 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast where we study, read and try to encourage you to read various books, usually in the canon of economics and particularly Austrian economics, but sometimes we go into related fields of politics and sociology and logic and philosophy and wherever the mood takes us. So this week I'm very pleased to have as our guest Donald Devine. He has a brand new 2021 book actually called The Enduring Tension, which I want to recommend to you and bring your attention to and hopefully summarize some of its main theses and concepts today. For those who are not familiar with Mr. Devine and his work, he's currently at the Fund for American Studies. He's also a fellow at Heritage. He was probably most famously head of OPM, the Office of Personal Management, which really controls the civil service element of the federal government back during the Reagan administration. And he received some less than flattering commentary from the left during his tenure there as he was trying to wrestle that beast to the ground a bit. And from my perspective, you know, during my time in Washington D.C. working for Ron Paul, Donald Devine was really one of those names you knew in conservatism. Some of what one of those heralded names like a Richard Vigory or Morton Blackwell or a David Keen, Donald Devine was very much sort of one of the guys behind the guys. And so I'm thrilled that he's written this new book. It was recommended to me and I got an opportunity to read it over the weekend and it is called the Enduring Tension Capitalism and the Moral Order. So it really fits, I think, a nexus for our listeners in grappling with this idea that, you know, libertarianism and markets are not sufficient. That there are cultural and religious and traditional elements to everything we do and that society needs those things. And I think this is a point that's often lost amongst libertarians, especially. So all that said, wordy on my end, Don, it's great to talk to you and thank you. Well, it's great to be here, Jeff. Name Mises is very important to me. You mentioned I was the head of the civil service of bureaucracy for Reagan. It's actually Ludwig von Mises who taught me about running government. He has a book, not too many people know it. A simple title is called Bureaucracy. It's published by Yale University Press and it is the only wisdom, really, of very few wisdoms on the bureaucracy. It tells you everything you have to know. And the basic thing is that government is different than markets. I could actually go into that more. It's a great book. He basically says the problem is in the government there's no way to communicate between the person at the top who's running the organization and making the decision and the people who are the ones that are supposed to be helped or serviced at the bottom. And the government, it can be 15, 20, 30 levels from the secretary of an agency at the bottom. And there's no communication device in the government in the private sector, although the private usually has fewer levels. But in the private sector, you can go down as far as you want because all you have to do is answer a simple question. Is it making a profit or not? And if it's not making a profit, then you have to do something, maybe get rid of it. And the government, if you go down and look at it, and if you can get through it all, when you go down you find out something's going wrong. There's a universal ante. You throw more money out. You throw more money out of the bed. It's just a wonderful little book. But anyway, I guess we'll get back to my book. One of the reasons it might be little is people have alleged that in 1944 when it was published, Yale was looking for small books because there were paper shortages. So not necessarily that we know that for a fact, but that's been suggested. Now, during your time at OPM, did you come to believe it was hopeless or did you think something could be done about officialdom, the deep state? Call it what you will. The biggest thing, and I have this in this book to have a whole chapter on bureaucracy, and it's very critical to my thesis. And it simply is that government, centralized government, especially how much we've grown up since the welfare state over the last 100 years or so, it can't work with so many levels and no way to communication. So, I mean, you can make government work better, but you can't really do anything unless you get rid of so many things at doing it. Ronald Reagan said when he ran for president, he said, I'm running to cut government, yes, to save money. But mainly, I'm trying to make it work. We got to get most of the government out of Washington and into the states and into the localities. And I think that's the only real thing. We've got to cut it in major, major ways. And I have to reform things like the Federal Reserve, get back to some more stable currency based to some degree on gold or other objective measures. We got a long way off the direction that the Founders set up with a very limited central government, most governments, state and local level, and really most of society is agreed to. Tocqueville said that by private voluntary associations and very, very local village-type government, people can have an effect. The only way you can make the government work is to slim it down, and then you can put some reasonable kind of solutions, one of which is to take down all the barriers to doing anything in the government. I actually went back into the government for a couple of months at the end of the Trump administration. They finally got somebody in the White House personnel office and knew what he was doing, so they asked me to come in and take a look at it. And it's so much worse. It's even worse than before Jimmy Carter passed his civil service reform act, which did a lot of good things and allowed us in the Reagan administration to do things nobody's been able to do since. We're getting rid of 100,000 non-defense employees, but my book is trying to look at this in a bigger direction. That doesn't work, and therefore we have to look for other things that can work. The easy answer is decentralization and privatization. That's what made us great, and we've gotten too far away from it, and it's got to be our load store to make it different. But to do that, I think you have to go back and look seriously at philosophy and history, understand how we got there. Part of the problem today is so few people know anything about history back when I first got in politics, which admittedly was a long time ago. Everybody read the activist people especially, but one of the things Frederick Hayek probably in the public sphere is the one that kind of reinvented this kind of libertarian conservatism that I identify with. He wrote an academic kind of book, but that book got to the guy who was in charge of the biggest circulation magazine in America. It was called Reader's Digest. People were reading, and he serialized that book, and that book, through that operation, got in the hands of people like William Buckley and Frank Meyer who kind of popularized it, and into Ronald Reagan's hand, as he himself says. So we need to realize that history, we need to really go back much earlier, how capitalism was formed, named after, named by actually Karl Marx, the father of communism, socialism, and that's kind of where I start in the book with him. I think this is an interesting time for lovers of freedom to worry about where the country is going. Democrats have an incredibly big agenda, and they control both houses of Congress and the president. Believers in freedom are going to have a limited amount of ability to do anything. It's a good time to read, to go back and think the basic thoughts to get away with our politics now, which is really just kind of slogans rather than serious thought. And recognize that it's not little kind of tweaks here and there, even throwing a big amount of money. That isn't a problem, it's the structure itself doesn't work, centralization doesn't work. Reagan always said again what made America great was federalism, a whole idea of separation of powers at the national level, and most things done down near the people where they can have some effect on what's going on. So that's kind of where my book is coming from. Well, you actually start in the introduction by discussing Joseph Schumpeter and his admonition about creative destruction and what would potentially bring down the West. So with all the hindsight we have now, do you think Schumpeter was correct? Yeah, actually I think we're at the end of an era. The progressives have been in charge a long time, probably the most important American intellectual since the founders was Woodrow Wilson. Many know that he was president of the United States, they tend to forget that he was a great intellectual, leader, president of Princeton University, instrumental in starting the American Society of Public Administration, the American Political Science Association, many other academic, and it was he who went to Prussia actually in Europe and said, hey, you know, Prussia works. When the Chancellor and the Kaiser decide something, it gets done. Over here we have all these checks and balances against power. We can't get anything done. So he says the Constitution's fatal flaws dividing power rather than bringing it together. And he convinced American intellectuals of that and they've been trying to do various things ever since to make centralized government work. And unfortunately Joe Biden is going to prove that it can't work. It's at the end of its exhaustion where it's just over 100 years now with the Federal Reserve and as I say in the book and quote some past leaders in the Federal Reserve, they don't have any ability to react anymore. They have so much debt piled up there and obligations for those that there's no room. You have the head of the Federal Reserve now admitting publicly that monetary policy doesn't work anymore and we can only deal with fiscal. He's a big cheerleader behind throwing almost $2 trillion, which we never even saw a couple of years ago, $2 trillion. We're at the point that this all welfare state is exhausted and it's going to be up to Joe Biden to prove it. And I just hope that the shocks that we have to go through to do it are not going to be too absolutely painful. So the title The Enduring Tension relates I think to fusionism. So explain to our listeners what you mean by the tension sort of the twin poles of markets and freedom and tradition and morality. A lot of people call this fusionism, but what this really is is Western civilization. Western civilization has always been this tension between freedom and tradition, between markets and government, between this moral idea that freedom is something important. Tradition is important and that tension, not all one, not all the other, that tension has been really the spark of all Western civilization and that's why I go into so much history on this. And it is this tension, even critics admit that it is this tension that gives it its vitality. A lot of them don't like this vitality. In fact, part of the problem is that this idea of freedom is scary, the idea that people can be free. They may not do all the right things. The influence of Judaism and Christianity and Western civilization, this idea that a creator gives you the ability, the freedom to not follow him. Now what kind of God is this? He's giving you the freedom to disobey him. I mean, no place else has this kind of idea. And that's why this freedom has a moral base, but it needs something to control that. And at least some of those people think that he also gave him part of those reasons, 10 commandments and the whole structure of religion and private associations, families, communities. These all are in a balanced tension, a fusion, if you wish. This is what made the West greater and why progressivism, the welfare state, it tries to cover that freedom so that it has to follow the leadership. The leadership of the experts who supposedly know everything, and I spend a lot in the book also on science and the scientific reasons why they can't do these things. I think it's a good time for people to realize the importance of freedom, to sit back and really be serious about what you need to do to preserve that freedom and to recognize that we've gone a long way off track. We've got to make some serious changes if we're going to survive the 21st century. Do you think the size of the United States, 330-ish million people, is that a big part of the problem? Absolutely. The bigger the population is, the more difficult it is to run it from the top. If you had only 100 people who were Americans, well, maybe you could run everything from the top then, or it would certainly be a lot easier. But as society grows, you need it more, and especially federalism. Having one plan to do everything just doesn't work. You saw the Trump administration, and he wasn't sophisticated about public administration, but he had enough sense to realize that you can't run this whole COVID thing from the center and have one rule for everybody. Joe Biden ran criticizing that saying he was going to centralize, Biden isn't doing that. He knows he can't. You can't have the same rules for people in South Dakota as you have in New York City. I mean, you just can't. It makes no sense. And yet, that's what progressivism says we should do. Have the one master plan, and everybody follows it, and follows the experts. And of course, the fact is the experts disagree. All of their great statistical things are statistics. They're probabilities. They're not absolutes. And we've got this really outmoded idea of science, that science is something that is absolute and precise. Modern times, we know that science is probabilistic. It doesn't answer every question. In fact, you can have a probability relationship between two principles in which no one fact faces the general tendency, the average. Everything's below or above it. So that can't be the way you have to deal with facts. And that's the great, great value of the market. The market allows individuals to make decisions. Each one of us decides what we're going to spend it on. We make our own decisions based on the realities that we face and what's available, that other free people are making available or not making available. Why the market is so important and why capitalism with all its problems is clearly the best kind of approach to economics. We've gone a long way away from Mises and Hayaki and ideas of market. But the basic structures there, and we make some changes, especially in terms of over-regulation, we can get back to a market and get back on the right track for freedom and for the good of society. Well, what's interesting here is that I think left critics would consider Schumpeter and Hayaki both to be extreme market liberals, but at the same time, both Schumpeter and Hayaki recognize that we need something more than just markets. It's not enough. We need some sort of tradition or morality or religion holding us together. And I think one of the big points you make in this book is we don't have a real good sense of what that something is these days. I mean, it's very clear that they're different. Take an interesting example. Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago had an article by somebody who was close to Milton Friedman. And it was a general kind of thing, but one thing really hit me on it. He said that Milton Friedman originally had the idea that markets will change everything. If you just put in freedom and markets, that's enough. And he predicted that in China that as they got into and put more market elements into it, they would gradually get there. But this fellow who was a close associate of Milton Friedman said that towards the end of his life, Milton said, you know, that was wrong. You can't get there only by adopting markets. You have to have a whole rule of law. Now, to me it was a shocking thing and I've been meaning to write about it and displayed it on too many other things. But, I mean, what an incredible admission that they're kind of a market only guy like Milton Friedman at the top of the group on that came to agree with Hayek and others that the rule of law that some kind of moral structure of rules is necessary. As I say, I think a great admission by one of the most important thinkers of our time, it was right on 90% or more of everything. But it's just not enough to have market freedom. You have to have a whole structure of morality built into a rule of law, of respect, private property that makes people not push the ground to take advantage of people. You need a whole moral structure or capitalism can't work. Well, you and you get into that you have a whole chapter chapter six on moralizing capital item. I was interested to see that you quoted Mark Lilla, who might consider an interesting left progressive actually read his book the once in future liberal. So the, you know, the question here is, what's our moral foundation? Is it Thomas Aquinas? Well, maybe, but as America gets increasingly secular, and I think by design, where are we going to find that? Well, I don't know if you can find it secular, but what it can't be is some kind of top down religion that everybody is forced to join, have the state support it. It's very important that the state not dominate religion. But that doesn't mean that you can't have many different varieties of religion. And of course, there are a lot of things that consider themselves secular that aren't. I mean, actually communism, the religion, the great Eric Vogel and the historian is very clear that you can't escape religion. It doesn't have to be one like Christianity or Judaism, fascism is a kind of religion. So you need some kind of moral system, and it certainly doesn't have to be in a single organization. But what it needs to do is tolerance. And as you know, if you read the book that my big person is John Locke. John Locke. Most people consider him totally secular, but he wasn't. But what he believed in was tolerance. You can have many different varieties of this moral. I need something related around the Ten Commandments, which are kind of the formal writing down that many structural societies had a lot of aspects of that. Some of social scientists believe that central ones are universal. I'm not sure about that. But my point is that you need a morality in society, and it doesn't have to be one single found fact requiring only one. I'll always give you more problems than not. I think we have, to many people, believing in environmentalism is kind of a religion. You need some kind of moral structure. I think you probably need something close to the Judeo-Christian tradition, maybe including deism. But you need some idea that there's something beyond pure individual self-interest. The idea of a creator, right in our Declaration of Independence, that's where it all comes from. If there isn't some kind of creation, maybe even a deist creation, then there's no value. What is anything worth? I think that religion is going to be a big, big part of this, and probably in America where it's embedded so deep, something along the Judeo-Christian tradition. Again, maybe even including deism. But you need some kind of moral structure. Now, you mentioned COVID and the Trump administration. One of the things they actually did well was allowing governors to take the lead on that. Does this give you any hope? I mean, we see people moving out of blue states into red. We see people rejecting the public school monopoly. We see various governors tweeting at each other and accusing each other and this sort of thing. Is COVID perhaps the silver lining will be that we've started to look more at states again? That's a very good observation. I think you're right. I think it's making it so clear that one solution for all doesn't work. It would be very interesting to see where President Biden ends up on all this. Is he going to really try to crack down? I think he's already kind of moved away from it. I mean, if you can get the Democratic president to recognize that you can't do everything from Washington, we may be starting maybe slowly but moving back in the right direction. You know, when we think about liberalism in the Hayekian sense of the word, not in maybe the modern sense of the word, one of the big criticism going around today on the right, they're critics of National Review, what they call conservative ink. I'm sure you've heard that. One of the criticisms is that, hey, liberalism has failed to stop ill-liberalism. It lets all these left-wing woke types take over the universities, lets them take over culture, lets them take over media, lets them take over civil service, and so we need to question the kind of liberalism that Hayek and Mises talked about because it hasn't worked. Well, I think it worked for a long time. What happened is that people who thought it didn't work took over the intellectual and political worlds again. I'm going to go back to Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson, you know, was trying to help people to do something good, but they tried it out and they've had a hundred years and I think we now know that it doesn't work. Once you pile it up too much and you promise everything, you have to realize that you've got to turn out beyond the central government. And if you don't, you're going to pay a price for it. So final question. If you had to give people words of advice, people who believe in human freedom, but people who also think there's a moral component, you mentioned earlier, it's a great time to get back to reading and I concur with that completely. We can't rebuild the world without a foundation. But if people say, you know, Donald Devine, you've been around, you've been in Washington, you've seen how the sausage gets made, you've seen all this left-right nonsense, you've seen Reagan come and go, tell me, let's say a young person who is starting out at age 20 right now, what would you tell him or her? Well, for the immediate term, I'd say, don't get in debt. I think we're going there. It's going to be a hard thing for people to realize that what we've been doing for so long is wrong. They're going to be shake ups and shake downs. The first thing I think I would tell somebody young is be very prudent economically because you're going to be in from some shocks. I don't want to hear that, but I think that's on a personal level the most important thing. The second thing I would say is reading. When I started out activism and politics, almost everyone read. I mean, people read high-hack, I mean, seriously. And people of that caliber, even at a lower level, are more popular like William Buckley or even Barry Goldwater's book, which was written by an intellectual helping him. Was that Brent Bazelle wrote that? Yes. Yeah, okay. And everybody read. It's just so important to read. You know, I think what made Ronald Reagan so different from all the other recent presidents we've had is he read. You know, that doesn't mean to be too critical, but, you know, George W. Bush, according to his advisor, had to tell him to start reading when he was president. I mean, you need to start reading now if you're a 20, and you can't just deal with tweets and simple messages. You have to dig into it. My book is tough, or I'm not going to tell you, it's going to be an easy read, or read something that isn't so tough. But you need to read. You can't understand unless you know something about history and philosophy, politics, government. These are all things that are so important in your life. And I wouldn't worry too much about politics the next couple of years. Democrats are in control of both houses of Congress and the president. They're going to be very hard to convince, I guess, those people involved in that can still do it. But this is the time to think, you know, in the Reagan administration, I mean, in the Bush administration, we go off the way. We're just throwing quotes around and symbols. We weren't talking, definitely were talking slogans. And again, this is a time to think there's going to be plenty of time for action in a few years. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the book, again, is called the Enduring Tension Capitalism in the Moral Order. It's just out this year, 2021, by Encounter Books. It's available on Amazon. It's an absolutely fantastic cover. I love the cover. And I really enjoyed reading it. I think there's a lot to think about here for all of us who are worried, who are concerned about human freedom. So Don Devine, I want to thank you so much for your time. I hope everybody has a great weekend. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and on Mises.org. Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org.