Sheldon Richman, senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, discusses the unsustainable expense of US empire, the ‘political transaction costs‘ that shield government from scrutiny and protest, lack of emphasis on foreign policy at the Freedom Fest 2010 conference and why defense spending is the trillion pound gorilla in the (budget deficit) room.
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Sheldon Richman, he is the editor of The Freeman, he keeps the blog free association, and you can read his latest article at The Freeman Online dot org.
Can America afford an empire?
Too late to heed Madison's warning?
Welcome to the show, Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, great to be back with you.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today.
Is it too late to heed Madison's warning?
It kind of seems like it's 2010 already.
Yeah, you know, I don't know if that was a rhetorical question or not, I haven't figured it out myself yet, but I guess just to ask it is to at least get people wondering.
Is it too late to pull all this back?
As you point out day after day, and your guests like to point out, there are a lot of interests that are deeply entrenched who don't want to see it change, so that's who we're going up against.
Yeah.
Tough job, but we're going to do it.
Yeah, well, you know, I think I read my favorite Gary North article of all the other day at LewRockwell.com where he said, you know, meet the evil secret conspiracy that controls America.
It's the American people who insist that things remain this way.
Yeah, I think there's some public choice considerations there.
You know, people are busy with their daily lives, making a living, raising their kids, trying to get them to schools and stuff like that, and those are the things that their efforts really can have some impact on, right?
They can really make some change in those little micro things.
But they seem to sense that in the big things, you know, what can they do?
If they have one vote, if they go outside and shout, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, you know, what does that do besides maybe make them feel a little bit better for a moment?
So they naturally turn to those micro things and leave those big questions alone because they feel powerless.
But part of it, I think, has to do with that, which then makes them, right, complicit in all this because they don't feel they can do anything about it.
Well, and it seems like, to a great degree, when they do care about it or know about it, they only know enough to be for everything that's wrong.
Well, that's right.
They're easily scared.
I mean, Mencken pointed out that the key to politics was to keep people scared with hobgoblins, real and imagined, so that they'll rally around the government and the politicians and look for safety in them.
And then people just, I guess, feel, how am I supposed to know what's going on?
There's stuff they won't, you know, they don't even tell me about.
So how can I possibly make a decision about this?
And it takes, I think, it takes a rare person to exercise that skepticism that some of us have and say, wait a second, I'm not buying it.
Show me some evidence.
Most people don't want to do that.
Again, there's every incentive not to think about it.
Charlotte White did a great book a few years ago.
You probably should interview her.
She was actually a student, in some senses, of Robert Higgs, a good friend of yours.
She wrote a book called Dependent on D.C. a few years back, which is a very good book.
And in that, she shows how government is able to increase what she calls the political transaction cost.
And in the economics of transaction costs, those are the expenses you undergo to, you know, find a person who you want to trade with and oversee the transaction, those are little extra costs that you don't incur when you do something yourself.
She says the same thing occurs in politics.
And the transaction cost would be keeping government doing only the few number of things that, you know, most people would want them to do, and monitoring the government, making sure that's all it's doing, and then protesting somehow if the government goes beyond all that.
Well, that's all very costly.
First of all, it's been costly intrinsically, because, like I said, people are just too busy with their own lives.
But the government has ways of, myriad ways of making it even more costly.
So every act of secrecy is an act of increasing the transaction cost.
It means we don't know what the government's doing.
How can we protest if we don't even know what it's doing?
Stuff like that.
So she goes through examples, historical examples, of how government makes it more expensive for us to, number one, know what it's doing, and number two, for us to do something about it, even if we figure out what it's doing.
Right.
Well, and most of us can't think of anything to do except write articles and do a little power radio show or something.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, there's a term that came out of a guy I'm not a great admirer of, Herbert Marcuse, who was a Marxist scholar.
But the term that, when I used to hear it in my college days, thought was nonsense.
But now I think it's not nonsense.
And the phrase is repressive tolerance.
You know, we might wonder, we think back to World War I, and Eugene Debs went to prison, right?
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving an anti-war speech or an anti-draft speech.
Well, luckily, he was freed, I guess, by Warren Harding.
These days, no one's getting put into jail, I guess, unless I haven't heard about it.
I would hear about it on your show, I guess, just for speaking out.
All right?
I mean, look, you're doing it every day, and you have guests on who are doing it every day, and anti-war.com is constantly posting articles that are critical of war.
So far, the government's not cracking down on that.
I think the reason is, if it lets all this stuff be aired, it's kind of like letting steam escape, you know, like a valve to let steam out, so the thing won't blow up.
In other words, if they tried to shut us all up, that would bring maybe a revolution.
So it's repressive tolerance, see, that's the point that Marcuse was getting at.
They're repressing us through tolerance of our dissenting speech.
Right.
Yeah, I love that, the whole counterproductive nature of my work.
You're right.
No, it is like that.
Remember that old documentary, that old miniseries from the 1980s, where it's America, but it's spelled with a K, and it's about the Soviets and the New World Order taking over America and the UN and whatever?
And that's what they do, is they let the angry young males have a punk rock show and scream and yell and mosh every once in a while and get it out of their system.
And that's part of the Soviet policy for controlling the American people, you know?
The metaphor's pretty ham-handed, but maybe it needs to be.
So you and I are unwitting tools of the empire.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, every time that I debunk the lies about Iran's nuclear program, all I'm doing is helping make it an issue, and, you know, I don't know, who knows?
Somebody listens to your show, and then after the show they say, okay, I feel good, I've listened to his show, now I can just go back and forget about it.
Yeah, of course, although, I don't know, man, it seems like the truth ought to matter, even if it doesn't, really.
No, it doesn't.
I'm being facetious here.
I know.
No, but you're right.
No, no, no, you're right, though.
Well, it's no different than, like, you know, you drive down the street, and because you were there, a wreck didn't happen, and, you know, the next Hitler goes on to take over or whatever, you don't know exactly what the ripple effects of your actions are going to be.
You have to just, you know, try to do what's right and hope for the best, I guess, you know?
Right.
You don't know who's going to hear it on a given random day.
Yeah, you could inspire the next Wayne Allen Root to go, hey, I think I'm into libertarianism now, and then come and ruin it, you know?
Well, listen, I don't know if this is because of your show, but Ann Coulter is starting to crack.
Yeah, no, it's not because of anything I did.
I know that.
Now, I'm not sure whether I'm, I think Justin might have been a little sanguine, Justin Raimondo, in his column praising her, egging her on.
I'm not quite ready to go that far.
Yeah, you went a little far, I think, but yeah, you know, I mean, that's how it is when one writes out of power, and then the question is, can we teach them that it's not Obama, it's Washington, D.C.?
That's the problem, and keep some of them on our side when the parties in power switch back again.
Well, there was one particular word that did not appear in her column, and that was the word Israel.
Yeah, or that she was wrong about anything, either.
Well, that's true, too.
But yeah, you know, I mean, I don't know if we'll really have time.
I guess we can just try to address this real quick in a couple minutes here.
The Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, the whole premise of that is the, you know, some kind of coalition between the right and the libertarians, and I wonder, you know, how does that work out on questions of war and peace in a big conference like that?
Well, there wasn't very much on war and peace at this conference.
Most of the, and this, I think, reflects Mark Skousen, who's the organizer, his own taste.
I mean, he's very heavy into investment-type sessions and gold and things like that, and the coming crash and stuff like that, which is fine, I don't have an objection to that.
But that, and I think he typically piggybacks this conference before or after an investment, a hard money conference, so you get a lot of those people.
And that's fine, and they're interested in bigger issues, too, but they do have this concentration on, you know, how to save their assets from government confiscation, one way or the other.
So you know that going in.
Now, there were, but there were, you know, some percentage, maybe less than half of the sessions are on other things, but very little of it on foreign policy.
There was a debate, well, there was a presentation by Doug Bonda, which I didn't get to see, and I didn't steal all of his stuff.
Well, go ahead and hold it right there.
Sorry, you know how it is with these hard breaks.
Oh, yeah, no problem.
Yeah, you know, I want to talk about the left and the right, because I got on pause over here, Ralph Nader interviewing Judge Napolitano, which is really cool, too.
And we'll talk about the cost to empire when we get back with Sheldon Richman after this, y'all.
You can interact with other LRN listeners on our message board at forum.lrn.fm.
That's forum.lrn.fm.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of The Freeman.
You can find their website, thefreemanonline.org, by typing thefreemanonline.org into your web browser.
Alright, Sheldon, we're talking about the right and the libertarians.
You were at this Freedom Fest conference.
You said it was mostly about gold and that kind of thing, but then when the questions of war and peace come up, I guess let me try to refine the question a little bit, which is, is there any progress in getting these right-wingers to adopt more of a paleo, anti-war position or more of a libertarian position, rather than continuing on with whatever Bill Kristol wants them to go along with?
You know, I haven't been going to Freedom Fest year to year, so I can't compare.
I can tell you that there was a presence, Dan McCarthy of the American Conservative was there, and as a matter of fact, in the package everybody, all registered participants received, they got a bag with goodies in it, there was a copy of the latest American Conservative, the August issue, which has a cover story about, will the Tea Party turn pro-peace?
I forget the exact title, but that's the gist of it.
That was very good timing.
So Dan was around, and there were a couple of sessions, Doug Mondo did give a talk on foreign policy.
I didn't fit in a lot of the stuff, so I can't tell you what was said, but we know Doug, and Doug Casey also gave a talk on foreign policy, somebody told me.
But the interesting thing that I think a lot of people were looking forward to, and a lot of people turned out to see, was a debate, it was the build of the debate between John Utley, who's actually, I think, associate publisher of the American Conservative magazine, and an old-time, old-right kind of libertarian conservative guy.
Yeah, he's the founder of Americans Against World Empire.
Right, strong credentials in foreign policy.
And the debate was against George Gilder, who I believe has a new book out, he did hold up a book, I think called The Test of Israel, or something along those lines, and I have to say, he gave the most appalling talk I've ever heard on any subject, anywhere.
That's pretty bad, right?
It was really bad.
It was a non-sequitur, to begin with, and then it was totally absurd after that.
The first half of his remarks were about how all the wonderful things Jews have invented, the Jewish people have invented, great, but of course that left in my mind the question, what am I going to do with Israel?
I accused him in the Q&A of violating Bastiat's admonition that we look at the unseen, namely that the Jews would have been inventing these things somewhere else if there hadn't been the Israel statehood movement, which has created so much problem.
And he didn't get that point.
He then made the statement, and John of course made a good presentation about how the Palestinians have been suffering, and so on, and various other little facts that he threw in, but Gilder made the statement that there have been no atrocities against the Palestinians, and I am quoting him verbatim, no atrocities.
He didn't say they were exaggerated, he didn't say they were provoked, he said no atrocities.
All right, so now we can see there's a real problem here with the right wing, the nationalism, the neoconservative movement that continues to dominate the discussion of foreign policy in the minds of so many of them, of course Rush Limbaugh tows the neocon line on virtually all of this.
And we've talked about this before, I guess, what we need to do, because there are more and more right wingers.
I mean, I see them on my Facebook page and yours saying, you know, I used to be a right winger until I started listening to you, and you make more sense than them, and that kind of thing.
So there's anecdotal evidence that it's possible there.
And then, of course, on civil liberties and on empire, we already have allies among at least the left, if not the liberals, at least the progressives and the real leftists.
It seems like the uphill battle that I'm fighting, because I know that we can't win everybody over to libertarianism, but I wonder if we can kind of help to realign the two-party debate instead of being between liberalism and conservatism, whatever that is.
It's all just a bunch of statism and warfarism mostly.
Maybe we can try to make the argument much more of a Jeffersonians versus the war party kind of thing, and where we really do have this kind of Nader Napolitano alliance, you know what I mean?
Well, I agree with you, and I think, I would not give up on it.
I think there have been times of progress.
There was that conference some months ago, and you interviewed a few people who attended that.
I think it is definitely worth doing it, and sure, we have to tailor the appeal.
I mean, the piece I did on the fee site the other day, which I think was the main reason you invited me on today, was to talk about the fiscal aspects of it, and that's going to appeal to some people that other approaches won't work in that direction.
But we need to invoke people like the old right types, John T. Flynn and Garrett Garrett, and I mentioned Robert Taft, because that'll at least get people listening.
They'll say, okay, this is not just coming from commie pinko sources.
This is somewhat safe.
I can listen to this.
Okay?
Maybe they'll put their armor down for a moment, or their force field, which is intended to repel anything that they think is coming from, quote, the left, and they'll begin to listen, and I think that is worth a try.
There are enough people on our side who can talk to people who up till now have been strong pro-empire types.
So, we have to keep at it, and your show is very important, I think, for that.
Well, thanks.
I wish it was.
You know, it's supposed to be.
It's the most important thing going on right now.
I was telling your colleague, Angela Keaton, the other day, who was at the Freedom Fest, and I've probably said it so many times, I was probably making a nuisance of myself, but this is one of the high points of the freedom movement right now.
Your show, and then, of course, the website, too, but the show is very important.
Wow.
Wow.
Thank you very much for that.
It means a lot to me, coming from you especially.
So, now, let me give you just the last couple of minutes here to talk about that financial aspect.
You know, the cover of the Freeman, this issue, has a picture of the riot police in Greece, and I guess there's another piece in the same issue asking the question of whether we're headed that way, and you bring that up in your article, too.
We're kind of at a financial breaking point here.
What's it going to be?
Are we going to give up all the social welfare programs for the poor first, or are we going to give up the empire?
Well, that's the important thing.
Of course, we want to start cutting all that stuff, but this should at least focus the attention on the fiscal hawks, right, the deficit hawks.
We need to broaden their horizons so they're willing to look at the, I was going to say the Pentagon budget, but as Robert Higgs teaches us, and I link to it and discuss his point, it's not just the Pentagon.
There's so-called defense spending, military spending, scattered throughout the federal department.
So if you put it all together, you get more than the $600 billion or $700 billion that the Pentagon is spending.
Right, because the Energy Department controls the nukes, et cetera.
Right, you have well over a trillion dollars.
And so any, you know, it's a trillion dollar, let's put it this way, it's like a trillion pound gorilla in the room.
If we're going to talk about the coming fiscal crisis and the possibility that the government won't be able to pay its bills, it's not a terrible thing to think of.
So how can we ignore the trillion pound gorilla sitting right there in the corner of the room, namely so-called defense spending, which is not defense.
And that should give us an opening with a lot of people who wouldn't be listening if the budget looked like it was more or less in balance.
They wouldn't be listening to this.
So I think we have a shot.
Well, as George Bush Sr. would say, not about this issue, but it's the prudent thing to do, to roll back your empire deliberately instead of watching it collapse all around you.
That will not make us safe to go broke.
So that's the answer to the people who say, what about our safety?
Right.
All right.
Everybody, that's thefreemanonline.org.
Thanks, Sheldon.
You're great, Scott.
Thanks.
