Rush Limbaugh Program - December 31, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2

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Dec. 31, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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December 31, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2

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	That is absolutely right, Johnny Donovan.
	And once again, we're back, and I'm substitute for Rush, and Rush continues to rest very comfortably in a hospital in Honolulu.
	It's this morning, I should say, because it's five hours earlier in Honolulu.
	And Rush had a comfortable night and is getting the very best of medical attention.
	He's aware and thankful for all the prayers and concerns and best wishes that have poured in by the ton.
	Yesterday, Wednesday, that's a little background for those of you just tuning into the show.
	And if you're just tuning in, you missed a dynamite first hour.
	Yesterday, Wednesday, he was taken to the hospital in Honolulu after experiencing chest pains.
	While those pains can be an indicator of a cardiac event, the cause of Russia's discomfort cannot be confirmed at this time.
	Obviously, out of respect for Russia's medical privacy.
	And we'll wait for him to provide detailed comment as to the cause.
	So we'll keep everybody informed.
	And when there's information to share, we'll know this through Rush.
	Just check RushLimball.com and also check the show.
	Once again, Rush is in good stable condition and as comfortable as one can be in a hospital while on vacation, but he's in good hands.
	What I'd like to do is welcome the show my very good friend and colleague, Dr. Thomas Sowell.
	He's the Rose and Milton Friedman Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in California, in Northern California at Stanford University.
	And Tom has just finished, he just completed his new book, Intellectuals and Society, and it's a very, very interesting tale about intellectuals.
	Welcome to the show, Tom.
	Well, good being here.
	Also, very good hearing about Rush.
	I got up in the middle of the night to check the internet, and they said he was resting comfortably there.
	This morning I discovered that Wikipedia is falsely pronouncing him dead.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, my God.
	Well, maybe they just wish, but they're very thought.
	Yeah.
	Let's start off with your book.
	One of the interesting things is your quote.
	I guess it's on page eight from Eric Hoffer.
	And he said, one of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free from, they're free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.
	And he says, the intellectuals who idolize Stalin while he is purging millions are still holding forth.
	They still have credibility.
	You go to point out that Ralph Nader, he became a major public figure in 1965 on the publication of his book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which is wrong.
	Many of the things he's saying in there is just plain wrong about the Corsair.
	And then also, Paul Ehrlich, he said that we'd be starving to death.
	But all these people, all these intellectuals, they somehow maintained respectability after they make some asinine statements and predictions.
	Well, provided that they are the kind of asinine predictions that advance the general vision that intellectuals have.
	On the other hand, you can be ruined by telling the truth if it doesn't fit their vision.
	That's absolutely right.
	Such as many things that you've said, Nobody's Ruined Us, that you and I have said about the minimum wage.
	That is the minimum wage has been destructive of young people, particularly black youngsters, but yet we're criticized, and the people who support a minimum wage, the intellectuals who support it, are shown to be compassionate and caring.
	That's right.
	In fact, Mac, the last year in which black unemployment was lower than white unemployment was the year before the first minimum wage law, which, as you well know, was the Davis-Bacon Act.
	Oh, yes.
	Oh, yes.
	And for those out there who don't know of the Davis-Bacon Act, the Davis-Bacon Act is a law that says that on all federal construction projects, the prevailing wage must be paid, and the prevailing wage is always interpreted, I think, illegally by the Labor Department as being the union wage or higher.
	And the purpose, actually, Tom, the stated purpose of the Davis-Bacon Act that was written in March 31st, in 1931, the stated purpose was to protect white workers, construction workers, from having to compete with lower wage black construction workers.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And very similar things happened in Canada in the 20s when they passed minimum wage laws to keep white workers from having to compete against Japanese workers.
	And as you also well know, in South Africa earlier in the century.
	Oh, that's absolutely right.
	Matter of fact, in South Africa, I wrote a book called South Africa's War Against Capitalism, and I give quotation after quotation of racist unions in South Africa being the major supporters of minimum wage laws for blacks.
	And matter of fact, they call it the, let's say, I forget the wage for the African-American wage for civilized workers.
	Yes, that's absolutely right.
	And so they recognize that if they could raise the wage, contractors would hire white workers instead of black workers.
	Yeah, the minimum wage law is very similar to a tariff on international trade.
	That is, the purpose of a tariff is to raise your competitors' prices to the point where you price them out of the market.
	And that's exactly the same thing with the minimum wage, that you raise the price of low-wage labor to the point where people won't hire them, and therefore the higher-wage laborers benefit.
	That's right.
	And you mean tell me, you know, there are other examples of this.
	That is American labor unions and as well intellectuals.
	They support environmental laws in India, environmental laws in many underdeveloped countries.
	And why?
	To raise the cost of doing business with them.
	Well, yes.
	And well, of course, they are non-discriminatory.
	They want to raise these costs everywhere they possibly can.
	The real problem is that they don't see these things in terms of trade-offs.
	They arbitrarily pick something that they call a good thing, and they pay no attention to the cost of that good thing, either in money or in terms of all the other good things that are going to be harmed by putting in whatever they happen to be in favor of.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Now, tell me something else.
	And actually, I'm ashamed to say I have not fully read your book yet, but I'm about halfway through.
	Tell me this.
	Why is it that when you look at college on college campuses, you find that Democrats outnumber Republicans in some departments like 40 to 1, 50 to 1, and it's only in certain fields like maybe economics where you find it might be 3 to 1.
	And so the dominance by, I guess, Democrat liberals on college campuses is, I mean, it's kind of overwhelming.
	And I'm trying to say, well, how can you explain it?
	Well, part of it is it depends upon the nature of the field.
	If it's a field where there are objective criteria by which you can determine whether ideas are right or wrong, that is engineering, medicine.
	I mean, you may come up with a brilliant idea for medical procedures, but if people die after you put it in, that idea is not going to last long.
	On the other hand, if you're in sociology or you're an English and a deconstructionist, there's absolutely no test for the ideas.
	And so untested ideas have a free pass in many parts of a college or university, but not at all.
	The one area in which, for example, there is no free pass whatever is in the athletics department.
	I mean, no matter how brilliant your idea sounds, if you finish the season 0 and 12, you know, that's the end of that coach.
	That's right.
	And matter of fact, if you're an engineer and you have an idea from, let's say, a religious idea that pi is equal to 3.0, and you build a bridge based on pi being equal to 3.0, and the bridge collapses, well, then a pi being equaling 3.0 is not going to have a very long life.
	That's right.
	But it doesn't matter how disastrous anything you advocate in some of the softer fields happens to be, you are never discredited.
	One of the classic examples, so all the intellectuals in the 1930s who were saying that the Soviet Union was just so much superior in terms of either efficiency or morality to the United States and so forth.
	At the very time that they were saying this, there were literally millions of people starving to death and many others being sent off to slave labor camps.
	But the facts did not harm their reputation.
	Oh, that's right.
	And I think Paul Samuelson, a very great economist, he was one of the people saying this as well as John Kenneth Galbraith.
	Well, Samuelson's famous textbook for a long time used to have lines showing how the Soviet Union's economic growth rate was higher than that in the United States.
	And they would extend these lines out to show where at some point the Soviet Union would overtake the United States simply because of its higher growth rate.
	And it was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but more particularly the opening of the files of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, that people discovered that these growth rates of the Soviet economy were completely fictitious.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And it's just amazing the young minds that are distorted with this kind of preaching that many college professors do.
	That's true.
	And they preach it not only in courses in political science or whatnot.
	I mean, you can sign up for a course in accounting or chemistry and get an ear full of the professor's views on foreign policy, even though he has absolutely no qualifications for that and is wasting a student's time.
	But the big problem is not the ideological problem, I don't think.
	The big problem is the educational problem.
	Students who hear only one side of an argument and who are prompted to go out and take action and get all worked up over that one side, they are not being prepared for the real world because in the real world, you're always going to find two sides of these arguments, of any arguments.
	And if you haven't had any experience in how to deal with that, you're just a setup for the first clever demagogue that comes along.
	And that can explain the election of President Barack Obama.
	Insofar as anything can explain it.
	The people have lost their reasoning skills.
	Hey, hold on, Tom.
	We're going to come back with some calls, and you can be on to talk with Tom Soul by calling 800-282-2882.
	And we're talking about his new book, Intellectuals and Society.
	We're back, and for those of just tuning in, Rush remains in stable condition, and we'll give you updates at rushlimbaugh.com.
	But right now, we're on the phone with Dr. Thomas Soule from the Hoover Institution based at Stanford University in California.
	And we're discussing his new book, Intellectuals and Society.
	And Tom, in chapter 8, you talk about intellectuals and war, colon, repeating history.
	Can you just explain a little bit what you mean by repeating history?
	Well, after the, from the 1960s on, intellectuals in the United States, Britain, and other parts of the Western democracies began to repeat arguments that had been used in the 1920s and 30s and which were disastrous in their consequences.
	One of these being that the way to have peace is to have disarmament.
	And they made it virtually impossible for the Western world to prepare militarily for the wars that were coming, such as that with Germany and Japan and Italy.
	Well, they thought peace treaties were going to be.
	Oh, yes, you signed peace treaties and especially disarmament treaties.
	There was even a treaty in which various nations renounced war.
	And there was big hoopla over that.
	I mean, I find it hard to believe that adult human beings could have believed such a thing.
	But not only were these adults, these were some of the internationally renowned intellectuals of the time, including John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, you name them, they were for this kind of stuff.
	And what that meant was that even though the leaders of the Western world, say the Prime Minister of Britain and France, knew that the Germans were rearming in violation of treaties, they dared not say anything because the people who made armaments had been so demonized as the merchants of death and so on that you couldn't build up the armaments needed to deter.
	I mean, the armaments serve two purposes.
	One, the most important purpose is they deter war because people realize if they attack you, they're going to get slaughtered.
	But even aside, if that fails, you need to have the armaments in case they attack you anyway.
	You have to be able to defend yourself.
	That's right.
	And I believe that in 1935 or 1934, that France alone could have taken Hitler out.
	Oh, yes, in 1936.
	In fact, Hitler himself was scared to death that when he violated two treaties by sending troops into the Rhineland, that the French would attack, because the German generals had told him that if France attacks, they don't have enough to hold France off for one day.
	I'm darn.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, the people who had this vision of the intellectuals who had this vision of war and peace, they are actually responsible for the death of 60 or so million people.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, just as one small example, you not only couldn't spend money to update your equipment.
	So when the war actually came, both the Germans and the Japanese, for example, had battleships larger than anything in either the American or the British Navy.
	During the Battle of Midway, 82 Americans flew in in these obsolete torpedo planes, which could barely do 100 miles an hour.
	The Japanese Zero shot them out of the sky.
	Only 13 out of the 82 Americans came back alive.
	And all kinds of slaughters like this occurred around the world until about 1942 before the Western side began to win any victories.
	Yeah, right.
	And to put this in today's perspective, we have a president who says that he wants to eliminate nuclear weapons.
	Hey, listen, I'm not sure.
	If there was some way to unring the bell so that nobody would ever know how to make nuclear weapons, I'd be all for it.
	But the real problem with both international disarmament treaties and domestically gun laws is it's easy to disarm people who don't mean any harm.
	It is hard to disarm people who do.
	That's right.
	You're right.
	And that's what they mean when we get rid of guns.
	Only criminals will have guns.
	Yes.
	Well, Britain has gotten to that point.
	And Britain, you can't even use toy guns to defend yourself.
	I mean, one guy who caught burglars and held him at gunpoint until the police arrived.
	When the cops got there, he told them the gun was really just a toy gun, which it was.
	They arrested him anyway.
	P. Dari.
	No, but that is, that is near lunacy.
	And I think at least some of the motivation, at least in America, about disarming is the idea of the so-called peace dividend during the early 1990s under the Clinton administration, where we thought that we're going to have all this money for social welfare programs instead of missiles and bombs.
	Well, that was part of the reason during the 1920s and 30s as well.
	In fact, Chamberlain was already to announce a new social program when he received the word that Hitler had just taken over all of Czechoslovakia in violation of a treaty.
	Probably Dari.
	Hey, Tom, we're coming.
	I know I asked you to stay for a half hour.
	Can you come back for one segment after the break?
	Oh, certainly.
	To take a few phone calls.
	People want to talk to you.
	We're on with Dr. Thomas Sowell, and we're talking about his new book, Intellectuals and Society.
	And today is a rather rare day.
	I'm sitting in for Rush, and Rush is doing well.
	And let me just kind of repeat it for people who just came, who joined lately.
	Excuse me.
	Let me repeat it for people who just joined the show.
	He's had a comfortable night.
	He's resting, and he's getting the very best of care in Honolulu.
	For those of you who just tuned in, he was taken to hospital in Honolulu after experiencing chest pains.
	He's going to have a test today to find out just what the chest pains are about.
	And we will keep you informed at RushLimball.com.
	We're back.
	Walter Williams sitting in for Rush, who is in the hospital, and he's in stable condition, and we'll keep you updated.
	And just check RushLimball.com.
	But right now, we're on the phone with Dr. Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at the University of Stanford.
	And we're talking about his latest book, Intellectuals and Society.
	And you can probably get it on Amazon.com.
	And let's go to the phones.
	Let's go to is it Gabriel?
	Welcome to the show.
	Thank you very much.
	Albuquerque, New Mexico.
	Yeah, I just had a comment for Dr. Sol earlier.
	He was talking about the soft sciences at the universities, and I think there's been a huge moniker associated with them being liberal.
	And I think, at least in our university now, the kind of undertone is being the conservative way is kind of like the rebelling against the norm.
	And I think liberalism has become so mainstream in the universities that rebelling now is the conservative way to do things.
	And I think especially that's proving fact because people are looking at the hard sciences where you're either right or wrong, especially in the business school.
	I mean, numbers don't lie.
	And I'm just noticing a trend.
	I want to know if you're noticing it in your university at Stanford too, or if it's just maybe something my university is doing.
	We tend to be more conservative.
	I don't know.
	I don't teach.
	I do research.
	And I do the research at home about 20 miles from the university, which makes me very comfortable.
	And if I might tell a story of my colleague, I have a very long, long-term relationship with the Hoover Institution, and they refer to Dr. Sowell as the Phantom Fellow.
	It's better than some of the things I've been told.
	All right.
	Let's go to Danny.
	And is that Cookborough, Tennessee?
	Yes, sir.
	Welcome to the show.
	You're talking with Dr. Samusow.
	I've got a crystal ball question for you.
	A little bit of background.
	I live in a state that has actually changed the value of pie to 3.0, you know, probably back in the 30s.
	But they've also, starting in about the mid-50s, have been giving incentives to industries to raid the rust belt, bring manufacturing jobs here to the state.
	And what has happened over that 50, 55 years or so, we're still losing 3% to 4% per year.
	Now, then, what I want to know is, some reason they're saying it's all going to be different now because we're going to go get a green job.
	Now, why would a green job be any more resistant to the economic forces that the manufacturing jobs are responding to?
	Well, the quick answer is that the green jobs are more resistant in the sense that it's spending the taxpayers' money and the job doesn't have to pay for itself.
	So the green jobs will last.
	The problem is, when the government creates a job, it gets the money to support that job from the private sector.
	So there's not a net creation of jobs.
	And that's why with Obama, as with FDR in the 30s, you can create hundreds of thousands of jobs and the unemployment rate keeps going up because you're robbing Pete of the PayPal, is what it comes down to.
	That's right.
	It's very similar to a colleague of mine at George Mason University, Russell Roberts, he was explaining the stimulus package, and he said that you could have confidence in the stimulus package if you believed if you saw a person with a swimming pool taking water out of the deep, taking buckets of water out of the deep end and putting it in the shallow end in the hopes of raising the level at the shallow end.
	And that's the same, I'm sorry, that's the same story with government.
	That is, the government has no resource of its very own, and the only way it can create a job is to first destroy a job through taxing somebody.
	That is, whatever the person would have spent that money on, he no longer has the money, and so it's a reduction of employment in one area to raise the employment in another area.
	But for the politicians, the people, the victims of many of these policies are invisible, and the beneficiaries are visible.
	Oh, yes.
	I mean, there are people who are eternally grateful to FDR for having given them a job in the middle of the Great Depression, Unmindful of the fact that his policies are what kept the depression going so long.
	That's absolutely right.
	Let's take one more call before Tom has to go from Ted in Humboldt, Nebraska.
	Good day, and dittos for Rush.
	We'll all be thinking about him.
	What I want to know is free trade.
	You were talking about free trade earlier.
	If Nation A has trade barriers or other unfair trade practices, is it even remotely possible for Nation B to have free trade with Nation A?
	Well, that's a semantic question rather than an economic question.
	I mean, if what you're trying to get at is whether a country with higher wages can compete with a country with lower wages, the answer from history is that's been happening for centuries.
	When the Dutch were the leading traders in the Western world, Dutch wages were much higher than wages in the other countries.
	And when Britain took over that role, its wages were much higher than the wages in other countries.
	And yet both of these became major traders.
	I mean, wage rates per unit of time are not the same as labor costs per unit of output.
	That's the thing that creates so many fallacies.
	That's right.
	As a result of, if I might explain, Tom, a little bit, as a result, in the United States, as a result of hiring one worker, well, the output of shoes may go up by 100 pairs of shoes, and that worker may be paid $20 an hour.
	But in some other place where the worker is less productive and hiring him, you only get 10 shoes, but you're only paying him $3 an hour.
	Well, the labor costs are higher in the latter country than the former country.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Hey.
	Okay, let's go to Pat in Columbia, South Carolina.
	Hey, how are you guys doing?
	Okay.
	You're on with Tom and Sowell.
	Yeah, when I teach my classes, I talk to my students and I say, what's the most productive country in the world?
	The U.S. is always the last answer they come to.
	Unfortunately, even though we are the most productive country in the world, it's interesting that as we move towards a recovery or even towards a recovery, the productivity rate that we're seeing or the productivity increase that we're seeing in this country is making it more and more difficult for people to get back into the job force because with productivity growing at greater than 3%, the economy has to grow faster than that for people to be hired.
	That's certainly true.
	Another factor is that when you put all these mandates on businesses to pay for various worker benefits, then it pays the businesses to do one of two things, to either work their existing workforce longer hours rather than hiring new people, or to hire temporary workers who are not entitled to these mandates.
	And so even though there may be a great increase in demand, there may be more man hours of work done, that will still not absorb the people who are unemployed because the employers are reluctant to take on these people because of the mandates.
	And that's absolutely right.
	Let's, Tom, thank you very much for coming on.
	It's been a delight.
	And the intellectuals and society is a really masterpiece, and I'd like to congratulate you on it.
	Thank you very much.
	Okay, thanks a lot.
	Folks, that was Tom Sowell, and we'll be back with your calls after this.
	We're back, and it's Walt Williams sitting in for Rush.
	And Rush continues to rest very comfortably in the hospital in Honolulu.
	This morning, it's still morning out there.
	It's five hours earlier in Honolulu.
	Rush had a comfortable night.
	Rest is getting the very best medical attention.
	He's aware and thoughtful for the prayers and concerns and best wishes that have just poured in hundreds and thousands.
	Yesterday, Wednesday, see why he's in the hospital.
	Yesterday Wednesday, he was taken to the hospital in Honolulu after experiencing chest pains.
	While those pains can be an indicator of a cardiac event, for those in real limbo, it means heart attack.
	The cause of Russia's discomfort cannot be confirmed at this time.
	Out of respect for Russia's medical privacy, we'll wait for him to provide detailed comment as to the cause, as to the cause.
	Today, Rush will have a complete physical examination and we'll know more and we'll keep everybody informed when there's information to share.
	Just know that Rush is in good, stable condition, comfortable, as comfortable as one can be in a hospital while on vacation.
	And he's in very good hands, and you're in very good hands with the show, with Walter E. Williams pushing back the frontiers of ignorance for Rush.
	And speaking of that, before we go to the phones, one of the things in the health care debate and the cap and trade debate and everything, one of the things, if you look back at the history of our country, you look back at the founders, did they trust the United States Congress?
	They didn't, yeah, yeah, Bo Snerdley says no.
	And here's the evidence.
	I mean, just look at the language of the Constitution.
	It says, the language says, Congress shall not infringe, Congress shall not disparage, Congress shall not prohibit, Congress shall not deprive.
	Now, with that kind of language, does that sound as if the framers of the United States Constitution trusted Congress?
	No, it didn't.
	They did not trust Congress, but here you and I do.
	Why do we trust these people to control our lives in the name of helping us?
	I'll tell you: look, when you die, when you go to your next destination, if at your next destination you see anything like a Bill of Rights, you know where you are?
	You're in hell.
	Because a Bill of Rights in heaven would be an affront.
	It would be an insult to God.
	And so the framers of our nation recognize that government is inherently evil.
	Why?
	Why is government inherently evil?
	Because government consists of force.
	Of force.
	And so, yes, the framers of our country recognize that we do need some government.
	And what should be the role of government in a free society?
	They should protect people from injuring the property of another person.
	The government should not be in the business of initiating force against someone who himself has not initiated force.
	Now look at the kind of, look, now here with this health bill, they're proposing to initiate force against me just because I don't want to buy a health insurance policy.
	That is, I mean, to do that is evil.
	There's no other way to explain it.
	That's just plain evil.
	But this is the lesson that Americans have lost down through the ages.
	Another thing that we've lost as well is that, you know, James Madison, James Madison is the acknowledged father of the United States Constitution.
	So James Madison should know what's in the Constitution, shouldn't he?
	Well, in 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees.
	James Madison stood on the floor of the House irate, and he said, and I'm quoting him right now, and these quotes are available at my website, walterewilliams.com.
	James Madison said, quote, I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution, which granted a right to Congress of expending on the objects of benevolence the money of their constituents.
	Now, if you look at the federal budget today, two-thirds or three-quarters is for the purposes of benevolence.
	Now, you'll get some jackass congressmen that will tell you, well, the Constitution says that we ought to promote, or sometimes they'll say, provide, for the general welfare.
	Here's another quote by James Madison.
	It's a short quote.
	With respect to the words general welfare, I've always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them.
	To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there's a host of proofs not contemplated by its creators.
	Thomas Jefferson said, quote, Congress does not have unlimited powers to promote the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated, only those specifically listed.
	And just one final quote, because see, you people, I mean, you've gone to public schools and you don't get educated.
	Let me just give you one more, because if I don't tell you these things, you're going to spend your life living not knowing them.
	So I feel obliged to tell you, in Federalist Paper 45, and the Federalist Papers were written by John J. Hamilton and Madison trying to convince the citizens of New York to ratify the Constitution.
	And they were saying, well, what's in this Constitution that we're going to ratify?
	Well, Madison said, the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and 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 have what we have now today.
	The powers of the federal government are indefinite and numerous.
	And those left with the people and the states are well defined, are restricted and well-defined.
	So, but you people, let Congress get away with this.
	Matter of fact, here's a tragedy for our country.
	It is a sad commentary on the American people.
	If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were running for the presidency today, what would you people do?
	You would run them out of town on the rail.
	You might turn feather and lynch them because you have, today's Americans have contempt. for the values of the founders of our great nation.
	I think that's it.
	We'll be back with your calls after this.
	We went a bit long in that segment.
	For the next hour, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchins will be on with us.
	She's senator from Texas.
	And I'm going to ask a couple questions about health care and whether we're doing enough about terrorism.
	And also for those of us just tuning in, and that's a mistake on your part because it's been a dynamite show, Rush continues to rest very comfortably in a hospital in Honolulu.

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