March 22, 2025 • 18 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the Saturday Podcast. If
you've listened to our show for any length of time,
you're gonna hear me quoting Milton Friedman, and you're gonna
hear me quoting his star student, the greatest black thinker
and writer alive today and perhaps the greatest thinker and
(00:24):
writer alive today without regard to race, which is a
pretty amazing thing to say, and I think it happens
to be true. It also happens to be true that
the greatest Supreme Court justice alive since Antonin Scalia passed
happens to be a black man, and yet nobody's naming
(00:47):
anything for him. My goodness, we name all sorts of
things for all sorts of black elected officials, activists. I
said that with air quotes.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
If you didn't hear it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
What about Thomas Soul, What about Clarence Thomas. These are
individuals that children can look up to that look like
them if they happen to be black. Well, we know
Thomas Soul as an economist, he's been one of the
great conservative thinkers of our time. But did you know
(01:21):
he was once a Marxist? He was something changed, what
caused him to make that radical shift in his outlook
on capitalism. This is an interview he did several years
ago where he explains his shift in philosophy working for
the federal government and realizing that liberals use good causes
(01:43):
like minimum wage because it sounds good, but that's not
really why they're doing what they're doing. They don't the
folks defending the usaid wasteful dollars, oh, because children in
poor countries will die. They weren't being saved with this
money anyway. Anyway, this is one of my favorites. We
(02:04):
do use a fair amount of Thomas Soul on Saturday,
and the reason is because we figure on Saturday, you're
less likely to be in the grind of going to work,
coming from work and you know, kind of halfway distracted.
Your Saturday podcast in our Minds is an opportunity to
do a longer form piece where you can really stop
and think about what you think about in the world
(02:26):
and really process something on a different level. It's magazine
versus a newspaper, So enjoy. You grew up in.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Harlem, gropped out of high school to join the Marine
Corps during the Korean War, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard,
a master's from Columbia, and your doctorate from the University
of Chicago, all of which pales by comparison with the
fact that you once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
(02:54):
But during this period from Harlem to the University of Chicago,
throughout your twenties, you've said you spent most of the
decade of your twenties as a Marxist.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Yes, why what was it? What was the attraction? Well,
I guess I first it was very puzzle. See, there's
one little correction I would make. At age sixteen, I
was a dropout, high school dropout, and I went to
(03:25):
work full time as a Western Union messenger.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And delivering telegrams.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Delivery.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
We'd better say that because there will be a generation
that won't know what Western Union was.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Because that's true too.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
And so I worked in the area of Manhattan called
the Chelsea District, which is around twenty third Street Ninth Avenue,
And at the end of the day I had several
ways of getting back home. The easiest, fastest way was
a subway, which was a nickel. In those days, when
I was feeling flushed, I might go for a bus
(04:01):
for a dime and then when I was really getting reckless,
I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which was the
elite of the buses. For Fifth was fifteen cents, and
so I would walk over to Fifth Avenue take that bus,
and it would take me up through all the glamorous
parts of Fifth Avenue, past the Empire State Building, past
(04:23):
the great stores and things of that sort, and then
on fifty seventh Street it would turn this is just
the elite part of town. The park starts, yes, and
then and you fifth, This park starts at fifty ninth, oh, sorry,
fifty to fifty seventh. I would turn over again the
same kind of scene, past Carnegie Hall, up Columbus Circle.
(04:46):
There was no Trump Tower at that time, and on
up to about seventy second Street, and go out to
Fifth Avenue, out to the Riverside Drive, which is another
elite area. And so for miles after that you'd have
all these wonderful luxury apartment buildings and so on.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And finally around one hundred and twenty.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
Ninth or thirtieth Street, it would go on a long
viaduct and then it would do a right turn back
into the occupied area, and there you'd see the tenements
and I would wonder why is this, I mean, why
this huge disparity, And there was nobody else, There was
(05:25):
no other other explanation around.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
There was nothing.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
There was nothing there other than Marxism. And I stumbled across.
I had not read marks, but I bought a second
hand pair set of encyclopedias, small set for some ridiculously
low price, and there I looked up Karl Marx. I'd
heard the name, and the stuff that he said seemed
(05:50):
to make sense, and then later on I would get
more and more into it. And that was that the
other rich had gotten rich by taking from the poor, right,
And well that was that was my explanation. But what
is interesting there was no other explanation out there, really,
and that's true largely in our colleges universities today.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So by the time you went to Harvard you had
already become intellectually engaged with Marxism, yes, and remained, And
Harvard didn't talk you out of it. And the study
of economics at Harvard didn't talk you out of it,
nor did getting a master's at Columbia, nor did getting
a doctorate at Chicago dissuade you from Marxism. Is that
(06:34):
you studied with Milton Friedman. Of all people, how could
you have sat in Milton Friedman's classroom and remained a Marxist.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Some people had just stubborn. But what really changed me
was not the University of Chicago. It was my first
job working in a professional capacity the government.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I was a summer intern.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
This is after Chicago or no, no, while I was
still a graduate student.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Got it, uh.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And so during the summer of vacation I worked in
the US Department of Labor, and I began to realize
for a number of things that the government is not
simply the personification of the general will, like resol or others.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
The government is an institute.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The government institutions have their own institutional uh interests. I
wanted to involved the minimum wage law. I was a
big supporter of that, but I also knew that there
was an argument that minimum wage law is simply price
low wage workers out of a job. And my first
assignment was was dealt with minimum wages in Puerto Rico.
(07:39):
And as I looked at the numbers, I would see
as they would jack up the minimum wages is a
number number of jobs would go down and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But there were two explanations.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
One was that of the economists that you priced the
people out of a job, and the other was that
there there were hurricanes, and it comes to Puerto Rico,
you see, during the sugar harvest, and therefore I was
studying the sugar industry, and therefore it destroyed a lot
of the crop. Therefore you wouldn't hire as many workers. Now,
(08:07):
Chicago had been taught that if there are two different theories,
there should be somewhat some empirical evidence in principle that
could distinguish what would happen under one theory from what
would happen under the other.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And so I wrestled with that for the most.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Of the summer. And one morning I came in and
I said, I got it. Well, we need a data
on the amount of sugarcane standing in the fields before
the hurricane struck. And as I waited for the congratulations,
I could see stricken looks around me in the room,
like this guy has stumbled on something and they will
ruin us all, you know. And they said, well, we
(08:43):
don't have those data. I said, oh, I'll bet the
Department of Agriculture has it. He said, well, but that
does mean we have it, you'd have to have a
request go up the chain of command to the Secretary
of Labor. He would then confer with the Secretary of Agriculture.
It would come down the chain in the Department of
agricolagship that whoever has those numbers. And so I said, good, well,
(09:05):
they say a journey of one thousand miles begins with
a single step. So I will now submit my request
to the Secretary of Labor, which I did, and I
am still patiently awaiting this reply. The US Department of
Labor administers the minimum wage law, and the money in
the careers of perhaps a third or some other significant
(09:25):
percentage of of the Labor Department resources come from administering
the minimum wage law. One of the real forces of
all this is that the law itself, Section four D,
I still remember, requires the Labor Department to study the
employment effects of minimum wages, and those studies are absolutely
a farce. In fact, some years after I left, I
(09:48):
did an article saying why those studies were a farce.
And when I came back later on to the Labor
Department to do some research, one of the older librarians
who remembered me turned to the younger library, and you said,
this is the man who wrote that article that has
everybody up at arms.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
So you became you began to be dissuaded about of Marxism.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
And of government in general, because the government is not
out there at the personification of the national interest, right,
they have their own interests. And the labor departments was
clearly an interest in keeping the minimum wage because that's
that's their jobs and careers, all right, and power.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Not long ago I asked you, Tom, what opinion, what view.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Do you regret having held?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
And you replied that for more than a decade, more
than a decade, you had been a serious Marxist.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes, explain that. Well.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
As a decade began, I was in living in poverty.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
How old, nineteen years old?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Nineteen So you're in you're starting college at that stage?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
No, no, all right.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
I mean I was out there working in unskilled jobs
and trying to make ends meet, living in a rooming
house on Harlem, right, And I'd heard about marks. But
I finally someplace found that an old second hand set
of encyclopedias for a dollar nineteen cents, which I bought,
and there was an article on Carl Marx. It seemed
(11:19):
to me that he explained these situations so well that.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
The situation was what that you took the train from
Harlem down to the lower end the other way around.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Coming home from work, I would sometimes take the bus
and it would go right up Fifth Avenue, past all
these glitzy places like cross fifty seventh Street where all
the fancy stores were at Carnegie Hall and the rest
of it, and then finally, as I got near home,
it would kind of turn off this viaduct into one
hundred and thirty fifth Street, and there was that sudden
(11:50):
change in the whole scene at that point, And the
question was why was that?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And the problem was to two problems.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
One was that no one else had given any explanation.
There was no competing explanation that sounded plausible.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
In your life so far, yes, right, yes.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
And the other was that no one had cautioned me
that it takes an awful lot more knowledge before you.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Can make these guys of sleeping judgments in any case.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
But fortunately I'd been taught earlier to respect facts and
so on, and so even during my years as a Marxist,
I would read things by people who weren't Marxist.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I would read facts and so forth.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
But you I have heard you say many times that
you got a good education in the New York City
public schools in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yes, so they did.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
They taught you to think. They may not have taught you,
Adam Smith that the offensive free markets, but they taught.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
You to think.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yes, all right now, but keep continue the story if
you would. You're a Marxist at the age of nineteen,
taking the bus home from the southern third of Manhattan, Iran.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
All the way up to Harlem.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
You remain a Marxist at the University of Chicago under
the instruction of Milton Milton Friedman. Yes, how did that?
If Milton couldn't crack you, you were a tough nut?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Well, uh, but what what?
Speaker 4 (13:09):
But one summer working for the government as an economist
was enough to show me that the government was really
not the answer. That the government that the level of
understanding among the people. And I was in a program
for interns where we saw the top officials of the
Labor Department and so forth, and I realized, these guys
are not going to save us.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
In other words, they had no They were not the
priestly cast that you might have been led to expect
they were ordinary chumps, bashing their way through life as
best they could, like anybody else. Yes, I see, all right,
and so but intellectually, all right, you spend a summer
working for the federal government and.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
That cures you of Marxism.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yes, But intellectually, when do you pick up the thread
of free markets?
Speaker 4 (13:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I guess well, well I had always.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Been you thought back to what Milton said, right, not.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Just Milting, but Hayek and the rest of them, because
I had read all those people while I was still
a Marxist.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
A couple of you. Have an essay in here entitled
Marx the manh yeah quote Marx's angry apocalyptic visions existed
before he discovered capitalism as the focus of such visions.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Explain that what.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
You can there are the poems he wrote in his
teen years. One of them in particular, I remember what
So let's the effect that then will I walk walk
god like and triumphant through the ruins of the world.
So he has these uh apocalyptic visions early on before
he said what you had thought about capitalism?
Speaker 3 (14:43):
And what the subtext does? I take it of your
It's entitled Marx not the Marx the political philosopher. Not
Marx the economists, but Marks the man. And what you're
what I felt reading that essay is you're in effect.
It's like the scene in The Wizard of Oz where
they pull back the curt Yes, that's right, great and
powerful Oz turns out to be an ordinary, cranky human being.
(15:06):
And what you're saying is Marxism is fascinating in some
highly intelligibent in some cases, in some ways kind of.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
A nut, yes, just a man, Yes, all right.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Another quotation from that essay. The members of the Communist League.
We're talking now about the mid nineteenth century Marx and
Engels form or they participate in the Communist League. The
members of the Communist League were overwhelmingly intellectuals and professionals.
It had the same kind of social composition that would
in later years characterize many radical groups in which the
(15:38):
youthful offspring of privilege called themselves the proletariat. Marxism is
the conceit of rich kids with fancy educations.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Yes, you see that in the what is this thing
called the Occupying Wall Street group? All these middle class
accents and so on. I mean, how many working class
people can or to take a month off to sit
around in parks and carry on and have all their
electronic equipment with them, but all the rest of it,
(16:08):
I mean, come sleeping.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
At sleeping bags with a first rate down feathers. So,
but at what stage was there a moment when you said, wait,
a moment? These putative Marxists and leftists and liberals, to
use the term the way it's used in this country,
as a leftist they have they have no knowledge of
nor concern for what life is like up one hundred
(16:31):
and thirtieth Street. That's right, there was a moment. Was
there a moment or an incident when that just struck you?
Or that's kind of a progressive realization, progressive realization.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
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The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the Saturday Podcast. If
you've listened to our show for any length of time,
you're gonna hear me quoting Milton Friedman, and you're gonna
hear me quoting his star student, the greatest black thinker
and writer alive today and perhaps the greatest thinker and
(00:24):
writer alive today without regard to race, which is a
pretty amazing thing to say, and I think it happens
to be true. It also happens to be true that
the greatest Supreme Court justice alive since Antonin Scalia passed
happens to be a black man, and yet nobody's naming
(00:47):
anything for him. My goodness, we name all sorts of
things for all sorts of black elected officials, activists. I
said that with air quotes.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
If you didn't hear it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
What about Thomas Soul, What about Clarence Thomas. These are
individuals that children can look up to that look like
them if they happen to be black. Well, we know
Thomas Soul as an economist, he's been one of the
great conservative thinkers of our time. But did you know
(01:21):
he was once a Marxist? He was something changed, what
caused him to make that radical shift in his outlook
on capitalism. This is an interview he did several years
ago where he explains his shift in philosophy working for
the federal government and realizing that liberals use good causes
(01:43):
like minimum wage because it sounds good, but that's not
really why they're doing what they're doing. They don't the
folks defending the usaid wasteful dollars, oh, because children in
poor countries will die. They weren't being saved with this
money anyway. Anyway, this is one of my favorites. We
(02:04):
do use a fair amount of Thomas Soul on Saturday,
and the reason is because we figure on Saturday, you're
less likely to be in the grind of going to work,
coming from work and you know, kind of halfway distracted.
Your Saturday podcast in our Minds is an opportunity to
do a longer form piece where you can really stop
and think about what you think about in the world
(02:26):
and really process something on a different level. It's magazine
versus a newspaper, So enjoy. You grew up in.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Harlem, gropped out of high school to join the Marine
Corps during the Korean War, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard,
a master's from Columbia, and your doctorate from the University
of Chicago, all of which pales by comparison with the
fact that you once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
(02:54):
But during this period from Harlem to the University of Chicago,
throughout your twenties, you've said you spent most of the
decade of your twenties as a Marxist.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Yes, why what was it? What was the attraction? Well,
I guess I first it was very puzzle. See, there's
one little correction I would make. At age sixteen, I
was a dropout, high school dropout, and I went to
(03:25):
work full time as a Western Union messenger.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And delivering telegrams.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Delivery.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
We'd better say that because there will be a generation
that won't know what Western Union was.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Because that's true too.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
And so I worked in the area of Manhattan called
the Chelsea District, which is around twenty third Street Ninth Avenue,
And at the end of the day I had several
ways of getting back home. The easiest, fastest way was
a subway, which was a nickel. In those days, when
I was feeling flushed, I might go for a bus
(04:01):
for a dime and then when I was really getting reckless,
I would take the Fifth Avenue bus, which was the
elite of the buses. For Fifth was fifteen cents, and
so I would walk over to Fifth Avenue take that bus,
and it would take me up through all the glamorous
parts of Fifth Avenue, past the Empire State Building, past
(04:23):
the great stores and things of that sort, and then
on fifty seventh Street it would turn this is just
the elite part of town. The park starts, yes, and
then and you fifth, This park starts at fifty ninth, oh, sorry,
fifty to fifty seventh. I would turn over again the
same kind of scene, past Carnegie Hall, up Columbus Circle.
(04:46):
There was no Trump Tower at that time, and on
up to about seventy second Street, and go out to
Fifth Avenue, out to the Riverside Drive, which is another
elite area. And so for miles after that you'd have
all these wonderful luxury apartment buildings and so on.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
And finally around one hundred and twenty.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
Ninth or thirtieth Street, it would go on a long
viaduct and then it would do a right turn back
into the occupied area, and there you'd see the tenements
and I would wonder why is this, I mean, why
this huge disparity, And there was nobody else, There was
(05:25):
no other other explanation around.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
There was nothing.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
There was nothing there other than Marxism. And I stumbled across.
I had not read marks, but I bought a second
hand pair set of encyclopedias, small set for some ridiculously
low price, and there I looked up Karl Marx. I'd
heard the name, and the stuff that he said seemed
(05:50):
to make sense, and then later on I would get
more and more into it. And that was that the
other rich had gotten rich by taking from the poor, right,
And well that was that was my explanation. But what
is interesting there was no other explanation out there, really,
and that's true largely in our colleges universities today.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So by the time you went to Harvard you had
already become intellectually engaged with Marxism, yes, and remained, And
Harvard didn't talk you out of it. And the study
of economics at Harvard didn't talk you out of it,
nor did getting a master's at Columbia, nor did getting
a doctorate at Chicago dissuade you from Marxism. Is that
(06:34):
you studied with Milton Friedman. Of all people, how could
you have sat in Milton Friedman's classroom and remained a Marxist.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Some people had just stubborn. But what really changed me
was not the University of Chicago. It was my first
job working in a professional capacity the government.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I was a summer intern.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
This is after Chicago or no, no, while I was
still a graduate student.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Got it, uh.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
And so during the summer of vacation I worked in
the US Department of Labor, and I began to realize
for a number of things that the government is not
simply the personification of the general will, like resol or others.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
The government is an institute.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The government institutions have their own institutional uh interests. I
wanted to involved the minimum wage law. I was a
big supporter of that, but I also knew that there
was an argument that minimum wage law is simply price
low wage workers out of a job. And my first
assignment was was dealt with minimum wages in Puerto Rico.
(07:39):
And as I looked at the numbers, I would see
as they would jack up the minimum wages is a
number number of jobs would go down and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But there were two explanations.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
One was that of the economists that you priced the
people out of a job, and the other was that
there there were hurricanes, and it comes to Puerto Rico,
you see, during the sugar harvest, and therefore I was
studying the sugar industry, and therefore it destroyed a lot
of the crop. Therefore you wouldn't hire as many workers. Now,
(08:07):
Chicago had been taught that if there are two different theories,
there should be somewhat some empirical evidence in principle that
could distinguish what would happen under one theory from what
would happen under the other.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
And so I wrestled with that for the most.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Of the summer. And one morning I came in and
I said, I got it. Well, we need a data
on the amount of sugarcane standing in the fields before
the hurricane struck. And as I waited for the congratulations,
I could see stricken looks around me in the room,
like this guy has stumbled on something and they will
ruin us all, you know. And they said, well, we
(08:43):
don't have those data. I said, oh, I'll bet the
Department of Agriculture has it. He said, well, but that
does mean we have it, you'd have to have a
request go up the chain of command to the Secretary
of Labor. He would then confer with the Secretary of Agriculture.
It would come down the chain in the Department of
agricolagship that whoever has those numbers. And so I said, good, well,
(09:05):
they say a journey of one thousand miles begins with
a single step. So I will now submit my request
to the Secretary of Labor, which I did, and I
am still patiently awaiting this reply. The US Department of
Labor administers the minimum wage law, and the money in
the careers of perhaps a third or some other significant
(09:25):
percentage of of the Labor Department resources come from administering
the minimum wage law. One of the real forces of
all this is that the law itself, Section four D,
I still remember, requires the Labor Department to study the
employment effects of minimum wages, and those studies are absolutely
a farce. In fact, some years after I left, I
(09:48):
did an article saying why those studies were a farce.
And when I came back later on to the Labor
Department to do some research, one of the older librarians
who remembered me turned to the younger library, and you said,
this is the man who wrote that article that has
everybody up at arms.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
So you became you began to be dissuaded about of Marxism.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
And of government in general, because the government is not
out there at the personification of the national interest, right,
they have their own interests. And the labor departments was
clearly an interest in keeping the minimum wage because that's
that's their jobs and careers, all right, and power.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Not long ago I asked you, Tom, what opinion, what view.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Do you regret having held?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
And you replied that for more than a decade, more
than a decade, you had been a serious Marxist.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes, explain that. Well.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
As a decade began, I was in living in poverty.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
How old, nineteen years old?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Nineteen So you're in you're starting college at that stage?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
No, no, all right.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
I mean I was out there working in unskilled jobs
and trying to make ends meet, living in a rooming
house on Harlem, right, And I'd heard about marks. But
I finally someplace found that an old second hand set
of encyclopedias for a dollar nineteen cents, which I bought,
and there was an article on Carl Marx. It seemed
(11:19):
to me that he explained these situations so well that.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
The situation was what that you took the train from
Harlem down to the lower end the other way around.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Coming home from work, I would sometimes take the bus
and it would go right up Fifth Avenue, past all
these glitzy places like cross fifty seventh Street where all
the fancy stores were at Carnegie Hall and the rest
of it, and then finally, as I got near home,
it would kind of turn off this viaduct into one
hundred and thirty fifth Street, and there was that sudden
(11:50):
change in the whole scene at that point, And the
question was why was that?
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And the problem was to two problems.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
One was that no one else had given any explanation.
There was no competing explanation that sounded plausible.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
In your life so far, yes, right, yes.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
And the other was that no one had cautioned me
that it takes an awful lot more knowledge before you.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Can make these guys of sleeping judgments in any case.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
But fortunately I'd been taught earlier to respect facts and
so on, and so even during my years as a Marxist,
I would read things by people who weren't Marxist.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I would read facts and so forth.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
But you I have heard you say many times that
you got a good education in the New York City
public schools in Harlem.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yes, so they did.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
They taught you to think. They may not have taught you,
Adam Smith that the offensive free markets, but they taught.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
You to think.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yes, all right now, but keep continue the story if
you would. You're a Marxist at the age of nineteen,
taking the bus home from the southern third of Manhattan, Iran.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
All the way up to Harlem.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
You remain a Marxist at the University of Chicago under
the instruction of Milton Milton Friedman. Yes, how did that?
If Milton couldn't crack you, you were a tough nut?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Well, uh, but what what?
Speaker 4 (13:09):
But one summer working for the government as an economist
was enough to show me that the government was really
not the answer. That the government that the level of
understanding among the people. And I was in a program
for interns where we saw the top officials of the
Labor Department and so forth, and I realized, these guys
are not going to save us.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
In other words, they had no They were not the
priestly cast that you might have been led to expect
they were ordinary chumps, bashing their way through life as
best they could, like anybody else. Yes, I see, all right,
and so but intellectually, all right, you spend a summer
working for the federal government and.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
That cures you of Marxism.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yes, But intellectually, when do you pick up the thread
of free markets?
Speaker 4 (13:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
I guess well, well I had always.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Been you thought back to what Milton said, right, not.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Just Milting, but Hayek and the rest of them, because
I had read all those people while I was still
a Marxist.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
A couple of you. Have an essay in here entitled
Marx the manh yeah quote Marx's angry apocalyptic visions existed
before he discovered capitalism as the focus of such visions.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Explain that what.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
You can there are the poems he wrote in his
teen years. One of them in particular, I remember what
So let's the effect that then will I walk walk
god like and triumphant through the ruins of the world.
So he has these uh apocalyptic visions early on before
he said what you had thought about capitalism?
Speaker 3 (14:43):
And what the subtext does? I take it of your
It's entitled Marx not the Marx the political philosopher. Not
Marx the economists, but Marks the man. And what you're
what I felt reading that essay is you're in effect.
It's like the scene in The Wizard of Oz where
they pull back the curt Yes, that's right, great and
powerful Oz turns out to be an ordinary, cranky human being.
(15:06):
And what you're saying is Marxism is fascinating in some
highly intelligibent in some cases, in some ways kind of.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
A nut, yes, just a man, Yes, all right.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Another quotation from that essay. The members of the Communist League.
We're talking now about the mid nineteenth century Marx and
Engels form or they participate in the Communist League. The
members of the Communist League were overwhelmingly intellectuals and professionals.
It had the same kind of social composition that would
in later years characterize many radical groups in which the
(15:38):
youthful offspring of privilege called themselves the proletariat. Marxism is
the conceit of rich kids with fancy educations.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Yes, you see that in the what is this thing
called the Occupying Wall Street group? All these middle class
accents and so on. I mean, how many working class
people can or to take a month off to sit
around in parks and carry on and have all their
electronic equipment with them, but all the rest of it,
(16:08):
I mean, come sleeping.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
At sleeping bags with a first rate down feathers. So,
but at what stage was there a moment when you said, wait,
a moment? These putative Marxists and leftists and liberals, to
use the term the way it's used in this country,
as a leftist they have they have no knowledge of
nor concern for what life is like up one hundred
(16:31):
and thirtieth Street. That's right, there was a moment. Was
there a moment or an incident when that just struck you?
Or that's kind of a progressive realization, progressive realization.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
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(17:27):
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Speaker 1 (17:38):
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