06/30/16 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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Introducing our good friend Sheldon Richman, the most libertarian man in the world.
He writes for antiwar.com and a lot of places, including his own blog, which is sheldonrichman.com, the free association blog.
And he's got a great article that I'm really glad he wrote.
It's called Brexit, Which Kind of Dependents Now?
What a curious title.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, and always great to be with you.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
Well, what kind of dependents now?
Break it down.
Well, what I tried to show in that piece, and I think it's a point that I haven't seen made, is that Brexit has been portrayed, at least at some level, as a contest between Britain being part of Europe, dependent, interdependent by being in the EU, part of that whole organization, or being independent by breaking away.
So that's the way it's often been portrayed.
But I think if you go deeper, you find it's really kind of a choice of what kind of dependency or interdependency, which is really the better word, interdependency, because if Britain leaves the EU, it will be legally and politically or institutionally independent, because it will no longer be subject to the European Parliament, the European Commission, all those bureaucracies that make up the EU.
But at the same time, it will be still in the world economy, and therefore dependent on both what its own policies are and what's going on in the rest of the world.
So I tend to be a decentralist, because not only for strictly libertarian moral reasons, but just because the smaller the jurisdiction, the cheaper it is to vote with your feet, in other words, to move.
So if the local government in a small jurisdiction becomes oppressive or too onerous compared to neighboring jurisdictions, the costs of picking up and moving are cheaper if the smaller the jurisdiction versus if the jurisdictions are very large.
So if you look at the EU, that's a very large jurisdiction, that's all of Europe.
And so moving is much more expensive than, say, moving from England to France or Switzerland or someplace else if you needed to escape the government.
So an institutionally independent state like England now, or Britain, will still be dependent in the sense that capital and people can flee if things get too burdensome.
And so I choose liberal dependency or liberal interdependency, liberal by liberal, I mean classical liberal, original liberal, libertarian, versus institutional, versus the interdependence that's represented by the massive bureaucracy known as the European Union.
Yeah, well, and you say in here the EU is in essence a cartel intended to suppress competition among the states of Europe, which, and then you say, yeah, it's complicated, there's some liberalizing things there, too.
But explain what you really mean by that.
Is that what it's for in the first place, is to make it too hard to vote for your feet so you've got to put up with what they want to saddle you with here?
Well, these things are always complicated.
I think we need to start out with that.
Anybody that presents these things as black and white is really not telling you the truth or has not fully understood it himself.
In setting up a united Europe, which actually goes back to right after World War II, it's taken different forms.
When I was growing up, it was the common market, and the goal there was a free trade zone, well, partly the goal.
There can always be a mix of intentions.
So it could be liberal intentions, and again, when I use the word liberal, I mean libertarian, I mean trade, free trade, small government that doesn't interfere with people's peaceful activities.
That's how they use liberal in Europe, too.
It's only here that we kind of mean the opposite in the sense of Ted Kennedy liberal.
So I have no trouble believing that a good part of the motive was liberalization, to have Europe be a free trade zone, not have barriers between the European states.
There was an understanding, and there were liberals who were pushing for this.
Don't forget that you have Ludwig Erhard in Germany, who at the end of the war, basically without the knowledge of the U.S. government, which of course is still administering Western Germany at that time, West Germany at that time, deregulates the economy, strips away all the wage and price controls to the horror of John Kenneth Galbraith and the American planners.
He just said the hell with it.
He did it like on a Sunday night, I think, when they were all drinking wine and partying or whatever they did.
So you did have liberals, people who were pretty good guys who understood that small government is better than big government and that free economic activity is good and tends to benefit everybody.
And so that was definitely part of the motive.
But here's the problem.
Even if that is your motive, if you assemble a large transnational bureaucracy, even to oversee a liberal program, you're setting in motion a perverse dynamic because you're going to have a gathering of regulator types.
Who's going to be attracted to those jobs?
Bureaucrats, regulators, and they will attract rent seekers, in other words, people, mainly big influential companies, that are looking for benefits that cannot be attained in the free market, that can only be obtained through political intervention.
So even if your motive is good in setting up the bureaucracy, in time, I think we need to bet that it's going to be turning out bad stuff.
And that's what the EU has done.
A lot of trivial and large regulations about how, in order for something to be classified a digital camera and not carry hundreds of dollars of tariffs, it can record no more than 30 minutes at a time before stopping.
If the camera records more than 30 minutes, it's called a video camera, not a digital camera, and it carries hundreds of dollars of tariffs.
I mean, I posted the article on Facebook.
That's the sort of thing that regulators will do under the influence of rent seekers.
If you put them all in one place and give them a lot of power over a large geographical area, that's what's happened.
Okay.
So now, Sheldon, the Brits have voted to leave.
I guess we'll see, you know, what really, even how that plays out.
They have a couple of years to do it, and who knows, they may find a way to undo the leave vote.
But I guess you say in the article it still is really up in the air whether this is actually going to be good for the economy of the UK or not, depending on how they play it.
Yeah, it depends on what they do.
The automatic consequences are pretty sparse.
It depends on what they do after the separation or during the course of the separation.
Look, there are some very prosperous economies in Europe that are not members of the EU.
Switzerland and Norway, for example, they're not poor backwater places by any stretch.
They have in fact have trade agreements with the EU, but they're not members of the EU.
Now, you know, under those arrangements, they do have to comply with certain conditions and, you know, they may or may not be good conditions.
But the point is it doesn't mean non-membership in the EU doesn't mean isolationism or, you know, self-attempted self-sufficiency or autarky.
England can – Britain – and who knows, Scotland may leave because Scotland wants to stay in the EU, so maybe they're going to end up leaving Great Britain.
But Britain can still – there's no reason why Britain can't trade with the rest of the world.
Now, you know, let's look at it in terms of America.
One of the things we have to get through our heads here and I'm hoping in this presidential campaign this point is going to get illuminated, certainly Trump and Clinton aren't going to illuminate it.
But why is trade a matter for the state to write agreements about?
Why aren't just – you know, free trade is supposed to mean free trade.
It means you and I get to make our own trade deals, not only you and me with each other, but you and me with respect to people who live across America's boundaries.
On the other side of America's boundaries, trade should not be – you know, trade shouldn't be followed by the word policy.
It should just be trade, people being free to trade, not trade deals.
And so why can't I buy from British companies?
Why do I need an agreement between the United States government and the British government before I can trade, buy things from Brits or sell things to Brits?
I mean that's what we need to start thinking about.
Maybe Brexit will give us an opportunity to think that way.
There are at least relative free traders who are very prominent in the Brexit movement, in the Leave movement, namely Daniel Hannan, who you may remember from a few years ago gave a very pro-free market speech.
He's a member of the European Parliament, gave a very pro-market speech on the floor of the European Parliament.
And Boris Johnson, both of these guys are possible prime ministers.
Boris Johnson, who has taken pro-trade, pro-free trade positions, I'm not saying they're against agreements, but at least if they're in favor of agreements, I think they may be in favor of something that looks much more like free trade than what many people talk about, including Clinton and Trump.
All right, now, well, according to the papers anyway, this is all about immigration.
Too many Poles, too many Muslims from Turkey and south of there.
And so the xenophobes and the right-wing reactionaries, they did a horrible thing by sabotaging the future, and yeah, like that.
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Well, it's not all about that.
That was part of it.
A poll from the, I think it's called the Lord Ashcroft, I guess that's a foundation, a polling organization in England and Britain showed that while it was the name, the top issue by people who voted leave, it was only one by a plurality, about a one third.
That means two thirds of people who voted for leave named some other issue as the top issue.
One issue that shows up a lot among people who voted for leave is they just thought British affairs should be decided by Britons and not by a huge bureaucracy in Brussels, which contains people from all the other countries of Europe.
Now, you know that from a libertarian standpoint, that's kind of both good and bad.
I mean, I can understand.
I do favor, like I say, I favor decentralization.
And if there's going to be government, have it close where people can keep an eye on it.
But that, of course, doesn't mean that that government can't be abusive.
Of course it can.
And so, you know, if you take this law, if you take the logic of the of these leave people consistently, if you applied consistently, they wanted to devolve power right from Brussels to London because they want Brits making decisions.
But however, you know, when a Brit makes a decision, that doesn't mean any individual Brit has any say in the matter because he only gets one vote to to put one person in the parliament.
And so the the logic of devolution is should be down to the individual level, right?
I want to make my own decisions for me, respecting the rights of other people, of course, and I want you to make your your decisions for you.
And so the logic of devolution with a D is the is is basically individual freedom all the way down where we only engage in voluntary exchange and other, you know, kind of voluntary peaceful relationships and no pseudo representatives, which is really in the end what they are, make decisions for us.
So if you carry the logic through, then you get you get the kind of thing I think you and I would like, not not simply a big parliament, you know, a parliament, a parliament in London is smaller than and closer than a parliament in Brussels.
But it's still far.
If you live in, say, you know, Yorkshire or somewhere else outside of London, it's still it's still too far.
I want to be my own parliament.
Each of his own parliament that maybe that's the new bumper sticker.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I'll send that one off this afternoon.
Hey, OK, but so here's the argument that, no, man, you got to have a U.S. federal government or a European federal government and even a global world trade organization to serve as a global federal government on trade issues anyway, in order that centralized power may use force to liberalize, because otherwise everybody's going to try to cheat.
And so, you know, someone asked me, I'm doing a ask me anything on Reddit and somebody asked me, I'm sure you've heard this case for war before that, you know, never mind individual rights and everything.
But over the broader sweep of history, isn't it a good thing that D.C. rules all of the middle part of North America and that therefore we haven't had a war or any kind of major conflict in more than 150, 170 years, whatever it is.
And everything's going really great right now as far as, you know, the overall number of trucks and factories and roads and the ability of people to have capital and move it around where they need it, make good investments and profits and and raise up a middle class and all these things.
How could that have happened if we'd had 50 states when they have all been at war all this time or at least some of the time and ruined everything?
Well, you know, you've maneuvered me into a position where I have to plug my book on the Constitution.
OK, so so I'll thank you for that.
It's it's it's good that you bring that up because there is the parallel there.
The debate over the Articles of Confederation versus the Constitution is kind of a similar debate where you had people making that very argument.
Madison and others argued for the Constitution, a consolidation of of the states into a into a unitary state, although there was going to be some state powers left behind, not not not many, maybe.
But but the argument was that would that would have a, you know, the benign effect, the liberalizing effect.
But the problem with that argument is that the states, the people in the various states under the Articles of Confederation, and that lasted eight years, it wasn't an insignificant time.
They weren't at war.
They were trading.
They were they didn't have internal passports.
They could move.
You could move from state to state.
You could carry goods from state to state and sell your stuff.
It was already a free trade zone.
I think what you've articulated, and I realize you're maybe you're playing sort of devil's advocate here, is that this is the belief that order can only be produced by a planner, by a meaning of political authority.
And there's a very nice piece on Reason magazine.
I think it's part of a larger study that that Cato has just published by getting I think it's Martin Tupy, T-U-P-Y, I don't know how he pronounces his name, but arguing against the idea that it's the EU that has brought peace and and trade and prosperity to Europe.
He shows that that's a that's a fallacy.
That's the number one, he points out the ways it actually has helped create this order.
But the order comes from other places, as Thomas Paine and others understood.
Order is not produced by government power.
Order is produced by people's natural interest in trading and and getting along.
And it's, you know, it's a minority of people who are very small minority of people that don't understand that people in their private lives trade and cooperate and respect the rights of other people.
States have ways of creating disorder and mayhem.
Well, but that being the case, since we all live in states and not anarcho-capitalist private property, Stan, then, you know, won't won't the well on the international level, isn't it more likely now that the Europeans and the British will have barriers to trade rather than they'll, you know, act as you would prescribe, which is compete with each other to be better places for capital to want to live?
Well, I don't think so, because Switzerland doesn't have barriers against the rest of Europe and vice versa, and neither does Norway or Iceland or there are countries that are trade with Europe, the European Union, countries within the European Union all the time, every day.
They're not and they're not members.
Even even Nigel Farage, the head of the UK Independence Party, who while he doesn't hold much power, he's a member of the European Parliament.
I think their party has one seat in the British Parliament.
He's not he says he's not for isolationism and trade.
He may not.
He's not good on the immigration issue.
He kind of demagogued that in the campaign, but he doesn't want to cut.
He says he doesn't want to cut Britain off from the rest of the world in terms of trade.
He just thinks decision making should be made in, you know, in London, not in Brussels.
So I don't know that there's an actual Trump who's among prominent people in.
In Britain, calling for out now protectionism, I mean, I don't know that there's a Trump like character in in in Britain, and I'm speaking now when I say Trump, I don't I don't mean necessarily an immigration, because there are Trump types on immigration.
But as far as trade goes, if you saw his trade speech the other day, it was horrendous.
It was a fully comprehensive protectionist program that he laid out, which is totally insane.
You can find some good stuff on Reason magazine today by Peter Suderman and others showing what a what a tissue of lies and fallacies it is.
I don't know of a character like that in Britain.
So I don't hear anyone calling for cutting Britain off from the rest of the world with the wall of protectionist wall.
So that doesn't follow from exiting the EU.
Look, the logic and just like I said, the logic of my position is individual.
Every man is on parliament.
Every person is on parliament.
The logic of the of the state types is world government.
And then you you've you kind of already stated that.
Right.
If it's good on a European wide level and if it's good in North America, why why shouldn't we have a world state?
Well, that's what they think.
Right.
That's the whole point of building the EU in the first place to be what was called the what was it called the World Federalist Society or something like that probably still exists.
It used to be more prominent in the 60s.
They wanted a single world government.
They were sad that the U.N. never, you know, wasn't actually that.
Well, they want a world central bank and a world currency, too.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And even the New Dealers during the war were sort of planning on a international new deal, which the IMF was supposed to play a role in that.
Obviously, they didn't get all they wanted, but they got a lot of what they want.
Well, look, I mean, the thing is, their attempts at building a world government proved why it can't work, because all they're going to really do is, you know, act like a bunch of economic hitmen.
That's the name of the game at the IMF, not truly building a greater world for all the citizens of mankind forever or whatever, as as if they would even know how to do such a thing.
Their game is we exploit you and steal your resources at gunpoint.
You know, it's all just a scam.
That's the way it has to be.
That's what our government is.
So the bigger the government is, the less able it is to accomplish its goals or to make its PR rhyme with its policy in any kind of way.
So people quit using the IMF.
People quit borrowing money from the IMF.
They got burned too many times.
How is it supposed to last as, you know, the great clearinghouse of global capital?
People will find workarounds where that's necessary.
A world government would just turn, you know, rule over to a global elite.
Obviously, the U.S. would be pretty prominent in that global elite.
But the alternative is not what we today, you know, what we call populism, which is sort of unlimited democracy.
We original liberals, libertarians stand outside of that, that phony dichotomy, right?
Neither elitism nor populism.
What we want is individualism, but but even that's not the best term because that sounds like atomistic individuals, right?
Cut off from each other.
We want what I call molecular individualism, where people are related to other people in all kinds of ways, trade, culture, you know, all kinds of ways people exchange from friendship, all the kinds of voluntary, peaceful relationships you can think of and where we make our own.
We each make our own decisions, but in coordination with other people, because it's to our interest.
So we're neither populist nor elitist.
If you look at the debate today, especially the way it's portrayed in the media, you'd think that's the choice, right?
Elitism versus populism.
I say no to both of those because nationalism versus globalism.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, globalism, unfortunately, the word has sort of been hijacked, that word could have been a benign word, meaning just a global market, not that there's an elite running things, but that but that but but that the political boundaries, even if they existed in some cultural sense, didn't exist in an economic sense, because if I want to trade with someone on the other side of a boundary, I don't have a political authority in the way saying, have you complied with all the conditions?
If not, you can't trade with that person.
Economically, we should be able to ignore those boundaries.
And what you can do is sell cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, though, if you want.
You know, you got some.
We don't need to because we can rely on the government to do that for us.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, man, I'm sorry I got to go because I got another interview lined up here.
But thanks very much for talking to me about this and for writing this great article.
I hope everybody will look at it.
Brexit, which kind of dependence now?
Sheldon Richmond.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right.
And you guys check out Sheldon Richmond dot com.
That's his great blog, free association and his column at antiwar dot com.
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