Authors Forum: What the Greens and the Nationalists Have in Common

0:00I had an old friend, Bill Parker, who's dead now. He used to teach economics history at Yale University. And Bill used to say, the older you get, the less you write and the more you publish. So, if I get up in here, I'm starting to become a great prolific publisher. And I want to tell you today about a couple of books and my journal a little bit, too. I never like to go anywhere without my journal of the way. Some people won't go without their American Express card and the independent review, this is the issue of the newsstand. You may have noticed it.

0:49I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that no other journal of serious political economy has ever had a cover quite like this. If that tells you, you can expect things a little out of the ordinary from my journal and you're correct. If you're not already a subscriber, get with it. The prices are right and I think you'll enjoy the reading. Many of the people who are affiliated with the Mises Institute, our friends at the Mises Institute, have written for the Independent Review, including Tom Buolanzo and Mark Thornton, I think it would be wrong to describe the Independent Review as an Austrian journal, but its editor is certainly one who is closely identified with the Austrian school nowadays, and is very much open to good writing by Austrian.

2:06So I want to tell you about a couple of books. One is about to be published, it's not yet published, so all I have to show you is three publications and proofs. This book is called Rethinking Green, Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, And it's edited by me and by Carl Close, who works at the Independent Institute. And the book consists of a number of essays, it's 450 pages long, so there is a lot of material here. But all of these essays were published previously in the Independent Review. It turns out that without quite trying, we have, as it were, focused on, I don't know, six or eight topics in the journal over the years.

3:05And when we look back, we see that if we brought all of these things on a particular topic together, it would make a nice collection. So that's what we've done here with essays dealing with environmental matters, and particularly the government's environmental policy. Environmental policy, I don't have to explain to any of you, I'm sure, is one of the battle fronts in the fight for liberty in this country. and environmentalism as represented by so-called environmentalists, the people who describe themselves that way in public, is a kind of manifestation of collectivism and tyranny as it has come to be most influential in the wake of the breakup of old-fashioned Marxist-type leftism, is now flourishing only on university campuses.

4:07But environmentalism flourishes all over the country. Many ordinary people actually think they are environmentalists and support environmental policies of all sorts. That's why Congress keeps rolling this stuff out. And the Environmental Protection Agency is one of the most egregious regulatory agencies we have to contend with in this country. So these essays deal with a variety of environmental policy questions, the Endangered Species Act, global warming, oil drilling, you name it, and many of the people who are friends of or associated with the Mises Institute have essays in here, two excellent pieces here by Bob Nelson, who's going to be giving one of the featured addresses This conference appeared in the book. A very nice Austrian paper by John Breitling is included.

5:08Roy Cordado has an extremely hardcore Austrian presentation as part of the debate with P.J. Hill on so-called market-based environmentalism. So I urge you to have a look at it if you have any interest in this topic at all. This will be available for sale very quickly within the next month. Now let me spend the rest of my time telling you about another book which is called Against Leviathan, a sub-title of government power and free society and this is my own work entirely And the book is a collection of essays, almost all of which were previously published.

5:59There is, I think, one substantial paper on the FDA, which was never published before, although I gave it at a conference a few years ago in Germany. but these essays go back as far as I think 1981 and come up almost to the present day the bulk of them were written in the past a decade many of them were first written for what I called my et cetera column in the independent Review. However, everything in this book has been rewritten, polished, updated, corrected, so nothing appears here exactly as it appears originally. So it's not simply a bunch of previously published pieces laid end to end. And I have selected for this collection only essays that I think are accessible to a general audience of intelligent readers.

7:08There's nothing included here that I wrote specifically for my colleagues in economic history or in economics. There's no technicalities of any kind in here, nothing especially esoteric. So I think everything here is accessible. And I've tried to bring together about 40 pieces, all of which I hope tell us something about the nature of government power. That's why the subtitle is what it is. And just to give you a flavor of what I think is the overarching theme of these essays, If I had to use a single word to describe what is fundamentally wrong with government today, I would use the word fraud.

8:07Certainly nowadays, and perhaps in every age, government is not what it claims to be, competent, protective and just. And it is what it claims not to be, bundling, menacing, and unjust. In actuality, it is a vast web of deceit and humbug, and not for a good purpose either. Indeed, its true purposes are as reprehensible as its noble claims are false. Its stock and trade is pretender. The velvet glove of countless claims of benevolence scarcely conceals its iron fist of violence and threats of war-violence.

9:00It wants to be loved, but it will settle for being feared. The one thing it will not do is simply leave us alone. So, sometimes catalogs, I've noticed, such as laissez-faire's catalogs, put this book under a heading called political philosophy and I'd like to correct that because I am certainly not a philosopher and this is not a book of philosophy. This is a book that specializes, as I have for my entire career, in being concrete and bringing facts to bear, along with some logic, to make arguments.

9:48And it's much more historical than it is philosophical by far. It's more analytical than it is philosophical. And yet again, I think it is accessible, not essay-based. The essays range across a number of areas. I have sections on welfare statism, which deals with various redistributionist policies and programs, such as Social Security and Medicare. I have one section called Our Glorious Leaders, which is a little more clear-eyed look at the people who purport to be political leaders and fetters.

10:37One section is called despotism, soft and hard, and this runs from the Bird and Drug Administration's regulation After the drug war and related matters such as the fact that the authorities in this country have now clamped millions of people in prisons and jails, many of them for things that ought never to have been calmed in the first place. One section is called economic disgraces, and this runs across a variety of policies and programs that are simply based on economic humbug. And a large section is called the Political Economy Crisis. If you know anything about my previous work, you'll recognize that these essays are all, as it were, sequels to what I wrote in my book Crisis and the Biathlon, and now almost 20 years ago.

11:37One little section is called Retreat of the State, question mark, and there I take up a number of views that have been propounded in recent years by people who see all kinds of constraints bearing down on the modern state and therefore suppose that it's on the run. Perhaps my vision is faulty, but as I look at it, it doesn't look as if it's on the run at all to me. In fact, I think these arguments for why it's on the run are extremely problematical, and I say why in this section. And finally, there's a section called Review of the Truths, which consists of a number of substantial review essays dealing with what other people have written about, important matters in political economy ranging across books such as Bert Olson's work on the capitalists, good and bad, and Mancer Olson's work, especially the final works before he died on the nature of the state.

12:50So, if you're interested in these kinds of topics, I think there's something here for you. And if you've seen these essays before and think, oh, I've already read that, remember, they're all a little different now, and many of them have been brought up today, so there may be something more for you here.