All right, welcome back to Anti-War Radiocast 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest is Christopher J. Coyne.
He is an assistant professor of economics at West Virginia University and North American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center.
He contributes to the blog The Austrian Economists, which is AustrianEconomists.typepad.com.
His new book is called After War, the Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, published by Stanford University Press.
Welcome to the show.
Christopher, how are you doing?
Very good.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us on the show on short notice here.
I really enjoyed your article, your first article for Anti-War.com.
I hope there will be many more after it.
Oh, thank you.
And this book is, well, an Austrian economist's point of view of exporting democracy at gunpoint.
Is that basically right?
Right.
Well, I'd even say it's an economist's viewpoint in general.
My training is in Austrian economics, but I try to draw on all different schools of thought and just kind of apply an economic way of thinking to the topic of foreign intervention and military occupation.
Now I think it probably should be said at the beginning here that I think, well, from my understanding, very few, even of the neoconservatives, actually believe that any of this had to do with exporting democracy.
That's really for the rubes.
This is about building empire.
And if, you know, getting the majority Shiites elected helps that process along, then they'll hold an election or something, I guess, or if they have no choice.
But isn't the exporting democracy idea just really the veneer of a, you know, iron-fisted imperial policy here?
Well, there's a couple of things going on.
I mean, you're exactly right that the history of U.S. interventions in general have had a myriad of different motivations.
Some have been security-based, some have been based on special interests, and some have been driven purely to export democracy.
But the way I set up my analysis is to take policymakers and politicians at their word.
They say, look, let's assume the best.
Let's assume that they actually want to accomplish what they say they want to accomplish.
So we're intervening to export democracy, to liberate people, and to allow them to engage in self-determination.
This is, after all, what they say, whether it's true or not, this is the rhetoric we hear.
Absolutely.
And if it's a good case or a bad one, it needs to be made.
Certainly.
That's right.
So basically, the starting point of the book is let's assume the best case on the part of politicians and policymakers.
Let's actually assume that they want to accomplish what they say they want to, what they tell the American people.
And what I try to do in the book is show that even given the best assumptions, given that they want to establish liberal democracy, they're actually more likely to result in failure as compared to success.
So then if we weaken that assumption and say, look, even if we assume the best case, they're more likely to fail.
And then we weaken the assumption to incorporate the things you're talking about, these ulterior motivations.
This leads me to the conclusion we should be even more skeptical about these efforts and about intervention in general.
Sure.
Okay.
Well, so what is Austrian economics and that perspective, well, and the other perspectives that you say you also looked at, but what's the special insight here?
In your article, I guess what you're getting at is you bring up the people who say, well, the war has been so terribly mismanaged.
I'm thinking of the movie, No End in Sight, where, gee, they just made mistake after mistake and somebody else, presumably, I don't know, Hillary Clinton or somebody could have done it much better.
That's right.
I mean, this is the strength of economics and the economic way of thinking.
And you're right.
So many of these discussions and debates about Iraq, Afghanistan, but also just intervention in general.
It turns into these partisan ideological debates.
The Republicans say they're strong on terror and they're willing to stay for however many decades it takes to see this through.
The Democrats say, well, you're not good at planning.
If only you had worked harder, if you hadn't been in bed with Halliburton, things would have been different.
But no one really asks the more fundamental question, which is, can government do this in general?
Can they centrally plan the complex array of institutions which underpin a free society?
And economics forces us to ask that question, that forces us to put aside these ideological issues and ask the more core question, can government accomplish this?
Do they have the means to do it?
And that's the strength of the economic way of thinking.
And really in the book, which I also highlight in my article on antiwar.com, is there's two major constraints.
Economics focuses on constraints and really that's what this whole issue of foreign intervention is about.
The first is a knowledge problem.
Government, policy makers, politicians, the development community, they really don't know what it takes to create a democracy and a free society where it doesn't exist.
It's not simply writing down a set of rules or mailing the U.S. Constitution around the world.
If it was that simple, we'd have a lot more free and developed societies.
So we really don't know how to go about creating these institutions where they don't exist.
Yet we undertake these interventions to try to accomplish these ends, despite the fact we don't know how to go about doing it.
So that's one major constraint.
If we don't know what we're doing, most likely we shouldn't do it in the first place.
The second insight from economics is looking at the incentives that politicians and policy makers face.
And again, I start the book by assuming the best of intentions on the part of these policy makers.
But then I kind of weaken that assumption and I say, let's look at the incentives they face.
And if you look at these incentives, the incentives that bureaucrats face, elected officials, special interest groups, they all lead to this complex array of perverse outcomes and dysfunction.
So the failures in Iraq, the way I see them, and what I conclude in the book, it's not because of the Bush administration.
It's because of government, because of the incentives they face.
We should expect to see bureaucrats fighting over turf and budget.
We should expect to see special interest groups influencing outcomes.
And we should expect to see elected politicians underestimating the cost of war, because they don't pay the bills.
And by the time those bills come due, they'll be out of office and on some speaking tour earning tens of thousands of dollars, where future generations of Americans will have to foot the bill.
Right.
OK, well, I want to break down the different economic incentives and on the different players here in a moment.
But I think it's probably worth mentioning that America doesn't even really go by the premises of a free society or self anymore.
You know, the whole idea here is that every individual is born free.
We allow the government to exist for the purpose of protecting our rights.
That is ideally the system that we're supposedly spreading around the world.
You know, bottom up democratic sovereignty, but Republican forms and so forth.
We don't go by that anymore.
We're moving into, you know, a total police state here.
We have empire abroad.
How can we possibly export the liberty that we don't even possess?
This is an excellent point.
I mean, the work of Bob Higgs on, you know, his work on the crisis on Leviathan and the expansion of the state, especially during times of foreign intervention, is really very relevant here, which is one of the costs, of course, in addition to all the monetary costs and the cost of soldiers' lives, is the expansion of the state.
They're associated with these interventions, the expansion of bureaucracy, the bloated budget.
And again, these costs will be with us for decades into the future.
I mean, the key insight of Higgs' work is that the government doesn't shrink back to its previous size after the intervention, and so this is a major issue.
And the other irony here, of course, is exactly your point.
We're trying to spread liberty and democracy, whatever else you want to lump in with those good catchphrases, but we rely on central planning.
We rely on bureaucracy.
You know, and it's the exact opposite of what we're trying to spread abroad, yet we utilize those means to attempt to generate those outcomes.
And one of the insights I try to mention in my article is that really the central planning we use with these reconstruction efforts is no different than socialism.
Both relied on central planning and a strong central government to allocate things and to design some top-down plan and impose it upon people.
And just like socialism failed, I think foreign interventions will tend to fail as well.
What is the Pentagon?
Is that the country's biggest government program?
That's exactly right.
I mean, you have massive bureaucracies.
The U.S. in 2004 set up an office of, I think it's called the Office of International Stability and Reconstruction or something along those lines, to oversee these foreign interventions, and that's set up a whole new massive bureaucracy.
We have the Department of Homeland Security at home, and it's going to keep growing as long as we do this.
And again, this is a major cost that most Americans don't realize when we undertake these foreign interventions.
It's the massive and bloated bureaucracy that results.
Okay, now, I like the idea that this is not about personalities.
It's not about, you know, Jerry Bremmer just happened to be the world's worst viceroy or something like that.
Explain, from your economic point of view, why is it that, I don't know, five guys working in a government office are not as able to do a good job as five guys working in a private office?
Sure.
Well, there's two issues, and they're interrelated.
The first is this issue of knowledge, the knowledge problem, which I mentioned already, which is they don't have the relevant knowledge of how to create these things, a free society, basically, what F.A.
Hayek called the extended order.
Now, why would private people, why would private people have the knowledge that the public people can't?
Well, I mean, the private people, it's not that they have the knowledge to centrally plan things.
It's precisely this issue of dispersed knowledge, which is there's, when there's individual actors, right, it's the individual versus the collective, right, basically top-down versus bottom-up.
Individuals have what Hayek called knowledge of time and place.
We know specific context, and we know specific cultures, and what works, and what allows individuals to cooperate at a local level, whereas when you try to top-down impose something upon people, you neglect all these underlying factors.
So that's the one issue.
The more important issue, though, is this problem of incentives, which is incentives that bureaucrats working in government non-profits face versus private firms, basically, the main one being the lack of profit and loss.
In private markets, we know if we're doing the right or the wrong thing because there's feedback.
If we do something that satisfies people that they like, we earn a profit.
If we don't, we earn a loss, and that's a hard constraint, a strong signal that's sent whether you're allocating resources correctly.
Bureaucracies, by definition, are non-profits, so they have to measure success in another way, and the way they typically do it is by the size of their budget and the number of subordinates, the number of people working in the bureaucracy.
So, of course, the way to show that you're important as a bureaucrat is to try to convince policymakers and legislators that you need more money and more people working for you, and this is, of course, why we always hear government never admit mistakes.
They always say, if we had more money, if we had more people, things would have been different.
We see this in education.
We see it in Social Security.
We see it in Medicaid, and we see it in international interventions as well.
Failure is always due to not having enough resources, and the reason why, of course, is because they don't want to admit that they don't have the knowledge and they can't do it.
Instead, they want more stuff.
They want a bigger budget.
Yeah, and failure itself is their success.
Basically, all of this has been fighting between agencies and bureaus who are trying to get a piece of the intervention pie, if you want to think about it that way.
There's a budget set by the government at some point in time, and these bureaus all want the biggest piece possible, and they're willing to fight other bureaus and agencies to get it.
This is precisely what we saw in Iraq.
We saw massive infighting between bureaus and agencies, each trying to secure the biggest part of the pie as possible.
Let me take this out of the war circumstance and just say, hypothetically, just a regular office.
Basically, what you're saying is, if I'm the manager of, I don't know, five guys, that's my hypothetical from before, and they're actually doing three people worth of work and spreading it out among themselves so that they can all keep their job and go drinking after work and so forth.
I'm going to end up firing a couple of those guys and consolidate or reassign them, figure out something else for them to do, because my bonus is contingent on it, basically, right?
Is making the most money for the boss as possible.
Whereas if I'm a manager in a government bureaucracy, the money is not my boss's money.
It's the taxpayer money coming straight from the treasury or Ben Bernanke's fingertips.
My incentive is entirely turned around.
Rather than having the leanest, meanest machine and getting rid of those two extra guys, I want to add five more.
That is exactly right.
It's all about having a residual claimant.
In the case of five guys, there's a residual claimant.
The buck stops with someone, and that individual, the manager, has an incentive to cut their costs or maximize their revenue, which are, of course, related.
In bureaus and government agencies or any non-profit associated with the government, what happens is, if you actually cut costs, you actually don't get rewarded as in a private business.
The bonus, in your example, or profitability, you get punished.
Your budget gets cut the next year.
The government says, oh, you can do this work with less money, and we're going to splice your budget.
This is why bureaus have an incentive always to exhaust their entire budget and request more money in the future.
It's the exact opposite than private firms, which is why we see massive waste on the part of government bureaucracies.
On top of it, you get poor customer service.
Think about the places where you wait in line the longest, where you get the worst customer service is places like the post office, the DMV, waiting in line to get your passport, waiting in line at security at an airport.
This is because there's no residual claimant.
Who are you going to complain to if the DMV doesn't work?
There's no competitive process.
There's no competitor to that.
It's the same logic.
Foreign interventions and reconstruction efforts are just the DMV or the post office, basically a thousand times the size of the post office with nuclear weapons.
It's the same exact logic, and you get the same exact outcome.
I remember in, well, maybe the end of 2001, beginning of 2002, there was this scruffy old conservative.
I can't remember who it was anymore, but it was on Fox News.
They were asking him about, well, what do you think?
Is it a good idea?
Maybe a Fox News office of Homeland Security, maybe a department of Homeland Security.
This scruffy old conservative on Fox News said, no, it's the worst idea I've ever heard because all their incentive will be to make sure that there are attacks because what if there's no terrorism?
They won't have an excuse to exist anymore.
Creating a bureaucracy like this puts us all in more danger.
They looked at him as though he just uttered the worst blasphemy, and I don't think he was ever on Fox News again, that old guy, whoever he was.
Yeah, right.
An excellent book on this, if you're listening or interested, by a political scientist named John Mueller.
It's a book called Overblown.
Oh, yeah.
I've interviewed him, actually.
That is a great book.
Basically Mueller talks about how the terrorist industry has emerged, the terrorism industry, I should say, has emerged since 9-11.
Basically, it's exactly what you're saying.
There's always more of a threat.
The war on terror will never end, and we need more money and more security and more experts It's a self-fulfilling, self-growing industry, and it's very frightening, actually, when you start reading about it.
All right.
Now, let's talk about the incentives of the massive private contractors, Blackwater, Kellogg Brown and Root, or, well, Halliburton, the rest of them.
What's different about these government contractors collecting money out of the treasury rather than just spending the money that they get from their shareholders and their customers?
Sure.
Well, it overlaps a lot with the incentives that bureaucrats face in some sense.
Of course, these are for-profit firms, but basically what happens is when you undertake a military intervention, or any government program for that matter, it creates what economists call rents, which are basically profits to be had, and there's a pie to be divided.
Everyone has their hand in trying to grab as much of the pie as they can.
Bureaucrats do, but also these interest groups.
Interest groups are basically groups of people that have an incentive to lobby government for certain policies, certain regulations, or certain handouts, and basically what happens is these contractors try to get in on part of the action, but they do that by securing the biggest contract possible.
Now, one of the key ways that you secure contracts with government is that you establish a relationship over time so that you can keep coming back to them for subsequent contracts, and of course, the way you do that is by giving them campaign contributions directly or indirectly by undertaking other lobbying activities to basically establish a good relationship with them.
Now, somehow in the American culture, a lot of people tend to think that Republicans love corporations and they're in bed with corporations and they hate the average worker, and that Democrats are for the working man and they're anti-corporation, they'll look out for you.
Right now we see Barack Obama on TV saying he'll look out for Americans against the greedy gas companies, but in reality when you look into it, both Republicans and Democrats are in bed with special interests and with what's known as crony capitalism.
Of course, regular capitalism is when people produce a product and then compete on the market.
They either win or they lose, but there's an open competition.
Crony capitalism is when companies or producers receive preferential treatment from government, and that, of course, isn't what capitalism is.
That's a bastardized version of capitalism.
So in all the reconstructions, it's just not Iraq, contractors have played a large role, and this has grown over time since World War II.
Halliburton, for instance, had a relationship with government going back into the 70s, so everyone linked them with Cheney and the Bush administration because Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, but they got massive contracts under Clinton.
I believe they got more total dollars under Clinton than they did under Bush, and they've been getting money for decades, and they'll continue to get money.
They have a well-established relationship with politicians, and they'll continue to donate money and get contracts, both domestically and internationally.
So basically, you have this interaction between bureaucrats fighting for money, special interests fighting for money, elected officials trying to cover their butts and defer costs into the future, and as you can imagine, you get a pretty screwed-up outcome.
Yeah, well, ask the people of Iraq.
They'll tell you.
It's interesting to me that Dick Cheney in the 1990s used to complain about Bill Clinton's sanctions.
He committed that ultimate faux pas, which is to travel overseas to criticize your own government, and he did it numerous times to criticize the sanctions against Iran specifically.
It occurred to me that when Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, if he had just gone to one of the shareholder meetings and said, all right, investors, we need to raise a trillion dollars so we can hire a Blackwater private army and go invade Iraq and take all their stuff, they would have fired him that day.
They would have laughed him right out of the room.
But then once he becomes vice president and he has access to the treasury and the Federal Reserve's money machine, and he can send the Marine Corps and the Army and the Air Force and socialize the costs onto the rest of us, it's on.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's right.
I mean, it's all about exactly your point about incentives and internalizing costs.
When you don't internalize the costs, you undertake behaviors that you otherwise wouldn't have been, and that's one perfect example of that logic.
You know, Ray McGovern was on the show last week, and he said, you know, you look at George Bush, here's a man who has actually never in his entire life had to be held accountable or responsible for anything that he's ever done, and certainly not as president.
He gets, I guess his incentives are all screwed up.
You mentioned the politicians, but you went into detail on the bureaucrats and the contractors, but what about the congressmen who get to sing God Bless America on the Capitol steps and pretend everything's fine, and then they're out of office by the time our dollar becomes worthless and the whole world hates us for what they've done to us, done to them?
That's exactly right.
There's all these long-term costs.
I mean, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, who are two economists, recently released a book called The Three Trillion Dollar War, where they try to forecast some of these costs.
Of course, they're understanding it, too, probably, because what they're counting are things that most people don't think of, disability costs, other mental care costs for soldiers when they come home, depreciation on military equipment.
They try to do some macro stuff, like the impact of the cost on oil, and that gets a little more difficult to do, but there's lots of other costs, as well, which can't be monetized.
The one you just gave, the hatred, or what the CIA calls the blowback against the United States, you can't put a dollar amount on that, but that's a cost that's going to impact us and future generations of Americans for decades to come.
Well, you know, a lot of people say that, well, the politicians, actually, are the public-spirited, public-interested ones with the longer view, and that, actually, the greedy corporations only care about the next quarter, that they're willing to screw over everybody as long as they can make money between now and the next time they have to release the numbers.
Well, that's a very poor logic, and if you understand basic economics, you understand exactly the opposite.
When you own something, when you're a residual claimant, you have an incentive to look into the future, to care about it in subsequent periods.
When you don't own something, when it's not yours, whether it's a park, a piece of property, taxpayer dollars, or what have you, you have very little incentive to take care of it, because you don't incur the cost of wasting it, of just allocating it wherever you want at that moment, not thinking about the long term.
Well, under private ownership, you incur the full cost.
If you own a piece of property and you neglect it, it's yours.
You incur the full cost in terms of the value of the property fall.
You have an incentive to look at your paycheck and to allocate your income in a manner such that you make yourself happy, but you incur the cost.
If you waste it, if you waste all your money, you incur the cost, you don't have that money anymore.
If bureaucrats and politicians, if they waste the money, they either leave office, or they just get more money next year, because they just tax people, or print money, that's where they get their income from, where you and I have to work for our income.
Well, you know, I guess the same principles apply in bigger, more bureaucratic corporations, too, right?
Because you have these CEOs who have golden parachutes, no matter what damage they do, they make $100 million and retire.
No, that's exactly right.
Firms don't have markets inside them.
From that standpoint, they have good markets, but they're bureaucratic internally, which basically causes issues, which is why you can never have a world monopoly, for instance, beyond the scope of what a firm could do, it would be better economically to break down to smaller pieces.
But on top of that, the one difference is, for-profit firms still act in a world of profit and loss.
So even though there's no prices inside the firm, and it is a bureaucracy from that standpoint, they still ultimately are accountable for profitability at the end of the day.
They can still allocate resources based on that pressure, of whether they're being profitable or not.
And of course, the owners, whether they're private owners, partners, or stockholders, always will pressure managers to make money and be as profitable as possible.
So a big corporation will make stupid decisions, but ultimately, they'll have to pay for it.
Oh yeah, of course, right.
Of course, when we argue for the benefits of markets, we're not saying that corporations or any private actors are infallible.
It's exactly the opposite.
People make mistakes all the time, which is precisely why we want people acting on dispersed and local information, and we want people to be allowed to make mistakes, and for everyone to observe them.
Now, of course, and this is, again, a failure of government, we see the exact opposite logic.
There's so many cases where people make money in markets, and of course, you make money by making your fellow man better off, and they're criticized as being greedy or burning windfall profits, and the government should tax them, and somehow it's unfair.
And then we also view, at the same time, government bailing out people that are failing.
They're losing money, and they're failing.
And this is very perverse logic, because if you're losing money in a market, it means you're not satisfying your fellow man.
You've done something wrong.
So really, we want those businesses to go under.
That's part of the process.
Now, it hurts people.
When you go out of business, you don't like it, and you might lose your job, but it's still a signal that you failed to satisfy consumer wants, whereas profitability is the exact opposite.
It's a signal of satisfying people, so we should embrace that, not penalize it.
All right, well, I'm sure you get this one all the time, so no offense or anything.
Germany and Japan!
Right.
So, post-World War II, Japan and West Germany.
These are the two cases of success that people point to and say, look, America can export democracy, and we have these two examples to show it.
I spend a whole chapter in the book, After War, discussing this.
First, I go through the historical record, and I just talk about the knowledge problem and the incentives that politicians face, what we've discussed today, and then I do some case studies, and Japan and West Germany are two of the ones I do, and I talk about why they were successes.
Now, and there's a couple reasons I point to.
The first is the fact that both were international wars.
So, we didn't go into either Japan or West Germany with the pure motivation of liberating them.
Both were international wars.
We had thoroughly defeated both of them.
Of course, in Japan, we really thoroughly defeated them with the use of nuclear weapons, and it was clear that we were occupying these countries.
But the more important point is that both had the foundations of a...the society we're trying to reconstruct, both had the foundations already in place.
In West Germany, we relied on the pre-existing constitution, and of course, you have to remember that the Nazis, while they were a horrible regime, were elected through the political process.
They didn't take over through a coup.
They went through the normal election process to gain their power.
And while they coerced many people, they did not destroy the underlying political system.
So, we were able to utilize that to reconstruct the country.
In Japan, we relied heavily on the emperor to implement the reconstruction effort.
We kept the Diet, which is the legislation.
We kept it in place.
When MacArthur and his crew wrote the constitution, they had it approved by the Diet, and they made changes.
So, there was this indigenous acceptance of the rules that we were trying to create there.
Well, and in Japan, before the rise of the empire, they had already had sort of a parliamentary system for a couple of generations earlier in the 20th century, right?
That's right.
And the thing people have to remember is that neither Japan nor West Germany are mirror images of the West.
So, people tend to think we created another United States in each of these places.
And of course, we didn't.
They're drastically different.
And so, the argument is that they were successful, not because the United States was able to go impose things upon people, but because a lot of the foundations were already in place, and we just made some tweaks on the margins.
Both were relatively highly developed countries.
Both had some experience in their history with legislation, exactly what you were talking about.
Of course, they differed in each country, but those foundations were there.
And in both cases, and I document this in the book, you still see examples of bureaucratic infighting, of problems with the U.S. political system, in Germany especially.
People forget the United States kept Hitler's price controls in place.
Talk about economic central planning, we were centrally planning the German economy.
And of course, it was doing horrible.
Ludwig Erhard, who was heavily involved in the finance of Germany, went behind the back of the occupiers and lifted all the price controls on the radio.
And I have this quote in the book, but he meets with Lucious Clay in Clay's office.
Lucious Clay was military general in charge of the West German occupation.
Lucious Clay says to him, why did you do that?
You're not supposed to go behind our back and implement changes to regulations without our approval.
And Erhard responds, if I had told you, your people would not have let me done it in the first place.
And he realized that basically, the U.S. was centrally planning the economy.
They were heavily regulating it.
And only when they lifted those controls and allowed people to freely trade and exchange did the economy begin to flourish.
Oh, come on.
It was the Marshall Plan that saved those people.
I mean, the Marshall Plan, this is a big myth.
It's just the aid that was dumped on them.
I always use the example of Microsoft or any well-established company.
If employees from Microsoft went home one night and the building burned down, we could rebuild it.
It would be purely a capital issue to rebuild the building.
That's not what makes Microsoft Microsoft.
It's not the building.
It's the people, the company culture, the intelligence of the employees.
If we picked up Microsoft building or spent millions of dollars building a beautiful Microsoft building in Iraq and then just left it, now they have Microsoft.
Of course, they wouldn't have Microsoft.
They have a building that says Microsoft on it.
But they wouldn't have the people and the knowledge and the company culture that allowed it to operate.
And that's really what the Marshall Plan did.
It provided some money to rebuild things, which is important.
But unless the underlying factors are there, the employees, in the case of Microsoft, it won't operate in the desired manner.
So the Marshall Plan myth is one that has to be pushed by the wayside.
That's good.
I can't wait to read this book.
This looks really good.
After War, the Political Economy of Exporting Democracy.
And let me ask you one more question in the last couple of minutes here.
We have this iron triangle.
We have what William S. Lynn calls the world's biggest honeypot.
That's just the DOD budget.
But overall, our budget is $3 trillion a year.
There's unmeasurable influence peddling in Washington, D.C.
The Congress has unlimited power, and it's for sale.
I think it's a congressman, a dime, a dozen senators, two bits.
And they'll do whatever the connected private interests have them do in order to turn our wealth over to them.
How are we supposed to stop this?
Well, I think the first thing, and this sounds like a very basic implication, but it's a very important one, is people just have to be skeptical of government.
The average American is just not overly skeptical of government.
And if they are even skeptical in some areas, they'll say, well, we still need the government to protect us.
We still need them to go abroad and protect us against these threats.
But really, we have to go back to the kind of culture that existed during the founding of our country.
And through the first, I'd say, several decades, well, actually, all the way up through the New Deal.
Let's put it all the way up to then.
I think you can – that's not perfect, but let's push it to there.
Where there is a major skepticism of government, politicians are viewed as real civil servants, not someone that deserves to be honored, but servants of the people.
Government was viewed as a necessary evil, not as someone that gave you handouts and took care of you, so there wasn't this view of paternalism.
And we just viewed government with major skepticism.
Of course, the founding fathers of our country were very skeptical of foreign intervention because they realized all the things we've talked about that eroded the foundations of our country and the liberties that exist in our country.
Until we return to that, I think we're in major trouble because as long as people continue to just accept this, the role of government with blind faith, they'll continue to be expansions in budget, expansions in bureaucracy, until basically the country implodes because we can't afford to pay for it anymore.
Yeah, all empires fall, right?
That's right.
All right, everybody, that's Christopher Coyne.
He's an assistant professor of economics at West Virginia University.
He's the North American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center.
He contributes at the blog, The Austrian Economists, which is austrianeconomists.typepad.com, and his new book is called After War, The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy.
You can read his first article for antiwar.com today.
I hope the first of many, The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy by Christopher J. Coyne.
Thanks very much for your time today on the show.
Thank you for having us.
