From the Easy Chair

Wealth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 33-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AR79

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AR79, Wealth from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 185, January the third, 1989.

Tonight, first of all, Otto Scott and myself are going to speak on wealth. The subject seems an obvious one, but wealth has had a great many definitions over the centuries. The culture and the religious faith of the people usually determines what is wealth. And, of course, there are individual variations.

Otto and I are usually poor when we come out of a book store as far as money is concerned, but we feel a lot richer. Now that gives you an idea of the differences in the definitions of wealth, the culture and the individual define wealth.

There have been some curious ones over the centuries. We will touch on some of them like the family, the land, power, gold and silver and so on. Sometime after World War II, not very long after, a couple whom Dorothy and I knew well in those days who went to a foreign country where the husband had a very important position. He was a part of the scientific community. He was doing some work as a liaison officer and therefore was in a very high level. Accordingly, his wife was invited to meet with some very prominent women in that country. However, she very quickly made herself unwelcome because of her temper which exploded over a particular thing and both the United States and the host country declared she had to leave.

The problem was that the wives of that country, high level people married to the most prominent of men seriously questioned whether her husband’s high ranking status was legitimate, that he was obviously neither important nor poor... nor wealthy. And they told this astounded woman that they had proof of that and the proof was that he had no mistresses, that any person who was supposed to be as important as he was, would have several.

Well that was the definition of wealth, a very important one to that particular culture at that particular time. And it infuriated this girl no end.

Now there are definitions all around us that might trouble us, too, that we do not cotton to. A culture always has tensions within it as differing peoples representing different perspectives and faiths vary in what they regard as wealth.

Well, with is introductory words, Otto, would you like to make a general statement as well?

[Scott] That is interesting, your comment about book stores. It reminds me that Erasmus said, “Whenever I get hold of a little money I buy books. The rest I use for necessities.” And I could ... I could appreciate that.

[Rushdoony] And Dorothy is smiling at that.

[Scott] The ... I recall the first time I received a payment from a ship, I received 1000 dollars and a penny. And they paid in cash at the end of the trip in those days. So I had 1000 dollar bill and a penny and I didn’t have any other money and I had to walk instead of getting a cab because there is no point trying to get a cab with a 1000 dollar bill and I checked into the first hotel I came to which was near the waterfront. It was a fleabag. And the door wasn’t very secure and the lock looked to me pretty flimsy and I laid awake half the night fearing somebody was going to come in and take away my thousand dollar bill.

And I suppose that was a sort of a indication of how a great many rich people get to believe. I think they live in fear that somebody or somehow their money is going to be taken away.

[Rushdoony] That is not a fear we have to worry much about.

[Scott] No, it isn’t.

[Rushdoony] Unless there are book thieves around.

[Scott] There are book thieves around in case you don’t know it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I understand that there are book sellers on the sidewalks of New York now.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Scott] Yes, they are selling books from little benches and stands and the backs of cars and so forth. And private libraries are now the object of burglaries.

[Rushdoony] Oh, my.

[Scott] And the book stores in New York, the regular book stores are very upset because all sorts of new books are appearing by these peddlers at discount prices.

But going back to the whole business of wealth, it is a relative thing. I remember a friend of my named Edwards who came from Scotland and talking about being young in Scotland. He said... I said, “Well, I understand that you are all very poor.”

Well, he said, “We didn’t know it.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We didn’t know it. He said, “I never felt poor until I came to the United States. Then,” he said, “I saw wealth. And when I saw wealth,” he said, “I began to feel poor.”

Now I ... the Soviet Union was a nomen klatura. Do not live... the people on the top of the Soviet Union do not really live much better than the middle class here. But every one else is so dirt poor that they feel immensely rich. And when Stalin’s daughter came over here, Svetlana, she stayed at an estate, I believe, in New Jersey near Princeton and the gardener came to her and told her that he was a poor man and that this was really a country of great oppression and she was very sympathetic. And he invited her to visit his home and she went to his home and she looked around and she saw what she had and she said, “Why you are rich. You lied to me.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But he felt poor. And a lot of people in the United States feel poor and they feel poorer than they are. I recall, and so do you, the 30s when out houses were common more than indoor plumbing across the United States, when the average family might have hamburger once a week and feel that they were doing pretty well, had chicken on Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is always a poor man’s meal. But I do recall in Windsor, the village where my mother’s people settled, the working class people there had their own homes, but they lived on a very Spartan level. They didn’t feel poor. There were many people poorer. And now I look at the automobiles parked alongside the fields where the pickers come, pretty good looking cars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A long way from The Grapes of Wrath.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And yet we hear more about poverty in the United States today than ever.

[Rushdoony] Yes. In the 30s electricity was still predominantly an urban thing. If you got out into the countryside very far the power was not there. It might run along the highways between certain cities or towns and therefore the farms that were on that road would get power, but if you went off that highway you did not find it.

I think the best way to describe life then, because people felt privileged rather than poor, they felt it was marvelous to be in this country. They felt it was a great wealth to have freedom. It is to recall the words of President Eisenhower when he was running for office and before he was elected in a speech which I thought was outstanding, he spoke of his childhood and described how little they had. And then said, “Looking back now I know how poor we were, but we and our neighbors all felt rich.”

Now the difference there is a religious one. At that time the people amongst whom he lived were German immigrants, very devout people and very much more given to assessing wealth in terms of their Christian faith. And we have lost a sense of the true wealth that one does have in a faith and heritage, in a culture and family, because we have become humanistic and materialistic in our culture.

[Scott] Well, there is a lot to that. But there is also the fact that but there is also the fact that in Europe the class structure was much more obvious and evident in, you might say, omnipresent.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the days of Eisenhower’s youth or childhood and I know that my own dad, for instance, was very much more aware of class than I was in the United States, because he brought with him a sense of class. And one of the things that made the United States unusual was the idea that everyone was equal socially even if they weren’t. And I think being released from that sort of class feeling, that you, after all, are not an aristocrat, you don’t have what the rich do and so forth, we didn’t see the rich in the United States in quite the same terms that they become evident since.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And those who were well off didn’t make a point of it, particularly. Even though there were larger homes and better off people, nobody was there to educate anyone about the matter. Now we have a constant drumming, the arousal, you might say, the contrived arousal of envy. The lives of the rich and famous, the magazines which tell you the palatial and excellence, elegant homes of the better off and so forth and so on.

And also we do have a class, an upper class of a different nature than before. The ... the more expensive schools. We have the more expensive accoutrements. We have 36,000 dollar automobiles and so forth, 75,000, 125,000 for a Rolls Royce, all that. But primarily we have people going around talking about poverty and talking about poverty as an injury inflicted upon somebody.

Now when I was a boy and a young man poverty was not a disgrace.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] If it was so you weren’t rich, but what difference did that make. You could work to take care of yourself. Nobody felt any the less. But here we have a rising tempo, a crescendo, you might say. I remember thinking during the 30s when I would read some of the sob stories in the paper on occasion and especially around Christmas, you know that every Christmas time the press indulges in great tears and sobs over the poor and over the troubles of people. And it is as though they are insistent. The journalists insist that they cannot be a joyful period because somebody over there is not having a good time. They are having a very hard time. But I remember thinking in the 30s that the greatest oppression in the history of the United States was in the 1830s, not the 1930s. The 1830s and the ... it began in the Andrew Jackson administration. It was one of the fallouts of his fight with the bank of the United States. He set off a financial debacle of enormous proportions which wiped out people all across the country. Unemployment and real privation all through the country through the 1830s, the whole decade. It lasted over a decade, if I remember correctly. And I thought in the 1930s none of the people who were crying in the 1930s would have been able to put up with the conditions of the 1830s, because it mean the country had made a tremendous leap forward in that century.

Now here in the 1980s, 50 years after the great depression, I just saw on television last night that nobody in Sacramento has to miss a single meal. The missions are feeding all the homeless.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You get all kinds of horror stories, but too little about what Christian organizations are doing.

Earlier, Otto, you mentioned the strong sense of class that marked Europe and which was absent in this country in earlier years and into our lifetime to about World War II, except in a few circles in the east.

I recall some years ago a very fine professor, a German who was an officer in World War I on the western front for Germany and at the same time had been a professor. So he was Herr Doctor Ober Lieutenant and so on and so forth. And once when he was feeling a bit mellow and was discussing the {?} his military history he described the title that had to be pronounced. It was a yard long before any junior officer could report anything to him, a whole formal title that could never be neglected. And he once said if those ladies from hell, that is the Scots, had come over the top charging as they did before the fellow could get through with this titles, they would have overrun them.

Now there was that very, very strong emphasis on class in Europe that was missing here. And as a result, there was a sense of freedom because a man was what he made himself. His life and his future depended on himself and his willingness to work. In those days and up until about 1955 to 60 the... some areas of our eastern cities where immigrants would land—I mentioned this before, but I think it is important enough to mention again—would have turnover every five to six years, because that was how long the migrants or immigrants would last in the slums. They would work their way out. They would have good homes. And they would be successful citizens. If they went into store keeping living above the shop was routine thing in many a family grew rich and never wanted to leave living above the shop.

And I was delighted the other day to hear Margaret Thatcher say that the best way... the best place to live was above the shop and that is what she was doing at 10 Downing Street, living above the shop.

[Scott] Oh, in that case she hasn’t fallen farm from the tree.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Because when she grew up she lived over the shop.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And when Mr. Coolidge left the presidency he moved into a small apartment over a shop in New England.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And he had no secret service guards.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Mr. Truman left the White House carrying his own bags on the way back to Independence, Missouri.

[Rushdoony] We have changed a great deal in a short time.

[Scott] I am not sure that this is going to continue. I was thinking earlier this evening. I was looking through a book and there was a comment in it about going to the Hilton hotel in Washington, DC and I guess in the 50s and paying 17 dollars a night for a room. Now I have been in the Hilton, the Washington Hilton recently and I can tell you that the price is over 200.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] From 17 dollars to over 200 in one generation.

[Rushdoony] And the service is not as good as it used to be.

[Scott] No, it is isn’t.

[Rushdoony] Because they have a steady stream of people going to Washington, DC and seeking out rooms.

[Scott] Well, they don’t have to worry about whether you come back or not.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] But the. ... it... it brings up the question of wealth and the loss of wealth. Inflation is the loss of wealth. It means that the government is stealing your money. And I remember, oh, of course, you are going to see it again. As the rates of inflation go up in the next few years which seems to be pretty obvious, we are going to be told once again that it is all due to the fact that prices have increased. No this canard is one of the favorites of the press. The press always looks at the symptom as the cause.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that happens when you have false views of wealth develop is that the emphasis becomes one of appearances. The appearance, the manner, the parade of wealth becomes everything. You have read as I have Thurston Medlin’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.

[Scott] Oh, a wonderful book.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You know, he is a brilliant man, but never able to keep a job in any university. They couldn’t stand him.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think this is very revealing on how it becomes more important to maintain the form than even to live.

[Scott] Conspicuous waste.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This episode from page 43 of The Theory of the Leisure Class. I quote. “A better illustration or at least a more unmistakable one is afforded by a certain king of France who is said to have lost his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master’s seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery, but in so doing he saved his most Christian majesty from menial contamination,” unquote.

[Scott] Isn’t that fantastic? And that reminds me of an anecdote which has been written about President Reagan. It said that a fire broke out in the White House and his office, the oval room filled with smoke and he didn’t leave until somebody came in and told him there was a fire.

[Rushdoony] Very interesting, like the French king who died rather than get up and move his chair.

[Scott] There was another store about French and a Frenchman and great wealth which I read some years ago. It said that this Frenchman went to a physician and the physician after looking him over said, “I have bad news for you. You have a terminal illness.” And the Frenchman said, “That is impossible. I am too rich.”

And I often think this is a syndrome which has overtaken the United States. We feel as a nation that we are too rich to suffer any debacles.

[Rushdoony] Well, I shared with you the other day an item in the San Francisco Examiner for November the sixth. Let me share it now with everybody, because it tells you what wealth now means in Japan.

I quote. “Until recently, the average Japanese commode was a small room usually unheated with a hole in the wall,... ah, floor, serving as a toilet. Today there is a tremendous demand for a 3000 dollar high tech paperless flusher. Consider the Toto Three model TCF 950, a top of the line number that looks complicated enough to require a license to operate it. Go ahead. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. A computer chip memory has seen to it that the seat has been automatically cleaned and perfectly preheated. The control panel blinks. Do what you sat down here to do. Then wait. Don’t reach for that toilet paper. Just press a button. A mechanical arm emitting the slightest of mechanic whirs slips out beneath the posterior parts. Jets of cleansing water shoot upward. You control the temperature, the pressure, the angle of the stream. The water is followed by blasts of drying hot air and then finally puffs of perfumed mist.

“The automatic bottom washing toilet took off in sales when a pretty young lady on TV said, ‘Even your bottom wants to be washed.’ A second wining commercial depicted a gorilla poking the control panel and squinting into the bowl only to be squirted by a jet of water from the bidet nozzle.

The public loved it. Manufacturers are not content with backlogs of orders. They are designing toilets that will perform various medical tasks. Urine and stool analysis, the taking of temperature and blood pressure, then feeding all the information by computer to the family physician,” end of quote.

Now...

[Scott] I am sure that a group would immediately be formed here to make it illegal.

[Rushdoony] Except for the elite.

[Scott] They are a very strange people.

[Rushdoony] Well, we are seeing more and more ways devised to show that you are wealthy. Niemen Marcus has gifts every Christmas out of which they make a fortune that are on the variety of this kind of thing.

[Scott] That is true, but what is also true, too, is that in the last, oh, let’s say 80 years the United States government in common with the government of Great Britain and other western governments has moved to destroy the historic creation of family wealth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Which existed through the centuries from the fall of Rome up until this century in the form of inheritance taxes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The family wealth has been pretty progressively broken down.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now all kinds of small business and enough of those small businesses created by families have had to be sold in order to avoid the tax structures on the air. The inheritance taxes did more to consolidate large industry in the United States than any other single factor. And the period when you could hand down your money to your son, your grandson, your great grandson and so forth and when a family could rest secure in their property is all gone.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What we are living in now is an era in which individual wealth has become the target of governmental efforts.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What happens... what has happened to the Hunt family, for instance, is very interesting. They have been persecuted on one angle or another for years and there seems to be a concerted effort to put them up against he wall.

[Rushdoony] The price of silver was broken by a federal intervention in order to destroy the Hunts.

[Scott] And that is not particularly unique.

[Rushdoony] No. Well, the family is a target.

[Scott] The family wealth is the thing that held families together.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because if you have to leave home to make a living it is the beginning of the end of the extended family. And this is true for cousins to uncles and everything else.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The family has been the basic locale of wealth over the centuries. Of course, there have been very different kinds of family culture. You and Dorothy are both of a Scottish ancestry and Dorothy comes from border Scots, particularly wild ones, you know, the border Scots. They...

[Scott] I think I have just been over publicized. That is all.

[Rushdoony] Well, they had two concepts of determining how important you were, how many members you had in your family and clan and how many people or clans you were fighting against. If you were at war with six or more other clans you were important. But the family has had very important history. Sometimes it has been a problem, for example, in Tibet. The family is all important and the individual has no significance and to maintain the family and the land in tact, the brothers have to share one wife so that there is no division.

In central Europe until the early 1800s a wife system prevailed. And all the ... except that all the brothers and sisters who did not inherit the land stayed on as servants or went out to work somewhere else.

And ancestor worship represents the ugliest kind of family life, because it does lead to a radical orientation to the past.

On the other hand, the family, as we have it in the Scripture, is all important, because there is a sense of responsibility required in that no one is in error unless they share the faith and are responsible as well. The oldest son, if he were capable and godly, received a double portion. If not, he was passed over. The family regarded the wealth it had not as private property, but as family property and as a trust received from previous generations to be handed down to the generations to come.

[Scott] Well, it was more like a corporation.

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly.

[Scott] The ... some of the noble Italian families adopted if there wasn’t a suitable heir.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The Colona family, for instance, adopted fairly regularly and fairly often a bright young man to carry on. And then, of course, the were the different forms of wealth in the agrarian society, land in one place, animals in another. Your biblical tribes of... I notice in the Old Testament are always talking about the number of the animals.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that was true, apparently in Ireland as well. It was not so much an Agrarian as a... whatever you call raising animals, husbandry, I guess.

The United States was very fortunate for the people who came here in the 19th century because there were enormous domains to be settled and the same thing was true in South Africa when the original Afrikaners first went down there. There was empty land as far as the eye could see and I believe that the Afrikaners staked out farms as much has they could encompass in a day’s ride. And very similar vast areas were allocated here, taken by individuals.

Now we have a very different sort of thing. The United States government owns more land west of the Mississippi than any of ht people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] All the millions of the people that live West of the Mississippi put together don’t own as much land as the federal government does.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the present federal government doesn't want the American people to get any of that land.

The former American government wanted the people to have the land so they could be rooted, so they could be loyal, so they could be self supporting and so froth. But the present government believes that people pollute land. We have here some very strange new ideas coming about. The environmentalists, for instance, are so dedicated to the land and to the animals one wonders why they don’t erect Hindu temples and be done with it. Because this is really Hinduism.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well here in this county we have a fair percentage of the population who are descendants of people who came at the time of the gold rush.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And many of them still have a deep sense of roots and in some instances if they are asked if they are interested in selling a piece of their land, they regard that as an insult.

[Scott] It belongs to the family.

[Rushdoony] It belongs to the family.

[Scott] Now don’t forget. When you look at the old buildings up here. They were made of stone.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the idea was that they would be used forever. Latin America used to build only in stone. My father said one of the things that shocked him when he first came to the United States was to see wooden houses, because he said they are impermanent. They are transitory. How long can a family occupy a wooden house?

Well now we have the other extreme. People don't want to buy anything except a brand new house. They don’t want to have a house that has been used by anyone else.

[Rushdoony] Well, wealth today is more precarious than it has ever been, because we have shifted our ground from enduring forms of wealth such as land, such as gold and silver to paper assets, paper assets that are inflated and are very much subject to deflation.

[Scott] Well, look at it. At one time sound as a dollar really meant what it said.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was backed by gold. But today we pick up the newspaper every day, the Wall Street Journal every day to see what the dollar is worth. It fluctuates every day and this is like trying to have a system of architecture or engineering in which the size of the inch and the yard would fluctuate every day. Under those circumstances it wouldn’t be possible to engineer anything, because you would be in a state of flux with your basic elements. And an economic system which has a unit of value that changes in value every day is in a similar state of flux. It is chaotic.

[Rushdoony] In the mid 60s I new a man whose very name I have forgotten now who was very wealthy. He could point to huge office buildings as his property. But... and he was very contemptuous of people who were cautious and who were back then buying silver because silver coinage was no longer being minted, having ceased in 64.

But it was ironic, because in one of the downturns under Lyndon Johnson you lost everything. Because he was continually expanding his financial empire from state to state. Everything was borrowed against.

[Scott] He leveraged everything.

[Rushdoony] He leveraged everything and he lost everything. And that is the kind of wealth that is considered significant today, very vulnerable.

[Scott] Well, the Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations which is really a history book.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is a great deal more history in that book than there is economics. It is a fascinating book. He went over to France, as you remember, and he ran into the arguments of the physiocrats who had observed that the French had an antique system whereby each city and village could tax the goods that passed through it so that in order to get a wagon load of goods from, let’s say, Lyon to Paris, you had to pay a different tax every time you went through a town. And by the time it got to Paris it was very expensive. And he said if they would simply remove these blocks to their internal commerce the goods would flow more easily, the prices would be more equitable and a lot of parasitic practices would ... that has interfered with production would go out of style, which was really the basis of his Wealth of Nations. He also, of course, had some observations about international trade saying that if one country was producing one thing that was useful in another, why then they could swap and both would be better off.

He didn’t foresee and couldn’t have that the whole world would be industrialized and that therefore in the long run in a completely open global market everyone would be working for the wages of the Chinese, because nobody would be able to undercut their costs. But it is interesting that when he himself—as a customs official, I believe he was a customs official, I am not sure—would ask his opinion on a tariff on a particular commodity coming into his area, he wanted it kept, which is just the difference between the ideal and the practical.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now we have a problem in this country and you called my attention to it recently and that is what you termed the neo platonic practice of making an abstraction out of everything that is real in life. And when you make an abstraction out of wealth in the terms of paper money, stocks, bonds, debentures and mutual funds and so forth, a lot of people have forgotten that this world is real and that the bottom of everything is work.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And because they have tended to abstractionism in every field, you have an instability in society. Family, land, gold, silver, meant permanent forms of wealth, permanent forms of security, nothing unstable. But we have shifted our ground radically. And the result is we have, really, a revolutionary society. It changes dramatically. It has no certain course. It has an inherent instability because of what it regards as wealth.

[Scott] Yes. Now we have, because of inflation, practically every physical good, every hard good is infinitely more valuable now than it was when it was produced.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You could not replace your library, for instance, at the price that you paid for it.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Your library is worth probably 50 times more than you paid for it. Books now are running in... in hard cover books prices are running the kind that you and I buy and read are running between 25 and 50 dollars each.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And some of the books, you know, I... I looked at the back page of one Rush’s books recently and I saw where the Presbyterian and Reformed Press had several of his books listed for sale at 3.50 and 2.50.

[Rushdoony] Well, I referred earlier to Thurston Bevlin’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. This is a 1931...

[Scott] Edition.

[Rushdoony] Edition... No, 34. Excuse me. It was reprinted in 34. Ninety-five cents hard back.

[Scott] Yes. Those were the modern library books.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And a great benefit when they came out, because they gave us books that were otherwise very expensive, everything being relative. I look at the list. I remember when William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich came out at 10 dollars. It is a very long book. And everyone said at that time in New York City that 10 dollars was an outrageous price and he would never be able to sell, 10 dollars. That was in the early 60s.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] IT was about 53 or 64 when the Bevlin book was 95 cents. Well, all these physical things are now very getting ... very, very expensive to reduplicate. Consequently those that exist are worth a great deal more.

[Rushdoony] Yes. What Bevlin said and what he was describing was a leisure class that was wealthy and regarded status as being no requirement whatsoever to work. And to expend money as though it ... it were limitless, even though he might be running out of it. Conspicuous consumption had to be manifested at all times.

Now that leisure class represented, over the centuries, a very small segment of the population of any country, of a minute group. Today it represents an increasing number. Whether it is your slum dweller now or your people at the top or in between.

For example, the people who are in our slums the amount of money many of them have is surprisingly large, but it is spent on drugs. It is spent on clothing or it is spent on junk food. It is thrown away.

[Scott] Well, of course, there is another point I am sure you are coming to and that is that they are living a leisure style.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they have a bottom, a platform underneath them....

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They can ... they have more leisure time than our grandparents had. Whereas we have an odd thing happening there. The middle class is working harder than it ever worked in the history of the world. But the upper and the bottom have got all the time in the world to waste time.

[Rushdoony] And our educational system, our state schools are creating more and more members of this class that Bevlin described. Students who grow up feeling that they have no responsibility to work, that the goal in life is to enjoy yourself.

[Scott] Well, the parallel really is with Spain. Spain received this flood of gold and silver from the New World and its armies had already conquered in their poverty stricken days, I might add, large areas of Europe. And as the gold and silver flowed into Spain, the Spanish government and the Spanish nobility began to get the idea that work was something beneath a caballero, beneath a gentleman. Anything with your hands was just not to be done. And the great treasure, the great fortune of Spain was spent in building churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries and palaces. And internationally Spain embarked on a series of adventures in which they used their money to subvert other governments and in useless wars.

[Rushdoony] That period is very interesting, because it is unique in all the history of the world in that an inflation was created by a vast influx of hard money, of gold and silver.

[Scott] That is right. It raised the price of everything in Europe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the Spaniards... it is interesting that Charles V and Philip II and his successors ran the Spanish government into bankruptcy time and time again. But they really had the feeling that the well would never run dry.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the process, however, of wasting this wealth, they forgot to work. Now I read a very interesting book by Thomas Sole examining five different groups of immigrants who came into the United States: the Italians, the Irish, the Japanese, the blacks and one other. I have forgotten now. I have forgotten which one. At any rate, none of these groups advanced until they buckled down to work. The Irish were the last and the latest to do so. They were the first to try to elevate themselves through political means. They got hold of the city machinery. They were the first people, by the way, to set up an anti defamation league was the Irish. A lot of good it did them and a lot of good it does anybody to set up such a league.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because a league to stop everybody else from speaking is bound to failure. But in any event they did elect mayors and congressmen and they did elect... they got people into the police and the fire department and in all the municipal service organizations. But the women remained house maids and the men remained laborers until they finally started to go to school and to work more intelligently. The same thing was true of al the other groups.

And I thought it was very interesting because Sole’s personal background is a professor of economics, has given him a grounding in reality.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have been talking about wealth. Now I would like to sum up a few of the things that we have been discussing. Work is the basis of wealth. Without work...

[Scott] Nothing.

[Rushdoony] Nothing. But work has to be accompanied by thrift and providence, goals so that...

[Scott] Well now you are talking about intelligently directed work.

[Rushdoony] Yes, intelligently directed work. The other main form of wealth is the family and thrift and maintaining what a family has accumulated. Again, that is disappearing. Both the work ethic and the family that thinks in terms of the future.

[Scott] Well, just let me add that a family today working hard and working intelligently has against it a tax structure which...

[Rushdoony] ... of course.’

[Scott] ...is against the accumulation of wealth.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The third point I was going to make apart from family and work is wealth could be accumulated by theft and that is how most wealth is accumulated today, because the state grants money subsidies to various groups and seizes it from the working persons and families or by personal violence, hoodlums, seizing it from others. So there is a vast transfer of wealth underway today, a phenomenal transfer of wealth, not only wealth presently created, but wealth that has been accumulated over generations.

[Scott] Well, don’t forget that to accumulate wealth in a monetary sense, a financial sense, would take Dr. Armand Hammer… Dr. Hammer made a great deal of money by selling treasuries from Russia to Americans and retired. The Hammer Galleries in New York are very famous. He retired. Then some people came to him and offered to sell him the stock of a company called Occidental Petroleum, a very small petroleum company and Hammer bought the stock at a very low price, several hundred thousand dollars and became involved in operating the company. And suddenly discovered, to his surprised—and he was genuinely, I think, surprised, because, don't forget, he was a crypto Communist who had never really gotten into the capitalist system—to discover that he could make more money manipulating the stock of Occidental Petroleum than he could in all selling all the treasuries to all the previous years.

What we have is an economic system which rewards financial maneuver.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] At a greater percentage than work. So who is going to work when money can make more money? Now this is, you might say, a Satanic trap.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] For a nation.

[Rushdoony] And it is one we have fallen into.

[Scott] We are struggling with it now.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And what we need to do is to hope that there is enough residual Christian character and strength in the country to see us out of the disaster this is bringing on.

[Scott] Well, of course, it is like the tulip mania.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It will collapse.

[Rushdoony] Yes, for sure.

[Scott] And then, of course, we are brought down to earth with a thud. Now if the collapse doesn’t provide the left with a catalyst to move forward, if we have enough people to prevent the stupidities which have occurred at other countries that have had great crisis, then we will come through all right.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then we might realize what real wealth is all about.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is almost over. Are there any summary statements you would like to add, Otto, at this time?

[Scott] Well, I think it is good to remember that we are wealthy Frenchmen. Health is wealth. Talent is wealth. Courage is wealth. God gave us all the ingredients, but he left us the task of putting them together.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very, very well put. Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you and prosper you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.