The Cultural Cloak of the Coercive State

0:00I'm very pleased to be here, it's actually the first time that I am in Houston, speaking in Houston, it's a wonderful city, it's a wonderful place here, Wargos Restaurant, first I thought it was Department of the Houston Zoo, but it's actually just a nice place to be. My topic today is the cultural cloak of the state, which brings me directly to Walter Block, more or less, took away my subject from me, talking about all these things, and also taking away the justification from me, so I had the urge to spring up and then rip the microphone away from him, say, stop Walter, that's my subject, but then he said, he brought up the example with his wife, and said, well, you have no right to prevent competition. So it's good to know that I can compete with you as far as your wife is I'm not very concerned, but he brought up another subject too, stealing terms and stealing expressions and so on, so therefore you get from me, from a German, a hearty howdy, and I'll still start to compliment, supplement a little bit what Walter Block has said.

1:20First, I'll go on defining my terms. After all, I'm a university professor, so you get what you asked for, and so the coercive state and culture, and then I'll talk about the reasons why the state intervenes into the culture and tries to obtain a cultural cloak and how the state goes about it and why he goes about it the way he does it. And then we'll talk a little bit about the consequences that result from it. Okay, so first of all we have the word coercive state. What is a coercive state? It's actually very nice to say this. I think it's an oxymoron. Not an oxymoron, it's a pleonasin.

2:09Isn't any state coercive? Well, I mean, again, it always depends on how you define terms. In terms, you can define a state in such a way. It's a government, as it operates based on right reason and so on, then libertarians would be tempted to say, well, okay, then we wouldn't have any government at all, so it's still, I mean, how can this be? But the crucial element in any case is indeed the distinction between governing services. And we do have governing services in various private and public institutions. We have governing services, for example, in condominiums. We have governing services in sports clubs and so on. So you need people who are organizing, setting up things, making decisions for a larger body of people.

2:58And as Walter Block has pointed out, and that's of course the libertarian plumb line, the crucial question is always, is it voluntary or not? The question is in particular, are you a voluntary member of the association that is being governed by this government or not? And the problem that we have nowadays is that we cannot opt out, right? You can no longer subscribe to the government services of the federal government in Washington, D.C. And I would very much love to opt out of the government services of the French government, but yeah, we're still further away from this. Okay, so the crucial element here is coerciveness, we are forced to consume these services, and again the question is, is it a true service? So the crucial element is the coercive element, and coerciveness means, well, taking away our property against our will.

3:51The government can exercise its coerciveness in two or three ways, it can take away resources from us in the way of taxation, sometimes also in a less visible form, in the form of inflation, then the purchasing power of the money unit is diminished, But it can also order us to do things, and order us to behave, interact with other people in certain ways, and in that respect too then, it infringes on our property rights. It takes away some liberty at the margin that we have, whether I'm married to a woman or to a man, and orders me, okay, in the name of equality and fairness, you've got to be married at least once a year to a man or something. And so the coerciveness must always be seen in this context.

4:51Now the second term that we have here is culture and when we think about culture we attempted to have in mind predominantly the arts, paintings, literature, and so on, and that's certainly a very important part of culture, but it's not the only part of culture. We must have a very comprehensive view of the meaning of culture, and especially if we want to understand government intervention in this field. So culture also belongs, for example, to the sciences. Of course I say this in some self-interest. I'm a cultural producer. I'm not just a mean economist interested in material things, but cultural work.

5:38But more largely also consumption, the kind of products that we consume. Why do we have a restaurant facility set up in this way? It could have been built in many other ways. The reason why it's set up in these ways, with this nice architecture of wood and glass construction, it's very airy and so on, then we have a kind of a zoo around, this is an expression of culture, it's a reflection of what those who run this restaurant think about life, and what they think about how their customers see themselves in their relation to these things. So we have consumption and production as part of the culture. Production itself is part of the culture. How do we produce things? Very different ways to go about it.

6:31Of course, from an economic point of view, we might say, okay, it's ultimately a question of profitability. We choose one way of producing things rather than another because it's more profitable than other things. but yeah and while this is true even in production things are not quite as straightforward as this as everybody knows who has to hire people if you are not dealing with completely primitive manual labor something more sophisticated than other things come into play the personal preferences of the people you're working with come into play the way they view the world they view their social relationships and so on you've got to take it out of this and it will therefore also be reflected in the way you go about things.

7:17So production is too a reflection of values, preferences of the individuals involved in production. Family. Walter Block brought this up. Sorry, it's impossible just to talk about other things than Walter because Walter pretty much covered the ground. So I'll not talk about language because he wants so much detail there. Family. What is a family? These days it's a good question. About 20 years ago it was pretty straightforward. You have a man, you have a woman, you have a couple of bimbo bambinis, as the Italians say. In these days, it could be anything, right? It could be two men and a dog, and two women, three women, next year a man and a monkey, I don't know.

8:08I had to think about this monkey thing, because Walter mentioned the AIDS virus, right? Social relations in general, a very important field of social relations is of course production. Business firms and so on, but I mentioned clubs, associations, but also the public sphere. How people interact in the streets is very different from one country to another. As all of you know, who have gone to other places, not necessarily Canada, but let's say Japan or China or even Europe, there's a big difference already between Germany and Spain, how people interact on the streets and so on.

8:58It's not only because it's colder in Germany, but there's other things that come into play too. Population. What's the composition of the population? population, what's the size of the population, how many different groups, what are their relationships and so on. It's an expression of the culture, what are the languages that they speak. We have the setting up of cities, the way cities are built, how they are organized. Of course, again, you see big differences today between European cities and American cities. Most Europeans are deceived when they come for the first time to the U.S. because they have these great images of New York and so on.

9:47New York is a distinct cultural product, and San Francisco as well. This is a common saying right in the US, you have three cities, you have New York, you have San Francisco, and all the rest is Cleveland. But of course, you could say similar things about Europe, there's also a certain type of European city, the way it is built up and so on. But again, so the point is, the way we do, we go about these things, the way we build cities, we organize them, is an expression of the culture. Same thing about regional development, how are streets built, how are settlements created within the country, how does this articulate with city dwellings and so on, it's all an extra part of the culture.

10:33Then of course in our day environment, what is the relationship between human beings and, well, their natural environment, not only as factors of production but more generally so again the way we view these things and we go about this or we make decisions about our natural environment is a reflection of the culture and finally religion probably the most fundamental factor of all is also of course a very very important and fundamental part of culture so we are talking about a huge bag and as we know We know the state today is present in all these fields. The state runs the arts, runs the sciences. Fortunately, in the US, you're very blessed, you still have private universities.

11:20You have private research. You even have private artists. I try to go about this, well, okay, there are private artists also in Europe, but they almost do this with a bad conscience. I'm always fascinated in the US when I see TV shows and their advertisement, The government is present in virtually all countries, more so in Europe than the U.S. in the arts and in the sciences. The government, of course, is present in consumption, tells us which things to produce, some products are not healthy enough, others might be too healthy, dangerous, morally offensive, and so on.

12:19The government also is present in production, tells us how to produce things, and your two aspects have come into play, of course, environmental aspects, but also social relations, you cannot just produce how you wish, or you've got to produce in the right way. So in some cases, the most flagrant example is the promotion by government of labor unions. In the U.S., as you know, we have quotas, a very strong move toward the establishment of quotas of certain types of workers, males, females, handicapped, non-handicapped, different ethnicities and so on. In Europe, this is still less pronounced, but we are moving very strongly into the same direction. Family, of course. Government has been in place for a long time. More recently in the U.S. than in Europe, and less strongly in the U.S. traditionally than in Europe, but ever more strongly so in the past few years. And again, we've talked about gay marriage.

13:18It's the most flagrant example. And of course, well, so, gay marriage is the natural outcome of having government in the marriage business at all. It's just a very natural consequence. As soon as the government has the authority to define what a marriage is, and it has the authority to, by virtue of its, well, authority to get marriage licenses, well, then, of course, the government can just make up its mind and make a different decision, say, OK, well, now the union between a monkey and a pheasant is a marriage. It's a completely fruitless debate because it's just quibbling about words. If they say, we are using this word from now on in this encompassing sense, any union that we decide is, that we think should be called this way, we do call marriage, then of course there's nothing to argue about.

14:11That's how they do it and that's fine. And it's again, it's a natural consequence of having this institution in the marriage business at all. City regional planning, of course, omnipresent population, government runs very expensive programs, very encompassing programs, designed to create a certain type of population, right proportion between different ethnicities, therefore very interested in questions of immigration and so on, but also in population growth. I find this very interesting. I sometimes wonder whether all these people running the population offices and population bureaus of the federal governments in the world, whether they have all been cattle breeders before. That's the kind of mental equipment that you need to have in order to do good population policy.

15:07and Policy. Ultimately you must look at human beings as cattle. It's just okay, well, we don't have enough of these and the cows don't give enough, so what can we do with some different nourishment or food or they need more stabs or more whips or more sugar. In our day, of course, the principle is the same. We don't, of course, whip them directly, we don't give We give them sugar, but we do other things. We give maternity leave, paternity leave, and all these things, which are again based on and result from a very mechanistic view of how human beings make choices, how they go about offspring and so on. You treat them in the same way as you would treat your cow, your sheep.

15:59The environment, okay, it's not necessary to say anything about this and clearly this is probably the most terrible threat to our liberty today. The government endeavoured to protect the environment differently from what it would have been if the choice were left to people on the free market. And finally, the example that I gave, religion, of course, here again, the government is very strongly present and virtually all religions are under very tight government control and have been under tight government control. The only exception is again, and bless you, the United States. And I hope very much for you that it will stay this way. this way that again, as you know, tendencies in the past few years by the present administration to change this and to bring the government also in the religion business.

16:55So, why all this? Why is the government present in all these fields? The catch word here and what we need to keep in mind is that the state is a cultural parasite, okay? State is a cultural parasite. It thrives on a culture that is by and large produced and has been created independently of its own efforts. So he has a parasitic relationship with cultural production. And the reason is, ultimately, that the government is under the The constant need to justify its activities and to hide its naked power.

17:41As we said, in a way it follows from the definition of the coercive state itself. The state is coercive, its defining element is the violation of property rights, taking away property from other people without their consent. And if the government just went about this in a straightforward way and said, okay, well, Give me all your money, because I said so. That would not be very charming. Some people would find this sexy or cool, but there would not be too many of them, especially of course in this group, but I guess even in the more general population would not be too many people who would find this sexy or cool.

18:30Because they know it, they have to seek for justification, they have to seek for a cover. They have to play on the illusion that their activity is something else but naked power. And therefore we have this very nice phrase of the cultural cloak culture, the presence of the government in culture is nothing but a cloak. It's a cover for its true nature to hide the fact that government intervention is in fact naked power. It is expropriation, subjection of some individuals by other individuals. And of course, this cultural presence or the parasitic nature of the government is in strict proportion to the ambition The stronger your ambitions are, the more encompassing your activities, the stronger is the cover that you need, the more diversified and varied is the cover that you need.

19:35So how does the government go about this? The important point here is that the government must go about it in a roundabout way in order to address the fundamental problem from the point of view of government, which is the problem of authority. We'll go about this step by step. First of all, we consider a government intervening directly without this roundabout way. Let's say the government just said, okay, Christianity is out of date, it's not a very suitable way to think about God and so on, and from now on, everybody has to believe in the goddess, whatever, the goddess water, the goddess microphone, whatever, so it could be anything.

20:30This wouldn't fly, and we all know it wouldn't fly, because, well, if you just come ahead as one individual and as one institution, we'd ever so prestigious and say, well, you've got all to change your mind about this thing about which you thought in a certain way before, it would not be convincing. The government would not find its support of the population. The support of the population is of course important because, as far as sheer numbers is concerned, government is always a minority, always a very small minority. in order to get therefore support for their cultural parasitism, they need to engage in political production. Now some of you again might think that that's a contradiction in terms of that is an oxymoron.

21:18Political production, how can that be? Well, that is of course true, but the problem disappears if we consider that production does not only concern goods, also concerns bats. You can't produce a bat. And that's what they're doing. So ultimately what they want to do is to expropriate people. That's the ultimate goal. And now the way to do it is a production process. And again, the main problem, the main intermediate objective of the political production process is to gain sufficient support. So you have one step back. You need to produce support in order to be able to expropriate. How do you go about creating support? Well, you must work on the media. You must work on people who publish opinion and make opinion, express opinions and so on, try to influence them.

22:10One step back in the production chain. And for those of you who know Austrian economics, of course, you see immediately that we have here a roundabout production. So the art for a government is, again, with each advancement of its own economic power to begin economic production at an earlier phase, at an earlier level, in order to influence the final product. Now, the same thing applies in the case of intervention in the culture. Government needs to engage in political production here, too. And here it encounters the problem of authority. Who defines how things, how cultural things are to be seen?

23:01Who defines the state of the art and the sciences? Who defines the state of the arts? Who defines what is the good religion, what is the bad religion? Who defines what are the environmental threats that we face and so on? And so we have here the question of truth and falsehood. And ultimately, therefore, the ultimate phase in political production And the question necessarily concerns the sciences and the arts and therefore it is very correct to perceive the sciences and the arts as the most eminent aspects of culture. And it is so as we see now because of their political roles, very important political role. It's in the arts that truth is expressed more or less beautifully in films, literature and so on and it's in the sciences that the truth is analyzed.

23:55So the government, if it wants to impose its vision on cultural affairs, has to seize the arts and the sciences where we have the authorities on these questions. So again, it's important not to confuse the two different meanings of the word authority. Authority can be somebody who wields political power. That's the way we use the word authority in political language. But more generally speaking, an authority is a person who has the ability, who is recognized as having the ability to define truth, as a scientist, as an artist and so on. So government needs to co-opt the authorities, needs to co-opt the elites in the arts and the sciences.

24:44And here we have the reason why government has taken particular care to co-op, to run universities, to run schools, because that's the way to get under control those who define truth and falsehood in these matters. Then the question is, why do the authorities consent? It's a different question. Why do intellectuals, why do artists consent to this game? It's a rather stupid thing. Why do they play with people who just want to wield naked power? Well, and here again we have a rather unpleasant feature of human nature. Walter mentioned competition before, right? Scientists and artists are also in competition with others.

25:32So an alliance with the government can be a very convenient way just to get rid of all these nasty competitors. A flagrant example was the rise of the power to the Bolsheviks. It brought this entirely new movement in the arts to the fore. Writers like Maxim Gorky and painters, sculptors and so on. and that was taken at the time as a proof that socialism goes in hand with cultural, with artistic innovation. Ludwig von Mises pointed out in 1922 already so just a couple of years after the Bolshevik coup that what was really going on was just that one part of the cultural producersivid the alliance with the government were crowding out all other competitors so because what they What they were doing was new right now, there was the false impression that socialism and state intervention is inherently innovative.

26:36But as time would go on, these people would just enshrine their vision of things, what beautiful paintings, what beautiful sculpture and so on is, into law. And would therefore stifle artistic innovation, artistic work, and that's exactly what has happened. So the only innovation came at the time of the Bolshevik coup. After this, socialist art has been barren. What are the consequences? Well, the consequences, of course, as we know, are, first of all, destruction, destruction of society. As economists, we have in mind, first of all, of course, economic waste, destruction of material resources. That's a very important aspect. But it's not the only aspect. The destruction does not just involve economic waste. It also creates the destruction of social institutions.

27:33Let me just take again the case of the family. It's quite obvious. If we look at the figures, what has happened to family life in the United States and in Europe, In Europe, that we had very terrible consequences of government intervention in this field as can be measured by divorce rates and by birth rates, birth rates declining especially in Europe, divorce rates being up in all countries, Europe and the United States and that's a direct consequence of government trying to be a social engineer of social relations, And all of government policies today are designed to create, well, separate individuals to dislocate the family as a form of the division of labor and to give economic incentives for women to join the workforce not to produce, be economically independent of the husband, not to have any incentives to give birth and so on.

28:48Another, the second very important consequence is the aspect of corruption and here intellectual corruption, artistic corruption. In the sciences this is very strongly present. And it's been a phenomenon that has been for a very long time observed. For example, at the beginning of the 19th century, Richard Waitley, who was one of the great classical economists, said, well, if physics or chemistry had any political applications, the government would very strongly interfere in this area and we would have constant disagreements about these things.

29:34200 years before, German philosopher Leibniz wrote that if mathematics had the slightest political application, there would be debates about whether 1 plus 1 is really 2. And, well, in economics it has always been the case that the only practical application of economics is in politics. I'm still waiting for my colleagues who want to try to get rich by economics, Economics, say good luck. So the application is in politics, and here precisely because there is an application in politics, the government has a very strong incentive to interfere and to promote those kinds of economics, those branches of economics that are least harmful, least obstructive to government activities. That's precisely what has been going on. Government has been promoting actively lefty schools, Marxist schools of thought. It has promoted a mathematized approach that economists know as neoclassical economics, which consists in applying the methods of the natural sciences to economic behavior, which in other words treats human beings as if they were stones or if they were rabbits and so on, behave

30:52completely mechanically, and they did this because this research is completely barren and therefore does not pose any threat, does not pose any risk of contradicting government programs. So all in all, the relationship between state and culture has therefore two aspects. On the one hand, culture is a cloak and the government needs this cloak to cover is what it's really about, naked power, expropriation of other people. But on the other hand, it's not so that the culture remains unaffected in this process. It's precisely because the government gets into the play that the culture gets perverted and depraved. And we are in the midst of this process.

31:38The only way to stop this or to oppose this is, well, to focus on those fields where culture is defined And the most important fields, again, are the sciences and the social sciences in particular. And therefore I'm very grateful for the existence of the Mises Institute, who promotes independent research, independent writing on these issues that are designed to keep up levels of criteria of truth and falsehood that are not directly controlled by these guys. And I'm very thankful for all of you to support our work, which allows us to carry it on in the future. Thank you very much.