 Welcome to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking from your friends at the Foundation for Economic Education. My name is Richard Lawrence, and as ever, we have our panel of Brittany Hunter, Dan Sanchez, and Mary in March. And we are, of course, a couple of days off from Independence Day, the 4th of July, which everyone around our beautiful nation celebrated on Wednesday. And we figured we'd actually dedicate some of the conversation this week to Independence Day, to the 4th of July, to the founding of this country, to the United States in general. And I think it's important before we actually begin to talk about these ideas, to really make a distinction when we're talking about loving our country and being patriotic, versus loving and admiring and being adherent to all of the things that the American government might do. And so I think, as we begin the conversation, to draw the distinction between country and government, is a very important thing to say. And so just kind of laying that out, I wanted to start to talk about Independence Day. What does it mean to each of us? And I'll say, from my standpoint, I studied in high school in Russia in St. Petersburg for a summer. And I began to understand what it was like to live outside of the United States, what it was like to be outside of a country that adhered to the principles of limited government, of free market, of laissez-faire, hands-off economics. And I really began to appreciate Independence Day a lot more than I did beforehand. And this was, of course, between my junior and senior year of high school. And so I personally believe that travel and being elsewhere is something that allows me to appreciate Independence Day much more than I ever have. And I think that you, we were talking before the show that Independence Day is also one of your favorite holidays. It is my favorite movie and my favorite holiday. Favorite movie. Now that might be controversial. There's nothing more patriotic than Bill Pullman giving that speech. He did a very nice job. But yeah, so I've never traveled, but this is my favorite holiday, mostly because my minor in college was constitutional studies. Okay. So for me, 4th of July really gained meaning when I learned why, when I learned what it is about this country that's so great. And for me, it wasn't necessarily the Revolutionary War. This was a revolution of ideas, ideas that have still changed the world. They're still changing the world. So I think it's, you know, you mix that with cheeseburgers, which are my favorite food and you can't go wrong with the 4th of July. And a quick point of order, is it Independence Day when you call it or is it the 4th of July? Because I insist on calling it an Independence Day. I think it goes both ways. It's kind of interchangeable. Yeah, yeah, something festive about the 4th of July. It automatically sparks fireworks and thoughts of hot dogs. But Independence Day, you have to stop and think, wait a minute. The movie or the holiday? Right, exactly. But I will say, Richard, that I had a similar experience. I lived out of the country for about six weeks and when I came back to the United States, I was so happy to be here. Even silly things like ice cubes in the drinks and getting extra napkins at restaurants. I was really pleased to come back. Napkins that weren't tissue paper thin either, right? Yeah. Because you were in Prague. That's right. Yeah, and that wasn't all that long ago. No, that was in 2016. Oh, that's just barely, yeah. Yes. When I came back, I felt so enthusiastic to be in the States. And it was interesting because my experience in Prague came very quickly after. I had spent about four months living in D.C. where I had started off cynical and became even more jaded if it was possible about the country. But it wasn't, I realized that my feelings weren't so much about the country as they were about the government. And that's not the same thing. No, a huge distinction to be able to draw. And so we actually have, as you might expect, a few pieces on fee.org that talk about the distinction between country and state or government, right? And one of them is by Feast founder Leonard Reed. And it's called The Essence of Americanism. And we tend to revive this piece every Independence Day. See, I call it Independence Day. But Danny, you and I were talking about this piece a little bit earlier and there were some things that you had to say on it. Yeah, I really like this notion of Americanism as being a philosophy and not being a sort of rah-rah for one particular government as we've been discussing. I like this line from his essay. He says, I do not think of the real American Revolution as the armed conflict we had with King George III. That was in a reasonably minor fracas as such fracas as go. The real American Revolution was a novel concept or idea which broke with a whole political history of the world. And he goes on to talk about how Americanism as it developed was basically a belief in freedom. So in particular, that this notion that our rights in here in us as individuals, whether you're religious and you think that they're granted by a creator, or whether you believe in natural rights and you think it's just something that is an individual basis, as opposed to previous ideas which thought of rights as something that was granted by the state. And he goes on to say that this Americanism, this idea of individual rights inherent in the person, that that is what led to what he calls the American miracle. And that freedom that he talks about personal freedom, but he also talks about economic freedom, is what led to just an explosion of prosperity that we are still enjoying today. And we of course have a link to the essay, The Essence of Americanism by Leonard Reid just underneath the video here. He's also very explicit about the types of rights that he's actually talking about in the piece. He talks about property rights, how this was a country that was founded on an idea. Again, that the rights aren't from the state. They are not from the government, but they're inherent to being human. But the human being has a right to property, also the rule of law, that all rules that the government imposes or that nature imposes, that society imposes, should be applied equally. This is a lofty idea and this is something that I think it bears mentioning. All of these ideals that we're talking about with Americanism have not been fully realized all the time, right? I mean, there are many, many problems with the United States. There are many kinds of criticism that we can levy on what the United States does, particularly the government. I mean, there are many things that we would feel uncomfortable endorsing here on this podcast. But we're going to focus today, again, on the ideal, right? I think, Brittany, you were telling me earlier about the fact that our founding documents contain language that say that we're seeking a more perfect union. A more, not a perfect one. Nobody was under the guise that this is perfect, but it was better than anything that the earth had ever seen at that point. And I'd argue better than we're seeing now. I mean, look at Venezuela. Oh, Venezuela, yeah. We've talked about it before on the feedcast a couple of times. Rampant inflation, crime, the rule of law is totally out the window. Socialism prevents businesses from beginning, entrepreneurship from taking hold. It's pretty much the anti-America. Well, and what I love about Leonard Reed's idea of Americanism is that it's something that even non-Americans can subscribe to. Yes. So we have an intern from Venezuela, Jorge Dressati, and he really subscribes to Americanism. So it's something that can inspire people across the world. Yeah, it doesn't stop at our borders. Exactly. I think Leonard said that it almost to me when he says, you know, we've had all these centuries of war, and it kind of reminded me that this was the beginning of human dignity for all, not just equality for all, but that everyone deserves the human dignity, you know, afforded to all of us. Absolutely. It's inherent in rights, the dignity in each individual. And so there's actually another piece that we should talk about here too, because I feel, again, when we talk about love of country, love of America, Americanism, we can very easily fall into the trap of being, you know, overly patriotic or at least effusively patriotic in a way that might not be understood. And there's an amazing essay that our current president, Larry Reed, no relation to Leonard Reed, wrote a couple of years ago. We have a video on our website about this as well. It's called The True Meaning of Patriotism. Yes. Again, the link is below the video. But, Brittany, you've looked into this a little bit. I did. I love Larry's work always, but there was one poet. He's a poet. He really is. He's just amazing. That really struck me. And it's, Patriotism is not love of country. If by country you mean scenery, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesty, and the like. Almost every country has pretty collections of rocks, waters, and stuff that people grow and eat. If that's what patriotism is all about, then Americans have precious little for which we can claim any special or unique love. And surely patriotism cannot give me, give, cannot me in giving one's life for a river or a mountain range. Patriotism is not blind trust in anything our leaders tell us to do. That just replaces some lofty concepts with mindless goose-stepping. That's the poetry that you guys are talking about. There it is. It's amazing. And in the essay, again, which we turned into a video a couple of years ago, he does go into the fact that this doesn't mean, again, looking to a politician or to a government or to a legislature to solve our problems, but to loving the idea and the principles under which the country that you're a citizen of or a member of or that you follow its ideas, loving those ideas. In fact, quite the opposite of goose-stepping, true patriotism and true Americanism, is being willing to criticize very vociferously your government. Absolutely. And I think Mark Twain said something. Yeah, I wrote this quote down. It's going to be a little bit of a quote heavy podcast today, I think. But Mark Twain said patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it. Well, that's awesome. Those are amazing quotes. And I hope we have more amazing quotes, but we're going to take a quick break and we'll see you on the other side of the break. Visit fee.org slash shows to get the latest content from the series you love, such as Out of Frame, Common Sense Soapbox, How We Thrive, The Words and Numbers podcast, and of course, The FeeCast. Once again, that's fee.org slash shows for more great content like this. Thanks for watching. Welcome back to The FeeCast. We've been talking about the differences between different concepts that we sometimes consider to be part of the Fourth of July Independence Day. And two of those concepts, one of them is patriotism. The other one is nationalism, right? So if we're talking about differences, there may appear to be subtle differences, but they're actually pretty dramatic. And there's actually a very good essay on fee.org. We've got the link below by Randolph Born. And it's all about the state and it's all about the difference between nationalism and patriotism. And you've written about this, Danny. Yes. Randolph Born wrote this sort of inspired by the experience of living in America during the build-up to World War I. And what he was experiencing then really was nationalism. And the way he describes it is sort of the aggressive aspect of the group and sort of this push towards coercive unity. So the notion that you can't criticize your government and be a true patriot, that is what is actually associated with nationalism. Because basically, especially in wartime, people begin to feel so threatened that they feel that they just have to unify under a rally around the flag and not broke any criticism of policy and enforce unity and homogeneity among the populace and be really aggressive towards anyone who's outside the group. So that is definitely not what we're talking about with patriotism. It's sort of talking about if we don't have a unified voice, a unified way of acting, that we won't win this war. Exactly. And so this typically happens in times of crisis with armed conflict, with invasion, whatever. If we don't rally around a leader or an entity that is leading us and has the authority, at least in some people's minds, to lead us, if you're against that, then you're not patriotic. Right. And so it leads towards blind support for militant foreign policy, but it also leads to centralized big government domestic policy too. So a lot of times in the buildup to war when you have this nationalism, then also there's no dissent in terms of central planning. So you have a phenomenon called war socialism where everything becomes, well, we have to have rationing and we have to have price controls to make sure that the armaments industry is getting enough supplies and that kind of thing. Right. Free speech too, right? Absolutely. Because it's, oh, we'll don't insult our leader. Look, it was the Alien and Sedition Act, passed by John Adams, where it was about don't insult the president because we need to get through this together. Way back when. One of the original patriots even fell prey to the notion that you can't go against a leader. Yeah. And so this is something innate, I think, in humans, right? I mean, and that is what separates the way in which, up to this point, to varying degrees of success, we pursued Americanism as you've said, is that we've had this constant pull back to principles, right? The principles of Americanism as you outlined them before. And as our outlined in our founding documents and our sort of collective national lore, free speech, free association, the right to defend yourself, the right to own a business and open a business and to operate. Privacy. Privacy is another one, absolutely. And so these ideas, again, are things that we need to constantly return to as the good things that Americanism can offer to us. Yeah. And I think that it's important to remember that when we fail to live up to these ideals, it's not that the ideas themselves have failed. It's just that we've let them slip. And it doesn't mean that we throw them in the trash can because one time we forgot. Absolutely. And typically we do forget, like Dan, you were saying, during times of crisis, right? And it's not only war socialism. It's not the only kind of socialism that we might be able to experiment with. Of course, socialism is when the government is able to operate very large sectors in the economy. It's controlling the means of production as we've talked before on the FECAST. And it's important for us to realize that when socialism is put into practice during wartime, it sometimes doesn't leave us, right? It can be employed outside of war as well. And in fact, John Maynard Keynes, one of the leading lights in thinking about how to stimulate the economy using government fiscal policy, he didn't advocate having that fiscal policy stimulate the economy outside of wartime himself. He only saw that as a wartime thing. The problem is all his adherents, practically, have wanted to continue his socialistic type of economic policy outside of war. And in fact, you hear it from politicians all over. Barney Frank, former congressman from Massachusetts, said, government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together, which is very interesting. And again, it's conflating a lot of these ideas that we've been talking about here. And it's distressing, right? I mean, if you end up thinking that the only way that we can act collectively is through the state, which is really doing these things by itself by basically coercing other people to fund it and to do those things, that's a problem. Yeah, I would actually replace this by spontaneous order is simply the name we give to things we do together. All right, you know what I'm gonna stop you. I think we've mentioned it before, but let's remind everyone listening and watching, what do you mean by this spontaneous order? Well, spontaneous order is the active, well, several acts of people coming together to create one product, Leonard Reid, I-Pencil, right? I-Pencil, one pencil, is the product of hundreds of work from different people, but yet they're all coming together all around the world without a central planner and all contributing to this one beautiful pencil. And that is spontaneous order, and I think it goes right in the face of this Barney Frank quote because it's the opposite of that, it's not government. We do this in spite of government. That's right, despite the roadblocks that they put into place, we come together and we build things. And it's the opposite of that kind of uniformity that Randolph-Born talked about emerging with the nationalism that the only way that we can get anything done is if we're all marching in locks that doing the same thing, this idea that people can be free and adapt to each other, and it's more like a dance than a march. Yeah, I like that. So we celebrated, not only America's birthday this week, but we've recently also celebrated another one of Liberty's leading lights, Frederick Bastiat, who we've also mentioned on this show before, and he also has something to say about how we conflate or confuse notions that we typically accept in our daily lives. And he writes in his amazing book, The Law, he says socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to it being done at all. And that is a hugely important insight that he was able to offer there. Just because we don't want the state or the government, for example, to undertake a public education program, let's say, or the Post Office, which is another article that you wrote this week that got incredibly high traffic and a lot of attention, just because we don't want the government running first class mail. Doesn't mean we don't want first class mail. And we believe that through the cooperation that we had through the market process, we can actually get these things, and by the way, far better than how we could get it through the state. Cheaper, faster, better. But then when you say that you're opposed to public education, they say, why do you hate kids? Why do you hate learning and education? And if you're opposed to government health care, it's like, oh, why do you hate sick people? It's just people to die. And of course, we all see through all that because it's all political sort of rhetoric. It's all electioneering. Let me explain to you, the voters, why I'm so much more in favor of the children than my opponent, right? So I think when you begin to see the world through the economic lens, through a lens of evaluating what is pro-liberty versus what restricts liberty, you can begin to understand why people who might not support certain government programs are not bad people. They just have a different way of going about making those things happen. Yeah, it's kind of embedded in the word socialism, too, because society is kind of like that's what the prefix of it is based on. And it seems like kind of a rhetorical trick. It is. It is. Socialism, which is society versus capitalism. Capital being, of course, the way in which we produce things. And so it's a very odd juxtaposition when you put the two against each other, you kind of say, well, of course I want to be social. But truly, the most pro-social kind of economic arrangement would be the market, right? Because in the market we can all choose what we want to do individually, what we want to produce, who we want to patronize, at what prices we want to patronize. And that's a very social activity, much more social than being told what to produce, what to buy, at what prices to buy. And what's social about somebody forcing you to come together? Nothing. What is social is our decision to come together and unite as groups. No one likes being told what to do, especially by a central authority who's not particularly keen on your interests. And what you said kind of reminded me of that. Well, so we have a lot more to talk about Americanism, socialism, and a few other ideas that we've been discussing up to this point. But we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with the FeeCast. Oh, boy. You know, starting out in the music and just any business, you have to have the carrot dangling. You have to know what your goals are. I think if anybody goes in without a goal you're pretty much doomed. This is a family business. Our daughters, our son-in-law, my brother. We can't walk away from this. This is not something we walk away from. This is something we pass on. I mean, you're always going to run into the wall. It's just, can you figure out how to go under it, around it, over it? It makes for a longevity of a business. You can't give up. You just don't let yourself give up. Watch Mama Gold Tone and more documentaries about women in business in our How We Thrive series at fee.org slash shows. Welcome back to the FeeCast. Of course, we've been talking about these ideas. We've been talking about very lofty kind of principles and concepts. But we really need to go into what the meaning is behind them, right? Friends or, you know, opponents or in the coffee shop. I'll say, they'll ask, you know, why do these ideas matter? Right? You say all this stuff about freedom of speech. You say all this stuff about laissez-faire or free market economics. But what does it actually matter? And I tell them prosperity just doesn't happen. Right? Prosperity happens because certain ideas are employed and other ideas are not employed. And in our context of Americanism, there are different ways we can talk about the meaning of these ideas here, Dan. Yeah, the ideas of liberty. So the idea that each individual should own his or herself and own the fruits of their labor that that is what results in prosperity. Like you said, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. And what Leonard Reid said is that the Americanism is responsible for what he called the American miracle. It's an explosion of prosperity, especially during the Industrial Revolution. And he said that the limitation of government is what freed, released, and released creative human energy on an unprecedented scale. So ultimately, it's just about the productive efforts of individuals. So you can't predict what kind of shape that effort will take. You know, Steve Jobs coming up with the iPhone, you know, there's nothing inherent about free market capitalism that is necessary about that. But it's just a matter where the ideas come in is that people are free to do whatever makes sense, whatever is the best way on the ground to create prosperity. And so your point, sort of drawing out the Steve Jobs idea is that Steve Jobs could basically come up anywhere where these ideas are in place, right? Steve Jobs, for example, might not be able to begin a multi-billion-dollar corporation such as Apple in a situation where there are no firm property rights in which it's very difficult to begin a business in which it's very difficult to even speak out against a government that is doing things that might not be productive for the beginning of that business or otherwise, right? And so anywhere where these ideas, rule of law, governments, low taxes, laissez-faire, again, hands-off kind of economic policy, any of those places is where these kinds of creative energies can be unleashed and bloom into things that create value and prosperity for each of us. Which it seems like the enemy to that is central planning. And so I think you can't central plan great ideas because look at all the ideas you might be missing. We might not have a Steve Jobs if our government was telling us we could only have one phone made by one manufacturer. Right. Or one type of toothpaste. Or one type of toothpaste. I don't want to live in that world. That's not a world I want to live in. But let's take a step back again because you mentioned the term central planning. And I want to make sure that everyone understands what that means exactly. Yeah, central planning where a governing body is essentially making all these decisions. And we see that even in occupational licensing, right? That is a central plan saying we know what everybody else wants so we're going to make this set of laws. But that's impossible. I don't know what you want. I don't know what Dan wants. I don't know what Mary Ann wants. So for me, given the authority to plan for you guys seems asinine because it is. And of course occupational licensing and the topic of last week's Vcast where the government will actually license someone to actually participate in a certain kind of professional occupation. Based on a set of standards that no one's really consented to, right? It's their idea. Right. And in the same sense that prosperity doesn't come from nowhere. Poverty doesn't come from nowhere either. That's good. And poverty exactly comes from central planning. That you know the difference that you see, I mean a lot of what people love about being in America is just the abundance of opportunity and the high living standards. And we sympathize with people who are being crushed by hunger and malnutrition and insecurity. But then you look at the ideas that have prevailed in terms of policy in those places and invariably they are ideas where property is not secure. Where central planning is running rampant. I think it's important when we talk about these ideas to think about what it's like to live in a country where maybe you have a constitution and these ideas are written down but they're not actually in practice. It's a completely different ball game to actually be able to make decisions regarding your private property than just to kind of like we pretend that you actually own it when we all know that the state comes along and they can take it right away. This has a big effect on the way people act in their everyday decisions and those decisions can lead to prosperity or they could lead to poverty. And that's why certainty is such an important aspect of the rule of law. If you don't know how to if you don't know how the law is going to be applied in your certain circumstance and it's uncertain why are you going to take the risk to open up a new business for example. Why are you going to take the risk to go out and protest a political decision that's been made ostensibly in your behalf but might not be in your greatest benefit. When we talk about prosperity it's not even just financial economic prosperity. It's arts and culture. Look at what we have because we're free to create. We have jazz. We have all these amazing American art forms that we get to say that we're home to because we gave people the freedom to actually pursue those things. That's right. When we say production we don't necessarily mean always on the assembly line always in front of the computer screen making valuable spreadsheets. If spreadsheets can be valuable they can occasionally. But we're talking about production of things of value. Ideas. They're pursuing what is by their own standards their greatest good. That's right. And meaningful. And hopefully in a marketplace that's free to find these ideas, to find these products, to find these pieces of art other people will find them valuable as well. And again that's something that foreigners can even subscribe to in terms of Americanism. A lot of what foreigners love about America are the cultural output that we have. And so they love jazz and they love blues and what was the British invasion was people like Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and John Lennon being really inspired by the American blues tradition and then the rock and roll tradition that was coming out of that and then feeding that back in and having that cross-cultural feedback and so that is really something that everyone can admire and repair to. A standard that all can repair to. And we've been talking a lot about America being a beacon not only for economic prosperity but cultural prosperity as well. But I want to circle back because we as Americans all three of us, all four of us are patriotic or at least we're citizens of the United States, right? But you don't have to be a citizen of the United States in order to ascribe to the views of Americanism as we've outlined them here. Yeah. And I think one place where we're seeing this happen right now is Iran. The youth of Iran right now are very into American ideals actually changing things. I know I watched a video the other day that women are now dancing in the street just because they can and they're dancing to American music. And that's having an impact because now these people are running or not running. I don't know how their religions work there but are now able to hold positions of power. And I think we're seeing this change. I think this is an example of what we've seen in American history and across the world of how changes actually occur. They start with culture. They start with we the people not with the guys up top. And Iran is a great example of that because you know that kind what people in Iran what they love about America is the freedom that they're inspired to emulate. What terrifies them and what threatens them is the foreign policy of the U.S. Central Government. And so again trying to centrally plan the American ideals and trying to export them by force that always backfires. And so obviously we have the ballot box, right? Go and elect certain people who in theory represent our best wishes and our aspirations and our dreams. And there's a lot to be said about how they don't in many cases maybe even most cases actually represent the will and the wishes of the people whom they represent. There's a topic or an idea here that you can criticize by criticizing, right? Or you can criticize by doing something else. You can criticize by creating. Yes. Which is a term that you love absolutely. I love it, yes. And I stole it from Max Borders who was our former editor of the Freeman. Good friend. She had to Max Borders. I love that because you can sit in a room and criticize all day long and what are you doing? You're really just making each other angry sitting there criticizing. But that's what entrepreneurship is. We're creating. So if you don't like the way the post offices run Lysander Spooner created his own. He criticized by creating. And that's what I think we need to see more of. Now his was criticized. So hopefully that doesn't happen. But Uber wasn't shut down. Uber wasn't shut down. Great point. So we're seeing this already. We are already criticizing by creating. And going to the Leonard Reed quotation that you had earlier, Dan, we're talking about unleashing creative potentialities, creative energies in order to be productive. And if we're not able to be creative, if we're not able to create value for other people, then what use is any idea, right? But the point is that the ideas under which this country were founded were not blood and soil. They were not a certain type of tribe against another tribe that carved out a certain part of land that they called their own. These were ideas. That's the true beacon of America is the idea under which it was founded, which is again we look at our founding documents. We had the ability to create a government all of our own and we had the ability to throw it off if it violates liberty again. And the opening of the constitution says we the people, right? Not always that it's able to fulfill that promise, but that that's the idea. And that's an amazing way that we've set up our country to unleash those creative energies that each of us have. And I, for one, love that about our country. And that's why I celebrate Independence Day. Well, we've enjoyed an awesome conversation. I hope you have too. I hope you had an awesome Independence Day and we'll see you next week at the Feast.