Well, first of all, let me just say thank you very much for this week
and thank you to the Mises Institute for having me
and to Lew Rockwell and to everyone here.
And it's been a pleasure for me to renew some old acquaintances
and to meet some new folks, you know,
always wonderful to meet the great folks
who are associated with the Institute.
It does such important work.
It's my favorite place to be basically in the world.
Okay, well, returning to where we left off, I'm going to keep talking about presidents until the end.
And this morning, my order of business was to say a few general words about the presidency,
then to talk about it, give an example, give Theodore Roosevelt as an example of somebody who radically transformed the office,
and then finally to discuss the evolution of presidential war powers and what the original
intent was and what has actually happened over the course of time.
And among other things, I mentioned that, you know, explaining the president was thought
to have largely, I don't want to say entirely, a ceremonial office because he does have some
important functions, but certainly much more so than the presidency that we have now.
And that's, we can see that also by the way in the very fact that although the president
in the constitution does have the authority to veto legislation, even that in early American
history was viewed as a questionable exercise of presidential power. It was strictly legal
of course, but at one point the Whig party actually in effect announced to people that
if they elected the Whig candidate that he would not exercise the veto. So even that
was viewed as questionable, the legislature should be deferred to.
Now going over the question of presidential war powers, my intent was to show that the
constitutional framework was one in which the overwhelming bulk of responsibility for
foreign policy would reside in the legislative branch.
And we can see that through the division of tasks pertaining to foreign policy, the vast
of the Presidential War Power and particularly early examples that have at times been cited as forerunners of more modern examples of the exercise of presidential war power, such as the Quasi-War with France or the struggle against the Barbary Pirates, both of which I tried to show were in fact authorized by statute.
In fact, a famous scholar of presidential war powers on the particular point of the quasi-war with France
says that it's altogether false to argue that this was just a presidentially initiated, undeclared war.
Again, continuing with Wormuth, he says,
The fact is that President John Adams took absolutely no independent action.
Congress passed a series of acts that amounted, so the Supreme Court said,
to a Declaration of Imperfect War, and Adams complied with these statutes.
Okay, well so now we'll just continue from there.
I left off with a point pertaining to the Monroe Doctrine, and now there are still other things to discuss.
Of course, the Mexican War naturally would arise in this context.
The Mexican War, of course, is 1846-48.
and on the eve of that war there were a number of grievances that Mexico had against the United States
and a number of unresolved issues that the United States had with Mexico involving unpaid debts to American citizens
involving the desire on the part of the U.S. administration to acquire some Mexican territory like California for instance
there was a desire to have territory on the west coast so that therefore it would be easier to, among other things
The Mexican government was reluctant to part with territory.
The Mexican government also had a standing grievance, of course, over the issue of Texas.
Texas had declared its independence as early as 1836.
Mexico had initially recognized that independence, but really only under duress.
under duress. I mean, almost literally, the Mexican ruler Santa Ana, in effect, practically
had a knife to his throat at the hands of Texas independence fighters who said to him,
do you recognize Texas independence? And of course he said yes. But then as soon as he
got away, he said, of course, I don't recognize it. So for nine years, the Republic of Texas
considered itself to be an independent republic, but Mexico did not recognize that independence.
It was only in 1845 that you got the United States annexing Texas.
Texas had applied for admission to the Union several times and been denied each time.
It had been denied by Andrew Jackson and I believe Van Buren.
And then initially there was an attempt by John Tyler that was not successful.
But then practically the last thing that John Tyler did before he left office was that he managed by joint resolution
to get Texas annexed. Tyler was obsessed, it seems, with securing a place for himself
in history, and he thought that the annexation of Texas would do just that. So he managed
to do that, and that was in the wake of the election of James Polk. Since Polk had been
in favor of Texas annexation, Tyler could in effect go to Congress now, and he wouldn't
have to say it in so many words, but we've now seen through a presidential election that
There does seem to be, since Polk is quite clear that he was an expansionist and he wanted Texas,
there seems to be popular support for this, so let's go ahead and enact it.
Well, of course, the Mexican government considers this yet another insult,
but more specifically, there was a dispute over what the precise southern boundary of Texas was.
Was it the Rio Grande River that it is today, of course, or was it the Nueces River, which was much further north?
So there was a disputed amount of territory, regardless of the overall disposition of Texas
and it's having declared independence and whether Mexico considered that legitimate or not,
there was the more specific question of what is the southern border of Texas,
even if it is a fait accompli that it's now part of the US, which border is the legitimate one.
So there was a disputed area.
There was an attempt by Polk's administration to resolve these outstanding issues through negotiation
by sending John Slydell, a diplomat, down to Mexico to discuss them.
But the Slydell mission was a complete failure.
In effect, no Mexican government would really dare to meet with an American official at that point
for fear of being overthrown by an angry population.
So Slydell had to return empty handed.
And it seems quite clear the Polk administration wanted the Mexican government
The United States' decision to counter that aggression would be perceived as an act of self-defense.
I know this is a very familiar story, of course.
Well, Polk didn't have to worry about it, because apparently at a cabinet meeting there was talk in the White House
of what can we do to manipulate the Mexicans into firing the first shot,
The First Shot, but they found out that the Mexicans had already fired a shot.
Well, that solves that issue.
And President Polk said to the country that Mexico has shed American blood upon American soil.
Well, it so happens that this was the term of office in which Abraham Lincoln was in the Congress.
And Lincoln, during his term, introduced something called the spot resolution into Congress.
The spot resolution consisted of a demand that Polk clarify for the country the exact spot on which American forces had been fired upon because Lincoln and others suspected that in fact what had happened was that American troops had been placed not along the Nueces River but in fact in the disputed area in which it was, if not a certainty, then a very great likelihood that they could provoke an attack because Mexico did not
So what was the spot? Lincoln wanted to know. Where were those shots fired on Americans?
Well, eventually it became clear that the shot was fired in the disputed territory,
and that Polk, in effect, had sent troops into territory where it must have been foreseen
that the consequence would be at least some kind of battle, if not war.
Well, Polk, in effect, said to Congress, war exists. But nevertheless, Congress, two days later, officially declared war.
But in 1848, the war ends in 1848, Congress voted 85 to 81 to censure President Polk and declared that the war had been
had been quote, unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States
because of the results of that spot resolution.
Now that is significant because again there are people in American history who aren't
afraid to say obvious things to a president and who censure presidents for things other
than things we've seen them be censured for in recent years.
Now following the Mexican War, we have an incident of, to my mind, rather great significance
in Nicaragua in the 1850s.
Now there's nothing in the Constitution that gives the president the authority to protect
American lives and property abroad.
But on many occasions, presidents have exercised authority for that purpose.
And they haven't typically cited, you know, they haven't said that, you know, Congress
has authorized me to do this.
Accordingly, they have claimed that there are certain executive powers that are implied in the very nature of the executive.
And one of those powers is the power to protect American lives and property, including business property, abroad.
But one example of a president carrying out this power occurs in 1854,
in the Nicaraguan port of Grey Town, which is no longer called Grey Town.
It's called San Juan del Norte, but that time it was called Grey Town.
Now, an American ship was ordered to that port because local authorities in the town of Grey Town, which is a small town,
had, number one, insulted an American diplomat down there,
and number two, had carried out really quite inexcusable acts of aggression against American property.
They had destroyed some buildings of an American firm, for example.
and all these complaints about property losses and this affront to an American diplomat
led to this call for an American ship to go to this port and in effect demand some kind
of restitution from the locals.
Well when the American commander decided that these local folks had not made appropriate
amends for their misdeeds, he went ahead and bombarded the town and he bombarded it for
After 45 minutes, then he'd stop and wait to see, are you people going to give in? No.
Then he'd bombard it again. Then he'd wait a while. Are you people going to give in? No.
Then he'd bombard it again. The people, since they'd been warned, the people themselves
had been evacuated, so thankfully no one was killed. But when finally, after several times
of pausing to see if anyone was going to make any kind of official surrender or any kind
American forces finally went ashore and burned down every remaining building in the whole town.
Now, President Franklin Pierce reported this to Congress,
and he spoke very highly of what the American commander had done in this incident.
He said,
by this procedure he afforded them opportunity to provide for their personal safety to those also who desired to avoid loss of property in the punishment about to be inflicted on the offending town he furnished the means of removing their effects to boats of his own ship and of a steamer which he procured and tendered to them for that purpose so you see that's not so bad just you if you can bombard the town as long as you have action
In 1860, a Federal Circuit Court declared that the commander's actions were in fact defensible, and they were an extension of the executive branch's authority to protect lives and property in foreign countries.
were in fact defensible, and they were an extension of the executive branch's authority to protect lives and property in foreign countries.
The court said,
Now, as it respects the interposition of the executive abroad for the protection of the lives or property of the citizen, the duty must of necessity rest in the discretion of the president.
Acts of lawless violence or of threatened violence to the citizens or his property cannot be anticipated and provided for, and the protection, to be effectual or of any avail, may not infrequently require the most prompt and decided action.
So that if American property is to be protected, then not infrequently that may require the most prompt and decided action.
So, in other words, the destruction of Grey Town.
Now, what's interesting is that James Buchanan at that time was an American diplomat who was speaking to the British government about this incident.
And he assured them, he was absolutely certain that this must just have been the action of a rogue commander
and that the U.S. government would certainly disavow this behavior.
But then he found out from the Secretary of State that no, in fact, the U.S. government was going to defend what this commander had done to that town.
And so poor James Buchanan has to turn around to the British government and say,
Oh, all right, well, remember what I said yesterday? Forget that.
We are defending this position.
So it's sort of an embarrassing situation for poor Buchanan to be in.
Well, once James Buchanan himself became president, you know, and was inaugurated in 1857,
he himself spoke about what had happened at Grey Town and what exactly the powers of the president were
in regard to the protection of American property abroad.
And he said that the executive branch, quote,
in its intercourse with foreign nations is limited to the employment of diplomacy alone.
The President cannot legitimately resort to force without the direct authority of Congress, except in resisting and repelling hostile attacks.
There again is the absolute mainstream view that the President can engage in defensive action but cannot initiate on his own authority offensive action.
And speaking specifically about what had happened in Grey Town, Buchanan said that the president
quote, have no authority to enter the territories of Nicaragua even to prevent the destruction
of the transit, that was the company that was attacked, and protect the lives and property
of our own citizens on their passage. And he went on to say in 1859 that although countries
like Great Britain and France that he called executive governments because their executive
branches were so vigorous. He said they could actually use military force to defend life
and property of their citizens. But he said, quote, not so the executive government of
the United States. He said that if the United States president sends a vessel of war to
some port in order to obtain redress for grievances, he said, quote, the offending parties are
well aware that in case of refusal, the commander can do no more than remonstrate. He can resort
Now, a little bit later, Congress in fact legislated on this matter of the power of the President protecting the lives and property of Americans and in 1868 there was legislation passed that is still in effect to this day, that in effect limits what the power of the
The president can demand of a foreign government an explanation for its behavior or depriving an American citizen of his freedom or property.
The president can demand the release of a citizen who is being unjustly held.
He can use means not amounting to acts of war to obtain the release.
Anything further than that would require congressional authorization.
So here was a loophole and Congress was reasonably, with reasonable dispatch, filled the loophole.
Okay, I already mentioned during the question session last time about what happened in the 1890s in the situation with Cuba.
Spain had Cuba as a colony and was, in order to fight a guerrilla war there,
In fact, when they were there, they were engaged in sometimes quite terrible tactics that became known to Americans, and that under the second term of Grover Cleveland, there was this agitation for war on the part of some congressmen, and Cleveland in effect said that even if you declared war, he would simply not mobilize the army as commander-in-chief, so I don't know if that would ever happen. It's just very hard for me to imagine a state of affairs in the country where the Congress would declare war
I just can't imagine it happening, but it's interesting that it nearly happened here and it goes to show what would happen in the case of such a situation.
Now also in that decade we get an incident that is easily overlooked because it seems on the surface of it to be relatively minor,
but it does have significant implications for presidential war powers and that's something called the Boxer Rebellion.
The people known as the boxers were called the boxers, because they were anti-foreign Chinese fighters who resented the fact that foreigners were in effect carving up their country, were acquiring for themselves what are called extra-territorial privileges in their country, and they resented that.
Sometimes they're called xenophobic, but I think it's at least moderately understandable why they'd be upset about what was happening in their country,
The Boxers could turn violent, they were Christian missionaries, Chinese converts, French and Belgian engineers, a German diplomat, all these types of people were targeted, and in the case of a German minister, was killed in 1900, and in response to that, several nations sent troops to restore order in China, and in the case of a German minister, was killed in 1900, and in response to that, several nations sent troops to restore order in China,
The Chinese translation of their organization's name ends with the words harmonious fists.
Well, in any case, President McKinley, U.S. President McKinley, contributed 5,000 American troops.
Now, this is an apparently minor action.
But Walter Lefebvre, who's a great historian at Cornell, notes this.
He says, McKinley took a historic step in creating a new 20th century presidential power.
He dispatched the 5,000 troops without consulting Congress, let alone obtaining a declaration of war,
to fight the boxers who were supported by the Chinese government.
Presidents had previously used such force against non-governmental groups
that threatened U.S. interests and citizens.
It was now used, however, against recognized governments
and without obeying the Constitution's provisions about who was to declare war.
But because it was such a minor action, hardly anyone really gave it much notice at the time,
although in retrospect we can appreciate its significance.
Oh my gosh, I almost consumed that. I'll explain this all to you later.
I don't even know what's in that glass, sick people, sick, deranged people at the Mises Institute, that's right.
Unbelievable. Okay, let's carry on, shall we? Let's think about World War I instead of this mysterious chemistry experiment that is up next to me at the lecture.
World War I, okay. It is true that President Wilson went to Congress and got a declaration of war to get into World War I.
But there's still some things we can say about Wilson with regard to war powers and also related to World War I.
Because, as I think many people realize, one of Wilson's great dreams was to establish the League of Nations,
The League of Nations
Well, the League of Nations created some controversy in the United States because of Article 10 of the Covenant of the League of Nations and the relevant portion reads,
Well, that's not actually a very precise statement, because does it mean, I mean, from the American point of view, the question was, on the part of many sceptics,
does this obligate the United States to involve itself in every conceivable conflict that could break out between members of the League of Nations?
I mean, what if it's an obscure border dispute that Americans don't even understand?
Would they have some kind of obligation, enforceable obligation, or any kind of obligation, to enter?
And could the president send troops into such a war and claim that he had the right to do so on his own authority,
because, hey, after all, I'm just fulfilling our obligations under the League of Nations?
There was concern about this. There was a desire for clarification.
Now, most of the people who called for clarification of Article 10 of the League of Nations Covenant
were not isolationists.
It's a terrible misleading word anyway.
But most of these people were not non-interventionists.
There really weren't very many non-interventionists.
Most of these people were what we would maybe today
call foreign policy realists, people who say that we should
intervene in this or that place, but only in pursuit
of American interests, whereas the Wilson types would be more
likely to say, well, we should intervene if we think we can
advance democracy, and that sort of thing.
So, they were all interventionists with relatively few exceptions, but still it is an important
point that the so-called realists or the opponents of the League said, like Henry Cabot Lodge
of Massachusetts was concerned about this.
So Lodge has named after him the Lodge Reservations.
They wanted to insert into the covenant of the League of Nations certain reservations.
The United States assumes no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country under the provisions of Article 10, or to employ the military or naval forces of the United States under any article of the treaty for any purpose,
except in any particular case in which Congress, which possess the exclusive right to declare war, shall so provide.
And the preamble to the list of lodge reservations also provided that American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles would not take effect until at least three of the four major allied powers should officially accept these reservations.
Now, Wilson did not favor any such clarification of Article 10, in effect, which he viewed as a watering down of Article 10.
I am not one of those who, when they go into a concert for the peace of the world, want to sit close to the door with their hand on the knob and constantly trying the door to see that it is not locked. If we want to go into this thing, and we do want to go into it, we will go in it with our whole hearts and subtle purpose to stand by the great enterprise to the end.
Well, Wilson came back to the United States, criss-crossed the nation to gain support for the treaty,
and was routinely accusing his opponents of just ignorance or malice,
because these are the only explanations for why someone would oppose this.
In fact, for people who said to Wilson,
we're afraid the League of Nations will compromise American sovereignty,
Wilson said that he looked forward to the day,
quote, when men would be just as eager partisans of the sovereignty of mankind
as they were now of their own national sovereignty.
And as people are collapsing in the audience out here as I read this,
former president William Howard Taft,
we all remember William Howard Taft who supported the League,
nevertheless was aghast at Wilson's behavior.
He said it is impossible for him to explain the League
without framing contemptuous phrases to characterize his opponents.
The president's attitude in not consenting to any reservations at all is an impossible one.
Thomas Fleming, not the editor of Chronicles, but the historian,
Thomas Fleming writes in his book, The Illusion of Victory,
a book that's hated by all the bad guys because it's revisionist on World War I,
as if it takes a lot of courage to be revisionist on World War I.
My gosh, obviously World War I is idiotic and foolish.
The more the president talked, says Fleming, the more he convinced a majority of the senators
that the treaty needed these reservations to protect the country against a league of
nations run by a leader like Woodrow Wilson, a wild-eyed idealist who would embroil the
country in bizarre attempts to perfect the world without the consent of the American
people.
Just about 20 years later, 1936, there's a key Supreme Court decision that has been
seized upon by supporters of a vigorous executive power in foreign policy.
And that's the case of United States versus Curtis Wright Export Corporation, or we just
simply call it Curtis Wright.
Some have said that this could well be the most frequently cited case involving the question
The case in and of itself deals with an extremely minor issue. It deals with the issue of whether it was constitutional for a joint resolution to be passed authorizing the president to halt arms sales to Bolivia and Paraguay, so it doesn't, on the surface of it, seem that it's going to have momentous consequences, but as we know, justices sometimes engage in obiter dicta, where they'll just go on to discuss other matters
The Dicta is occurring when you have a case where the justice has no jurisdiction to hear the case, but still goes on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, like John Marshall in Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, he says, I can't hear this case because the Cherokees are not American citizens, but let me tell you my opinion anyway, that would be considered dicta.
Because the Cherokees are not American citizens, but, let me tell you my opinion anyway, that would be considered dicta.
And sometimes the important sections of the Dred Scott decision are considered the same way,
because if Roger Taney doesn't think Dred Scott is a citizen, that should just end the discussion.
If that's his opinion, then he has no authority to hear the case.
He should not go on for 45 single-spaced pages talking about slavery in the territories.
He would have saved everybody a lot of grief.
Well, it's the dicta of this decision that caused all kinds of controversy and mischief.
Now, the court's decision was composed by Justice George Sutherland.
And it's been said, it was later said by Professor Thomas Reed Powell at the Harvard Law School.
He told his students, just because Mr. Justice Sutherland writes clearly,
you must not suppose that he thinks clearly.
In effect, what Justice Sutherland says is that domestic and foreign powers of the U.S. government derive from different sources.
They don't all derive from the Constitution.
He says that domestic powers derive from the Constitution.
The states delegate powers in Article 1, Section 8, to the Congress.
Foreign policy powers, though, are different, he says, because those powers, he claims,
powers of external sovereignty, and then to use his words, passed from the crown,
the British crown, not to the colonies severally, but to the colonies in their collective capacity
of the United States of America. And so therefore, foreign policy powers,
because they come to the US central government directly from the crown,
are not dependent upon any constitutional grant.
Now, that's a strange statement, first of all, for a number of reasons that I'll get to in a second.
But even if we accepted this as true, even if we accepted that somehow only domestic powers are delegated by the Constitution,
whereas foreign policy powers come right from the Crown and don't need any particular grant from the Constitution,
that still doesn't explain why the President would be the one who would exercise those powers.
I mean, why wouldn't we still have the Congress exercising them?
I mean, it doesn't answer really the question that's at hand.
But more than that, this idea that powers were passing from the Crown to the United States in the aggregate
can be refuted by some of the evidence we looked at earlier this week.
Because there is no United States government that acts in the aggregate in 1776,
or even in the early 1780s, I should say, when the war is concluded.
The British recognized thirteen separate sovereign states, states that exercised attributes of, and made clear they possessed attributes of sovereignty.
We have the Articles of Confederation saying that the states retain their entire sovereignty, freedom and independence.
And we also have Federalist No. 45. In Federalist No. 45, James Madison says,
He says, the powers delegated by the proposed constitution are few and defined.
And he says they will be exercised principally on external objects
as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce.
So he clearly says that these things are in fact being delegated to the federal government.
So this isn't just me being flippant and maybe I should take this guy more seriously.
This is a bizarre decision. There's no other way of looking at it.
And yet it's been cited again and again in favor of the idea
The President has a very, very broad discretion at his disposal and, of course, in fact, he does not.
So that's the Curtis Wright decision. Somebody should announce it more often, I think.
Now, we start to get the modern view, of course, is really that there are hardly any restraints on the President worth mentioning.
It's true that there was a War Powers Resolution, more commonly known as the War Powers Act of 1973,
The watershed point was the Korean War, 1950-53, because that war breaks out, North Korea invades South Korea, and the United Nations condemns this and authorizes use of force, and so Harry Truman commits American forces to battle in the Korean War of 1950-53.
Harry Truman commits American forces to battle in the Korean War without securing a declaration of war from Congress.
Why does he not get a declaration of war? Because he says it is not a war, it is a U.N. police action.
Therefore I don't need a declaration of war because it's not a war, it's a police action.
Okay, well, you can assess the strength of that argument, if you like, but in effect, he is doing exactly what opponents of the League of Nations feared that a president might do, claiming that the authority of this supranational organization obviates the need to go to the Congress, which is the branch of government in which is reposed the power to declare war.
Now, there are some people, there were some people at the time who criticized this.
One of them is Senator Robert Taft, a Republican from Ohio.
He was called Mr. Republican, by the way. Mr. Republican.
And here's what Mr. Republican said.
My conclusion, therefore, is that in the case of Korea, where a war was already underway,
We had no right to send troops to a nation with whom we had no treaty, to defend it against attack by another nation,
no matter how unprincipled that aggression might be, unless the whole matter was submitted to Congress
and a declaration of war or some other direct authority obtained.
Very clear. This was stated by Mr. Republican.
Whereas now Mr. Republican has become Congressman Ron Paul, in effect, in this sense of being Mr. Republican.
and yet even on this point, even saying that the UN declaration, the UN authorization, this UN police action gives me the authority to intervene, even that is highly questionable at best because the relevant UN documents and UN charter make clear that when countries go to war in some way under the auspices of the United Nations, they nevertheless do so following the constitutional
So this is before the Vietnam War. You're already seeing members of Congress arguing,
and here's one such argument, that history will show that on more than 100 occasions in the life of this republic,
the president as commander-in-chief has ordered the fleet or the troops to do certain things
which involve the risk of war without seeking congressional consent.
So this type of argument is raised.
Well, this list of precedents, this hundred or so, or hundreds as other people will say,
you will search in vain through that list of precedents for anything that comes anywhere near even one quarter of one percent of the significance of the Korean War.
Edward Corwin, whom I cited earlier on Theodore Roosevelt, says this,
says this, this list of alleged precedents for the President acting without the consent of Congress
consists largely of quote, fights with pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts,
the dispatch of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border and the like.
This is what the neocons are relying on when they say, oh, there are all these precedents.
Right. Chasing cattle rustlers across the Mexican border
is a precedent for sending a half million troops to the Middle East.
I mean, how does a brain compute that?
I mean, how does that come out of a functioning brain?
I don't understand that.
But that's what they mean when they say,
oh, gosh, you're just being too unreasonable.
We've done this hundreds of times.
Yes, if you want to count the cattle rustler thing,
then it would be hundreds of times.
If that's the point you want to make, I will yield it to you.
Now Bill Clinton, to skip way ahead, I have to have just one little thing.
I've been in this anti-Bill Clinton mode because in 1992 when he was elected,
I think I drank my first beer that night because I was at that time the vice president of the Harvard Republicans.
Yes. All right. You know, let's hear the hissing.
And to me, this was like the world had ended.
Like, I can't believe this happened. So I actually drank a beer.
I mean, so it must have been absolutely catastrophic.
And then, lately, I've been doing so much radio with people who want to talk about the Clintons.
So, you know, I'll talk about any president because, you know, they've all been so miserable.
You want to talk about Clinton? You know, fine, talk about him.
But it's interesting to note that, you know, Clinton, of course, got away with stuff on this, on foreign policy,
because the neocons aren't going to criticize Clinton for, you know, ignoring the congressional requirement
to get a congressional declaration of war. Like, why would they care?
The only thing that they would criticize him for typically is that he wasn't vicious enough.
Like John McCain and Bill Kristol were saying,
we've got to send ground troops into the Balkans.
So the big opposition party was saying,
yeah, Clinton's policy is correct, just not severe and harsh and savage enough.
Well, there's an opposition party for you.
Well, the reason I bring him up is that it's true that Congress was sort of sending mixed signals
throughout the whole Balkan intervention in the early to mid-90s and then in Kosovo in 1999.
In 1999, when Clinton was authorizing the bombing of the Serbs,
you actually had a congressional resolution that voted against giving the president authority to bomb the Serbs in 1999.
And Clinton went ahead with it regardless.
There's a particular circle of constitutional hell reserved for somebody who does that.
It's one thing to say, I've got all these presidential powers,
And then when the Congress expressly says, we're not authorizing this, and then you say, well, I don't care because I'm the president, it does seem to be a violation of the traditional understanding of how war powers are allocated among the branches.
But I think that's an example. But as I say, he'd get away with that because I still don't quite know what it was that the conservatives didn't like about Clinton.
Okay, all right, he's a disgusting person. I agree with that. But most presidents are disgusting people, so there's nothing really unique there.
He was reasonably restrained by modern standards in spending.
He did reform welfare to some degree and he went to war a lot.
He bombed a lot of places.
I don't really see what the big problem is.
It seems like the arguments against him are kind of silly.
Anyway, now in our own modern time, by which I mean the past few years, obviously the current situation involves the invasion of Iraq.
And there was, well, very muted, but nevertheless some attempt to oppose this on constitutional grounds.
And to argue that the president is exercising power that he does not legitimately possess.
The argument is as follows. When the Congress passes a resolution authorizing the use of force, actually more precisely, telling the president that, you know, we give you the authority to decide if and when you think you should go to war.
The argument is that that is an unconstitutional delegation of power that belongs to Congress.
It is supposed to remain with Congress to decide whether to go to war.
You can't delegate to the president of the power whether to go to war.
You can delegate to him certain limited tasks in directing and carrying out a war.
But the decision is supposed to rest with the Congress.
So I was just reading not long ago, there's a gentleman, 85-year-old former congressman from rural Nebraska,
Clare Callen, U.S. Supreme Court declares that the president had no legal authority to go to war in Iraq.
And he's carried on with this and he's got a number of arguments to that effect.
And he's arguing it differently from how I would argue it.
But he says that the resolution authorizing the president to use force that was passed in October 2002
expressly invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
Now, among other things, the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
that resolution contained provisions, for example, saying that the president,
he can initiate aggressive action if an attack is imminent by another country.
We almost are sure we heard him say that it was imminent, right?
Well, interestingly, that works against the president in Callan's argumentations.
He says, well, if you're going to admit the president never said it was imminent,
well, then he's violating the War Powers Act,
because he went to war against a country from whom the threat was, according to him, not imminent,
according to his own words right now, not imminent.
That's not the way I would pursue it, because then we'd just get presidents saying,
The threat of an attack from Somalia is imminent.
You know, I mean, they'll just say it, you know, and then what do you do?
Another way of arguing it is the way that I've suggested,
that the Congress has no authority to delegate this decision-making power.
And there have been a number of attempts to bring to various federal courts
to bring this issue and force it.
And typically it's been dismissed or the lower courts say they have no jurisdiction.
That's typically what happens to these cases.
A couple of years ago, in early 2003, we did get a serious, you know, at least a number of serious attempts,
largely by parents of people in the military who got together and they secured the cooperation of dozens of constitutional scholars who supported them,
and in fact went ahead and initiated this legal challenge.
And it's interesting that I was just reading about the mother of a 25-year-old Marine said this,
When we look at the world community, we see that they had a debate in the parliament of Turkey.
They had a debate in the parliament of Great Britain.
They're having serious debates in legislative bodies all over the world, and yet there is no debate in Congress.
And so she and parents of troops joined not only constitutional scholars, but also a dozen congressmen in this lawsuit,
The president's purpose was to try to stop the president, obviously didn't work, from ordering an attack on Iraq without getting the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war.
She said, if the rest of the world can debate this war, then America can as well. Our constitution requires that debate.
And a legal consultant to the case made this point, that this is an unconstitutional delegation of power.
Now, it's interesting that in addition to the law professors who signed on to a brief in support of the suit,
U.S. Representative John Conyers from Michigan went on the record in support of it.
Now, Conyers, as I recall, he's not a guy I'd want to have over for dinner,
because actually there's almost no congressman I'd want to have over for dinner other than Ron Paul.
But Conyers, as I recall, isn't he the guy in Fahrenheit 9-11 who said to Michael Moore,
Michael Moore, you know, son, we don't have time to read all the legislation that comes before us.
You know, how would we ever get anything done? I'm pretty sure that's John Conyers. Okay.
I remember laughing out loud at that one. My gosh, do you realize what you're saying here?
Well, this is what Conyers said. President Bush recently told journalists that whether we go to war,
quote, is not up to you, it's up to me.
The Founding Fathers, continues Conyers, in a rare reference to the Founding Fathers,
did not establish an imperial presidency with war-making power.
The Constitution clearly reserves that for Congress.
I know he means to say that the Constitution reserves the war-making power for Congress,
but it kind of sounds like it.
If we're going to engage in imperialism, the Congress will do it, but obviously I know
that's not what he means.
What is odd in the universe, when I'm looking at a quotation from John Conyers and saying I don't see anything wrong with this statement, and it's really scaring the heck out of me that I'm in complete agreement with Conyers.
Well, that in a nutshell is, that's the beginning of the, I think, an overview of the constitutional aspect, the background to that, how it's actually worked out in practice.
I think this has been an answer to the, there have been hundreds of examples of the use of force by the President without getting Congressional authorization, that is a completely phony argument that could not possibly be advanced by somebody who is seriously looking for the truth.
And then finally carrying things through to today, looking at the various arguments that have been cited in support of the alleged lack of a need to get a Congressional declaration of war, it's a police action, or I'm the Commander in Chief, that's the most recent one,
I'm the commander-in-chief, so I can dispatch troops.
No one in early American history believed that the commander-in-chief had that authority.
Absolutely nobody.
So today, in effect, what you have is arguments that are made on the assumption
that the American population doesn't know any of this history,
and so they can just easily be bamboozled.
And I'm sorry to say that it has worked like a charm.
Okay, so we end off on a totally depressing conclusion, right?
War is inevitable, we can't do a thing to stop it, we've got crazed presidents, unrestrained by anything,
but it's been a great pleasure talking to you.
I remember when I listened to Ralph Reiko's seminar, he ended early on his last day for the sake of discussion,
so I thought I would follow in the footsteps of the great Ralph Reiko.
So, let's hear them. It could be on anything from the whole week or a comment about anything that you're interested in, anything at all. Yes, sir.
Well, President Wilson had a personal advisor by the name of Hedwig Mandelhaus,
with criteria as a lawful ego, in fact.
Yes.
I'm wondering because he seems to be an internationalist himself, great.
Well, in fact, this had a lot to do with the League of Nations development, or the idea.
I wonder if he didn't exert a tremendous amount of influence on Wilson.
Well, I think the question involves so-called Colonel House.
He was never in the military, Colonel House, but he was called Colonel House.
He never had an official position in the White House,
but Woodrow Wilson used to say that he was the first person he talked to in the morning,
the last person he talked to before going to bed.
I remember actually one of the things that, on the few times I had a chance to meet Murray Rothbard,
he was concerned that there was no biography, there was no modern biography of House.
And that was partly because the House papers were not available at that time, but they are available now.
And I bet if you dug around the papers of this House character, you'd find some stuff.
If he didn't burn them, of course, you'd find some interesting stuff.
House wrote this novel anonymously, I think.
Philip Drew, administrator.
You know, it's sort of like a fantasy of, you know, suppose there were, you know, kind of like a military dictatorship in the U.S.
What types of things would we want to force through on the country?
And it pretty much consisted of, you know, the income tax and everything that in fact did happen.
And so, you know, you read about this a lot, like the John Birch Society, for instance, has kept this book in print,
as if to say, isn't it kind of odd that this guy has this daydream about what he'd ideally like to do with absolute power?
And this is exactly what winds up happening.
I don't think it's because House has a direct influence, but I think it's because he reflects the same way of thinking that all these, the way that they all think.
I think that House plays a very substantial role in all this, but until somebody really digs around in his papers, we won't know exactly the precise nature of that role.
There was a gentleman in the back, yes?
I was going to ask you the same question you might be asking.
I was going to ask you about Henry Hopkins too.
How do you explain the Roosevelt myth?
From your quotations of Lew Rockwell's work on the presidency and how he'd rather have a shadow of a president, we don't care who he is, nameless, faithless, what do we better have a president who drinks his presidency away or one that quibbles with Congress and brings better gear today?
The President is a bad example to the kiddies, but you shouldn't be taking moral instruction from the president anyway.
That's a disturbed idea in the first place.
I know that Calvin Coolidge is not perfect, but he said some great things.
Nobody ever went far wrong by just keeping his mouth shut or not doing anything.
He would just say things like this over and over again.
That just enrages some people, like, man, he should be doing this and that, whatever,
but he just let people, you know, you do what you want to do, and if you insist on doing
something via government, then let your state government take care of it, but it seems to
me that was what the president was supposed to be like, so I guess I would favor that.
Now Harding, he wasn't a drunk, but he did drink during Prohibition openly in the White
House. So that's kind of not altogether off from the image that you're proposing and I think it was
it was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter who later said that you know poor Warren Harding it's like
well I don't want to say this on the tape but let's just say there we all know there were
scandals associated with Harding and not just government scandals personal scandals and so
one statement was this poor guy doesn't even know that beds have been invented yet because he keeps
He keeps finding himself getting caught in compromising situations like in a closet and whatever.
The guy doesn't even know beds have been invented yet.
So I guess he frittered away his administration in other ways.
But the hilarious thing is that although there was the Fed inflation and there shouldn't have been a Federal Reserve,
nevertheless it was, economically, basically a pretty good decade.
Excellent production figures, good unemployment figures, and historians seem to resent that.
Isn't there some viciousness of Congress that would rise under a push over president?
Okay, I have a question and then a comment. First, who was the Whig Party candidate who said that they would never have a veto?
Well, my comment is, I'm going to do something that I, I don't think I've ever done before, but I'm going to defend some neoconservatives. So to be fair, some of them did oppose Costa Rica.
And even Cliff Kincaid did, as Justin Raimondo pointed out after he was on MSNBC with him.
Kincaid is crazed for the current war, but yeah, right, that is true.
That is absolutely true, and I stand happily corrected on that because there were some people who were against those bombings.
Because I remember at the time, now all the memories are rushing back to me.
Two things, listening to you, it doesn't seem to be much point to have it in the Constitution, because it's going to be totally ignored, but the other thing, I can't remember who wrote it in Lew Rockwell's book, but the other thing, I can't remember who wrote it in Lew Rockwell's book, but the other thing, I can't remember who wrote it in Lew Rockwell's book,
How much better off the citizens of the Roman Empire were after Rome collapsed?
Not Romans, but all the people who were abused by Rome were better off with the collapse of Rome.
Right.
Which kind of leads to what leads better off of Washington.
Right, right, right. Well, on the question of the Constitution being ignored, yeah, I mean,
Yeah, I mean, Tom DiLorenzo actually wrote, I think, one of his best columns ever, on
Lew Rockwell, is called Constitutional Something, but it was a two-word title, where he just
went through and said, you know, on the one hand, you can understand, it's okay, you meet
a lot of decent people who love the country and they love the Constitution, and they just
walk around saying, you know, if only they would obey the Constitution. But, you know,
After years and years and years and years of hearing this, at some point you have to
draw the conclusion that it's just not going to happen. And now it's just getting silly
to sit around saying, gosh, all we need is for them to obey the constitution. They have
no particular incentive to do so. And Tom DiLorenzo also posted a blog thing on Lew
Rockwell saying that a recent meeting of congressmen, one of the points that was made was that arguing
Being a point on constitutional grounds is just totally out, totally passe, like it's
silly, it's laughed at, it's just considered ridiculous.
So you can't, I mean on the one hand I make constitutional arguments because I just want
to embarrass these people.
I mean these are the rules you yourselves have said you're going to live by and you
can't even live by them, well then I want to shove that in your face all the time.
Not because I have some fantasy that will shame them into doing it, but that it will
will throw them into, it'll make people more suspicious of them, which they should be.
Now on the question of the Roman Empire thing, I would just say that when the Romans finally
do extend full citizenship to everybody in the Empire, well this is meant to coincide
with being able to tax all these people, so it is very much a mixed blessing, I would
say.
Yes?
You said this week, demonstrating how our government functions today, that it's in no way like the government that emerged post-1776.
I was wondering if maybe you thought it would be more effective to try to get the people back.
Well, just one phrase that you've used this week oftentimes is you say, it was a different world.
And usually you use that regarding social relations.
In a sense, this was another country. We don't even live in the United States like you were talking about.
Do you think it would be more effective to try to convince people that they're really not in heritage?
That they're not violating the constitution because they live in an entire other country with another tradition
where you have this pale constitution that you just violate and rewrite?
It's a semantic difference, but I think it's a really important, I think it's an important semantic difference.
The regime we have now is, I mean, it's almost in no way related to the, I mean, other than
the most superficial way.
We have an election every four years, but other than that, I mean, only the most superficial
way is it related to this one.
It is a different, it's an entirely different regime.
I think both of ways of phrasing it raise questions of legitimacy in people's minds.
Because how, if this is a different regime from the one that was given to us, but yet
there was absolutely no popular consent to this change of regime, what makes it legitimate?
I understand there's an argument that no governments are legitimate, but my point is that in the minds of most people,
this would seem to be a very disturbing anomaly to them.
Is that more or less? Yeah, yeah, right, good.
Other thoughts? Harry?
Yeah, I was wondering earlier this week about something that you see as a historian,
The Republican Party seems to tend to disfavor intervention in Europe as opposed to other parts of the world.
and the World War I and World War II, cross the road and don't ask questions.
There's a word for this, I don't know if it's a different question or if it has this much
to do with the war, but I'd like to have the debate.
I think there's a union of civilizations in Europe, and if Europe wants to do that,
They don't want to have any of their affairs on that, or...
or to get themselves into that sense of favor and other degrees to the world,
or whatever they may think that they're wrong. I find this wrong.
I'm part of the League to Enforce Peace. I love that organization, the League to Enforce Peace. Freedom is slavery, you know.
So I don't know, I think I'd have to think about that, but I'm inclined to think that the Republicans,
although you can find historical epochs in which they're more hesitant to intervene maybe in Europe,
I tend to think they are nevertheless, at the end of the day, they are equal opportunity interventionists.
Other thoughts that people have? By the way, we're watching a movie tonight at 7.
So you have one free movie remaining. Okay, you should come and take advantage of that.
Not you people in internet land. You have nothing tonight. I don't know what you're doing. Okay?
Yes?
Alright, so this might be too big of a question to answer in this kind of environment,
but you started off the week talking about how the American Revolution was a conservative revolution
Yeah, I know, I know. I mean, it's a good question. You know, the question is, you know, is the relative merits of an unwritten
The thing is, they both have disadvantages, and Don Livingston is absolutely convinced that written constitutions are worse than unwritten ones, and I'm not sure I've totally accepted that argument, but I think this is why I was coming to all these conclusions year after year, and then I read Hans Hoppe's book on democracy, and he said,
and that's exactly the book I needed to read at that moment because it just finally it just kept clocking me over the head with how many times do you have to go over this issue that you know obviously there isn't a piece of paper that's going to solve these problems and you know it's like how why did it take me so long to figure this out I don't know but as I say I think there are pros and cons to both kinds because I mean at least a written Constitution you can at least make a clear statement that
When the Constitution says something in clear language, then you can appeal to normal, sympathetic fellow Americans and say we're not being treated fairly according to the rules that were established.
Whereas if you have an unwritten Constitution, then it's very easy for the government to become legal positivist.
And just to say, well, the Constitution is what we say it is.
Well, of course, that has happened with the written constitution too, but at least when people say, well, you don't have a right to bear arms, and you can just see it right there as part of the Second Amendment, it's a little harder for them to get away with that.
But when there isn't any single codified source to consult, then I think it's much easier for governments to be evasive.
Evasive
So I can think of pros and cons.
One person has mentioned to me this week that the very fact that the U.S. Constitution is
so difficult to amend may have helped to contribute to some of the loose construction because
the thinking then became, well, it's impossible to amend this document, so we may as well
just go ahead and exercise the power in question.
So I guess the only conclusion that I've come to is that this stuff just doesn't work no
No matter what you try to do to limit these people, and in this modern world when the
worst consistently get on top, and it's almost as if the rules are rigged that the worst
people get on top, it seems that, you know, I don't think you can dismiss out of hand
the types of things that Hans Hoppe talks about any longer. I mean, with all the evidence
to the contrary around you, you have to be willing to accept radical alternatives when
and everything else has failed.
as it dangers, as it is in quantity
and has a limited power of documents
I didn't think of it that way as I was writing it, but now that Chris has sort of clarified this in my mind, that's really what it is showing.
It's not just making cutesy little arguments about, hey, isn't this the opposite of what they said?
At root, beneath all the cuteness, it's saying that a really dramatic swindle has just taken place over the past couple of hundred years, if you've been paying any attention.
That to me explains why people who like this regime or who want to be employed by it or who want to root for its wars, of course are going to hate this type of message.
I used to think, well, maybe it's my fault. It really isn't, I've concluded.
People have a vested interest in this order of things and when you throw it into question and when you ridicule it, well, those people are going to come after you.
I would imagine in modern-day academia, particularly in the industry department and philosophy departments, you would be, I think, maverick would be a, yeah, you'd be really understatement.
So obviously you must have a lot of critics after printing this book. How do they come at you with trying to refute when you're actually pointing at facts?
As far as other people, the major complaints have been of a couple of kinds.
Number one is that the book is very selective.
But as I say, I mean, I had to cut two entire chapters out of it.
I had to cut a half a chapter out of the American Revolution, which I thought was the best part.
And so one of the recent criticisms was, boy, it's really thin on the American Revolution.
I know it.
I know.
You're not telling me anything I don't already know.
And so some of it will be, well, he doesn't talk enough about slavery or he doesn't talk
enough about this or that.
I don't talk about the Spanish-American War at all, okay, but I mean, that doesn't mean that I don't think it's important or I'm denying that it occurred.
It's just that, you know, given the limitations of this project, you know, I had to do what I thought, I had to cover the issues that I thought most needed to be clarified.
So that's, but that's a common thing is that I leave things out or I don't talk enough about this, don't talk enough about that.
But you know what? I agree with those people. But that's just the nature of this project.
The idea was to keep the book at a length that a normal, non-dork American would read.
I'm a dork. I'll read the book no matter what the page number is.
But the idea is that this is a book that they can give their neighbors and friends and children, whatever, and they'll read it.
The other type of criticism has been...
By the way, people can stop emailing me that the Iron Curtain speech was delivered in Missouri, not Michigan, that was in the first printing.
I don't know how it got in there. It is not in any subsequent printing. We fixed that.
Thank you very much. I do very much appreciate those e-mails, but I can stop sending them now.
But, you know, there's a recent review on History News Network that makes it sound as...
that actually says that Woods just has contempt for the evidence.
So I looked and said, we'll see, what contempt do I have for the evidence?
So I looked and, you know, half of it is nitpicking, because I said, you know,
Belgium had agreements with such and such countries,
and I should have said Belgium had understandings with these countries.
I mean, oh, yeah, well, that just shows complete contempt for the evidence.
I mean, it's that type of nitpicking thing that this just shows, you know, that you can't
trust anything in the whole book.
Or I do think that I slightly, I do think that I was a little bit inaccurate in describing
Neil Ferguson's thesis in the book, The Pity of War.
But I can change the sentence with three words to make it accurate.
My point is that his thesis was that the British government, by its intervention, helped more
than any other to make it into a global conflict.
Now that's what I'm trying to get at.
In the book I said that he says that Britain is the most responsible for the war.
Well that can be taken to mean that Britain is the most responsible for the outbreak of
the war, whereas what I was trying to get at was that Britain was most responsible for
turning it into an international conflict.
Well, again, you know, come on now, all right, it's a careless sentence, it can be fixed,
it hardly throws the whole book into question, but, you know, you have an accumulation of
little things like this, and then, well, he just has complete contempt for the truth.
I mean, you know, some of these things are defensible, and some of them are just, you
know, and really we're talking about a handful of things, just a handful of little things
that happen in every single book, and then you just tweak them in subsequent printing.
That's just the way it goes.
But this is a way, instead of answering, am I fundamentally correct or not correct on
the following things, of what the true meaning of the First Amendment was, the true meaning
of the Second Amendment, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments? Am I right or am I wrong? Am I
correct or am I incorrect about the principles of 1798? You know, is that something that's
been neglected or is it something that's not been neglected? Am I fundamentally correct
in what I say about antitrust law or the Fourteenth Amendment not being legitimately ratified
or World War I being a boondoggle or the 20s being prosperous or the New Deal being a boondoggle
or World War II not getting us out of the depression or the Marshall Plan not being responsible for European recovery, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, are these things right or wrong?
On those grounds, they don't want to address me.
But on little things on the periphery, you know, that's that's the most I ever get.
Usually, though, I don't get either type of argument.
I don't get the, he left all this out, or, look, I found, you know, three i's not dotted.
The usual thing I get is not to address the contents of the book at all, but simply to say,
oh, isn't it terrible that history is being politicized and, you know,
this being written by people who do that for a living, you know, who are saying,
oh, it's just so political these days, you know, and, oh my goodness, look at this.
Here he is saying, can you believe he's saying the New Deal didn't get us out of the Depression?
Can you believe he thinks the 14th Amendment wasn't ratified?
This is the style of the New York Times reply.
Or can you believe he doesn't think the Marshall Plan was responsible for European recovery?
Because after all, we had the Marshall Plan and then we had European recovery.
You know, so I mean, I guess there's an obvious correlation because one happened after the other one in temporal sequence.
That was the whole nature of the New York Times attack.
It was just to say, oh, can you believe it?
Well, yes, I can, because I can defend all those statements.
I can actually defend all those statements. It's just that we've gotten to a point where
the truth is so far from what the mainstream is teaching that it seems bizarre, subversive
and just plain weird to say it anymore. So, anyway, I thank you for that. It's almost
like I planted that question. Boy, have I been needing to get that off my chest for
a long time. Oh, man, I'm even calmer now as a result of that. Okay, anything else on
people's minds? Yes?
If the tendency of government is intellectually towards expansionism and attempts to constrain government by appealing to these institutional and constitutional barriers that guard against this type of governmental hegemonism,
then it seems to me that it does matter a great deal whether we have the right guy in office or not, which is kind of jeered at by a lot of people.
Especially it seems like libertarian thinkers, which I myself find guilty of making of retorting to my ignorant friends.
Oh, it doesn't matter who we have in office, rather the powers that have been usurped by those in office.
Well, it seems like...
Well, yeah, I wouldn't say that it doesn't matter.
Because, I mean, if Ron Paul were president, things would be much better.
So, I mean, it's not that it doesn't matter.
Usually when I say the term doesn't matter, I just mean I look at the two people I'm being offered and I say, well, this doesn't matter.
John Kerry also favors war in Iraq, but he would rather have waited an extra 11.5 minutes to do it or something.
That's what I have to choose from. So then I would say it doesn't matter.
But obviously the right guy in there could fix it.
But the problem is, as of right now, when you have a dumbed-down population,
and you have interest groups all over the place, I don't see how the right guy gets in.
Could you talk a little bit about the dumbed-down population, and how you would explain that?
No, no, no, I understand that. I mean, present company accepted, you all understand, right, when I say dumbed-down population.
Well, I mean, this is something that even, you know, I don't think this is even just a libertarian or a conservative point.
I mean, you know, even if you talk to, you know, left-wing academics, I mean, you know, in a candid moment,
and they'll say, you know, it's unbelievable how little my students know and they can't write a coherent sentence,
let alone a paper with a thesis and then arguments in defense of it.
But I don't mean just dumbed down in the sense that the population doesn't know, you know, when the Mexican war was or when the Civil War or the war between the states was.
But more than that, it's not just that they don't have a factual foundation, but they often believe things that are just propaganda, they're just the opposite of the truth.
They believe a comic book version of the history of their country, whether it's with Lincoln or with FDR or with big business.
You can pretty much rely on the fact that three quarters of the population, at least, have got a view of history that is, to the extent they know anything about these people and events at all, is about as much the opposite of the truth as you can imagine.
And so, given that, given the way government has been portrayed as this benevolent protector and the private sector has weakened, then it's, when I say that with a dumbed down population, I mean people who believe this propaganda,
And there are professors, there are professors who have been stalking me, like law professors,
who are basically ignoramuses, who have done no reading on anything outside their tiny little tradition.
Then it's very, very difficult to make a radical transformation of the country, to go back to what was intended.
Because you have to have, as Rothbard would always say, the state of public opinion is important.
And if public opinion thinks that your solution would lead to oppression and death and wickedness,
then it's very hard to implement that solution.
Now, one comforting thing, though, is that in addition to being dumbed down,
I think the population is very largely apathetic.
And they'll just, more or less, most of them will just go along with what the winds, the various currents are saying.
So, I mean, the more we can become a critical mass of the opinion-moulding people, you know, the better off we'll be, but, you know, that's all I can say on it.
Yeah, John?
I just have a comment further on this.
I almost sometimes think that with the way people get taught history in high school that they almost shouldn't even bother to teach it, because it's worse for them to think that they know things.
I know it.
And then be completely wrong about it.
And this is, I talked to this with professors at my college who, you know, these are mainstream guys, even though they're like, they're teaching people things that are not true.
That's just not true, that's right.
And they're astounded by it that they don't have been, you know, they tell them the truth in class, but they're like, that's not, no.
Right, right, right.
We'll do that.
Well, for the Internet folks, the heroic John Payne is reminding us of the point that, given the way history is being taught today,
Thomas Jefferson said it would be better not to teach them anything than to teach them what they're teaching.
That reminds me of a statement that Thomas Jefferson once made,
speaking about the newspapers, the print of his day,
saying that it would be better to read no newspaper at all
than to read the newspapers that are coming out in our day.
It would be better to have nothing in your head than to have this stuff in your head.
That reminds me of that Roger Garrison anecdote.
Some of you know Roger Garrison, economics professor, great, brilliant guy.
I met a guy and his own assessment of what's happened about the collapse in academic standards
is summed up in this anecdote. He says that, you know, years ago, I used to have students coming into my class
and their heads would be filled with all these economic myths and I'd have to go and refute the myths.
He says, now I have to teach them the myths and then refute the myths.
Okay. Yes, Harry?
And you wanted to do that?
I mean-
I mean, how does it work in your mind?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure how I feel about the Barbary Pirates.
I mean, I would sort of tend to think that if there's a way of dealing with them, you know,
I mean, I would rather, you know, issue some letters of marque and reprisal
and send some private guys out there and deal with it and give them a reward or something.
But, you know, as I was going over some of these incidents, I was thinking to myself that, you know,
It's partly your point that at the time, I'm sure nobody really, you know, people just thought,
oh, this is a small, small thing, but I don't know, now that you look at what we have now,
everything looks like it's a precedent for it, but on the other hand,
we have to be careful not to draw unnecessarily sweeping conclusions.
We have to be careful not to become just careless wig theorists of history that, you know,
Well, you know, right now we've got this crazy, you know, global democratic type, you know, state that wants to intervene all over the place.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we have to look into history and find that every preceding intervention is necessarily a precursor to this.
Because Jefferson was not of the opinion that, you know, he had, there was no ideological mission going on here.
He wasn't trying to civilize the Barbary Pirates.
He wasn't trying to change their religion.
He wasn't trying to preach 19th century liberalism to them.
He was engaged in a fixed and limited engagement that
may have been wise or may have been unwise.
But it doesn't in any way have to culminate in the present.
It's sort of like, I don't believe
that the Beatles has to culminate in Marilyn Manson.
That's just human choice.
They don't have to lead that way.
Related to the wake history issue, I've had history professors tell me outright that in order to really understand history, you have to be sympathetic to the currents that are influential at the time that you're studying.
And so it kind of pushes you in the direction of everything, every change that happens is good.
And I was wondering what you would say to a history professor that told you something like that, because I get it all the time.
Ludwig, sort of thing, like for example, in other words, during the civil rights movement,
we'd be more inclined to look critically on favorable depictions of slavery in the past
and historical treatments, that sort of thing.
In other words, because at that time, there's a wave of egalitarianism sweeping the country,
so we become more impatient with, you know, those other, you know, these negative aspects
of our history.
Is that what you're getting at?
If you're studying the Civil Rights Movement, that's the movement when we look back that has the momentum at the time.
You want to somehow identify yourself with that movement and understand what happens.
How do you know that was a good policy? Have you studied this type of policy before?
But they just take for granted that this type of program is good, that type of program is bad.
And yet, when I've written articles here and there, where I will just make an off-handed reference to this being fortunate or unfortunate,
I've had references to this being fortunate or unfortunate.
And yet, when I've written articles here and there where I will just make an off-handed reference to this being fortunate or unfortunate,
I've had referees say, you can't be partisan like that in this article, but everybody in the world is partisan on the other side of Roosevelt.
So that just annoys me. It's not really an answer, but that's just my thought.
How does your argument fit in Van Crevelle's The Rise of the Planet of the States, which said that all of Western countries' states are collapsed?
He defended himself here. A young woman from Canada asked him how he'd present the arguments he does when he lives in a country with more and more regulations.
But if that were true, then the U.S. has been in its last gasp for a century because the regulatory state has been...
And I'm saying this just not to be flippant about your question, which is a good one,
but that I want to believe what Van Creveld is saying about the decline of the state,
I think that there could be severe crises in these states in the future
that could very dramatically change the whole landscape.
Obviously, we all know about the welfare state collapsing
and demographic changes that are going to cause big problems,
but I don't see a gradual and steady decline.
It seems to me more likely that we'll just sort of hum along
In response to what John Key was saying in terms of Facebook views, and not just political misperceptions, but historical accurate information,
Frank Appleton, a couple of teachers recently on systematically biased beliefs about economics and rational rationality and what makes people think like economists, where he tries to seriously compare a collection of health beliefs by economists with the same issues as regular people.
regular people facilitate their beliefs, but through express action in politics about economics,
that key attributes is there's no real opportunity cost to expressing wrong beliefs or irrational beliefs in politics,
versus business, but if you think that putting orange juice in your car is going to be the best thing...
There's a checking mechanism to it.
Right, exactly, yeah, there's an immediate cost paid for that.
I think socialized healthcare is the best thing in the world. Nothing can stop people going out and voting for it.
I was just wondering if any kind of empirical comparison is done in terms of what people think about history.
It seems like there's no opportunity cost to that either.
I can think that so-and-so was the Abe Lincoln, the kind-hearted guy who likes puppies or something like that.
Okay, Dan asks, for you Internet folks, Dan asks a very good question about some work that Brian Kaplan apparently has done,
making the argument that in certain spheres of human endeavor, like history or in politics,
well, for example, in politics, there doesn't seem to be a huge opportunity cost associated with being dead wrong about something.
If you have some idiotic belief about public policy, you know, or I want a single payer health care plan or something,
In business, if you have some false belief like you can power your car on orange juice, there would be an immediate checking mechanism that would stop you from holding these views in the future.
And is there such an empirical study of, have we looked at this in terms of history?
That people's historical knowledge doesn't seem to have, there's no apparent opportunity cost associated with thinking silly things about history.
I don't know, but it sounds plausible to me.
In fact, this is associated with the usual student question, which is, why does any of this matter?
They always ask, why does any of this matter?
So there's no real opportunity cost.
Other than getting a bad grade in the short run,
in the long run there doesn't seem to be much opportunity cost.
Unless you think being ignorant in and of itself is something to be avoided,
and apparently this is less and less of a motivation for people, apparently,
then we're stuck with this problem.
By the way, does Kaplan still have that quiz on the crimes of communism?
Has he ever given that to students? Or is it just for people going to the website?
I just wondered about that. I've wondered about giving that to people.
Okay, I think actually we're at the time, but we can talk to each other informally, so thank you all very much again.