From the Easy Chair

The Role of Business in Society

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: X-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AN73

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AN73, The Role of Business in Society from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 179, October 12, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss business, the world of business, the attitude of people towards business and the role of business in society. I believe this is a very important question, because I think the world of business lacks a sense of calling. Partly it is the fault of society, partly the fault of business.

Years ago in this country—and we were different from the rest of the world in that respect—the businessman had respect. In fact, if you retired and did not work you had to go to Europe, because a non working man was despised in the United States. There was a great deal of respect for work and, hence, for the businessman.

The background of this, of course, is Scripture with its sense of vocation for every man, its respect for work as God ordained and, as a result, Christianity introduced a different temper into the world. The pagan world despised work. The Greeks felt that work was something for slaves and commoners. And most of the inventions that we credit the Greeks with were the work of slaves. The slaves were sometimes rewarded with freedom for what they did, but it was the work of slaves. Rome had a similar attitude. And this pagan attitude has, over the centuries, from time to time had a dominant influence within the realm of Christendom so that churches have at times preached as though work were discreditable or the businessman on the lower status than the monk, priest or pastor and yet at other times have preached about the Christian vocation, the dignity of labor. And we must remember that labor must be defined in terms of what we call old capital and labor. Actually, the man who is in business for himself usually works harder and longer hours than his employees. So to call those who work under him workers and assume that he is not a worker, is ridiculous.

Well, this is a general introduction to the subject. Now, Otto, what do you have to say?

[Scott] Well, the Reformation, of course, I agree with Weber who said that modern industry and Protestantism have a lot in common. Before that they always had commerce and much of the world is still involved with commerce which is another word for trading and includes manufacture and so forth. But commerce, generally speaking, is content with short range profits, single deals and not with long range programs. Capitalism, which is, incidentally, a Marxist word which we have adopted for lack of any better short hand, Capitalism thinks in the long run and the Protestants who began to plow back their earnings into the business in order to set up and maintain a venture that could last for generations, for a long time were heroes in this country.

When I was a boy in school, when you were a boy in school, I remember writing about Edison and Harvey Firestone.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And various businessmen. I remember my father, one of his heroes was Otto Kahn, the financier. And the financiers were the objects of a great deal of admiration up to 1929, up to the 1930s.

Now we have something else that has come into the situation. We have the corporate world. Corporations were an invention just as much as the automobile, I would say. And they came in the... they are not totally new. There were syndicates in the Roman days. There were companies, but they were short lived. They were ventures to put together a particular cargo ship or something of that sort.

In the modern sense, it is the post civil war period where the corporation was given the rights, the function of a personality, but actually is an impersonal and abstract concept and I think when most people talk about business today they think about corporations. They don’t credit the corner grocery with being in business, but he is. In fact, now, of course he has to fill out as many forms as General Motors, or it seems that way.

But I think we could go into the corporate state and into our present condition we would have a lot of fun. Let’s begin with Mussolini and the corporate state. I mean, his... his idea was to expand the whole corporate idea.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Mussolini provided the form of freedom while having the substance of Socialism. And he really is the patron saint of the 20th century state, because everybody runs Mussolini down, but all the countries and now even the Soviet Union imitate Mussolini’s program of pretending they are not in the slightest fascistic. But Fascism is a corporate state. It absorbs the whole society into the state, but is not doing so with a socialistic name. It maintains the form of private ownership, private business and so on, while controlling everything so thoroughly that they, to all practical intent, are branches of the state.

For example, when we were still in the Los Angeles area, Dorothy and I had a home, a tract house which before we sold it was being taxed in the early 70s 2400 a year, 200 a month. I a sense we were paying rent on the house.

[Scott] Oh, you were.

[Rushdoony] And shortly after we had to ... when we sold it we saw that the taxes on that street went up from 3600 to 4200. Well, that is Fascism.

[Scott] Well, it is a bit more. Fascism actually Mussolini was Hitler’s father intellectually.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Hitler admired him and bowed low before him, because he considered Mussolini the most creative of the dictators, the rulers. The dictator should be recalled in the 20s and 30s, was very popular. Autocracy is always popular.

Well, it preserved the façade of Capitalism in the sense that it allows unequal incomes. It doesn't try to flatten everybody into the same income. It preserves titular ownership of a house or shares in a corporation of whatever. It retains material controls in the hands of the state. So that means that if you have a tin can factory you are not going to get any steel or aluminum if the state doesn't want you to have it.

Now it would be pretty hard, I think, for me to differentiate between Hitler’s... or Mussolini’s Italy and today’s Japan. All Japan is run as a single corporation. We did not break up the Japanese monopolies. There were not very many of them. There were, I think, four major families who controlled almost all Japanese industry. An I understand the Japanese government will advance or take away in the raw materials that enable one industry to survive or another to diminish depending upon the market situation and national needs. Yet you have low incomes, middle incomes and high incomes in Japan. But ownership is essentially, I would say, controlled by state.

So Fascism is an economic system. Where most people get misled regarding Fascism is that they take the Marxist use of the word to mean racism. The Marxists called Hitler a Fascist whereas, actually, he was something that different. He was unique in the sense that he set up not only an economically absolute state, autocracy, but it was on a racial basis. And I think that is the first state to be set up on a racial basis in the modern world and it is not a very good establishment anymore than to set up a state, a modern state on a religious basis. Because, we know, that has been done again.

In any event, Fascism is an economic theory which is not taught in American schools so far as I know. So most people here don’t know what Fascism is and if you don’t know what it is, it is hard to avoid it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Mussolini was shrewd in that he began as a Marxist, an avowed Marxist and came to realize that there would be no way of weaning the common man from his desire to own his own land, his own house, to have private property. So he decided to maintain the façade of private property while instituting , in effect, total control by the state.

[Scott] All right. Now in a corporation in Germany today, western Germany, I should say, when you ... before it can appoint a senior executive has to have permission of the government, because the government of western Germany considers a corporation a quasi public institution and not a purely private institution. And I remember when I was sitting in my office in Ashton Oil and a fellow appeared in the doorway and said, “Go next door to the board room.”

And I said, “Why should I?”

He said, “You have got to be fingerprinted.”

I said, “By whom?”

He said, “Well, the government, because we have got classified projects.”

Now what is the difference between that and western Germany?

[Rushdoony] Yes. So your finger prints are on file, Otto.

[Scott] Oh, well. Everyone’s finger prints are on file, I assume. If you have a driver’s license you got thumb print.

[Rushdoony] That is right. I forgot about that. Big brother has his eye on us all.

[Scott] Well, we have moved by stages into what I consider the Fascist economy. And it may even be worse than Mussolini’s version, because, as we know, the Italians have unique abilities. They are an old people. They are terribly sophisticated. And they run either legal or illegal mafias. The mafia is a pretty good example of an Italian style organization. It may be engaged in crime, but the type of organization is very Italianated, because it is personal, it is personalized. It consists of familial type relationships. And it keeps secrets from itself. The Italian business is impossible to put down on paper, because right now the Italian government owns an incredible number of corporations that operate in the private sector exactly as though they were private corporations. In fact I think it would probably take even the Italians themselves to find out who they all are.

At the same time you have private corporations that are competing with the public corporation. You have tax dodgers of all sorts all over the place. So it is... it is an anarchistic... it is a combination of old autocracy and Libertarianism all operating at once. But we are different. We are more like the Germans. We are more organized. We are systematic. Americans today are people of the rule. And, unfortunately, we have maybe 50,000 or more bureaucrats who can all write a new rule that has the force of law...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...any time they want.

[Rushdoony] The Italians have an inefficient civil government which means its ability to tax are limited. It is not very good at collecting taxes. But, unhappily, like the Germans, we have an efficient bureaucracy in Washington that is efficient in collecting things from us.

[Scott] Well, that is true, but it is also very pragmatic.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there is a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on Pragmatism. It is ... it is applied a little bit differently. They are talking about the pragmatists around Reagan who keep talking him or kept talking him, so we are told, into various practical positions that, in effect, gutted and undermined his administration.

Pragmatism is short range, sensible, long range myopic. Now we have bureaucrats who are writing these pragmatic regulations, each one of which is designed to solve some problem that has arisen who are indifferent to the long range effect of the proliferation of all these regulations each of which is, in effect, a law, because if you violate it, you can be punished.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Disraeli said, “Practical men are men that practice the blunders of their predecessors.”

[Scott] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] They are very short sighted, in other words, and cannot see in terms of the future. They are practical in terms of the moment.

[Scott] Which is a bad way for government to be.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because the government should be long range.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, by being short range, our so efficient tax collectors and I am aware of it, because I have mailed in a tax check today. That is the reason I look a little pale. The ... it is like a transfusion, you know. It is like giving one, you know, into the body politic. Here is a little blood, Sam.

At any rate the tax system that we have demands that we pay in advance by the quarter. Corporations have to submit an earnings statement every three months, four times a year. And if their earnings have not gone up in those three months the Wall Street Journal runs a headline saying, “Your earnings fell.” Once they ran a headline saying, “Ashton Earnings Fell.” And we fell one... one penny a share. We had a real friend in court that ... on that occasion. But I have never found out who it was. I tried to. It is easier to break into the Pentagon.

But if you have to show a profit every three months and under Mr. Roosevelt, incidentally, you were prevented from plowing money back. You could not distribute the money in the form of dividends. He put a limit in the percentage of dividends that you could recompense a shareholder to. And you couldn’t plow the money back. You had to pay taxes on it.

Consequently, you can’t plan for a five or a 10 year period.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And that is destroying American business in its ability to compete with other countries. We are not allowing this long range planning.

[Scott] It can’t be done.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And it means that every industry is caught in short range Pragmatism.

[Rushdoony] Yes. In one of your books, Otto, you made a very telling point about banking and the future. You pointed out how the New York banks, although they had the reputation, were always betting on the past, the big corporations that were already over the hill.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And at one time Chicago was ready to invest in the future, but even that has disappeared, so that we have a short term thinking which is past oriented rather than interested in entrepreneurs and the future.

[Scott] “Well, we have never ... we have never promoted entrepreneurship in this century. We have taken money, huge amounts of money, recycled petrol dollars, for instance. You know when the Arabs instituted their boycott and increased the price of oil by four times, an immense amount of money was credited to Arab accounts, but they had no place to put it, because in those days , early 70s, they had neither banks nor industries, nor projects, nor plans, nor a sophisticated... nor a commercially educated group capable of advising them.

So the banks like Citibank and the others simply took those petrol dollars and invested them wily, nilly into third world countries and governments and around the world. They spilled money all around the world to keep it within the system.

Now for a while that seemed like a wonderful solution, but unfortunately they lent the money to governments and not to people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And governments do not produce. The purpose of a government is to govern, not to make jobs.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] When... when Dukakis promises to make jobs and when Bush says he has made jobs, they are both lying through their teeth. Governments do not produce anything except laws, rules and taxes.

[Rushdoony] The only jobs they create are in the bureaucracy.

[Scott] Well, all right. Italy has government owned corporations all over the place and undoubtedly they make money. So they fill in for their tax inefficiency by being into the private ... the private market. And if you are up against a company that is owned by the government that has the treasury behind it, it is kind of hard to compete.

[Rushdoony] But it is interesting that in both France and Italy, private tax paying corporations are competing with and outdoing the state owned corporations.

[Scott] Yes, because there is nowhere you can keep politics out of anything the state governs. So who staffs the private corporations? Who runs them. Who runs them? Well, some fellow who has a good taste in cigars and girlfriends who now has friends in government. I mean, your politician runs the...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...he runs a government company.

[Rushdoony] When I was at William Volker, this is a minor point, but confirms what you have said. There was professor at UCLA who did some research on a grant from the Volker Fund. And it was a ... it had many ramifications, but there was one point that was very interesting. He said, “The closer the corporation was to being more or less a branch of the federal government, the more attractive its secretaries were than the more inefficient.” But if it were truly a private corporation with production and profit in mind, the secretaries were marked by efficiency rather than beauty.

[Scott] Oh, absolutely.

[Rushdoony] And in federal offices the secretaries, he said, were amazingly beautiful.

[Scott] Is that so? I will have to take another look.

Look, the... the Paul Blaser was an entrepreneur who founded and was the architect, rather, of Ashland Oil. He saw a marked difference between the days when he was beginning with the early part of the century, let’s say the late teens and early 20s and the generation that came later in the 30s together hand in hand, you might say, with the New Deal. The institutionalization of management, the professional managers who began to appear as opposed to the fellow who came up the hard way, came up the ranks or came out of the entrepreneurial group. He said, “These men collect a fat salary whether the corporation earnings are up or down.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Consequently, they don't lose any sleep at night over the marketplace. They lead a very nice life no matter what. And we read now that ... that the head of Ford Motor in that book we had in the front of us...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... got 17 million dollars compensation in one year and it was not a good year.

[Rushdoony] It was a disastrous year.

[Scott] It was a bad year, but he got 17 million dollars. And Mr. Glaser felt that there was something inherently stupid in this arrangement and he felt that all managers should be... their compensation should be closely tied to the earnings of the corporation and if the corporation lost money, I said, well then, he said, they shouldn’t get anything.

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Scott] Well, this sort of thinking seems to have gone out of style because results no longer seem to count in the American society, not just in business, big business, but in big government, in big labor or almost in any of our institutions.

We have school teachers now, college professors and in high school teachers who get more money than all their predecessors ever dreamed of getting and yet the grades of the students go down. Their skills go down, but these salaries keep going up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That nowhere that you look can ... does America.. does results seem to strike the American attention.

[Rushdoony] Well, you have the same attitude among the unions. Irrespective of whether the business is successful or not, their salaries should be maintained in a high level and continue to go up.

[Scott] You mean the union member’s salaries.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes. Yes. Oh, sure. Well, James {?} of Arch Mineral gave me a chat on that. You know, of course, the coal companies have had lots of problems with the unions, especially the United Mine Workers. After all the president, one of the... one of the presidents of the United Mine Workers was sent to prison for murder and I was told that when they were opening up some new mines in some new districts they got some rather ugly telephone calls from some of the organizers of the unions.

In any event, Samples is a coal executive from the time he left school said, well, he said, “The whole question of unions... Unions,” he said, “from the production point of view are getting their own way.” He said, “If you are dealing with union members, you have to pay a poor worker as much as a good worker. You can’t punish the poor man. You can’t reward the good one.” So he said, “You are holding back merit.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. And that is why most farm workers will not join Chavez’ union, because they are making more money than they will get if Chavez is able to organize California agriculture. Then they will get a flat sum, every worker. And ...

[Scott] Well, it is some will coast on the ones that work hard.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The ones who work hard can make more without the union.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] And it is only the shiftless workers who will then benefit.

[Scott] Well, that is one of several aspects, but we started out, I think, we were talking, in effect, about governmental forms being blended into business when we talked about Fascism. And in the United States there has been an effort to blend the corporation into social programs which is the American way of saying political purposes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We cover... and they never say we are politically oriented. They says we are socially oriented.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We want to help people.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the name of helping people they are steadily destroying freedom in this country. And the future looks very bleak unless there is a turn around. And I believe Christians will have to lead the way by applying their faith to every day life and making clear that in the realm of politics, in the realm of economics, they do have ea responsibility under God. And they have to think intelligently and biblically in order to cope with the problems of our time.

[Scott] I think maybe seminaries should include business courses.

[Rushdoony] I could not agree more.

Otto, you and I were discussing on our flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles last Saturday Paul Weaver’s book The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America, published this year by Simon and Shuster, a very interesting book.

But after we discussed this book on the plane I decided to do a little studying in the background and I turned up some interesting things. The world of business in our civilization began in the Middle Ages with the rise of the cities, the towns at first. And the towns were an area of freedom. This was where serfs could go and be free men. It was a walled area so it was an area of security and peace except in time of war. But not subject to bands of robbers and depredations by roving bands.

It was a place where there was a church at the center. So European civilization began with a combination of the faith and business. As a result, the city grew rapidly because it represented freedom. It was an ideal that was deeply influential among the common people of the medieval era. The town represented an ideal.

However, the town faced a very great enemy, the lords and the kings, because the town represented an area that was outside of their control. And while the king had a nominal power over the town and then the city, basically it represented a world outside is control, a world of freedom. It was also an area of learning, because the universities were built in connection with the cathedrals and the larger towns or cities.

And so the town, the city became central to civilization. But towards the latter part of the Middle Ages and especially with the Renaissance, what happened was something very interesting. The lords and the kings moved in to the cities. They maintained double residences. They took over the city and made it theirs and the drove the businessmen out to the suburbs outside the walls. So the flight to suburbia began a long time ago. It began with the Renaissance and a little before.

Now one of the curious facts that I turned up was this. The lords loved to have people dwelling on their bounty, a welfare mob, so that whether it was in their castles or in their town residences they were always surrounded by beggars, by hangers on, by people who lived off the bounty of the Lord. So when they went into the cities, they took with them and created around them a group of drifters, no accounts, beggars, bums. And this, in effect, created a problem within the city which helped drive business out of the city that business and the church together had created. And this love of the mob by the lords, goes back to Rome. And the kings loved this, too. It was a part of showing their bounty. You had gratitude from people who depended upon you for their living.

Then these lords turned the city from a place of business, the inner city, to a place of elitist culture. It was a place not as a church had been, of music and of art that was related to the faith, but of music and art which was dependent upon the lord, an elitist, which others were not expected to enjoy.

So the modern city has had this on it. State and inherited wealth, non productive wealth creating and enjoying hangers on, indulgent towards the lowest of the low, catering to their non productive ways.

Whereas the world of business gets forced to the edges and is despised because it is a working world.

Now that is an interesting and a very curious history and it has not, to my knowledge been developed and studied in any detail.

[Scott] Well, no, that particular view point has not. That is new to me. Although, of course, cities have always been a mixed bag.

Industry in the United States is in a curious position because although the whole country lives on business and industry, it is despised, literally despised. I mean the transition from where we stated when we were in elementary school and industrialists in particular industrialists were admired, they are now despised.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Exploiters. If America... when American corporations were going overseas, for instance, and employing black Africans and Asians and Europeans and Latin Americans, they were called exploiters. And yet they would have only one or two Americans in the whole enterprise. All the rest were working on jobs that had been created by American capitalists that were super directed by one or two men.

Now if that is exploitation, of course, everyone who has a job is being exploited.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Or the whole business of work is another form of exploitation.

[Rushdoony] That is the point.

[Scott] Well, that its he argument.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And that is exactly what this history of the city that I outlined is all about, the attitude that work in the business sense, in the productive sense is exploitation.

And one of the things that happened, for example, in England, was that businessmen who became very wealthy were looked down on, but their daughters could marry and take money into prominent old families. And their grandchildren would then be a part of the non working aristocracy.

[Scott] I know. I started the coal book off with a recitation of the noble families and titles in England whose fortunes were based on coal.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Partly for that reason, because I thought it was an amusing side light.

[Rushdoony] Well, in this country what came to pass was the only way you could atone for being wealthy and successful in the business world was to pour out your money on the world of art. And as you have pointed out, the corporate world has warehouses full of modern art that is worthless...

[Scott] Well, businessmen and the world of art will never come together. For some reason or another their taste is invariably ridiculous and the same thing is true to a very large extent of businessmen in politics. Businessmen have not really very good political instincts as a general rule. I think one of the congressmen whose name I can’t recall right now gave a little chat about that one time. I heard him say that business is based on compromise. You have to... the customer and the supplier have to come together. If the customer won’t pay this much, maybe he will pay that much and maybe if he won’t pay that much, maybe he will pay a little less over a longer period or this or that or the other thing, but the main thing is you have got to sell the product.

Whereas politics is based on confrontation. It is not based on compromise at all. In politics somebody wins and somebody loses. And there is no other way. Well, business can’t understand that, because a businessman cannot afford to get into a fight with his client, with his customer. The author of that book, Paul Weaver, with is great two years in the public affairs staff third level down at Ford Motor Company made me laugh when I read it because he seemed to think that Ford Motor company should get on a white horse, pick up a lance and run head on into the government.

No way.

[Rushdoony] I do think there is another fact, as you are right. But I also feel that businessmen going back to the time of the Renaissance have felt intimidated by intellectuals and artists and have been made to feel as though somehow they were inferior when for the most part they are probably superior.

[Scott] Well, I think in certain areas they are superior. And certain areas they are not. The intellectual’s role, really, is to rationalize events, trends and so forth. I mean, it doesn’t suit either one of us to decry intellectuals.

[Rushdoony] We are a different kind of intellectual.

[Scott] Ah, I ... I don’t know about that.

[Rushdoony] But, oh, we are not a part of the New York crowd.

[Scott] Well, that is true. We are not New York intellectuals. That may take some of the curse off. But the fact is, although he is not... doesn’t seem to... Mr. Weaver doesn’t seem to be aware of it, because he came fresh from Fortune magazine and he went back to Fortune magazine. In Fortune magazine he only had to be afraid of the editor. The editor is not afraid of the government, because the government is very kind toward the media. But the creatures of the media, such as Mr. Weaver, have no real economic information in their head about the world in which we live.

Let me put it to you this way. The entire media is the result of a single treasury ruling which rules that advertising can be written off your tax as part of operating expense. That one rule has allowed the great media empires of the country to come into existence. If any bureaucrat decides to cross that out—and they have the power to do it any time—the media here would shrivel down to the size of a raisin, because they would have to live then on subscription rates, the number of readers and not on advertisers.

Fortune magazine is living on a subsidy, in other words...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...of the tax code. Mr. Weaver doesn’t know that. He is decrying the fact that businessmen look for subsidies. But he is in a business that lives on a subsidy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I... I always look twice at somebody who is sitting in a large, ornate, glass house who says what we need is more stones.

The media is ... Fortune magazine, in particular, teaches the theology of business, what business should be. But they are not out there sweating bullets trying to turn a profit against the myriad reports, forms, statistics and so forth.

Now at one time business in this country had a political presence, but it was a much different country. It was a much simpler country. It... it always from the beginning, business here the feeling of the American people from the time they became independent of Great Britain was that the purpose of government is to help the citizens in a very material and immediate way. This country, as you know, has always been a sucker for easy money, paper money, inflation and it inflated before the ... it inflated during the Revolutionary War. It starved the Revolutionary War soldiers with inflated money. The farmers wouldn’t give them food because their ... the Hessians had gold. Washington’s men had no shoes at Valley Forge because they had no money.

And somebody wrote a book about Washington’s expense account and said, “Look how enormous it was.” Well, it was in paper dollars. It was in continental dollars. Washington lost money. Everyone lost money in that thing.

Ok. The railroads were built with land grants. The canals were built with special privileges. The toll roads were removed because there were certain privileges given to the construction of the highways. This country started out with protected industries behind a high tariff wall, just as Japan is today.

Now along comes Mr. Weaver, boy writer about business, who says we have got to change all this and do it right now, because it isn’t holy. But, unfortunately, it worked. And as long as the government of the United States was assisting bonafide ventures, fiscal ventures that physically improved the country, we could see a very good reason for it.

The Union Pacific railroad, for instance, was passed by the Lincoln administration. He gave them 20 miles on each side of the road at alternate sections all the way across the United States. And mineral rights included. And the purpose was from Washington’s point of view, to tie California to the rest of the union and in the middle was what they called the great American desert.

When Horace Greeley took a stagecoach through Kansas, he said it had sands as pure as the Sahara. It was irrigation which created that agricultural doubt. And the Union Pacific not only got the land, but then it began to sell the land. It kept the mineral rights by the way, far sighted enough for that. But it was after the railroad came across the continent that the people moved west. They didn’t move west until there was a railroad. The covered wagon thing has been greatly exaggerated, greatly exaggerated. Maybe a few families went by covered wagon, but thousands and tens of thousands went by railroad.

[Rushdoony] The covered wagon meant two things. First, an all out effort to settle Oregon in order to keep it and the fact that from all accounts Oregon was such a rich, green and lush area and Washington...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] So that the Oregon territory was a prize.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And people hurried to get there. Then, of course, gold in California.

[Scott] That was a big thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, at any rate, even the so-called robber barons... Now I like that language, because it was imported from the revolution in Germany. These people came over, the failed revolutionists of ... of Germany in the 1840s and they brought with them the vocabulary of European revolution.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they to use European label against Americans. The original robber barons were the barons of the Middle Europe who charged a toll and a tax for everyone who went through their territory and, incidentally, so did the barons of France and the barons of Italy and every other country, including England.

So all the barons are robbers, in that sense. But we didn’t have any barons here. Carnegie wasn’t a baron. He was a steel magnate. He put together a bunch of firms, some of them efficient, some of them not so efficient and made U. S. Steel.

John D. Rockefeller put together a bunch of failing entrepreneurs in the oil industry and made every one of them rich and people said, “Oh, what a pirate.”

They created these great industries. All right. Perhaps they made a lot of money. They did make a lot of money. But why shouldn’t they make money? The whole point of the United States up until 1930 was that it was a country where you could come, work hard, think straight and get rich.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the Socialists say, “Join us and we will stop everybody from getting rich.” What a promise.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have to be awful dumb to be follow a promise like that.

[Rushdoony] New York was the city where immigrants landed and within five or six years were on their way up. They didn't’ stay in ghettoes.

[Scott] No they...

[Rushdoony] They moved out of them within five to six years.

[Scott] I believe that and I remember reading Tom Solo and his book about immigrants into the United States including the black. And he.... the black Jamaican immigrant.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who ... who had exceeded all other kinds of groups in terms of entrepreneurial success. And he said, “If color is so important to the Americans, how is it that the black Jamaicans have done so well?”

And he talked about the Jews. He said, “They came over without an education. They were so uneducated that in 1917 when men were given the first IQ tests before they came into the army, they were put at the bottom. They were called stupid morons and what not, because, of course, the IQ is a cultural test.” They worked as tailors. They worked as... at whatever and they sent their kids to school.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is... it is a generation that never received the credit it deserves. The first immigrant generation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the sad fact is that our school books now reflect none of this so that people see nothing of our past realistically and honestly and are under the impression that we have done nothing but exploit and abuse peoples.

[Scott] Well I look at Mr. Glaser who took 24 men in a refinery and four people in the office. When he died it employed 30,000 and it was an international company. It was located on the edge of Appalachia. It was the greatest anti poverty program in that whole region. It didn’t get any money from the government. It paid tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. When he died he didn’t even get two lines in the Wall Street Journal. And he was by no means unique in the history of the United States.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] There were many, many, many. Now there are lots of things we could say in critical terms about the large corporations, large corporate America. Let’s say the top 500 companies or whatever. Their public relations—and I will agree with Mr. Weaver on this—their public relations is abysmal because business men will not indulge in an open struggle. They have lost... the modern American... it is not true just as the modern American businessman. It is true of the modern American clergy, the modern American medical profession, the modern American attorney. How many lawyers will go into court? One out of ever 500 if that many. You go to a lawyer with a bona fide case and he will say, “Well, now, look. You don't want to go to court. It is going to be expensive and protracted and difficult and painful and so forth. Let’s settle it.”

And even if you talk him into court, he will settle. Anything except fight. So what we... what his... Mr. Weaver’s main complaint about the corporation is that it snuggles its ... its... its program into the rubric of being socially beneficial, that they are really a social organization. They are going to do something culturally, as you mentioned in art. They are going to something for medicine or they are going to do something for education.

In the meantime they are trying to sell a product. They are trying to make friends. And, of course, they don’t make any friends, because the modern American takes all these gifts for granted.

[Rushdoony] And too often they go into the wrong side.

[Scott] Almost always.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Almost always. Almost always. I... I am... sometimes in my more cynical moments I think that the second rate is always preferable to the third rate than the first rate.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. People who retail our idea a second hand and watered down, {?} that we do, because people like things watered down.

[Scott] Smooth as it follows.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] Well, of course, there is also academia. Don’t forget as we have got a strange next... triangle working. Let’s put the government at... at one corner, the universities in the second corner of the triangle and the corporations in the third corner. The professor goes as a consultant to government and convinces the government it should set up a bureaucracy of this sort and then it... the professor goes over to the industry to tell the industry how it can deal with the... with the bureaucracy. And in the process has bureaucratized the university, the government and the corporation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that, of course, is one of the great reasons for the student revolt of the 1960s that people do not realize.

[Scott] And a good reason.

[Rushdoony] Yes. What the students found out was that their professors were sitting on federal commissions and also sitting on the boards of various corporations.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And, in effect were telling both how to behave and...

[Scott] And the academic system...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...has permeated the government and the corporate world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The peer review, the continual psychological analysis, profiles. Do you recommend? Can he be promoted? This or that or something ,no matter what. I mean it. We are covered with paper.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the universities were getting vast sums from both the federal government and the corporations.

[Scott] And still do.

[Rushdoony] And still do.

[Scott] Now if you if you want... if a man gets promoted to a senior executive position in a corporation today, he is immediately sent to Harvard or some other business school, Wharton School of Business or whatever to take a special course. And I have talked to at least 100 men who have gone through the Harvard T course and said what good did it do you and they all said, “Well, we made some great contacts, met some very nice fellows.” Nothing... I myself was sent by the publishing company that had the magazine to the ... one of those courses and in the middle of it, on a Thursday, I skipped a day and went up and interviewed Louis Cabot, because that day they were teaching us how to get along with top people. Well, I thought Louis Cabot is pretty top and I had an interview lined up with him. So I went back. They were angry about that at the company because it cost them 500 dollars a day to have me there of the week.

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] And they were also terribly angry over the fact that when I came back I fired somebody. And ... and the front office said, “We sent you to a sensitizing course.”

I said, “Oh, that is what it was.”

And ... and you came back as big a bastard as you left.

[Rushdoony] Well, you had been made sensitive to poor workmanship.

[Scott] Well, it was an interesting experiment, because at the end of the course the last day we were supposed to judge one another and then we were supposed to select from our own ranks. We were separated into groups. The leader of our group , well, the fist guy that got up to do the judging put me way down and made some other, what I thought were questionable judgments. And, of course, I was the only professional observer there. I mean it is my job, my trade, really, to listen to other men and to rank them.

So I said, “Well, first of all, we will begin at the bottom. This fellow here who made himself the clerk of the group and who stayed out of all trouble and kept his head down and was bought... liked by everybody because he was taking notes on everybody, we will put at the bottom.”

And I went around the table in that fashion. So they elected me leader, which did not impress me any better with the results of the course.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and we do appreciate your comments and suggestions.

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