06/15/15 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

Yeah, check it out, y'all want to win a free vacation to the jungles of Costa Rica this summer and help support the Scott Horton Show?
You can.
Joshua Hughes, peace activist and permaculturalist, runs Verde Energia Pacifica, an intentional community in the mountains of Llanes de Periscal, Costa Rica, and he's offered a raffle off a week's stay to listeners of this show.
Airfare is on you, but transportation to and from the airport, as well as a seven-day stay for you and a guest in your own private house with three meals a day is covered.
You can learn and practice some skills, or just go for a swim in the river, pool, or waterfall, walk jungle trails, enjoy the views, do yoga or dance in the studio, make art, play music, check out a local soccer game, or simply relax in a hammock by the river and read.
Raffle tickets are just $50.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash raffle for details, and anyone who enters will get half off on any future stay down there. scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Alright guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Hey, I got Jim Bovard on the line.
He wrote a lot of books.
The latest one is called Public Policy Hooligan.
He is that.
Go look at his Wikipedia page.
I think it's on his website jimbovard.com somewhere too, and you can find the collection of quotes from all the national government bureaucrats that have denounced Jim's very existence.
How dare he tell the people the truth about how evil and corrupt and oppressive and in defiance of their legitimate authority, so-called legitimate authority, the US government is.
What a badge of honor.
I don't know of anyone who could who could brag with a CV of such distinction.
Also, hey, read his book.
Well, there's a lot of them, but my very favorite one is Attention Deficit Democracy, and well, read it and it'll make your brain more good.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Jim?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
So today, am I right, it's the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta?
Absolutely.
It's a good reason to drink beer.
That sounds good to me.
I know you're always looking for an excuse.
Found one here, nice and easy.
Not yet, but you know, I got to wait till the show's over.
Yeah, well, it's 1.30, man.
Come on, wait for your lunch to go down.
It's past 5 o'clock in England where the, you know, where it was actually signed.
But who am I to quibble?
Hey, you know what?
We got a break coming up in just a few minutes.
You can run to the fridge.
Yeah, sit here and do a couple of shots of schnapps.
All right, so who cares about some stupid old piece of paper from back when in the first place?
Please tell me.
Well, it's absolutely appropriate to make a major celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.
It was a landmark agreement that put a limit on the king's power.
Many people have criticized it because it wasn't perfect.
It wasn't nearly as good as the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
It was not as good as the petitioner right that the English Parliament compelled the king to sign, I believe, in 1628 or so.
And it was not as good as later bills.
But it was a landmark in English history, which established the principle that the king could not violate, could not do certain things without, could not go beyond a certain point without violating the rights of the barons, and in many cases, the rights of the people.
And that if he did that, that he had forfeited his right to power.
And that is the most important principle.
It's not so much the actual details.
There were there were there were lots of details are completely arcane.
There were some principles in there that are still relevant.
But but the important thing was that this was a the important thing was that the barons compelled the king to formally accept a limit on his power.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole deal that they had just established the right for them to tell him so that power flowed somehow from not really the bottom.
In this case, we're talking about a bunch of nobles.
But relatively speaking to the divine right, they're basically saying, no, it's the people who are sovereign, not you.
Well, yeah.
And getting away with it.
Right.
Or not.
Well, the yeah, there were a number of provisions in Magna Carta, which put which which limited the king's power, that the government's power over folks who were average citizens.
And those are and some of those principles got established and carried on forward.
There were certainly a lot of benefits for the barons as well.
But the thing that was important was it established the idea that the king could not go take his power beyond a certain point without forfeiting his right to reign over other people.
Yeah.
And then so everybody lived happily ever after that, huh?
Well, now that I was on a David Hume kick lately and then reading his, I guess, six volume history of England lately, and I was fascinated by a passage in there that ever that I've not seen anybody focused on.
But what happened just after the the king signed Magna Carta, there was a brief lull.
And then then the king brought in a bunch of foreign mercenaries and tried to butcher the barons who had written the Magna Carta.
And so there was huge fights across England.
There was there was lots of devastation.
The king and his mercenaries were in burning down things, villages, houses, estates, manors, this horrendous devastation.
And so there was civil war, basically.
And and there was a role that the that Pope Innocent, the head of the Catholic Church at that point, had in this because the the because the pope issued a bull which canceled Magna Carta and absolved King John of any obligation to respect either Magna Carta or the rights of the barons or the English people.
Yeah.
Wow.
And so what was the casualty rate of the guys who had actually forced him to sign there?
You know, the John Hancocks of the situation?
That's an excellent question.
I've not been able to get that to find an answer to that.
Sounds pretty bad, though, huh?
Well, you know, he was certainly trying to butcher the people who wrote the Magna Carta.
And there was a lot of devastation that King John and his mercenaries did.
There was a French intervention to try to counterbalance him.
There was all kinds of stuff going back and forth.
And it was very lucky for the English people that the king died not too long after he had double crossed them his signature on Magna Carta.
But the The New York Times says he died of dysentery shortly after that.
So at least.
Well, yeah, you know, it was dysentery right in the middle of a war campaign.
I mean, he was you know, he was struggling.
He was fighting.
He was racing here and there.
I mean, it wasn't like he was it wasn't like he was staying home watching soap operas.
I mean, there was an ongoing civil war that was provoked by his total betrayal of Magna Carta.
So chewing on this, the a lot of folks have criticized Magna Carta for not being including this out the other.
But from my perspective, the real lesson is that solemn pledges do not make tyrants trustworthy.
King John had been a horrendous tyrant.
That's why the English barons tried to put limits on his power.
But even though he signed the contract, as soon as he signed it, he basically stabbed the people in the back.
He had the Pope's help.
And there was all kinds of horrendous damage.
And there's a lessons for this now because there are a lot of people who think that think the fact that the American president takes an oath of office to uphold and faithfully defend the Constitution means that it's safe to trust the American president with almost boundless power.
But it's been a very long time since any president paid a price for crampling the law.
And it's hard to think of any president who's really gotten hammered for violating the Constitution.
If you see what's happened with Obama and George W. Bush, they basically just laughed all the way to reelection.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
Well, you know, Neil Postman has a thing in his book Technopoly.
And I guess he wrote this in his other books, too, where he talks about how society is changing so rapidly at the hands of the state and at the hands of rapidly developing technologies.
That's just changing everything.
And that when it comes to surveilling people, for example, really the only thing holding the state at bay from implementing a kind of complete totalitarianism, you know, Orwellian type thing is just the old law just left over from the old piece of parchment when the people and the government's power were much more equal than they are today.
And that, you know, just a few decisions, a few laws here and a few court decisions there, and that stuff can be gone and gone forever.
And it seems like we're seeing that now.
I'm reminded of Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, who said in the Congress when they were passing the Military Commissions Act in 2000 and was it 2006?
Yeah, yeah.
The first in 2006, says this cancels Magna Carta going all the way back to running me.
And then he voted for it.
You know, Senator Specter was he was a paradox.
There was some great stuff he did.
He's someone who showed more courage than anybody else in the U.S. Senate in digging into Ruby Ridge on the horrendous abuses by the Marshals Service and the FBI and the federal cover up there.
But on civil liberties, he would say some good things and then do some very bad things.
And good old Mr. Magic Bullet going back to the JFK fascination.
He was he was one of the biggest, one of the main attorneys, I think, on the Warren Commission cover up.
You don't think that bullet was magic?
Come on.
Well, hey, you know, I'm not from Texas like you, so I wouldn't know.
Yeah, I don't know either.
All right.
Well, more about the great charter and its successors and our current state of affairs in just a minute.
Hey, all Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause or campaign, and you need stickers to help promote, check out the bumper sticker dot com at the bumper sticker dot com.
They digitally print with solvent ink.
So you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold the bumper sticker dot com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it.
There are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me to let the bumper sticker dot com help you get the word out.
That's the bumper sticker dot com at the bumper sticker dot com.
And.
All right, welcome back to the show, I'm Scott, I'm talking with Jim Bovard, he wrote a whole bunch of books, terrorism and tyranny, the Bush betrayal.
Attention, deficit, democracy and public policy, Hooligan is the memoir, his latest the Web site is Jim Bovard dot com, you can find all this great stuff there.
And oh, he ain't a partisan either.
Back in the 90s, it was all freedom and chains and feeling your pain.
And Bill Clinton is the worst person in the whole wide world.
And his administration, too, is full of other people who are just as bad as him.
That was actually the title of one of them.
So go check out that list there at Amazon dot com.
James Bovard's many, many great books.
OK, so, man, I want to get to the intellectual gravy train thing here about the think tanks in just a minute, because that's really cool.
But we're talking about the Magna Carta and all of that.
And one of the things that the New York Times article about it today pointed out was that even though it was actually really ignored, as you're saying, was brutally suppressed and betrayed and disregarded off the bat.
It was apparently ignored for many centuries after that, too, but then really became popular again with the American founding and its best parts quoted and that kind of thing.
And just basically for to claim ancient tradition or relatively ancient tradition for the premise, the revolutionary premise that never mind individuals, but at least the people are the ones who are sovereign.
And maybe the king has a divine right.
But we all have the same divine right to.
And so you you can only you know, like the Declaration of Independence says that a prince who is thus marked with every act that defines a tyrant has then forfeited is no longer fit to be ruler of a free people.
Right.
Like if he respected their rights before that, it would have been OK.
They're implying right.
I would disagree hardly with the New York Times analysis.
I mean, I've been as I might have mentioned, I've been reading through the six volumes of Hume's History of England.
And this is a book that Friedrich Hayek very highly recommended because it's a history of how English development, how liberty slowly grew in the English world.
And again and again, after the early 1200s, English monarchs are compelled to pledge that they will honor the Magna Carta.
They often broke the pledge.
But it the but this is a compact, a political compact that set a moral standard and a philosophical standard by which the subsequent monarchs could be judged.
And simply because the monarchs often violated it does not mean that it was, you know, no good.
I mean, it was the same as some parts of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. history.
I mean, they were often trampled, but they set a moral and intellectual standard which people could use to judge and often condemn the government.
And it was the same with Magna Carta.
They were, you know, going through the English history, the kings of 1300s and 1400s.
Yeah, there were lots of tyrants.
But again, and again, the members of the members of Parliament as the House of Commons slowly came to be in place and slowly evolved and acquired more power century by century.
This, this is something which which the members of the Parliament would invoke to say, okay, the king has violated our rights because in 1215, it was established that and much of the Magna Carta was, you know, written as if it was a recognition of pre-existing rights, the same same as our Bill of Rights.
I mean, politicians like Janet Reno, were famous for talking about their freedoms that the federal government gave the American people.
But if you look at the history of the 1780s and 1790s, the federal government was only allowed to come into place because the politicians promised to, in the Bill of Rights, to recognize and respect the pre-existing rights.
So there are all kinds of benefits that the Magna Carta has had over the subsequent 800 years.
It certainly wasn't perfect.
There were flaws, it was probably trampled more often than it was respected.
But by setting a standard, even if it wasn't a gold standard, it gave people footing in which to judge and often condemn the government and the monarchs.
Well, as usual, I'd have been better off if I hadn't read the New York Times version at all.
But actually, no, I'm glad I did.
I'm glad I had a chance to get that wrong.
So as to provoke you to explain the real truth behind that, that no, it really did provoke.
Do I?
It was.
No, no, I don't mean in a bad way.
It's fine.
Go ahead, Scott.
Yeah.
No, I don't mean in a bad way, but just so that you could answer that as a response.
Like, no, really, the the kings were, you know, had to at least pay lip service to them pretty much from then on.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, and there were some there were some kings whose power was somewhat limited by that.
Some were pretty much able to completely ignore it.
But it was there.
It was there in the background and it could be invoked.
And, you know, it gave a footing for folks who wanted to put a leash on the king's power when the king went too far.
Well, and I like what you say about the Bill of Rights, too, because, you know, they're talking about doing a Bill of Rights in England now.
And that sounds like, you know, the the not good enough version to me, the one where the her holiness, her highness, the queen recognizes that you have this much liberty in a King John to the nobles fashion, which, like you're saying, is a great precedent for 800 years ago.
But it doesn't measure up to the standard of the United States, where we start with the premise of the Declaration of Independence and we only get to the Bill of Rights later.
And it's titled it's a list of not of rights, but of declaratory and restrictive clauses, not against the people, but by free people against the government, that you may not violate our right to choose our own church or not, or to speak freely, to have a free press, to own guns, to be secure in our houses.
And that's the way the language is all phrased, as you say, that these are restrictions against them by us.
But we started out free in the first place.
And that was, of course, the disingenuous, I assume, argument of Hamilton that we didn't even need a Bill of Rights because the government was so limited.
It only had the powers that were expressly written into the Constitution.
And the people were sovereign beyond that.
It couldn't do anything that they wouldn't let it.
Yeah, it's one more reason not to trust an intellectual who really wanted a monarch.
Yeah.
And by the way, you think he was just lying about that, that he didn't want a Bill of Rights to get in the way?
Or that was a sincere argument on his behalf at all?
It's hard to tell.
I mean, there's, I mean, there's a lot of good reasons that distrust Hamilton.
He was good on some things.
He was a brave soldier in the Revolutionary War.
And there were some things he had good sense and good judgment on.
And certainly James Madison is someone who I have a lot of respect for with some asterisks.
But so it's, it's really hard to know who was being honest and sincere back then.
But it's also hard not to like Patrick Henry, who had such a hearty disdain, and he was the leader of the Anti-Federalists.
So I mean, he was, I mean, he was a gold standard back then for many things.
Yeah.
I smell a rat, I think was a quote of his.
Hey, this isn't gonna work out.
Well, I mean, it's always good when you're around politicians to smell a rat.
Yeah.
Then again, I think his real worry was that the national government was going to steal all the slaves away and set them free, right?
I don't, you know, I wouldn't say that, you know, I don't know that much about Patrick Henry's personal history, but he's someone who took great risks, and put himself in grave peril for the things he said, and that he did from the early mid 1770s onwards.
Yeah.
All right.
And then so now the think tanks, at least, tell us about this piece of what it's all about.
And we'll see, you know, we still got a couple of minutes for some details here.
Okay, there was a story that the I wrote for the Mises Institute, they have a new Austrian, an Austrian newsletter on Austrian economics.
And this is a piece that came out that was posted online last week by them.
And the the title is the is the Washington intellectual gravy train.
And it talks about how the the culture of Washington, that a lot of the intellectuals have been are put on a pedestal, but a lot of them have sold out.
And they've been, and they've basically gotten very affluent, thanks to the bad advice they've given, that's helped sanctify big government.
And it's, it's, there's a fundamental change in the whole whole dynamic.
Because politicians have captured so much power, that it's become a lot more profitable for intellectuals to serve them as, you know, basically pimps, pimps for power.
And folks, and it's unfortunate that so many folks still think of, you know, folks, well, folks who work as government consultants, like, like Gruber, the the guy who was lying in favor of Obamacare and helped push that into law, then afterwards said that it had it was necessary because of or justified because voters were kind of stupid, that Obama was justified in misleading them.
The same thing happens in area after area of public policy.
It's been especially prevalent for foreign policy, and some of the military policy, you have these think tanks have gotten very, very rich from shilling for foreign interventions that have worked out disastrously for America and the world.
Yeah, well, and you know, Bill Kristol and his allies have just mastered the effect of creating these think tanks that are usually nothing but a piece of paper in a desk drawer somewhere.
He's got the same 30 or 40 neocons run three dozen of these damn things.
And they all agree, man, we got to bomb Iran.
Yeah, and it's just man, they dominate even though we're still talking actually only about a couple of dozen guys.
Well, it certainly it certainly makes for an easy consensus.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's amazing.
You know, I guess I couldn't recommend the same tactics for libertarians to all go move to DC and become like that or something.
But I don't know.
No solution to that, though, because they're so successful at creating that echo chamber, Jim.
Well, part part of the solution is for people, people to become more skeptical of intellectuals who are close to politicians, because the closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the bigger weasels they usually become.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you go to look at any of these, like A.I. or any of the rest of these so called conservative and neoconservative think tanks, they're all bankrolled by the military industrial complex, right?
I don't know that all of them are.
There are some there are some decent folks at A.I. that have done some good work, but they've also you know, I think that they've given shelter to some of the biggest advocates of torture and wars and stuff like that.
So that's the general.
Yep.
Yep.
But the same is true of many D.C. think tanks.
Yeah.
I wonder if there's a way to trick Northrop Grumman into giving me a lot of money to be an anti-imperialist.
But I guess probably not.
Well, you know, if you think of a good name for a think tank.
I'll have to think about that.
I could just call it Think Tank.
I could call it Think Tank.
And then it'll be all about promoting the use of tanks.
That's how I'll sell it to them.
No, no, no, no.
The Austin Institute for Foreign Intervention.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Who's the enemy?
Which is bombing?
We'll figure out who we're bombing on our way there.
Well, there you go.
Bomb first and ask questions later.
Well, it's worked for Obama.
Yeah, it has.
Really?
Well, he's the he's the peacenik around here.
Everybody knows that.
Well, he's still popular with a lot of folks, though.
It's one more damn mystery.
Yep.
All right, man.
Well, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Jim.
Always good to talk to you.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
All right.
See you.
All right, John, that's the show.
Jim Bovar, Jim Bovar dot com.
And check out his book, Public Policy Hooligan.
It's really fun, man.
Breaking in there and stealing documents and writing stories and getting in trouble.
I wish I was a journalist.
But now, hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or peacenik live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world.
Iran, central banking, political realignment and well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out Scott Horton dot org slash speeches for some examples and email me Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more information.
See you there.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
You're like me.
You need coffee.
Lots of it.
You probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.