04/16/10 – Lew Rockwell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all.
Well, you think I hate the government.
Check out this guy, Lou Rockwell.
Welcome back to the show, Lou.
How's it going?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Glad to have you back.
Happy post-taxation day.
Yeah.
Well, and to you, too.
Everybody, Lou is the proprietor of lourockwell.com, which is the biggest and most important libertarian website on the Internet.
Go look at it.
It's L-E-W, rockwell.com.
And he's the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He wrote a couple of books.
The last one is called The Left, The Right, and The State, which belongs, you know, through your eye holes in your brain, as well as all his great articles.
And, Lou, I ain't going to lie to you.
I sit here and I leave your blog open in one of my tabs all day long and hit refresh over and over again.
It's great.
Oh, well, thank you, Scott.
All right.
So now here's my problem.
I got a chip on my shoulder.
Oh.
Well, so I just interviewed this guy named Syed Salim Shahzad, who's a reporter for The Asia Times.
And he was in Islamabad, Pakistan, which means that ipso facto my rights were just violated by the national government of the United States.
One end of the phone conversation was in another country, and so the Fourth Amendment does not protect me.
Also, you were talking to a guy with an un-American name and who probably belonged to an un-American religion and, of course, was in an un-American country.
Yeah, I mean, un-American indeed.
How far away from America can you get than Pakistan anyway?
Yeah, that's right, unless, of course, you're in the American-occupied parts of Pakistan.
Right, but that's different.
Well, so anyway, I just thought I'd make a national security agency joke there.
Listen, I've actually been having a really good time looking at your website because you've got this optimism bug going on about, you know, libertarians taking strides all over the planet.
Let's talk about that.
Sure.
You want to talk about, what, Brazil?
Well, what's making you optimistic?
I'm looking at the news all day and I do nothing but complain, but you've been, I can tell by your writing, you've been feeling better and better about how successful you and the rest of us have been and are becoming at pushing this libertarian ideology on people.
Scott, I'll know we're successful when you take Rachel Maddow's place.
Yeah, well, that's going to be the day, you know, we'll wait around.
No, but I think we are making progress, and ideas among the people.
I mean, of course, the regime itself seems to me it gets crazier and more out of touch by the moment.
I mean, Obama, you know, announcing yesterday, and, of course, the plaudits of the Republicans, that now he's going to have an expedition to an asteroid and spending a quazillion dollars shooting money out of rockets and the rest of the stuff.
It actually gave me an idea.
President Obama, even though he's happy to wage wars and murder people left and right all over the world, just by, I'm sure, the mere fact that he himself is not in the army.
But I think, you know, he's in great shape.
He's a young guy.
After he's president, why shouldn't he lead the expedition to the asteroid himself?
I mean, I think he should take Rahm Emanuel with him and he could have his own planet that way.
Well, you know, they just socialize the costs, and some, you know, Dianne Feinstein's husband's company would get all the mineral rights.
Well, why don't we send Dianne, too?
That would be, you know, I bet we could come up with a great expedition.
See, that's my idea for the airstrikes on Iran.
Just drop the neocons on Iran from the sky.
You know, see how they like it that way.
Oh, that's pretty mean, pretty mean of you, Scott.
Yeah, well, I'm a mean guy.
Yeah, well, I know, I was thinking it would be bad for the collateral damage on the ground and everything, but ultimately, you know, you've got to break a few eggs.
You know how it is.
It's the neocon philosophy.
All right, so let's talk about central banking and war.
This is one of the reasons why the libertarian message is getting out, obviously, is because Ron Paul, who's as good a libertarian as anybody could find at luerockwell.com, actually has a seat in the House of Representatives and gets to go on TV all day long.
And all he talks about is central banking and war.
Lew, what's the big deal?
Well, you know, this is, in fact, nothing new.
I mean, I've known Ron since the middle 1970s, and while over the years he's put more emphasis on foreign policy, that's always been his big emphasis, besides central banking and economics.
So he's always understood, as all the great classical liberals and libertarians throughout history have understood, that war is the worst aspect of the government.
I mean, it's the most destructive, the most murderous, the most expensive thing government does, and it gives them also the excuse, unlike everything else they do, of suppressing dissent, of making anybody who differs with them into some kind of hate criminal, and of giving them an excuse to put you in jail eventually if you say things they don't like, if you're guilty of sedition or defeatism or any of these other made-up crimes that the government likes to accuse people of.
So this has always been an emphasis of Ron.
He's always emphasized this.
And because of his presidential run and because of the work that he's done for so long and all our great heroes and intellectuals have done for so long, Rothbard and the others, he is getting a hearing.
And as Justin Raimondo, who has a great column today on NAWar.com, points out, Americans are rightly terrified about the economy.
We get the propaganda, of course, from the government of everything's getting better every day and every way we're getting better and better.
No regular American feels that.
We all know that there's very serious economic troubles in this country, that things are getting worse.
They may be living it up on Wall Street and in D.C. and the other precincts of the empire, but among regular people, the regular taxpayers, we know that we're being hurt and we're going to be hurt even more.
So people look around for a solution.
And when they hear Ron Paul, either in person or they hear him on television or on the radio, they read what he has to say.
When he says, you know, we have to cut, everybody knows we have to cut.
The media may not say that.
Obama may not say that.
Boehner and the rest of the Republicans may not say that.
But people know it.
And Ron is saying we have to cut the empire.
And it's a brilliant political thing, too, because he's exactly right.
No regular American gets any benefit out of just the reverse, of course, nor cares about whether the U.S. has got a gigantic marine base, to take one of 730 examples, in Okinawa.
It's a very controversial thing right now where the Japanese would like to get this base out of Okinawa and the U.S. wants to simply move the base.
And there are 50,000 marines there, plus dependents and so forth.
Why is that?
Why, after all these years, after World War II, is the U.S. still militarily occupying Japan and especially Okinawa, bringing crime and fleas, and you only have to look at any American military base and see what's around it?
No regular people want to be around such a thing.
So Americans, when they think about it, they think, well, I'd much rather cut something like the military base in Okinawa even though they should be wanting to cut all the spending here at home.
It's just much easier, and it would be actually the best thing, the best cutting that could take place.
Obviously, domestic spending, welfare spending, corporate welfare, all of the horrible things they do, bailing out Wall Street and the banks and all that, is unbelievably evil and corrupt.
But every American, just like every American was opposed to the bank bailouts except people connected to the regime, no regular American cares about the empire.
When it comes right down to it, when it's their livelihood, their family's livelihood, their economic future, whether they're even going to have a job or food on the table, they will all say, bring the troops home.
So finally, people are listening to Ron Paul, and this is resonating, and of course we know his work against the Fed and for honest money and for why deficits are wrong and his mainstreaming of Austrian economics and Austrian business cycle theory has just been, it's a dream come true for all of us.
But his anti-war position, his anti-imperialism position, is so powerful, and Justin points out, these are issues that are considered too crazy except for people like you and me, Scott, who ever discussed that nobody would ever agree with us, just nuts, that's crazy, wacko, those sorts of criticisms, there's no arguments ever made, it's just politically incorrect, don't mention it.
So it's a great moment in American history.
They have wrecked our economy, we haven't begun to see, by the way, the bad effects of what they've done to us, but in this kind of a crisis situation, good change can come about, and so I think that the government's crazy, they'd like to all put us in the gulag and that sort of thing, and what Obama said yesterday, that horrible that people were complaining about paying taxes, they should be grateful to him.
Now I thought that was funny, like the taxes are going to him personally, maybe they are going to him personally, who knows, that's a maniacal, messianic kind of a comment to make, but who doubts that these people go into government for the most part because they're power mad, they don't want to rule other people, so that's the way they think, but regular Americans, there's a real, this is what Murray Rothbard dreamed of all his life, this kind of populist resistance, the good aspects of the Tea Parties, there's just a lot of anger in this country, and we hear this demonized all the time of course, don't be angry, love the government, but people are angry, they should be angry, because as Murray said, as important as it is for us as libertarians to explain for example economic error to somebody, or why foreign policy, why wars and other foreign policy episodes are damaging to our civil liberties and to our economy and so forth, it's also important to put out to people, you're being ripped off, people are ripping you off through their wars, through their inflation, through their bailouts and all the rest, people are angry, and real change can happen, now this is of course not exactly anything that's necessarily in the cards, we have to make it happen, we have to educate people, we have to stir up people, and we have to do everything possible to bug the media, if they're getting upset, you know good things are happening.
Right yeah, well and they are certainly upset, it's almost funny to watch, except for the scary part, well anyway, here I'm going to make up a quote, that I'm sure you've heard a million times, I'm making it up as a quote, of something somebody told you, but the same thing that they've told me, which is that, wow I was a young republican warmonger, until Ron Paul ran for president, and then I realized, oh yeah, that old guy is right about all this, and it seems to me, it seemed to me then, even in 2007, the first thing I knew, when I read on your blog, that he was running for president, was that, this is the permission slip, to conservatives, that they've been waiting for, but didn't know they had, I guess if they read, the American conservative magazine, they'd have known they were all right, or whatever, but the common conception was, you got to be Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, to be anti-war, and I'm just not like them, that's what a lot of people thought, and Ron Paul said, oh yeah, well I'm a republican from Texas, and I say, you know, not only do I prefer peace, but we absolutely must have peace right now, how do you like that, and they said, oh good, so that means I can say that too, and I can still be a Christian, and a patriot, and a republican, and be a peacenik, and not have to be Michael Moore, and it seems like, that's really where he's made so much progress, and as Justin points out in that article, no matter what they ask him, well what are we going to do about social security Ron, well we've got to end the empire, and the first thing we've got to do, is get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, that'll fix your social security, you know, it seems like, maybe there really is opportunity, for the libertarians to lead a left right coalition, to really end the war, because you know, this is to me, Lou, I'm sorry to just go on and on here, but to me, the most important thing, is stopping the war, you know, having all of my libertarian agenda, in the future, history of humanity, and whatever, great, but right now, the most important thing, is America's relationship, with the other countries in the world, particularly the ones we're occupying, and the absolute destruction, of whatever traditions of liberty, we have left in this country, in the name of that war, and it seems like, you know, we can't just get all conservatives and liberals, to become libertarians, but we can lead them, and form a new coalition, as Ron mentioned on Larry King, last week, he used that term, the new realignment, and get the progressive left, and the paleo right, led by the Lou Rockwell's of the world, to really, put an end to this empire, post haste, before the collapse, just because it's the right thing to do.
You know, Ron has such an amazing, facility for explaining things, in a way that just pierces, people and makes them think, I mean, when you hear the typical, guy in office talking, you turn it off, right, even if somebody, you really don't mind, you can't listen to him too long, because it's all balderdash, but with Ron Paul, he's got that facility, I mean, I'm just on a slightly different topic, I remember him talking about, at one point, about the bank bailout, and he said, I'm not for the feds, ever printing money, I'm not for the federal government, spending, you know, all this deficit spending, but he said, if they had to spend that amount of money, you know, what they could have done, if they were concerned about, actually stimulating the economy, was to abolish the federal income tax, for a year, get rid of every single, American's income tax, well, you know, that's the kind of thing, that somebody's thinking about, wait a minute, you mean, I could have, paid no income taxes, or a JP Morgan and company, Goldman Sachs, could have gotten richer, that's not a difficult, that's not a difficult choice to make, so even if people, aren't quite ready, to come along with us, on what's wrong, with the social security system, which of course, has been a horrible program, economically, extremely damaging, from the very beginning, when Ron says, look, social security, is going to have to be cut, but, we don't have to do that, right this minute, it's morally, and economically, and it's important, in every other sense, to stop the wars, and of course, this is why, your anti-war radio, was important, you've always been, a leader on this, and it's, this is the important issue, as Rothbard always said, this is always the key issue, and conservatives, quote Joe Sober, and he said, conservatives, are opposed to all, big government programs, unless they're killing people, but that wasn't always true, and, until Bill Buckley, came out of the CIA, with money from who knows where, and started National Review Magazine, and set out to purge, the, if we call it, the conservative movement, it wasn't called that in those days, but, the right wing, or whatever, purging of any anti-war sentiment, purging any leaders, of the anti-war movement, intellectual leaders, John T. Flynn, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and many, and many, and many more, than the conservatives, and the black, and the gay, and the polynesians, gave them money too, propaganda eyes for the warfare state, and this is what the C.I.
A.'s, a, you know, some people, seem to believe the C.I.
A.when they say they weren't involved in domestic affairs, although, it, it's legal for them to be involved in domestic affairs.now they're, of course, openly involved with domestic affairs.
Well that's funny too, because it's the official history that everybody knows, that the C.I.
A. funded the so called moderate Left, throughout Europe, all through the Cold War, to keep them anti-communism, and keep them in nato, and that kind of thing.
So why would anybody think that they do any different with the Right Wing?
Make sure and keep them pro-war, and pro-banker.
But we're not supposed to have any bad thoughts about the C.I.
A.
Why, Scott, they're protecting our country from terrorist attacks, you know that.
Oh man, am I in trouble, if I'm not supposed to have bad thoughts about the C.I.
A.
Boy, oh boy.
Just the bad thoughts that former C.I.
A. agents say on this show, about the C.I.
A., could, boy, cause misery.
Well it's an organization, if we just want to put it as a thumbnail sketch, that engages in murder, theft, lying, and, you know, meddling in other people's lives overseas, meddling in people's lives here, framing people, framing the innocent, torturing people.
It's, of course, a criminal gang.
The whole government is a criminal gang, as Rothbard said, and anybody who's not a libertarian, if they want to understand how we think about the government, it's a criminal gang.
It's a gang of thieves, and if you understand that we think that, then you'll understand really everything from libertarianism follows from that.
So we, the C.I.
A. is an openly, you know, it's like the, I don't know, it's the button man squad of the criminal gang.
So yeah, it's a particularly bad bunch, and the idea that we're supposed to love them, and have their former leaders be our presidents, as in the case of George H.W. Bush, and, or Bill Buckley, and there were many of the conservative intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s, who came out of the C.I.
A., and we're supposed to think this is a happenstance, though, of course, it was a deliberate, very, very successful domestic propaganda effort that hampered and wrecked for a number of times the right-wing anti-war movement.
But it's all back, and you're exactly right.
Ron Paul makes conservatives realize you don't have to be for murdering people who look different from us, or have a different religion, or for the sole reason that they don't want to obey Obama, or Bush, or whoever is the dictator at the moment.
And this is, of course, the U.S. government engages in murder, mass murder, just because people wear government suits when they're murdering people doesn't change the nature of the act.
It's still murder.
Just like people may be wearing government suits when they steal your money, it's still theft.
So, this is the key issue, the most important issue.
It's always been, ever since Buckley, the most difficult issue, but, as you say, it's all changed.
Ron Paul has changed it.
And I hear, like you do, from, I can't count how many people of all ages, young people especially, but people of all ages, about how they were sort of unthinking neocons until they heard Ron Paul.
And typically they'll say, you know, when I first heard him, I thought, well, that's just nuts.
But then they say, well, you know, I began to think about what he said, and I thought, well, wait a minute, that makes sense.
So that's, Ron Paul has that effect.
Yeah, no question about that.
Have you ever had anybody rethink something?
Well, maybe some people at AIPAC realized, wow, I could vote Democrat or something.
So, Ron is just, he's an amazing man.
He keeps getting better.
And he's always been a good speaker, but he gets to be a better and better speaker.
He's, just can explain things so well.
Lou, in a poll, he was 1% away from the sitting president.
Yeah, quite something.
And, of course, everybody's very upset about that, or they don't mention it.
I mean, I've noticed in the last day or two, when the political shows talk about who's doing what in the polls, and so forth, he's the unmentionable.
But that doesn't matter, because nobody who's paying attention to Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann, and believing them as a potential Ron Paul voter anyway, and the potential Ron Paul voters, either are watching these people like I do and hating their guts, or they're paying no attention to them.
Either is fine.
But, Ron is winning converts, day by day, all over this country, all over this world.
I was just, came back from a trip to Brazil, to celebrate the founding of the new Mises Institute in Brazil.
And they were very nice to invite me and other people from the U.S. Mises Institute down there.
But I can't tell you how many young people said, because they hoped they were going to get Ron Paul, he wasn't able to make the trip.
And people kept saying to me, you know, he could get a respectable number of votes running for president of Brazil.
And you know, it sounds like a joke, but it's not a joke.
All over this world, not only all over this country, Ron appeals to people.
I mean, he's like the, he shows people all over this world that we're not all ugly Americans.
That we're not all killers.
That we're not all thieves.
We don't want to dominate their lives.
We're not interested in occupying their countries, blowing up their homes, and stealing their money, and doing all the rest of the things the empire does.
Ron Paul represents the good America, the real America.
And he does, he's like an intern, you know, it's a cliche, but he really is an international ambassador for peace and goodwill, even without going to these countries.
Everybody watches him on YouTube.
They pay attention to what he writes.
It's quite extraordinary.
I don't know of any, I've never seen anything like this in my life.
Anybody who had that kind of impact for good, all around the world.
Yeah, it really is something else.
And it's really, you know, more so for you than me, but I've been following him since he went back to Congress in 97.
And still I have this whole thing where we used to say, did you know that there's this one good congressman?
And he was always this underground phenomenon and all this stuff.
But now everybody knows him.
And I see reporters who I've never seen before say, well, Ron Paul is saying this and that, like he often does.
And I'm thinking, wow, this guy has heard Ron Paul often.
And, you know, that's progress right there.
Cause I know that, you know, I don't have to even worry at all.
I know that whatever it was that he heard Ron Paul was saying was, you know, pretty much exactly what I would have had him say.
But now we got to wrap this up in the last few minutes here, Lou, getting back to central banking, because, well, I'll, I'll, I'll make it a question that makes sense here.
Ron Paul on TV say that inflation was a hidden tax and that that had something to do with all this imperialism.
Lou, what in the hell was he talking about?
Well, you know, Scott, if we didn't have central banking, they never would have been able to be world wars in the last century.
They never would have been able to be a cold war.
They couldn't run the wars they're doing right now because there's no way that Americans or any other people for that matter would put up with direct taxes sufficient to fund the warfare state, which is far bigger than they admitted to being.
So the way they do it, they do it through the hidden tax of printing money.
And so the federal reserve is the bloodiest.
I mean, it's, it might as well be an adjunct of the Pentagon.
I might as well just make it the, the sixth side of the Pentagon, because it is absolutely essential to the warfare state.
And it's the fact that when Bush, for example, or now Obama asked for another, you know, quadrillion dollars for it to murder more people in Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Iran or wherever they're going to do it.
There's no thought about, nobody worries about an appropriation.
Nobody worries about actually having to either borrow the money or, or tax the money they just printed.
But that's also something that's coming to an end because economic laws can't be repealed and caught in the, the things the federal government is doing have effect.
So when they borrow as much as they have, they inflate more than, you know, like buy more Germany, even though we're not seeing the effects of it yet fully.
And of course, already you're taxing us.
They're planning to introduce a VAT tax and then tax us even more.
But the, the whole government, the whole regime is in big economic trouble.
They, of course, have put us in economic trouble, but Ron Paul, I mean, I've been interested in the fed for decades and I never could get anybody else interested.
Ron Paul in his campaign got millions of people in this country and all over the world to think, Hey, wait a minute, here's this organization.
It's not just a name on the bill in my pocket.
It's ripping me off.
It's ripping me off, lowering my standard of living so that the merchants of death and the merchants of, of a fraud on wall street and, and in the banking industry can get rich at my expense.
He made people interested.
He explained how it causes the business cycle.
Why things like our present recession, depression, are they exactly the fault of the federal reserve?
And again, why we could not have the wars, the killing, the murders, the oppression, the corpses piled mountain high, as they have been ever since central banking was introduced in the U S in 1913.
Well, just to bring that right to the ground level of people, just remember back how it was in 2002 and 2003, they promised this Iraq war specifically was going to be free, that whatever's, you know, slight costs, a couple of few tens of billions maybe would be picked up by the Iraqi oil.
And you get a stimulus check in the mail and a tax cut.
And so come on, we're going to war and they could never have done it.
If they said, all right, this is going to cost 3 trillion bucks.
Everybody, you just got bumped up to tax brackets.
How do you like that?
They could, they could have never done it.
It's as simple as that.
No, and there's something that historians talk about is war fatigue.
And what they mean is, uh, wars have typically stopped in history because the taxpayers finally just had it.
However, we don't have that.
We haven't had that check in this country because of central banking.
Uh, so it's Ron Paul.
It's even, it's the cause of peace as well as the cause of economic prosperity because of justice and the cause of, of just, um, our standards of living and our children's standards of living to get rid of the Fed, to target the Fed, to educate people about the Fed.
And that's what we've done in attacking central banking and attacking the empire, the two most important things.
And what a great moment it is to be alive as these start to resonate with the American people.
Right on everybody.
That is Lou Rockwell.
He's the president of the Mises Institute, the author of the left, the right, and the state and proprietor of lourockwell.com.
That's L E W rockwell.com.
Thanks very much, Lou.
Thank you,