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Dec. 30, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:39
December 30, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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That is absolutely right.
And again, Rush will be back on January 3rd.
And it is Walter Williams filling in for him.
It's the last hour of the last show in 2011 on EIB.
And I guess, you know, it's kind of appropriate in this last hour just to continue to push forward the frontiers of ignorance.
So hopefully Americans do better next year in 2012.
You know, there's one thing that's coming up that people are beginning to compare Barack Obama's administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter.
But you know, an actual better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and 1940s.
And we can look at this with the help of an excellent article written by a colleague of mine, Dr. Lawrence Reed.
He's the president of the Foundation for Economic Education in New York.
And the title is, and the title is available at my website, as well as the website for the Foundation for Economic Education.
And the title of the article is The Great Myths of the Great Depression.
And it's by Dr. Lawrence Reed.
And it turns out that, now just listen to this.
During the first year of FDR's administration, his New Deal, he called for increasing federal spending to $10 billion, while revenues were only $3 billion.
Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83%, and federal debt skyrocketed to by 73%.
President Roosevelt signed off on legislation that raised the top tax bracket to 79% and then later to 90%.
And Hillsdale College economics professor, actually his historian, Bert Folsom, he's the author of a book called, a recent new book, I think it was last year, it's called New Deal or Raw Deal.
Bert Folsom notes that in 1941, President Roosevelt proposed a 99.5% marginal tax rate on all incomes over $100,000.
When Roosevelt's top advisor questioned him about the idea, Roosevelt replied, quote, why not?
President Roosevelt had other ideas for stimulating the economy.
That included the National Recovery Act.
The economic impact, they called the NRA, was immediate and powerful.
It drove unemployment even higher than what it was.
And industrial production dropped.
And it turns out, you see, you hear so many black Americans worshiping Roosevelt now.
But blacks were very hard hit by the National Recovery Act, the NRA.
And matter of fact, during the 30s, black spokesmen and black press often referred to the NRA as the Negro runaround or Negroes Rarely Allowed or Negroes Ruined Again or Negroes Robbed Again or and also No Roosevelt again.
And matter of fact, the courts eventually ruled the NRA, the NRA, unconstitutional.
And as a result of that court ruling, unemployment fell to 14% by 1936 and even lower by 1937, but it remained very high.
And by the way, for those pundits out there saying that Obama cannot lose, cannot win the election because unemployment was so high, well, President Roosevelt won elections when unemployment was 20%, much higher than what it is today.
So unemployment, high unemployment, is no guarantee that Obama will lose the election.
And by the way, folks, there's something very disgusting to me.
It's unrelated to this particular set of ideas I'm talking about right now.
But there's a fraudulent column that was written and was attributed to me, and I did not write it at all, saying that Obama was a shoe-in.
He would never lose the election.
And it's been going around the country.
And people have said, Williams, can you write the why do you say this?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
It turns out to be a fraudulent column.
And I have it listed, I have the apology for it listed in my website at walterwilliams.com.
And it's titled, Apology for Fraudulent Article About Obama's 2012 Election.
Anyway, but continuing about Obama and Roosevelt, Roosevelt's agenda, his ideas, was not without its international admirers.
The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkskeiser Bacher, something like that, repeatedly, quote, praised Roosevelt's adoption of national socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies, close quote.
And again, they praised him for, quote, the development towards an authoritarian state based on the demand that the collective good will be put before the individual self-interest.
Roosevelt himself called Mussolini admirable, admirable, and professed that he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini accomplished, maybe making the trains run on time.
And Roosevelt's very own secretary, Henry Morgenthau, saw the folly of the New Deal.
And Henry Morgenthau wrote, We have tried spending, quote, we have tried spending money.
We're spending more than we've ever spent before, and it does not work.
We have not made good on our promises.
I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as we started and an enormous debt to boot.
That is, here's what Roosevelt's a New Deal accomplished.
His New Deal policies turned what would have been a sharp three or four year downturn in the economy into a 16-year affair.
And so the 1930s depression and the problems that we're having today are caused by and aggravated by acts of government.
And this is the reason why we're in the mess that we have today.
And so we have to ask ourselves, do we want to repeat history by listening to those people who created the calamity?
I mean, listening to the politicians today, both Democrats and Republicans, in terms of what to do, that's like calling on arsonists to help you pull out the fire.
The arsonist caused the fire, and here you are calling on him to help you put it out.
And keep in mind another thing, ladies and gentlemen, that from 1787, when we became a nation, until 1930, there were recessions, there were depressions, sometimes called panics, and there's no intervention.
No one thought that government should do something to get us out of the Depression because it's not authorized by the United States Constitution.
And when government did get in, starting with Herbert Hoover and then later with Roosevelt, when government started messing with the economy, then they started messing things up.
That is, we had the Depression from 1930s, 1930 until it was after World War I, World War II, I'm sorry.
The Depression did not end, and did Americans start having a better life until after the war.
And so we're, so Obama, I wouldn't put him in the category with Jimmy Carter.
I would put him in the category with FDR.
And FDR's administration, it's painted as a wonderful administration, but it was an abject failure.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
Okay, it's Walter Williams sitting in for a rush.
Mr. Engineer, is that sly in the Family Stones?
Okay.
Well, see, I'm not as I'm kind of hep, ain't I?
Anyway, a lot of people think I'm old, but I know this.
And you see me dance to the sly in the family stones.
Okay, let's go to the phones.
Let's get down to business.
Mark from Desplains, welcome to the show.
Dr. Williams, thanks for taking a call from a former fellow cab driver.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, you probably weren't even born when I was driving the cab.
Thank you.
That's a compliment.
You don't know how old I am.
No, I was driving a cab in 1957.
Well, let's see, 1974.
Okay.
Anyway, I want to talk to you about Mitt Romney.
The guy has jurisdictor slash master of business administration joint degrees from Harvard's Laws and Business Schools.
He was heavily recruited after Harvard, went to work for Boston Consulting Group, founded Bain Capital in 1984, turned around several major companies in that role.
He didn't even take a salary as governor of Massachusetts and turned that state's economy around.
I think he's head and shoulders above any of the Republican candidates for president because he understands how free enterprise works.
What's your opinion of him?
Well, I haven't been following these guys that much.
I think, well, I hear people say, oh, well, Newt is so smart, or Romney is so smart.
Do you realize that the world has been messed up by smart people?
Dumb people have not messed up the world.
It's those people who think they know better than everybody else and they're willing to impose forcibly that vision on others.
So the fact that a person is smart or he's clever, that doesn't bear much weight with me.
Now, if you said, look, here's a guy who really believes in the United States Constitution, well, then I'd be a little bit more impressed.
Yeah, you know, here's what I think, though.
He has this uncanny ability to take a lot of data, analyze it, and what I think he's going to go for is to repeal Dodd-Frank Obamacare campaign finance reform, stop cab and trade, rein in the EPA, and end Fannie and Freddie, and fire Bernanke.
That's the way I think he'll go.
Was I dreaming?
Well, yeah, I think you're dreaming.
I think one of the things we have to recognize, you hear people say, oh, well, the Bush tax cuts or the Obama tax increases.
Well, the Constitution does not permit a president to cut tax erase tax.
That is, the sole appropriation and spending power lies with the United States Congress.
Now, what a president can do, he can veto a congressional measure or he can recommend, but he does not have that kind of power, and we would not want him to have that kind of power.
And moreover, I think that, and speaking of power, I think it's one of the most dangerous things that we have in our country.
You have one person, Ben Bernanke, who has the awesome power to destroy our nation, and we're letting one person have this kind of power over 310 million people.
And I don't believe that that should be the case, but I don't have a recommendation on what to do about it.
I can't agree with you more about that.
And I couldn't agree with you more about what you said about the New Deal.
That was the most rancorous problem.
And this is where I think this election stands.
We are at the crossroads between free enterprise and capitalism and socialism.
And there are so many people out there who are avowed socialists now.
I mean, in the rank and file of America, that we need to educate people about how free enterprise works.
I'm not sure how much education can do.
I would hope that it can do something.
But do you realize that if Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, or John Adams, or George Washington, if they were running for the presidency today, the American people would run them out of town on the rail.
The American people would have utter contempt for the values held by the founding fathers.
Give you an idea of this.
In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees.
And I have these quotes on my website at waltewilliams.com and look under quotations.
And James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, he stood on the floor of the House irate.
And he said, and I'm virtually quoting him, he says, I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to spend the money of their constituents for the purposes of benevolence.
And he later added that charity is no legitimate duty of government.
Now, can you imagine somebody running for the presidency today saying that?
The American people would run him out of town on the rail.
Well, and that's part of my point.
I mean, I think that a president, Romney or anybody else, can only do what he can get away.
I hate to use the word get away with, but you know what I mean, based on what he's got to work with with Congress.
Well, see, what we have to do, no, what we have to do, we have to, as I always say on this show, that we have to convince our fellow American on the moral superiority of personal liberty and limited government.
We have to convince our fellow American that it is immoral for the government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another American.
That's what most, if you look at the federal budget, most of it has to do with forcing one American to serve the purpose of another.
And that's a fairly good working definition of slavery.
Absolutely.
Because what is slavery other than the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another?
Now, I believe in helping my fellow man in need, and I believe when you reach into your own pockets to help your fellow man in need, that is praiseworthy and laudable.
When you reach into somebody else's pockets to help your fellow man in need, I think that's worthy of condemnation, and it is despicable as such.
But the average American believes that it's right to reach into the pockets of your fellow man to help another fellow man in need.
And that's where most of the federal spending and probably state and local spending as well, it has to do with nothing more than legalize theft that I think is immoral and it's unconstitutional.
And we Americans, we should not allow that to happen, but we do.
So I'm not quite sure what we're going to do.
We'll be back.
We're back, and it's Walter Williams sitting in for the last half hour of this show for the year.
And let's go to Jim in Hyde Park, New York.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Hey, Walter, can I call you WW?
W-E-W.
Oh, W-E-W.
Okay, listen.
My little comment, I'm going to make this short and sweet.
Mr. Schumer is my senator.
I inform him every week that there is no middle class.
Don't worry about it.
You got the elite class that runs the country and the no class that pays the bills.
Well, I think you're wrong.
I'm sorry.
I feel sorry for you that you have Schumer as your guy.
Oh, well, don't worry.
I do too.
We have a carbon copy of him.
Her name is Kirsten Gildebrand.
But look.
She always does what he tells her to.
Okay, well, look, look, look, look, look.
I can't give you all the citations, but there's a citation.
It's called a recent study, material well-being of the poor and middle class since 1980.
And it's done by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
And there are two professors, one of Chicago and one of Notre Dame.
And they point out that the median income has been rising.
And see, one of the things, when people talk about income or the wages not rising fast enough, well, they're excluding some of the compensation that workers are getting.
Workers are getting health care benefits, prescription drugs, insurance, or contributions by their employees to their retirement plans and other non-wage benefits.
So if you only look at the wage benefits that people are getting from employment, well, that's going to understate the true, all the benefits that they're getting from employment.
And matter of fact, people benefit immensely from the non-wage benefits because to a large extent they're not taxed.
The money wages are, in fact, tax.
So you have to, when you look at people's well-being, you have to include the non-wage and the wage.
I don't mind paying taxes, my friend.
The government has regulated the auto industry off of cliffs.
In five years, we're going to be on mopeds wrapped in bubble wraps.
No, no, no.
Well, if we look at these crazies, if you look at these crazies at the EPA, they're going to have us riding in electric cars and those little square little gay cars that you see on the road.
But I got a question.
What's the difference between burning the power or burning your fossil fuel in a power plant and turning it into heat, making it an electric and putting it in my car, or burning it in my car very efficiently?
Well, there's very little difference, isn't it?
Well, you know what?
These damn do-gooders, we're not allowed to build nuclear.
We're not allowed to build hydroelectric.
We're going to put in windows and solar panels.
Give me a break, boys and girls.
Well, look, look.
You sound like a very young person, which is a good idea.
That's still young.
That's still young compared to me and my very good friend and colleague Thomas.
Well, I'm looking up to you, my friend, because if you want to crack the whip, I'm ready to jump.
Okay, look, thanks for calling in.
And let's go to Terry and Tucson.
Welcome to the show, Terry.
Oh, hello, and thank you for taking my call.
Okay, here's my comment.
Christoph, in the 1970s, we did have a revolution in this country.
We did go from the family as a base economic unit from home economics to individual rights.
There was a lot of inflation and a lot of unemployment, which, as you know, can exist at the same time.
And now that adjustment's been made.
Now we live in a peasant and property class society.
The rules changed.
No, I'm not following.
Start all over again.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Remember the 1970s, early 1970s?
Yeah, slow down a little bit.
Okay.
Well, let me start again.
In the 1950s, the Communist Party came out and said what they were going to do.
They were going to overthrow Korea, overthrow Vietnam, overthrow China, no, excuse me, Africa, Central America, and overthrow the United States by about the year 1973.
Now, in 1973, we did have a revolution in this country.
The economics changed.
We went from home economics, from the idea that family is a base economic unit, the family is the smallest economically productive thing, as you know, to individual rights.
And there was a profound change.
I remember around here in Tucson, houses went up about $2,000 a month sometimes.
And now that adjustment's been made, and now the world's changed.
Now we live in a monopoly as opposed to a normal supply and demand curve.
Well, no, no, no, no.
You cannot repeal supply and demand no more than you can repeal the law of gravity.
And so what we have, we have different institutions.
And yes, I think the people who advocate communism, they want to attack the family, and also they want to attack the church because they want people's allegiance to be to the government as opposed to these institutions.
Well, yes, well, yes, right.
If I'm still in your game in the playground, I shall call you up tomorrow and tell you the little story of the priest in the temple.
You can use that.
They did throw out the God, you know, a normal supply.
Think of a normal supply and demand curve as a theoretical extreme, of course.
No, no, no, no, no, it's not theoretically.
That's reality.
The reality is, let me just give you a little tiny lesson on economics.
The reality is that as the price of something rises, people do less of it.
As the price of something falls, people do more of it.
As the price of something on the supply side, when the price of something rises, people supply more of it.
And as the price of something falls, people suppliers supply less of it.
And so you cannot repeal reality.
That is, you can maybe change some of the manifestations of reality.
It's very much like when a paratrooper jumps out of a plane with a paratroop with a parachute on, he does not change the law of gravity.
All that he does is that he changes the manifestation of the law of gravity.
The same thing.
I mean, you're making a mistake if I can get on your phone.
No, no, no, no, no.
We do not make mistakes on this show.
We do not make mistakes.
What they threw out wasn't economics, but you go upstairs and you have virtues.
Now, remember, think of the South during the Civil War in the North, and let the South represent a monopoly with a monopoly price.
And there's those guys that live in the big house, and the price of a good is very cheap for them, and that's why they can afford to live in the big house.
And then there's the peons who live in housing projects in Chicago, and they can't afford anything.
Well, no, I think that your theory is wrong, but we don't have time to fully exploit it.
Let's go next to who are we going next to, Beau?
Well, let's number four.
Number four, Bob?
Okay, Bob in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Mr. Williams, one of the great states of the Union.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking my time.
Actually, it's not a state, it's a commonwealth.
Exactly.
Okay.
I totally agree with you that the Social Security system is a Ponzi scheme.
However, it's a Ponzi scheme that I didn't freely choose to jump into 40 years ago.
So my question is: what happens to us folks that are 50 and above that have paid in for 40 or 45 years if they decide to scrap the Social Security?
Well, you get nothing.
I mean, that's the, I mean, when they scrap it.
See, Congress has the power to completely eliminate Social Security.
Matter of fact, there's a Supreme Court case in 1962, I believe it was Fleming versus Nestor, and said that there's no contractual relationship between Social Security, the Social Security Administration, and the people who pay into it.
And matter of fact, I have a column.
I've written several columns, but I have a column on my website.
Just click under Social Security, do a search term using use Social Security as a search term, and you'll find out these quotes from the Supreme Court about Social Security.
Congress has no obligation whatsoever to send you a Social Security check.
Okay.
That's the fact of the business.
And a lot of people just plain do not know that, which is unfortunate.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
During the break, folks, Bo Snartily said, what do we have to honestly do to save our country?
I think we have to do what made us great in the first place.
That is to have a country with limited government and individual freedom.
And how we get that, I don't know.
And we might be beyond the pale.
I think Americans, I think Americans in general, I hate to say this about my fellow Americans.
I think Americans in general have contempt for the ideas of liberty expressed by the founders of our country.
That's what I think is the problem.
And we have to somehow, between Rush and me, we have to sell the Americans on the moral superiority of liberty.
Rush does a good job, and I'm trying to do a good job too.
Let's go to Ed in Springfield, Virginia.
Welcome to the show, Ed.
Yeah, how you doing, Dr. Williams?
I want to thank you for being my professor at George Mason University and introducing me to free market principles.
I recall very vividly you were the first professor I ever had who offered $100 for a correct solution on a problem.
Well, what class were you in?
It was in the late 80s.
I was in one of your doctoral level courses.
I ultimately was teaching physics, and I was able to introduce an entire generation of physics students to your style of teaching.
I probably gave away well over $1,000 teaching for people who actually perform.
Well, let me tell the folks a little bit.
In my classes, sometimes I'll ask students, and we're working through a math problem, and I'll say, well, what's the economic interpretation of Lambda?
And nobody knows.
And so I'll tell the students, well, the next class, I will, and sometimes I show them the money, don't I?
You did.
I say, next class, I hold a $100 bill out of my wallet and I'll tell the students, well, if the student, the next class comes up with the answer, they get $100.
And then we, of course, we have an auction for it.
And sometimes it turns out to be $100, sometimes it turns out to be $50.
And so you are doing teaching what now?
Teaching high school physics.
I've had it from 1985 till just retiring this past June.
So your ideas touched an entire generation of high school students.
And you teach them some of the relationships between the second law of thermodynamics and economic theory that you learned in my class.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Anyway, keep on doing what you're doing, and I hope you live to be half the age of our country.
That's going to take some doing.
That's going to take some doing.
Thanks a lot for calling in.
And thanks for the compliments.
By the way, a little bit earlier we were talking about wealth and well-being.
And it turns out, it's kind of interesting statistic, that in 1918, John D. Rockefeller's fortune, his wealth, accounted for a little bit more than one half of the total private wealth of our country.
That's a whole lot.
That's a lot of concentration of wealth.
Now, the question is: is wealth more or less concentrated today?
Well, it turns out to be less concentrated.
That is, today, to have the same one-half percent of the total private wealth in the United States, you'd have to combine the fortunes of Bill Gates, $59 billion, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, $19 billion, with 10 other billionaires in between.
So there's less concentration of wealth.
I mean, if you think that's a good thing, there's less concentration of wealth today than it was yesterday.
And you know, sometimes on college campuses, professors are known to demonize the so-called robber barons like Rockefeller.
They call him a robber baron.
Well, the environmental wackos ought to be happy about Rockefeller.
Why?
Rockefeller saved the whales.
I mean, whale oil was used for lighting.
And Rockefeller, in the late 1890s, he perfected the marketing of kerosene.
And people stopped using kerosene, stopped using whale oil, and started using kerosene.
If people kept on using whale oil for lighting, there'd be no whales.
And so, all you wackos out there, you ought to have a parade for John D. Rockefeller instead of condemning him.
We'll be back after this.
Okay, we're about to end the show for 2011.
And, Nate, you have the opportunity to be the last talker on the show.
You have to be quick.
Dr. Williams, thank you so much for taking my call.
I love listening to you on the show.
My question for you is: what do you think about Ron Paul and his economics and his plan to restore America?
Okay, I think in terms of economic policies, domestic policy, I think Ron Paul is right on top of it.
As with many of my libertarian colleagues, I think that we live in a hostile world and we have to use our equipment appropriately.
But I think, and also the accusations of his being a racist are plainly not true, at least from I've known Ron Paul personally for at least 20 years, 25 years maybe.
But he's a good guy, I think.
Look, folks, it's the end of 2011, and I hope that 2012 will be better and that there might be change for 2011.
But Rush is going to talk about that next week when he comes back July 3rd.
Keep in mind that Monday is the best of, and Tuesday, Rush will be back.
And I don't know when I'll be back, but whenever Russia calls, we'll be on the show, and I'll be here to help Rush push back the frontiers of ignorance.
But in the meantime, have a happy, happy new year.
I guess I should be politically correct by saying, have a lot to drink, but drive responsibly.
That's what all the advertisements have to say.
But for me, I'm going to have some fine Chardonnays.
We'll see you next year.
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