Libertarianism: Is it Conservatism’s Future?

0:00Maybe some of these questions that we raised tonight about declining birth rate, about environmental activism, treating humanity as a plague, about the problems we have in Downton. He said, can be answered by our next guest, because I know that he's a, what do they call it, a polymath? Who's very, very smart in very many areas. I'm talking about the former chief economist for the Fraser Institute, the current Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar, Chair in Economics, and Professor of Economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, and the Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that is a prestigious institute, and self-described libertarian and macro-capitalist philosopher, I love that, I got to love this man as well, Dr. Walter Block, hello Walter.

0:47Hi Terry, good to see you, hear from you again. Yeah, well if you turn your computer on and go to www.roadkillradio, you can see us too

1:25Let it from virtual nothingness to being the fifth or sixth major party in Canada. Or the fifth largest national party. Fifth largest national party. Sixth largest if you include the block. So there you go. So I'm not sure if the Christian, well I'm pretty sure the Christian Heritage Party and the libertarian parties across Canada and North America meet in some areas, but they don't have a lot of convergence. Walter, the reason I have you on tonight is because it seems that every second week or so on our show something to do with, even though Kerry Simpson and I and Ron Gray, we're broadly social conservatives, right?

2:13I'd say Ron's a paleoconservative and I don't know how exactly to describe Kerry, but anyway, we're definitely social conservatives, we believe in strong families and we're against abortion and all these sort of stuff like this. But every couple of weeks, something comes up where the libertarians come to the fore and we say, yeah, they got a good idea there, yeah, they got a good idea there. And the thing that's been coming up most often, in B.C. we had a provincial election that neither Kerry nor I could stand voting for any of the established parties. I ended up voting for a libertarian candidate, thinking, you know what, this is a good option in this particular election. Kerry ended up spoiling her ballot. Ron, I can't remember how you voted. You might have had a conservative candidate.

2:59No, I didn't. You didn't? Well, yeah. No, I didn't have a B.C. conservative candidate, so I wrote on my ballot, no conservative candidate. Okay, well there you go. I think Kerry said if she had had a libertarian candidate, she would have voted libertarian. So we talk about that and then we see in Alberta there's a new party rising up, the Wildrose Alliance, in opposition to the so-called conservative party in Alberta, the government there, and the leading candidate for that leadership is Danielle Smith, a self-described libertarian. Dr. Block, what is going on here? Are libertarians taking over the world? We're everywhere. As the homosexuals say, we're everywhere. We're accustomed to getting 1 or 2 percent of the vote in Canada and maybe 3 or 4 percent in the U.S.

3:50But with Ron Paul putting us on the map, we're way above that. Ron Paul True ran for the Republican Party nomination for president. But in a previous election, he ran as the Libertarian candidate, and he's certainly a Libertarian, even though he's in the Republican Party. So he has escalated our vision. People now see us much more than they did before, and he's given us a big boost. Well, I'd certainly encourage people to get on YouTube and enter Ron Paul and do a search, because he has some extremely interesting things to say about the current economic problems. Oh yeah, well he's got something to say about a lot of things. He's sometimes called Dr. No, because whenever there's a vote of 437 to 1 on something, he's usually the one, almost always the one.

4:45You're talking about social conservatives being pro-family. Well, libertarians are pro-family. I guess we're also in favor of single people too, if people don't want to get married. So there might be some overlap between Christian heritage or social conservatives and libertarians, but there are obviously some differences as well, for example, legalizing drugs might be one of them, libertarians believe in legalizing drugs and I think social conservatives would be against that. It doesn't mean that libertarians favor the use of drugs, there's a very sharp distinction to be made between favoring the use of and favoring the legalization of. If my kids, God forbid, ever got into drugs, I would hate it and I certainly wouldn't want them to do it.

5:30But I wouldn't want them to be arrested for it because they're adults and they would only be hurting themselves. Though, again, Ron Paul has said some interesting things there about Amsterdam and, you know, the effect of legalizing prostitution and drugs in that city, and he is not... Yeah, I think Portugal is now legalized drugs. Yes, they have. Amsterdam is for a long time legalized prostitution. I have a daughter, I wouldn't want to be a prostitute, God forbid, but if she were, somehow, I wouldn't want to be arrested. She's an adult and she would only be engaging in consensual behavior between adults, so why should she go to jail for that? The purpose of the law is to stop people from murdering and raping each other and killing each other and stealing from each other, namely engaging in uninvited border crossings, namely engaging in aggression.

6:20Well, although Victor Malarek, the guy with CTV, he's got two books out now, the Natasha's and the John's, about prostitution, he argues very strongly against legalized prostitution because he says that this is almost never consensual behavior. These women are being exploited and oppressed. So that's probably a different aspect of that problem. Well, if they're being exploited and oppressed, that means that they're being made to be prostitutes against their will. And they are. And what we should do then is put those people in jail who are oppressing them, but not stop them from being prostitutes. If someone is forcing someone else into a life of prostitution, that's called slavery or kidnapping. Bingo. Those were you and I agree on that issue.

7:06Yeah. That's right. And listen, I want to bring you a piece of news. Okay. This will be an exclusive news for Roadkill Radio, the first medium in Canada to break this news, largely because the rest of the mainstream media, don't care, but the whole executive of the Social Credit Party of Canada, Social Credit Party of Canada? Does that still exist? and it still exists and they have en masse joined the Christian Heritage Party now and the leader of the Canada Action Party, Dr. Moulton, has quit that party to join the Christian Heritage Party because he feels he'd be able to be more effective for the principles. You remember that party was the one that Paul Hellyer started?

7:53Yes, yeah. So poor libertarians are left out in the cold again here, Walter, but okay, well there's news, okay? Walter, both sides of the border, and here's something where I think social conservatives and conservatives of all stripes, libertarians, maybe with the leadership of libertarians can unite on, is this growth in government in response to the economic problems that We've been swept over, especially from south of the border, by this, well, let's grow government bigger, bigger, bigger in response to this. In Canada, we're seeing, okay, well, let's get all this extra money here in B.C. by joining the harmonized sales tax regime.

8:44Because you know what? It's going to be a lot easier. Walter, all the opposition to the HST that's fractional, you know, it's from this restaurant segment, this entertainment segment, the ski hills, this group here, this group here. So it's easy to kind of ride out that opposition, but it's much more difficult to ride out opposition if we started cutting back government because the unions will get up in arms. Anyway, that's a little theory that I have there, Walter. But how can we start getting the message out there again that we can't just endlessly grow government in response to problems like this?

9:29Big question, Walter. Have you been thinking about this? What can we do here? Oh, yes. Well, I think that government is the cause of these problems and growing government in order to solve them is sort of like pouring gasoline on a fire in an attempt to put it out. The government created the crisis in the first place. Ron Paul has been very outspoken on this with regard to the Fed. The Fed has artificially lowered interest rates through its inflationary policies and this has led to a misallocation of capital resources and it's led to these booms and busts. And we're now enjoying the bust part of it. And the way that the government The reason it's attempting to get us out of this is by propping up industries that never should have been built up as much as they were in the first place.

10:21You use the term circus. The analogy I sometimes use is it's as if a store, a restaurant knew that the circus was coming into town and figured that the circus would bring a lot of people and a lot of customers and a lot of the circus workers, so what they do is they double the size of for their restaurant. And this is very good for the two weeks that the circus is in town, but after the circus leaves, you've got to double the size of a restaurant, double what would be justified by the ordinary weekly trade. And they're about to go broke, and the restaurant gets the government to subsidize and prop up this double-sized restaurant. Well, it never should have been built in the first place, and you know, why subsidize it?

11:06And if you subsidize it, what you're doing is taking money away from other things that So government is not the solution to these problems, government is the cause of these problems, but Obama and Harper and other leftists, and I use that word advisedly, are I don't know what, enthralled by the Keynesian vision that if the government just, we can spend our way out of the depression and I think this is just false economics. Well, you know, they're driven there. Certainly Harper has been driven there by the majority of the parties, all the parties in parliament. He's reflecting a broad consensus of opinion, and so there wasn't anything to sort of hold him back.

11:52I mean, his government would have fallen, A, but B, there was really no alternative in terms of everything was to the left of him there. I just get frustrated here when for so long we did see, from various points of view, from various political parties, from think tanks and things like that, a really well-stated argument for market principles, smaller government, lower taxes and things like that, then overnight in the face of the first sort of not even a full-scale hurricane, but a gale-force wind perhaps, we see this total reversal. Is this sort of inevitable? I can't say it's inevitable, but somehow our society is at a place where the answer is always more government.

12:40How do we get the regular people to start thinking that the answer is a more self-motivated individual effort or something like that? How do we change that? That's a big question. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate just how deeply embedded this anti-economics for Economic Illiteracy is in the people. I now teach in New Orleans and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which by the way the damage was not caused by the hurricane, it was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA, a government agency. What happened was that the prices of all sorts of things in the aftermath of this debacle arose. For example, a bucket of ice was a dollar a bucket before and afterward because all the Electricity was shut off, it was like 20-25 dollars a bucket. So some guy came down from Ohio with a big truck full of ice cubes and started selling buckets of ice for 20 bucks a bucket and there were a bunch of people lining up to buy it and the first five or

13:49so people online had already bought it. And then what happened is that the cops came and arrested the guy for price gouging, and do you know what the reaction of the people who are still online, willing, more than willing to pay 20 bucks for a bucket of ice? They applauded the cops. Can you imagine that? I mean, here was this guy come all the way from Ohio somewhere to bring them ice. He was doing them a favor because the ice was just not available and they needed the ice. And I think even one of the people online called the cops. So this just sort of shows the depth of the pravity or the depth of economic illiteracy on the part of these people. And I remember the governor of Louisiana started calling for price gouges to be put in jail.

14:39Well, the economics of it is that whenever there's a shortage, and there was in the aftermath of Katrina, the prices rise. And the rise in prices has two salutary effects. One, a rationing effect, namely, at the old price, the first guys online are going to grab it all up. Whereas at the higher price, they'll share and they'll let the people at the back of the line get some too. And secondly, even more important, the high price is a signal that everyone from everywhere else should come and help these people. And as they bring stuff, the price comes back down to the normal pre-hurricane price. There was just no appreciation of markets, and I have a theory about this, and my theory is that it's biological. I'm sort of a sociobiologist in this regard.

15:28Add that to your libertarian and macro-capitalist philosopher as well, okay, so explain yourself now. I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and I guess philosopher, I'm not sure about that, but why not? You see, the sociobiology is the theory that we are the way we are because of what it meant to survive a million years ago. For example, nowadays, bathtubs kill many, many, many more people than snakes do. And yet, little kids are instinctively afraid of snakes, as are adults. When Indiana Jones was guarding the jewelry, they didn't surround the jewelry with bathtubs, they surround it with snakes. People have an instinctive, visceral fear, hatred of snakes, but not bathtub.

16:15Why? Well, a million years ago, if you didn't have a fear of snakes, you didn't live, and you didn't leave much progeny. So, in other words, fear of snakes was pro-biological, but fear of bathtubs was neither here nor there. Well, I've got a little grandson who has an aversion to bathtubs, so that may blow the theory. He takes after his grandfather. Well, you see, getting back to the economics of it and why people are instinctively economically illiterate and why every freshman class I've ever had in economics are just totally lefties and totally unappreciative of markets, the reason is that a million years ago, there were two ways that we can cooperate, and we were weaker than the saber-toothed tigers and the bears and those guys, and the only way we could survive as a species was by cooperating.

17:08Well, there are two ways of cooperating. One is explicit cooperation. We're pretty good at that. Explicit cooperation is the idea you help me, I help you, I'm sick this week, you get me food next week, you're sick, I get you food. The human creatures who do that will survive and the ones that don't, won't survive. Adam Smith has even written an entire book about the Charitable Instinct, which I read. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that's right. But there's another, and so this is biologically ingrained in us, we are selected as the people who were cooperative with each other, and that's why we survive. And that's why if you see a starving person on the street, or a person hit by a car, you know, the natural instinct is to stop and get out and help them. Okay, but then there's another kind of, and this sort of cooperation is good for small groups, and we lived in small groups a million years ago, 25, 50 people.

17:58But if we're going to cooperate in terms of millions or billions of people, you can't cooperate explicitly with a billion people. You know, the idea that I invited 10,000 of my best friends to my birthday party is silly. We're not constituted to be able to have 10,000 best friends or to have good relations with 10,000 different people. And yet, if we're going to have a sophisticated modern economy, we have to cooperate with millions of people. In the lowly pencil, no one person can make the pencil. It's a cooperative effort of the graphite and the wood and the paint and the metal and the rubber and the whole business. Well, this is implicit cooperation. It's through markets, but we're not hard-wired to appreciate that. That's why the people online that pick up this ice, they weren't hard-wired to appreciate the benefits of a higher price and gouging. That's why we have such a problem. That's That's why government keeps increasing. That's why it's sort of like the Rock of Sisyphus.

19:00We people who know economics and are into libertarianism, we try to convince people of this, but no sooner do we get the rock halfway up the hill, its thoughts falling down because we're going against biology. That's the long and short of my theory as to why we live in an era of economic illiteracy. Walter, I couldn't think of a better time to introduce that particular sound effect, because as our regular listeners know, that sound effect signals the naming of our Roadkill Radio Warrior of the Week. And you, Walter Block, because of your perception, perceptive insights into the nature of markets and the foibles of humanity have earned a place in our Hall of Fame, the Roadkill Radio Warrior of the Week.

19:58You join an illustrious group of people who have been so honored, and by the way, so named the Roadkill Radio Warriors of the Week because so many of the people we honor are knocked down on the side of the road, get back up, get knocked down again, get back up, get knocked down again and are still standing and still fighting, you're one of them, Ron and I are Part of that we hope as well, that's why we're doing this show. Kerry Simpson certainly is, so congratulations Walter Block! Oh, you're very kind, thank you. That's good. So it's a little bit of fun we have, the sound effect always signals that. And while we're pausing here from our discussion, it's almost the top of the hour, I want to tell our listeners and viewers, hello out there, that you're listening to Roadkill Radio. If you'd like to email us, please do so at roadkillradio.live.ca, that's again email at RoadkillRadio at Live.ca, Ron has got his computer fired up there, the coal generated

20:54computer, or you can call us, we've had a caller earlier today, a really perceptive caller from Victoria, area code 604-525-4167, if you have questions for our guest Walter Block or comments on this particular subject. So we'll get back to the big broad issue of libertarianism. Walter, is libertarianism and the libertarian parties always doomed to be a party of the fringe? Because they're not a consensus party. They never will be. They stand for these issues and these are the issues election after election after election, it seems to me. They're never really going to win power, but is the best hope for libertarianism to influence the other parties, to put forward policies that they can say, ah-ha, yeah, here's one we need now. Is that what you...

21:46Well, that's sort of the Fabian and New Democratic Party communist line in the Western countries, namely, you never really win the election. I'm sorry for insulting you, is that what I just did? I'm not sure. I'm sorry. Did I insult you by making... Oh, no, no, no. It's a perfectly reasonable technique. It can work for the people on the left, it can work for the people on the right. Look, right before the Berlin Wall fell in 89 and right before the Soviet Union went belly up in 91, nobody predicted that stuff. Nobody said, you know, the Berlin Wall is going to fall. I mean, Ronald Reagan said tear down this wall, but nobody thought it would happen. Nobody thought the Soviet Union would change. Sometimes these things happen. You never know.

22:31Who knows? Maybe Ron Paul in 2012 will become president. I'm one of his advisors. I think that if he wins, he'll appoint me head of the Fed or head of the labor secretary or something with the goal of getting rid of those things. If Ron Paul makes you head of the Fed, that'll be a really short-term job because I'm pretty sure he'll shut that institution down. Well, no, he'll ask me to shut it down. That's why I would be the head of it. Let's talk specifically about the... You never know for sure, and you know, in a sense, the question of are we likely to win, will freedom win out, will libertarianism triumph, it's an interesting speculative question, but I tell you, it really doesn't turn my crack.

23:17You know why? Because I will not change what I do one-eyed out or whether the case for optimism is good or the case for pessimism is good, I'm going to do exactly what I'm doing anyway, namely Trying to promote liberty through writing and speaking and teaching and publishing and stuff like that. So, while it's of interest and the listeners may be interested in this, it doesn't really impact my life and I don't think it impacts Ron or Terry, you guys, your lives because you're going to be doing what you're doing anyway. Yeah. I'm trying to look at this from a practical, political point of view right now. I think Danielle Smith and the Wild Rose Party, she's talking, she's libertarian and has lots of libertarian principles to which she adheres, but in this particular political framework, I think what she's putting forward are probably, are issues regarding the size of government and that's one of many issues that she could put forward, but this is the one that resonates.

24:22expenditure, the growth the size of government and the fact that this government's taxes are too high, they become enemies of the oil patch, things like that. That seems to be resonating in that particular area. Since you're so closely involved with Ron Paul and working in the United States now, and since the titular conservative party, the Republican Party, seems to be in so many In many ways, confused and adrift and corrupt in some ways as well. There is a chance, of course, for libertarian ideas to advance, to make real progress. Are there a set of those ideas that you see, as Daniel Smith sees, that have more resonance in the United States right now than the other ones?

25:15You might say, you know, your drug ones might really, your drug liberalization or getting rid of the anti-drug laws, that might work, or taxation ones, or getting rid of the Fed or something like that. Is there one or a set of beliefs or principles or policy planks that you think are the ones that would really work coming up in the next election, or was Ron Paul running for either Libertarian Party or the Republican Party? Long question. Well, I don't know that anyone is more attractive than the other, you know, getting rid of unions, privatizing health care, not going towards socialized medicine, engaging in free trade, having less inflation, going on the gold standard, getting rid of antitrust laws.

26:04I mean, there are just any number of ways in which you could go. I don't know that any have more resonance than in the others. Ron Paul is a doctor, he's an obstetrician who's delivered a lot of babies and maybe the healthcare way would be one way to go. You hear all these horrible stories of Canadian healthcare where there are these long lines and waiting lists and brain drain of doctors going down to the U.S. to practice. and now the US is thinking of adopting a closer situation to the Canadian one so that might be one that resonates it's hard to tell you know it's sort of like when you blow up a balloon it's hard to know which spot will break you just know that something is going to break. You raise an issue there that I hadn't actually associated with the party before or with libertarianism and that's About Getting Rid of Unions I know that you've argued very persuasively in the past that public sector unions should

27:04not be allowed to strike because if it's important enough for it to be in the public sector then it should be important enough for the work to be done at all times. But I didn't know that there was something about getting rid of unions. That surprised me because I thought unions were like a free association of people getting Well, first, I just wanted to mention Danielle Smith before I answer your question about unions, if I might. Sure, go ahead. I happen to, I won't say I'm a buddy of hers, but I certainly know her. I'm an acquaintance of hers, as she is of me. She's a very attractive candidate both physically, which is not unimportant, and also, I don't Theoretically, she's a good public speaker, she's a very intelligent woman.

27:56So I think that this is just a wonderful thing and I wish her every bit of luck and I hope that she's the next Premier of Alberta. Yeah, there will, by the way, be a series of town hall meetings that the Wildrose Alliance public meetings will be, Alliance will be having in September and their leadership vote will be in October and we'll be following that. We think it's very important and we hope it positively influences the political atmosphere I don't really think of Daniel Smith or any libertarian as conservative. I think that I think that libertarianism is equidistant from conservatism and liberalism.

28:48I don't really regard libertarianism as one category of the right or of conservatives. I think that on certain issues, libertarians are closer to conservatives, but on other issues, we're closer to liberals. And the way I see the political map, we're equidistant between them. I don't feel any more comfortable as being labeled a conservative than I would, God forbid, being labeled a liberal. Well, you said, God forbid, being labeled a liberal. So I think you would be more uncomfortable being labeled a liberal than you would a conservative. Well, I don't know. I like to think of myself as... I think there was something there that came out. There was a God forbid in front of a liberal and not a God forbid in front of a conservative, Walter. Well, maybe you got me there, Terry. I'm guilty as charged.

29:34I guess the reason for it is that I came in through the conservative movement, so maybe I have a softer spot in my heart for it. But in my brain, I know that they're equidistant. Conservatives are a little bit better on economics and a little bit worse on civil liberties, civil rights, like legalizing drugs and prostitution and pornography and stuff like that. that and on war that is imperialistic aggressive wars against countries that have never done anything to us conservatives are slightly worse than liberals although liberals do that too maybe it's a tie but we libertarians are a unique sui generis group we're neither liberal nor conservative and while I might have more of a disgust for liberals it's just my own background but my brain tells me that we libertarians are equidistant from both okay then we You know where your heart is then. You were going to talk a little about the policy towards unions, because I had a question about that.

30:33Yes, let me talk about unions. First of all, public sector unions, not so much I'm against public sector unions as it is I'm against the public sector. I don't think we ought to have public schools. I don't think we ought to have public post offices. I don't think we ought to have public transportation. My most recent book is Why We Shouldn't Have Public Highways, Why We Should Privatize Wall Highways. My next major book, after a few more Defending of the Undefendables, will be Why We Should Privatize Oceans, Lakes and Rivers. So, I'm not so much against public sector unions as I am against public sector, period. I mean, the garbage collection, the policing, the fire protection, all that should be done privately. Well, you know, let me talk about that. Quickly on that point then, noting the kind of thing, how silly it is for Americans to be going to

31:52I'm very irked by public libraries. Don't ask. I just went to the library to borrow some discs and they've got more discs there than Blockbuster does. Poor Blockbuster has to compete against a library that's giving it away for free. I don't see why we should have public libraries. Okay, but on to unions, now you're right, unions are a complex issue. If the union limited itself to a threat of a mass quiz, and that's all they did, in other words, here's the theory, one guy goes to the boss and says, hey boss, I need a raise or I'm quitting, and the guy's got 5,000 other workers, so he says, okay, my way or the highway, take a hike, fine. But if he goes in there and says, Look, I represent all 5,000 of the workers, and unless you give us a 10% raise or whatever is what we want, we're all going to leave.

32:46Well, now the boss has to sort of think twice, because to get rid of 5,000 workers who are well coordinated and have been there for a number of years, it's not easy to find 5,000 new workers and get them to mesh well with each other, so he'd be more likely to listen to reason or to listen to the union, and if that's all the unions did, if all the unions The only problem with slavery, by the way, is you couldn't quit. I mean, slavery was okay in other ways. You know, they give you gruel, and you could sing songs, you could pick cotton. The only problem with slavery is you couldn't quit. The only problem with slavery, by the way, is you couldn't quit. I mean, slavery was okay in other ways, you know, they give you gruel, and you could sing songs, you could pick cotton. The only problem with slavery is you couldn't quit. So if you can't quit, and if one person can quit by himself, he doesn't lose the right to quit just because everyone else wants to quit, but if you can't quit, you can't quit because you're a slave.

33:44So a mass quit is a legitimate function of unions, and if all unions did was that, then I would say unions are just like any other voluntary organization in society. However, unions do not limit themselves to that. What they do in addition to that is that they say, not only are we going to down tools and walk out and you're going to have to hire another 5,000 people, but we're going to set up a picket line around your factory and any scab or that is any competing worker who's The Theory of Money and Credit

34:43and I went through a lot of unions and they all favored yes the scabs are evil they have no right to take our jobs which is silly because jobs are an embodiment of an agreement no one person can own a job it's not like your code it's very different so I went around and I finally came up with this thing called CLAC, C-L-A-C, Christian Labor Association of Canada, and I figured hey Hey, I've got a live one here. So I said, when you guys go on strike, will you beat up scabs? Oh, no, no, no. We're Christians. We turn the other cheek. We never use violence. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Fine. I said, wow, whoop-dee-doo. We've got a candidate. And then I said, well, what do you think of labor laws, the laws that compel the employer not to engage in quote unfair labor practices, namely hiring scabs instead of you guys? I said, oh, we save for those laws. Well, so even CLAC doesn't make it. Namely, I'm now willing to say that

35:39But there are no unions that are compatible with libertarianism, even though there could be theoretically, if they would just uphold the right to quit en masse instead of the right to prevent the employer from hiring scabs. Look, if you want to divorce your wife, well, it's a personal tragedy. But suppose, in addition to divorcing her, what you do is you get all your friends to Surrounder House, and then beat up any other guy she might date, well that's a horse of a different color. You have the right to quit because otherwise you're an enslaved to her, but you certainly have no right to prevent her from dating other men if she wants to. Well that's what the union does, not only does it want to quit, but it wants to prevent the employer from hiring other people.

36:26So I think that unions, extant unions, not theoretical unions that don't exist, they're are all a bunch of criminals and they all ought to be in jail, every last one of them. And I realized that in Canada this is sort of an unpopular thing because in Canada the labor force is unionized at a much higher rate than in the US. In the US it's in single digits for non-public sector unions, whereas I think the unionization rate is in Canada something like 40-45% of the whole labor force, which is one of the The reason that Canada is much poorer relatively per capita than the US, one of the main reasons is unions and another big one is unemployment insurance, which is like four times more generous than in the US, which is due to some great degree to unionization.

37:15Your comment about slaves not being able to quit reminds me of a line from the movie earlier this summer, The Year Zero, when one of the... Terry, could you speak up a little? Her comment about the slaves not being able to quit reminds me of a line from the movie The Year Zero, a comedy from earlier this year in which one of the sort of proto-cavemen or something who stumbles into a city asks a slave, hey, kind of attracted, a male caveman sort of asks a female slave, hey, you know, you're pretty good looking, when are you off, when are you off tonight? And she looks at him and says, I'm a slave, I'm never off. I'd like to leap back to when we were talking about the conservative party and ask Dr. Block your opinion.

38:15Look, there was a political scientist from Australia who came up here recently and did a piece for Reform Perspective magazine in which he said if Stephen Harper were in Australia he would be to the left of their labor party, and he said if he were in the United States he'd be considered a Clintonian Democrat. And what I wanted to ask you is, do you think, after having gotten in with admittedly a minority government, if he had hewed to truly conservative principles and worked for smaller government Do you really think that he would have been defeated, or do you think that might have been his, would have been defeated in the House, but might that have been his path to a majority government, if he'd really held on to conservative principles?

39:10Well, that's a very interesting question. And I'm appreciative of the Canadian political system. I mean, he had a minority government. He really couldn't go berserk and go against all the other parties and against the median voter. So I'm sort of willing to be more forgiving of him than if he had a majority government and did what he did. But, you know, I sort of resist your notion that a conservative government means less spending. I don't believe that for a minute. Ronald Reagan talked a good Good Conservative, Ronald Reagan is a hero of conservatives, yet when he was governor of California, the California budget increased. When he was president for two terms, the U.S. government budget increased. I don't think that it's fair to say that the conservatives stand for smaller government. I think conservatives stand for smaller government in some things, but bigger government in other things, and that balances more government.

40:04Of course. So with regard to Harper, what the hell is Canada doing in Afghanistan? When is the last time any Afghani ever attacked Canada? This is an imperialist foreign war and if he were true to not conservative principles, which he is, which is very bad here, but if he were true to libertarian principles that as I thought he was when he was the, what was the National Citizens Coalition? That was a libertarian-ish organization. If he had pulled out every troop The NDP would have at least applauded him. He could have gotten away with that with a minority government. But no, we're in there, I guess, sucking up to the U.S. and engaging in an imperialist war against the people that never attacked us.

40:52So I quarrel with your assessment that a true conservative government would be a smaller government. It wouldn't be. It would be a bigger government. Conservatives are bad guys too, despite what Terry found out about me with my Oh God about a liberal. Oh God, thank God I'm not a conservative either. Oh yeah. Conservatives are a bunch of rascals. That's all theatrics there, Walter. I can tell. No, no. Conservatives are a bunch of rascals. Equally rascallion. Rascallion? Sure, well. Let me pop one more question at you because way earlier on in the conversation you made an oblique reference to the fact that we have booms and busts and we are now enjoying a bust and it occurred to me there are some people who are enjoying it more than others and I wondered if you had seen Matt Taibbi's book or his articles in the Rolling Stone about the great deception, I think is the title of his book, but he points out that the Obama White House has now become virtually a branch plant of Goldman Sachs, and I wondered

42:00if you were familiar with that whole theory that says that there's a bunch of robber barons who have now infiltrated into the government they are taking money from the taxpayer and giving it to their buddies as for example they gave money to AIG which gave it to Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs is now planning to give its employees $11.6 billion dollars in bonuses in a time of what is being called a crisis so some of us are enjoying the bust more than others Yes, now I'm very sympathetic to this view. I believe that this is, what is it, monopoly state corporate capitalism or fascism?

42:45Yeah, we're in fascism. The government gives money to its favored crew. I certainly am against socialism for big business. I'm against welfare for big business, and this is just welfare for big business. But there's a long history of this in the United States, giving money to railroads, making it impossible for people to enter into the medical field The Farm Subsidies, the big agribusiness, the list goes on and on about this and I'm very sympathetic to this. This is some of the leftists like Gabriel Coco, who's a Marxist historian and is very good on this, showing that what's going on with government is giving money to big business, hand over fist, and AIG and Goldman Sachs are just the latest in a long list that includes Rockefellers, Morgans, all throughout the U.S. history this has been done and it's just some sort of crony capitalism or fascism and it's evil.

43:48Well, I've got one more for you then. There's a Toronto analyst named Sunil Ram. He was doing a radio interview out here a couple of weeks back and he made the observation that, The estimated total value of all the real property in the world, not just real estate, houses, apartments, commercial real estate, factories, trains, planes, buses, everything, He says it's been estimated somewhere between 100 and 150 trillion and then he pointed out that the amount of fiat money in circulation by banks primarily but also by central banks which are not really government in most countries anyway, The amount of money that they put in circulation is 8 to 10 times the net value of all the real assets in the world.

44:46And he was saying, this balloon has got to break too, and it is going down. What's your read on that, the inflated state of the global economy? Well, I think it was our man Lenin, or was it Stalin? I think it was Lenin who said that the surest way to conquer a country or screw up a country is to debauch its currency. And, you know, what happened in 1923 in Germany with the hyperinflation and what's happening in Zimbabwe and what's happened in certain South American countries, It's just a horrendous thing because the money supply, the money stock, is to the economy as the blood is to the body. Every trade except the border, half of it is money. It's just insidious. Just as the blood flows to every capillary in the body, money flows to every interstitial of the economy. So money is very, very important. And Ron Paul has done yeoman We've been working here saying that we can't trust government to run money, just as we should have separation of church and state, we should have separation of money and state, we should get back to the gold standard, the reason that the bureaucrats and the totalitarians hate gold is it's very hard to inflate gold, it's impossible to inflate gold, they can't inflate gold, or they can inflate fiat currency. So I'm not sure that the amount of currency has to equal the amount of all goods and services

46:20That's a different issue, but I think the point where I agree with this theorist is that not just the U.S., but every country is off the gold standard, every country is... You've heard of this thing, what is it, girls gone wild? Yes. Well, we've got central bankers gone wild. They don't take off their clothes. Much better if they took off their clothes, they wouldn't do as much harm. But what they do is they inflate the currency. You know, when I was younger and our kids were very small, we had this babysitting co-op. And various couples, I think there were ten couples and we all had kids between, oh, I guess, age one and five. And, you know, this one would babysit for that one and couple A would, the rule was only the woman would babysit for someone else. But we would keep records and at the end of the thing, it evened out.

47:15Suppose some central planning bureaucrat of a Fed got in there and started inflating the babysitting credits. This would have just ruined the whole cooperative venture. And that's what governments are doing there. You see, there are only three ways that governments can get money. One is through taxes, but everyone knows who's doing the taxing. You can't blame taxes on capitalist greed. I mean, everyone knows that. The second way is borrowing, but there are limits there. I mean, if the government reneges, people aren't going to lend it money. The third way is just print it up. And now you can say, well, the inflation isn't really, because people are so economically ignorant, they start saying, well, the inflation is due to greed or people trying to make profits. When it's due to the fact that they're running the printing presses or under fractional reserve banking bank credits, it's much easier to raise money that way because it's much more insidious.

48:10and it's a tax on the poorest people, the people who are on fixed incomes. So I think that you're quite right that one of the enemies of civilization, one of the leaders toward barbarism is an uncontrolled central bank. And there are those that are worse and those that are better, Canada is slightly better, but look at, I mean, I'm more familiar with the US statistics on this. When the Fed came in in 1913, a dollar was worth a dollar. Dr. Walter Block, I'm sorry that we're going to have to say good night.

48:56We've got some business that we have to wrap up here before we go off the internet air in six minutes. Thanks for giving me that award, Terry. and that's not the only thing I gave you tonight but anyway I hope I didn't give you too hard of a time no it's a lovely time great I really enjoyed having you on the show and I know Ron did too he was really looking forward to this because he does a lot of thinking about the world financial and the monetary system and banking system as well so it's a it was a good mix here tonight I hope we can do it again yeah and great good night guys and thanks for having me thank you Thank you very much. Good night. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.