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All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out all my archives, 4,000 and something interviews at scotthorton.org.
And check out the big new deal.
It's not that new, but it's kind of new.
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Introducing the great libertarian scholar and writer, Joseph Stromberg.
I've been reading him for many years now, used to write for antiwar.com, a lot of really great articles for antiwar.com back in the day.
And he's a something at the Independent Institute where he writes sometimes.
And he often also writes for the Future of Freedom, that's the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
You have to subscribe.
It's fff.org slash subscribe.
It's really cheap, and it's totally worth it.
It's really great.
You know, you get Hornberger and Bovard, and you get Stromberg.
And this one is really great.
It's called The New Deal, Part Two, which I missed Part One, sorry.
But anyway, this is what I'm most interested in.
The New Deal, Part Two, Foreign Policy.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Joe?
Oh, very good, Scott.
And thank you for having me and various compliments you just made.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I'm very happy to have you on the show.
I tried a couple of times in the past, but it's kind of unbelievable that this is the first time we've actually had a chance to do an interview.
But very happy to have you here.
And seriously, everybody, go and click Joe's name in the right-hand margin at Antiwar.com.
There's so much great stuff there.
Truman Treaties and the Bricker Amendment.
There's one for you for the ages, guys, at Antiwar.com.
All right.
So wow, this is really a great essay.
I hope I picked up on all the best points you were trying to make here.
I think I pretty much did.
We'll see if I can remember them all.
But well, geez, we'll just start where you start.
The New Deal was in serious political trouble by 1937.
Why is that?
Well, they hadn't fixed the economy.
And this was their central job and the central claim of what they were trying to accomplish.
They hadn't fixed it.
The country enters a sort of secondary recession on top of the lingering Big Depression.
And the election returns show that.
They're already losing support, at least in Congress, in 1936.
They lose a lot more in 1938.
And while they may still have a political coalition, they're worried about their political prospects because the economy is visibly still in very bad condition.
And so you say their big idea was, I guess, you know, at the beginning of the Depression, they had passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
And I guess a lot of the other countries in the world all turned toward protectionism back then.
And that had made the Depression that much worse.
And I guess you're saying that they never really had fixed that, well, from a libertarian point of view, fix that by opening trade back up up until this point.
And then at this point, they decided, man, we have to get at least open up foreign markets to our exports somehow.
Oh, well, right.
And this was also just an inherited idea that policymakers would think about anyway.
I mean, Henry Wallace's book, he's the secretary of agriculture under the New Deal, his book, New Frontiers in 1934, he's got a whole bunch of ideas about how to fix American farming.
But one of the key things that emerges is, of course, to find more foreign markets for exports.
So some people are already predisposed for this solution.
Now, with trade blocs forming and the various European empires putting up tariffs around a huge portion of the world because they have those colonies, it's becoming clear that there may be some political risks involved in trying to find the foreign markets, but they're still going to want to find them.
We're going to run into Japan, which has a similar problem also in the Pacific, if we insist on trying to enter those markets and so on with political support for the exports.
Right.
You're saying, yeah, because they didn't have anywhere else to target, really, at that point.
Basically, they wanted to kick open the Chinese door, but they were already at least partially occupied by Japan at that point, right?
Yeah, northern portions of China and the Japanese are bogged down, but they can't come up with a better idea than to keep doing it.
But they're in a bind, too, because they've been taught that they should industrialize and export, and now they're subject to the same restrictions that Britain and France and all the other Dutch and all these other imperial powers are putting on trade.
And this is right in their backyard.
All those places that the Europeans control, they can't trade with them as well now.
So and then, I guess at this point, you say, too, even the Midwestern type businessmen had their own interest in signing on, basically, with the Rooseveltian economic policy, which up until that point, they hadn't before?
I don't know.
I don't think that they changed as rapidly as the other people did.
I mean, you still got the Chicago Tribune, which is kind of a symbol for their opinions opposing intervention down to Pearl Harbor.
So I don't think they changed particularly rapidly, or very many of them, really.
But the northeastern business bloc, people in oil and exports of farm machinery and the cotton guys, the cotton brokers in the south, and so on, they're very interested in pursuing this open-door policy.
When you got all the grain in the Midwest, right, but that wasn't, it didn't matter as much to them?
I don't think it's as much in play.
They've got a large domestic market, and for a lot of these people, that was their main interest.
I don't, well, I wouldn't say that nobody in that field was not on board, but I don't know offhand that very many were.
All right.
So, oh, yeah, you talk about here, too, how, yeah, it's not just all about kicking open the door to American exports.
There's a lot of raw materials overseas that they want to get to.
So you really have at this point, I think you even say where these guys, especially the Anglophiles, who loved the British so much, were really the first ones in line to want to push them out of the way and replace them as the world empire here.
Yeah, it's a paradoxical thing.
They do love it, but they think once we've learned all the tricks and our people have been trained by MI6, we should run it because we also have the American know-how and so forth, and we should inherit it, and they can be the juniors, right, they can be the junior partner, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, and after all, we got a lot more raw materials and a lot more, as they say, human resources to use as well.
So it kind of makes sense.
All right, so now.
Can I go back and correct one thing?
Sure.
Well, it wouldn't be true to say that nobody in agriculture, because obviously Henry Wallace himself is a spokesman, is saying that agriculture needs these foreign markets.
And if you go back into the 1880s, the idea is already around.
So I suppose we'll have to take the grain exporters as part of this coalition.
Well, it's really my error.
I conflated the Midwestern farmers with the Midwestern industrialists, and those aren't necessarily the same faction.
Yeah, the people who actually do the exporting once the grain is harvested are different people than the farmers, so it'd be hard to say who exactly other than exporters would be interested, although farmers, I suppose, depend somewhat on the exports for the income.
But again, I don't know there's a groundswell amongst your average Midwesterner for being in another war, I'd say it's somewhat the opposite.
But sure, the grain people wouldn't be part of an export coalition.
And then, well, so, I mean, the war was just fought to stop pure evil in the world, right?
So what does that have to do with all these economic policies one way or the other here?
I mean, I guess it makes sense that there was this policy of kind of military Keynesianism and make work in a military kind of manner.
I could see that, you know, Democrats doing that to appease the right that, you know, basically diverting some of their welfare state into, you know, by way of the military state sort of a thing.
That makes sense.
But but then the Japanese attacked us and then Hitler was killing everybody and conquered all of Europe.
And so America had to go save the day, right?
What am I missing?
Well, of course, it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
But as far as as far as Japan is concerned, we were on a collision course, and this has some deep background.
I mean, we sort of opened Japan up to trade by sending some gunboats in, what, 1858.
But once the Japanese had been forced into that, then they realized they should modernize because otherwise they could suffer the fate of China.
So they began building a modern army advised by the British.
I'm sorry, the Germans.
And then they build a modern navy advised mostly by the British.
And they're becoming a regional power.
They fight to our short war with China.
And then they attacked Port Arthur, proving how backward the Russian military was.
And at this point, Theodore Roosevelt intervenes to make peace between Japan and Russia, and he's leaning toward the British view that the the Russians are the problem and the Far East are a problem.
So he tends to pretty clearly favor Japan and helps their general diplomatic position at the time.
And in the 1920s, we talked the British out of renewing their treaty with Japan.
They had an agreement during World War One that effectively made Japan a part of the Allied coalition.
So they're on the good side, so to speak, in World War One.
And we put pressure on the British to not do that anymore.
And a restraining hand on Japan has been removed.
And then they bog themselves down for their own reasons, I suppose, in China.
And they're pretty vicious there, and they see it as part of having to break out, to have more territory and resources and realize their economic destiny.
And of course, with the Depression underway, they are closed off from even Asian markets to some extent by the imperial powers.
And they're initially viewed as a kind of vanguard of Asian liberation by the other Asians until the Asians have to deal with them.
Then they find out they're not too agreeable when they're on the scene.
Now, our interest in it is that for a very long time, Americans have been calculating that if we can sell every Chinese person a pair of shoes, that would be a lot of shoes.
It's just regarded as a huge market, provided they had any money to buy these things with.
That part wasn't really filled in.
I mean, as far back as the American Revolution, you've got Yankee Clippers going all the way around to get silk and other valuables from China.
The idea that there's some big, stupendous trade to be had in China is very old.
You begin to hear more of it by the 1840s.
One reason people want to build railroads.
Once we have California, is to open up the window on the Pacific.
This is why we annexed certain territories in the war with Spain that ostensibly was about Cuba.
But we acquired the Hawaiian Islands, which had been waiting for us to acquire anyway, because there'd been a so-called revolution whose leaders wanted to be brought in.
These were the pineapple growers and so on, who had overthrown the Queen of Hawaii and wanted to come in and Grover Cleveland ignored them.
Well, in 1898, it's a good time to annex Hawaii.
And we also acquire the Philippine Islands as a jumping off point, too, that marks to China.
The only problem there, of course, is that the European powers have been carving out their own private areas of trade.
So Britain, Germany, everybody's got a share of influence.
Even Belgium's got, I think, a hand in it.
So we then recommended to them this idea of the open door, that we should all just get along and everybody trade freely in all of China.
And it was at that point in time, basically just an aspiration.
But the idea is put out there that the world owes it to us to let us sell our goods and maybe even invest everywhere with no political restrictions.
And at that time, we can't put much force behind it.
But it's a standing theme ever after, even down in the 20s, down through the 20s, when there's not much interest in playing a big world role in the public administration that couldn't do much that they wanted to and so on.
So that's a factor in the Far East.
Europe is harder to sort out.
But it would be hard to say that it was a purely a matter of philanthropy for Britain and France to declare war after Britain made a guarantee to Poland that it couldn't possibly keep.
They were drawing a line in the sand.
They had concluded that they had to stop Hitler as a threat to their empire.
So he wasn't, it wasn't his interest, but he was a threat to the balance of power in Europe and so forth.
And this is based, I guess, on observing his behavior.
If you go back to the Munich conference in 1938, of course, this is a point by which the British had been feeling, started to feel very bad about the Versailles Treaty and realized it had created a bunch of problems that any German politician would try to overcome.
And so they, France and Britain practically handed him Czechoslovakia on a platter.
And this is now the great case of they gave in.
Well, no, they thought they were doing something that would keep this fellow happy.
And when his next set of demands were made against Poland or of Poland, they decided they had to draw a line in the sand somewhere where they would keep on rearming.
And if he did invade Poland, then it would be war.
And let me ask you a question about that, too.
And I'm sorry, it's a little bit off topic from the the piece here, but the way Pat Buchanan writes it in his book, Churchill, is that when Hitler absorbed Czechoslovakia, however you call it, there is a coup de main kind of a situation, right, where he just kind of rolled right in there without opposition.
When he did that, that Neville Chamberlain basically had a little panic attack and or or just got all red in the face and in an emotional reaction, then in there handed over the war guarantee to Poland, which basically made it their decision whether Britain would go to war or not at that point, and that everyone else in the cabinet was against it and said he was crazy.
And what was he thinking?
And it was only because Hitler had embarrassed him because of the whole piece in our time and all of that and had made a fool out of him that he got so angry.
But, you know, ultimately, it wasn't even British strategic thinking.
It was the, you know, the personal decision of an upset and embarrassed man one night at the expense of British planned out strategy before that.
Well, that's possible.
I have read that book a number of times.
That point doesn't stick in my memory, however.
Suppose I can pull it off the shelf here.
But that's conceivable as big policies have been put in motion by smaller considerations.
Let's see where we can find them.
Well, so let me ask you about then.
So, you know, what all this has to do with the New Deal, because that is the title.
Right.
But, of course, World War II didn't just take place in Europe and Japan.
It did take place here.
Only, you know, not that we were subject to V2 rockets or anything like that.
But things really did change here in the United States in terms of the national government's relationship with the states and with the individual, with the economy.
OK, well, yeah, let's take that on.
Well, first of all, I guess it's important to realize how Americans had come to feel about World War I.
And there had been a number of memoirs and revelations coming out all through the 20s.
And it created a certain popular feeling.
And I have a quote here, if I may.
All right.
So in reference to these revelations and memoirs, the quote is Proofs such as these that our leaders had shamelessly lied in their protestations of neutrality were published in the 20s and 30s.
This explains the passion of the anti-war movement before the Second World War much better than the imaginary Nazi sympathies or anti-Semitism nowadays invoked by ignorant interventionist writers.
And that, of course, is the late Ralf Reiko, who will miss quite a tremendous amount, as you know, just died in December.
But that's a quote from Ralf Reiko's assessment of World War I.
So we have a lot of people who think we've been burned once by getting into World War I, and that may have caused the problems that Europe is now trying to solve in a similar fashion.
So we have a great reluctance to be hoodwinked again.
That's just a good part of the popular mood and why there is a persistent opposition movement, even into 1941, when a lot of dire things are happening that Roosevelt can point to and say that it proves that we have to give him more power to keep us out of war or whatever he has to do.
So there's a whole background, there's a whole generation of sociologists, for example, who had felt hoodwinked by our being in World War I.
A lot of them go over and are in the liberal wing, so to speak, of the anti-war movement.
There's John Dewey, the famous philosopher.
He opposed intervention in World War II and people don't remember that.
There's socialists, there's businessmen, there's a whole spectrum of people who are opposed to being in another war because they just think it can't possibly turn out well.
And by the way, can you give me a ballpark estimate how many Americans died in World War I?
Oh, I think it's somewhere over 100,000, but that's the kind of issue where I tend to rely on Colco and people that keep all those numbers in view.
But if the Vietnam War was 58,000 over 10 years, and this was, I think that's right, by the way, 100 and something thousand Americans.
Maybe 25 young.
Yeah.
In just a short amount of time, in just a year and a half, something like that.
So this was, I guess people can imagine, 4,500 Americans died in Iraq War II.
So imagine how, you know, just think of how traumatic that was for the society going through that.
So compare that to World War I and you have an idea of the scale of the kind of reaction that the American people had to have had to that, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think everybody practically must have known somebody was a dead or wounded veteran.
I mean, it was a very large effort.
And plus, people may have participated at a time or kept their heads down, but I think they also remembered the repression during World War I and didn't want to go through that again.
So there's a whole set of dimensions here.
And then there was a feeling that we didn't even get paid back for the war loans, which frankly is not an issue to me because the money doesn't come to people like me, but it would go to J.P. Morgan.
OK, fine.
But he didn't get those guys didn't get paid in full either.
But that's what you get when you write checks out of nothing sometimes.
Right.
But but yeah, so there's a whole background.
So Roosevelt's having to work around this organized opposition once the America First Committee ends and the what is it, the Keep America Out of War Congress, which was a more liberal, non-interventionist group, but they often overlap.
And Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin would speak to either kind of group.
You had a you had a whole congressional bloc like in the upper Midwest and other parts of the Midwest in particular, who have been former progressives of the Western type who were all opposed to being in the war.
And here and there, you've got a New York congressman.
It's not just the Midwest and the upper Midwest.
So he has to proceed carefully, but he's already promised the king of England before there was a war that we would help out.
You know, when when George VI visited the United States, he Roosevelt got on his maps and they planned war strategy for a war they thought was coming, but hadn't yet actually arrived.
So his orientation is clear.
But he had to be fairly careful and he even had to run as his own anti-war candidate, you know, in 1940.
And so and so this is what if I can go on with this theme for a minute, this is what so angered Charles Baird, who was in the one of the non-interventionists who had been hadn't opposed World War One.
And this is why he wrote that very large book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, which came out in 1948.
It was his last book before he died.
And he gives a long summary toward the end of things Roosevelt did that misrepresented his actual policy, and he thought that that is at least a rather bad way to proceed.
And then he goes on to a nice summary of the gains in presidential power that accrued if Roosevelt claimed if his claims were all going to be taken as precedence and so forth.
So he's got a great critique of the presidency as we now know it in Charles Baird's last book.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty from medieval history to the Ron Paul Revolution.
Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
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Yeah, well, and so once Pearl Harbor did happen and they got us into the war, can you talk about what changed in terms of control of the economy?
And I guess the theory goes, of course, like Bob Higgs ratchet effect that, well, of course, some of the wartime economic controls and New Deal controls were rolled back, but only some.
And then, of course, Truman kept most of them and then had his own Cold War and his own war in Korea and his own, you know, clampdowns, what have you.
And then once Ike Eisenhower, the Republican, came and didn't repeal it, it was all solidified from then on, you know, to whatever degree it was left.
But, you know, if you could sort of compare how it worked from before the war to during the war to then after the war again, you know.
Well, partly it's this thing I call the accordion model of the Constitution.
So the accordion is, you know, closed.
And that's the size of the government and then the war comes and then it goes out.
And then after the war, it's supposed to go back to the starting point, but it never quite gets there.
And it's the opposite with civil liberties.
They're supposed to shrink during the war and come back to their full pre-war size.
They don't ever quite come back to their full pre-war dimensions in terms of cases that have been heard and decided and so forth.
So it is upward and it may vary, but it was already noticeable after World War One that when some of the most of those powers were given up and a lot of those administrative bodies were dismantled.
But as soon as the Depression hit, everybody said, well, this is an emergency.
Let's do what we did during the war.
So suddenly all these things like the War Industries Board are being invoked as possible peacetime precedents, if you can justify the policy as an emergency policy.
So, of course, when we're in World War Two, finally, all the precedents of World War One, all the precedents going back to Lincoln, for that matter, are suddenly usable again.
And Roosevelt starts going around on his own motion, disinventing new government departments.
And then Congress has to hurry up and put a statute underneath this department that the president has created.
They have to go past the statute to make it appear legitimate.
He does that time and time again with things he wants to have administered.
So you have a War Labor Board, you've got the War, whatever the Industrial Board was called.
It's not called the War Industries Board in the second war, but all these economic regulatory, you've got the price control organization, you've got propaganda, the Office of War Information, all of these things are all put together.
And, of course, rationing, although it's been suggested that that was just a matter of symbolism, but price control, all these things are put down and then you got the War Labor Board.
I really like that way, the rationing as symbolism.
In other words, there is no real need to ration anything at all.
In fact, if anything is probably counterproductive, economically speaking.
But you've got to make people feel the sacrifice by depriving them of, you know, meat and things that they need.
Well, that's certainly what Leonard Liggio used to think, and he was a great student of this period.
Yeah, I don't want to dwell on that too long, but I just thought that was worth putting a highlight on.
So if I can leap forward again.
Yes, of course.
OK, well, it's so much it's hard to summarize.
I'll mention a book.
Edward S. Corwin was a constitutional historian.
They had fairly liberal and centralizing views and even advised Roosevelt's administration apparently on the court packing bill.
After the war was over, he had seen enough.
And he wrote this scathing book called Total War and the Constitution, 1947, in which he listed a great many of the things we've been talking about and the court decisions and how the court did not rein anything in in particular or at all.
And even the occasional occupation of a big department store, you know, if they had failed to comply with some restriction and the.
I don't I guess there was a blackout in New York City so that the German submarines couldn't come up and bombard the city, although submarines really don't bombard anything.
I don't know what that was supposed to do.
Again, maybe more symbolism.
But Corwin's book is a very good beginning point for studying the the degree of wartime government participation in everybody's life.
And another book is The New Dealers War by Thomas Fleming, who also has a similar book on World War One is that I don't know, maybe you'd call him a popular historian.
But anyway, he does the very lengthy books on these subjects.
So Thomas Fleming.
Let's see.
Oh, no, no.
I mentioned the one one or one court decision here.
Wickard versus Filburn.
Yeah, about that one, I mean, it's one that a lot of libertarians know, but it's also one that non libertarians become libertarians when they learn about it.
Well, it's a case where it was in 1942 determined that a farmer couldn't exchange his federal week quota even for his own consumption, because if even that little bit of weight was taken off the market and he didn't have to go buy it from someone else or however else, however, he might otherwise get the weight, it might microscopically affect prices and thus might microscopically defeat national planning goals.
And I have a I'm quoting a historian here, Adelstein, Richard P.
Adelstein, who says it's the Supreme Court, thus, quote, wrote his own version of the general equilibrium theory into the Commerce Clause and brought virtually all forms of private activity, economic or otherwise, within the regulatory reach of the federal government.
Unquote, and so that seems to me to be an important case.
I mean, and people always talk about the US versus Schechter-Paltry in 1935, because in that case, of course, said, well, Congress has delegated too much power in this National Industrial Recovery Act is invalid.
Well, they never said how much Congress could delegate.
And during the war, they're much more generous.
So this kind of economic precedent is this decision is kind of thing that might have saved the United States.
Had we been at war in 1935, there's just a tremendous amount of implicit power if they can tell a farmer he can't grow a little extra weight for his own home consumption.
Right.
I mean, I think that's what's great about it, right, is this is the the only time this is the first time that anybody claimed with a straight face or on that level on the Supreme Court.
This is the first time that anybody claimed with a straight face or on that level on the Supreme Court claimed that the Constitution granted Congress to regulate virtually any economic activity.
I mean, as you're saying, this isn't even about selling wheat to your next door neighbor over the fence without paying your sales tax or something.
This is about eating your own wheat.
And so but then that's the joke, right, is in granting the court just basically inventing and granting the government this much power over the economy.
They pick the most ridiculous example possible to do it.
It's like a joke.
It's like they're just trying to highlight the degree to which they were actually overturning the Constitution and waging a revolution against it.
You know, as though anyone ever thought back in the 1780s or 90s that the national government had the authority to tell a man whether he could eat his own wheat or not, as though that was the republic they'd created.
Yeah.
And even the high federalists like Hamilton, I'm I doubt that even they thought that this was how far the.
Commerce clause could extend, they mostly probably had in mind that it would justify a tax here and there.
I don't think they.
Wanted to micromanage the economy to any degree.
Other than the financial sector, possibly, or anyway, they didn't want to do this, I'm fairly certain.
Yeah.
Well, certainly, you know, it's an unforgettable kind of a thing, you know, once you learn about it, at least was for me, has been.
All right.
So.
Now, then, after the war, I guess they got rid of some of these things.
And yet.
Truman, you know, George Carlin, actually, in a great interview, told this story as good as anybody, I think, about how it was a couple of years after the war.
And then Truman, he decided, no, we got to keep the whole war system going and launch the big phony Cold War against the Soviet Union and all of this.
It's been told a lot of ways.
But George Carlin, he was the best, I think.
Well, yeah.
Wait, let me say the way I learned about this.
And in fact, I just read a quote about this the other day was George Kennan, the theorist of the containment policy, whatever, at the end of the Soviet Union was lamenting the fact, Joe, that, well, we're going to have to find an enemy to keep this system going, because if we abolish the permanent war economy, it would just be too much of a shock to the people and the system and everything would just completely fall apart.
So we've got to keep this thing going forever, he lamented.
And apparently this has been the thinking all along is that we built up such a huge part of the economy from, as you write here, from a state of depression.
They built up a huge segment of the economy based on a system of war.
And now they can't cancel it because it's just too big of a dirty snowball rolling downhill.
So look out, Iran or whoever.
Well, that's the thing, if you look at the postwar writings of John T.
Flynn, I mean, he gets sidetracked and he starts defending Joe McCarthy.
He gets into some strange corners.
But there is a theme that continues down through a lot of Flynn's later work, and that is the economic aspect of a semi-permanent war economy, which he'd already talked about in 1944.
And as we go marching, he sees this trend continuing down into the Cold War.
He's still complaining about this kind of thing in the early 60s, right before his death.
He wasn't very welcome at National Review, but yeah, and he's not the only one.
I mean, there's a whole literature now on the wartime planning, followed by the end of war panic, where the policymakers are wondering what levers they can use to get the economy to start up again without this stimulus.
And a lot of them actually don't mind having a substitute for World War II, so the Cold War is not quite as serious and it's not actually a war.
But if you can spend a comparable amount of money forever, that's a good thing.
And there's just no shortage of analysis of that whole dimension of the Cold War.
Well, and it seems like nowadays, I mean, you have, and I guess I don't know exactly how typical this is, but up the road from Austin, Texas, where I live, is Fort Hood, which is actually the biggest military base in America.
So there's a town adjacent to it, Killeen, that basically, you know, I don't know exactly how things would be without that base.
But I know if you took that base away, it sure would be a shock to their economy.
And in fact, I mean, really, isn't there some entire giant segment of the American population who them and their entire families are dependent on?
And I'm not just talking about infantry, but just everybody connected to the thing.
I mean, it is a huge welfare state program, the American warfare state.
And I mean, I don't know, when I talk to Ron Paul or Jacob Hornberger, those are two libertarians I've asked in the past, economists, well, especially Ron as an economist.
Well, how shocking to the system would that be?
And they certainly both have answered.
I think Bob Higgs has also answered that no problem at all, because all you'd be doing is freeing up all this wealth and especially all that intellectual capital, all those engineers now free to actually help distribute goods and services to people instead of blowing stuff up.
But I guess people are afraid to change.
You know, and I just wonder how much you think that that was sort of really a big part of the Cold War, even back then, was just, we can't let it collapse.
Yeah, and once it got going and the congressmen were right on board after the mid 50s, they still had this congressional block that got just more and more was outvoted.
But you initially had a kind of old right block symbolized by Taft, but Taft was always willing to compromise a bit.
But over time, they're just worn down.
And they're also replaced, like Congressman Howard Buffett of Omaha.
He didn't run for reelection in 1952 because the Republican, I don't know what you'd call them at the time, conservatives, whatever you'd call them, decided to either believe in the Cold War or just they found it useful.
And plus, they could then attack the other party for being soft on the communists.
For whatever reason, there was a transformation of the right, as Rothbard talked about, and also the congressional.
But once everybody was kind of largely in agreement about the Cold War.
They just worked out that everybody could get Cold War spending and he's in his district.
And so the argument was made that, well, we can't have all this important defense stuff and munitions being built in one or two places.
That would be a target for the enemy.
So we need to spread it all over the place.
It needs to be spent in Boston and California and everywhere they could think of, which is pretty much any congressman would think of spending some in his district.
So they decentralized defense spending geographically to make it politically viable.
And Southern politicians were pretty good at getting it.
South Carolina, Florida, all sorts of places got some of these bases or projects.
But the Californians were very good at getting military spending.
I mean, they had mayors of cities in California who had a kind of had their own diplomatic relations with the Pentagon.
So this became a huge factor for a lot of places and regions.
So, yeah, you can't minimize it at all.
Yeah, that was something that Chalmers Johnson always emphasized was the spreading out of of the industry all over the place where there's virtually and they go congressional district by congressional district, as you say, any any rationalization that they come up with, you know, after the fact, notwithstanding, it's all about keeping that consensus in Congress to keep the war dollars flowing first.
Oh, yeah.
The book, by the way, a very good book is by Roger W.
Lutgen called Fortress California 1992, but he doesn't just talk about California, but that is his focus because so much defense spending took place there.
So Lutgen, all it's worth a read.
So tell me who's William Henry Chamberlain?
Oh, OK.
He had been a radical, he did a book on the Bolshevik Revolution, but like everybody else, by the time he did his book, he was disillusioned with it.
So it was critical.
So he was a well-known writer throughout the 20s and 30s, and he was a non interventionist as we're coming down toward the choice of getting into World War Two or not.
So should I read the quote out loud here?
Yeah.
Well, OK, this is actually not his words, but anyway, Chamberlain thought that on the broad notion of defense, as held by the interventionists, the War Party would soon declare possession of Afghanistan or Tibet essential to American safety.
And he wrote this in the American Mercury in December 1940.
That's so funny.
And that was his hyperbole that, yeah, right.
Next, we'll have to go to Afghanistan, you know, that's where we're headed now.
Right.
Well, you wouldn't believe it, would he?
I don't know.
I guess he just probably shrugged like the rest of us at this point.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on the show, Joe.
Great piece.
Everybody got to subscribe to the Future Freedom.
The Future Freedom, it's futurefreedomff.org slash subscribe to subscribe to the journal.
And this one is, I guess, a month or so old now.
It's called The New Deal, Part Two, Foreign Policy, and it'll end up running on the rest of the page, the other part of the page at the Future Freedom Foundation website at some point.
But right now it's a subscription only article, The New Deal, Part Two, Foreign Policy by Joe Stromberg.
Thanks again, Joe.
Appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
All right, Sean.
That's the show.
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