trevor burrus: welcome to free thoughts fromlibertarianism.org and the cato institute. i’m trevor burrus. aaron ross powell: and i’m aaron powell. trevor burrus: joining us today is roberthiggs, senior fellow in political economy at the independent institute, editor at largeof the independent review and author of many books including the libertarian classic crisisand leviathan. his new book is taking a stand reflectionson life, liberty and the economy. welcome to free thoughts. robert higgs: thank you very much.
trevor burrus: so i would like to start withyour background and history, how you came to libertarianism both in the ideas and thento become a professional libertarian. was it something you were just born into or didyou have a moment of revelation when you were 18 or something? robert higgs: i would have to speculate onthe remote origins of my inclination toward libertarianism. i was not brought up in apolitical household and was not especially interested in politics even when i was incollege although i was interested in certain things at the time. i think i might actually date my movementin that direction to – when i was 17, i
went to the us coast guard academy in newlondon, connecticut and that was a very rigorous place especially in those days. there wasconstant harassment and physical and psychological pressure being put on people constantly. sothe idea was to drive away or break people who couldn’t take the pressure. there wasa kind of method in the madness. but one of the things i learned there is thatin a situation like that where there are superiors and inferiors in a chain of command, someof the superiors will abuse their power and i think that is an insight that stuck withme from then on for the rest of my life. you give people power, even petty power, atyour peril and there are people who enjoy abusing those who can be abused. i think thatsensibility was important to me as my political
thinking developed, which happened duringthe 1960s. i didn’t fancy myself a libertarian. if anything, when i was in college, i thoughtof myself as a new leftist, which wasn’t all bad. i was always opposed to the vietnamwar even when most americans didn’t know it was happening. so that was a big influence on me too becausethat taught me that the government is capable of routinely committing horrible crimes foryears on end for the slightest political motives and … trevor burrus: did you read any authors aroundthat time that helped you out? robert higgs: well, i used to read rampartsmagazine. that was probably the only kind
of ideological reading i did consistently.but i dabbled in the leftist books of various sorts. i read some marks and some of the contemporaryleftists. i became enamored actually of c. wright mills and to this day, i actually defendmills in many ways. i think mills was an honest scholar and of course he didn’t have a decentunderstanding of economics and would have benefited greatly from having one. but despite that, c. wright mills i thinkcontinues to be someone one can learn from and particularly his analysis of elites andhis book the power elite and others. he also wrote a book called the sociological imagination,which has some really excellent advice to young scholars. how do you go about your workwith integrity? just how do you do the nuts
and bolts of it? what are you trying to do?which was basically tell the truth. aaron ross powell: i’m curious how thisnotion that you picked up that people in power will abuse that power led to specificallylibertarianism and a skepticism about state power, because one of the things that we oftenhear especially from those on the left is that that very idea that if people have power,they’re going to abuse it, the big guys are going to beat down the little guys, iswhat makes them want to embrace the state even more because they see the state as theway to correct that. the bosses or the warlords or the strongestguy in an archaic world or whatever is going to beat up the little guy or take advantageof them or force them work long hours for
low pay. so we need the state to be the protectorof the little guy, the protector of the common man. robert higgs: well, i was not completely immuneto those kinds of thoughts by any means. but i was saved from going too far down that pathby the fact that i was studying economics. i think if you want to identify one overwhelminglyfatal flaw in the thinking of nearly all leftists, it’s that they don’t have a clue abouteconomics. the more i learned about economics, especiallyafter i got into graduate school, the more i understood the importance of markets andthe benefits of markets and even the relationship between markets and freedom in general.
so by the time i got my phd which was in 1968,i certainly didn’t consider myself a conservative. never in my life did i consider myself a conservative.but i still thought of myself as a person more on the left than anywhere else. but after i went to work as a professor atthe university of washington, they kicked that out of me pretty quickly and at the sametime, some time in the first year of my teaching career, i stumbled across hayek and just lovedhayek. the first thing i read by him was his great 1945 article, the use of knowledge insociety and at the time, i thought, well, that’s a really good article. i can usethat for my students because there’s no math in it. everybody can understand this.
but i didn’t really understand it myselfbecause being trained as a neoclassical economist, i was thinking that it’s a lot like whati had learned from stigler and other chicagoans about the economics of information. so i still had a lot of understanding to arriveat. but it led me to have a high opinion of hayek and so the next thing i did was to readthe constitution of liberty which to me was a very important book. now when i look backat it, all i can see are all the concessions that hayek is making one after another, whysome people call him a socialist and all that. but at the time, he seemed like just the perfectclassical liberal and he impressed me with his scholarship. that’s what won me over.
hayek was this great old-fashioned europeanscholar who knew a lot of languages and he knew about philosophy and law and he wasn’tanything like the economist i had read in my education. he was the real deal as a thinkerand so that kind of tipped me over into classical liberalism very early. from that point on, i think i just graduallyevolved in the direction of being a more and more unforgiving classical liberal and latein the 70s, again because of hayek’s having cited mises, i read human action from coverto cover and i would say that was the only kind of epiphany experience of my whole lifeas a scholar. that really hit me very hard and actually made my think that i – despitethe success i had been having in mainstream
economics, it made me think that everythingi had written was just garbage. trevor burrus: i want to ask you about oneof those things. you wrote about – around that time, because it’s my favorite bookof yours. in ’77 it was published. the competition and coercion: blacks in the american economy,1865-1914, which is definitely in that old style economics, full of graphs and numbers.but what were your general theses? what did you generally find in that book? robert higgs: well, the book aimed to, asit were, change the emphasis. practically everything written in black history took theview that blacks had been victimized from a to z at every point in history. it’s almosta case of what my old colleague morris morris
used to call the “theory of infinite andincreasing miseryâ€. they started on slavery and then it gets worse every year not withstandingtheir emancipation or anything else. that was just so counterfactual that nobodywho respected evidence could accept it and i didn’t when i started reading black history.but what i tried to do in that book, first is a result of some research i did on particularissues about land tenure and land ownership and occupational distributions and migrationand so forth. i built up a body of analysis and a set offacts that led me to believe that not only were blacks not 100 percent victimized butdespite everything working against them and there was a tremendous amount working againstthem, they actually succeeded by virtue of
their own efforts and by virtue of the factthat there was competition for their services. that’s why the book is titled competitionand coercion because competition – and i had leaned this from gary becker’s workand other work in just the mainstream economics of discrimination. competition is the salvation of oppressedpeople and that can be seen in any case. pick your ethnic group and you see the same phenomenaoperating. if people have something valuable, and certainly black labor was valuable, andsome blacks had skills beyond labor power, there’s going to be potential for someoneto bid away an exploited worker, workers being paid less than the value of his marginal contributionto output.
so in a way, my book was infused by pursuitof that theme and included ultimately some attempts to estimate what had happened toblack income levels between the late 60s and 1860s and world war one approximately. i foundthat black income on average was growing faster than white income was growing. that was aperiod of very rapid economic growth in general. but because blacks had started at such a relativelylow level, even if we go 50 years’ time, they’ve only improved from about 25 percentof the white income level to 35 or 40 percent of the white level. but that’s not trivial.that’s a lot of improvement and i collected a lot of evidence that demonstrated just inconcrete ways how their living conditions had improved, what kinds of things they mighthave in their home, what kinds of clothing,
food and entertainment and what have you. they had access to – by the end of thatperiod, typically, that they had not had access to at the beginning of that period. i meanthe immediately post-war period was horrible in every way because of all the disruptionsof the war and all the destruction that had taken place in the south where 90 percentof the blacks lived and continued to live throughout the next 50 years. trevor burrus: when competition – the markethave done – i mean do you think it did better for blacks in that period than attempts bygovernments to alleviate or fix these problems whether it – so we had the problem withseparate but equal for example which was very
[indiscernible] when plessy v. ferguson camedown. it was – he was saying you had to have segregated railcars. you were allowedto but that meant the rail companies had to have two railcars that were half full as opposedto one that was full, which doesn’t seem to really – the businesses themselves inthe market were not as in discrimination as perhaps the government was. would you agreewith that? robert higgs: oh, yeah, that was another partof my thesis that whereas competition in the market was their salvation to the extent thatthey had salvation, whenever they encountered the government – in their case it was atthe state and especially the local level where they made these encounters. they were totallyout of luck then. the only hope they had in
their encounters with the government was theprotection they could get from a powerful white patron. so a system developed in the south but particularlyin the plantation areas where blacks became beholden to plantation owners or businessowners for protection from the state and if they were arrested, their patron would goin and pay their fine. if they were about to sentenced to jail or something, the guywould go in and talk to the judge. in all sorts of ways, there was a trade going on.this was a market phenomenon, this paternalism. there was a trade going on. the blacks providedfaithful services. they didn’t run away the first time they were unhappy about somethingand in exchange they got the protection from
the official discriminators that stood readyto squash any black at any time. aaron ross powell: how much does competitionalleviate these discriminations based on race if i guess the discriminators gained utilityfrom the racism? so they like not hiring blacks or they would – they really don’t wantto hire them because they don’t want to be around them or the railcars. like yes,we could have integrated the railcars but then the white customers might not have beenwilling to pay as much or wouldn’t have patronized the service. robert higgs: well, it continues to operateand can operate with great power, so long as there are enough people who value wealthmore than the exercise of discrimination.
in the south, between the war of – betweenthe states and the first world war, there were plenty of people who preferred wealthto the pleasures of discrimination and especially these wealthy people. the blacks were hatedmore by working class, lower class whites. wealthy people didn’t fear blacks. theywere so far removed from them by class status and wealth. they didn’t see the blacks asa threat to them at all. they weren’t hankering to hurt blacks in the same way that lowerclass whites were. aaron ross powell: it sounds a lot like our– a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric today. robert higgs: yeah. trevor burrus: well, also especially if thoselower class whites were unionized and then
it got really bad for african-americans. robert higgs: yeah. many of the unions thatwere formed – and of course in the south, there wasn’t as much unionization as inother parts of the country. but where unions were formed, they usually did – either discriminateagainst blacks or simply exclude blacks from employment. so unionization was definitely a negative– big negative factor but not one that affected most black workers because there was not enoughunionization in the whole economy. trevor burrus: there was more in the northafter the great migration. david bernstein’s only one place of redress is the right bookabout that.
robert higgs: yes, right. trevor burrus: but i wanted to ask you aboutanother book, the one i had mentioned at the introduction crisis and leviathan and probablyyour most known book. for those who haven’t read it, definitely if you’re a fan of thispodcast or libertarianism in general, you have to read it. can you give us an overviewof what you looked for in crisis and leviathan? what have you found? robert higgs: well, that book was aimed attracking the growth of government, especially the federal government, from the late 19thcentury up to the time it was written in the 1980s. at that time, the growth of governmenthad become a kind of cottage industry among
economists and to some extent among politicalscientists. people were applying various theories that were lying around in economics or thatthey devised for themselves to account for why government got so much bigger in thatcentury. i didn’t have a great interest in that wheni first started my career but my colleague douglas north who was the department chairmanand the man who hired me … trevor burrus: and a future nobel prize winner.well, that – future at that time. robert higgs: doug was viewed as the experton government economic relations among us economic historians. so he was constantlywriting about this and talking about it and we all worked together, the economic historiansespecially. we read each other’s papers.
i was in his office practically every dayjust to talk about economic history. so i talk to him a lot and in my own teachingof us economic history courses, i dealt with that subject. but i wasn’t doing researchin that area. but i was getting more and more in a sense frustrated by my inability to persuadedoug of certain things, particularly that ideology had been very important in this process,ideological change, and also that the national emergency periods, especially the world wars,had been critical times for the growth of government. neither element at that time had become importantin doug’s thinking. so by the early 80s, by 1980, 1981, i decided, well, i think iwill write a book on this and my idea was
just to write about basically the two worldwars and the great depression because that’s where the main action was for these crises. but when i started writing and started goingaround giving talks to other universities, one of the questions that often came up was,“well, there were crises at earlier times in history. why didn’t they produce thisratchet effect you are telling us was produced by the wars and the depression?†that led me to decide that i needed to havea chapter on progressivism because i had come to believe that it was that ideological watershedof progressivism that created a condition wherein there would be a ratchet effect. youhave to have people predisposed to think that
when there’s an emergency, government shouldjump in with all four feet and that had not existed in the 19th century. it’s not thatnobody wanted government to come in and hand rents to them or do favors for them. thathas always been the case. but in the 19th century, there was a kind of dominant ideologicalbelief that government should be limited. trevor burrus: or at least the federal governmentor … robert higgs: certainly the federal governmentshould be but even at the state and local level, there was a belief that politicianswere crooked, that they wasted people’s money and that they were always engaging inboondoggles especially after what happened in 1830s, early 1840s with all the bankruptciesof states and their canal projects that went
belly up. that led to a bunch of constitutionalrevisions and so forth. so from then on especially, there was a lotof thinking among opinion leaders and lawyers and writers and what have you that governmentwas simply a factor that while people didn’t want to get rid of it, they wanted to havegovernment for kind of classical-liberal reasons. it’s not that – it had to be kept small.it had to be limited or it would abuse its powers or waste a lot of people’s money. progressivism altered that as the defaultideological background condition and as a result, it meant that the next time therewas a pretext for a great increase in government action as during world war one, then manypeople were predisposed to favor. well, let’s
have the government do this. let’s haveit do that. if we have to have a big bunch of ships builtby the government to fight the war, why don’t we have the government build housing for theshipyard workers? it just went on and on. there was always some connection whereby someimmediate pretext like fighting the war could be hooked on to some other government activity. so when your government started buying a lotof certain raw materials to produce ammunitions, well the next thing you know is that it bidsup the prices of copper and leather and burlap and various raw commodities. that createspressure because people who used those commodities in their own businesses, their costs are beingdriven up. then that creates pressure for
government to use price controls. so in world war one, you ended up not withcomprehensive price controls but with selective price controls on these specific items whoseprices had been driven up by government’s own purchases on a large scale. you just seethis kind of thing again and again and again. it’s because nobody was stopping to say,“look, this is a bad idea for government to create a shipping board to regular oceanshipping rates and working conditions of sailors.†that’s a bad idea. we should let marketstake care of those things because by the time this was done in 1916, opinion leaders thought,“oh, that’s a good idea.†we’ve got railroad regulation. ship, that’s very similar.now shipping rates have been driven up because
the british navy is driven from the seas andit’s very expensive for americans to ship goods to latin america or to bring raw materialsfrom there and other places. so people who had to incur shipping rateswere screaming for some kind of relief and … trevor burrus: and on and on and on. robert higgs: it just went on and on. everyonehad a similar element like that which required that there be a predisposition to use governmentin a way that it had never been used before. aaron ross powell: so how intentional wasthis ratchet effect in the sense that – so the way you’ve described it, it sounds almostlike government grew but people didn’t set
out to grow government. they might have apredisposition to say like, “ok, so government undertook this activity and that activityhad negative effects somewhere else. so well, we screwed that area up. so we shouldgo and fix it,†and you had people who naturally thought that government would be better atfixing it than markets. so that’s what we ought to do. then that lead to this ongoingratchet. but was there an intentional element going on behind it, either like within government,like people saying here, “this crisis is an opportunity to grow our power or the powerof government. let’s do it,†or people outside of government saying this crisis andthe things that’s leading to our way for me to use government to benefit myself?
robert higgs: both. there was some of eachand even when people entered into these expanded government activities, as a simple reactionto the immediate problem at hand, they quickly realized that they might have a good dealhere. so later on, they defended its continuation or perhaps even its enlargement. you had forexample, after the war industries board, set priorities for purchases of different materialsthe government was using so that the government’s contractors got the top claim on copper orsteel or lead or whatever it was. that system of priority was something thata lot of businesses liked. they thought after the war, “oh, we should keep this. we shouldhave somebody regulating industry because before we had all these dreadful price warsand companies with …â€
trevor burrus: destructive competition. robert higgs: yeah, destructive competition. trevor burrus: i made some air quotes on that… robert higgs: always a lot of big businessescomplaining about destructive competition because the incumbents like things the waythey are. they want to be the producers. they don’t want to have to be fighting off entrantsall the time. so if there’s a regulator, particularly if they’re the guys doing theregulation, they can take care of this. they can normalize everything and they can getrid of uncertainty and destructive competition and all the rest of it.
trevor burrus: that’s sort of one of you– the sort of – i think at that point with crisis and leviathan, which is reallyinteresting because the first line of the book – now this is – maybe this was becauseit was oxford press or – but the first line of the book in part one is – this is interestingfor now because you kind of went into sociology of the – i mean that’s a lot of what youkind of ended up doing, how – what is the mindset of people in government? what arethe mindsets of people who work with government? what are they trying to achieve? but i thinkmaybe that started with crisis and leviathan. but the first line is, “we must have government.only government can form certain tasks successfully,†which is an interesting – i’m not sureif you believe that now. you did seemingly.
robert higgs: well, when i wrote that, i believedit in the usual way that it was taken. i still believe we had to have government – as isay government as we know it and the government says they really are in the world coercive,imposed. trevor burrus: mean. robert higgs: you don’t have any choiceabout these governments. we’re the government and you’re not. do what we say. i continueto believe we must have government to do a variety of things, to keep social order, tosuppress criminal behavior and to adjudicate disputes and for a variety of reasons. buti do not believe that we must have government as we know it. we don’t have to have coercive,imposed government, and i’m satisfied at
this point that it is quite possible to havenon-coercive names of carrying out all the functions that really need to be carried out,to have an orderly and prosperous society. that conclusion was a long time coming forme. when i wrote crisis and leviathan, i was still very much a classical liberal, stillvery much a neo-classical economist and those things gradually changed. i became more radicalover time. aaron ross powell: did that shift result fromjust a lessening of practical concerns? so when you say wrote that sentence, the thoughtthat we must have government as we know it was because the alternative, while it wouldbe better from a moral perspective, might not work or did you have a shift in moralreasoning that just said that i now think
that it’s totally morally impermissibleto have this sort of course of government? robert higgs: well, when i wrote that line,i wasn’t even thinking about moral issues. i was thinking as an economist, i was thinkingwhat will work and like almost everybody else, i thought anarchy won’t work. obviouslythat’s out and i followed up that sentence in the same paragraph with a wonderful quotationfrom mises who’s explaining that government is not a bad thing. it’s actually the mostwonderful institution human beings have ever devised! that’s the opposite of what i now believethat – what caused my thinking to change over the years was not so much learning moreabout the literature of anarchy or a changing
moral position although i didn’t make moralchanges. but it was simply that the more i learned about government as we know it, governmentas it actually is, the more horrified i became to see government as it really is with youreyes open. it’s something that i found appalling. itjust seemed more and more outrageous to me that these people who had a sign over theirhouse saying “government†were permitted, allowed, to commit criminal acts right andleft. their very existence depended on criminality and everybody just took this for granted asif there’s no problem here. not only is there no problem but as mises said, it’sthe greatest thing that ever happened. so eventually the moral outrage and the analyticalchange of understanding that i acquired joined
forces to me – to bring me to a positionwhere i’m just astonished that people put up with what they put up with. aaron ross powell: well, you – shortly beforewe recorded this, you were giving a talk here at cato on your book and during that, youmentioned that things are actually a lot worse, so things in washington, things with the governmentare a lot worse than most people even think and most people tend to think no matter what– where they are in the political spectrum that things aren’t great. aaron ross powell: so how are they worse?and then relatedly when you talk about the people seemed to be ok with this, how muchdo people know about how bad these things
are? robert higgs: well, i think they’re verymuch worse than most people think or understand. as i say, if you had a microphone in everybody’soffice, the way you had in nixon’s office, this would be a revolutionary news item forpeople. if they knew what these guys are actually saying and doing – there’s one thing i’vealways loved about the fbi, which is their sting operations against politicians. theyset these up so elaborately, so that they get just ironclad film, audio, documentaryevidence, so that they get these bastards just nailed to the wall. they can’t possiblysay they’re innocent and i just love it when these guys are revealed.
but the trouble is you can’t do a stingon every single politician on earth and as for the second part of your question, i thinkmost people know practically nothing about what really goes on in politics. they watchthe news. they hear politicians give speeches. that’s about the extent of it. there arevery few people who actually study and scrutinize politics at a level where they would beginto think about these things and even those who do usually are overwhelmed by ideology. they start playing with one team or the other.there is a lot of partisan political affiliation that muddies everybody’s water. they beginto think, yeah, these progressive politicians are all sleazebags. but our guys are uprightchristian, god-fearing, mother-loving, apple-pie-eating
– or vice versa. that’s just a total waste. that just meansyour understanding is hopeless when you sign up to play for one of these teams. you don’tunderstand that they’re both committing the same crimes. they just have a differentset of clients. aaron ross powell: are the crimes limitedto – i mean you talked a lot about politicians and politicians and all this stuff, but oneof the things you learn spending time in washington is how much of the federal government is reallyout of the politician’s hands. it’s the bureaucrats, the people and the agencies whodominate so much. are things as bad there as well?
robert higgs: i think the politicians themselvesare the most crooked but … trevor burrus: are there any good politiciansat this point? do you think that it’s possible that anyone got here clean? you got to dc,you got to federal office. robert higgs: it’s conceivable. i’m notgoing to name any names. trevor burrus: but then the bureaucrats areanother level too. robert higgs: the problem i think is a littledifferent in the bureaucracy. the problem there is that these bureaucratic kingpinshave a lot of discretion and they have tremendous power and they’re pretty much entrenched.it’s – you got to do some pretty outstanding stuff to get yourself removed from power.
so they’re pretty confident they can wheeland deal as they like and of course some of them get bought with cash in a plain brownwrapper too. but that i don’t think is the typical way in which they’re corrupted.they’re corrupted by just the ease with which they’re able to exercise power andabuse their power and by being able to think of themselves as really being right, of noteve committing crimes. but of doing good things for people, if not all people, at least theright people. i think they’re corrupted by hubris morethan they’re corrupted by cash. the politicians of course, they’re not immune from hubrisby any means, but they’re constantly fighting to collect money to run the next electionand that means cash is really terribly importable
to them in a way that it’s not importantto the bureaucrats. trevor burrus: well, how culpable are – shouldwe regard people in government? i mean of any sort, whether it’s a dmv person up toa dea and then up to someone who files papers at the epa. so we regard all of them as somewhatculpable in this endeavor or do some of them get a free pass of some sort? robert higgs: well, yeah, in a philosophicallevel, if you work for government, you’re culpable. you’re living on stolen property.but i don’t see any point in saying the janitor who cleans the offices in the departmentof agriculture is a big criminal and of course a lot of the clerks and workday drones inthese bureaus, they don’t have anything
much to do with policy at all. they’re justshuffling papers. that doesn’t mean they don’t abuse peoplethey run into. even the guy at the welfare office, he can give some grief to the poorsobs that go in there, trying to get a month’s worth of groceries. but at the same time, they don’t make policy.they don’t set any rates or rules about how they’re going to deal with people. it’sthe policy makers, people who have some influence on making policy. i think too that a lot of the lawyers thatwork in the government are – basically their job is to put a legal gloss, to throw a legalgarment over whatever kind of crimes their
bosses want to commit. that to me is reallydespicable because in theory, a lawyer’s highest obligation is to the law and to truth.they all swear to this. but i think that’s kind of laughing stuff. if you had 10 lawyersin a bar, they would get a good laugh out of that. certainly if they had anything to do withthe criminal justice system where things work almost in the opposite way [indiscernible].it’s like built into the very tissue of what they do every day. but i think the culpabilityquestion is not an easy one. it’s not a black and white thing and it’s possiblethat there are even people at very high levels who aren’t – who don’t deserve to beindicted.
sometimes they do the honest thing. they resign.in world war one when colonel house and company were wheedling the president toward the engagementin the war, williams jennings bryan the secretary of state and this – all this pro-britishpolicy and all this anglophile thinking and he was appalled by that because in his circles,these brits were not good guys. the whole idea that the us is going to end up goingto save their cookies seemed wrong to him. it wasn’t that he was pro-german. he justwas pro-peace and he didn’t see a good reason for the us to engage in that war and he wasright. but it turned out that he couldn’t prevail. so he resigned. you notice that it’sextremely rare that anybody in government in a high level ever resigns. people can dothis, that and be called to all kinds of names
and whatever. they just stick it out. it’sas if they can’t stand the idea of living without that power. aaron ross powell: on that matter of peaceyou write in the book, although i generally issue quarrels with fellow libertarians overdoctrinal matters, i draw the line at the question of war and peace. robert higgs: yes, because war is, as i callit, the master key. it unlocks every door where your liberties are protected. it openseverything up to state dictation. it reduces everyone to the status of potential slavery.the fact that millions of men were forced into the military, the state told them youhave a choice. you can go to prison where
you will be horribly abused or you can gointo the army. take your pick. on top of that of course, there were all thepropaganda, pressures and the pressures just – you know, their friends and relativesand what have you because the country has been bamboozled into this kind of belief inthe nation state over time. so it’s not just that the state is out there driving peopleto do what it wants. there are plenty of social pressures too. i remember when i was youngand thinking about, “what if i get drafted?†i certainly wasn’t going to go in vietnam.i wasn’t going to go into the army that was fighting vietnam either. so i had to decide and i decided i would leavethe country if they tried to draft me. but
the main thing i thought about at the timewas what effect that would have on my parents because i knew that would have a very devastatingeffect on them. even though they weren’t political people, that was a very unsavorything. they would have to face their own friends and neighbors. their son is a draft dodger. so these pressures are real. there is a societyout there that by a whole variety of means has been molded into suitable raw materialfor the rulers and they don’t know it. they think this is all how it ought to be and it’sjust unfortunate that people don’t have greater awareness of the reality of what’sbeing done to them by people who have no right to do it.
aaron ross powell: is war ever ok though?if people have say an individual right to self-defense, don’t we have a right to collectivedefense? robert higgs: you would if ever individualhad power to decide, if he would participate in that collective effort or not? then itwould be fine. but it’s never that way. it’s never that way. it wasn’t even backin the colonial days when there was militia. you didn’t have a choice. everybody wasin the militia if you were able-bodied. so i think the problem when people try toequate the right of self-defense was what governments do when they go to wars. they’rejust not the same thing. if you attack me and i fight back, i’m exercising my rightof self-defense. but if some guy is running
around in yemen and trying to overthrow thegovernment and the us government sends a drone over there and kills him and 50 other peopleat the same time, that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with my self-defense or anybodyelse’s. that’s just murder. there’s no other gloss you can put on it.people accept this because they haven’t thought about it and in fact, many peoplereally don’t have a well-developed sense of moral thinking or moral reasoning. theyjust do what is customary or what they’ve been told or what they’re used to. habitis the worst thing in the world for those of us who try to build a free society becausethe thing that keeps most people in line is just habit. it has always been this way andthey would have to break away from the way
things normally are, get out of line, getthemselves in trouble, make enemies. well, no wonder there are so few mavericks. it’scostly to oppose statism in a world infused by statism. trevor burrus: a lot of people read your newbook especially like the first section, first 80 pages or so, and also maybe listening tothis podcast and they think, “oh, well, professor higgs is pretty angry.†you alsohave a great essay in here called the power of the state versus the power of love. sois it to accurate to say you are angry in some way or are you more just trying to implorepeople toward a friendly – toward love rather than force?
robert higgs: well, both actually. i am angryat the state. i think it consists of a lot of people who are committing crimes. they’rehurting a lot of people by doing so. when you think about what a great world it couldbe, if we didn’t have these crimes being committed, if we didn’t have for exampleso many government measures to hold down the poor, minimum wage laws, the licensing regulations. trevor burrus: public schools. robert higgs: public schools. it just goeson and on and on. we really couldn’t even have a poverty problem in a country like theunited states if it weren’t for public policy. there are too many ways in which people couldget out of poverty and would, but not only
do these policies keep them in poverty, butthese policies corrupt them. they make them think they deserve handouts. they make themthink that people owe them something. these are the kinds of beliefs that say ahundred years ago or more when immigrants came to the united states, they don’t comehere thinking, “oh, the people that are over there owe me something.†they justwanted a chance to work. trevor burrus: do you ever think that youmight be utopian about what freedom can do versus government? i think that there stillwould be problems in freedom. people would still be poor. we would have to give an actualaccurate assessment … robert higgs: no, no. i’m not utopian. iknow that any world with human beings in it
will have trouble. ok? that’s the natureof the raw material. some of us are no damn good. ok? so i certainly do not believe thatan abolition of government as we know it would bring about some kind of heaven on earth. but it would be vastly better than the worldwe live in infused by state power and the way in which problems were dealt with wouldbe very different too. there wouldn’t be for example people punished for victimlesscrimes and if you look at our world, punishment of people for victimless crimes is almostlike name of the game. jeff tucker wrote a piece just a few daysago about what goes on in traffic court every day. it’s just robbery. you bring in thereall these people one after another who haven’t
hurt anyone. they haven’t violated anyone’sjust rights and they’re just being ripped off altogether thousands of dollars. whathappened out there by st. louis and that suburb and it was very much tied to the fact thatthose little suburban governments live off stealing from people through giving traffictickets to people, hauling them into court or all kinds of stupid pretext. so the robber barons are not things that goback to the middle ages. we have robber barons all over this country. whole local governments,whole police departments live off robbery, outright robbery. it’s not just the factthat all taxation is robbery. it’s blatant robbery. people talk about, oh, in mexico,if a policeman stops you, he’s looking for
a bribe. well, sometimes he is. but what doyou think is happening here? it’s a much more elaborate system of extracting your money.it’s no more decent in any way than that poor, ill-paid mexican cops who wants 100pesos to let you off. but people don’t understand it. they acceptthat it’s the law. it’s the rules, blah, blah, blah. that’s crap! it’s robbery.that’s all it is and i wish people would come to see it as that more than they do becausethis is the kind of thing where something might be done. this isn’t like you haveto overthrow congress or replace the president or anything. it’s just you got to go tocity council and say, “you bastards better stop this or we’re voting your butts allout of office!â€
aaron ross powell: one of the really distressingthings about government and particularly powerful governments and big governments is – i meanwe can go to the city council and we can tell them we will vote them out. but we’re oftenin the minority and even if we can get a group of people together, these things are so bigand so entrenched that the amount of control, the amount of say we have over it is vanishinglysmall. what can – those of us who recognize theimmorality of a lot of this and see the system for what it really is, is there anything thatwe can do in our daily lives to move the needle, to shift things more towards not that utopianworld but the – a better world? robert higgs: i think there are a lot of thingsthat can be done. many things can be done
in the form of opting out or relocating yourself,adjusting somehow how you live, where you live, what you do. people don’t very oftenat least think about their lives in that way. they don’t think – when they think, “wherewill i live? what job will i pursue?†they don’t think about, “well, how exposedam i to the evils of the state?†but when you can get them to think in thatway, they often find there are a lot of things they can do to evade, avoid, lower the risks.when they do that, they in a sense become believers who can sort of talk to their friends,relatives and neighbors and say, “look, you don’t have to put up with this stuff.â€you make a missionary out of him as it were, as soon as they discover that they can escapesome of the abuse.
i know friends. i have good personal friendswho they don’t get involved in libertarian activities or groups or anything like that,but they live their lives in a way that is constructed to maximize their actual freedomand avoid government abuse, to make their tax bill as small as possible, to make theirexposure to government regulation as small as possible, to do all sorts of things thatare within the grasp of most people if they thought about working toward that. so there are ways of opting out. i mentionedin my talk earlier today home schooling, which has been tremendously successful in removingabout 10 percent of the children in the country from the horrors of the government schoolsand there’s plenty more room for home schooling
or for private schooling. i think a lot of people are dissuaded fromdoing home schooling or private schooling by the expenses and by the time demands andby feeling they’re not qualified. but i think if you can get people to thinking aboutjust how bad it’s going to be in the public schools – now the public schools are likeprisons, literally. trevor burrus: in some areas. robert higgs: you go through metal detectors.there are security people in the corridors. would you want to send your child to a placelike that every day? it’s like, ok, sonny, it’s time to put your six hours in the cityjail. off you go. have a good day! i don’t
know why people do this except that it’sjust inconvenient to pursue the alternative. but the truth is when you get started, youget a critical mass. it’s not as hard as you think. we’ve home schooled our kids,my step kids that i have, and they – the home schoolers get together and cooperatewith each other in so many ways that people aren’t aware of, to give certain classesto the kids, to give activities to them, to really flesh out a nice educational experience.it’s not that every day they’re – you got to have six hours of class time as itwere with mom or dad sitting there working with the kids. there’s a lot of online stuff you can donow, tremendous resources for that, cds. you
know, you name it. it’s just all sorts ofthings that home schoolers can do and when they do that, they take their children outof the control of these wicked school authorities who are in some ways the most irresponsiblepeople i can think of. they’re just sick with the idea of following rules no matterhow much sense they make. a lot of them are just stupidly p.c. they ram ideas about theenvironment and all sorts of discrimination and what have you down the throats of thekids and of course kids are not as easy as people might think. if a kid has a brain inhis head by the time he’s eight, he begins to see what’s being done to him to someextent. but not all of them. a lot of them just end up being affected by what’s doneto them in the government schools.
trevor burrus: well, that makes me think ofthe question that reflects a bunch of these ideas which is, “what is worse, competentgovernment, highly competent government that’s really good at accomplishing its goals nomatter how nefarious they might be or incompetent government, ones that fail in the processof trying to accomplish their goals?†robert higgs: well, certainly incompetenceis better in many departments of government. unfortunately in some cases where you reallywould love incompetence like the police, the incompetence becomes fatal. they send a swatteam to the wrong address very often for example. so you really wish they had been more competentat a time like that even though i don’t want them going to anybody’s address toserve a more …
trevor burrus: but you would like the nsato be less competent … robert higgs: oh, yeah, absolutely. i wouldlike them to be utterly incompetent. they just hear static when they plug in, if itwere up to me. trevor burrus: so do you think things are– do you have any optimism at all or do you think things are just kind of circlingthe drain? robert higgs: well, there’s always hope.sometimes people listen to me and they say, “this guy has no hope.†that’s not true.there’s always hope. we’re alive. we still got brains in our head. we may wake up anddo something someday. it’s not inconceivable. but what are the odds? i think the odds arenot good. one gentleman in my talk today was
pointing out all the positive trends aboutlife expectancies and wealth and what have you. there’s no [indiscernible] that the unitedstates and other advanced welfare-warfare states are wealthy, people have a high levelof living. they’re constantly entertained. they have marvelous electronic toys. everybodyfrom four years old up has a smart phone now and so yeah, it looks wonderful in some ways. but on the other hand, it’s a police stateand the police state part of it gets worse every day. it doesn’t seem to matter whatanybody says about it. it’s as if all the protests is just part of the ritual dance.you even have members of congress. they stand
up and they make a speech or they go in andintroduce a bill or something. but what is different? what has the nsa stopped doing?i think it started doing a lot more in the past 10 years than it stopped doing. so i really do believe that there’s a partof government and this is the heart of it, the war, intelligence, foreign policy part,that really runs on its own power, that it’s really not under effective control. i wondersometimes even how much control the president of the united states has over some of thesepeople. because what can he do? he issues an order to the head of the nsa. how is hegoing to know if that order was really carried out? of course the guy will say, “yes, sir.yes, sir.†but maybe he won’t do anything.
how is the president going to know? he’snot a techno genius. he has got other things to do. he has got a golf game. trevor burrus: so things could get betterbut likely not. robert higgs: well, that’s the short termview i hold in this country. there are parts of the world where things are getting betterin most ways and that’s glorious. the fact that china went from being a centrally-plannedcommunist country to being a semi-open-fascist country, that was a huge improvement for hundredsof millions of people. that one change probably did more to improve human well-being thanany other single thing we can think of. look at just the numbers of people that benefited.people don’t have famines anymore in china.
what a glorious thing! they used to starveby the scores of millions when they had a famine. they had them every once in a while.same in india. india is not having famines anymore. they’ve got the technology to avoidthat. so yeah, things are getting much better in some ways. has anybody created a free society? hell no!not even close. are most of the advanced countries moving in the wrong direction? yes! theirfreedoms are diminishing rather than increasing. it’s not that it’s all one way. there’sa mixed picture all the time. some things go worse. some things get better. but youhave to evaluate the overall picture and you have to decide what’s important to you.is it important that you have more electronic
toys or is it important that you not havecops breaking into people’s houses with hand grenades to serve warrants? so to me, i don’t want to live in a policestate and if i have to go somewhere and live in relatively primitive conditions, that’san improvement for me. i don’t think many people would like it. they wouldn’t considerthat improvement. i’m sorry. they don’t because that’s the crux of the thing. atground level, it’s the fact that people don’t love liberty very much and when theyhave to pay a price for it, they won’t pay much. until that changes, it’s hard to seehow we can ever have much freedom. trevor burrus: thank you for listening. freethoughts is produced by evan banks and mark
mcdaniel. to learn more, find us on the webat www.libertarianism.org.
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