hayek transcript

[00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000]   [MUSIC]
[00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000]   Reality, captured in user friendly symbols and processed for understanding.
[00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:33.000]   [MUSIC]
[00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:35.000]   The Idea Channel.
[00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000]   Terrible conditions.
[00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:52.000]   Contrary to Ashton's thesis, the conditions in Chicago were worse than they had been in
[00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.000]   lunch, not the other way around. Because we had no heat.
[00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:58.000]   We can start at.
[00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:00.000]   Well, you signal me when you're in this room.
[00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:08.000]   Well, Dr. Fon Hayak, it's a pleasure to see you after years of reading you and indeed listening to you.
[00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:15.000]   I was one of the auditors of a course you gave at the London School of Economics many, many years ago.
[00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:22.000]   Tell me, did you begin in your intellectual life as an adult?
[00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:25.000]   Did you begin as a Fabian? Were you a socialist?
[00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:26.000]   Yes.
[00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:28.000]   You were an Adam Smithman?
[00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:29.000]   No, no.
[00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.000]   See, you could just type as a Fabian.
[00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:36.000]   Well, there were. In fact, Fabians are also there too, but I didn't knew them.
[00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:45.000]   The influence, which led me to economics, was really Walter Ratenau's conception of a planned economy.
[00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:48.000]   He had himself been the raw material dictator in Germany.
[00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:54.000]   And he wrote some very persuasive books about the reconstruction after the war.
[00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:03.000]   And they are, of course, socialist of the sort, central planning at least, not a proletarian socialist,
[00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:06.000]   and were very persuasive indeed.
[00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:11.000]   And I found that they really do understand that I had to study economics.
[00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:16.000]   The first two books of economics, which I read while I was in the fighting in Italy,
[00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:21.000]   were so bad that I'm still surprised that it didn't put me permanently off of economics.
[00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:28.000]   But when I got back to Vienna, somebody put me on to Karl Mängen, and they'd caught me definitely.
[00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:32.000]   Had you read the English economists, the classical economists?
[00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:34.000]   Well, it's a time note.
[00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:37.000]   Adam Smith, I read fairly early, but the only one.
[00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:43.000]   And in the German translation, you see, English is really the third foreign language I learned.
[00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:45.000]   It's not the only one I can speak.
[00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:53.000]   But I began, I was tortured all my childhoods, being taught French, irregular verbs, nothing else.
[00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:57.000]   And the consequence of the never learned to speak it early.
[00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:03.000]   I picked up Italian during the war in Italy, well, sort of Italian, a Venetian dialect.
[00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:04.000]   I don't dare to speak.
[00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:08.000]   I don't dare to speak it in polite society.
[00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:09.000]   Quite so.
[00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:15.000]   And that gave me the confidence to take up English, and ultimately, of course, I really don't.
[00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:17.000]   It went on as a young man.
[00:03:17.000 --> 00:03:25.000]   After my degree, you went to the United States, and my first experience was American English in New York in 1923 and 24.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.000]   I didn't know you'd come to the United States that early.
[00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:31.000]   It was before the time of the Rockefeller Foundation.
[00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:34.000]   It was my own risk and expense.
[00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:44.000]   And I arrived in New York in March 1923, which was $25 in my pocket, with a serious letter of recommendation by Schumpeter.
[00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:45.000]   Oh, yes.
[00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:48.000]   Each earned me a lunch and nothing else.
[00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:50.000]   Had you known Schumpeter in Vienna?
[00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:52.000]   Not really.
[00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:58.000]   But he was the one. He was a visiting professor at Columbia before the war.
[00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:07.000]   So when Mises and Theresa learned that I wanted to say, "Send me to Schumpeter," who was then a chairman of the bank.
[00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:10.000]   He had just been Minister of Finance, and it was chairman.
[00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:19.000]   And he equipped me with a number of letters, ministerial, size, which had to get a separate folder to carry them to America.
[00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:23.000]   And I delivered them all. I met all the famous, all the economists.
[00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:26.000]   They all were very kind to me, but did nothing.
[00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:32.000]   I'd gone over there for promise of a job by Jeremiah W. Jenks, a trust specialist.
[00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:37.000]   But when I arrived, he was away on holiday, so I ran out of money.
[00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:40.000]   And I told the story already here.
[00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:47.000]   Then it was greatly relieved that the very morning I was to start as a dishwasher in the six-time year restaurant.
[00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:50.000]   Tell me if I'm called, came from Jenks, had to return.
[00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:57.000]   I was willing to, as since bitterly regretted that I cannot say I started my career in America.
[00:04:57.000 --> 00:05:03.000]   You say you began as a Fabian socialist under the influence of Walter Rothenau.
[00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:08.000]   In those days, of course, this was kind of an intellectual socialist.
[00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:10.000]   You mentioned the fact it wasn't proletarian.
[00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:23.000]   Did it interest you that so many of the German, Russian, Austrian intellectuals were the ones who became the Marxist?
[00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:26.000]   Not the masses.
[00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:30.000]   It was an intellectual movement that spread within enormous.
[00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:31.000]   Oh enormous.
[00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:38.000]   But see, I spent my university days already arguing with these my opponents were Marxists and Freudians.
[00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:39.000]   Oh yes.
[00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:42.000]   And we had endless discussions.
[00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:51.000]   And it was really what I thought the poverty of the arguments of the Marxists, which told me against socialism, I see.
[00:05:51.000 --> 00:06:00.000]   And incidentally, all that to another thing, both the Marxists and the Freudians had the dreadful habit of insisting that theorers were irrefutable.
[00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:10.000]   They were logically, absolutely coagant. And that led me to see that the theory which cannot be a future is not scientific.
[00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:17.000]   And that made me later praise Popper when he had spelled this same idea out, which he had gained in the same experience.
[00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:20.000]   He was a few years younger, so we didn't know each other.
[00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:25.000]   But it was when till this experience, arguing all the time with Marxists and Freudians.
[00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:29.000]   And they were both ideologies, sort of a very strong sort.
[00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:36.000]   And both very good arguments mean the very answers to the discuss.
[00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:47.000]   They also had, I think, the power of an evangelical movement and a humane movement.
[00:06:47.000 --> 00:07:11.000]   And by this I mean that those of us who listened to you and read you and are studied under people like Jacob Viner or Frank Knight or Lionel Robbins always had to come to terms with the fact that the system, the free market system, whatever you want, was not humane.
[00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:20.000]   And that we felt that these society had to undertake something. Remember this was depression.
[00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:33.000]   And we were seeing unemployment and poverty and banks failing and people scared and people killing themselves because there were earnings that had been wiped out.
[00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:39.000]   When the New Deal came along it seemed that here was the humane answer.
[00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:47.000]   And indeed my parents who were socialists stopped voting socialists even though they liked and loved Norman Thomas and began to vote for Roosevelt.
[00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:53.000]   And we all felt that at last government had developed a "heart".
[00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000]   Did any of this make?
[00:07:55.000 --> 00:08:09.000]   I didn't see it that way but of course it's a catalyst completely. I'm doing it the moment. You may be amused that a few days ago, as before I was returning, the last volume of law legislation liberty for being printed.
[00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:17.000]   I had served that one sentence into it and it runs, "Man was civilized very much against his wishes."
[00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:27.000]   And it's really the innate instincts which are coming out of this.
[00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:29.000]   That's a very Freudian state.
[00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:36.000]   It's a very Freudian and anti-Fridian because Freud of course wanted to relieve us of these repressions.
[00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:40.000]   And my argument is that his repressions became civilized.
[00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:52.000]   The repression of aggression of aggression of hostilities. When he wrote the civilization and his discontent, he was only getting upset about what his pupils were making of his own ideas.
[00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:53.000]   Quite so.
[00:08:53.000 --> 00:09:07.000]   I was interested that your works in the last ten years have become or have returned to a much more social philosophical scale than your earlier works.
[00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:30.000]   Well, let's start with the earlier ones. You created a furor in the United States, England, I imagine, around the world with the road to serfdom because it came out at a time when you were a lone voice speaking in the wilderness about the terrible dangers which were inherent in turning over to government, even good government,
[00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:37.000]   even by good and well-intentioned people powers which were both dangerous and inexorable.
[00:09:37.000 --> 00:09:46.000]   If you were to write that book over again, first would you make any changes? Secondly, what would you call it?
[00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:59.000]   Well, I suppose I would still call it the same. Although I was never quite happy with the title, which I really adopted for sound because I...
[00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:04.000]   The idea came from Tocqueville who speaks about the road to servitude.
[00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:05.000]   Yes.
[00:10:05.000 --> 00:10:08.000]   And I would like to have chosen the title, but this is not sound when the title.
[00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:12.000]   So I changed servitude into serfdom for merely for nitty reasons.
[00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:28.000]   Had it occurred to you since then that this was one reason that there was so much vicious response because the English and the Americans could not believe that they were in danger of becoming serfs.
[00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:29.000]   It seemed unthinkable.
[00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:37.000]   There wasn't the vicious reaction in England. In fact, the English socialist, the most of them, had all...
[00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:39.000]   themselves become a little apprehensive already.
[00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:40.000]   That early?
[00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:48.000]   Oh, yes. The book was received in England in the spirit in which I meant it to be understood as a serious argument.
[00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:57.000]   In fact, let me tell you once, or a barber of warden who wrote one book against me, told me, "You know, I have been on the point of writing rather similar book,
[00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:02.000]   but you have now so was stated the case that I have to turn against you."
[00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:06.000]   She said, "You had overstated the case against me."
[00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:10.000]   The United States' perception was completely different.
[00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:14.000]   Of course, it came here. It's a height of the enthusiasm for the New Deal.
[00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:23.000]   All the internationals had just discovered their new great idea and the extent to which I was abused here.
[00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:28.000]   Worst incidentally, by men who had been my colleague at the London School of Economics.
[00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:29.000]   Herman Feiner.
[00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:32.000]   I think that's the most savage book I've ever read.
[00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:36.000]   But as a comic child, I think I can now tell you the story behind it.
[00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:42.000]   Herman Feiner had come to hate the London School of Economics, in particular Harold Laskett.
[00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:49.000]   Because when he had come to the United States and wore a barber of gold, he asked for a leaf and the extension of a leaf.
[00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:53.000]   And that was denied to him because he was needed for teaching.
[00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:56.000]   And he was so upset about this.
[00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:59.000]   He turned against the London School of Economics, particularly Laskett.
[00:11:59.000 --> 00:12:07.000]   And then it happened that I was the first member of the London School of Economics on which he could release all his hatred of the place.
[00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:10.000]   So I had to suffer for Harold Laskett.
[00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:16.000]   I am horrified to hear you adopt so simple a psychological point of view.
[00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:18.000]   May I suggest another point?
[00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:33.000]   It takes a good deal of sophistication and poise to accept a system which is full of apparent paradoxes.
[00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:40.000]   The socialist system is very persuasive and very simple to explain to people.
[00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:48.000]   The government will take care of making sure that resources are sensibly rationally distributed.
[00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:55.000]   That people will get what they deserve, there will be no unemployment, there will be no war, there will be no depression.
[00:12:55.000 --> 00:13:02.000]   The system that you have described and that actually is in the great tradition of economics is one,
[00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:11.000]   which demands a very high degree of equilibrium in the presence not only of complexity,
[00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:15.000]   but of apparent indifference to human happiness.
[00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:20.000]   As prophets are wicked and cruel, workers are exploited.
[00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:24.000]   Imperialism, the search for prophets, brings war.
[00:13:24.000 --> 00:13:26.000]   And the evidence seems visible.
[00:13:26.000 --> 00:13:33.000]   What I am trying to suggest is that people like Feiner and many political scientists and sociologists
[00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:44.000]   were reacting to what they believed or felt threatened by as an intellectual performance of great complexity
[00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:49.000]   which "ignored the human problems of the time."
[00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:59.000]   I remember coming up to what I am doing at the moment, in fact what I am writing at the moment is called the reactionary character of the socialist conception.
[00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:06.000]   My argument is essentially that our instincts were all formed in the small face-to-face society
[00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:13.000]   where we are taught and our instincts formed to serve visible needs of other people.
[00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:20.000]   Now the big society was built up by obeying signals which enabled us to serve unknown persons
[00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:25.000]   and to use unknown resources for their purpose, it became a purely abstract thing.
[00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:36.000]   Now our instincts still is we want to see whom we do good and we want to join with our immediate fellows in serving common purposes.
[00:14:36.000 --> 00:14:41.000]   Now both these things are incompatible with a great society, a great society became possible
[00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:48.000]   instead of aiming at new needs of known people to be guided by the abstract signals of crisis
[00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:53.000]   and no longer working for the same purposes with your friends but following your own purposes.
[00:14:53.000 --> 00:15:01.000]   Both things are according to our instincts, still very bad, and these bad things which have been more than a society.
[00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:08.000]   May I ask you to comment on the fact that it isn't the instinct because we have been raised that way
[00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:13.000]   and I don't think that instincts vary very much according to how you are raised, except in intensity,
[00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:21.000]   but that the fact that the need of people to have some kind of religious structure,
[00:15:21.000 --> 00:15:27.000]   now you can qualify the word religion, some scale of what is good and what is evil,
[00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:32.000]   some scale of what is worth and not worth living for.
[00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:40.000]   Our Judeo-Christian tradition tells us love thy neighbor, our am I my brother's keeper,
[00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:47.000]   and as you very shrewdly pointed out we start with family as a little society in which we take care of each other
[00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:55.000]   and the mother gives food from her plate to the child or says to the child, "Don't be greedy, give a little to so-and-so,
[00:15:55.000 --> 00:15:59.000]   just because you're older and stronger does not mean that you have a right to it."
[00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:12.000]   And the whole structure of a religiously supported and religiously cemented social system is involved when you come to deal with it.
[00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:19.000]   Exactly, exactly, but it's very characteristic that the first is a neighbor, the new fellow man.
[00:16:19.000 --> 00:16:24.000]   And our society is built on the fact that we serve people whom we do not know.
[00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:32.000]   Roosevelt was shrewd enough to say to Latin America, "We shall be your good neighbors.
[00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:36.000]   We want to be good neighbors."
[00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:42.000]   He didn't realize he was so confirmed in Hayek, but how do you respond to this?
[00:16:42.000 --> 00:16:48.000]   Do you find that in societies which have a different religious structure or a different ethos
[00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:57.000]   that it is permissible to run the society without such values or that power is and of itself sufficient?
[00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:02.000]   That's a very long story, almost hesitate to talk about it.
[00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:10.000]   After all we had succeeded, so long as the great mass of the people, we're all earning, they're living in their market,
[00:17:10.000 --> 00:17:19.000]   either as heads of a household or small shop and so on, everybody learned and unquestioningly accepted
[00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:25.000]   that what had evolved is what you might call the capitalist ethic of course, much older than capitalism,
[00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:27.000]   the ethics of the market.
[00:17:27.000 --> 00:17:32.000]   It's only with the goals of the large organizations and ever increasing part of the population,
[00:17:32.000 --> 00:17:40.000]   Newland is brought up in their ethic and at the same time as it no longer learned the traditional ethic of the market,
[00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:48.000]   the philosophers are suddenly telling them, "Oh, you must not accept any ethical rules, which are not nationally justifiable."
[00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:52.000]   And these two different effects, Newland and learning the traditional ethics,
[00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:59.000]   and actually being told by the philosophers are nonsense, you're not going to accept any rules which you do not see have a visible purpose,
[00:17:59.000 --> 00:18:06.000]   led to the present situation, which only is 150 years, and the beginning of it is 150 years ago.
[00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:14.000]   Before that there was never any sales revolved against the market society, because every farmer in Newland here to sell his grain.
[00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:24.000]   Do you think that Marx, who was not alone and who after all had his own predecessors?
[00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:30.000]   First of all, his misreading of history was always to me so astonishing, even when I first read him,
[00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:38.000]   when he suggests an effect that all wars are carried on for purposes of profit as part of the profit-making system.
[00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:46.000]   And all you had to do is pick up a map of the world and look at the ferocity and the horrors of wars in the east, say, or in Africa,
[00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:52.000]   or a history book on the religious wars, which were very, very much worse and so on.
[00:18:52.000 --> 00:19:03.000]   It is interesting that he captured, and that his disciples then captured, a kind of an umbrella, all of our troubles.
[00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:08.000]   They did not distinguish society from a capitalist society.
[00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:13.000]   They did not distinguish the group from a capitalist group.
[00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:28.000]   They found a convenient way of saying to people, "The reason you are miserable or inadequate or short or weak is because this system has been so unjust."
[00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:46.000]   And this appeal then, not so much to the Germans as to the Russians, was then implemented by, to me, one of the great tragic disasters of the human race, Lenin, who taught Hitler.
[00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:55.000]   Oh, I'm sure. I think the intellectual history of all this is quite complex,
[00:19:55.000 --> 00:20:02.000]   because this idea of necessary laws of historic development appears at the same time in Hegel and Kündt.
[00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:09.000]   And you had two philosophical traditions, Hegelian idealism and French positivism,
[00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:19.000]   really aiming at a science which was supposed to discover necessary laws of historic development,
[00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:26.000]   which is computer science for many reasons, but the cult called the imagination.
[00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:33.000]   And not only is the imagination, it pleased certain traditional feelings and emotions.
[00:20:33.000 --> 00:20:43.000]   I mean, as you said before, the one who put it out is the market society does not satisfy our instincts.
[00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:55.000]   And once people became aware of this and Reynolds from childhood taught that these rules of the market are essential, because they're vaulted against it.
[00:20:55.000 --> 00:21:06.000]   The interesting thing is the unawareness that people can have about the impersonal consequences of a system.
[00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:17.000]   I was my own intellectual history was enormously affected by the book that you edited, in which you have a chapter,
[00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:28.000]   Capitalism and Historians. That's a remarkable book, because in effect what it says is that all that my generation had been taught about the horrors of the Industrial Revolution,
[00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:38.000]   based almost entirely on the work of the Hammons, that this was a terribly incorrect and a terribly superficial state.
[00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:48.000]   But then that, I think it was Ashton who points out that, of course, if you went into the slums of London and saw the poverty there,
[00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:52.000]   you thought these people were poorly off, but they thought they were very well off.
[00:21:52.000 --> 00:22:01.000]   And he quotes the letters of the clergyman who would come to visit London and say, "I just saw the Jenkins, isn't it marvelous?
[00:22:01.000 --> 00:22:07.000]   Only last year they were starving in the ditches and sleeping in the barns and had no shoes.
[00:22:07.000 --> 00:22:11.000]   Their children now are shot and go to school and so on and so forth."
[00:22:11.000 --> 00:22:24.000]   Well, I've long believed that misery becoming visible, not appearing for the first time, but being drawn to the attention of the urban population was really the cause,
[00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:28.000]   even of an improvement of the status of the poorest class.
[00:22:28.000 --> 00:22:32.000]   But the longer the status of the privileged classes...
[00:22:32.000 --> 00:22:45.000]   Oh, good, but see, that the people who lived so miserably in town were really much, had been drawn to the town because they were so much better off than they had been before.
[00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:55.000]   Yes, we mentioned this book which I edited, again, as in the form of the one with collectivist economic planning.
[00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:02.000]   It was found that general public just did not know of most important work which was being done by the historian.
[00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:17.000]   In this case, it was not only Ashton, but that's a very hot study of the early industrialization and the misrepresentation by certain party parliamentary commissions
[00:23:17.000 --> 00:23:25.000]   and enquiring into the state of the poorest, which for purely political reasons had distorted the effects.
[00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:35.000]   Have you ever read a book by a young Cambridge graduate called "Prennied to Imperialism"?
[00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:38.000]   I've only seen the title now, I don't know the book.
[00:23:38.000 --> 00:23:51.000]   It's an extraordinary book because it's in the tradition of Ashton and Hutt, but what he did was to examine the letters of the Christian missionaries who went to Africa, the letters back to their societies.
[00:23:51.000 --> 00:24:03.000]   And what emerges is as startling a transformation of our impressions of what went on in Africa as the one dealing with the Industrial Revolution.
[00:24:03.000 --> 00:24:10.000]   The most exploited group in Africa were the wives of the missionaries.
[00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:25.000]   They worked much harder than the natives because they had to teach them their own language and make a vocabulary and sing the Psalms, but raise the vegetables and be the nurses and the doctors and settle the quarrels.
[00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:28.000]   I can quite believe it, never hurt him, eh?
[00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:40.000]   But the book is full of extraordinary examples of what I like to say are the non-visible and much more significant consequences.
[00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:57.000]   For example, if you were to take 90% of the graduating students of the colleges of the United States and ask them what a bank or a banker does, what percentage do you think would answer to your satisfaction?
[00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:00.000]   Hardly, eh?
[00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:06.000]   Yet they have all been exposed to banks, bankers, economics and professors.
[00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:11.000]   How many of them would know what an executive does?
[00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:16.000]   Well, that is extraordinary to explain, you know, that I know from my own experience.
[00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:24.000]   I mean, the business school are doing quite a good job, but the economic students know nothing about it.
[00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:33.000]   The ignorance of people about the things they vote about is, of course, very depressing.
[00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:49.000]   The feeling that one must temper one's disillusionment with the fact that these are very complicated, and to utter a heresy, not all people are intelligent.
[00:25:49.000 --> 00:26:04.000]   And you run into the problem of what the fate of a democracy will be when the crises become more acute and depend on more technical signals to use your word or information to use mine.
[00:26:04.000 --> 00:26:19.000]   What I'm very pessimistic about this is, in my concern, the occasion becomes that we call the democracy system in which it isn't really the opinion of the majority which governs the necessity of paying or for any number of special interests.
[00:26:19.000 --> 00:26:32.000]   And unless we change the organization of our democratic system, democracy will just, I believe in democracy as a system of peaceful change of government.
[00:26:32.000 --> 00:26:35.000]   But it's all, it's all a advantage, it's no other.
[00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:39.000]   It just makes it possible to get rid of a government which is like.
[00:26:39.000 --> 00:26:44.000]   But the omnipotent democracy which we have is not going to last long.
[00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:51.000]   And what I fear is people will be so disgusted with democracy that even if we abandon its good features.
[00:26:51.000 --> 00:27:09.000]   And if you had magical powers, or to set about restructuring the system, a friend of mine in making a witticism prompted me to start by saying, that's a good rule.
[00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:17.000]   Let's pass a law that for every law that Congress passes it, but simultaneously repeal 20 others.
[00:27:17.000 --> 00:27:21.000]   Yes, at least 20.
[00:27:21.000 --> 00:27:25.000]   But what would you do?
[00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:44.000]   In the long run, the English chance is to alter our constitutional structure and have new omnipotent single representative assembly, but divides the powers on the traditional idea of separation of powers,
[00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:49.000]   the one which is confined to two legislations in the sense of general rules of conduct,
[00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:54.000]   and the other governmental assembly being under the laws laid down by the first.
[00:27:54.000 --> 00:28:03.000]   The first unable to discriminate, the second in consequence being unable to take any coercive action except to enforce general laws.
[00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:13.000]   Because the present system, say, I believe Schumpeter is right in the sense that right socialism can never satisfy what people expect our present difference.
[00:28:13.000 --> 00:28:21.000]   Our present political structure inevitably drives us into socialism even if people do not want it in their majority.
[00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:30.000]   And that can only be prevented by altering the structure of our democratic, so-called democratic system.
[00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:38.000]   But there's not necessarily very, very slow pressures, and I don't think that an effort towards reform will come in time.
[00:28:38.000 --> 00:28:53.000]   For another fear that we shall have a return to some sort of dictatorial democracy, I would say, where democracy merely serves to authorize the action of a dictator.
[00:28:53.000 --> 00:29:03.000]   And the system is going to break down, will be a very long period before a real democracy can re-emerge.
[00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:11.000]   And the point is, if I may, the Schumpeter book, I assume you mean socialism, capitalism, democracy, which was to be a stupendous piece of work,
[00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:18.000]   makes the horrifying point that capitalism will be destroyed because of its successes.
[00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:22.000]   In a way, it's true. Would you comment on that?
[00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:30.000]   Well, the capital, the hedge, of course, raised expectations, which it cannot fulfill.
[00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:45.000]   And unless we take from governments and powers to meet the demands of particular groups, which are raised by success, I think it will destroy itself.
[00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:49.000]   I mean, the class of political capitalism, democracy.
[00:29:49.000 --> 00:30:04.000]   Does it strike you as ironic that perhaps the most influential group in terms of political leverage is not the business group or the capitalist group in the United States at all, but the unions?
[00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:10.000]   Oh, no, my main use is England. You cannot be any way of this.
[00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:15.000]   I hope that we're in better shape than England, and please, I don't want to lose any sense.
[00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:30.000]   The sector is still a little behind in English development, but I used to say, when I use the states' petal, then I do now, that in America, fortunately, the unions are just a capitalist racket, but it's no longer true.
[00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:33.000]   Unions are part of the establishment of the United States.
[00:30:33.000 --> 00:30:44.000]   Well, so they are in England much more so, but they did believe basically in capitalism, but I believe fear this is changing.
[00:30:44.000 --> 00:31:04.000]   In the United States, certainly the unions have been much more flexible and less doctrinaire, and it would seem to me that no matter how one read history in a free society, it's impossible to prevent people from meeting out of a feeling of their joint interest in order to-
[00:31:04.000 --> 00:31:24.000]   Oh, I've no objection against unions as such. I'm for freedom of what is a classical phrase, freedom of association, of course, but new right to use power to force other people to join it to keep other people out.
[00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:44.000]   It's a privilege, which has been granted to unions in America, only by the judiciary in England, by law, 70 years ago, that they can use force to prevent people doing their work they could like, which is their culture, their dangerous aspect of it.
[00:31:44.000 --> 00:31:57.000]   And while I think unions are fully justified, in fact, I should support freedom of association. Freedom of association means free to join and not to join.
[00:31:57.000 --> 00:32:13.000]   Freedom of non-association, yes. Yes. The interesting, one interesting fact about this is that the Communist Party tried to infiltrate the unions of the United States in the early 30s in the late 20s.
[00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:30.000]   And were quite savagely and quite successfully, and I think quite intelligently, kept out of the leadership. This was much lesser degree true in England where the Louvre, they don't call themselves Communists, they say they're Marxists.
[00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:57.000]   But they do want to destroy the present capitalist system. And the stewards, or what we would call the foreman, are surprisingly candid about that, and the responses in the polls, for instance, a friend of ours, Mark Abrams, who was also at the London School, did a poll in which he asked a group of stewards at one of the large factories, I think it was Leyland, which was in very serious trouble.
[00:32:57.000 --> 00:33:11.000]   It was really bankrupt, it was being held up by the government. He said, "But if your demands are met, don't you realize it will wreck the company and that will wreck the entity?" He said, "But that's exactly what we want."
[00:33:11.000 --> 00:33:16.000]   I don't think you would find an American Labour leader who's responsible who would say that.
[00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:24.000]   And that means it. A certain you wouldn't admit it. Now I have the feeling you wouldn't have it anyway.
[00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:45.000]   Probably, yes, you'll probably have it. That's why I said to a degree that the experience in England, which I have returned often as a country I love, the depth of the classed distinction, which is just beginning to disappear, has created degrees of bitterness, which I've never found in the United States.
[00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:48.000]   There is a hatred.
[00:33:48.000 --> 00:33:53.000]   My impression of England may be wrong in the sense that I only really know the South.
[00:33:53.000 --> 00:33:58.000]   And all you are speaking about this in the north of England, where I think the feeling prevails.
[00:33:58.000 --> 00:34:04.000]   But if we live in London, now my relations are mainly to the south west of England, where my children live.
[00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:17.000]   I don't find any of this sharp, resented time, when the curious thing is in the countryside of South West England, the classed distinctions are very sharp, but they're not resented.
[00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:20.000]   Still accepted as part of the national order.
[00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:28.000]   That is so. And one puzzles about that. But as in all of these social things, you can make certain guesses.
[00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:49.000]   Are you impressed as you get older, as I get older, by the unbelievable intensity with which people maintain their beliefs, and the difficulty of getting people to change their mind in the face of the most extraordinary, powerful evidence?
[00:34:49.000 --> 00:34:55.000]   Well, one has to be you, one has preached, I think for 50 years, is also succeeding personally.
[00:34:55.000 --> 00:34:59.000]   You mean you still have the voice of the wilderness? What did you hardly say that?
[00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:14.000]   No, you see, I now in the habit of saying that, while when I was young, only the very old people believed the sort of libertarian principle, which I believe, and while I was from a middle age, nobody else did, I was the only one.
[00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:25.000]   I've now lived long enough to have the great pleasure of seeing things reviving amongst the younger generation, the people in their 20s and early 30s, an increasing number who are turning to our...
[00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:40.000]   So my conclusion is, I think, once or twice already in these interviews, if the politicians do not destroy the world in the next 20 years, there's good hope, because there's another generation coming up which reacts against this.
[00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:46.000]   But the chance that the we destroy the wilderness in the next 20 years, I wish I'd be high.
[00:35:46.000 --> 00:36:05.000]   The difficulty of contending with government power, when even the press is dominantly committed to the faith or the ideology that you think wrong, only increases the difficulties of the problem.
[00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:12.000]   That is, we do have a very, very free press, a free radio order, free television.
[00:36:12.000 --> 00:36:29.000]   But the system which has produced the people who do the writing and the thinking and the talking and so on is such that your hope for a rise of the libertarians, let us call it seems to me to be a faint one, given the opposition.
[00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:56.000]   Well, I'm not so pessimistic as I used to be on this subject as a result of recent experience, and see, it's long been a puddle to me why what one commonly calls the intellectuals, for which I don't mean the original thinkers, but what I once called the second-hand dealers in ideas,
[00:36:56.000 --> 00:37:00.000]   were so overwhelmingly on the left.
[00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:07.000]   And there of course, parts of efficient explanation were whole generation influenced, but this has grown up.
[00:37:07.000 --> 00:37:18.000]   And I've long been convinced that unless we convince this class, which makes public opinion, there's no hope.
[00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:27.000]   But this seems now to begin to operate. I mean, there is now a reaction taking place in the same class.
[00:37:27.000 --> 00:37:42.000]   I mean, while even ten years ago, it was hardly a respectable journal, either newspaper or periodical to be found, which was not more or less on the left, that is changing now.
[00:37:42.000 --> 00:37:51.000]   And I seriously believe that this sort of thing, in twenty or thirty years' time, may have changed public opinion.
[00:37:51.000 --> 00:37:56.000]   Questions was waived so much time.
[00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:07.000]   When you think of the likelihood of a recession, which most economists say, we all have whether we're in it now or we'll have it in the beginning of '79,
[00:38:07.000 --> 00:38:14.000]   you think of the human responses to that recession. You think of the man and his wife and three children, he's thrown out of work,
[00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:20.000]   and there isn't a job anywhere except five hundred miles away and in some of the different businesses on.
[00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:32.000]   When you not have a revival then of feeling that the system has let them down, the system has failed, that again we are having unemployment.
[00:38:32.000 --> 00:38:49.000]   Again we are having inequity. There will certainly be a reaction of this sort, but I rather hope that for the idea of the system, government will be substituted.
[00:38:49.000 --> 00:39:00.000]   I think people are beginning to see that the government is doing a greater harm, and there's myth of the system,
[00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:09.000]   which is responsible for everything, can be explosion. Nothing is gradually being weakened. I may be a optimistic on this,
[00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:18.000]   but I think I believe government is now destroying its reputation by inflation.
[00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:25.000]   Isn't that because inflation is the easiest way in which to meet the demand of the president?
[00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:38.000]   At the same time people do see that this is a constant concession to the experience of the moment at the price of destroying the whole system.
[00:39:38.000 --> 00:39:44.000]   Are you a complete monetarist?
[00:39:44.000 --> 00:39:51.000]   In the sense that I am absolutely convinced that inflation is done by government, nobody is contributing about it.
[00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:57.000]   Yes, today I have no doubt. I believe Milton does over simplify a little.
[00:39:57.000 --> 00:40:01.000]   No, I should say so.
[00:40:01.000 --> 00:40:11.000]   By concentrating too much on the statistical magnitude relation between the total quantity of money, the price level thing isn't quite as simple as this.
[00:40:11.000 --> 00:40:25.000]   For all practical purposes we are really in our differences, our fine points of upstoost theory, but for practical purposes we hold it on the same side.
[00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:33.000]   The inflation, the political uses of inflation are so attractive and so powerful.
[00:40:33.000 --> 00:40:40.000]   But as you say people begin to realize that they are being gold, that they are being cheated.
[00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:47.000]   That's sure they get $10 a week more, but look at how much more they pay in social security withholding and how much more they pay.
[00:40:47.000 --> 00:40:56.000]   Two things that astound me, that parallel with the growing awareness about what inflation does,
[00:40:56.000 --> 00:41:06.000]   there has not been a growing awareness about the appalling shabbiness of official figures on almost everything.
[00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:12.000]   That is the figures on inflation itself are outrageously underestimated.
[00:41:12.000 --> 00:41:14.000]   To feel unemployment on the other side.
[00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:23.000]   Unemployment is over estimated because they ask a person if he is employed or unemployed and the person says he is unemployed.
[00:41:23.000 --> 00:41:33.000]   That includes many housewives who don't want a job or don't care about the job, but it's morally more justifiable to say,
[00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:35.000]   "Oh I've been trying to get a job!"
[00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:38.000]   Then to say, "Who wants to work?"
[00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:48.000]   But it's surprising to me that the figures on both of these very significant indices are continually being put out.
[00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:56.000]   The president has regular press conferences, every member of the cabinet, and no one says tell us, "How did you get these figures?
[00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:01.000]   And how much faith do you put in them? And can we believe them?"
[00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:04.000]   Well, I'm saying you're speaking.
[00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:06.000]   Do you eat a Wall Street Journal?
[00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:10.000]   Oh yes, they get all the facts very clearly put in the Hill New Effect.
[00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:22.000]   When you were talking about the growth of new voices, the Wall Street Journal has become a national newspaper in a way that it wasn't as thought of as a trade journal.
[00:42:22.000 --> 00:42:31.000]   I often think that just as you might have chosen a different name for the road to serfdom, they would be better off if it wasn't the Wall Street Journal,
[00:42:31.000 --> 00:42:40.000]   because to the Midwest that already means bankers and so on. But also the rise of a magazine like the Public Interest,
[00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:50.000]   which has become influential far beyond its circulation and in the intellectual community.
[00:42:50.000 --> 00:43:01.000]   I was interested that one of your fellow Nobel laureates, who I think would be classed as a liberal, Paul Samuelson.
[00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:13.000]   In a column several years ago, I was quite startled because he raised the question as to whether imperialism really pays.
[00:43:13.000 --> 00:43:23.000]   He had been reading people like Hutt, I suspect, and Jukes, I suspect, and possibly Cairns.
[00:43:23.000 --> 00:43:30.000]   And he came to this extraordinary conclusion. He said, "I would be hard put to know how to prove it."
[00:43:30.000 --> 00:43:35.000]   That explains why. And it says, "On balance, it would be very hard to say."
[00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:45.000]   This is not to say that, of course, some Englishmen profit, but that on balance, whether the total input, as compared to where it might have gone,
[00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:54.000]   that this necessarily represented English interests as against India. And he said, "I couldn't try to make that case."
[00:43:54.000 --> 00:44:00.000]   And what he would effect says was, "We really can no longer continue to hold that position."
[00:44:00.000 --> 00:44:05.000]   Which was one of the great props, I think, of the socialist movement.
[00:44:05.000 --> 00:44:11.000]   Well, you see, Samuelson just really belongs here. I think he's the only person.
[00:44:11.000 --> 00:44:22.000]   And he's moving in the right direction. He probably started, well, I wouldn't say far on the left, but anyhow, predominantly, what you hear, called, "liberal."
[00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:33.000]   I call socialist ideas, but he does see the problems. The others was on. Even the Bill Lloyd's.
[00:44:33.000 --> 00:44:39.000]   Well, you were a co-lariat with a man who probably didn't agree at all with you. Am I right?
[00:44:39.000 --> 00:44:43.000]   When Mill died, when the woman was here, she had to press.
[00:44:43.000 --> 00:44:45.000]   But he's not really an economist, is he?
[00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:50.000]   Well, you're always thought of as a sociologist because of his work on the American Negro.
[00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:53.000]   He started exactly the same sort of problems I did in that.
[00:44:53.000 --> 00:44:56.000]   That's right. 40 years, 50 years ago.
[00:44:56.000 --> 00:45:09.000]   Which of the Englishmen do you feel the English economists are beginning to follow the pattern of re-examining the, what you call socialist, what I would call, liberal tradition?
[00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:23.000]   Well, there's no, in which the young people, no single very eminent person, but the work being done by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London is, of course, absolutely the first class.
[00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:30.000]   And there's a very good, because they're taking up particular problems and illustrating and point after point.
[00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:40.000]   Other thing, present system doesn't work. I think they have gradually achieved a position of a very great influence indeed.
[00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:56.000]   And that is really the main source of resistance. It creates a coherent body of opinion, which is probably more important than any of the periodical soil newspapers in England do.
[00:45:56.000 --> 00:46:08.000]   You had said earlier that with Shumpeter, you agreed that one of the problems of the free market or the free society is that the economic base thereof, capitalism,
[00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:23.000]   arouses expectations that cannot fulfill. I wish you would comment on the passion, or the drive, or the delusion, or whatever you want to call it,
[00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:30.000]   but the power of the movement for equality.
[00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:47.000]   Well, it's basically a confusion. The idea of equality before the law is essential basis of a civilized society, but equality of law, before the law is not compatible with trying to make people equal,
[00:46:47.000 --> 00:46:56.000]   not to make people who are inevitably and fortunately very different than thousands of respects, to make them equal, you have to treat them differently.
[00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:07.000]   So between these two conceptions of equality is a near-consizable conflict. Material equality requires political discrimination,
[00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:14.000]   and ultimately, really a sort of digital to all government in which people are told what they must do.
[00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:28.000]   I think the egalitarianism, when I would even go further, our whole morals are being based on our steaming people differently according to how they behave.
[00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:38.000]   And the bottom kind of egalitarianism is destructive of all moral conceptions, especially ahead.
[00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:45.000]   Coming to that problem from an entirely different discipline, since I was in political science and political theory,
[00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:56.000]   two comments that in all of the debates on the Constitution, and in the Federalist, the United States had a collection of political brains,
[00:47:56.000 --> 00:48:04.000]   such as I think existed nowhere in history exactly that happened. It was unbelievable, billions, resilience of flexibility.
[00:48:04.000 --> 00:48:11.000]   Two very interesting things, nowhere did they worry about the growth of federal power. On the contrary,
[00:48:11.000 --> 00:48:19.000]   they were reasonably convinced that the states would be so jealous of their sovereign rights that they had to coax them into the Union,
[00:48:19.000 --> 00:48:28.000]   and coax them and bring them in dragging their heels. But the idea of a federal system, which has become a Leviathan,
[00:48:28.000 --> 00:48:37.000]   as far as I remember, is nowhere to be found. It's one of the few examples in which their predictive activities were blank.
[00:48:37.000 --> 00:48:39.000]   Yes.
[00:48:39.000 --> 00:48:48.000]   Now, the egalitarian idea would have seemed to them ludicrous, because what they said was that it is in the kind of society
[00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:58.000]   that were trying to form the very diversity and richness of life, of the farmer to tell his soil, of the hunter to do this and so on,
[00:48:58.000 --> 00:49:10.000]   the awareness that they had of the fact that freedom would give people an opportunity to express themselves and live their kind of lives,
[00:49:10.000 --> 00:49:16.000]   even unto what they believed, you know, what church they went to, or whether they went to church or not.
[00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:24.000]   None of them incidentally is the word God, you know. What I say, none of them. There's providence, a divine providence.
[00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:32.000]   Well, everyone who I think came near to seeing is a danger of excessive power to the government was magisten,
[00:49:32.000 --> 00:49:36.000]   a man whom I think was tired of. I wrote the fifth, yes.
[00:49:36.000 --> 00:49:48.000]   Oh, the other certainly quite right. He also saw the, what he picked up the point of Aristotle about the middle class, in a most powerful way.
[00:49:48.000 --> 00:49:59.000]   Incidentally, it just occurred to me, we're sitting here talking and I couldn't help but think how few economists I know with whom I can carry on this kind of discussion.
[00:49:59.000 --> 00:50:12.000]   In that sense, if I may say so, you are the unique and I'm reminded of the fact that in the United States, the word God separate fields called economics and political science.
[00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:18.000]   It was called political economy and it seems to be a great tragedy that the fields were split.
[00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:32.000]   I agree and I even more regret that there's a complete split between economics and law. See, my time in the continent could study economics only as part of a law degree.
[00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:43.000]   Yes. And that was very beneficial. And I still maintain, as someone has put it, that an economist who is only an economist cannot even be a good economist.
[00:50:43.000 --> 00:50:53.000]   Well, I'm so glad to hear you say that. Incidentally, just as you mentioned the rise of a libertarian movement among the young economists is interesting.
[00:50:53.000 --> 00:51:00.000]   How many new centers there are, call the study of law and economics or economics and law. There's one down in Florida.
[00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:06.000]   I'm going there in February, yes. I always anticipate you or I'll be right here.
[00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:23.000]   Let me ask you this question. What do you think that if you were talking to a group of working men who would say, well, these two, you know, eggheads and high brows, they talk on a high level, but I've got a wife and kids to support.
[00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:37.000]   And I can't possibly raise them on the salary I'm getting to. So, rotten society. We have moved 20 times. We were brilliant out until the insurers didn't cover it or whatever you want.
[00:51:37.000 --> 00:51:51.000]   What do you think a society owes if you want to use that term? I'm not talking about the social contract which was written by another very talented, but I think crazy men.
[00:51:51.000 --> 00:51:59.000]   What do you think the society owes those of its members who are law abiding?
[00:51:59.000 --> 00:52:18.000]   Well, oh, I think it's somebody inappropriate expression. But I think you can reasonably expect a tolerably wealthy society to guarantee a uniform minimum floor below which nobody needs to say.
[00:52:18.000 --> 00:52:31.000]   The people who cannot earn a certain very low minimum in the market should be assured of physical maintenance beyond this.
[00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:39.000]   But I'm afraid even this cannot be channeled as because only a tolerably wealthy society can physically do it.
[00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:47.000]   I mean, the Indians couldn't possibly do it. And many others. You mean India, not the American Indian. No, no, they are the East India.
[00:52:47.000 --> 00:53:06.000]   And the same is true of many of the underdeveloped countries. But the ones you have reached a certain level of wealth, I think it's a common interest of all citizens to be assured that if there were those who were children, for some circumstances, became unable to support themselves,
[00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:21.000]   there would be a should of a certain very low minimum which on current standards would be miserable but still secure them against extreme deprivation.
[00:53:21.000 --> 00:53:24.000]   But beyond that, I don't think we can do anything.
[00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:35.000]   Do you say we can't do it because we really don't have the resources or the BNP or... We'll destroy the motive to keep the system going.
[00:53:35.000 --> 00:53:45.000]   Now, if people who are getting this minimum income, I should, as an ad, I'm sure you do not mean the minimum wage, which is a different animal.
[00:53:45.000 --> 00:53:52.000]   But if people could supplement that income by part-time work, handyman work and so on.
[00:53:52.000 --> 00:53:56.000]   That's all right. I wouldn't have to do that. You wouldn't deduct that.
[00:53:56.000 --> 00:54:06.000]   No, no. I think for some... When most of the people I have in mind would really not be able to make much of the next thing coming.
[00:54:06.000 --> 00:54:18.000]   But if some widow who had to live on that small minimum income did take in some washing and addiction, I just would not do it.
[00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:27.000]   Well, you would certainly agree that... I said, "What does the society owe?"
[00:54:27.000 --> 00:54:35.000]   And I feel that, in that sense, that a society does owe its people certain things.
[00:54:35.000 --> 00:54:37.000]   First, military protection in this world.
[00:54:37.000 --> 00:54:39.000]   Oh, yes. Oh, sure. That's a good one.
[00:54:39.000 --> 00:54:43.000]   We can't go out and buy. You can't go out and buy a few bombs and protect your house and so on.
[00:54:43.000 --> 00:54:50.000]   We owe the society owes and the legislators and the people who have been elected freely.
[00:54:50.000 --> 00:54:52.000]   That would be a form to society for exactly.
[00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:53.000]   Forget this, protect it.
[00:54:53.000 --> 00:54:54.000]   Exactly.
[00:54:54.000 --> 00:54:59.000]   We don't want to be eaten by the nearby cannibals, whatever name they may have.
[00:54:59.000 --> 00:55:05.000]   Incidentally, you were surprisingly lenient, it seemed to me, on the Soviet Union.
[00:55:05.000 --> 00:55:06.000]   In the Sierra Leone...
[00:55:06.000 --> 00:55:07.000]   In the Lutus of Tum?
[00:55:07.000 --> 00:55:08.000]   Yes.
[00:55:08.000 --> 00:55:13.000]   Well, you forget that it was our ally in war at the time I was in published.
[00:55:13.000 --> 00:55:15.000]   Well, what year did you come out?
[00:55:15.000 --> 00:55:16.000]   '44.
[00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:23.000]   Well, this was just shortly after the execution of Ehrlich and Alter, and the Cottied Forest and all of that.
[00:55:23.000 --> 00:55:25.000]   No, I'm not criticizing you.
[00:55:25.000 --> 00:55:29.000]   We didn't know about these things yet, but see, in fact, I say he came out in '44.
[00:55:29.000 --> 00:55:32.000]   It was mostly written in '41 and '42.
[00:55:32.000 --> 00:55:33.000]   I see.
[00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:34.000]   And you felt that it was our wife.
[00:55:34.000 --> 00:55:37.000]   I just had to restrain myself to get any hearing.
[00:55:37.000 --> 00:55:40.000]   I mean, everybody was enthusiastic about the Russians at that time.
[00:55:40.000 --> 00:55:41.000]   Yes.
[00:55:41.000 --> 00:55:45.000]   And to get a hearing, I just had to tune down what I said about the operation.
[00:55:45.000 --> 00:55:46.000]   I see.
[00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:47.000]   Yes.
[00:55:47.000 --> 00:55:48.000]   Yes.
[00:55:48.000 --> 00:55:56.000]   If you asked me before, whereas anything I would do differently, both now, apart from that is directed against the sort of socialism,
[00:55:56.000 --> 00:56:06.000]   which is largely abandoned by the official socialist party, I would certainly speak much more openly about the communist system than I did in that book.
[00:56:07.000 --> 00:56:13.000]   [music]
[00:56:15.000 --> 00:56:16.000]   [silence]