Venezuela and Socialism

HUGH HEWITT: Morning glory, America. Bonjour—hi, Canada. Greetings to the globe; it is Hugh Hewitt. That music means it is the last radio hour of the week before me, and that means Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College joins me for our weekly Hillsdale Dialogue where we look up from the news of the day. And I've been talking about Roger Stone, and people will be talking about it all weekend long. So you can go back and listen to the first two hours, you can go read the indictment, read my Twitter feed.  

But there is a huge story bigger than that, and it's unfolding in Venezuela. And I asked Dr. Arnn to speak specifically about that today and to come prepared to talk about why is it that socialist countries end up in revolution, and why is it they end up poor and misery-ridden, and with the military guy standing next to the dictator? Dr. Arnn, good morning and welcome.  

LARRY ARNN: Good morning. How are you?  

HEWITT: I'm great. What do you think about what's going on in Venezuela?  

ARNN: I think it's either wonderful or tragic. We'll see in the next few days. You know, first of all, it matters to the United States. There's a reason, if you just look at the map—look where Venezuela is. The way that the North conquered the South in the Civil War was up the Mississippi, because that's the way into the middle of America. If you try to go from the coasts, there are mountains in the way that make it hard.  

So Venezuela is the southern border of the Gulf of Mexico.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: And Russia has its longstanding interest in Cuba. And, if you look at the sea lanes around Cuba, north and south, they're narrow. So, a navy operating from Cuba, but now also Venezuela—because the Soviets have military equipment there, and the Chinese are in alliance with them together with the Soviets. So this thing has strategic dimensions.  

But then, as an example, the destruction of the Venezuelan economy is the inevitable result of socialism, and also of the Venezuela political system, because, if you oppose the regime—Hugo Chavez became president in 1998, and this guy who runs it now is his successor—if you oppose them in public, you'll get arrested. And whole major media outlets have been shut down by these guys.  

HEWITT: And the supreme court corrupted and the generals removed. The headlines today—Washington Post: “With Risks Ahead, Trump Administration Pins Hope on the Venezuelan Opposition.” And from The New York Times: “Venezuela's Military Backs Maduro as Russia Warns US Not to Intervene.”  

Now, our friend, David Harsanyi, who is the senior editor of The Federalist, has a great thread this morning, which I want to read to you: “Reminder that Bernie Sanders, who might well win the Dem nomination, once said these words in this order: ‘The American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela’ than the United States.’ Hat tip, Reagan Battalion. He was not alone.  

“I'm not even talking about Sean Penn, Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone. Here's the aspiring leader of Great Britain, Jeremy Corbyn: ‘Thanks, Hugo Chavez, for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela and a wide world.’ Progressive hero Naomi Klein praised Hugo Chavez’s ‘21st Century socialism’ as a ‘zone of relative economic calm’ and stability.  

“David Sirota literally wrote a piece headlined ‘Hugo Chavez's Economic Miracle.’ Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz? Big fan. He argued that Chavez's socialism would ‘bring education and health benefits to the poor, and strive for economic policies that not only bring higher growth, but also ensure that the fruits of the growth are widely shared.’ I'm sure he and many others will be back at the 92nd Street Y lecturing about the importance of wealth distribution.”  

“Oh look here's Mark Weisbrot”—Harsanyi writes—“the co-director of the often-quoted Center for Economic Policy and Research, praising Chavez-style socialism. ‘Predicting a Venezuelan apocalypse won't make it happen,’ he says. And, ‘As illness ends Hugo Chavez's life in Venezuela, what will his legacy be? Richard Gott argues he brought hope to a continent.’  

“Jimmy Carter: ‘Chavez brought profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized.’ “As it turns out,” David writes, “The free market economists were the ones who got it right again. I'm not sure about the initial Bernie quote. Apparently it was on his site but written by someone else? I don't see that it's been corrected in other sources.” What do you make of that litany of just being flat out, 100% wrong?  

ARNN: Well, there are two grounds for favoritism for socialism, and one is foolishness in the rich countries, and the other is oppression in the poor countries. So Venezuela—it's certainly true that Hugo Chavez came—and now Maduro came to power in the wake of various strongmen who had, off and on for 300 years, despotized that country.  

And so, it's reasonable for it to look like hope—I'm going to stand for the people, right? Well, what do you do when you do that? First of all, there are these economic problems, right? The problems of socialism are on the levels of economics and politics and philosophy. Economics—just allocating goods—people don't quite understand how the free market economy works, but the way it works is it's what we call a demand economy—that is to say, people are free to try to meet the demand of other people.  

And so, if you want more oil, people will go look for it. And, if you want more clothes, people will sew them up for you. And there's a freedom to do that, and it's radically decentralized. And it actually has been proved in history, in my opinion, but also in some really great books—Churchill read Friedrich Hayek, who was a favorite economist of mine, along with Milton Friedman.  

And he read him late in his career, right after the Second World War, and then he began to articulate beautifully what Hayek had said, which is, basically, if you're going to hire a bunch of people to make all of these allocations that go on in an economy, automatically, you're going to need an army of those people, and it still won't be big enough.  

HEWITT: Yep.  

ARNN: And if—you and I have been involved in growth politics in Southern California, and one of the great things is, everything's got to wait for the roads and the sewers and all that stuff. And I remember, I asked one time—you might have been there—a county board of supervisors says, why doesn't everything have to wait until shoe stores and banks come?  

HEWITT: Ha! Yes!  

ARNN: Don't they just—don't they—you know. And just think what they're trying to plan, and they're incompetent to plan it, which is just infrastructure stuff, right? But then they try to plan everything else, right? Oh yeah, we're going to need grocery stores. So it's hopeless, right?  

And what happens—I mean, in Venezuela, two million people have left, at least, according to the United Nations. And the United Nations is friendly to Venezuela. When George Bush spoke—George W. Bush spoke before the UN once—Hugo Chavez spoke immediately after him, after George W. Bush. And he says—a decent human being, right? And he stood up and he said—his first words were, I smell sulfur up here. As if the devil had been there.  

HEWITT: Yep.  

ARNN: And that got a wild ovation, see? But according to the UN, two million people have left, and that's a population of 32 million people. So they're fleeing literally for their lives. And it's not just oppression from the government—it's that, but people can't get anything to eat in Venezuela.  

HEWITT: And they are fleeing. That is why it has been raised as a possibility that the neighbor to the east, Colombia, and to the west, Brazil, might be inclined to go military and support a Panama-style intervention, whether led or supported by the United States. I think it is that serious, but I also think there are going to be a lot more Cubans in Venezuela than there were in Granada, Larry Arnn.  

ARNN: Yeah. You know, just look, these—you know, first of all, how corrupt is it to—basically, Russia and China are propping up a regime. By the time Russia got involved, Hugo Chavez had already arrested his opponents, and suppressed the press, and rigged elections, and outlawed political parties, right? And they go in there and embrace him, and look, they're giving us warnings now.  

Well, why are they doing that? Well first of all, Venezuela had, before it wrecked it, a lot of oil money, and so it sold them a lot of weapons. I think it was in 2010 or something—2008—that American military equipment was stopped being used in Venezuela. So he did it for profit.  

But then, he gets access to a place that can threaten the United States, and I'm not thinking that Russia or China are likely to invade the United States, but to bottle us up, see? Because our strategic position in the world is extremely favorable—is that we're a big naval power and we can get out away from our shores without anything impeding us—  

HEWITT: And one of my retired Navy captain friends, Jerry, writes to me, the US Southern Command is the most under-resourced combatant command. The admiral who retired that job a few months ago routinely spoke about the lack of ships, planes, aircraft to support the national security missions in the South American region. I think that's because—Dr. Larry Arnn, 30 seconds to the break—we haven't taken it seriously, but we should.  

ARNN: Yeah, that's right.  

HEWITT: When we come back, we'll talk more about Venezuela. Why is it that the press loves the left and the press is not covering what happened there? They do not cover the Cuban secret police. What is it about the infatuation with dictatorships of the left that takes the media off-course? Stay tuned. It's The Hugh Hewitt Show. The Hillsdale Dialogue—all things Hillsdale are available at Hillsdale.edu. All these dialogues available at HughForHillsdale.com dating back five years. You can binge-listen with Larry Arnn and me at HughHewitt.com.  

Twenty-two minutes after the hour, America, it's Hugh Hewitt. It's the last radio hour of the week, which is The Hillsdale Dialogue. Every Friday at this hour I'm joined either by Dr. Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, or one of his colleagues at the College. And all things about the College are available at Hillsdale.edu, including amazing online courses, one featuring Dr. Arnn and Victor Davis Hanson—just released on the World War II. “Second World Wars” is what it's called. It's fascinating. I'm deep into it. It'll be on the airplane with me today.  

And every online course, there's another one. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. And all of these dialogues, which have been going on since we began talking about Homer and Genesis in 2013 are collected at HughForHillsdale.com. If you go to Hillsdale.edu, you can also sign up for the absolutely free monthly speech digest, Imprimis, which will be the best reading of your month.  

Dr. Arnn, we went to break, and I'm calling on your Churchill knowledge here as being part of the official biographer of Churchill and author of Churchill. He saw socialism clearly, even though there were some nice Socialists in Great Britain—you know, the Fabians—but there were more nasty Socialists over in Russia. What did he see when he first saw it?  

ARNN: Well, one thing to distinguish—so Churchill writes a novel in 1898 when he's 24 years old. It's the only one he ever wrote. And there's a figure in it by the name of Karl with a K.  

He's a very evil man, and now he wants—and he and his colleague, who's unnamed, they want both community property and community of wives, in which a president's wife, he has—the president—the soon-to-be-deposed president has a pretty wife. And that Churchill is on to that. socialism—the Socialist Party entered Parliament in 1900, the same year Churchill did, and he was its enemy all his life.  

Now, I should embellish that—his point about it's not a personal thing—it wasn't to try to keep personal things out of politics. Clement Attlee was the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Second World War—Churchill's close colleague. He's the man who beat Churchill in 1945 to bring socialism to Britain—now largely discarded, by the way, because it didn't work.  

But Attlee actually was one of the last soldiers to leave the Gallipoli peninsula in the Dardanelles campaign in the First World War. And that was, of course, Churchill's great disgrace, although I think unjustly. And so there was an enormous opportunity for Attlee, leader of the opposition and a decorated soldier, to make hay with Churchill.  

But he decided, during that campaign—while he was fighting in it—that Churchill was right, and he never did that, right? And they fought each other tooth and nail, but they were friends. So first of all, Churchill's point is not socialism is bad because the people who favor it are bad. It's a doctrine that will corrupt the—it talked about the economics already. It will corrupt the politics of the country inevitably.  

And the reason for that is, people who favor socialism favor it as a solution to human greed. And so we can have the government dole out everything and it'll all be fair. But the trouble is—and this is in James Madison as well as Winston Churchill, the people in the government are also people.  

HEWITT: And they're greedy!  

ARNN: So why won't they use that for their own purposes? Hugo Chavez, right? What does he do? He gathers power unto himself and he uses it to suppress the people who oppose him, and make himself into a great world figure and a rich man. And that's the problem with it, right? Churchill says that they have appointed an army in 1945 to '51—when he was in the opposition, he said things like this all the time. They've appointed an army of hundreds of thousands of people to manage the society. And, of course, that army becomes a political interest of its own.  

HEWITT: Yep.  

ARNN: And they have interests just like everybody else, and they can influence elections. The last industry that the Socialists nationalized was the steel industry. And Churchill swore that he would undo at least that one in his first term if returned to power, and he was, and he did. But, he says, just remember, they're not doing that because they want more steel. The steel industry in Britain is thriving right now.  

HEWITT: Yep.  

ARNN: They're doing it because they want more power.  

HEWITT: Power, yep.  

ARNN: And then he says—and in their announcement that they were going to do steel, they said, looking for other targets of opportunity, that's a warning to anybody who raises his hand in opposition to this.  

HEWITT: Amen. Dr. Larry Arnn, we'll be back. We're talking about the biggest story among many big stories. There's a revolution underway in Venezuela. Will it succeed? What ought America to do in support of the freedom fighters who want their liberty back in Venezuela from the dictator Maduro? Stay tuned. It is The Hillsdale Dialogue. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt. The Hillsdale Dialogue is underway with Dr. Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale, including the application to attend and the opportunity to sign up for Imprimis, their free speech digest. Or give them a million dollars to build Hewitt Hall. I think they need Hewitt Hall on the campus of Hillsdale.  

ARNN: Oh, we'd be so proud.  

HEWITT: We'd be—you know, give them $10 million for Hewitt Hall at Hillsdale.edu. I want to remind people this week on Townhall Review with Hugh Hewitt—Jake Tapper on the Covington Catholic school episode; Jean Case, who's the CEO of the Case Foundation, on her book, Be Fearless; and Dennis Prager on the controversy of Karen Pence's choice to teach at a Christian school. We'll come back to Venezuela, but I found that to be the opening shot, Larry Arnn, in an attack on private Christian schools that maintain orthodoxy with regards to human intimacy.  

And, yesterday, a New York Times reporter put out a call for stories from graduates in their 20s of Christian schools. And so, I'm urging my friends at Servite Catholic, at Padua Franciscan in Cleveland, at JFK in Warren, Ohio—any Christian Catholic school—any Christian school—to deluge this reporter with the good stories so they don't cherry-pick a nightmare. What do you think that's all about?  

ARNN: Well, I think you're doing a noble thing, but also they will cherry-pick.  

HEWITT: You're going to end up dead anyway, but nice charge.  

ARNN: That's what they do now. If you just read The New York Times as I do, right? And they—The Wall Street Journal is, by the way, a much better newspaper, forgetting what your principles are. And The Wall Street Journal, everywhere except the editorial pages, is offensive to my principles. But it's more careful, and it's fair, and it doesn't say, because they found three people that said a thing, that the thing is true.  

HEWITT: Right.  

ARNN: And it's a license to steal the way they write these stories now. And the private Christian schools, if they're worth their salt, are teaching sexual abstinence, right?  

HEWITT: Yes.  

ARNN: So it's not—  

HEWITT: Outside of marriage, between a man and a woman.  

ARNN: That's right.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: That's right. Well, of course, because they have to have more students so they are interested in [INAUDIBLE] in the end.  

HEWITT: Well, Al Mohler, my friend who are on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says all of his students arrived, they're not married, they're usually virgin, but boy do they have a lot of babies afterwards.  

ARNN: Yeah, that's right. Well, in Hillsdale, our medical costs are high. And, one time, a broker explained to us, you have more babies than anybody ever saw, and then we've got some old people too.  

HEWITT: Good faculty, producing new students in the future. But I do think that they have decided Karen Pence was the opening wedge, and now the Covington Catholic kids, who did not distinguish themselves—I think Hillsdale College students would have acted differently. They would have been trained. But they're high school kids, right? They're not going to get it right.  

ARNN: Yeah. Of course they’re not.  

HEWITT: But they have been pilloried—threatened with death and burning—and I think that is just the wedge.  

ARNN: That's it. See, those are—it's a bunch of kids standing on a street corner, right? And they get confronted. And I'm not confident that—our kids are good kids and they don't fight—well, they do once in a while, but not much. And so the point is, they're young. And this idea that there's a national storm about them as an example to overturn something that's hallowed and great—that's the way politics works today.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: And we're talking about socialism, that's what the government gets the power to do, see? It's going to allocate everything, and it's going to do it by a bureaucratic process which will have to involve millions of people, it's very inefficient, and those people will become a political force unto themselves.  

HEWITT: I'm reading from The Wall Street Journal what you just cited there, Venezuelan coverage this morning. Venezuela's military—this is wrong—as you said, they're often wrong, they're wrong here: “Venezuela's military threw its support behind embattled President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday, dealing a significant blow to the US effort to back a parallel government and oust the authoritarian leader. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, flanked by the heads of the country's armed forces, said the military would oppose any effort to remove Mr. Maduro, who began a six-year term this month after elections last month that were widely regarded as a sham.  

“He ended his speech with shouts of “Chavez vive,” a reference to the late Socialist strongman Hugo Chavez. Juan Guaido, a 35-year-old lawmaker who was recognized by the US and other countries Wednesday as the country's legitimate president, formally asked the US for emergency humanitarian aid to ease shortages of food and medicine. US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the US was ready to provide $20 million in assistance as soon as logistically possible”—it goes on.  

That doesn't mean the military is with Maduro. It means that the people at the top of the military are with Maduro. The push-comes-to-shove part comes—do they fire on the people? Is it Tiananmen Square or is it the Berlin Wall?  

ARNN: There's a very good quote in the paper this morning from a broker—an investment analyst who analyzes Central South America. And he said, “The contest is this—are there enough soldiers who can still feed their families against the soldiers who cannot feed their families? And the military is going to end up going that way.” [LAUGHS]  

HEWITT: Well, he's right.  

ARNN: And that means a crisis in the military, too.  

HEWITT: Which is why you always keep the secret police well-fed. Now, the question becomes—nobody's well-fed in Venezuela, and people are fleeing the country and there have got to be stresses even on the secret police, but there are Cubans there. And the Cubans will just put a gun to your head and shoot you. So, the question is, ought we to act in a military capacity?  

ARNN: Well, I don't know the answer to that question and know what we're able to do and what would work. It's hard to think about that. You do it by air, probably.  

HEWITT: It'd be Panama.  

ARNN: And— 

HEWITT: 1991 Panama—1990 Panama.  

ARNN: That's right. And I would say along here—you're an imaginative man here, and I can run away with you, but I would say that your idea of help from Colombia and Brazil would be very helpful in such a thing.  

HEWITT: Because they are, in fact, the countries most impacted by the despotism of their neighbor, in that they are being flooded with refugees. And we've seen interventions in Africa repeatedly—into Sudan and Congo—from neighboring countries, which are overwhelmed by refugees. So there is a precedent under Article 51 to defend yourself against the collapse of a regime that is causing a refugee wave.  

And it does seem to me we can make that argument, but that—how do you think the American people would react? They don't even often know where—I've been to Venezuela—I don't know if you've been to Venezuela. It's hard to find on a map unless you know where you're looking.  

ARNN: That's right. Well, it's in a prominent place, right? It's ticking up there and somewhere important. And it's a big country, and it was for a long time the richest country in South America because of its oil exports. It has a tremendous amount of oil. And that's not as valuable as it used to be because a lot more people have a lot more oil than they used to.  

But yeah, so how would they react? Well, I think the rule of strategy and the rule of politics is the same here. And I'll just cite Winston Churchill, right? You don't go looking for a war, and you certainly don't want a long war. And you don't want that, not chiefly because politics is negative—and in a democratic country, it is. I hear people say sometimes, the American people don't have the discipline for a long war.  

Well, we know, when long wars are imposed on the American people, they have the discipline for it, but they don't like them chosen, and that's because it is an assault on limited government itself to be perpetually at war. These are the words of Winston Churchill.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: So, Winston Churchill didn't want to go to Vietnam—wouldn't join Eisenhower in going there. And he just said, those are jungles, we fought in them, you don't know what they're like, and he turned them down. And that's—you know—very rare in Winston Churchill's life. So, if you're going to do it, better to do it with friends, better just do it in a way that it'll get done in a hurry, and then get out of there.  

HEWITT: And I'm looking at a map— 

ARNN: Trump thinks like that.  

HEWITT: Yeah. I'm looking at a map of Venezuela as we speak. Caracas, the capital, is right on the ocean. And so, that does expose it to American power in a way that others are not. But it's in the middle of the country, so it's not close to Colombia, or Brazil, or Guyana, which is not going to be a player in this. And it's a sprawling country of vast topographical differences, which reminds me that Iraq was relatively flat, with a couple of rivers. And that became a problem.  

And we don't want a guerrilla war, right? We would expect this leftist, who has been elected, Guaido, to actually rule as a leftist. That's not the problem, but he wouldn't rule as a despot. So there's a difference there. So you're saying get in and get out if we do it.  

ARNN: Yeah. And we'd need a plan. Maybe they're making one right now, but it needs to be a good plan. And I understand, partly from people I know, that there was divisions in the Bush administration about the Second Iraq War, and that there was a bunch of people that included Rumsfeld that said, We're going to go in there and topple that guy and then we're going to get out and let them sort it out. And there was others who said, No, we're going to build a democracy there. And that's complicated, right?  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: As I said once to a senior man in the White House, I said—he said, don't they want freedom? And I said, I don't really know for sure. They may want Islam, I don't know. But just wanting it is not enough. And he said, what else does it take? And I said, read the first 50 pages of The Federalist Papers.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: There's quite a lot, right? And the other thing is, you can't live a free life for another person, right? You can't do that. By the way, what we're talking here now, your idea with Brazil—it's a good one, and Columbia—is Churchill's idea for world security, because, after the Second World War, these brushfire wars started all over the world— 

HEWITT: Malaysia, Vietnam, you betcha.  

ARNN: —and, for the same reason, some of them are happening now.  

HEWITT: Yeah.  

ARNN: And that's because the Soviet Union—the Comintern—was provoking those wars, all over the place—they were fueling them, right? And so, Churchill's strategy about that was, find some people in the area and help them fight this thing and preserve the sanity, and safety, and freedom of their own area.  

HEWITT: That's what he did in the Malaysia—  

ARNN: —regional groupings.  

HEWITT: Yeah. That's what we did with Nicaragua with the Contras, that's what we did in Africa with Savimbi in Angola—that you find proxies.  

ARNN: That's right. And, first of all, Venezuela is in a mess, right? Whoever gets control of it is going to be dealing with a mess. And, if the current guys keep in control, they're going to try to do that with force. People say, about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Russia, that it had to do with Gorbachev not being as ruthless as Stalin was. Well, he surely was not.  

But, if he had shot all those people he woud have needed to shoot to put that down, that, too, would have increased the intensity of the opposition the thing was collapsing. And that may be what's going on in Venezuela.  

HEWITT: When we come back, I want to talk about Peterloo, because I saw a trailer for the movie and what that has to do with this, which we will tell you about after the break, because Dr. Larry Arnn actually is one of the few people I know—he probably didn't prepare for Peterloo, but he knows about it, don't you, Dr. Arnn?  

ARNN: No.  

HEWITT: Well, go look up Wikipedia. I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere, America. The Hillsdale Dialogue will continue in just a moment. All things Hillsdale at Hillsdale.edu. It's a Churchill thing, Larry.  

Welcome back, America. It's Hugh Hewitt at the ReliefFactor.com Studio with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale.edu are worth consuming, and it is worth—and it's free—most of it. I think all of it is free. The previous Hillsdale Dialogues are all free at HughForHillsdale.com.  

Larry Arnn, the Peterloo massacre took place at St. Peter's Field, Manchester on August 16 of 1819—200th-year anniversary will be this year. About 60,000 people had assembled to demand parliamentary reform, and the British cavalry charged, and many were killed. I bring up Churchill because of The Guardian this morning—has a column: “The kind of history that now seems to dominate our culture is too often centered on kings, queens, and powerful men, something lately seen in the revival of the cult of Winston Churchill. Peterloo and everything that followed it were the products of the things that were much more profound: distinctions between systems of power, a new industrial economy, and the fact that among the first people to live out those contradictions and demand their resolution were the thousands who gathered in St. Peter's field.”  

So, what you've got is an indictment of everyone who's ever been a conservative, by virtue of a massacre that occurred in 1819, but it also informs what could happen in Venezuela this weekend.  

ARNN: Yeah. Well, OK. So I looked it up, too, and 1819, right? And, in 1819, Britain was dominated by an aristocracy. Never as bad as on the continent, but still, they controlled the House of Lords, and they controlled much of the House of Commons through the influence of aristocrats over the land that they owned. And it became a parliamentary democracy much later than we became.  

Well, in 1819, that was the first of the Corn Laws in Britain. Corn means grain, and they were taxing imports of food, and there was a famine on, right? And the people didn't have any means of redress. Indeed, the taxes on the food went to the landowners, right? Because the basis of wealth in the nineteenth century was mostly land. It changed as the century went on.  

And so, they were actually transferring wealth from poor people to themselves. Now, it just turns out that, later, in the late nineteenth century, Winston Churchill's father and then Winston Churchill were key to destroying the last vestiges of that.  

HEWITT: Yes. They were but then— 

ARNN: And Churchill— 

HEWITT: —in 1911, Churchill is the home secretary, sends in the police against the coal miners, and he had the secretary of war with troops nearby. So, I'm wondering, does Churchill believe in putting down the mob, or does Churchill believe in yielding to the mob when the mob is right?  

ARNN: Nobody got shot at Tonypandy.  

HEWITT: OK.  

LARRY ARNN: And he took care that nobody would. And there's a much more vivid example of the same at Amritsar in India in 1919. There was a General Dyer, and he ordered firing on a crowd.  

HEWITT: Oh, that was—oh yes.  

ARNN: And several hundred were killed. And many were killed because they—men, women, and children were killed because they jumped in a well for protection and drowned in there. So the first ones piled on top of by the later ones. Dozens were killed in that well.  

Well, Dyer was disciplined by the army. And then forces rose in the House of Commons to defend General Dyer, and Winston Churchill gives one of his greatest speeches about that. And Churchill is a soldier. He understands, and he says, first of all, firing on unarmed people is not what the military is supposed to do.  

HEWITT: Right.  

ARNN: He says, if they're armed, that's different. But they can find the means to control the situation without shooting civilians. And then somebody responds to him and he says one of his most famous things—somebody responds to him, But Dyer has said that he did that to put down a general revolt that was underway as an example. And Churchill replied, The policy of frightfulness is not available to the British pharmacopoeia. We don't do that, right?  

HEWITT: Wow.  

ARNN: Winston Churchill—you should read him, because he's a very great man.  

HEWITT: There's a shiv right there in the back, but that's OK. I'll get you back tomorrow night. But what you're saying is, in Venezuela, the army has no cause to shoot on these demonstrators unless they are themselves armed.  

ARNN: That's right, that's right. And you don't shoot lots of people because they're looting. What you do is get the force together to arrest them. And the state needs, and has, a monopoly on force, but one of the reasons for that is, you just don't use tanks on children.  

HEWITT: Unless you're the Chinese in Tiananmen Square.  

ARNN: That's it. Yeah. And so, that's the line that Churchill drew. And the Tonypandy thing—Churchill was an anti-socialist. He was pro-union, by the way. But that was a strike, and he intended to keep order, and he got a lot of force there for the specific purpose of having enough so they wouldn't have to kill anybody.  

HEWITT: A great message to the military in Venezuela, who, I hope, is listening. Dr. Larry Arnn, I will see you tomorrow, as a matter of fact, inside the Beltway. Dr. Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale available at Hillsdale.edu. Go sign up for Imprimis right now. Got $10 million? Build that Hewitt Hall.