 Well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the final session of our 10 talks on the growth of government in the United States. I will confess that when I started this seemed like a very big project and I wasn't at all sure I was man enough to make it to the end or at least that I had voice enough to make it to the end, but but here I am still talking so if I can carry on for one more lecture then I'll I'll be ready to make one of those declarations like the chief of the Nez Perce tribe made In my case, I will lecture no more again That might be a little hard promise for me to keep but at all events for the time being it'll It'll put me at rest What I want to do this time is give some consideration to the most recent crisis episode that might be viewed as fitting the mold of the ones I've discussed in the in the past a few days and then to Consider explicitly What we might expect to happen in the future in light of our understanding of what has happened in the past Those of us who care a lot about history and are so audacious as to even Stand up and try to teach it often try to persuade students that that this is a worthwhile subject that it Can do a lot to help you understand the world and to give you a better appreciation of what is going to happen in the future as I said in my very first lecture there are no laws of history So we we can never know for certain what will happen in the future But what we can learn from the study of history if combined with sound theory is That we can make a pretty good probabilistic forecast About what future patterns will hold and expect that some of the patterns we've seen in the past to provide useful guides for shaping our our expectations to illustrate this I want to start off right now by Giving you some excerpts from an interview I gave in September of 19 Excuse me of 2001 In fact on the September 20th Which was just nine days after the the dreadful Events of the terrorist hijacking and the collapse of the buildings in New York City with so much loss of life and I was I Was approached by Michael Lynch of Reason magazine and who wanted to interview me Given what seemed to be the terrorism crisis that we were plunged into at that time and and Asked me some questions about what I expected to happen given my study of crises in the past and So this was an occasion for me in a sense to take a test To see whether in fact it is true as I'd always insisted to students that knowing something about how history seems to have operated is a good guide to the future and I Answered the questions put As follows There were a number of them. I'm not going to read the whole interview, but it did appear in Reason Online Lynch said what ought we to look for this time and I said we can expect thousands of reservists to be called to active duty and taken away from their ordinary jobs We can expect the assignment of military forces to some unprecedented duties It appears that some military units are going to be used for domestic police activities It is clearly going to be the case that the FBI will become far more active in surveillance activities the government will mount a variety of overseas actions requiring the armed forces and Perhaps a number of civilian employees To attempt to kill to disable or to damage what are taken to be terrorist camps Facilities and cadres It is also fairly clear that the government is going to have to bail out the airline industry and maybe the insurance industry When the government takes large-scale unprecedented actions of this sort Unanticipated consequences always occur then the government has to expand even further to deal with those consequences Lynch asked later, what's the nature of the coming crisis and I replied the whole concept of wiping out terrorism is completely misguided It simply can't be done Terrorism is a simple act for any determined adult to perpetrate no matter what kind of security measures are taken And I suspect that after the government finishes making its show of force in the next few weeks It will only inspire new acts of terrorism if not immediately then eventually And finally he said what do you expect in terms of leviathan at the end of the day? To which I replied the ultimate result will be an enlargement of the big brother state We were moving that way already. This will accelerate it Well, I'll let you be the judge of how well my Forecasts have held up to this point, but in my own estimation I hit every single nail on the head Now maybe any sensible person might have come to the same Expectations that I expressed in that interview, but I don't think so and so I think that What has been happening in the past two years? It has in fact Mimicked in many ways the experience of previous crises Obviously each one has its own specific details and no two are exactly the same and so What the government does in any given crisis is always a little different from what it's done in another But again, there are patterns That occur again and again and again. There is a kind of internal political logic That creates those patterns that brings them into being and there is an ideological Underpinning that makes possible the working through of these patterns on each occasion As I argued in my book there have been crises throughout history, but they didn't always work like the ones of the past century They require a certain ideological context in order for them to work As they have more recently and that ideological context still exists despite what people Seem to think for a while in the 80s and 90s about having put the status to to route nothing of the sort of course happened and As I told many of the people espousing those views in the 80s and 90s You're you're just indulging in wishful thinking if you think somehow we've won the battle Against the status and and got them on the run that the masses Could be turned around on a dime by the simplest crisis or even by a bogus crisis and The politicians will will quickly come running to exploit the opportunities of a crisis Well, what did they do this time round? Very quickly after the attacks of September 11 President Bush asked Congress for an emergency appropriation Apparently aimed largely at just giving twenty billion dollars more or less to New York City to for the purpose of Making repairs of the damage there Congress responded not not by agreeing to the president's request but by doubling it and Appropriating forty billion dollars to what amounted to a an emergency slush fund The airline industry which was plunged into and to Even more money losing by the fallback of its of its demand after the attacks received a five billion dollar appropriation for cash subsidies and ten billion dollar authorization for The federal government to make loan guarantees if the airline companies got Banks or other lenders to help prop them up During their hard times Congress created the air trend air transportation stabilization board Which was to oversee the dispensing of this loot to airline companies many of which were On the verge of going bankrupt anyhow at their own initiative and and so they were probably Happy to have this a crisis come along and provide a provide a pretext for subsidizing them When the market had was already telling them to close up shop Airport security Almost everybody decided obviously needed to be nationalized at that time the airline companies Under the supervision of the FAA and in accordance with FAA rules along with the airports were managing these baggage checks and and Searches of passengers and and since the terrorists had got on board as passengers and carried out their They're hijacking everybody panicked and real and concluded that We couldn't rely on private employees to perform this critical security task and For some reason even though everybody knows perfectly well that when anything is moved from the private sector to the public sector It's done worse not better They all somehow believe that this was completely different because this was called security or or policing And obviously we don't want private policing Again flying in the face of the fact that the great bulk of real Policing going on in the country right now is being done by private employees as opposed to these make-believe Thugs who wear uniforms and steal people's property and arrest them for non crimes but nonetheless the government proceeded to Nationalize airport security checks and created something called a transportation security administration just recently transferred to the Department of Homeland Security after it was created One in one half months after the hijackings Congress passed something called the USA Patriot Act cute What an acronym where do they get these geniuses? This was a statute of more than 400 pages which According to members of Congress nobody in the Congress read prior to voting on it Not not that they often read much of the legislation they pass that that in itself is not unusual of course, but But this this was an especially important law and they clearly rushed it through These 400 plus pages of the law Consists in very large part of Amendments to existing laws Which had been sought and prepared already Particularly by the Department of Justice which has been seeking to expand its powers for many years and to give itself more power to spy on people and to and to collect and exchange information in a whole variety of ways that were forbidden at least Officially forbidden one one always wants to take with a grain of salt these rules that are Supposedly imposed on the FBI or the CIA or the other intelligence agencies because it's not as if they necessarily Feel obliged to follow them But at all events they did have some constraints They didn't like and had been trying to get loosened and they are smart guys They know that when a certain time comes they can then come forward with what they they want and And have a much better chance of getting congressional approval. So that's what they did and the USA Patriot Act and the upshot was that the legal authority to conduct surveillance was greatly increased a Whole new categories of criminal were defined such as domestic terrorist But a domestic terrorist was defined in the law so so loosely As to be applied to to anyone committing virtually any crime So long as the authorities is somehow linked it That's a that's a wonderful word. We're always seeing things or people that are linked to terrorism and It behooves us to always say how linked how says who Because it's it's an all-purpose claim That can be trotted out and is trotted out all the time nowadays To to cover what they're doing Anyhow these domestic terrorists are now to be to be dealt with harshly and Special measures are to be taken to to ferret them out Including so-called sneak and peek search of people's premises Normally before police Of any kind can can can break into your house or your car They need a search warrant at least under the Constitution it would appear that they should have one And And often they do get them. I mean they're not that tough to get All you have to do is take somebody from the prosecutor's office and have him waltz into a judge and tell some lies And he waltzes out with a search warrant. So It's not as if it's a big burden on the police to get search warrants But it's not one they like anyhow So sneak and peek search allows them to to to come on to your premises unannounced and Furthermore even after they've conducted their search to not tell you for months if they choose not to tell you now What that means is that if they come and take something that wasn't even Stipulated as what they were looking for in the search warrant. You have no way to know that they've exceeded the warrant you have no opportunity to go before a judge and And ask that that evidence be excluded from any legal proceedings in which they might seek to prosecute you You have no way to offer an explanation of why you might be in the possession of something in a lawful way That they might have linked with some crime Including terrorism so sneak and peek search warrants Were a kind of authority that certainly took away some Protection that people thought they had at least against unreasonable search and seizure The law authorized so-called one-stop search warrants in the past if you wanted to search somebody's house in Philadelphia you had to go to a judge in that in the Area with jurisdiction over that house and get the search warrant and if the person who lived in that house also had An apartment in Miami and you wanted to search that too You had to go to a judge in Miami and go through the motions again to get another search warrant One stop search warrants allow you to do this once and then to search a person's property anywhere He happens to go or anywhere. He happens to be living or staying Wiretap rules were loosened and made quite undiscriminating Internet tapped rules were made looser and undiscriminating the FBI's use of these filters Which they start out calling carnivore another one of their blunders You wonder you know there must be a guy somewhere in charge of giving the original names to all these programs And he's the dumbest guy in the agency And he comes up with these real doozies Which the minute they get out in the press just cause them no end of grief because they're they're all too suggestive Aren't they carnivore? Being aimed in the direction of human beings. They might as well called it cannibal or Not not what you want your FBI to be doing to you But but at all events these These electronic filters are now Implanted at internet service providers and and when you and I send our subversive emails back and forth that As long as we keep keep putting in little catchphrases like we must do as Osama says They filter that information right out and add us to their data banks, okay, so The the the internet is now completely vulnerable to these people's wandering filters For everybody. It's completely undiscriminating. They don't have to have identified Mark Thornton as a potential terrorist his emails passing through whatever ISP he's using and it's all being Subjected along with the other fish in that ocean to being taken out by the net they're using number of provisions were added under the Patriot Act to Confiscate property the government has discovered in the past 20 years that confiscations are good and more confiscations are better so under the the guise of Stopping money laundering You'd think well money laundering they must be talking about money passed back and forth in support of terrorism But in this regard as in many others in the Patriot Act There's no confinement of these these provisions to terrorist related activities They're generally applicable so that regardless of the kind of crime the government might Pretend to be investigating it can still go ahead and confiscate property and in fact it's been doing so There was an article just a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times reporting a dispute between the State Department and The Justice Department the State Department was reporting that a number of foreigners were complaining because The Justice Department had been confiscating assets of foreign banks and These foreigners doing some kind of business in the United States did not appreciate just having their assets snatched And so they were come making diplomatic complaints and that pressure was being relayed to the Department of Justice Which was telling its colleagues to go to hell So the it's already an issue that is anyone who's studied things like this knows If you create authority for one ostensible purpose, but you don't strictly Can confine it to that purpose by clear language the first thing will happen is that it'll be used across the board and Ultimately, it'll be abused and it'll be used for political purposes We've seen it again and again and again and this this Anti-terrorism legislation so-called is tailor-made to be abused in that fashion the FBI Pretends to have made drastic changes in its mode of operation back in the mid 70s After revelations were made at the considerable length in the Congress having to do with the so-called co-intel pro Operations of the FBI between 1956 and 1971 Co-intel pro is an acronym and really Ugly acronym at that for counter intelligence programs And it's also an inaccurate acronym because although the pretext for these programs at the FBI was to find out about communist spies operating in the United States The the authority was quickly expanded and extended so that it wasn't just Gathering information after a while it was actively intervening not just to plant agents not just to plant agents provocateur Not just to plant misinformation or not just to intimidate people involved in some subversive activity, but but to spy on disrupt and to Discourage up to and including discouragement by collaborating with their murderers People engaged in various anti-government policy activities as people who were opposing Government foreign or domestic policies many of these people were radical groups socialist groups communist groups Some of them not so radical groups like the American Friends Service Committee of the Quakers Which was very active in anti-war activities in the 60s especially And I suppose they still are for that matter, but they were subjected to dirty tricks By the the evil geniuses at the Co-intel pro Great deal has been written about all of this And supposedly when it was revealed by the church committee and by other committees of Congress in The early 1970s the FBI changed all its rules to ensure that they wouldn't engage in these kinds of actions again Well, all right, if you want to you can choose to believe they stopped But at all events just recently the Attorney General has decided officially that they'll resume That they'll once again start monitoring and collecting information on political and religious groups So they would have us believe that all they're doing is sending guys into a few mosques to make sure that the terrorists aren't in their concocting acts of terrorism, but But we all know that's not all they're going to be doing the Patriot Act provided for a lot of information sharing that used to be against the official rules between FBI and the CIA and the DIA the defense intelligence agency And in fact increasingly in the past two years the Pentagon has become very much engaged in What you might call? domestic police work This is something historically American tradition Regarded as extremely dangerous and we thought the army should stick to making war and should stay out of policing but Because of particularly the drug war drawing military forces into cooperation with domestic police People have grown used to this now. So it was an easy thing to To add to that kind of activity under the Patriot Act There's a lot more in the Patriot Act as I say it's more than 400 pages long and and the language being what it is It's a very difficult to decipher what it really means a lot of it just says and you know section 421 of the law September 9 1979 is amended to remove the word which in line 7 and add the word including Things like that. So it's you really have to put a lot of work in and almost Be a specialist lawyers at the Department of Justice And and then it's written that way not not just because that's an easy and technically a apt way to do it But it's also because nobody else will know what they're doing It's very difficult even for journalists who want to write about this to know what Power was actually altered or changed by this kind of law so What I've told you about we're pretty sure is there Other things are there too and we could indeed have have a whole course on the Patriot Act if we were so inclined the the attacks of September 11 gave new impetus to increases in the defense budget that were already beginning to be made and Bigger ones planned for the future when the Bush administration took office They they said they would try to add some 50 billion dollars a year to the rate of defense spending every year By the time their first term ended. Well, of course, they're they're they're double that already as of next year and So they must be very pleased with their their ability to jack up the Pentagon budget now you might say What does this have to do with terrorism? They're all the Army Navy and Air Force didn't do a lot to defend us from the acts of terrorism on September 11 and Indeed should future terrorists acts be attempted It's hard to see how the Army Navy and Air Force would be of much good in preventing them But those military services are very good at somehow transporting munitions to Afghanistan or Iraq or any other part of the world and And and carrying out aerial bombardments of whoever happens to be down below That's what they know how to do So as I forecasted right after the hijackings, that's what they're going to do They'll do what they know how to do drop bombs So they dropped bombs fairly quickly on Afghanistan and they've continued to drop them ever since The the Afghan shrewdly tried to get out of harm's way And so they by this time found ways to pretty much stay out of harm's way Although not all the villagers and people driving around innocently and vehicles have been equally successful but But they have dropped a lot of munitions on Afghanistan and I'm sure they'll be doing that for a long time to come so that's that's good steady work and Meanwhile, of course, we've had this new war on on Iraq Which we all Witnessed and saw coming and argued about the lunacy of knowing it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on What was about to happen? I felt very much akin to the people in the late 1930s who saw World War two coming they saw how horrible it would be and They knew they could do nothing to stop it. So For me it was personally painful to to await that catastrophe and then to see it happen as it did and is as it is continuing to happen now and We many of us fear of course that it's just One chapter in a whole book of catastrophes that may be carried out along similar lines But the defense establishment. Thank goodness will now be much better funded to do its part in dropping cluster bombs on cities all over Central Asia a Funny thing happened on the way of the forum The public opinion changed overnight like that The government had grown at one level at least somewhat unpopular in the 80s and 90s It used to be back before the mid-60s if you ask people questions like how much do you trust the the Government officials in Washington to do the right thing, you know about two-thirds of the people would say a lot or somewhat And then with the war in Vietnam and Watergate and all the rest of it government Didn't get so many approving answers from the public and and with the the Reagan people coming on bad-mouthing government and People rediscovering some said the virtues of the free market These public opinion polls showed less and less Ostensible public approval of government and its ability to do the right thing and to do it in a competent way So that if we had asked that question Let's say in the summer of 2001 as indeed some polling organizations did They found that only about a third of the respondents said well, they'll do the right thing Most of the time or at least some of the time that we we have quite a bit of trust in them Well as soon as hijackers come here and knock down two big buildings and kill thousands of people The public suddenly has renewed trust in government That was not a typo I spoke They have the old level of high-trust in government all at once because two buildings have been demolished Now you go figure I've got it figured out myself. I know how people respond to heightened apprehension They turn to their protector and Modern Americans turn to government as their protector It's not their protector of last resort. It's their protector of first resort They demand immediately that the federal government do something and They expect that it will somehow it's as if every time the fresh times like it's like The old peanuts cartoon with kicking the football, you know every time it's pulled away at the last moment Charlie Brown falls on his butt, but he and it's like a shock every time The American people every time they they kick and miss that football of protection That's jerked away from them by the government, but they think it's going to be there Every single crisis they run thinking that football of protection is going to be held right there for them to kick so Public opinion switched tremendously very quickly and it has remained At a high level it's fallen back a little bit But it remains at a very high level of approving government of trusting government of approving what's called the job The president is doing all these measures of how people feel about the state and we're transformed for the betterment of state Functionaries by the catastrophe of September 11 Well Government officials being no dummies in this respect knew they had a great opportunity And so they along with countless opportunities in the private sector Rushed to Washington DC to exploit those opportunities the crisis had created whether it was to get a new contract to sell your your security gizmo to the FBI or whether it was an Opportunity to increase the Pentagon budget or give more power to the FBI To the president you name it. It was an opportunity For all those neocon and triggers who had been trying to rule the world for 30 years and hadn't quite got there yet it was a great opportunity indeed because now they were able to make the president their total puppet and to use him as the as the ostensible actor and carrying out this Plan to Conquer first the Middle East and then to intimidate anyone else in the world who got out of line So they they said in motion very quickly. They were the best prepared of all so well prepared that it makes you wonder One thing that it came of this after a year or so was passage of the Homeland Security Act on November the 25th 2002 and This was a typical government make believe Statute it's almost 500 pages long very complicated and Consists mainly of just a reorganizing a lot of the organization chart a bunch of existing government agencies were now brought under one umbrella and made subsidiaries as it were of one big firm instead of being Separate and competitive One upshot of this of course will be that they'll have more budget clout Now acting as a unit than they used to have when they were to some extent fighting against one another in the bureaucratic process So they'll all end up better off is my expectation in terms of how much loot they extract from the taxpayers They there are about 170,000 employees in the Homeland Security Department right now and I expect that number to grow the act also empowered these people with the much new authority Extending to some extent what had already been done in the Patriot Act they power to collect information on persons and organizations and to to mine existing databases And to and to bring all that information together into one gigantic de facto database was was was given to to The government they started out calling this total information awareness TIA and Again, it was that that really dim-witted fellow Back in the basement who came up with that idea Well, Melvin, it's a little too Orwellian sounding. Don't you think? Yeah, so they decided to without changing the acronym to just call it terrorism information awareness and of course that that solved all the problems because Just saying the word terrorism always solves all these problems. It's all we have to do It's like a mantra. We just utter the mantra and all our woes disappear. All our powers are magnified there I Don't know if it occurred to anyone that it's also The TIA Tia, that's the Spanish word for ant, you know, like you kind of get the feeling of an old lady hectoring you But maybe that's just my own fevered imagination that calls that to mind You know that that relatively wants to give you a kiss at a family get together and you don't want her to kiss you Tia Maria She's the one yes The Homeland Security Act extended the limits or I beg your pardon put new limits on What you could find out through a FOIA request a freedom of information act request that that's the Mechanism that we've been using for the last several decades to try to extract information that the government holds and Sometimes it works, you know You sometimes eventually get a little information out of them if you're patient and willing to wait a long time Although it may have been blacked out in large part so that it's still near useless to you but there are now more limits on what you can find out by FOIA request and Government advisory committees have received new power to meet secretly and I don't know how much help that's going to be in Putting down terrorism, but it's probably going to help vice president Cheney stay out of jail a little longer There were new health emergency powers in the act powers for the government to quarantine people or even to force them to have vaccinations against various Diseases whether they wanted to be vaccinated or not and new centralization of surveillance data was provided So that again we've made the Patriot Act even stronger now, of course you all know I'm sure that there there's a separate movement to pass Patriot 2 or you know son of Patriot or some such act that the Justice Department has cooked up and when it when that was leaked they denied it Of course by that time the New York Times was holding a copy and it's sweaty little hands So it was hard to deny that they had done this but they they they recommend that we not take seriously what they had done So don't worry But that's all in addition to what the Homeland Security Act has done to increase the government's power to spy on us and To trade the information around among themselves But to keep us from knowing what it is they're doing So that in case they might say get one of those credit reports that we all know are impeccably accurate and Use that information a way that would be harmful to you based completely on error Well, at least this way you'll never know that that's how you came to your misfortune the The president's request for defense money for fiscal year 2004 is for just under four hundred billion dollars That's up from fiscal year 2000 just four years earlier when it was a 294 including the nuclear program. So That that's more than a one-third increase in four fiscal years, but of course the four hundred billion That's being requested does not count the seventy five billion in the separate Request to pay for the war in Iraq Because when the Pentagon gets money to make war Well, that's not really to make war and if it does make war then it has to have extra money I'm not going to get into the complications of what the money is for if there's no war because that's all classified Part of this seventy five billion dollar Request for the war in Iraq is is more than three billion for more airline bailout and And we'll never know how that got in there. I'm sure And some eight billion dollars for what looks for all the world like bribes to selected Governments in the Middle East and Central Asia Turkey Israel Jordan Egypt Pakistan Afghanistan Of course with the big big payoffs going to the usual suspects Who were already getting large amounts of foreign aid and military assistance aid before this little add-on here? so these are all some of the events that have have occurred after the terrible events of September 11 2001 and and I think they are Sufficient to make the point I made in general terms At the beginning of this talk, which is that this crisis is following the same general pattern as Previous ones not only is government responding by doing a lot of the things that that seemed plausible increasing funds for intelligence and war making and what have you but it's also using the pretext of The war on terrorism to endow itself with new powers and new funding For a lot of actions and activities and programs that really have nothing to do with wars on terrorism So what we're seeing is the exploitation of crisis by opportunists of all kinds and Every one of these things will create a constituency That will fight to the death to keep whatever it's recently acquired Whether it's new power new flow of funds or anything else new jobs All right, I I want to now in the time that remains to me Look back over what I've said in the past week and and see if we can Learn from history again in a in a little more general way Government grew a lot in the past in the United States and and when I think in capsule form about why that happened I tend to see two distinct at least conceptually distinct sources of the growth of government and And and I see them as interacting In a paper, I've just recently written I invented new acronyms That's what the world needs And I'm not I'm not even sure that they're that they're any good at all because they're okay when written down But when I talk about them they seem to be pronounced the same so It's a really ill choice of acronyms it turns out but But this stands for structural Ideological political this for crisis ideological political What I see as having happened in our history is that a number of the structural changes took place as the economy developed going back to the 19th century industrialization urbanization Technological change is improvements of communications and transportation and so on and so on all of all of these things had the effect of Both creating progress and of creating a lot of people who at least in the short term were losers or Were put at a disadvantage somehow by the way things were developing and Who turned to the political process to try to get some relief or to fight back against those they took to be the the responsible parties for their plight so that these structural developments over time altered the configuration of political forces in the Perpetual struggle to redistribute power and wealth that goes under the shorthand politics at the same time they gave rise to changes in ideology and along with the Ideological changes that that seemed to be Indogenous or or created by these very events in some way The United States was subject to a variety of ideological Influences by virtue of ideas that were imported from abroad especially from Europe I spent quite a bit of time talking about specific ideas brought over from from Germany everything from socialism to the idea of letting that academically well educated experts take charge of doing what had been done via markets So all of all of these kinds of developments structural Ideological political changes had the effect of tending to produce bigger government In a variety of ways But then every once in a while particularly after progressive ideology had become the dominant Ideology of the country at the beginning of the 20th century every once in a while a crisis would come along such as the world wars the Great Depression or the events of the Johnson Nixon years And during those crisis times we would have it as it were superimposed on these structural changes additional forces brought to bear and They of course had their own Ideological and political effects And they tended to to work toward augmenting government and indeed Augmenting it abruptly creating these bursts of government growth Superimposed on what had been a slower trend toward bigger government beforehand Now not only can we distinguish these two separate categories that are promoting the growth of government But but we can recognize and what I've tried to argue in my book and sense is that they're not independent and we shouldn't certainly shouldn't see these as just aberrations or Stochastic events or or blips or something like that They work as they do because of what's been going on here If we hadn't had all these structural changes of the late 19th and early 20th century Then the way Americans responded to World War one would have been different So these things affect how the crises play out But in turn when a crisis does occur it alters the nature of how these structural changes are Operating to bring about more more government In a sense we we get these ratchet phenomena in which government may be growing Slowly for these kinds of reasons then we have a big growth because of crisis and Then a retrenchment but partial retrenchment. So even if we have The same structural forces as before it's at a higher level But very often it's not the same as before indeed It may be the only reason it appears to be the same as before is that that we had this crisis Is it were to keep certain things going? It may have been that it's wrong to keep projecting this forever And it might have leveled off at some lower level But for this crisis pushed it up or it may be that afterward the trend is not the same as before Normally it it's at some higher rate So there are inner relations the crises Operate they they end but they affect the workings of the post crisis normal Events and how they tend to enlarge the scope of government What what happened in our case is by the time we get to The end of World War two the the country has Gone sufficiently in the direction of massive government pervading many different aspects of society and it has gone so far as to by that time is to virtually Eliminate in the case of the Constitution any check on the growth of government or in the case of Ideology to greatly weaken the kind of ideological forces that that held government somewhat in check in the 19th century That those kinds of fundamental constraints on the growth of government count for very little in the past 55 or 60 years So we've we've been living in a world Since World War two where the status quo is a kind of carnival of rent seeking by one and all and the Proliferation of rent seeking interest groups organized for political action Has been greatly expanded especially during that Johnson Nixon episode Where all these people were mobilized by civil rights and anti-war crusades and then that Spread out and spilled over on to any number of new interest groups environmentalist groups feminist groups a Groups representing the elderly and the Chicanos and and it just goes on and on and on So so we now have this a gigantic jungle filled with rent seeking beasts of various colorations And we've had a continued development of ideology Not in the classic socialist direction, but in what you might call the soft collectivist Direction the the direction that Tocqueville warned against when he talked about the kind of despotism that democracies would arrive at eventually this kind of nanny state therapeutic paternalistic Activity that more and more pervades the the actions of government whenever it's not engaged in Explicit death and destruction through the armed forces and the police And sometimes even when it is strange to say so So we now we now have have reached this situation Which I must confess seems like a very unpromising one for friends of liberty Our liberties have not all been totally crushed yet And so the question is as we look forward Can we expect anything to change in the process that has operated for Some 100 years to bring us to where we are today My own answer is Is no I I don't see anything about how the process is operated That has changed for the better that tells me it's not going to work this way anymore Now of course, I may be wrong I may be totally cockamamie in my understanding of how we got here to begin with so Maybe there's no no force to my argument But if my argument has a measure of validity Then the only way we can expect the future to be different is it's something about the process as it's operated in the past Will be different in the future and frankly, I don't see any element of it that I I see operating differently at least so far as my vision can penetrate into the fog of the future Now there have been many people of course who who have Have imagined that that counter-force is not only exist, but that they are actually becoming stronger so I I'm quite prepared to consider some of these potential or actual counter-forces and one of them is One I've always regarded as Extremely far-fetched, but nonetheless it has a very good Paternity as it were and that is that the whole system this political economy of Rents seeking nannyism pervasive government Could just crack up there could be some massive meltdown or it would break apart somehow and actually I think that is the expectation you get from reading Mises and Mises wrote a lot about the mixed economy and What he wrote is that it has an internal logic The interventionists have set out to do something by intervening in the market, but by virtue of Interventionism and what it is They're unable to achieve their objective and furthermore when in the course of carrying out their intervention They create even more problems and difficulties So then they intervene in new ways to take care of the new problems they've created or to cut off what seems to be interfering with the realization of their first intervention and They enter into a kind of spiraling intervention every every element of which fails and ultimately they they arrive at a kind of full-fledged socialism and For perfectly good Misesian reasons we know that can't work and and that will crack up it'll break up and Mises argued that at that point the system would would revert to laissez-faire Idiotically illogical interventionism until the system eventually reaches the point where it's so absurd that we have a total breakdown The good news of course is that then we have laissez-faire and everything is wonderful So some of us might say it's an acceptable price to pay That's a possibility. That's a possibility. I I won't say it has probability zero. I personally Have argued and the paper I'm floating around right now and we'll present this September at the Mont Pelerin meetings I argue that that is not what I expect to happen. I do expect that there will be accumulating Idiocies and that the interventions will create more problems and elicit more Intervention to deal with them and so forth. I simply part company with Mises At the final step. I don't think there'll be a crack-up. I think there'll be Perhaps a fallback at some point. There'll be ad hoc repair efforts. There'll be there'll be limited concessions There'll be opening up enough room for maneuver in the market that Entrepreneurs can can at least keep the ship afloat And I think that might well happen at some point. We may have some ebb and flow of the the Leviathan that has developed it it may actually Move back at some point rather than relentlessly Forward I just don't expect the the system to crack up and revert to laissez-faire because It seems to me that Ideologically modern Americans and modern Western Europeans and modern just about everybody else These people are unwilling to live in a free society They they don't want individual responsibility They can't tolerate it and they can't live with it. And so I just don't think they will tolerate The kind of individual responsibility that is part and parcel of a genuinely free society And I I'm not sure how they could ever be brought to a position where they would tolerate it it either So if you can imagine that I'd I'd be happy to be educated about it But nonetheless that that is the the main constraint I see keeping the system from ever going back toward a very free condition Now another counter force that to some people have put a lot of weight on is It's what you might call t-bow type competition named after Charles t-bow t i e b o u t a man who who used to teach economics at the University of Washington and and and For some reason chose to drop dead the year before I joined the faculty there His ghost was still about the corridors when I arrived and it used to bother me a little bit Someone said that he complained of a of a of a bad headache To the secretary and then he dropped dead So for years when I went to teach at the University of Washington whenever I developed a headache I would begin to worry quite a lot, but I Managed to get off of that faculty before I had a massive heart attack But t-bow wrote a famous article in which he talked about the local public finance and how Even if you had a lot of different units of government And they all provided different kinds of services to the residents of the of their their towns or districts That you might end up in a situation where all these citizens got exactly the collection of services They wanted from government even though these governments were as it were In flexible, you know and I'm not willing to make concessions to what people wanted But people would just move around and relocate themselves in those areas where where the local government happened to provide things that they valued more and Flee from those places. They found most disagreeable now. There's no there's no doubt that that kind of Voting with the feet takes place. I've done it myself more than once To get into different jurisdictions In my case I did it to get out of Seattle school district because my child is going to school in the government schools And I was taking Intolerable offense at the way he was being treated. So I moved to another district and That worked out a lot better for him and me And millions of Americans have made moves for that exact reason and many others and of course this kind of voting with the feet operates internationally many people have Migrated to another nation state where they considered their prospects better or their freedoms fuller and We like to tell ourselves in the United States that that's why those 30 million Europeans Once picked up and left their homes and came over here To find freedom But Okay, so you can you can vote with your feet It's costly Even local move is costly international moves very costly Especially for people who don't know the language of the place they're going the customs the laws Doesn't make it impossible millions of them do it anyhow and manage to Succeed or even thrive, but it makes it costly And whenever we raise the cost of anything we discourage it to some extent so question exists as to how much effect we can have in restraining government by People's voting with their feet Sometimes we can we can have a lot of effect. I think that's why the Berlin Wall was built in the first place is because Germans were voting with their feet and leave leaving East Berlin So they just Physically stopped them from doing it a few were so intent on leaving that they They took an unbelievable measures to leave nonetheless at risk of life and and limb Another way that Tebow type competition operate doesn't require anybody to move himself But involves the movement of other resources and a lot of people have talked in recent decades about international capital markets particularly as electronic funds transfers Were developed and made accessible very easily even to individuals so that now with a click of a mouse You can move your investments around the world And some people do that all the time It does require some Investment in in either getting an expert to help you do it or in learning how to do it yourself So it's not something everybody is prepared to do this afternoon, but it's not that tough There's an interesting book by Dwight Lee and there and Richard McKenzie called quick silver capital published in the early 1990s and at that time they were arguing that indeed the growth of government was slowing and The main thing that was slowing The growth of government was that people were just removing their wealth from jurisdictions that taxed People too heavily or regulated them too abusively Or acted in some other way they didn't like so they just as it were packed up their capital and went elsewhere well Again, I don't have any doubt that that To some extent serves as a counter force to restrain governments from abusing people The question is how much does it restrain governments and in what way does it restrain them and How much effect does it have I? I Criticized the quick silver capital book at the time and I really haven't changed my mind about why I Criticized it. I think they just put way too much weight on that argument Ultimately many of these forms of resource mobility That can be squashed by government when governments decide that they really need to squash They can either build a Berlin wall or or if say they don't like you transferring Your capital electronically and they the law they pass forbidding it is not a law you're obeying They may try to just send an agent into your house and arrest you or or come with a baseball bat and Do a job on your computer so that Governments ultimately have coercive force and if worse comes to worse they can deploy that coercive force So it's all wonderful to think that we're freely sitting at our computer monitors And and that makes us free citizens of the world because what can government do and the answer is they can always kill us And if they feel seriously threatened enough, they will do so They're willing to do that a lot of Americans. I think don't face up to the murderous capability of their own gruelers These people will kill And they won't just kill foreigners either they will kill people right here If they feel that the great need will be served by doing so So I think these arguments about quick silver capital and voting with the feet. I have some force But they also have some limits and we have to recognize those limits These these people have the biggest scam in the history of the world in the United States Look at how much they rake in every year Close to 40 percent of the national income of the united states Is taken into the hands of government officials That is such a gigantic sum of wealth That it boggles the mind they take it in year after year after year and use it for their purposes At our expense And they're not going to just stop doing that because we take offense So We've got serious problems here with relying on t-bow type competition Well, ultimately, uh, everything as hum told us rests on public opinion As I've myself argued, uh, none of this would work as it does but for the dominant ideology well Ideologies can change Why not this one Some of us might say that's what we're trying to do indeed. That's uh, that's how we spend our days in a sense is Working toward a change in the dominant ideology that has brought These conditions into effect Uh, I certainly accept that ideologies can change I'm inclined to think that they rarely change quickly for large groups of people Uh, even for individuals ideological change is normally a gradual process in which more and more one becomes Unhappy with one's old set of beliefs and decides that there's a preferable Way to understand the world and evaluate it So ideological change. I don't think is Is ever something that on a large scale happens quickly But it's possible that slow accumulating ideological change event eventually becomes Great enough that it alters the character of a dominant ideology or replaces it with a new one It's happened before The dominant ideology of this country circa 1885 Was totally different from the dominant ideology circa 1945 And even more so from today So we know ideological change can take place. It may take 50 years. It may take a hundred years The question then becomes what would make it change? I've tried to argue how some of the historical events some of the ideological occurrences importations even In the past led to the kind of ideological change that occurred in this country Well, how is the ideological change of the future if there's to be one going to come about? Maybe Maybe you all Will make it happen. I hope so. I hope so Well, let me stop there. We've got some time for questions and comments It's it's it's been as it turned out a lot of fun to talk to you this week and So let me have at it if you if you want to lambast me for what I've been saying Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I have two questions. First of all, can you confirm or deny I deny those reports categorically Booked in a library Called crisis in Leviathan And I wanted to read the short section and see if you could comment on it says we must have government Only government can perform certain tasks successfully Without government to defend us from external aggression and preserve domestic order Defining a forced property rights to could achieve much and So just in light of all that we've learned this week I'm wondering how a statement like that could be I was just paraphrasing Ludwig von Mises And I defer to his authority The easy way out would be say that was written by my evil twin I Think I stand by the statement, but I understand it in a different way than I did when I wrote it When I wrote it, I understood it in In the straightforward way that probably most readers would When I referred to government I referred to the kind of government we're used to the actual kinds that Exist and operate in the world Uh, I still think that that we need government to perform those tasks I think there's a a legitimate honest real demand For some agency some someone who specializes in those tasks to undertake them I I I learned a few things in the past 17 or 18 years since I wrote those words And I now I now have greater Conviction that that the government we we need to perform those tasks Might conceivably be one that would that would rest on a very different basis from the governments that actually operate in the world That would that would be more more like a government we hired To perform those services or contracted with in an open An explicit way that is to say we would have The government by the consent of the government in a very literal sense. It wouldn't be this kind of metaphorical Oh, yes, we have government by the consent of the government in the united states. Well, I never gave my consent Why wasn't I asked? I mean they they they enforced their laws on me and they forced me to pay tribute But I never consented to this and And who did? None of us ever consented to this We found ourselves in this situation and and We've kind of made our calculations and decided to tolerate it all things considered, but that's very different from from Consenting to it. So I think People need government and want government, but they they don't have to have the kind of coercive Imposed oppressive apparatus that the governments of the world we live in amount to Karen you said in your first lecture that if you go back in time, there's a lot you had changed in this book Especially the first few chapters. Are you going to do an updated edition at some point in time? I doubt it. Uh, I thought about it. I've been collecting Information since since that book itself was written to as it were Or revise it I'm just skeptical that I'll ever have the opportunity to do that and and a little skeptical too about whether it's a good idea I will have two books Coming out next year Which are collections of papers All of which bear in some way on the themes of this book And it will I think be seen by anyone who's read this book as as obvious sequels Almost everything in those two collections Was written after I wrote this book and and so My mind was already working along those lines But as I've just indicated I I've learned a few things and I've worked on some new topics And I've pursued some of the subjects I touched on in the book much more thoroughly So I think these volumes will Will have to substitute for a revised edition of crisis in Leviathan Mark Bob, I wanted to ask you about something that's really not in your theory of the growth of government but relates to the crisis Most americans view these crises As being exogenous or random events right But now the balance of information and evidence suggests that our leaders actually caused these crises or egged These crises on you know, the spanish didn't attack the main Wilson lied us in the world world and on the fed caused the great depression Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor I'd like to go on and on but You know, what what possible world could that get us out of this cycle if americans were more aware of Tree causes of these crises like september Yeah Some of us hope that if we can make people more aware of what has happened historically Then we can moderate this sheep-like behavior That characterizes their response to any given crisis if people weren't going to respond so readily as they always do To the occurrence of a crisis then there'd be no profit in in creating a crisis for the rulers They're they'd get nothing out of in fact. They might be blamed It might be unprofitable for them and therefore restrain them from doing it so I I I believe that it's important to try to give people a better understanding of what has happened in history and and And how our leaders have have not been innocent bystanders as The series of great crises came along. They weren't just bolts from the blue at all And if we can imagine making some headway in that educational effort, then I think it will have an effect It seems to me that these kinds of educational efforts ebb and flow And they depend I think not so much on the efforts of those of us who are trying to do the education As on the receptivity Of the people we're trying to educate If we if we go back say to to the 1960s Even though there are many things that That all of us dislike about that time The general profusion of anti-authority Feeling that characterized the 60s was actually a good thing for restraining the government Unfortunately, some of the people who pretended to be against authority turned out to be just some species of leftist Who really was willing to buy into authority if used for purposes they approved of But still I think it's true that in the days when people had bumper stickers say saying things like Question authority or defy authority That That was fertile ground For us to make our arguments On other occasions the ground is very hard And it's almost hopeless to go out and try to persuade people To see the light because they're just a hell bent On following Even if the leaders are taking them over the cliff What you said about education People are educated to worship the state from the time they're five years old and sent to public school So I don't I mean these kind of things are great, but we're all adults and But these kids who go and they're raised by you know in the schools by and taught in the schools by people who Who um get paid by the state to uh spread the curriculum of the state? I mean We went to those schools But that's what we were talking about You went to those schools and you are what is called by the mainstream a member of a lunatic friend Dan Well, yeah, actually going on what we just said actually, um As far as questioning authority goes that can be beneficial to the extent of questioning government authority But on the other hand, there are other authorities that might be opposing the government whether churches or something It seems like questioning authority can actually be counterproductive And that really leads to my question, which is um, what would you think there is a form of some sort of institutional base some sort of um sort of a cultural um Counter counter measures against the state for example a home school. It seems like a good Um in good tendency that's going to undermine the state a little bit at least Uh and perhaps other things as well. Um alternative media, uh, perhaps things like that just institutional Right Well, I think there's some hope Indeed, I think education may be one of those few places where the hope is significant because The failure of the government schooling system is so utter And complete and atrocious That it's almost impossible for anybody to pretend that it's anything else And as a result a lot of people have been willing to at least listen to proposals for making changes or reforms of some kind Now unfortunately many of the reforms that have been put forward are the kind of of measures that that don't Cut to the to the ground Uh vouchers for example seem like a great, uh proposal Except that the the the very real danger Attaches to them that that not only will they they not work very well to do what People want them to do but at the same time They will kill That little remnant of genuinely private schooling that exists right now because the minute a school accepts a student With the with the government issued voucher It's going to make itself subject to all the rules that will come along as strings Tied to that voucher And it'll be very tempting many of these private schools struggle financially They'll be very tempted to accept voucher students if if such students exist and come to them And they will for certain i'm sure many of them find themselves hogtied and Be made de facto government schools at arms length and and uh, I I don't favor vouchers for that reason But uh, I think homeschooling is an important Countertrend in in education genuinely private schooling is all for the best If if some way could be found to to get people to just say what we want is to is to eliminate school taxes And then just let people do what they will at least they won't be forced to pay taxes To schools they may not want If they still want to take their kids down to the to the government school All right, they can go down there and turn around and pay a fee What what would have been collected in taxes for example? And send them there, but at least they would have the option And and the choice would really be freely theirs rather than already rigged Somehow and made part of a system that would Insinuate government control into what had been privately controlled before now. They're there any number of other kinds of Political and cultural initiatives we can imagine that are anti-statist and in thrust And I think the more the better, you know, we all have varied interests We all have varied knowledge and and what I I think will work best is that if we can make Anti-statism the kind of counterculture Wide spread in its own right if we can somehow just get people to Immediately react to the idea that government is doing anything whether it's x y or z With the with the idea. Well, that's stupid. How how could we do that in some other better way? Then we would have the problem Half solved already because once people are able to cut their thinking free of dependency on government Then the world is full of creative knowledgeable people Capable of performing all kinds of miracles We don't know what is possible in a free society. I mean it's glorious to imagine But but so long as people can't allow themselves to imagine those possibilities We're never going to find out. So so I I'm I'm all inclined to let a thousand flowers bloom