.680 --> 00:28:30.680 And I suppose that's enough myth for one talk, so I'll close.