Brandon Coale Notes

I really enjoyed this conversation between Mikhail Svetov and Lawrence W. Reed.  It was posted on YouTube in January 2019 and has timeless ideas about people and freedom.  I made the following transcript of the conversation, which starts at 1 minute into the video after the intro.  I can recommend Reed’s book “Real heroes: inspiring true stories of courage, character, and conviction.”

Transcript

Svetov:  Please tell us about the foundation and what you do, and what are your greatest achievements.

Reed:  I’m president of the Foundation for Economic Education.  It was founded in 1946 by the late Leonard Read, no relation to me.  The purpose is to educate and inspire young people, high school and college age in particular, in ideas of individual liberty, free markets, and personal character. We do that through a very robust website, fee.org and also through seminars that we host all over the country, all over the US, but also in other countries as well.  We have free online courses, we’re very active in social media, every single day we post four or five or six new pieces.  We have 70 years of material archived and easily searchable.  It’s a treasure trove of free-market ideas going back decades.

Svetov:  What is your interpretation of liberty, what is liberty according to your foundation?

Reed:  Liberty to us is the absence of the initiation of force.  It means that force ideally is confined to retaliatory instances where someone has violated someone’s rights: rights to life, contract, peaceful association, and then force must be used to repel that violence.  Otherwise people should be free to make decisions, live with the consequences of them, to map out their own personal lives as long as they do no harm to other people.

Svetov:  Do you think those ideas are popular enough today, in today’s society, and if not, why so?

Reed:  Well they’re certainly not as popular as I would like them to be.  Whenever they do become that popular, we can close down the foundation and consider our work having been done.  But even then we wouldn’t do that because you have to constantly educate for the future, for the next generation.  I think there are a lot of temptations that people face everyday that draw them away sometimes from ideas of liberty.  There’s a temptation to get something through government at other peoples’ expense.  That may seem more quickly acquired than through peaceful, voluntary means, hard work, investment, and so forth.  Some people are drawn to that.  Some people don’t have the character to speak truth to power, or to avoid using their connections to power to get something at other peoples’ expense.  Some people just don’t understand basic economics. They may have good intentions, but they fail to comprehend the fact that government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody.  And there’s always a tradeoff- if government gives you something, it’s only possible to the extent it can do something to you, or to someone else.  So it’s a constant educational battle, always has been.

Svetov:  What would you call the biggest threat to the idea of liberty?

Reed:  The biggest threat to the ideas of liberty I think is the erosion of character.  When people allow their personal character to fall apart. When they become, say, dishonest, less committed to the truth.  When they become arrogant and condescending and think that they can rule over other people, that they have the knowledge necessary to run other people’s lives.  When they cease to be responsible, when instead they point the finger of blame for their own shortcomings at other people and say “well you owe me a living” or “you must bail me out” or “you must give me something- I’m entitled to it”.  When they allow their character to erode in that fashion, and they take on those kinds of destructive mentalities it’s very harmful to liberty.  I don’t think a dishonest society, or an irresponsible society, or a society of people who don’t respect the lives and property of their fellow citizens- that society cannot be a free one.

Svetov:  What would you call like the biggest issue to solve, libertarians today, I mean what is one issue that you think hinders the advancement of, hinders the popularity of libertarianism among people today?

Reed:  Well I can think of a couple and I’m not sure which one I would put as more important, but one certainly is corporate welfare.  There are a lot of people who are sort of superficially opposed to things like free markets or capitalism because they think that those things mean corporations or business people using their political connections for personal advantage.  Those of us who understand and are trying to promulgate a different perspective, we’re trying to get people to understand- we’re opposed to that to – that’s not really free markets when somebody uses politics and their political connections; the force of government to disadvantage their competitors to get some sort of subsidy, we should as libertarians oppose that strongly, as much as we oppose subsidies for anything else.  So getting people to understand what real free markets are, and that crony capitalism isn’t a part of that, is a big challenge. It’s drawing a lot of people to socialism because they they hear the message of Bernie Sanders who says “I’m opposed to big companies using their political connections”, and they think “Ah, I’m for that”.  When they really need to understand that under socialism, you have the greatest potential for the abuse of power for those who are politically connected to use power to their advantage. So if you’re opposed to that you should be for free markets, not for any kind of socialism.  So that’s one issue, I think another at least in America is immigration. That’s an issue that has divided a lot of people, and unfortunately there was a time in America when almost all of us regarded individuals as a great resource.  When people come to America we used to think that they brought culture , they brought diversity, they worked, they added to our society in so many ways.  But the welfare state today has so confused the issue.  A lot of good Americans are sympathetic to immigrants, but what has caused them in many cases to be skeptical of more immigration is they see immigrants coming, and then getting benefits of some kind.  Now I think that’s overdone, if statistics tend to show that immigrants don’t use public services anymore than native Americans do.  But still it’s complicated the issue unfortunately, and we’ve forgotten.  Many Americans have forgotten the importance of a vibrant culturally diverse, energetic, enterprising society of independent hard-working people wherever they may be from.

Svetov:  But you can’t really blame them for that because the issue is not isolated from the welfare state that actually exists.  So the outcomes of the immigrations that they see are not necessarily as positive as they would have been on the free market.

Reed:  Exactly right, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s not a kernel of truth in their argument, there is.  It’s just that the welfare state so confuses the issue, I just wish that we could reduce or eliminate that, and then people would see more clearly the value of people coming to America not for any kind of government provided goodie, not because of any political party trying to demagogue them to join their party or vote for them, but rather because they want to work and contribute to society.

Svetov:  That’s exactly the argument neo-reactionaries use, and the populists use in Europe as well as in the US to advance their agenda is that they’re saying that you know we have a welfare state and we have the immigrants who sort of leech off, you know, of our wealth.  Because every citizen sees himself as a, you know, having a stake in the government that they’re paying taxes to.  They also see themselves as privileged, and I don’t feel like that’s the entirely wrong attitude. Because, you know, the constitution protects American citizens, not people of the whole world.  And so the government exists for them even though there may be disagreements about whether it should be as big or as pervasive, but it exists to serve them and not some other people around them.

Reed:  That’s perfectly legitimate.  I understand that.  They’re the ones paying taxes, they are the citizens, they have say in what the government does because the government imposes conditions and taxes and what-have-you upon them.  The problem here is one of government grown too large.  I would like to see it small enough that we don’t have to fight over it because it’s such a tiny portion of our lives that it’s not worth fighting over.

Svetov:  I agree with you completely, but are there means to achieve that goal in current society, and what are they?

Reed:  I think the only means ultimately is through education, and that is by

convincing people of the sound arguments for less government, and then by their subsequent behavior they will help us deliver less government.

Svetov:  So you don’t buy the argument that in a democracy, government only grows and never shrinks?

Reed:  Well that’s certainly been the trend most of the time.  Thomas Jefferson put it well when he said the tendency of things is for government to grow and for the individual to retreat.  (Something to that effect).

Svetov:  It’s the kind of perverse argument that the radical right makes today, is that they’re saying “you can’t protect liberty through democratic institutions precisely because democratic institutions sort of follow the will of the masses and the will of the masses will always be to demand more welfare”, the tragedy of the commons basically.  “And that’s why we need this strong authoritarian leader that you know will bring us back to the origins, will bring us back to what our founding fathers intended.”  That’s what happened in Singapore; you know they had a leader and he sort of installed the market economy on Singapore.  My point is that maybe that’s inevitable, that’s the logic of you know, of a Republicanism, that it gets so dysfunctional, then people start to look for answer in the individual.

Reed:  Yeah well I mean that may be the case, that may be what happens over the long term, but I don’t think libertarians should focus their attentions or their energies on trying to find the right authoritarian figure who will deliver liberty.  To me that sounds a little incongruous, and of course there’s no guarantee that even a good person that you think you can trust with power we’ll exercise it properly once you give it to him.  Chances are just, I think more likely that he will not, or that over time he’ll be corrupted by that power. I think we have to focus on ideas and let the chips fall where they may.

Svetov:  Does democracy actually allow for us to move the society in that direction?

Reed:  Well, you know I don’t want to suggest that democracy is some kind of guarantor of liberty.  Of course it’s number one saving grace, or it’s number one positive principle is simply that it allows for change to happen without violence.  That you can vote for those who will give you something different.  But it’s no guarantor that that difference will be a positive thing; you could vote yourself into slavery.

Svetov:  It’s funny to hear that because that’s the kind of logic that Vladimir Putin uses in Russia when he advocates, you know, for there to be no change, and well obviously we don’t have a democracy in Russia, at least a working democracy, but his argument is that, you know, if you want if you don’t want a revolution you have to play by the rules, but the rules are rigged on a much bigger level than in the US, but in the US they seem pretty much rigged as well.  Do you disagree with that?

Reed:  Oh increasingly I think yeah the people that you might think “wow there’s a man or woman of character they would do well if they were in public office”, but they say things like “that’s dirty business, why would I want my name dragged through the mud, I’m going to do something else” so you end up with the worst of both worlds- bad people running big government.

Svetov:  So basically libertarian hopes are such that there will be this corpus of politicians who will come to power and decide to give it away?

Reed:  I know that sounds fanciful, but I don’t know what the alternative is. I mean how do you dismantle the state?  You either rip it apart overnight through some sort of violent revolution with almost every assurance that the result will not be positive for liberty, or you dismantle it peacefully one brick at a time because you’ve done your work and you’ve educated people that that’s the way to go so they support the politicians who will deliver that and they discipline the politicians who won’t deliver that.

Svetov:  Do you think the power of education is stronger than the power of incentives?  Because in your other essay that I’ve read, if incentives matter we might be in trouble.  You describe pretty much what I’ve been describing right now is that incentives are set up in such a way that it’s in everyone’s personal interest to behave the way they behave, and the kind of selection that goes on among the people who go into politics is distorted to such a degree that, you know, no libertarian, no honest person gets through.

Reed:  Yeah well, education and incentives are both very powerful tools in fact part of our education process has to be to get people to understand the power of incentives; that itself as an educational point, that we should support a kind of system in which the incentives move people in the right direction toward respect for lives and property, where the disincentives to steal or to use fraud or violence are powerful, and one of the great virtues of the free market is that it tends to align incentives in directions that lead to mutual benefit across society.  In a free market where you can’t use the government to get something at other people’s expense, well then you’re left with the alternative of having to produce, to produce for consumers, having to please your customers because there’s no alternative that’s where the incentive lies. But, I think to get there, education is indispensable.

Svetov:  What happened to the American universities then?

Reed:  Yeah, American universities, I shake my head and sigh because to a great extent many corners of academia that’s where the problem is today.  I think a lot of that is because universities are no longer dependent so directly as they once might have been, on actual paying customers.

Svetov:  On achievement?

Reed:  That’s right, and through such artificial apparatuses as tenure.  You know we tend to reward for a lifetime, poor performance.  I think there should be a lot less government involvement in incentives. That’s that’s been the source of so much corruption.  That’s why today you’ll almost never see a university academic on his own initiative going out to talk about the virtues of less government.  Sometimes they do it through maybe a privately funded center that might be on their campus where they have some degree of autonomy.  But as agents of the state, employees of the state, to a great extent they become spokespersons for the state.  They work for the government and they want the government to get bigger; surprise, surprise.

Svetov:  It’s my feeling, and its the outsider’s perspective obviously, is that the biggest shortcoming of the American libertarians is that you’re very reluctant to go into politics, and there hasn’t really emerged a person who would personify your ideas. That’s why Ron Paul for example was so effective for a while.  At the time he was like this beacon of hope and a fresh face, but he’s like what 77 now, so, and we’re still when we’re thinking about libertarian politicians we’re still thinking about Ron Paul.

Reed:  I think he’s actually 81 or 82.

Svetov:  That’s just yeah, that’s insane he’s been like the fresh face for

the past 50 years, yeah and there hasn’t been someone like him since then, and to me that seems like a big problem.

Reed:  Yeah I would grant that.  I would love for there to be someone who is of such solid character and such great ability to articulate these ideas, that people in great numbers say “wow this guy has some answers”, or this woman, this man, whatever it may be.  I’d like to see that happen but by the same token I don’t want to overdo or overemphasize the importance of politics in our lives. It isn’t everything, I mean it’s important, but.

Svetov:  This is where we disagree.

Reed:  Okay, you believe in fact it is?

Svetov:  Yeah, I believe that politics shapes our life more than anything else really; you can work hard, you can do your best, but if the politics are not right you’re gonna fail.

Reed:  Oh, I don’t disagree with that.  I admit that politics is very important.  I also admit I wish it weren’t.  And I certainly wish the best for those many people for whom politics isn’t their cup of tea.  I say that’s fine, if that’s you, then there are a lot of ways in which you can live a good life, especially if you keep your character high.  But for those who do focus on politics, yeah I wish there were more who were more principled, articulate, persuasive, but time will tell if we can produce those kinds of people.

Svetov:  The American experiment was actually founded on this.  It’s a political project, and all the success that the US had stems from the few very good people who did what they did, who were politicians.

Reed:  Who created that framework, but even they would be the first to say “that’s all it was, it was a framework. The most important thing was that it was a framework that allowed people to do their thing and that’s where the greatness of America would be.  It will be not in politics; we wanted to make politics such a small corner of our lives that it liberated people to do far greater things in civil society, in business, and so forth”.   So one of the things I applaud about the founders is they realized that politics isn’t and shouldn’t be the central focus of our lives but the only way you get there is,

Svetov:  You have to get your hands dirty.

Reed:  That’s right, yeah somebody has to get involved and get in there and

dismantle it and you have to also hope that there will be the political consensus among people to support that because if you have the right people in the right positions but they’re not representative of the public at large, the good they can do will be undone by the next guy.  So it still comes down to mass popular education and understanding of liberty so that those people in government can do the right thing and get away with it.

Svetov:  So my understanding of the situation is such that the socialists and the Democrats (well in the American sense) you know have this product that doesn’t really work and we have numerous examples of it not working, but somehow they manage to sell it to the audience, and why do you think it happens and why even the domestic examples like Detroit for example, what happened to

Detroit, no lessons have been learned from that.

Reed:  Oh I wouldn’t say no lessons have been learned, I lived in Michigan for 30 years and I think there are a lot of people,

Svetov:  Michigan still votes Democrat though.

Reed:  Oh it’s a bit of a swing state.

Svetov:  Still, I mean they saw what happened.

Reed:  But you know outside of Detroit itself, the rest of the state is much more sympathetic especially the west side of the state to ideas of liberty and free markets then Detroit is.  So maybe the question is how can Detroiters who have been so damaged by leftist ideas, still be so supportive of them?  Well, half of them have left the city, so apparently you know, it was once a city of almost 2 million I think and now it has 700,000 so there are a lot of people who apparently didn’t quite agree in Detroit with with those ideas and they left.  Leftist/statist perspective has an awful lot of short term appeal.  It, oftentimes, you can get people to forget the long run, or not even consider it, if they can get something in the short run. That is often what leftists are selling.  They’re selling security for the foreseeable future, we’re going to give you something now.  They don’t tell you what that might mean in the long run, and our job is often to explain to people that there are a lot of things you can do in the short run that seem to be beneficial, but that are harmful in the long run.  I mean it’s like going to a party; the bartender who says “here have another”, you know that’s hard to resist if you know that for the moment it’s going to make you feel better.  It’s going to make the party a lot more fun.  He doesn’t say, “here have another drink so that tomorrow you can have a nice nasty headache”.  Our job is to try to convince people that a little character and self-discipline now is going to be of more benefit to you in the long run then this short-term stuff that momentarily makes you feel good, but then saddles you with a lifetime problem.

Svetov:  But, this brings about the, the game theory dilemma thing, is that while refusing to use a certain instrument to your advantage you just basically surrender it to your opponents.  I do think that refusing to use a certain populist rhetoric to win over support is self-defeatist in a way.

Reed:  Yeah well why not turn that around and say to an audience “you know I’m tempted to use the same kind of populist rhetoric that large audiences seem to like these days.  I could do that with you, but let me tell you why that that compromises in my belief, my moral standing.  Let me tell you why it’s more important for me to speak the truth to you”.  At least whether you’re successful or not you can go to sleep at night knowing that you didn’t pander to the masses, you didn’t compromise on principle, you didn’t offer something that was seriously flawed.

Svetov:  Do you think pandering to the masses is necessarily a bad thing?

Reed:  That’s a very good question.  If you’re pandering in the form of offering them something at other peoples expense, that’s a bad thing.  But if you can appeal to their innate desire that most people have to be free of arbitrary forceful interference in their lives.  If you can get them excited about living independent lives in which they’re in charge and some wise guy in the distant capitol city isn’t running their lives for them, maybe you could call that pandering.  Our side probably needs to use a little bit more passion and emotion at getting people to appreciate liberty; it’s powerful stuff, it’s what makes life worth living.

Svetov:  I think our side lacks a clear understanding of who the enemy is, and that’s where Trump did a really good job at creating this idea of establishment, and that’s why he was elected president. I think libertarians are in a very good position to do the same kind of a maneuver, and to attack the establishment, but for whatever reason Trump did it and libertarians never did.

Reed:  Well perhaps we should do more of that. You’d have to ask each individual libertarian who may have run for office why didn’t you employ that tactic more?  If I were running for office I certainly would.  I would make it an anti-establishment campaign.  I would point out that one of the greatest enemies to prosperity and our liberties is the unholy alliance between elitist bureaucrats and those with political connections in the business world.   I would cash in on that, I would try, I would say “look every dollar of corporate welfare is a dollar that’s taken out of your pocket”.  I would use that issue if I were running for something, that’s a kind of populist appeal.  But the kind of populism that some people use, certainly there is a leftist populism that Bernie Sanders employs is very destructive; I mean it’s appealing to envy, and using government to steal from people.  I certainly strongly object to that kind of populism.

Svetov:  But the reason why Bernie Sanders succeeds in his rhetoric is precisely because we see this corporate welfare and we don’t see politicians from any party objecting to it.  The stimulus was voted in by both parties.

Reed:  Yeah well I know that there’s been plenty of people in the Republican Party who espouse liberty, but then when it comes to voting on important things like bailouts, they cave to the crisis of the moment, and I lament that.  But there are some exceptions.  I know you’re gonna ask me now who, and I realize they’re a few and far number.  I’d have to really think about that, I’m not an expert in how do we breed the right politicians.  All I know is that if you ever do get the right ones it’ll be because somebody worked on people when they were very young, imbued them with ideas of liberty, ignited their passions for that cause, and set them on their merry way.

Svetov:  Funnily enough, I think libertarians are in a much better position to fight for actual political influence in Russia than in the US, because in Russia we very well understand that government and the kind of system it created is the enemy and there’s no future there, but I think American libertarians are still suffering under the illusion that you know they can work under the existing system to bring about change, and I became skeptical about that recently.

Reed:  Maybe there has to be some substantial crisis in our future that helps us get our message across, maybe so.  It’s the old argument of the frog in the pot, you know if you put him in when the waters lukewarm and turn the heat up slowly he may never jump out, but you drop him into a pot of already boiling water he jumps out right away.  It may well be, I don’t know this for sure it may well be that liberty ideas will not truly be successful until there’s some crisis that awakens the conscience of people, I don’t know.  I’d rather work to see that happen without a crisis, but either way it seems to me my work is is no different.  You still do the best you can with the youngest of people so that the right ideas are in place whatever the future circumstances may bring.

Svetov:  So going back to your essay about the fall of Rome.  Are we Rome then?  Because , a lot of people clearly see that there is a problem but there’s no obvious solution to that problem and the fate of the Cato is a fate of a failure, not a victory.

Reed:  Yeah well of course we have something in our day that Cato and Cicero, people like that, defenders of the Old Republic, didn’t have in their day and that is an awful lot of history to point to.  And an awful lot of economic understanding and literature that they didn’t have, so I’d like to think maybe our fate doesn’t have to be the same as theirs.  We can point to the 1500 years since and what we have learned and escape the same fate that they suffered.  But there are a lot of lessons, no question about it from the course of the Roman Republic.  Both Rome and America arose in the first place in a rejection of concentrated power.  Both America and ancient Rome recognized early that putting so much power in the hands of a monarch or central government was harmful to the liberties of the people.  So they dispersed power, created representative assemblies, and respected basic rights to a greater degree, flawed though it was, then perhaps any society beforehand.  But, when they lost their understanding and appreciation for those principles, they lost their liberties.  It’s the same battle today, we have to point out to people there’s nothing about liberty that’s automatic or guaranteed.  There’s nothing about it that says that just because you’ve had it, your kids will have it.  It requires that we constantly recommit ourselves, muster the courage to defend it. Because the world is full of people, not only overseas but within our midst who will happily take your liberties from you if you give them the opportunity.  It’s a never-ending battle.

Svetov:  Do you think it became easier to defend liberty after the Soviet Union collapsed?  Or did it actually become harder because you lost this, you know, very obvious enemy?

Reed:  I think in the immediate years after the fall of communism it was easier. Because there were so many people on the left who had been holding up the Soviet Union or socialized economies of Eastern Europe as some kind of example.

Svetov:  That’s ridiculous in itself.

Reed:  I know, it was at the time and we recognized that, but there were plenty of people who thought they were good examples.  So in the immediate years after the downfall of the Soviet empire it was easy for us to say “aha told you so, see look what happened: ecological, economic, moral, and spiritual nightmare after decades of the concentration of power”.  But you know memories have faded, and now we have younger generations who have never experienced the Soviet empire and it’s a forgotten quarter in their history book.  So it’s like in many cases we’re starting from scratch again and to educate people, young people in something that yeah 30 years ago it was easy to people of that day to use as an example of our ideas.  Now we have to educate upcoming generations who never experienced the old Soviet Union.

Svetov:  Well I really wish to share your optimism, and I’m quite optimistic myself, but my optimism is directed towards, the, I’d say towards more radical ideas.  I think that just talking about good things is not enough.  I think we have to do something. You’re doing an important job, but I wish more people stood up and became agents of change instead of just, you know, transmitters of those ideas.

Reed:  I’d like to think that you and I are in complete agreement on that.  I think that we will see more such people to the extent that groups like FEE are successful at educating young people about these ideas.  Some of them will muster the courage to go forth in very dramatic ways.  It’s the ideas that will propel them and that’s what we at FEE work to try to make them appreciate.

Svetov:  Awesome, thank you very much for this interview.