 In the deepest sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution on behalf of libertarianism and against power, a libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of liberty and property. That was a quote from Murray Rothbard in the series Conceived in Liberty. And as we begin this first season of Liberty versus Power, we're going to touch on the different parts of cronyism, Liberty versus Power in America, 1607 through 1849 by my co-host, Dr. Patrick Newman. A lot of what he drove from, especially this first part that we're going to cover today, is kind of, I think, inspired by Rothbard's series on this issue. So before we really dive into the topic at hand in this particular period, Patrick, can you just talk a little bit about the introduction of the book and kind of the framework that we're working from? Yeah, sure. So one, it's a pleasure to be on. It's a pleasure to be talking about Rothbardian history, and I'm thrilled to be discussing my book. So as you mentioned, the title of my book is cronyism, Liberty versus Power in Early America. Okay. So I explain cronyism, which are special interest policies that benefit various business and political groups at the expense of the public overall. Through the lens of this Liberty versus Power framework, which Rothbard discussed heavily inconceived in Liberty. This is something that greatly influenced his overall historical perspective, right? So what exactly is this Liberty versus Power framework? So I describe it in my introduction, and I build off of Murray Rothbard, who in turn built off of earlier historians who were studying this, researching this as figuring out what contemporary Americans were thinking during this time. So the Liberty versus Power theory argues that history is a clash between the forces of Liberty, so the forces of small government, they're against cronyism, they're in favor of free trade, hard money, minimal government spending, et cetera, et cetera, and the forces of power, so the forces of big government, the forces of cronyism, they're out for the power, they're out for the pelf and the privilege, so to speak. They support central banking, tariffs, internal improvements, and so on and so forth. When power has control of the government, cronyism goes up, right? When Liberty has control of the government, cronyism goes down, or at least we would expect it to go down. The issue is that this is something Rothbard repeatedly stressed in his own historical work, and I talk about this a lot in my book, is that power corrupts. So power incentivizes people to engage in cronyism. So when libertarian reformers have control of the government, they get corrupted by power. They lose sight of their original goals, they start to dish out their own special privileges to their various supporters, they look ahead to the next election, so on and so forth, right? So this makes reform very difficult, because cronyism, when the forces of liberty are in control, it only really moderately declines before it starts to increase again. This is why getting rid of cronyism is so difficult, even when you have a mass movement libertarian political group that's actually not only interested in winning office, they can win office, they can pass legislation at reducing cronyism and so on. So this is the general structure that I'm, the general theory that I'm working with, and I argue that it really explains a lot of history during America's sort of formative years, and this is not only my opinion, this is also the opinion of Americans at the time, right? They constantly saw things through this liberty versus power lens. So all I am doing, and all really Murray Rothbard was doing, was arguing that what many Americans had insisted was true, was in fact true. And that's what we're going to find out through this episode and future episodes, that there's a lot of names that are usually celebrated as some of the saints of the American Revolution, who are certainly not immune to the corruption of power. Absolutely, absolutely. There's no stone shall be left unturned. There's a lot of American heroes who were dabbling in various special privileges, and I try in my book to call a spade a spade and to show who are the cronies and who weren't. And one of the things I think it's interesting, when we begin with this period, the colonies were not intended to be conceived in liberty. They were intended to be conceived in power as extensions of kind of the old order of their absolute kings of Europe and feeding these sort of dynasties. Can you just talk a little bit about sort of the incubation of these colonies and their direct role that they were intended to play can help financing things going on across the seas? Yeah, absolutely. So Murray Rothbard describes and conceived in liberty as well as in his history of economic thought that before colonization, before the age of exploration, you really had this age of absolutism and this age of the old order, right? So the old order refers to the combination of mercantilism, so granting various special privileges to favored businesses and other groups, various economic fallacies are involved with that. A nation can only grow at the expense of other nations. You have feudalism, which is the king would basically tie his various henchmen to the land. He'd parcel out the conquests, give them land that they couldn't sell, et cetera. So it creates this caste system and absolutism. The idea that the king was divine and the king, what his words came from God, so you had to listen to the king, so on and so forth. So the colonies, if we're just focusing on England, right? You think the main players at this time were England, France and Spain. They were all sending ships over to try and basically claim land that no one, most part didn't really own. It was, it was very, you know, relatively unsettled. So England was involved, you know, was in the practice of basically chartering these companies, giving them these companies, these corporations, various crony privileges. So then these companies would go out and settle land on the east coast of the United States. So if you think of the, if you think of Virginia or Massachusetts, some of the earliest colonies and so on. So these colonies were designed to basically be raw, just raw materials markets. So they would, people in the south would ship over various crops. People in the north would ship over some, you know, different types of crops or maybe lumber, et cetera. All of that would go to England. England would use this to make anything from furniture to weapons to ships, et cetera, and then they would use it for themselves or they would sell it back to the colonies. So it was really that they were designed to be extensions of the, the colony, excuse me, of England. They were designed to be extensions of the old order, right? And this was really, a lot of people in an ironic sense, America was not conceived in liberty. It was conceived in power and only became conceived in liberty due to the fact that the sheer abundance of land made it very hard to monitor colonists. England was preoccupied with various foreign wars and its own internal strife. If we think about the English Civil War and the glorious revolution, so on and so forth in England, they kind of had to just sort of let the colonies engage in their smuggling because whenever they did try to really enforce laws, the, the, the public revolted. Yeah. And that the inability to enforce, I think overseas again, it kind of sows enough freedom in there that, you know, I know later on, you know, it's kind of the view of, of the American revolution less as a revolution, sort of in a, you know, kind of the French mold, you know, it really was kind of just a war of, of, you know, national independence or kind of maintaining the society that had been built up, you know, from just the disconnect of, you know, the sea in between in the American colonies and old Europe. And, and I think it's interesting looking at, you know, the 1600s as the precursor to the American revolution itself. Obviously, you know, we had within, you know, European history, I mean, particularly, you know, Anglo history, the British Civil War, the rise of the levelers, which I know Rothbard praises as one of the early libertarian movements. But then you also had incidents in America of kind of people sort of, of, you know, chafing at some of the established, you know, King oriented power structures. I know you mentioned at one point in the, in early in the book, you touched on briefly about Bacon's rebellion, which was one of the first rebellions in the colonies, which I'm just diving into a little bit more. You know, it was an interesting where it was kind of a broad coalition of, of kind of European indentured servants, you know, slaves. It was kind of just a mass class rebellion against the current power structure. It's kind of just interesting seeing some of the precursors to what ended up fueling some of the fires, you know, a century later. Yeah, exactly. Bacon's rebellion, in a sense, it happened in 1676. So it was a hundred years really before, you know, really the American revolution started in 1775, but it was a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. It was in many ways a prequel. And yeah, you got Nathaniel Bacon, the rebellion itself. Yes, very, very interesting character. No relation to Kevin Bacon in case, as far as I'm, I was able to find out. But basically it was the classic instance, one of my, one of Rothbard's reasons as to why his original project in American history, so he was supposed to write a basically a one or two volume history on the United States from Jamestown to, you know, 1960, right? When the time he was started to work on this was, he said, well, there's all this new information that I had never seen. So there's all these instances of tax rebellions. And I can't leave that out. Now, Bacon's rebellion is a more famous instance of that, but it's still just really a sign that, yeah, Americans, they, they would fight for their rights, so to speak. Yes, did the Nathaniel Bacon and his supporters want to maybe take Indian land, et cetera. Undeniably, that was a motivation, but they were upset at the ruling Virginia oligarchy, their control over the colonists. When Bacon quickly, he was able to assume power. He did enact some democratic reforms providing for basically greater representation, these moves towards liberty. Okay. So these were good things and trying to strike down some of the onerous taxes and regulations that the colonists were upset about. Unfortunately, and this is certainly true throughout most of American history, Bacon, like many people who, who, who lead the rebellions. He quickly became a despot. He quickly became like a dictator and it would have been interesting to see what would happen, but then he died. So then like the whole thing kind of fell apart. Once again, power corrupts. Yeah. Power corrupts. Absolutely. I just realized the pun I did there, right? You know, but yeah, it, you, you, you see this, this, this corrupting nature of power not only affected Nathaniel Bacon, who we could consider on the side of liberty, broadly speaking, but many other later people, but these rebellions were, you know, it was a sign that, and this is England knew this. They, they recognized that, okay, we can't, at least until later on in the mid 1700s, we're not really going to try and push the columnists too much because they have a rudimentary understanding of private property, right? They had all of this land they had settled. So they had so much abundance as opposed to your average person in Europe, they were influenced by various libertarian ideas in Europe, et cetera. England kind of had to, all right, we just got to let them do their thing, but we're still going to have control over you, but we're not going to, we're not going to push it too much. At least that's what they thought. Well, in the intellectual environment that was going on in the times, you know, kind of helped sparked in 1600s, but you, you have the rise of John Locke and, you know, John Trencher and Thomas Gordon, Kato's letters and things like that. There was also an intellectual revolution, you know, thinking about Mises's, you know, work on the importance of ideology, sort of guiding different political developments and things like that. You know, we wore kind of, you're seeing a sort of proto-libertarian intellectual bent alongside, we're just the practical elements, restraining what the state could do across the seas. There was an intellectual foundation that I think helped, you know, obviously fuel a lot of, you know, what had become the founding fathers later on. Oh, absolutely. So the, the enlightenment thought was becoming bigger and bigger in the, really in the late 1600s, early 1700s to this idea that, you know, reason is a good thing. Mankind can understand the workings of the world around him, the, you know, the natural laws, so to speak, and this includes the laws of what were known, what later became known as political economy, you know, a.k.a. economics. So to understand how markets work, understand how private property works in mankind, you think, oh, that we can learn this, and we can use this to design a better world, you know, that, that will improve people's living standards. So John Locke, his two treatises of government, very big and influencing this. And then later people, you know, as you mentioned, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. So this was a Kato's letters, really kind of distilling John Locke to a popular audience, right? And this is the beginning of this Liberty versus power theme, right? Where you've got people recognize that the government is power. The government is a cancerous tumor. Power is always encroaching. We need to set various constitutional safeguards to prevent power from encroaching. And this, they really kind of nailed this. And this is something that really animated colonists around the, around this time, as well as many other later Americans. So since we've now kind of set the stage for the environment upon which the American Revolution was to build up, and then obviously, you know, you have your kind of standard history on, you know, the different England trying to crack down on the colonies, the different stampbacks and things like that. I think it's, it's worth taking a minute to just kind of look back and thinking about some of the battles over what the American Revolution really stood for. I know Rothbard goes into great detail, kind of highlighting, you know, in criticizing a lot of mainstream interpretations, you had kind of, I believe in the early 20th century. So this, this idea that the American Revolution was a revolution of property owners, minority, the population were those that really, you know, cared about all of this, you know, revolutionary stuff. A lot of people just wanted to be, kind of, go along with, with how everything was going. And then on the others, and Rothbard critiques that and points to the degree to which the American Revolution was itself a genuinely popular movement supported by all classes. And then on the other side, you kind of had this sort of conservative, what they called the the consensus school about, you know, kind of undermining and underselling some of the explicitly libertarian notions of the revolution. Can you talk a little bit just from, kind of, the battle over what the American Revolution meant from this sort of historical, almost political perspective over the years? Yeah. So the American Revolution is very important in American history, obviously. That's, it's defined as if you think, at least back in them, in the good old days, so to speak, when let's say you and I, we are in elementary school. You would learn about the American Revolution. It was like, yeah, this was just, you think this is just great, this great struggle. You know, we, we, we beat the British, we beat the evil British Empire. I just remember when I was in elementary school, the Patriot, the movie had come out and it was like, all right, yeah, they, they, it was, it was a little bit of an exaggeration, so to speak. But it was still, you're like, yeah, America, this is awesome. Everything's great. And now we can get into, that's a whole different conversation on how that whole, whole thing has changed. But the, the, the meaning of the American Revolution, the interpretation has certainly been subject to multiple transformations, criticisms, and, and, and so on as to what exactly it meant. What were the colonists fighting for? Were the colonists, so to speak, broadly, what we would consider, you know, now to what would be called nowadays liberal, you know, more, you know, let's just say of the left, was it of more of a conservative, like you mentioned a minority, you know, my, my more minority movement among property owners, AKA, you know, conservatives, the right, or was it a libertarian movement where Americans generally just interested in smaller government. And Rothbard argues the latter, I, of course, take his perspective on this, because, and so he argues, because he looks through the whole history of the building up to the revolution. He's got a whole volume, volume three of his book, basically from the French and Indian War to the American Revolution, because the issue is after the French and Indian War in the 1750s, Great Britain had more or less taken all of France's land in North America. They were the undisputed world superpower. It was Great Britain. And they said, all right, we're in charge now, but we aren't really making a lot of money from our colonies, or at least they're not paying what they consider their fair share. So then Great Britain decided to engage in what was known as a grand design and pose various regulations, mercantilist restrictions, start to enforce all of the laws that they had established previously. These were known as the navigation acts on and so forth. And yeah, they actually wanted to raise taxes just slightly, right? But your average American was very fearful of that because they said, all right, this is just an opening, you know, an opening wedge, right? It was just an opening wedge. So once Americans basically started to resist this, each law was protested, every tax, et cetera. And the Americans, it was really, they were fighting against taxes. There were some who wanted only just representation in Britain's government, but a majority of Americans, they were influenced by John Locke. They were influenced by the burgeoning libertarian movement. You got guys like Patrick Henry, et cetera, they wanted a small government, they wanted to break away from Great Britain. They wanted to do their own thing. They said, hey, look, we understand that if a government becomes despotic, we have the right to secede and form our own government. Just that basic idea is intensely libertarian. It's the ultimate attack on a state. It's literally trying to destroy it, or at least trying to break away from it. You can't really get any more libertarian than that. So the American Revolution was intensely libertarian. It was a mass movement revolution, the old saying that only a third of Americans supported the revolution. That's like this one of those classic myths that really just comes from a misreading of a John Adams letter when he was talking about like the French Revolution. But the American Revolution, it was a mass movement, unlike the US Constitution, but that's a story for another time, maybe later. In Americans, they were upset. They were upset at Great Britain's depredations or perceived depredations. They wanted to stop that. They wanted to do their own thing. So I think this often gets completely neglected in presentations of the American Revolution. It kind of did before, let's say 20 years ago, it definitely does now where the common consensus is almost that, well, Britain was actually they were the good guys because well, they wanted a big government. They they wanted to think of all the benefits you have the strong government around the world and blah, blah, blah, blah. And well, just the Americans, they weren't paying their fair share. And oh, yeah, Americans, some of them were motivated by they were fearful Britain was going to free the slaves, which is totally not true. That was just a huge debate going on right now. But it's just that was not a leading factor, motivating Americans to, you know, to secede. The conclusion is inescapable. It was a great battle of liberty and power. The Americans are on the side of liberty. The British were on the side of power. End of story, so to speak. And it's interesting, because when we look at, you know, within the American side of the story, you know, we see these figures start lining up, you know, on their own sides within this same sort of battle. You know, one of the things I you highlight is that a lot of the people that that in applying a large role in the finance side of things, they start off as loyalists, you know, with you at the very least, you know, wanting or perhaps the most wanting representation, you know, in the UK, within parliament, but not looking for independence. People like Gouverneur Morris and Robert Morris, no relation. And then on the other side, we have, you know, kind of the diehard ideologues who were, you know, kind of embodying this sort of new liberal spirit, you know, people like Sam Adams and Patrick Henry. And it's interesting how throughout this story, some of the individuals end up, you know, far too many of the ideologues end up kind of enjoyinging the power camp as time goes on in ways that we will dive into more. But can you talk a little bit about, particularly Gouverneur Morris and some of kind of again, the degree to which a lot of the financiers saw the the the advantages that came by being part of the power structure and in trying to temper perhaps some of the radical inclinations that were going on before shots being fired in the revolution. Yeah, so the the revolution, the Americans, they quickly split into two camps. So these are the groups. This is the one group wanted, you know, independence. The other group just said, hey, look, we're going way too far, going way too fast. We need to just ask to go back in the British Empire. We just want a little bit more representation, etc. After Britain said, no, as in like, you know, we're upset at you guys. Then it basically those two groups evolved into, you know, the first group really just wanted what was known as an empire of liberty. So sort of this decentralized the system of decentralized governments spanning across the North American continent separate from all of the problems of Europe, all the old order stuff. You know, we got the Atlantic Ocean, right? And then you have the people who say, all right, yeah, we'll create our own government, but we want it to basically be another old order power, maybe more democratic, less monarchical, etc. But you know, we want the big government stuff. So a huge proponent of this was Robert Morris. He was a prominent merchant in Philadelphia at the time Philadelphia was really the the leading center of business in the United States. New York City would not supplant Philadelphia really until about the 1830s, 1840s. And then you have a Gouverneur Morris, who is sort of one of Robert Morris's henchmen. There's no actual relationship between them, you know, familial relationship. And they recognized that the war would provide various advantages to the mercantile class, right? So the war could be used to get the stronger government that they wanted, right? The war could be used to justify raising taxes on Americans, right? Which could be used to then protect various manufacturers to fund government spending, right? The war could justify a central bank, right? Or really a monopoly chartered bank, the first bank in the United States, the first bank in the United States, the first bank of the United States is a different animal and they could in that would obviously benefit businesses, right? Because they could acquire loans from this organization and so on. So they were very big in pushing for the, you know, Robert Morris in his various henchmen, Alexander Hamilton was one of them, were very big in pushing for the Articles of Confederation, right? Which initially was a very strong big government document because after the Declaration of Independence, you technically had these 13 independent states, right? States meaning independent really governments and they were sort of informally allied through this continental Congress, just this, you know, this sort of collection of all the 13 states in the proponents of big government after the Declaration of Independence, they wanted to now bring everyone in together in a stronger system of governance. So they said, all right, well now we're going to create our own large country, basically. And fortunately, the forces of Liberty whittled it down. But the basics was still there. You had these states that were united, so to speak, you know, the United States. And this was the opening wedge to further interventions. But it's important to note that some of the biggest supporters of government power during this time period were the mercantile class for various businesses, which is a recurring theme in American history. There's a lot of things here that are recurring themes, like the Articles of Confederation being a consolidating document and then being used by the opponents of the consolidating document was kind of hit on some of the parallels later on with the Constitution. But I also enjoy how quickly Robert Morris went to work. You highlight how he got like a $2 million deal done for munitions and like $500,000 went directly to his own company and other 300,000 went to his cronies. It was like right off the bat, Robert Morris knows how to play this game. Yeah, absolutely. And in a sense, obviously, I'm not a fan of him, but you kind of got to admire him at least because things were much more. Yeah, things were much more Frank back then. Like, yeah, all right, I'm just gonna do this sport, you know, sport, sport myself and, you know, and other people are, yeah, if you make me treasurer under the articles, yeah, I'm just gonna create like first thing I'll do is yeah, I want to pass a bank. And guess who's gonna be the president of the bank? You know, my partner, my business partner, right? And you're like, oh, okay. The guy's name, I think was Thomas Willing. And he was, you know, he was ahead of the Morrison Willing this company. And yeah, it's just it's very blatant. But, you know, yeah, it's certainly it's certainly interesting that you're like, yeah, he knows what he wants to do. And he was sort of known as the merchant prince, so to speak. He was really, you could say the first in the you know, in modern and modern American history in the sense of, but you know, not the colonial era, not technically linked with the British, so to speak, or an agent of the British government. He was kind of one of the the head of the first one, maybe considered power elite like the group of the entrant, the head of the entrenched interests, you know, that this this small little oligarchy that controls things behind the scenes is using it to get various special privileges, you know, it's crony, right? And this is what happens now throughout American history, these power elites are fighting each other, they're clashing, you got to rise and you know, then they fall, you know, all the stuff. But it's important to sort of focus, you sort of see how they're actually operating behind the scenes. Rothbard does this a lot with Morris and Conceived in Liberty and I try to do the same thing in my own book. Talking about some other figures that are perhaps even far more deified within the traditional story. I think one of the things I also kind of enjoy is the dynamic when it comes to military leadership, which again, I think kind of touches on this sort of old order versus kind of new, new order dynamic in an interesting way is the battle over George Washington, who you know, is dressed very much like a professional soldier, has experience within the British military, kind of definitely has some sort of Anglo file sort of tendencies in terms of the proper way of doing things. And he immediately has, you know, this kind of sort of dynamic between him and Charles Lee, who himself being I believe a former British officer in his own right, you know, he wants to adopt this more guerrilla warfare sort of tactic kind of kind of more of that that patriot dynamic from the movie right there can just touch a little bit on kind of this kind of gets to the very beginning, obviously, of the of the myth of the great Lord George Washington, you know, the secular deity of this country, but kind of right from beginning, it's him kind of almost representing the triumph of old order over this sort of new period going on. Yeah, so you stole my thunder. I was going to mention the Patriot too, right? Because when I was first reading this in Rothbard, because Rothbard's the fourth volume of conceding freedom liberty, which is my favorite out of the original series, I will say I'll be biased. I say my fifth the fifth volume is my favorite overall, but that's because I edited it. But I the fourth volume could easily give a run for its money. When I was reading all of Rothbard, talking about guerrilla warfare, I'm immediately thinking of Mel Gibson throwing Tomahawks at British soldiers in the forest. And I was like, oh, yeah, I watched this in the movie. So, you know, everything in the movies is true, right? And yeah, this was very important, because a lot of people don't understand this is that in what's also sort of ironic is that, of course, a couple years later, we invade the Middle East and guerrilla warfare was used against us, right? But guerrilla warfare was how we won the war. We did not win the war through conventional battles, right? Conventional battles at the time where you got your soldiers, you line them up. And then the other the other side lines up their soldiers and then you kind of move the troops, you know, the generals are safe at the back of the the battlefield and you're able to blow the horns and send the signals and people are just able to die for you, fire rounds, people aren't moving, etc. Americans were not well trained in this. The militia was not disciplined. You're going up against the best army in the world. You could not beat them in pitched battles, basically. So the way we won was we would sap at their supply lines, we would ambush them when they're moving troops, when they're moving personnel, we would occasionally flee battle to try and draw the British to pursuing us into, you know, further into a field or a forest where then you can ambush them. That those were the tactics and it was just slowly kind of whittling away, sapping, reducing, reducing the morale of the British army. That's really how we won the war. And this was something that George Washington, right, the famous general of the American Revolution, it wasn't actually his strategy. He wanted to do the traditional standard armies, right? Standing armies financed through all the traditional means. Washington sort of a mixed figure. He was, you know, definitely linked with Robert Morris, linked with sort of the old order. But admittedly, he did turn down being a dictator multiple times over his career. So you have to give the man credit where credit's due. But he wasn't really that good of a general. Great, you know, good for morale, but not a good general. If you think his most famous battle in the battle of Trenton, sending the troops across the Delaware, that was guerrilla warfare. You're surprising the enemy, right? So Washington is someone, one of those people, Rothbard brings down a notch. And I try to do the same thing in my book. In our first episode, I mentioned a little bit about Gore Vidal, who I think almost has kind of a Rothbardian streak within his American history. But, you know, the first book of his series on the rise of the American Empire is Burr, which very much has. I kind of love Burr's figure in American history, because he really is sort of, you know, the Satan of the American Revolution. You know, despised by the Hamiltonians, despised by the Jeffersonians. You know, he's kind of made out to be this very self-serving, conniving character, but there's all these great critiques that he has of all these great men. And I think that there is something to be said about that cynical angle, though in defense of Washington, you know, who is, you know, definitely, you know, as history went on, right? I mean, he does become the indispensable man, you know, for better or for worse. You know, I do know one of his strengths, you know, as a military leader was not necessarily within the field of battle, but, you know, building up supply lines, you know, he was a master of the retreat, you know, which is not necessarily what you even know for, but there is value within that and that kind of plays throughout. So I think that kind of ends up helping himself lend to kind of this this waiting game of kind of wearing down the British, but it is interesting just that also the different backgrounds of the American generals, you know, we have a lot of, you know, a lot of of self-trained soldiers, Nathaniel Green, Henry Knox, who ended up having again, having their own loyalties to the military, which has its own sort of consequences later on. Uh, uh, Baron von Stufen, uh, Stefan, right? Who had completely made up. I mean, also it's interesting characters all playing a role in the military side of things. If we touch back on this a little bit, though, you know, with kind of the new wave of intellectual developments going on during the American Revolution, kind of new ballads of liberty coming up. Obviously you have the Declaration of Independence from Thomas Jefferson. You have overseas something we'll touch, I think, more on in later episodes, but the wealth of nations ends up having a lot of consequence later on. But also that the work of Thomas Paine, that there's one quote that you have any here, which again, going to some of the egos and less divine aspects of these great founding fathers, you know, that Paine's common sense stole the thunder from John Adams, uh, who prior to that was kind of a force of liberty, but, uh, kind of unfortunately responded by drifting into the reactionary ranks. I think I kept there was a sort of ego that John Adams has. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that that that is something that is a lot of people dismiss that type of motivation as to why did people get into fights? Oh, ego. Oh, politicians, they're not. They wouldn't be motivated by something so trivial. They go, absolutely, they would be motivated by something so trivial like their politicians and their their big thinkers. They have enormous egos and they whenever they feel threatened, they they they lash out. I mean, this is one of the reasons why, you know, Patrick Henry did not or Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. They had a nasty split why Madison didn't like Patrick Henry until you had Jefferson Madison and you had Henry. Yeah, egos do matter. And and so you John Adams, unfortunately, that was kind of the beginning of when he started to move more into the the the reactionary side, which he really maintains throughout his life, though he does kind of there's a flicker in in the late 1790s, which is something we can get into later. But, you know, in another episode. But yeah, it does. It does matter those individuals, they they do have those reasons. But that being aside, tough for John Adams, Thomas Payton had common sense. And that was an enormously important book. I mean, a book, you know, a little panflit. And it was it was part of the symptomatic of this burgeoning libertarian thought. One of the things Rothbard discusses about common sense that I always enjoy was that he really kind of articulated what would be later described as the the conquest theory of the state. So this is different than the the contract theory of the state, which is that, oh, how governments are formed. We all get together. We all hold hands. We all decide we're going to relinquish some of our freedoms and pay taxes for protection. We sign a social contract and the government's just like a club. It's just your friendly neighbor down the street and you can go to it and, you know, provides a post office and all sorts of other great stuff, right? Payton goes, no, governments are created through conquest. You know, the kings just take people's liberty. They take people's government, you know, a property and then people are sort of resigned under the system and you know, the king's despotic and all this stuff. And yeah, it's very important that that that's a huge thing that a lot of people and it's unfortunate many libertarians you take this contract theory of the government and that's it might be good rhetorically might be good, you know, when you're arguing secession or something like that. It was obviously very influential with John Locke, but it's empirically not accurate. In Rothbard always went to Payne's to say, you know, another pun there, went to Payne's to say that it really, the governments are not voluntary, governments are coercive in a big, you know, part that's a big part of the American tradition. I mean, that was, you think about it, that's like realizing that governments are coercive, governments are born through conquest as Thomas Payne argued, I mean, that motivated Americans to secede. So you can't really get any more libertarian than that, right? Conquest theory of the state leads to secession. It's a pretty straightforward argument. I think there's also some value there in the fact that Payne's work as opposed to perhaps some of these other great thinkers that were very influential, it was very much a popular document. You know, it was being read by normal people. And I think that conquest sort of theory of the state that can hit people in the gut and the heart, I think in a way that, you know, perhaps other more intellectual arguments, some people in the brain, but you're gonna motivate a lot more people with some of that kind of fire, kind of populist approach. Yeah, absolutely. And this is what Kato's letters did for John Locke, right? You could argue many Americans were Lockeans, right? Many Americans might know who, some Americans might know who he was, but it's sort of, even the ones you have the book, like you might not even read it, right? But it's just, oh, I got the book right here. You know, you see, you know, you'll call fancy. But then you've got the secondhand dealer, so to speak, the lower level that's communicating in a short manner, right? The pamphlets of the day, this was really before newspapers, pamphlets you can imagine were the 18th century tweet or, you know, blog post, right? You're like, oh, someone's got this. And then, you know, you read it and you're like, you know, you're average for it and my God, you know, look at this, this is ridiculous. And yeah, it really, it's important to know it was a pamphlet because intellectuals back then were not only, many of them, especially the ones on the side of Liberty, were not only writing things in the abstract for other intellectuals, right? But they themselves or their followers were trying to distill it to politicians and other people because this is an equally important task. You can't have one without the other. You can't only do popular stuff. You have to have the research. You can't have the research without the application, right? So when you're able to get, when Liberty, when the side of Liberty can get both of them, it's like a one-two knockout punch. So we now have in America, under attack, British forces, skirmishes throughout the North and the South, we have a populace being motivated by works like Thomas Paine. We now have to deal kind of with the financing issue of this war effort. And of course, then our good friend, Robert Morris, comes back in. We have the establishment of the Bank of North America, it gets congressional money to kind of help underpin it, ends up channeling loans to his cronies with war contracts and the like. I know Rothbard uses the words, this is all kind of virtual embezzlement from Morris in this regard. And so again, we have, within the fog of war, the eye of Robert Morris is still firmly fixed to the prize. Oh, absolutely. And so really, what's funny is again, a lot of this stuff, so the war, technically, I mean, it was for all intents and purposes, over in 1781, it was the famous battle of Yorktown. The rest of it was kind of a mop up operation. You had to have various negotiations for the Treaty of Paris and so on and so forth. But Robert Morris, right when the Articles of Confederation was passed and under still this crisis of seeming wartime emergency was pushing for a tariff to fund the national, to fund the debt that the government had contracted. They didn't have taxes to pay for any of this. So he was pushing for a tariff or was known as an impost. He was also pushing for a, again, a central bank. And he was, he got a central bank and he was very close to getting the tariff. But the issue was with the Articles, every state had to ratify. You had to have unanimity. And so we have a victory for Liberty with David Hell of Rhode Island. Yes. Libertarian professor of Rhode Island. He's fighting it. He's saying, no, we're not gonna raise taxes. We're, you know, this is ridiculous. Once you do this, then you're opening up Pandora's box, basically. And it's little Rhode Island, little Rogues Island, which coincidentally, or perhaps not, was the last state to sort of reluctantly join the Constitution. It was more or less actually forced to join. You know, Robert Morris was gonna, you know, tighten the vice so to speak, but then Virginia decided to repeal their ratification of the impost amendment saying, well, the war's over, we don't need to do this. And Robert Morris and everything, it literally just collapsed from there. So by the end of the war, you had the weakened Bank of North America, you had an Articles of Confederation, but there wasn't much able to be done with it. And you had this issue of all of this war debt that there were no taxes to pay for it, right? And this was a big thing that obviously motivated the U.S. the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Before we get to that issue in particular, though, I do think it's important to highlight, and this is Washington being the great man of history, you do have an attempt for an outright military coup by Hamilton and the others that didn't get it. I think there's some parallels here to the British Civil War, the century earlier, you know, the problem is you mount this great military to defend your rights, but in the military, it's like, okay, we've won the war now, where's our money? Where's our money, right? And so you have debts Hamilton is trying to, in league with some of these people and aspiring for an old world empire within the U.S., they want to use the threat of military force to kind of force Congress to bend the knee. And this is when Washington says, no, we ain't gonna do that kid. And he's got the famous scene with the spectacles and he's gone blind in their service and that sort of stuff. But this is an example of Washington being a great man elevating himself beyond kind of simply personal motivations or even that of his soldiers. Yeah, so there's a great book that came out really around the same time Rothbard was writing conceiving liberty, it's a book I referenced in my own book that's called Eagle and Sword by Richard Cohn. And it also just looks cool because the cover has this like awesome militaristic eagle and it's kind of like a sword and a shield and it's all this awesome stuff. And it goes through this Nuber conspiracy because yeah, this was an actual thing. It was sort of ruminations about a potential military coup, basically all the military officials, they said we want pensions, we want the good stuff and you guys better raise these taxes. And if Washington went along, there was probably a fairly decent chance it would have succeeded, right? Because what traditionally happened with most rebellions throughout history up until that point was that, okay, the guy in charge, he would only temporarily have power, but he would then never relinquish it and like Washington could have easily become a monarch. And he chose not to. Instead, he really embodied the Roman Kinkanadas, right? The military guy who Rome called upon to save them from barbarian hordes and he becomes temporary military dictator and he gives up the power, right? Because Americans back then, George Washington included were very, they were obsessed literally to the point of like Roman virtue and like the Republic, you know, and all of that. And well, yeah, Washington nixes it. So you don't have this coup. It would not be the last time Hamilton tried sort of tactics of that nature. But anyway, Washington basically said no, so the whole thing more or less collapsed, right? And then we're in the era of the Articles of Confederation in the 70s. But of course, unfortunately that you have, you know, after the war is over, Treaty of Paris 1783, we're not looking around. And America's in a state of post-war depression. Incredible damage too. Obviously we don't have quite that cushy trading relationship with England anymore. There's a lot of damage. I mean, the amount of pillaging and destruction that had to occur during the war from both sides. You play as a major mark. I believe you mentioned that the American economy doesn't really recover from its pre-war position until 1800, you know, many, a few decades later. And so the response to this is that now, okay, we've not gotten rid of the king. We now have the Articles of Confederation and play as a national structure, but then we have individual state governments, many of which are kind of now utilizing their own power. They're becoming instruments of power within their own right. I know that some of the methods you're dealing with debt repayment become a very big issue that ends up fueling kind of a new generation of rebellion of, again, the state authorities kind of overplaying their hand trying to get water from a stone, if you will, and trying to tax the population in ways that they just can't handle it. Can just touch on a little bit about the policies of the state governments that end up fueling things like Shays Rebellion here on out. Yeah, absolutely. So the state governments, the issue is how to pay for the war debts, right? So how to pay for the mass amount of war debts in the libertarian solution would have been to repudiate or default, at least in some form, which is what many people had argued, but there were various reactionaries who had bought this debt at highly depreciated rates from the soldiers and the merchants who were given them in lieu of actual payment of money. And they wanted governments to bail them out at par, right? So they wanted to make a speculative killing. So various states such as Massachusetts were raising taxes to fund this debt. These taxes fell on poor farmers. And this encouraged Shays Rebellion, which is really a tax rebellion, right? Other states such as really those in the South defaulted, they lowered taxes, they paid off their debts, et cetera. Massachusetts and other Northern states chose to sort of maintain this debt or that to not default and then paid off depreciated rates. And so Shays Rebellion was a symptom of that. It was a fight against tax collection. And many people one way they would repudiate the debt was they just argued print money, right? Which was print money and just pay bondholders in this printed money. That's like here you go, right? And so in a weird sense, the forces of liberty were in favor of paper money, not for legal tenure, not because they thought it would stimulate the economy, but this was simply just because they had, that's how they had repudiated the debt. And this was a big issue that motivated the constitution among various other privileges, which was we need to find a way to raise money for the government, right? Because otherwise the Articles of Confederation will just simply not work. And you're going to have multiple confederacies that will basically sort of coexist, a Northern, a Mid-Atlantic, a Southern, maybe a Western, et cetera, confederacy and so on. So they various reactionaries push for the constitution, they push for this constitutional convention, notably Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Morris, James Madison, et cetera. And they're pushing for this, and they get the constitution, which is really what the Articles of Confederation was supposed to be. It was a big government document that gave the central government a lot of power, gave it the power to charter a stronger central bank to fund debts, to raise taxes for internal improvements, to raise taxes for standing armies. You had a powerful chief executive who you Congress could create various executive cabinets for this chief, it could also create a Supreme Court, et cetera. And so it's important to understand, because Rothbard argues this, and I do as well, the constitution was not intended to be a limited government document, it was intended to be a big government document. And this is something I really go at pains to describe into sort of the show in cronyism, right? Because it's no coincidence that the people who were fighting the constitution were genuine, you know, the libertarians, the original fighters of the people supporting independence the most, guys like Patrick Henry, you know, et cetera. And that's one of the tragedies of Shays Rebellion, because it's interesting, reading Rothbard's description of it in Conceived in Liberty 5, he points out that, again, that the anger was just, if I recall correctly, some of these states were actually requiring like specie payments for the payment of debts, which was kind of just like rubbing, adding insult to injury, when these farmers only had access to like the devalued paper currency, I mean, it was just kind of worst way. If you were to design something to make it the worst way possible to help average farmers, like that would be it right there, right? And so there was something that was gonna end up having to break from that. And then, you know, the targets of these rebellions were just targets, right? Yeah, they were courthouses that were the, where the trials were being held to deal with indebted farmers, you know, it was targeting tax collectors and the like. So it's not as if, you know, they were burning down target in the name of social justice, you know, they were actually targeting the institutions of systemic power destroying their livelihoods. And yet, as the result of this chaos, you had a lot of, you know, let's just use the phrase liberals that were kind of disturbed by that disorder that ended up joining this kind of rising nationalist faction that that helped kind of, you know, set the stage for the constitution and its consequences there on out. Is that correct? Oh yeah, I think that line of reasoning is correct. It's just something Rothbard mentions and I describe as well. You had this fracturing among the forces of liberty. Shay's rebellion had scared a lot of people. Thomas Jefferson was one of the few who was not disturbed by it, though he was in France. He wasn't afraid of low bloodshed. Oh, yeah, exactly. You know, the tree of liberty, it's gotta be watered from time to time, right? With the blood of, you know, patriots and tyrants, I guess. That's a quote that like if Stalin had said that, it would seem quite like you wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, oh, oh, geez. Oh, oh, Tommy, Tommy, what are you saying? But you know, that's how he was. But yeah, it really did lead to the growth of the nationalists who then sort of strategically called themselves federalists. And normally federalism, how originally it was described as a balance of power between the federal government and the states, right? Then the nationalists said, all right, scratch the states. We want to reduce the power of the states. We'll say the federal government will be, you know, the power will be constrained through the various branches. So you got the executive, the legislative judicial and they'll all sort of constrain each other. But of course it overlooks the fact that they can all join forces, right? And then screw the states and the people, something that's much harder than getting all the states to join forces with the federal government. So this was really kind of the motivating factor behind the US Constitution. Weak in the power of the states, establish an empire of liberty that has a strong central government that can provide various crony favors to bankers, debt holders, promoters of internal improvements, military officials, and so on and so forth. And we have now set the stage for him, what was an extra legal coup. It was an overthrow of the standing regime beyond the orders that they were, you know, allowed to have by whatever they were claiming to have, you know, their legitimacy comes from, right? And one of the things I love that Rothbard highlights and it's something that I never really thought of is why is George Washington here at this convention? And then I get hindsight, it seems like, oh, obviously, because he's leading this thing. But in the moment where this is not supposed to be going on, the reason why George Washington is here is because little Jimmy James Madison has the right idea that the reason why the Hamiltonian nationalist coup failed back in the day is because they didn't have Washington on their side. So we're gonna bring him in, we're gonna make him part of the conspiracy and by having George Washington be involved and people like Ben Franklin and others, we're going to defend this, you know, illegal use of power. We're gonna staple it to their reputations and from that, this is gonna be the weapon, the mechanism that we're going to now use to impose this new order that we have created onto the people. Yeah, absolutely. Washington, I believe, is a force McDonald said, someone who Rothbard references in conceit and liberty. He's just lent his prestige. He just, you know, the proceedings, because you got to imagine Washington was tall for his time. I mean, he was sort of like average, shy, a little bit average, like I think above six, you know, six, one, six, two, something like that, which was like a giant back then. And you've obviously got the legendary general. We're pretty much standing next to James Madison. Yeah, little Jimmy as he's referred to affectionately. You know, he's like five, two, right? So Washington, he's this powerful imposing figure and of course, he supported the Constitution during the ratification debates. And so, well, if Washington supports it, well, then, you know, he's Washington. And this led to a lot of, you know, basically enormous influence. And so, yeah, this was, and also Washington probably knew, though he wasn't actually super looking forward to it, but it was still, you could say, it probably affected me. He was gonna be president. Most people knew that he was going to be the first president because it was like, who else? You're gonna choose the famous general that everybody knows and loves, right? And so that obviously adds an enormous amount of prestige to the government. Now, what people don't know is that if in the 1780s and 1790s, if Washington was the most famous American, number two was actually Patrick Henry, right? He was just seeing, cause he was the, the give me liberty or give me death. And, you know, he's just, there's the great order. Everybody knew he was gonna be the factor with the Virginia ratification convention. And, and yeah, so he was sort of against it, right? And he didn't attend the constitutional convention, at least because so were told he smelt a rat, this famous saying, he knew something was up and he would turn out to be, you know, it turned out to be correct. And that's one of the things I think is interesting within kind of debates, you know, history has proven right, anti-Federalists, so many of these figures that there's, you know, they say, if we do X, why is it gonna happen? And sure enough, and yeah, these are the people we don't really talk about in terms of their content, right? Patrick Henry, luckily he's got that one killer line and that kind of makes in the textbooks. Like, but we kind of overlook all of these thinkers that were, again, history proved right. It's the people that were either intentionally lying or just naive that we end up celebrating, you know, it's just 200 plus years later, which I don't think is out of coincidence, right? That kind of goes to exactly the, you know, why history is a battlefield of modern politics. But when you kind of, as we're kind of wrapping up here, one of the things that I enjoy about your narrative, or perhaps it's unfortunate about your narrative, it's like how many of the big names end up just becoming corrupted? Kind of right at this time, you talk about the corruption of Ed and Randolph who ends up being a very massive blow to the anti-federalist cause in Virginia and elsewhere. You've got John Hancock who has bribed with future positions of power. You've got Sam Adams that gets brought down, right? It seems like the who's who of American Revolutionary Heroes that are now either being bribed by the potential of power or money or contracts or whatever, just one by one, they just start falling. Yeah, exactly. And that's the funniest thing because like Ed and Randolph, all right, becomes Washington's attorney general, I think. John Hancock, they basically lie to him, but with him, it's the funniest because Hancock was really sick and they wanted him to make this speech at the Massachusetts Convention. So like apparently I read in a book, they like bring him in on like his bed, like it's like Sova, so he's like coming in and he's like, yeah, I support the constitution cause he thought to be vice president. And he's like, also I have these amendments and like the federalists gave him those amendments. They were just like, oh yeah, we'll pass all this stuff after you give us the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, which is like literally the worst idea. It's like, let's give all of the guns to one group and then we'll all be able to decide rules together. And it's like, no, it doesn't actually work like that. But yeah, I mean, they got corrupted. This was an issue that even happened in New York, which was very against the constitution. I think it ratified it by like a razor thin margin, a very small, but there was a couple of delegates that were basically taken away. And this is a recurring theme in American history because you have these people who are genuinely interested in reform and they sell out. So there obviously is a difference between some people they'll just say rhetoric, like Republicans nowadays, many of them, they'll talk the free market up the wazoo, right? But they're not actually gonna, but these guys, they were genuinely free market, at least in varying shades. But yeah, they got corrupted and you kind of like, you go, oh, that's unfortunate. Well, then you have this dynamic. And I think you mentioned with George Clinton, if I recall correctly, where you get to the point where if you recognize where the wins are going, then the worst thing that you can do is to then work your, take a principled stand that puts you out of power, and which I think ends up playing some significance. We're gonna, I think next week's episode, we're gonna focus on the way that the Jeffersonians are able to make the Constitution, kind of use it for their own purposes. But that only further kind of incubates this sort of push towards adopting the Constitution is that it gets to the point where if you take that principled stand, you're gonna be on the outside looking in, and it's gonna be your enemies that are gonna be the ones that are benefiting from this document. Oh yeah, and that's a huge problem. And one of the issues that makes this whole constitutional thing very difficult is that the Federalists are smart. I don't actually speak about this in my book because I wasn't able to get definitive proof on this, but I'm fairly certain it's true, is that obviously as we all know, in order to be an officer, in order to be serving is the Constitution, politician, whatever, you have to take an oath or an affirmation to uphold it. You have to act like you support the Constitution. You can't be intentionally subverting it. So you have to argue all of your acts are constitutional, right? So this is even like nowadays, you've got Elizabeth Warren, you know, Uber progressive, Democrat, a socialist arguing, all sorts of stuff, you know, she's gonna say it's constitutional, right? And so now you have the anti-Federalists, the guys on the outside, they're gonna have to say, all right, well, we lost the constitutions in place. So how are we going to whittle it down? Well, now we just gotta start arguing that everything we want is constitutional. And this is something George Clinton wanted to do because he wanted to be vice president, back then the tickets were separate and he wanted to basically sort of like slowly destroy the Constitution, which is the Federalists were like, oh no, we can't have that. So yeah, and it's a very interesting dynamic that I think it gets neglected, but it is an issue where if you don't, you know, one, outside of the point you were making, you gotta, if you don't sell out, well, then other people are gonna sell out and you're gonna lose your influence, but now you actually have to work within this system. You can't fight the government. You can't secede from the US Constitution. At least none of the anti-Federalists thought that would be a good idea. You basically have to work within it. But that's a story for, I guess, then. And also just the degree to which the Federalists had power, had control of very important institutions. I know you mentioned how one particular anecdote, the degree to which mail for the Federalists would travel between six to 14 days, whereas the anti-Federalists trying to get their own ideas out there, the mail would travel six to 10 weeks. And so, while I think, if I recall correctly, Rothbard dismisses the grand importance of the Federalist papers as kind of the, its position is kind of celebrated wrongly from his sort of perspective as really being that influential document that pushed the lovers. It seemed obviously that the anti-Federalists, even in spite of all the intellectual arguments they could make with the anti-Federalist papers and whatnot, just simply the degree to which their ideas could spread in the country was severely limited because of the other side having power and being willing to use it. Yeah, absolutely. It was the modern, you know, Twitter ban or Twitter censoring, right? It, nothing's changed. I mean, obviously it's the change, technology's changed, but it's the same thing. Forces of big government have always been able to use their control of the media to sway opinion, the strategic development, how each state ratified the constitution, selective reporting and information, saying certain people were in favor even though they weren't. Yeah, it's all linked. And even the other Federalist papers were basically just propaganda tool. They were basically just propaganda pieces. And looking back, it's funny because I think there's a lot of the critiques of the American Revolution that we have, we addressed earlier being wrong that very much do apply to the constitution. For example, both you and Rothbard highlight that the constitution was not a popular document that while it did win ratification with the conventions, there were various mechanisms that we would address for that, the majority of the people, the public itself were not necessarily calling for this. I even highlight, I think in Massachusetts, the anti-Federalists tended to be poor farmers. The Federalists tended to be the merchant class. And so they ended up telling the farmers of Massachusetts that they paid for their trip to the convention, but wouldn't pay for their trip back home if they voted for the darn thing. And so again, you have this very interesting class dynamic where again, it was the elite, shall we say, that were the biggest benefactors from this consolidation of power. And it was the public as a whole that were either apathetic or hostile to what they recognized as that rat that Patrick Henry was smelling. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all sorts of dirty tricks, shenanigans, delegate malapportionment, bribery, broken promises, all that stuff we use. So this was not the social contract theory that we're told. This was much more like the state conquest theory. Most notably with Rhode Island when we basically threatened it with retaliatory trade legislation, right? We forced them to join more or less. And yeah, it is something that needs to that deserves to be explained, right? This is something Rothbard didn't consume liberty. This is something else I do in my own. And I feel like this kind goes directly to a core and says some of the continued divides within, let's call it the American right broadly. Let's talk about just the libertarian circles. There is a tendency from some libertarian factions out there to kind of really celebrate in the constitution as a document of liberty. Whereas kind of this Rothbardian perspective is still kind of skeptical of the degree to which it had already given way to the state and in the consolidation of power. And I think that this sort of divide, it continues to have ramifications to this day, which is why kind of taking this sort of cynical look at this period. Even though it can be an uneasy, right? It's a little bit uneasy in 2021 seeing the social environment that we're in, right? Seeing this the statues of Jefferson and Washington et cetera being torn down. It kind of feels a little wrong to be just, being critical of George Washington for justified reasons, right? Because there is I think a reflex that I know I personally feel and defending this American nation, the great men of history. Yet it's important to recognize because again, there's so much parallels that we still face today where this dynamic, again, this is why this Liberty versus Power framework has such broad applications throughout history. Learning the proper lessons from this moment, even if it means taking inconvenient stands against some of the secular gods of our founding, it has important lessons that we can apply today as we try to identify ways to reign in the regime that we are burdened with as Americans in the 21st century. Yeah, a lot of people treat, oh, the US Constitution is a small government document. So, oh, as long as we just go back, we'll be fine. That strict constructionist view itself is a strategy, right? So we wanna try and apply similar strategies to the modern world. We understand the Constitution's defective, right? So we're gonna try and use extra constitutional means, things like secession, nullification, really trying to fight the quote unquote federalism with the proper federalism, right? The history does provide lessons for today. You have revived the spirit of 1776. So with that being said again, this has been part one of cronyism, Liberty versus Power in America, 1607 to 1849. We now have the stage set, the Constitution's in place, George Washington as president, James Madison's building departments, Hamilton's about to become your Treasury Secretary. You've got all sorts of new villains and heroes to come about in next week's episode. But as always, I've enjoyed this conversation, Patrick. And if you are enjoying the show, please go ahead, subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends. For this Mises History Podcast, Liberty versus Power. Until next time, this has been Thoe Bishop, Patrick Newman, join us next week. Oh, oh, Tommy, Tommy, what are you saying?