01/19/10 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
And now all day we've been talking, well every show really, but especially today it seems we're talking about the lawlessness of the national government of the United States of America in terms of the murders and vast cover-up of the murders at Guantanamo Bay as covered by the other Scott Horton in Harper's Magazine and in terms of Tony Blair's advice from his foreign secretary of how to construct what will seem a legal case for launching an aggressive war and in terms of the FBI breaking their own rules about whose phone records they seize.
And so now here to talk with us about this theory of governmental lawlessness, this observation of governmental lawlessness, is the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of The Freeman, which is published by the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE, in Irvington, New York.
He is 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.
You can also check out his awesome blog, Free Association, at SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing real well and happy to be with you as always, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
We'll get to the lawlessness thing here.
Let's talk about Lysander Spooner.
It's sort of the same question.
Who's Lysander Spooner and why should anybody care?
And especially today, why should they care about Lysander Spooner?
Sheldon?
Well, he's very relevant to the things you've been talking about.
He would understand lawlessness of government very well.
He would say lawless government actually is a redundancy.
You don't need the word lawless.
It's government.
It is lawless.
Spooner, the reason it's good to talk about him today is because it's his birthday.
He would have been 202 years old and he's a man that every American should know about.
He's one of my personal heroes.
Sounds like he's got a strange sounding name and he's from olden days.
Are you sure this matters?
He was born in 1808, died in 1887.
He lived in Massachusetts, I think, most of that time.
He was a lawyer.
He was a constitutional scholar.
He was a businessman.
He set up a rival post office and it was so good, it was so cheap and so fast that the Congress passed laws to close them down.
He also beat the law in Massachusetts that said if you didn't go to college but wanted to practice law, even after you apprenticed with a lawyer for quite a while, you still needed three years of education.
He actually helped to defeat that law.
He was an abolitionist and he wasn't just an armchair abolitionist.
He used to sneak into the Confederacy in the 1850s and nail posters up on trees urging, trying to foment slave rebellions.
So he wasn't just sitting around talking.
When John Brown was captured after that little unpleasantness at the Harpers Ferry, he tried to hatch a plot where the governor of Virginia would be kidnapped and held for ransom, the ransom being the release of John Brown.
Unfortunately, Spooner wasn't able to raise the money, which was a problem that has plagued libertarian efforts ever since.
He was a wonderful man.
He attacked, and this will sound strange at first, but I'll elaborate.
He attacked the capitalist system.
But by capitalist system, of course, he meant a pro-business system of intervention by the state or a partnership between government and business, which screwed working people.
And he was for free banking, which he thought would lower the price of capital, which means people could start their own businesses and work for themselves rather than having to work for somebody else.
He was just a wonderful person all around.
And I forget, I think you said it, but where was he from?
He was a Yankee, right?
He was born in Massachusetts, spent some time in Ohio, I think maybe spent the bulk of his time in Massachusetts.
He did practice law first in Ohio.
He has a great book called Trial by Jury, which the jury nullification movement, I believe, still uses as a handbook because he believed that juries should be able to nullify laws.
For example, this wouldn't have been relevant, I guess, in his time, but if someone is brought up to trial on drug charges, the jury should be able to say, yes, he did it, but we think the law is unjust, so we free him.
So he was a great advocate of that sort of thing.
He wrote a book on poverty.
He wrote several books and lots of pamphlets and his most famous writing, which really is where his anarchism stands out.
He was an individualist anarchist, individualist, and I stress that.
He was for total free trade and economic freedom and private property.
His most famous pamphlet, and it's actually a booklet, it was part of a series called No Trees in a Brief Series, and the subtitle of that particular entry was The Constitution of No Authority, and that's where, in a very learned way, and he was quite a constitutional scholar, he showed both in moral terms and in political terms the Constitution couldn't have bound anybody but the few people that gathered in Philadelphia to write it and perhaps sign it.
It certainly couldn't bind future generations.
Well, for now, I will encourage people to go ahead and put that in your favorite search engine, The Constitution of No Authority, and I definitely think we'll have time to go back and talk a bit about that, but I want to talk a bit about his abolitionism first.
Lysander Spooner, whose birthday it is today, he argued, and I believe contrary to William Lloyd Garrison, well, in fact, I'm sure contrary to William Lloyd Garrison, that the Constitution does not enshrine slavery.
The Constitution forbids slavery, if you read it his way, where William Lloyd Garrison, who was probably famous for being the most radical abolitionist, said that the Constitution is a pact with the devil, a pact with these Southern slave owners, and that the North ought to secede from the South.
That's right.
He called it a pact with hell or something, an agreement with hell, a pact with the devil.
He burned a copy of it on the Boston Common.
This is Garrison.
That's right, and that was the position of the abolitionists, that slavery was unconstitutional, sorry, was constitutional, and therefore the Constitution, that was the problem.
Spooner alone, and I think pretty much alone, I don't know if we know of anybody else who took this position, was as hardcore an abolitionist as those guys, but he argued that if you read the Constitution in the way Constitution should be read, and he wrote a whole book about this, that slavery was unconstitutional.
In fact, you can find his books online.
If you just search for him, you'll find it, LysanderSpooner.com, probably.
Well, can you give us the basic sketch of the argument there?
Yeah, I'll throw up the argument.
LysanderSpooner.org, you can find all his works.
He wrote a book called The Unconstitutional Analogy of Slavery.
He said, look, one thing he pointed out was if you read the original Constitution, the word slave never appears.
It's true.
The word slaves, slavery, nothing like that form, in any form that word appears.
There's no reference to blacks, to Africans, nothing like that.
They always used euphemisms, right?
They said three-fifths of all other persons when they were talking about the tax, apportionment for taxes, and then voting in the Congress.
You know, there was a big argument over whether slaves should be counted as a full person, which the South wanted, right?
The slaveholders wanted it because it would mean bigger population, more representatives, and the Northerners, the abolitionist types, wanted them not to count at all.
Some people don't understand that.
They think the slaveholders would want zero and the abolitionists would want one.
It was actually the reverse.
Well, I saw the emotional thing because they say each man was only three-fifths of a man, which that's not the point.
The point is count three-fifths of those quote-unquote other persons in order to not counting them and counting them full.
Yeah, and the more counted, the more congressmen the slave owners had.
The slaves never had any congressmen at all.
They wanted each slave counted as one person, but that's a secondary point.
Spooner's point is that it says, it doesn't say three-fifths of slaves.
It says three-fifths of all other persons.
And the other references to slavery are also veiled.
The one about the slave trade doesn't mention the word slave.
And there's a third one, but I can't remember what it is right now.
The point is, he's not playing dumb.
He's not saying, well, I guess it doesn't mean those guys didn't have slavery in mind because they didn't like slaves.
He's not saying that.
He knows they had slavery in mind.
He's saying we're not bound by what they had in mind.
If we're going to be bound by this constitution, by the way, he didn't believe the constitution was valid, but he was willing to play the game within it for the purposes of this debate.
He said, we're not bound by what they secretly meant by other persons.
We have every right to just read it and give a reasonable meaning to the term other persons.
And he didn't put it this way, but this would be the gist of his argument.
What if a Martian who spoke English, but didn't know American history came down today, and the Martians understood English perfectly, but didn't know American history, didn't know there were slaves, and just read three-fifths of all other persons?
What would that Martian, that creature, do?
How would he interpret those words?
And Spooner says, if we're being reasonable about it, the reasonable interpretation would be that maybe resident aliens would only count three-fifths.
Obviously, they're not citizens yet.
They're living here.
They're not citizens because it already talked about citizens, and it talked about Indians.
And now he said, well, what other category if you don't know that they're slaves, if you're just reading the plain language?
And he said, well, you can come up with other reasonable interpretations.
So his general idea is that if a constitution is supposed to limit the power of government, then you have to give it a pro-freedom reading.
You have to interpret any clause in a pro-freedom way, unless it's impossible to do that.
That's what he says, unless it's impossible to do that.
So if the word slave was in there, then he'd have to say, no, well, obviously this means slave, and then I suppose he would have taken Garrison's position.
So that's the gist of the argument.
I don't think he carried his fellow abolitionists on this, but it's a very interesting argument.
And he's a very clear writer.
He's very tenacious.
He writes.
He just pounds away at his opponents.
He's great to read.
But it wasn't anything like in the Bill of Rights that was being denied to the slaves, something like that?
I'm not sure I understand your question.
Well, I mean, I guess nowadays the national government forbids individuals from violating each other's rights, like under the color law, a national law will forbid state laws from enshrining the violations of people's rights.
But that's kind of a school of thought that comes much later.
At this point, the Bill of Rights was only a list of restrictions against the national government.
And so that wouldn't necessarily have been part of his argument against slavery would be anything in the Bill of Rights that mark.
Right now, I think that's right.
It was regarded as a limit on the Congress.
But now, I mean, if if, you know, the state of Mississippi tried to legalize slavery, the national government would just say no, because the supremacy clause and enforcing the Bill of Rights would say that you're violating people's rights under the color of law.
And you have no right to do that by allowing one private individual to enslave another.
I don't know.
I guess I'm no lawyer.
I think his argument, I think what he was trying to do was, I mean, I think he made a sincere argument.
But I think strategically, what he had in mind was if you concede, I mean, there was a lot of reverence for the Constitution in those in those days.
I mean, the right hand is 18.
This is the 1850s.
And so he thought you're giving away the high ground if you say slavery is constitutional, which is what the Garrisonians were saying.
And I think he felt that you could win over people, including maybe some Southerners.
After all, most Southerners weren't slaveholders, right?
You could win them over if you if you can show them and make a strong argument that that slavery was unconstitutional.
That would put a lot of people in a bind.
They'd say, oh, wait a second.
Slavery is unconstitutional.
But I like the Constitution.
So maybe I need to rethink my position about Southern slavery.
I think that's that's what he had in mind.
I think he also believed it sincerely.
But I think he thought it was a good strategy and a bad strategy to say, hey, this is a pact with the devil because it gives his blessing to slavery, which he didn't believe.
It also has shades of that whole argument about what the founders meant versus what they wrote and what we can make out of it now and all that.
Well, I think he was you know, I think it's a difference between judging the Constitution from above the way he would as an anarchist and then judging it from within in the context of the debate over slavery.
He would not have wanted.
Look, he was against the Civil War.
He was one of the rare abolitionists who was against the war.
I did a paper on this some years ago in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
You know, most abolitionists, even the Quakers, even the pacifists, once the war got going, they said, oh, well, we might as well get some good out of it and end slavery.
So they became sort of enthusiastic for the war.
But Spooner condemns condemns the war.
He does this in no treason because he thinks it's an act of northern aggression and northern imperialism, even though he's against slavery.
He wanted to free the slaves basically through private action and then uprising.
The name no treason almost sounds like he's against treason.
No treason.
But what he's saying is, I never owed you any allegiance in the first place.
Well, that's right.
He said he never signed the Constitution.
You know, if the guys in Philadelphia want to sign it and say we're bound by this, that's fine.
But why is he bound by this government?
Why does he obey it?
Why does he have to obey it?
Now, he has a full theory of natural law.
And he wrote quite a bit about this.
He wrote a letter to Grover Cleveland.
It's just simply called a letter to Grover.
He loved to write to famous people and lay out his theory of natural law.
And it's quite detailed.
Very well, Rothbardian.
Rothbard was a big fan of Spooner.
And so he thought you were bound by the natural law not to kill people, not to take their property, you know, stuff like that.
But not that you were you weren't bound to obey the dictates of the government or pay taxes or anything of that sort.
Well, and he goes through the argument in there and he says, listen, just because you pay taxes and just because you vote, that doesn't necessarily mean that you consent.
Although I'm pretty sure a lot of people would come up with those same arguments, right?
Oh, that's right.
And he's one of a few people in our tradition who have.
Oh, I got one more.
If you don't like it, you can leave.
Yeah.
Well, and he like Herbert Spencer and others have attacked this idea that you've tacitly consented by either not leaving or by voting.
And he said, look, somebody could just be voting in self-defense.
You know, you could feel it.
OK, one person is so bad.
One candidate is so bad.
I just have to do something and try to stop that candidate.
That doesn't imply a consent to the system.
Just like Spencer pointed out that, you know, people will say nobody thought he shows that the argument is logically the idea.
Nobody's allowed to criticize the government because if you voted and your guy won, well, how can you you can't how can you complain?
Your guy won.
If you voted and your guy loses, then how could you complain?
You win in knowing there was a chance your guy was going to lose.
And if you don't vote, they say, well, how can you complain?
You didn't vote.
So, you know, Spencer was great, too.
I mean, he was right in that same tradition.
And and Spooner would have understood that completely.
Well, and, you know, he also has a great utilitarian argument, aside from the natural law about the Constitution there.
And this is, I think, the most famous quote of Lysander Spooner, where he says, but whether the Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain that it has either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless to prevent it.
In either case, it is unfit to exist.
Well, he was a great logician because I because I don't know how a limited government libertarian responds to that.
I've posted that several times on my blog and I never really get an answer.
I don't see the answer to that.
He seems to be right.
It obviously has not stopped the growth of government.
So where does that leave us?
And that's what I think he was saying.
That's how he closed the number six of no treason.
It's a very powerful sentence.
Tom Woods on this show said, look, if you came from Mars or something and tried to set up a brand new controlled experiment in minarchism, the U.S. Constitution would be, you know, that's about how you do it.
And how's that working out for you?
Well, that's right.
And, you know, this is Spooner in the I forget exactly when the treason was written, 1870s, maybe early 1880s.
He's complaining about big government in those years.
Now, you can go back to the first decade of the 1800s and John Taylor of Caroline, the Southern classical liberal who wrote a lot, he was complaining about big government in 1808, 1807, about how Congress has already outgrown what they said it was going to be when they promised the Constitution was going to limit government.
He's complaining in 1808, 1807.
So anybody who says libertarians today are being a little oversensitive to the size of government just have to point to, you know, those guys who were writing 200 years ago.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, on the question of if you don't like it, you can move.
I mean, there are all kinds of, you know, natural law arguments that can be made.
But the enemy of the state hanging out in the chat room points out the Bill Hicks response to that was what?
And then be a victim of our foreign policy?
No way.
That's a great, that's a very good line.
And, you know, and, you know, watch the Freeman for an upcoming article that deals with this idea of tacit consent.
Unfortunately, you find it in none other than John Locke, that if you don't leave, then that's a sign of consent.
But, you know, Charles Johnson, who writes for the Freeman and who has a great blog, Rad Geeks People's Daily, has done some writing on this, his blog, arguing that if there's no way that you can't not consent, you know, openly show your lack of consent, then it's meaningless to talk about the fact that you've consented.
Right.
And also, there's an argument that the private property is perfectly legitimate.
If the government is illegitimate, then how can it be that they own the property more than you do, that they have more of a right to control over it than you do?
Well, of course they do, too, because try not paying your property taxes and guess who gets the property?
The government just will put it on the auction block and sell it to somebody else.
So who's the ultimate owner of the land?
And does that make the government the landlord and the rest of us just tenants?
All right.
So bottom line here, then, is that when I took even maybe fifth grade, but certainly, you know, high school government class, that whole theory of popular sovereignty, that we the people can authorize such a thing as the government to exist is, you know, so much communism, basically, it's not correct that people have the right to authorize that the people have the right to authorize a government to exist and to control everyone who even wasn't in on it.
Well, that's right.
And then you can find some very good stuff, even by modern historians today who point out that if you go back to the ideas of the consent of the governed and representation, those were really devices to quiet the people.
In other words, to shut the people up.
Because if you can convince them that this is all really being done with their consent, and through their representatives, you've diffused, right, the potential opposition, because people, you know, people, if they buy that, they'll say, well, it's being done on our name.
And it's, you know, it's, we voted and represents us.
So it takes, you know, if the government is seen as an external thing, you're more likely to resent it, and maybe even do something about it.
But if you if you've been indoctrinated to believe it's, you know, you're part of it, and you want it's actually being done in your name, that that takes away a lot of the potential for opposition.
And I think that I think that's right, then these guys understood it.
That's what was so great about Spooner and that whole, that whole group, they saw that, that there was a problem.
Well, you know, I've been having a great time reading George Carlin's memoirs.
And apparently, I don't know if you know any of the story, but his mom was a high powered advertising executive and brought him up to be very conservative, just sort of, he said it wasn't even really his own view, but it was just hers kind of grafted onto him.
And then he had a talk with a buddy of his.
And his friend said, Look, George, I got to talk to you, man.
You know, the right, they care about property, the left, they care about people.
And then you're not really a right winger.
Let me explain some things to you.
And I was thinking that is actually a very good way to sum up the kind of basic understanding that most people would have about what it means to be liberal or conservative, something like that.
And it occurred to me in my libertarian mind, of course, that, you know, libertarians are concerned about people's property and, and property rights are our human rights like the rest of them.
But I kind of want to tie this into a discussion of a couple of blog entries below your Spooner entry here on your blog, Sheldon free association dot blogspot.com it is again, under your remembering Murray Rothbard is libertarians against capitalism.
So what the hell is libertarians against capitalism?
And could you possibly weave in also a response to George Carlin's friend who advised him how the left and the right really work and what those ideas what those kind of mindsets sure are really about their keeping simple, by the way, one thing I should mention, you can simplify things regarding the blog is if you go to just Sheldon Richmond calm, you'll get there.
Okay, so libertarians against capitalism that was actually inspired by the Tom, the john fossils program last week, and he did a show on Fox Business on crony capitalism.
And it's something I've been thinking about for a couple years.
But I watched that show.
And it was really well done.
Don't find it on YouTube is worth saying he had Russell Roberts and a few people.
But what it would it crystallized things I've been thinking recently, and brought back a lot of what I hear people say, because you'll hear people say, you know, that capitalism caused the current problems, economic problems, the housing, the financial, and the other side will say, I mean, our our side, generally speaking, will say, No, that's not capitalism.
That's crony capitalism.
Because capitalism means such and such.
And so I kept wondering, okay, what does this phrase mean?capitalism means?
And what sense does it mean that?
I mean, it's not like a platonic thing, out in the world of the forms, there's this pure thing called capitalism.
And it's free markets, you have to look at historical capitalism.
And historically, capitalism has been what Spooner talked about, and what Benjamin Tucker and those guys talked about, basically a union of prominent businessmen and the state.
And while there was there were markets, it wasn't obviously centrally controlled, like, you know, Stalinist system or anything.
There were there were markets, they were markets that were guided and constrained by basically pro business intervention and privilege.
So instead of us, I think it's a waste of time for us to say, Well, no, today, we don't talk capitalism, we have today, it's crony capitalism, we want to get back to the real capitalism, I think we just give up the word most people understand capitalism to mean not pure free markets, but markets that that have a healthy dose of government involvement, and a lot of it being pro business.
And I don't see why we should try to save this word, it was never really our word to begin with, it was coined by the opponents of the system.
So we should just talk about free markets, or laissez faire, or some other thing that's clear, I think capitalism is not clear.
Well, and even discussing the jargon is useful.
I mean, how many people listening went, okay, you know, now their understanding of the differences between those different concepts is crystallized even better.
So, I mean, it's not that everybody's going to be won over into dropping the term capitalism.
But the more we talk about it, the better.
Anyway, it looks like to me, the what what prompted the blog post is that I started a group on Facebook, because it's just been bugging me, I started a group called libertarianism capitalism, which stimulated quite a bit of discussion and a lot of comments.
And we got, we got, I don't know, over 100 members very quickly.
And so we're, yeah, we're talking about it.
And I'm not the first to launch this other people have been talking about it, too.
So that's, that's the point.
The word I think is an albatross.
It's associated with rent seeking and greed and all that stuff.
And why don't we just talk about free markets?
The way I summed it up is, if we have, if we feel compelled to say laissez faire capitalism, and or free market capitalism, then there's something wrong with the word capitalism, right?
We wouldn't modify it.
So let's just talk about free market laissez faire.
Try the word.
That's, that's my point.
Yeah, when it goes back to cool hand Luke, what we've got here is a failure to communicate.
And so that's motivating.
What's motivating me?
Well, and it goes to, you know, when I first learned about libertarianism was, I don't pay any attention to that.
That's the rich white man's anarchy.
But of course, the truth is that liberalism and conservatism are the rich white man's anarchy, the, the vile form of capitalism that you're describing right now, class war by the most powerful people who control the state and use it against the rest of us with and have no mercy, by the way.
Yeah.
And look, I did a little bit of writing about this last year, because when I went to see Michael Moore's movie, if he had called the movie crony capitalism or state capitalism, a love story, I vote, I would have almost applauded the whole thing.
I mean, it's a little vague because sometimes he says free market, sometimes he says capitalism, but most of what he's talking about is the crony stuff, right?
The subsidies, the bailouts and all that stuff.
He doesn't see it.
He doesn't understand free markets, but the movies, you know, wouldn't be too bad if he said, this is crony capitalism said he wants, he wants you to get the idea that it's the free market, not just capitalism, but free market.
Regarding Carlin, Carlin's one of the two or so people I would have loved if they had sat down in a room with Carl Hess for two hours.
I think Carl, I don't know if your viewers or your listeners are real familiar with Carl Hess, but Carl Hess was a great libertarian and sort of counter-cultural.
So he could reach some people that, you know, a lot of other people can't reach.
And if he had sat down with two, the two people I have in mind are George Carlin and John Lennon.
I would have loved to see Carl Hess sit down for a couple of hours with each of those guys, because I think they would have come out anarcho-libertarian.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Bill Hicks too, man, if he hadn't died when he died, it was just, you know, it was the beginning of 1994.
He was great on Waco from the very beginning.
So he would have spent the whole rest of the 1990s at war against the Clinton guys from his microphone.
And I think he, you know, there are a couple of places where he denounced socialism in England and stuff like that.
Carlin, of course, had very skeptical stuff about the whole Earth Day movement and recycle your plastic bags and plenty of cynicism about the left as well.
And so, yeah, it's interesting, like the people who would have, could have been libertarians, if only, right?
Yeah.
But as to the advice that Carlin got, you, of course, are right that property properly conceived is simply a human right.
It's people using material goods, which we need to live and to prosper.
And when left free, we trade money for property or property for property, items for items.
So we need material goods.
But there's still a grain of truth in what Carlin was being told, because I mean, traditionally, and you can see this in a lot of conservatives, property ends up getting cut off from individual rights from people.
When government is taxing people to give bailouts and provide subsidies to well-connected businesses and all kinds of privilege, that does appear to be putting property ahead of people.
And that's something that should offend libertarians.
Although we do need to clarify the issues and explain that, like I said, properly conceived property is just people keeping what they create and what they've made or what they've traded for, and that that's peaceful and that creates social cooperation.
But I think we have to be sensitive to the thing that Carlin was being told, because if we just say, oh, that's nonsense, that's nonsense, we're missing something important.
Well, on the real important point there is that all of that cronyism is a violation of the property rights of the rest of us.
They're stealing from us, they're regulating us, they're aggressing against us on behalf of others.
So it doesn't just take place in a vacuum.
Well, that's right.
And if we bring this back to the abolitionists, Garrison and his people called slavery man-stealing.
They knew that slavery was a property violation.
And this is interesting because, of course, the slaveholders put the defense of slavery in terms of property.
This is our property, right?
You're denying us our property.
That did give property a bad name.
But of course, to be able to own somebody else, to own a person's property, undercuts the very philosophical foundation of property.
Property is simply people being able to control what it is they've honestly and legitimately acquired, either through appropriation of something that's unowned, like a piece of land that no one else owns already, or what they've made out of the raw materials that they own or what they've traded for.
That's really what property is in the libertarian conception.
So there's nothing anti-human about it.
But it's been turned into an anti-human institution in some ways, first through slavery, but then in these lesser ways through government, taking people's money in order to give it to favored groups and favored interests.
And so again, libertarianism has the perfect answer for both the left and the right.
Well, if you're a conservative and you're trying to find consistency in your understanding of property rights, then at the end of the day, you're going to be a bleeding heart liberal who cares about people.
And if you're a bleeding heart liberal who cares about people, then you have to see that their right to their own property, including ownership of themselves, this is all the very same thing.
It's the basis of all their rights is their ownership.
And so why would anybody be a liberal or conservative?
Here's your unified field theory right here.
Well, unless you're a nationalist and a collectivist in some way, which both the left and the right, in that sense, tend to be a different collective.
But it's still a form of collectivism.
And that I think is one of the problems.
They're not sufficiently individualist.
Right.
Well, that's the truth.
But if they want consistency, that's where they'll end up, it seems like to me.
And I'll go ahead and leave it at this.
I thank you for being such a great example to people and to help them on their paths from the left and the right toward a real understanding of individual liberty.
Sheldon, great work.
My pleasure.
And I appreciate you saying that.
And I'm glad you called me.
And I don't mind even calling short notice.
Please do it again.
Well, great.
Yes.
I hope we can soon.
OK.
All right, everybody.
That's Sheldon Richman, editor of the Freeman Senior Fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation and keeper of the blog at Sheldon Richman dot com.
That's Sheldon Free Association dot blogspot dot com.