Our Threatened Freedom

What Makes a Quack

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 11-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 011

Dictation Name: Vol. A – Part 11 – What Makes a Quack

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] What makes a quack? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Sometime ago I saw some old time medicine show acts. The medicines advertised each claimed remarkable healing powers. One in particular had a long list of ailments which it declared it could heal. They included tuberculosis, female complaints, rheumatism, impotence, and about 10 things more. This and other like ads were fun to read. What made people believe in such quackery?

Before we say that people were more gullible in those days, let us consider what quackery is. Perhaps we’re even more gullible than people were a century ago. There is some reason to believe that ours is the great age of quackery.

The difference between a quack doctor and a good one begins with a sense of limitation. A quack medicine and a quack doctor promise too much. This is why some of our wonder drugs, including perhaps the pill, border at times on quackery. They promise too much. A sound medicine offers limited help for a limited and specific problem. It works no miracles. It cannot replace good hygiene and sound nutrition.

Similarly, the doctor who promises the least is the wiser doctor. Because he recognizes how limited his rule is. The more we demand of a medicine or a doctor, the more likely we are to fall prey to quackery. It is sound medical practice which offers the most modest and specific goals.

Today we demand quacks in one area of life after another, because we make exorbitant and unreasonable demands. One such area is politics. If we expect the politician to be a combination of a savior, a perfect ruler, a promoter of prosperity, and a perfect law and order, we are asking for a quack. What a state legislator or congressman is do is actually very limited, and the more limited, the better. Once elected, he is assigned to some committees to become a specialist in very limited areas, such as some aspect of agriculture, foreign trade, law enforcement, or the like. At his best he can work to clear obstructions and free some area of activity from the controls of the omnipotent state. If he becomes a quack, he will pass laws to try to cure every imaginable problem. Laws to end poverty, unemployment, social conflicts, and the like. He will try to create agencies to take care of all the problems of education, health, labor and management, conflicts, welfare, and the like. The more the law promises to give us, the more popular it is.

What we laugh at in the old patent medicines, we demand from our politicians and laws. The old medicine show is with us still, it has simply changed locations. Its new local is the political circuit, where, by popular demand, the new medicine men promise all kinds of cures, if we will only give them our votes and money.

What makes a quack? Why, we do. Every time and everywhere, when we demand more of medicine or of politics, or of anything else, than can sensibly be expected.

We have quackery in politics, because we demand it. We have created a market for political quackery.

Copies of this broadcast are available from R.J. Rushdoony. P.O. Box 188, VALLECITO, California, 952 – 51. Please send 1 dollar to cover the cost of reproduction, postage, and office expense. Ask for the broadcast on ‘What Makes a Quack’.