WEBVTT NOTE How Government is Unraveling Civilization by Force 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.960 How many people here know what the Wanderer is? The Wanderer... Oh, funny, a Catholic 2 00:00:05.960 --> 00:00:10.120 table over there, I see. Okay. I don't write about economics for the Wanderer. I write 3 00:00:10.120 --> 00:00:15.120 about music. So you read the column? You don't actually read the Wanderer. You just know 4 00:00:15.120 --> 00:00:20.760 about it. Okay. Yeah. I understand. I understand. Everybody who reads the Wanderer is over 80, 5 00:00:20.760 --> 00:00:28.600 as far as I can tell. So, I'm very grateful to Dr. Cochran for putting this wonderful 6 00:00:28.600 --> 00:00:38.600 This is the chart that shows wealth in England from 1100 up until the Industrial Revolution to the present. 7 00:00:38.600 --> 00:00:45.600 So I love these kinds of charts because they help us think outside of our own times and our own generation 8 00:00:45.600 --> 00:00:48.600 and think more broadly, which is very difficult to do. 9 00:00:48.600 --> 00:00:54.600 I have children and one of the things that I was astonished to discover about children 10 00:00:54.600 --> 00:01:00.360 about Children is it's almost impossible to pass on knowledge to them. Have you noticed this? 11 00:01:03.400 --> 00:01:07.000 It's very strange, you know, you think there ought to be some kind of software or something, 12 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:11.000 there's a developer over here, a couple software developers, so I could just download all my 13 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:15.720 experiences and knowledges to her head, you know, and she could carry it around with her so she 14 00:01:15.720 --> 00:01:21.160 wouldn't have to go through all the troubles I've gone through. And so how wonderful would that be 15 00:01:21.160 --> 00:01:28.360 If we had such a system that we could just kind of download information, every new generation is smarter than the previous one. 16 00:01:28.360 --> 00:01:39.760 Sadly, for whatever reason, the world wasn't constructed this way, so that we all have to keep learning every generation as individuals. 17 00:01:39.760 --> 00:01:46.560 We keep having to learn and we can't seem to learn from, we keep, you know, just drawing on our own experiences of our own times. 18 00:01:46.560 --> 00:01:57.560 And it's really tragic from the point of view of economic understanding because we're not allowed to experience what it was like to be a peasant in 1150, you know, in London. 19 00:01:57.560 --> 00:02:05.560 I think that it's very likely that if we could do that, that we wouldn't be bothering with a lot of the fallacies that are around today, 20 00:02:05.560 --> 00:02:13.560 most of which are taking for granted the world in which we live, this world of astonishing amounts of wealth. 21 00:02:13.560 --> 00:02:20.440 You can draw a similar chart like this for Europe and show actually that the increase 22 00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:28.640 in income came before 1750, 1776 is I think the date that Professor Cochran likes to talk 23 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:33.640 about but actually occurred 100 years earlier or 150 years earlier but the thing that the 24 00:02:33.640 --> 00:02:37.840 chart illustrates is the point that he was trying to make that the default position of 25 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:45.080 Humanity in this world is miserable. It's really rotten. It's a state of hunter-gatherer 26 00:02:45.080 --> 00:02:49.800 society. This is where we would be. And I think it would be interesting to actually 27 00:02:49.800 --> 00:02:54.880 to perform in your own mind a mental experiment. You can try this with other people to discover 28 00:02:54.880 --> 00:03:01.560 the way they think about the world. Imagine that we take the whole world as it is right 29 00:03:01.560 --> 00:03:09.560 right now and zap away all capital accumulation, all private wealth and the division of labor 30 00:03:09.560 --> 00:03:14.600 across the world completely and imagine the kind of world you would end up with and what 31 00:03:14.600 --> 00:03:18.360 you would end up with is the world that you see in this first part of the chart right 32 00:03:18.360 --> 00:03:23.520 here, which is income near zero, right, that's just a miserable lot and by the way that's 33 00:03:23.520 --> 00:03:28.440 far better than people were in the ancient world, you know, I mean this is actually progress 34 00:03:28.440 --> 00:03:58.440 Superimpose on top of that system, of the world that we have, all of the existing governmental structures that are 35 00:03:58.440 --> 00:04:00.200 are with us today, right? 36 00:04:00.200 --> 00:04:05.120 So you can give this year, 1100, a TSA, for example, 37 00:04:05.120 --> 00:04:11.160 a Federal Reserve, a Consumer Product Safety Commission, 38 00:04:11.160 --> 00:04:17.360 a Department of Labor, Barack Obama, 39 00:04:17.360 --> 00:04:20.600 and transplant the whole apparatus of the state 40 00:04:20.600 --> 00:04:23.720 that we have right now on top of this year, 1100. 41 00:04:23.720 --> 00:04:25.040 And what would happen? 42 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:28.320 How much wealthier would people become 43 00:04:28.320 --> 00:04:33.800 As a result of this superimposition of the total state, you know, on top of, and I think 44 00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:38.560 the answer that I would give is they wouldn't be wealthier at all, they wouldn't be any 45 00:04:38.560 --> 00:04:45.640 better off and would probably be made even worse off. There's nothing that the state 46 00:04:45.640 --> 00:04:53.840 can do to eliminate the poverty that is the default position of humanity. It is only private 47 00:04:53.840 --> 00:04:59.840 is a private enterprise that can dig us out of this catastrophe of the state of nature. 48 00:04:59.840 --> 00:05:04.840 It's only private enterprise. You understand this is a reversal of the view of Thomas Hobbes, right? 49 00:05:04.840 --> 00:05:13.840 As Thomas Hobbes had this view that without the state, our lives would be short and we'd be fighting each other and miserable 50 00:05:13.840 --> 00:05:17.840 and the state comes along and somehow fixes us up. Well, this is just fantasy, really. 51 00:05:17.840 --> 00:05:20.920 I mean, the exact opposite is the truth. 52 00:05:20.920 --> 00:05:22.680 In fact, the only thing that can get us out 53 00:05:22.680 --> 00:05:24.880 of a state of nature is private enterprise. 54 00:05:24.880 --> 00:05:25.960 So if you understand that, 55 00:05:25.960 --> 00:05:27.360 and I think we would understand that 56 00:05:27.360 --> 00:05:31.280 if we could somehow download all human experiences 57 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:33.680 into our head, I think we would understand it very easily. 58 00:05:33.680 --> 00:05:35.320 We would understand a lot about economics 59 00:05:35.320 --> 00:05:37.240 and wouldn't have these endless debates 60 00:05:37.240 --> 00:05:38.240 that we have right now. 61 00:05:38.240 --> 00:05:42.160 And yet, if you tour Washington, D.C. 62 00:05:42.160 --> 00:05:45.980 and you come along the building 63 00:05:45.980 --> 00:05:47.440 for the Internal Revenue Service 64 00:05:47.440 --> 00:05:53.720 and look up at its facade, you'll see a quotation emblazoned up there from Oliver Wendell Holmes 65 00:05:53.720 --> 00:06:05.520 that says, taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. This is the message that 66 00:06:05.520 --> 00:06:12.600 we are given when we tour Washington. The logical culmination of this view is of course 67 00:06:12.600 --> 00:06:21.600 and of course the total state. I mean, after all, if taxes are the price we pay for the civilized society, the more taxes we pay, the more civilized we become, you know? 68 00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:35.600 And this is more or less the early theory of the socialists, which is hard to remember now, but Dr. Cochran is right, you know, the scientific socialism of Marx and his generation 69 00:06:35.600 --> 00:06:46.600 really was about the goal of improving society. This is the belief that they looked around at the world of England and Europe and said, 70 00:06:46.600 --> 00:06:51.600 look, lots of people are getting rich, but a lot of other people are getting poorer all the time. 71 00:06:51.600 --> 00:07:03.600 So Marx in his Communist Manifesto said, the modern laborer, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. 72 00:07:03.600 --> 00:07:10.160 It becomes a pauper. And pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. 73 00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:16.160 So this is an empirical position. It's a prediction that's easily subject to investigation. 74 00:07:17.840 --> 00:07:23.120 And his prescription was socialism, which he believed was going to make us all better off. 75 00:07:23.120 --> 00:07:26.640 And Marx wrote that under socialism, the free development of each 76 00:07:26.640 --> 00:07:29.280 is the condition for the free development of all. 77 00:07:29.280 --> 00:07:35.400 Now, Dr. Malcev, Yuri Malcev, is here with us and he's going to be giving, I think, a 78 00:07:35.400 --> 00:07:40.000 wonderful talk along these lines and discuss a little bit about whether or not socialism 79 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:44.680 really did accomplish this and his experience and world history. So, I won't go there. But 80 00:07:44.680 --> 00:07:50.760 I do just want to emphasize the point that early socialist theory was, the goal of it 81 00:07:50.760 --> 00:07:55.520 was to improve the lot of humanity, to get us out of the state of nature. There was a 82 00:07:55.520 --> 00:08:01.400 fundamental belief in material progress in the early socialist theory. It was hard for 83 00:08:01.400 --> 00:08:07.760 us to remember this today. You know, I was looking this up and trying to document in 84 00:08:07.760 --> 00:08:12.600 my own mind that socialists used to believe that it would be a good thing to see material 85 00:08:12.600 --> 00:08:18.040 progress for all of humanity. And I ran across Lenin's great slogan that he used when he 86 00:08:18.040 --> 00:08:22.880 was the ruler of the newly created Soviet Union when he was asked what communism was. 87 00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:32.880 He said, well, look, it's easy to sum up what communism is. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. 88 00:08:32.880 --> 00:08:48.880 Electrification, right? That was the idea. And it was true, the whole left-wing establishment at the time believed very strongly in what we might call a kind of national greatness, 89 00:08:48.880 --> 00:08:54.000 It's a belief in the material progress of humanity. 90 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.080 Some years ago, there's this publication called The Weekly Standard, which is kind of a conservative 91 00:08:59.080 --> 00:09:00.080 publication. 92 00:09:00.080 --> 00:09:05.080 I don't know, does it still exist, Tom, The Weekly Standard, does it still exist? 93 00:09:05.080 --> 00:09:06.080 Okay, yeah. 94 00:09:06.080 --> 00:09:09.240 Yeah, ever since the advent of digital media, one never knows anymore. 95 00:09:09.240 --> 00:09:13.880 So apparently, there's still this publication called Weekly Standard, I don't know. 96 00:09:13.880 --> 00:09:17.280 And so, they had this idea that, look, conservatism has become really boring. 97 00:09:17.280 --> 00:09:25.280 We've lost the vision. What we need is a new kind of conservatism called national greatness conservatism. 98 00:09:25.280 --> 00:09:33.280 We need to get back to this idea of doing huge things as a nation, massive, big projects that inspire us, 99 00:09:33.280 --> 00:09:41.280 like making Mount Rushmore an inspiring thing, or the Hoover Dam, look how inspiring that is, 100 00:09:41.280 --> 00:09:49.300 and going to the moon and having a big war. These are the kinds of things that conservatism 101 00:09:49.300 --> 00:09:55.680 needs to be about. It's a funny thing because this national greatness conservatism, as they 102 00:09:55.680 --> 00:10:00.600 called it, David Brooks, I think he writes for the New York Times now, right? But this 103 00:10:00.600 --> 00:10:05.720 was not a conservative view at all, actually. It was taken over from the left. This is what 104 00:10:05.720 --> 00:10:10.920 the left used to believe, that they would use the state to build up the nation, to make 105 00:10:10.920 --> 00:10:14.920 to make us ever richer, to make us more materially prosperous. 106 00:10:14.920 --> 00:10:18.920 So, how does it happen that the conservatives would take over this line of thinking? 107 00:10:18.920 --> 00:10:23.920 Well, it turns out that the left completely abandoned it sometime in the 1950s, 108 00:10:23.920 --> 00:10:27.920 when left-wing socialist theory turned on a dime. 109 00:10:27.920 --> 00:10:33.920 And this is what I would like to talk about today. 110 00:10:33.920 --> 00:10:38.920 So, looking back in even the American experience, you know, the progressive era, 111 00:10:38.920 --> 00:10:42.600 The theory behind the progressive era was that they would create all kinds of government 112 00:10:42.600 --> 00:10:46.200 institutions that would uplift us materially and make us richer. That was what the Fed 113 00:10:46.200 --> 00:10:53.460 was supposed to do. That's what all the institutions were designed to do. Suddenly in the 1950s, 114 00:10:53.460 --> 00:10:59.920 everything began to change. Murray Rothbard is discussing, discusses this whole shift 115 00:10:59.920 --> 00:11:07.920 of socialist theory and fingers that the critical book here is John Kenneth Galbraith's book 116 00:11:07.920 --> 00:11:16.560 called the affluent society. It came out in 1958, where we see a complete change in the 117 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:23.040 nature of the socialist critique of capitalism. Instead of claiming that capitalism was leading 118 00:11:23.040 --> 00:11:28.800 to ever greater popularization and impoverishment of the working class, which it obviously was 119 00:11:28.800 --> 00:11:34.560 not, right? I mean, capitalism was making everybody richer. It was an implausible claim at some point, 120 00:11:34.560 --> 00:11:40.560 So, he changed everything completely. He said, you know, the problem with capitalism is very different, you know. 121 00:11:40.560 --> 00:11:47.560 The problem is that it makes us too consumerist in thinking. It makes us too materialist. 122 00:11:47.560 --> 00:11:55.560 In fact, our problem is that we have not too little wealth, but far too much wealth, and it's leading to a sort of middle class decadence. 123 00:11:55.560 --> 00:12:06.560 and this ever-increasing wealth under capitalism is crushing us and impoverishing us in ways we don't entirely understand. 124 00:12:06.560 --> 00:12:16.560 This is Galbraith's claim and he said that the rising wealth of the private sector was coming at the expense of the wealth of the public sector 125 00:12:16.560 --> 00:12:24.560 and the public sector is really the measure that we ought to be using to decide whether or not we're better off as a society or not. 126 00:12:24.560 --> 00:12:31.680 Society or not. So this is a completely new way of looking at the problem with capitalism 127 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:41.360 from the point of view of the socialist left. And today's terminology is called the first, 128 00:12:41.360 --> 00:12:45.400 this is what the left calls it, the first post-materialist book. So now we're supposed 129 00:12:45.400 --> 00:12:51.840 to be post-materialist, you know, and enact policies that help us to get there more quickly, 130 00:12:51.840 --> 00:12:54.560 which they are in fact having a great deal of luck in doing. 131 00:12:55.760 --> 00:12:57.820 There have been 10,000 books along the lines 132 00:12:57.820 --> 00:13:00.240 of Galbraith's affluent society since then 133 00:13:00.240 --> 00:13:02.480 and I like what Lew Rockwell has written about this. 134 00:13:02.480 --> 00:13:04.680 He said, it's as if the socialists discovered 135 00:13:04.680 --> 00:13:06.640 that their plan creates poverty, 136 00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:09.880 so they decided to change their name to environmentalists 137 00:13:09.880 --> 00:13:11.560 to make poverty the goal. 138 00:13:11.560 --> 00:13:12.400 You know, so. 139 00:13:12.400 --> 00:13:17.400 The term sustainability here is an interesting one. 140 00:13:17.400 --> 00:13:32.400 Sustainability here is an interesting one, I think it came around, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago or something in terms of sustainability, which is really just a synonym for socialism that aspires to impoverish everybody and make us happy about having done so. 141 00:13:32.400 --> 00:13:42.400 So, it's very strange. And ultimately, really, it comes down, sustainability comes back to reducing the advances of civilization by force. 142 00:13:42.400 --> 00:13:46.800 Civilization, I'm really talking about a series of very small things. It comes down to whether 143 00:13:46.800 --> 00:13:55.240 or not our houses are clean and free of disease, whether we have good ways of disposing of 144 00:13:55.240 --> 00:14:00.720 our trash, whether we have indoor plumbing and it works well, whether we have dance troupes 145 00:14:00.720 --> 00:14:06.080 and local symphonies and opportunities for our children, whether or not our churches 146 00:14:06.080 --> 00:14:10.640 can be well-funded, but through private wealth. This is what civilization is all about. It's 147 00:14:10.640 --> 00:14:15.760 It's not about Mount Rushmore. That's not civilization. It's about the small things 148 00:14:15.760 --> 00:14:23.360 that make our lives more beautiful, cleaner and make life more worth living, really, ultimately. 149 00:14:23.360 --> 00:14:27.720 And this is what I would argue that sustainability is attacking at its very core. So I just kind 150 00:14:27.720 --> 00:14:31.580 of went through a list of books that I could come up with on Amazon. If you look up the 151 00:14:31.580 --> 00:14:37.160 word sustainability on Amazon, you come up with some amazing things. So just a few titles. 152 00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:44.440 Sustainability by design, a subversive strategy for transforming our consumer culture. 153 00:14:44.440 --> 00:14:50.360 Sustainability indicators, measuring the immeasurable, indeed. 154 00:14:50.360 --> 00:14:55.680 Return to sustainability, 147 tips for teaching sustainability. 155 00:14:55.680 --> 00:15:04.240 Returning to sustainability, by the way, means returning to this part of the graph. 156 00:15:04.240 --> 00:15:10.440 Green, A Practical Guide for Simple Sustainability, The Bridge to the Edge of the World, Capitalism, 157 00:15:10.440 --> 00:15:15.160 the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Sustainability, an Amazing 158 00:15:15.160 --> 00:15:24.080 Picture of What Life Will Soon Be Like, Permaculture, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, 159 00:15:24.080 --> 00:15:29.240 Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change. 160 00:15:29.240 --> 00:15:38.480 The author of these last two, his name is David Holmgren. He's in Australia. You can 161 00:15:38.480 --> 00:15:45.520 look up his name and find that he has done many interviews on YouTube. You can watch 162 00:15:45.520 --> 00:15:50.500 these interviews and they're very interesting. He's a very fascinating guy and a very nice 163 00:15:50.500 --> 00:15:54.920 sort of fellow. I'm sure if we met him here for cocktails we would like him very much. 164 00:15:54.920 --> 00:15:59.800 He insisted his interviews take place outdoors, since that's the great place to be, because 165 00:15:59.800 --> 00:16:03.960 you've got bird sounds and nature scenes behind you. So he's outdoors and he's got this Australian 166 00:16:03.960 --> 00:16:09.720 accent. And he has this kind of way of speaking. He's got spaghetti-like prose and he kind 167 00:16:09.720 --> 00:16:13.480 of goes on and rambles at great length and he's kind of captivating. I watched him for 168 00:16:13.480 --> 00:16:23.960 a full hour. I regret it. But he's speaking and he casually just tosses off. The interview 169 00:16:23.960 --> 00:16:32.400 By the way, his whole theory is that we're running out of oil, and that's just a fact, 170 00:16:32.400 --> 00:16:36.000 and it's part of a central doctrine that he has, you know, and nobody is permitted to 171 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:37.000 question this. 172 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:39.760 He doesn't even feel like he needs to argue it, you know. 173 00:16:39.760 --> 00:16:43.560 Oil's going away, that's one thing that's terrible that's happening, you know, and there's 174 00:16:43.560 --> 00:16:45.320 just nothing that can be done about it. 175 00:16:45.320 --> 00:16:51.520 And also, the globe is burning up, you know, it's kind of like getting hotter and hotter 176 00:16:51.520 --> 00:17:21.520 are because we're all driving our cars around and using oil and doing industrial sort of things, decadent, consumerist sort of things, going to Walmart and that sort of thing, it's causing the world to heat up and the world's getting on fire, you know, and we're running out of oil and then suddenly everything's going to collapse, okay, that's his view and so the interviewer asks, she says, the interviewer says, well how long do you suppose we've been on the wrong track in this regard? He says, well I think it's been about, I've thought about this, I think it's about 500 years. 177 00:17:21.520 --> 00:17:27.520 I've been on the wrong track. And then the interviewer says, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, that's about right. 178 00:17:27.520 --> 00:17:49.520 It's crazy. But as I began to think about this point of view, I thought of all the people, my fellow shoppers at a grocery store in Auburn we have now called Earth Fair, which promises to sell you only organic stuff, you know, fashionably organic stuff at very high prices, by the way. 179 00:17:49.520 --> 00:17:54.940 And I wondered how many of my fellow shoppers would agree with Mr. Holmgren here, and I 180 00:17:54.940 --> 00:17:59.200 decided there would probably be just nearly about 100 percent, you know, if you go up 181 00:17:59.200 --> 00:18:06.600 to people, you know, who are buying their ear candles and granola bars, do you suppose 182 00:18:06.600 --> 00:18:11.440 we've been on the wrong track technologically about 500 years? They'd say, yeah, you know, 183 00:18:11.440 --> 00:18:15.580 I think that's about right, yeah, about 500 years. 184 00:18:15.580 --> 00:18:21.820 What is going on? And he says, so the lady, she says, well, what are we going to do? What 185 00:18:21.820 --> 00:18:25.900 are we going to do in the future about suburbia? He said, you know, I'm not pessimistic about 186 00:18:25.900 --> 00:18:32.620 suburbia at all. You know, if you think about suburbia, it's got lots of asphalt. And that's 187 00:18:32.620 --> 00:18:41.900 great in some ways for collecting rainwater for us to drink. And you know, the other thing 188 00:18:41.900 --> 00:19:11.900 The thing about suburbia is we have backyards, and backyards are great also for growing our food, so we can use them for that purpose, and another thing that you find in suburbia is you find garages, and of course in the future our cars, they won't be worth anything because of course there won't be any gasoline, so nobody will be driving, so what can we do with our garage? Well, we can make things, we can make crafts, and benches, and chairs, and it'll be a beautiful thing that we'll be making our crafts in our garages, 189 00:19:11.900 --> 00:19:18.260 Making rainwater from the asphalt and pulling carrots out of the ground out of backyards. 190 00:19:18.260 --> 00:19:27.740 So I'm not pessimistic at all. This is a very beautiful vision of the future. 191 00:19:27.740 --> 00:19:41.340 So the problem here... So the problem is 500 years ago, there were 500 million people living 192 00:19:41.340 --> 00:19:49.340 and the Earth. Today there are seven billion. We've got to find something to do with the 193 00:19:49.340 --> 00:20:01.900 difference. Some place to put them, store them, stack their bodies. And it's very likely 194 00:20:01.900 --> 00:20:09.500 that in the world that Holmgren imagines that there won't be micro-digital devices like 195 00:20:09.500 --> 00:20:16.380 like this, in which I can watch his YouTubes. Very likely. And it's also unlikely I won't 196 00:20:16.380 --> 00:20:22.300 be able to press a button to order his book, you know, to come to my house by truck. So 197 00:20:22.300 --> 00:20:29.460 I do consider that perhaps there is one benefit from his vision that he won't be a best-selling 198 00:20:29.460 --> 00:20:37.300 author anymore. This is hardly an unusual view. Today we're told constantly that we 199 00:20:37.300 --> 00:20:42.060 We need to slow down production, take away conveniences, and this will all make us more 200 00:20:42.060 --> 00:20:45.820 virtuous because it will lower our standard of living. 201 00:20:45.820 --> 00:20:50.820 We're constantly being told to cut back, to consume less, buy locally, go green, carpool, 202 00:20:50.820 --> 00:20:53.740 recycle, save, stop indulging. 203 00:20:53.740 --> 00:20:58.580 And to this end, consumer products are constantly being banned every day. 204 00:20:58.580 --> 00:21:03.420 We have ever fewer choices in the area of medicine and chemicals and food and drink 205 00:21:03.420 --> 00:21:07.980 Bank and otherwise in every aspect of our life, sector after sector, this is going on. 206 00:21:07.980 --> 00:21:14.300 And all of this, I submit, really amounts to a regression of everything we know of as 207 00:21:14.300 --> 00:21:20.100 civilization and all that we associate with living better, healthier, smarter, more prosperous 208 00:21:20.100 --> 00:21:26.300 and more cultured lives. And the heck of it is that it's being done by design, by purpose. 209 00:21:26.300 --> 00:21:31.180 This is the goal. And I would like to just, in the time I have, go through a series of 210 00:21:31.180 --> 00:21:39.500 Light bulbs. The government's banned incandescent light bulbs. In a few years, you won't be 211 00:21:39.500 --> 00:21:43.620 able to get them anymore. And we're being told we must use fluorescent bulbs because 212 00:21:43.620 --> 00:21:48.500 fluorescent bulbs use less energy. They give just as good a light, really. And so we need 213 00:21:48.500 --> 00:21:57.140 to be told to do this. We need to be forced to upgrade. Well, this is already happening. 214 00:21:57.140 --> 00:22:01.780 The last factory that made light bulbs of an incandescent nature, it just closed down 215 00:22:01.780 --> 00:22:07.060 last week and in the future we'll all be buying fluorescent. It may not seem like much, right? 216 00:22:07.060 --> 00:22:13.540 I don't know. I can't stand fluorescent lighting. My daughter loves it, you know, but whatever. 217 00:22:13.540 --> 00:22:18.180 It should be the choice of the individual. Last year I tried to buy some lights for their 218 00:22:18.180 --> 00:22:21.540 Christmas tree. Have you ever tried to use fluorescent lights on your Christmas tree? 219 00:22:21.540 --> 00:22:26.820 They say it's the same light. It's not the same light. The tree did not look 220 00:22:26.820 --> 00:22:42.820 I do want to mention the problem of bed bugs. Are you keeping up with this? It's an astonishing 221 00:22:42.820 --> 00:22:50.280 thing. Okay, so this country right now, we have a bed bug epidemic. It's going on all 222 00:22:50.280 --> 00:22:55.400 over the country. The offices of Google in New York are now infested. The offices of 223 00:22:55.400 --> 00:23:09.960 This is a remarkable thing. Bedbugs have been wiped out off the whole planet about 50 years 224 00:23:09.960 --> 00:23:17.080 ago. They were gone thanks to DDT, invented by a brilliant private chemist working for 225 00:23:17.080 --> 00:23:23.640 a private Swiss company and saved untold millions of lives when he got the Nobel Prize for it. 226 00:23:23.640 --> 00:23:30.260 DDT is a magnificent pro-civilization chemical and it was banned thanks to a fraudulent book 227 00:23:30.260 --> 00:23:36.120 by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. Just a garbage piece of book and it persuaded the 228 00:23:36.120 --> 00:23:40.960 governments of the world to eliminate DDT thereby causing something on the order of 229 00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:46.960 200 million deaths. Even today between one and three million people in Africa die every 230 00:23:46.960 --> 00:23:52.960 year due to malaria because of the absence of DDT. And we don't spray it anymore in this 231 00:23:52.960 --> 00:24:22.960 in this country. And look, we've got a, unbelievable, we've got a bed bug problem. People say, no, bed bugs, you know, they actually don't cause any diseases, you know, they don't transmit diseases. Well, you know, there's just something terrifying about the idea that you would lie down in your bed and these bugs would come up from your mattress and seize on your back and they've got this chemical inside them. They put you to sleep, you know, they don't, so you can't know that they're there. They're kind of like dead in your skin. And then they suck your blood all night. 232 00:24:22.960 --> 00:24:29.200 If you get enough bed bugs on you, you can lead to massive blood loss, but even if you 233 00:24:29.200 --> 00:24:34.680 don't have massive blood loss, it's difficult to get to sleep at all. If you imagine that 234 00:24:34.680 --> 00:24:38.600 the second you close your eyes, the bugs are going to come out and seize on you and suck 235 00:24:38.600 --> 00:24:43.780 your blood. And there are cases where people just live in terror, fear of bed bugs. They 236 00:24:43.780 --> 00:24:47.500 run out into the street screaming, I can't stand it anymore. Just the very thought of 237 00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:51.840 bed bugs. So we've got to get rid of bed bugs. We can't get rid of bed bugs because all the 238 00:24:51.840 --> 00:24:58.400 All chemicals that kill these things are banned today, especially for indoor use. DDT, certainly. 239 00:24:58.400 --> 00:25:03.800 There's another chemical called propoxone. It's permitted by the EPA to be used outdoors 240 00:25:03.800 --> 00:25:08.460 but not indoors, so we can't get rid of these things. The Ohio Department of Health has 241 00:25:08.460 --> 00:25:13.320 pleaded with the EPA to let them use this chemical. Uh-uh, can't use it. You got to 242 00:25:13.320 --> 00:25:18.000 live with the bedbugs. This stuff is spreading. The bugs, in our times, we're dealing with 243 00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:31.000 What about bed bugs? Why? Because the market's been subverted. When I say the market, what I mean is not that, you know, DDT is the magic prescription for all things, and if, you know, maybe there's some other chemical. 244 00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:43.000 The point is, and some people say actually that many bed bugs are now immune, and mosquitoes too, immune to DDT. That may well be true. I don't actually know, and I'm not actually advocating some kind of mass DDT spray. 245 00:25:43.000 --> 00:25:48.840 is that these government interventions have subverted our capacity to civilize 246 00:25:48.840 --> 00:25:52.920 our world and that if you had a legitimate market working where we could 247 00:25:52.920 --> 00:25:56.560 try these chemicals out on a trial and error basis, we could actually compete 248 00:25:56.560 --> 00:26:03.440 with insects. Insects are the only known thing on this planet that have 249 00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:08.200 killed more people than governments. You realize this, right? More people die from 250 00:26:08.200 --> 00:26:18.200 If we die from insects, then gulags, gas chambers, insects. We must kill them if we're going to have civilization. They won't let us. 251 00:26:18.200 --> 00:26:28.200 Now, the EPA recommends... Look, you got a bed bug problem? Not a problem. Just use hot water. I'll use hot water. I'm going to put hot water in my mattress. 252 00:26:28.200 --> 00:26:33.200 But there's a funny problem about the hot water issue. They don't let us have hot water anymore. 253 00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:41.200 You know that government mandates require that hot water heaters are shipped with a fixed low temperature. 254 00:26:41.200 --> 00:26:44.800 So that's why when you turn on your water, it's sort of vaguely tapping you, where's my hot water? 255 00:26:44.800 --> 00:26:48.000 You keep turning it and turning it and turning it. It's just sort of, it's not quite hot. 256 00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:54.200 You have to go in there and hack your water heater in order to get hot water anymore, you know. 257 00:26:54.200 --> 00:26:59.600 This is again an EPA regulation. This is catastrophic. It means our clothes aren't getting clean. 258 00:26:59.600 --> 00:27:04.200 And so your sheets have bedbugs in them, you can't get them out even by washing them, and so on. 259 00:27:04.200 --> 00:27:08.200 I mean, I could go through the list of examples. 260 00:27:08.200 --> 00:27:12.100 We've got ever-increasing limits on trash pickup in our house. 261 00:27:12.100 --> 00:27:15.600 We've got mandatory recycling, which is just beyond belief. 262 00:27:15.600 --> 00:27:20.000 The idea that in this day and age, we'd have to be sorting our hands through our dirty trash and separating, 263 00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:26.000 oh, there's plastic, there's a soiled towel, here's an unsoiled towel, 264 00:27:26.000 --> 00:27:28.400 and separating them all out into all these various areas. 265 00:27:28.400 --> 00:27:32.880 This is radically uncivilized and is super unsanitary. 266 00:27:32.880 --> 00:27:37.880 Since the beginning of time, we've been dealing with the problem of diseases being spread by trash. 267 00:27:37.880 --> 00:27:44.360 You know, this is something that the private sector and capitalism actually fixed and accomplished. 268 00:27:44.360 --> 00:27:49.040 We got rid of the problem of trash, which is, you know, trash combined with insects 269 00:27:49.040 --> 00:27:53.200 killed off about two-thirds of Europe's population, you know, in the Middle Ages. 270 00:27:53.200 --> 00:27:56.920 This is serious business, trash disposal, but we turn it over to government. 271 00:27:56.920 --> 00:28:00.440 They limit the amount of trash we can make. They limit how often they pick it up. Then they 272 00:28:00.440 --> 00:28:04.760 mandate that we stick our hands in and recycle it all the time. It's a terrible mess. This is 273 00:28:04.760 --> 00:28:10.440 de-civilizing. The attack on plumbing is an intolerable situation. Our toilets no longer 274 00:28:10.440 --> 00:28:17.720 work. Our water pressure is absurdly low. Our shower heads now have to be hacked with drills 275 00:28:17.720 --> 00:28:23.400 in order to make them work properly. A few years ago, I highlighted a company that was getting 276 00:28:23.400 --> 00:28:26.960 Shipping around government rules, shipping showerheads that actually worked, I said, 277 00:28:26.960 --> 00:28:27.960 this is a wonderful company. 278 00:28:27.960 --> 00:28:32.400 Well, the company wrote me and said, would you mind taking our name off your article 279 00:28:32.400 --> 00:28:37.720 and especially the link, because we've gotten calls from the federal government wanting 280 00:28:37.720 --> 00:28:39.040 to go after our showerheads. 281 00:28:39.040 --> 00:28:44.160 Folks, this is being seriously enforced, it's not a joke, they're going after showerhead 282 00:28:44.160 --> 00:28:48.580 companies that tell you showerheads at work. 283 00:28:48.580 --> 00:28:55.580 Here are a few examples. Pseudephedrine. Many of us use pseudephedrine to get through the difficult months of the year. 284 00:28:55.580 --> 00:29:03.580 There is a woman now languishing in jail in my own hometown for having bought too much pseudephedrine. 285 00:29:03.580 --> 00:29:08.580 Something like 12 packs over the course of over four weeks. 286 00:29:08.580 --> 00:29:14.580 Bush banned the stuff for free distribution. Now you have to use your license, and it's rationed. 287 00:29:14.580 --> 00:29:19.140 This is a civilizing drug, it helps many, many people, makes it possible to live without 288 00:29:19.140 --> 00:29:20.680 the stuff he knows. 289 00:29:20.680 --> 00:29:26.060 This woman in my own community is now faced with 20 years in jail for buying too much 290 00:29:26.060 --> 00:29:31.260 Sudafed, a drug that you could buy only five years ago in unlimited quantities. 291 00:29:31.260 --> 00:29:34.380 These things are happening every day to us. 292 00:29:34.380 --> 00:29:40.580 Mandatory de-civilization, the attack on cars, intolerable, the appalling subsidization 293 00:29:40.580 --> 00:29:43.300 of this preposterous thing called the electric car, 294 00:29:45.500 --> 00:29:46.980 which if you want to buy an electric car, 295 00:29:46.980 --> 00:29:49.540 that's fine with me, but you shouldn't be done 296 00:29:49.540 --> 00:29:52.460 with government planning and mandates. 297 00:29:53.400 --> 00:29:56.740 The attack on energy, oil, and can you believe 298 00:29:56.740 --> 00:30:01.620 the hysteria that was brought about over this oil leak 299 00:30:01.620 --> 00:30:04.100 that occurred in the Gulf not too many months ago 300 00:30:04.100 --> 00:30:06.500 with BP, which was treated as like some sort 301 00:30:06.500 --> 00:30:09.900 of terrorist organization as if they wanted 302 00:30:09.900 --> 00:30:34.060 The Attack on the Internet is growing by the day, in the name of intellectual property. 303 00:30:34.060 --> 00:30:39.520 We have now for the first time in history an opportunity to put online a universally 304 00:30:39.520 --> 00:30:47.280 is the available library of all known things, all books that have ever been printed and 305 00:30:47.280 --> 00:30:52.040 what has stopped it? Government regulators. Google wanted to do this with its Google book 306 00:30:52.040 --> 00:30:56.560 program. Many people were cooperating. The government is preventing it through the enforcement 307 00:30:56.560 --> 00:31:03.240 of intellectual property rules combined, working with a private industry to enforce what is 308 00:31:03.240 --> 00:31:09.060 an effective government regulation. So we can begin to see a pattern here. Government 309 00:31:09.060 --> 00:31:13.440 Government planning was never a good means to do anything, but at least there was a time 310 00:31:13.440 --> 00:31:18.420 when at least government planning set out to bring progress to humanity. It was the 311 00:31:18.420 --> 00:31:23.980 wrong means to achieve what I regard as the right goal. Today, government planning is 312 00:31:23.980 --> 00:31:31.220 working as maliciously as possible and effectively as possible as a means to achieve the wrong 313 00:31:31.220 --> 00:31:37.440 goal, which is the de-civilization of society. I mean by this that if there is anything that 314 00:31:37.440 --> 00:31:54.440 The government is actually good at doing. It is at destroying things. Even so, in seeking to reduce our standard of living and drive us backwards in the progress of civilization, the government is really playing with fire, unleashing evils that are unknown to us even today. 315 00:31:54.440 --> 00:31:59.440 Never forget that it was not government, but freedom that gave us civilization. 316 00:31:59.440 --> 00:32:09.440 Freedom gave rise to innovation, the unleashing of human ingenuity that built cities, expanded the division of labor across the globe. 317 00:32:09.440 --> 00:32:19.440 It tripled the average lifespan. Freedom gave us universal distribution of food, medicine, music, learning, global communication at zero price. 318 00:32:19.440 --> 00:32:28.440 It gave us the modern miracles of the grocery store and fast food. I'm not shy to say it. I love it. 319 00:32:28.440 --> 00:32:37.440 Freedom created the wealth that funds our churches, our centers of research, civic association, dance troupes, symphonies, art museums, nature preserves. 320 00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:43.440 Freedom is what allows institutions like the Mises Institute to exist and experience vibrant growth. 321 00:32:43.440 --> 00:32:48.440 Only a free and wealthy society permits civilization to flourish for everyone. 322 00:32:49.440 --> 00:32:57.440 It was Joseph Schumpeter who said that the great tragedy of capitalism is that it produces riches so abundant that people tend to take them for granted. 323 00:32:58.440 --> 00:33:05.940 imagining that they can hobble and destroy its productive machinery without great economic and social consequence. 324 00:33:05.940 --> 00:33:09.240 This is precisely what is happening today. 325 00:33:09.240 --> 00:33:15.740 This tendency to romanticize poverty and simplicity in a world without modern technology 326 00:33:15.740 --> 00:33:22.940 is an ideology that is animating the antics of many of today's intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats 327 00:33:22.940 --> 00:33:30.060 who have set themselves up as enemies of all that makes life grand, of all that makes life 328 00:33:30.060 --> 00:33:34.700 worth living, which is to say they have set themselves up as enemies of freedom. 329 00:33:36.060 --> 00:33:41.340 Now, I began with an Oliver Wendell Holmes quotation, so I'll end with one. 330 00:33:42.380 --> 00:33:48.060 In a moment of good sense, he said, state interference is an evil where it cannot be 331 00:33:48.060 --> 00:34:05.060 The libertarian tradition has shown that government intervention cannot be shown to be a good, ever. Especially now. Our taxes are paying not for civilization, but rather for its destruction. 332 00:34:05.060 --> 00:34:19.060 In dramatic contrast, your support of the Mises Institute, which is dedicated at its very core to defending the institutions that permit civilization to flourish, is helping to sustain what too many take for granted. 333 00:34:19.060 --> 00:34:28.060 So I would like to thank you for your support. Thank you for being a friend of progress, freedom, and the well-being of all of humanity. 334 00:34:28.060 --> 00:34:30.060 Thank you very much.