How the Free Market Will Save the Planet
2014-01-11 · Guest: Walter Block (Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans) · 82:35
Libertarian principles and the non-aggression principle
Bob Zadek interviews economist Walter Block about how libertarian principles, specifically property rights and the non-aggression principle, offer better solutions for environmental protection and social issues than government regulation. They discuss historical common law approaches to pollution, the privatization of endangered species, and the economic fallacies behind the light bulb ban and corporate income tax.
Topics: Libertarianism, Non-Aggression Principle, Property Rights, Environmentalism, Pollution, Endangered Species, Light Bulb Ban, Corporate Income Tax, Crony Capitalism
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Host
- Walter Block – Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans
- Caller (David) – Listener from San Francisco
Introduction to Libertarianism [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek, every Sunday at noon at Talk 910. Thanks so much for listening. We are an hour and a half of libertarian live talk, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. All ideas, all the time.
The public political debate, when it’s not focused on Obamacare, unemployment, foreign policy—the debate, regretfully, often spills over into social and moral issues. Social and moral issues should not be part of the public political discourse. They are matters of private behavior for each person to set their own morality, so long as it’s not illegal and shouldn’t be illegal. But morality is very much in the political conversation, especially among those who identify themselves as social conservatives, whatever that actually means.
Morality is quite interesting when applied to the political discussion. And before the hour is over, we—myself and my guest, Walter Block, in a moment I’ll be happy to introduce him—will celebrate, before the hour is up, the unsung heroes in America. Who are they? Blackmailers, pimps, prostitutes, slanderers, libelers. What in God’s name am I talking about, you ask? Well, stay tuned and you’ll see.
My guest today is Walter Block. Walter is a professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans. Walter’s biography, if one were to print it out, is about 183 pages. He’s the author of some 300 articles in professional and lay journals. He’s written two dozen books, including a book we will discuss and you will race down to buy before the show is over, Defending the Undefendable. He’s written hundreds of op-ed articles and he lectures widely on college campuses and appears regularly on television and radio shows. And that is why Walter joins us today. Walter, thanks so much for giving us an hour of your time and welcome to the show.
Walter Block: You’re very kind. That was a wonderful introduction. Boy, I better be good.
Bob Zadek: Walter, you are going to be good. I have watched countless interviews. I feel like we were separated at birth, and it is a pleasure. After I’ve listened to so many of your interviews, it is a deep honor to finally share an hour with you on the radio this afternoon.
Now, Walter, one of the first things I noticed about your presentations—and there are lots that I noticed—when you are interviewed or when you share a podium at a college campus or on television and radio is you have this wonderful pedagogical ability to take concepts that others might find complex and might spend paragraphs explaining, you can distill them in a couple of sentences that capture the absolute essence of the concept. And the concept, of course, that’s relevant to me is libertarianism—a political and philosophical approach to life that has many syllables, but it is very, very simple at its core.
Many of my listeners believe themselves to be and self-identify as libertarians, as I do. But often—and this is somewhat of an admission on my part—when I’m asked to explain it, what exactly is libertarianism, what does it mean to be a libertarian, I find myself often I can grasp the essence to some degree, but it takes me more time than I wish it did. At least it used to. You have explained to me, and I would love to start the show by having you explain to the audience, how utterly simple and how all-encompassing the meaning of libertarianism is. Summarize for us what it means to be a libertarian.
Walter Block: Well, I think you started us off on the right foot in your preliminary remarks when you talked about morality, because that’s what libertarianism is not about. Libertarianism is not about morality. Libertarianism is just a very narrow philosophical perspective as far as I can see, and it focuses only on what just law should be.
So for example, let’s take, oh, I don’t know, prostitution or drugs, marijuana, heroin. Now, I personally think that marijuana and heroin and prostitution and pornography and things like that are not good. My own personal morality, I’m sort of conservative and I don’t use those things and I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a prostitute and wouldn’t want my son to do drugs. But libertarianism has got nothing to do with that. Rather, libertarianism says, well, what should the law be? What’s just law? And what it says is just law consists of the non-aggression principle, namely, keep your bloody mitts to yourself.
The Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights [07:05]
Bob Zadek: The non-aggression principle. Now, as you have taught me, Walter, that is half of the entire concept of libertarianism. NAP: Non-Aggression Principle. Walter, tell us what those three important words mean to the political world.
Walter Block: Right. Well, as you say, that’s one half of libertarianism. It’s a good start. The non-aggression principle means you have to keep your mitts off of other people and their property unless you have their permission. Anything between consenting adults is legitimate, and nothing but things between consenting adults is legitimate. And the idea is you cannot force or threaten violence against anyone else or their property.
Bob Zadek: And let me just interrupt, Walter. The “you,” the “you” in “you cannot be aggressive towards a person’s property,” the “you” includes not only individuals acting alone, but includes individuals acting collectively through government. The “you” includes government. So the non-aggression principle says no entity, whether acting under the color of government or as an individual, has the just right, has the moral right to interfere with another’s enjoyment of their person or property. Fine. Go ahead.
Walter Block: Well, when you say that, what you’re really talking about is anarcho-capitalism or very radical libertarianism. But in my view, libertarianism is a house of many rooms or many mansions or whatever. There are some libertarians who would exempt government, and these would be the minarchists or minimal government libertarians, and they would say, well, there are some exceptions to this. But I and you, you and I are radical libertarians, so we would say there are no exceptions. The “you,” as you quite properly say, includes everyone, whether individuals or robber gangs or governments operating under color of government, what have you. No one should invade anyone else. No one should threaten violence against any innocent person. That would be the radical libertarian view.
And the other half of it is property rights. I mean, how do you decide whether who has what property? Suppose I grab the hat off your head. Have I initiated violence against you? Well, it depends upon who owns the hat. If you stole the hat from me yesterday, well then I’m just repossessing my property. On the other hand, if it’s your hat, then I’m a thief. So we have to have a theory of property rights to sort of accompany the non-aggression principle. And the theory that I adhere to, following John Locke and Murray Rothbard, who are heroes of mine and I’m sure yours, is you homestead—first of all, you own yourself. And secondly, you own any part of nature or natural resources that you homestead or mix your labor with. And third of all, you own anything else that you achieve through voluntary means, such as buying and selling and gifts and gambling and what have you. So for example, if I clear some land and grow some corn and you domesticate some cows, you own the milk, I own the corn. But then we trade, and now I own the milk even though I didn’t produce it, and you own the corn even though you didn’t produce that. But we can trace it back to voluntary action and homesteading of initial resources.
Bob Zadek: So we start with, of course, the concept of homesteading, which to some in the audience, they might not be so familiar with it. That assumes virgin land not owned by anybody. It goes back in time a bit, and it says if you add labor to land that otherwise doesn’t belong to anybody else or any other property, you acquire ownership by dint of you have added value to it by your own labor. That the homesteading doesn’t get created so much anymore because the land especially is all accounted for. Now the oceans haven’t, and we may get into the oceans, but the land is for the most part accounted for. So homestead goes back in time and traces how property was first instilled upon a person. But now property is acquired or divested through voluntary cooperation among—uncoerced cooperation among consenting adults. And that’s the system of property.
Walter Block: Now, I would say that you’re only 99% correct. Because there is still some land that is virgin land at the top of, I don’t know, some mountains in the middle of Wyoming or in Alaska, and certainly the moon and Mars and, as you mentioned, the oceans. So you’re quite right, you’re 99% right. This is mainly a theoretical construct talking about past justifications. But there still is some virgin land that is not owned, and if somebody plants himself on it and mixes his labor with it, he gets to own that according to the libertarian doctrine.
Bob Zadek: And once you establish, once you sign on to those two concepts, with whatever degree of intensity—you’re right, there are, there is a spectrum of libertarianism, it’s not so specific—but once you sign on to, in general, the non-aggression principle, the principle that one has no right to inflict violence on the person or property of another, that’s the non-aggression principle. And the importance of private property. Private property—and we’ll get into things like the tragedy of the commons and show the importance of it—but once you sign on to those two concepts, then almost any political question that’s before us can be comfortably answered. And what’s most interesting is the answer that one reaches is one that I dare say most of us would be quite comfortable with. It doesn’t produce bizarre results; it produces quite natural results.
Walter Block: Well, again, I think you’re 99% correct. There are some weird results, as in the abortion pro-choice/pro-life case. I would say that that is a weird result there. But you’re quite right, very, very few things are weird or unexpected. And also I would say that if you ask the next 100 people to walk down the street, “Do you agree that it’s not a good idea that it should be against the law, murder, rape, theft, to initiate violence against innocent people?” I’m sure 99% or 100% would say yes. I mean, that’s what civilization is; otherwise we’re barbaric.
The problem though, or they say the devil is in the details, when you start applying it to things like, say, the minimum wage law. Is that a legitimate law? Now, those 100 people that we just asked, “Is it okay to use violence against innocent people?” and they all said no. And then we ask them, “Well, what about the minimum wage law?” and they say, “Oh yeah, yeah, minimum wage law is great, you know, poor people earn low wages and we have to have a living wage.” But they don’t realize that what this is is an assault on consenting adult behavior. So for example, I now want to hire you, and I want to hire you at five bucks an hour, and you agree, and we go to jail? This is a victimless crime. So there’s many a slip between the cup and lip. Yes, everyone, I think most decent people will give agreement to the non-aggression principle and private property rights based on homesteading. But when the rubber meets the road, look, libertarians only get 1% of the vote. We’re very unpopular. You know, you have a radio show, a magnificent radio show, but it’s on a Sunday afternoon and you’re not on CBS, NBC, TV or anything like that. So we have to acknowledge that libertarianism is not that popular, even though it should be.
Bob Zadek: Well, you know, two comments, Walter. Both—two responses. Number one, what’s interesting—I did a show on minimum wage one or two weeks ago—but what’s interesting on the minimum wage issue is those people—and I’m not going to turn this into a minimum wage show, we have too much other stuff to talk about, but just a sentence or two—those people who support the minimum wage, if you ask them, “What is the underlying principle by which you favor the minimum wage?” they say, “Well, people can’t live on it.” Well, that’s not a principle. That’s not a principle by which you make decisions. The principle is—what’s wrong with—the principle is that consenting adults, if I think my wages are only worth $4 an hour, and I know I’m not employable for more, and I want the job, and I don’t consider myself to be exploited because that’s what I am worth, what in the world is it the business of government to make me a criminal for wanting to sell my services at exactly what they’re worth? And that’s how—
Walter Block: And also, and also me a criminal for hiring you.
Bob Zadek: And you a criminal for hiring. That’s the point. The point is libertarians don’t just reach conclusions in the abstract or because of the very specific effect upon one person. Rather, it is a set of principles by which one adheres to. You sign on to the principles, as you said, Walter, most of the people in America would in general sign on to the principles, but then they have trouble applying it because sometimes the results do not produce the immediate results they want.
Environmentalism and Air Pollution [17:21]
Bob Zadek: Now, Walter, you did some—and I want to spend some time on an area that is very much in the public debate, and you made it—when I heard you speak on this many times, you make it so easy to understand, which is the rap on—one of the raps on free market capitalism. One of the raps is that it results in environmental degradation. That what happens is if you allow the free market to just function, free market unfettered by government intervention, one of the—while it may produce wealth for some, those opposed to free markets would argue, but one of the detriments it is felt is that we end up with extinction of various species, we end up with degradation of water—people point to Love Canal, sort of remember that upstate New York—people point to the problem of pollution and dirty rain and soot from smokestacks and climate change. And they say no, you cannot just respect private property, you need a system of government intervention in the enjoyment of private property lest the planet—lest we don’t save Earth. Save Earth, interesting concept.
Now Walter, we can divide environmentalism into a bunch of different areas. Air pollution is a reasonable place to start. It’s very important for students of economics and of the political process to understand how the free market efficiently and effectively, while being true to libertarian principles, does in fact result in better results in protecting the environment—and let’s focus on clean air—than would be a system of top-down government regulation.
Walter Block: Well, I agree with you entirely, and I think pollution is a good way to start, and maybe the next one we should do is species extinction.
Bob Zadek: We’re going to do that. Buffalo and the cow. But first we’ll do air pollution.
Walter Block: Right. The situation with regard to air pollution is that in the 1830s and 1840s, there was a spate of nuisance cases. Some little old lady would hang out her wash on the clothesline—this is before the days of washers and dryers—and she would scrub her clothes and put it on the line with clothespins and she’d hang it out and it would be wet and clean. She’d come back two hours later and it would be dry and dirty. And she’d go to court and she’d say, “That there factory over there, two miles away, you can see its disgusting dirty smokestack stuff and it’s coming onto my laundry.” Or there’d be some farmer who would have a bunch of haystacks and a railroad would come choo-chooing through and setting off sparks 300, 500 feet away and burn his haystacks. And both of them would go to court and they would say, “We want two things: we want the damages because of the ruined clothing or the haystack, and we want an injunction, namely a ruling from the judge to say, ‘Hey you guys, cut it out, and if you don’t cut it out, we’re going to put you in jail.’” And in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, I don’t say that every environmental plaintiff won the case—it was up to the courts to determine whether this was true or not—but the courts were very amenable to this type of lawsuit.
Bob Zadek: Well, not only, Walter, not only were they amenable, but it was consistent with existing common law. The law of nuisance goes back long before we were a country. It goes back to common law in England, and the law of nuisance simply says one cannot carry on activities that damage, in this case, adjacent landowners. So this was the protection of private property. It was part of the common law, which means it was judge-made law. It wasn’t created by a philosopher. This is what people—what the law naturally evolved as people cooperate together and resolve disputes. So this wasn’t something artificial. This was humans, the result of human interaction. The law of nuisance is old law and it works. Go ahead, Walter, sorry.
Walter Block: No, no, no, I certainly agree and I think what you said is very helpful. See, a lot of people, left-wing environmentalists as opposed to free market environmentalists, think that property rights is bad. But here what we’re saying is that you had trespassing soot, and it trespassed onto the property of this lady. Or you had trespassing sparks that trespassed onto the farmer’s haystacks. And we’re protecting property rights by saying, “Yes, go to court, get an injunction, get damages, and stop them.”
Now, this had several very good effects. First of all, the environmental violators here, the polluters, now had to take into account the external costs, the costs of their soot pollution or their sparks. And they had to put in spark-catching devices on their locomotives, or they had to put stuff in their smokestacks sort of that would catch most of the effluent, most of the pollution. Not all of it—I mean, you never get out of all pollution, I mean we all exhale, you know, so there’s carbon dioxide—but this was a very, very good result on the basis of these laws.
And also you had even a thing called environmental forensics. It was very early, it was the 19th century, but the point was, here’s a spark or here’s a soot particle on some laundry, and now you have to figure out, well, which factory did it come from? Because you don’t want to just sue innocent people; you want to sue the guilty people. So you had all sorts of very, very good things. The entrepreneur had an incentive to use more expensive but cleaner-burning anthracite coal.
Bob Zadek: And all done, all done without the government as such interjecting itself. This was humans resolving their own disputes. Now Walter, we’re going to have to go to break. We’ll be back in 90 seconds. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking to Walter Block. We are examining libertarianism. It is really the mainstream political point of view in America, and it can, working with the free market, solve environmental problems. 800-345-5639. Please stay tuned. We’ll be back in 90 seconds.
The Shift in Nuisance Law [25:06]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, Sunday at noon at Talk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I’m your host, Bob Zadek, happily spending an hour with Walter Block. Walter is an economist, professor of economics at Loyola in New Orleans, Louisiana. Walter is an Austrian economist. Walter will explain what that means before the end of the hour.
We have so much to cover. Among other issues, and a topic that I want to spend a fair amount of time on, is to demonstrate how environmentalism, how we can best protect the quality of life on the planet through free market capitalism, not through top-down, inefficient, politics-driven, crony capitalism-driven, governmental intervention.
Before the break, we were discussing how simply the use of the courts to protect your own property worked just fine for much of our economic history, and it worked without government intervention, and it allocated costs properly so that the polluter bore the cost, which it passed along presumably through the pricing of its product, and those people damaged by the pollution had recourse in the courts under established principles of law. So one’s property could be protected from the economic—from the environmental damage caused by another.
Now Walter, you gave this wonderful explanation, which I want you—I would love you to share with the audience, on the issue of endangered species. We’re going to get to that.
Walter Block: Wait, wait, wait, let me interrupt you. I just want to do a little bit more on pollution. And I’m glad you mentioned crony capitalism because that figures heavily into what’s going on.
What happened was they were using anthracite coal, which came from Colorado—now we’re talking in the 19th century—and they stopped sulfur coal, which came from, oh, I don’t know, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, places like that. And things were, you know, not perfect but pretty good. Then what happened is we had the so-called Progressive Period in the 1880s, 1890s. And the next time this little old lady or the farmer came to court, the court said something very different. It didn’t say, “Yes, we’re going to uphold property rights and the common law.” It said, “Yeah, yeah, they’re violating your property rights, your stinking lousy selfish property rights. There’s something more important than stinking lousy selfish property rights, and that’s the public good.” And what’s the public good consist of? Well, the public good consists of manufacturing. So we’re going to let the factory spew forth smoke and we’re going to let the railroad run amok with sparks all over the place.
And you might ask, well, why this change in the law? And the reason was, in the 1890s, the US wanted to engage in some imperialist ventures, and who was number one in those days? It was Great Britain. And the US wanted to be number one, and the way to be number one in armaments with battleships and tanks and whatever is not to let little old ladies and farmers run roughshod over manufacturers and railroads, but rather the other way around. So what they did is they said, you know, to hell with your property rights. So this sort of underscores, and it should underscore, the importance of property rights in defending against pollution.
Let me read a very short quote from Murray Rothbard, and he is my guru not only on this but on many things. And what it says is, here is the classic case of Holman v. Athens Empire Laundry Company in 1919, which is during the Progressive Period. The Supreme Court of Georgia declared, quote, “The pollution of the air, so far as is reasonably necessary to the enjoyment of life and indispensable to the progress of society, is not actionable,” unquote. Not actionable means you can’t sue polluters. Well, of course, if you can’t sue polluters, then they’re going to pollute, because if they don’t pollute, if they use the expensive anthracite coal which doesn’t pollute instead of the cheaper sulfur coal which comes from Pennsylvania and eastern places where they had more political votes, well then they’ll go broke. So the invisible hand was working, but in a very bad way, because the courts, instead of upholding property rights, were now denigrating property rights.
And let me just put the nail in the coffin here. What then what they did is, as a sop to the environmental plaintiffs, the green people that we would now see them as, they said, “Okay, well what we’ll do is we’ll have minimum smokestack height regulations.” So previously the smokestack was, oh, 20, 30 feet high, and you could tell, you know, just where the pollution came from. Now the smokestack was 300 feet high—I don’t know if I’ve got the exact numbers here—and now it was very hard to tell where the pollution was coming from because, you know, instead of putting it under the rug, we’re putting it into the clouds. So then—in other words, the government created the problem, and then the government had the audacity to say, “Well, this is private enterprise created the problem and we have to have the Clean Air Act.” If they would have kept the libertarian system of property rights that they had in the 1830s through 1850s, we never would have had the problem. We wouldn’t have had to have the Clean Air Act. We wouldn’t have been saying, “Well, it’s private enterprise, it’s greed, it’s ruining the environment with pollution and stuff.” So here is a perfect case of free market environmentalism. And the greens—I call them, you know, watermelons because they’re really red on the inside and green on the outside—if they just but realized that the way to achieve what they want to achieve is not through government intervention and crony capitalism, but through the upholding of private property rights, we’d all be a lot better.
Bob Zadek: And what’s very important is the common law, which is judge-made law, it changes slowly and it represents the collective wisdom of lots and lots and thousands and thousands of people interacting naturally and uncoerced on a daily basis. That’s how the common law gets created, as opposed to statutory law, which is top-down, a bunch of self-appointed—elected to some degree, but the administrative, the executive branch is often unelected, parts of it—and they bestow upon themselves that they are smarter than the mass of people acting cooperatively and resolving disputes. So the common law is far more small-d democratic than the autocratic rules from the top down, which the government never can be as smart as all of the people acting, interacting voluntarily. And that’s the real message.
Endangered Species: The Buffalo and the Cow [32:40]
Bob Zadek: Now Walter, another area—and you do a wonderful explanation, I’ll just say the buffalo and the cow and you’ll explain how even something like endangered species are protected a lot better by simply adhering to private property rights instead of creating statutes like the Endangered Species Act, which have profound economic dislocations, like the snail darter and all of these small species that get protected at great economic cost. So please explain how private property—and you do the wonderful cow versus buffalo analogy—how private property protects endangered species.
Walter Block: Well, and this is something that you alluded to about the tragedy of the commons. When you own something privately, you take care of it. When you don’t own it, when it’s owned in common like the buffalo was, then it goes extinct. And the analogy I use is the cow and the buffalo are very similar animals. Maybe to a biologist they’re different, but to the ordinary common person such as you and I, I mean, they’re both big and they’re smelly and if you crash into one of them you’re in trouble, and they give milk and they run around. They’re very—even biologically they’re probably close, closely associated, although I’m no biologist. And yet we have to explain as social scientists why cows never went within a million miles of extinction and buffalo almost bit the dust.
And the reason is the cows were allowed to be privately owned and the buffalo for many years—thank goodness nowadays we’ve changed the law—were not allowed to be owned privately. So look, if you shoot a cow, what’s the cost of shooting a cow or slaughtering your own cow? Well, it’s the cow tomorrow, which is a pretty high cost, so you’re not going to shoot the cow indiscriminately. You’re not going to take a machine gun into the lower 40 and start spraying bullets at cows, because the cost to you of doing it are very high. On the other hand, with the buffalo, you will shoot them indiscriminately because if you don’t shoot them, you’re not going to have them tomorrow anyway.
Bob Zadek: Because they’re not yours. And if you don’t shoot them, somebody else will.
Walter Block: Right. And you have this stupid movie Dances with Wolves, which I—and book—which I sort of enjoyed, but you have to, you know, park your facilities, your mental facilities somewhere else if you want to enjoy it, because these are just economically illiterate. The point they were saying, well, the reason the buffalo got extinct is the white man or greed or something like that. No, it’s the fact that they were never allowed to be privately owned.
You had the same sort of a thing with the crocodile and the alligator. They were almost extinct and no one was allowed to own them, and then people were allowed to own them, and all of a sudden they’re not extinct. Well, in my view, the elephant, economically speaking, is just a buffalo with funny ears and a funny nose. The same principle applies to the elephant and the rhino. And nowadays the elephant and the rhino are in grave danger, and the reason is they’re not allowed to be owned privately in farms or barnyards. And then you have these crazy people in China and Africa, what they do is they gather tusks from the elephant and then they burn them in an attempt to say, “Well, we shouldn’t have free trade in elephant tusks.” They’ve got it backwards. Look, we have free trade in cows. People buy and sell cows. Cows aren’t in any danger, and nowadays buffalo aren’t. And all we have to do is privatize, allow people to homestead those wild animals, the rhino and the elephant. The reason that they’re endangered is not because they have valuable tusks and valuable horns—they do—but cows are valuable too. I mean, it’s just economic illiteracy.
So Botswana is one of the countries that has quasi-semi-demi ownership, and their herds are increasing, whereas in the rest of Africa, they don’t have private property and their herds are decreasing because of poachers. Because as I say, it costs nothing to kill one because you’re not going to have it anyway tomorrow, whereas if it’s yours, then you take care of it. So if these creatures were privately owned and I owned a herd of elephants, would I allow you to shoot a pregnant elephant? Yeah, but you’ve got to pay an arm and a leg—and I mean a human arm and a leg, I’m just kidding—but you have to pay a lot of money. Whereas if you were to shoot an older elephant that couldn’t have children anymore, have babies anymore, well then I would charge you a lower price. Namely, I would act rationally in order to make profits, which is another dirty word among the watermelons. But the point is that if you allow incentives and people to make profits from preserving these species, well then the species will be preserved, whereas if you don’t, then they’ll disappear. So the reason for the extinction, the reason for the endangerment, has got nothing to do with private enterprise; it’s the very opposite. The reason is that they’re not allowed to be owned privately, and if we could privatize them, we would save them. My motto is, if it moves, privatize it; if it doesn’t move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or doesn’t move, you privatize everything.
The Tragedy of the Commons [38:09]
Bob Zadek: We have used the phrase—and we use it quite comfortably—“tragedy of the commons.” That phrase may not be so familiar to my listeners out there. And before I go on, I’m talking with Walter Block. Walter is an Austrian school economist. He teaches economics at Loyola University in New Orleans. The tragedy of the commons is an important concept and explains a lot about the libertarians’ strongly held respect for private property. And it probably goes back—the first example I’ve learned of tragedy of the commons goes back to John Winthrop and the Pilgrims, the story about the Pilgrims almost starving to death on their first winter in the New World. But Walter, explain briefly, just because it’s a phrase that’s used so often, explain briefly the doctrine of tragedy of the commons.
Walter Block: Well, let me just give you an example. When you rent a car, do you worry about changing the oil?
Bob Zadek: Of course not.
Walter Block: Not really. Whereas in your own car, you’re very careful about whether you change the oil or not, because if you don’t change the oil, the whole engine is going to go kerbluey and—the point is that if you own it, you take care of it. If you don’t own it, then you don’t take care of it. Now the automobile rental companies, Hertz and Avis, they’re very careful about changing the oil. So the point is that if a thing is owned in common, like the buffalo were, or like the elephants and the rhinos now are, and like the alligators and crocodiles once were but now are not, if these things are owned in common, you don’t take care of them because you don’t own it, you don’t lose if the thing breaks up.
Bob Zadek: Not only that, but to use fishing, which you often use, Walter, in your lectures as an example. When the oceans off the Grand Bank, off Nova Scotia and Maine, when they are overfished, the reason they’re overfished is that until it was controlled, fishermen knew that if they didn’t catch as many fish as they possibly could, somebody else would. And so everybody fished as much as they could because they weren’t trying to preserve the value, the rich value and the ecology of the oceans. But once somebody owns an area, like a field which they grow grain on, they will preserve it because it’s theirs and they want to keep its value. So people, if they are sharing an area in common, it’s for common use, everybody will use it as much as they can before somebody else does. But if it’s yours, you’re going to be a much better steward for the land.
Walter Block: And not just the steward of the species, but even the grass. Like if you own two fields, what you’re going to do and you have cows and sheep, you’re going to make sure they don’t eat all the way down to the roots, because if they do, then there’s no more grass for them. So you’ll take them off of pasture one and put them on pasture two, and then you’ll perk up pasture one. Whereas if we have five or ten or fifteen herds all on the big commons, nobody has any incentive to say, “Well, don’t eat over there,” because then we won’t have any more grass there. So it’s just common sense applied to very complicated—well, very simple issues, but with the fallacies running around, it becomes complicated.
Defending the Undefendable: Prostitution and Blackmail [41:45]
Bob Zadek: Now Walter, in your book—which I made a promise to myself I would get to—in your book, Defending the Undefendable. You wrote that book back in 1971, I believe, and it’s still very much in print. Tell us—we’re going to get into some specifics because my friends out there will love it—but tell us the premise, first just the premise of the book, and then we’ll get into some specifics.
Walter Block: Well, the premise of the book is—you’ll never guess—libertarianism. And what it says is that there are people that are hated and reviled and prohibited by law who do not break the libertarian code. They might break other codes, they might break morality codes or whatever, they don’t break the libertarian code, and therefore they deserve our protection. And since they insist on breaking these codes, they’re heroes.
Look, right now it’s legal to wear a blue tie. You wear a blue tie, no one’s going to arrest you. Even Obama’s not going to arrest you for wearing a blue tie. Not yet, but right now let’s count our blessings. But look, suppose they passed a law saying blue ties are no good. And now you insisted on wearing a blue tie. Well, I would defend you because wearing a blue tie does not—is not a per se violation of the libertarian axiom or principle of non-aggression. And you’re heroic because you flaunt this unjust law. I think it’s heroic to flaunt unjust laws. And so the prostitute is a hero of mine.
Bob Zadek: Walter, just interrupt. When you said—it’s very important and I don’t want to have this point be lost—you said “unjust laws.” It’s not what Walter the human says is an unjust law. It’s unjust according to core libertarian principles. Remember we started the show with: non-aggression principle and private property. A law is unjust if it prohibits an activity which doesn’t harm another person or takes away private property. That’s the frame of reference we use. So for example, you mentioned earlier in the show—we’re not going to get back to it—prostitution. Prostitution is, under libertarian principles, the criminalization of prostitution is, by libertarian standards, an unjust law. Because the prostitute is carrying on an activity which is part of the free market system, assuming no extraneous factors like coercion and teenagers being dragged—put away the ugly stuff. Let’s talk about a call girl. Voluntarily goes into it because she can make lots of money doing it and she perhaps enjoys it. That activity, by the standard of just or unjust, is an unjust law applying the principles we started off with.
So Walter, you have identified—and the prostitute was one of them—you identified a prostitute as being a hero in the sense that she is—or he is—carrying on an activity which is criminalized by an unjust law. Now just walk—just apply libertarian principles to why it is unjust to criminalize prostitution, simply by applying libertarian principles.
Walter Block: Well, I think you’ve done a marvelous job at doing that. It’s an act between consenting adults. We’re not talking about young girls or children, we’re not talking about coercion, we’re not talking about people forced into it. We’re just talking about someone who says, “Look, I prefer to do this, I want to rent out my body or provide a certain sexual service,” and you get someone else who says, “Yes, I’m willing to pay you for this sexual service,” and we put them in jail? Well, that’s horrible. That’s a violation of the libertarian principle.
See, the libertarians agree with the left on certain civil liberties and personal liberties issues, and libertarians agree with the right on certain economic issues—or at least the left is a little better on these things, although some of the lefty feminists want to prohibit prostitution, and some of the free market—well, some of the Republicans like Romney favored the minimum wage. But in general, the right, the conservatives, are a little better on economics; the left is a little better on personal liberties. They’re both horrible on foreign policy, which is another issue. But the point is that libertarianism is unique. We are not right, we are not left, we are not conservative, we are not liberal; we are libertarian, which is very different than either of those two other issues.
Bob Zadek: And what’s important is—and I say this without the slightest hint of defensiveness—it’s not like, “Oh, libertarians, they favor prostitution.” No, we don’t favor the activity. We simply say, while we would discourage, as you said, Walter, you would discourage people you care about from carrying on the activity, you strongly discourage the criminalization, the imposition of some absurd moral code into the law where one person is criminalizing behavior that one person simply abhors. And so it’s not the issue, “Oh, libertarians like prostitutes.” No, we simply favor just laws.
Now, in your book, when you list dozens of these types of activities, one that really tickled my intellectual imagination was blackmailing. You did a wonderful analysis of blackmailing, and I enjoyed that perhaps more than any of the other heroes in your book. Now, the audience is—before they jump to turn their dial—explain, because you’re exactly right, it really tickled my mind when you explained why blackmailing should not be a reviled activity.
Walter Block: Well, by the way, I do now have another book out. The entire book is on blackmail, whereas in Defending the Undefendable there was only one chapter, but I have expanded it to criticize people who don’t see the light on this issue. The point is, what is blackmail? Blackmail is a threat coupled with a demand for money. Walter, I want to mention we have only two minutes and I want to be sure the audience gets this because it’s great fun. So we have two minutes.
Walter Block: Okay. So what is the threat? The threat is to engage in free speech or to gossip. So I now threaten you that I’m going to tell everyone you take a bath with a rubber ducky. And if you want to buy me off, pay me $1,000. That’s what blackmail is. It’s a threat coupled with a demand for money. But look, what I’m threatening is not to—like extortion, I’m not threatening to burn your house down or to kill you or to kill your kids or anything. I’m threatening to become a gossip or to engage in my free speech rights. And if I have a right to gossip—look, suppose I just said, “You take a bath with a rubber ducky,” and that’s all I did. I’m not going to jail for that because gossip is legal. Or suppose I said, “Hey, give me $1,000.” That’s okay, I’m requesting money. But when you put the two together, somehow it’s illegal? No, it shouldn’t be illegal.
And look, suppose you knew that I saw you taking a bath with a rubber ducky and you approached me and said, “Hey Walter, I’ll give you $1,000 if you don’t tell everyone.” And you know, that would be okay. But if I approach you, it’s not okay. So the whole thing, the blackmail law is just crazy in many, many different ways and it violates libertarianism. And you have to distinguish blackmail from extortion. Extortion is where the threat is to commit violence. Here the threat is to engage in something that you have every right to do in the first place, namely engage in free speech.
Bob Zadek: In effect, the blackmailer is selling their right of free speech. It’s like, just I have a right and I will—you can pay me not to exercise a right I otherwise would have. And it’s so interesting, Walter, and when you compared it to a gossip. When you said gossip is something, “Oh, that person’s a gossip,” it’s sort of a shrug of the shoulder. And gossip is simply blackmailing without the economic component. It’s a blackmailer who says there’s no amount of money that would prevent me from saying something, so therefore I’m going to say it. That’s a gossip.
Walter Block: Well, if you’re in the hands of a blackmailer, at least he has the decency to tell you that for money he’ll shut up. Whereas if you’re in the hands of a gossip, it’s all over. I’m going to tell everyone you take a bath with a rubber ducky because I’m a gossip and you have no possibility of shutting me up. So gossip is even worse, and yet we don’t criminalize gossip, so therefore, ergo, QED, we shouldn’t criminalize blackmail.
Bob Zadek: And blackmail is nothing other than the voluntary exchange: I value your $1,000 more than I value telling the world what you have done, and you value my silence more than you value the $1,000. And remember, let us assume the blackmailer is going to tell the truth. So the victim of the blackmailer in the first instance did something he doesn’t want people to know about, probably it may be illegal, but in any event, and he’s buying silence. That’s a commercial transaction. What’s wrong with it? But yet you really tickled my imagination when I read that and I could not rebut it intellectually.
So Walter, Defending the Undefendable is a great read. I invite my friends out there to get the book. It’s fun to read. It’s great dinner-time conversation when you challenge your audience instead of talking about the boring stuff of everyday life. Try discussing that over dinner; the sparks will fly. Walter, thank you so much for spending an hour with me. We really appreciate it. Please make a promise publicly that you’ll come back and share more of your thoughts.
Walter Block: I if you don’t have me back on your show, I’m going to threaten you with physical violence. You can’t intimidate me, Walter. But if you want to get something done, you have to threaten violence. So I hereby threaten violence if you don’t have me on your show.
Bob Zadek: I’ll be glad to invite you. I’ll be back in 90 seconds. We’re going to celebrate the new year and the banning of incandescent light bulbs. Yes, go to jail if you burn an incandescent bulb. We’ll also talk about the corporate income tax if we have time. Bob Zadek, 800-345-5639. Boy, am I having fun. I’ll be back in 90 seconds. Please stay tuned.
The Incandescent Light Bulb Ban [54:54]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, Sunday at noon at Talk 910. Thanks so much for listening. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. 800-345-5639 is the way to join the conversation. We are the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend, the show of ideas, not attitude.
Well, 2014 is upon us and there’s reason to celebrate. We have taken a huge step closer to the long-sought-after goal of—drumroll please—energy independence, whatever in the heck that means. George Bush in 2007 signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, and it went after the threat to the planet caused by incandescent light bulbs. You thought they were just those bulbs would just provide light. Well, they were doing far more than that. They were destroying the planet. Forget about the fact that they were cheap and they lit the place up and colors looked natural and when people put on their makeup they looked how they were supposed to look. They’re banished.
Well, last year the 100-watt bulbs were banished. We were given a year to go cold turkey. This year, the 60 and the 40-watt bulbs are banished. Sayonara to incandescent light bulbs. To tee up the issue, Raymond, if we can play Nick Gillespie, Reason magazine quote, to introduce the issue of the banishment of incandescent light bulbs. Raymond, the clip please.
Nick Gillespie (Clip): It was pushed by light bulb makers eager to upsell customers on longer-lasting and much more expensive halogen, compact fluorescent, and LED lighting. When customers balked at paying more for home lighting, General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips did what corporate behemoths do all the time: they turned to the government for regulations that rigged the market in their favor. So when you throw out that last 40-cent 40-watt light bulb, remember that you’re not just tossing out a piece of history; you’re also throwing out a piece of the free market.
Bob Zadek: Incandescent light bulbs: they were cheap and efficient and they did—they had one job to do and they did it well. And the light bulb manufacturers were not happy. They wanted to sell us a more expensive, less desirable product, and since they could not do it the old-fashioned way by persuading the public it was a good idea to buy a $50 light bulb, they did so through crony capitalism, that is, legislation. If you criminalize the selling of cheap incandescent bulbs and force people to buy mercury-laden halogen light bulbs and fluorescent light bulbs, if you force people by federal law, then you get to make a whole lot of sales of a product that nobody especially wants, but they have no choice but to buy. Crony capitalism in spades.
And what’s really weird is these new light bulbs—well, now that the 60s and the 40s are illegal, we have to buy either LED bulbs, which are very expensive and burn very hot, or fluorescent light bulbs, which are quite dangerous to use. With these new light bulbs, the fluorescent, those curly bulbs you have seen, they contain mercury. Mercury is scary stuff, and yet now that is being brought into American homes in spades with these bitty little curly fluorescent light bulbs. These fluorescent bulbs are highly dangerous. When you want to change a light bulb, you better have a Brooks Brothers hazmat suit handy because you can’t let this stuff touch you. The incandescent light bulb, when you replaced it, you threw it away. It was a piece of glass and a piece of wire. That was it. Now we are bringing mercury into our homes, and the EPA has extensive rules on how you go about replacing a fluorescent light bulb and what happens if, God forbid, this fluorescent light bulb breaks. And of course, light bulbs break all the time. So if you want to see what or hear what George Bush and the greenies have done to us, I have a clip. It’s an interesting clip I’m going to play for you. It’s a show, it’s a tape from a show where the participants are doctors. And this is a public service, this is serious, and this is the doctors explaining what the drill is if the fluorescent light bulb, the bulb that you are required by federal law to use, listen to what you have to have to do simply if this light bulb breaks. Raymond, the clip on the light bulb breaking, please.
Doctors (Clip): Mercury’s bad. Yeah. Because—and they’ve got babies. So pregnant women probably shouldn’t be the ones cleaning up if you do break a CFL bulb. Open the windows, you want to turn off the AC and heat. You can go ahead and leave the home for 15 minutes if—leave the home? Oh my god. And just—you don’t want to be right there the minute those potential vapors are released. Yeah. Don’t vacuum or sweep. Number one: use gloves. Gloves that you’re never going to use again. You don’t want to touch this stuff with your bare hands. Use cardboard to go ahead and help pick up anything on a hardwood floor. Gotten as much out as I can, but as you can see, there’s a lot of glass left. Don’t vacuum or sweep. So Dr. Lisa, can you hand me that duct tape? So the glass is still there. What you can do, believe it or not, is take duct tape to get up these loose pieces. Get it out in the garbage and take unbroken CFL bulbs to a recycling center that has a toxic waste center or your local hardware store often times will have a way to dispose of these in a proper manner.
Bob Zadek: Did you hear that? Get out of the house for 15 minutes, open the windows, use gloves you’re never going to use again, take it to the recycling center immediately. This is a light bulb. This is what is imposed upon us by statute. Is there—and does anybody out there even know how an incandescent light bulb allegedly damages the planet? Does anybody know that, or are we all just sheep passively going along with a new statute that says one of the most brilliant inventions in the history of the free market system, the incandescent light bulb, cheap and effective, how that got banished and replaced by a life-threatening bulb? I’m curious, does anybody out there know why the light bulb has been banished? 800-345-5639 if you know the answer.
Well, at first I couldn’t figure it out, and I did some research, and it took a lot of research. And I learned that the problem, in quotes, with the light bulb is that it, in addition to throwing off light, it throws off heat. That is, it uses some of the electricity that it consumes to make heat. And heat is different than light, and therefore we are using electricity to make heat which we don’t otherwise need, therefore we are wasting electricity. And that’s how we’re damaging the planet?
Now the absurdity is that using electricity in and of itself doesn’t damage the planet. It only damages the planet if—and this is theoretical but there—if the electricity is created by a coal-fired plant. Then if you burn an incandescent bulb, you use more electricity which burns more coal which pollutes the air which creates greenhouse gases. George Bush, have you lost your mind? That’s the line of reasoning for which you’re going to ban a very inexpensive, very effective product?
And the irony of all of this is that in California, to take just one state, California gets almost none of its electricity from coal-fired plants. Therefore, the environmental—therefore in California, if you use more electricity than you otherwise would, you’re not fouling the environment at all because our electricity is generated by hydroelectric power, by solar a little bit, or by natural gas, which doesn’t foul the environment. So California, the effect of the massive economic dislocation caused by these light bulbs is nil. There’s no benefit to the planet by banning these light bulbs. But there is cancer-causing mercury going to be into the air, the inconvenience of having to wear special clothing and go through a toxic fume drill just if a light bulb breaks in your home. So there’s huge downside, but the greenies and George Bush got the country to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 just to ban light bulbs.
Well, of course, I had the wisdom to stock up, and I have, I’m proud to say, enough light bulbs—I’ve done the actuarial study—to last well beyond my personal lifespan on Earth. I own about 220 100-watt incandescent bulbs, so that if you don’t like how you look at home or how your home looks using fluorescent lighting, just give me a call. I can get you a good deal on a 100-watt bulb. Of course, we’ll have to meet in some dark alley or maybe on some street corner, and you give me a fistful of twenties and I’ll give you a couple of light bulbs and hope nobody catches us. But I have them available. 800-345-5639 if you need incandescent bulbs. We will see if this statute—now this statute is not going to be repealed because the light bulb manufacturers have invested too much money in manufacturing plants, all of which are in China, I should mention. Light bulbs were manufactured in the US, or incandescent bulbs, and the CFLs, the fluorescent bulbs, are manufactured 100% overseas in China, if you care about such things. So there is a modest effect upon American jobs, but at least we’re not killing the planet by using incandescent bulbs.
The Corporate Income Tax [67:30]
Bob Zadek: There was an interesting article in the New York Times this week by an economist at Boston University who raised an issue that we discussed on this show lastly four, three or four years ago. It is quite an interesting topic. The economist, Laurence Kotlikoff by name, wrote a somewhat lengthy op-ed piece in the Times in response to the terrible unemployment numbers in the US. We can’t seem to increase employment and increase the number of jobs. And Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston, he raised the issue yet again—this issue is raised often—that we must, we should eliminate a job-killing statute known as the corporate income tax.
The corporate income tax is quite interesting. It is, of course, a tax, as the name implies, an income tax where the taxpayers are American corporations or corporations that earn income in the US. Now what’s wrong with the corporate income tax? Well, it’s supported by those political types, mostly on the left, who believe that corporations are pretty unpleasant economic entities. They are a home for the rich. They represent the wealthy, the 1% more than the 99%. And therefore, taxing corporations is, quote, “taxing the rich.” Corporations become a surrogate for, quote, “the rich.”
Well, corporations, of course, can’t pay taxes. They write checks, to be sure. But they don’t pay taxes because, as with any other expense that a profit-making business incurs, that expense is simply built into either the sales price of the product, which means the corporate income tax is paid by the customers who buy the product. It is built into the calculation of how much wages they can afford to pay their workers, which means if the corporation made more money, i.e., paid less taxes, it could pay its workers more. It also is factored into how much it rewards its stockholders by way of dividends, which are a sharing with the owners of the profits of the business. If the corporation wouldn’t pay an income tax, it would pay more in dividends and it would reward its owners. Now its owners, of course, are for the most part 401(k)s owned by individuals, pension plans which fund individuals. So at the bottom line of it, corporations do not pay income taxes. They just write the checks and they spread the cost either on its workers, on its suppliers, on its creditors, or on its owners, all of which ultimately are humans. So a decision to tax a corporation is a decision to tax owners, workers, suppliers, creditors, but not to tax the corporation.
So why is it there? Why do we have a corporate income tax? Well, we have a corporate income tax—and the reason it doesn’t get repealed is purely—it’s an inefficient tax because corporations, as we know from everything we read in the paper, they—corporations, businesses will go to Congress and seek tax breaks, special tax bills that benefit the corporations. I.e., it is yet another home for cronyism. And it’s a very hidden benefit. Us voters rarely know when a corporation is given a tax benefit. No one tells us, we have no way to find out. So it is a private deal between the corporation and the legislature. It’s cronyism, and that is per se unhealthy; it’s bad for us all.
Also, there is a concept of economics called concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. The benefit of a tax break to a corporation is highly focused on the corporation. Let’s pick a number: the corporation realizes a $10 million benefit as a result of a special tax break. Now, the cost to you and I is four cents each. So I’m not going to go storming the Bastille to save four cents in taxes. So with dispersed costs, no one cares about the cost. But people care about the benefit. Therefore, the corporation will spend a lot of money to lobby for the benefit because it’s worth it. None of us will spend more than one second of our time to prevent it because it doesn’t hurt us enough. It only hurts us in principle, but not economically. So when you have concentrated benefit and dispersed cost, it’s unlikely the tax loophole will be cured.
Also, there is a principle of taxation which says an old tax is a good tax. When you have a tax that’s been around for a long time, people have adjusted to it and they know how to live with it. Therefore, there is inertia and the likelihood of it changing, even though the change would be very good, the likelihood of it changing is diminished. And the corporate income tax is a very old tax.
Caller David from San Francisco [74:53]
Bob Zadek: Now we have a—I see my light bulb discussion of a few minutes ago has caused the phones to ring quite a bit. It would be nice to hear from my listeners. David in San Francisco, welcome to the show this afternoon. How are you?
Caller (David): Yeah, how are you, Bob? You know, I was listening, I wish I could have called in during your interview in the last hour. I would have challenged him on quite a few of his principles. But the light—
Bob Zadek: He’ll be back.
Caller (David): Okay. All right. Well, I was going to raise the idea that there are basically fake greens, and the issue of crony capitalism got into the decision to make mercury light bulbs. As a matter of fact, the mercury light bulbs were very much opposed by honest greens. But very similar—you remember about five or ten years ago, California created gasoline with MTBE in it?
Bob Zadek: Oh sure.
Caller (David): And that was also heralded as if the greens had chosen that MTBE. But in fact, it was a great fraud. And in fact, even a third example is the deregulation of electricity in California that was written by Enron back in 1996.
Bob Zadek: But deregulation, on deregulation, David, I should just remind you that deregulation the way California did it was horrible. We can discuss the principle of deregulation and then we can discuss how California did it. California’s approach was utterly moronic because it didn’t deregulate the retail rates, only the wholesale rates. But go ahead, David.
Caller (David): Well, that’s exactly right. And the night before the vote, there was common agreement from everybody from the Sierra Club to the Heritage Foundation agreed on the deregulation. But then the next morning, somebody put a new bill on the table, and everybody thought that that was the same bill and that’s what they voted for. So it was bait and switch, pure bait and switch. And Enron looted California based upon bait and switch. And I would contend that this MTBE, which, you know, MTBE was a waste product from the oil and gas industry. They were trying to get rid of it, so they conned the state legislature into thinking that it was something that would reduce emissions when in fact it was just getting rid of a hazardous waste product, and so they basically conned the legislature into it.
So the idea that it’s a kind of a one-two punch. The state legislature should have a bank of scientists that they can fall back on to verify these products. But with the budget cuts in the universities, they fire all of the honest scientists, they get a bunch of the corporate guys who essentially sell out the state for their corporate masters, so to speak. And then you end up with this crony capitalism dumping their products onto the market with the authorization of the state. And in the case of MTBE, when somebody tries to sue the state for allowing this junk to get into their well, they’ve essentially got the waiver because the state authorized the pollution. And I would contend that the light bulbs were the same way.
Bob Zadek: Oh, they absolutely were. As I said, as Nick Gillespie said earlier in this segment, once business can find an environmental reason, even if it’s junk science as the mercury-laden light bulbs are, once you can wrap a proposal in the protective blanket of environmentalism, it sails through and it’s nothing other than imposing a product that you want to manufacture on the public. So you’re exactly right, David. We could have, and indeed the manufacturers could have simply started offering CFL and LED bulbs to the public at their higher price and let the public decide. But to mandate, to have the government jump into the marketplace and mandate one product over another is not the way the free market is supposed to work.
Caller (David): Well, and that gets into the hazardous waste angle. You know, I guess your show’s about up, but I was just going to ask you about the—did 910 just reduce their signal? I was riding my bike around with a little Walkman and it seemed like your signal was a little weaker than it used to be.
Bob Zadek: I think they—a couple of the AA batteries started to fail, we had to replace them. I think that was the problem.
Caller (David): Oh, is that it? You know, one other thing about the free market. I noticed that Rush Limbaugh took over on 960, and he and Glenn Beck are getting absolute zero ratings here in San Francisco, yet the market forces put him on and got rid of three of the highest-rated shows for that station. So market forces are not at work in the radio markets right now.
Bob Zadek: Well, they are for me, my ratings keep on going up. David, thanks a lot for your call. Appreciate you being a listener.
Closing Remarks [80:02]
Bob Zadek: Thank you very much, David. I’d like to close the show with a wonderful explanation as to why the corporate income tax, even though it is really a dumb tax focused on the wrong people, why it has survived for so long. And this explanation—and it’s because there’s not a strong constituency to repeal it because nobody knows exactly who pays it, whether it’s the workers, the suppliers, the creditors, or the owners. And there was a 17th-century French administrator, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who reportedly said, quote, “The art of taxation consists in so much plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” The art of taxation: get as much as you can with the smallest amount of complaining. That’s why the corporate income tax has survived, because nobody knows they’re paying it. And there are many taxes we pay without knowing we’re paying them, and that’s how the government sucks so much of our money out.
This is Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be back next Sunday with Jeffrey Singer. Jeffrey Singer, as you recall, is a practicing physician who knows Obamacare from the inside out. Please stay tuned. Jeff is a great guest. I’ll be back next Sunday.