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help us understand the events of the last 11 years in light of the history that you lay out here. >> the topic of crisis of leviathan is the growth of the government in the united states from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. that growth has many causes and i start up the book by making clear that i'm not offering a new favorite cause explanation for that complex development. it can be related and traced back to a great many changes in the nature of social and economic change during that period and changes in ideology and political changes of various sorts and so forth. but, my own development in that book focused on the fact that the growth of government over that century was not slow and steady. it was instead episodically interrupted by big lurches in this size, scope and power of the government. and at that time i began my work on the book in the late 1970s, most of the economists who were working were basically ignoring that profile. they were attempting to explain the long-term growth of government without worrying about the exact path that followed in the course of its growth. it seemed to me after some years of reading and teaching economic history the connection with this experience that ignoring the profile of the way government had grown was missing a great deal of an understanding about why it had grown. and it seemed to me increasinincreasin gly as i continued my research that these episodes of abrupt growth were all focused on national emergencies such as the world wars and the great depression. those three more than any others those episodes didn't behave the way many people at the time thought they ought to behave or how historians later imagine they have behaved. that is to say very often when the government expanded its power in one of these emergencies, there was a kind of promise, sometimes explicit, that the government would exercise extraordinary powers in order to deal with the crisis at hand but that once the crisis had passed, once it had been dealt with adequately then the government would relinquish those powers and referred to something like the status quo antebellum. that however had never happened and it led me to formulate a new version of an old idea which i call the russian phenomenon where the ration effect which is the idea that in national emergencies the government would grow up properly in size, scope and power. after the emergency had clearly passed it would indeed relinquish some of the new powers but not all. never would have relinquish all and so instead of growing a long a steady upward tilting path like that for various reasons, it would grow along a smooth path, abruptly increase, partially retrench and then resume growth along a higher trajectory so that each one of these crises. in effect shifted the size and scope and the power of government to a higher level and created a higher baseline from which it would grow abruptly on the occasion of the next crisis. so as i attempted to sort of research the facts of history and find out how they related to this pattern, i became more and more convinced that there was a logic behind the ratcheting effect and it involved not changes in government spending or tax revenues or borrowing in emergencies but perhaps more important involve changes in institutions which were enduring government would create new bureaus. it would pass new laws. it would change the conditions that allowed it to exercise coercion over the societies and then it would retain some of those powers after the crisis had passed. and another dimension of the crisis was that in the course of passing through these episodes, people's thinking would be changed. people have a habit of getting used to things that they must endure for some time particulaparticula rly for years on end. and having gotten used to them, even if they objected to these conditions before, they therefore accepted more readily. each crisis softens them up as it were tolerate a larger government, and more power for for -- powerful government with a larger reach. that is what was borne out and when the attacks of 9/11 happened, and i began to receive calls from reporters who had set familiarifamiliari ty with that historical work asking me what i thought the effect of 9/11 would be i said that it would probably be the same if it had been before, that in the wake of these attacks people being more fearful and people being uncertain about what was going on or how they should deal with it would turn to the state. the state would take advantage of this concession as it were in the citizens normal resistance to the growth of government and the upshot would be another upward ratcheting up the size scope and power of government. i am absolutely convinced that is exactly what has happened during the 12 years since 9/11 attacks. and so i believe current history , recent history gets to the pattern of the preceding century very well in terms of its logic. each such set -- episode has unique specifics of course, unique personalities and many differences but the inner logic, what is driving this growth in an episodic manner for a ratcheting process remains the same. >> we certainly observed it on steroids as you have cited. anthony, -- >> yes? >> your hot off the press new book from cambridge university press "the power of habeas corpus in america" from the king's prerogative to the war on terror. you spent the past several years becoming an expert in habeas corpus and the book reflects that. it's been endorsed by scholars and civil liberties leaders across-the-board and is earning very high praise and rightfully so. but what about habeas corpus made you think it's an important thing that you spent the last few years of your life on and what about it can help us in our fight for our liberties in the midst of the war on terror? >> well during the bush years the first years of the war on terror i was like many other americans horrified by a number of practices in the administration in guantánamo and in other wise with detention policy and i have long taken the traditional civil libertarian view that the most fundamental of our liberties in the anglo-american tradition is the right of habeas corpus because if the government can jail somebody without saying why then all of these other freedoms seem moot. like many other civil libertarians i believe that the legal history of habeas corpus was very simply on our side but with the bush administration was doing was clearly outside the bounds of the tradition and that if i just looked into it that i could come up with that airtight silver bullet argument for what they were doing and why it was so wrong. as i researched more and the paper became a book, i discovered that the history of habeas corpus is unfortunately a lot rockier and less clear-cut than that. starting in england, which is actually more important than it might seem to a lot of people in the united states because even the supreme court decisions often discuss english legal history to try to determine how habeas corpus would apply here in the united states because the common law was carried over via the constitution. i noticed in this english history, the history of habeas corpus was kind of elusive in terms of its silver bullet potential to vindicate liberty. it was first established by royal courts to exercise control over other courts and bring detainees to their jurisdiction. it was abused and did not have this very unambiguous pro-freedom connotation that we attach to it today. when the parliamentarians were arguing for habeas corpus, they would say you no habeas corpus is always guaranteed, that no man should spend two days in jail without cause. but that was wishful thinking actually and not what it always did or what it always guaranteed i see you found out so when parliament took over after the english civil war, they were just as bad as the king if not worse in violating the rights of the detained. and i say this might be kind of a downer but i soon came to the conclusioconclusio n of the golden age if there was one might have been the colonial era in the british colonies in north america where habeas corpus seemed to have more of an idealistic application where the colonists instead of establishing it as this authoritarian measure, established a purely for the good reasons but then once the constitution was ratified and the power to suspend habeas corpus which we look at the suspension which is how congress can suspend habeas corpus but thomas jefferson said why should they ever be allowed to suspend it? in some ways there is a centralization of authority and jefferson turned out himself to try to suspend that when he was president like the parliamentarians. he was something of a hypocrite on this. he was not the first and he was not the last and you see it in the antebellum period, habeas corpus being used to recruit slaves and it's it's a rockier history than you might think. in the mid-19th century the supreme court undid one of the most revolutionary aspects of american habeas corpus because in america the states would be able to issue habeas corpus writs requesting federal imprisonment which is a really radical kind of stage right that a number of supreme court decisions overturned that and soon enough there was the central government using habeas corpus to question state governments which was more like how it developed in england. we saw how well the federal government protected the rights of the detained in the civil war and in the world wars, especially world war ii where the supreme court did eventually get around to determining that a loyal citizen of the u.s. government declared loyal than japanese internment shouldn't be detained by then the war was basically over in in the program was basically over. now in the 20th century most of the discussion of habeas corpus concerned criminal law and the scope of federal review of state convictions. so whereas back in the day it was usually brought to bear before someone went to trial, it got changed in this other way where now it was used mostly after trial but it continue to be relevant in these classical cases of executive detention power and we see this erupted ever since 9/11 with some incredible claims of executive authority under bush. despite what the courts have done and certainly under obama despite what the courts have done we have seen these glorious , many of us thought of them as glorious court decisions that seem to vindicate the rights of the detained but the executive branch has found a way to circumvent the spirit of that and obama is no exception. at guantánamo there are quite a few prisoners that the government admits it has no evidence against and they are not a threat but they can't release for one reason or another. and they have been there for over 11 years. the treatment there is outrageous and we have gone a long way from this idea of two days to 11 years. so now, just this week a circuit court has sided with the obama administration in this case with the ndaa and the indefinite detention power executive to detain people without due process and i know a lot of people are outraged and they think what this is entirely unprecedented and unfortunately it's not unprecedented. where i t. c. hope is throughout this entire history there were people, there were idealists, who saw around all the legal jargon and all the technicalities of love that what was important was the principles of liberty and the principle that it's wrong. it's the wrong thing to do to put someone in detention without giving reasons to put the innocent behind bars to be shoddy with the procedures in doing so. and so i think that whatever the courts are doing and whatever congress does and whatever the presidents do i have no reason to believe the next president will be much better in this respect. what i think i have come away with is the belief that we really need a revolution of thinking and the american people need to become more focused on the ideals that underlie it because these are not just legal decisions. these are not just statutes. they are court decisions. they are flesh and blood people that are being mistreated and stripped of their human rights and it's an outrage and it has to stop. >> well. >> while the country was founded by people who helped those ideals, such ideals as we are talking about very deeply. they fought the resolution and established a republic that they hoped would ensure that those ideals were carried on. the principles grew from the natural law tenants of all men are created equal and we are endowed in a line of blade with rights to life, liberty and property. obviously as you say it's been upheld in perfectly throughout our history but i think many of us have been utterly blown away with how completely they have been abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11 and it's a shock to see how readily so many have abandoned these principles and have replaced them with the utilitarian view that for some reason it's okay that those unfortunate to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time should be subjected to retribution for an offense for which they had no culpability and they have no responsibility. they are being ruled by people they don't want to be ruled by that didn't have anything to do with any terrorist attacks etc.. since then of course as we talked about earlier with you bob ,-com,-com ma we have seen the growth of governing power and loss of liberties and you detail it further in your most recent book om the institute, "delusions of power" new explorations of the state, war and economy and yet many people argue that the ideals of the founders are irrelevant. those were fine nonintervention and peace with all was fine when we have these great oceans that formed our borders and we could be idealistiidealisti c but in the new modern age we have to be realistic about it. so, both of you, all of us can jump in on this but what would a u.s. foreign policy look like that was both consistent with those ideals as founding principles as natural tenants and deal well with modern reality? >> that is a big question. >> you really? >> i hope we have had a few years. i am quite sure that u.s. foreign policy would have to be changed root and branch from what it has become, to some extent over the past century or more ever since the spanish-american war and particularly since world war ii. the even as late as the eve of world war ii. many americans still took seriously the idea that the united states ought properly to conduct its affairs with other nations as a neutral power. it should not take alliances with any other country. it should not entangle itself with the complex within or between other countries, that the proper role was to protect the rights of the american people, period. and should it become involved -- involved in other people's corals and attempts to rectify the evils of the whole world, it it would only result in making americans themselves worse off, less free, less prosperous and more at risk of the reactions from abroad to the actions it might initiate to the world outside of our borders. and yet, through a series of occasions the government has again and again and again abandoned that classical stands toward foreign policy most memorably enunciated by george washington and thomas jefferson and launched into precisely the kinds of foreign involvements and alliances and entanglements and other people's corals that have marked its whole history since the late 19th century. and although one can't say that this has been 100% failure, it has purged on that and one certainly can't say and that is part of the message i tried to get across, that the effect some liberties in the american people has been adverse. it's been highly negative. every time the united states set out to involve itself unnecessarily, and it was almost always unnecessarily, in these foreign affairs that could have refrained from involving itself in. the ultimate result for the american people was a loss of liberties of some kind because the government that attempts to affect the world must use power to make those changes and in order to exert more power the government must get the resources for that exertion. we are the reservoirs of those resources. the ordinary people, the working people, the creative people, the entrepreneurs who create the wealth that make this country as affluent as it is, we are the ones that must provide the wherewithal for the government to act as a crusader, as a savior, as a power of first resort whenever any quarrel breaks out. no matter how manifestly unrelated to the interest of the american people in general. i would think very few americans can tell me a reason why the united states should involve itself in the civil war in syria for, and i could just go to one case after another and get the same commentary about it. and yet this has become not an extraordinary at djibouti but a sick operating procedure for the u.s. government and it involves not simply the state department but an ever-increasing degree the pentagon which is very much a foreign policy now and all of the pentagon's foreign installations. it's hundreds and hundreds of cases major bases located all over the world for which it attempts to intimidate foreigners and to create fear and to crop up a strong man that it chooses to support today although it may turn on them tomorrow of course. all of this bedlam ,-com,-com ma all of this chronic interventionism has not made the american people better off. i didn't say never. there may be instances in which one could make a positive case for it but it's the exception to the general rule and so the main thing that would have to happen would be an alteration of what you might call the present default stands of the american foreign policy which is the idea that america ought to be involved in everybody's troubles all over the world. that is a basic mistake and a desire to act or capacity to act in that mistakes the idea that one knows enough to act intelligently with the reality of the vast ignorance, even the people in the state department and the pentagon have about what is going on in other parts of the world and why and it gets us involved in quicksand again and again and again for which it's very difficult to extract ourselves and we sometimes end up with what is represented as a surgical action of some kind in which there we are decades or even more time later. somebody might want to tell say the state department or the pentagon that world war ii ended in 1945. there is not a real good reason we still have u.s. troops occupying japanese and german territory. it's over now. they are not our enemies now. we can worry about other things and yet there they are. i can explain to you if i have enough time why they are still there but those explanations usually boil down to things that have nothing to do with our well-being, nothing to do with the preservation of our liberties whatsoever. they have everything to do with the politics of predation, of rent seeking, of all the things that make real politics is different from idealistic politics. >> i see two basic sets of rationale that we get for going to war or for intervening one is the safety, the security, the well-being and the freedom of the american people and the other is the freedom and the well-being of foreigners. you will often see this calculus where they will say well we will make the sacrifices for the sake of these foreigners or in some cases u.s. wars might hurt a lot of warners but -- and in every case these calculations are made by government and by politicians who in this area no less than in any other area are acting out of self-interest and to prevaricate and who are not always acting out of their motives as they say as bob suggested. i think that it's clear if you look at most of these wars that the rationales given for american security don't pass the self test. this was true with the iraq war which is one reason that they like to shift to the other rationale. this is to liberate the iraqi people. and some people were better off after saddam but not all of them perhaps maybe likely not most of them, not the christian groups are the sunni groups are the women are many others who were displaced in the millions who have lost their homes and to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who have died as a result of the war. on amacalee see the webby aw that president obama participated in that was sold almost entirely on the basis of liberating the libyan people from gadhafi, the awful dictator and the u.s. should have never supported him in there. and what happens is there is this of attention span where americans are very excited about the war and what it is supposed to have done for these people and they stop stopped paying attention so they don't realize that it has unleashed this war against libyans and immigrants who were being put into tension camps. they don't really look into the circumstantial allies between the u.s. and libya which were al qaeda the way it's and this happens over and over. and so americans seem to toggle between these two rationales and it's a very convenient and very useful recipe for constant intervention because a lot of americans don't believe so much in the national security threats as they are presented but they really do want to help foreigners and a lot of other americans are less concerned about that. they have part of that american american -- but if they feel threatened even if the threat is as small or miniscule as the terrorist threat they are willing to sacrifice unbelievable amounts of their liberty and they're willing to go along with major wars. i think that the solution is an ideological one and a philosophical one. i think one problem is the american people have come to live in the seat of what is currently the world empire and americans in many ways don't make particularly good imperialists because they have notoriously failed geography for one thing. .. >> should be regarded the number one issue. i easier except in the moment of hysteria or great patriotic pride the american people to knout in the longer think the word is even important it is a minor issue. you have people voting on everything imaginable and people who dislike the foreign policy intellectually but don't regard it as a high priority. they look at it as the talking points of the week or the obama run campaign and some of this stuff is very important but much of it frankly is trivial compared to the life-and-death matter wrapped up in intervention and the been thousands or hundreds of thousands. >> let's focus back home the recent revelation underscores that others have been instituted for many years and it is very well documented capturing every american's so-called, e-mail , all of the internet activity, the library usage, transaction and we carry around a portable device to eavesdrop and record any conversation going on in the vicinity and in short every aspect is captured and stored the gigantic databases to build a dossier against anybody. yet despite the violation of privacy is not making a city safer. and with your book neither liberty nor safety, with the ideology of the growth of government that it is a false trade-off is to show how the u.s. cover increases the military intervention and with the prosperity and our security. one of our directors to grow during world war ii with the 69th anniversary with the attempt to kill hitler in his but bunker and also what occurred at the time they did not know in advance. the yet polls show the majority of americans think it is okay for the u.s. government to we spying on americans. the general attitude is i have nothing to hide. is okay. so what is wrong with the government having that information? and if they don't how would day with these threats? how do we judge against domestic threats while retaining our essentials freedoms? >> i think it is a mistake we go how the state into constrain grossly with the lack of resources so look getting as a balance it is important to have perspective against the threat. the boston bobby was terrific and enact tough new mass murder serial murder and to condemn it but if word that did the bombing as every day in the united states you still be more likely to injure or be dead in a car crash. so what liberty duty is negotiable to deal with the threat even with the year of 9/11 your far more likely to we killed to a murder or pedestrian homicide. so then with the degree of savings it may assess the threat more responsibly during the cold war they had nuclear -- russia had said the thousands of nuclear weapons and to take over the globe it yet to look back at what the fbi did in those in the late '70s that were thrown out by the last administration since. but still there was a line that we all grew up i remember torture and mass surveillance. it is true that these were seen as operation and embarrassment and not the policy and the surveillance that we talk about truly is unprecedented i am careful about that word i don't think the people in charge them are evil as the rulers of the past that with the technological infrastructure it is something that they did it because it goes way beyond and for this president to keep you safe for the next president you have to keep in mind the state rarely cuts back in this conflict with terrorism like the germans and the jacket -- the japanese there is no point where they say enough is enough. been lighted is dead. especially if the u.s. is all over the world so would every think of this particular administration you should be horrified. the mere fact that it oversees this policy should probably change your mind about this administration. >> you have anything to add? >> with the judgment that it truly is unprecedented. the power of the current technology of where we are every single minute of it day and night it might have been made that would have been too ridiculous with disbelief by "the reader" back yet here it is with the reality that grows steady now there is a huge value of $100 billion a newly. in the people in this industry involve hundreds of thousands of the employees and i tea companies that are hard-working to intensify our already developed for every one of us that they can't know about. most people are in line with the degree of scrutiny no one dreamed of intel quite recently ended the americans say so what? i'll it's a that is extraordinarily stupid attitude to take that you don't thank you have done anything wrong is quite irrelevant. even if it serves the purposes of the people who control the power to use against zero if you think there is anything wrong or not the new count on them? that we cannot point to any when of political power to say that this individual is worse is irrelevant. the people a position today are plenty bad either half and extremely evil and i don't think they will stop. if they have the purposes they will use it and a company it to discredit anyone who opposes as the recede now with eric snowden but the fact the issue is edward snowden is not the issue. the messenger is not the issue but yet because of the way the media operates with a highs powers in this country they did not by accident but that is simply a typical way the government is distracting of the unimportant to keep us thinking seriously about what they're doing to us. not that this country ever had a golden age but there never was a time americans would have tolerated this kind of treatment than it does not speak well at all. >> is hopeful of a growing protest dan backlash of the new revelations that came out to a couple days ago of the cars being captured and the testimony before congress that there are in fact, capturing your buddies information not just the terrorist especially everybody in any network whatsoever. so the revolution -- revelations are to build a political backlash but two weeks ago on independence day, a group that organized itself protested in 80 cities across the country including it in utah to bring about the data and half of that is in data bytes that was an incredible amount of data. but even to organize in front of the consulate in munich it calls for the abolition of the nsa. not reform or scaling back. the last year of the 20th anniversary with our alexis day tocqueville ward, a d.c. parallel for hope between the protest that led @ the protest that led to the eventual fall of the berlin wall? or what we can drawn today? >> we can certainly hope to move in that direction. one of the advantages the east germans had by the 1980's was ideological support that totally evaporated over the course of time. of course, there were many people who went along to get along but they could build day movement for the opposition but not by offical excuses and the greatest difficulty is a great many americans are using it. many more protests i hope there will be in the held at 800 cities in every city in america. people can now and said no. we will not tolerate this house we will oppose you with every ounce of this totalitarian measure. with david do is say yes. you are right. with david hold a hearing in they would introduce bills out of recognition along the way. then they would come forward with their reform that is the nature of the great popular pressure. i would hope that people would understand what we need in this case is not reform but we need to tear these things apart brick by brick and let people know that we will never trust again positions of power if we tolerate this to me will be treated that way we tolerated it this long with the excuses and the blown out of proportion with lies and lies. and we forgive them somehow. that is very dangerous. i'll dig this is an issue that is negotiable because this portends under totalitarianism of they know everything about you then very few people can be blackmailed and even if you are not blackmailed by virtue they will threaten family members. the communist know how to get you to fall in line when they know so much about everything they have to the power to make everybody fall in line. the only way to stop it is to tear the damn thing apart. bulldoze it. do not tolerate the congressional hearings we want it stopped and we want it stopped now. with the president to issue an executive order terminating all work on it. and not intel we make that demand will they do a damn thing. but we tolerate it tolerate for decades and decades and decades which brought us to this point. we did not get here by accident. we made a possible not many of us are as evil as he kept pushing the lover but we never said no. no more. no fooling us again. i think this time if we don't do what we are lost. >> you go to a lot of conferences and gatherings and one of the most exciting thing to me is a great numbers of young people when i was at that age group now there are a lot of young people involved there very principled and active in and organizing it unique ways using the power of social media and other thing is. in very interested to pursue these ideas and put into action in a principled way. so that gives me a tremendous hope and optimism >> when i was a student interested in these ideas considerably smaller than now eliot that is very encouraging. i think one reason the user often attracted to ideas is they have a long-term outlook. in many cases they know the short-term is not the greatest hope they don't buy as much into the fleeing controversies in thinking in the long term and hopeful in that sense in that is the way i am hopeful in the long run i think eventually something has to give and there are too many internal contradictions with the american political system to maintain the support and it is human nature of the law of economics something the state passed to deal with the to show many of the promises they made of wood as possible in the future. also lies and distortion but also to be enthusiastic in terms of freedom being the international idea. i mid-american and i want freedom of i'd like to see it flourish i want to see it for the entire world. to be honest i think that fixation of liberty as the american ideal has tourists to that historic lee is to jump the shark but in the long term i have more hope there will be people elsewhere in the world the u.s. and doing this and the rest of the world and people all over the world outraged by it i have no doubt most of these people living under the most powerful sense on earth the government had basis of where to claim authority to capture or kill anybody of earth which is what are president claims the authority to do but that is not the way and we saw with communism in china a far way to go a move to liberty away from the depth of knowledge that is inspiring during the long term it may sound pessimistic short-term. i think it is important in the short term to have a sense of urgency where it most matters but this is the issue if there ever was one that we should approach with the utmost urgency there is no time to squabble we will not get that anytime soon but for the stampede that will accelerate since then 11, i am hoping americans will eventually understand if we have the 9/11 every year does not help justify what is happening abroad or at home but i do hope that eventually the lack of attention span that many americans could work in our favor they will stop believing in everything they have been told how the u.s. government is keeping them saved by waging wars or spying on everyone or claiming its authority in the detention policy. i'd like to see the whole national security as we know it abolished. i would like to see like i say it sounds to be out there but was out there are even more so is the direction we are going and this is unambiguous because the trajectory could not be more clear. that is what is umbrageous and just like the abolitionist during slavery made a point you have to be urgent garrison the great abolitionist said to be in perpetuity and practice if you talk about reform or to tweet things a little bit you hope a congressional leader will become of might and to make them a little more protected than that is your stand then is total control that is not a compromise but i guarantee we will keep going the same direction. it is time for people to be as urgent and emphatic about this and outraged about this as they are about anything imaginable. because honestly, i have a good imagination even i was a little shocked not by the revelation that the american response which could be worse but it could be a hell of a lot better. >> is the ideological battle and that is an honor to work with people like bob and it anthony to provide the information rooted in principles that affect change so we look at the idea is that will shift the culture to begin stand on principles to say it is not okay. it is not a pale little bit. it is not a pale lot in the best of these principles regardless we could be in danger in with this going on in reid very much appreciate you informing us we know what to open this up to involve the audience as well as those participating by live stream. . . >> well, crisis attract the viewers. they attract readers. dangers attract interests, whatever the form of the media, and so the media are constantly hyping potential dangers. i should say not dangers, but potential dangers. at least 99% of the great threats cnn bring up on a day-to-day basis or scarcely even real, let alone threats that turn into dangers to humanity. they are, in a sense, the moe toc app renne di of news deseminaters, and as horror movies attract viewers, visions of future real horror attract viewers too so the media are entertaining us as a horror movie producer entertains us, and at the same time, they're maintaining their liaison with the state, and they need that very much because if you ever notice the great bulk of material they use and report on comes from some kind of government official, some kind of government statement, and in many ways, the mainstream media are simply amp miers. they are megaphones to make a big noise of the the government begun by making so everyone will know about it, and especially be frightened by it because they know very well that under current ideological conditions, most americans, when frightened, will turn to the state to protect them, to save them from this imaginedded danger. it's obvious that people grow tired of this, constant wolf crying after a while, so they can tune out to some extent, but all one has to do is change the nature of the threat or raise the level of the volume a little bit, and they come running again as if they never learned before that it's almost always a trick. it's almost always a way to purchase their subserveing, a willingness to depart with their own resources and liberty. fear is the title of an article i wrote a few years ago, and it's the lead article in this book. i may not be a good judge of my own work, but i think it's one of the best articles i ever wrote in my life because it seems to me that fear is at the very foundation of how all states operate, and that can be involved in a variety of ways, but the fact of the matter is if you want people to take leave of theircepses, to not use good judgment, all you have to do is scare them, and it will work, particularly if they are predisposed to look to the state for their salvation. >> regarding the media, though, i'm very cognizant that in the instance of the nixon administration, as a couple reporters who nobody believed that doggedly pursued the water gate story, the vast majority of americans were completely apathetic about it, could care less, water gate what? they kept pushing it. they kept digging it, and, again, they were entrepreneurial media types, and they eventually brought down the most powerful man in the country, and we had kind of a reverse effect where americans in general said, well, we don't want to trust government anymore, and we want to roll it back, so there is -- and today, of course, there's many more opportunities. we don't have just three networks anymore that control all of the news. there's a lot of entrepreneurs in the media. there's a lot of new media. there's a lot of entrepreneurial newsmen all over the world, and i think it's a different picture, and we can get that sort of phenomena again, and i'm very hopeful that we can have an even better outcome if we get a few, you know, even just one, really great person digging and making a career out of making sure that we're not apathetic, that we pay attention to it, that we get the story, and we understand why it's important, and as a result of this and hopefully fed by principled arguments, really shift the culture and see change. do you want to say anything about the media? >> briefly. i think there are specific reasons the mainstream media are so in bed with the state. you know, a lot of conservatives talk about the liberal media, and there's a little truth to that, and a lot of liberals talk about the corporate media, and there's truth to that, but, really, it's the state media. it is true that it's nominally private, but it's kind of private in a fascist sense. it has this relationship, and it's a very tight relationship. if you want access to the white house, if you want access to the war, you'd better play nice, and that alone goes a long way in explaning all of this, and furthermore, it's true that there's all of these independent media erupting, and one thing that gives me some hope is it's breaking down this nonsensical left-right spectrum that i think the state just loves because divide and conquer has been the -- has been the resort, has been the strategy of imperialist rulers and other villains throughout history, and people need to stop getting in this whole red team, blue team mentality and lining up behind the talking points of the week, and realize fundamentally, although other people have different views on all sorts of issues and people are very different culturally and in any given political issue, you might see them as your adversary, if people keep thinking that their enemies are their next door neighbor, and obama's their savior, or their enemies are somewhere in a different country or coming from mexico, and their savior is a republican politician rather than seeing the near identical nature of all of the politicians, i think we're going to have a lot of trouble. people need to snap out of it and stop spending all their time arguing over relative trivialities for now because this really is an urgent matter. >> okay. yeah. >> we didn't have -- you may have briefly alluded to it, but one of the things that reading that has been an unprecedented change is the government, particularly as the federal law system becomes more and more complex and intervening into more and more areas of activity there, it almost, you know, that the government could find that they figure, they could find -- could make any of us a criminal in the sense they can find some violation of some law, not only can they do that, they have been starting to do that, and combining that with the fact, the surveillance ability to know what everybody is up to, there seems to me there is a, you know, an impending, you know, ability to be able to, you know, use term "blackmail," but along that line. the blackmailing taken out of the way there, and we've seen that interfering into electoral politics there where besides the question of disadvantaging certain groups from participating, we also have the issue of releasing information, you know, about unfavored candidates that are really privy information or otherwise tieing them up in things. i wonder, you know, that's part of the symptom here, but how would you -- how would you put that into your equation in terms of overall, the -- in terms of if you tilt the playing fields with that, so that the institutional ability, institutional corrective of the people being able to vote becomes, you know, income pass at a timed by this qualifying, you know, candidate. >> well, there's been a tendency for over a century for the government to multiply the details of its statutory restrictions and requirements, and at the same time, to build an immense regulatory state, and we now have a legal system in which laws are made without real consideration by legislatures at all. there are simply regulations made by the members of regulatory commissions, boards, what have you, and there's a due process procedure for their doing so, and there's always supposed to be some underlying statutory basis for them, but they are inventive and persistent. they work on this every day of the week and every bureauments to have more regulations to enforce, gives it more power, more ability to bring about the state of the world it wants to bring about, for whatever reason and it also puts every person increasingly in the position you described where they can find we're in violation in most cases of some felony restriction, and it doesn't take much at all. it can be done quite by accident. i noticed yesterday standing in the los angeles airport a big sign standing there informing me of something i already knew, but i was struck by it once again. that is that the u.s. law forbids anyone to enter or leave the united states with more than $10,000 in currency or the equivalent in foreign currency without reporting, and there were -- it's not one form to be filled out, but three, and that in order to make the reports, it's just failure to make those reports and to make them accurately may result in the forfeiture of all your currency and your imprisonment. now, think about that. how easy might it be to be off by a dollar when you report the amount of money you're carrying? there's just any number of ways in which people could totally innocently, and this is not just conjecture on my part. this has actually happened in regard to this rule in the past. people have had all of their money stolen by the government because they didn't correctly report the amount they had, or they didn't fill out the forms properly. now, that's just one instance. multiply that by about 400,000, and you have the world we live in, a world where we're all criminals. any time prosecutors want to show that we're criminals. historically, there was a natural law. it definedded crimes. they were obvious things like murder, robbery, burglary, you know, you could count them on your fingers the number of real crimes that could be committed. well, that hasn't changed. that's still the case, but what we have now is this jungle of criminal requirements and prohibitions created by the state, precisely so it can put the fear of god in everybody, bring them into full compliance with whatever it tells them to do no matter how ridiculous it is, and no matter what real reason it has. what is it to the state how much money i carry across the border? it's none of their damn business. how much -- what is their care in somebody bringing into the country $12,000 in some currency? it's none of their damn business. why are they worrying about this? they are worrying about this because they want to enforce absurd rules on people who have harmed no one, but who give them the opportunity to push their weight around and steal money from people who often innocently put themselves in violation of these ridiculous laws, but, as you say, here we are now, and the only way we could get out of this is by beginning to hack away at the rules and repeal these laws one after another. not reform, repeal. make them disappear. >> repeal and start all over with the natural law. of course, the really neat think about them having data bases with the phone calls and everything else as they said to the famous in the three said, give me six lines by the most honest of men, i'll find something in them which will hang him. >> if i could real quick make a point about this regulatory state. >> absolutely. >> a very short point. as we talk about dividing and conquering, there's a lot of americans who have at least some skepticism of the criminal justice system. they love regulation thinking any new regulation has to be good, and if they don't think that, they think they are well-intentioned. they think that generally regulations are the path to stability, fairness, and so forth. other americans are skeptical of the regulatory state, but they are blind to the horrors of the criminal justice system, its brutality, the inequity, the inhumanity that we see in it. this is one of the many cases of pure cognitive disdense where they don't get together and realize that the regulatory state and the criminal justice system are the same people, and that the regulatory state is enforced but the criminal justice system. that's all. >> good point. [laughter] in the back, paul? >> thank you. i want to thank the panel for a really excellent discussion. it was reported in tonight's "new york times" that earlier in the day under deputy secretary of state, ashton carter, announced that the aspen institute that they're now -- the pentagon is ready to deploy advanced cyber defense and offense troupes,4,000 of them, under the command of alexander who runs the cyber command. i was curious what the implications of that could be, particularly how the whole cyberdefense thing is, you know, piewtively constructed to defend us against threats from china, ect., but what the implications would be for everything you're talking about, thank you. >> well, i think the, in terms of any businesses, any businesses that depend heavily on the interpret, which practically all of them do, i think that they should pay for their own defense against cyberattacks or any of this. this is just one more pretext for more power and even with the best of intentions behind it, there's no reason to think they are going to do a good job on this anymore than any others. the boston bombing happened despite the surveillance state, and even if that multiply the power, reform it, tweaked it, such attacks could still happen. the threat of there will always be people who can out smart the system to do bad. it's specifically with terrorism, of course, which is an act of violence available to any able bodied human being and always has been. there's no way to stop this all together. people need to get perspective. i don't know all the details about that but i have no reason to believe it's the one exception to the rule. [laughter] >> i, myself, would wonder whether it's really cyber defense they are working on, or whether it's more cyber offense that thigh are developing to aim at other countries. in general, all the defense programs have that semimetry built into them, and it's the defense posture that the armed forces require total spectrum dominance it's called so that they control the land, they control the air. they control the seas, and they control space, and this fits into the vision of universal domination. i mean, it's almost the stuff of bad movies at this point, but nonetheless, it doesn't mean they are not spending to deploy this kind of stuff. >> over here. >> embrace your cosmopolitanism and feel that liberty is not just exclusively an american ideal, but global, and international students for liberty feel the same. i feel compelled to play devil's advocate and so as an american citizen, what threats do you think face this country and the government, legitimate threats, or what legitimate threats face the country, and how might they address the threats in a just way? >> well, terrorism is a -- is a threat. it's a minuscule threat, you know. it's almost statistically neglectable, but it exists, i believe, for the most part, because the u.s. props up dictators, overthrows them, torturing people, drone bombing like it's doing in western pakistan, it's terrorizing and made life hell on earth for those people. this kind of behavior makes people mad, and as long as the u.s. continues to do this, then the threat of terrorism, i'm confident, will be higher than it otherwise will be. i really don't see any way that the government can stop terrorism other than pulling out of these countries, declaring peace, and perhaps, although it would be disinjen ewous, going on a real apology tour. i don't think there's any way to stop people from sneaking things on planes. i mean this is absurd. they can make the cocktails if they get the liquor. there's all -- anyone with any imagination at all can think of how to unleash horror that would take many lives. it's as people have access, the government is profiling, and we see with the boston bombings, the white muslims didn't fit the profile, so wide wide en the pr, and the state has everyone's information, but they cannot comb it in any way to stop the threats. maybe on the margins it's possible they'll stop some things, but the ma senior my of all these failed terror plots since 9/11 involved first in informant, where the fbi sends people to stop this plan, and stop them before the plan is carried out. there's one or two exceptions, but this is just -- it's just this -- the national security state is not protecting us. i don't think it can protect us. i think the only hope against the, again, rather trivial threat of terrorism. it's not trivial if it impacts you or lose someone in it, but same with car accidents or people drowning in pools or any other horrible thing would happen. i know criminal is murderous, but there's threat of crime. there's no guarantee to pure safety. people need to get over there, that you -- there's no guarantee of pure security. we know the state is attempting to move towards clear control, african-american there's no possibility of pure control either, especially directed towards any purpose. they make life unbearable and much less free for all of us, but i think the time has passed which americans should be, even humoring the idea of what do we do to get the government to protect us better? the time for that discussion was september, october, november 2001. that was 12 years ago. the state blew its chance. it unleashed great horror, destroyed great american life, and if it's true that terrorists hate us for our freedom, the state is conspiring with the terrorists however inadvertently. there's no way that terrorists can take away our freedom. they can destroy life. they can kill people. they can destroy property, but not nearly on the scale of the state, and when it comes to our liberties, they are no match for government. this is bin laden's wildest dream that the american people would do this to themselves. >> diane feinstein claimed the nsa prevented attacks and there's no evidence that's the case, and tsa claimed it stopped plots that there's been no evidence, and what we know historically is the few would-be bombers and hijackers stopped were stopped by fellow passengers. we can protect ourselves, and we have to remember we have more power than we ever give ourselves credit for, and utilize it, and we'll be far safer under that basis. there was withdrawn over there, and then let's come over here. okay, do it the other way. >> i particularly conflicted on this matter because i usually like to evaluate both sides of an issue, and when i attend events like this, i always usually hear one side of it, and i would really like to hear you poke holes in the other side, and i'd like to use this opportunity to ask you a very specific question. what you just mentioned about, we don't know how many acts of terrorism have been thwarted, and therefore, i conclude none of them have been avoided, part of the security methodology is you find evidence and find an act of terrorism. it's counter productive to review how you did that, so there's a catch 22 situation here, and i don't think we'll ever know until 50 #-60 years go by and the freedom of information act tells us how many acts of terrorism were actually stoppedded and how it was done. i want to pose a hypothetical to you. >> i don't think the state could resist champ uponning -- >> it's not good security if you did. tip off the bad guys, you don't find them that way again. the hypothetical is -- >> i think you can reveal you stopped a plot without revealing how it's done, and they do it with murderers in the newspaper every day. they talk about certain things, but they don't reveal all the details. >> we have a difference of opinion on that issue, but the specific question i have is if hypothetically and i'm not naive enough to think all government workers are men and women of good faith as a primary goal. a lot of them just want to make their job pay off, but assuming there's some good people there, if they were able to find out and have stopped 9/11 incidents that we don't know about, how many of those incidents would have to occur before you would be willing to give up any of the individual freedoms that we're championing? >> i, myself, am not willing to give up any freedoms at all, period, for their claims that they are protecting me on the path or for their promise to protect me in the future, and the republican for that is that i simply don't consider them credible sources. we know that they, and we can document the ways in which they have lied again and again and again, so the default position i take is that the government may be telling the truth, but i'm just going to assume it's lying. whenever it tells me something that i can't confirm independently like that, and i'd be a damn fool without independent confirmation to believe anything i'm told because it clearly serves the purpose of the government, to represent itself as having succeeded in these kinds of protections. when i think about what it takes as anthony said to commit an act of terrorism, it's so simple, it's so accessible to virtually any adult with an iq over 75, that the fact that there have been no serious terrorist incidents in this country since 9/11 tells me that damn few people must be trying to carry out terrorism. i could carry out terrorism in the next few days if i set my mind to it. anybody can. it's not that hard to do some kind of terrorism. it's just a tactic. it can take a thousand different form, and if we don't see acts of terrorism, why in the world do we believe these boogie men are under our beds in great numbers? it doesn't make sense and incoherent as an argument. >> do you take into account at all historical operations against the japanese code or inanything ma machine, and i agree with you whole heartedly that a single individual can do an act of terrorism at any time. most of the restrictions are against good people and they're totally inconvenient, but if there's a conspiracy monitoring, develops patterns, and i'm wondering if we have enough information to determine whether conspiracies of many phone calls and this, that, and the other thing came out to prevent terrorist attacks. >> well, i agree with you that it's conceivable that things are happening that we can't go about, certainly. i mean, you and i don't have access to the kinds of information. that's why we're complaining here tonight. we don't have it. they shouldn't have it. the point is we don't have all the information they have. we can never say for certain they've never prevented a terrorist plot, but even if they prevented one, prevented 50 of them, i still don't want them to take any of any liberties away because it is a relatively trivial threat to me in the broad spectrum of threats to me, my life, limb, liberty, and well being, and at the same time that i think terrorism has been utterly blown out of all proportions by these scare tactics the government's carried out, there have been genuine threats that continue to exist. the greatest threat this country ever faced was during the cold war when we were on hair trigger opposition with the ussr, both sides with tens of thousands of nuke rare weapon -- nuclear weapons, long range and interimmediate range missiles deliverable in an hour. if even a small proportion of those were engaged in an exchange of nuclear weapons, it would have well destroyed the entire world. that was a real threat. even if we were all sweet as angels and competent as god, there were accidents, okay? accidents on several occasions very nearlily triggered all-out nuclear war between the ussr and the united states. we say, oh, but the cold war is now over, but not really. russia still has thousands of icbms with nuclear weaponnings. operational, retargetble in just a few minutes to any site in this country. if, somehow things should deteriorate or the technologies should develop a glitch, we could have a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons. it's not at all out of the realm of possibility. about ten years ago, there were actually a number of generals and admirals about loof and half split between the former ussr and the united states, and they formed a group, and they attempted to brings to the public's attention the continuing danger of maintaining these weapons. it was in the news for a short while, and it disappeared, and i assumed these guys gave up any exasperation because nobody paid any attention to them, but the fact is these weapons still exist. they pose the greatest threat we can imagine to people all over the world, and especially to us in this country. i would say people need to get their priorities straightened out that system terrorist with a bomb on an airplane is not even in the same universe with the exchanges of the big h bombs. >> we have one more question in the audience we'll take, and i would just say my answer to them is, you know, if they can't keep me safe without securing my liberties, then i'm going to fire them and hire somebody who can. yes? >> fourth amendment rights analysis starts with defining the zone of privacy or the expectation of privacy. it seems that our digital communications all start with checking the box that says "read and accept," and that read and accept check of that box indicates we have an agreement with the conduit or entity who is providing the conduit of our digital communication. inevitably, that agreement contains a very porous privacy policy, and my question is, given that we checked the box "read and agreed," are our digital communications protected by the fourth amendment? if the answer is yes, what's the argument indicating that those digital communications are, in fact, protected by our fourth amendment rights? >> my response would be that the way you posed that question really requires a lawyer who's expert in that area of law, and i'm not a lawyer with that kind of expertise, but i would respond to the question differently. i would say i don't care how expert lawyer would answer your question. i don't want these people in the government reading my e-mail, period, and if the people who serve me with the capability of send r e-mail messages are handing it over to the government, i want them to stop, and i want them to make clear that they're not going to hand it over to the government, and i want all carriers to make it clear they will not hand it over to the government, and i want all of us to make clear to the government officials that we want them to stop reading our damned e-mails. it's simply not something that has to be done, and it's not something that serves a legitimate defense or security purpose. if they have a good reason to read somebody's e-mail, if they have some evidence, if they can show cause, then they can easily go to a court and get a warrant to read our e-mails or look at any other form of evidence that we consider private by virtue of having a court authorize them to do so. they do this now. the fisa court rubber stamps temperatures of thousands of requests for this guy to be searched every year. it's not hard. they can get it in just a matter of a few hours so that fact doesn't satisfy them, and they have to, instead, scoop up every single human being's electronic communications, they are thinking along different lies. they are not really concerned about going after somebody who, for some plausible reason, might be engaged in acts of terrorism or other criminal acts. they are just fishing. they are fishing in every pool, and, to me, i just can't believe that they are doing this for good purpose. >> one thing i note about fisa in the years between it was created, the foreign intelligence surveillance act that created the court, within the justice department, it's not the executive branch court, but the year between then and 2001, they were asked for about 13-14,000 warrants, and they rejected zero, and this was the -- this was the restriction that bush and obama couldn't put up with, but, and i agree with everything -- [laughter] i'll agree with everything bob said. i will note that i think it's a mistake, and this is not my primary interest, but if i am going to play the legal game, i think it's a mistake to look at it just in terms of privacy of some kind of thing that we have. the fourth amendment like most of the bill of rights is a prohibition on government conduct, so it doesn't matter what you do. it doesn't matter how open you are about it. there are things that the state doesn't have the authority to do, first of all, because it was not given that authority, and second of all, because in many cases, it's prohibited from engaging in it, so, yeah, people open themselves up and relinquish their privacy in a sense, but that still doesn't mean the state has a right to even look at it. >> i'll take one that came in through the remote viewers. edward snowden hero or traitor? i'll quote his former associates in the nsa that came out, three senior nsa officers who, among them, have almost a hundred years experience working for the nsa. they've all been whistle-blowers the past seven years, trying do go through the official channels, couldn't get traction on it, and they could snowden a hero. i say that's good enough for me. i want to thank everybody for being here, bob and anthony, so much for being with us, and especially all of you who were here this evening. this is an incredibly important issue, probably nothing more important now, and we hope that you have lerved thing -- learned things, and bob and anthony's books are available for sale op the book table and here to sign them, if you'd like, and for further information, we have a lot of content on our website, independent.org including this program to be available there, many, many articles that they have written, analysis, and i think a lot of information that you can take and use and share with your friends and hopefully empower us to really shift the culture. in the mediate term, abolish this current state of affairs and have a much brighter future. we hope to see you again soon at another independent institute event, and thank you, and good night. [applause] >> a share of miss, and mark twain is every present. everybody likes to call mark twain, or so they say that it's mark twain, and what i found is there's a lot of things mark twain said that he didn't say. one is whisky is for drinking and water is for fighting over. this deals with all water rights in the west, and it's quoted all the time, all the water wars we had out here in the west. you know what mark twain said, you know, whisky for drinking, water's for fighting for. well, what i did, because i heard it time and again, in the legislature, in the newspapers, all forums, i contacted the mark twain papers in berkley, the leading scholars in the country, and i said, did mark twain say this? their answer was, we have no evidence he ever said this, although it's probably something he would say, but we don't know that he ever did say it, yet as much as i tell the world and tell nevada it's not true, once you ring a bell, try to unring it. it'll always be done, but i'm grateful that c-span's given me a chance to tell the world once again mark twain didn't say that. in another instance, a mark twain quote, he covered the legislature many times in our territorial nevada, and the myth associated with that is mark twain said this, it's better that the legislature meet for two days every 60 years than 60 days every two years because of the shenanigans of the legislature. the myth is the legislature met once every year. he didn't say that. he said a lot of choice things about the legislature, but tee didn't say that, yet people like to quote that one all the time to say a two-day legislature is just fine every 60 years. mark twain didn't say it, but the public says he did. >> and now more from carson city, nevada. booktv sat down with conrad and steve who tell the story of the family, the danbergs. >> dan jrnberg, one of the most prom innocent settlers in early western nevada. he came to the united states in 1848. his first job came through new orleans from germany, and his first job was racking logs on the mississippi, which was not quite as good as what mark twain portrayed in his book, but after doing that for a year, he teamed up with another american of german dissent named ben mast, and together they went to work in a flour mill in st. louis, and they did that for about a year; then they moved to illinois where they worked on a farm for three years, and in 185 p -- 1853 after hearing the great stories about the gold rush in california, they decided to make the move west, and they did this by buying 200 head of livestock driving them from st. louis to california, and turns out that could be a profitable venture things even back then were more expensive in california than they were in st. louis. you could buy a cow or ox for five or ten dollars in st. louis, and the same animal cost $50 or more in california. it was a profitable trip for them. they arrived in dayton, nevada in 1853, and they immediately went to work panning for gold in the carson river the next day. they did this for about three years working gold, operating a sleuth box for mixed results. some days very profitable, many days not so much. they did that for three winters until 1856. one of the letters we recovered he wrote to his parents, he said he gave up gold mining because there was no water in the river in may of 1856, and they couldn't wash the dirt, so he took up his supplies. he had a wagon, and he'd go to plasterville and sacramento, and he'd buy supplies, liquor, food, clothing, things like that, and bring them back over the hill here to the carson valley and sell them to the immigrants who were crossing on their way to california, and keep in mind a lot of imgrants had to stay the winter in carson valley because if they were too late to the foot of the sierras here, they couldn't cross until springtime because of the snowfall, so many of them had to spend the winter here in the carson valley, and that's when he started to notice how the hay grew so well along the river and how good it was for the cattle. he started accumulating cattle. he was very smart. he would buy worn out oxen and horses from the immigrants. he might buy two or three of them and give them one healthy animal in return, and then he would, you know, resuscitate the tired horses and oxen and make them healthy again on this hay growing near the river. he did that for probably three or four years before he settled down. he first set his first land claim here in the carson valley came in 1856, that same first year giving up gold mining, he and ben mast built a cabin about one mile from this location later known as the qualber ranch, and they settled there, and we believe that's when they returned in the spring of 1857. they probably went to sacramento, had to stay there until the snow meltedded, and then they came back to the carson valley when they arrived at their cabin, a gentleman by the name of lucky bill thorington was sitting on the front porch with a couple of his cronies and a rifle lying across his lap, and he said, well, dutchman, i jumped your claim, what are you going to do now? he was a wiseman, and his first instinct was to fight for what was rightfully his, but he decided looking at the situation that it was one that he could not win, so he just walked away from that land claim, and they came about one mile south upstream on the river, and he settled here at the home ranch in 1857, and the original two-room cabin was constructed that year, and ben and hf added another partner, charles holbrook, a carpenter, who no doubt did the work constructing the original cabin here, and we believe they added that third partner so that there would always be someone here at the ranch, and they wouldn't have to worry about being claim jumped again. unfortunately, the partnership with holbrook lasted just about a year, and they split up in 1858, but then the others stayed together and started to add to their claim here and started to raise cattle and farm the land, and one of the biggest early products here was butter because they had dairy cows and butter was the quite a precious commodity back then, and he would actually make -- we heard as much as a thousand dollars worth of butter and take it to sack. toe and plaster phil and sell it there, and there's a great story about hf on the way back from the trips. he would be carrying in excess of a thousand dollars cash, and, of course, he was worried about being robbed. the story goes he would travel with an old indian and send the indian in to beg for food and shelter on the way back so everybody thought they were destitute and didn't have any money, and then, of course, when he got back to the carson valley, he would deposit his gold or cash into the banks, and that's one of the ways he made a nice early profit. he married margaret gail ferris in 1866, better known as maggie. her brother is the famous george washington gail ferris, jr., the inventer of the ferris wheel. they had six children, albert, 1868, john, 1871, only daughter, eva, in 1873, george in 1875, and clarence in 1879. albert died as a young boy, so it was only the five children that continued through to adulthood. all four sons were involved in the ranching business initially, and they all grew up here at the home ranch until years later clarence, the youngest son, decided ranching was not for him. he sold his interest in the company. it was hf and his three oldest sons that continued the tradition of farming and ranching after he passed away. when hf senior died in 1904, the company owned in excess of 33,000 acres, which is really incredible considering the fact that he started with 160 acres right here where we are sitting. i mean, he really built on his empire, and hf senior never sold, as far as we can tell, a single acre of land. he kept everything that he worked hard for. the sons had a little different idea how to run the business, especially fred. unfortunately, fred had some bad habits that got him into trouble, most namely gambling. fred was notorious gambler, and he also liked to have a good time with the liquor and those two are never a good combination, and, unfortunately, he encountered serious financial difficulties. we believe beginning around 1912 is when he went bloke about that time. unfortunately fred's bad habits made a rift between he and john, and that rift, sadly, was never resolved. what happened was fred would start to use some of the company's assets, and some of the company's money to pay his gambling debts. we know that the board has got started in the sheep business when fred lost a band of sheep, which is 2 # ,000 sheep, in a poker game when he was bluffed with a pair of deuces. we also know about 160 acre plot of land lake front of lake tahoe, today worth untold millions of dollars, that he lost in a pot of gold eagles. he had assets he was almost giving away, but losing in card games, and he started to take money from the company to help make up for this. once they discovered that, there was a real problem between john and fred and george. george passed away in 1936, and he was the lynch pin that kept john and fred at bay, civil to each other enough to run the business. after george passed away, the riff between the two, the feud, if you want, it just got wider and bigger, and, sadly, it was never resolved. finally, they had to tax his name off the account so he couldn't sign for company checks anymore, and i mean, it's really a sad story. fred, in the early 1900s, was the most powerful man in douglas county, possibly the richest, and when he dies in 1946, he was completely broke. what happened was that the family had to go back to work. steve's mom and her sisters, they, for the first time in their life had to work to support the family. there was no money coming in to pay the bills, so they had to earn the money to support the family to keep him here at the home ranch. sad part about it is the ranch was owned by the company, yet the family was living here, and they served eviction notice at the ranch on kris mall eve to try to evict fred's family after he passed away in 1946, so it was a really sad desperate situation for the family there was a group of valley resident that is bought into the company to save it for the family after the death of hf, jr.. this group known as the minority shareholders, tried to save the company, and they couldn't do it. the swing vote was eva, she cast her vote with the attorney, he ended uptaking control of the company, they were forced out. one of the minority shareholders, frank, went to bat for steve's mom and her sisters, and was able to secure them the ability to live here at the home ranch for $1 a year until the time of their death. that is what preserved this property, kept it in the family; otherwise, there would be no park here. i'm sure this would have been lost too. >> so they went from owning 37,000 acres to how much now? >> the family owns absolutely none. sadly, there's not one street, there's not one building that bears the name of dengberg in this entire valley. they do refer to a couple reservoirs on east valley road, but there's no -- there's nothing left of the family. honestly, there's not one part of western nevada history in this area that they did not touch, and play a large role in, and this man is a real pioneer that did things that we can all see today, this valley wouldn't look like this or be all these green fields if not for hf, sr., so his legacy will live on forever, even though the name is not here, we all though who is responsible. >> i thought i was a dengberg to be honest with you. my grand dad, this is what i'm told, took a look at me when my mom brought me home at 8 weeks old, and he said, boy, is he dingy, and that stuck, dinky, so through the third grade, i knew myself as dinky dangberg, and until we had a new teacher coming in, they said you're not dangberg, you're ashard. i said, oh? finally, i figured out -- i didn't put it all together that day, but, finally, i put together that year that my legal name was charles, and so i've gone by steve since then or di this, k -- dink to my friends in this part of the country. i knew there was haywire going on in the middle of, oh, gosh, right after world war ii started. i knew there was some -- you'd almost -- you could almost feel the tension, you know, coming down, and my grand dad had an all-night gambling or doing something like this, and i was up early one morning when my grad dad came in, and i never saw this before in my life, but my grandmother really laid into him and slapped him, and so, and i knew there had to be something going on there, but i didn't know what the devil it was. my mom didn't tell me, and i figured it was none of my business, so i went from there. you could see whether we had to go in, had to get our stuff from the store, a lot of the staff from the store. we closed out of the butcher shop here by the company, and we've been closed out of all the gardens my the company, and so we had to do everything ourselves, and that's when i started stating up things and doing other things. i do remember that. i don't -- i wish i could put my finger on when it was, but i'll never forget bill coming out here, in, well, it was right there, serving eviction notice on my grandmother. my grandfather was well and my great grandfather were extremely well known and contributed just a tremendous amount both agricultures, both involved politically in the legislature, and they contributed to a lot there, and so between that and just trying to -- i just -- as i told conrad, when we started this thing, i said, conrad, i want the story out, let's put the chips wherever they fall and just go for it, and with the idea, primarily, two things, of maybe putting this thing out so somebody else wouldn't stumble into the same trap my family did, although i'm sure they will. that's human nature. and/or i wanted the family story just told the way that it was with no -- with no flowers, no missed anything, just the way that it was, and so that's primarily my reason, so i told conrad this when we were in the process of putting this thing together, and so we entered it together quite a number of times, and so it came out just the way i wanted. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to carson city, nevada, and the many other cities visited by the local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/low cancontent. >> here's a look at some books published this week: ..

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