country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. you are watching booktv on c-span2. next, author and economics professor deirdre mccloskey discusses whether it is humane to be a socialist. .. that's a look at how the next three programs on booktv on c-span2. now, deirdre mccloskey, omni morality of socialism. good morning.

i'm david burton, senior fellow in economic policy at the heritage foundation. our subject today is is it humane to be a socialist? highly relevant subject it is. today's event is the fifth and the speaker series we call free-market, the ethical economic choice. the provides a moral and ethical critique of socialism and makes the case for the moral superiority of a free economy. i want to bring to your attention the next two events in the series on november 15 george giller of the discovery institute will give a talk called capitalism, is an information learning system. and november 30 mike monger of duke university will give a talk, and poverty is a real problem in capitalism is the only solution. i would also like to bring to your attention an event that's not part of the series but may be of interest to you on november 16 gregory may will be here to talk about his new book, jefferson's treasure, how

albert ãsaved the new nation from debt. gallatin i think is a seriously underestimated figure. he cut taxes, reduce the national debt by half. he was sort of a one-man omb and funded both louisiana purchase and the 1812. he was both jefferson and madison's secretary of treasury and answered to alexander hamilton.it's his statute that stands in front of the treasure building. onto today's event, it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, doctor deirdre mccloskey. she is among the most defenders of classical liberalism and a free economy in the united states today. since the year 2000, doctor deirdre mccloskey has been a distinguished professor of economics, english and communications at the university of illinois in

chicago. trained at harvard which we will hold against you, as an economist. she's written 16 books and added seven more and published some 360 articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics and the law has a challenging task of teaching ã ãwell professor of economics at the ãbthat was my good fortune she was also professor of economics and history at the university of iowa.doctor mccloskey many books are unusually well written. particularly when it comes to economics which as written isn't always a discipline that has the very finest writing. although lawyers do pretty bad too. spending time with these books is always both equally edifying and a genuine pleasure. i want to bring a few to your

attention. first, the bird was era trilogy, three books written over the period of about 10 years. the most recent is virtual inequality, how idea is and not capitals institutions enrich the world. birds want dignity, why economics cannot explain the modern world. and the first, bourgeois virtues, ethics through commerce written in 2006. these books argue that new ideas are the explanation for the great enrichment from 1800 to the present. liberty and dignity for ordinary people. classical liberalism. and what she calls trade tested betterment. she argues that materials explanation such as capital accumulation and exploitation are mistaken. in a modern restatement of ideas explored originally by adam smith and his theory of moral sentiment she also makes the case that virtue ethics celebrating bourgeois or middle-class virtues the sound

and central to our society success. other books you might find of value, the statistical significance how the standard era ãbwritten with stephen. the rhetoric of economics. knowledge and persuasion of economics. if you are so smart the narrative of economic expertise second thoughts, myths and morals of u.s. economic history. and last but not least, the applied theory of price. we use the applied theory of price in many ãbin chicago. it's now available online for free at www.áuntran6á.com for those who would like the good price theory book. if you haven't read a price theory book you should. the coronet in a logical power of economic, in my judgment, is ã after presentation we will have time for audience q&a and a copy of her remarks, or at least an outline, will be available to anyone who wants

it after the event. please join me in welcoming deirdre mccloskey. [applause] >> thank you very much. i have a speech defect, which you will have to grow accustomed to or run screaming from the room. it's still a free country even after yesterday's election. [laughter] i had to make a joke about the election at this institute. the price theory book you speak of i intended a third edition also. when i get the time from the other things i want to do. among the things i want to do is one of the core ideas ãbin the trilogy that david mentioned is to undermine the

attractions of socialism. socialism is attractive. the title of my talk is, socialism is ethical at age 16. now at 26 or my own age. i'm 76. when i was 16 as a child of the harvard professor, therefore upper-middle-class, by birth. i was a socialist so to speak. a non-scholarly one. it was the age of folk music so i was ãbi called myself a joan biased socialist. i dreamt i saw drew hill. the old joke is that someone who's not a socialist by age 16 has no heart, someone who is

still a socialist at age 26 has no brain. at age 16, with the background that i had. socialism looked ãbyou could say was ãbethically defensible. if you grow up in a family, and i take it everyone here did, you grow up in a socialist enterprise. the mom and the old traditional family wishes thankfully slowly declining, was the central planner and indeed had her own little homework ãbmy grandmother could make all the girls clothing. could cook for b,40 a week. everything from scratch.

so there was economic production in the home that she did and then her husband went off to be an electrician and an electrical contractor. in the people in the house and certainly in mind where my father would go off to the office and do god knows what and then come home and income would fall like manna on the household. that background makes makes for socialist. it's still more people like me who haven't done honest work in her entire life, i've been in academic life was good at school so i stayed. if you go to college and live in a dorm as i did, and then go to graduate school and live in

it dorm as i didn't get married and have a central planner to take care of you, and then you and then you and then you, if you particularly field is english or history as mine sometimes is you are going to emerge at age 27 as someone who has always lived in families. and you're going to view the market as is very strange for an intrusion on the intellect seen from each according to her ability to teach. to each according to her need. of course grow up in a firm as very few americans do now over 80% of americans were in firms. now it's about one percent. then you know where meat comes

from. you know as we say the value of money you know that your past worried about the price of hogs or soybeans. or if you grow up as some of you surely dead, over the shop, so to speak. in a small business apartment upstairs with the family lived and he worked as a child in the family. or if as a child he had a paper route or something like that. there is variation it turns out in the organization and the paper routes, some of them are more entrepreneurial than others.

it's no wonder, considering those occupations those families are declining in weight in the american economy. most particularly agriculture. it's quite enormous. that socialism survives in people's minds. young people's minds especially. and david and i were speaking earlier about how strange it is and on tv you see these kids being interviewed and they say earnestly, they're not bad people, they're just saying earnestly, i think we ought to try socialism as though socialism has never been tried. let's change the system. people are always saying. which is my own experience of changing the system is it doesn't work.

one version of the golden rule is those that have the gold, rule. under whichever system we have. it seems to me, i wonder if you agree, that one's political convictions tend to freeze sometimes in one's 20s. most people acquire their politics in their 20s and then don't other change. below are marked once the youthful tryce gives he was more scholar than i was. he found it very hard to shift as he graduated. he had to be some sort of

conservative. as far as the ethical question is concerned that we are dealing with here, of course, the age of reason and the age of reason in both of our lives were supposed to use reason. it's decidedly unethical not to and thinking about politics that we are going to impose on our neighbors. it's striking to be once a socialist, now a free-market advocate. i call myself a humane libertarian or bleeding heart libertarian. or a christian liberal. it's striking that my socialist friends with whom i have great many. resist reason.

resist the reasonable claims that this book that david plans to come out of these. the claims of reason against socialism. the claims of sheer experience that would be historical reasoning. the people who advocate socialism now and i'm saying bernie sanders and jeremy corbin both of whom are about my age. we shared the same views in 1960. but they didn't change. you hear speeches by bernie sanders and they sound like 1960s socialist speeches.it's

striking the habit learn from history at all. jeremy corbin and my friend the economist joseph stiglitz. praised show beds and no mondello in venezuela. in the coverage of the venezuela catastrophe it's quite notable that the journalists again i'm sure innocently they are not bad in that simpleminded of sense. though it was a national disaster. the hurricane that hit venezuelan for some reason you can't get any food or medicine at the store. and for some reason you had to take wheelbarrows full of money

to buy bread. if ãbmost of this in a way since the 1980s has been released. i noticed resistance to my three wonderful books which are available on amazon.com cheap and even in spoken books, so what are you waiting for? [laughter] have a mark sawyer theory of history which is that the history of all to existing societies is the history of class struggles. when i read that as a kid i thought, great, i don't need to read anything more. because now i have the formula. ãbbut we are all in a sense

for about 100 years we've all been uninterested ãbthat isn't the word, unpersuaded by the force of ideas. the independent force of ideas. and what's strange about this fact of intellectual history, especially in the west. is that the people saying it, saying you can do something that all that matters is interest. murray rothberg, another acquaintance of mine, i call them both america's leading boger marxist because they talk this way all the time. but it's interesting the terms and ideas. when they themselves were purveyors of ideas. they themselves were making speeches just like the one i'm making now. there's something strangely inconsistent about this

materialist preposition. but my ãfriends to get back to that sense they walked by the evidence, the evidence that brings the historical evidence, the economic evidence. i think one reason for this is that the progressives, to cover them all, assume that people like most of the people in this room are evil. look to your left, look to your right, which means you don't have to pay attention to what they say. why pay attention to hitler? extreme case of this is the egregious effects are nancy

mclean of duke university. wrote an astounding ãbook about james buchanan, a great liberal economist. attacking him for no good reason. she did an interview anyone to do this. wants to do with calhoun theories and races. or charles cook, whom i worked for. so i'm the enemy. she has a rule actually, which she articulated this year which is that nancy will not ãb she's an historian.nancy will not speak to anyone who has accepted cook money. and indeed she won't speak to anyone from any university the problem with this is that duke university has accepted ãba

lot of money from charles cook. so nancy can't speak to herself. which perhaps explains why her book is so shockingly bad. we libertarians and conservatives by contrast i speak at least for the libertarians. such as don boudreaux, charles mason or tom pollard. or for that matter for charles cook. assume the progressives say socialists are just misinformed. and that if we teach them that the tariffs are idiotic or that stopping people from starting businesses is a bad idea, they will say you are right. i hadn't thought of that, you are right.

but they don't. what's the evidence against socialism? that the people at the age of reason should be listening to but don't. after they had put away their natural and childish emotional toys of socialism, by the way the hypothesis i made a few minutes ago about the family is a highly testable proposition. it's a piece of sociology that i wish some sociologists to find out about. i've argued in the trilogy that david mentioned that the rise of income per head, the countries that have adopted

what could properly call historically liberalism, free markets and free minds, has since 1800 increased by 3000 percent. that's income per head. indeed it can be income of the poorest. there's a lot of anxiety these days about inequality become part of the can't, not the conduct but the can't on tv. but in fact it was the poor who benefited the most from this gigantic increase of income. if you ask people, even quite well informed people, even employees of the world bank sometimes, as the great hans

rustling ãbhe would ask people how much do you think income has increased since 1800 in finland? or japan? or the united states? even well-informed people would say, i don't know, 100% may be. maybe 200 percent. but you know it's all gone to the rich. poor people haven't benefited. even while the poor people went in 1800 from having nada. to having large apartments, air conditioning, refrigerators, which most americans didn't have, as is recently certainly hundred years ago they had ice boxes if they were well-to-do. automobiles, etc. excellent

healthcare by the comparisons of 1900 when going to the doctor was very dangerous. they think it's 100% or 200 percent. no it's not, it's a factor of 30. i have the embarrassing task in a speech i gave more or less the same subject two weeks ago in cambridge england to an audience of all people and apologists. explaining to a very eminent anthropologist, i will give his name, it's embarrassing, who stood up afterwards and said, i agree with your claim that it's a factor of 30 cents the olden days. he is a very eminent historic anthropologist but there's 3000 percent is wrong. and i did it say, a professor.

30-1 divided by one is 29, multiplied to 100 to get a percentage and he got 2900, which is roughly 3000. i couldn't do it. i see what you mean. good point. but that fact is extremely important to acquire as john dewey is to say on your pulse. you should really get this into your head and your heart and grasp that free free markets have increased income per head by 3000 percent. and bid fair to do it for the entire world. there is no racial or cultural reason why ãcan't be as rich as the united states. and as indeed the case of china and india show very plainly. when i was young, when i was a student young beginning student

of economics, i was told by my teachers, my distinguished teachers at harvard that things were hopeless in china because they are all confucian. and in india the problem they are all hindus or muslims, which is maybe worse. it's hopeless. india and china are never going to grow. in 1978, at least in the economy, the chinese government started to introduce liberalism. and in india, thank god, in 1991, the world's largest democracy started to do the same thing and since then these growths have been from five percent to 10% from the year per capita. whereas under mall they were essentially zero percent per capita. under what the indians called the license garage under narrow

and the gandhi's. one percent. in a good year to percent. five percent per year, six percent per year. solves a lot of social problems and is since 1991 in india. the argument from our progressive friends and i use that phrase not in contempt but because i do have progressive friends. they say it was caused by the government. this rise since 1800. and it wearies me but then i go for the arguments why it was not caused by the government. i have a very distinguished colleague in the mercy of

chicago he's laid wrist and i said to him casually that the eight hour day wasn't caused by laws. it wasn't called by struggles of the picket line or the voting booth. it was caused he was startled by this assertion and didn't believe it. of course it was laws. it says so right in the law. no one should work more than eight hours a day. what more do you need? you conservatives, he called me. but of course it's not true. we have an eight hour a day law and that law a custom in the united states because people don't want to work more than eight hours a day and indeed for a long time the standard workweek froze, went down from 12, 210, to eight.

it seemed to have frozen but actually continued going down because people live longer on retirement, they go to school longer the amount of time people spend not working i retired in order to work. it is not because of laws but because of immensely increased productivity of the economy. indeed the effect of welfare states takes quite a while to emerge is a course partly because of the spread of the right to vote but it's also legal source. it's also because, as our economies get more rich we feel we can to use a non-economy word, afford a welfare state. and indeed more generally wages

are not determined by bargaining. there is a kind of theory on the left, which i see a lot of new stories and speeches by politicians that the bosses have piles of gold in the back room and that the job of us progresses is distract the gold and give it to the workers. and they believe this especially in france, where one labor law after another is imposed on the french economy. on the idea that the only way the workers will get there of is by going after the gold. it's not true. as economists have understood since the late 19th century and

the amount of evidence for that is just using the word overwhelming doesn't express its gigantic. why did this happen? if we are going to convince our socialist friends. socialism is not the way forward. we got to convince them that capitalism is but one of the troubles of upward capitalism embodies a scientific error. it's a very foolish word. unfortunately it's been dominant in economics not since marx, marx never use exactly capitalism, he only used capitalist freely. since the late 1900s. but it suggests very strongly to both the left and the liberals and conservatives. that the modern history the

economy is about the accumulation of capital. and i have many other friends. who still believe this. the capital is necessary rule of law and private property. for the specter of 30 days 3000 percent. it's not the spring of the watch. think of that. the metaphor here. the spring that make it grammatical, are ideas. ideas. the capital and rule of law and

peace and whatever, are the gears or even the phase that shows the result of the ãband not itself in any offense and i think we need to counter this metaphor. it focuses on what's important. it's a society in which ideas can flourish. i been everything, a socialist, ãbsocial engineer, i've been a man, i've been everything. back as the austrian economists say, these are the discoveries that the entrepreneur notices. as she walks around.

the mass of free lunches that made up 2000 percent. the idea of electric lights, the idea of cameras, in the old days the camera would have to be much larger than it is. the idea of projectors, the inexpensive carpeting. the steel that makes up the chairs. those are all ideas indeed the idea that a think tank, which this building embodies, is itself an idea. that my absolutely favorite

example is malcolm maclean, no relation i take it to nancy, who invented in 1956 containerization. you have standardized steel boxes. you've seen hundreds of them. either 20 feet long, 40 feet long, that can be stacked on top of each other and put on two ships in the number of 10,000 40 foot containers per ship. 10,040 foot ãb10,000 40 foot containers. that's a lot of trains. which radically reduced the cost of ocean transport for ã goods. at the same time both carriers,

old thinkers in particular, got larger and larger and larger. no science was involved. containerization is an organizational idea like think tanks. for the modern university in berlin. in 1810. combining research and teaching. so the ideas are not necessarily mechanical or electronic whatever. but they get tested in commerce. i keep altering that phrase that david mentioned. trey tested betterment. that's the test. the test is, does the container make money.

of course the left and the socialist views the money, the prophet as just kind of a tax. in the domicile is a brilliant passage. suppose profit is just a tax. the tax necessary, he says. and even our socialist friends would agree, to call out the enterprise that makes for containerization or the ã

it's about that. let's consider socialism.the tax and socialism let's compare east and west germany. make a more extreme case, in north korea. okay class, which system do you want? the one with 15 to 20% tax or one with a 50 or 90% tax. so this commercially tested betterment made us rich and reasonably good. it didn't corrupt our souls. that's the claim that's been common in all cultures since the beginning. since the beginning of specialization there has been ã ãthere have been middlemen.

while taking loans from them. it argued at length. commercially tested betterment is just essentially corrupting because as a christian this is an issue an important issue for me. what does it matter if someone gets the earth but loses her moral soul. if i thought that i called it in buddhism, which is a better word then in of is him ãbãi

would be a socialist. if i actually thought that socialism would do a better job for the soul and i think the evidence there is a little overwhelming that it doesn't. the 70 years of communism in the soviet union lacked the ethics of ordinary with the russians. and it's not just the high-level stuff. the containerization. when the claim containerization you would end up with 10,000 containers and he just cannot do a few of them. so he started small. but so did ray croc. so did bill gates. not so small actually.

but it's also the ordinary people having a go. the ordinary woman who decides to open a hairdressing salon in the neighborhood and puts their heart and soul into it. the ordinary guy who goes to the oilfields, moves to the oilfields of north dakota and its old and oil. where did this confidence come from? this confidence in having a go. humans have always been innovative to some degree but it's very striking how much more innovative they become in countries like england or france or the united states or italy or japan after 1800. how did this happen? it came from what adam smith

calls the obvious and simple plan. the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice. by which he meant the quality of social standing, the kind respect that all americans according to each other or should. liberty to open the hairdressing salon or invent the internet and equal justice before the law. here i want to quarrel with someone in the audience who might be traditional conservatives who don't believe in equality. i don't believe in what i call french style equality.

equality after the event. cutting down of toll puppets. i do believe in equality that adam smith spoke up. equal rights to venture. so at age 26 and certainly by 76, you are supposed to know this kind of thing. you are supposed to know that socialism has starkly work but there are some reasons it doesn't work. even though it works in small societies. among friends dividing up a pizza with the obnoxious if you are so-called friends said paid for the pizza i should get most of the slices. that's friendship destroying. you wouldn't want to do that.

so among friends, all things held in common in his great book of latin tags, that was always the first one. but that's among friends, not among strangers and the great society, i about a couple of years ago a little accordion and i'm trying very slowly to learn it because i won't practice. the old joke how you get to carnegie hall, stop practicing. they ought to know that in the great society you can't have, for each according to his ability. to each according to the need.

st. paul said, st. paul said he who does not work, should not eat. he who is complaining by correspondence that his former friends who thought that the messiah was about to come again, decided, why work of the messiah is going to come tomorrow, he said no. the great motto of the month from the fourth century on. to work is to pray. is it ethical to go on with such misapprehension? of course not. it's the ethical responsibility of an adult to know what's going on. we should know it when we vote or in a business or in our

marriages or whatever. so the ethics i approve of is explained in these books, that i think the best way to approach ethical questions is through so-called virtue which is the oldest impulse about ethical thought. it's common east and west and south, you can find pieces of it in confucianism or hinduism or buddhism. in islam, the abraham it religion. there is an old joke advice about how to write well, how to write well.

be good, then write naturally. i'm suggesting that the named virtues, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, the love, and the greatest of these is love, with their libraries of cultural products on each of them, should be and models for behavior, florence nightingale ãb these should be our guides, not the abstract rules that became unsurprisingly popular in the 18th century.

or jeremy benson, with prudence elevated to the one. as adam smith said, when i do this in russia i always do it the other way. [laughter] as adam smith said, in his greatest book, a must-read, called the theory of moral sentiments in its last edition. the great guide to behavior should be the virtues arranged together. but if all you have in your heart is justice, he lack love. if all you have in your heart is love, you will lack justice.

so i and with this summary of how the rules turn out. which is a combination of our conservative heritage and the liberal abraham nick egalitarian promise we call souls. all of babylon in the first century. said do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you. this negative form is like the libertarians, in fact it is. it's masculine. leave me alone.

don't tread on me. i have autonomy. whereas another jewish sage in the early century bce jesus in nazareth, nazareth said, do unto others what you would have them do unto you. this positive way of saying it is so to speak feminine, although i don't want to make some essentialist argument, me least of all. be a good samaritan. don't cross by on the other side. be nice. and i think we need both. i think the socialist society we will not have both reminds me of still another old joke.

someone who wrote on the wall, scribbled on the wall, to do is to be descartes. the next person wrote, to be is to do ãbthe third person wrote do be do be do, sinatra. [laughter] and that's about right. to do and to be, to be the kind of person who does good you need to live in a free and responsible society such as i think everyone here. thank you very much. [applause] thank you very much.

we have time for some questions. we have folks that are going to go around the room with microphone. please state your name and institutional affiliation before you ask your question. try to keep the questions brief. yes, ma'am. >> simone goal, from newtown dynasty television, i have three questions. first, [inaudible conversations] thank you so much. my first question, what do you think is the deepest flaw of socialism and what's the cause of that flaw? >> the deepest flaw is the notion that an economy can be run from the top down. this is a point that hyatt made and a lot of other people.

when martha hamburg retired as the head of the federal drug administration, she was interviewed on npr and the reporter said, with apparent delight, that amberg had been in charge of 20% of the american economy, you think what, 20%? one person? yes. food and drugs. and it's a persistent error that the economy is easy. that's another of the socialist that's it's easy to do. we don't need discovery. we don't need to learn if the neighborhood needs another hairdressing salon. what's the second question? >> follow-up to the first question, why is this theory

wrong? like top down economy, why is this wrong? >> it's possible there is a world, perhaps an alternate universe, in which top down management economy is fine, and indeed as i said in a family that's how it's managed. top down. the analogy of the emperor was a mandate of heaven being the father of the nation and is a metaphor that occurs everywhere is the source of the problem. people believe they can take the model of the family and apply it to the whole society. as i said, from an ethical point of view from the point of view of the 16-year-old that doesn't know anything but is pretty sure she does, and sure she knows everything, it sounds fine but it's not.

indeed anyone with any and expand select know the family can be covered as well. think of your offspring, your children, i think of mine who haven't spoken to me for 22 years. >> so you are saying, it's proven wrong cannot. >> yes, it's proven wrong because there is no logical proof, this is an empirical fact. that's why it comes with maturity, if it does. in the case of bernie sanders it didn't, but that's okay. it comes with maturity. or reading, if you open your mind. like geewhiz, things didn't work out very well in the soviet union. but even that and ultimately it's empirical. indeed that is how the socialists and the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s

and 30s took it. they took it as a challenge to get more computers. to get smarter and smarter people at the center and then everything would be fine. i have a friend, a colleague of mine in iowa who was asked to go to one of the soviet republics to advise them on transport of agricultural goods and he's from iowa so they said look we have trucks and grain elevators and ships and barges. and then someone in the audience said, but who's the commissar? who's in charge? and gary said, well no one is in charge. they stopped believing him. they thought he was hiding a state secret. what's the third one?

he had his hand up earlier, this guy. i go for eager beavers. >> and pat backward work for senator ron johnson. you used the term inivism, i wonder this, to what extent is the charm of socialism a feeling by people that somehow they could be protected from somebody else who is going to disrupt them with an idea? >> that's absolutely true. and it's evident, it was evident yesterday. and in the appeal of, this is something that bernie sanders and trump agree on. protectionism. i understand that the disturbances of new industries of what was terrifyingly called

creative destruction. it's not his friends but he brought it from someone else. comes from progress. not from neoliberalism or 's speaking chinese are trying to sell us hammers inexpensively or something like that or mexicans auto parts. it's very irritating they do that. it doesn't come from those, it comes from progress. speak of the socialist calculation debate that that in all wise, central planner would order. and all wise central planner would allow the chinese and now the be enemies before the japanese, before that the germans, to specialize in low wage industries. and export to us a central

planner would under ideal socialism. it's progress they are objecting to. not neoliberalism. it's very clear in hungary where him gary and agriculture is not a good prospect for the future of hungry. so despite enormous subsidies from the common market, it's not doing very well. so you get support for fascism which is another form of socialism. it's very depressing. ... ...

i think that education should be subsidized by taxes on you and me, but of course, pay for i isn't the same that's provision it, and as you know, there's just a deep confusion about this people say we have to have elementary education. all right, and i'm willing to be taxed to provide it because i don't think poor people will do enough if it's not free. but i want it to be free. i want it to be free. the same thing holds in a more radical way for roads. when you speak to a convinced status, more comprehensive tomorrow but covers socialism, you say, look, we ought to have a smaller government. they say, don't you want roads? and imagine a world in which suddenly all the roads disappear. and i say, yeah, i want roads

but i want them to be provided privately as they were in the united states and britain in the 18th and early 19th century. then in a way that would make a very interesting dissertation in history, they became defined as public goods. i think it's a piece of municipal socialism. but in a case that now it's trivial for roads to be owned privately. you put a transresponder in your vehicle, and you can pay for the roads the way you pay for your gas bill. , but it's very hard to get people to change. in ireland, there's a proposal, which seasoned very reasonable, even in such a wet place, to meter water. okay? meter water. this has become and -- immense

political number ireland, the irish say, to hell with that. i want to written 24 hours a day as long as i want. go away. well, we -- it's the ideological battle on points like this we need to win. and one, here's the cheerful note. we did win once. henry thoreau -- there's a sensational biography called henry david thoreau, read it. skip the first chapter on the geology of walden pond. but he said, i fervently support the proposition that government is best that governs least.

he was not a socialist. yes, dear. >> i'm dianne with heritage. i thought it was very interesting what you had to say about the new family and its impact. i wonder, do we come -- is it altruism -- do we have any -- come with some altruism that over experience become tempered? >> we do. humans among the great apes,' humans are unusually cooperative. there are experiments win chimpanzees, the nicest of the two, and we cooperate all the time. i think it's in twined with

language. but what we need to convince people of is that specialization, and ownership of property, and its outcome, result in massive cooperation. i said i didn't quite finish my tale but buying my accordion. my little accordion, trying to learn it. i forgot to give you the punchline, which is that, what, i bought this accordion from czechoslovakia. it's a beautiful instrument. i just wish i could play it. i'm supposed to make my own accordion? in fact, the logical reduction of protectionism of any sort is, all right, let's protect illinois. erect tariff barriers. all right. chicago. all right, printer's row. all right, my own house and then

i'll have plenty of jobs. it's -- so, yes, cooperation. here's another version of that point. you always hear enterprises called -- well, nonprofit enterprises are always identified as being nonprofit, as if there were something virtualous, presumption of virtue unless they're called the heritage foundation. if in nonprofit institutions, but come on, this system of markets is the most altruistic ever designed. people work for each other incessantly. i get very annoyed what's become the current cant about admiring people for their military service, and they do it on msnbc

as much as on fox news. thank you for your service. what are you talking about? someone who makes toothbrushes is doing you a service. stop it. >> there is a question over here? , so i. >> we don't want to ignore the left. >> thank you for being here. >> you talk about innovation and in yourlight say what changed in the 19 until century, and early 20th center when innovation was as much as the innovation and one drove each ice the way society views the innovator and the inventer instead of somebody as -- instead of the cackpots were visionaries and benefactors

of society. what is responsible for this and is there hope in that you can still get a progressive admiring steve jobs, want to redistribute his wealth but still admire the invention, the technology, the innovator. >> well, the characteristic figure of this is benjamin franklin who held only one patent in his life, though he invented a whole bunch of things. and at age 43, offing -- having become most successful print are in the colonies, he sold his business and become a public inventer and scientist and so on. ben wanted to be a gentleman, very much in the 18th century. so he is no -- he was -- wanted to climb the existing hierarchy, but that's right. it's the change in attitude towards benjamin franklin that matters. it's not -- people have only read the titles of my books --

the title of the first of the trilogy, think i mean that there was a change in that business people became more virtuous in the 18th century, say. it's the same way they feel if they haven't read any of my books on the rhetoric of economics. they think i'm advocating more fancy language in economics. i am saying that there's a change in social attitudes. why, you ask? you evidently haven't read the third book of the trilogy, because that's where i answer it. you must run down and get it. thank you, dear. and it says, the causes were accidents in europe. nothing deep about europe. my argument is not as -- so many of my conservative friends want

to make it, a story of the deep superiority of people -- i call them mel -- mel anyone challenged people. that's out in about the deep innovativeness of europe which wasn't the most innovative society in the world in 1492 is china. it had the best ships, the best growing, the best science, the best market mat ticks, the best painting, whatever you want to talk about. china. it was the accidents of a whole bunch of accidents, not just one, the protestant reformation, the dutch revolt against spain, both of. the reasonably successful. the english civil war of

1640s, and its followon in the 1650s. the great glorious revolution. the american revolution. the failed dutch revolution. accomplish the french revolution. all of these accidentally made ordinary people bold. fake protestantism. it's not my -- lutherans, the imagine steeral reformation, which kept a hierarchy in the church . my priest is chosen by the bishop. but congregationalism, or as the name implies, the congregation chooses the minister, or still more radically out of the 1640s in england, the society of friends, the quakers in which

no one is the minister, and women are allowed to speak in the meeting. and one after another of these -- the dutchman, the northern dutch, so to speak, defeat the military hegemon of the 16th and early 17th 17th century, spain, augsburg and this gives them the idea they can have a go, and this having a go is crucial. who is next. >> this gentleman and then this young lady in the back. >> i'm dave, retired, and i'd like i am, too, thank god. >> it's a good thing. >> i tell you, all all of you ought to work on getting retired. >> worth waiting for. i want to get to your definition of socialism. in capitalism, everything is owned by somebody. and the stream of capitalism is

feudalism where everything is owned by one person, the emperor or or czar, whatever. i in capital him if you own a house you step offer property, glory somebody else's property and they can charge you to use it. >> trespass. >> stance you start having public highways, roads and stuff like that, then you're socialist. by the definition. so, base include the situation we live in right is no socialism, a mixture of public and private property. >> i agree. >> when everything becomes public property or community pro, that's communism. >> well, yeah, something like that. actually the -- in socialist theory, communism is the last stage. it's when everything -- >> whenever everything is publicly owned, owned by the commune, and in state communism, everything is owned by the state, and if the state is controlled by one person, then it's not really communism, it's feudalism. one person owns everything.

so the soviet union was not really communist. i wait feudal. >> i agree. >> your question? >> my question -- >> i don't actual live agree with that analysis, although it has elements with which i agree. >> what is what i was going to ask. >> and experts are wrong. >> i think -- getting back but to the accidents in europe was the end of feudsallism, where it wasn't all owned by one person. >> that's long. that's what -- >> i want to ask,. >> here's the key point. >> correct me. >> one of the many recent its don't like the world capitalism is people think it's a stage of history. we're all marxists now, and that is wrong. ownership, property, markets, are pervasive in human society some always have been. one of the earliest archaeological sites is the cave

in south africa, and at the time the blombos cave area where these people lived was 100 miles from the sea shore and yet they found also 70000bce they found a necklace made of sea shells. they didn't get it by walking 100-miles and then walking 100 miles back. they must have been trading with -- and it's dangerous in such circumstances to walk over to another hunter-gathererrer's area. you're liable to get in trouble. no. that's one of theels but there are many others, evidence of trade. it's not true that exchange or property is new. property is in fact characteristic of some species of butterflies who will take up a position in a sunny area of a

forest and defend it against other butterflies. property is commonplace in the animal world and even in the vegetable world. so, this whole idea there's something new about so-called capitalism is wrong. it's deeply mistaken. what is new is info victim. what is new in world making is the incredible amount of innovation and that's new and that's what we need to explain, not this matter of the stages of history, which is wrong, mistaken. >> we have time for one more question. >> thank you for your time, i'm cecelia with the institute for human studies, and i have -- >> ihs. yay! >> the economists, heather cowan and the -- have recently written

but how extremely capitalistic places like california, tend to overestimate the virtue signal even when they benefit a lot from the market and tend to vote toward more social policy. ridiculous. >> i was wondering if you could talk but that and what effect that has, very capitalistic communities do -- >> all we can do, we can't take them out and shoot them. i want want to. we can't send them to chinese government reeducation camps as the chinese government is doing on a massive scale as we speak. with the -- so, we can't do that. but all we can do is preach to them, and actually probably better than academics like me preaching to them, is popular culture. there's a great movie called "joy," about joy mongano, the

inventer of the self-squeezing mop. a terrific include, basically proinnovism tale. about the same time there was movie called "the founder" about ray kroc who failed in business over and over again and then figured out that you could take the mcdonald's brothers model of assembly line production of hamburgersed -- i mean, i was watching a hamburger guy this morning, had to get breakfast at the train station. and he was -- it was wonderful to watch him, but of course he couldn't do the volume that an assembly line can, and that was their discovery, which he -- okay, look, more rock music with

free market themes, i think country music -- not much of a country music fan. like it but don't know much about it. i think country music is a really good place to look for pro-innovism, pro markets, there's a kind of whining that happens when a country music you -- when you run a country music tune backwards, the guy gets back his girl. [laughter] >> his gun and his pickup. [laughter] >> but it's popular culture. that's where the rubber meets the road to use a country music expression. that's where it is. it always has been. ideologies are formed in the high and low culture. they're not formed -- look, hollywood produces endless anti- -- pro socialist movies --

actually here's what is so absurd, anticorporatist movies produced by massive corporations with corporate officers hanging from the ceilings. it's ridiculous. >> well, thank you all for coming. [applause] if you want to get a copy of the outline, i'll leave it here and just one final reminder, the next event in the series is november 15th, george gilder, speaking on capitalism, an information learning system. thanks again.

through the year, book tv attended author events, conferenceses and book fairs to speak with nonfiction authors. at the national press club's annual back fir in washington, dc, we spoke with ira shapiro but the future of the senate. >> give us a sense of your career. >> guest: my career is for want of a better word, long. it goes back actually my love of the senate goes back 50 years to when i