 Bill is a longtime student and teacher of both sociology and psychology. He's written a number of books over the years that have been, I would say, extremely influential in terms of what might be called power elite or elite style analysis of how the political system works in the United States. That's to say we have in this country some people who believe that consensus or there's no veto groups or whatever it is, it's not some belief that rules. Bill's books, Who Rules America, this book, Fact Cats and Democrats, Who Rules, Who Governs New Haven, really governs New Haven and so forth have been very, very central works in this tradition. Professor Rothbard, I think, is generally well known, even I'm going to introduce him as you can see here, so we can just slip him right in, but he's the author most recently of Ethics of Liberty and also obviously of America's Great Depression, Manhattan State and so forth. I'm Bill Edwards, I'm a graduate student of political science in Stanford and I dabble in all sorts of classes, including this one. So I'm going to say a few words later on. Why don't you kick off? Thank you, Bill. Well, it's a pleasure to be here today and it's a pleasure to know I'm on a panel with... Bill, why do you do it here because I think they want to hear the... They want to tape it? Because I know he said that but I was trying to get out of it. Is that okay, my set? Well, thank you very much, Bill. We go back a long way and also with Murray, I'm glad to hear that Murray is going to be on the panel. Most recently, Murray wrote a review of somebody else's book in which he said it was good but that the person should have taken more account of some of my work. So my biases are all in favor of Murray and much like his needless to say. Well, I think to talk to most of you about power brokers in California is like carrying coals to Newcastle or in this day and age like bringing chips to the Silicon Valley. What I will have to say, many of you probably already know and may know more in detail than I do. I will probably say it only in a little different language, language that maybe sounds a little too academic. So hopefully then I'll be fairly brief and then we can get into discussion and questions. There was a day when I knew all these names and as Bill pointed out, we listed them out in the back of the Bohemian Grove hardcover edition but I received so much criticism from my fellow academics who said I was trying to pad the book that I called the publishers and I said I don't need that kind of grief. Take it out of the back of the book. I thought it was fun. I thought it was interesting. It also would be fun to look these people up. But I got a lot, as I say, a lot of criticism so we dropped it out of the paperback edition. The publisher didn't want to but I felt embarrassed that nobody thought it was as fun as I did. At any rate, over the years what has happened then is the names have gradually dropped out for me but the process remains and the general structure remains and I feel that the names are interchangeable and you can fill them in in any given era or epoch. What I'm going to say today is that the powerful exist in networks. Networks to use another fancy term are often nested within each other. The powerful in America we can find them as interlocking overlappers. That is, the people that are on a lot of different boards and in a lot of different organizations are invariably the people who are picked to be the most powerful by a reputational method. That is, by asking people in a position to know who is powerful. Hi, Murray. How are you doing? Good to see you. So they are interlocking overlappers. The people who are power brokers are people who link networks together. They are not necessarily the most powerful people in the given state or in the nation but they are instead the people that are the go-betweens that articulate the needs of the various parts of the network. When we talk about the most powerful, we're talking about, I believe, the people who stand at the center of the corporate networks in the state of California. And if we would look at the boards of directors of the major corporations in this state, as we have at various times over the last two decades, we would find that these corporations are very tightly interlocked in terms of sharing directors. And we would find that at the center of these networks are the major banks in Los Angeles and of San Francisco. And when we look on the boards of these banks, we will then find the representatives of the major growers, the major manufacturers, the major retailers, and so on of the state. This corporate network then creates a corporate community. I like to call it the corporate community. And this community not only consists of these corporations but a variety of think tanks and discussion kind of organizations. The most prominent of which in California right now are its Chamber of Commerce and its California Roundtable, which is the state-level equivalent of the national business roundtable. And this corporate community in turn then relates to government. And it does so in a variety of ways. I think it's important to understand that each one of these ways of linking the government in and itself is a little network or subsystem of the whole larger system. And that's why it's necessary to have these go-betweens or power brokers within it. Each one of these subsystems does a little different kind of a thing. We have, for instance, in California as in the nation or in any other state, a whole complex special interest process by which specific corporations or specific industries relate to government. Wherein they set up their trade association, they hire a set of lobbyists and publicists, and these people then go and work very hard in Sacramento. These trade associations also give money to specific candidates. They work very hard and short to look out for the narrow, short-run interests of their particular sector of the larger corporate community. And that process has been very much studied in the state of California, and the special interests are well-known and very famous. And they work on you day in and day out. I knew in the 60s a man named Bill Stanton who had been an economist at San Jose State and had been elected to the legislature. And Stanton felt that he was going to just change things and he would be this dangerous radical. But as he said, that didn't bother the Sin Lobby, the liquor interests, the racing interests, all other special interests related to them. They would give him money no matter what. He said, but I'm against you on everything. They said, that's okay, Bill. You may come to change your mind. They would give him money to be re-elected, which would then bother him. No end that he couldn't upset them. But their job is to stay in close, to make friends, to say, look, on one issue you might come to be with us eventually. At the next level up, though, there is what I call a policy planning network. And this is the network through which the more general interests of the corporate community are developed and articulated. It's at this level that the California Business Roundtable or the Chamber of Commerce in general, that is not its various subcommittees, would try to influence the legislature or more particularly to reach directly to the governor. The kinds of people involved in this process are more likely to be people that have been legitimated as experts, often as academics. People who seem to be above the fray. They're not looking out for lumber. They're not grinding a special axe for the agricultural interests. They're looking out for the economy as a whole. They're looking out for the state as a whole. They are tempted to be seen as nonpartisan or as bipartisan as the case may be. And then thirdly, we have a process, a whole complex network that links into the two political parties, which I call the candidate selection process, which means, which is what we mean by politics, but I use that different term for a very special reason, which is to emphasize that what we do through this process is not really politics in the wider sense, but the narrow sense of just filling the office, that we don't really go through much political education, we don't really go through much policy development, and we certainly don't have much party discipline in our political process. So the political process comes down to filling these offices, finding candidates that will end up serving in government. And that particular process is related to by the corporate community in a way, again, that won't be surprising to you at all, and that is through campaign finance. And so we find that the people who are so central in the corporate networks are the people who are the important moneyraisers for the two political parties and for specific candidates within those parties. And very often even for Northern California candidates, they will go hat in hand to LA to what are called the big taps and ask if they might receive money for their campaigns in Northern California. Those I think are the main ways in which this corporate community relates to a government here in California and as I say in the nation as a whole. Each has a little different function, each has a little different set of people involved, and because it's complex, then there have to be people that serve this brokerage kind of a function. Well, that kind of a static picture is what interests sociologists, people interested in the distribution of power in the United States, but more interesting to you perhaps is what they are doing, and I wanted to just say a brief word about that. I agree with Fran Piven and Richard Cloward who at the national level say that currently the powerful in the United States are involved in a new class war. Their major concern is to undercut the social programs that were developed in the 1960s and the 1970s. They want to undercut those social programs because they provide in effect a social wage to a great many people, which makes them then more resistant to cuts in their individual wage. In short, in order to have workers be willing to work for less to make America then more competitive in the international economy, this new class war has been undertaken. It's undertaken by saying all those liberal social experiments failed, all those liberals that were sort of running amuck with their ideas, trying this and that out, it all was really crazy kind of idea. Well, as a power analyst, I don't know whether they were crazy ideas or not. I'm just concerned about the fact, or I just analyze it in terms of the fact that I think they were not just ideas or adventures by liberals, but rather were the response to the great upheavals of the 60s and the early 70s, and that this was the way of dealing with the disruption that was occurring in the system. Now that that disruption has gone away, meaning that most people are back in their routines, now we can brand all of those as liberal social experiments, wild ideas from the Ford Foundation and so on, when I think they were basically damaged control kinds of programs, which from the side of the poor were won and from the side of the corporate community could be seen as kinds of concessions. This particular, this class war is being fought in the name of ideas that are, I know, dear to your heart, namely the idea that the government should not be big or if it should exist at all, it should do the very bare minimum. In other words, it's a libertarian sounding kind of program, but I do not think that the corporate community is libertarian. I think rather that they are very pragmatic and when there is disruption, they are social democrats and when there's no disruption, then they're libertarians. They do want spending cut in the state of California, but they were not eager and big backers of Proposition 13. It was not their idea, and only some of them got into it rather hesitantly. And I would suggest to you in closing that for them the problem is that the state is needed. They do need the state. They need it to regulate themselves and through regulating them, having regulatory agency, partly legitimating themselves. They need the state for subsidies. They need the state speaking generally, not the state of California, but governmental apparatus and the whole system of government. They needed also to extend and defend their foreign markets and their need for resources that are on other soils. For all those reasons, the state is needed by the corporate community, but the state is also feared by the corporate community. It's feared by the corporate community because states can become, they can get out of hand, they can become over bureaucratic and dangerous to the interest then of the powerful, but the state is also feared in America, I believe because of our specific American heritage and history and ideas, and that is that the basic founding idea of the country is in the idea that power is rooted in the people, and there's always the fear then of the danger that the people may take over the government. And I believe an analysis by a political scientist at Berkeley, David Vogel, wrote an article called Why Businessmen Mistrust Their State in the United States. In terms of this populous kind of analysis, that the state may come into the hands of the people. And so they join in the general denunciation of the state out of that kind of fear, but at the same time caught in the situation where they do need it for a great many of their purposes. So we are in that phase then in closing where the attack is on the social programs that prop up the wages of the working people and the poor, but at the same time they are fearful that that kind of thing would go so far as to lead to a general attack on the government. Let me stop at that point and turn it over to Murray and then we'll go to Bill and have a question. Thank you. I got to give this to Murray. They want to tape you. They want you for posterity. You got to just put it on anywhere. Right there. There. He'll let you know if he's here. Put it on your collar. I don't know where to put it. It's got to be stiff. Collar? Got it? Okay. Let me tell you how I got into this whole movement, so to speak. I started as a libertarian economist and still am, and recorded the record of economic error and sin and so forth and all the increasing government intervention throughout the century. And, of course, the first thing you realize is that when you look at the situation is that how come so many businessmen or big businessmen are favorite government intervention? Now, the standard argument when I was starting out, which was also essentially the Randian argument, is that big businessmen are filled with altruism, inducted into altruism by their instructors or their culture and they're corrupted by left-wing teachers in their prep schools. Somehow it didn't seem to be a satisfying explanation. Okay? And it didn't seem to me that Nelson Rockefeller, for example, when he skyrocketed out the political scene was filled with altruism or guilt. It didn't look like it, right? It didn't seem like a guilty sort of craven type. It seemed out for power. So the explanation wasn't very satisfying. I looked into it and read the works of Professor Domhoff and Koko and others. The whole thing began to be illuminated. Okay? There was an important missing ingredient to the explanation for the growth of statism in the 20th century. Namely, they're getting a lot of money out of it. Okay? Not old businessmen, but those are in on the take, on the boodle. Also, in history, when you confront the sort of when you start dealing in a sort of explanation, there are two smeared terms that people attack you with. One, that you're engaging in a conspiracy view of history, conspiracy theory of history. Two, that you believe in economic determinism. Okay? I don't believe in economic determinism. I just think it's an important influence. As Robert Sharkey, the brilliant historian of the post-Civil War period, said at one time in his book, people are not determined by their economic interest, but they very often act against them. Against their economic interests. They don't very often act against their economic interests. I think that's a useful way of putting it. It doesn't mean it can't happen. It's just not very likely. Okay? And also, the historian that used to me should ask the question, que bono for any particular event. All right? You start saying, okay, something happens in the world, whatever it is. Who benefited from it? It doesn't mean, of course, just because somebody or some group benefits from something, these people are therefore responsible for the action. That's, you see, the error that most conspiracy people have. That's when you go sort of off the rails. If you don't check and find out whether these people are really responsible for the initiation of the action. The most extreme version of this I think was one by the crazed ex-reporter Douglas Reid who, looking at World War II, he used to be a reporter from London Times. Looking at World War II in a series of books, he said, look, who benefited from World War II? Well, the Germans lost. It was shattered. That was, you know, early part of the post-war period. And Israel benefited. Therefore, Hitler must have been a Zionist agent consciously after the story of Germany. That sort of thinking, quote, unquote, gives conspiracy analysis a bad name. All right. So what you have to do is not only figure out who benefited from something, but also did these people, did the beneficiaries actually lobby for the particular action? Okay. If they did, then things begin to check out a little bit. I think it's reasonable to say these people were therefore responsible for the action. Now, most people, almost everybody will agree on things like tariffs, okay? There's a lobby for steel tariff, let's say, or steel import quota. Everybody knows damn well that people behind there's a steel industry. You're not accused of economic determinism or conspiracy theory if you say this, okay? But the tariff, it's crystal clear, all right? It doesn't mean you can't have suckers who will get involved in this because they believe in protectionist philosophy if you want to call it that. It's pretty obvious the initiating force behind the tariff is the particular industry being benefited. Okay. But so if it's true of tariffs, why can't it be true of other things, other acts of status intervention which are not quite as crystal clear as a protective tariff? And sure enough, it works out that it is true and has been true. It continues to be true. Now, it's important, I think, for various reasons to zero in on this because if we keep saying, well, gee, here we have us for educational activities. We're saying that such tariffs are bad and somehow we can't convince everybody. We will never convince the steel industry. We might if the steel industry was really cracking up like the railroads have finally been convinced after pushing for government intervention for 100 years in such bad shape they're now a favor of the free market. So it can happen, okay? But the point is it's very difficult if you have people who are heavily involved in the industry living on protection, it's very difficult to talk them out of it by pure economic reasoning and realize that, okay? Who are the forces behind this particular error? It's not just the error, it's also economic interest. Two examples of this I think are interesting and you might not realize. One is the beloved and revered Marshall Plan, probably the most venerated plan since World War II. Pushed by the establishment as being important for the reconstruction of Europe it really launched the whole foreign aid program. This is really true of foreign aid in general. Marshall Plan was the beginning of the post-war foreign aid program specifically to reconstruct Europe. And most historians and they deal with these things the recorders say foreign aid will just deal with that. Who passed what legislation and what year and et cetera, et cetera. They don't deal with who launched it, who was behind it, and do they benefit from it? The Marshall Plan was put through the Congress, well first of all, many congressmen were against it. There was a period when it was still only my mighty propaganda campaign launched by something called the committee for a thousand or a hundred or ten thousand whatever it was for the Marshall Plan. They took out full page ads all across the country. They looked at the names of the people on the ads, all big shop businessmen, who were they? They weren't just businessmen. Each and every one of them were connected with the export, the American export industry either as presidents of export firm or bankers for export firms. And it is because the essence of foreign aid has nothing to do with reconstructing Europe or Asia or anything like that. The essence of foreign aid is quite simple. It's still true first. Namely, the U.S. taxpayer is socked, is mocked at a huge amount of money. This money then goes to the U.S. government which extracts a handling fee of all bureaucrats that live off the program. The rest of the money is shipped to some foreign dictator, it's almost always a dictator, who then uses it to build up his own power base versus his subjects. This is the oppressed subjects. They then take the dollars, what do you do with dollars? The only thing you do with dollars is buy American products. If you're whatever country you're in, therefore they then use most of the money after deducting their handling fee to buy American products from American export firms. So what you have actually in more detail is that they take the money and then they take the goods that they buy, the government does and it sells it to their own citizens and it pockets the money that way. So we have foreign aid is one gigantic racket by which the American taxpayer pays for the following beneficiaries. The losers of the American taxpayer are also, of course, the foreign country taxpayer because they lose visa of aid to their own government. The losers of the American taxpayer number one, number two, number three citizens whichever country we're dealing with is country X. The gainers are the American bureaucrats, the foreign dictator, and the vast bulk of the American export firms who get the contracts. The Marshall Plan was put through not only by these export interests, the Under Secretary of State, Marshall, of course, was a figurehead, didn't know anything about foreign policy or anything like that. The Under Secretary of State who put through the Marshall Plan, he then resigned from the State Department, rejoined his own private sector. Under Secretary of State, Will Clayton distinguished quote, free market, unquote, businessman. Sponsored all sorts of free market institutes, spoke at free market associations. He put through the Marshall Plan. He then resigned from the Marshall Plan after his deed was done, rejoined his firm, which was Anderson Clayton Inc. which got a huge, multi-million-dollar contract from the Marshall Plan organization. That, to me, is the microcosm of government business relations and government intervention. You talk a free market game and then you engage in subsidies, contracts, monopoly privileges from the government. A friend of mine used to work for years ago, he was an economist, used to work for his writing speeches for businessmen. He said, Jesus, speeches are really great. They sound like Hungarian types, almost every one of them. Of course, the policies are usually completely different. The other thing, I just got through doing a lot of research in the origins of the Federal Reserve System. But, again, we think it was a giant economic error brought about by incorrect banking theory. I'm sure incorrect banking theory is involved here, but the real essence of the Federal Reserve System is the work as a giant cartel scheme by which the Federal Reserve System acts like a cartel organizing the banks so that they can all inflate together. Which, of course, is what the consequence has been. It was sold to the American public as a way by which the banks can banking actually could be stabilized and the government will step in as Big Daddy and iron out the business cycle. Because private banks are too greedy and they tend to inflate too much. This was the general doctrine that was sold to the public. The actual facts is precisely the opposite. Banks on their own can do very little because you have 10,000 banks that don't run back in flights. They're going to be sucked pretty quickly and go out of business by the other 999 banks. So you need a giant cartel organization run by the government called the Central Bank which can pump reserves in and float and wash the whole system up together and inflate uniformly throughout the country, which is, of course, what they did. And the banks of the time who organized the Federal Reserve System put it through New Darn Wella, that's what they wanted. They set it openly to themselves because it didn't go out to the general propaganda media. So they said the money supplies in Elastic were suffering from inelasticity which means the banks can inflate enough. We therefore need some federal mechanism by which the banks can inflate and that was the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve System was written by big bankers, was planned by big bankers and was organized and staffed by big bankers from its very inception. So when you look, when you see that record it becomes pretty clear what the problem is, the enemy, so to speak, of libertarianism and the free market is not just incorrect ideas. It is incorrect ideas, of course, but it's also something else, namely a relatively small bunch of people who are ripping us off, us off, us off. Now this also has a certain dramatic appeal. See, a lot of people tell me Professor Rothbard, how can we carry our message to the public? We're libertarians, how can we encapsulate these things in, it's a complex theory that we're engaged in, moral theory, economic theory, political theory. We inflame the passions of the masses that you even get interested in this theory. And one of the answers is, they're ripping us off, damn it! Okay? And we can point out how they do it. I think it's a very effective propaganda weapon as well as being true as well as filling in the picture of why stateism has developed in the 20th century. Thank you. Since I'm not on the program and sort of informally here my remarks are going to be a bit sketchy and perhaps I may engage in some dialogue with our other two panelists here. But several things occurred to me here that I would like to hear some more thoughts on. One is the whole question of the cohesiveness and ability to work together of these people that are essentially ruling the American political system. You know, as Professor Rothbard mentioned in describing the banks, these guys are all in a lot of separate businesses and might look in the first instance as if they're going to automatically be rivals to each other. And yet, here they are a lot of times they're lobbying for the same program or they're working supporting some particular policy institute. How is it that they get the grease, get the they oil the thing so that they're not at each other's throats all the time, they're able to do a certain, some of them, the ones that have the will to dominate are able to work together. What are some of the mechanisms for that? And I know Professor Damhoff has some thoughts on that. Another thing, it seems to me is that Professor Rothbard is making an extremely important point and that is that it's people are interested in naming names. Look at your newspaper. It's full of names. It's full of stories about who is doing what to whom. We can in our political work essentially, we can essentially be described as trying to tell a story. And that story is somebody is taking what's rightfully yours and they're doing a damn good job of it. And here's who they are and how they're doing it. So you need to think about how you can describe this. One way you can do this is by Professor Damhoff's books Professor Rothbard's America's Great Depression has some of this stuff in it also. Gabriel Colco's book on the the Triumph of Conservatism has a certain amount of this in it. Also his book on American foreign policy. A lot of these things are beginning to get a little old. We need essentially a new generation of research. Don't be upset, you know, you're going to find that many of these writers are socialists that you don't agree with. Okay? First of all a part of that is jargon. Okay? And Professor Damhoff doesn't agree with Dan Smoot. Okay? Who, interesting enough, I think went to high school with C. Wright Mills a famous academic sociologist of the same elite school. But anyway and yet I think Professor Damhoff will tell you he can pick up stuff from what Smoot is saying. Sure, he wants to check up on it, you know. You don't automatically check out other people's research and so forth. But Dan Smoot and Bill Damhoff and Murray Rothbard in fact, even though one is a kind of socialist as Professor Damhoff is and one is a libertarian and Smoot I guess is some kind of bircher they're actually dealing with the same empirical reality. Okay? And so it's valid. You have to do this in your own community. If you're running for local office somebody is running your city. Somebody is trying to run your city. Okay? Same at the state level. People like you know Warren Christopher. Remember Warren Christopher who was involved in the negotiations to get the hostages out of Iran? There's a famous article that was written by Warren Hinkle in a now long defunct magazine called Scanlon about Warren Hinkle and the law firm that runs California and he described he said this man is the Cardinal Richelieu of California politics. Okay? And he described how he and the law firm of O'Malvinian Myers strove to influence both the Republican and Democratic policy. How they were in the same law office and they talked about each other and all the sort of thing. Okay, right. The Susan Love Brown edition of the second, the one you've seen no one even knows about the first edition of that book. Anyway the incredible bread machine is in a popular form that's quickly assimilable. Some of the Kolko books and so forth may take some more background and work to get to. Another thing that's interesting is the example of urban renewal. Here is a case of a thing that's constantly sold as benefiting people. This is great. It's reconstruction of our destroyed core cities. Right, slum clearance and so forth. Okay? Now, there's some right wing criticism of this. People are saying, you know, it's really not economically sound. It's if you read Martin Anderson there's even questions raised about property rights. But there isn't that much out there in the conservative and free market literature about really who has put this through. You know, carrying a policy through like urban renewal that involves all sorts of governmental districts incredible bureaucracy elected officials, federal state, local things and so forth. That's complex stuff. People have to put this together. That's what has been studied. And there's a famous book called Who Governs? Okay, about New Haven that says, really there's no organized effort to put through a concerted plugged-in network that's trying to put through policy. It just happens. There are a lot of groups out there that balance each other. Professor Domhoff has actually looked into the reality of this and I think he could share a little with us. The last thought I had is maybe Professor Rothbard or Professor Domhoff or I might have some thoughts about watching the California connection in the Reagan administration. This is a fascinating thing. Take a company like the Beckville Corporation. Okay, here's a company now, you know, it's a company that has a long time interest in government activism. It's a construction company. It builds big things, dams, airports, military airports in Thailand. You know, that's the kind of thing that they have specialized. Yes. In fact, some of you may read in the paper, Ronald Reagan suddenly coming to the conclusion that all his attacks on make-work jobs may have been an exaggeration, but he is responding to what he sees as the reality of power not simply abstract arguments. Okay, so it's important libertarians believe as they do, in many ways because of abstract arguments. But we have to realize there are other things, there are real people that hold abstract ideas or that refuse to accept them and go for meat and potatoes by some other route. And don't forget that the American Revolution, the revolution that created the political culture in which we're and a political culture some of the original ideas of which libertarians certainly admire, was fought by pointing out that there was a conspiracy to take power, that there was, that the government in England was taking away rights of people, naming names. If anybody who goes back and reads those original pamphlets can see that saying who is doing what to whom is an incredibly important ingredient in mobilizing popular sentiment. So I've thrown out a bunch of ideas that could consume 10 hours' worth of stuff but I thought I would raise some of them and perhaps we can hear some more comments. I think we should stay seated here and just think that's the... Yeah, that will have some questions and answers. Yeah, because I don't think I could elaborate much on what Bill has said. I'd find myself nodding and I don't know whether time is exactly right now to get into urban renewal, although if that comes up in questions, that's fine. So maybe Les Murray has something for the thing we could get your ideas in response. Well, I don't know. It's all very new to me and you've channelized me so very much so people are going to take some more investigation. A few quick questions to come out. What about the other power centers, the unions the teachers' organizations? Those aren't companies in that sense and they're not capitalists in that sense. Right. How do these groups how do they see the system? If you see it and then we're going to go some of them, see it and then we're going to consciously working in that and then we're making it more of a conspiracy than just happening the way Jill said. I think the unions see it the same way. You can see the teamsters union or the UAW and they're plugged into different they're each picking some different kind of network and the construction union will pick gets through and the auto workers will pick gets through. They're each trying to plug into what they see the most effective power system for that. There's also a common sharing of interest between Bechtel Corporation and the construction workers, right? Right. So that's where they, yeah. Or the ICC bureaucrat and the teamster versus the independent trucker. Right. How about Craig in the background? Speak up. Speak up. Speak up is a lot of noise here. If your theory is correct, but these powerful corporations make more money by, for example, polishing the corporate income. Instead of getting special subsidies for their industries, why don't they go after that? I think the answer to that is that when we say that there is a dominant, as I do, corporate community in the United States and that it's relatively cohesive and can come together real well when it's highly threatened or on a highly important general issue. After you said all that, you don't deny that you don't say that everyone else is totally powerless if they are organized. For instance, the teachers have been in certain states or in certain cities such as New York for a time, when organized and in a time of expansion of education, they were fairly powerful of certain issues for a while. And I think there have been times and circumstances in which the power of the corporate community has been somewhat circumscribed. But having said all that, it's still the case, the kind of thing that Murray and I have been saying on them having needed money for various kinds of things. And the corporate income tax or the taking of money, corporate tax, not an income tax, they had to fight World War II. And the corporate tax was very important at that time period and then have gradually been whittled away down over the years. But they were certainly fought against being whittled down by the opponents of corporations. I'll put that very generally. But the way that corporations reacted then was to get all sorts of complex special breaks. That is not a general abolishment of the taxes but there's a depletion allowance here and a special privilege here and so on. But that shows the play of power it seems to me within the system. Also I can't prove this for the corporate income tax. In many of these situations which looks like a left wing quote unquote anti-business thing, is really put in by big corporations to screw the small competitors. For example the workman's compensation laws in the progressive period. These add tremendous fixed cost to the small businesses. Large businesses I really can't have an apartment filling out forms and all that. You wind up then by especially burdening small business competitors, especially new ones who are trying to break into this cartelized system. Same way with the income tax. The income tax that Mises planned out many years ago, injures the rising entrepreneur. He wants to make money fast and reinvest it and so forth. Rockefeller doesn't really care much about the income tax. They've got billions already. There's no tax on wealth as it shouldn't be. The point is what you're doing then is with the income tax you're punishing those who are rising up to try to compete with the already existing wealth structures. So a lot of these things work out that way. We have to study it. It's an invariable question. It's not solid. The urban crystal people are talking about the new class, I think also works here too. There's a lot of class pressure, so to speak, from technocrats planners and intellectuals who want to plan the system and there's another group that's in there lobbying for this particular thing. The famous phrase that the only people the only poverty that was cured by Lyndon Johnson's war against poverty was the poverty of the bureaucrats running the organization. Was there any coincidence behind the 1913 being the year of the formation of the Federal Reserve System and the income tax? Yeah. That was the combination of the progressive system. Did that both happen in 1933? Well, the income tax was passed a little bit before that. They both had the actual tax, right? There was a Federal Trade Commission about that time. Clayton Act. The whole damn thing really comes in. Interestingly enough the statement that the phrase often used on was we need the Federal Trade Commission to do for general business what the ICC did for the railroads of the Federal Reserve, the bankers of the agriculture program, the farmers and so forth, consciously integrated into this kind of system. They said at the time, if you were actually doing it, I think it's true. That's why it's so important to study these general policy organizations of the corporate community because you can see them over a long period of time learning how to best deal with their problems. And as Murray said, they learned about regulation through the experience of the Interstate Commerce Commission. They realized regulation could be useful for other things. They thought, sometime, not just that it was useful for them, but it was also a better alternative than, say, the pressure of the socialists at that time. There was a socialist party that was demanding municipal ownership and they would do public regulation instead. So that and then they had various times kinds of money panics and concern. There was a real problem in 1909. When you study a policy organization you can see the strands then coming together and then an opportunity that came with the election of Wilson who had less hostages into the right wing obviously, the Republican of the business community. He had more of the modern business community that were Democrats and Republicans and then there was a possibility of making, culminating this progressive era and creating this set of reforms that then worked for them for a long, long time and dealt with their main problem which was the socialist and disruptive labor force. By the way, the single best thing I know of on the New Deal period was a chapter that Bill wrote in his book, The Higher Circles, on the big business support for the Wagner Act and for the Social Security Act. Fascinating chapter. I would like to raise a practical question for some people who might want to take some notes on this and that is are there some books about who governs, who rules California that people might want to look at to get an idea so when they're like reading their newspaper, they don't like to watch for what kind of things they might want to clip and store up and that sort of thing. I will, I hate to be such a shill for Don Huff here, but this book actually is pretty good, especially if you can find, in my opinion, the hardbound one which you can maybe find in the bookstores. You're very kind, Bill. The only trouble is that the data doesn't have the money on the user. No, but it's not in print. It's 1970 or 1972 and these things keep moving and that's a real problem. What kinds of things to look for? How about there's that Chester Harmon book on the Yerba Buena project in San Francisco and that's an interesting book and that does a lot of this stuff and that was reviewed by Christine Dorphy in Libertarian Review and she, I think did quite a good job. Harmon is not a Libertarian but it's a very good book. It's got a lot of stuff in it and that's a good exploration of San Francisco in some respects. Also, Chester Harmon Hartman, H-A-R-T-M-A-N called Yerba Buena. I told you, Bill, and I went back a long way. Unfortunately, that one's out of print, too. Isn't there something down on the most famous water stuff in Los Angeles? Yes, there's a new book by this guy. What's his name? Yeah, but it's called Water Power. There's a new book. It's Carl. Carl is his name. K-A-R-L He's a water geographer. He did the huge water map for the state of California. Anyway, he's done a huge book, a fat, fat book on the whole history of water politics in Southern California. He's led to the American Historical Association panel on the book and there's some weaknesses here and there as academics always buy. That's a profession, but anyway I think it's called Water and Power or something called Water Power and K-A-R-L Last name. I don't know any one good book on the state of California or on power in this particular state and many of the things are out of date because they were done in a time political ferment and there's less now. Less interest, less market. No Ramparts magazine. Robert Felmouth did a book on land and power in California some years ago. He was a Nader's raider and went through the data in great detail. But what I could do, I think the only way I could respond really constructively to Bill's question and maybe go along beyond it in a certain way is that there is a little book called Research for Action put out by this California rural institute in Davis and I cannot I don't have the address with me but what this person has done is a physicist who turned power structure researcher and he's out for the facts he's out for, he's often out for convictions, you know, you're out for politics. He says, I don't want convictions meaning he's looking for illegality and he is a really a fine, fine expert on researching any power structured looking up corporations in relation to government and in this pamphlet he gives a number of examples of, for instance, a public hospital. Why was the local power structure so interesting as a public hospital? Well, in the public hospital is this one little private part where they, you know, do this fancy scan or operation. It turns out that the people, the directors of the hospital were making him fortunate, you know, so he exposed that and helped them to organize politically in Woodland or some such near David and I could, you could leave your, if you're interested in this information, you could give me your name and address and I could mail you a photocopy of the front page of that book just so you see what it was like and you could write to them it has the price on it and so on. But it's the kind of thing that makes it possible then to understand what goes on in your particular town and since Bill mentioned urban renewal and your, and local activity the main thing to understand about local activity in an American city is that it's, that the whole game is around growth to improve land values. A city in America is a growth machine. It is run by those who want to intensify land values and then from there you go to figure out what their strategy is to intensify the use of their land and in Santa Cruz it's to have more amusement and recreation because it's good beach property in somewhere else where you don't have such attractive land then you bring in, you know, smokestack kind of factories and if you don't have anything at all like Nevada then you legalize gambling and prostitution and everything you can or if it's Atlantic City and you're going downhill then you legalize gambling but you do, you have some strategy to maximize the value of your land and the people that are involved in local government are intensively concerned about issues of water and zoning and planning street layouts and so on and this book explains how to research that kind of activity and to see just how they are realizing these goals through their involvement in the city. You might be lucky that some new left group still exists that cares about this stuff you know, you might only just have crazy Marxist groups that read it all out it's all the property relations and we don't need to study any particulars or you may have just conservative groups that say it's all the Jews or it's all the scuzzy poor whatever it is and they're not worried about the details either but you might have some real groups out there that are interested in this for example if you live in the Bay Area there's the Pacific Study Center in Mountain View and they have to do it, books. There's also the no growth movement which often does the same thing in other words keeping out poorer people keeping out apartment houses and that sort of stuff and keeping out subdivisions and that can aid another set of we have to leave here they're having a wedding here and I'm sure you're holding up another panel we're holding up someone's personal celebration so thank you all for coming my name is Ed Clark I've read your speeches I'm sort of a big business representative