04/26/03 – Harry Browne – The Scott Horton Show

Scott Horton 0:00
Hello, everybody. I’m Philip Dru Administrator. This is the weekend interview show. And I’m joined on the phone by Harry Browne, the former presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party from 1996 and 2000. He’s written 11 books. And right now he is the Director of Public Policy for the American Liberty foundation. His two most recent books that you’ve probably heard of “Why Government Doesn’t Work” and “The Great Libertarian Offer”. Welcome to radio chaos. Mr. Browne,

Harry Browne 0:30
thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Scott Horton 0:33
I guess many people in our audience might not really be familiar with what it means to be a libertarian. So maybe you can help explain for us briefly what is libertarianism?

Harry Browne 0:42
Oh, it’s very, very simple. Libertarians believe you should be able to live your life the way you want to live it not as George Bush or Al Gore thinks is best for you or best for the Fatherland. Libertarians think that because you’re the one who gets up and goes to work every day, you should keep every dollar you earned, not just what George Bush or Al Gore or Trent Lott or Bill Clinton thinks you are entitled to keep but every single dollar spend it, save it, give it away as you see fit, not as some bureaucrat thinks that money ought to be spent. And we think you ought to be able to raise your children by your values not the values of those who think they’re creating a better world, with your children as the pawns in the process. So it’s really very simple. Libertarians simply believe that it’s your life, and you should make the decisions. And as long as you don’t do violence against anyone else, then you should be free to do whatever you want.

Scott Horton 1:36
Well that’s very interesting, I’m trying to figure out where does that philosophy fit on the current political spectrum that they teach us in college?

Harry Browne 1:43
Well, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. In the libertarian view of life, there are just two poles, and that is violence and force at one end, and peaceful intercourse at the other. And the Republican and Democratic spectrum, what you have are two different kinds of force being employed. The Republicans want to force you to do certain things, the Democrats want to force you to do other things. And they argue politically, over which view will prevail during any election. And whoever gets elected and forces what he wants. Most of the force overlaps I mean, the Republican say there for economic freedom that you should be able to spend your money your way. But then they support corporate welfare, they support high taxes, they support all sorts of things. So the Democrats say that they’re for civil rights and peace and so forth. So when the chips are down, they support invading your privacy, letting Treasury agents rummage through your bank accounts, censoring the internet, putting a beach chip in your television set, supporting wars, and on and on. So there’s a tremendous overlap between the two of them. But they are both on the end of the spectrum that favors using force to impose somebody’s idea of how the world ought to operate.

Scott Horton 3:03
Okay, well, how would you apply libertarian principles to, for example, the current situation in Iraq?

Harry Browne 3:10
Well, a libertarian president would be eating his lunch right now and completely unconcerned about Iraq, because American troops wouldn’t be there. America wouldn’t be trying to tell people in the Middle East, what kind of government they should have, whom they should support. And America would not be supporting Israel with troops and partly with money and arms and so on. nor would it be supporting Israel’s enemies, and it would stay completely out of the Middle Eastern problems. And traditionally, that was the American way the Statue of Liberty was given to America, by the people of France, not the government of France, but by the people of France, who voluntarily raised the money to build that statue and send it over here because America was proof that a country could live in liberty and peace without getting embroiled in all the endless wars of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and people admired the United States so much, because it proved that it was possible. So maybe it could happen in their country, too. And now all of that has been lost. Now, America is the global cuff, the superpower. The bully the one who’s going to tell everybody in the world, what is right and what is wrong and how it must live. And it’s record of improving things in other countries is as bad as any other busy bodies. That is, it shows some kind of immediate victory leaves, and then everything falls apart behind it and nobody cares, because now we’re concerned with writing some wrong and some other country. Afghanistan is chaos and a mess. Lebanon, after the US was in there was a tremendous anarchy afterward, and then the United States allowed Syria to come in and take it over as the price of getting Syria to join the coalition against Iraq during the Gulf War. It’s just been one mess after another that the United States has created by abandoning its libertarian philosophy of letting the rest of the world work out its own problems.

Scott Horton 5:17
When did that happen? At what point did America cease being a peace loving Republic and become an empire?

Harry Browne 5:24
Well, there’s an interesting correlation here, and I have not explored it to its utmost limits. But when big government started to take hold in the United States in the late 19th century, the late 1800s, with regulatory agencies and other trappings of what were called the Progressive Era, that also led politicians to the arrogant view, that we can make everything alright we can make all products in the United States state by using government force, and we can make the rest of the world safe by using government force. So the United States went to war with Spain, even though Spain had no argument with the United States whatsoever. And when that war was over, the United States then went into the Philippines, which it had freed from Spain, and took over the Philippines, according to President McKinley to Christianize the heathens there, and 1000s of Philippines were butchered in the slaughter that took place to try to pacify the Philippines just like trying to pacify Vietnam later. So my point is that it was the growth of big government that turned the politicians views outward. And the passage of the income tax in 1913, to me was the defining moment because it gave the government the resources to get involved in World War One. I imagine anybody listening to this show knows that World War One started in 1914, as a purely European war. And in 1917, the United States entered the war, tipped the balance of power to the Allies and destroyed Germany and created this terrible conditions in Germany, that the Germans were willing to turn to somebody like Adolf Hitler, which then of course, brought on World War Two, again, unintended consequences of trying to write all the wrongs of the world. But my point in all of this is that it is big government at home, that has enabled the politicians to turn their attention elsewhere to foreign countries, we wouldn’t have troops in 100 countries around the world today, if there were no income tax, and the government had to live up to $100 billion a year from tariffs and excise taxes

Scott Horton 7:37
Well, let me let me go ahead, sir. In terms of foreign policy, there was a promise made at the end of World War Two called Never Again. And the point was that if crimes if atrocities are being committed, even by a sovereign government, against its own people, on such a scale of cruelty, like, for example, what we saw in Rwanda in the early 90s, where the rivers were running literally red with blood, is it is it ever okay? For the United States of America to intervene and stop something like that from happening?

Harry Browne 8:11
It is always okay for you to do that. If you think that you have an obligation to go over there, you have the perfect right to go over there to fight, to send money over there to do whatever you want to do as a free sovereign individual. But you have no right to tell me that I must go over there that you will decide what is right and what is wrong, what is atrocity and what isn’t, and that you can take my money for that purpose, and that you can send me over there to fight and maybe die to do it. And that’s where the problem is that when you give politicians the power to be able to make these decisions for us, that power will always be abused. That power will always be a problem. You mentioned Rwanda, the United States didn’t go in and intervene there. The United States very selectively chooses where it will go in and intervene. And not only that, there was an enormous massacre in Indonesia, after Suharto took power there and the United States cooperated in that massacre. And it also cooperated in the massacre of when Indonesians committed atrocities against East Timor. To say that the United States has this obligation simply means that you are giving politicians the power to make decisions that if you actually knew what decisions they were making, you might be appalled at what they’re doing in your name or in the name of righting the wrongs of the world.

Scott Horton 9:42
So volunteers couldn’t have gone to Europe and defeated the Nazis, because they have I mean, didn’t it take D Day and the entire American army marching across Europe to stop Hitler?

Harry Browne 9:52
Well, in the first place, you have an enormous contradiction. We are over there fighting for freedom whether we want to or not. In other words, people can be sold into slavery to fight for freedom. And that doesn’t make any sense at all. Secondly, there never would have been a World War Two, if the United States had stayed out of World War One. The allies and the Central Powers were engaged in this drawn out enormously expensive, enormously fatal war that was going on and nothing was happening, and both sides were suing for peace when the United States decided to enter the war, once the United States entered the war with its overwhelming economic and military power, the doom was sealed for Germany and Austria. And as a result of that the allies were able, instead of coming to an armistice, to go ahead and prosecute the war to ascend to devastate Germany to exact enormous and unrealistic reparations, that destroyed the German economy, they took land away from Germans, the German people were forced to become Poles forced to become Czechs, forced to become French, as a result of taking territory away from Germany. And naturally, the people wanted revenge, just as the people in the Middle East today are wanting revenge against the Americans. And so when Hitler came along, the people of Germany, that’s the, that’s the country of Beethoven and Wagner and Schiller and Gerta very cultured, educated people, but they fell for Hitler, because they have been so devastated and so put upon by the Allies because of the United States getting into World War One, the world, history does not begin on some date, like September 11, or December 7, 1941, you always have to look at what preceded the event, in order to understand whether or not the United States should have done this better, something else. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear about that

Scott Horton 11:56
Very clear. I’d like to change the subject a little bit. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you, why should a rich white guy like yourself be so opposed to the current system, it seems as though you might be missing out on all the government programs set up for your benefit?

Harry Browne 12:14
Well, I do have a conscience for one thing.

Scott Horton 12:16
Oh so that’s it.

Harry Browne 12:16
But secondly, I’m not that rich, I, there was a time when I was rich, and then I made the mistake of deciding to run for president twice, which had a great deal to do with changing, putting me in the middle of class coming downward instead of going upward. But the point is that I value freedom, just as you do. And everyone else does, freedom is a natural desire of humans in size, the way I see it, there are three instincts that are built into human beings. First is the desire to survive, no matter how bad life gets, we still want to live and so we will do everything possible to stay alive under the worst possible conditions sometimes. The second is the instinct or desire to procreate, which is reflected in the sexual urge. And the third is the desire or the instinct to make one’s own decisions. I don’t believe there’s a single individual in the United States of America, who thinks that Bill Clinton, or George Bush could run his life better than the individual himself could run it. I don’t know of anybody who would say, gee, if George Bush would only come into my home and make all my decisions for me as to where I should live, and what kind of a job I should have, and so forth, I’d be so much better off than I am today. And I’m no different from anyone else. I want to live in freedom the difference is that I see a glimmer of hope, not a big hope, but a glimmer of hope, that it might be possible to make America a free country again. And because of that, I find it very difficult to turn my back on it and not do what I can to try to make it happen. And I don’t know if that’s really an answer to your question.

Scott Horton 14:04
Ya it sure is.

Harry Browne 14:06
But I just, I guess the simple way of putting it is I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Scott Horton 14:11
You mentioned before about, well, like basically the turn of America into an empire and how it happened in the era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the so called progressives of 100 or so years ago. And I’d like to ask you, doesn’t America really need serious antitrust laws to protect us from monopolies?

Harry Browne 14:32
Well, it may seem that way but in practice, the anti trust laws actually preserve monopolies. The anti trust laws are used more to quash competition than they are to promote it. The, for instance, the Microsoft case is a good example. The idea that Microsoft was getting too big and we had to stop it through anti trust or not legislation but prosecution is contrary to the facts, the fact is that Microsoft got as big as it did because people wanted its products. And in all the discussions of Microsoft, nobody bothered to point out the kind of service that they offered, the products that they offered, and so forth, nor did anybody recognize that there were dozens of competitors for every product that Microsoft produces. By the government coming in, what it did was to say that you cannot get beyond a certain point in size. Because if you do, the government’s going to move in on you. Therefore, companies were encouraged to become less competitive, to offer less than the way of products and services so that they would only get to a certain size and no larger. And what is promotes is the idea that if you’re AOL, or WordPerfect, or some other companies, some other producing some other products, then the answer is not to go out and out compete Microsoft, but to go to the government and get the government to do the work for you. And that’s what government is, we think of government as a place where we can enact some wonderful financial legislation or charitable legislation, or military security or all these other things, but it isn’t. Government is just politics, anything you turn over to the government, you automatically transform it from a scientific, medical or financial matter into a political issue, to be decided by whoever has the most political power. And that’s never going to be you and it’s never going to be me, which simply means that when you envision the anti trust laws, making America safer competition, what you’re really thinking about, without realizing it is a bunch of politicians like Teddy Kennedy and Trent Lott and George Bush and Bill Clinton, horse trading, in order to divide up the spoils, reward their friends and punish their enemies.

Scott Horton 17:05
But didn’t the era of the company town system not end until the New Deal, and didn’t take the national government to recognize in law, the right of workers to unionize before any sort of real progress on hours and wages was made?

Harry Browne 17:19
No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I once saw an interesting graph in a book which portrayed this so beautifully, and that was it showed the correlation between the rise of union membership and the rise in wages. And it showed just with irrefutable proof that the rise of wages were dependent upon the rise in union membership, but the graph started in 1900. Then on the next page, you turn and you find the same graph, but now it starts at 1800 and you see that that rise in wages was going on for 100 years before the union movement actually began to become effective in any way whatsoever. So all the unions had done was to climb on a trend that had already existed for 100 years before unions became involved. I’m describing something graphic with words, which is never completely satisfying so I hope you can picture what I’m saying is that the unions simply have traded on the idea that they cause the higher wages. But what they did was they have caused higher wages of certain industries, but always at the expense of people in other industries who are unorganized. So you really have only two choices. Either we force everybody to join a union, whether he wants to or doesn’t want to, or we continue to let the marketplace decide what wages are. And employers will continue as they have for 200 years to bid for the best employees and in the process, push prices, pardon me not prices but wages upward

Scott Horton 19:03
But I thought workers in this country used to make $2 a day and work for 18 hours

Harry Browne 19:07
Of course they did

Scott Horton 19:08
And breathe in coal dust all day long

Harry Browne 19:10
Of course and at the time a loaf of bread was five cents. Henry Ford was the first person to come up with the dollar an hour wage, and he was in an un-unionized company. And he created far better working conditions for his employees because he wanted them to be more productive. And it was in his self interest to make his plant as attractive as possible for workers so that the best people would come and go to work for it. The fact that people worked in terrible conditions in coal mines is understandable, because we’re not talking about the 21st century. We’re talking about the 19th century, when all sorts of technological things did not exist then. You know, it’s wonderful to think that there should never have been any child labor. But if there had never been any child labor, people would have died of starvation. People who lived on the farm, everybody in the family had to pitch in, the children had to get up at five in the morning, go out and milk the cows and do other things, because that was what was necessary to survive. As technology improved and mass production started, a lot of these families sent their children to factories to work and it was the families that sent them there because the children could be more valuable to the families working in the child labor places than they could be back on the farm. The money that the children could earn could buy much greater health and technology on the farm, than the children working there could produce for the benefit of the farm. And this is the way progress takes place.

Scott Horton 19:35
So was it a bad thing when the government outlawed child labor?

Harry Browne 20:54
Well, the funny thing is, the government never really outlawed child labor, child labor began to die out in the United States about the start of the 1900s. Because technology had reached the point where a father in the family could earn enough money to support the entire family without his wife or his children having to work as well. And so now child labor just died out because nobody really wants his children to work. The children were working because it was necessary for survival. The first child labor law, the first federal child labor law passed in America, Taft went 1938, 38 years after the child labor movement was already beginning to die out. By 1938, there were hardly any children working in America in conditions we would consider to be sweatshops or slave labor or that kind of thing that’s always depicted by the muckrakers. The point is that government takes the credit many times for things that the marketplace has created simply because it’s in the self interest of everybody involved.

Scott Horton 22:03
Okay, well, let me bring up the two most evil and most powerful businessmen from that era, Rockefeller and Morgan. I don’t recall reading about the free market taking care of these evil monopolists, wasn’t it government interference that finally broke up Standard Oil?

Harry Browne 22:18
Well, you’re talking about two different kinds of people entirely, Rockefeller and Morgan were not one in the same. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil. And he revolutionized the production of oil in this country so that it became the product that we think of today. Because of what Rockefeller did, there were millions and millions of families in this country who could afford heating oil, that before that, had to shiver in the wintertime or to build fires in order to try to heat their homes. And he took them out of primitive conditions, with the discovery of oil in Texas, and Oklahoma and places like that, there was a tremendous run on of people trying to get into this new, wonderful market of oil and produce it. Rockefeller kept buying up other companies and people would go into the oil business just hoping to strike one well, because if they were able to get one well producing, they could sell out to Rockefeller and make a huge return on their investment.

Scott Horton 23:27
Well, but didn’t also buy up the railroads and buy up all the delivery systems and set up a system where anybody trying to compete with him couldn’t get anywhere near the same rates on the rail cars because he had a monopoly on those too

Harry Browne 23:40
No he actually, he didn’t actually buy any railroads, at least not that I’m aware of, what he did was with the enormous market that he was offering to the railroads, he negotiated lower rates than other people could get and that’s perfectly understandable, because he was giving so much business to the railroads to transport the oil from oil wells to markets or to refineries and that’s understandable. Now, what’s the alternative? So let’s suppose that despite what I have said, that you don’t believe anything that I have said and you think Rockefeller was some kind of a predator a really bad person, the Saddam Hussein of the 1900s.

Scott Horton 24:24
Well I’m really no fan of his grandsons.

Harry Browne 24:28
Oh well, his grandsons are a completely different story because they of course, have not created anything. They have just been simply using the wealth that John D Rockefeller created for their pet political causes. But getting back to John D. Rockefeller suppose he was a really bad egg. What is the alternative? Well, there really is only one alternative, and that is to allow people like Teddy Kennedy and Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, and people like that to decide what rates he can charge how much, how large a company he can have, what kind of deal he can make with the railroad companies and so on? And do you think those politicians are going to make those decisions in your interest in mind that they’re going to do what is the fairest, what is the most just, they don’t have to. Rockefeller had to be on his toes every moment of every day because if he wasn’t, somebody else would dethrone him and take his markets away from him, he had to be providing something of value to other people, or they wouldn’t give him their money. But Jesse Helms and Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton and George Bush, they don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. Because they have power, they have the the force of government behind them, they can just simply sign an executive order or enact a bill or pass a regulation and make people do their bidding. They don’t have to please anybody. Of course, they have to stand for election. But God knows how many people in this country are even aware of the laws that are passed by Kennedy and Helms and Lott and these other people and the laws that are signed by George Bush, these people are continually passing laws day after day laws that are so long and so complicated that even the Senators and Representatives don’t read them, and have any idea what’s in them and very often, some Congressman says, my God, I didn’t know that was in the bill when I voted for it. This is not what I intended. So all of these people can do these things without any public accountability, because they have the force of government on their side. John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, these people did not have the force of government on their side, they competed in the free market. James J. Hill is another person who built the Great Northern Railroad without a dime of government subsidy and it was the only railroad that didn’t go broke in the late 1800s.

Scott Horton 26:56
So wouldn’t the Rockefeller offspring control the entire country and everything in it today, if the government hadn’t broken the trust in 1901? I mean, these guys were seem to be on the path of consolidating monopoly power over basically all wealth in the country.

Harry Browne 27:12
Well, first of all, they didn’t break the Rockefeller trust, they just appeared to do so. You have to understand that politics is power, the government is power. And you think somebody as powerful as John D. Rockefeller, when he could see the handwriting on the road, was not going to buy up a bunch of senators and congressmen and bureaucrats to make absolutely sure that whatever was done was going to still continue to be in his interest. Once it became obvious that the, the game was now going to be fought out in Washington instead of in the marketplace then that’s where Rockefeller turned his attention. And as a result, he continued to control the various Standard Oil companies even though they have been split up to several types. The perfect example of this is Bill Gates. Microsoft never had even a lobbying office in Washington, DC, until AOL brought that anti trust suit against Microsoft over Internet Explorer and Netscape. And once that happened, and Gates realized that people have the power to use government to interfere with his plan, they set up an enormous lobbying base in Washington and began playing the political game.

Scott Horton 28:28
So now Microsoft will be protected forever by the federal government, is that right?

Harry Browne 28:32
Probably so, because AOL and these other companies don’t have the resources to compete politically, the way Microsoft does. When you give power to Washington, to government, any place for a good purpose, you’re automatically giving that power to people whose purposes are not the same as yours, and who in most cases, are going to be far more powerful, far richer, far more influential than you are. So to support the idea that government should get you what you want, is really supporting the idea that somebody else is going to get what he wants it at your expense.

Scott Horton 29:10
Well, let’s let’s be clear for the record here, of the Standard Oil companies once it was broken up. We’re talking about Texaco and Chevron and what are the what are the other, tt was what, the nine sisters they called it or something?

Harry Browne 29:25
I, you know, I’m not an expert on this, but Standard Oil was broken up so that it became Standard Oil of Ohio Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, and so forth. And then, over the years, there have been various mergers and buyouts and things of this sort, so that the companies have changed, ownership changed names and so forth. I mean, today’s Exxon was Esso before that it was Chevron and before that, it was Standard Oil and so on. And it’s very difficult to keep track of this all. So I guess what is your question?

Scott Horton 30:00
Well, my question is, don’t these companies still control most of the oil on earth? 100 years after the trust was broken? Aren’t these still the same companies that we pump our gas at the gas station at every day?

Harry Browne 30:12
Well, actually, when you say, control the oil on Earth, the biggest control is in Washington, DC. And I can give you the perfect example of this. How old are you, by the way?

Scott Horton 30:23
26

Harry Browne 30:25
Oh, well, you don’t, you don’t remember the gas lines of the 1970s then. But maybe your grandfather has told you about that

Scott Horton 30:33
Actually this is a question that I have written down for you here, does black gold and the way its price is manipulated, hinder the rest of the free market?

Harry Browne 30:43
Actually, it is far less manipulated now than it was 30 years ago, in 19, and I’m not sure about the year but it was probably 1971. In fact, I’m 90% sure it was 1971. 1971, I am sure Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Inflation was getting out, supposedly out of control. And of course, inflation is caused by the government too, by expanding the money supply too fast. But he imposed wage and price controls on the American econom, I mean, just like we were the Soviet Union or something. He imposed enormous surtaxes on cars coming in from Japan, and did a number other things. that one of the things that was little known and little noticed at the time, was that he also imposed price controls on oil and natural gas. This meant that if you were an oil producer, you knew no matter how much you invested to produce oil, you could only get so much for it at the marketplace. And so production of oil in the United States just dried up. Then came the 1970 war between Israel and the Middle East countries and the Arabs imposed an embargo. First of all, anybody supporting Israel, they wouldn’t sell oil to them. And here the United States was without any real domestic production of oil, and not able to buy from the Middle East but that didn’t last very long. Then what happened was OPEC started flexing its muscles, OPEC being the cartel of a Middle Eastern oil producing states, and also Venezuela and a few others outside the Middle East. But anyway, they started raising the price and cutting back production and the price of oil went all the way up from about $3 a barrel in the late 1960s to $40 a barrel by the middle of the 1970s. And, as a result of that, America was really held hostage to these companies qnd there was nothing that could be done about it, because there was no significant production of oil in the United States to compete with that. Now, here’s the point of the story, I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan, I think he was all talk and no action, on the things that really count. But in his entire eight years in office, he did one good thing. And that was just after he took office in 1981, he removed the price controls on domestic oil. Within three years, the price of oil has plunged from $40 a barrel, down to $6 a barrel or $8 a barrel, I guess it was and since then it has worked its way back up but it’s still much lower than that $40 a barrel.

Scott Horton 33:38
So it wasn’t Ronald Reagan getting involved in the market, it was him ending government involvement in the market that saved it

Harry Browne 33:45
Releasing the market to be able to produce what was necessary. Because once the price controls were gone, there was an enormous incentive at $40 a barrel for anybody who thought there was oil anywhere close to where they were to dig for that oil and drill for it and try to get it up and take advantage of this price. And oil began flooding the market from the United States within a year after that and the price started coming down $35, $30, $25, $20. And over the next four or five years, it just kept coming down steadily until as I say it got under $10 A barrel by I guess, around 1986 or 1988 somewhere in there. And so all of this came from your question of do the oil companies control oil throughout the world? Well, it’s obvious that the oil companies didn’t have nearly the clout or the power that some bureaucrat in Washington had by being able to enforce the price controls on oil.

Scott Horton 34:47
Mr. Brown on welfare. I guess it’s pretty widely known the libertarian position on welfare is that there should be no such thing and so my question to you then, is what should society do about those people who really cannot take care of themselves? Well, I know there are people like that who really cannot

Harry Browne 35:05
Of course, and I’m all in favor of welfare, I just don’t want any government welfare, because government welfare will be just as political as government oil policy, government wars, government anything else, is all going to be politics. We have never had in this country, the phenomena that has existed, that have existed in countries throughout the world for ages, and that is of people actually dying of starvation in the streets. And the reason is not because there are no helpless people in the United States, but that there have always been ways of taking care of those people, churches take care of people, private agencies take care of people and they do it without coercion, without force without causing anybody against his will to support some program. Once you turn it over to an agency of force, then it becomes a matter of power and politics. And almost entirely these programs are supported not by the supposed beneficiaries of the programs, but by the people who make the most money out of them. For example, low cost housing, produced by the government does not come about because various tenants or other people hold demonstrations in the street and clamor for government housing. No, it comes about because wealthy contractors go to Washington and get urban renewal programs passed, which in many cases destroys the only housing that the poor people have, and replaces it with more expensive housing. Welfare has become a gigantic scandal over the last 30 years, not because people have become more evil or more venal, but simply because government welfare has grown to such a huge pile of money, that it is going to be ripe with corruption, corruption falls naturally upon power, it doesn’t just come out of thin air because Satan has suddenly decreed that some government program is going to be infected with it, it comes because there’s so much money there, that sticky hands are always going to reach for it. One thing we have to realize is that the problem is never the abuse of power, it’s the power to abuse, because once that power is there, it’s going to attract the worst kind of people. And when you say, I think George Bush is the greatest man who ever lived, and therefore I see no reason not to give him the power to give money to faith based charities, or to other things of this sort. What you don’t realize is you’re giving the same power to whoever is going to follow George Bush in office. And that may be Bill Clinton, or a clone of his, or Al Gore, or somebody that you don’t like. And you can reverse this and say, I think Bill Clinton was a wonderful president, but all the powers that were given to Bill Clinton to do good, then naturally fell into the hands of George Bush to reward his friends and punish his enemies, which are a different set of friends and enemies from those that Bill Clinton had.

Scott Horton 38:12
Well, all that corruption and politics aside, is it not true that before Social Security and Medicare that if you’re poor and sick, you just died?

Harry Browne 38:22
Well, first of all, Social Security doesn’t do anything to speak up. When people say, I have to live on my Social Security, that almost always is not true, what they’re doing is they’re getting some Social Security, but they’re also getting money from their family and from other places, and maybe even from churches or, or private charities. But hardly anybody can live on Social Security. If you are getting the maximum available from Social Security, which is about $1,600 a month, then that means you must’ve when you were working earned a lot of money in order to be able to qualify for the maximum. So the $1,600 is going to be peanuts, compared to what you were living on at the time you produced the record that entitles you to the $1,600 a month. Secondly, we have to realize that it is a fraud. You put the money you don’t put it in, it’s just taken from you every week 15% of what you earn either through directly out of your paycheck or your employer having to pay it so that he can’t pay it to you. And the result is that you think you’re putting this in there for your retirement but you’re not the money is immediately spent by the politician. The whole thing operates on a very simple principle, they take the money from you and they spend it on whatever they want. They may spend it on somebody else’s retirement, they may spend it building monuments of themselves. They may spend it propping up the Russian ruble for a week they may spend it waging a war on Iraq, but the one thing that they will never do is to put it in a count with your name on it so that it is safe and waiting for you when you retire. Now, if you didn’t have to pay that 15%, you could probably put 5% of what you earn in a bank savings account. You don’t have to be a stock market speculator just put it in a bank savings account. And you will come out at age 65 far ahead of what Social Security even promises if Social Security even survives that long, then everything that you put in will be yours. If you need to take it out for an emergency, you can, if you die somewhere along the way, so that you never get to 65, then your heirs will receive it, which they don’t do with Social Security. The whole thing is an absolute fraud. It is just one more welfare program where the politicians tax us and then spend the money on whatever they want and try to tell us that if it weren’t for them, we’d all die in our old age from starvation. And the fact is that that didn’t happen before Social Security people did not starve before Social Security because other people took care of them.

Scott Horton 41:03
Well but didn’t they die of curable diseases because they didn’t have the money for the health care.

Harry Browne 41:09
Well, they died of terrible diseases

Scott Horton 41:11
Curable diseases

Harry Browne 41:12
Oh I’m sorry, curable diseases. Perhaps in some cases, but there is less charitable healthcare available today, either through the government, or through private agencies than there was 50 years ago. The government has virtually shut down all of the private charitable health care, things that we once took for granted. There used to be free clinics, all over every American city, where various doctors would sign up and each doctor would come in for one day a week and take care of the poor. There used to be charity hospitals all over this country. We still have the Shriners Hospital in San Francisco, for instance. But it’s almost an anachronism because there used to be hospitals like that everywhere. The crippled Children’s Society, had hospitals all over that took care of Crippled Children. Now, government regulation has either put these hospitals out of business or mad them so expensive to operate, that they can’t possibly handle as many children or as many poor people as they once did. Meanwhile, people are expected to depend instead on Medicare and Medicaid. And Medicaid, like any other government welfare program is just ripe with corruption, and graft and waste. Medicaid is a program by which the federal government sends some money to each state but the state is supposed to set up its own program to take care of the poor health care, the health care problems of the poor. And in Tennessee, where I live, for instance, is called TennCare and in your state, it’s probably called something else. But the point is that in every one of these states, it is a gigantic boondoggle and every year politicians are running on the platform of they’re going to clean up the state’s Medicare program, and nobody ever does because you can’t clean up a program like that it is just too powerful, and therefore, too subject to graft. And Medicare has made elderly people worse off than they were before. Most elderly people today pay twice as much for health care out of their own pocket, as they did before Medicare began in the 1960s. And that’s even after allowing for inflation. Medicare has hundreds of thousands of rules. If you’re a 70 year old person, for instance, and your doctor says you’ve got a bad condition here, we need to run some tests and he submits this to Medicare and Medicare says, well, we can’t run these, you can’t run these tests, we won’t approve it, or we won’t approve this treatment and you say to the doctor well if Medicare won’t pay for I’ll take the rest of my savings to pay you to do this , it’s against the law. The doctor can go to prison, if he treats you on his own when Medicare turns it down. So we have now become, the elderly people of the country have now become slaves to bureaucrats who are not doctors, who are not medical care professionals who are deciding what treatment people can have and under again, intimidation, the threat of jail and prison time and so forth, are enforcing these rules, rather than you and your doctor working this out on the basis of what’s best for you. And people say, well, look, maybe these older people are paying more now but there are more treatments available, there are more technologies available, but that hasn’t caused the prices of computers to go up, computers which don’t operate in a government market have been coming down in price. So have VCRs and telephones and all types of electronic equipment is so much cheaper today than it was 20 years ago, but what is more expensive? Health care, education, welfare, all of these things that the government does are far more expensive than they were 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, while everything else is going down in price. Now, doesn’t that tell you something about whether or not you want to turn something over to the government?

Scott Horton 45:20
Well, it sure does, but I can imagine, you know, if I was broke, and I, and I broke my arm, for example, I can see how a charity could pretty easily take care of the cost of fixing my arm. But what about somebody who’s, you know, from the poor side of town, and who comes down with lupus, and who needs very expensive medication for the rest of his life, they’ll never be able to cure it, they’ll only be able to treat it and it’ll cost him $50,000 $100,000 a year for the pills or whatever, how could charity ever take care of some incredibly expensive disease like that?

Harry Browne 45:57
Well, first of all, don’t operate under the assumption that the government will do it. Because the government isn’t going to pay $100,000 a year to keep somebody like that alive. It just doesn’t exist. There is no such program to do that. But there are charities that do, there are foundations, there are Lupus Foundations, for example, you see these ads on television from time to time about that come from foundations that are promoting research into these things, and also promoting the care of people now, while awaiting for a cure for these things. But it’s not perfect, because we don’t live in a perfect world. But it is so much more perfect than what the government does that we should be down on our knees thanking these people for doing it and there’s two points that I would like to make number one, if you have an aunt, or somebody in your family who has had lupus for instance, and suffered from it badly, then you take a very personal interest in that even after your aunt dies and the result is that you find yourself contributing money to the Lupus Foundation, because it’s something very personal to you. The same thing is true of relatives of cancer victims and victims of polio and other things of this sort, it happens because people it becomes very personal to them and they don’t have to be forced, nobody has to come with it and stick a gun to their head and say you’re going to give this money because they have natural desire to do something about it. The second thing that we should notice is that government, fortunately, today does not give money to churches, churches are tax exempt. But the government does not have them on the dole, like it has so many industries and so many individuals on the dole. And yet, without $1 of government help. We have in this country, hundreds of thousands of churches that have been built completely through voluntary donations that are maintained week after week after week completely through voluntary donations and government was not necessary to do that, but I can tell you this if there were a government program to finance the churches that have been in existence for the last 50 years, 90% of Americans would say if it weren’t for the government, we wouldn’t have any churches in this country. Just as if government were building the cars. And we were driving Model T’s today, which we probably would if government were responsible for it. We would believe that without government building the cars there would be no cars.

Scott Horton 48:37
Okay. Well, I’ve got an example for you and this isn’t in terms of welfare, this is in terms of federal involvement in what had always been reserved as state powers. My question is, many people would point to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s as an example of the national government doing not just good, but what was absolutely necessary to secure individual liberty, the most important thing. Slavery and segregation in the South both lasted until the national government criminalized them and in the case of segregation, gave individuals the right to sue in federal civil court for violations of their rights. Why was the previous system so unable to change without national government interference? And if those federal laws were repealed, what do you think would happen?

Harry Browne 49:27
Well, there are a lot of misconceptions about that. First of all, going back to slavery, most of the abolitionists in the country were opposed to the Civil War. They did not want slavery to end through enormous Northern aggression against the South. They wanted slavery to end through economic means, and we need to recognize to put things in context, at the beginning of the 1800’s Slavery existed in many, many countries throughout the world. At the end of the 1800s it existed in practically no country around the world, except for a few African countries that still had it. The difference between all of these countries was that the Americans, that America was the only country who ended slavery through a gigantic war, in every other country except Haiti, it ended peacefully. And in Haiti it ended because the slaves themselves rose up, and overthrew the slave masters and established a new government there. America was the only country that required the violence that the Civil War presented where over 600,000 people died, not just soldiers, but civilians, including slaves and other people who died, property was destroyed on a gigantic scale and it created a bitterness that existed for 100 years afterwards. With regard to the civil rights laws, by granting the federal government the power to do good, we granted the federal government the power to do bad. So once the civil rights laws were passed, they were immediately amended to include one group after another, so that now if you run a business, you have to justify to any federal bureaucrats or even state bureaucrats who shows up at your door, you have to prove to them that you are not discriminating against Hispanics, you are not discriminating against gays, you are not discriminating against atheists, you are not discriminating against anybody and if you don’t think that there’s a connection between that and the Civil Rights Acts that were passed in the 1960s, then you just simply do not understand government.

Scott Horton 51:36
Well that, to be fair, I mean, there were black guys who couldn’t get into law school because they were black, or who couldn’t sit at a lunch counter because they were black

Harry Browne 51:44
Of course. And, and you know, who was enforcing those laws government?

Scott Horton 51:50
The state, yeah

Harry Browne 51:50
You don’t solve a problem of government by piling more government on top of it all you do is aggravate it. And it may be that there were lots of individuals who were better off as a result of the Civil Rights Act. But there were also lots of individuals who were worse off, including a lot of blacks, who could no longer get jobs. For instance, suppose you run a television station and this is actually a true case from the early 1980s. You run a television station, and you are needing to hire a new news anchor and you suddenly read in the paper, that a woman at another, another television station, excuse me, who had been hired as an anchor and fired was now suing the station for a million dollars, because she claims she was fired because she was a woman and she would not dress the way they wanted her and so forth. And so you now have these applicants for the anchor at your station and one of them’s a man and one is a woman, and the woman actually looks to be about, let’s say 10% better than the man. But if you, either case, if you’re hiring somebody and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, if you hire the man, and he doesn’t turn out, you just let him go. If you hire the woman, and she doesn’t turn out, you may be subject to a lawsuit. And so you hire the man. Now how is that woman better off because some other woman stuck up for the rights of women, she’s not better off, she’s worse off and the same thing happened to blacks, in many, many cases around the country. And life is not perfect. It never is. I have been subjected to all sorts of discrimination in my life for things that you might say, well, those are trivial those that doesn’t matter that’s not the same as being born a black man. But we all have to face the conditions, the world that we’re born into and if we rely on the state and politicians to bail us out, then we are relying on a fantasy. But if we look at the situation the way it is and say, these are my choices, what is the best choice for me to take given the circumstances, maybe it is that I’m living in Alabama in 1950 and the best thing I can do is to sell everything I own in order to be able to buy a bus ticket and go to Indiana, where I have a better chance of getting the kind of job and building eventually the kind of career I want. Sure you shouldn’t have to do that in a perfect world, but in this world, the choice of doing that or having an all powerful federal government who can decide everything and take a huge percentage of what you earned whether it’s an Alabama or Indiana. Now, most people won’t put it in those terms because they don’t see the connection between the Civil Rights Acts and big government and big taxation and big regulation and so on but it’s all a piece of one thing and you can’t take something out of context and say, well, this proves that government does good work, when in fact, even in that field it’s not doing good work necessarily.

Okay, I’d like to ask you about the environment, since the world of business tends to be centered around short term gain, and given that people tend to take shortcuts if they’re available to take, how would a libertarian system protect me from companies dumping toxic stuff into my air and water, when the consequences might be too long term to dissuade them from doing so?

Well, I’m afraid that the assumption is backward, no disrespect. But, it is the politicians and the bureaucrats who deal in the short term. If you’re a politician, all you’re concerned about is the election, that’s no more than two years away, when you have to be up for reelection to stay in Congress or the state House or whatever it is. So you will do whatever is necessary to get through any kind of crisis or any kind of situation, without, without rubbing the wrong way, anybody who is powerful enough to have an effect on your reelection. Now let’s look at the world of business. If you do anything to destroy the property of the company, you are hurting its long term stream of dividends.

Scott Horton 56:13
Well but, what if the company has a pipe that dumps all their Mercury right into the river? And it doesn’t affect the company’s property at all?

Harry Browne 56:21
Who’s… Very good point. Who owns the river?

Scott Horton 56:26
The state, I guess?

Harry Browne 56:27
Yes. And why does the state let them dump mercury into the river?

Scott Horton 56:31
Well, that’s my question. In the libertarian system, there wouldn’t be any laws against doing so would there?

Harry Browne 56:36
Well, somebody would own the river, and if somebody owned the river, who had a vested interest in the future value of that river, he wouldn’t let anybody dump mercury into the river. But bureaucrats don’t have a vested interest in the future value of the river. They couldn’t care less if 20 years from now, it turns out that the rivers polluted, and so they will gladly make any deal that might further some other program that they have, by making some kind of a deal with a company to allow them to use the river, or they just simply will have no interest and won’t do anything to stop anybody from doing it even though there is no vested interest at stake on the part of the bureaucrats. The important thing to realize is, first of all, 90% of the pollution that takes place in this country that we worry about takes place on government property, takes place in government rivers, on government lands, and government streams, government lakes, and so on. All the clear cutting the strip mining, there’s a there’s another terrible evil and it’s escaped me for the moment that people complain about all the time. All of this takes place, generally on government property. Because companies make sweetheart deals to use the government property, oh, the ranching and so forth, they make sweetheart deals to use the government property and the government lets them do so. Now, the company has no interest in the long term value of the land, what they want to do is to get the most out of it immediately. And so they go in there and do anything to get the largest profits immediately. But if they own the land themselves, instead of leasing it from the government, they have an enormous interest in the long term value of the land, because anything that they do to hurt the future stream of dividends will hurt the stock price today, private enterprise looks to the future. Everything in the stock market is looking to the future, it’s always what is coming in the future and I want to act before anybody else does. I want to get out of the stock before it starts going down so I sell today and my selling of the stock makes the price go down. And the executives of that company loaded up with stock options and stock of their own and so forth, can’t stand to see the price of that stock go down so they don’t do things that will hurt the assets of the company. But if they can get sweetheart deals with a government to use government land, for whatever purpose they have then they don’t care in the slightest, what they are doing to the property because it’s not going to hurt the company at all. And if they, if some bureaucrats will let them dump toxic waste in the river, that’s fine. Why not do it? It cuts cost for us that we don’t have to ship this to some waste dump 100 miles or 1000 miles away. One last point about this is also that the biggest polluter in this country is the US government. It’s testing laboratories, its military bases, even the laboratories of the EPA itself, the Environmental Protection Agencies are dumping toxic waste into two rivers and other places. Yellowstone Park and other national parks are in many cases disasters. There’s raw sewage running through the rivers in Yellowstone Park. Government is the worst steward of the land, whether it is owning it directly, or setting the regulations for others on how they have to operate their own property. And to turn this over to the government, it’s no longer again, an environmental matter, it is now a political issue to be decided by whoever has the most political influence

Scott Horton 1:00:25
In this case George Bush who could care less about what’s in the air in the water.

Harry Browne 1:00:30
No of course not, all he cares about is getting reelected and enjoying his stay in the White House and you simply cannot depend upon these people in Washington or Austin or anywhere else, to take care of you and to look out for your interests. And occasionally, somebody gets into politics, because he really believes in something and he hopes to make a difference, as they say, any hopes to help the poor or he hopes to make health care more affordable, and so forth. But first of all, you can’t succeed using force, it’ll never work it always produces unintended consequences. You can’t bomb the Middle East into democracy and peace. And you cannot force doctors and hospitals into being better health care givers. It just doesn’t work. But secondly, once the person has been there for a while he belongs to a party, the party says you’ve got to go along on this, you’ve got to vote for this bill or we won’t put you on any committee that you want, we won’t do anything to support the bills that you want. So you start trading favors with other people, and you start doing things that are the exact opposite of what you went to Austin or Washington to do. And eventually you become just a political hack like everybody else there. And all that you’re concerned about now is just keeping your position and staying there and enjoying the perks that are available to you. Because it is a good life, for the politicians. They make a very good living just on the income alone, but on top of that, they have all of these perks that are available to them all these free services that are available. And then if they ever get voted out of office, they’ve already made such good connections with large companies and other and now with their prestige of having been a public servant, so called, they can get a 200 or 300 or $400,000 a year job on the board or the figurehead executive at some corporation.

Scott Horton 1:02:37
Or if they lose their election to a dead guy they can be made an Attorney General.

Harry Browne 1:02:43
True, absolutely true.

Scott Horton 1:02:44
All right, Mr. Browne

Harry Browne 1:02:47
By being a good party regular.

Scott Horton 1:02:49
Mr. Brown, it’s already six minutes after five I have a whole second page full of questions here for you is it okay to keep you on for a little while longer or?

Harry Browne 1:02:58
Let’s go to the bottom of the hour and then I do have to move on I’m sorry.

Scott Horton 1:03:02
Okay, well, let’s try to roll through this as fast as we can then.

Harry Browne 1:03:06
And I’m sorry for giving long lectures as the answer to questions, but it’s important I think, not to deal in slogans, but to actually put things in their proper context and in their historical context, to understand what we’re really talking about, rather than just who’s got the best one liner.

Scott Horton 1:03:24
Sir Alan Greenspan and George Bush have announced that Greenspan will be staying on as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, because according to The New York Times, the financial market see him as a source of strength and stability in uncertain times. What do you make of this?

Harry Browne 1:03:40
Well, the first place there shouldn’t be anybody in that position to begin with so the Financial Committee is looking for the least evil that they can find, they think Alan Greenspan is better than somebody else who might be appointed to the position and who might be a great inflationist or something else. The Federal Reserve System is a national bank, it was set up as a private agency to disguise the fact that the federal government was going to now regulate the money supply, and take over an area of the economy that the Founding Fathers had been adamant about not letting happen, they have seen the evils that had happened with the Bank of England, and the Bank of France and other national banks and so they explicitly prohibited the US government from having a national bank. So in 1913, they set up the Federal Reserve System ostensibly as a private system of banks, but in fact, the officers are appointed by the President, all the excess profits are put into the US Treasury and so on and the government is no more capable of running the economy, or regulating the money supply, or any of these functions that the Federal Reserve supposedly performs it’s no more capable of doing that, than it is of bringing peace to the world, or bringing prosperity to the country through corporate welfare, or improving our health care or education. It’s just something that should not exist in the first place.

Scott Horton 1:05:15
So when people base their political opinions on well the economy was good under Clinton, it’s bad under Bush or whatever, I don’t think Bush is doing enough to help the economy. You don’t think he should be?

Harry Browne 1:05:27
No, I don’t think that the President can even do anything all the President can do is hurt. And Clinton tried as much as he could to hurt the economy, but it was just time for a better economy and, you know, everyday you hear on the radio or television, the market went up 100 points today and it went up because… and some reason is given, nobody knows why the market went up. What happens is the editor of the television station or the newspaper, wherever it tells the reporter, well, you can’t just say the market went up, you’ve got to say why it went up so the reporter calls some broker and the broker says, Oh, well, let’s see the market went up today, because investors were glad to hear that the uncertainty over Iraq had ended or whatever it is, when they don’t have the faintest idea and nobody does. It’s the result of supply and demand, in which millions of people are involved. And in much the same way the economy goes its own way, we know that the economy is much better off if the government stays out of it. But once the government is in it, it is subject to all kinds of pushes and pulls that no President can control. The economy improved considerably in the 1980s, under Reagan over what it had been under, in the 1970s, under Nixon, Ford and Carter. But that doesn’t mean Reagan had anything to do with it but you notice, the Democrats keep telling you how good the economy was in the 1990s and Republicans keep telling you how good it was in the 1980s, which means that neither one of them really cares and knows anything about it they’re just trying to plug their own political party. What’s happening now that George Bush has inherited is just the sort of morning after, after the growth in the 1990s, the economy was ready for a recession. Now, Bush has made it worse, by spending so much war on Homeland Security, and so forth, and creating innumerable problems for business in this country. You know, it’s easy to toss off things like well, you go to the airport so suppose you have to stand in line a little bit longer it’s for the security of the country, what you don’t realize, is that some businessman who’s making a business trip today has to get up two hours earlier, to get to the airport, and he has to leave the other city two hours earlier, in order to get home that night and what I’m saying is that millions, if not billions of man hours of productivity, are being flushed down the toilet, through all these security measures, and so on so of course, it affects the economy of course, the country is not as productive as it was, of course, people are not as able to get the things that they want as they could before all of these security measures were put in, and you cannot spend $100 billion, bringing peace to the Middle East without taking those 100 million dollars out of the height of the American citizens of the American economy even if they don’t do it overtly as taxes, it’s going to come out of our highs, because the Russians aren’t going to pay for it, the Martians aren’t going to pay for it, it’s the American citizens who are going to pay for it one way or another,

Scott Horton 1:08:39
Mr. Brown, it’s Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t overturn Hamilton’s economic system in 180o,. how could we ever abandon fiat money now in the 21st century?

Harry Browne 1:08:49
Well, the money system is a rather complicated affair, especially as the government has made it so and it is much easier to stay on the gold standard, once you’re on it than it is to get back on it once you’ve fallen off the wagon. But the main thing, I think that in the area of money that needs to be done is to get rid of the Federal Reserve System, return to a gold standard and eventually get the government completely out of the money system entirely. And let the market develop whatever would be the best, most efficient system that we could have for handling money, meaning the lowest cost, where the fewest of our resources are devoted just to keeping the money system going. But I don’t know if that really was your question.

Scott Horton 1:09:39
Yeah, actually, my question really was about how could we get back to a gold standard without disaster I mean wouldn’t we have incredibly high interest rates, which would probably press the middle class right out of homeownership and leave those who are already in debt trapped with no way out.

Harry Browne 1:09:55
No as a matter of fact, it would be just the opposite. The interesting thing is in 1913, one of the biggest arguments for imposing the Federal Reserve System on the country was that it would create an elastic currency, which would end the booms and busts of this country, the booms and busts of inflation and recession, which did exist in the 19th century. But within 20 years after the inauguration of the Federal Reserve, the country suffered its worst depression in the history of the country, it suffered its worst banking crisis in the history of the country and in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was founded, the price level in this country was about 1/3 less than it had been in 1800, which is the earliest date at which you can track consumer prices in the nation. And it’s not an explicit an exact science by any means but you can get a general idea of the trends. And in 1913, the price level in America was about 1/3 less than it had been in 1800. In 2003, ninety years after the inauguration of the Federal Reserve System, the price level is now seventeen times what it was in 1913. In other words, what would have cost $1 in 1913, now costs $17. So rather than saying that government regulations of the money supply keeps prices low, it has created a terrible inflation in this country, and it is not over yet, we have had low inflation in this country for about 20 years now it began to come down in 1981. And to think that that’s never going to happen, again, the kind of inflation that we had in the 1970s is very naive. As a matter of fact, right now, that money machine is cranked up tremendously by the government and as soon as people relax a little more about security, and feel free to spend money on a new home or a new car, or whatever it is, I think we are going to see quite an outbreak of inflation in this country, and it would not be impossible for us to go back to where it was 6% 10% 15% a year, just as it was in the 1970s I can’t.

Scott Horton 1:12:17
So the high interest rates come from them having it too low, and then they have to raise them too high in order to fix the problem they created?

Harry Browne 1:12:24
Well, it’s sort of like that what happens is simply this, the Federal Reserve pumps money into the economy, and they’re continually creating new money. If they create it too fast, it creates inflation but the inflation doesn’t come immediately. In other words, you increase the money supply today, tomorrow, you don’t see more inflation, you don’t see it for a year and a half later, approximately. That year and a half goes by and inflation is breaking out, and they say oh my god, we pumped up the money supply too fast, we’ve got to stop this inflation. So they put the brakes on the money supply but nothing happens again for a year and a half so when they put the brakes on, inflation continues to increase and get worse so they put the brakes on even more, they put it on even more and then by the time that it finally is having an effect on inflation they have restricted the money supply so badly that now they are creating a terrific recession in the country. And Paul Volcker was probably the best Federal Reserve Chairman that the country has had and maybe even in its history. In the late 1970s, when we were going through this put on the brakes, step on the gas, put on the brake, step on the gas, inflation, recession, inflation, recession, period, all through the 70s Volcker said, we can’t have this anymore, we are gradually going to slow the growth of the money supply very gradually and have a soft landing. At the time I as an investment advisor didn’t believe it was possible and I said we won’t have a soft landing, we’ll have a crash, because it’s too late to fix it. But he actually did, he brought about the soft landing and inflation dropped from a high of 15% in 1981, to where it got down in the mid 80s to only about 1% or so, of course Reagan took credit for it, but he had nothing to do with it. And that persisted and now in the last five to ten years, that kind of discipline has been fading away and under Greenspan who thinks that he can rule the world from the Federal Reserve building, I guess, and do all sorts of good things with government force we are getting back into the situation where I think we may I can’t swear to it, but we may be laying the groundwork for another disastrous period like we had in the 1970s.

Scott Horton 1:14:48
Well, and it was all the money created out of nothing to pay for the Vietnam War that really caused all that inflation, right.

Harry Browne 1:14:54
Well it may have had a lot to do with it, but it was more just the whole idea that the politicians sitting in Washington, at the Federal Reserve could bring prosperity to the country and solve all kinds of problems and it doesn’t, a war aggravates it, but a war isn’t necessarily the cause, immediate cause of it.

Scott Horton 1:15:15
Okay you still there?

Harry Browne 1:15:17
Yes I am

Scott Horton 1:15:19
I’d like to ask you if the Libertarians, like you say, at the beginning, you talked about how everybody wants to be free. And I wonder if the Libertarians represent the real principles of the United States, why does the party consistently come in with 2% or 4% of the vote, I would expect it to go from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 20, to 65.

Harry Browne 1:15:40
Sure, I would expect that to if we had a free market in elections, but we don’t. There are ballot access laws in every state that make it very difficult for third parties to get on the ballot. Not all states are as restrictive as other states, but some of them are horrendous. There are some states for instance, where if you’re a Republican and you want to run for Congress, you pay $100 and you submit 100 names on a petition. But if you’re not a Republican or Democrat, you have to put up $10,000 and you have to maybe give 10,000 names on petitions in order to get on the ballot. In my State of Tennessee I was on the ballot in 1996 and 2000. In 2000 there was Republican George Bush, Democrat, Al Gore, then there was Ralph Nader, independent, Pat Buchanan, independent, Harry Brown, independent, and three or four other people independent. In other words, you could only designate your party affiliation if you’re a Democrat or Republican, it’s still the law here in Tennessee. So who’s gonna vote for Harry Brown maybe he hates Gore maybe he hates Bush, but he’s not gonna vote for one of these other guys, because the other guy might be a Nazi, for all he knows or a communist. Because they all say independent by the names, the point being that third parties have to whatever money they raised, they then have to devote an enormous percentage of that money just to getting on the ballot, before they can even spend money on advertising or anything else, to tell people what they stand for and as a result, they have very little chance of being elected, then you compound that with the campaign finance laws, which say that I as the Presidential candidate could not go out and get some wealthy person who believed in what I was doing to put up a million dollars to help the campaign, we had to raise it all with a maximum of $1,000 a person and we couldn’t go to a law firm like Al Gore could and say, pledge $100,000, on behalf of all the attorneys in your law firm, and you go collect for me, because we have nothing to offer the law firm, we’re not going to get the law changed to make it easier for them to sue corporate clients. We can’t do, the same thing we can’t do as George Bush could to have $1,000 plate dinners where a company will put up $25,000 for 25 of its employees to go but do it in a way that seems to conform to the law, because we have nothing to offer that company, we’re going to set them free but the company right now is getting lucrative contracts from Washington has no interest in Libertarian ideas. So once again, we’re spending all of our time just trying to raise a little bit of money to get some ads on the air then on top of that the Democrats and Republicans get $60 million apiece to run their campaigns and another !25 million or $12 million, pardon me to stage their conventions. So we’re running against the Republicans or Democrats who are using our money to finance their campaigns, I also qualify for federal funds but obviously, as you’ve been listening to me for the last hour and a half, you know, I couldn’t possibly accept that money, because then I would be part of the problem. So obviously, I didn’t accept the money and we were able to raise a million and a half dollars in 1996 and 2 million and a half in 2000 and how is that going to get our message out against the others. Now you compound that with the fact that the people in the media recognize that we have no chance to win so they would be remiss in their duties to give us much publicity at all. Every media outlet in the country would give me one obligatory interview and then their duty and their responsibility is done but nobody’s going to send the reporter to follow me around the way there are hundreds of reporters following Bush or Gore around reporting on my activities and what I say in my proposals every day. So third parties are really up against it if you’ve got a celebrity like Nadir, or Buchanan, you can make a little splash but not very much of a splash

Scott Horton 1:19:48
Which by the way, for the record, you beat Pat Buchanan here in Texas anyway.

Harry Browne 1:19:52
Oh did I?

Scott Horton 1:19:53
Yeah

Harry Browne 1:19:53
I know I did in some states and during the campaign we were, we were neck and neck all the way in the polls and when I said neck and neck, we were neck and neck at 1%.

Scott Horton 1:20:05
You may have just already answered this question, but I was gonna ask you why does Ron Paul who is a former Libertarian Presidential candidate himself, consistently do so well in his elections as a Republican? He was just reelected last November by a major landslide.

Harry Browne 1:20:21
Well, he is a good example of the fact that you do not have to go along to get along, that you can stand up for what you believe in but you have to be somebody as talented and as strong willed as Ron Paul is. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for him. He has stood up against his party with regard to the war with regard to corporate welfare with regard to these civil liberties intrusions by the Patriot Act, and the Homeland Security Act, and so forth. And at one time, when Gingrich was in charge of the House Republicans and he was imposing party discipline on the Republicans, he would tell them in a caucus, every single one of you has to vote for this bill. Well, everyone except Ron Paul, of course, because they knew that there was nothing they could do to get him to go along so twice, the Republicans have sent people into his district to run against him in the Republican primary, but he has won both times. And he really is a remarkable person, and we could use a large group of people in Congress like him but it is an anomaly. It’s, it’s probably not something that could be duplicated in just any district in the country. I really haven’t answered your question, because I don’t know what the answer is.

Scott Horton 1:21:45
Okay well so… oh, that’s okay. In bringing up Ron Paul, you brought up how I guess he’s the lone anti-war Republican or one of a small handful of House of Representatives. I’d like to ask you, what do you make of the differences between the Pro and anti war left and the Pro and the anti war right? How is the libertarian argument different from those arguments?

Harry Browne 1:22:07
Well, libertarians have a guiding principle, and that is that you should never initiate force. In other words, force is, of course, perfectly acceptable in self defense. If, if you hit me, and I hit you back, that’s retaliation and it’s understandable and justified. But if you hit me, and so I hit your sister, that’s not retaliation, that’s aggression on my part against your sister, and all the screaming and yelling about you hitting me doesn’t have anything to do with it at all. And what has happened is that the United States is attacking countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and whoever is coming next, who have not attacked us who have not even threatened to attack us and who are not our enemies. And the libertarian position is you simply do not go into another country and initiate force on the assumption that maybe if you don’t, someday, they may attack you or they may cause you trouble, or they may not do what you like. Now, what has happened is you have some Democrats who are opposing the war simply as a partisan political issue, you have some Democrats who are supporting the war, who are supporting it, because they feel intimidated, that to oppose the war would put them so far beyond the pale, they’d be no better than libertarians or something. You have a third class of Democrats who are supporting pardon me who are opposing the war for principled reasons. The unfortunate thing is, they cannot extend that principle beyond war. In other words, they realize it is wrong to go over there and force America’s will on these foreign countries but they see nothing wrong with enforcing the will of politicians upon doctors and hospitals and companies and individuals, they see nothing wrong with rummaging through your bank account looking for suspicious transactions they see nothing wrong with using force in other contexts and that’s unfortunate. And as a matter of fact, I’m working on a lengthy article now that I hope that maybe the Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, or The Nation or one of the left wing publications might be willing to publish on what liberals can learn from the war and that is to just take the principles that they have used in opposing the war and apply them to domestic programs and they will realize that number one, the programs will not produce the results promised for them just as wars never produce results, promised for them. Number two, that they will cause untold injury and misery to innocent people who are not the targets of the force, but who will get hurt by the taxes, who will get hurt by the regulations, who will get hurt by the unintended consequences. And number three, they will be putting power in the hands of people who will misuse it and then apply it to all sorts of situations that you did not intend the power to be applied to and all of these principles apply whether you’re talking about war against a foreign country, or force being used against your own citizens for some great social good.

Scott Horton 1:25:19
And both of those things tend to go hand in hand, don’t they? I mean…

Harry Browne 1:25:23
Yes

Scott Horton 1:25:23
We see the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, and all these things pass while we’re at war.

Harry Browne 1:25:28
Sure, if we hadn’t gone to war with Afghanistan, and so on, you’d never would have gotten those bills through. And another thing is, it works the other direction that without big government, as I said earlier, you couldn’t have troops stationed in 100 countries around the world, you wouldn’t be able to engineer coups in countries and put dictators in power of people like Noriega and Panama, and then go in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years later, and depose him, because he no longer is doing what you wanted him to do the same thing with Hussein same thing with a Shah. I mean, God, American foreign policy has installed so many vicious dictators around the world. And then gone out said, Well, these terrible people have to be removed from power, they create their own problems, and then claim to be the only ones able to solve them. But the point is that big government causes big wars and big wars cause big government, and we need to strike at both of them. And unfortunately, there are a lot of liberals and Democrats who don’t see the connection between them. Now, Republicans, on the other hand, they support the war, because it’s a Republican war, many of those same people who are just so gung ho to go to war against Iraq, opposed Clinton’s interventions in Serbia, and Bosnia, and so on, in the 1990s, because those were democratic wars and the Republicans are showing that they have no scruples, no principles whatsoever, all they see is that Bush’s approval rating is up in the high 70s whereas before 911, it was down in the 40s. And if it’s… this is what it takes to keep a Republican president in power, then that’s what we’ll do. The Republican President isn’t doing anything for these Republicans. Many of these Republicans believe in smaller government, many of them believe that the government is way too big and Bush is doing everything in his power to make it bigger domestically, as well as in foreign affairs and yet they’re supporting him, because they’ve got this idea that it’s my party right or wrong and whatever, failings the President has, any democratic president would be primafacie, by definition worse and therefore, we have to do everything we can to support this President and including suspending my critical faculties.

Scott Horton 1:27:47
Okay, right before we finish up here, I’d like to ask you, in what ways or, first, well does the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security threaten the liberty of average Americans, and if so how?

Harry Browne 1:27:58
It doesn’t threaten it, it takes it away. It gives the power to officials of the government employees of the government to make searches and seizures without warrants, in many cases, to put wiretaps on phones without the same kind of scrutiny, to get those wiretaps that was necessary before in just every single area of law enforcement that you can imagine, either restrictions have on government power have been either reduced or taken away eliminated altogether. And in other areas, that, of course, is creating a huge, huge boondoggle, with more money being spent on more bureaucrats and more politicians. And if you travel at all and go to airports, you can see the Patriot Act in action there, the Homeland Security Act just by the ability of these people to come in and say, if you don’t submit to the search, you can’t get on this plane. Well, they don’t own the plane, it’s not their airline, but they can come in and say you can’t get on this plane, unless you are willing to step out of that line and come over here and take your clothes off. Unless you are willing to do whatever we tell you to do you no longer have the right to step on that airplane and go where you wanted to go. Now that’s not liberty that’s not freedom that doesn’t make this a free country, that makes us a police state, like all of the police states of Europe that so many people fled when they came to the United States in the 1800s and 1900s. Trying to find that free country that was represented by the Statue of Liberty that was providing light and hope and inspiration to the entire world. It was the beacon of liberty. And here we are living in a state of siege and a police state where Americans are scared of the whole world and the whole world is scared of Americans. This is not the America I knew. And this is not the America I grew up in. I’m 70 years old in a couple of months and I remember what it was like before we got into the Cold War and before we got into the war on drugs and the war on the American citizens for these pro war mongers to call us anti America and and unpatriotic and unAmerican when we are trying to preserve the real American values of peace and liberty, while they are trying to turn us into the Roman Empire, to go the way of the Roman Empire, I think is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Scott Horton 1:30:29
My next question for you, sir, is there any chance that you’re going to run for President in the year 2004?

Harry Browne 1:30:36
No I have term limited myself out. And as I alluded to earlier in the broadcast, I am now fighting to regain my financial health after six long years of campaigning, because I started in 1994, and it went through the 2000 election. And I just simply have to get my life back together now but I am continuing to write articles, people can go to my website at harrybrown.org and read my articles, I am writing a book now called the war racket. I have a radio show every Saturday night, it will be on at 10 o’clock tonight, the radio America network and if you go to my website, harrybrown.org you can hear it on your computer and if you can’t listen to it at 10 o’clock tonight, go to the website, and you can hear the archives of the previous shows. Tonight’s show will be on in a couple …on the website in a couple of weeks. So I am continuing to work to try to restore freedom in America. And to continue what I said earlier, I believe there is a glimmer of hope. I am hopeful, but not optimistic. I believe that the odds are strongly against us. But I can see how liberty and freedom and peace can come back to America and as long as that hope exists I’m not going to give up.

Scott Horton 1:31:55
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, Harry Brown Libertarian candidate for president in 1996 and the year 2000. Thank you very much for joining us.

Harry Browne 1:32:03
My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Scott Horton 1:32:05
Ladies and gentlemen. That was Harry Brown.