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Feb. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:34
2090 Depression, Slavery, War and Hope - Dr Lawrence Reed on Freedomain Radio
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I am honored, I would say, to have the great Lawrence Reid, who is the president of the Foundation for Economic Education, which you can find on the web at fee.org.
Now, it was a couple of years ago that I got a hold of your article, The Great Myths of the Great Depression.
And it blew my mind.
I mean, I'm used to propaganda.
I'm used to the government, you know, pouring the proverbial Hamletian kind of poison into your ear.
But the degree of misinformation that I received through, I mean, that was exposed through this article just blew my mind.
And so I was wondering if you could just talk about the, you know, the myth versus the reality.
Because some people may not even be that familiar with the myth or the slander against the free market that was represented in the 30s and afterwards.
I'd be happy to, Stephan, and you're absolutely right.
There's a great deal of myth and misconception and error surrounding the Great Depression.
Probably the single largest error from a big picture perspective would be that the free market economy was just sort of chugging along in the 1920s, free of undue government interference, and then it just fell apart of its own weight or its own inherent shortcomings.
And then, in the midst of depression, government had to grow and tinker with the economy and intervene in order for us to recover.
But there's a lot of myth baked into that view.
The free market was not the cause of the Great Depression, and government didn't rescue us.
In fact, it's quite evident now from the record that the policies of two administrations, Hoover And Franklin Roosevelt kept us in depression far longer than we had ever seen before in American history.
And I remember, I think an uncle of mine gave me a book, you know, the 10 great disasters of the 20th century, the Hindenburg and the Titanic and so on.
And there was a chapter which, even as a kid, I remember reading with rapt fascination about the Great Depression.
And, of course, it had the standard pictures of the guys in those felt hats, you know, standing in lines, dismal-faced, unshaven to get a bowl of soup or a loaf of bread.
And I remember even at the time as a kid thinking like, well was there nothing left to be done in the country that these guys couldn't even earn a nickel a day or a dime a day?
Had all of the crops been harvested, had all the buildings been built, why was there nothing for these people to do?
But I think the reality of what you talk about is that in many ways they were almost forcibly or legally prevented from working through a variety of measures.
Absolutely. We first of all had tremendous mismanagement of the money and credit supply by the Federal Reserve which gave us First, a boom, the so-called Roaring Twenties, an unsustainable boom in the economy.
And then the Fed changed gears in late 1928, began to slow the rate of growth in the money supply, and actually to contract it through 1933.
Well, you can't put monetary policy through that kind of a roller coaster without expecting the same sort of effect to materialize in the market as a whole.
So we had very low unemployment during the unsustainable boom period, and then extraordinarily high, painful unemployment.
Looking back on it, with so many millions of people out of work, what a tragedy it was that they lost employment and income on such a massive scale because of the follies of the federal government, the Federal Reserve in particular.
Yeah, it is always interesting to me that people look at the pre-1913 and post-1913 US economy, or really world economy, since a lot of the countries in the West were setting up central banks at that time, as if they're the same thing, as if when you had relatively privatized currency on a gold standard, followed by a still gold standard but heavily fiat-controlled supply of money.
Money, of course, is really the lifeblood of the free market.
If the money is corrupted, as Lenin pointed out, everything else is going to fall apart.
That people don't divide The economic history of the U.S. into sort of pre-Fed and post-Fed.
It's not the only factor, but it would seem to me to be such a large factor that to ignore it, it's just going to lead you down the path of error almost inevitably.
Yeah, that's right. And even the current head of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Mr.
Bernanke, has admitted publicly that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression.
He thinks that the Fed has learned from that experience and will not allow something like that to happen again.
Well, time will tell.
What, nine or ten or eleven recessions, largely engineered by bad policy at the Fed since the Great Depression.
But the Federal Reserve really was at the core of it.
But if nothing else had happened, perhaps the American economy would have recovered in 1930 or 31.
But then you had a string of interventions by the federal government under two different parties, two different administrations, that prolonged and deepened the depression for many years.
Right. So this is where you talk about, and the numbers are truly chilling about the amount of tariffs that went up, the international tariff war that followed, which could be argued led, sometimes it seems as night follows day, into the World War of 1939.
So the Smoot-Holy Act, let's talk a little bit about that, because that's, as you point out, the stock market had recovered by 1930, and then the economy and the workers really got hammered by these truly insane tariffs that sparked off a trade war.
That's right. In the spring of 1930, four to six months after the big stock crash in October of 29, we didn't have a depression yet.
We only had a recession.
We had unemployment in the vicinity of 8.5%.
That's high, but it's not a depression.
What made the situation far worse very quickly was, as you point out, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.
That was signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in June of 1930.
It raised tariffs on foreign imports to an all-time high.
It virtually closed the borders.
It ignited a worldwide trade war.
And any industry that was involved in the import-export business was hit, and in most cases hit very, very hard.
I hope this isn't going to be too tortured a question.
I've been trying to figure out all afternoon how to phrase it in a way that isn't too tortured.
Now, there is a theory which says that governments have legislation kind of cooking in the back of their heads and then they wait for a crisis to emerge in order to apply that legislation.
And I've heard arguments on both sides and, you know, sort of the Patriot Act 9-11 and so on.
Was the Smoot-Hawley Act something that was in the works and they were waiting for a crisis, or was it simply pandering to the economic miseducation of the general voting public, which is that, you know, if we stop foreign goods from coming in, then more people will buy American and you'll all go back to work.
Was it more nefarious, or was it just the economic illiteracy of the population as a whole being pandered to by equally economic illiterate politicians?
Well, it was really rather both.
Of the two major parties, the Republican Party...
You know, as an economist, I knew you were going to answer both.
Not the one hand, not the other hand, but both.
Sorry, go ahead. The Republican Party had a protectionist past going way back to its very origins in the 1850s.
So they had been pushing for higher tariffs all along, in part because many Republicans felt that it would protect American industry.
In some cases, they were doing the bidding of particular businesses that wanted that protection.
But there were others who, perhaps well-meaning, just simply thought, mistakenly, that if you raise barriers to imports, you will thereby stimulate domestic industry.
There are a lot of fallacies of economics embedded in that.
But in the midst of a terrible crisis like we were facing in 1929, early 30—admittedly not yet a depression, but still a very high rate of unemployment— The public was vulnerable to being sold a bill of goods.
And so when people were running around saying, well, we can fix this high unemployment by disclosing the border to those goods that are coming from foreigners, you know, they swallowed it.
And so it was passed in June of 1930 rather easily, and the public largely embraced it.
Yeah, I guess until they start teaching Austrian Econ 101, starting from kindergarten, we're always going to be susceptible to this kind of demagoguery.
Now, you touch on this in the essay, but I thought it was really a fascinating argument to look at the degree to which the trade war sparked by the Smoot-Horley Act Spilt over international relations and of course particularly in Europe, of course reeling after 10 million dead and most of France and other countries wiped out in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles, the massive reparations, the destabilization of the economy through the wholesale pillaging of German gold and industry.
To what degree do you think this started the dominoes that did lead to the greatest military calamity in human history?
I would give Smoot-Hawley and the trade war that it ignited a major share of the blame for the start of the Second World War.
We know now that in the case of the war in the Pacific, the Japanese came to a conclusion In part based upon the trade barriers that we had erected, that they could not get the things that they needed through peaceful trade.
So that lowered the cost, you might say, of war to them and probably made war more likely.
And throughout Europe, I think the increase in trade protectionism in the 1930s fueled the fire of demagoguery and of statist politicians who Rose to power in part by condemning foreigners and promising to wage economic war against them.
It certainly raised tensions to the point where it clearly had a major impact on the coming of the Second World War.
And there is a theory which argues that it is the middle class that really is the ballast, so to speak, of society.
That's where the great stability comes from in society.
I think this is fairly evident in Germany under the Weimar Republic that there was a huge detonation of the middle class through the hyperinflation that occurred there.
Who was the most affected, I mean, it's hard to narrow it down, I know, but of the sort of three upper, middle, and lower classes, you always see, you think of sort of the grapes of wrath, the itinerant farmers and, you know, half-starved farm workers and so on.
To what degree did this affect or carve out the economic stability of the middle class in the U.S.? Well, I think it had a major negative impact on the middle class and lower classes.
They were the ones who bore the brunt Of trade protectionism, while a few industries and the people who led them may have benefited from protection from competition.
It's consumers, it's low-income people and middle class that end up paying the cost in the form of higher prices on the things they purchased and fewer job opportunities in those industries hammered by the effect of protective tariffs.
So, in the long run, the very wealthy And there are plenty of notable exceptions, but in the long run, the very wealthy can somehow manage and get by in tough situations, but it's the lower and middle classes that are most vulnerable to losing their homes, losing their jobs, and not having much recourse to recover from all that.
Yeah, I always thought it's a real shame that John Steinbeck didn't have the artistic talent to turn to the boardrooms of the Fed rather than the dust bowls of Kansas, because I think that would have been an easier answer, a more accurate answer for people to accept.
Now, let's talk about 1932.
Okay, so we've had the hammering of, you know, the Fed expands monetary supply by a third and then contracts it, creating a massive destabilization in the economy.
The free market, as it always tends to do, as you can see it happening even now, is struggling out from under the weight of the bricks being dumped on it by the state.
And then 1930, it struggles through Smoot-Hawley.
Things are starting to get tiny little bit better.
And then 1932, massive income tax hikes.
I mean, it is like watching a gruesome Rocky movie where it's like, he's down.
Stop kicking him. He's down.
Stop kicking him. Doubled the income tax rates in 1932.
That's right. The top income tax rate was actually more than doubled from 24 to 65 percent.
This was the Revenue Act of 1932.
It was designed to, or intended, to raise revenue to help close the budget gap because we had a huge budget deficit at the time.
And one of the two ways you can at least try to close a budget gap or a deficit is to raise more revenue, raise taxes.
The other way is to cut spending.
That's what I would prefer, cutting spending, but the politicians were actually raising spending at the same time the deficit was getting bigger, and then they slapped on this doubling of the income tax and a lot of other excise taxes, just the last thing that an already sick economy with double-digit unemployment needed.
Right, and a point that you touched on that I think really bears underlining is that, I mean, I was an entrepreneur for about 15 years, and I know the degree to which instability causes, it's not exactly paralysis, it's just significant hesitation.
It really raises the barrier to spending.
If you don't know what's coming down the pipe, if you don't know when taxes are going to be raised, if you don't know what tariff policies are going to be, I mean, you don't close down your business, but you hesitate before you Apply significant capital reserves to productivity improvements or hiring and so on.
And you touch on that, and I wonder if you could expand upon that, because that's much more ethereal.
It's people hesitating to enter into market situations that they otherwise would have, which is the unseen, which is always the great challenge of economics.
Yes. The great historian Bob Higgs has called this regime uncertainty.
And we certainly had a heavy dose of it for the rest of the decade under Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932.
Roosevelt gave us a series of radical interventionist policies that indicated he really didn't know what the cause of the problem was.
He was flying in all directions with regulations and price controls, even higher taxes, destruction of crops and cattle in order to reduce supply and raise agricultural prices.
For the rest of the decade of the 1930s, we had a terrible environment for the renewal of confidence and for investment.
You had Roosevelt, you know, on a regular basis attacking people of enterprise, calling wealthy people economic royalists, railing against the profit motive.
This is not the kind of environment where, if you're lucky to have a few bucks to invest after all that had happened in the previous years, It's not the kind of environment where you're likely to plunk down your resources and take a risk to start a business or to hire people.
So it was a terrible situation for a number of years.
And a few years ago, two UCLA economists argued very convincingly that this regime uncertainty of the Roosevelt years prolonged the Great Depression by some seven years.
I can certainly, certainly imagine that is the case.
Now, there was, of course, the list, and this is part of what is so fascinating about this essay that you've written, is the list is so tragic.
I mean, it's heartbreaking to look back and to see.
Because I wonder if you can talk about two other things you mentioned in the essay, the Wagner Act and the unit banking laws.
I know that sounds dull to my listeners, but it really, really is important, of course, especially when we compare what was going on in the 1930s to what's going on now.
Yes. First of all, the Weiger Act, it was passed in 1935 and scheduled to take effect in 1937.
It was the major reason for a renewed collapse in the American economy in 1937.
We'd actually brought unemployment down below 20 percent right before 1937.
And then in that year we saw the swiftest collapse in American economic history, with unemployment soaring again and a great number of bankruptcies.
Renewed, deep depression.
The Wagner Act was formerly known as the National Labor Relations Act, informally called by organized labor, Labor's Magna Carta.
It gave enormous powers to organized labor.
This is the origin of our exclusive representation laws.
The mandatory collective bargaining, once you've secured 50% plus one, Workers at a work site to vote for a union.
So you had a wave of militancy across America in various factories in 1937 because of the Wagner Act.
The number of man hours lost because of strikes more than doubled from 1936 to 1937.
Costs of business soared because of the Wagner Act.
I think 40 percent, you mentioned in the article, in manufacturing facilities, the cost of business would go up by 40 percent.
Yes, it was tremendous.
Terrible, terribly depressing for an already sick economy.
And you mentioned also unit banking laws.
This is interesting because the United States stands in stark contrast in the 1930s with its neighbor to the north, Canada, when it came to bank failures.
We had thousands of them, but Canada, which had a deep depression, didn't have a single bank failure.
And the major reason for that was unit banking laws that effectively forbade banks from diversifying.
They effectively said to a bank, if you're located here, you have to draw your deposits here, make your investments here, and it prevented them from opening branches in other parts of the state or across state lines.
So if you're located in an area that's particularly depressed, Such as an agricultural area hurt terrifically by Smoot-Hawley and other federal interventions, then your bank may have gone out of business simply because the farmers that you served went out of business and you didn't have the ability to invest in other areas to try to protect yourself and diversify your holdings.
So unit banking laws were terrifically harmful in the 1930s.
Yes, and the tragedy, of course, I mean, you sort of look across the ocean to Europe.
I mean, this is a time when the Great Ukrainian Famine was occurring over in Russia, in the Soviet Empire.
And at the same time, you have millions of livestock and crops, millions of livestock and millions of tons of U.S. crops being destroyed.
By the government! It's absolutely absurd in hindsight that people are starving, trade is down, and people are destroying crops and essential food items in America.
Yes, that was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 at the start of FDR's New Deal in his first term.
Just imagine, in 1933 you had something in the vicinity of 25% unemployment.
Smoot-Hawley flattened The agricultural economy, because foreigners couldn't sell here due to our high tariffs, which meant that they couldn't buy here.
So they weren't buying American soybeans and corn and so forth.
So you've got a terrible agricultural depression, and along comes the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which levies a new tax on agriculture.
You know, already in depression, you've got a new tax now levied on this industry.
And then they used the money from the tax to supervise the destruction of perfectly good fields of corn and wheat and cotton and perfectly healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs.
There was one order alone from the agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace, that called for the destruction of six million baby pigs in the United States.
There was nothing wrong with the pigs.
The problem was in Washington.
They thought that if they destroyed supply, they would raise the price, and that would lead to higher farm income.
Higher farm income, in turn, would help to spread prosperity in ever-widening circles.
But now we know how ridiculous that was.
I mean, even if this had helped the farmers, it could have done so only at the expense of everybody else.
Well, and there is, of course, still the myth that the Great Depression was ended by World War II. In other words, the slaughter of 40 million people is as good for the economy of the West as the slaughter of 3 million pigs was for the farming economy, which is not at all.
Yeah, that idea that the war explains the recovery is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, but it's very, very false.
Well, of course, you know, in the sort of three actors in this kind of propaganda, you have the little boy, and you have the lampshade, and you have the family dog, right?
The little boy breaks the lampshade, the voters call, the parents come in and say, what happened here?
And, of course, the first thing that the little boy does is point to the dog and say, Rover did it, and somehow the parent swallows it, though it makes no sense at all.
Yeah, good analogy. So, there's two parallels that have popped into my head that are so obvious.
I'm sure I barely even need to mention them.
But when you look at things like...
Massive inflation of the money supply, of course, that occurred in the early 2000s.
You know, America embarked on wars without troubling itself to pay for them.
And, of course, that means debt and inflation, as true in the Roman days as it is now.
And so the parallels that I see going on are sort of late Rome and, unfortunately, you know, 2000 and 2001 and onwards.
I was wondering if you could touch on those, if these parallels make any sense or if they're too divergent to be of use to us.
Well, every time period, of course, brings its own unique set of personalities and popular reactions and so forth.
But there are some strong parallels between recent history in the last decade or so, and the 1930s, and even going back to ancient Rome.
I've written about that as well.
You had, during the 1920s, as I've mentioned already, an easy-money policy of the Fed keeping interest rates low, stimulating an unsustainable boom.
Much of the newly created money at very low interest rates in the 1920s found its way onto the stock market and into a land boom in Florida.
Well, we had the same sort of thing in the last decade.
After 9-11, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates incredibly low for a very long period of time.
It fueled a boom in the housing and real estate business in particular.
And some of that was also prompted by government policies that pushed banks to make loans to people who didn't have the wherewithal to pay them back.
So you had a combination of easy money and a lot of policies of mandate and jawboning of the banks to make bad loans.
You saw the same thing in the 1920s and 30s.
Going back to ancient Rome, you might be interested to know that in the year 31 A.D., There was a financial, or 33 AD, one of those two years, there was a financial crisis that gripped Rome, and the government's response was the massive issuance of zero interest credit throughout the economy to try to stimulate the economy.
And we look back on that now, and we know that that was the start of a lot of bad policies over many, many decades to come.
It led to industries being Ultimately nationalized by the Roman government.
It led to the government inflating the currency.
Beginning with the Emperor Nero, they began to reduce the metallic content of the Roman coinage, which at one time was ninety-five, ninety-six percent silver, the Roman denarius.
But by the time of Emperor Aurelian, in the latter part of the third century AD, The silver content was less than 1%.
They had mixed in junk metals in order to manufacture more money.
In the mistaken belief that they could stimulate the economy, pay their bills, we're doing the same thing today.
Right, and I mean, the imperialism and its distortionary effects upon state finances also struck me at the sort of Spain's new world conquest of North America and some parts of South America.
Of course, you know, shipload after shipload of gold bullion came back to Spain, creating hyperinflation, driving all the talented people away.
And Spain ended up in a recession for about 400 years.
And this is the kind of mess that can be made with these kinds of policies.
It struck me, and it's always hard, it's impossible to some degree to know people's true intentions, but let's assume that the people in the 1930s or even the 1920s wanted to help the workers, wanted to help the poor and so on.
And if they drive them to unemployment and then to the slaughterhouse of war, it really shows in the grimmest possible way the law of unintended consequences.
It really is tragic to see, even with the best of motives, if you, you know, a lack of knowledge is a kind of death.
Yeah, that's right. And yet the view that big government had to get even bigger in the 1930s in order to solve the problem continues to persist.
And in many respects it persists because its advocates never accept responsibility for their own failures, for their own handiwork.
They think they have a monopoly on good intentions, and so even when their policies fail or lead to disastrous consequences, It's difficult to get them to admit that they made a mistake because they think, well, we meant well, and we did our best, and, you know, that's what you hear.
They rarely accept responsibility for their own mistakes and bad consequences.
Well, of course, to accept responsibility, if you, I mean, the sort of people respond to incentives to accept individual responsibility would be to argue themselves out of a job.
And there are very few people who put, you know, 15 years into getting educated who then will vote themselves out of the remuneration of that education.
Because, I mean, I know the revisionist history is taking its own sweet time.
I think you started to see some glimmers of it now.
Yes. But of course, I mean, Rothbard's book came out in 1975, I think it was, that detonated a lot of the myths about it.
It was the free market that drove the roaring 20s and, of course, a lot of the work that other economists have done has really exploded this myth.
But you're only now starting to see the occasional crack in the edifice of mythology that defends this viewpoint.
I mean, we've touched on it, but do you have any other thoughts as to why it is simply so hard to break through to the truth?
I mean, we've had revisionist history about cowboys and Indians.
We've had revisionist history about slavery.
We've had revisionist history about the role of women, thank heavens.
I mean, why is it so hard for people to undo this monster?
Well, you're right. I think it is being undone, finally, but it's taken decades to get to this point.
Part of it is that the whole The Roosevelt period is mired in partisan politics, and that makes it difficult for some people to admit to error, because they're wrapped up in the party they believe in and its philosophy.
So a lot of it's just partisan politics.
Oh, so it's like the Republican Hoover was the free market guy, and look what happened, and then the Democrat FDR came in and all turned to roses as best it could.
Is that the general line?
Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, a lot of this mythology about FDR saving us from the Depression and having to grow government as a way to do that is coming from government universities.
And it's a case of a lot of Tenured academics who depend for their livelihood upon the government, and lo and behold, they want the government to get bigger.
And that's the way they see the world.
That's the way they see history.
But the further removed we are from that period, I think the more objective scholarship has become.
We're looking back now and we can say, look, the numbers are obvious.
The Depression didn't get better under FDR. When the war came, we fixed the unemployment problem officially by simply shipping 11 million overseas.
But the standard of living didn't really improve for the average American until well after the war.
Right. Yeah, I mean, the myth that I grew up with, of course, is that after a fevered night of drinking and cocaine binging, the economy slipped into a coma for a decade or so and then was only awakened by the fire and thunder of war.
But I think the more accurate metaphor that you present or the more accurate way of looking at it is that you have a guy struggling to climb a cliff that's continually having stones dropped on him and things weighed on him to the point where he just keeps falling back.
That there was an upward rise and an attempt to even adapt to these new circumstances, but the blows that were put in by law and other government edicts were simply too great for the economy to recover from.
And that's not something – the government is portrayed as the doctor that's attempting to revive something that has died of its own accord, but it really doesn't seem to be where the facts go.
Yeah, if the government was the doctor, then it was in fact a witch doctor applying remedies that could never work.
After the war, we finally did get some economic recovery, of course, but it was not because of all this intervention by the federal government.
It was largely because we had the biggest reduction in federal spending in American history after the war.
And I know Keynesians like to argue, well, that's, you know, when government spends less, it fails to stimulate the economy.
That's harmful. Oh yeah, and of course you have all this nonsense about the Marshall Plan saving Western Europe when, of course, the economic recovery was well underway before any of that money came in and had largely to do with the actions, as history often does, with the actions and choices of individuals.
You had a German minister entirely devoted to the free market and he got things going long before the Marshall Plan money ever dropped in.
Absolutely. Ludwig Erhard in Germany, I'm sure you're talking about him and Konrad Adenauer.
They busied themselves getting rid of a lot of the wartime or post-war price controls that even the United States, its occupying forces, had imposed.
Wasn't there also a story that there was a government agency that was supposed to be set up to help divert returning soldiers to economically productive areas, but by the time it had finished getting set up, the unemployment had almost vanished and everybody had found a job anyway?
Isn't that typical? I mean, when the government does act, even if it does the right thing, its timing is always off.
But, you know, after the war, we got recovery because we released a lot of resources for productive uses by the private sector instead of being taken and blown up by governments.
But here's another thing that explains the recovery after the war that Americans are not often reminded of.
In 1945, President Truman signed into law.
He didn't really favor it, but the Republicans kind of pushed him to it.
He signed into law a huge reduction in the corporate income tax from 90 percent down to 38 percent.
So in one fell swoop you had a massive burden on American industry largely removed or dramatically reduced in 1945.
Well, actually, if we're going to touch on the 50s, I've had a number of questions about the argument that is made by the leftists.
And, of course, you know, leftists are annoying because they're so often right about foreign policy and so often completely wrong about domestic economic policy, just as the opposite tends to be true for Republicans.
But the argument is that, look, we had stellar growth in the 1950s when we had a very high personal income tax rate.
And I've... Deep down, I know that can't be true, but I never like to go with my instincts where a fact will do.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Yeah, I mean, the numbers indicate the 50s weren't a stellar decade at all.
And in fact, when John Kennedy ran in 1960 against Richard Nixon, part of his platform was that he was going to get the economy moving again because it had been so sluggish.
We did have sky-high income tax rates, but we also had minimal growth.
And much of that you could explain simply by the absence of war, finally, and some good policies in places like Germany where demand for American products rose.
But that was because of the free market policies in Germany, not because of our high tax rates here.
Right. First of all, I really want to thank you for your time.
It's a fascinating conversation. I do feel that there is a little bit – I don't want to sound overdramatic – but I feel that in the dissemination of these kinds of facts, we are a little bit in a race against time because it seems like there are beginning to be some threads of sunlight coming over the dark hills of prior propaganda,
but it feels that it's relatively slow compared to the perception that so much more government intervention is necessary There has been a lot more hidden government intervention, I would sort of argue, since 07, 08 onwards, in that you aren't seeing mountains of new legislation coming down, sort of healthcare excluded, but the amount of financial jiggory that's going on behind the scenes is still incredibly dangerous, I would argue.
What do you think that people can do?
Well, first of all, do you think it is a bit of a race against time, and what do you think people should best do, again, other than going to fee.org to check out the amazing material that your organization has?
My feeling is you just work as hard as you can for the right ideas and let the chips fall where they may, and ultimately, sooner or later, whether it's in our lifetime or later, the right ideas will prevail.
I'm not sure where the country's going, but I'm encouraged by the fact that there's a revival of interest and ideas of liberty, especially among young people.
Those of us who are active in the liberty movement are planting seeds all over the country and abroad.
And I'm hopeful that at some point those seeds will sprout and we'll see a freer future, but I can't predict when that'll happen.
No, of course, omniscience is not granted to us.
All we can do is do the greatest good we can, and as you say, just hope that the winds will fill our sails to a freer future.
Well, thank you. This again is Lawrence Reid.
He's the president of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of Great Myths of the Great Depression.
I'll, of course, I've just done a bit of a recording of it, and I'll throw that on my feed and on my YouTube channel.
And it's fee.org for people who want to go.
And I highly, highly recommend.
You know, Mises.org and fee.org are two of the great places to go on the internet to further your economic knowledge and understanding.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really do appreciate it. My pleasure.
Thank you, Stephan. Goodbye.
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