Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio and Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and our next guest is Sheldon Richman.
He is a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, that's FFF.org.
He's the editor of the Freeman and the author of Separating School and State.
For money or your life, why we must abolish the income tax, and tethered citizens, time to repeal the welfare state.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Great to be back with you.
Thanks for asking.
I should have practiced saying show and Sheldon next to each other like that one time.
I could have got it right.
Okay, hey, listen.
So there's this very interesting article that you have here, posted September 20th, 2006, and I found it from a link of a discussion they were having over at the blog at LewRockwell.com, and it's Libertarian Class Analysis, and a very interesting subject here to me, you know, what is class war, and whose side are you on, and all that kind of thing.
That's I guess the old left-wing song, right?
But so what's the difference, I guess would be the first question, what's the difference between libertarian analysis of class divisions versus left-wing or Marxist analysis of the same issue?
Well, first of all, I didn't know that there was a discussion going on over at the Rockwell.com, I'll have to check that out, so if my article's being cited, that's flattering, so I'll take a look.
That's an interesting story.
This is a story I learned over the years when I was a young and upcoming libertarian from Ralph Rako, and Leonard Ligio, and some of the great minds of the modern movement.
And one thing I learned from them was that class analysis did not begin with Marx, which of course is what we kind of all come up believing, because he's so identified with that.
If you start talking about class analysis, generally people will think you must be a Marxist of some kind, or at least a socialist, or somebody on the left, not the libertarian left, but the other left.
There's a lot of lefts these days.
Anyway, I learned from these guys, and then I'll later confer for myself by reading, that Marx himself realized he did not originate class analysis.
In fact, in one of Marx's writings, he pays tribute to the French bourgeois radicals, I think he refers to them in that way, the bourgeois economists, I forget how he puts it, but it's clear who he's talking about, for developing the first class analysis.
Well, the guys he's talking about are people that I wish were better known, but the two biggest names in this area would be, both happen to have the first name of Charles Comte, as in Auguste Comte, but not the same Comte, this is Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer.
These are early 19th century French radical liberals, bourgeois liberals, who were students of Jean Baptiste, who was a radical Smithian, he was sort of a disciple of Adam Smith, more radical than Smith, wrote a big treatise on economics, gave us what's known as Say's Law.
These guys developed the class analysis, beginning from a liberal, in the sense of libertarian, free market framework.
And what they said was, as soon as the state comes into existence, and taxes people, you immediately have two, roughly speaking now, two groups, they're going to be overlapped of course, but two groups, you have taxpayers, and you have tax consumers, and that is the beginning of class analysis.
But then, you know what that sounds like to, I guess, I couldn't say my formerly liberal ears, but my ears that I guess could have in another universe become liberal ears, is it sounds like a way to kind of do a semantic trick, I mean, I understand you're saying the chicken came before the egg in this case, or whatever, but for you to latch onto this now sounds perhaps cynical, in that now poor people, who are on welfare, are somehow the ruling class, or the mean people who are taking from the regular people, instead of pointing a finger at the people who actually have all the power and control the state.
Well, yeah, well that would be a very superficial interpretation, and of course, no libertarian writing about class analysis today would just leave it at that, I mean, I made one brief statement, which did not delve very deeply into this, no, you're right, this does not lead to the view that poor people who are getting, you know, a few pennies of welfare are the, constitute the ruling class, in fact, it's a much more sophisticated analysis, showing that in fact, those, the group you just referred to, are sort of the, you know, the mascots.
Yeah, the scapegoat.
Right, well, they're not so much the scapegoat, they're used to show, oh look, we're doing great things, when we milk the taxpayers, so don't complain, you're just being, you're just being a, you know, a scrooge by complaining about the system, because look who we're giving it to, but of course, those are not the people that get the bulk of the wealth that's distributed, I hate to say redistributed, because in a market there's not an initial distribution, so there can't really be a redistribution, anyway, anyway, they are not the major beneficiaries, they are the surface beneficiaries, you know, the camouflage, the distraction, to make us think, oh, this is all big humanitarian effort, the people that are really raking it in are big defense contractors, other big companies that may not be exactly involved in defense, but the people that get trade barriers in order to beef up their own industries and firms, they're the ones that really get the big benefits, and then, you know, they throw a few bones to poor people as a way of making it look like, you know, this is all just a welfare state to help the downtrodden.
Well, so, I guess let me ask you this, do you think that your list of corporations that you despise is the same as the hippie down at the hippie bookstore around the corner?
It may well be, first of all, a lot of those companies are involved in so-called defense, it's not really defense, of course, in one way or another, they're developing products and software and, you know, this and that, which they hope to sell to the Pentagon, if not to the Pentagon, to the government in general, I mean, because the government buys a lot of other things that aren't even necessarily military-related, like computers that are going to be electronifying all of our medical records if they get this healthcare package through.
So, it may well overlap, I mean, you know, they may have, they probably have Walmart at the top of their list, I put Walmart more in the middle of the list, I mean, it does benefit from eminent domain and sometimes lobbies for things like that, but I don't think it's the, I wouldn't put it at the top of the offender list, I'd put maybe GE at the top of the offender's list, groups, you know, companies like that, Grumman, and, you know, they've, I don't even know if these names are, they've all merged over the years, I don't even know if the name is the same.
Yeah, it's Northrop Grumman now.
Yeah, Northrop Grumman, right, yeah.
But they would be very similar.
The point is, once the government is dispensing goodies, and this began a long time ago, people start looking for ways to get at the goodies, I mean, that stands to reason, that's where you begin to get a division of classes.
Now, the early bourgeois liberal economists I talked about, the ones that Marx actually paid tribute to, had a different story from Marx.
You see, Marx, in my view, Marx takes the legitimate liberal class analysis and then twists it, because he moves one of the players from one side to the other.
These economists were also known as industrialists, they had the view that industrial society, meaning the free market society, was the wave of the future and was going to be, you know, peaceful and cooperative and all that stuff, and individualistic, and they weren't quite anarchists, but they were certainly a very, very minimal government.
But they placed, in the industrious classes, entrepreneurs and business people, people we would tend to call capitalists, in other words, people who own capital.
Not people linked to the state, but just people who own capital, own machines, factories.
They put those people on the same side as the workers, because they were the people producing things.
And the other side, the parasitic side, were basically the state noblemen, anybody who was basically living off the state and was in a position to wield power.
So it would rule out the kind of group you're talking about, you know, the poor that they throw some crumbs to.
What Marx did was, because of his bad economics and other reasons, moved owners of capital, in other words, not people who were linked to the state, but actually just legitimate owners of capital in the marketplace, he moved them to the parasitic class, because he thought...
Because the theory is, right, that to own property, basically, is theft.
It really belongs to everybody.
And so to keep it is stealing from other people, rather than stealing would mean to take somebody's property from them.
I mean, that's where the things get turned upside down, right?
Well, that's one of the places.
But they also had, he and Engels had some, I think, disagreement, depending on what particular piece of writing, I mean, their minds might have changed over time.
But I think I may have this right, I could have these reversed, I apologize if I do, but I think Marx took the view that any employment arrangement, any employment transaction was inherently exploitative.
And I think it was Engels, at least in one piece of writing, where he pointed out, it's only when you have a state of a certain kind that it is exploitative.
In other words, it's not intrinsically exploitative.
If two people just say, you know, I'll pay you to make something, and I'll pay you a wage for it as you produce it, that in itself is not exploitative.
And that's, of course, what Sey and Comte d'Aunier also believed.
But Marx ends up twisting it, I think, to say that it doesn't require a state that is dispensing privileges and keeping down the working man.
Any employment agreement or contract would be inherently exploitative.
So there's even tension among the Marxists over whether that's the case or not.
But also, I mean, I guess if you accept the premise that everything belongs to everybody, and if you're keeping property, you're basically stealing it, that part of the Marxist understanding there, isn't it, is that the capitalists, the property owners, need the state and the socialized cost of the police force and the National Guard and whatever to keep people from taking what's rightfully theirs.
That ultimately private property is a false construct that is itself dependent on a socialist police force, at the very least, right?
And so if you got rid of the state, you wouldn't have private property.
You would have everything, everybody sharing everything.
But yeah, that's the position they would take.
Of course, Marx learned a lot from the predecessor of his by the name of Thomas Hodgkin, who worked at The Economist magazine in the early days, was a mentor of Herbert Spencer, and is regarded as sort of an ancestor of Marxism, and erroneously called a Ricardian socialist.
He wrote a book called about the artificial and natural right of property, and by natural, he had a much more Lockean view that people could appropriate from nature, property, land, and that that was properly their possessions, and that it would be wrong to come along and take it from them.
But then at the same time, condemned artificial property, which was state-granted property, state-granted rights, that departed from the more Lockean view.
So even though Marx learned a lot from Hodgkin, he apparently didn't get that distinction from Hodgkin, and sure, all land should be, or all property should be collectively owned.
Okay, so now in, well, let's talk about our world.
In our world, well, in our country, in this society, between Canada and Mexico here, if we can pretend to respect those borders for a moment, the great majority of the entire population for the last hundred years or so, and it's been getting more and more like this, but virtually everybody is dependent on the state, one form or another.
I mean, hell, I've got subsidies as well as taxes on my tobacco, I'm not exactly sure how it works out, probably against my favor, but I've got to drive on public roads, and almost everybody who goes to college gets a government loan to do so, everybody counts on Social Security for when they're old, or if they are in a terrible accident, or something like that.
Basically you have almost the entire population is on one form of welfare or another, if you can call it that.
And I don't just mean as a pejorative, but there's major dependence on state power at this point, and it seems like at the same time, as you said, that's still really just the illusion, that the vast majority of the welfare goes to people who are already billionaires, because they're already billionaires, so when it comes to figuring out how the state is going to distribute the resources, they're going to distribute them to themselves, right?
It shouldn't be surprising, but even with the entire population dependent, the bailout makes the Social Security budget pale in comparison, right?
No, you're right, you're right.
First of all, the first part of what you said is absolutely true, we can't avoid the state right now.
It's tentacles are all over, very deep, winding around everything, and yet to think that you could try to live without any contact with the state, you'd end up being, you know, living in Ruby Ridge or something, but of course, in that case, the state came to him, and not in a very pleasant way.
So it would be very difficult, I mean, people do try to get off the grid, but it's, you know, you'd have to accept a very low standard of living, I think, to try to cut your contact with the state down to a zero, or near zero.
That's just because the state has grown over the years and has expanded into so much, and in ways we don't even recognize, because it's just sort of woven into the tapestry, it's part of the landscape, we don't notice it anymore.
So it's incredible, and part of that is the fact that the well-connected are doing very well and continue to do very well, and have been for a very, very long time.
Kevin Carson, the writer Kevin Carson, has a very good phrase, I think, which is the subsidy of history.
In other words, these firms and these well-connected people are the recipients of historical favors that just over the years have come to them and have mounted up through the system.
And you know, it would be like if we said, even if we said today, okay, we're going to knock out all the subsidies, we're going to cut the state back, so it's not doing any of this.
This group, of course, has benefited so much over time that they're, of course, well ahead of anybody.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the solution will be some sort of leveling and, you know, expropriation, that can get pretty ugly, and I'm not, you know, exactly sure what you do about that if we ever got to the stage where we could roll back government.
But it's certainly true that big companies have benefited for generations, and that's, you know, that's cumulative.
They have a huge amount of advantages over some new competitor who might want to come in and get into the same sort of business that one of these companies may be in.
Well, I guess that brings up the question, right, is if we just abolish the state, would those people who already have such a big head start because of state power and the way it's helped them get to this point, would they just, I guess the Marxists would say, of course, that in a free market, they would just lead to total monopolies and an even worse monopoly than the Washington, D.C. that we deal with now.
I guess, honestly, Sheldon, maybe I'm a commie or something, but the reason I believe in individualism and libertarianism or one of the reasons, I guess, is that I think it works.
And if I thought, if I truly believe that you'd have, you know, I don't know, 10 private property owners in the society or something that would just amount to kings again, I would certainly not be an anarcho-capitalist.
I would say, well, I guess the state is a necessary evil because, you know, something, something, things have got to be more egalitarian than that.
If we abolish the state, those people with the head start, would they own everything or would the market actually be more egalitarian than this fascist system that they've created?
Well, I think one bright side is that when you, when you subsidize by the state and you're shielded from competition to a large extent, you're also not terribly efficient when, if you're subjected to true market competition.
So if you were to remove all those benefits and remove all the barriers to competition, you would then have new companies or existing companies who were maybe not so privileged moving into new areas.
And they might be able to out-compete the company that is flabby and, you know, has existed only because it's had so much protection.
So that's the bright side.
So I don't think it leads to your scenario where they have such a head start that even if we got rid of the state tomorrow, you know, they'd be in the lead and there'd be nothing anybody could do about it because they've been protected all this time.
They're like a child who gets to the age of 50 and still has been treated like a child all that time.
I wouldn't expect them to be the most well-adjusted and well-adapted companies if they were suddenly thrust out into the marketplace where the full force of the winds of competition are blowing in their faces.
Well now, if I can probably, I won't get this right, but I'm going to try to honestly paraphrase Noam Chomsky here, where the private power concentrated in these unaccountable boards of directors at these limited liability corporations, that they are actually, you know, as dangerous and violent to our liberties as the Pentagon or something like that, and that really the House of Representatives or what it could someday be or whatever is the solution to that.
More democracy.
That's the only place where the average guy has one man, one vote, and can check the power of these evil corporations is through the state.
And I think he would even concede that, yeah, I know it doesn't mostly work that way, and I know that mostly the corporations use the government to protect themselves from the people.
But on the other hand, OSHA regulations and whatever nice examples of where people power through Congress checks the power of evil corporations gone mad.
What's your answer to all that, Matt?
Yeah, but that's naive.
And, you know, I have respect for Chomsky, but sometimes I just wonder, you know, where he gets this stuff.
There's no reason to think that you and I and regular people have any clout in Congress whatsoever.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, once in a while they do something so they can then run for re-election, and look what we did for you folks.
Meanwhile, they don't talk about all the other stuff they're normally doing, which is keeping the privileges funneled, you know, funneling to the already privileged.
Look, OSHA comes in under Nixon, I believe.
So as he was trying to tell me Nixon was really a closet Marxist or closet man of the people, you know, typically what those laws, and I can't tell you exactly about OSHA, I'd have to do the research, but very often those laws are the result of big companies trying to stick it to little companies.
Because those kinds of regulations, particularly something like OSHA, are always much more of a burden on a small company.
They don't have the money lying around for whatever they're being asked to build in, you know, various protective devices and things like that.
And there's also a way, when they started putting in these OSHA things, wages had to be reduced because the money had to come from somewhere, and where's it going to come from?
It's going to come from the workers.
I think Milton Friedman pointed this out a long time ago.
You can take your money either in cash, you can take your pay either in cash, or improvements in the plant to apparently make you safer.
So that's typically the choice.
So you know, working people got stuck to them, and mostly in smaller companies, because again, the bigger companies can handle this stuff better.
So I think Chomsky's just wrong about that.
And the idea that somehow we have clout in Congress is a joke.
I mean, look what's been happening over the last couple of years.
You know, the big bailout last year got defeated the first time around, and we all rejoiced, thinking, wow, this is historic.
And it was kind of historic.
But of course, what, a week later, what happened?
Oh, come on, it was a week and a half or something.
All right, we had a little celebration for a week and a half, except we knew it was coming to an end, so it wasn't even a good celebration.
All right, now, so here's where the libertarian finally comes down, then, is that when you talk about the two groups that are the parasitical classes, which means rich people and poor people, but especially rich people who use the power of the state against the rest of us, the other group is the state itself.
And where the libertarian ultimately comes down is that the state itself is the root of the problem.
If you hate the corporations, you've got to destroy the state.
Wither that state away, let's get to anarchy, and we'll have more freedom then.
You don't create a dictatorship and then make everything perfectly fair, and then the state withers away.
If you want to wither the damn thing, you've got to wither it, right?
Yeah, I think that's right.
That's where Chomsky's wrong.
Chomsky wants to build up the national government on his way to anarchism.
Now, this reminds me of something the late Marshall Fritz used to say about the voucher plan for education, because you've got about 10% of kids who don't go to government schools.
About 90% do.
It's going to seem like off the topic for a second, but I promise to bring it back.
So you have voucher advocates who say, look, vouchers are the way to get rid of the public schools, the government schools.
So Fritz would say, I don't quite get that.
You want to bring the 10% that are off the plantation onto the plantation en route to having everybody off the plantation.
So he said, that's like trying to bridge a 10-foot chasm with two 5-foot boards, two 5-foot planks.
It's not really going to work.
It's not really going to work.
Well, same with Chomsky.
Chomsky wants to build up the national government in order to bring about anarchism or bring about zero government or very small government.
I don't get that.
I don't see it go from whatever we are now to 100% so that we can get to something close to zero.
Yeah.
And after all, when you look at the history, I mean, there's a reason why the bankers, as Rothbard describes them, the most often competing Morgan and Rockefeller factions all came together over at Morgan's estate off of Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia in 1910 to write the Federal Reserve Act.
They didn't think they could hack it in the marketplace.
And they needed to get on welfare fast.
And so they created, they used the pressure from the congressional investigation into their criminality to say, yeah, we need to pass a new law.
And it was their law, the one that gave them, that guaranteed them the access all along.
So if these evil corporations that we all hate so much, I would think that Citigroup, the successor to what was then the National City Bank, I would think that they'd be at the top of the list.
If we really want them to fail, take their state away from them.
That's the worst thing about them is that they got the, what, the discount window.
Right.
Look, I think we have a lot to learn from Gabriel Kolko, who you've interviewed, I know, because I've listened to some of those interviews.
He, his book, The Triumph of Conservatism, and again, he's not coming at it from a libertarian perspective, as you know.
I mean, he's certainly left, I don't know if he considers himself a Marxist, but he's certainly something similar.
But his whole, his work of history in The Triumph of Conservatism was to show that as the 19th century was coming to a close, the quote, the quote, problem was not monopoly.
The problem was the lack of monopoly.
The problem being in the eyes of the big businessmen, Morgan and those types.
And they, after trying a bunch of market methods to stem the wild competition that was going on, wild only in the sense of they couldn't hold their market share, not wild from the eyes, from the point of view of the consumer, who was benefiting by expanded output and falling prices, the Morgans and those types tried a series of mergers and whatnot, setting up trust, whatnot, trying to consolidate and stabilize their markets, what they called rationalizing their markets.
It didn't work.
They would lose market share after the merger, you know, with smaller market share than they had before the merger.
At that point, Dan, as we go into the early 20th century, they hit on an idea, let's get the government involved.
And Kolko and others document how the FTC and the antitrust laws and various things come along.
Wait, wait, the FTC, that's the Federal Trade Commission.
So this would be, this is what you're talking about, the very origins of the national regulatory state here.
Right.
And you can go back earlier to 1887 with the Interstate Commerce Commission, which the railroads wanted.
In other words, these weren't consumers coming to Washington, hat in hand, saying, please save us from the ravages of monopoly.
These were the businessmen themselves who couldn't, who were trying to form monopolies, couldn't do it, and therefore went to Washington to say, hey, we need boards and commissions to calm things down.
Things are too wild, and wild meaning, hey, when I wake up in the morning, I can't be sure I have the same market share I had the day before because there's nothing to stop someone getting in the business and competing with me.
That's what they did.
So you have to apply that to today.
These people don't want, the last thing these people want is laissez-faire.
They would terrify them.
They don't want that.
You know, back long before this current bailout scandal, you know, I was a cab driver for a long time.
I always tell people in the cab, look at the propaganda about deregulation.
People always say, what caused the banking crisis in the 1980s?
It was the deregulation of the SNLs and the deregulation of this and that.
But you notice, they kept the regulation that says you have to bail them out when they fail.
So if it was deregulation, that would mean no regulations, sink or swim.
But what they do is they deregulate the limit on how much fraud these guys are allowed to commit and then they still get to socialize their costs on to the working people.
Right, but they're very good at deceiving us because, to be a little more specific than what you just said, although in general you're correct, they took the, with the SNLs, they took off the restrictions on how they could invest the money.
But they did not take off the deposit insurance.
Now deposit insurance looks like it's something for the consumer, for the depositor.
It keeps them safe.
The government's keeping them safe.
But what it really does is safeguard the institution, the banks, the SNLs from competition.
Because you as a depositor now don't need to wonder, is this bank safe?
I'm going to check, before I decide where to put my money, I'm going to go talk to the banker, I'm going to see what kind of investments they make.
No, it takes all of that out of the competitive realm.
We don't need to, people don't worry about that anymore because there's a sticker on the window saying, don't worry, the government will give you your money if this bank should fail.
It's the banks.
It doesn't protect, you know, in the end you get your money, but primarily it's protecting the banks.
We'd be safer, look, we would be safe without deposit insurance because competition would assure that.
So what it's doing is safeguarding bankers from our scrutiny.
Same thing.
So what looks like a beneficiary ends up actually being a victim.
You mentioned the poor, but I wouldn't put the poor in the parasitic class.
I mean, even though on the surface they get money that's taken from the taxpayers, but one reason they are poor and are stuck in poverty is that the state has set up all kinds of barriers to getting out of poverty.
The minimum wage, occupational licensing, you name it.
So it's, you know, Kevin Carson would like to say the state breaks their knees and then looks benevolent in giving out the crutches.
So it's not, you know, the main thing going on is not that they're having crutches handed to them, but that their knees were broken by the state.
Yeah, well, you know, there's a great, very interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor the other day, they were passing around on Facebook, I guess, about the underground economy.
And in fact, they weren't too scaremongering about it.
They weren't really trying to criminalize it that much.
They were basically saying, well, it's unenforceable and what are you going to do?
But they're basically talking about, you know, the model that's basically based on how a lot of the black community operates in their economy, which is cash under the table and nothing official and no taxes paid and that kind of thing, or minimal, I mean, obviously everybody's getting their wealth destroyed through inflation and all the sales taxes and property taxes and the price of their rent and everything else.
I'm not saying that, but here's what the interesting part was that they're describing regular people.
There's nothing criminal or really black market.
They're not talking about contraband.
They're not talking about drugs and guns and prostitution, nothing like that.
They're talking about just regular business only on the under the table level.
And basically they're just describing a free market economy.
And they're talking about how, and, you know, they're just none of the licenses, none of the official things to hang on the wall, none of the, all the, it's, it's, it's a very strange phenomenon that you would have free people, regular people going, especially in troubled economic times, making their own businesses out of their own kitchens and their own living rooms and, and doing odd jobs and posting for bulletin boards and, you know, and all they're talking about is just free people being free people.
That's all it is.
And yet it's this whole other strange category of economics in America.
It's becoming a larger and larger percentage of things somehow.
Yeah.
Well, look, that's what people do when that, when little zones of freedom open up, if the government isn't looking, happen to be looking their way, people turn to commercial activities, right?
To make their lives better, to trade.
I mean, people, it doesn't take much to discover the trade is mutually beneficial and people start to find ways to do this.
Entrepreneurship is sort of, comes naturally to people given the freedom to do it.
And it really makes the rest of the society seem downright Soviet, you know, right?
And by comparison, the way, especially the way it's written in that article, it's like, wow, America really is a Soviet type.
Well, almost.
Or you could say Mussolini type and pick your, yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
He didn't.
Yeah.
We, we, uh, murder foreigners on the same level that Stalin murdered his own people.
So it's kind of different.
Right.
Yeah.
Pick your flavor.
We're more like national socialists.
Right.
And, and another thought came to mind as you were telling me about the story in the paper, a lot of these laws, licensing laws and other kinds of barriers to just sort of on the street entrepreneurship are race were race-based.
I mean, they came out of the post civil war time, uh, as a way to keep a free blacks hampered and crippled economically because they were competitive with whites.
And you find a lot of things like this, the Davis Bacon act, which, uh, which says that, you know, in federal projects, you got to pay a so-called prevailing wage, which of course was aimed at keeping, uh, blacks and other, uh, upstart companies from charging less than getting, taking business away from the established white construction firms and white unions.
A lot of these have their roots.
David Beto has written a lot about this and, uh, Wilbur Williams also have their roots and attempts to keep, uh, blacks and, you know, and other minorities, uh, from climbing the ladder.
It takes the state to do that because leaving people free, they figure out ways to start climbing the ladder and they do it.
I mean, that was happening in the U S well, and that's where marriage licensing came from and gun control, especially in the South, all the licenses to own firearms.
And, and in fact, you know, this is one that I guess it does get more and more mentioned now and we can be grateful for that, but it can never be enough.
The low interest rate makes it impossible for people to save.
It makes our whole society based on if you're going to build any kind of business, it's just, it might as well be a felony to save up money to do so.
I mean, it's much better to borrow dollars and pay back dimes and artificially low interest rates and whatever.
But meanwhile, the money's being printed out of nothing by these banks and leading to the, uh, you know, the booms and the busts, which make it even harder.
But you know, if you just think about somebody who's trying to, uh, save up a little money to even for his down payment on something so that he can get a decent loan to build a business or something like that, he's being punished every single day as the, as the corners are being torn off the, his dollar bills, you know?
Well that's right.
Look, the people that always bear the brunt of this kind of stuff are the, are the least, you know, franchised, the least well-connected, uh, and, and that's why that, uh, the, the, I think the free market position, the libertarian position is, is actually a very radical position.
It's nothing like a conservative position.
And the biggest beneficiaries would be the, the people who are doing the worst under the current system.
And the, you know, the people that the politicians always exploit, the people they say they want to help so badly who actually hurt.
And you know, the, you know, I think back to the 19th century when, um, Richard Cobden and John Bright were the great free traders of their time in Britain, uh, when they launched the anti-corn law league to, to end all the trade barriers on grain, which was keeping bread and, and food artificially expensive on behalf of the aristocratic landowners, they made that a working man's, uh, movement.
I mean, this was not, uh, I mean, there were, yeah, there were businessmen, uh, involved who were, uh, who weren't able to, who were hampered by these trade restrictions, but this was primarily a working man's movement.
And that's who they appealed to because it was just sort of the regular guy who was hurt by all these, uh, measures that helped the privileged, uh, aristocracy.
Well, and you know, the whole controversy over eminent domain, this is the kind of thing where I think you can, uh, hopefully get, uh, liberals and leftists to really realize just how much they already believe in property rights because, uh, eminent domain in this society, of course, is, has always been and will continue to be a racist thing.
I mean, it almost means when the government steals land from black people and of course, you know, that's not entirely true.
They steal land from everybody, but pretty much it's always the black folks on the East side who got to get up and move when the giant new parking lot for a factory that never gets built comes to town or whatever.
And so there's broad opposition, broad and deep opposition from, you know, basically anybody who's not the parking lot owner against that kind of thing more and more because the abuse of it is becoming more and more prevalent.
Seems like.
No, that's true.
And to her credit, when, um, when Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the dissent in the, uh, Kelo in eminent domain case, the big landmark case from a few years ago, she, she specifically said, you know, this is going to hurt low income people, working class people.
It's not going to hurt, uh, people who are doing well, but those, those parts of town aren't going to be touched.
They could, they can make sure they're not, they're not affected by eminent domain, but it's going to be, you know, she, I don't know if she specifically said racial minorities, but it's going to be working class, lower, lower class people.
And she was, and she was right.
And that you're, and you're absolutely right.
Those are the people that are going to get the brunt of this.
So that's the irony that the welfare state, the modern mixed economy is always presented as a, as a way to help the people that are sort of left out, right.
Left behind.
And, and yet they're the ones that are keeping them out.
And then they throw them a few things to ameliorate their condition and make a whole big deal of that.
And I agree, you know, I would tend to agree with Kevin Carson that as we, as we try to get rid of, uh, peel back the layers of the state, uh, and this is something conservatives don't seem to get.
If you can help it, you don't begin with those ameliorative measures.
You begin with the privilege, privileges, go after the privileges first and get to them amelioration later, you know, the welfare payments, that shouldn't be the first thing you don't have to go after that as the first thing.
That's not the big, the big, uh, offense, uh, you know, to, uh, to freedom and to, and to economic sanity.
It's, it's all the big stuff, the big, uh, corporate favors and the whole, it's, it's much more systemic than just, you know, a program that hands out cash.
Yeah.
Well, you know, uh, the Pentagon is pretty big.
And right before I was talking with you, I was talking with Gareth Porter, the, I don't know how to characterize him.
I guess he's just a progressive.
He's not that radical of a guy.
He's a historian and journalist from IPS.
I'm sure you read his stuff at answerward.com.
And uh, I'm not sure how surprising this is necessarily, but I guess it's, uh, uncharacteristic to the dictionary definition anyway, uh, of being a leftist type historian is he does not, uh, focus, uh, or he does not believe the focus of the, uh, the real engine of the world empire, uh, comes down to oil companies and arms manufacturers.
Although he does point out where they're guilty of sin, that it's perfectly, uh, justifiable to point out, you know, specific corruption, but he believes that the overriding force in the empire is the Pentagon itself, the generals themselves.
And uh, that, uh, I guess it goes back again to the, you have these two different groups.
You have, uh, those who live off the state like Lockheed shareholders, and then you have the state itself as the engine of this thing.
And the way Gareth Porter tells the story, they don't even know what they're doing in Afghanistan.
They don't even have a policy other than fight the people who are fighting us.
And that's it.
They are so dumb and so blind.
They just have this, um, where the Pentagon itself is not just, um, the, the point on the spear, it's the heaviest part of the spear.
It's leading the thing.
Well, you know, it's very complicated and, um, he may well be right.
I think it, you know, uh, it's hard to assign, uh, the proportions, you know, the right proportions to who's responsible.
I have no doubt that once the system is in place, uh, and maybe even when it's first getting into place, a lot of it is being initiated by people within the state itself rather than outsiders trying to get, uh, goodies.
So you know, I'm, I'm not in a position to argue with him.
He may well be right.
It's, I just think it's one of these very complicated things and untangling the various strands would be extremely difficult.
Uh, Well, I mean, in a way, Anthony Gregory said to me one time, you know, leftists hate billionaires, but you know what?
There's only one real trillionaire in the world.
That's Barack Obama, right?
He's the biggest, he's got the biggest bank account of all to wield the most monopoly influence of anybody.
He's the president.
And he's got the most guns.
So for all these people who like gun control, why are they like, why are they a little nervous about him?
No, it's a great point.
It's a, it's a fair point.
And, um, uh, you know, it is not a simple project to, like I say, untangle all the strands and see who's precisely responsible.
Uh, we can, we can, uh, pick out a lot of people who are responsible and then assigning, you know, the weights would be, would be the tough part, but I'm not sure we really need to be, maybe we don't need to be that precise.
I mean, it's like the argument that Chomsky gets into regarding the Israel lobby, right?
You have a, you have a lot of people who say the Israel lobby is a tremendously powerful and is wagging the dog of the U S government.
And he says, that's nonsense.
He says, this is the U S government's agenda and they may use the Israeli lobby.
The Israeli lobby, uh, makes a contribution to this and may take them on and cheer them on and things like that and give them the support.
But he thinks that you're getting the U S government off the hook.
If you want to blame the Israeli lobby for the U S strong support of, uh, of Israel.
Uh, and I think that's a fair point too.
And it's hard to say exactly again, what the proportion is of responsibility between those parties.
Right.
But it's just as easy as it is when you're talking about the military, industrial, congressional, scientific, whatever, complex, uh, to identify that the policy's wrong.
Same thing with the, the, uh, American Israel relationship.
There's plenty of immorality go around regardless of exactly, uh, you know, who's the one in charge.
Yeah.
And, you know, like I said, I'm not sure we need to get it down to a, uh, such a fine point where we can say, you know, so, uh, this, uh, the government's X, X percent responsible and outsiders are, you know, Y percent.
Uh, the point is we can say with generally who is, uh, you know, who's benefiting, who's pushing for these benefits, who's dispensing them on the inside.
And, and, uh, you know, that may be as close as we need to get.
I think, uh, one thing that's cool too, is to see, you know, lourockwell.com, for example, uh, oftentimes, I mean, you mentioned Gabriel Kolko and he's always been, uh, the favorite Marxist of the libertarians, I guess, for the triumph of conservatism.
But, uh, you know, of course, uh, Lou links to Matt Taibbi and all his stuff and any kind of good, uh, leftist critique of, uh, you know, right-wing, uh, so-called at least capitalists using the state for evil always gets the highest praise from the Mises Institute type libertarians and of course the future freedom foundation types.
And I think that as you said before, uh, it really is important, uh, to, you know, figure out exactly what our priorities are because, uh, for one, you know, for example, like stopping the mass murder of foreigners by the Pentagon, uh, is of the most, of the highest importance in protecting the bill of rights and that kind of thing.
But also if we, if the libertarians are the ones who are the most right about the most important issues, then that's how to lead America in general toward actually fixing these things.
I mean, who wants to sit around and be anti-war all day?
I want to end the damn war.
And so, you know, hopefully if we're the best on these issues, then people will see where the wisdom came from in here, where like, oh wow, so class theory comes from before Marx and he actually screwed it up.
It was started out a little bit more accurate in the first place, you know?
I like it.
I don't know.
I, I like to think that, um, that there's, uh, there's a little bit of hope in when the, you know, the left and the right switch and we see everybody having to question their premises when their heroes do all the things that their enemies used to do and all that kind of stuff, where this is a good opportunity for libertarians to teach libertarianism to people kind of thing, you know?
Well, that's right.
And I think, uh, I think we, uh, do a service by, uh, not doing this in some historical and historical way, but in pointing out the paradox of parasitism that's intrinsic to the system and, and, and who the main beneficiaries are and who, uh, who, who often initiate it.
And the fact that, uh, you know, the, the people living in, uh, stuck in the inner cities are not the big movers and shakers who are causing the, uh, the middle-class taxpayers to be exploited.
That's just ridiculous.
They can't.
You're an apologist for acorn there.
There what's wrong with America and you know, them and also the, the Mexican immigrants, the weakest people in our society with the least authority of all, they're the ones to blame.
That's the, you're right.
That's the surface.
They're used by, they're like mascots.
They're used by people that want to beef up the state.
Uh, it's a smoke screen.
And I think, you know, I think conservatives have always hurt their own, you know, to the extent they have the, they're working from good faith and really want something like a free enterprise.
They've always hurt their own cause by making it seem like, uh, you know, people trapped in the inner city or somehow these, uh, diabolical, uh, people who have caused this monster state to be created to, to milk the middle class.
That's just ridiculous.
It's not, it's not credible who, who the heck could possibly really believe that.
But you know, the race gets mixed into it and this is all the unfortunate part of it.
Race gets mixed into it.
So, so it has a tinge of racism, whether it's even intended or not.
It looks that way.
I mean, look, even, even from the analysis of the, uh, of the housing bust has looked racist.
And then on the other side, the progressives have pointed this out, haven't they?
They said, oh yeah, you are, you're blaming it all on the people that got the, who got the community reinvestment, uh, loans.
Uh, so in other words, you're blaming, uh, black people and Latinos for the collapse of the worldwide financial system.
Yeah.
Well, no, they didn't lobby for the community reinvestment act.
They didn't, uh, you know, they weren't well connected enough to possibly be bringing that about.
Uh, so this was the typical, uh, first of all, the bankers, the construction industry, the realtors who knew they would do well by a big boom in, uh, in housing.
And then all the people on the inside of the government who could look good and get reelected and you know, all the other usual stuff, uh, they, they, the victims, part of the victims were these people that got loans.
They were used often by the system.
Now that doesn't mean particular individuals didn't use the system and lie about income.
Certainly that happened too.
But that's not, that's not the big, uh, uh, uh, culprit for what, what's going on.
They wouldn't have been capable.
I mean, in the sense of they wouldn't have been big enough and powerful enough to bring that about.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the funny thing too, is that that kind of thing works.
You know, I remember years ago seeing Alan Greenspan tell the, this may have even been before the computer bubble bursted, uh, uh, any, one of these bogus hearings where he went to testify and he went and he says, yeah, you know, there's been a little bit of upward pressure on wages recently.
And if it continues, that could trigger inflation that could cause inflation.
And so we need to move to, you know, do what we can to keep pressure on wages downward.
And you know, all this represents is the very last people on the list finally getting the slightest cost of living increase to keep up with the inflation that Alan Greenspan himself had caused.
And then he wants to blame them for, uh, you know, the local retailer having to raise their prices in order to pay the higher wages.
Right.
I mean, look, most people who speak about this know nothing about economics and, uh, and so they, uh, you know, they say stupid things.
Uh, look, the right has, uh, has always, uh, approached us with an extremely blunt sort of blunt instrument, uh, assuming, uh, I mean, even though state connected unions, uh, can create a lot of damage and big companies, of course, in the thirties, one of the, uh, something like the labor laws that got passed because they wanted to bring a sort of a labor piece right to, to industry.
They didn't like when the wobblies were calling wildcat strikes and, uh, engaging in secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes, uh, all of which became illegal when the labor laws came into the way.
You know, another thing, uh, Carson has pointed out and others have pointed out, uh, the right likes to think that the labor laws were imposed on, on the, on the, uh, businessmen.
And it was an unjust imposition on, on, on businessmen in order to help working people, which of course must've had, must've meant that there was Marxism behind it, right?
Cause they're helping working people.
In fact, the biggest, uh, heads of corporations for generations and Rothbard has written about this, uh, wanted labor legislation.
There was a thing called the American, uh, Association of, uh, for labor legislation and the national civic federation in the early, late 19th century, early 20th century.
They wanted labor laws because they didn't like that the strikes could happen, you know, without any kind of procedures that we, the workers could just walk off the job one day and make demands or threatened to.
And they didn't like that.
So what did the Wagner act and the NLRB and all that stuff do in the thirties, it, it set rules.
You couldn't just, you had to have a cooling off period.
You couldn't just call a strike.
You couldn't strike in sympathy with someone else.
You couldn't have a boycott in order to help your, your brethren and some other, uh, you know, up the line or down the line in the, in the production chain.
Uh, you had to go through channels.
Elections had to be, uh, uh, guided by government.
It was a way for big business to bring labor to the table as junior partners anoint their more quote responsible leaders, right?
Which was to exclude the radicals and, and therefore bring some industrial peace.
And I think somewhat Mussolini style, maybe the government wouldn't have played quite the heavy hand that Mussolini did in, in Italy, but it was something very similar.
It was a corporatist type system.
And so this historically has been portrayed as, you know, uh, the working class.
If you were sympathetic, you'd say the working class was, uh, you know, finally getting even with business, which had trashed them all these years.
And if you're right wing, you say he's poor, persecuted minority, big business, to use Ayn Rand's phrase, uh, were, uh, were, um, imposed upon by government, uh, an alliance of government and workers.
But that's not the story.
That's not the true story.
It's much more like Colco talked about.
It's government.
It's a big business going to government, trying to get, uh, things that they could not get in a marketplace, uh, to, uh, to tame, uh, uh, unbridled competition, which hurt, hurt them because it took away market share and also to tame the workers who might have, uh, an independent streak in them and not might want, might not want to go through government channels if they want to bring complaints against workers, against their employers, but simply threaten a strike instead, rather than having to petition the NLRB and, you know, do the, uh, warming, uh, the cooling off period, et cetera, et cetera.
Um, the surface stories are usually wrong and they have to dig a little deeper to see what's really going on.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the story of Philip Drew Administrator, right?
The Democratic Party platform in the 20th century was, let's call it, uh, you know, pro little guy Marxism, but really it was fascism.
And Edward Mandelhaus, the author of the book, uh, which was published, I guess, in 1911, uh, 20 years later, something when it came out, he bragged that, you know, I anticipated Mussolini by several years and that, you know, his whole story was let's overthrow the constitution and make a fascist America.
Well, and then, and then during the depression, the very early years of the depression, the head of a general electric, uh, Gerard, Gerard Swope, uh, made a proposed a plan.
You can find it online.
Actually, you can find online a, uh, a 1931 article in Time Magazine about the Swope plan, which was, uh, hard to tell from a distinguished from a Mussolini's plan.
It would be every, all the big businessmen and then, you know, some, some anointed labor leaders and government gets together around a big table and they just plan everything.
And it, it kind of, uh, is somewhat embodied in the, in Roosevelt's national recovery act.
But that's what, that was the head of GE, GE.
Okay.
GE didn't, GE always pointed out as some great, uh, free market, uh, company.
Ronald Reagan was a spokesman for GE going around the country talking about free markets.
It was a sham.
It was a sham.
They never worked for free markets.
They, they, they, they made, they made their plans palatable by explaining to people that, no, this was free enterprise.
This was the American way.
You know, they, they, they enlisted all those symbols and slogans, but behind the scenes, they're working for a corporate system where, uh, you know, the, the individual worker is basically going to have to take, uh, what he's given without much choice.
Well, and that's the whole thing too, is owning both sides of the argument where, you know, it's a scam that's really, well, it's smart, but it's not that smart.
It's just saying, well, okay, look, half the people in the world are going to be born hating those of us who are billionaires and wear top hats and, uh, you know, own everything where they work and whatever like that.
And so what are we going to do?
Just be the conservatives and fight them all along.
No, we got to do some Judo.
We got to make them think they're getting even with us when actually they're playing our game.
And so that's exactly what it was.
You know, and that's the story of the triumph of conservatism right there, right?
Is, you know, let's use the anti us sentiment to get all of our agenda through so we can play the red, white, and blue on one side and just the red on the other and still win.
That's right.
And then, so, you know, bringing it back to today, now the libertarians who I think have, you know, generally have the right analysis, certainly the radical libertarians have the right analysis or are kind of, um, overshadowed by the two dominant stories, which both of which are wrong.
I mean, they contain some elements of the truth, but they're, but they're both wrong.
And so you watch, you know, you watch Fox at night, uh, Fox news and you see O'Reilly and Hannity and you get that version.
And then you watch MSNBC and you watch Oberman and Maddow and Ed Schultz and you get that version and you, and if you're a libertarian, you're saying, when are we going to get the libertarian version?
Which seems to be much closer to the truth that all, that all this, that you guys are both wrong, that this is a corporatist system and you're each emphasizing certain elements while leaving, you know, leaving out a big part of the story in a way simply to push your own agenda.
And of course it's very, very frustrating to be a radical libertarian and to be watching these commentators because, you know, gosh, I mean, Glenn Beck and Ed Schultz, they deserve each other.
They're just mirror images of each other.
And if you're looking for what's really going on, you're not going to get it from either one of them.
Hmm.
Well, and you know, this is the thing too, where, you know, I'm not sure if I fit into this category, but if you do have faith in other humans reason, then libertarianism ought to win the argument, you know, in a couple of centuries at some point anyway, because really we're not just telling everybody where they're wrong.
We're telling them where they're half right too, where liberals of course have a lot of things right and conservatives do as well.
It's, and actually the places where they agree are half good and half bad too.
I mean, you have, well, for example, I think Ron Paul fits in the center of the left, right spectrum supposedly, but at the top.
And then you have Lindsey Graham who fits in the center of the left, right spectrum as well.
He's actually, despite rhetoric and all that, he's basically a liberal Republican in the John McCain type mold.
And yet he's the extremist.
He's down there at the bottom, but they're both still in the center.
In fact, some of the newspapers during the campaign would say they think Giuliani is a libertarian or something.
Even though he's the inverse of Ron Paul, they don't know how to categorize him.
And so if we can tell people where they're half right and it's the places where we're actually right and of course always side with peace and freedom, then it seems like we ought to somehow be able to, if this is a Hegelian dialectical type of world where everything is a synthesis of a couple of arguments, then we ought to be able to synthesize the right argument out of these goofballs and get a little bit of peace and freedom, right?
Well, yeah, it would be nice to think so.
Gosh, I've heard the extremes in the U.S. Senate described as Bernie Sanders on one side and what's his name, Joe Lieberman, on the other.
Well, and of course there's a wide spectrum.
Yeah, exactly.
Gosh, you could cross that with, you know, there's no danger of falling in the chasm there between Sanders and Lieberman.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I try to think of at least two dimensions that's better than one as far as the left-right thing like the Nolan chart.
It seems to me like the way the libertarians ought to really be categorized is we're the moderates.
We're the ones who are right in the center at the very top and we're moderate because we're against everything evil that government wants to do to people.
And then the people who get away with calling themselves the moderates now, they get correctly labeled the extremists down at the bottom of the diamond shape there.
They're the centrist too, the John McCain, Joe Lieberman types.
They're centrist too, but they're the extremists.
They're the authoritarian ones who are for everything bad that government wants to do to everybody.
And it's not that complicated of a thing.
You know, it seems like I ought to be able to win that with the power of suggestion over time anyway.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Of course, extreme also means consistent for some people.
So in that sense, we're extreme because we consistently apply the principles of liberty and a free society.
And so, and we don't...
We're extremely moderate.
Right.
We don't make...
That's right.
We're extreme middle of the roaders.
We don't make exceptions for these principles.
We think people, government should look at people's lives across the board.
In fact, I just did an op-ed on this, the FFF just posted, where both, I point out that the progressives and the conservatives make arguments against each other that they could apply to themselves on various policies, but they never think to do that.
So it's a problem.
So you have the progressives complaining about the privacy concerns when it comes to the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, properly so.
They're concerned about civil liberties and privacy.
But when it comes to this so-called healthcare reform, all of a sudden, they're totally trusting of Health and Human Services and all the other commissions that are going to get set up by this monstrosity, these 2,000-page bills.
Now suddenly they don't...
They're totally at ease.
They don't worry about our privacy being interfered with, our private choices, our most personal choices regarding medical care.
They have no problem with that.
They just don't get it.
If you don't trust the CIA, why would you trust the Health and Human Services?
Well, I want to be sort of vague about this, but I'll tell you a story.
I was at a place where there were a lot of liberals last night, and I was given sage counsel by my producer, Angela Keaton, to explain what it was that seemed so inexplicable to me, which is exactly what you're talking about, hiring a bunch of mass murderers to be your doctor, and how silly that seemed.
And she said that, well, the thing is, it's just a religious thing, basically.
They are basically describing a government that doesn't really exist, as something that's invisible, that you can't touch, that's always just kind of an imaginary article of faith.
And something like socialist healthcare, it goes without saying that this is simply the way it has to be, and every other smart, rich country has this, and we're crazy for not having it, and everybody knows that.
And there's never even a question as to, wait a minute, how exactly is this going to work?
And has anybody modeled out what the costs are going to look like 15 years from now?
And whatever, even the slightest concern, none of those details are part of it.
It's sort of the same thing with going overseas and kicking air, but if you're a right-winger, it just goes without saying.
In fact, what was I just read?
Oh, it was a great article, and thanks for staying over time with me, I'm having so much fun in this interview, Sheldon.
There's a great article we linked to today on antiwar.com, by Mark Ames, who's one of my favorite leftists, who writes over at Alternet and at The Exiled.
And he talks about how, in this poll, the government overall has a 20% approval rating for the federal government, while 78% of people say that they have a favorable view of the military.
And this is where it's not just conservatives, but it's almost this major consensus that the one thing that we can all agree on is the Pentagon and the flag there, if not the White House and the Capitol building.
And that's scary to me, because I think General Petraeus wants to be the president, and I think that as things fall apart from this economic black hole that they're driving us even further into now, that, you know, if the one agency that people trust even more than Health and Human Services is the Pentagon, then they're going to end up being our governors and legislators, even more than they already are.
You'll have to send me that link, because I'd like to read that.
That is, that's worrisome, because even though you have huge numbers of people saying we shouldn't be in Afghanistan now, or we should get out, they still think the Pentagon, they hold the Pentagon in high esteem.
Is that the point?
Is that the point?
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
78% approve of the Pentagon and the military in general as being, now those are people who got their act together.
They can bounce a quarter off their bunk, and so obviously what they do makes perfect sense on a day-to-day occasion, regardless of any other things you might know about their projects lately.
Right.
And if they're mad about Afghanistan, they wouldn't blame the Pentagon for that, because they would understand that it's not the Pentagon that got us into, at least they wouldn't think it is, that got us into Afghanistan, but rather the civilian leadership under Bush and now kept there by Obama.
So it's not totally incoherent for them to like the Pentagon and not want to be in Afghanistan.
But that is disturbing.
You're right, because as you alluded to, Petraeus has been known to express his presidential ambitions in the past, and he wouldn't be the first general who's tried to go, tried to make it.
Yeah, and you know, I'm not a wonderful fan of Ike Eisenhower, but he had a certain kind of humble, where not even a very expensive business suit kind of persona about him.
He didn't go marching in there, you know, he wasn't no General MacArthur or something.
Yeah, I mean, Chris, we do owe him some debt, because he gave us the phrase, the military industrial complex, which...
Yeah, on his last day.
Too little, too late for me, pal.
Well, that's true.
At least, you know, on his way out, he said something good.
But you know, you make a good point about how the right, being able to kick butt in the foreign land is sort of iconic, and don't worry about the details, it'll all work out.
And with the progressives, national health care, again, is iconic.
Education too, yeah.
Education, they feel this great shame that we're the only, what, the only advanced country that doesn't have a, well, they don't have a single payer, but the huge, you know, much more government involved than they already have.
Of course, we have a lot more than they're willing to admit.
And again, they don't care about the details.
This is right, so it'll all work out.
That's kind of the attitude.
But it says something very, I think, pretty unflattering about them.
They pride themselves on their critical faculties, and yet they let that go when it comes to something like health care.
They think, oh no, just turn it over to the government, it'll work out.
This is the same government that, you know, they wouldn't trust to nation-build in Afghanistan or Iraq.
On the other hand, you know, I've heard Hannity at one moment condemning the government's ability to run the medical system, and then, you know, a minute later, saying what wonders we can do in foreign countries.
I mean, don't they listen to themselves?
It's like they don't, they used to talk about Bill Clinton compartmentalizing the stuff in his brain.
Lots of these people do also.
They never listen to themselves, or they, it's a whirlwind in newspeak, right?
Or no, sorry, doublethink.
They hold two contradictory principles at the same time, but never allowing themselves to acknowledge that they are holding two contradictory principles.
Never saying to themselves, you know what, you really can't hold these two at the same time, because they don't fit.
If a government's not competent to run a medical system, why is it competent to bring enlightenment and peace and wonderful things to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq?
This makes no sense.
But it reminds me of something George Will, who lately has been writing good stuff, but he's had his very, very bad phases during his years.
And some years ago, in the 80s, he wrote a column when he was in his more Hamiltonian phase.
He said, you know, conservatives are really making a mistake to say that governments can't legislate the minimum wage without bringing about bad consequences.
And they can't do other things, you know, in the economic realm without bad consequences.
Because if we convince people of that, how can we possibly convince people that the government can go into Cuba and execute regime change?
In other words, so he was making a case for conservative totalitarianism, right?
He didn't say you can't do X, because when you wanted to do Y, why would they believe you can do Y?
You just told them they can't do X.
Oh, poor George Will.
He was underestimating the ability of that double thing.
I think, you know, the difference between double think and cognitive dissonance is double think doesn't hurt, right?
Double think means it's perfectly, you can continue on like that, no problem.
Cognitive dissonance kind of makes your face twist and like, wait a minute, you know, I got a problem here.
Maybe I'll bury it.
But somewhere in there, there's a conflict.
But double think is just openly embracing completely contradictory things.
Yeah, but you know, I don't know if it's my Aristotelianism here or something, but I have a feeling that if you're engaging in double think, it's got to be showing up somewhere in your psyche.
It's got to, you got to be losing sleep or something.
You just can't, I don't see how you can do that for very long.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know, there's still 100 other ways we could take this conversation, but I don't want to risk people just giving up.
So we'll try to keep it under an hour and a half or two here.
And I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Sheldon.
This has been great.
My pleasure.
And you're welcome to call again.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Sheldon Richman.
He's the senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the editor of the Freeman Journal.
He's the author of Separating School and State, Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax and Tethered Citizens.
Welcome to Repeal the Welfare State.
