04/25/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
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Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Let's get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
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And now we go to our first guest today.
It's our good friend Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom, which you can subscribe for to at fff.org slash subscribe.
$25 a year for the print edition, $15 to read it online.
And man, it's worth it.
All right.
What should libertarians do is the title of your most recent piece here at fff.org.
What should libertarians do?
So I'll ask you, Sheldon.
What should libertarians do?
No, it was a maybe I could have thought of a better title.
I don't know.
I kind of like it because, you know, there was a famous essay by by the James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winning economist and all around, you know, generally a good guy who wrote an essay called What should economists do?
So I guess I had that in the back of my mind.
Well, I'm trying I was trying to say to people something that I think we already know.
But I think we forget it sometimes that we need to be we need to master the art of of rhetoric, of persuasion if we want to advance liberty.
So, you know, any any libertarian who wants to be an active libertarian, not rather just a sort of a private libertarian or to be come good at persuading, because our our goal is not to just be able to say to ourselves or even just say out loud, you know, the hardcore position on any libertarian or the hardcore libertarian position on any issue.
That's that's not what it's about.
Right.
Just being able to recite to ourselves.
Oh, yeah.
Fed abolish it.
Oh, yeah.
This abolish it.
That doesn't advance liberty.
We need to be able to explain to people not only what the position is, but what supports the position.
What's that come from?
Because people if people are totally uninitiated, they're not going to know what you're talking about.
In fact, they're going to think you're nuts.
And so the example I use is, you know, economic regulation.
If you if someone who knows nothing about economics hears you say, well, just get the government out of the economy, total separation of state and economy, they're going to think you're you're proposing that nothing take the place of something.
They may concede it's an imperfect something.
But if you don't understand how markets work, a free market person sounds like he's just claiming, oh, you know, just take away the only hope we have that the market will, you know, in any way help people and and let it let it just go wild by itself.
Well, it takes economic knowledge.
So we have to be good at explaining the basics, at least, of how markets work so we can persuade people that markets run themselves.
Namely, the people when they're engaged in mutual aid and social cooperation and exchange that that generates orderly market forces.
Well, you know, on that point, I may not be the best person at saying it, but I certainly know what argument must be addressed on that point.
As always, it's the Great Depression because everyone learns it the same way I learned it in seventh grade.
I remember where I was sitting in class and everything, the way they teach it.
The free market was just too wild and uncontrolled and blew itself up, basically.
And it needs wise stewardship from above.
And that was why the American people and their wise leader, FDR, decided to create the New Deal to control the wild excesses of capitalism that lead us to these terrible ends.
And so if you can't turn that myth upside down, forget it.
Yeah, that's true.
And, of course, that was coming in most likely in a government school.
And, of course, one reason the government has always wanted schools is so it could teach the young, moldable children their version of history, its version of history, the official version, which always makes the state the ultimate rescuer and savior from the rampages of liberty and freedom.
That's basically what the story is.
So, no, you're absolutely right.
You do need to explain that.
And there are other things.
That's the big one.
But there are other things.
And the robber barons, too.
None of these guys did anything for anybody.
All they did was take from everybody.
And, of course, a lot of that was true, right?
The criminal cartels that control the railroads and all that.
Well, the railroads were a creature of the state, right?
Huge land grants given to special interests who were running railroads with lots of land on both sides of the track bed.
And that was a huge favor.
And that generated lots of land speculation, which was based in state privilege.
So, you point out a very good thing, which I didn't talk about in this article because it was running long.
Not only do we need to be able to talk about the basics of economics, which means we need to understand them first so we can speak about it plainly, we need to understand history.
That will have to be the next installment of the article, I guess.
We need to know.
We need to have an accurate story of what happened historically so that we can explain it.
Because you're right.
When you explain the Great Depression, you're not just talking about abstract economics.
You're referring to a particular historical episode, and you would need to talk knowledgeably about it.
It's not just enough to say, oh, it was the Fed's fault, so let's abolish the Fed.
That's not going to persuade anybody who's not already on your side.
And then you don't need to persuade people who are on your side.
You need to reach other people.
Well, and it's not just the left.
I mean I think pretty much everybody in America has the basic understanding, as you outlined it, I think, really perfectly there.
And not just because of the New Deal myth, but just generally speaking, you've got to have a government in Washington, D.C. to be the lid on the pot kind of running, preventing something bad from breaking out somehow.
And the fact that, of course, the U.S. government is the most violent force on the face of the planet perhaps only even reinforces it.
Because they wouldn't do that if it wasn't so necessary to keep such a dangerous world at bay all the time for us so we can live nice.
That's how people rationalize it.
They assume that must be the truth.
Well, people – most people are Hobbesians even if they've never read or heard of Thomas Hobbes.
So in other words, they've grown up implicitly believing because it's reinforced in so many places that the government prevents a war of all against all.
And then there's the additional points that the government prevents the marketplace from being in constant depression and being dominated by monopolies and low wages and high prices.
So in other words, it's a broader Hobbesianism.
The government is what prevents chaos in all kinds of ways, violence plus economic chaos.
And people believe it.
I mean if you're taught that from birth and that's basically all you hear unless you happen to come in contact with libertarians or free market thinkers, then you're going to believe that because it's what you've heard all your life.
So if a libertarian comes along to someone who's 20 or 30 and that's all he heard was the official version and the libertarian says, you know what?
The state should have nothing to do with the economy.
In fact, maybe the state should even disappear totally.
The person is going to think you're nuts.
You're going against the whole lifetime of quote learning that the person has just undergone, teaching him the indispensability of government regulation of the economy and other government activities.
Why is he going to believe you just because you say, you know what?
We don't need any of that.
Let's just get rid of that.
They're going to think you have some malign motive behind your bravado.
They're not going to see it as some sort of reasoned position.
So we got to give them the reasons and we got to be good at it and patient and clear and that's a challenge.
I mean, this stuff is not intuitive.
As I said in the piece, you know, very few of us figure out how markets work by ourselves.
Well, go ahead.
You've got a minute and a half to explain.
Well, every libertarian I know, including myself, had to learn it from reading, you know, Hazlitt and Bastiat and Mises and Hayek and Rothbard and a whole bunch of other people.
I didn't figure it out and Adam Smith.
Well, I have a minute to explain what?
How markets work?
Yeah, sure.
This is worse than Twitter.
Well, then we're going to take a commercial and then we'll be back for another segment, of course.
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, well, let me put it this way.
For someone, for the average person who looks at it as just crazy to think that you could just have no government, that that's some kind of ridiculous fantasy, you've got a major premise to turn around there before you get, I think, into any real details of curves here and macro this, that and the other thing, right?
Well, I'm not going to do macro curves anyway.
Oh, now you've got no time.
Now you've got no time at all because the drums are playing.
So now you've got to wait.
It's Sheldon Richman, everybody, the great Sheldon Richman.
He's vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the most libertarian man in the world, actually.
And we're going to talk with him more about libertarianism and economics on the other side of this break.
FFF.org.
Also SheldonRichman.com for his great blog, Free Association.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's a little downbeat, isn't it, for the tempo of the show so far today?
All right, well, Ray McGovern's coming up on nuclear war, so we'll play the metal for him later.
All right, we've got Sheldon Richman on the line.
He's vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation, and we're talking about libertarianism.
And now, okay, it's silly to ask you to teach all of economics in one lesson here, Sheldon, but let's talk about income inequality here and basically what you already outlined.
The idea, as understood by a great many people, and I think this is expressed in the blockbuster new economics book that's even breaking into pop culture here, is that capitalism is great for people who are already rich or who are really talented enough to figure out how to really get rich, but it just doesn't work for regular people.
Basically, screw them.
That's the name of the system.
That's what capitalism is.
And so now you're going to try to tell me that, no, that's a misunderstanding.
When we see the desperate and weak and helpless everywhere, at the same time we see people who just throw money away by the hundreds of millions on ridiculous bets on luxuries and yachts and crap while people are dying, and it just doesn't seem right.
Well, I would say that that may be true of capitalism, but it's not true of the free market.
We don't have a free market.
I mean, it's impossible to look at the last over 100 years, and you can go back further than that, and argue that this is a free market.
I mean, the government has a huge amount of control and power over certainly the command posts, money and banking, for example, which has long had control of, and this goes back before the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913.
So we don't have an open free marketplace.
We've had all kinds of government measures to help the well-connected, the corporate elite, the people that have the connections.
And so throughout American history, they've gotten tariffs, which has kept prices up, and imports artificially expensive, which hurts lower-income people.
We've had, like I said, money and banking controls.
At a more local level, we have things like occupational licensing and permits and zoning that prevent low-income people from starting their own businesses, so they can get out from under the typical corporate employment or get out of unemployment altogether and just employ themselves along with people, say, in their neighborhood.
The funny thing is you never hear progressives, and I assume the author of this book, I think his name is Piketty, is that right?
I think he would count himself as a progressive.
You have progressives bemoaning income inequality, but they never talk about the things that keep people from even getting on those lower rungs of the ladder, namely the things I just mentioned, licensing, permitting, zoning, intellectual property.
Yeah, they want to give them jobs implementing those regulations.
That's how they can imagine government jobs for people.
Here's the tip-off.
I'm not saying they don't argue in good faith, but there's an odd thing about all the things they favor.
They always empower politicians.
They don't empower people.
The things I'm talking about would empower people.
Strip away all the rules that keep somebody from being a street vendor.
That's how a lot of people got going at an earlier period in history.
They were able to get a push cart, and these days they could get, say, a used car or used truck or something, and become a street vendor.
But in city after city, there's tight control over street vendors.
In some places like Atlanta, it's basically been turned over to a monopoly company.
In the old days, you could get a used car and write the word taxi on the door and begin driving a taxi and start making money, and you had independence.
You weren't working for the boss.
You could make your own hours.
All those roads or most of those roads have been blocked off.
There's licensing for hundreds of occupations throughout the country.
I'm not talking about being a doctor, although I don't think you need licensing for that either.
I'm talking about things like being a florist in Louisiana.
You can't be a florist without the permission of the government, which means without the permission of the current florists because you have to pay money to go to a school, take classes, and then take your test, and the test is judged by the current practitioners.
All this keeps people down.
Why don't we hear Robert Reich, Piketty, all these people, why don't they ever talk about things like that?
All they talk about are things that empower politicians.
What's going on here?
Well, it's interesting too because somebody like Robert Reich, who you mentioned there, it seems like the answer is obvious.
He doesn't want to admit that capitalism is the solution to the poorest problem.
They need access to property rights.
They need the ability to build up their own personal capital in their own life and in their own property and have the ability, as you're saying, to enter into the marketplace doing this, that, or the other thing, maybe have a decent interest rate so they can save for a minute.
And yet Reich is just a centrist, Democrat, neoliberal, right?
So he's supposed to be at least two cheers for capitalism like Irving Kristol or something like that, isn't he?
But that is the root of the problem I think right there is ideologically they don't want to admit that what the – like Jack Kemp used to say, what the poor need is capitalism.
That's what they're lacking.
Yeah, but I think we have to break out of this.
As you're talking, I mean break down the semantics.
Go ahead.
Look, for historical reasons, I don't like the word capitalism.
What we have today I call capitalism and most people call capitalism.
I want the free market.
I want the radical freeing of the market, which means none of this – all this background intervention which only helps people who have already made it and it gives privileges to corporations and big companies.
I'm talking about things like not only railroad subsidies earlier in the history but highway subsidies.
The interstate highway system is a massive subsidy to big retailers, cross-country retailers and other people that move stuff along because most of the damage to roads are caused by these big tractor trailers but most of the repair cost is paid for by passenger cars.
That's a subsidy.
Instead of those products in the marketplace containing the true transportation costs, it's pushed onto the taxpayers.
So that's a disadvantage to companies that don't ship long distance, more local or regional companies.
I'm not a localist by ideology.
I just don't want subsidies to big national companies.
Going back as far as Lincoln but even further back, there was a self-conscious attempt to create a national market.
This new book by Rich Lowry about Lincoln praises it but it's not something to be praised.
Lincoln was trying to create a national market.
Now most people would say that's a good thing.
Yeah, we needed to have a national market but it was full of government where the government was spearheading it, which means it was distortionary.
It wasn't the result of free cooperation and exchange on the marketplace where the market prices actually determine what got built, what the projects were.
The politicians determined it.
It's the American system.
It goes back to Henry Clay.
It goes back to Alexander Hamilton.
Most of America's rulers have this idea in mind, and this is what Rice is defending.
They love the 1950s.
They like the John Galbraith 1950s where you have big corporations, big labor unions, and big government all sitting down at a table and dictating to us what happens.
That's not the free market.
I will call that capitalism but it's not the free market.
When Rice says the free market has failed, he doesn't know what he's talking about, or he does know what he's talking about, but he's being disingenuous.
Now let me change the subject from economics for a second when it comes to what libertarians should do here.
I had a big fight with Justin Raimondo about Rand Paul.
I just can't stand Rand Paul.
He makes me so mad all the time, and Justin's argument was, shut up, this isn't about you.
This is about our societies on the cusp of complete totalitarianism here.
Outright, lawless, fascism, real martial law.
Not this, you know, sometimes a little bit here and there, SWAT raids here and there, but for everybody, all the time, kind of, total state Snowden revelations type of society.
We have to fix it, and Rand Paul's the best we got.
And we need a massive popular front of left, right, libertarian, and anybody who wants anything like the Constitution as compared to what's coming next.
Whether the Constitution is their libertarian dream or not, and I wonder what you think of that.
Well, what I like to say is, put not your faith in any politician.
I think anybody that does that is bound to be disappointed.
First of all, Rand Paul said plenty of things already to deflate any hopes.
I mean, he said we've got to be tough with Russia, and his immigration position is bad, but Justin may agree with him on that, so he wouldn't see it as bad, but I do.
I just don't see that as the root.
I don't think that's going to get us to liberty.
Could there be an emergency bad enough?
His example always is, and it seems like a good one, the socialists and the communists in Germany refused to make an alliance against Hitler.
And I think it was the communists who said, well, after Hitler, us.
Well, they got 60 million people killed, and then they got to rule half the country, but only under the domination of the Russians, and it sucked.
Great political strategy there, to not do what it took to keep the Nazis out.
And at this point, we're talking about Hillary Clinton.
She's not much less dangerous, you know what I mean?
Right?
He's got a point.
I'm trying to concede a little to him.
Yeah, well, I'd be a little careful about the historical comparison.
The analogy, I'm not quite sure we're in the same position as the German people were pre-1933.
Look, it's a low bar when people say that Rand Paul is the best we have going.
It doesn't take much, right?
The one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, he wins.
Exactly, yeah.
I just don't think, this is my personal view, if people want to work from fine, but I just don't think that kind of politics is the vehicle that's going to get us where we want to go.
Even if he got in, he'd be fighting a Congress the whole time, so what would happen?
He'd get blamed for any problems.
I don't know.
I don't like to be the reigning on people's parade, but I just can't get excited about it.
Well, I'm feeling you.
But I'm glad I got a chance to ask you.
And I'm sorry that we're out of time.
But thank you very much again for your time.
Okay, Scott, anytime.
All right, we'll talk soon.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that is the heroic Sheldon Richman.
He's at the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the vice president there, fff.org.
They got so much great stuff there.
I mean, they got 25 years worth of great stuff there, really.
25 years worth of archives of great libertarian articles by the best libertarian writers, fff.org.
The military industrial complex.
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