17:00. Civil service reform essentially created lifetime tenure for the vast majority of bureaucracies. In my opinion the federal Judiciary is probably the worst of all these bureaucracies because they really have lifetime tenure Andrew Jackson when he was president we still have this spoils system and he condemned the idea of what we call a property right in a government job and he fired 41% of all federal bureaucrats you can applaud if you want Andrew Jackson by the way was one of Murray rothbard's favorites he wasn't a saint he wasn't the perfect libertarian God when I say this I'll probably get email from the libertarian Furious out there that say well what about the Indians or what you know yeah he of course was a human being did a lot of bad things as well but this was a good thing that he did.
18:04. President John Tyler who's ever heard of President John Tyler? Maybe about 2 or 3 people in the room? There's a book called Re-carving Rushmore by Ivan Eland, published by the Independent Institute in California, and he ranks all the presidents according to how good a job they did in protecting life, liberty, and property. Lincoln is way down there near the bottom. Number one is John Tyler became president in 1841. My favorite President William Henry Harrison died after 1 month in office, and Tyler was the vice president and he took over and he vetoed everything. He vetoed the tariffs. He vetoed the National Bank. He vetoed corporate welfare for the railroad corporations and other road building companies, and all that, so he was a pretty good guy. And he fired 50% of all federal bureaucrats. He did even better than Andrew Jackson this is 1841 so in comparison what Elon Musk is doing is nothing it's trivial.
Who were these reformers this all happened in the 19th century and this is pretty interesting what Rothbard says about these people. He says,
They're almost exclusively from New England and New York, highly educated, shaped by the cultural and religious values of their neo Puritan Yankee culture. They wanted only good men in public office the good men being themselves they believe they had an inherent right of their sort to rule over lesser citizens.
They profess to believe in democracy, but only if guided by people like themselves. Otherwise, democracy shamocracy. They don't care about that, and when I reread the statement by Murray, it reminded me of something Clyde Wilson wrote. He wrote a whole book called, Yankee Problem in America. He says
By Yankee, I did not mean everybody from the north of the Potomac in Ohio loss of them have always been good folks I'm using the term historically to designate that peculiar group descended from new englanders who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a museum quality specimen of a Yankee.
