Robert Higgs

So, so two questions on, on this one.

Which one of the specific interventions do you think, say, Smoot-Hawley or the NIRA, uh, that's the National Industry Recovery Act, or the 1937 tax increases, which one of these do you think most prolonged the, the Depression? And perhaps more, more importantly, if the New Deal largely failed by, by its own architects' admission, why does virtually every mainstream historian still say it succeeded?

Let, let, let's deal with the first question first.

All right.

Smoot-Hawley did not cause the Great Depression.

Maybe to a certain extent it, it, it contributed, contributed a bit to its lastingness.

But Doug Irwin, the master historian on this topic, makes pretty clear that as bad as Smoot-Hawley was, and again, it was, it was not the main cause or even the secondary cause of the Great Depression.

It made things worse, but the Depression would have happened without Smoot-Hawley, had Smoot-Hawley existed or, or not.

War expands government not merely through military spending, but by altering the relationship between citizen and state.

Coyne and Yatsushina connect Rothbard here with Robert Higgs's later work on the ratchet effect.

Emergency institutions, expenditures, and expectations have an unfortunate tendency to survive the emergency that supposedly justified them.

The post-911 experience provides an obvious illustration.

It's fair enough in their very limited context.

But it's just like the great economic historian Robert Higgs said about Pearl Harbor.

And they always truncate the antecedents.

Right.

For most people, consent precedes action.

In the world of government as we know it, an invaluable Robert Higgs expression, the exact opposite is often the case, especially when the action desired implies a disastrous change to American life.

Ever wonder why false flags are so dear to government's heart? The Gulf of Tonkin lie used to escalate American intervention in Vietnam.

leading to millions of deaths at a cost of over a $1 trillion in today's dollars, serves as a tragic example of how consent grudgingly followed government action.

According to prevalent wisdom, economic turmoil follows from anarchy.

How did government achieve what is usually associated with its absence? Madison's Angel Theory of Government In the summer of 1787, Federalists James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay led a coup in Philadelphia against the national government of the Articles of Confederation.

Their proposed new government, as Robert Higgs writes in Delusions of Power, had...

the powers to lay and collect taxes, and to maintain a standing national army and navy.

tweeted a screenshot of that and that got like 200 likes.

And then I remember that my dad texted me like the next day or a couple of days later, a picture of a Bob Higgs book that Robert Higgs book that he was reading.

And I'm like, oh, he's going to be a fucking full blown egg soon, baby.

Yes.

So what would you guys recommend, you know, for people listening to this podcast or like what, what sorts of things can be done are being done to try to address this? And at what scale are we talking? Is it, is it primarily County? Is it sometimes state? You know, I know Julie mentioned the Trump administration has some ideas that probably won't work real great, but at what kind of scale should be looking for solutions and what kinds of things are being tried or might we try to, uh, alleviate some of this sort of housing constraint and these high housing prices?

A framework that I encourage people to use when they think about specifically housing regulation is the concept Robert Higgs coined with the ratchet effect.

Regulation typically goes only in one direction, right? You don't have people being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we actually want to limit the safety regulations, we want to decrease that.

Oh, we actually want to decrease the size of rooms, right? That is not very politically palatable.