Authors Forum: The Left, The Right, and The State

0:00Well, it's great to be here in this lineup talking about this subject just at a moment when we've moved from a regime of fascism and socialism to one of socialism and fascism. I do want to publicly thank Judy Thomason for saving me from the original title of this book. The dedication page, I mentioned Mises is great, a motto adopted as a boy from Virgil, Tune Cady Malus said contra identi or eto, that is, do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. So the original title of this book was Tune Cady Malus, and Judy said... So the present title is the former subtitle, and of course, far better.

0:49I'm just going to read the introduction, the short introduction to this book and then take questions if you have any. In American political culture and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state's power should be expanded. The left has a laundry list, the right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the world and its inhabitants, liberty. What is the state? It is that group within society that claims for itself the exclusive right to rule everyone under a special set of laws that permit it to do to others what everyone else is rightly prohibited from doing, namely, aggressing against person and property.

1:40Why would any society permit such a gang to enjoy an unchallenged legal privilege? Here is where ideology comes into play. The reality of the state is that it is a looting and killing machine. So why do so many people cheer for its expansion? Why indeed do we tolerate its existence at all? The very idea of the state is so implausible on its face that the state must wear an ideological and social garb as a means of compelling popular support. Ancient states had one or two, they would protect you from enemies and they were ordained by the gods. To a greater and lesser extent, all modern states still employ these rationales.

2:29But the democratic state in the developed world is more complex. It uses a huge range of ideological rationales parsed out between left and right. that reflect social and cultural priorities of niche groups even when many of these rationales are contradictory. The left wants the state to redistribute wealth, to bring about equality, to rein in business, to give workers a boost, to provide for the poor, to protect the environment. I address many of these rationales in this book with an eye towards particular topics in the news. The right, on the other hand, wants the state to punish evildoers, to boost the family, to subsidize upright ways of living, to create security against foreign enemies, to make the culture cohere, and to go to war to give ourselves a sense of national identity.

3:24I also address these rationales. So how are these competing interests resolved? They log roll and call it democracy. The left and the right agree to let each other give to have their way, provided nothing is done to injure the essential interests of the other. The trick is to keep the balance. Who is in power is really about which way the log is rolling. And there you have the modern state in a nutshell. Although it has ancestors in such regimes as Lincoln's and Wilson's, the genesis of the modern state is in the interwar period, when the ideas Because of a laissez-faire society fell into disrepute, the result of the mistaken view that the free market brought us economic depression.

4:12So we had the New Deal, which was a democratic hybrid of socialism and fascism. The old liberals were nearly extinct. The U.S. then fought a war against the totalitarian state, allied to a totalitarian state, and the winner was Leviathan itself. Carl Leviathan doesn't always have a chief executive who struts around in military costume, but he always enjoys powers that the Caesars of old would envy. The total state today is more soothing and slick than it was in its interwar infancy, but it is no less opposed to the ideals advanced in these pages. How much further would the state have advanced, however, had Mises and Rothbard and many others We must become the intellectual dissidents of our time, rejecting the demands for statism that come from left and right, and we must advance a positive program of liberty, which is as radical, fresh and true as it ever was.

5:28I keep thinking that we're in uncharted waters. At least in the 1930s there was still a partial gold standard. There were some restraints on the central bank. Never, of course, in human history have we been in a situation in which no central bank was restrained and that they all have an entirely discretionary monetary policy and we've seen the U.S. Central Bank create, we don't entirely know, but more than probably nine trillion dollars in new money since the crisis began. It seems like, as we know, Bush and Obama are duplicating the policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, but building on a much bigger state, much more interventionist, I don't know.

6:21I don't know. I mean, it seems to me, you know, at my worst moments, I think they're actually capable of preventing a recovery from ever taking place. On the other hand, as Frank Szostak argues, when we begin to have a recovery, and my guess is he's right, that then the banks will discourage their reserves. It's a wonderful moment when the banks all seem Rothbardian. They're all running practically 100% reserves. But at that moment the banks begin to discourage their reserves and then he says we have hyperinflation very, very quickly. So, you know, you don't know which, you know, it seems like we have two bad alternatives. But they put us into a very, you know, a very bad situation. And it seems to me like they've, you know, in some sense, even before our eyes, moving from crazy Keynesianism, as bad as that is, to socialism.

7:15and certainly there are many totalitarian impulses in this bunch. I must say I found it hard to believe there could be anybody worse than Bush. But, of course, there is. It's always the next guy. Who was it who said that sooner or later every president makes you nostalgic for his predecessor? It took a short time in this case. Not that I think that Bush wouldn't have bailed out everything and run crazy Keynesian policies, too, He's two, after all, Greenspan and Bernanke are his appointees. I mean, he comes from the conservative Keynesianism of the Republican Party that has characterized the Republican Party, I guess, always. Except when they were in opposition against Roosevelt, it didn't characterize them.

8:02But in power, it's always characterized them. So I don't know. I must say, it doesn't look good. On the other hand, the opposition is far greater than it ever was. I mean, who was the intellectual opposition in the 30s? I mean, you had Mises in Europe, and you had Hayek. You had Hazlitt. You had Benjamin Anderson, Garrett Gourette. I mean, there were just a handful of people, magnificent people, but just a handful. Now, many, many thousands understand Austrian business cycle theory. It has vast new tension. And Jeff Tucker distributed an article that was in Barron's today about the Austrians' right, even though he thought that the solution advanced by the Austrians is too harsh, as he put it.

8:54So, you know, I think that I still have hope because of the vast amount of learning and education that's taking place. So I think there's just far more opposition. The Republicans overnight, of course, are talking like us, as they always seem to do when they're out of power. So I think maybe there's a chance they're not going to get away with this, but they're certainly trying everything bad. As I said in a recent call, maybe it's time to reread the Black Book of Communism, just so we realize why we don't want Obama to go where he seems to be headed. My mom articulates a view that I think is actually really common, maybe not among the people at this conference, but among a lot of Americans, which is that that swing from left to right, that this is a great virtue of American democracy, it's moderation.

9:51We haven't fallen into a Soviet Union, a Bolshevik revolution, nor a Nazi takeover. We're a middle-of-the-road country. Just gently go. And this is a wonderful thing about America. Well, so we only have moderate Bolshevism or moderate Nazism. Well, we know Mises said, you know, middle of the road leads to socialism, right? I mean, of course, and that's what's happening. So that all the interventions lead to more interventions to correct the interventions leading to more. But this is, you know, I don't believe in democracy. I don't believe in the American democracy. I think Hans-Hermann Hoppe has cured anybody who's read his great book of that myth.

10:39But maybe this may be a common view, but we're moving, of course, towards the total state. I mean, whether it's a Republican total state or a Democratic total state. Certainly we don't live in a free country by the standards of Thomas Jefferson, maybe even by the standards of Alexander Hamilton. Maybe even Hamilton didn't envision something quite this bad. But, you know, everybody's convinced that because there's a vote, things can't go too bad. Well, yeah, this is the biggest, richest, most powerful state in the history of the world, the U.S. state. And, of course, it's an empire that claims control over every country in the world, that it wants control over. I mean, claims the right to have its huge bottom mapping ship, Which is designed to enable the American killer submarines to go in without hitting anything on the bottom going 75 miles off the Chinese coast right off their big submarine base.

11:42And of course the U.S., if somebody brought something in 75 miles off San Diego, you'd capture it or sink it or something because the U.S. says you can't do that here. But the US claims power and domination, hegemony everywhere and seems to almost have the view of Genghis Khan who believed that the gods had given him control over the whole earth and therefore anybody who was opposing him was blasphemous as well as stupid. So the U.S. seems to believe that God has given the U.S. government control over the whole earth and anybody opposing it. You don't actually have a right to oppose the U.S. It's actually a crime for a country the U.S. is targeting to defend itself, just as Genghis Khan thought.

12:35So this is an extraordinary government. On the other hand, as we all know, who've read De La Brede and Mises and Rothbard and Hume and the others, that governments all depend on the consent of the governed. And that consent can change. There's some people who think that this whole crisis was brought on deliberately by the power elite. Power Elite, obviously I don't agree with that, I don't think they're that smart, and they're much too arrogant in their belief in their power and the ability of their printing press and their guns to achieve any ends, but they're one of the reasons they would not bring on a crisis like this is because it's so destabilizing, indeed it's destabilizing for the whole regime, so this is another reason to be optimistic, the climate of opinion can change, changes, changes can change very very quickly so you know this is why we need to keep up why you all why you all need to keep teaching we all need to keep

13:39writing and I think we're having an effect now again there's always a fight between power and market as Murray said we just have to keep fighting for the I agree with you that the crisis is quite stabilizing, but isn't that kind of what governments want? I mean, Rob Emanuel obviously wants destabilization. He wants government to take control of the crisis situation. No, and of course, you're right. I mean, governments also love crises. They love 9-11. They should have like a holiday, a government holiday for that. because of course every state would like to be a totalitarian state, although my guess is they've actually learned they don't want public ownership of the means of production because it means they're all poor too, so I think they've learned that, but other than that they want a totalitarian, a fascist state, in other words a public-private, but the reason we don't have it is because of public opposition, but when public opposition withdraws as it did after 9-11, then of course the state immediately expands,

14:46They love crises and they love this present crisis for that same reason but it's still destabilizing because it makes them look bad. And also one other point of optimism, Tom Woods' book and I think the work of Rod Paul and the work of Rothbard and Mises and so many others have helped for the first time in history target the Fed. I mean people are actually aware of the Federal Reserve. When I was a boy, the Federal Reserve was just a name on your bills and it was supposed to make your eyes glaze over. Pay no attention, you know, it's boring. Of course, the fact that you're being ripped off is actually very interesting. And, you know, millions are aware of the Fed and hate the guts of the Fed.

15:36This is why Alan Greenspan wrote that article in the Wall Street Journal. Don't blame me, don't blame the Fed, you know, it's the Asians or whatever, you know, or whoever. They loaned us too much money, that was the trouble. So, there's, again, reason to be optimistic. Again, because people are aware of the Federal Reserve, many Americans hate the Federal Reserve, I think this is increasing, and of course it's important to target the villain, The villain of the piece is of course the Federal Reserve. You're not supposed to even know about it, think about it. I think that worries them. I think that animated Bernanke speech who again says, it's not us. The Federal Reserve always cures the crises but never causes the crises. That's the rule, believe it, think it, that's it. Why are they saying these things?

16:29You've never seen a Fed chairman, Arthur Burns or whatever, defend the Fed like that. It's because of us. So, very good. Thank you very much.