Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Introducing Sheldon Richman.
He's the executive editor at the Libertarian Institute.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine and great to be back with you.
Hope you're doing fine.
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining me this morning.
Big day today.
We got some business to talk before we get to other things.
First of all, our institute, the Libertarian Institute, that's you and me, libertarianinstitute.org.
We've just published Will Griggs' book.
It was You, Me, and Will.
But then he died after about half a year of that, unfortunately, two years ago.
But we finally got it together with an incredible foreword by Tom Edlum.
And an incredible, and already all the compliments are rolling in, about the cover art done by Will Griggs' friend Scott Albert, who did such an incredible job on this cartoon of Will for the front cover.
And it's all set up.
The Kindle's out.
The paperback is out.
It's no quarter.
The ravings of William Norman Grigg.
And it's so good.
It's so good, man.
I had to read it two or three times, three or four times for the edit and all that.
It's just devastating, too.
And the consistency of the quality of his writing and, of course, his nose for caring about all the same stuff as us and everything is just great.
On war, on peace, and especially on the cops, man.
And so many things.
I just know everybody's going to really love it.
I think anyone could guess this, but also it's true that all the money goes directly to Will Griggs' family.
It doesn't even stop at Go or anything like that.
It's all connected directly to them.
And so all the proceeds from the book.
And this is the kind of book that should sell for generations.
I mean, it's timeless.
I mean, it's timely, but it's timeless, too.
You know what I mean?
Kind of a thing.
Yeah, well, this is really great news.
Thanks to you, I saw what it looks like on Amazon.
So the cover is unbelievably great.
Great caricature.
Everybody go at least take a look at it and then buy the book.
I've read a lot of Will over the years.
I haven't looked at this exact collection yet, so I'll be doing that.
And also my thanks to you for making this happen.
It's just a super great tribute to him, but also just a great service to all the readers out there.
Potential readers, because if they don't already know Will through his writing, they need to meet him and enjoy what he did, because he was unique and irreplaceable.
But at least we have this collection.
We have all the writings he left behind.
I'll tell you what, this is one of those, and this happens every time, whenever a friend of mine dies, but this case especially.
It really bothers me, the whole incongruity thing between the value of a human life and how easy it is to lose one.
It's so stupid.
Some stupid heart attack that happens for just the space of five minutes is enough to cancel out the existence of a man as great as this.
It just pisses me off.
Anyway, I do miss him.
We miss him.
People will when they read this, too.
It's just not fair that he died at 52.
It just totally sucks.
But anyway, while he was alive, man, he was kicking ass.
I was a fan of Will for a long time.
I read him in the New American Magazine starting, I think, in 95 or 96, right at the end of high school years.
So I was a huge fan of his for a very long time.
And then we finally became friends by 2003 or 2004.
That's when I started interviewing him and talking with him.
And yeah, he's a great guy.
Oh, I want to say about the book, too.
And I'm sorry because this should have got a note in the book.
I don't know.
He probably doesn't care.
But I want to give credit to Grant Smith for helping to format the paperback version of this thing.
Mike Dworsky also, who did such a great job of putting together the EPUB and the .
MOBI, that's the Kindle version of it.
All the credit to him.
And it was Will himself who edited the book.
And it was Will and Tom Edlum who originally formatted it and got all the everything.
I mean, all I did here really was finally get off my butt and put the thing finally together.
But it was everybody else's work.
I didn't really do anything.
I had a little publisher's note at the end just to say I missed the guy kind of a thing.
But other than that, all the credit goes to, of course, Will, Tom Edlum, Scott Alberts, Mike Dworsky, and Grant Smith for putting the thing together.
Well, let me add my appreciation to that group you just named.
Yeah.
Great guys.
They've done yeoman's service and lots of people will be benefiting by having this book so easily available for years to come.
So my thanks to everybody who had any hand in it.
Yeah, man.
So get out there, everybody.
You'll see the banner ads up.
We're getting them together.
So they'll be at the Institute and at scotthorton.org and hopefully, I'm sure, at antiwar.com.
And also, you know what?
Call goes out right now to all Libertarian podcasters.
Please interview me and or especially Tom Edlum who was really Will's protege at the New American Magazine there for many years and who wrote the introduction that Tom wrote is just a perfect biography of Will.
You couldn't ask for better than what Tom did there.
And I'm interviewing him later today about it, too.
But please, I beseech all Libertarian media people.
Write about this thing.
Interview Tom Edlum especially about this book and help promote it.
You know, never even mind the fact that he left behind six kids and a sick wife, unfortunately.
But I mean, even without that, the thing is worth its weight in platinum.
Forget it.
It's stellar.
It's the best stuff the Libertarian movement produced so far in the 21st century or equal to it.
You know, it's like Ron Paul's first run in 08 on paper, that level of quality of greatness.
Anyway, hey, here's another thing.
Speaking of Ron, I'm interviewing him today again and that'll be interview 38 of Ron.
I'm about to get that transcribed and added to the book I'm about to put out here in just another couple of weeks.
I hope.
If I say a couple of weeks, that probably means more like five or something.
But I'm really trying to buckle down now that Will's is out and I'm putting out a book, The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004 through 2019.
And it's just great.
And when I go through editing it, I'm so proud of it and of him and of, I guess, myself, you know, pat on the back for just letting this man come on my show and say things 37 times over these years because he's just so brilliant and so perfectly morally libertarianly consistent on everything and just expert on every subject.
And it's just, it's not like reading the same interview over and over and over again, other than my praise for the guy, I guess, which is a little embarrassing, but I don't care.
But it's just awesome.
And that's coming out real soon.
And part of that is because the IRS is trying to kill me because, of course, I've worked for antiwar.com for, you know, the last 15 years, making $1,000 a month.
So somebody's got to pay.
So this is my version of the Willie Nelson IRS tapes here, this Ron Paul book.
I hope.
I'm not even going to get the money.
I'm just going to use it to pay off the federal pigs so they don't, you know, continue extorting me and coming to my dad's house, begging on the door.
Huh?
There's some irony there.
Yeah.
Well, I figure, you know what, here's the guy who introduced the constitutional amendment to repeal the 16th every year, the liberty amendment and to get rid of the central bank.
I figure I'll go ahead and use that for my IRS tapes and exploit that irony a little bit and try to put that behind me.
And then I'm putting out a book.
I know I'm just talking all over your interview today, but then I'm putting out a book of your essays about Palestine, like all of them, going back for 30 years or something like that, 1980s, 90s, and especially your recent series that you did last year for the Libertarian Institute, Why Palestine Matters.
And it's such great stuff.
I just put it down for a minute when I was trying to rip those PDF files of just the last few there.
But it's almost ready already, so that ought to be able to come out pretty soon.
And then, of course, I'm getting back to work on my book about the terror war.
It's hard running an institute and doing all these things at the same time.
Yeah, plus you're doing interviews every day.
But no, think of the stream of stuff that's coming.
I'm saying this to the listeners now, not you.
Just think about the stream of material beginning now with Will's collection that is on the way, not in the far distant future.
So this is going to be very exciting stuff coming out from the Libertarian Institute.
You're the man.
You're kind of the mover and the shaker here.
You're making it happen.
Well, we're really suffering for the lack of Will Grigg here.
The three of us together as a team was really the perfect kind of a thing there.
And compared to all the other Libertarian Institutes out there, I don't know how much of an institute we are, but we do have some great podcasters and some great regular writers.
And now, with this book series putting out here, starting with Fool's Aaron and the rest, that gives us a little bit of something to claim.
Street cred.
Street cred.
Yeah, man.
And speaking of interviews, too, like this one, and you just mentioned interviews all day.
Well, all day today, I'm doing 11 interviews, including this one.
And the last one will be Gareth Porter, number 5,000.
That's unbelievable.
And that's an occasion for breaking out the champagne, I think.
Yeah, I need to stop drinking.
5,000.
Maybe I'll get some.
And just think of that, 4,000 are with Gareth Porter.
So that means 1,000 for the rest of us.
Yeah, there you go.
Just kidding.
Actually, you know what?
You probably know the number.
How many does Gareth have?
It is.
I checked.
Because he's last today.
Right now, it's at 316 Gareth Porter interviews.
So today will be 317.
It's not quite 10%.
Not quite.
But that's pretty good.
That's pretty darn good.
And all that represents is that I've interviewed him about everything he's written since January 2007.
Because why wouldn't I?
And he's such an article-producing machine.
Unbelievable.
That he's giving you every week, he gives you many occasions to interview him.
So actually, it's not that surprising when you think about it.
He's stated that he is eager to be on your show, and so therefore has done so many.
Yeah.
Because he's a busy guy, but he also realizes talking about those articles with you just is a magnifier, a megaphone for the articles.
So good for him, good for you.
Yeah, you know, I think it was Tatiana Meraz asked me, so what's the big deal with Gareth, then?
Why is he so special?
I said, well, you know what?
If I was Mr. White, then he's Clark Kent.
He's just the best, man.
You know?
Yeah.
If I had the money and I could run my own Daily Planet, he's my star reporter, man.
Simple as that.
Gareth, go prove that what they said about Iran today isn't true.
And then out he goes, and then just a little while later, he shows why you should not believe what they're claiming today.
Right.
He's in a class by himself.
That book he did, On Iran, a Manufactured Crisis, people need to read that.
It's as timely today as it was the day it came out.
And, of course, you're right.
He's keeping up with every one of these phony stories about Iran, given that the war with Iran is certainly possible.
I'm not sure I'm ready to say likely, but, you know, you can't tell day to day.
And we need Gareth in there debunking all these claims that, you know, for decades they've said Iran is, you know, the biggest state sponsor of terrorism.
And then, you know, but they never name anything.
Once in a while they do name something, but you can count, you can look it up to see what Gareth has had to say about it.
And, you know, usually he will show you that he's addressed probably all of the, all the charges, but he'll show you that there's nothing to the claims that there's either false flag or something phony going on.
The demonization of Iran since 1979, it has been, you know, intolerable and thank goodness for Gareth.
Oh, yeah.
Well, what about that time they attacked the USS Liberty?
Oh, wait, that was Israel.
Sorry.
Well, it's funny.
I guess I'd never heard anybody claim that it actually was Iran.
Somewhere somebody is claiming that.
I just never heard it.
So you can't even make fun of it.
Just me now joking.
What was pretty close, though, was when Ladeen had influenced Michael Flynn to the degree when he was the head of the DIA that he was saying, you know, trying to get the DIA to prove somehow that Iran had done Benghazi.
I was like, no, man, those are your Al-Qaeda guys.
Well, in that book, didn't Flynn and Ladeen do a book together?
Yeah.
They had their own axes of evil, which included Al-Qaeda, Iran.
Maduro.
Him and everybody.
In other words, they couldn't even keep the line straight, making Iran an ally of bin Laden.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, man, here's a book you guys got to read.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No I.T. by Hussain Badajani.
No Dev, No Ops, No I.T.
It's a book about how a libertarian ought to run his tech company.
I think you'll really get a kick out of it.
No Dev, No Ops, No I.T.
All right.
So listen, man, let me ask you a thing here.
We got about 10 minutes to talk about this.
So I was kind of thinking I would ask you all about libertarianism.
But on the other hand, we don't really have that much time.
So let's talk about one extremely important aspect of libertarianism.
Anti-imperialism.
And I don't know if you saw this, but the Libertarian Party chair put out this video by, I guess, the treasurer of the Hawaii Libertarian Party chapter, something like that.
Anyway, you know, coming out full throated for regime change to put Guaido in power in Venezuela because libertarianism means opposition to socialism.
And so all us libertarians stand by this coup, he announced.
And it was the chair of the party that put that thing out and said, Hey, everybody, check out this great thing.
And so, you know, I was wondering if maybe you could explain a little bit about like maybe if there's anything more important than opposing socialism in other people's countries to the libertarian ideology, our movement, our future.
Well, I was unaware of the story you just related.
I don't see that.
I get press releases from the Libertarian Party, and maybe it was in that, but I don't pay close enough attention to them.
I usually don't open them, so maybe that's my fault.
Well, I don't know the kind of case this person in Hawaii made, but the idea that you can go from, quote, opposition to socialism to favoring U.S. efforts to change the regime in Venezuela, you know, there's like several hundred thousand light years between those two statements.
You can oppose socialism all you want, but nowhere follows that therefore the U.S. military or even diplomats, to think of Ukraine for a moment, should be engaged in regime change.
I mean, one doesn't follow from the other, because a whole lot of other things come into play if you favor regime change, like the U.S. government having a military that's prepared to engage in regime change, and all the things that go along with that, which take us way more than ten minutes to discuss all the implications of an imperial state or national security state, whatever name we want to attach to it.
So go ahead, oppose state socialism all you want, but what's that got to do with the U.S. government being involved in regime change?
You know, I don't want any government, but you can't even have a very small limited government if you're going to be pursuing imperial policies all over the world.
Even if you think you're a good-faith world policeman, which doesn't happen anyway, we know it's not good-faith policing that goes on, it's political stuff, geopolitical ambitions, and military-industrial complex interests that end up controlling.
But even if you imagine for the moment some utopia where there's good-faith world policing, you can't have a small government and low taxes without that, I mean, with that policy, with world policing.
Because, hey, the world's in a way a disorderly place in a lot of ways, and if you're going to give that mission to the government, it's going to be pretty busy, which means it's going to be consuming resources, distorting the economy.
And again, this just assumes unrealistically good faith.
Add to the fact that you're not going to get good faith, you're going to get operators who are self-serving, and are interested in mission creep, and interested in justifying everything as a threat to us, even when there's not even the remotest threat.
And that's a recipe for a humongous government that's gobbling up tons of resources, diverting labor and entrepreneurial ingenuity away from serving consumers and into serving the government's missions.
And how does that in any way line up with libertarian sensibilities?
It doesn't at all.
And, you know, I get it that libertarians, a lot of times, they come from the right, and I hate this, because this caricature is, I think, not really representative of the libertarian movement overall at all.
I think it's a mischaracterization, but there is a certain truth to it that libertarians essentially are republicans who are for bro jobs and pot smoking.
And so that makes them different than republicans a little bit.
But essentially, they are still relying on all of the same garbage that they were taught in government school when they were a kid about the benevolence of the government's intentions and the transitive property of democracy where you believe something and then the government makes it happen for you.
And just all this garbage, the way that people are raised, especially conservatives in this country.
So they just, I guess they're just kind of helpless, right?
They're lost in the dark.
They can't even sit here and say to themselves, well, geez, I was just reading in the paper this morning that America bombed a bunch of their own puppet Afghan soldiers and cops twice in a week.
Like 30 of them.
Oops, dropped the JDAM on the wrong group of cops.
And this is a war that's been going on for a generation now.
Oh, you know what we should do?
We should go to Venezuela and help the people there.
After all this, after Iraq, after the Islamic State, and Libya, and Yemen, and Afghanistan, now you're going to go help the people of what?
Honduras again, too?
You're going to help another coup in Honduras?
I mean, and never even mind the history of all of American oppression in Latin America.
You know, they've actually been on the back burner this century so far.
USA's been busy killing Arabs.
But how the Libertarian Party could sit here and act like history just began yesterday.
And there's this poor Stalinist country a couple miles from here that could really use a helping hand without taking into account the context of any other thing.
American corporate power, oil interests, John Bolton, the CIA, any other thing, any of the consequences for the people of the Middle East or of Latin America this whole time is just absolutely incredible.
You know what I mean?
Like this guy gets everything he knows from CNN, the leader of the LP, or what?
No, it's appalling, and to gauge in a little bit of hyperbole, none of us should sleep until we demolish the impression that Libertarians and Conservatives are relatives, are in the same family.
We have to destroy that idea.
Because that has been so damaging.
That was a historical sort of accident because of the Soviet Union after the Cold War, after World War II.
And that too many Libertarians, there were heroic Libertarians who fought this, but too many Libertarians thought, oh no, the Conservatives are our natural allies.
And they'll be, because they're for free markets, we're for free markets, they're for limited government, we're for limited government.
I'm for limiting government, but I'm not for limited government.
And then even some of them would say, well look, even once the Soviet Union goes away, they'll be with us on foreign policy.
Even the ones that were tuned into foreign policy correctly would sometimes make apologies for the Conservatives and say, but once the Cold War's over, they'll be with us even on foreign policy.
Well, none of that is true.
We can see the Cold War's been over a good long time.
And an awful lot of Conservatives, there are honorable exceptions, like the American Conservative, but an awful lot of Conservatives are as warmongering as they were when the Soviet Union existed.
They're not with us on the free market as we could see.
You just need to go back to George W. Bush, and when the recession hit, and he said we need to violate free market principles to save the free market.
And now with Trump, it's all over.
Again, with a couple of, I was going to say a couple of honorable exceptions, but maybe the people I'm now thinking of are really Libertarians, not Conservatives at all.
But look at them, with Trump now, they embrace protectionism, they embrace, they've talked some peace, but somehow we haven't actually seen it in action yet.
So they're not allies of ours, they're not family members.
If there's a family, a Libertarian family, if there's a Conservative family reunion, don't send me an invitation, because I'm not in your family.
And if I put on a Libertarian reunion, don't expect an invitation, because I don't believe you're in my family.
Historically, liberalism and libertarianism have been on the left, and have been anti-empire, anti-military, with no thank you for your service.
I like to say thank you for your service to the empire.
If I'm going to thank for service, that's how I'm going to complete the sentence.
There's no family resemblance or relationship.
So let's stop acting like it is.
And I can't stand it, I hear it almost all the time.
People say Conservatives slash Libertarians, as if they're Republicans who think marijuana should be legal.
If you think that's the difference between those two camps, you've got to go back and do some reading.
Yeah, well, and there sure are a hell of a lot of differences between us and the left, too, which is, I think, as you say, that's the historical accident where, wow, the leftists in adopting Marxism became even more statists than the Conservatives, who always were the party of the Crown and the Church, and I mean the Church with political power, not just religion in general.
The old order of feudal power.
And so that does make us seem like friends of the Conservatives, compared to people who want to nationalize everything, and abolish prices and human nature.
That's not going to work.
But yeah, you're right, that shouldn't make us move right.
That should just show Conservatives why to stop being Conservatives and to become Libertarians, really.
Right, but there's always been a Libertarian element that identified with the left.
Bastiat, when he was in France's national legislature in the early first half of the 19th century, sat on the left.
That's where that term actually comes from.
You had the opponents of the old regime on the left, and the apologists for the old regime on the right.
And Bastiat sat with Proudhon.
They disagreed on a lot of things about whether if you abolish government, if the government stops intervening in the economy, will there be rent, will there be interest?
They debated economics, but they agreed that the government shouldn't be meddling, interfering with people's peaceful economic, not just economic activity, there are no strictly economic activities, with people's activity, peaceful activities.
And then if you go to the early American Libertarians, I'm talking now late 19th century, 20th century, Benjamin Tucker, people around Liberty Magazine, they identified with the left.
I mean, they were part of the Socialist International.
Now, they had big arguments with them, and Tucker sort of got fed up eventually, but they saw themselves as leftists.
They were pro-worker, they were part of the workers' movement, trying to free it from government, and bosses who were linked to government, they had all the same concerns that many Libertarians have today.
And it was not right-wing, it was not pro-military.
Hey, what's a good article by you about that stuff?
Gosh, I don't know if I've actually done an article about Tucker and those people, but others have, I don't have anything off the top of my head.
Look up, people can Google Roderick Long, and put in Benjamin Tucker, and you'll find stuff and I think, who was it?
David D'Amato has written about Benjamin Tucker at libertarianism.org, one of the Cato Institute sites.
So overall, in that broader take, I always, of course, have my old standbytes.
One of, if not my favorite, Rothbard essay from 1965, Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty.
People know of Rothbard as a crotchety old right-winger by the 1990s, but in this case, he's saying that libertarianism is all the way to the left, to the left of the Reds.
And what statists the right are from that angle.
And it's a great one, there's so much, you know, these are all kind of metaphysical concepts and all that, but there's so much truth.
And I've had so many people tell me that their mind has been blown by reading that article, that just makes them have to recategorize all kinds of things.
There's actually a speech he gave about that Rothbard essay.
So if we put in Roderick Long and Rothbard and The Prospects for Liberty, or Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty, that commentary by Roderick will come up and that will be filled with interesting stuff on this topic.
Cool.
All right, well, I got to let you go because next up is Peter Ford on Al-Qaeda in Syria.
Okay, well, have a great day and congratulations on 5,000 interviews.
Fantastic.
Cool, thanks very much, Sheldon.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
And, you know, for people not too familiar, don't think, well, anyway, let me tell you, he wrote the book on homeschool, on guns, and on abolishing the income tax.
That's what kind of leftist libertarian he is.
Well, that's even two stages, but...
Yeah, I know.
I didn't mean to make you out like a collectivist there, but on the way to anarcho-nothingness.
All right, appreciate it, bud.
Bye-bye.
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