 Okay thank you everyone for attending so I want to thank everyone for making it this far in Mises Hue so it's Wednesday you're at the halfway point so this is now when all of the lectures will become good and challenging. So I'm here to talk about a project I've been working on for a long time and it's a great honor that I've been involved in the project and it is conceived in the Liberty Volume 5 the New Republic 1784 to 1791 okay so this is another book by I should have put Murray Rothbard there is another book by Murray Rothbard that I'll be talking about so we'll really be discussing in this presentation two things so it's talking about the Conceived in Liberty series as a whole which was one of the many projects Murray Rothbard worked on his series on early American history and we'll talk about how it initially grew out of his American history project and how it's something that he's working on throughout most of his career and then I'll be going through the overview of the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty which is the New Republic and this primarily deals with the US Constitution okay so we talked about the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debates over the over the Constitution as well as the significance of the US Constitution. So this means it's you with Judge Napolitano's classes on the Constitution out this this will be a very Constitution heavy means it's you. So when I go through the overview of the fifth volume I'm gonna try and you know I won't be able to go through everything you'll only be able to touch the main points and I'm gonna try and do a good enough job that you're interested enough to buy the book if I explain it too well then you're gonna say oh I don't need to buy the book because he does everything he talks about everything in the presentation. So here I'd said to be just mediocre enough basically to sort of weigh your appetite and I think I'm perfectly suited for the task. All right so you know another Rothbard book yes Rothbard in all of his Conceived in Liberty books and his prefaces he started off with he says what another American history book the reader may be pardoned for the seemingly inexhaustible supply of history books and this you'd say another Murray Rothbard book the reader may be you know may be pardoned pardoned for wondering you know how there's another Rothbard book he's been dead and they keep coming out but yes I'm here to tell you that there is another Rothbard book and is another completed Rothbard book. So here is the Conceived in Liberty series as a whole volumes one through four which formed the original series came out in the 1970s around the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence volumes one and two mainly discussed the history of America up to about 1750 the French and Indian War around that time period volumes three to four talk about the the path to the revolution the American Revolutionary War as well as the American Revolutionary War itself and then volume five which we'll be discussing the most today goes through after so if you've you'll notice here the last volume was published in 1979 and the fifth volume is published will be published in 2019 so you know tried to make it so you get the 40 year anniversary basically of the fourth volume so never say never basically so you know it came out there will come out all right so let's talk about the history of Rothbard's history of the United States so what's quite remarkable about about the Conceived in Liberty series is that if you ask someone or whether a prominent academic do in their life and they say oh so and so wrote a five volume series on early American history okay and then you put a period there and then like maybe they did some book reviews a couple you know papers here and there but that's you know that's an incredible accomplishment you know that's the CV basically they wrote a five volume series on early American history for Rothbard in a sense that you could you could have an entire discussion about all of his accomplishments and then you could say oh yeah he also wrote a five volume series on early American history and then someone goes wait what and then you say oh yeah this series is it was about 1800 pages you know it was five volumes it was it was a little thing there and you go like excuse me and yeah you know it's incredible that this was just one of the major projects of his life he was that talented of a you know that prolific of an author that I mean this was literally just just one side you know pursuit that he poured his energy in so in the 1950s he was as we all as hopefully we all know he was working on man economy and state with power and market in then America's Great Depression these two works came out in the 19 early 1960s so in the 1950s he worked a lot on economic theory and then he says all right I'm going to switch a little bit in the 1960s you know just a little bit he's gonna switch to a whole new field of American history something that on you know it's something he's also very well trained in he got his PhD from Columbia University and he wrote a book his dissertation The Panic of 1819 which is still very well cited today okay it's hard enough to get someone to read you know my dissertation that came out like four years ago but you can still look at American history books and Murray Rothbard's Panic of 1819 is still referenced so in the 1960s Rothbard started to work on a American history project I had a research grant sort of from the mid 1960s and initially he thought I was gonna be you know one volume history then it kind of said all right the plan is for two to three volumes and he sort of broke it up into phases so the first phase he said all right I'm gonna work on early American history so 1600 do about 1789 it'll take about one and a half years phase two the 1800s he said about two years then he said phase three the 1900s up to the present day back then circa 1960 about 1.5 years okay so this is the original outline so much like he would sort of have a huge treatise on economic theory man economy and state he would similarly have a huge treatise on American history okay so the main another major point of this book was that it would be specifically from a libertarian perspective okay and in one of his memos that he wrote and I think this is very important he said you know why was such a libertarian American history book needed and I think it's still true today so he wrote this in 1962 and still decades later his words you know that they still resonate so he said there is perhaps no greater single influence in forming the American mind than its view of American history while economics for example is almost completely confined to specialists into a narrow market at best works on history and especially history of the United States have a far wider and broader market the student and adult American are then shaped by one the textbooks used in the scholastic courses in two general interpretative works on American history read by adult layman and by professional historians as well so what is he saying here he's basically saying that your average person if you want to spread the libertarian message your average person is going to be most convinced by reading some sort of history historical work okay and I know this from my my own perspectives I'm sure many of you do as well when I first got involved in Austrian economics and libertarianism the work that I devoured the quickest was alright refuting the common perceptions on the Great Depression the Industrial Revolution the Civil War various sorts of events that again we already have background knowledge in most people take an American history course if you if you go to you know in high school in America people have read history they find it more interesting it's less technical etc so I think this is it's still true that you need this because if you want to spread it you still want to have the overarching sort of libertarian history I know the reason he doesn't say specifically here but this is even more true today is he said that well American history books are generally biased in a status direction so they're predominantly liberal in the modern usage of the term as well as he says sometimes there's conservative which really more of like a neo conservative that every war we've ever fought has been great and we always need to fight it and so on and so forth and maybe some tax cuts here and there were all good but aside from that you know that's the general perspectives you see and that's increasingly become true now so sort of go on by the end of 1966 Rothbard had only phase one completed so he had typed drafts of volumes one to four in a handwritten draft of volume five okay so this is the phase one was really what became the five volume conceived in Liberty series and the reasons why he had that I mean it's incredible within five years you know on top of everything other things that projects he's working on he comes out with literally about 1800 pages of material main reason is that there were problems with typing the manuscript so he initially would hand write the manuscript then he would dictate it into a recording machine and then Joey his wife would help him type it out and he also wanted to devote more time to phase one he said that there's you know a lot of pride you know a lot of things that have gone on mention unnoticed things like tax rebellions all sorts of other events people who are more libertarian than common historians have have characterized them etc so he says you know I've had to devote more time to this and rightfully so in my opinion so he you know he wanted to spend more and more time and this is a sort of a familiar occurrence with Rothbard's projects so man economy in state started out as a textbook on human action okay that was the initial plan it became this this massive treatise conceived in Liberty been talking about this story he was talking about the progressive era he became much longer than he initially envisioned his history of economic thought I mean he was just someone who is so prolific and so intelligent that you know once you got him to write on something he would you know he would just keep keep on writing basically he's like the energizer bunny in other words you know you just keep going in Rothbard actually started research on phase two on the 1800s but he basically had to stop he even presented it some of his findings at a conference with Joseph Dorfman the research grant ran out and he wanted to we had to get a job at Brooklyn Polytechnic so he became a professor so this is sort of the the general kind of evolution of the project and this is kind of getting to a major question I'm sure many of you have in your mind is saying okay so why exactly was the fifth volume never published you know why is it taking 40 years for it to to come out so this is Rothbard he's discussing this more in a 1972 new banner interview he's talking about a lot of the projects he has so he's discussing for new liberty he says I've got betrayal of the American right I'm working on ethics of liberty and now he says are you talking about his American history project he says in that I've written up to the Constitution it will be a history of the United States from a libertarian point of view it is very difficult to write that because the thing is we don't know what has happened a lot of the facts have been buried orthodox histories don't give many facts a lot of facts are just left out the manuscript could be used as a textbook I hope you know man economy in state was originally supposed to be a textbook and round up and wound up as a giant treatise I think this might be the same thing okay and that in truth be told that is that is what it became it became a massive treatise on early American history okay so always remember to save your work especially nowadays so Arlington House published volumes one through four in time for the bicentennial and what would happen is so Rothbard had those typed out and he would edit them but to make a long story short the discs for volume five were ruined the recording machine so it was broke so only about 60 pages were typed out and instead you had 500 pages of a handwritten manuscript okay so you have about 60 pages and you say okay this is good and then all the sudden as you'll see as it'll show you have his hand written pages and this is in Rothbard's own words in an interview in 1991 he says volume five on the Constitution was written in longhand and no one can read my handwriting and he is certainly not lying when he says that he says no one can read my handwriting and he sort of has a statement you wonder like oh you're kind of being hard on yourself like you know don't don't say that you know but yeah no you know so you know you have this and you know this is the picture you have and this is so you can kind of see you know we have we have to be a little bit far out but so one it was written in cursive so it almost looks like the handwriting from the fact you know from the founding fathers you know it's like he's writing the Declaration of Independence part two and he's going on and even Thomas Jefferson to be like how do you read this and you know he's got things crossed out he's got he's got arrows and he's got you know he's got footnote or paragraph and he writes things he writes his ands with pluses and you know everyone you know that that's normal and then you know he's got he's got citations and so basically that was kind of what was there and so most people would say who want to start this project would say I'll pass you know maybe maybe later and so it took someone who had nothing else to do an enormous amount of time on their hand and really nothing else going on in their life to really set you know sit down and you know and work on the project and I'm not gonna you know that was me but so so last summer I decided to literally learn a new language Rothbardian and I'll be starting courses soon on that and you had to learn each word you had to translate it and the very beginning I was I was I was ready to throw in the towel it took about a day and I had two sentences down but then it you know it kind of picked up and you know you learn more and more and it was about a month and a half of really just concentrating and you know I was going to sleep and I was seeing his handwriting in my in my head I said I only got 150 pages left like okay you know we can do this Rocky style so there's more on the actual history of the project sort of going to this in a new issue of the Austrian I'm sure you know you can find it downstairs assuming the other fellows haven't thrown them all out by now we talk about the this project you're really just I'm happy to talk more about it but so that's that's the history of the project and that's the actual handwriting so it's about 600 pages of this okay so but it was great experience doing so all right so enough about the actual history of the project you know what's what's the book about so the book as as is other conceived in liberty of volumes is divided into parts and then there's subsections and so what this book as I've mentioned is about it's it's about the actual it's about a period in history that is actually very rarely spoken about or it's usually kind of rushed over so you say all right you had the Articles again Federation they were adopted in 1781 the Revolutionary War ended and then the great men at the American the Constitutional Convention 1787 Constitution George Washington's president 1789 and all right you know now we're off to the races sort of so the 1780s not really discussed that much in the Constitution its adoption is always portrayed as sort of this this great event this significant I mean rightfully significant but this this beneficial you know procedure in the whole the whole nine yards and so Rothbard spends a lot of time talking about things that you would never hear about in another American history book you know for examples will you know a briefly just sort of mention here he talks about how a bunch of states in the West tried to secede from the the the Articles Confederation and there was this forgotten state called Franklin that's a leader of the Sandwich didn't like North Carolina and you can find it on Google and you're like oh I didn't know about that you know there's a bunch of those kind of lurking in the mist but so part one and two he discussed this sort of the 1780s the economic environment and then the foreign policy under the Articles of Confederation he goes through that he explains how many of the problem all the problems were due to sort of government intervention and how things weren't as bad as they were actually portrayed and then part three is really where the narrative kind of picks off all right picks up and he discusses you know you see all the parts the Nationalist Triumph the Nationalist Triumph the Nationalist Triumph the Nationalist Triumph right so he goes through this this huge series of steps is how the supporters I'll be talking about the Nationalist a little bit more later on how the supporters of a stronger central government basically secured a plethora of extremely crucial victories so first they call a Constitution Convention all right they say they're gonna do something else they say they're gonna do it legally but you know they they lie basically they call a Constitution Convention you know it's in secret they draft this Constitution all right at the Constitution Convention all right then they got to ratify it again illegally as we'll talk about not by the normal procedure of the Articles Confederation and then they have to pass a Bill of Rights to sort of you know for the fears of those people who didn't want the Constitution they had to basically calm them down and as we'll talk about the Bill of Rights was actually very different than what many of the people who are later known as the Anti-Federalists wanted so that was even a victory for the the Nationalists okay so this is a sort of a brief overview and then we'll be kind of going through each part in more depth in more depth all right so the year was 1784 you know I remember it like it was yesterday right it was the end of the Revolutionary War so now we're gonna go through your elementary school history class you know really fast you know this this one bullet point the end of the Revolutionary War 1775 the 1783 and you know these these final three points Rothbard talks about in Conceding Liberty Volume 4 so you have these centralizing Articles Confederation enacted so as Judge Napolitano mentioned in his Monday night talk most people would say that the Articles Confederation wholly inadequate total chaos total decent totally decentralized was weak and only Rothbard the historian would call it the halfway house to a stronger government the Constitution so you know Rothbard spoke about how the Articles Confederation was a centralizing measure to actually straight you know it caused problems instead the the 13 colonies soon become 13 independent states should have remained just that independent or at least in separate confederacies then you have a failed power drive by Robert Morris so he was a major financier the guy in charge the treasure in charge of the Revolutionary War enormously influential to someone who I'm sure many of you are more familiar with and that's Alexander Hamilton and then you have the Treaty of Paris formalizes US independence in 1783 alright so here we are 1784 we were all caught up we you know we can now pass our AP US history course and all of that so the Confederation Congress it was called the Continental Congress before the Articles Confederation now it's called the Confederation Congress and the states have a huge wartime debt this is the central problem basically of the 1780s and it's increasingly held by wealthy speculators so why they have such a huge debt basically the United States or the colonies at least initially they made the choice to fight the war with a formal army rather than sort of guerrilla warfare and this is a very important point that Rothbard discusses in conceiving Liberty Volume 4 he says guerrilla warfare it's the more libertarian way of fighting you need a less regimented ossified beer cratic structure it's less expensive people know their own home territory and this was actually where all of the United States you know or the the Patriots basically victories came from it was mainly in guerrilla warfare you know ambushes etc not pitched battles and this is why he sort of looks downly upon George Washington because he wanted to fight all many of his battles sort of you know pitched battles and you know his most successful victory you know Trenton where he crosses the Delaware River Christmas Christmas night was precisely an ambush attack so it's not like hey we're gonna meet you at this you know this field five o'clock be there bring the drinks you know that you know how it was done back in the day so and this is this is discussed and usually when historians mention this they say oh you know this this debt they had to pay farmers and soldiers with you couldn't just you had to pay it off because it's held by the people who fought the war you know the poor farmers you know who gave their crops the soldiers etc but in reality as Rothbard mentions this is the point that isn't really properly emphasized is that it was all those people most of those people sold their securities at vastly you know depreciated rates to speculators they needed money now they couldn't wait ten years for the government to pay them off so it's held by wealthy speculators and also held increasingly in the north in particular so Rothbard solution basically you know you have this federal debt as well as the state debt you know you should have divided it up among the states and then let them default or repudiate however they felt so a decentralized method so default is when you just stop making some payments and repudiate is when you just totally cancel the contract you don't give them anything and this was something Rothbard would discuss multiple times that you know the debt you don't actually need to pay off government debt it's backed it's backed by basically a coercive means of payment right taxation so in terms of the massive federal debt we have now it would take so long it would take an enormous amount of tax revenue to actually pay it off the best way is basically to default or even better to repudiate the national debt so some states defaulted by printing money basically just paying creditors or the debt holders in depreciated money saying all right this is what you get take it or leave it with others raise taxes right in both of these cause problems of their own as I'll discuss so this is the year 1784 dot dot dot and well what we also have in 1784 is a depression okay so at the end of the Revolutionary War you have a war ravaged economy independence came at a very high price so you had hyperinflation printing the continental currency you had military confiscation of goods you had the British pillaging of infrastructure and supplies and you had the flight of loyalists in their capital okay so the loyalists were those colonists who said oh I want to stick with Great Britain so they leave to Canada to the British West Indies or back to Great Britain proper so you know you have that enormous shock and then after the war the US had to readjust to trading realities okay so during the war a whole bunch of artificial manufacturing was stimulated because basically they weren't allowed to trade legally with Great Britain anymore so after the war Great Britain is says all right well export our goods to you but they're still stuck in the in the thralls of a mercantilist fallacy but they say all right you're you're not allowed to export to us particularly the British West Indies all right so that naturally hurts us that's a negative government interference basically hampering our trading capabilities and now you also have efficient British manufactured goods out competing inefficient Americans right because all of these American manufacturing that was only basically profitable because it was the wartime economy all right so you have these massive trade adjustments that have to occur it's beneficial there's gonna be a process though and then you have sort of a brief boom bus credit expansion from the Bank of North America the Bank of Massachusetts in the Bank of New York that Rothbard discusses in all of these basically lead to a problem that many Americans thought there was a huge issue is this is chronic excess of imports okay and the really sort of the excess quote of imports came from all the negative government shocks that caused this and it led to sort of stagnation in the economy all right and this depression of course was aggravated by states printing money in raising taxes to pay off their debts okay so many states in particular Massachusetts drastically raised taxes okay which really hurt a lot of people who were you know they just suffered from under a you know the war economy as hard for them to pay off you know the the is hard for them to pay the taxes and then at the government was taking their goods throwing them in debtors prison in Shay's rebellion a very significant event that you so Daniel Shay's rebellion in Massachusetts a lot of it was a big big significant event behind the the articles you know scrapping the Articles in Federation moving the Constitution as Rothbard discusses mainly a tax revolt Massachusetts primarily put their taxes on the on the poor interior farmers okay so naturally they're going to revolt states also erected tariffs and navigation acts so navigation acts are various regulations on shipping but interstate competition made them very ineffective so the extent that point is ever spoken about in your an American history class you say oh all these states enacted all these barriers and those all sorts of problems because if you wanted to you know buy goods from Pennsylvania and you live in New Jersey you had to pay you know like a 90% tariff actually the tariff rates were quite low and that's simply because of competition all right if one state has high tariffs or strict navigation acts other states are sort of incentivized to undercut them all right so what you really need in order for tariffs in these types of regulations to work is you need a national tariff a national navigation act but the issue is that those failed under the Articles of Confederation because particularly to raise revenue that was the one one power the the Articles of Confederation did not have and everyone when you hear about them talk about they wail they complain they say the government did not have the power to raise revenue and Rothbard was like that's great okay because they can only rely on the states for voluntary requisitions and generally the states were parsimonious with those requisitions so if you separate the power of the purse from the power of the sword it's going to be it's actually a good mechanism so those failed and that was because primarily to get a tariff you need to have unanimity so every state legislature in order to pass a amendment to have a tariff had to agree to it and these two main drives basically one state state Rhode Island and then New York refused to pass it so even with all this the economy was not as bad as contemporaries argued and usually those contemporaries who argued that the economy is bad they were in favor of a stronger central government okay so they say oh it's chaotic we need a stronger central government we need to revise the articles because of all these problems that were going on in the Confederation Congress 1786 1787 they were about to throw in the towel on the debt so they were going to say all right we can't pay off the federal debt we're going to have to just divide it up amongst the states and then let them do as they please okay and with that happened that would have kind of meant the end in the sense that the Confederation would have been permanently weakened and it would have either remained in this weakened state or would have broken up into various confederacies and so on so by 1787 of course that's not the path that was taken and instead you have the nationalist forces are coalescing so the nationalists are those groups that they didn't want a confed a confederation of basically separate states where power is decentralized instead they wanted a nation where you have centralized power and the states are in a greatly weakened condition and you say all but emasculated basically so you have this group of people you have speculative public creditors they want the debt paid off okay they want the government to pay it off at its face value because they bought it at such a depreciated price they would stand to make a killing and that eventually happened under Alexander Hamilton's basically one of his first major policies as Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington you have ex-army officers they want a strong standing army okay because they wanted to be sort of hereditary they want to belong to this this this army interest group they can benefit from you have manufacturers who want a centralizing tariff to block out more efficient Europeans producers you have merchants who want a centralizing navigation act to block out European shippers you have land speculators who are who have you know have claims to land even though it's not really just claims they didn't really homestead it they want to prevent western secession various states and regions linked up with the Mississippi River might secede and sort of break off and join with Spain own the Mississippi River at that time you have Southerners who want to control the Spanish Mississippi River you have land speculators and northerners who want to control the British Northwest or at least get them to leave their forts you have southern slave owners who want to protect slavery and encourage the spread of slavery and you have commercial farmers who want an aggressive foreign policy in the west indies in Europe you have all these groups and who are they against they say we want to benefit at the expense of basically the poor interior farmer in the west which also just so happen to be the majority of the country all right so you say all right we want all these special privileges and of course they disagree amongst themselves but what's the one thing they agree on they say we want a stronger government so they're coalescing and they leave it up to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton James Madison Virginia Alexander Hamilton of New York so they go they go to work so to speak so they're very famous partners during this this process and then in the 1790s quite famously they they split so they're no longer besties basically they used to be great friends now you know now they don't even talk so they organize a all-state convention to revise the Articles of Confederation legally okay so what I mean by legally is that means you stick to revising the articles so you're not going to create a new government you stick with the actual government of the Articles of Confederation and then the revisions must be first approved by the Confederation Congress and then the state legislatures unanimously that's how if you want to actually bring about revisions in the Articles of Confederation that's the way you got to do it okay so that all-state convention is the Philadelphia Convention from May late May to September 1787 and it's dominated by nationalists so it's mainly in control of the people who want a stronger government there's only a couple of people who are actually would later be called anti-federalists they want to keep the Articles of Confederation or they want a you know only a some minor revisions so naturally if the conventions dominated by people who want stronger government what are you going to get you're going to get a stronger government so you have most of the prominent people in American history there though there are some notable absences John Adams is a way minister to England Thomas Jefferson minister to France Patrick Henry sort of the fiery virginian who said you know give me liberty or give me death he declined to attend because he said he smelt a rat and that turned out to be correct and you have you have some others but you have you have all the famous you have George Washington Alexander Hamilton James Madison Robert Morris Gouverneur Morris you have you know you have the whole cast of characters they're all there all the same people who are trying to push for a stronger government in the early 1780s during the Revolutionary War they're back for the party six years later so this is Rothbard's quote you know you could spend a whole lecture you can spend a whole week on the Constitutional Convention so he goes through the U.S. Constitution this is sort of a great summary and he says the Constitution was unquestionably a high nationalist document this is very important because we'll talk about later sort of common perceptions of the Constitution and then he goes through various things he says congressional selection of the president was changed to chosen by popular election all right actually to weaken the power of the states and indirectly the people admission of new states was made purely arbitrary okay this was to keep the eastern states in domination the amendment power was transferred from the states to the congress to basically keep the federal government in control of of amendments and then loopholes existed in the enumerated list so you see how oh the government we strictly enumerated powers and you go there all right so you go through some of these the national supremacy clause the dominance of the federal judiciary the virtually unlimited power to tax raise armies and navies make war and regulate commerce the necessary and proper clause the powerful general welfare loophole all allowed the virtually absolute supremacy of the central government okay so you have a lot of loopholes that in truth be told if you look at actually the progress of how more and more invasive features government intervention in American history were justified it was mainly through a lot of these clauses Rothbard continues and he says while libertarian restraints were placed on state powers which was good he said no bill of rights existed to check the federal government that was done on purpose because the nationalists were okay with restricting the powers of the states but not the power of the federal government and he says and quite crucially he says in slavery was cemented into American society by the nationalist 20 year guarantee of the slave trade in the three fifth clause representing slaves in congress and in the compulsory fugitive slave clause the northern nationalists were willing if shame facedly to agree in exchange for the right to regulate commerce and thus grant themselves commercial privileges while the southern nationalists were willing to concede regulation of commerce in confident expectation of an early slave state preponderance in congress for the south and southwest okay so the north wanted many of their mercantilist regulations the south one of those two but the south said okay we have to be able to protect slavery so if you didn't have the constitution you can imagine a sort of a decentralized way which was actually what was occurring in the 1780s of slavery dying out sort of peacefully at least unlike the civil war later um sorry you have this high nationalist document um all right now you gotta now you gotta ratify it some way all right so the constitution basically illegally said that the confederation congress did not have to approve the document I mean they sent it to them anyway and they said all right what do you think if you like it great if not oh oh well we're still doing this um and then the US constitution was sent to special quote ratifying conventions rather than the state legislatures explicitly because the people at the convention knew that it would be easier to pass and then they said only nine states were needed not unanimity so there's nothing actually legal about the whole thing even if you charitably say the US constitution was an amendment you just say the giant thing was an amendment though the actual process that you know was not according to the rules so to speak and at this point there were really two sides you had the federalists the nationalists okay they called themselves federalists for tactical effect they say oh it's a strictly um you know limited government powers diffused among the executive you know the legislative and the judiciary um in reality they were nationalists and then they called um the true federalists anti-federalists all right and that just doesn't sound nice you say someone's anti like if you had the two-party system where the democrats and the anti-democrats or the republicans and the anti- republicans one of those is just going to you know when you say that you're anti it just you know you're just negative right look at the glass half empty um and you know the actual ratification process which is in my opinion the uh you know my favorite part of the book um it's not the social contract theory of state formation and is what we're taught in schools that we all get together um you know we all agree we all unanimously agree to a government we all hold hands uh then you know we're happy and then we not only sign our lives away we sign our children's lives and our children you know we all agree to this thing and you know basically forever uh in reality it fits much more with the uh conquest or the coercive theory where a government is sort of coercively imposed on people against their will and then they just sort of learn to get used to it basically um so you look at the ratification debates and the federalists had the advantage undeniably they had the advantage one they had superior leadership the more eminent men the america's great men as rothbard calls it were in favor of the government why uh because as rothbard discusses he says great men are almost always generally in favor of of government of bigger government because that's how they got their power or that's how they can continue to augment their power uh the federalists also had uh control of the newspapers in the mail all right so much they had all they control of all the uh all the great newspapers of the day like facebook and twitter and cnn and washington you know the washington post etc but they would basically stifle opposition it would take longer for anti-federalist mail uh to be delivered and sometimes the mail would be opened up and you know and cut up and and all this stuff um and they generally sometimes they lied uh but you know about anti-federalists so naturally if you control the newspapers which back in the day was you know the the vital you know source of information uh you're naturally going to be able to sway more people very crucially uh in fact this was really the main reason why the constitution was ratified uh it was there's a malapportionment of delegates uh to these state conventions much like the existing state legislatures the western regions were underrepresented okay so they weren't actually able to send as many delegates as their population warranted okay so and this was something that naturally the older eastern sections did on purpose uh in the state legislature as well as the constitution to basically increase their weight right there's like an ancient form of gerrymandering all right uh they bribed anti-federalist delegates okay um quite crucially as well they promised them restrictive amendments after ratification uh which is saying like all right give us the keys to complete power and we'll do you say after you give us the keys right which isn't really the best way kind of of of doing things you say no why don't we do this before um some parts of the states uh actually threatened to secede unless um the state would ratify new york city threatened to break off from new york new york was an enormously anti-federal state they said were going to secede uh one of the main reasons was or two of the two of the reasons were they were hit hard by the depression and they were also the existing capital uh the the site of the confederation congress and so if they weren't allowed to be in the new government all the power and the privileges uh the swamp would basically move so they wanted to keep it there uh for for a little bit uh and then there was actually threats of hostile retaliatory trade legislation against those states that didn't join so little rhodeland was the last state uh to basically of the original 13 uh the states to to join uh and why do they do so it's because draconian trade legislation was basically impending in the senate uh in the new us senate they they didn't join they said all right you don't have to join but we're basically gonna you know just quarantine you for a lack of a better term um and um so rothbard goes through fascinating discussions in massachusetts uh in new york uh in virginia sort of the toughest large anti-federal states uh you know he goes through how sort of all the uh chicanery one of his favorite you know words he uses in and uh you know just general shenanigans uh occur to basically allow all these states to very you know barely ratified to join and it talks about how actually they didn't represent the true uh you know the population of the state's wishes uh and so on um so then we go to the bill of rights and the constitution was ratified in the summer of 1788 new new hampshire was the ninth state in virginia new york followed uh they follow shortly thereafter and then north caroline and rhodeland ratified later so actually when george washington was initially rat uh was initially excuse me inaugurated uh two states had not yet ratified uh and the anti-federalists they were fuming right because they were upset they said we've been tricked we've been cheated they said all right you promised us they were strict of amendments restrictions on taxing restrictions on national supremacy on standing armies uh and so on uh and we won a second constitutional convention all right where we can be invited to uh and so basically all the federalists go we're not doing that because they know what's going to happen uh and so in the house of representatives congressman james madison sort of strategically pushes for a bill of rights uh to sort of thwart the opposition okay so it were mainly personal liberty amendments uh in a weak structural amendment the 10th amendment okay which quite crucially in the articles confederation said expressly delegated so all powers you know they're not expressly delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and now it just said delegated okay and that was a bone of contention among many anti-federalists and later was exploited uh by alexander hamilton uh in the 1790s uh and what's also important is the bill of rights we all cherish them now in fact most people will probably say the bill of rights particularly you know like the first amendment etc uh those you know the best parts of the constitution well those weren't actually even really part of the constitution at all and what's also funny is that the bill of rights was more or less kind of discarded by contemporaries uh the 1798 alien and sedition acts uh the constitution of that was uphold you can't criticize the federal government uh that might violate free speech i think i don't know uh the embargo act um you know later on we could talk about this uh search and seizure um and all sorts of uh rights were also disregarded uh so it wasn't really a sort of ironclad protection um and it sort of later became as we'll talk about uh so just sort of wrap up the anti-federalists in order to stay relevant uh they interpreted the constitution strictly so you said all right the federalists lied to us in the ratification debates we're going to take a lie uh for our own you know to basically uh make the government you you promised us and along with some federalists uh thomas jefferson eventually came out for the constitution sort of james madison uh for his own reasons in the 1790s uh and so that's how you know the the strict constitutionalists they were actually really the uh sort of the children of the anti-federalists okay and in the 1790s you have the hamiltonian federalists versus the republicans coalition of anti-federalists and disgruntled federalists by jefferson and madison that last part that last bullet point that's just kind of a segue into current history that's not spoken about so much uh in the actual book uh so that's just sort of the the overall narrative uh so just in conclusion really uh to wrap this up so one rothbard as always provides a unique and radical interpretation of american history uh rothbard also has most uh more after death publications than tupac uh as someone brought up to me before and what i think is uh is true i mean literally just new stuff just keeps coming out um and he's been dead since 1995 uh you should read the book when it comes out in october uh and in the meantime uh you should read the the progressive era which is uh for sale in the bookstore downstairs uh so with that i think i will stop thank you so much