John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State
2019-07-21 · Guest: Randall Holcombe (Professor of Economics at Florida State University) · 52:10
Transformation of American Government from Liberty to Democracy
Bob Zadek interviews Randall Holcombe, professor of economics at Florida State University, about his book Liberty in Peril. They discuss the historical shift in the American ethos from a primary focus on individual liberty to an emphasis on democracy, exploring how constitutional changes like the 17th Amendment and landmark Supreme Court cases like Munn v. Illinois facilitated the growth of the administrative state and the erosion of economic freedom.
Topics: Liberty vs. Democracy, The Founders’ Intent, Electoral College, 17th Amendment, Progressive Era, Munn v. Illinois, Economic Rights, Regulatory Capture, Public Choice Theory
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Randall Holcombe: DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute
Introduction: From Liberty to Democracy [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show of ideas, never ever the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this end-of-summer, beginning-of-fall Sunday morning.
We are a show which, as today’s show will emphasize, cares only a bit about what you believe, what positions you take in politics, in economics, and in public life. Opinions are kind of boring. We do care, and I profoundly care, about why you have those opinions. It is the “why” of opinion that is infinitely more interesting, infinitely more important than the fact of the opinion.
This morning we are going to explore a profoundly important topic. It is a topic I have wondered about almost constantly as I have been doing my show and doing my reading of American history. And that is how we evolved from a country which was founded on the bedrock principle of liberty, of personal freedom, of having government merely protect our rights and not tell us how to run our lives—how we evolved from an ethos that cherished liberty to one where liberty and freedom has become relatively unimportant and a throwaway benefit that we are willing to give up in favor of more temporary and tangible benefits.
A perfect example is, of course, on college campuses today. Free speech—the freedom, the liberty to say what you wish free of government interference—free speech has been devalued by a majority of college students in favor of protecting them from being slighted, being harmed, being offended. That’s just one example. Another example is we are so willing these days to surrender freedom, to turn over our freedom to government, to cash it in in exchange for the promise by government, never met, of taking care of certain of our economic and personal needs.
How did freedom become and liberty become so cheapened that it is not that we Americans are willing to give it up so quickly? I’ve invited Randall Holcombe to join me this morning on the show. Randall has revised and written a book that he first published several years ago called Liberty in Peril, subtitled How the Fundamental Principle of American Government Was Transformed from Liberty to Democracy. In other words, democracy has become, in the opinion of public officials and most Americans, the coin of the realm, the most cherished commodity. That is citizens’ direct participation in government. Democracy was feared by the Founders, as we will see during the show. Democracy is by no means a goal that we should seek to acquire more and more and more of. Democracy is to be feared as much as it is to be valued.
Randall is the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University, a research fellow at the Independent Institute. The Independent Institute is a wonderful think tank in Oakland, California, which labors mightily and effectively in the belly of the beast in Oakland, California, adjacent to Berkeley—we know about Berkeley. Randall was the past president of the Public Choice Society, past president of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, and he’s a senior fellow at the James Madison Institute. Randall, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time and your wisdom this morning.
Randall Holcombe: Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate the invitation.
The Thesis: Liberty in Peril [05:38]
Bob Zadek: Now Randall, tell us, just to set the stage for this morning’s conversation, tell us the thesis of your book. What prompted you to write and to revise Liberty in Peril, and what is the point that you make so eloquently with so much data in your book?
Randall Holcombe: Well, I’ll tell you, Bob, when I started working on that book, my main interest was trying to understand the growth of government. And the more reading I did, the more research I did, my focus sort of changed on that book. And one way to look at it, just to explain basically the book from start to finish what I’m doing in the book: If you were to go back to 1776, you just ask the typical American in 1776, “Tell me in one word, what’s the fundamental principle behind the new American government?” That one word would have been “liberty.” That we are designing a new government to protect our rights. You look at the Declaration of Independence; it’s a list of grievances against the King of England. He’s violated our rights, he’s violated our liberty in all these ways, so we have the right to establish a new government. So back in 1776, you tell us in one word what’s the fundamental principle of American government, that one word is liberty.
Now, fast forward to the 21st century. You ask somebody today, “Tell me in one word, what’s the fundamental principle of American government?” I think most Americans would say “democracy.” We’re a democracy, the role of government is to carry out the will of the people, and how do we find out the will of the people? Well, it’s through a democratic decision-making process. We have elections, we have democratic processes whereby the legislature makes our laws. And basically, in one word, our government’s a democracy. And I think that that’s problematic. It’s problematic to think about democratic government because a democracy, a majority, can be just as oppressive as a dictator. So the purpose of the book was really to look at how that transformation occurred, how that fundamental principle of American government was transformed from liberty to democracy. And I think you see over 200-plus years of American history, you see step-by-step-by-step this transformation occurring. So you really can’t point to one event, but rather you look at American history and that’s the way that we have evolved since the beginning of the country.
The Founders’ Fear of Democracy [07:53]
Bob Zadek: The Founders feared democracy. There are countless quotes that Randall points out showing how much the Founders feared democracy. And my view of democracy in America today can be summed up, and was summed up, by Winston Churchill. Randall, I don’t know if you are aware of this quote; if not, you’ll enjoy it. Winston Churchill was quoted as saying, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
And that kind of says a lot of it, but it is not—I don’t know what Winston Churchill exactly meant by that, what he was saying, what his sub-rosa argument was. But the point is not to criticize, not to make fun of the voter, but rather to point out the inherent weaknesses of the system. No voter who is sane could spend all of the time necessary to understand all of the issues that confront America. And therefore, a voter, the typical voter, is incompetent to decide many issues, not because of any inherent weakness, but because they didn’t have the time or the inclination to study them.
And Randall, to pick an economic issue, I use as the best example of that the 2008 election of President Obama. If we recall, the country was in the economic pits in 2008, and Obama was running promising to fix the economic doldrums. In effect, the vote of the 2008 election was on whether Keynesian economics or free-market economics was the right solution. How in the world could a voter make that decision, learn the economics necessary? But yet the vote was on economic policy. That’s an insane standard by which voters should select a president. They simply don’t have the information. So Randall, I think in your book, when you point out the unfortunate transition from a country which values liberty to one which values democracy, we are regretfully hitching our wagon to the wrong horse.
And tell us about—there have been certain key moments in American history where we made a sea-change difference by surrendering liberty in favor of democracy, unfortunately. Tell us some of them, if you will.
Randall Holcombe: Yeah, well, really, I could read you the whole book, except we don’t have an hour to do that. But one place to start is to go back to the American founding and the Constitution. Look at the Constitution, because it almost sounds anti-American to be anti-democracy. But if you go back and look at the Constitution and the way the government was designed, I like to say just in shorthand that the Founders designed our government to be one-sixth democratic.
And how do I figure one-sixth democratic? Well, the Founders designed a government with the three branches of government: the executive, legislative, judicial branches of government. Three branches of government to check and balance each other. And if they’re going to check and balance each other, then those three branches would have to be roughly of equal power. So let’s start with the legislative branch. There you have the House of Representatives, and representatives—that’s the democratic part of government. Representatives were elected by the people.
Then there’s the Senate. Now, the Senate, as originally designed by the Founders, Senators were chosen by the state legislatures, not by the voters. The 17th Amendment, which was passed in 1913, changed that so now we have direct voting for Senators. But up until 1913, the Constitution specified that Senators are chosen by the state legislatures. And that was an effort to deliberately insulate the Senate from democratic pressures. Indeed, one of the things the Founders wanted was for the Senate to represent the interests of the state governments, not the people, but the state governments.
And you look at the judicial branch; the justices, judges, federal judges have always been appointed, never elected. Once again, insulated from democratic pressures. And then in the executive branch—and this is something I think is kind of of current interest—the President was to be chosen basically by the Electoral College and maybe by the House of Representatives.
And Bob, I think it’s probably worth going into a little bit of detail about the way that the Founders envisioned the Electoral College. Because if you read the Constitution, the members of the Electoral College, they’re selected by the states. The Constitution never said how the electors are selected by the states, so it’s up to the states to determine how they select their electors. And then the electors vote for presidential candidates in their states. The Constitution says they vote in their states on the same day for President. And if nobody gets an electoral majority, a majority of the electors vote for them, then the House of Representatives chooses the President. And the Constitution originally said chooses the President among the top five vote-getters; that was changed by the 12th Amendment to the top three electoral vote-getters.
But the way that the system was designed, the Founders envisioned that the electors would be chosen by the state, and they would be people who would be better informed about the candidates than the general public. And also, the electors, because the vote was taken by electors, not by the general public, that was another way that the Founders envisioned that the selection of the President would be insulated from democratic pressures.
Now, one of the things the Founders thought was that in most cases, most electors would vote for a “favorite son” candidate from their state. So they figured, you know, most electors are going to vote for somebody in their state, and that’s one reason why the Electoral College, the Constitution specifies that electors vote for two candidates, at least one of whom has to be from another state. But if the electors are voting for favorite son candidates from their state, that means in most cases nobody will get an electoral majority. That’s what the Founders envisioned. The Founders envisioned that in most cases nobody would get an electoral majority. So then it would be up to the House of Representatives to choose from the top electoral vote-getters.
So the way they envisioned this, the Electoral College would be like a search committee of experts. They would forward a list of names to the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives would choose, as the Constitution now reads, they would choose among the top three electoral vote-getters. So I went into a little bit of detail on that, but partly that’s to show that the way the Founders envisioned the system working would insulate the selection of the President from democratic pressures and from popular voting.
But the Constitution never specified how states choose their electors, and by the time you get into the 1820s, very early in American history, most states went to popular voting for electors. The last state to go to popular voting was South Carolina, and that didn’t happen until after the Civil War. But by the 1820s, the system had been transformed into popular voting for electors. So I say the Constitution was designed to create a government that was one-sixth democratic. Only members of the House of Representatives would have been accountable to the voters. Senators were chosen by the state legislatures, justices were appointed, the President was chosen by an Electoral College and ultimately by the House of Representatives. That’s the way the Founders envisioned it. So it seems kind of anti-American to say that you’re not in favor of democracy, but if you think about democracy as a government that’s directly accountable to the voters, our Founders deliberately designed a government that wasn’t democratic in that sense.
The Value of the Electoral College [17:35]
Bob Zadek: I am passionately, I am passionately both emotionally—a passion—and intellectually supportive of the Electoral College system for several reasons that aren’t discussed all that much in public today. The main reason is: just imagine, I hold this out as a fantasy clearly, but just imagine how much more pleasant life in America would be if all we had to do was vote for electors and not succumb to the noise of a presidential election every four years and the unpleasantness of a presidential election.
And lest I seem like I’m favoring some form of tyranny, I would remind Americans that Americans are totally comfortable outsourcing many decisions. We vote for representatives in the House because we don’t want to decide every single issue, so we hire people to do it—they’re representatives. And we outsource the selection of judges and other key decisions in American life to the Senate. We vote for Senators, so we outsource many decisions because we can’t be bothered, appropriately, to learn these issues ourselves. So the Electoral College is simply another outsourcing. We still get to vote; we get to vote for electors, but having voted for electors, we say, “You do all the hard work of selecting a president. You have the time, the inclination, the motivation to do it. We have other things to do with our lives.” I love an Electoral College system, and one can be designed to work quite perfectly. So as Randall said, when I oppose—I don’t oppose democracy, I oppose too much democracy. Democracy is important as a key check on government. It is a check on government; it is not the be-all and the end-all of government. But if we have elected officials who ultimately have to be answerable to the public, they will behave in a way that we like. But to assign the task, too much task, upon voters is simply misplacing decision-making. So Randall, I know I guess I speak for you; I’m certainly not opposed to democracy as such, but it is simply a tool to be used judiciously to keep an eye on government.
Randall Holcombe: Well Bob, there are two ways that we might look at democracy. And one is that elections are a way of determining who holds the power of government. And that’s the way the Founders envisioned democracy. Another way is another vision of democracy, is that the role of a democratic government is to carry out the will of the people. Now, you look at that first vision of democracy: it’s a way to decide who holds the power of government. But how are those powers determined? Well, originally our Founders thought we have a Constitution that gives the federal government limited and enumerated powers, and democratic elections are a way to determine who it is who gets to exercise those limited and enumerated powers. And these days, we tend to look at democracy not that way, but thinking, “Oh, democratic governments ought to do what the people want.” But a constitutional government with limited and enumerated powers, it doesn’t do what the people want; it’s constrained to do only what the Constitution empowers them to do.
The 17th Amendment and the Loss of State Sovereignty [21:43]
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting about what you said, Randall, and you mentioned it a few moments ago when you mentioned the 17th Amendment. The 17th Amendment is a fascinating subject. Interesting as an aside, the 17th Amendment follows the 16th Amendment—duh. What’s the 16th Amendment? Income tax. Those two amendments changed forever the nature of American government and voters’ relationship to their government. They were sea-change.
And what is important about the 17th Amendment, which was changed in 1913, I believe, during the beginning of the second Progressive Era—Teddy Roosevelt was president, there was all this populism, power to the people and the like—and at that time Americans became—there was a minor scandal where some Senator bribed or through other nefarious means got elected by a statehouse to be Senator, and that got into the press. So there was an isolated or several isolated events of minor scandal, and it was felt, “Let’s put the power in the people.”
And what that meant was the states, which had representation in Washington—the states as a political body had representation. The Senate was their house. And the states could protect their interest against intrusion by the federal government into the police power, which is typically reserved, which was historically reserved for the states. That changed all of that. As a result of the 17th Amendment, in my opinion, states changed over time from independent co-equal political bodies to merely agencies of Washington. So the state of California became, if you will, the California Department of the federal government, and certainly that is the way states operate substantially today. So Randall, you’re correct in pointing that out, of course, and that was a sea-change in political life in America.
Randall Holcombe: And another effect of the 17th Amendment is it made it easier to pass legislation. Because before the 17th Amendment, the House of Representatives represented the interests of the people, and the Senate represented the interests of the state governments. So for any law to pass, to be approved by the House and the Senate, it would have to be approved by both the representatives of the people and the representatives of the states. But with direct election of Senators, now Senators are representatives of the people too, so it lowers the bar. Now legislation doesn’t have to meet with the approval of the representatives of the states.
And I’ll just give you one concrete example where that probably made a difference is with Obamacare. Because when the Affordable Healthcare Act passed, Obamacare passed, one of the things it did was to impose higher costs on the states because the states had to expand their Medicaid programs. And if you think about a Senate that represents the interests of the states, when Obamacare came up for a vote, it’s pretty likely if the Senate represented the interests of the state governments that Obamacare would not have been able to shift some of those costs to the state governments. But the Senate doesn’t represent the interests of the state governments anymore. So I mean, that’s just one concrete example of where it might make a difference that the Senate no longer represents the interests of the state governments.
Bob Zadek: You’re exactly right, Randall. I would have picked that as the very same example. And there is much legislation, there’s a lot of talk from time to time about Washington imposing what’s called unfunded mandates. Washington requires the states to adopt certain policies and carry out certain federal government goals but does not give them the money to do so. They’re unfunded mandates. Of course, there would never be even one unfunded mandate because the states, through the Senate, would not enact the legislation. So that helped the states preserve their independence, and without the 17th Amendment, states become far less the “laboratories of democracy” and laboratories of innovation that Chief Justice Brandeis observed at the beginning of the 20th century.
This is Bob Zadek, and I’m speaking with Randall Holcombe. Randall has written a very important book, Liberty in Peril, where Randall traces the evolution of political life in America from one which favors liberty above all else to democracy. More and more populism, more and more power to the people. And while that’s an empty concept, that probably has some appeal. In practice, it doesn’t produce good government. And as power devolves to Washington, that devolution of power is not without a cost, and the cost is personal liberty. So we are willing to surrender, willing by how we vote, to surrender our liberty in favor of giving more power to Washington. We’ll be back to discuss the economic consequences of this with Randall Holcombe after our break. Please stay tuned; the economic aspects on our life is overwhelming. Please stay tuned; we’ll be back in 30 short seconds.
(Commercial Break Omitted)
Economic Rights and the Progressive Era [31:31]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Always the show of ideas, never ever the show of attitude. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are talking with Randall Holcombe. Randall has written Liberty in Peril, where Randall traces the decline in personal liberty in America in favor of democracy. Democracy as a concept seems to everybody as a positive value, something which should be cherished, that we can’t have enough of in America. That of course is false. While nobody would favor the elimination of democracy, democracy is a tool to be used judiciously to keep an eye on government, and many in America, Randall included, myself included, and many, many others, fear that the scales have tipped too much in favor of democracy. That places an unfair burden on voters because voters can’t possibly spend the time, nor should they, to understand all of the sometimes quite complex issues confronting American governance. That task should be outsourced, but outsourced that decision-making in a way that we can keep an eye on them at the ballot box.
Randall, you also traced in your book—you are an economist, a well-written economist, you’ve written about 12 books, and you have studied how that trend from liberty to democracy had a profound effect upon economic rights. What’s interesting about economic rights is the Constitution says almost nothing about the economy. It doesn’t use the concept or the phrase “free markets,” it doesn’t talk about capitalism, it says almost no words about the economy. Yet the government today runs the economy and controls contracts between private bodies, minimum wage laws, things of that nature, rent control, where it regulates huge swaths of American economic life. How in the world did that come about?
Randall Holcombe: Well, I think we can trace a lot of that back to the Progressive Era that started in the late 1800s. I mean, the reason that the Constitution says virtually nothing about the economy is that it designed a government with limited and enumerated powers. So basically, the Constitution says, “Here are the powers of the federal government,” and then the 10th Amendment says, “Those powers that aren’t explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution are reserved to the states or to the people.” So the limited and enumerated powers—the Constitution does not give the federal government any powers over regulating the economy. So in one sense, yeah, the Constitution says nothing about government control of the economy, but what it does say is, “Here are the limited and enumerated powers of the federal government,” and those powers don’t include regulating the economy.
So how did the federal government get so heavily involved? And I think a lot of this goes back to the Progressive Era and that the—what I call the ideology of progressive democracy. When the nation was founded, as we discussed in the first half hour of the show, when the nation was founded, the key idea was that the role of government was to protect our liberty, to protect our rights. And the Founders really envisioned that the biggest threat to our rights was government. That’s why they created a government of limited and enumerated powers. So the idea is, you know, what’s the role of government? It’s to protect individual rights.
And in the late 1800s, this progressive ideology came along that expanded the vision of government. The idea was not only is the role of government to protect our rights, it’s also to look out for our economic well-being. And that in a nutshell is how I would define progressivism: the role of government is not only to protect our rights but to look out for our economic well-being. And in the late 1800s, the nation was industrializing for the first time in the history of the world. Somebody could start from nothing and become one of the richest people in the world—people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fisk, Vanderbilt, those people. And that progressive ideology was a reaction against these people who had amassed a tremendous amount of economic power in a short period of time. That the progressives thought that they were using their economic power to take advantage of people who had less economic power.
And so the progressive ideology, looking out for people’s economic well-being, from the beginning it was redistributive. The idea was that we’re going to impose some costs on these new industrialists, these people and the new financiers. We can impose costs on them in order to provide economic benefits to other people. So it was really a response to the industrializing United States and the idea that it’s okay to impose costs on some people for the benefit of others. Of course, the people they wanted to impose costs on back then, they were the new rich in the country, the people who were responsible for the rapidly increasing wealth of the country. So as you look at how that progressive ideology develops over the 20th century and into the 21st, it says it’s really okay to impose costs on some people for the benefit of others. That’s the origin of the welfare state.
Bob Zadek: Now Randall, I just want to mention, if I may, I just want to mention one point often overlooked. In your book, you refer to “robber barons” during this era, and it should be pointed out that popular mythology is that when Rockefeller built the Standard Oil—I won’t say monopoly, but very large corporation that had a substantial control over oil and petroleum products—that prices had never been lower. What Rockefeller did was constantly, constantly lower prices. So yes, there were victims of these large entities, but the victims were simply other competitors who couldn’t compete with Rockefeller. Well, nothing in the Constitution says that it is the role of government to protect those people who cannot compete on the merit and therefore seek government help to rig the competition.
And of course, today, the same can be said about Amazon. Washington is starting to get attention to Amazon—is Amazon a monopoly? Should Amazon be attacked? And other big tech companies. But remember, Amazon and all the other big tech companies provide either a free or a ridiculously inexpensive product to consumers. So yes, there are victims; the victims are the competitors. Well, who the heck cares about the competitors? Us voters get profound benefit. So I just wanted to mention that, Randall, and how misguided even that trust-busting approach of the end of the 18th century was so wrongheaded.
Randall Holcombe: Yeah, absolutely. And all of this goes back to the Progressive Era and this idea that part of the role of government then, in looking out for people’s economic well-being, is to protect most people from economic power of the powerful individuals.
Munn v. Illinois: The Turning Point [38:11]
Randall Holcombe: And one turning point, you know, as we look through American history and we look at turning points that pushed us further from liberty and toward democracy, one turning point was a Supreme Court case, Munn v. Illinois in 1877. And that Munn v. Illinois, the state of Illinois wanted the right to regulate grain elevator rates. The farmers, when they harvested their grain, they would take their grain to grain elevators which are on rail lines, and then the grain elevators would buy the grain and then ship it on the rail lines. And the state of Illinois thought, “Well, farmers are being taken advantage of, that the grain elevators have an unfair bargaining position.” And so the case went to the Supreme Court: does the state of Illinois have the right to regulate grain elevator rates? And the Supreme Court weighed in in favor of the state of Illinois. It said yes.
The reason why that’s such a landmark case is that prior to that Munn v. Illinois case, 1877, so it’s at the end of the 1800s, prior to that Munn v. Illinois case, government had no right to interfere with private economic transactions between individuals. When individuals make their transactions, it’s up to the individuals to determine what are the terms of their transaction. And the Munn v. Illinois case, it said, “No, actually the government can step in and determine the terms of transactions.” So you look at something like minimum wage law. Why does the government have the right to tell people you can’t work for less than a certain wage? And that it traces back to the Munn v. Illinois case; it’s the first time that the courts said the government has the right to dictate the terms of market transactions between individuals.
Bob Zadek: And Randall, what’s so interesting about the Munn case and what you pointed out, it was the farmers versus the grain elevator operators. What’s interesting is politically there are more farmer voters than grain elevator operators. Therefore, democracy—too much democracy—is behind the scenes causing the economic rights, if you believe there are economic rights, as of course I do quite passionately, the grain elevators were then denied the right to say, “We are offering a service, and here is the service and here is the price. If you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to use it, but that’s what we are charging.” And let the market decide if that’s the right price. The same thing happens today in spades with rent control—there are more renters than landlords. The same thing happens with minimum wage law—there are more voting employees than voting employers. So all of this, once we trend towards government being excessively responsive to the voters as opposed to what’s good for the country as a whole, as that happens, terribly unsound economic policies result. But it’s a form of vote-buying because elected officials have to and therefore do pander to voting majorities and enact policies that are economically unsound, as Randall has just pointed out.
Randall Holcombe: Sure. So Randall, in a way we go full circle and we go back to excess democracy invariably causes the loss of liberty, in this case economic liberty. Yeah, and we pass these laws and somehow we think that they’re in the public interest, whatever that means. But because, as you pointed out, citizens don’t have the time to really understand everything that’s going on with government—I mean, they’re trying to live their own lives, they have their own jobs, they have their own families—what ends up happening is that the people who are regulated by these government regulations end up taking control of the regulatory process.
Similar to the idea of Munn v. Illinois, the Interstate Commerce Act was passed in 1887 largely to regulate railroads. And the idea was it was in the interest of the general public for the federal government to control rail rates and rail routes and so forth. But the general public doesn’t have much knowledge, they don’t have the time to learn what’s going on, and so the Interstate Commerce Commission, other government agencies, they end up being controlled by the economic elite. It actually works against the general public.
The Duty to Vote vs. The Duty to be Informed [43:39]
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting is democracy and voting is treated—people get misty-eyed often when talking about the right to vote, it is the duty of citizens to vote. And I always find myself responding that no, you have no duty to vote whatsoever. Your duty is, if you do vote, spend an inordinate amount of time understanding the issues. That’s your duty. One citizen’s duty to another is to vote intelligently or not at all. But to vote per se, voting without being informed is a vacuous, empty act which means you’re probably going to respond more to emotion than to reason. And the collective result is bad government because it is easy for people running for office to appeal to emotion—that’s a much easier task than appealing to reason. And therefore, to the extent that people are going to vote without being informed, they are inviting them to be preyed upon by having their emotions drive how they vote, because people can have emotions with very little effort. It takes effort to reason out how to vote, and politicians and government all too well take advantage of that issue.
Now, tell us, Randall, what you—what you see, if you do see, do you see any—this trend just continuing until, as the Founders feared, democracy destroys itself? Is that the trend? Do you see reasons for hope?
Randall Holcombe: Yeah, I mean, you look at it, Bob, and that looks like the long-term trend. But nevertheless, I’m optimistic. And maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on the power of ideas. Well, I’m a professional educator, so you would understand that. But let’s go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment era. And one of the things that jump-started the Industrial Revolution, that gave people more rights, that limited government, were the Enlightenment ideas of people like John Locke, people like Adam Smith, people like David Hume. Those ideas had real power.
Move up toward the end of the 20th century, and Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, they said that one of the sources of their views on freedom came from Milton Friedman. And so ideas are powerful. I started teaching in the 1970s, Bob, and if ever there was a decade to be pessimistic, it was the ’70s. We had wage and price controls, we had lines at the gas pumps as a result, we had rising inflation, we had rising unemployment. Things looked like they were getting worse and worse and worse. And then you have the Reagan revolution, the Thatcher revolution, the influence of people like Milton Friedman, the influence of people like Friedrich Hayek, and things in the 1980s started looking better and better. I mean, it looked like the ideas of freedom were winning out. And then the end of the Cold War and, you know, the last couple decades of the 20th century, there was good reason to feel optimistic.
Now, in the 21st century, I think things have moved back toward where freedom is eroding. But nevertheless, I’m still confident in the power of ideas. And so we need to get those ideas across with people like you with your radio show. If we get those ideas across and people start to understand the value of liberty, they start to understand the problems that come with mob rule, or government that’s run by a majority, the ideology of democracy—if people can understand those ideas, then I’m optimistic that we can have a reversal of the trend. I mean, we did in the 1980s, and I’m hopeful that we will again.
Conclusion [48:27]
Bob Zadek: You point out, of course, your whole theme of your book is concerning democracy and the surrender of liberty in favor of democracy. John Adams, clear and away my favorite Founder and the one that I respect the most, he wrote a letter I think around 1814. And in the letter, remember John Adams was then in retirement living in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was fearful that he was going to die and not being given appropriate credit—that was his mentality, and he deserved all the credit anyone could give him. He observed in a letter, and I’ll quote: “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes and exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
And I hear his words in my head as I see what’s going on in California with recently enacted economic legislation, because it seems to me it’s the economic legislation that will drive us to the ground. I’m more concerned about that because economic regulation is the clear deprivation of the freedom of two consenting adults to enter into a transaction that doesn’t affect anybody other than the contracting parties. And yet government feels the need to regulate that, which means government is substituting its judgment for the judgment of the two contracting parties. When government exercises that much hubris, it scares the heck out of me.
Randall Holcombe: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And just quoting the title of my book, I do see that liberty is in peril. But nevertheless, you know, over more than two centuries, we’ve retained a fair amount of freedom, and I’m hopeful that that ideology of liberty—that we can spread that ideology of liberty and that we can retain the freedoms we have and that we can enlarge our freedoms. So I see some reasons for pessimism, but ultimately I’m an optimist.
Bob Zadek: Randall, tell our friends out there how they can follow your work.
Randall Holcombe: Well, you can get a copy of my book, Liberty in Peril, off of the Independent Institute website, and that’s www.independent.org. So you can go there and pick up a copy of my book. And also they have a blog; the Independent Institute has a blog, and I’m a pretty regular blogger on their blog also. So another way that you can keep up with some of my ideas.
Bob Zadek: And if you’re in the Bay Area, Independent Institute has lots of in-person seminars and meetings. I commend the organization; I am a strong supporter of the work David and Mary Theroux have done at the Independent Institute and of course the work that Randall has done in his writings. Randall, thank you so much for giving us your wisdom this Sunday morning. This is Bob Zadek saying so long to my friends out there. Have a good Sunday, have a good balance of the weekend.
Randall Holcombe: Thank you, Bob.