Transcript

Doug Blackmon: Welcome back. At a time when Americans appear more politically divided than at any point in decades, we hear an almost constant refrain. The American political system is broken. It’s corrupt. It can’t be fixed. Conservatives say this is the fault of an overgrown, over-reaching federal government. FACTOID: The Question: Is there too much government interference? Liberals say our economic system has become skewed to consolidate power and wealth among the rich. Both sides seem to agree that the sun may be setting on the era of American greatness. Our guest in this episode is Charles Murray, a political scientist and author whose books over the past 30 years have been deeply influential among conservatives and libertarians, and at times, highly controversial. In his most recent work, a book titled By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission he proposes a radical solution: civil disobedience. The American people, including the wealthiest and most conservative, should simply refuse to obey the rules and requirements of a government that he says has become both tyrannical and absurd. Thank you for joining us.

Charles Murray: My pleasure.

Blackmon: So, it’s not a common thing that someone we would call a Libertarian or Conservative, particularly Conservative, ah, is calling for civil disobedience. It’s something we associate more with Martin Luther King. But so what is this rebellion of civil disobedience that you call for in the book? What are you talking about?

Murray: I’m talking about first the regulatory state and I am also talking about the kinds of things that ordinary people going about their lives in ordinary ways. So Doug, I want to get a couple of things on the table. I’m not against all regulations and I’m also not going to go into a long disposition about Dodd-Frank and how that affects the financial industry. I’m coming at it from a very simple point of view. FACTOID: Dodd-Frank tightened regulation over U.S. banks and Wall Street One of the main things that the American project promises is that people can live their lives as they see fit as long as they let everybody else do the same and don’t bother anybody. That’s, that’s kind of at an end. I mean if you are trying to get a job, if you’re trying to hire employees, if you’re trying to put a deck on your back porch, there are all kinds of things where you can’t live your life as you see fit because we’ve got thousands of rules that are sometimes pretty silly of themselves and other times are enforced and that’s what I’m going after.

Blackmon: I renovated a hundred year old house in downtown Atlanta over the course of many years and don’t tell anybody but I never pulled a building permit. FACTOID: Gallup: Only 49% of Americans said too much regulation in 2014 I wouldn’t be able to get away with that today. But also in hindsight I realize that it actually would have been better if I had pulled a building permit. There were some things the way the work was done at times that actually would have been done better if I had actually followed the rules instead of doing an act of civil disobedience like what you call for here. But how do we balance these things? The reason the regulation is there on the deck is to make sure that when you have your Christmas party the deck doesn’t fall off and everybody get hurt.

Murray: That should be it. And if you have regulations that specify a tunnel in a coal mine has to be really strong, that’s fine. And there are all sorts of other regulations. I have no problems with it but let me give you a couple examples to give you a sense of where I’m talking about civil disobedience. And these are real examples I’m about to give. There is the case of the brick factory in Pennsylvania that was told to replace it’s railings on staircases at a cost of several thousand dollars. Now it’s ok to say there should be railings on open stairwells. That’s fine with me. But they had to replace them because they were 42 inches high instead of the specified 44 inches high. There was the bartender who was fined $3,000 for failure to card a customer. It’s not unreasonable to want to keep kids out of bars. The customer she failed to card was her father. Think about that for a minute. There’s a dentist friend of mine who just told me a couple of weeks ago that she spent several thousand dollars replacing a compressor because the label on it was paper instead of metal. Don’t ask me the details of this because my reaction to her was huh? Are you serious? And she looked me in the eye and said I’m serious. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. And the only way the government gets away with enforcing rules in this really stupid way is because we can’t afford to fight it. If that woman had said this is ridiculous, I’m going to fight this, ah, the bureaucrat who was enforcing it would have said good luck with that because you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars and then you’re going to lose. I want to give away the pushback. I want to give a disincentive to regulators to enforcing either stupid regulations or enforcing them in stupid ways. I want to see some legal defense funds.

Blackmon: Gum up the works in effect?

Murray: Yea, if somebody says do you want to put sugar in the government’s gas tank, you know what might be the better analogy is? What state troopers do on interstate highways? Now I drove down on a highway today. Guess what? The flow of traffic was about seven or eight miles above the speed limit. That’s true all the time. The troopers do not stop people going five miles above the speed limit. Ah, they couldn’t because there’s massive civil disobedience going on. And it’s so massive they can’t possibly do it. So they end up stopping people who are going really really fast or people who are weaving in and out of traffic. And that’s as it should be.  If you are making an honest living, being a good neighbor, a good employer, a good citizen and so forth, you should be able to go about your life.

Ub Blackmon: But so if this were to happen, if the kind of civil disobedience you are calling for were to happen, I’m still trying to get a picture of what it looks like. Are we going to have a “Letter From a Wichita Jail” from Charles Koch?

Murray: What a great thought! Ah, no. I think that in fact it’s simpler than we realize. If you take something like OSHA which has responsibility for 8 million workplaces and it only has, well it has inspectors well one for what? FACTOID: OSHA is agency responsible for worker health and safety I can’t remember exact number. One for every 20,000 work places. They don’t have enough people to enforce all these laws. They have to rely on voluntary compliance. And also something else that I’ve been told since the book came out that I didn’t realize. If you want to make a bureaucrat really unhappy, don’t say that 42 inches is no different from 44. They will defend to the death that their regulation is the right way to do it. They don’t like to have their name in the paper. They don’t like to be the guy who’s publicly identified as doing this kind of thing.

Blackmon: On the other hand there is a reason why the 42 inch standard was created in the likelihood of somebody tipping over that and being hurt, someone has actually come up with a basis for it. And the inspector . . .

Murray: A lot of people we hope.

Blackmon: We hope. We hope. There’s some truth to it. Ah, the  ah, or the thing like the distance between the rungs in the railing. It’s a specific distance that a child can’t put their head through and get stuck. There is a logic to it ah, sometimes. And if an inspector is empowered to not enforce it, to wiggle around on it well then we open up, well actually maybe there’s no regulation at all. So how do we make the positive part work and lose the negative that you identify?

Murray: You’re right that this cannot be a haphazard process. A huge majority of the American people have to be on the side of the defendant. And for, let me give you a quick example. Ah, I don’t recommend ignoring Affirmative Action regulations even though personally on principle, I think, for me the action is wrong. And the reason I say you can’t ignore those is because even though I feel that way and maybe even the majority of the American people do, there’s a large minority that doesn’t feel that way. And so you don’t, you don’t make those regulations the subject of civil disobedience. FACTOID: PEW: Only 19% of Americans trust government to do what is right You go after the ones where 90 percent of people who hear about the case say yeah, leave this guy alone.

Blackmon: Though as you were talking just now reminded of a case from just a year or so ago down in Georgia where there was a peanut butter factory where the CEO of that company ultimately went to prison I think because they shipped out peanut butter that had salmonella and some people had died as another case recently a CEO convicted in this mining case out of West Virginia that where 29 workers were killed. And so it is a balancing act. It’s a much safer world but there are things that still go awry.

Murray: Yea, and I’m saying that we’re way over balanced in one direction.

Blackmon: You talk about this very famous case this, in libertarian circles, Halvering v. Davis, 1937 when the Supreme Court said the Social Security Act is constitutional.

Murray: Which meant the enumerated powers were dead.

Blackmon: And that the constitutional right of the Congress to spend money for the “general” welfare suddenly becomes a very expansive definition of that.

Murray: You had a set of half a dozen cases starting in 1937 ending in 1942 which first said that the enumerated powers no longer constrain what we can spend on. Said that, in fact, the ninth amendment is wrong. That, in fact, you do not have rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution. Not only that it said even the rights specified in the Bill of Rights are subject to different levels of scrutiny. That’s a pretty big deal. Then you had the Commerce Clause which was initially buying and selling things across state lines, you know. If you send rice from California to Pennsylvania you can’t charge an import tax on it in Pennsylvania. The Commerce Clause becomes everything. So that even if it’s manufacturing and agriculture, which was not originally part of the Commerce Clause, and even if it is only within a given state if it has indirect effect. And then the final one NBC vs. the United States where the Supreme Court said Congress does not have to have what they call an intelligible principle in this legislation that

11:00 Blackmon: In the end in fact you write attacking the regulatory state through the legal system what you mean by the civil disobedience version, this obstructionary version, you call that the only option for rebuilding liberty. That there’s not a the right presidential candidate winning, the right wing of the conservative movement prevailing whatever whichever win that would be, ah, those are not going to be the ways that this fought back. But that seems to be a . . .

Murray: Counsel of despair?

Blackmon: Yeah, a despairing view of democracy.

Murray: Well I have a little gleam of hope, ok? You can still get better education policy through the legislative process, you can still have better tax policy. On specific policies you can make improvements. You can have Supreme Court, which from my point of view, would do good by making other kinds of decisions that other supreme courts have made. So I’m not saying those are powers. But if you’re talking about rolling back to reach the state that’s hopeless. But there’s a deeper form of hopelessness that I don’t want the audience to be unaware of. Because what you have in Washington now is the special interests or what Jefferson and Madison and the other Founders would have called factions, they lock in their special benefit. FACTOID: Founders worried about “factions” with power to push self-interests We are now an advanced democracy that is increasingly sclerotic and sclerotic means you’ve lost your flexibility. You lost your ability to react to and the rest. And I’m afraid that’s just true. It’s not a problem caused by the Democrats, Republicans, it’s deeper than that.

Blackmon: When I first read about the Helvering case some years ago trying to understand some of the arguments, I found fairly persuasive the concerns about the case. FACTOID: Helvering upheld federal funding for social and anti-poverty efforts It’s another question though of in the grand scheme of things whether the outcome for the country is bad or worse, whether this violates the ideas of the Founding Fathers versus what’s the result of these things. Those in some respects are different questions. But I want to put in front of you a counter narrative. Because you write at one point in the book that the, you make the point that between 1789 and in the 1930s the U.S. government is really the only example of true limited government. Really in history. And I think that’s probably an accurate description of things. And you say in that period of time and because of limited government that this society becomes the richest and most powerful nation on earth. That’s a common view I think. And I think there’s a certainly a merit to that view. But one can also say and I think a lot of historians would say that if you look at America in the 1910s, and 20s, and 30s, as you were referring to a little earlier in the Progressive Movement that this was a country in many respects was largely a third world country. Millions of people living in poverty, real poverty, not the kind of poverty people talk about today, real hunger. Some folks have heard me say before a great grandmother of mine died of pellagra in the 1920s, a protein deficiency. She starved to death. She was a sharecropper in Texas. Whites and blacks were born in desperate poverty. Ah, no schools of any kind for millions and millions of black kids. I mean the picture, the idea of America in the 1920s and then as the Depression began in the ’30s that it was this clear winner in the competition between the different forms of government is a debatable question. And so does that complicate the argument that the era of limited government was in fact the closest thing to the perfect version of our government that we want?

14:37 Murray: We’ve got two things that are true at the same time Doug. One was in the 1920s we were the richest nation in the world. So whatever problems we had of massive poverty and the rest of it we were better off than going out to the rest of the world. You did not have the option until very recently of taking all the wealth in the country and dividing it up and having everybody have a comfortable living. You’re right. There was massive deep poverty and also the trend lines were going in the right direction really rapidly. Let me give you a statistic from a little later in our history because the war on poverty was started supposedly to accelerate the reduction of poverty. FACTOID: As late as the 1920s, almost 60% of Americans lived in deep poverty From the end of World War II until the early 1960s when Lyndon Johnson came to power my perception might be a little bit off but not much we went from about 40 percent to low 40 percent of poverty at the end of World War II to 20 percent in 1960 and below that. We cut poverty in half during the supposedly listless Eisenhower years. We were going in the right direction real fast.

Blackmon: Social Security and some of those other New Deal programs did have a huge effect on poverty and that’s a part of the explanation for the decline of poverty, isn’t it?

Murray: You know we can’t, we can’t answer that question empirically in one sense because we don’t have good enough numbers to do it. The good numbers on poverty we can reconstruct back to about1940 but how big was the inflection point in the 1930s? My suspicion is probably pretty small.

Blackmon: Let’s actually go to your most controversial book The Bell Curve, yeah, which is in its own right is a kind of story of American intellectualism and American media and perception. I mean you can make a movie about The Bell Curve in respect and the controversy that surrounded it. Ah, and because it was a book that on the one hand explicitly, co-written by you and Richard Hermstein, now the late Richard Hermstein. But in the book you explicitly said we’re not saying that intelligence is driven by race. There’s a line beginning in chapter 13 I think. . .

Murray: I’m so happy that you read that.

Blackmon: …that explicitly said that. But then it goes on to cite a lot of studies that seem to suggest that perhaps there is some correlation between race and intelligence as it was read by many people and the bottom line of that seems to be a suggestion by many that whites and Asians particularly Asians were ah, performed better and had higher IQs than perhaps African Americans and Hispanics. That’s a super simplification of it. But the, that was 20 years ago, that was in 1994. Do you view all of that the same way now?

Murray: A lot of what we talked about in The Bell Curve has come to pass. At the time we talked about it then we said this is looming, it’s going to be a problem. In a book called Coming Apart that I published just two or three years ago I recycle the first part of The Bell Curve only this time I was saying it’s here, it’s already happened. With regard to race and IQ. I hesitate to even get in to it because it’s so, but let me just real quickly, are there test score differences on these tests among different ethnic groups? The answer is yes. Are these a result of cultural bias on the tests? No. There’s been a lot of academic work done on that that’s quite strong and reputable and that’s not the explanation. They do representative differences of cognitive functioning. What is the source of these differences the causes? The sentence I think you were alluding to is we are resolutely agnostic on that issue. Those are all still true. Have there been any changes over group test scores over the last 20 years? Not a lot. There’s been some. Nothing that changes the basic description we gave then. But what we said then and what I am able to say now and what I hope people take away from it is you can face all the facts of this and not run screaming out of the room. This is not scary stuff. It has implications at the extremes of performance. It doesn’t have very many implications for the way that we live everyday life. And I will say that I think the only reason that group differences and means of IQs become a problem is when people try to make policies on the notion that there are no such things. That I think has screwed things up pretty seriously.

Blackmon: And what exactly do you mean by that?

19:20 Murray: You have with aggressive affirmative action where you have large differences in the mean anything whether it’s an IQ test, whether it is some other measure of job performance, whether, I don’t care what it is. And I don’t care what group you are given the aggressive affirmative action for. If it were a law that every company in the United States had to have at least three percent of its engineers be Iowans, I come from Iowa, you would have a real problem because the competition for getting Iowan engineers would be such that they would not be as able as the ones that are hired on their merit. You do have a problem of mismatch. It does have impacts on the way people perceive their groups. I think that it has been something that has retarded the growth of racial harmony rather than facilitated it. Why did I lead to those assertions? Because I don’t think we’re going to settle that issue across the table today.

Blackmon: You were tarred with the reputation of an organization called the Pioneer Fund which does have a somewhat dubious past of support for eugenics and white supremacist causes, but had also paid for funding some of the research.

Murray: You’re talking about what out of thousands of sources in The Bell Curve. The ones that got these headlines. There was a story in the national New York Review of Books I think, I mean these were trivial. We could have dumped every single one of those references and it would have made no difference to anything.

Blackmon: But then in the 20 years since then we now had a lot of those factors have changed. Some of the more positive stories in American life are the declining crime rate, teen pregnancy rate among African Americans has plummeted among all cultures but especially among African Americans has fallen dramatically. People don’t realize that, but it’s fallen by more than 50 percent. And even on education there’s been a lot of debate about this but a couple years ago the high school graduation rates reached the highest they’ve ever been, 80 percent and likely 90 percent soon. But so there also seems to be these countercurrents some of these social dimensions maybe are going the right way but in the whole body of your work not just in The Bell Curve what is, but what do you make of those more positive dimensions of what’s happening?

21:38 Murray: You gotta disaggregate. Uh, because the national trend lines are as you describe them. And suppose you then just aggregate them by socio economic class, forget about race just aggregate them by socio economic class. And actually this is what coming apart is about and you have two very different stories. I mean marriage is a really classic example because the mantra these days is oh, we now have these alternative forms of the family and the idea the traditional two parent family is better than the alternatives is ridiculous and most kids don’t grow up in that. I understand that everybody says that. Guess what? If you talk about the upper middle class and non-given white statistics you still have among those ages 30 to 50, 84 percent are married. Marriage is alive and well in the white upper middle class and most kids are not only being raised in such families but there are fewer divorces than before. So they’re original parents. Ah, the white working class, these are numbers from 2010 ages 30 to 50, 48 percent are married. That used to be where the upper middle class was and that marriage has collapsed under the white working class community. So that if you take trend lines for the whole nation you get in some cases either a benign picture or positive picture. When you disaggregate you have real problems with what traditionally has been the working class that cuts across the races and I think threaten one of the most important aspects of the American project which is a sense that being an American was more important than the socio economic class in which you belonged because we did share so many of the same values. And a lot of that is a risk.

Blackmon: At the end of By the People you seem to soften in a sense, that might be a way to put it. But you say, “in a country as rich as America it is ridiculous that anyone lacks the means to live a decent life.” It sounds like Barack Obama. And then you go on to say that conservatives need to be willing to give up some things and move away from some hard held principles and there needs to be some openness to some transfers of wealth in various ways. And that liberals also need to give up on some things. But have you softened in some sense in terms of finding a compromise for how you think all these things could work out?

Murray: National wealth is going to continue to increase unless we have leadership of terrible stupidity. It’s always possible. But national wealth will probably increase as it has for the last century and a half. And the advances in the all sorts of science and technology and so forth are such that I can’t believe that 200 years from now we are going to say the best way to run a country is with thousands of bureaucrats enforcing thousands of rules. I just can’t believe that. And I can’t believe that by that time we will not also have said it’s ridiculous that we are spending x number of dollars per poor person and we still have poor people in this country. So long term I think a lot of the things I would like to see happen are going to be happening because they’re driven by large historical forces as opposed to one political party beating another one.

Blackmon: Charles Murray, thank you for being here. The book is Buy the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission.  We hope you’ll join the conversation with American Forum at the Miller Center Facebook page, or by following us on twitter @douglasblackmon or @AmericanForumTV or @charlesmurray. To send us a comment about this program or download Podcasts or Transcripts, visit us at millercenter.org/americanforum. I’m Doug Blackmon, see you next week.