 Thank you everyone for coming on their own, you know, their own voluntary volition to this presentation, the hour before lunch, so when everyone is going to pay attention the most. I also want to thank the Mises Institute for asking me to give this presentation. So the title of my talk today is Rothbard on the Progressive Era. And so I recognize it's the end of the week, so the whole week we've been learning about the economics, the Austria economics of notably Ludwig van Mises and Murray Rothbard. And so this talk I'm going to discuss a very important area of research interest. Oh, okay. Very important area of research interest. I thought I was from New Jersey, so I'm loud enough. But anyway, I guess now I got to lean in a little bit of Rothbard's thought. Dr. Klein discussed this a little bit in his talk on government in big business earlier in the morning. So he used a lot of many historians, many economists, economic historians, political scientists, notably Gabriel Coco. So there's an old saying, at least in TV, that the Simpsons did it. So whenever it comes to anything, any sort of plot arc, character arc, episode story, the Simpsons have an episode on that. So you could say somewhat similarly that Rothbard did it when it comes to any sort of economic theory, economic history, political science, et cetera. Chances are Rothbard wrote something on it. In some cases, he wrote an entire book on it. And this is one of those cases. So when it comes to the progressive era, Rothbard did it, so to speak. So what is this presentation about? So it discusses Rothbard's forthcoming book, The Progressive Era, that will be out later this year in the fall. And sort of part unpublished, part published. So it contains a unpublished manuscript written in the late 1970s and his published essays on the period written in the 1980s in the 1990s. So for those of you who have read some of these essays, such as World War One as fulfillment, these were sort of, he wrote those essays on topics that he planned to do, planned to write more on the book if he finished it. So he originally wanted to write a full blown book on the period. Instead, his research interest shifted and he sort of finished up by writing essays. So for anyone who's listened to his lectures, his 1986 lectures at Brooklyn Polytech, they're on YouTube, they're on Mises.org. They're called The American Economy and the End of Lez's Affair, 1870 to World War Two. These are very similar to those. In fact, when he was sort of lecturing in class, he actually used parts of his book, sort of he was going off of it. So it's sort of very similar. And this is his book length treatment of it. So if you ever listen to those and you say, boy, I wish he wrote something on this. Well, now he actually did write something on this. Okay. So the book is a little bit talk about the book. The book is roughly 600 pages with 15 chapters. And the first nine chapters are the unpublished book manuscript. So that's roughly about 300 pages. And these were discovered in the archives. And I could spend an entire PowerPoint presentation just going through the discovery process of actually sort of a treasure hunt of you had to look all over the archives and finding this. Sometimes the pages were sandwiched in between, you know, piles of notes, etc. But anyway, they all the whole nine chapters, they are there, we were able to find them and edit them. And they discuss many sort of canonical historical examples from the progressive era. So he discusses railroad interventions. He goes through the Interstate Commerce Commission. He goes through the merger movement around the turn of the century. He discusses the election of 1896, in the fall of the laissez-faire sort of Democrats during this time, and the presidency of really the first progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt. The remaining six chapters are on sort of previously published essays, roughly about 300 pages. And these are on topics that if he finished the book, he would have written these in a sort of a chapter format. They discuss local progressivism, origins of the welfare state, World War One, the Federal Reserve, and 1920s corporatism. So when Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, and later President of the United States. Okay, so, you know, in a sense, you know, why should you care about this book that it's coming out. So for most people, economists, historians, politicians, basically what you learn in high school, as Tom Woods pointed out, the progressive era was a very important and beneficial period. So the common perception of the 19th century was that you had harmful monopolies. You had unsafe working conditions. You had dangerous consumer goods. You had crippling deflation and severe business cycles. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism, if it ever existed was only applicable to a sort of agrarian economy. And now that we're industrialized, we have to have the visible hand of government sort of step in and regulate things. We, you know, we need the middle of the road solution, so to speak. So the traditional story, the masses, the well-intentioned reformers, so the Bernie Sanders, the Paul Krugmans, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, these well-intentioned reformers, they rose up, they fought the established interests, the monopoly man, as Tom Woods pointed out, you know, the big businessman, he's got the monocle and all of that, they, you know, they resisted fiercely. And they instituted these enlightened government reforms. Rothbard's interpretation is slightly different of the period. So in his period, in his interpretation, you know, it's almost the regressive era. You had really political entrepreneurs, those who are entrepreneurs who are looking to enact various government regulations in order to hamper their competitors, they sort of allied themselves with court intellectuals. Okay, so those intellectuals who are out for their own power and prestige bureaucrats, who too often are just sort of considered as self-interested. Okay, so you had bootleggers, to use the bootleggers in Baptist phrase, Bruce Yandel, that a doctor client spoke about, the bootleggers were also interested, not necessarily in the public good, but enhancing their own power. Okay, so, you know, sort of building off of this, here are words from Rothbard's preface. So, you know, the man himself can speak on this issue. So he says, quote, he says, the purpose of this projected book is to trace the causes, the nature, and the consequences of the dramatic shift of the U.S. polity from a relatively laissez-faire system to the outlines of the statist era that we are familiar with today. Okay, so how exactly, you know, do we get to this modern system of government? And Rothbard continues on. He says, from a roughly free and laissez-faire society of the 19th century, when the economy was free, taxes were low, persons were free in their daily lives, and the government was non-interventionist at home and abroad. The new coalition managed in a short time to transform America into a welfare warfare, imperial state, where people's daily lives were controlled and regulated to a massive degree. So he's trying to explain, you know, how we got the modern system of government, how we got the modern government intervention in the economy. And this is sort of his task. And so we sort of, you know, this is his main goal. Okay. And sort of the rest of the presentation, going through the nine unpublished chapters. So here's the new material no one has seen before. So we're sort of going to go through the chapters and go through a general outline of them. So someone stuck in a conundrum. So the ultimate goal of this is to go through the book. So you'll buy the book. So I was stuck a little bit on this because if the PowerPoint presentation was very uninformative, then no one would say, well, this book isn't very interesting. I'm not going to buy the book. On the other hand, if the PowerPoint presentation was too informative, you'd say, well, I know everything I need to know about the Progressive Era, so I'm not going to buy the book. So basically I had to design the PowerPoint presentation be just as mediocre as possible. So you're left wanting for more. And I am an individual who's uniquely suited to this task. So hopefully, hopefully, you know, I will achieve my goal in this. But anyway, so jumping into the first three chapters, sort of part one, you have railroads and mergers. So I think these are some of the three best chapters. It's, you know, Rothbard is finest as an economic historian. So it's somewhat of a traditional narrative. You sort of heard through various lectures this week. Business had tried to monopolize the market, but failed due to the mechanisms of the free market. Various industries, railroads, petroleum, so standard oil, steel, US Steel, sugar, the American sugar refinery company, even cookies. So the company that we all know today is Nabisco was originally the National Biscuit Company. And it started off as a giant attempt to monopolize markets, but it failed miserably. As the old saying goes, that's how the cookie crumbles. So it was a bad one. I know, I'm sorry. But anyway, so starting off with railroads, they turned the government to push for cartilizing regulations to prevent. And these are many of the sort of examples that Dr. Klein spoke about earlier today. You had price competition, banning rebates. So secret price discounts for bulk orders, although it's unfair. You know, how can I compete with, you know, with this company, et cetera. These are the traditional, you know, rationale, product competition. Well, you can't produce products that are quote, below quality. Well, below quality to whom? You know, we know the market segments produces various goods of different quality. Well, you know, it's according to certain government officials and the classic smaller competition. So you raise their rivals costs. This is, you know, you, you, you make them have to upgrade their, you know, new safety legislate, you know, new safety standards, you have to upgrade their plants, you have to make them hire more accountants, et cetera. For larger companies, or those companies have already, you know, enacted those on their own, it's a lot easier for them to adapt. Okay. So sort of jumping in, we go to railroads, you have the failure of the cartels. So hopefully, everyone here has played monopoly. You have the four railroads, you have the, it's the Redding railroads, not the reading, the Pennsylvania railroad, the short line in the B&O. The reason I bring this up is because at least the two on the right, the Pennsylvania and the B&O, these are all actually real railroads, by the way, they were back in the day when people used railroads. But they were very prominent in these cartilizing attempts, particularly the Pennsylvania. So just to have it there. So Rothbard sort of starts off, he talks about the lavish subsidies that were granted to railroads during the Lincoln administration. These are the topics that Tom DiLorenzo was written about, also Burton Folsom. And so they were fiercely competitive. So railroads tried to form pools. It was basically their definition, basically their form of a cartel, you pool together railroad fright. That was the idea, railroad and you work to raise rates. But they didn't work because of cheating and new competition. So this is basic cartel theory in the sense that every cartel fails because of internal and external competition. It's the easiest way to think about it. Competitors, new competitors entering in, in existing competitors to say, oh yeah, we're not going to raise, we're not going to cut rates, etc. They turn around and then they enact various secret, you know, rate cutting. So Rothbard goes through many examples. Two prominent ones I'll just list right here are the Iowa pool from Iowa to Chicago and vice versa in the joint executive committee, Chicago to New York. So whenever the railroads they tried to cartelize, particularly rates through between states known as interstate rates, the classic, you know, result that basically sound economics would say would happen. They didn't work. So here's a quote from a historian that Rothbard was influenced by. He wrote the visible hand of government. And so this is his name is Alfred Chandler. So he says quote by 1884, nearly all of the railroad managers and most investors agree that even the most carefully devised cartels were unable to control competition. OK, somewhat of a revealing quote. So on the market, you can't control competition. So in a sense, you know, what do they what do they do? Well, you push for a regulation. So Albert think he was a he was a German cartelist. They they they brought him over from Germany to work to try and stabilize railroad rates. He had a very frank quote and he wrote this he wrote this in a private letter in 1876. He says, quote, whether this cooperation can be secured by voluntary action of the transportation companies is doubtful. Governmental supervision and authority may be required to some extent to accomplish the objecting view. So it was you had too many competitors. They're cheating. You need to make cartel agreements coercive. You can't, you know, leave them and you need to try and ban rebates. That was the basic idea. So you need to bring in the the visible hand of government to do something that the invisible hand of the market could not do. And railroads are one of the main interests. Others were shippers. They shipped their products on railroads. You had farmers similar behind the drive for federal regulations or everyone was sort of belly aching something about the railroad rates. Railroads would say the rates are too low. Shippers would say the rates are too high. Maybe you had people say, well, wait a second. Why am I paying a higher rate than my competitor, etc. So everyone had some sort of vested interest in bringing the government to sort of control the railroad rates. All right. So, you know, in a sense, what do we get? Well, you sort of get a compromise. You get 1887 interstate commerce act. This ban rebates, which the railroads liked, and it banned pools, which the railroads didn't particularly like, but it also created a regulatory commission. So the whole history of the ICC is basically a giant attempt by railroads to cartelize by blatantly, you know, blatantly banning cartels. It looks too obvious in a sense if you actually, you know, have pools, so to speak. So JP Morgan is a very prominent investment banker. He's featured significantly in this in the book. He tried to stabilize rates after the act. Didn't work. He's tried to work within the commission and it didn't work and it led to later acts such as the 1903 Elkins Anti-Rebating Act in 1906 Hepburn Act. The problem was that by roughly a decade after the turn of the century, sort of rival shipping interests, they sort of captured the commission and they started to block rate increases. OK, so there's an old saying and it goes that policy is personnel. So it matters who you have on the top. So you have a, you know, government legislation. If you have someone favorable to your interest in forcing it, can be, you know, it's the exact same law. But if you have the right, if you have the right people in charge, you can do what you want with it. Releasing, you know, in today's environment, it's not really who's in charge, but it just, you know, I guess the bureaucrats and the various agencies that will decide what what are we're not to enforce because necessarily who's in charge of various departments doesn't seem to matter so much anymore. But anyway, so they starved railroads of revenue by World War One. And then the railroad sort of push for nationalization. So this is sort of an interesting case study of government intervention, where the railroads sort of are pushing for stronger and stronger intervention, one to sort of prevent competition, but also to prevent various rival interests from sort of taking over the legislation, so to speak. So we move on to the merger movement, occurred roughly around the turn of the century, the dates, depending on who you talk to, you have slightly different dates, but it's 1897 and 1901. So the mergers were formed to monopolize markets, much like railroads. But even with the high tariffs, they still failed. So there's an old saying that the tariff is the mother of all trusts. You think of them, trust is similar to a merger, it's that you block out foreign competition, you block out competition, save steel imports from Britain, and you're going to help cartels and monopolies in America. So various types of companies that were formed that sort of mentioned some of them. And there are many more. And what always happened is that the promoters were too optimistic about expected revenue. So they thought they were going to be more profitable than what they were. But what happened is given a couple of years and the stocks still weren't paying dividends, the companies were earning losses, etc. So you do the exact same thing you do in railroads. You turn to government to cartelize. So in Rothbard's words, sort of at the turn of the century when this merger movement failed, said the stage was set at the turn of the 20th century for the giant leap into statism to become known as the progressive period. OK. So I have a quote here from an economist named Arthur S. Doing, who was a roughly around this time, he was someone who very influential Rothbard. He cites him extensively. He's actually in man economy and state as well in the footnotes. And here's an important quote. Hopefully I have time to get through it. So I have been impressed throughout by the powerlessness of mere aggregates of capital, the whole monopoly. I've been impressed, too, by the tremendous importance of individual innate ability or its lack in determining the success or failure of any enterprise. With these observations in mind, one may hazard the belief that whatever trust problem exists will work out its own solution. I know there's another page. The doom of the inefficient waits on no legislative regulation. It is rather delayed thereby. Restrictive regulation will perpetuate the inefficient corporation by furnishing an artificial prop to support natural weakness that will hamper the efficient by impeding the free play of personal ambition. It's a pretty good analysis of the trust problem when you think about it. Don't do anything. Just let the market work. It will weigh the monopolies. Unfortunately, this advice sort of ran after the fact in it and it wasn't really taken. But so this is sort of the snapshot of the first couple chapters. So sort of, you know, moving on to the next topic, we have the chapters four to six, sort of the next part, the collapse of laissez-faire politics, sort of the prequel to all of this. So Rothbard wants to explain the political situation that developed. So Rothbard goes into this. He says, quote, how could America experience a great leap into statism after 1900? A leap that went virtually unchallenged. What happened to the longstanding American tradition of individual liberty and laissez-faire? In the election of 1896, it was that sudden collapse that spelled the doom of laissez-faire and American party politics and paved the way for the unchallenged statism of the progressive period. And indeed, for the remainder of the 20th century. OK, so Rothbard's explanation is basically he had the sort of the destruction around the turn of the century of this strong laissez-faire party, or at least this faction of one of the major parties in America. So something that always Rothbard is always wondering about his whole life as a academic was the difference in politics back then. As many of us know, Rothbard is not only an ivory tower, you know, he's not an ivory tower academic. He wrote many theoretical works who's also very interested in politics and he's also very interested in reaching the people directly. So you take a look at politics back then. Politics back then was very different than politics now. You had very high voter turnout, very ideological parties. There's no fuzzing of the issues. And you had very emotional enthusiastic voters. Voters back then were extremely interested in economics. OK. You take a look now and you have very low voter turnout. You have very similar parties. You have very disinterested independent voters. This is politics today. So people were very passionate about economic issues, whether they be out of gold or silver standard, whether or not to have high tariffs or free trade, whether or not to have high government spending or low government spending. So why on earth do these people write about economics? So this is something that Rothbard always wondered about in his class. And he said, I can't even get my own students to be interested in economics. And this was him telling his students on the first day of class. So some of it is gentle. You know, you knew what you were getting into, I guess, this period. So Rothbard's answer to this was you basically had ethno religious factors. So people voted on economics because they were connected to sort of local gut issues. People, things that directly affected people's lives. So Rothbard sort of concentrates on the battleground states of this time period, mainly the Midwest, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, someone eerily familiar. You think of now Illinois, Indiana, et cetera. So you had sort of two groups of the two political parties were very different based on sort of the religious background of their voters. You had liturgical Democrats, mainly German Catholics. You also had Irish Italians, so Catholics and Lutherans versus pietist Republicans, sort of native Methodists and Baptists. So liturgy is when you sort of follow the traditions of the church, it's right belief. So you go to the church, you obey its sort of its rituals, et cetera. Its traditions and you'll be good. Pietism is slightly different. The church doesn't have such a structure. Instead, it's the individual's direct relationship with God. So sort of right behavior. You save yourself by saving others. So pietists wanted to ban alcohol. They wanted to ban sort of parochial private schools, sort of religious schools and Sunday fund to protect morality. So Rothbard was very influenced by a writer known as H.L. Menken and the Puritans were sort of the ancestors of the pietists and H.L. Menken had a great quote and he said the haunting Puritan fear is that somewhere someone is having fun. And that's you know, you can think of it is very similar to this. So you try and ban alcohol. You ban Sunday fund to protect morality. I mean, what else was there to do? So this spread to supporting cheap money in high tariffs to protect the economy. So just as we need government to ban pro ban alcohol to protect morality, so we need high tariffs to protect ourselves from cheap foreign competition. Liturgical is on the other hand is sort of the opposite. They wanted to preserve personal liberty. This spreads to supporting the gold standard and free trade to preserve economic liberty. So they attacked all of these interventions as paternalistic. So I mentioned that German Catholics and Lutherans were sort of the main immigrant group. And they also wanted to ban immigration, by the way, pietists, main immigrant group to the Midwest. So you look at these statistics and the Germans basically cared about two main issues back then. It was about their beer. It was about the gold standard. So the main planks basically have a sound, you know, I guess you could say libertarian contingent there. So you have that they were known as sort of the bourbon Democrats. They were centered in the Northeast in the Midwest, in sort of the Democrats of Grover, Cleveland, and they were sort of the libertarian group. On the other hand, in the Democratic Party, you sort of had the pietist populist Democrats, those from the South and the far West, who are much more statist. So the South after the Civil War was never going to vote for the party of Lincoln. So to speak, that was the idea. So they were always staunchly in Democratic hands. And so you really had these two somewhat, you know, contentious factions, as we'll see, one of them took over the other by the turn of the century. So sort of moving on, we have the rise and fall of the bourbon Democrats. You look at the space of roughly about, you know, two election cycles. So you look at those pictures. You have Benjamin Harrison on the left, the top left. He's a pietist, Presbyterian, Republican from Indiana. And on the right, you have Grover Cleveland, sort of, you know, sort of more liturgical Presbyterian from New York. I think it was from Buffalo. And so this was sort of the, you know, the traditional sort of showdown, so to speak, that happened every every four years. So due to demographics, basically a higher birth rate in immigration, Democrats were slowly gaining the upper hand in the Midwest. So Rothbard spends a tremendous amount of time going through these local and state elections in 1890, the congressional, the midterm elections. And it also goes through the 1892 elections. So the Democrats were basically, they were finally getting, you know, they're getting the upper hand. What happened is that Republicans sort of realized they were losing strategy, so to speak. So they dropped pietism, they sort of downplay alcohol prohibition and their soft money inclinations, such as green backs or silver become more pro-gold. And this, the idea was mainly to attract the one swing vote in the Midwest, which was the German Lutherans. Again, they care about beer and gold. So whichever one supported those policies more, those were the German Lutherans were going to go. And, you know, poor Grover Cleveland, he was reelected, the only president to be reelected non-consecutive terms. In 1892, he starts office in March, 1893. And what do you know? There was the panic of 1893, OK? So the Bourbons were wrongly blamed, basically, the incumbent bourbon Democrats. They just won this, you know, they just got back in the office. Something happens right when they get back in the office. They're stuck with the blame, basically. And so they lose the 1894 elections. So, you know, Rothbard goes through this and he basically talks about how is the populace, you know, the Cleveland Democrats are weakened. So the populace basically take over the party, they hijack it by 1896. OK, so William Jennings Bryant, the man on the left, on the right, the bottom right is a pietist from the far West. He's a strong inflationist, pro-silver. And he's now battling against William McKinley, who's sort of a moderate Republican who's recently became pro-gold. So you sort of have a shift in the parties where now you have two sort of center status parties. As opposed to having these laissez-faire bourbon Democrats, you now have these sort of these two center status parties. The bourbon Democrats, they form a third party and they quickly die out. They're called the National Gold Democrats. So I guess it's always good when your party actually has, you know, there's the word gold in it. You know, I would, I'd look at the, I'd support that. So you have now the fourth party system. So the third party system was after it was during the sort of right after the Civil War, 1854 to 1892. And you roughly have the fourth party system, 1896 to 1932, which allows for the open door of progressivism. Basically the beginning of modern politics as we know it. Both parties are very similar. There's less religious emphasis. And this means a drop in voter turnout. Voters, you know, they're just less energized. And most importantly, you had close contests now replaced by Republican landslides. OK, for the first 10 years of the progressive era, Republicans controlled both the House, the Senate, and the presidency. OK, they only did that once in the post-Civil War era. There was only one there's only one Democrat president elected during this time. That was Woodrow Wilson. He didn't have all the it was a split way. It was a three party contest, basically. He had less than majority. So something that's interesting, it's important to note out is important to note is that this was actually associated with sort of this de-democratization and increasing bureaucratization of previous positions. The progressive era was actually not a period of increasing democracy. And this was mainly done to sort of insulate government from voter wrath. You had the beginning of the civil service sort of starting around this time period where before you could replace various positions that'd be elected. Now they're sort of insulated. All right. So the sort of the swamp just sort of just stays a swamp. You can't even really recycle the people out. You just you just can only add more people on. So you can only get bigger at that point. So here's a historian who Rothbard is very influenced by. I think it's a revealing quote. He says the cumulative effect of noncompetitiveness and mass demobilization was further to insulate decision making from organized mass opinion. That insulation was an indispensable stage in the efforts of cosmopolitan elites to eliminate the party as a critical source of localist resistance to the centralizing impulses of corporate capitalism. So you weaken the parties. You weaken the voter turnout. You know you weaken voter enthusiasm. And now you have you know you will have for this government bureaucracy is sort of the takeover and corporate capitalism of political entrepreneurs, big business, et cetera, neatly coincides with the end of the merger movement. So you sort of have a new coalition. It's not really new. It's just sort of recycled. It's been done before. So it's a mercantilist coalition. And it's the basically new Rothbard uses this word. I love it. It's a quadripartite. So it's a four part coalition sort of the take hold and sort of you know ram through a whole spate of quote progressive legislation. You had big business. They wanted to cartelize. You had big big government. So unsurprisingly they wanted to enhance their own power. You had big unions. They were there to sort of stifle the radical opposition of labor. And you know most importantly at least from my perspective you have big intellectuals who are there to plan and administer the system. Most academics realized that the free market does not provide great job security for you know various you know academic positions, et cetera. So when you're you know when you're planning if you can be in charge of a government bureaucracy you can insulate yourself from the pesky you know uncertainty of the marketplace. So sort of moving on you have the progressive era sort of enter theater at Roosevelt. He's the man on the right. So Roosevelt Rothbard during this time period he goes through sort of a power elite analysis and long story short Roosevelt was very closely connected with sort of the J.P. Morgan ambit. It's another word I like the ambit sort of the spear of influence. It's not just one man but it's an entire organization. People who have sort of gone to the same schools together. They've worked at the same companies. They're on the same board of directors, et cetera. You connect all the dots and you get this you know sort of remarkable coincidence so to speak. So one of his first moves was to establish a new department of commerce and labor. Those two are split up because you know just like everything they get bigger and then you split up with a new bureau of corporations. That's the predecessor to the Federal Trade Commission. And this is supported by sort of the Morgan ambit most notably George W. Perkins. He was known as sort of Morgan's right hand man. Roosevelt they were such good friends that he actually gave him the pen he used to sign the legislation with George W. Perkins. And this happened February 1903. Someone interestingly the same month as the Elkins Anti-Rebating Act. And the cartilizing goal here was compulsory publicity sort of a step in that direction. You now have to make various pricing and production decisions public. It's a way of sort of cracking down seeing what your competitors are up to. So here's something from the Wall Street Journal. It's the longer the quotes longer it's in the book. He says nothing is more noteworthy than the fact that President Roosevelt's recommendation in favor of government regulation of railroad rates in federal control of interstate companies have met with so much favor among managers of railroads and industrial companies. So it's not as if these reforms are being you know they're being shackled you know the business they're being shackled they're fighting them with everything they got. Instead you know they're warmly they're saying all right we're going to use these regulations. You know we're going to try and shape them to our desires basically. I still read the Wall Street Journal. So it's it's been a good big been a good paper after all these years. But so sort of we move on to a very famous part of Roosevelt's presidency and he was known as the trust buster and he had the good and he had the bad trust. And so the good trusts were really the Morgan companies such as US Steel International Harvester and the Roosevelt he met very favorable you know agreements with them. JP Morgan was able to basically get the government off off off off his company's backs. So you know the way some of this worked is that JP Morgan he met the attorney general on a private jet on the tarmac of the Phoenix Air I'm just kidding. I was it's a later thing. I get my get my facts mixed up. But anyway it's quite similar to that. Talking about their grandchildren for a little bit and then you know but anyway so he had the and yeah on the other hand you had the bad trusts. OK. So these were the rival financial groups John D. Rockefeller and E.H. Harriman another railroad tycoon. Morgan really didn't like Harriman at all. So in late 1906 Roosevelt sort of threatens to break up Harriman's union in Southern Pacific and Harriman sort of sends an attorney over to the White House and this is a great quote. His attorney sort of you know he writes this in his in his biography of Harriman later and so he's talking to Roosevelt and he's saying I mean he's saying why are you doing all these bad things against you know Harriman my boss and he says well you don't know what Morgan and some of these other people say about Harriman. So you kind of wonder you're like all right so I as a president sort of taking the advice about one sort of railroad person from you know his rival you know sort of one of these things that make you you know make make you think for a little bit. Standard oil had the unfortunate foresight to be against the bureau bill and so in 1906 and 1907 against you know Roosevelt sort of launched these suits against standard oil. They violated antitrust they they accepted rebates you know these are all these are all sins and so Roosevelt you know reminisces about this later and he says standard oil antagonize me before my 1904 election. When I was getting through the Bureau of Corporations bill I love this phrase he says and then I promptly threw that gauntlet to it. So it means that you issue the challenge. All right so you know they're they're in the way of my legislation so now I'm going to break them you know I'm going to throw in the gauntlet issue the challenge. Again another revealing quote my opinion. So sort of moving on you have the Roosevelt was sort of known for his square deal. So we hear about a lot of deals now you had the square deal you have the new deal you have the fair deal and now we have the better deal. That's you know it's just recently discussed by many politicians recently and does three main planks were sort of corporate regulation consumer regulation and conservation regulation and you can basically replace the whole you know the word regulation with cartelization. Okay so in each way you're looking to sort of help cartelize these industries that was sort of the you know the in the sense the the ulterior motive behind this square deal. So June 1906 you had the famous meat inspection act as you know you hear about this you read about this in high school this is why you know you have the government regulation or else you know there's gonna be rats in the meat and you know people are gonna fall in you know I've heard the story of Upton Sinclair you know Rothbard again has a slightly indifferent interpretation of this and so he says quote the large meat packers were enthusiastically in favor of the bill designed as it was to bring the small packers under federal inspection. One advantage to imposing uniform sanitary conditions on all meat packers is that the burden of the increased costs would fall more heavily on the smaller than on the bigger plants thereby crippling the smaller competitors. Okay this is very similar to the raising rivals costs that Dr. Klein spoke about it's that meat many meat companies the larger companies who already have these safety standards yeah sure make all the other companies do it they're gonna have to spend all this money upgrading their facilities and that's going to hurt them. Moving on actually the same month and in fact the same day Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act this didn't create the FDA but it sort of the FDA was created later but it was the you know the first step along the way and Rothbard says about this he says neither was the Pure Food and Drug Act a triumph of the people over the interests the pure food agitation had been carried on for years by business interests in general and specifically by large food companies anxious to use the government in a mercantilist way to cartilize to restrict competition and to impose higher relative costs on small business competitors okay the name of the game is basically making it harder for your competitors to compete all right so spent a little time on this Rothbard goes into the sort of the the main bureaucrat pushing for this he's his man named Harvey Washington Wiley and he's a pietist crusader sort of run amok for over pure food so here he is he's 50th anniversary in the 50s he gets his own postage stamp so sort of in the annals of history now um and he had a sort of a similar position like Roosevelt he had the good businesses such as sugar and you know you think of straight whiskey versus the bad and pure businesses they were producing below quality products you had saccharin sort of a substitute for sugar you put in coffee and you had you had sort of rectified whiskey sort of a pure in more impure whiskey he was pro sugar and sugar tariff so I actually I don't have this quote on there but I think it's somewhat revealing let me see if I can bring it up he talks about talks about sugar and it's very odd you know so he says let me make the sweets of the nation and I don't care who makes the laws they sort of channeling his inner Rothchild there and he says the consumption of sugar is a measure of progress and civilization childhood without candy would be heaven without harps okay so the FDA has has slightly changed his position on sugar a little bit but he also has he was very pro sugar tariff and he says free trade is the tender tropical nursing of the college hot houses and professional you know dilettantes you know these dabblers they don't really know what they're talking about and he says he was asked you know the the sugar tariff would throw you know a bunch of people in the Caribbean out of work and it's sort of revealing quote most progressives of the time are very racist Rothbard goes into this he says the native solely lollying in the sun can look up and see coconuts and bananas he will not starve nor freeze so you know I guess just let them eat coconuts kind of that's the idea that's yeah that's that's sort of what he's going after but anyway so he was a pietist crusader he had the drive for great moralization and over time he became secularized and this is his biographer this happened to many intellectuals around the time and he says quote science filled devoid left by the loss of faith perhaps Wiley's views stemmed from his heritage of evangelical Christianity a heritage whose theological superstructure had lost its zeal for him who's burning zeal for social justice remained okay and so Wiley eventually Rothbard goes into this he sort of got his comeuppance because what happened is he started to attack saccharine and Theodore Roosevelt really enjoyed saccharine he put in his coffee every day and so for Roosevelt this was the end of Wiley he said well he said anyone who thinks saccharine's bad for you is an idiot that's in a book and he sort of he ended up replacing Wiley so at the end of the day you know he sort of got what was deserved of him sort of I want to just briefly go through this part sort of finish up it's on conservation if you haven't got any idea now it's a giant cartilization effort so you know Roosevelt's ally in this was Gifford Pinchot for the longest time I thought it was some sort of rendition of like Pinocchio or Pinchot or something with Pinchot of the Forest Service and the basic name in the game here like everything else was you withdraw land and you could also subsidize so various lumber manufacturers yes sure they want government to withhold government land from you know for new lumber companies to use because why is going to raise their value of their pre-existing property okay so again you have another example sort of briefly subsidization you have irrigation Newlands Act so you subsidize irrigation or you cartilize very very similar process is the same thing going on today sort of finishing up here was chapter nine so this is local progressivism and this is the National Civic Federation so this is organized in 1900 it was organized by big businesses in big intellectuals so you have Ralph easily he's the organizer of this and he has a very revealing quote because the progressives they prided themselves on being middle of the road so on one hand you had laissez-faire capitalism too reckless on the other hand you had proletarian Marxism too Confiscutory right so he said our enemies are the socialists among the labor people in the anarchists among the capitalists it's a very revealing quote so notice how he calls the capitalists the anarchists laissez-faire capitalism cause anarchy but not the good type of anarchy you know the bad type of anarchy you know everything's on fire and you know all that and so they you know they're prominent in supporting many very local state and local regulations particular safety legislation banning child labor etc you know why would they do that so another historian Rothbard is very influenced by things a very revealing quote he says a number of pieces of progressive legislation were not only supported but also were in a number of important instances drafted by enlightened businessmen these are enlightened guys so these men many of them quote corporate liberals could support some regulation on the grounds on the grounds that a uniform application of the laws by the states or the federal government would permit the socially conscious employer to compete on even footing with the individual individualistic cost-cutting employer right so notice if you're individualism is bad now you know you're employing you know you're running a sweatshop sweatshop employing children or you're just cost-cutting okay so of course businesses that aren't using those particular types of production processes would like to see them outlawed it puts a hamper you know it hinders their competitors all right so you had the same thing going on not only on the federal level but also on the state and local level and sometimes it was always sort of couched in this idea of quote uniform application of the laws but the idea was always uniform up okay so it was uniformly you know increased regulations upwards all right that's sort of you know the code word so sort of wrapping up I you know I recognize this is a presentation right before lunch show you wrap up I know people are starting to get hungry but we have the progressive era brought the modern era of big government you had disinterested voters political entrepreneurs and other special interests power hungry bureaucrats and idealistic technocratic into intellectuals so other than that I guess it was a pretty great time but uh so you know Rothbard he sort of sums up and this is at least in his preface he says in short the progressive era ushered the modern American political economic system in the being despite the spate of studies in the past two decades he's writing he's referring to the 1960s the 1970s no one has yet and no one still is yet put all of the pieces together into a coherent explanatory framework that will be the aim of this book so in conclusion don't forget to buy the book when it comes out thank you very much for your time