 Let me introduce Robert Higgs. I'm so glad you were able to come and be with us here today. Be our black swan in our series of interviews as you described yourself. Let me ask you a big question that I didn't even prepare you for. What do you think is your single most valuable contribution to classical liberal understanding in the course of your career? I suppose it's my book Crisis in Leviathan. And I say that not so much because of my own opinion of it as because of the reaction it's received over the years. It's now 24 years old and when most people think about me or hear about me if they know anything at all, that's what they know about and so I think the public has spoken. That's what they think I've contributed. Well, as a matter of fact, don't you think your thesis to some extent has entered into popular discourse even detached from your name to some extent? Well, to some extent I suppose it has. What I find a little amusing about that is that the notion of a ratchet effect, for example, was not something I discovered. Economists had been playing with ratchet effects for a while, but most of the work that was done before my book was narrower in scope. Before we talk about spending ratchets, for example, Peacock and Wiseman wrote a whole book about spending ratchets in British economic history and showed that both world wars had created such effects. So I didn't invent ratchets, but I think what I did was to expand them to show that it's not just spending. Indeed, it's not simply fiscal variables, it's not just spending, taxing, borrowing. More importantly, it's institutional ratchets, legal ratchets, and most important of all, it's ideological ratchets associated with the great national emergency episodes of US history. To my knowledge, I was the first one who had fleshed out the ratchet effect in that way. I still think a lot of people don't understand what I did, particularly economists, because they like to seize on something narrow and quantitative, so they can associate the ratchet with fiscal ratchets, particularly. And also in small slices of time, one of the things that's nice about your book is you integrate things that people usually consider an isolation, for example, the war preparations for World War I and the conduct of the war, the wartime economic planning, and the new deal. Yes. Two totally separate areas, separate things, presumably usually. Crisis in Leviathan is, for the most part, an act of synthesis. That relationship you just mentioned about World War I and the new deal was written about in a great essay by William Luckenberg, who's a left liberal historian of note, and I took the bulk of the evidence for that from Luckenberg. So I did not invent that either, and if I have any regrets about crisis in Leviathan, and I do have a few, one is that what I thought was really somewhat original and a real professional contribution, which was chapter three on how to think about ideology and relate it to political economy, probably has received less attention and less real understanding than any other part of the book. So to me, it's as if, well, yes, I talked about these other things, and some people may think that was an important contribution, but I can't claim any creativity or originality in those regards, and in the one place where I might make such a claim, nobody's paid any attention really. Well, I've heard, you know, you hear this again and again from the great thinkers. You know, what Haslett thought he did was most important is the most ignored thing, and the thing he's most famous for is he thought it was his least significant contribution, so that's hardly unusual, I suppose. I remember when I sent you Nation State and Economy years ago, this was Musa's 1919 book on the SS chapter on war socialism. You had a letter that you returned, I think this is back for the days of email, and you said, I can't believe it. I mean, he seems to have anticipated everything. Well, you know, one lives long enough, he has that experience over and over and over. So many times, and in fact, maybe one of the worst times I had that experience was when I discovered John T. Flynn's book As We Go Marching, which I did not know about at all when I wrote my book, and of course, Flynn had talked about explicitly many of the things I talk about when I discuss World War II, and one simply wishes when he has those experiences that he had read more and that, you know, in my case, I'd taken Murray Rothbard's advice and gone out and read those other 500 books he recommended. Right, right, right. You know, on John T. Flynn, you make an interesting point. I think that book came out during the war. It did. Now, as a historian, and having read, you know, thousands of books, how do you balance out the value of things written like contemporary histories from observations of what's going on right now as compared with, you know, competent historians who write about the same thing decades later? Well, the contemporary accounts have something that can never be recaptured later. That is, the authors were personally engaged in the events or near the events or in the same world as it were as the events they're writing about. So there's a quality of being able to understand something about things like public opinion and difficult to measure variables that only a contemporary can appreciate fully. Later writers have to use their creativity and whatever evidence has survived to arrive at that same kind of sense of what was going on. On the other hand, it's invariably the case that with the passage of time we find out things that were not known at the time and we may also gain a way to understand them that was lacking for contemporaries. So the contemporaries are extremely valuable, obviously. We should always attend to them, particularly when they are the work of intelligent, perceptive, honest writers. But if we had to rely only on history as written by contemporaries as we went through time, we'd be in trouble. These later reconsiderations, revisions, fleshing out are essential for arriving at what you might loosely call a truer understanding of history. One of the things you notice in the midst of war, whether it's a minor war like, I don't know, you call that minor, but our war is on a rack or whatever kind of war is followed in 9-11, is that there's an element of hysteria, an element of sort of cultural hysteria that affects the writer and the way you write. It's difficult to describe, I would think, after it passes. In fact, it's almost difficult to remember. Do you know what I mean? Well, certainly many people who write about wars, especially in the beginning of wars, are caught up in the enthusiasm or high spirits or hysteria, as you say, of the time. Usually that wanes if the war goes on for a while and people take a more hard-headed, clear-eyed view of what is happening. But even then, some people are never able to put what's before their eyes in any kind of larger perspective. And again, that's why later accounts can achieve something that contemporary accounts can't. Well, one of the things that you find that most commonly rears its head during wartime is a kind of a crazed nationalism. And nationalism or that nationalist spirit is something that you have written about very extensively. You've come to some kind of understanding of what it amounts to. Probably you have a more sophisticated understanding than most people. What do you think nationalism consists of and why do you think it's dangerous? Well, I think it consists, in large part at least, of a kind of unspoken incorporation of membership in a national community into one's personal identity. So if you ask people, what do they say? The normal response, particularly if you're in a country, another country, when they say, you know, what are you, you normally would say, I'm an American. And someone else would say, I'm a Frenchman or I'm from Belgium or wherever the person comes from, the immediate way to identify oneself in the modern age is by what kind of national citizenship one holds. And it's a rare person who responds to the question, what are you by saying, I'm a painter or I'm an economist or I'm a citizen of the planet earth. So I think the harm, the danger that is associated with nationalism arises in part because it's a mindless, thoughtless association and yet one that has very powerful claim on people's loyalties. So that when some excitement breaks out, particularly some perceived danger to the nation state, people are inclined everywhere in the modern nation states for at least the past hundred years to rally around the flag, to immediately fall in line. Even people who were hostile to the government previously, one of the great examples of course is World War I when the great German socialist movement just collapsed and fell into line to go forth as cannon fodder. Of course they lived to regret that before long, but that's what they did. They had been talking for decades about how countries were irrelevant and how the workers of the world were all comrades and brothers and yet when war came, all of that talk was shown to be extremely shallow. It hadn't entered into their self-identification in a way that their national identity. You saw the same thing with the 19th century American anarchists, most of whom over throughout their anarchism to defend World War I and then, well, the most obvious example is American conservatives who in peacetime are all against the government. You've seen this many times, right? Well, conservatives in the United States are of course the most nationalistic people of all and many of them will condemn root and branch every department of the government except the Pentagon. When it comes to the Pentagon, it's as if this vast bureaucracy can do no wrong and every government employee and functionary is suspect in their view unless he's got a uniform of the armed forces on in which case he's not just not suspect, but he's viewed as a hero merely by virtue of wearing that costume and it's so blatant that it's ludicrous sometimes. I mean, it's persistent, isn't it? That was his background. Well, one hears lately, unfortunately, at sporting events, at baseball games, at football games, certain interludes of worship for the armed forces. I find it disgusting myself because I like baseball and I don't want my baseball to be spoiled by intrusions of nationalistic fervor and worship of the armed forces. To me, baseball is glorious for being a peaceful activity. We don't have to kill people to find excitement in life. But isn't that the nature of Leviathan, that it tends to sort of penetrate every aspect of society and culture in ways that are unwelcome and leaves nothing untouched, whether it's religion or culture or sports or anything? Well, I think that is its nature and that's why it tends toward totalitarianism. At that point, of course, it has penetrated everything. There's nothing left, not personal identity, not family, not private groups, not any kind of intermediary organization that stands between the naked, solitary citizen and the Leviathan. You know, you are probably one of the most prolific classical liberals, libertarians in our time, maybe in the last century. You've written many books, I don't know how many, 10, 12, 15, something. You added a journal, you've written about so many topics. I think in some ways as powerful as your contribution is with regard to war and power, there's many other things that you've written about. What do you think is an area that you've written about that you don't want to be forgotten about that you wish would be more attention paid to? I would hope that the topic I lectured about this morning, the Food and Drug Administration, might someday arouse many more people because it's an irony of this matter that even though this organization's activities cause incalculable suffering and excess death, premature death, almost everybody in American society gives it the highest marks. They may condemn the IRS, they may condemn any particular government agency you can name for them, but almost no one will condemn the FDA. In previous surveys it's been demonstrated that more than 90% of the people give high marks to the FDA. What that tells us is that they have no real information, no real understanding whatsoever of the agency, what it does and what effects it produces. This is very disturbing. It's as if people can live in a situation in which they are constantly menaced and many of them are literally killed by a government agency and yet at the same time applauded. It's like something from the last page of 1984 where Winston Smith loves Big Brother as it's boot is grinding his face. So I would very much hope that if not my writings, then other people's writings that others have written on the same vein for a long time and that again is a startling disjunction. The people who've seriously studied the FDA, certainly all the economists who've studied it, have almost all come to the same or very similar conclusions about its net harmfulness. And yet these studies, these conclusions, this understanding have not penetrated the general public. And partially for that reason there doesn't seem to be anything holding back its expansion, right? It's very ill constrained. It tends normally to push out the envelope and then whenever there's a crisis generated by the media, often out of a very small germ, it makes major gains in the scope of its authority. So it too has grown in a ratchet like manner and all the great public health tragedies that we can think of like the Thalidomide Affair give rise to new legislation widening the scope of the FDA's powers. There's no exception. Every big crisis of that sort has that effect. So it's as if nothing can make it turn around. The only defeats, if that's the right word, of recent times have to do with the FDA's constant attempt to take over supplements, dietary supplements. And it's been trying for decades basically to abolish them, really, to drive them out of the market and make them unavailable to people. And when it can't get that, it tries something somewhat less but getting rid of some of them. And it's at work right now on that same quest. When it made its most spectacular attempt to do that in the mid-90s, millions, literally millions of people took offense and were mobilized to make calls and to send letters opposing the congressional action and the agency action and they succeeded. It's really the only event I know of comparable to it in the arousal of millions of people opposing a policy proposal. In a way, it's kind of pathetic and tragic, isn't it, that people have to become so politicized and involved politically in order to stop violations on their liberty. And yet, would you say that public opinion and public activism is one of the most important sort of checks on the state, one of the most effective checks on the expansion of Leviathan? It certainly can be a check and at times it is. I wish it were more often a check, but again, it's difficult to mobilize. Large numbers of people and members of Congress in particular don't respond well to ordinary people unless they come forth in an organized, mass way. Otherwise, they're constantly beholden to special interest groups and its politics as usual. Right. And so many of the special interest groups, all the lobbying pressure, really consists of one or the other side of the same thing, expand the government this way versus expand the government that way. Right. Whereas a true anti-government movement that's really grassroots is really a rare thing to see, isn't it? Well, it is very rare and part of the reason is not simply it's difficult to mobilize people, but in this country, there really aren't that many people who have a general opposition attitude toward the government. People take offense at particular government actions or particular policies enough to rouse themselves and to get involved in political action from time to time. But overall, unless there's some crisis like the current one in the economy that disturbs many, many people, in general, people would just say, well, that's like the weather. The politics goes on, government goes on. I may not like what they do, but I can't do anything about it. They don't get involved because they go on living their ordinary private lives where at least some of their actions can have expected effects. Whereas getting involved in politics is normally a matter of just throwing away their time and money and effort. Now those of us who have watched your work over the course of a long period of time have noticed a certain tendency in your own thought to become ever more radical. Would you agree with that? Yes. No doubt. I mean, we're about to republish a book that you had written on the Gilded Age, which is so good. But you mentioned to me that when you wrote that, you were fresh out of graduate school, newly minted PhD and accepted most of the mainstream ideas about collections of data, about your methodological concerns, about engaging in a kind of conventional conversation. Yet, the book has a very strong sort of impulse towards free markets and free enterprise. What way would you say that is the most substantial way you've changed from those days to now? The most important is my understanding of the nature of government. In the beginning of my professional career, I never questioned the desirability of having a nation state and all the other layers of government were infected by in this country. It seemed to me that government was necessary to do the usual things mainstream people claim it is needed to do, to keep order, to define property rights, to protect people's rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, blah, blah, blah. It was only over long periods of time that I first encountered people challenging that view of government. Many more years went by before I began to say, I think that's right, that ultimately I concluded that government is not necessary for anything. We can do everything we want done without the government. That doesn't mean it's going to go away or that I expect it to go away. Indeed, I don't. I wish I could say we're going to drive it away. We're going to crush it, but I don't believe that either. I think it would be good if we did, but I don't foresee at least in my lifetime certainly anybody and certainly not Americans crushing the state. I did eventually come to the point where I could say anarchism is the most desirable moral ideal. It's not going to create a perfect world, but it is. There are no perfect worlds if people are inhabiting them. Given that, the worst thing you could do is give some people all power. Yes. Indeed, in recent years one of the arguments I've offered is something known as the precautionary principle. It was cooked up by environmentalists to justify crazy restraints on freedom in order to allay very remote and unlikely risks. In that application, I'm completely opposed to it, but my application is that government is a dreadfully dangerous institution. It has the capacity, the demonstrated capacity to commit crimes on an enormous scale, including murders by the scores of thousands, by the millions. If we credit RJ Rommel's estimates, governments in the 20th century alone killed, I think by his latest estimate, 262 million of their own citizens. This doesn't count all the people who perished in their wars, but this is simply the number of people who perished as a result of their own government's actions and very often their own government's deliberate actions taken in order to kill them. If you say we need government to keep order or protect life, I think you bear a very heavy burden of proof. It seems extraordinarily unlikely to me, unlikely to the vanishing point, that without states, any mayhem on that scale could possibly have been carried out. I think there are some crimes so vast that only the nation state, with its organization and resources, is capable of committing those crimes. So in my mind, every time you resort to state action to achieve some objective, you're choosing to take a terrible, terrible risk. If there is any kind of private alternative whatsoever, then it ought to be the default position that we use it. And only if it shows itself to be utterly incapable of achieving the desired objective should we even begin to think about the alternative of resorting to the state. Beautiful statement, Dr. Higgs. Thank you so much for all of your past work and we look forward to all your future work and for being with us here today. Thank you, Jeff.