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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:25
Obamacare: Too Big To Succeed? | Lawrence Reed and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, coming to you, as usual, from the inside of my philosophical ping-pong ball, and we are speaking with the head of FEATH, Foundation for Economic Education, the great Lawrence Reed.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Hey, my pleasure, Stefan.
It's always great to be with you.
So, I believe that in the truly great libertarian award for seeing a silver lining in a threatening storm cloud, you have referred to Obamacare as a teachable moment.
Now, as the steamroller of socialized medicine rolls over the pancreas of most freedom-loving people across the 52 states, I wonder if you could help rescue the faint fairy of hope from the Pandora's box of demonic social statism.
How can this be a teachable moment?
How can we find positive in what's happening?
Well, it's not so much a teachable moment for libertarians because, you know, we saw some of these problems coming and we opposed Obamacare from the beginning, but it's a great teachable moment for non-libertarians and an opportunity for lovers of liberty to use it to win over new converts, to make our arguments more powerful, more resonant with non-libertarians.
I mean, think of it, the seductions, the lies, The broken promises of Obamacare, right from its very inception, are so plainly evident for so many millions of Americans now to see.
I mean, that's a wonderful opportunity that we need to drive home to people.
All this talk of hope and change, a new face in the White House, and transparency, and everything's going to be on C-SPAN.
Well, now and for decades to come, we ought to be able to say to people, don't forget Obamacare.
Now that's true whether we end up repealing it or not.
We ought to be able to say that was ushered in by a guy who promised to be a man of the people, thinking of everybody, the general welfare, going to help you out and do it above board and very openly.
But now we know it's full of lies, lies from the start and lies to keep it going.
I think there's something really fascinating that's going on, which is normally there's quite a considerable delay between the implementation and the disasters, or even admitting them, right?
I think it was, what, 80 years after the Fed triggered the Great Boom and then the Great Depression, Bernanke finally admitted it long after everyone who was going to jump off a window ledge has already jumped.
The welfare state takes like a generation, public school education, when in the 60s it was no longer possible to fire teachers.
The quality degrades about 20 or 30 years later.
So usually there's this weird delay where nobody can really figure out the cause.
But this one, I've sort of referred to it as government without anesthetic.
In other words, this is kind of what happens when you get the effects of government programs not cushioned by things like debt and borrowing and the law of unintended consequences.
Why do you think this is happening so rapidly to the point where people are seeing the disasters, not like a generation later or in unguessed sectors, but right away, directly?
Well, a lot of reasons.
One is that this is an extraordinarily ambitious project, even for big government.
There's a lot of new ground here that government has been trying to turn over and do it basically all at once.
And the man at the top, even if he were a decent manager, I think he would be up to his eyeballs in problems right now and implementation.
But to compound things, he's not a manager.
And he tends to hire people Who are academic ideologues who put their faith in, well, you know, government can do it, without any thought to, you know, how to really make something like this happen.
I wouldn't want that task, because I don't think you can make it happen.
But the extraordinarily poor appointments, the lousy nature of the way the law was written, The vast overreach.
I mean, all of this is coming together right at one time.
And it's so apparent that, you know, we talk so much in the economy about companies, certain companies or banks being too big to fail.
What's becoming apparent now, and this is a great opportunity for libertarians, that we're turning health care over to an outfit that's too big to succeed.
Government has just gotten now so massively large That, you know, taking on these additional massive obligations is bound to flop from the beginning.
And there is something I think that's also instructive in that this is replacing or is attempting to shore up a whole bunch of other government solutions to health care.
It's not like this is the first time the government has intruded upon a almost universally free and voluntary health care system in the US.
Rod Long's got a great article on how the government solved the initial health care crisis at the turn of the last century, which was that doctors felt that prices were just too darn low.
And it was a big problem that they couldn't raise their rates.
So they went to the government to get the exclusive licensing to break the grip of the friendly societies on hiring doctors.
You could get quality health care for literally $20, $30 a year in the past.
And now things have just gone completely insane.
And there's not a lot of reference to how, you know, the Congress giving doctors the right to write their own prescriptions, which was supposed to limit problems.
The massive takeover of employer-sponsored insurance in the Second World War period, Medicare, Medicaid, prescription drug programs.
Government power has been thrown at this problem for over a hundred years, and now it's like, well, one more, boy, one more, and we're completely set.
Which is so utterly absurd, because you'd think before you would ask anybody to take over some new duty, new responsibility, that you'd ask a few questions about their track record.
And if we had done that, or if non-libertarians had done it, because we were certainly doing it, we would have understood that almost every intervention by government in the healthcare marketplace in the last 50 years has been a disaster.
Look at the Veterans Administration hospitals.
You have people who are, quote, entitled to care there, who are fleeing and paying for care elsewhere because the care in the VA hospitals is so bad.
In Medicaid, 50% of people who die in hospitals Wait a minute, I want to make sure I get this number right, because it's quite astonishing.
Medicaid patients are 50% more likely to die in the hospital after surgery than patients with private coverage.
Medicaid coverage and Medicaid health care is already substandard.
So, down the line, you find that what government has already done in health care has only made the problem worse.
It's been lousy.
Its programs are fraught with fraud and Long-term financial insolvency, and yet here they are now taking on a massive new obligation.
It's a testimony to this blind and irrational faith in the power of the state.
And it's a testimony, too, I think, to the fact that almost all people naturally put a greater stock in the private sector.
We expect it to do better.
And so when it fails in something, even in a minor way, you know, we're all over it.
But with government, boy, you have to have a colossal failure before an awful lot of people even realize that it's inherent in the system.
Well, we now have that with Obamacare already.
It's a wonderful opportunity for lovers of liberty to drive some important points home.
I mean, look at the arrogance of central planners.
Obama's response to people losing their Uh, health plans because of his law is basically, well, you had a lousy health care plan and you need mine because I know better what, uh, what you need than you do.
I mean, you know, the arrogance of statism is on display here in a bigger way than I've seen in a long time.
Yeah, it's like saying, you may think you love your wife, but our Central Marriage Bureau has determined that she is substandard, and therefore you must divorce her, and we will supply you a new wife.
Don't worry, she'll be much more to your liking.
It's like, well, I'm kind of used to that.
Now, the thing that also I find frustrating is the hope goes always for trying to limit government power.
The hope goes to the Republicans.
And, I mean, they talk – I mean, talk, you know, Paul Ryan with his history of objectivism and Newt Gingrich with his history of skepticism towards federal power.
But in recent tussles, you know, whether it's over Obamacare itself, the government shutdown, the recent budget crisis where they basically just traded away the farm for, you know, a six-pack of light beer – I mean, why is it that the Republicans seem to have such trouble just articulating and sticking to this principle of all they seem to be able to do is hold a thimble up to a tsunami and saying, look, we are breaking the momentum.
What do you think is going on with them?
Well, I think most of them, and there are some notable exceptions, and we need to increase their number, but most of Republican lawmakers are not really deeply principled.
They're not thoughtful people who come to government because they have certain ideas that are well-rooted in logic and history and experience and economics.
They want power.
They want to be in charge.
They like the lights and the notoriety of being a congressman.
And so if they sense that the wind is blowing in one direction or another, that's where they're going to head.
And so don't expect most of them to really argue from any principled perspective.
They don't know how to.
Remember George Bush, the second one, when the Democrats and other statists began beating the drums for a prescription drug entitlement, which we ultimately got, there was a great opportunity for a principled president, principled in our way of thinking, To come out and talk about what a massive expansion of government would produce.
But George Bush was utterly ill-equipped, unequipped to make that argument.
And so like most Republicans, he just scrambled to do what it took to take the heat off him and get whatever people seem to want for the moment.
I think also, yeah, I think that's true, but then you'd say, well, if they just wanted the easiest ride, they'd probably go Democrat, because Democrats get such a free pass from the media on such a wide variety of issues, because the media, I think the argument that Bernie Goldberg and Alan Coulter and other people have made that the media is very left-wing, I think is pretty valid.
But there is a huge constituency in America of people who want smaller government.
I mean, Rush Limbaugh isn't speaking to like three cats in a house plant.
Yeah.
And, you know, so in the talk radio in particular, like the Michael Savages and the Rush Limbaugh's and so on, there is a huge constituency of people who want a smaller government.
Of course, they're offset by, I think you pointed out, the 49% of people receiving government checks on a regular basis.
But I think there is a constituency and I really do believe if people could just like if the Republicans or whoever it was going to be could just fight through this media nonsense and realize that the media is just preaching to mainstream media.
They're just preaching to the choir.
Why not take that message directly?
I think there would be a quite a surprising groundswell of support for that and the battle that it constantly keeps being avoided would come into the open and we could actually hash this stuff out.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And I constantly lament the fact that so many Republicans, who may seem to have good instincts, wilt in the face of even the slightest opposition.
Largely because they don't know how to go up against it.
They don't know how to make the case.
They don't know how to avoid being pinned as uncompassionate and uncaring.
They just need to be trained better and need to train themselves better in argumentation.
But hey, if they're not even going to read the bills in most cases, don't expect them to read human action.
The people that are drawn to politics tend not to be deep thinkers.
They just don't.
Deep thinkers go elsewhere.
All right, so let's chat a little bit about something that is, I think, a little underreported, even in the libertarian circle.
Some people talk about it.
There is this incredible concentration of power in the executive branch, to the point where, as you pointed out with the late Roman Empire, You know, the Senate and the deliberating bodies, which are supposed to have the responsibility for forging the laws, have become largely window dressing, largely decoration for the arrogance of imperial power.
You know, two brief arguments about Obamacare.
The first, of course, is that millions of lines of regulations were added to the bill after it was passed with no input or even the expectation of feedback from Congress.
That's sort of the first one, which would render it I mean, the whole thing, the whole mess is fundamentally illegal.
And the second, of course, is that 1,300, 1,400 organizations have been granted, you know, seat-of-the-pants exemptions from Obamacare, including, of course, a lot of unions who championed its passage to begin with.
Again, you know, under the Constitution, unequal treatment under the law is automatically invalid, and people are trying to find these really obscure ways of undercutting Obamacare Why is nobody in the government or anywhere really focusing on the fact that this stuff is all illegal just based upon basic laws that don't require a lot of interpretation?
Well, there are a few people who are.
In fact, there were hearings in Congress a couple weeks ago, I think for one day, where this was the focus.
The unconstitutional rewrite of the law, the arbitrary extensions, waivers.
Obama, I mean, the catalog of such crimes is just growing almost by the day.
Obama will just Arbitrarily redefine, re-express the law the way it wants to cover up this rolling disaster.
I'm glad you mentioned Rome because as I see these disasters unfolding and this overreach of executive power, it sure rings familiar to me.
This is how the Roman Republic was ultimately lost.
Later it gave way to the empire, to an imperial autocracy and dictatorship.
It took place over about a hundred years, but step by step you had senators, you had the consuls, who were the top authority in the Roman Republic, exceeding their authority and often paying little attention to the Roman constitution.
Rome, like say Britain, had an unwritten constitution, but it was deeply embedded in custom and in precedent and in consensus for several hundred years.
But by the second century B.C., in order to accumulate more power for themselves and increasingly to satisfy the demands of sectors of the public who wanted something from the government, you had senators and consuls and other members of the popular assemblies just pay no attention to it.
There was a time, perhaps, in Rome when even the lowliest of citizens might have raised a cry.
But increasingly, it didn't matter.
Romans no longer seemed to have much sympathy for their own constitution.
They were more interested in getting something from the government.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
Oh, you know, it is one of the most, you know, if you study history in any depth, and particularly late Roman history or any empire's late history, there's this horrible sense of looking at mankind like a, you know, when my daughter was three, she could watch the same movie and be surprised.
At the ending, you know, oh, did you see what happened?
It's like, well, we just saw this last week, but she's three, right?
So, you know, I understand that.
Now she's like, oh, yeah, I know the ending and so on.
So it's weird, you know, with statism, with politics, with government, it really is like watching mankind watching the same movie again and being completely surprised that exactly the same thing is happening.
With Rome, you had, of course, as we've talked about before, these three major components.
Inflation, imperialism, and the creation of a dependent class.
If you'd like to touch on those, just to give people a sense of just how we've really seen this movie before.
Well, time and again, Rome is but one example, perhaps one of the very best.
The decline of Rome was not just coincident with the rise of the Roman welfare state, it was largely caused by it.
The Romans lost a sense of independence, of respect for life and property, respect for the institution of limited government.
They discovered that they could vote themselves benefits instead of simply working for one.
And politicians were more than happy to cater to that.
And in the process, as they catered to it, they accentuated and accelerated it.
And politicians began outbidding each other.
You know, I'll get you even more than the other guy if you support me.
People in America need to understand that there's a trade-off here.
You can't expect government to be providing you with all sorts of goodies without at the same time demanding increasing
uh... oparium imposing increasing demands on your life he who pays the piper calls the tune and sometimes to carry out its own programs government has to follow up with mandate so that they even have a semblance of working that's why under obama care for instance you're going to see things like rationing price controls uh... you're gonna see government increasingly uh... short-changing prepare health care providers more than ever before
In an effort to somehow make this program work when they're expanding the number of recipients by tens of millions.
So the controls will automatically follow the program itself.
As we used to say at the Mackinac Center in Michigan, where I was for 20 years, we used to say that government shackles always follow government shackles.
It's an iron law of human life.
Now let's touch a little bit on libertarian compassion, which of course to a lot of the untutored listeners sounds like an oxymoron, but I think there is a really strong case to be made for it.
Now at an individual level, if my neighbor doesn't buy Fire insurance.
And then his house burns down.
He's going to be upset.
And everyone's going to be upset.
I'm sure a lot of people will pitch in.
But there is part of us which always says, you should have bought some insurance.
You know, like if you roll those dice, if you take those risks.
Then it is like taking your life savings and putting it on Red 22 in Vegas, you know, you either come out with a big smile on your face or wearing a rain barrel and a pair of flip-flops.
So I think for compassion's sake, so, and this is particularly true in health care, so people who don't, you know, in a free market situation, people who don't take out health care, who then, you know, they come up snake eyes, they get sick.
Maybe they didn't, it wasn't lifestyle choices, maybe they didn't smoke, they didn't drink, they exercised well, whatever.
But they just, you know, something happened, they got sick.
And part of you, of course, says, well, that's terrible.
And the other part of you, me at least, says, that's what insurance is for.
And if you don't take it, life is very rough for you.
And if you try to eliminate that roughness, although you may help one person in the moment, you set things in motion that cause a lot more suffering than you're curing in the moment, in that if you then force insurance companies to take that person who's sick, that person feels like a whole lot better.
And I completely understand that.
And if I were in that person's shoes, I'd feel the same way, although I'm insured up the yin-yang, so who cares about that?
But I think this idea of compassion for a particular individual in the moment Without looking at the long-term consequences of using particularly state power to intervene in that situation, I think is where the real claim for libertarian compassion is to be made.
But it's very abstract.
It's very long-term.
It's fundamentally economic, right?
It's the long-term and it's the unseen.
And I think that's where I think we've got to make a better case for what is meant by libertarian compassion.
Well, that's right.
I think it was William Graham Sumner who put it well when he said that the consequence of subsidizing fools is to populate the world with fools.
There have to be consequences for one's poor judgment.
Now, by the same token, I don't want to suggest that everybody who decides not to buy health insurance is exercising poor judgment.
We take risks, all of us.
Every moment of every day of our lives.
And it makes more sense for a young, healthy person to take a risk of not buying health insurance at age 20 than it would for an older person at age 50 or 60.
So some of these are rational risks and decisions that are being made by private people.
But at the same time, we should recognize that government has done an awful lot over the years to make insurance beyond the reach of a lot of people.
And Obamacare is only going to accentuate that.
It's not going to solve the problem.
It's going to make it worse.
For example, at the state level, beginning in 1960 or thereabouts, state governments started meddling into the insurance business, health insurance, by adding mandates.
Where they said, OK, if you're going to sell insurance, health insurance in our state, it must include coverages for the following things.
In 1960, I know that the number of mandates across all 50 states were fewer than 20.
Now we have thousands.
And these are mandates for things like you must sell Your health insurance plans must include coverage for alcoholism, drug abuse treatment.
In Minnesota, there was a requirement that all health policies include coverage for hair transplants.
Well, each of these has a cost.
So each time you add another mandate and tell people, well, if you sell insurance, you've got to include this, which is to say if you're going to buy insurance, you have to pay for these coverages.
The cost of those mandates has gone through the roof.
And our friends at the National Center for Policy Analysis took a look at this a few years ago when they said about a quarter of all the people in America who are without health insurance were without it precisely because the cost of state mandates had priced them out of the health insurance marketplaces.
So we can't look at 30 or 40 million uninsured and say, well, they've all made a lousy judgment.
Some of them have been priced out of the health insurance market by mandates from government, which now are only going to get worse.
Well, and of course, economically speaking, if you have a sort of obscure ailment, then if you can force the government to enforce mandates on everyone, you are enormously subsidized.
And so it's the old story of concentrated gains and diffuse losses.
So everyone who has an obscure ailment, like I think now you have to cover in vitro treatments for couples facing infertility, which is a minority, small minority of couples who try to have children.
Now, they, of course, love the fact that everyone has to pay for this, even single 60-year-old men, because it lowers the cost for themselves.
But of course, the trade-off is they then also have to pay for everybody else's.
There are things like maternity benefits.
I mean, how is that even remotely a healthcare issue?
I mean, that literally is like getting a car insurance for an oil change.
Something that you know is going to happen, something that you choose.
If you choose to have kids, then you know this is not an illness.
Childhood, having kids is not an illness.
I mean, there is some swelling, there is some discomfort, and you will lose some sleep.
But I don't, you know, I think, but also the detonation of the family has had a lot to do with why All of these single moms have had to crowd onto the healthcare bandwagon saying that, you know, pediatric dental issues, lactation issues, maternity benefits, these things used to be paid for by a nice little fella called a husband.
And now they've had to kind of get on that bandwagon.
And it's interesting because the same dissolution of the family was occurring in the increasingly decadent ancient Roman situation.
And again, this is a movie that it feels like we just rewound it, took off the togas and started again.
That's right.
And once again, when it comes to the erosion of the family as a unit, government bears a huge share of the responsibility for that.
For decades, our welfare policy made it so that the mother with two or three kids would get more money if the father left town.
They were paid more if they split up, and that was government policy.
You know, we should point out, too, Stephan, that at all times in America, even with our screwed-up healthcare system pre-Obamacare, screwed up by government policies, there was an immense amount of free and low-cost care provided by doctors and hospitals for people who were truly needy.
And I think any free society can easily handle A pretty good share, in fact, of charitable care for the truly needy.
The problem is, when you get to where government is taking 40, 50, 60 percent of national income, of per capita income and on top of it is expanding the welfare state so that millions are entitled to new entitlements.
You've got a situation where private charitable care is going to dry up and more will be simply offloaded onto the taxpayer where if care happens it'll be at twice the cost before the government intervene in the first place.
Yeah, I think that is a real shame.
And it's funny because there are some aspects of libertarianism that seem to be more libertines than libertarians.
And I get often accused of having this Victorian mentality when it comes to things like sex and marriage and children and so on.
I'm pretty old school, as far as that goes.
I just put out a video about this movie actor, Paul Walker, who was 33 years old and having intimate relations with a 16-year-old, which I found kind of skin-crawly.
And everyone's like, oh man, that's so square, and so on.
But I've always enjoyed your perspective on this.
I've heard it a number of times, but I never tire of introducing that to my audience.
Which is your conversations around character.
And people find this kind of unsettling.
Again, there is this sort of, in the anarcho-capitalist and some of the libertarian communities, it really is around permission to do things.
But I think that character is a very important aspect of regaining a free society.
I wonder if you could talk a bit about that.
Yeah.
In fact, increasingly, I think character is the number one issue that so many of the other issues That our attention is focused on debts, deficits, out-of-control government.
They themselves are manifestations of an erosion of character.
And by character, I mean things like respect for the property of others, respect for contracts, for keeping your word, honesty, patience, courage, self-reliance, responsibility.
I think one of the most exciting aspects of liberty is that it's the only arrangement, the only social, political arrangement that really requires us to live at high standards of character.
Every other system, you can be a scumbag and fit right into any socialist system, but if you want to be free, you and lots of other people have to practice these virtues.
I can't imagine a free society of largely dishonest people Or timid people who will not stand up and defend their rights when they're under assault.
Because the world is full of people who would be happy to take your freedoms away from you if given the chance.
So if you want to be free, you've got to be prepared to defend your liberty against all comers.
I can't imagine a free society where people are irresponsible, where they don't feel as though their own poor judgments should come back and bite them, that they expect other people to bear the consequences and bail them out.
I think the absence of character or the erosion of character inevitably produces a decline in personal freedom and the rise of government to come in and try to fill that void, which it ultimately cannot and always will fail when it tries.
Yes, I think all alleviation of legitimate suffering serves only to increase it in the long run.
I mean, one of the things that has become, we've become exquisitely sensitive, I would say oversensitive, to some of the necessary suffering that occurs in life.
I remember an old poster I had up in my office, which I used to when I was in the software field.
It was a ship that was sinking, you know, that the ass end was going.
It was sort of plunging straight into the water.
And underneath it was written, it could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
And I think there is, you know, there's victims, the genuine victims, people who bad things happen to through no fault of their own and so on.
But there are people who take massive risks and end up in very bad situations.
It doesn't mean we don't sympathize, but having the strength of character to let people suffer in order to make better decisions, in order for society to make better decisions.
I think there's a kind of strength of character that we in the West used to have quite a bit of.
And now it seems to have anybody who's upset, you know, immediately gets their pacifier, immediately gets their candy bar, immediately gets whatever they need.
It's like we've lost the ability to allow legitimate suffering to instruct the culture.
That's right.
And there are so many people who think that allowing people to suffer, even if it's the result of their own poor judgments, is just too much to tolerate, that government has to commit and help out.
But they should be asking themselves, what is it about government that makes it more compassionate than the people who send its politicians there?
To positions of power.
I think it's a very condescending view of ordinary citizens to say that someone who is in need and truly deserving of a helping hand will not get it except from politicians.
I mean, I think that's incredible.
What is it about them that makes them, quote, compassionate?
Most of them are interested in one thing, their own power, their own notoriety, their own wealth and their own living.
So I think America has shown time and again that a people of high standards of character will, on the one hand, Demand accountability, demand that people who make poor judgments bear the consequences, but at the same time will help out when somebody genuinely deserves a helping hand.
And to sit back and think, no, we don't know when those occasions arise, or we're too dumb or uncompassionate to deal with them.
Politicians can fix it for us.
I think that's incredibly condescending, short-sighted, and just dead wrong.
Well, of all the social relationships, I think charity is the one that most needs to be under the free market because charity is like morphine.
It's absolutely essential when you're having surgery or you have some particular ache or pain that only morphine can help you with, but it is extremely addictive.
And so I think charity is one of these things that needs to be applied with all of the sensitivity and rationality and skepticism that the free market is going to bring with all the provable results.
And because it is, you know, helping people out is an essential moral task, I think, for virtuous people.
But the risk of dependence and the danger of addiction to that kind of help is so high that I think it needs to be handled as pretty much the most powerful drug that mankind has.
And just handing it over to the government, I think, is the worst thing you can do in such a sensitive situation.
Well, it ceases to be charity when you hand it over to the government.
For the same reason you don't make a person religious by taking them to church at gunpoint.
I mean, these things have to come from the heart.
And don't forget, when government tries to fix these problems, it ends up politicizing them, it ends up empire-building, so you've got a massive bureaucracy implementing all of this, I mean, you end up, if you solve the problem at all, which often government doesn't, it's in the business of perpetuating problems, you've done so at two or three times the cost of what private compassion could have fixed it for.
And the big difference too is, when private people help others in need, there tends to be a built-in accountability mechanism, certainly one that's far more efficient than when government simply sends checks from a distant bureaucracy.
I know when I give to a charity, I want to know something about how effective are they?
What are other people saying about how they think their dollars are being spent there?
What are the testimonies of people who've been helped?
But with government, you know, you qualify, you fill out a form, here's the check, see you later.
I mean, there's no accountability.
Yeah, a friend of mine who runs Mises Canada was uprooting his floorboards and came across a newspaper article from the 1930s where a number of insurance companies were getting together to try and find a cure or a way of preventing polio because of course it was such a catastrophic illness.
in the past.
And the insurance companies, of course, every time a polio claim came in, they had to raise rates.
It was hugely expensive.
So they had a huge incentive to try and eliminate this illness.
The people who provided iron lungs and wheelchairs and all of the other paraphernalia that were used, they had no incentive to eliminate polio because, and there's nothing wrong with it, it was just the source of their income.
And the other thing I think that gets set into motion when you get government bureaucracies is that they have every incentive to not only to avoid preventing poverty, but to actually farm it, like to increase it, to have more people dependent upon them.
Charities are limited in that by the skepticism and the competition for charitable dollars with other competing agencies.
But governments, you know, you get them to try and solve a problem and their profit comes from that problem.
And they no longer have a profit to eliminate or reduce that problem, which is why they tend to be like magnets to the iron filings of people who have those problems and work only to increase them.
Absolutely.
It's the nature of the beast.
There is no sense in trying to construct a government that will not do those things.
It is a very Essence of the very nature of government.
It's funding depends upon coercion to begin with, so there's a built-in lack of accountability there.
We try to fix that a little bit by having elections, but they're so imperfect as a way to hold politicians accountable for what they've done, that it's hardly a very reliable mechanism.
Nothing like the ability of a consumer to say to a business or charity, sorry, I don't like what you're doing.
See you later.
I'm going to go elsewhere.
I mean, there's accountability for you, but with government, you know, you got to cough up the money, whether it performs or not.
So, we just talked before beginning the conversation that you have laid down your travel bag for a little while and you're holding up in the writing den.
Now, what are the projects that you're going to be working on over the winter?
Of course, fee.org is where people can go to get more information about the Foundation for Economic Education, which is a great, great institution.
So, what is on your plate for the winter months?
Well, actually at the moment there are no books in the works, although I have plenty of ideas of books I'd like to get around to writing one of these days.
But I have a large and growing list of subjects I want to address in articles.
My first love is economic history.
And I, more specifically, I like Roman history.
I like U.S.
history.
The last half century of the 19th century is a specialty of mine.
And I think there's a lot of stuff there that hasn't yet been written about or popularized that would be very welcome by libertarians.
So between Christmas and New Year's and well into January, I hope to crank out maybe a dozen or 15 new articles, mostly on economic history.
But there's one thing I want to do that's not history-related.
Thinking ahead to, you know, the elections of 2016 and what they might produce, I don't put much faith in politics, I must add.
Nonetheless, I'm thinking about writing the speech the next president should give.
And, you know, a talk that sort of says, hey, you know, to the American people, it's time we level with you.
Here's what needs to be done.
So who knows?
I want to get to that and maybe it'll have a little bit of an impact.
I hope it will cause some people who are thinking of running for that office to muster the courage and the principle to stand for things that really matter.
Well, if you do get that speech written, send it to me.
I will put a full set together and put on an outrageously annoying southern accent and deliver it with all my acting background.
Well, thanks a lot, Lawrence.
It was hugely, hugely, as always, a great pleasure.
If you ever get a chance to see Lawrence live, it is the place to be.
His use of backup dances and flashpots is truly Impeccable.
It is a stage show rivaling only that from Cirque du Soleil, especially when it comes down upside down on the Lariat.
So, if you get a chance to see Lawrence live, feed.org.
We look forward to your articles and have yourself a very Merry Christmas.
Thanks, as always, for your time.
Thank you, Stefan.
I hope your viewers will also like my Facebook page, too.
Oh, yes.
We'll put a link for that in the show description.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you much.
Goodbye.
Bye.
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