07/11/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to this here radio thing of mine.
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All right.
Our next guest is my good friend, Sheldon Richman, our good friend, Sheldon Richman.
Welcome back, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm doing fine.
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us, everybody.
You know, Sheldon, he's the walking definition of libertarianism.
I don't know if there's a discrepancy there between who's more libertarian, him or Anthony Gregory.
I think that.
Do you guys disagree on anything?
You and Anthony, do you know?
We disagree on who's more libertarian, right?
These two.
I'm kidding.
Sheldon.
Sheldon.
He's as libertarian as Anthony Gregory.
OK, there you go.
That's how libertarian he is completely.
Anthony calls himself a Richmond Ian, if that tells you anything.
OK, I like I like Gregorian chants, so I guess I'm a Gregorian.
Yeah, well, I like Gregorians.
I'm not so into chanting.
It's soothing.
You know, it seems like turning over.
You're thinking of somebody else chanting.
I don't like that.
Anyway, I'll I'll lead a chant, but I won't follow one.
Hey, listen, you're the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And you're the article of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
And you're that makes you the publisher of me right now, July 2013.
I've got an article in that thing.
Somebody else said they read it on my Facebook page.
It's called stupidity or the plan, but they can't read it unless they go to FFF.org/subscribe.
Isn't that true?
That is true.
If you want to get it when it comes out in hard copy or you can subscribe for a lesser amount to an email version or to an online version or maybe it's email or yes, eventually it will be online for everybody.
But the privileged people, the people that have paid us some money because we exist through donations get to see it as soon as it comes out.
There you go.
And this article, it's way too long, isn't it?
This one I've written.
I didn't think it was.
I thought you did a good job covering the subject.
All right.
Good.
It's my take on Egypt.
Well, America's policy towards Egypt, Libya, Syria since the dawn of the Arab Spring two and a half years ago.
Basically, that's what it is.
Stupidity or the plan.
So go to FFF.org/subscribe.
All right.
Enough of that.
Let's talk about your great new article here, which anyone can read for free by clicking on FFF.org.
It's called what the immigration bill overlooks.
So you know what?
I just never pay attention to this issue.
And I know it's supremely important.
And I know that our government's oppression of immigrants in this country is absolutely out of control.
Mostly, I know this from listening to Anthony tell me about what he's been reading because he keeps up on this stuff really well.
But I know that Barack Obama is three times as bad on cracking down on immigrants as George W. Bush was.
It's just horrible with the mass roundups and sweeps and the lawless indefinite detention and immigration, ICE prison and whatever.
There's a horrible, gigantic tangle of issues, the drug war, everything.
And then now, oh, but Congress is going to fix it.
So what do they have in store for us?
Well, it's kind of an interesting just as a sports event to be watching.
It's kind of interesting because you have some people, some Democrats and some Republicans who think, yeah, well, we really ought to have a comprehensive approach to this because a lot of people want to do something to bring, to sort of legitimize the 11 million so-called illegal immigrants or illegal aliens.
I call them simply people without government papers, in other words, big deal.
But anyway, some people think it's a big deal.
So they don't like the idea.
And some of it's for good civil libertarian motivations.
They don't like that these people are living in the shadows, right, in fear of being turned in.
That doesn't open them up to exploitation and all kinds of stuff.
So people want to have some path where, you know, some sort of criteria by which these people can now live legally.
And some of them want to go even further and have them have a pathway to citizenship.
There are a group of people among that in that camp who say, OK, we'd go for that.
But we want it combined with securing, so-called securing the border.
In fact, we want to make sure the border is secure first before we can put, we put people on this pathway to citizenship.
So the Senate, through this coalition, this gang of eight, which includes Democrats like Schumer, Republicans like, what's his name, Rubio, have come up with this bill, this grand bill in the Senate, which has like a 13-year pathway to citizenship.
And, you know, the person would have to pay fines and taxes and, you know, stuff like that.
And meanwhile, it's combined with a, you know, a security portion to the bill, which spends like $50 million, sorry, billion dollars over the next 10 years to do things like add 700 miles to the fence that's already down there, 20,000 new patrol agents, border patrol agents, surveillance equipment.
The Washington Post had a great article a couple of weeks ago about all the money that contractors making or would make on this bill, because the bill even specifies the brand and model of the helicopters that have to be purchased.
You know, so whoever, Grumman or whoever makes these helicopters, of course, are, you know, champing at the bit to get this bill passed.
So a lot of money to go into surveillance, which means drones and other kinds of electronic surveillance.
So they passed that.
They passed the Senate.
The House, on the other hand, which is more in control by conservative, you know, xenophobes, I would say, don't like the bill.
And they say, we want to start from scratch with our own bill and rather than just take the Senate bill and work from that, because they don't think it secures the border enough.
They want it 100% secure.
And they don't want to even talk about any kind of pathway until that's taken care of.
So they don't even really want a so-called comprehensive bill.
They'd rather do a piecemeal, starting with border security.
But of course, that's a trick, because you can never have 100% secure border, right?
So they'll always be able to say, no, we're not ready to deal with the other issues yet, because the border is not secure yet.
And if you listen to Sean Hannity about this, it's quite clear that border security is a chimera.
In other words, it's like the horizon, right?
The more you pursue the horizon or the more you move to the horizon, the more it moves away from you.
So they have this neat, little neat trick, as I say, which means they never need to get on to any other part of the issue.
My whole attitude and the thing I pointed out in my article, the first overlooked point I said to this is that people have natural rights, including the natural right to move, to settle somewhere else, as long as you're not violating other people's rights.
And therefore, the whole bill, the Senate bill, and certainly whatever the House would want, is nonsense, because it has to violate this natural right to move.
And I went on to make some other points about this.
See, one thing that really sticks in the craw of conservatives, and it's very revealing about conservatives, is they like to say, I don't believe that someone should be on a pathway to citizenship when his first act with respect to the United States was to break the law.
To them, that's like the most, right, that's the most horrendous thing they can think of.
And I argued in my point number two that was overlooked, that a law, in other words, a product of a legislature that conflicts with natural law is not law.
That's an old precept, an ancient precept of the natural law theorist going back, you know, to Plato.
When a legislature issues a decree that conflicts with the natural law, it is not law.
And there's a famous Latin phrase for that, which is, you know, lex in justia est non lex.
It is not law.
So, in other words, they did not violate the law.
They might have violated the statute, but they did not violate the law, and therefore they should be left alone.
Right on.
Well, you know, there you go, putting principle before, you know, the letter of things.
You know, what kind of strange philosophy is this anyway, this libertarianism?
Yeah, a little thing like justice, you know, why should that figure into anything?
The conservatives are totally repugnant on this.
And my friend Shikha Dalmia, who writes for Reason and a lot of publications, made a great point that the quest for a 100% secure border, she equates to the, you know, the Democrats or the environmentalists' request for a 100%, you know, pure environment or something like that, right?
A 100% secure, in terms of public health, secure, risk-free environment.
There's no such thing.
And the same thing with the, and conservatives like to point that out when it comes to environmentalism.
But they do the same thing when it comes to the border.
They claim that there can be something like a fully secure border, and they will not hold out against anything to treat these people humanely.
You know, they'll say, no, no, we won't even consider it until there's a 100% secure border.
And I think that's simply demagoguery.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so here's the thing, man.
I got to try to take their side as a devil's advocate there, obviously.
Well, I don't think there should be any borders, private property lines anywhere, but...
You radical.
Yeah, I'm kind of stuck like this.
But here's the thing.
So, but they're taking our jobs, and the corporations, you libertarian anarchists, purists, theorists, are just front men for these corporations who want to drive down all of our wages and make us all slaves and all dependent on food stamps, and Walmart would be the best opportunity we'd ever have if these guys got to run the economy the way they want to run it, and that's all that's really going on here.
And so the natural rights of a Mexican notwithstanding, this is policy.
This is economic policy by powerful people, and they hate America's middle class, and they're trying to destroy it, and you're trying to help them.
That's one thing.
And then the second thing is, they all want to come here, Sheldon.
Everybody knows that.
All seven billion people on Earth will all emigrate to the middle part of North America immediately if you have it your way, and then we'll all have to learn new languages and stuff like that, and learn to like foods that we've never tasted before.
Yeah, like, you know, pizza.
But look, on the first part, well, what was the, I forgot the first part.
Driving down our wages for the evil crony capitalists.
The second part was so persuasive, I forgot about the first part.
Yeah.
Yes, driving down our wages.
As a good friend of mine and a very good economist put it, if you're concerned about, if your job is at risk from a largely uneducated and untrained non-English speaking Mexican, you've got bigger problems in life than immigration.
So that's the first thing to be said.
Although, you know what, though?
That's not much of an argument, because there are a lot of regular working class white folks that like swinging a hammer for a living, and honestly can't swing a hammer for a living if they don't speak Spanish, because the immigrants just have a lock on the market now.
That could be a real problem for a guy who'd like being a house framer.
What's wrong with that?
Well, that's life, that's what I would say.
I would say that's life.
First of all...
It is a real problem, though, and not for someone who's a bad person or has necessarily even made bad decisions.
I'm not saying no one would be affected by this, but that's just life and that's just change, and that's what happens.
Anybody can face that, and it doesn't have to be from a Mexican, right?
Your job can...
You can find you're newly competed against by someone you weren't worrying about yesterday and may have to make some adjustments in your life, but rights don't just attach to Americans, right?
Rights are individual rights.
Human rights are individual rights, and individual rights are human rights.
They belong to everybody, and the end doesn't justify the means.
So the government should, and conservatives, I thought, don't like when government engages in wage and price controls or meddling with wages and prices, so why should the government step in to hold up anybody's wages by violating the human rights, the individual rights of a group of people who were born on the other side of, as you alluded to, essentially arbitrary line in the sand or some river?
That's no reason to violate somebody's rights, and so I would knock that one down.
They also can't...
They're not coming...
The same people that argue that they're coming for our jobs, and I'm thinking of South Park now, also say they're coming and going on welfare, and those two arguments don't quite match.
If you have a job, you're going to have trouble getting welfare, and also you don't qualify for welfare anyway if you're here without some sort of permanent residency or citizenship, so that's a bogus issue, too, and there have been studies that show that immigrants aren't on welfare to any great extent.
You know, they come here and work hard.
The other point you made was that everybody wants to come here, right?
Seven billion people want to come here.
The point is, the people that do pick up and come here, that's no small matter.
I mean, we Americans are arrogant, so we think, oh yeah, everybody wants to be here.
Everybody's willing to pick up and leave and come to the United States, but the people that come are the people with the most initiative, by definition, the most initiative, the most entrepreneurship, because to pull yourself out, you know, in a lot of parts of the world, people die within, what, 25 miles away where they were born.
They don't move very far any time in their life.
It's a big deal to tear yourself away from family, the land you were born in.
Even if you're being oppressed by the government, it's hard for people to do this, and to move to a different culture, where there's a different language, and a whole bunch of things to learn, you know, even if you're not going through formal citizenship classes or something like that.
And that's a big deal.
And so this is a bogus fear that everybody's going to move here, like, on the same day, yet, you know, everybody's going to come on the very same day, you know, the moment they legalize it.
That's a bogus fear.
That's ridiculous.
If you're worried about the Mexican border, as somebody just reminded me, the best thing you can do, I think I was one of your guests, actually, the best thing you can do is to end the war on drugs.
If you're concerned about the Mexican border, end the war on drugs, and a lot of that concern just disappears.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so here's the thing.
Put aside libertarian, natural rights theory, and all this stuff for a second, and just live in the American democracy that we're stuck with, with me for a minute, and what the policy's going to be here, that kind of way of looking at it.
Would you argue that open immigration, the kind that you're describing, really is not a detriment, would not, could not be a detriment to the American middle class?
Because it really does seem like more and more, America's becoming like Venezuela or something, where you got the rich people who live in their gated communities and their high rises, surrounded by their phalanx of security guards, and then everybody else.
But meanwhile, the kind of jobs where a regular guy, without too much education, and an average C plus IQ, could have a decent job, and a house, and a family, and take care of his family, and live more or less a decent life, and in fact, maybe even combine with others like him, to have a little bit of political power, and a little bit of a say in how the society's run, instead of just turning the entire damn thing over to the billionaires.
And it looks more and more like we're moving toward that kind of billionaire and then everybody else model.
I think you know what I'm talking about.
So are you saying that immigration's not a problem one way or the other with that?
Or one percentage point up or down, but not the point?
I don't think that's the problem in any respect.
Even if what you're talking about is a real problem, and I agree with you.
Immigration is not the part of it, it's not the cause of it, and keeping immigrants out is not going to help it.
And I didn't say the only thing we need to do is open the borders.
I mean, you know my radical program, it's like yours.
We want to get government out of the economy altogether.
It should not be regulating, it should be extending no privileges to anybody, abolish intellectual property laws, all the things that do enable the people who are already at the top to secure their positions and increase their wealth, I want to wash that away.
Because that's not natural property, that's false property, it's government-created scarcity, which costs all of us and increases the wealth of the people at the top, so I want to get rid of all that stuff.
But all other things being equal, and we allow, you know, we pass the Sheldon Richman immigration bill, then what?
Are there any negative consequences that you need to even, you know, be concerned about?
Or do you think just cheaper houses and better food for everybody?
Well, don't forget, you're right, the people coming in from all over the world will be the most entrepreneurial types, so not only will they be consumers, which expands markets for people that are selling things, they're also producers, you know, a lot of immigrants start businesses, and they started some rather successful ones over the years.
When you move people from capital-poor areas to capital-rich areas, like if you go from Mexico to the U.S., you're suddenly surrounded with capital tools, you know, machines and computers superior to what they have per capita in Mexico, a person very quickly becomes more productive, or certainly is on a much more productive path in life, which means they're going to produce more for themselves and their families, that means more goods and services for us, for the rest of us, in making their own lives better.
So there's a gain all around.
Now, will no one be harmed by this?
No.
As we already acknowledged, people of lower skills, some people of lower skills, and even people you said who just like the job of hammering house frames together, and could be doing other things, but they like that, they may find themselves with more competition.
There's a study that Brian Kaplan likes to promote, and Brian Kaplan's a great advocate of open immigration, an economist at George Mason, that, you know, a tiny percentage of people could see, in the immediate, you know, term, see a depression in wages because of this competition from, you know, unskilled, new unskilled workers, but, you know, that would pass, because the economy is a dynamic thing, if the government, you know, lets it operate.
Why would anyone want to move here?
I keep thinking every day that I want to flee, and I haven't really traveled the world, so I don't really know where I'm headed or something, but man, I'm terrified to even drive down the road, and that's, and the APD are not the meanest cops in the country, but man, I don't know, it just seems like, you know, you read a couple of Radley-Balco articles, and then you start applying to make sure your passport's updated, and you're ready to get the hell out of here.
Yeah, well, look, a person in desperate, desperate straits in Mexico may not be fully aware of all that, but even if he was, he might find that still preferable.
I mean, things aren't great in Mexico, either, right?
It's all trade-off.
Well, you have, you do have terrible gang warfare that's drug-related that would go away with legalization of drugs.
I mean, so let's, you know, say that right up front, but that's pretty bad, and of course, it's spilling over, to some extent, over the border into the United States, and that makes abolition of the war on drugs, the misnamed war on drugs, not a war on drugs, it's a war on people, it makes abolition of that all the more urgent.
I mean, that ought to be one of the highest priorities, maybe not the highest, but just having people peacefully come here and work, I don't see why people get so upset.
Yeah.
Yeah, me either.
I don't know.
I guess, well, I'm from Texas, and I grew up around people of all different, I guess maybe, well, I don't think my neighborhood was much more mixed than the average one or whatever, but it still seemed like, you know, every different kind of last name, I didn't even realize that different kind of last names sort of indicated where someone was from or something like that until I was like 20 or something.
Everybody had all different kinds of last names, and were from all over there, or their parents or their grandparents were from all over the world, and what difference does that make?
Not much.
You know, I don't know.
I just, it's just funny to see people so concerned about stuff like this, and you know, when you look at the conservative coalition, the fiscal conservatives, the big business types, they like open immigration, or maybe they want to keep, you know, a good bit of it illegal so that it can be black market and extra low wage or whatever, but for the most part, they want immigrants to come and do their jobs for cheap wages.
The only pushback against this really is just racism, right?
A bunch of white guys are afraid that they're just going to have their hamburgers replaced with enchiladas.
You know, it's hard to say in any particular person's case what the actual, you know, deepest reason is.
I mean, some of them, I'm willing to concede that some of them, it's not racism, but there are staunch nationalists who believe that the first duty of a government is to control the borders.
I mean, I heard Hannity, I think it was Hannity the other day, saying, asking somebody, well, you do believe we should have sovereign borders, don't you?
Now, whether that's a rationalization for something less attractive, although that's pretty unattractive in my view, or that's an honest question on his part, I can't know, because I don't know, you know, I can't look within his soul to tell you what he's really thinking.
I think that's objectionable enough.
Someone who thinks that, you know, the very notion of a nation means that there has to be walls, you know, at the borders, I think that's repugnant, and it's not my idea.
I mean, I'm not a nationalist, and I agree with you about borders.
People ought to be free to move.
That's more important than any nationalist considerations.
Also, it's been pointed out that, you know, most of the people who come here illegally aren't sneaking over the border.
They're just overstaying visas.
So that's got nothing to do with border security.
Yeah, that's true.
Well, and on to the Constitution, never mind, you know, high-principle libertarianism.
In front of the Constitution, the national government is not delegating any authority to keep immigrants out whatsoever, and as far as the border, their national government's responsibility over the border, it's simply keeping the Mexican government and its courts and its pretended jurisdiction out of this side of the line.
That's all.
They don't have any war power against civilians.
Yeah, I'm not clear on the constitutional issues, and I'm less interested in that.
You know, the Constitution talks about naturalization, which is a different issue, right?
A person can come here and live here forever and never become a citizen, so they're really separable issues.
Right, yeah, that's what Anthony Gregory was saying just the other day.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
It's really different.
Right, that's right.
Now, the states, of course, are claiming they should have, under the Tenth Amendment, should have the right to keep people out, but I don't want to see Texas keeping out Mexicans either, or Arizona keeping.
So I wouldn't want either level of government to be doing that.
Well, yeah, but you know, it's like you say about any law that contradicts the natural law is no law at all.
Well, you got sort of a pseudo that with the Constitution.
It should be anyway that, you know, you got your enumerated powers and that's it.
Pallet says in Rule Number 10 that, in case you didn't understand that before, that we really meant it.
Well, but one complication is the Fourteenth Amendment, and that was passed.
We can't ignore the Fourth.
We don't like when people ignore the Second, so we shouldn't be ignoring the Fourteenth.
The Fourteenth has been interpreted as applying the Bill of Rights to the state.
It certainly says that a person can't be deprived of life, liberty, or property by the states without due process, and so it's more complicated.
If you were talking pre-Fourteenth Amendment, it would be a different story.
Yeah, but so you're saying that then that could be interpreted, honestly, to mean that the national government has the unlimited right to intervene in immigration cases or in immigration policy in the name of preventing the states from violating someone's rights?
Well, what I'm saying, I don't see, it doesn't seem like a real stretch to say the Fourteenth Amendment would authorize the federal government or the federal courts from stopping a state government from, let's say, going into private workplaces and asking people for their papers and then throwing them out of the country.
Yeah, but what about them going and doing it instead?
Oh, I don't think they should do it either.
No, no, no, but I'm saying, are you saying that the Fourteenth Amendment legalized the national government doing it instead of the states?
No, no.
You're saying they have the right to prevent the states from abusing people but not to do anything else?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Okay, I got you.
I thought you were saying that that was really serving as a pretty big loophole where now they can just intervene and enforce policy however they want at the same time.
All I said was it didn't seem like much of a stretch to say that under the Fourteenth Amendment the federal government, and I'm no fan of giving powers to the federal government, but of stopping the states from oppressing people in the states.
Now hold it right there.
We've got to take this break real quick, and then when we come back I want to talk just about the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation and your upcoming webinar.
It's Sheldon Richman, our good friend, and I'll let you go right after that.
Sheldon Richman from FFF.org right after this, y'all.
I mean, more of him after this, you know.
Okay, so we're on the line with our good friend Sheldon Richman, Vice President of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Spoiler alert, and don't give it away too much here, Sheldon, but please talk to us about your upcoming webinar, From the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.
This gets to the heart of what we were just talking about there, about what's legitimate law and what ain't.
Yeah, it's going to be fun, and I hope people will sign up to come to that.
To go to FFF.org and look at the calendar on the right side and click on that, you'll get instructions for how to be able to sign on to this.
We use GoToMeeting, but you'll see how you can attend to this.
This is an interactive webinar where I speak for about half an hour, and then we open up to discussion and questions, and you've got a webcam.
It makes it even more interesting because we can see each other, but you don't need to have one.
Anyway, it's a lot of fun.
This is the fourth one we're doing, so this one's going to really put the Constitution in historical perspective.
That's my purpose here.
It's not that I'm a huge fan of the Articles of Confederation, and I won't give away too much, but I will say that it allowed even much more government than I would want, and that wasn't much, but it was still more.
It's not so much to praise the Articles, but to put the Constitution into perspective.
There's a lot of sentimentality about the Constitution, even among libertarians, thinking it's something pretty sacred, that this was a magic moment in history in 1787 or 1787-89 when they debated it, formulated it, sent it out for ratification, and then put it into effect.
This is considered somehow some amazing point in history, and I want to show that it's not quite so amazing, not quite so wonderful, but you have to put it, like I said, into its context to understand that.
You have to see what came before it and a little bit about what came afterwards to, I think, give it a proper judgment.
So that's what we're going to do on that next Wednesday.
Great.
And that is, as you find out all about, of course, at FFF.org, the FFF webinar, From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.
That's the 17th, July 17th at 7 p.m.
Eastern Time.
Admission free.
Yes.
I'm here, Sheldon Richman, at FFF.org, From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.
Now, so, man, did you hear the Robert Higgs interview yet from the other day?
No, I didn't.
Oh, okay.
Now, so, yeah, so Bob Higgs, he was on Independence Day, and to paraphrase him roughly, he said something like, bah humbug, Independence Day.
It was just, hey, some, basically a bunch of princelings saw the opportunity to grab power, so they took it.
The fact that the guys who declared independence are the same ones who passed and ratified the Constitution and inherited the power ain't a coincidence, and it ain't because they were the best men for the job, either.
It's because they were the ones who got away with it.
I guess I'd be a little more nuanced than that.
It seems to me that there were a lot of good people that wanted independence.
Well, he was a lot more nuanced than what I said, too, by the way.
I mean, there was a struggle within each of the states, and I draw on the great historian of this era, Merrill Jensen, about this.
There were people, he has a great book on the Articles of Confederation.
In every state, there was a struggle, internal as well as external.
He said there were two revolutions going on.
There were the people that wanted a break from England, but there were also a group of people that were sort of libertarian, sort of small-D Democrats who wanted to overthrow the elites in each of the colonies, too, because there wasn't an elite, a homegrown elite, that would grow up.
You would imagine over time this would happen, right?
In the South, it was the big planters.
In the North, it was the merchants.
They had greater access to the political power, and you had rent-seeking and all the stuff we know about today.
It happened back then, too.
It was in some kind of a different world.
So you had people who wanted to end that system as well.
So they had two opponents in mind.
Now the other side, at first, the elite didn't want independence from England, because they thought their own grip would be threatened, because they saw who favored independence and they didn't like those people.
They eventually came around to it.
The king overplayed his hand, and eventually even the elitists said, yeah, we need independence from England.
But they simply wanted to recreate the British system here, run by them.
They weren't radicals in the sense that the more grassroots types were, Sam Adams and some of those people.
And so you had this multilayer struggle going on, and not all sides were libertarian.
Jensen says the people that drafted the Declaration of Independence were very different from the people who drafted the Constitution, and not only in the sense of they were actually different people, in a lot of cases they were, of course, but also they were different types of people.
In other words, there was much more of a libertarian infusion into the Declaration than there was into the Constitution.
I mean, who was running the Constitutional Convention?
It was Hamilton and Madison.
Madison, who for some reason everybody loves, was a centralizer.
He got a little better later in life under the influence of Jefferson, but he was a centralizer.
And then Hamilton was a centralizer.
That was outside the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
Jeff Hummel, my friend who's a great historian and a great economist, said it was a counter-revolution.
You can find an article of his online.
Google Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Constitution Counter-Revolution, and you'll find this great piece about how the Constitution was a counter-revolution when you compare it to what was being said and what people were thinking in 1776 versus 1787.
Well, you know, it's funny.
When you talk about how sentimental even libertarians are, maybe especially libertarians are about the Constitution and that kind of thing, I think in my experience, you know, I went to government schools and whatever.
I learned the whole mythology the way you're supposed to and all that.
And then when it came time for revisionism, of course, there's the official revisionism about it really was mean what they did to the Indians and that kind of thing, but not too much worse than that.
But then, so when it came to the revisionism about, say, the Cold War and Ronald Reagan being a coke dealer and Richard Nixon murdering four million Vietnamese people for fun and you know, whatever, and going back, the further back in time you go, the less real it is and the more mythological it is and the more difficult it is to imagine really that like at some point you're asking me to change who I am, Sheldon, if I now got to go back and revise my opinion of the Civil War, if I got to go all the way back and revise my opinion of World War I, go back and revise my opinion of Texas joining the Union or go back and revise my opinion even about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson now, it seems like it's easier to, if you're just going backwards, it's easier to quit it just like World War I or something and not have to go all the way back and challenge the very premise of the creation of the American state.
Because then at that point, especially if you're in my line of business or yours, you know, trying to spread the ideology of liberty, you're just counting yourself out anyway.
You're making yourself such a radical that who's going to listen to you if you'll even forsake the founders and blah, blah, blah, you know what I mean?
It becomes very difficult for people to change their mind about this kind of thing or even imagine themselves changing their mind about it, you know?
I know.
That's the sort of the bedrock of people's knowledge, this historical narrative that they hear very early on from parents and then school and then it's reinforced so many different ways.
But hey, you know, you and I both came up under that too and you can encounter literature and people who make a reasonable case that you should look at this with a fresh set of eyes and some of us do that and then say, you know what?
We need to adjust our story, the story.
All peoples, the American people, you know, no exception, have a sort of a fiction, you know, underlying the narrative about how that people, you know, came to be.
I mean, there's a famous case where when Italy was finally united, right, Italy was a bunch of states.
When it was finally united under, who was it, I can't remember who it is now.
Anyway, the first thing that was said by the people that engineered the union of the states into Italy, to a unified Italy, was, okay, we have Italy, now we need Italians.
Because the people in the different states didn't think of themselves as Italians, right?
They thought of themselves as members of a particular state and there were different dialects.
And very often they never met anybody from another state and maybe they would have trouble understanding.
This is true of Germany, too.
It's true of a lot of the European countries.
So you have to invent the people and you start teaching people through the public schools a particular folklore, which then over the generations becomes accepted as the truth.
And America's not an exception.
America's not an exception.
I'm going to bark.
Barking dog here.
America's no exception to that.
And so it's useful, we don't do it for the heck of it or the fun of it, to upset people.
We do it for a purpose.
As I call my column, the goal is freedom.
So part of it is to further the case for liberty by getting people to understand their own history.
Right.
And I guess this is worth mentioning, too, about, I mentioned the official revisionism over the Indian Wars, but over slavery, too, of course.
And it's perfectly acceptable, certainly anywhere left of center in political thought, to go ahead and throw all the founding fathers overboard over slavery.
They claim to own human beings.
And Thomas Jefferson tortured children in his nail factories.
This guy was a monster, right?
But so it's such an important point, though, that, you know, so you have half the population saying, OK, they're devils because they had slaves.
And then you have the other half of the population says, no, they're angels, more the right-leaning type.
No, they were angels, except for the one big slavery problem.
They'll concede that was a big problem, the slavery thing.
But other than that, they were great and whatever.
And then but what you're saying is, though, that, no, everything that they did was wrong or so much of it that they did was wrong in creating this new state that, you know, it's no surprise they were the kind of guys who owned slaves, basically.
Like this is, you know, what they did was wrong.
And so even if they didn't own slaves, they still what they did was wrong kind of thing.
And it'd be hard, I think, to even get the liberals who hate them over the slavery issue to concede that, that, wow, you know, maybe they shouldn't have created the Constitution at all and that kind of thing.
Well, again, you got to look closely at people.
John Adams did not own slaves.
Right.
I assume he was anti-slavery.
He, he was an early proponent of independence, but he was a conservative versus the radical type.
So he he was unusual as a conservative because he was an early proponent of independence.
Right.
The rest of his fellow conservatives were anti-independence.
He had his own, you know, mission in mind and he and independence fit into that.
But, you know, he he was a centralizer.
He certainly was no advocate of radical libertarianism.
When he became president, we got the Alien Sedition Act with violations of the First Amendment, which was still basically wet on the parchment.
Right.
The First Amendment.
And he puts people in jail or the administration puts people in jail for criticizing the government.
So they weren't libertarians as a whole.
There were libertarians among them or more libertarian types among them and less libertarian types.
So the slaves.
Yeah, that's to me, that's a pretty big black mark on your on your record.
And I don't think you can claim to be a libertarian if you own people, even if you were planning to free them on your deathbed.
I don't that's not good enough in my book.
So you've got to look at individuals.
Individuals are always complex.
There's no simple story here.
So we always have to be nuanced and careful.
You can find broad themes.
And I'm not saying I'm not saying the the effort to get rid of the British was not was not a radical mission.
Hummel argues that the revolution was was libertarian and radical in its in its foundation, even though there were also people who figured they would benefit by it who were not libertarian.
So like anything else in history, it's not simple.
Right.
Yeah.
I guess all I'm trying to do is just crack open the possibility that it needs a fresh look kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
For me and for everybody else to.
Well, I think I think I think this is part of being a responsible human being.
You need to be open to views and facts that you haven't encountered before, which may cause you to change your your position on things, even some deeply held things, even a whole worldview.
Most people don't like to do that.
It makes you uncomfortable, especially when it's something you've grown up with and figured was the truth all the time.
But it seems to me that's a sign of maturity.
You have to be willing to to revise, which is why history should, by definition, be revisionist.
Right.
Well, hey, as long as I'm keeping you way over time here, let's talk about the Civil War, too, because, of course, this is a huge controversy now is that, you know, these libertarians, they're just well, they really just don't like black people.
That's why they pretend to believe in liberty or something.
I don't know.
I read that in Salon Dotcom.
And so Lincoln was great or else you're pro slavery.
Right, Sheldon.
Well, again, and this is a great example of how you have to be.
You have to look for the nuances and the complexity.
I think people do write about this on all sides in caricature.
And it's very, very bad, including some people who are regarded as libertarians or written about Lincoln in outrageous ways and other other people who take Lincoln side in equally outrageous ways.
The Confederacy was a horrendous place to live.
Every bad thing you can say about the union during the war, you know, when they were when they were two separate countries was true about the Confederacy.
They drafted.
They had taxation.
They had taxation in kind.
They come to your farm and seize stuff from you.
They they had other, you know, all other bad things, including an official enforcement of slavery.
But, of course, the North didn't get rid of enforcement of slavery at the time either.
So I'm not saying there's something like a moral equivalency, but look, slavery is among the gravest crimes you can commit against people and a group of people.
I mean, it's well known that Lincoln didn't set out to free the slaves and that he, you know, he, like a lot of people of his time, was a racist.
But on the other hand, he also didn't like the idea of slavery.
I think it's Lincoln that said if slavery is not wrong, nothing's wrong and nothing's wrong.
That didn't mean he wanted to abolish it.
I mean, everybody knows that he said in order to save the union, it took freeing half the slaves.
If it took freeing all the slaves, he'd do that.
If it took freeing none of the slaves, he would do that.
I think everybody should be able to acknowledge that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any actual slave because it didn't apply to slaves under the federal jurisdiction.
And there were slaves under federal jurisdiction, like Washington, D.C.
It only referred to areas not yet conquered by the North.
So it was symbolic and maybe it was a way to get slaves to fight against the Confederate forces, but it didn't free slaves.
I think we all say that.
I mean, that's a mythology that Lincoln freed the slaves.
But you can then white, you can be a caricaturist as much on the other side and portray Lincoln as the devil.
I think if you want a much better look at all this, the best book to read, and I've mentioned Jeff Hummel, what, three times now, his book, Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men.
It's a balanced book.
It's a very fair book.
No one is more careful in researching any matter he takes up than Jeff Hummel.
He's the kind of person who, which doesn't mean he's infallible, of course, but anything he writes is something he's considered in research very, very carefully.
I would trust my life with his research.
That's how much confidence I have.
That's the book I would recommend if you were looking for a, quote, revisionist history of the Civil War and all the surrounding issues, and he gets into military, politics, economics, a whole bunch of things.
That is the book to read, and I mean that.
Read that one over the other ones that are more talked about, coming from, like, the Mises Institute, and you know what books I mean.
I won't mention the titles of the authors.
Well, you know, yeah, I've read Hummel, and you're right that his book really is great.
And I noticed in the Washington Post piece, they used him as an example of a very rational, you know, not demagoguing type thing, and got a comment from him that was decent.
But then, you know, they also quote Stephan Kotsilas saying, who at least formerly was associated with the Mises Institute, I'm not exactly sure, but anyway, saying basically in one breath condemning the Confederacy and Lincoln just the way you did, you know, explaining that the enemy here is the state, and it's the, what was controversial about the quote, I guess, was he's saying that Lincoln was the worst tyrant that America ever faced.
Whether you would argue it was worth it or not, I don't know if it's arguable, you know, whether or not he was the bloodiest American president when it comes to that, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
He certainly did, you know, suspend habeas corpus and do all these things, but, and some people would argue that, you know, the result that slavery ended up abolished because of it is, you know, and that, you know, so many of those that died were on the southern side is, you know, God's justice or whatever.
You can't really argue the fact, and then, of course, that was the worst quote they could find from Kotsilas, I guess, condemning Lincoln and supposedly being bad on the issue.
But there he is saying exactly what you just said, too, about the Confederacy was a horrible totalitarian state.
There was nothing libertarian about them.
It was just the question, depending on how the question is asked, it was, you know, does the average southerner have a right to pick up a rifle and invade his state from an invading army?
You know, what about that?
Right.
Or is that question not being, you know, not included in it, you know?
Right.
Again, there's a lot of layers of issues here.
You know, there are people, and libertarians, unfortunately, among them, who want to essentially deny that the South seceded over the slavery issue.
I mean, there's a book they like to promote that says it was over the tariff issue.
Well, this is nonsense.
The lower South, and I get this right from Hummel, the lower South, there was two phases of secession, of course.
The lower South secedes over slavery.
They feared for the future of slavery.
Jeff Hummel says there are a few things that are as historically certain as that, and the reason we know that is because it's in the Articles of Secession passed by the state governments, the legislatures of those governments.
There's no doubt about that.
There should be nothing debatable.
Now, that leads to other questions.
Why did the upper South leave?
And there, I think the argument is that they left because of Lincoln's intent, you know, to go after the lower South to keep them from leaving.
Well, but then isn't Charles Adams, in his argument, not that they left so much over the tariff, but that that's why the North invaded was over the tariff.
That was why the North refused to let them go.
Well, again, I'll go with Hummel, because he's much more authoritative than I am, and he makes a, you know, it's a well-researched thesis of his, that the main reason Lincoln goes to, is willing to go to war, which he thinks, you know, Hummel thinks was a very bad thing for Lincoln to do, was to keep the union together.
So you may say, well, they did that in order to keep the revenues from the tariff.
Maybe that was part of it, too.
But I think there was also a religious fervor about this union should not be allowed to be dissolved.
Yeah, just plain old nationalism, American nationalism.
And I think Lincoln, I think, falls into that.
So yeah, there could always be an economic factor that goes along with other factors, but I don't think we should say this was exclusively economic, this was exclusively cynical.
I think these people believed there was something holy about the United States, it was something God, you know, God did, essentially, and this should not be torn asunder by human beings.
So that would be my answer to that.
I don't understand people who want to downplay the slavery issue and say, well, no, it really wasn't about slavery, the secession wasn't about slavery, you have to break it up.
Why did the Lower South leave, why did the Upper South leave, and why did Lincoln go to war?
Yeah.
It's been quite a few years since I...
Those are three different questions, and they have plenty of different answers.
I read the book about the tariff, the Charles Adams book, and I'm trying to remember, I thought there was a bit of nuance there about, you know, how much slavery had to do with it and then the Upper South and all of that, but I guess it's been a little while.
But of course, a big part of the argument was whether slavery was going to be spread into the West or not.
Well, it was about the territories at that point, right?
Yeah, wasn't the question of...
I mean, slavery wasn't directly being threatened against the states, you know, the existing states that had slaves, although some might have foreseen that there was going to be problems in the future about that.
But yeah, the immediate issue was the territories.
And so, yeah, that was a big deal.
All right, well, anyway, but you and I aren't supposed to talk about this at all or else we're horrible racists or something like that.
Unless we're Jeff Hummel.
For some reason, he got a pass.
Well, I don't think we took the...
I hope...
I assume we didn't take the position that, you know, brings those nasty reactions.
Well, you know, this guy, Jack Hunter, I'm not his biggest fan in the whole world or anything, but all the quotes, all the horrible scare quotes I read of him that they're attacking Rand Paul over, he didn't say anything about black people at all.
And they're calling him a white supremacist as though he had gone on and on and on talking about the inferiority of Africans or something like that.
But there's nothing like that, not in any of the quotes that I read.
So but they're saying for him to condemn Lincoln and he's being a smart aleck on the radio and saying good shot, John Wilkes Booth or whatever.
But so what?
For him to do that is to be a white supremacist.
I'm tired of this.
And although the good news is they're scared to death of libertarianism and even of Rand Paul, which I think is hilarious.
So good for us.
No, I think I think there's a lot to what you're saying.
That's also agenda.
You know, the attacks on that is agenda driven.
Unfortunately, sometimes the people that get attacked have have given the other side enough to grab onto them to build, you know, to build this case.
But you're right.
It's agenda driven.
They want to associate any positive remark about secession, even even the general concept of secession.
Right.
Not necessarily the historical secession of the South.
They want to equate that with racism.
That's that's unfair.
But the the particular secession does raise a lot of complicated issues, because on the one hand, you want to you'd want to say, you know, any area should if they want to, you should be able to break away from a larger state.
But, you know, did everybody want to break away?
And there was a subjugated portion of the population not insignificant that was not consulted.
Right.
In other words, black labor, if they wanted secession.
On the other hand, the North wasn't wasn't disciplining, wasn't, you know, trying to end slavery either.
So, you know, it wasn't as if they had a champion in the North.
And then then the southern states pulled away so that the North couldn't touch slavery.
All right.
Well, I got to stop you now.
We got to go.
It's next Wednesday.
And maybe we'll talk about it again from Articles of Confederation of the Constitution with Sheldon Richman, a webinar at FFF dot org.
Hey, thanks a lot for doing the show again.
Anytime, Scott.
Thanks.
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