All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, I got the great Sheldon Richman on the line, and he is Executive Editor of the Libertarian Institute and is the author of a great many books, including Coming to Palestine, his recent one, and the brand-new What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, proudly published by the Libertarian Institute.
That's at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
Thank you for having me back, and I'm doing fine.
Thank you.
Congratulations on your wonderful accomplishment.
Well, I appreciate that.
It's 20 years in the making, and I'm glad to see it all between two covers now.
So my part is I edited it, which means I read the whole thing just once, because I've got a pretty full plate here.
But man, I love it.
It's so great.
And so, well, let's start with that kind of goofy title, What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
What's going on there?
Well, it is the title essay, and I stole the title and then modified it from a book collection.
It was actually a collection of essays from the late 19th century by the great classical liberal sociologist.
In fact, one of the founders of sociology, William Graham Sumner of Yale University, who wrote a book called What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, and it's been a long time since I read it, but it has a lot of good stuff in it.
Anyway, I was writing an essay on ethics and how it relates to interpersonal activity, and of course, that then takes you into political stuff, because how can you treat other people?
What's right and what's wrong?
What are the limits and all that stuff?
And my influences, my orientation is really to the ancient Greece, the Greeks, the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, most of all, but Socrates, you'll find some in Plato, not his political philosophy, but Plato, Stoics, lots of strains.
There were differences, but then there are also broad agreements about what's the proper way?
What's the good life?
And that involves how do you treat other people?
So I spun that out.
I rely a lot on my friend and philosopher.
I admire him greatly, Robert McClung at Auburn University, a very good libertarian.
And at the end, it occurred to me that that title was the perfect title, What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, because we're social animals.
We flourish to the max in society, and libertarians don't always stress this and not imply that and I think sometimes non-libertarians believe that our symbol of the libertarian life is Ted Kaczynski without the letter bombs, living in some shack somewhere, where was he, Montana?
Living a hermit's life off the grid, no amenities, and that's somehow the perfect libertarian life, which is ridiculous because we libertarians praise the division of labor all the time.
Division of labor.
What is that?
That's social.
So I've written a lot over the years about what is social cooperation?
What have the great classical liberals, libertarians, what have they said about that?
And that's why I called the whole book by that title.
Yeah, but oh, that's commie talk.
That's positive rights and libertarians only believe in negative rights and the natural right to be left alone by everybody else, so now you're some kind of kooky deviationist, I accuse.
Well, actually, I didn't say anything that implied, quote, positive rights.
I do think we owe people things, but libertarians like to talk about the non-aggression principle and I call it, because I want to be more explicit, I call it the non-aggression obligation.
I think I may be the first to put it that way, at least among libertarians.
But that means that's owing them a negative, first of all.
You owe it to them not to aggress against them.
Now the question is, why is that?
And I explore that in the title essay.
Why is that the case?
If you're not religious, so you're not saying, well, that's God's commandment, you can't rely on God, what rational explanation can come up for that?
And I, again, drawing on my influences, I'm not inventing this, perhaps in my reformulation I've maybe hit on some new angle, I don't know.
But I want to point out that to owe them not to aggress against them, and that's what you're owed by other people, where does that come from?
And I want to argue, again, in this sort of Greek tradition, the reason you owe them that is because you owe other people what you owe yourself, namely reason and rationality.
If you're going to flourish as a social animal, as a language-using, reasoning animal, then you want to be around reasoning, language-using people.
You want everybody to be that way, because you're going to prosper to the max, you're going to flourish to the max.
I don't want to just put it in terms of prosperity, like material prosperity, but flourish in the fullest sense.
So that means you don't treat people as ends, sorry, merely as means, and you don't use force.
You treat them as conversation partners.
And that's where that comes from.
So there's not positive rights, it's not positive rights in the sense of, you know, welfare rights from the state.
Of course, I'm just provoking you there, I understand, but I want people to understand and prevent any misunderstanding there about what that means.
So the non-aggression principle, that's the first starting point for all of libertarianism.
And you're just, you're talking about the same thing.
You're not really modifying the definition of what you're talking about.
You're just modifying the term itself in a way to make it a little bit more explicit of what that kind of already means, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You owe it to others not to aggress.
And you can put it in your, you can put it from the other perspective, right?
Other people owe it to me not to aggress against me.
That's, we can also call it the right to life, but that's what that means.
The right not to be aggressed against, that's the one and only right.
Actually, an essay that didn't make it into this volume deals with that issue.
And again, this is stuff I've learned from Roderick Long and other people that we, in a sense, we really only have one right.
Now we can come up with an exhaustive list of legitimate rights, right, that each of us has, not a positive right, but you could state the negative rights in a list that goes on forever.
But all those would just simply be implications of the one true right, which is the right to not be aggressed against.
And that means treating other people as ends in themselves and not merely as means to your ends.
All right.
Now, but so here's the thing, and I don't think that the book is necessarily explicitly meant this way, but it is, it's sort of amounts to an argument to the left, to liberal, well, the entire left half of anybody, right, the liberals, progressives, and every different kind of socialist and whoever, that if you have, as your principle, flourishing for, say for example, the people who have the least opportunity in the first place and that kind of thing, that really, no, it's liberty that is the answer, even for the people who have the least to start.
Not some kind of socialism or government program or this or that, which of course is contrary to their, you know, almost all of their preexisting understandings of the way things are.
And they would probably presume before they read the book that the idea essentially must be that you're running cover for big business.
That when rich, powerful people do what they want at other people's expense, it's okay.
Isn't that what libertarianism means according to liberals and leftists?
Isn't that what they presume about us?
And so why isn't that what this is about?
Because I know it's not- Well, I do intend it the way you said, you said I probably didn't intend it this way and then you went on.
I did intend it that way.
When I was writing so many of the essays in this book, that's exactly what I had in mind.
This is much a book aimed at, I will say good faith, well-intentioned leftists who are today status leftists.
I mean, I consider myself a left libertarian, so I want to be careful about leftists, but status leftists.
And who are good intentioned and well-meaning and good faith.
Yeah.
Anyway, because you can distinguish them, I think, from people that just want power or who just hate, who are motivated in their leftism by hate, just like there are people on the right- Well, but let's not let it pigeonhole too much either because, I mean, really conservatism, American conservatism is generally about preserving old classical liberalism.
The liberalism of Benjamin Franklin and all of that kind of thing in the first place, right?
So I think you attacked Franklin in here a couple of times, but you know what I mean.
So it's not exclusive.
It's not like right-wingers won't enjoy it or anything.
There's all kinds of great stuff.
It's for everybody.
I mean, it's for libertarians because I think a lot of libertarians overlook a lot of these points and I've once in a while been criticized for making these points by libertarians.
And it's for good faith conservatives as well.
But as far as the way you posed the question, you said maybe this wasn't part of your intention.
I explicitly talked to the left.
I mean, there's one chapter in particular, it's funny you said, oh, this makes you sound like some kind of commie in the beginning.
Bastiat, and I make a big deal of this, Bastiat wrote a chapter and nobody ever, no libertarian discusses this chapter.
People missed it.
In his magnum opus, which he never lived long enough to edit, but Economic Harmonies, he's got a chapter called, chapter 11, and the title is something like private property and common wealth.
And that's two words, common wealth, not commonwealth.
And in that article, he points out that if you have, and again, he's a, what, first half of the 19th century French radical pro-market liberal, radical liberal.
And libertarians love him, but they neglect this chapter, where he says that if you have, when you have technological innovation and free competition, society at large gets more and more free stuff.
And this is the way he puts it.
This is almost a direct quote, wealth or value or utility, whatever term you want to use, gets transferred from the realm of the private realm to the communal realm.
That's his term, the communal realm.
Because think about it, what does technology really do when you think about it?
When we substitute technology for human labor, we're substituting the free services of nature for the onerous effort of human beings, right?
When you use water power, gravity, you know, any of those things, electricity, you're harnessing the free services of nature.
Now, In other words, individual liberty creates a lot of positive externalities for others who weren't involved in the actual creation of any specific thing.
Costs of production fall, and prices will fall if there's competition.
In other words, if the original seller tries to keep his price up, even though he's using a lot of free services of nature, someone else will come along, unless the state stops them, someone else will come along and offer, you know, the same kind of service, but not charge so much for the free stuff.
So the price will begin to fall and approach the cost of human labor and the effort involved in extracting resources.
So in other words, the point I want to make is stuff becomes more and more free, and free in the sense of, you know, no cost.
I mean, think about it.
If in 1900, it took X amount of money to buy a chicken, or X number of, let's say, you know, two hours of labor to buy a chicken, and in the year 2000, it takes like 15 minutes to buy a chicken, you're getting, it's as if you're getting a whole lot of the utility of that chicken for free.
So think of all the labor you don't have to expend to buy the chicken, and there've been books on this.
There's a great book called Myths of Rich and Poor, which talk about the falling amount of labor the average manufacturing worker needs to exert to buy stuff, and it's not just the same stuff.
Of course, it's better stuff, right?
Well, and throughout the book too, Sheldon, you routinely attack privilege, and I don't mean like the common PC fad of being white or whatever, but in terms of political rigging of the game against the little guy by the big guy, and that seems to be your enemy.
That seems to be the issue you focus on far more than criticizing socialism or, you know, for the poor subsidies or whatever.
Yes, I'm talking about all, you know, direct and indirect subsidies by government, which mainly, you know, go to business, and certainly the most significant ones go to business and larger business.
I'm talking about intellectual property.
I'm talking about zoning, land use restrictions that hurt poor people, occupational license that protect people.
Yeah, that's what I mean by privilege.
I don't mean some sort of vague thing like we're all guilty for slavery.
No, that's nonsense.
I'm talking about today, real privileges today, but also- As you just said, unless the state stops them from entering competition with the previous guy.
I think that's Bastiat's point, because if there's IP, and Bastiat was not friendly to intellectual property.
He thought imitation was extremely important, and he was a big fan of imitation, but what does IP do?
What do patents do?
It prohibits imitation, and within imitation, you get innovation, because when you're trying to imitate somebody, very often you either make a mistake or you stumble onto some improvement on the thing you're trying to imitate, so we need that for progress, but if you have very strict IP laws, then we wouldn't get the benefits that Bastiat was talking about in technology, because you'd be able to charge for nature's free services because no one else could compete with you, and so that's a very important part of it, but here's the funny thing.
When he wrote that chapter, he said, I'm going to be accused of being a communist.
That's why you reminded me of it when you said that to me, because he said, look, I'm talking about wealth.
I'm talking about real wealth going from the private realm to the communal realm as a result of free competition and the markets and the division of labor.
He said, they're going to accuse me of being a communist, and then he pointed out why that's a ridiculous charge, and so this is what I'm trying to tell the socialists and the good faith left.
Here's my point, and I say this through a couple of different things.
The socialists, in a way, I always say good faith, so remember I'm saying good faith if I forget it.
The state socialists don't understand that the market gives them what they say they want.
In the marketplace, even though we believe in individualism and legally it is an individualistic regime when you're talking about the free market, a libertarian society, in a sense, the means of production are controlled by the masses.
Here's my example.
The bookstore chain that used to compete with not only Amazon, but Barnes & Noble, which still exists, Borders went out of existence, what, five years ago?
It just died.
In Amazon, the brick and mortar, and, sorry, Barnes & Noble, brick and mortar, Amazon Online, it couldn't cut it.
Wasn't that, couldn't we really look at it this way?
We collectively made a decision and said to the board of directors and the stockholders of Borders, we don't need you to use these resources for books anymore.
We're getting our books fine in these other ways.
You are using resources and labor services for books, and that's redundant, so go use those things for other things we want.
Isn't that really what happened?
No, we didn't sit down at a mass meeting and vote on whether Borders should go out of business, but didn't we do that?
We did do that.
In other words, the means of production, who holds the means of production is in the hands of the people.
Mises, you know, a little bit of Mises, you can read this in Human Action and his other great works, who's a saint for libertarians and should be, he points this out too.
In a way, there's a collective control of who controls the means of production.
Well, isn't that what the left says they want?
They got it.
They want to wither the state away.
Marx himself says the end goal here is that the state will wither away and then we'll be left with society minus the state.
Well, might we start with withering the thing rather than building a dictatorship to make these choices first, huh?
Well, which is what Mikhail Bakunin and the Marxist critics of his time, who were anarcho-syndicalists and stuff like that, they were collectivists, but they were anarchists and they said, hey, guess what?
That dictatorship is not going to ever wither away, Carl.
Get real.
They were good liberal public choice types without knowing it, right?
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, that makes sense.
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There's this great essay.
It's a mind-blowing thing and I know because I learned so much from it and I know that I've gotten such a good reaction from showing it to people too.
It's Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty from 1965.
And I forget now, I think you mentioned it in the book somewhere, right?
Yeah.
I've read it many times and I've quoted it many times.
Sure, and I think Roderick Long has written a whole kind of treatment on the treatment in the first place.
Well he did like an anniversary address about it, 40th anniversary or whatever it was.
So this is where Rothbard says that libertarians are all the way to the left, to the left of the anarcho-syndicalists who are to the left of the communists, and that we are the all-the-way leftist radicals, as radical as you can get the individualists, the natural individual rightists and rightsists.
And that then all the rest of the left made the big mistake of using the conservative means of state power to try to achieve those liberal ends of the fair shake for the little guy kind of thing in the broad conception as we talked about.
And what's funny about that of course is that the communists ended up being far more statist even than the most conservative right-wingers, even than the fascists.
And so then libertarians, especially in the 20th century, ended up a lot of times allied with the right-wing on a lot of things, where the left was even more statist than them.
And so then, you know, and because the right-wing nominally supports markets where the left outright eschews them, then that kind of confuses the whole issue and makes libertarians seem like we're a kind of right-winger.
And where we're really, I think, an entirely different kind of creature than really fitting on that two-dimensional plane sort of a deal.
But anyway, I don't know, take it from there.
That's part of the tradition that you're expanding on here, right?
Well, Bastiat, you know, after the French Revolution, Bastiat lives from 1801 to 1850, something like that.
He's in the National Assembly.
And this is where the terms left and right come from.
He's sitting on the left of the Assembly.
He's sitting next to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who's famously known for saying, property is theft, although he didn't exactly mean what the way, he didn't mean what the left today means by that.
He was a pro-market guy.
He was an anarchist.
I think maybe the first person to call himself an anarchist.
The left in those days was an umbrella term for, number one, against power.
No, they disagreed about means.
So you had collectivist types, and then you had Bastiat, who was an individualist type.
But they were for progress.
They were for industrialization.
They were for general increase in wealth for all segments of society.
They all could join in that.
They had some disagreements about how to do that.
On the right, you had the defenders of the old regime, right, the Ancien Regime.
The pre-French Revolution types who wanted to restore power.
And so libertarianism, as we think of it today, really does belong on the left.
And this is why there's a group of us that use the term left libertarian.
We explain it whenever we can and whenever we have to, because I think it still captures something.
And by the way, just so people don't get it confused, you wrote a book against the income tax for guns and for homeschool.
You don't mean left deviationist from libertarianism.
You mean real ass libertarianism belongs on the left.
That's a different argument.
I don't know why we need to say that, but maybe sometimes we do.
People get confused.
And a lot of libertarians, they come from the right.
And it sounds like you're telling them to be a hippie at first glance.
Well, I'm trying to educate them.
It has nothing to do with being a hippie.
I'm just trying to provoke you into clarifying even more.
That's all.
It has nothing to do with being a hippie.
I get up and do work every day, although I'm kind of an advanced agent, probably need to do a lot of work every day, but I always held a job.
So no, I'm not a hippie.
I believe in full legalization of all drugs, but the only drugs I use are caffeine and nicotine, I think.
Occasional Advil.
So no, it's got nothing to do with that.
I just want to make sure people have a chance to understand and not get tripped up and misunderstand.
Just one last thing here, and I'm sorry, because we're really running short on time here, but it's really important that you talk about in here, and I did not know this, that the all-important foundational, well, not foundational, but sort of kind of foundational text of Austrian school economics, Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, which is originally to be titled Social Cooperation.
And this really goes to our current moment where you have, especially on the modern left, this conflict theory where everybody's a member of some kind of racial or economic or whatever group that separates them from everyone else.
And then we're all in a war of all against all for the power so we can dominate each other and loot each other and rule all this stuff.
And you're arguing here that no, stupid, freedom really works and we can all get along together and it'll be fine as long as we're free.
When we have all this power to fight about, that raises all these different questions.
And then you cite Mises of all people.
This was going to be his whole thing was, I shouldn't say of all people, but again, because people sort of misunderstand that Mises is the great godfather of all great capitalist arguments.
And so, but here he is saying, yeah, because that's how human beings can get along with each other well, that that is the end in the first place.
That's the point.
It's how they can.
It's how they do.
It's not something they need to be taught.
They learned it.
And Mises discusses, it goes back into the, you know, myths of time and tells a very convincing story about how people discovered that.
At first, tribes killed each other because they figured if I don't kill them, they're going to kill me.
So we better, let's go get those guys.
And then someone realized there were gains to be made from trade.
So we learned that a long time ago, we don't need to be taught it.
You know, there's something else I have in common with Mises.
I could have called my book social cooperation.
It's the second most used term in human action, which is a thousand page book.
Someone actually ran it through a computer program, a friend of mine, and said, because I guessed it was the second most used.
I figured the most used is division of labor.
He said I was exactly right.
Division of labor first, social cooperation second.
Markets are social cooperation.
What else are they?
They're people trading with each other.
And strangers trade.
We trade with people we'll never meet on the other side of the world.
Thanks to the Internet now, although there was world trade before the Internet.
It's the human way to live.
It's the natural way.
It is the natural way.
But Sheldon, people really do believe, and George Carlin often said it best, even when he's wrong, that look, every businessman is a dirty SOB and all they try to do is screw each other.
You know they're screwing you.
And so it's all just sinful, man.
Bloody green dollars.
And that's why in a lot of ways, you know, I love George Carlin for a lot of things.
I think his fun with language is wonderful.
But that side of him, you know, just showed how ignorant he was.
I don't know if he was just going for laughs, but that stuff doesn't wear well, in my view.
OK, but look, some businessmen are crooked SOBs and it kind of it's it's a fair enough stereotype for some kind of reason.
And so but you're trying to argue that what, it doesn't matter?
Or it's just not true?
Look, first of all, we don't have a full free market today, you know, for a lot of very important reasons.
We're far from it.
But even with that caveat, look at the countless transactions you go through in a week or a month or a year.
How many of them did you get screwed by?
Did you never get screwed?
Of course not.
But here's the thing.
This is a very important thing.
Competition is what keeps would be competitive competition, keeps would be cooperators honest.
The left likes to think that cooperation and competition are opposites.
They're fighting with each other.
I say that this two sides of one coin, because if I get to choose with whom I will cooperate, that means there's competition, right?
Two people want to cooperate with me.
Well, those two are competing with each other.
But what are they competing to do?
To cooperate with me so that they go together hand in hand.
And competition keeps cooperators, competitors keep cooperators honest.
So that's why we need maximum competition in government.
Much of what government does is trying to stifle competition in order to help favored groups.
Right.
That's what I'm against.
And you know what?
Man, I hate to leave it here.
We got to go.
But that's exactly the follow up point too, though, is it ain't that always the way?
And that's what the leftists would say.
As long as you have private profit as the motive, they're going to bribe the government to rig the game.
Always there will never be a free market.
Only this kind of cronyism, the same way that we say, oh, yeah, boo hoo for you.
That's not real communism.
You know, mocking them.
Well, that's kind of our excuse, too, right?
Well, in real capitalism, you wouldn't have a world empire.
Well, I don't like the word capitalism.
And you can see why in the book.
Don't call it that.
Look, so that leads you to the anarchist position.
Get rid of the state and then you can't.
There's nothing to lobby.
Go lobby a non-existent state legislature.
That's what I'm saying.
Privatize the war doesn't mean a DOD contract.
I'm not going to lobby a non-existent state legislature.
I'm not going to lobby a non-existent state legislature.
There you go.
Problem solved.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry that I got to go.
I really do.
But the wonderful book.
Everybody, I know you're going to love it so much.
It's so good.
And give it to your people.
I mean, really, it's the best.
It's called What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
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