493: Liberty vs Tyranny of Socialism with Walter E Williams

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It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Walter E. Williams. You've heard his name. He is a professor at John M. Olin Distinguished professor of Economics at George Mason University. He's the best selling author of up from the Race and Economics, Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism and his most recent book, American Contempt for Liberty. Walter, welcome. How are you?

Well, thank you. I'm doing fine.

It's good to have you on the show. Does America really have a contempt for liberty? Watching the news, it would sort of seem so.

We have a deep moral problem in our country. And the moral problem is that most Americans think that it's okay for the Congress of the United States to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another American. And indeed, that accounts for roughly two thirds to three quarters of the federal budget. That is one. When I say forcibly using one American to serve another, I mean that is Congress is taking the earnings of one American and giving it to farmers, giving it to food stamps, bailing out businesses, foreign aid. And that's the forceful use of one person to serve the purpose of somebody else. And indeed, the forceful use of one person to serve the purpose of somebody else is a fairly good working definition of slavery.

Couldn't agree more. You didn't mention health care, but of course that's all over the news for the last decade. People somehow think they have a right to that. A right to force other people to pay for their health care.

That is right. A lot of people don't know what a right is versus a wish. That is a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and it does not impose an obligation on you. That is my right to free speech imposes no obligation on another person except that of non interference. But if you say I have a right to something I did not earn, well, that does impose an obligation on another. That is, it requires another person not to be able to keep as much as he did earn because the government takes it away from him and gives it to me. And so it's a misuse of the term right. Matter of fact, if we use my rights to free speech, if we use the same term that people say, rights to health care, well, my right to free speech would require others to provide an auditorium for me to provide a microphone, my right to require others to. To pay my airfare, hotel accommodations, et cetera, et cetera.

So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we also have the right to peaceably assemble. But that doesn't mean that when you want to have an assembly or a demonstration that other taxpayers have to pay for your travel to get there and your hotel room to stay there. Right?

That is absolutely right. So when people say about healthcare, I'd like to see the terminology that they wish everybody had healthcare. And I also wish that as well.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, is there any going back from the world we live in now? It just seems that we've gone the pendulum always swings back and forth throughout the decades, throughout the centuries. But it seems as though, as Bill Bonner says, politics always lists like a ship listing a sailboat to the left. Right. It doesn't seem like there's really any going back because once you have this situation where people have voted themselves the treasury, nobody's going to ever give that up. Right. You have these iron triangles that just. They just can't be broken, it seems like.

Yeah, I think you're right. And some people ask me, well, what can be done? And I asked the question, I threw a question back at them. I say, are American people any different as human beings from the Romans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the British? These are great empires of the past, but they went down the tubes mostly for the same reason, bread and circus. And are the American people any different? And I suggest that American people are no different from people who were citizens of those great empires in the past.

Right, Yeah, I would agree. But people are going to argue, look, we're a rich country. I mean, you know, nobody should be without health care. Nobody should be living on the street. We have enough. And interestingly, the people who say that they don't seem to want to contribute their own money to the costs.

That's right. I personally believe that we should help our fellow man. And helping one's fellow man by reaching into one's own pockets to do so is praiseworthy. Helping one's fellow man by reaching into somebody else's pockets is worthy of condemnation. And for the Christians among us, they have to remember that when God gave Moses the eighth commandment, he did not mean thou shalt not steal. Unless you got a majority vote in the United States Congress.

That's a good way to put it. I love it, but it's so sad. In other words, it would be funny if it weren't so sad.

And by the way, in 1887 at Queen Victoria's jubilee in London, if someone had suggested that Great Britain would become a third rate nation challenged on the high seas by a six rate nation Argentina and almost lose, you would have been put Indian san asylum that it was inconceivable at the time that Great Britain would ever go down the tubes. It was the mightiest nation on the face of the earth. They used to say that the sun never set on the British crown.

Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. We've got this huge problem. You know, you talk in the book about the national Ponzi scheme. Are you referring to Social Security or just the general financial mismanagement of the country?

No, Social Security. Social Security is a, is a Ponzi scheme. And it would be illegal if it weren't done, if it was done by anybody else other than Congress.

Bernie Madoff actually made a comment that that's where he got the idea.

I don't know if he was just being sarcastic, but it's pretty interesting. So talk to us a little bit about the economic side of the equation because this all plays into economics and many of our listeners are interested in that. These politicians, as you talk about, exploit economic ignorance. They think it's just give out goodies and get reelected. That's basically the game by votes. Where are we and where are we going? Is the tide turning at all with the present administration?

I don't think the tide is turning. I think if anything, it's getting worse and it doesn't have anything to do so much with the present administration. But it turns out that among so many Americans, socialism is becoming increasingly attracted to them. Bernie Sanders is pushing it and you look at the former governor of Colorado said that socialism is not the way. And he got booed out of the.

I saw that. I saw that clip. That's unbelievable.

Yeah, and the issue is, is that people don't know what socialism is. That is, socialism is government ownership and or control over the means of production. And wherever that has been tried, it has led to ultimate disaster. And we see it in our own backyard, in places like Cuba and most Recently Venezuela. And you see it all over the world. And you know, like the Nazism, Hitler was the National Socialist Labor Party. That's what Nazis stands.

Everybody forgets that Hitler was a socialist and came to power with a lot of free, with a lot of promises. Yeah, well, I mean, socialism and its ugly big brother communism are responsible for the deaths of easily over 100 million people in the last century.

Oh yeah, easily, yes. Well over 100 million people. And matter of fact, the greatest murderers were Stalin and Mao Zedong. They murdered more people such that it makes Hitler look like a boy scout in terms of the number of people that were murdered. And a lot of people will say, well, no, we're not talking about the Soviet Union and China. We're talking about places like Sweden or Denmark. And the prime ministers of Denmark and Sweden have said we're not a socialist country. That is, they have a market, but they have a huge welfare state, but they have a free market economy. Matter of fact, America's socialists would not like very much the way Sweden operates. That is, Sweden has a voucher system, a school voucher system. And that's the last thing that American socialists want.

They don't want people to have any choices for their education. Right?

That's right. Except with abortion. That's what they, their idea of choice is with abortion. But Sweden has relatively little regulation. It's easy to get a license to operate and get in the business. And same thing with Denmark. And so socialism has been a disaster. And I think one of the things about it is that it sounds so good. That is everybody from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. That just sounds wonderful. But wherever it's tried, it does not work very well.

It's failed every place on earth and every time in history. It's totally oppressive, obviously, but it seems like people can make a better argument for some degree of redistribution when you have this situation we have now in America where the middle class is getting hollowed out and it seems to be under attack from all sides. The rich are like the super mega rich nowadays. Is it fair to say if you have over $100 million, you should pay a wealth tax of 3% of your net worth every year or something like that?

Well, it all depends whether you earned it. That is, if you earn something, that's determinants of agreement. That is, if you look at the wealthy people in our country, for the most part, they did things that satisfied their fellow man. They did things that made their fellow man's life better, such as Bill Gates. And with all the work that he's done with Microsoft and all this kind of stuff, he became rich. He didn't take anybody's money. They voluntarily forked over $400 for his windows program and other programs. And so people who make their fellow man better off, make his life more livable, make his life longer. I don't think that they should be held up for ridicule and scorn and mistreated. The big thing in our country, or anywhere in the world, and is that in a free economy, in a free market, one becomes wealthy by serving his fellow man. That's what you're doing. That's what I'm doing. We work and we do things that make our fellow man better off. And so the people who should have ridicule and scorn heaped upon them are the parasites in our society. The people who seek to live at the expense of other people, the people who seek the business bailouts or crop subsidies or food stamps, those are the people, the people who are parasites. Those are the people who should have scorn heaped upon them. And by the way, when people talk about redistribution, that's what thieves do. A thief redistributes income, that is, he takes from you and puts it in his own pocket.

Absolutely.

And so Congress does the same thing, but we put a nice name on it. Redistribution of income.

Yeah, right. And I certainly agree with you, Walter, with everything you're saying. We all know, though, in practice it's a lot more complicated, right? Things do get more complicated than these principles. Look, well, here's what I'm saying. Just hear me out for one second, okay? And listen, I agree with you, okay? But the concept of monopolistic practices, crony capitalism, this all just gets really watered.

Down, and that's wrong. Crony capitalism, I agree.

Of course, I don't either, but it happens. And a company like Microsoft, because you used the example, and these companies nowadays, because of the way technology has changed, they can develop such incredible scale. I mean, just take it into this realm, and I have a feeling we might agree on this. The big tech companies, right? It seems like there's arguments on both sides of the aisle to bust these companies up. And I have to tell you, I agree with it. I think they're just too big. They're bigger than a lot of countries. They control our speech. You have no recourse against Google. If they deplatform you Twitter, they can just decide they don't like what you're saying. And it's not like the Government, you have no free speech rights.

Well, the point is if you, if you're looking for a monopoly, the greatest monopoly and the abuse of power is in the federal government.

Well, of course it is, of course it is.

However, we support that. To help understand where I'm coming from. When I think about things, my initial premise starts off with we each own ourselves. That is I am my private property and you are your private property. Now if you make the assumption of self ownership, then certain things are moral and certain things immoral. The reason why rape and murder is immoral is because private property.

Yeah, right.

To interfere with peaceable voluntary exchange violates private property. And so these companies that are very, very big, and if they became big through the marketplace as opposed they're becoming big through special advantages heaped upon them by government, I have no problem with bigness. That is, the bigness shows that they've been successful in serving the fellow man that is Google and others. While we like everything that they do, they've been relatively successful and they. And so long as the government does not prevent others from entering the market to compete with them, then that's the name of the game.

Well, interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg is calling for regulation. And you know, I think he's doing that because regulation always has the consequence, intended or not, of keeping other new entrants out of the market. Look at Wall Street. Okay, well that's what we need to fight. Yeah, exactly. There's no startup culture on Wall Street. There's no one that's going to come and compete with Goldman Sachs. There's just very little innovation because there's no startup culture. And so Facebook, now that they're huge and they have the money to comply with the regulations, they're just going to say, well, regulate us. And then nobody else can start their own thing to compete.

So who would you blame for that?

Right, but on the way up, I agree with you. They have a product that the public wanted, etc. Etc. But now that they're big, they're abusive, that's all.

They become abusive because they're able to use government to rig the rules of the game.

They've got lobbyist galore. It's disgusting. Google, Google and Facebook, especially Google has. They have lobbyists coming out of their ears in that company. It's ridiculous.

They're lobbying, lobbying government.

The handout capital of the world is Washington D.C. of course.

Well look, look, we elect these people to office and the congressmen are allowing themselves to be lobbied and persuaded by these big interests. You Blame the Congress. You blame the politicians?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

But, you know, you can't blame a company. You might say, well, gee, they shouldn't do that. But if they can use their power to do it, well, you have to fight the people who give them the power to do it. I mean, it's just like people blame politicians for our problem, but politicians are doing precisely what the American people elect them to office. Do the American people elect politicians to office to give them something that belongs to somebody else or give them a special privilege that's denied another American? So we could say that politicians should be more of a statesman, but that's what they do. And any politician who does not do what the American people want him to do, he'll be run out of office. One example I'll just ask you, I'll do it very quickly. Is that if I were running for the Senate from the state of Virginia, and I go back and forth across the state of Virginia, I say, look, I read the Constitution. Don't expect for me to bring back aid, higher education, highway construction funds and farm subsidies, et cetera, et cetera, because it's not in the Constitution. Do you think I would get elected to the office from Virginia?

Yeah, right.

No, I wouldn't. And the tragedy of it is that the people of Virginia would be doing exactly the right thing by not electing me to office. Because if I. I don't bring back billions of dollars of handout money, it doesn't mean that Virginians will pay a lower federal income tax. All that it means is that North Carolina will get it instead. That is, once legalized theft begins, it pays for everybody to participate in it.

Yeah, it's pretty scary. I mean, we need. The idea of lobbying is people have the right to address the government. Right. And to get the government's ear. But with these giant companies with the corporate interest, it's been. It's just the whole thing's been maligned. I mean, hardly any individuals go to Capitol Hill to lobby. Right? It's all commercialized.

You know, here's my question to you. Should congressmen be in the business of creating favors for some Americans and denying them to other Americans?

Of course not.

Okay, so that's where you focus your energy on these people who are granting favors and, and special conditions to some Americans because they're giving a lobby, they're contributing to their political campaigns. That's what we need to go after. But we're saying we're going to blame the companies for using their lobbyists to try to get A special favor from the Congress. And so what we should do, we should get Congress out of the business of granting special favors. Matter of fact, I was talking to a very famous economist, he's long deceased, Friedrich Hayek. And we were having dinner and I said, what do you think we should do? What's the best thing? If you can make one law that would help all Americans, what would it be?

What would Hayek say about that? I can't wait to hear.

He said he would enact a law that Congress cannot do for one American what it does not do for all Americans. That is, he said, he gave an example. If Congress pays some people not to raise pigs, then it should give money to everybody in the country that's not raising pigs.

Right. That's a great point. Yeah. The subsidy, the farm subsidies would just go to everybody, not just the farmers. Right. Because I'm not making cheese. So why don't I get some money for not making cheese? Right.

See what we ignore, we ignore the fact that all these lobbyists, they're in Washington not because of the weather, they're in Washington to twist the arms of congressmen. Say, if you do this for us, we'll do that for you. And it just does not benefit all Americans equally.

Yeah. No question about it, Walter. Give out your website, Walter.

Ewilliams.com and there's a lot of my publications there and videos and things like that that might be interesting to the listener.

Are you still filling in for Rush Limbaugh? I haven't been listening to his show lately. But do you still fill in?

I did that for 20 years. 20 years is enough.

I always enjoyed you and Mark Stein a lot. Ye there.

You're good.

Oh, yeah.

Mark Stein still does it.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Just want to ask you, I kind of ask you a lot of questions. Threw a lot at you, but is there anything you want to say to people? Just wrap it up for us with anything maybe? I didn't ask you or whatever comments you have.

I say that we'll solve our problems. Only way we can solve our problems as a nation is to convince our fellow Americans on the moral superiority of personal liberty. And the main ingredient for personal liberty is limited government. That's exactly what the founders of our nation visualize. A federal government that was limited in power and scope. And it was Thomas Paine who said that government under the best of circumstances is a necessary evil, under the worst, an intolerable one. And that's what we're facing. We're facing an all powerful government. We're encountering some of the problems that you're. That you're mentioning. We're encountering the lobbyists and getting special favors and government spending. And just one final point. You know, if you read the Federalist Papers, the Federalist Papers were written by Madison, John Jay, and Hamilton to try to convince the American people to ratify the Constitution, which was not a very easy job to do. And In Federalist Paper 45, James Madison was trying to tell the nation what was in the Constitution, what the Constitution would provide. And I'm virtually quoting him. And all these quotes are on my website. He says that the powers that we have delegated to the federal government are few and well defined and restricted mostly to external affairs. Those left with the people and the states are indefinite and numerous. Now, if you turn that upside down, you'd have what we had today. That is the powers of the federal.

Government are numerous and those of the.

People in states are restricted.

That is a sad case. And I hope that tide turns because.

It is just ridiculous the way it's gone so far. But I'm glad there are people like you out there, Walter, spreading the word. So thank you so much for coming on.

Okay. And thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, my pleasure. And it's WaltereWilliams.com right?

That is right.

All right, everybody, check out his great books and all that's in all the usual places. And thanks for joining us.

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