The Decline of American Independence
2020-08-27 · Guest: Robert C. Wright (Economics professor and author) · 52:11
Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on small businesses
Bob Zadek interviews economist and author Robert C. Wright about the devastating impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on American small businesses. They discuss how the destruction of the entrepreneurial class threatens the political center and the founding principles of economic independence, contrasting the “crony capitalism” of big business with the consumer-focused nature of small enterprise.
Topics: Small Business, COVID-19 Lockdowns, Economic Independence, Crony Capitalism, Rent Seeking, Constitutional Rights, South Dakota, Joe Biden, Science and Policy, Job Creation
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Robert C. Wright
Introduction to the Loss of Independence [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio—13 years and counting. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are, this morning and always, the show of ideas, never once, not once, the show of attitude.
This morning, we, with some trepidation, may be bidding farewell to independence—the independence promised us in the Declaration of Independence, the independence assured to us all in the Constitution, the second of our three founding documents. Why do we fear the loss of independence? And independence from what? Well, the independence from what is easy. It is independence from the intrusion of government in our private—underlined private—daily lives, so we are free to trade with whomever we wish, to interact with whomever we wish, to go about our lives having total dominion over how we spend our days and our money, free from government interference, so long as the activities we undertake do not impair the equal rights of others. That is, in a few short words, the founding principle.
Now, why do we fear the loss of independence? Why now? Well, this morning, we honor probably the single most important group of Americans who are a need and committed to preserving economic independence—independence from government so they are free to trade. And free to trade means free to give us what we want, what we need, at a price we are going to pay. This morning’s show recognizes, a paean to, and a somewhat concern over the loss of, the entrepreneurial class in our country, specifically small business. Small business is, I am afraid, the proverbial canary in the mineshaft. As small business goes, so goes the rest of us.
The statistic we start our show with is, according to Yelp, about half of the businesses that Yelp follows and reports upon in America—they are small business—about half of the small business have closed and are unlikely to reopen. That is scary stuff. It’s scary stuff for the businesses that failed, and it’s scary stuff for the rest of us. And we will examine in great detail what is happening to small business in America, why did it happen, and most importantly, why do we care?
To help us understand these crucial concepts, since they are early predictors of what’s likely to happen to the rest of us, I’m delighted to welcome to the show Robert Wright. Robert Wright is an economics professor. He is an author of over a dozen authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited over a dozen books on an eclectic list of topics, including but not limited to topics of economics. He is a resident research fellow at the Georgia College and State University in Georgia. He is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, where I follow his frequent writings every morning. And of great interest—and we’ll discuss this as soon as I welcome Bob to the show—is a member of the American Philosophical Society. Bob, I didn’t even know that until I studied up on your bio. So, Bob, welcome to the show this morning.
Robert C. Wright: Thanks for having me, Bob. It’s a great honor. I had no idea that your show started 13 years ago, so that was right before the financial crisis.
Bob Zadek: It was, but we didn’t cause it. So please, no cause and effect here. I don’t want to take a hit. Now, before we get into the business of the day, I perked up and a big smile crossed my face when I saw you were a member of the American Philosophical Society. Now, if I am not mistaken—yes, go ahead.
Robert C. Wright: I’m not a member. I just have a research fellowship there for a book I’m writing about the American Revolution.
Bob Zadek: Ah, okay. Tell us about the American Philosophical Society.
Robert C. Wright: Oh, well, it’s a very ancient non-profit organization begun in colonial times in Philadelphia.
Bob Zadek: Who founded it? Tell us who founded it.
Robert C. Wright: Benjamin Franklin. He founded just about everything.
Bob Zadek: Exactly. It was, I think, besides the Post Office and lots of other things and the stove and stuff like that, he founded the American Philosophical Society, which predated by years the founding of our country. So, I just had to give you a hat tip for being a research fellow at the American Philosophical Society. And I suspect in their office or offices, you kind of get a sense of the past when you walk in there.
Robert C. Wright: Oh, absolutely. It’s right in that historic district of Philadelphia, along with Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center and the Liberty Bell and all of that good stuff. So it’s just steeped in history and it’s very helpful for getting into the correct mindset for what I’m writing about the Revolution.
The Destruction of the Entrepreneurial Class [04:50]
Bob Zadek: And I will just hope that Dr. Franklin has found the time to tune in this morning to our show and hope he agrees with our conclusions. Now, you recently wrote for AIER an article entitled “So Long, Independence,” where, as I said in my opening, you focused on the entrepreneurial class, small business people in America, the widely reported loss of many, many entrepreneurs because of the pandemic crisis. So tell us first—we’re going to get into a lot of detail on why this happened and what it means—but tell us first, we’ll start off with what is happening to the entrepreneurial class that you focused on in your piece? And equally important, Bob, why do we all care about the loss of small business? After all, many of our listeners have suffered economically as well as otherwise, but economically because of the COVID crisis. Why do we care perhaps a bit more about the damage to the class, the entrepreneurial class in our country?
Robert C. Wright: Because they constitute the political moderate center of the political spectrum. Many are Republicans, many are Democrats, a full third of them call themselves independent, in that they don’t adhere to either party line. But regardless of party, they are almost to a person right smack dab in the middle of the political spectrum. They’re not way left like Bernie and AOC; they’re not way to the right like some Republicans. They’re right in the rational center. They are the folks who have the most to lose from extreme policy, as witnessed by what’s happened to them over the last few months.
It’s not just Yelp, by the way. Even McKinsey & Company, the great business consultancy, has put out a report that says—and I’m going to quote just one line here—“Among small businesses, recovery is likely to take even longer than for larger companies, and many may never reopen.” So that means that these folks—maybe upwards of 30 million of them—are not going to be independent political voices in the center anymore because they’re going to have to get jobs. And hence, be subject to influences from their employers. And so they’ve lost that political independence that the Founding Fathers thought was so crucially important to the well-functioning of our Republic.
Bob Zadek: Now, it’s not a statistical accident that the entrepreneurial class, small businessmen and women in America—it’s not like a statistical accident that they are in the middle. They need to have stability and predictability in order to prosper. So tell us about why are they—help us understand, expand upon what I just said—and tell us why they are collectively such an important force for stability, stability in our government, which we all benefit from, but we don’t need it as much as small business people. What is there about the activity of being a small business person that requires that they fight so hard for stability from which we all benefit?
Robert C. Wright: Well, running a small business is risky even in the best of times. All sorts of shocks can happen just through normal market processes. Maybe the town where they run a retail store loses a major employer, and so people don’t have as much income anymore and they don’t come into that store anymore. Maybe there’s a shift in consumer preferences away from buying whatever good or service the small business is selling and they shift preferences to something else—so like maybe away from hamburgers towards falafels or whatever.
So there’s all kinds of this stuff happening all the time in a dynamic market economy like that of the United States. And so they have to be alert to their business, they have to be alert to new possibilities, they have to be alert to the cost of inputs like labor, health insurance, whatever product that they’re adding value to before they resell it. It’s a very difficult thing. To layer in on top of that political risk—the risk of a change in the regulatory environment or the tax environment, zoning ordinances, employment law—just makes running a small business that much more difficult, that much more risky.
And so folks who run small businesses don’t like to see large changes in public policies, especially ones that come along quickly from out of the blue. If they can’t predict it or see it coming, then they can’t prepare for it and they can end up getting caught in a tough position that can lead to loss of profits, that might lead to their bankruptcy or them just deciding, well, it’s not really worth it to run this small business anymore. I’m not making enough profit; I could make more as a lackey for some big corporation. So they tend to be right there with the senior citizens at all sorts of public meetings to make sure that policymakers from the local zoning board and the local school board all the way up through state and national government don’t do anything too rash that could hurt their businesses.
Small Business vs. Crony Capitalism [14:42]
Bob Zadek: And what’s so important—and so many light bulbs went off in my brain when I read your piece—and my thought process was along the lines that I’ll ask you to expand upon if you would, Bob. What I started to process is, I’d ask myself as I read your piece, well, what are the specific policy requirements that small businesses as a class would want? And I started to build it in my head. I said, well, they want economic freedom, they want the right to be open as long as they choose to be open. And what does that mean? That means they want the right to serve us—us being the consumers—for as many hours a day as we would want them to be. They want the right to be able to open a business without a lot of costs. Why do they want to open a business? Because they want to provide us consumers with what we want at the price we want to pay. They are fighting only for the privilege of satisfying our needs.
Who else in our country is fighting simply for the privilege of giving us what we want at the price we want to pay? And they want total economic freedom without licensing and regulations. They want, of course, low taxes so they could redeploy their money to expand the business of giving us what we want and not give it to the government who has more complex and many ways contradictory goals. So if you tick down what are the policy needs of small business, they are the needs on which our country was founded. They literally, as a class, are the spokespeople for all of us. Because everything that small business wants and needs, we want and need, and yet we as a group have not been active in fighting for it—we being non-entrepreneurial class fighting for it—but small businesses have. And when and if they fail, we lose our principal spokesperson.
Bob, compare that just briefly because the comparison is so easy with the justifiable rage that we feel towards what has been called broadly crony capitalism, where big business gets a seat at the governmental table to form policy and get special favors. There’s none of that ever flows to small businesses. They don’t get to game the system. So compare for us, if you will, the relative economic weakness that small businesses have at the seat of government as compared to crony capitalists and why we all should and do identify with small business.
Robert C. Wright: Yeah, that’s a great point, Bob. Small businesses tend to function in highly competitive markets. So that means, as you say, they are basically in the business of pleasing us. And that means producing what we want, when we want, how we want it, and for a competitive market price. That is the essence of Adam Smithian market economies. That is literally what makes the U.S. economy great. And that is why these folks also call for the same public policies that Adam Smith called for, for prosperity not just for the small businesses but for all of us. And that is peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice is the way that Smith framed it. And that’s what most small businesses most of the time in this United States advocate. Peace, both with other countries and internally; easy taxes, which means taxes that are low but also are not onerous to figure out; and a tolerable administration of justice, knowing that perfect justice would be prohibitively expensive, but there needs to be enough justice, there needs to be enough balancing of things like the right of assembly—the right to peacefully assemble, which is in the First Amendment, of course—versus the right to own property, including businesses, and not have them violently assaulted and so forth.
So yeah, the interests of the small business class in America are pretty perfectly aligned with those of the rest of the country. Big business, on the other hand, is often in the business of what economists call rent-seeking, which basically means getting something for nothing, which is great work if you can get it. And it’s usually gotten through government largesse—what’s called crony capitalism or corporate welfare. You do something that imposes costs on your competitors, or you do something that creates market power, meaning moving away from that Adam Smithian small business competitive market and towards monopoly. You might not get all the way to monopoly, but even moving just part of the way increases profit, holding all else constant. And small businesses generally cannot—don’t have the political pull to do that, except maybe in some corrupt small town governments and what have you. But big businesses are what does that. So there used to be this old saying that the country, meaning the U.S., and GM were closely aligned—General Motors, the car manufacturer—but in fact, the U.S. goes the way of its small business class and not large corporate entities that are obviously able to sway parts of the political system for their own benefit.
Small Business as the Engine of Job Creation [22:15]
Bob Zadek: And it needs not be expanded, but we all know that the engine for job creation and independence—the engine is small business. Small business creates all the new jobs. Every big business in America started as a small business—every single one, including Amazon. They all started, including Walmart, they all started small. And it was this fertile economic environment that allowed them to grow and to prosper. And you mentioned, Bob, a second ago, that they are competing. All small businesses, you said it was very competitive. Now, strangely enough in our society, putting aside professional sports, competition is usually followed by the phrase “cutthroat.” And competition is looked upon economically as being something bad. And that’s insane. What does competition mean? It means businesses fighting, fighting amongst each other for one right: the right to give us what we want at a low price. We have so many businesses fighting only to satisfy us. And that’s a negative? That’s cutthroat? The more cutthroat the better if the result is we get what we want at better quality and even lower prices.
Now, I am correct, aren’t I, that businesses, small businesses account for the lion’s share of job creation? Therefore, when small businesses fail, the engine of job creation fails. Yes, of course, big businesses employ lots and lots and lots of people, but job creation at the local level springs up with much greater quantity and intensity at the small business level. Isn’t that a correct statement, Bob?
Robert C. Wright: It is. And one of the books that I’ve written that you so kindly mentioned at the beginning of the show is called Little Business on the Prairie. And it’s a study of entrepreneurship in South Dakota over several centuries, concentrating of course on the most recent history. And what I discovered is that South Dakota has such a steady—I call it tortoise economy, going back to that old fable between the tortoise and the hare, you know—where it just plows along with very low levels of unemployment. I mean, generally well below 2%. And sailed through the financial crisis with no problem, which is why I moved out there in 2009 and lived out there for a decade. And it’s because they have an entrepreneurial climate. If you lose your job out there, you don’t say, “Oh, let me go to the government and get money for a while until another job comes around.” No, you make your own employment. You make your own company and you start to sell goods or services to other businesses or to individuals. And it’s actually taught in the schools out there. My kids all had to come up with business plans and work out detailed budgets. And it was great because it taught them math skills and some stuff about business and got them thinking, “Hey, I can form my own business.”
And so South Dakota has, even leaving the ag sector aside, the highest percentage of income that comes from proprietorship—from owning your own business. And I think that’s one of the reasons why South Dakota didn’t lock down during the COVID-19 panic. That and the fact that it has a very good Republican governor named Kristi Noem. But she was also facing a lot of pressure from this proprietor class, this small business class saying, “Don’t you dare lock everything down. We can figure out what we need to do ourselves. We don’t need somebody in Pierre”—that’s the capital of South Dakota—“telling us what we can and can’t do. How can you possibly know what’s best for our businesses here locally?” And thankfully, she listened. And the only thing they shut down were big gatherings like concerts and big movie theaters and whatnot. But everything else was allowed to stay open and to figure out what they needed to do in order to keep COVID from spreading. And the only major problem they had was with a Chinese company called Smithfield that runs a huge pork processing plant in Sioux Falls. But even that was tamped down pretty quickly, even though there were hundreds of people infected there at one point. And it was because they allowed the people with the most information and the most incentive—the business owners—to make decisions for themselves.
Bob Zadek: I’m so glad you shared with us your experiences in South Dakota. And the reason I am glad is, since the media is so focused on the coasts, one would think, if you didn’t give it a lot more additional thought, one would think that what goes on in the New York City subway system, in New York City and in Chicago and in L.A. and San Francisco—one would think that is the country. And it is so easy, and I of course live in California, it is so easy intellectually to forget there is an entire—this is going to sound naive on my part, I don’t intend to sound naive—but it is so easy to presume that what goes on in those big, badly run, really badly run states and cities is the country. But there is an entire country that is living and behaving and experiencing life so different than what we see predominantly on the news. Americans ought to be required to tune in to heartland news stations and be required to watch the evening news in Sioux Falls and in Boise and in Oklahoma City and just learn, yes, there is more to our country than New York. And your perspective changes so much. I just had to make that statement because as soon as you referred to South Dakota, I myself had to be reminded, yes, there is a rest of the country. So thank you so much. It puts a spring in my step for the rest of the day until I forget again about South Dakota.
Lockdowns and the Constitution [30:20]
Bob Zadek: Now, during the COVID, the pandemic experience, the policies themselves, the governmental policies, the lockdowns and what comes from the lockdowns, disproportionately affected small business. Lots of big businesses were deemed essential or got themselves to be essential, and they were able to more or less operate. But the effects of the lockdown were—it’s almost as if they were targeting small business with the lockdowns. Now, in your piece, you helped us understand how the lockdown, if you focus on the working class and on small business, how the lockdowns literally ripped the heart out of the Constitution. And you shared with your readers—and I’ll ask you to share again—Hamilton’s observation about the Constitution and how frail it is. So tell us—I want our friends out there to really understand what specific cherished rights were eliminated or subordinated by the lockdown. How unconstitutional—if you will, not making a legal conclusion, but just a sitting-around-Starbucks talking about it conclusion—about what happened to our rights and what specific rights were diminished during the lockdown. Because you wrote about it very well in your piece, which I really enjoyed. And remind us of that wonderful Hamilton quote, if you would.
Robert C. Wright: The Hamilton calling the Constitution a frail and worthless fabric?
Bob Zadek: That’s right. That’s right. That was his fear.
Robert C. Wright: Yeah, because it is just a set—it is just a bunch of words. And he was afraid that those words could be manipulated, and they have been, starting especially in the New Deal and running pretty much to the present. The mistake that the Founders made, I think, was in not enumerating our economic rights in the Constitution. And they did it because they were afraid that if they left something out, that it could be used as a wedge to try to take that right away. What they could never conceive of happening is us losing essentially all of those unenumerated economic rights, like the right to work being foremost among those.
Bob Zadek: Or freedom of contract. Freedom of contract.
Robert C. Wright: Freedom of contract, right. So the sea change that happened is still happening. It’s just been accelerated by the lockdowns, which looked very much like the dekulakization of America.
Bob Zadek: Your reference is to Stalin. Your reference is to what Stalin did when he took all the independent farmers and confiscated their land and took away all of their economic freedom. The audience may not be familiar with that term, but it refers to the Stalin era.
Robert C. Wright: Yes, that’s right. Where he took away their economic freedom, took away their land, outright killed many of them, and sent others off to re-education camps in Siberia. When the U.S. was founded, we were a nation of proprietors, a nation of shopkeepers and artisans and farmers. Almost everyone owned their own business. People who were employees were kind of looked at—especially if they weren’t young and clearly building up, like if they weren’t an indentured servant or apprentice who was an aspiring proprietor—but if they were just somebody’s employee, they were looked upon almost like slaves because they were so dependent upon their employers. But most people were not in that category. Most people owned their own business. It might have been a professional service, like a law business or medical business, or it was a wholesale trading house or a retail stall, or of course back in that period, farming was such a bigger percentage of output. Many people were farmers. Lots of people had multiple businesses. So they might have been attorneys but also politicians, they might have been farmers but also bankers, and so forth. But everyone had that independence of running their own business.
Well, by the time we get to the New Deal, to the Great Depression and all of that, most people are employees. They don’t own their own business and they’re not politically independent. And this happened slowly over the course of the 19th century and was one of the reasons why we shifted from having open forms of balloting—like by voice or by open ballot—to the Australian or secret ballot system. It was to preserve the independence of voters to the extent possible when they worked for some big mill or some steel company or some oil company or what have you, so that they could no longer influence their votes as easily. But what we lost was that solid center of our politics. And so starting around 1900 or so with the Progressive movement is when we start to see the radicalization of both the right and left in our political system.
Bob Zadek: And what’s really—I just want to interrupt for one second because you made such an important point just then, and I want to make sure that our friends appreciate the significance. When we have or when we interact with entrepreneurs and there is relatively equal bargaining power—when you go to the hair salon, when you go to the local gym, when you go to whoever you go to at the small business level—you don’t—there’s nothing you need from government. You are perfectly—you feel like you have somebody who’s fighting to make you happy, or else you don’t come back. You don’t need protection because you know if the product isn’t any good, you will return it and they will accept it because it’s good business to do so. There’s no power imbalance. So the entrepreneurial class is one that thrives on the absence of a power imbalance. It doesn’t need power. It just needs freedom to do what it wants, which is to serve us.
Now, when you’re dealing with large business and small consumers—think cable company and the like—then there’s a profound power imbalance. And then you start clamoring for government to interfere with that contract because there is a power imbalance. So economic freedom, which is needed at the small business level—economic freedom is damaging to the consumer without small business. With small business, you don’t need economic interference. You don’t need minimum wage laws. You don’t need much about employment law because you can quit, you’ll go to a different hair salon or a different gym or a different plumber, and jobs are plentiful. Nobody has an economic monopoly. So there is such a parallel between the needs of small business and what they require or don’t want from government and the needs of us ordinary people, the consumers. What we need from government and don’t want from government—the needs are co-extensive, they’re the same. So small business is there as a group fighting for the very rights and relationship to government that all of us want as well. So our interests are perfectly aligned with small business. And that, I think, that is my takeaway from what you have explained in your piece. The interest—there’s a perfect alignment in the relationship between us and government and small business and government.
Robert C. Wright: Yeah, that’s what I was driving at. You’ve definitely captured the essence of it. And I thank you for providing the platform to get those views out to a big audience and in a different form, because not everyone likes to read website posts, right?
Science, Economics, and Policy [41:50]
Bob Zadek: Now, you have written extensively also, and very recently, in commenting on, again, on indirectly on the pandemic. Presidential candidate Biden, in his speech when he accepted the nomination of the Democrats, he had—he made as one of the cornerstones of his policy: “Listen to scientists.” Now, you have written with great knowledge and passion—you write beautifully—about science and governmental policy. So first, when Biden says, “I will be different, I will listen to scientists” in determining how to govern the country, the whole nation, during the remains of the pandemic crisis, did that make you feel comfortable and looking forward to his election, or are you concerned by the phrase “I will listen to the science”?
Robert C. Wright: Well, I’m very concerned, to the point that—and thank you for the kudos about my writing style—but throughout the article, I put “the” in quotation marks whenever I referred to “scientists,” right? “The scientists,” he said. Well, which one? There is hardly a consensus. And so which ones do you know how to follow? And if it was easy to know which ones to follow, what do we need Joe Biden for anyway? Right? Why not just put “the scientist” in charge and cut out the middleman? But the fact is, of course, there is no “the scientist.” There is a process of learning called science, and it is supposed to be rigorous in that there’s supposed to be evidence that has a logical relationship to observed results that can be replicated by other researchers, right? We call it the scientific method. And it’s not a thing; it’s a process, it’s a mechanism for discovering the nature of reality, which of course is always nuanced and always very complex and sometimes counter-intuitive.
There was a post—I don’t know if you saw it—by Vincent Geloso that picked up on my mentioning the Peltzman effect in one of my posts. And he went into considerable detail about it. But the Peltzman effect is about the effectiveness of policy choices and how they will affect how people act. So it’s usually put in the context of mandatory seatbelt laws and their effectiveness or lack thereof versus putting a big spike in the middle of the steering wheel and mandating that. And it turns out that putting the spike in the middle of the steering wheel is much more effective at making people drive more slowly and more carefully than the seatbelt law. Because all people did with the seatbelt law was drive faster and more recklessly, thinking, “Oh, I have the seatbelt, it’s going to save me.” You put a spike in the middle of the thing, then people know that if they get into an accident, they’re going to be impaled on their steering wheel, and so they behave in a safer manner. So the same thing comes up with the COVID, right? So you might have science saying, “Oh, you should wear a mask,” but if all that does is induce people to take more risks, then there might not be any aid to masks in the real world.
Bob Zadek: What I started thinking about when you wrote about Biden and “listen to the scientists”—or I think he said “follow the science” was the exact quote—is that which science? For example, medicine is a science. So is, most would agree, economics. So if the scientist you listened to was an economist, then the economist would be speaking every minute of every day about the damage to the economy. And on the evening news would not be in big red letters the number of new cases—a totally meaningless number—it would be the number of job losses and the damage to the GNP and the number of people who are first-time applicants for unemployment insurance. You would have in red letters in bold behind the talking head, you would have economic results every day. And you would have economists on the evening news, not people wearing white lab coats standing behind the president, giving the president political cover so he can say, “Don’t yell at me, it’s the doctor who told me what to do.” But the economist told him something entirely different. So what scared me when I read your piece about “follow the science,” I kind of would agree with Biden if the science that was followed was, as was called by Thomas Carlyle, the “dismal science” of economics. And if you follow that science, I’m all in. Where do I vote? Because that’s the right science to follow.
Robert C. Wright: As I obliquely hinted in the article, you know, what if Joe wants to follow the science of phrenology or eugenics, right? Or of some of these physics?
Bob Zadek: Eugenics was mainstream science in the 1920s. Think of that, listeners. That was the science, eugenics. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a scary decision from the Supreme Court in the 1920s, when asked to decide whether a Southern state—I think it was Mississippi, but I could be wrong—whether a Southern state could impose compulsory sterilization on somebody with impaired mental ability. The woman was a third generation of a family with impaired mental ability, and the state wanted to sterilize her. And the question was whether that was constitutional. And in concluding that it was, a very leading judge in the U.S. Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, said, quoting science if you will, “Yes, you can sterilize her,” and then he said in this famous quote—it’s painful to even report—“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” So that was science circa 1920. Follow the science? I don’t think so.
Predicting the Unrest [49:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, we have only a minute or two left. If you can in a minute, you predicted the rioting that’s been going on as an economist. Tell us—and you have a minute, Bob—tell us what happened when you saw what was happening back in March that you presciently predicted the rioting.
Robert C. Wright: Well, yeah, I just—because I’m studying the American Revolution and saw how it came about because of an economic recession followed by very dumb government policies coming out of Britain, you know, I just couldn’t believe that Americans were going to put up with lockdown policies that weren’t doing anything really to help stop the virus for very long. And I knew that anything that would come along could trigger it. I didn’t know that it was going to be a police shooting, but I did say that there was going to be riots by the summer if things hadn’t dramatically improved. I said that back in the middle of March.
Bob Zadek: Oh my goodness. Well, Bob, thank you. We’re running out of time, regretfully. I always regret this part of the show; it’s the most painful part of the hour. Thank you so much for sharing your insights on the entrepreneurial class and how if they go, we all go, and we will truly all suffer the loss of independence. We will lose more economic rights, we will lose political rights. As the entrepreneurial class goes, so goes America. Bob, how can our friends out there follow your writings at AIER?
Robert C. Wright: I have my own page. It’s got—I guess I’ve done like maybe 60 articles for them over the last couple of years. So if you just find my page on there, you can look through them. I have all kinds of articles on things like California’s AB 5 and the travesty that that is, and lots of other things that should be of interest to your listeners.
Bob Zadek: That’s Robert E. Wright, W-R-I-G-H-T, a prolific writer, a very wise man and professor. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us this Sunday morning. And to my friends out there and to Bob, please have a nice balance of the weekend. Thank you so much.
Robert C. Wright: Thanks, Bob. Take care.