08/02/07 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Introducing our guest today, Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
He's a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the author of the books Separating School and State, How to Liberate America's Families, Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, and Tethered Citizens, Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
His blog is SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com.
He's got a new article at the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE.org website entitled, The Goal is Freedom, Lausai Fair, Anti-Imperialism.
Welcome to the show, Mr. Richman.
Oh, thank you, and I appreciate your inviting me.
Oh, well, you know, it's funny.
I was just telling the audience earlier in the show, I was sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out why I haven't interviewed you 10 times by now.
I've always been such a big fan of your writings at FFF and at FEE.
I'm really glad that I finally have the opportunity to make your acquaintance, and this is a great opportunity, in fact, to do so.
This wonderful article that you wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education, The Goal is Freedom, Lausai Fair, Anti-Imperialism.
It's a really good history lesson about the war against Spain and the individualists who opposed it here in the United States.
So, I guess let's start with the name William Graham Sumner.
Some people may have heard it before, may be familiar, maybe not.
Can you remind our audience who William Graham Sumner was in American history?
Sure, I'd be happy to.
He's one of those maligned people.
Anybody in polite society, if they know about Sumner, will sneer at him.
The first words out of their mouth will be social Darwinists.
The second words out of their mouth will be dog-eat-dog or survival of the fittest, something along those lines.
So, he has this reputation for being just like Herbert Spencer, by the way, and he was something of a... he was very influenced by Herbert Spencer, let's put it that way.
But because he was an advocate of lausai fair, total free trade, complete free markets, individual liberty, very limited government, the enlightened and progressive intellectuals have to sneer at him.
So, what they're not likely to tell you about him is that he was a peacenik.
He was openly anti-empire, anti-colonialist, anti-aggressive war, and some of his... while he wrote a lot on domestic affairs and international trade, always in the lausai fair direction, he wrote a fantastic essay, which is what I devoted that article to, called The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
And this was after the war, the war lasted a few months, it was very short work.
But the US inherited colonial possessions as a result of that war, and he was protesting that by our stepping into Spain's imperial shoes, Spain had in a sense conquered us on the field of ideas.
Yeah, it's a very interesting title.
Well, before we get actually into the essay there about the conquest of the United States by Spain, you mentioned about how they don't want to talk about how this guy was a peacenik.
They don't want to bring that up, the establishment historians and so forth.
But of course, Mr. Richman, it doesn't make any sense that this guy who was pro-lausai fair would be a peacenik.
Everybody knows that to be a peacenik, you have to be part of the socialist left, and that all people who favor capitalism are imperialists.
Well, that's right.
There's a package deal which has been, unfortunately, it's been forged from two sides.
The opponents of free markets have an interest in linking free markets with war, because that helps to make it look very unattractive.
And unfortunately, the American conservative movement, which pays lip service to free markets, but not a whole lot else, has also married it to war, going way back to the Cold War, and basically starting in the Cold War.
So this package that free markets and aggressive foreign policy go together has been sold to the American public by both sides of it.
It's a package deal.
In other words, it's been pasted together.
Those two things not only don't have to go together, but don't go together.
And one of the things that I've been trying to stress and that others have stressed is that war and preparation for war work against any effort to keep power limited, to keep government limited.
And the slogan I like is a very profound sentence that was written in 1918 by Randolph Bourne, namely, War is the Health of the State.
Well, you know, I saw Rudolph Giuliani on the Charlie Rose show last night, and he said that he stands for the core American conservative principles, a strong national defense.
And of course, he said, we must stay on the offense against the terrorist war against us and limited government and free markets and property rights here at home.
You're telling me those two things don't go together?
Well, no, they don't go together because historically, war, and like I say, preparing for it, has been the biggest stimuli to government, the growth of government, intrusion into private property and privacy, and all the other things that advocates of the free market claim to believe in.
Now, Rudolph Giuliani's credentials on free market issues are pretty poor.
All you have to do is go back to the 1980s when he was a U.S. attorney in New York and see what he did against Michael Milken to demonstrate that this guy is no advocate of the free market.
Yeah, and that is career locking capitalists in jail.
Right, and Milken was an upstart.
Milken was not part of the establishment.
He was not part of one of the big Wall Street firms or big bank or anything like that.
He was basically an independent guy who innovated the use of what are known as junk bonds.
They're just high yield, high risk bonds to enable people to get credit to launch businesses at a time when they were not able to.
If you walked into Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1980s, you couldn't get a business loan unless you were IBM or Exxon, something like that.
But Ted Turner, who in those days was completely unknown, who wanted to launch the first cable news network, couldn't get a cent out of the New York bank.
And it was Milken and his innovations in the use of these high-yield, high-risk bonds that enabled somebody like Turner to raise a lot of money and launch a company.
This is true of a lot of companies, but that takes us kind of far from it.
The point is, Giuliani is no friend of the free market.
He may be using the rhetoric now because he wants the nomination of the Republican base and they respond to that rhetoric, but he's got no credentials in this department.
Well, and when he cites those two irreconcilable principles, strong national offense permanently at war overseas with free markets here, that really narrows down straight to the problem of the entire philosophy of conservatism.
They hold these two completely contradictory principles.
And of course, war always wins out over, as you say, their lip service to free markets.
That's right.
And they don't want to confront this.
This reminds me of George Orwell's 1984, the idea of doublethink.
Doublethink was the ability of people to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, never allowing themselves, never acknowledging really to themselves that they are contradictory, sort of going through life that way.
Well, this is how I look at most conservatives, not so much some of the what are known as paleoconservatives.
They do understand this war issue, although they're not always very good on the free market.
They like interference with free trade around the world.
But the neoconservatives and the sort of mainstream conservatives, national review type, they hold these two contradictory ideas.
They will say, they will insist very vehemently that they're for limited government and free markets.
At the same time, they want the U.S. to be a world policeman.
They think, oh, the U.S. has been anointed by history or by God or by somebody to bring order to the world, to keep order, that it's perfectly proper that we have interests all over the world that might require our military action in order to protect them.
We also have allies that we might have to spring into action to protect.
And so we have this globe girdling military and diplomatic establishment, which, of course, has to be supported by the taxpayers of the United States.
And it gets very expensive.
You know, we're spending 10 billion dollars a month on two wars right now.
How do you have limited government and free markets when the government is sucking 10 billion dollars a month out of the economy in order to get on far flung adventures thousands of miles away?
Well, really, your article is about the birth of this global empire.
It could be argued, and in fact, I think I would argue that America really has always been an empire since the Constitution was ratified.
You count the conquest of Mexico and the Indians and the westward expansion and all that.
I agree with it.
The foreign empire was really born with the war against Spain.
Well, maybe with the seizing of Hawaii a few years before that.
In fact, I remember a great article.
I wish I knew the Congressman's name, but I think it was William Grigg who wrote a great article about the Americans stealing Hawaii, where he cited some Congressmen, one of them an anti-imperialist, who talked about how this is a betrayal of our country's principles.
We're never going to be able to go back after this.
You can't go around stealing people's islands like this and claiming possession of them.
Once we embark on this world empire, why do we want Hawaii anyway so we can refuel our navy, so we can go steal even more stuff?
We've got to put an end to this.
The argument against his position was, you're a wimp.
America is a full grown man now and it's time we take our place on the world stage.
Just a bunch of highfalutin rhetoric about being a full grown man and a tough guy who would be shirking his responsibility to the world if he didn't go around conquering people's islands and stealing them.
Well, that sounds like Teddy Roosevelt.
In this regard, too, I might mention a book by Stephen Kinzer called Overthrow, which the subtitle is self-explanatory, America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.
This is so unappreciated.
I wrote a column a few months ago or weeks ago about how Americans, and certainly so many of the official spokesmen for America, self-anointed official spokesmen, like to complain about how the US has been bullied, a whipping boy, through the 80s and 90s and then into the 2000s we were hit by terrorists here and there and we never much responded.
The whole picture is like we're minding our own business.
We don't bother anybody.
We're just at home taking care of our own affairs.
Out of nowhere, these terrorists come and do things, like they kill the Marines in Lebanon.
They ignite a bomb and ram the USS Cole, or they hit a couple of embassies in Africa.
All these examples, they hit the World Trade Center in 1993.
We never did anything.
We showed what wimps we are, and that set the stage for the big one on 9-11 in 2001.
That's the sort of the standard story that people mentioned.
Left out of that, left out of all that, of course, is all the stuff the US government has been doing for at least 50 years, and like you say, going back to, really, back to the Spanish-American War, but particularly in the Middle East for the last 50 years, all kinds of interventions, starting with the overthrow in 1953 of an elected popular secular prime minister in Iran.
Iran.
Iran, our mortal enemy today.
We overthrew, like I say, a secular prime minister in 53 and reinstalled the Shah, the royal family, the king, basically, of Iran, who was very unpopular, basically had to leave power under public pressure.
We, the CIA, including Roosevelt's grandson, I think, Kermit Roosevelt, leading that effort, brought him back to power.
He proceeded to rule brutally over the Iranian people, including an infamous secret police known as Salak, but he was, besides Israel, our closest enemy, closest ally, excuse me, in the Middle East, got, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of military equipment and money.
He was so unpopular that in 79 there was the religious uprising against him and the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power.
The U.S. Embassy was seized and, you know, the inhabitants of it, the people who were in there were held hostage for a very long time.
And we all thought this came out of the blue, right?
Most American people have.
There they take our embassy.
Well, you know, the Iranians didn't forget 1953.
Most Americans are totally ignorant of it, but the Iranians know about it and have taught it and don't forget.
And then we wonder why we have trouble with Iran.
It's the same thing over and over again.
Well, what's funny about that particular story, this is something I only just recently learned in the book Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfus, and that is that the Ayatollah Khomeini and his group of right-wing crazies, they were in on the 1953 plot.
They helped to overthrow Mossadegh and reinstall the Shah.
And so the blowback 26 years later in 1979 when they took over and had the revolution and held all the hostages from the American Embassy and so forth, it was some of the very same people that Kermit Roosevelt and the boys had used in 1953 coming home to roost.
So I assume that Khomeini was interested in getting rid of Mossadegh because he was secular.
Right, yeah.
He was a secularist and they figured, hey, we'll team up with the Americans in the short term, get rid of this guy, the Americans won't hang around, and then we'll be able to put in a theocracy.
Sure.
Well, and the Shah, of course, once he used these guys to get into power, oppressed them and sent his Soviets to skin them alive and the rest of that kind of stuff, too.
So he had betrayed them and made certain enemies out of them.
It was just a matter of time, basically.
And really that is the story that this is the kind of thing that William Graham Sumner was trying to beat into the American people's head 100 years ago, is that once you start down this path, you're going to keep intervening and keep intervening until you just bankrupt this country.
We're going to have, by the end of this, abandoned all of the principles that made this place great in the first place.
Well, that's right.
And that was what Sumner was warning about.
And we can also bring in sort of Ludwig von Mises in this case, although he didn't quite talk about it in these terms, but he wrote a book called A Critique of Interventionism, which shows that one intervention usually brings the reason for the next one.
So you either have to stop the whole interventionist scheme or you keep proceeding along until the government is basically in charge of everything.
Yeah, or completely bankrupt.
And this is where we are right now, right?
Well, we've intervened in Iraq, but we can't leave now.
We have to keep intervening until matters are better.
And of course, the only reason we're doing that is because we had a problem with Hussein, who we'd propped up against the Iranians, who were the blowback from the original coup there.
And we got a problem with the Mujahideen that we backed against the Russians.
And the Russians, oh yeah, they're the same ones that we saved in World War II from the Nazis when our intervention in World War I had basically set up the creation of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany both.
And on and on, it all goes back.
You can trace it all the way back.
At some point, we have to just kick this habit and say, you know what?
When we stop intervening, there are going to be consequences.
America is the dominant power in every country pretty much on every continent on this planet.
And if we adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy, there are going to be power vacuums and there is going to be violence and so forth.
But you know what?
We just have to kick some time, right?
It's either this or we just keep doing the junk until it kills us.
Well, that's right.
And I don't see why more people don't see the sense of that at all.
I guess one reason is they don't, they've never heard it explained this way.
They don't know what the U.S. has been doing.
And so they can sort of rest assured that we didn't bring this on somehow and now we need to kick some butt to get even.
But that's a very bad policy and it's what the great historian, Charles Beard, called the perpetual war for perpetual peace.
Right.
Yeah, great book.
And you know, something that just really annoys me about this is something that you kind of highlight in your article too, in some of your quotes of William Graham Sumner.
That's that kind of shallow macho talk that I mentioned earlier when they were stealing Hawaii.
It seems like, well, I remember when I was a kid, you know, the whole idea was that, you know, adults are calm and rational and go off of facts.
And if you have a question, you ask one of them and they're smart and they do things the right way and so forth.
And yet it seems like, you know, basically a politician just has to challenge the manhood of anybody who imposes his imperial policy and it's enough.
That's all they have to do is say, well, look, you're not on the side of the terrorists, are you?
In fact, you know, just today on antiwar.com, there's a story where the Democrats are racing to expand the eavesdropping power of the president.
And it says right there, they're worried.
Harry Reid, the majority leader of the imperial Senate says, well, you know, preemptively, we really hope that George Bush doesn't call us weak on terrorism.
See, we're giving him all this wiretapping power.
And, you know, he hasn't even been called a wimp yet.
You know, he's already going for it.
Well, that's right.
And they're really all on the same side when it come right down to it.
What happened with something earlier in those remarks you just made reminded me of the sort of amazing confrontation between Ron Paul and Giuliani in that debate.
Most people watched it probably think that Giuliani won that confrontation because, you know, he was able to make this really macho kind of statement and insult Ron Paul by saying, you know, I never heard that explanation before.
And then and then he gets applause for it.
But you know, who actually won that?
I mean, all it was was was sort of a macho response and a confession that he was completely ignorant of even the 9-11 report, which which talked about what the motive behind the bin Laden's organization was when they attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
And you're right.
I mean, the Democrats, you'll have no problem whatsoever finding Democrats to basically sound just like Giuliani.
They hate us because they're evil, because they hate us because they're evil.
And that's it.
And if you if you look for any kind of further explanation than that, well, then you're justifying the terrorists.
You're blaming America.
They're still saying that about Ron Paul.
I read an article in a Dallas newspaper yesterday where he praises Ron Paul for 10 paragraphs and said this is probably the most honest politician in American history or my lifetime anyway.
What a great man.
But he blames America for bringing on the attacks ourselves.
That's crazy.
Blaming America for it.
And that's how he dismisses Ron Paul's by picking up on that that Giuliani vibe.
I mean, it's a shame.
I mean, you're right.
There's no question as to who won when it comes to the facts.
And yet, you know, the macho applause line seems to win out ultimately.
Right.
And you have to watch the language very closely.
This business about, you know, you're blaming America.
Well, America is a very abstract term.
So you need to disaggregate it.
What do we mean?
What do we mean?
You know, the average guy on the street invited, which is the term used by Wendell Goller and the follow up question to Ron Paul at that debate.
Does that mean he's responsible?
You know, just the average person going about his business is responsible.
Of course not.
I mean, he didn't know he may be ignorant about the policy and maybe he shouldn't have been.
But he he's not the one who chose the policy or implemented the policies that made that made people mad enough to be willing to do what they did on 9-11.
On the other hand, if we buy America, do we mean the government?
Do we mean a series of presidents and their secretaries of state and people like that?
Then, yes, they have a good measure of responsibility for what happened.
You know, it doesn't justify someone's murder to at least try to understand what it is that preceded it and created the conditions for it.
Yeah, that's that's exactly right.
And, you know, the funny thing about this, I guess, I don't know, if I tried to break it down in a math problem, it wouldn't make any sense.
But it seems to me that when responsibility is shared that that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to break it into little pieces of the pie.
I mean, in my eyes, Bill Clinton is supremely responsible for September 11th, leaving those troops in Saudi Arabia, creating a serious enemy out of our old allies, the Mujahideen, and then doing nothing about it, nothing to prevent what happened on September 11th.
Of course, he's responsible.
Does that in any way diffuse the responsibility of the 19 hijackers of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden?
Of course not.
They can they still retain 100 percent of their responsibility.
Just because they have to share some with Bill Clinton doesn't mean theirs has been diminished in any way.
That's right.
And while we're talking about Bill Clinton's crimes, we should throw in the, of course, the continued embargo on the Iraqis, which was creating, you know, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths by children, lots of disease because they couldn't rebuild the sewage plants and water treatment and all that stuff.
And there, of course, is the famous line from from his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, when she was asked by Lesley Stahl in 60 Minutes, I think, when you when you contemplate that half a million children have died, do you really think this was it really worth it to try to overthrow Saddam Hussein?
And she looked in the camera and said, yeah, we think it was worth it.
Now, we know darn well that that clip was played over and over again throughout the Middle East.
Everybody should know that.
Probably no American or, you know, very few Americans are even aware of aware of that statement.
If they watch the show, they forgot it the next moment.
And that was it.
But people don't forget about it when they're on the other end of the of the gun.
In fact, here, let's go ahead and play that clip.
I have it right here.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice that the price, we think the price is worth it.
Yep, there you go.
And you're right.
That's a clip that is played all over the world over and over and over again.
It's probably the American people are the only ones who aren't familiar with that sound bite.
I mean, you would just think about that for a second was a very hard way to at least consider it was a hard choice.
You know, I guess if anything could be worse than that would be to say, Oh, it was an easy choice.
Okay, so you know, we'll give her a, you know, a fraction of a point for for being a hard choice.
But then she said it's worth it.
She doesn't even she doesn't challenge the half a million figure.
She just says it's worth it.
Now, in her memoirs that she wrote some years later, she said she was stupid.
Why didn't know?
Why didn't she question the numbers?
And why don't you do this, but she never really takes any of it back.
She's just covering her ass.
Right.
She's doing for history.
And you know what Amy Goodman asked her about this on democracy now one time to you got to give credit to Amy Goodman.
She first question right out of the gate.
She nailed her and said, How could you say this?
And the entire answer was, you know, I really should not have said it like that.
I really wish I had phrased it differently, etcetera, etcetera.
But as far as the sentiment, you know, well, what was she going to say?
We killed a half a million kids and it wasn't worth it.
It was a rare moment of honesty, which he's been read regretting ever since.
And yet, every time she writes a book, she's had one or two since since her memoirs, at least one since her memoirs, she'll get orange TV shows, she'll get on Jon Stewart who likes to see himself as this outrider who you know, is gutsy and anti establishment.
No, he brings her on and kisses her feet like that.
She's royalty.
This is how they treat this woman.
This woman ought to be you know, she ought to be disgraced publicly, she should be shadowed down.
I mean, you know, I must let her have her first amendment rights, but people ought to boycott her or at least express their discontent when she comes to go and speaks places.
She's got the blood of a half a million Iraqi kids on her hand.
And 911 I'll never forget, I think, who was it?
It was Alexander Copeland, I believe, with a very moving article sometime after 911, shortly after 911 on counterpunch.
He said he would love to drag her to the hole in the ground in New York and say, was this worth it?
Madam Albright, Madam Secretary?
Absolutely.
And, you know, let nobody be confused about it.
The reason that they attacked us, the reason bin Laden has this jihad against America is because of our troops occupation of Saudi Arabia.
And our troops occupation of Saudi Arabia was for the purpose of enforcing the blockade on Iraq and bombing them in the no fly zones.
That's what it was for.
We were bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia.
That's what got those 3000 killed.
There's no doubt about that.
That's right.
We were we were bombing on a frequent basis in the north and the south, on the basis of unilaterally declared no fly zones by the US and the UK, not even the UN, which I'm not, I wouldn't consider that any great authority.
But we didn't even have the cover of the UN with those no fly zones.
Those were just declared by American administrations and then enforced and people died.
Innocent people died in bombing, because when planes would go over, sometimes there was fire on those planes.
Now, somehow we regard that as aggression against the United States.
When an American Air Force plane flies over Iraqi territory, and the Iraqis take some kind of action against that, we regard that as aggression against the United States.
Now, if this is not Orwellian, right out of 1984, I don't know what could be the total total nonsense.
And even in the run up to the war, Ron Paul pointed out that, hey, look, there's such a big threat.
They can't even shoot our planes down flying over their country.
They haven't been able to hit a single one in 12 years.
And, you know, I also wanted to bring up, it was Alex Coburn's brother, Andrew Coburn, broke the story on this show that Madeleine Albright and the rest of them were ready to certify Iraq as weapons of mass destruction free in 1997.
They were ready to certify that fact.
And then the policy came down that, oh, no.
And she said this publicly, too, that the sanctions will not end.
The embargo will not end until Saddam Hussein is removed from power.
Right.
That is the policy.
It doesn't matter whether he's complied with every single United Nations resolution or not.
That's right.
And that's when he that's when Saddam actually turned uncooperative.
Right.
It was at that point.
And then another thing you mentioned the the troops in Saudi Arabia, which prompted another thought, all of what you said was completely confirmed by none other than Paul Wolfowitz, who was one of the chief architects of this war, and a person who again, his name should be blackened for the rest of history.
But he pointed out after the early military success in Iraq, one benefit of this war will be that we can take the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which have been so upsetting to people in the Middle East, and we can redeploy them to Iraq, because they've been so upsetting to have them to have them in Saudi Arabia.
There it is.
There's the full concession.
Right.
And in fact, it was more specific than that it was even this has been a major motivation for Osama bin Laden and a major tool for his recruitment.
I mean, it was specific about this is about al Qaeda.
Now we can move our bases out of Saudi Arabia, as though moving them to the holy land of Najaf and the rest, you know, occupying Iraq is any better.
It's just ridiculous.
But you're right.
He did say that in Vanity Fair, just riding high on the on the victory of the fall of the Balthus regime.
And I think it was May of 2003.
Absolutely right.
Now, let me let me ask you about something here, Mr. Richmond, which by the way, everybody I'm talking with Sheldon Richmond from the Foundation for Economic Education and the Future Freedom Foundation.
You mentioned at the beginning of the show that that William Graham Sumner shares with Herbert Spencer kind of this negative connotation that they were social Darwinists, that their version of laissez faire libertarianism amounts to let the weak starve and die.
And I know that that's not the case.
And I know you know, that's not the case.
So I was wondering if you can address that?
Well, both of them.
But it's really wrong and Roderick Long, unless you've talked to him, but the good philosopher at Auburn, great libertarian, and is a great Spencer fan and vindicator has pointed out many, many times that it's really incorrect to call Spencer a social Darwinist, because his work on social evolution precedes Darwin.
He doesn't even technically fall into the category of Darwin.
In fact, Darwin, I think paid some tribute to Spencer about how it influenced his thinking to be thinking along evolutionary lines.
Well, these two men were actually the founders of modern sociology.
And one of the things they did was to to look at society, almost as if it were an organism that itself that undergoes growth and evolution and change.
Now, they didn't deny individuals that they didn't oppose methodological individualism, they understood that societies are made up of individuals.
But almost by analogy, societies are regular relationship and ongoing cooperation among the members, you can analyze society for some purposes at this more holistic level, and see how it undergoes changes.
And they did, they pointed out that, like a biological entity, societies also change in response to conditions that they find themselves in.
And, and the ones that change in directions that are more suited to the conditions prosper and the ones that don't, don't prosper.
In other words, it's quote, survival of the fittest.
And that doesn't mean, you know, killing people and, and leaving people by the wayside, both of them supported private charity efforts, they just thought they should be private efforts, not government efforts.
Hayek later does quite a bit of writing on this very same subject of social evolution.
But it's people that want to attack their support of laissez faire and free market and individual liberty, that then have an interest in distorting this making it sound very cruel, making it sound like social Darwinism means rule of the jungle, which is ridiculous, because both Spencer and Sumner understood that the industrial form of society, division of labor and trade and peace, were a higher stage, a higher maybe the highest stage of evolution, and that the militant what they call the militant form of society, the warlike militant was, was closer to primitivism, and something that we were passing through and hopefully would be passed through completely.
Right.
And both of them also recognize, of course, that the prosperity created by free markets and property rights was the best way really to provide for the poor and the helpless anyway, how can we provide for them if we're all broke?
Right.
And you know, even today, you'll hear welfare state say that if you oppose government providing help for very low income people or poor people, homeless people, whatever, that must mean you oppose anybody helping them or you oppose the help per se, which is a logical fallacy.
There's no reason to go from one to the other.
The fact that you don't want the government to do it, which will screw it up anyway, and have to coerce innocent people in the process doesn't mean that you don't think anybody should do it.
Right.
And in fact, really turning to government is just going to undermine the idea that it's our responsibility to, I don't know, for example, take care of our parents when they get old or take care of our neighbor when he needs a couch to crash on.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I already paid.
They already took the money right out of my paycheck.
I'm not giving to charity.
This is all I got left.
That's the way people think.
That's right.
But of course, the demagogue's approach is to say, well, you're against it.
Just like if you say you're against government schools, that must mean you're against education.
I mean, it's silly on the face of it, but people actually say things like that.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times says things like that.
I just heard a friend of mine told me a story about how he was talking with a college sophomore taking a philosophy class, and they were talking, you know, this and that, philosophy and politics and what have you.
And a mutual friend said, yeah, you know, I'm really interested in this Ron Paul campaign.
He seems like a really good guy.
I've watched some speeches.
He seems great.
And the college sophomore fresh out of his philosophy class said, oh, Ron Paul?
No, I don't like him at all.
He's for laws that are fair.
He just wants to let the corporations take over the whole world and do whatever they want.
Laws are fair is uncaring and mean and favors the worst corporate criminals among us.
And I mean, on one hand, I'd like to say it takes a college sophomore and just fresh out of a philosophy class to think that.
But then, you know, my more pessimistic side thinks that that's probably what most Americans think of when they hear laws are fair.
Everybody knows that laws are fair failed and that the wonderful Franklin Roosevelt saved us from it and that you have to have government to smooth the markets out and to to control and protect us from the predatory corporate masters and all that kind of stuff.
Well, that's right.
You're absolutely right about that.
And the key to exposing that whole line of thinking is that is there a major corporation in the country that would want laws are fair?
The answer is obviously no.
They're all tied in with subsidies and trade restrictions or patents or some kind of state intervention.
And they would never want to give it up.
They were the ones that helped increase the power of government at the turn of the 19th, 20th century during the Progressive era.
If you look at the work of Gabriel Kolko, particularly his book, The Triumph of Conservatism, you'll you'll find it very well documented that the major business elite, the major corporate leaders, wanted government involvement at the national level for all kinds of reasons.
But one reason is it kind of keeps markets from being too unpredictable, settles them down and makes it makes it more certain that you can hold on to your market share because otherwise you wake up one morning, you don't know who's going into business to compete against you.
That's very nerve wracking.
And that's really what's great about free market capitalism, right, is that there is no auto king.
There is no steel king.
The market will depose them.
That's why they hate free markets.
That's why they turn to the state is not it's not the people turning to the government to protect us from the corporate masters.
It's the corporate masters turning to the state to protect them from us.
That's right.
And they had a sort of a an alliance of convenience with the progressive philosophers.
And together they portrayed this very profit oriented, self-interested, the status strategy as humanitarian and progress.
The businessmen liked it because they were going to get their profits and have their market share locked in.
And the philosophers liked it because, you know, social science is like this because, well, for a couple reasons.
One is that they're going to get jobs out of it.
They're going to be able to write studies and write books and get government grants of all kinds and run bureaus.
Plus, they could portray this as humanitarian, as the laissez faire was cruel and we were going to put in something more progressive and humanitarian so that people have a better standard of living.
And they wiped away the whole radical notion that laissez faire is, first of all, in the interest of the masses of people, not the elite, because nobody can have a sort of a vested interest frozen in place under laissez faire.
It doesn't respect any vested interests.
Laissez faire is anti-privileged.
There's no privileges under laissez faire.
And that's what people generally don't know.
And the elite, of course, doesn't want to know this because that would make laissez faire the philosophy for the masses, which is what it should be.anti-imperialism.
Thanks very much for your time today, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Oh, my pleasure.
And I do appreciate the invitation.