Egalitarianism and Value-Free Economics | Wanjiru Njoya
Summary
Philosophical Focus: The lecture centers on Murray Rothbard’s systematic ethical theory of liberty, integrating economics and ethics to defend individual freedom.
Egalitarianism Critique: Extensive critique of egalitarian ideology as incompatible with private property and liberty, arguing it leads to coercive equalization and social conflict.
Methodology Debate: Distinguishes value-free economics from political philosophy, criticizing interdisciplinary approaches that blend economics with ideology.
Key Figures: References to Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Thomas Piketty; no public companies or tickers are discussed.
Market/Investment Angle: No sector, region, or stock recommendations; the talk offers political-philosophy insights rather than market outlook.
Risks Highlighted: Identifies the expansion of egalitarian policies across academia and public institutions as a broad societal risk to property rights and civil peace.
Transcript
Uh, thank you everybody, and uh, welcome to the Mises Institute. Thank you for joining us here to celebrate the legacy of Murray Rothbard, and thank you, uh, to my colleague, uh, Dr. Salerno, for that great introduction. And I think that from his introduction, it will have given you, uh, a sense of, uh, where I'm going to go with this lecture, because my own background is in academic law, and that's how I got into reading Murray Rothbard, because of course, I think that you all know that he thought it would be a good idea to, uh, create a system of libertarian law. This would be, uh, a system of law that would enhance liberty. And so that's how I got into reading about Murray Rothbard, and that's what I really want to emphasize, uh, in today's lecture, because I think that as we honor his legacy, we should remember how important it was to him to promote liberty. So that's really the message of my lecture today. And I want to begin with an observation made by Lew Rockwell in his preface to Murray Rothbard's book, Making Economic Sense. Uh, Lew Rockwell says that Rothbard had a passion for public persuasion. He wanted to persuade the public of the importance of liberty. He was devoted not only to teaching sound economics, but also to making the general public aware of the vital importance of liberty. And that is the the context in which I want to talk about the importance of Rothbard's political philosophy in alerting the public to the great threat facing liberty in our time. It's not enough for the experts to see the threats to liberty. It's important to make the public aware of the threat and of its gravity. The importance of Rothbard's political philosophy is nowadays gravely misunderstood. You know, people have forgotten about liberty. So, when people defend liberty, ideas like freedom of association, I think a lot of people have forgotten why it matters that you should have freedom of association. So, they don't understand why you want to have freedom of association, and they assume that your motives are probably, you know, maybe you're a misanthrope and you just don't want to mix with people. They forgot that it's liberty that drives all these ideas. It is when Rothbard tries to promote these ideas in his writing, it's often dismissed as just politics, as something of a sideshow in Rothbard's professional life. That is not the case. In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard wrote, and I quote, "All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty. For it has been my conviction that, while each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity, in the final analysis, all sciences and disciplines of human action are interrelated and can be integrated into a science or discipline of individual liberty." Those are Rothbard's words. He recognizes that each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity. In fact, if you don't keep the autonomy and integrity of your discipline, you can't call it a discipline. And that's been one of the things that has has gone wrong in the modern academy. It's kind of every discipline collapsing into politics. So, he does talk about keeping the autonomy and integrity of your discipline, but he also wants to create a system of political philosophy that can be seen as the benchmark for an integrated science or discipline of individual liberty. He called this a systematic ethical theory of liberty. A systematic ethical theory of liberty. In his introduction to the first edition of his collection of essays, Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, Rothbard wrote, and I quote, "Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me in some exasperation over the years is, why don't you stick to economics?" So, people who did not see the conceptual link between economics and liberty, so that when he started talking about liberty, they thought he was straying away from his field of expertise, which is economics. So, he was trying to show that these two things are not only interlinked, but if you try to delink them, you lose all the economic gains that you thought you could make. So, some people think, "Oh, you don't need the liberty. You can just copy the economic stuff." And just jettison the liberty. And it was part of his um political philosophy to show that that is not the case. He says, and I quote, "For different reasons, this question has been thrown at me by fellow economists and by political thinkers and activists of many different persuasions, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, who have disagreed with me over political doctrine and are annoyed that an economist should venture outside of his discipline. I think that in many cases this is just a failure to understand the distinction between his political philosophy and what many people think of as political doctrine. So, for example, things like which presidential candidate are you voting for? That type of trivial well, in the context it's a trivial question, which is not what he was trying to preach to people. He was trying to explain uh a systematic ethical theory of liberty. And Rothbard writes in Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature that mastery of pure economic theory is not enough. It is vital to explore related and fundamental problems of philosophy, political theory, and history. He writes He's writing here about economists that have been influential like Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, and Friedrich Hayek. And he says that they realized that it was possible and crucially important to construct a broader systematic theory encompassing human action as a whole in which economics could take its place as a consistent but subsidiary part. And Rothbard writes, "In my own particular case, the major focus of my interest in my writings over the last three decades has been a part of this broader approach, libertarianism, the discipline of liberty." And I think that it's important He talks about this as um his focus over three decades because what you find from some libertarians today who don't like Rothbard's politics saying things like, "Oh, this is just something he was musing about in his old age." And that's not correct. Rothbard says he's focused on a political philosophy of liberty for decades. And I think that that work is worth studying carefully and systematically. And that is what is emphasized by uh Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his introduction to Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty. Hoppe describes Rothbard's philosophy as, and I quote, "a system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones." Based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones. You need a cornerstone for your political philosophy because without a cornerstone, you are just a will-o'-the-wisp. You're just going this way and that way, whenever, you know, following the political trends and, you know, just following whatever happens to be in the news. And that's the importance of having economics and ethics as its cornerstones. And the doctrine of private property is central to this political philosophy. So, the doctrine of private property is playing this particular role in Rothbard's political philosophy. And again, I'll quote from Hans Hoppe. He says, "Rothbard's unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy." Ethics, or more specifically political philosophy, is the second pillar of the Rothbardian system. I really like the way that um Hans Hoppe depicts the Ethics of Liberty as the second pillar of the Rothbardian system. If you're missing the second pillar, your understanding of Rothbard is askew because you've only got one of the pillars of his eco- of his uh system. And he says, and again I think this is important that political philosophy is strictly separated from economics. And that's what I'm getting at in my title about value-free economics. Political philosophy does not become subsumed within economics because if you do that you lose the integrity of your discipline. It is strictly separated from economics and I think that good economists as good disciplinarians in any field, I mean I think you all come from different academic fields and backgrounds so you understand this that you're able to keep a strict separation in your minds between the integrity of your discipline and you know whatever contextual things that you may be talking about. I think most of us that have been through any academic training understand what this is and why it's important. But Hoppe says that it's equally grounded in the acting nature of man. And it complements Rothbard's economics to form a unified system of rationalist social philosophy. It is rationalist social philosophy. It's a system and this means that it is not random. It's not just some random thoughts that he had. With economics and ethics as the cornerstones of this philosophy, Rothbard argued powerfully against egalitarianism. Which is the ideology behind so many statist welfare schemes. So you get many people who don't like the government because they don't like authority. That's that's one way to be an anarchist. Where you just don't like being told what to do. Okay, so some people are anarchists for that reason. They're not interested in the ideology. They're more like tantruming teenagers. Like nobody can tell me what to do. And that's not what Rothbard was What all that he was about maybe Maybe there's an element of that, but that's not all that Rothbard's anarchism was about. There's an ideology underlying that. He saw egalitarianism as an evil ideology. He actually uses the word evil in his writing against egalitarianism. He sees it as an evil ideology that when followed to its logical conclusions would create a dystopian world of horror fiction. So Rothbard doesn't say, "Well, we can have a little bit of egalitarianism." Because you wouldn't say, "We can have a little bit of evil. We can have a little bit of horror fiction as long as it's not too much." So I think it's really important to keep that in mind to understand the strength of his opposition to egalitarianism. It wasn't simply as you get today people saying, "Uh I don't like the Democratic Party. They're you know, they're crazy." It wasn't simply that. He was looking at the underlying ideology. Egalitarianism is the ideology that everyone should be equal in every way that you can possibly equalize them and that the state should take steps to make us equal. It takes different forms and I think some of you have heard me talk about some of the forms that it takes under civil rights law. But the premise is that as far as possible human beings should be equal in all respects. It presumes that the meaning of the good life is to be found in the equalization of everything and that all other ideals like individual liberty, private property come secondary to this great equalization ideology. Or at least even if they're not secondary, the idea is that you need to balance them. Let's balance liberty with equality. Or people view it as a trade-off. We have a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. And this is what Rothbard rejects utterly. So, it's important for us to ask, over 50 years since he wrote Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, why does egalitarianism persist? Why does it persist despite us seeing the horrors that it can lead to? I think it's clear to everyone who's uh awake and watching uh what's going on in politics that egalitarianism is now our ruling ideology. That's what members of the public are concerned about. That's what almost all academic disciplines now are concerned about. Not just in the humanities. So, people say, "Oh, well, you know, the humanities, you expect them to do that and maybe the social sciences." But now even the natural sciences or the hard sciences, as some people call them, are also moving into this egalitarianism. Mathematics, computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, you know, they have these courses called Afrochemistry. Mathematics A mathematics professor from Australia said, you know, you you you can do ethnomathematics. So, maybe 2 + 2 is 4, but maybe 2 + 2 could be something else in your culture. You know, maybe you can use smoke signals to tell you what's 2 + 2. So, for this to work, there are no right or wrong answers. You just say whatever you want when you're asked what's 2 + 2. It could be anything. So, it's it's it's everywhere in all the fields and disciplines. And nobody questions the premise. They don't question the premise. They may say something like, "Well, you're going too far with all this. It's It's now becoming ridiculous." They may say things like this, but they don't question the premise that some form of equalization is needed. They're all busy um measuring attainment gaps. So, the reason why they're trying to introduce ethnomathematics is because they've realized that some ethnicities aren't doing as well in mathematics as some other ethnicities. Well, okay, let me just put it plainly. They're saying, "Okay, the black kids aren't doing as well as the white kids. So, something wrong with the mathematics. We have to change that and we have to change this idea that some people are getting the answers wrong. And you have to stop giving people homework because that disadvantages the children that are not doing any homework. So, that This is why they come up with all these things. And they're measuring gaps, attainment gaps. In fact, all this is driven by the measurement of attainment gaps. And I've asked some people who claim to be classical liberals. They claim to be against wokery and they claim to be against all this egalitarianism, but they're busy measuring gaps. And I've asked them, "Why are you measuring these attainment gaps?" And they say, "What do you What do you mean why am I measuring the gap? There's a gap, and so I want to measure it so I can see how wide the gap is." You know, it It reminds me of the British mountaineer George Mallory who was It's said that he was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. And he said, "Because it's there." Like, there's a mountain, so that's why I want to climb it. So, this is the way they see the measurement of attainment gaps. They say, "Well, we have attainment gaps. I want to see how big they are so I can measure them." But, you know, they're not just measuring so they can just tell you what's the gap. So they measure, for example, the gender pay gap, as they call it. Let's measure what men earn, and let's measure what women earn, and this is the gap. They call it the raw gap. And why is it called the raw gap? Because they aren't going to tell you what work these people are doing. They're just going to tell you men earn, for every dollar that men earn, women earn 82 cents. That's the raw gap. They're not just telling you that so that you can know about the gap. You know, if you've been on the London Underground, the voice tells you to mind the gap. They're not just telling you this so that you can know there's a gap. They're telling you this because they want to equalize. That's the whole purpose of it. And so the point that I want to make is that no part of the public discourse disputes the premise. They debate what form equalization should take, how it should work, how far it should go, is it being done properly? This is another one that used to infuriate me whenever I say to people, "This is crazy. We need to question the premise." And they say, "Yeah, it needs to be done properly. This is not the right way to do it." So they still think we need to be equalizing people. They just think we need to find a better way of equalizing people because this way isn't very well it doesn't work very well. So you know, in the Procrustean ideal, that Rothbard has talked about, where it's from the Greek uh mythology, where the host has an an iron bed, and all his guests have to fit that bed. And if they're too tall, he hacks off the head and the feet, so they'll fit. And if they're too short, he pulls at them with a rack, so that they'll fit. So that's the idea of the Procrustean ideal. But when you tell people about this to show that equalization is a horror, they say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you shouldn't use a rack or chop people off. Find better ways. You should do it properly." No, you should question the premise, and that's what Rothbard says. Question the premise. Libertarians also support egalitarianism these days. They're they're at the forefront of this. We need to find a way to do it properly. By contrast, Southern conservatives like M.E. Bradford understood, almost instinctively, that all forms of egalitarianism are incompatible with individual liberty. And this explains why Rothbard found such good friends and staunch allies among the states' rights Southerners. And why he supported Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. The the Dixiecrats had a uh political platform of states' rights. And he later uh Rothbard later supported Pat Buchanan's presidential run. And so a lot of people say, "Well, maybe Rothbard just had some crazy politics." It wasn't about politics. It was about the defense of liberty. And the recognition of the deep vein of liberty in Southern conservatism began when he was a university student. That was when he first uh joined the Strom Thurmond Society to say why states' rights would be so important in um expanding the scope of individual liberty. And it ran through his life. It did not suddenly emerge later in his life when he formed a political alliance uh with Southern conservatives uh as a co-founder of the John Randolph Club, which he co-founded with Thomas Fleming. John Randolph of Roanoke, um whom they named the John Randolph Club after, famously said, "I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality." To love liberty, to hate equality, ran like a golden thread through Rothbard's political philosophy. And to dismiss this as just politics is a grave error. It is a central element in the philosophical ideal of liberty. It recognizes the threat posed by egalitarianism. Rothbard objected to the equality premise because it undermines liberty. It erodes liberty. It ultimately justifies violence against private property. It leads to conflict, and it is incompatible with peace or harmonious relations between different groups in society. And ultimately, there can be no civilization and no peace without the right to private property. And that's why it matters. There can be no protection of private property when the state is involved in its endless and increasingly intrusive equalization projects. And that's why Rothbard said, "The call of equality, the siren song of equality, as he puts it, can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human." And so, he has a challenge for us. And here I'm going to quote from Rothbard. He says, "It is not enough for an intellectual or social scientist to proclaim his value judgments. You know, to say I support equality. These judgments must be rationally defensible and must be demonstrable to be valid, cogent, and correct. In short, they must no longer be treated as above intellectual criticism. If people think their ideas are above intellectual criticism, that suggests there's something wrong with their ideas. And in fact, people who proclaim these value judgments, they never defend them. If you criticize them, they try to shut you down, they try to silence you, or they just insult you. Why? They should be able to offer a valid, cogent, and correct justification for their ideals. So, now I want to ask, how do we get on with challenging these egalitarians to defend their ideals? I think we can uh classify them in two. I've classified them in two for purposes of this talk. We have the open socialists who admit to being socialists. So, they're egalitarian and they say, "Yes, I want a socialist revolution." And then there are the others, the liberals who deny that they're socialists. So, these are two completely different groups. The open socialists and the Marxists do not claim to be promoting value-free economics. I think that a good example of this is uh Thomas Piketty. He's an open socialist. He doesn't hide it. He talks about socialism and the socialist revolution in interviews. He doesn't pretend to be doing value-free economics. He doesn't pretend to be separating economics from ideology. He doesn't pretend to be separating uh economics from his own value judgments. He openly promotes socialist politics. He attacks the 1%, the rich. He supports slogans like eat the rich. You know, so he's out there in the open. But here's the thing about these types of socialist econom- economists. They're nevertheless treated as experts in economics, even though they're openly preaching socialist revolution, because they're economists, they're treated as experts on what they're saying. They're not treated as politicians, even though what they're promoting is politics. And nobody ever asks them the question that they used to ask Rothbard, like why don't you stick to economics? Nobody asks Piketty, why don't you stick to economics? Einstein, who admittedly said he knows nothing about economics, he said economics is irrelevant as to how we should build our socialist world. He said it's irrelevant in building the socialist society of the future, which will be built based on socialist values. You know, Mises criticized him for saying I know nothing but about economics, but I know that socialism works. But here's the point I want to make. People believe him because they view him as a smart and as intellectual and as an expert. These open defenders of socialism do not claim to value private property, so they don't care if you tell them, well, what you're promoting is going to undermine private property. That's their goal. They want to undermine private property. They think property is theft. Yes, they want to undermine it. They would celebrate if they would achieve that. They're not interested in whether socialism works. You aren't going to persuade them by telling them, but socialism doesn't work. They're interested in their dreams and their political goals, so they don't care if they fail, they just keep trying. The more they fail, the harder they try. And you can't persuade them. The liberals are a different kettle of fish, because the liberals deny that they're socialists. They deny everything. You know, I wrote an article about this called The Disappearing Marxists. There are no Marxists in the United States. They all promote Marxism and deny that they're Marxists. So, you can't get them because if you say, "Well, you're undermining private property." they say, "No, I'm not. I'm just balancing private property with kindness and you know, being nice to people." And you know, then they say, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you want to be kind to other people?" That's the way tends to go with the liberals. They don't see themselves as progressives, either. If you say to them, "Oh, so you're a progressive." they say, "No. No." they say, "I'm a classical liberal doing value-free economics." They claim to be doing value-free economics. They claim to be merely presenting you with a cost-benefit analysis, even though they're openly promoting wealth redistribution and anti-discrimination principles which are rooted in egalitarian ideals. They're promoting egalitarianism while denying being progressives. And so, in some way, they're the most insidious because they're silent as to their ideology. You can't get a handle on their ideology because they deny it. "They're not promoting any ideology." they say. They claim they're just measuring the gap so they can tell you how big this gap is. They say, "That's not ideology. It's measurement." They say they're just conducting empirical studies of phenomena of scientific interest to those who want to understand the distribution of economic factors such as income and wealth. They purport to be both scientific and interdisciplinary. How can you be both scientific and interdisciplinary? You wouldn't think much of a an engineer if you said I want you to build a bridge. If you said, "Okay, I'm going to do an interdisciplinary bridge, which is going to be based on mathematics, engineering, architecture, sociology, measuring attainment gaps, diversity, equity, inclusiveness, you wouldn't be too confident in what bridge you're going to get. But this is what they claim that they're both scientific and interdisciplinary in their economics. They do not see a strict separation between economics and politics. In fact, they're proud of their interdisciplinary method. They see it as a strength of their research methodology. And I have an example for you. You know, I didn't want to name names. So my example is an edited collection called the Oxford Handbook of economic inequality. So there's a bunch of economists, academic economists who've contributed to this Handbook of economic and inequality, which is value-free economic science. So you just want to know about the gap. So that's why you want to study this. It describes itself as a challenging analysis of economic inequality. They're just studying economic inequality from a value-free perspective. And they say that these are This is what they're studying from a value-free perspective. Gender, happiness, poverty, the rich, the super rich, the welfare state. Yeah, they're calling that value-free and then saying it's scientific research. That's what they say. What do they mean by scientific research? They listed their science of economics. It includes economics, sociology, demography, politics, philosophy, and law. What kind of economic science is that? The whole point about science is that it is universal and universally valid. Otherwise, it's not a science. If you're saying, "Oh, I'm doing science, but I'm including culture, philosophy, demography, that's no longer a science. There's no strict separation there." When they're explaining about the science, they quote Anthony Atkinson, great economist who wrote a book called Economics of Inequality, very value-free. What they don't tell you is that Anthony Atkinson was a socialist. Actually, he denies, and his friends and colleagues deny that he was a socialist. But, he was a member of Britain's Socialist Labour Party. I don't know how value-free that is. They also cite Britain's Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth of 1974 to say, "This is is just a study of how wealth is distributed." What they don't tell you is that it was commissioned by a Socialist Labour Government in 1974 that had been elected on a platform of wealth redistribution. As part of a social contract with a powerful trade unions. You would think that would be relevant when you're presenting your value-free economic science. You would want to tell people about this, you would think, but they don't. Um the aim of this uh Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth was to come up with uh the data to justify wealth redistribution because they were adamant that wealth had to be redistributed. Uh by 1978, their policies had proved so economically disastrous that they precipitated the infamous winter of discontent. Some of you will have heard about this. And Mrs. Thatcher was swept to power by 1979 on a platform to break the trade unions. This is what they're citing as their value-free economics. They present this as, and I quote, "scientific research on wealth redistribution." Maybe they assume that this is all very well known, and so there's no need to specify it. But today's students don't know this. If you just tell them this is a study of wealth redistribution, they don't know the history of Britain in 1974. They'll assume it's value-free. It does ask, "Why should economists care about inequality? Why should economists care?" I mean, even the way that this question is put is very tendentious. Because it still assumes that inequality is uh a social problem, and and that economists are saying, "Well, why should I care about the social problems?" So, even the way it's been framed is so as to suggest to you that you should care. But the answer it gives to this question is revealing. It says economists should care about inequality simply from scientific interest. It's a scientific interest. It says "the desire to know and understand the world around us. You just want to know." Okay, this could be a good answer. So, when people who study uh IQ IQ studies, they're always asked, you know, they want they're uh studying, for example, race and IQ. They want to know if there's a difference in the IQ of different races. And when people ask them, "Why are you studying that?" This will be their answer. They'll say simply scientific interest, the desire to know and understand the world around us. I think that's a good answer. You see things and you want to know and to understand. That's how we expand knowledge. Then they cite Adam Smith and David Ricardo as examples to show that economists have always been scientifically interested in inequality. But what they don't tell us is that Adam Smith thought that capitalism or the free market would be beneficial to everyone, the rich and the poor. In fact, this is a point that Ludwig von Mises makes in his book Liberalism. He says, "People accuse us of uh so because Mises does value-free economics, of course, like all Austrians. But also has value-free political philosophy of liberalism. He wants to show that liberalism is what leads to better outcomes, to freedom and for peace. So, it is value-free in that sense. But he says, "Um people accuse us of not caring about the poor. But actually, it's because we care about the poor that we want to promote capitalism. Because capitalism ultimately helps the poor. It helps everybody." They So, this book on inequality doesn't tell you that. It just says, "Oh, we should care because we are caring people." It then immediately circles back explaining that in their attempt to understand the world, they study inequality because they care strongly about inequality. So, here's what this book of economic supposed economic science says. "Why should economists care about inequality?" And then it answers, they should care about inequality because they care strongly about inequality. They say people feel strongly about inequality. It's a concern with social justice on the part of the researcher. So, they're implying that if you're not interested in studying inequality, it's because you don't care about society. And if you're not an egalitarian, that's because you're just bad people. Cuz if you were good people like us, you would want to measure all the gaps. You would want to know the costs and benefits. And they say that this is uh they say they also want to uh re uh they cite Atkinson, the socialist economist. They cite him saying it's important to reintegrate the study of income distribution with the core concerns of economics. In essence, they're saying economics should be about wealth redistribution. And why is that important? They say because it is a top research concern. It's very circular justification of the project that they're involved in. So, Rothbard is right to say that this colonization of economics by socialists cannot be answered with value-free utilitarian arguments. You need something more. Something more powerful. And what I think is the best approach as a more powerful way to answer them is by the Rothbardian system of social and political philosophy. So, to conclude, I want to make this I want to make two points. What does this tell us about Rothbard's challenge in questioning the egalitarian premise? I think we can draw two conclusions. First, our challenge to the egalitarians must be overtly and explicitly founded on political philosophy, on the ethics of liberty. By means of a moral and ethical defense of individual liberty and property rights. The egalitarian premise must be questioned as a political matter. Egalitarians cannot simply be corrected on their erroneous data as some people attempted to correct Piketty. You know, they said to Piketty, "Uh you made some mistakes in your data collection." They said, "You You need to make some adjustments in your spreadsheets." They said, "You entered data for the wrong year. You entered data from 1908 under 1920." And Piketty said, "Okay, I'll correct my spreadsheets." Like he he won the public debate because all that these, you know, the Financial Times was the leader in this. All the the the criticism they made against him was about mistakes and errors in his collection of, you know, the tax records. So, he said, "Fine, I'll correct it." And when people said to him, "But aren't you ideological?" He said, "Well, the Financial Times is ideological, too." They're they're capital They're dirty capitalists. That's their ideology. They They They just couldn't pin him down. You can't just get at them by saying the cost-benefit analysis weighs against you. That's what some other um uh utilitarians tried to do. They tried to say, "Look, Piketty, you underestimated the costs and you overestimated the benefits. And so, your analysis was skewed." But here's the point. If Piketty's ideology is philosophically sound, if you don't question his premise, then he can fix his mistakes. He can rebalance his cost-benefit analysis. The public gets the message that he is correct, just that he made a few mistakes here and there. So, that's why Rothbard says you have to question the premise. This brings us to the second point I want to make. Our ultimate goal is to persuade the disinterested public observer, not the socialist. Our enterprise isn't to persuade Piketty not to be a socialist. Okay, he's a socialist because he believes in, you know, socialist revolution. We're not trying to persuade Piketty that socialism doesn't work. He doesn't care if it works. Socialists don't care if their dreams are going to work. They will fail and just keep trying again. In fact, that works for them in the public sphere because they say, "We are um we're can-do people. We believe we can do it, and if we fail, we just keep trying." And that plays to people. They think, "Oh, yeah, well, you know, we we want to try. We want to keep trying." Hayek said that if socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. And to that, we may add, if egalitarians understood Rothbard's political philosophy, they wouldn't be egalitarians. Thank you. >> [applause]
Egalitarianism and Value-Free Economics | Wanjiru Njoya
Summary
Transcript
Uh, thank you everybody, and uh, welcome to the Mises Institute. Thank you for joining us here to celebrate the legacy of Murray Rothbard, and thank you, uh, to my colleague, uh, Dr. Salerno, for that great introduction. And I think that from his introduction, it will have given you, uh, a sense of, uh, where I'm going to go with this lecture, because my own background is in academic law, and that's how I got into reading Murray Rothbard, because of course, I think that you all know that he thought it would be a good idea to, uh, create a system of libertarian law. This would be, uh, a system of law that would enhance liberty. And so that's how I got into reading about Murray Rothbard, and that's what I really want to emphasize, uh, in today's lecture, because I think that as we honor his legacy, we should remember how important it was to him to promote liberty. So that's really the message of my lecture today. And I want to begin with an observation made by Lew Rockwell in his preface to Murray Rothbard's book, Making Economic Sense. Uh, Lew Rockwell says that Rothbard had a passion for public persuasion. He wanted to persuade the public of the importance of liberty. He was devoted not only to teaching sound economics, but also to making the general public aware of the vital importance of liberty. And that is the the context in which I want to talk about the importance of Rothbard's political philosophy in alerting the public to the great threat facing liberty in our time. It's not enough for the experts to see the threats to liberty. It's important to make the public aware of the threat and of its gravity. The importance of Rothbard's political philosophy is nowadays gravely misunderstood. You know, people have forgotten about liberty. So, when people defend liberty, ideas like freedom of association, I think a lot of people have forgotten why it matters that you should have freedom of association. So, they don't understand why you want to have freedom of association, and they assume that your motives are probably, you know, maybe you're a misanthrope and you just don't want to mix with people. They forgot that it's liberty that drives all these ideas. It is when Rothbard tries to promote these ideas in his writing, it's often dismissed as just politics, as something of a sideshow in Rothbard's professional life. That is not the case. In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard wrote, and I quote, "All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty. For it has been my conviction that, while each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity, in the final analysis, all sciences and disciplines of human action are interrelated and can be integrated into a science or discipline of individual liberty." Those are Rothbard's words. He recognizes that each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity. In fact, if you don't keep the autonomy and integrity of your discipline, you can't call it a discipline. And that's been one of the things that has has gone wrong in the modern academy. It's kind of every discipline collapsing into politics. So, he does talk about keeping the autonomy and integrity of your discipline, but he also wants to create a system of political philosophy that can be seen as the benchmark for an integrated science or discipline of individual liberty. He called this a systematic ethical theory of liberty. A systematic ethical theory of liberty. In his introduction to the first edition of his collection of essays, Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, Rothbard wrote, and I quote, "Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me in some exasperation over the years is, why don't you stick to economics?" So, people who did not see the conceptual link between economics and liberty, so that when he started talking about liberty, they thought he was straying away from his field of expertise, which is economics. So, he was trying to show that these two things are not only interlinked, but if you try to delink them, you lose all the economic gains that you thought you could make. So, some people think, "Oh, you don't need the liberty. You can just copy the economic stuff." And just jettison the liberty. And it was part of his um political philosophy to show that that is not the case. He says, and I quote, "For different reasons, this question has been thrown at me by fellow economists and by political thinkers and activists of many different persuasions, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, who have disagreed with me over political doctrine and are annoyed that an economist should venture outside of his discipline. I think that in many cases this is just a failure to understand the distinction between his political philosophy and what many people think of as political doctrine. So, for example, things like which presidential candidate are you voting for? That type of trivial well, in the context it's a trivial question, which is not what he was trying to preach to people. He was trying to explain uh a systematic ethical theory of liberty. And Rothbard writes in Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature that mastery of pure economic theory is not enough. It is vital to explore related and fundamental problems of philosophy, political theory, and history. He writes He's writing here about economists that have been influential like Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, and Friedrich Hayek. And he says that they realized that it was possible and crucially important to construct a broader systematic theory encompassing human action as a whole in which economics could take its place as a consistent but subsidiary part. And Rothbard writes, "In my own particular case, the major focus of my interest in my writings over the last three decades has been a part of this broader approach, libertarianism, the discipline of liberty." And I think that it's important He talks about this as um his focus over three decades because what you find from some libertarians today who don't like Rothbard's politics saying things like, "Oh, this is just something he was musing about in his old age." And that's not correct. Rothbard says he's focused on a political philosophy of liberty for decades. And I think that that work is worth studying carefully and systematically. And that is what is emphasized by uh Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his introduction to Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty. Hoppe describes Rothbard's philosophy as, and I quote, "a system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones." Based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones. You need a cornerstone for your political philosophy because without a cornerstone, you are just a will-o'-the-wisp. You're just going this way and that way, whenever, you know, following the political trends and, you know, just following whatever happens to be in the news. And that's the importance of having economics and ethics as its cornerstones. And the doctrine of private property is central to this political philosophy. So, the doctrine of private property is playing this particular role in Rothbard's political philosophy. And again, I'll quote from Hans Hoppe. He says, "Rothbard's unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy." Ethics, or more specifically political philosophy, is the second pillar of the Rothbardian system. I really like the way that um Hans Hoppe depicts the Ethics of Liberty as the second pillar of the Rothbardian system. If you're missing the second pillar, your understanding of Rothbard is askew because you've only got one of the pillars of his eco- of his uh system. And he says, and again I think this is important that political philosophy is strictly separated from economics. And that's what I'm getting at in my title about value-free economics. Political philosophy does not become subsumed within economics because if you do that you lose the integrity of your discipline. It is strictly separated from economics and I think that good economists as good disciplinarians in any field, I mean I think you all come from different academic fields and backgrounds so you understand this that you're able to keep a strict separation in your minds between the integrity of your discipline and you know whatever contextual things that you may be talking about. I think most of us that have been through any academic training understand what this is and why it's important. But Hoppe says that it's equally grounded in the acting nature of man. And it complements Rothbard's economics to form a unified system of rationalist social philosophy. It is rationalist social philosophy. It's a system and this means that it is not random. It's not just some random thoughts that he had. With economics and ethics as the cornerstones of this philosophy, Rothbard argued powerfully against egalitarianism. Which is the ideology behind so many statist welfare schemes. So you get many people who don't like the government because they don't like authority. That's that's one way to be an anarchist. Where you just don't like being told what to do. Okay, so some people are anarchists for that reason. They're not interested in the ideology. They're more like tantruming teenagers. Like nobody can tell me what to do. And that's not what Rothbard was What all that he was about maybe Maybe there's an element of that, but that's not all that Rothbard's anarchism was about. There's an ideology underlying that. He saw egalitarianism as an evil ideology. He actually uses the word evil in his writing against egalitarianism. He sees it as an evil ideology that when followed to its logical conclusions would create a dystopian world of horror fiction. So Rothbard doesn't say, "Well, we can have a little bit of egalitarianism." Because you wouldn't say, "We can have a little bit of evil. We can have a little bit of horror fiction as long as it's not too much." So I think it's really important to keep that in mind to understand the strength of his opposition to egalitarianism. It wasn't simply as you get today people saying, "Uh I don't like the Democratic Party. They're you know, they're crazy." It wasn't simply that. He was looking at the underlying ideology. Egalitarianism is the ideology that everyone should be equal in every way that you can possibly equalize them and that the state should take steps to make us equal. It takes different forms and I think some of you have heard me talk about some of the forms that it takes under civil rights law. But the premise is that as far as possible human beings should be equal in all respects. It presumes that the meaning of the good life is to be found in the equalization of everything and that all other ideals like individual liberty, private property come secondary to this great equalization ideology. Or at least even if they're not secondary, the idea is that you need to balance them. Let's balance liberty with equality. Or people view it as a trade-off. We have a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. And this is what Rothbard rejects utterly. So, it's important for us to ask, over 50 years since he wrote Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, why does egalitarianism persist? Why does it persist despite us seeing the horrors that it can lead to? I think it's clear to everyone who's uh awake and watching uh what's going on in politics that egalitarianism is now our ruling ideology. That's what members of the public are concerned about. That's what almost all academic disciplines now are concerned about. Not just in the humanities. So, people say, "Oh, well, you know, the humanities, you expect them to do that and maybe the social sciences." But now even the natural sciences or the hard sciences, as some people call them, are also moving into this egalitarianism. Mathematics, computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, you know, they have these courses called Afrochemistry. Mathematics A mathematics professor from Australia said, you know, you you you can do ethnomathematics. So, maybe 2 + 2 is 4, but maybe 2 + 2 could be something else in your culture. You know, maybe you can use smoke signals to tell you what's 2 + 2. So, for this to work, there are no right or wrong answers. You just say whatever you want when you're asked what's 2 + 2. It could be anything. So, it's it's it's everywhere in all the fields and disciplines. And nobody questions the premise. They don't question the premise. They may say something like, "Well, you're going too far with all this. It's It's now becoming ridiculous." They may say things like this, but they don't question the premise that some form of equalization is needed. They're all busy um measuring attainment gaps. So, the reason why they're trying to introduce ethnomathematics is because they've realized that some ethnicities aren't doing as well in mathematics as some other ethnicities. Well, okay, let me just put it plainly. They're saying, "Okay, the black kids aren't doing as well as the white kids. So, something wrong with the mathematics. We have to change that and we have to change this idea that some people are getting the answers wrong. And you have to stop giving people homework because that disadvantages the children that are not doing any homework. So, that This is why they come up with all these things. And they're measuring gaps, attainment gaps. In fact, all this is driven by the measurement of attainment gaps. And I've asked some people who claim to be classical liberals. They claim to be against wokery and they claim to be against all this egalitarianism, but they're busy measuring gaps. And I've asked them, "Why are you measuring these attainment gaps?" And they say, "What do you What do you mean why am I measuring the gap? There's a gap, and so I want to measure it so I can see how wide the gap is." You know, it It reminds me of the British mountaineer George Mallory who was It's said that he was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. And he said, "Because it's there." Like, there's a mountain, so that's why I want to climb it. So, this is the way they see the measurement of attainment gaps. They say, "Well, we have attainment gaps. I want to see how big they are so I can measure them." But, you know, they're not just measuring so they can just tell you what's the gap. So they measure, for example, the gender pay gap, as they call it. Let's measure what men earn, and let's measure what women earn, and this is the gap. They call it the raw gap. And why is it called the raw gap? Because they aren't going to tell you what work these people are doing. They're just going to tell you men earn, for every dollar that men earn, women earn 82 cents. That's the raw gap. They're not just telling you that so that you can know about the gap. You know, if you've been on the London Underground, the voice tells you to mind the gap. They're not just telling you this so that you can know there's a gap. They're telling you this because they want to equalize. That's the whole purpose of it. And so the point that I want to make is that no part of the public discourse disputes the premise. They debate what form equalization should take, how it should work, how far it should go, is it being done properly? This is another one that used to infuriate me whenever I say to people, "This is crazy. We need to question the premise." And they say, "Yeah, it needs to be done properly. This is not the right way to do it." So they still think we need to be equalizing people. They just think we need to find a better way of equalizing people because this way isn't very well it doesn't work very well. So you know, in the Procrustean ideal, that Rothbard has talked about, where it's from the Greek uh mythology, where the host has an an iron bed, and all his guests have to fit that bed. And if they're too tall, he hacks off the head and the feet, so they'll fit. And if they're too short, he pulls at them with a rack, so that they'll fit. So that's the idea of the Procrustean ideal. But when you tell people about this to show that equalization is a horror, they say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you shouldn't use a rack or chop people off. Find better ways. You should do it properly." No, you should question the premise, and that's what Rothbard says. Question the premise. Libertarians also support egalitarianism these days. They're they're at the forefront of this. We need to find a way to do it properly. By contrast, Southern conservatives like M.E. Bradford understood, almost instinctively, that all forms of egalitarianism are incompatible with individual liberty. And this explains why Rothbard found such good friends and staunch allies among the states' rights Southerners. And why he supported Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. The the Dixiecrats had a uh political platform of states' rights. And he later uh Rothbard later supported Pat Buchanan's presidential run. And so a lot of people say, "Well, maybe Rothbard just had some crazy politics." It wasn't about politics. It was about the defense of liberty. And the recognition of the deep vein of liberty in Southern conservatism began when he was a university student. That was when he first uh joined the Strom Thurmond Society to say why states' rights would be so important in um expanding the scope of individual liberty. And it ran through his life. It did not suddenly emerge later in his life when he formed a political alliance uh with Southern conservatives uh as a co-founder of the John Randolph Club, which he co-founded with Thomas Fleming. John Randolph of Roanoke, um whom they named the John Randolph Club after, famously said, "I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality." To love liberty, to hate equality, ran like a golden thread through Rothbard's political philosophy. And to dismiss this as just politics is a grave error. It is a central element in the philosophical ideal of liberty. It recognizes the threat posed by egalitarianism. Rothbard objected to the equality premise because it undermines liberty. It erodes liberty. It ultimately justifies violence against private property. It leads to conflict, and it is incompatible with peace or harmonious relations between different groups in society. And ultimately, there can be no civilization and no peace without the right to private property. And that's why it matters. There can be no protection of private property when the state is involved in its endless and increasingly intrusive equalization projects. And that's why Rothbard said, "The call of equality, the siren song of equality, as he puts it, can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human." And so, he has a challenge for us. And here I'm going to quote from Rothbard. He says, "It is not enough for an intellectual or social scientist to proclaim his value judgments. You know, to say I support equality. These judgments must be rationally defensible and must be demonstrable to be valid, cogent, and correct. In short, they must no longer be treated as above intellectual criticism. If people think their ideas are above intellectual criticism, that suggests there's something wrong with their ideas. And in fact, people who proclaim these value judgments, they never defend them. If you criticize them, they try to shut you down, they try to silence you, or they just insult you. Why? They should be able to offer a valid, cogent, and correct justification for their ideals. So, now I want to ask, how do we get on with challenging these egalitarians to defend their ideals? I think we can uh classify them in two. I've classified them in two for purposes of this talk. We have the open socialists who admit to being socialists. So, they're egalitarian and they say, "Yes, I want a socialist revolution." And then there are the others, the liberals who deny that they're socialists. So, these are two completely different groups. The open socialists and the Marxists do not claim to be promoting value-free economics. I think that a good example of this is uh Thomas Piketty. He's an open socialist. He doesn't hide it. He talks about socialism and the socialist revolution in interviews. He doesn't pretend to be doing value-free economics. He doesn't pretend to be separating economics from ideology. He doesn't pretend to be separating uh economics from his own value judgments. He openly promotes socialist politics. He attacks the 1%, the rich. He supports slogans like eat the rich. You know, so he's out there in the open. But here's the thing about these types of socialist econom- economists. They're nevertheless treated as experts in economics, even though they're openly preaching socialist revolution, because they're economists, they're treated as experts on what they're saying. They're not treated as politicians, even though what they're promoting is politics. And nobody ever asks them the question that they used to ask Rothbard, like why don't you stick to economics? Nobody asks Piketty, why don't you stick to economics? Einstein, who admittedly said he knows nothing about economics, he said economics is irrelevant as to how we should build our socialist world. He said it's irrelevant in building the socialist society of the future, which will be built based on socialist values. You know, Mises criticized him for saying I know nothing but about economics, but I know that socialism works. But here's the point I want to make. People believe him because they view him as a smart and as intellectual and as an expert. These open defenders of socialism do not claim to value private property, so they don't care if you tell them, well, what you're promoting is going to undermine private property. That's their goal. They want to undermine private property. They think property is theft. Yes, they want to undermine it. They would celebrate if they would achieve that. They're not interested in whether socialism works. You aren't going to persuade them by telling them, but socialism doesn't work. They're interested in their dreams and their political goals, so they don't care if they fail, they just keep trying. The more they fail, the harder they try. And you can't persuade them. The liberals are a different kettle of fish, because the liberals deny that they're socialists. They deny everything. You know, I wrote an article about this called The Disappearing Marxists. There are no Marxists in the United States. They all promote Marxism and deny that they're Marxists. So, you can't get them because if you say, "Well, you're undermining private property." they say, "No, I'm not. I'm just balancing private property with kindness and you know, being nice to people." And you know, then they say, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you want to be kind to other people?" That's the way tends to go with the liberals. They don't see themselves as progressives, either. If you say to them, "Oh, so you're a progressive." they say, "No. No." they say, "I'm a classical liberal doing value-free economics." They claim to be doing value-free economics. They claim to be merely presenting you with a cost-benefit analysis, even though they're openly promoting wealth redistribution and anti-discrimination principles which are rooted in egalitarian ideals. They're promoting egalitarianism while denying being progressives. And so, in some way, they're the most insidious because they're silent as to their ideology. You can't get a handle on their ideology because they deny it. "They're not promoting any ideology." they say. They claim they're just measuring the gap so they can tell you how big this gap is. They say, "That's not ideology. It's measurement." They say they're just conducting empirical studies of phenomena of scientific interest to those who want to understand the distribution of economic factors such as income and wealth. They purport to be both scientific and interdisciplinary. How can you be both scientific and interdisciplinary? You wouldn't think much of a an engineer if you said I want you to build a bridge. If you said, "Okay, I'm going to do an interdisciplinary bridge, which is going to be based on mathematics, engineering, architecture, sociology, measuring attainment gaps, diversity, equity, inclusiveness, you wouldn't be too confident in what bridge you're going to get. But this is what they claim that they're both scientific and interdisciplinary in their economics. They do not see a strict separation between economics and politics. In fact, they're proud of their interdisciplinary method. They see it as a strength of their research methodology. And I have an example for you. You know, I didn't want to name names. So my example is an edited collection called the Oxford Handbook of economic inequality. So there's a bunch of economists, academic economists who've contributed to this Handbook of economic and inequality, which is value-free economic science. So you just want to know about the gap. So that's why you want to study this. It describes itself as a challenging analysis of economic inequality. They're just studying economic inequality from a value-free perspective. And they say that these are This is what they're studying from a value-free perspective. Gender, happiness, poverty, the rich, the super rich, the welfare state. Yeah, they're calling that value-free and then saying it's scientific research. That's what they say. What do they mean by scientific research? They listed their science of economics. It includes economics, sociology, demography, politics, philosophy, and law. What kind of economic science is that? The whole point about science is that it is universal and universally valid. Otherwise, it's not a science. If you're saying, "Oh, I'm doing science, but I'm including culture, philosophy, demography, that's no longer a science. There's no strict separation there." When they're explaining about the science, they quote Anthony Atkinson, great economist who wrote a book called Economics of Inequality, very value-free. What they don't tell you is that Anthony Atkinson was a socialist. Actually, he denies, and his friends and colleagues deny that he was a socialist. But, he was a member of Britain's Socialist Labour Party. I don't know how value-free that is. They also cite Britain's Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth of 1974 to say, "This is is just a study of how wealth is distributed." What they don't tell you is that it was commissioned by a Socialist Labour Government in 1974 that had been elected on a platform of wealth redistribution. As part of a social contract with a powerful trade unions. You would think that would be relevant when you're presenting your value-free economic science. You would want to tell people about this, you would think, but they don't. Um the aim of this uh Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth was to come up with uh the data to justify wealth redistribution because they were adamant that wealth had to be redistributed. Uh by 1978, their policies had proved so economically disastrous that they precipitated the infamous winter of discontent. Some of you will have heard about this. And Mrs. Thatcher was swept to power by 1979 on a platform to break the trade unions. This is what they're citing as their value-free economics. They present this as, and I quote, "scientific research on wealth redistribution." Maybe they assume that this is all very well known, and so there's no need to specify it. But today's students don't know this. If you just tell them this is a study of wealth redistribution, they don't know the history of Britain in 1974. They'll assume it's value-free. It does ask, "Why should economists care about inequality? Why should economists care?" I mean, even the way that this question is put is very tendentious. Because it still assumes that inequality is uh a social problem, and and that economists are saying, "Well, why should I care about the social problems?" So, even the way it's been framed is so as to suggest to you that you should care. But the answer it gives to this question is revealing. It says economists should care about inequality simply from scientific interest. It's a scientific interest. It says "the desire to know and understand the world around us. You just want to know." Okay, this could be a good answer. So, when people who study uh IQ IQ studies, they're always asked, you know, they want they're uh studying, for example, race and IQ. They want to know if there's a difference in the IQ of different races. And when people ask them, "Why are you studying that?" This will be their answer. They'll say simply scientific interest, the desire to know and understand the world around us. I think that's a good answer. You see things and you want to know and to understand. That's how we expand knowledge. Then they cite Adam Smith and David Ricardo as examples to show that economists have always been scientifically interested in inequality. But what they don't tell us is that Adam Smith thought that capitalism or the free market would be beneficial to everyone, the rich and the poor. In fact, this is a point that Ludwig von Mises makes in his book Liberalism. He says, "People accuse us of uh so because Mises does value-free economics, of course, like all Austrians. But also has value-free political philosophy of liberalism. He wants to show that liberalism is what leads to better outcomes, to freedom and for peace. So, it is value-free in that sense. But he says, "Um people accuse us of not caring about the poor. But actually, it's because we care about the poor that we want to promote capitalism. Because capitalism ultimately helps the poor. It helps everybody." They So, this book on inequality doesn't tell you that. It just says, "Oh, we should care because we are caring people." It then immediately circles back explaining that in their attempt to understand the world, they study inequality because they care strongly about inequality. So, here's what this book of economic supposed economic science says. "Why should economists care about inequality?" And then it answers, they should care about inequality because they care strongly about inequality. They say people feel strongly about inequality. It's a concern with social justice on the part of the researcher. So, they're implying that if you're not interested in studying inequality, it's because you don't care about society. And if you're not an egalitarian, that's because you're just bad people. Cuz if you were good people like us, you would want to measure all the gaps. You would want to know the costs and benefits. And they say that this is uh they say they also want to uh re uh they cite Atkinson, the socialist economist. They cite him saying it's important to reintegrate the study of income distribution with the core concerns of economics. In essence, they're saying economics should be about wealth redistribution. And why is that important? They say because it is a top research concern. It's very circular justification of the project that they're involved in. So, Rothbard is right to say that this colonization of economics by socialists cannot be answered with value-free utilitarian arguments. You need something more. Something more powerful. And what I think is the best approach as a more powerful way to answer them is by the Rothbardian system of social and political philosophy. So, to conclude, I want to make this I want to make two points. What does this tell us about Rothbard's challenge in questioning the egalitarian premise? I think we can draw two conclusions. First, our challenge to the egalitarians must be overtly and explicitly founded on political philosophy, on the ethics of liberty. By means of a moral and ethical defense of individual liberty and property rights. The egalitarian premise must be questioned as a political matter. Egalitarians cannot simply be corrected on their erroneous data as some people attempted to correct Piketty. You know, they said to Piketty, "Uh you made some mistakes in your data collection." They said, "You You need to make some adjustments in your spreadsheets." They said, "You entered data for the wrong year. You entered data from 1908 under 1920." And Piketty said, "Okay, I'll correct my spreadsheets." Like he he won the public debate because all that these, you know, the Financial Times was the leader in this. All the the the criticism they made against him was about mistakes and errors in his collection of, you know, the tax records. So, he said, "Fine, I'll correct it." And when people said to him, "But aren't you ideological?" He said, "Well, the Financial Times is ideological, too." They're they're capital They're dirty capitalists. That's their ideology. They They They just couldn't pin him down. You can't just get at them by saying the cost-benefit analysis weighs against you. That's what some other um uh utilitarians tried to do. They tried to say, "Look, Piketty, you underestimated the costs and you overestimated the benefits. And so, your analysis was skewed." But here's the point. If Piketty's ideology is philosophically sound, if you don't question his premise, then he can fix his mistakes. He can rebalance his cost-benefit analysis. The public gets the message that he is correct, just that he made a few mistakes here and there. So, that's why Rothbard says you have to question the premise. This brings us to the second point I want to make. Our ultimate goal is to persuade the disinterested public observer, not the socialist. Our enterprise isn't to persuade Piketty not to be a socialist. Okay, he's a socialist because he believes in, you know, socialist revolution. We're not trying to persuade Piketty that socialism doesn't work. He doesn't care if it works. Socialists don't care if their dreams are going to work. They will fail and just keep trying again. In fact, that works for them in the public sphere because they say, "We are um we're can-do people. We believe we can do it, and if we fail, we just keep trying." And that plays to people. They think, "Oh, yeah, well, you know, we we want to try. We want to keep trying." Hayek said that if socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. And to that, we may add, if egalitarians understood Rothbard's political philosophy, they wouldn't be egalitarians. Thank you. >> [applause]