 My name is Jeffrey Tucker and I work for laissez-faire books and I would especially like the other speakers like to thank Hans and Gulchin for inviting me to this wonderful event. Of course the surroundings are spectacular, Josler and I were just talking about the amazing food. We both have a sense that of regret of having to go back to the United States, you know, we thought we lived in a place with wonderful food. Now we know it's all just terrible. I guess, you know, Americans are specialized in the distribution of massive quantities of food to the masses at very cheap prices, but of course it's all deadly. You know, they don't tell you that part. So, it's thrilling to be here. And of course the laissez-faire books were very honored to be the publishers of Hans's new book, The Great Fiction, which is out on the table. So my speech today, like many other speeches, will cover... Can you all hear me well? So my speech will, like many of the other speeches, will chronicle the decline of civilization, so I hope it's nice and uplifting for you. In this case, I will not be talking about the decline of mores or values or anything else, but the very strange way in which the law is being used to deliberately take away from us all the advances that the market has made over the last century, in particular and then going back in time. It's a very strange thing that's happening in the U.S. It doesn't get much attention, so I hope to chronicle it in some detail in these few minutes. Well, I remember too well back in 1989 when socialism fell apart in Eastern Europe and Russia, and there was a great moment for any believer in liberty, and I recall thinking at the time, I can't believe it. Everything I've dedicated my life to so far has already been achieved. Now the whole world will have to embrace freedom completely, now that it's been obviously proven superior to every form of statism. It seemed to me the battle had been won, and I wondered what I would do, actually, with the rest of my life. I rushed to the library several months after the great events and dug up many of the proto-socialist journals of the time, the Marxist journals, the Stalinist journals, to see what they had to say about the failure of socialism. To my astonishment, I didn't rattle them the slightest bit. I was alarmed by the sheer calm of these journals, the sense that nothing had really gone wrong at all. Over time, of course, we've seen vast increases in the size of the state, not just in the US but all over the, and many other parts of the world. So then I began to look through Mises' great book, Socialism, 1922, to try to understand what I had misunderstood. See, up to this time, I had thought that the purpose of socialism was to, the belief was that socialism would enhance human well-being and make us more materially better off than we were before. That it would bring a kind of garden of Eden to the world of wealth and prosperity and equality of distribution, and that humanity would be vastly better off under socialism so they believed. And this is what Mises directly addressed in his 1928 article showing that this was an impossibility, in fact. Every step towards socialism was a step away from prosperity and material wealth. So he conclusively demonstrated that socialism could only lead to the opposite of its intentions. But by 1922, he writes this book, Socialism, he covers other forms of socialism besides the one that believed that socialism could make us more materially better off. And he covers a whole variety of types of socialism, and in particular, I was drawn to the section addressing what he called chelastic socialism, which is a version of what Rahim addressed in his first lecture here, which is a kind of a millenarian theory of mostly religious origins. The chelastic view originally dates from a kind of a Jewish sect that mutated into a Christian sect and mutates into our own time into a secular sect. The view is this, that we once lived in a golden age where everything was perfectly balanced and beautiful in every conceivable way. Man was united with God, man was united with nature, all human beings were equal. Whatever your view of the golden age is, this is what once existed at some point in the past, and then some corruption into the world to cause this golden age to turn into the present misery. So it's the job of the chelastic view of the world to expunge from the world the evil so that we can restore the golden age. And this turns up in many different forms. We saw it throughout Christian history with Murray Rothbard's very well and hilariously in his history of economic thought. And Mises saw it even in the 1920s. He saw that there was a view of socialism that had nothing to do with enhancing material well-being of humanity, like the old socialist views, but rather had this much more mystical view that we could expunge from the world some source of evil and restore some golden age of whatever it may be. And this is the type of socialism, and I didn't understand this at the time, that had come to dominate socialist thinking in the United States. It was no longer about making us more prosperous. It was about bringing about some kind of utopian view through some kind of change in the world that the socialists themselves would enact. And Murray Rothbard in his pamphlet on equality and primitivism in the division of labor likes to identify John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Affluent Society from the 1950s as the beginning of this type of chelastic socialism in the U.S. where Galbraith observes that the market had made the world vastly more prosperous than we ever imagined. But he said the affluence alone is enough. In fact, affluence is the problem because the expanse of private wealth has come at the expense of the public sector. The public sector is getting increasingly impoverished. And our human well-being really should be defined not by how much money you have in the bank, but by how much money the government that's really new has and how many resources it has at its disposal, and that's the real source of wealth. So we needed high taxes and high regulations and a vast transfer of wealth from the private economy to the government in order to achieve this kind of vision. It's kind of an early view of this chelastic position that we need to restore a golden age where the government was big and ruling everybody. His view of the golden age was the New Deal or something like that. Well, there's another book that came out in 1962 by Rachel Carson called The Silent Spring. And maybe you know something about it or you've heard something about it. Ironically, the same year that Man Economy State comes out. So Rachel Carson comes out with this book, The Silent Spring. Last week I wrote a kind of bitter criticism of the book and I swear to you that I've received more email about that column than anything I've ever written from the partisans of Rachel Carson. It turns out she is not just a writer who wrote a book 50 years ago. She is a modern saint. Not just a saint. She's like the mother of God or something, I mean the way people perceive her. I mean she's the founder of the environmental movement, I guess many people believe. Her book was a gigantic bestseller at the time. It was an example for the American left, a rare example where a book, one book, completely changes the public culture and has this gigantic effect on law itself. So it was a kind of a model for them. Rachel Carson herself was not really an academic. She was just a worker for the government, actually, the Fish and Wildlife Service or something like that. But for some reason her book of 1962 really took off like no book in the post war period had up to that point and ended up causing a gigantic shift in American public policy. Most famously her book ended up in banning DDT, which was the cool chemical that caused us to vanquish many evil insects from the world like mosquitoes' bed bugs. This was a great uptick in life as far as I'm concerned. Well her book ended up in banning DDT and we see the effects all around us, not just in the United States but around the world. More importantly, it turns out her book had served as the purpose of modeling a kind of a new socialistic view and I want to just read a few passages from her because she goes way beyond Galbraith. It's said to be a book of science that documents how chemicals are killing birds. So the one day that spring will come and we'll wait for the birds to hear and there will be no birds outside of our windows and this will be a result of evil chemical companies spraying to get rid of insects and they inadvertently kill birds and so we have a silent spring. This is the vision of the world that she creates. It's like the ultimate nightmare for the suburban housewife or something. No longer will the hummingbirds dance outside the window, outside the breakfast room and this is all because of chemicals. So her book raises this specter that chemicals are taking its way from the golden age. But more importantly than a book of science and her science has been debunked through many, many books in the meantime and there have been dozens of books that have come out attacking her book Silent Spring and its scientific specifics. More importantly, it really is a book of philosophy. Its advances, exactly what Mises called the chelastic view of the world. So I just want to read you the opening of her book, it's a very strange thing. Something you could only believe in 1962 really, where there's no mosquitoes around you and every life seems happy and everything's wonderful and you can now have washing machines, all this technology, everybody's bored out of their minds and they decide to destroy the world. So this is what she says, the history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. Okay, I mean, right, okay, we can get that, we can get that. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. That's a little bit suspect, right? It's been molded, the environment is molded, okay. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect in which life actually modifies its surroundings has been relatively slight. So to the extent that you and I have done anything to change the environment, that's a relatively small period of time. Only within the moment of the time, only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species, man, acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. Only in the 20th century has man altered his environment to his own benefit. According to her, that's right. Only in the 20th century. So, I mean, what did the 20th century give us, really? I mean, well, a few things like we got internal combustion in the car and like running hot, running water in every household and like the air conditioning and the heating and flight and other cool things like that. But this, to her, all these things represent the first time in the history of the world that man ever presumed the right to alter nature to his own benefit. And this, she says, is what we have to stop, beginning with chemicals, chemicals. That's the great evil. So that's the opening of the book and I'll read you the closing of the book. The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born... So if you like plant to plant or whatever, out in a pot, that's like arrogant, extremely arrogant of you to think you can just like rip up a plant and put it up and look at it. It's a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. What arrogance? The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from the stone age of science. This is, you know, the science of killing the hell out of bugs, okay, this is evil. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons and that in turning them against the insects, it has turned them against the earth. So she recommends, she says, only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves, can we hope to achieve what she calls a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves. So we have to kind of sit down with the bed bugs and with killer mosquitoes that are killing millions of people around the world. We have to have like a negotiated settlement or something. This is her view of the... This is her view. Of course, she's a moderate by any standard of today. You can go out into the libraries and pick up practically any book on sustainability and find that people have far more extreme views now. It's not just the last hundred years that are corrupt, but it's like the last, you know, couple hundred years. Really, everything's been going wrong since the industrial revolution. And the further back historians have dated the industrial revolution, the more radical the achelastic socialists of our time date the beginning of the end and date the golden age. So, you know, it's nothing to come across thinkers now in the environmental movement who tell you that everything began to go wrong, you know, like something like five hundred years ago, or maybe it was a thousand years ago, or maybe it was with all the way the ancient world. And so we need to reverse all these things using the power of the state. And this view of socialism, you know, the problem from the socialist point of view is that insofar as you allow man to be free, he is going to adapt his environment to his own benefit. The goals of this movement is by enhancing, transferring the power from you and me to a state to control us. And this is essentially what we've seen playing itself out in the whole post-war period of American economic regulation. I mean, a systematic issue by issue, slow going unraveling of all the achievements that we have achieved in the twentieth century. And it's been going slowly and systematically through a whole series of products and you have to keep your eyes open to out for this because otherwise you'll miss it. It's unbelievable the expanse of the central planning that's taking place in America right now that's systematically unrolling all the advances of the twentieth century, including, you know, every form of indoor plumbing and internal combustion. And you name the advance of the twentieth century, you'll see a attack on it in a regulatory form. So I make part of my, what I like to do is to investigate these things and find the regulatory source of the problem. So I've made a list here and I don't know how many of these things I can get through, but I want to talk about some of them. Let me just start at the top here. For one thing, in the 1970s, and this continues all the way up to now, there's been a systematic attempt to take all phosphates out of detergent. Now phosphates essentially are the things that make things clean. Okay, it's not soap, it's stuff that takes the soap out and whatever the soap gets out of stuff like dirt and pulls them out of your clothes or off your dishes and results in clean stuff. And basically that's what phosphates do. But these have been banned largely in detergents in the United States, systematically a little bit at a time. The way that most of this legislation works is that like Congress passes something, it's sneaked into some big piece of legislation. It's not like an immediate ban, it's like five years out or ten years out. It's like goals for industry and industry immediately gets on board with these things. There's a slogan in American capitalism called new and improved. So under the new legislation, nothing's ever new and improved is always new and worse than it used to be. So like almost all products are worse now than they were a few decades ago. Industry doesn't like to talk about it because they don't want to advertise to consumers that actually the soap is kind of crappy compared to our most recent release a few years ago because that's not good for marketing. So nobody wants to tell the truth about what's happening here. The phosphates were taken entirely out of dishwashing soap. In the late 1970s, not dishwashing soap, it was soap for clothes. Any soap that you use for washing clothes was taken out of there, resulting in far dirtier laundry than it used to have in the past. And it's almost impossible to find, in fact you can't find any laundry soap anymore in the US that has phosphates in it. And the same thing has happened to dishwashing soap more recently, only within the last ten years. It's a very interesting thing to me because many American households, millions of American households discovered that their dishes were dirty when they were coming out of their dishwashers, sometime in the last five years. So many people went and replaced their dishwashers to get better dishes. Only to discover the dishwashers they bought were actually worse than the previous ones because they had to be energy efficient. And this combines with several other effects I'll talk about here. Now there's a hack for this. There's a way to get around it. You can actually buy phosphates and add them, but those are increasingly under attack too. Air conditioners are another one. Now this is obviously, Doug French has written the mighty treatise on the glories of the air conditioners. But back in the 1970s, we saw the first attacks on CFCs that, you know, on Freon that makes the air conditioner work in the US. So industry replaced it with a different version of CFC. Well, that was banned too. And just within the last four years, basically because of international treaties, we've had a new form of coolant introduced that only works on something like 5% of air conditioners. 95% of air conditioners run the old form of coolant. So when you're free on it and your air conditioner runs out and you call the repairman, he will tell you that unfortunately, yeah, it will cost you about $1,200 to replace the coolant in your air conditioner with that old form of coolant because it's severely rationed right now, severely rationed. So your best bet really is to buy this new kind of air conditioner. They use this new form of coolant that's much cheaper. So you should spend about $2,000 doing that. And that'll save you money over the long run. And most American households are bamboozled into doing this because they don't know any better. There's a gigantic black market right now for a CFC. There was a guy arrested and put in jail the other day for having imported tons of it from China where it's made very, very cheaply. And it can be sold without any problem in Mexico. And I'm not sure about Canada actually, but in most places of the world, you can use this stuff in the United States. So there's a gigantic black market that's developed for the thing. I have to raise the subject of toilets because one of the things you'll discover when you come to the United States is that your toilet doesn't work. Sorry to report this to you, but it's just true. It doesn't work. And the reason is that they lowered the amount of water that can go into that could be held in the tank. There used to be something like six gallons or more so you could flush down like a ham or something. But now, it's like nothing flushes anymore. You have to flush like 20 times and it's extremely dirty. I mean, what do you want to call civilization because it begins with indoor plumbing. That's why I'm concerned. This is a disaster. Hot water heaters, you can no longer get hot water. Like the showers in this hotel, you turn it to hot, it's hot. Great. The US, all the hot water heaters are shipped so that they can only get as hot as 120 degrees. If you ask your plumber to hack it, he's forbidden by law from changing it, forbidden. So you have to do it yourself. You have to get a screwdriver and get it out. Unbelievable. The dishwasher itself, an amazing thing. Just within the last year, new regulations are mandating that new dishwashers, they don't work anyway because the detergent is so crappy. But now they have to be reduced from using 6.5 gallons in the course of the load to using five gallons. Only five gallons. So you've got cold water washing dishes with crappy soap. Using only a mere five gallons of water in the course of the load. And everything comes out dirty. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna hand wash. This is what they're driving us back to. Hand washing. And there was a testimony about this in a regulatory hearing the other day where a woman who's a real serious dishwasher expert explained them, do you understand what this regulation would do? Do you understand this is gonna drive the American bourgeoisie away entirely from dishwashers? To hand washing their own dishes? And the answer was yes, of course. We do understand that. That is exactly what they're intending to do. Get rid of them completely. When these appliances were first introduced in the 1940s, there's a common phrase in American culture. Women proclaimed the liberation from drudgery. That's what the washing machine did. That's what the dishwasher did. These are glorious inventions. So much for liberation from drudgery. Drudgery is going to be back. Refrigerators with ice makers. When I was a kid, you had to attack the freezer like every few months. They would build up this ice ring around the freezer. You had to unthought out and chip it out and it'd fall everywhere. Now the innovations are that these freezers don't freeze up anymore. And also you can get water and ice out of the front door. It's fabulous stuff. The physical capital of stuff. Capitalism gives us cooler, greater things every single day. Well it turns out this uses a little bit more energy than the old machines. And the government doesn't like that. So now the energy controls are so severe on the new forms of freezers and refrigerators that they're having to eliminate some of these features like ice makers or to the extent that they use them. The energy used in the ice maker has to come from the functionality of the refrigerator itself. So now in the old days people would buy a refrigerator in the 1930s and use it until the late 1950s or something like that or buy one in 1960 and use it until the mid-1980s. Now a refrigerator is gonna last three to five years at most because it burns up. So you end up spending ever more money. The things are being depreciated by law. Drain on cloggers. Lie is no longer legal in the US. If you get a clogged drain, forget it. And you are going to get a clogged drain because your water pressure is by law extremely low. And of course the water's not hot. And of course your toilet doesn't work. So everything's gonna be clogged but you try to unclog the clog. Lie is banned. That's a strange one though. It wasn't done for environmental reasons. It was done in the name of the war on drugs. I don't understand the relationship between lie and the war on drugs but there you go. Light bulbs, incandescent bulbs are under fire. Even now when you go to the Big Back's hardware stores in the US it is hard to find light bulbs. Mostly what they have are something else. These light oriented things. I mean you're called fluorescence. But if you have a room full of fluorescent bulbs you definitely feels like you're being tortured. It's terrible. So you're getting rid of incandescent bulbs. Congress keeps putting off the final regulation like one month at a time. Just barely intervening right before the regulations kick in. So lots of Americans are right now hoarding light bulbs like as never before for fear of this. Makeup is another one that's under fire. The regulations are so severe that American women will report to you very quickly that makeup doesn't work anything well as well as it did a decade ago. Mentioned gasoline briefly. I don't know if you know this, but gasoline in America is increasingly made out of corn syrup. So America has the thing about corn. We love corn. We love our corn growers and things. So Congress decided that we should make practically everything out of corn really. Everything should be made out of corn. But especially gas. So now there's like 10% of your gas is made up of corn. And 40% of the American corn crop is not going to feed the poor. It's going to be burned up in our gas tanks. And unfortunately this stuff is really, really evil. It's called ethanol. And it gunks up your gas, or gunks up your engine, which causes it not to work very well. And also you can't store it. So for example, if you have a can of gasoline that you're keeping over the course of a season for fear that maybe during hurricane seasons, a tree is going to come and fall on your back porch or something. So you want to put the gasoline into your, what's it called? Chainsaw. You pour the gasoline in there. It doesn't work because the gasoline separates the corn and the real gas, you know, separate over time and wrecking the whole thing. So you're stuck. But since I brought up gas cans, this is amazing. So I ran a gas one day in Opelika about six months ago. And because my gas gauge stopped working, probably because of the ethanol, I don't know. But I called up a guy, said he can bring me some gas. And so he shows up from the gas station, and he starts to pour gas in my gas tank. He goes, I don't know what the hell's going on with these gas cans these days. They just don't work like they used to. Of course, my ears are very sensitive to this, right? Oh really, what's happened? He goes, well, I don't know. He said, they don't put little plugs on the end anymore, so you can get a good circulation of the gasoline so it can go in quickly. It's all this kind of solid state enclosed thing. So the gas kind of gulps out and big belches, you know, blah, blah, like that. So it takes forever to fill the thing up. He said, I've hacked some gasoline cans back at the station, but this is the new kind that doesn't allow any kind of air filter to make the can work properly. So I said, well, that's very interesting. Do you think the government has anything to do with that? And he literally said, everything is wrong with the world the government did. That's what the guy in Alabama said. So sure enough, I got back quickly. It took one search only to find that within the last 12 months, new regulations had regulated the gas cans so that now they don't work anymore. They don't actually pour gasoline out of them. You have to actually drill holes in them and hack them. And it turns out YouTube is filled with videos on how to hack your gas cans in order to make them work properly. And on eBay, the price of the old gas cans is soaring now. This is what's happening. But let me finally get to the question of insecticides because this is the one that Miss Rachel, St. Rachel Carson is most responsible for having banned any development in insecticides in the U.S. And increasingly, you can't get anything that smells like insecticide at the stores anymore. You certainly can't get DDT. And the consequence of this is that the U.S. is undergoing right now a bed bug epidemic of epic proportions. Bed bugs first revisited the U.S. about three years ago. And it was kind of a big news event. CNN covered it, oh look, isn't that interesting? We've got bed bugs, isn't that strange? And oh, Google employees had to flee for their lives out of their headquarters because the place is infested with bed bugs. And then suddenly the news shut down. Well, thank God somebody started a bed bug registry because you could look at a map of the U.S. and see where they're infesting. They're infesting the whole country. There are something like 200 reports a day appearing on the bed bug registry and it's getting worse by the day. I don't know that I need to go into the details of what a bed bug does. I mean, this is an old medieval sort of animal that used to eat people all the time. That you expect to have gone entirely in the developed world and the civilized world. They have not gone, they've come back. They crawl out of your mattress. They lie dormant for up to a year. They crawl out of your mattress in the middle of the night and they first bite your back in a way that takes away that sense of feeling so that you don't know that they're really there. And then they feast on you the entire night. And then the morning comes and they sense that you've woken up and they all crawl back inside the mattress. And you go, this is what bed bugs do. And you know what? When they show up, they're sort of small and black and when they leave, they're large and red. That's what bed bugs do. This is Rachel Carson's fault. Not just because of the banning of DDT but because of the regulations that prevent any innovations whatsoever. I had a lot of mail where people wrote me. I said, oh, you can't use DDT on bed bugs anymore. If it doesn't work, nobody will use it. No, it's still gotta be bad. So I'd like to try it anyway. I'd like to try a little DDT. Just to make sure. In any case, we don't have any innovation in insecticides anymore. I've said before that the only thing on this planet that's killed more people than governments are insects. And it's extremely dangerous to unleash these things in the world that's exactly what these kind of regulations have done. But let me end on a hopeful note here. Just like our friend who is a smuggler of freon from China and people who hack their gas cans and people who drill holes in their shower heads so you can get a decent shower and people who open up their hot water heaters to crank up the temperature gauge and people who buy phosphates from sketchy, phosphate black market companies and add them to the dishwashers. All these kinds of activities represent a kind of revolt against the state in small but important ways. A very popular show on television in the United States is called Breaking Bad. And it's a story of a high school chemistry teacher who discovers he's got lung cancer and he will die in 18 months and he wants to leave his family better off than they are because he's got two kids, everybody's got one kid and another kid on the way. He decides to go into the production of methamphetamine and sell it. And he's a very good methamphetamine cook. Now you're thinking this is a very bad man, right? Watch the show, you will cheer for him episode after episode after episode. However implausible that sounds. I'm only in now third season, he's making about $6,000 a day, he's doing pretty well for himself, you know? Breaking Bad is very interesting. It occurs in the first episode where he first begins to cook methamphetamine and a kind of a local drug dealer comes up to him and says, you know, what's his name, do you remember his name? Mr. White. Mr. White. Mr. White, when did you start breaking bad? Right, breaking bad. That's sort of doing things illegal in order to survive and preserve yourself. Breaking bad is the new theme of American life. You have to break bad. As Stefan Cancelo said, you are a criminal regardless. No matter what you do, you are breaking a law. You have to find ways around it. And fortunately, this is happening. I urge you all to have a look at this book by Robert Neuarth called Stealth of Nations, where he documents something like two thirds of the workers in the world that are working in the informal sector. They're in full-scale revolt against the state's attempt to control and regiment our economic lives. They're going outside the law. This, my friends, I'm afraid, is the only path to freedom left to us. In fact, I think it's the best one. We can and must build our own liberties, our own world of liberty, and our times and our lives, even if it means breaking bad. And I'm afraid that the preservation of civilization itself absolutely requires this. Thank you very much.