How Government is Unraveling Civilization by Force

0:00How many people here know what the Wanderer is? The Wanderer... Oh, funny, a Catholic table over there, I see. Okay. I don't write about economics for the Wanderer. I write about music. So you read the column? You don't actually read the Wanderer. You just know about it. Okay. Yeah. I understand. I understand. Everybody who reads the Wanderer is over 80, as far as I can tell. So, I'm very grateful to Dr. Cochran for putting this wonderful This is the chart that shows wealth in England from 1100 up until the Industrial Revolution to the present. So I love these kinds of charts because they help us think outside of our own times and our own generation and think more broadly, which is very difficult to do.

0:48I have children and one of the things that I was astonished to discover about children about Children is it's almost impossible to pass on knowledge to them. Have you noticed this?

1:03It's very strange, you know, you think there ought to be some kind of software or something, there's a developer over here, a couple software developers, so I could just download all my experiences and knowledges to her head, you know, and she could carry it around with her so she wouldn't have to go through all the troubles I've gone through. And so how wonderful would that be If we had such a system that we could just kind of download information, every new generation is smarter than the previous one. Sadly, for whatever reason, the world wasn't constructed this way, so that we all have to keep learning every generation as individuals. We keep having to learn and we can't seem to learn from, we keep, you know, just drawing on our own experiences of our own times. And it's really tragic from the point of view of economic understanding because we're not allowed to experience what it was like to be a peasant in 1150, you know, in London.

1:57I think that it's very likely that if we could do that, that we wouldn't be bothering with a lot of the fallacies that are around today, most of which are taking for granted the world in which we live, this world of astonishing amounts of wealth. You can draw a similar chart like this for Europe and show actually that the increase in income came before 1750, 1776 is I think the date that Professor Cochran likes to talk about but actually occurred 100 years earlier or 150 years earlier but the thing that the chart illustrates is the point that he was trying to make that the default position of Humanity in this world is miserable. It's really rotten. It's a state of hunter-gatherer society. This is where we would be. And I think it would be interesting to actually to perform in your own mind a mental experiment. You can try this with other people to discover the way they think about the world. Imagine that we take the whole world as it is right

3:01right now and zap away all capital accumulation, all private wealth and the division of labor across the world completely and imagine the kind of world you would end up with and what you would end up with is the world that you see in this first part of the chart right here, which is income near zero, right, that's just a miserable lot and by the way that's far better than people were in the ancient world, you know, I mean this is actually progress Superimpose on top of that system, of the world that we have, all of the existing governmental structures that are are with us today, right?

4:00So you can give this year, 1100, a TSA, for example, a Federal Reserve, a Consumer Product Safety Commission, a Department of Labor, Barack Obama, and transplant the whole apparatus of the state that we have right now on top of this year, 1100. And what would happen? How much wealthier would people become As a result of this superimposition of the total state, you know, on top of, and I think the answer that I would give is they wouldn't be wealthier at all, they wouldn't be any better off and would probably be made even worse off. There's nothing that the state can do to eliminate the poverty that is the default position of humanity. It is only private is a private enterprise that can dig us out of this catastrophe of the state of nature.

4:59It's only private enterprise. You understand this is a reversal of the view of Thomas Hobbes, right? As Thomas Hobbes had this view that without the state, our lives would be short and we'd be fighting each other and miserable and the state comes along and somehow fixes us up. Well, this is just fantasy, really. I mean, the exact opposite is the truth. In fact, the only thing that can get us out of a state of nature is private enterprise. So if you understand that, and I think we would understand that if we could somehow download all human experiences into our head, I think we would understand it very easily. We would understand a lot about economics and wouldn't have these endless debates that we have right now. And yet, if you tour Washington, D.C. and you come along the building for the Internal Revenue Service and look up at its facade, you'll see a quotation emblazoned up there from Oliver Wendell Holmes that says, taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. This is the message that

6:05we are given when we tour Washington. The logical culmination of this view is of course and of course the total state. I mean, after all, if taxes are the price we pay for the civilized society, the more taxes we pay, the more civilized we become, you know? And this is more or less the early theory of the socialists, which is hard to remember now, but Dr. Cochran is right, you know, the scientific socialism of Marx and his generation really was about the goal of improving society. This is the belief that they looked around at the world of England and Europe and said, look, lots of people are getting rich, but a lot of other people are getting poorer all the time.

6:51So Marx in his Communist Manifesto said, the modern laborer, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. It becomes a pauper. And pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. So this is an empirical position. It's a prediction that's easily subject to investigation. And his prescription was socialism, which he believed was going to make us all better off. And Marx wrote that under socialism, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Now, Dr. Malcev, Yuri Malcev, is here with us and he's going to be giving, I think, a wonderful talk along these lines and discuss a little bit about whether or not socialism really did accomplish this and his experience and world history. So, I won't go there. But I do just want to emphasize the point that early socialist theory was, the goal of it was to improve the lot of humanity, to get us out of the state of nature. There was a

7:55fundamental belief in material progress in the early socialist theory. It was hard for us to remember this today. You know, I was looking this up and trying to document in my own mind that socialists used to believe that it would be a good thing to see material progress for all of humanity. And I ran across Lenin's great slogan that he used when he was the ruler of the newly created Soviet Union when he was asked what communism was. He said, well, look, it's easy to sum up what communism is. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. Electrification, right? That was the idea. And it was true, the whole left-wing establishment at the time believed very strongly in what we might call a kind of national greatness, It's a belief in the material progress of humanity.

8:54Some years ago, there's this publication called The Weekly Standard, which is kind of a conservative publication. I don't know, does it still exist, Tom, The Weekly Standard, does it still exist? Okay, yeah. Yeah, ever since the advent of digital media, one never knows anymore. So apparently, there's still this publication called Weekly Standard, I don't know. And so, they had this idea that, look, conservatism has become really boring. We've lost the vision. What we need is a new kind of conservatism called national greatness conservatism. We need to get back to this idea of doing huge things as a nation, massive, big projects that inspire us, like making Mount Rushmore an inspiring thing, or the Hoover Dam, look how inspiring that is, and going to the moon and having a big war. These are the kinds of things that conservatism needs to be about. It's a funny thing because this national greatness conservatism, as they called it, David Brooks, I think he writes for the New York Times now, right? But this

10:00was not a conservative view at all, actually. It was taken over from the left. This is what the left used to believe, that they would use the state to build up the nation, to make to make us ever richer, to make us more materially prosperous. So, how does it happen that the conservatives would take over this line of thinking? Well, it turns out that the left completely abandoned it sometime in the 1950s, when left-wing socialist theory turned on a dime. And this is what I would like to talk about today. So, looking back in even the American experience, you know, the progressive era, The theory behind the progressive era was that they would create all kinds of government institutions that would uplift us materially and make us richer. That was what the Fed was supposed to do. That's what all the institutions were designed to do. Suddenly in the 1950s, everything began to change. Murray Rothbard is discussing, discusses this whole shift of socialist theory and fingers that the critical book here is John Kenneth Galbraith's book

11:07called the affluent society. It came out in 1958, where we see a complete change in the nature of the socialist critique of capitalism. Instead of claiming that capitalism was leading to ever greater popularization and impoverishment of the working class, which it obviously was not, right? I mean, capitalism was making everybody richer. It was an implausible claim at some point, So, he changed everything completely. He said, you know, the problem with capitalism is very different, you know. The problem is that it makes us too consumerist in thinking. It makes us too materialist. In fact, our problem is that we have not too little wealth, but far too much wealth, and it's leading to a sort of middle class decadence.

11:55and this ever-increasing wealth under capitalism is crushing us and impoverishing us in ways we don't entirely understand. This is Galbraith's claim and he said that the rising wealth of the private sector was coming at the expense of the wealth of the public sector and the public sector is really the measure that we ought to be using to decide whether or not we're better off as a society or not. Society or not. So this is a completely new way of looking at the problem with capitalism from the point of view of the socialist left. And today's terminology is called the first, this is what the left calls it, the first post-materialist book. So now we're supposed to be post-materialist, you know, and enact policies that help us to get there more quickly, which they are in fact having a great deal of luck in doing.

12:55There have been 10,000 books along the lines of Galbraith's affluent society since then and I like what Lew Rockwell has written about this. He said, it's as if the socialists discovered that their plan creates poverty, so they decided to change their name to environmentalists to make poverty the goal. You know, so. The term sustainability here is an interesting one. Sustainability here is an interesting one, I think it came around, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago or something in terms of sustainability, which is really just a synonym for socialism that aspires to impoverish everybody and make us happy about having done so. So, it's very strange. And ultimately, really, it comes down, sustainability comes back to reducing the advances of civilization by force.

13:42Civilization, I'm really talking about a series of very small things. It comes down to whether or not our houses are clean and free of disease, whether we have good ways of disposing of our trash, whether we have indoor plumbing and it works well, whether we have dance troupes and local symphonies and opportunities for our children, whether or not our churches can be well-funded, but through private wealth. This is what civilization is all about. It's It's not about Mount Rushmore. That's not civilization. It's about the small things that make our lives more beautiful, cleaner and make life more worth living, really, ultimately. And this is what I would argue that sustainability is attacking at its very core. So I just kind of went through a list of books that I could come up with on Amazon. If you look up the word sustainability on Amazon, you come up with some amazing things. So just a few titles.

14:37Sustainability by design, a subversive strategy for transforming our consumer culture. Sustainability indicators, measuring the immeasurable, indeed. Return to sustainability, 147 tips for teaching sustainability. Returning to sustainability, by the way, means returning to this part of the graph. Green, A Practical Guide for Simple Sustainability, The Bridge to the Edge of the World, Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Sustainability, an Amazing Picture of What Life Will Soon Be Like, Permaculture, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

15:29The author of these last two, his name is David Holmgren. He's in Australia. You can look up his name and find that he has done many interviews on YouTube. You can watch these interviews and they're very interesting. He's a very fascinating guy and a very nice sort of fellow. I'm sure if we met him here for cocktails we would like him very much. He insisted his interviews take place outdoors, since that's the great place to be, because you've got bird sounds and nature scenes behind you. So he's outdoors and he's got this Australian accent. And he has this kind of way of speaking. He's got spaghetti-like prose and he kind of goes on and rambles at great length and he's kind of captivating. I watched him for a full hour. I regret it. But he's speaking and he casually just tosses off. The interview By the way, his whole theory is that we're running out of oil, and that's just a fact, and it's part of a central doctrine that he has, you know, and nobody is permitted to

16:36question this. He doesn't even feel like he needs to argue it, you know. Oil's going away, that's one thing that's terrible that's happening, you know, and there's just nothing that can be done about it. And also, the globe is burning up, you know, it's kind of like getting hotter and hotter are because we're all driving our cars around and using oil and doing industrial sort of things, decadent, consumerist sort of things, going to Walmart and that sort of thing, it's causing the world to heat up and the world's getting on fire, you know, and we're running out of oil and then suddenly everything's going to collapse, okay, that's his view and so the interviewer asks, she says, the interviewer says, well how long do you suppose we've been on the wrong track in this regard? He says, well I think it's been about, I've thought about this, I think it's about 500 years.

17:21I've been on the wrong track. And then the interviewer says, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, that's about right. It's crazy. But as I began to think about this point of view, I thought of all the people, my fellow shoppers at a grocery store in Auburn we have now called Earth Fair, which promises to sell you only organic stuff, you know, fashionably organic stuff at very high prices, by the way. And I wondered how many of my fellow shoppers would agree with Mr. Holmgren here, and I decided there would probably be just nearly about 100 percent, you know, if you go up to people, you know, who are buying their ear candles and granola bars, do you suppose we've been on the wrong track technologically about 500 years? They'd say, yeah, you know, I think that's about right, yeah, about 500 years.

18:15What is going on? And he says, so the lady, she says, well, what are we going to do? What are we going to do in the future about suburbia? He said, you know, I'm not pessimistic about suburbia at all. You know, if you think about suburbia, it's got lots of asphalt. And that's great in some ways for collecting rainwater for us to drink. And you know, the other thing The thing about suburbia is we have backyards, and backyards are great also for growing our food, so we can use them for that purpose, and another thing that you find in suburbia is you find garages, and of course in the future our cars, they won't be worth anything because of course there won't be any gasoline, so nobody will be driving, so what can we do with our garage? Well, we can make things, we can make crafts, and benches, and chairs, and it'll be a beautiful thing that we'll be making our crafts in our garages,

19:11Making rainwater from the asphalt and pulling carrots out of the ground out of backyards. So I'm not pessimistic at all. This is a very beautiful vision of the future. So the problem here... So the problem is 500 years ago, there were 500 million people living and the Earth. Today there are seven billion. We've got to find something to do with the difference. Some place to put them, store them, stack their bodies. And it's very likely that in the world that Holmgren imagines that there won't be micro-digital devices like like this, in which I can watch his YouTubes. Very likely. And it's also unlikely I won't be able to press a button to order his book, you know, to come to my house by truck. So I do consider that perhaps there is one benefit from his vision that he won't be a best-selling author anymore. This is hardly an unusual view. Today we're told constantly that we We need to slow down production, take away conveniences, and this will all make us more

20:42virtuous because it will lower our standard of living. We're constantly being told to cut back, to consume less, buy locally, go green, carpool, recycle, save, stop indulging. And to this end, consumer products are constantly being banned every day. We have ever fewer choices in the area of medicine and chemicals and food and drink Bank and otherwise in every aspect of our life, sector after sector, this is going on. And all of this, I submit, really amounts to a regression of everything we know of as civilization and all that we associate with living better, healthier, smarter, more prosperous and more cultured lives. And the heck of it is that it's being done by design, by purpose. This is the goal. And I would like to just, in the time I have, go through a series of Light bulbs. The government's banned incandescent light bulbs. In a few years, you won't be able to get them anymore. And we're being told we must use fluorescent bulbs because

21:43fluorescent bulbs use less energy. They give just as good a light, really. And so we need to be told to do this. We need to be forced to upgrade. Well, this is already happening. The last factory that made light bulbs of an incandescent nature, it just closed down last week and in the future we'll all be buying fluorescent. It may not seem like much, right? I don't know. I can't stand fluorescent lighting. My daughter loves it, you know, but whatever. It should be the choice of the individual. Last year I tried to buy some lights for their Christmas tree. Have you ever tried to use fluorescent lights on your Christmas tree? They say it's the same light. It's not the same light. The tree did not look I do want to mention the problem of bed bugs. Are you keeping up with this? It's an astonishing thing. Okay, so this country right now, we have a bed bug epidemic. It's going on all over the country. The offices of Google in New York are now infested. The offices of

22:55This is a remarkable thing. Bedbugs have been wiped out off the whole planet about 50 years ago. They were gone thanks to DDT, invented by a brilliant private chemist working for a private Swiss company and saved untold millions of lives when he got the Nobel Prize for it. DDT is a magnificent pro-civilization chemical and it was banned thanks to a fraudulent book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. Just a garbage piece of book and it persuaded the governments of the world to eliminate DDT thereby causing something on the order of 200 million deaths. Even today between one and three million people in Africa die every year due to malaria because of the absence of DDT. And we don't spray it anymore in this in this country. And look, we've got a, unbelievable, we've got a bed bug problem. People say, no, bed bugs, you know, they actually don't cause any diseases, you know, they don't transmit diseases. Well, you know, there's just something terrifying about the idea that you would lie down in your bed and these bugs would come up from your mattress and seize on your back and they've got this chemical inside them. They put you to sleep, you know, they don't, so you can't know that they're there. They're kind of like dead in your skin. And then they suck your blood all night.

24:22If you get enough bed bugs on you, you can lead to massive blood loss, but even if you don't have massive blood loss, it's difficult to get to sleep at all. If you imagine that the second you close your eyes, the bugs are going to come out and seize on you and suck your blood. And there are cases where people just live in terror, fear of bed bugs. They run out into the street screaming, I can't stand it anymore. Just the very thought of bed bugs. So we've got to get rid of bed bugs. We can't get rid of bed bugs because all the All chemicals that kill these things are banned today, especially for indoor use. DDT, certainly. There's another chemical called propoxone. It's permitted by the EPA to be used outdoors but not indoors, so we can't get rid of these things. The Ohio Department of Health has pleaded with the EPA to let them use this chemical. Uh-uh, can't use it. You got to

25:13live with the bedbugs. This stuff is spreading. The bugs, in our times, we're dealing with What about bed bugs? Why? Because the market's been subverted. When I say the market, what I mean is not that, you know, DDT is the magic prescription for all things, and if, you know, maybe there's some other chemical. The point is, and some people say actually that many bed bugs are now immune, and mosquitoes too, immune to DDT. That may well be true. I don't actually know, and I'm not actually advocating some kind of mass DDT spray. is that these government interventions have subverted our capacity to civilize our world and that if you had a legitimate market working where we could try these chemicals out on a trial and error basis, we could actually compete with insects. Insects are the only known thing on this planet that have killed more people than governments. You realize this, right? More people die from If we die from insects, then gulags, gas chambers, insects. We must kill them if we're going to have civilization. They won't let us.

26:18Now, the EPA recommends... Look, you got a bed bug problem? Not a problem. Just use hot water. I'll use hot water. I'm going to put hot water in my mattress. But there's a funny problem about the hot water issue. They don't let us have hot water anymore. You know that government mandates require that hot water heaters are shipped with a fixed low temperature. So that's why when you turn on your water, it's sort of vaguely tapping you, where's my hot water? You keep turning it and turning it and turning it. It's just sort of, it's not quite hot. You have to go in there and hack your water heater in order to get hot water anymore, you know. This is again an EPA regulation. This is catastrophic. It means our clothes aren't getting clean. And so your sheets have bedbugs in them, you can't get them out even by washing them, and so on.

27:04I mean, I could go through the list of examples. We've got ever-increasing limits on trash pickup in our house. We've got mandatory recycling, which is just beyond belief. The idea that in this day and age, we'd have to be sorting our hands through our dirty trash and separating, oh, there's plastic, there's a soiled towel, here's an unsoiled towel, and separating them all out into all these various areas. This is radically uncivilized and is super unsanitary. Since the beginning of time, we've been dealing with the problem of diseases being spread by trash. You know, this is something that the private sector and capitalism actually fixed and accomplished. We got rid of the problem of trash, which is, you know, trash combined with insects killed off about two-thirds of Europe's population, you know, in the Middle Ages.

27:53This is serious business, trash disposal, but we turn it over to government. They limit the amount of trash we can make. They limit how often they pick it up. Then they mandate that we stick our hands in and recycle it all the time. It's a terrible mess. This is de-civilizing. The attack on plumbing is an intolerable situation. Our toilets no longer work. Our water pressure is absurdly low. Our shower heads now have to be hacked with drills in order to make them work properly. A few years ago, I highlighted a company that was getting Shipping around government rules, shipping showerheads that actually worked, I said, this is a wonderful company. Well, the company wrote me and said, would you mind taking our name off your article and especially the link, because we've gotten calls from the federal government wanting to go after our showerheads.

28:39Folks, this is being seriously enforced, it's not a joke, they're going after showerhead companies that tell you showerheads at work. Here are a few examples. Pseudephedrine. Many of us use pseudephedrine to get through the difficult months of the year. There is a woman now languishing in jail in my own hometown for having bought too much pseudephedrine. Something like 12 packs over the course of over four weeks. Bush banned the stuff for free distribution. Now you have to use your license, and it's rationed. This is a civilizing drug, it helps many, many people, makes it possible to live without the stuff he knows. This woman in my own community is now faced with 20 years in jail for buying too much Sudafed, a drug that you could buy only five years ago in unlimited quantities.

29:31These things are happening every day to us. Mandatory de-civilization, the attack on cars, intolerable, the appalling subsidization of this preposterous thing called the electric car, which if you want to buy an electric car, that's fine with me, but you shouldn't be done with government planning and mandates. The attack on energy, oil, and can you believe the hysteria that was brought about over this oil leak that occurred in the Gulf not too many months ago with BP, which was treated as like some sort of terrorist organization as if they wanted The Attack on the Internet is growing by the day, in the name of intellectual property.

30:34We have now for the first time in history an opportunity to put online a universally is the available library of all known things, all books that have ever been printed and what has stopped it? Government regulators. Google wanted to do this with its Google book program. Many people were cooperating. The government is preventing it through the enforcement of intellectual property rules combined, working with a private industry to enforce what is an effective government regulation. So we can begin to see a pattern here. Government Government planning was never a good means to do anything, but at least there was a time when at least government planning set out to bring progress to humanity. It was the wrong means to achieve what I regard as the right goal. Today, government planning is working as maliciously as possible and effectively as possible as a means to achieve the wrong goal, which is the de-civilization of society. I mean by this that if there is anything that The government is actually good at doing. It is at destroying things. Even so, in seeking to reduce our standard of living and drive us backwards in the progress of civilization, the government is really playing with fire, unleashing evils that are unknown to us even today.

31:54Never forget that it was not government, but freedom that gave us civilization. Freedom gave rise to innovation, the unleashing of human ingenuity that built cities, expanded the division of labor across the globe. It tripled the average lifespan. Freedom gave us universal distribution of food, medicine, music, learning, global communication at zero price. It gave us the modern miracles of the grocery store and fast food. I'm not shy to say it. I love it. Freedom created the wealth that funds our churches, our centers of research, civic association, dance troupes, symphonies, art museums, nature preserves. Freedom is what allows institutions like the Mises Institute to exist and experience vibrant growth.

32:43Only a free and wealthy society permits civilization to flourish for everyone. It was Joseph Schumpeter who said that the great tragedy of capitalism is that it produces riches so abundant that people tend to take them for granted. imagining that they can hobble and destroy its productive machinery without great economic and social consequence. This is precisely what is happening today. This tendency to romanticize poverty and simplicity in a world without modern technology is an ideology that is animating the antics of many of today's intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats who have set themselves up as enemies of all that makes life grand, of all that makes life worth living, which is to say they have set themselves up as enemies of freedom.

33:36Now, I began with an Oliver Wendell Holmes quotation, so I'll end with one. In a moment of good sense, he said, state interference is an evil where it cannot be The libertarian tradition has shown that government intervention cannot be shown to be a good, ever. Especially now. Our taxes are paying not for civilization, but rather for its destruction. In dramatic contrast, your support of the Mises Institute, which is dedicated at its very core to defending the institutions that permit civilization to flourish, is helping to sustain what too many take for granted. So I would like to thank you for your support. Thank you for being a friend of progress, freedom, and the well-being of all of humanity.

34:28Thank you very much.