11/11/16 – Jim Powell – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
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And it's Veterans Day, so I'm happy to bring back to the show our friend Jim Powell.
He is the author of a whole bunch of great books.
FDR's Folly, Bully Boy, The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy, Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, and The Triumph of Liberty, a 2,000-year history told through the lives of freedom's greatest champions.
And more than that.
It goes on.
And we're going to talk a little bit more about that Triumph of Liberty here in a few.
But first, as always, as we do every year on the 11th, we're going to talk about Woodrow Wilson and his Great Blunder.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you, Jim?
Good.
Glad to be with you.
Good, good.
I'm very happy that you're able to make the time for us this afternoon.
I really do appreciate it.
And so now here's the thing.
Everybody knows that in World War II, Superman, a.k.a.
America, stopped evil in the form of Nazism and Japanese imperialism that were rampaging across the world.
And the American people stood up for truth, justice, and the American way and put an end to evil and set the precedent for all time of the goodness of American power in the world and all of that.
Everybody knows that, Jim.
But nobody knows really anything about World War I, and almost nobody has heard your take on it, about the importance, what it is about American intervention in World War I that made all the difference for the worst.
So obviously, as your subtitle suggests in your book, two main subjects here.
How Wilson's entry, getting America into World War I, one, helped lead to the creation of the Soviet Union, and then two, helped lead to the rise of Nazi Germany as well.
So you can just take it from there.
Fill the people in on what they ought to know here.
When we intervene in a foreign war, which is not for the purposes of self-defense, but it's for becoming a major player in global politics, building an empire, whatever it may be, we are venturing into things that we know often not much about, and so we make mistakes and miscalculations.
So in the case of American intervention in the First World War, the President Woodrow Wilson dreamed of playing on the world stage as a great diplomat and displaying American power and so on.
He was a good friend of Great Britain.
Great Britain, of course, was one of the belligerents in the war, and for three years the war was stalemated between the British and the French on one side and the Germans and the Austrians and several other players on the other side.
So they were stalemated, neither side able to impose their will on the other or settlement on the other.
So Wilson got involved.
We entered the war in 1917 on the British and French side and suddenly enabled them to win a decisive victory.
Because they won a decisive victory, they could not be stopped in avenging their suffering.
Most of the fighting had taken place on French soil, and so the farmland, a lot of structures were damaged or destroyed, and there were about two million casualties that the French had.
So they were even more upset about that.
So when the decisive victory had been won, the French pushed and pushed and pushed for a vengeful settlement of pushing all the blame for the war on the Germans and doing as ruinous a settlement as they possibly could.
They transferred railroad cars, peaceful equipment, weapons, anything that was valuable.
They moved it out of France and into Germany.
So this of course climaxed with the Versailles Treaty.
A lot of that was contained in the Versailles Treaty.
So they have this avenging of war losses, war casualties, war suffering, and of course there was a backlash in Germany.
That was quite predictable.
Anybody presented with a diktat, this was not a negotiation.
The Germans had to sign it.
They had nothing to say about it.
So there was a political backlash.
The Germans, first of all, were surprised that they lost because their leaders had been telling them that everything was great and they were winning and soon would come the ultimate glorious victory.
So they were disillusioned.
They were angry.
The generals got out of the way very quickly so that the people would see that there were civilian government officials who were signing the surrender papers.
So that of course stained them in the eyes of the Germans.
They had been betrayed.
So you had the bitter, violent backlash which gave Hitler his first backing as he was making a bid to become a political figure and somehow capitalize on the bitterness, the disillusionment, and so on.
Now let me stop you there just to rehash a little bit of this.
First of all, I want to start with the last thing that you said there about how Woodrow Wilson had got it in his head that almost in a Dick Cheney way, we don't talk to evil.
So he insisted that he would only negotiate with the Germans who hadn't been guilty of the war.
And so they were the ones, as you say, who completely took the rap for the peace which was such a harsh peace on the part of the Germans.
And the way you put it in the book is that Adolf Hitler began almost every speech with denouncing the traitors of 1918 and those who had signed that treaty.
And they were the ones who represented the republic and the law as opposed to Nazism.
And they were the ones, Wilson saddled them with the blame instead of the militarists who would actually pick the fight.
Right.
And that is just really an incredible turn.
And I guess it takes a real intellectual like Woodrow Wilson to make a decision that bad, to think that he's right to do something like that and not see the repercussions that could come from it.
Right.
And that was unfortunately only the first step in the process of miscues.
Before the Germans surrendered, they were negotiating with Russia.
Russia was in the process of getting out of the war.
And the Germans were negotiating with Russia.
Maybe going back, taking a step back a little bit.
Sure, no problem.
Russia was in terrible shape from the very beginning.
Russia was allied with the French and the British and adversary with the Germans.
So from the very beginning of the war, the Russians were unprepared for it.
They did not have enough railroad capacity to both ship food to everybody on the front and ship a million men to the front for fighting.
They didn't have enough guns for everybody.
They sent a lot of the Russian soldiers had no guns.
And they were told, when your buddy is shot, you get his gun.
That's your gun.
So there was a lot of anger, as you can imagine, the parents of these kids who were getting sent to the front without any guns.
I mean, that sounded suicidal.
So Russia just went from one economic...
They had economic problems, as I indicated.
Their production didn't function very well because there were a lot of shortages.
Whether guns, tanks, it was a mess.
And then Russia increased.
By 1917, Russia was desperate to get out of the war.
And so they started talking with the Germans.
But the situation was, you had a revolution against the czarist government.
That brought in the provisional government.
And Wilson then was getting the U.S. into the war at about that time.
Wilson then started pressuring the Russians to stay in the war.
The last thing Wilson, the French, or the British wanted was to have the Russians pull out of the war, make a treaty with Germany.
And then Germany would be able to move a number of their troops to the Western Front, making things more difficult for the British and the French.
So then Wilson, of course, cared very much about that.
As soon as we became a belligerent, we didn't want the Russians to pull out and then enable the Germans to reinforce the Western Front with troops taken from the Eastern Front.
So the Russian government stayed in the war.
Spring of 1917 and the summer of 1917, Lenin made three tries to seize power in the summer of 1917, and he failed.
He could not, even with hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers defecting, deserting the army, because the Russian army consisted of peasants, and they had heard that land was being given away, and they wanted to hustle on home and get some of that land.
They didn't want to be the suckers who stayed on the front and somebody else got all the land.
So there were hundreds of thousands of Russian peasant soldiers who were abandoning the war, and the Russian army was rapidly disintegrating.
So three times they failed in that summer, and it wasn't until the Russian army had just about completely collapsed in the fall of 1917 that Lenin and his small contingent of Bolsheviks were able to seize power.
So what we got out of that, of those interventions, we got the beginnings of Hitler's career, and all the evil he was able to do once he came in power in 1933, and we also got 70 years of Soviet socialism.
Which then spread to China, where it starved 40 million people to death, and Pol Pot, and the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and all that came with the Cold War against the Soviets and the Communists then.
Yeah, so Wilson, knowing as little as he did about the circumstances that he was entering when he brought us into the war, he imagined that he could control his allies, the British and the French.
And it turned out that once we enabled them to have a decisive victory, they could push, push, push the Germans, and Wilson could not stop them.
Clermont, the Frenchman, was particularly adamant in avenging their suffering, so he couldn't control his allies.
He obviously could not control what our adversaries did, namely the Germans, that there was going to be a political backlash there.
And he certainly had no control over the Russians, and the Bolsheviks, he gave the provisional government $400 or $500 million, which is a lot of money back then, if they stayed in the war, but he had no control over what they did.
And then, of course, finally, when the Versailles Treaty came up for approval in the United States, he treated the Senate arrogantly, dismissively.
There were obviously a bunch of ignoramuses that signed this treaty that he put together.
It was going to be the capstone on his career.
And as we know, the Senate rejected it, and he was humiliated, and he died with pitiful circumstances.
So he couldn't control his allies.
He couldn't control how the adversaries would react.
And he couldn't predict, he couldn't handle how Americans would act.
He had no clue why.
And then it turned out after the war that there had been a lot of secret treaties undertaken during the war between the allies, between all sorts of things.
You had Italy, for example, that was very late in entering the war because they were basically trying to get both sides to bid against each other and promise them favors if they came out as an ally one way or the other.
So the biggest mistake that was made in the First World War, which has made so many other places, is an inability to predict what your allies are going to do, what your adversaries are going to do, and what anybody else who may come into the equation is going to do.
He was completely delusional about major factors that were going to influence the outcome.
And so instead of being a glorious thing, when all of these secret treaties, I think most of the secret treaties were released by the Russians, by the Bolsheviks I should say, because they were trying to discredit the war.
So they released, they got text of all these secret treaties.
Before the war, French and the British had a treaty that provided that if France were attacked by the Germans, that Britain would enter the war on the French side.
However, that was a secret treaty.
So nobody knew about it.
Certainly the Germans didn't know about it.
So it was of zero value as a deterrent to war.
That's the whole point of an alliance.
The major part of an alliance is to gain some, if you're a little country, it's just going to be in your interest to try to get a bigger country to be on your side if you're threatened by somebody else, some other neighbor.
So anyway, he couldn't control any of the major things that were, the way people would react that completely affected whether the war is going to be something glorious or whether it's going to be a catastrophe.
Of course, it turned out to be a catastrophe.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
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Yeah.
Well, now, so in the interwar years, I mean, one thing is, I guess looking back on it, I did have a pretty good history teacher in seventh grade because she taught us about the hyperinflation and the wheelbarrows full of money and how this had helped set the stage for the rise of the Nazis.
But, you know, I really think, and no offense to my audience, I mean, this is basically my understanding up until I started, you know, started really reading this history when I got older, was basically what I learned in junior high about this.
And they had brought up the hyperinflation, the war reparations and how, you know, the Germans had to borrow money from the Americans to pay back the British and the French and all this.
And it was just this, you know, the French and the British had demanded so much of repayment for the entire cost of the war from the Germans, and that this had led to all the money printing and destruction of the economy.
But that was still in the 20s.
So then the question still remains, how could the people of Germany allow the rise of the Nazis into, you know, 1933 and after that?
And then that's where your book really answers.
And this is something that, I don't know, maybe everybody knew this but me, but this is not what I learned in school, was it was all about the territories that had been stripped from the Germans.
We're not just talking about their colonies on other people's territory.
We're talking about major parts of what was then mostly kind of newly consolidated Germany, the nation state was being dismembered.
And this was the gripe that Hitler was able to invoke that really got people to, you know, rally around his side.
I don't know if the analogy is fair about if America had lost some states of the Union, if we had lost a war and somebody took away Florida, Texas and California, how hell bent the rest of the country would be on taking those pieces back.
I don't know if that's an exact analogy, but something along those lines.
And then, of course, Nazism is a reaction to communism too.
So this is a whole part of the history of the rise of the Nazis, is the Nazi thugs are in the street fighting the commie thugs.
And so who are you scared of more?
And people were rallying around the Nazis to protect them from the commies.
But who were the commies?
They were the fifth column of the Soviet communists that had come into power because of Wilson's blunder, who again never would have been.
So I'm not like trying to excuse away the Germans allowing this to happen or whatever.
That's the explanation, right?
They teach us the inflation part, but they don't teach us the part about, you know, really the stripping away of the territories and just how completely humiliated the Germans had been with the Versailles Treaty, you know?
Well, there's another point too in this.
When you mentioned Hitler coming to power in 1933, when Hitler came in, he did not have to build a totalitarian regime from scratch.
He came in and took over the existing machinery of government.
Now the existing machinery of government went back to the mid-late 19th century in Prussia.
There was a king who became known as the Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm I and II.
So they had a king, the Prussian government had a king, and then the king controlled the military budget, which was 80% of the total budget.
The king could summit the legislature, which is called the Reichstag, and the king could dismiss the legislature.
And the king could fire his ministers.
His head, his chief minister, was Bismarck, Otto von Bismarck.
So there were some free market types, some classical liberals, as they're also called, and there for about a 20-year period, maybe 1870s to 1890, 1890, it's over.
But they are struggling to limit the power of the king.
As I said, he controls the budget, controls the legislature.
He makes the Kaiser the power of making decisions about war and peace.
So there's a mighty struggle in Prussia where some Prussian liberals are trying to limit his power, and they fail.
So by 1890, when Bismarck is fired, that's basically when the fight is over.
They lost.
So before 1900, the principle in Prussia had been set that the executive, in other words, the Kaiser, controlled the budget, controlled the legislature.
So they were just pawns.
They had to assemble when he summoned them.
They had to disband when he dismissed them.
So there was no constitutional limit on the power of the executive.
And then you go into World War I.
The government gained complete control of the economy.
That was known as war socialism.
And that was the first glimpse that anybody had seen of a socialist state in modern times.
Lenin certainly hadn't seen one before.
There were Marxist theories, but Marx nowhere told people how to organize a government.
How would you organize a government in a genuine communist fashion?
Nobody had done it before in modern times.
And so you have the struggle to establish a limitation on the power of the Prussian government.
Then you have the rapid, very rapid and comprehensive control of the economy that occurred during World War I.
And so then Hitler comes in.
Hitler, of course, was nominated, was appointed by Hindenburg, the World War I general.
And so Hitler comes into a government where there's no constitutional limitation on the power of the executive.
There's nothing.
I mean, no constitutional limitations.
And I might say that the history of constitutional limitations on power is quite remarkable.
You can go back a couple thousand years.
You find the ancient Greeks have term limits where an executive can serve for a one-year term.
They have random selection, drawing by lot.
This is also expanded during the Roman Republic.
They have a lot more drawing by lot.
In Venice, they are most afraid of dynasties.
If you look at the history of China, it's one damn dynasty after the other.
The history of the Egyptians is 20 or 30 dynasties over a period of a couple thousand years, where parents, the father nominates son.
They kill anybody who's going to come in as a rival or as a usurper.
So that's what Hitler comes into.
He immediately starts accelerating the size of his secret police.
And they start rounding up Jews.
I'm really hearing a lesson for today here, Jim, as far as just how much government you're willing to let your opponents inherit.
I'm seeing all this stuff on Twitter right now, everybody's fighting about.
I hope you liberals are happy that you decided to ignore the fact that Obama killed Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, Abdul Rahman, who is completely innocent of any even suspicion of terrorism, by the way.
And you look away when he taps our phones.
You look away when he militarizes our cops.
Oh, but now you're afraid Donald Trump's going to come and inherit this strong executive state, which is exactly what's going to happen.
And, of course, we had this same conversation eight years ago, when all the totalitarian Bush fans were upset that Barack Obama was about to inherit all this total power that they had just cheered, as Dick Cheney and Addington and his people had erected this whole new homeland security state after September 11th.
Right.
Yeah, well, that has certainly been a pattern of experience, that power is expanded by one person for their own reasons, and other people who come later often expand that power and use it in very different ways that were not intended.
Right, and here I am stuck in the middle with you, right?
Each time these guys trade off in power, we lose our freedom, even though it's not our fault.
Yeah, the hardest thing to do is to limit government power.
As I said, if you survey the history of government going way back, it is surprising how many people you find that are trying to do something to make it harder for government to do various things, to try to limit the power they have, limit how long they can do it.
One of the most interesting cases is Venice, where the process might involve several hundred votes by lot.
You know, elect nine people, the nine people are going to pick 25 people, then the number gets cut in half and they pick somebody else.
I mean, all this is to make it impossible for any established government there to pass on their power by a dynastic means.
And the Venetian Constitution lasted for 500 years, until Napoleon came along and wiped out Venice as an independent republic.
But the most sophisticated constitutional development, of course, occurred in the United States, the separation of powers with checks and balances.
And there's a long historical process there, because the separation of powers came up very early, of having different departments of government to have competing powers.
But that was not enough.
It was discovered much later that separation of powers is a vital basic principle of limiting government power, but by itself it's too simple, it can be easily taken over.
So you needed to introduce checks and balances of various kinds to make it much more complicated.
And that's really the American contribution, is to get that combination of a separation of powers and checks and balances.
But as we have seen in this country, the separation of powers and checks and balances only slow down the process.
That concentration of power can still go on, particularly in wars.
That's mainly when you see most of these things happening.
You don't need astronomical levels of taxation.
War is the most expensive thing that any government does, and it doesn't need extraordinary levels of taxation to pay for peaceful things, many of which functions can be handled privately, roads and bridges and other stuff.
So you don't need a government to do most of that.
So let me ask you, because I'm looking at your Amazon page and I see here The Triumph of Liberty was published in the year 2000, right?
A 2000 year history told through the lives of freedom's greatest champions, and yet if I heard you right before we went on the air, you were telling me you're just finishing up a whole new manuscript that's just like this, that's the sequel, or how's that work?
Well, The Triumph of Liberty consists of 10 thematic groupings of profiles.
There are about 60 or 70 people who my profile, and they are organized chronologically in thematic groupings.
So there are 10 groupings, natural rights, toleration, peace, self-help, and so on.
Courage for liberty, dangers to liberty.
There are 10 groupings, and each grouping might have 4 to 8 profiles in them, and they're chronological.
So the first chapter, for example, is on natural rights, and the first chapter is also the earliest chapter, Cicero, in the late Roman Republic period.
And the last grouping is courage for liberty, and that's about 8 profiles.
And the climax there is Milton Friedman.
I mean, that takes them up to the present.
And that's, of course, about the often-overlooked link between economic liberty and political liberty.
So that's all about people.
That's focusing on people, and it has the disadvantage of where one story, you might say, sometimes comes up in more than one place.
I mean, there are several different stories that relate to the American Revolution.
Sam Adams is in one.
George Washington is in another.
Jefferson is in another.
Now, the book that I'm in the process of aiming to finish by next spring is the first comprehensive history of liberty from ancient times to the present, and that is a narrative.
And so I'm relating stories in that, not focusing on profiles, where I can have a lot of space in the triumph of liberty, a lot of space for individuals.
But now I'm dealing with wars, revolutions, tax revolts, slave revolts, peaceful mass movements.
There are a lot of successful cases, and I chronicle some failures.
For example, you've got Simon Bolivar in South America, the great liberator who drove the Spanish out of South America, helped them achieve independence.
But Bolivar wanted absolute power.
He was a general.
He wanted absolute power, and he got it.
So that kind of takes him out of the running as a successful case.
But that's what happens.
And I think you have more of an appreciation for how liberty has developed, how all the institutions for liberty have developed.
If you see some of the failures, where they went wrong, they got wiped out, whatever it was that happened.
For example, most people don't know much about how liberty developed as a result of the Middle Ages.
Well, one of the things that happened during the Middle Ages, you had a lot of violence.
There were Viking raids, there were Muslim raids across North Africa and Southern Europe, getting into France and Spain.
Then you had a lot of Germanic invasions.
There was a tremendous amount of violence between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Because of all that violence, the people who had some kind of property, they built castles around them.
There were city walls built.
And the people who had property made deals with other people, with fighters, with warriors, who agreed to provide military service in exchange for some land.
The kings or the feudal lords did not have a direct relationship with the vassals who were actually committed to provide military service when the need arose.
The vassals had knights under them, so you had, you know, I'll defend you if you defend me.
So they had reciprocal arrangements.
But the king himself didn't actually have very many troops.
Now, in the Muslim world, the sultans had a lot of money.
The East was always the richest part of the Roman world, the Roman Empire.
So the sultans, the Muslim sultans, they had a lot of money.
So they paid the group known as the Mamluks, who were slave soldiers.
And the slave soldiers swore their loyalty to the sultan, to do whatever the sultan asked.
And they had a lot of them.
And they could enforce a totalitarian regime.
The kings who had these feudal armies, they didn't actually have any armies.
I mean, they had bodyguards, but they didn't actually have money.
That's why they gave the knights land.
They didn't have money, but they had land.
But they didn't have a direct relationship with the soldiers, with the knights.
So eventually, the knights were all getting land as part of the feudal bargain.
They were not working directly for the king.
So the kings actually didn't have much in the way of an army.
He had bodyguards, but he didn't have an army.
The army consisted of when the men could be raised.
These were all the knights who were out working the land until they got a military call.
Anyway, so the knights have all this land that they got in agreeing to provide military service.
But the knights, as the years went by and the knights occupied this, continued to occupy the land that they got from the king or from the feudal lord in exchange for the obligation to provide military service, the knights wanted to consider this their property so they could pass it on to their children.
And eventually, that's what happened.
Even though they were given the land on a conditional basis, you can have it as long as you are available for military service, they actually eventually, that became their land.
And when knights inherited all this land and could pass it on, that basically meant that the knights gained independence.
They became land owners.
And so this was the origin of the counselors to a king.
They had independence from the king.
They could defy the king if there was some kind of serious agreement, because they were the ones who were asked to provide military service, essentially if they went on strike, or they could gain assets with the property that became theirs.
This is essentially the aristocracy.
There's also a basis of parliament.
All the representative assemblies that became a major method of limiting government power, they all came out of the Middle Ages out of all this insecurity, all the violence that led to the feudal agreements between knights and feudal lords.
And the knights and all those people could not be denied some voice in the way the kingdoms were run.
So that's basically what happened with Magna Carta.
In other words, what you're saying is liberty is a product of circumstance to a great degree.
Just like in real life, you have free choice within the constraints of your situation.
And in this case, the knights were powerful enough to tell the king, actually, you're going to be at least this nice to us.
Whereas in most places, that just is never the case.
Well, yeah.
The main discussion between the king and the knights was probably going to be over money.
King probably wanted more money.
Maybe he wanted to get more troops that were loyal to him.
But the knights who had economic independence, because now they controlled their land, and so they could get revenue from the land, they could defy the king.
So that is a narrative of how people were able to resist kings.
Later you had centralized monarchies develop in Europe, but in the early period when there was all this violence from Muslims and from Vikings and from Germanic tribes and other invasions and so on.
So this was an unintended consequence, the development of representative assemblies that came out of the feudal system.
The feudal system was a period of weak government.
A lot of historians think that was a terrible thing.
The governments were weak.
Well, it is only a terrible thing if you are talking about, if by weak government you mean the government cannot defend, people cannot be defended, do not have the means of defending themselves against violence, against hostile tribes and armies and invaders of various sorts.
You have to be able to defend yourself.
But the class problem is that, and this is not something that we are really accustomed to here in the United States, because we have a 3,000 mile ocean or greater oceans on both sides.
Well, you know, still, as you are saying, I think this is the most important lesson about what you are saying is, if you are lucky enough to have, I don't know, say, a rule of law that bans torture or mandates a public trial or that kind of thing, you better fight like hell to keep it.
The reason we have that law in this country is because it is left over from a time when the army was just as powerful as whoever George Washington could get together, so he could only ever go so far.
Right.
But now, of course, our national government is the most powerful force that's ever existed.
If the old law wasn't there, if the Eighth and the Fifth and the Sixth Amendments, if these things weren't there, they could do anything in the world to us, and no number of AR-15s in the hands of the neighborhood could stop them if it came down to it.
It's the tradition.
It's the belief in keeping that old system.
You know, I'm not a master historian, but I read a little Carol Quigley, and he talks about the invention of the saddle was a huge step back for liberty because now these specialized warriors on horseback were so far a cut above their competition, they were able to consolidate all this power, but then somebody invented the musket, and now power devolved again because now the average schmuck can kill you from way over here, and the professional army is no better armed than he is, basically, and it was during that era that the ships happened to be good enough to really found the new world and for the U.S. American civilization to be founded right during that time where basically, you know, we might like James Madison or something, but James Madison had to pass that Bill of Rights because the power already really was that devolved.
He was trying to centralize it as best he could.
It wasn't working the other way around.
Right.
Well, yeah, so basically what you're talking about in this book, First Comprehensive History of Liberty from Ancient Times to the Present, are the narratives or the stories about how these limitations on power were discovered or developed, and there's no end to it, but it is fascinating to me to see how early and how frequently different people are trying to limit government power.
I mean, the struggle never ends because you may not have had any dynasties yet, but there's one guy who comes in, and he's able to appoint his son as his successor, but there are some underlings who revolt against it, and you've got another fight, and everybody's killed.
So the number of cases where you have different combinations of restraints that are imposed, there's some random selection, there's some term limits, there's a separation of powers.
The basic lesson of the story is you need a lot of limitations on power because they're not all going to work all the time, and over time, some of them are going to be degraded.
That's a good way to put it.
Multiple fail-safes, right?
You need all the protection.
So what that also means, if you're an emerging country, if you're, let's say, a newly independent country like the republics that were liberated from the Soviet Union, there may have been a long history of absolutism somewhere, and they're trying to start a republic and protect liberty, but they only have three of the protections that we originally had.
Chances are that's not going to work.
Chances are that's going to collapse.
I mean, it's just not going to collapse.
If you only have three types of limitations on power, you have some limitation on, you know, you may have a term limit, you may have, I know the United States has an anti-nepotism law.
If you have a few of these things, well, that's better than nothing, but if you only have a few of these things, and you're not able to add more limitations and exclusions or have a more complicated government structure, so it's harder for somebody to take it over, you're probably going to be subverted.
You need all the limitations, all the obstacles you can incorporate.
I mean, you can't have somebody that the government can't function.
And, you know, I've always found the idea of limited government to be kind of boring, but when you also consider, well, who's going to handle national defense?
I know Murray Rothbard made a case, no problem.
You know, Sears Roebuck can handle that or whatever.
In fact, it's been difficult.
When we get to the point where we don't need all this, at least some governmental functions performed, you know, then we can take it to the next step.
But it's just a constant battle to preserve the limitations on power that you've got.
And now if you have the Supreme Court undermining it over, you know, a 50-year period, 60-year period, which is a 70-year period.
You know, Jim, I think that maybe other than a particular handful of lawyers and weirdo libertarian ideologues like you and me, I think that less and less do people in this country and especially in the government even really understand the most basic theory of popular sovereignty, that the people come first, that we're born free, that we ask them nicely if they would like to be our security service and that they work for us and all of that.
I mean, after all, that's really just PR for the rubes anyway, right?
And yet if we hold them to the PR as best we can, that's at least something, you know?
But if the common conception just boils down to, yeah, the government are the masters and we are the servants to them and that we exist to pay taxes so that they can do the things that they want to do with the money and this kind of thing.
If that just becomes totally normalized and that's the scheme of things.
You know, like for example, and this is maybe the most bare-bones example at the rubber-meets-the-road kind of level.
How many actual, like what percent of police officers in this country actually understand the theory of people have natural rights and even if they are suspected of a murder, your actual mandate is only to protect the rights of the accused so that they get to their fair trial safe and sound.
That that's the whole theory of what your role is here, is to prevent the lynch mob from getting them and make sure that the judge and the prosecutor have a crack at it and a jury has a crack at it first.
But do they even know that?
Or they just think that they're the bullies whose job it is to mostly pick on criminals but also poor people.
You know what I mean?
Do they even know?
Does anyone even have the most basic kind of baptism into this supposed civic religion in this country that says that freedom comes first, that the people come first?
Well, I think a lot of people could probably say that but they don't seem to have much clue what do you have to do to maintain it.
That I'm sure, you know, we have a good deal of cronyism so the cronies are not currently subject to all the restrictions and taxations and inhibitions and all sorts of things.
So they support the system.
They're not the victims of it.
And so they don't care.
And a lot of other people don't care either.
As long as they're not losing anything then they don't care.
They're focusing on things that are closer to home.
And, you know, when you have sinister circumstances I think Hitler has done this and certainly others have where you pick on one group at a time and nobody else cares because it's not me this time.
And next time he picks on somebody else well nobody's going to bother to help them.
They didn't help, you know, when their neighbors needed it.
So you go all the way around and you've picked everybody off and nobody spoke up and so you have that problem.
It's too late.
But anyway, that's the basic story.
How did limitations on power develop?
I sure can't wait to read that.
What's the title of the new one again?
It'll probably be called The Fight for Liberty.
The first comprehensive history of liberty from ancient times to the present.
Man, that is really something else.
I can't wait to read that, Jim.
Well, I can't wait either.
I'm looking to get it done.
I mean, as I said, it's already about 1,100 single-spaced pages.
And I still have to add about 10 chapters.
Wow, I thought I was bogged down writing my book, stuck in the Afghan quagmire as it is here, but boy, you're really getting work done there.
Well, my first concern is to be comprehensive, so I'm not concerned about excessive length right now.
Sure.
The first thing is to get everything on the table.
Is there anything major that I have overlooked?
Is there any names?
I'm going to have some names that I haven't worked in, so I have to try to figure out some way to work them in.
There's going to be a lot of that.
Because there are so many chapters, there are going to be fitting issues of having them fit together in a coherent way.
Obviously, it's going to be generally chronological, but, you know, there's just a lot of pieces to fit together.
So I am continuously revising it.
Each additional chapter I do reveals, you know, it might impinge on, it might duplicate what's covered in another section, so I have to figure out what to do about that.
Sure.
Well, anyway, man, I mean, it sounds like a really great project, Jim.
I'm really excited, actually, to go back and read The Triumph of Liberty, the 2,000-year history that you already wrote back 15 years ago now.
And for that matter, you know what?
I have your FDR and TR books here, but they're just off on the pile waiting for me to get to them someday.
But I have read Wilson's War, and, God, I'm begging people to read Wilson's War.
It's so great.
Well, I appreciate that.
For The Triumph of Liberty, I was asked several years ago to cut it, to condense it.
So I did a version that was a 40% cut, and then I also did a version that was a 70% cut.
And the first one, the 40% cut, there's still a lot of narrative in that, in the profile.
But the 70% cut, the narrative basically comes out, and it becomes like an encyclopedia, a summary, because there's no room for a really narrative development.
So anyway, that didn't really happen.
I did those two drafts, so they're sitting around until I can figure out what to do with them, because I've been focused on the other book.
But I did those two, a 40% cut and a 70% cut, and I guess I'll have to figure out what to do with it after this is all over.
Yeah, put them out as a twofer special or something.
So, all right.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time this afternoon, Jim.
It's been great to catch up with you here.
My pleasure.
All right, y'all, that is the great Jim Powell.
And are you still at Cato?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
Jim Powell of the Cato Institute, author of FDR's Folly, Wilson's War, Bully Boy, that's TR, of course, The Triumph of Liberty, and also Greatest Emancipations, How the West Abolished Slavery, as well.
So check out all of that stuff at his Amazon page.
Stop by ScottHorton.org to get to Amazon on your way there, as long as you're buying a bunch of Powell books.
And thank you, guys.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archive.
Sign up for the podcast feed and all that at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
Thanks.
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