09/19/14 – Abigail Hall – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Abigail Hall.
She is a research fellow at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
Of course, that's David Thoreau, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, Robert Stinnett, the great Independent Institute there, independent.org.
Abigail Hall, she is a research fellow there, a Ph.D. candidate, and the J.I.N. fellow in economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which I think I pronounced wrong.
Welcome to the show.
Abby, how are you doing?
Fine.
Thank you for having me.
Well, really appreciate you joining us.
And how do you say the name of that center again?
It's the Mercatus Center.
Mercatus Center.
Okay, well, I've heard of it before, but I never did remember how to say it.
All right.
Well, anyway, so yeah, you got this great study here at independent.org.
It's the Independent Review edited by Robert Higgs, of course, and it's co-authored with our friend Christopher Coyne, Professor Christopher Coyne, and it's called Perfecting Tyranny, Foreign Intervention as Experimentation in State Control.
I think we all, everyone in the audience, right?
We all think of James Madison, the instruments of foreign war become the instruments of tyranny at home.
And so this is a full scale study here.
The PDF file is, oops, I had it here.
It's 26 pages long.
So you guys really went in depth.
And I think you say in your introduction here, you really focused on two specific, you know, examples, and then went at those in depth.
And that would be domestic spying, as well as the militarized SWAT teams at the local police level.
So I guess you just take it from there and, you know, pick up one than the other.
Sure.
So we start off the paper, actually with a quote from Mark Twain, where he's talking about this hypothetical great republic.
And the point that he makes about this republic is that they had been going out, engaging in all different types of foreign intervention.
And that eventually what winds up happening in this great republic is that they wind up suffering the same kinds of imposition that they tried to place upon other people.
So the phrase that he uses is that they've been trampling upon the helpless abroad, and they had been conditioned to endure with apathy, the like at home.
So what we're looking at is what if this great republic that Twain is talking about is actually not hypothetical, but what if this is really true?
What if the foreign interventions which the U.S. and other countries are engaging in don't just have the international consequences that people typically think about, but also have real, far-reaching domestic consequences?
So what we try to do is to examine what happens when the U.S., and again, this is generally applicable, but what happens when the U.S. government engages in foreign intervention?
How do those interventions wind up coming back and demonstrating their effects domestically?
So what we look at are what we refer to as coercive foreign interventions, where the government is trying to shape the political, legal, social, or economic outcomes in another country and actively invest resources to deter resistance from these foreign populations.
So what we look to do is we come up with what we refer to as the boomerang effect, which illustrates how the foreign intervention allows government to expand their social control techniques abroad and then implement those domestically.
So if we think about what happens when the U.S. goes abroad, they're not as restricted as they are domestically.
So there's some fairly strong limitations on what the government can do to its own citizens in the U.S., but when you take the U.S. government out of its domestic borders, a lot of those constraints are either relaxed or altogether absent.
So we argue that this provides sort of a testing ground in which individuals in the government can engage in different kinds of social control experimentation, and then those are brought back into the U.S.
Well, yeah, and I mean, the SWAT team is the perfect example because there you simply have, you know, there's a direct line of dissent from the creation of modern special forces after the disaster in the Iranian desert in the Carter administration to the FBI and the federal police SWAT teams and then all the training of the local police.
It all comes from the Special Operations Command tactics, the kind of things that they train to do to foreigners is exactly the same equipment, same training and same mentality down to our local sheriff's department.
Right.
So in the paper, we identify four different mechanisms through which we can see this importation of social control techniques from abroad.
So we talk about changes in, first of all, the overall structure and centralization of government.
So one of the benefits of a federalist system is that you have different groups which are providing this sort of check and balance on the other groups.
But what happens when the U.S. engages in a foreign intervention is that some of the groups which were providing a check on a centralized government now wind up becoming intertwined within that intervention or drawn into the programs and into the activities of the centralized government.
And so you wind up eliminating some of those checks.
We also look at issues of physical capital.
So this would be things like military technology.
So drones or surveillance techniques is one of the examples that we talk about in the paper.
Changes in human capital or basically be things that people are good at.
So if you're engaging in a foreign intervention, you're going to hone particular skills that are going to make you better at that particular job.
Or from the very beginning, you're going to wind up drawing people into the intervention with that skill set.
And then these kinds of things are brought back home in particular through what we refer to as changes in administrative dynamics.
So these people that have gone abroad, developed new technology, and developed these new personal skills wind up coming back and they reallocate their talents, if you will, to public service and private service.
And this really winds up changing the dynamic of a lot of different domestic companies.
Yeah, I mean, that just makes a lot of sense.
People come back and I mean, after all, look at the police.
I don't know what the percentages are, but it's probably majorities in a majority of jurisdictions in America of sheriffs and city police who are military veterans.
And not, you know, during some 1980s, more or less peacetime, or only a proxy war era or something like that, but battle hardened veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So there's definitely a lot of crossover in terms of former military veterans now engage in in policing activities.
I'm not sure of the current domestic numbers.
The military actually doesn't report the civilian occupations of its members.
But one of the statistics that was surprising to me in engaging in this research was that the first SWAT team, which can be traced back to the mid 1960s out in California, every member of that SWAT team had former military training.
Right.
Yeah, well, and I mean, that's where they all get their training is the military bases, the SWAT teams, right?
Right.
So we look in the paper about the, again, the early SWAT teams in particular, getting training from the Marines and from other branches of the military.
And you can actually trace the origins of SWAT teams to military tactics.
So the entire organization of a SWAT team is based on what was referred to as elite force recon units in Vietnam.
So if we look at the origin, oops, sorry, that's the bumper music.
We got to take this break.
Yeah, there's even there's a funny story there about the Marines in 2007 going back to the LAPD and saying, can you teach us the counterinsurgency tactics that we taught you back in the early 80s because we forgot them and now we need them for Iraq.
So it goes back and forth.
Okay, we got to take this break.
We'll be right back out with Abigail Hall.
She's at independent.org.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to three weekdays.
I'm talking with Abigail Hall.
She's co-authored this study for the Independent Review with Christopher Coyne.
And oops, now I got to rewind back up to the beginning for the correct title, I think.
Perfecting Tyranny, Foreign Intervention as Experimentation in State Control.
And you know, I was kind of spacing out during the break there, Abigail, and I was thinking about what we've learned from the Snowden documents about parallel construction.
And again, I confess and I admit, and I'm guilty that I have not had a chance to read this whole thing.
I have scanned through quite a bit of it.
So I don't know if you guys get to this exactly in here or not, but it's revealed that the NSA, through their Special Operations Division or some other name for it, likes to launder intelligence on Americans through or to the DEA or other federal and state and local police agencies, I guess even.
And then they tell them, hey, lie about how you figured this out.
Don't let them know that it's this quite illegal, warrantless, you know, kind of dragnet fishing expedition type surveillance that's led to this information.
Pretend that you pull them over for having a taillight out and then make your case from there.
And it seems like, wow, just imagine if it was a few years from now.
And that's not even, I mean, hell, it's hardly scandalous now.
But what if that just becomes official policy?
Like, all right, whatever.
Nobody really cared, not enough to roll it back.
And so, say there's another terrorist attack or two.
And from now on, the NSA can go ahead and legally turn over their entire haul to all American police agencies the same way they turn it all over to the Israelis every day.
And then all of our local and state police agencies have access to everything the NSA has on all of us and can pick and choose any level of enforcement they wish against any of us all day long.
I mean, we could move from authoritarian to totalitarianism here in America in pretty much a day and a half, it seems like, if that was to simply become.
In fact, one more thing about that.
Gareth Porter's great award-winning work about this is how McChrystal and Petraeus kill people with airstrikes and target them for midnight SWAT raids by the Delta Force in Iraq and Afghanistan is they use all this metadata whose cell phone is connected to whose cell phone and that's who they decide to kill.
So you'd see, obviously, there are more legal restrictions here at home in the law for now, but you can see how we're moving more and more that way.
Most definitely.
We don't talk specifically about the Snowden documents or about we mentioned the current incarnation of the NSA, but we're really focused on how it is that these types of relationships were built in the first place.
And one of the things that we do focus on is exactly what you're talking about is this information sharing that's going on between not just areas of the federal government, but between the federal government and state and local law enforcement.
So we see things like the creation of joint terrorism task forces, which have exploded in particular after the attack on 9-11.
We've seen a lot of information sharing between state, local, and federal forces, tactical, and other kinds of training that's being shared.
And also what's become incredibly popular lately is the 1033 program that was highlighted following the events in Ferguson of weapons being transferred.
Right.
And you know, the other thing I think is really important that you mentioned earlier was about, I guess you didn't call it the opportunity cost.
That's the part that got my interest, the changing specialties of people.
It's almost unimaginable how much engineering brilliance goes into killing people, especially in the United States of America.
And to think about if we just, you know, nevermind a completely libertarian society or anything, but if we could just be a normal country in a normal time for a minute, it's, I think we would be shocked to find out just how powerful all that intellectual capital is that's been diverted from, you know, market purposes.
Like, I don't know, figuring out better ways to distribute food to hungry people or something like that.
Education to the needy.
And instead they just, they're like locked down in a basement all day long, designing and redesigning and redesigning a gun for an armored personnel carrier or whatever madness just to destroy.
Absolutely.
And this isn't something that we talk about in the paper, but the opportunity cost is absolutely significant.
And it's really what's the incentive facing individuals who are engaging in these types of interventions.
So one of the things in economics that we talk about is entrepreneurship.
And what you're talking about is what is often known as a constructive versus unproductive versus destructive entrepreneurship.
And so the question is what's more profitable for people, for individuals to engage in.
And so if it's more profitable for people to use their entrepreneurial talent, to engage in market oriented types of activities, you know, creating a new phone or building new goods and services for people to consume.
If that's more profitable, people are going to pursue that end.
On the other hand, as you were saying, if it's more profitable for people to design a new type of weapon or a new form of surveillance, then that's the kind of activity that people are going to be directed into.
Yeah.
And, you know, speaking as a paranoid, who's been really kind of freaking out about all the surveillance state NSA unleashed stuff since I was a kid.
You know, at this point, it seems like, you know, it's all the worst nightmares come true.
And it was it was so obvious from back then that there's so much government money behind the R&D for this stuff that like, for example, biometric identification of people, which was just an idea that people talked about 25 years ago.
It was pretty obvious that, oh, they're going to get this perfected as fast as they possibly can, because the government has made it a priority that, you know, forget competing in the market.
If you're, you know, one of these level 35 computer genius types, you ought to be working for the Pentagon right now, helping develop iris scanners.
And, you know, there's there's profits to be made there that you can't beat in Silicon Valley.
Absolutely.
And then you have individuals who not only are doing that, who not only engage in those types of things, but then figure out ways to market their other ideas to the government.
So if you actually go back to the origins of the NSA, for example, and this we talk about extensively in the paper, there was a man named Captain Ralph Van Deeman, who actually was engaged in the US occupation of the Philippines.
This is all the way back in 1898.
And as part of that assignment, he was responsible for really quashing the resistance to the US occupation in the Philippines.
And the way that he and his colleagues went about this was engaging in really intensive surveillance tactics, getting people blacklisted, ruining their reputations, following people, telegraph tapping.
And what wound up happening is when he returned to the US, he thought, hey, this is a really great idea, not just to use in the Philippines, but to use domestically.
And he was a real champion, if you will, of setting up an intensive kind of security organization within the US.
So the point's definitely well taken.
And it's absolutely something we're thinking about.
Yeah, well, and I'm pretty sure that's what Mark Twain was referring to, since he, I forget, I guess, I think he had started out supporting the Spanish American War.
But then when it turned to conquering the Philippines, he figured it out real quick and joined up the Anti-Imperialist League and all of that.
So he was, you know, our guy back then.
And this is exactly what he was talking about.
You know, it's just this kind of thing.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And yeah, that's what we need now is an Anti-Imperialist League.
I'm thinking with a gigantic portrait of Mark Twain hanging in the background all the time, some giant auditorium full of millions of people.
Yeah, anyway.
I like it.
All I need is billions of dollars and I can get the millions of people together.
It'll be easy.
If only.
Yeah.
I will say one of the things from the paper, though, because when we kind of got through the end of the paper, we were feeling really kind of like Debbie Downers of like, is there really nothing that we can do?
And one of the things that we were thinking about is why is it that some interventions wind up coming back and really eroding civil liberties and others appear not to?
And one of the things that we point to is the attitudes of citizens of the country whose government is engaging in the foreign intervention.
So if U.S. citizens have a real aversion to a particular type of activity, then this could be a way that such interventions would wind up at least being a slower incursion, even if not eliminating it completely.
Right.
Yeah, that's a very important point, too, that ultimately really is up to us.
And we saw a lot of backlash from Ferguson.
A lot of people really surprised to find out all of a sudden just how militarized things have gotten from those images.
So maybe right now we have a real window of opportunity to make our voices heard, you know, along those lines.
Great work.
I really appreciate it, Abigail.
Thank you very much.
That's Abigail Hall.
She's at Independent.org, wrote this with Christopher Coyne, perfecting tyranny.
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