Requiem For Dissent

Who Will Pay for the Violence of the State?

2008-05-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

"We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen." -- Ayn Rand (Anthem)

"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." (Adolph Hitler, 1933)

"Our nation must come together to unite."
(George W. Bush)

"You're either for us or against us"
(George W. Bush)

"We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated."
(Barack Obama)

The intellectual battle that each and every American faces today, is not about Liberalism, Conservatism, the Right Wing, or the Left Wing. The battle that we face is about one central question; do we want a Government for and by the people? Do want want a Government that is afraid of it's people, or do we want a people who are afraid of their Government? Do we want to live in a country that placed the State above the individual, or do we want a nation that respects, honors and empowers it's citizens to exercise their god given liberties. This is our battle, and those of us that happen to love liberty are outnumbered and outflanked.

While those who yearn for a "freer" society are outnumbered, misunderstood and generally laughed at, in the end our perspective will be the norm; however, then it may be too late. Thomas Jefferson understood that Liberty requires individual responsibility. We are individually responsible for the actions of our government. Those of us who voted for the Bush administration are personally accountable for the war in Iraq, and the loss of our liberties at home. We are accountable for the abuses of Guantanimo and Abu Gharib and even accountable to those American citizens who have been black bagged and whisked off to some secret military prison. Those who did not vote for Bush are also responsible, all us have handed the government the power to become the size that it has become. Long ago we chose to be selfish and ask the government to play Robin Hood and to steal from some, to give to others. We demanded that they pay for our kids to go to college, demanded that they force businesses to force their customers to not smoke, we have also individually ruined our neighborhoods and created a police state by forcing the government to keep drugs illegal. It is now time for us to pay the price of asking the State to perpetrate violence on our behalf.

Who will pay for the hundreds of thousands of innocents that we murdered? Who will pay for those whose lives we destroyed? We shall pay, and in some respects we already have. We've paid for our thugs with our liberty. WE NO LONGER HOLD THE CONTROLS. We no longer run the system. The state is lumbering about, like Dr. Frankensteins monster, about to attack his master who created him. Individually we can't destroy the Frankenstein, and we can't win by dealing with it rationally. The only means of restoring our liberty and thus our power, is through millions of angry Americans with pitchforks and flaming torches. This is not a day that I look forward to, but I assure you it will come.

The next time that you petition the State to perpetrate violence against another on your behalf, ask yourself, "Are you willing to hold a gun to your neighbor's head and to do it yourself?"

Our day of reckoning is at our doorstep, so take heed to these words. As the cost of fuel and food start to become out of reach for many people, the government will have only one course of action: locking people up.

Resisting The Leviathan, Fighting for My Life

2008-05-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Founding Father and our nations 2nd President, once wrote, "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide". In our present age, this 'Age of Information' as some say, perhaps one out of a hundred can explain the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy. I argue that this so called age of information is an Age of Ignorance. What passes for public discourse in this country is much like a rancid frankfurter, squishy, foul and utterly gut wrenching. The utter intellectual sloth that dominates the airwaves is an insult to anyone with even half a brain. "Is America ready for a black president" one network asks. "Is America ready for a Woman President" another network blurts like an awkward school boy amped up on caffeine, bursting at the seams to get his voice heard.

What passes for intellectual discourse in this day and age is putridly disgusting, and frankly rather embarrassing. We have three candidates running for the Office of President of the United States of America, who have political and public records that show nothing but disdain for the constitution, and nothing but disdain for every Man, Woman and Child born of circumstance rather than privilege. Yet the brainwashed masses march on into the abyss waving their "Obama Change!", "Hilary!" and "McCain 100 years of war!" banners. Never mind that fact that if you asked the common man what policy issues they admired about any of the three candidates, as I have done, they wouldn't be able to tell you. Instead you get a kind of pathetic answer, something along the lines of, "I like So-and-So because they seem presidential", or "This guy seems like he really wants to change things". The last time I checked, such techniques were known as showmanship. During the 1990's teenagers didn't accept such inauthenticity from rockstars on MTV, and yet now it's the status quo for those seeking the highest office in the land?

We are in this mess because we've lost our ability to think. Sure we can buy cars, houses and designers jeans, but when was last time someone you knew actually had a free-formed thought? Our citizenry are to busy watching lost, 24, or getting high. If Liberty requires individual responsibility, and we've abdicated that, then surely we deserve the fascism that is marching ever closer and closer? When you ask the rapist in the alley for mercy do you really think you'll get it?

If we are to maintain our dignity and to preserve whatever precious little liberty that we have left, then we must GET INVOLVED. As Jefferson once argued, The preservation of liberty is the responsibility of the individual. That means resisting the State when it wants to give you a free education, but stealing from others. That means fighting back, when they pass a law that not only infringes on your rights, but also your neighbors rights, such as the smoking ban. That's my rant for now.

In Liberty,

Corey

OBEDIENCE AS A RADICAL ACT

2008-04-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Obedience as a Radical Act

by Butler Shaffer

A recent news story told of cities that are removing their cameras that photograph cars running red lights at certain intersections. The reason? Drivers are aware of such devices and, rather than run the risk of getting a ticket in the mail, they stop in time. One would think making intersections safer might be a cause for self-congratulatory celebration at city hall. Not so. By reducing red-light violations, cities have also reduced the revenues coming from the traffic tickets.

This report reminded me of another phenomenon of local policing: the use of parking meters. On first impression, one might conclude that city governments would want car owners to keep meters filled with the necessary coinage for the duration of their stay. Quite the contrary. City officials count upon time expirations on meters so that motorists can be given tickets by the battalions of meter-maids who prowl the streets in search of prey. An additional dime or quarter in a meter pales in monetary significance to a $25 parking violation. This is why most cities have made it a misdemeanor for a person to put coins in a meter for cars other than their own.

A former student of mine once made an inquiry into the revenues cities derived from parking violations. Without such monies, he concluded, most cities could not sustain their existing municipal programs. This leads to an obvious conclusion: if you would like to reduce the scope of local governmental power, keep your parking meters filled!

Decades ago, I read a most important book: Humphrey Neill’s classic The Art of Contrary Thinking. While Neill focused largely on the world of market investing, his ideas carry over into almost all fields of human endeavor. The contrariness to which he addressed himself was not simply a reactive antagonism to existing practices or policies, but a challenge to use intelligent, reasoned analysis in considering alternatives. Unlike what passes for thinking in our world, "truth" is not necessarily found either in consensus-based opinion or in middle-ground "balances" of competing views: it is to be found wherever it may reside, even if only one mind is cognizant of it.

I have long found Neill’s book a useful metaphor for extending human understanding into realms he did not contemplate. One of these areas relates to the assessment of political systems. Government schools and the mainstream media condition us to take both the purposes and the consequences of governmental decision-making at face value; to believe that the failure of the state to accomplish its professed ends represents only a failure of "leadership" or inadequate factual "intelligence." But what if there are dynamics beneath the surface of events in our world that reflect alternative intentions or outcomes?

More so than in any other area of human behavior, the world of politics is firmly and irretrievably grounded in contradictions and illusions. If you were to ask others to identify the purposes for which governments were created, you would likely get the response: "to protect our lives, liberty, and property from both domestic and foreign threats." This is an article of faith into which most of us are indoctrinated since childhood, and to suggest any other explanation is looked upon as a blasphemous social proposition.

"But what," I ask, "are among the first things governments do when they get established? Do they not insist upon the power to take your liberty (by regulating what you can/cannot do), and your property (through taxation, eminent domain, and regulations), and your life (by conscripting you into their service, and killing you should you continue to resist their demands)?"

The marketplace – not that corporate-state amalgam that so many confuse with the market – doesn’t operate well on a bedrock of contradiction. If the manufacturer of the Belchfire-88 automobile starts producing vehicles with defective transmissions, consumers will cease buying this car, despite the millions of dollars spent on glittering advertising. Unless the company is resilient enough to respond to its failures, it will go out of business.

While contradictions confuse the information base upon which marketplace transactions are conducted and, thus, impede trade, political systems thrive on them. If the police system fails to curb crime, or the government schools continue to crank out ill-educated children, most of us are disposed to giving such agencies additional monies. The motivations for state officials become quite clear: "the more we fail, the more resources we are given." Contrary to marketplace dynamics, contradictions arise between the stated incentives of government programs (e.g., to reduce crime, to improve the quality of education) and the monetary rewards that flow from the failure to accomplish the declared purposes. Like the intersection cameras now being dismantled, public expectations end up being sacrificed to the mercenary interests of the state.

Perhaps there is a lesson for libertarian-minded persons in all of this. It is both useful and necessary for critics of state power to condemn governmental policies and practices. But there is a downside to just reacting to governmental actions on an issue-by-issue basis: state officials are in a position to control both the substance and the timing of events to which critics will respond. This allows the state to manipulate – and, thus, control – its opposition.

While such ad hoc resistance is essential to efforts to restore peace and liberty in the world, it is not sufficient. As we ought to have learned from the Vietnam War experience, opposition to war is not the same thing as the fostering of peace. We will not enjoy a peaceful world just by ending the slaughter in Iraq, if the thinking and the machinery for conducting future wars remains intact. What is needed is a broader base from which to demonstrate to others – as well as to ourselves – how the functional and harmful realities of state action contradict the avowed purposes for which such programs were supposedly undertaken.

Drawing from the earlier examples, one such tactic might be – depending upon the circumstances – to foster a widespread and persistent obedience to the dictates of state authority. As valuable a tool as the ACLU is in using the courts to attack governmental programs, judicial decisions upholding a right to privacy are not what is bringing down traffic cameras. It is the fact that such devices are inadvertently – through motorists’ obedience to them – promoting traffic safety (the stated purpose by which they were sold to the public) at the expense of their actual purposes (i.e., to generate more revenue for local governments).

Many cities have ordinances making it a misdemeanor for a homeowner to fail to cut his/her grass before it reaches a stated limit on height. Someone told me of an acquaintance who let his grass grow almost to the maximum height allowed. When one of his neighbors commented on this, the property owner went into his house, brought out a yardstick to measure the grass, then commented that the grass still had two inches to grow before reaching the statutorily-defined limit. He then reportedly asked the neighbor "you don’t want me to violate the ordinance, do you?"

A friend of mine told me of the practice of one of her male friends who was subject to the Selective Service System. One of the mandates of this agency was that those subject to conscription had to keep it advised of any relocations. This young man carried a stack of pre-addressed post-cards, upon which he would write: "I am now at the Rialto Theater at 3rd and Main" and drop it in a mailbox. After leaving the theater, he would send another post-card reading: "I am now at the Bar-B-Q Rib House at 10th and Oak." How much more effective might such a widespread over-compliance be in challenging the draft than hiring a lawyer to argue a 13th Amendment case to a court of law?

Along the same lines, I was at a conference where a man spoke of the compliance problems banks had in providing the Treasury Department with the information it demanded regarding customer banking transactions. In order not to be in violation of the government requirements, the banks were over-reporting such data, a practice that inconvenienced both the banks as well as the reporting agency that was suffering an information overload. The speaker suggested that the legislation be amended to provide a more narrowly-focused definition of what was required. During the question-and-answer session, I suggested that no such amendment be made; that the banks continue to report – and, perhaps, to increase the scope – of such transactions, thus providing the government with more information than it could control. As banking customers, each of us might choose to comply with the avowed purposes of such regulations – to combat "terrorism" and "drugs," right? – by sending the Treasury Department a monthly listing of all checks we had written!

During the Reagan administration, the government mandated the taking and reporting of urine samples to test for drug usage. At the time, I raised the question: what impact might it have on this program to have each one of us mail a small bottle of our urine to the White House every day, so as to satisfy the curiosity of the president? Rather than opposing this program, it might be brought down by our daily compliance – an act of obedience!

One of the more enjoyable demonstrations of the libertarian value of being overly obedient is found in the wonderful movie Harold and Maude. For those who have not seen this film, Harold is an iconoclastic denizen of the dark side. His constant faking of suicides to get the attention of his mother finally leads her to set up a meeting with her brother – an Army general – in an effort to get Harold interested in a military career. During his conversation with the general, Harold asks if he would be able to gather some "souvenirs" while in combat, "an eye, an ear, privates" or "one of these," whereupon he presents his uncle with a shrunken head. After earlier efforts to persuade Harold to join the Army, his uncle now tells him that he believes the military is not for him.

Such examples may open the minds of some to a wider variety of creative responses to statism. Neither blind obedience nor knee-jerk reaction are qualities to be embraced by intelligent minds. It has been the combined influence of such behavior that has made the world the madhouse that it is. But when engaged in selectively and with reasoned insight, obedience can occasionally produce beneficial consequences for a free and peaceful society. In helping the state play out the unintended consequences of its contradictions, an over-zealous cooperation may cause the state to dismantle itself.

Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.

JESSE IS SO FUN TO HAVE AROUND...

2008-04-13T21:03:00.001-07:00

And he did get rid of those pesky emissions tests!

The George W. Bush of 1929

2008-04-13T03:24:00.000-07:00

Hoover's Attack on Laissez-Faire

by Murray N. Rothbard

This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of America's Great Depression.

f government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire – to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates, and business liquidation will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch.

Any propping up of shaky positions postpones liquidation and aggravates unsound conditions. Propping up wage rates creates mass unemployment, and bolstering prices perpetuates and creates unsold surpluses.

Moreover, a drastic cut in the government budget – both in taxes and expenditures – will of itself speed adjustment by changing social choice toward more saving and investment relative to consumption. For government spending, whatever the label attached to it, is solely consumption; any cut in the budget therefore raises the investment-consumption ratio in the economy and allows more rapid validation of originally wasteful and loss-yielding projects.

Hence, the proper injunction to government in a depression is cut the budget and leave the economy strictly alone. Currently fashionable economic thought considers such a dictum hopelessly outdated; instead, it has more substantial backing now in economic law than it did during the 19th century.

Laissez-faire was, roughly, the traditional policy in American depressions before 1929. The laissez-faire precedent was set in America's first great depression, 1819, when the federal government's only act was to ease terms of payment for its own land debtors. President Van Buren also set a staunch laissez-faire course, in the Panic of 1837. Subsequent federal governments followed a similar path, the chief sinners being state governments, which periodically permitted insolvent banks to continue in operation without paying their obligations.[1] In the 1920–1921 depression, government intervened to a greater extent, but wage rates were permitted to fall, and government expenditures and taxes were reduced. And this depression was over in one year – in what Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson has called "our last natural recovery to full employment."

Laissez-faire, then, was the policy dictated both by sound theory and by historical precedent. But in 1929, the sound course was rudely brushed aside. Led by President Hoover, the government embarked on what Anderson has accurately called the "Hoover New Deal." For if we define "New Deal" as an antidepression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention – including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works) – Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons. As a consequence, he left office with the economy at the depths of an unprecedented depression, with no recovery in sight after three and a half years, and with unemployment at the terrible and unprecedented rate of 25 percent of the labor force.

$35 $29

Hoover's role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover's tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market. To portray the interventionist efforts of the Hoover administration to cure the depression, we may quote Hoover's own summary of his program, during his presidential campaign in the fall of 1932:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action…. No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times…. For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered…. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for … "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom…. We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.[2]

The Development of Hoover's Interventionism: Unemployment

Hoover, of course, did not come upon his interventionist ideas suddenly. It is instructive to trace their development and the similar development in the country as a whole, if we are to understand clearly how Hoover could so easily, and with such nationwide support, reverse the policies that had ruled in all previous depressions.

Herbert Clark Hoover was very much the "forward-looking" politician. We have seen that Hoover pioneered in attempts to intimidate investment bankers in placing foreign loans. Characteristic of all Hoover's interventions was the velvet glove on the mailed fist: i.e., the businessmen would be exhorted to adopt "voluntary" measures that the government desired, but implicit was the threat that if business did not "volunteer" properly, compulsory controls would soon follow.

When Hoover returned to the United States after the war and a long stay abroad, he came armed with a suggested "Reconstruction Program." Such programs are familiar to the present generation, but they were new to the United States in that more innocent age. Like all such programs, it was heavy on government planning, which was envisaged as "voluntary" cooperative action under "central direction."[3] The government was supposed to correct "our marginal faults" – including undeveloped health and education, industrial "waste," the failure to conserve resources, the nasty habit of resisting unionization, and seasonal unemployment.

Featured in Hoover's plan were increased inheritance taxes, public dams, and, significantly, government regulation of the stock market to eliminate "vicious speculation." Here was an early display of Hoover's hostility toward the stock market, a hostility that was to form one of the leitmotifs of his administration.[4] Hoover, who to his credit has never pretended to be the stalwart of laissez-faire that most people now consider him, notes that some denounced his program as "radical" – as well they might have.

So "forward-looking" was Hoover and his program that Louis Brandeis, Herbert Croly of the New Republic, Colonel Edward M. House, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other prominent Democrats for a while boomed Hoover for the presidency.[5]

Hoover continued to expound interventionism in many areas during 1920. Most relevant to our concerns was the conference on labor-management relations that Hoover directed from 1919 to 1920, on appointment by President Wilson and in association with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, a former official of the United Mine Workers of America. The conference – which included "forward-looking" industrialists like Julius Rosenwald, Oscar Straus, and Owen D. Young, labor leaders, and economists like Frank W. Taussig – recommended wider collective bargaining, criticized "company unions," urged the abolition of child labor, and called for national old-age insurance, fewer working hours, "better housing," health insurance, and government arbitration boards for labor disputes. These recommendations reflected Hoover's views.[6]

Hoover was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Harding in March 1921, under pressure from the left wing of the Republican Party, led by William Allen White and Judge Nathan Miller of New York. (Hoover was one of the first of the modern breed of politician, who can find a home in either party.) We have seen that the government pursued a largely laissez-faire policy in the depression of 1920–1921, but this was not the doing of Herbert Hoover. On the contrary, he "set out to reconstruct America."[7] He only accepted the appointment on the condition that he would be consulted on all economic policies of the federal government. He was determined to transform the Department of Commerce into "the economic interpreter to the American people (and they badly need one)."[8]

Hardly had Hoover assumed office when he began to organize an economic conference and a committee on unemployment. The committee established a branch in every state having substantial unemployment, along with subbranches in local communities and mayors' emergency committees in 31 cities.[9] The committee contributed relief to the unemployed, and also organized collaboration between the local and federal governments.

As Hoover recalls:

We developed cooperation between the federal, state, and municipal governments to increase public works. We persuaded employers to "divide" time among their employees so that as many as possible would have some incomes. We organized the industries to undertake renovation, repair, and, where possible, expand construction.[10]

Standard Oil of New Jersey announced a policy of laying off its older employees last, and it increased its repairs and production for inventory; US Steel also invested $10 million in repairs immediately upon conclusion of the conference.[11] In short, the biggest businesses were the first to agree.

Happily, the depression was about over by the time these measures could take effect, but an ominous shadow had been cast over any future depression, a shadow that would grimly materialize when the 1929 crash arrived. Once again, these measures bore the characteristic Hoover stamp; the government compulsion and planning were larded with the rhetoric of "voluntary cooperation." He spoke of these and other suggested measures as "mobilization of cooperative action of our manufacturers and employers, of our public bodies and local authorities." And there came into use the now all too familiar war analogy: "An infinite amount of misery could be saved if we have the same spirit of spontaneous cooperation in every community for reconstruction that we had in war."

While the government did not greatly intervene in the 1920–1921 recession, there were enough ominous seeds of the later New Deal. In December 1920, the War Finance Corporation was revived as an aid to farm exports, and a $100 million Foreign Trade Financial Corporation was established. Farm agitation against short-selling led to the Capper Grain Futures Act, in August 1921, regulating trading on the grain exchanges. Furthermore, on the state level, New York passed rent laws, restricting the eviction rights of landlords; Kansas created an Industrial Court regulating all key industries as "public utilities"; and the Non-Partisan League conducted socialistic experiments in North Dakota.[12]

Perhaps the most important development of all, however, was the President's Conference on Unemployment, called by Harding at the instigation of the indefatigable Herbert Hoover. This was probably the most fateful omen of antidepression policies to come. About 300 eminent men in industry, banking, and labor were called together in September 1921 to discuss the problem of unemployment. President Harding's address to the conference was filled with great good sense and was almost the swan song of the Old Order's way of dealing with depressions. Harding declared that liquidation was inevitable and attacked governmental planning and any suggestion of Treasury relief. He said, "The excess stimulation from that source is to be reckoned a cause of trouble rather than a source of cure."[13]

To the conference members, it was clear that Harding's words were mere stumbling blocks to the wheels of progress, and they were quickly disregarded. The conferees obviously preferred Hoover's opening speech, to the effect that the era of passivity was now over; in contrast to previous depressions, Hoover was convinced, the government must "do something."[14] The conference's aim was to promulgate the idea that government should be responsible for curing depressions, even if the sponsors had no clear idea of the specific things that government should do. The important steps, in the view of the dominant leaders, were to urge the necessity of government planning to combat depressions and to bolster the idea of public works as a depression remedy.[15] The conference very strongly and repeatedly praised the expansion of public works in a depression and urged coordinated plans by all levels of government.[16] Not to be outdone by the new administration, former President Wilson, in December, added his call for a federal public-works-stabilization program.

The extreme public-works agitators were disappointed that the conference did not go far enough. For example, the economist William Leiserson had thought that a Federal Labor Reserve Board "would do for the labor market what the Federal Reserve Board did for the banking interests." But the wiser heads saw that they had made a great gain. As a direct result of Hoover's conference, twice as many municipal bonds for public works were floated in 1921 and 1922 as in any previous year; federal highway grants-in-aid to the states totaled $75 million in the autumn of 1921, and American opinion was aroused on the entire subject.

It was no accident that the conference had arrived at its interventionist conclusions. As usually happens in conferences of this type, a small group of staff men, along with Herbert Hoover, actually prepared the recommendations that the illustrious front men duly ratified.[17] Secretary of the crucial Public Works Committee of the conference was Otto Tod Mallery, for a long time the nation's leading advocate of public-works programs in depressions. Mallery was a member and guiding spirit of the Pennsylvania State Industrial Board and Secretary of the Pennsylvania Emergency Public Works Commission, which had pioneered in public-works planning, and Mallery's resolutions thoughtfully pointed to the examples of Pennsylvania and California as beacon lights for the federal government to follow.[18]

Mallery was one of the leading spirits in the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) an organization of eminent citizens and economists devoted to the promotion of government intervention in the fields of labor, unemployment, and welfare. The Association had held the first national unemployment conference in early 1914. Now, its executive director, John B. Andrews, boasted that the presidential conference's recommendations followed the standard recommendations formulated by the AALL in 1915. These standard recommendations featured public works and emergency public relief, at the usual hours and wage rates – the wage rates of the boom period were supposed to be maintained.[19] Neither was the conference's following of the AALL line a coincidence. Aside from Mallery's critical role, the conference also employed the expert knowledge of the following economists, all of whom were officials of the AALL: John B. Andrews, Henry S. Dennison, Edwin F. Gay, Samuel A. Lewisohn, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Wesley C. Mitchell, Ida M. Tarbell, Mary Van Kleeck, and Leo Wolman.[20]

It seems clear that the businessmen at the conference were not supposed to mold policy; their function was to be indoctrinated with the Hoover-AALL line and then to spread the interventionist gospel to other business leaders. Andrews singled out for particular praise in this regard Joseph H. Defrees, of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who appealed to many business organizations to cooperate with the mayors' emergency committees, and generally to accept "business responsibility" to solve the unemployment problem. President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) also hailed the widespread acceptance by industry of its "responsibility" for unemployment, as an outcome of this conference.

Hoover did his best to intervene in the recession, attempting also to stimulate home construction and urging banks to finance more exports. Fortunately, however, Harding and the rest of the cabinet were not convinced of the virtues of governmental depression "remedies." But eight years later, Hoover was finally to have his chance. As Lyons concludes, "A precedent for federal intervention in economic depression was set, rather to the horror of conservatives."[21]

It is, of course, a sociological law that a government bureau, once launched, never dies, and the conference was true to this law. The conference resolved itself into three research committees, run by a staff of experts, with Hoover in overall command. One project bore fruit in Leo Wolman's Planning and Control of Public Works, a pro–public works study published in 1930. A second committee published a study on Seasonal Operation in the Construction Industry, in 1924, in cooperation with the Division of Building and Housing of the Department of Commerce. This work urged seasonal stabilization of construction, and was in part the result of a period of propaganda activity by the American Construction Council, a trade association headed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its foreword was written by Herbert Hoover.[22] The most important project was a study of Business Cycles and Unemployment, published in 1923.

Hoover invited the National Bureau of Economic Research (headed by Wesley C. Mitchell) to make a "fact-finding" study of the problems of forecasting and control of business cycles, and then appointed a Committee on Business Cycles to draft policy recommendations for the report. Chairman of the committee was Owen D. Young, and other members included Edward Eyre Hunt, who had been secretary of the President's Conference, Joseph Defrees, Mary Van Kleeck, Clarence Woolley, and Matthew Woll of the AF of L. Funds for the project were considerately supplied by the Carnegie Corporation. Wesley C. Mitchell, of the National Bureau and AALL, planned and directed the report, which included interventionist chapters by Mallery and Andrews on public works and unemployment benefits, and by Wolman on unemployment insurance. While the National Bureau was supposed to do only fact-finding, Mitchell, in discussing his report, advocated "social experimentation."[23]

Meanwhile, Hoover had not been idle on the more direct legislative front. Senator W.S. Kenyon of Iowa, in late 1921, introduced a bill supported by Hoover, embodying recommendations of the conference and specifically requiring a public-works-stabilization program. In the December 1921 hearings, the Kenyon Bill was supported by numerous leading economists, as well as by the American Federation of Labor, the American Engineering Council (of which Hoover had just been named president), and the United States Chamber of Commerce. One of the supporters was Wesley C. Mitchell. The bill never came to a vote, however, largely due to healthy senatorial skepticism based on laissez-faire ideas.

The next public-works-stabilization bill before Congress was the Zihlman Bill in the House. This was promoted by the National Unemployment League, formed in 1922 for that purpose. Hearings were held in the House Labor Committee in February 1923. Hoover backed the proposal, but it failed of adoption.

Finally, Hoover presented the report on business cycles and unemployment to the Congress, and strongly urged a public-works program in depressions. Later, in 1929, Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes would also support a public-works program.

In 1924, the AALL continued its agitation. It participated in a national conference proposing public-works planning. The conference was called by the Federated American Engineering Societies in January. In 1923, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were persuaded to adopt a stabilizing public-works program. Massachusetts was directly swayed by testimony from the ubiquitous Andrews and Mallery. These state programs were never translated into effective action, but they did indicate the developing climate. In January 1925, Hoover had the satisfaction of seeing President Coolidge adopt his position. Addressing the Associated General Contractors of America (a group that stood to gain by a government building program), Coolidge called for public-works planning to stabilize depressions. Senators George H. Pepper and James Couzens tried to pass public-works-planning legislation in 1925 and 1926, but they failed, along with later attempts by Senator Wesley Jones, who submitted bills that had been drafted in Hoover's Department of Commerce. The Republican Senate was the most recalcitrant, and one Pepper Bill was filibustered to death there. Even favorable reports by its Commerce Committee could not sway the Senate. By this time, not only Hoover and Coolidge, but also Secretary Mellon, the Democratic Party in 1924, and later Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, had endorsed the public-works program. In May 1928, Senator Robert F. Wagner (D, NY) introduced three bills for comprehensive public-works planning, including the creation of an employment stabilization board, but the plan was not considered by Congress.[24]

After Hoover was elected president, he became more circumspect in presenting his views, but he carried on the fight with renewed vigor. His technique was to "leak" the "Hoover Plan" to trusted associates, who would obviously be presenting Hoover's views. He chose as his vehicle Governor Ralph Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster presented a public-works plan to the Conference of Governors in late 1928, and waxed eloquent about the plan as designed to "prevent depressions."[25]

His use of the term "Road to Plenty" was hardly a coincidence, for Hoover had adopted the plan of Messrs. Foster and Catchings, which had recently been outlined in their famous book, The Road to Plenty (1928). The authors had submitted the plan to Brewster, and, after Hoover's endorsement, Brewster brought Professor William T. Foster along to the Governors' Conference as his technical advisor. Foster and Catchings, bellwethers of inflation and the bull market and leading underconsumptionists, had been closely involved in the public-works agitation. Foster was director of the Pollak Foundation for Economic Research, founded by investment banker Waddill Catchings. The pair had published a series of very popular books during the 1920s, agitating for such panaceas as public works and monetary inflation.[26]

Although seven or eight governors were enthusiastic about the Hoover-Foster-Catchings Plan, the conference tabled the idea. A large part of the press hailed the plan in extravagant terms, as "prosperity insurance," a "prosperity reserve," or as a "pact to outlaw depression"; while more conservative organs properly ridiculed it as a chimerical and socialistic effort to outlaw the law of supply and demand. It was not surprising that William Green of the AF of L hailed the plan as the most important announcement on wages and employment in a decade, or that the AF of L's John P. Frey announced that Hoover had now accepted the old AF of L theory that depressions are caused by underconsumption and low wages.[27] The press reported that "labor is jubilant, because leaders believe that the next President has found … a remedy for unemployment which, at least in its philosophy and its groundwork, is identical with that of labor."[28]

The closeness of Foster and Catchings to Hoover is again demonstrated by the detailed account of their own plan that they published in April 1929. In an article entitled "Mr. Hoover's Plan: What It Is and What It Is Not – A New Attack on Poverty," they wrote authoritatively that Hoover should wield a stabilization public-works reserve, not of $150 million, as had often been mentioned in previous years, but of the gigantic sum of $3 billion. This plan would iron out prices and the business cycle, and stabilize business. At last, scientific economics was to be wielded as a weapon by an American president: "The Plan … is business guided by measurements instead of hunches. It is economics for an age of science – economics worthy of the new President."[29]

The Development of Hoover's Interventionism: Labor Relations

We cannot fully understand Hoover's disastrous interference in the labor market during the depression without tracing the development of his views and actions on the labor front during the 1920s. We have seen that his Reconstruction Program and his Economic Conference of 1920 praised collective bargaining and unionism. In 1920, Hoover arranged a meeting of leading industrialists with "advanced views" on labor relations to try (unsuccessfully) to persuade them to "establish liaison" with the American Federation of Labor.[30] From 1919 through 1923, Hoover tried to persuade private corporations to insure the uninsurable by adopting unemployment insurance, and in 1925 he praised the American Federation of Labor as having "exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry." He also favored the compulsory unemployment of a child labor amendment, which would have lowered the national product, and raised labor costs as well as the wages of competing adult workers.

Most important of Hoover's activities in the labor field was his successful war against United States Steel and its chairman, Judge Elbert H. Gary, a war conducted as a "skillful publicity campaign" (in the words of a Hoover admirer) against "barbaric" hours of work in the steel industry.[31] The success of this battle made it much easier later on to persuade businessmen to go along with his labor policies during the 1929 depression. Hoover had decided that the 12-hour day in the steel industry must be eradicated and replaced by the 8-hour day. He persuaded Harding, lapsing from his usual laissez-faire instincts, to hold a conference of steel manufacturers in May 1922, at which Harding and Hoover called on the magnates to eliminate the 12-hour day. An admiring biographer notes with satisfaction that Hoover made the steel leaders "squirm."[32] It was of course easy for Harding and Hoover, far removed from the necessity of meeting a payroll or organizing production, to tell other people how long and under what conditions they should work. Hoover was supported by such "enlightened" steelmen as Alexander Legge and Charles R. Hook, but bitterly opposed by other leaders like Charles M. Schwab, and of course by Judge Gary, chairman of the board of US Steel and president of the American Iron and Steel Institute. The war was on.

The steel agitation, it should be pointed out, had not been begun by Hoover. It originated back in September 1919, when Gary refused to engage in collective bargaining with a workers' union. The workers struck on that issue, and the strike was led by Communist leader William Z. Foster. By the time the strike had failed, in January 1920, public opinion, properly regarding the strike as Bolshevik inspired, was squarely on the side of US Steel. By this time, however, the Interchurch World Movement had appointed a Commission of Inquiry into the strike; the commission issued a report favorable to the strikers in July 1920, and thereby initiated the 8-hour day agitation.[33] The report started a propaganda war, with the nation's leftists attempting to change the whole temper of public opinion. The Reverend A.J. Muste, the Socialist New York Call, Labor, and The Nation backed the report, while business associations strongly attacked the inquiry. The latter included the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Federation, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Many religious papers, however, were persuaded by the prestige of the committee (a prestige in religion that somehow carried over to secular matters) to change their previous views and to line up on the antisteel side.

It was at this critical point in the battle that Hoover entered the fray and persuaded President Harding to join him. Hoover "deliberately broke the story" of the unsuccessful private meeting with Gary, Schwab, and the others to the press. He told the press that President Harding was "attempting to persuade industry to adopt a reasonable working day."[34] Thus did the government mobilize public opinion on the side of the union. Hoover managed to have the national Engineering Societies – effectively dominated by Hoover – issue a report (again outside of their competence) endorsing the 8-hour day in November 1922. Hoover eulogized the report, wrote the introduction, and persuaded Harding to sign it.

Under the presidential pressure, Judge Gary appointed a committee of the steel industry, headed by himself, to study the question. The committee reported on May 25, 1923, unanimously rejecting the 8-hour day demands. US Steel also issued a reply to the Interchurch Report, written by Mr. Marshall Olds, and endorsed by the prominent economist, Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks. Abuse rained down on the steel industry from all sides. Forgotten were the arguments used by US Steel, e.g., that the steel workers preferred the longer 12-hour day because of the increased income, and that production would suffer under an 8-hour schedule.[35]

This and other arguments were swept away by the wave of emotionalism whipped up over the issue. The forces of the Social Gospel hurled anathemas. "Social Justice" and "Social Action" committees of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations set up a clamor on issues about which they knew virtually nothing. Attaching a quantitative codicil to the qualitative moral codes of the Bible, they did not hesitate to declare that the 12-hour day was "morally indefensible." They did not elaborate whether it had suddenly become "morally indefensible" or whether it, and even longer work days, had also been morally wicked throughout earlier centuries. If the latter, it was certainly strange that countless preceding generations of churchmen had overlooked the alleged sin; if the former, then a curious historical relativism was now being mingled with the presumably eternal truths of the Bible.

The American Association for Labor Legislation of course entered the fray, and threatened federal maximum-hour legislation if the steel industry did not succumb to its imperious demands. But the most effective blow was a stern public letter of rebuke sent to Gary by President Harding on June 18, written for the president by Hoover. Faced by Harding's public requests and demands, Gary finally surrendered in July, permitting Hoover to write the notice of triumph into Harding's Independence Day address.

The Hoover-Harding victory over US Steel effectively tamed industry, which, faced by this lesson, no longer had the fight to withstand a potent combination of public and governmental pressures.[36]

Nor did this exhaust Hoover's labor interventionism during the 1920s. Hoover played a major role in fostering railway unions, and in foisting upon the railroad industry the Railway Labor Act – America's first permanent incursion of the federal government into labor-management relations. The railroad problem had begun in World War I, when the federal government seized control of the nation's rails. Run by Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, the government's policy was to encourage unionization. After the war was over, the railway unions tried their best to perpetuate this bastion of socialism, and advocated the Plumb Plan, which called for joint operation of the railroads by employers, unions, and the government.

The railroads were returned to private owners in 1920, but Congress gave a dangerous sop to the unions by setting up a Railroad Labor Board, with tripartite representation, to settle all labor disputes. The board's decisions did not have the force of law, but they could exert an undue pressure on public opinion. The unions were happy with this arrangement, until the government representatives saw the light of economic truth during the depression of 1921, and recommended reductions in wage rates. The nonoperating railway unions conducted a nationwide strike in defiance of the proposed reduction in the summer of 1922. While Attorney General Daugherty acted ably in support of person and property by obtaining a federal injunction against union violence, the "horrified" Mr. Hoover, winning Secretary of State Hughes to his side, persuaded Harding to force Daugherty to remove the injunction. Hoover also intervened privately but insistently to try to wring pro-union concessions from the railroads.

After the unions lost their strike, they determined to rewrite the law so that they could become established with the help of federal coercion. From 1923 on, the unions fought for a compulsory arbitration law. They achieved this goal with the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which, in effect, guaranteed collective bargaining to the railway unions. The bill was drafted by union lawyers Donald Richberg and David E. Lilienthal, and also by Herbert Hoover, who originated the idea of the Railway Labor Mediation Board. Seeing the growing support for such a law and lured by the promised elimination of strikes, the bulk of the railroad industry surrendered and went along with the bill. The Railway Labor Act – the first giant step toward the collectivization of labor relations – was opposed by only a few far-sighted railroads, and by the National Association of Manufacturers.[37]

Even more mischievous than Hoover's pro-union attitude was his adoption of the new theory that high wage rates are an important cause of prosperity. The notion grew during the 1920s that America was more prosperous than other countries because her employers generously paid higher wage rates, thus insuring that workers had the requisite purchasing power to buy industry's products. While high real wage rates are actually the consequence of greater productivity and capital investment, this theory put the cart before the horse by claiming that high wage rates were the cause of high productivity and living standards. It followed, of course, that wage rates should be maintained, or even raised, to stave off any threatening depression. Hoover began championing this theory during the Unemployment Conference of 1921. Employers on the manufacturing committee wanted to urge lowering wage rates as a cure for unemployment, but Hoover successfully insisted on killing this recommendation.[38] By the mid-1920s, Hoover was trumpeting the "new economics" and attacking the "old economics" that resisted the new dispensation. In a speech on May 12, 1926, Secretary Hoover spread the gospel of high wage rates that was to prove so disastrous a few years later:

not so many years ago – the employer considered it was in his interest to use the opportunities of unemployment and immigration to lower wages irrespective of other considerations. The lowest wages and longest hours were then conceived as the means to obtain lowest production costs and largest profits …. But we are a long way on the road to new conceptions. The very essence of great production is high wages and low prices, because it depends upon a widening … consumption, only to be obtained from the purchasing-power of high real wages and increased standards of living.[39]

Hoover was not alone in celebrating the "new economics." The National Industrial Conference Board reported that, while during the 1920–1921 depression, wage rates fell by 19 percent in one year, the high-wage theory had taken hold from then on. More and more people adopted the theory that wage-cutting would dry up purchasing power and thus prolong the depression, while wage rates held high would quickly cure business doldrums. This doctrine, allied with the theory that high wage rates cause prosperity, was preached by many industrialists, economists, and labor leaders throughout the 1920s.[40] The Conference Board reported that "Much was heard of the dawn of a new era in which major business depressions could have no place." And Professor Leo Wolman has stated that the prevailing theory during the 1920s was that "high and rising wages were necessary to a full flow of purchasing power and, therefore, to good business."[41]

As the final outgrowth of the famous conference of 1921, Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes issued a general multivolume report on the American economy in 1929. Once again, the basic investigations were made by the National Bureau. The committee did not at all foresee the Great Depression. Instead, it hailed the price stability of the 1920s and the higher wages. It celebrated the boom, little realizing that this was instead its swan song: "with rising wages and relatively stable prices we have become consumers of what we produce to an extent never before realized." In the early postwar period, the committee opined, there were reactionary calls for the "liquidation" of labor back to prewar standards. But, soon, the "leaders of industrial thought" came to see that high wages sustained purchasing power, which in turn sustained prosperity.

They began consciously to propound the principle of high wages and low costs as a policy of enlightened industrial practice. This principle has since attracted the attention of economists all over the world – its application on a broad scale is so novel.[42]

This change in the industrial climate, according to the committee, came about in a few short years, largely due to the influence of the Conference on Unemployment. By the fall of 1926, steel magnate Eugene Grace was already heralding the new dispensation in the Saturday Evening Post.[43]

The conclusions of the Hoover-appointed economic committee were ominous in their own right. "To maintain the dynamic equilibrium" of the 1920s, it declared, leadership must be at hand to provide more and more "deliberate public attention and control." In fact, "research and study, the orderly classification of knowledge … well may make complete control of the economic system a possibility." To maintain the equilibrium, "We … [must] develop a technique of balance," the technique to be supplied by economists, statisticians, and engineers, all "working in harmony together."

And so, President Herbert Hoover, on the eve of the Great Depression, stood ready to meet any storm warnings on the business horizon.[44] Hoover, the "great engineer," stood now armed on many fronts with the mighty weapons and blueprints of a "new economic science." Unfettered by outworn laissez-faire creeds, he would use his "scientific" weapons boldly, if need be, to bring the business cycle under governmental control.

Hoover did not fail to employ promptly and vigorously his "modern" political principles, or the new "tools" provided him by "modern" economists. And, as a direct consequence, America was brought to her knees as never before. Yet, by an ironic twist of fate, the shambles that Hoover abandoned when he left office was attributed, by Democratic critics, to his devotion to the outworn tenets of laissez-faire.

Notes

[1] For an appreciation of the importance of this fact for American monetary history, see Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking (London: P.S. King and Son, 1936).

[2] From his acceptance speech on August 11, and his campaign speech at Des Moines on October 4. For a full account of the Hoover speeches and antidepression program, see William Starr Myers and Walter H. Newton, The Hoover Administration (New York: Scholarly Press, 1936), part 1; William Starr Myers, ed., The State Papers of Herbert Hoover, (New York. 1934), vols. 1 and 2. Also see Herbert Hoover, Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (New York: Macmillan, 1937), vol. 3.

[3] See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1959), vol. 14, p. 27.

[4] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 29. Hoover's evasive rhetoric is typical: "I insisted that these improvements could be effected without government control, but the government should cooperate by research, intellectual leadership [sic], and prohibitions upon the abuse of power."

[5] Cf. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 81ff.; Harris Gaylord Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 24ff.

[6] Hoover records that the "extreme right" was hostile to these proposals – and understandably so – and notably the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Also see Eugene Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President (New York: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 213–14.

[7] Hoover to Wesley C. Mitchell, July 29, 1921. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 364.

[8] Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, p. 26.

[9] See Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2; Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression; and Lloyd M. Graves, The Great Depression and Beyond (New York: Brookmire Economic Service, 1932), p. 84.

[10] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 41–42.

[11] See Joseph H. McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results" (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1922), p. 33.

[12] See Graves, The Great Depression and Beyond.

[13] See E. Jay Howenstine, Jr., "Public Works Policy in the Twenties," Social Research (December, 1946): 479–500.

[14] See Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 230.

[15] In reality, public works only prolong the depression, aggravate the malinvestment problem, and intensify the shortage of savings by wasting more capital. They also prolong unemployment by bolstering wage rates. See Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 792–94.

[16] The payment of charity wages as high as market rates began in the depression of 1893; public works as a depression remedy started on a municipal scale in the recession of 1914–1915. The secretary of Mayor John Purroy Mitchell's New York Committee on Unemployment urged public works in 1916, and Nathan J. Stone, chief statistician of the US Tariff Board, urged a national public works and employment reserve in 1915. Immediately after the war, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and Governor Frank O. Lowden of Illinois urged a national public-works-stabilization program. See Raphael Margolin, "Public Works as a Remedy for Unemployment in the United States" (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1928).

[17] McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results," p. 16.

[18] Pennsylvania had established the first public-works-stabilization program in 1917, largely inspired by Mallery; it was later repealed. Mallery had also been made head of a new Division of Development of Public Works by States and Cities During the Transition Period, in the Wilson administration. See Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization," vol. 4, p. 7.

[19] See John B. Andrews, "The President's Unemployment Conference – Success or Failure?" American Labor Legislation Review (December, 1921): 307–10. Also see "Unemployment Survey," in ibid, pp. 211–12.

[20] American Labor Legislation Review (March, 1922): 79. Other officials of the AALL included: Jane Addams, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Professor John R. Commons, Professor Irving Fisher, Adolph Lewisohn, Lillian Wald, Felix M. Warburg, Woodrow Wilson, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

[21] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 230.

[22] The American Construction Council was formed in response to the hounding of the New York construction industry by state and federal authorities during the depression of 1920–1921. The governments charged the industry with "price-fixing" and "excessive profits." Hoover and Roosevelt together formed the council in the summer of 1922, to stabilize and organize the industry. The aim was to cartelize construction, impose various codes of operation and "ethics," and to plan the entire industry. Franklin Roosevelt, as president of the council, took repeated opportunity to denounce profit seeking and rugged individualism. The "codes of fair practice" were Hoover's idea. See Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Economic Thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 102ff.

[23] Wesley C. Mitchell, "Unemployment and Business Fluctuations," American Labor Legislation Review (March, 1923): 15–22.

[24] The following economists, businessmen, and other leaders had by now served as officers of the American Association for Labor Legislation, in addition to those named above: Ray Stannard Baker, Bernard M. Baruch, Mrs. Mary Beard, Joseph P. Chamberlain, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Fred C. Croxton, Paul H. Douglas, Morris L. Ernst, Herbert Feis, S. Fels, Walton H. Hamilton, William Hard, Ernest M. Hopkins, Royal W. Meeker, Broadus Mitchell, William F. Ogburn, Thomas I. Parkinson, Mrs. George D. Pratt, Roscoe Pound, Mrs. Raymond Robins, Julius Rosenwald, John A. Ryan, Nahum I. Stone, Gerard Swope, Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip, Joseph H. Willits, and John G. Winant.

[25] Ralph Owen Brewster, "Footprints on the Road to Plenty – A Three Billion Dollar Fund to Stabilize Business," Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 28, 1928): 25–27.

[26] The Foster-Catchings Plan called for an organized public-works program of $3 billion to iron out the business cycle and stabilize the price level. Individual initiative, the authors decided, may be well and good, but in a situation of this sort "we must have collective leadership." William T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, The Road to Plenty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), p. 187. For a brilliant critique of the underconsumptionist theories of Foster and Catchings, see F.A. Hayek, "The 'Paradox' of Savings," in Profit, Interest, and Investment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), pp. 199–263.

[27] See Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 4, pp. 349–50.

[28] "Hoover's Plan to Keep the Dinner-Pail Full," Literary Digest (December 8, 1928): 5–7.

[29] William T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, "Mr. Hoover's Plan – What It Is and What It Is Not – The New Attack on Poverty," Review of Reviews (April, 1929): 77–78. For a laudatory survey of Hoover's pro–public works views in the 1920s, by an official of the AALL, see George H. Trafton, "Hoover and Unemployment," American Labor Legislation Review (September, 1929): 267ff.; and idem, "Hoover's Unemployment Policy," American Labor Legislation Review (December, 1929): 373ff.

[30] Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 147. As early as 1909, Hoover had called unions "proper antidotes for unlimited capitalistic organizations," ibid., p. 250.

[31] Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, p. 28.

[32] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 231.

[33] See Marshall Olds, Analysis of the Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1922), pp. 417ff.

[34] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 231.

[35] Also forgotten was the fact that wages were involved in the struggle, as well as hours. The workers wanted shorter hours with a "living wage," or as the Inquiry Report put it, "a minimum comfort wage" – in short, they wanted higher hourly wage rates. See Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles (New York: S.A. Russell, 1956), pp. 255ff.

[36] On the 12-hour day episode, see Frederick W. MacKenzie, "Steel Abandons the 12-Hour Day," American Labor Legislation Review (September, 1923): 179ff.; Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 103–04; and Robert M. Miller, "American Protestantism and the Twelve-Hour Day," Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (September, 1956): 137–48. In the same year, Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania forced the anthracite coal mines of that state to adopt the eight-hour day.

[37] For a pro-union account of the affair, see Donald R. Richberg, Labor Union Monopoly (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), pp. 3–28; also see Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2.

[38] See McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results," p. 17.

[39] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 108.

[40] One of these industrialists was the same Charles M. Schwab, head of Bethlehem Steel, who had bitterly fought Hoover in the 8-hour day dispute. Thus, in early 1929, Schwab opined that the way to keep prosperity permanent was to "pay labor the highest possible wages." Commercial and Financial Chronicle 128 (January 5, 1929): 23.

[41] National Industrial Conference Board, Salary and Wage Policy in the Depression (New York: Conference Board, 1932), p. 3; Leo Wolman, Wages in Relation to Economic Recovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 1.

[42] Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), vol. 1, p. xi.

[43] Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes in the United States, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), vol. 2; Henry Dennison, "Management," p. 523.

[44] Another important foretaste of the later National Recovery Act (NRA) was Hoover's use of the Department of Commerce during the 1920s to help trade associations form "codes," endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to curtail competition in the name of eliminating "unfair" trade practices.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money, For a New Liberty, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books and articles. He was also the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Copyright © 2008 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved.

Public Transit? No, Private Transit!

2008-04-11T00:31:00.000-07:00

Socialists, wannabe college professors and anyone promoting a political agenda that they garnered from the glistening screens of CNN utopianism, often times utilize a certain mental trickery to portray those they disagree with seem "extremist". The trick involves an unspoken assumption that the State and Society are one and in the same. For example, if I state that, "Public transit is a poor and inefficient means of carting people around, not to mention a waste of tax payer dollars", then the Cooper Anderson struck, "government is awesome" do-gooder might respond with, "Why are you against Mass Transist? Are you some kind of oil company lobbyist?". This mode of reasoning is anti-intellectual at best and terribly dishonest at worst. Just because I think pointing a gun to hard working people of Minnesota and forcing them to empty their wallets to the tune of $1,000,000,000 to build a poorly (if at all) managed train and tracks that hauls people from downtown Minneapolis to the Mall of America seems like THEFT to me, doesn't mean that I don't like mass transportation. I just don't like government owned, operated mass transportation that uses force to steal my property to pay for it.

Once upon a time the Twin Cities had a privately owned mass transit system that was the envy of the nation. Did you get that? We had a PRIVATELY owned mass transportation system that made a profit, and provided a service that individuals were willing to pay for WITHOUT the threat of force on behalf of the government. Twin City Rapid Transit was started back in 1867 and was considered the best mass transit option in the entire United States, . TCRT operated for almost a hundred years, until GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil formed a holding company that bought and destroyed the company. The media and the history books like to blame the "evil capitalists" for doing such a terrible thing, but these were no capitalists. These were corporatists, who had the go ahead of a federal government who promised cheap subsidized oil, and free federally funded multi-lane highways. If the government would have never subsidized the automobile, gas and highways, we'd still have a highly functional, privately paid for and maintained transportation system. We'd be $1,000,000,000 better off as tax payers and only the people who actually used the train would pay for it. I'm guessing that it would probably offer free wireless internet also.

The point of this rant is that just because someone argues against a government program, likes public schools, public transit or public health care, it doesn't mean that they are against those programs. They just believe that someone else can do them better, cheaper and without the use of a gun pointed at the individuals head.

OBAMA SUCKS

2008-04-10T01:35:00.001-07:00

WASHINGTON

2008-04-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me this. I thought I'd share...

Why Republican Leadership Should Support Ron Paul

2008-04-09T02:11:00.000-07:00

My experiences over the past few months have shown me that there are many misconceptions about what it is to be a Republican. It doesn't help that many of these misconceptions are propagated at the hands of the left for political gain, and that your average American doesn't have a working knowledge of basic political science; however, that is an argument for another day. I've considered myself many things as I've slogged through the mud these twenty-nine years trying to identify my political and philosophical beliefs. I used to belief that it was me who changed labels as I shifted from Republican to Libertarian to Republican to Anarchist to Libertarian and around and around again. Now I know that my ideals have been consistent, it's society's that have changed.

First and foremost I believe in the supremacy of the individual above the state. The constitution was written to protect the individual from the tyranny that is inherent in any government and any state authority. The Republican party believes this when it comes to some issues, but changes its mind when it comes to spying on us, and sending boys over seas. The common myth is that your average Republican is in sync with the wiles of the Bush administration and McCain's war drums. What I realize now, though my campaigning to be a RNC delegate and through my volunteerism in the MN GOP is that most Republicans do not follow the Neocon agenda. Most republicans are like me.

On Saturday while I was attending the 5th Congressional District Republican Convention, I shook hundreds of peoples hands and spoke to them. There were some cranky folks who asked me who I would support if I was elected as a delegate, and of course I answered. But, there were far more people, even a majority of people who praised me for what I was doing. Some of these people were even party insiders. When our Ron Paul friendly candidates ran for delegate and alternate delegate positions we took then swiftly and easily. Ron Paul folks knew who we where, but outspoken Ron Paul voters were not in the majority. I know this, because one guy who ran as an alternate, gave a two minutes rant on how he would never support McCain, he would not support the party unless they supported Ron Paul etc. Needless to say, he didn't get a majority. The rest of us did.

This suggests that there are a lot more Ron Paul supporters within the GOP than it seems, and these supporters aren't just Libertarians or party infiltrators but life long Republicans who are mighty angry at the direction the party and our nation seem to be headed.

To be fair, Congressional District 5 has some fantastic GOP leadership (Carleton Crawford, Bob Olson), and my BPOU has a fantastic chair (Barry Hickethier). We may or may not see eye to eye, but they are more than fair, they are welcoming and they want to grow the party. However, I think things at the state level might be a bit different. When Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman spoke, they knew who they were addressing and they urged party uniformity. They told us to support McCain no matter what, as it was better than electing a Democrat to the presidency. Wasn't that what we did with Bush?

Nationwide Republican Party membership is down. The Democratic party is the dominant party and it really scares me. I'm putting my time in to support the GOP and sure, to try to get Ron Paul into the White House, because I believe in the Founders vision of America. As Ron Paul's campaign has proven there are a lot of enthusiastic young people out there who feel the same way, and some of them are even running for state and local offices. The GOP Party Leadership needs to welcomes these people and give Ron Paul a fair shot. He is the true lifeblood of the party and his supporters can strengthen and bring the party back to it's roots.

OBEY

2008-04-09T01:05:00.000-07:00

OBEY YOUR MASTERS IN ALL THINGS

by William L. Anderson

As I write this review of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s A Nation of Sheep, I am about 37,000 feet above the ground in a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737. That means that I dutifully took off my shoes, belt and whatever else I had on my being that was metallic and went sheep-like through the infamous Transportation Security Administration gauntlet.

On my trip to the airport, I made sure I did not violate speed limits – or at least drive fast enough to be conspicuous on the highway – and at the rest stops, I did not park in the spaces that were reserved for Pennsylvania state troopers. Once on the plane, I did not violate FAA regulations or do anything that would call unwanted attention to me. When we land in Las Vegas, I will make sure that I do exactly what the authorities tell me, and when I fly back home in four days, you can bet I will not place my flying "privileges" in jeopardy.

To most Americans, obeying the authorities at all times, especially in the post-9/11 age, seems like the thing to do. I recall a conversation with a prominent conservative evangelical who works in Washington, D.C., barking the following words to me: "Are you telling me that our government is tyrannical?" The tone of his voice, and the things he said afterward clearly indicated that the U.S. Government, and especially government under the Republican Party, displays no telltale signs of tyranny.

After all, he reasoned, tyranny is carried out by people with "SS" on their collars, who wear leather boots, goose step, give stiff-armed salutes, and speak in a foreign language. Tyranny is Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Judge Napolitano is not buying any of this sophistry, and in A Nation of Sheep, he explains unequivocally that my Republican operative friend is wrong. Whatever belief that Americans hold in regard to their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, reality is much different. The USA no longer is the Land of the Free, no matter how many times that line is belted out when people sing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Napolitano wastes no time in laying out the grim picture that is the wreckage of long-held American freedoms:

Picture this: The Attorney General of the United States testifies under oath that the president is not ordering federal agents to read the mail, listen to the telephone calls, and monitor the computer keystrokes of ordinary Americans, without a warrant to do so from a judge. That would be criminal. But six months later, the president admits that he has done so.

Picture this: The Constitution prohibits Congress from abridging free speech. But suddenly, Congress made it a crime to talk about receiving self-written warrants from an FBI agent.

Such things, Napolitano notes, are not imaginary, but are the present state of U.S. policy. These things are done in the name of "protecting the homeland," but the good judge is not buying that line, nor does he agree with the premise that in order to "preserve freedom," the state needs to take away "some" of those very freedoms it supposedly protects. Napolitano asks the simple question: "How can the government possibly preserve freedom by taking it away?"

After his introduction, in which Napolitano clearly lays out his thesis, he then explains the natural rights origin of freedom, and how many of the founders of the United States held to a natural rights position. Law, in their view, existed to protect individual liberties from those who would deny them. Today, the deniers of liberty are those legally entrusted to protect it.

Napolitano quotes Benjamin Franklin, who certainly knew something about a natural rights origin of law: "Those who give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." The judge explains that people who are willing to give up liberty are giving power to a government that will take away the rest of their liberties, and make the people even more unsafe, as a predatory government never brings safety.

In his first chapter, Napolitano takes issue with legal positivists, who seem to dot the political landscape these days. I remember speaking to a True Believing socialist who held a high place in President Jimmy Carter’s government, as he told me, "The Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is."

Certainly, it seems that legal positivism holds sway. From the writings of Judge Richard Posner to the Federalist Society to the New York Times to the leaders of both major political parties (or the "Republicrats or Democans"), the idea of natural rights and natural liberty seem not only passé, but also downright subversive to Good Government. Even though politicians will make passing remarks about individual rights and Constitutional government, nonetheless they govern as legal positivists who do what they want whenever they have enough weapons to back up their positions.

In Chapter Two, Napolitano asks the simple question: "Are you a sheep or a wolf?" Sheep, he writes, "stay with their herd and follow their shepherd without questioning where he is leading them. Sheep trust that the shepherd looks out for their safety."

While most Americans would not like being called sheep, nonetheless the conversation in the TSA lines generally moves along a "it’s inconvenient, but I am willing to put up with it because it makes us safer" line. Americans dutifully accept the tickets police officers give them for slight infractions of the speed limit, and if anyone resists in the slightest, Americans will give unqualified support to the police when they tase or even shoot that person who really posed no danger to anyone.

From there the Good Judge goes through a litany of sins committed by the state, from the self-written warrants that federal officers now may write to the destruction of habeas corpus. Government at all levels is destroying rights and most Americans seem not to care, or will make excuses for the state.

Yet, the first aim that Napolitano takes is not at the authorities, as critical as he is of them. Rather, he writes that Americans have become sheep, and the state is the Bad Shepherd. Perhaps the greatest irony comes with the annual July 4 celebrations in which Americans now hold to be a day to give homage and honor to their government. That July 4 marks the signing of a document that declared the British state to have an illegitimate claim upon the lives of the signers and American colonials is lost completely in the mix of parades and fireworks (which are set off by state-approved entities – for public safety, of course).

That the present U.S. Government makes King George’s "tyrannical" rule look to be downright benign libertarianism does not seem to faze Americans at all. If one were to challenge the state (as opposed to telling a bunch of Democrats, heads nodding all, that George W. Bush is a Really Bad Guy), one is seen as challenging freedom. Indeed, we have gone from a view of the state being an entity that was supposed to protect liberty to an entity that protects us by taking away liberty.

The reasons for this decline are many, and they have been discussed in other articles and papers. I would like to present a different view, one that has the economist’s explanation. It goes back to my dutifully and quietly standing in the TSA line.

Yes, I knew that the TSA is a terrible organization that has no place in a free society. Heck, I even have written articles to that point. Yes, I knew that the kind of searches that the TSA does regularly are things that our Founding Fathers would never have tolerated.

But, I just wanted to get on the plane. Any resistance on my part would mean I would have to pay my university hundreds of dollars for the air fare, lodging, my advance for meals, and the like, since I would not be permitted to fly that day. Moreover, any resistance on my part would have meant I could be charged with "interfering with the duties of a federal officer," which carries 20 years in prison.

Resistance would have meant I would be out of work and in prison, and my family would be on the streets. Resistance would have been something for which I would have had to pay the price – alone. The TSA would have declared that its officers "carried out their duties as they have been trained" and most Americans would have agreed that whatever punishment I received was deserved.

In economics, we would say simply that the marginal costs I would have incurred for resistance would have outweighed any benefits on the margin that I would have gained from standing up to the TSA. Not only would my life and the lives of my wife and children be destroyed, but nothing good would come of it. The TSA would be given even more power, and my life would be over and government would have grown even more.

Robert Higgs has pointed out that governments grow because they promote and exploit fear. The idea is that people come to believe that unless the state is protecting them, the "bad guys" might hurt or kill them.

However, there is another aspect of the state and fear, and that is the fear that all of us have of the state and the individuals who work for it. On the local level, there are police, tax collectors, social workers, and others who are given the power to destroy our lives – and not pay a price, themselves. On the state and federal level, it is even worse. Resistance really can be dangerous.

The problem is that people – liberals and conservatives – believe that those who resist are the bad guys. Government cannot be the "bad guys," no matter what happens. Yes, in conversations with Democrats where I work, they are all-too-happy to pin the label of "tyrant" on George W. Bush. But, when I bring up the abuses of the Clinton Administration, from the massacre at Waco to the vicious bombing of Serbia, they suddenly become Defenders of State Supremacy. It is not that these people are against misuse of government power; they just want their people to be able to wield the batons and shoot the guns.

Governments grow because the benefits are concentrated and the costs are diffused. Yet, they also grow because the penalties for resisting injustice are draconian and are felt by that relatively small number of people who resist. At the same time, there is little sympathy for the resisters, but much sympathy and support for the abusers.

There seems to be an inevitability regarding the nature of the growth of government and the subsequent cowing of the people. Yes, as the Good Judge says, we truly have become a nation of sheep. The shame is that we have a heritage of freedom, but have thrown it away with both hands. However, they still let us get on the planes.

Although I might seem to be pessimistic, in truth, freedom and liberty always have been on the defensive throughout human history. We are given thousands of excuses for giving up our freedom, or not resisting the authorities when they try to deprive us of our God-given liberties.

The importance of this book is that it provides the framework for which we can – and should – hold government accountable for violating our rights. Furthermore, in those brief, shining moments when freedom has been the polestar of a society, the very principles that Napolitano lays out are the principles that have guided those who led the way. For that, alone, this book is worth reading, and one hopes that people will understand the judge’s message to all of us to hold fast to our liberties, as well as the very ideal of liberty.

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services.

Your Government At Work

2008-04-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

GAO: Millions Wasted on Gov't Cards

By HOPE YEN Associated Press Writer

Associated Press Writer

Federal employees charged millions of dollars for Internet dating, tailor-made suits, lingerie, lavish dinners and other questionable expenses to their government credit cards over a 15-month period, congressional auditors say.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, examined spending controls across the federal government following reports of credit-card abuse at departments including Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

The review of card spending at more than a dozen departments from 2005 to 2006 found that nearly 41 percent of roughly $14 billion in credit-card purchases, whether legitimate or questionable, did not follow procedure - either because they were not properly authorized or they had not been signed for by an independent third party as called for in federal rules to deter fraud.

For purchases over $2,500, nearly half - or 48 percent - were unauthorized or improperly received.

Out of a sample of purchases totaling $2.7 million, the government could not account for hundreds of laptop computers, iPods and digital cameras worth more than $1.8 million. In one case, the U.S. Army could not say what happened to computer items making up 16 server configurations, each of which cost nearly $100,000.

Agencies often could not provide the required paperwork to justify questionable purchases. Investigators also found that federal employees sometimes double-billed or improperly expensed lavish meals and Internet dating for many months without question from supervisors; the charges were often noticed only after auditors or whistle-blowers raised questions.

"Breakdowns in internal controls over the use of purchase cards leave the government highly vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse," investigators wrote, calling the governmentwide failure rate in enforcing controls "unacceptably high.
"

"This audit demonstrates that continued vigilance over purchase card use is necessary," the 57-page report stated.

The report calls for the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget, both of which help administer the government's credit-card program, to set guidance to improve accounting for purchased items, particularly Palm Pilots, iPods and other electronic equipment that could be easily stolen.

OMB and GSA were also urged to tighten controls over convenience checks, which are a part of the credit-card program, and to remind federal employees that they will be held responsible for any items if the purchases are later deemed improper.

In response, both OMB and GSA agreed with portions of the report. But GSA administrator Lurita Doan noted the vast majority of federal employees use their cards properly and that many oversight measures already are in place. She acknowledged there is room for improvement but added that by using purchase cards the federal government saves about $1.8 billion in administrative costs each year.

"We agree that no level of abuse or misuse is acceptable," Doan wrote.

The GAO study comes amid increasing scrutiny of purchase cards, which are used by 300,000 federal employees and are directly payable by the U.S. government.

The AP reported Sunday that VA employees last year racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in government credit-card bills at casino and luxury hotels, movie theaters and high-end retailers such as Sharper Image. Government auditors have been investigating these and similar charges, citing past spending abuses.

In Tuesday's report, investigators did not seek to determine the extent of fraud or waste at each agency. They cited numerous cases of questionable spending, which they said represented what could be found government-wide, including the VA.

"The purchase card is a useful tool for the government, and in no way are we suggesting it shouldn't continue to be used widely," said Gregory D. Kutz, GAO's managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, in a telephone interview. "However, I would say these cases once again show that lack of internal controls cost taxpayers millions of dollars and thus continued focus is needed on improving these controls.
"

Among the expenditures cited in the report:

-An Agriculture Department employee fraudulently wrote 180 convenience checks for more than $642,000 to a live-in boyfriend over a six-year period. The money was used for gambling, car and mortgage payments, dinners and retail purchases that went unnoticed until USDA's inspector general received a tip from a whistle-blower. The employee, who pleaded guilty to embezzlement and tax fraud charges, was sentenced last year to 21 months in prison and ordered to repay the money.

-U.S. Postal Service workers separately billed more than $14,000 to government credit cards for Internet dating services and a dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Orlando, Fla., for 81 people at a cost of $160 each for steaks and crab. The dinner bill also included more than 200 appetizers and more than $3,000 worth of wine and brand-name liquor such as Courvoisier, Belvedere and Johnny Walker Gold.

In the Internet dating case, a postmaster charged $1,100 over 15 months for two online services, including the Ashley Madison Agency. The expenses went unnoticed for more than a year even though he was under internal investigation for viewing pornography on a government computer. The postmaster was eventually told to repay the Internet charges but faced no disciplinary action.

-At the Pentagon, four employees purchased $77,700 in clothing and accessories at high-end clothing and sporting goods stores. The spending included more than $45,000 at Brooks Brothers and similar stores for tailor-made suits - $7,000 of which were purchased a week before Christmas. The credit-card holders said the items were for service members working at U.S. embassies with civilian attire. Pentagon rules allow purchases of civilian clothing when performing official duty, but generally only up to $860 per person.

-Justice Department and FBI employees charged $11,000 at a Ritz Carlton hotel for coffee and "light" refreshments for 50 to 70 attendees for four days, averaging about $50 per person. Seventy percent of the total conference cost of $15,000 was for the food and beverages, while audiovisual and other support services totaled only about $4,000, or 30 percent of the charges. It was not clear what action, if any, that Justice took in light of the conference expenses, which GAO deemed excessive.

-At the State Department, one credit-card holder bought $360 worth of women's lingerie at Seduccion Boutique for use during jungle training by trainees of a drug enforcement program in Ecuador. One State Department official later agreed that the charge was questionable and stated that he would not have approved the purchase had he known about it.

"Too many government employees have viewed purchase cards as their personal line of credit," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations, which requested the GAO report. "When money that was intended to pay for critical infrastructure, education and homeland security is instead being spent on iPods, lingerie and socializing, we must immediately remedy the problem.
"

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the investigations subcommittee, agreed. "Although internal controls over government credit cards have improved, we still have a long way to go to stop the fraudulent use of these cards," he said.

2008-04-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul statement before the Joint Economic Committee on April 2nd, 2008

The Liberty Agenda

2008-04-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

There are some people that don't understand the concept of Liberty, and what it means to our culture, government and way of life. Many of these people mistakenly get wrapped up in party labels, pet issues, or the perceived social "good". I've promoted the Liberty agenda throughout most of my life, and have usually come across proverbial brick walls of stanch opposition from those who claim to believe in the supremacy of the individual, yet would rather not see their power, or pet projects sent to the trash heap.

Yesterday, for me, this changed. I saw a room full of Liberty minded people literally overtake the Congressional District 5 GOP from hard liner party appratchiks. I saw Liberty minded people cry out that they would NOT support John McCain at the GOP national convention, to standing ovation. I saw dozens of libertarians who had been cynical and angry, actually make the change that they wanted to see in the world. Today the Hennepin county Republican Party is a better, stronger group that can help us move this nation in the right direction. There of course, is still much work to be done.

If what is happening here is happening in other places around the country, we have something to look forward to. To ensure that we can continue this Revolution of ideals, we must encourage the young and angry to get involved. We must show them that there is room for them in the the sphere of public discourse.

Perhaps dissent is not so dead after all.