02/12/10 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show is the great Sheldon Richman from the Future of Freedom Foundation.
He's the editor of the Freeman and he keeps the blog SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com.
And I think last time we talked, you told me there's an easier way to get there.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Hey, I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us.
And what is the easier way to get your blog there?
SheldonRichman.com.
SheldonRichman.com.
That's a lot easier than .blogspot this, that, and the other thing.
Yeah, .blogspotnonsense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway, so thanks for joining us on the show.
And well...
Always a pleasure.
Oh, great.
So here's the thing.
So basically what we cover on the show, you know, day in and day out here is the lawlessness ultimately of the National Guard, well, the immorality ultimately, but in practice the lawlessness of the government of the United States and their widespread persecution, torture, kidnapping, disappearances, and murders, and aggressive warfare across the world, the global battlefield as your associate Jacob Hornberger was just describing on the show a little while ago.
And so I was kind of thinking maybe I'd let you come on here and make the case for maybe we should just abolish this state, and particularly the warfare state.
And well, for example, could you make the case, I bet you could, that America's been at war pretty much since 1791 and that there's really no such thing as national defense at all.
There's only aggression, at least in this country.
Yeah, I don't think it's continuous since 1791.
That may be a stretch.
You know, there was more of an interest in keeping America at home in the earlier days.
You know, things pick up, of course, with McKinley and the Spanish-American War, and then we become a, quote, Pacific power.
And you know, you can find bits here and there, but yeah, we don't want to put too fine a point on it.
Well, that's the Cherokee, you know.
Well, true.
True.
Okay, I wasn't thinking that.
I was thinking more traditional sorts of wars, but good point.
Yeah, there's a lot of nasty stuff that has gone on.
I had occasion to think of this recently when, with the passing of Howard Zinn, prompted me to take a look at the first couple chapters of his People's History, and he goes through some of that interesting stuff.
So yeah, so the question is what?
We talked about the lawlessness, but of course, you know, if we take the Nixon Doctrine seriously, one of the Nixon Doctrines, if he, the president, does something, it's got to be legal.
So government lawlessness is a contradiction of terms, according to some people, is that right?
Yeah, I mean, that's basically the thing.
Well, we just ended the last interview with a prosecutor who himself was prosecuted, an unprecedented event for framing up these guys on terrorism charges.
Well, one of them tried to sue him, and the court said, no, you can't sue him, he's got sovereign immunity.
He can frame up whoever he wants.
That's just the least example, right?
Right.
Well, yeah, there's good old sovereign immunity.
They've got other rabbits in the hat too, I guess, but yeah, that's a good standby.
You can't sue me unless I give you permission to.
That's a good deal.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great one.
So that's consistent, really, if you think about it, with the doctrine of what the state is.
The state is not just another organization in society.
It's super special.
So it does, it's sort of consistent that the view of a good state defender is that what it does is not, can't be against the law by definition.
I mean, there have been attempts, many attempts over the years to subject government to law, but always found ways around it, or doctrines that give it exceptions.
Well, you know, yeah, like Tom Woods said, you probably couldn't have had a better experiment in minarchy than America.
And yet, look at us now, the biggest government ever, times a hundred.
Well, what always astounds me is when you look back at certain people, critics of the American political system, very early on, I'm thinking of John Taylor of Carolina, and he's writing in the first decade of the 1800s, okay, that the ink is still wet on the Constitution, am I right?
You know, like 1804, seven or something, right?
Yeah, Jefferson administration or something.
Yeah, it's pretty early.
He's complaining about big government and how the federal government has already violated the boundaries that Madison and Hamilton insisted were there in the Constitution.
That's all, you know, the Congress has already gone beyond the limits we were told it would go.
I mean, he's complaining prior to 1810.
And then, you know, you can find similar things in the late 19th century, you know, which is sometimes thought of even by libertarians as the golden era, right?
Once slavery is gone, we're often told that there's a golden era from 1870 to the progressive era, or maybe a little earlier, 1870 to the progressive era, the turn of the century was kind of the time, not perfect, I would say, but darn close.
And yet, look what Alexander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and those guys were saying back then, they were complaining about the money monopoly, the patent monopoly, the tariff, all the ways that big business essentially was gaining power through the government.
And the olden age.
Hey, you know, one time I read my horoscope in the Onion.
And it said, today, you will realize that the nation state with a monopoly on forest, based on the theory of protecting you from an endless series of scary foreign threats is no longer tenable, and that we're going to have to find a better way, something like that.
So, well, what about that?
I mean, if I had my wish, and I could just sink Washington DC and all the statues and everything into the ocean, and we just didn't have a national government anymore, or even the state governments, and we had some kind of private property anarchy, wouldn't we be helpless against attack from the Canadians?
I mean, that's, that's why you absolutely have to have a state, right, is because or else another one will come and replace it, and it'll be even worse than this one.
Well, no, see, it's worse than you think.
We're already at the mercy of an invasion of the Canadians, because what's so insidious is the Canadians look just like us.
Yeah, exactly.
They can infiltrate, and we don't even know.
Yeah, haven't you seen the South Park movie?
Yeah, sure, I have seen it.
Especially if they don't talk, and don't say A or something, then we don't know who they are.
So, it's insidious.
I mean, the Mexicans are much easier, because we can spot them.
Yeah.
And I don't know why people aren't worried about, more worried about the Canadians.
It doesn't make any sense.
No, actually, but seriously.
Well, we do have a government that, you know, if the Canadians really could ever take over America, it would have to be a coup d'etat, and then we have a giant empire for them to control.
So, in a way, we are.
Yeah, but, you know, we don't know.
We don't know.
You know, for what it's worth, it's an unappreciated fact that the Articles Confederation explicitly invited Canada to join, join the Confederation.
Oh, yeah?
Yes, it's right in there.
Very early on in the Articles.
Of course, it's short, so everything's early in the Articles.
Yes, it's right there.
The Canadians, if they wish, could become a member, could become a member of the Confederation.
So, I think we should, you know, launch a movement to bring back the Articles of Confederation, and then invite Canada.
Yeah, that'd be a good start.
To join.
That's my personal project.
But, again, though, back to the serious question, though.
Okay.
Who would protect us without the Pentagon?
Well, I have to laugh, and anybody who's paying attention should have to laugh.
Who would protect us without the Pentagon?
Who's protecting us from the Pentagon?
Who's protecting us with the Pentagon?
Which is, of course, what we've been talking about the entire first part of the show today.
Look, as has been pointed out before, I'm hardly going to take credit for this, the Pentagon couldn't protect its own headquarters on November 11th, or September 11th.
You know, this is a joke, right?
Yeah, don't go confusing Armistice Day with Cheney's holiday now.
Is this camera?
Yeah, yeah, you're boasting.
So, again, to make it a little more serious, but just a little, I think the case is stronger than ever for a non-state approach to defense.
I mean, when I say strong or never, it's always strong.
But, I mean, as far as it being plausible to regular people who haven't thought much I think it's now is the time that we can make the most persuasive case.
Because, look what's going on.
Looking at it from the eyes of the establishment, they say the biggest threat is, what, international terrorism, right?
Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, and Iran.
Well, again, Iran too.
But terrorism seems to be number one.
Well, and those are all the same thing anyway.
Okay, so terrorism by nature is extremely decentralized, entrepreneurial, flexible.
You don't know where it's going to show up.
You don't know what people are going to think of.
They're not marching in formation.
They don't have divisions marching in formation in uniforms.
That's what's considered so dangerous about it.
Anybody can call themselves Al-Qaeda.
You know, waiting one of these days for some couple of guys or one guy pulls off a really sloppy, shoddy incident somewhere and then, you know, he claims he's Al-Qaeda and then the next thing we read is the Al-Qaeda attorney is suing them to get them to stop saying that it was Al-Qaeda because they're defaming them because it was such a shoddy job.
You know, they have a reputation to keep.
But there's no copyright, right?
There's no trademark in Al-Qaeda.
Anybody can say they're Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, not yet.
If we're really concerned about protecting ourselves from this, and I agree with, who is it, John Mueller, is that how he says his name?
Yeah, from the University of Chicago.
He wrote the book Overblown.
You know, I tend to think that's right.
But let's grant to the other side that it is a big menacing thing.
Then we need precisely a decentralized, entrepreneurial, flexible approach to defense.
And the last entity in the world to deliver that is the U.S. government, a big plodding dinosaur with bureaucracy, which so-called terrorists can run rings around if they want to.
Yeah, but what about the Russians and the Chinese?
You know, it's still 1975 around here.
Well, look, if you want to keep the Pentagon around for the Russians and the Chinese, fine.
But let's take them off the terrorist watch because they're positively dangerous to us.
Let's decentralize.
Look, people who have expensive assets have an interest in protecting them from people who want to plant bombs or whatever.
So let's tell shopping malls and people who operate plants of various kinds, you're in charge of your own security.
You have the most direct interest in it.
You have the local knowledge.
And you have the flexibility.
If they look to us, you take care of it.
And then they'll take care of it because they have the biggest interest in it.
Yeah, well, now what about the Navy?
Because the Navy secures free trade all around the world, Sheldon.
Well, I would sell the Navy.
I would break it up.
Look, I don't want the government to be the world's policeman.
I know there are people who are advocates of empire and they put a new gloss on it.
I don't want an empire that would simply keep the trade lanes open and be the good cop.
The problem is you can't trust the government to do that.
It's going to do all the bad things.
It's going to meddle.
It's going to get at the mischief.
It's going to draw from the mischief.
It's going to kill foreigners.
It's going to bleed the taxpayers.
And Americans will end up getting killed too and stimulating terrorism.
So I don't see, we're not getting any value for it.
And it's costing us a huge amount of money.
We'll find other ways privately to protect sea lanes.
The people that have an interest in trade will have an interest in protecting their ships.
You know, it's interesting to me that Dick Cheney in the 1990s actually went overseas.
This is the cardinal sin, of course.
Went overseas.
And I guess it was Australia.
So that only kind of counts as a foreign country.
No offense to him and the rest of you all out there.
So he went to Australia to complain about Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iran.
And he was speaking as the CEO of Halliburton.
And he was saying, come on, the Persians are reasonable people.
Let us do business here.
We ought to be going the other way.
Instead of more sanctions, less.
And get some things done.
And then, lo and behold, just a couple of years later, he becomes vice president.
And he has the entire military at his disposal.
And he's ready to regime change and occupy the entire Middle East.
Starting, of course, with Iraq.
But then, as he admits now.
He was the strongest voice inside the administration.
Pushing for war against Iran.
Right.
And, you know, as Madeleine Albright said.
What's the point of having all these weapons if you never get to use them?
Right.
She really did say that, too.
You all can Google it.
She said it was directed at Colin Powell, I believe.
Who was acting a bit dovish.
At least in a relative sense.
At that particular meeting.
And that's right.
She did say that.
She said it was directed at one of these Iraqi children.
I forget who it was.
I think it was Alex Coburn.
Or somebody who, after 9-11, said he would love.
Was it Alex Coburn?
The one that would drag her over to the hole.
Where the trade center used to be.
You know, hold her face down into the hole.
And say, is this worth it?
Yeah.
That's what she needed.
Well, I don't know if that was Alex Coburn.
That sounds like something he would write.
Sounds like a lot of fun to do.
There's still nothing but a hole there.
So why not?
And she's a big celebrity, of course.
Yeah, of course.
She's got these really nice brooches.
And apparently, I read one New York Times story that was entirely about her brooches.
So I'm pretty sure it was also an important focus of Jon Stewart when she was on the show last, I think.
Yeah, he has her on a lot.
She's like the hypno-toad or something.
With those brooches.
She just puts everybody in a trance.
She doesn't ever bring up these remarks to her and say, what were you thinking when you said this?
But my attitude toward the American...
Well, by the way, she's actually apologized for saying it.
And it's funny, because she's apologized for saying it a few different times, including to Amy Goodman.
And every time that she's apologized for saying it, all she ever says is, well, you know, I'm really sorry it came out that way and that your feelings were hurt by it.
Or something like that.
One of those complete non-apology apologies.
By the way, I'm still glad that 500,000 kids are dead, because she just spits on the floor, you know?
Exactly.
And when her memoir came out, where she issued, I don't know if that was the first one, but it was in print, I did an article in FFF's periodical, the Freedom Daily, on that.
And I can't remember exactly what she said.
I haven't read that in a while.
But I took it apart, and it was not a real apology.
I shouldn't have said that on TV or it came out wrong.
You're right.
But she didn't take it back.
My attitude toward the American defense establishment, sort of like that old line about lawyers, if we didn't have it, we wouldn't need it.
That's why I say it.
I mean, it gets us into the problems that Ben claims is saving us from, which is very typical.
Well, it's clear that it causes far more violence than it prevents, although I guess a lot of Americans would just assume the premise that, well, it's violence against somebody else, not us, but we're a civil society here, so go ahead with it.
That's basically the consensus in society, right?
I like the approach to defense.
I mean, it's a serious question, okay?
There could be bad guys out there.
What do we do?
Jeff Hummel, who has written in this in a few different places, who's a historian and economist at the San Jose State, has a very good approach to this.
And he points out that protecting ourselves from foreign states is protecting us from the state in general.
I mean, we have a need to protect ourselves from the American state.
The American state could be doing much worse things to us than it's doing.
I mean, as bad as a lot of the things are, it could be worse, right?
I mean, in World War I, they put Eugene Debs in prison or they sentenced him.
He didn't serve because a Republican let him out.
Ten years, right, for what?
For giving a speech, I think, in danger, like fire in a crowded theater, they said.
Okay, today, they wouldn't be able to do that today.
Now, that's not because they became good and they love freedom now.
I mean, the people running things.
It's because, and I don't think we have a full explanation for this, but they don't think they can get away with it.
They couldn't get away with it.
Gosh, if Cheney and Bush didn't try it, they must really believe they couldn't get away with that.
Yeah, even Bush asked, did not demand, that the governors put National Guard troops in their airports after September 11th and stuff like that.
It was pretty clear.
I actually remember breathing a sigh of relief that they could have gone much farther with the whole continuity of government thing that they have there.
So, there's a line they realize they can't cross.
Now, what creates and enforces that line?
It's certainly not guns.
We don't have enough guns to protect ourselves from the government if the government was going to start jailing anti-war critics.
So, it's an ideological barrier.
This is Humboldt's point.
It's ideology, ultimately, that protects ideas.
He says, rules the world.
This is almost a direct quote.
Ideas rule the world, not force, because ideas determine what direction people point their guns.
So, ultimately, it's ideas, not force.
And it's ideas that keep the government as contained as it is today.
In other words, keeping it from doing more.
Among the ideological forces that protect us from, say, these violations of free speech, I mean, I can get up and make a speech against the Afghan war, and chances of my getting arrested, it's not going to happen.
What's saving me?
Well, the ACLU, in part, is saving me.
They know that the ACLU and other civil libertarians will spring into action if they were to attempt anything like this.
The ACLU doesn't have any guns, and yet the ACLU, I mean, to use them as a symbol, is protecting all of us from government violations of free speech.
And nonviolently.
Who says nonviolent defense can't work?
They're an example of it.
Well, but they would just argue, no, no, no, they would say, well, forget that.
The judges are force.
And that's what the ACLU does, is they go to the judge, and they say, judge, you have a monopoly in this case, tell the government no.
And that's the only reason they get their way.
They can't stop them from speaking.
Look, there's a lot of anti-war activity going on on the internet and other places, and the government is not trying to stop it.
I think they know that there would be enough war.
So they're being deterred through nonviolent institutions.
ACLU being an obvious example, but it's not just that.
And similarly, gun rights organizations keep the government from doing even more than it does on guns.
They're permitting concealed carry and stuff like that.
Or, you know, why hasn't the federal government done more?
Because there still is this nonviolent protection from unarmed institutions.
You know, various organizations.
I hate to mention the NRA, because it's kind of the weakest of them all, but it's in that constellation of organizations.
So what I'm getting at is Humboldt's point that it's ultimately that keeps governments from attacking us.
And so the same thing would be true of foreign governments.
The same methods we need to keep our government at bay would also be used to keep foreign governments at bay.
We would be making it undesirable for anybody to try to invade us because of nonviolent resistance and all the rest.
That's what ultimately would protect us.
The government is not a good protector.
That would be a better protector.
Now, you can find examples, of course, of societies with either no state or very minimal states were overrun by other governments.
But you can also find states, and you can also find countries that had governments that were overrun.
So governments aren't any better protection.
There's no guarantees in life.
But at least you don't have a homegrown so-called defense establishment, which is creating the very problems you thought it was there to prevent.
Yeah.
Well, and the other thing is, too, is we've got to recognize that on the earth that we live in, or on, or whichever, I guess you can live underground, the thing is that there is no combination of powers that could invade this country.
If Europe, Russia, and China all worked together, how many troop ships would they have to make?
How many people would they have to give up and put on those ships and try to cross the Pacific Ocean and land in California, where everybody's got automatic weapons?
Everybody does.
Forget the cops.
They're armed to the teeth.
Nobody could ever invade the United States of America.
The only thing anybody could ever do to America would be to just drop hydrogen bombs all over the thing, which would make it not worth occupying in the first place.
And really, the only way that that would ever happen, other than some fluke, which there have been close calls and whatever, but other than some fluke, really that would only happen if, say, for example, the Russians or the Chinese were trying to defend their country from ours.
It's much more likely our government would be the one starting a war on that level.
Well, we are, as we're constantly reminded by the pundits and others, the sole superpower.
And that creates an arrogance and an ability to feel like, well, American exceptionalism, right?
The rules are different for us.
And so we can do what we want, but don't no one else better try it or else there'll be hell to pay.
And the concern about nukes, which of course people are now worried about suitcase bombs and stuff like that.
It's becoming cheaper and smaller.
That all goes, I think, to my argument, that what we need is as decentralized and entrepreneurial form of defense as possible.
And you're not going to get that out of the state.
The state's a big plotting, you know, Dilbert-like bureaucracy with a bunch of pointy-haired people, guys, you know, making decisions when they don't really know what they're doing.
And information is imperfect.
It's not just imperfect, but I mean it's incomplete.
It gets filtered up in an edited, shaded way to make each level look better to the boss above.
And you can't trust it.
It's a bureaucracy.
And it's got all the problems that Mises and Bill Miscannon and the public choice people have written about.
Bureaucracies are fatally flawed.
And why do we want to, of all things, of all things, okay, I want to privatize and I want competition, but of all the things, returning over to a bureaucracy, the worst thing, it seemed to me, would be defense.
Because that's where it really gets dangerous.
Alright, well now, so let's take it to a smaller scale in the local county sheriff's department.
If you want private property anarchism, how's that supposed to work where you don't have a local police force?
Because this is where people, you know, think back to before you were an anarchist.
Boy, what are you talking about now?
Abolishing all cops everywhere and whatever.
This is fantasyland utopianism or something like that.
How's this supposed to work?
Well, of course, it isn't abolishing cops.
It's not, I'm speaking for myself, and of course I know many people who would generally take the same philosophical approach as me.
It's not this idea that once we get rid of the state, everybody will become nice so we can throw away our guns and not have police and, you know, because everybody will be nice and wonderful and in some big commune.
That's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about simply that the functions, traditional functions of government, traditional so-called legitimate functions of government, like police, would be much better handled in the private sector.
You know, I heard a lecture recently by Brian Kaplan who liked to point out that there were more private cops in the country than government cops.
And what he tells us is that people are dissatisfied with the government cops.
I mean, why are they hiring private cops for all kinds of things, malls and, you know, other...
Yeah, but there used to be battle days of Pinkerton thugs and we don't just want a bunch of private Blackwater armies running around acting like little governments, do we?
But they weren't acting on their own, were they?
The government was calling them in to break up strikes and things.
That wasn't freelance.
Was that freelance stuff or was that companies calling them?
Well, I'm sure in some cases the companies called them, but then, of course, you have the company calling the governor and then the governor calls them.
Of course, John Rockefeller Jr. was responsible for the massacre at Ludlow, California.
That was his call.
And I'm not sure, though, where the politicians were in the chain of command.
Right.
Well, look, they can't commit crimes.
First of all, people can defend themselves against that.
They won't have the aura of the state on their side because, by hypothesis, there wouldn't be one.
So they would just be recognized as thugs.
I keep forgetting these conversations, is that there's a whole...society is a good deal of... a good part of what society is, and Thomas Paine recognizes if you read The Rights of Man, most of what society is is informal custom that has just grown up over the ages, that is embedded in people's behavior and thinking.
And if you took away the police, most people aren't going to commit crimes, I mean, if suddenly the police just disappeared one day, most people are going to say, hey, cops will go out and rob banks and kill and rape, and that's not true.
Yeah, most riots are responses to cops anyway.
Everybody knows that.
So, when we can identify something as a society that already implies that there's some sort of order and ongoing understood custom regarding how you deal with people, and those things tend to be what we think of as libertarian, right?
I don't touch your stuff without permission, you don't touch my stuff without permission, I don't hit you, the stuff you learn as a kid, right?
Don't hit, don't take the kid's things without permission, and don't lie.
Keep your promise, keep your contract.
Societies discover those rules pretty readily, and they become embedded.
Now, governments have come along when they conquer some place, then, you know, early in the early days, they then codify these rules, and often distorted them and made sure the king would get, you know, the fine when there was an offense, rather than just let it be restitution to the wrong person.
The king had to get his cut.
It suddenly became breaching the king's peace, right?
It wasn't, A, harm B, so A better pay B.
It was now the king is the party to it now, on behalf of everybody else.
So, it didn't come along and write the rules, write the, you know, no murder, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal.
They didn't write those rules.
It just, they realized that people were already abiding by those, and so it formalized them and said, hey, we're here to enforce them.
So, it was just a way of grafting itself onto an already existing society.
And the early, you know, liberals, classical liberals understood this.
Like I said, you can find it in pain.
There's a great quote in pain.
I don't have it at my fingertips, but you can find it early on in, I'm pretty sure, The Rights of Man, where he talks about the greater part of society has nothing to do with government.
He wasn't an anarchist.
You know, he still wanted some minimal state, but the point is, he recognized that government is not the motor of a society.
That self, it's organic.
It's emergent.
It's self-generating.
And so, a lot of these problems don't look quite as formidable, the problems that you mentioned, you know, who's going to provide police at the local level, when you realize that.
It's only when you see everything is top down that then you think, well, oh my gosh.
Heck, you take away the state, and there's nothing.
There's no glue holding us all together.
Yeah, really.
You take away the state, you just take away the baton that everybody takes turns beating each other over the head with.
That's the thing that people fight about more than anything else.
Like the culture war in the schools.
Are we going to brainwash all the kids into being secular, liberal, commie, pinko types?
Or are we going to brainwash them into all being a bunch of Pat Robertson following born-again Bible thumpers?
And so, whoever wins the fight at the superintendent's meeting, or whatever, gets to force their way on everybody else's kid, instead of just letting everybody go to school where they feel like.
It would seem to be the obvious answer, or something like that, but anyway.
When people, if you propose this idea that we're talking about to people who haven't thought much about it, they're immediately thinking of the inner cities, and oh my gosh, you know, the place will go to hell.
But who produced the conditions to begin with?
Yeah, and who's going to keep them there so they don't come here?
Who gave us the drug war?
Who gave us the rotten schools?
Who gave us the various laws that keep people from climbing out of poverty, or make it much more difficult than it would be?
Minimum wage laws, and things like that.
In other words, the thing you're asking, that they'd be asking to protect us, the very thing they're asking protection of, is the thing that gave us what they think they need protecting from.
All right, that's it.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much.
You got it.
My pleasure.
You nailed it.
All right, everybody, that's Sheldon Richman.
He is the editor of The Freeman.
He's a fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
His website is SheldonRichman.com.