From the Easy Chair

Growing Attack on Property Rights

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 72-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BK116

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BK116, Growing Attack on Property Rights from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy chair number 224, August the first, 1990.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss the growing attack on property rights. What we see now everywhere is an equation of property as somehow evil if you have more than everyone else or anyone else or more than somebody else. And the matter of property rights is increasingly made a matter of social disunity and division.

It used to be that property was closely associated in the United States with freedom. Most Americans owned property. The first person of any note to separate property rights from freedom, the freedom of the individual was Theodore Roosevelt. And he picked up, after a trip to Europe, the language of the Socialists and came back attacking property rights as somehow alien to human rights. Since then, of course, we have had a growing anvil chorus of critics of property.

The subject is important because in today’s paper there is an item about it in USA Today and I am going to read this very brief article. There is a longer article in another page.

“The Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama admitted its first black member Tuesday diffusing a threat to the PGA championship it hosts next week. A civil rights group then canceled plans to picket the event at the private club. Louis J. Willy, 66, a black insurance company executive was named an honorary member of Shoal Creek’s board of governors. That status means Willy has all rights and privileges of regular members, doesn’t have to pay the 35,000 dollar entry fee, didn’t need approval by the full membership. Another black is being processed for selection as a regular member.

“‘The board felt it was in the best interest of all to expand our minority membership,’ said Shoal Creek president John Pittin.

“Earlier Spalding, the USA’s largest golf ball maker had joined the list of companies pulling TV ads from coverage by ABC and ESPN. ABC had no comments on whether Willy’s admission would change advertiser’s positions.

“The reverend Abraham Woods, president of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said Shoal Creek’s action sounded the death knell to exclusionary clubs,” end of quote.

Now we may disagree with that club on its policies with regard to membership, but the point is if we start denying the right to anyone to exist or to function unless they agree with public policy, we have instituted tyranny. We will then have a dictatorship. And this is, of course, what is happening to us.

Of course, it works one way. There is nothing said about the necessity of, let us say, a black organization admitting white members or the B’nai Brith including non Jews or a Swedish organization having to admit non Swedes. It works only one way. And this is an injustice. We can feel very strongly against discrimination and against policies that are designed to hurt people, but to compel people to change is not to produce change, but coercion and the coercion does not change people. If it could be done here in racial matters, what is wrong with using machine guns to compel people to become church members or else? The ideas behind such anti discriminatory policies are idiotic.

Otto, what would you like to say?

[Scott] Well, the... obviously blackmail is no longer a crime. Blackmail consists of forcing people to pay a certain price under the threat of being ruined.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that club, a very high level club, obviously with a wonderful course, because the PGA has played tournaments there before, a very high level tournament. Putting together a club like that is a very expensive proposition.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It costs millions of dollars. And the entrance fee is 35,000 which is a pretty good peg. And the member has to be approved. He has to be recommended by two members and then he is subject to a black ball. If any member objects that is the end of that. And the whole thing is done, of course, theoretically, in most cases it is supposed to be confidential. You are not even supposed to be... know, that you are being considered for an invitation. In most cases, of course, the fellow knows and, usually, I say, the fellow, because these are usually male dominated clubs.

We get down to the point of what exactly is this government trying to do to the people? It is trying to tell the people who they can associate with and who they must associate with. Now it is very difficult to conceive of any civilization which will actually tell individuals who they must associate with that can parade itself as being democratic. And the whole question here of private clubs or private associations being subject to governmental dictate carries us back a great many years. You said using machine guns to send people to church. Well, there was a time when church attendance was compulsory and you were imprisoned or jailed or had your ears cropped and what not for not attending services. And we know that in countries under the Soviet yoke and still may for all I know in the Soviet Union, no private associations were allowed. Only governmental sponsored meetings and groups were allowed to get together.

Well, we have come in a side light, side way into the same sort of reasoning, that only groups that the government approves can get together. And we have given to certain minority groups rights which the majority doesn’t have.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have seen here in California this past year Mills College, an all girl school banned the proposed inclusion of males. The proposal was in the hopes of increasing the financial support of the school by having more students. The girls created all kinds of disturbances and won. But at the same time we are not saying that was discriminatory. But it is VMI, isn’t it, Virginia Military Institute?

[Scott] Yes. Yes.

[Rushdoony] That is being told they must...

[Scott] ...must take women.

[Rushdoony] They must take women.

[Scott] Well, of course, the girls at Mills are there on daddy’s money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But nobody talks about that. Men are still held responsible in American law for the support of women and children and yet they cannot have a club of their own.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this seems to me very, very strange. I don’t... I don’t quite understand the mentality of a person who want to go into a club by force in the first place.

[Rushdoony] Glen Murphys, the Rotary was compelled to take woman members. But the Seroptomists are limited to women.

[Scott] Well, no man wants to join. I mean they are.... they are groups that don’t have this problem. Nobody wants to get with them.

[Rushdoony] But we have increasingly this coercive policy in the name of liberation.

[Scott] Tolerance.

[Rushdoony] Tolerance...

[Scott] Tolerance.

[Rushdoony] ...and brotherhood.

[Scott] Yes. Some brotherhood.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Now how... where do you suppose we will go from here? This sort of social compulsion is a pre revolutionary sign in Europe, in Germany. Let’s take Germany. Germany had private armies. The Communists had an army with weapons, with black jacks, with boots and with uniforms. The Nazis had a private army. In Austria there were a number of nobles that had private armies, because they had enough money to pay the men and arm them themselves. And these private armies made it their business to see that nobody had a meeting or listened to a speaker of whom they did not approve. They would break the meeting up. They would beat the spectators. They would drive the speaker off the stage.

Now we have driven people... people are being driven off university stages. People are not being allowed to speak in various parts of the country on various topics.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But this is, of course, as they said in Germany, in the name of a greater good.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But the basis is violence and force and fear.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Social ostracism, social sanctions, the loss of revenue to the country club and so forth is just as much an act of violence as a physical assault.

[Rushdoony] And yet we do these things and boast that we are becoming a tolerant society.

[Scott] Well, our murder rate is going up. Our robbery rate is going up. The rape incidents has taken a spectacular leap. There is practically speaking a war against women, which the government has not recognized or done anything about. Every city that I go to in my travels closes down with sundown. All the people vanish from the street. It is not safe to go out after dark...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in the United States excepting in rural districts like our own.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And yet we hear speeches, speeches about justice. And what does it boil down to? It boils down to racial politics.

[Rushdoony] I recall, oh, about 25 years ago being in New York City and going in to visit a friend, Cyril, who was a Russian prince and count. And when I left the doorman called a cab for me and I was going to step outside to wait and he said, “No, no. Don’t do that. Stay inside. I will call you and you come and get in quickly.”

So he held the door and then motioned to me when he had the cab door open to come quickly. And it is much worse than it was then.

[Scott] Well, we were talking about property. The club, of course, is the property of the members. Their dues support the club, pays for the upkeep of the greens and so forth and so on. And my dad was a member of the New York Athletic club. He used to put up his friends there or visitors who came to the city to see him and talk to them. He put them up at the club. It is a very old custom. And it relieves my mother of the necessity of having to entertain these businessmen with whom she had nothing in common.

And the clubs are not public institutions any more than a church is a public institution.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Scott] I can recall 20 odd years ago when with photographers coming along, groups would invade churches in the South and some of the churches would not let them in and I belonged at that time to a luncheon club in New York and one of the members expressed indignation to me. He said, “What sort of churches could they be that would bar people from coming in?”

And I said, “Have you ever been a member of a church?”

And he said, “What do you mean?”

Well, I said, “It is not cheap, you know. You have to pay dues. You have to contribute.” I said, “You have to be a member of the church. You have to enter it. You have to join it. You have to carry out its activities and accept its program and everything else.” And I said, “What are these stranger doing in that church? They weren’t there to worship. They were there to make a point. They wanted to break down the walls of that particular church and open it up to the world. That would destroy the church. It destroys a club.”

[Rushdoony] I am...

[Scott] It destroys a community.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I mentioned this in another context a while back, but one of the finest things in California years ago when I was young was the existence of a Welsh Presbytery. Presbyterian churches that were exclusively Welsh and their singing was superb. They would have an annual concert, usually in Los Angeles, great numbers of people would come out to hear the Welsh singers, the mass choirs. But in terms of the civil rights act and the insistence of the Presbyterian Church USA that this should be the moral standard for all churches, these churches were outlawed. They had to become open to non Welshman. And a marvelous aspect of California culture went down the drain.

[Scott] Well, here we are. We have homes that we have to pay taxes on every year or we lose the home. We have automobiles we have to pay a license every year to... and registration every year to operate otherwise we cannot operate the car. In the state of Oklahoma, I am not sure whether it is this year or next, an inventory is to be made...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... of every item that a family owns, every stick of furniture, every book, every chair, every teapot, every suit of clothes, every pair of shoes and everything else for the tax collector. And if the inspectors are not allowed in to take inventory, the individual can be arrested and if the inventory is incomplete the individual can be arrested.

[Rushdoony] I am really startled by that fact. I had been aware of it for some time. Something must have happened to the people of Oklahoma. I am being facetious and yet I am baffled that they put something in their drinking water that has tamed them?

[Scott] I don’t know, because when J. B. Saunders was a resident of Oklahoma—and he is a very famous Oklahoman. He is in their hall of fame and everything else—the state bureau of taxation came after him and gave him such a time, such a terrible harassment that he finally transferred his allegiance to the state of Texas. He died in Texas. He would not go back to the state of Oklahoma. They literally drove him out of the state. So apparently it is a state where the authorities do not feel any limitation upon their power.

Now we have come into this area where the government of the United States is beginning to feel that the possession of property is a privilege and not a right and treating it as a privilege instead of as a right. A right is something that cannot be tampered with. A privilege can be given or taken away.

[Rushdoony] The statement of James Otis that a man’s home is his castle, no longer is valid.

[Scott] No. I don’t think it is, because we are in the position of the peasantry of previous centuries because we have to keep those taxes up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And efforts to limit the tax are treated as a tax upon the poor. I have actually had men say to me, “You want to limit taxes, because you are against the poor. You are against these wonderful social programs to help other people.”

And I have said, “Who keeps you from donating money?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Why don’t you give the government what you feel the government should have?

[Rushdoony] Yes. They want to take it from our pocket and not from theirs.

[Scott] Well, it is ... it is an interesting thing. If the percentage of tax were equal they would still collect unequal amounts, but if you add to the inequality of the amount the inequality of the tax, then you have upended the constitution. You are treating people unequally.

[Rushdoony] John Marshall said the power to tax is the power to destroy. And we are seeing that underscored and today because the power of taxation has become destructive.

[Scott] Well, this is entirely due to congress. It is not due to the agency that congress created. It is due to congress. And congress has long since reached the stage where the people cannot reach it, or, at least, the people are so discouraged at this point that they do not reach it.

There are many offices, many seats in congress, you know, that are now unopposed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...in every election because the people don’t even go to the polls and they don’t have the leaders that can rally them to take them to the polls.

But to go back to the property thing, there... there does seem to be a feeling here today that everyone has a right, for instance, to a home of their own. Now I remember when John call, the represent chairman of Ashland was an assistant to Paul Blazer, the founder, and John bought a home, he announced that he had bought a home. I am sure what he did was put down a payment and signed up with the bank and so forth. There is an awful lot of home owners around here that don’t seem to remember that the bank is sitting there. And in any event Mr. Glazer looked at him and said, “Well, John, you are only 31.” He said, “I was much older than you when I bought a home.”

And I... Mr. Glazer was a little bit surprised that so young a man would be able to buy a home, because it was always the culmination of many years of effort to get a home.

[Rushdoony] Well, it used to be before the war here in California notes were normally five years and one fourth down.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] So you waited a while.

[Scott] Yes, you did.

[Rushdoony] And the age of marriage was later and the young couple usually worked, both of them, for several years, saved up their money to make a down payment on a place and then got married.

[Scott] Sure. The ... the home was... then the family would hold that home for generations.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because that was the family home. And the clan, so to speak, would build from there.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because that was the first big milestone in the fortunes of the family was a place, was a home. And it was all theirs. They would... it wasn’t taxed.

[Rushdoony] Urban redevelopment destroyed enclaves in our big cities of various groups, Irish, Italian, Polish and so on where people lived in a home, their children, their grandchildren, great grandchildren lived there.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And many of these were stone houses.

[Scott] Well, they built around each other.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You bought some land and then if you got ... you got a house that was close to your father’s, close to your grandfather, close to your uncle, whole neighborhoods were dynastic, practically and fairly secure, very happy with the world, very happy with the country. Along come the social engineers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...who have wiped out... they wiped out whole areas of New York. My dad told me that when he first saw New York it was a neighborhood city. He said it was the first place that he saw white men doing manual labor, because he came up from Latin America. And he said it was very brisk and very clean. And he was terribly well impressed. And look at it today.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They... it is not a neighborhood city. It is... the idea of a neighborhood is almost illegal.

[Rushdoony] Well, it used to be—and I remember it very well—that in these cities with an all Italian or all Jewish or all Armenian or all Hungarian neighborhood there would be local newspapers in the language of those people.

[Scott] That its rue.

[Rushdoony] ...delivered from door to door.

[Scott] {?}

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] That is true, but there was no language problem.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Because in most instances, well, there was an area in Texas where German was so common that even trials were in German.’

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But as successful generation grew up, it shifted into English automatically without any particular thought or any particular effort by any outside group.

Now it is almost like walking. You don’t think about it. You get up and you walk. But if the drill sergeant came in here to tell us how to walk, we would have trouble walking. A society can only stand so much control. If it gets beyond a reasonable point it becomes artificial. It becomes difficult. It sows thee seeds of hatred which it claims to be getting rid of.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is where we are trending. There ... there are more crimes committed by blacks against whites in this country by a factor of seven. And the courts have taken no cognizance of it at all. Now that is a very serious thing when one race becomes the target of another. And, of course, you can say that is a discriminatory statement, but it is statement of fact.

[Rushdoony] And it is a fact that because of similar socialistic policies is true in one country after another in Europe as well as here.

[Scott] All right. You have Turks in France.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have black people in Italy. There are between two and three millions that poured in from north Africa. And you have various Asiatic groups that are warring against one another. Tribal war has broken out again in black Africa on a massive scale.

[Rushdoony] And interesting fact in today’s paper indicates that the census bureau is going to classify Asiatics with whites, because they are so successful that they cannot be regarded as a minority.

[Scott] In that case, what is the definition of a minority?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Are we talking about poverty? I mean, there are more women than men in the United States and women are act... officially treated as a minority.

[Rushdoony] It is totally arbitrary. It is a political matter.

This matter of property and freedom is a very grim one because what we have seen in the past 15 years is a steady intrusion into the church precisely in this sphere as well as others. And the predictions by people within the framework of civil government that they have all the rights already over the churches or they believe they do. And, before the decade is over they plan to exercise them.

[Scott] Well, property is really, you know, it was originally intended the constitution would say life, liberty and property. It got side tracked, but property begins, I suppose with the right to be physically safe, your own property, yourself. The right to be physically safe according to Noah Webster is one of our inalienable rights. And a government that doesn't provide it is a government that is failing in its duty.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Then we can move from there to our possessions. Now I understand that burglaries are so common that the police no longer answer in person. They take the information over the phone. They don’t look for fingerprints. They don’t look for signs of the burglar. There used to be burglary squads.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Burglary was at one time considered a very serious felony in this country and I don’t know how many tens of thousands of burglaries are committed. Every once in a while the police set up sting operation and bring in stolen goods and collect a net full of these people, but that is not quite the same.

[Rushdoony] No. Well, the police mostly now write traffic tickets.

[Scott] Well, the police, after all, have to take the fellow into our courts. And in the court the policeman’s word is no better than that of a criminal. What can we say about our courts? And what can we say about the court treatment of property?

Ashland Oil was recently found guilty in a West Virginia court of creating an unhealthy environment by its refinery which is in the neighboring state of Kentucky over four people. None of the four owned any property. They all lived in rental property. They were given ... they were credited with having been damaged somehow, but they had no medical report of any illness, no specific illness. One of them was unemployed. The jury granted them 10 and a half million dollars in punitive damages.

[Rushdoony] Are they going to appeal?

[Scott] Oh, yes. They are going to appeal. But the very fact that such a verdict could be handed down...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that is what our courts are like now. The judges belong in the prison, not on the bench in many instances.

[Scott] The judges are Socialists.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The judges...

[Rushdoony] Hot heads.

[Scott] The judges do not believe in property rights. They believe that you can be guilty of contempt of court, but not contempt of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you are... if ... if an airport decides to... if the powers that be decide to locate an airport where your house is, that is the end of that. We have eminent domain. We also have the withdrawal of property from the people in the sense that whole areas and territories now are being sequestered for, as you once talked about, William the Conqueror’s deer parks.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we are seeing something similar take place. Civil War battle fields. Now what is there about a piece of ground that makes it so important?

[Scott] Nothing.

[Rushdoony] You might say, “Gettysburg, all right,” and one or two others. But battle fields that some people have never heard of.

[Scott] That was a big war. They fought all over the place.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The whole of much of the South can be confiscated in the name of preserving a battlefield.

[Scott] It is hardly a place anywhere that something hasn’t occurred. I remember that cartoon tumble weeds, one of the nicest features was historic trivia marker. It said October the 17th, 1812, nothing happened here.

[Rushdoony] Very good.

[Scott] But this is confiscation of property from the people as a whole.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Where national property is ... is taken out of the ... a developer is a bad word. Imagine, somebody who comes and puts up homes or puts up apartment buildings or factories is considered an enemy of the people.

[Rushdoony] And if a church is declared to be a national or a state landmark the congregation and the denomination lose control over that church. And this is being done regularly.

One prominent church in New York is fighting hard to avoid being put on such a list.

[Scott] Well, they have... I am sure they are going to do something about the collection plate. I am sure they are going to insist that some sort of an automatic collection machine be put in which will keep a regular tape of every dime, quarter dollar and what not that goes into the collection so that they can keep track, to begin with.

As it is, cash transactions are illegal, because the government cannot get a cut out of cash transactions. So transactions must be recorded.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And if you deposit a large amount and large can mean something you have not deposited before, you are in trouble or if you withdraw more than you normally withdraw from your own account then the federal government is notified.

[Scott] Well, the... I don’t really know what they teach in school about property rights. I don’t know whether I have ever said this before on the tapes. You know, it is difficult to remember what we have said.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because we have made so many. But I do remember that the London Spectator had... has this little column, “100 years ago.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And several years back they had 100 years ago a titled lady had some property which she had not used. It was more or less a game park.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And some hungry villagers went in and killed her deer and she had them arrested for poaching. And their defense was that they were unemployed and hungry, which is a very moving defense. But the court said if we make a need into a right we will destroy all the elements of civilization.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Dorothy and I read that with great interest. There was a discernment in that judge’s decision that our courts no longer have.

[Scott] To convert needs into rights...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is what ... exactly what is going on.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A... the need for welfare has been converted into a right to welfare. And the government has taken on this idea of arbitrary. The government needs this. Therefore the government has a right to take it. And there is a confusion here. It ... it may to some extent be traceable to the inaccuracy of the American language. We have reached the point where we ... I think it was Al Capp, the cartoonist who described things—or someone else—as {?} and people spoke the {?} language. Everything was {?} together. And if you listen to the commentators on the air, their use of language is so imprecise it sounds great, but they are using words out of context and twisting the meaning.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we are seeing some strange thing happen here and the idea of property as being in any sense something desirable in the hands of common people is increasingly attacked. Property is somehow a public trust. And you are seeing the right of inheritance increasingly denied. So we have some very great peculiarities. If you inherit something the federal and the state government in some instances, or both, come in and tax you heavily for it. And you inherit the liabilities, very often, without any of the blessings.

A dramatic case of that occurred just a matter of days ago when this man who headed up a good will was faced with a dilemma and spoke about it. His good will client inherited a huge factory which they thought would be a great asset, something they could sell. It was given to them by a business man. It was a polluted factory. It would take 30 million to clean up the property. And he found that by law in receiving that he man had passed all the liabilities on to him and divested himself of them. And now he cannot get rid of that property. The good will in that community has a 30 million dollar liability. This is the kind of thing that is taking place. You are given liabilities with property and the assets are withheld from you.

[Scott] This is what the Bible called the letter that killeth the spirit.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... of the law. The ... Margaret Thatcher took public housing and offered it to the occupants on very easy terms that they could buy. And suddenly the public housing cleaned up, get painted. Things got repaired.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the people bought them and it was theirs. Now we keep putting up public housing projects, but I haven’t seen anybody suggest that they be sold to the occupants.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And yet we are supposed to be the free enterprise country and they are supposed to be the socialistic country.

[Rushdoony] And our public housing disintegrates and we have to tear it down at great cost after having built it. Truett Iglo was the ...

[Scott] That was a famous one.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They had to blow it up finally.

[Rushdoony] Yes. An almost indestructible building. But it had become such a shambles and so disreputable they had to destroy it.

[Scott] There have been attempts to create integrated public housing that have failed, mainly because people who violate the peace and order and tranquility of the place have not been punished by the courts. And we have whole areas in the Bronx. You have seen them in the photographs that look as though a war has taken place and a major war.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And yet those who set fire to those buildings were simply moved into some other building by the courts, by the courts.

[Rushdoony] Well, there was a man here on the west coast in one city who was ... served a notice by the city fathers charging him with all kinds of offenses because there were no fixtures in this housing unit that he owned and was renting to the very poor. And he said there were none there because every time he installed pipes, toilets, sinks, they were torn out overnight and sold by these people. So he said, “You tell me what I can do with his situation.”

[Scott] Well, there was a study I read about landlords in New York, almost all of whom, by the way, were immigrants.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They were immigrants who had worked hard, hard working, highly skilled people generally, skilled working men and women.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...who saved their money and bought an apartment house and who were then so mistreated by the city government that they walked away. Left... to the entire thing as a loss.

[Rushdoony] Most landlords in this country are not Donald Trumps. The overwhelming majority are poor working people who worked to buy an apartment building or a duplex or something of the sort as a source of income for retirement. And they are the ones who are being punished and their property confiscated in every turn.

[Scott] Look at the horror stories that we have been hearing for years from our friends in San Francisco, or at Berkeley, rather.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Phil Spielman.

[Scott] Phil... Phil Spielman. A nightmare of harassment that he went through from the city government of Berkeley which is sitting there under the shadow of what is supposed to be a great university which has turned Berkeley into a slum.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, right now it started all over again for Phil Spielman.

[Scott] It has?

[Rushdoony] Because the lovely home that he has he, I think, has the upper story and his mother now lives, since he is married, below him. And the city has said it is rental unit and therefore subject to control even though they are, I believe, both owners jointly, on the grounds that they will not recognize an owner owned and operated home if more than one family dwells in it, even though they may be relatives, or, in this case, mother and son and daughter-in-law, grandchild.

[Scott] So what does that mean in this situation?

[Rushdoony] Well, it means he has got another long fight on his hands.

[Scott] Berkeley which sends Ron Vallens to congress.’

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... which has a massive housing shortage, which has rent controls and has controls of every conceivable sort.

[Rushdoony] Business has left Berkeley increasingly. The climate there is not congenial to work. The better Negroes have moved out. They cannot take it.’

[Scott] Well, what a commentary on academia.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] it is like one of my friends who worked on the New York Times a few years back and he said something to me about after I left the city how I could live out in some other part. And I said, “Here you are presiding over the greatest sewer in the country telling the rest of us how smart you are.”

[Rushdoony] Well, I think it is interesting that the universities increasingly are surrounded by ghettoes even though the homes are magnificent ones in many instances, old mansions.

[Scott] It used to be a beautiful city.

[Rushdoony] But these universities have helped destroy their own communities by their socialistic policies. And then the chickens come home to roost. They are an island in a sea of crime.

[Scott] It is interesting. I read the New York review of books and I can’t read the New York Times book review anymore. There is a limit to my digestive ability, but I still get the New York review of books and others and I keep looking for any sign that the American liberal left has learned anything from the debacle of eastern Europe and I see not a flicker.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Not a {?}. I can’t see any relevance at all to what they have promoted all these years. And the big thing on property, property of half of Europe was taken away from them by the Russians. How that property is ever going to be sorted out again, of course, boggles the mind. We have an enormous amount of property in the United States which in one form or another has been placed into, you might say, semi public hands. Banks, the banks and all their equity loan business, really own almost all these homes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Only elderly people today who have outlived the mortgage on their own home.

[Rushdoony] An equity loan is a ticket to disaster.

[Scott] The second mortgage.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is all it is. It doubles the payments.

[Rushdoony] And in most instances if you lose it, you are still liable for what you owe.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] So you he no home and you still have ...

[Scott] And you have the debt.

[Rushdoony] ... a mortgage. Yes.

[Scott] And you know that in the 30s the poor people were plucked like chickens by the bankers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The Bank of America really became a giant during the 30s by foreclosure and it wasn’t loans. It is ... there are many groups in a country like ours, an economy like ours who see a depression as an opportunity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I remember one of the old bankers I talked to once from Chicago who said when the fire starts—that is what he called the Depression—when the fire starts cash gets the bargains. Now we are talking about property.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And we are close to another fire.

[Scott] Yes. We see signs of the fire. Yes. And it is a good time to be careful and to build storm shelters.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the Christians who get out of debt and stay out of debt...

[Scott] ...will never regret it.

[Rushdoony] They will never regret it. I recall that the farmers who have had no debt when the Depression hit were like rich men.

[Scott] Of course.

[Rushdoony] They had the food. They could sell what they had for any price and still come out ahead, because in those days taxes were almost non existent. And it ... in that day seemed absurd, but I can recall my uncle having all of us kids in the fields to pick malagas that he was going to sell the winery green one dollar a ton.

[Scott] A ton.

[Rushdoony] One dollar a ton.

[Scott] That... that... that fits the 10 cents a barrel oil.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... that they had in Texas.

[Rushdoony] Now if you had to pay for that labor you couldn’t do it. If you owed money it was futile. You were lost. But if you are out of debt, you are growing your own vegetables...’

[Scott] You were free.

[Rushdoony] ...milking your own cow. Had a chicken, your own eggs. You could take the malagas down to the winery and get a dollar a ton and you had cash that put you ahead.

[Scott] Being out of debt is a very great thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You sleep... you sleep at night. A debtor is a slave. And we are living in a credit economy, very difficult, very difficult, great pressures, great temptations on young people. And also the equality idea, the idea that everyone has a right to the same goods, that everyone has right to a car, a home, this, that and the other thing. You have a right to all these things.

I was once told by a person I was very close to that they had a right to be happy. And ... and that absolutely fixed me so I couldn’t speak for five or six minutes. Because the implication was that somebody else had to make her happy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was someone’s duty to make this woman happy. Well, she is still looking, I think. I am not sure.

[Rushdoony] The Depression for those families who went into it without debt it was a time when even at a dollar a ton they accumulated money. They picked up other farms at bargain prices for their sons or in some instances for the grandchildren. Sure, cash gets the bargain.

And they instilled in their families and some of those families are going strong to this day that premise. You don’t go into debt.

[Scott] Well, now, the government of the United States has forgotten that it was entrusted with the property of the people. It has wasted the substance of the people. It has taken the hard work of the American people since 1945 when it was the richest country on earth, the greatest military power, the most admired country on earth and it has steadily put us into the sink.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It has forgotten the basic elements of property.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think God now is in process of getting our attention. You know the old story of how the farmer with a balking mule took a two by four and whacked it across the head and said, “That is to gets his attention.” Well, I think God is in process of picking up that two by four and we are better off if we pay attention before we feel it across our head.

[Scott] Well, the fires of inflation burned away the Articles of Confederation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The fires of inflation have burned away the Confederate States of America and made it impossible of them to fight to a draw which they could have done if they had been sensible. And the fires of inflation are going to burn away our masters in Washington before they are finished.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And we had better be prepared for the new freedom that is coming and the greater responsibilities.

[Scott] It will be worth all the trouble.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is about over. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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