Why the Right Is Still Losing Intellectually
Remnant Review
Compared to where we were in 1943, the libertarian movement and the conservative movement are vastly better off.
In 1944, Hayek's Road to Serfdom was published by the University of Chicago Press. That was a major victory. This indicates how bad things were. In 1945, it was summarized in the Reader's Digest. That was a major breakthrough for libertarianism. Hayek was no Mises, but he was surely better than Keynes.
In 1946, Henry Hazlitt's little book, Economics in One Lesson, was published. I have never been a great fan of the book, other than his summary of Bastiat's broken window fallacy, but it had a lot of influence, and this influence was mostly positive. I do not think it was Hazlitt's best book by any means.
Let us talk about his best book. His best book was his critique of Keynes, The Failure of the "New Economics" (1959). That is a terrific book, and it is virtually never footnoted by anyone. You can still get it online for free, but nobody reads it. Almost nobody read it 1959, when it was first published. Nobody has read it since.
I want to use this is an example of why we really are still losing.
I begin with two principles.
1. If something needs to be done, someone should do it for free.2. If a man does not have fire in his belly, he won't get much done.
Two things put out fire in the belly: (1) tenure, (2) an advance royalty payment to write a book.
FLAKES
Back in 2008, I thought it would be a good idea to get someone to write a study guide for Hazlitt's book, which could be published online in 2009, on the 50th anniversary of Hazlitt's book. I was willing to put up $5,000 to get somebody with a Ph.D. in economics to write this. I had one taker. He flaked out about three months later. He was your standard academician. He had no reputation. He has had never had any influence on anybody. He had written nothing. He needed the money. He had summer vacation. But he pleaded that he was just too busy. He committed to it, and then he quit. He was briefly floating around the Mises Institute, but after he flaked out, he disappeared. I have never seen him again.
This is typical. I have watched this process for over 40 years.
You cannot believe the bone laziness of most men who spend their lives teaching college. The overwhelming majority of them never produce a book, never produce an article worth reading, never inspire a group of followers, and then they disappear without a trace after their retirement. This has been true from the beginning, but it is surely true in the libertarian movement.
Here is what can be done. Here is what the flakes cannot abide.
You have somebody like Rothbard or Mises, who were enormously influential, but none of their influences come because of their academic positions. Mises was not even paid a salary by New York University. For most of his career, Rothbard taught in Brooklyn Polytechnic, which did not offer an economics major. They wrote their way into significance. They were enormously productive, but neither of them defined himself in terms of his academic employment.
In 1958, I began my study of the Roosevelt administration. The only book that was available at the time that was critical of both his foreign policy and his domestic policy was John T. Flynn's book, The Roosevelt Myth (1948). I read it, and I realized at age 16 that it was a weak book. It was lacking crucial footnotes. It was well written, because Flynn was a journalist, but it was not a serious piece of historiography. Here is what we need. We don't get it.
Today, there is still nothing any better. There are books on various aspects of Roosevelt's administration, written critically from an economic point of view, and this is all to the good. These books have had zero influence. There are a few books on the fact that he lured the Japanese into attacking us, but hardly anybody believes these books, and there is no textbook has stated that this is what Roosevelt did. In other words, Roosevelt is still untouchable -- the ultimate Teflon President in the thinking of Americans. We have had conservatives like Reagan and Gingrich who referred to Roosevelt as if he were some sort of a saint. This is a sign of just how bad the conservative movement is.
After all these years, no trained historian has sat down and devoted his career to showing that Franklin Roosevelt was the most disastrous President in American history, the man who sold out to the far Left, but who also sold out to the bankers he claimed to hate, for whom he had worked selling bonds from 1921 to early 1929. No large bank went under; 9,000 small ones did. The only person who has ever gone into print to prove this was Antony Sutton, and Sutton was never in academia. He was a first-rate scholar, but no university would hire him. For telling the truth about U.S. government's sales of military technology to the USSR in National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (1973), he was fired by the Hoover Institution. That was what he told me, and I believed him.
Another example which has bothered me ever since 1962, when I took a course on American constitutional history, is the fact that there is no conservative textbook that covers the development of constitutional law -- one that shows how the Supreme Court has centralized federal power. All of the textbooks are written by liberals who approve of it. All of the books favor the centralization of power. All of the books ignore the political, economic, and intellectual arguments in each time period that led to the appointment of Supreme Court justices, who in turn reinterpreted the Constitution. There is no refutation. Yet there have been hundreds of conservative lawyers, and there have been two generations of supposedly conservative legal theorists who are experts in the U.S. Constitution. Yet not one of those lazy bones has ever sat down to put on paper a comprehensive history of how the United States Supreme Court has sold this country down the river. The textbooks are all entirely in favor of the process. I know what is needed. This. But how can we get it?
Tom Woods will teach a Ron Paul Curriculum course on this next year. He has no reliable textbook to read or assign. He will get the basics in front of students. Maybe he will write the college-level textbook we need, plus the website needed to back it up. He has the academic credentials, but he is not in academia. There is hope.
THE KEYNES PROJECT
We come to the Keynes project. There is no comprehensive critique of John Maynard Keynes. There are lots of articles about this or that Keynesian mistake. Hazlitt compiled a collection of them in 1960. They never had much influence, and neither did his book. It is now over half a century later, and all the articles in the obscure academic journals have accomplished almost nothing. There is no textbook written from front to back on the comprehensive errors of Keynes, which is why I have encouraged someone to at least begin the process by writing a simple student workbook on Hazlitt's 1959 classic.
I have never gotten a single email from anybody volunteering to do anything on the Keynes project. They are lazy. They are bone lazy. They have no vision. They have no idea of the nature of the fight. They have no awareness that we have lost the fight, and have lost it since 1936, because nobody would put his career on the line, and produce a comprehensive critique of the dumbest system of economics in the history of man. The whole system is fraudulent, the whole system can be figured out by anybody who has read Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. But nobody will do it.
Somebody might say that I should do it. But that would not be wise. It is not my calling. There are hundreds of Ph.D.-holding college professors who could do these projects. The calling is the most important thing you can do in which you are most difficult to replace. I had to do the economic commentary on the Bible. Nobody had done that in almost 2000 years. I figured that the project needed to be done, that nobody had done for 2000 years, and that I was the only one who wanted to do it. So, I wrote 31 volumes over 39 years, and I continue to write in the field, free of charge. Has anybody read all these volumes? Of course not. Have they had any impact? Not yet. But it had to be done. It was not my job to write a history of constitutional law, or the Roosevelt administration, or a refutation of Keynes. That is for specialists in the field, who are paid $70,000 a year or more to do practically nothing outside the classroom.
The trouble is, they get used to being paid to do nothing outside the classroom. Specialization takes over. They become experts in doing nothing outside the classroom. They are paid so well that they continue to specialize in improving their skills in this area. By the time they retire, they are past masters at doing nothing outside the classroom. You cannot believe how skilled men can be, doing nothing outside the classroom, when they do it for 40 years. Let me tell you, they become highly skilled.
THE BUCKET BRIGADE
The conservative movement and the libertarian movement have yet to produce a comprehensive critique of the new deal and world war two. This is proof positive that the whole movement has been a gigantic waste of money. All the articles, all the books, all the conferences, and we have yet to get a comprehensive critique of Franklin Roosevelt. This boggles the mind. And yet it is normal.
I am making a point. Here is my point: to the extent that any movement relies on somebody who has tenure in an institution of higher learning, that movement is dead. To the extent that it relies on academics in university settings to carry its water, that movement is about as useful as a fire brigade in the 1880s with a community hand pump and 50 guys lined up with buckets. The building is going to burn down. The bucket brigade is there for show. Nobody thinks it is going to stop the fire, but the participants are willing to get together occasionally to put on a show. It looks good.
I think it is all encapsulated in one event. Hayek refused in 1937 to write a comprehensive critique of Keynes. He did not write any critique of Keynes, not even in a journal. He said this was because, when he did critique Keynes, Keynes switched his views. That was his critique on Keynes's book, Treatise on Money. Hayek admitted in 1972 that he had made a mistake, but he still never sat down to write a critique. He could have written it late, but he did not.
Rothbard might have done this, but he died. He never completed his third volume on the history of economic thought.
This is why, intellectually speaking, students coming up today are in a terrible disadvantage. They are overloaded with materials they can read, but very few of the materials are worth reading. Students are overloaded with academic bricks, but nobody has enough energy in academia to sit down and use the bricks to build a skyscraper. We need three skyscrapers: a comprehensive critique of Roosevelt, a comprehensive critique of Keynes, and a comprehensive critique of the Supreme Court. We have needed the last book for a century, with updates every 20 years. It does not exist.
CONCLUSION
When a movement cannot recruit three people in 60 years to deal with the incarnation of the opposition, which was Roosevelt, or the most influential spokesman of the movement, which is Keynes, or the implementer of the entire process, beginning over 100 years before Roosevelt or Keynes, that movement is intellectually brain-dead. It can crank out all the bricks it wants, but it is brain-dead. It cannot get its story to younger people.
There is no conservative U.S. history textbook comparable to David Saville Muzzey's American history textbook. The closest thing was Clarence Carson's obscure six-volume paperback set. It sank without a trace. Yet Muzzey's book was published in 1911, and it was republished every decade until 1966. Tens of millions of students read that book, and it was one long defense of nationalism and centralized government.
If you want to know what is wrong with the conservative movement, I offer this suggestion. It has relied on academics in colleges and universities to carry its water. The buckets have holes in them.