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Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, you guys.
How's it going?
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I figured I'd play a little music to celebrate.
I got Sheldon Richman here in the studio with me.
Hey, Sheldon, how are you?
In the studio.
And I'll say that again now that I hit the button on your mic.
I said I am doing great, and yes, I am indeed in the studio.
Cool.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Happy to have you here.
Great to be here.
And thank you for dinner last night.
It was very good.
Pleasure.
All right.
So, yeah, man, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show, archives at scotthorton.org, at libertarianinstitute.org.
And, of course, follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show, et cetera, like that.
And speaking of the Libertarian Institute, Sheldon, we should talk about the Libertarian Institute here for a minute.
The future of it, the past.
Let's start with the past of it.
Last summer, I says to myself, I know I got an idea for doing what I always wanted to do, which was some kind of libertarian project with William Norman Grigg.
And I always thought he or me and him both could use a jab and an institution to associate ourselves with.
And yet, yeah, what am I ever going to do about it, you know?
And then somewhere in there, it occurred to me, Sheldon, bring Sheldon on.
He'll be the third guy.
And then the three of us will be the Libertarian Institute.
And it'll be the greatest thing, man, because I'm the foreign policy guy.
And Will Grigg, of course, is the criminal justice guy.
And coming from the right, not that he still was a conservative in any way, really, but coming from the right.
And then you, of course, are the jack of all trades and libertarianism, historian, economist and polemicist and ideologist and all kinds of great things.
And so what a great new institute we could have.
And then, of course, Jared LaBelle from Taxpayers United stepped up and said, well, I'll help you run the thing because I know how to run things like this.
So thank God for that.
But now Will Grigg is gone, Sheldon.
So, I mean, I think we still have an institute, sort of.
We got a website.
But kind of gigantic hole in the whole program here with the loss of our dear friend.
So I don't know, what do you think about where we're at and what we should do?
Well, yeah, that was a huge loss and his shoes are going to be very, are big.
We're very large, be hard to fill.
But I think we're still on track.
And Will, of course, I think would be applauding us or is applauding us.
And so I'm optimistic that the institute is going to get better known.
The website, wonderful people got that going and without my having to lift a finger.
So that's always nice.
Great things without any effort on my part.
So it's a great website.
We have great original articles, but also the best of stuff that's been posted all around.
It saves you the trouble of shopping around, looking for the best libertarian analysis and news.
And so I think there's no reason not to be optimistic.
We'll carry on.
It's like I said, Will's loss is a great one.
But I think we're still on track.
But it doesn't mean we can't carry on, which I'm sure is what he wants.
Yeah.
Well, one of our first projects is we're going to put out a book of Will's.
And he had already collected, you know, we'd been discussing this and he had already gotten together his collection of articles about Chris Tapp, who had been so unfairly and falsely convicted of a murder in, I think, 1996.
And Will had written this series of articles.
I forget how many, a couple dozen, maybe something.
Anyway, but we have the compilation and that's, you know, our first real project is going to be publishing my book here, hopefully in just a few weeks now, my Afghanistan book.
And then right after that, we're going to publish Will's book about the life, the stolen life of Christopher Tapp, which I guess will be the title.
And then we're putting out a couple of books of compilations of your articles on which topics now?
One is economic analysis, which I think I'm calling market state and autonomy.
And there's a title, there's an essay.
I like this guy.
There's an essay by that title that I wrote a few years ago.
So that'll be the title essay.
But I have other yeah, I have other tentative collections also dealing with history.
The Constitution book, which came out a year ago, was kind of the first in a planned series of compilations, which it also has new material.
It wasn't just compilation.
Right.
And I'm sorry, refresh my memory, the title of that.
That is really important book.
That is America's Counter-Revolution.
The Constitution Revisited.
It's available on Amazon and also in Kindle form.
The case for should have kept the Articles of Confederation and not gone for Washington's Constitution.
Even they were a little too statist.
Yeah.
Well, Sheldon, he's a radical.
Yeah, so that should be good.
And yeah, you're right that the website is great.
And I'm sorry, I forgot the name of the company right now.
Jamie from Green something or other that did the thing.
I've been meaning to cut a spot to run on the show about her company.
What a great job she does building websites for folks, as you guys can tell, the Libertarian Institute site.
And, you know, we also this is something that I guess I hadn't had much of opportunity to talk about is we've got, you know, not exactly brand new and exclusive writers, but we kind of have a rising new generation of libertarian writers that are writing for us at the Libertarian Institute.
James Holbrooks, who also writes at anti-media is doing really great stuff, especially focusing on Asia issues lately.
And of course, Eric Shuler from the Daily Face Palm has written a lot of great stuff for us.
Brad Hoff from Levant Report.
And who am I forgetting?
Saved my life here, man.
There's a couple of more.
Craig Cantoni, of course, he's not a young guy, but he's kind of an unknown, but a great libertarian writer you can find on our blog pretty regularly.
Yeah, I mean, it's a great sign that you're recruiting people that I don't even know.
The names are unfamiliar.
That's that's a sign of growth.
I mean, there was a time, you know, before when you were a little kid when I probably knew everybody in the movement.
So it's a good sign that I don't know everybody in the movement.
I mean, Rothbard used to say the whole movement could fit in his living room, remember?
Right.
I was pleased to be able to say later in life that that was not the case.
Right.
Well, you know, we're one we're running one right now by Zach Sorenson.
And you may have heard me talking about this, Sheldon.
This is the Air Force captain who quit and got CEO status and left the military, left the Air Force.
And you know what it was?
He was flying a C-130 full of weapons on a delivery to Saudi Arabia, presumably to be used in the genocide in Yemen.
And he was listening.
I think it was he was listening to an audio book of Ralph Rako talking about World War One.
And at some point it sunk in like, wait a minute, this whole thing is wrong.
Oh, my God, what am I doing?
That's a great story.
Isn't that great?
Ralph Rako on World War One.
That was what got him.
And so but now check this out.
Did you see the article today on the site?
It's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
It's 3,000 words or something.
And it's libertarianism can offer clear answers about war and peace to the others, not just when we talk to each other.
But the libertarian answer really is the best way to explain this to other people, because as he puts it, after all, we're Americans and all Americans are sort of kind of pseudo libertarians in a way, because this is our the creed of the Declaration of Independence right there hanging on the wall before progressivism.
This is what Americans pretended to believe was that people were born free.
And so and that it's our highest, our highest ideal, even among people who don't really believe in it.
They still invoke it, of course, you know.
So so it's just a great piece.
And I'm really I'm really glad that we have it.
And I hope I'm glad he's out of the military.
I hope we can continue to run stuff by him in the future.
It looks like I think he's going to keep writing.
Excellent.
So yeah, that's a good one.
And then of course, your brand new one is on the site.
I guess we'll get to that in just a second.
And you know what, I should say this too.
Oh, Kyle, I didn't mention Kyle.
He does a great news roundup on the blog every day.
Yep.
Which is definitely worth mentioning.
We're taking submissions.
So sorry, I am kind of jerky and I might say no to you.
But if you want to try to submit an article, you just submit it to editor at libertarianinstitute.org.
And Jared, I or Sheldon will take a look at it.
See if it passes muster and and get it running up on the site.
And you know what?
I mean, assuming I'm not in the world's worst hurry to I'll give constructive criticism.
If I have to reject something, I'll say why and maybe work with you if it's close.
So there you go.
I don't pay.
We don't have any money.
So we can't pay anybody to write for us.
But think of the exposure and think of the glory of being in with the Libertarian Institute from the beginning.
Back before we were the greatest thing in the whole world, Sheldon.
So, I mean, current day.
I admit that I haven't been really present on the blog and at the site as much as I would like.
And that's basically I'm telling myself at least when it's partially true, at least it's because of this book.
I'm trying to get this book knocked out.
I'm going through it one or two more times with the new editor lady who's great.
I'll tell you all about her soon.
And then I'm putting this book out.
And once the book is out, I mean, I guess I'll have new responsibilities there and trying to get rid of the book.
But I plan on being a much greater presence around the Libertarian site and making it feel like a lot more of a home to people where they can hang around and have the build a community in the comment section and all these kind of cool things that it's always what I meant to do.
But we sort of started this thing when I was wrapping up my first draft of the book is kind of bad timing to start an institute, it turns out, especially when you're not a talented writer like myself.
I just have a lot of things I insist on saying.
That's not the same thing.
I've been reading the book.
And so I would say you are a talented writer.
Yeah, but you're reading it after it's been edited like 10 or 12 times or something.
We've gone over and over and over.
But so do you like the thing?
I'm wondering over and over and over.
But so do you like the thing?
I'm wondering what's taking so long.
I thought maybe Sheldon's just bored to tears.
He can't stand.
No, it's just the demands of time.
No, that's not the reason I am.
I am sorry.
I'm guilty of being slow.
Just like it.
I don't care if you don't know.
I definitely liked it.
People, the people out there, you're going to learn a lot about the general war on so called war on terror, but in Afghanistan in particular.
So it's going to be a very important book.
Cool fact filled, but also accessible.
Rad, well, I guess, with us being in the same institute here, it'd be too nepotistic for me to put that blurb on the back.
But right now, I only have two.
So that actually might be on there.
Put anyway.
Yeah, I was already thinking ahead to once it comes out that I'm gonna put special word out to any Afghan vets out there who, you know, actually read and like the thing to go ahead and write a little review on Amazon.
Because it's pretty easy to anticipate that it'll come under attack to be nice if some Afghan war vets were saying that, you know, he's kind of got a point.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
We'll see.
Yeah, I don't know.
All right.
So hey, let's talk about Korea for a minute.
We should.
You've got this great piece.
And look, you know, my job, if I have one is the opinion editor of anti war.com.
And so I read basically all the views that anybody's writing about Korea that have any kind of anti war band at all.
I print a lot of them.
And I link to a lot of them.
And I reject a lot of them too.
But this is really comprehensive.
In fact, I should say, Sheldon, I think, you know, I probably run 10 or 12 articles in the last few weeks, that are sort of attempting to do what you have succeeded in doing here, which is going back to the 1990s and telling it right about how it is that we're in this mess.
I mean, it's about the 1950s.
Actually, well, yeah, that's true, too.
But I mean, the deal is, of course, just like with Saddam and Koresh, and with whoever, with any dictator, it's easy to say with Assad, whoever, it's easy to say, look at what a maniac this guy is, because especially to libertarians, anybody making themselves the boss of a bunch of other people that especially totalitarian dictator of a state is going to be an enemy of ours.
But built in with that is, you know, almost always, is that these people are so evil that they are have broken into cartoonish level supervillainy, which is itself insane, psychopathic, and most of all, irrational, and therefore, leaves us with no choice but to resort to force because there's no one to negotiate with, as the Israelis would say.
And so that's what I think a big part of what you're taking on in this story, too, is here's this guy, Kim Jong Un, do you have any good words to say about Kim Jong Un, Sheldon, or what is it we need to understand about this guy?
Well, I'm not a I'm not a Kim puppet.
You're not on the payroll.
No, I'm not on the payroll.
Okay.
Putin didn't put you up to this.
I'm not sure I'd want their currency.
Anyway.
Yeah, I do have $100 trillion Zimbabwe.
I do, too.
Right, right down there, your feet.
I got one autographed by Ron Paul, actually.
Mine's not autographed.
So yours is worth more than mine.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, when I wrote this article, I actually approached this article, the way I think I approach all articles, I wanted to explain the situation to myself.
That's how I approach something.
So I needed to start looking at, you know, the Korean War, what the US did it to the North Koreans in that war, and then what has happened ever since.
And so in explaining it to me, I hope I also explained it.
Obviously, I wanted to be as clear as I could be for myself.
So I hope that means it's very clear to other people.
And I've gotten a few compliments on Facebook about it being clear.
So I'm very happy about that.
Yeah, it really is a great piece.
I mean that when I say in comparison to all the rest of the Korea pieces I've been reading lately, finally, somebody nailed this correctly.
A lot of people have gotten most of it, but they missed one big point or another, that kind of thing.
So so as to as to the mental state of Kim Jong Un, if you start off, if you start off with your premise, being that this person's a madman, or insane, you know, that's a very, it's a bad way to get started, because you can, you now told yourself, there's no way to attempt to understand things the way he sees things.
And if you do that, now you can't perceive the real effects of your own policies.
And so it's a non starter.
So we have to throw out the assumption that, you know, he's a madman, or Saddam, Saddam was a madman, or Assad's a man, you know, was is a madman, or Gaddafi was a man, we always do that.
And, but that that is counterproductive.
I mean, it's self defeating, and it leads to very dangerous policies, you need you need to start off with the presumption that he's rational by rational, you know, people use that term in many ways.
Rational doesn't mean good.
Rational means subservient to American interests.
What rational really means, at least in sort of the social science economic sense, is that the actor, the person we're talking about, sees a reasonable link between means and his ends.
And so we need to say, what is he trying to accomplish?
What are what does he see his goals as his goals?
And what means is he now adapting to the achievement of those goals?
Once you do that, you're going to get a much better picture.
And I think this certainly works in the case of Kim, he's not just a madman who wants to let fly nuclear tip, you know, armed missiles at San Francisco or Seoul or Tokyo.
Because first of all, why would he do that, that would bring instant destruction to his regime himself, personally, his country.
And the guy wants the guy's a survivor, the guy wants power, which means he needs to have a regime, which means that he needs to have a country, right, a ruler without a country is kind of up the creek, he doesn't have much going on.
Right.
So he doesn't show signs of being suicidal.
And therefore, we can interpret his, what he's been doing in the area of acquiring nuclear weapons as a defensive or deterrent strategy.
Now, you might say, well, what does he have to deter?
What does he have to defend himself against?
Well, once you begin to look at the history, the answer to that becomes very clear than that unit, the United States, the United States has been on a war footing against that regime.
Ever since the war ended in an armistice, which is to say not a formal treaty, the US has been on a continued to be on a war footing in alliance with the South Koreans against North Korea, they hold annual war games that practice invasion and regime change.
And they practice all that stuff.
They know that the North Koreans know that the US obliterated urban centers in North Korea.
During the war, Truman actually brought nuclear weapons over to Korea to see while contemplating whether they would be of practical use in North Korea.
Don't forget, this is Truman, the you know, the veteran of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So he figured he was the only one with nuclear experience under his belt, right?
He's the authority.
Well, they decided they weren't weren't of good use there.
And so instead, they just carpet bombed the hell out of North Korea.
So they the North Koreans have had reason to be afraid of the US for a very long time.
It doesn't matter that.
I mean, for our in our context, for this discussion, it doesn't matter that Kim and his father and his grandfather were brutal to their own population.
That's certainly true.
I'm not challenging that.
But brute brutality doesn't translate to madness doesn't equal madness.
People can be totally rational, immoral, but totally rational and brutal.
They have ends and they see the brutality as as means to the ends.
That's what we have to understand.
Well, I mean, and that's the real threat, right is with so much of American imperialism, the dangers that the American policymakers believe the lies that they tell us.
Because, you know, the story of the madness is always at its root, the explanation for why they would dare oppose us why they would dare resist us.
It must be that they're crazy or irrational or pure evil or hate freedom or some insane thing, because it just couldn't be the way you say that they have anything like a shadow of a legitimate reason to see us as the aggressor.
When everybody knows we're Superman, we're baby Jesus, you know, never hurt nobody who only want to protect humanity from terrible, evil, crazy people like this.
So it and they they beat our whole society in the head with this so much that to put it the other way around, even just for the sake of argument, is like a real subversive, challenging thing.
Like, wow, Sheldon, you're really asking me to see it the North Koreans way for just a minute that all they have to do is think back a few decades to that time the Americans burnt 90 percent of them to death or whatever the number was, deliberately broke their dams and flooded them out, you know, ruined their country.
We're not very good at looking at our the U.S. when I say our, I'm slipping.
Obviously, I'm in the U.S. policy.
We're not very good at looking at U.S. policy from the receiving end of it, the other side of it.
We're not we don't believe that.
So we therefore we don't have a very good, anything like an objective look at that.
I mean, here's a tidbit.
Our very close ally, of course, in that region is Japan, very close.
And of course, the North Koreans know that very well.
The current Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, this is something I only recently learned.
His grandfather was a high ranking military officer in the Japanese military during World War II and was regarded, declared a class A war criminal by the occupying American administration after the war.
Abe reveres this grandfather.
He reveres him.
He's a family hero.
You don't think the North Koreans know that?
This guy fought against Kim Jong-un's grandfather during World War II when the Japanese were occupying and were treating the Koreans rather poorly, to put it mildly.
They know all that.
They know all that stuff.
Americans, of course, know nothing, none of that.
Yeah, well, and of course, Americans also don't usually realize that the whole South Korean regime is based on whatever they call the Vichy government of Korea under Japanese occupation.
They were the sock puppets of the Japanese.
And when the Americans drove the Japanese out, the Americans backed this same group in power to fight against the communists.
Yes, Syngman Rhee, who was South Korea's dictator, recruited the collaborators, the Korean collaborators with the Japanese, for his army and regime.
That's right.
And then, so he stayed in power for, I don't know how long, but the country itself stayed a military dictatorship until what, like 89 or something?
Fairly late, yeah, exactly.
You're right.
So, yeah, people think of it like, oh, yeah, we fought for freedom and democracy.
Yeah, right, just like that time we put the king back on the throne in Kuwait, we fought for freedom and democracy in Korea, you know?
Or when we fought for the French, maintaining the French colony of Vietnam into China until 1954.
And the Americans don't know that stuff.
I was watching a CNN show yesterday, which is talking about music and how it's tied to historical events.
And it was about, it was about 9-11 and the music around 9-11.
And they were, of course, there were some country songs written right around that time to rally Americans.
And I forget the song, I'm not a country fan, so I forget who the composer was.
But one of the lines in it was, he was confessing, I don't know anything about this, I just know, you know, we were hit.
One of the lines is, I admit I don't know Iran from Iraq.
And I was watching the show and I'm shouting out, yeah, that's the problem.
That's a symbol of the problem.
You don't know Iran from Iraq, what are you singing songs for?
How about this?
Because you trust that George W. Bush is going to use his discernment to figure out exactly what should be done here.
We can trust them, it'll be fine.
What are they going to do?
The wrong thing?
Surely not.
Right.
Yeah, boy, weren't those the days, huh?
2002 and three and all that madness and boycotting any musician who dared to say otherwise and all of that stuff is completely crazy.
And, and almost as an exact mathematical proportion somehow to how wrong they all were that, you know, because all this was in support of starting an extra war.
None of this was about attacking Afghanistan.
All this was about the bonus war in Iraq and keeping everybody on the bandwagon for that.
But nobody really suffered for that all the pundits that were all pro war and making predictions of how easy it was going to be are still the people you see on the on the cable news station.
Same for the country music stars.
You never see the war critics.
Do you ever see the war critics?
No, you don't.
Nope.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing is they basically sacrificed Judith Miller, who after all was the most guilty out of all of them.
But that was it, though.
She was the only one who was held accountable for the Iraq war.
Her writing partner is still going strong.
Yeah, Michael Gordon, not only still going strong, done nothing but lie this whole time on the wrong side in a bad way on virtually everything, especially on Iran, because, you know, confusing those two when back when he was, say, blaming Iran for all the roadside bombs in Iraq.
Right.
And going back to the Korean piece, I mean, I watch a lot of CNN much more than I should.
And some MSNBC can't stomach Fox at all.
But you'll never see in the current discussion, and I've given enough chance to know a discussion of the Clinton grand bargain or whatever they called it.
Right.
The agreed framework.
Yeah, the agreed framework.
You have the article open in front of you.
I don't.
I already knew that the agreement framework that that Clinton struck in 1994 with the North Koreans, which had the makings and was an offer made first by the North Koreans.
I guess it was his father, right.
The current Kim's father.
Right.
And he said he asked for it and said, let's settle all outstanding issues.
He made this grand gesture.
And Clinton, to his credit, said, OK, let's do that.
And they sat down and had people talking and they hammered out a really good deal.
I mean, I discuss it a little bit, but I also link where you can see the more details if you want.
You'll never hear that talked about.
Now, what?
Why did it go wrong?
Or if you hear it talked about at all, they'll bring it up just to say, oh, yeah, Clinton tried having to deal with these people.
That's right.
And you see how that worked out.
But of course, they don't ever explain how that worked out.
They just point that, well, geez, it's not in place now.
So they will be whose fault?
Well, they will tell you that people you're talking about, the John Bolton types will say the neocons and John Bolton type.
So they'll say, oh, yeah, he gave it a try.
He was too trusting.
And the North Koreans, you know, broke every obligation, which is total nonsense, because even Fareed Zakaria, who's a rather, you know, counsel on foreign relations type middle of the rotor, will tell you that it was the Clinton.
It was Clinton, the Clinton administration that didn't fulfill its side of it.
It only had heartedly began to comply a little bit.
Meanwhile, for eight long years up to 2002, which is already the Bush years.
The North Koreans kept their word and produced no additional plutonium, they froze their program, and they stuck to it for eight years.
That says something that shows good faith, right?
Meanwhile, Clinton didn't go through with it.
And then when Bush came in, he formally repudiated it.
When he had an opportunity to reaffirm the non aggression pact that Clinton did negotiate with the military of North Korea, he refused to Bush, Bush and Bolton and chain Cheney refused to reaffirm the declaration of non hostile intent, they called it right, they wouldn't do that.
And then in 2002, famously, thanks to I guess, David from in the State of the Union address, they listed North Korea in the access of evil.
So what is North Korea supposed to think, right when they went into an agreement, kept it for eight years were complying and then the US at first only halfheartedly in a minor way compliant, and then the whole thing got repudiated when Bush came in?
What's he supposed to think?
So I've compared it, I don't do it in the article, but I compare North Korea to Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football, and Lucy holding the football, having a teed up, and she keeps moving the football every time he everybody knows the cartoon.
Every time Charlie Brown tries to kick it, she moves it, he goes flying on the ground.
Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's fascism versus 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 versus capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audiobook find it at Audible, Amazon iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
There is us the quick we're Lucy.
The question again, you know, people know what I mean by we're when I when I'm speaking, us.
It's not Scott Sheldon actually does not own control.
It's not Scott.
It's not Scott and me.
If you own and control the state, I would have you resign.
The question is, I ask you nice.
The question is not can we trust the North Koreans?
The question is, can the North Koreans trust us?
And I mean that very seriously.
I'm not being polemical here.
I mean, it's quite literally right.
And now you know, I'm glad that you dug that out because I had forgotten all about that about the declaration.
I don't know if I ever knew that about the refusing to sign the declaration of non hostile intent as one of the straws breaking the camel's back there that was meant to break the camel's back as we know.
And it's interesting.
I forget if this is in the article or not.
But in the early months of Bush Junior's first term before September 11, Colin Powell had said, I guess kind of offhand it.
Oh, yes, of course, we're going to keep the current North Korea policy because it's working quite well.
And you know, right around the time he and Condoleezza Rice were both saying that Saddam is in the box and he's under control and his military is diminished and he's no longer a threat.
They were saying, yeah, not Bill Clinton's North Korea policy.
Maybe they said like, oh, it's not perfect, but we're going to work with it.
We're going to it's going to be the basis of what we do.
Something along those lines.
And then but no, it wasn't up to Powell.
Right.
He found out quickly on that issue and a lot of others.
I'm not saying he was a great guy or whatever.
I'm just saying everybody else was worse.
Well, they were the relative good wing because later in the Bush administration, when things were a mess and by then we had North Korea pulling out of the nonproliferation treaty, kicking out the inspectors because they just weren't getting anywhere with the U.S. Well, it wasn't just the axis of evil speech.
It was new sanctions.
It announced the creation of the proliferation security initiative, which was the claimed right to seize boats on the high seas outside of international law.
And then also just the announced abrogation of the agreed framework by the Bush administration and saying, you know how Clinton never fulfilled his end?
Yeah, well, we're never going to.
The deal is off.
So they pull out of the only then did they go ahead and get out.
And when and that means the the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors are asked to leave the country.
There's no more inspections.
That's that would hardly be progress from the point of view of Hawks.
Right.
You would think, oh, well, we want them to be under inspection.
And they were under inspection before that.
And so they then they embark on the North Koreans, then embark on their building of nuclear warheads, which are still engaged in and missiles.
So getting late in the Bush administration, 2005, 2006, it suddenly dawns on some people, including Condoleezza Rice, whose secretary of state by then is wholly.
You know what?
Cheney and Bolton have really created a mess here because now we have an uninspected North Korea that's building nukes.
Maybe this wasn't such a good idea to abrogate.
So they try to start it up again.
And the Chinese and the Russians also start up like five party multilateral talks.
I guess the U.S. is also participating in, but I guess they also have their own bilateral thing going on.
And they begin to try to put things together.
And amazingly, North Korea seems somewhat willing.
They can't quite agree on verification.
And by then, you know, I'm sure they weren't fully trusting of the United States, given what had happened anyway.
And so nothing ever happened.
The Bush years end, Obama comes in and Bush and Obama does not try to jumpstart it.
Maybe he was afraid he was he wanted to, you know, look what happened when he said he wanted to close Guantanamo and bring and bring Guantanamo detainees here for trial.
You see what pushback he got?
Maybe he thought, oh, there's no way I can say let's start up North Korean talks.
I don't want that kind of pushback.
I'll tell you what, that man's going to go down in history as the weakest person ever to be the president of the United States, man or woman ever for as long as America lasts.
And can you imagine?
I mean, even when the counterfactual so obvious, what if he made peace in Iraq, made peace in Afghanistan, made peace with Iran, made peace with North Korea and said, how do you like that?
And ran on that for reelection in 2012.
Instead of no, look, see, I'm, I'm mostly pleasing McCain, please don't attack me, which after all, I have to admit he did win reelection.
But to what end?
What for for $200,000 pension?
I just hope he's plagued, you know, for the rest of his days with the thought.
What was I thinking?
I squandered eight years.
Okay, not that he's a good person.
But he's intelligent enough to know better than all the horrible things that he did anyway.
Yeah, I went to Libya, thanks to my good friend, Hillary Clinton, and and Susan Rice, and what's her name, Samantha Power.
That was what she called the biggest mistake.
It was of his administration going to Libya.
Well, whose responsibility was that was the three most powerful women in the administration.
Okay, he did the Korean, he did the Iran thing.
But of course, all Iran gave up was a weapon they had no intention of building, right?
I think that we already had the NPT.
I think the Iranians are very clever, because they got you know, they got the good funds unfrozen, and at least they're in the process of getting an embargo lifted, unless Trump does something really dumb.
And all they had to do was give up something they didn't want and weren't doing anyway.
So they're pretty crafty.
Those Iranians, I got to give them credit.
I like that, right?
Trump ought to admire them for their dealmaking prowess, right?
At the end of the day, all they did is expand inspections that were already doing the job.
And they reduced their stockpile of low enriched uranium that you can't use to make a bomb anyway to a lower amount.
Shrug, can I have my money back that you stole now, please my $400 billion.
So Obama did that.
And as you reminded me yesterday, he did the opening.
Yeah, he did the opening to Cuba.
Half hearted, maybe.
Other than that, what did he you know, what did he do in foreign affairs?
So I hope he's just saying he left Iraq for two years, Sheldon.
Yeah.
I hope every day he hits himself in the forehead saying, what was I thinking?
I squandered eight years, I had a golden opportunity.
And I didn't do it.
So what a waste.
Yeah, he don't care.
He's doing fine.
He's on a permanent vacation now.
He don't care.
He'll never care.
Well, I hope I think we we're gonna have in Obama, somebody like George W. Bush, who doesn't even think about world politics.
Again, after this, he just goes back goes and paints his little pictures or whatever.
Well, I hope some of your menus will always live across the street from Barack Obama, wherever he lives to remind him he needs to be reminded of that.
You know, it's not that he didn't do things.
He did bad things.
Right.
And Yemen is one of them pouring all that those those arms into Saudi Arabia, so they could and then helping refueling and the satellite, helping pick targets and all that stuff.
That's criminal.
That's work.
That's that's Hague level stuff.
Yeah, well, and the whole war broke out as a consequence of all his aid to Yemen as a bribe to bomb them since Oh, nine anyway, from the very beginning.
You know, that's a whole other chap and also mollifying Saudi Arabia over the Iran deal.
Yeah.
So what he gives with one hand, he took away with another the other.
Yeah.
All right.
So I don't know, man.
North Korea.
Now, I guess the whole world thinks maybe Mattis and McMaster will agree and then explain to Trump that we actually can't do anything militarily here.
So yeah, I'll talk if talk tough if you want.
But other than that, forget it.
Well, yesterday, he's saying he told Reuters, you know, there's a chance of a, as he puts it, triplicate typical Trump, a very, very serious war to varies in a serious, you could just say war, that's going to already be very, very serious.
But then today, Tillerson, who's chairing some meeting at the UN said, we'd be willing to talk with the North Koreans.
So I don't know whether this is an orchestrated good cop, bad cop, or they're just such so disorganized, it's hard to tell which is, which is true.
It hit me the other day, that we spend, let's say the US spends, what is it about a trillion dollars all told on the military, if you use Bob Higgs's and some other calculations, it's not just the 600 million, the Pentagon on the Pentagon budget, there's a lot of other stuff.
If you put all that together, we're spending over a trillion dollars.
And what good is it in with North Korea, zip, right, they cannot use the military, they'll kill 1000s and 1000s of South Koreans, 30,000 Americans, possibly Japanese, possibly Chinese.
It's, it's no good.
That military establishment is worthless.
They need to sit down and talk.
And not with they need is not a stick, they need carrots, they need to say, look, you want a non aggression pact?
You want a formal peace treaty?
Yes, we want that too.
Let's sit down and talk about that.
Instead, they're going about it the wrong way.
They're saying the first thing is precondition.
First thing is the denuclearization of the peninsula, right?
Well, that's not going to happen.
Look what happened to the denuclearized or unnuclearized Iraq and Qaddafi and Libya, Qaddafi Syria, what happened to Qaddafi?
I won't say it's too, it's not appropriate for family was lynched for family.
Yeah, but he had something shoved up or something else.
And Saddam Hussein, they're dead.
Now, Kim reads the papers, I assume he knows what happens to countries that the US doesn't like, that don't have nuclear weapons.
So right, our lesson has been over the last 15 years, if you don't want to have your regime change, get a nuke.
That's the US lesson they taught, it might as well take about a blackboard and write like a teacher and write that on there.
If you do not want to be invaded by us, and have regime change, get a nuke.
That's our lesson for today, folks.
Right?
Well, and you know, the thing is, I mean, I guess, war is the health of the state for the North Koreans, too.
And it's nice for them to have a couple of enemies in a few in America, Japan and South Korea.
But on the other hand, you know, I say this to Eric Margulies, to Ted Carpenter, and Doug Bandao.
And I mean, admittedly, these are all pretty libertarian leaning anti interventionist folk, but John Pfeffer, he's a liberal, another guy who knows a lot about North Korea.
Hey, man, couldn't we just make peace?
Like if America just said, all right, listen, we declare a full end to the war.
Ceasefire is moot because we declare full peace.
Sign here if you want to, but we recognize you in a state of peace.
Anyway, we're lifting all our sanctions.
We're sending Dennis Rodman and every basketball team we got over there to entertain your people.
And we're sending every businessman we got to invest in whatever it is that you'll allow us to invest in if you guys want.
And let's be friends.
And hey, other 7 billion people in the world.
Look, balls in their court.
We're being cool now, right?
All that horrible stuff.
Well, that was just Bush and Obama.
Those days are over.
Brand new day.
Come on, North Korea.
And all these expert type people, instead of saying, Scott Horton, you don't know what you're talking about.
This is utopian.
This is stupid.
That's what some hippie thinks or whatever.
They all say, yeah, no, we could absolutely do that.
We could absolutely do that.
There's no good reason why not to.
Right.
Simple as that.
So in other words, if Ted Carpenter was the Secretary of State, he'd be over there right now and they'd be working it out.
Simple as that.
Come on, let's work it out.
You know, there's the surface policy and then there's the deep policy.
So the deep policy, of course, is all this since the end of the war, the Korean War has served the empire.
It was all, you know, it was all calculated to serve some end of the empire.
I'm not saying everything works out the way they plan because nobody's perfect at planning in your own life.
You're not perfect at planning.
So there's some spontaneous element.
But the point was to serve the interests of the empire, which means we didn't want anybody who was non-aligned.
We didn't believe in non-alignment.
This is a Chomsky point, right?
We couldn't tolerate non-alignment.
So, but on the surface, a lot of people think our policy toward North Korea, just like toward Castro and toward other dictators was kind of a virtue signaling, right?
Oh, we can't sit down with that brutal dictator.
You don't sit down with a dictator.
But if not sitting down with a dictator leads to the terrible results that we now have, there's something wrong with just a virtue signaling strategy.
You may feel good.
You may be tapping yourself in the back saying, I'm a good person.
I don't sit and talk to dictators.
Who's the most famous proponent of that whole doctrine?
Dick Cheney, the most evil American of all is the one who insists that we don't talk to evil.
Yeah.
I think that's probably a pretense since you're straight from the pits of hell and everything, you know?
And the other Dick Nixon went and shook hands with Mao Zedong.
Yeah.
Which is the good example.
And people demonize that in a way on the right still like, oh man, what a terrible thing to do.
Well, wait a minute.
He ended the Cold War with China 25 years or oh, I guess 15 years before the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
That's pretty good.
He just short-circuited.
And yeah, I'm sure his hand felt really icky later and he had to scrub real good back at the hotel that night.
But other than that, you're talking about Mao shaking Nixon's hand?
They both thought so.
Well, okay, both.
But yeah, no, I mean, at the end of the day, just think about the business they were getting done.
And even if you're the most cynical person about it and all the corporate exploitation and all the inmate slavery in China and all the horrible everything still, you know, I mean, all violations of non-aggression aside, the level of progress, you know, Lou Rockwell wrote a great article about this one time when there were all these scandals about lead in the toothpaste and a couple other, you know, problems that happened in the news in a row.
And everybody was just demonizing China and he was going, hold it right there.
And the articles from death camp to civilization, you know, here's a society where the government starved about 60 million people to death, basically raise the entire civilization to the ground.
And then at the end was like, ah, okay, whatever.
And gave it up.
And basically then he died and Deng Xiaoping took over and let a thousand flowers bloom and whatever kind of crap.
But then as Lou was writing just in 30 years, look at the difference from absolute caveman level status, you know, pre-bronze age level barbarity is what communism reduced those people to.
And then man, are they doing good?
How about a round of applause instead of a bunch of finger pointing and shame at these people?
This is the greatest human miracle ever.
Well, does anybody think that the U S policy toward North Korea has freed a single North Korean?
Obviously it hasn't, it's helped to make them even more miserable.
Right.
And, uh, there's no prospect that it's going to ever, you know, we, we kept waiting for the regime to fall.
Right.
Right.
Even, even the Clinton, the good Clinton policy was premised on the idea that don't worry, the regime is not going to last anyway.
Right.
And here it is 2017.
And the third generation is now running the country of Kim's.
So it's not going, it's not going away.
That was what Ted Carpenter was saying too, was that, uh, yeah, the policy was based around, yes, we're clamping down like this, but it'll only take a little while for the regime to fall the policy.
At least the idea being that at the time they never would have instituted the policy of this level of containment and isolation of North Korea back in 1993, 94, they would have never chosen this path.
If they had known it was supposed to last until 2017, at least presumably, because at the time the argument was it's just for a little while because they're sure to collapse without Russia to back them up.
Right.
So us policy makers ever since that time have been accomplices in the, in the immiseration of the North Korean people.
Uh, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying, I'm not trying to let the Kim family off the hook.
Uh, they've done obviously horrible things.
They've run a totally barbaric regime.
Uh, but that doesn't let the U S off the hook.
When the U S does policies that help cement the Kim regime in place and let them do their dirty work, the U the U S policy makers are, are complicit and we've made people worse off, not better off.
I mean, back in the fifties, the people around the foundation for economic education, you know, the, one of the early free market organizations after world war two said used to argue in favor of free trade with the Soviet block on the very grounds that trade is a civilizing, uh, practice.
Cause even if Western traders, business people go over to those countries to, even though they may be only dealing with government officials and working out trade arrangements, people see them, they see the cut of their clothes, they see things they brought with them, right?
Products.
And they say, wait a second, there's a better life possible.
That begins to plant thoughts.
Trade does that.
So we've not traded with North Korea.
We've deprived them the same with Cuba pretty much until recently.
We've deprived those, the people of getting even a glimmer.
And when what change really comes when people have rising expectations is something Tocqueville pointed out.
You don't get re you don't get a revolution or, you know, let's say a dramatic evolution even when people are ground down in the dirt and they can't imagine anything better with the danger for rulers when he lets things improve a little bit.
Cause then they say, Oh, wait a second.
Living in the dirt is not the only fate we have.
You mean there's actually something better?
Well, we want more.
That's the dangerous part, right?
I heard an anecdote like that about, uh, I don't remember where anymore, but about when the Americans would travel to the Soviet union, even the deputy assistant secretary and nothing had a really nice wristwatch and the Soviet ministers and commissars be like, Hey man, you gotta be way high up on our ladder to have a watch like that.
But here, even the flunky and the translator and the lady that goes and gets the coffee seemed to really, you know, be living a lot better than us.
And there's the propaganda video about look at how the poor blacks live in Harlem.
But it's a picture at night and every window is lit up with the blue lights of the television sets.
And it's like, yeah, you know what?
They're living pretty bad for Americans, but for a Soviet, they're living like Kings, you know, and every Soviet who saw that propaganda was like, Hey, they're living better than we are apparently.
So America might be racist, but I rather be black there than me here.
Well, and there's an anecdote about Angela Davis.
It may well be apocryphal, but it makes the point.
Uh, Angela Davis, of course, during the new left days in the sixties was, uh, was, I guess she's still around as it was a Marxist professor, uh, one of the universities in California, I believe.
And there's a story about her again.
It may not be true, uh, being in, uh, Russia and saying in the United States, you know, in the evil United States, you use the word capitalist United States, rich people have new cars and poor people only have used cars.
And people are saying poor people have cars, right?
Um, you know, I saw, I don't know if this is even true.
I saw the tweet this morning.
They claimed that it was from the live stream of a left-wing rally in Berkeley today that someone supposedly had said in Russia and China, they had to kill millions of people to institute communism.
And that's what we're going to have to do here in America too.
Yeah.
You guys good luck with that.
All right.
Um, I just thought that was funny that one, they thought that, yeah, what a great rally and cry.
Apparently you can't really ever do this without genocide, but still it's totally worthwhile of a project though.
Um, and then too, they think that they're going to win a fight with who a bunch of American, you know, right-wing gun owners when, when they say 50% of Americans own guns.
Yeah.
It ain't the left.
I mean, except in Austin, but otherwise it ain't the left.
It's the right that own all the guns.
Good luck turning this into a fast, uh, well, a fascist one.
Yeah.
I'm a communist one.
Probably not.
Um, uh, the thing about, um, uh, that you were saying about propping them up by isolating them in this way, uh, it reminded me of something that, um, I just thought about the other day for the first time in a long time was, uh, when I was driving a cab, it was 2002 or three, it might've been Oh three, like right before the war, maybe it was the end of Oh two, but it was when the, all conversations were about Iraq and when are we going to attack Iraq and all this.
And, uh, there was a bouncer or he was a parking lot attendant or bouncers, whatever it was at a club.
And he was Iraqi.
And I asked him, I kind of, you know, I already know all this stuff, but I wanted to see what he would say, you know?
So I said, you know, the excuse for all this is that they want to go in and save the Iraqi people from this guy and all this.
But so that raises the question, how can the Iraqi people don't just finally rise up and take care of this guy themselves?
And he looks at me and he goes, you already know the answer to that.
And I said, cause the sanctions regime keeps them too weak and isolated relative to him and his power.
And he said, yeah, of course.
In other words, from his point of view, this was no accident.
In other words, they would have overthrown Saddam if not for the sanctions regime that kept them all desperate and starving and worried only about bringing home a piece of bread to their kid tonight rather than any other larger goal.
You know?
Yeah, I think it's actually more, I think that's true, but I think it's, there's more than just the fact that they're weak and starving.
It tends to be the case that if outsiders embargo you, your country, you rally around the government.
Now the strategy is also, is always they'll overthrow the government, right?
We really turn the screws on them.
Yeah, they'll blame him for getting them into this mess.
Yeah, but they don't blame him.
First of all, it does give the ruler propaganda points.
He can say, look what they're doing to us.
We know the Castro, Castro and his brother have been doing that for, did that for a long time.
So people tend to rally, especially when, look, they're, they're subject to propaganda all their lives from a regime like any of these that we're talking about.
So they're going to rally around the regime.
It's counterproductive.
It doesn't get them to overthrow the regime.
Yeah.
All right, man.
So where should we go with this conversation next, Sheldon Richman?
What North Korea needs is free market.
Well, well, sure.
We don't call it capitalism.
Well, they need free markets, but I'm not so crazy as to, to say, let's get, let's have Kim go through a seminar put on by the Libertarian Institute and he'll, he'll usher in the free markets in North Korea.
I think you're naive.
I think that would work great.
I'm tired of everybody saying, don't bother with that.
Cause I think that, you know, I, and I know it sounds stupid, but that's kind of the point too, is that sending Dennis Rodman and the dumbest of his six idiot friends, I don't care to go over there and just say, this is what a flamboyant, rich, interesting black guy from the USA is like, watch me.
And just to trip them the hell out, like he does everybody else, wherever he goes.
Right.
I don't know if he's still a thing or not, but there was a time when he tripped people out, wherever the hell he went.
Yeah.
Send them over there to disrupt the thing, jam their culture, man, give, you know, well, I've read somewhere.
I think John Stossel makes this point that the cold war was doomed.
I forget what year it was when Bruce Springsteen gave an outdoor concert to over 300,000 people in East Berlin, I believe it was, or somewhere in East Germany.
And they're all singing with him born in the USA, which is a cynical song about being used and abused and going to Vietnam and dying for nothing.
But anyway, but you can, if you want to pick a date for the end of the cold war and the crumbling of the wall, the disbanding of the Warsaw pact, and then the actual collapse of the Soviet union, that's as good a day as any.
Sure.
Imagine 300,000, 350,000 East Germans subjected to Marxist propaganda all their lives and pro-Soviet propaganda.
And all the pro-capitalists are the young liberal left and the communists are the stodgy old right wing conservatives who've got to be overthrown.
What a cool thing.
Oh, we got to protect our people from rock and roll jazz and rock and roll.
Right.
If you've got a fear of rock and roll, I think time is ultimately on our side.
Yeah, because there's no way you're going to keep it out.
Yeah.
There's even a song like that.
It's called you can't stop rock and roll.
All right.
I believe it.
I think we should probably let these people off the hook.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you so much for coming by.
My pleasure.
I sure like hanging out with you and being an institute with you.
That's the great Sheldon Richman, everybody.
He's the author of a book about guns, a book about schools, a book about why we should have never, they should have never adopted the U.S. Constitution.
He is the senior editor at the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm the managing director and libertarianinstitute.org.scotthortonshow for all the interviews.
Check out the full archives at scotthorton.org, of course.
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