All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org, Antiwar.com slash radio.
And first hour all this week, up through and including our next guest from Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty.
And our next guest is Robert Higgs, he's Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute.
He's the author of Crisis and Leviathan, Against Leviathan, Resurgence of the Warfare State, Depression War and Cold War, and Neither Liberty Nor Safety.
He's the editor of the Independent Review and truly one of the greatest minds that libertarianism has to offer.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thanks, Scott.
It's great to have you here, sir.
And I have your book right here in front of me.
And forgive me, it's been a little while since I've read it, but it was a great one.
Still is.
Depression War and Cold War Studies in Political Economy.
And I really like this because not only are you telling important truths and getting important points across, but you're directly contradicting the official myth and the official history of the 1930s and 40s, which, in my estimation, undergird the entire theory of American imperial exceptionalism, America as Superman in World War II.
And therefore, any force that we use is, by definition, just and good and wonderful.
And it all comes out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era.
So I really like the fact that you told the truth about this, because it's the exact opposite of what they would have us believe.
So let's start.
Please explain to me, Robert Higgs, as best as you can, why it is that we call the 20s the roaring 20s.
What caused that bubble?
What caused it to pop?
And then why did the Great Depression last so long?
Was it the wild free market capitalism and the excesses of greed, and we needed the government to smooth out our booms and busts, or what?
Well, Scott, your questions would require at least a few hours for me to answer completely sensibly.
But let me state a few highlights by way of responding to your questions.
To a very large degree, a degree that most economic and other historians have not appreciated, the fountainhead of these troubles in the interwar period lies in the war itself, World War I.
World War I completely destroyed the old economic and political order of the Western world.
That led to not only a tremendous amount of death and destruction, but to the disordering of economic relationships that had been in place for a long, long time among the European countries and between them and other parts of the world.
In particular, because of the inflation that all the warring powers had used to finance the war, the currency systems were more or less destroyed during the war and had to be re-established afterward.
One upshot of that was that many people agreed that it would be desirable to return to the gold standard that had existed and formed the basis of the economic order before World War I.
But at the same time, many of these countries did not have the gold reserves to support the return to the gold standard, or simply didn't really want to return to it, because if they did, it would constrain their government spending in ways that the politicians didn't want the government constrained.
During the war, many governments had more or less bought off the working classes by promising them state benefits, and so people's expectations of the state had changed in Europe.
Politicians after the war were under pressure to deliver on these promises, and they had to have money to do that, they had to spend a great deal, and in order to control spending, which under the gold standard would be constrained by balance of payments problems, they wanted to control their monetary system.
These things didn't go together, Scott.
You can't have a controlled fiscal and monetary arrangement in a country and still have that country participate fully in a real gold standard.
So they faked it.
They created something called the gold reserve standard, in which basically the United States and Britain would be on a more genuine gold standard, and even those weren't quite the real thing.
In turn, the other countries would hold a pound sterling or dollars as well as gold, and so in a way, this was allowing the whole world to pyramid on a relatively small amount of gold, a large amount of currency issues and bank deposits, so these different countries could carry out the fiscal policies they wanted.
One upshot of this was that in order for Britain to play its role, it had to go back to being one of the reserve countries, and that meant it had to restore the convertibility of pounds sterling to gold.
It ultimately decided to do that in 1925, but meanwhile, because of some economic interventions in Britain, the British economy was doing very poorly, and funds were flowing out of Great Britain for more attractive investments elsewhere, including the United States, and that made it more difficult for the British to return to convertibility of the pound and gold.
What happened was that the head of the Bank of England, a man named Montague, and Benjamin Strong, who was the head of the New York Fed, more or less got together and decided that the Fed would help the British out, and it would do that by creating easy money conditions in the United States, and that would reduce the incentive for people to move funds out of Britain in order to get higher yields in the United States.
So that's what was done.
The Fed, for several years in the mid-1920s, kept monetary conditions very easy, increased the bank liquidity a great deal, and that allowed the British, in fact, to resume convertibility.
Unfortunately, they resumed it at a very non-market level that could not be sustained, and that created further problems for them later on.
But for our purposes, the important thing here is that this easy money policy in the mid-1920s provoked a lot of investment that otherwise would not have been made.
It provoked what we call malinvestment.
Many economists don't understand this still.
They think the claim is that it provoked excessive amount of total investment, but the claim is not that.
The claim is that it misdirected investment funds, and particularly enticed people to make too many investments in construction, real estate development, financial market instruments, things of that sort, and it led to a big boom in building real estate values all over the country, similar to the one we've seen in the last few years here, and for similar reasons, I might say.
And at the same time, it encouraged funds to flow into the stock market and created a big rise in stock values, especially in 1927, 28, and 29, before the crash.
So what we've got here is World War I leading through a fairly complicated course of events to a situation in which the Fed creates an artificial boom in the United States that is not sustainable.
Now what happened then was that when that boom began to collapse in the fall of 1929 in the stock market, a little earlier in other parts of the economy, the government then began to intervene in a variety of ways to stop the recession.
And virtually everything that was done under the Hoover administration, and then even more so later, after Roosevelt became president, all of these anti-recession, anti-depression measures, almost without exception, had the effect of compounding the problem, of making matters worse than they would have been by getting in the way of the price system, by encouraging various subsidies, bailout, government promises, by propping up prices and wages when the need was for prices and wages to fall in order for markets to clear and unemployment to be diminished.
But this conjunction of extremely unfortunate policies under Hoover and Roosevelt had the effect of transforming what otherwise might have been a fairly mild and brief recession into the Great Depression.
Because of America's connections with the rest of the world through trade and finance, the rest of the world, to a very large degree, was dragged down along with the United States in a cumulative process.
So this was, I know this is a long-winded answer, but it's still a desperately brief reply to your question.
Yeah, well, certainly it is.
And already there, even in that very brief reply, we have at least a couple of major myths being busted.
First of all, that there was any other cause to the bubble in the stock market than greed and bad margin call policies and the kinds of things that we learn in high school.
That actually there was an easy credit policy in conjunction with the Federal Reserve working together with the Bank of England, which created the bubble in the first place.
But then the second one, you only kind of mentioned in passing and didn't really emphasize, but this is, I think, the most important myth that undergirds the American people's more or less collective consent for the idea of this giant New Deal government.
And that is, you imply that Herbert Hoover was something other than a completely hands-off, lousy libertarian.
You seem to say that it wasn't his failure to intervene that made the Depression terrible, and that's why he's such a lousy president.
It's because he really started the New Deal before Roosevelt even took power.
Yeah, the whole idea that Hoover was a do-nothing president is a myth that has grown out of the propaganda of New Dealers trying to differentiate their product and blame Hoover for everything that had gone bust, which is just standard partisan politics.
They propounded ideas that are completely at odds with the facts.
Herbert Hoover was a Wilsonian, and he was very much an interventionist.
Now, when we say that, he's not exactly the same kind of interventionist as, say, some of the most zealous New Dealers, but at the same time, he's certainly not a man who believed that the government should keep hands off the economy.
He believed in what the historians call associationalism.
That meant that the government could and should join forces in all of these kinds of arrangements with government, business, and sometimes labor unions, the representatives of the public playing token roles, concocting joint measures to somehow make the market system operate in a more stable or organized way.
These guys are always talking about standardization and preventing waste, and these are sort of code words we learn when we study history for attempts to suppress competition and promote cartelization.
And Hoover was very much in favor of that kind of government involvement in the economy, and he had been the leader of efforts along those lines as Secretary of Commerce during the 1920s.
So when he became president, he simply continued that kind of interventionism.
Now, he also approved more straightforward kinds of interventionism, like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which he signed, a disastrous measure in any circumstances, but especially in those circumstances.
The big increase in taxes, which was enacted by Congress in 1932, at that time, it was the largest peacetime tax increase in history.
Now, think about that, Scott.
1932.
Things are terrible already in the economy, so what does Congress do?
It enacts the biggest tax increase ever in peacetime.
Hardly anything could have been more destructive in the circumstances.
And in addition, the government intervened in various ways to prop up farm prices, to subsidize credit for homeowners and businesses and bankers.
It created this thing called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was actually a recreated institution.
The War Finance Corporation of World War I, which had lasted after the war until 1925, was brought back to life and called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
And this was a device to basically bail out banks, insurance companies, railroads, other big firms.
And this sort of thing keeps coming up, and in fact, as we can all see right now if we read today's newspapers, it's being recreated again right before our eyes in this massive bailout for banks and financial institutions we're now witnessing.
All of these things were supported or promoted by Hoover.
Hoover was anything but a do-nothing president.
Now, when the New Deal took over, even though Roosevelt had campaigned on a rather conservative platform of cutting government spending and cutting the bureaucracy and keeping sound money and balancing the budget, he did the opposite of all those things, but also because of the kinds of people who flocked into the Roosevelt administration, some fairly radical people came along and joined the administration.
And that, along with all the rent seekers, led to things that were even worse than what had happened under Hoover, because they were more pervasive and, in some cases, really more damaging.
Things like the National Recovery Administration was just a terribly damaging institution in those circumstances.
I had a friend over, and I handed him some Garrett Garrett.
He says, oh, this is interesting, ex-America.
He opened it up, and I think it's right there in the introduction, actually.
It is an extended block quote from Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural address, where he asked Congress for war powers against the emergency as though we were invaded by a foreign foe, he said.
And my neighbor immediately picked up on that and said, whoa, to fight the Depression?
He asked for emergency powers?
And to read Garrett Garrett is basically to come to the understanding that there was a revolution within the forum, he calls it, but that by the end of the New Deal, I guess the ratchet effect as you identify it, America's changed forever.
The Constitution no longer means what it says.
The Congress and the President can do almost anything they want after the precedent set by Franklin Roosevelt.
I guess, would it even be fair to say, Robert Higgs, that by comparison to dictator Roosevelt, Hoover was some kind of libertarian?
Well, Hoover looked good in retrospect, I think.
Not everybody agrees with me.
I think Murray Rothbard, for example, always regarded Hoover as just as egregious as Roosevelt.
I don't, myself.
I think Roosevelt and his administration were considerably worse in almost every regard.
But at the same time, we have to remember that Murray was fighting against this myth that Hoover was the conservative, the do-nothing, the laissez-faire guy.
He was a progressive.
He was a self-identified progressive, right?
Yes, he was.
Late in his life, Hoover wrote an adoring book about Woodrow Wilson, a fancy dad.
He was a lifelong Wilsonian.
John McCain right now is saying that his model is Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive Bull Moose guy.
Yes, the pathological proto-fascist Theodore Roosevelt, the certifiable lunatic.
Anyhow, he makes a good model for McCain, I do believe.
When you see Roosevelt in his inaugural declaring that he will insist on having emergency powers, and he'll seize them if Congress doesn't give them to him.
That's what he said.
He's basically threatening to make himself a dictator if Congress did not make him one.
You've got to wonder, who did the guy think he was?
Hank Paulson?
Yes, right.
He's the guy who defied all of American tradition up until that point and ran for a third term and then even a fourth term in power when no other president, and these are all guys who think they ought to be the king of the world, right?
None of them dared challenge the precedent set by George Washington that we retire after two.
They had to make it the law after that.
There is an interesting little footnote to that, Scott, and that is that Wilson, who of course became almost totally demented after his stroke in 1919, still retained a kind of consciousness, and part of that was that he still fantasized that he would seek a third term and be elected.
Apparently, almost to the day he died, he fantasized that he would come back into power.
I always thought that the emperor from Star Wars, that his cloak was modeled after Woodrow Wilson, but I'm not certain.
Okay, well, alright, so now here comes the big myth.
World War II saved us from the Great Depression.
Robert Higgs, is that the case?
No, it changed the nature of the depression we were in.
Things were different during the war, but conditions during the war were not at all like what we would expect in a normal, peacetime, prosperous economy.
There was reduced level of living from what people had enjoyed in, say, 1940 and 1941 before the U.S. became a declared belligerent in the war, so the level of living went down.
There was a lot of particular economic privation simply because of the government's controls of materials and rationing.
People couldn't, for example, buy a new car because the government had shut down the civilian automobile industry in the early months of 1942, so there weren't any new cars produced during the war, only military vehicles, and very few consumer durable goods, so you couldn't expect to buy appliances for your kitchen or things of that sort.
Even for a while, you couldn't buy typewriters during the war.
Gasoline was rationed in very small amounts, as well as dozens of other important consumer staples.
This was a time when life was not exactly high on the hog for the mass of the people, and in that sense, it was a continuation of the Depression.
At the same time, people were earning a lot of money.
Even if they couldn't turn around and spend that money for the things they wanted, they were earning a lot of money from wartime employment, particularly those people who were employed by the government or by government contractors in munitions plants.
Wages were much higher there than comparable work elsewhere in the economy.
So, people were making a lot of money.
About 40% of the labor force was either in the armed forces or working in some civilian or contractor capacity for war purposes during the three peak years of the war.
So, there was no unemployment.
Of course, the reason there was no unemployment is that so many people had been dragged into the armed forces that it more than overwhelmed the number of unemployed before the war.
It had nothing to do with Keynesian reasons.
That's just a mistake in reasoning to think that it was the big government deficits or the big increase in money supply that wiped out unemployment.
It was the draft that wiped out unemployment.
Almost a blind man could see that.
So, I don't know why so many economists have missed it.
But nonetheless, this war situation was anything but similar to a prosperous, peacetime economy.
And yet, it was not the same as the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was bad especially because you had not only low rates of production of goods and services, but you had a lot of people out of work or worried about becoming out of work any moment.
So, that situation was completely different during the war.
And I think, Scott, that is overwhelmingly why the people who lived through these years all think themselves, think it was a prosperous time.
Because the unemployment had disappeared.
And that had been the big worry for more than a decade.
And so, we need to recognize that.
We can't just say it's five or six more years of depression.
Because it is different.
But at the same time, it's not real prosperity.
There's a lot of production.
All the additional production added during the war went into war goods and services.
The actual amount of private production declined during the war.
And so, the level of living declined with it.
But it was an odd time.
I think it was a time that's simply not comparable in the usual ways we make comparisons in economics with the years before or after the war.
We just have to specifically say what we're talking about in order not to create misleading impressions.
Lou Rockwell was on the show yesterday.
And he cited your work and said that after the war was finally over, I think it was 1946 that you had calculated that the rate of growth finally was, the productivity of the American people was finally unleashed after the war ended.
I think he said 30-something percent growth in one year.
Is that right?
Yes.
If you look at the private portion of GDP, it increased between 1945 and 1946 by at least 30 percent.
Again, it's hard to make that comparison, Scott, because in 1945 we still had price controls and a lot of other controls and rationing.
In 1946, that was being abandoned.
And by the end of 1946, most of it was eliminated.
So it's a difficult comparison to make in a precise and completely defensible way because the conditions we need to compute GDP and to compare one labor force with another and so forth are not comparable in those two years.
But there is no question at all in my mind that 1946 was the most genuinely big increase in private production in U.S. economic history.
Well, now, all the economic controls of the New Deal and some of the new ones from the Second World War hadn't all been lifted, right?
Why weren't they all still strangled to death?
Well, the war had laid a tremendous number of additional controls on top of those that were put in place during the 1930s.
And it's true that most of those New Deal-type controls remained after the war.
But they were not nearly as constraining and restrictive as the wartime controls.
The wartime economy was really a command economy.
It looks like a market economy because people are still buying and selling things in stores and they're still going around and hiring themselves out to work for private employers.
But even the people who were doing that were subject to so many special wartime rules that it's a mirage to think that these are free markets.
And for about 40 percent, if we can believe the GDP, which we can't, but 40 percent, give or take, of the whole economy was directly channeled to war purposes.
And so this is really an economy so different from anything before or after that immediate comparison is just not possible.
I see.
Yeah, I understand.
And that's why everybody's got to read the book.
Again, it's Depression War and Cold War by Robert Higgs.
Now, was there a kind of gap?
I think the history is that they sort of started to demilitarize after the Second World War, but then a political decision was made to pretend that the Soviet Union was a global threat to the United States and that we had to wage this containment policy against them.
And I guess it's your view that that was pretty much just a cynical move to keep selling airplanes and ships and tanks and so forth.
Well, it's a combination, Scott.
I mean, I wouldn't say it was a simple conspiracy by the military-industrial complex.
It's more complex than that.
But that's part of it.
During the war, some industries, like the aircraft industry, were thrown from almost nothing before the war into giant enterprises.
And, of course, when the war production stopped, these people were in for a huge reduction in their rates of output and their profits and everything else.
So to try to reduce the damage that peace was causing to their enterprises, they kept lobbying to have the government not retrench so deeply in the armed forces than to maintain a more modern peacetime armed force than it had in the past.
And they had some success in that, but in the late 40s, the economy was much, much demilitarized, 1947, 8, 9, right up to the time the Korean War broke out.
There were various moves.
The Cold War started to heat up.
The Berlin Crisis.
A lot of things happened.
And, of course, the government was by no means a party with clean hands in all of these events.
But what really turned the tide was the outbreak of the Korean War because this was used not only as an occasion for the United States to project itself, where it really had no good reason to project itself, but it was used as a pretext by people like Acheson and others in the administration who had been trying to persuade the government to persuade the public to go along with a big military buildup.
They wanted this buildup not so much for anything related to Korea.
They wanted it more for Europe, where they wanted to go toe-to-toe with the Russians, and elsewhere in the world where they wanted to contain what they viewed as a threat of Russian expansionism.
But however you characterize this, they were seeking a big enlargement of the armed forces, even though the United States was not at war.
So getting the United States engaged in Korea allowed them, very similar, by the way, to how the war in Iraq has allowed the government to grow massively in the past seven years, in many ways totally unrelated to the war in Iraq.
The Iraq war is a pretext for huge levels of government spending that get spread all over the budget, in many cases in strictly civilian ways, having nothing to do with wars on terror or wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Likewise, in Korea, the government was able to build up the armed forces for the most part in ways unrelated to fighting the war in Korea.
Well, of course, there's a bomber gap and a missile gap and all kinds of things that never really existed that became the excuses for these policies as well.
Well, whenever you scare the public, and this is the standard operating procedure, we're seeing it right now in the financial crisis, scare the public, stampede them into allowing the government to initiate some very large measures, the fright wears off after a while, Scott, particularly when these threatened-to-bogeys never appear.
And so the public begins to think, well, we're spending too much or we're wasting money or we're sacrificing too much along other lines.
And so in order to keep the money flowing where the powers that be want it to flow, they have to continually devise new scares, new ministers, new life-threatening horrors du jour in order to keep people apprehensive and gain their assent for being fleeced.
Can you address the dollar as the reserve currency of the world and the relation of that reserve currency status, the Bretton Woods Agreement and then Bretton Woods II and so forth, and in regards to our inheriting all the empires of the world lest the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, it seems like Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell both talk quite a bit about the relation between, well, as Lew put it yesterday, if there's imperial power in your country with nuclear weapons, you're pretty much going to loan them money if they want you to.
Well, I don't know that the reserve currency status of the dollar in itself is the critical thing.
I mean, in my mind, what's important is that when the government undertakes to put its armed forces all over the world and to spend huge amounts of money year after year, it needs to have a way of bankrolling this, and using the Federal Reserve is immensely helpful in that capacity, particularly during crises when it's not possible to suddenly get more tax revenue, but the government wants to suddenly spend more money.
So the Fed can accommodate government borrowing, and the government is in a much stronger position to the extent that the Fed's easy money policy to accommodate the government spending surges does not lead to a quick decline in the purchasing value of dollars.
So one way to stop that decline in the purchasing power of dollars is to get foreign central banks and foreign firms and persons in general to hold more dollars.
And so that means that if they're holding dollars and using dollars in transactions, like, for example, people use dollars to buy and sell oil, that's an immense transaction demand for dollar balances in today's world.
But to some extent after World War II, the whole world needed dollar balances because the U.S. had the only big intact industrial economy, and so if people wanted to buy industrial goods from the United States, they needed dollars, and the Fed supplies the dollars to them.
And this system became, under the Bretton Woods Agreement, the kind of anchor.
It was the kind of dollar standard for the world, and the dollar up until 1971 remained tied to gold, at least in the sense that the Fed would redeem dollars for gold for foreign central banks, not for anybody else.
And, of course, we couldn't even transact in gold as U.S. private citizens.
But that little link to gold remained until Nixon clipped it off in August 1971.
But all this time, and even up to the present to some extent, dollar balances held all over the world allow the Fed to be more expansive than it otherwise could be without creating more dollar price inflation.
So that, to me, is the importance of the reserve currency status.
It surely plays other roles as well, but they're pretty complicated and hard to explain in layman's terms, I think.
Well, you know, one thing that Ron Paul talks about is that, well, the way he calls it is we're exporting our dollars, like he says, sort of hides the inflation because everybody else is collecting them all around the world and that kind of thing.
But he's also talked about how that has encouraged the situation where American production has almost, I don't know to what degree or what the percentages are, but a great amount of American production has moved overseas, and that that's intimately connected with our inflationary money dollar standard situation.
Can you explain that?
I guess I have a different view of most of this offshoring.
I think it's, for the most part, it's just the product of the development of the world economy.
And as different labor markets have produced skilled labor forces or sufficiently trained labor forces that these people could be brought to work in plants that multinational corporations would put in these economies that people have taken advantage of these opportunities for trade.
So I don't think that the offshoring problem, I mean, in my mind, is not a problem at all because I think national boundaries only confuse people.
Economics and economic relationships are really not constrained by borders.
You could forget borders and all the laws of economics apply.
It's just a lot of people trading with one another.
The only reason the national borders have become important is because they define the areas in which a particular national government can distort market forces.
And, of course, that happens all the time in every economy.
There are countless ways in which the local national government interferes with what would otherwise be the free flow of exchange.
I personally don't.
I'm not a nationalist.
I'm not a statist.
In my view, the world would be a better place if it didn't have any nation states.
So these offshoring problems don't bother me in the least.
I'm happy when Indians or Mexicans have opportunities for employment.
And I certainly resent it when some guy in Toledo thinks that he should have access to government power because the employer wants to switch the job from Toledo to Hyderabad.
Well, at the same time, though, if that guy in Toledo is a skilled worker and the government does intervene, I know at least in some ways there's the Overseas Finance Corporation or whatever that will basically, if the locals in Indonesia burn your factory down or something, then the U.S. taxpayer will bail you out.
The federal government will basically subsidize your offshoring.
And so no wonder the guy in Toledo is mad when his job is gone.
And it's not just the market, but the government has intervened in some ways, right?
Well, at the same time, there are all kinds of government interventions that cut in the opposite direction.
Probably the reason the guy has the job in Toledo to begin with is because of government trade restrictions that keep foreigners from selling their products in the American market.
These are very hard to sort out, Scott.
They run in all directions, and it's very tempting to just seize on some of them or a part of them and draw a conclusion.
But in a world so infused with interventionism by all governments in all directions, sometimes they subsidize offshoring, sometimes they subsidize onshoring.
So it's virtually impossible to add them all up and say, where does the balance lie?
I don't think anybody really knows.
We just live in a world of chaotic interventionism.
There are so many forms of intervention, so rapidly changing, so hard to track in terms of their secondary and tertiary effects and ramifications, that all we can do is recognize that, as Mises called it, this is just interventionist chaos.
People who talk about having a market system just aren't aware of the world we live in.
Okay, now, when you talked about you don't support the idea of nation-states, I just want to be clear here.
It's not that you're for a one-world government.
You're an anarchist.
You're for private property and no states at all.
That's right.
I'm for secession right down to the last man, Jack.
Yeah.
All right, I love it.
All right, so one more question, and it's sort of a two-parter.
Is the current crisis the end of dollar hegemony, and is it the end of the American empire?
I don't think so.
Certainly, if they go through with a $700 billion or perhaps even more bailout, which will just be an increment to the government's deficit, there's going to have to be a monetary accommodation to pull that off, and that's going to put tremendous pressure on the dollar.
So it's certainly going to move in the direction of encouraging people throughout the world to use a more reliable currency.
But when you look at the choices, they're not all good, Scott.
In the past, the dollar hasn't been exactly a hunky-dory store of value, but it's been better than most national currencies.
Right.
And so even though right now it might look attractive for people to switch to euros, they can't be confident that the euro will always be kept in its reins either, and similarly with alternative currencies that they might adopt.
So I just think that so many relationships in the world right now are defined with relation to dollars and institutions that deal in dollars, banks that issue dollar balances and so forth, that to say that this would just disappear quickly is, in my mind, unthinkable.
I think certainly we can move in a direction where people begin to substitute against it, and I won't be surprised if that continues.
I don't think the current events portend a quick end of the dollar regime, nor do I think it portends a quick end of American imperialism.
It's a very big deal what's happening now, but the American economy and the American government are much bigger still.
So when we put this into perspective, I think we need to hold back from making kind of doomsday forecasts.
I'm not inclined to see the world changing like that.
I may be wrong.
It may be that a week from now I wake up and hell is broken loose and people have given up on dollars and the American troops have been brought home from 140 countries.
But I'm not banking on that.
Yeah, I think I had a dream like that one time.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your perspective, and frankly I appreciate the opportunity to let more people know about you and your work.
Everybody, that's Robert Higgs.
He's the author of Depression War and Cold War, Crisis and Leviathan, Against Leviathan, The Resurgence of the Warfare State, Neither Liberty Nor Safety.
He's a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and the editor of the Independent Review.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show today, Bob.
You're welcome, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
