Traveling Down the Road to Serfdom: History of Socialism from Marx to Obama

0:00Phil, I'm the last big obstacle between you and lunch because I'm really big and speaking about bigness, my immediate boss in Moscow was chief economic advisor to Gorbachev, his name was Abella Ganbignan, he was the biggest economist in the world, maybe about 500 pounds and I want I want just to add to my bizarre biography that I worked for the Soviet government in Moscow as one of economic advisors. I wasn't their advisor, I wouldn't take the blame. And then in 1989 I defected to the United States and found myself working for the second largest bureaucracy of this planet for the U.S. federal government in Washington at the congressional think tank called United States Institute of Peace, which like all government and Think Tanks didn't think at all, but we were thinking, I think, quite a lot.

1:00And I would say that definitely, speaking about bugs and governments, this is very interesting what we can learn today, because my mom, she is in her 80s, she lives in Chicago, Illinois, and she told me, she said, Yuri, you are probably right about socialism coming, the bad bugs is already here, because in the Soviet Union, bedbugs were everywhere. That was the only thing which was not in shortage. Well, and continuing a good tradition of commenting on John Cotran's graph about prosperity, I recently saw in American Economic Review a similar graph together with another graph, the growth of government.

1:59And so the point was that we are getting wealthy because the government is growing. And sure enough I think Hillary Clinton, recently she was in Brazil and she said Brazil is the fastest growing economy in Americas. And why this is the case? Because they have the highest marginal tax rates. Yeah, I'm not making it up. It's just... But returning back to bugs and socialism. Yes, short of bugs, socialists killed the next great amount of people. The bugs are killed, it looks like, 280 million people just of malaria alone. And Rudy Rummel, a very famous US demographer from University of Hawaii, he is specializing on something he calls democide, death by government, death by government.

2:51He calculated 160 million people last century were murdered by socialism, by socialism, 160 million people. So I think that the obvious conclusion is that's definitely not enough. Let's try it again. And Jeff was talking that his children are not teachable, that it's difficult to convey experience verbally, that children do not learn from us. I have children as well. Also amazing. Back in Soviet Union, I didn't have the slightest idea of having children. Came to the United States, exploded with children. But my children are exactly like Jeff's. They don't learn much from me.

3:39But so are our adults. Adults are the same. Adults do not learn anything from anything. I think the only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything. 160 million people were killed just to prove that socialism can work, and it didn't, and we are trying it again, again, and again. Speaking about Marx, Karl Marx was, I would say, a genius of evil. I don't think he believed in a better future of humankind. I don't think he believed that we should take care of the poor. He believed in Marxism, in Marxism, in himself, in himself. That was his claim to power, his claim to power.

4:24Recently, they unclassified Marxist writings from the central archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine? Some of Marx's work was so horrific that even communist mass-murderers like Lenin classified, Put away some of his writings for people not to know what he was referring to. In 1848, he was editing a newspaper, Neue Reiniger Zeitung in Bonn, Germany. And in editorial of this newspaper, which he wrote every day, he wrote that we have a lot of racial trash in Europe. and racial trash would be Scottish Islanders, Basques, Poles, Serbs and other dirty Slavs.

5:16And his point is that we should do the cleaning, that these people are so backward that they can never embrace our progressive teaching and they should be discarded, they should be burned in the fire of history. This point was that violence, in the same editorial, he's saying violence is a midwife of history. Violence is a midwife. In the letter to Engels written in 1856, he's saying, dear Friedrich, because Engels were complaining that many people think that they are mass murderers. He said, don't pay any attention to that. We will be accused of mass murder, we will be accused of terrorism, we will be accused of anything. If we are victorious, we shouldn't care about it. And they didn't, and they didn't.

6:09And sure enough, I mean, speaking about that, what his teaching was, that the state should wither away, so we need to give all the power to the state, all the power, submit ourselves as slaves of the state and then the state would for some magic wither away, wither away. What kind of brazen dishonesty is that? This is just amazing. It was pure propaganda and Marxism is nothing but justification of public slavery because it was nothing like, can you imagine if private slave holders would kill 160 million slaves, They would become broke.

6:56Public slavery, that's again, it's a government waste. Why should I care about these millions? Stalin used to say, death of one person is a tragedy, death of millions is just statistic. They still cannot reconcile themselves in today's Russia, how many skeletons they have in their cupboard, how many millions of skeletons. Some estimates are that around 60 million, that would be Rudi Rammel, that would be Solzhenitsyn. And KGB admitted themselves that it is 42 million, 42 million. I remember I was still in Soviet Union when the chairman of KGB was put in the time of glasnost, maybe you heard, you remember that, glasnost.

7:41So they put him on the national TV and the chair of KGB, Mr. Kruchkov, and he was answering

8:19What is there? What kind of history they have? And Mr. Khrushchev, he said, yes comrades, the number is about right. However, it's preposterous to think that they were all killed. Most of them died of natural causes. And the natural cause would be, the most obvious would be, if you don't feed people, they tend to die. and also surviving without clothes in Siberia leads to other natural causes and what not. So they even admitted that. So why mass murder? Because socialism cannot exist without it. That's the system which is completely, it's not an economic system. Von Mises was saying that socialism is a simple system of management.

9:08Socialism is run like an army division. You should work just because you are told to. And millions of people were sacrificed because they didn't want to or were not working hard enough. In 1922, Lenin already sick. Well, he looks like sick all his life, mentally sick. But in 1922, he wrote to Dzerzhinsky. He said, I am telling comrades and they don't listen. and I am tired of it, what if we'll take, Zyrczynski was the first chief of KGB, and he made a point, what if we'll take, and I'm tired of it, take a couple of them and shoot them publicly, and they will listen, and they shot them publicly and people began to listen, and then they began to shoot people in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and the attention span was perfect. Amazingly enough, the highest rates of economic growth of the Soviet Union were achieved in In the 1930s, when they were murdering people with a speed of 12,000 a day, can you imagine that, that this is a, that society, because there is really, you, it just cannot, cannot work this way.

10:21And sure enough, my boss, Mr. Gorbachev, inadvertently, what he did, he removed fear from the system, which was glued only by fear, and the system collapsed right away, and nobody was defending the system. Why did he do that? I think he took Marxism and Leninism seriously. He thought that, really, maybe there should be something. And I remember, I was kind of thinking, what's behind that birthmark? I mean, what is going on? Because he would say, for example, that we should return socialism, its human face, human face. Can you imagine a murder, a socialist murder, 160 million people, in China 78 million people, in even little Yugoslavia 1 million people, in North Korea 2 million people, and on and on like that.

11:15And he was saying we should return back to human socialism, human socialism. And we were kind of thinking, what is he talking about? But then people decided that yes, maybe that's the case, maybe that's the case. There was a joke at that time, popular in Moscow, that the CIA sent the best agent to Moscow, and this person was walking from one store to find out about Perestroika, what's really going on. And this CIA agent was with a little notebook, he would go to the butcher's shop and write down, no meat, would go to the bakery, write down, no bread, go to the shoe store, no shoes. And there was a KGB guy overlooking over the shoulder and he said, well, ten years A few years ago, you would be shot for doing that. He writes, there are no bullets.

12:03And when people realize there are no bullets, then everybody stopped working. I kind of had an idea that the Soviet Union would collapse maybe ten years before the CIA. I think the CIA just read it in the Washington Post. And how could I guess that that system is doomed? I had a secretary, Tatiana, very nice lady, 23 years old. She was an evening student of the Moscow State University. Once I noticed she's picking paperclips into her purse, and I said, Tatiana, why you are stealing state property in such strange form, paperclips? And she said, Yuri, and she just went berserk on me, she said, Yuri, what else can I take from this f-office. Just show me I'll take that. And I remember that time I was walking back home thinking that economy is doomed if the young and brightest are going to work only to think what we will steal there today. And in the Soviet Union, the Winton and Father in Condemnation of Christmas. Christmas was prohibited altogether, even with fluorescent

13:22light bulbs. And so everybody was celebrating New Year Eve. And I was invited to her house for her apartment to New Year Eve. And so she had a New Year tree that was, you couldn't Christmas tree, New Year tree, and when I came there, I spilled wine on myself, because can you imagine, I saw all these paper clips, you can make chains from paper clips, and that was an ultimate bureaucratic Christmas tree, decorated with paper clips, so that society is gone. However, again, it looks like the lesson that so many people were murdered, so many people perished in a dreadful gulag, that this lesson was not learned by humankind.

14:19A year ago, a very interesting video was produced in Latvia, in the Republic, in the New Republic of Latvia, and the video is called The Soviet Story, The Soviet Story. I used travel to Cuba to inoculate my students against socialism. That was very good and I would take students and we would go to Cuba and everybody would return back either a libertarian or at least fierce anti-communist. Then George W. Bush prohibited this. He prohibited that in a very interesting way, yes. Bush administration issued a decree that many people abuse these so-called exchanges with Cuba.

15:06Well, no exchanges. Have you seen crowds of Cubans around here coming from Cuba to see how we live? No, it's a politically correct kind of thing. I was an exchange student in England, for example, myself. I don't think anybody was exchanged for me. But both of them issued this decree that exchanges should be at least semester long, and this prohibition is still in place, at least semester long. So Cuba is the place when you go there for one week, it's just more than enough already. You are depressed, chronically depressed. And I would better spend this semester in Kenosha County jail rather than in this island of Freedom. It's a monumental accusation of socialism. And can you imagine, Mr. Castro was what last week he was saying, Cuban economic model didn't work. So they murdered a million people out of ten. Another four million are living in Miami or Mexico or Spain or Argentina.

16:09So they devastated the country. Now he's saying, sorry, we made a mistake. It was the same One thing as Gorbachev, referring to the 60 million people who died in Gulag, he said mistakes were made in the past. Can you imagine? So, that is the, I think that is, and this video is depicting it, how they were using famines. Seven million Ukrainians were starved to death, starved to death. What kind of devilish experiments they had in Gulag. For example, And what we have in the West, at that time we had the praise of the Soviet Union, complete Praise of Socialism. The governor of Wisconsin would go to Soviet Union in 1937, Robert LaFollette, the Fighting Bob, and returned back to Mises and said, I saw the future and it works. 12,000 people a day. It was a means machine. Speaking about my publication, Doug mentioned that I I published in American and Russian and Finnish and so on.

17:35My last publication in Russian magazine was about electing Putin, KGB Colonel, proud KGB Colonel, as President of Russia. That happened in March of 2000. And the title of my article is self-descriptive. Meat voted for a meat grinder. And that's exactly what happened. It is, I think, a very powerful warning for us that we should not repeat it. And we do. Judge Napolitano, he called people in 2008 sheeple. We voted what we have right now ourselves. It's just an amazing lack of judgment on behalf of people.

18:24Now people are trying to recover from this, I would say, kind of mental collapse with tea parties and what not, and this is at least provides me with some hope, but to elect a Marxist-Leninist who never made it a secret. I mean we cannot accuse the president of lying to us. No, he published these books. The dreams of my father, the book that I've read was a huge occupational hazard for the benefit of the Mises Institute. But it was scary, scary. He refers to his mentor. His mentor was in Hawaii when he lived there from I think the age of 11 to the age of 17. And his mentor There was Frank. He doesn't tell us what Frank, who is Frank. Frank is African American. His real name is Frank Marshall Davis. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the United States and the best friend of Paul Robson. Maybe you remember Paul Robson.

19:31Paul Robson was a KGB spy. He was also a singer, but he was on the payroll of the KGB. He was of the KGB. He was the best buddy of Stalin, of Stalin. And Frank Marshall Davis, he was a poet, and his poems were, Ode to the Red Army, for example, or Praise to Stalin. And in essence, these poems are how better the life is in the Soviet Union, in the Soviet Union. There are some conspiracy theories about him as well, that he was assigned to to move to Hawaii in 1951 to spy on the U.S. Naval Intelligence Facilities. I don't know whether it's true or not, but I remember Murray Rothbard, who I was very much blessed to know and rather well, he would usually say, Yuri, I am not following conspiracy theories, but conspiracies are happening all the time, left and right, mostly left.

20:30And that's exactly what we need to see, the whole spectrum of things. So it is really sad to see the government destroying industry by industry. There's an interesting book I would like to recommend you also to read, and not as short as fired. It's about socialists taking over Western countries, and it's written by Jan Kozak, who was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. This was at first published as a manual for socialists in the West how to take power. And the recipe is pretty simple. It was drafted at first by Antonio Gramsci in 1920s, an Italian leader of the Italian Communist Party.

21:24His point is that in United States, in United Kingdom, in Western Europe, we have something called civil society, which should be destroyed. And the first should go, the family should go, the church should go, the predominant culture should go, because there is no, he said, there is no shortcuts about it. In Russia, the revolution could take place because they were not civil society there. Civil society was destroyed by Tsars and destroyed by the First World War. So that's why people were already destitute and people were so confused that they followed Bolsheviks who led them to this destitution and mass murder. In the United States, as Mr. Kozak is saying, that would not happen.

22:13We need to destroy beliefs of American people. We need to destroy their religion. We need to destroy their family and only then they would be naked before the big government and we can't take over it. And amazingly enough, it looks like exactly what is happening. He is making also a good point. He is comparing National Socialism or Nazism with International Socialism, which is Marxism, Marxism, which are just two, two kind of varieties of the same, of the same beast, of the same beast. And he is writing about Volkswagen, for example. Hitler, when he came to power, the first thing he created, government automobile industry, Volkswagen, that Volkswagen means people's cars, people's cars, run by, by, by him and his cronies of the government. Now in the United States, what is socialism? Socialism Socialism and it boils down to something called state ownership, state ownership.

23:11So if you're the most defining short of bed bugs, the most defining feature of socialism is government ownership, government ownership. And now we see explosion in this government ownership. Government is taking over the largest industry in the United States, healthcare industry. In today's Russia, life expectancy for men is 57. It went up after the collapse of Communism. 36% of hospitals in Russia, mostly in rural areas, do not have running water or sewer system.

24:10Can you imagine? This is free healthcare for you. You go there for a surgery and they would go to the well and pick up some water and boil it and then cut you up and whatever. And definitely, 57, I think it's even pretty generous kind of life expectancy, life expectancy. So then Glenn Beck, you mentioned, Glenn Beck, he asked, his assistant asked me about Cuba and she said, well, Cuba looks like a pretty rundown place, but how about the healthcare when you were there? What did you learn? The only healthcare in Cuba is to swim to Miami, Florida. And that's what I told her, and Mr. Beck asked me to repeat it, and that's why I maybe was kind of pretty wooden on the program, because I all the time was thinking not to forget to talk about that.

25:03Yes, no healthcare whatsoever, whatsoever. And so we are doing away with the best healthcare system in the world, the best healthcare system in the world. Look, this, I was recently walked into a conference of certified public accountants, just amazing. Certified Public Accountants and especially auditors, they openly would admit at their conference that they are not serving their clients anymore, that their first responsibility is to FBI and IRS, so you are hiring a FBI or IRS surrogate agent and paying this agent to lock you up, so this is, I came to the United States, I defected to the United States 1989. And I cannot attest that it was a completely different country, completely different country.

25:58Even during the last 20 years, it was so much, I mean it's just amazing. I think that we are losing cultural wars. Look, academia, mass media, almost a church. I cannot go to church anymore. It's already not a church, it's a church of doubt. So it's a, so I would Let's say that now it's about time for us to realize that we are on the brink already of disaster. Because in the United States, I think, was Flynn, was a great American journalist and he wrote a wonderful book about Roosevelt. And speaking about this book, this book, I contributed a chapter on Roosevelt, on Franklin and Ellen Roosevelt, with a self-descriptive title, Tyranny Loves Company, the story of Roosevelt and Stalin.

26:55The story of Roosevelt and Stalin. But today, today we have almost Stalins in Washington, DC. We have the Congress which is completely out of control, which is, it is really, I mean, we are losing liberties every day in a very fast way. And Flynn was writing in 1941, he wrote that tyranny in America will not come with a black shorts or with a hammer and sickle, it would come as a cozy American thing, it will come with an apple pie and well I think he was very optimistic about that. Now it's not coming as an American, it's coming as a multicultural kind of thing without without any pies, without anything else, with a situation that I can, 20 years ago when I began teaching in American Academia, I could at least, with my liberal colleagues, I could at least discuss weather. Now I can discuss weather even. There is absolutely no reference point, I mean nothing to talk about, nothing to talk about. And these people are in charge

28:06of Your Children, and these people are disposing of your taxes. So I think that this is a very pivotal, very critical moment for liberty, and we should be aware that they will come not in black shorts, they're already here, they're already here taking your liberty away. And I again would say that we have some institutions of free society, like Ludwig von Mises Institute to Pike Peak Economics Club, and we should cherish what they are doing and how they are defending our individual liberty. And we talked with Paul that those of you who are interested in viewing this video, this is a copy I have for public performance so we can, without the government intellectual of Property. I promise it will not be locked up for viewing it. And we're thinking of maybe viewing it at about 3.30 or 4 o'clock at the facilities of the Pike Peak Economics Club because I think that would be it. If anyone is interested, but before organizing it, if those who are interested in watching it, if you can raise your hand. So we'll see

29:25The last advertising for this video is that it was produced by Edwin Schnorre, a young Latvian producer. His effigy was immediately burned in Moscow. His life expectancy probably of Money, The Theory of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money and Credit of Money

30:20And I pray, dear scientists, dear chemists, come up with some humane gas that we can put these people to sleep. And sure enough, this gas was invented, called Cyclone B. So before, I'm not kind of saying that we will go that way right away, no. But I was reading recently a book by Michael Moore, a communist propaganda kind of hitman in the United States, downsize this, downsize this, the book is, and in that book, on page 27, he is saying that people like William Sapphire, who was just conservative columnist in New York Times, not kind of a big deal libertarian at all, but he said that people like that would be raking manure in the collective farms in North Dakota if he would be in power. And I think I think that promise we should kind of take seriously, because that's what they're all about.

31:19Well, thank you very much for your attention.