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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  June 19, 2011 8:00am-9:30am EDT

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want to know why i was there. and i'm going to do this during the summer. >> tell us what you're reading this summer. send us a tweet at booktv. ..
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>> she was kind enough to mention a little bit something about my background. and he mentioned that i'm an author and a father of four children and for a while we had three children under 3. now, we've got -- the oldest one turns 8 next month but she's 8 going on 58 and she reads a gazillionth grade level and that and she's curious about daddy's book and what is daddy writing? the words are long for a sev --d she's dying to write about them and she wants to talk about that and i want the meeting of the minds and what motivates me. all right. we're going to sit down and talk about it and we read together a part of one of my books and she basically was getting it.
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i thought this was really fantastic and i realized not long ago that she really able to absorb some of these things and this is not a made up phony lonely story when i got wind with a conversation she had with one of her peers. and she were talking about some old time story that her friend read, a 19th story about penny henny and she said what do you think anything and she said a penny hardly bought a story, and my daughter said penny. want a bet? [applause] >> all right. well, i would also like to thank c-span to be here to record these remarks for booktv. wichita these days, soon, we'll see when it gets aired but don't jump up and down, they are just taping it. i will forego any further banter
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and get right down to business. what i'm going to talk about tonight is a myth. it's a multifaceted myth we talk and live by in the sixth grade and i think even the best of us in our heart of hearts still cling to a portion of this myth. that myth is something like this. the government is composed wide selfless public service innocently pursuing the common good. and that were it not for these people, well, where would we be, we would be helpless wandering boobs. we would have no art in our society. every artist would put down his paintbrush if it were not for joe biden. we would all be i go noramuses. and our kids would be working in a mine for a dmrar a day and the
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economy would be run by short men with white mustaches running arrest carrying with sacks of money with dollar signs. [laughter] >> now, didn't we all kind of get this? we all got that. that story is superficially plausible. i understand why people believe it. i'm not arguing that people are stupid for believing it. what else would people believe. this is what we're fed all the time. if i were running a flak washington that's what i would you poor souls to think. sure, you got to fork over a lot of money. you may not like it, gosh, think of where you would be. and dog-eat-dog, we should just grin and bear it. but let's suppose for a minute and the sake of argument instead of being educated in government-funded schools, which north americans are, suppose what would happen if people were
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educated in schools funded by wal-mart and every day kids went into their wal-mart funded school and up on the wall they saw all the ceos of wal-mart over the years and they were taught to sing songs to the ceos of wal-mart and they were taught how indispensedible they are and all the progress we have and america's success is from these ceos and every year there's a special day kids go to the school and they meditate on the wal-mart ceos and where would westbound. and if that isn't this kind of creepy i would rather think we would have gotten by all right, you know, without this sort of arrangement but as soon as its u.s. presidents on the wall well, we believe the whole package. where would we be without the presidents we would all be dead in a dish with some limbs.
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this is what we got day in and day out and making like my life's work and repeal this whole thing about. this is what "roll back" is about. it's not a book about cutting the budget although that is part of it. it's not enough to cut the budget. as hard as it would be. we really need to cut out is the propaganda that yields a budget like this. that made leaps of people to believe they'd be helpful and impoverished and terrible if the government cut back. everyone is trained to think this way. that's the root of the problem. that's where we need to go. it's an educational issue. now, having said that, i do want to say a little something about the patriot act and, of course, behind me we've got the u.s. debtclock.org website which is
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pretty depressing but it's not an open board, but i do want to -- i do want to talk about some specifics about what's going here. because if we reject this idea of government, we reject this notion of helplessness perhaps the fiscal crisis we're facing is an opportunity to be embraced rather than a calamity to be deployed. maybe the outcome of this will be the restoration of some kind of free society. and, yes, there is going to have to be some substantial change. they can't keep kicking this particular can down the load even if the best scenario, and an interest rates rate say super low even with these heroic assumptions the government's own figures tell us that by 2020 u.s. government will be paying nearly a trillion dollars a year just in interest payments on the national debt. that's in the best scenario and
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i would rather doubt we're going to see the best scenario. incidentally, i think it's not as someone who's always had it -- you know, the glass is always half empty to me, i'm just looking at the figures, and these are figures that would not be disputed by anyone. it's not like people saying this is misleading and the real number is x and he's saying y. there's no disputing it. this is based on sources that are easily consulted. we have the entitlement programs, the unfunded liability of social security and medicare are greater than twice the gdp of the whole world. that's a teensy bitty problem. we're arguing over a $38 billion cut which turns out to be phony baloney anyway. as i said before, this is like taking 10 cents off a trip to the moon and that's the -- --
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it's interesting to note that when you speak to the finance minivans in these countries which i'll confess to you, i haven't done that personally but i know of people who have, they more or less confess that the demographically the aging populations of those countries is just going to be a tsunami for those -- it's going to simply destroy those systems. they all know that. they're not idiots. they just act like them on tv but they know that. [laughter] >> but their view is i the finance minister will be safely retired by the time this happens. this is going to be hitting everybody. so what are we going to do what
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could we do that. could we tax the issue and let's leave the moral issue of taxation and just go to the practically of the. a little known statistic that we have seen since the korean war, tax rates have gone up, tax rates have gone down but regardless the federal government has rarely been able to get from the private sector much more 20% of gdp in terms of revenue from the taxpayers. so it's true they could squeeze out perhaps a little bit more than they are now. but not nearly enough to solve this problem. that's the point. there seems to be an upper bound for varying reasons beyond which the federal government simply cannot confiscate. we could borrow our way out and let's go invest with 0% return u.s. government debt. that sounds like the way to go.
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obviously, the terrible atrocities from japan they would be a debt lick dare of u.s. debt. china has got its own demographic problems largely self-inflicted because of its one child policy and it will want to spend money on its own industrialization. there are be these problems and there won't be enough suckers in the world but they could print the money but as i explained my 7-year-old already sees through that. which goes to go a panel of 7 years old would be better than the supreme court and the federal reserve board. [applause] >> at the state level things aren't much better. how could they be worst, legally but we got a lot of states on the verge of bankruptcies. seven states are going to go burst in 2020. and that assumes they get a 8% annual return. which there's a slight chance that might not happen.
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[laughter] >> my favorite, though, favorite indicator, there are problems. last year the governor of new york at the time of seriously considered a plan to bail out the pension fund by borrowing from the pension fund. [laughter] >> you have hit a dead-end at that point. it's not just us that some think it's a little fishy of it. look at what happened to detroit. there is your classic case of the liberals got everything they wanted in detroit, they got the taxes, they got the regulatory structure, they got the spending, everything in their wildest dreams they could have asked for and what happened to detroit, general collapse occurred. and it never occurred to any of the architects of that disaster that a general collapse was possible. they just assumed that, you know, there'll always be more suckers to use to keep the thing going. never occurred to them that they
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could come crashing down. since 1950, half the population has fled. and in recent years, a quarter of the schools are closing. the home prices tell the story, though. in 2003, the median home price in detroit was $98,000. by 2009, that was down to 13,000. you think, wow, they hit rock bottom that year. no last year it was 7,000. you read an article about this a brief news item but in proportion of the scale of the collapse, the likes of which we have not seen in american urban history, this story went unreported. now, meanwhile, what's happening to the young generation? well, good thing they're all playing video games and getting drunk or we would have a revolution on our hands. let me reverse that, i wish we did have a revolution on our hands, of course. [applause]
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>> look at what their facing. a poll last year found 85% of graduating seniors from college are moving back to their parents because they don't know what to do from that. with that problem, we have a fact -- these kids when they do get jobs they will have to work longer, and harder to standstill to prop up on a system that everyone knows is going to collapse anyway. that's fundamentally unjust. i don't care what your philosophical position is, there's no way you can defend that system. and so the data that i am referring to here, there's much, much more besides, you can find of chapter 1 "roll back." i have it on tom woods.com. what i want to spend the rest of my time though is not these dreary numbers. what i want to talk about this this i had ideology of dependence and helplessness that
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has been drilled into us to make us these pathetic little nobodies, where would we be if it weren't for bob dole and joe biden. no! . i'm worthy of a free people for us to think this way so i want to just go through these typical arguments that we get, where we would be without our wise overlords. so, for example, poverty, well, poverty, would surely be worse if it weren't for our wise overlords. i mean, they are the ones who brought about the great conquest of poverty that we've seen over the past 200 years. well to the contrary. in 1820, 85% of the world's population lived in what economists call absolute poverty. by 1950, that was down to 50%, and by the early 1980s, down to about a third. and by 2001 it was down 18%. so that meant that that 2001 and 1981 for the first time history we've seen both a percentage and
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the absolute number of people living in absolute poverty fallen. we've never seen anything like this in history. now, is it a coincidence that we see this kind of progress against poverty at a time when free market economics, albeit, not that we expect. in "roll back" i explain it's not a coincidence. this is what makes absolute sense. this should be led to respect that the market economy would lead to fantastic outcomes. in the developing economies we've seen rising life expect tent si and caloric intake. what about the u.s., we're using a less desperate u.s. poverty metric but in 1900, about 95% of the population lived in what today we would consider poverty. by the late 1960s, that was down to about 12 to 14% and that's where it has stagnated ever since. now, no, lyndon johnson is the one who got the war on poverty
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started. the funding for those perhaps really got started in the late '60s. with hardly any antipoverty programs to speak of, poverty goes down amazingly in the u.s. and then the government programs step in and then stagnates. now, imagine, imagine if those numbers were reversed. let's imagine we had lyndon johnson in 1900 and he gave us the war on poverty programs and then for nearly seven decades we have progress against the poverty and the mean old republicans and the poverty stagnated. can we predict what they would say. of course, it goes no show these programs are wonderful and we need them and where would we be without them but when reality is exactly the opposite, what do we hear? crickets, no acknowledgement of this at all. how about in the year 1200 nobody proposed poverty? was that because everybody was living in fantastic wealth in the year 1200? it's because nobody thought
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poverty could possibly be conquered. nobody thought that you could possibly -- basically, what people took for granted was you're born in this world. in squalid conditions, you're going to live your life basically one bad harvest away from starvation and you're going to die and there's nothing you can do about this. it's because of the wealth that the market economy made possible, that suddenly it occurred to us maybe we can abolish this or we'll always have the poor with us but we can seriously alleviate this suffering. it never occurred to anybody before. in fact, now we live at a material level -- it's like out of a science fiction novel, when we consider even in late modern europe -- i mean, for heaven's sake even the greatest monarchs in the 18th century didn't have flushed toilets. they didn't have central heating, any plumbing. all these sorts of things we take for granted. i mean, okay, they had servants. that's true.
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but the difference between a rich man and a poorman 300 years ago, is that the rich man road in a coach of four and the poor man walked in bare feet. today the difference between a rich man and poor man, the rich man has a fancy car and the poor man appearance beatup car but they both have cars. that means there is less inequality than before. do you remember that book "the "grapes of wrath"" by john steinbeck. the soviet government showed the movie version of that in the 1930s as a propaganda vehicle to show how terrible the capitalist west is and look how poor everybody is but it backfired on them because the soviet population watched that movie and couldn't believe the people had a car. l[laughter] >> now, look at this device i have. this smart phone. i can talk to picture and picture -- i can talk to some guy with his face on the screen,
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you know, in munich right now if i want to walking down the hall while i'm doing three other things. theet -- jetsen didn't predict that and you had had to sit in a chair and we take it like any social system could yield this. no it isn't. it's a system that respects private property and the rule of law so on and so forth. so in other words, there is, as i say -- there is a causal mechanism between the free market and this type of prosperity and this conquest of poverty and yet we get -- there's no credit given to the private sector for this basically. you know, you read that sixth grade textbook and you think, you know, the private sector is where all the wicked exploiters are and thank heavens we have people in the private sector. i should say that's rather not the case. so it's not enough, though, that the government sector will take credit for advances that are due to the private sector.
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they will then blame the private sector and it might sound like a boring example but it's not. i remember being in the grad schools in the '90s and we would hear what happened in california. there were rolling blackouts in california supposedly because of energy deregulation. and, boy, this goes to show you crazy capitalist ideologues that we need our overlords who need energy and we need blackouts. what deregulation are they talking about? it's true. wholesale prices of electricity which were paid by the state's electric power distributors they could fluctuate but the retail prices were fixed and moreover, it was extremely difficult because of the regulatory barriers to bring new power plants online and some of them were actually taken off-line. and so this is at a time when demand is surging. you've got the voracious demands in the power industry in california, you got a growing
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population and you got a surging demand and the private market is not to respond to the surging demand and that's blamed out of a private market. it's like another page of the george orwell novel. the poor guy should get royalties. this is a dystopia. he wasn't giving us is model to live by. now, i also talk a little bit about, but i'm going to spare you folks this, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s that's supposedly another case when the free market run amuck and that was the case of an institution husbanded by the government given an impossible business model when you have an rising interest rates and interest rates. but they keep ensuring their deposits and then they are surprised when they make reckless investments and then that's blamed on the free market. even though the government guarantees behind it. what i did want to talk about
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the classic case about the government blaming everyone but itself for failing and that's the most recent financial crisis. now, the left typically says that those of us in this room are engaged in special pleading when we try to pin the blame on what we just endured for the government and the federal reserve and if we weren't wearing our laissez-faire blinders we would see clearly this is a failure of capitalism and so on and so forth. well, i talk a little bit about this in "meltdown" that was the "new york times" bestsellers two years ago. and a lot of this is in "roll back," but in "meltdown" i hope the roll of the interest rates. interest rates turn out to be the most interesting thing in the world because they play a
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coordinating function in the economy. you can't just intervene in the economy and say, i think interest rates should be even lower so let's do it and i bet there will be no consequences. no, haack who won the nobel peace prize in 198 but i know the nobel prize has been a bit poisoned in years but hayek's win of nobel prize but he won it for saying the exact opposite what the nobel team wanted him to say. this is a boom/bust cycles. the interest rates sets the economy on kind of a sugar high that it crashes from but hayek says interest rates are supposed to act as a break. they're supposed to be a break on our ambition. they're supposed to say, no, you are setting the economy on unsustainable path. we don't have the physical resources to complete all the projects we've embarked on so stop doing it but we didn't have any brakes starting in 2001. thanks to allen greenspan we had in red lights. everything was green. oh, sure, you had five
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investment properties with interest-only mortgages and no job. that seemed like a sensible thing. and people did. people thought that was -- all i have to do to get rich is buy a house and sit there. and i automatically become wealthy, yeah, that's what i'm going to do and this seems sensible and this was encouraged by the authorities. in 2001, we were just coming off that dot.com collapse and allen greenspan, former saxophone player, has decided -- nothing against saxophone players it's so odd one person -- well, you know, i have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that maybe the federal funds rate should come down 25 basis points. it was that creepy. "the new republic" had this author, he had the most interesting stories because he made them up it turns out later.
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how did he -- 'cause he invented the stories which you could do more easily before the internet but one story he made up was that some investors on wall street had built a little shrine to allen greenspan with flowers and candles and they would meet together and meditate from him. he didn't get caught on that story. people heard that story and thought, yeah, that seems like a sensible thing somebody might do. this was the madness that overtook the kind of -- particularly, during the housing thing. during 2001 greenspan lowers interest rates seven times. and that's the only recession on record when housing starts went up. so what conclusion do people naturally draw? well, i got to put my money in housing because apparently housing is robust through thick and thin. best investment you can make. flipping houses is the best thing -- i mean, all this and then greenspan says you should take out adjustable rate mortgages and the housing market
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is fine and then the successor says the housing market is fine and there's no bubble. lending standards are robust. lending standards are robust and this guy is supposed to be one of the major regulators in the banking system. lending standards are robust. so, you know, the fed might have played a teensy weensy might play a role. teregulation i got the c-span audience you can't do a technical thing on this. but i don't want to go in technical things. i got them right where i want them. why make them change the channels. they think it's going to be boring. but it's not. we got to know this. this is the version of the narrative that we are getting from washington. we have to be prepared for it. we got to be able to answer this in our sleep. all right. so what was deregulation? it's just some sinister word, you know, just suggest sinister characters skulking around. what does it mean?
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over the years, we're getting rid of regulation q and we put a cap on the level of interest rates that you could put on a savings account or pay on a savings account. okay, well, that was like the early '80s, it's not going to cause a worldwide catastrophe three decades later presumably. we had in the early 90s restrictions on interest rate branch banking lifted. well, for my vantage point that makes the system more stable because now a particular banking system is not subject so swings. they can be diversified withholdings and depositors across the country. but then the one we hear the most, though, that supposedly caused the problem is the so-called -- the alleged repeal of something called glass-steagall. and we get this all the time. now, the reason they mention this is because this is the only act of deregulation that is even remotely plausibly connected at all. they all harp on it and then
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it's a little tricky for them signed that and joe biden supported it so the story didn't quite work and you have to paint the horns on the biden's head and clinton's story which is fine with me. but to make it really quick what happened was this. in 1933, we got this thing the glass techniquele act it's supposed to separate commercial and investment banking. that means you're a commercial bank you can't underwrite or deal in securities. you can buy them if you think they're going to be a good investment for you. you can sell them if you no longer think they're a good investment or you just need cash but you can't be a broker basically. you can't deal with these things. and investment banks can't take deposits so we're -- moreover, there could be the same parent company that owns -- that controls both the commercial bank and investment bank so it separates these two types of banks. now, in europe they never had this restriction and they never had any problems as a result of it. so this -- the only part of this
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that was lifted in 1999 was that last prohibition and the commercial bank can't be controlled by the same holding company. that was lifted and now they could be. that was it. that's the big thing that brought the entire world to its knees apparently. when you look at the data, one of which stand-alone investment banks and stand-alone commercial banks also blew up and did badly just as much as ones who happen to be connected. there's no clear connection and as i said, there's much more evidence with regard to this. and then you look at the sheer size. there's no way a commercial bank could possibly bring down investment banks and so forth and so on. by and large, the alabama administration began to abandon this version of the story, to its credit, i will say. instead of saying deregulation caused it because i suggest there is no repealed regulation that would have prevented this crisis. the banks were always allowed to securitize mortgages.
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they're always allowed to secure them and add them to the portfolio. they were always allowed to do so. it's not like deregulation made this possible. well, anyway, i just -- i want to just move on to some other things. the glass-steagall thing is a complete red herring and then beyond that we must we didn't spend enough on the regulatory agencies. it's always -- it's always this narrative that if only our overlords had had the power to crack a few more skulls, then we wouldn't -- there is no problem that they couldn't have addressed if they had more authority. but in real terms, adjusted for inflation, spending on the regulatory agencies in charge of the financial sector tripled since 1980. did not get cut under george w. bush. blame it on george w. bush, he must have cut it. he didn't cut it, and it was not these things. they were not cut. and there's 115 federal agencies
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in charge of regulating the financial sector, you'll forgive my skepticism of the proposition if only we had 116 then we would have seen this thing coming. [laughter] >> because, remember, the regulators we did have told us everything was fine. so what do we do? hire more of these bozos -- these are the people -- remember, if you graduate from business school at the top of your class, are you going to run a business and if you graduate at the bottom of your class, you become a government regulator. the models that we go with it, well, these regulators who have no financial stake on the outcome, they'll keep an eye. why should we not expect them to be as totally clueless as they showed themselves during this current crisis. they will relying first of all on the risk assessment of a small cartel of government-approved rating agencies and beyond that they either grossly misread the condition of the housing market or just misled the public.
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green span is saying it was encouraging but even if they had perceived the problems what are the chances they would have done anything about it? it would be extremely politically costly to do anything about this particular one and i quote here the economist arnold cling who says a regulatory crackdown would have meant taking away a punch bowl filled with more homeownership along with minorities in the prospect of businesses of homebuilding, mortgage origination and wall street's financial engineering. well, that's not just going to happen and then also we had this so-called prudential regulation to keep the banks from doing crazy things and so they had these regulations that said the safer the assets you're holding, the less you have to keep in reserve as capital. so the way it worked was for every $100 you got in standard loans you're going to keep $10 in capital. for every $100 you have in mortgages, you have to keep only $5 in capital. and for every $100 you have in
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aaa-rated mortgage-backed securities you only get to keep $2 in capital. so take a wild guess at which asset class everybody and his uncle fled into, right. everybody goes into this. so then the thing collapses and now it's all the worse because this type of regulatory apparatus almost mandates herd behavior. instead of a normal situation where people would have been diversified into a variety of asset classes, everybody is in this. and then we're told, okay, but didn't we have poor management of major financial institutions? well, no doubt about that, that's why you need to have failure. you have to allow them to fail the same bozos don't keep doing the same thing. mra[applause] >> you got to read david stockman on the myth of t.a.r.p. we would have been through a
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black hole and never been heard of that. you can google t.a.r.p. and stockman. okay. but we got this bad leadership but what we don't hear about is that the current regulatory financial environment makes it difficult to do anything about bad leadership so insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds, and banks are simply not allowed to old more than a very small stake in a particular country. hedge funds are restricted that prevent them from having a controlling interest in the bank holding company. they have a stake on keepingian i did not on wayward market. they're going to get their salary. they might get their raise if they don't perceive it in time because they would be deprived of a good salary and we got to pay them more. maybe that's not the most promising model but because of this government policy, stockholders of these
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institutions are artificially disorganized and scattered and management enjoys artificial protection that it would not enjoy on a free market. okay. now a further point about this myth of government is that it causes us to lose our imagination. we begin to think, we can't -- once government does something we can't think any way it could be done otherwise and this is why murray rothbard used to say imagine the government produced and distributed shoes and somebody said why don't we privatized the shoe manufacturing, what people have all different types of feet? how would we ever privatize it. maybe a private company would produce only a left foot shoes. we think of the convoluted -- it's amazing how little dignity we have. and how helpless. why would a company have left foot shoe isn't it so why? they have no interest in doing
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that? why would they want to do that. to immediately resist no we couldn't live without this funding. if you're against government funding for the arts this makes you an opponent of the arts apparently. so we think there would be no arts without government funding. you terrible philistine you want to cut government funding. look at the national endowment of the arts. what do they got a couple hundred books but private donations for the arts amounts in the billions of dollars. we in our own activities have already refuted this myth but we don't know it. incidentally i look at kansas and the governor sam brownback is trying to eliminate the kansas arts council or whatever it's called. and try to encourage private investors, donors to fill the gap. and my wife went to a theater in rural kansas, the columnian theater. we got this email and i was on the list. they were panicked. this is terrible. brownback is going to take our
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money away. do you know every year we get $5,000 from the state. so they have become so pathetic, they have so little creativity, so little imagination they think they couldn't have a sale -- $5,000? i'll give you the $5,000. what's the difference between that and shutting the doors, i'll give you the 5,000 bucks. that's one jog-a-thon thing or a raffel. enough with this poverty and regulation. let's take on science. and, of course, all the left wing hate sites as soon as this airs can just imagine what media matters go after me. they can't answer anything that i say, by the way and my biography is at tomwoods.com which they never link, well,
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he's got some credentials, we'll go after the crazy neanderthal is against government science. i have arguments for this and i'm going to share them with you now. and it's basically this, let's take, for example, britain in the 19th century. britain was the most wealthy industrialized country in the world home to some of its illustrative science and do you know how much government funding there was? zero. meanwhile, france and germany spent boat loads on science through the government and fell way behind. now, let's again do a thought experiment. supposed it was reversed. supposed britain had spent all the money and then did very well and france and germany had spent nothing and then did badly we would never hear the end of it. a-ha, it goes to show the difference between good science and no science at all is government funding but when the opposite and once again as usual
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reality defies what the status tells us, we just hear silence. it never comes up. people don't even know about it. japan's civil research and development is the most privatized in the world. and yet japan engages in an enormous amount of what's called basic science which supposedly the free market would never provide. basic science 'cause it doesn't yield immediate profits and fruits of it could be stolen by a credit so why would the free market ever provide it? but it does. it takes place in japan in industrial laboratories instead of in tax-funded universities. we have bought into this false notion of science i think france begged us several years. we have basic science just scientists just working in a laboratory and that gives rise to discoveries which then in turn are adopted by private entities which put them in the service of human welfare. now, that is a plausible story.
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i believed that for a long time but that's not how science, in fact, has progressed. what normally happens, in fact, is that applied science builds on applied science. not on basic science. classic example of this is the steam engine. the steam engine did not emerge from scientists in lab coats. it wasn't some guy was in a lab somewhere experimenting and all of a sudden he said something, oh, my gosh, i can't believe it. i got a steam engine over here. [laughter] >> this is not the case. it was practical men adapting preexisting technology to modern problems. in fact, the science had to adapt to the technology because the steam engine was actually more efficient then existing science said it could be so the science had to exchange. the department of defense years ago did -- looked into how many of the 700 key research breakthroughs that led to the development of important weapon
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systems were attributable to basic science. and the answer was two out of the seven. so applied science built over applied science but the point is even basic science is supplied more by the free market than it is by governments. if you look at percentage of gdp, it's no contest. private donors way outspent governments in the age before the estate tax decimated incomes. and terrence keely explains this in his great book "the economic laws of scientific research." it's, unfortunately, very hard to find that book. i summarize it a bit on my own here. there's a lot more evidence and rationales of why we should expect this to be the case. in fact, he makes a very cogent argument that government funding will always displace more than it replaces so there will be less overall spending. this is a very counterintuitive
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but i give more support to it in the course of the book. now, let's take on a example more toughies here. obviously, i can't take on the whole regulatory apparatus. it would require a whole revolution in our thinking but i want to raise some ideas for reflection. just throw out some facts that a lot of people just don't perhaps know. it's not to say that we don't need any oversight of various things. it's just what form does that oversight take? and what sort of agency in our society engages in it but take, for example, osha, occupational safety health. well, before osha everybody is dying on the job 'cause people are standing there on the assembly line and it's so unsafe that they're falling into the grinder and we're eating hot dogs made out of a guy's leg. we got that constantly. we got that in the upton sinclair book, okay?
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but first of all, 60% of the of the injuries on the john are nothing that an employer can do anything about. 20% of them are like violent -- like people beating each other up. once that happens, you know, it's already going on. there's not much you can do about it. another 40% -- and so adding up to the 60% is traffic fatalities, during like you're on the highway or something. these are not the classic things that we've been led to think of when we think about workplace fatalities but we don't notice -- people say hey, look we got osha and then look what happens. workplace fatalities declined and injuries and so on. but the point is they were already declining at an even faster rate before we got that. now, that's not to say maybe osha accelerated it again, we'll talk a little bit more about that in the book. the point is you don't already realize it and progress has made the wealthier a society becomes the more desirable and possible it becomes to bring about safer
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environments. it's the national evolution of society. or the national highway traffic safety administration. surely, this must be the reason that we're seeing, there being fewer fatalities on the highway. 3.5% a year it's going down but you know what? in the 35 years before we had that injury, do you know what rate fatalities were going down 3.8% a year. we don't hear -- not a word, not a word. this is entirely due to your wise overlords and you would be debt without them so shut your mouths. and also there are countless examples of how the private sector, the bad part of the private sector uses the regulatory apparatus to its own advantage to hurt its competitors. just think -- like, for example, anytime there's some industry where there's some government move to ban advertising in that industry, who's advocating that? the biggest established firms, of course. it doesn't hurt them.
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everybody knows about marlboro. nobody knows about joe's cigarette company. kids, if you're watching, don't smoke. you see my point, right? you see the logic we tend to think what a wonderful message for this. it's rare. like there's a reason that the most free market political candidates on the national level tend not to get a huge amount of money from big business but they kind of like the system the way it is now. they're perfectly happy with the way it is now. the regulatory bodies prop up the established firms and meanwhile, we have gullible people who think, gosh, where would we be without them? so just one example of this. for a long time we were told that we have to avoid cutthroat competition. and on that -- and cutthroat competition means lowering prices for people. that has to be treated as like the devil. like that's like godzilla. we don't want. and so in the name of doing
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this, every major innovation was fought tooth and nail by existing firms precisely on these grounds. we had this innovation it would lead to cutthroat competition. no it means i would have to get off my leah you know what and work harder to compete with my competitor who is having a sale. so, for example, when we hear about -- this is kind of david these days but we used to hear jokes about traveling salesmen. the -- processor traveling salesmen he was the butt of so many jokes. talk about a misunderstood fellow. and why do they make jokes, well, okay. the traveling salesmen was not liked by a lot of wholesalers because he could get into a town and visit every retailer and show off his wares and get out and win their business and, of course, the established way of doing things i don't care like that. who does he think he is so the
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established firms moved to get heavy licensing fees imposed on traveling salesmen which they couldn't afford to pay. if i go into this town i would pay this fee this they would sneak into each town and get out before they could be detected and so because they were operating sort of on the edges of legality, people began to think of them as being slightly underhanded and perverse. even though it seems underhanded and perverse to make them do this but as usual wise overlords are guiltless and it's the terrible, you know, traveling salesmen you have to go after. or department stores, my god, department stores were treated like the return of godzilla when they were introduced. how dare these institutions sell multiple products and to add insult to injury, they're doing it on different floors. [laughter] >> who do these people think -- and mail order. mail order, you're just going to send out a series roebuck
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catalog and i got my whole storefront here? and so there were people counselored to have large bond fires of the sears roebuck catalog, the great enemy of society and then whatever the chain stores and then it was the discount houses. and this is great. for a long time there were rules in some of the states that a retailer cannot sell a product for less than the manufacturer's suggested retail price because if they did so, that would be cutthroat competition. well, obviously we all know who was pushing for this law the retailers. it was not the general public oh, i'm so sick and tired of sales. would you please stop marking things down. laugh >> how horrible. of course, it was the retailers but by the 1950s, the heroic discount houses popped up where they were going to offer you the low price ghouls marking them off the manufacturer suggested retail price in defiance of the law. and people didn't know what to
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say. the establishment was all wrong. who are these people? these discount people. i reported in "rollback" magazine horrified at the discount houses because at the discount houses they are not waiting on you hand in foot and they go i need a fan section. i need a fan, no, they'll answer it but that is how they kept their prices low and they don't swept the aisles and "life" magazine was going they have unswept aisles and people are rude in there. and they couldn't compute with this type of thing so a lot of times these discount houses were called into court injunctions were brought against them but finally it became impossible to deal with and today we have this heroic situation where today we look at the manufacturers suggested retail price and we think what sucker is paying this thing. [laughter] >> it's the heroic discount houses who stood up against this, this use of the apparatus
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of coercion and compulsion, namely, the state to benefit certain institutions at the expense of others. okay. i was told i still continue with my regular time so i am going to take advantage of that. i will say very quickly and i will say a little bit more about it and i will truncate things a bit but even when we get to something like national defense, even here there is reason for skepticism and i think -- and i say this as somebody who years ago i would have thought if you say that the military budget should also be on the table, but when you're talking about budget cuts well -- go back to russia you commie, but the more i read about it and think well, now i'm being taken advantage of. now i feel like my former patriotism is now being exploited by people and it's not
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right. and so, for example -- there's a lot of military analysts who have been around the pentagon say this that we got this problem with the missing trillion bucks over the past roughly nine or ten years. since 9/11, the pentagon budget went up by a couple trillion dollars and half of that went to the wars but the question is what happened to the other half that's what winslow wheeler and other people who are not liberals are? where did the other trillion go and the reason they're asking when you look at the state of things and you see the combat air fleet is weighed down by 51% when -- down by 43% 53% budget increase. how can that be with the number of battleships in the navy be down 53% and the army is up but the budget is up substantially. how could this be? where is the money going and the institutions, the one can't department that's not subject to audit. it's explicitly exempt from audit. it's not to say they failed from
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audit. we don't have contractors who were paid once, twice or not at all. nobody notices. but we're sort of told well, you can't mention that and that means you hate americans, no, no. it would be like the most important thing to look at. and then moreover there are -- there have been economic consequences of all this. and one of the points i make is there are certain incentives that a private firm faces on the free market. those incentives, you got to keep your costs low. and you got to keep the quality of your quality of your product super high. these are not the incentives that firms are operating under when their client or their major client becomes the pentagon because although money is an issue, it's not like they could spend a quinn tillion million dollars on something. they'll get the money. the concern is how welk you work with the military community? how welk you deal with the fact we may be chasing the design on
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you frequently. and a number of scholars have noted that the business model of these firms becomes -- instead of cost minimization becomes cost and subsidy maximization so that once they then go back to the private sector, they've almost forgotten to be a competitive firm of this again. an example would be what happened to the u.s. machine tool industry which is the envy of the world as recently as the 1960s. and then the pentagon became its chief customer. and so we have the first a lot of the great research and development minds are being siphoned off in the government ferc. nobody is replacing them and there's a fixed number of geniuses and if they are doing this they can't be doing r & d work. the incentives they were offering under was very unheat. and there was numerical machine tool company and the japanese developed it inexpensively, the germans developed it
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inexpensive. the u.s. machine developed but so expensively that no private firm can buy it. it's because they are operating -- now the pentagon could buy it and did but they're operating completely under different incentives. i mean, these are issues that need to be considered. all this stuff has to be on the table. but ultimately what we're talking about here is more than just about spending or balanced budgets or debt. ultimately, it is about right and wrong. and here i want to close but it's a long close. i'm building up to something, okay? [laughter] >> i want to close with a little story from robert elsick who was a harvard philosopher wrote a book called "anarchy, state and utopia." they are his words but my ideas. i want to read you.
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the tale of the slade runs like this, first, he invites all of us to consider ourselves as the slade in the story. you are a slave at the mercy of a brutal master who forces you to work for his purposes and beats you arbitrarily. second, the mast jer decides to beat you for only breaking the laws and even grants you some free time. third, you are part of a group of slaves subject to this master. he decides on grounds acceptable to everyone how goods should be allocated among you all. fourth, the master requires his slaves to work only three days per week, granting them the other four days off. they can do as they wish during their free time. fifth, the master now allows the slaves to work wherever they wish. his main caveat is that they must send him three-seventh of their wanes corresponding to the three days of work they once had
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to do on his land every week. in an emergency he can force them to do his bidding once again and he retains the power to alter the fraction of his wages to which he lays claim. sixth, the master grants all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, the right to vote. they can decide among themselves how much of their and your earnings to take and what outlets to fund with the money. they can decide what you are and are not allowed to do. we can suppose for the sake of argument that the master grant this to the 10,000 slaves you have 10,000 master or a 10,000-headed master. seventh you are granted the freedom to troy to persuade the 10,000 to exercise their vast powers in a particular way. you still do not have the right to vote but you can try to influence those who do. eight, the 10,000 grant you the right to vote but only to break a tie. you write down your vote and if a tie should occur, they open it and record it.
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no tie has ever occurred. ninth, you are granted the right to vote. but functionally, it simply means as in the eighth stage that in case of a tie, which has never occurred, your vote carries the issue. no such question is this. at what stage between one and nine did this become something other than the tale of a slave? well, that's an interesting unexamined question because it is an unexamined premise of our society across the american political spectrum that society cannot function without a single coercive institution, with a power of dispose of the lives and fortunes of over 300 million individuals. while throwing the poor a few scraps in 1001 covert ways this institution enriches various elites at the expense of the various production. the more it grows, the worse it gets. more and more sectors of society
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conclude that they too must enrich themselves by means of government-granted privilege. everyone begins to clamour for subsidies just in order to break even. the industrialists take, the farmers take, the scientists take, the military establishment takes. the social workers takes, the social bureaucracy takes, everybody takes. all of this looting under cover the law is what the great 19th century french economist memorably called "legal plunder." no one considers it legitimate to stick a gun in his neighbor's ribs and take his things. yet, we are taught to believe that a dramatic moral difference separates that kind of open way. when a government sticks a gun in your neighbor's ribs and hands the proceeds to you. it's put like this, when you tax away from someone the fruits of five months of his labor, you are in effect taking away five months from him.
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you are taking away part of his life. dance around the issue all you'd like but this is forced labor by any reasonable definition of the term. [applause] >> and be honest when i said harvard philosopher you weren't expecting it to turn out this way. [laughter] >> but this is the most humane way for human beings to interact with each other? is it so unimaginable to conceive of a society in which we finally put the guns down and deal with each other on the basis of reason and compassion rather than force. it's once described as the state as the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live by everyone else. well, this arrangement is coming to an end. something is going to have to give. we're facing fiscal collapse. we may be confronting a currency
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currency in which the dollar will fall over precipitously over the course of time and there won't be anything left for the poor or for the pressure groups or anyone else except for a bunch of worthless promises and every year the crisis is not addressed the situation becomes all the worse. so in short, the propaganda with which we are flooded regarding how indispensable our wise overlords in washington is, this is unworthy of a sixth grader. we would not die instantly were it not for the constant oversight of our overlords in washington. we would flourish. .. and here's the proof. thank you very much. [applause] ..
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>> jorge castaneda has written another new book, "manana forever?" it is called. i want to start with the subtitle of this book, mexico and mexicans. where were you going without subtitles because basically what i'm trying to do is tell the story of mexico and its people for an american reader, although i'm also publishing the book simultaneously in spanish in the united states for spanish-speaking readers in mexico. it's a play on words. it's being published simultaneously in mexico in spanish in another version with a different edition which is also just come out of this very week in mexico. the purpose is to tell the story
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minute to americans but also to mexicans in the united states and mexicans in mexico. the story of who mexicans are. we were, who we are now, and why what we are doesn't really work anymore with what the country has become. and why we have to change. >> what kind of change? >> basically it's a national character change. what i tried to hear in this book is to take four or five very well detected traits of the mexican national character, as described by classic authors like anthropologist from the middle of this century, americans for example, like oscar lewis and others. and say okay, these character traits which are great for mexico over the last 500 years both as a colony, as an independent country, to form a nation today are totally
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dysfunctional. to what the country has become. a middle-class society, a representative democracy, and open economy, globalized economy and the country that is absolutely desperate for the establishment of the rule of law. the character traits and these features don't work anymore. they are at odds. and so since we can't change material reality, we've got to change people's heads. >> let's start with the mexican middle class. what's wrong with the mexico middle-class? >> there's nothing wrong with a middle-class. what's wrong is its members who tend to be incredibly individualistic. the first chapter is a chapter about mexican individualism which even by your standards is outrageous. it's excessive. mexico is a country with less
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collective or associative participation than any country in latin america, let alone the united states or western europe. we are a country at terrible in sports. winner what anything in team sports, though we are good at individual, boxers, runners, walkers, bullfighters, golfers. we are a country where people don't like to live in high rises because they don't believe it's their home. they want their home on the ground level, which means cities stretch out endlessly and cost a fortune. we are a country where there are no collective action suits. the notion itself doesn't exist. we're a country of leaders of movements, the uprising from 15 years ago. we are not a of movement of processes.
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so individualistic is great except when 60% of your society is middle-class. then it doesn't work anymore. >> how would you describe the current relationship between mexico and the united states? >> what i tried to do in this book when i have a long chapter devoted both with the relationship of the united states and the mexican national character of the intersection, obsession with the past, fear of the foreign, and i tried to explain why a country that is so tied to the united states can no longer continue to be a country that often sounds off against the united states too loudly. i give an example back from 2004 -- three actually in the city in guadalajara. with the u.s. and mexico were
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competing for participation in the athens olympic soccer competition at the mexico stadium in guadalajara. and the american players had been improvise a bit aggressive. but all of a sudden through, towards the end of the game, the crowd starts chanting and this made these concerns some of our american people are watching us, osama, osama, osama, osama. needless to say the american players got a little bit upset. now, this would be an insulting anywhere in the world but in guadalajara, the state of jalisco, it is worse because how this goes mexico number when sending state of immigrants to the united states and has been for 100 years. it's the home of porter by our to that you know welcome one of our most important if not the most important resort city in
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mexico. it's the home for probably 5,400,000 american retirees in guadalajara who live there and spend a wonderful time and are extraordinarily well received either mexican neighbors and friends. in this city, at this time, to be that insulting to americans means there's something going on which is not right. doesn't work. that's part of the problem, the relationship with the united states. now we've got the drug wars, which the united states is helping on, but not enough. >> you describe those drug wars as unwinnable. >> absolutely unwinnable. it's a ridiculous war. we should not have started it. we will never be able to win it. it has now cost us more than 40,000 lives, more than $50 billion. widespread human rights abuses,
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and a tremendous damage to mexico's image abroad, with no results to show in exchange. there is nothing that can be done with drugs in mexico as long as the united states keeps consuming what it consumes. and it hasn't changed its consumption patterns, probably there's no reason why it should. i was a strong proponent of proposition 19 in california last november. i had hoped it would pass, legalizing marijuana in the state of california. it didn't pass. it lost by three points. i'm hopeful that in 2012 it will pass, and then we in mexico can also begin a process of legalization of drugs, starting with marijuana. >> resident col de romme is conducting this war in mexico. is it time for him to end the? >> he unfortunately will not end it because he is too stubborn to just taken this as a personal battle of his own.
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he's all alone in this battle. the rest of the government, of the country does not follow him. but he's only got a year and a half left. so it doesn't really matter anymore except for the people who will continue to die, which is not a minor event, what he does. the next president will have to end this absurd war which is going nowhere. >> how open is the mexican economy? >> well, the point i tried to make in the fourth chapter of this book is that we now have the mexican -- fifth chapter, which is when the most open economies in the world. far more open than the united states, and any latin american economy along with chile, and similar to most european economies. the sum of exports and imports over gdp is one of the highest there are, more than 50%. we are eight country where tourism is enormously important. it's the number one generator of hard currency and the number one
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in employer in mexico, where remains for mexican immigrants abroad are a very important source of currency. and also by the way, the country where there are more u.s. nonmilitary nationals living than any other country in the world. around a million americans live in mexico, which is more than anyplace else in the whole world. this open economy which has been a group thing by and large, not as good as many people thought it would be, and perhaps not as beneficial as many expected, but it's been a good thing in general terms. but it's also very much concentrated with the states, with the united states. 90% of our exports go to the u.s. 90% of our oil goes to the u.s. 90% of the tourists that visit mexico come from the u.s. and so on and so forth. obviously, all of our immigrants
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are in the u.s. by definition. there's a very open economy, so mexico can't be an introspective closed off character. we can't have the traditional mexico way of being in our mind what in our everyday life. for an open economy. >> i want to return to a mexican jenne phobia, fear of the foreigner. with a growing middle class in mexico, has that changed the? >> it hasn't changed yet. it's beginning to change but we are still very much immersed in this fear of the for and in this notion that we've always been victims of the past, or that we are conquered by the spanish in 1519, 1521, and humiliated and exploited by the spaniards for the following three centuries. then during the 19th century
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with independence, first we have taxes taken away from us in 1836, then the united states invaded us in 1847, then the french invaded us in 1963. then the americans invaded once again in 1914. and so on and so forth. as a matter of fact, all of these factoids are more complicated than they seem. but in any case what i try to say in this book, in this chapter is let's move on. let's leave all that behind us. look to the future, and more importantly, look to what the country has become. look to the 11 or 12 million mexicans who live in the united states, one out of every nine mexican citizens in the world lives in the united states. that's a greater share than in any country in the world, except el salvador and ecuador which are very small countries.
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as i said, a million americans live in mexico. 300 million cross the border back and forth every year. why do we want to dwell on the past when they're so open and it's so beneficial to the country to be so open? but we are obsessed with it. we have a very strange situation in mexico. it's one of the anecdotes i wrote about -- i write about. we have laws that foreclosed a series of government jobs and elected positions to naturalized mexicans. a naturalized mexican cannot be an ambassador, a console, a member of the cabinet, a governor, a mayor, a police chief, member of the board of central bank. he can have none of those -- congressman, he can't be a senator. so we are in this absurd situation, we mexicans, where on the one hand we demand, rightly,
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rights for mexicans in the u.s., whether they came to the u.s. legal or illegally, we demand full rights for them. but we deny minimum rights to naturalized mexicans, americans, spanish, brazilian, chinese, whatever. it's an absurd situation which can't go on. >> jorge castaneda served as foreign minister of mexico from 2000-2003 working with president fox at the time but how much of your time as foreign minister was given with the u.s. and used in -- first of all how much of your time was spent dealing with the u.s., and of that time how much was spent teaching on the immigration issue? >> any mexican foreign minister is going to spend up to 70, 75% of his time dealing with the u.s. we have a few other important relationships in the world. obviously, guatemala because
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where the border with them. some countries in western europe, mainly spain. some countries in latin america, mainly chile. and with cuba we have always a long-standing and often conflicted relationship. canada also. but 75% of any mexican foreign ministers time is devoted to the u.s. i tried to devote as much time as i could to immigration. because i thought and continue to think this is mexico's single most important issue with the u.s. and by the way, i also think it's the united states single most important issue with mexico. there are 11 or 12 million american citizens are arriving in the u.s. there are important states in the u.s. like california, like texas, like arizona, like nevada, like illinois when mexicans make up a very significant part of the
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electorate or of the population at large. it's a central issue, and it's an issue that has to be addressed and that nobody wants to address forthrightly. >> how should it be addressed? >> it should be addressed a little bit the way we said back in 2001 and 2002 with my good friend former secretary of state colin powell, the way president bush and fox wanted to address it, and wake president obama wants to address it now. legalize the people who are here without papers, established a migrant workers program for people to be able to continue to enter the united states as the u.s. economy needs their labor. support and help the areas of mexico where these migrants come from so that they eventually start staying in their own towns unless they are needed in the u.s. and once you have done that, i sure that the u.s.-mexican border is only open to legal
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entry with the cooperation of both countries to make that entry legal. but you can't stop illegal entries unless you increase the number of legal entries. if not you're going to have people climbing over the fence or under the fans or swimming across the moat with alligators in it like president obama said a few days ago. >> jorge castaneda, what are you doing today? >> i spend about a third of my year in new york city. i teach at nyu. i had been there now for 14 years except for the years i was in government. i spend a lot of time in mexico lecturing and speaking all over the country, trying to put forward ideas like the ones that are in these books. i gavel in politics but tried to stay a little bit away from it. and i write a lot. i'm not sure how well but certainly i write a lot. >> "manana forever?" is the name
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of the book. here is the english version to be sold in the united states. here is the spanish-language version to be sold in the united states. and finally, here is the version to be sold in mexico. why a different cover on the mexican version? >> two reasons. i like the mexican cover for the u.s., but the people said it was too somber. the u.s. cover in mexico has an arguable legal status because if you look at it, if you can put it back on, you see the mexican eagle is divided into. this is the center of the mexican flag. you've got the top of the eagle at the bottom and you have the bottom of the eagle at the top. and in mexico, distorting the national emblem and flag is a dubious legal status. so we decided not to risk it. >> back to the mexican version,
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what is this on the cover of? >> this is a painting by person i considered to be and most people consider to be mexico's foremost artist today, rafael. he just finished an extraordinary mural of the mexican supreme court. these are kids who are migrants. they are about ready to leave for the united states. if you look down at the bottom, right hand corner, the license plate on the truck says mig, migrants 666. he said hyperrealistic paint and these are six or seven kids with extraordinary faces about to leave for the united states. i think they tell the story of the ministry of mexicans as the subtitle of the book in spanish indicates. >> this is c-span booktv the and we've been talking with jorge castaneda, author of "manana forever?." thanks for being with us. >> thank you.
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>> what are you reading this summer? otd wants to know. >> well, i'm reading "ulysses" by james joyce. i started that on january 1. it's a new year's resolution of mind to plow through that book by june 16. that's the date the whole book is built around. i have a chapter to go. i don't recommend it. it's a classic, but it's impenetrable, very hard to be but i will get it done. also, this summer i will be reading "founders" which is a rafael book about those are part of the american revolution, not a lot of new ground plowed but very interesting stories. looks good to me. two books by patrick o'brian, "master and commander" and far side of the earth which is what was put together to make the master and commander moving starring russell crowe. and the other book i will be reading is called "sword and honor" which is a compilation of
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military stories, some commission, summer and at the time about 19th century battles in the napoleonic wars, the zulu wars and the civil war. that's what i will be reading this summer. >> visit booktv.org to see this and other summer reading lists. >> there's a new self published book out on the market. it's written by richard toliver and we are joined now by richard toliver. who is that on the cover of this book? >> that's a young richard toliver. it's an air force fighter paul -- fighter pilot of a few years ago and was taken during the time that i was very fortunate to be involved with the f-15 aircraft. >> when was that? >> 1974-1976 to be exact. >> why did you write a book? >> after i'd gone through life, retired from the air force, looked back over some 50 years i
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realized that i had some very unique experiences in my life, and i have met some very unique people. and all of them, the experience made a significant difference as to who i was at that time. and so i decided with the encouragement of my family to write the story of those people who i called and caged eagles, the people that were placed in my life, all along the way. i must admit i did not who they were and they did know that was taking place at the time. when you get to be about 65 years old, and you the opportunity to look back and you begin to see these things. and so i saw that there were a number of people that needed to be spoken of who made a difference in my life, to cause me to be who i am today. and i wanted to tell that story in the first person. >> who is one of those people? >> probably the first person was
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a little they be who owned a one room store. she gave me my first job, and paid me $3 a week. on the other spectrum was a man by the name of ross perot. and he gave me an opportunity to work with him and he paid me a few more dollars a week at that point. but in between the people like jackie robinson, dr. martin luther king jr., there were task edm and that i became a part of, that second generation and launched out into the air force. there were many people along the way taken during the struggles in my life there were always somebody there. and so i identify these people along the way. and later the and caged eagles were indeed my late mother and older sister, an older sister. a next-door neighbor gave me courage. and there were other people like many people in the air force
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that were officers, enlisted people and so on. >> where did you come up with the term, uncaged eagle? >> very interesting. when i was about 13 years old, i heard a sermon from the reverend franklin who was a father of a recent franklin. and he told a story about an eagle that had been unwittingly trapped in a cage with crickets. i was the 13th when i heard that sermon. in a way it was me he was speaking to. because i was an eagle inside but i was trapped by my circumstances. and i want to get free pickup so i took then, that metaphor then became richard toliver, trapped by circumstances. and the circumstances were in fact the chickens or the people that did note that there was an eagle inside of me or a burning desire to fly airplanes. so i took that as my way of
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going forward and how i was going to get free one day, to impact. >> where did you grow up and what did your parents to? >> at that time growing up i was near shreveport, louisiana. to be very candid my father and my mother's marriage had failed and six children were left alone in the deep south in the '40s and '50s. my mother died young trying to raise the six children, and so it was not people of means are parents of great stature. but from that experience, from those who are brought along into my life, made it possible for me to go forward. >> you self publish this book. why and what was that experience like for you? >> i had been in the air force. i spent some 20 years being a developer of small business and entrepreneurship and so one. and when i wrote the book and realized that he was going to
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take an enormous effort to get it published, so i set about using my business skills or experience at the time and said i think i can do this, if i figure it out what it is we need to do. so i did. and i was able to establish a publishing team. and then put together the book. following examples of the great publishers out there. i wanted to be able to put a book out there that would indeed look like a great publisher had done it. and make sure that the story was there, the possible, and the processes were there and i was able to do that. >> forward by ross perot? >> yes. ross perot is a great american that i happen to know. i was recruited by the ross perot organization back in the '90s when he was putting together united we stand america, and later the reform party.
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and when i met ross we both realized that we shared a common interest in our country, our god, our families and so on. and we struck up not on a provincial relationship but a personal relationship. and so when i get ready to write the book actually i made a visit to ross and said i want to talk about ross perot in the book and i want to talk about him as i know him, not as the people know him or the media know him, and i want to tell about ross perot up close and personal. he gave me permission to do that and told a few stories in the book about ross and his great philanthropic work and contributions to the country. and because of that when i wrote the book, i had another visit with ross and said, do you want to take a look at this and give consideration to endorsing it? and he did. does the forward. >> richard toliver, "an uncaged eagle: true freedom." if people are interested in getting this book, where can they go? >> well, i have a website now
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that sony of able to people to get the book. it's www.and and caged eagle.com. that's the way they can get the book right now. or they can contact my publishing company at (623)340-5768, four, peter, they might contact you and you in turn did the word to me and i will see that they get a book. >> author richard toliver. this is book tv on c-span2. >> next tomiko brown-nagin looks at the civil rights movement in atlanta. and the differences between the activists who participate in it over three decades. this is a little over an hour. >> welcome. it is my great pleasure o

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