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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy to welcome Will Grigg back to the show.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com and is one of the most interesting writers in the freedom movement, one of the most talented writers, I should say.
He's also the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
Scott, thank you so much.
It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, it seems to me, I know you read antiwar.com too.
Yes, I do.
There's a new world order in foot.
It does seem that way, doesn't it?
It's very new.
So, what do you think?
How do you like it?
It's a stimulating and invigorating prospect.
It reminds me of that famous line from Wordsworth about the French Revolution.
Bliss was that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
I don't know whether it'll turn out well, but it certainly represents the end of something that was unsustainable.
Something that is unsustainable cannot be sustained by definition.
There's no way that the folks running the empire of Washington, D.C. can maintain terror and repression indefinitely, particularly when you're taking a look at the dollar and its, I think, fatal decline.
Once we no longer have the dollar as the substitute for the sword, chances are things will go pear-shaped for the empire very quickly.
That's the history of empires.
That's how empires come to an end.
One of the very compelling reasons why the Founding Fathers, whatever one thinks of their wisdom in all matters, they were certainly wise in talking about the deadly consequences of building an empire.
We're living through those consequences now to some extent.
Well, I was just talking with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
We were talking specifically about Libya and Bahrain, but also I asked him about Morocco and Algeria at the end.
He said, well, one of the common themes that's being seen here in all of these protests, different levels of protests and revolts across the Middle East, is the very non-bogeyman nature of the things.
If you listen to Frank Gaffney and Glenn Beck and the crazies trying to say that Osama Bin Laden is getting his way here, it just couldn't more obviously be further from the truth.
It's the 21st century after all.
Who wants to live in the 13th century in the way Osama Bin Laden would have it or something?
Nobody.
It really is a very libertarian revolution, right?
At least it's anti-imperial.
I don't know whether it would be considered libertarian.
The message is all, we want economic freedom.
We want to end to your cronyism and corruption.
We want to be able to participate in the government that rules over us at the very least.
No taxation without representation and all those very basic themes.
Not Islam or Marxism or anything problematic at all.
Yeah, it's Jeffersonian rather than jihadist, at least to that extent.
And it's not being driven by some cryptic alliance of Islamofascists and cultural Leninists.
This in large measure is being catalyzed, particularly in Egypt, by the predictable reaction of people who are on the receiving end of quantitative easing on the part of the Federal Reserve.
They're the ones who are being devoured alive by the inflation that's just beginning to nibble at American households.
That's a very important accusation there.
Please explain what you mean about that.
When the United States decided to sunder the ties between gold and the dollar back in 1971 to close the gold window, we saw the United States create an entente, as I understand it, in which the dollar was going to be propped up primarily by the Saudis being willing to accept it in exchange for petroleum.
And so you have all these regimes that are sort of centered in the Saudi monarchy that are being propped up by the Pentagon.
And they're using weapons, particularly in Bahrain, really good example right now, where you have an island nation with tanks that serve no defensive purpose and warplanes that are being turned on the Shiite majority population by the Sunni monarchy.
You have these people who are living in very dire economic circumstances to begin with on the receiving end of an empire that's paid for through fiat dollars being propped up by these petromonarchies in this sort of, I'm tempted to call it a human centipede type economic model, quite frankly.
They're at the end of that chain.
That's a rather disagreeable metaphor, but I'll let it stand.
In any case, when the Federal Reserve recently began its most recent binge of dollar creation printing press money, you had a price shock in the staple foods, which, of course, begin with wheat.
In Egypt, they import all their wheat, as I think Mr. Margolis, is that how I pronounce his name, pointed out in your program just a couple of weeks ago.
It's actually Margolis.
Mr. Margolis pointed out they have to import all their wheat and that we can be cut off by the United States and Israel if the Egyptians get a little bit too restive.
But you end up with a situation where the very bread on their table, the table of the average Egyptians, is being priced out of reach.
That's the sort of thing that drives people into the streets, is the prospect of starvation.
Seeing their kids starve is something that clarifies their thinking on a number of things.
That has as much to do with the uprisings in Egypt as any other factor.
Police abuse and brutality by the secret police and their plainclothes thugs, their subcontractors, was a real flashpoint late last year.
That's another factor which played into this.
And we have elements of that sort, of course, present in our own domestic apparatus of cronyism and repression here as well.
The thing is, those people, once again, are being devoured by the price inflation and finally got to the point where they really had no alternative but to do something to withdraw their consent from these governments.
Here in the United States, we're starting to feel just a little bit of a nibbling on our heels.
I mean, we're not being bitten off at the knee or bitten off at the waist the way that people are in Egypt and elsewhere.
But if you take a look at what's going on in terms of the way that our middle class is getting devoured incrementally by the same forces, we see that really the people in Egypt and Bahrain and elsewhere are fighting a battle against the same forces that are destroying the middle class here in the United States.
And the Glenn Becks and Frank Gaptes of the world would lead us to believe that somehow we need to be pouring our money into supporting and prolonging this apparatus of tyranny overseas as if we could do that.
We simply can't any longer.
The system is breaking down.
It simply is incurable.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
It's such a big empire that, you know, you got that Humpty Dumpty thing going on here, but it's a really big Humpty Dumpty egg up there that seems to be falling.
I mean, there is no set of crisis managers in the world can do anything about what's unraveling before our eyes here.
No, I agree with you.
I don't think that it's possible to prevent the fall of Humpty Dumpty or to use the biblical expression, the fall of Babel on the great.
And there's never been an empire that's had literally the global compass of that run out of Washington or anything like the assets that it has been able to mobilize in terms of material and the machinery of mass destruction that Washington has been able to deploy to suit its whims.
And I don't think that there's ever been an imperial payroll to match that, which Washington has been able to maintain for a number of decades now.
And this is the sort of thing, once again, that eventually will destroy itself.
I mean, this is a machine that will go of itself to the machine destroys itself.
And we reach we've reached the phase, quite frankly, of of imperial self-destruction.
And it's not going to be pleasant, but I don't see how it's avoidable.
Yeah, well, and, you know, my thing is, too, is I keep trying just for devil's advocate purposes, you know, for my own arguments sake, I keep trying to figure out what anything the American people have to lose by letting the world go, you know, and it really is nothing unless they actually work for Northrop Grumman or hold a lot of stock in.
Well, of course, as some of your guests have pointed out before, our economy is militarized to an extent that most people don't recognize.
A lot of it occurs at the margins or a lot of it is incorporated in sort of the sunken or hidden costs of what it is that we put up with as consumers and as tax victims.
But there is this assumption that if the United States isn't running the world, somebody else will be eager to fill that role.
I don't necessarily think that's the case.
Strangely enough, as I survey the horizon right now, I can't think of a more militaristic or interventionist government than the one afflicting us in Washington, D.C.
I don't see another potential contender that would be eager to fill that role.
The Chinese are not ruled by nice people.
Nice people don't become rulers.
But the people running China right now are more interested in making money than in pursuing grand ideological vendettas.
The ideological crusaders seem to be pretty much creatures of Washington, D.C. rather than Beijing.
Yeah, well, certainly the Russians have learned their lesson about overexpansion and the Chinese.
I mean, why why bother trying it out if they have the Soviet Union and America standing right in front of them as examples of what not to do?
Yeah, there are many things, but they're not stupid.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
It's Will Gregg, everybody.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Will Gregg.
Liberty in Eclipse is the book.
Pro Libertate is the blog.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
Now, well, I don't want to spend too much time on this because it is anti-war radio, but I just can't help myself here from the raw story exclusive troopers would, quote, absolutely use force on Wisconsin protesters if ordered police union president tells raw story.
That's an interesting statement of the food chain here, because it was a priority on the part of Governor Walker to cultivate that element of the public employees unions that is involved in direct coercion, meaning the police and the state troopers particularly.
And the police unions have professed to be in solidarity with the rest of the striking government employees here, which means that in terms of the Leninist dichotomy, who does what to whom, they consider themselves to be among the takers rather than the makers, the who rather than the whom, the whom being, of course, the tax victims who composed the general public in Wisconsin.
But even within the who, there, of course, are some animals who are more equal than others here.
And I think that when there's a lot of rhetorical nonsense being spewed here about the strikers in Madison being somehow akin to the freedom protesters in Tiger Square and elsewhere, there are a lot of what is being said here talks about the potential for an oligarchy emerging here and how only the government employee unions and their kinfolk in the labor movement stand as a counterbalance to the emergence of this oligarchy.
That's what Paul Krugman was saying over the weekend, which Krugman, of course, is wrong about economics as Judith Miller was about Iraqi WND.
But what we're seeing here is the possibility of a real oligarchy emerging in this country, because there are fissures, if you will, among what I refer to as the revenue devouring class, you know, the takers.
And it's entirely possible that you are going to see some kind of deeply embittered, entrenched oligarchical militarist system emerge here to manage America's decline as all these states start to disintegrate under the burden of this unworkable fiscal system.
Wisconsin is the first, but you've heard rumblings in Ohio.
Good grief, Illinois, New Jersey, California, you pick the target.
There are going to be uprisings of this sort.
And these are not instances where you have a very sympathetic proletariat simply asking for a few more crumbs to be put in their dishes.
I mean, this isn't the sleep-tight pajama factory from Doris Day's pajama game film for the 1950s.
You know, we're talking about an entrenched and very privileged government-sponsored and government-sustained elite.
The police unions are the worst.
In my current essay, I talk about a couple of examples where police have been discharged for criminal conduct, one involving a DUI and a home invasion, the other involving illegal seizure of private property, which is to say theft, have been put on paid vacation for years.
In one case, three years, this guy collected a quarter of a million dollars while he was on unpaid leave after he got pants-wetting drunk, wrecked his car and kicked in the door of a stranger's home and fell asleep on the floor.
He was fired, but it took three years to get him off the payroll entirely.
In that time, he collected a quarter of a million dollars.
He's from Madison, by the way, which is where all the fun's taking place in Wisconsin.
There's another case going on right now where a female officer who was dismissed for theft, among other things, is going to have two and a half years of unpaid vacation, which she'll collect over a hundred grand.
These are the sort of things that drive people absolutely crazy when they take a look at their own household finances and their tax burdens, and then the burden imposed by the cruelest tax, which is inflation, that's quantitative easing at work, and they see what's going on in Madison right now when they hear these people trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of the martyrs at Ontario Square.
That's not what's going on in Madison, but something ugly is likely to come from it nonetheless.
Yeah, no, I have to tell you, I mean, this whole thing is like I ate too many mushrooms or something.
How can you have people, how can Americans get it so wrong, when the whole world is in upheaval and these anti-government protests?
You can't get regular working people out of the house.
The only people you can get to protest are government employees demanding that nothing gets cut ever at the expense of the rest of us, and then even have the police union saying, yeah, we'll recreate Mubarak's secret police and come in here with swords and clubs and guns and clear this building.
Even the government employee unions are willing to go to war with each other here.
It's like American society is this cannibal eating itself to death, Will.
It's just crazy.
Yeah, we're suffering from some kind of terminal autoimmune dysfunction that I think afflicts empires at this stage of decline.
They eventually start to eat themselves, and that's what we're seeing here.
The same thing happened in the former Soviet Union when, prior to abolishing their political monopoly, the Communist Party divvied themselves up into a number of nominally contending parties and deeded to themselves everything of value there.
Actually, Egypt did that in the 1970s when the Arab Socialist Union became the National Democratic Party in the mid-70s.
They did exactly the same thing then that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would later do in Russia.
What's happening right now, I think, is something similar here with respect to the American Soyuz.
It's interesting if you take a look at what happened after Mubarak fled and the peaceful anti-government protesters had attained this victory, which is a tremendous victory, albeit a very limited scope.
After that happened, then the government employees went into Tahrir Square, and they started to demand increased pay and increased benefits.
That happened.
They did this after the protesters had stood up to the mounted thugs and the secret police and the army in Cairo.
It was after that had happened that the tax-feeding class Egypt took to the streets.
Actually, if you want a better parallel for what's going on in Wisconsin, it would be the second phase of what happened in Cairo, when the privileged elites demanded more privileges after Mubarak had fled.
That, I think, is a better analogy for what's going on in Wisconsin.
It's likely to ulcerate other capitals over the next several weeks and months.
Yeah.
Well, it's just amazing to see the people who are in charge talking about what victims they are of the rest of us and whatever.
I guess, as we've talked about before, the empire, the government itself, because of government employee unions like this, they'll be the last thing to go.
I mean, they do nothing but increase spending more and more.
Obama just announced another $4 trillion budget, while the rest of the country is just devoured by the parents.
It's from within.
And the very last element of that privileged elite to go will be those people who are government-issued costumes and bear arms on behalf of the state.
They're the ones who are in the privileged position over in Egypt and Bahrain and these other countries.
And we have the same system here, albeit slightly attenuated form and apparently more user-friendly variety.
But you know what?
The friendliness certainly dies down once the economy takes a tumble, and we're likely to see some real ugliness as a result.
Yeah.
Well, I believe, and I could be wrong, but it seems to me like if all those people in the state lost their jobs, then we'd all be way better off, including them.
We'd all make way more money because they'd be doing productive things.
And it's the difference between the seen and the unseen.
Everybody imagines millions of unemployed people, but just think of all the wonderful wealth they could create if they were creating wealth for a living instead of just being a bureaucrat.
Instead of consuming it.
Well, once again, Krugman this morning made that same claim.
Oh, these people would earn more in the private sector than they do as public servants.
Well, why aren't they?
Yeah, right.
Let them quit then.
Sure.
How about we, I think, first step, abolish all government employee unions, the cops first.
I mean, you start with the cops.
They do that.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, sir.
We're out of time.
Everybody, that's Will Grigg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse.
Thanks, Will.
Take care, Scott.
