05/01/12 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is our good friend Sheldon Richman.
He's got a blog, SheldonRichman.com, SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com.
It's called Free Association.
He's the editor of the Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE.org, and also FFF.org, where he's a senior fellow of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
He's written 10 million wonderful articles for them in the past.
And yeah, good.
Hey, welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for inviting me.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
And the reason I invite you here is because it's May Day.
I don't actually even know why that's Communism Day in the world or whatever, but apparently it is.
And hopefully you can instruct us a little bit on the background of all of that.
But I'm pretty much just over the conservatives.
There just ain't no hope.
I mean, usually they're good on guns.
That's about it.
And mostly I just resent them for their bloodthirst.
They're probably for guns for the wrong reasons.
Anyway, they're a bunch of jerks.
But I'm sort of obsessed with trying to, and I know it's ridiculous, trying to get leftists to quit being a leftist and start being a libertarian, which I perceive libertarianism as being outside of the left-right spectrum.
But just get them to give up their statism and become an anarcho-individualist like myself, because why not?
I'm right, and so they ought to change their mind.
And so I was thinking that since you're a leftish-leaning libertarian and you can speak in those terms that leftists can at least relate to, if not agree with, that maybe I would ask you a little bit to talk about what you see as the differences between, say, left anarchism, individualist anarchism, or libertarianism, or favored natural rights theories and favored economics arrangements and these kinds of things, and see if we can get to, I don't know, why you're not a leftist.
Sheldon, even though you're a left libertarian.
So I said a bunch of stuff, now you talk.
Well, sure, I'd be glad to.
That's a great subject.
I don't know exactly how May 1st became May Day, and sure, the socialists and the communists and I guess laborists in general regard this as an important holiday, and I guess I should have done some research.
I was on an airplane when I learned that I was going to be on your show today, so I didn't have access to the internet, but people have shortened Google that easily and looked that up.
I think, I mean, I agree with you about the reaching out, because what we need to do is to show that idealistic progressives, and I'm using that now generally to mean people who are on the left, but who are good-faith idealistic progressives, that their ends can be achieved through our means, namely through voluntarism, markets, and the things that libertarians generally talk about, especially libertarian anarchists talk about.
This is not really new to libertarianism.
If you go back to the early 20th century and then to the 19th century and back, going back, the people that we now recognize as libertarian, to use that word, were very pro-worker.
Their concern was a union of state and capital, and so they would often regard themselves as anti-capitalist.
Thomas Hodgkin, an early 19th century radical, classical liberal, radical libertarian, mentored Herbert Spencer, an early editor of The Economist magazine, which was one time a laissez-faire magazine, he's regarded as a socialist, because he used the word capitalist disparagingly, and what he meant by it was owners of capital who had good connections to the state and got laws passed to privilege them to the detriment of workers, keeping workers from getting the full reward that they would get in a free market.
Now that view was also considered socialist in those days.
It's only later that the word becomes more associated with the state, you know, controlling all the means of production.
Those people were also under the umbrella of socialism back in the days I'm talking about.
But also under that umbrella were advocates of laissez-faire free markets who hated the capitalist system because it privileged owners of capital, and the privilege came from the power of the state.
This goes as late into the early 20th century in a view that's held by Benjamin Tucker, who was an American editor of a magazine called Liberty, which was the libertarian magazine of the day, where all the debates were going on, and, you know, fantastic stuff like Sanders Spooner even wrote in his later letter to his wife.
So there's nothing really new about libertarianism and libertarian anarchism advocating for workers and arguing that mercantilism or the corporate state, whatever we want to call it, denies workers and consumers, I might add, denies workers what they would be getting in a completely free market.
And so that's what we're trying to teach the more traditional leftists now who think the only way to get justice is to increase the power of the state, which sounds kind of silly when you think about it, because the problems come from power of the state.
Why would you give the state more power?
Well, you know, it's funny.
It's too bad this is the best example I can think of, but Mark Ames from The Exile, he said, because it's too late, because, you know, you might have a point that all the worst billionaires are all the worst for their access to political power.
But you got a better chance of using government and trying somehow to get it to be good government and regulate.
I mean, you got to admit that, like, from time to time, local electricity regulators will do the right thing on behalf of, you know, customers as compared to, you know, some capitalist cartel, that kind of thing.
So they glom on to that kind of thing and say, use good government to protect the people, because at least it's one man, one vote.
It's open access to the system.
And then that way you can limit the power of these private tyrannies, which if you don't use the state that way, they get to use it against you in all the horrible ways that they do.
And since the state ain't withering away to the left or to the right, democracy is better than no regulation which would just let these private tyrannies run wild and roughshod over all of us.
Well, I would just say it's too late for that kind of hope.
I said it way better than he ever did.
Sorry, go ahead.
It's too late for that kind of hope.
We have too much experience.
We know too much about how states operate.
And there's just too much history that's passed to hold out any kind of hope that somehow we can use the state to its justice.
I mean, we don't have any advantage when it comes to controlling the state.
I mean, how many times do we have to try this?
That's the wild-eyed utopian position, not our position.
We're the hard-headed realists.
They're not going to control the state.
The people he has in mind are not going to be the ones pulling those shots.
And the worst thing that the people who are well-connected today, their worst nightmare would be for the general population to begin to accept ideas that are moving in a stateless direction, because they'd lose everything at that point.
And by the way, it doesn't mean we just keep everything in place and get rid of the state.
There's plenty of room for remedial action.
There's a lot of land that's being held that's been unimproved, but being held off the market by people who gained it in various illegitimate ways.
They've never mixed their labor with it, so it doesn't pass Lockian, the Lockian test.
That land should be open to homesteading.
So there is ways to undo a lot of the injustice.
I'm not saying, okay, let's freeze everything now and now we'll have freedom.
That would be a suspect position, I agree, but that's not what the crowd I hang out with believes.
Although, you know, I could be wrong about this, but it's my belief that if I could kind of iDream a genie the situation, just get rid of the state and leave everything else the way it is, that without this state, that the giant conglomerates that rule the world now, they'd have to spin things off.
Clear Channel would have to spin off the radio stations.
J.P. Morgan would have to spin off their branches and on and on like that, because they can only take the giant conglomerated form that they take because of that state power in the first place.
So even though it wouldn't be fair, and obviously a lot of people would have a huge head start with how much property they have, it wouldn't be, you know, everybody starting from the same equal place or anything like that.
It still would be the best process for distributing that power down and that property ownership down.
Hey, and I'm not talking about some, you know, horrifying scene where owners of big companies are expropriated.
You know, that would require a state to up the...
All right.
Sorry.
Hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Sheldon Richman.
FFF and FEE.org, both, actually.
SheldonRichman.com.
All right, Sheldon.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Freeman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Freeman, the Foundation for Economic Education, as well as the Future Freedom Foundation.
And he's got this piece of the Freeman, Can Mutually Beneficial Exchanges Be Exploitative?
Which is a very complicated kind of piece, but it gets to what we're talking about here about, well, in a sense, I don't know if we really quite grappled with this part of it yet.
But there's the idea that to be an employee is not to be a free person, an entrepreneur who sells labor for a living.
But it's to be some level of slave to whoever owns whatever business it is.
And that's the thing that, I guess, the left-wing principle, I don't know how they think they prove this, but they say without really a socialist public state to enforce those kinds of rules, you couldn't have capitalism where one person gets to own a business and simply employ someone else and pay them less than their quote-unquote worth, et cetera, like that.
How do you answer that kind of thing, Sheldon?
Well, what I tried to suggest in that article, although it wasn't precisely on this point, but I really suggest it, is that where business, especially big corporations, have gotten from their friends in government various measures, monopolistic-type measures, measures that make it harder for somebody to go into business to compete with them, in other words, anything that reduces by political means workers' and consumers' choices is exploitative.
So if there were fewer employers bidding for your labor services because of political favors that keep the number of competitors down or maybe even creates monopoly, then you as a laborer are being exploited.
So we want to wipe all that away so workers would have the maximum bargaining power.
By the way, these barriers also limit self-employment opportunities.
So a person who might have just decided to open a small business for himself, even in his home, rather than go to work for someone else, often can't do that.
Bargaining and other things that increase the cost, permits, etc., make it very hard for some of us to start just a small-scale business that might give him a modest living that's enough for him, and he may feel that's worth it to not have to work for somebody else.
But if the state makes that very difficult or even impossible, then you're stuck in the wage labor market, and that's a form of oppression.
People may say, well, he chose that as voluntary, he only chose it because many other alternatives were closed off.
That's what we have to look at, not whether the choice seemed free, given what you were confronted with, but whether the state has closed off other options that would have existed if the state didn't exist.
And so, you know, that's the exploitation.
You know, I was reading just recently Herbert Spencer, the great Herbert Spencer, one of the great classical liberal libertarians of all time, that's early in the 19th century, and not very popular with most left-wingers, I'm sure.
But he's got a chapter in his book, Principles of Sociology, called Cooperation, where he says that when we reach a more advanced stage of social evolution, which he thought would be somewhat in the near future, people generally wouldn't work for other people.
There would be worker-owned firms, worker co-ops, because he...
And this is Herbert Spencer, remember, now.
This is not some, you know, communist Papakian or Bakunin or Marx or anybody like that.
This is the great laissez-faire of Herbert Spencer, saying that when we get to a more advanced stage, people will realize that working for someone else is a form of compulsion, because, look, you've got to do what you're told to do on the job, or you could be discharged, which could be a very great hardship for somebody.
And a lot of people would choose to not be in that situation, and would rather be part of a worker-owned, worker-managed firm or collective or something like that.
Well, see, I think this is where the leftists got it all wrong in the first place, because it started out the liberals were the individualists, but then I think the way Anthony Gregory put it was they adopted the conservative means of statism to try to leapfrog ahead and try to, you know, change nature and force an amount of wealth to exist that didn't really exist.
And so then the whole dream becomes soak the rich instead of allow everyone to finally catch up with that.
We all just come from sticks and stones here, you know, there's only been so much capital in human history, and then the more of it the better, but it takes a while before the average schmuck is living like a millionaire.
Well, this point that you attribute to Anthony Gregory actually comes from Leonard Ligio in the 1960s and Murray Rothbard, who pointed out that historically, as they saw it, socialism arises as sort of a middle ground between radical liberalism, that's us, and the conservatives.
And so they said, well, we can achieve liberal ends with conservative means.
In other words, the state will bring the liberal end.
That is from the left and the right, prospects for liberty, right?
He talks about a fair, and I believe actually Leonard Ligio is really the first person, I think even before Murray, who suggests this, and I think Murray learns it from him.
But that's a keen insight, because it certainly does look like what state socialism is all about.
And you know, Chomsky will say this, Chomsky will say, look, I'm an anarchist, but before we get to anarchism, we really have to beef up the power of the central government.
Well, come on, I don't see how you get there from here, if you do that.
Right.
Well, I mean, that was the whole thing in the Soviet Union, they tried that.
Well, the dictatorship is going to make everything fair, because it will be a dictatorship of people who are just hell-bent on fairness.
And then once everything's perfectly fair, there'll be no need for a state, and it'll magically disappear.
Now that, to me, just sounds like a comic book, I don't know how anybody ever bought that in the first place, I don't know how anybody could possibly believe that after we've seen the history of the Soviet Union and Communist China already, you know, take place and come to an end.
People need to go back and read Marxist critics, Marxist leftist critics, like Bakunin and like Kropotkin, and they said, what are you, nuts?
You think the dictatorship of the proletariat is not going to turn into a dictatorship, you know, over the proletariat?
And they said, you're nuts, to give the state that kind of power to work for that.
Of course, Marx thought it was inevitable anyway, so that wouldn't have mattered to him.
But those guys are right, and Marx was wrong.
Giving the state power is not a way to reduce state power.
I don't know, it seems kind of obvious, but I have to say that too many times.
Well, and also, you know, you look at Mexico, just next door, where, you know, and I'm the furthest thing from the world's expert on this, but I know that land is held in common in such a way where you really can't just improve your property and keep it and keep those profits and reinvest those profits and improve it and improve it.
It just doesn't work that way.
Anything that you do has to be with the, you know, consent of the local planners, whoever they are.
And look how much more poverty there's always been in Mexico compared to just north of the border.
But even more egregiously than that, in Latin America, you have these huge pieces of land that were, that are owned by individuals or families that was given to them by the copperers or by the rulers of the time, you know, in the earlier centuries, down the colonial period and after that.
I mean, these huge, you know, tracts of land that, which took land, closed it to homesteading, so peasants, peasants who had been working it were either kicked off or turned into renters, like tenant farmers, and they suddenly had to pay rent on land that their families might have been working for generations, as is applied to Palestinians, too.
This is true throughout a lot of the world, where you had feudalism at an earlier time.
There's still the remnants of feudalism, huge amounts of land, illegitimately in a few hands, which keeps people poor and dependent on the powers, on the power.
So that needs to be broken up, and every libertarian should see that that's a libertarian cause, to be against that.
And the great Roy Childs, the late great Roy Childs, when he was editor of the Libertarian Review, spent much time talking about the need for land reform.
This was for a solid libertarian position, right?
The need for land reform in Latin America, because, and we should be sympathetic to that, we always regard that as, oh, that's commie, we can't talk about land reform, that's communist, but it's ridiculous.
Yeah, well, I mean, well, and you know, what it does, it comes down to how long ago was it stolen?
Because all the land was stolen.
I mean, boy, the amount of blood spilled in Texas, where I'm broadcasting from right now, you couldn't, you know, dig enough Olympic-sized swim pools for it all.
But how long ago was it stolen?
How many times has it changed hands since then?
There's no real solid mathematical formula on there, other than just kind of shrug your shoulders rule, I guess, huh?
Well, look, there's a lot of vacant and unimproved land which is registered in the names of particular individuals or companies, and it seems to me there's no grounds for not having that open up to homesteading.
First of all, it hasn't been improved in any kind of Lockean way, right?
It's just seized.
It was seized some time ago, and then it's been kept vacant and off of, you know, undeveloped.
So there's no Lockean claim for that, and I think that should be open to homesteading.
In this country, you know, you have the corporations, which are almost the next thing to being creatures of the state, namely a lot of, say, military-industrial complex firms.
Maybe that stuff should be open to homesteading.
I mean, there are an awful lot of people who have what Kevin Carson has called the subsidy of history.
So if we were just to say, okay, from now on, there'll be freedom and everything stays in place without any remedy whatsoever, even where it's really obvious, I think there is some problem there.
And we get asked about that by left-wingers a lot, and I think we need to have a good answer to that.
All right.
Well, not anymore, because we've got to go.
Thanks very much.
Sheldon Richman, everybody.
F-E-E dot org, thefreemanonline.org, SheldonRichman.com.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it, man.