05/23/13 – Robert P. Murphy – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and he's the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism and the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
And he keeps this great website, freeadviceatconsultingbyrpm.com Robert P. Murphy, consultingbyrpm.com Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm great.
Good, good.
Very happy to hear it and very happy to have you here.
And let me just take a couple more seconds to talk about how much I like your books.
I really like your books.
I read the both of them there.
And the Politically Incorrect Guides, if people aren't familiar, they're sort of the economics for dummies or politics for dummies sort of a thing, a kind of a brief introduction rather than graduate-level textbooks or whatever.
And I wouldn't say all of the Politically Incorrect Guides to this, that, and the other thing is my very favorite, but I certainly like yours a lot.
And I really think that on the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, every kind of liberal or conservative, if I may be so overly broad in my definitions, every kind of liberal or conservative argument that I could think of to try to contradict whatever you wrote in there, your next statement said, nope, already took care of that too.
And you just really did such a great job in answering any and all objections to that wildcat, laissez-faire, free market capitalism that causes so many problems in the world, Bob.
I just love it and I want to congratulate you again on it, thank you again for it, and really recommend it to people, that they read it, that they learn it good, that they learn it well, I guess, and that they share it with other people, liberals or conservatives or really anybody, or just the young who need to learn, yeah, that's right, the minimum wage is a horrible thing to do to somebody, all of these things, it's just great.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate that, and it's true that I did it in that book, there are certain arguments, topics where I didn't just say what the standard conservative right-wing talking point would be on something, because a lot of times, like you know, it doesn't really make sense, or like it's not consistent with their other views on things, and so I think it's really the libertarian position that's consistent, that says, well no, the government, if it can't be trusted in domestic policy, can't be trusted in foreign policy either.
Exactly, and see that's, especially I think it's important for liberals to see that too, you know, well these libertarians, they really don't care for whoever happens to be the most powerful corporate rich at any given time, you really would be happy to see the free market serve them ultimate defeat, if that's what they had coming.
Yeah, and I think it helps too that there is a consistency there, so it's true that a lot of times the people that talk radio, show host or whatever, they'll rail against food stamps for poor people, but then they won't care about, well we needed to do the bailout of the Wall Street firms in 2008, because the whole economy would have come down, and so when someone's talking like that, it's like okay, it does sound like they really don't care about poor people, and whereas, you know, it's not really that they can't sleep at night without violations of property rights.
Right, and now it's funny to me actually that apparently fewer people come from the left to libertarianism than from the right, and I guess, well I don't really understand why that is, frankly.
It seems like liberals are people who, they start out in the most very basic sense, they really at least think that they care what happens to the least of their neighbors, right, the least advantaged of their neighbors, and think that everybody, even somebody who's the son of the scum of the earth, ought to have a decent chance to get by in the world, and have a decent life and whatever.
So it seems like they would all give up liberalism immediately, and become libertarians.
I mean, what, are they going to become conservatives?
They hate life, you know?
They don't care about the least of people.
They only want the least of people to die sooner and get out of their way.
I think you're probably right that statistically, if you looked at libertarians and said, you know, what was your background, it's probably true that more of them would say, oh yeah, I used to call myself conservative, then I switched, and that was certainly true in my case.
I think that's probably changing, though.
So in other words, I bet you the proportion now is different from what it was 10 years ago, and I think some of it is just, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that if, or network effect, if you want, that once, you know, in other words, when the major libertarian writers, if they had come themselves from a conservative angle, you know, that's the kind of arguments they could use.
So like in my case, I first realized, oh yeah, taxing corporations doesn't make sense, minimum wage laws are stupid, blah, blah, blah.
And then it was only later through consistency that I realized, oh wait a minute, well then why should I be in support of Desert Storm if I think these bureaucrats can't even, you know, set the minimum wage, that doesn't make any sense.
Right.
So, you know, if I make an argument like that, I could see why an anti-war liberal who hates big business or is very suspicious isn't going to trust my argument because, you know, they're going to get a sense of the stuff I care about.
But like, especially with Ron Paul's candidacy, you know, and all his educational efforts, I've met plenty of people who got into the liberty movement because of Ron Paul and they told me they used to be socialists or at least didn't have a problem with socialism.
So I think it is changing and it helped to have somebody like Ron Paul because he was anti-war but also anti-bailout and anti-Fed and you needed that combination so at least people, you know, you might still think he's crazy, but at least there's a consistency to his craziness whereas, you know, these other people, it seemed like, oh come on, they're just citing the Constitution or property rights or whatever for their program that they want to defend.
It's not really that they care about that because, you know, they don't have a problem throwing somebody in jail for smoking a plant.
You're telling me that person cares about individual liberty?
That doesn't make any sense.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I mean, that's my thing has always been because I learned in high school, I learned from leftists that libertarianism was the rich white man's anarchy.
But, of course, the truth is that no, liberalism and conservatism are the rich white man's anarchy.
That's why they built this country the way they built it.
Fascism suits them.
But what libertarianism is, is anarchy for everyone, even the least father-havenist, least educated, least advantage-havenist person.
They all have sacred natural rights too and deserve to have them protected and even if you never met them or never even met anybody who ever met them, you're still against locking them up for consensual behavior or whatever, like you were just saying.
Yeah, and I thought there's a logic, I think, to the theory, but also just practically or pragmatically I think it's more realistic.
You know, I think a lot of times libertarians have this rap against them, oh, we're just naive with our heads in the clouds and we don't know the way the world works.
I would say it's the other way around.
When someone like Noam Chomsky says, I don't trust these mega-rich corporations and that's why I want to have a strong central government to keep them down and to keep them in check, I want to say, what are you, crazy?
You think if there's these rich corporations that have billions of dollars that they're not going to be the ones that take control of that government apparatus when they fund the campaigns of the senators and what have you and the president?
You think like the unorganized working-class people, they're going to be the ones that this powerful government is going to respond to and not these super-rich corporations?
That's crazy.
Well, you know, Mark Ames, he's decided that libertarians are the worst thing in the world over the last few years or something.
I'm not sure why, but he used to be a lot nicer.
And I interviewed him a few times with actually the kind of frame of the argument being, or the frame of the interview being, he's arguing for liberal statism and I'm arguing for libertarianism and we're trying to figure out what all sames we have and what all difference is.
And I think, you know, I basically got him to concede that regulatory capture was the name of the game in the first place, that the industrialists wanted a railroad commission and they wanted food, you know, FDA or whatever it was called originally.
They wanted nationalization of the radio waves.
They wanted a Federal Reserve Board, a Federal Reserve System to control banking and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so to me, that's just ipso facto proof that, man, we need to wither that state away as fast as we can and take those advantages away from these private conglomerates that, you know, after all can affect our lives in major ways and whatever and take their gun out of their hand first and then maybe we can whoop their ass with the market.
Ames basically was conceding that, okay, maybe regulatory capture was the name of the game in the first place, but now look at how powerful and gigantic these corporations are, where many of them have GDPs bigger than many of the nation states in the world, bigger than many of the nation states in the world combined even.
How if you just withered away the U.S. state that you would basically, they wouldn't wither away with it.
They would not go away.
Now it's too late.
Now they've used the state to empower themselves so much that they would be the new governments.
They would be, we would have, you know, four or five corporations would just rule us all with an iron fist, that kind of deal like that.
What do you think about that?
Well, I mean, I understand the argument, but I would just say that, I mean, let me put it this way.
That seems like a very risky Hail Mary path that he's going for.
In other words, he's saying, yeah, right now there's this institution that has nuclear bombs and riot police at their disposal and tanks, and there's these rich corporations that are lawless and we can't control them, and so what my move is is let's try to take, you know, we'll take over the group with the nuclear bombs and stuff, and we'll beat back the billionaires that way, as opposed to just preaching to the world, why don't we just reduce power all around and stop supporting these institutions and just equally enforce the law on everybody.
You know, to me that makes more sense, that you don't want to have these super powerful government apparatus around that can form cartels and that can crack down on people selectively when you know there's a good chance that you're not going to be in charge of it.
It's going to be these global corporations that you're so afraid of.
Okay, now here's the thing.
Did you see this article last week about how there are, what, four or five mutual funds that control all the banks, that control all the corporations, that control all the private capital in the world, and that, boy, it really is a lot more centralized than you would think, and you can understand why, I guess, with the mutual fund situation, right, where you have these gigantic institutions that own these huge amounts of stock and these various corporations and whatever.
I mean, did you see the article?
Is that oversimplified and is that only a symptom of state power?
Unfortunately, I don't know the specific article you're talking about, but in general, right, it's certainly not the case that the U.S. federal government and the other major European powers and so forth are contributing to smaller financial institutions.
I mean, the Federal Reserve, one way to describe it is it's a cartelization scheme.
It props up, it literally props up banks, and everybody knows that the actual rationale for why we allegedly needed TARP and the Fed to do all of its extraordinary measures in 2008 was people were saying, well, if they didn't do that, all of the major investment banks would have gone down.
So you can hardly, you know, it's not libertarianism's fault that there's all these major super-concentrated financial institutions when the apologists for government intervention are telling us we needed to do this, otherwise these big firms would have gone down.
So, I mean, their own rhetoric is saying they're propping them up.
You know, and just things like the U.S. tax.
I mean, why does everyone invest in Wall Street-based mutual funds?
It's because there's this punitive tax code, but then they give exemptions with your 401K and other tax-privileged or tax-qualified retirement plans.
So it's like they have this huge club that's the default, and then they say, but if you funnel your money into these Wall Street-run institutions, we will tax you less.
And so that's why everyone now is taught, oh, that's a responsible thing to do for my retirement is to put it into a mutual fund.
So, I mean, it's not that the free market is causing that outcome.
It's that the government is steering your money there, and that's not a coincidence.
Ah, see.
Now, that's really a big part of this, isn't it, that the artificially low interest rates force everybody's auntie, everybody, to try to be a speculator.
They have to put their money in real estate or in stocks or something, because if they just keep it down at the local thrift, they're losing out to inflation all day long.
Yeah, that's exactly right, and it's, you know, if you read Ludwig von Mises from back, you know, he's writing from things in the 30s and 40s, for example, and he just says matter-of-factly how the common man saves either by buying bonds or life insurance.
You know, nowadays people say, well, are you crazy?
You can't do that because of inflation.
You get killed.
You've got to be in the market to just tread water and stay ahead of inflation.
And so you're right.
That's just another, and again, I don't think that's a coincidence.
Right.
You know, so we're not being crazy conspiracy theorists when we say the money center people, the people on Wall Street and whatever, they benefited from the creation of the Fed, and this is all documented stuff.
I mean, Murray Rothbard, among others, obviously, you know, a creature from Jekyll Island and so forth, all those guys, they can document and show you who supported the founding of it.
It wasn't just a bunch of disinterested academics who got together and said, let's have a central bank, you know, and all the Wall Street people are going, oh, no, we don't want that.
I mean, no.
No, it was Henry P. Davidson representing J.P. Morgan, and Frank Vanderlip representing John D. Rockefeller, and Nelson Aldrich, the most powerful Republican senator, whose daughter had just married John Rockefeller Jr., and Andrew Mellon, the deputy assistant or whatever, secretary of treasury, and then Jacob Schiff from Kuhn Loeb and Company representing the Rothschilds.
Yeah, it was not a bunch of, I think Tom Woods says, geez, I don't see a bunch of professors and public-interested, you know, just academics here saying, you know what would be the ideal system?
Nothing to do with it.
Right, and it certainly wasn't like a bunch of labor union leaders or something.
Right.
You know, rich fat cats probably literally had top hats on when they're at meetings.
Although they do sell inflation, and they have somewhat of an argument, right?
They sell inflation as beneficial to the common man.
This is what created the ownership society in America, and, yeah, there's been a housing bubble or two here or there, but people get to borrow dollars and pay back dimes.
So really it's the banks who are getting ripped off, right?
It's, I mean, I know you're being sarcastic.
Yeah, it is astounding how they have framed it so that, and especially, you know, lately with our current crisis, the Keynesian economists in particular have somehow framed the debate such that people are clamoring for more inflation.
They're angry at the tightwad Bernanke and the European Central Bank and Bank of Japan and so forth for, you know, why don't you guys give us more inflation?
We want prices to rise more quickly, and that's the way we'll get out of this mess.
Which, you know, just on the face of it, you know, you're unemployed, you're struggling as it is, and then these major academics are saying the way to help people is to have gasoline and electricity be more expensive next year and have, you know, medical costs go up even faster.
So it is amazing that they've somehow, that that's now the default, and guys like you and me sound like we're nutjobs for opposing inflation, that, oh, we're antiquated and we're thinking in terms of 19th century.
But that is where the debate has gone.
So you're right, it's amazing just to sit back and behold it.
How could they have swung the debate like that so you and I are back on our heels and arguing, no, no, no, printing up money and giving it to rich bankers isn't the way to help poor people.
Right.
Well, you know, here's the thing, too, is it's kind of like I had this conversation with Chris Coyne about the distortion in the economy since World War II and the creation of the permanent national security state and the world empire and all the arms manufacturers and how, you know, when you look at the seen versus the unseen or, you know, the imaginary counterfactual, what if we had not, you know, embraced the Kenan doctrine and whatever after World War II, how different things might be.
The same kind of thing goes to really if you want to go back all the way to 1913, obviously the wars, you know, have a lot to do with it, too.
But just domestically speaking, it seems like capitalism itself has been where the definition, and I don't know, maybe this isn't much different than the way it was before, but it seems like when it comes to savings in order to build new businesses and new productivity and employ new people and whatever, that the concept that a regular person would just save up money and invest their own money that they save into their own business and make it or break it and kind of be their own man and be independent and see if they can do it and whatever, all of that is off.
Like we talked about before, it's always artificially low rate.
It's always very difficult to save.
They always prefer to try to push your money into the stock market or something like that.
And when it comes to you being an entrepreneur and creating your own business or something, you're supposed to go straight to the bank and borrow somebody else's money rather than get your own out of your own savings account.
And it's not even somebody else's money.
It's brand new money that the bank's creating.
And so there's really no capital left in capitalism.
It's all inflation.
And so it just seems like it's an entirely different – it's such a different creature from what free market capitalism would be per a sound money kind of standard since 1913 that who knows what kind of different world we'd be living in, right?
Like we're so far off now.
Yeah, that's a great point you're making.
The way I would try to put it is – and I'm sure I was guilty of this too earlier in my career and maybe I still am seeing the remnants of it – where you come up as a free market economist, and so your natural inclination is to defend everything that happens in the U.S. economy and say, well, that's basically capitalism.
And so you end up defending corporations and if somebody gets injured on the job or whatever, you say, well, there's a cost of regulation, da-da-da-da-da-da.
And the average person who's not trained in economics or whatever just kind of looks with his eyes and can just tell, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense.
I get laid off in the factory, get shipped to Bangladesh or something, and I can't get a job.
Now, this is crazy.
And so it's true that having tariffs and having the government crack down on employers and impose all kinds of new codes on business, that's not the solution.
But the average person who feels this is not right, this is unfair, rich people are screwing us, that person's also correct.
And what you just said, I think, is right.
The guys who are defending laissez-faire capitalism are correct in terms of their principles, but where they go wrong is if they then say, and what we see right now in the U.S. economy, that's basically capitalism and let me go defend this existing structure.
And you're right, if we had actual laissez-faire capitalism, I don't think Wall Street would be nearly as powerful.
There wouldn't be this huge market in derivatives and stuff like that.
So you can defend all that stuff, but you need to realize that it's an outgrowth, I think, primarily of fiat money and the Federal Reserve System and things like that.
And what actual capitalism or laissez-faire free market outcomes would be would look nothing like the present system.
You mentioned the word conspiracy earlier.
No, it's not really a conspiracy theory.
It's just history that interested parties created the central bank for their own purposes.
I would just add that it's also not conspiracy.
It's just policy of what they do and who benefits and who loses in it.
And one of the greatest little anecdotes of this from the past few years, I think, was when Alan Greenspan went on The Daily Show.
Now, Jon Stewart, he's no Bob Murphy or anything, but he had some pretty good questions for Alan Greenspan.
And one of the things that he said was, hey, listen, I understand you guys want to cut the interest rates in order to get more money into the stock market and get that stock market pumping, right?
And Greenspan says, yeah, yeah, that's right, Jon Stewart.
And he goes, yeah, but what about the little old lady who's trying to save?
She's really getting her ass handed to her while you're saving Wall Street.
And Greenspan goes, well, yeah, you know, I guess that's more or less right.
So there you go.
It's not there's no one going, I'm a real mean person and I'm going to hurt this old lady.
It's just that, hey, this guy's a genius.
He knows what he's doing and that's what he's doing.
He's hurting the old lady to benefit Wall Street.
That's his job.
Yeah, I love that, Jon Stewart.
And because he also asked him, he said, wait a minute, I thought you were a free market.
Let the market kind of decide, guys.
So why are you setting interest rates?
And that was just brilliant.
And, you know, Greenspan, well, you know, back in the gold era, maybe that made sense.
But now you need a technocrat.
So, yeah, I love that because, again, Stewart, you know, not that he's a libertarian or something, but at least he was taking the rhetoric seriously and realizing, wait a minute, this is inconsistent.
So I think you're right.
Yeah, with a lot of this stuff, I mean, it's a complex thing.
So, you know, I do a lot of issues like with energy regulation, carbon tax, that kind of stuff.
And you could see that, for example, the natural gas producers, you know, for a while they were against it.
And then they got on board with the carbon tax.
And why would they do that?
It's not because they had a sudden change of heart and read some, you know, the IPCC's latest report.
It's because they realized, wait a minute, this thing is going to hurt coal more than us.
And then, you know, the electricity market right now, they can't switch over to wind turbines.
So, you know, our business will go up by selling natural gas to refiners, to producers, you know, electricity producers, if there's a carbon tax because that will kill coal more than us.
So it's things like that where they can kind of see something coming, and then they realize, well, how is this going to benefit us?
And they go ahead and then start lobbying.
So it's never, though, you know, the people for Greenpeace or PETA or whatever, they're not going to get the bill they want.
They should at least realize that.
Okay.
Now, so I want to see if I can get this right here.
What if I was the magical dictator of the place for a little while, and I only really meant well, and I was just trying to make everything right again, and I abolished fractional reserve banking, or at least abolished government support for fractional reserve banking, and we ended up, the market ended up mandating some kind of sound-ish money and things like that.
The national government ceased to exist.
Call it Austerity Plus.
I would just vanish them off into the void.
The Mandrake mechanism, you could call it, if you wanted to.
A little inside joke for the Jekyll Island fans out there.
So if that happened, would I completely destroy the economy?
Because there's this meme going around that austerity doesn't work.
It's a proven fact now.
All this austerity, all you're doing is you're taking money out of the hands of the weakest people and hurting them, and it's not even helping the rest of the economy anyway.
Well, it's a subtle point or question.
So somebody like, with the views of Peter Schiff or Ron Paul or me, we think that the economy was on an unsustainable track, and that the collapse of the housing bubble and the stuff that was coming to a head in 2008, that was the natural outcome, that the economy got pumped up unrealistically, and it had to come crashing down before things could get back to normal and resume a solid growth, and that Bernanke just came in and flooded the market with $100 bills he created out of thin air, metaphorically, and that that just postponed the crisis.
So it is true if we went back to honest money and the government slashed its budget, whatever, there would be a short-term depression with a small d.
I mean things would be awful, I'd say, for six months.
But the point is that's going to happen anyway, and the question is just do you want to get it over with now?
Well, it's going to be not as bad, or do you want to postpone it so that when it hits a few years from now it's that much worse?
And the stuff about austerity or whatever, I mean a lot of it too is governments, especially in Europe, they're raising taxes while they're doing modest cuts in spending.
So that's certainly not a solution I would have recommended.
Yeah, if you want to rein in budget deficits, go ahead and slash spending.
And even normal academic literature supports that claim, that if you're going to rein in a budget deficit while the unemployment rate is high, the way you do it is you cut government spending, you don't raise taxes on people, and then be shocked that businesses don't hire more when their tax bill just went up.
Wouldn't you recommend kicking rich people off of welfare first, like the arms industrialists, instead of little old ladies off of Social Security?
Well, sure, I mean just for one thing, because that's where a lot of the money is.
You know what I mean?
Well, there's a lot of money in Social Security too, and a lot of little old ladies.
Yeah, Social Security, but in terms of food stamps or something like that, I mean that's not in the grand scheme a big thing compared to the Pentagon's budget.
Or the bank bailouts.
Right, exactly.
So there's real austerity, bankruptcy for Wall Street.
But in other words, what you're saying is, yes, go ahead and give me full-scale deflation, good and hard, because we'll be alright after that.
You're right, that is what I'm saying.
And also, just with a supplement too, it's because I'm saying there is no alternative.
The things people are worried about saying, no, it would be awful if we did what you said.
I'm saying there's no way around that.
We've got to go.
That's it, Bob Murphy, the heroic Bob Murphy.
Mises.org, consultingbyrpm.com, the politically incorrect guide to capitalism.
Thanks, Bob.
Thanks, Scott.
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