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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, and say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing David R. Henderson.
He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
And I guess he's retired now, but was a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School.
He's the author of The Joy of Freedom, An Economist's Odyssey, and other books, including the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
And around antiwar.com, we call him the wartime economist, David Henderson.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing real good.
It's been way too long since we've spoken.
Very happy to read you and have you back on the show here.
Yeah, me too.
And congratulations on quitting your job.
Yeah.
So, and now that's kind of an interesting thing here, right?
Is this is an economist's take.
There are a lot of different takes on a lot of different wars, but you're applying a libertarian economic analysis to causes and effects and things seen and unseen, and all kinds of interesting stuff like that.
And that's actually really unique, to get an expert's take that is not bent on either getting us into a war with Iran, or maybe striking a nuclear deal with Iran, or something.
You're an expert, but do you have a different set of incentives than most experts who write about foreign policy?
Yeah, I'm willing to work for low pay.
That's what it is.
And let me make the serious point I'm making.
If antiwar.com were able to pay the kinds of prices that other publications pay, you would, on the margin, get a few more economists writing about this.
And I'm not dumping on my fellow economists.
But I would say that one of the reasons we don't have many economists writing about this is not that they wouldn't agree with me.
It's just they've never done the research, they've never looked into it, because the incentives just haven't been there, either in academia or in the public policy world, to the extent they are to write about, say, why we should cut taxes or whatever.
And that's unfortunate, because of course, one of the points I make in my article that led to this interview is that in fact, it's war that led to those taxes.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole thing, too, is it's all wrapped up in left and right ideology and partisanship, too, where supposedly, if you're antiwar, you're some kind of pinko.
And if you're in the opposite of that, if you're some kind of capitalist, then you know that that's why we have to bomb people all the time.
Our standard of living depends on it.
So let it rip.
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas, of course, the extent economists have studied it, and I quoted in my piece to economists, Solomon Palachuk and Carlos Sigley, who point out that the freer the trade you have between nations, the more peaceful those nations are, which is yet another reason to worry about with each other, which is yet another reason to worry about Trump's trade war.
Well, you know, we can get back to that in a sec.
But as far as the deep pockets and the incentives and this and that, because there are, you know, quite a few experts on foreign policy, but really all of their different think tanks are bankrolled by the Olin Foundation or, you know, a very few, very rich people.
And for the most part, the richer you are, not the more libertarian capitalist you are, but the more conservative and right wing you are.
And so all of the big foundations are financed by people who are very government interventionist in the economy and in the world.
Right.
And by the way, though, I think partial exceptions to that are the Koch brothers.
They've been pretty good, I think, on foreign policy, way better than the average rich person.
So, you know, there's one big exception.
Now, as far as how much money they've put into that, not as much as I would have liked to have seen.
Yeah.
Well, and that is certainly right that, you know, they back defense priorities and the Cato, not everybody at Cato is perfect on foreign policy, Tom Palmer, but the actual foreign policy guys at Cato are great, right?
Doug Bandow and Trevor Thrall and Ted Galen Carpenter and the...
John Glaser.
Yeah, Glaser, of course, but Emma Ashford, I'm sorry, is the name I got hung up on there.
And I mean, they're just, what would we do without them?
I have no idea.
I mean, these are good money.
Anyway, so yeah, definitely, they do deserve credit for that, such as it is, you know, what they've done on it.
And you know what?
It's interesting, right?
Because I think, and I don't know everything about the Kochs, but I get it that they basically make carpet and tires and stuff that people need, and they're not really arms dealers.
It's not in their interest.
But then, doesn't that make them pretty typical of most American billionaires that they would have a, wouldn't, shouldn't they have a greater interest in supporting a peaceful foreign policy and therefore greater open trade and better export marketing and that kind of thing, as compared to, obviously, the very highly organized military industrial complex, who have everything to gain in this system at the expense of the rest of us, including other rich people, other big business owners?
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point.
If you look at the arms sector, it's a very, very small part of the economy, and it's still a pretty small part of the manufacturing economy.
So the typical firm...
Is that right?
Can you break that down in some numbers for me a little bit, off the top of your head, you know?
Ballpark it for me.
Yes, this is going to be rough.
I would say that the arms sector is under 3% of the economy, which would put it at, let's say, to be safe, under 4%, which would put it comparable to agriculture.
The arms sector would be roughly under 20% of the manufacturing economy.
I think I could safely say that.
Wow.
Okay, great.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
And so it's true that the typical rich corporation or rich person who made money in business didn't make it by being an arms dealer.
And by the way, did you notice, and I haven't followed it carefully because I was traveling last week, but I remember just seeing a little news spot that when Trump made this deal, and I have no idea whether it's going to work with North Korea, but when he made the deal, defense stocks fell.
And it's like, whoa, maybe it is real, you know?
Right.
Yeah, just in case anyone was wondering how it works around here.
And it is a funny thing though, right?
I mean, I mentioned the cultural thing, right, where if you're anti-war, you're some kind of hippie or whatever.
Do companies that make their money outside of the war industries, do they really have that much to lose by organizing and opposing America's permanent state of war?
Or it's really just an ideological thing, USA number one, we have to lead and all that.
I think it's probably more the latter.
It's the country they grew up in.
I don't think the Pledge of Allegiance helps.
I don't think the way they learned history in government schools helps.
I think there are all kinds of things that made them see that the way to be patriotic is to, quote, support our troops, which by the way, to many people means support sending them into other wars, which isn't exactly my idea of support.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's always been such an obvious irony and yet one lost on so many.
All right.
So, and speaking of losses here, the article is war fighting and the loss of liberty.
So, you begin by saying, yeah, we need a grand strategy, but maybe rather than whatever the guys in DC think the grand strategy should be, maybe we should take a more American national interest, every man perspective on what our grand strategy should be.
And then use this cranky old term from a bygone era, liberty, and say that maximizing liberty should be the grand strategy of the United States government.
Right, right.
And of us.
So, in other words, if we wait on the government, we're going to wait forever.
So, that should be our strategy in our political activity is to always look for the pro liberty side and push that, whether it be trade, foreign policy, immigration, whatever.
All right.
Introduce us to Robert Higgs then.
So, Robert Higgs wrote a book called Crisis and Leviathan in 1987, which was aimed at academics, but I managed, he gives me credit for this and I think it's deserved.
I managed to figure out how to write a book review of it in fortune magazine.
And that was unusual for that kind of book to be reviewed, but I made it about how did government grow, which one of my editors at fortune was quite interested in.
And so, basically Higgs story is that government in the 20th century in the United States grew due to three crises, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.
And with each crisis, the government took on more power.
When the crisis ended, the government gave up some of the power, but not nearly all of it.
So, he calls this a ratchet effect.
So, in World War I, we had just started the income tax before World War I, before United States got in World War I and boom, they raised tax rates dramatically.
They went from a rate of 7% when it first started in 1916 or 1915 to 77% by the end of the war is the top marginal tax rate.
They did things like that and they nationalized the railroads in World War I. They denationalized the railroads after it ended, but never got the railroads back to the amount of freedom they'd had beforehand, not until 1980 when Carter deregulated railroads.
And so, that's kind of the story and I could tell the story for World War II also.
Well, one thing about World War II that affected a huge percent of your listeners is under World War II and during World War II, they made what was called the class tax, the income tax, which was aimed at just high income people into the mass tax, the tax aimed at everyone.
And the way they did that was withholding.
So, they had the employer be the tax collector for the government.
And so, and why did they do that?
Because one of their advisors who used to be chairman of Macy's said, people buy more things on the installment plan and so let's have an installment plan for taxes.
And so, now we're stuck with withholding even after the war ended.
So, things like that.
So, there's a huge, huge correlation between growth of government, between war and growth of government.
Well, so, you know what's funny about this to me?
It always has been, is that this is pretty much the history of the 20th century as I learned it in government school in the later part of the 20th century.
And yet, it's basically taken as a given, but also taken as an unquestionable good.
Man, it used to be that people didn't want the great father to have unlimited power to make everything good, but FDR, he fixed that.
Thank goodness.
Right?
That's what we all think.
He's our founding father far more than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln at this point, right?
Well, I think that's true.
I grew up in Canada, as you know, but my father was strongly pro-FDR person.
And so, to the extent we talk about politics at home, which fortunately wasn't much, it was FDR was this good guy who saved America, and saved America twice, right?
Saved America from the Great Depression, which of course he extended with his policies, and saved America from Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism.
Yeah.
So, that's the whole thing, zooming in on it.
All of a sudden, maybe we'd be better off with less national government and more liberty.
Maybe it wasn't all the right thing.
So, let's do FDR in a minute, but let's go back to World War I for a second.
I like the way you talk about World War I in here.
I think you hit all of the most important points about not just World War I, but American intervention in World War I, and how that made all the difference for the future of Germany and for the future of Russia too.
Right.
So, one point I didn't make in the article because of my space limit was that when Germany surrendered, there was not an acre of German soil that their enemy occupied.
And so, what happened?
Well, what happened was America entered.
And once America entered, everyone could see where that was going to go.
And so, Germany surrendered, saying that they contacted Wilson, I think November 1st, 1918, and said, do you really mean it about your 14 points?
Do you really mean it about self-determination?
And Wilson goes, yes.
Well, of course, Wilson shows up at Versailles.
He's sick.
He gets outmaneuvered by Clemenceau, the head of France, and we get this Versailles Treaty, which, of course, makes Hitler's coming more likely.
Moreover, Wilson said to the provisional government that had taken over from the Tsar in Russia, we will pay you if you stay in the war.
Well, the war was very unpopular with Russians, and that was the Bolsheviks' way in.
And so, you can reasonably argue that without any Wilson intervention, we wouldn't have had Hitler, and we wouldn't have had communism.
So, those are two pretty big negatives due to him.
It's amazing, too, because he just is known as the great idealist philosopher, king, president, one of the nicest guys that we ever had.
And I mean, really, the best I can tell, and Jim Powell has written a great book called Wilson's War, making especially those two major points you just made there about this, how really it was just his vanity more than any other thing.
I mean, he was serving the House of Morgan that had been servicing the debt of the British and their arms sales.
And I think Morgan even owned some of the companies that were selling the arms and then was loaning them the money to buy them and all of this.
But at the end of the day, it was really, he wanted to be important.
And instead of being treated like some redneck from the backwoods of the new world, that he was going to bring America and himself up to the level of these European royal types, for his own, just so he could look at himself in the mirror and talk about it, I guess.
And as one of his allies in the New Republic put it, this was a great moral adventure.
And the word moral, I kind of get, although I think it's mistaken, but adventure, war as adventure, there's something really wrong with that.
I just saw a poll this week, just two days ago, that had the reasons that young men joined the military in America on the multiple choice answer.
Adventure was the number one answer.
Yeah, yeah.
At the expense of who cares who, right?
As long as dad and coach and minister agree that it's a good idea, then it's still always an honorable thing to join the army.
Let's do it.
What fun.
It's like being an Eagle Scout, only better.
And one other point I want to make about World War I, we were talking about how it led to the growth of government.
That's how we got the modern draft in the 20th century.
And so again, to their credit, they ended the draft when the war ended, but it kind of set it up for the next draft to be easier.
And then we got the draft again in 1940, well before America was formally in the war.
And of course, then we had it till 47.
It was dropped for a year, and then we had it from 1948 to 1973.
Now, one thing that I learned in school was the hyperinflation was part of the war reparations to France and Britain.
And there's a whole corrupt triangle of financial dealings there.
But anyway, it was also, and this is a part they didn't ever emphasize, was that under the Versailles Treaty, the Germans lost all this territory, and not just imperial stuff they'd conquered, but their bordering regions in major pieces were cut off and given to allies of the British and the French.
And this was really sowing the seeds.
As Jim Powell says in his book, Hitler began every speech denouncing what he called the traitors of 1918, and that was the Democrats.
Oh, that was the other rub.
Even though it was the Kaiser and the military who had gotten Germany into this mess, Wilson said they were illegitimate power because they weren't the Democrats.
He would only accept surrender from the Democrats.
And so he just absolutely discredited them by making them be the ones to sign the, quote, terrible treaty.
And Adolf Hitler just absolutely used all of this as his stepping stones to power.
Right.
And if I remember correctly, Ralph Rako, the historian who died a couple of years ago, made this point in something I read by him about Wilson, that the, remember that the allies had these very, especially the British had these very tight controls on food entering Germany, even after the war ended, but certainly during the war and even after the war ended.
And that some of the most extreme Nazis in world war two were people who'd been children during world war one, who remembered that who suffered under it.
And so there again, this unintended consequence of a really, of a, of a policy that's bad on its face anyway, starving civilians.
But then of course, it has this really bad unintended consequence for foreign policy.
Oh, and Hey, there's a great public choice theory type story there too, which Andrew Coburn has written about in Harper's magazine about how the British bureaucracy in charge of enforcing that blockade had been perfected right about the time they should have called it off, assuming it was okay in the first place.
But right when the war was over and they should have ended it, the bureaucracy had just gotten really all set up and they didn't want to give it up.
And so it was a huge part of what was going on there was just the job holding by the people in charge of that particular bureaucracy and keeping it going.
And then such has been the case, you know, in later cases too.
Yeah.
I remember Ronald Reagan once said the closest thing we have to eternal life is a government bureaucracy.
And that applies to this one too, maybe.
Yeah.
And even, yeah, when we're talking about starving babies and stuff, it doesn't matter.
It's just like a scene out of Brazil or whatever.
We're just make sure you punch the right card and it's fine.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Also, when you talk about communism, you were summing up your point, but it's worth elaborating on that the Kerensky government, as you said, the Tsar had already been overthrown, but the interim government, it didn't last because it had been successfully bribed by Wilson.
It's not just that Wilson intervened in the war, but he deliberately intervened with the Kerensky government and gave them whatever the price was to keep them in the war, and therefore, undermining his legitimacy, but also keeping the army far away from him, where they could protect him.
And so, as Jim Powell says, on their fourth try, Lenin and Trotsky are able to seize power.
And then, it does go without saying, but I guess we should stop to mention, and then, therefore, there would have never been a Kim or Mao or Pol Pot or Ho Chi Minh or any communism and no American Cold War world empire in the name of protecting the world from that communism after World War II either.
And never mind, as Pat Buchanan says, giving the British, expanding their empire by a million square miles in the Middle East and setting them up to create Israel and the rest of it too.
Right.
I don't know enough about the Mao or Pol Pot thing.
I just don't.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
But I do think we could have avoided a Cold War because, of course, the Cold War was mainly with the Soviet Union.
Without the Soviet Union, there's no Cold War.
Yeah.
That's hard to imagine.
I mean, I guess, I don't know, but it's hard to imagine that Mao would have ever been able to come into existence if the Soviet Union hadn't been around as a communist power all that time leading up to it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Um, but yeah, no, I guess I really don't know enough about that either, but just, I guess it just never occurred to me that you could have had a communist revolution in China before anywhere else, you know, if it hadn't already been done in Russia, but...
Well, I think we can see the Chinese, uh, we get back to World War II.
We can see the Chinese communist taking over as a result of World War II.
Because of course, why did, why did FDR want to go to war with Japan?
He wanted to protect China from Japan.
Well, uh, he did in the short run, but of course, in the long run, we got Mao.
Right.
Who was much worse for, for the Chinese people, even then the foreign occupation by the merciless Japanese army.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, if you look at numbers killed, numbers murdered, it's an order of magnitude more.
Yeah.
Which is almost unbelievable, but yeah, it's true.
Um, all right.
Now you did a study way back when in, um, the, uh, 1990s.
And then I think you followed up on it since then too, right?
About how we spend so much more quote, securing oil resources in the Middle East than we ever even spend on oil from there.
I never said it that way.
No.
And I doubt that that's true, but I did say that we don't need to go to war for oil.
That was my study.
That if you look or oil is fungible, whoever wants it, whoever produces it is going to want to sell it.
And so there's just, it's just so implausible that we need to spend serious resources on, you know, propping up countries or pulling down one dictator in favor of another, you know, any of those things, because the people who have oil want to sell it to us, even if they hate us.
Yeah.
But so what I just made up that whole thing about the, uh, the ratio between the spending that we engage in on, on the wars or on that support for those foreign countries and the actual spending on the oil.
I don't know if you made it up.
I know.
I never said it because I don't even think it's that relevant.
I think what's relevant is to look at what would be the loss from, from someone say, restricting the supply of oil slightly versus what we spend annually.
But that's different from what we spend on oil, right?
The loss to us is the differential in price times the amount we buy.
And that's a small number.
Right?
So it seems like though, I mean, wherever I got that from, I'm sorry.
I thought I was paraphrasing you about that.
Um, but so, but the way you put it there where it's actually the differential, that's really the point.
Then what I said is actually probably right.
Then if you consider the costs of the dominance of the middle East compared to how much Americans, that differential in the price of the oil there.
Well, the differential.
Yes.
Yes.
So, huh.
But, but not the total.
I just don't know.
You know, I just don't know.
Okay.
And, and I'm not going to know, like, I'm not going to sit down after this interview and check it out because the number is meaningless to me.
The meaningful number is just makes it more ironic, I guess.
I always liked the way it sounded, but I'm sorry.
I had that wrong.
That's all right.
That's all right.
Um, all right.
Well, and now, so, um, uh, can you talk about Truman and the steel mills and stuff?
I mean, there's a limit to this.
Um, but the ratchet does keep getting tighter in terms of, uh, government intervention in the economy.
How much, I mean, can you, um, do you have like a, a thumbnail kind of measurement of, of just how nationalized our economy is?
They, what I was taught in school was it's a quasi free market, a mixed economy where, you know, the government intervenes to make sure everything stays on a nice even keel and a level playing field.
I do think the term mixed economy is a good term and it's been lost.
You don't see it in textbooks anymore.
It's this euphemism.
Now we've got a free market economy, which is actually way less accurate than the term mixed economy.
But yeah, back to Truman, Truman did try to nationalize a one or two steel companies and to their credit, the Supreme court knocked him down and said, no, you can't do that.
So yeah, he did try to do that under FDR.
There's this famous picture of this guy, this executive being hauled away by soldiers out of his firm.
He was this guy who refused to go along with something Roosevelt wanted.
And a lot of people on the left point to that picture.
I can't remember the guy's name, but they point to that picture and say, Oh man, wasn't it great what FDR did?
And I'm going, man, that guy's sitting in that chair is my hero, you know, because he tried to say no to FDR and he found out the world had changed dramatically.
And whereas say in 1900 or something, someone might've been able to say no to the president and the president just says, okay, moves on in, in 1944, whenever that guy got hauled out and taken to jail, I think, uh, you know, and, and his company taken over by the feds, the world is different.
Yeah.
I mean, there were even people prosecuted for refusing to obey the fixed prices of laundry services and stuff like that.
Right.
Isn't that one of the cases?
Yeah.
Economy-wide price controls in, uh, in United States enforced in part by my, uh, fellow Canadian, John Kenneth Galbraith in the office of price administration.
And, and yes, we had wide controls on, on, on the economy and people did go to prison for violating those controls.
Well, of course we can see, you know, more in our modern times too, where it's not just the outright Patriot acts and the NSA spying on us and all of that, the militarization of the police, which is all horrible, but it's all very seen, but it's also, there's this deformation as, uh, David Stockman calls it where so much of our economy, I guess you say it's smaller maybe than I thought, uh, gets bent out of shape in this mixed economy where basically government intervention in it.
And especially in a militarist fashion really distorts the free market away from actually satisfying customers and makes matters worse for everyone.
Right, right.
And by the way, one thing we probably won't have time for, and I didn't talk about it all in the article, but one of the ways we got huge government intervention in higher education was through the cold war.
We got to keep up with the Soviets.
Let's start having federal funding of, of higher education.
And of course that's just gone on and Yeah.
Well, and wrapped up in that too, is the GI bill to where, Hey, the least we can do for our heroic soldiers is help pay for college.
But then that becomes all the only reason they're even in the army is so they can go to college.
And so now they're killing some guy so they can go to college.
Right.
And the, and the question of whether any of the wars that they'd actually be fighting in are justified or just put aside, that's somebody else's issue for some reason.
Right now, I think the GI bill was seen as a kind of a, let's make up for the fact that we drafted them, but it also is what led to federal government intervention in accreditation.
Because if you're going to give a money to a guy to go to college, you'd better be sure that that college measures up.
And that's how we got accreditation, how we got a huge amount of federal intervention in higher education.
Yeah.
That's always been like the, the more radical libertarian uh, critique of school vouchers and charter schools is that you're just inviting government into the private school market when need to be trying to keep them out as much as possible.
Right.
That's actually my critique of vouchers too.
It's not my critique of charter schools because they're already in government.
Right.
And our government is just trying to relax some of the constraints.
Yeah.
Um, and then, man, I forgot the great point I was going to make.
Oh, I know.
Well, how about just, um, you know, the, the national debt and the amount of spending that goes into militarism, I guess you're talking about proportions, but still they're just past another $700 billion bill.
Robert Higgs says it's a trillion a year.
If you count the VA and the nuclear weapons and the energy department and all of that together, um, just how big of a distortion is that?
Yeah.
So I think he's wrong on that.
I think it's closer to 800 billion, but that's, that's pretty close.
Um, so, uh, yeah.
And I think what we could have, if we had national defense, not national offense is we could probably have under a $200 billion a year budget for the, for the department of defense.
And so to wipe out 500 billion a year, there's close to the whole deficit right there.
And then, and what difference does that make?
Because Cheney says that deficits don't matter and Lord knows the Democrats agree.
Yeah.
Well, Cheney's wrong and the Democrats are wrong.
Um, yeah, but it seems like they get away with it.
Right.
I mean, we have a boom and bust every once in a while and yet, um, um, and then the, the national debt is what, almost $21 trillion now or whatever it is.
And yet things continue and, and they will indefinitely, right.
Or not.
I don't think so.
I think that there will ultimately be serious budget cuts in both domestic and, and defense side or some kind of default.
And Jeff Hummel and I have written about the default part.
And you think that's coming within what sort of timeframe?
Well, I've been wrong so far.
I thought it'd be coming in the early 2020s.
And now I think I'm probably wrong.
I think the late 2020s, but I tell it, tell you what I'm taking my, I start taking my social security at age 67 rather than waiting until 70, because at least I'm getting the full amount now.
Yeah.
Ron Paul used to say, I remember that, oh, they'll never stop sending the social security checks, but at some point they just won't be worth anything.
So.
Well, no, I don't think.
Get it while you can.
Yeah.
I don't think that's right.
I think Jeff Hummel and I pointed that out.
We don't think inflation's the way they're going to go.
We think there'll be an actual default along with, along with cutting social security.
And that default then will prevent massive price inflation then, is what you're saying?
Yeah.
There's no reason to have massive price inflation because it won't get them much.
And that's a whole long thing that I cannot explain in the roughly half minute we have left.
Yeah, that's fair.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming back on the show, David.
It's been great to talk to you.
Yes.
Thanks, Scott.
Same.
All right, you guys, that's David R. Henderson.
He's the wartime economist over at Antiwar.com.
This one is called Warfighting and the Loss of Liberty.
And as I said, he taught economics as a professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School.
And he's the author of The Joy of Freedom, An Economist's Odyssey.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com.com, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys!