 Okay, I think we'll get started. So if I remember to take a seat, I'd appreciate it. Thank you. So I'm actually surprised there's this many people here that means you haven't gotten sick of my presentations yet which I'm flattered. So for those of you who don't know me, as I'm sure most of you do know me, I'm Patrick Newman and the title of my talk is The Progressive Era in Crony Political and Local Reform. Okay, so what exactly will I be talking about? So I've given a couple talks on The Progressive Era before. The Progressive Era was a book that I edited in 2017. It included a partially finished, partially written manuscript by Murray Rothbard, nine chapters of a planned book on The Progressive Era as well as later essays. So looking at his notes when I was working through the manuscript, looking at his notes as well as listening to his audio lectures on the topic, he planned for chapter 10 of the unfinished book which he never got to to talk about Crony Political and Local Reform. All right, so he ended in chapter nine sort of talking about the National Civic Federation and various sorts of economic regulations that were being pushed during the Roosevelt administration. Instead, he would move to in chapter 10 some topics that he spoke about in chapter six regarding politics in local reform. So a lot of measures that you've probably heard about that will go through when you hear about The Progressive Era, sort of the standard narrative. So in terms of economic regulation, what you often hear about with The Progressive Era is you say, okay, this is the period when the little guy was sort of rising up to regulate big business. You had all sorts of regulations that big business fought. This was all in the public interest and it benefited the public. Things like food regulation, banking regulation, the income tax, federal trade commission, all the things that we know and love at the Mises Institute and so on. In politics, there's also sort of the similar narrative. So you have sort of the Crony Political and Local Reform or just what Rothbard considers Crony, but this is the reform that was supposedly to expand democracy, improve the efficiency of government as well as, all right, moving on here, reduce corruption, all right. So these are measures that I'll talk about, things regarding various ballot initiatives, direct election of senators, trying to reduce the power of the political machines and so on. So that's sort of the stated reform, excuse me, the stated goals that you hear about. You say, all this was to promote democracy, make it more egalitarian, et cetera, et cetera. In reality, what Rothbard planned to do was he planned to show how they were designed to decrease voter choice, increase business control of the government, as well as institutionalize corruption, okay. So the actual, the real goals were almost the opposite of the stated goals. And the big thing here is that the whole progressive movement of expanding democracy was really a cunning trick to sort of limit democracy, or limit actual control to certain people, okay. So this is what Rothbard planned right about in chapter 10. Unfortunately, there's only notes and audio recording. And in a paper of mine that was recently published in the quarterly journal of Austrian economics, I sort of go through this. This will be the general theme of what I'll be talking about in this presentation. So really kind of analyzing what Rothbard planned to discuss, which was he sort of incidentally mentioned in the progressive era, as well as some footnotes that I have in that book as well. Okay, so we'll break it up into either political reforms or local reforms. So political reforms that we'll be talking about is various measures such as voter registration. So this is a period when voter registration requirements became a big thing, as well as the Australian secret ballot in the short ballot. So the Australian secret ballot we'll be talking about was instead you would, instead of bringing a ballot that your party gave to you, the political party, and you would publicly vote, it would be done in secret, the government would control the balloting process. You also had the short ballot, which was instead of voting on a long list of various positions. So someone to be some sort of bureau, vote for someone to be some sort of mayor's assistant or, you know, bureaucrat or, you know, local, you know, whatever. Instead, the ballot will be limited, okay? Because it would be to make it easier for people to vote. Easier to understand, et cetera. Referendums, so the people could directly vote on an issue, political primaries. So you now had the familiar process that before the election, you basically have an election in an election where instead of the actual parties voting on a candidate, say for a president, instead you had the people voting on who their nominee would be and then they would square off against the other, you know, the Democrat or the Republican party. And most famously, the direct election of senators, which was later the 17th amendment, where before senators were actually elected by the respective state legislatures, and now the people would vote on them directly, much like a congressman, you know, the House of Representatives, right? So all of these, when you look at it at the outset, they seem as if they're designed to expand democracy, improve voter choice, but will actually go through their sort of more sinister and nefarious reasons behind those. And then you have local reforms. So you have various attacks or restrictions on political machines. So political machines, most famously, you have something like Tammany Hall, all right? The Democratic Party in New York City. So these are these organizations, they were certainly corrupt as will go through and they had all sorts of things. You know, negative things where they did have some uses. There were various attacks on political machines. You don't see political machines anymore. At least you just see the political parties themselves. The whole city council movement, which was to take various positions and put it in some non-elected council that would be run primarily by businesses, as well as wealthier members of the community. In particular schools, this has happened in the school system, the public school system, which we'll talk about, as well as a fascinating procedure known as urban imperialism, which was actually where one city would literally take over another city, okay? So something like New York City took over the independent city of Brooklyn. In the late 1890s, you had Pittsburgh and Allegheny much earlier on before the Progressive Era, you had Philadelphia and Germantown and so on. So this was actually one of the main ways cities grew and this was all done in the name of efficiency. Oh, we're gonna streamline things, reduce corruption, et cetera. Instead, it was really just a tax grab as well to reduce the political decentralization in various areas, which we'll talk about. So all various interesting things. These only sort of touch the surface of a lot of the Progressive Era reforms that Rothbard planned to discuss, but it'll make for a good presentation, hopefully, can't promise that though. All right, so before we go on to the Progressive Era, we have to talk briefly about the change in the political environment. So you had one of the main reasons behind the Progressive Era was you had the collapse of what was known as the third party system. So American politics, since the founding, it was organized into what we consider various party systems. So the second party system was between the Democrats and the Whigs, right? The third party system was between the Democrats and the Republicans and that's the way it's been since. So the third party system started roughly around the time of the Civil War in 1861, as well as right all the way up to the Progressive Era was a period of fierce ideological and ethno-religious conflict with very high voter turnout. So what that meant was that people, there were very visible ideological differences between the parties, okay? Particularly at the local level and also generally your background, your ethno-religious background determined who you voted for, all right? So during this period, you could break up, say you had the Irish Catholics, they were staunchly Democrat, you had various native, what's known as a pietist or you might say evangelical groups, say as Baptists or Methodists, at least in the North they voted Republican, German Lutherans voted Democrat, we'll talk about why in a second, as well as very high voter turnout, which we'll go through. So voter turnout was extremely high during this period and since the fourth party system has been greatly decreased. So people really had an interest in politics back then. And the main reason was because parties basically took issues on the national level and sort of tried to attach them to the local level. So why people were always so interested in parties back then, voting was because they were very concerned about local issues, particularly something like prohibition. So various religious groups that thought alcohol consumption was okay, such as Catholics or various Lutheran sects tended to vote for the Democrats because they were anti-prohibition versus those religious groups that thought alcohol, drinking alcohol was a sin and if you wanted to get to heaven, you had to make sure other people didn't drink alcohol and so on, then they meant you tended to vote for the Republican party. And they attached this to saying that okay, just as the Republicans want to regulate your alcohol consumption, they also want to regulate the money supply as well as tariffs, et cetera. So for example, the German Lutherans, they basically had two main voting planks, at least positions. One, could they drink alcohol too? Which party supported the gold standard more? It's not bad positions in my opinion. So basically whichever combination Republicans or Democrats at the time appealed to them the most, they would fiercely vote for them, all right? And that was a very cultural phenomenon, all right? So you could break it down into Democrats were really controlled by the laissez-faire Bourbons in the socialist populists, sort of a unusual coalition and a whole lot of time to explain. The laissez-faire Bourbons, so the party of say Grover Cleveland in the Northeast, so they generally supported free markets as well as the more populist groups in the South and West. So in the former Confederate states as well as the far out, you know, off mountain states where like five people live back then versus the Republicans who in general were more on average interventionist pietists, okay? So people were really concerned about voting, voter turnout was very high as all go through, et cetera. So as Rothbard explains in chapter six of the Progressive Era, after the panic of 1893, basically the Democrats were in control of the federal government at that time. And whenever you're in control of the government and a recession hits or depression, you generally lose and the Bourbons were in control. And basically this was the time period when the populists took over, they kicked Grover Cleveland in the other Bourbon Democrats out of office. And this was really the beginning of when the Democrats were known as the more, you could say interventionist party. So back then, you know, at that point, left wing still kind of referred to classical liberal in that sense now left, you know, since then left wing refers to the left wing that we know of highly interventionist, et cetera. So with that, you have the fourth party system because when the populists take over the Democratic party, they secure control of the Democratic party but they basically only confine themselves to the South and West. So they're in a sense a minority party. They don't win any elections, right? For the entire period of presidential elections are always out of their grasp. The only reason Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat won in 1912 was basically because the Republican party split at that period. You had the Bull Moose party of Theodore Roosevelt and then you had the Republican party of William Howard Taft. There's all, you know, the whole story behind that and so on. The fourth party system is really the beginning of the modern political era because you have little ideological and ethno-religious conflict. And this is the beginning of when people say that, okay, both parties, they're kind of the same thing. I'm not really interested. I'm just going to sit out and not vote, okay? And then you have low voter turnout and voter turnout declined at the beginning of the fourth party system and it's kind of remained at that same level, as we'll see. Both parties were now sort of center status and there's less political emphasis on moral issues, okay? So tying things related to say, prohibition on the moral emphasis instead it became more of a efficiency aspect, et cetera. Okay, so politics in a sense became secularized and that was a reason why people were less interested in it. So, we talked about the fourth party system. You have Republican dominance. Democrats are a minor party. The collapse in ideological conflict basically leads to a large drop in voter turnout. One aspect that people would always bring up to say, oh, the real reason for the decline in voter turnout was you had a large amount of fraud. So, if anyone's ever seen the movie Gangs of New York in the early 2000s, Martin Scorsese, there's this very famous scene where it's happened before the Civil War, but it was the same principle where basically there's an election going on. You see a lot of fraud. People are voting twice or three times. You know, this guy goes up and only says, oh, I voted three times already. He says, oh, you call that doing your patriotic duty. And then they're trying to basically shave people to vote again, et cetera. That's actually was fairly insignificant. It wasn't really the main reason behind high voter turnout. So, just to go through a couple of numbers, and I have a graph that sort of shows this more. 1896 turnout outside the South was about 80%, okay? And then in 20 years later, turnout outside the South was about 60%. And since then it's basically hovered around 50 to 60%. So, out of the eligible voters, people were registered to vote, only around half a little bit above that actually vote, okay? We're before as a much higher percentage. So, this collapsed in sort of the laissez-faire contingent, the Democratic Party, as I mentioned, the suburban Democrats, and voter turnout. This really is what created the power vacuum for sort of corporate elites, you might say is big business, big government in court intellectuals to really take over the political arena. So, they would support regulations that would help them consolidate monopolies and prevent threatening regulation, as well as support reforms that would increase political control. So, the first point is, I've discussed this before, this is what Rothbard has spoke a lot about in the actual book. And then in chapter 10, what he planned to do, and what he already, in a sense, what he talked about in some of the later essays in the book, as well as a little bit in the chapters one to nine, talk about how they supported reforms that would increase their own political control. So, ironically, in the name of promoting democracy, they would work to restrict democracy and sort of consolidate their grip on the political system. So, you look at voter turnout, this is just a picture showing this, both presidential and midterms, right around here is the third party system, and then right after the election of William Jennings Bryant, the populist in 1896, like it just falls, and then it's kind of been there, this goes up to 2008, but it's basically kind of plateaued. And not only in the presidential era, but all, excuse me, in presidential elections, but also in midterms, and so on. So, as we'll talk about Rothbard, in addition to this, he said one of the reasons for this was voter registration requirements, but the main reason Rothbard always wanted to talk about was ideology, because actually in some of the mountain states, voter turnout increased, in most of the voter registration requirements, et cetera, that was generally in urban areas. So, for Rothbard, the emphasis was always on ideology, where it was the beginning of, why don't people vote now? You say, well, neither the parties really appealed to me, they kind of say the same thing, I don't really see the need to, and so on. That all began basically during the progressive era. Okay. So, when we talk about voter turnout, this was actually something that was deliberately intended by the progressives. So there's a great book that recently came out by Thomas Leonard, it's called The Liberal Reformers, and it discusses how the progressives were basically a bunch of elitist racists, who, the reformers who actually, when push came to shove, they just wanted to have more control by themselves. So, what Thomas Leonard says, this is a quote from him, he says, the progressive economists, or certainly the most outspoken among them, were not egalitarians and never entertained the notion that expertise could work through the people. They were frank elitists who applauded the progressive era drop in voter participation, and openly advocated voter quality over quantity. Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform. So the whole idea of the progressive era is they basically said, the people cannot be in charge, they don't know how to take care of themselves, you gotta give us the keys to the kingdom basically. And of course, the only way you can sell that, if you're a politician saying, vote for me, I'm going to restrict your choice, you're probably not gonna win an election. Just like you say, vote for me, I'm going to raise your taxes, it's really not gonna work out, you have to generally cloak it in some sort of, intricate and elaborate sales pitch. So we get to progressive reforms, so we talk about things like voter registration, this involved things such as poll taxes, literacy requirements, citizenship laws, et cetera. The stated goal of these, which happened, really picked up speed in the progressive era, was to reduce electoral fraud. The actual goal was to decrease voter participation of minorities, these minorities often voted for the Democrats, at least before, back in the day. Republicans in the North attacked Southern and Eastern Europeans, which sort of the minorities they were trying to restrict. In Democrats in the South, the populist Democrats, those Democrats that apparently were all sort of egalitarian and wanted to promote the common person, generally attacked, the goal was to restrict the voting of blacks, okay? So you had really the goal of all these registration requirements was to restrict voting of minorities and really try and increase the political power of various vested groups, okay? Mainly upper-class, WASP reformers, okay? So white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, all right? Then when we go to say, we actually talk about the ballots, so before, political parties actually distributed their ballots to reformers. So the voter, you used to carry the ballot to the poll, and then there's a long list of electable positions that you would vote on, et cetera. The Australian secret ballot, which picked up around this time period, and this is something that Rothbard was a pain to emphasize, the government basically provided the ballot, okay? And the stated goal was that you would vote in secret, there'd be less voter intimidation, there'd be more transparency. The actual goal was basically to weaken the parties, because they no longer actually had to provide ballots to voters, which would encourage people to go out and vote. You know, one of the ways they used to get people to vote is they said, hey, come and vote. We got some pork, we got some beer, it's a nice social event, that actually sounds pretty fun, I would enjoy that. Instead, you know, a lot of that started to decline, and so on. The actual goal weakened parties, particularly third parties, why? Because this is a problem that still is an issue for third parties, is if you wanna get on the government ballot, you gotta meet various eligibility requirements. If someone's name wants to be on a ticket, you gotta have a certain amount of people who already express support for them, or you have to have certain registration times, and so on, and so on. The short ballot was they basically had less elected positions. The ballot, in a sense, was shorter, not longer. In the stated goal was they said, okay, we wanna reduce confusion in the difficulty of voting, voting for all of these positions, it was difficult, instead, just let the government choose and appoint most of these positions, you guys get a vote on the local, some local guy in the president, and a couple congressmen and all that. And the actual goal, of course, is that well, you entrench bureaucrats, because it's always a pain to constantly try and basically be elected, and you can remove yourself from control of the people. So there's no coincidence that the positions that were no longer voted on benefited those people who were already in power, because instead, they would just have to get appointed by the local city or state government for like 10 years or something. Okay, or even longer, if it's a civil service position. Various other reforms, such as the direct referendum, where people, not politicians, would directly vote on issues, those compulsory primaries, the people, not party conventions, would vote on candidate, or excuse me, would nominate candidates, as well as the direct election of senators, the 17th Amendment, 1913, where people, not the state legislatures, would elect senators. So all of these, what Rothbard said, is he planned to describe as how the stated goal was to increase voter participation, because now you actually got to vote on more people, you got to participate in the primary, you got to choose your own senators directly, et cetera, and make everything more democratic. So in particular, these reforms are the ones that are always discussed in the history class and so on. The actual goal is that they were to weaken the states, because the state legislatures no longer decided on senators, as well as the local political parties, to benefit the federal government. Because what you did is, you actually, as we'll talk about, when you have things, is a very cunning goal, is a very cunning task. You make things more democratic, you give people more direct control, but what we actually do is you remove their control, because you remove the vehicle in which they actually vote, or they can channel their political concerns, which is the local party. We all move through basically an intermediary, and that's the more efficient way of getting things done. So in general, when it comes to politics, most people are ignorant, they don't know a whole lot about things, and they best represent themselves in small, decentralized units. So something like a local ward or a state party that really channels their concerns, and then they can represent them. And they represent them on the state level, which in turn represents them on the national level. So the goal of progressives was you basically weaken both the states and state parties, as well as local wards, which we'll talk about, in order to aggrandize power and restrict voters. So instead of the people going through the states, and then to the national government, you have the people just go directly to the national government, in a sense. And it's harder for people to decide things because they don't have a state or a local party representing them. This weakens the local party, obviously, and then it makes it easier to control things on the federal level. Back in the day, when you belong to a political party, you belong to the Democratic party of Tampa, or even though Tampa really was in a thing back then, that's just where I live right now, et cetera. And that was actually a thing, that was a real civic responsibility you cared about that. Now, state and local parties, they don't really matter. So this is actually something the federalists, what Rothbard talks about in the Constitutional Convention and Conceived in Liberty, they were able to do the exact same thing. They continually appealed to just the people instead of the states, because the real goal was not to actually give the people more power, it was to increase the power of the federal government, by making it harder for people to mobilize. So really a strategic plan, basically, quite cunning. So we move on to say local reforms. The whole goal of the local reforms, and this was intertwined with political reforms, was to move political control away from sort of local wards, so local neighborhoods and divisions of various cities and towns, et cetera, which were generally controlled by the lower middle class, as well as smaller businesses. Obviously, if you're poorer or if you're a smaller business, your political concerns are more local, say what's gonna happen in this particular neighborhood of Philadelphia or New York City, not really the state of New York. And instead take it to a much more centralized political control, generally dominated by upper class or big business. Why? I mean, just think about it from the perspective of running an election or controlling politics, the higher up the election or politics, you have to have more money. That naturally makes it harder for poorer people to compete, especially when there's various campaign financing laws, which kind of start around this time period. If other people can't donate to you, then well, if you already have the most amount of money, the biggest war chest, you're going to be at an innate advantage. Okay. So the movement of political control away, there's also the movement of political control, excuse me, away from party machines, okay, which we'll talk about sort of these organizations that really represented people and try to instill them with an ideology and get them to vote. And instead you quote honest bureaucrats, politicians and appointed commissions, all right. So the whole idea was to weaken the local and decentralized party and instead just shift all of the control on a much more centralized level. So again, the stated goal was to increase transparency and reduce corruption. So it's a local wards, they're corrupt, local party machines, they're corrupt, which they were, but they did serve purposes, as we'll explain. And instead, just increase business control, particularly a larger business control, because they're the only ones who can compete on a federal or a centralized level. And also institutionalized corruption, okay. So you say you're getting rid of certain forms of corruption, but instead you're basically just codifying it and preventing other people from competing with different forms of corruption, okay. Again, quite a smart strategy. So political machine, so you see this is a classic example of a political machine, at least the way it's portrayed, you have some guy, usually he's fat, he smokes a lot of cigars, and he's got his tentacles here, so he's controlling the tax department when it says he's got blackmail there, he's got the building department, it's very standard oil-esque, the octopus, basically. And this is sort of city hall and it says for my own pocket all of the time, and it's just controlling and it's just strangling the people and it's just this massive sort of leviathan that's taken over a local area. So that's usually the insinuation that's described, but in general political machines, they got a lot of bad rap, you don't hear about them anymore for various reasons, but they were really just an organization to gather votes in ideologies while providing various, that should be benefits to supporters, okay. So it was a reason to get people involved in politics, you vote for us, we'll give you certain things such as patronage, like jobs, et cetera, and we'll make you a loyal supporter of the Democrat Party or the Republican Party and so on. So there's no doubt that they were corrupt when they wanted to do things at the local level, they bribed people, they sometimes extorted people, they gave out patronage, et cetera, a very famous, one of the ways in which the machines used to raise money or political parties used to raise money was before, if they would give you a job, such as patronage, you would have to basically contribute some of the money you earned back to the political party, okay. Then with the rise of the civil service, which became especially prominent in the 1880s, 1890s in the progressive era, it was harder to do that. So what they instead do is they engage in something known as frying the fat where they would go to a business and the way I imagine it is you have some sort of party boss if anyone's seen like the second Godfather movie, they got the long coat, of course they don't have their sleeves through the actual coat, sort of hanging out like there's some sort of mob boss and they come there and they say, well, so you want the tariff, you wanna keep having a high tariff on steel rails, well, if you don't donate to us, maybe we're going to actually support lower steel tariffs or the opposite, et cetera, so they would instead have get businesses to contribute to them, sort of like a form of extortion and so on. So you fry the fat, you put bacon on a skillet and you wanna get the grease flowing and all of that, that was the idea, you wanna get the money flowing. This is actually still done, it's known as milker bills in today's world, patronage, et cetera, but machines still had their purposes. So when they increased voter turnout, they got people interested in politics and they also had various quasi, sort of private welfare systems. You hear about the old story of the hot soup or the Thanksgiving turkey dinner, et cetera, that wasn't perfectly private, but it was more voluntary and this was a big reason why you didn't have welfare system, a government welfare system at the state and local level because the parties took care of you, okay? Again, if you watch Gangs of New York, you see some, there's a scene where a bunch of immigrants are coming off the docks and there are these guys, sort of, throwing them basically bread and they go, folk, Tammany, basically, Tammany Hall and that was the idea. So as Rothbard described in one of his lectures, he goes, well, it's a lovable form of corruption basically. So everyone can like that. Now, there's no surprise, it's no coincidence that the party system was severely hurt during the New Deal of FDR, why? Because instead of actually going to the party for some sort of quasi-private welfare system, you can just go to the government. They got you covered. And then the last thing was actually, a lot of the bribery was sort of defensive bribery to evade taxes and regulations. Rothbard had a great quote from H. L. Menken who's reminiscing about his father one time and he was saying how he basically had to bribe a police officer to avoid certain regulations and then there was a reform movement and he couldn't bribe the police officer anymore and instead he had to pay a higher fee to the government each year. So it was basically instead of having defensive bribery, which is good, you now lose that opportunity. So for example, the Soviet Union basically survived on defensive bribery, underground market bribery. That was how the market basically worked or how the country didn't just collapse back then, one of the reasons. So at least continuing on with this local reform, you have the city council movement, which is basically the emergence of these unelected centralized boards, okay? The stated goal was to efficiently manage cities. So instead of having the people directly elect officials, the school superintendent, various people on the board, you instead had them appointed by the mayor, okay? Or someone in charge of the water supply or whatever they would be appointed by the mayor. The actual goal was not really to efficiently manage cities or at least most of the time it wasn't, it was to aggrandize power, centralize power in the hands of business in the upper class and in doing so, it would make it easier for them to obtain centralized contracts, franchises, so various forms of monopolies, tax assessments. All right, so not only lowering your tax bill, which is perfectly fine, but also as we'll see basically shifting the cost of payment onto other businesses, all right? So raising taxes on other businesses as well as subsidies. So for example, you take a look at Pittsburgh, so major city in Western Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania. In 1910, they had a 27-man city council and a 360-man localized school boards, all right? So local, lower and middle class. So when you have a huge localized school boards, it means it's, again, school control is more at the localized level. You have a lot of representatives, et cetera. There's a new city charter and a school board system that was passed in 1911, and now what do you have? Instead of the 27-man city council, you have the nine-man city council, okay? And quite crucially, instead of 360 people in the school boards, you only have a 15-man school board, which is predominantly dominated by the upper class, okay? So the idea here is you're basically taking control away from the lower and middle class to the upper class, you used to have 360 representatives, now you have 15, okay? 360, 15, all right? That greatly reduces basically the control, all right? And there are various other similar sorts of reforms regarding education. In the book, Rothbard talks about San Francisco. There's actually the fascinating situation, he spoke about this in a later essay, excuse me, in an earlier essay about Oregon, where basically Oregon passed a law in the early 1920s, and this was still part of the progressive era that basically made all private schools illegal. And instead you had to attend public schools. And the idea was you wanted to, the goal was to weaken private schools, predominantly Catholic schools, and instead bring them all to a centralized public schools run more by Protestants. The group that was in charge of this back then was none other than the Ku Klux Klan, who's the main sponsor behind the bill, because in Oregon, at least outside of the non-South, the two groups through the Ku Klux Klan always railed against were basically Catholics and Jews. So the idea was you're trying to Christianize the Catholics, take them out of their schools, and instead you gotta bring them to the public schools. This was actually brought up to the Supreme Court, 1925 ruled that you can't do that. So they said you can force children to attend schools, but you cannot force them to attend only public schools. You have to at least give them an option. Okay, famous court case, I think it was Pierce First Society of Sisters, something like that. All right, we move on. So you have, say, urban imperialism. So this is a fascinating process, is one of the most interesting things Rothbard planned to discuss. He relied on some various scholars working in the 1960s on this. So urban imperialism was when large cities would basically lobby state legislatures in the courts to annex surrounding smaller cities. So the stated goal was to basically improve the efficiency of the city government. They said, oh, you have all these cities, you have New York City, right next to Brooklyn, you have all these, you have Pittsburgh, right next to Allegheny, and so on. Well, instead we just centralized it, we streamlined the whole process. Whenever you're streamlined, you know, you always, you know, when you're, you know, be a little suspicious. Because the actual goal was to, frankly, monopolize political and economic power. So one, they wanted to crush basically the political power of the surrounding smaller cities, and they wanted to try and siphon off all the large businesses in those areas to the downtown of the larger city, okay? So the downtown is really the political power. And what they also wanted to do was instead they would, you know, without any control by the smaller city, they would go to the state legislator, or the court, whatever, they would annex the city, then you just happen to have new property, you know, tax assessors come through, and they say, oh yeah, and all, you know, these new areas, we're now gonna raise your taxes, okay, to benefit the downtown. And this is where you got the increasing concentration of resources in downtown, right? For example, Pittsburgh in 1907 annexed Allegheny and raised taxes to pay for Pittsburgh proper's large railroad debt, okay? So they had a large amount of railroad debt. The government, the local government subsidized it. They need to raise money. Oh, what better way of raising taxes, you know, not on your particular constituents, but on someone else, right? In the Pittsburgh survey, so five years later, it said that the downtown businesses and residential areas paid two thirds the level of taxes of the surrounding areas, okay? So you wonder why? Well, that was the whole goal all along, basically. So you, instead, if you think about it, if you're paying a higher tax in the surrounding area, what are you gonna do? Well, if you have the opportunity, you're gonna move downtown, all right? So these cities themselves became more concentrated during this time period, and this was actually one of the main ways when you look at population statistics in the progressive era, it says, oh, the population of cities went up. Well, the reason the population of New York City went up, one of the reasons was it was, you know, just literally just taking over other cities. So it's not really, the population went up, don't get me wrong, but it's not as if, you know, when you include, you know, Brooklyn, a whole new city, and it's obviously gonna, you know, increase the total, okay? And so many of the problems of, you know, various urban issues, say, you know, the under-providing of municipal services and so on, overcrowding, you know, filth, et cetera, that came from basically just undue concentration due to basically cities taking over other cities, okay? Related to this is people would always say, oh, you know, it was good we had the government take over municipal, you know, various services like street provision, water provision, et cetera, because it was being under-provided by the market beforehand. Well, that in a sense is true, it was being under-provided, but one of the main reasons it was being under-provided was because those businesses were always under constant threat of the government taking them over. So it basically created a self-fulfilling prophecy where you're not going to invest in a water line if some local government is going to take it over and instead, you know, have some sort of price regulation where the price isn't high enough to cover costs and they're just trying to get votes, okay? So this is still a problem today in cities where local governments, in order to win votes, they're going to intentionally basically put a price ceiling on various services so people will say, oh, wow, well, they're lowering the price of water, et cetera, you know, that's great, I'm gonna keep voting for them, but in 20, 30 years, the whole system is basically breaking apart and just crumbling. It's because the business wasn't investing in it because they weren't making money, right? But that's 30 years from now, so the politicians now don't care about it and so on as the story goes. So in conclusion, the stated goals of the political and local reforms are not usually the actual goals, in fact, very rarely they were. You know, there were some people who sort of bought into the whole story, but when you actually look at the motivations, you engage in historical analysis, this is not the case. So during the progressive era, in the name of expanding democracy and voter choice, democracy and voter choice were restricted, all right? So that's good. In the name of reducing corruption, corruption was institutionalized, okay? So there you go, and then in the name of increasing efficiency, businesses had more control over urban governments and particularly larger businesses so you had less competition and things like that. So, you know, you also got that. So really, the actual goals in the sense of very, you know, antithetical or they're the opposite of the stated goals, okay? So, some sort of shameless self-promotion. I recently, there's an article published in the quarterly journal of Wall Street Economics about this where I go through Rothbard's notes and some of his other essays and I go through these various reforms because the whole movement Rothbard discussed was sort of taking government out of politics. So the idea was you would remove various functions from politics because politics is messy, the people can't, you know, the people don't know how to choose and instead you just institutionalize it. You shield it all from the public, okay? And this is really the beginning of the swamp that you hear about, you know, DCEO drained the swamp. You know, it's this whole mass of people who when you elect someone new, they can't get the other people out of office. It's sort of this ossified structure. So there's that paper and then there's obviously Murray Rothbard's The Progressive Era and so I highly encourage you to read this book if you haven't done so already and I think with that I will end. So thank you very much. You good? Are we up? We have one minute. I guess if anyone has any questions, yeah. Yeah, I want to ask you one. So you always hear that debate about when the Democrats and Republicans switched. Some say they never switched at all. Some say they switched. They're like Nixon's other strategy, they see cracks. Am I thinking it kind of seems like the switch happened during the Progressive Era? What would you say? Yeah, I would agree with you in terms of the actual political parties themselves like in terms of their belief systems, the Democrats since the Progressive Era became the much more interventionist party. In terms of regions, it's actually true that basically in the late 60s, early 70s, before then the Democrats staunchly controlled the Southern states. So in many ways, there was sort of one party system around that time period. Beginning in the 70s, you had the switch where now you have basically the South more Republican and the North is more Democrat. So you have both. But yeah, I agree with you that the actual, the beginning of the switch, at least in terms of ideologies and belief systems, occurred during the Progressive Era. Yeah, question. Yeah. Are there more of Henry Rothbard resources at? Well, there's always, yeah, there's a bunch of that. Yeah, in terms of the Henryton notes, it's more, the notes are more interesting when they're not actually written out. Instead, they're even more chicken scratched than the actual sort of the sentences, which is great. But yeah, there's a bunch of stuff actually, especially his class notes. There was a couple pages of the Progressive Era, some graphs and stuff that were sort of sandwiched between a stack of the class notes because he was just like, and I guess he wanted to teach and he's just, I'm gonna grab them and then he just threw them in there. So yeah, there's a whole stuff, particularly history of thought, Progressive Era, economic history, a bunch of his class notes, as well as other research notes that aside from just reading the very insightful information, they're just very entertaining to look at because I can just imagine him teaching in front of a blackboard. He's literally got this crumbled up paper and he was just writing a bunch of stuff and that's what got me into teaching because I wanted to do that. But yeah. So yeah, there's plenty of stuff in the archives. I think with that, I think we're done. So if you have any more questions, you can come up. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you. Thank you.