 He's the president of Institute for Humane Studies, the editor of Literature for Liberty. He's on the editorial board of the Journal for Libertarian Studies. Author of Essays in New History of the Leviathan and Cold War Critics, editor of Watershed of Empire. He will be addressing foreign policy from a libertarian perspective tonight. Please welcome with me Leonard Ligio. Having been speaking recently from many podiums, I had discovered that lecture podium design in America has fallen way behind what I hope is the advanced state and the rest of the world. This is the best of all because it's flat. Most of the podiums have only inclines and my water always falls off of the thing. I doubt if anyone who's ever designed a lecture podium ever had given a lecture. So we have here an advanced Victorian lecture podium. Before I begin my talk, I would like to introduce to you two visitors to New York, two libertarians from Norway, Mr. and Mrs. Hans Christian Johnson. I had recently had the opportunity to address the libertarian group in Christian sand Norway where the Johnsons come from and on the SAS flight into Christian sand, the stewardess announced that as we approached the city, no picture taking was to be permitted because this was a very important NATO base and immediately the Oriental gentleman behind me took 400 pictures. I don't know, I imagined he was a North Korean plant of the KGB or something, doubtless he was a Japanese, he didn't understand any Western language and had the most advanced film processing system and just took more pictures than I could imagine anyone taking. So that may have some relevance to our topic this evening. I very much enjoy the opportunity of speaking to you in New York and especially in the vicinity of NYU. This afternoon I had the pleasure of being interviewed by a medical technician who was busy trying to find the vein in my arm to take some blood and in the process as usual was engaged in important colloquy and complained about how could I possibly have left New York and gone to some places far and as California. When she leaves New York, she can't stand any place she goes to and how New York is so wonderful and I may have grimaced slightly either at the thought or the search for my vein and at that point she said, well of course we have muggers here too but at least they're New York muggers. You don't be mind mugged by your fellow citizens I felt she had probably read Aristotle on the polis and how our fellow citizens are something that we cherish very much. Yesterday I came from Rochester by a circuitous route due to the inclement weather all the planes to New York were canceled and I finally was able to become the last passenger on a flight to Philadelphia which made me feel like one of the characters in the movie The Last Train out of Mombasa and I arrived in Philadelphia and I was too late to catch the 134 train except that the 134 train was late so I did catch it so I had the good fortune of having government Amtrak at my service. Last evening I decided to reconnoitre the World Trade Center and have dinner down near Trinity Church and unfortunately I couldn't see the top of the trade center the fog had created a condition of non-visibility but I then decided to when I was returning home to use the subway and found that the subway entrances down there are absolutely beautiful they're all made of marble they're all Chase, Manhattan, this and Marine Middle and that and all of that sort of thing the only trouble is they're all closed with grates you can't get into the subway in the evening from there and I finally had to take a cab to Grand Central Station which was the only subway stop I knew or understood so the the great system that Mayor Koch has been proclaiming on the television in his campaign may be a little confusing to those of us who are not really denizens of the city I always lived on the far reaches of the city much nearer to the outer border than to the center of town and so that exploring down here and visiting NYU when Mises gave his seminar and having the pleasure of attending his seminar which was held at six Washington Square North in the Gallatin House was a great adventure and it is always a pleasure to visit down here and attend programs near where Mises conducted some of his really greatest educational activities his great seminar at NYU I think perhaps is much more important and will have much longer impact than the one he had in Vienna now the issue of foreign policy for Libertarians is one that for some reason has appeared to be a problem the reason that that has been the case is that not that there's any problem with Libertarian views on foreign policy it's the problem is with the Libertarians we have the situation where most Libertarians are very unknowledgeable about their own history or about the history of their ideas they have sort of stumbled onto these ideas they embrace them very fully because they're obviously right but they don't have any knowledge of the background of how these ideas have come into fruition and this evening I'd like to relate the Libertarian ideas and how they came into fruition to the question of foreign policy if we date the beginning of a modern Libertarian movement to its roots we would take it back to the 17th century the 17th century when the American colonies were founded was also the century that experienced a huge increase in political analysis an increase in scientific analysis it's the century of the scientific revolution and Libertarianism is one of the fruits of the scientific revolution because the people such as John Locke who were very much involved in the scientific revolution were developing the ideas that are direct for bearers and one of the things that emerged for the people of that period was to see the role of foreign policy and the role of war in the development of the state John Locke published his essays two essays on government in 1691 after the declaration of the Bill of Rights the English system of rights was established in the revolution of 1688-89 and as a result Locke's ideas which he had dead not published before because people like Algernon Sidney and others had been executed for very similar ideas a very few years before so this political freedom developed but it developed simultaneously with the British government's involvement in a major war and actually a major series of wars and since the government's involvement in the wars of the 1690s and 1700s was not very popular the government had to find ways of carrying out the war and what they did was to establish a substitute for direct taxation that is the taxpayers who were very well represented in parliament refused to be the bearers of the course of the war and so the government in order to carry out the war had to develop a new system, an innovative system and so we have what is known as the financial public finance revolution the fiscal revolution because the government developed something very very new known as the national debt that is postpone the collection of the taxes over a long period of time by borrowing the money now and collecting taxes later over many years to pay it off and in order to guarantee the national debt to guarantee people who would lend money to the government for it they set up another very very new institution that is to say the central bank and so we have the national debt and the central bank established as a mechanism to make a adventurous foreign policy palatable to the public so very early in the development of libertarian ideas the fact that war is the health of the state that war permits the state to get away with things that are not possible under ordinary circumstances made a very very big impression on early libertarian thinkers since this war dragged on for a long period of time even that national debt and that central bank the Bank of England was insufficient to fund the war and so the government came up with an additional source of funding and that was a monopoly company known as the South Sea Company that is a company, a group of investors was willing to give the government a huge chunk of money and guarantee the payment of future debts in return for a wonderful privilege that is to trade in the South Seas otherwise known as the Pacific it was not really a very good bargain but in this period of rather speculative activities in which one company was set up with the name a company to invest in a project which we will not reveal and lots of people bought into that one too they were forerunners of current investors in US government securities today the South Sea Company therefore not having much financial base not even comparable to the Bank of England began issuing a great deal of its own paper with the result that you had a runaway speculation and inflation in England and a collapse the so-called collapse of the South Sea bubble which had many many ramifications including laws against incorporation in England on the technical level but which brought about a whole new view of political affairs a new group of politicians came in who reorganized the finances who recognized that if you corrupt the money the rest of society is corrupted and therefore a sound pound was essential for the stability of England and for its long range development and so you have the parliament turning over power to a group who otherwise the parliament wouldn't turn power over to who immediately put to work to reestablish the value of the pound by getting rid of depreciated money and by committing itself to a long term process of reduction of taxes year after year the taxes were reduced so that from the wartime highs they were much much lower and this was extremely important because it was this low taxation that permitted the capital accumulation that was invested in the industrial revolution that could not have been an industrial revolution if as a consequence of the bursting of the South Sea bubble the English government had not pursued an extremely low tax policy the other countries of Europe did not follow a low tax policy and as a consequence they did not have the ability to take advantage of the industrial development that took place in fact many other countries had more advanced industrial and scientific development than England but they didn't have the capital accumulation to take advantage of it only England had this long term low tax policy now the reason the other countries didn't is that they continued to pursue an active foreign policy and continued therefore to have high taxation and big military budgets the English government realized that if it was going to have the positive effects of a low tax budget the only way it could have low taxes was not to have a large military budget and so the English government pursued a conscious policy of detente of avoiding conflicts with other countries of not meddling in other countries affairs here we see the influence of ideas that the political leaders were influenced on the one hand by ideas from people like John Locke but also by the reality that if they wanted a sound economy they had to have low taxes and if they wanted low taxes they had to drastically reduce the military budget unfortunately some members of the public and political leaders did not understand this process and eventually replaced these political leaders with a new generation who immediately embarked on another 25 years of warfare and this 25 years of warfare was extremely valuable to England England won almost every battle they conquered India they conquered Canada they conquered Florida they captured Manila and Havana and parts of West Africa it was a immense victory it had a price that is the biggest national debt in the history of any country so England came out of these wars with a massive national debt in the 1760s and of course had to raise taxes to pay for it and of course the American colonies were one place that they wanted to impose taxes because under that previous regime that regime of laissez-faire in which low taxation and non-enforcement of regulations was the rule the Americans benefited from that that was the period of so-called salutary neglect the Americans were neglected by their government in England the English government paid no attention to the Americans with the result that America blossomed this was the period of the greatest growth in the colonial period huge numbers of immigrants came to America from Europe farms were developed industries were developed and now the British government decided to shift and to say let's tax these people and we know the consequence of that the consequence was the American Revolution and the Americans knew the consequence of that they understood that they had been driven to revolution by the costs of war and the costs of an adventurous foreign policy further a number of Englishmen recognized that a number of Englishmen recognized that this return to the mercantilist system and mercantilism is the economic system created to maintain and support the national security state Englishmen began to recognize that this was not a good policy the revolt of the American colonies the opposition to the Stamp Act the opposition to the Townsend duties the vast amount of healthy smuggling that went on in the United States the American colonists were the premier smugglers of the world they were they had excellent teachers since half of the population of England was engaged in smuggling at this time so the Americans apple did not fall far from the tree all of a sudden the government started cracking down on this freedom of trade tried to in order to be able to tax what had previously been left alone Englishmen watch this in the seventeen sixties and seventeen seventies and one in particular Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations to describe what was wrong with what the British government was doing that this kind of policy this mercantilist system could only have the effect of driving the colonists into revolt and impoverishing the British people and so you have as a result the wealth of nations making an incredible impact on america as well as on england and the concepts in the wealth of nations would drawn from this experience that occurred in the eighteenth century examination of the period of low taxation and the consequence vast accumulation of capital which then was available to fuel the industrial revolution the fact that the american colonies who are quite happy to be associated with england so long as england never tax them and therefore according to adam smith were great supports for england in other words america gave the england additional military security to the extent that it wasn't taxed and to the extent it did not provide military support the economic strength of america aligned with the economic strength of england adam smith showed was itself a great defensive approach to military affairs and that this was being destroyed by the stupidity of taxing the colonists on the ground that they should support military activity in fact before the seventeen sixties that is during the whole hundred and fifty years in which the french were as were equal to the english in north america when the spanish were in florida there were no permanent british troops that were stationed in the united states it was only when there was no apparent foreign threat that the british government established troops in american cities and insisted that americans pay for the troops and the americans drew the conclusion that troops are used more to collect taxes from themselves than to defend them from any foreign military forces are more a backup for the fiscal system than they are for supposed foreign dangers as a result of this the founding fathers drew a very very strong conclusion that the united states would be very different than the england from which they revolted but very alike the early eighteenth century system which de-emphasized foreign policy pursued detente kept a very limited military power and therefore a very low taxation system there are a whole series of ideas and actions in the eighteenth century that lead to washington's farewell address the consequences of the british policies were written very very strongly in the minds of the founding fathers whether the usurpers of the philadelphia convention in seventeen eighty seven the patriots the so-called anti-federalists although they differed much on domestic policy therefore that is to say they differed whether there should be a real government or whether americans should be free although there was this difference they didn't differ fundamentally on foreign policy because they agreed there should be no foreign policy that was a given in their minds and therefore washington delivered the farewell address it was something around which most american political leaders rallied because it was the basis on which the whole american revolution and the whole constitutional process had been based now if we examine the century that followed washington's farewell address we find that to be for the most part a century of no wars or very limited wars in fact the only great important war of the nineteenth century was the american blood bloodbath of the civil war the usurpers of seventeen eighty seven got the dividends of their constitution in the civil war and the immense cost and retardation of american development that the civil war represented one of the great problems with the civil war was by creating this retardation it put american industry in such a poor position that you had an immediate demand for protective tariffs before the civil war majority of americans were very clearly recognized that free trade personal freedom were the same thing after the civil war because of the economic retardation that occurred you have a much larger although not a majority in numbers constituency for protection because american industry couldn't compete with european industry european industry had had the advantage of not having a major war in the nineteenth century and therefore it had the advantage of much more capital investment and much more innovation and technological development but pre-civil war america the countries of europe all benefited from this century of peace by not having to have large military establishments not wasting money on military budgets and therefore being able to have increasingly lower taxation rates and increasingly lower taxation rates meant increasingly increased capital accumulation and investment so that that great miracle of industrialization that occurred in the nineteenth century was a direct fruit of this low budget low military spending policy and most of the great libertarian thinkers of the nineteenth century recognized that and spoke to that whether thorough or emerson or william graham sumner they were very very much aware of the connection between war and the state and peace and freedom the most obvious analyst of this was herbert spencer who wrote very very detailed uh... analysis of the relationship of war and barbarism war and the state peace and the development of liberty and a free society and it was no accident the great shift from this concept of peace among political leaders in the public could occur only after they had been a great shift away from classical liberalism so long as classical liberalism was dominant in politics you had at least a good sense of politicians to not try to diminish industrial development by introducing increased military spending but after the turn of the century when the twentieth century emerged you find a vast diminishing of classical liberal ideas classical liberalism is put aside and as classical liberalism is put aside the idea of increased military spending new weapons development comes directly to the fore some people in the nineteen sixties thought there was some uh... special unique connection between johnson's development of the great society and johnson's involvement in vietnam and the consequent huge defense budgets that we've had since then if we remember that in the mid nineteen sixties johnson was worried lest he have a budget over one hundred billion dollars and we know today what how insignificant a hundred billion dollar budget is so that in less than fifteen years we've had a revolution in thinking but this was not unique the great society and military budgets going together was quite much prefigured in the early twentieth century the english under Lloyd george's direction as chancellor of the x checker introduced simultaneously a whole new set of welfare measures a new set of military spending and in fact military spending in europe at the beginning of the twentieth century was entered was the cause was the base on which welfare was introduced on the ground that since we needed military spending and military manpower we needed the welfare state to make sure we had healthy soldiers and the welfare state to make sure we had healthy mothers of future soldiers that malnutrition at the age ten mean defeat on the battlefield fifteen years later or thirty years later or fifty years later and as a result the great society and if you remember defense secretary macinamara said that the only real reason why we needed a huge increase in uh... defense personnel was that since everyone knew the public schools had failed the defense department would teach reading and writing to the conscripts we've learned over a long period of time that bad ideas are hard to kill and the same bad ideas look good for every new generation now the consequence of these bad ideas at the beginning of the twentieth century was that great suicidal civil war of capitalism the first world war first world war destroyed the immense accumulation of the nineteenth century the youth immense capital accumulation the immense investments in industry the world was very very different before and after world war one before world war one classical liberalism still had a chance of winning people's minds after world war one there was no chance because world war one had so destroyed the institutions of classical liberalism had so impoverished people people would not return to those ideas now the united states unfortunately did not play a useful role in that situation the united states under president wilson that is to say the president decided that the united states would play a beneficent role in world affairs uh... the beneficent role was at a point when european countries after almost two and a half years of war was so exhausted so completely debilitated by the war that they really could not continue that they were at the point when they were forced to enter into explorations of a negotiated peace a negotiated peace which at least would have somewhat stabilized conditions at that point the united states entered the war and prolonged it for another almost two years and those two years made an immense difference to the world if peace had been made after two and a half years they would not have been a russian revolution the czarist government had suffered immense losses czarist government emphasized massive use of manpower and minimal use of weaponry uh... quite often their armies only the first two rows had rifles and then as those got killed the next people picked them up used them until they got killed czarist armies suffered perhaps ninety percent casualties as you might imagine the people in russia were tired of the war and the czar had the choice of making peace and keeping control or not making peace and suffering consequences the united states movement to enter the war meant that the czarist government was pressured to stay in the war it did and suffered an overthrow so you have the february revolution in which the czarist government was overthrown and replaced by the provisional government made up of various left-wing groups other than the communists and the american government then devoted an immense amount of its effort to keep russia in the war on the ground that if russia left the war it would be non-democratic the only way you could show wilson that you were democratic was to engage in war and so as george kennan has so completely detailed in his book on russia leave two book volume book on russia and leaving of the war the american government constantly pressured the russian provisional government to stay in the war and so the russian provisional government launched offensive after offensive which were obliterated by the germans and only one political party in russia continued to advocate pulling out of the war only the bolshevik stood for withdrawal from the war and so only the bolsheviks gain a huge popular support from that position so wilson's benevolence created the conditions for the russian revolution he then followed that sending american troops to russia along with japanese and british troops to try and put down the russian revolution the russian public again seeing foreign invaders rally to the only government they had which happened to be the bolsheviks how much they hated the bolsheviks was put aside temporarily and gave the bolsheviks plenty of opportunity to consolidate their power to eliminate opposition at home behind the popular support against outside intervention and when the war ended the objective that president wilson had desired that is the overthrow of the german empire and the austral hungarian empire and their replacement with new democratic governments of course up until nineteen fourteen many people in america viewed the so-called german empire as the most democratic country after the united states it had the largest popularly elected socialist party in the uh... democracy operated quite well and americans all thought so until the president began or george creel and the propaganda arm of the government began to teach them that uh... the germans uh... sport was to bounce little babies on bennett's consequence of the war was the overthrow of these two very well-founded political organizations and their replacement with extremely weak governments as george kennan has written in his book on american foreign policy if decades later america could do one thing in europe the one thing it would do would be to try to recreate the austral hungarian monarchy because it was the only thing that maintained stability in central europe and that without that balance russia would have no counterbalance so that by destroying the austral hungarian empire the americans contributed to the deep in balance in european politics after the verse i conference in nineteen nineteen herbert hoover who had been food czar in the united states and became food czar in europe at the end of the war and he's his chief assistant robert a tap returned and recognized that the wilsonian policy had been a total disaster that in american intervention in the world disaster for the rest of the world that america's immense economic power had meant that the war that is it was could have ended early and stabilize the situation but when america took sides in the war it could drag the war out for years because america's great economic capacity could mean that it could drag the war out until the other side collapsed which is what happened the germans and the austral hungarians finally collapsed having overthrown those governments through this collapse there was a huge vacuum and the americans called that democracy but in reality there was a terrible vacuum in international affairs that what was so great american economic policy american economic capacity which was so great in peacetime and a great contribution to world order when the americans intervened in international affairs meant a huge distortion all of the countries of europe had come out of the war without liberal institutions instead industrial laws had been established national planning had been established the income tax had been vastly increased the immense amount of income tax in england between nineteen fourteen and nineteen nineteen was incredible from forming a very minuscule part of the taxing system it became eighty or ninety percent and you can imagine what happened to the investing class in england and that england was the least worst example also in june of nineteen eighteen in order to encourage the troops to continue getting killed at the front the electoral law was changed in england where instead of the previous pre-war number of seven million voters in which the liberal party had a majority it was increased to twenty one million in which the labor party had a majority once again for the benefit of the war state just as welfare measures were introduced also new electoral measures were introduced that vastly changed the politics of the country most important hoover and taft recognized that war had an immense effect on the monetary system that war caused depreciation the government's chose depreciation that is the indirect taxation associated with inflation rather than the direct taxation of uh... ordinary tax structures and so when another american president proposed in nineteen forty that america once again intervene in the rest of the world hoover and taft put forward the opposing view that american involvement in any war among other powers would once again dragged the war out and that the extent that the war was drawn out although the united states might not suffer very badly all the other countries in the world without the depth of american economic development suffer tremendously that their whole capital structure would be undermined that they would turn to greater national planning they would turn to more inflation in order to try and succeed in the war and they predicted that justice world war one had meant a couple of hundred million people ended up under communist control due to the american involvement that if america became involved in world war two many hundreds of millions more would come under communism as a result and unfortunately their prophecy was true that america special capacity economically made america more dangerous for the world economy than any other country and therefore by ruining other countries made the world more dangerous for the united states that each intervention to remedy the previous interventions effects create even more disaster in other words hoover and taft who compared to most of the other politicians were much more free market and had some sense of concepts of investment capital accumulation we must remember that taft was made his national political career in nineteen thirty five and thirty six on the basis of his being the council against the abolition of the gold clauses they very very clearly saw intervention abroad is exactly the same as intervention in the domestic economy it has on foreseen consequences it has the effect of a drug which makes things worse and therefore you have to take more of it in order to try and solve the problems created by the previous uses of the drug of interventionism so that modern proponents of even lukewarm classical liberalism in a sense backed into the libertarian analysis of world affairs and provided a very very clearly libertarian analysis of why the world is in the situation it is just as a domestic economy is in a disastrous state due to government intervention each intervention done in order to try to remedy the effects of the previous intervention so intervention in foreign affairs has the same consequences it creates disaster and each further intervention has the same result that each intervention makes the world less secure from for the united states than before now i'd like to answer some questions al-janan sydney is the most famous well he was a forerunner of modern libertarian political thinkers and uh... the uh... government became suspicious that he might publish his writings which was of course forbidden and uh... so they ransacked his house and found that he did have such writings in manuscript and tried him for treason and executed him in england in england yes it would have been more difficult in america they would have liked to do that sort of thing but you know it's uh... the same as uh... mark twain or huckleberry finn they could always uh... high-tailed out and joined the indians you could always get away in america and it was more difficult in england to do that well though the policy of destroying the rest of the world no no i didn't say that no i said america's previous pre-war economic strength was so strong that by dragging out the war every other country's economics uh... base collapsed using your have it wasn't that they used it wasn't the the fact of the war itself that destroyed the economy necessarily was the dragging out of the war and the malinvestments that occurred year after year instead of good investments and so each country's economy then got worse and worse that's right that's right that's right well probably the reason was that the united states can't get involved in the middle east without a whole general war occurring and therefore is going to be much more careful about getting involved in other words as you say it's much more dangerous but because it's much more dangerous than the u.s. has to be much more careful the u.s. doesn't have to be careful at all about al salvador can do whatever it wants and therefore if it wanted it could just you know like it the whole country with american troops to the public and that seemed more dangerous simply because the u.s. could do whatever it wanted it had it was much more limited in the middle east than it is in central america so i think that explains the difference yeah but the rhetoric is within the context that the u.s. can only intervene if it wants to go into a general war whereas in al salvador it could intervene like it did in vietnam by slow stages so that's what people were concerned about i mean part of this relates to the the fact that well starting with really even with mckinley in the spanish-american war indefinitely with uh... wilson and roosevelt and then truman in correa and uh... johnson in vietnam uh... the u.s. government has gotten involved in these wars first by getting involved and then declaring or not bothering to declare war afterwards that couldn't happen in the middle east where that is at this point we already had done all the preparation over the years of involvement in the middle east so that we're now at a point where we can't take a major action without all the other countries reacting for one reason or another so it's a it's different very different in that sense even though it's more dangerous we choose we could choose follow a very different policy and any other country germany policy any country can choose to change its foreign policy a change the direction in which it's going and at the present time it's quite possible that a lot of european countries will entertain that possibility so they they're much uh... less free than the united states to make choices the question is uh... with uh... world war two provide a different uh... rationale for this perspective because uh... hitler might have uh... had an atom bomb and been there for more dangerous uh... well i think the analysis that i would give would be the same one that hoover and taith gave which was that uh... they did not see any real difference between nazi germany and soviet russia and the u.s. had a choice of being an ally of one or ally of the other or not being an ally of either one to the extent that the united states chose to be an ally of germany or an ally of russia the united states would determine whether nazism or communism would be the beneficiary of world war two i mean one of the conclusions that taft and hoover drew was that you cannot that capitalism is not a beneficiary of war they learned what herbert spencer and william graham summoner had showed uh... that and hoover set up the hoover institution on war peace and revolution because he said war leads to socialist revolutions peace leads to communism so we need to study how to preserve peace and how to prevent war if we want to prevent socialism from for developing and uh... they were very very clear that even more than world war one because they had learned the lesson of world war one that the u.s. should not intervene in world war two because to intervene meant to choose tyranny would dominate the world after the war the u.s. had that's the kind of choice the u.s. had that didn't have a choice of making the world more democratic or more prosperous it could only make the world full of more communists are full of more nazis talker just you know probably had stopped thinking after his bookstore burn so i'd not just i mean they he just went and lived on the riviera and you know i don't i don't think after his bookstore but he had a very important role in libertarian thinking or or doing anything so you know anything could happen mean once you stop being a committed uh... libertarian intellectual and uh... and any kind of uh... confusion can enter so you know i don't see it as anything of any importance i mean lots of people get confused nothing new under the sun the thing that's important is always to recognize those who remain consistent that's the unique unusual thing the whole world is full of confused people so there's nothing nothing that should uh... make us uh... feel uh... surprised at that what's unique in what needs to be celebrated as those who remain consistent they're the only you know they're the only ones that are contributing to civilizations advance it wouldn't have looked very different than it did before the war that's the thing in other words the kaiser still would have been in germany and the france joseph or king uh... carl his successor would have been in austria-hungary the zahar or the zahar's brother or his cousin would have been the zahar in uh... in russia russia austria-hungary in germany would have remained large countries and uh... france and england and italy would have remained the same in other words it would have remained roughly what it had been before and would have probably easily gone back to less socialism and less government intervention the short of the war was what happened in the succeeding two years was uh... you ludendorff became the sort of economic zahar of germany and created a huge military industrial scheme uh... which was really the forerunner of nazism uh... after the war the america a lot of americans uh went over there and kept saying how wonderful it had been and why didn't we copy it in america americans uh... businessmen who had set up the war industries board and things like that like bernard baruch wanted to keep it going after the war this was so great because there wasn't competition there wasn't waste if you have planning you have efficiency the market is so inefficient and we could get rid of the market and unfortunately in america the market came back unfortunately for them but it didn't come back in other parts of the world couldn't they just were one of the key things is that if you even forget about what happened in russia germany the war directly and through the great early nineteen twenties uh... inflation destroyed the middle class and with the middle classes economic position destroyed when the great depression came which was itself the consequence of world war one it was the problem of trying to pay reparations for the war huge amounts of american money being loaned over to germany to either pay off the reparations and then the other then it became so easy to borrow in america that all the german cities decided to build sports stadiums schools bathhouses they borrowed huge amounts for non-productive purposes and the depression was a consequence of that so that that immediately led in other words the wiping out of the middle class followed by the depression was the foundation of the nazi party the nazi party in the twenties was insignificant it was really it kept declining actually it's big point was during the inflation soon as the inflation was over it lost seats in the succeeding parliaments soon as the depression came in the next election they got at the largest single block in the right stock and in italy not uh... musselini would never have risen to power if they hadn't been the war the whole fascist movement was the fascist fascist were modeled on the commandos at the front the war just as the uh... essay and the ss in germany were modeled on those who were not the ordinary soldiers but ones who sort of went out into the no man's land and set off special bombs or killed other commandos these became the model of those societies and so this warrior this sort of niche in warrior became for the fascists and the nazis the ideal compared to which the business man was beneath contempt and so you have a whole and then the consequences of those attitudes those who had been fighting types were highly idealized those who were in commerce were evil because if they had been engaged in commerce that was contrary to the warrior spirit great thing was to eliminate commerce in order to create everyone as warriors and so the spirit of which is nothing nothing like that before world war one it all came out of the war a whole new psychology and you know then the novelist started picking that up and there's immense literature and public attitudes were formed around the idea of the heroism of a warrior and that the people who remained in commerce were traitors because they had not gone to the front to be warriors they had been engaged in this disgusting trade and uh... so the whole revolution and attitudes occurred well because it was a war between the various capitalist countries germany i mean the reason that england uh... developed hostility to germany was that germany had replaced england in the markets of the world the germans were more efficient they were that made better arrangements better contracts they were more aggressive in going to find customers the english had been the first producers so everyone used to come to england and place their orders in english didn't know what salesmanship was they didn't understand how to develop their products to satisfy particular demands of their customers they produced the same widgets for a hundred years and everyone should be satisfied with them so they got very angry when the germans replaced them in the in world markets and so you have the germans and the english the french etc where the major capitalist countries of the world and therefore the war the war itself was a civil war between capitalist countries after the war you really didn't have except in america any capitalist countries everything had been put by the board thank you