Hey everybody and welcome to classical stuff you should know.

We are a podcast about old books, old philosophy, some thoughts, some architecture

here and there, kind of whatever we like that's older than a hundred years

that's the kind of stuff we talk about we also talk about education my name is a j hanenberg

I am joined by Thomas Magby hello and Graham Donaldson hi and today the whole goal for me

and Thomas today is just to serve doll like we are here to serve Donaldson it's everything we

want to do so So everything he says,

you can expect us to say, oh, that is absolutely correct. Can I get you some coffee?

Do you want a foot rub while you do that? We get you a snack? Do you want some pizza? I do. More pizza? Yeah. Okay. Good. Yeah. How many times would you like to be told how attractive you are? You guys are in quite the state.

Yeah, as AJ is alluding to, we are, I'm going to be talking about a You guys are in quite the state.

Yeah, as AJ is alluding to, we are, I'm going to be talking about a book called The Servile State.

And it's a book, but it's also sort of a theory of history, an economic theory, and it's written by a dude named Hilaire Belloc, a dude with a French name, but he's an Englishman. He sounds like a bad guy in a movie. I know. He does sound like a bad guy in a movie. Hilar Belloc's great. Hilar Belloc. He may be Belgian. I can't remember. He's from somewhere in France or Belgium. But anyway, he's English in the early 20th century. He was best friends with G.K. Chesterton. He is part of that

British, he's one of the British Catholics. So he's, you know, there's not very many of them.

He is probably most well known for his delightful children's poems about terrible things that like

cautionary tales for children oh those yeah i remember those i bought those they're wonderful

they great we're like a little boy is getting eaten by a lion and because he ran away from his

nanny or a girl gets horribly burned to death on a house fire because she keeps calling she keeps

saying that there's a fire when there is no fire um a little boy who eats a little, who has like a habit of eating little bits of string and then he dies. Anyway, they are delightful little poems. These descriptions don't go with each other. And my dad read them to me as a kid to go to bed at night. They're very, they're just so funny. Did that terrifying?

No, they did not just terrify me. They are hilarious. Anyway, but Haller Bellock wrote a number of books on sort of economics. And his, there's one called the Servile State. There's an essay on the,

I think it's called like the essay on the reclamation of property or something like that. And he and Chesterton kind of put together, they were living in the

era of kind of the unfettered robber barren capitalism. So the Industrial Revolution

had had its big push, and they are sort of living in the era of gold standard capitalism

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