 Our first speaker this evening is Dr. Thomas Hazelit, a professor of economics at the University of California Davis and senior editor of the Manhattan Report on Economic Policy, and also a fair to middling humorist. I will confess, as I was out in the hall just a moment ago, that I have not read all of Dr. Hazelit's work, particularly his more learned publications, but I have laughed uproariously over the numerous, very humorous articles he's published in recent years in Reason Magazine. I'm sure that most of the people out in the audience are familiar with these writings, even if, like me, you have something of an allergy to books that weigh more than your pair of shoes. Dr. Hazelit, in short, is one of those people who has the intellectual horsepower to do a little state smashing and fee simple, and also the wit to occasionally offer to drink from a dribble glass or offer to seat on a whoopee cushion. So without any more of my blathering on, I would like to present to you Dr. Thomas Hazelit and his speech, Bumper Sticker Ideology, a lighthearted examination of the current political scene. You'll excuse me for the long walk up here. It's part of my new physical fitness program. As a matter of fact, it is my physical fitness program. I'll have to rest for a minute before continuing. Just as a warning, and I think it's fair to warn you, if you're going to invest an hour of your valuable time in this, that one of the things they do at the universities to make the students feel like we actually care about them is to hand them out little things called teacher evaluations at the end of a quarter, and they're very, very important. It's an interesting exercise to read these things, and the best one I got was this last of March. I had taught a two-quarter finance sequence, and it's like a long-term relationship having students for two quarters. One quarter, ten weeks is certainly long enough, but to have the same people in your class a second time is very rough, particularly after you've read the student evaluations the first time around, and it's basically like being American and Beirut. But the best evaluation I got the second quarter was the very nice comment from the student that Professor Hazelit had dramatically improved his teaching performance in the second quarter, possibly because I drastically lowered my expectations. I can take that. We all have to go through a little bit of attack from time to time. A lot of people are attacking Ronald Reagan now, and I think it's very silly that somebody is actually suggesting and raising money to put Ronald Reagan's face up on Mount Rushmore, and it may be a little far-fetched, although I think maybe a better idea would be to go ahead and put Nancy Reagan's there. She's already had her smile chiseled in, and I think that that would sort of cut down the work in granite and be a very cost-effective sort of thing to do. At any rate, I'm happy to be here. My flight from Sacramento this afternoon was canceled, and it was only by sheer luck that I was able to get down here. I don't like flying anyway. I'm very suspicious about leaving from a place they call terminal, and having had an eight-hour delay coming back to the United States from a trip abroad just a couple of weeks ago, I'm not doing real well in airports these days. That was very interesting. They canceled our flight while we were in the air over the Atlantic. This was the day that the one-hostage crisis you may have heard of, the one-hostage crisis was solved. The TWA immediately took flight 861 from Paris hostage and forced us to go to all sorts of places we didn't want to go. Only after we were on board. You may not have read about that, but it was quite a severe trauma for those of us who are incarcerated. The talk I'm going to be giving tonight, I think, is called Bumper Sticker Ideology. No. Is that what it is? Anybody read the program? By the way, I got here for a seven o'clock speech that's seven o'clock on the program, and somebody says you'll be speaking at eight, and of course my first reaction was, why so soon? I've been to a few of these libertarian gatherings before, obviously. At any rate, Bumper Sticker Ideology, I believe, is the announced title. It's really not going to be too much about bumper stickers. I wanted to call it lapel humanitarianism. Dagny informed me that libertarians don't know what lapels are because they rarely wear them, which is a proof of this, because libertarians often don't wear anything at all. So I also thought a good title might be Ideology as a Consumption Good, which of course appeals greatly to economists. It would be on the floor laughing at this point, but does not go over with real humans, as you can tell. At any rate, I'd like to talk a little bit about what's going on in the political world these days and talk about the way people talk about politics. A friend of mine in New York, where I work with the Manhattan Institute, told me just a great story, which I think sums up a lot of the current level of fervor and morality about political discourse in America. And he lives in New Jersey, and he's still a friend. At any rate, he hangs out from time to time at a bar which in New Jersey is noted for its political left-wing activists meeting there and tipping a few and talking over their war stories. And times have not been good lately for left-wingers in America. And these two fellows of the socialists left were really commiserating in their beers. And one said to the other, my friend Larry overheard this just a few months ago, that things were really going to hell, that Reagan had just walloped Mondale in a landslide, that there's this sort of fundamentalist religious revival on the right, Congress is talking about cutting social programs. It just doesn't seem the left can do anything right anymore. His friend said, no, no, you've got it all wrong. This is just a phony recovery engineered by the Reagan administration. Reaganomics is nonsense. The supply side stuff is terrible. He says, I predict that within a year, we're going to have a massive depression. Millions will be laid off. There's going to be rioting in the street, mass starvation. The whole system is going to come apart. It's going to be chaos. And the other fellow looks at him and says, I don't know. I wish I could be so optimistic. It's an actual discussion. And this, to me, sums up a lot of what's right and what's wrong about political discussion in America. Now, we'll start off by citing one of the libertarian heroes, George Will. Where's Sam Konkin? Obviously, he's not here. There might be something destroyed at this point. At any rate, just because George Will says something does not mean it's wrong. And I think he had a very interesting point just a few weeks ago. Actually, it was on the occasion of Reagan stripped a Bitbird. And the title of his Newsweek column was called The Indignation Industry. And this fascinated me. I've had this on my list to write on this topic for some time. And I thought that giving a talk to this conference would move me along to write something on it. And sure enough, as soon as I got on the plane, I did. But Will noticed that today, many Americans earn their living by striking moral poses. They make neither shoes nor butter nor poetry. They are participants in an unending moral Olympics, a competition in spiritual preening, the more sensitive than thou event. For a week or so, while he's going on to a specific example there, he says more importantly, no advocate, and he's talking about special interest advocates, no advocate nervously looking around him can dare to seem less indignant than the other advocates, less he seemed insufficiently sensitive. And this to me really zeroes in on the principal level of political discussion in America. And I'd like to take off from that to talk about several different topics. George Will uses the example of Ed Meese worrying about the fact that he didn't see a lot of poor people in America, which got the moral education industry very excited indeed. But I'd like to talk very quickly about a couple of examples that I've seen from time to time. In the last election, for example, there was a very big headline in all the papers on the Sunday before the Tuesday election. And it had to do with the fact that Ronald Reagan was advocating, or people in his administration were advocating, that we start taxing unemployment benefits. Now, this was very good news for the Mondale campaign. And well, there's good news and bad news, I suppose. But in the bunker, I guess there is such a thing as good news. And this was good news that Reagan was being hit with this terrible insensitive policy of taxing unemployment benefits. What could be worse? Taxing people that are out of work. Well, the Reagan administration responded with characteristic quickness. They shut Reagan up in the White House or on a staff plane, where I guess he was in Sacramento actually at the time. And he had actually lived in Sacramento for eight years without doing any real intellectual work. So there was no problem to shut him up there for a couple of days. And they made it through the election and skimped by on their slim lead there. But there was a lot of shouting and yelling about this thing, about Reagan taxing unemployment benefits. Well, it was fascinating to me because I had made the mistake of about a year previously, reading in The Washington Monthly, which is not a conservative journal, about this issue of taxing unemployment benefits because it had come up very recently in the midst of the great recession of 1982, November, as a matter of fact, Thanksgiving, evening. Dan rather sat down to tell millions of Americans just before they cut into their turkey dinners. Then in fact, yes, the Reagan administration was going to tax their unemployment insurance benefits. And it was big news for that week, too. Well, the story that came out a few months later in The Washington Monthly indicated that, yes, in fact, the Reagan administration thought it was a good idea to tax unemployment benefits. And they not only thought it was a good idea, they were continuing to do it. Continuing because in 1979, the Carter administration had already started the policy. Well, the great thing about it was that this whole thing went. Dan rather did a big number and all the news stories pick it up. It's headlines for the whole weekend, which as headlines go, I think it probably was a good Thanksgiving story. But the whole thing was run and then quieted without anybody pointing out that, in fact, we already were taxing unemployment benefits. Of course, the end of the story is there's no reason if you're going to tax income at all, there's no reason to treat unemployment insurance as some sort of preferential income. In other words, somebody who works for a living is being taxed at x-ray. Why not tax a person who doesn't work for a living and collects unemployment benefits? Which was, of course, the exact reason the Carter administration had used to tax them in 1979. Well, at any rate, one of the funny things, of course, was when this came up in the election campaign, I guess nobody at the White House reads the Washington Monthly. Because they were apologizing profusely and wouldn't let Reagan talk to the press because they thought this was too hot an issue. And nobody seemed to know that it was policy for five years now to tax unemployment benefits. Anyway, it was a good chance to show that, really, you ought to go to the upper house after purgatory. And a lot of people took advantage of it. Now, it sort of seems like a childish game, of course, at times, is sort of a kiddie's game of figuring out who has moral cooties. And the ostracism that you find after these moral indignation blow-ups occur is just sort of the social ostracism of the sandbox. But I always liked the blow-ups that Stockman, David Stockman, got into. And poor little Davey's going to Wall Street to make $400,000 or $500,000 a year. And Stockman's days were numbered, quite obviously. He had told the truth three times. And as everybody knows, three strikes you're out. And this is certainly true in Washington, as it is in Comiskey Park. Stockman, first of all, told the truth. In 1981, you'll recall, in the Atlantic Monthly interview, where he said he wanted to cut tax rates to let productive people make more money and spark the economy. This was called trickle-down. And he was attacked viciously for this. He also talked about the greedy pigs over at the Pentagon. And for some reason, this didn't make the headlines, the way the Trojan horse comment and all this stuff about supply side did. Well, that was his first mistake. He got taken to the woodshed for that one. And the second one, of course, was earlier this year when all these farmers came back from Cancun on vacation to protest they weren't getting enough subsidies from Washington. You'll know, of course, that the farmers in America now make significantly more income in federal subsidies than they do from farming. The average farmer makes about 40% more from federal subsidies than he does from selling crops. At any rate, the farmers were all going to Washington and the fighting men in the military were screaming that they should have more military pensions. And Stockman called these pensions and farm subsidies obscene and was quickly called on the carpet for that. And then just a couple of weeks ago, Stockman gave a speech where he made the very simple statement that the budget was out of balance and that given the current spending plans of Congress and the current taxation plans, the numbers didn't match. This came out in the New York Times. I read the comment very carefully. It came out in the New York Times where the headline Stockman calls for tax increase. It's just nonsensical, but that's what the headline was. And so poor David got demoted to Wall Street. At any rate, this is the sort of treatment that people get in the political system for telling the truth, whether on purpose or by accident. Possibly Stockman was trying not to tell the truth and that could be a factor. All I will say that David is obviously a Republican. You can tell he's a Republican by this unbelievable attraction he has to talking into secret microphones. Happens all the time to him. He's always getting recorded and then these comments are being played somewhere. It's a distinctly Republican trait. I guess they use these microphones when they go in behind closed doors and everything else. Having not been invited, I'm not sure, but I really think there's something to that. At any rate, I did have the great opportunity to go to both the political conventions last summer. Republicans and the Democrats, the two great political parties in America. And for those of you who are fans of wit and comedy and have to go to Atlantic City or Reno to see your shows, I sort of apologize that I got this great experience and you didn't. I got to see Jesse Jackson sweating and Jerry Ford on the anabolic steroids up there, giving a real speech, really was great fun. But one of the greatest experiences I had was encountering this particular species of politicus democratis in San Francisco. The most popular button of all, except for the suspiciously sexist button, a woman is on the ticket, which I didn't know if that was people making fun of the Mondale choice or people endorsing it. The most popular button, perhaps with this one exception, was a big H with a line through it, had a slash through it, like a no smoking sign. And a little bottom that said no hunger. Presumably this meant people were wearing these to indicate that they didn't agree with hunger. Now, a lot of these people were around, literally hundreds and hundreds of them. And there's sort of a cub reporter who asked some champions that were sporting this fashionable democratic medallion. I generally, by the way, came up to them while they were having lunch, which was an excellent way, of course, to stop hunger. I made the practice of asking them what their position would be and what position their party should take on agricultural marketing orders, dairy price supports and payments and kind of farmers. Of course, these are all massive federal programs that have the aim of restricting farm output, restricting the opportunities of people, poor and rich, to buy crops, to buy food, and hence drive the price up. Wow, I can tell you, it didn't take me very long to figure out that this was not the real topic of conversation at the Democratic Convention. And really to a Democrat, their eyes dilated and all their tongues sputtered. And they would sort of make a nice little joke about the fact that they really didn't know what I was talking about and they weren't from that state. Anyway, they were interested in oil being from Texas or discounts for business yachts being from Connecticut, wherever the state was. So these are activists, of course, who wear their concern for the poor on their sport coats but oppose a policy of allowing farmers to grow more food. Well, this kind of gave me a clue, I thought, to what might be motivating political activity in a wide range of areas and sort of got me thinking about these things. Of course, now we see a lot of very good music coming out of the African famine. And there is a lot of posturing on this subject. If anybody knows exactly what's happening in Ethiopia, you'll be pleased to know that the Western aid that's going down there has very little effect on feeding hungry people. The policy of starvation is an express one of the Ethiopian government, which is part of the long-term political interests of the country has decided that certain territory should starve to death. This, of course, has to do with something called a Civil War that the Marxist government has, unfortunately, not promoted the revolution quickly enough and all these sort of weird people that don't want to live with the Marxist utopia even after 10 years of bliss and have now been cut off from rations. Now, these outlying areas might have been able to last a little longer but even before the insurgency began, there was a very nice farm policy instituted by the Ethiopian government. They went on a vicious anti-hording crusade over the past several years. They had discovered that farmers out in the boondocks were hoarding all sorts of warehouses full of crops. They asked, of course, the farmers what they were doing and these farmers said that they were trying to guard against something called a drought. Well, the farm experts from the Ethiopian central government could smell a capitalist plot when they ran into one and instantly liquidated these hordes and wisely prepared the countryside for the coming political turmoil which now experiences the annihilation of millions and millions of people. At any rate, the situation in Ethiopia is rather black and white. If you're in cities that are occupied by the government, there is food on the stores and no particular problem. Of course, if you're in different areas, you're on your own. So this is the kind of situation that you might think would lend itself to some sort of an analysis where people would be able to see that there is a moral to the story. In fact, there's been a lot of brow-beating in the international community that the real reason that there is all this terrible starvation is because we didn't start our records sales fast enough. And it is certainly the fall of the United States and the Western countries for not giving our humanitarian relief quickly enough and with a few enough strings attached so they could do enough good so quickly. At any rate, it's nice to think that you're helping the starving victims of Ethiopia and there are organizations that are doing better than others and I certainly hope that they get there before. The government's policy of extermination works. I don't think you should have any illusions and I think you should know that the commies in Ethiopia are a constraint much more brutal than nature. Well, I'd like to talk now maybe about a little different aspect of this, which to me seems at once funnier and even sadder in a certain way. I'd like to talk about the right-wing ideologists, the right-wingers who sort of consume their ideology not because they wanna change the world in any particular fashion, really, but because they like to show people that they're morally somehow better than you. Well, as I say, it's a little different talking about right-wingers on these things. Right-wingers in general don't have as many morals as do left-wingers. Depending upon what part of the country you find them, some parts of the country, of course, have great numbers of morals and that's the place you wanna go. If you really wanna look at right-wing piety, my favorite example of this, of course, was the Reverend Billy James Hargis from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who some years ago was, well, he was preaching for years and years before the new right was the new right about morality and the breakdown of the family and so forth, pornography and drug sex, rock and roll, all the things that you people came here to Inglewood this weekend to check out. But at any rate, the Reverend Hargis was sort of exposed in a certain fashion and you may have read about that back in the mid-70s, but the favorite aspect of that story to me was the couple that he had married at his very conservative church there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, fine young Christian boy and girl and the Reverend Hargis wedded these two in holy matrimony and they went off on the very exciting honeymoon, being good Christians. They had not, well, this being good Christians, they were actually looking forward to this evening and before anything got underway, they had a nice serious chat and decided to bear their souls that in fact, well, neither of them were pure, but they had something in common. Both had shared that special moment with Reverend Billy James Hargis, which to an economist seems to be a very efficient arrangement indeed, given the fact that Reverend Hargis had joined the two in wedlock and I guess in a few other things as well. At any rate, right-wingers are continually doing things like this to let us know that morality is a fun thing to engage in and to root on to other people, to let them know that you're really quite a good moral person yourself and it makes you feel a little bit better about some of those things you might be tempted to do. Prohibitionism, of course, is sort of the classic right-wing dalliance with trying to make other people better and the right-wingers actually slipped on that one and got it passed into law. This is one of those cases where I'm sure they really didn't mean anything by it but it just got sort of out of control and before they knew it, they had to break down the old radiator and go to the back room to whip up the brew and of course, if you've ever been to some of the dry portions of the United States, you'll know how the prohibitionist's fairer under prohibition and it's hardly dry at all. Well, at any rate, there are conservatives and there are conservatives and many, many conservatives are sufficiently greedy to be very low on their morals and I find these people much more pleasant and I find, for example, many conservatives in California of this low moral caliber and I get along with them just fine, you have to stay away, generally speaking, from the state of Arkansas and the Bible Belt in general but to be honest, I'm the conservative I'm most familiar with, I think, speaking authoritatively, would be a California conservative, Ron Reagan, the president, not the ballet dancer and Reagan, as you know, was a war hero for USO camp shows during WWII and served with distinction in the trenches with Bob Hope and Betty Grable and it really brings to mind the fact that conservatives have more or less this genetic thing for the military and I guess it's ever since Taft got moved out of position by General Eisenhower that they've had this thing, maybe it's because their government jobs nowadays depend on it but they seem to have this sort of mystical allegiance to the military, generally speaking, the military for other people, of course but I think this came through quite dramatically in the recent US policy with respect to Lebanon now you may remember before we got the United States got into Lebanon in 1982 and 83 it was a mess, it was a mess and now look at it on a tip there was trouble we swooped in with the battleship New Jersey with its 100 centimeter cannons and its $650,000 toilets and a few good men see and the problem was once we got to Lebanon there wasn't a whole lot we could do after you checked out the restaurants basically understood that it's not a nice place to be there wasn't a lot of action we could take short of shipping about the entire United States east of the Mississippi over to occupy the country but there was something about having this military presence that apparently fascinated the administration and it really gave us that pride pride with a capital poof back in the White House hence we stuck these Marines over there we didn't put them in trenches didn't put them in barracks and didn't give them live ammo it was a Boy Scout camp and the express policy of the Pentagon and the White House was we didn't want the Marines to look hostile you might incite the Lebanese to violence well then the United States Marine Corps in literally its most costly single encounter in 40 years goes head to head with one Shiite Muslim in a 56 Chevy pickup boom we lose 241 to one now what's the White House response to all this now policies ended up total disaster the White House response is to blame it on terrorism you mean there terrorists in Lebanon it's unbelievable CIA must have gotten a budget increase and beefed up its old Middle East espionage staff it was humiliating and we couldn't let it go by so what was the U.S. response one day later an invasion of Grenada the U.S. military response okay zap Grenada's dead well we used for a short time we use this hoax of the medical school and not even George will bought that one and condemn the administration for being so duplicitous he thought it was a good idea to show them we were killing people in Latin America just on general principle and not doing it to save American lives this is actually what he wrote in Newsweek more or less but on the pretence we were saying medical students we went to Grenada and sent the Marines down there and did a nice thing well you can argue about Grenada but the idea of Grenada is just a non-entity it's a dead letter policy-wise it certainly was a response to Lebanon everybody knows that and the right-wingers pride themselves on it George will congratulate the administration on this victory to make up for Lebanon one year later the young Americans for freedom demonstrated Grenada days at campuses around the country at the very best by any rational conservatives estimate I'll make their argument for them Grenada was a unnecessary evil people had to die so the United States could straighten out some communist dictatorship in the Caribbean but this was not the case it was made it was celebrated as some sort of glorious gala event we're going to have celebrations one year later how many of you know by the way that better than thirty Americans died in Grenada well at any rate uh... I'd like now to uh... talk a little bit about uh... very fascinating experience I just had in uh... in the Republic of South Africa now there's a really no uh... no place on the globe today that's better for whipping up some moral Ignatian in South Africa and I'm glad to have had the experience of going there myself uh... was just uh... there on an academic speaking tour and testifying in front of government agencies and so forth on questions of competition and monopoly but did manage to do a little of my own work so to speak while it was down there and uh... drive through suede and uh... interview bishop to do and so forth and so on but let me uh... just sort of sum up the whole thing uh... my reaction to South Africa and I'm sure the indignity producers will will shriek uh... when I say that uh... I I braced myself to be embarrassed being a white person in South Africa that this was by pigmentation complicity with the oppressors i was embarrassed in South Africa but i was not embarrassed because of my color but my passport you'll find the closer you examine the south african apartheid system how closely it parallels all the sorts of progressive legislation that the united states in the light and western countries engaged in and you think i'm joking when i refer to things like forced removal very vicious uh... anti-black policy of south african government as being as i saw it their urban renewal program i think uh... the most uh... unmentionable of the south african apartheid policies is the color bar in employment and this was the meat and potatoes and is today the meat and potatoes of apartheid the color bar acts of nineteen eleven and nineteen twenty six with the start of apartheid in south africa we have the davis bacon act in the Wagner act the minimum wage laws do essentially the same thing as the color bar in employment in south africa they have what's called the group areas act that's where people have to live in one part of the country and even if they work in another part they've got to go home at night based upon who they are and where they came from in america we have environmental zoning and i happen to teach in an area where nice wealthy affluent white professors live the staff comes in during the day to work at the university and then goes home to the outlying areas to live they can afford the solar reflector panels the city council of davis requires they put on their homes i was embarrassed all right now was indignant but i was embarrassed and indignant because of the things i read in the newspaper i should tell you just a little bit i think about uh... sort of uh... sort of heroes we have out of this uh... very interesting and uh... and terrible situation south africa uh... interesting terrible and exciting situation in south africa you think i'm pulling your leg but i'm not uh... i think that there are tremendous possibilities for reform in south africa because of the fact that we've all shut them off i mean all the wise people uh... don't think there's any chance of it and i think that gives them a very good opportunity was actually quoted in one of the south african newspapers saying they had a great opportunity in the coming racial upheaval that's not exactly what i said but uh... to some extent that's the gist of it much as germany in japan came out of the ashes of world war two and became the miracle stories of the next four decades economically socially politically in every which way i think the uh... south africans really do have an opportunity if they can avoid that holocaust uh... to come through with uh... fascinating uh... integrated society it anyway i did interview bishop tutu when i was in south africa he had been to davis i just missed them but i read the reports and had the newspaper accountings of it and so forth and wanted to ask him about his positions on many of the issues in south africa and uh... the first thing i i asked is i said well do you think that the political reforms are taking place down here uh... are good to be honest with you and i did not go uh... to a lot of places that that probably would have looked interesting to me but in the uh... hotels and uh... universities i went to the businesses and government agencies i went to they were not separate bathrooms uh... uh... there were there was a substantial amount of integration and uh... there was uh... was enough integration that you were fairly shocked within hours of being in that society and uh... people explain to me that apartheid was breaking down both both formally and informally that is to say that the laws that have not been uh... repealed are simply not enforced to a very large extent i asked to do if you thought this this development was a good thing you immediately chastise me for being uh... so naive is to think that it meant anything at all the blacks in south africa that they now have the legal right to walk into a five-star hotel because of course they did not have the economic means to walk into that five-star hotel well this brought up my next question so i said well uh... kindly professor uh... bishop and as a matter of fact uh... it's the first time i've ever interviewed somebody uh... who had prayed before an interview which led me to think he had got me mixed up with mike wallace but i said that does bring up my next question uh... bishop and that is uh... do you think that uh... uh... some of the economic development that's taking place in south africa is good and how would you further economic development for blacks uh... where upon he almost bit my head off a second time because he said you you stooge of the government uh... we do not want to make blacks more comfortable under apartheid we want full political rights while i was left in a quandary political rights were no good without the economic means but the economic means were no good without the political rights the status quo seem to be very very nice to bishop tutu and you'll have to understand the tutu is a man who's been created by the apartheid system i mean if he didn't live he would have been created and he has been and he's not been created by blacks in south africa who didn't know who bishop tutu was until he got the nobel prize he was created by the white liberals of the world council of churches which he headed for many years and then the uh... white liberals in stock home who awarded him the nobel prize and now he's uh... doing very nicely thank you by patrinage from the white liberals in berkeley and uh... other enlightened centers around the world that haven't come out to speak by the way he does get flown around the world on the xerox company learjet which makes traveling to these uh... outposts of civilizations such as berkeley uh... to be uh... little less hazardous under the apartheid system that you might think tutu likes the status quo in south africa he really does and he will talk quite uh... in quite vicious terms about other black leaders in south africa we're actually doing things to improve a lot of blacks now you can you can make arguments both ways certainly uh... as to what might be the best way to uh... develop the the economy of south africa and particularly the uh... to open up opportunities uh... for disadvantaged people have been kept out of the mainstream but tutu does not do that he simply vilifies uh... those people who disagree with his approach to the problem and uh... leads you very quickly to the conclusion that tutu wants to keep the status quo or failing that to simply give the whites in south africa that do have some political power in fact all the political power uh... basically speaking at this point give them the the opportunity to do one thing and that is to push up against the wall with their backs now here's here's the real bottom line on the debate on south africa nobody who has been there and nobody is familiar with the situation can honestly believe that the south african uh... whites uh... particularly the offer conners which is sort of their version of billy carter uh... the africaners would would would vacate they're not colonialists uh... for the most part they're not imperialist although there was uh... there were there have been some battles between the offer conners and expanding into into tribal lands over the centuries but these are people that started settling and uh... came by and large said it started settling the sixteen fifties and came centuries ago and they're not going away sure the british and rhodesia can duck and run because they haven't been there more than a few generations but these africaners go back centuries their south africans they're gonna stay there if there's going to be a transition of power it's going to be a peaceful one or it's going to be a bloody one but they're not going to disappear and anybody who argues that some crisis should be promoted as a solution to the welfare of blacks in south africa has to face the bloodbath issue i mean these blacks in south africa if if they if they do uh... engage in some sort of racial uprising will very quickly find that the south african economy is able to sustain a very nice battle with bishop tutu's minions now that simply happens to be the fact the the the south african government uh... has the strongest military in the entire continent they are the israel of africa they produce forty percent of the iron for the entire continent we're talking about an economy in a political system controlled by four and a half million whites the simple fact of the matter is that there is going to be a bloodbath if there is not a peaceful transition just the way it falls out the thing that i love about this is to go to berkeley and suggest for example that you should think of alternatives to the bloodbath is to be a racist how terrible of you being a white american to think that we should actually improve a lot of blacks in the present system in south africa what we need is a bloodbath now not only is that a respected intellectual position in berkeley it's a courageous moral position in berkeley you are in fact an intellectual and moral coward to suggest that there might be a third course there might be some way to reform the system without killing millions of people if you think the income differences which are seven to one in favor of whites in south africa are bad wait till you see the kill ratios out of the revolution anyway if you want to come to berkeley and meet people get involved in the stop apartheid movement it's a good place to put on a button and uh... score and uh... generally in spring the weather is good in berkeley and uh... the sit-ins and uh... and uh... so forth uh... as i say uh... will improve your social life as a matter of fact if you're a politico you can even now prearrange for your arrests on the apartheid issue and uh... you have to be careful because it's very popular to have to book early uh... make sure you're uh... photo opportunities and ruined by people standing in the way you've got to have a little rehearsal ahead of time but a couple city council members in sacramento i know just went back to washington get arrested it was good publicity and uh... uh... i'm sure their p r agents uh... got a little bonus for it at any rate uh... one of the things of course it's funny about the whole debate here and let me just back off from you what you think is now a defensive apartheid in south africa which i think is a fascinating issue i'd be happy to talk to people about later uh... uh... there's not going to be a race war in south africa given the current environment it's just it's just uh... i drove through suede on myself and uh... picked up a couple of black hitchhikers and you know talking about these problems and talking to other people and went into stores and so forth and so on it there's just not that just was shocked i mean there's just you certainly were much safer doing it uh... suede oh then you would be in harlem uh... or or across the street and uh... uh... you just don't find that sort of animosity it's not a racially divided society in that sense now they have their problem certainly and the third world is known for problems you may have heard about this there is violence in africa and uh... uh... as a matter of fact uh... the one of the very interesting things about the political environment there of course is that uh... all of the south africa's neighbors have uh... some very striking similarities whether you look at uganda uh... angola mozambique zair and zambia zimbabwe you find brutal political solutions and in fact there was just last uh... week uh... when i was coming back uh... reading about this one fellow twenty four years old it very well for such a young guy comes out of the civil service is a public servant over in uganda uh... had tortured personally and killed three hundred and fifty political dissenters and uh... usually uh... i don't know how this fits in uh... william niskan has a stereo bureaucracy that if you're in the public sector you try to expand your bureaucracy i guess in some systems you try to expand the number of kills or tortures uh... at any rate that's a public choice topic we could deal with another talk at any rate uh... amnesty international is interested in talking to this fellow from uganda got uh... sort of twelve page news in the new york times and the international herald tribune where i read it this is this is the kind of thing that goes on uh... on a weekly basis in in uh... countries bordering uh... south africa certainly if an african south african official uh... had tortured three hundred and fifty uh... uh... political dissenters you hear about it uh... for a little while in america that by the way of the policeman all the policemen i saw uh... in south africa were black uh... which i was also shocked to find uh... at any rate uh... uh... the idea is that there's a lot of moral fervor about south africa which you don't find i mean i haven't seen any protests this week uh... uh... on the civil liberties issue in zair and why is that is it ok for blacks to torture blacks uh... where's the moral ignite shin over this kind of barbarian isn't again it's not doing i uh... i've speaking to libertarian group don't have to back off and do all these little flips to show you that i'm morally not in favor of the white south african government torturing the people uh... of various colors but but you understand my comment Now, on the disinvestment issue, I should like to say, because there's so much heat about this, and it's very funny, they are interested in South Africa. I gave a long talk to the Cape Town Press Club on competition and monopoly, had a lot of questions, and it seemed to go real nice, and the press wrote this up in several newspapers, and they ran the same story in all the papers. They've quoted verbatim everything I had said in about two minutes on the question of disinvestment, and the last line was Professor Hazlett's comments came in a brief question and answer, a brief answer to a question, his talk was on competition and monopoly, and the only thing that got reported was my answer to this one question. At any rate, disinvestment is just a dead letter, I mean, there's fine the United States can pull out, and maybe we can even encourage IBM to pull out of South Africa. The Japanese, by the way, computer manufacturers are already telling the South Africans that their computers are compatible with ICL, the British manufacturer, and the South Africans ought to think about that. You'll say the Japanese, they're not supposed to be in South Africa, and that's right, 20 years ago, the Japanese promoted a disinvestment policy, no investment with South Africa. If you go to South Africa today, Toyota's the number one selling car, Japanese products all over the place, Japanese businessmen, tourists, and the whole shot, so how can this be? Well, they just set up paper corporations and have Nissan of South Africa do the business, and it's all set up contractually. You'll say, why did Japan, by the way, do this disinvestment in South Africa? This shows you the apartheid system and how it works. The Japanese were classified as non-white in the mid-60s, and so when the Japanese came to South Africa, they had to apply for honorary temporary white citizenship, and so they made them an honorary white person and got to travel around the country and do business, and they'd leave and become Japanese again or something. So the Japanese, I don't know, they got very touchy, they got miffed about this. So they had this disinvestment policy, and as I say today, the market is just crawling with these sorts of goods. I had the most fascinating talk with, well, many people down there, one business fellow in particular, very bright guy, and in the midst of a conversation on disinvestment where I'm sort of making these points, it's not going to amount to a hill of beans. We've been boycotting the Russian wheat deal, and that really improved the welfare of Afghans enormously. God, they were really mad when we took that off, and so forth and so on. And boy, the Nicaraguans are scared about the embargo going on down there. But in the middle of this conversation about disinvestment, this fellow whips out a cigar, and I said, what the hell is that? He says, that was just a cigar. I said, no, it was a Cuban cigar, and of course we haven't been able to buy these things in America for 25 years, which is why we've been able to keep Castro out of Angola and so forth. And the joke is that we boycotted, we embargoed Cuba to get Castro out, and we did. Now he's in Angola, Nicaragua, and where else? Anyway, so I thought this idea, obviously you couldn't think of two better political allies, Cuba and South Africa, I thought this was just too juicy to pass up, so I ran out and bought some Cuban Stoges. And now whenever I have this disinvestment question come up, I'm going to have these Cuban cigars with me. And I'm going to say, would you like a Havana cigar? And then when they ask where I got it, I think that that will end the conversation. But anyway, I haven't smoked any of these, but I hope to start maybe a tradition here for the conference that each speaker inhales one item of contraband. Are there any federal agents here? Not a cigar smoker. My experience with cigars is limited to seeing pictures of H. L. Menken. But anyway, I'm one of these libertarians who likes to put his life on the line for the movement. Well, as a really stand-up libertarian, you'll know I was sweating bullets through customs, and hopefully we'll start a trend here. The disinvestment thing is basically a dead letter, so I think it's a good policy. As a matter of fact, I heard Andrew Young say that he had pleaded with Congress to have a disinvestment policy against South Africa, and he knew it wasn't going to have any effect. See, on those grounds, I favor it. I think it's fine. Anyway, now, I just have a final thing on South Africa. Oh, except for my experience with the color bar. While I was in South Africa, they did away with the ban on interracial marriage, and now sex also across the color line is legal. And I thank these, and when I was down, I made a point of thanking everybody for doing this for me and improving my chances by 500%, just based on mathematical probability. Didn't help in the long run, but a higher chance. At any rate, the same day this interracial ban was ended, they had a front page story in the Cape Town newspaper. There was a batch of birth control pills that were put out on the market, but they were duds. Didn't work. Obviously the last hurrah for apartheid, they're going to legalize sex across the color line, but by God, you were going to take a chance. Anyway, a fellow that sponsored my trip down there ahead of a foundation that brought me down was telling me a funny story, too, and it gives you a little thing about apartheid. The sister-in-law, his wife's sister, wanted to marry a colored guy. They have these different gradations, white, black, colored, and Indian, or Asian, and most Asians are Indians in South Africa. And so anyway, she wanted to marry this colored guy. I always feel like I'm Billy Carter when I'm saying colored guy, but at any rate, that's a gradation that they have. And it was illegal, she couldn't marry him. So it was like living in Orange County. So she had two choices that they could go to Zimbabwe on the shuttle, get married and come home, or they could apply for this guy to be reclassified white. So people, I've been telling people these stories, they said, well, how the hell do you get reclassified white? So of course, I've been telling you, they put him under the basket. He missed three lamps in a row. And anyway, we're so close to the forum here. Who is the Clark Kent guy that plays for the Kurt Rambos Honorary White Person Award? Something like that. Anyway, so you'll find that apartheid really is breaking down. I mean, obviously not an expert, I was there 11 days. But it's funny the way that these things just fall by the wayside. And as an economist, I was ashamed that I had actually thought that these laws could promote the sort of separation when there's as much interest people have in coming together financially and every other way. But let's do this thought experiment and just see how this moralizing that we see in the political system and in the public discourse, let's see how it affects policy. Just on hypothetical terms, think of this. The University of California was thinking about divesting its portfolio, dumping those stocks of companies that did business in South Africa. IBM, Xerox, Exxon, all the major firms almost have some, you know, some interest in South Africa. The legislative analyst or some, not the legislative, the legal counsel for the University of California said this would cost $100 million and was illegal because those funds are invested as pension funds for jerks like myself that should they accidentally get tenure and, you know, retire on the system. You'll say, well, how can they tell if the state employees are retired? It's a very, very complicated formula. Anyway, there's a fiduciary responsibility that funds are invested, you know, for people taking out of your check and they invested for you. Okay, well, anyway, it was going to cost $100 million. Well, that's a lot of money. It's not going to do it. Everybody knows Andy Young knows it's not going to do any good. It's a symbolic gesture. Instead of 100, why don't they just take the $100 million out of our portfolio and sell off all our Chrysler. I'd be in favor of divesting from Chrysler. Now, you've got $100 million. Let's do away with apartheid. Okay, and continuing the thought experiment. Let's take $25 million and just give it to Prime Minister Bota. Okay, it's under the table now. This is a democratic crap. Okay, we're actually trying to get something done. Okay, yeah. We give Bota $25 million if he does away with all these laws. And then we take the 10 most powerful guys in the white parliament. There are three parliaments now, white, colored, and Indian. We go to the white parliament and take the 10 most powerful guys, give them $5 million each. And then we still have $25 million left over, so there might be 25 swing votes because they give them $1 million each. We do it intelligent. We hire a couple guys from Chicago to run this for us. And we don't just blow the money. We actually figure out who we have to buy off to do away with the whole system. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that we get some real fast action here. I mean, we're talking millions. This is big bucks. Agnew did backflips for $1,500. We could eliminate apartheid. Now, what would the crusaders say about this? What if I gave a seminar at Berkeley and said, I wanted to take $100 million of University of California money to buy off the white supremacists in Pretoria? I don't have to tell you they're not going to go for that. That's terrible. You're paying off these terrible people. Let's have a revolution. It would be cowardly and morally weak to pay off the white supremacists. Let's risk the lives of blacks in South Africa and the thought experiment. So you've got to be careful with these. It could be one of the exploding ones. Snuck it through the U.S. the first time or something. Well, as I limp to a conclusion here, I observe that there is a St. Peterization of our political debates. We really take particular positions and submit ourselves to his judgment. Now, the best of us, of course, are accepted as pure based solely on our motives, not the effects of our advocacy. Can you imagine if Roosevelt II, which Menken was always calling Franklin D., had to come back and stand charges of grand fraud, theft, and larceny for his public housing debacle. Maybe the punishment would be something like he'd be condemned to live in public housing and urban renewal projects and inner city ghetto areas for all eternity. Those who in the prevailing orthodoxies failed to stamp with a good housekeeping seal are prima facie candidates for a label not of wrong-headedness, but of wrong-heartedness. Mean and evil, the product of a bad, bad man. Hence, political discourse is not a debate, but a catechism. And all serious participants must submit to the moral authority of the righteous. Now, happily, there are poles of righteousness in our pluralistic society, and the only saving grace of democracy is that it inspires the creation of multiple schools of puritanism, all of which detest each other, and hence allow some of us room to maneuver, particularly those of us who are fiercely immoral by all the acceptable standards. I'd like to tie in somebody who's actually smart on this topic. Eric Hoffer said that faith in a holy cause is, to a considerable extent, a substitute for lost faith in ourselves. The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause. When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty, and self-surrender are, in essence, a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hoffer saw that the wild crusades of faceless masses, which he thought were everywhere on the march in his mid-20th century classic, The True Believer, were manned by the guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to communism. Now, of course, Hoffer dealt with the cliff-hanging extremist, but my thesis here today tries to extend Hoffer's True Believer diagnosis. That political movements must be understood in psychological terms, really as consumption goods that are valuable to the people who practice them, who wear the buttons and put on the bumper stickers. They're not reason positions of personal conviction. And I believe that that's the only way that we really can understand the most respectable wards of the political asylum. It is the pious, my-souls-better-than-your-souls-price who, to date, dominates the American commentary on issues political and economic. And he, no less than Hoffer's guilt-ridden hitchhiker, consumes his ideology as a tasty and satisfying swallow of morality pie. While a radical Nazi or communist or Christian or Muslim may pose the greatest immediate threat to our flesh and bones, I suspect that the goody-two-shoes attitudes of today's moral in-crowd is just as stifling over the not-so-long run. Today, in today's pushing, for instance, for toothless sanctions against South Africa, the pious majority shift the locus of discussion from serious efforts to remove apartheid. For example, what comment does one ever hear about the ongoing claim, unchallenged, anywhere, there or here, of white South African trade unions for job reservation, meaning that only whites can be employed in certain jobs? Why don't we hear a call for a consumer boycott of all firms doing business with white labor unions in South Africa? Of course, because it is not morally fulfilling to Americanos who attack poor little racist workers in South Africa. The sad fact is that the political discourse, such as it is, exists to puff up the speaker's chest, not to light up the listener's mind. So long as we continue to look at the movement, whether it be Khomeini's crazies, the Feminazis, the Falwellians, the Naderites or the Church of Moon, we will get far more on the way of moralizing, I believe, than the way of morality. Thanks very much.