 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of a number of books about liberty and its adversaries. And he's also, I should note, the contributor of the really wonderful biographies of major figures in the history of liberty that we have on libertarianism.org. So Jim, given that we're having this conversation in the capital city of the United States of America, I wanted to ask about the American experience and liberty. And I guess start by asking why is it that it seems like liberty has gained a toehold and flourished in the United States in a way that it often and tragically hasn't other places around the world? Well, liberty is a rare thing. It has taken a long time to develop in places like the United States where it has been successful. And it has failed to develop in far larger number of places. I could review for a moment the lucky breaks and exceptional things that had to happen for this to come together in America. For starters, we were lucky to have the best place in the world to develop a free society, flanked as we are by very large oceans that have made it difficult for another country to invade us. By contrast, we might imagine the situation if we were a small European country surrounded by adversaries, we would have to have a standing army, and even then it probably would not be sufficient. So we had a very healthy separation from all the problems of the old world. This also meant that we were a considerable distance, 3,000 miles away from England when we had settlements developing here, and that distance made it difficult for the English to monitor what was going on over here. So the distance was also a separation from the colonial rulers. We were very fortunate to be settled by the English because of the constitutional tradition that they had for limiting the power of their rulers. They had not just the Magna Carta, which everybody's heard of, which was the first charter that was forced on a king. That was substantially based on the Charter of Liberties issued by King Henry I that bound the King to law. So that was actually the model for Magna Carta. There was the Petition of Right in 1628. There was the Habeas Corbus Act of 1679. The English Bill of Rights in 1689. We had a series of advances, the beginnings of an effort to limit power, and we were very fortunate to be beneficiaries of that. If we had been settled by the Spanish, the Spanish America was incorporated in the crown of Castile as conquered territory, and the ruler in Spain, the king of Spain, had much more direct control. We did not have had a lot of the local institutions that developed in the English colonies. We were very fortunate that nobody discovered gold in the English colonies until much later, until we had a constitutional framework that was established and running, and until we had a much more diversified economy. So we didn't just become an extractive economy like the Spanish, and all they did was haul gold across the ocean for Spain to spend on its wars. Or Africa, too, I guess. Or Africa, and they end up with nothing. So we had to build both the physical basis for a society and to get everything else running. We were fortunate that private property became established in the colonies early on. The first two colonies, Jamestown and Plymouth, tried to do without private property, and those both failed miserably. And all the colonies that came after Jamestown and Plymouth had private property. All of the English colonies were proprietorships. They were owned by particular people. They tried to make money. And it became apparent in experience that you really can't make money as a company that owns all the property and denies any of the participants the opportunity to get land. So they had to figure out that what was essential for a colony was to be able to attract large numbers of people. So they had to offer the prospect of getting land. When you say that these colonies that didn't have private property failed, what formed of that failure take? How did the not having private property lead to them failing? Oh, people starved to death. Well, that's in the Jamestown and Plymouth account, too. Yeah, 50% mortality rate in a year. The starving winter in Jamestown and Plymouth were counted by Governor Bradford, I think it was. We tried to socialize all the property and it didn't work out. Actually, we should link that in the show notes that's available online, widely. Well, the company owned everything and then the company also owned everything that people produced. So that would go into a common warehouse. And that caused conflict because the people who were more productive resented the fact that they got the same payout as the people who they could see lounging around whenever they had an opportunity out in the fields. The wives did not want to see their husbands producing crops that single women would get. The whole thing, it was a discovery not just the private property was essential, but the absence of private property becomes a source of endemic conflict. But we got that out of the way. The second, that was the first of four big experiments during the colonial period that had momentous consequences. The second was the development of religious liberty. There were so many sects, there were dozens of religions and sects including Jews and Catholics and innumerable Protestant sects that it became impossible for any one group or a small number of religious groups to gain control over the rest. As soon as they thought they would begin to get control, another group would come over or they would move. Well, we call that an interesting point about the people, which I think is broader too because I always say not only did we bring over some ideas, some British ideas, some British constitutional ideas, but everyone who came here pretty much in the colonial period and even in the immigration period were pretty probably individualistic people and bringing their own ways of life over. They were leaving behind their families saying, I will probably never see you again and I'm going to go live in the wilderness somewhere and try and live, including with my religion. And eventually the compromise of all these different divergent people coming over is more liberty because you don't want anyone to control the wheels of power to take over what kind of religion you're going to be practicing, what the morality is going to be, things like that. Right. You had intolerant regimes most notably in Puritan, Massachusetts, but the biggest breakthroughs were the three colonies that had an explicit policy of religious liberty, namely Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania was the biggest. William Penn, yes. And they were Quakers. They were also in West Jersey, which is next to Pennsylvania. That really had the most far out toleration that there was. The big discovery was the greatest large number of people who came over went to Pennsylvania and they went to the other territories where there was religious liberty. So a byproduct of this was the insight that what really counts in development and success of a colony had the number of people that come over. If you have a dwindling population, ultimately a population that could be wiped out by a disease or by Indians or bad weather or something. So the biggest colony was Pennsylvania. And that meant you had bigger markets, you had bigger everything. And diversity can maybe breed that kind of restraint in government. If you had, everyone come over like we saw in the Puritans in Massachusetts more, if you look at the rights and liberties of Massachusetts from the mid-17th century, it's a fairly moralistic document I think compared and contrasted to the diversity that you saw in Pennsylvania with many different religious sects. Right. And there's also an important transition from religious toleration, which was the policy that England was moving toward and religious liberty, which was really the Quaker contribution just across the board. It's not of anybody's business what you're doing in your church or your home. So that was a very important development. Every colony ended up getting experience with representative assemblies, and that was a major development. In most cases, the English crown colonies appointed the governor and the deputy governor, but the council, the king's council, which initially had very little authority, but it had influence, that was elected by all the property holders of the various colonies. And these, as happened in England and elsewhere, the governor, he's a long way away from England. There weren't many ships that were coming, certainly with soldiers, and that was no part of the British intention to provide soldiers. Their strength was a navy not getting involved in land wars. The governors really needed the cooperation of the assemblies, and the assemblies got more and more experience fighting back. In particular, for example, some of the assemblies would appropriate money in a very specific way so that the appropriation only applied to one person. So, in effect, the assemblies were appropriating for themselves the power to make appointments. And if the governor didn't like it, it was hard for the – he needed it. So by the time you get to the mid-18th century and parliament starts to assert its authority over the colonies, especially for taxation, the colonies had had a lot of experience dealing with somebody else who's trying to tell them what to do. They weren't new off the block and likely to be intimidated. They were and they were very, you know, determined to hold on to the prerogatives that they had been accustomed to. Does that strike you as odd or not odd but a little exceptional in the sense that the kind of taxation that was put on the American people in the early 1760s at the Stamp Act and things like this trying to pay for those seven years war, which had been an incredible cost. And the colonies had paid almost nothing to account for the huge debt that they ran up fighting that war. And then they try to put this little tax on there. And there's this massive revolt to the point of burning people in effigy and literally tearing down tax collectors' houses piece by piece by angry mobs in pretty much every single colony. And that strikes me as amazing that that little tax could engender that level of widespread popular revolt. Have we ever seen anything like that in any other British town in the mainland, in the homeland? Or was this just incredibly unique? Well, you think about India. That's much later and about other things as well. But the issue of taxation, it involved the underlying issue of sovereignty. I mean, that's what really happened when parliament started to be interfering more with the American colonies in the mid 1700s. The colonists, especially those involved in the self-government, they were accustomed to making their own decisions. So it wasn't just taxes. Ultimately, they're saying, you know what, they're trying to move in a direction to take over what we had been doing. So it was a broader issue of sovereignty. And they were saying, you know, how much? And they're raising the whole issue. There actually wasn't an established British policy toward the colonies. So there were people in the colonies in the mid... Just kind of ad hoc, you mean? It was ad hoc. Yeah. There was no British pop. There was one doctrine that the king was the supreme authority over all the colonies, everywhere, in India and everywhere else. But there wasn't a government agency. There wasn't particular laws of parliament. And they said, you know what, we've been doing all this. They're trying to encroach. So it started on taxes that sound hard for us to understand today. After they weren't paying anything, they were beginning some protection from the French. So there are underlying issues and they became a bigger deal here. They may not have been such a big deal elsewhere. Let me ask about other colonies. Because it's not like... I mean, America is not the only colony that's existed. A lot of the examples, the reasons that we've given that kind of created this air of liberty in the United States, the people who were somewhat independent were the ones who were coming over and settling, people who wanted to get away from, say, religious oppression, came over and settled. All of these things would seem to apply to other colonies from other countries around the world. I mean, even if a country doesn't have as much of a culture of checks on government that, say, England had, it's still the self-selection of the people who choose to pack up and go across the world. It's still going to lead to probably more independent people than less independent people. So again, why did we only see this really happen in this particular colony as opposed to all the other colonies throughout human history where a lot of these same kind of selection processes appear to be at least to a great extent still at work? Well, in part, you have a number of extraordinary individuals. So you could call that a lucky break. As I think we've suggested, you need a culture of individualism and self-reliance. And nobody did more to promote that than Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia. Just to take one small corner of his career, you know, he started the First Police Department, the First Volunteer Fire Department, the First Fire Insurance Company, the First Public Library, the First Hospital, the First Scientific Society, the Academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. All of this stuff, and he had his Junto group of local craftsmen, and they debated public issues and discussed what to do when an issue came up in Philadelphia. He also had established a network of printing partnerships throughout the colony. So there was communication between, you know, with what people were doing in different places. Before, we had the committees of correspondence as you approached the revolutionary period. And, you know, take the committees of correspondence. Do you have any idea how many people were involved in that? It was about 9,000 people. Can you imagine? You'd think, well, somebody's writing a letter in Boston to inform them of, you know, something in Charlotte, Virginia. No, it's a lot of people are involved. And you also had, by the mid-1700s, you had freedom of the press, effective freedom of the press in America, which you did not have in England, because you had pre-licensing requirements in England for a lot of the time. You also had seditious libel laws that basically discouraged anybody from printing, or they would be subject to ruinous penalties. We got beyond that in America, and you had a tremendous burst of publications in the mid-1700s. You had pamphlets, you had broadsides, you had books, you had all kinds of things. Thomas Paine, of course, wrote the bestsellers. Common Sense, which convinced most colonists to support revolution. Would you say most, or would you say most colonists? That it convinced most colonists to support the revolution? Well, let's call it the effective majority. It's the effective majority, but there's always been dispute about how many people actually support it. Yeah, we don't really know, but a lot, yes. Yeah, we can say it was a substantial number, and we can also say later on, some of the, during the Revolutionary War, that the British generals, especially in the south, were expecting critical support to come from loyalists, and they didn't get it. Now, who knows where these people were? Were they intimidated? I doubt it, because in the south, you know, you didn't have the kind of uprisings that came immediately that Sam Adams started in Boston and spread elsewhere. When the time came for revolution, there weren't many Americans who had combat experience, who had command experience, and so we were very fortunate to have George Washington. Now, he was not a great strategist, but he was capable of learning from his mistakes. He would listen to the advice of junior officers. A lot of officers wouldn't do that. And of course, you had his rather massive integrity. He didn't take any pay, although as you may know, he had his expense account. There was a book done about George Washington's expense account, but his biggest accomplishment, I think, was he was able to hold the army together. Nobody else could have held the army together when they're not being paid. They're getting wretchedly supplied. There are periodic talks of mutiny. The desertion rates were high. The re-enlistment rates were low, because after all, all the guys were farmers. And they couldn't afford to leave their farm for months or years at a time, so it was extremely difficult to hold the army together. And that was the only thing that mattered militarily, as long as he stayed out of a battle where he would be wiped out. If he could hold the army together, then he could fight another day when circumstances were more favorable. Now, would you say that the revolution, sometimes this is a contentious statement, and I think historians fall on different lines, but could it be classified as an attempt to reinvigorate or reclaim the rights of British, their rights as British citizens? I mean, they were going for the rights that they had as British citizens, that they were being denied, and they were fighting for those. Yeah, well, that's a very confused area. On the one hand, they're colonists, and as I said, there was a presumption that the colonies have to obey the crown, but they were Englishmen too, most of them, and so that was one of the things that got resolved. It was a confusing issue. The colonies clearly needed financial help. So, again, we tapped Franklin. Franklin, as we know, became famous for his scientific experiments involving lightning, and he was viewed as a savior, as the man who ended terror of thunderstorms in Europe. So, he goes to France to be the American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI, and his job is to try to get money from the French. Their bet is that even though France is a monarchy and they're trying to rebel against a monarch, still, the major thing was, the Monet deal, because the monarchies viewed colonies as an asset, and maybe they could pull loose England's asset, so you had the hated rivalry between France. Anyway, so Franklin was a very effective ambassador, and he had help from Lafayette. So, we get another guy who came in there, and Lafayette was an extraordinary character himself, and he in Washington had a very poignant correspondence. And he was over, he was from a very politically connected family, so he's talking with royalty about helping the United States, but that's not enough. It's not enough to get the money. The French still hold back, but they've got the basis for a relationship. France didn't move over and provide help until October of 1777, so it turned out that another person we needed was Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, a future trader, because at Saratoga they defeated a much larger army of John Burgoyne, Gates outmaneuvered Burgoyne, and as things were falling apart at one point, Benedict Arnold rode as Washington did, right through the front lines, telling the people, do not retreat, and keep going and charge over there, and so on. That made a big difference. So, the news got back to Europe that the Americans had finally won a pitched battle against Great Britain, and at that point the money started flowing. Because the French didn't want to back a loser. So that got the money going. That was a huge thing. It turned out to be several thousand troops, the fleet of ships, but it was still not enough because when the Battle of Yorktown was the maneuvers toward the Battle of Yorktown, the French had the troops, they had the fleet. But Washington's army, which was near New York, Washington had been parked out of New York, which is where the British had gotten tired of chasing Washington around the colonies because all he would do would be to retreat until the circumstances were favorable. But the British got tired of chasing him, so he sat there. He couldn't move. The men wouldn't march without silver, and they didn't have any flour. They didn't have anything else to walk down several hundred miles. There was no way of getting transported by water. So, we also needed Robert Morris. Robert Morris was a British-born entrepreneur. He came here penniless, Philadelphia, and he developed a merchant network throughout Europe. He could find flour and bullets, clothing, whatever. He could find it, and he could get it shipped. So, Washington was humbled by Rochambeau, who had twice as many soldiers. Rochambeau was horrified to see how poorly, how could these people, a lot of them, don't have shoes? How are they going to march? How are they going to hold up? So, Morris came in, and basically he paid for the American cost of the Battle of Yorktown on the extension of his personal credit. He didn't have any assets left because he'd been buying all this stuff, but at some point, I hope, presumed he would have assets. Everybody was betting on his personal assurance that the money would be repaid. Congress didn't have any money. The problem we had there was the Continental Congress did not have the power to tax, and the voluntary contributions were seldom forthcoming, and other sources just weren't enough. So, there's Morris, and he makes a deal that gets the silver, and he gets the flour, and he gets the blankets. So, now Washington can march. So, Washington and Lafayette at the base of Yorktown, and Rochambeau's men, and then there's a race to see who gets to Chesapeake Bay, because the British heard about this, and they sent a fleet down. Thomas Graves and Degrasse, the French commander, got there first, so there's some luck, and beat off Graves, so he had to retreat, and you had the clothes there. So, can we find – we need happy circumstances, of course. Yeah, let me ask about this, because this is what I'm thinking. Well, there's more. But as far as, I mean, the kind of story that you're telling of, you know, we wouldn't have made it, but we needed this, and then somehow through luck or whatever else we got that, but then it could have stalled here, but then we got lucky. It reminds me – our colleague John Mueller has an argument he makes about the threat of, say, terrorists getting their hands on an atomic bomb, and should we be scared of a suitcase nuke going off in New York City kind of question? And the way he answers that is by saying, look, in order to get from someone wanting to blow up New York City to someone blowing up New York City with a nuke, there's these series of steps that they have to go through. They have to complete each one successfully, and if any given step fails, they're done. And we can assign like a probability of failure to each of these steps, and each step seems like more improbable than the last. And so the result is that the actual likelihood of someone getting all the way through from wanting a nuke to setting one off is astronomically tiny, to the point where it's just probably not going to happen, and we shouldn't be scared about it. So that seems to be the kind of story that you're telling right now is that this question of how did liberty – how did we get to this United States that is by no means perfect and stomps on liberty in all sorts of ways, but on the whole and compared to the alternatives that we see out there looks fairly good. How did we get to that from our humble beginnings? It seems like your answer is a whole lot of luck, like an almost unbelievable amount of luck. And so what I want to ask is, is that true? Is that what liberty's flourishing was dependent on? Was basically an extraordinary amount of luck, and if that's true, that seems kind of depressing as far as bringing liberty flourishing in the rest of the world because the chances of any one of these steps failing was pretty good. And so the chances of this experience being repeated is vanishingly small. Am I reading this correctly? No, that's right. That's right. If I could finish the couple of points about Washington, which is even more dramatic, you can keep in mind that during the Revolution, Washington was many – he would commonly ride his fabled white horse back and forth across the lines. A number of horses got shot out from under him. Bullets went through his clothing. Yeah, that happened in the Braddock engagement. Well, yes, during the Seven Years' War. So Washington, who could have been shot, any point along the way? I mean, that's the most extreme case of luck. And then you consider that after the war, the so-called Newburgh conspiracy, the officers who had not been paid were meeting in Newburgh, New York to figure out how can we get paid? Do we charge? Do we take over Philadelphia? Do we take over New York? Do we invade the Congress? What are we – I mean, they don't have any money, so how are we going to get paid? But they were really playing a basic cue. They were in a mutinous mood. Washington heard about that. And he went in there and he said, you know, I've been through everything that you've been through. And if you do this, you're just going to completely destroy what you fought for. And then he brought out his glasses. And nobody had seen him with glasses before. And suddenly he looked very frail. And he gave this heartfelt talk. He said something like, forgive me, gentlemen, I have not only grown old in your service, but my eyesight has also failed me. You are right. And that was it. Now, you get to the next couple points. Washington, he kept us out of the war with the French, you know, after the French Revolution as president. And that could have undone everything, since war is the most costly, destructive, unpredictable thing there is. That could have done us in. And then, of course, there's Washington who only serves two terms. Well, if he had taken a third term, he would have died in the middle of it, which would have established a precedent for a president for life. So you ask, can you name another military commander who could have seized power and did not? Well, you have to go back to Cincinnati, maybe, in the Roman Republic. But, you know, you look at Simon de Boulevard, Spanish independence from Spain. Well, at one point there, he demanded absolute power and he got it. And it's easy to come up with a long list of Chiang Kai-shek and Chairman Mao and Franco and Pinochet and so on and so on. You can easily come back, going back to Napoleon and Cromwell and so on and so on. It's very easy to name people who, military commanders who were politically ambitious. It's hard to name another one. He could have gotten shot, so yeah. And that would have, things would have had, I mean, I don't want to suggest that luck is everything, it clearly is not. But, at the same time, there are a lot of lucky breaks and it is also true that liberty has proven to be very rare and if you go out in any part of the world and you say, I'd like to start a free society here, Well, you have a lot of problems and a lot of people aren't going to. When the Declaration of Independence was translated, it had a, you know, after the Declaration of Independence was issued, it was slowly translated over a period of decades. A Chinese version didn't get published till around 1900. The Spanish translation was maybe 1860s because the governments were monarchies and they didn't want anything like this getting in the country. And when it was translated into some of these languages, they didn't have words for all the meanings, the words for liberty, for a lot of things they didn't have words for. There's no cultural relations, so. We skipped over something, the Declaration of Independence, we went to Washington's presidency but they got this Constitution in the middle, this sort of amazing event where 50-ish people get into a hot courthouse or state building for four months and debate political philosophy and create a constitution. Is there anything that you think uniquely made that a possible event, any people, any ideas that were made that more possible here than other places? Well, you had Madison who was certainly the greatest. He had spent the most time studying previous experience with constitutions and the general finding was that it can work in a small place, but it's never worked in a big place. And so he was the major scholar, the major source of certainly initial input. But, you know, he recommended the Virginia plan that favored the big states so there was a big tussle and the solution, you know, have one house or two houses that were going to favor big states. That wasn't what he came up with and that was true with a number of other things, what he wanted didn't come out. So he did compromise with the anti-federalists and agreed to carry the water for the Bill of Rights after the election of the first Congress. So, you know, he was the greatest source of input. Prior to Madison you looked to Montesquieu. Well, Montesquieu really had a lot of, you know, short notes. He didn't have any great scheme and there were a lot of problems that had to be worked out. So I think the major thing about the Constitution, one of the major things about the Constitutional Convention was their willingness to compromise. In a lot of places, you know, you get factions that are completely, they have hostile aims, there's nothing and you end up with a civil war. You had Franklin who was counseling, you know, this is probably the best we're going to get. Let's go with it rather than fight, you know, get dug in and fight. So you had people who had a high level of common devotion even though they were fighting bitterly over a lot of things, but they were able to work together. You had Jefferson counseling him, you know, Jefferson liked a lot of the things that Madison had done. So it's a combination of knowledge and trying to get something that everybody could agree on before they get at each other's throats. And in so many other countries, you know, what do we see going on in the Middle East? It's our house or, you know, it's our way or the highway and that's it. And the next thing is they pick up weapons. So it's hard to make, to arrive at agreements that don't completely, you know, subvert your values. Let me ask about another improbability and something I've often kind of wondered about, which is so we have in American popular mythology, right? We have this notion that the brilliance of the founding fathers, that these men were just extraordinarily brilliant people by historical standards. And arguably, you know, the greatest group of minds existing in a single place since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Athens. Is that true? Like do we overestimate the brilliance of these men or were we really somehow blessed to have this grouping of some of the most extraordinary minds in human history all kind of together in one spot to put this thing together? Well, as I think I suggested earlier, you need, it may be true that they were the most brilliant group. There certainly you have some extraordinary strengths in different places. So together they have a lot of the talent you needed. If they're all, you know, one sort of experience that none of them had business experience or anything else, that would have been a problem. But the great, you also needed support from large numbers of residents. If they were, I mean, any group of brilliant people, you know, can get together around a table, but then what happens? They can't force it on if the population doesn't want it, populations never heard of it. They're not accustomed to doing things on their own, and you're going to come along and tell them that they have individual responsibility and they don't know what you're talking about. It's a different culture than they wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. So you really need all of these different things happening in one place. The short answer to another question, what does it take to sustain a free society, as I'd say the specific answer, is you need a lot, all these different things, and they have to be there in one place. And support, and that's the interesting thing too. There wasn't just four months of the elite, of the elite of the continent debating in Philadelphia. It was then another two years of ratifying conventions and debates amongst the public. And you had already had all of these things published for 50 or 60 years. You mean like Montesquieu and stuff like that. Right. Going back before Montesquieu, they all knew about Cato's letters and John Locke and Algin's in Sydney, especially because of Sidney's martyrdom. You needed all these things coming together in one place. And if you take the situation today, what do we have to do today to get a freer society? Well, it's obviously not enough to control one house of Congress. It's not enough to control both houses of Congress. It's not enough for the presidency or the governorships. You need the culture to be behind you. It's very hard. That's going to be a big negative if you're constantly going against the culture that supports terrible things. You need to go through the thicket of laws that have gone in another direction. You've got a lot of things that have gone wrong, and the more it goes on, the harder it is to deal with. Before we get to that present day, one other question about the sort of constitutional area. If you had hazard a comparison to France, just two years after the Constitution, we have the French Revolution, which at that time was very influenced by the American Revolution and American statesmen such as Jefferson, and everyone was watching it with interest. It didn't seem to work out there in the way that it worked out here. It was just a lack of these confluence of events. Or was there sort of a different attitude behind the French Revolution, do you think? Well, that's true, but in France you also had an established noble classes. You had aristocratic order, you had land holding, feudal land holding that carried through largely into the modern period. So in France the question was how do you establish a new society which nobody knew much about, the population that was supposed to benefit, the population whose name the revolution was going on. They didn't know what they were talking about. There was a small group of philosophs who were going for several decades, but you've got all of these noble orders who were not interested in having their privileges torn down. And they tried to tear down all the privileges, much more like the Russian Revolution. They tried to do all of it quickly and you had, before you could get one more step, you had to deal with all these people. So they're all resisting, they're all against you. The question of course that remains about, France didn't do it very well, America seemed to do it pretty well, but the big question that of course has to be asked is slavery. It may be to some people absolutely farcical to talk about American tradition of liberty when we put in more people into chains for a very long period of time in half the country. How does that play into the story? Well, I should have mentioned Jefferson. I certainly would mention Jefferson for articulating the principles of natural rights, which in fact became the argument used by American abolitionists against slavery. Natural rights is an argument you can use when you can't make a legal case. So William Lloyd Garrison had discovered that he could not make a legal case because the Constitution was implicated in the support of slavery, especially the Fugitive Slave Laws. And so although he despised Jefferson, he went around quoting the Declaration of Independence. And similarly, so that became the doctrine of emancipation that was provided by, you know, in the founding document. Similarly in 1848 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted to start a movement to achieve equal rights for women, what does she draw on? The Declaration of Rights and Settlements is almost a word for word. It's a paraphrase, it's a substantial paraphrase of applying equal rights to women. That becomes the founding document. And then you go another century beyond the Martin Luther King fighting compulsory racial segregation. What does he go around quoting? He goes around most famously in the, you know, in his... I have a dream speech. I have a dream speech. Yeah, he's quoting Declaration of Independence. Again, he couldn't make a legal argument because that was all enforced by state laws. So that's what he ends up doing. That's the function of national rights that would perform the same function in Nazi Germany or any other place where it was applied. Otherwise, if you're not accepting national rights then you're embracing whatever the law says but in a lot of cases that's unfavorable. So in any case, getting back to your question, the founding provided the solution, provided the doctrine that became the basis of the solution. It was a little different in England. They didn't rely on natural rights so much. Natural rights was really implicit in the first abolitionist movement that began in England and was associated with Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. Did they provide the solution though or did they provide the cauldron for an insanely bloody and drawn-out war? Well, personally, I think it would have been... Personally, I think it would have probably been better. We can't say for sure because we're dealing in hypotheticals. I think it probably would have been a better solution. This is really a whole other thing. A better solution if we had let the South secede. I think it is... The short answer as well would that have been... You're saying slavery could go on. My guess is slavery would have gone on for several decades but I think we probably... I think you're going to make a case that we would have gotten to equal civil rights in less than 100 years which is how long it ended up taking. I think the danger was... What happened during the Civil War was that the military strategy, military solution, you might say... I mean, it was not intended. That's the way it worked out. The South gets crushed and the former slaveholders... Well, first I'll say the former slaveholders had often been cruel but they hadn't killed their slaves because they invested money to buy the slaves. So there was a constraint. After the war they lose everything. They lose their slaves, they lose their plantations. So now they're motivated to avenge their suffering including their losses. So now they support the KKK and they kill the blacks. That makes them feel good actually because now they're getting even. They've already lost it. And so now you have another 100 years because it seemed like force and violence was a shortcut. It turns out to be more complicated than that. And I think, OK, if you want to go even into more specifics, what would have happened specifically if we had let the South secede? I think it's, first of all, any runaway slaves to be safe, crossing the North-South line was not enough. They had to get to Canada and the winter was the easiest time to escape but the hardest to survive because they didn't have winter clothing but they didn't have the guards posted the way they did anyway. So in the Union, slave hunters, slave catchers, they went up to Boston and New York and they pointed to somebody and say, he belongs to my, you know, I'm working, I'm an Asian, I'm a slave hunter working for so-and-so in Maryland. They take him. But if the South had been allowed to secede, I expect you might have gotten a nationalist reaction. The Northerners are saying, you rejected our constitution. You rejected the Union. You're not going to come up here and send slave hunters and kept peaceable citizens off the streets. Canadians don't allow us to go up and do what we want to their people, drag them away. You know, you're not going to be coming here. So in fact, I think it would have been, all the runaways would have to do would be to cross the North-South line. Now, the trend at that time was for slave holders in the border states to sell off more and more of their slaves before they run away. If they sell them off, they get something. If they run away, they get nothing. So while they still have control, sell them. Sell them was into the deep South. Now, the population in the South, the population of blacks was very high. I believe that whites were certainly the slave holders. There's only a small percentage of white people who own slaves. Whether it was a quarter, I forget what it was. But anyway, the population of slaves was large enough that a slave revolt was becoming a real risk. Now, fewer and fewer people in the border states had a stake in slavery. They got out while they could simply to recapture whatever they invested in them. So I think it would have been an unstable situation to consider the border between East and West Germany. So I think it would have deteriorated. Meanwhile, after 1860, there are only two other slave societies in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba, which goes out in the 1880s. Brazil. Brazil that goes out in 1888. And then if you look at the last Western controlled slave society, which was the Belgian Congo. And I forget when that was started. I would guess 1880s. Anyway, when King Leopold started it, opinion was very much against slavery, certainly in Europe. And so he found it necessary to maintain secrecy. He did not permit outsiders to go in. Some got in and they were either shot or escorted out. He did a lot of public works, sculptures, and fountains and such in Belgium so that if word ever did get out, he would be viewed as a public benefactor. So how could those accusations possibly be true? And what finally ended the slave society in the Belgian Congo were four guys. And it's been a while since I've looked at this, so I would have to check their names. But you had an English shipping clerk and you had an Irish diplomat and you had an African-American journalist and an African-American missionary. That was it. Those four people. The shipping clerk was in a position to see ships coming back from Africa. And he noticed that the ships coming back from the Belgian Congo, they were loaded with rubber. And then they went back empty. And he was asking himself, in what circumstances are you going to have a boat? It costs money. You know, these are steam ships, so they have energy. Why is it going back empty? The people who produce the rubber, they're not buying anything? And of course, then it occurred to him. The answer could be the only explanation that applied was slavery. And so anyway, the shipping clerk got together with the diplomat, Casement, I think was the diplomat's name. And then you have to plug in the names of... You had a Polish novelist, Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, was his novel written about. And what they did after 1900, or a few years after 1900, was the same kind of movement that had occurred a century earlier by Wilberforce and Buxton and Clarkson and those people in England going after the first the slave trade. And they thought abolishing the slave trade would take... Slavery would dry up because the U.S. was the only place for the slave population increase naturally, everywhere else because of the harshness of the climate. If you didn't get refreshing numbers of slaves coming in, then the population goes down and eventually it's out. Anyway, so they did the same mass movement of rallies and slave equipment used for slave control and torture. And... So it seems like it would have gone away, but not with 500,000 people dying in a war, which is what the... 750, 725. 725. Yeah, there was a revision about five years ago. Don't ask me what it was based on. Maybe civilian casualties. Right, right. So, well, I think it's much better if you can avoid the war because, you know, when you push people around, you're going to get pushed back. So we ended up with 100 years, was the time that had to pass from the end of the Civil War. But you look what happened in the reconstruction period, the Republicans in the 1776, you had the contested election, and the troops were being taken out of the south already. And they just agreed to take the rest of them out. They're being taken out because of dealing with Indians and other things. In the 1776 contested election, the Republicans and the Democrats made a deal. The Republicans got their guy, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the White House in exchange. Republicans agreed to pull out remaining troops in the south, let the Democrats do whatever they want. I think a major insight there is that... is that nobody can be counted on to protect the former slaves if the former slave holders are motivated by revenge. I wanted to close our conversation by asking about the future. Given this story that you've told and given the enormous role that luck and circumstance played in it, are you optimistic about the prospects for liberty going forward? And if you are, are there places around the world where you see at least some of these ingredients where we might expect or hope to see a flourishing of liberty? Well, there are a lot of places that have some of the elements needed to sustain a free society in terms of optimism or pessimism. As I suggested earlier, I believe there are many things that are needed to sustain a free society and we need all of them and almost all of them are under assault and they are all essential because they don't all work all the time. So I probably evade the question about optimism or pessimism. There are many things to be optimistic about and rather than be pessimistic, I would say that there are some of those things that if they're going to change, they're going to take a long time. Are you worried that the culture of liberty in America is not as strong as it once was? Of course it's not as strong. And there's no easy answer. There's nothing any of us can do. I mean, there are a lot of things we can do but we have no control. Ultimately, do other people are going to start making movies or thrillers or getting into the popular culture, television shows with liberty as themes? That can certainly happen but it's a long process. So I would say rather than say, well, it's all pessimism and the bag it and go to the beach, I think many of us are going to try to do what we can and those of us, there are a lot of different talents that are needed and if somebody thinks they can write a thriller, well, that's good. There are some thrillers that have libertarian themes. I think it's very exciting that there are a few people who are starting to make documentaries and get theatrical distribution. So there are a lot of things that need, before you even talk about Washington, but clearly it's not enough to elect people on various levels. You need that to happen otherwise you don't get any laws passed to undo previous laws but there are a lot of things that need to be done. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.