Authors Forum: Unmasking the Sacred Lies

0:00My book actually began from my teaching and what I've been involved with over the time is teaching a number of economics courses and I'm a storyteller, I like to tell student stories that hopefully they'll remember for some time and with that in mind I was always looking for a book to teach public choice. I was not enamored with neoclassical price theory and all the utility diagrams in those books. So over the years I changed it into a public choice course and developed a number of articles for the students to read. I was always looking for books that I could assign for them and really could never find one that I liked.

0:50and so that's where this particular book began and as I conceived of it what I wanted to do is write a book that would serve my purposes as kind of the skeletal structure for the course that I could fill in with additional readings along the way and as I began to work on it one of the things I wanted to do with that as well is put it in a format that the average person out there could read as well. And I ended up self-publishing it, which was quite out of the blue, but that whole story began earlier because of a mentor of mine by the name of Clarence Carson. I don't know if any of you are familiar with his work, but Clarence was a pretty strong mentor and he involved me in writing an earlier book that the title is Understanding the Modern Culture Wars.

1:45It's really a book on Western civilization that he had always wanted to write and so I had been working on this book, ended up at the time we were coming to fruition with it, he kind of backed away and didn't want to publish it and ended up self-publishing that particular book. And as a result of that effort, that's what got me into the self-publishing business and also another reason why I wanted to write a book for the kind of the average person on the Street, and then where I could begin to tell some of the stories as well that I tell in classes, for example, you know, when I'm going through the Great Depression and talking about the issues of slaughtering baby pigs and chickens and whatnot, the way I relate it to the students is I'll do it this way, I'll ask them how many of them have seen the and the movie Castaway. Of course, they've all seen it.

2:41And so, okay, now, you know, Tom Hanks, how many of you would say his life had, standard of living, had dropped when he washed up on that island? And they all go, yeah, it did. And so, okay, now, what if he had diagnosed his situation this way? My problem is that the price of coconuts is much too low. and what I need to do is chop down a few of these coconut trees and burn them because that will raise the price of coconuts and I'll be better off which is exactly Roosevelt's whole premise. I mean, when you put it in those terms, its utter nonsense is utterly ridiculous and they all get it. Another one that I use in class is on the Social Security.

3:30and explaining Social Security to them, that this is nothing but a Ponzi scheme, and there's no money in it. See, all the students seem to think there's money in it, and you've got to try to illustrate to them that there's no money in it. And so I'll ask them, how many of them remember Al Gore running for president? And, you know, a few of them still remember that. they were not that young at that time but so they raised their hands and I said did you ever listen to this guy talk you know you've spent a lot of time talking about the social security lockbox and they'll they'll say yeah I kind of remember something about that I said now how many of you saw the movie dumb and dumber and you know most of them have seen that and so I said well Al Gore's lockbox is just like the briefcase full of money and Dumb and Dumber at the end of the movie.

4:29Now think about, you remember what happens, you know, Jeff Daniels and Kerry, they're fighting over the briefcase, they're all the way to Aspen and they're fighting over the briefcase and they hit it against a rock and it busts open, there's all that money there and they go, well, you know, we can't spend it. Wouldn't be right, it's not ours and we've come all this way. But, you know, we have brought it this far and we are cold and hungry and, you know, if we kept track of every dime we spent, then I'm sure, you know, the woman that we're returning it to should not be thinking too lowly of it. So we'll just do that and the next scene, they're driving up to the nicest hotel in Aspen in the Ferrari, you know, stepping out in new clothes, staying in the presidential and then there's a classic scene at the end of the movie where the kidnapper finally gets his hand on the ransom money and he pops open the briefcase and

5:33he goes what is this I owe you $250,000 for a Lamborghini and Jim Carey says you know those are just as good as money and by the way that's a big one I'd hang on And all of a sudden, when you put it in those terms, students get it. They get it. I use a different example in the book. I just talk about, let's suppose that I wanted to save money and I'm going to create my Cleveland Automotive Trust Fund. And I'm a clever sort. I've been paying attention to what's going on out there in government.

6:19And I decide that the way in which I'm going to save for my automotive purchases is by this trust fund. And so every month I'm going to save $500 a month. And the way I'm going to save it is I'm going to loan myself $500 a month to go out and spend any way I want. I'll write myself a Cleveland security bond, and I'll put 10% interest on it, payable annually, on $500 per month. And I'll go out to Walmart, buy myself a lock box, have my little key, and every month I'll put my bonds in the lock box. And I always ask the students, after about four years of this, how much money will I have to go buy a car? And they pretty much get this one too. Zero? Bingo, you're on the right track.

7:09That's what Social Security is like. And all of a sudden, when we put it in those terms, the fraudulent nature of what in the world it is they're doing, I think, comes out. So that's what I've tried to do in the book and just walk through it. And I do it with painting with a big brush. I start at the beginning, and what I'll do chapter by chapter is my introductory chapter is kind of laying out some basic principles about trade and about private property and then also try to format the nature of the way in which I'll approach public choice and there's a bit of a debate here I mean you do it kind of the neoclassical public choice approach which is assuming the most and antisocial behavior, always on the parts of bureaucrats and politicians.

8:07And, you know, while sometimes that's the only approach that makes any sense, there is also the Austrian approach that approaches it from the point of view that's really a knowledge problem of arrogantly believing that you know something you really don't know. And so I kind of play that off to one another in the first chapter and then each chapter The first chapter, beyond that, what I'll do is just go policy area by policy area and start from the beginning, you know, how has one policy led to something else? And so the first one deals with fiscal policy, taxing and spending and how that's changed over time. Second chapter, monetary policy, beginning back with the central banks, well, you know, The first state national bank and then the second national bank and these banking crises, the Lincoln's affair with the greenbacks and, you know, then the creation of the Federal Reserve and, you know, how we kind of moved into this particular direction.

9:15After that, then I'll go into sort of the policy areas transportation, agriculture, education and so forth, and work my way to the end. My last chapter, I think, is an interesting chapter. I titled it The Lawlessness of Too Many Laws. And I did that because, you know, there's so much, I mean, our government's creating all these rules and regulations daily. Who knows what they are? That's why I haven't been arrested, at least not yet. I guess they might pick me up on the way out for violating something or another. At any rate, when you think about it, I use an illustration from the Clinton administration, although we could use it from today, of all of these appointees who were brought up before Congress and somebody somewhere went back and looked into their past and said, sure enough, you didn't pay the nanny tax, the Social Security matching funds, you didn't Therefore, you're not qualified.

10:22Well, who could keep up with all this crap? You know, I mean, they literally come up with thousands of these rules and regulations yearly. And so I'll take a poll in my classes at Birmingham Southern. I ask how many of them know all these? And of course, they don't. I say, well, you're probably a felon then, you know. And you'll be out, that's right. And the point of this is, you know, when nobody knows what the laws really are, we're all likely guilty of violating who knows which ones. And therefore, since they're not going to put all of us in prison, we don't have that much space, right, and built that many prisons yet.

11:07That means that the application of the rule of law is going to be totally politically motivated. and that's not a great place to be. That's not likely to lead to a good society in any way, shape or form. That it's much easier when you have a fairly well-defined, limited set of laws that are well understood and that people can understand and abide by. So, three minutes? I could probably take a question or two if somebody had a question. That's right. I don't think that's anything new. I doubt they ever read what they pass.

11:59Oh, yeah. I was trying to come up with a cover and, you know, I had my title, Unmasking the Sacred Lives, And so I was thinking about covers, so one of the things I thought about was maybe a picture of, you know, the emperor's new clothes, play on words type thing. And I couldn't really find anything I liked and one day I was kind of searching through art museum websites and I ran across this Rembrandt. and this is Belshazzar's feast by Rembrandt and I don't know if you know the story, the story comes from Daniel where Belshazzar has, he's having a big party with his nobility, they've ordered up the wine goblets from the museum and they're going to drink a toast from these goblets to the gods of wine and good times.

13:04And at that moment, the hand appears and begins to write on the wall. They don't know, they're all terrified of this. And they invite Daniel in to give the meaning, to interpret the meaning. And he comes in and he reads the words and he says, well, here's the message. Oh, King, you've been weighed in the balance by the sovereign God Almighty and been found wanting. Therefore, you're going to get wiped out. And I thought, wow, that's perfect. That's perfect because one of the things I wanted to point out is governing officials cannot pursue their illegitimate goals with impunity forever.

13:52You know, civilizations come and civilizations go. They typically die because of this sort of stuff. So, we out of time. Thank you very much.