From the Easy Chair

Contracts & Licenses

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 160-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DE200

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DE200, Contracts and Licenses, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 310, March the second, 1994.

Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will be discussing now contracts and licenses. Both are important areas of modern life. Both are areas where we are seeing a great deal of lawlessness, first, with regard to contracts. The validity of contracts is no longer respected and maintained by the courts. When they sit fit, they set aside contracts as does Washington, DC.

On the other hand, licenses have become an area of increasing importance to the state so that no matter what you do today it is likely that you will be licensed. If you are a beautician, a landscape gardener, if you have a cleaning service, you name it. In one sphere after another licensing is required and examinations before you can be licensed so that licensing is a powerful means whereby the state controls a great many areas of life and also collects a great deal of money in the form of licenses and renewals.

Licenses are own being used also to control areas of public concern in a rather lawless way. For example, we have all kinds of rules about timber cutting, rules about the spotted owl and how its habitat cannot be disturbed and so on and on. And yet in spite of this a certain amount of cutting is still legal.

Well, what is now being done is that loggers who have been logging for most of their life now must suddenly get a license. We have an example right here in one of the men who comes to our services. He must now get a contractor’s license to be a logger.

Now he is able, because I have seen him do it, take a tree with a lot of trees around that he doesn't want that tree to hit as it goes down and make it fall right between and delineate within inches where it will fall. That takes a great deal of skill and ability, but the license that is now required of loggers—at least in California, no doubt this will happen elsewhere—is a contractor’s license of building houses. Now what does a logger have to do with building houses? It is only a way of eliminating a large number of loggers.

The news tonight spoke of a logging town north of here where the regulations are shutting it down. The loggers are not going to be able to go on logging. They cannot get licenses and the town will be virtually wiped out. And it has been there for generations. The tree cutting has been judicious. It has allowed for second growth.

So licensure has become a means of ungodly control over peoples.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas.

[ Murray ] I was thinking that... that the logic behind the ... I don’t want to get off on the environment... the environmentalist movement, but in regard to trees it is that trees get old and die and if you don't cut them down they become absolutely useless. They are not even any good for firewood after they lay on the ground for a while and they are absolutely no good for timber when they lay on the ground of a while.

The ... the licensing thing has had some interesting twists and turns in my area of endeavor in electronics. The federal government tried to license citizens band operators and there were so many of them and they were so lawless and it became obvious... I mean it just pointed out the absolute futility of the government trying to ... to regulate them that the government, after a period of about 20 years totally gave up and now require no license of the operation of the citizen’s band transmitter, because it was simply unworkable. It overloaded their facilities to the ... beyond the breaking point.

But they still continue to license amateur radio operators because there is not as many of them and they can still collect a fairly sizable fee from them. So if the enterprise gets big enough and they can’t handle it, they give up on it as far as trying to collect any fees.

Broadcast stations, commercial broadcast stations at one time, television stations in various markets were being charged 50,000 dollars for a license to ... to operate a broadcast transmitter. They went into federal court and sued the U S government on the basis that they were charging way beyond the actual cost of issuing the license. And the court ruled in their favor so that after hat all license fees were eliminated for a period of about 20 years.

Now recently they have started back up again in very modest amounts for both broadcast stations and amateur radio licensees. But that is about probably the last time that we will see that happen that the courts would rule that the government cannot charge a fee for a license beyond the actual cost of administrating that license of the purpose of simply regulating the activity to comply with rules that in... in... in essence traffic rules so that the service stays orderly.

[ Scott ] Walter Williams the economist at Mason University wrote a book a few years back called The State Against Blacks in which he said that the license laws were used for an awfully long time to introduce and to expand Jim Crow, restricting the entry of black workers and entrepreneurs into various areas. And he brought up the taxi cab medallion in the metropolitan cities. In New York City a medallion is worth an incredible amount of money, 100,000 dollars or something like that. And in order to obtain and drive a cab with a legitimate medallion on it you have to have that kind of money. So, of course, they have gypsy cabs which are against the law, because they are not licensed. And they are allowed because they pay off the police. There is a shakedown involved and they have to probably pay off everybody that approaches them.

And we could expand this into the whole license thing. Licensing ... license... everybody has to b licensed. You hear every so often one of our... one of the members of our goodness party which our largest party, protesting against an unlicensed and unregulated activity which is described as a great menace to the nation.

[ M Rushdoony ] {?} I read an article in an old encyclopedia, just dates... just after the war. And it was interesting to see the change in law from encyclopedia that is just a little bit older than ... than I am. It .... it said that the judicial meaning of a contract was a bargain or agreement, but that it was beginning to become now only an agreement enforceable by law so... and now today oral agreements are virtually worthless in a court of law. It is only something that can be enforced in a court of law.

But there is... the article said that traditionally the government responsibility to provide for the peace and to ensure personal rights and property rights were...were the only rights superior to the rights of contract and the importance of the contract and... which makes sense because the rights for free people to engage in... in free market activities depend upon the right to engage in... in voluntary agreements.

But in their discussion of the ... the Constitution’s guarantee of ... that no state could make a law infringing on private contracts they listed some things that are now ... have passed by the boards in which the government could not interfere with private contracts. And all these various things have now pretty much passed by the boards. It gave the example that the government could not establish the size of a loaf of bread, for instance, because the baker and seller could agree on the size of a loaf of bread and the government could not do anything to interfere with the rights to... to such an agreement.

And after reading all these things it seems now so outdated, 40, 45 years later they said that there was... there was a... two different views of contracts, one that it was necessary for freedom of the market place and that was a ... that was a matter of freedom. And then second was that it was a matter of protecting weaker individuals versus more powerful individuals. And... and there presumably the government had the right to step in and interfere with the rights of contract. And it shows how far we have gone in that the government now considers that we are all weak and that we have to be protected. And therefore they must pass laws and regulations to protect us in every area. We can’t even agree to something. .

Something we were talking about the other day is you are limited in your rights to who you hire to do a job if your house needs repair. If you... a man doesn’t have a contractor’s license then he can’t agree to do it for a certain amount. He can’t build a room onto your house for a certain amount. He can only work for an hourly wage, materials and an hourly wage if he is not a licensed contractor.

So the government interferes... doesn’t... it is no longer a matter of freedom. It is a government ... it is a matter of licensure and regulation. So the whole area of contracts is now turned to one of government control rather than an area of freedom.

[ Murray ] Well most young people would probably be surprised today to find that most business transactions were carried on by verbal contract.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It was done on a handshake.

[ Scott ] They still are.

[ Murray ] A man’s word is his bond. I mean your... your credit worthiness was based on your personal integrity and that is it.

[ M Rushdoony ] I heard a seminar on a ... by an... an attorney at a Christian school convention telling you how to avoid the legal trap about problems with contracts. And he said that many provisions if they are very, very specific about if you don't do this than this is null and void, if they are not close to your signature, very often a judge will deem them to be non binding.

[ Murray ] How far... how many inches away?

[ M Rushdoony ] But even if it is in writing or if the print is too small or if the contract is too long, longer than the judge deems necessary he will exclude it.

[ Murray ] How about the... something that is new to our society, I guess. I ... I don’t know of any historical precedent for it is prenuptial contracts.

[ Scott ] Oh, they are pretty old.

[ Murray ] Where the assets are ... are kept apart, kept separate that were accumulated prior to the marriage.

[ Scott ] Very old.

[ Murray ] Is it?

[ Scott ] Yeah. Almost ancient.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Mark, you touched on a key aspect in the whole matter of contracts. Contracts represented the people’s lawmaking power. When you had the freedom to make a contract with someone else without interference from the state, the two of you created a law that would bind each of you. Or if you did it orally that was law. It meant when contracts were valid between persons and the state did not interfere or feel that it had a right to reassess the contract or judge the validity of it, that a great deal of practical law was in the hands of the people.

Well, when you take away the right of contract oral or written from the people and allow the courts to intervene, then you have destroyed freedom. For example, it was not too long ago that—and it still exists—but it is rapidly disappearing—in a number of professions there would be a kind of appellate board so that if there were a dispute between these particular types of workers or traders, the appeal went to this board. The civil courts had nothing to do with it. It was totally determined very quickly, very efficiently, very effectively by the group itself. That was very important, because it, in effect said, “Here is an area where the state cannot intervene.”

[ Scott ] Well, that was part of the guild rules that were set up in the Middle Ages when we had free cities and when the various guilds had certain inalienable rights and they took care of their own disputes and contracts, working conditions and so forth. I think—and I am not sure, because I haven’t actually researched the area—but it seems to me that the great demolition of the right of contract in the United States was started by Mr. Roosevelt seize the gold, because that invalidated, according to the Supreme Court, all contracts drawn up with payments I gold. The court of the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the president could alter the constitutional currency and that every contract written in gold was no longer valid and was automatically transferred into dollars.

Later on, under the same president, we drew up war time contracts and cost plus contracts on war work. And that was presumably to prevent profiteering. There had been a series of hearings on the profits made by various industries during World War I and it was labeled retroactively as excessive. So World War II there was a great attention paid to limiting the profits, war time profits.

As soon as the war was over... Now in the course of the war it was a very interesting war period because a great many people worked themselves almost to death. Your father being one of them, Doug. Everyone worked... worked their heart out during the war because it was a popular war, one of the few popular wars we had. After the war a whole bunch of new accountants, new young governmental accountants poured into every industry and office that had a contract during the war and renegotiated the terms of the contract retroactively and decided that the 10 plus, the 10 percent profit was too much, arbitrarily. It was valid. They were ... they were legally followed and so forth, but it was still too much for them to have. In some cases, I was told, the owners or the proprietors of the business or the managers of the business had already stamped most of the... much of the money or committed the money to post war time purchases so that in order to give the money back it was a real burden.

Well, that, of course, fundamentally destroyed... a government which makes contracts with its citizens and then breaks the contract, is a dishonorable government. And the demolition of contracts since then has been precipitous because now we are going on torts and liabilities irrespective of contracts, even when a company will have a valid contract saying we give you this under these conditions only. They can be sued and the courts and the juries will find them guilty of some sort of violation.

[ Murray ] I think the all time great verbal contract that was broken was read my lips.

[ Scott ] Well, that...

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] That... that cost him the presidency.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, there is an important violation of contract in English history which is now forgotten. One rarely finds a mention of it, but it cost the king his head, Charles I. The monarchs of England—and some of them were far from being as good as they should have been—and at least one debased the coinage, but the gold smiths stored their gold I the tower of London and the crown did not touch that gold. It was not theirs. The tower of London was a royal center. It protected the wealth of the gold smiths. And that was held to be a matter of honor.

Charles I seized that gold and it destroyed his credibility with the people. It led ultimately not only to the civil war, but to his beheading. He violated a contract and yet you can read biographies of Charles I and this fact is never mentioned.

[ Scott ] Well, he has been made a saint.

[ Rushdoony ] Of course. You have ...

[ Murray ] That is... well, if you went back to the monarchy, you know.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You have actually a day for ...

[ Scott ] He is… he is... is... an Episcopal saint.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You have a day in January, I think the 26th or there abouts in which prayers are offered for the blessed King Charles. But also it pointed to something that was going to be from there on out a habit.

[ Scott ] of the...

[ Rushdoony ] Of governments.

[ Scott ] Yes, of seizing the assets of the people.

[ Rushdoony ] So they hardly are going to be prone to calling attention to that as an offense so that an important part of English history in the 17th century and the life of King Charles I has dropped out of sight.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true, but the whole question of contracts here in the United States has dropped out of sight.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Contracts... nothing that the citizens say... and we have to, I think, expand our definition of the citizen. Citizens who are working together in a commercial enterprise are still citizens. They are always referred to as a special interest. Woodrow Wilson used to call them selfish interests as though ... as though a man wasn’t supposed to be interested in his own affairs.

[ Murray ] Well, it is part of the demonizing process. It is an instrument that liberals use to get what they want.

[ Rushdoony ] Franklin Roosevelt’s violation of contract is not mentioned.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And subsequent presidents countenancing the violation of contracts with the Arab oil states, with oil companies here and in Europe, that is not mentioned. It is taken for granted that that was some kind of act of nobility on the part of our government.

[ Scott ] Well, they pulled the rug out from under the oil companies that had contracts with the oil producing countries and allowed the oil producing countries to escalate their taxes, their price and so forth at will.

Now when the English had an empire if a local authority violated the contract with an English firm, they would send in the gunboats. In fact, they sent battleships down to Venezuela under Victoria and our president ordered them out of the Caribbean and Victoria painted the map of Venezuela black, because they did retreat on that occasion.

Now we never understood that in order to have international respect we had to back up the sanctity of contracts, because we didn’t believe in the sanctity of contracts. And, of course, if you don’t believe in a contract, in keeping a contract, why then you have, in effect, no honor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And the violation of the contracts was done in the name of international morality.

[ Scott ] Yes. Being good to the Arabs.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And yet the Arabs who when you and I were young, Otto, before oil was developed there, were poor people walking behind their camels, most of them going blind from trachoma before they were even middle aged. And the oil companies went in there. They changed the aspect of the country. They eliminated diseases that had been there for centuries.

[ Scott ] Yes. They had to build whole... whole towns.

[ Rushdoony ] And they created hospitals, schools, a host of things that revolutionized the Arab countries. And yet we vindicated those peoples and gave them a justification for ingratitude. The work of the oil companies the world over in alleviating poverty and eliminating a number of diseases was phenomenal. Very few people, for example, are aware of the fact that the Rockefellers had teams of doctors going to all corners of the world to see what kind of healing they could effect, how they could improve the quality of life. But that story is ignored.

[ Scott ] Well, it is denied. We discovered oil, created the oil industry in the United States, changed the world. That discovery changed the world. It energized the world. It made the internal combustion engine possible and so forth.

I just saw a movie the other night in which the oil companies and the oil refinery were the evil environmental polluters of the pristine Alaskan wilderness.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] And at the end of the movie the hero of the movie who was playing superman in another guise, gave an impassioned speech about the fact that all the corruption of the earth is the result of big business and an evil government.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think I would agree with someone who disliked a particular oil man. I think the Rockefellers with their championing of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches did a lot of harm to Christianity. On the other hand, if you want to look at the facts honestly, you would have to say, first, that the greatest missionary agency in all of history in not only converting people, but bringing health, education and more to the far corners of the earth have been Christian missions. But after that you would have to say it is the oil companies, not on the same grand level, but in a very limited time they have done remarkable work the world over. And no one gives them credit for that.

[ Scott ] Well, our ... our great prosperity came from cheap energy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We got oil here cheaper... the oil companies treated the United States people very well. They kept the price of oil in this country at rock bottom while it was much more expensive in other parts of the world. The countries that didn’t have oil didn’t share in the third technological revolution and this is what held ... really created much of the third world is that it didn't have access to the oil which would have enabled it to industrialize sooner. The ... we have now moved into another level, another stage on technology where you might say electrification and the new instruments are considered the source of all our technology. But oil is still the basis. And probably will be the basis for another couple of hundred years because, actually, the world is swimming in oil. There is lots of undeveloped areas.

But the whole story of what industry has meant to civilization and ... and to the world today extending life spans and so forth, I don’t believe that any longer taught. We are taught Environmentalism. We are taught that industry pollutes. We are not taught that most pollution is where there is no industry. When I was in grade school in the sixth grade, or actually the fourth grade, I remember, which was, what? 1928, maybe? Or somewhere around there. We had to write compositions or themes. We called them compositions then on what Harvey Firestone and Edison and other men produced.

Well, the activities of our industrialists and inventors was something that we were once very proud of. They used to talk about the fact that the average man, which is a term that was used then, once released from the binds of your... proved by his inventiveness and energy and diligence what was possible for the human race. We were admired around the world for this.

Rush mentioned geography in the ... in the interim here. I think what you were saying, Doug, was very interesting about ...

[ Murray ] Well, learning geography at a young age was very beneficial. I started out in amateur radio at 12 years old and by the time I got into high school I had acquired a great deal of familiarity with geography because a lot of amateur radio activity was involved in talking to people in foreign countries. But something I wanted to ask you, Otto, regarding the contract thing. Now we have just had a ... I mean everybody assumes that the Constitution is a contract between the people and their government. We have just had a... an example of retroactive tax increases in violation of the ex post facto law rule in the Constitution and then Roosevelt apparently created money, outlawed gold and forced ... forced people to take paper money and had to create money himself by his own act which was usurping the power of Congress. Was that the.... the watershed event? Were there any prior instances of ex post facto laws being put through by the executive branch without any conflict with the Supreme Court?

[ Scott ] Well, the ... the amendments to the Constitution that were enacted after the Civil War ended altered the nature of the Constitution. Before the war certain acts of Congress, certain amendments were laid down and said Congress shall not or the government shall not introduce ... interfere, for instance, with the freedom of speech and so forth and so on. After the war they said the government shall and enact appropriate legislation. They enacted a ... a... an area where the government could act via what they called enabling legislation.

Now this changed a government of limitations to a government of operations. And one would say that retroactively that very lawyerly sort of insertion enabled the government to change the Constitution retroactively without saying anything about it.

[ Murray ] Who generated this change, the executive branch or Congress?

[ Scott ] No, Congress did. It was done by the Abolitionist Congress of 1867 and eight and nine. The ... they call them Radical Republicans now because the name Abolitionist is a sacred name in conventional American history and they don’t want to have it linked to the terrible tyrannical acts that the post Civil War Congress enacted. It was that period that Congress assumed control of the whole government.

[ Rushdoony ] We are now being told by the newer historians that that was the great era of advance until recent years and that all the talk about the bad Congress of those years and the bad years of the occupation of the South are myths.

[ Scott ] Myths.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The occupation was a myth?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they don’t talk about the occupation.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] They talk about the...

[ Scott ] The reconstruction.

[ Rushdoony ] The... yes.

[ Scott ] They have a nice word for it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Liberals can come up with terms that will convince you that stumbling over a skunk was a good experience.

[ Murray ] Well, I hate to tell you that, well, Khrushchev, I will... I will... I will gentrify the... Khrushchev’s comment about bureaucrats. He said they could make bullets out of feces.

[ Murray ] Did you hear that comment by the alderman in Chicago concerning Rostenkowski?

[ Scott ] No.

[ Murray ] He said that we want somebody that can deliver the pork. We don’t want a freshman congressman who can’t find his rear end with both hands.

[ Scott ] Well, the...

[ Murray ] Talk about arrogance.

[ Scott ] Chicago used to be a synonym for a city... a godless, terrible, awful city. I remember when we were in Rio that the ordinary people used to say, “Oh, you are from America.” And they would stop and look at you as though you had come from Mars. And then they would ask you: Have you been to Chicago? Chicago had a reputation around the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I used to correspond with boys in my days in grade school who were in Africa, in Europe, in Britain and it was amazing the ideas that they had about the United States, everything from Chicago west was an area where people were shooting at each other and killing each other. Of course, the death rate then is lower than anything you can see in any big city now. And also they assumed that out in California it had to be a lot worse than Chicago, because we had wild Indians roaming around scalping people.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Did you encounter that...

[ Scott ] No, I didn’t...

[ Rushdoony ] ...in South America about the wild Indians?

[ Scott ] No. I didn’t get much on the Indians. It was mainly Chicago. The idea was that everyone in Chicago was shooting somebody else.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the really tough subjects in grade school in those days was geography.

[ Scott ] Yes, it was.

[ Rushdoony ] You had to know specifically a great deal about every country in the world.

[ Scott ] Their natural resources, their productivity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Their ... what they exported and imported.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We I those days had to do things like having a blank map of the United States and filling in the name of every state and the state capital. We had to be able to do that with Europe and Asia and Africa and that was just the beginning. It was amazing how much content there was to geography then. And I recent years only two countries have had any solid teaching in geometry, the USSR and Canada.

[ Murray ] Well, geography, I think, is... was considered many years ago as part of the primary training for going into business. If you were going to deal in international commerce you certainly had to know what was going on in the world.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true. Also as I look back on it, there were certain deficiencies. We weren’t taught much in ethnic and racial terms, which I see now as a deficiency. I was talking to somebody recently about Mexico. Yes. A friend of mine who has a foster child who is Mexican of origin who is running into inexplicable to her reactions to what she considers average behavior and instruction.

And I said, “Well, you have to remember that 90 percent of the population of Mexico is Indian and not only Indian, but from a different tribe.” The tribes are not the same. You just recently have been seeing in the paper about {?} Indians who have had their own language all these centuries who do not speak Spanish and who do not get along with the rest of Mexico.

Now the Spaniards discovered from ... from the Cortez onward that some of the Indians were very docile and some of them were very fierce and there was a ... were many variations in between. So her we have a country that is right next door to us with dozens of different languages and peoples of whom we lump them all together as... as just Mexican. So no wonder we can’t understand South Africa with its 13 different nations or 15, however you want to count it. Or, for that matter, the literally thousands of different languages in the continent of Africa and I think in this inability to realize the diversity of the world, diverts us from reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I think it has been a major problem as you said in understanding some of these countries and why very foolish solutions are found by the international community. The attempt by the UN and other groups to force a solution on South Africa, which is totally irrational and unrealistic is an example of that. And you can take every African state and call attention to the irrationality that puts hostile peoples together and creates a situation of tyranny.

[ Scott ] Well, the Americans are particularly prone to this, because we are composed of many different peoples from different parts of the universe. What we forget is that up until recently these people were not brought in as a group. They were... they came individually and they came voluntarily.

Now there is a lot of difference between a voluntarily immigrant from another apart of the world and whole groups of people who have been forced into juxtaposition with another group.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the ... the idea that has prevailed since World War II is that these third world countries should be given their independence in terms of certain ideas that come out of the world of Rousseau and the social contract theory and this totally overlooks the tribal characteristic of these peoples so that you have a group of educated peoples, for example, in Africa, sitting up at the top who have no relationship to the live of the diverse peoples under them. And they can only rule them by tyranny, because nothing else will hold these people together. And the social contract is an artificial contract. It is a contract imagined by rationalists, scholars, philosophers that has no relationship to reality. And the modern state is a kind of artificial contract.

[ Murray ] Yes, it is. It is a construct.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] More than a contract. It is a construct and there is here a denial of the differences between people. I was... my dad taught me to ... a knowledge of the differences is crucial. Now we have different names because we are different persons. And we can’t ... otherwise we might as well all call ourselves John Smith. And we are not all alike and some of our attitudes are inherently different. Not necessarily a matter of education or, for that matter environment.

[ Murray ] That is evident on government forms. They never give you enough space to put in your full name yet they demand your full name.

[ Scott ] Well, that is... that is part of torture... that is torture. You know, we run into that all the time.

[ Rushdoony ] There is another very important aspect to the subject of contracts and that is Constitutionalism. A constitution is contract.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] In the United States it is a contract between the states even though since 1860 we don’t like to talk about that because we have, in effect, been in process of abolishing the state.

Now Constitutionalism, the world over, is virtually dead today. It is a dead letter. And it is because Constitutionalism presupposes a faith that says a man’s word has to be his bond. It presupposes a biblical concept. It presupposes a governing law.

Now if you do not believe there is a law above and over all men and nations, then you are going to treat any law that is subordinate to that and which is a governing factor over a people as really a trifling matter.

The Constitution of the U S requires an oath of office. Now at that time an oath was a very fearful fact and the oath of office required of the president and all subordinate officials invoked all the judgments of God’s law as set forth in Deuteronomy 28 for faithlessness so that to take an oath and not to keep it was to invoke a fearful judgment upon yourself and those people believed in the God of the Bible.

Well, when you don't have that faith in the people at large you have abolished the Bible from the state schools, how can you expect Constitutionalism to survive, because if there be no higher law there can be no subordinate law.

[ Scott ] Well, there is... if there is no sense of honor there is no word. In... incidentally, business still operates on... on verbal contracts. I mean you have a verbal contract with your lawyer when you hire him. When you buy a carload of oil you do a verbal contract over the phone. And when you come to an agreement with somebody else and I have... I have had contracts with corporations in which I come to an agreement with them conversationally and then a lawyer draws it up in terms that neither one of us can read. But we don’t really pay much attention to that. We pay most attention to the agreement that we have privately made.

[ Rushdoony ] Incidentally, there is a very important forthcoming book, I believe, to be published by the University of North Carolina press, a very good friend and a Chalcedon supporter, Jud {?}. Very...

[ Scott ] I think she wrote a review of one of my books once.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Very nice... very nice review.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, she did.

[ Scott ] I remember. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] You have got a good memory. That was almost 20 years ago, I believe.

[ Scott ] Well, I have forgotten how long ago, but I remember the name. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. She is a professor of history and...

[ Scott ] She was a student then, I think.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Yeah Well, I have a turkey memory.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] I remember trivia of most things.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, her book on honor is ...

[ Scott ] Is that what she is going to write on?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, on honor in certain areas of the South, the concept of it, its impact on society.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And that is unusual because ...

[ Scott ] It is a subject that has always intrigued me.

[ Rushdoony ] And it is a subject that is almost totally neglected in our time.

[ Scott ] Well, you can see why.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You can see the results if it is neglect.

[ Rushdoony ] Honor was a form of personal contract.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Honor doesn't seem to survive...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...in diverse cultures, because honor seems to well up within a homogeneous group. You know, the Japanese are very honor bound.

[ Scott ] There is a difference of the concept between each group. The Japanese idea of honor is not ours.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in this country until, of course, urban redevelopment destroyed the nationalistic communities in cities, you had a strongly developed concept of honor, say, in the Italian community and the Irish community and the German and so on so that each area of the city had an integrity.

[ Scott ] But it was almost all Christian.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And then a very strong one.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I think one of the efforts after World War II was to destroy the integrity of these units to homogenize everything.

[ Scott ] Well, when the government abandoned honor then, of course, the people began to see that it did them no good. You cannot today go into an American court and rely upon its honor. It is not even treated as existing. We have ... we have the American version of law now is down to rules.

[ Murray ] Attorneys now take classes in conflict resolution. In other words, they go in there to ... with a disputed contract and they negotiate their way out of it. The law doesn’t mean anything anymore as far as they are concerned. It is, you know, how do you get these two parties together and get out the door?

[ Scott ] Well, what can you say about the prosecutor in Waco who charged men with murder who were not present at the scene?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What can we say about such men and such a jury?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean a grand jury had to indict them. If a man is 100 miles away from the scene of the event can you charge him with it? What do you say?

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] Well, it is this... this is all, you know, the recent collapse of the Soviet Union with all of its diversity of cultures and diversity of language and they have probably written more constitutions than any other government in history. You know they have shown that it just doesn't work big time.

[ Scott ] Here I have a ... a book at home which I haven't looked at yet called The Inter Ethnic Disputes in Russia. Now ethnicity, which was just a few years ago considered outmoded has suddenly re arisen.

[ Murray ] I mean there are large areas of the former Soviet Union that didn’t even have the slightest idea what was going on in Moscow. They were not... they may have had a delegate in the ... at these constitutional conventions that they held, but they didn’t have any idea what was going on.

[ Scott ] Well, we don’t really know a great deal.

[ Rushdoony ] I recall reading some years ago, speaking of the Soviet Union, that planes would fly over the Siberian forests regularly trying to find a trace of smoke because old believers fleeing persecution had settled there in isolated places, a cabin here, and maybe five miles away another cabin doing everything they could to conceal their existence from the air as well as from the ground. And this was the tenacity with which they were holding on to their faith and their old ways which went back to before Peter the Great.

Now the intellectuals find it very difficult to believe that people can have that tenacity about what they believe. They assume it is ignorance and that all that is needed is to bring them up to the modern age with education and all this will disappear, but it hasn’t. And I believe that with the difficulties we are beginning to experience, the world wide collapse of the humanistic, statist order, the economic collapse, that people are going to go back to their roots, that all these old beliefs and loyalties are going to reassert themselves and I think the results will be startling, 30 and 40 years down the road.

[ Scott ] I think there is a lot to that.

[ Rushdoony ] Our time is almost up. Is there a last statement that any of you have to make on the subject?

[ Murray ] Well, I don’t think that people can last very long cut off from their roots as our government has methodically tried to do and like the Communists in Russia tried to do. People cannot remain rudderless indefinitely. They have to have something to believe in and the belief systems that have been handed to them by the state don't hold up.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] And the young people are beginning to see this in universities and colleges across the country they are beginning to question the ... the prevailing liberal point of view, because you are seeing a lot of conservative clubs beginning to pop up and various campuses and universities and I think there is a movement, a ground swell moving in that direction.

[ Scott ] I think the most difficult thing to endure is instability. We have a very unstable society. The value of our money fluctuates every day, hourly, practically. And that makes for an unstable economy and I think the human spirit requires stability and security. If we do not have either of those things, why, then, you have a ... a transitory society.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, 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.