All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Sheldon Richman.
His blog is Free Association.
That's Sheldon, freeassociation.blogspot.com.
And I think there's a shorter version that'll forward you on, but I'll ask him in a second.
But first, I got to tell you that Sheldon is the editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in New York, and is a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the author of Separating School and State, How to Liberate America's Families, Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax, and Tethered Citizens, Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
Also, Separating School and State.
I already said that, so not also that.
OK, welcome to the show, Sheldon.
How's it going?
It's going great.
Great to be back with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And so, OK, first things first, foreign policy.
OK.
All right.
Talk to me a little bit about libertarianism and imperialism.
The history going back, because...
They're mutually exclusive.
OK.
Libertarian, I mean, if you look at the people that we would today call libertarians, of course, the words are relatively new, so a lot of early people didn't know that word.
They called themselves liberals or other things.
They, in their opposition to domineering government, understood that that applied to foreign policy as well.
War was always seen as the root of all evil because it brought so many other bad things along, aside from being bad in itself.
It also helped to justify the growth of the state, higher taxes, debt, conscription, violation of civil liberties, anything, you name it.
Everything stemmed from that.
Everything got worse.
Everything got aggravated by war.
And so there's always been this hostility to war among people who I would call libertarians.
Well, and you know, it's interesting that when it comes to political alliances and the history of the libertarian movement, a guy like Murray Rothbard would ally with the left, he would ally with the right, because after all, there's few of us, right?
So if you want anything to happen to get better at all, you've got to try to make alliances.
He was always choosing his alliances based on where they were on the war issue.
That's true.
It was always the central point.
I agree with that.
And because it's something that's a point you bring out often, that, you know, when there's a war going on or whether or when we're being, you know, drumbeat into war, that's the most urgent issue.
And a lot of other things need to be put off in order to stop that.
And you've said this before, that it's time for all people who are against the war, no matter what they think of Social Security or Obamacare or whatever, to put the empire first as far as our target.
And Rothbard always did that in the late 60s when the Vietnam War was going on.
He was working with new leftists who were demonstrating against the war and writing against it.
Later on, when, you know, in the 90s, when the wars were being fought by or started by Clinton, he teamed up with the better conservatives who understood the dangers of empire.
I endorse that sort of thing.
I mean, I'll unite with anybody that wants to stop this madness.
Well, see, I think that might be confusing to a lot of people who tend to think of, and this could be, you know, depending how you spin it, I think it's still sort of the same view from the left and from the right, which is that libertarian is some sort of very right wing that, you know, even Dick Cheney's for food stamps and and public schooling and stuff here.
You want to abolish government schools?
You want to abolish that?
Maybe that's a prejudicial way to say you want to abolish public schools.
You want to abolish the welfare state where the, you know, the government takes care of the people who can't take care of themselves.
You're cruel, man.
You're worse than Dick Cheney.
So why should we believe you that you're such a piece, Nick?
Well, I don't want to torture anybody.
Isn't that doesn't have enough of a credential?
Well, because it's the old look.
It's the old fallacy.
It's not really a fallacy because I don't think anybody really believes it, but it's an old canard that if you're against the government doing X, no matter what X is education, you know, name any good thing.
That means you're against the X too, which of course is ridiculous.
If I'm against government schooling people, it's because I don't want bureaucrats and the same people that, you know, basically take us into wars and do other bad things, teaching my kids and saying, you know, because government is both incompetent and is also often, you know, pernicious.
So I don't want them to, those services are too important to be left to politicians and bureaucrats.
Well, now you have this interesting article here at the American Conservative Magazine.
Subscribe, but it's online at amconmag.com.
Libertarian left, free market, anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal.
And in this, you're trying to tackle this perception from all sides of where libertarianism fits on this so-called political spectrum.
What we have as libertarians in common with the left and the right and kind of in what order and how this, you know, kind of mixed up legacy over the years has, you know, created really an entire segment of libertarians that would, I guess, seem on the surface to probably non-libertarians as completely distinct from, you know, what they would typically think of as sort of a right-wing business interest type libertarianism.
You know, the kind you could read about in the New Yorker or something.
Right.
Well, you know, in a way, we're stuck with the history, the linguistic history and the political history, or what we call political linguistic history.
We do have these terms left and right.
And as dissatisfactory as that spectrum seems, we do have it.
So, you know, we need to talk in language people understand.
There's a historical connotation to left and right, even though it has gotten jumbled over the years.
But those terms actually begin in the 19th century, after the French Revolution, where the French National Assembly had a left and right side to it.
I mean, it begins with something as mundane as that.
And the people who sat on the left were the opponents of the old regime.
In other words, the regime that was overthrown, the monarchy.
And there were people who wanted to bring it back or reconstruct it somehow.
And those people sat on the right.
And the people on the left were a variety of held a variety of viewpoints that didn't agree on everything.
But they were progressive in the best sense of that word.
In other words, they were forward looking.
They wanted nothing of the old regime.
They looked ahead to progress and prosperity.
And they had many, but they had many, many differences.
Some of them were out and out collectivists and who wanted total collective ownership of the means of production.
Others didn't.
Frederick Bastiat, who every libertarian claims is sort of a godfather, sat on the left.
But he was an individualist and for free markets.
But he sat next to Joseph Pierre Proudhon, who was an anarchist.
I think maybe the first person to call himself an anarchist.
People think he was a socialist in the sense of imposed collective ownership of the means of production.
But he wasn't.
He was basically an individualist.
And who had strange views about property in the sense that you can find statements where he says property is best.
But then in another book, he says property is freedom.
And then he says property is impossible.
And then he says property is the only is revolutionary and the only bulwark against the state.
He was an early, I think, French post modernist who like to speak in terms of synthesis, antithesis and thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
So you can get a little confused.
But everybody picks out the one statement that he makes.
Property is best and says, OK, he's an enemy of individual freedom and markets.
But actually, he was not.
So left libertarians today accepted that we've received this scheme, this spectrum from history.
And so we work with it.
Libertarianism did begin on the left.
And so libertarians today, regular libertarians, as I might call them, have overlooked this, have forgotten some of the concerns that the earlier libertarians had.
So left libertarians are trying to revive those concerns, which are discussed in the article.
There's another sense, though, that we can attach to the word left libertarianism.
Within the libertarian movement, there's a left and right spectrum.
And so therefore, I think it's fair to put what I'm calling left libertarianism on the left.
All right, well, I want to let you explore these ideas a little bit more here right after this break.
Sheldon Richmond, Free Association, is the blog.
He's the editor of the Freeman.
And we'll be right back.
Did I ever tell you guys about that thing I saw?
Maybe someone had posted on Lou Rockwell's blog or something.
It's 1990.
And there's Sheldon Richmond and Joe Sobrin and a guy I can't remember.
And they were something like the Committee Against the Holocaust in Iraq or something like that.
And and my man, Sheldon Richmond, on point, not just saying, hey, look, it's wrong to mass murder Iraqis, which is obvious.
But any idiot knows that, right?
But no, like point by point by point and about the future of American entanglement in the Middle East that this could lead to and on and on.
It's just brilliant from, you know, back when I was in ninth grade, the heroic Sheldon Richmond.
He's the editor of the Freeman.
He's a fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, and he keeps the blog free association.
And so we're talking today about this article Sheldon wrote in the American Conservative magazine, the libertarian left free market, anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal.
And you were talking before the break here about different priorities that set apart left libertarians in your perspective from, say, for example, the shall go nameless think tank that tried to put all the Social Security money into the stock market bubble a few years ago.
Well, first of all, I want to say I'm going to have a hard time convincing people I'm youthful if you keep bringing up facts about my being on panels in 1990, whatever it was in the future.
Keep that to yourself.
OK, sorry about that.
It's really great.
Everybody go search it on YouTube.
Yeah, I watched it myself recently and was pretty amazed by that.
Well, I think some of it is understandable.
I mean, the left libertarian point is, is that the main line libertarianism has forgotten some things or de-emphasized some things, and they need to be reminded.
Now, one reason I think that happens is because there's the old principle that you're well aware of.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So if a free market libertarian is or a non-left libertarian or any libertarian is hearing leftists attack companies today, you know, oil companies and stuff like that, there's a tendency to say, well, I better rally to the defense of whoever the left is attacking because those people are anti-market.
So then whatever they're attacking must be in some way pro-market.
So I therefore will rally.
So you can kind of understand why that happens.
But there's a big mistake that's made, and this has variously been called vulgar libertarianism or by Kevin Carson or Roderick Long has come up with a, I guess, a more academic sounding name, right conflationism, which boils down to this.
If you're complaining, as libertarians rightfully do, you know, all the time about the amount of government intervention in the economy, interference with people's economic affairs by coercion and threat of coercion.
If they're doing that, then you can't at the same time come to the defense of, you know, blanket defense of big companies and big corporations claiming that if what they were doing was not serving consumers, they would not be able to get away with it because that's not how the free market works.
So what I'm saying on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you can't complain we don't have a free market.
And on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, you can't complain, hey, leave those companies alone because the free market will punish them if what they're doing is no good.
Yeah, we don't have a free market.
I mean, they kind of forget that it's like a occasional amnesia.
We know I learned about libertarianism first from an anarcho leftist who taught me that, you know, modern American libertarianism, what they call it is just the rich white man's anarchy.
There shall be no regulation that prevents a business owner from poisoning his own employees to death with no consequences or whatever.
And I can't see why people would would see that.
But, you know, I got to tell you, maybe this makes me some kind of evil utilitarian aggressor or something.
Perhaps it does.
But I wouldn't, you know, part of the reason why I am a libertarian is because in my idea of a libertarian society, a private property anarchist type society, is that it would be the everybody's anarchy, not the rich white man's anarchy.
It would be the best, most freedom for everyone, the way to provide the opportunity for people to to, you know, keep what they earn and etc.
Control their own destinies.
If I thought that libertarianism meant we'd have, you know, six kings instead of one big stupid democracy, I'd just leave it alone.
Well, and what libertarians do and I'm not I don't want to say that other libertarians don't do this, but I think we I think we we do it in a better way is we emphasize the privileged side of of of the government intervention, the corporate state, as well as the regulation side.
I mean, this is something you see so-called progressives do all the time.
And, you know, I have in mind a feature that Rachel Maddow once did.
She was talking about the deregulation and she she found a couple of examples where regulations were, you know, scaled back or maybe abolished altogether.
And and I kept screaming at the TV.
But you're not looking at the privilege side.
If you only take away regulation, but you don't remove the privileges, the promised bailout, the guarantees and all that stuff, tariffs, patents, all that stuff that protect incumbent companies, then you have not moved toward the free market by only by taking off some regulation.
In fact, what you've done is maybe made things worse because regulations sometimes limit the scope in which insiders can exercise their privileges.
So in other words, absolutely right.
It's true of the FNL during the during the 80s when they when they took off the regulations on how FNLs, the savings and loans, could invest money because they used to only be able to do 30 year mortgages when they said, OK, you can do pretty much anything.
They didn't take away the safety net.
And the deposit insurance, which told depositors, hey, you don't have to worry about how reckless your FNL is.
The government stands behind you and will pay you every penny should it lose lose all your money.
Yeah.
You know, Anthony Gregory, your colleague there at the Future Freedom Foundation, once posted a speech by Ron Paul from I think it was 98.
I'm not exactly sure, but it was a speech in opposition to Phil Graham's bill in the Senate and the House, whatever version it was in the House, to repeal Glass-Steagall that separated the kinds of banks from each other.
What kind of investing can be done by these Wall Street banks in this case?
And Ron Paul was saying, no, we should keep Glass-Steagall as long as we have this system of inflationary money and central banking.
Then the last thing we want to do is take off the last break on how much fraud these men can commit.
But that takes a pretty sophisticated understanding to apply principles in that manner.
Well, I was going to say, that is amazingly, and I don't mean this as any kind of about Ron per se, but that's an amazingly sophisticated analysis.
Now, it might be that he's not right about that.
It may be that you look at it and say, no, they should go ahead and get rid of that and get rid of the Glass-Steagall.
It's a very tough thing to look at all the interconnections.
But the fact is, he was looking for the interconnection because everything is related to everything else when it comes to public policy.
And so you can't, you know, it's like the game of Jenga.
You can pull, if you pull out one little piece, the whole thing may crumble down.
You may have unintended consequences that will be worse than with that piece in place.
It's not a simple analysis.
And that's really great that he looked at that.
Now, this makes public policy and attempt to roll back government interventions difficult.
But that's the way it is.
I can't change that fact.
But that's a very sophisticated form of thinking.
And we often don't do that.
Libertarians often don't do that.
Left libertarians at least try to raise the issue, to say, let's not take our eye off the ball, namely the privileges that special interests get, and only look at regulation.
And I think that's been one of the flaws in the libertarian analysis.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I like to try to explain to leftists that, you know, my list of corporations that I hate is the exact same one as yours.
You got SIAC on there, right?
And Walmart and whatever.
And the only difference is my analysis of why it is that I despise them so much is, you know, not just because they're greedy capitalists or what have you, but the way that they use state power to, you know, basically steal from people.
I mean, pretty much everywhere a Walmart is built, they get the government to steal the land from whoever owned it first and then give it to them at half price or worse.
And, you know, that kind of predatory thing.
So, but then the question is, you know, if even if you take the left argument all the way to the extent, like Mark said, the withering away of the state, well, what better way to wither it away, but to wither the damn thing and stop being the demand for its supply.
Stop asking it to protect you from Walmart.
It ain't gonna, it's going to steal your house and give, or your business and give that land to them.
Wither that damn thing.
And we're all libertarians now.
Well, and, and you make a great point about how the power comes from the state.
Now that doesn't mean that the companies don't initiate and lobby and try to get hands on that power.
They're not just sort of passive recipients and I'm not saying that's what you meant, but you're right.
I call this the dangerous, the most dangerous derivative.
Remember all that there's been all this talk about derivatives.
You have to regulate derivatives.
They passed the financial bill that didn't even talk about the most dangerous derivative, the power that corporations derive from the state.
That's the dangerous derivative.
Right.
As Anthony Gregor said, Barack Obama is the only real trillionaire in the world.
The biggest corporation of all.
All right.
Thanks very much everybody.
That's Sheldon Richman from FFF.org and the Freeman.
And I got a new one in the American conservative magazine.
Check it out.
Libertarian left, free market, anti-capitalism.
Thanks Sheldon.
Thank you.
