From the Easy Chair
The Application of the Law
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 76-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161BM120
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BM120, The Application of the Law from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 228, October the first, 1990.
Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a very important subject, the application of the law, because one of our problems today, of course, is that we are not seeing the law applied or we are have a wrong set of laws that are being applied and we don’t really know a good deal of the time what the law is because the courts tell you what the law is rather than the legislators.
Well, with that brief statement, Otto, do you want to make a general introduction to the subject?
[Scott] The application of the law... we are in a state of national confusion, I would say, regarding what is the law. At one time we thought the law was a fixed series of boundaries regarding what we could do, what we could not do. But if we violated the law we were subject to certain penalties and so forth. But I recall talking to the chief legal counsel of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company some years back and he said the idea that the law is a fixed area is a fallacy. He said the law is a process. And he said, “It is my duty as counsel for this corporation to see the trend of that process and to anticipate the decisions of the courts and that is how I advise the management.”
Now I haven’t thought of the law of a process. I always thought of the law as much as I think of the Decalogue, of the 10 Commandments as fixed, not necessarily limited in its implication or significance, but at least firm enough so that we all had an idea of what it is. Now, however, we find ourselves confronted with a law or a set of laws in which property can be confiscated before you are arrested and before you are charged and before you are tried and before you are convicted. Now this is such a startling reversal of anything that as an American I thought was proper under our constitution...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] That I can hardly find a way to describe it, but that is the RICO act.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And this also applies to any charge or any suspicion that the individual might be involved with drugs. Then everything he has and everything his wife has, everything his children have can be confiscated.
[Rushdoony] I meant to bring a clipping, but I misplaced it, of a man who was arrested on a drug charge who was acquitted, but a sizable percentage of his property involving some tens of thousands of dollars was never returned to him and the judge justified that.
[Scott] How could he justify it?
[Rushdoony] Because the judge has become a law.
You mentioned earlier that the ... this attorney told you the law is a process. I think that is a very much abused description of it, because the process that is involved with the law is not a process of changing the meaning of the law, which is what happens today, but instead in the application of the law.
Let me illustrate. I read a book yesterday which dealt with Rochelle, the French port in the 18th century and in the process there was one discussion chapter devoted to it of insurance laws and how the sate stepped into and required the registration of insurance laws. This was a development in the laws of insurance. And the reason for it was this. To protect themselves and to protect all who shipped on their ships insurance became a necessary and a requirement. But then what developed all over France and only at La Rochelle but everywhere was that dishonest ship owners would take out insurance with several different insurers in different places and then it was highly profitable to lose their ship, because thy would collect several times its value. So development in the laws of insurance was to require the registration of every insurance immediately and make it illegal to get multiple insurance on a cargo.
Now in that sense you can speak of law as a valid process. Here is a case of thou shalt not steal.
[Scott] Surely.
[Rushdoony] And an application of it as we see problems developing.
[Scott] Right. Yes.
[Rushdoony] Now that is a legitimate process. But what we have today is something that turns the meaning of the law upside down.
[Scott] Well, we have been fooling around with our laws in the United States for quite a while. The 16th Amendment, the income tax amendment, you were the one who first brought up the point, which I think is a good one, that an amendment is like a codicil to the will. It changes the preceding text. Now we up until the 16th Amendment we were supposed to be equal before law. the law was supposed to treat all citizens equally. The 16th Amendment, if it had applied an income tax of, say, 10 percent against all incomes, would have treated everyone equally and if it had applied a straight 10 percent of all incomes it would have collected more from the rich than from the middle class and from the poor. So the {?} the amount that men paid would have been... would have been different. But the parentage would have been equal.
Instead the income tax made a progressive tax in which the more you earn the more you pay.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So the unequal percentage of income was extracted from citizens. That meant that citizens were equally treated... were treated unequally before law.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now the minute that was applied and ratified and, of course, it called upon envy and jealousy in order to be popular because everyone said, as they say today in the Democratic congress, soak the rich.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, the whole business of equality before law upon which the whole constitution was based was immediately eliminated. Since then—and that was when? 1913. Equality before law has not operated in the American system.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] Neither in the civil courts nor in the criminal courts. And we have gone farther and farther along.
[Rushdoony] We have , in fact, enthroned inequality in the name of equality. For example, in most cities and in most of the United States today and abroad this is true also in a number of countries. The use of weapon or violence by a police officer is punishable unless he is doing it as a last recourse when his life is threatened. As a result, on the 28th of September in a California city an off duty police officer looked up from his cup of coffee when he was sitting in a Denny’s restaurant and saw legs flailing out of car window that was rolled down and two men driving and he immediately chased them. There were two illegal aliens who had picked up this prostitute and then refused to pay her. When she insisted on being paid they stabbed her and threw her body in the back of the car to take her and dump her somewhere apparently.
Well, these men were armed with knives. He was armed with a gun and could not use his gun. And so he had to fight to subdue these two men armed with knives and unable to use his gun. It is a miracle that the prostitute who subsequently died was not joined in death by this police officer. But this is the kind of inequality that prevails.
[Scott] Well, that is regulation prevents him from using a gun unless the other fellow had a gun?
[Rushdoony] That is true in many instances today and I am not saying it is true in every community.
[Scott] Well, of course we have such a welter of community and laws.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the police operate under great restrictions and many areas are not treated I court, I understand, any better than the accused. Their word is treated as equal which means, in effect, inequality.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] On the other hand I notice more and more than policemen no longer are content with shooting somebody in the leg. They empty their gun. That is a cowardly thing to do, but it happens time and time again because the fellow gives some provocation which makes the shooting possible. So they are not content just to shoot, but they want to kill.
Now this may be a... this may be a result of frustration on the part of the police.
[Rushdoony] They can be sued by the man if they don’t kill him.
[Scott] Well this is a pretty bad state of affairs.’
[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.
[Scott] I mean, murder is murder.
[Rushdoony] That is right.
[Scott] Even if it is under the color of law. And it is hardly necessary to empty a gun into most people. Where we really... we get into these things because we cannot say this or that is the general case. We have a whole variety of courts. We have a whole variety of rulings. We can no longer tell the application of the law. Going into court any lawyer will tell you today is a very dangerous thing to do.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... because even the lawyers have no idea of what is going to happen. It is Russian roulette.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Good term for it. Well, I think one of the ugliest aspects of the law today is the RICO amendment and we see that, of course, in the Milliken case. We saw that in a number of cases whereby Giuliani in New York prosecuted people and did a great deal of damage to some innocent people by the use of the RICO amendment.
[Scott] Well...
[Rushdoony] The RICO amendment was used also against operation rescue demonstrators.
[Scott] Yes. They were accused of being racketeers.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] I find it interesting. According to this article in the National Republic...
[Rushdoony] Review.
[Scott] The National Review, yes, world of difference, the RICO act was drafted by a Notre Dame law professor, Robert Blakely who said about Milliken that nobody else made that much money in the history of the country except for Al Capone and in reference to Milliken earning 550 million dollars in the single year 1987 but, said the article, chain store owner Sam Walton earned four billion the same year while the publishing brothers Cy and David Newhouse earned 2.4 billion each and {?} Rupert Murdoch and Roy Hunt, Ray Hunt each added more than one billion to his net worth. And it says that the main difference was that Milliken earned his money from his own activities while the others benefited from appreciated assets.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, now the law professor who I am sure somebody has sent a copy of that law or maybe he will write a letter in talking about it, but the RICO act is, on its face such a arrogant exercise of arbitrary power that I cannot understand how the Supreme Court of the United States can sit there and allow it to remain.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Especially when we hear all this rhetoric about compassion and freedom and rights.
[Rushdoony] Well, in the Wall Street Journal for Wednesday, September 26, 1990, an article on the Milliken case calls attention to the enormous pressures placed on Milliken. And we are told that they indicted Mr. Milliken’s brother Lowell as a hostage. They even sent an FBI agent to pressure Mr. Milliken’s 92 year old grandfather. They twisted RICO to coerce a plea from Drexel Burnham Lambert and testimony from others and so on.
[Scott] Well this... in ordinary life this is called blackmail.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And I think in the National Review article by {?} one of the most grim aspects is the fact that what it... well, what it has to say about the so-called junk bonds. And they point out that less than 10 percent of the junk bonds went to finance the takeovers. Moreover, I am quoting now, “Junk is in the eye of the beholder. Only some 800 companies in the United States now enjoy what is called investment grade ratings. This leaves junk bonds for 99.9 percent of all US companies and 95 percent of companies with revenues of 35 million or more. The politicians may not realize it, but there are many states that have only junk bond grade firms incorporated in them. No minority owned firm qualifies for anything other than junk financing. Mr. Milliken helped raise funds for more than 1000 small firms many of them which have become household names such as MCI Communications, KinderCare and the Turner Broadcasting System and so on.”
[Scott] Well, the whole business ... the whole bond market was given a very heavy blow by the semantic weapon of using the word junk.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now a small town that issues bonds based, of course, on their tax revenues and on bringing in some business which will increase the tax revenues which will then enable them to make the bonds good to pay the dividends and so forth, these are junk bonds. Most of the people in this country who are on pensions are getting those pensions from dividends from bonds invested by the various companies and the whole United States government, for that matter, issues bonds. I don’t know what you call US Government bonds looking at the state of our budget and our balance sheet. I wouldn’t invest in a company that had a balance sheet like our government, but most people think the treasury bonds are diamonds of some sort and that they will never default.
We had the bonds of the State of New York defaulted under Governor Nelson Rockefeller. And the bonds from the State of Washington defaulted and, of course, when a company goes bankrupt the bonds are no good. These individuals who want to nationalize the oil industry maybe the very people whose fathers are getting a pension from oil company bonds.
What we are running into here is economic illiteracy on a high level and we have several things going on. We have the U S district attorneys which Giuliani was and which Giuliani was trying to kill people in order to further his own political career.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now that should be a moral crime.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the National Review article says the man who has probably written more articles critical of Milliken is a man who applied for a job with Milliken and was turned down.
[Scott] He is talking about Ben Stein.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now Ben Stein who wrote one good book The View from Sunset Boulevard.
[Rushdoony] Yes. It was a good book.
[Scott] ... but Ben Stein has done some very sleazy things. He wrote an article against a very famous actress under a false name in a skin magazine which accused her of help driving her husband to suicide. And it took private detectives to find out that he was the actual author and finally cornered he admitted it and she sued him. I am to surprised that he would do a thing like that either.
[Rushdoony] Milliken lives very modestly. He set up a family trust which has given away some 300 million dollars to schools and other charities.
[Scott] He is famous for his philanthropies.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And there was nothing criminal in anything that he did.
[Scott] Well, he was forced to plead guilty to six charges on the pressure that he would be totally stripped of all assets and that they would be vengefully treated in the court and so forth. So he pleaded guilty. However, the judge was a relatively new judge is holding a special hearing. He was due to come up very recently for sentence. He is liable to a sentence of up to 28 years. The prosecution was asking for the full amount. But the general consensus was that the might get as much as five years.
When the prosecution gave the court an enormous volume of charges which they never brought in to the court, which they said showed the context of his operations. In other words, they made charges unofficially after they had made a deal with him and the judge is going to hold a special hearing. The judge is studying those charges and then will call him in for a sentence.
So here we have a situation where a man pleads guilty to a certain set of illegalities and then the court is provided with evidence charging him with many, many more off the record.
[Rushdoony] Well, that sounds very much like Turkish law rather than American law, which tells you how far we have fallen.
[Scott] We don't seem to have any standard at all.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] It is whatever... as you said earlier, it depends on whatever any judge decides.
[Rushdoony] Well....
[Scott] These... these are sultans or pashas.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Milliken has been blamed for the savings and loan crisis and the junk bonds have nothing to do with it.
[Scott] Well, the savings and loan crisis we could go back to... you know, it is possible to go back to Mr. Bush on that. There is a theory floating around to the effect that when Mr. Bush was vice president he went over to Kuwait and to Saudi Arabia and made an arrangement with them on behalf of {?} of the government of the United States that we would protect both of those countries if they put ... kept the price of oil down to a reasonable level, say 15 dollars or so a barrel.
Now at 15, 14 dollars a barrel, discounting for inflation, would put the price of oil almost back where it was before OPEC had its famous embargo.
[Rushdoony] What does it cost to take a barrel out of the ground?
[Scott] Ten cents.
[Rushdoony] Ten cents.
[Scott] Ten cents. And it was four dollars at the time of the embargo started. Well, since the embargo, you know that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have both bought immense parts of American marketing companies, American oil companies. I mean, when people shake their fist at Gulf and Mobil they are really shaking their fist at Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because they own a tremendous amount of them. So they are getting it on both ends.
In any event, by putting the price, keeping the price of oil down, by over producing, according to the OPEC thing, by just putting oil out, this is what got Saddam Hussein so upset with Kuwait because, he said, it was keeping the price of oil down. It had the effect of making the Reagan administration look good. But it also had the unintended side effect of virtually destroying our domestic oil industry.
[Rushdoony] Yes. It put Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi into a depression. Now they had previously spent a lot of money on real estate and so forth when the price of oil was up during the days that OPEC was keeping the production back and most of them expected the price to continue to go up. So they built shopping malls and apartment houses and all the rest of it and then when the price of oil went down, the whole real estate structure of Texas collapsed. It took down Connelly with it. It took {?} with it. It took the Hunt brothers with it. And everybody in New York laughed gleefully. It was just wonderful, but it also took the S and Ls with it.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] This is where the S and L thing came from. It came... it came from government intervention.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And then, of course, once they began to fall, the bank examiners got panicky for fear they would be charged with not having applied the regulations with sufficient vigor and they have been closing down all the rest.
[Rushdoony] And, of course, we will go after some of these little guys, heads of savings and loans who are big compared to us, but very little compared to the bureaucrats in Washington.
[Scott] Well, don’t forget, too, that what assets these savings and loan companies have is being sold at bargain rate to real pirates who have political connections.
[Rushdoony] Yes. What is done with the savings and loan properties and I use that term generally, is that the bad assets are passed on to the tax payers. The good assets are purchased by banks.
[Scott] At bargain rates.
[Rushdoony] At bargain rates. So the tax payer is the loser.
[Scott] The tax payer is the loser. Now the congressmen, of course, are into this up to their ankles but in the meantime there is an aspect to the Milliken situation which I think is very interesting. As you know, there were an awful lot of people who got very upset over the takeovers. Now in an unrestricted market, in a free market place, companies being taken over is not great calamity if it is taken over by better operators and, in any event, if it is weak enough to be taken over, that says an awful lot about the caliber of the management.
But congress gets very upset at any signs of life in the country, any signs of any activity of any sort that the government hasn’t permitted.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They call a hearing. There was one fellow that wanted to call a hearing of the oil companies when the price of gasoline went up six cents a gallon.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, what we do with Milliken should be of concern to everyone, because if they can treat important people like that with so little regard for their rights, what are they going to do with us?
[Scott] Well, this isn’t exactly new. I remember you remember the Insull case.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Samuel Insull. He was a utility magnet. He put together... he probably next to Alva Edison was probably the best man that ever hit the electrical industry I the history of the United States. He took a bunch of small power companies and he knit them together in to an empire which was not simply paper. It was technical as well. And, of course, in his hey day he was a very arrogant man. He used to call the bankers in when he was going to put out a new stock issue and tell each one how much he would allocate to them. So he had a lot of enemies. Incidentally he had been an assistant to Edison.
But when the market fell he couldn’t cover his margin or his company’s margin and he went up against a wall and was in very bad shape. And it was a great scandal. And he was accused of all kinds of crimes and, in fact, he fled the company... the country. And he was brought back under arrest. But in the end, which everyone forgets, he was found innocent of all charges.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] He had never done anything illegal.
[Rushdoony] Now he would not be found innocent.
[Scott] Well, he couldn’t go to court today because he would have been threatened with total ruin under the RICO act.
[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the problems today, of course is the vulnerability of our corporations. I mentioned earlier the case of the insurance companies on Rochelle, France, La Rochelle. In that book one of the things that interested me was the permanence of many of the corporations in France. What destroyed them was the French and Indian War and then the French Revolution. But they had a permanency because they did not have a lot of stock holders. They were family owned. And a very interesting aspect of that was that the families would arrange marriages very carefully because the daughter’s husband or the son’s wife were going to be important to the family corporation. So the women folk had a considerable amount of know how and responsibility, something the Feminists have totally ignored. And the corporations had a great deal of civility. They had controls by the crown going back to Louis XIV that were staggering. You wondered how they could operate. At every turn they were penalized. The state controlled them in every act. And yet because they were family owned corporations and outsiders were not included in any respect, they were able to survive. The modern corporation by having a vast number of people to whom it is responsible is not able to have that log term vision that these corporations in France were able to have.
[Scott] Were actually could have but two things happened. First of all, Mr. Roosevelt in his time reduced the amount of money that a corporation could put aside for future development. It insisted that dividends had to be issued from earnings that ate up most of your earnings. You couldn’t sequester them for the future and that immediate... and then the quarterly profit, the quarterly tax. Between the two things corporations here have to operate on the short run. They cannot operate on the long run.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] If, for instance, they have a couple of quarters in which earnings begin to sag, there is immediately an outcry from the market place and from the shareholders and so forth. You can’t... the worst thing in the world is to cut back a dividend. You are always supposed to increase the dividends and you are always supposed to increase the earnings and it is a rat race.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And then you have something else here. You have the severance of the loyalty from below, from the top to the bottom because in order to meet these insane qualifications it is necessary to keep pruning and cutting back and economizing and doing the various and sundry thing which destroy loyalty and then, of course, when you destroy loyalty in the lower and the middle echelons, you run into the night of the long knives on the top.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, and this book on La Rochelle was a bit technical, but it was very interesting, because one of the things that came out very clearly was this. They were successful and yet you would have to say reading about the regulations and the liabilities they faced they all started with four strikes on them. The families recognized that it was only because of their total dependence on their own resources that they could survive.
La Rochelle was not a good port. It had a very narrow area only a few ships at a time, but the families which were predominantly Huguenot with some few Catholic families also in the same business worked together and there was no religious conflict between them. In fact, a great deal of mutual help they always maintained as the head of their association a Catholic so that the crown wouldn’t get suspicious. But here in a situation where there was a port that could only accommodate a few of their ships at a time where under no reasonable circumstances could you expect a great shipping industry to be built, they did in the face of the tremendous controls by Paris. And it was precisely because there was that full sense of responsibility at a personal loyalty from top to bottom.
[Scott] Yes. Well, that is... that is ... now in addition to the other aspects that I mentioned the biggest problem I think American business has today is in the courts. Again, we are back to the application of law. the courts have allowed the expansion of the use of the tort to bring corporations to civil court for having an industrial accident. Now this is a very primitive thing. I talked to a woman just the other day back at ... in the East whose husband was ... is number one head of a safety squad for a big refinery and, of course, being a safety man he goes to conventions and meetings of other safety men where they talk about methods and so forth. And one of his close friends became safe head of the safety squad at a refinery in Kuwait, up to a year or so ago. And in that refinery there was an industrial accident and one of the workers was killed and this man was put in prison for life. He was given a life sentence in a Kuwaiti prison.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] He was held responsible. Now we are taking people to court. We have now laws that make the chairman of the board responsible for an industrial accident out in the field.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And there is a book. There is a series of books coming out and arguments coming out that managers should be put in prison for long sentences and, of course, you know something else about the civil courts of the United States that if you get into one of them and you are found liable there is no limit to the penalty. The penalty will be everything you have got.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Because you are going up before a blue collar jury. We have now, you know, I think if we ever had draft laws in this country, we should draft people for the jury, because the only people who wind up on the jury are people who have nothing better to do.
[Rushdoony] You said blue collar. One very prominent California lawyer called our juries skid row juries.
[Scott] Skid row juries.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So the...
[Rushdoony] A blue collar man can’t afford...’
[Scott] No. The blue collar man has to work.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the only people who get on the juries are those who don’t have to work and there is a great sense... envy is encouraged in this country and not discouraged. They feel that hit them with everything.
[Rushdoony] I was told within the past month of two men who were preparing excuses. Did you... were you...
[Scott] No.
[Rushdoony] ... about a murder trial so they would not be jurors. Because, they said, we would vote of his death and a judge would overturn it and turn him loose in short order and he would come after us.
[Scott] Oh, really?
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, of course, intimidation of jurors takes place in cities like New York, especially where the mafia is concerned.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Or... or its equivalent. The mafia is not the only mob of its type. You know, there are m any of them across the board. There are Chinese mobs. There is Puerto Rican mobs. There is black mobs. So... but they find out who the jurors are. They try to track down their dwellings. They look and see how many children they have and so forth. And it is a very brave man ... one of the.... one of the biggest gangsters in New York was recently turned loose and there are articles saying that it was because of his presence dazzled the jurors. It wasn’t his presence that dazzled the jurors. It was something a lot more serious.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] In fact, I begin to wonder if the jury system is possible to maintain in this country. And on the other hand we... we cannot rely on the judges.
[Rushdoony] Yes. I was just going to say it is a very ugly situation because the judges are so bad and the jurors are skid row juries.
[Scott] We should really go back to the idea of Christian courts.
[Rushdoony] Yes. The court cases are becoming the despair of judges... or of lawyers, because they go with the most contentious preparation spending unending hours researching the law only to find that it means nothing not the judge. I am involved in one situation now which has gone to the Supreme Court of that state and the judge in the superior court chose to disregard a recent decision of the US Supreme Court after declaring he was going to go strictly by the court. But they are totally arbitrary.
[Scott] Well, the... it is a breakdown of justice.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the whole idea of justice. We have these games that go on on television. I attended one in San Diego before I moved away, ethics in journalism or something of that sort. I have forgotten now what it was. And they had various professors and they had various people from the press in which they set up hypothetical situations and then would ask you how you would behave. This is the case ... case system which Harvard introduced into the school of law so that I talked... listened to one young lawyer here in the state of California not too long ago who said that he received one week on the Constitution. And the rest was all on court decisions. One week on the Constitution. And actually lawyers and judges will laugh if you even mention the Constitution.
[Rushdoony] Oh, they forbid mention of it in some state and federal courts. They only go in terms of court decisions.
[Scott] I think the most outrageous thing I ever read was this female judge in San Diego who was having these right to life {?} for trespass and who forbid the lawyer to use certain words such as murder, motherhood, birth and various and sundry other things and actually found the lawyer in contempt for forgetting himself and using one such word in his defense.
Now...
[Rushdoony] And there is no overruling in most cases of such judges because all the judges want the freedom to be arbitrary.
[Scott] Well, you know what will happen in the long run. The judges will be hanged.
[Rushdoony] Well, meanwhile they are very secure because the average courtroom is empty. They can be outrageous. If occasionally a periodical reports it there are not many who will read the periodical. The one thing that does make judges nervous which I have seen in a few trials is if the courtroom is crowded and there are a lot of people outside. This normally happens only with very sensational murder trials or in a few cases with Christian school or home school trials. But even that is becoming rare.
[Scott] Well, we have some surprises. Imelda Marcos as found not guilty.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And the financier who was charged with her was similarly found not guilty. And, of course, the whole idea of putting somebody like Imelda Marcos on trial seems strange to me, because we first insisted that we were the country that offered her refuge.
[Rushdoony] I have a book I picked up recently, happily at a marked down price, but it was about the heroism of four men who were in charge of kidnapping the Marcos from the Philippines to Hawaii for the American government.
[Scott] Really?
[Rushdoony] Yes. Presented as great heroes.
[Scott] To kidnap them.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, we have also talking about the application of the law, the United States government has recently said it has followed the path of Israel that any offence against any American anywhere would be considered ... would enable us to kidnap that person, bring them here and put them on trial. Now Israel was the only other country that ever did that.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So we have followed that path. Suppose other countries followed the same path. Then what happens to the concept of sovereignty and international law?
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Who would be safe anywhere? If the Irish decided to kill the English here or kidnap them from here and take them back to Ireland and try them there, or whatever...
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we feel we are justified in doing that to someone in Mexico.
[Scott] We did.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] We have become an imperial power, in other words. But the strange thing about it is that we have become imperially minded as our power has declined. It is almost like a fellow who loses his money and still wants to behave like a millionaire.
[Rushdoony] Yes. I have seen that. In fact, one of the saddest examples of that was a very, very successful man who in his late 50s threw his own folly lost everything and was absolutely useless after that, because although he had exceptional abilities he could not work with anyone because he had delusions of grandeur. He should be president. And what corporation was going to hire him to replace their chief executive officer?
And as a result, he had to live off of his mother, an elderly woman.
[Scott] Well, let’s go back to this business of the breakdown of the courts which is what we are really talking about.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The breakdown of the system of law. It introduces a system of pressure and blackmail. We have district attorneys and United States attorneys who actually behave like Sioux Indian chiefs. They want scalps.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] If they get somebody...
[Rushdoony] Good analogy.
[Scott] ...into their head that they want to ruin whoever they can get... prove anything on and so forth.
[Rushdoony] They are trying to be media personalities. They want to be in the media for outrageous statements they make against Milliken or anybody else.
[Scott] Well, look at Ira Reinhardt down in Los Angeles. He has the Mc Martin school trial on. It was the longest and most expensive trial in the history of the United States.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And he actually brought one of the defendants back to try him a second time.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And I see him standing before the microphone looking as though he tied his own shoelaces, but he is obviously a lunatic.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] By any rational standard. Well, what is in... what is... what is ahead? When the government loses the respect of the people, when a government loses its way, so to speak, it loses coherence. It loses a sense of justice. Governments, as the crime rise in crime in any country, a rise in the lack of fiscal safety is the sign of a decline of the government. This is not a sign of a strong government or even a tyrannical government.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It is a sign of weak and whimsical government.
[Rushdoony] Theme verse of the book of Judges in the Bible is, “In those days there was no king in Israel.” That is, God was not the king. “And every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
That is what is happening today. I mentioned on another occasion, I think, more than once, the lawyer who told me with some disgust and despair. He said, “I don’t know what the law is until I go to court,” because it has become so arbitrary. And when you have this, it is the prelude to anarchy.
[Scott] Well, then you have the reign of terror.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And in every revolution the breakdown of justice, the breakdown of the system of law has led to the rise of the people’s courts. In other words, to terror.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now these... our governors, our rulers, are living on tradition. They have not been able to do anything about the serial murders. They have not been able to do anything about the drug lords. They have not been able to do anything about all kinds of societal problems, unsafe streets, unsafe parks, unsafe parades, unsafe speeches and so forth. So, of course, when the crisis comes and it is never a question of if a crisis comes. It is always a question of when the crisis comes because there is always a crisis.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] When the crisis comes this house of cards is going to fall.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have today on university campuses even though overturned by the courts, universities attempting to forbid certain types of speech.
[Scott] Yes. Reason magazine had an article that it was headlined as the ACLU selling out.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The ACLU which made its name for defending the rights of free speech has now joined university administrators in saying that free speech should not be allowed on the campus.
[Rushdoony] There are some devastating accounts of that in the current chronicles of what the universities are doing in the way of framing laws for the university which deny free speech to anyone they feel should not have it.
[Scott] Yes. Free speech is dangerous. Free speech may hurt somebody’s feelings.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Free speech is too good for you.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Free speech may be blasphemous to certain liberal shibboleths.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] But, of course, what we are talking about is a pre revolutionary period.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now the people of the United States are long suffering, but I remember—and so do you—the country that I knew was a very violent country and this is one of the most violent of all industrial advance societies. This is a very tough country. The people who are in charge have forgotten how tough the United States can be. They don't believe it. They haven’t seen it. I mean we have had this boon from the 50s to 90. That is a long time.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] That is a generation and a half. So we have rulers now who don’t remember when this... when things were tough in this country and they don’t remember when the people were tough. But if you shut off free speech you shut off the feeling that justice is available, you shut off the feeling that you are safe when you listen to people telling you that despite all of these horrible murders, you shouldn’t have a gun. You know something is going to explode eventually.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the Bible tells us where there is no vision, that is, no vision of the law. That this what the Hebrew text indicates, the people perish. And this is why we are perishing.
Robinson Jeffers was...
[Scott] A poet.
[Rushdoony] The poet, yes, was an Atheist, but he had a Calvinistic hangover. His father had been an old fashioned Presbyterian minister and he saw the direction of what was taking place in this country and he wrote a poem which in the 20s and 30s occasioned nothing but distaste on the part of those who read it, but it was an unforgettable one. And it began, “Shine, perishing republic.” And he spoke of the fact that what we were seeing beginning in the United States now was the light, the phosphorescence of decay. I think he was right.
[Scott] I think he was, too.
[Rushdoony] And so it is now time for Reconstruction.
[Scott] I think so, too. I think that people who are lost, people who are searching, people who see all the old landmarks vanishing, they see the evil prosper and the good pursued. I started to say before, this government can go after all the people who try to obey the law, everyone who puts in their income tax, everyone who pays their bills. It is only the outlaws, the murderers, the horrible people they can’t seem to find.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] You never hear of any of these drug people being brought up on income tax evasion charges.
[Rushdoony] Well, they feel the hot breath of Christian Reconstruction. That is why we are constantly criticized, two pages in the equivalent of Time magazine in Canada attacking us with my picture in it.
[Scott] Was it a good picture?
[Rushdoony] It was a good picture, yes. That was the only good thing about the two pages. But this is what is happening. They are dying and we are showing signs of life and they don’t like it.
Well, our time is up. 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.