Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Myth of Over-Population – Q & A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Myth of Over-Population – Q & A

Genre: Q&A

Track: 20

Dictation Name: RR258A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1967

[Introduction] I think probably a fair percentage of you already are quite well acquainted with our speaker, but for those new faces in the group, if you will bear with me for just a couple of minutes, I would like to give you just a very brief background.

Our speaker holds degrees, the bachelor and the M.A. degree from U.C. He holds the Bachelor of Divinity from the Pacific School of Religion. The areas of special interest for him are in theology, philosophy, history, and economics. He has written for The American Opinion, The California Farmer, Freedom Press, Christian Economics, News & Views. He has a newsletter, and if you aren’t currently receiving this newsletter, I would strongly recommend that you get on the list. It brings you up to date on quite a number of very interesting things, so that is a good item to take care of. He lectures extensively across the country, and fortunately for, if I may say “our cause, he does get onto a number of college campuses, and this is only to the good. He has made a good number of tapes on the books of the Bible, and these are excellent for use in study courses, study groups. Now, in the rear of the room, there are lists of these tapes as well as many of the books that he has written. So, I strongly recommend that you take a look at these before you leave. You might find that they are very, very useful. The titles, just to give you an idea of some of these books: By What Standard, Intellectual Schizophrenia, The Messianic Character of American Education, This Independent Republic, Freud, The Nature of the American System, United Nations, A Religious Dream, and one of his more recent books, The Mythology of Science.. I think you’ll find any of those are well, well worthwhile. The topic for this evening is the Myth of the Population Explosion, Part 1. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to bring you the Reverend Rousas Rushdoony.

[Rushdoony] Tonight we shall begin a series of studies of the myth of over-population. This is an extremely important question because, at this point, there comes to focus a great many of the issues and causes of our day; the political and the economic, the monetary, the question of the United Nations, our modern sociology, and a great many other important modern forces.

In this, our first study of the myth of over-population, we shall deal with the question: What is over-population? Modern man is told increasingly that we have a serious problem of over-population. We are told that the world is running out of food, out of space, and that drastic measures are necessary, but before we can answer this question of Does the world face over-population, we must deal with this basic question: What is over-population? Over-population is an imbalance between the number of people living and their food supply, which results in hunger and even famine, because the available production of food cannot match the population’s needs.

Let us restate that definition of over-population because it is basic to our concern this evening. You have over-population whenever you have an imbalance between the production of food and the available food supply, and the number of people, and the result of this imbalance is hunger to the point of and including famine.

Now, in terms of this definition, it is necessary for us to say that the world has had the problem of over-population several hundred times at least and probably during most of its history. The North American continent had a very serious and chronic problem of over-population before the white man came. Now, we do not think of North America as having too much population before the coming of the white man, because the highest estimate of population was perhaps 250,000 Indians in what is Canada and now the United States, and it would be possible to say that this estimate is much too high, that the total population of the Indians in the Canadian and U.S. Territories was perhaps not even half that amount, and yet, they had a problem of over-population, because there was a chronic imbalance between the production of food and the food available, and population. As a result, hunger and famine was a chronic factor in Indian life. It was so commonplace, that cannibalism was a common practice. We don’t realize this, but the word cannibal comes from North America, from the Caribbean area, so that the term first was applied to the Indians.

Now it is true that cannibalism had a religious function in Indian life, and it was very important to the Indian religions, but it was also an economic fact. Regularly, the Indians faced starvation, and regularly, through the bad months of winter and spring, and sometimes as early as in the fall, and once in awhile in the summer as well, they resorted to cannibalism. This was so chronic in some cultures that in South America, for example, the Tupian Indians bred their women regularly to captives of war and rais4ed the resulting children like veal calves for butchering. Cannibalism was therefore, basic to the Indian life, because it was necessary as a result of over-population.

Why were the Indians hungry in America? The reason is that the food supply was severely limited, and you see, over-population, strictly defined, is an imbalance between the available food and the production of food, and the number of people living. Take, for example, the eastern half of the United States. From the Midwest to the Atlantic, it was possible to walk without ever seeing the sun, because the forests were so think that, in many areas, only light filtered through. As a result, there was very little in the way of vegetation. Those of you who have been in the Redwood forests, where you have a thick stand of redwood, have seen, of course, how little there is on the ground, and in those days, the deer population, for example, was very meager. The number of rabbits were very meager. There was not the food in a highly forested area.

What about the plains? The Great Plains? You did have, of course, the great herds of buffalo, but remember that before the coming of the white man, the Indian did not have a horse. The Spanish introduced the horse to North America, and so the number of buffalo that men on foot could hope to kill was severely limited. Moreover, the buffaloes were migrant. They moved over vast areas. So that even they were able to kill them, they only saw them periodically, because the buffalo ranged from Texas on into the far reaches of Canada, the great herds. The same was true of, for example, the passenger pigeons. Indeed, when the passenger pigeons came, they covered the sky and a man could go out and kill a large number quickly, but they were gone in a few days, and how did you live the rest of the year? The available food supply for the Indians when it came to living off the land was so meager, that North America, north of Mexico, that is, could not support a quarter of a million and probably did not support half of that.

Some of the agricultural Indians, those who farmed, did somewhat better, but even they, because of their primitive methods, were not able to raise enough food to avoid famine and cannibalism. Now a days, you have the federal government bulletins telling you how we have laid waste this continent since we ugly white men came to these shores. As a matter of fact, we have vastly increased the game, except for a few things like buffalo and passenger pigeons, but in most areas, the game was vastly increased. Why? Because, wherever there was cultivated land, the forests were cleared or the plains broken and farmed, there was increased fertility and increased production, and immediately, game congregated around those areas, and one of the major reasons for the troubles between the white and the Indians was precisely this. When you had your first settlement of Indians along the Atlantic seaboard, the deer population and the rabbit population, and every other kind of game, both birds and animals, began to increase rapidly around the settlements. Here was an abundance of feed. If a man planted, for example, a wheat field, more birds, and more rabbits, and more deer could live around that wheat field than could live over hundreds of miles. There would be more feed available from one farmer’s production, than two or three counties an area could previously supply, and so you had a population explosion of game around a white settlement, and of course, since the Indian lived on game, they came to that point, for the game, and then there was trouble. The Indian thus, moved toward the white man continually, because that was where the game was.

By and large, living off the land is an impossibility. It’s a dream that Romantics have, but living off the land means living like the Indians did, starving most of the time, and your Frontiersmen did not live off the land. The fur trappers, who were the great frontiersmen always had a grub steak from a fur company, and they went out, they carried their food with them of pack animals, trapped, came back, and took more food out. They did not try to live off the land. All the land provided them with once in awhile was some fresh meat, but they knew they could not depend on it without starvation.

Similarly, when white settlers moved West, they didn’t just pull up stakes and come West. They came West in groups, with at least two year’s capital, until they could subjugate the land, plant it, bring its fertility to the point where it would produce enough to provide something for the market.

The total Indian population of the United States and Canada, before the coming of the white man, was less than an average American city, a smaller city, and the total food production of the continent then, was probably not equal to the production of a number of California counties. What must you say then? There was over-population in our country before our coming because there was an imbalance between the available food and the food produced, and the number of people living. So the only time we have seen over-population in territorial United States was before the coming of the white man. Now do you begin to see what over-population, when it is dealt with honestly, means?

We have two hundred million people in the United States now. We do not have over-population. We had perhaps a hundred thousand in territorial USA, before the coming of the white man, and there was over-population.

The same was true of Europe. In England, for example, during the thirteenth century, hunger and famine were very commonplace. Let us examine the years where they had serious famine in the England, in the thirteenth century, 1203, 1209, 1224, 1235, 1239, 1243, 1257, 1258, 1271, 1286, 1289, 1294, 1295, and 1298. The famine of 1286 was a twenty-three year famine, and the years after that which I mentioned, 89, 94, 95, and 98 were simply the worst years of that twenty-three year famine. In 1258, people ate the barks of trees and their horses. Twenty thousand starved to death in London. In 1235, the same number again died in London. In 1239, people became so desperate they ate their children. The population of England in the thirteenth century was a fraction of what it was in the nineteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, England had a prosperity that it does not have today. The Plymouth Colony faced famine in its first winter, as a result of its practices and its farming. It started out as a socialist colony, not because the people of Plymouth Colony were, by nature, socialists, but because the owners of the Plymouth Plantation back in London laid down the requirements that this is the way they were to farm, and Bradford tells us that they broke with it after the first winter and they had no problems with it after that, and he writes, “At length, after much debate of things, the governor, with the advice of the chiefest among them, gave way that they should set corn, every man for his own particular, and in that regard, trusted themselves. In all other things to go on in the general way as before, and so assigned to every man, every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number for that end.” This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inabilities. Before that, they couldn’t drag the women out into the field to work for somebody else, or for the group as a whole. They were always sick, or their children ailing, or the baby couldn’t be left alone, but now it was different. The experience that was had in this common course and condition tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth (that is, communism) would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God. For this community, so far as it was, was found to breed more confusion and discontent and retired much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

The problem then, in Plymouth Plantation, was restrictive farming practices. Basic to sound farming is freedom from statist controls. A couple of centuries ago, Montesquieu observed, “Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.” In other words, it is not nature but man who is the major cause of famines. Natural disasters such as storms and droughts, frosts and the like, can indeed destroy a vast amount of farmland, of crops, but these natural disasters are local in their character, so that when the affect one area, production in another area continues and so food can always be shipped into that area, and the people in the affected area must either resort to their savings or find work of another sort to tide them over. For example, there is a drought in one portion of Australia at present, the wheat growing portion. This is going to have an effect on China, because Red China has depended, in part, on Australian wheat and they are in desperate circumstances in China this winter. Their problem, of course, is their communism, which has destroyed production. Now, the Australian farmers who cannot tide it over because they do not have the savings accumulated from a number of years now of bumper crops, are simply moving into town to work, or commuting back and forth, taking jobs in industries. The result? No famine, no problem.

This last winter, for example, in the San Joaquin Valley, frosts and late rains and hail, in some areas, destroyed for mile upon mile the orchards and vineyards so that nothing was left. Not a grape on the wines nor a prune on the prune trees, or whatever the case was. What happened? Those farmers who could not, because of their savings, last a year until the next year’s harvest, got part-time jobs in town and their womenfolk began to work in town, and they’ve weathered the year. There is no famine.

In certain parts of southern Utah, the farmers have seen two years of frost destroy production now. There has been no famine. There has been no crisis. They have simply moved from one type of labor to another. In other words, natural disasters are not total. They do not destroy the entire world, or the entire country. They do not destroy every type of labor. So natural disasters create problems for certain people in certain areas which, by their initiative, they are able to overcome, so that it is painful, it is costly, but it does not lead to famine.

Now, what are the causes of famine? Famine comes about when you have over-population, we have said. Now, what creates a condition of over-population, so that you have an imbalance between the production of food and the available food, and the number of people? Wahlberg and Prentice have studied the history of famines extensively, and they have analyzed the four basic causes of famine, and they are as follows. First, the prevention of cultivation or the willful destruction of crops. Second, defective agriculture caused by communistic control of land. These two are basically one. It is a socialistic control of the farmer, and of the land, and of the crops which destroys production and the incentive to produce. Third, governmental interference by regulation or taxation, again, related to the first, and fourth, currency restrictions, including debasing the coinage, so that when there is a debasing of the coinage, production begins to decline, and it reaches the point when the coinage becomes worthless, and the paper money worthless, that the farmers will not sell for worthless paper. This is in the final stages of inflation.

Thus, the basic causes of famine are not only man rather than nature, but it is the socialist state. The world, during its least populous eras suffered most from hunger and famine. As statist controls receded, hunger also began to recede, and the nineteenth century was the great century of liberty and prosperity. The century that saw the least amount of hunger and famine in the world, and as statist controls receded from various countries, in those countries, production increased and population also increased, and there was no problem of over-population.

It is not the new technology that led to the increased production. It was the freedom from controls. The Soviet Union has seen technology applied to agriculture since 1917. The Soviet agricultural production since has never achieved the production of 1916 in the pre-war years. Why? In the old days, the Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. It fed not only the entire Russian Empire, but it provided the grain for all of Europe. What has happened since then? The grain can no longer feed the Soviet Union, and vast new areas throughout Russia and in Siberia have been brought under cultivation, but they are no longer able to feed their own people. Technology has not been able to increase production. Controls, collectivization have steadily destroyed production. You know, one of the best kept secrets concerning American power is the small American farmer. He out-produces the world. The small American farmer, that is, the farm operated by man and his wife, and his children, with only occasional hired help, is the most productive agricultural unit in the world. Why? He still enjoys (although it’s being rapidly taken from him) more freedom than any other farmer in the world. He has an incentive. He owns his land, and over half the farms in the United States today, as in Lincoln’s day, are still owned by a man and his wife, and children, and are small farms. Unfortunately, there is increasing federal regulation which is destroying the small farm, and in the United States, farm production per acre has been steadily declining because of the increasing controls and regulations.

Take another country as an example, Algeria. When the French went into Algeria, it was mostly wasteland, barren desert land, and the people of Algeria were barely able to survive hunger, year in and year out. The French farmers who settled there rapidly brought that land into cultivation, and Algeria was not only feeding itself and surrounding areas of North Africa, but it was feeding France and other areas of the Mediterranean world. Now, in a few short years, because of the socialist state that is there, those same rich farms have returned to barren wasteland. What creates over-population? Over-population is an imbalance between the food and the number of the people, and this imbalance is created by statist intervention.

Now socialism, or statism, statist control, affects the food supply by limiting it, by its regulation, so that the incentive to produce and the ability to produce is curtailed. But it also has an affect on the population. First of all, as socialism begins to grow, degree by degree, as you have a creeping welfare economy, you have a kind of population explosion in a certain area of your population, because a welfare economy, a dawning socialist state, gains increasing power by catering to one segment of the population, by offering them subsidies, and so it caters to an element with welfare and, as a result, you have a population explosion in that group.

Now, the Roman Empire, of course, is a classical example here, as Rome advanced in the Empire, there was progressively a decline in the population in the last century or two, so that when Rome fell to the Barbarians, it had only a fraction of the population that it had had two and three centuries before, but the small farmer had, by that time, disappeared. He was gone. The middle classes were gone. They had been taxed out of existence and heavy taxations had been the best birth control on the farmer and the middle classes. The Aristocracy was largely gone, except for those who had sold out and become a part of the bureaucracy. What was left? A vast welfare mob. A welfare mob that was so deadly that the government was finally doing nothing but buying the mob. Aurelian, in about 273 or 4 or 5, gained the favor of the mob by promising all welfare recipients that their children would not longer have to apply for welfare when they came of age. They would have a hereditary right to it, and would not have to go through the trauma of an application. A hereditary right to food, clothing, and housing, as well as entertainment. The mob drove the capital out of Rome. The capital became, for a time, Milan, and the mob, as the welfare mobs grew there, drove them elsewhere. When Rome fell, it was no longer the capital. Ravenna was.

You have therefore, in every subsidized group, a population explosion. The Roman mob increased fantastically. The rest of Rome withered and died.

The subsidized group is released from the responsibility of work. It lacks inhibitions in that it does not feel that it has to worry about the care of its children or its future, and so it feels no constraint about anything. Very often, more children mean more subsidy, and so you have a population explosion there. We have seen this, for example, in this country among the Negroes.

I have, of late, been making an analysis of the population figures among Negroes, and going back and looking at the old census reports is extremely interesting. The American Negro, under slavery, existed in a welfare economy, because slavery is a form of welfare economics. Now, some of the masters were very good and the Negroes they had lived quite well. Some lived rather poorly, but irrespective, it was a cradle to grave security. Slavery and socialism are related forms of economics. Now, as we analyze the census figures, the slave Negro increased at a very rapid rate to 1860. In fact, there was a population explosion among the slaves continuously, of an exceedingly high birthrate. Now, when you examine these figures among the slave Negroes in the various censuses to 1860, you have to remember this. Some Negroes were being liberated and sent to Liberia and into the Caribbean. Many Negroes were unhappy with slavery and they were fleeing through the Underground to the Northern states and into Canada. Many other Negroes were being liberated by their masters and were living in the South or in the North, as the case may be. There were, incidentally, the census figures make it clear, a large number of free slaves, living and working, in the South, as well as the slave Negroes.

Thus, when you see the vast increase in the slave population, you have to recognize that the figures would be phenomenal if there were not this drain in the form of liberation. At the same time, the census figures reveal, clear through to 1860, that the free Negro had no increase rate whatsoever, and even with many factors that contributed to his numbers, he barely held his own. He was not reproducing himself. In other words, the competition he faced was leading him gradually to breed himself out.

Now, with the end of slavery, the Negro ratio in the United States began to drop rapidly with each census. They were no longer in a welfare economics. As a result, the Negro birthrate dropped rapidly, but what has happened since 1930? Welfare, the New Deal, and so on, so that by 1960, the census indicated that the Negro birthrate was precisely what it was in 1860. In other words, they now have the same cradle to grave slavery and so there is a population explosion among the Negroes.

Let us examine some of the statistics. In the cities today, the figures indicate that one-fourth of the Negro women who have been married have married are either divorced or separated as against seven and nine-tenths the white rate. The Negro illegitimacy rate is one-fourth of all children, as against a white rate of 3.07. More than half of all Negro children in 1965 were helped by federal state aid to dependent children, as against eight percent of white children. The Negro birthrate is forty percent higher than for whites. So that by 1972, at the same rate, Negroes will make up one-eighth of the population in the United States, and it will not take too many years after for them to be one-fourth, and one-half, and so on. It’s a snowballing rate, and at the same time, the birthrate among the better class Negroes, the non-welfare Negroes, is not skyrocketing. It is a very, very low rate. So, it has been the progressive destruction of the Negro people and their character.

When you have full socialism, the need to gain votes by subsidies gives way to totalitarian controls over all the people, and then the population figures begin to show a marked decline. It is no longer necessary when total power is gained, to cater to any group. The population in Red China is a state secret. Various figures are issued at various times for the press, but they are contradictory. The same is true of the Soviet Union. Fairly authentic reports indicate that the last census Stalin had conducted was so shocking that he ordered the census takers also to be liquidated. In other words, full socialism is destructive of the population.

We have asked the question, What is over-population? and we have answered it as an imbalance of the number of people living and their food supply, and we have pointed out that it is a condition common to history. In answer to the question therefore, Does the world face over-population, we must say yes. Not in the sense that you read about it in the papers. It is facing over-population, hunger, and famine because of socialism, which on the one hand, destroys the food supply by its regulations of agricultural and its debasing of the coinage, and on the other hand, creates an over-population with a subsidized group. Over-population, as a product of socialism, is facing us on all sides.

One of socialism’s major and chronic problems is people. Socialism always faces over-population. A free economy does not, and so the answer to over-population is not more socialist controls, but a free economy in which population and production function one against the other protectively. Thank you.

[Audience] I’m sure that Reverend Rushdoony will handle your questions in just a moment, but right at this point we have a little custom that we usually go through. I think you recall that just five days ago was Thanksgiving, but it isn’t too late for us to say “thanks” for our speaker making a trip up her from Southern California, and at this time, we would like to help him to defray the expenses that go along with that. Thank you.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] That I cannot say, but the population in Europe today is facing a rapidly declining birthrate, even as we are here in the United States. I will go into that the next time. The next time I’m here, which will be in January, the question will be Too Many People? And we will analyze the birth factors and some of the implications of this in terms of socialist controls and what the world population future is. Yes?

[Audience] I was under the impression {?} people work {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, many of these planners have a concept of ideal population. For example, at a conference held here just, I think within the past two weeks and I believe on the Stanford campus. One of the speakers, a Stanford professor, I believe, made the statement that the United States should restrict itself in the very near future, to a population of no more than 150 million. Now, since we have just passed, we are told, 200 million, what are we going to do with 50 million? Now, you see, when you begin planning this way, you are not thinking in terms of man, you are thinking in terms of the drawing board, as though you were dealing with so many board feet of lumber or something similar, and you are going to create an ideal order, and more than so many exceeds your planning, and of course, this is the total impossibility. Agriculture, in terms of this, is to be conducted in certain ways, and it will be then ideal agriculture in terms of certain planning board concepts, and this is why, of course, there is total chaos when planning takes over as in the Soviet Union. It is no longer capable of feeding itself, and well over 50%, and it could be as high as 65% of the people of the Soviet Union are fed with foreign grains; Canadian, American, Australian, and so on, and of course, this is the reason for the frantic gold mining, perpetually, in the Soviet Union. They need the gold to buy it from most countries. We are prone to giving credit without any possibility of payment, but the Canadians and the Australians, and the others do want gold for their grain, and without this gold mining by slave labor, they cannot hope to feed their people. Yes?

[Audience] There is no truth then, to the fact that we will eventually run out of ground, {?} over-population?

[Rushdoony] No. Over-population, as I shall point out next time, is nonsense and the idea of too many people running out of ground, I’ll state this, which I will be going into next time. The entire population of the world could be put into Ventura County and we wouldn’t be crowded. Yes?

[Audience] {?} something like that {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I’ll be dealing with malface{?} in one of the subsequent lectures, so I’ll leave that, but I’ll just briefly say this. It’s like these Ripley Believe It or Nots you something seen that if every oyster that is bred, reproduced itself without any death or problem occurring in what is its, three months the whole world would be six feet deep in oysters? And if one pair of mice reproduced itself and all its children without any deaths or any mishaps, I don’t know how many months it is, and there would be no standing room on the earth because we’d be knee-deep in mice, and so on. You can get all kinds of statistics like this, and this is what a lot of these theories basically are. They talk about the birthrate as though it were a kind of automatic thing, that there was simply this inevitable progression to astronomical numbers, and this is nonsense, and this is why, of course, they’re always wrong about the birthrate. They haven’t been able to predict it. Now, in the thirties, to their shock, because they had been predicting a tremendous increase, there was a marked decline in this country in the birthrate. So, they forecast a very gradual decline in the total population of America and so on and so forth. Well, then came World War 2 and the post-war baby boom, and so they began to predict a fantastic population for the United States, but what’s happened? Now, most maternity hospitals in the state of California, for example, and we’re not as bad as many states in the union, are running 50% if they’re doing well. Fifty percent of bed space as of four, five, six years ago, and it’s getting worse every year. The obstetricians are getting, some of them, worried in Southern California, and in a few years, we are going to have a lot of empty kindergarten rooms in the state of California. Now, how can they predict this from the drawing board? It’s like trying to predict the oysters, you see? It doesn’t work. Yes?

[Audience] Slightly apropos to your remarks {?} something, could you remark on the effects of {?}

[Rushdoony] Alright, the question is with regard to what’s been going on economically, the devaluation situation, and De Galle and so on. Well, if De Galle didn’t exist, it would be necessary for Washington to invent him, because Washington needs somebody to blame right now. Now, I can illustrate De Galle’s position in this situation by this: supposing you have a mother in-law whom you don’t get along with, and supposing you come home some night drunk, and you smoke in bed and set fire to the bed, and you burn up the whole house, and when it’s over, there’s nothing but a heap of ashes there, and then you say, “It’s all my mother-in-law’s fault. She hates me.” Well now, it may be true that your mother-in-law hates you, but you set the house on fire. Now, it well may be true and I’m certain it probably is that De Galle hates us, but in his wildest hopes, De Galle couldn’t do us one-hundredth of the damage that Washington D.C. is doing us. So, it’s nonsense to blame De Galle. Now, what’s happening? Well, we are not off the gold standard. This is nonsense. The world cannot be off the gold standard. Now remember, I talked a couple of times back on the Soviet view of money, and one of the things I cited several times was Lenin on money, and Lenin said when we have a communist world where everything is totally controlled, we will no longer need gold. In fact, he said, we will take gold and use it to set up the public toilets at the street corners. Why? Well, because gold represents economic freedom. If you have gold in your pocket, you have wealth that cannot be destroyed by government edict, because paper’s value can be nullified, wiped out, a new currency issued, but gold is gold and it’s wealth in any time, and the more you have paper, the more the value of the gold goes up. So, as long as you have some element of freedom in the world, and you’re always going to have an element of freedom in the heart of man, there is going to be a desire for gold. Gold will have value. It has a terrific value in the Soviet Union. The miners who mine it, if they try to smuggle it out, they are killed, that’s it. But believe me, they’re smuggling it. They’re smuggling it, and they’re hoarding it.

Now, the point I’m trying to get to is this: as long as you do not have a perfectly communist control, total control, Lenin said gold is important. Therefore, we are going to use it, because if you are going to buy something from free countries and free men, there will have to be gold because they won’t accept worthless paper, which you can force your own citizenry to take. As a result, the various countries are on a gold basis with each other. In other words, what they’re saying is to one another, “Your credit is no good to me unless you give me gold.” Now this has been modified somewhat. It’s on a gold exchange standard. I won’t go into that except to say that basically, it’s what we have done of late, and it’s this. We have said and we made various international treaties to come to this. We started to tell the European countries and other countries, “Now look, of course you have this gold there, and you are entitled to get gold from us, but don’t take it. We’ll guarantee you that anytime you want to claim gold from us, we’ll give it to you, but don’t do it now. We don’t want to be embarrassed. There’s a war on, or there’s trouble in Korea, or we’re trying to stand against communism, but we have it. We’ll give it to you, but don’t take it now.” So, we’ve been stalling them for some years. We admit they have about $28 billion or better in claims against us. If we admit that they have $28 billion, it could be $30-35 easily, because we’re not noted for honest statistics. We ostensibly have $12 billion left in gold. Now that’s questionable also because the Friday before Britain devalued, loaned them another billion in gold, which went down the drain, so we don’t have that, and to show the $12 billion, we’re borrowing from the world bank, and Canada, and here and there so that we can show it on the books when we make our monthly reports. So, there’s a lot of doctored bookkeeping. If you tried it, the federal government would see to it that you went to prison. It’s legal for them, or it’s legitimate, at any rate.

Now, we have been, meanwhile, printing more and more and more paper. Just in the last year, we have increased the paper money supply by twelve percent. We are also going into deficit financing more and more so that one of Johnson’s recent statements indicated that we were likely to have a deficit of $35 billion. Now, this means the dollar is pretty shaky. Let’s say you had money in a bank and you began to realize that bank was likely to fold. Wouldn’t you try to get your money out? Well, that’s exactly what the people of Europe are doing. De Galle, right now, is not drawing much for us because for one thing, this year he’s been in a bad situation financially. De Galle does not want to see us go under, and it isn’t not because he loves the United States. It’s because he knows that if we go down the drain, we’re going to carry him and everybody else down the drain. One of the first things he did when Johnson became president was to ask Johnson to get together with him, because he wanted to tell Johnson, “Look, we’re all going to go down the drain if you don’t do something to institute some sound economic practices and some balanced budgets in the American economy. You’ve got us all tied to you.” And so he suggested that they get together, and of course, when Churchill died and all the heads of states were to go to the funeral, he sent word that he’d like to have a conference with Johnson after the funeral in London. So Johnson ducked that. He went to the hospital with a slight case of sniffles and they made it into a national emergency virtually, and they woke up poor Hubert at 3 a.m. in the morning to tell him that the president had been rushed to the hospital, and poor Hubert and his wife sat there with their hopes rising for awhile.

Now, what was the point of this dodge? Johnson, being in the hospital, naturally couldn’t go to London, so Hubert was sent over there, and so De Galle was miffed. He wanted to talk about some sound economics in the United States and no one did it, because what could Hubert {?}. So, De Galle has a right to be miffed with us. Now, I don’t like De Galle anymore than I like Johnson, but at this point he has a right to be miffed with us.

Now, what’s going on in Europe and everywhere today? Well, some friends came back Sunday evening from a round the world trip. Someone else I knew came back six weeks ago. When he was in the Middle East and in Europe, they were giving him a ten percent, businessman, ten percent discount for American money. They didn’t want him to use the local money. Why? They wanted to take that American money. They didn’t want the government to get it. They wanted to take it to the bank and get gold with it, because they know paper money is going out of style. This time, this was six weeks ago, last week and the week before, these people said it was 20-45% discount on any goods, jewelry or anything, to get the paper dollars so they could convert it into gold. In some cases, they were taking no profit on it just to get the gold quickly while they could still get it, at $35 an ounce. It’s the best bargain you can get. After all, it’s a price that went out of date about 1940 to 1942, and if you could get a car for prices of 1940 or 1942, you’d do well, anything at those prices, but gold is still at a price that is about twenty-five years out of date.

Now, they are, as a result, claiming our gold, and the gold is leaving us at a fantastic rate, and incidentally, thirty-five percent of those claims against our gold are being made by Americans who are using people in Europe to do it. And I don’t blame them. This is good sense.

Now, what can we do in the face of this? Well, we talked to Britain three years ago out of devaluation, and we said, “Don’t devalue. We’ll make loans to you. We’ll prop you up. We’ll keep you going,” and so they had to substitute for devaluation, which means raising the price of gold and lowering the value of the paper, they had to substitute for it austerity and controls. So, they’ve had unemployment, and they’ve had progressive demeaning of life, and a lower standard of living, and so on and so forth, and it didn’t work, and at the last minute, without warning us, they went ahead with it. The whole world knew they were going to, but Washington, and so, at the last minute, we get caught short with another billion dollar loan to them which goes down the drain.

Now, the British devaluation was too little and too late. It was only twenty percent. The pound was devalued from $2.80 to $2.40. It’s not enough. They’re going to have to devalue again and again and again. Now, we have a number of ways out, but basically it’s controls or devaluation. Well, there’s an election coming up next year, and either way, it’s unpopular. Washington has already suggested that they might try controls, and controls that you wouldn’t really feel and know about, controls on investments abroad and so on. But, it’ll become more and more progressively. Now, this may or may not work. I doubt that it will because the people of the world have lost confidence in the dollar and they’re going to snowball this run on the bank. Meyers, a Canadian financial consultant, has come out flatfootedly and said in short time, in a matter of days or weeks, the United States will be forced to devalue, and it’ll probably be a small devaluation. It’ll again be a case of being unwilling to take a full step, but Franz Pick{?} said that at the Rio conference a couple months ago, in October, the common talk there, not the public statement, but the real statements expressed by the delegates was devaluation after the election of 68. In other words, don’t rock the boat before the election, but of course, they’re not going to be able to hold out, I’m quite sure.

Now, one of the things that is aggravating the situation is Washington. Every time Washington opens its mouth, the whole world becomes more and more aware of how stupid we are. For example, this statement that was made Friday by the Treasury and repeated by some senators since, which is the epitome of assaninity, telling the peoples of the world that if you continue to make this run on gold at $35 an ounce, we will bankrupt you by lowering the price to $6 an ounce. Well, it’s selling on the black market around the world from $75 to $300 an ounce. What will happen to our gold if we lower it to $6 an ounce? It’ll all be gone overnight, and how much confidence do they have in our ability to work out way out of this mess when we make statements as totally stupid as that? It’s like saying to people who are lining up to buy Cadillacs because they’ve been reduced $500 in price, “Now quit crowding or else we’re going to ruin all of you by reducing all Cadillacs to a total price of $100.” Do you think they’ll walk away and leave you alone?

Now, what is likely to happen, of course, is that we will have a series of small devaluations, but this will continue. You see, socialism is like pregnancy. You can’t have too little. It grows on you.

Now, what is the end result? It’s bankruptcy. Once a government begins to devalue and really devalues, it’s such a heady wine that they can’t avoid it. It’s like a narcotic. They want more of it, because if we devalue, as Pick{?} says, we’ll be done after the November election next year, we’ll have some smaller once perhaps till then, raise the price of gold to $100 or $105 an ounce, in other words, three times as much, we will lower the value of the paper money sixty-six percent. So, if you have $100,000 in the bank, it’ll be worth $33,000 in purchasing power. You see, paper money is going to go out of style.

Now, what will the federal government do with that? It will have, at the stroke of a pen, because all they need to do to change the price of gold is to so enter it in the Treasury and pick up the phone and call the mint and so notify them, that’s all. They will have wiped out two-thirds of the national debt. Well, that’s a marvelous way to get rid of your debts, isn’t it? You simply change the value of the money you have, you increase it, and you decrease the value of the money other people have, the paper.

So, what’s going to happen? Well, if our national debt is going to increase this year $35 billion, what is it going to do next year, and the year after? We’ll have a deficit of $100 billion, $200 billion, $300 billion, and meanwhile, the paper money will become worth less and less and less until it goes down the drain, and with a bushel basket full of it, you can’t buy a loaf of bread. This is what happens with paper. So, this is the prospect. Now, at Rio, the general statement was, “Well, they hoped after this big devaluation to about $105, the nations of the world would wake up, or else there would be total disaster, but this is not likely that they will wake up.”

Does that answer your question? Yes?

[Audience] Are you saying in Europe, an individual could go in and get gold?

[Rushdoony] Depending on the country, yes. In France you can do it, in Switzerland you can do it. You can go and take your paper and get gold against it. Now, if you wanted to do it in Switzerland, you’d have to go there. You would go to a Swiss bank and do it secretly so the U.S. government wouldn’t know, you would get a number to count, they would buy gold for you, they would store it, they would sell it for you at any time if you sent your number and name to them, and deposit it to your account at any bank in the world; American bank, Mexican, Canadian, Japanese, Australian, New Zealand. So you could go there and take the money.

[Audience] And the gold would be there.

[Rushdoony] Well, no, the gold would in Switzerland, but if you instructed them to sell it, they would then deposit the proceeds anywhere you designated in the world.

[Audience] You couldn’t take the gold and put it in your purse and leave?

[Rushdoony] You could, but where could you go with it? You couldn’t bring it here, you see.

[Audience] You couldn’t?

[Rushdoony] No. So, you would deposit it to their account and work out this way, but, of course, only those who have enough money to afford a trip to Switzerland and to invest this way can do it. For the rest of us, we have to become coin collectors here. Yes?

[Audience] One of the problems is that you can go, that there isn’t enough gold in the world {?} able to use it, at the basis for our money. Now, {?} they don’t allow the price of it to go up in order to compensate for supply and demand. Is this what has to be done in order to satisfy the conditions {?}

[Rushdoony] Exactly. You can say to anyone, you put your finger on it, you can say to anyone who raises the question, “There isn’t enough gold in the world,” you can say, “Oh no, as a matter of fact, there isn’t enough paper money in the world and can never be to supply the monetary needs,” because it gets progressively worth less and less and more and more is printed. But gold, when you have only gold, what does it do? There is an adjustment between the amount of gold and the available goods. For example, in the last century, the price of gold scarcely varied, until 1913. During that time, prices were sufficiently low, that in terms of the business transacted, everyone had more than enough of gold. You could, for example, for $1,000 in 1905, build yourself a house that you could not build today for $50,000 to $75,000, you see? Because gold had that much value.

Now gold, in a sense, still has that same value, because, you see, they’ve simply increased the paper against it. So, if it takes you $75,000 to build a house today, the difference is simply the amount of taxes plus the increased paper that has been printed against that same amount of gold. Now in the last century, too, most of your basic coinage, that is, for common every day use, was your small change, as we would say. Your half penny, and most Americans don’t know we once had a half penny, your penny, your two penny, three penny, five penny pieces. A lot of your business was done with that. Most of it. In the 1880’s, of course, that was a period when it was deflation, but it is significant that you could go into Delmonico’s in New York, the best restaurant, and get the best dinner, a New York cut steak, or any other kind of steak, and in those days you had everything. We couldn’t eat on that scale for four cents. What you had then was hard money, you see. But, for example, the entire national debt of Germany in 1923, when you had untold billions and trillions of paper money, could have been paid off with one American penny because the penny was convertible to gold and silver. So you see, this is what hard money is as against paper money. Yes?

[Audience] What is the best hedge as far as a {?} is concerned {?} gold?

[Rushdoony] Gold and silver coins is an excellent hedge against inflation. They are good investments. For example, I’m a modest coin collector. Now I have here a twenty dollar gold piece which I bought two years ago during the Thanksgiving vacation. $47. I expect the price this week to be about $67, this week or next. Now consider how much my investment here has appreciated. Twenty dollars of a 447 investment is close to 50%, isn’t it? It’s forty percent, or forty-five percent now. Where else could you have invested it where your money would have appreciated that much? Meanwhile, your paper money is depreciated probably ten percent, and you see, as you have more and more inflation, your silver and your gold coins will progressively appreciate more and more even as your paper depreciates. To give you another example, I have here a silver dollar. Now, a silver dollar was selling two years ago during the Thanksgiving week for a dollar and twenty cents, I believe, ten, yes, ten or fifteen cents, and you could buy a sack full of them thus for $1100, $1000 worth for $1100. Now you could sell such a sack full for $2100, $2200, or $2250, depending upon the year of the, because they’re selling for $2500. Now, where else could you get 100% profit in two year’s time? And as inflation increases, this will be progressively the thing. What has happened to gold coins in the last two weeks? Why, they’ve skyrocketed from about $53 to $65, $66, $67, there are some places in Los Angeles where it’s $75 for one of these double eagles, and so it is with all your coins, and if you’re not saving your silver coins, you’d better because you won’t see them much longer. Yes?

[Audience] We were just in Washington, D.C. at the mint, and man {?} that took us through, and he said {?} we saw, just great big huge sacks of money, and we thought it was money {?} but it was quarters coming in and they’re recalling them at the rate of $25 million a day, I think is what he said, and they’re going to melt them all down, and they’re not going to just have very little silver in them for now on. Now is that what they’re going to do with all coins? {?} talk about saving dimes {?} and but he mentioned just quarters at the moment, they are calling them all in.

[Rushdoony] Oh, the dimes also. They’ve got machines in all federal reserve banks, sorting them out every day, and if you have a sack full, say a thousand dollars worth of dimes or quarters, there’s almost $1500, or a little better perhaps than $1500 in silver in them right now.

[Audience] Even with sandwich{?}

[Rushdoony] No, no, not the sandwich coins, the real silver coins, anything with the date 64 or earlier. Yes?

[Audience] What is the emotional attachment to Britain{?} years ago, even {?} their economy all the time {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course in England, they complain that they are being made into the fifty-first state, so they are bitter about the attachment to the United States. The reason for it is that our leaders and theirs are both Fabian socialists and they have a common dedication to the Fabian socialist cause, and they’re going to help one another work towards a Fabian socialist world order. Yes, you had a question.

[Audience] Yes. What are they going to do if they decided {?} in the gold coin, in the gold, silver coins?

[Rushdoony] Well, in England about a year and a half ago, they called in all the gold coins that were dated after 1843, I believe. I didn’t hear of anyone turning them in, and I haven’t hear of anyone going to jail.

[Audience] Well, they did that two years ago down in Italy {?}

[Rushdoony] We don’t have any law calling in the coins. We just have an emergency regulation, and how long does an emergency last? So, it’s legally questionable. Now, however, you can legally hold coins prior to the 1933 date in certain quantities as a collector, so become a coin collector. It’s a good investment. Yes?

[Audience] What’s the best thing we can do to fight this thing, outside using a shotgun? I’ve got that figure out, but what else can we do? We’ll probably do that one of these days if it goes much further. But what’s the best thing we can do?

[Rushdoony] You’ve got to realize this is going down the drain. It’s going down the drain. You can’t stop it. What you have to do is to begin to create forces for reconstruction in every area; new institutions, new movements, in politics, in economics, in education, in every area, because this whole order is going to go down the drain. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Swiss arrangements. Will their {?} go down along with the dollar?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Do not invest if you can afford to go to Switzerland and do this in the Swiss Franc, because you can go there and deposit your money, or have it converted into any kind of paper currency, but all the paper currencies are going to go down, ultimately. They’re going to go down the drain. So, your hope has to be, if you do that, to convert into gold. Now, I don’t know just what they’ve done about the legality of it, but I do know that it’s being done every day, and it’s being done by members of the establishment in Washington. This is an area where I don’t know the details because I don’t have the money to fly to Switzerland and try this, so I’m not particularly concerned about it.

[Audience] {?} yen right now [?]

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, a number of powers are devaluing, and the more, yes. It’s impact will be to push us that much closer to devaluation because it means that the various governments of the world are recognizing that the present price is unrealistic, and they are indicating that they will not support us by that act. I might add that bankers of seven countries have indicated they will support us, but you know when the United States federal government has to be supported by bankers who are begged to make loans, you know we’re in a bad state. When a giant goes to a flea for help, the giant is in trouble.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?} of individuals in France and Switzerland getting gold for dollars. Can they do this with any other currency?

[Rushdoony] Yes. In France, in particular, they can do it with any currency they choose.

[Audience] Other than their own?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] They can’t with their own?

[Rushdoony] I’m not sure as to that, but they can with regard to any other currency in the world, I do know. Yes?

[Audience] I’m just curious, because {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, in 1200, you had increasing controls by the central government, so that from then on until the period of the Reformation, you had continual crisis of food. You had the debasement of coinage and you had central controls progressively, as the various monarchies replaced feudalism. Feudalism was decentralization, but the centralization by the central states destroyed a great deal of the older agriculture. Yes?

[Audience] Is there any particular book that you would recommend to read up on this? There was one mentioned the radio named Created Money. Have you heard of that one?

[Rushdoony] No, I haven’t.

[Audience] {?} is there any particular one you would recommend to read up on this some?

[Rushdoony] There is a little paperback on gold by Theodore Macklin, that has just been published. I can send you the name if you will drop me a letter, and put a postcard in it so all I have to do is to write the title of the book on the back. It’s a very good paperback, about 50 or sixty pages, intensely readable, and it will be one of your best guides on the subject. Then, Gary North has written some pamphlets, and we have had some of them on sale, and we do have, I think, his Monetary Hoarding, The Economics of Survival on the table in the back.

End of tape